As critics of medieval drama routinely noted throughout the twentieth century, the Towneley cycle play of Abraham and Isaac is strikingly different from the dramatizations of Genesis 22 found in the York and Chester cycles, or the N-Town play, or the separate, non-cycle plays from Brome Manor and the Northampton version (formerly known as the Dublin play) and the Abraham segment in the Cornish Ordinalia.1 The most crucial distinction? The Towneley Abraham never confesses to Isaac that God has called for the killing. The Towneley cycle also differs on this point from the late medieval world’s most intellectually sophisticated dramatic treatment, Theodore de Beze’s Abraham Sacrifiant, a well-known Italian treatment of the subject, Feo Belcari’s La rappresantazione d’Abram e d’Isaac suo figliuolo, and a lengthy Cretan play.2
In every comparable play Abraham reveals to Isaac God’s demand, and this mitigates the anxiety for Abraham, Isaac, and audiences. According to V. A. Kolve and Rosemary Woolf, in the Brome play, the “finest” and “best” of the Abraham plays, the dramatic tension eases when Abraham confides to Isaac:
Isaac. Ist it Godes will that I should be slain?
Abraham. Yea, truly, Isaac, my son so good,
And therefore my handes I wring.
Isaac. Now, father, against my Lordes will
I will never grutch loud nor still:
He might have sent me a better destiny
If it had been his pleasure.3
The York, Chester, N-Town, and Northampton Isaac, provided with the knowledge of God’s will, all take on the serenity of a heroic, willing, self-sacrificing Christ-like figure. Consequently, each play provides some emotional relief to the horror of a confused, terrified, and grotesquely betrayed child. In the York version, the one play that casts Isaac as a grown, thirty-three-year-old Christ-like man, father and son work in concert. The adult Isaac, self-conscious of his own strength under such a threat, advises the aging Abraham on how he should be bound:
I know myself, by course of kind,
My flesh for death wil be dread and—
I am feared that you shall find
My force your forward to withstand—
Therefore is best that you me bind
In handes fast, both foot and hand,
Now, whiles I am in might and mind.
So shall you safely make offer and,
For, father, when I am bound,
My might may not avail:
Here shall no fault be found
To make your forward fail.
For you are old and all unwieldy,
And I am wight and wild of thought.4
Most of the cycle plays provide some comparable corresponding narrative to the illustration of the scene, like the one depicted in the Hampton Court tapestry, which shows the story ending with Abraham and Isaac joined in prayer. (See Figure 1 in the Introduction.)
The Chester play provides a Christian typological epilogue explicitly reminding audiences that the terrible scene points to God’s sacrifice of his own son.
Lordinges, this signification
Of this deed of devotion,
And you will you wit mon,
May turn you to much good.
This deed that you see done in this place,
In example of Jesu done it was,
That, for to win mankind grace,
Was sacrificed on the rood.
By Abraham I may understand
The father of heaven that can fand,
With his blood, to break that bond
The Devil had brought us to.
By Isaac understand I may
Jesu that was obedient ay,
His fathers will to work always,
His death to underfong.5
All this is not to suggest that these plays do not generate pathos. As Kolve says, referring to the Brome and the Northampton specifically,
these versions are alike in their respect for human love, and in dramatizing a test designed to prove that Abraham’s love for God is greater than his love for his son, the medieval drama achieves its moment of greatest pathos—greater even than that associated with the death of Christ, for we can feel and understand the redemptive necessity of that later death. Neither Abraham nor Isaac can understand the necessity of the command that is given to them. They only know it must be obeyed.6
My initial point here, again, is to reemphasize what many critics have already noted: the Towneley is very different. The Towneley Abraham not only does not tell Isaac the reason for the trip, he lies to Isaac before leaving home: “My dear son, look thou have no dread, / We shall come home with great loving.” He adds, “We shall make mirth and great solace.” When Abraham does tell Isaac, he does not explain his actions as God’s will: “But certainly thou now must die, / If my purpose hold but true.” Consequently, the Towneley Isaac’s pleadings are not the rational, controlled, and moving speeches of the Brome, but wild, emotional cries: “Ah, father, mercy! Mercy!” Isaac says he will cooperate but his stage actions belie this: “Be still!” Abraham cries, “Lie still!” Isaac repeatedly asks “What I have done?” while crying for mercy. The boy pleads continuously for his life, physically resisting his father. At the critical moment, Abraham attacks Isaac as a crazed murderer rather than as a religious actor: “I must rush on him my pain to ease / And slay him here right as he lies.”
Martin Stevens, in Four Middle English Cycle Plays, has argued that the “Wakefield Master” (who may or may not have had a hand in the Abraham play) consistently blurred the common, everyday, and often ugly with the divine. He notes, for example, that the Towneley/Wakefield version of the Cain and Abel story is called The Murder of Abel (Mactatio Abel), not, as elsewhere, the “sacrifice of Abel.” “The emphasis,” he says, “is on murder.”7 This potentially ugly turn to the real marks the Towneley Abraham and Isaac. An angel has to literally wrestle Abraham to the ground. “Who is there now?” Abraham demands, apparently attempting to fight the angel off: “Ware! Let thee go!” After the angel finally stays Abraham’s hand, Isaac remains shaken, confused, and uncertain: “But, father, shall I not be slain?” and “Is all forgein?” Nothing in the play mitigates the horror of the moment.
