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The Return to Metaphysics: William Desmond’s Deployment of Hegel to Answer the Postmodern Critique of Metaphysics

One of the most profound and insightful contemporary readings of the work of G.W.F. Hegel is that of William Desmond, who carries out a prolonged critique of Hegel, but Desmond’s critique is subsequent to a deep appreciation of Hegel, which will come to shape much of his work. To understand Desmond’s view of the failure of the postmodern critique of metaphysics (inclusive of Hegel) and his return to metaphysics, it is necessary to examine his earlier work in which he explains how deconstruction and “postmodernism” have misinterpreted Hegel. Even recently, when I raised the issue of deconstruction, Desmond pointed me to his early work on Hegel’s aesthetics to understand his take on deconstruction and the failure of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who short-change Hegel.[1] They, along with a variety of their heirs, critique a kind of metaphysics, but fail to recognize Hegel preceded them in this critique, and that a full reading of Hegel indicates the metaphysics Desmond would recover.

In his work on Hegel’s aesthetics, Desmond undertakes exposure of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian legacy, working in the one-sided “anti-shadow” (negativity) of Hegel, so as to delineate both links and departures from Hegel, and then to show how Hegel’s dialectic can serve “as a fruitful foil to deconstruction.”[2] Desmond argues Hegel’s dialectic is based upon the resource of an original wholeness, which allows for the dynamic complexity appreciated by deconstruction, but which it would dissolve, not having understood its necessity. The Absolute (God) is written off: to “long for any such road is to be guilty of ‘nostalgia’ for metaphysics.”[3] This leaves only the absolute of deconstruction; “the absolute aimed at subverting all absolutes,” which fails to deal with the “intricacies in Hegel’s texts” and the necessary wholeness implicit to his dialectics.[4] Hegel’s affirmation “that the true is the whole” is at once basic to his philosophy and aesthetics. It is the necessary “teleological thrust” to his dialectics, enabling the “wholeness” of articulation. He is resisting the deconstruction of his day; “the forces of a dissolving negativity” which he “recognized as a mark of modern culture generally.”[5]

As Desmond puts it, “We can see here the shift wrought by this negative dialectics as first from God to man, and then from man to language itself as the cunning, indeterminable power that eventually mocks all simple human pieties.”[6] This shift of the modern consciousness, the secular negation of God supposedly allowing for self-determination, gives way to absolute indeterminacy. That is the “death of man” follows hard upon the heels of “the death of God.”  The initial liberation (the “horizon wiped clean”) will ultimately leave only agonistic destruction. Desmond notes, those uneasy with this conclusion, but acknowledging deconstruction, have offered no counter-theory (the point of his project). For Desmond there are no partial measures against loss of the whole (the complete destruction of metaphysics). “Better to put Satan behind one, than to sup with this devil, however long one’s spoon. The command to Satan, however, does not seem to carry much efficacy. This Satan is not a docile boy.”[7] To partake of the fruit of deconstruction, without succumbing to absolute negation, involves a deep engagement with the complexities of Hegel.

Desmond first notes, Hegel precedes Nietzsche in his pronouncement of the philosophical failure, the “death of God, in his depiction of the “Unhappy Consciousness.” The question is, how to respond to this desolation, without simply surrendering to it. Desmond points to Hegel’s defense of the wholeness of art, extrapolating to and from an original wholeness. Nietzsche was not originally unappreciative of this unifying wholeness. He saw both the Dionysian (representing chaos, emotion, passion and creativity) and the Apollonian principle (symbolizing order, reason, logic, structure and clarity) as balanced in art and life, but then the Dionysian comes to predominance in his Will to Power. Nietzsche characterized life’s antagonisms as boiling down to Homer versus Plato, art versus metaphysics, the substitution of an eternal other world (a world of pure Being, the forms, the ideas) for the world of poetry, art, and becoming. The dead world of stasis displaces the living world of Becoming and beauty. Platonism is nihilism, negating the wealth of a living reality for a dead univocity.[8]

The forms, in their dead stasis, must be dismantled so as to recover life in its “Innocence of Becoming.” Like a child, becoming is diverse, disunited, dynamic, but in Nietzsche’s estimate time must be privileged over eternity, the creative must begin with deconstructing illusions of soul, eternality, and permanence. Fixed forms need exploding. “I am not a man; I am dynamite.”[9] Cold logic has displaced the warmth of art, poetry and myth, in all of their diversity. They are traded for the illusion of a univocal language (Logos), a contradiction free, rule-bound structure. Nietzsche would explode this “logical ideal.” For man to be born, God must die, so that poetry displaces the heavy burden of this divine simplicity. As Desmond explains, univocal language is an impoverished version of a more primordial utterance. “If we can adapt the title of one of Nietzsche’s works, we need a Genealogy of Logic which will restore language from its deformation by the logic of univocity.”[10]

Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is that it smuggles in God in philosophical terms, such that the deity is controlled by the terms of philosophy. The God of metaphysics is not one that freely bursts on the scene in the Burning Bush or arrives as the God/man, but his work is determined by philosophical logic, serving as the ontotheological glue and ultimate cause. This determinant way to God stresses sameness, an unmediated objectification and an absolute univocity.[11] Heidegger develops Nietzschean themes, accusing the west of being “logocentric” or “onto-theological” and thus there is a “forgetting of Being” or a forgetting of the source of truth. The metaphysics causing this obscuring must be destroyed, to arrive at the truth of “being here.”

According to Heidegger, language must be reconceived. “Man does not think through language, but language thinks with and through man.” Language means more than is intended and more than can be interpreted. “As Derrida puts it: the field of language lacks a center; rather language is defined by a free play of substitutions.”[12] Heidegger and Derrida consider Hegel one of the main culprits, in his drive to systematize and cognize God. Isn’t Hegel responsible for attempting to complete western metaphysics, and doesn’t he claim as much? “The real is the rational, the rational is the real.” The “Logic of Being” in his “Absolute Idea,” sounds like a compounding of Plato, an “absolutization of the Apollonian imperative.”[13] Hegel is accused of “grasping meaning” and deconstruction would disillusion the reader of this “naïve faith”; only partial, incomplete, or contradictory readings are possible. Logocentrism and univocity must be exposed and unsettled through the equivocal, through the multiplicity of meanings, and through contradictory meanings. “Difference, sheer difference, or multiplicity without an enjoining unity, is the keynote of this world. In this case the sheer difference means the reduction of univocity to the equivocal.”[14] The point of deconstruction is to show that equivocity is inherent to language.

Desmond counters this reading of Hegel (as the last metaphysician) with a more complicated picture. He notes that Hegel’s dialectic already contained themes picked up by the deconstructionists. Afterall, dialectics entails conflict: “antinomies,” “antithesis,” “opposition,” are part of Hegel’s equivocal. In addition, dialectic is descriptive of “linguistic acts” which pertain not simply to thinking or the “logical” but to Being or the “ontological” as it is connected to “Becoming.” These are themes in Hegel, absorbed by Nietzsche, but for Hegel this dynamism is not simply a formless flux, but is in the process of forming and structuring (both the Dionysian process and the Apollonian form). The one is necessary to the other, and neither can exist in isolation.

Hegel recognizes equivocity and univocity are inherent to language. The real is in process and cannot be frozen, but this process is not given over to absolute difference. Verstand (Understanding) abstracts from the flux so as to differentiate but this is not a final abstraction or a rigid separation. Verstand embraces antinomies, allowing for the return of the equivocal. “For through univocity the analytical understanding tries to conquer a given equivocation; but its conquering categories are themselves conquered by equivocation on the other side of established univocity. Dialectic, for Hegel, simply follows the flow of this development by which an initial unity, seemingly simple and hard set, breaks itself up into polarities, contradictions, antitheses, oppositions.”[15] We must tarry with the negative, stare it in the face. But this is not an end, but the opening to a fuller consciousness. “Each configuration (Gestalt) of consciousness disfigures itself, each form deforms itself, every construction deconstructs itself under the relentless power of the ‘negative.’”[16]

As with deconstruction, thinking wars against itself, generating contradiction and driving itself to a greater fulness and creativity. Hegel likewise uses the language of “negativity” and skepticism as essential to authentic thought. All absolute fixity fails and dissolves. But this is a generative process which touches upon reality and deconstructs partiality. Thus, Hegel turns to the peculiar properties of the German language, in its ability to capture this unfolding dynamic. “Richer language, language which contains a whole world within itself, a world inclusive of opposites, is required. The dialectical language of Hegel’s own philosophical discourse is his effort to live up to this requirement.”[17] As Desmond concludes, “negativity does not completely exhaust the process of articulation, but rather is itself completed by its balancing power. At the heart of the ‘negative’ we must affirm a positive.”[18] There cannot be pure dissolution or negativity, as the positive makes dissolving possible. The negative “makes the release of the positive power” which cannot be reduced to the negative. “For Hegel, after deconstruction, dialectic opens up to a moment of reconstitution.”[19]

This is the point of Hegel’s Aufhebung: something is suspended as we transcend what is simultaneously suspended and preserved. This suspension involves negation, transcendence, and preservation, as thought moves beyond the limitations of that which is suspended. But the suspended is not simply destroyed, but is recognized as a limitation, beyond which is a fuller realization. The suspended element marks the standpoint from which one is liberated. “In more popular terms, terms which Hegel himself did not employ, the breakdown of the thesis and its simplicity by its antithesis points further again to the synthesis of these two previous antagonists.”[20]

This “more embracing synthesis” is not simply deconstruction, though it involves the breakdown of univocity, while pointing to the possibility of opposites being held together in a more unified meaning. “Equivocal difference dissolves univocal unity, but for this ‘dialectical identity’ there is a reintegration of these differences beyond sheer equivocation. We are capable of thinking of the ‘togetherness’ of these differences, of embracing a unity of opposites.”[21] Dialectical unity embraces the equivocal, dissolving power, so as to “go positively beyond” negation. “That is, there is a complex unity, a dialectical identity which embraces both univocal unity and equivocal differences. This unity is absolute because it is absolving, freeing, not just dissolving.”[22] There is a reconstructing with Hegel, allowing for further developments involving the reality of limited articulations and understandings. Things are not simply disintegrated, but reintegrated which accounts for continued density and value, aimed at increased understanding and fulness. The original impetus and energy are not completely spent. “Through the process of dialectical formation the original dynamism is shaped and set forth into its different stages and gathered together into a rich whole.”[23]

The negative and absent are only realized out of an originary appreciation of wholeness. This wholeness may not be reducible to total comprehension but it points to the pleroma, an overflowing Being. Where deconstruction will not allow for synthesis, Hegel’s dialectic presumes this synthesis precedes and comes after suspicion. “Dialectic . . . allows the strain toward dissolution in every synthesis, but the given experience of the synthesis indicates that contraries are already contained within this original unity.”[24] The very possibility for art or understanding presumes an original beauty and understanding which does not simply end in dualism, irreconcilable opposition, or equivocation. Dialectic simply traces movement in and through this possibility of something more.

This reappreciation of Hegel allows for a new understanding of wholeness, not as a univocal and closed system, but as a complex and ever unfolding formation. The accusation of Hegel’s “closure,” Desmond argues is oversimplified by the deconstructionists. One cannot leap over Desmond’s appreciation of Hegel, as out of this deep engagement springs Desmond’s passage beyond, but through, Hegelian dialectics. Desmond does not leave us with an isolated equivocation or univocity but returns us to metaphysics, having appreciated the metaxological toward which Hegel, however inadequately and incompletely, pointed him. Desmond clearly has found in Hegel, inspiration for his life’s work in developing this metaxological understanding.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] William Desmond, “Dialectic, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

[2] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 83.

[3] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 79.

[4] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 80.

[5] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81. Indeed, the continued “cutting edge” “deconstruction of faith” is still working the Hegelian negative, not as Hegel intended (for its power to positively determine) but simply to reveal final indeterminacy.  

[6] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81.

[7] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 82.

[8] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 84-85.

[9] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 85.

[10] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 86.

[11] William Desmond, Being Between: Conditions of Irish Thought (Galway: Arlen House, 2008) 317.

[12] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 88.

[13] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 87.

[14] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 90.

[15] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 93.

[16] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.

[17] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.

[18] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[19] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[20] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[21] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[22] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.

[23] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.

[24] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 98.

There is a Crack in Everything: Reading William Desmond and Slavoj Žižek with Flannery O’Connor

Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. There is a crack in everything God has made. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”[1]

We may imagine we are invulnerable, but then a wound opens. A world that seemed complete, cracks open so that both darkness and light flood in through the gaps. Flannery O’Connor, in various forms and characters, describes how the gaps can open, revealing the dark suturing point holding our world together, and this inevitably is conjoined with enlightenment. In her story Revelation, Ruby Turpin’s visit to the doctor has her reflecting on her good fortune relative to those she surveys in the waiting room.[2] There is the rude child who will not make room for her to sit down, the leathery old woman in a cotton print dress with the same print as sacks of chicken feed, the woman in wine colored gritty-looking slacks with a yellow sweatshirt, the ugly girl with a skin problem. She judges their shoes, their socks, and besides the pleasant looking lady and the common girl, she concludes they are mostly white trash “worse even then n….” “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home and land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.”

