The Sacrifice of Isaac

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Andrea Del Sarto, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1527

Lamia Priestley February 13, 2024

This is a painting about a father attempting to kill his son. 

It’s also a painting about faith. 

In Andrea del Sarto’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (1527), Abraham is instructed by God to kill his only son, Isaac. But as Abraham brings down his knife, an angel of the Lord appears and calls out from heaven: “Do not lay a hand on that boy…do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Genesis 22:15) Abraham looks up and a ram appears—a sacrifice provided by God in Isaac’s place.

A rational interpretation of the Biblical tale would condemn Abraham as a murderer. Instead, the father of the world’s three major religions is considered the face of unwavering faith. 

It's unbelievable, it’s horrifying, it’s beyond all reason. Kiergegaard expresses his outrage at Abraham’s characterisation in his book, Fear and Trembling (1843) when he writes,“there were countless generations that knew the story of Abraham by heart word for word. How many did it make sleepless?” 

In other words, how can we believe in, much less love, a God who would ask such a thing of Abraham? And how can we look to an Abraham who would do such a thing to his son?

A close-looking at The Sacrifice of Isaac with Kierkegaard’s question in mind reveals something of the painting’s ambition. The work shows us the power of visual experience in bringing us to a place, Kiekergaard describes as, where “thinking leaves off.” A place where we can not only interpret, but identify with Abraham’s actions, not as murder, but as the ultimate act of faith. Only then, can the visual experience of Abraham’s story, the experience of its material representation—its colour, texture, brush stroke, composition—become a personal experience of faith for the viewer. 

Look first at Del Sarto’s treatment of light—the areas of canvas that soak it up or are wholly drained of it. The soft washed curls of the hills; the inky dark depths from which the ram emerges; and the pearly luminescence of Isaac’s flesh have a dreamy, other-worldly quality. Distinct from naturalistic representations of light and darkness, this light, its character, is separate from the physical world of the painting. There’s either too much or too little of it across the canvas, as if, unbound by the laws of nature, the light gets to choose what and how to illuminate. Art historian Steven J. Cody describes this kind of painted light, which took Del Sarto many years to develop, as “the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections. This fire is God.”  

In their thin application to the canvas, Del Sarto’s brushstrokes are left visible, exposed. This creates a loose patchwork of textures that allow the painting’s ground to show through, giving off a kind of ethereal glow. The surface’s unusual texture and Del Sarto’s rhythmic handling of paint have the effect of entrancing the viewer, drawing her into the painting’s abstraction, into its very painted-ness. Arrested by the overwhelming redness of Abraham’s shirt, the flecks of paint that make up the tufts of his beard, the delicate transparency of his shin cast in shadow, the viewer can no longer read the image before her literally, but absorbs the scene in its totality on a deeper, visceral level. The depiction of the figures, their actions, and the story at large become secondary to the viewer’s experience of the materiality of the painting. In this way she is moved beyond the Biblical story, beyond the painting’s content. 

The Sacrifice of Isaac was completed in Florence in the early 16th century amidst a rising demand for reform in the Catholic Church. Much like their northern counterparts, Italian reformists criticised the Church’s elaborate, institutionalised rituals for offering impersonal, grandiose routes to God. They argued, instead, for a return to a stripped back, “pure faith”, a faith based in a personal, intimate relationship with God. Such a relationship might be cultivated through the experience of reading scripture or contemplating God through works of art. To the reformers, “pure faith” came from acts that allowed “one’s conscience to be addressed by God.”

Del Sarto’s painting is a direct address to the viewer’s conscience. It moves the viewer to an experience of Abraham’s faith and by extension her own, not through a retelling, but through a visual and material evocation of the divine. 

¹ Andrea del Sarto: Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance altarpiece

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

The Category of the Human and Immanuel Kant

Nicko Mroczkowski February 8, 2024

Immanuel Kant is probably the most difficult Western philosopher with household-name status – and maybe one of the most difficult philosophers of all time. His work is the historic precedent for obscure terminology, and all the difficult philosophers that came after, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Derrida and Deleuze, openly follow his example. According to an anecdote that every philosophy graduate will have heard at least once, first-year humanities students in Germany are encouraged to read Kant in English. Only the lifelong clarification efforts of translators have been able to make his work the least bit accessible.

In spite of his difficulty, and the nearly 250-odd years that have passed since the initial publication of his works, we still can’t stop talking about Kant. Because unlike any other thinker since the golden age of Greek philosophy, and maybe nobody since, Kant managed to define, interrogate, and subsequently shape the soul of the Western subject. His model of the human mind and its limits was a decisive factor in the historic upheavals that define the modern period in which we continue to live. Wherever the ‘human’ is concerned, whether in art, anthropology, hard science, or international law, we are still Kantians, if not by that name.

When he began practising philosophy in 1754, Kant inherited a cultural identity crisis. Two centuries prior, French philosopher René Descartes was inspired by the scientific developments of the Renaissance to consider the soul as a ‘thing that thinks’. These meditations convincingly established that we can obtain solid knowledge and mastery over the natural world without God’s help – a radical proposition in mediaeval Europe. This ushered in a new spiritual and cultural regime that marks the beginning of modernity, the era in which knowledge production, faith, and morality take care of themselves. And with this came the new burden of institutions such as custom and the law, which, in the absence of a divine authority (or the monarch as its spokesperson), needed to be rewritten in terms of unshakeable truths, rather than commandments.

As the dust of this sudden cultural shift settled, early modern philosophers began to ponder the nature of these prospective truths and our means of accessing them. Two competing approaches to these problems – ‘epistemologies’, or philosophies of knowledge – emerged in the two centuries that followed; we now refer to them as rationalism and empiricism.

