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Julian of Norwich and the Reversal of Theology

If there is a single voice in the West which consistently develops a theology of originary peace, matching the leanings of Maximus and Origen, it must be Julian of Norwich. She develops a theology focused on the personal revelation of the love of Jesus Christ, dispelling any notion of unworthiness, with realization of the self with and in divine identity, very much on the order of theosis or apocatastasis. In the midst of the plague and death of her own family and some 50,000 citizens surrounding her, she feels the “woe” or heaviness of life, and then the realization of being secure in the love and goodness of God. Her feelings of personal brokenness and despair, and then entry into joy and love, in a deeply personal experience, describes the universal arc. She sees the typical theological focus on guilt, wrath, and law, as something of a necessary anthropomorphism, limiting redemption and God to negative terms characterizing human experience, and she presumes God is the unmoved, loving agent drawing humankind into divine identity.

Rowan Williams refers to her work as an “anti-theology” in that she turns the usual understanding upside-down. Rather than agonizing over God’s satisfaction, she turns from “squaring the circle” of how “God has to ‘do justice’ to his own justice.”[1] The point is not that God must pay himself a fair price. “Anger happens in us; it is that atmosphere of bitter conflict and fear which holds us away from peace, being at one with ourselves, living in atonement.”[2] We are the one’s in need of satisfaction. As God says to her, “If thou art apaide, I am apaide.”[3] God would bring us fully alive, into the satisfaction of his love – believing that we are loved – by pouring his life into us. “To be ‘apaide’ in Julian’s theological world is to discover that we cannot pull apart human need and divine self-enactment and make them struggle for resolution.”[4]

Julian explains that there are two levels of judgement, the first in which “I must necessarily know myself a sinner. And by the same judgment I understood that sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath,” but these judgments reside in myself, not God.[5] Movement beyond guilt and wrath, into the second level, is the deeper working of grace (potentially “filled with endless joy and bliss”).[6] This entails a necessary and eternal progression: “And therefore this belongs to our properties, both by nature and by grace to long and desire with all our powers to know ourselves, in which full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fulness of endless joy.”[7] The common teaching, perhaps necessary, misses the deeper focus: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry.”[8]

While we are in process, still our nature is complete and perfect in oneness with God, which she treats as an accomplished reality. “I saw that our nature is in God whole.”[9] In Christ, God has taken on our nature and shared his nature with us. “God is knit to our nature that is the lower part, in our flesh-taking: and thus in Christ our two natures are oned.”[10] Reality in Christ is without beginning but is integral to God’s plan and identity: “I understand in our Lord’s signifying, where the blessed Soul of Christ is, there is the Substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.” So that “I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.”[11] Christ, for Julian, is so tied to humanity that “When Adam fell, God’s Son fell,” as God’s Son cannot be separated from Adam. Christ’s incarnation insures no ultimate separation between fallen humanity and God: “for the Son to be the Son is for the Son to be the one who has always been the lover and companion of Adam’s race.”[12] God is who he always was and is, and to pull this apart is an unsolvable conundrum.

She recasts the usual theological dilemma, characterizing it as an overcoming of refusal of God’s love. Like a neurotic who enjoys his sickness, imagining this is the kernel of who he is, our tendency is to ward off divine love. We would have God change, so as to accept us, as if it is God who is out of sorts. Julian shows, the “‘problems’ can be resolved only by the erosion of my anger, my refusal of life.”[13] Sin is precisely this refusal of life, and is thus always an embrace of death. “And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life.”[14] But this deadness does not change the truth of God. “But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us.”[15]

There is a reciprocity involving a sort of divine necessity: “But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer.”[16] We are working out in nature what is fulfilled in God’s grace, but God is the undergirding reality. We may be confused about who God is and who we are, but God is not. We are coming to know ourselves and God, in the assurance, as Paul says, that he knows us (Gal 4:9). God’s knowledge, and not our own, is the sustaining center of who and what we are. The unreality of sin does not alter God, and he is the reality we are being drawn into. “Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.”[17] It is just a matter of coming to see rightly: “Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”[18]

God is unchangingly himself, acting in his love to bring us out of our disasters into his peace. Redemption is not balancing the legal books, but is “the sheer outworking of who or what God is.”[19] God in Christ is tied to humanity so that the journey of Adam (of humankind), is God’s journey in Christ. It is not as if God started at some point to love mankind, this love is an eternal fact about us and God. Likewise, there is no anger for God to forgive as “between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight. For our soul is so wholly united to God, through his own goodness, that between God and our soul nothing can interpose.”[20]

Anger, in her description, in both its source and object is purely human, and falls short of God’s unmoving love. Self-destructive anger obscures God and self, and misses the deeper identification of the soul with God’s unchangeable goodness. She acknowledges that this is not the common teaching of the church, and humbly submits to this teaching, but she also offers a counter-explanation. Man in his weakness and fallibility loses sight of God, “for if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feelings nor any kind of prompting, no sorrowing which is conducive to sin.”[21] There may be the necessity for sorrow, wrath, and forgiveness, as if these are movements in God, but this describes the changeableness of humans, fallibility and sin, and not the fulness of divine peace and love. “For we through sin and wretchedness have in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love.”[22]

Sebastian Moore, in the spirit of Julian, describes this “refusal” to enter completely into the fulness of life, as the result of a deep attachment to the false self. It is not simply refusal of “obedience to God” but an unwillingness to relinquish attachment to death. “Some unbearable personhood, identity, freedom, whose demands beat on our comfortable anonymity and choice of death. Further, something that at root we are, a self that is ours yet persistently ignored in favor of the readily satisfiable needs of the ego.”[23] Moore though, like Julian, hits upon the necessity of a deeper identity with Christ: “What if Jesus were the representative, the symbol, the embodiment, of this dreaded yet desired self of each of us, this destiny of being human, the unbearable identity and freedom (freedom and identity being really the same thing)?”[24] The crucifixion of Jesus is not, at its deepest level, concerned with conflict involving Caiaphas and Pilate but it concerns “man’s refusal of his true self.”[25] The crucifixion is at once the ultimate evil and its defeat: the evil of destruction not just of a general “true” humanity, but of the individual’s true self. But recognition of this self-destruction in Christ is also the resolution of this evil. This recognition is already “forgiveness.” Evil is transformed into a specific and personal sin and sin transforms into grace. “And through this conversion the believer finds as his own that identity which first he rejected and crucified.”[26]

Our life is with God in Christ, and where we fall short, we turn to death. As Julian describes it, where we fall we die, and “we must necessarily die inasmuch as we fail to see and feel God, who is our life.”[27] We may pass from doing the nailing to being nailed to the cross, from being the crucifier to being the crucified. The life and self, invested in crucifying, is in reality the destruction of life and self. The passage is at first the refusal of our own death, the projection of it on another, and then the relinquishing of this false sense of self. The passage beyond the ego, the death of self, is the only means of “return” to the Father.

God accepts our failings and works with them to transform us: “grace transforms our dreadful failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace transforms our shameful falling into high and honourable rising; and grace transforms our sorrowful dying into holy, blessed life.”[28] Grace is transforming who and what we are, turning our earthly shame and sorrow into heavenly honour and bliss, and our present sufferings into endless rejoicing. She concludes: “And when I saw all this, I was forced to agree that the mercy of God and his forgiveness abate and dispel our wrath.”[29] Not God’s wrath but our wrath is dispelled and abated. Likewise, God cannot forgive because he cannot be angry. “For this was revealed, that our life is all founded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”[30] God’s love is the ground and reality of life and it is into his life that we are being endlessly united.

Seeing ourselves as crucifiers, as filled with wrath, and recognizing this in the cross, gives rise to the recognition and possibility of God’s love. The recognition of evil in the crucified, awakens to love. We can see “evil’s visible effect. And this is the manifestation of God’s love: that extraordinary love that highlights our evil in order to leave us in no doubt that it is accepted.”[31] Moore describes this as “the deepest logic of the psyche, love is experienced in the vision of the Crucified.”[32] The killing of Christ and the exposure of the ultimate limits of human evil and possibility open directly onto new life.

Both Julian and Moore speak of the absolute ground, the penetrating force of God’s love. All human movement is in this love, leading to his peace. We may be victims of a temporary blindness but this unreality cannot compete with the reality of “God’s merciful protection.” God accepts us at our worst, and he exposes and accepts this worst in us, and this is the point of the cross. The defeat of this evil though, goes beyond our rational grasp, God making Christ sin exposes the depth of evil and reaches us in our sin. God comes to us in Christ, beyond our own capacities for self-acceptance, to make us his. “It is the mystery of God who comes upon us and loves us beyond the limits of our ego-organized potential.”[33]

We cease being self-organized or egocentric, and become Christocentric. In the words of Julian, “So I saw that God is our true peace; and he is our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, and he constantly works to bring us into endless peace. And so when by the operation of mercy and grace we are made meek and mild, then we are wholly safe. Suddenly the soul is united to God, when she is truly pacified in herself, for in him is found no wrath.”[34] As Moore puts it, “I acquire sufficient selfhood to be identified with the crucified. This is the transition from man who ‘crucifies the Lord of Glory’ to man who is ‘nailed to the cross with Christ.’ It is the same man, changing only through self-discovery in Christ.”[35]

Williams sums up Julian as “saying that grace is God’s ‘no’ to our ‘no’: our persistent leaning towards nothingness, to the refusal of the act that is our very being, [this] is what is annihilated by openness.to God.”[36] Our “no” is annihilated, but this does not cancel creation, but is God’s crucifixion of evil. As Moore puts it, “In the ultimate order the ultimate sin, of crucifying the Just One, reverses itself, the victim giving life to the crucifiers.”[37] Evil takes on the only “being” possible in the ultimate effect, but in this form, it is defeated and annihilated. The effect of sin in the crucified is identical with its defeat and healing.[38] Our evil is made explicit in its annihilation. “When we say ‘no’, there is an abiding ‘no’ to this ‘no’ at the heart, of what we are.”[39] Death’s power and its denial of life and love are defeated in the cross. “Yet it is at the same time the reminder that God cannot be put to death and that the passion of Christ also declares the unchanging presence, of God in the centre of our being.”[40]

Julian is a counter-voice to the Augustinian tradition by which she was surrounded. She begins her theology where most theology leaves off, by focusing on the absolute unchanging love of God and works out all the movements of redemption through the logic of this love. Total identification with Christ opens a level of grace and love, which mark Julian’s unique perspective.

