William Desmond lays out what he calls a fourfold way of thinking about metaphysics, deploying the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological, as an overall description but also as orientations or misorientations when isolated or truncated.[1] As he puts it, “They are not to be understood purely chronologically, though phases of human self-becoming may dominantly give prominence to one rather than the other. They give expression to orientations to being, communications from being, potencies of our being in the between, each with a promise that can be more or less realized or developed.”[2] They are a description of a dynamic interplay. “As formings they have their own dynamic but they can pass into each other, appear and recede, interrupt and continue, diminish and augment each other. The promise of one or each may be recessed but is not necessarily negated by the overt predominance of another.”[3] With passage through these ways, there is the possible development of a discernment, or a certain finesse or fitness for living, but this life is not without its passage through death. “We each may have to sweat blood with this tormenting question, urgently and as singulars, each of us suffering, like Jesus, our own night in Gethsemane garden.”[4]
The Metaxological Dialectic
For example, an over determinate focus on the univocal might consign to a distant God, the transcendent, or simply the law, the singular significance of being, so that sameness or unity overrides immanence and difference. This could be describing a form of theology, in which the significance of the incarnation is overridden by God’s sovereignty, or in a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame it describes one of the primary forms of human sickness – a punishing servitude of the superego, the law, or the perverse father figure. It is not that the univocal is always sick, but the drive for determinate solutions might result in a science or a person reduced to absolute law. On the other hand, the equivocal, focused as it is on difference and diversity might so focus on absolute difference or opposition that being itself is thought not to cohere, or in personal terms the self is divided against itself in continual agonistic opposition. A religion built on dualism, or a philosophy split within itself, or a house divided, cannot stand. The third way, the dialectical sense is focused on mediating and reintegrating difference, such as that between mind and being, but as a self-mediated effort this tends to lead to a stress on self-determination, and as in the philosophy of Hegel it falls, according to Desmond, completely in the immanent realm or upon the notion of complete synthesis or sameness.
These three ways, as Desmond emphasizes, are not really discrete, but facets of an interlocking way which tend to reduce to the same thing. Absolute difference is an impossibility that collapses back into sameness. That is, there is an inevitability in these three ways that imply the others, no matter if there is an attempted suppression. The “attempt” to think the metaxological is to not give way to absolute sameness or difference, nor to imagine these can be self-mediated. This is not onto-theology nor foundationalism in the modern sense of reduction to a univocal reason, nor is it a postmodern relinquishment to difference and deconstruction, nor is it the Hegelian mode of dialectics, which would reduce to total synthesis and immanence, but it is an acknowledgement of the truth and inadequacy of each of these ways. Taken all together, “The fourfold sense of being offers an interlocking set of articulations of transcendence—both the transcending of mind and the transcendence of being, and without the closure of either to ultimate transcendence.”[5] This seems to be on the order of a dialectics, that in Desmond’s description takes us beyond dialectics.
Desmond has a deep appreciation for Hegel’s dialectic, and as I have traced it in Eriugena (here), the presumption that dialectics can be done rightly. Hegel, in his estimate, has missed the mark, but Hegel’s dialectics draws out a necessary relation even in seeming contradiction. “Dialectic quickens mindfulness of this togetherness, intermediating a more faithful vigilance of the ontological promise of the ethos. We must explore dialectic’s ‘thinking beyond’ of opposition.”[6] Dialectics can help dissolve a false univocity or a misunderstood absolute difference and come to a new appreciation, with Hegel, of the subject. God however, cannot simply be equated with the powers of dialectic or equated with the between, so the metaxological appreciates the power of dialectic and its limitations.
In short, Desmond’s fourth way, the metaxological is an embrace of the dialectical, but with a difference. It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[7] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context. Desmond describes the metaxological as referencing the immediacy of the happening of being. It is the circumstance of being in the world. It is our immediate circumstance, but it is the openness to the other or different mediations beyond the self. As he sums up, “The metaxological sense keeps open the spaces of otherness in the between, and it does not domesticate the ruptures that shake the complacencies of our mediations of being.”[8] The astonishment of being is not to be domesticated or reduced, but is to be kept alive as the truth of metaphysics.