While she surveys the various low-grade humans by which she is surrounded, a gospel hymn was playing and Mrs. Turpin mentally supplied the final line, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.” The ugly girl, Mary Grace, seems to read Ruby’s thoughts (and clearly picks up her demeaning racist conversation), and at a moment in which Ruby is thanking Jesus for her own good disposition and circumstance, Mary Grace heaves her book and hits Ruby over her left eye. “The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she whispered.” Ruby Turpin’s world cracks apart as she comes to terms with the opening of this fissure, which she takes as a revelation.

Both Slavoj Žižek, the atheistic philosopher, and William Desmond, the Irish Catholic philosopher, speak of a “crack in everything.” Both are engaging the Hegelian reflection on the Kantian antinomies and coming to different conclusions about the significance that our world does not hold together but is somehow out of joint. The One does not correspond with itself; the subject can be its own object; thought does not arrive at the thinking thing; I and me do not entirely align. This discord may be taken as an indicator either that reality is incomplete or that it opens onto something beyond. With Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality. O’Connor reaches a depth of darkness on the order of Žižek, but she combines this realization as only being exposed in the light of revelation. The discord between atheistic materialism and philosophical theism points to the “between” we all occupy. The disease of being stuck, of desire which gives rise to drive, may be the predominant force in our lives, but this force, which seems to be for evil, is the gap through which the light potentially shines.

Žižek calls this the “parallax gap” and he defines it as “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”[3] He notes, Kant referred to this as the “transcendental illusion,” in which one can describe the same phenomena from two different perspectives between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. This gap exists all around us, though our tendency is to “balance” or “harmonize” binary opposites, imagining the out-of-jointness is temporary, and it is best if we are not over-focused on the problem. We are surrounded by binary opposites such as masculine and feminine, liberal and conservative, wave and particle, nature or nurture, freedom and determinism, mortality and immortality, the individual or the group, or in Kant’s summary of the problem “phenomena and the noumena.” Everything from the colors of the rainbow (wave length and the appearance of color) to mind and brain are disjointed, posing a gap. “Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip.”[4] There is a minimal difference within a singular thing in which it is divided against itself. Reality cannot be completely synthesized, so it might seem that Kant has named the problem for which there is no solution; that is, it may seem as if Kant has the final word over Hegel.

In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, antinomy is not the problem of reality but its basis. Where Kant exposes the structuring principle of the world in antinomies, Hegel presumes this is not a problem to be solved, but the very nature of reality and this is Žižek’s point of departure. “And does not Hegel, instead of overcoming this crack, radicalize it? Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”[5] Psychoanalytically the divided self (the split within Paul’s I) may seem to be the primary problem but this problem for Žižek is also the cure. There is no escape from the conflict of drives or the antagonism between the registers of the self (symbolic, imaginary, and real), but recognition of this reality is the first step to controlling it. The perceived gap or difference is constitutive of “reality” and closure of the gap or dissolution of dissonance, the exposure of the primordial lie, would amount to a dissolving of this perceived reality. The goal is not to overcome the gap but to conceive it in its “becoming” and thus manipulate it.[6] So, one should learn to enjoy their symptom rather than cure it, as sickness is the reality of the Subject.

Žižek, unlike Desmond, argues that Hegel’s was not a closed synthesis, while Desmond develops his metaxological understanding presuming he is moving beyond Hegel, though both are developing the significance of the gap, which Desmond dubs the “metaxological.” According to Desmond, “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[7] As he explains, “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[8] While Žižek presumes this tension is inherent to Hegel, Desmond thinks Hegel’s synthesis goes beyond the tension, which he sees as a continual resource. The “mystery” of the middle draws us toward it.  “The strangeness is not that of a hostile stranger, but rather of an intimate from which one has been estranged, which estrangement now begins to be slowly overcome.”[9] Desmond describes an awakening on the order of O’Connor’s: “Our ears, long caked with misunderstanding, hear sporadically only a faint echo of song. We have been deaf for too long. This deafness can last centuries, as with Western modernity that has systematically closed its hearing to ‘It is good.’”[10]

In a passage that sounds very much like Hegel, Desmond describes truth both as the enabling reality and the impetus toward a deepening of reason: “Self-determining thinking is released into its own freedom to think for itself by an enabling resource that is not self, a source not captured in terms of this or that determinate thought, or by thought’s own determination by and for itself. There is more that allows thinking to be itself more than itself.”[11] In the “crack” there is a mystery which does not speak of absence or lack but an excess which the theologian recognizes as Logos. Desmond does not explicitly identify the Logos but this is implicit. He speaks of “a call” more primal than self-assertion in which through the process of conversion (metanoia) we feel an indebtedness which endows us to move beyond the self and self-glorification to a sense of gratitude. “There is reverence for what has been given rather than arrogance for what is claimed as one’s own.”[12]

The wakening up of this reverence occurs in the “godsend” which frees from obsession with the self, working through the gap: “there are graced communications when self-transcending is freed from self-circling and an energy of generosity is released towards the otherness of the between, into the givenness of creation as good, into the neighborhood of others as good. A godsend of generosity visits us in the between.”[13] The between of self and other, work toward a realization or enlightenment opening up to reality: “We start in the midst of things, and we are open to things. We are open because we are already opened. Before we come to ourselves as more reflectively thoughtful, we already are in a porosity of being, and are ourselves as this porosity of being become mindful of itself.”[14] This mindfulness is a personal realization of what Hegel might call “spirit” becoming aware of itself in the individual. For Desmond, the godsend opens up the crack in reality, exposing the darkness and letting in the light.

Desmond appeals to O’Connor’s Revelation, as an example; the exposure of the racism by which Ruby Turpin orders her world, and then her godsend literally strikes her in the face in the form of the book and the girl’s harsh words. Her dark reality is exposed. She looks at the girl who had thrown the book, “‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath waiting, as for a revelation.” Long past the events, after the girl is gone and Ruby and Claud have returned home, she silently carries on the conversation. “Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.” She answers the girl’s accusation: “’I am not,’ she said tearfully, ‘a wart hog. From hell.’ But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now.” She recognizes from whence this godsend has come and complains directly to God: “‘What do you send me a message like that for?’ she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. ‘How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?’” She rages at God, “‘Why me?’ she rumbled. ‘It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.’”

As the sun is setting and the light is fading, “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’” The question reverberates back, putting everything she knew into question. Then she catches a vision: “Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She sees a vast swinging bridge stretched toward heaven, and on it were companies of white-trash, black folk, “battalions of freaks and lunatics” “clapping and leaping like frogs.” And then she sees her own kind at the back, marching with all the dignity they could muster. “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

This seemingly random act of violence, for Ruby is a revelation about herself and her world. Her sense of self, her invulnerability, her station in life, which she thought free of illusion turns out to be a lie. Like the prodigal son who comes to his senses among the pigs, like Peter caught in the midst of denying Christ and suddenly broken, like the two on the Road to Emmaus who encounter a stranger who turns their world upside down, the godsend, Christ, may come in any number of forms, through which one world is undone in opening another. Could it be that something like Žižek’s dark hopelessness necessarily accompanies Desmond’s godsend? As Ryan Duns writes, “The ‘crack’ in everything renders philosophy and theology, or at least a metaxological philosophy and theology, porous to one another. The theological layer is not imposed but exposed and revealed by the godsend and our response, in faith, is to live according to the logic of these depths.”[15] There is a speculative darkness eclipsed by joy in the theological turn to philosophy; a path opened by Žižek’s Hegel which comes alive in Desmond.

Ruby’s vision fades but the realization it brought remained. “At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] Ryan Duns deploys Emersons quote for his opening epigraph. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 76.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, Revelation, included in her collection titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” but also available online https://andrewmbailey.com/oconnor_revelation.pdf.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 4.

[4] Parallax View, 4.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 8). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[6] Parallax View, 6-7.

[7] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[8] Reader, 199.

[9] William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY, 1995) 205.

[10] Being and the Between, 205.

[11] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC:CUA Press, 2012), 217. Cited in Duns, 349.

[12] William Desmond, “Consecrated Thought: Between the Priest and the Philosopher,” (Louvain Studies, 30, no. 1-2 (2005): 92—106), 97. Cited in Duns, 350.

[13] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition), loc. 4207.

[14] Desmond Reader, “Wording the Between,” loc. 3730.

[15] Duns, 351.

Agapeic Love Versus the Antichrist: William Desmond’s Resolution to this Age of Nihilistic Christianity

The Antichrist in the biblical description is a false duplicate, imitating and perverting Christ in a near mirror image, which perverts the original enough so as to create the opposite effect. This distortion turns the spiritual into the demonic, love into hate, and peace into war. Living, as we seemingly are, in the age of the Antichrist, Christians have made a Faustian-like bargain with the political powers and popular religion. Christ’s admonition regarding the stranger is turned into exclusion rather than inclusion, his admonition of nonviolence is displaced by extreme violence, and his admonition of love – love of enemy, the stranger, the alien, has become a vehicle of hatred. This “masculine” form of the faith sees viciousness as a virtue in bringing about the “rule” of Christ through a bullying grab for power.[1]

This blunt statement does not get at the subtlety and means of how it is that the Truth has been displaced by a lie, but William Desmond, through his life-long philosophical engagement sets forth a key description particularly through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, exposing this displacement of the Gospel. The temptation may be to frantically point out the Antichrist serving in place of Christ, and imagine that everyone can see the obvious, but there is a blinding logic at work which is not dispelled by the pronouncement. Where hate has displaced love there is a need for a depth of engagement, a transformation of the mind, a grounding in truth, which can account for the lie. If we cannot name or describe the truth (in depth), we may not understand how we might be implicated in the problem. It is not enough to declare the stink to those at home with the odor.

Nietzsche recognizes the rot in German Christianity, and as “a philosopher of the nose,” as he calls himself, “he claims to smell out, in high ideals, through subtle traces and trails, the secret stains of rottenness.”[2] Desmond, a subtle reader of Nietzsche, points out that reading him as a “secret (Christian) fellow traveler” or as univocally Antichrist (his self-description), misses the fact that neither captures his equivocation. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, says, Christians will have to “sing better songs to make me believe in their Redeemer.” It is not enough that they roll their eyes to heaven invoking love of neighbor, a “command that secretly enforces one’s own sweet will?” This “categorical imperative reeks of cruelty.”[3]

G.W.F. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness and Nietzsche’s Will to Power describe how in our own self-division we bow down to a power we conjure up and project, evacuating the world of meaning. “God as our own beyond is the source of the devaluation of the earth and ourselves.”[4] We are unhappy, self-punishing and cruel, because we have projected our own self-image onto God. This God needs crucifying if true humanity is to be recovered. Zarathustra exults in the freedom killing God produces, but what seems obvious is that any semblance of the Christian God is already dead, and the Christianity that Nietzsche is describing is already a practical atheism.

Nietzsche is recommending an atheistic resolution to the problem of God, but this solution of working within an immanent frame already describes German Christianity. Absolute transcendence and the loss of divine immanence is the result of a Christianity that has reversed the meaning of the cross. Luther’s “death of God on the cross” (which Nietzsche plays upon) aimed to defeat the metaphysics of scholasticism, affirming an empty nominalism, so that Nietzsche is only carrying out the logical implications of a God rendered inaccessible. The Nietzschean reversal of the meaning of the cross resonates with a Christianity in which immanence is the only practical possibility. His recommendation of the Übermensch, which Hitler took personally, is of the same order as a Christianity which needs their thugs to gain control in an immanence divided from transcendence.

Nietzsche however, recognizes that Christianity has powers of enchantment which need to be utilized in his project of recovering a masculine will-to-power. “The Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ” in The Will to Power, describes his project of educating rulers, who will need to “master even one’s own benevolence and pity,” and not put it to work in the childish forgiveness of the enemy: “the affect of creator’s must be elevated” so that a new kind of master arises. Not one set to craft artificial power but one which comes fully into power. “[T]he exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings (compared with any prince hitherto): the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.”[5] What is needed is a Caesar who is no longer constrained by any servile residue of pity or forgiveness. The Christian God has stolen the power of creativity from rulers who do not recognize that they can be the Creator. This Uber ruler will exceed the power of princes of any previous age, through taking on a spiritual superiority exceeding hatred or forgiveness of the enemy. “This ‘above, this ‘über,’ seems to embrace the extremest promise of human creativity: highest superiority of spiritual power.”[6]

This Caesar with the soul of Christ will combine the attributes of the lion (with his strength of will) with the characteristics of a child. Nietzsche describes a three-stage metamorphosis of spirit, first is the camel, representative of a strong servility, then a lion who asserts its own will (though it is not fully creative) but opens space for the fully developed child. “The child is the third: the self-affirming spirit that is a sacred “yes” and self-propelling wheel; it is a new beginning of the will willing itself.”[7] Here is pure unfettered will, which will focus only upon the self, breaking any obstacle or constraint (whether legal or the human other).

There is complete repudiation of reliance on the other. “Thus Nietzsche/Zarathustra will confess to not knowing about receiving. He knows about giving; and giving out of an abundance. This giving out is in the form of self-affirming; it is not for the other as other; it is the fulfilled power of the child simply overflowing, through being full with itself.”[8] This Caesar with the soul of Christ will seek only his own glorification. Like Christ he is creator and creation – a self-creation – exercising full self-determining autonomy. Obviously, Nietzsche does not mean “child” in the sense that Christ uses the term, but this is his Antichrist who takes on a resemblance to Christ, parodying the sacred with its enchanting creative possibilities.