[1] Rowan Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 171.

[2] Ibid, 174.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,2002) The Thirty Third Chapter.

[4] Williams, 173.

[5] Julian, The Forty-Fifth Chapter.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Fifty Seventh Chapter.

[10] Ibid

[11] The Fifty Fourth Chapter.

[12] Williams, 176.

[13] Williams, 177.

[14] The Seventy Second Chapter.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Forty-Fourth Chapter

[19] Williams, 175.

[20] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[21] The Forty-Seventh Chapter.

[22] The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[23] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) X.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, XI.

[27] Julian, The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[31] Moore, 2-3.

[32] Ibid, 3

[33] Ibid, 6.

[34] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[35] Moore, 7.

[36] Williams, 179.

[37] Moore, 8.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Williams, 179-180.

[40] Williams, 183.

Sabbath Healing: The Sharing of Divine Presence

Salvation in the Bible hinges upon the presence of God, linked to his relationship to creation in his Sabbath rest (or Sabbath peace), the sacred time into which he invites those (being) created in his image. God’s rest contains and extends the divine reflection, “It is good, it is very good.” This reflective time is returned to creation as revelation: “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen 2:3). This permanent day, without morning or evening, is God’s significance, his sanctifying presence, given to and revealed in this day. The six days of creation, of activity, of motion, of control of chaos, etc., are for and lead to the seventh, containing the divine reflexive goodness. It might be said nothing happens on this day, but this day is the happening, the significance, the meaning arising out of and enfolding the other days. It is the final marker, contained within the sequence of events, each with its own sort of goodness, but culminating in the eternal goodness. According to Sigve Tonstad, “By the act of hallowing the seventh day God drives the stake of the divine presence into the soil of human time.”[1]

This day, in the description of Maximus, has no “created origin, since it is the manifestation of realities beyond limit and measure.”[2] It is subsequent to the created realities of the previous six days, with their measured beginning and end, morning and evening. It is unlimited and uncircumscribed, as he is in this eternal day. This “perpetual day, is the unalloyed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest.”[3] Maximus links the day with eternality in three modes or through three ways: being, well-being, and eternal-being. It is not that God’s Being is contained on a continuum with being, but it is out of the “essence” of God” that creation’s being occurs. This is a potential, actualized through human well-being and free choice. Given the reality of creation and nature, there is the potential to enact (or not), well-being. Eternal-being, contains and fills out the potential and activity of the others, and it is not a “natural potential within beings.”[4]

Maximus sidesteps an ontotheology which would put God on a continuum with being, through the division of the six days from the Sabbath. We do not get to God through creation directly, due to its own nature or its own essence, but we come to God in creation as on the order of a temple or a resting place for God, in which the meaning is in the added divine declaration. The motion and free choice of that which has a beginning and whose activity and motion has an end, cannot come to eternality through itself. There is an eternality to which creation gives access, through Sabbath, but the motion of the other days must cease. All activity, evolution, creation, even of an infinite or ongoing kind does not come to eternality, in fact it ensures, in its continual beginning and ending, that eternity will be obscured. All process (as in materialistic evolution or continual creation) does not allow for encounter with the agent behind the process, and this is the meaning given in the seventh day, otherwise lacking. It links creation with the Creator, not only by implication, but through presence, enunciation, and participation.

Nature and creation are not everything, though the world religions build upon this presumption in worshipping nature, and human philosophy often concludes the world is all that is the case (materialism, atheism, animism etc.). Sabbath puts a limit on creation from within, which opens onto or is eternity. Nature and free choice have a potential but there is a limit to their powers and activity, but that limit is the eternal. Their limit accords with the eternal principle for which they were created. We might say time is circumscribed by eternity, but this seventh day is an interpenetrating time. It is encountered among the other days and time as goal, as eternal possibility. God speaks on the other days (manifest in what is made), but God’s Word on this day is a direct manifestation and reflection of himself. The other days can be seen in what they produce, but this day is devoted to God’s word, to his delight and declaration, and to hearing. This difference marks the limits of what is made (manifest, seen, objective) from what is unmade (God himself).

There is activity, creating, working, tending, and eventually sweating and toil (which must end but is not its own end), then there is God’s sharing of himself. Nature and free choice have a potential which grace fulfills, and this is the significance (the symbol and the reality) of Sabbath. It is not that the eternal is outside of creation, but in Sabbath the eternal is conjoined and resting in creation. The eternal is not limited by the finite, but the finite is precisely for and intersected by the eternal. Eternality, God, Goodness, True Essence, are not limited, as if eternity were limited by time, or God excluded or limited by creation, but the opposite is the case; the created and finite are limited by the Eternal. This day without beginning or end, without created origin, is not succeeded by another, but is the terminus of all days and ages. This terminus though, is met among the others, as its own day and an alternative way.

The problem is that Sabbath presence is obscured for humans, and the story of the Bible might be read as Sabbath (re)gained. The faith founded on divine presence begins with a Judaism dealing primarily in absence. God speaks to Abraham, but shows up intermittently, though “Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (Gen 26:5), which points to Sabbath remembrance. The first lesson of Israel in the wilderness concerns remembering Sabbath rest, which had already been given (Ex 16:1-31). They were to trust in God to provide double manna on the sixth day and to preserve it on the seventh, though they feared starvation. God shows himself in Sinai and the Tabernacle, but the Jews approached the sacred space only in trepidation and through representatives (Moses, Aaron, the high priest). He was hidden in the holy of holies, but then his glory absconded from the Temple entirely. The sacred space is lost in the exile, and sacred time is all that remains, but the prevailing sense is: “Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!” (Is 45:15). The Sabbath no longer claimed location, and its time was limited. The Sabbath was a remembrance of creation and God’s resting, holding out a promise of freedom, but in slavery, exile, and subjugation, the Jews seem unprepared for divine presence.

Jesus’ Sabbath controversies, his deliberate healing on the Sabbath, and his direct identity with God, fill out the revelation and meaning of Sabbath. Jesus explains, the Sabbath is not a day of doing nothing, but it is the day in which God is working in healing, redeeming, delivering, and saving: “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (Jn 5:17). Throughout, Jesus challenges the received Jewish understanding of Sabbath (as inactivity), to emphasize divine activity. In turn, the paralytic must carry his mat (Jn 5), the blind man must mix mud (Jn 9), both involving activity the Jews prohibited on the Sabbath. It is this Sabbath work of redemption, performed by God but including a joyous response (mud mixing, bed carrying, running and leaping). A burden is involved, but it is a joyous burden inclusive of healing.

Believers take up the burden of cross, the work of redemption of Christ, learning the rest of God is a cessation of one kind of work, synonymous with the work of redemption. Jesus’ direct identity with God (“I am” the life raising the dead, the light giving sight to the blind, the true water curing thirst) arises in healing, the lifting of crushing burden, exchanged for an easy life-giving yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). The healing is a proof of who Jesus is, but also of who God is. The absence and seeming indifference of God to human suffering is remedied in the curing of blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and death itself. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28).

This violation and correction of Jewish Sabbath expectations involves reidentifying God in Christ, re-understanding the Sabbath, and accepting that God is present and revealed. There is a burden to bear, but it is not the weight and toil of the world, but the taking up of the cross, the burden of redemption. The Creator is the Redeemer, as Jesus is  true light, true life, true glory, revealed in his seventh-day work. He is the Sabbath, the life-giving rest, giving God and rest in himself, to creation.

[1] Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (p. 37). Andrews University Press. Kindle Edition. Thank you Jonathan for the gift of this book, and putting me onto Tonstad.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol II, trans. Nicholas Constas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 279.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 277

Resurrection as the Confrontation and Defeat of Antisemitism and the Antichrist

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamín Netanyahu recently said “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan” while explaining the rationale behind military actions involving the US and Israel against Iran. Netanyahu, referencing the historian Will Durant, was arguing that the military action of the US and Israel against Iran, and presumably the destruction of Gaza, were examples of when morality is not enough, and strength and power must be exercised. According to Netanyahu, “If you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Ignoring the implications of out-eviling the evil through ruthlessness, the contrast between Genghis Khan and Jesus may have come to Netanyahu so easily, as one of the defining necessities of Israeli citizenship concerns Jesus and Christianity.

The Law of Return, defining who can be a citizen of Israel, refrains from defining the term “Jew,” but the Law simply states: “Every Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel.”[1] However, in 1962 the High Court of Justice ruled that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who had converted to Catholicism and had become a Catholic monk (Brother Daniel) could not immigrate to Israel, since he had converted to Catholicism. “The argument of the majority judges was that after his conversion to Christianity he is a member of a non-Jewish religion, and is not allowed to immigrate to Israel.”[2] The problem is that “Jew” was not specifically defined as pertaining to religion, but had been defined either as the child of a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism. Those with Jewish mothers were not required to be practitioners of Judaism, but the only requirement is that he/she be one “who is not a member of another religion.” Secularism, atheism, nationalism, and Zionism, are not considered as competing with Judaism as a religion.