The Four Ways as the Movement of the Subject
Though Desmond’s first three ways may describe discrete periods of history, or a focus in philosophy or religion, psychoanalytically they would seem to reduce to the same problem, and that is the loss of the mediating and transcendent other. That is, described as movements within the self, the drive to being or univocity creates the Big Other of God or the law or the punishing superego, which splits the self in an antagonistic dualism, which one spends their life attempting to dialectically mediate. One would like to get rid of this obscene Other, and escape the fracturing of the world this entails, but the physician simply cannot heal herself. Ontotheology, foundationalism, modernism, and postmodernism are certainly discrete epochs, but they share the problem of the human sickness which, as Desmond describes the fall, is the collapse of a metaxological openness, and the attempt or event of being one’s own mediator.
As he describes in God and the Between, “By eating the forbidden fruit one assimilates its otherness to oneself, one seeks to have a radical source within oneself, the source of the primal division between good and evil.” [9] The drive to be in oneself and displacing the life from God describes a metaphysical pursuit gone bad. The displacement of the mediating presence of God, or the tree of life, means taking up the difference of good and evil in the self. One constitutes the difference, perhaps with the goal of overcoming it, but rather than being able to digest this equivocity, one is consumed in the dialectic. There is a falling apart, a total shame. All three of Desmond’s ways are captured in his depiction of the fall: the grab for univocity results in equivocity and dialectic. He captures the necessity of these ways in his description: “The turn to self that turns the self into an original being for itself is equivocal, because in being for itself as power to be itself, it can refuse the necessity of the other for just its being itself.”[10] There is an attempt at univocity through equivocity that is an obvious lie: “To insist that humans are measured by univocal truth is to be in the untruth, that is, to be in the equivocal that one has denied. . .”[11]
To accept the gift – the gift of life or the gift of being – entails accepting that the gift is not mine to control, and rightly acknowledged it is to be open to the other. We can either accept the gift in gratitude or refuse to acknowledge the origin. To be the origin, to be the singular, univocal, giver and receiver, results in a fracture. “But our claim to undo the equivocity absolutely through ourselves alone is just again the fatal equivocity redoubled. For this undoing is the will to undo gift, to undo porosity, to undo our passio essendi. We ourselves cannot be absolute sources of control or certainty concerning the gift and its source.”[12] The passion or patience of being rightly received does not grab for being, so as to secure it and make it one’s own.
The grab for being (conatus essendi) undoes the gift or would deny it: “For we would then only accept what we have given to ourselves. But any such self-giving is a rebuff to the more original giving: everything we give to ourselves is only thus because we have first been given to ourselves. Our being for ourselves is also first given to ourself; we do not give ourselves to ourselves; we only begin to give ourselves to ourselves, subsequent to being given to ourselves.”[13] This acknowledgement of the givenness of being (the metaxological realization), recognizes the drive to exploit equivocity (otherness) in the drive to univocity. We would do away with the gifting Other in the attempt to be both bestower and beneficiary. “This taking does not consent to the other, does not wait upon the consent of the other. Taking like this is thus like stealing or sacking or raping. We speak of ‘taking’ in another person, or being ‘taken in,’ that is, deceiving or being deceived. ‘Taking’ is thus also at the origin of deceit and being false. Is this not one reason why Satan was called ‘the father of lies’?”[14] Out of greed for eternal life we create hell, and refuse the gift as the offering that it is. “Hell is the will to be one’s own creator and creation in one, and by the denial that anything at all is given to one, least of all one’s own self. Hell is the fiction of absoluteness that ontological ingratitude secretes.”[15]
We have been “taken,” by ourselves perhaps, but what is lost is realization of the agapeic origins of life, the sanctuary of nature in its divine givenness, or simply the astonishment of being. In striving to be gods we become our own tormenting devil. “In the turn to self, what has turned up is the devouring worm in innerness itself. We ourselves are consumed by this worm, consumed by ourselves. We are the inversion: the power that dedivinizes itself in the very act of divinizing itself.”[16] Desmond describes it as the opening of the rapport with death as we have realized not the power of divinization but of negation. “Do we create death or are we created by death? Does it matter how we answer, if death is the truth of being when the face of God has faded?”[17] Death becomes the controlling impetus in a life of self-consumption. “There closes in on itself the circle of self-laceration and torment. Look what strange animals we humans have become, we who tear the flesh of our own being into strips, we who eat ourselves in this monstrous evening, we who even this bright morning went forth from our caves glowing with ourselves as our own sun?”[18] It is not that other people are hell; this misses the infernal nature of the I turned upon itself. “I am hell. I am the excremental self that eats excrement, myself as excrement. Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light, excretes not light but an infernal equivocity.”[19] Grounding the self in the self, metaphysical striving, brings equivocity into play in the drive to univocity, and this dialectic of death is the descent into hell aimed at heavenly ascent.