Caesar with the soul of Christ moves in the opposite direction to Christ’s command to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Christ would separate the two while Nietzsche fuses them, but he also wants to reproduce the power of Jesus to evoke the inner presence of the kingdom. “He did not know the ‘no’-he was innocent of the will that stands against, that negates, and in that sense empty of ressentiment and revenge.”[9] Though Nietzsche is inconsistent, with Jesus sometimes suffering from being too Jewish, here Christ is the ultimate anti-Semite: “Jesus uttered his ‘no,’ his ‘anti,’ not only against the ‘Church’ and the ‘priests’ but against the ‘Jewish Church.’”[10]

He is unconstrained by the law and even unconstrained by the neighbor. Nietzsche would also have us say “no” to the neighbor, as if the neighbor is more important than I am. He “is clearly intent to break with any subordination of the ‘I’ to the ‘thou.’ Zarathustra says: the ‘thou’ is older than the ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ is to be the crowning achievement of the creative individual.”[11] We need friends, but only in our self-attainment. “May the friend be to you a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Superman.” “In your friend you should love the Superman as your principle.” “What finally comes back is my own self!”[12]

Desmond questions if distinguishing the self in this way or outranking everyone else is of any value. “If all value is projection of will-to-power, how do we establish rank? For if all is will-to-power and there is no inherent value (as Nietzsche believed), the whole is valueless and the truth of rank in value is actually homogeneity, since high and low are each a projection of will-to-power.”[13] For Nietzsche this will to power is all there is, but one wonders what is the point, in a world drained of meaning. What is being created and to what end in a world in which ultimate power is only one more form of controlling obedience?

This is Jacques Lacan’s argument against Dostoevsky’s “if God is dead everything is permitted.” Lacan counters, if God is dead nothing is permitted, as the weight of power ultimately crushes all who would gain it. The weight of the law taken into the self does not relieve oppression but multiplies it. Being the law (power for powers sake) is the ultimate servitude of nothing, and it exacts everything in draining life of its depth and beauty. For Nietzsche there is no escape as absolute freedom seems to also picture a crushing servitude to self: “For me-how could there be any ‘outside-me’? There is no outside!”[14] Nietzsche is not unaware of the hell he would create: “But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break from me. I do not know the joy of the receiver; and I have often dreamed that stealing must be more blessed than receiving. It is my poverty that my hand never rests from giving. Oh wretchedness of all givers!”[15]

Nietzsche’s atheistic musings which include a failure of Christian thought, points to the possibility of a reinvigorated Christianity, more mature than a striving for control or sovereignty, beyond a willful willing of self. Desmond notes that it is not a matter of setting aside erotic love but a surpassing and fulfilling of eros and sovereignty, desire set upon self.

As such, it would imply a kind of unselving, if you like, but not in terms of an innocent will-lessness before erotic will, but with a willing beyond willfulness and beyond will-to-power, and indeed beyond good and evil, in so far as these are defined by a determinate, humanized moral measure. This is to be, not in the innocence of becoming, but in the agapeic good beyond moral good and evil.[16]

There is a higher freedom and autonomy which is for the other which is already a participation in a love exceeding the self. There is a self-transcending agapeic service in which the glory of the self is not the point. Caesar will have to step down from his throne to take the name of Christ; Christ’s is not a spirit gained through sovereign power. In his temptation in the wilderness Christ refused sovereign rule, he refused to turn stone into bread, he refused rule over the world of men, he refused spiritual domination. In this, Nietzsche and his contemporary Christian followers need to understand Christ differently. The form of Christianity that would do evil that good may abound, is stuck in the finite necessity of evil.

Evil is only a parasite on the agapeic good and exists through the patience of the good. “It is not crushed because the good does not crush, for the good is not a master or an erotic sovereign; it is an agapeic servant.”[17] “Caesar with the soul of Christ” would fuse agapeic power of service with sovereign power, but sovereign power is already a failure of the undergirding reality of agape. Perhaps the most radical form of evil is not simply that of the lion or the typical sovereign, but the power which takes unto itself the spiritual power which exceeds all boundaries. This is the spiritual corruption of the Antichrist which would fuse the power of love with evil. The only power to counter the Antichrist is that of agape.[18]

[1] The phrase in the recent Atlantic article by Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue.”

[2] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 200.

[3] F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Nachgelassene Schriften in Werke, ed G. Colli and M Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), VI, 3, 253-372, § 3 of “Warum ich so weise bin”: ‘Diese doppelte Reihe von Erfahrungen, diese Zugänglichkeit zu anscheinend getrennten Welten wiederholt sich in meiner Natur in jeder Hinsicht,-ich bin ein Doppelgänger, ich habe auch das ‘zweite’ Gesicht noch ausser dem ersten” (Werke hereinafter referred to as I7.) Cited in Desmond, Ibid, 201.

[4] Is there a Sabbath for Thought, 203.

[5] The Will to Power, 513. Cited in A Sabbath for Thought, 206.

[6] A Sabbath for Thought, 207.

[7] A Sabbath for Thought, 207

[8] A Sabbath for Thought, 208.

[9] A Sabbath for Thought, 211.

[10] A Sabbath for Thought, 212.

[11] A Sabbath for Thought, 222.

[12] A Sabbath for Thought, 221.

[13] A Sabbath for Thought, 221.

[14] W, VI, 1, 268; Zarathustra, 234. Cited in A Sabbath for Thought, 222-223.

[15] Cited in Desmond, 227.

[16] A Sabbath for Thought, 216.

[17] A Sabbath for Thought, 215.

[18] Desmond lays out a more positive agapeic love in his development and correction of Hegel, not so much to distinguish types of love, self-love, eros, philia, and agape, but to show how every kind of love is undergirded by agape. In erotic and philia we find the self in the other, but “if divine love is agape, and if human loves can be graced with love of the neighbor and indeed the enemy, it would have to transcend the self-relation of the inclusive whole that comes to itself in and through the other. William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1988) 39. Even in self-love there is a delight to be found in being, and this is grounded and points to agape love. “In agape, there is a going towards the other but not from a lack in the lover but from an excess or surplus of good that gives from itself, gives beyond itself to the other. The point of the going towards and the giving is not the return of the giver to itself through the other that receives. The point is to be released to, or to release, the other in its own good as being for itself. Hegel’s God, 40.

William Desmond’s Completion of Hegel

As a boy in Texas, unattenuated perhaps to the age, the world around me came alive with divine grandeur, discovered through my new-found faith. At the time it seemed obvious that I could ride off into the prairie and meet God, who showed himself in the meadowlark, the killdeer, the quail, the rabbits, the ever-present coyote. It was a stark landscape and yet the patches of life, the cottonwoods, occasional streams, the striking sunrise and sunset, seemed to show the face of God. What was once a regular occurrence and always in easy reach, faded with time, education, and perhaps attunement to the age. How is it that the world as saturated with the grandeur of God, once the common understanding, can be renewed?

As Charles Taylor has demonstrated in A Secular Age, the world has changed from one in which it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society,” to one in which “many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”[1] Taylor describes the closing in of the world into an “immanent frame” in which this world in its finitude is determinant of value, and there is a closing in upon the self, what Taylor calls the “buffered” self. Our age has been captured by the “punctual” or “atomistic” sense of self, cut off from history and only vaguely aware of any alternative culture, so that the framework shaping life is perceived as the singular possibility. “So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moves in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call ‘the immanent frame’.”[2] The irony is that the original effort, producing the secular, was to protect God from being contaminated with finiteness or materiality. It “was an achievement of Latin Christendom in the late Middle Ages and early modern period . . . made in order to mark clearly the autonomy of the super natural.”[3] Taylor spends much of his book describing how this immanent frame has come to dominate modern life: “Modern science, along with the many other facets described—the buffered identity, with its disciplines, modern individualism, with its reliance on instrumental reason and action in secular time—make up the immanent frame.”[4]

“God is dead,” not just philosophically or religiously, but in the sense of no longer being an obvious possibility. “From within the picture, it just seems obvious that the order of argument proceeds from science to atheism, through a series of well-grounded steps.”[5] There has been a subtraction or loss of concern for God or the transcendent, and “what we’re left with is human good, and that is what modern societies are concerned with.”[6] Human welfare in general is not the goal, nor is human freedom in general my goal. “Just being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family or immediate milieu.”[7]

Even where belief endures the values that prevail in the Christian faith are often those of immanence and there has been a secularization or flattening out of faith, as transcendence has been eclipsed. God has been evacuated from public and social spheres and religion relegated to a private realm. Religious belief and practice are a realm apart from the practical political necessities of utilitarianism. Perhaps, worse than unbelief is a belief in God, confounded with the secular state and secular religion (e.g., Christian nationalism). It is as if “our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.”[8] Ours is a world no longer enchanted with the divine.

Taylor calls for a new itinerary or a new path which will move beyond the dead-end of this secular age. “One could say that we look for new and unprecedented itineraries. Understanding our time in Christian terms is partly to discern these new paths, opened by pioneers who have discovered a way through the particular labyrinthine landscape we live in, its thickets and trackless wastes, to God.”[9]

This renewal begun by William Desmond, begins with a return to Hegel, who founds his philosophy on the createdness of the world. He presumes faith in the Creator is the proper frame in which to understand the world: “If someone were to make his profession of faith as follows: ‘I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth’, it would be surprising if someone else were to conclude from this first part that the person professing his faith believed in God, the creator of heaven, and therefore considered the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal.”[10] Hegel was criticized for equating the “actual” and the “rational,” but he explains that he simply intends what the Christian religion is founded upon: God is the mind behind the world, and we encounter God in thinking this out. “With regard to their philosophical meaning, however, we may presuppose that the reader is sufficiently educated to know not only that God is actual– that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly actual, but also, insofar as the merely formal difference is concerned, that existence in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality.”[11] God cannot be equated with the appearance, but he is the personal actuality behind the appearance encountered in thought.

Hegel recognizes that the world is apprehended by persons, in thought, created as it is by a personal God. “They must be involved in it, whether through their external senses only or with their deeper spirit and the essential consciousness of their respective self. This is the same principle that in our time has been called faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation coming from outside and in particular from one’s own inner being.”[12] To imagine, with Newton, that everything is reducible to rule, to principles, or to abstractions, is to miss that these too are thought. “But what in essence they aim at and produce are laws, general propositions, a theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is.”[13] Empirical knowledge or scientific laws are part of human experience and thought, marked by “freedom, spirit, and God.” To separate empirical laws from thought and experience is to lose the reality undergirding them. “The reason why they cannot be found in that sphere is not that they are supposedly not a part of experience; they are not experienced by way of the senses, it is true, but whatever is present in consciousness is being experienced– this is even a tautological sentence. Rather, they are not found in that sphere, because in terms of their content these objects immediately present themselves as infinite.”[14] This is part of recognizing the personhood on both sides of thought, not in the manner of Descartes – though an understanding toward which he gestured, that the person is involved in what he knows.

Hegel is also critical of the metaphysical tradition which would understand the world as an object or objectivity existing over and against the thinking subject. Traditional ontology focused on the world as a substance, which could be potentially endowed with thought, but nonetheless the thinking subject still viewed the world as a separate object: “something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject.”[15] Hegel saw his work as bringing to completion the Kantian turn to the subject, but he expands upon this subjectivity and thinking, as “the world is, at its core, subjectivity itself. For this reason, substance had to be shown to be subject, too, and substance ontology had to be seen ultimately to be subject ontology.”[16] One need not approach the subject on the basis of the philosophical arguments for God, as if one needed to prove God before setting out in belief and thinking. This would be like needing to comprehend the digestion system before eating, or learning to swim before getting in the water. The content of philosophy is thought and this thought is engagement with the spirit “the living spirit, a content turned into a world, namely the outer and inner world of consciousness, or that its content is actuality.”[17]  

This sets up a very different relationship between the finite and infinite. For Descartes the finite, inclusive of the body and the world of finite physical things, must disappear in thinking being. Where Descartes thinks away the world in his grasp for infinite being, Hegel presumes there is an encounter with the infinite only as being first proves to be finite. As Stephen Houlgate explains, for Descartes “not only does the infinite precede the idea of the finite in our minds but infinite being itself precedes and transcends finite being in reality.”[18] According to Descartes, and here much of the western philosophical and theological tradition concurs, God may create and sustain but this is secondary and subsequent to his existence apart from finite things. For Hegel the infinite and the finite are inseparable, and to separate them is to limit both. The infinite must include the finite or it is a bad infinite or not a true infinite. The determinant or concrete is not a limit for the infinite, as each implies the other and each turns into the other.

