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.

Benoît Chantre’s Girardian Reading of Paul

Among the several recoveries of Paul found in Girard and spelled out by one of his premiere French interpreters, Benoît Chantre, is recognition that Paul is picturing salvation in anthropological terms. That is, Paul is describing the human predicament, whether religious, psychological, or social, as a manmade and human problem. In Girardian terms, people are mad with religion, with sacrifice, with violence, and the compulsion to repeat, portrayed in sacrificial religion is the human sickness Christ addresses. They may have contracted the disease, in any of its infinite manifestations (religious, social, or psychological, all of which are mixed and merge), but it consists of the desire to obtain the being of the Other (to be God). The admired model becomes the envied obstacle-cause of desire, but for both Paul and Girard, going to the end of the sickness is on a continuum with the cure.

Paul’s personal/religious break(down) on the Road to Damascus is contiguous with his recognition of the Messiah, as failure of a false transcendence, a false God, a false sense of law, is on a continuum with the truth. When his world falls apart, the significance of the Messiah stands out in full relief. It is not that “original sin” is moral, but as Paul shows (in Romans 7:7), it pertains to covetousness, or in Girardian terms it is mimetic rivalry (the same thing). The law is not impotent because its maxims are inadequate but the law is impotent because it creates covetous rivalry, as in the biblical story of the fall. Adam and Eve are jealous of God, their model, and as with any model, rivalry ensues. They would imitate him, in his containing and dispensing laws, and they would be him (knowing good and evil). Given the opportunity, adamah (human kind) would kill God. Their problem pertains to misoriented desire, misrecognition and deception. They would be like God, knowing good and evil, and they imagine this is the mode to life and the means to avoid death.

Paul concentrates his explanation of the human predicament, as it pertains to the law, but this law is not just the the Jewish law, but the universal “law of the flesh,” which Paul explains in regard to both the Jewish Law and the law given to the first couple. As Chantre puts it, “the essential function of the law necessitated a decisive confirmation and a decisive transformation.”[1] The confirmation traces the pattern of the universal fall, in which the object cause of desire becomes the obstacle. “For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Rom 7:7–8). The prohibition or obstacle gives rise to what it forbids, murder and sacrificial religion. Cain’s sacrifice is reproduced in sacrificial religion, culminating in the sacrifice of Christ.

Christ exposes the nature of this scapegoating sacrifice in his passion and death but this is not simply exposure of false religion but, according to Chantre, it is the revelation of a new sort of “immanent transcendence.” “It causes the advent of a completely different type of transcendence—the transcendence of parousia, the growing ‘presence’ of another transcendence, which this time is at the heart of human history.”[2] The gap or distance in the law prompts an escalated desire to possess the law or to be interpolated into the law (to be possessed or a possessor of the law). Paul’s questioning of the law in Romans 7 describes a failed interpellation from which the law is enacted as an outside force. The woman consorting with her lover, in Romans 7:1-3, only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. As Slavoj Žižek asks, “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation . . . the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation . . . the ultimate proof of its success . . . that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166). For Žižek, there is only the failed subject in regard to the law, and this failure constitutes the subject. The distance between the subject and the law is the enactment of the only possibility of the law and the failure is the power of the law to create subjects.

According to Chantre, “The subject, raised in the Law and guided by it, suddenly enters into rivalry with the commandment.”[3] Transgression is the attempt to obtain what stands behind the prohibition. There must be life in the law, according to the serpent, and God is holding out. The reification of the law (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), or the law of the flesh, keeps one eating the deadly fruit to obtain life by taking and grasping the law. “Veneration of the Law has become an obsession with the Law and the benevolent God has become a jealous God who opposes my own will, blocking my way. We are no longer dealing with a transcendent God but with a God made from human hands, an idol.”[4] This idol demands death as the means to life.

In Pauline and Girardian terms, this failure is the beginning, and not the end of subjectivity as it prompts the turn to authentic subjectivity. The move is from an external desire and rivalry, an external mediation to an intimate mediation, which brings with it an ultimate collapse. One begins to act, possessed by desire: “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Ro 7:17–18). This demon that inhabits me, is a “deviated transcendence” that “pushes me to do what I don’t want to do, that ‘disorients’ my desire, which was originally a desire for God, by offering mirages of a jealous divinity.”[5] This “deviated transcendence” is the counterfeit image of the Law, in which God is a jealous rival in the pursuit of self-divinization.

This “ontological sickness” brings on “all manner of covetousness” and ultimately experience of the law of sin and death. “When the external mediator becomes internal and when admiration is transformed into rivalry, when the model become too close is suddenly fetishized, the subject, obeying the law of desire, enters into a mimetic crisis that is one and the same as sin.”[6] The desire for God’s law becomes the desire to become God’s law, which brings on the split and collapse of the subject. “I do what I do not want to do” . . . “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom 7:15,11).

Paul is split between the law of his mind (reason) and the law of the flesh. He is caught up in the movement described by Girard, between “games of external and internal mediation, admiration and rivalry, ‘mimetic models’ and ‘rational models.’”[7] The back and forth speaks of a compulsion to repeat, in which the self is at stake. “I would gain myself through repetition.” “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:14–15). The practice repeats itself as “the sinner always believes he can extricate himself from sin through a reiterated veneration of the Law: ‘So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and just and good.’”[8] More veneration repeats and tightens the circle as the grab for God’s transcendence grounds one in the flesh.

The law gives rise to sin, and sin is the failure of the subject, but this failure precedes the remedy. Mimetic desire, or covetousness of the law, takes a particular course, pointing to Christ. It might be described as a process of maturing, in which the father as model becomes obstacle and rival giving rise to murderous desire. There is a collapse of an outward structure that constitutes an inward desire and structure, in which one becomes both father and child, law and subject, so that the social structure becomes a deadly psychological structure. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Ro 7:10–11). The law, meant to be a barrier to mimetic rivalry, provokes it, mediating what it forbids.

This external mediation is taken up within, the law of the flesh, in which the model is a rival, producing the war within and without. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Ro 7:24–25). The law is a dead end that leads to Christ, but this dead end must somehow be pursued to appreciate the alternative. It poses the choice between a renunciation of the violent attempt to obtain the law, or a complete renunciation of violence and entry into an alternative Kingdom. It is not attachment to the law, but to Christ, through faith, that enacts true subjectivity.

Those who “were made dead to the law through the body of Christ” no longer serve the letter of the law as they have dispelled the fantasy of this failed interpellation. Imitating Christ closes the gap. There is no distance, no failure of interpellation, as the law of Christ incorporates into his body. “Only an intimate mediation, the return to faith in a unique Mediator—the one whose Incarnation, for better or worse, has put divinity within reach—can save the religious structure and with it the long process of hominization.”[9] There is a turn from the external models, mimetic rivalry to a different order of transcendence – and immanent transcendence in which we identify directly with Christ. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:1–2).

The passage is from being captive to a deadly law which has been at work throughout history in religion and society and in the human psyche, to freedom in Christ. “Thus faith does not suppress the Law; it ‘frees us from it,’ says Saint Paul, ‘delivers’ us by suppressing a proximity that too often risks degenerating into promiscuity, which is to say into ritualism and into transgression.”[10] The point at which man failed, in the flesh, Christ enters in. Christ fulfills, completes, and takes the place of the Law. The misorientation to the Law seemed to promise the Father through the Law, but Christ delivers God where the Law could not.

The passage is from out of violent sacrificial religion into imitating Christ, the model with whom we have a direct identity. The Law mediates, not the Father, but sin, and the emptiness of sin points to the fulness of Christ. Law will lose its “alienated” character of an external force brutally imposing itself on the Subject the moment the Subject renounces its desire for completeness within the self (the law of the flesh). There is passage through destitution, death, and rebirth: “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:3–4). Christ has destroyed the cycle of punishment and veneration of the law, as the law of the flesh is set aside for the law of the Spirit. Paul, due to the law, was persecuting and killing Christians, but now the law has been nailed to the cross. God has reconciled us to Himself through Christ, accomplishing what the law could not (2 Co 5:18–19).

There is now a new law at work, which still involves imitation and repetition, but repetition is no longer the deadly spiral of oscillation. The law of the flesh has been replaced by the law of the Spirit of Christ: “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Rom 8:6–9). The law creates hostility and jealousy, as it creates the impossible pursuit of God through the law. This fleshly law distances and alienates, and this is its work, while the Spirit is God dwelling in the flesh. The intimate transcendence displaces the distancing hostility. “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness” (Rom 8:10). Mimetic desire, rivalry, and murder, are exposed and resolved: “the Resurrection resolves the enigma of the founding murder; the Passion, the event of the death and resurrection of the victim, is the ultimate variation on the religious structure.”[11] The work of Christ does not ignore this religious structure but intervenes and delivers from it, and this is resurrection power. Life in the resurrected body of Christ directly answers the deception of life in the Law.

Religion, society, the self, fall apart but this failure is on a continuum with the coming of the Kingdom. The crucifixion or collapse of everything is followed by resurrection of the victim. The innocent victim, Christ, brings an end to scapegoating and sacred violence: “the Passion is a dynamic repetition of the religious structure, which is itself defined as a first repetition, the sacrificial victim repeating the scapegoat victim and reactivating the first trauma for cathartic ends (or as a vaccine against violence). This third form of repetition deepens awareness of the origin, working back to violent foundations.”[12] The violent foundations of culture and religion are exposed, bringing the human kingdom to a close with the coming the Kingdom of Christ.

[1] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 55). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Chantre, 47-48.

[3] Chantre, 59.

[4] Chantre, 59-60.

[5] Chantre, 60-61.

[6] Chantre, 61.

[7] Chantre, 63.

[8] Chantre, 64.

[9] Chantre, 52.

[10] Chantre.66.

[11] Chantre, 53.

[12] Chantre, 53.

Harry Truman and His Undisturbed Sleep After Hiroshima

Clifton Truman Daniel, the eldest grandson of Harry Truman, came to the Moberly auditorium last Thursday, a week from August 6th (today), the date 81 years ago that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He told us many funny stories about his grandfather, and considering the age of the audience (at 70 we were on the younger side of this grey headed group), and the content of the evening, it was as if we were transported back to a more innocent time in the 1950’s. Good ole’ give ‘em hell Harry was back with us. We heard of his car trip to Washington, how he got out of mowing the lawn, and of his attempts to keep the grandchildren from watching cartoons by reading to them from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Clifton quickly provided the usual explanation of the dropping of the bombs: it saved half a million lives, it brought the war to an end, and it was the only option. Mostly we all felt the warm glow of former days and enjoyed hearing about the Missouri President.