But even to describe this descent in the way of Desmond, is to have the perspective of the metaxological. It is to recognize that falling into the pit may bring about metanoia, or a knowing beyond the self. To be driven to extremes and desperation is perhaps to be awakened, through our wretchedness, to that which is beyond us. “The horror is secreted in the inward otherness of our selving – here the excess in self of selving that turns to the infernal.”[20] Perhaps becoming a self requires some time in hell or purgatory, and isn’t this also part of the four ways? “Who doubts that human beings can be infernal, but can we make sense of the infernal outside of religion? Is being mindful of evil inseparable from being mindful of God: God as either violated, or horribly turned away, or withheld in the midst of being we otherwise would think of as good?”[21] Recognition of the possibility of evil comes with the recognition of God, not just philosophically but experientially.
The failure to master the equivocal holds the potential to awaken to what is beyond it. “Seen so, the purgatory of the equivocal helps create a new humility. Rocked back on ourselves as not God, we step on a thorny path to God, or from.”[22] We may learn to laugh at our hubris and to mock the idols we have constructed, such that the passage through the univocal/equivocal dialectic may turn out to be preparation for the mataxological. “Will we find ourselves? Find ourselves in ourselves but as awakening to a dialogue with God in innerness; find ourselves always beyond ourselves, and in what is beyond us, even as within us?”[23] There is the possibility (not in the Nietzschean sense) of going beyond good and evil, to a sense of overflowing mercy and justice, having passed through good and evil. Desmond appeals to the parable of the vineyard to describe this beyond. “The Father of Jesus gives in excess of the measure; there is no measure that is proportioned to human exactitude; all are given their due, and more again – and in a sense, nothing is due, for all is gift.”[24] Ultimately the metaxological dialectic points to its overflowing agapeic origins.
Divinization Through the Agapeic Origin
The very possibility of the dialectic passage points to its ground in agapeic love. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic. That space of empowered openness witnesses to the porosity of the between and the allowance of both the passio essendi and the conatus essendi.”[25] The very possibility of the passion of being (passio essendi) or the possibility of trying to control it (conatus essendi), indicates a God-endowed freedom. It holds out both the possibility of refusal or acceptance of participating in this agapeic origin. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic.”[26] As he describes in his recent article on eschatology, there is the promise of wholeness, a “threading together the middle, the beginning and the end” to which we must remain open, and this is why “the God of the between” must be thought of “as a God beyond the between, a God whose wholeness is agapeic.”[27] This God is not a conceivable wholeness but can only be approached in “wording the between.” “Such an agapeic God is other than and beyond the God of the whole, recurrently perhaps more consoling to philosophers.”[28]
Desmond likens realization of the metaxological to divinization, and perhaps the entire course can be counted as fully entering into and appreciating that it is the agapeic God that is being communicated. We begin to “think God” as the
clogged “porosity” of our being opens up and we become mindful, open and patient to this communication, all the time recognizing these depths are not fathomable. There is no “apodeictic certainty” but only this patient minding on the order of prayer. “One starts there; one ends there; more determinacy is possible in the middle. With God one is always divining.”[29] So one remains in the middle, divining, realizing, but not determining. “There is no point at which divination of the gist gives over entirely to clear and distinct determination alone. One is always in the dark even as the brightness grows. One listens for the unspoken in the spoken, and the spoken beyond the unspoken, and the silence reserved in both the spoken and unspoken.”[30]
Desmond describes an awakening or “resurrection of astonishment” which is an appreciation of the “too muchness” of being. The initial child-like wonder which gave way to pursuit of univocity, and entrapment to equivocity, also describes a spiraling into a kind of boredom with the world. The second astonishment is not like the first which we have unwittingly squandered. “The second refreshed astonishment is born out of the known and knowing pathos of the between. In despite of our being stressed by the extremities of receiving and loss, the gift of an overdeterminate joy in being flares up: primal passio essendi.”[31]
We can call upon it as a form of prayer, but it is not to be commanded. As a boy, I remember the frustration of times in the literal desert, which previously had imparted deep joy, but which could not be called upon at a whim. Desmond calls this desire to command, a kind of idolatry. We must patiently wait, perhaps in the midst of suffering in a literal or metaphorical desert. “When this joy comes it is offered as a godsend.”[32] We must be exposed to the darkness perhaps, to appreciate the light. We must have a prognosis of the disease to recognize the cure. “The waters rise to our neck, and above it; the words of appeal we would were prayers come out instead as gurgled mumbles as we drown. In being shattered, is there ingression? In breakdown, breakthrough? In dying, life?”[33] Suffering and agony and even enduring evil, bear directly on realization of participation in agapeic love.
