Paul Axton

Paul with Kant, Sade and Lacan, on the Source of Evil

Paul warns in 2 Corinthians that “scripture slays” (2 Cor. 3:6) in that it is not grounded in Spirit. This could be stated as the law, the symbolic order, principle, letter, or language, slays if it is taken as an end in itself. The problem Paul is addressing is the relationship between the written word, whether in the form of letters of recommendation, the Scriptures, or Torah, and the reality of embodied humans. Paul does not need letters written with ink, as he has the Corinthian believers as living letters bearing the living Word in their heart. Words or laws inscribed on stone, even if put there by the finger of God, by angels, or by the highest law giver, cannot possibly compare to the Spirit of the living God written on the heart. The former is a “ministry of death” in that it does not pertain to flesh and blood and spiritual reality. Paul refers to it as a “ministry of condemnation” or a “ministry of death” which is “from death to death” in that it is a fading reality which “veils” its own transitory nature. This ministry of death obscures or veils its own reality but it also veils the truth or the true glory which comes from the Spirit.

The thinker who unwittingly stumbled over Paul’s equation of death, emptiness and deception, with the law, was Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality”[1] 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.”[2] The beauty of the Kantian maxim, in his own estimate, is that it 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.[3] The problem Kant stumbles upon, is that if his maxim is completely enclosed in the will, then there is no determinate content to it, and it may give rise, not to the supreme principle of morality, but to what Kant calls radical evil. This radical evil, like its counterpart in the good, is completely enclosed in human will. “So we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and because we must always accept the guilt for it we can call it a radical innate evil in human nature, though one we have brought upon ourselves.”[4]

This radical evil is a necessary possible result of Kant’s anthropology as reason and freedom are not dependent upon anything outside of the self: “Now the human being actually finds in himself a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason.”[5] The faculty of reason provides simultaneous access to absolute freedom and to the choice of evil, for no reason (outside of the will). As Alenka Zupančič explains: “Evil, radical evil, is something that can be defined only in paradoxical terms as the ‘free choice of unfreedom’. In other words, here, too, a genuine negation of freedom proves impossible. The subject is free whether she wants to be or not; she is free in both freedom and unfreedom; she is free in good and in evil; she is free even where she follows nothing but the trajectory of natural necessity.”[6] Reason, the law, the categorical imperative, all arrive at a pure form or pure idea, which does not depend upon anything but itself.

Paul exposes the inherent fault or evil in this orientation to the law, locating it in the drive or desire which stands behind it. As he describes in Romans 7:7, the law gives rise to desire or covetousness: for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Rom. 7:7). In Paul’s description, the law generates the desire it forbids.

The Freudian explanation or the ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics, which accords with Paul’s description, is that “what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego.”[7] The superego is not God, the will, or a rational moral imperative, but is the individual’s attempt to be a law unto themself. Rather than the law being inscribed on the heart, the transgressor of the law, would inscribe themselves into the position of the law, thus obtaining what the law obstructs or forbids. In his drive to freedom (from the law of the father) he enslaves himself to this law (the law of the father or superego taken up into his own identity). The moral imperative, as Freud recognized, is a “moral masochism” in which the individual subjects himself to his own “cathected” father image – which gives rise to the worst forms of evil.

The superego serves in place of the law, and proves itself in relation to the ego. Thus, Freud pictures the superego as the seat or medium of the death drive; the law or the letter kills in giving rise to a dynamic of death. As Zupančič describes, “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 ‘honourable’ inclinations of the subject.”[8] The superego is, in Freudian terms, the attempt to be one’s own father. In Pauline terms, this orientation to the law is a displacement of the true Father.

Interestingly, Kant’s critique of the biblical notion of evil aligns with Paul’s universalizing of the problem of the law. This is not simply a historical problem which humanity inherited from its progenitors, but is the problem which every individual faces. The problem of evil is not a historical but a logical problem, though Genesis seems to present the problem as one residing at the beginning of history. For Kant, evil presents itself as part of his understanding of freedom. “The propensity to birth evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).”[9] Kant posits an original freedom at the heart of every human, but if the original innocent pair were irresistibly seduced or tricked, then this is not true freedom. For God to punish what they could not and did not have the power to resist means God is unfair.

According to Kant, humans are not subject to determinations beyond their control, yet they do evil, which demands an explanation. “Kant’s solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom. This ground itself has to be considered as an act of freedom [Aktus der Freiheit]. In this inaugural act, I can choose myself as evil.”[10] There is the possibility, in Kant’s own estimate, that the categorical imperative may be grounded in a perverse will, in which the service of the seeming good is actually pure evil: “It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found with it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned), and the man is hence designated as evil.”[11] But by Kant’s own criteria, it is not clear how the individual might sort out radical evil and the good.

Jacques Lacan adds a problematic layer onto this Kantian/Freudian dilemma, with his own categorical imperative: “Don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire as it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty.”[12] As Dylan Evan’s notes, “The very centre of Lacan’s thought … is the concept of desire.” Lacan argues that “desire is the essence of man” (Seminar XI, 275), and the goal of therapy is to articulate and recognize the nature of desire (Seminar I,183). Lacan’s three registers (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) intersect with and emerge from his symbol for desire – objet petit a (Seminar XX, 87) and the conscious and unconscious dialectic occurs in and around the medium of desire (Seminar II, 228).[13] Lacan links desire with the life force and “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”[14] To give way on desire is to give up on life and subjectivity as the structure and dynamic which gives rise to the desire for the self is precisely the dynamic necessary for subjectivity to occur. The impossibility of desire is the necessary structuring principle against which desire (jouissance) forms.

Likewise, in Žižek’s understanding, apart from desire for self or the compulsion to obtain the self there is no self. He uses Paul’s terms for sin to describe the rise of the Subject. The “hermeneutical” procedure of isolating the letter of the law creates a frontier or “coast-like” condition between the real (with the obscene superego) and the symbolic and out of this tension jouissance or forbidden desire arises. The letter and jouissance describe the form and substance of life under the compulsion to repeat – the letter being that which “returns and repeats itself” in the life force of desire.[15] The problem is now double layered, in that the moral law, the will, duty, or reason, taken as an end in and of themselves, are without any recourse to circumstance – the world. In turn, Lacan’s jouissance (or evil desire) is indistinguishable from that desire necessary for life.

We are surrounded by examples of those who perform the most evil deeds, due to their form of the categorical imperative. Paul counts himself blameless in regard to the law as a Pharisee, and for the same reason he persecuted and killed Christians, and thus considers himself the chief of sinners. Adolph Eichmann appeals to the Kantian categorical imperative (doing his duty, obeying the law) while on trial in Jerusalem, as reason enough for killing Jews. The Marquis de Sade appeals to the categorical imperative as a call to universal sadism – each one is duty bound to pleasure himself through his neighbor. He has one of his novelistic characters propose as his maxim to murder anyone who gets in his way: “With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms . . . what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes.” This is the law of universal metamorphosis, and murder is simply part of this universal principle.

Both Kant and Sade need an eternity to pose the possibility that the highest good (the holy will, or the diabolical will), though not now attainable, might be attained in an eternal future. In Sade, this clearly translates into the worst form of evil (eternal sado-masochistic torture chambers), but the point is Kant is aligned with Sade in putting into place the machine of compulsive repetition. Desire, the good will, the categorical imperative must be pursued and it must be pursued endlessly into eternity. “This then necessarily leads to the exclusion of (the possibility of) this object (the highest good or ‘diabolical evil’), an exclusion which, in turn, supports the fantasy of its realization (the immortality of the soul).”[16] The categorical imperative requires a bad infinity (no longer simply desire but drive), giving rise to the depth of the human sickness, the compulsion to repeat. Here we no longer have to do with life, but the pure form of the death drive. Kant cannot imagine that someone would want their own destruction, but Lacan pictures this, not as an extreme, but the human situation; “on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not.”[17]

My point is not to refute either Sade or Kant, but to indicate how the worst forms of evil might be associated with the law. To call this “radical evil” is obviously as mistaken as to imagine that there is a highest moral principle obtainable through the will. Both are mistaken, but the lie of this mistake is the universal deception which Paul equates with the sinful orientation to law.

[1] 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).

[2] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:421).

[3] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:420).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Jonathan Bennett, 2017 )15. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf

[5] Metaphysics of Morals, 68 (Ak 4:452).

[6] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 39.

[7] Ibid, 1.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 88.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25. Cited in Zupančič, 89.

[12] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 153.

[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 36.

[14] Zupančič, 2.

[15] Evans, 100.

[16] Zupančič, 100.

[17] Ibid.

Hegel’s Reconciliation: A New Form of Divine Consciousness

In Anselm’s atonement theory God’s honor has been impugned and needs restored and in Calvin’s penal substitution God’s law requires punishment and Christ renders payment for this punishment. In both instances, it is Christ’s power or the amount of honor or the amount of the payment due, that requires his divinity (so he can meet the amount required), but the divinity of Christ is not the primary focus. His divinity enables him to restore the honor or make the payment, but his divine nature, though necessary to render satisfaction, is not itself given or shared. The New Testament makes it clear that it is the divine nature, the person of God, the life of the Spirit, given through Christ. It is not that God receives payment but that humanity receives God through being reconciled into the life of the Trinity. As Peter describes, the point is to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4); as Revelation describes, there will be direct incorporation into the divine name and presence (Rev. 22:4), and as John says, “we are called the children of God” (I John 3:1-2). While Anselm and Calvin rightly perceive there is a gap or divide that needs to be bridged, it is not simply honor, will, or legal righteousness which Christ provides, it is unity with God, reconciliation with the divine image (in which we were created), and entry into knowing God and sharing in his life. Christ completes the divine image for which humans were made, yet this fundamental truth of Christianity has been obscured.

This direct access into the life of God was obscured by pagan or Greek notions (taken up in theology) that God is unknowable or inaccessible. Christians, such as Anselm, took up Greek rational and philosophical arguments in which God is known only indirectly or negatively, such that God is “something than which nothing greater can be thought.” This greatness or absoluteness is ultimately empty, nothing, or darkness, in Anselm’s own description. This apophaticism became the norm in nominalism, which presumes universal trues are not directly knowable, and that God in his immanence is unavailable. The Kantian divide between subject and object or between the noumena (things in themselves) and the phenomena (the experience of things) was presumed to be an unbridgeable gap. Not only the reality of God but the reality of the world was felt to be beyond knowing.

The philosopher/theologian who did the most to combat this notion was G.W.F. Hegel, who bluntly described Christianity as the bringing together of subject (humans) and object (God). Hegel refers to Christianity as the religion of reconciliation, as it brings together those things which would, from the human side remain separate. “The Christian religion is the religion of reconciliation— of the world with God. God, it is said [2 Cor. 5:18—19], has reconciled the world with himself. The fall of the world from God means that it has fixated itself as finite consciousness, as the consciousness of idols, consciousness of the universal not as such but rather in external ways or in regard to finite purposes.”[1]

To many, Hegel appeared so radically positive that he was and is dismissed as arrogant and unchristian, yet his primary point is nothing more than the teaching of the New Testament, that the knowledge, power, and nature of God are directly accessible in Christ (2 Peter 1:2-4). The “consummate religion,” Christianity in Hegel’s estimate, brings “subjective consciousness and its object, namely God” into direct relationship through the spirit. “The consciousness that knows, and the absolute object that is known, are both spirit, and hence the concept of spirit is what relates humanity and the absolute to each other.”[2] For Hegel this is the point of Christianity, this is why it is the “consummate religion,” as through the incarnation it accomplishes reconciliation between God and man. This reconciliation brings together the divine and human, in the incarnation, the results of which are granted to all through the gift of the spirit.