After the program he asked for questions or comments, and some told of personal association with the Trumans, or relatives who remembered the Trumans in Independence. No one really broached or disagreed with the narrative on the bombs, though one older gentleman noted the numbers killed in the fire bombings in Tokyo exceeded the deaths due to the bombs. This was a patriotic crowd, some of whom had friends and loved ones who had gone off to war. I was happy not to break the spell of the evening and to leave, but Faith had a different idea. She wanted to talk to Clifton personally, and I must say, I did not. But we got in line, and made our way to Clifton, who strategically stayed up on the stage. At our turn, Faith explained to him, that her father had been stationed in Japan after the war and that they had returned as missionaries, so she grew up in Japan. Clifton said he had spent more time in Japan than any other foreign country, and he had met many times with hibakusha – those who survived the bomb. He had met Setsuko, famous for her anti-nuclear advocacy, and other survivors who spent their life speaking out against nuclear arms. Faith has a soft voice, and was a bit emotional as they traded stories, and Clifton drew closer and closer and knelt down, till he was only a few inches from her face. They had clearly connected.

So, I felt free to ask my one question, about his grandfather’s reaction to the bombs. I explained, I had heard reports, that he said he never lost a minute of sleep over the decision, or alternatively, that the dropping of the bombs haunted him. I wanted to know which was true. By the time I had finished posing the question, Clifton had stood up on the stage, and was backing away. He responded, “He never said that.” He then repeated the propaganda we all know. “If anything, he knew he would save lives.” Clifton distanced himself, up and away from us and my question, much like his grandfather had distanced himself from the issue. It was obvious I had touched a nerve, and the conversation was over. I had not meant to be provocative and the strong reaction surprised me. Our warm evening with the Trumans was over.

The strange thing in Clifton’s reaction, was that his grandfather’s standard answer was that he never lost any sleep over the issue.[1] Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell say in their book, that the metaphor of sleep was his best known reaction. “As early as 1959, he declared, as he did many times subsequently, that “I never lost any sleep over my decision.”[2] Sleeping soundly was his way of saying he felt justified in doing what he had done. In 1959 he told an enormous twelve-hundred-student “class” at Columbia University that the bomb was just like an ordinary artillery weapon, that the Japanese had deserved it, that he had lost no sleep over the decision, and that, if necessary, he would make the same decision.[3] Of course the weapon was not ordinary, and Truman would say as much himself in describing it later, and to say the Japanese “deserved it” gets at the revenge in using the weapons. The women and children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, even in Truman’s more thoughtful statements, did not deserve it, but the tendency was to demonize the race.

Sleep was a lifelong concern for Truman; the losing of it or getting it. He had trouble with insomnia and anxiety, especially when younger, but then when he did sleep, he would boast as to how quick he could do it. To sleep quickly was for him, metaphorically and literally, a sign of moral steadfastness, which he connected with his energy, and overall self-confidence. As Truman told Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”[4] He wanted Tibbets and the world, strangely even those in Hiroshima to whom he would convey similar sentiments, to lose no sleep.

A Japanese doctor from Hiroshima asked him by letter about his glib answers; “Why didn’t you have conscience enough to avoid using such means as to completely destroy humanity and human civilization?” Not losing sleep, indicates a lack of both consciousness and conscience. “Do you consider it a humane act to try to justify the outrageous murder of two hundred thousand civilians of Hiroshima, men and women, young and old, as a countermeasure for the surprise attack?” The doctor artfully weaves throughout his letter, an implied lack of awareness, that the well-slept Truman glibly willing to drop more bombs, should have not been guilty of. His letter went on to ask, “Do you consider your country which having manufactured the atomic bomb, was aware of its explosive power, and could anticipate the formidable destruction, be excused, just because it is a conqueror, for the crime of the first, the most cruel, and the largest scale manslaughter that has ever taken place in the history of mankind?”[5] Maybe the whole country should have been more awake. Truman did not respond, though they had been corresponding about a possible visit to Hiroshima. Imagine the response, “I did not lose any sleep,” in this context. To say he lost no sleep, would be a confirmation of his lack of conscientious morality.

 The message was, let’s not think about it. The decision is done, we saved lives, and we can now move on and distance ourselves from such considerations. In other words, Clifton’s reaction to my question was a physical enactment of his grandfather’s recommendation. My question was little more than, did Truman think about what he had done or did he not think about it? To move beyond sleep, to thought, implies consideration, and consideration itself is problematic, whether deep consideration or no consideration. What Clifton was resisting was what his grandfather resisted, and that was to express regret. To say he regretted it had too many implications for all the lives lost needlessly and for his poor decision. Good sleep, no regret, is the message.

The insistence on good sleep was to hide just how troubled Truman may have been. As Lifton and Mitchell note, “There is evidence that Truman never ceased to be preoccupied with his decision. Tom Clark who had been his attorney general, told of visiting Truman in a Kansas City hospital four or five months before his death. Though told to stay only briefly, Clark remained for about 45 minutes, during much of which Truman defended his dropping the bomb.”[6]  The old man spent some of his final conversations on the subject over which “he lost no sleep.” Lifton and Mitchell also record Truman’s private discussion, which may be the only occasion upon which he expressed regret about using the bomb. Former White House photographer Joe O’Donnell told them that in 1950 he accompanied Truman on his trip to Wake Island to meet with General MacArthur. Truman strolled along the beach with O’Donnell who dared to ask if Truman had any “second thoughts” about the decision to drop the bomb. “According to O’Donnell Truman quickly replied, ‘Hell yes!’ and then added, somewhat cryptically, ‘I’ve had a lot of misgivings about it, and I inherited a lot more, too.’” 

What he may have meant about his “inherited misgivings” is not clear, but several, including Eisenhower had tried to warn him off of using the bomb. Eisenhower, according to his daughter, was deeply disturbed by even the prospect, and he thought it unnecessary, as he confided to his diary: “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”[7]  As he goes on to write, “I had been conscious of depression and so I voiced (to Sec. Of War Stimson) my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” He reiterated on multiple occasions that he thought they were on the verge of surrender. “It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.'”[8] They wanted to surrender and it was unnecessary to hit them with that “awful thing.” At Potsdam, he conveyed his unsolicited advice to Truman. In the PBS documentary, American Experience, Samuel Rushay (the Presidential Archivist) maintains Eisenhower said to Truman at Potsdam, among other things, “Mr. President, I don’t think it is necessary to use the bomb.” The overwhelming testimony is that the majority of military men were against it.

Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, though inconsistent, had not wanted to use the bomb. He thought Truman should consider backing down on his demand for unconditional surrender. William Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, Henry Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, Admiral Halsey, Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Major General Curtis LeMay, who had innovated new weaponry in the fire bombings of Tokyo, all opposed the bomb. Congressman Stewart L. Udall thought the bomb prolonged the war by delaying immediate negotiations. He says, “I have come to view the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that August as an American tragedy that should be viewed as a moral atrocity.”[9] This may be what he “inherited.”

Some may have spoken more strongly with hindsight, but Truman was made aware of options. Far from a foregone conclusion, those who understood the situation most intimately, considered it a “war crime,” a “holocaust,” a “barbarity,” and “a return to the dark ages,” in their various descriptions. They thought the Japanese were defeated, and talk of the loss of a half-million lives in an invasion was an estimate they knew was wildly exaggerated. Also, it did not take into account that with the bomb, there was to be no invasion. It was not simply a matter of invade or drop the bomb, as invasion was taken off the table as an option, as soon as the bomb was available. It was a matter of negotiation before or after dropping the bomb.

Truman, may have been carried along by events, by the huge investment in the bomb, by the foregone conclusion of making it means using it, and by the manipulations, lies, and prodding of Leslie Groves, the general in charge of seeing the project to completion, but it was not, as some have contended that no decision was ever made. Truman made the decision, and he wanted that to be clear, and he also resisted any show of feelings of regret, any note of self-condemnation. He would become infuriated when asked about regret or ethical responsibility in the mass killing, itself a sign he had thought about it.

Truman was threatened by any reflection on the atomic bombings and would sometimes attack even those who were sympathetic to him. In response to a historian (sympathetic with dropping the bomb), who nonetheless said that the bombing did not end the war and that the Japanese would have surrendered within a few months even without the bomb, Truman wrote one of his most vitriolic letters, which he never sent. He says, “You write just like the usual egghead. The facts are before you but you would like to garble them. The instruction of July 25th, 1945 was final. It ended the war. Now if you think of any other, ‘if’ ‘as’ and ‘when’ eggheaded contemplations bring them out. It is a great thing that you or any other contemplator ‘after the fact’ didn’t have to make the decision. Our boys would all be dead.”[10] Truman did not appreciate “egg heads” or “contemplators,” and never considered deep deliberation a quality he wanted to be known for. He wanted to be seen as a man of action who makes decisions. Deep reflection of any kind may slow down masculine action. His famous sign, “The Buck stops here,” conveyed that he decided.

As Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted, “Truman was exceedingly eager to agree with everything I said. He also seemed eager to make decisions of every kind with the greatest promptness. Everything he said was decisive. It almost seemed as though he was eager to decide in advance of thinking.”[11] Even in his own self-reflection he wanted to do away with doubt or hesitation. He consistently limited the flow of information, which his own advisors were already surreptitiously doing. Knowledge of the destructiveness of the bomb, that it was actually a chemical weapon and not just another standard weapon (as he often said), were things he knew, and resisted. He cut off the flow of information, in his own mind, so that he acted and spoke quickly, on less knowledge than he was aware of. He knew of radiation sickness, he knew the Japanese were ready to surrender, he knew of the moral issues at hand, but these were not things he wanted to contemplate too deeply.

