Bodies in Question

Gender, Religion, Text

Darlene Bird, Yvonne Sherwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754635307
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351955096
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Exploring a range of subjects from the human genome project to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, the poetry of Jorie Graham to feminist Christian art, the contributors pose questions around the theme 'Body and Voice'. Questions raised include: 'Who speaks for the foetus and on what basis?'; 'What effect does the near-sacrifice of Isaac have on mother Sarah's body?'; and 'What do embodiment and gender mean for the resurrected body and Jesus's body?'

PART I
UNEXPECTED WOMEN

Chapter 1
When Johannes de Silentio Sounds Like Johanna de Silentio: Strange Harmonies and Discords in the ‘Attunement’ Section of Fear and Trembling

Yvonne Sherwood

In this paper I want to share with you the most powerful feminist response to the story of the so-called sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22) that I have ever come across. The curious thing is that it was written over 160 years ago, in 1843, and that the author is a man. And not just any man, I might add, but Søren Kierkegaard, a man hardly renowned for his proto-feminist sympathies. This is the man whose first published work, called ‘Another Defense of Woman’s Great Abilities’, sardonically portrayed the new Eves naïvely biting into the bad apple of women’s suffrage (1990, pp. 3–52); the man who defined woman as Being-for-Another (1959, pp. 424–25); the man who came out with such eminently quotable lines as ‘the feminine nature is devotedness, abandon’ (1980, pp. 49–50), and ‘When a girl’s love is not sacrificial she is no woman but a masculine figure’ (1941, p. 46), and ‘There is really something to it that in the last resort women are a bit more self-sacrificing. It is probably because they live more quietly and withdrawn’ (1975, p. 499). Of course, it’s hard to say where exactly ‘Kierkegaard’ is in all this because he’s constantly splitting himself up into pseudonyms to convey the splitness of what he calls the poor existing individual – that poor creature who eats and sleeps, sneezes and gets sick, and all those other things that bodied human beings do, and who lives in difficult relationship to those ideal, unified, philosophical terms such as Geist, Sein, Sittlichkeit and the ‘thinging of the thing’. But I think it’s true to say that the existing individual in Kierkegaard is a male existing individual and that the role of woman is to play helpmeet or foil to his existence.

The text I want to look at is the ‘Attunement’ section of Fear and Trembling, which comes as the second of four prefaces (‘Preface’, ‘Attunement’, ‘Eulogy on Abraham’, and ‘Preliminary Expectoration’ or ‘Preamble from the Heart’).¹ This already tells us something: Kierkegaard, as you may know, wrote a book of prefaces under the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene partly to convey the sense that no philosophy is ever complete, and partly as a joke (the joke was that his troublesome wife kept interrupting him and using his papers to curl her hair so poor Nicolaus could never get anything finished²). The fact that there are four prefaces suggests that there are many alternative paths up Mount Moriah, many ways of beginning, and this is demonstrated on a smaller scale in the Attunement section itself. Told by Johannes de Silentio, John of Silence, it tells the story of a certain man who is perplexed and fascinated by Moriah – that is, it is the story of a man who is perplexed and fascinated by Moriah told by another man, Johannes, who is himself a pseudonym of Kierkegaard. Like a Russian doll, the Attunement section is a tale within a tale within a tale, a voice within a voice within a voice, and one is never quite sure who is speaking. And indeed, one of the things that this text is about is the impossibility of speaking. The passage is packed with allusions to silence: it describes (twice) how Abraham and Isaac ‘rode on in silence’ (‘Attunement’, pp. 45–46; ‘Exordium’, pp. 10, 12), tells how ‘silently [Abraham] arranged the firewood, bound Isaac; silently he drew the knife’ (‘Attunement’, p. 46; ‘Exordium’, p. 12), how ‘Abraham made everything ready for the sacrifice, calmly and quietly’ (‘Attunement’, p. 47; ‘Exordium’, p. 14), and concludes the last performance, eerily, ‘Never a word in the whole world is spoken of this, and Isaac told no-one what he had seen’ (‘Attunement’, pp. 47–48; ‘Exordium’, p. 14).

