sacrifice of Issac in medieval English drama, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1999 by Davidson, Clifford

It will not do to explain away the story by means of some abstraction or other that will purportedly provide a full answer to the questions that are raised. Little merit adheres to the anthropological-historical speculation that the event was "really" about the abandoning of human sacrifice by an antique civilization.l2 Such an explanation will hardly elucidate the popularity of the story in the Christian Middle Ages and subsequently. In this respect the commentary of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard may be useful. In his examination of the sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard saw it as demonstrating an abstract principle-the teleological suspension of the ethical-which he saw as revealing the highest stage that the religious life is capable of achieving (5-123, esp. 54-67). While Kierkegaard understood the event as a lesson in faith which asserted a religiosity that was superior not only to merely conventional morality but also to ethical behavior in the purest sense, he nevertheless also recognized the predicament faced by Abraham in all of its terror. God demanded that Abraham commit the most terrible crime and the most horrible deed that anyone could imagine. In the end God rescinded his command, but only when he saw that Abraham was poised to comply. The ethical is thus, for Kierkegaard, not abrogated but is proven to be in fact taken up (aufgehoben, in Hegelian terms) into a religiosity which asserts an absolute duty toward the Absolute. This, in Kierkegaard's view, does not diminish the frightening aspects of the episode when one considers it in all its aspects.

It is possible, on the other hand, for typological interpretation, especially as it has been applied to literary texts in twentieth-century criticism, to dilute the more terrible aspects-and, therefore, the more overtly theatrical aspectsof the Abraham and Isaac plays. Arnold Williams's 1968 article "Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria" argues against what he saw as the misuse of such interpretation, specifically in the case of the Abraham and Isaac plays. Because the texts were not open to view except as spoken from the stage, the test of any interpretation should in his view be dramatic effectiveness. He also insisted that dramatists who overused typology produced less aesthetically satisfactory plays, as in the case of the text of the York Abraham and Isaac, which, following Peter Comestor and the exegetical tradition, presents an Isaac who is slightly more than thirty years of age (Williams 683).13 An older Isaac such as this can hardly compete with dramatic versions of the story that utilized child actors to put forward an Isaac who is innocent and very young. To be sure, Isaac, as one of the patriarchs of ancient Israel, was seen as an object of veneration, and the child Isaac would have represented expectations that, in order to complete salvation history, especially required fulfillment. The sacrifice of Isaac as a child would at once have canceled not only the life of the son miraculously born of Sarah in her old age but also the whole plan of salvation history. A useful parallel here would seem to be the killing of the Innocents by Herod's henchmen, for this later event too would threaten the plan of salvation, and once again the threat would be averted by divine intervention.