Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham’s faith was not of this sort, if there be such a faith… Abraham believed precisely for this life…

— Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Sacrifice is a strange dance. A man gives what he owns to God — who truly owns it anyway but who gives it to man expressly for the purpose of sacrifice. God gave Abraham a son, then demanded that son’s life, then gave Abraham a ram in his stead. All that God demands of man must be given to him by God in the first place. More, this oscillation being initiated by God reveals that He is desirous of said sacrificial intercourse as an end rather than mere means and, therefore, must give to man not with a static, transactional design, but specifically with intent to ignite the dynamism of self-giving which only He can begin, as though it is not the thing given which He desires man to have, but rather the giving itself is the gift.

It is a motif to which the innate pragmatism of modernity is entirely alien. The numeric mind can only comprehend this action in estimations of material net change; it is numb to the emergence of love as the pattern engendering itself within the living motion of that ceaseless flux, Providence ever echoing itself more emphatically against the canvas of privation. This restlessness of love is unintelligible to the purveyor of practicality. It is a love attuned, not attained, just as the telos of a symphony lies in each note rather than in its conclusion. The point is to listen, not to finish.

But Abraham did not have one son only. He sired another, fated not to be his heir, son of neither the promise nor of perdition. Abraham gave up Ishmael as well, and Hagar, though not as an offering. Isaac ascended the mountain, borne up to the altar where the power of the air is thin and that which it otherwise obscures whispers jubilant glories, while Ishmael clung through the wilds to his sojourning mother, who at what she thought was the last moment could not bear to watch him die. But when the dark talons of exhaustion came nearest to seizing their prey, God rescued this banished son, too. When that old patriarch of the Hebrews breathed his last, both sons bore him to his grave.

Both sons he gave away at God’s bidding — one to heaven, the other to earth. Both sons God saved and brought back to him in the end. What did Abraham sacrifice? What did Abraham truly lose?

Jordan Peterson’s genuine magnum opus, Maps of Meaning, identifies consciousness as essentially the point of transformation of potentiality into actuality. This process, he pontificates, most basically consists in constant winnowing of mere grains of wheat from the infinite chaff of the cosmos, calling pinholes of light out of the boundless black waters above. This notion is concomitant with the work of Peterson’s colleague John Vervaeke in identifying the phenomenon he terms “combinatorial explosiveness,” that is, the reality of the arena of existence as infinitely fractally multivariate such that any given single strand of reality participates in the same diffusion of possibility as the whole, and therefore reality as such is utterly unnavigable without a sufficiently powerful mechanism of exclusion.

Again, every moment participates in the infinity of possibility insofar as the factors of its unknowns propagate indefinitely. It is upon that infinity that the definition of the moment subsists — the anything from which everything startlingly appears in every moment. But the counterpart of the moment’s subsistence in possibility is its coalescence within its being experienced as a moment.

Attention is the event horizon of the moment’s infinity. From the very fact itself of consciousness, the limitless span of what could be is realized as what is. So reality is begotten as a passing-between the Divine Mind and the human. Every choice, and indeed even those acts we commit beneath the level of conscious choice — every shifting of the eyes, every drawing in of breath — instantaneously annihilates an endless sea of alternate possibilities while simultaneously crossing the threshold into another equally endless sea.

So it is clear that every moment is inherently an instant of infinite sacrifice, over and again. A harmonious navigation of reality therefore requires a map that integrates this principle as fractally as its corresponding solution occurs within the territory. Thus the sacrifice of Christ is the Tree of Life, branching upon branches, its pattern embedded with its own echo from the leaves to the roots. The death of the God-Man and His resurrection is the cosmic adhesive in which the fibers of the corpus of the universe are anchored together against the tugging vacuity of chaos and meaninglessness.

If to live is to sacrifice, then to live rightly is to sacrifice rightly. Abraham was commanded by God to give up his actual heir on the premise of faith in the potential of the promise, and likewise he also gave up his potential heir to the chaotic wilderness and received that son in a kind of appropriated actuality.

So it is that Abraham could not live to see what might have happened had he not given up Isaac, or if he had not sent away Ishmael. In the inscripturated perspective of destiny, Abraham lost nothing, and everything — nothing because his sacrifice collided with Providence, and everything because Providence threaded his steps along their singular course to the exclusion of every alternative.

Every step leaves in its wake a slaughtered host of lives unlived, paving a lone and narrow bridge across the frothing darkness lapping at its sides and perfuming the air with mists of remorse. Should the lonely pioneer turn back to survey the white pier he’s raised as it glows in the turbulent night, it is not unlikely that, as it vanishes into the horizon behind, he will be overwhelmed at the volume of dark encroaching upon his feeble work — the dread of what could have been. The sleepy phantoms of all he might have done instead, should he permit them to rise before his sight, cannot be matched for number.

