Author: Paul Axton

Paul V. Axton spent 30 years in higher education teaching theology, philosophy, and Bible. Paul’s Ph.D. work and book bring together biblical and psychoanalytic understandings of peace and the blog, podcast, and PBI are shaped by this emphasis.

William Desmond’s Four Ways: From Spiritual Sickness to Divinization

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.

The Development of Dialectic in Eriugena

Reference to the Logos as developed by Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Maximus, for many if not most just means the development of Neoplatonism, so it is no surprise that John Scotus Eriugena, who specifically takes up the mantle of Origen, Gregory, and Maximus is also read as a Neoplatonist. What may be refused by this insistence, is that Christianity is introducing a new way of thinking, a different logic, or a new order of understanding, which Eriugena will refer to and explain as “dialectics.” It is impossible to correctly read his understanding, and its constructive use of “contradiction,” through a Neoplatonic lens, which has no notion of contradiction as the means of breaking through to a unified understanding, devoid of duality.[1] For Eriugena, dialectic is not simply a mechanism of understanding, but is at once an epistemology and ontology which unifies being and non-being (his “fundamental division”). This is not just more Neoplatonist metaphysics. As Sergei Sushkov, notes, “no matter how attractive a metaphysical schematism might seem to be, it is in fact utterly irrelevant to a dialectically coherent way of thinking of the living whole, and for this reason can hardly be imposed upon Eriugena’s discourse.”[2]

Of course, neither Origen nor Maximus can be reduced to Neoplatonism either, as both are specifically developing an alternative to a Greek metaphysics, while like Eriugena, each deploys Greek resources. Origen identifies Christ as a unique and new order of understanding. “All who believe and are assured that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, I am the truth, derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ.”[3] Christ is the singular source of this Truth. Origen notes specifically, that his principle is a departure from a Greek understanding and is a turn to Christ as first principle (see my blog on Origen here): “For just as, although many Greeks and barbarians promise the truth, we gave up seeking it from all who claimed it for false opinions after we had come to believe that Christ was the Son of God.”[4] Origen is clearly working within a Christological frame. He is setting forth an alternative world-view, a Christ centered logic, or a Christian metaphysic. The problem is that very few may have been up to the task of following the subtlety of Origen.

Beyond the fact that the name of Eriugena’s major work, Periphyseon, is taken directly from Origen, he is developing Origen’s apokatastasis or the notion of a universal return and divinization. According to Ilaria Ramelli, The noun ἀποκατάστασις, related to the verb ἀποκαθίστημι, “I restore, reintegrate, reconstitute, return,” bears the fundamental meaning of “restoration, reintegration, reconstitution.”[5] She argues that “this doctrine was abundantly received throughout the Patristic era, up to the one who can be regarded as the last of the Fathers: John Eriugena.”[6] She considers Eriugena “to have been the last great Patristic philosopher, whose thought was nourished by the best of Greek Patristics.”[7] There was nothing heretical about apokatastasis. It was deployed by Origen, Gregory, and Eriugena to combat the heresies of the Gnostics, Marcionites, and predestinationists.[8] As she explains, Eriugena is consistent with Origen’s idea “that precisely participation in the three Persons of the Trinity will bring every rational creature to its restoration. For rational beings receive their existence from the Father (who is the Being par excellence and the Good, so that progress toward the Good is also a greater and greater acquisition of being and existence), their rationality from the Son-Logos, and holiness from the Holy Spirit (Princ. 1,3,8).”[9] Book V of the Periphyseon, demonstrates the deep continuity between Origen and Eriugena, as here he deals with the reditus of all beings to God. As Daniel Heide argues, Origen is the greatest ancient advocate of apokatastasis and Eriugena its greatest mediaeval proponent.[10]

Eriugena is also developing Maximus’ picture of Christ being “all in all”, which is thematic for him. Jordan Daniel Wood has laid to rest the notion that participation, in the Greek sense, adequately encompasses Maximus understanding of divinization, and it is Maximus notion (for the most part, along with Augustine) that Eriugena is developing (see my blog on Maximus here). [11] The logic of Origen’s apokatastasis is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). The union of divinity and humanity, the bringing together of the contrary pairs, God/man, or hypostasis, involves a new order of understanding grounded on total identity between God and human. This is not just true in the case of Christ, but according to Maximus, the Christian becomes Christ: “they will be spiritually vivified by their union with the archetype of these true things, and so become living images of Christ, or rather become one with Him through grace (rather than being a mere simulacrum), or even, perhaps, become the Lord Himself, if such an idea is not too onerous for some to bear.”[12] He “draws near to us in his humanity” while bearing the fulness of his divinity, and “having given the whole of Himself, and assuming the whole of man” he witnesses to perfection of humanity and deity “bearing witness within His whole self—by the perfection of the two natures in which He truly exists—to the unchangeable and unalterable condition of both.”[13]

Maximus (and Eriugena) will deploy Origen’s notion of logoi, which makes Christ the ground of the developing dialectic:

The logoi stemming from the Body of Logos will concur anew according to the divine administration in order to form new souls (i.e. the logoi will be ‘embodied’ afresh), in accordance with the Universal Causality which originates in the Body of Logos (i.e. in the will and judgement of Logos) and determines what the new cosmic setting will be for the drama of History (i.e. the dialectical relationship between creaturely and divine will) to take place.[14]

This dialectical exchange is no mere rhetoric, but is descriptive of the taking place of cosmic theosis. Sushkov explains, “According to the dialectical understanding of unity (with a strong appeal to a dialectically coherent treatment of contradiction) that Eriugena does adhere to, the reality of creation cannot be thought of, and therefore known, otherwise than in the way of being inseparable from the universal Principle of all.”[15] The universal principle of the logoi, stemming from the body of Christ, is the ontological ground of this dialectic. As Eriugena claims, “a logical dialectic can lead us to a clear knowledge of spiritual things.”[16]

Eriugena, like Hegel, recognizes that God is in no way excluded from finitude (which would be a form of finitude), but God’s eternality is inclusive of the finite. For Hegel, “God becomes man generically, universally, essentially.”[17] Likewise for Eriugena, “God cannot be known as a finite being, and cannot therefore be thought of by means of predicating attributes of His essence.”[18] Rather, “The infinite is only conceivable by means of contradiction dialectically treated.”[19] Knowing the infinite involves a complete transformation of the mind through which the unity with God restores human integrity, and dialectic pertains to entering this reality. “The combination of dialectic interpreted as a science of being, capable of expressing truths about the sensible world as well as about discourse, with an ontological interpretation of logical concepts allows Eriugena to develop his metaphysical theory, a strong realism.”[20]

One of the examples Eriugena deploys of dialectic contradiction is “man is an animal” and “man is not an animal.” “When taken together in their integrity as the two inseparable aspects of a truly simple (undivided) and therefore really subsisting human nature, in which the inner and the outer cannot be severed, these predicates are to be rightly understood as mutually complementary or, as Eriugena himself puts it, ‘entirely suitable’ (755b).”[21] There is a real contradiction residing in human nature, where man is in one instance bound by an animal state, but he surpasses himself through a dialectical exchange. It is not simply a negation or denial of the body or animality but a revealing or coming to his true nature, in which God Himself is revealed, not through a disconnection but an integration with the flesh. According to Eriugena, “For everything which her Creator primordially created in her” (i.e. human nature) “remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, ‘awaiting the revelation of the sons of God.’”[22] As John puts it, humans were made to be born of God to become “children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1, 12-13). People are to be twice born, of the flesh and the spirit.

Just as Christ is divine and human, so too the apparent duality in human nature – the “contradictory and mutually opposed predicates” taken separately are contradictory but this contradiction describes a potential wholeness so that each is said to be “everywhere a whole in itself.”[23] Humans are both animal and not animal. “This finally means that man’s proper nature can neither be conceived in its truth nor actually affirmed in reality without the negation, which in fact is but the negation of the one-sided finitude of his being, leading to the restoration of its proper wholeness.”[24] “Not animal” must be understood along with “animal” as both true, but neither of which alone captures the fulness of the truth.

The dialectical treatment of the opposition arrives at a new logic: “This is the reality which is embraced by the contraries and is therefore approached when coherently thought of by means of contradiction, aimed at overcoming all dichotomies between the opposites, including the ultimate ones of being and non-being.”[25] This dialectic logic which accords with a dialectic reality enables a restoration of the mind and human nature as a whole, unified with divine reality. The person “becomes at the same time one with the whole of the substantial reality of God’s creation, where the universal contains the particular, and the cause gives rise to the effects, but not vice versa.”[26] The dialectically shaped mind is restored to the reality of the image by which it was created.

Along with other medieval scholastics, Eriugena takes the “image” in Genesis to refer to the natural capacities and the “likeness” to refer to the supernatural endowment, and concludes that through dialectic man is both the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26).

For just as God is both beyond all things and in all things – for He Who only truly is, is the essence of all things, and while He is whole in all things He does not cease to be whole beyond all things, whole in the world, whole around the world… – in the same way human nature in its own world (in its subsistence) in its own universe and in its visible and invisible parts is whole in itself….[27]

For Eriugena there is not a Neoplatonic hierarchy, but “even the lowest and least valuable part, the body, is according to its own principles whole in the whole man, for the body, in so far as it is truly body, subsists in its own reasons which were made in the beginning of creation; and since human nature is so in itself, it goes beyond its whole.”[28] We are made to “cleave” to God, as Eriugena explains. As the Gospel tells us, “Where I am there is My servant also” (Jn. 12:26).“But He is above all things: above all things therefore is the man who cleaves to Him, and above himself in so far as he is in all things.”[29]

Through a dialectic very similar to that of Hegel, Eriugena pictures how it is that Christ is “all in all” or why “incarnation is creation.” As Sushkov concludes, “All this convinces a careful reader of the Periphyseon that the logic Eriugena is pursuing is all about the transformation of the entire human being (brought about through the cardinal change of the way the mind operates) and bringing it into the substantial reality of creation as it truly is in union with God.”[30] He argues that Eriugena’s dialectic through contradiction, which does not seek a Neoplatonic harmony (a mere difference), marks this new order of logic and reality, through which a true uniformity of subject is realized.