Everyone can know God. He refers to the church father, Tertullian, claiming, that with the advent of Christianity even children have a knowledge of God, which only the wisest men of antiquity aspired to.[3] This knowing God and making God human and humans God, is directly concerned with the sharing of the divine with the human in Christ. Only God can share God, “It is only God who can reveal himself, not an external force or understanding that might unlock him.”[4] Hegel too, speaks of sin and finitude, but only God can make himself available to humanity through himself (in spite of sin). It is not simply a matter of will or morality, it is a matter of divinity. The finite spirit of humanity (its contentment with finitude) was abolished and “Thus spirit became sufficiently capable of absolute consciousness for God to reveal or manifest himself. Spirit is precisely this image of God.”[5]

Consciousness of God ushers in the capacity for a fullness of consciousness of the world and of the self. God’s self-consciousness, shared through Christ and the spirit, is the power of consciousness. God in Christ brings together the absolute object (God) in a concrete capacity for knowing. God reveals himself, but this revelation is the enabling of consciousness. “Revelation, manifestation is itself its character and content. That is to say, revelation, manifestation is the being of God for consciousness, indeed, the revelation for consciousness that he is himself spirit for spirit, i.e., that he is consciousness and for consciousness.”[6]

The finite understanding is incapable of bringing together subject and object, and in this Kant is correct, but this finitude is overcome through the incarnation. In other religions, and in a failed form of Christianity, “God is still something other than what he reveals himself to be. God is the inner and the unknown; he is not as he appears to consciousness.”[7] But in the true Christian faith, he reveals himself and this revelation is definitive of truth and knowing the truth. Knowing this truth is not simply knowing historical facts or affirming the historical truth of the faith. “Whoever possesses it knows the true and cognizes God as he is. A Christian religion that did not cognize God, or in which God is not revealed, would be no Christian religion at all. Its content is the truth itself in and for itself, and it consists in the being of truth for consciousness.”[8] For Hegel, this is the meaning of atonement and reconciliation.

Outside of Christ the world has “fixated itself as finite consciousness, as the consciousness of idols, consciousness of the universal not as such but rather in external ways or in regard to finite purposes.”[9] However, the estrangement involved in this finite consciousness prepares the way for the “turning point,” which becomes explicit in the cross. “Reconciliation begins with differentiated entities standing opposed to each other—God, who confronts a world that is estranged from him, and a world that is estranged from its essence. They are in conflict with one another, and they are external to one another. Reconciliation is the negation of this separation, this division, and means that each cognizes itself in the other, finds itself in its essence.”[10] The estrangement disappears in reconciliation.

It is not clear whether Hegel pictures estrangement as a necessary evil, but it is a state in which evil is made a possibility. The separation results in the realization “that I exist for myself,” (a necessary stage) and this “is where evil lies.”[11] There is no avoiding this possibility: “Inasmuch as it is spirit, humanity has to progress to this antithesis of being-for-self as such. Humans must have ‘their antithesis’ as their objective—what for them is the good, the universal, their vocation. . . In this separation being for-self is posited and evil has its seat; here is the source of all wrong, but also the point where reconciliation has its ultimate source. It is what produces the disease and is at the same time the source of health.”[12] As he states it in another lecture, “This separation is the source of all ill, the poisoned chalice from which human beings drink death and decay; at the same time this point where humanity is firmly posited as evil is the point where reconciliation has its source. For to posit oneself as evil is the implicit sublation of evil.”[13] Humans initially recognize they are not what they should be, and this realization of rupture gives rise to a desperate grasping (being-for-itself) in which the soul is felt to be naked, empty, or lacking. For the truth to appear as a possibility the “infinite anguish, the pure depth of the soul” in its anguish and contradiction must be experienced so as to point to the need for resolution.[14] Realizing finitude, differentiation, and separation, is the necessary ground for reconciliation.

The recognition of differentiation allows for return, but this is the movement which God himself enacts, and is part of who he is. “This consciousness consummates religion as the cognition of God as spirit, for God is spirit in the process of differentiation and return. . .”[15] In Christ on the cross is the pinnacle of separation, which is the inauguration of reconciliation. “This is because all differentiation, all finitude, though it is a transitory moment, is a moment of the process of the divine nature, which it develops, and hence it is grounded within the divine nature itself.”[16] Death on a cross confronts separation and negation, and the giving of the spirit through this reconciling act of love, is the movement of exaltation. Human fragility and mortal weakness are not ‘outside’ God but the entry point into who God is.

In its development, this process is the going forth of the divine idea into the uttermost cleavage, even to the opposite pole of the anguish of death, which is itself the absolute reversal, the highest love, containing the negation of the negative within itself and being in this way the absolute reconciliation, the sublation of the prior antithesis between humanity and God. The end is presented as a resolution into glory, the festive assumption of humanity in the divine idea.[17]

To repent and to turn to the reality of God is to have one’s estranged finitude taken up into God’s eternality – “to be implicitly the unity of divine and human nature, and the process of eternally positing this unity.”[18]

The realization of this unity is a new consciousness or certainty, which is the knowing and freedom imparted by the spirit. The Subject and the truth of subjectivity and personhood are realized in the spirit. The work of the spirit, or the very definition of spirit, is the unity of the divine and human, which Hegel refers to as the realization of the “absolute concept.” “Since we call the absolute concept the divine nature, the idea of spirit is to be the unity of divine and human nature. Humanity has arrived at this intuition. But the divine nature is itself only this, to be absolute spirit; hence precisely the unity of divine and human nature is itself absolute spirit.”[19] The spirit is the process of and reality of the bringing together of the human and divine. In the spirit thought and being are united, which is not simply the proof of the ontological argument, but is the accomplishment of God in Christ through the spirit.

While Hegel thinks Anselm’s argument (the continual touch point in this lecture), bringing together thought and being, is a legitimate presupposition, the bringing together of the two is the accomplishment of reconciliation. Where Anselm presupposes this must be the case, Hegel maintains it is a reality that must be shown, and this is the work of reconciliation. The apparent incompatibility between subject and object (the evil subject and the infinite God), is not the truth, but the unity between the divine and human, which is the truth, must be demonstrated. “The truth of this unity must therefore appear to the subject. But how can it appear to humanity in the latter’s present condition of immediacy, rupture, evil, anguish, being-within-self, and so on? It is God who appears, the concrete God, in sensible presence, in the shape of the singular human being, which is the one and only sensible shape of spirit.”[20]

It is not on the human side that being, divinity, life and spirit are made possible, it is on the side of God. God creates the world and finite spirit, in their separation, but then God reconciles what is alien to himself. The realization of the separation evokes the need for reconciliation, but this is already who God is. “Because other-being or difference is already present within the divine idea (indeed, is what makes it spirit), the other-being, the finitude, the weakness, the frailty of human nature is not to do any harm to that divine unity which forms the substance of reconciliation.”[21]

Like Origen and Maximus, Hegel sees the reconciling work of Christ as an eternal fact about God. “For it, Christ’s history is a ‘divine history,’ ‘the eternal history, the eternal movement, which God himself is.’ To say that ‘Christ has died for all’ is to understand this not as an individual act but as a moment in the divine history, the moment in which other-being and separation are sublated.”[22] Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, are eternal facts about God such that God, by definition, is the closure of the gap between subject and object, thought and being, divine and human. Faith is the appropriation of this Trinitarian truth, the reality of which accounts for the formation of the Holy Spirit community, the Church (a subject for another time).

[1] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 65.

[2] Ibid, 61.

[3]Ibid, 61.

[4] Ibid, 64.

[5] Ibid, 62.

[6] Ibid, 63.

[7] Ibid, 64.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 65.

[10] Ibid, 171-172.

[11] Ibid, 206

[12] Ibid, 206.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 213.

[15] Ibid, 110.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 132.

[18] Ibid, 65

[19] Ibid, 66.

[20] Ibid, 31.

[21] Ibid, 42-43.

[22] Ibid, 45.

Rowan Williams and the Rereading of Hegel

Perhaps there is no philosopher more blatantly misinterpreted than G.W.F Hegel. Hegel is said to be a pantheist, reducing all that is external to the self into possession of the rational self (“the same”) such that all difference is made univocal, monological, and subject to reason (synthesis). Hegel is made the boogeyman, whose pretensions must be opposed so as to preserve the Other, and the finitude of reason must acknowledge absolute difference and otherness, resisting synthesis (sameness). Hegel is portrayed, variously, as a super-rationalist or as marking the end of reason, and he is either an atheist or a heterodox Christian who imagines God in process. In much (most?) of what is written on Hegel, though there is not a lot of agreement, his Christianity and his self-description as an orthodox Christian working within the parameters of Trinitarian theology, is often not accounted for or mentioned. The exception to this reading, are those theologians reading him from an Eastern Orthodox orientation, such as Sergius Bulgakov, or even the Swiss Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar. In this list I would include Rowan Williams, who wrote his dissertation on Vladimir Lossky, though he credits Gillian Rose with his reconsideration of Hegel. Williams recognizes that Hegel is not effacing difference in synthesis and sameness, but in Christ this difference is preserved but overcome.[1]

This reconsideration of Hegel is important, as Hegel develops a full appreciation of the meaning of Trinity and the Trinitarian necessity for thought. As Williams points out in his key article on Hegel,[2] thought is ultimately dependent upon what God has done in Christ. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[3] God, in the tradition, is portrayed as completely Other to the world, which means he is unthinkable, discrete and independent. But this notion of God leaves out the fulness of a Trinitarian understanding. In his philosophy of religion, the culmination and final project of Hegel, “God is defined as ‘the living process of positing his Other, the world, which comprehended in its divine form is His Son.’”[4] The “consummate religion” in Hegel’s description of Christianity, in this final work of his life, is “the religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself – spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined (‘positive’ or ‘revealed’) faith.”[5] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the other. God is not an isolated Subject, but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Much like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy aimed at dispelling the notion of private language (specifically as illustrated in Augustine), Hegel pictures self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. “To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such thing as a consciousness that is ‘privately mine’).[6] Thus, Hegel defends the melding of thought and being, but this defense is part of his explaining the doctrine of the Trinity, the work of Christ, the meaning of createdness, “which leads to the full and mature thinking of God, as spirit in community.[7] The condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation.