Truman was more complicated than he may have wanted to either appear or be. He had grown up surrounded by women, with a protective mother, and close female friends. This did not make him openly sensitive, but eager not to be seen as a “sissy” or a “crybaby” (his favorite put downs). As a child, due to his bookishness, his piano playing, his refusal of sports due to his thick glasses, he was, in his own estimate, “a sissy.” His closest friends, two female cousins and his mother, doted on him and his mother had hoped he would be a girl, and seemed to instill that wish. Due to his eye trouble, she had bred caution into him. Truman, says, “I was afraid my eyes would get knocked out if there was too much of a rough and tumble play.”[12] The child that admittedly ran from fights, and who considered himself a sissy, became overly pugnacious, in constant pursuit of a felt lack of masculinity. “He was bedeviled by the image of being just a ‘little man’ who could not be expected to act significantly on the world, and he needed to see himself as acting quickly, boldly, and above all, decisively.”[13]

Alonzo Hamby, in his biography, presents Truman as an overachiever, who spent his life attempting to demonstrate a confidence, he did not possess. He was insecure and his pugnacious exterior was meant to cover that.[14] He was unsure of himself, as a sickly child, and certainly as a new president, following the God-like Roosevelt. Military endeavor and then political success were his dream, by means of which he could put off this perceived inadequacy. He read military history and thought of himself as a military hero after serving in WWI. His female cousins, his best friends, referred to him as Horatio. Mostly, however, he was engaged in a war with himself, as is expressed in one of his characteristic statements: “I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.”[15] The peace that eluded him, he sought to bring about through greater success and power. He wanted to be seen as a decisive leader, and the metaphor of not losing sleep was part of the image he sought to portray, one of being in control. He found crybaby eggheads, moralists, sensitive types, as repulsive.

The scene from the film about Robert Oppenheimer, when the scientist confronts Truman about his own guilty conscious captures this. When Oppenheimer and Dean Edgerton (Under Secretary of State) came to the oval office in November 1945, Oppenheimer wanted to convey his agitation about the atomic danger. He blurted out, “Mr. President I have blood on my hands,” at which he started wringing his hands, as if to get the blood out. Truman had him quickly escorted out of his office, and tells Dean Atchison to never bring that “crybaby” around again. He would repeat the story on several occasions, mocking Oppenheimer’s weakness, wringing his hands in imitation. This sort of eggheaded-emotion was exactly what he could not stand and wanted nothing to do with. He would refer to Oppenheimer thereafter, as the “crybaby scientist.”[16] He would take responsibility, he would be the one with “blood on his hands” to save the nation. The sacrifice was great, but he was willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands. Truman was eager to distance himself from Oppenheimer and his troubled conscience, or his cross-bearing responsibility. He preferred outward performance, moving up and away, from even the possibility of thinking about such things.

It is little wonder that he felt “jubilant” or “elated” with the biggest bomb ever made and he felt a new confidence in negotiating with Stalin. One of his advisors describe Truman and Churchill, upon receiving news of the bomb at Potsdam, “Like little boys with a big red apple secreted on their person.”[17] The Japanese seemed to recede as a threat, and he began to realize Stalin and the Russians, were the real threat. Observers noted he began, even at Potsdam, to move from military, to political imagery, in regard to the bomb. He said of the Russians, “I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.” He was now confident of exercising control over the Russians. The war was won in his mind, as he felt a new capacity to control events with Japan.

According to Lifton and Mitchell, “To keep the self functional a man like Truman needs power surges. He received just that when he gave his first presidential speech to Congress and mentioned his commitment to unconditional surrender.”[18] He felt it again with the bomb. He considered it the “greatest thing in history” and when news reached him of the destruction of Hiroshima, he said it was the “happiest” announcement he ever made.[19] As the psychologist Lifton indicates, killing is the greatest feeling of empowerment, serving feelings of immortality and even omnipotence. Killing hundreds of thousands might explain Truman’s descriptions of absolute “happiness,” and “elation.” “His fears combined, strangely and tragically,” with what Lifton and Mitchell refer to as a “bomb centered omnipotence.”[20] Truman, like many connected to the project, felt the power of the bomb.

For Truman it was the solution to the war, to his political success, and to his personal struggle. The bomb seemed to “enable one to do everything – to solve and transcend all immediate problems, bring about instant victory as well as control of the future, and offer those who used it a deity’s dominion and immortality.”[21]  That Truman would use the bomb became evident as he was drawn to its power. Omnipotent-like power as opposed to a seeming weakness, which he feared more than anything, must have played into his decision. As he said, this was “the greatest thing in all of human history,” and he had unleashed it. Of course, he could sleep comfortably, so long as he did not stop to consider the source of his new happiness. To think of the moral responsibility, which Truman did on occasion, was to lose his happiness.

As he saw evidence of the destruction in Hiroshima, he spoke of “the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.”[22] He went from elated awe to self-doubt and feelings of dread. His life-long headaches returned. On August 10th, the day they decided on surrender terms, he told Henry Wallace he “had bad headaches every day.” Wallace asked, “Physical or Figurative?” Truman said, “Both.”[23] In spite of his supposed good sleep, Truman suffered and would agonize over this decision for the rest of his life, which only points to his humanity.

Truman had several coping mechanisms to avoid being overwhelmed with guilt. His “good sleep,” his supposed decisiveness, were not simply a public ploy, but a personal mode of surviving self-condemnation. He was not hesitant to lie to himself and to others. When a friendly Democratic politician asked if “jubilation” over the death of innocents was appropriate, Truman immediately falsified his response, to say he meant he was jubilant over Russia having entered the war. Later when asked about his glib answer over any feelings of guilt, Truman also revised the nature of his not lost sleep. He said, “I lost plenty of sleep but not over saving Japanese lives. I lost sleep worrying about our boys and it broke my heart when just one of our soldiers, sailors or marines died.”[24] The metaphor breaks down, but so does Truman’s various answers. He would lose sleep and get emotional only on the right topic, and the loss of Japanese lives was not usually that topic.

The problem is that Truman’s good sleep meant, as he reiterated many times, that he would do it again. “A favorite phrase was. ‘I’d do it again’ (1956) or ‘I would not hesitate to drop the A-bomb again’ (1965).” Deep sleep meant no reconsideration but commitment to a correct decision. Dropping bombs was justified and might be the way to go in the future. He said as much in connection to Korea, where he considered dropping the bomb again. No president, other than Dwight Eisenhower, has questioned the decision, so that being president can now be equated with a ready willingness, when necessary, to use the nuclear option. The people of Hiroshima, those peace activists attempting to stop nuclear proliferation, were more disturbed by this unthinking response than by the original decision to drop the bomb. “As much as they deplored the weapon and viewed it as criminal some expressed understanding of how it might be used under the pressure of war. But to speak more or less detachedly of using it again was to dismiss what victims had been subjected to and reject human lessons of the weapon.”[25] Sleeping soundly through future deployment of the weapon seems inhumanly callous, yet that is also implied in his good conscience. He did it once and would do it again.

Atomic diplomacy, on the order of Truman, is now the background to any international conflict. At this moment Donald Trump, who has threatened the use of nuclear weapons and is engaged in a war in Iran to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, is acting in the wake of this story. Truman’s good sleep has meant entry into the cold war and nuclear proliferation to at least nine countries, with others eager to obtain their own weapons. Those nations who have the weapon feel empowered to act unilaterally. Putin, Netanyahu, Kim, and Trump, embody the Truman doctrine in regard to the atomic option. The willingness to commit genocide, or perhaps bring on world destruction by deploying nuclear arms, is now the unspoken qualification for the highest office. Truman was not unaware of this possible legacy.

In his farewell speech from the presidency, he spoke of the “stakes in our search for peace,” as they’re “immeasurably higher than they have ever been before” and that we are in danger of digging our own grave and that of our own society in this new age of destructive power. He describes “the war of the future would be one in which man would extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations.” He concludes that “such war is not a possible policy for rational men.”[26] But his words came too late, and his actions in allowing unfettered testing and deployment are irreversible.

The problem with his overstated confidence, his sound sleep, is more than his personal issue, as this simple-minded decision making is the light in which nuclear arms proliferated. If the primary concern is to cut short the destructive understanding which has gripped the world, there is a great deal at stake in seeing through the façade, not just of Truman, but of the decision he made. By seeing through the “inevitable nature of it,” the seeming lack of choice, and realizing there were many choices, many possibilities, this may open up deeper consideration of present options. Many elements went into creating what many still cannot clearly see for what it was. Racism, vengeance, self-righteousness, lack of empathy or even its possibility, created a blindness, and the next time we are thrust into this situation we can expect the same blindness to recur. If we can examine the cause of the blinding scapegoating, recognize it when it comes over us, and seek a larger or different perspective, that may be all that can be asked. But if we are comfortable in our self-justifications, in not losing sleep, then we are doomed.

[1] The question as to whether he said he never lost any sleep, is not debatable, in spite of Clifton’s strong reaction. He had in fact said something like this many times. It is true there are versions of it that he may not have said, (he apparently never said, I slept like a baby, which was the way the press summarized his usual statement) but his standard line was in regard to sleep.

[2] Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Denial (Diane Publishing Co, 1995) 176.

[3] Robert H. Ferrell, INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, XCII (June, 1996). 0 1996, Trustees of Indiana University.

[4] Fifty Years of Denial, 176.

[5] Fifty Years of Denial, 178.

[6] Fifty Years of Denial, 184.

[7] From the Diary of Eisenhower, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/38.pdf.

[8] Diary.

[9] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/38.pdf

[10] Fifty Years of Denial, 178-179.

[11] Fifty Years of Denial, 126.

[12] Fifty Years of Denial, 196.

[13] Fifty Years of Denial, 199.

[14] Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[15] Fifty Years of Denial, 199.

[16] Fifty Years of Denial, 168.

[17] Fifty Years of Denial, 154.

[18] Fifty Years of Denial, 199.

[19] Fifty Years of Denial, 169.

[20] Fifty Years of Denial, 161.

[21] Fifty Years of Denial, 161.

[22] Fifty Years of Denial, 169.

[23] Fifty Years of Denial, 152.

[24] Fifty Years of Denial, 175.

[25] Fifty Years of Denial, 175.

[26] Fifty Years of Denial, 192.

William Desmond’s Metaxology as a Refinement of Sophiology

The benefit of delving into Sophiology and by extension, metaxology, is to aid in attaining to a positive knowledge of God. Can we know God in Christ, and does this knowledge structure our understanding, or is Christ analogous to God, a partial or expedient revelation, that does not intersect with knowing per se? In Catholic and Protestant nominalism there is no positive knowledge, but empty words and names and perhaps religious feeling. Pietism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and many forms of religion (popular and academic) have abandoned the project of a speculative theology (a thinking out of the faith). Followers of Luther’s condemnation of scholasticism have tended to throw out the philosophical baby with the bathwater, and abandon every form of speculative theology which would tie theology to philosophy. The question, “What does the God of the Bible have to do with the God of the philosophers?” has sometimes stifled all thought. Even if a particular form of philosophy has fabricated idols, does this rule out any attempt to think philosophically?