Hegel, Taylor, and Desmond, have a deep appreciation for the power of thought, to either delude or liberate. Thought has the capacity to locate and evaluate itself, but it is also easily lost in the age. Taylor traces how the power of persons to evaluate where they are, how they got here, and how things can change, has been captured by a utilitarianism which limits options to what principle will work. This is also the point of Hegel’s logic, namely that thought cannot merely be reduced to the useful: “insofar as the logical dimension constitutes the absolute form of the truth and even more than that, the pure truth itself, it is something completely different from anything merely useful.”[19] There is an inherent value in thought, as coming to the truth is the point. “Truth is a grand word and an even grander thing. If someone’s spirit and mind are still healthy, his heart must leap at once at the thought of this word.”[20]

There is a seeming “incommensurateness” between thought and truth, raising the question whether or not we can know God. “God is the truth; how are we to know him?” This is not a time for false humility. “Such language as ‘How am I, a poor earthly worm, to know the truth?’ is a thing of the past.”[21] Hegel notes, this is Pilate’s question, which (after Christ) is a thing of the past. Christ commands worship in spirit and truth, and Hegel is explicating this goal: “Only in thinking and as thinking is this content, God himself, in its truth. In this sense, then, thought is not just mere thought, but rather the highest and, properly viewed, the only manner in which it is possible to comprehend what is eternal and in and for itself.”[22]

This explains the departure of Desmond, who has been called the last metaphysician,[23] as he unrepentantly takes up the issue of being, but he sidesteps the postmodern critique of metaphysics in his reworking of Hegel. He adapts the Hegelian dialectic, keeping equivocity (difference) and univocity (sameness) alive, which he characterizes as “a process of interplay between same and different, between self and other.”[24] The focus is on dialogue as “mindful communication” between persons, as opposed to impersonal arrival at theory. Dialogue entails an openness to others, and a dynamic unfolding involving “a rhythmic process of unfolding, whether of process or events, thoughtful articulations or communications.”[25]

Desmond dubs his approach “metaxology” which attempts “to think beyond an oscillation back and forth between univocity and equivocity, while facing both of these fair and square.”[26] In the dialectic exchange there is a certain perceived lack, which moves the conversation forward. According to Ryan Duns, “Metaxology neither supplants nor annuls these voices but hold together to allow each to speak of being. Metaxology symphonically weaves together each voice and allows it to speak its truth yet balances these voices so no one dominates the other.”[27] Like Hegel, Desmond understands his work to lead to the “practice of a kind of thinking” which is mindful of the multiple voices at play within being.[28] Of course, Hegel is the focus of much of his critique, but it is from the advances of Hegel and his interactions with Hegel, that his philosophy of the metaxological takes shape.

The metaxological builds upon Hegel’s notion that infinite being is in-finite (or non finite) being that can only be understood on the basis of the finite. This turns the presumption of Descartes on its head and with him much of the ontotheological project. Descartes assumes that infinite being is that purely positive being, grasped in his cogito (“I think therefore I am”), which is the necessary beginning point which must be comprehended prior to knowledge of the finite, but for Hegel and Desmond being first proves to be finite and it is only on this basis that it also proves to be infinite. It is not that our faculty of reason arrives at God through its own power, but the infinite is given in the finite, first and foremost in human subjectivity. This is the truth Desmond builds upon and refines, as in his understanding the transcendent shows itself in the world. Where in a Cartesian modernism the infinite is gained by abstracting ourselves out of the world, Desmond’s philosophy presumes and shows how the Transcendent or Infinite is available in and through the finite.

While this was once the prevailing notion and sensibility (that the world is filled with the glory of God), the Cartesian divide served to disenchant the world, reducing it to a mechanism, no longer serving as a door to the infinite. Ryan Duns argues that Desmond has taken up Taylor’s challenge to forge a new path toward God. It is not simply that Desmond begins again, but he is a careful reader of Hegel, such that his work might be characterized (perhaps not the way he would characterize it) as a revamping and reworking of Hegel. As Duns notes, “By inquiring into the truth and limits of dialectic, Desmond exposes the nearly-imperceptible cracks in Hegel’s philosophy, exposing openings in the Hegelian system capable of leading us toward a renewal of metaphysical thought.”[29] This is not a return to an abstract metaphysics but is a path of spiritual renewal through a reawakened wonder which Duns compares to a pilgrimage. The secular age poses an obstacle to God which requires effort and practice to overcome.

The question of what to do, or even what would Jesus do, misses that the primary question should be what one desires to be. The focus, in Taylor’s terms (taken up by Duns), has been “corralled” by questions of “what we ought to do” without addressing “questions about what it is good to be or what it is good to love.”[30] The ethical issue is not to live up to a code but to enter into a relationship. Taylor contrasts an apodictic reasoning, set upon some code, to an ad hominem reasoning, which takes account of love in dialogue. As Duns explains (in applying Taylor to Desmond), “By ad hominem he means an argument that goes “to the person” and assumes the interlocutor’s point of view. Essentially, ad hominem argument begins from another’s standpoint and, by means of dialogue, shows how adopting another position might prove beneficial. Rather than trying to find neutral ground or territory, it seeks to engage the subjectivity of one’s interlocutor.”[31]  Duns likens it to the practice of prayer: “In its commitment to abiding within the flux and ambiguity of existence and giving ear to the call of voices suppressed in other philosophical practices, metaxology affects a stance of ongoing vigilance, open and attentive to the call of the other. Metaxology, so framed, becomes akin to a form of philosophical prayer listening for and willing to respond to the call of the Other.”[32] The practice of metaxology means dwelling between sameness and difference, not through a final synthesis, but by “recurrence to the rich ambiguities of the middle.”[33] Desmond pictures Hegel as privileging a self-mediation which would reduce or encompass the Other in the same, but he advocates a continual inter-mediation focused on what is other to the self. Genuine philosophical thinking “must be both self-mediating and also open to the intermediation between thought and what is other to thought, precisely as other.”[34]

There is a convergence of Hegel and Desmond on human experience. The point is not absolute certainty, as in a traditional metaphysics or philosophical argument, but building upon experience and openness to dialogue. Where Descartes, like Anselm before him, begins with absolute certainty, presuming that he has grasped the infinite, the presumption of Desmond’s “dialogue” is that closure is impossible. “It is a biographical argument, one that offers a new form of life, that initiates an ongoing process of growth in articulacy as one approaches asymptotically the goal of human flourishing.”[35] Duns claims that Desmond’s metaxology redeems the promise of Hegel’s dialectic. “Whereas Hegel’s dialectic suppressed equivocity, metaxology recuperates equivocity and balances it with univocity.”[36]

[1] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25

[2] Taylor, 542.

[3] Taylor, 542.

[4] Taylor, 566.

[5] Taylor, 565.

[6] Taylor, 572.

[7] Taylor, 572.

[8] Taylor, 307.

[9] Taylor, 755.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Edited and translated by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 11.

[11] Logic, 33.

[12] Logic, 35.

[13] Logic, 35.

[14] Logic, 36.

[15] Logic, xiv.

[16] Logic, xv.

[17] Logic, 33.

[18] Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2006) 401.

[19] Logic, 48.

[20] Logic, 48.

[21] Logic, 48.

[22] Logic, 49.

[23]  John Manoussakis writes, “William Desmond is arguably in our times the last metaphysician.”, “The Silences of the Between,” in William Desmond and Contemporary Theology 269. Cited in Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 79.

[24] William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) 421. Cited in Duns, 122.

[25] Ibid.

[26] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2012), 55. Cited in Duns, 134.

[27] Duns, 133-134.

[28] The Intimate Universal, 423 and Duns, 134.

[29] Duns, 124.

[30] Duns, 33-34.

[31] See Duns explanation, 25-26.

[32] Duns, 133.

[33] Duns, 132.

[34] William Desmond, Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of being and Mind ( Albany: SUNY 1990) 5. Cited in Duns, 132.

[35] Duns, 30.

[36] Duns, 131

Why Are Some Blind to the Slaughter?

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were caregivers, described by friends and family as compassionate and kind, and both were killed in the midst of caring for their neighbors. Renee had just dropped off her 6-year-old at school and her final words, in the midst of protesting the actions of ICE, were to give comfort to those who killed her: “I am not mad at you.” Alex’s last words were for a woman who had been pepper sprayed, “Are you okay, are you okay?” He put himself between the woman and her assailants, perhaps the natural response of an ICU nurse. Pictures of Alex helping veterans and offering comfort to patients, reminded me of the ICU nurse who cared for me after having heart problems. She seemed angelic, and Alex was clearly also gifted with compassion. Both Alex and Renee spent their lives caring, until there was no more to give.

The wanton slaughter of these two precious lives is obvious for all to see, such that the mystery is why some are blind to the reality. Beyond the obvious evil of the killings are the slanderous responses, betraying the same blindness. The claims that “they had it coming,” before and after the fact, are made of the same stuff. Clearly the killers are blind, but so too those unable to see that shooting a mother in the face or a man in the back ten times, is not justifiable. Blindness to slaughter of the good and beautiful is exposed for what it is at the cross, however, recognizing this “evil” means exposing the lie of the justifications, the law and order that killed Christ.

There are three levels of “legal justification” surrounding the murders, and accompanying each level is a more profound evil.

The Universal Law in Which the Evil Suffer and the Good Prosper

The main law justifying the killing is on the order of the unwritten law of the friends of Job, presuming “he had it coming,” otherwise it would not have happened. The instinctual presumption that the guilty suffer preserves from the troubling reality. We can identify with the “good” and not worry about the contamination involved in identifying with the “guilty.” In this absolute legalism, suffering is already guilt. The pervasiveness of this understanding struck me, when a local man in our little town was killed by the police and the wife of a man who is now a Republican legislator, immediately pronounced him guilty. The world is divided into the guilty and the innocent and those who are poor, black, brown, foreign, or immigrants, suffer because they probably deserve it.

The law “justifying” the killings and deployed in the form of ICE agents, is aimed at weeding out illegals, foreigners, and immigrants, and has been mainly leveled at people of color. “These people” are not protected by this instinctual law, but are its living proof. Justification is inscribed in the flesh of those being punished and those who do the punishing. Those white citizens who might empathize or even identify with the suffering have placed themselves outside of this unwritten law and are guilty by association. “Clearly, they had it coming.”

This law may float free of religion or it may be codified as part of a religious understanding. It may be called karma, nature, reaping what you sow, or lex talionis, but it is the misunderstood law written on the heart which stands behind many forms of “natural” and religious law.

The Christianized Version of the Universal Law

Ironically, Christians may be the most confused about where Christ stands in regard to the law, presuming that he died to uphold it rather than to expose its deadly nature. Rather than mere blindness, inherited from the universal law on the order of the friends of Job or the aggravated blindness of the scribes and Pharisees, some suffer from a doubly confounded blindness in assigning Jesus’ death to upholding the law that killed him. Penal substitution presumes God does the killing, and the killers are his instruments, assigned to play their various roles so as to achieve an atoning payment. There is a Christianity blinded to the evil which put Christ on the cross, assigning it to God, and it is this form of the religion that confuses God with the victimizers.

Here the Christian friends of Job can quote Romans 13 (in isolation from chapter 12), along with German Christians serving Hitler, justifying the murder of all who oppose the Leader. In this understanding Caesar, the President, the police, the soldiers, or ICE, cannot break the law as they are the law. They embody the law and serve as its instruments. These Christians imagine that their allegiance to Empire and their allegiance to God are one and the same and the presumption is that God put Trump, or Putin, or Caesar in power.  The notion is that God ordains specific governments to accomplish his will and this is in line with his redemptive strategy in and through the Church, so that the ordination of Christ and the Church is on a continuum with God’s use of state and law.

In this understanding, Roman law and God’s law are united to bring about the death of Jesus, so that he might pay the penalty of the law. God is working out his providential intent to punish Jesus under the law so that he might be punished for all. Rome, with its god-Caesar is not being judged, nor is Israel and its leaders who bow down to Caesar. None are called to repentance, but Israel’s and Rome’s justice are perfectly adequate for God’s purposes. After all, Rome and the Church will unite under Emperor Constantine and this Constantinian Christianity imagines that human law, justice, and government, are in accord with God’s purposes in Christ. In this understanding the economy of salvation works with the economy of human cultures and nations so that salvation comes through Constantinian Rome or Christian America. 

People fleeing violence and poverty are subjected to a law, which anyone vaguely familiar with the teaching of Jesus would seem to condemn as evil. Yet, it is Christians, steeped in a religion they link to Jesus, that are blinded to the forces which killed Jesus, which slaughtered Renee and Alex, which continues to kill Palestinians, and which can be linked to a catalog of genocidal violence.

This may seem as close to radical evil as possible, but something even worse is unfolding.

A Scapegoating Christianity

There is an elite who recognize the function of the law in creating scapegoats, who recognize Jesus’ exposure of the scapegoating mechanism, and rather than eschew violence, they are taking control by deploying new levels of violence. The oligarchs backing Donald Trump, and who have also shaped the career of JD Vance, recognize that their accumulation of wealth and power depend upon heightened fear, continued willingness of the masses to submit to authoritarian rule, and ultimately the suspension of democratic society, and several identify as Christians.

