Grammars of Sacrifice: Futures, Subjunctives, and What Would Have/Could Have Happened on Mount Moriah?
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In A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives, published seventeen years ago (unbelievably), I looked forward to what would become a significant turn back towards the biblical texts’ past futures. In this paper, I look at the density of futurity and modality in these past futures. The sacrifice of Isaac reaches beyond itself into the space of the subjunctive, the optative, the cohortative, poetry and prayer. Drawing on Nietzsche’s and Steiner’s intuition that the uniqueness of the human lies with the grammars of the future and the promise, I revive the memory of lost Christian texts in Greek, Syriac, Coptic and Middle English that show, clearly, that the akedah does not just have a long and obsessive history, but a dense and long history of longing. If ‘every human use of the future tense of the verb “to be” is a negation, however limited, of mortality’ (so Steiner), then the fundamental structure of human grammar is sacrificial. In the modest sacrifices of modality, we give up and, in a sense, negate what is in order to make plural possibilities, myriad lives, more and less substantial. As Abraham offers up one son and gets a heavenful of sons, so modality offers up or qualifies or pluralises what is in order to make new possible lives: those that were, that could have been; and those that might yet live or live again.
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1
Emily Dickinson, ‘I Dwell in Possibility’, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. Ralph W. Franklin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 466.
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4
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford World’s Classics; trans. Douglas Smith; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 39.
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5
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 6.
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22
Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers (ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), vol. 3, p. 714: ‘The whole experience has made me forever at variance with what it is to be human. If it had pleased you, O Lord, to let me be changed into a horse, yet remaining human, I would be no more at variance with what it is to be a man than I have become through what has just happened’.
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24
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies’, p. 116, Memra 1, my emphasis.
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25
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies’, p. 123, Memra 2, ll.25-29.
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26
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies’, p. 125, Memra 2, ll.113-22.
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28
Pseudo-Chyrsostom, ‘In Abraham et Isaac Sermo’, in Various Old Testament Homilies, Contra ludos et theatre, in natalem Christi diem, Other Works (Patrologia graeca [162 vols.; ed. J.-P. Migne; Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857-86], pp. 56, col. 539-41.
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31
Romanos, ‘Hymn of the Sacrifice of Abraham’, pp. 148-49, stanza 9.
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32
Romanos, ‘Hymn of the Sacrifice of Abraham’, pp. 150-51, stanza 11.
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33
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio (trans. Alastair Hannay; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 88.
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34
John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis (trans. John King; Edinburgh: Edinburgh Printing Company, 1847), vol. 1, p. 553.
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36
Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. xxiv.
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46
Allen J. Franzen, ‘Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Sacrifice and Antisacrifice in Works by Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten and Derek Jarman’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3 (2001), pp. 445-76. In contrast, and closer to my own argument, V.A. Kolve describes how these medieval dramas unexpectedly exploit the ‘differences’ as well as the ‘similarities’ between ‘figure and fulfilment’; Clifford Davidson argues that the potential for ‘mental hurt’ is not stifled by typology; while Peter Braeger contends that the plays exploit ‘typology as contrast’. See V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), p. 67; Clifford Davidson, ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama’, Papers on Language and Literature 35.1 (1999) pp. 1-18; Peter Braeger, ‘Typology as Contrast in the Middle English Abraham and Isaac Plays’, Essays in Medieval Studies 2 (1985), pp. 131-49.
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53
Romanos, ‘Hymn of the Sacrifice of Abraham’, pp. 148-50, stanzas 9, 7, 10.
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55
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 108, Memra 1, ll.14-16.
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56
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 123, Memra 2, ll.15-16.
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57
Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (trans. Walter Lowrie; New York: Harper, 1964) p. 102.
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59
Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way (ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 270.
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60
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 108, Memra 1, l.22. Sarah elaborates further on their oneness, thus: ‘You went off and fetched a calf, while I kneaded unleavened bread / we were as one person with a single love when we received (those) supernal beings / when they rested and gave us rest – and the child came as the result of their blessings’ (p. 108, ll.21-23).
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61
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, pp. 108-109, Memra 1, ll.33-38 (my emphasis). The second memra repeats the lines – ‘You are so drunk with the love of God – who is your God and my God – and if He so bids you concerning the child, you would kill him without hesitation’ – but suggests that Sarah is now giving them a more positive inflection. This second Sarah intuits the sacrifice to come, and wants to participate.
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62
See Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 112, note to Memra 1, line 6.
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63
See Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 112, note to Memra 1, line 6.
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65
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verses on the Binding of Isaac’, p. 109, Memra 1, ll.76-82.
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72
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies’, p. 110, Memra 1, ll.117-22.
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73
Brock, ‘Two Syriac Verse Homilies’, p.111, Memra 1, ll.172-73.
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77
J. Samuel Preus, ‘Secularizing Divination: Spiritual Biography and the Invention of the Novel’, JAAR 59.3 (1991), pp. 441-66 (446).
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78
See Dennis Bielfeldt, ‘Luther, Metaphor and Theological Language’, Modern Theology 6.2 (1990), pp. 121-35. Bielfeldt argues that the grammar of heaven is articulated through the clash of earthly categories. The grammar of the Holy Spirit does not obey the normative rules of grammar, which is why it can break through the grammar of life which dictates that we are born and, at the end of the paragraph or sentence, die.
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79
See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 115; and Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 174.
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80
Thomas Morgan, The Moral Philosopher in a Dialogue between Philalethes, a Christian Deist, and Theophanes, a Christian Jew (London: Printed for the Author, 1740), vol. 3, pp. 133-34.
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85
See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
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Grammars of Sacrifice: Futures, Subjunctives, and What Would Have/Could Have Happened on Mount Moriah?
In: Biblical InterpretationSearch for other papers by Yvonne Sherwood in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
In A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives, published seventeen years ago (unbelievably), I looked forward to what would become a significant turn back towards the biblical texts’ past futures. In this paper, I look at the density of futurity and modality in these past futures. The sacrifice of Isaac reaches beyond itself into the space of the subjunctive, the optative, the cohortative, poetry and prayer. Drawing on Nietzsche’s and Steiner’s intuition that the uniqueness of the human lies with the grammars of the future and the promise, I revive the memory of lost Christian texts in Greek, Syriac, Coptic and Middle English that show, clearly, that the akedah does not just have a long and obsessive history, but a dense and long history of longing. If ‘every human use of the future tense of the verb “to be” is a negation, however limited, of mortality’ (so Steiner), then the fundamental structure of human grammar is sacrificial. In the modest sacrifices of modality, we give up and, in a sense, negate what is in order to make plural possibilities, myriad lives, more and less substantial. As Abraham offers up one son and gets a heavenful of sons, so modality offers up or qualifies or pluralises what is in order to make new possible lives: those that were, that could have been; and those that might yet live or live again.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 330 | 36 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 213 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 214 | 17 | 1 |