In the first issue of Macrina Magazine, Micah Enns-Dyck offers a “dialogue” of sorts between two thinkers not often paired—Stanley Cavell and Gillian Rose. Through placing Cavell and Rose in conversation, Enns-Dyck explores shared themes of sociality and embodiment, arguing that “the essence of who we are is ‘out there,’ out in the social world; vulnerable, accessible.”¹ I hope to here approach similar themes from a different—albeit similarly conversational—method. For both Søren Kierkegaard and Hannah Arendt, a view of Abraham as paradoxical promiser is foundational to their thought. They use the Biblical narrative to expound similar themes of faith and sacrifice, uncertainty and vulnerability. However, they come to very different conclusions regarding the politicality of the Abrahamic promise. By placing these two thinkers in dialogue, I hope to draw out these differences, as well as some surprising parallels, and perhaps point toward future, equally fruitful conversations.

The sacrifice by Abraham of his son Isaac is, unsurprisingly, foundational to both Christianity and Judaism.² For Søren Kierkegaard, the Biblical figure of Abraham offers the prototypical knight or hero of faith. His sacrifice in the face of uncertainty is taken as the “leap of faith” par excellence. Central to Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham is the notion of the promise. Kierkegaard sees in Abraham’s faith an exemplary paradoxicality, like that of Christ: “Abraham was the greatest of all, great by that power whose strength is powerlessness, great by that wisdom whose secret is foolishness, great by that hope whose form is madness, great by that love that is hatred to oneself.”³ 

Abraham’s paradoxical faith is in the promise of the revealed God, and herein lies his admirability: “By faith Abraham received the promise that in his seed all the generations of the earth would be blessed. … [T]ime passed, it became unreasonable, Abraham had faith.”⁴ Later, “He accepted the fulfillment of the promise, he accepted it in faith, and it happened according to the promise and according to his faith.”⁵ Through the example of Abraham, Kierkegaard pushes expectation to the point of absurdity—Abraham has faith in the promise of his God for the future, even to the point of holding a knife to his son’s throat. 

Arendt’s discussion of Abraham and the promise are firmly grounded in her broader discussion of action. For Arendt, “action is the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, [it] corresponds to the human condition of plurality…this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.”⁶ Arendt calls the reality constructed by action “the ‘web’ of human relationships.”⁷ Crucial, however, to the Arendtian notion of the web, is its uncertainty and frailty. This is rooted in the precise limitations of the communicative capacity of action: “the impossibility, as it were, to solidify in words the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of action and speech, has great bearing upon the whole realm of human affairs, where we exist primarily as acting and speaking beings.”⁸  

As Arendt describes it, “the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and ‘reified’ only through a kind of repetition.”⁹ Here is where the human capacities for forgiveness and promise-making become crucial: “the remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting…is one of the potentialities of action itself.”¹⁰ Arendt goes on to define forgiveness as the “possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility,” and “the faculty to make and keep promises” as the “remedy for unpredictability.”¹¹

The Arendtian faculties of forgiveness and promise-making are thus symmetrical, outwardly-directed potentialities oriented toward the past and future respectively. Furthermore, Abraham is as central to Arendt’s notion of the promise as he is to Kierkegaard’s; Abraham’s “whole story,” she writes, “shows such a passionate drive toward making covenants that it is as though he departed from his country for no other reason than to try out the power of mutual promise in the wilderness of the world, until eventually God himself agreed to make a Covenant with him.”¹² 

Immediately, two crucial differences between the Arendtian and the Kierkegaardian view of the Abrahamic promise stand out. First, Arendt places the genesis of this central theological-political promise, at the heart of the Judeo-Christian traditions, in the Covenant Abraham makes with God,¹³ and not in the immediately-preceding near-sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac,¹⁴ as does Kierkegaard. Second, for Arendt the Abrahamic promise is critically initiated by Abraham, and God is practically forced into it by Abraham’s stubborn belief in the power of his own promises. Inversely, Kierkegaard’s account begins with a promise of God, which Abraham is just as tenacious in holding to. Thus, the Abrahamic promise is for Kierkegaard the prototypical believer-God relationship, while for Arendt it serves as the initiation of law as political binding. However, it is equally important not to overstate the differences between these two thinkers. As my analysis continues, I hope to, by turning to their shared notions of “world,” find certain potential affinities between their works.

While there are few references to Kierkegaard in The Human Condition, these scattered allusions may further clarify the differences between their thought, particularly as related to the politicality of the promise. Contextualizing these allusions via their shared discussion of Abraham may also point to some areas in which Arendt “got Kierkegaard wrong,” or perhaps missed some nuances within his thought. In her discussion of the universality of Cartesian doubt, Arendt notes that “[n]o one perhaps explored its true dimensions more honestly than Kierkegaard when he leaped—not from reason, as he thought, but from doubt into belief, thereby carrying doubt into the very heart of modern religion.”¹⁵ Later, she argues that post-Cartesian philosophy (and, in Kierkegaard, theology as well) has become little more than experimentation with the self.¹⁶

If Arendt critiques Kierkegaard’s philosophy for its inwardly-directed or subjective nature, leaping from a Cartesian doubt of the external world to a faith in a God beyond said world, then it makes sense that the Kierkegaardian promise would be as individual(izing) as it seems to be. However, there is another side to the matter which must be acknowledged; as Kierkegaard writes: 

Yet Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for a life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong… Abraham had faith specifically for this life—faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by prosperity and unforgettable in Isaac.¹⁷ 

While, as I have noted above, Kierkegaard views the Abrahamic promise as one made between (hu)man and God—indeed, as the prototypical believer-God relationship, the Danish philosopher’s view of the faith of Abraham cannot be deemed wholly unworldly in the sense for which Arendt critiques much of Christian thought. Thus the ‘polity’ envisioned by Kierkegaard cannot be a “counter-world” in the way that Arendt critiques the polity of Christian theology.¹⁸ She writes, 

Without [the] transcendence [of the world] into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible. For unlike the common good as Christianity understood it—the salvation of one’s soul as a concern common to all—the common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die.¹⁹

While Kierkegaard’s view of the Abrahamic faith may not be political, it is certainly worldly. In this sense it accords with Arendt’s view of the liminal or intermediary position of the Hebrew faith, “which stresses the potential immortality of the people, as distinguished from the pagan immortality of the world on one side and the Christian immortality of individual life on the other.”²⁰ And this is precisely what God promises Abraham—the immortality of Abraham, not as individual, but as progenitor of a mighty nation, as father of a great people. Kierkegaard may miss this dimension of the Abrahamic promise in his glowing (and typically Christian, as Arendt would see it) exaltation of Abraham the man: 

No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the greatest of all.²¹ 

In lieu of a conclusion, I will here offer some preliminary observations, which may lead to future explorations and conversations. In her discussion of the promise’s parallel and opposite, forgiveness, Arendt invokes Jesus, “the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in human affairs.”²² Arendt’s Jesus is thus a political thinker as much as he is a religious one (if not more so). His Sermon on the Mount is for Arendt the Forgiver’s Manifesto. Perhaps, in the figure of Mary these two actions—that of forgiveness, and that of the promise—converge. In her Magnificat, Mary “magnifies” and “rejoices in” God the savior and her son the forgiver. She specifically invokes “the promise [God] made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” (Luke 1:55). The Magnificat can be viewed as the end of the Abraham story, but it is also its own beginning—foretelling and even promising the coming forgiveness—a forgiveness that, as so many liberation theologians have reminded us, is both theological and political.