This is true even though the manuscript of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play we have is incomplete. The last two folios are missing, so the play concludes with these lines:
One could argue that the play’s distinctiveness may have been originally tempered by a few more lines wherein Abraham explains his silence. Donna Smith Vinter speculates that we “would have found father and son worshipping together.”9 It is difficult to imagine, however, what sort of after-the-fact explication could have made sense of the deeply troubling scene just displayed.
Even the God who sends the angel to stop Abraham seems unnerved, uncertain of his own power to prevent the killing he ordered:
Angel, hie with all thy main!
To Abraham thou shalt be sent.
Say, Isaac shall not be slain—
He shall live and not be burnt.
My bidding standes he not again.
Go, put him out of his intent!
Bid him go home again,
I know how well he meant.10
Abraham turns away from the angel of the Lord at the end in an attempt to reconcile with his terrified son: “To speke with the have I no space, / with my dere son till I have spokyn.” Finding a typological rationale for this would be difficult. To borrow a term from John Caputo we might describe this God of the Towneley Abraham as “weak,” a God with surprisingly limited power.11
The unrelenting intensity of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play has prompted twentieth-century scholarship to describe the play as “naturalistic” and “psychological” rather than religious.12 This particular Abraham and Isaac play, it has been argued repeatedly, points forward to the secular modern world, either accidentally or intentionally, clumsily or artfully. Most critics see the absence of Christian typology as the result of a secular impulse, either artistic or ethical. The near chaotic horror tends to be read either as an attempt to make the play more exciting than the supposedly predictable and ritualized, typological religious drama, or an acknowledgement on the part of a more modern-thinking playwright that Abraham may be simply crazed. For these critics, the story centers on the tension it depicts between inscrutable divine law and rational human ethics.
Medieval dramatic criticism has thus been working within the wake of the supposedly outdated “secularization hypothesis” of early English drama, the influential notion that some evolutionary process took place wherein primitive, ritualistic, religious performances developed into sophisticated, representational, and secular drama. I point this out not to begin an indictment of medieval dramatic criticism. In fact, I find much of this secularization criticism on point. What I am trying to do here is begin describing a pressing literary critical trap. On the one hand, the scholarly suggestion that a medieval cycle drama about Genesis 22 actually turns away from religion is clearly a case of the secularization hypothesis operating at its most absurd. This play must be, in some sense, religious. On the other hand, much of what criticism has said of the play’s seemingly secular direction rings true—even to a religiously minded critic.
The Towneley Abraham and Isaac and its critical reception, then, illuminates the general state of our current literary critical thought relative to religion and the secularization hypothesis. While no serious scholar would argue for the secularization hypothesis, no one has put forward a persuasive alternative for understanding the relationship of religion to the development of early English dramatic texts. The secularization hypothesis may be unsatisfactory, but its narrative still organizes discussions. As Lawrence M. Clopper puts it, “Remarkable as the rethinking of early drama has been, we continue to use schemes of organizing material in our histories that imply the theories that we dismiss.”13
Early English dramatic criticism still lacks even a basic grammar for talking about a religiousness that seemingly exceeds its cultural or historical moment, especially when that religiousness presses close to anything like what we critics consider the secular or modern. Sarah Beckwith’s Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays is a notable exception.14 We still tend to rely on rather common Enlightenment divides to ground our discussions: if not religious, a play must therefore be secular, or moving in the direction of the secular-modern. The need for a more refined instrument in early English dramatic criticism is especially acute given the fact that reconfiguring the traditionally understood break between the religious and the secular as determined by Enlightenment thought has been a primary occupation of leading intellectuals and, correspondingly, there is a growing, general geopolitical awareness that the divide between the secular and religious is not as distinct as it was generally considered to be in the mid and late twentieth century. It is becoming clear, for example, that the very notion of the “secular” is inextricably linked to a certain development of Western Christianity and therefore, understood in its current form, limited in its usefulness.15 In brief, early English dramatic criticism would benefit greatly from a sustained engagement with these broader conversations.16
In early modern literary studies, for example, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton sketched a broad outline that may help begin organizing these critical discussions. “Religion,” they argue, almost as if addressing specifically the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play and its rather stunning break with Christian typology, “is not fully reducible to culture.” Instead, religion can be thought of as
a reservoir of foundational stories, tropes, exegetical habits that structure and give shape to political institutions and literary forms in ways that occur in culture—in specific spatio-temporal moments—while also manifesting a shaping power not fully reflective of the historical settings in which they are exercised. . . . Like ghosts or viruses, religions leap across groups and epochs, practicing cultural accommodation in order to outlive rather than support the contexts that frame them. Religions survive when they manage to install elements of thought that stand out from the very rituals and practices designed to transmit but also neutralize them.17
The Towneley Abraham and Isaac functions as a host for religion as Hammill and Lupton describe it.