Eriugena’s purpose is not to abolish the Greek logic of non-contradiction, but his aim is to escape the finitude of this thought. Contradiction is not a sign of error but a way of thinking and realizing wholeness spread between being and non-being. “Understood like this, contradiction becomes for the human mind nothing other than an effective instrument of uncovering the infinite nature of things as they genuinely are beyond their one-sided appearance, while belonging to proper (unconfined) being and actually participating in it.”[31] Or the way Eriugena puts it, “Let it then not trouble you that it is said of human nature that it is everywhere a whole in itself, that the Image is whole in the animal, and that the animal is whole in the Image. For everything which her Creator primordially created in her remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, awaiting the revelation of the Sons of God.” Through this dialectic is realized “the unity of substance with Him.”[32]

[1] See the dissertation by Sergei N. Sushkov, Being and creation in the theology of John Scottus Eriugena: an approach to a new way of thinking (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2015)

[2] Sushkov, 11-12.

[3] Origen, On First Principles, trans, John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Preface, 1.

[4] Ibid, 2.

[5] Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013), 1.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 2.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 140.

[10] Daniel Heide, Ἀποκατάστασις: “The Resolution of Good and Evil in Origen and Eriugena,” Dionysius, Vol. XXXIII (Dec. 2015, 195-213) 195.

[11]  Jordan Daniel Wood, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” (Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy, Boston College, 2018).

[12] Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Maximos Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014), 21.15.

[13] Ambigua 31: paragraph 8.

[14] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 358.

[15] Sushkov, 2.

[16] John Scoturs Eriugena, Periphyseon: The Division of Nature, Trans, John O’Meara (Saint-Laurent: Bellarmin, 1987),  Book V, 865B.

[17] James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (State University of New York Press, 1983) 120.

[18] Sushkov, 39.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Christophe Erismann, “The Logic of Being: Eriugena’s Dialectical Ontology,” Vivarium (45 (2007) 203-218) 203.

[21] Sushkov, 150.

[22] Periphyseon, 761b. Cited in Sushkov, 151.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Sushkov, 152.

[25] Ibid, 153.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Periphyseon, 759a-b. Cited in Sushkov, 154,

[28] Periphyseon, 759b. Cited in Sushkov, 154.

[29] Periphysion, 760a.

[30] Sushkov, 154.

[31] Sushkov, 159.

[32] Periphyseon, 761a.

Understanding William Desmond Through John Scotus Eriugena

As I noted in my previous blog (here) in his intellectual autobiography, Wayward and Homebound,[1] William Desmond accounts for his thought of betweenness (metaxology) as arising from his Irish roots, but beyond the various circumstantial conditions of language, geography, and politics, the central figure in what it means to be philosophically and theologically Irish, not just for Desmond but for Irish intellectuals such as Richard Kearney and Thomas Duddy, is the Irish philosopher and theologian John Scottus Eriugena (c. 815-877). The thought of John the Irish-Irish (as both Scottus and Eriugena might be translated), is the opposite of and should not be confused with the later John Duns Scotus. His thought can be traced though Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius, and Maximus, and thus it is no surprise that it was the early Hegelians who were among those who rediscovered Eriugena. Here is the Irish version of the Eastern understanding of theosis, panentheism, and idealism. And perhaps for the same reasons (and accusations of heresy), Eriugena was excluded from the main western philosophical and theological tradition, helping produce a distinctive Celtic religious sensibility of betweenness. “He navigated between here and elsewhere, peregrine not only between Ireland and Europe, but between Greek and Latin, between Athens and Jerusalem. . . He is peregrine religiously and philosophically: between the Jewish exodus and the promised homeland of the Father; between the Neoplatonic going out and coming home, exitus and reditus, pro[h]odos and epistrophē.”[2]

It is not simply epistemology but ontology which is on the move for Eriugena: “Eriugena traces the etymology of theos to both ‘I see, θεωρῶ’ and ‘I run, θέω’ (Periphyseon, 452B15–452D32).”[3] “He makes all things run from a state of non-existence into one of existence” – suggesting divine energy is a dynamic field of theophany.[4] For Eriugena, the transcendent God or the unknown God is primary, and Desmond affirms God’s absolute transcendence as the “unknown” God, not only beyond being but beyond nonbeing. However, the Word/world is God’s self-articulation, the procession of God which can be termed a “self-creation”, or a procession from out of darkness and non-being into the light. Speaking the Word, who is at once eternal and filling all of time, there is an immanent universal available to every subject. “The whole of reality or nature, is involved in a dynamic process of outgoing (exitus) from and return (reditus) to the One. God is the One or the Good or the highest principle, which transcends all, and which therefore may be said to be ‘the non-being that transcends being’.”[5] This creation ex-nihilo is unfolding in the incarnation, and according to Dermot Moran, “Creation ex nihilo means God’s own self-creation, His self-manifestation in theophanies, His movement from darkness to light.”[6]

Following Maximus, the incarnation is the exitus that can be equated with creation: creation is incarnation (and vice versa, incarnation is creation). “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). Eriugena develops this understanding “to construct a deep correspondence between epistemology and ontology. Thus, Maximus’ cosmic Christology based on the Logos-logoi ontology, offers Eriugena a framework which allows him to expand the use of dialectic from mere method to a cosmic framework which underlies both epistemology and ontology.”[7] According to Moran, for Eriugena, “The process of creation is, at the same time, the process of the begetting of the Word, or the simple exclamation of the word in divine speech (clamor Dei). . . God is really ‘not other’ than the world, and creation is ‘not other’ than God.”[8] In turn, Desmond’s metaxology is both epistemology and ontology, which like Eriugena’s philosophy is a dialectic, bringing together what dualistic thinking separates into opposites. For John, “There is a companionable betweening of philosophy and theology” as “God is above all encapsulation, and hence transcendent, other than the finite world, and yet there is an immanence between God and creation. All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[9]

Eriugena, though, like Origen and Maximus, is in danger of being misunderstood, of working in the same manner (real or imagined) as Hegel, in that he speaks of God creating himself through the world. “It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature.”[10] As with I Corinthians 15.28 God will be all in all or John 1.3-4, all things are in God as life, are phrases that appear frequently in Eriugena, following Dionysius, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. Or as Echart and Nicholas of Cusa assert, God is in all things and all things are God. This is more than as assertion of God’s omnipresence but neither is it pantheism. If one recognizes with Origen and Maximus (and not Hegel, in Desmond’s reading) that transcendence is preserved along with immanence, then one can rightly speak of the “between” of creation as divine.

God is manifest in the Word, in creation, but this manifestation is not determinate or final. In the between there is the too-muchness or “the overdetermination appearing and receding in the determinate and the self-determining: because appearing communicated, because receding elusive, and yet always suggestive of more than every determination and our self-determination.”[11] Eriugena was wrongly accused of teaching the identity of God and the created world, which though mistaken, gets at the radical turn of his thought. As Moran points out, “This, of course, is only one side of Eriugena’s doctrine; his Dionysian negative theology also asserted the absolute transcendence of God.”[12] As he concludes, “Eriugena is not a pantheist, and his strong monistic statements concerning the identity of divinity and creation are always counterbalanced by assertions of the absolute difference between God and creation.”[13]

The theophanous manifestation of God occurs within a negative dialectic in which non-being, ex-nihilo transcends being. “We might speak of the nothing through excellence (nihil per excellentiam, nihil per infinitatem) and the nothing through privation (nihil per privationem), and still further a phrase that keeps recurring in his work is: plus quam, ‘more than.’”[14] This is not an absolute knowing but a humility always open to more, arising from nothing. God is beyond denial and affirmation, “an above God Godhead.”  As Desmond notes, for Eriugena, “In some degree all being is theophanous”[15] but this theophany points beyond what is manifest, as “the world is God’s own self-othering, an intermediate moment in the circular process by which God is brought back into unity with self.”[16]

For Maximus, there is an ongoing synthesis in the body of Christ, which not only accounts for the deification of the Christian but is the means for cosmic deification: “The ‘body of Christ is either the soul, or its powers, or senses, or the body of each human being, or the members of the body, or the commandments, or the virtues, or the inner principles of created beings, or, to put it simply and more truthfully, each and all of these things, both individually and collectively, are the body of Christ” (Amb. 54.2). The body of Christ is the body of “each human being” it is the “virtues” or “the inner principles of created beings.” Eriugena’s anthropology follows Maximus’ insight that the human being, like Christ, synthesizes all aspects of creation as the “workshop of creation.”

He speaks of knowledge and training of the mind as a spiritual exercise, an understanding which might be said to characterize Desmond’s entire corpus.[17] The Periphyseon is a sort of spiritual exercise: “the goal of exercitatio is to contemplate nature in the right way in order to repair the fragmentation of creation by achieving a unified vision and thus realize the return of all things to their divine source.”[18] There is a synthesis in nature, for Desmond and Eriugena, as it intersects with the divine and is divinized, and though Eriugena, like Origen and Maximus, employs Neoplatonism, this is clearly an overcoming of the Neoplatonic distrust of fleshly reality. The human being mediates between the divine causes and the created effects, and Christ, the fully human one, assumes the full cosmic scope of mediation and unification: “through the incarnation of Christ the Logos, the universal human nature and through it the rest of creation is unified, redeemed and ultimately divinized.”[19] Though this is a historical and even a natural  realization, (“All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[20]) it is at the same time transcendent.  

