Tag: Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Teleological Argument: The Maximian Answer of Michael Polanyi to Paley and Kuhn

William Paley’s version of the teleological or design argument, pictures someone discovering a watch in a field and presuming that the watch was made by a watch-maker. So too, the universe displays a complexity that implies a universe-maker. If someone is walking over the heath and kicks up a stone, he might presume the stone has always been there, but if he kicks up a watch, he cannot make the same presumption. The watch is put together for the purpose of telling time through the motion of the hands, and all the gears and springs of the watch serve this purpose, and it all speaks of human artifice. Yet every manifestation of design found in the watch is displayed by the universe, with the universe far exceeding the complexity of the watch.

I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity. . . [1]

Notice the focus on “mechanical” and “mechanism” in Paley’s argument, which are very much interconnected with the rise of the clockwork universe and a deistic understanding of God (which will in turn give rise to a pervasive atheism). While Paley’s argument is a fine argument for limited purposes, his image of a clockwork universe had captured his age, not simply because of Paley but because the revolution in time surrounding the development of mechanical clocks reframing basic perceptions of time, the universe, and the role of God. As in the kalam argument, the implicit assumptions of the teleological argument (which are developing not simply due to the argument but arising with the beginnings of the industrial and scientific revolution) will have an impact on religion, science, and human experience, and it is in this context that Paley’s argument seems so convincing. God is the divine clockmaker who relates to his creation like a mechanical engineer, who may need to occasionally adjust the mechanism, but otherwise is a hands-off machinist.

This conclusion is driven by a scientific and social revolution which captured and included the best scientific minds (Galileo, Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Huygens, and Pascal himself), the best mathematicians (the brothers Bernoulli, La Hire, and Leonhard Euler) and the finest master clock- and watchmakers (Solomon Coster in the Hague, Isaac Thuret in Paris, the Fromanteels and Thomas Tompion in London).[2] Meanwhile there is a shift, largely due to the watch, to a privatized sphere (no longer subject to the time kept by the church), to a separation between natural and mechanical time, and to a separation between perception and ultimate reality (the sun is not the ultimate timekeeper but time controls and exceeds the limitations of this natural marker).

Isaac Newton, who is very much involved in the developments of the mechanical clock (sitting as one of the judges who would award the 20,000 pounds to whoever could develop a timepiece which would work at sea, on the deck of a rolling ship) is also behind the revolution in science, in which the laws of the universe are perceived as absolute and independent entities. For Newton (an anti-Trinitarian) space is the “sensorium of God,” the organ through which he perceives the universe and flowing through space “equably without regard to anything external,” is time.[3] Newton’s entire science functioned like a teleological argument, but as with Paley’s watch, the implications outpaced the need for God. Within the next generation Pierre-Simon de la Place proposed a purely mechanical universe, making God superfluous. Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace, “Newton spoke of God in his book. I have perused yours, but failed to find His name even once. How come?’. To this came Laplace’s famous reply, ‘Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”[4]

The next revolution in time, arising with Einsteinian relativity, brings in its wake two competing models of science and two very different notions of the universe, but also two very different notions of teleology. Michael Polanyi writes a groundbreaking work, and yet will spend most of his life in relative obscurity, compared to Thomas Kuhn, who borrows many of his ideas (though he is inconsistent in acknowledging his debt to Polanyi). Both left their work as scientists (Polanyi as a chemist, and Kuhn as a physicist) to take up philosophy of science. They both rejected Newton’s and Paley’s mechanical universe, with its positivist notions of “objectivity” and its refusal to recognize the biases which it allowed to foster. Polanyi had experienced both the fanaticism of National Socialism and Soviet Communism and he laid the blame directly on the doorstep of mechanical science. “The mechanical course of history was to bring universal justice. Scientific skepticism would trust only material necessity for achieving universal brotherhood. Skepticism and utopianism had thus fused into a new skeptical fanaticism.”[5] The lesson he learned was that science and human knowledge is not based on a detached impartiality, but is derived from an acknowledged “rootedness” in the universe. His picture of “tacit knowledge” is that we always know more than we can say. We recognize faces, we ask questions, we intuit understanding, in a way in which we are not fully aware. There is no positivist, impersonal, grounding to knowing.