The Republican party has a long history of weaponizing Christianity, so as to manipulate the shift that is unfolding. Where I am located, in rural Missouri, thirty or so years ago there was next to no Republican presence, while today the opposite is the case. The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Robertson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric and action against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war. Establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue originally behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1]

Peter Thiel, arguably the key ideologue among the cohort of oligarchs surrounding Trump (including his fellow South African, Elon Musk), writes, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[2] He remains committed to the “Christian faith” but stands “against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” Thiel hopes to use technology, so-called “transhumanism,” to escape death. He plans to create a new order with its own currency, its own social order, and its own interplanetary colonies and is taking active steps to bring this about. He has not only funded Vance but Curtis Yarvin, the architect of “neocameralism,” advocating replacing “democracy with corporate governance, citizens with customers, democratic deliberation with algorithmic optimization.” His RAGE doctrine aims to “Retire All Government Employees”—and Musk’s DOGE (Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency) began systematically purging civil servants following this blueprint.[3]

Mike Brock lists the various means Thiel is deploying, but key to the death of Alex and Renee are his plans for ICE. As Brock notes, “Palantir’s ICE integration means deportation agents use Thiel’s surveillance software for mass raids—over $248 million in documented contracts since 2011, including systems that track Americans’ movements, associations, and communications. This isn’t law enforcement technology but population management infrastructure that makes democratic resistance impossible by eliminating the privacy necessary for organizing collective action.”[4] In Thiel’s overt deployment of scapegoating, some must die that a few (himself) will be saved. In one interview, when asked whether humanity should continue, he was unclear if this was his goal.[5] The overt weaponizing of the power he finds exposed in Christianity (through the work of René Girard), uses the evil power exposed by the crucified, and seeks to manipulate it for his personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

The Exposure of the Lie of Evil

Jesus exposed the lie that God is not with those on crosses, those who suffer, the poor, immigrants and the outcast. God does not wield power through death and suffering but in Christ has defeated this power. He exposes the blindness of those who cannot recognize the innocent victim. In the words of the Psalmist quoted by Jesus, “They hated me for no reason” (Jn. 15:25; Ps. 35:19). They demonize and criminalize Jesus, who submits himself to their blindness as, “These words of Scripture have to be fulfilled in me ‘He let himself be taken for a criminal’” (Luke 22:37; Mark 15:28). As with every scapegoat, Christ is the perceived source of the problem and he is killed to protect the law and the nation. He pronounced his killers blind, both before and from the cross. These blind guides cannot see they are crucifying the Lord of Glory because their vision is distorted by the law, which separates good from evil, Jew from Gentile, clean from unclean, and ultimately God’s people from his enemies. They imagine God is on the side of the victimizers, the crucifiers, those wielding the law and he is against all who fall outside the law.

This blindness is compounded by those who pervert Christianity and see scapegoating sacrifice as God’s instrument of salvation. They fail to benefit from Jesus’ exposure of the lie and due to their misconstrual, there is no rescue available. But there is something worse than this failed form of the faith: those who recognize Jesus was scapegoated, that he exposed and defeated this mechanism, but instead of implementing his defeat of evil they would manipulate it so as to control the world enslaved by its power. They are worse than blind, in that they would use their insight to manipulate the blind. Renee Good and Alex Pretti are victims of this engineered blindness, on display not only in their killers but in those blind to their murder.

[1] See my piece, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?”

[2] He explains in “The Education of a Libertarian” https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

[3] Mike Brock, From the website “Notes From the Circus,” https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-oligarchs-bible-how-peter-thiel

[4] Ibid.

[5]https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&p=thiel+interview+questioning+if+humanity+should+continue&type=E210US105G91970#id=1&vid=ba10f2404febf524085599d5fd85c897&action=click

David Bohm and G.W.F. Hegel on the Unity of All in All

There is a stream of theology focused on the unity of all things in Christ, beginning with the New Testament and developed by thinkers such as Origen and Nicholas of Cusa, and then rediscovered by Hegel. Through Hegel and Nicholas, this understanding is taken up in interpreting theoretical physics in the work of David Bohm (1917– 1992). In turn, Bohm’s understanding of a unified wholeness serves to illustrate the radical shift involved in the Creator being incarnate.[1]

Christian identity is, in Hegel’s description, the core of an alternative logic in which “knowing God” is participation in the Infinite. Hegel works this out most carefully in his Logic, but it is thematic in his other works, such as his Philosophy of History. There is a unified and unifying spirit which must be “cognized” so as to overcome the antinomies of Kant.[2] According to Hegel, truth is a unifying essence and energy which is not dependent on antinomies or dualisms. “It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means (such as subject/object duality) from which it may obtain its support and the objects of its activity.”[3]

Reason and God are not separate but “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.”[4] Reason is grounded in and sustained by God and therefore “it is its own Substance,” its own “Infinite Power,” “its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form — that which sets this Material in motion.”[5] The Infinite Energy of the Universe, or the Infinite mind in which thought participates, is not a mere abstraction but the concrete reality enfolding all things. “It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth.”[6] While finite reason is grounded in the dualisms of subject and object (or God and world), infinite reason passes beyond alienated thinking to a unified knowing of God in “true reason.” Hegel explains this reason, particularly in his Logic, which captured Bohm’s life-long interest.

Throughout his life Bohm was reading and rereading Hegel’s Logic, apparently to such an extent that his wife complained. As reported by Maurice Wilkins, “Mrs. Bohm told me that not long before he died, he was sitting in his armchair at home reading Hegel again, and she said to him, ‘David, don’t you know everything about Hegel by now.’”[7] Specifically, Bohm found in Hegel a way in which to develop his focus on wholeness and his concern to overcome fragmentation.[8]

This choice between wholeness and fragmentation are alternative understandings of all of reality (social, scientific, and religious). Bohm recognizes that to overcome fragmentation, philosophy and religion cannot be treated as discrete realms separate from science. He found physics to have an immediate and necessary overlap, such that “his physical insights became essentially inseparable from the philosophical ones.”[9] Mind and matter in Bohm’s thought (as in Hegel’s) are not separate, but interactive realms, so that to understand the one is an insight into the other. As he explains, “I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”[10]

Bohm found this sensibility most fully expressed in Hegel, though he also, at first, associated it with Eastern religion (with which he eventually became disillusioned) but not with religion per se. He may not have appreciated the degree to which Hegel was concerned with recovering Christian orthodoxy and delivering it from the philosophical abstraction into which it had fallen. According to Hegel, “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[11] Hegel sets out to displace dry abstraction with an engaged and all-embracing speculative philosophy.

The Hegelian project is not unlike Bohm’s, in that both are seeking to overcome formal distinctions (a separate existence for God and the world or in physics the notion that the world can be divided into distinct parts and discrete causal laws). Both are displacing classical notions of causality (an objective power or force) found in the divided world of Descartes, Kant, and Newton. Ultimate reality, Kant’s “thing-in-itself” was inaccessible, there was a mind/body dualism, and human action and freedom were delimited by the mechanical order. Bohm describes the shift he sought as the displacement of the assumption that “the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts each having a separate existence, working together according to exact causal laws to form the whole.” He would replace it with the idea that “the world acts more like a single indivisible unit, in which even the ‘intrinsic’ nature of each part (wave or particle) depends to some degree on its relationship to its surroundings.”[12]

While Hegel is seeking a synthesis of thought in his vision of logos, Bohm’s pursuit is a consequence of the wholeness necessary to account for quantum phenomena. At first he perceives wholeness as an emergent property, but then posits wholeness as fundamental. This “new ‘basic reality’ was no more a manifest reality of discrete objects, and forms – our usual ‘explicate’ or ‘unfolded’ order – but the ‘implicate’ or ‘enfolded’ order that is carried by the ‘holomovement’.”[13] He pictures an unbroken flow from the “implicate” order through the manifest “explicate” (or “unfolded”) order, the whole of which is “holomovement.” He describes it as “the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”[14] Nature is neither unchangeable nor bounded: “there are neither unchangeable ultimate elements nor fixed ultimate laws describing them, i.e. that nature is ontologically and our science epistemically inexhaustible.”[15]

The world is in process, and as reflected in quantum phenomena “becoming” is built into reality. He compares it to a flowing stream of water: “On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow.”[16] Space and time may lend itself to division into abstracted moments, like particular ripples or waves, but the splashes of a particular moment are part of the overall flow.

As Bohm explains, “explicate ‘moments’ that unfold have a certain temporal thickness, a certain duration. Moments are temporal segmentations of unfoldment.”[17] Time is typically broken into past and future with the present as an ungraspable point, but the “unfoldings” of time belong together. “[I]t follows . . . that becoming is not merely a relationship of the present to a past that is gone. Rather, it is a relationship of enfoldments that actually are in the present moment. Becoming is an actuality,” that “continues in all succeeding moments,” that is, “the two principles of the being of becoming and the becoming of being must be woven together.”[18] Time is nested in infinite layers as “any given level is unfolding (in principle creatively) from levels that are more comprehensive and more fundamental.”[19]

According to Michael Younker, “as physics has been further advanced, unexpected and nonintuitive layers beneath the atomic level have been discovered, and the subatomic level contains its own behaviors, and, again yet further, beneath the subatomic level, a layer of fields exists which contains its own distinct behaviors. This illustrates, in a manner, how there could theoretically be many deeper implicate or super-implicate orders.”[20] General laws may apply in particular contexts but this context must be viewed as part of a larger order. This means “laws will take the form of generally valid relationships between the nested sets of projections of its past enfolded in one moment and the corresponding set enfolded in another moment. The special creative quality of each moment cannot, however, be predicted in this way.”[21] Within the infinite implicate order there are always other underlying influences so that any particular moment or event cannot be isolated: “all these projections into any given moment will have the past of the entire universe as their potential content, which is thus enfolded into the moment in question.”[22]

The tendency in science to extract and divide is the tendency of society as a whole, with nations, races and religions pitted against one another. “And in turn, each man is fragmented into different and incompatible loyalties, aims, desires, etc.”[23] There is inevitable despair and helplessness in the face of these overwhelming social forces – “going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”[24] So too in science Bohm notes, “there are sharp divisions between applied science and pure science, between theory and experiment, between one specialized field and another, and between different branches of each specialty. The gap between science and other aspects of life is just a further example of such fragmentation.”[25]

He sounds very much like Hegel in describing how human thought divides and separates as part of an alienating utilitarian mode. “However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man’s notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives (i.e. to his self-world view), then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments.”[26] Humankind is confronted “with a worldwide breakdown which is self-evident not only at the political level but also in smaller groups and in the consciousness of the individual. The resort to mindless violence is growing and behind it all is the even more mindless threat of mutual annihilation, which is implicit in our current international situation and which could make everything we are doing quite pointless.”[27]

For Bohm, the cure for fragmentation is wholeness. Health and holiness, he notes, both derive from a root meaning wholeness, and this captures the human drive. “All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.”[28] To survive the disintegration, a new form of consciousness must be realized in what he calls a “postmodern science.” “A postmodern science should not separate matter and consciousness and should therefore not separate facts, meaning, and value. Science would then be inseparable from a kind of intrinsic morality, and truth and virtue would not be kept apart as they currently are in science.”[29] He calls for an understanding in which seemingly discrete fields or fractured parts are recognized as “enfolded” in a unified whole, claiming “the whole universe is actively enfolded to some degree in each of the parts. Because the whole is enfolded in each part, so are all the other parts, in some way and to some degree.”[30] The power of the imagination is in realizing synthesis as a participation in the essential wholeness of reality. “You see, like I was explaining with Hegel, the idea is first implicit only in itself and then it unfolds, it spreads out, in the imagination or in some other form like writing or painting. It becomes explicit, unfolded.”[31]

The world is not a big machine but is grounded in the energizing power of God (creation is tied to incarnation). The food and nourishment of the world are from within creation, from within history and nature. The alpha and omega is “its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe — the History of the World.” This “’Idea’ or ‘Reason’ is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence” that “reveals itself in the World, and . . . in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory.”[32] This is the thesis which Hegel and Bohm share and demonstrate. In Christian terms (which Bohm did not embrace but which his work illustrates),God identifies himself with, in, and through, creation so that the eternal is not an entity apart from creation, but is identifiable in creation, in which Christ is being made all in all (I Cor 15:28).

.

[1] This peculiar Christo-logic is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.” Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] According to Hegel truth, by definition is a unified understanding realized in thinking God: “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.” Science of Logic, 267. Conceptions of God must be immediately related to thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in faith. There must be a concerted effort to arrive at a consciousness of God, inclusive of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world and others.

[3] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, transl. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 23.

[4] Philosophy of History, 23.

[5] Philosophy of History, 23-24.

[6] Philosophy of History, 24.

[7] Interviews of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics. Cited in Boris Kožnjak, “Waterfalls, Societies, and Temperaments – Fragmentation and Wholeness in the Lives and Work of David Bohm and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” (SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 73 (1/2022) p.p. (89–128), 99.

[8] This is the claim of Kožnjak.

[9] Kožnjak, 90.

[10] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. x.

[11] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) 113.

[12] David Bohm, Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe. An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993) 144. Cited in Kožnjak, 93.

[13] Kožnjak, 95. Bohm credits Nicholas of Cusa for the particulars of his vocabulary. Thus, for example, when asked about the Hegelian flavor of these concepts, Bohm replied that “well, of course, you can say that Nicholas of Cusa talked about something like this with a implicatio, explicatio, and complicatio”. Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 27 February 1987, American Institute of Physics. Available at www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohrlibrary/oral-histories/32977-9 (accessed on 31 July 2022). Cited in Kožnjak, 103.

[14] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 218.

[15] Kožnjak, 123.

[16] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 62.

[17]David Bohm, “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” in Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy, ed. David Ray Griffin (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 185. Michael F. Younker, “The Theological Significance of the Relations of Freedom and Time in the Sciences and Humanities: An Evaluation of the Contributions of David Bohm and Pauli Pylkko” (2019). (Dissertations. 1694. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/1694,) 242

[18] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 185. Cited in Younker, 242.

[19] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 186. Cited in Younker, 243.

[20] Younker, 243.

[21]  “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[22] “Time, The Implicate Order, and Pre-Space,” 191. Cited in Younker, 245.

[23] David Bohm,” Impact of Science on Society,”(https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000003864)  160.

[24] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[25] David Bohm, “Fragmentation in science and in Society”, The Science Teacher 38 (1971).

[26] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 3.

[27] David Bohm, “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World” (https://www.davidbohmsociety.org/library/postmodern/),

[28] Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 4.

[29] Postmodern Science.

[30] Postmodern Science.

[31] Interview of David Bohm by Maurice Wilkins on 6 March 1987. Cited in Kožnjak, 127.

[32] Philosophy of History, 24.