The goodness of being, specifically recognized in Gethsemane and Golgotha enact in the patience of Christ, divine redemption. “The last moments of Christ suggest that in the desolation of abandonment, and in being bereft, there is release beyond abandonment, a different abandon to the good of God. His life is given up to another, the final ‘yes’ releasing self from clinging to its own absoluteness, giving itself over to the Father.”[34] In following Christ, participating in his redemption, all that is asked is an affirmation, a “yes.” “Yes: that our dying be our birth into gratitude for being as gift, gratitude no matter what comes in the narrow grave, perhaps nothing, perhaps resurrection, perhaps transfiguration. Love is entrusted to the goodness of the origin in trusting beyond the measure of finitude.”[35] We have the hope of an “infinite saving” or life beyond evil and suffering, and this is redemption: “Living the service of agapeic being, even in the undergoing of the ultimate suffering of death. God shows the living of agapeic being, in the ‘yes’ to the good of being, even in the nihilation of finite life which death brings. There is a ‘yes’ beyond death. Redemption is living beyond the threat of death: life beyond death, in life itself, in death itself.”[36] That is, this is not simply life after death, but life itself into which we “are reborn in the life of agapeic service.”[37]
In sum: the movements of Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics are grounded in this thinking of God as the eternal agapeic origin of being: “always already having given the other its being as for itself – and the giving of ‘coming to be’ is not its own coming to be but is given for the other as finite creation that comes to be.”[38] Agapeic love is the eternal source pouring out being into otherness, and this is the gift of time, of goodness, and of coming to be.[39] Movement through the metaxological dialectic has its end (and beginning) in agapeic divinization.
[1] See William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition)
[2] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) 122. He also spells out the four ways of the metaxological in Chapter 6 of this book: God and the Metaxological Way.
[3] God and the Between, 122.
[4] God and the Between, 145.
[5] Reader, location 314.
[6] God and the Between, 92.
[7] Reader, location 295.
[8] Reader, 302.
[9] God and the Between, 85.
[10] God and the Between, 85.
[11] God and the Between, 88.
[12] God and the Between, 85.
[13] God and the Between, 85.
[14] God and the Between, 85.
[15] God and the Between, 149-150.
[16] God and the Between, 86.
[17] God and the Between, 86.
[18] God and the Between, 86.
[19] God and the Between, 86.
[20] God and the Between, 149.
[21] God and the Between, 149.
[22] God and the Between, 89.
[23] God and the Between, 90.
[24] God and the Between, 186.
[25] God and the Between, 149.
[26] God and the Between, 149.
[27] William Desmond, “On the Edge: Philosophical Thoughts on Theology and Eschatology” in The Heythrop Journal (HeyJ 00 (2026), PP. 1–16), 4.
[28] On the Edge, 4.
[29] God and the Between, 120.
[30] God and the Between, 120.
[31] God and the Between, 121.
[32] God and the Between, 121.
[33] God and the Between, 121.
[34] God and the Between, 187.
[35] God and the Between, 187.
[36] God and the Between, 196.
[37] God and the Between, 196.
[38] God and the Between, 297.
[39] God and the Between, 297.
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