The primary issue was in regard to Jews who had converted to Christianity or Messianic Jews, all of whom were disqualified as having the right to immigration. That is, the primary consideration for the right to Aliyah (immigration to Israel, and originally referring to the honor of being called upon in the synagogue to read from the Torah) was rejection of any other religion, with Christianity and Christ being of specific and primary concern. The ruling was passed down, “a Messianic Jew (i.e., the child of a Jewish mother who believes that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel) is of ‘another religion’ rather than Judaism.” As Justice Barak makes clear, an atheist or secular Jew along with religious Jews all agree, for purposes of immigration, there is no such thing as “a Jew who believes in Jesus.” Justice Barak expressed his opinion that even according to a secular outlook there is general agreement that “a Jew who believes in Jesus” is no longer a Jew, according to the national meaning of the term.[3] The key determinant of who is a Jew cannot be said to be either religious or ethnic identity, as converts are welcomed as well as the children of converts who are secular or atheistic, but not being a follower of Christ is the clearest unifying factor.

Given the history of the conflict between Jews and Christians and the persecution of Jews by Christians, it may be understandable that Israel would want to preserve an identity which is specifically and definitively not Christian, but it is also true that this conflict goes to the heart of Christian identity. The rejection and crucifixion of Christ, and recognition of this fact is the beginning point of Christian preaching. Peter, in the first Christian sermon, says, the resurrected Messiah, is the one “you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men” (Acts 2:23). Everyone knows, “The things about Jesus the Nazarene . . . how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to the sentence of death, and crucified Him” (Lk 24:19–20). This killing is not a vague result of general wrongdoing but is the historical and concrete result of the beliefs, practices, and religion, grounding Jews (and Romans), causing them to condemn and crucify Jesus. These people have blood on their hands, and it is this recognition that “cuts them to the heart” causing their repentance which leads to their baptism (Acts 2:37–38). A neutral or innocent audience is simply not addressed by the Gospel, but it is aimed at those complicit in the killing. This message cuts to the heart, as “the things concerning Jesus” pertain to those who are guilty, but this guilt is not simply Jewish.

“For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27). The “Gentiles rage,” and “peoples devise futile things,” and “all the kings of the earth” take their stand, “against the Lord and against his Christ” (Acts 4:25–26). The opposition to Christ is universal, including Israel, Gentiles, kings of the earth, priests, common people, or all that are represented in the gathering in Jerusalem, which seems to include the root of humanity. This city of man, Jerusalem, which is responsible for his killing, is also the site of the beginning of Gospel proclamation.

It is the crucified who is risen and who directly saves those involved in the crime of his murder. This is not generic or genetic guilt, but is specific, historical, and concrete.[4] It is in their role as “the Council of elders,” the  “people assembled, both chief priests and scribes,” Annas as High Priest and Caiaphas, all who were of the “high priestly family,” as well as Pontius Pilate and Herod, or those who gather in Jerusalem (e.g., Lk 22:66; Acts 4:5-6).  These are the judges who will be judged. The antisemitism is not in the details but the details contain the concrete reality that brought on the killing. Betrayal, scapegoating, victimization, judging, capital punishment, sacrificial religion, or the very modes of redemption in which Israel and Rome put their hope, killed Jesus. Where the first Adam encounters the second Adam, all that has gone into shaping and misshaping Adam, comes into play. The murder concerns the very ground constituting humanity, as it comes into conflict with the reality of his humanity.

They condemned him as a threat to their nation, to their temple, and to their religion and considered him a blasphemer (Mk 14:63–64). He is accused of colluding with Satan, of being insane (Mat 12:22, 24, 26, 27, 28; Mk 3:30; Jn 10:19–21), of having demons (Matt 12:25), and of wanting to destroy the temple (Mk 14:58). He is accused of being a malefactor (John 18:29–30), which may include being a sorcerer and may have been aimed at his miracles.[5] He was accused of claiming to be the rightful King of the Jews (Jn 18:33-38; 19:19). They crucify him because of the threat he poses, and the resurrection is a refutation of their legal-religious condemnation. It is a reversal and judgment on their “nailing him to the cross.”

It is not that Christianity is antisemitic, but Judaism is the specific site in which the Messiah reveals himself (universally), and he brings fulness and truth from out of the Jewish faith: “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27). He is in all of the Jewish Scriptures because none of it stands alone, it all requires relativization in the light of Christ. The law made absolute, the Jew made absolute, or even God, apart from Christ, made absolute, is captive to the orientation and power of death, which causes theme to condemn him. This God, this religion, this law, is built on crucifying. It absolutizes the tomb, and Jesus empties out this tomb religion, and this is the promised fulfillment of the law and the prophets (Is 28:14-28).

In light of the resurrection their accusations and understanding are proven false, the point of Christ’s vindication. Peter proclaims not only that Jesus’ resurrection vindicates him, but it indicts those who killed him, along with all their reasons for crucifying him. “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24). The “power of death” pertains to the deadly condemnation, but also to the nature of the worship, the religious nationalism, the essentializing identity, which drove in the nails. The condemnation, and the understanding and systems of religion and identity which brought it about, are judged by the resurrection. Peter distributes culpability to Jews (the “you”) and the Romans (the “godless men”) but all serve the power of death, which they presume is absolute and is theirs to manipulate. This essentializing, absolutizing, of death and their ability to wield it upon victims of their choice, is proof in the flesh (they imagine) of the truth of their power. The entire system, is overturned in the resurrection: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Your beliefs, judgements, and religion (or at least the understanding of your religion), which brought about his crucifixion, stand condemned.

This confrontation of Peter with the Jews is the pattern of proclamation of the resurrection: Peter is himself confronted as a betrayer of Christ and all of the disciples share in the betrayal exemplified by Judas (the charge levelled by Jesus while washing their feet, in Jn 13:1-17). Peter is not shifting the blame but explaining how Jews and Romans are complicit in yielding to the bondage which killed Jesus. Some may not be persecutors on the order of Paul, deniers on the order of Peter, betrayers on the order of Judas, but may simply give themselves over to grief, like Mary at the tomb, but what all share prior to or outside the realization of resurrection is bondage to death. In a long explanation concerning the prophecy presumed to be about David, Peter explains that God has not abandoned Jesus to the grave, and this means life, and the Holy Spirit, not death, are the final reality (esp. Acts 2:33).

The message is a judgment on the judges, as the apostles condemn those who condemned Jesus. “On the next day, their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high-priestly descent” (Acts 4:5–6). The same Jewish court that condemned Jesus condemns the apostles and demands their silence (Acts 4) but the apostles reverse the roles, and proclaim Jesus has judged the judges in his resurrection. This however is only the beginning of the message, as they have “acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17) and through repentance and return, the wiping away of sin, and times of refreshing come through Christ (Acts 3:19–20). Absolution and forgiveness are possible through the power of resurrection.

The pattern is established: realization of complicity in the crime as the first step in a new sort of worship, a new sort of temple, a new understanding of Scripture and Israel. “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11–12). God judges human judgment, as the victim has become the vindicator, offering true justice. As Rowan Williams notes, “grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.”[6] Grace comes to those who recognize their complicity in the crime, reifying the law, opting for the nation over Christ (the law of sin and death).

The refusal to recognize the resurrected Jesus is a refusal to recognize God is with the victim. This coin though, has two sides: the refusal of Jesus places one on the side of those who killed him, but victimizing through scapegoating, is also the crime that killed him. Jesus can be overtly or implicitly rejected, but on both sides of the equation are the guilty. The “not Christian” as the essence of Jewish identity performs the same work as antisemitism. Each is defined by the same reifying process. The scapegoating which killed Jesus is the same scapegoating which was turned on the Jews. That is, Zionism and the modern State of Israel may preserve the identity which, along with Roman complicity, brought about the death of Christ, however Christian antisemitism (e.g., the crusaders’ accusation that Jews are the “Christ killers”) repeats and preserves the same reifying identity which brought about the death of Christ. The reification of the law and the temple on the part of the Jews is repeated by those antisemites who also reify Jewish identity. Antichristian, antichrist, and antisemitism, are made of the same stuff in that each makes an absolute of the negative. While the tendency may be to quickly pass over “who killed Christ,” not only the sin of antisemitism but all sin is defeated by exposure and proclamation of what caused the death of Christ, as it is precisely the scapegoating reification which Christ confronts, judges, and defeats. Indeed, antisemitism is simply a case in point of what killed Jesus. Othering Jews or Romans, is of the same order as blaming Jesus, and in this victimization of the Other there are no innocent bystanders.

[1] Joshua Pex, “Immigration to Israel according to the Law of Return after conversion to another religion?” OFFICE@LAWOFFICE.ORG.IL, Updated on: 29/06/2025

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd LtD, 2002) 2.

[5] Deuteronomy warns, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, . . . that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death” (Dt 13:1–2, 5). Later sources also indicate it may have been the accusation of sorcery which got him killed: Evidence of Jewish opinion at the time of Lactantius is the following passage from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 43a: “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu [the Nazarine] was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.” See John W. Welch, “The Legal Cause of Action Against Jesus in John 18:29–30” Celebrating Easter: The 2006 BYU Easter Conference, ed. Thomas A. Wayment and Keith J. Wilson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University), 157–75. Accessed here: https://rsc.byu.edu/celebrating-easter/legal-cause-action-against-jesus-john-1829-30.

[6] Williams, 4.