In Russia there has developed the most expansive example of this thinking out, simultaneously recognizing the danger of a philosophical theology but also its necessity. Sophiology is a continuation of the “Eastern” interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula, which declares, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man, possessing two distinct natures in one single person. The natures are still distinct, and are not fused in general, but are synthesized in this person. Christ synthesizes or unifies what were considered antinomies. God and not God, earthly and divine, created and uncreated, are opposites, and yet they are united in Christ. It is no longer a question of whether there is any communication between transcendence and immanence, as clearly in Christ this is the case. But it is also true, that though these categories are united in Christ, there is still a distinction to be made. Sophia is a way of describing this reality, in which there is the possibility of synthesis, and yet there is a distinction that must be maintained. The problem is in maintaining the balance, neither allowing for a dualism between these categories nor allowing for a collapse.

The Goal of Sophiology

The father of modern Sophiology, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), struggled much of his life with the tension between God’s transcendence and immanence, seeking to understand God in conjunction with the idea of the whole, and attempting to express this philosophically. He begins with the understanding that the synthesis accomplished in Christ is being communicated to the world. All material reality is undergoing the transformation which took place in the death and resurrection of Christ. There is a “spiritualization of matter,” a process of theosis, in which the world is penetrated by the spirit. There is an unfolding deification of both the individual and the created world, which Soloviev ties to “worldly” spheres.[1] According to Oliver Smith, “Soloviev understands this process of transfiguration not only as a divine initiative but as the conscious ‘task’ of humanity, which is called to transfigure both itself, as corporeal form, and the material world around it. He sought to explain how “the individual realization of the spiritualization of matter coincides with the realization of the same at a universal level.”[2] Soloviev is seeking to explore uncharted territory, searching to bridge, through “All-unity” the individual and the universal, the human and divine. “The spiritualization of matter is thus an idea that feeds on an entire historical complex of philosophy, theology, and mystical experience.”[3]

Christ demonstrates the potential holiness of matter extended to the world, which is at the same time challenged by “the bondage to decay.” The struggle between the mortal and immortal was keenly felt by Soloviev. Being between life and death makes of the spiritualization of matter the personal liberation from death, but it also poses the possibility of the idol or the lie. Throughout, his thought is linked to an intense mysticism and experience. The love of Sophia (an erotic sort of love), the fear of death, and the possibility of the counterfeit or the anti-Christ. This intensity was augmented by his visions of Sophia, which he characterized as the most significant events of his life. As Smith maintains, “Sophia’s role as the wellspring of that feeling of consonance between the spiritual and material realms should be remembered as the constant backdrop to his thinking.”[4] He was eager to communicate this reality, which though it began as a mystical experience, must be thought. Thought and experience must be joined: “A God who is only thought, though, remains an abstract principle until she is concretely felt in the temporal and spatial conditions of our physical reality.”[5]

To realize (affectively) and think out the joining of the material and the divine, was the goal of his vision of “All-unity,” in which all aspects of human life would be united to the divine. As he put it, “I consider it my duty, from different perspectives, in different forms and in different contexts to explain the central idea of Christianity: the idea of the Kingdom of God as the fullness of human life — individual, social and political — reunited through Christ with the fullness of the Divine.”[6] His project is to articulate a worldview, with its own criterion for truth, and answering the fundamental question of meaning: “the goal of the historical process; the vocation of humanity; the interaction of the divine with the creature.”[7] He sought to overcome the absolute dualism toward which philosophy tended, but he also recognized the potential danger of collapsing transcendence into immanence.

The Problem of Sophiology and the Entry of Metaxology

One of Soloviev’s primary interlocuters was Lev Shestov (1866–1938) who bitterly opposed any sort of collusion between philosophy and religion, maintaining that the difference was unbridgeable and that Soloviev had indeed collapsed the transcendent, referring to “All-unity” as an over-reaching “omnitude,” without clear distinctions.[8] So while Soloviev strived to arrive at an “All-unity” which would be compatible with Christianity, Shestov would cling to the distinctiveness of biblical revelation, which he thought could only be distorted by philosophy. Philosophers cannot compete with prophets, he maintained.

William Desmond enters into this controversy, and places his (philosophical/theological) metaxology between the poles of “absorption” and “dualism” he sees represented by Soloviev and Shestov, respectively. “The metaxological way seeks to avoid both reduction and absorption, trying to find the right words for a sense of the One and the plural, beyond both dualism and the self-mediating whole.”[9] The extremes are the absolute sovereignty of God, which does not allow for integrity and meaning in the world, or a complete reduction of God to the world in some form of pantheism. Desmond locates metaxology between the two, and concludes “it is other than both in the way it seeks, beyond their respective exclusions or overemphases, in the between of the intimate universal, for the God beyond the whole.”[10] The meaning of Desmond’s “God beyond the whole,” resisting the tendency either for God to be absorbed into the world or for the world to be evaporated into God, is filled out in following his intervention in the struggle between Soloviev and Shestov.

Soloviev’s turn to German idealism, according to Desmond, favors immanence and God’s absorption into the world. What is lost in idealism is the sense of creation, with its distinction between creation and Creator. Creation, according to Desmond, is a departure from the holism advocated by Soloviev, as creation from nothing “stresses the difference of nothing, as not within the divine life, rather as between world and God. God is, and is not the world; the world is, and is not God.”[11] This “not” separates, but it also brings together, conditioning the communication between God and the world differently than holistic self-communication. “It is communication between others—an intercommunication, not a self-communication, though it is not exclusive of self-communication. The world is not relatively ‘‘outside’’ God, it is essentially ‘outside’ God.”[12] Where the holistic God would tend to reduce creation to emanation, the God of creation “keeps open an essential difference.”[13] To speak of “outside” God is obviously an approximation, as nothing is outside God, but this contrasts with the holistic “reassimilation” of world to the source, in which the world disappears into the creator. “Assimilation invokes similitude, likeness, but we can push likeness to the verge of merging into identity.”[14] There is a potential loss of difference in this similitude or holism. “With creation, likeness and participation keep open an essential difference. World and God are not of the same essence; creation is not the self-creation of God. God cannot be cloned.”[15]

In this, Desmond recognizes the value of Shestov’s criticism, that freedom is in danger of being given over to rational necessity. As Josephien van Kessel notes, “Shestov pleads for the freedom of the creation and of revelation. Every revelation comes from beyond the whole, from transcendence, but every rationalization tries to include this beyond into the whole, to make it immanent.”[16] This is the “death-knell” of revelation, on the order of the Hegelian reduction of God’s word to the immanent whole. The transcendent nature of truth is lost and there is a loss of plurality and difference. What comes to us from within the whole will be attributed to the whole, which is not revelation.[17]

The Possibility of the Anti-Christ in Sophiology

As Soloviev came to recognize ‘‘All-unity’’ risks reducing God to a human projection, and this imitation of God would be the anti-Christ. It requires more than Shestov’s simplistic distinction between reason and revelation, as it is “even more intractable, concerning the counterfeits of God, and the counterfeits of the absolute community.”[18] Soloviev’s holistic god is in danger of usurping the God beyond the whole with the whole, something more intimate and tempting than the God of the philosophers. “This is a superbia that takes worldly form in the claims to initiate the absolute, the ultimate community within the whole of immanence itself.”[19] Soloviev began to suspect that his god of the whole is a monstrous idol. He came to see that the anti-Christ can take shape in the worldly community, mimicking Christ and corrupting the church.

Desmond wonders if Sophia may in some way contribute to this error. It is supposed to be a doctrine which, while pointing to the milieu between the ultimate other and the finite, is also maintaining an ontological difference. “This difference of the Word turned back to the origin (Father) and wisdom turned toward creation might be seen as intending to keep open the ontological difference of Creator and creation.”[20] But does the feminine Sophia lend itself to over-accentuating the difference and in fact blocking communication between the divine and immanent. “One might wonder if the doctrine of the Mother of God, Theotokos, perhaps takes up some traces of mother religion, even the pagan love of Gaia, over against an utterly aloof father who simply stays aloof, as a God beyond the whole.”[21] As Shestov argues, Sophia may become an idol.

Yet Desmond counters, “But why not a name for a community of wisdom and love between the God beyond the whole and the divine-human community coming to be within the finite whole?”[22] He notes Soloviev’s Sophia is not unlike Old Testament depictions of God, both being intimately personal: “But then is not the doctrine of Sophia, especially in its feminine and maternal metaphorics, as intimately personal as the dominant paternal metaphorics of the Old Testament transcendence that seems to be Shestov’s preferred emphasis?”[23] The problem is not in the doctrine but, according to Desmond in the language of “All-unity” or a language of the whole, which is not adequate, in that it may indeed produce the counterfeit double of the anti-Christ.

Six Questions for Soloviev as Pointers to Metaxology

Desmond concludes with six questions which indicate the inadequacy of Soloviev’s holism. His first three questions focus on the assumed fall into difference in Soloviev. Isn’t the focus on the negative element of difference (a result of the fall, to be overcome), missing that difference is the very means of recognizing unity? “The very plurality that roused us to thought of the One is put into the pale by the One. Being put in the pale is not entirely wrong, but we want a One that will lead us out into the sun, and give us to affirm, reaffirm the plural.”[24] Kessel notes that Bulgakov agrees with Desmond, “that to see difference only as the result of the fall is to see it too negatively: both want to affirm plurality as positive.”[25]

Why consider a fall in time at all? “Does not this too degrade the temporal, instead of elevating it as the gift of finite becoming in the between?”[26] The early church, beginning with Origen, down to Maximus, will locate the fall outside of time. The fall in time degrades the temporal, as if the temporal is the result of the fall, “instead of elevating it as the gift of finite becoming in the between.” As Desmond asks, “Why does the One have to alienate itself at all, if it is the absolute it is? Why not be one with itself from eternity? Why then temporal differentiation at all? Suppose there is no fall, only the giving of being to the other, being-other as good. Clearly, the language of fall is not adequate to this good.”[27] Necessity and not freedom rules in a creation ruled by the dynamics of the fall.

