I’m reading through Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and despite the many intellectually interesting points raised, I find his head bashing against a specifically Western conception of the divine, troubling. What follows are some rough thoughts regarding a mystic/esoteric conception of divinity and some possible ramifications for reading Abraham’s story.
The duty becomes duty to God by being referred to God, but I do not enter into relation with God in the duty itself. Thus it is a duty to love one’s neighbor; it is a duty in so far as it is referred to God; yet it is not God that I come in relation to in the duty but the neighbor that I love.
Most basic Western conceptions of God are based on a hard and fast distinction between the divine and human beings. Christ, of course, is an exception as God’s manifestation on Earth but is unexceptional in that he is used to sustain this human/divine divide, precisely by being the exception. After all, we cannot become Christ. Thus, we have Kierkegaard’s claim that performing the duty to love one’s neighbor only achieves duty to God through a mediation, a reference that does not put one in direct communion with the absolute, as Abraham achieves.
A more esoteric reading would absolve the human/ divine divide and place one’s performance of duty in the path of direct communion. There are two interesting consequences when we remove the boundary. First, since your neighbor isGod, as one instantiation, your love for your neighbor is directly a love for God. There are stories of Indian saints who, after an enlightenment/ higher consciousness experience, in the midst of their ecstasy began feeding every stray cat they found, put their wives on the alter to worship them simply because they saw the divine as a living reality embodied as material reality. Another saint, experiencing a similar ecstasy, poured flower petals on herself; the flowers were meant for an alter. The second consequence is one which this latter saint experienced, specifically, seeing oneself as a moment of God. These two realizations break the human/ divine binary and lead to an entirely different conception of Kierkegaard’s moment cited above.
One’s obligation to love neighbors is directly a love of God because your neighbor is a living breath of divinity. Moreover, the duty to love becomes nothing more than a dualized (in the duality v. Nirvana sense) moment of the obligation to love yourself. Since I too am a divine moment then loving myself is loving God, which filtered through the lenses of time and space is also a moment of loving the neighbor. God is loving God, or to use non-semetic language, Self is loving Self, as Self.
In Abraham Kierkegaard finds the father of faith, specifically, as one who is able to wholly renounce (as the knight of infinite resignation) but also make the superhuman leap to expect what he has renounced. Kierkegaard, at this moment, terms him the knight of faith because his expectations are built on “the strength of the absurd.” However, if we apply the esoteric paradigm we can begin to theorize an Abraham who is conscious of himself as a divine moment, as divinity itself, and consequently aware of all that is around him as such, as God. What Kierkegaard calls the ‘absurd’ is nothing more, or less (in this paradigm), than an elevated state of consciousness in which Abraham knows that Actor, Action and Object are all God, and as such, indestructible.
The ethical paradox Abraham presents dissolves as such in this consciousness––a consciousness that can only be understood as absurd by a conception of divinity that divorces human being and God.