The distinction from Hegel, which Desmond brings out, is that in Eriugena God exceeds comprehension and does not even comprehend Himself, as to comprehend is “to render determinate, and God exceeds all delimitation, including all comprehensive determination.”[21] God is at once “no-thing” or nothing and more than all things. There is no final synthesis. This “more than,” for Desmond, “is indicative of a difference with Hegelian immanence, beyond which there is nothing more.”[22] John proleptically includes the Hegelian dialectic, but is not simply a philosopher of immanence, but the passage to transcendence from out of immanence is marked, like the thought of Desmond, as being between: between being and nothing, the apophatic and kataphatic, the transcendent and immanent. This betweenness is the movement of God, from out of Himself and returning to Himself, and it is not Hegel’s settled Wholeness or univocity, realized without transcendence. “In Eriugena there is exceeding transcendence as there is exceeding immanence.”[23]

Desmond notes that there may be the temptation with Eriugena’s dialectic, as with Hegel, to close the metaxu: “if the whole is only the betweening of God with Godself, we are tempted with a desire to close the circle of divine self-relating, such that the thought of absolute unity can overtake all other thoughts, even the thought of the between.”[24] Though there is exit from and return to the One “there is the always-ever-superlatively-surplus-more of the One”[25] and human participation in this One reflects this continual excess.  “The idea of the human (homo) transcends any simple univocity of determinate essence. He exhibits the overdeterminate unity of contradictory determinations; as an image of God as beyond comprehension, man infinitely surpasses man (to echo Pascal).”[26] Humans created in the image of God found in Christ are realizing this image, and this process, is without end. “Wayward and homebound, metaxologically back and forth, going forth and coming back, within the whole, but yet opened beyond the immanent whole: can one think here of a relation to the Apocalyptic betweening of the ‘already and not yet’?”[27]

This betweening however is not to be resolved in a final realization (or synthesis), and this seems to mark Desmond’s departure from Eriugena. Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ. Eriugena envisions a final return which will abolish all difference but Desmond suggests the need to think metaxu differently: “does the between keep open the space of difference, and this now as the distance (di-stans: standing by two, bij twee, betweonum) wherein we can come to love all, even God, and be loved, even by God?”[28] He appeals to  William Butler Yeats’ “Crazy Jane” to make the point: “Going outside or returning inside, passing along the way or passing away, being exiled or repatriated, there is a constancy in passage, a constancy in distance, and all things remain in God, not as in a circle closed into itself but as a porous intermedium of coming and going. I do not come across self-circling with Crazy Jane.”[29]

Desmond also sees it illustrated in Celtic crosses: “We are drawn to the circular patterns there, but the effect is more one of crisscrossing. There is a liminal in-betweenness of interwoven patterning in which beginning and end are hard to separate.”[30] As with Maximus, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. “Crossing oneself, one comes across oneself, and more than oneself.”[31] The movement of God and the movement of the self are eternal in their coming and going and being stretched out. Desmond also likens it to a labyrinth, “There is something infinite, beyond every whole, in the traversing. While amazing, the between as labyrinthine has no simple center and no circular closure. It has to be crossed, crisscrossed, again and again.”[32] There is no exiting desire and satisfaction in God, but only a continual growth in agape love or theosis.

The work of William Desmond, understood against the background of Eriugena, locates his work as part of a distinct tradition, largely absent in the western context. Eriugena, like Maximus, is working out the details of Athanasius’ formula, “God became man that man might become god.” Apocatastasis or theosis seems to likewise characterize Desmond’s metaxology, the working principle of the cosmos and God in which transcendence and immanence are an unfolding realization, in which God would be all in all (creation is incarnation). Desmond may not venture as far as Richard Kearney, but they are on a similar path in their reading of Eriugena, in which humanity acts as God’s co-creator. As Kearney puts it, “The basic thinking was this: divinity possibilises, humanity realises. God is not but may be—on condition that we show up and respond to the unconditional call for love and justice on this earth.”[33] Desmond’s between, as I am understanding him, is this same disruption of binary thought, which with Eriugena and Kearney (to say nothing of John, Paul, Origen, Dionysius and Maximus) would remake our conceptions of God and reality.  

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: Suny Press, 2025).

[2] Ibid, 95.

[3] Ibid, 96.

[4] Ibid.

[5] John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Thu Aug 28, 2003; substantive revision Wed Oct 30, 2019).

[6] Dermot Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 236

[7]  John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[8] Dermot Moran, “Nature, Man and God in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena,” in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, Editor Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985) 236.

[9] Wayward, 30-31.

[10] John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, vol. 3, 678c, cited in Moran, The Irish Mind, 91.

[11] Wayward, 138.

[12] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 88.

[13] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 89.

[14] Wayward, 31.

[15] Wayward, 30.

[16] Wayward, 31.

[17] This is the way Ryan Duns characterizes Desmond’s work. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018).

[18] Stanford Encyclopedia.

[19] Wayward, 31.

[20] Ibid, 30

[21] Ibid,31.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 32.

[28] Ibid, 32-33.

[29] Ibid, 33.

[30] Ibid, 32

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Richard Kearney, “My Way to Theopoetics Through Eriugena,”in Literature & Theology (Vol. 33. No. 3, September 2019, pp. 233–240 doi:10.1093/litthe/frz019) 233.

William Desmond on Being Between: Irish-Wise

As an introduction to William Desmond and the upcoming course Desmond is teaching for PBI, I presumptuously excerpt a small vignette from his most recent work, Wayward and Homebound,[1] in which he describes his philosophy and autobiography as “being between” as part of his being Irish. This work demonstrates how it is Desmond’s philosophy brings together the transcendent and immanent, grounding experience of the infinite in the immanence of subjectivity. I was very taken with his phrase describing this, the “intimate universal,” which he here develops as part of his experience. However, if my reading is any indication, this should spark recognition in everyone. This is partly what he means by “being between,” which he acknowledges may be an off-putting description, but as he describes, it pertains to his Irish experience and by extension to every particular experience, and the universal:

This concern has many dimensions, some more local and intimately rooted in my being Irish, some less localized and crystallized out of wanderings in a more ecumenical space. Being between is itself defined by extremities of intimacy and universality. We are drawn again and again to the question: Is there something like an intimate universal? Is there something in the intimacy of life that, for all its localized character, has something universal about it? Likewise, is there something about the universal that is not sustaining enough food for the soul, if it is only abstract, placeless and faceless? Intimacy risks our being too much there, and we cannot see the wood from the trees. Universality risks being nowhere at all, and in claiming to hover over wood and trees, we come down nowhere, and see neither trees nor wood. Is there a “being between” that is both intimate and universal? How speak about both the intimacy and the universality? Must it be from a position neither inside nor outside, yet both inside and outside; from somewhere in the midst of life, and from a somewhere that is nowhere, since it touches the void whence thinking comes forth and sometimes fructifies?

Does “being between” constitute a condition of Irish thought? We speak of the human condition; or of having a condition, meaning an illness; or of being in condition, meaning being healthy. One might say “being between” is a condition of thought, in a more general sense, but are there Irish conditions of mind that show themselves intimately cognizant of “being between”? Many special offers in Ireland have the proviso attached: Terms and conditions apply. Is “being between” among the terms and conditions presupposed by Irish minding?

Desmond describes his metaxological philosophy as arising from the betweenness of being Irish, which put him between two languages, and then his struggle to learn Dutch in Belgium, causing Irish to rise to the surface, and the feeling of an otherness residing with him. There may be one world but in Desmond’s worlds of experience, Ireland/America/Belgium, he found he could no longer be at home.

I was in the space between, and the between was not to be overcome. It was to be lived with, lived in, and traversed. This space of the between became a leitmotif of my thinking, in which different poles, though there might be communication between them, could not be reduced to a univocal unity or subsumed into a dialectical whole.

Maybe it was my experience of being between multiple places growing up (some ten different moves), recognizing multiple ways of being, and then moving to Japan cast all of these experiences as alien, or what Desmond calls being other. In Japan the constant reminder is that one is a Gaijin, or foreign other. As Desmond puts it:

It was a descent into the marvelous and sometimes horrifying otherness within one, intimate to one’s own selving. Indeed, by being outside the first home, by being no absolute insider in the second home, one comes home to oneself differently, by not-being-at-home. By being thus outside in the between one becomes intimate to the irreducible intermediacy within oneself, within us all, and between us all in the most intimate communications that both bind us together and respect our singular solitudes.

The awakening to the intimate universal captured for me my realization as a young teenager on the Texas prairie, when awakened to God, prayer, and transcendence, a new order of subjectivity grounded in communion, or an infinite communication. Desmond provides a prolonged explanation of this intimate universal, which as with Christ brings together the human and divine, but this Christic experience, is human experience. Desmond doesn’t say it this way exactly, as far as I know, but this is how his description fit my understanding and experience. The discovery of communication with God is a discovery of the ground of thought and communication, which is living and moving in the between, in the intimate universal.

Desmond brings together the rich Irish rootedness of his experience to describe how human experience merges with the divine. If you have not discovered William Desmond, or if you have and want to dive deeper, this course with PBI is a unique opportunity for a life transforming study.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025) quoting from the section on “Being Between: Irish-wise.

Peaceful Realism: “Peace I Leave with You”

“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful” (John 14:27).  

In archaic societies there was no questioning the cosmic principles. Submission to the “order of things,” however that order was conceived, was as good as it gets. Karma, the Law, the gods or God, or fate, were conceived as the given realities, and though one might act with boldness or try to manipulate within the given parameters, there was no sense of getting beyond those parameters to the basic mechanisms undergirding society and the world. As I understand the Christian message, it is exposing the supposed foundations which enslave to violence, false religion, mental sickness, and slavish, unquestioning obedience. The principalities and powers which seem to be an unbreakable force, ruling through the social order, politics, religion, law, or simply tradition, were shown, through the work of Christ, to be suspendable, if not supplantable.

The Christian revolution is still working itself out, but it has sparked a series of revolutions, each of which share the realization that the order of things is not just a necessary given. Medicine, economics, politics, science, and even psychology, have exposed access to the controls, if not complete understanding or control. Sickness is not always inevitable or incurable. The economic and political order can be rearranged, and capitalism and socialism are the proof. Science presumes to get at the basic structure of things, though that structure has proven elusive and infinitely deep. The fears and neuroses which seemingly control the mind have an etiology that is not inevitable or unbreakable. This is more or less common knowledge, but how to maintain this knowledge and what to do with it, is not immediately clear. Part of this lack of clarity, is the failure to recognize the undergirding power of the dark cosmos addressed by Christ. That is the revolution instigated by Christ, resulting in a series of revolutions, has not yet culminated in the final revolution.

Strangely, the power interwoven with every other, structuring the order binding the human condition, but which is left unquestioned and largely untouched, is precisely that power most directly addressed by Christ. The coercive violence of society, the “absolute necessity” of sacrifice, war, and capital punishment, and the general sickness of masochism and sadism, continue to reign, in spite of the fact that this dealing in death was exposed and defeated by Christ. The realization of this victory was clear to the early church in the realms of war and government servitude and the understanding that restorative possibility had replaced retributive justice (while it was less clear when it came to slavery and patriarchy), but these early gains were eroded. For most Christians today, slavery is wrong and war inevitable.

The sentimental account of the Christmas truce of 1914 illustrates the point. German and American soldiers, killing one another the day before and the day after, emerged from the trenches and exchanged gifts and food and sang hymns such as “Silent Night.” Though the carnage was only briefly interrupted, this story is often told, without irony. The absurdity that Christians, sharing in the Body of Christ, celebrants of his birth and incarnation, could only halt the slaughter momentarily, escaped the participants and those who retell the event in the “Spirit of Christmas.” The numbness (dumbness?), or the general passive submission to “inevitable violence,” is on the order of an archaic resignation to the powers. The sense that Christ has defeated these powers is a non-sequitor.