Leaning into Christ’s Death as the Hope of Resurrection

My wife, Faith, asked me in a point-blank way what I thought about my resurrection. Maybe it was the wording or the way she asked, but in the moment, I felt only disbelief. I mumbled that I was unsure, and kept to myself that annihilation sometimes seemed plausible. I assume I am a peculiarly poor example of Christian belief, and I know that for many the reality of resurrection and heaven are live options. We went on to talk of her mother, who had an immediate and lively hope of heaven. But as I thought about it, I realized I have no trouble believing in the resurrection of Christ, and I recognized in the New Testament his resurrection is the fulcrum opening the possibility.[1]

Resurrection faith, as it develops in the New Testament, is not focused so much on the future as it is on reconceptualizing immediate, concrete, experience. Baptism, for example, is a voluntary embrace of death so as to be reborn with a new sensibility and experience. Paul makes this argument in telling the Romans they must abandon sin and live virtuous lives (Ro 6:3). Resurrection faith is a training in dying, or in reconceptualizing life. Certainly, this entails future possibility, but it is primarily a more immediate engagement, which points to the significance of the bodily resurrection.

This is not a belief in the Platonic forms, or in some vague afterlife, but it intersects with or is on a continuum with embodied human experience. The death and birth imagery in baptism plays out the immediate embodied point, of resurrection faith. Yes, perhaps it is those of us who are weaker or more immature Christians who get drug down by earthly attachments, but it is also true that it is precisely in this earth-bound embodiment which Christ addresses us. I can take up (or at least grasp) the incremental orientation of living out virtue, dying to the self, and living for others. The immediate thing that impinges is also that which can be immediately resisted, to grasp hold of life as if to preserve it, but this immediate struggle seems obvious. The danger in leaping over these realities, to a future disembodied bliss, is to imagine we get there without passing through embodiment, mortality, and death. That is, we may leap over this reality and misconstrue the eternal significance of the present condition. Rather than severing these bonds, which would amount to giving death final say, Christ lifts us up together with all of creation beyond death, and we are to realize this now. The point is to inhabit the body – bodying forth a virtuous, resurrection faith. Christ has bound us fully and completely to embodiment, and on this basis we live resurrection faith.

We live within or between two experiences, or two overlapping ages, so that the possibility of resurrection, or the end of all things (“The end of the ages has come upon us” 1 Co 10:11) is negotiated now. Paul describes being simultaneously dead to transgression and alive in Christ. He goes on to describe, in the present tense, that he “made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:17). He does tie this to the ages to come, but he poses this future possibility on the basis of the present reality, fusing past, present, and future together in a singular movement.

The working of time, in putting off sin and dying with Christ (Ro 6), is an immediately enacted realization. Believers “have been baptized into His death” (Ro 6:3); “our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with” (Ro 6:6); we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Ro 6:5). The resurrection is not first, but a faith arrived at given the reality of dying with him. We live into this understanding, not as a mere metaphor or mere likeness, but a present participation. As Ann Jervis notes, it is not that “believers travel to Christ’s past but because Christ’s past is present and can be known in human present tenses.”[2] So too we do not travel to Christ’s empty grave but live his resurrection and ascension in the present.

The movement described by Athanasius, “He became man that we could become God,” ties the purposes of creation and redemption in a singular time continuum. Stage one, making humans in His image and likeness, is not instantaneous but a project only completed in the one who is fully human (his inhumanization), and then stage two is a development out of stage one, human divinization. Christ unites himself absolutely and forever (hypostasis), with human nature so as to enact entry of humanity into divinity. God becoming man and man becoming God are distinct but intertwined and overlapping.

Dying to transgression, being brought to life, and being seated at the right hand of the Father, occur for Christ, but are repeated or realized in those found in Christ. There is a realized and being realized eschatology. It is an apocalyptic explosion in slow motion, in which we can see one order coming to an end and the other commencing. For Paul, the end of the ages have come upon us, as God in Christ has become human, but he is becoming human as we too incarnate who he is. In the process we are seated with him in a full divinization, both accomplished and unfolding. As Maximus writes, “To state the matter briefly, of these ages, the former belong to God’s descent to man, while the latter belong to man’s ascent to God.”[3] But Maximus goes on to explain, that inasmuch as this has happened to Christ already, and Christ is the beginning, middle and end, in this sense all of this “has already come upon us.”[4] All at once in Christ, in whom the ages are enfolded, we are caught up in this cosmic creation purpose.

Maximus describes this as consisting of an active and passive principle, with past ages or the ages of the flesh involving “human toil,” having “the characteristic property of activity, but the future ages of the Spirit, which will come about after this present life, are characterized by the transformation of man through passivity.”[5] The Psalm Maximus references, indicates man’s life is full of wearisome toil: “seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps 90:10). The imagery of Sabbath rest (described in my previous two blogs) intercedes into this wearisomeness, as we participate in God, in passive reception. As with Mary and Martha, the activity of Martha accompanies and provides for the reception of Mary at Jesus’ feet. With Mary and Martha (in varying proportions), so too we are caught up in two ages and modes, involving both action and receptivity. These two ages, of activity and passivity, are interfused as we must actively make our way to receiving. Having put on Christ is not an end of reason, of thinking, of putting on virtue, but involves a new nexus of reception and action.

Past, present, and future, run together, so that all things are occurring or unfolding in Christ, in and through whom we are active and passive. We accept Christ, we work, we think, we choose (e.g., to be baptized to partake of the Eucharist), we receive. This working of Christ within us is not finished, as the dying we do in taking up the cross and following him is still occurring, and the rising we do is not fully enacted, but the dying we begin, we believe will be made complete at the Parousia or at our death. “Existing here and now, we will reach the ends of the ages in a state of activity, at which point our power and ability to act will reach its limit.”[6] That is, our death is not our end, but is the full realization of the birth which we are undergoing, but it is also where God takes over. “In the ages that will follow, we shall passively experience by grace the transformation of divinization, no longer being active but passive, and for this reason we will not cease being divinized. For then passivity will transcend nature, having no principle limiting the infinite divinization of those who passively experience it.”[7] There is a limit to what we can do, what we can believe and understand, but this limit is where we entrust ourselves to God. The new creation has commenced, but there is still a groaning, a decay, a dying, which will be completed.

God will complete the good work, creation ex -nihilo begun in you: “And we are passive when, having completely traversed the inner principles of the beings created out of nothing, we will have come, in a manner beyond knowledge, to the Cause of beings, and, since all things will have reached their natural limits, our potentials for activity appropriate to them will come to rest.”[8] Our faith is not that we can take it all in, as we pass beyond knowledge and beyond our natural limits, but we can rest in God’s possibilities for us. Paul says, we shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor 15:52). The transformation begun in you will no longer revolve around your ability to receive, but we must put this understanding to work now. “Blessed, then, is the one who, after making God human in himself through wisdom and fulfilling the genesis of such a mystery, passively becomes, by grace, God, for the fact of eternally becoming this shall have no end.”[9] Our active inhumanizing God within us, our training in righteousness, will become the age in which we are directly taken into the arms of God (our training in passive receptivity concluded).

The understanding that we are in the stages of a birth “converts” the meaning of death: no longer a condemnation of nature but clearly of sin.[10] Death reigns in one age, but those who are conformed to the death of Christ, are brought to life: “through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men (Ro 5:18–19). As Jervis notes, this one act of righteousness extends to people in every historical period. “In regard to Christ’s temporality . . . this suggests that Paul thought that an act in Christ’s human past affected all of humanity, even those who lived before the incarnation. In effect, Christ’s past spans all of human time.”[11] Though our time and place bound natural capacities limit our perspective, recognition of this time of Christ pertains directly to participation in him: “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Ro 6:9).

 Paul, and Maximus after him, compare this state to being in the womb: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who are the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Ro 8:22–23). We may see as in a glass darkly, or as if we are peering through a womb, prior to which has been the activity of our conception (creation) and the other side of which is our entry into the fulness and purpose of creation (divinization). As Maximus writes: “For it is true—though it may be a jarring and unusual thing to say—that both we and the Word of God, the Creator and Master of the universe, exist in a kind of womb, owing to the present conditions of our life.”[12] The Word may appear obscurely in this material, sense-perceptible, enclosure, but the delimitations of the womb, set in the context of the birth it indicates, provides a continuity with resurrection which we can live and die into.

The work begun in us, the reality in which we are engaged, the effort of our life, Paul says, will be brought to completion (Phil. 1:6). This makes of death the final descent through birth. I may not immediately leap to faith in my resurrection, but I can fully embrace the faith of Christ, who is “the author and perfecter of faith,” and so I fix my eyes on Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection and his ascension (Heb 12:2). This Christocentric approach is not a faith in my faith, it does not depend on my power of belief but it is a participation in his faith, in his dying, and rising.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. 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] I found the lecture by John Bare on Maximus, and I turned to Maximus’ approach to the subject, parting some from Bare’s and Maximus’ analysis.

[2] Ann L. Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Translated by Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 22.5.

[4] Ibid, 22.6.

[5] Ibid, 22.7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 22.8.

[10] Ibid, 61.10,

[11] Jervis, 82-83.  

[12] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 6.3.

Perspectives on Peace: An Inquiry and Invitation

This is a guest blog by PBI Professor Ethan Vanderleek

From April 8-May 27, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares entitled “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled”: Perspectives on Peace. Here I offer a few initial reflections on peace, as well as some guiding questions for the module, in the hope that others will join me in reading some excellent texts and asking some tough, relevant, and meaningful questions.

The question of peace involves every level of human, even cosmic, existence. Spiritual teachers often say to start with inner peace, in your own heart and life. Such inner peace will spill over into relationships with others. The reverse is also true: inner peace, peace with and within yourself, is impossible if you live in deep enmity with your neighbor. And peace in neighbourly relationships extends to include our communities, cities, churches, nations, and the human race as a whole. When we talk about peace, then, there is ultimately no human reality that is left out of the discussion: when we truly desire peace we desire it at every level. 