The Living Letter/Logoi of Creation: The Science of David Bohm as Illustration of the Theology of Maximus

In drawing out the connection between Paul’s positive use of “letter” and Maximus’ development of the term logoi (see here), the material world is inseparably bound-up with meaning. Significance in the Logos is incarnate or embodied and in turn what is embodied has significance. Maximus works out this participatory ontology through his identification of the Logos directly with creation (in the logoi). His is not the Neoplatonic notion of emanation, with its distinction between the One (in whom there is no distinction) and divine Intellect (with its logos and distinction) but in the explanation of Mika Törönen, “This is another kind of simultaneous union and distinction where wholes and parts through God’s providence and judgement make up a harmonious manifold.”[1] The structure of reality, according to Maximus, is in its wholeness through which things are united, but this takes place at both the level of the particular (logoi) and the universal (Logos). In Paul’s terms Christians are the particular instantiation of the letter of Christ, and for Maximus, Christ’s stamp is put upon all creation in the logoi: “‘Who … would not recognize that the one Logos is many logoi distinguished in the undivided difference of created things through their unconfused individuality in relation to each other and themselves?”[2] This accounts for the union between the created and the uncreated but also, according to Maximus, the “union of the mind with the senses, and the union of heaven with earth, and the union of sensible things with the intelligible, and the union of nature with the logos.”[3] The one being made “all in all” or incarnate in all things “lends” the meaning of personhood to all of creation and it is through this incarnate reality that meaning is available (the Logos/logoi relation). This is the primary principle, I would argue, behind Maximus’ theory of logoi and it is the driving presumption (“discovery”) reflected in the theoretical physics of David Bohm.

Theologically the choice is between a theology which divides the Logos and incarnation, so that a preexistent Logos is separated from the incarnate Christ (a logos asarkos or disembodied Christ), or incarnation is understood to be an eternal fact about God in Christ being worked out in and through all of creation. In physics the choice is between a matter and mind duality or, as in quantum theory, the recognition that matter is interdependent with mind and meaning. According to quantum theory, elementary particles account for and respond to the observer, so that mind appears on both sides of observation. In the words of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, commenting on Bohm, “mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by an electron.”[4]

In most contemporary science reality is presumed to be material or physical, and this is foundational. Matter serves as the final reference, so that the brain may produce consciousness, but this is a by-product of the brain’s activity. A purposeless evolution has produced a material based human activity grounded in the set structures of the physical world. As Sheldrake sums up, in contemporary science everything, including people and animals are reduced to the mechanical and matter is unmixed with consciousness; nature is fixed and unchanging as the total amount of matter is the same and the laws of nature are fixed; all life is based on biological structures carried in genetic material such as DNA; minds are inside heads and are the product of brains; memories are material traces in brains; there is no direct activity between mind and matter (such as found in telepathy); and mechanical or material medication alone is authentic.[5]

Even where this neo-evolutionary doctrine may be denied, the Cartesian split between mind and matter, body and soul, thought and physical reality often prevail, and matter is defined as something that exists independently of mind. A privileging of material reality prevails, even where materialism may not be consciously embraced and even where the existence of mind is acknowledged, it is usually given no place in physical reality. This physicalism reigns, though the emergence of life is mostly unaccounted for (statistically it is improbable if not impossible) and even though science now recognizes that 96% of reality in “dark matter” or “dark energy” is still obscure. Better to believe in infinite parallel universes, all with different laws, then allow for the possibility of a creator God. The prevailing doctrine not only excludes the divine mind, but mind itself – consciousness should not really exist as matter is prime reality. Thus, the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett can write a book, Consciousness Explained, in which he dismisses consciousness as illusory.

Bad theology guided by materialist assumptions, is actually the historical cause preceding materialism. That is, it was dualistic Christians who first separated mind from matter. As Sheldrake explains, “They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds making them completely different from unconscious matter.”[6] They assumed they were strengthening arguments for the soul (mind), empowering it over the body (as in Descartes), and they sought to show the superiority of humans over animals. Humans, they would argue, are immortal, completely separate from animals (in their possession of mind and soul), and in the process, they created an unbridgeable gulf between body and soul and between humans and “nature.” Most people, Christian or not, presume this dualism, in spite of its deeply unchristian bias and regardless of the fact that modern physics indicates the fallacy of the materialist worldview.

Bohm (1917-1992), a theoretical physicist who studied under Robert Oppenheimer, has boldly set-forth for an alternative understanding. He argues that quantum physics, due to its interactions with the mind of the observer, spelled the end of both materialism and Cartesian dualism. Mind is not localized in the head of the observer but extends into the world, so that thought shows itself in and through material reality. Human minds can reach to the stars because the world resonates with and can be read and touched by thought and at the same time,  the world seems to look back.  

Bohm’s interpretation overlaps with Maximus’ understanding of logoi, in that the world is penetrated by mind. The materialistic tendency is to separate the physical and mental, or soul (mind, meaning) and body so that the “psychosomatic” is thought to refer to two distinct entities, with “psyche” or mind arising as a result of the material body (soma). Bohm maintains there is a unity between soma (the physical) and significance (the mental) as they are part of “one overall indivisible reality.” [7] The observer is part of the observation, and in turn the observed accounts for and responds to the observation. Like Logos and logoi or creation and incarnation, each “reflects and implies the other (so that the other shows in it) . . . they are both revealing the one unbroken whole of reality, as it were from two sides.”[8]

The letter written in stone or ink does not have its meaning in the medium, and so too in the physical world, DNA or electrical and chemical activity, are not reducible to their medium. A television signal is produced by images from a camera transformed into subtle electrical signals, carried on even more subtle radio waves, but the content is not found in electricity or radio waves per se, but in the images and sound in the television set received by the mind of the viewer.  According to Bohm, “Meanings are thus seen to be capable of being organized into ever more subtle and comprehensive overall structures that imply, contain, and enfold each other, in ways that are capable of indefinite extension.”[9] The depth of subtlety and the extent of their manifestation is infinite.

Meaning is not fixed, and as a result there is an openness toward infinite clarification, deeper understanding, ongoing discrepancies, which all point to a depth of structure or an ever-changing understanding and more comprehensive meaning.[10]   For example, Newton’s laws indicated Einstein’s insights of a conjoined space/time, which indicate a quantum reality. Bohm explains this involves a paradoxical unfolding: “while the quantum theory contradicts the previously existent classical theory, it does not explain basic concepts of this theory as an approximation or as a simplification of itself. Rather, it has to presuppose the classical concepts at the same time that it has to contradict them.”[11] It is not that quantum theory introduces new basic concepts, but it introduces ambiguity into concepts such as position and momentum, which were previously unambiguous. The ambiguity is not simply in the mind of the observer, but there is an ambiguity (openness) built into basic reality.

Matter is open to mindful interaction, which means the world can act back upon us, positively or negatively. In cancerous cells there is replication and duplication, or in neurosis the compulsion to repeat, a sort of miscommunication which damages the body or mind, creating a closed feed-back loop. Misinformation or disinformation is a disease or neurosis that directly impacts the host. “It is evident that this typical form of a runaway feedback loop between the soma- significant and the signa- somatic is deeply involved in a wide range of neurotic disorders.”[12]

The letter kills, or meaning takes on a deadly form precisely because it is stunted and turns in on itself. A deadly relationship to the law (occurring between meaning and embodiment) may infect one individual, interpersonal relations, or relationships with nature, as all involve soma-significance. There may be either a circular feedback which gets stuck in a deadly loop or soma-significance extended and opened to ever-renewed growth. Relationships with Nature or with the Cosmos are affected, on both sides of the relationship, by a meaning that may be rightly or wrongly construed. That is, just as in human relationships there are two sides interacting and affecting the relationship, so too the world in general reflects this interactive relation. “Indeed, insofar as we know it, are aware of it, and can act in it, the whole of Nature, including our civilization which has evolved from Nature and is still a part of Nature, is one movement that is both soma- significant and signa- somatic.”[13]

There is no flat material world, or in Paul’s language, the letter that kills is deceptive and deadly, not because it is a reality, but because it is presumed to be an end in itself. The law, Scripture, or the letter, which is presumed to be a foundation is on the order of a materialism that assigns the fulness of reality to the material order. It is deadly in its finitude, deceptively hiding the eternal. On the other hand, the living letter has the breath and breadth of personhood and access to participation in or even identification with Christ. The letter is part of a word which is part of a structure of meaning but this meaning always exceeds itself in the manner of personhood, not simply referring back to the material or to other letters but resonating with the eternal – an excess of meaning without a definitive closure. As in Maximus, the many logoi have their union in the Logos, containing both a distinct and unconfused particularity with an integrity in the unifying Logos.

There is the continual encounter with Christ in creation, or the filling out of the Logos in the logoi, which may simply specify the mind in Bohm’s description. The name of the universal in the particular, or the union of body and meaning, is specified in the logoi of the Logos. The extension of the incarnation into all creation, is a reality about creation reflected in quantum physics, which is simultaneously sensible and intelligible. There is a singular unbroken reality, which apart from the specificity of the Logos tends to be divided and delimited (the letter that kills). The isolated letter, law, or material nature cut-off from its extended meaning is reductive but the letter or quantum reality as a living process refers to the personal, mindful, eternal, interpenetrating all things.

[1] Mika Törönen, Union and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 8.

[2] Ambig. 7 (PG 91), 1077C. Cited in Törönen, 30.

[3] Qu. Thal. 48: 188–9 (CCSG 7), 341. Cited in Törönen, 30.

[4] Rupert Sheldrake, “Setting Science Free from Materialism,” (Explore 2013; 9:211-218 & 2013 Elsevier Inc) 217.

[5] Sheldrake, 211.

[6] Sheldrake, 213.

[7] David Bohm, “Soma- Significance: A New Notion of the Relationship Between the Physical and the Mental” (https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/bohm.html, 2016) 1.

[8] Soma-Significance, 1.

[9] Soma-significance, 2.

[10] Soma-significance, 3.

[11] Soma-significance, 8.

[12] Soma-significance, 3.

[13] Soma-significance, 4.

The Letter Versus the Logoi

Derrida, Freud, and Lacan make the philosophical and psychological case for Paul’s argument that the letter kills (2 Cor 3:6), while also leaving open the implication that the Spirit gives life. What they demonstrate, and what is implicit in Paul’s point, is not simply that there is a distinction to be made between speech and writing but that speech contains the problems of graphic communication in that it too is reducible to the material, the finite, the repetitive, and that there is an enslaving aspect to language. There is an orientation to language and law, identifying it with access to God or the fulness of reality, in which the material, cultural, and finite form of language shuts off from the freedom and fulness of the Spirit. Paul is not making some Platonic argument, privileging speech over writing, but he is making a broader point about two ways in which language can order reality. The letter or Scripture, or the law engraved on stones, is inherently deadly, not because it falls short of the spoken word (after-all it was spoken by God’s messengers and then written), but because, by its very nature, it obstructs and hides the Spirit. In Paul’s depiction the letter obscures, as it creates duplicity, hiding, and shame, due to its fading reality (2 Cor 3:4-18; Php 3:19) and those put to shame by this circumstance would equate the letter with access to God. The letter made absolute is not simply the Jewish problem, but is universal and attached to the organs of speech and to language (Rom 3:10-20), which gives rise to division and violence, and Freud, Derrida, and Lacan show why this is the case.

Jacques Lacan develops Freuds picture of the working of the unconscious as following the system of signs, claiming “the unconscious is structured like a language.”[1] He argues that the psyche develops along the material or concrete structures of language, necessarily working through difference in sounds and meaning, and always driven to an end it cannot achieve. Just as language naturally divides and gains meaning through different phonemes, letters, or words (over and against others), so too the structure of consciousness (largely in the unconscious) takes on this material function. One meaning is against another, just as one letter and sound gains its meaning over-and-against another, so there is no origin to be found in language, but only an ever-receding meaning.

The parallel argument of Jacques Derrida is that there really is no difference between speech and writing, inasmuch as both share the characteristics of language in marking differentiation.[2] The drive to privilege speech over writing is due to the notion that speech or the phonic sign has no structure of difference (which demonstrates the drive to synthesis); and then the presumption that in this perfect accord there is immediate access to the signified. This desired access is first an access to myself, or my self-presence, as I would have myself in my thought life. The presumption is that I am in or behind the silent speaking, and this inner voice not only provides access to myself but access to the world and to God. The obvious characteristics of writing (its material form, its exterior and conventional nature, its rule based iterability), in this argument, are absent in speech. Writing is presumed to be a parasite on speech, with speech not being completely reducible to marks in stone or ink but is a future possibility or outworking derived from speech.

The linguistic counter-point is that the phonic sign employs the same conventions as the graphic sign, and writing is not imposed upon speech but oral language “already belongs to this writing.”[3] “Original” or “natural” language shows signs of always having been touched and shaped by writing, and the notion that there is a living speech as opposed to a dead letter, misses that breath, the clicking of the tongue, aspiration, etc., are as material as ink and stone.  “Living speech,” due to its existence in human interiority may more successfully hide the objective, material, and chain-like necessity, of language made explicit in writing. There is only the continual unfolding of signs which endlessly refer to other signs to gain meaning. Whether the medium is ink or a stream of air, the substance is built upon a chain of differences. No one, however, has thought to examine the chemical content of ink to get at the substance of language, though a certain deceptive magical quality is sometimes assigned to air, but in both, what Derrida calls arche-writing, is at work.[4] Both create meaning through the play of differences, or what Derrida calls “différance,” in that meaning is never fully present. Movement, temporality, and iterability, may give the appearance of some stable substance, a presence or ego, behind the movement producing difference.