In the “real world” it is obvious that the one with the biggest weapon, wins. Vengeance, or its threat, is the only possible security. It is reinforced by the violent content of mass media and the passive parameters of the form of spectacle. Those who seek center stage through mass shootings and terrorist attacks, recognize that to garner attention requires spectacle. Dirty Harry and the Columbine killers are bound by the same matrix. The towering infernos (the movie or the terrorist attack), the overwhelming crime, the pleasure of revenge, the necessity of killing, overwhelms any sense of a peaceful counter-agency to violence. The art of film sets forth the received deep structure of the cosmos. The degree to which the form accommodates or creates the impassive lack of agency is unclear, but the medium testifies to the inevitable nature of violence. (Even portrayals of Christ in popular media, such as The Chosen, shape Jesus according to the myth of violence.)

The case of Japan indicates that it is not just life following art, as the atomic holocaust unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seemed to produce the peculiar art form of Japanese cinema. Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah, and Gamera, embody the monstrous threat of total destruction that the nuclear age stirred up. Prior to the nuclear age Japan was able to ward off every enemy, and the samurai, the divine winds, the Yokai, the magic of the islands, cast a spell that could not be broken. The archaic world was broken by the “Christian West,” not through the Gospel but through the destructiveness of its perversion. It was the “Christian Nation” (the United States), which would martyr more Japanese Christians in a day than had been killed in 200 years of persecution. Christianity did not cause Truman the Baptist, Byrnes the Catholic and one of Truman’s closest advisors, or Charles Sweeney (pilot of Bock’s Car) a devout Catholic, or any of the long list of Christian advisors and actors to pause or refuse. Truman reported sleeping soundly and never having a second thought. The faith simply served to ease the consciences of its adherents. Though the image of Christian slaughtering Christian in genocidal proportions forever exposed the emptiness of the predominant form of the Western religion, it was precisely faith that blinded to this conclusion (I write about this here).

The blinding nature of this faith was brought home to me as a boy when I first encountered Christian nationalism. As a new Christian I was worried for Johnny French, whom my father employed for odd jobs, but who was often so inebriated he could not move. I found him in a stupor one day, and wanting to help, asked if he was a Christian. He seemed to suddenly sober-up and was angry that I could ask such a question. He said, “Of course I am a Christian. Don’t you know I was a ball turret gunner in the war.” The piety of being American, of having participated in its greatest sacrament, was proof of his American form of the faith. The fusion of loyalty to country and to God and serving this ultimate power by making it ultimate, were completely melded.

I would like to think, that in my childish way, I was attached to a more direct route to God, and that I was never completely duped by religious nationalism. I felt myself enough of an outsider, even frightened of normal society, that my retreat to nature, no matter how twisted by my own suffering sensibility, served a more universal and intimate form of the faith. “Outside society” I had come to a profound sense of communion with God, as if self-awareness was only fully awakened in this divine fellowship. I had few human companions, no real church family, but it was a glorious time of communion with God and nature, bent inward as it was, but nonetheless an awakening to transcendence. It had not occurred to me before (this transcendence), and I was awakened to a different form of subjectivity.

William Desmond describes this awakening as the arrival of the “intimate universal,” the “ontological way of immanence.” “The meaning of the most intimate immanence is just transcendence as communicative being.”[1] I understood others were called into this communion, but I felt uncomfortable in church society. My communion did not fit with this communion, though I may not have been able to articulate this. “We do not think of God and then, after thinking, try to make up a community with God. The thinking is always and already in that community, though it may not know that, and even though it may not recognize that, or may indeed entirely reject the suggestion of being in that ultimate community.”[2] It was not isolation, or an isolated subjectivity, but a deep communication. Dog, horse, prairie, rabbit, were my only fellow congregants in this communion, but I felt it a fine fellowship in God. “The porosity of being is opened in an ultimate communication, and the passion of our being is our passion for God.”[3] Prayer was my conversation and even if not consciously directed at God, the dialogue was open. “Praying is thought awakening to its original ground, waking in the intimate universal to its own most intimate being as a love of the endowing origin.”[4]

This was not an undisturbed or continual peace, but peace must begin here, and it is in no way regulated by the political, mediated by the social, or grounded in the national. In fact, it may only be tangentially related to the church as institution. The peace won by war, the peace by compromise – a temporary cessation of conflict, the peace of mutually assured destruction, have nothing to do with this peace of the intimate universal. This peace does not depend upon peace gained in the immanent frame. The peace of Christ breaks into this immanence, and this is the form of Christian witness to the world. Christians are not bound by the cosmos, but where they begin with the immanent frame, the political, the nation-state, the peace of compromise, and willingly participate in gaining peace through violence, they betray their primary witness. The peace beginning with infinite subjectivity, is the witness of the church, the power and purpose of the Christian faith. This is the peace the world cannot give.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) location 2514.  

[2] Ibid, 2520.

[3] Ibid, 2525

[4] Ibid, 2525

Reflections on the Dynamics of Participating in the Trinity

Trinity as ultimate reality means reality is relational. Ultimate reality is not a monism or one thing in three modes, nor is it three substances within a single abstraction, but the Trinity is a relational dynamic. This has implications for nearly everything; for how we conceive human experience, the church, creation and relationship to God. As Nicholas Lash describes, Trinitarian doctrine is the grammar, the structure, of the Christian school of discipleship.[1] This Trinitarian grammar provides for a creative and generative dynamic, which the early church and the church today is continuing to realize.

The Unpredictable Nature of Trinity

The problem is, the Trinity has political, social, anthropological, and even economic implications, which are impossible to predict. As Raimon Panikkar notes, “The Trinity is an irritant to any monarchic ideology, be it religious (monotheism), political (imperialism and colonialism), economic (global market), academic (pensée unique), or even lifestyle (technocracy).”[2] The Trinity is a doctrine to be realized, and “the world” mitigates against this realization in its attachment to an ever collapsing dualism (an identity through difference that reduces to sameness). This collapse (the violence of the world) in its various political, ethnic, and psychological antagonisms is predictable, but the positive overcoming of the mechanism of violence (peace) cannot be predicted or captured in a theory. Paul describes it as passage from slavery to sin to freedom in the Trinity.

The Passage from Trinitarian absence into Trinitarian Realization

In Romans 7, Paul pictures the ego pitted against the law as controlled by death, which amounts to a Trinitarian absence, which becomes clear in Romans 8, with the Son displacing the isolated ego, and Abba displacing the law, and death being displaced by the Spirit. Human violence against the self and the world is working out its trinitarian absence, a struggle undone through entry into the Trinity: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God . . . (Rom, 8:2, 15-16). Slavery to sin is characterized by fear and death and the impenetrable law which split the ego. This is displaced by a relation to Abba, in the Son, which is life in the Spirit. The realization of this unity not only shows itself in a psychological reorientation but in bringing together categories which were seemingly beyond reconciliation. God and world, matter and Spirit, heaven and earth, typically pitted in a dualism, are harmonized in a Trinitarian synthesis. Quite simply, realization of the truth of the Trinity is entry into peace and reconciliation, which is salvation.[3]

The Organic Nature of Salvation

This is not so much a cultural project (Christendom) or an institution or religion (Christianity) but it is this realization, corporately and individually of the wholeness to be found in the Trinity. According to Jesus, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21). God does not indwell an organization or a civilization but people. The civilizational and religious project have tended to obscure the point of the faith, to enter into Trinity and to live out the implications of being the kingdom. Christendom is on its last legs and Christianity as an institutional religion is in sharp decline, but this opens up the opportunity to the reality of “being in Christ” as a personal realization.

Which is not to say the project is individualistic, but the point of the ecclesia is as an organism and not an organization.[4] This organic understanding means not just personal growth, but recognition that relation to this truth is not like that of a religion or organization but is entry into the full realization of relationship. We are realizing but have not yet realized the fullness of this truth, either as it relates to ourselves, to other religions, or to the world as a whole, but we can participate in this growth without full comprehension. We are growing into Christ who, through us, is growing in the world, but we can only follow the form from our present perspective. “But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Co 12:7). The kingdom is in process and is not historically complete, and this unifying work, certainly involving knowledge (beyond full comprehension) is giving rise to an intelligibility.

The kingdom is in your midst for the common good, but no single mind or organization or hierarchy controls or has a handle on this kingdom. It is a process of discovery and realization, which cannot be predicted or conceptualized or reduced to a set of doctrines or propositions. It is an unfolding story, which involves who God is in Christ. As Rowan Williams describes, there is no single institutional project or clear course of engagement with other traditions, other than the concrete future of a Christlike humanity, that is a humanity “delivered from a slavish submission to an alien divine power and participating in the creative work of God.”[5] It is not our place to provide a universal theory or explanation of how this might work in particular places, cultures, and religions. Though we may not know the universal how, we do know that it is in and through specific human encounter with the ever-expanding story of Jesus Christ and the church.

Conclusion: The Process of Salvation as a Trinitarian Realization

The unfolding relational nature of Trinitarian theology could never assume to speak the last word. “To the extent that the relation of spirit to logos is still being realized in our history, we cannot ever, while history lasts, say precisely all that is to be said about logos . . .  We know that the unification of all things through Christ is not a matter of a single explanatory scheme being manifested to us, but of the variousness of human lives being drawn into creative and saving relation to the divine and to each other.”[6] We are in the midst of the purposeful groaning (Rom 8:26-27) working itself out in creation and the body of Christ. “Being Christian, if it means acting for these goals and for these reasons, is believing the doctrine of the Trinity to be true, and true in a way that converts and heals the human world.”[7]

[1] Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), 183-96. Cited in Rowan Williams, “The Trinity and Pluralism,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Edited by Gavin D’Costa (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 13.

[2] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 224-225.

[3] The experience of the synthesis of the Father and Son, time and eternity, Creator and creation, is through the Spirit. The Spirit is the realization of synthesis in an ever-abiding dynamic (Rom 8:26–27). Trinity as the structure of reality shows itself in being between (creation in process), and this relational betweenness constitutes not just a third, but is the truth of the whole. Time is not pitted against eternity, as if God is incapable of the temporal, but in Christ the Creator is groaning with creation (Rom 8:22). Just as the Father is through the Son, so too the eternal is in time. Panikkar calls it “tempiternal” in that just as the Father and Son cannot be separated neither can time and eternity be separated.Ibid, 226.

[4] Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness,” in Hick and Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, (New York: Orbis, 1995),  104

[5] Williams, 11.

[6] Ibid, 12.