There is also a sense in which peace is primordial or foundational to human existence and experience. Many people, perhaps most, would say they desire peace. St. Augustine says that wars are fought not for their own sake but so that peace may be won. Violence is only engaged to bring about peace. No one could say they love violence for its own sake. The peace that is violently fought for may indeed be a false peace, but there is some connection to peace nonetheless. “What men want in war is that it should end in peace. Even while waging a war every man wants peace, whereas no one wants war while he is making peace” (Augustine, City of God, XIV.12).

What do we desire when we desire peace? First, it is a negative desire. It is the desire to be freed from certain forms of un-peace, of dis-ease, from violence and war. When a parent yearns for a moment of peace and quiet in a chaotic household, it is a desire that the noise, commotion, and inter-sibling conflict would cease. Peace from war and conflict, in our historical moment, often starts with a ceasefire, with something stopping, not so much something starting. This is negative peace: the cessation, even temporarily, of violence, conflict, and aggression.

But this negation of violence is only the barest condition for peace. Is there a positive sense of peace? First, peace is a positive, dynamic, energetic relationship between people or between things. There is peace when an infant slumbers on the breast; though there may be quiet, there is also excitement and anticipation at what this little life will hold, how the mother and father will encourage and behold the child’s growth and curiosity. Peace between friends involves conversation, exploration, pursuing common projects together: building a swing-set, perhaps, cooking a meal, or talking through some complex matter. Religiously, peace may involve the silence of prayer, listening for the voice of the creator; even here, in silence and stillness, there is an energy of relationship, of receiving life and love from beyond. So peace is not just an absence of violence: it is a positive set of relationships, sharing life and energy between differences.

To attempt a formula: peace is dynamic life-giving relationship between differences. Peace does not involve collapsing or eliminating all difference, where all that remains is an undifferentiated whole. Nor, though, does peace involve an absolute emphasis on difference, where individual people or communities isolate themselves from the unity that comes through relationships. Peace involves a delicate balance between unity and difference: an over-emphasis on either is the destruction of relationships, either collapsed into a whole or spread out so thinly and remotely that no relationship is possible. 

Starting April 8, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares on the question of peace. Four key questions will guide our inquiry. I sketch out some preliminary thoughts here, but these are open questions that admit to ever further thought and prayer. They are: 

  1. What is true peace?
  2. What is false peace?
  3. Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence? 
  4. What is the peace that Jesus gives?
  1. What is true peace? Peace is dynamic, energetic, ordered, exploratory, relational, and freeing. It operates at every level of existence: personal, relational, communal, political, and cultural. Peace at one level integrates with peace at other levels: I cannot have true personal peace if I am not at peace with my brother or sister. We cannot have true peace between nations without peace between cultures and civilizations.
  2. What is false peace? Peace masquerades in many forms. There is the false peace of withdrawal into the self, the self making peace with itself totally apart from relations with others. There is the false peace of uniformity, where everyone must fit into one expected way of being. There is the false peace of the common enemy, where peace is made in a community by finding an enemy that everyone agrees to despise and hate. There is the false peace of victory, where one person or group achieves peace by defeating, perhaps subjugating, another person or group. There is the false peace of indifference, where the effort of relating is too great, and we agree to ignore difficult aspects of a relationship. There is the false peace of distraction, where work or entertainment keep us from deeper relationships, questions, or human endeavors.
  3. Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence? There is the further, troubling question of whether peace is a worthwhile question and whether it is a true or worthy object of desire at all. Is it possible that all peace is ultimately false? The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “war [polemos] is father [pater] of all” (F23, The First Philosophers, trans. Robin Waterfield). Conflict seems constitutive of reality.And sometimes we crave the adventure of conflict, war, or aggression. Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, “Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency” (New York: Penguin, 1990; 128; trans. R.J. Hollingdale). On the one hand, then, peace might simply be brief moments of rest within reality’s deeper constitutive violence. On the other hand, peace might cover over our fundamental humanity, which needs to express itself through conflict, power, and victory. Nietzsche warns us against desiring a lazy peace that squelches the endeavoring human spirit. Perhaps the pursuit of peace is one of Christianity’s lies, uncritically accepted, but needing a total revaluation when we return to the fundamental human drive to life, a drive which, far from fearing or shunning war and violence, seeks out and embraces them. This is a question that invites ever further inquiry, sometimes troubling inquiry, when we consider how deep seated the impulse to violence and war is in our world and in ourselves.
  4. What is the peace that Jesus gives? Christian faith teaches that peace is the truth of creation and redemption. “My peace I leave you,” Jesus says, yet “not as the world gives.” The peace of Jesus is set firmly against all forms of false peace. But false peace is endemic, and so his presence is not first pacifying but aggravating. He exposes false peace. He is identified not as a wise, serene sage but as a man of sorrows. He suffers all the effects of our forms of false peace, our insistence on making peace through violent means. Jesus’s peace cannot be secured through military violence, which would be to totally compromise it. He makes real and accessible the peace of the Triune God, that infinite relationship of source, response, and openness, of Father, Son, and Spirit. 

These questions and more will guide our inquiry in the “Perspectives on Peace Module.” We’ll examine historical sources with Augustine and Julian of Norwich. We’ll address critiques of peace from Heraclitus and Nietzsche. We’ll learn from Jewish and Muslim writers on peace. We’ll consider peace between nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions with Raimon Panikkar. Through it all we’ll strive to keep Jesus himself as the ultimate criteria and judge for what true peace is.

Where Does Thought Begin and End: Mary Versus Martha

The most basic question concerns that with which we are always occupied, the why and how of thought. What is it, how do we best do it, and how does it shape who we are? We might picture thought as either a verb or noun, a doing or a receiving, a striving and working from lack, or a resting in a given and received abundance. It is like the difference between six days of work and the day of Sabbath, or the difference between Mary and Martha upon Jesus’ visitation. “Mary was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations” (Luke 10:39). If we think of the two women figuratively, with Martha representing the verb, the working form of thought, and Mary representing the Sabbatical resting form of thought, it not only illustrates two forms of thought but the perspective of each in juxtaposition to the other.

From Martha’s perspective, Mary is being lazy, and she is “left to do all the serving alone.” Martha’s response to Mary is not meant to devalue Jesus’ teaching, but there are “more pressing and practical matters.” In terms of thought, Martha might represent a kind of pragmatism, asking what work is being accomplished? Martha’s busy-ness (food and serving preparation) will result in a tangible product. We often picture thinking and life as a task aimed at producing. Thought is not simply to be enjoyed and indulged, but must justify itself, and show its value in some other coin. Martha is cleaning, getting a meal ready, and the value of her work is evident, but it does not occur to her that all of her preparations are subordinate to the “one necessary and good thing.”  

Mary, as a Sabbath form of thought, is thought for itself, and is not for something else. Our tendency is to put thinking to work, either in a neurotic compulsive repetition, or aimed at attaining (perhaps ourselves) in and through thought. Sabbath thought, is on the order of Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet and taking in his instruction. We may have the experience of insight or a realization occurring to us, in which we are the receptors of something beyond ourselves. This thinking is not like producing a meal but is more on the order of a form of art, to be enjoyed for itself. There is food for thought which has no object other than itself. In the case of Jesus teaching, so too with a certain form of thought, it is simply to be received with joy. According to William Desmond, it presumes an original ontological ground: “a vision of all things being what they are by virtue of an ultimate ontological peace —to be at all is to be in the gifted peace of creation as good.”1 Sabbath thought is a realization of this ground of thought outside of itself.

Given this ground, contemplation, study, meditation, and prayer, are for themselves, though they may infect and channel all that surrounds them, but thought which does not have this center, is all Martha and no Mary. Sabbath thought “rests” in the realization of the divine, presumes a dependence on God, a providential guidance, an opening to deeper insight. It is a waiting, expectation, and gratitude, while its opposite is pure distraction which never realizes its primary purpose. Sabbath thought bears peace, that is beneath and perhaps beyond articulation. Unadulterated appreciation of beauty, enjoyment, profound contentment, pervade this thought centered on receiving grace. It is the “very good” of God in his admiration of creation and it is our participation in that same realization.

However, before we too readily dismiss Martha’s accusation (or before Jesus’ dismisses it), we recognize that though sloth is not Mary’s problem, this is a real possibility. Isn’t it the case that Sabbath itself contains the possibility of a sort of bored laziness; that the day in which we are to sit at the Saviour’s feet becomes instead a groggy oppressiveness in which we fail to discern the Lord? Thomas Aquinas recognizes this juxtaposition and poses Sabbath as an exposure of slothfulness: “Sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. . . [, which] implicitly commands the mind to peace in God to which sorrow of the mind about the divine good is contrary.”[2] Aquinas defines sloth, as an oppressive sorrow, which, “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing. . . . hence sloth implies a certain weariness of work. . . a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.”[3] Sabbath sluggishness, describes a form of thought that is sorrowful, and having ceased activity (busyness), sorrow sets in as the mind turns in on itself. The lack of purpose, the despair, covered up by activity, may strike us in this moment. The wait for Godot, or for some larger explanation or purpose, is the opposite of Sabbath thought, in that it is all delay, anticipation, suffering, and there is no meaning. Sunday boredom may be much more pervasive than Sunday joy, but from this perspective Sabbath (the day of the Lord) is exposing something otherwise repressed. Sabbath may expose a sloth, a sorrow, a boredom which work hides.