This is why Hegel focuses on Anselm’s ontological argument, which in Anselm’s version he judges inadequate, but which he would rescue. While he is not unappreciative of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, picturing God in his simplicity as unthinkable, Hegel would transmute the Christian tradition of divine simplicity “into the terms of a process” rather than in terms of pure negation.[8] For example, Anselm would equate the greatest thought with God, and yet Anselm erases all content for this thought. The God that is thought (to be or to have existence) is absolutely different from any other existing thing, such that the world is rendered comparably nonexistent. Hegel’s point is that this notion of absolute otherness is at once contradictory, rendering thought an impossibility. “If there is what is not and could not be thought, there would be some sort of life or reality with which consciousness could not be in relation.”[9] Hegel may be thinking of Kant, but also Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, maintaining Kant is confused. “We should have no word or idea for such a ‘reality’ (we could not even call a reality what we could not in any way engage with).”[10] As in Anselm’s cosmological argument, in which he pictures God, in comparison to the world and normal thought, as “absolutely different,” there is a contradiction. If something is “absolutely different” than there is no comparison to be made and no thought of God whatsoever. “For Hegel, an otherness that couldn’t be thought would not even be a negation, because it would not negate anything that could be thought (if it did, it would not be absolutely other; part of its definition would be given as ‘not x’).”[11]

Anselm is in a line of thinkers who picture thinking absolute difference as the thought of God. Hegel’s point is this destroys thought itself, as God is Truth, the ground of truth and reason, and to leave God out of thought – as the impossible thought – destroys thought. The universal and eternal Truth of God holds all things together, and knowing anything is to enter into this relational understanding. “To say that there was thinking and . . . whatever, that there was no identity between nature, action, history, law, society or religion and thinking, would be to conclude that thinking is not what we do, and that therefore we cannot think what we are.”[12] Thinking is based on a relational understanding, in which thinking and knowing relate to the self, the other and to God, but where things are imagined to exist discretely (without relationship) than nothing is thinkable. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[13]

If God is beyond thought, Williams is quick to point out, this also means that not only thinking and knowing are rendered impossible, but sensation, emotion or love are also empty. Hegel’s point, in the Logic is, “there are no discrete and simple objects for thought . . . “ as “thought is bound to dissolve the finite perception, the isolated object, as such, moving from the level of diversity (a contingent multiplicity of things) to that of complementary opposition: each ‘thing’ is defined by not being another, lives only in the absence of another, and so ‘passes over’ from being a discrete object to being a moment in a complex movement.”[14] This complex movement allows for no final resting place for thought, no static presence, or no end to movement. Certainly the self, is not a discrete object for thought or something we come to possess. The self-presence which a misoriented desire is in pursuit of, is that static letter of the law, that immovable written word, that object in the mirror, and is not focused on a Person or the personal.

Again, it may be helpful to think of Anselm arriving at his final thought, the place of the word arising within himself, and yet this word cannot speak as it is before language (it is the place of language). He pictures an end to the movement of thought, but this end is no-thought, no-movement, no-place, but an unthinkable apophatic interiority. Anselm thinks the greatest thought by ceasing all other thoughts. As with Descartes, all relationality, all movement, all embodiment, is excluded. One is left with an empty, static thought, in which there is an end to thinking. Rather than demonstrating the existence of God, the God who is beyond thought, establishes doubt, darkness, and nothingness, as prime reality.[15]

In contrast, Hegel is picturing thought, in its dialectic form as that which “outlives and ‘defeats’ stable, commonsense perception, not by abolishing it from the outside, but by the penetration of its own logic and process.”[16] It opens up to and requires relating thought as that which is grounded in God. “Everything can be thought” and “nothing is beyond reconciliation” as thought is the “overall environment” establishing harmony and relationship between all things. God is where thought begins and, in this light, there “can be no such thing as unthinkable contingency.”[17] The particular is thinkable in its relational harmonies and this relational entry into understanding is made possible by the fact that God gives himself for humanity, for thought.

This is the power and love of God. “God’s goodness has to give way to God’s power – but to a power which acts only in a kind of self-devastation.[18] God’s kenotic self-giving love makes God available in the Son through the Spirit. “It means both that the life of God comes to its fullness in the world solely by the death, the stripping, of the human – the human, that is conceived as something solid in itself, as the finite negation or contradiction of the divine, and that human fragility and mortal weakness are not ‘outside’ God, in the sense that they do not prevent union with God. After Calvary, then, human self-awareness, the human knowledge of humanity as vulnerable and finite, becomes inseparable from awareness of God.”[19]

Human weakness is not the end but the beginning of human understanding. Weakness is not something alone (something in and of itself) but this weakness is “a moment in the life of God.”[20] It is the place God meets us and we meet God. The dispossession of the self and of the thought of self in self-emptying, is the entry into the life of the Spirit. “Only through a history of the emptying out or bringing to nothing of the fullness of Spirit” can “thinking establish itself, because only in such an event can we definitely lose the pretensions of the individual consciousness.”[21] The self as a thinking thing is beyond thought. Despite Descartes, and the confused reading of Hegel, this is not a fusion of subject and object (sameness) in some mystical synthesis. It is itself a sign of the limitations of thought without God, or of what Verstand (understanding) alone can only think fragmentarily or episodically.”[22] The Cartesian cogito splits thought and the reality of self, isolating thought from the body and the world.

The condition for thinking is impossible apart from God who is mediated through the Son and Spirit to himself and the world. The “Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine self-hood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God’s act of being (as ‘Father’ and ‘Son’) is what constitutes God as ‘Spirit’, as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.”[23] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[24]

Hegel’s continual refrain in this final lecture, is the love of God, expressed through the Son and realized in the Spirit.[25] The “concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealizable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.”[26] Thinking is the realization of self in reconciliation with God. “Hegel asserts that the ‘reversal of consciousness begins’ at Calvary. The beginnings of the Church have to do with the discovery of reconciliation, the discovery that freedom is realized on the far side of dispossession so total that it is now impossible to think of a God who claims the ‘right’ to be separate from humanity.”[27] “That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.”[28]

[1] See the article on Williams by Matheson Russel, “Dispossession and Negotiation: Rowan Williams on Hegel and Political Theology,” in On Rowan Williams: Critical Essays (Cascade Books, 2014) 88.

[2] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007).

[3] Ibid, 36.

[4] Ibid, 41.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39 And here to avoid equating Hegelian theory with something like process theology, the Maximian formula, creation is incarnation, enters in. God is always creator, and always the Father of the Son.

[9] Ibid, 36.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 36.

[14] Ibid, 37.

[15] Ibid, 47 “God’s ‘exceeding’ of thought cannot itself be thought or spoken, and, in this regard,” we see Hegel’s convergence with Wittgenstein.

[16] Ibid, 37.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 45.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 38.

[23] Ibid, 42.

[24] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[25] It brings to mind the work of Julia Kristeva who pictures all dialogue as an act carried out in love (see here).

[26] Hays, ibid op. cit., 44.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid, 42. Williams is quoting Hegel, but provides no reference.

The Uses of Language: Julia Kristeva and Kenotic Love

Language is the medium in which we live and move, and what we make of or do with language, is determinative of the reality in which we live. In this post-theological age, it may not occur to us to consider that we have an orientation toward or within language. Psychoanalysis, or the talking cure (as Freud described it) is nearly the last realm in which what we do with words, linguistic exchange (even in dreams), how we linguistically constitute ourselves towards others and ourselves (transference and countertransference), is an object of study.

Psychologists have noted that young children pass through a fundamental depression just prior to acquisition of language. Julia Kristeva describes the passage into language as an abandonment by the mother or the narcissistic paradise in which all needs are met, and entry into the symbolic world of the father. “The child must abandon its mother and be abandoned by her in order to be accepted by the father and begin talking … [L]anguage begins in mourning …”[1] Both death and abandonment and the establishment of the self are implicated in language acquisition.

In the description of G. W. F. Hegel, language brings simultaneous awareness of death and its refusal. As he describes, inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.”[2] The “faculty” for language and the “faculty” for death arise together, but of course the peculiar faculty for life, at least in the Christian understanding is interwoven with this “faculty” of death and language. Which is to say, this focus and enquiry into language is first and properly the domain of theology.

As Kristeva describes, the work of the cross is to address us at this most basic and deep psychological level: “The ‘scandal of the cross’, the logos or language of the cross … is embodied, I think not only in the psychic and physical suffering which irrigates our lives … but even more profoundly in the essential alienation that conditions our access to language, in the mourning that accompanies the dawn of psychic life. By the quirks of biology and family life we are all of us melancholy mourners, witnesses to the death that marks our psychic inception.”[3] Yet it is through this passage, from out of blissful narcissism, that we discover the other. We form connections, not simply warm support in an extension of the life in the womb, but the possibility of love and hate, life and death, self and other, through entry into language. Kristeva depicts this slightly hellish condition as precisely the place in which Christ meets us: “Christ abandoned, Christ in hell, is of course the sign that God shares the condition of the sinner. But He also tells the story of that necessary melancholy beyond which we humans may just possibly discover the other, now in the symbolic interlocutor rather than the nutritive breast.”[4] Language is for finding the other, for recognizing and negotiating mortality, and yet it can also be deployed as a refusal of this reality.

The matrix of language can be made to constitute its own reality, and can act as an obstacle rather than a bridge. In this understanding, attaching ourselves to the law, the immovable symbolic order, is simultaneously a means of inscribing ourselves into stone (becoming immortal) but the stone is an epitaph. Meaning attached to language per se, to the occurring of the sign, mistakes the letter of the law for its meaning. Kristeva raises the example of Chinese reification of the word: “In classical Chinese (for example, the I Ching), ‘to believe’ and ‘to be worthy of faith’ are expressed by the word xin, where the ideogram contains the signs for man and speech. Does ‘to believe’ therefore mean ‘to let speech act?’”[5] In the case of Japanese, being a speaker of the language conveys the spirit of Japanese identity. Much like the Jew, marked by Hebrew speaking and law-keeping, attachment to the sign conveys an immovable essence, which Paul characterizes as deadly. The reification of the word seems to be the universal tendency.

The philosopher often uses words much like the mathematician employs numbers, as a coherent symbol system which is or produces truth. In this understanding, language works within a closed system, in which words and symbols constitute their own reality. Thinking is being, as the thought contains the essence of reality. Rather than language leading from death to resurrection, we can be haunted by negativity, rejection, castration, death drive. In the language of the Apostle Paul, we can be caught between wanting and doing, between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and we can find ourselves overwhelmed with the ego, that ungraspable “I” in the mirror. The ego cogito is ever allusive, and yet pursuit of the ego poses as salvation.

To pass from death to resurrection requires a relinquishing of the ego. What Paul describes as kenotic self-giving love, is a relinquishment of stasis, being, and position, so as to reach out to and exist with and in the other. This kenotic lover does not insist upon his status or position in the symbolic order. This deadly attachment to law, is a futile attempt to have existence within the self – to establish the self-image as distinct from and not subject to the other. The ego is preserved at the cost of love. In the description of Graham Ward:

To be redemptive, to participate in the economy of redemption opened and perfected by Christ the form of God’s glory, our making cannot be in our name. Our making cannot, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, make a name for ourselves. Our making cannot reify our own autonomy. Such making is only death and idolatry. Our making must be in and through an abandonment to an operation that will instigate the crisis of our representations. Our making has to experience its Passion, its descent into the silent hiatus.[6]

The recognition of mortality, forsakenness, alienation, is the first step toward life. According to Kristeva, “It is because I am separate, forsaken, alone vis-àvis the other that I can psychologically cross the divide that is the condition of my existence and achieve not only ecstasy in completion (complétude: reunion with the father, himself a symbolic substitute for the mother) but also eternal life (resurrection) in the imagination.”[7] She is specifically thinking of life in Christ as completing the journey to love. ”For the Christian believer the completion of faith is real completion, and Christ, with whom the believer is exhorted to identify, expiates in human form the sin of all mankind before achieving glory in resurrection.”[8] The passage through death with Christ enables, through tarrying with the negative, kenotic love.

As Slavoj Žižek explains I Corinthians 13, this love necessitates self-emptying:

the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love I am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge.[9]

Žižek’s negation rests upon an atheistic reading of Hegel, but the Christian Hegel sees negation, not as an end in itself, but as the merging of the infinite and finite. The infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[10] As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[11] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. God in Christ emptied himself, not of deity, but of the presumption of infinity. “He existed in the form of God, [but] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Php. 2:5–7). Paul is recommending Christ as the model for the Christian, who obviously cannot empty themselves of deity, but they can “have this attitude” of self-sacrificial giving. They can “hold fast to the word of life” (Php. 2:16) in taking up this self-emptying Word.

