Other Abrahams: Sacrificing Faith

Abstract

This article analyses the complex intermingling of positivity and negativity in the circular definition of faith, as well as the different sacrifices deemed necessary to keep the “circle” intact. The analysis departs from the first paragraph of Saint Augustine’s The Confessions, Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and two short excerpts by Franz Kafka: a reflection on “other Abrahams” in a letter to Robert Klopstock in 1921, and a fragment named “Die Prüfung”. Kafka being one of the most original interpreters of modernity’s drastic implications for religion, the aim of the article is to display and reflect upon both a continuity and discontinuity from Augustine and Kierkegaard. In Kafka, the structurally dynamic tension inherent in humanity’s relation to the divine has been stretched all the way to its breaking point, leaving us with a religious structure but without access to a living core, a faith without a possible life form.