Desmond’s between does not fall but is focused on the power of being raised or of being elevated. “Arising is as if every moment were a resurrection from the dead; or a preserving from the threat of death, a guarding the goodness of beings; as if God were torn by grief for every death, and yet on the instant resurrected the beloved this into the goodness of life.”[28] As Kessel explains, “In Desmond’s metaxology, the origin of difference is not the fall in time, but an arising in time: time is supported on the love of eternity which cannot be an erotic love, but only an agapeic love.”[29] The emphasis on the erotic in Soloviev (which Bulgakov will also critique) falls short: “Is it the love of the agapeic origin that frees time into the goodness of its own otherness? Is it the love of an erotic origin that needs time to be itself the consummated absolute?”[30] Soloviev, in both the estimate of Desmond and Bulgakov, gives too much weight to erotic necessity, which Desmond will counter with an agapeic freedom.

Desmond’s final three questions concern the space for freedom in view of the holistic God. The question concerns both human and divine freedom, and the possibility of a community of freedom. “Where is the allowance for the unfinished and the open? Is the indeterminate not engulfed by the self-determining whole?”[31] The eternal predetermined necessity crushes divine and human personhood. “Destining and destined universality would be no more than a monstrous universality, a quiet indifference the resting face of an enemy, if it merely crushed the singular in its intimate being for itself.”[32] On the other hand, “An agapeic destiny would communicate, in the intimate universal, the promise of a gift. We must accept the gift, though we can refuse; since the gift is itself a promise, we must serve the good to redeem its promise.”[33] Desmond maintains the holistic view is a closed view of God, with no space for freedom. As with Bulgakov, he recognizes the Economy in which we live “is this fight, and synthesis between freedom and necessity” which is a human and divine struggle.[34]

Agapeic love is open to the difference of self and other, and according to Kessel, “even demands it.” The integrity of the individual is not undone by the whole, but there is the possibility of “‘a community of open wholes’ in the between, beyond the dialectical language of parts and wholes.”[35] Soloviev’s holism reduces both God and the individual to a dialectical community, reducing community to an organic self-communication. “Is this adequate to the communication between beings in the finite middle? Or between the origin and the beings in the between? Or indeed between the divine and itself?”[36] As Desmond argues in conclusion, “Surely, the other as standing in the integrity of its otherness is necessary for community as more than self-communication. But if so, there is a community of metaxological togetherness that is beyond dialectical self-mediation, and hence beyond the embrace of divine holism.”[37]

Desmond’s Corrective to Soloviev’s Holism

Creation, for Desmond, must be thought within an agapeic origin, and rather than a speculative unity or a whole, he offers a logos of the metaxu: “a metaxology of the between rather than a dialectic of the whole.”[38] He wants to maintain a qualitative difference between God and creation, which allows for the integrity and otherness of creation, and individual integrity of God and humans, which still allows for communication between the two, as in his understanding of the “intimate universal.”[39] Desmond appreciates the struggle between Shestov and Soloviev, but indicates the failures of each, pointing to his metaxological resolution. Shestov may tend toward a simplistic opposition to the God of the philosophers, which may land in some sort of dualism – “an affirmation of divine transcendence insufficiently purged of dualistic opposition.”[40] Soloviev does not bear Hegel’s hostility to the transcendent, but his “All-unity” still poses the possibility of a counterfeit double of God, something which Soloviev himself came to realize. The conclusion is, the “God beyond the whole” of All-unity cannot be thought within the idealistic notion of the whole. Recognizing why this is the case, brings out the strengths of the metaxological realization.

[1] Oliver Smith, Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011) 2.

[2] Smith, 13-14.

[3] Smith, 2.

[4] Smith, 9.

[5] Smith, 10.

[6] V. S. Solov’ev, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. N. V. Kotrelev, 2 vols, 1989, ii, p. 316. Cited in Smith, 11

[7] Smith, 12.

[8] Josephien van Kessel, “Transcendence in Metaxology and Sophiology” inWilliam Desmond’s Philosophy between Metapysics, Religion, Ethics and Aesthetics: Thinking Metaxologically, ed Dennis Vanden Auweele (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 247. Many thanks to Professor Kessel for providing me this chapter.

[9] William Desmond, ‘God Beyond the Whole: Between Solov’ev and Shestov,’ in Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005 pp. 167-99), 199.

[10] God Beyond the Whole, 199.

[11] God Beyond the Whole, 171-172.

[12] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[13] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[14] God Beyond the Whole, 172.

[15] God Beyond the Whole, 172

[16] Kessel, 247.

[17] God Beyond the Whole, 175.

[18] God Beyond the Whole, 180.

[19] God Beyond the Whole, 180.

[20] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[21] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[22] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[23] God Beyond the Whole, 181.

[24] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[25] Kessel, 250.

[26] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[27] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[28] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[29] Kessel,250-251.

[30] God Beyond the Whole, 193.

[31] God Beyond the Whole, 195.

[32] God Beyond the Whole, 194.

[33] God Beyond the Whole, 194-195.

[34] Kessel, 251.

[35] Kessel, 252.

[36] Beyond the Whole, 197.

[37] Beyond the Whole, 197.

[38] God Beyond the Whole, 169.

[39]

[40] God Beyond the Whole, 168.

Ethical Potency and Impotency: The Pleasure of the Spirit Versus Law

The tendency is to connect ethics to law and moral striving or doing, but the biblical pattern is to remove the ethical from under the power of the law and to locate it with the Spirit and being (as opposed to doing). The fruit of the Spirit is the New Testament ethic, and in Paul’s explanation, cannot be regulated by law, as nothing can be posed against this reality (Gal 5:23), as this is ultimate reality beyond and before the law. The tendency may be to stunt Paul’s point, as merely to say the law does not touch upon these non-transgressive issues, but it does not touch on ethics of the Spirit which goes beyond ethics as mere regulation. Ethics is usually connected with regulating, guiding, and perhaps more than anything, stifling, stopping or suppressing. In regulating the sensuous there is a turn against the senses and pleasure, as if these are not an adequate medium for truth and goodness. Biblical ethics returns to life and being as the pure ground of the good and the fruits of the Spirit are embodied realizations. The choice posed between the ethics of the Spirit and law, is not only a choice of life or death, but life as given from an overflowing and original goodness and love (the all-encompassing embodied ethic), and ethics as duty assigned to the will (the tendency toward the disincarnate). In the former there is no system, measure, or determinate understanding, and in the latter all is reduced to the imperative of a particular system or category. This “categorical imperative” demands exercise of the will or a doing, while the gift of the Spirit precedes ethics and enables an ethical life, empowering and compelling through empowering ethical gifts.

Overflowing Goodness as the Power of the Spirit

Before any ethical system, there is the impetus and resource driving and providing for ethics; a goodness, which any particular system may shape, stunt, or accentuate according, to its perceived parameters. This goodness is a power, which is felt (it is an affect, or an emotion), which is not to reduce it to this, but it is an embodied power that takes hold and is expressed through the senses and produces an ethical atmosphere. Being, creation, humanity, is endowed with a worthiness which is its ground, but before the realization or cognition of this ground, there is participation in this goodness, and the realization of morals and ethics, is simply an attempt to understand and shape this gift. Before the understanding and shaping though, there is the sensation, the feel, the taste, of the good. Its sweetness, joy, peace, and radiance are felt. It may be felt and perceived according to the shaping force of the person, the culture, the place, but prior to everything is the reception, or the endowment. We are gifted with being in the world, though we may need to be reawakened to this reality.

As William Desmond describes, “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[1] It is manifest in and through us, but we are so intimate with it, so familiar and sustained by this reality, that astonishment and joy at this elemental goodness may be obscured. Clarity may fade or be brought back into focus, according to the shaping milieu of life and circumstance, but what is also to be noticed in this flux is the affect which gauges understanding or its absence.

Pleasure as the Power of the Spirit

There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in the recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. This goodness does not by-pass the senses, but in the biblical understanding (which Friedrich Nietzsche also came to understand), this truth is received through the senses. Incarnational truth, is by definition, embodied and passing through the body. Pleasure may fade, but it does not pass away, but conveys a reality. As Desmond describes, “There is passing to this pleasure: it passes into us, it passes through and beyond us, it passes away. There is no absolute fixing of it. But something of the good of the ‘to be’ passes in this ‘being pleased’ of pleasure.”[2] We feel and absorb the potency of being as a recurrent and ever-giving possibility. It is the possibility that transcends us but in which we recognize or experience the transcendent. It points to the One enabling this transcendental realization, which may be the distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness indicates the ephemeral moment of experience, but joy is a spiritual realization. Desmond relates it to the daimon of eudaimonia: “The daimon is a being between the mortal and the divine, at the limit of the mortal and on the threshold of the divine.”[3] The power of the Spirit is at work in this middle domain, divinizing the mortal, which is not a stunting of pleasure, but its fulfillment.

As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic. It is not that the erotic in the Song of Solomon is a metaphor for divine love, but the erotic is directly joined to enjoyment of the divine. The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs, recognized 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. Paul, likewise, pictures the act of marriage as completed in the body of Christ (Eph. 5:32). Even Plato describes eros as binding mortals and divinities in the whole. Ecstatic love and pleasure are the power of the ethical and not its diminishment, though focus on the pleasure per se may be distorted in imagining it as an end in itself. Spirituality does not oppose pleasure but traces it to its source and opens the possibility of its continual renewal. 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.”[4] The pleasure of God mixed with the pleasure of life, and all of life as taking delight in divine pleasure, is the realization of the Spirit recognized in the Song.

The Deadly Impotency of the Law

We may be more familiar with life’s affect through the negative emotions, which Paul relates directly to the law. Fear and shame, both describe loss or shrinking engagement with the world, induced by the law (Rom 7:7ff). This affect is a somatic or bodily quality, though not this alone, but the inward turn of shame or the negative affects of jealousy, envy, or fear are written on the body. They are felt viscerally and experienced as a psychological pain. Paul describes his body being colonized by an alien force (Rom 7:9). As he describes in Galatians, the individual is subject to the flesh: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing” (Gal 5:19-21). These deeds of the flesh are caught up in the law, and even inspired by the law in a covetous and deceived grasp for reality (Rom 7:7ff).

Though Immanuel Kant did not intend to, he illustrates how this is the case. He arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality” which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[5] The Kantian maxim does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[6] He pictures the law as regulating such things as sexual love, and presumes adultery would not be committed were gallows awaiting transgressors. He cannot recognize that the threat of death may heighten perverse pleasure (Paul says as much in Rom 1:32).