Language is made for love, for connection to the other, such that all true dialogue is an act of love. Speaking as a reaching for the other is a relinquishment of the isolated ego. All true discourse is an act of love. According to Kristeva, “The speaking subject is a loving subject.”[12] But at the same time, “Love is a death sentence which causes me to be.”[13] As Ward explains, “All representation is a kenotic act of love towards the other; all representation involves transference – being caught up in the economy of giving signs.”[14] We gain access to both God and the neighbor through transferential (mutually indwelling) discourse of the kenotic Word. The task of theology, the work of the Christian, is to recognize how it is that the language of Christianity shapes us according to a different order of desire – (as Hans Frei describes) the unique “cultural linguistics of the Christian religion.”[15] In the vivid explanation of Ward:

As such, Christian theology is not secondary but participatory, a sacramental operation. It is a body of work at play within the language of the Christian community. Our physical bodies are mediated to us through our relation to other physical bodies and the mediation of those relationships through the body of the signs. Thus we are mapped onto a social and political body. The meaning of these signs is mediated to us through the body of Christ, eucharistic and ecclesial, so that we are incorporated into that spiritual body. Transcorporality is the hallmark of a theological anthropology. [16]

The deep grammar of the body of Christ inducts into an alternative linguistic community, in which lack and negation become the opening to love and entry into the corporate body of Christ, sharing a body, indwelling one another, through the “transcorporality” of Christ.

[1] Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Colum[1]bia University Press, 1988) pp. 40. Cited in Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 207.

[2] According to Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) xii.

[3] Kristeva, 41.

[4] Kristeva, 41.

[5] Kristeva, 35

[6] Ward, 215.

[7] Kristeve, 35.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute — Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York, Verso 2000) 147. Cited in Ward, 264.

[10] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019), 12.

[11] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[12] Kristeva, 170.

[13] Kristeva, 36, Cited in Ward, 212.

[14] Ward, 212.

[15] Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 20. Cited in Ward, 217.

[16] Ward, 217-218.

Hegel’s Ontological Proof as an Account of Christianity in a Postmodern Age

Of the apologetic proofs for God, Hegel considers the ontological argument key, not simply as an argument for the existence of God but as the argument which captures the significance of Christianity. It is in conjunction with this argument that he lays out his doctrine of the Trinity, his understanding of the atonement, describes the various (Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist) views of communion, describes the significance of the fall, and in which he pictures the completion or point of the Christian experience of God and God’s integration into man through the Spirit. He does not see the argument as a rational proof for God which stands along or separate from the Christian religion, but this argument is integral to that which Christianity brings about. The bringing together of thought and being, that which Anselm presupposes and which Kant critiques, cannot be either understood or accomplished apart from the work of God in Christ. That is Christianity, as spelled out by Hegel, provides the content for the argument and shows how the promise of the argument is accomplished (his critique of Anselm, that he does not demonstrate the proof).

It is not that the argument contains a form of rationality which offers a proof of Christianity or God separate from Christianity, rather the argument sets forth the accomplishment of Christianity in a form of reason which does not otherwise exist (in Hegel’s estimate). It is perfectly rational, but is a reason known only in the revelation of Christ. Thus, he can both critique Anselm’s form of the argument and Kant’s critique of the argument as inadequate, but true insofar as they go, because what both fail to see is that the legitimacy of the argument rests upon what God has done in Christ; namely give the Spirit as the means of knowing God. God can be thought and, in this thought, there is life and being (spirit). This is the primary premise of the Christian faith which is succinctly set forth by the argument. (Anselm presumes this without explaining it, and Kant in the spirit of the age, dismisses it).

The history of the argument, its naïve presentation by Anselm taken up as the foundation of modernity through Descartes, critiqued and set aside by Kant, captures the modern and postmodern fate of ontology. Unfortunately, this fate, given that Hegel is largely misinterpreted, reviled as a heretic, and set aside, unfolds absent the Hegelian insight into the argument and its importance. The degree to which modernity and its ontological assumptions inherited from Anselm and presumed by Descartes would dominate the age of modernity, may not have been clear to Hegel. The presumption of Anselm and Descartes, challenged by Kant, captures the movement of modernity and postmodernity, yet Hegel is already there, bringing a corrective to each phase of the fate of the argument. It is not a matter of metaphysics versus anti-metaphysics but it is a matter of Christ, revelation, knowing God, and redemption versus their absence.

In this sense, the argument is best approached not as a rational proof which will either stand or fall within the contours which Anselm, Kant, or Descartes present it (which is not to say they did not see the argument as profoundly important). Where each of them fail is where Hegel begins. For Hegel Christianity provides the content or makes real what a mere formal argument can only indicate. God can be thought and known because this for-thinking and knowing is precisely who he is. Rather than judging the various presentations of the argument (some of which Hegel does), Hegel’s main concern is to show how Christianity accomplishes what the argument promises. But he also indicates the argument might be used, much as Slavoj Žižek uses the Cartesian reduction of the argument (the cogito), as a barometer of human spiritual health. Either there is a gap between thought and being (the human sickness, the failure of the argument), and all of human life is a grasping attempt to combine the two, or one receives the Spirit in whom being is thought.

In the first estate, the infinite and finite, being and thought stand opposed. The thinking thing, the depth of what it means to be human, fails to achieve life and this failure shows itself in the compulsions of evil. In Hegel’s depiction of the fall, knowing or cognition (which is not itself evil) entails a “cleavage, rupture, or severance within the self and from whatever is outside the self.” (As the editor (of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion) points out, the “divided will” of Romans 7 is probably what he has in mind.)[1] In the second estate, there is reconciliation between the infinite and the finite and the very being of God is manifest (revealed) and the eternal nature (spirit) is made known in human consciousness and the liberating effects of freedom and life are realized. Thus, the argument can function as the indicator of a psychological and spiritual state, in which the failure of the argument describes the human sickness (the spilt between thought and being), and the success of the argument depends upon reconciliation and redemption.

The human sickness or failure is a result of remaining split in knowing (between good and evil) which Hegel describes as “being-for-myself” or “singularizing myself in a way that cuts me off from the universal” or from knowing God.[2] As he puts it, “Now the consciousness of this antithesis, of this separation of the ego and the natural will, is the consciousness of an infinite contradiction. This ego exists in immediate relation with the natural will and with the world, yet at the same time it is repelled from them. This is the infinite anguish, the suffering of the world.”[3] Recognition of the antithesis or the state of “being-for-self as such” is a dialectically necessary step toward health. Being split is the disease but the recognition of the disease is the beginning of health.

In his reading of the Genesis story, there is the necessary possibility pronounced by God and fulfilled by Christ, “Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:22).” There is the temptation of a knowledge that leads to deceit and pride, however “it is placed on the lips of God himself that precisely knowledge—the specific knowledge of good and evil in general, that is—constitutes the divine in humanity.”[4] As he explains, “The deep insight of this story is that the eternal history of humanity, to be consciousness, is contained in it: the original divine idea, the image of God; the emergence of consciousness, knowledge of good and evil, (and at the same time responsibility;) [the knowledge of good and evil emerges] as something that both ought not to be, i.e., it ought not to remain as knowledge, and also as the means by which humanity is divine.”[5] Knowing God is only possible, in Hegel’s estimate, if a prior antithetical knowing precedes the unifying knowledge of God. “Knowledge heals the wound that it itself is.”[6]

In Hegel’s reading, the Genesis story contains inherent contradictions: “according to the first view, humanity was created immortal but lost its immortal nature because of sin; according to the second view, humanity was created mortal but had the possibility of gaining immortality by eating of the mythical tree, an opportunity that was lost.” In pointing out the contradictions, he attempts to show that the “punishment” theme is mythical, but this also elucidates the truth that knowledge, gone bad, is the origin of evil.[7] However, the power of knowledge (to “become like one of us”) indicates something more than the original human likeness to God. Becoming like God (Gen. 3:22), indicates “the likeness that is to be regained. It is represented as something that has already come to be, expressing generally this other aspect of knowledge, namely, that it is in itself the turning point.”[8] This “likeness” contains the promise of the new Adam.

Hegel’s doctrine of the atonement, the defeat of evil or overcoming of the split between being and knowing, is already contained in the Genesis story. The serpent represents autonomous knowledge “found outside of Adam and indeed on the side of evil.” This knowledge is without being or life, but the one whose heel is bruised by this evil will crush the head of the serpent.[9] The consciousness of the unity of divine and human is present in the fall, and it is through this consciousness as imparted through the second Adam, that the first Adam is made complete. The first moment or first Adam or first knowledge is the necessary prelude to the second. “This consciousness consummates religion as the cognition of God as spirit, for God is spirit in the process of differentiation (and return,) which we [have] seen in the eternal idea.”[10]

Like Origen and Maximus, Hegel pictures what is happening in Christ as what is eternally true about God. Not that God is somehow coming to fulness in history, but that history contains the movement of the eternal. “This means that the unity of divine and human nature has a significance not only for the definition of human nature but just as much for that of the divine. This is because all differentiation, all finitude, though it is a transitory moment, is a moment of the process of the divine nature, which it develops, and hence it is grounded within the divine nature itself.”[11] The being of God shared through the humanity of Christ brings together divine and human, being and knowing, defeating and bringing to completion the moment of alienation and evil.

According to Hegel, to say that God has being, as in the Anselmian proof, lacks any real substance, and so too knowing or thinking (the concept) apart from its Christian content. He describes this lecture series (on the philosophy of religion), as making the transition or bringing together thought and being. Where they stand alone, they are one-sided or incomplete: “Neither of them must be defined solely as the term that permanently has the initiative or is the origin; they must rather be portrayed as passing over into the other, i.e., each of them must be a posited term. In this way each displays itself as a transition into an other, or as a moment, so that it must be demonstrated of both of them that they are moments.”[12] Hegel’s project then, is to show the inadequate understanding of both (thought and being as separated) and how it is they are unified through Christianity. The ontological proof, in Hegel’s description, is only a formal (paltry) concept apart from the content given to being and knowing in “the consummate religion.”[13] In the ordinary sense, concepts or thinking are just in the head and are not directly connected with reality or being (Kant’s point), but this modern sensibility is a sign of the human disease. The disease is to be spiritless or lifeless or without access to being.