Clearly one of the things that the Attunement section is about is silence, and later John of Silence will have more to say about silence – in fact he goes on about it endlessly, at verbose length. Looking at that strange exchange where Abraham says to Isaac ‘God will supply the lamb, my son’ (Genesis 22:8) – where he speaks yet says nothing – looking at the fact that he says nothing to Sarah, to the servants nor to Isaac, Johannes argues that Abraham is marooned in silence, that he is forced to go incommunicado because of his Absolute relation to the Absolute, his singular relation to God. If language is a communal thing, if we can only speak using shared words and shared concepts, then Abraham is in exile, a refugee, outside the community, outside what Kierkegaard calls the ‘relief of speech’ (‘Attunement’, p. 137). His pain is his isolation which is linguistic, philosophical and ethical: he is outside all systems of sense on a limb, or leap, of faith. Abraham’s actions fit neither with the prescriptions of Kantian Moralität, according to which religion (meaning Christianity) must be ethical, nor with the Hegelian belief that the ethical-universal is the highest good; indeed so much so that, in extreme circumstances, the particular can legitimately be sacrificed for the universal, so that Agamemnon can legitimately sacrifice Iphigenia for the good of Greece. The scandal of Abraham is that he sacrifices the particular good, which is Isaac, and the universal good, which is Isaac, because the universal (that is, Israel) as yet only exists ‘in Isaac’s loins’ (‘Attunement’, p. 88; ‘Exordium’, p. 59) as Isaac’s seed.

Johannes’s point throughout Fear and Trembling is that although Isaac technically is not wounded, at least according to the testimony of biblical narrative, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac inflicts a fatal wound or separation between ethics and religion. Johannes’s argument is that the founding story of the world’s three monotheistic religions is not ethical, which is why it wounds our conscience and why it throws up more problems than can be solved by knowing Hebrew. As a biblical scholar, I love that passage where Johannes laments, with pseudo-naivety, that unfortunately the certain man was not an ‘exegetical scholar’ and did not know Hebrew, which is a shame because ‘if he had known Hebrew, he perhaps would easily have understood the story and Abraham’ (‘Attunement’, p. 44; ‘Exordium’, p. 9). Johannes is clearly joking: he believes that Genesis 22 will have a profound effect on all existing individuals, if they dare to read it – really read it – without protecting themselves from its drastic implications for human bodies by using various subterfuges of the brain. He describes the experience of reading it as a series of symptoms felt on the body, at the visceral level of our existence, and suggests that rather than glibly proffering it as the subject of a sermon, or the kind of story that one can digest while puffing at one’s pipe on a Sunday afternoon (‘Attunement’, p. 58.), this story should come with a health warning like a packet of cigarettes. If you read it, Johannes warns, you will feel fear and trembling; you will shake with the ‘shudder of thought’ (‘Attunement’, p. 45); your brain will reel (‘Attunement’, p. 76); you will feel the heat of perspiration (‘Attunement’, p. 59); you will be struck blind (‘Attunement’, p. 55); you will be paralysed by the twists of thought that you must put your mental body through like a tightrope dancer or a trampoline artist (‘Attunement’, pp. 55, 63, 66; cf. ‘Exordium’, p. 36); your intellectual digestive system will be strained to its limits by the gigantic thoughts that you must try to gulp down whole (‘Attunement’, p. 60); you will suffer from sleeplessness and congestion of the blood (‘Attunement’, pp. 60, 81); you will strain your mental muscles (and at the very least pull a mental hamstring) (‘Attunement’, pp. 62, 63); in short, you will tremble with the ‘convulsions of existence’ (‘Attunement’, p. 91). Johannes is clear: this is a story that hurts and is important because it hurts, because it inflicts damage on the flesh and on the brain.