In the description of Alenka Zupančič, the “Freudian blow” to Kant’s philosophical ethics is to recognize that the moral law or what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” is in fact nothing other than the superego, or what Paul would call the law.  Where Kant had sought to set ethics on a foundation of reason and will, Freud has hit upon the intertwining of the will, duty, and law as the deep pathological malady of the human race. As Zupančič concludes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honorable inclinations’ of the subject.”[7]  The pleasure found in pain, either masochistic or sadistic, is the perverse pleasure of serving the bounded law of the will.[8] There is a manufactured reality enacted in the will which only touches upon the negation of reality in unpleasure. The Platonic forms or the absolutely transcendent good which Jacques Lacan will refer to this as the “imaginary,” evokes service of the unreal while abandoning reality. This means the greater the pain, the more heightened the punishing asceticism, the greater the suppression of this world, and thus the greater the pleasure (pure masochism).

The unspiritual is marked by descent rather than the transcendent, and in the Bible, is described as descent into the grave. The grave is personified, using the Hebrew term Sheol, to represent an insatiable, greedy monster with an unyielding desire to consume the living. The human appetite is like Sheol, and like death, never satisfied (Hab 2:5). “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Prov 27:20). Sex and death, or erotic pleasure unto death, describe a kind of transdescedence, finding ultimate pleasure in near death experience. Autoerotic Asphyxiation or erotic choking, points directly to how death, rather than life, poses the only ecstatic possibility for some. Rather than an embrace of life, there is a direct pursuit or shutting off of life, but this illustrates how the wires of life and death can be crossed. As with Paul’s adulteress woman, it may be that pleasure is thought possible only when “consorting against the law” (Rom 7:3). Unlawful pleasure would exceed the law by breaking it.

The Pleasures of Life in the Spirit in Excess of the Law

Trust, the generosity of others, or love, are necessary for giving and sustaining life. We are weaned and determined by this good, which is neither within our capacity for measure or control, but we know and feel and experience the beauty as it irradiates and engulfs us. “There is an aesthetic givenness of the ethos of being to our senses and our bodies. . . . The incarnate good of the world is in rapport with our response to goodness and our being as good.”[9] Feelings of pleasure, gratitude, awe, convey the potency of this goodness.

The gifts of the Spirit fuse the power of life with pleasurable affects, such as love, joy, peace, patience, none of which can be reduced to an emotion but none of which are understood apart from the emotional affect. The good can be directly experienced and this shows itself in the pleasurable fruits of the Spirit. The Spirit insinuates herself into the concrete experience of life, drawing together in love (rather than separating by law). The gift of the Spirit is shared life, and all of the gifts of the Spirit are aimed at promoting this communion with life. We are given life in the community of family, but then pointed to a more expansive communion. “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31–32).

In Desmond’s description, “We are pointed to a community of the good beyond self-determination, a community already at work in the incognito of its surplus generosity, enabling the powers of self and other to be determining of themselves, giving them to be themselves, giving also the ethos of possibility wherein our immanent powers can be more truly realized.”[10] The gifts of the Spirit are the continuing work of the original gift of life. “This is not a moral value reflecting our self-determining powers, but an ontological worth with ethical radiations. It is an intimate goodness to being as given to be, given to be by God as the ultimate origin and end of all finite goods.”[11] The gift continues, working more intimately within than we can perceive, bringing the original gift to its goal of life, to a life more abundantly realized (John 10:10).

In summary, the “potencies of the ethical” attached to goodness show themselves in the power of the Spirit. Goodness is the source and the resource prior to or behind ethics; the potency or power, which any particular ethical understanding taps into but which it may also repress. These potencies enter differently into any particular ethical system, but what any system tends to do is lose contact with its originary source. We get stuck on the law or the ethical system and miss the goodness preceding and exceeding the system. We need awakening to “our constant ethical powers and abiding endowments.”[12] The awakening of the Spirit is nothing less than realization of this life giving ethical empowerment.

[1] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”

[2] Ethics and the Between, 67.

[3] Ethics and the Between, 69.

[4] Cited in Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 98.

[5] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392) 38.

[6] Metaphysics of Morals, 38.

[7] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real:  Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 1.

[8] In the explanation of Maximus, the attachment to the sensory or the finite and passable, results in a masochistic play between pleasure and pain. “Wanting to escape the oppressive sensation of pain, we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment.” Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.:  The Catholic University of America Press) 61.6, p. 437.

[9] Ethics and the Between, 66.

[10] Ethics and the Between, 71

[11] Ethics and the Between, 73.

[12] Ethics and the Between, 63

Metaxology as an Extension of Sophiology

Metaxology and Sophiology are all-encompassing descriptions of reality, of God’s relationship to creation, and are theological and philosophical descriptions of the realization of this relationship. So the most important element of this blog is in the title. Placing William Desmond’s work on a continuum with that of Sergei Bulgakov’s, helps explain the tenor and emphasis of his project, and for example, helps answer the question as to why the turn to aesthetics. I do not question the possibility of a difference, which there is, but work from the premise, that showing the conjunction will reveal the significance of this ground-breaking mode of thought.

Bulgakov’s Sophiology and Desmond’s Metaxology are both focused on the metaxu, or the between, or living this out (betweening), as living out the between of immanence and transcendence contains the fulness of human potential. Both describe a transformational synthesizing process, recognizing the antinomy of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. In Bulgakov’s description of Sophia, “in setting alongside itself the extra-Divine world, the Divinity thereby places between itself and the world a certain border and this border, which according to the concept itself is found between God and the world, the creator and the creature, is itself neither the one nor the other but something completely particular, simultaneously uniting and separating the one and the other.”[1] As Josephien Kessel explains, Bulgakov was “interested in the nature of the connection and border between immanence and Transcendence, which is Sophia as metaxu, or ‘between’,” which also explains the parameters of Desmond’s Metaxology.[2] The principle of the metaxu or Sophia is “the ultimate middle term, the intermediary between God and the world . . . which makes the God-world relationship possible.”[3] As John Milbank explains, “one could say that Sophia names a metaxu which does not lie between two poles but rather remains simultaneously at both poles at once.”[4] Bulgakov and Desmond are continuing the particular synthesizing work of Maximus, Eriugena, and Hegel.  The mode of thought, the turn to a reworked dialectic, and the attempt to describe the potential encounter with God in philosophy and aesthetics, characterizes each. In Bulgakov’s terms, there is a “symphonic connection” or a synthesizing unity or togetherness. Both recognize Hegel aimed at describing this synthesizing process, the dialectic of unity in difference in which opposites are paired and synthesizing (syzygy). For them though, it is a dynamic unfolding reality. Both can be characterized as building on the project of Hegel and German idealism, and of course Desmond is conscious of his work’s continuity with Sophiology. It seems he takes up where the Russian sophiological tradition left off, refusing the sense of a gulf between Creator and creation, and presuming supernatural grace pervades creation. This is an attempt to demonstrate, in a very small and inadequate manner, the convergence of this thought.

The Synthesizing Possibility Between Infinite Life and Death

In Desmond’s description, there is a glimpse of the infinite that may “put us out to sea,” arousing something on the order of the sublime, which he relates directly to the darkness and light of the Eucharist. Likewise, Bulgakov, in his Sophiology of Death, expounds upon the awakening to eternity through a dark realization. “The day’s din of temporality alternates with night’s whisper of eternity, and under the swelter of life, the icy breath of death occasionally blows by, and when this breath enters а soul, even just once, that soul can thereafter hear this silence even in the middle of the din of the market, can feel this cold even under the scorching sun.”[5] Recognition of good and evil seem to arrive entwined. “A historical sense of self is colored by a feeling of the tragic in life, in history, in the world, it is freed from its eudaimonistic coloring, it is made deeper, more serious—and darker.”[6] Desmond concurs: “Yes, the passion of being is not univocal and its saturated equivocity can border an extremity of affirmation, as well tempt desire with a descending movement into darkness, touching on death, if not going into hell.”[7] He appeals to Freud and Schopenhauer to make the point: “Begetting on the beautiful participates in the agon of eros and thanatos. Doomed love: intenser life. Death itself raises the ultimate question of the giftedness of beauty.”[8]

 Desmond relates the mixture of this infinite darkness and light in the story of Moby Dick: “the blank Leviathan, whether innocent or malicious, who knows, mysterious beyond our moral measure of good and evil. The saturated equivocity of beauty still tasks us metaxologically.”[9] Ishmael, when he finds himself dampened in spirit, a “November of the soul,” is lured to the sea to purge his burdened soul, to hunt the monster of the deep. Can we equate, Desmond wonders, “Ecce homo: the sacrificial lamb on display. And the sea monster?”[10] The infinite sea, personified, is at once monstrous and sacred: “’Monstrare’ means ‘to show’: the monster is a show of the sacred, but there is a sacred show in the monstrance: golden carrier of the consecrated bread that is the body of Christ, once to be beheld, even on the streets of the city of man on the feast of Corpus Christi.”[11] Christ is present in the midst of darkness and death, in the very midst of the city of man, the infinite shines forth. According to Bulgakov, the creature exists between being and nonbeing, and creaturely Sophia acts as a counter to death and nonbeing, and the Holy Spirit as Sophia, “actualises,” “concretises,” and insinuates “beauty,” “sensation” and “life.”[12] Both thinkers converge upon the exposure of infinite goodness in the midst of a potentially overwhelming darkness.

Inspiration and Deification in the Between

Both Desmond and Bulgakov depict a simultaneous revealing of infinite light and darkness in Christ. There is an erotic yearning for “sophianic Illumination” and this unfading light challenges the darkness. “The love of the Father through the Spirit in the life of the Son is unbroken and there can be no room for any sort of mutual abandonment. But ‘economically,’ in the relationship of God to the world, as Creator to creation, there occurs, as it were, a division of the hypostases because the very hypostasis of union, the Holy Spirit, in ‘abandoning’ the Son, ceases, as it were, to unite the Son with the Father and instead remains with the Father.”[13] The Spirit, which “blows where it wills” (John 3:2), momentarily and manifestly (economically) “stops blowing on the Son.” This presence and absence, darkness and light, experienced by humanity, however, is encompassed within the reality of the Trinity.[14] The outcome of deification, in the midst of death and darkness, being predetermined.