The rationalists, who were largely based on the European continent – most notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Descartes himself – believed that concepts are the true stuff of knowledge. It’s no coincidence that these two thinkers are also associated with ground-breaking developments in mathematics. Concepts, in this case, are essentially pure ideas – logical truths that can be reached ‘in the armchair’, or by simply thinking about them in silence.

Such perfect ideas are, however, perfect only to the extent that they are confined to the mind. They have at best a weak relationship to lived experience, and come to resemble objects of faith. Leibniz, for example, purported to deduce from ‘self-evident principles’ that there is only one thing in existence, God. All activity, from the inorganic to the human, is sustained by His constant intervention, as if everything were a thought in God’s mind. It’s difficult for the individual to achieve very much under this assumption.

Back on their island, the British empiricists saw sense experience as the only reliable source of certainty. Experiences and our memories of them, they held, are enough to add up to a working knowledge of things. Contemporaries of Newton, these thinkers were part of a scientific revolution.

But empiricism, too, had dire consequences for Western culture; trusting experience alone created greater, more paralysing doubts about all the most important aspects of life.The skeptical works of David Hume raised these kinds of questions. Does causality actually exist, given that I only perceive two events in sequence, with no guarantee that this sequence will repeat itself in the future? Is there really a Self, given that I only perceive a jumble of events and memories? Are we really bound by moral law, since I only experience petty incentives or ‘moral feelings’ like pity and compassion, which can be explained by my motives and character?

Neither the rationalist nor the empiricist, it seems, could adequately respond to the urgent task of providing a foundation for culture and practice in the West. Neither tradition had succeeded. Enter Kant, awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by the questions of Hume. In his most famous book, the Critique of Pure Reason,¹ Kant argued that both concepts and experiences are ingredients in legitimate knowledge, which is actually produced by their interaction. He achieves this by appealing to the notion of a representation. Generally speaking, a representation is an image or likeness that ‘re-presents’ an object to make it accessible to its audience in a particular way.

In Kant’s world, everything that exists is a representation of actual reality, created by the human mind according to its inherent capacities and limitations. Concepts for him are like ‘rules of thought’ which shape everything we can experience. Because of the way our minds work, all things we perceive must take up space, move through time, and be acted upon by causes to produce effects, among other fundamentals. This checks out – quantum weirdness aside, no event we’ve ever known has taken place outside of space or time, and without an initial cause. Kant was the first to realise that this fact tells us more about ourselves than it does about the world.

Modern psychology continues to follow Kant here; in particular, we have him to thank, belatedly, for the cognitive revolution of the 20th century. According to its proponents, the mind is a device that processes information, like a computer, according to its hardware and programming. This, as we are seeing in recent years, is not only a metaphor – the field of AI starts with the assumption that human intelligence, as such a processing device, can be replicated by a sufficiently complex system of algorithms. Our AI models are, at this point in time, essentially Kantian.

So, where both rationalist and empiricist understood the mind as a kind of place occupied by ideas and experiences, Kant saw the mind as an active instrument of sense-making which actively constructs the world it belongs to. Given this role, there is no reason to doubt that the mind is capable of knowing the world – because it made it. It just needs to know itself.

Interestingly, however, there’s still a skeptical element in Kant’s philosophy. He shows that the world behaves in a consistent and knowable way, and that there’s an objective truth about how things are. It’s based on how the human mind processes reality. But it only makes sense to humans, and is not the same as reality from the perspective of, say, an animal, or God. Instead, it’s a facsimile of the ‘really real’ – which, itself, we can never access, because our brains can only handle so much. The kernel of Kant’s humanism is that our kind, with some unfortunate exceptions, is united by our possession of reason, and responsible for the world of representation that it produces. But we are not responsible for the Absolute, or ‘things in themselves as they really are’.

This is a curious conclusion for a philosophy that, above all, championed the autonomy of the human intellect – a philosophy that participated in historic revolutions against high or divine status in favour of common humanity. However, it’s important not to misunderstand this as a weakness of Kant’s thinking; in fact, his point is only that there will always be, and in fact must always be, unknowable elements in any system of knowledge; and this, too, is a necessary aspect of the functioning of human reason.

Today, we understand that a ‘perfect theory’ is not possible, but only the continuous substitution of imperfect hypotheses; but we create these hypotheses by aiming for perfection. And we also understand, for the most part, that perfect knowledge of God or the afterlife would eliminate all the differentiations and beautiful uncertainties that characterise human spacetime. We don’t necessarily want that.

Our finitude, for Kant, is what makes life what it is. Our limited knowledge is sound enough to sustain our limited forms of life – we wouldn’t know what to do with Absolute knowledge anyway. Kant’s humanism is also his humility, and it contains a measure of the anthropologist’s sensitivity to the fact that knowledge, even if it grounds it, is not the greater part of human culture. There must also be an appreciation of love, community, and all those other activities that lie outside of the scope of logic and reasoning. They are uncertain by nature, and beautifully so. He himself understood his philosophy as an exercise in ‘denying knowledge in order to make room for faith’.

¹ The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s nearly unreadable masterpiece of philosophy. Kant himself described it as "dry, obscure, contrary to all ordinary ideas, and on top of that prolix." (Prolix means verbose.) He was right. He once sent the completed manuscript to a friend who was himself an eminent scholar. The man read some of the book but returned it unfinished, explaining, "If I go on to the end, I am afraid I shall go mad."

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Nicko Mroczkowski