More specifically, the playwright of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac taps into the particularly deep reservoir of stories, tropes, and exegetical habits surrounding Genesis 22. The Towneley play may be distinctive within the generic boundaries of medieval drama, but it fits well within a broader category: the long and complex history of interpretations of Genesis 22 dating from the early Jewish commentary (Jubilees, 4 Maccabees, Pseudo-Philo, Josephus, etc.), to the Jewish/ Hellenic moment of Philo, to St. Paul’s use of Abraham, to the Early Church Fathers (Tertullian, Origen, St. Augustine, etc.), to the Koran and Islamic exegesis, to medieval Christian commentary (Bede, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Aquinas, etc.), to Luther and Calvin, to the continental philosophers Kant and Hegel, and Kierkegaard’s remarkable Fear and Trembling—all the way up until our current moment and Derrida’s recent reconsideration of Kierkegaard and Genesis 22 in The Gift of Death. Like these texts, the Towneley play rigorously and powerfully explores the complexity and terror of Genesis 22.
In so doing, the Towneley Abraham and Isaac (as I will argue about much of Shakespeare) presses very close to what Derrida calls a “religion without religion,” a messianic openness to something altogether other, an openness that determines the traditional Abrahamic faiths while not being equivalent to those faiths.18 And, somewhat paradoxically, this religion without religion produces the supposedly secular quality of the Towneley Abraham. The play’s distinctiveness in a medieval dramatic context, again, derives primarily from the artistic choice to keep Abraham silent. But in making this choice the Towneley playwright does not deviate from its religious source text but attempts, instead, to follow more closely than the other Abraham plays the famously sparse biblical narrative.
Let me explain. Genesis 22 does not tell us anything about what Abraham says to Isaac on Mount Moriah. “God will provide,” Abraham says succinctly when Isaac queries him about the whereabouts of the sacrificial animal. The sparse quality of the narrative prompted Eric Auerbach to begin his influential Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by juxtaposing Genesis 22 to Book 19 of Homer’s The Odyssey in order to illuminate the “two distinct styles” that “exercised their determining influence upon the representation of reality in European literature”: Homer employs “fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective,” while the Old Testament includes “certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.”19
In Genesis 22, Abraham keeps silent, never telling Isaac, nor anyone else, including Sarah, about God’s command. Many have suggested, in fact, that keeping God’s demand a secret from Sarah corresponds in some way to the announcement of her death, which opens Genesis 23, a midrashic tradition of interpretation that strangely coincides with the Towneley narrative where Abraham considers the possibility that when Sarah ultimately does hear the news it will kill her: “And I am feared her for to slay. / I ne wot what I shall say to her.” Interpreters have long noted as well that the silence of Abraham in Genesis 22 corresponds to the narrative fact that this is the patriarch’s last direct conversation with God and, perhaps not surprisingly, his last conversation with his son Isaac. Father and son do not appear in a text together again until Isaac and Ishmael reunite at Abraham’s funeral.20
But if Genesis 22 keeps silent on what Abraham says or does not say to Isaac on Mount Moriah, how can one play be said to follow more precisely than another this silence, this secret? What does it mean to follow a silence in a narrative? Because we do not know what took place either in Abraham’s thoughts or between Abraham and Isaac, one could argue equally well the legitimacy of depicting an informed and compliant Isaac or a bewildered and terrified Isaac.21
This is the paradox at work in any response to Genesis 22. If there is to be something we refer to as “the Abraham and Isaac story” we must imagine what happens on Mount Moriah. But even the simplest response immediately compromises the secrecy of Abraham that constitutes a crucial element of the story. Once a secret is told, it no longer remains what it was, it no longer remains a secret; it becomes a particular interpretation.22 Even in identifying the secret of Abraham as a secret, I am still in some sense interpreting, putting words in Abraham’s mouth and thoughts in his head. The truth of what happened on Mount Moriah, like the God inextricably bound up in that truth, thus perpetually eludes us even as it calls to us for a response and an interpretation. As Kierkegaard writes in his famous response to the narrative in Fear and Trembling, “Abraham cannot speak, because he cannot say that which would explain everything (that is, so it is understandable).”23 Even the Hampton Court tapestry suggests something of this secrecy: the images of Abraham and Isaac become less and less distinct as they approach the sacrificial moment, and the final image has them barely visible on a cliff’s edge, their backs to the viewer. (See again Figure 1 in the Introduction.)
I am therefore not arguing that the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play has fascinated people because it somehow reveals the truth of Genesis 22, or because it magically resolves the ancient paradox of Abraham’s silence. Like every other interpretation, the Towneley Abraham and Isaac does provide an audience some access to the character’s thoughts; Abraham does not keep absolutely silent. During the violent struggle with Isaac, he speaks to the audiences:
[Isaac] speaks so ruefully to me
I would these tears might not be seen.
All worldly joy that I might win
Would I give if he were unkind,
But no default I found in him;
For him in torture I would grind;
To slay him thus I think great sin,
So rueful words I with him find;
To part I feel such woe within
For he will never from my mind.