Bulgakov links the working of Sophia explicitly to Christ: “The humanity of Christ is created Sophia, permeated by Divine Sophia and in this union with it already pre-deified.” [15] Desmond likewise, describes a pre-deified creation. God breathes into the mud, energizing, enlivening, making human (the breath of Spirit and Sophia?). “God’s kiss is not just a blown kiss that dissolves in the air. It touches the humus and what it touches comes alive and breathes—breathes for itself, breathes as itself.”[16] Creation and divinization are deepened and widened. “Created Sophia, as the human nature of Christ, admitted of further sophianization or divinization, which is exactly what was accomplished through the resurrection of Christ and in his glorification.”[17]

The struggle between life and death, being and nonbeing, indicates the possibility of divine being or nonbeing enacted in every human life; a struggle predetermined in Christ and carried out in the Spirit. “The Divine ousia is thoroughly transparent for the Spirit and in this sense is Sophia, entirely hypostatized and not leaving a place in itself for anything that is not hypostatically clarified (for any Urgrund or bottomless abyss).”[18] Communication of the Spirit is the ongoing work of the Trinity in creation and the repetition of God in the human image calls for continued life and repetition with a difference.

Desmond describes this as the possibility of “inspiration and creation” as the world is not determinately bounded, but open. It is open to a “participation in the porosity,” expressed in “energetic endeavor in relation to what is beyond itself,” a “beyond as already seeded or sleeping in itself.”[19] The metaxological supposition “draws on the aesthetic overdetermancy of being,” and “draws us to it as alluring” and so to we draw on this supposition in creating “works that shine with its surplus.”[20] Desire is not simply a lack but the opening to an enabling grace. “The poros as opening a way, as enabling a porosity, is not always recognized when we treat of desire as if it were only a lack. There is the memory of divine festivity in the birth of eros, and with this the endeavor towards beauty is already in receipt of the promise of more than lack, of a more fulfilled festivity.”[21] Desire points to “the promise of the agapeic”: “the promise of a surplus generosity that comes to us in the delight of beauty. This festivity participates in an affirming ‘yes’ to being. The gift of beauty offers this incarnate ‘yes’ in a celebratory delight.”[22] The infinite shows itself in this unexpected, and even potentially monstrous (sacred) beauty; an agapeic overflowing which might be likened to Sophia.

The Iconic Aesthetics of Sophia and the Potency of the Middle

Sophia or betweenness is a possible realization of the divine in the immanent, a recognition and pursuit of unity in difference and betweenness. Bulgakov illustrates the natural intersection of Sophiology and art through icons, which are images made to reflect the Godhead, but these images are possible because the Name of God is the original and real icon of the Godhead. [23] Art, like the icon, is made possible by the iconic nature of reality, the presence of God in creation. Just as the human is an iconic and real representation of the divine, so too the possibility of art or language. God is present in his Name, just as he is present in the sacramental bread and wine, indicating the sacramental nature of all creation. “More than an icon, it becomes the temple, the altar, the shrine, the Holy of Holies, the place for the presence of God and of encounter with God.”[24] Creation as temple, a fit dwelling for God, and human encounter with the divine.

For Desmond, the pursuit of love, goodness and beauty, are at once erotic and spiritual (on the order of the icon?) and give rise to focus on the aesthetic and ethical as realms of “potencies.” Being permeable, porous, and relational, is definitive of personhood and its powers. The ethical, for example, is not delimiting or disempowering, but a potency.  “We are endowed in receiving and being invested with these potencies. And we are plurally endowed in that these different potencies bring to explication the ethical promise of our ethical being.”[25] There is promise in the good and ethical, open to realization. “All of the potencies of the ethical come forth out of an initial immersion in the ethos of being where we are offered an opaque intimation of the surplus of the good.”[26] The good (like the sophianic), is a gift of the between opening the human to the divine. “There is an elemental intimacy with the worth of being: before all determinate values, there is a pre-determinate sense of the good of the ‘to be’ at all, which we participate in, and witness to in the fact that our being is itself a kind of affirmation of being.”[27]

There is a potential sabbatical peace, beyond war and peace or beyond death, but also an encounter with something other. “Beauty witnesses an elemental rapport between ourselves and what is other. There is nothing of a vis dormativa in this rapport. We are surprised by beauty and taken outside of ourselves.”[28] It as if the other has “taken the initiative in communicating to us.” We are given the (divine) perspective of “beholding from the beautiful.”[29] We receive from the other, and only then are we “perceivers and conceivers.” There is an erotic, energized, endowment given in beauty. It is “not that our passio essendi makes us merely passive. To the contrary, we are energized to creative work in receiving originating power. But there is an endowed character to our participation in creative power.”[30] We can be perceivers, conceivers and creators because grace saturates creation, and this is the foundation of all human endeavor.

Conclusion: The recognition that Desmond’s metaxu accords with and can be read as a development of Sophiology, is a simple but enlightening realization, providing a long historical context for Desmond’s work, which like that of Bulgakov, calls upon the (mostly Eastern) tradition, in his expansive theology and philosophy. The excitement and beauty of his writing hit me, when I recognized he is providing a first-order description of divine encounter, on the order of Bulgakov’s Sophiology. The promise of the Gospel is premised on a universal accessibleness to God and the Spirit, and it is this premise which Desmond and Bulgakov are spelling out in Sophiology and Metaxology.

[1] Sergei Bulgakov, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 217. Cited in Richard Paul René, Absolute Vulnerability: A Contemporary Orthodox Anthropology in Dialogue with Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson, John Zizioulas, and Sergius Bulgakov (Toronto: University of Toronto and St. Michael’s College, PhD, 2024), 83.

[2]Josephien H. J. van Kessel, Sophiology and Modern Society: Sergei Bulgakov’s Conceptualization of an Alternative Modern Society (Nijmegen: Ipscamp Printing, 2020) 148

[3] René, 27.

[4] John Milbank, Sophiology and Theurgy: the New Theological Horizon (Unpublish paper available online at https://rprt.northwestern.edu/documents/research-scholar-articles/milbank-article-2.pdf, 9

[5] Sergius Bulgakov,. The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal )Cascade Books. Kindle Edition) 3-4.

[6] Sophiology of Death, 4.

[7] William Desmond, The Gift of Beauty and the Passion of Being, (Eugene, Oregon, Cascade Books, 2018), 60.

[8] The Gift of Beauty, 60.

[9] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[10] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[11] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[12] Milbank, 17.

[13] The Sophiology of Death, 128.

[14] The Sophiology of Death, 129.

[15] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[16] The Gift of Beauty, 33.

[17] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[18] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter (pp. 62-63). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.

[19] The Gift of Beauty, 50.

[20] The Gift of Beauty, 26,

[21] The Gift of Beauty, 26-27.

[22] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[23] Sergii Bulgakov, Philosophy of the Name (NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies) (pp. 295-296). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

[24] Philosophy of the Name, 314,

[25] William Desmond, “The Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good” in An Ethics of/for the Future? (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 65

[26] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[27] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[28] The Gift of Beauty, 21

[29] The Gift of Beauty, 21.

[30] The Gift of Beauty, 24.

Appreciating the Similarities and Differences Between William Desmond and René Girard

René Girard’s theory is a complete repudiation of the metaphysical project, connected as it is to an inherent violence, while William Desmond sees metaphysics as “a living option.”[1] There are levels of agreement between Desmond and Girard, in their assessment of the value of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and their portrayal of a “despairing” way toward God, and it is no huge task to touch on some of these agreements (as I do below), but it may be necessary to also bring out the differences, so as to emphasize the strength of each. Girard draws out the absolute difference between Christ the Logos and the human logos, recognizing that the reification and attachment to the word or language per se stands over and against the divine Word. The lie and the violence of the satan are completely opposed by Christ. Desmond does not so much disagree with the critique of metaphysics, provided by Girard and others, but this is not the end of the story for him. In fact, his theory might be seen as giving priority to a Word, before the word, which accounts for human failure and its movements within a larger ontological frame. 

Girard Against Metaphysics

Girard recounts and agrees with Martin Heidegger’s tracing of Greek metaphysics into an originary violence, locating essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being (see my blog here). “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[2] Girard explains how and why the pursuit of being, the metaphysical enterprise, is violent. Human being and speaking, along with any theology or philosophy that has girded itself with the Greek philosophical understanding, has a hidden and necessary violence at its origins. This is the charge Anthony Bartlett, a contemporary Girardian, levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). As first cause of everything (being), according to Bartlett, “God here reinforces a hierarchical order of origin, authority, and, necessary, violence.”[3]

In Bartlett’s recounting of the story, the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and John Deely, converge on the notion that “being,” which cannot be posited apart from its apprehension in language, already contains the antagonistic otherness of the sign (see here and here) . There is no being apart from its sign, and the sign contains or sets forth meaning in its separateness from the biological world. Both being and the sign refer to an extended, infinite, otherness. “The world itself is the ‘other,’ rendered present in a sign, yet strange, infinite, congenitally open itself, by virtue of the mysterious, ‘nihilating’ event of the sacred.”[4] In Girard’s terms, the original murder is hidden in the sign as that which is negated, and this compelling emptiness or otherness requires another sign, so that the signifying chain covers over the original absence (murder), as in Derrida’s “deferral” of meaning (to define one word requires a multiplicity of words – ad infinitum), or Heidegger’s and Hegel’s nothingness (the other over and against which all else, something, derives its meaning). To imagine God on the basis of the sign of being is to project violent mimetic desire and sacrifice onto God. There is no possibility for a Christian to think of God rightly, according to Girard, through a metaphysical understanding.

Desmond’s Reworking of Metaphysics

Desmond defines his entire project as the development of metaphysics: “Being and the Between asks: What does it mean to be? Ethics and the Between asks: What does it mean to be good? God and the Between asks: What does it mean to be divine or God? As the metaphysics of the first work points further to the ethical philosophy of the second, God and the Between represents the philosophy of God continuous with both the metaphysics of the first work and ethics of the second.”[5] Desmond is not unaware of the Girardian critique and is intimately familiar with the postmodern critique of metaphysics, but his is a reworking and perhaps a redefinition of this philosophical and theological enterprise. Chris Simpson summarizes the different approach Desmond takes:

For Desmond, metaphysics is not in the business of providing the assurances of a pure access to reality—it entails perplexity, disquiet, struggle, strain and failure. Metaxological metaphysics is a discourse of and in the middle—it does not overestimate its grasp by envisioning an escape from the middle to gain a view from nowhere. Instead of nailing things down, metaphysics is an attending to astonishment and perplexities that rupture and constitute a breakdown—a self debunking—of thought’s claims of self-sufficiency and absolute self-certain knowing. Metaphysics is an “interpretive fidelity” to and a mindfulness of the emergent happenings in the middle, the between—to the “finite facts” on the surface of life—a being attentive to the community of being’s plurality of others in interrelation.[6]

This is not the metaphysics which presided prior to the Girardian and postmodern critique, but it is a reworked and reevaluated understanding that accords with that critique.