Aquinas explains that sloth may pass from being a venial to a mortal sin, if it is deep ceded enough: “So too, the movement of sloth is sometimes in the sensuality alone, by reason of the opposition of the flesh to the spirit, and then it is a venial sin; whereas sometimes it reaches to the reason, which consents in the dislike, horror and detestation of the Divine good, on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit. On this case it is evident that sloth is a mortal sin.”[4] That is, the spirit may be willing but the flesh weak, or it may be that fleshly torpor also dominates thought and spirit. Sloth can become a way of thinking and Sabbath is meant to intercede in this downward spiral. According to Aquinas, sloth is opposed to joy, and as he explains “sloth can infect reason,” constituting its own joyless form of thought.

Thinking, of the Sabbath kind, the Mary kind, the received kind, is joyous. It is the thought God had on the Sabbath when he recognized, “It is very good.” There is an inherent pleasure in this recognition, which need not “do” something. This thought is an ontological ground out of which all thinking and goodness flows. There is no thinking, of any kind, apart from this origin. This goodness and peace are the basis of peace and goodness, making even defective forms possible. This thought need not wait till the end of history but is present throughout, the beginning and middle, as well as at history’s end. This goodness though, may be so pervasive that it is taken for granted, in that all possibility flows from this reality, making it difficult to recognize.[5] Martha-like busyness may not have time or inclination for this recognition.

We can hide from work, in the manner Martha projects upon Mary, but work can be a distraction, and this may be Martha’s problem: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things” (Luke 10:41). Jesus’ description of Martha captures life for many: worry and bother about many things but missing the point. According to Aquinas, “Now just as we do many things on account of pleasure, both in order to obtain it, and through being moved to do something under the impulse of pleasure, so again we do many things on account of sorrow, either that we may avoid it, or through being exasperated into doing something under pressure thereof.”[6] Martha is exasperated, and she seems to betray a sorrow, which according to Aquinas, she may be repressing. Sloth is a resistance, a dis-ease, the opposite of peace and joy, even where sloth is hidden by activity. Martha and her repressed kin may be missing the only thing necessary, “the good part.”

Martha wants Jesus to spur Mary into action, presuming she is avoiding work, but Jesus suggests Martha’s exasperation is causing her to miss what Mary has found (v. 41). He explains, “Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:42). Martha is misfocused, worried, anxious and bothered, and in the process may miss the good thing, the main thing, and to take it away from Mary would be tragic. Mary has found the peace that has escaped Martha. This peace and goodness give value to everything else. It is the original goodness that makes all the work and preparation an extension of goodness.

Jesus doesn’t tell Martha to drop everything and come and sit down, though we might expect she would finish what she is doing and not miss out. He doesn’t command her, or us, to stop working, and sit meditating, but the work is not going to produce goodness, but flows from and toward this goodness. Martha cannot whip up this thing in her kitchen. What is being imparted to Mary may be assisted by Martha, in that Mary is not taken away from what is necessary, but Martha’s worried, bothered, busy-bodyness, is not helping, but is a distraction from what is essential. “Mary has chosen the good part,” the part that gives value to what Martha is doing. Martha’s busyness is justified by what Mary is doing, but not her worry and bother.

To say her worry and bother are justified would be to justify her experience of exasperated futility. It would be on the order of saying war is necessary for peace, or evil is justified by goodness, or sin is essential to salvation. The two are not connected. Martha’s worry is for nothing, serves nothing, and accomplishes nothing, though it is connected to her service. The problem is, separating Martha and her worry, her service and her exasperation. Is worry or war a necessary means to an end? The one necessary and good thing Mary is experiencing is not aided but hindered by Martha’s worried interference. Mary does not need the worry of Martha. Jesus is immediately accessible, and the goodness and peace he brings are accessible. Nothing else is necessary, and certainly futility and sin in no way aid or serve the good. Paul can experience this peace in prison, John received visions of hope and peace while in exile and under torture, and Christ grants peace from the cross. This thought transcends context and potentially descends into every context.

Now if Mary had said to Jesus, “Excuse me, I must go into the kitchen and strangle my sister,” this would have been like the strategy of peace through war. There is a total disruption, a total break. The one is completely opposed to the other, though we understand the confusion. Life as war, or thought as a plague, killing as the means to life, all Martha and no Mary, kills off the goal in striving to achieve it. There is a basic negativity, nothing as ground, which is not simply a philosophical problem, but which philosophy exposes.

For example, Descartes would doubt his way to God, in a form of thinking which receives nothing which transcends it. Like Kant, he “wants to accept nothing he has not earned through his own work.”[7] Descartes gives more room to doubt and the demonic, (the possibility a demon is deceiving him), than he does to love of God. He considers the possibility that he is brain damaged, that he is dreaming, or that an evil genius is deluding him. Things are precarious, my head may be “made of earthenware,” or “glass,” or I may be insane, or a demon deceiving me. Every possibility must be equally entertained before the arbiter of doubt.[8] He aims for a sure thought, like mathematics, that cannot be doubted but which can be mastered. This suspicious doubt is aggressive to what is beyond its control, and has no room for wonder, astonishment, or love, none of which can be reduced to a mathematical formula. It is as if love of my wife needs a prior surety, perhaps a private detective to investigate, so as to relieve any doubt. In this thinking, love of God is not a possible starting point, but the detective of doubt must first be deployed. Doubt may seem the more rigorous form of thought, but it is by definition the refusal of received thinking (not just received tradition, received authority, received understanding, but the very possibility of reception), on the order of the Sabbath. I must be in all the thought as author and originator. Given Descartes’ starting point (radical doubt and the possibility of radical evil), Sabbath thinking is not possible. Things are too unsure. Tradition, Church authority, and faith, have their place, but not in the realm of serious thinking (the rational kind). It is no great leap from Descartes’ radical doubt to Nietzsche’s nihilism.

This Enlightenment thought promotes an empty autonomy, all Martha and unaware of the Mary form of thought. They will do for themselves: think the greatest thought after Anselm, think one’s being after Descartes, and accept nothing not earned with Kant. The fumes of a presumed autonomy render them unconscious to any alternative; all work and no resting-playful grace. This form of empty thinking brings on Nietzsche’s pronouncement, “God is dead,” and he is dead for this form of thought. It is as if Martha has gotten so caught up in her kitchen duties that she has forgotten the possibility of divine visitation (Jesus in the other room). Mary-like reception can be disrupted and broken, not due to lack of effort, but because of energy, effort, worry, and bother, all directed to attaining what can only be received.

In the same way, grasping the tree of the knowledge of good and evil excludes from the tree of life (they die unaware), but then they find they are naked and ashamed. This failed knowledge is a doing, a grasping, a divinizing through its own power, and at the same time it is a refusal of mortality. Adam is the original Descartes, imagining that in this knowing he has grasped immortal divine being. Busyness, business, war, philosophy, or neurotic thought, may distract and cover the reality (of nakedness, mortality, and frailty). The human impetus is to cover the nakedness without addressing the root problem. As Desmond describes the philosophical project, “preaches speculatively against nakedness and every beyond, and the system weaves its conceptual clothes to cover our naked frailties.”[9]

To cease one form of thought, to bring busyness to an end, to enter the Sabbath, is to give up on covering frailty. There is no activity, no thought, no system of knowing, that can cover this nakedness. All pretense of defense, all weapons, all notions of self-determination, all busyness, must be dropped, as there is nothing to be done, other than receive the gift of the Master. There is no working to get there, but the work of preparation, in the metaphorical kitchen, must cease so as to enter the metaphorical living room at the feet of Jesus. There is no warring our way to peace, struggling to gain rest, or working our way to salvation. You cannot get to Mary-thought through Martha-thinking, the one precludes the other.

The dialectical intelligibility of the world, its oppositional antagonism, may in fact be more familiar, and may even provide a momentary satisfaction, but hunger will return. As Jesus explains at the well in Samaria, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about,” (Jn 4:32) and he promises a living water which “will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). Martha-thought may provide temporary sustenance but it cannot serve in place of what Mary receives. Mary takes the time given to receive what is not otherwise available, while Martha cannot make time.

Goodness and peace, like the thought they entail, require only sitting at the feet of Jesus. This is cessation of activity of the Martha kind so as to receive the Word in the way of Mary. This thought is from beyond us, just as every origin, including ourselves, transcends us. We cannot cook up this peace or create this goodness, but only receive it. The point is not to denigrate Martha and her work or any work, but to acknowledge that all work requires more than itself. Even God’s work days are followed by interludes recognizing the goodness and then an uninterrupted Sabbath day, recognizing and declaring this goodness. To enter into this divine recognition is the beginning of Sabbath thought. “There is nothing we can do, nothing we are to do; except to take joy in the gift of being, and to live divine praise.”[10]

So thought is that which pervades every waking and even sleeping moment of our lives, and it may not have occurred to us that there is a failed form, an inadequate form, and a redeemed form of thought. It is not that we can easily be continually absorbed into this reality, but the goal of this transformed, grateful form of thought, holds out the immediate realization of rest and peace, the fulfilled Sabbath rest of Christ.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. 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, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 320.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa, ques. 35, art. 3, response, and ad. 1. Cited in  Desmond, 319.

[3] Summa, Question 35, Article 1: Whether sloth is a sin?

[4] Summa, 35:3.

[5] Desmond, 320.

[6] Summa, 35:4.

[7] Desmond, 341. This Lutheran rejection of works somehow preserved a toilsome thought, perhaps in making God so transcendent that his goodness was unavailable.

[8] René Descarte, Meditations 1 & 2.

[9] Desmond, 347.

[10] Desmond, 347.