But as with other notable interpretations of Genesis 22, the Towneley Abraham and Isaac seems to recognize and engage this religious paradox of Abraham’s silence in an extraordinary manner. The Towneley playwright does what other interesting interpreters do: he resists the dominant trend of history to explicate Abraham’s situation rather than respect the paradox as such. Some early Christians, such as Tertullian, Origen, and St. John of Chrysostom, are worth reading in a modern context because, for example, they offer some resistance to explicating Abraham’s situation through typology in their interpretations of Genesis 22. Origen, for example, briefly honors the mystery:
What do you say to these things, Abraham? What kind of thoughts are stirring in your heart? A word has been uttered by God which is such as to shatter and try your faith. What do you say to these things? What are you thinking ? . . . I am not able to examine the thoughts of such a great patriarch nor can I know what thoughts the voice of God which had proceeded to test him stirred in him, what feeling it caused, when he was ordered to slay his son.24
Ultimately, however, Origen and others relieve their readers or listeners from the anxiety the situation instills, usually with some typological gesture.
The tendency toward explication predates specifically Christian typologizing or even Pauline allegory wherein Isaac becomes a figure for Christ. Drawing mainly on the scholarship of Geza Vermes, Carol Delaney points out that “at some point before and during the period around the time of Jesus, the focus of emphasis in the story shifted from Abraham to Isaac. Rather than passive victim, Isaac became an active participant and the exemplar of a Jewish martyr: ‘Isaac offered himself to be a sacrifice for the sake of righteousness’ (4 Macc. 13:12).”25 Two hundred years before Jesus, Vermes argues, Isaac became the model for sacrificial atonement or redemption. This pre-Christian typologizing can be found in Jubilees, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus as well. The Pauline Christian reading of the story, wherein Isaac prefigures Christ, may not be as narrowly Christian as we have come to think. Paul’s reading of Isaac as Christ is rabbinical; and the habit of interpreting or explicating Abraham’s silence at the expense of honoring the paradox extends further back than one might think.
One could go as far as to say that Genesis 22 cannot keep silent about itself. Abraham is silent in Genesis 22, but the Genesis author/s is/are not, offering an interpretation of the events on Mount Moriah after the fact.
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, ‘I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me. (Geneva Bible)
These lines (verses 15–18), however, “have long been recognized as late additions to what is basically a complete story by line 14. Biblical scholarship commonly treats 15–18 as a late interpolation, secondary or inferior and attributes the lines to the J source, although the rest of the story is assumed to be from the E tradition.”26 From the beginning, some interpretation, some economizing, has always already been going on.
Those who work to address the paradox as such deliver more. Philo of Alexandria was at great pains to avoid any Christian typology and to explain that this sacrifice could not truly be explained in the context of sacrifices generally. It was extraordinary, unique, akin to mystery: “What is there which is not peculiar to him, and excellent beyond all power of language to praise?”27 Gregory of Nyssa, in Answer to Eunomius’s Second Book, located in the mystery of Abraham a means to escape all forms of idolatry, any scandalous effort to explain or justify God. Christians should be like Abraham, he argued, because Abraham took hold of a faith which was “unmixed and pure of any concept,” a faith without a recognizable, economical faith. That is, Abraham’s faith resisted explication. Something of this ancient notion of Ibrahim/ Abraham as a model for anti-idolatry is famously embedded in the Koran, where he is championed as the first hanif, or monotheist (Sura 3:67).
Luther repeatedly describes Abraham’s gesture as “impossible” to comprehend, a “contradiction” he is “unable to resolve”—that is, he does so before offering a quite specific resolution. But Luther begins by recognizing the paradox of Abraham as such. Abraham must kill Isaac without expecting anything back in return.28 He says in one moment the call to sacrifice Isaac “is a momentous command and far harsher than we are able to imagine,” before explicating in another, “These were [Abraham’s] thoughts” at the impossible instant of the gift before returning, in yet another reversal, to “we cannot comprehend this trial.”29 Abraham and Isaac makes Luther spin, putting his intellectual rigor at odds with his profound faith and exegetical energies. We cannot comprehend this trial, he says, “but we can observe and imagine it from afar, so to speak.”30 Luther ponders: “I do not know why Moses omitted” such details as a conversation between Abraham and Isaac that would have led to an easier typological interpretation.31
Of course, Luther abandons the imagination and narrative for explication and thus closes that opening off with Pauline allegory: “Abraham understood the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and through it alone he resolved this contradiction.”32 In other words, Abraham knew of the New Covenant to come in Christ’s grace and thus tolerated the contradictory demand to kill Isaac in response to God’s call. What had seemed incomprehensible for Luther abruptly becomes clear in this pronouncement. Interestingly, Bruce Chilton argues that the Koran’s handling of the contradiction similarly ameliorates Ibrahim’s choice. For Ibrahim, Allah provides a continuous vision and prophecy that shows no real sacrifice is called for at this moment. Allah resolves whatever tension Ibrahim experiences by providing all this as prophecy and vision.33
In recognizing and engaging the paradox of Abraham’s silence so passionately and profoundly, then, I suspect the Towneley play illuminates the religious in a way few treatments of Genesis 22—a narrative critical to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—had done prior to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which tries to push back to the initial problem of Abraham’s silence. If the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play looks forward to the secular modern world, it does so by way of looking forward to Kierkegaard. And in looking forward to Kierkegaard one is actually looking backward to the paradoxes embedded in Genesis 22. And this confuses and confounds everything about so-called secularization—even, I might add, its refutation.