The power of those dreadful shades is of one substance with all despair. It is the promise that to sink the bridge, to let its distinctive course be subsumed into the aimless whirlpools beneath it, to liberate it from its own structure, is salvation. Faith is the faculty of the soul which disavows that promise, the strength of the spirit to rip its gaze from the tumbling mirages of the unsacrificed vestiges of unreality that come, like the devil’s angels, in the radiant guise of presence. Faith is a solemn commitment to the solidity of the moment. It waves away ghosts like a hand does smoke.

Abraham’s other sons he sent away. Their record is not borne by the narrative of redemptive destiny. In the end, we all send away all we have, and only that which passes to the Lord can return. What we do not take up the mountain we send into the wilderness.

But, as every step is an infinite culling of innumerable alternatives, then it is not even possible to know what is “sacrificed” in any given moment. If what is actual is truly too vast and complex to be contained in the mind, then what is potential is certainly beyond the limits of human knowledge. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Here, the seascape of unlived-lives manifests its common affinity with ghosts for lingering, haunting, enduring through imposing salience. The immense valence of the unknown compounds itself. Ishmael returns.

Faith cannot suffice formulaically as a single act of scorn for these phantoms, eradicating them with one facile stroke. The pioneer must trudge stalwartly on, at every step entangled in the nebulous brambles of his other selves, deathless sleepers grasping enviously for the solidity they can never attain — or at least resentfully hoping that the stumbling they cause might amount to a fall, might bring their nemesis-progenitor to share in their apparent torment of ephemerality. So far from the path of ease, faith follows the via dolorosa carved pace-by-pace, moment-by-moment, through the avaricious dark.

Some paces prove more difficult than others. The road is indeed narrow and often arduous, but the other way is so broad as to be no way at all. But, painful as it is, what does the wanderer of that narrow way truly lose? He who gains the whole world in exchange for his soul gains nothing. He who loses his life will find it. The headlong plunge becomes an ecstatic emergence by the transfiguration of faith.

What, then, is the difference between the fates of Isaac and Ishmael, on this allegorical view? On the altar, Isaac undergoes a death and resurrection (Hebrews 11:19), and Ishmael undergoes the obverse in his passage through the wilderness, where his mother receives him back from the dead not by a substitute but by a spring of water. Perhaps it is the case that in offering up the child of promise to heaven and the child of sin to the earth, by Abraham’s moving within the paradigm of faith which orients him properly in relation to both points, each son paradoxically returns to their common source as a recapitulation of teleological fulfillment. That is, faith enables Abraham to direct each element of his life toward its own respective end, and therefore neither kind of sacrifice results finally in privation, but rather by the activity of the proper movement in itself Abraham finds what he gave up more completely. In Lewis’ words, he aims at heaven and gets earth “thrown in.”

So ‘spirit’-ual faith includes not only the impetus which drives the patriarch forward into the dark frontier, but also the direction which calls his luminous footpath out of the roiling blackness. It is both animus and orientation, faith both sufficiently and properly placed. As Paul Vanderklay has opined, Christianity is not fundamentally about heaven and hell, but about heaven and earth — even as the God-Man is fundamentally a hypostatic union of His two natures, a marriage of Head-Groom and Body-Bride. Faith apprehends this communion, and in so doing does not obsolete humanity. Theosis is a transformation, a resurrection of the “bare kernel,” not an annihilation. Glorification preserves continuity, and the New Jerusalem descends even as He ascended expressly “that He might fill all things” rather than be absent from them.

Those lives unlived, those potentialities sacrificed to earth are perhaps not thereby voided of significance. In the grave they find their purpose, and in that sense something of their worth is returned to us — if only we sacrifice properly. And yet, the proper sacrifice is the totality of life, nothing and everything. So the life lived toward God, the path walked in the good works for which one was created, climbs up the mountain where it dies and rises as a fragrant offering upward, while the infinite paths of deeds undone meander into the wild to be redeemed back to their father. One ascends then descends, the other descends then ascends — both embraced in the capacious graces of God, both movements in the activity of love, both subsisting in its relational vitality.

Can this be the strength from which faith draws its power to exorcise the shades of regret? Indeed it must be. Regret is not beyond the scope of Calvary’s reach. Is it not also drawn up into those harrowing words, “Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani?” which afterward, transfigured by grace, reach a degree of hope which mirrors the depth of their despair? Abraham’s wisdom, the orientation of his faith, was profoundly simple: it adhered, clung with desperate joy, to the words of his God. So he lost everything, and gained more.