Both Kuhn and Polanyi see the key role of persons and the personal in the scientific enterprise. Where the mechanical science of Newton counted the human observer out of the observation, relativity theory depended upon noting the location and perspective of an observer. Kuhn and Polanyi not only take the observer into account in the specific sense of Einstein, but both recognize that science as a whole depends upon human perspective, belief, culture, community, and intuition. Kuhn captures this in his notion of paradigms, as he traces the history of science through paradigms, with paradigm crises, paradigm shifts, and normative science, in which there is a reigning paradigm accepted by the majority. These paradigms are very much like worldviews, though it seems Polanyi recognized this and built upon it, where Kuhn did not account for his own worldview or even his notion of truth. Thus, though Kuhn will deny it, his theory seems to end in a kind of fideism, without any role for objective truth.  

The clear difference between the two thinkers concerns their basic understanding of the universe, with Polanyi acknowledging his theistic understanding, and Kuhn denying any objective ground for truth. Thus, Polanyi will found a new order of knowing, based on persons but also imagining a personal dimension to the universe. In the first instance there is the fittingness of the personal, as the only means of arriving at discovery.  “I have shown that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge.”[6] Polanyi finds the person and his insight as standing at the center of a literal Copernican revolution. Though the Copernican revolution is often read as a displacement of a man centered perspective, Polanyi takes the opposite tact. He acknowledges that Copernican theory is more objective, but not because it displaces the egocentric view of Ptolemaic theory. The Copernican theory is more intellectually satisfying, thus, “We abandon the cruder anthropocentrism of our senses-but only in favour of a more ambitious anthropocentrism of our reason.”[7] Human thought, embracing all of what it means to be human is enabled to comprehend the entire cosmic array, not through mere observation, but through a depth of consciousness.

His understanding of science and knowledge is grounded in a larger picture of meaning. In the book entitled, Meaning, he pictures freedom and meaning as contributing to intellectual freedom and perspective.[8] Scientific meaning takes part in a larger dimension of truth and meaning grounded in the eternal. Polanyi’s vision, partially shared by Kuhn, takes on a broader meaning, with Polanyi encompassing the whole of human life in his theory. He had experienced Nazi persecution, and the impingement of Soviet Communism upon freedom, and he saw scientific freedom as dependent upon an all-inclusive (political, intellectual, religious) understanding of human freedom.

In The Tacit Dimension, he tells of his encounter in Moscow with a Soviet scientist, soon to be executed, who said that pursuit of pure science “was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five Year Plan.”[9] A society built upon a presumed independent scientific thought had produced a “mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science and history itself.”[10] Polanyi agrees that the pursuit of science for its own sake had ended badly in the fanaticism by which he was surrounded in Germany and the Soviet Union. So, he seeks to set science on a firmer foundation:

I SHALL re-examine here the suppositions underlying our belief in science and propose to show that they are more extensive than is usually thought. They will appear to coextend with the entire spiritual foundations of man and to go to the very root of his social existence. Hence, I will urge, our belief in science should be regarded as a token of much wider convictions.”[11]

As Polanyi writes in the conclusion to The Tacit Dimension,

Men need a purpose which bears on eternity. Truth does that; our ideals do it; and this might be enough, if we could ever be satisfied with our manifest moral shortcomings and with a society which has such shortcomings fatally involved in its workings.

Perhaps this problem cannot be resolved on secular grounds alone. But its religious solution should become more feasible once religious faith is released from pressure by an absurd vision of the universe, and so there will open up instead a meaningful world which could resound to religion.[12]

In this meaningful world, Polanyi, very much in the mindset of Origen and Maximus (in speaking of the meaningful particulates of logoi), describes the meaning of the universe reaching out to persons. “Potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it inflaming the scientist with creative desire and imparting to him a foreknowledge of itself; guiding him from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise.”[13] The conditions for discovery unfold or emerge slowly, not through the strained efforts of the scientist, but almost in spite of them. After giving up the frantic measurements and operative actions, during a cup of tea perhaps, things begin to emerge. “All the efforts of the discoverer are but preparations for the main event of discovery, which eventually takes place if at all by a process of spontaneous mental reorganization uncontrolled by conscious effort.”[14] Suddenly the climber finds himself elevated to the top of the mountain, after relinquishing his efforts, his mind transformed.