To get a handle on Kierkegaard’s Abraham we need to begin with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant—even though his critical statement on the passage appears in a single footnote. In the Conflict of the Faculties Kant suggests that Abraham should have ignored the horrible call from God because there was no way to establish that the voice was God’s. Because of its subsequent influence in secular modernity, Kant’s logic is familiar and clear even to those who have never heard of Kant: “We ought . . . to do a thing not because God wills it, but because it is righteous and good in itself—and it is because it is good in itself that God wills it and demands it of us.”34 Abraham, Kant argues, “should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: “That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven.’”35
For Kant, the philosophical problem was not with the notion of God or his divinely revealed word—there may, in fact, be a God and a divinely revealed word. Authenticating that word is the problem. “Now a code of God’s statutory (and so revealed) will, not derived from human reason but harmonizing perfectly with morally practical reason toward the final end—in other words, the Bible—would be the most effective organ for guiding men and citizens to their temporal and eternal well-being, if only it could be accredited as the word of God and its authenticity could be proved by documents. But there are many difficulties in the way of validating it.”36 So according to Kant, absent the means to ascertain God’s true will, reason must govern our understanding of the Bible, and those biblical teachings that challenge reason need to be reassessed in this light. We need to seek a pure moral religion, not one derived from the acts or choices of figures named in the Bible. The Bible is only useful to the extent it provided humankind with a workable moral framework for so many years.
According to Jon Levenson, this widespread understanding of Genesis 22 (even among those who would define themselves as devoutly religious), “dramatically reverses” the “traditional celebration and appreciation of Abraham’s performance during his tenth and last trial.”37 Abraham no longer stands as a religious hero of sorts, but an ethical suspect, acting outside of reason. Many current broad treatments of Abraham, such as those by Delaney and Chilton, testify to this contemporary interpretive concern.
I am not suggesting, of course, that Kant’s brief comments enact this transformation. But I am pointing to the way interpretations of Genesis 22 signal much about broad cultural, religious, and intellectual transformations. In brief, it is an ancient narrative that is employed to think through major concerns, a narrative that helps one understand Being itself—and non-Being.
What Kant really wants to wall off is the access to the unknowable implied in earlier and more decidedly positive readings of the text. Abraham was celebrated for his radical obedience to a call from a divine “Other,” and it is the paradoxical presence of that Other in the world of reason that troubles Kant. He argues that we should seek morality or religion within the limits of reason alone, without positing access to something “Other” that we do not have.
In this sense, Kant follows a long tradition rather than innovates. Western thought has always tried to purge the very notion of non-Being or the notion that there is something other than or outside of Being. This is because the idea of non-Being (as the pre-Socratic Parmenides first suggested in his poem “On Nature”) implies some minimal participation in Being. Consequently, to talk of the being of non-Being was to talk nonsense; correspondingly, to talk of something “other” is also nonsense because that other will always be some version of what we already know and therefore not other in any thorough-going way.
Nonetheless, as Kant’s attention suggests, the notion of the “Other” or a state other than Being continues to exert an incredible pull on human thought and activity. And one of the forms in which the call of something other than Being has always manifested its (non) presence is religion. Kant is not so much directly attacking religion, then, as he is trying to strictly limit what we try to say or even think about transcendent “otherness.” For him, we should learn to think without reference to transcendence.
Kant’s successor in the continental tradition was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel also suggested that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was nothing to be admired. For the more distinctly Christian Hegel, Genesis 22 was one of many flawed Jewish events or stories that inhibited the attempts of Jesus to bring people to consciousness of the divine. Identity and difference, self and other, pass into one another, and thus ultimately there is no difference, there is no “Other”—no “justified incommensurability”—in his dialectical logic. In a Hegelian universe the inscrutability of divine law—the command to kill Isaac—becomes manifest. In this, Hegel forecloses the possibility of “otherness” in a manner distinct from the way Kant only foreclosed access to otherness. This dialectical logic is inextricably linked to a Christian vision of the world wherein the divine Other came to be revealed in this world. There is ultimately only a self or a same, and the “other” gets translated through sublimation into that self/same. Abraham, in Hegel’s reading, has limited understanding of this because of his unhappy or “inwardly disrupted consciousness,” which cannot see the (ultimately Christian) process of sublimation at work in history.38 This Hegelian logic informs much of the secularization hypothesis, particularly the notion that religious passion is transformed into the emotional realism of the secular stage. In the context of recent early modern studies, Brad S. Gregory has brilliantly identified this long process as a religious development of “univocal metaphysics,” a process that reached its peak in the Reformation and, in turn, led to what we call a “secularized society.”39
Kierkegaard’s reading of Genesis 22 and Abraham was specifically intended to unsettle the dominance of Hegelian thought in nineteenth-century Europe.40 In attending so rigorously to Abraham’s silence, Kierkegaard specifically seeks to identify a figure who eludes this Hegelian universal “self-contained sphere”—where self and other collapse—suggesting a relation to the absolutely Other.41 Kierkegaard’s distinctly different Christianity leads him to strikingly different conclusions, conclusions that actually push backwards toward a pre-Kantian Genesis 22 and use the story to reopen the impossible possibility of otherness.