When Faith Bows Down Before Power

Guest blog by Allan S. Contreras Ríos

Pictures of religious leaders surrounding political figures, laying hands on them, and pronouncing public blessings have become part of the contemporary media landscape. Recently, a photo circulated on social media showing religious leaders laying hands on Trump and praying for him in these times of war. But this is not unique to the United States; it has also been done in Mexico. In fact, regardless of the country, the scene is repeated with different accents and partisan colors. And every time it appears, it awakens an ancient, almost visceral memory in those of us who have read the Bible with open eyes.

Because this situation is not just a symbolic gesture. It is the repetition of a pattern that Scripture knows all too well: the temptation to turn faith into a seal of legitimacy for projects of power. A temptation as old as the kings of Israel and as current as any modern political campaign. It is an echo of the false prophets, an echo that calls for a voice like that of the prophet Jeremiah.

In biblical accounts, court prophets, those who came too close to the throne, rarely spoke on behalf of God. Their role was rather different: to produce a false sense of tranquility, to promise false stability, to pronounce false blessings on political decisions, and all this in the name of God.

There are three features that characterized their message: 1. They promised peace when there was no peace. And in this way, they anesthetized the collective conscience.2. They confused the voice of the king with the voice of God. And in this way, they turned theology into nationalist propaganda. 3. They silenced those who did denounce injustices. Because the truth always makes those in power uncomfortable.

This pattern is repeated over and over again when religious sectors present a political leader as a “protector of the faith,” a “divine instrument,” or a “guarantor of the national destiny.” No matter the country, the mechanism is the same. Faith becomes a tool for violence, rather than a means of raising awareness.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador was becoming president of Mexico, at a National Christian Fellowship, a congregation was proud to have had the opportunity to be with AMLO and pray for him that God would bless him as he led the country. This pride was based on a misunderstanding of 1 Timothy 2. A misunderstanding that fuels a dangerous religious nationalism.

1 Timothy 2:2 says that the Church should pray “for kings and all those in authority,” but the purpose is explicit in the same verse: “so that we may live peaceful and quiet lives with all godliness and dignity.” That purpose changes the entire narrative that was being told at this Christian event. Because Paul is not saying: “Pray that they win wars.” “Pray that God will bless their political projects.” “Pray that their nation will be superior to others.” “Pray that God will make America great again.” “Pray that Morena will be the hope of Mexico.”

Paul is saying something much more humble and pastoral: “Pray that the rulers will not bother the Church. Pray that there will be enough stability to live the faith without persecution. Pray that we may practice piety without interference.”

It is a defensive prayer, not a celebratory one. It is a pastoral prayer, not a nationalistic one. And it is especially not the latter. We must remember, and it is important that we do, that Paul writes this under a violent, militaristic, and pagan empire. Paul is not legitimizing Caesar. He is not blessing Rome’s military campaigns. He is asking that the Church be allowed to survive and witness in peace. And not a peace obtained through violence, as was the Pax Romana.

So when we pray publicly today for a ruler to “win wars,” “defeat enemies,” or “fulfill his divine destiny,” we are not obeying Paul; we are seriously misinterpreting him. We are repeating the pattern of the false prophets of the court, not that of the apostles.

On the other hand, in contrast to these false prophets, we have an authentic prophetic voice that was (and is) almost never popular. Jeremiah knew this well. While the official prophets assured everyone that all was well, he denounced injustice toward the vulnerable, religious corruption, the idolatry of nationalism, and false security based on sacred symbols. Jeremiah’s message was not “God is with our nation no matter what,” but something much more uncomfortable: “God is with justice, and if the nation abandons it, it also abandons his protection.” Jeremiah did not bless political projects. He blessed the truth, even if it hurt the rulers and the people. And that is why they beat him, imprisoned him, and accused him of being unpatriotic. Prophetic faithfulness has always come at a cost.

What is today called “religious nationalism” or “Christian nationalism” —whether in American, Mexican, or any other country’s discourse— shares elements that the Bible identifies as dangerous because it reduces faith to a patriotic symbol, divides between “true believers” and “enemies of the nation,” promises salvation through state violence, not the Kingdom of God, and uses spiritual language for electoral purposes: one nation under God! The hope of Mexico!

This is not only a theological error. It is a spiritual disease. Because it transforms the Gospel into an instrument of tribal identity and distances it from its mission: to liberate, heal, reconcile, denounce injustices, and proclaim a Kingdom that does not depend on borders or parties.

When faith kneels before power, it loses its voice. When it kneels before Christ, it regains it.

Those who raise their voices to denounce these distortions often feel like a minority. And they are. But the Bible never measured truth by majority. In fact, a sign that something is wrong is when a majority agrees with an idea.

The prophetic vocation today, then, involves naming injustice even if it is unpopular, remembering that the Kingdom of God is not a national project, unmasking religious manipulation without falling into cynicism, and caring for the community so that it does not confuse faith with propaganda.

It is not about attacking people, but about discerning spirits. Like when the disciples wanted to rain down fire on Samaria and Jesus rebuked them, saying that they did not know what spirit they were of. We must question which discourses produce life and which produce violence, death, and idolatry. We must remember that faith does not exist to bless empires and their wars, but to humanize those who live under them. And to care for those who are affected by imperial violence.

Biblical history warns us that when religion becomes an ally of power, it loses its ability to speak the truth. When faith becomes a political tool, it ceases to be good news—the gospel—for the poor, immigrants, widows, the oppressed, etc. And when prophets are silent, injustice becomes the norm.

That is why, in times when faith is used as a tool of national identity, Jeremiah’s voice becomes urgent once again. Not to destroy, but to heal. Not to divide, but to remind us that God cannot be tamed by any human project.

The Gospel does not need a king to be true, nor does it need the king to propagate it. But kings—and systems—do need prophets to remind them that they are not gods. And that the violent actions they take are not approved by God.

As a Christian, you are either a prophet of God who denounces the powers that be, or a false prophet who applauds your homeland.

Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

The seventh day on which God rested, and which holds out the possibility of resting in God (ceasing from laborious struggle), is definitive of salvation. Sabbath rest is a return to and acknowledgement of that which precedes tragic knowing (war, struggle, and violence). In Hebrews, Sabbath as salvation is described as a continuous and open possibility, an avenue of experience that by-passes the reign of death, the agonistic struggle in the wilderness, and which provides peace. “For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb 4:10). Sabbath provides entry to all that follows in the commandments, for acquisitiveness of the neighbor’s stuff, fear of death with its murder and revenge, the worship of idols with its manipulation of death, are undermined, in recognizing God. “Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:16).

This is not simply a delayed peace, awaiting the end of time, as the writer declares we must enter in today: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb 4:7). This “today” stretches out to every moment of history as the continual and ever-present possibility. “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Heb 4:9-11). This peace is continually available but the vessel must receive what is poured out.

Job describes the all-consuming nature of unrest and suffering, such that sleep offers no refuge, as even his dreams terrify him (Job 7:14). His inability to escape suffering, to turn off his mind, describes mental suffering, perhaps worse even than his physical suffering, as the mind becomes both victimizer and victim. Even death offers no refuge and so he cries out for God to obliterate him: “Oh that my request might come to pass, And that God would grant my longing! Would that God were willing to crush me, That He would loose His hand and cut me off!” (Job 6:8–9).

Job’s description resembles the desperation of case histories presented by Sigmund Freud, describing individuals driven to hysteria or self-harm due to their torturous thoughts. The Wolf Man, the Rat Man, and the case of Dr. Schreber, describe the workings of the obsessive-compulsive disorder and Freud’s attempts to find a cure. He assumed that these extreme cases offered archetypical insights into the universal human condition, which he would eventually link to the death-drive (or Thanatos). Jacques Lacan, extends Freud’s conclusions, presuming that the death-drive or the drive to self-destruction is the worst sort of solipsism, in that the drive to escape the death-drive is the death-drive. The human sickness drives one to a Job-like conclusion that the only cure is annihilation. Annihilation as cure, explains Lacan’s rather sad diagnosis, that the sickness is driven by pursuit of a cure, when in reality the best compromise is to relinquish this notion.

On a larger scale, but following the same logic, is Heraclitus understanding that “War is the father of all things.” Just as death-drive is the impetus undergirding the ego and superego (in Lacan these structures, constituting the human subject, arise from the death-drive), so too, war is the impetus to formation of the city, and the various social and political structures of corporate human personality. Even Plato called for a permanent military class, since the threat of war is constant and peace is never permanent. Though the scale is larger the subject has not changed; killing and being killed in war must trace its etiology to the same dynamic, found both in the individual and corporate personality. The drive to obliterate, projected inward or outward, has the same result.

Thus, the Rat Man, will find a final cure in being slaughtered in WWI. As the Japanese author, Yukio Mishima recognized, war was a missed opportunity in which he could have ceased being, and thus have been relieved of his torturous thoughts (making up the corpus of his work). Peace enters into the equation only as the end-result of death and war. As with the Lacanian therapeutic conclusion, the drive to peace may be seen as the core of the sickness, as it is this pursuit, continually illusive, that sets the world on fire. Peace through war, either implicitly or explicitly, privileges war as original. It is the means and end of the death-drive. The drive to escape the death-drive is the death-drive, or the drive to escape war through war, is only a difference in scale. This is the human sickness, and it describes the masochistic and sadistic snare which entraps the world.

This dark description may function at an unconscious level but the same dynamic unfolds in consciousness. The conscious desire for life, the sex drive or the drive for acquisition (covetousness), speaks of the same death dealing consequences, in that life is to be acquired, extracted (from the other), and spent. Will to power, will to life, springs from a desire in which life is lacking and must be obtained. As Arthur Schopenhauer describes, “All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied.”[1] The process is infinite, in that satisfaction is only “apparent” and not real and an attained object is by definition not a desired object, it is “merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.”[2] Desire is bottomless and its demands infinite, calling for final resolution or ultimate satisfaction. Freud hit upon the death-drive, finding it behind Schopenhauer’s will.