The psychological point is that the letter shapes the psyche in its pursuit of presence through this illusive absence. This is evident in Freud’s focus on symbols and signs in dreams, fantasies, and everyday discourse, and it is stated in the title of one of Lacan’s articles “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.”[5] This is a “literal” or material work which can be traced in the structure of the psyche: “By ‘letter’ we designate that material support which concrete speech borrows from language.”[6] The “unconscious structured like a language” posits the meaning of the conscious and unconscious as following the structure of contrasting binary pairs. The unconscious is not a deep structure obscured from view but is simply the obverse side of the signs of language or the place of the signifiers. Lacan links this directly to what Freud calls the “death instinct” as the pursuit of self, or the insistence to be through language is bent on obtaining being through non-being, or on obtaining presence through absence. In Paul’s explanation, the letter kills because it does not contain life, and yet it is presumed to be the source of life. One who is coming to identity in and through language is subject to the fate of language. There is the dynamic of language in the chain of signifiers, but meaning (the self) is not found in any singular signifier or any moment in time.

In the description of both Paul and Slavoj Žižek, the realization of the impossibility of law or language to produce life, creates a feeling of alienation or of being “out of joint.” According to Žižek, “Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘great chain of being,’ as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint,’ as excluded from the ‘order of the things,’ from the positive order of entities.”[7] Paul describes his realization that all he counted as most important is now so much excrement (Php 3:8). Locating the self in language or the law is a frustrating impossibility which points to a further need and realization. No longer does Paul find comfort in his identity as a Jew, though he at one time had total “confidence in the flesh.” The fleshly sign of circumcision, the national sign of Israel, the genetic sign of being of the tribe of Benjamin, and the legal sign of being a Pharisee, he now counts as loss.  But for Paul, this loss is embraced as part of an alternative identity: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Php 3:7).

Paul relinquishes his striving to find identity and life in his Jewishness in his turn to Christ, though he makes it clear that this is not something to be grasped, in the way he grasped after being a Jew. “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (Php 3:12). Desire and its attainment, the role of the logos or language, and the understanding of the self, undergo a shift in this new understanding. Paul refers to it as the freedom of the Spirit, which is the alternative to the deadly letter. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Co 3:17). It is not that Paul has lost confidence in speech or language, but he now recognizes the working of the Spirit, which gives him a new confidence in speech (2 Cor 3:12) and in which he can identify Christians as “the letters of Christ” (3:3). This letter is not material, it is not formed in opposition, it is not fading, it is not mortal, it is not finite. This is the sort of letter that provides adequacy.

Maximus the Confessor’s picture of this realization, which ironically gets confused with Platonism (and thus falls back into reification of language), focuses on the absolute difference between God and world, bridged by the Logos. That is, there is no natural speech, natural origin, or human logos that can attain the divine Logos. There is no supposed natural synthesis between sign and signified or of God and the world. The theological and philosophical tendency is to follow the human sickness (identity through difference), by either identifying God with the world (e.g., in various forms of pantheism) or by making God absolutely transcendent and unattainable (e.g., nominalism). The tendency is to erase difference or to accentuate it, or in biblical terms, to keep the law or attempt to be the law. Maximus point is that in Christ, God is both absolutely different from creation while identified with creation as incarnate Word: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[8] Creation does not account for itself “naturally” but calls for the supernatural as both its logic and end.

The way in which this Christo-logic or the Logos is deployed in the world is through what Maximus calls logoi. In creation as incarnation, the Logos is spread out in the logoi, the particulars of creation which are part of Christ’s becoming “all in all” (Col 3:11; Eph 1:22-23). In Jordan Woods description, Maximus’s logoi are the “One Logos’s hypostatic, kenotic procession into becoming the natural power of every individual creature to be, and that such a procession secures the metaphysical ground of an inevitable, identical, unnecessary creation.”[9] There is simultaneously no confusion between Creator and creation, and yet direct identity in the Logos and logoi. The hypostatic identity of Christ grounds the world in a deeper identity than a Spinoza-line pantheism (which leaves out subjectivity) and a wider difference and logic than the actual non-difference embraced in linguistic and psychological difference. “Only this sort of “both-and” – both similarity-dissimilarity and identity – can claim rights to a truly Christo-logical God-world relation.”[10] According to Maximus, “if we wish to have a complete knowledge of things, it is not enough to enumerate the multitude of characteristics,” that is, “whatever is around the subject,” but it is “absolutely necessary that we also indicate what is the subject of these characteristics, which is the foundation, as it were, upon which they stand.”[11] The foundation or subject which Paul says, “fills all things” (Eph 1:23)

Identity and difference are not naturally resolved, language is not its own end, and according to Maximus no creature simply “coincides in its essence with what is and is called the assemblage of characteristics that are recognized and predicated of it.” The grounding identity of the individual creature “is something different from these characteristics, which holds them all together, but is in no way held together by them” and so “is not derived from” or “identical with them.”[12] This Word found in creation is not structured like the letter, the law, or the order of language. Things do not otherwise hold together, and this psychological, linguistic, and theological reality, is directly addressed in the God/man who is the beginning and end of creation. In the language of Paul, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). According to Maximus, from the viewpoint of God taken up by the virtuous person “by conforming to this beginning,” a beginning in which “he received being and participation in what is naturally good,” “he hastens to the end, diligently.”[13] This end is deification of all things: “In this way, the grace that divinizes all things will manifestly appear to have been realized.”[14] There is an overcoming of the law, of the human sickness bound to the letter that kills, through the freedom of Christ’s Spirit, filling all things.

[1] Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” (Yale French Studies, 1966, No. 36/37, Structuralism (1966), pp. 112-147) 113.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) xvi-xvii; 54, 74.

[3] Derrida, 55.

[4] Derrida,60

[5] Lacan, Ibid.

[6] Lacan, 114.

[7] Slavoj Žižek, cogtto and the unconscious, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 4.

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

[9] Jordan Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor” (Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2017 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) 4.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] Amb 17.5, cited in Wood, 6.

[12] Amb 17.6, cited in Wood, 6.

[13]Amb. 7.21.

[14] QThal. 2.2.  

Hegel’s Theology of Knowledge: A Defense of Hegel’s Orthodoxy

What distinguishes humans from other creatures is a capacity for thought, for a self-aware and world-embracing thought. According to G.W.F. Hegel, this is because the core or ground of reality is in thinking or reason, which he equates with God or spirit.[1] Knowing God, or conceptualizing reality is a participation in that reality, as basic reality is thought. Contrary to the usual portrayal, Hegel aims to regain an orthodox Christian philosophy, and to displace the semi-agnostic musings grounded in Enlightenment faith: “The faith in that would-be philosophical sense is itself nothing but the dry abstractum of immediate knowing, a completely formal determination, not to be confused with or mistaken for the spiritual fullness of the Christian faith, either from the side of the believing heart and the Holy Spirit dwelling within it or from the side of a doctrine abounding in content.”[2] He wants to return to the concrete reality of God known in Christ, and trace how this knowing is of a different order of thought. He notes there is a form of thought and philosophizing that denies the substance and authority of the Christian faith: “The content of this faith, however, is so indeterminate in itself that, while it will, to be sure, countenance that content in some way, it encompasses just as much the belief that the Dalai Lama, the bull, the monkey, and so forth, is God, and for its own part it restricts itself to the idea of a God in general, a supreme being.”[3] Dismissal of the primacy and specificity of revelation results in the God of Christianity being traded for an empty abstraction.

Though the world may appear as Other, and the individual in her thought may seem isolated from the world, thought stands behind the world and the bridge between subject and object, self and world, is in thinking (cognizing) God. Hegel argues for training in the faith, baptism, formation in the Church, and far from being an atheist or heterodox he considers himself an orthodox Christian.[4] “When the standpoint of immediate knowing admits that, for religious faith in particular, a development and a Christian or religious education are necessary, then it is mere arbitrariness to want to ignore this again when it comes to talking about believing.”[5]

Reconciliation with God, self, and creation, is not simply conceivable, but it is in the conceiving that reconciliation is accomplished. This overcoming of the gap between self and Other, or the negation of the seeming inherent alienation in the world (the negation of the negation) not only gets at the root of Hegel’s system but of Paul’s. Hegel is borrowing from Paul (deploying Luther’s translation of Paul’s κατήργηται in Romans) so as to describe this suspension of the negative (aufheben or Aufhebung).[6] Hegel was reacting to an Enlightenment understanding, much as Paul was reacting to a common Jewish understanding in which law, the world, or objects, are pictured as mediating God rather than God in thought and spirit as mediating the world. As Hegel puts it, “Now in the same way natural philosophizing, which holds itself to be too good for the concept and which through this deficiency takes itself to be an intuitive and poetical thinking, trades in the arbitrary combinations of an imagination which is quite simply disorganized by its own thoughts. . .”[7]

Hegel finds Kant’s philosophy an improvement (on Spinoza and Descartes) in its focus on the faculty of knowing, but the error is in trying to know about knowing before knowing. “To be sure, the forms of thought should not be employed unexamined, but examining them is already itself a process of knowing. Consequently, the activity of the forms of thought and their critique must be joined in knowing.”[8] There is a relinquishing of the possibility of knowing in Enlightenment thought, and in Hegel’s estimate this is its own kind of unbelief as thought is deemed inadequate. There is a simultaneous passage beyond Kant, which is actually to fall behind Kant into the metaphysics he critiqued.[9]

Hegel’s “concept,” he claims, preserves the Kantian critique while moving beyond it. “The concept in its speculative sense must be distinguished from what is customarily called a ‘concept’. It is only with reference to the latter one-sided sense of the term that it has been asserted again and again a thousand times and been made a prejudice that the infinite cannot be grasped by means of concepts.”[10] In Hegel’s definition, the concept is complete in itself: “The concept is the free [actuality] [das Freie], as the substantial power that is for itself, and it is the totality, since each of the moments is the whole that it is, and each is posited as an undivided unity with it. So, in its identity with itself, it is what is determinate in and for itself.”[11] There is an overcoming of subject and object through the concept (inclusive of a negation of negation), key to Hegel’s thought (derived from Paul).

Hegel’s negation of the negation extends Paul’s “suspension” of the law (Rom 7:2), in which knowing God in Christ is direct, and thus involves a denial of both Enlightenment antinomies and a Jewish understanding of God. This involves, both as Paul and Hegel describe it, a different experience of the self. Paul in Christ (Rom 8) is no long divided against himself as he was in his pre-Christian life (Rom 7:7ff). As Hegel describes (following Kant), the resolution pertains directly to experience of the I: “The I relates the manifold of sensing and intuiting to itself [the I] and unifies it [the manifold] within itself [the I] as one consciousness (pure apperception) and, as a result, this manifold is brought to an identity, into an original combination.”[12] Kant, in Hegel’s estimate has correctly articulated the issue, but Hegel’s point is that “it is not the subjective activity of self-consciousness that introduces absolute unity into the manifoldness. This identity is, rather, the absolute, the true itself.”[13] Kant’s philosophy is a subjective idealism, in that he does not incorporate objective experience into the subject, but Hegel maintains this unification in thought (the subjective) is not only true of the individual but of the world. “Now although the categories (such as, for example, unity, cause, and effect, and so forth) do belong to thinking as such, it does not follow at all from this that they should for that reason be ours alone, and not also determinations of the objects themselves. This, however, is supposed to be the case according to Kant’s outlook.”[14] Kant’s religion, like that of the Enlightenment, “contradicts the explicit command of the Christian religion to know God in spirit and in truth and . . . derives from a humility that is in no way Christian but instead conceited and fanatical.”[15] The ultimate conceit, according to Hegel is to refuse the knowledge of God offered in the Christian faith, while claiming to believe and follow this faith.

In Hegel’s estimate, this sort of thought is stuck in the finite realm: “If a fixed opposition attaches to the thought-determinations, i.e. if they are of a merely finite nature, then they are unfit for the truth that is absolutely in and for itself, and the truth cannot then enter into thinking.”[16] This finite thinking is split between the “subjective” and “objective.” “[D]ue to their limited content generally they persist in opposition to each other and even more so to the absolute.”[17] Science presumes that truth is available for and resides in “immediate consciousness” and so too “philosophical science” must begin with this fundamental acknowledgement, which Hegel calls the “simplest appearance of spirit.”[18]

The science of philosophy begins with the proclamation of a specific capacity for knowing God: “More precisely, the consoling quality of the Christian religion lies in the fact that, because God himself is known [gewußt] here as the absolute subjectivity. . .”[19] God is absolute Subject and it is knowing this reality that “our particularity is also by this means recognized, not merely as something that is to be abstractly denied, but at the same time as something to be preserved.”[20] Knowing God and being persons is not to be conceived as an abstract possibility but a lived reality, which is the very goal set before us in the Christian faith: “the Christian God is the God not merely known [gewußt] but the unqualifiedly self-knowing [sich wissende] God, and not merely imagined but instead an absolutely actual personality.”[21] God’s person encompasses all things and is the ground of human personhood and knowing.