According to Kierkegaard, God’s absolute demand to kill exceeds any sense we might have of the ethical, or right. For us—or, more importantly, for Abraham—to translate that absolute, singular demand into a recognizable human code compromises the nature of the demand, transferring it to the realm of what Kierkegaard terms the “ethical” and/or “universal.” If Abraham were to say or even think “God must be asking this for some good reason,” that would compromise the absolute alterity of God’s call, reducing it to some form of the ethical or human that everyone, eventually, could understand. This is in part why, for Kierkegaard’s Abraham, “the ethical is the temptation.”42
Kierkegaard’s Abraham cannot in deed, word, or thought translate his act or the specific call to him into something good without reducing it to the ethical or the universal. He cannot be ethical or religious in the traditional (sacrificial) sense even, or especially, in his own heart of hearts.
Allen J. Frantzen has pointed toward this aneconomic quality in Genesis 22 by referring to the “anti-sacrificial” potential in all medieval Abraham and Isaac plays. “Few medieval works,” he notes, “exploit that potential.”43 I am arguing that the Towneley play, in its refusal to depict an economizing Abraham, exploits that potential like no other play does and, in fact, as very few other texts of any genre or time period have. As suggested, Abraham can have no secret hope or wish, or even a secret self for that matter. To put this in Christian terms familiar to the medieval world, the call to Abraham thoroughly divests him of any secret economizing and illuminates the “emptiness” of subjectivity found in Augustine’s paradoxical expression that God “wert more inward to me than my most inward part.”44 As Derrida writes, Abraham must “Keep the secret (that is his duty), but it is also a secret that he must keep as a double necessity because in the end he can only keep it: he doesn’t know it, he is unaware of its ultimate rhyme and reason. He is sworn to secrecy because he is in secret.”45 Abraham must be a religious actor responding to God and, simultaneously, in a seemingly impossible instant, also a crazed, hateful murderer, unable to justify his actions even to himself. He must be two people, or, more precisely, as Derrida’s language illuminates, no person—without a recognizable intact interiority or other qualities by which we traditionally recognize the subject—secret even from himself.
Derrida identifies the crucial Kierkegaardian moment in Genesis 22 as the aneconomic, the impossible, the instant when the economic circle of exchange is interrupted and Abraham gives death (or almost gives death) without expecting anything from God in return, thus avoiding any movement that compromises the infinite alterity of the latter in some human economy. This impossible moment of the gift, when Abraham is both “religious” actor and crazed murderer, preserves an absolute aneconomic relation without relation between Abraham and God whereby Abraham responds to the “wholly other,” but does not cast that wholly other as some version of the self/same with whom he can make sacrificial deals. Derrida’s gift identifies that which is not an exchange, that which stands outside even a sacrificial economy—that which is absolutely other. Abram/Abraham/Ibrahim, the common patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and his “gift of death,” Derrida argues, points to nothing less than the messianic structure determining all three Abrahamic faiths, a structure that demands an absolute and terrifying openness to the wholly other or a complete willingness to give oneself up to the absolutely other in a manner that defies reason or self interest but, at the same time, defers any communion, any totalizing gesture that dissolves the self in the other.46 The medieval dramatist approaches the actual narrative of Genesis 22 with a surprising Kierkegaardian or Derridean rigor.
Clifford Davidson, in “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval Drama,” a broader and useful look at all the Abraham plays, has already suggested that a certain pre-Kierkegaardian understanding infuses all the Abraham plays. He notes a Kierkegaardian understanding of Genesis 22 can offset the ways in which typological interpretation “dilute[s] the more terrible aspects—and, therefore, the more overtly theatrical aspects” of the plays.47 But Davidson uses Kierkegaard merely as a means to illuminate the purely medieval, Christian form of “angst” that appears in many of the plays. “Suffering and anxiety are . . . ultimately regarded as necessary in history for the achievement of stability and amity in the Christian community and of the hope of salvation for those who worship the Creator of all things and his Son.”48 That is, these plays are determined by a particular historical context and, again, all the Abraham plays display a degree of religious fear and trembling, a fear and trembling ultimately required for Christian salvation.
The medieval Christianity he discusses promulgated a certain fear and trembling for something, for salvation, for God. As Davidson’s own language also makes clear, though, the fear and trembling Kierkegaard identifies, in contrast, must be absolute (“an absolute duty toward the Absolute)—there can be no hidden economizing, a secret hope for a deal with God. Indeed, this insistence by Kierkegaard is what pushes his “religious” thought so close to a certain existentialism, or a postmodern flattening out of differences. If one empties out the desire for a relation with God as completely as Abraham must, according to Kierkegaard, then what is left of God?