Hegel makes reference to the Cartesian copula, not simply to point out the gap between thought and being (as Kant would have it) but to suggest that the “is,” though empty in itself, points to its satisfaction in Christ. The “is” is a form of truth, though in and of itself it is lacking any substance. “Solely for the idea is this ‘Is’ the form of truth— but not as though the “Is” gives a content, a particular truth.”[14] Christ provides the content, filling out the form universally present in human thought. “But the idea is realized for humanity only in the form of this single individual, and only one such individual—‘this’ individual—is the infinite unity in this subjectivity, in a “this” of this kind.[15] The idea is implicitly and naturally present, as expressed in the Cartesian cogito, but Kant is not wrong. Thought and being remain separate, whether in the individual, or as in Hegel’s illustration in any religion, such as Hinduism, which posits a multiplicity of incarnations. “It is only then when I posit only one ‘this’ that the unity is objective, that the idea is in and for itself for the first time.”[16]

Hegel describes a universal salvation, dismissing the Calvinist notion that only some are chosen, as the form of individual subjectivity (the “is”) indicates a universal form realized in Christ. “Once is always. The subject must have recourse to a subject, without option.”[17] There is a necessary exclusivity in the one, but an exclusivity that gives forth to universality. “The consummation of reality in immediate singular individuality is the most beautiful point of the Christian religion. For the first time the absolute transfiguration of finitude is intuitively exhibited so that everyone can give an account of it and have an awareness of it.”[18] The universality of Christianity is in its subjectivity. The “universal soil” or the common experience is not to be found in any outward circumstance, but in human interiority. The divided self, thought removed from being, the inward experience of alienation, is universal preparation for the spirit.[19]

The disease is spiritlessness, alienation, and separation and Hegel’s focus is to describe the cure. Or in terms of the ontological argument, it is to show how the truth of the argument is made a reality. Cognition or thought is not simply a human hobby, but knowing God (the point of Anselm’s argument) is the point of what it means to be human: “This cognition constitutes the highest stage of the spiritual being of humanity, i.e., of its religious determination. This is the vocation of humanity as human in general, to enter wholly into the consciousness of human finitude—the ray of eternal life that shines clearly for it within the finite.”[20] From here he unfolds how realization of the infinite in the finite is accomplished in the incarnation. [21]

The teaching of Christ is not itself the accomplishment (of the kingdom of the spirit), but is a preparation for its accomplishment (through Christ) by which the spirit will come: “The kingdom is the universal idea still presented in representational form; it enters into actuality through this individual, and the history of spirit, the concrete content of the kingdom of God, has to portray itself in this divine actuality.”[22] In the period of Christ’s teaching his primary proclamation is about the kingdom, and the divinity of Christ is as yet only implicit.[23]

The death of Christ is a full embrace of humanity and finitude, in which the separation or “divestment” of life and divinity are complete: “‘God has died, God himself is dead.’ This is a monstrous, fearful picture [Vorstellung], which brings before the imagination the deepest abyss of cleavage.”[24] It is through full realization of the cleavage, the absolute separation of life and thought, that the cleavage or separation can be overcome. “Reconciliation begins with differentiated entities standing opposed to each other—God, who confronts a world that is estranged from him, and a world that is estranged from its essence. They are in conflict with one another, and they are external to one another. Reconciliation is the negation. Reconciliation, consequently, is freedom and is not something quiescent; rather it is activity, the movement that makes the estrangement disappear.”[25]

It is through Christ’s death that the divine and human (being and thought) are brought together in the highest love. “It is precisely love [that is] the consciousness of the identity of the divine and the human, and this finitization is carried to its extreme, to death. Thus here we find an envisagement of the unity of the divine and the human at its absolute peak, the highest intuition of love.”[26] To love through the spirit is to divest oneself of ego or the drive toward being in the self, and to find life with and through the other. Death with Christ transforms the meaning of death. “This negative moment, which pertains only to spirit as such, is its inner conversion and transformation.”[27]

Hegel describes the death of Christ as making Christ available, consumable, or assimilable. Through his death we can assimilate Christ to our identity by taking him into ourselves. Hegel compares it to consuming an apple and then proceeds to the importance of communion. “Thus my eating an apple means that I destroy its organic self-identity and assimilate it to myself. That I can do this entails that the apple in itself (already in advance, before I take hold of it) has in its nature the character of being subject to destruction, and at the same time it is something that has in itself a homogeneity with my digestive organs such that I can make it homogeneous with myself.”[28] He has in mind the sacrament of communion in which Christ is either literally, or pictured, as being assimilable, but also the gift of the spirit which is poured out on all humankind.

To give a full account of the unification of thought and being, the infinite and the finite, is to describe in concrete terms how it is that the incarnation initiates this activity, culminating in Pentecost, the formation of the church and the realization of a community of the spirit. Woven throughout his lecture and indicated in the title, is the ontological proof of God. This proof turns out to require the entire content of the Christian religion (which I have only briefly referenced) to fill out its form and to give substance to its promise. The argument only takes on its full and final form, as Hegel presents it, in conjunction with this fuller reality and explanation.

(Sign up for the next PBI class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July to the week of August 23rd. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to sign up.)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 210.

[4] Ibid, 105.

[5] Ibid, 106.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 107. This is the editor’s succinct explanation.

[8] Ibid, 108.

[9] Ibid. Hegel is not always a carful reader of the story, and he seems to confuse who gets bruised.

[10] Ibid, 110.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, 175.

[13] This is my summation, but also referencing the editor’s summation of the 3^rd volume of lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Ibid, 11-15.

[14] Ibid, 111.

[15] Ibid, 114.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid, 115. The editor notes that Hegel is probably making direct reference to Pauline Christology as in Corinthians: 2 Cor. 5:14—15: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”

[19] Ibid, 116. “It occurs as a state of affairs; it is not God alone, the One, but rather a kingdom of God, the eternal as a homeland for spirit, the eternal as the dwelling place of subjectivity.”

[20] Ibid, 110.

[21] “The idea is realized for humanity; its appearance and existence occur only in this single individual.” Ibid, 112.

[22] Ibid, 123.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid, 125.

[25] Ibid, 171-2.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 126

[28] Ibid, 127.

Apologetics According to Maximus, Hegel, and Lonergan

The apologetic proofs such as the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, or historical arguments, “proving” Christianity may have their place, but traditional apologetic arguments are also guilty of misconstruing the very nature of Christian truth. Christianity is the proof – the incarnation of meaning, the enactment of inner truth, and the realization of historical truth. Incarnational truth is the truth revealed. To imagine we must prove the incarnation, miracles, or resurrection, is to miss that this is the proof. Christianity contains meaning, otherwise lacking. This truth is the beginning of true philosophy, true speculation, and true experience. The notion that the resurrection, the life of Christ, the incarnation, and the existence of God, rest on proofs so as to know them, is to trivialize the Truth. This is to get the cart before the horse. These “proofs” rest on a foundation of sand in a propositional and tautologous logic (on the order of mathematics) which is itself lacking in the substance of truth. We might argue for the truth of Christ on the basis of logic, or we might enter an alternative Logos and logic, in which truth is the system, the presumption, the realization, and the end.

Christ as the truth means truth is embodied and thus experienced in mind, body, and spirit such that the experience of love, virtue, self-sacrifice, and even faith is an imitation of Christ in which the Christian embodies the truth, making truth part of experience and bodied forth in and for the experience of others. Christianity is a realization of the truth. Proofs for Christianity, while they may serve some function, by their very nature, fall short of the immediate first-order realization of truth. As John writes, “The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself” (I John 5:10, NASB). So too all that goes with believing, such as obedience, imitating Christ, agape love, the transformation of the mind, are entry into the truth.

This does not mean truth by-passes the mind, any more than it by-passes the body, the will or human intention. The truth of Christ residing in the heart must be accessed, uncovered, practiced, willed and intended. As Maximus puts it, “In Him we live and move and have our being for he comes to be ‘in’ God through attentiveness, since he has not falsified the logos of being that preexists in God.”[1] The truth shows itself for the Christian in being true to the logos of Christ. The incarnate meaning of Christ requires an imitative alignment with Christ, as the truth is personal and centered on this particular Person. One can be true to this word or one can falsify the truth in his life. Note that Maximus speaks of attentiveness to the truth. As in the work of Bernard Lonergan, this truth requires intelligent judgments, evaluative deliberations, decisions and actions, with the continual guidance, model, and goal of Christ drawing along the process. To fail in this attentiveness is a failure to embody the truth. This following, discipleship, and faith is not a blind search for meaning, nor is it an attempt to establish meaning or logic, but it is an entry into discovery, realization, and insight, which provides a phenomenological, fully embodied intellectual coherence (intelligibility).

But to undertake this entry into truth requires a willing deference, a conscious mimesis, or a faith whose pathway is prearranged by the interior structures of intelligibility (what Maximus calls the logoi) entailing the cosmic order. “In honoring these logoi and acting in accordance with them, he places himself wholly in God alone, forming and configuring God alone throughout his entire being, so that he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by His condescension is and is called man for the sake of man.. . .”[2] Maximus carries on the work of Origen, in describing apocatastasis or divinization as the point or goal of humanity, but also as the purpose of creation. In Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things”[3] This is the path of discovery laid before humanity. All stand before Christ, faced with the question, “Who do you say that I am.”

As in all modes of discovery, the inquiry exceeds the understanding. The questioner has already begun to feel the force of meaning before the fulness of that meaning dawns. According to Maximus, the Christian “‘moves’ in God in accordance with the logos of well-being that preexists in God, since he is moved to action by the virtues; and he ‘lives’ in God in accordance with the logos of eternal being that also preexists in God.”[4] Jesus’ embodied meaning attracts through a mimetic force, which like every meaning exerts a pull, but this force is a divine gravity. The good, the true and the beautiful embodied in Christ is a perfect love, perfect friendship, perfect understanding of the Father, which brings peace, healing, and reconciliation, and this exerts a pull beyond acquisitive, rivalrous, jealous, mimetic desire, which in Maximus and Lonergan would amount to being inattentive or untrue.

Of course, one can fail in the task of truth, which in Maximus explanation is to abandon one’s own origin and is to be swept away toward nonbeing, and in this state one experiences instability and suffers from fearful disorders as he has traded truth for what is inferior and nonexistent.[5] The untruth is a form of suffering as it entails a loss of meaning, a loss of agape love, and a failure to be fully human, in falling short of the interpersonal truth of love. It would seem that to prove this on some other basis is already a loss of love and meaning.

In short, as Maximus describes, this meaning carries the weight of divinity. 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.”[6] For Hegel, “God becomes man generically, universally, essentially.”[7] In Hegel’s explanation, the hypostatic union lies at the base of all human religion and all seeking after truth. As James Yerkes explains, for Hegel “the reconciliation of God and man universally longed for in all religious traditions and only implicitly understood by thought, is now in Christianity concretely fulfilled and made explicit to and for thought.”[8] According to Hegel, “It was Christianity, by its doctrine of the Incarnation and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, that first gave to human consciousness a perfectly free relationship to the infinite and thereby made possible the comprehensive knowledge of mind [Geist] in its absolute infinitude.”[9] Incarnational truth, is the truth revealed. “Hegel is arguing that the entire event of Jesus of Nazareth is a religiously central paradigmatic event by which the truth of what ultimately is and the truth of the meaning of human existence are disclosed to human consciousness.”[10] To imagine we must prove the incarnation, miracles, resurrection, is to miss that this is the proof. Hegel describes this knowing as the most concrete reality.[11]

Likewise, in Matthew Hale’s explanation of Maximus, the Christian embodiment is dependent upon the incarnation of Christ (two concrete realities): “First, Jesus Christ is the content of what is revealed by the embodiment of the Word in the Christian. Second, Jesus’s own way of revealing the divine Word to humankind has a normative, exemplary force for the way in which the Word is revealed in the Christian.”[12] The virtue and knowledge of Christ embodied in the Christian is the Word in bodily form. Christ is the content revealed in and through the Christian. Hale argues that for Maximus, the embodiment of the Word in the Christian aligns with what Lonergan calls the “incarnate meaning” of Jesus Christ, so that the Christian bears the meaning of Christ in her life. The hypostatic union of Christ (fully divine and fully human) is one that occurs through the Word for the Christian. Christ initiates what Maximus calls “the beautiful exchange,” which renders God man by reason of the divinization of man, and man God by reason of the Incarnation of God. For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment. Such a one is a “‘portion of God’ insofar as he is God, owing to the logos of his eternal being that is in God.” According to Yerkes, “Religion is the existential starting point of philosophical reflection in dealing with the truth of reconciliation as an accomplished fact, and not as a mere yearning which is forever unrealizable. And this is why Hegel constantly can insist philosophy is the truth of ‘what is.’”[13] Truth or the “notion” is consummated in Christianity as Christ is the incarnation of the divine idea or notion. Here the mind of God is enfleshed. “In Christianity the nature of the religious consciousness itself is central, and thus the Hegelian conviction that Christianity is the “revealed” religion also implies that the form and content of human religious consciousness in the Christian religion for the first time adequately mirrors the form and content of God’s consciousness of himself as living Spirit.”[14]

For Hegel, as for Maximus, the incarnation of Christ is the reality upon which human thought and philosophy depend. “The content, it is then said, commends itself to me for its own sake, and the witness of the Spirit teaches me to recognise it as truth, as my essential determination.”[15] Apart from “eternal reconciliation” there would be no concrete or lived experience of the truth. Apart from the “incarnational principle” human experience flies apart between the finite and infinite or between the divine and human. The recognition of these poles is necessary but inadequate apart from the one who incarnates their synthesis. Reconciliation or synthesis is actualized in Christ and made available to the Christian. “The antithesis of subjective and objective” of infinite and finite is a realized redemption in the fact that God is “known as love.”[16] As Hegel states succinctly, “the truth exists as actually present truth.” It is, through the Holy Spirit, an appropriated truth: “the Holy Spirit comes to be in them as real, actual, and present, and has its abode in them; it means that the truth is in them, and that they are in a condition to enjoy and give active expression to the truth or Spirit, that they as individuals are those who give active expression to the Spirit.”[17]

In Maximus and Hegel, the truth is known and experienced directly in Jesus Christ. According to Hegel, “this is the inward, the true, the substantial element of this history, and it is just this that is the object of reason.”[18] This is not an object obtained according to reasonable proofs, or human reason, but is the object of reason, the ground and experience of meaning, which is its own proof. The New Testament, Maximus and Hegel, speak of a certainty grounded in Christ, and not in the biblical text, not in the authority of tradition, and not in rational proofs. There is a direct and immediate certainty realized in the Spirit, bearing witness to Christ, that God is revealed in the God/man.