[7] Ibid, 13.

The Trinity as the Foundation of Human Experience and Truth: Drawing Together the Thought of William Desmond and Raimundo Panikkar

The Trinity is not simply a complicated or obscure way of describing the Christian God, but the foundation of truth at the root of true human experience. Trinity as the guide into truthful experience goes beyond an objective and abstract correspondence theory of truth, which pictures human intellect as the adequation or correspondence of human intellect to things. It goes beyond a coherence theory, with its immanent self-consistency, beyond idealism, which would equate being and thought, or pragmatic theories in which truth is that which works. All of these theories hit upon a description of truth which may allow for a certain utility, but the full existential and personal dimension is left out, not only that ultimate truth is personal (Trinitarian) but the reception of this truth fills out human personhood (trinitarian).

Each of these other trues contain a drive to absolute possession and control, within the self, which belies their inadequacy. Truth may be absolute, but that form of truth that requires absolute possession is not absolute truth. Humans are not God, we cannot possess this truth as that which completely corresponds to us, or coheres in us. The human relation to truth is not as maker or possessor, as truth is divine. We can seek it, desire it, and participate in it, which already speaks of a relation that is sought (but not possessed). Both Raymondo Panikkar and William Desmond describe this relationship as being between.

According to Desmond, “This being in the between, the metaxu, defines our participation in the milieu of being within which our own middle being intermediates with the truth, truth that might well be beyond us, though not out of relation to us.”[1] The nature of our being is not as originators or makers or owners of truth as this truth, in its very constitution, is beyond us but this beyond is not beyond relation but constitutes our relation, both to ourselves and truth. It is prior to us, after us, surrounding us, permeating us, such that we are in this space of truth as the mediating reality of who and what we are. Just as God is constituted in the relationship of the Trinity, we too are who we are only in relationship. “There is a call of truth on us that is coeval with our being: it is constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. It releases us into a certain freedom of seeking, but this freedom and release are not themselves self-produced.”[2] Our relationship to truth, which is beyond us and calls us, is who we are.

Truth does not simply pertain to our search or simply to us, though it pertains to everything about us. Our pursuit calls for a fidelity to the form of truth, which will presume neither that it is absent nor that it can be manufactured or possessed. “Despairing nihilism” or an “intoxicated will to power,” miss that truth is granted through truthfulness to its form. We are neither completely ignorant nor totally in possession of truth, and our truthfulness is a testament to that condition. To be truthful is to answer the call of truth upon us: “to be open to something other than our own self-determination, something that endows us with a destiny to be truthful to the utmost extent of our human powers.”[3] One dedicated to the truth, to living truthfully, is called to a life of fidelity (faith) which shapes self and experience.

As Panikkar writes, we are between the created and uncreated, or between anthropomorphism (understanding everything in human terms), and theologism (understanding everything in divine terms). He calls this a theandric spirituality, which is both divine and human. “The proper balance of the scales is upset when one ceases to look at the centre; if one gazes at God one is blinded, if one gazes at man one is deafened.”[4] This betweenness is between “body and soul, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, action and contemplation, sacred and profane, vertical and horizontal – in a word, between what one may continue to call divine and what one has been accustomed to call human.”[5] For Panikkar this “theandric” betweenness is determined by the realization of the Trinity in the God/man, and it is through this paradigm that he finds all human religious experience converging.

Trinity rules out both a completely immanent or transcendent God; a judging God above or a material God below. “The Trinity in fact, reveals that there is life in the Godhead as well as in Man, that God is not an idol, nor a mere idea, nor an ideal of human consciousness. Yet he is neither another substance nor a separate, and thus separable, reality.”[6] It is through Trinity that the unified nature of all reality can be accounted for without falling into pantheism or atheism. The place in which we necessarily encounter Trinity is in human experience, through which we can arrive at a model of a unified reality. A person is neither an isolated monolithic individual nor a corporate plurality. “A singular isolated person is a contradiction in terms. Person implies constitutive relationship, the relationship expressed in the pronominal persons.”[7] A person is constituted as I/thou or a We/you or a as a he/she, the place where the I/thou relation takes place. This is neither wholly objective or subjective but is between subjectivity and objectivity. “Modernist ‘subjectivity’ is erroneous when it eliminates objectivity; but even more erroneous is juridical objectivity – and legalism – when it stifles all true subjectivity.”[8] We can turn completely inward to subjectivity or completely outward in clinging to a law or proposition, and both are a betrayal of the self.

The subjective and objective, as realms apart, consist of the same category mistake as making God transcendent or immanent. In Christ the immanent and transcendent are given an ontological link (in his person). Just as God is himself only in conjunction with Christ so too, we are only ourselves in our integration into this conjunction. God is not enclosed either within himself or within us, in the subjective and immanent or the transcendent and objective. There is a convergence and overlapping of God with transcendence and immanence and humankind is located in and with this convergence. The fully human is “penetrated by this divine dynamism.”[9] This describes the place of the Son, but it also describes the human place in the Son.

Desmond refers to this place between subjective and objective as “transsubjective.” We are endowed with something beyond us and it is in this sense “objective,” but it is in intimate relation to us and fundamental to who we are. Being true involves a fidelity to this form of truth, which Desmond characterizes as “finesse.” This finesse is a readiness for an intimate knowing, an “embodied mindfulness” which is witnessed and imitated. “Finesse refers us to the concrete suppleness of living intelligence that is open, attentive, mindful, attuned to the occasion in all its elusiveness and subtlety. We take our first steps in finesse by a kind of creative mimesis, by trying to liken ourselves to those who exemplify it, or show something of it.”[10] Finesse is a realization of an ontological givenness and the recognition that truth is received – a patient reception. The acceptance of finitude is the recognition we are not our own fathers or our own creators, the rejection of which is a kind of self-hatred. Desmond likens it to a “flower trying to ingest its own ground – impossible, yet were it even conceivable, it would show the inner self-hatred of the flower that must only destroy itself in this way of absolutizing itself.”[11] It is no more possible to dig beneath the flower to discover its origins than it is to definitively name the Father apart from the Son.

We know the Father through the Son, as everything the Father is he transmits to the Son, and the Son returns to the Father. There is a mystery in this exchange. The Son in not the origin, as the Father begets the Son, but as Jesus tells Philip, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). The “Son is the is of the Father.”[12] As Panikkar puts it, “To know the Son qua Son is to realise the Father also, to know Being as such implies to have transcended it in a non-ontical way.”[13] God is the Father through the Son. He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To ask what he is beyond this, or in God himself, is nonsense, as it implies an origin, other than that of the Father of Christ. The Son does nothing on his own, yet he is the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. He is God made flesh, God made available, God made human, God made being. The Father causes the Son’s emergence but there is not another preceding the Son. “This of-God is precisely the Son. It is the Son who acts, who creates. Through him everything was made. In him everything exists.”[14] “The phrase ‘God in himself’ already implies a ‘reflection’ which presupposes already this ineffable God (whose ‘self’ we are asking for) and derives from there the notion of a ‘self’ of God which already has an origin and is thus no longer original and originating.”[15] This ineffable self-reflection is no longer the Father.

This sui generis origin, unrelated and totally transcendent, is the contradiction on the order of being one’s own father (the tormenting superego). This impenetrable god is beyond comprehension as he is a contradiction. There is no God alone, apart from the Son. The only approach to the Father is the Son. The Father has no “I” apart from his relatedness to the Son, and this is a primal insight into the human “I” or ego. Personhood is in relatedness, and it does not presume to get behind the origin of this relation or go beyond it, as the relation is the reality. God is not the ground of God, which would amount to an infinite regress, but the Father begets the Son and being of–God, which is definitive of the Son, is definitive of all created in his image.

We do not have ourselves apart from this reality, but the human sickness expresses itself in dividing the Father from the Son, or in objectifying or splitting self from self. To “think my being” or to “have my being” is a refusal of life. We can refuse the gift of life, refuse to receive ourselves in our efforts at self-determination. The fear of losing life, in Panikkar’s description is already an indicator of the nonvalue of this life. “‘Life’ which can be lost is not Life. Nor is existence which can be lost real existence.”[16] This misplaced love of life is neither life nor love, as true life and love would relinquish all for love, and this is stronger than death. According to Desmond, “We can so insist that everything be subject to our self-determination that we betray the joy of this gift, in the overriding of our own self-affirmation.”[17] Refusal of mortality and finitude is a refusal of the gift of life from God, while consent to death is the reception of life. “None of us is exempt, and we will all come to the fearsome challenge of this harder consent. In a certain regard, we are always coming to this consent, or fleeing it, in every moment of our life.”[18]

We can build our life on a lie, fleeing mortality and finitude. “When we realize that we are not seen through entirely by human others, we make our bodies into masks. We become more adept at being liars.”[19] Shame can play a positive role in the feeling of being unmasked, but at the extreme, the mask becomes a complete façade of shamelessness. Both shame and laughter point to the porosity or received nature of the self. Both may expose the absurdity of the self-grounding lie. “There is ontological receiving before there is existential acting. As something ontological, this receiving is constitutive of our being as selving, but it is not self-constituted.”[20] As Desmond goes on to say, “Where the energy of laughing comes from is mysterious, and its ‘point’ often dissolves into nothing, beyond all self-determination. Laughter can be festive and can reveal an ontological affirmation at play deep in our being, preceding logic, exceeding logic.”[21] To be put to shame, or to recognize in laughter the absurd we may cling to, is not the worst thing that could happen. Perhaps there is a little death, an exposure or falsification in both laughter and shame, that opens us further to consenting to death.

In Panikkar’s picture, to consent to death is the reception of the Spirit: “The Spirit comes only after the Cross, after Death. It works in us the Resurrection and causes us to pass to the other shore.”[22] According to Desmond, “In this care, we may be released beyond ourselves in a minding of the other potentially agapeic.”[23] We can invest our lives in patient service of the truth, which relinquishes self-determination and is open to the divine. The Spirit enables this alternative perspective, in which one feels himself addressed by God, and is turned from an “I” to a “thou.” The calling of God is the granting of being (Is 42:6). “In so far as man has not had the experience, in one way or another, of being a Thou spoken by God, in so far as he has not discovered with the wonder of a child (because it is full of mystery) that he is precisely because the I calls him (and calls him by his name, the name representing here his self-hood, his being) he has not yet reached the depth of life in the Spirit.”[24] The deepest realization of self is one of porosity or openness to the Spirit, in which the absolute is relinquished for relationship.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death . . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:2,15). The experience of the Trinity fills out personhood, as the “I” or ego is displaced by identity in Christ, which is the Spirit of adoption, by which there is direct relation to Abba! Father! This Trinitarian self is the reality of the self for which we were made.