In posing the question this way we can perhaps better see the distinction between Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, which is often seen as a precursor to twentieth-century existential philosophy, and the fear and trembling demanded generally by medieval Christianity. Even the great medieval mystics, the first negative or apophatic theologians who profoundly realized the paradox of speaking of the unspeakable transcendence of God, had some essence in mind when they addressed the paradox—a God behind the inscrutable God they couldn’t see. As Caputo writes, “When Meister Eckhart says, ‘I pray God to rid me of God,’ he formulates with the most astonishing economy a double bind by which we are all bound: how to speak and not speak, how to pray and not pray, to and for the tout autre. But in theology the tout autre goes (and comes) under the name of God.”49 Kierkegaard, in contrast, wants to make our response to the “wholly other” harder. In his reading of Abraham, there cannot be a God on the other side of fear and trembling. This demand to keep the other absolutely other, a demand that actually pushes toward an apparently secular position utterly without God, is what differentiates Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling from the more generalized Christian fear and trembling Davidson considers. Ignoring the literary critical discussion of the Towneley’s distinctiveness, Davidson does not consider that one or more of the plays might, in fact, gesture forward (or backwards?) toward a Kierkegaardian fear and trembling. From his perspective, all the plays remain trapped in their historical and distinctly Christian context.50
In contrast, I am arguing that the play’s Kierkegaardian rigor strikingly unsettles the play’s own ostensible Christian orientation. There is, again, no Christian typology at work in this play, no specifically Christian way of processing Abraham’s situation. That is, despite its originating context, this play offers up a strange religious perspective, not specifically Christian and seemingly edging toward the secular, a perspective, again, Derrida might call a “religion without religion.” The play eschews dogma and doctrine, pressing toward and revealing a structure of faith which is painfully aneconomic and unrewarding—particularly for Abraham and Isaac, but for an audience, too. This exposure of a structure of faith, somewhat paradoxically then, also creates a disturbing “realistic” or even “modern” bit of drama. All this, of course, points us toward Shakespeare, whose dramatic power also leads him to the paradoxes of Genesis 22.
That a religious passion might produce a certain kind of medieval dramatic realism is not a new suggestion. Auerbach (among others), for example, showed how a “serious realism” existed in the medieval world.51 He argued that the Christian “story of Christ, with its ruthless mixture of everyday reality and the highest most sublime tragedy” ultimately “conquered the classical rules of styles” that separated the everyday from certain artistic structures. In so doing he offered an implicit critique of the secularization hypothesis in drama. When such moments of “realism” appear, he cautioned, they should not be confused with modern realism or even as a gesture toward modern realism.
It is misleading to speak of a progressive secularization of the Christian passion play. . . . For the saeculum is included in this drama as a matter of principle and from the beginning. . . . A real secularization does not take place until the frame is broken, until the secular action becomes independent; that is, when human actions outside of Christian world history, as determined by Fall, Passion, and Last Judgment, are represented in a serious vein; when in addition to this manner of conceiving and representing human events, with its claim to be the only true and valid one, other ways of doing so become possible.52
And Auerbach’s thesis still works well for Abraham plays like the Chester and Brome and their artful and poignant depictions of human emotions that fit certainly within a Christian context.
The understanding that emotional realism is actually inextricable from the religious has a significant and productive place, too, in scholarly explorations of medieval Catholicism. As Michael O’Connell has pointed out, the Reformation’s emphasis on the “word” or the text of the scripture tended to occlude the earlier period’s emotional engagement with religion. For medieval audiences there was certainly a “religious truth” in the very performance of the mystery plays, the emotions they generated, a “Catholic” truth, one “consonant” though not precisely analogous with traditional Christian interpretations. Biblical narratives should be “physically immediate and expressive” as well as “emotionally accessible.” But this visual, expressive, emotional religious truth becomes a potential threat with the iconophobia of the Reformation. In this formulation of early modern drama there is a clear link between a certain kind of dramatic “emotional realism” and religious experience, a link or tie that becomes obscured with the Reformation’s intensified fear of idolatry, and thus difficult for us to access.53
This “Protestant” blind spot certainly seems related to the scholarly tendency to interpret the unrelenting pain and suffering in the Towneley Abraham and Isaac as secular or modern, often misrecognizing its religious passion as an attention to secular ethics. In this, O’Connell’s attention to Catholicism recalls Auerbach’s cautionary argument about misidentifying the medieval, religious “realism” with modern realism. O’Connell suggests that even in the more conventional Abraham plays that rely on typology the religion is actually in the emotions, not in the dramatic expression of doctrinal positions. Religious passion generates the powerful emotional realism. The Chester Abraham, for example, the only play, again, to offer an explicit typological exposition of the events depicted, taps a deep religious sensibility through the emotional engagement it offers to an audience, enhancing even the Christian typology that initially organized it.54 O’Connell goes on to note, too, the emotional power and connection to the “real” in the Brome Abraham, a power and verisimilitude it achieves without the Chester version’s explicit typology: “The Brome play on the same subject goes so far as to dispense with the typological interpretation and to elaborate even further the emotional pathos, which is explicitly related to pain and suffered by mothers in the loss of their own children.”55
The same is true, he argues, for Feo Belcari’s La rappresentazione d’Abram e d’Isaac suo figliuolo (1449), which employs a “thorough-going naturalism of emotional response.”
There is not apparent in the text any attempt at symbolism or any attempt to foreshadow in a direct way the sacrifice of Christ. What matters is the emotional character of what Abraham must do and Isaac’s reaction to it. In fact, Abraham will not carry out the sacrifice until he has disclosed it to Isaac and persuaded him of its necessity. The latter’s reaction is not immediate acquiescence but a natural horror of death. He even reminds his father of the reaction his death will provoke in Sarah. . . . The play . . . clearly intend[s] to naturalize the emotions they understand to inhere in the biblical narratives in terms the contemporary audience can readily accept. It is much less doctrinal understanding than emotional engagement that is the point of the play’s embodiment of the narratives.56
O’Connell also points out that while Theodore de Beze’s Calvinist Abraham Sacrifiant (1550, translated in to English by Arthur Golding in 1577) “does not achieve the intensity of emotional engagement” of the earlier Catholic plays, “it does confront the stark sorrow of Abraham’s dilemma that any portrayal of the text, whether visual or dramatic, must achieve.”57 Beze’s version is particularly interesting because it approaches the Kierkegaardian paradoxes with great intellectual sophistication but lacks the dramatic power and realism of the Wakefield version.