Spirit, the concept, or knowing, in Hegel’s system, refuses traditional metaphysics – “an ontology focused on substances as with Aristotle and Descartes, or on the one substance as the sum total of reality that is both God and nature, as with Spinoza.”[22] Spinoza’s God, according to Hegel, left the human subject contemplating the world as an object. “Although substance could be endowed with thought or reason like Aristotle’s nous or Spinoza’s God, the thinking that contemplated this substance contemplated an object: something other than itself that is not a self for itself and therefore still separated from the contemplating subject.”[23] Hegel supposes that Spinoza’s problem is the Jewish problem, and so ”it must be admitted that the Spinozistic philosophy lagged behind the true concept of God, which forms the content of Christian consciousness.”[24] According to Hegel, Spinoza continues the assumption of Jews and Orientals in general that all finite things are “transient” and “vanishing.” This truth requires the further development of a Christian understanding that personhood or the individual is not subject to this vanishing transience.

He notes that Spinoza did not deserve the accusations of atheism, but terms his belief “acosmism, since according to this philosophy there is actually no world at all in the sense of something positively being [eines positiv Seienden].”[25] It is deeply ironic, that in denying the God of Spinoza and replacing him with the Father of Christ, Hegel is accused of atheism. In Hegel’s description, Spinoza is only guilty of what every Jew, Moslem, and Christian who regards “God merely as the unknowable, supreme, and other-worldly being” is guilty.[26] They are all semi-atheists in-as-much as they do not acknowledge the true Christian God. They are content with difference and antinomy, but according to Hegel this does not attain to Christian truth. They are finite thinkers, who make subject-object opposition the final form of thought, and they deny that God or ultimate reality or “the thing in itself” can be known.

Hegel presumes deism is the natural outcome of Enlightenment religion, and he juxtaposes this faith with Trinitarian orthodoxy: “the definition of God put forward by so-called deism, is the concept of God insofar as it is a mere concept of the understanding, while by contrast the Christian religion, knowing [wissen] God as the triune God, contains the rational concept of God.”[27] True reason is grounded in the orthodox faith passed on through the Church: “Christian faith includes within it the authority of the Church; by contrast, the faith of that philosophizing standpoint has only the authority of one’s own subjective revelation. Furthermore, that Christian faith is an objective content, rich in itself, a system of doctrine and knowledge.”[28] Hegel presumes he is building on a Christian orthodoxy largely abandoned.

Ironically, a post-Enlightenment world, very much like the Jewish world which Paul faced, so equated God with what is not God (the law, objective reality, the Other, or simply feeling and intuition) that knowing God directly in Christ involves denial of an empty category. God as the big Other (the transcendent Other), displaced by Christ, struck the Jews as blasphemy in the same way Hegel’s notion that God is cognizable is a denial of the God of the Enlightenment. The fact that Hegel is mostly read as heterodox or as an atheist points to a failure of thought; the failure to overcome the binaries of the Enlightenment (Kant’s “antinomies of the understanding”) and to embrace the full reality of Christian thought. As Hegel puts it, “God’s being is inseparably bound up with the representation of God in our consciousness.”[29] Conceptions of God must be immediately related to conception and thinking itself, as this is the “concrete” and unchanging foundation given in Christian faith. Knowing God in Christ through the spirit, is not isolated from knowledge in general but opens the world and ourselves to true knowledge.

[1] Goerg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic, Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]) xi.

[2] Ibid, 113.

[3] Ibid, 113.

[4] Ibid, 117.

[5] Ibid, 117.

[6] G. W. F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 68.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Encyclopedia, 84.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 37. In Hegel’s description, contemporary philosophy is caught up in trying to describe the instruments of knowing, before it actually begins to know, but to know the instruments of knowing is already to deploy them: “the examination of knowing cannot take place other than by way of knowing” Ibid, 38. He likens it to trying to learn to swim without getting into the water. To want to know before knowing is the conundrum that never allows for a beginning.

[11] Ibid, 233.

[12] Ibid, 85.

[13] Ibid, 87.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 206-207.

[16] Ibid, 66.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 221.

[2o] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, xiv.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid, xiv.

[24] Ibid, 224.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 256.

[28] Ibid, 224.

[29] Ibid, 267. Here he is favoring Anselm (whom he will also fault) over Descartes and Spinoza.

When Means Devour Ends: Three Parallel Collapses

This is a guest blog by M. James Johnson

It was one of those groggy predawn hours, the kind where the world feels like it’s still half-dreamt. My 10:30 pm routine—listening to audiobooks as I drift off—had worked like a charm, lulling me into sleep night after night. But as Hannah Arendt narrated her Between Past and Future, her voice cool and insistent, pierced my sleepy haze around 4 a.m., she started describing how “all ends turn and are degraded into means.” That sentence jolted me awake. I can’t explain why—but it lodged there like a half-remembered dream. Not quite words, more like an echo: “…ends… means… degraded.” It lingered as I rolled out of bed, grabbed my walking gear, and stepped into the icy rain.

After breakfast, with coffee finally cutting through the fog, that half-heard whisper wouldn’t let go. It turned into a quiet itch of curiosity, the kind that scratches at you until you give in. So I did—typing into a Grok search, “What does Hannah Arendt have to say about means and ends, or ends and means?” Grok fired back: “In Between Past and Future, in Chapter 8…” and continued several pages with too much information for 6:30 in the AM.  But my “Withdrawn from Junior College District of St. Louis County Library, St. Louis, Missouri” 1961 edition of Between Past and Future, retrieved from the shelf mid-sip, only had 6 sections, not even chapters. The mismatch landed like a splash of cold water… right on the nose. Disorientation, sure—but the fitting kind, the sort that mirrors our whole unraveling moment. I’d caught a glimpse of something about Arendt’s means to an end that was raw and true, even if I couldn’t nail it down yet: a pattern of collapse thrumming just under the skin, more a bone-deep hunch than tidy footnote.

What I sensed was this: innocently installed ‘means’ create diffusion, dilution, and detachment from intended goals. But there’s a fourth stage I didn’t see at first—capture. The means don’t just replace the ends; they imprison us. We become unable to imagine alternatives because we’re trapped inside the logic of the means themselves.

And here’s the tragic irony that compounds the problem: when meaning drains away, we don’t stop and reconsider. We intensify the means. More infrastructure, more force, more optimization. The acceleration itself becomes evidence that we’ve lost the plot entirely.

Three cases prove this isn’t isolated to one domain—it’s a structural pattern in how instrumental reason consumes itself, even capturing those who claim the name of Christ ?

Arendt: When Political Action Becomes Fabrication

Hannah Arendt diagnosed the collapse of genuine political action when we adopt “homo faber’s” ( man the maker/craftsman) logic— treating politics like fabrication, like building things. In The Human Condition, she traces how this destroys what makes politics political: “natality” (the capacity for new beginnings), “plurality” (the irreducible “who” of each person), and the space of appearance where freedom is enacted.

The mechanism is subtle. We begin with a genuine end: freedom, justice, human flourishing in the public realm. We adopt seemingly practical means: laws, institutions, processes. But fabrication’s logic is instrumental—everything becomes a means to an end, which itself becomes a means to another end, endlessly. The original “for the sake of what” dissolves.

– Diffusion: Energy scatters across competing instrumental priorities.  

– Dilution: The original vision of freedom becomes vague, rhetorical.  

– Detachment : Finally, complete disconnect. We’re building systems to maintain systems, writing policies to manage policies—what Arendt called “curious ultimate meaninglessness.”  

The compounding trap: when politics feels meaningless, we install more bureaucracy, more procedures, more  technical solutions. This intensification proves we’ve already lost genuine political action, which would have been freedom enacted now, not achieved later through instrumental means.

AI: When Human Flourishing Becomes Synonymous with Computational Power

The pattern repeats in our AI moment with startling precision—and it’s a sobering warning for the church. Once again, evangelicals and others chase technological dominion under the banner of stewardship, echoing the Cold-War logic that framed nuclear superiority as responsible dominion over creation. The stated end remains noble: AI for human flourishing—breakthroughs in health, climate solutions, creativity unlocked. But we adopt the same innocent-sounding means: build ever-larger computer infrastructure, concentrate ever-greater power, all to “stay ahead” of rivals and maintain technological leadership.

By December 2025, the drift is complete. The end (human flourishing) has degraded into a means (technological supremacy), which becomes its own end (not losing to China), which justifies any means whatsoever. Open AI’s Stargate project—a $500 billion juggernaut with partners like Oracle and SoftBank, now under construction at sites in Texas and Michigan—exemplifies this: fortified campuses drawing gigawatts, razor-wired against intrusion, nuclear-adjacent like Amazon’s expanded Talen Energy deal for 1,920 megawatts.

Once again: Diffusion: Resources scatter toward infrastructure arms race rather than applications.  

– Dilution: “Human flourishing” becomes a marketing ploy; the real measure is teraflops and training runs.  

– Detachment: We’re building data centers to justify building bigger data centers. The U.S. now hosts over 5,000 such centers, consuming about 4% of national electricity. For what? To stay ahead. Of what? Other builders.  

The compounding intensifies: when anyone asks “why?”—when the original purpose becomes unclear—we double down. Build bigger. Build faster. Pour copper and rare earths into monuments to means without ends. The question “for the sake of what?” becomes unanswerable, even embarrassing. And in Christian circles, this frenzy echoes the old temptation: dominion through mastery, as if God’s image-bearers are perfected by silicon, not the cross.

Coda: The Pattern Captures Us Now—and the Church with It

This isn’t just theoretical or technological—it is happening across every domain in December 2025, and we are captured by our means. Worse, the backwash of Christian nationalism drags diverse Christian persuasions into the same vortex: ends like “biblical justice” or “kingdom values” diluted into metrics of power and exclusion, all while claiming divine mandate.

Consider the pattern laid bare:

In each case, the same mechanism: original ends that were hard to measure (security, democracy, coherence) get replaced by means that are easy to count (deportations, strikes, exclusions). The metrics replace the meaning. Immigration’s end was border security, national coherence, perhaps even compassion through order. The means—ICE raids, mass deportations, family separations—have become the performance itself, with over 527,000 removals year-to-date. We measure success by numbers removed, not by any coherent vision of what we’re securing for. The deportation machine generates its own necessity. We’re captured—and too many pulpits bless it as “God’s border.”

Military intervention: The end was democracy, stability, stopping drug trafficking. The means—strikes on smuggling boats, escalating control and now threats of incursion into Venezuela—become self-justifying. Intervention creates instability requiring more intervention. The logic is closed. We’re captured, with Christian nationalists framing it as a holy war against “godless regimes.”

Religious exclusion: The end was security, perhaps community coherence. The means—surveillance, denial of services in foster care to LGBTQ+ families, exclusionary policies under new Trump orders echoing Project 2025’s “biblical principles”—become the definition of who “we” are. The exclusion itself captures us, narrows us, makes us unrecognizable to our stated values—yet it’s preached as fidelity to Christ.

When the hollowness becomes unbearable, we don’t stop—we compound: more raids, more strikes, more exclusions. The acceleration itself is the symptom of advanced capture, and the church, in its nationalist streams, leads the charge.

The Kingdom: The Only Way Out

Stanley Hauerwas’s reading of the Gospel offers something more radical than “use better means” or “clarify your ends.” The Kingdom of God, he argues, cannot be made, organized, built, or achieved. It cannot be earned by religious effort, imposed by political struggle, or projected in calculations. “We cannot plan for it, organize it, make it, or build it… It is given. We can only inherit it.”

This isn’t passivity—it’s a complete refusal to play the means-ends game, a direct rebuke to the fabrication that Arendt decried and the compute crusades that now seduce the faithful.

The reason the Kingdom resists instrumentalization is that “scripture refuses to separate the Kingdom from the one who is the proclaimer of the Kingdom. Jesus is Himself the established Kingdom of God.” The Kingdom isn’t a future achievement requiring proper means; it is present in Jesus’s life and cross, requiring only recognition and participation.

This is why, as Rauschenbusch wrote, “Jesus deliberately rejected force and chose truth… Whenever Christianity shows an inclination to use constraint in its own defense or support, it thereby furnishes presumptive evidence that it has become a thing of this world, for it finds the means of this world adapted to its end.”

The cross wasn’t a means to the Kingdom, not even the way to the Kingdom—it is the kingdom come. Because the cross reveals the social character of Jesus’s mission: a new possibility of human relationships based not on power and fear, but on trust made possible by truth.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi captures the pattern we’ve traced: he names Jesus as Messiah but assumes this means worldly power to restore Israel’s preeminence. Jesus rebukes him: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Peter had learned the name but not the story that determines its meaning. He had innocently installed the means of empire to achieve the ends of the Kingdom—but those means would have transformed the end into its opposite.

The pattern is everywhere: Arendt’s political action is consumed by fabrication’s logic. AI’s flourishing is devoured by compute supremacy. Contemporary America—and its captured churches—is ensnared by enforcement, intervention, and exclusion. In each case, the remedy seems to be more—more systems, more infrastructure, more force—accelerating the very meaninglessness we’re trying to escape, all while waving crosses at the chaos.

The Kingdom offers the only exit: stop trying to achieve it. It’s already present, requiring a different posture entirely—not building or forcing or optimizing, but participating in a reality already given. A community based not on the fear that generates moats and raids and escalations, but on trust made possible when “our existence is bounded by the truth.”

That truth, as Rauschenbusch saw, “is robed only in love, her weighty limbs unfettered by needless weight, calm-browed, her eyes terrible with beholding God.” It asks no odds. It needs no spears or clubs or data centers to prop it up. It simply is—and invites us, the church adrift in nationalist backwash, to stop running the race we’re already losing, to step out of capture, and to inherit what was never ours to make in the first place.