[1] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2012) 188.

[2] Strangeness of Being, 189.

[3] Strangeness of Being, 190.

[4] Raymondo Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), 74.

[5] Panikkar, 73.

[6] Panikkar, xiii.

[7] Panikkar, xv.

[8] Panikkar, 3.

[9] Panikkar, 31.

[10] Strangeness of Being, 192.

[11] Strangeness of Being, 197.

[12] Panikkar, 46.

[13] Panikkar, 46.

[14] Panikkar, 51.

[15] Panikkar, 44.

[16] Panikkar,

[17] Strangeness of Being, 198.

[18] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[19] William Desmond, Godsends: From Default Atheism to the Surprise of Revelation (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 142.

[20] Godsends, 143.

[21] Godsends, 152.

[22] Panikkar, 66.

[23] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[24] Panikkar, 68.

Do We Need the Insight of Islam to See Ourselves Rightly?

One of the most successful bridge builders to other religions was the Catholic Monk, Thomas Merton, who emphasized the need for a Christocentric understanding for engagement with other religions and traditions. His was not the watered-down approach which imagined it was enough to reason together, but like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, he saw the times as requiring drastic and emergency measures. With Bonhoeffer he concurs, people with good intentions who imagine that a little reason will suffice do not understand either the depths of evil or of the holy. “The news that God has become man strikes at the very heart of an age in which the good and the wicked regard either scorn for man or the idolization of man as the highest attainable wisdom.”[1]

Merton’s advocacy of peace, without compromise, at once appreciated that other religions recognize peace and goodness are to be equated with God, but he also recognized that reasoning together was inadequate to stand-up against political expediency. “Men do not agree in moral reasoning. They concur in the emotional use of slogans and political formulas.”[2] The persuasive power of fear and desire, such as that dealt out by the Nazis or our own Nazified political situation, is untouched by the call to ethical considerations. The evil done in the name of religion, in the name of the good, by those committed to lies and murder, will be unphased by moral or religious theory. The evil and destructiveness of the day, seemingly determined to ignite a world conflagration, is the necessary preparation for man to become a god, or for the president to be the Messiah.

We might have wished the Nazis saw themselves through the eyes of those they were destroying. Shouldn’t we wish the same thing for the United States at this moment. That it might see itself through the eyes of the hundreds of parents slain at a girls school, that it might see itself through the eyes of those suffering oppression and terror in Iran and Gaza. Bonhoeffer understood that the church of his day had failed, as it had been coopted by the Nazi regime. The sickness was too deep for a sermon, a philosophical correction, an ethical or religious discussion, but doesn’t that describe this present moment in the United States? Isn’t the best thing that could happen, in order to expose this present delusion, recognition that Iranians – those whom our military would destroy, may also be in the best position to expose the lie of the times? Isn’t that the point of loving the enemy, that we be enabled to see things through their eyes? If we simply demonize the enemy, and make no attempt to see the good in them, then we also will not appreciate where they are right in their judgment of us. According to Merton, “As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.”[3]

We are living at a time when Christians would identify themselves over and against the culture of Islam, imagining the West is a Christian culture. In the rhetoric of various evangelical leaders (as Franklin Graham has put it), Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion” and war seems to be part of a “necessary” clash of religions and civilizations? This seemingly Medieval perception is precisely that – Medieval in its theological roots. Steve Bannon, perhaps the key thinker behind Donald Trump, believes the United States is a Christian nation, not just in the sense that a majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, but also in the sense that the country’s culture is Christian. This means our war with evil is a literal war against Islam: “We” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or we will be overrun by dangerous outsiders (Islamists) who will impose a different identity upon us. In a speech at the Vatican, he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” An article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Bannon as a “supporter of apocalyptic geopolitics,” the logic of which is “no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” This notion of a clash of civilizations is a delusion.

Christians are not those who align with Western civilization over and against Islamic civilization. The fear of Islam is on the order of a previous generation’s fear of socialism. As a child in Texas, it seemed all of the evils of the world could be attributed to the communists and socialists, and what we were blind to was the “socialist” aspect of the gospel. Because of this inability, Christianity was reimagined as a capitalistic religion, in which concern for the poor was largely absent, and the injustices of Western oppression were excused or made invisible; which is not to excuse or deny the problems of communism, but the demonization of the enemy blinds to the value in their critical perspective on ourselves.

If this is true of “godless communism,” it is even more profoundly true of our coreligionists. Islam shares the early texts of the Bible and a high regard for Christ. The goodness, beauty, and love of God, as with Christians, is a first order reality. According to Islamist Seyyed Nasr, “All reality issues from the One, Who is the sole absolute Reality, which is also absolute Beauty. As the One manifests the many on various levels of cosmic existence, this absolute Beauty is also manifested along with existence, of which it is the splendor like the aura around the sun.”[4] In Sufism, aesthetics is part of ethics and spiritual discipline. One is trained to recognize Absolute Beauty as of God, and it is God for whom the soul yearns in its appreciation of the beautiful. Nasr appeals to Plotinus: “the soul strives after beauty and beauty is a manifestation of that spiritual power that animates all levels of reality. The Sufis agree completely with this view, which once dominated Western aesthetics but was marginalized in the West. . .”[5]

Aesthetics, in Islam, developed as a recognition that all beauty is a reflection of divine beauty, a profound spiritual insight, which may not be entirely lacking in the West, but in my branch of the faith at least, aesthetics has never been a focus. Yet who could disagree with Nasr’s assessment: “The supreme beauty is the beauty of the Supreme Reality; absolute beauty is the beauty of the Absolute. Even the most intense beauty experienced in this world in the beautiful face of a loved one or a supreme work of art or of virgin nature or even the perfume of the soul of a saint is a reflection of divine Beauty.”[6] As the Song of Solomon states it, “For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord” (So 8:6).

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, attaches great significance not only to the original garden scene of paradise, but to its reenactment in human love. Christians may have lost this significance of peace and love preserved at the heart of Islam: “According to the Quran and a saying of the Prophet, the greeting of the people of Paradise, of the Garden, is salam, or peace; hence the ordinary Muslim greeting, al-salām” ‘alaykim, or ‘peace be upon you.’”[7] Christians might learn from the Islamic mystical tradition, in its assigning spiritual significance to human sexuality: “a sacred reality, hence to be governed by the Sacred Law, [and] not as a sinful act simply resulting from the fall.”[8] Could it be that Western Christianity, plagued as it is with sexual transgression, might benefit from the understanding that “sexual union, which is the most powerful sensuous urge within most human beings, is in reality the search of the soul for union with God, especially when human union is combined with love”?[9]

Connecting human beauty to the divine also comes with a certain realism, seemingly lacking in Western youth driven culture. Outward beauty tends to fade, absent liposuction and face lifts etc., and is primarily the domain of the young. “As we grow older our actions based on our choices and free will become evermore reflected in our outward countenance, and inner beauty, in the case of those who possess such beauty, begins to dominate the outward while the original God-given outward beauty usually fades away.”[10] Still, there is an unabashed recognition of beauty: the “female face reveals a Divine Quality and unveils a Divine Mystery.”[11] Lovers of God in Sufism, are lovers of beauty, which is inseparable “from the Divine Reality and which, being related to the infinitude of the Divine, brings about total peace and liberates the soul from all fetters of restrictive existence.”[12] Shouldn’t Christians share this profound sense of beauty which “liberates” and brings “peace”?

A Christianity and a Western culture driven by egoism also might learn from the Islamic notion that love “is always combined with some degree of dying to one’s ego, to one’s desires, to one’s preferences for the sake of the other.” This is the case “because human love is itself a reflection of Divine Love, which we can experience only after the death of our ego, and can lead to the Divine those souls who are fortunate enough to have experienced this love.”[13] Are Western evangelicals blind and forgiving of the rape culture surrounding Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and the Catholic and Evangelical Church because they are missing the insight which Sufism might provide? Desire of the ultimate kind is fulfilled only by the Divine.

Maybe it is time to listen to our so-called “enemies” to gain the insight gone missing in Western Christianity, the insight to which Islam appeals: “When we ponder the terms pace, shalom, shanti, and salam in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam respectively and their ubiquitous usage by the followers of these religions, as well as terms with the same meaning used elsewhere, we become aware of the universality of this yearning.”[14] Absent focus on the peace longed for in the world religions, the gospel is perverted and its potential to address the hope of the nations relinquished.

When Christians take up the sword in civilizational war imagining this crusader mentality is Christian, they have missed the Christian faith. This civilizational security is not the security of Christ. In addition to denying enemy love, taking up the sword and slaying the enemy is to slaughter the very prophetic voice that is needed. As Christians faced with a Medieval form of Christianity, we must turn firmly from the means and method of empire or Christian civilization. We are not to seek power and security through the defeat of Islam in war. The danger is that in aligning with the powers and methods of empire, Christians have joined forces with the counter-Kingdom of the anti-Christ and have slain the very enemy who might have provided kingdom insight – that of the loved enemy.

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 58. Merton is quoting but Bonhoeffer, but gives no footnote.

[2] Ibid, 59.

[3] Ibid, 63.

[4] Seyyed Hossein, Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper One, 2007) 71.

[5] Ibid, 72.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 78.

[8] Ibid, 65.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 74.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 66.

[14] Ibid, 78.

Abraham Heschel’s Sabbath Realized in the Person of Christ

Abraham Heschel has written one of the most profound reflections on Jewish conceptions of Sabbath, and I could not help but feel the beauty of his book pointed throughout to Christ. His expansive picture of the Sabbath is in no way diminished by this interpretation, as its universality is inclusive of both Judaism and Christianity. What this interpretation makes clear, is the personal reality and dynamism behind Heschel’s description. Perhaps the great offense of Christianity to Jews, is that all that Judaism claims about holiness is thought by Christians to be fulfilled in the person of Christ: the embodiment of the holy law, the holy place, the holy time, and ultimately of the holiness of God, but this holiness in the Bible never existed as an entity unto itself, but is preceded by and conjoined with the Sabbath (indicative of a fulfilled messianic time). Holiness (qadosh), the word which is representative of the divine, is not first connected with a holy object, a holy mountain, or a holy altar, but it is first introduced in Genesis at the end of creation as a holy time.[1] “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen 2:3). This is not the usual religious thinking, concerned at it is with holy places, but it is connected to a holy time and voice, speaking of himself to all creation. “It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”[2] The holiness of the Sabbath preceded and extended beyond Israel, with its land and feasts and temple and the Jews as a people, and is directly connected with God’s universal sanctifying presence. “According to some it is the name of the Holy One,”[3] a day into which all humans are invited.