Of course, in the crucial moment Beze’s Abraham, like all the other Abrahams except for the Towneley, justifies his act to Isaac: “That I for thee a thousand times might dye: / But God will have it otherwise as now” (813–14). And, a few lines later, “Alas my sonne, God hath commaunded me / To make an offring unto him of thee, / To my great greef, to my great greef and pine, / And endless wo” (830–33). But Beze recounts Abraham’s long and difficult history leading up to the call to sacrifice Isaac and thus intensifies the fear and trembling of the situation. He also includes the figure of Satan, who tempts Abraham to do the ethical thing and save Isaac. And Beze attends carefully to the impossible aneconomic demands of the call, the way in which the call from God precludes any internal, devotional deal making on Abraham’s part:
O God my God, thou seest my open hart,
And of my thowghts thou seest ech secret part,
So that my cace I neede not to declare. Thou seest my wofull care.
Thou onely canst me rid of my disease,
By graunting me (if that it might thee please)
One onely thing the which I dare not crave.
Intriguingly, O’Connell does not discuss the Towneley Abraham and Isaac and its distinctiveness, which arguably provides even more “thorough-going naturalism” than these other plays. He has, perhaps, good scholarly reason to avoid the play and concentrate on the stirring pathos provided by the performance of other Abraham texts because, again, the Towneley distinctiveness may in part be the product of a textual accident. O’Connell concentrates on the loss of a visual, expressive, physical Catholic culture at the moment of the Reformation. Inasmuch as he is interested in the emotional engagement the cycle plays provided, an emotional engagement that can be clearly linked to this disappearing iconic Catholic culture, the more complete Abraham plays provide more substantial and sustainable evidence for the specific case he wants to prove.
However, one must also acknowledge that the emotions of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac do not so much as enhance or emphasize or embody the biblical narrative and the Catholic doctrinal understanding of the narrative as they do threaten to blow that correspondence all to pieces. Thus I think O’Connell’s avoidance of the Towneley play may not be just a matter of scholarly caution, avoiding a texual accident. The Towneley Abraham and Isaac puts religious sensibility itself in peril, and thus, as a piece of literary evidence, its distinctiveness complicates as much as it supports O’Connell’s argument. The Towneley play straddles not the line between medieval Catholicism and Reformation Protestantism but, again, the line between the religious and secular writ large.
For this reason the Towneley Abraham and Isaac utterly defies Auerbach’s argument, too. We cannot understand the play’s realism as a distinctive Christian realism (saeculum) because the play is at once outside the frame of the Christian narrative (in more senses than one). And yet the play is not a piece of modern realism because it is not completely an independent secular action or, at least, a secular action that makes any kind of sense to us. One can, of course, willfully retrofit certain post-Enlightenment, post-Kant notions about the divide between divine law and human ethics to the play and, in so doing, make “secular” sense of the action. In a post-Kantian framework, then, one could argue, like Robert Bennett, that the Towneley playwright realized that the “true” significance of the story was the ethical and strictly human imperative not to kill Isaac and the utter “madness” of listening to a “God” and emphasized that side of the story accordingly.58 But proponents of a post-Kantian “secularism” often seem blithely unaware of the historical stakes involved here. Jon Levenson, for example, reminds us that in calling for a “pure moral religion” Kant also called for a “euthanasia of Judaism.”59 We are reminded in such instances how closely tied the notion of the “secular” is to the development of Christianity.
How, then, are we today to understand the relationship between the extraordinary religious and the everyday in the Towneley play?60 Let me conclude by suggesting that Derrida addresses this proximity between religion and the everyday in a most exquisite fashion. The “sacrifice of Isaac,” he writes, “illustrates—if that is the word in the case of such a nocturnal mystery—the most common and everyday experience of responsibility.” He acknowledges the story’s monstrousness, its strangeness, its mystery. Then, however, he asks provocatively, “But isn’t this [Abraham’s situation] the most common thing?”61 Derrida does not mean to suggest by this question that we are everyday being asked to sacrifice our children on a mountain but that the structural situation of Abraham recurs every day for everyone. In merely taking care of our own, as it were, we are sacrificing others, infinite others. “I can respond only to the one (or to the One), that is, to the other, by sacrificing the other to that one. I am responsible to any one (that is to say any other) only by failing in my responsibilities to the others, to the ethical or political generality. And I can never justify this sacrifice, I must always hold my peace about it.”62 To explicate even further this everyday sacrifice, Derrida turns to the everyday in the form of cats and cat ownership. “How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people?”63 The distinction between this extraordinary religious story and the story of our everyday lives begins to blur rather dramatically. The call of something “Other,” we shall see—whether that be the call of the state, a sense of justice, God—routinely threatens our relationships with “others”—very often those closest to us.
Enter Shakespeare, and his early and somewhat “weak” kings.