The story of Abraham and Isaac has always been one of the more confounding parts of the Hebrew Bible. Even millennia later, one can scarcely imagine the doom of Isaac’s revelation, as Abraham brought the knife to his throat: “The fire and the wood are here, but where’s the lamb for the burnt offering?” The sudden appearance of a ram and the merciful angel that spared Isaac’s life, may have provided short shrift. One imagines Isaac shattered and dissociative, wracked with questions as they walked back to Beersheba.
Many great thinkers have sought to make sense of Abraham’s deranged vision – Kierkegaard, Kafka, Derrida — and the sort of God that could have sanctioned it. For Kierkegaard, the absurdity of a father trying to kill his own son can only be grasped in its own terms. By some flavour of supreme logic, in the terrible clarity of God’s command, Kierkegaard surmised, Abraham must have expected a deliverance: if not the return of his son, at least a “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. By trusting in the absurd, his faith was commended.
Succession reveals a different element of the parable. As we approach its season finale, its Shakespearean themes of corruption, trauma and power are clear. Yet until its penultimate episode, “Church and State”, its Christian themes were left more subtle.
The funeral of Logan, the Roy’s patriarch, is held in the ornately painted and cavernous halls of a church in New York. The hypocrisy of the ultra-rich and far-Right sat in pews is not lost on his second eldest son Kendall, bipolar and drug-addicted and proud of his “ambition”, who whispers of “money changers in the temple” while plotting before the service. Younger brother, Roman, intends his eulogy as a Mark Antony-esque pitch for the crown. But after his prior claims that he had “pre-grieved”, Roman quickly breaks down. The boy — for he is a boy at heart — can scarcely believe his father has really died: death would surely only be another obstacle for his Titan Father to surmount. “Is he… is he… is he in there?” Roman pleads on the altar steps. “Well, can we get him out?”
Yet there is no hope of resurrection in Logan’s tragic arc. By the time of his death, he had consciously and unconsciously sacrificed all of his children on the altar of personal ambition. Paranoid and depressed, his absurd trust in “things unseen” — the empty promise of Satanic power — would never travel beyond the emptiness before his eyes. “You’re my pal, my best pal,” he told his bodyguard, before consoling himself with the empty Gospel of Adam Smith. “People are economic units. I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies.”
For the Christian, the coming to earth of God’s son completes the template forged by Abraham and Isaac. Having first set creation free, God knows the inability of humans to overcome the patterns of their lives. So God sends his son to bear man’s sin himself, plunging down to Hell, before the resurrection reveals the limitless power of goodness: an absurd event none of the disciples seemed quite to understand.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe