Once upon a time there was a man who, as an adult, came to hate Paul the Apostle as the living hate death. He charged Paul with the crime of ressentiment, of inverting the values and virtues of life, so that weakness was strength, infirmity was health, poverty was wealth, and spiritual death — when cast as “re-birth” — was greater than life. Fired by the joys of his own powers of linguistic perception, the man waged war against Paul and his influence — the insult against life itself through this moralization of all things against life, and demonization of all vital virtues.
But the man aimed low. For beyond Paul lay another man, more ancient, without whom Paul’s crimes would not have been possible — a man too weak to even rise up and earn the proper title of “evil”: Abraham.
If the story of Abraham’s life was merely the story of the weak and the undeserving being lifted up by divine forces into life and connection, that would be one thing. But Abraham is not a story of salvation! Rather it is a second Deluge, a promise of humiliation of everything good and powerful by means of the low, sayeth those who speak on behalf of God.
Let us consider the life of Abraham. He is chosen like the protagonist of a bad novel, for no particular reason — seemingly against all reason (except to make a point) — to be the founder of a Great Nation. He is told that all who bless him will be blessed, and all who curse him will be cursed. What is his response? He decides to curse Pharaoh, not even out of malice, but out of cowardly deceit. For misplaced fear of his life, he tells Pharaoh that his barren wife is his sister. From this lie, Pharaoh takes Sarah into his house and sleeps with her. His cowardice and dishonesty causes him to become a cuckold, and results in God sending down plagues upon the innocent Pharaoh, who, upon discovering the deceit, chastizes Abraham and sends him and Sarah away.
To this, we may add that Abraham allowed himself to be persuaded by his wife to sleep with the serving girl, resulting in strife and abuse between the women in his household. Then, when he did have a son by his wife, his crowning achievement: his expressed and demonstrated willingness to sacrifice his own son.
Was supreme loyalty and faith? That is what we are told. The only man to truly grapple with the question of Abraham called him a “knight of faith,” maintaining confidence that God would fulfill his promise to make a nation of his offspring, even as he prepared to kill the child from whom that nation was to come. But where was that confidence and faith when Abraham was passing through the land of pharaoh, or later, when he was passing through the land of Abimalech, where he again lied and proclaimed his wife to be his sister, with the even more detestable explanation that in fact he had not lied because his wife Sarai was, in fact, his half-sister? Did he trust in God to save his son, but not to save himself?
In the person of Abraham, we see almost no redeeming qualities. For his one instance of courage, in rescuing his nephew Lot, we see two instances of cowardice, one of which results in the harming of an innocent man. For the sake of his own nation, he abandons the land of his fathers; for the sake of his offspring, he nearly kills his own son — an act which was not understood as an aberration of a tragically flawed hero, but the demonstration of faith.
In the story of Abraham, we see not just an absence but an inversion of virtue. Here, the man who leaves family and home is to be gifted a homeland and a nation. The old and barren are fruitful. Those created in God’s image are commanded to modify the genitals by the knife. God chooses the dishonest, the cowardly, the unfaithful, not merely as a project, but as a vehicle of revenge against “all peoples on earth,” who must endure such a man to travel and live amongst them, on pain of being cursed by God.
Indeed, in the promise that God will bless who blesses and curse who curses Abraham, Abraham is removed from the ordinary negotiation of right action between men, wherein good is rewarded and evil deeds are punished. The acceptance of Abraham is made non-contingent; he is granted an entitlement to acceptance and even praise by all others, by God Almighty, even if he shrinks away and lies. Against such corrupting incentives, even a good man would be broken and twisted into a creature of insufferable self-righteousness and intolerable vice, for whom no fault is not excused, and from whom no standard of action may be expected or enforced. But we are not starting with a good man. We are starting with Abraham — Abraham the decrepit; Abraham the deceiver; Abraham the coward; Abraham the unfaithful. He is Abraham the ressentimental. Abraham the living vengeance not only of the weak against the strong, but of the old against the young, of the liars against the truthful, of the fearful against the courageous, of the deathly against the vital. Abraham is a revenge fantasy story, and he separates his descendants from the world while at the same time binding them in strife with other nations, who are to be “blessed” through Abraham’s line, or else cursed if they refuse this most undesirable of gifts.
To a society or a world which elevates and glorifies excellence and virtue, the story of Abraham is not a cancer, but a virus. It is a germ, intelligently designed and coded to destroy everything good and noble, to humiliate the better by means of the inferior, under the translucent cover of God’s supposed need to show his power — not by direct exposure, or in any other logical manner, but through a convoluted story which takes “convenience” to heights of audacity which no man had ever dreamed of before.
The time is approaching when the world of men will recognize this essential antagonism — will recognize Abraham as a curse. It is still a ways off, since even those who think they oppose Abraham’s descendants remain under his spell, battling for a birthright that they have not recognized as a curse. They remain enchanted by language, believing this idea of “God” to be a source of virtue, even as his champion embodies the antithesis of virtue. Was there ever a less excellent man than Abraham? Was there ever a more rejected and punished people, a greater victim in all of human history, than those who chose to accept his birthright? This curse of a blessing invokes conflict with the world, not merely for supremacy, but for existence. They will kill or be killed, because they do not answer to those they wish to live alongside and bless with their vices. How fortunate was Esau, to have been saved from this birthright, and how unfortunate was Jacob! …and yet how fitting, in the manner in which he acquired this “blessing” of Abraham.
It is fortunate for many living today that this nation, this birthright, and the God in whom they were sanctified, are fabrications of language. No man is beneath the reach of virtue, or beyond the striving for excellence. Those who have been cursed by Abraham’s birthright are vested with the means and power of salvation; they may yet choose to cross the Euphrates to meet with Terah, to become noble and excellent people once more. No man or God can do this for them, but neither can man or God stop the man who chooses the path of virtue, and that story does not begin with the veneration of all that is unvirtuous is humanity.