For most of his career Freud attempted to link the basic drive to sex or biology or to a more positive and life-giving desire, but he realized desire functions at two levels, and underneath desire was drive, in which life and death are confused. He concluded sadism was a projection of masochism, or the internal dynamic turned outward. The superego (father) which would punish the ego (child) makes oppression and dominance, or acquisition from the self (self-consumption) the means to life. The price for life is death (self-punishment). Consciously or unconsciously, the grave is the final immortalization, as here there is no mortality. The drive for life, in other words, is death-drive hidden beneath the layer of conscious desire. Security is achieved through acquisition (of wealth, power, and sex), which means the race is driven by a deadly acquisitive aggression. As a result, eternal life is through unlimited resources and acquisition, so that peace and security arise through mutually assured destruction. As William Desmond notes, “If this is our primary relation to the world, war inevitably defines human existence relative to what is other to us.”[3] He raises the question (and answers it) as to whether we can give it a rest, and find peace.

God’s resting and his declaration that creation is not only “good” but “very good” contains the goodness released from God into creation, realized in Sabbath. This primordial goodness contains no hint of violence nor is this a self-satisfied and selfish goodness: “this is not the erotic self-satisfaction of an autistic god, but an agapeic release of the otherness of creation into the goodness of its own being for itself.”[4] The otherness of creation to God informs recognition of goodness, which does not require acquisition or consumption. “When we behold something, something of the otherness of the thing beheld is communicated to us: beholding is not a self-projection. Every anthropomorphism —call this our own self projection on the other —is made possible by this “yes,” as first giving creation to be for itself, endowing it with the promise of its own being for itself.”[5] We can enjoy creation, not because it is “good for us” but simply because it is good. “It is given for the other as other, and the good as for us comes to us from a giver that is beyond any enclosure of ‘for self.’”[6] This is a knowing, a mindfulness, which is given, perhaps reflected in the activity of bestowing names; recognizing what is given, and not struggling to determine thought, or to attain being through thought, but enjoying what is.

In contrast, the tragic knowing of the fall is centered on the self, and aimed at attaining through knowing (“You shall be like gods”). The falling apart and shame impose a new sort of work, in which the self is at stake in the struggle. Antagonism, disputation, agonistic struggle, argument, conflict, murder, become the means to life and wisdom. This human failure is reflected in all the areas constituting humanity (religion, psychology, philosophy, and culture).

In religious myth, war and violence are the primal reality behind wisdom and existence. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is the goddess of war, springing from the head of Zeus, brandishing her spear. Heraclitus’ “War is the father of all,” accords with religious myth, in which out of violence and war the world is created. The celestial gods war among themselves, and often it is out of the cadaver of the deity that creation commences, thus death is divine (e.g., Thanatos, Hades, Hel, Yama, Anubis, Mictlan). The gods of war promise salvation through destruction. Odin leads warriors to Valhalla through death, while Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky swoops like a falcon, and Kali transforms through destruction.

So too modern philosophy focuses on the creativity of death: Kant presumes war produces the sublime, Schelling pictures God arising though being opposed to himself; Hegel pictures dialectical strife and contradiction, or spirit at war with itself as the avenue to synthesis; Marx translates the Hegelian dialectic into a creative class warfare as the engine of history; and according to Lenin, “The unity of opposites is temporary; antagonistic struggle is absolute,” which Mao liked to quote in conjunction with his idea that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”[7] Desmond goes on to describe Socrates, Nietzsche, Blake, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza as given over to an originary violence. In this nightmare, work, war, and struggle are primary. Nature, red in tooth and claw, power through the barrel of a gun, ceaseless struggle over limited resources, is the Hobbesian reality with which we are most familiar. Life is no rose garden, and at best peace is the temporary cessation of war. It is derived from war, from preparation for war, and from threat of war. Machiavelli would advise a pretense of peace and religion, while recognizing the cruel realities necessary to exercise power. Even thought and the possibility of thinking are relinquished, in a form of thought which must first attain the self (e.g., the Cartesian grasp for self). Lost thought, the lost self, the absence of life, is the ground of originary violence (religious and philosophical).

Sabbath is a return to an original possibility upon which everything else depends, “The Lord God is One.” Here there is rest and peace, and the painful labor produced by human rebellion is resolved before it occurs. “God is good” and his goodness is overflowing, and grace is simply given. Desmond appeals to the poetry of Yeats to capture the imagery: “peace ‘in the bee-loud glade,’ peace that ‘comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.’”[8] It is “dropping slow” like honey from the comb. It descends like the evening, when night falls, as it is a gift from above.

It is not that a certain effort is not involved: “strive to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11), or strive to bring about the conditions ripe for receiving. According to Desmond, “When peace descends on us, we do not sleep but are overtaken and transformed, though if we were asked to give a definition of that peace it would be like the intimate universal —impossible to fix completely.”[9] It is a “God send” which awakens us to a peace beyond finite possibility, opening to a “love of being,” a gift which we mostly fall asleep to. Perhaps like Job, we are awakened from our nightmares to a more primordial possibility: “If it is true that it is polemos (war or conflict) that is second-born, then polemos is the fugue state, and born of falling asleep to the first peace of being.”[10]

The promise of Sabbath is to remind us that there is more than exile, more than the fall, more than the sweat of the brow, and the pain of labor. Though this darkness has penetrated to our bones, there is the possibility of exposing this lie through the word of God (“penetrating joint and marrow”) and the power of Sabbath (Heb 4:12-13). “I would say that the Sabbath is not the first, but it follows from the first. God is the First. Hence the first and most hyperbolic commandment: I am God, and there is none other; God is God and nothing but God is God.”[11] This God is not equivocal or in opposition to himself. He is a singularity in which there is the possibility of Sabbath harmony. Our tendency is to create divine false doubles (requiring equivocity), the myths of war between the gods, so that inevitably the “harbingers of war are hidden in the false names of God.”[12]

The Sabbath is made for recognizing God and to rid ourselves of idols (the derivatives, the seconds, the counterfeit reality). “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:2–3). In false realities, God’s otherness is made to seem an infinite distance and his peace an otherworldly impossibility. God draws near in the Sabbath. Love of God is renewed so that we might once again recognize his image in our neighbor and in ourselves. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex 20:4).

The turn to worship of the creaturely is to forget the God of Sabbath peace. To attach the name of God to death is to transgress the third commandment (Ex 20:7). The resolution: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God” (Ex 20:8–10). The peace of the Sabbath is more primordial than death, and the unified God of the Sabbath precedes the deities of division. “It is a reminder: against the counterfeit doubles we produce, the substitute seconds we secrete, against the war hinted in the equivocal, there is a recall to the First, a recall to a peace more primordial than war.”[13]

We are at stake in realizing the primordial peace of Sabbath; our own well-being, our mindfulness, our salvation, from out of violence and war, into participation in the primordial peace of God. This touches on what is deepest and most intimate to us, as we are involved in this remembrance or forgetting (it is not merely an objective problem). It is the realization of the overflowing love of God – what Desmond calls, “agapeic astonishment.” We are awakened to the love of God and the sheer wonder of the world in its plenitude, a “too-muchness.” “Astonishment has the bite of happening in it: an otherness is shown or communicated to us, and a celebrating wonder at its sheer being there as given awakens us to it, and indeed awakens mind to itself.”[14] Sabbath is a time of grateful reception, peace with self, others, and God are communicated (we receive ourselves back).

As Desmond explains, there is a “de-weaponizing.” There is a disarming, a dropping of all weapons, a ceasing of weaponized work (futile striving) so as to take up the work of love. It is not so much working as grateful enjoyment and gratitude. “Work becomes prayer. Prayer is not now the impotence of work, that is, impotence for which nothing anymore works. Prayer is the empowering apotheosis of powerlessness.”[15] It is on the order of Paul’s weakness, in which he discovers God’s grace. This disempowerment frees for a saturation in grace. Like Job, who endures the extremity of suffering and the acceptance of his nakedness, which is the entry point of blessing. “Naked I came into being, naked I go out; the Lord gives, the Lord takes; blessed be God forever. This is a sabbatical prayer —a faith in sabbatical being beyond the night of exposure.”[16]

Yes, there is a Sabbath for thought, in which the war of words, the inner struggle, and its outward form cease. It is not an end of thinking, but a new form of received thought, in which we are awakened to mindfulness, to love, to “It is good,” and we become participants in God’s recreation. Lack, absence, and deprivation describe the violent struggle which is all consuming in the annihilation of war or the all-consuming “neurosis” of death-drive but the work of remembrance, of receiving, of participating, is on the order of prayer. The grace of Sabbath peace is the overflow granted to being in creation. This life is not gained through struggle but remembered as the good gift. War springs from a love of life that must be gained, protected, and preserved, but this life is not one that is missing but which is freely given.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. 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] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp,  (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1909) 260.

[2] Ibid.

[3] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 317

[4] Desmond, 325.

[5] Desmond, 326.

[6] Desmond, 326.

[7] Philip Short, Mao: A Iife (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 459; on power out of the barrel of a gun, see 203, 368. Cited in Desmond, 328.

[8] Desmond, 322. Citing Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

[9] Desmond, 322-323.

[10] Desmond, 323.

[11] Desmond, 324.

[12] Desmond, 325.

[13] Desmond, 325.

[14] Desmond, 332

[15] Desmond, 347.

[16] Desmond, 347.

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.