The Bride of the Lamb/Sabbath

“The love of the Sabbath is the love of man for what he and God have in common.”[4] In this time humans are joined to God, joined to this time permeated by the eternal presence, and are thus literally made in his image through this union. This is universal man, Adam, and not a particular race or religion. The Jewish people preserved the Sabbath, but it was never theirs alone. The completion of man by woman means creation is an open-ended process, in which the whole inner basis of humankind (contained in the name Adam) is an ongoing realization of love, an ongoing realization of the divine image through marriage.[5] “This is what the ancient rabbis felt: the Sabbath demands all of man’s attention, the service and single-minded devotion of total love.”[6]

In the interpretation of the rabbis, all the other days are paired and the Lord says to the Sabbath: “The Community of Israel is your mate.”[7] Sabbath is God’s search and longing for man, a reversal of the usual picture. “The six days stand in need of space; the seventh day stands in need of man. It is not good that the spirit should be alone, so Israel was destined to be a helpmeet for the Sabbath.”[8] Welcoming the Sabbath is likened to meeting one’s bride and its celebration is like a wedding.[9] “We are the mate of the Sabbath, and each week through our sanctification of the Sabbath, we marry the day.”[10] A wedding feast for all.

The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs indicates that the depth of love is lit by the flame of Yahweh’s presence (8:6). The one flesh relation between male and female is realized only in the presence of this binding, passionate, presence. According to Rabbi Akiba: “All of time is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.”[11] Early Christians concurred, reading it as an allegory of the marriage between Christ and believers. It was cited by Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, and Augustine and in medieval Western Christianity it became the most popular biblical text.[12] In the Jewish conception the promise of the Sabbath is this depth of love, being conjoined to God in the spirit in the love of a day. In Christian thought the two becoming one in Genesis is the mystery fulfilled through Christ and the church (Eph 5:32). The Second Adam completes the human capacity for image bearing and the second Adam and his bride join the human and divine for eternity.

It is not so much an observance as an alternative existence in and through relationship. The marriage of and to this day contains the movement and purpose of personhood and history. This time, this event, this personhood, is what God and humans share and in which they are conjoined. The Church as the bride of Christ indicates Sabbath predestination was always the unfolding telos summing up all things. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). Sabbath pointed to and contained the reality of Immanuel, “God with us.” God has come to his Temple, he has been joined to his creation, inclusive of the cosmic order but most particularly his habitation in and with the human soul.

Sabbath Rest as Redemption and Arrival of the Spirit

Rest or menuha is not simply a ceasing from work, but from the futile toil of labor as described in Genesis, outside the presence of God. Heschel describes civilization as caught up in the struggle of toil, subduing the earth, forging instruments of war and technology, being “within” the world without being able to surpass the world. Sabbath is this surpassing possibility.[13] Even at the beginning, it is the creation of something new, in that tranquility, serenity, and repose, with God are made possible. There is a divine dignity in labor, which Sabbath does not diminish but ensures, by providing a time of freedom from the all-consuming demands. On this day the toil, the futility, the worship of money, are halted.[14] We can do without such things, such possessions, such values. “The seventh day is the armistice in man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man; a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world’s chief idol.”[15] Heschel equates menuha with happiness, stillness, peace, and harmony. It is the root word Job used to describe the after-life he was longing for, or the state in which troubling wickedness and weariness, fighting, strife and fear are abolished. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters (the waters of menuhot).”[16] “All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.”[17]

The Sabbath is the foretaste of the miracle of redemption, sometimes considered as the arrival of the soul unto itself (a second soul). As Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: “The Holy One, Blessed be He, gives a person an additional soul on Shabbat eve, and at the conclusion of Shabbat removes it from him, as it is stated: “He ceased from work and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).[18] It is not the creation of the soul but the reception of more soul, or spirit. It is also described as the “resurrection of the soul, of the soul of man and of the soul of all things. A medieval sage declares: The world which was created in six days was a world without a soul. It was on the seventh day that the world was given a soul.”[19] As Heschel describes referencing the rabbis, man is given a “supernal soul” or a soul which is “all perfection.” “It is ‘the holy spirit that rests upon man and adorns him with a crown like the crown of angels….”[20]

This granting of the soul or Spirit, completed through Christ, is the end point of God’s in-breathing of his image. No longer will death and death-dealing inclinations intervene, as life and peace are an enduring presence in the Spirit. “He gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). In Judaism the spirit comes and goes with the passing of the Sabbath but as the writer of Hebrews describes, Christians enter into a continual Sabbath rest (Heb 4). This abiding presence is to be coveted and desired above all things. “It seeks to displace the coveting of things in space for coveting the things in time, teaching man to covet the seventh day all days of the week.”[21] “Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11).

The love, joy, peace, and long-suffering, granted by the Spirit, were already to be present in the joy of the Sabbath. As Heschel writes, “Not only is it forbidden to light a fire on the Sabbath, but, . . . “Ye shall kindle no fire– not even the fire of righteous indignation.”[22] There is to be no sadness, anger, or mourning on the Sabbath. This is not simply a day, but the beginning of the realization of paradise, in which wrath, and strife are overcome. The Sabbath was always anticipation of the messianic age in which there is an enduring Sabbath: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.”[23]

Sabbath Time Giving Significance to Space

Sabbath is the entry of the eternal into time, an eternalization of the moments of time. Time can be “spent” in subduing nature, in gaining control through technical means, and thus one can build houses and barns but these things are not what is required for the soul (Luke 12:20). Barn building technique enlarges the physical habitation but does nothing for the expanse of the soul. The six days of toil are not to reign over the seventh, but are subordinate, as life spent in gaining power, wealth, and control is a form of slavery, if not conjoined to the eternal. “The manufacture of tools, the art of spinning and farming, the building of houses, the craft of sailing-all this goes on in man’s spatial surroundings.”[24] All of these describe a preoccupation with space, and this aim of spatial dominance tends to infect even religious understanding. In Japan, for example, sacred groves, sacred rocks, sacred mountains, constitute the “places” of the holy. People tend to “locate” the divine in space, and time and history are not assigned spiritual significance. The question of “where” and not “when” is primary.

This spatial attachment, to land, to place, to objects, or to things, tends to mold our image accordingly. Memorials to the dead and sacred shrines to the deities are literally made of the same stuff. Remembrance and preservation of the dead, service of dead objects, exercise a kind of spatial tyranny. “Thingness” or material space seems to constitute reality. “In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived, by most of us, as a thing.”[25] The gods fashioned in our image, reflect back the tyranny of the material world over our self-conception. In Sabbath there is an engagement of time, not simply as passing, but as an intersection with the eternal. Our tendency to cling to objects and space as if they are not perishing, is an obvious falsehood. “Things perish within time; time itself does not change.”[26] Time does not pass or die, but things in time do. “Monuments of stone are destined to disappear; days of spirit never pass away.”[27] The desire to possess creates rivalry, but time cannot be possessed or owned. “We cannot solve the problem of time through the conquest of space, through either pyramids or fame.”[28] The Bible assigns primacy to time, and so history, generations, events, are more important than countries, geography, or space. Time bears the meaning of space and is assigned a significance to which space is relegated.

Heschel notes that the Jews, like other people, celebrated life in nature, with its respective agricultural celebrations, these were transformed into time focused celebrations. Passover, originally a spring festival became a celebration of the Exodus, the wheat harvest festival became the celebration of the day Torah was given, the festival of vintage became the celebration of the sojourn in the wilderness. “To Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature, even though physical sustenance depended on the latter.”[29] The Jews began like other peoples, focused on nature and things, but then the redemption from slavery, the giving of the law, the guidance through the wilderness, drew the focus to events in history.

Heschel maintains, “It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded.”[30]The sanctity of time in the Sabbath, and then in the events of the exodus, were followed by a sanctity of space in the tabernacle, the temple, and then the land. “Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses.”[31] There is a holiness in time attached to sacred events. Each of these shifts however, come to be centered on the temple, which unlike the events proves subject to destruction. But then Jesus identifies himself as true temple and the significance behind each of these events.

Jesus as the Significance of Sabbath

Jesus disrupts the Passover sacrifice in the temple with a sign which, in his explanation, points to himself as true temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The Jewish holy place is turned once again into a holy event in his person. During the Feast of Dedication, celebrating the reconsecrated temple (in 165 BCE), Jesus describes himself as the “consecrated one” (John 10:36). This temple is not subject to destruction, and this “building” is no longer a place but a person and a people. John the Baptist’s introduction and summation of the work of Christ, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29), pictures both Passover and the Day of Atonement as fulfilled in Christ. The event of the Exodus (the passing over of death), becomes an eternal event and entry into God’s presence (atonement) a personal and permanent realization. At the Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths), Jesus describes himself in terms of this festival as the source of thirst-quenching water (John 7:37) and the light of the world (John 8:12) recalling the miraculous events in the wilderness, but this deliverance from out of bondage, homelessness, hunger and thirst are eternal events in time. Christ is identified as the true giving of the law written on the heart through the Spirit (John 3; Rom 2:14-16). Here is the creation of a holy people promised in the law. The passage is from space centered to a centering on events, but then the focus on the temple returns these events to a place. Christ turns them into a focus on the dynamics of his personhood and incarnation.

Conclusion

The threat of time, seems to be a series of empty and identical moments delivering to death and the loss of the world, but Christ as Sabbath fills time with eternal presence. As Heschel writes, “All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time.” Here “Eternity utters a day.”[32] As the writer of Hebrews puts it, “So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb 4:9–10). The Sabbath rest is to be found in resting in his presence. The sanctification of time, begun in Sabbath, invades all of time in he who is the reality of Sabbath.

[1] Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 9.

[2] Ibid, 10.

[3] Ibid,  20.

[4] Ibid, 16.

[5] Ibid, xv

[6] Ibid, 17.

[7] Ibid, 51

[8] Ibid, 52.

[9] Ibid, 53-4

[10] Ibid, this is the summation of his daughter in the Introduction.

[11] Ibid, 98.

[12] See Karl Shuve, The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[13] Heschel, 27.

[14] Ibid, 28.

[15] Ibid, 29.