(Sign up for the next PBI class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July to the week of August 23rd. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to sign up.)

[1] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1 Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7, paragraph 22.

[2] Ambigua 7:22.

[3] Ambigua, 7.22.

[4] Ambigua 7:22.

[5] Ambigua 7:23.

[6] Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Maximos Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014), vol. 2: Ambigua 31: paragraph 8.

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

[8] Yerkes, 112.

[9] G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the”Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1830). Translatedby William Wallace, together with the Zusdtze in Boumann’s Text(1845) translated by A. V. Miller, with a Foreword by J. N. Findlay. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 2. Quoted in Yerkes, 112.

[10] Yerkes, 123.

[11] Philosophy of Mind, B 2.

[12] Matthew Hale, “Knowledge, Virtue, and Meaning: A Lonerganian Interpretation of Maximus the Confessor on the Embodiment of the Word in the Christian” (PhD Faculty of the School of Theology and Religious Studies Of The Catholic University of America, 2022) 310.

[13] Ambigua 7:24.

[14] Yerkes, 119.

[15] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 151.

[16] Yerkes, 116-117.

[17] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Together with a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 3, Translated by E. B. Spiers and J. B. Sanderson (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1968) 124.

[18] Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, 146.

Men’s Girardian Study Group on Marriage

Rene Girard offers a perspective on marriage that seems to go unnoticed. In the wider culture there are discussions of marriage with a myriad of diagnoses, labels for issues and, most difficult of all, labels for people. Men are acutely, if subconsciously aware that once a behavior is labeled a person is a hair’s breadth away from being labeled. A person with a label in any culture is usually beyond redemption. We will sidestep this entire trend as much as possible and examine root causes and behaviors that are impediments to peace in a marriage with as few labels as possible in the hope of finding healing for men in Christ. Forging Ploughshares’ focus on peace, a healing, communal image of God and salvation, and the work of Rene Girard provide, we believe, a robust foundation for exploring this vital issue together in a confidential forum. We have a few privately written resources drawing on the theological currents in our work that we will share, and we will together decide on resources (books, articles, podcasts) to look at.

In this 4 part series beginning in July (day and time to be determined) Forging Ploughshares will host a men’s reading and discussion group examining peace in marriage and the impediments we bring to peace, we will examine the following areas: the false self, desire, impediments to peace through the brokenness of desire in marriage, and some thoughts on reorienting desire through Jesus. We hope that the men’s group will provide a safe, confidential way to explore together. There is no charge for the group, and all materials will be provided in the class.

Email Paul Axton at paulv.axton@gmail.com to sign up or make inquiries.

Reflections on the Impact of Jürgen Moltmann on My Theological Journey

I was saddened to hear of the passing, on Monday, of Jürgen Moltmann. I am told he was working on one more manuscript, even at age 98. As I thumb through my well-worn copy of the Crucified God with its copious underlining and notes in the margin, it brings to mind my excitement in reading Moltmann as a missionary in Japan, and for the first time finding an explanation of Christ’s saving work, with immediate implications. Moltmann displaces legal justification with the turn to liberation from bondage as the focus of salvation. What particularly struck me was his picture of psychological liberation and the turn to Sigmund Freud to explain both the problem and the solution.

Moltmann describes the passage from an Oedipal conception of God to a religion of brotherly love: “In origin Christianity is not a father-religion; if it is a religion at all it is a son-religion, namely a brotherly community in the situation of the human God, without privileges and without the rebellions that are necessary against them.”[1] This would point me toward the work of Slavoj Žižek, with its primary focus on getting rid of the oppressive force of the obscene super-ego father, which functions in both human personality and religion as an oppressive, punishing, law-giver.

In Moltmann’s portrayal, deploying Freud’s mythical picture of the Oedipal horde, both the human sickness and its expression in human religion can be traced to (either an unconscious or conscious) guilt. He describes Freud’s prehistoric primal horde father, who prohibited his sons from possessing their mother or sisters, by castrating them. Even should the mother allow it, the sons can only sire children through the permission of the father, thus the sons kill their father. “Totem religion emerged from the sons’ awareness of guilt as an attempt to relieve this feeling and to reconcile the injured father through subsequent obedience.. . . It makes it a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal.”[2] As Moltmann explains, “The parricide and blasphemer is out for annihilation and therefore falls into apathy. He rebels against the restrictions laid down by the authority of the father, but his rebellion does not free him from being a mirror image of his adversary. In the Oedipus conflict he remains clamped to his opponent.”[3] This sickness is both religious and psychological: “These are two sides of the same coin. There are psychological and religious forms of straitened and hindered humanity, sick and on the way towards death.”[4]

Christ on the cross demythologizes the obscene father who laid down the law and its castrating effects. “God allows himself to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from oppression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity. Knowledge and acceptance of the new situation extends God’s freedom from the gods and antigods who produce the universal feeling of guilt and the need for compensation, right into the unconscious.”[5] Moltmann acknowledges that the obscene father and idols may still haunt us, “But if one can laugh at them, one need no longer repress them. They are still there, but they have lost their power.”[6]

The idols with their punishing guilt are replaced by a loving and suffering God that is psychologically liberating. The situation of the “the crucified God” presents us with the “pathos of the loving and suffering God” and the idols and fetishes – and their implicit “refusal of the cross,” are defeated.[7] Combined with the power of the resurrection, this affords one to abandon the imposed suffering of guilt, and allows for hope, even in the face of death. “Christian faith understands itself as faithfulness to hope as it is mindful of the resurrection of Christ, and as faithfulness to the earth as it is mindful of the cross of Christ. Because it leads man into this history of God, it frees him for an acceptance of human life which is capable of suffering and capable of love.”[8]

Moltmann pictures the human disease as a rejection of life, an incapacity in the face of repression and fear, and an overall apathy, which is summed up in fear of death. He launches his book with the pronouncement that the cross of Christ can enact a reorientation to death which changes everything: “only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because it is no longer afraid of death.”[9] God and the world are reconceived in light of the cross, and the task of theology is to speak of God and the world in light of the cross. “As far as I am concerned, the Christian church and Christian theology become relevant to the problems of the modern world only when they reveal the ‘hard core’ of their identity in the crucified Christ and through it are called into question, together with the society in which they live.”[10] The Crucified God comes after his Theology of Hope, but as he explains, his theology of the cross is the “reverse side” of the focus on resurrection in the theology of hope.[11] The theology of the cross addresses the problem of death as it is construed in religion, society, psychology, and politics. With the cross there is a new diagnosis of the human situation: “the cross alone, and nothing else, is its test, since the cross refutes everything. . . .”[12] The cross is the means of diagnosing and curing the problem of death denied.

A society, psychology or politic founded on death denial cannot recognize the depth of suffering it inflicts, and a church caught up in defense mechanisms against death, absorbed by the social environment, is worthless before the suffering inflicted by the world. A church at home in the world has become the problem, and only the rediscovery of homelessness can offer hope and healing. The various reformations of the church are a rediscovery of homelessness: “It is this inner homelessness which enables it to perpetuate its institutions, even when they become an established part of society.”[13] Only in continually rediscovering its origins does the church become “a dangerous and liberating reality.” This “faith becomes aware of the incommensurability of the cross of Christ with the revelation of God, and realizing this, becomes aware too of its own strangeness and homelessness in its own Christian world.”[14] The world is built on death denial, and the cross deconstructs this false understanding, leaving the church and Christians strangers in the world.

Perhaps this strangeness is most sharply felt in Moltmann’s depiction of the way in which Christian knowledge functions. Knowing God on the basis of analogy and metaphysics is part of the human problem (knowing God through the world). The God of metaphysics “is determined by its unity and indivisibility, its lack of beginning and end, its immovability and immutability” but this God is not directly knowable or capable of love. This form of knowing is a defense mechanism: “As the nature of divine being is conceived of for the sake of finite being, it must embrace all the determinations of finite being and exclude those determinations which are directed against being. Otherwise finite being could not find a support and stay against the threatening nothingness of death, suffering and chaos in the divine being. Death, suffering and mortality must therefore be excluded from the divine being.”[15] Theology as a defense mechanism against death has dominated the theological project. Moltmann’s statement of this made a lasting impact: “Christian theology has adopted this concept of God from philosophical theology down to the present day, because in practice down to the present day Christian faith has taken into itself the religious need of finite, threatened and mortal man for security in a higher omnipotence and authority.”[16] The metaphysical concept of God rules out the death of God – “evacuating the cross of deity.” It is this notion, of a distant, unmoved mover which Moltmann attacks at every stage of his theology.

Rather than beginning with analogy, and the finitude of the world to describe how God is known, with Luther and Hegel, Moltmann presumes God is only directly known in the cross.

The theology of the cross therefore takes quite seriously God’s interest in his knowledge through man. God reveals himself in the contradiction and the protest of Christ’s passion to be against all that is exalted and beautiful and good, all that the dehumanized man seeks for himself and therefore perverts. So God here is not known through his works in reality, but through his suffering in the passiveness of faith, which allows God to work on it: killing in order to make alive, judging in order to set free. So his knowledge is achieved not by the guiding thread of analogies from earth to heaven, but on the contrary, through contradiction, sorrow and suffering. To know God means to endure God.[17]

To know God in Christ is to abandon the “dreamed-of-exaltation” of knowing God in his divinity, and it is to turn to God in the humanity of Christ – abandoned, rejected and despised. This “brings to nothing his dreamed-of equality with God, which has dehumanized him, and restores to him his humanity, which the true God made his own.”[18] Man’s inhumanity is his pursuit of deity, and he is made fully human only in the embrace of the crucified God.