In other words, Johannes is prepared to admit, and even develop, the idea that this story matters precisely because it has to do with sacrifice – a fact that we acknowledge when we call the story, without thinking, the story of the ‘sacrifice of Isaac’ rather than the ‘near-sacrifice of Isaac’, thus recognizing, in our very unthinkingness, what religious apologists and exegetes are at pains to deny. Whatever commentators try to say about this being a story banning child sacrifice – and I totally sympathize with, though am not convinced by, their completely responsible attempts to heal the wound between religion and ethics – the fact remains that even though Isaac is replaced with a ram, the story clearly reports how Abraham is praised and rewarded for his adherence to principles of sacrifice, and also reports a blessing based on the incremental principles of sacrifice (by being prepared to offer up one son Abraham receives a nation/cosmos full of sons). The narrative reports how Abram ‘exalted father’ became Abraham ‘father of nations’, and makes it clear that the exaltation of Abraham has everything to do with the willingness to offer up his son on the altar: ‘Because you have done this’, the messenger of God says, ‘your seed shall be as stars in the sky, and sand on the seashore and your seed shall possess the gates of your enemies, and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves’ (Genesis 22:16–18). The power of the story is precisely that it demonstrates the nature of religion, from re-ligare, to bind: it is about the tie that binds beyond and above all and despite all other ties (a fact highlighted by that curious Jewish title for story, ‘The Binding’, the ‘Akedah’). The greatness of Abraham is that, as the first-century Jewish interpreter Philo put it, ‘He did not incline partly to the boy and partly to piety, but devoted his whole soul through and through to holiness, and disregarded the claims of common blood’ (Philo, On Abraham, 198; trans. Colson, 1935, p. 97). Johannes is scathing about those who try to remove the offence of the story by translating Isaac into the ‘best’, so that Abraham gives his best (‘Attunement’, p. 60).³ The whole point is that Abraham gives his son, a person, and a son not a daughter because, according to the book of Genesis’ monogenetic model of human generation, the power of reproduction and of future is passed from man-to-man, with woman playing the part of receptacle. The seed, the future, is in the son. If we imagine Abraham building a very large shrine to honour God and think how relatively trivial the story becomes, we can appreciate the power of the idea of giving up the body, and particularly the body of the (only) son. And if we imagine Abraham obediently climbing a high mountain to pick a bunch of rare yellow flowers to offer up to God, we realize how far the story is tied up with gender, with seed, and the sacrificial productive actions of men, which are seen as something difficult, not something as natural and womanly as birth. These arguments, which I can only allude to briefly here, are discussed in detail by Carol Delaney (1998, pp. 17–34): ‘By relinquishing some of his paternal power to God’, Delaney argues, ‘Abraham receives it back a thousand-fold’ and becomes the father of a universe, a cosmos full of sons.

Johannes thinks that Genesis 22 finds its most natural biblical home alongside passages about working out your salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12) or forsaking your mother and father and sister and brother for the sake of the gospel (Luke 14:26): it’s message is faith hurts, faith is sacrifice, faith is hard, knife-edge, steely hard. John Caputo puts it thus: ‘A man cannot say he loves and serves the Lord and then shrink back, when it comes time to draw the knife … a man must bear the fear and trembling, the thunderstorm and the earthquake … he must, otherwise religion would be a matter of womanly sighs and softness and suppliant prayer’ (Caputo, 1993, p. 140). The text, or test, is about paternity, not maternity, fathering not mothering (and think what different connotations those words have in the Bible and our culture where to father means ‘to create’ and to mother means ‘to nurture/to smother’): it is about the gift of God the father in response to the father’s gift of the son. We are drawn to the story not just because it is literally the beginning and the raison d’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Gender, Religion, Text: Body and Voice (Körper und Kommunikation)
• Part I: Unexpected Women
• Part II: Indecent/Subversive Women
• Part III: Demonic/Angelic Women
• Part IV: Techno Bodies
• Part V: The Question of The Body in Literature, Theology and Philosophy
• Part VI: Future Bodies
• Index