[16] Ibid, 22-23.

[17] Ibid, 32.

[18] Beitzah 16a:12

[19] Heschel, 83

[20] Ibid, 88.

[21] Ibid, 91.

[22] Ibid, 29.

[23] Ibid, xv

[24] Ibid, 4.

[25] Ibid, 5.

[26] Ibid, 97.

[27] Ibid, 98.

[28] Ibid, 101.

[29] Ibid, 7.

[30] Ibid, 9-10.

[31] Ibid, 10.

[32] Ibid, 101.

The City of God Versus the Earthly City

Before Virginia Giuffre killed herself, she pronounced the entire society, which enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic her, as corrupt to the core. Not just those who had sex with her as a teenager, including those from academia, royalty, and the business world, but those from a much broader swath of society who never spoke up. The billionaires, media moguls, corporate leaders, political leaders, and those who carry influence and shape society, were represented by those who raped her, but they also made up the cadre of people who did not object. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known as sex traffickers, it is the first line in Epstein’s Wikipedia profile, and had been for years, yet this was overlooked. Epstein was able to groom hundreds of young girls for sex trafficking, but at the same time the ruling class was willingly groomed by the same techniques. It is not just that he was friends with President Donald Trump and the Democratic President Bill Clinton, but he was able to worm his way deep into Harvard, MIT, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers the Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University, turned to his friend Epstein to get instruction on how to seduce a young woman he was mentoring. Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties, owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, needed help getting a child into an elite school, so he reaches out to Epstein. Heads of state, heads of major institutions, elites from nearly every sector of society, willingly associated with Epstein, and there is no record of any of these individuals protesting or seeking to expose his activities.

The journalist, Anand Giridharadas, confirms Giuffre’s judgment, comparing Epstein to a kind of food poison passing through every major organ of the social body, proving the system is inherently sick.[1] There was no nausea, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no reaction. Out of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at dinners and parties, no one who blew up at the circumstance or objected to the girls being abused or to the influence being traded. Epstein was a test, and though he is dead and gone, what he has proven is that the system lacks the capacity to react, to notice, to expunge this vileness, because the system is corrupt to the core. The institutions that shape society, the values and incentives held throughout the system, are sick and corrupt.

Add to the Epstein story his proven connections with Israel, and the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran, and the depth of depravity, involving not just a culture of rape but one bent on murder is evident. Sex was the lure, but Zionism and genocide the goal, so that Israel could abolish the Palestinians and dominate in the Middle East. The problem for the Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, is not simply that the illness infecting culture has not been resisted by the church, but it could be argued, that the sickness proven by Epstein, is that of the church. There is no need to recount the levels of abuse to make the point: sexual abuse, avarice, greed, capitalism, and the grab for power, are not simply at the periphery of church institutions. Christian Zionism and with it, extreme nationalism, are forces that the church unleashed and made possible. Donald Trump is president due to the support of Christians, but this could also be said of the trends Trump and Epstein represent. The question is, why is the church now at the center of the problem? 

Christianity began as a resistant community, resisting emperor worship and the ethics and religion of empire, so as to proclaim Christ as Lord and his ethical mandate as overriding the demands of empire. Even into the third century, Celsus (a late pagan traditionalist) is concerned that Christianity is causing the decay of the Roman Empire (not an accusation leveled against modern Christians). He considers Christianity completely subversive to the religious and social order of Rome, which he considers to be the true universal order. It is not monotheism to which he objects, “it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians,”[2] but the problem is Christian exclusiveness. The Christians reject the worship of “daemons and quote the saying of Jesus, ‘No man can serve two masters,’” and for Celsus this is “a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”[3] The Christian teaching on humility, and against wealth, and their refusal of the traditions, their refusal to engage in war, or even to take part in public life, means they cannot be good citizens.

This accusation of being different, a testament to the resistance of the early church, describes the faithfulness of the early Christians to being a peculiar people. As Thomas Merton sums up, “Christians not only believed that Celsus’ world was meaningless, but that it was under judgment and doomed to destruction. He interpreted the otherworldly Christian spirit as a concrete, immediate physical threat.”[4]

Origen responded, however, that Christians are not simply subverting society but make good citizens:

Christians have been taught not to defend themselves against their enemies; and because they have kept the laws which command gentleness and love to man, on this account they have received from God that which they would not have succeeded in doing if they had been given the right to make war, even though they may have been quite able to do so. He always fought for them and from time to time stopped the opponents of the Christians and the people who wanted to kill them.[5]

The evident linchpin in this argument is the role of violence and war. Celsus presumes war is necessary for human society, while Origen argues for a more profound understanding of peace: “No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus who is our author instead of following the traditional customs by which we were strangers to the covenant.”[6] Origen makes reference to the passage in Isaiah, Christians are “to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us into pruning hooks.”[7]

Origen argues that Christians play their part in the city through their spiritual influence and activity, especially in prayer: “The more pious a man is the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can.”[8] Christians as a “priesthood of all believers,” are not unlike the pagan priests who devote themselves to offering sacrifices: “that it is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of the sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders. And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests.”[9]

Origen counters Celsus’ notion that all citizens “help the emperor with all our power . . . and fight for him,” arguing that Christians offer an even greater service: ”We may reply to this that at appropriate times we render to the emperors divine help, if I may so say, by taking up even the whole armour of God.” He quotes Paul, who exhorts Christians to take up spiritual armour: “I exhort you, therefore, first to make prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men, for emperors, and all that are in authority.”[10] If not even pagan priests kill in war, then neither should Christians offer violent resistance, but they do a higher service “keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed.”[11] Origen concludes, “We who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths and disturb the peace, are of more help to the Emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.”[12] As Merton notes, “If these evil forces are overcome by prayer, then both sides are benefited, war is avoided and all are united in peace. In other words, the Christian does not help the war effort of one particular nation, but he fights against war itself with spiritual weapons.”[13]

Unfortunately, this singular idea of the early Christians is gradually eroded with the Constantinian shift, and the rise of Augustinian theology, which now dominates among both Catholics and Protestants. In the two hundred years between Origen and Augustine, Constantine had his vision at the Milvian bridge in 312, and Christianity is officially recognized by Rome, and then in 411 Rome fell to the Goths. In 430, Augustine as bishop of Hippo, is confronted with the invasion of the Vandals and he develops his theory of just war. He understands Christians as split between two cities and two types of love. Confronted with the same objection Origen faced from Celsus, Augustine formulates a very different answer. Christians do not simply pray, but they may participate in the military, as long as the war is just, and as long as the Christian has the right motives. “Christians may participate in the war, or may abstain from participation. But their motives will be different from the motives of the pagan soldier. They are not really defending the earthly city, they are waging war to establish peace, since peace is willed by God.”[14] Origen would argue this false peace, through war, is unworthy of Christian peace, but Augustine succeeds in creating a lasting confusion.

Augustine agrees with Celsus, against Origen, maintaining that war is inevitable, and universal peace impossible. Maybe the early church was too intent on the Parousia, but Augustine is more of a realist amidst the collapsing empire, and he felt war was unavoidable. The question was not if, but how Christians might fight in war, and thus appealing to Cicero, Augustine drew up his notions of just war theory. But even in a just war, the Christian must be only motivated by love: “The external act may be one of violence. War is regrettable indeed. But if one’s interior motive is purely directed to a just cause and to love of the enemy, then the use of force is not unjust.”[15] Augustine poses the new possibility of a distinction between interior motive and exterior action, which will have tragic consequences. The divide between church and world is more or less demolished, as the Christian can serve the world with his exterior body, and reserve his mind for spiritual activity. This divide marks Christian entry into serving state values and purposes. One can even kill fellow Christians, given the right motive and circumstance. For example, better to kill heretics and save their souls, which will become the motive behind the crusades. “And so, alas, for centuries we have heard kings, princes, bishops, priests, ministers, and the Lord alone knows what variety of unctuous beadles and sacrists, earnestly urging all men to take up arms out of love and mercifully slay their enemies (including other Christians) without omitting to purify their interior intention.”[16]

The contradiction of Augustine’s logic should be felt, and yet is not, even in this nuclear age, in which the world may need to be destroyed so as to achieve peace. The Augustinian logic consigns the world to hell, not imagining that the church or the Christian might act as a constraint on the voracious appetites of the flesh. Along with the Conquistadors, who felt the need to destroy civilizations in Christianizing them, and the inquisitors willing to torture to death so as to save, we, in the United States, are subject to a leader ready to destroy a civilization, supposedly in the name of peace.  

Jeffrey Epstein, like one emerging from the primeval depths, exposed the lie undergirding our culture. As with Nazi Germany, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description, it is a “time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are – liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil.”[17] If as Gandhi maintained, “The way of peace is the way of truth” then according to Merton, “lying is the mother of violence.”[18] A world of necessary violence and war is built upon a lie, and this lie serves in place of truth. As long as evil takes accepted forms and there are no objections, then it is “good.” The Augustinian (Constantinian) merger of church and empire through just war, the division between internal and external, creates a split mind and necessary duplicity. Killing in love makes nonsense of morality. The unfalsifiable claim of good intention opened the floodgate to the crusades, the inquisition, and ultimately to a series of holocausts. This church can no longer claim any likeness to the resistant New Testament Body of Christ or to the counter-ethics of Christ.

Merton quotes Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as the counter to the stink of this moral decay: “It is not astuteness, by knowing the tricks, but by simple steadfastness in the truth of God, by training the eye upon this truth until it is simple and wise, that there comes the experience and knowledge of ethical reality.[19] The truth, peace through Christ, is the singular resistant counter to the lie of the reign of death in the city of man. It is easy to convince ourselves that the lie is irresistible, that peace and purity are an impossibility, and that truth cannot endure, yet, Christ has spoken and those who hear his voice have a singular obligation to this Truth and Peace.

[1] See the interview on the Daily Beast, I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57xynBbVUuw.

[2] Origen, Contra: Celsum, tran. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) xvii.

[3] Origen, xix.

[4] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2004) 35.

[5]Origen, III: 8, 133, cited in Merton, 35.

[6] Origen, V: 33, 290, cited in Merton, 37.

[7] Origen, V: 33, 290.

[8] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37.

[9] Origen, VIII: 73, 509,

[10] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[11] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[12] Origen,Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37-38.

[13] Merton, 38.

[14] Merton, 40.

[15] Merton, 42.

[16] Merton, 43.

[17] This is Merton’s summation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 60.

[18] Ibid, 79.

[19] Ibid, 60.