The Theological Import of Metaphysics

Karl Barth’s notion that “the analogia entis (the analogy of being) is the invention of the antichrist,” may be inaccurate in the details but also an apt description of the metaphysical pursuit as it actually unfolded. Barth was surveying the consequences of metaphysics in Nazi Germany, and had a sharp appreciation for the difference between the human logos and the divine Logos as the mediating reality. Add to Barth’s understanding the Girardian insight, and it becomes clear why a certain naïve understanding of metaphysics can be literally assigned to the satan (the scandalan, in Girard’s explanation). In a Girardian explanation, entry into language is through the scapegoating mechanism (a lying violence), so to imagine that Christ can be understood as aligning with or analogous to human religion, philosophy, or culture, would mean, as Heidegger recognized and agreed, that the Logos of Christ is in servitude to the human logos.

Heidegger chooses Hitler over Christ because he understood the human logos, as portrayed by Heraclitus is the by-product of war and violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[7] As I have previously explained (here), it is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) to the Greek Logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[8] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition other than the Johannine Logos is subservient to and a development of the Greek understanding.

Heidegger is a sophisticated reader of metaphysical development, recognizing in his historical and philosophical analysis what Girard would uncover in his anthropological and literary analysis. In his examination of being, Heidegger concludes that the primary recognition in Dasein of “being there” is that language precedes or speaks the human, meaning the provenance of language is determinant of its speakers. “Language speaks” and this being in language is primary.[9] What is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward.”[10] Metaphysics is letting this being in language show itself, and what it shows is the implication of language in violence and death. To not take this history into account, to not assign a specific role, as Girard does, to Christ uncovering of this violent logos, is in danger of mistaking the devil for God. This form of the analogia entis is indeed, of the antichrist. The postmodern critique of metaphysics is not only deserved but necessary, but is it possible that the problem is not in metaphysics per se? Is there a taking into account the Girardian and postmodern critique, simultaneously incorporating metaphysical failure, into a more holistic understanding?

Desmond’s Philosophical Theology

Desmond is not working from a Girardian form of Christocentrism, in which Christ alone uncovers the violence of the scapegoat, but he does see the Christian task as one of uncovering counterfeits or doubles which parody or counterfeit the God-man (on a broader scale), but these counterfeits are subtly interwoven with the human circumstance. It is not that human desire is the origin of this circumstance, but its perversion and misconstrual. Through a close reading of Hegel and Nietzsche he demonstrates how in our self-antagonism we project our image onto God. “God as our own beyond is the source of the devaluation of the earth and ourselves.”[11] This God needs to be displaced, if true humanity is to be recovered, but this can also be described as part of the metaphysical task. Desmond takes account of the failure of a form of metaphysics and aims to point out the goodness of being and the wonder of creation. A failed metaphysics would evacuate the world of wonder, but Desmond seeks to show why this is a stunted form of reality. Man may be fallen, evil may be present, but this is not the primary reality of being. There is a “too-muchness” to being that needs to be allowed for. “Rather we begin to ‘know’ the absolute, in a knowing that does not know, just when we understand that there is nothing more necessary for philosophy than that it should just so go beyond itself, without immanent reserve, without reserving the divine for its own immanence – in an agapeic exceeding of mindfulness beyond thought thinking itself.”[12] There must be a thinking out of philosophy in light of faith, rather than an abandonment of either faith or philosophy, and Desmond sees his work as renewing entry into this key crossing.

Desmond wants to put religion and philosophy into dialogue, opening up the possibility of a renewed speculative theology and philosophy. To close up philosophical shop due to its failure, is to give way to an immanent frame, but Desmond seeks a renewal of thinking and openly acknowledges his theological indebtedness. “There is a porosity between religion and philosophy, not a rigid separation, and communications can carry or be received from both sides. . . . We find vigor for it because we are first invigorated. The promise of being religious is recurrently resurrected because it is constitutive of what we are, what we are given to be, and what we are to be.”[13]

The Convergence of Girard and Desmond

As Ryan Duns explains, Desmond and Girard are on a parallel path, offering a despairing way to God: “we learn to discern within faith’s ‘withdrawing roar’ not God’s absence but a gathering silence testifying to God’s presence.”[14] Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics acknowledges God’s presence, even in the dialectical drive to univocity through equivocity. That is, he is completing or building upon the Hegelian project: “the metaxological sense is an Aufhebung of the other three senses, preserving the truth of each way as it attempts to give a fuller account of what it means ‘to be.’”[15] As I previously summed it up (here), Desmond’s four ways might be read as the passage from fall to redemption in which the human failure is the attempt to be their own origin (univocity) through an implicit and denied plurality or difference (equivocity), and this fall into metaphysical striving (dialectics) is the common human passage toward realizing the fulness of personhood (in the metaxological).

In Pauline terms, the law is simultaneously necessary and it is necessary that its punishing effects be suspended (Aufhebung). There is something necessary in the passage from the first Adam to the Second, with the first not simply a negation but providing for recognition of Christ. In a Girardian sense, language may only be acquired through the deception of the scapegoat, but this logos establishes recognition of the Logos that is Christ. For Desmond, metaphysics (of the metaxological kind) is necessary to describe “the ontological stage on which life’s play unfolds.”[16] There is a “primal ethos” which is given through creation and then the “reconfigured” shaping of that ethos or givenness. “In every era, however, we exert ourselves as we mold and shape our ethos. The resultant “reconfigured ethos” describes how the effects of our self-assertion either remain true to the primal ethos or distort it.”[17]

Desmond is attuned to the subtleties of this reshaping – in the modern reconfiguration there is a “devaluing objectification of being” and “subjectification of value.”[18] The interplay of the ethos of the age and philosophy converge in the emptying out of being, evacuating its value and astonishing goodness. In both Girard and Desmond, the emptying out is itself a revelation. “The nihil’s purgation clears the cataracts from our eyes and we behold not an alternative reality but reality alternatively, as replete with God’s presence. We encounter the divine not by being freed from the finite (Plato and Aurelius) but by glimpsing the infinite disclosed within it.”[19] Girard’s theory is a counsel in despair, pointing to the singular revelation of Christ, but Desmond’s may be an even broader despair but also a pointer to all of creation illuminated by God’s goodness and grandeur.

Before one did not see, but now one begins to see; begins to see because a light that one cannot command is coming up and coming over one. One is being lighted; one is not enlightened, one is being enlightened. We are recipients of something that we cannot entirely specify or pin down. It stuns us into silence. The seeds of a metanoetics are being sown. A new noesis: a new mindfulness that does not know what it knows, and yet it knows that the same things will no longer be the same.[20]

An Appreciation of the Difference Between Desmond and Girard

It is not that this broad enlightenment is absent from Girard, in his exposure of myth and the uncovering of sacrificial violence, but Desmond shows how even failure is temporary and points beyond itself, while the Girardian appreciation of the Gospel shows how the world is disfigured by sacrificial violence and how it can be delivered through gospel peace. Strangely, my own work might seem to favor the focus on Girardian deception, the lie that is at the heart of violent culture and religion, which is a necessary lie for Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, but before the lie there must be the truth. Girard brings out the sharp distinction between the human logos and the divine Word, showing how the human error is to reify and absolutize this word, while Desmond seems to emphasize that what precedes and accounts for the human logos is the Divine Logos. The distinction between the two may not be as sharp in Desmond, but Desmond’s work calls upon this resource of the Word, beyond being and beyond knowing, providing for both fall and redemption.

[1] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) xi.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 160.

[3] Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (Cascade Books, 2020) 91.

[4] Bartlett, 97.

[5] God and the Between, xi.

[6] Christopher Ben Simpson, Divine Hyperbolics: Desmond, Religion, Metaphysics and the Postmodern (Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2008) 108.

[7] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.

[8] Things Hidden, 265.

[9] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207

[11] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham  University Press, 2005) 203.

[12] God and the Between, xii.

[13] God and the Between, xii.

[14] Ryan Duns, “’In Despair, Despair Not’ : Ways to God for a Secular Age” in Theological Studies (2020, Vol. 81(2) 348 –369) 350.

[15] Duns, 352.

[16] Duns, 352.

[17] Duns, 352.

[18] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 41 Cited in Duns,

[19] Duns, 355.

[20] William Desmond, “Godsends: On the Surprise of Revelation,” Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 92, no. 1 (2016): 7–28 at 28. Cited in Duns, 366.

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

William Desmond’s four ways might be read as the passage from fall to redemption in which the human failure is the attempt to be their own origin (univocity) through an implicit and denied plurality or difference (equivocity), and this fall into metaphysical striving (dialectics) is the common human passage toward realizing the fulness of personhood (in the metaxological). As Desmond 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.”[1] 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, resulting in shame. That is, 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.”[2] 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. . .”[3]

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.”[4] The passion or patience of being rightly received does not grab for it 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.”[5] This acknowledgement of the metaxological, the givenness of being, 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’?”[6] 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.”[7]

Desmond’s fourfold way of thinking about metaphysics is a definition or overall description, but also what might be described as orientations or misorientations when presumed to be isolated or singular ways unto themselves.[8] 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.”[9] 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.”[10] 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.”[11]

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, when truncated, 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” of 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.”[12] 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 helped him appreciate that 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.”[13] 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.”[14] 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 finding ourself in the world, so 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.”[15] 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.

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 in my would-be 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, for there is no evil in a universe devoid of absolute goodness.

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. 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]

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 and the drive to control this passion point to a God-endowed freedom, which holds out both the possibility of refusal and acceptance and fusing with 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 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 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 even 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] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) 85.

[2] God and the Between, 85.

[3] God and the Between, 88.

[4] God and the Between, 85.

[5] God and the Between, 85.

[6] God and the Between, 85.

[7] God and the Between, 149-150.

[8] See William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition)

[9] God and the Between, 122. He also spells out the four ways of the metaxological in Chapter 6 of this book: “God and the Metaxological Way.”

[10] God and the Between, 122.

[11] God and the Between, 145.

[12] Reader, location 314.

[13] God and the Between, 92.

[14] Reader,  location 295.

[15] Reader, 302.

[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.