With Luther, Moltmann concludes one can know God indirectly through the world (the focus of the theologians of glory) but he can only be known directly in the cross with the saving knowledge of God. Knowing God directly is to know of his deliverance. “His grace is revealed in sinners. His righteousness is revealed in the unrighteous and in those without rights, and his gracious election in the damned.” God is fully God not in his eternality, but in what is opposite to eternality. “God is only revealed as ‘God’ in his opposite: godlessness and abandonment by God. . . . The epistemological principle of the theology of the cross can only be this dialectic principle: the deity of God is revealed in the paradox of the cross.”[19]

The Unmoved Mover is not the Father of Jesus Christ, and Moltmann prophetically declares it is time to make an absolute departure from such notions, so as to recover the Christian faith. This is not the faith of bourgeois conservatives or of Christian nationalists but this faith “breaks the spell of the old philosophical concept of God, at the same time destroying the idols of national political religions.”[20] The death of God on the cross cannot be understood or accepted on the basis of Greek metaphysical presuppositions, but “God’s Godness” is known only in the event of the death of Christ. The omnipotent God of metaphysics is impotent in his incapacity for suffering, finitude, and love. This God that cannot suffer or die is incapable of relating or being known. This God that we project upon the idols of our imagination is the God from which Christ delivers:

Thus at the level of the psychology of religion, Christian faith effects liberation from the childish projections of human needs for the riches of God; liberation from human impotence for the omnipotence of God; from human helplessness for the omnipotence of God; from human helplessness for the responsibility of God. It brings liberation from the divinized father-figures by which men seek to sustain their childhood. It brings liberation from fear in the ideas of political omnipotence with which the powers on earth legitimate their rule and give inferiority complexes to the impotent, and with which the impotent compensate their impotence in dreams. It brings liberation from the determination and direction from outside which anxious souls love and at the same time hate.[21]

The projection by finite human beings of the impassable God, threatened as they are by their finitude and creation, is a counter salvation system to that of Christ. But the God of metaphysics, the Oedipal father, is an impotent and incomplete being in his inability to experience death, finitude, helplessness and powerlessness. Worship of omnipotence by the helpless, as a defense mechanism, deprives them of the love of God. It is this love by which the Father of Christ is defined. The “almighty” is a being without history or experience or destiny or love.[22] This God that oppresses human beings is the devil from which Christ delivers in his love.

For Moltmann, faith always speaks of a practical liberation from the various forms of oppression foisted upon man by social, religious, and political institutions. He notes that both institutional and psychological oppression must be addressed simultaneously. “Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and structures is an idealist illusion, as though man were only a soul and not a body as well. But a change in external circumstances without inner renewal is a materialist illusion, as though man were only a product of his social circumstances and nothing else.”[23] This fullness of salvation and liberation cannot make peace with the principalities and powers which beset him inwardly and outwardly. Liberation is a real world throwing off of oppression.

It is interesting (or was to me, being in Japan) that Moltmann turns to the example of Christian students in Japan who recognize Christian complicity in the problem. Students at Meiji-Gakuin declared, “God does not exist in this church, but rather in the living deeds of a man involved in human relationships.” Thus, they barricaded the church as by “making our church a refuse dump we want to proclaim to the university authorities and our fellow students that Christianity and worship can become symbols of the absence of humanity and contempt for it.”[24] Moltmann concludes, “Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’, for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him.”[25] This critique of society can only occur through identity with the Crucified, by “a witnessing non-identification with the demands and interests of society.”[26] Christian identity is founded upon this act of God in Christ, the crucifixion, in which God identifies with the godless and abandoned.

When faith becomes fearful and defensive, it is focused on morality and penal law and misses the identity of God in Christ. “He who is of little faith looks for support and protection for his faith, because it is preyed upon by fear. Such a faith tries to protect its ‘most sacred things’, God, Christ, doctrine and morality, because it clearly no longer believes that these are sufficiently powerful to maintain themselves.”[27] A faith that is afraid for itself and its Christ is a lack of faith. Fearful faith would build a defensive wall so as to defend “true belief, pure doctrine and distinctive Christian morality.” “They accept the increasing isolation of the church as an insignificant sect on the margin of society, and encourage it by their sectarian withdrawal.”[28] The God of metaphysics, of conservative social and moral ethics, is not the God who died on a cross. Where the cross is not kept front and center, the tendency will be either decay by withdrawal or decay through assimilation. Both are forms of fear, unbelief, and ultimately death denial. True faith is willing to confront the world and acknowledge Christ as effective ruler, and in this faith, fear is overcome.

Moltmann described in real-world terms the freedom of the children of God through faith. This freedom can be described in concrete and specific psychological terms and entails a fully embodied (political and social) deliverance. Moltmann describes the need for a “psychological hermeneutics of the word of the cross”[29] and this set the course of my theological journey.

Thank God for the faithful witness of this servant of Christ.

[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1993) 307.

[2] N. O. Brown, Love’s Body, (New York 1968), 122. Quoted in Moltmann, 304.

[3] Moltmann, 307.

[4] Ibid, 313

[5] Ibid, 307.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 312.

[8] Ibid, 313.

[9] Ibid, 1.

[10] Ibid, 3.

[11] Ibid, 5.

[12] Ibid, 7

[13] Ibid, 10.

[14] Ibid, 37.

[15] Ibid, 214.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 212.

[18] Ibid, 213.

[19] Ibid, 27.

[20] Ibid, 215

[21] Ibid, 216.

[22] Ibid, 223.

[23] Ibid, 23.

[24] Ibid, 14-15.

[25] Ibid, 16.

[26] Ibid, 17.

[27] Ibid, 19.

[28] Ibid, 20.

[29] Ibid, 291.

Christian Championing of Jordan Peterson Exposes a Perverse Form of the Faith

The popularity of Jordan Peterson as part of a conservative backlash to this supposedly postmodern moment is surprising in its scope and in the fact that many Christians have found a champion in Peterson. This however may say more about the shape of modern Christian faith than it does about the depth of insight of Peterson. A faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, this is not the Truth of Christ.[1] But Peterson is not confused about his stance (he does not identify as a Christian and he does not hesitate to interpret Christ and the Bible according to his definition of truth).[2] The confusion arises with Christians who imagine law, the symbolic order of culture, the structural hierarchies of state, society and church, are definitive of the gospel.

This is not simply a rhetorical point, but describes a form of the faith which interprets the gospel through law, which understands Christ through the Old Testament (e.g., dying due to the law) and which attaches primacy to language, symbols, and law, rather than to Person or personhood. For Peterson the personal and personhood is subsequent to language, symbols, and culture – this is no surprise, given his worldview. What is surprising is that Christians would relinquish the primacy of the Person of Christ and God, and assign it to the structures of the social order. While one might agree (or not) that Peterson occasionally says something true, this is very different than confusing his truth with Christian Truth. One is evolutionary, dualistic, gradually unfolding, and ever aiming (never arriving) toward the arche contained in myth, while the other is the Divine Person.

Peterson has made it clear that he is not simply offering advice, self-help, or cultural critique, but is attempting the broadest of philosophical/scientific projects in which he is tracing the rise and function of truth. Peterson and Jonathan Pageau (an Eastern Orthodox Christian) describe the ground of truth as evolving through human attention: “Our own personal attention becomes organised in a more comprehensive and universally viable, rewarding, and stabilising sense when it is related to others; when it is given or offered up to our connection with our family, friends, and fellow citizens; when it is sacrificed to the social hierarchies we participate in.”[3] This attention then gives rise to the unity and coherence of truth.

He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[4] As Marc Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[5] The key point here is not that Peterson reworks the story of Moses, or questions whether the law came from God. Paul and the writer of Hebrews do as much, suggesting angels and not God delivered the law, and that it has a secondary function to Christ. The point is, Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization.[6] Every son can perform the inductive trick.

Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[7] The logos for Peterson, is not a person but a “leading principle” distilled from many human samples over a long span of time. “The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time.”[8] Human beliefs, for Peterson, “make the world, in a very real way – that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense.”[9] Human belief (the archetypes, the trues extracted from religion), evolved and tested through time provide a moral and metaphysical order (Peterson’s absolute).

Peterson claims “the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker.” He has learned “why people wage war,” which paradoxically revolves around “protecting and expanding belief” but he can tell us how to “ameliorate this tendency,” universal though it is. Unfortunately, in Peterson’s world it is life’s cruelty that produces life: “the terrible aspect of life might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence of life – and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in consequence, as comprehensible and acceptable.”[10] What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, in Peterson’s Nietzschean world. Life’s cruelty and evil is part of life’s necessity.

In terms of his field of specialty, psychology, Peterson is a Jungian, holding that the archetypes (a sort of basic truth) are uncovered in considering all religions, dreams, and myth, which also serve as the foundation of the human psyche. In psychological terms, this is a rejection of the Freudian/Lacanian understanding taken up by Slavoj Žižek, which while recognizing the primacy of language, notes that a fundamental lie must accompany the psychological structuring around language. Language, in this lie, must be reified, made substantive, and accorded a metaphysical reality. (This is precisely what Peterson sets out to do in each stage of his work.) The big lie for Žižek is that there is something substantive to the ego, while in fact the dynamic between the symbolic (the superego, law, language) the imaginary (the ego, the sense of self), creates a dynamic of death drive (the id, the real) which is a dynamic of death and nothingness. This aligns with Paul’s picture of the fallen self in Romans 7 (according to Žižek), but of course, Žižek is an atheist, who denies there could be anything more (he is a Romans 7, atheistic Christian). While Peterson may acknowledge something like God, it is the lying image of God (God as the one who holds the symbolic order together as Big Other, as Superego, as Law Giver) which Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament would rid us of. In both Christian and Žižekian terms, Peterson is a promoter of the lie, that language, society, the symbolic order, is truth per se, and this he equates with God. In terms of Genesis, Peterson is on the side of the serpent, advocating for the dialectic of the knowledge of good and evil as accessing the divine order.

He comes by this conclusion in the typical fashion of Platonists or dualists, by positing two primary forces, chaos and unity, as the dualistic poles which constitute reality. He says, “We are adrift in chaos and longing, in the absence of a firm identity, no foundation underfoot, nothing to strive toward, prone in our lacking conscious and unconscious to decomposition and strife. Something must unite our attention and our action, so that we are integrated, psychologically. Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collectively, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably.”[11] He points out the dangers on both the chaos and order side of the dualism, but suggests this is the engine of history driving toward extremes but eventual harmony: “It moves forward in time like a powerful motor, pistons cycling back and forth, driving the machine of modern identity toward ever-greater extremes.”[12]

The dialectical war between the state and individual is not one in which either can emerge triumphant over the other, as the dualism is the truth. Too much autonomy of the individual, “freeing himself from religion, family, nation. . . means the totalitarian state becomes more likely” to occupy all these “intermediary roles.” This becomes the opportunity (he uses Covid and the vaccine as an example) “to universalize the collective.” The pendulum swings between Weimar and Reich, between Revolution and Napoleonic empire, between Great Mother and Father, but as the book of Revelation describes, this war produces the heavenly City. “This may seem obscurely mythological to some, but the image of the heavenly city is in fact the ultimate representation of structured harmony, a vision of the reality that might obtain if the entirety of existence properly found its place, served what is highest, and integrated itself into a transcendent whole.” [13] The trick is to keep the Beast or Leviathan from consuming the individual through totalitarian control, and so “nation, gender, family, and religion,” pose the obstacle to totalitarianism. The dialectic must be kept alive, both by preserving the individual but by also preserving intermediate identities such as those found in heterosexual marriage and normative sexual identity. Too much relinquishing of these identities unleashes state control over identity.

