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and even familial relations of love. With this breach, Abraham isolates himself over against “the whole world,” which he then regards “as simply his opposite,” and as “sustained by . . . [a] God who was alien to it.”30

      In Hegel’s reading, Abraham trades in communal and familial ties for an exclusive God-relation that transposes the reciprocal, loving nature of those former communal and familial relations into a register of mastery. “Nothing in nature was supposed to have any part in God; everything was simply under God’s mastery. . . . Moreover, it was through God alone that Abraham came in to a mediate relation with the world, the only link with the world possible for him.” Consequently,

mastery was the only possible relationship in which Abraham could stand to the infinite world opposed to him; but he was unable himself to make this mastery actual, and it therefore remained ceded to his Ideal [God—“the product of his thought”31]. He himself also stood under his Ideal’s dominion . . . he served the Idea, and so he enjoyed his Idea’s favor; and since its divinity was rooted in his contempt for the whole world, he remained its only favorite.”32

Hegel sees this combination of contempt for and breaching of all communal and familial relations in which Abraham opposes himself to the world, together with the way in which he is simultaneously sustained in that isolation by loyal servitude to his divine “thought-product,” as constituting an extremely toxic cocktail of interpretive imperialism. And this interpretive imperialism inevitably plays itself out in the most intimate relationship in Abraham’s life. In Hegel’s reading, “even the one love he had, his love for his son” was not spared the consequences of Abraham’s essential “spirit,” a spirit of isolation from and contempt for all worldly relations mediated through absolute, privileged loyalty to an equally isolated divine Master. Abraham’s natural intimacy with his son, Isaac, could not help but “trouble his all-exclusive heart . . . to the extent that even this love he once wished to destroy.”33 Even Abraham’s love for his son must fall under the knife of Abraham’s essential religious spirit, the spirit of mastery through exclusionary opposition and absolute religious servitude.

      Hegel sees the essential hostility and exclusionary violence of Abraham’s religious genius, then, as expressed paradigmatically in the sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham imperialistically subjects all natural and communal relations, even his relation to Isaac, to his own exclusive relation to God. All creaturely others, and the natural familial and communal webs of inter-relation they entail, are interpreted by Abraham through the particular lens of his own all-encompassing God-relation. And it is this spirit, this distinctive, Abrahamic religious genius, that Hegel sees animating and determining the entirety of Jewish history.

      For Hegel, the violent and exclusionary logic of Abraham’s religious genius plays out in relation to the religious neighbor as well. Abraham’s God-relation is unique for Hegel in that it leaves no room for the religious genius of any other people or nation, or for the gods that their religious genius would symbolically express.

Hence, Abraham’s God is essentially different from . . . the national gods . . . a nation which reverences its national god has admittedly also isolated itself, partitioned what is unitary [i.e., human life], and shut others out of its god’s share. But, while doing so, it has conceded the existence of other shares; instead of reserving the immeasurable to itself and banishing others from its sphere, it grants to others equal rights with itself; it recognizes . . . gods of others as . . . gods. On the other hand, in the jealous God of Abraham and his posterity there lay the horrible claim that He alone was God and that this nation was the only one to have a god.34

And as the family of Abraham becomes a nation, acquiring the requisite means and resources, and discovering itself to be in a position of power in relation to its neighbors, Abraham’s religious genius plays itself out in a very material, e.g., bloody way. The children of Abraham, possessed by his spirit, “exercised their dominion mercilessly with the most revolting and harshest tyranny, and utterly extirpated all life.” For “outside” the relation to their god, which they assume to be the only God, outside that relation “in which nothing but they, the favorites, can share, everything is matter . . . a stuff, loveless, with no rights, something accursed which . . . they treat[ed] as accursed and then assign[ed] to its proper place [death] if it attempt[ed] to stir.”35

      Hegel’s description of Abraham’s religious genius as a coercive imposition of his own particular interpretation of divine and worldly reality upon the neighbor (be it Isaac or the surrounding religious communities) that thereby reduces the neighbor to a silent, lifeless object, resonates strongly with the kind of imperialistic violation of the integrity of the other described by Said. It would seem, then, that the young Hegel understands the breach of the ethical by Abrahamic faith in terms resonant with contemporary analysis and critique of imperialistic discourse.

A final point of irony. The young Hegel believed, as did Kant and others, that Christianity itself was among the victims of Abraham. There was a strong modern consensus in the wake of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism that the Christian religious spirit had been historically dominated by what was taken to be the foreign cultural symbols of an inherently violent Jewish religious genius, and that this cultural domination was at the heart of Christianity’s own violent, imperialistic legacy. Christianity, especially in its earlier history, was seen to have mistaken the particular Jewish religious genius as the proper lens through which to read the universal ethical vision of Jesus’ own, radically unique religious instinct (i.e., it mistakenly took Abraham as a model for faith). It thereby distorted Jesus’ religious vision of the “brotherhood” of all peoples into an imperialistic discourse of mastery. Hegel (by no means alone here) saw this imperialistic grip of Abrahamic faith upon the spirit of Christianity as the cause of Germany’s cultural impoverishment. His paradigmatic slogan of resistance against this cultural domination: “Is Judea, then, the Teutons’ Fatherland?”36 And for these moderns, Judea was no more the homeland of Jesus than it was for the Germanic peoples. Jesus was, in fact, taken to be closer kin to the modern German philosophical spirit than to Abraham and to Jesus’ own Jewish contemporaries.

      •

      Let’s review. Hegel’s assumptions with regard to religious faith and the ethical can only characterize the internal logic of Abrahamic faith (as paradigmatically expressed in the sacrifice of Isaac) as a breach of the ethical. And it understands the nature of this breach to be essentially structured as an imperialistic—both interpretive and material—violation of the neighbor. Consequently, it seems clear that these assumptions do not allow for the possibility of a positive and respectful affirmation of Abrahamic faith as a viable alternative. There is no moment in which Abraham stands alongside Hegel, on a level playing field, as it were. He is simultaneously condemned and superseded as soon as Hegel (but as we shall see, not only Hegel) comes on the scene.

      The Ethical is the Universal (as Context for the Particular)

And now we return briefly to the second consistent Hegelian refrain (according to Johannes) with regard to the ethical: the ethical is the universal. We have already seen hints of how the Hegelian concept of the universal represented in this context is rather distinctive. As the highest, Hegel understands the ethical to be the totality of creaturely relations constituting the communal whole. The universal, then, is not meant to signify a philosophically abstract category, as in the case, for example, of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), wherein that which is true is universally true, in the sense of being true for any person at any time and in any place. This abstract notion of universality characterized Hegel’s early thought on the ethical, when he was still thinking largely under the influence of Kant. But the more mature work that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling has in mind conceives

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