Why We Need Nightmares

Re-enchanting the world through the story of Isaac.

Ivan Meštrović, “Mother Pledging Her Child”

This week, I was taken by a remarkable review essay in the London Review of Books by James Butler titled “Trivialised to Death”. What sucked me in before reading a word was the painting sitting up top of the page: Caravaggio’s “Sacrifice of Isaac.”

I’m not sure when I saw my first Caravaggio in person. I want to say that his “Medusa” was on loan at some point to the National Gallery here in DC. I remember staring at “Judith Beheading Holofernes” in Rome. And I certainly spent some time gawping at the Caravaggio collection at the Uffizi, where the “Isaac” is on permanent display. But it may be that I first saw this particular painting in a book somewhere, well before I saw it in person.

In any case, it’s transfixing. I have stared at it many times. In his essay, Butler refers to the painting in passing: “Caravaggio’s Isaac howls with his face pressed to the altar.”

Look into those eyes. Caravaggio is a master of such faces. And of kinetic violence. Abraham’s thumb pushing into the cheek, keeping the boy’s head down, knife in clenched fist, ready to slit. That’s the stuff.

But what is this stuff, exactly? Butler’s essay offers more clues. Overall, he is reviewing Marilyn Robinson’s latest book ruminating on Genesis. His argument is complex and worth engaging. But for our purposes, I want to focus on his treatment of the Isaac story.

He manages to conjure up what has, I suspect, been lost for far too many of us. He captures the awe-inspiring horror of it all:

A silence descended on him. He rose and walked three days to the place of sacrifice, his son carrying wood for an immolation but no sacrificial lamb. The absence of a lamb must have seemed ominous to the servants, who remained at the foot of the mountain. Only the son dared break the silence, asking what it was they were to sacrifice. As they climbed, the man answered his question ambiguously. God, he said, will see to it. His phrase might be interpreted to mean ‘provide’, but also ‘observe’. It wasn’t a reassuring response. He built the pyre, bound his son’s limbs and raised the knife.

We all know what happens next: an angel appears to Abraham and stays his hand. And the superficial lesson we take from it is that God’s will is inscrutable, and that blind faith in providence is necessary — “thy will be done,” as a future prophet would put it. God will see to things if you bend to Him.

But while that might be a lesson of the story, it’s not the force of it. If you know how it’s going to turn out, it becomes easier to abstract the nightmare away into some kind of parable. But that’s the problem with well-known stories: it’s too easy to forget that the protagonists didn’t know how it would turn out. Abraham certainly didn’t. Nor did Isaac. The discomfort of walking up the side of the mountain in near silence is nightmarish. And that nightmare is the point.

Butler goes on to juxtapose two figures which stand in for two modern reactions to Isaac. One is old Kant, the consummate rationalist.

Kant thought this story obscene: any theophany which commands so fundamental an ethical transgression as child murder cannot be considered divine; still less can obedience to it be celebrated as exemplary piety. This was his pretext for arguing that moral reason must never submit to authority, even when that authority seems to speak with the voice of God.

Butler contrasts him with Kierkegaard, “for whom the ethically impossible demand became the terrible, paradoxical predicate of faith. In Fear and Trembling he wondered how many had truly understood the story. ‘How many did it make sleepless?’”

It’s these two faces of modern human experience that I’m still sleeplessly chewing over.

I stumbled across another tidy little essay this week, a column by Janen Ganesh. In it, he scolds liberals for failing to vanquish the illiberal threat of wokeness. Liberalism failed in large part, he claims, because liberals have come to believe in nothing in particular. In the middle of the essay, almost as an aside, he sets up Richard Dawkins as a contrast to these spineless moderns — as a liberal who stands for something. He describes Dawkins’ Enlightenment creed as follows:

Religious claims about the workings of the universe are either wrong or unfalsifiable. Science is not just truer but more majestic. The church acts all nicey-nicey now because it is weak. When it was strong, it sought to permeate everything, so don’t give it the slightest inch ever again.

I’ve never had much time for the New Atheists. Had you asked me about them in their heyday, I might have rolled my eyes at their anti-clericalism and observed that “atheism has become a religion itself.”

Ganesh anticipates just this kind of response. “Fine, whatever,” he retorts in his column. “Is. Dawkins. Wrong? If so, what about? Where do you stand?”

Today, I increasingly stand with Kierkegaard, and find the fussy old Kants like Dawkins tiresome. And I see now more clearly that the problem isn’t so much that atheism has become a religion, but that in becoming a religion, it has failed to reflect that universal human feeling of terror and awe. It has nothing comparable to what is being channeled by, say, Ivan Meštrović in his various sculptures. Instead of making us face this ineffable experience head-on, New Atheism tempts us with certainties. Science is falsifiable, and its truths are therefore replicable, applicable and useful.

But Dawkins is wrong: this does not make science majestic. Indeed, the opposite is true — in its manifest progressive usefulness, scientific knowledge is rendered banal. And if we anchor our entire existence in these banal certainties, we lose something vital.

Max Weber got at a lot of this in a well-known passage in his “Science as a Vocation” lecture, where he articulated how the very idea of human progress ends up sucking out all meaning from the marrow of life:

Abraham or any other peasant in olden times died “old and fulfilled by life” because he was part of an organic life cycle, because in the evening of his days his life had given him whatever it had to offer and because there were no riddles that he still wanted to solve. Hence he could have “enough” of life.

A civilized man, however, who is inserted into a never-ending process by which civilization is enriched with ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become “tired of life,” but not fulfilled by it. For he can seize hold of only the minutest portion of the new ideas that the life of the mind continually produces, and what remains in his grasp is always merely provisional, never definitive. For this reason death is a meaningless event for him. And because death is meaningless, so, too, is civilized life, since its senseless “progressivity” condemns death to meaninglessness.

What could it mean to regain some meaning for ourselves today? As a first step, it requires us to not be smug — smug about knowledge, smug about ultimate ends, smug about any analysis we conjure up. It requires a great deal more skepticism of truth claims proffered up by our truth-making institutions. It means easing our grip on the rationalist safety blanket.

That won’t get you to full mysticism or faith or experiences of the supernatural — full re-enchantment requires more than mere skepticism. And society-wide re-enchantment may in fact be impossible.

But let’s maybe start with baby steps.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!