Peterson references Platonism and Christianity as playing key roles in imparting this dialectic and keeping it alive. It is in fact, the secret behind the cosmos, the secret of God, carried within each individual. “This perspective is offered by the early Hermetic and the Neo-Platonic writings. It permeates the Christian mysticism running from St. Paul to Meister Eckhart. Within this tradition, the individual is understood as the active embodiment of and participant in the patterns of the cosmos itself—even of the God who created that cosmos—instead of a unity in contrast to or competition with the superordinate social order.”[14] The knowledge of good and evil, the dialectic, provides access to deity, and is itself the divine reflected in each individual. This, according to Peterson, is what St. Paul meant when he “describes the Church as the Body of Christ, he is similarly stepping into this domain of fractal conceptualisation, journeying between macrocosm and microcosm in a manner that is no mere literary trope.” It is like “the head of a city or a company, or of a body of laws, a body politic, or a corporate body we are, like St. Paul, employing this vision of a fractal identity or reality, attempting in that way to describe the very nature of our participation in reality.”[15] Paul, in Peterson’s estimate, had in mind Peterson’s sort of dualism, and the body of Christ, is just one example of how society can organize itself, and in doing so fully participate in reality.

Peterson’s God, and apparently the God of those Christians who align themselves with his metaphysics, is no bigger than the dualism of chaos and unity. Each side of the dialectic, as in the knowledge of good and evil, yin and yang, something and nothing, is required. Evil (suffering and human cruelty) is the means to the good (unity), and the good is never free of the evil. “Unity—purposeful essence— and multiplicity define each other.”[16] Chaos and multiplicity feed new information into unity, freeing it from a frozen totalitarianism. The building blocks of unity are forged in furnace of chaos. Error and fallibility are inevitable and perhaps, the desired constant of the human environment.[17] God needs the devil, just as unity needs the disrupting powers of chaos.

Real evil is to be found only in those who do not fight the good fight and take responsibility for themselves. “The best strategy for coping with the ignorance and suffering that result from our finite nature is to take personal responsibility for one’s hardships and constantly negotiate between sticking with one’s beliefs and revising them.”[18] This is the mode selected by Darwinian mechanisms and taken up in cultural dynamics. The very fact that certain forms of life have evolved and endured is testimony to their foundational role.

While a Christian might find some good advice in Peterson (get married, have a family, etc.), this is not all that is happening. Though he invokes God, Peterson’s metaphysics are at best atheistic or theism of the worst kind. If he is articulating what they see as essentially true, this may mean many Christians are functioning from an atheistic form of the faith or a deeply perverted understanding of God. A metaphysically shallow faith, attached to Christendom, social order and unified rituals and institutions, may need an unbeliever like Peterson to articulate the “conservative values” which now serve in place of the radical faith preached by Christ, but to mistake this for Christian Truth is on the order of fusing the law with Gospel or confusing Christendom with Christianity. It is a failure to grasp the foundational Truth of Christ, and to replace it with an alternative foundation.

[1] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[2] Which is not to say he may not be confused about the nature of Christianity.

[3] Identity, 1.

[4] Marc Champagne, Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 92) . Societas. Kindle Edition

[5] Ibid.

[6] Champagne, 1812.

[7] Ibid, 100.

[8] Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, (Toronto: Random House, 2018) 104..

[9] Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 13.

[10] Maps of Meaning, Ibid.

[11] Identity, 1.

[12] Identity, 2.

[13] Identity, 3.

[14] Identity, 6-7.

[15] Identity, 7.

[16] Identity, 7.

[17] Maps of Meaning, 47.

[18] Champagne, 100.

Rereading Žižek’s Hegel in Light of the Spirit and Truth of Kenotic Love

Though Slavoj Žižek, reading Hegel as if he were an atheist must ultimately misread him, there is a great deal in Žižek’s atheistic reading which commends itself and acts as a guide, not only to Hegel, but to New Testament Christianity as understood by Hegel. The particular point where there is both convergence and divergence between an atheistic and theistic reading of Hegel concerns the meaning of Spirit and the death of God. As Žižek describes it, the Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” as definitive of the experience of God, and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). Indeed, this suspension of God as other, and the immediate experience of God as immanent is key to Hegel. But Hegel’s point of departure is not simply negation, but he is focused on the Pauline concept of kenotic self-sacrifice in which one arrives at the Spirit of Christ. The kenotic sacrifice simultaneously marks the death of something “beyond” humanity and this is realized in the Spirit through imitation of Christ’s self-giving love.[1] But it is not simply the negation of God as Other, but the bringing together of the infinite and the finite in Absolute Spirit as Concept [Begriff] or a new form of speculative understanding and Truth.

In Hegel there is a double movement as the infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[2] But this is no mere feeling, but is the way of the Spirit, the way of love and of reason. As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[3] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. As Hegel puts it, “If God has the finite over against himself, then he himself is finite and limited. Finitude must be posited in God himself, not as something insurmountable, absolute, independent, but above all as this process of distinguishing that we have seen in spirit and in consciousness—a distinguishing that, because it is a transitory moment and because finitude is no truth, is also eternally self-sublating.”[4] God is not limited by the finite or infinite, as this would be something less than God.

Žižek gets this understanding half right, in that he misses the movement of Spirit as arising from both God as infinite Father, and the immanent Son. As he describes it, the Hegelian “reconciliation” is the “redoubling of the gap or antagonism” as the gap that separates opposites “is posited as inherent to one of the terms” (Parallax View, 106). “The gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself” through the death of Christ, so “the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God” (Parallax View, 106). There is relief from the oppressive otherness of God as Christ makes God immanent, but in Hegel’s understanding there is not simply the relinquishing of the infinite for the finite, but a realization of the infinite in the finite. In “externalization” (Entäußerung), Luther’s rendering of “kenosis,” Hegel depicts the break from “immediacy” through self-sacrifice, which is the work of the Spirit experienced in the Eucharist, and in the Christian’s taking up the life and death of Christ. In Pauline terms, self-sacrifice or being crucified with Christ is to arrive at the self, and in Hegelian terms self-negation is at the heart of self-actualization.

In Žižek’s understanding, the focus is on the negative moment. The move from the legal, symbolic, totalizing religion of Judaism to Christianity, is due to the death of Christ which suspends the perverse relation to the law. In Žižek’s Hegelian/Lacanian notion of dialectic, Judaism and Christianity posit the gap either as a gap between man and God or as within God, respectively. Judaism posits the gap between God and man, as God stands outside the Law in that he cannot be properly represented within it. The holy of holies, the empty room, is isolated and separated from everyone by a series of walls emphasizing God’s absolute transcendence to the Law. God is the Other, outside of the symbolic, and yet the one who holds the symbolic together (Parallax View, 106). The death of Christ exposes the orbit of the oppressive symbolic in God as Other. In Žižek’s Hegel the death of Christ, the fulness of the work of the Trinity comes into effect as thesis/antithesis/synthesis. There is the suspension of the Other (thesis) in the death of God (antithesis). The Holy Spirit is “then posited as a symbolic, de-substantialized fiction” which exists in and through the “work of each and all” (synthesis) (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42).

Of course, the primary contention between a Christian and atheistic reading of Hegel, revolves around Spirit. In Žižek’s reading the Spirit is a fiction, which is not a dismissal of its importance, as the Spirit is an open fiction, where the movement of the Subject, in all of its phases prior to the gift of the Spirit is a necessary lie, but one that remains hidden. The hidden force of negation or death drive animates the Subject – giving life through death, but in therapy exposure of the lie, the death drive and its attendant categories, can be tapped as a source to unplug from perversion and to come to an understanding of Being as sustained in and through negation. The encounter with the death drive is a “limit-experience” which “is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event, yet its excess always threatens to undermine it” (Ticklish Subject, 161). Behind the good, the true and the beautiful is the constitutive background of the death drive – “the Void that sustains the place in which one can formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’” (Ticklish Subject, 161). The means of manipulating the truth is through tapping into the underlying ground of the death drive and approaching the void of deception in which the symbolic truth is grounded. The death of Christ and dying with Christ provides access to this deception undergirding the truth. The truth inheres in a lie, so to refer to the Spirit as a fiction, is a new form of truth.

For Hegel, the Spirit is not a fiction but the absolute truth: “it is here maintained that this content, which the knowledge of absolute Spirit has of itself, is the absolute truth, is all truth, so that this Idea comprehends the entire wealth of the natural and spiritual world in itself, is the only substance and truth of all that constitutes this world, while it is in the Idea alone that everything has its truth, as being a moment of its essential existence.”[5] This truth, in the Spirit is a realized truth. Kenotic love unites the infinite and finite in the Concept (Absolute Spirit), which is the realization of presence (God’s and the self) and identity. Hegel slowly recognizes the inadequacies of other forms of sacrifice, which fall short of fostering the social relation, inherent to kenosis. Mere self-negation, apart from the establishment of a community of the Spirit, simply ends in self-defeat.[6] To be a living sacrifice or to “live” sacrifice is not simply a negation, but the arrival at one’s true essence.

A way to get at the divergence in regard to Spirit, is in Žižek’s focus on the death of Christ, which more or less sums up what he has to say about the gift of the Spirit and resurrection (unlike Hegel). Where for Hegel the death of Christ results in the immanence of God in the Spirit, Žižek has more to say about death, which he equates with resurrection and spirit. He repeatedly refers to Christ’s cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15.34; Mt. 27.46)., “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). This negation or death opens up the possibility of life in the spirit.

In describing the death of Christ, Žižek equates life and death: “Life and death here are not polar opposites, contrasts, within the same global Whole (field of reality), but the same thing viewed from a global perspective” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). He concludes, “The (temporal) death of Christ is his very (eternal) life ‘in becoming’” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). Death and life are not in some sort of “pseudo-dialectic relation as utter loss/negation (death) and its reversal into absolute life” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). The death of Christ is the founding of the community of the Spirit and this community is his resurrection. According to Žižek, “That is to say that Christ’s death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.”[7]

Christ’s death reveals the psychoanalytic ground; the Freudian moment of madness which Schelling anticipates and which Žižek comes to understand Paul to describe in Romans 7. Radical negativity, the death of Christ or death drive, is the constitutive moment of the event which serves as the ground of a Subject no longer constrained by law or ideology (the significance of the resurrection Event). Resurrection can be identified with death as they both amount to the destruction of one’s symbolic supports and the emergence of a new form of subjectivity. This new form of subjectivity is the hysteric, which Lacan and Žižek equate with Hegel – “that most sublime of hysterics.” Where the masculine orientation identifies unquestioningly with the symbolic order of the law, the hysteric questions the status of the law. So, for example, Žižek identifies hysteria with the Paul of Romans 7. The feminine, hysteric position from which Paul writes describes the necessary passage through negativity and death drive as this is the road trod by Christ himself.

In my original reading of Hegel, through Žižek and Lacan, the role of negation was key to understanding the rise of the Subject in the dynamic interplay of the three registers of symbolic, imaginary, and real. The real is the engine of negation and death which explains the negative energetics dominating fallen personhood. I think this reading is a partially true reading of Hegel, in its diagnosis of the disease, much as Žižek’s is an insightful reading of Paul’s depiction of the problem in Romans 7. But both Paul and Hegel pass beyond this negative moment. But for Žižek, nothingness and death drive precede the Subject and are the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death drive and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil (Reader, 273). Lacan also describes the death drive as the attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle to the realm of excess jouissance, the pure substance of the death drive, which he also does not hesitate to call evil: “We cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII, 184–5). This evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good (in Žižek’s reading). The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive.

But of course, if one understands Hegel is working with negation, not in an atheistic sense as a point of origin, but in the Pauline sense of kenotic self-giving love, this will account for the illness of the Subject diagnosed as more or less incurable by Lacan and Žižek, and go beyond this privileging of the negative, to kenotic self-giving love, truth and unity in the Spirit.

[1] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019).

[2] Goggin, 12.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition – The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter Hodgson. One-Volume Ed edition. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1988, 190. Quoted in Goggin, 273.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 206.

[6] Goggin, 11.

[7] See On Belief, 106 – 51; The Puppet and the Dwarf, 171; The Parallax View, 106; For They Know Not What They Do, liii.