Nature, in Polanyi’s description calls out to be realized. “In this light it may appear perhaps more appropriate to regard discovery in natural sciences as guided not so much by the potentiality of a scientific proposition as by an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds.”[15] As in Maximus’ doctrine of the logoi, which Dionysius had called “paradigms” and “divine wills,” Polanyi speaks as if the discoverer is not only looking into the world, but the world looks back and calls to him. The thoughts and will of God found in the logoi, in the Maximian notion of creation’s purpose found in incarnation, specifically identifies this beseeching presence with Christ. As Balthasar puts it in regard to Maximus, there is a “teleological structure to all being, and especially of conscious, finite intellectual being,” and in turn the transcendence of this teleology shows itself in all being, in the call to theosis.[16] As Balthasar clarifies, this is not a pantheism, but the realization of synthesis with God, an “incorporation and initiation of the Christian into him, Christ.”[17]

Where Kuhn had disparaged Polanyi’s “occult” like picture of intuition, Polanyi pictures this tacit dimension as the very substance of discovery. “The solution of riddles, the invention of practical devices, the recognition of indistinct shapes, the diagnosis of an illness, the identification of a rare species, and many other forms of guessing right seem to conform to the same pattern.”[18] In his list he includes “the prayerful search for God.” They all share the same “creative rhythm” shared by both artists and explorers. “It suggests that great discovery is the realization of something obvious; a presence staring us in the face, waiting until we open our eyes.”[19] The waiting presence seeks to make itself known, and seeks realization in our minds. It is a spiritual realization, which Polanyi connects to every mode of discovery, but particularly the natural sciences.

Polanyi notes that these significant “meanings” in the universe seem to reveal themselves simultaneously to a community or plurality of persons, with the interesting result that all may arrive at the same meaning, but may tend to portray it differently. In regard to quantum mechanics he says, “Thus we may think of Heisenberg and Schrodinger both penetrating to the same meaning but drawing different pictures of it; so different that they did not themselves recognize their identical meaning.”[20] In regard to electrons: “In 1923 de Broglie suggested that electrons may possess wave nature and in 1925 Davisson and Germer, not knowing of this theory, made their first observations of the phenomenon soon after to be recognized as the diffraction of these waves.”[21] He provides several examples, but one more must suffice: “And we may add the prediction of the meson by Yukawa’s theory of nuclear fields (1935) and its contemporaneous discovery in cosmic rays, finally established by Anderson (1938).[22] He concludes, “Could it be that the same intuitive contact guided these alternative approaches to the same hidden reality?”[23]

Polanyi, unlike Kuhn, anchored discovery to an external reality, but this reality is not simply external but extends into and appeals to the knowing subject. He recognizes with St. Augustine that all knowledge is “a gift of grace” and that depth of insight depends upon guidance through this antecedent belief (“Unless ye believe, ye shall not understand).”[24] Polanyi concludes, that belief must be acknowledged as the source of all knowledge. He concludes, “It says . . . that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premises.” There is a continual dialectic occurring in exploration as we arrive at a proper exegesis. He claims,

We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.[25]

Michael Polanyi may have been too far ahead of his time, or too far behind, depending on one’s perspective. His deep insights into scientific method were overshadowed by the weak imitation of his thought found in Thomas Kuhn. As Martin X. Moleski puts it in contrasting Kuhn and Polanyi, “From my point of view, all that is good in Kuhn’s position is found in Polanyi, while there is no trace in Kuhn whatsoever of Polanyi’s orientation toward purposes which bear upon eternity. Polanyi’s worldview goes far beyond Kuhn’s in its orientation toward truth as a metaphysical prerequisite for the progress of science.”[26] In contrast, “Because of his empiricist outlook, truth is not something that can appear in Kuhn’s system—it is not something that can be ‘observed’ impersonally.”[27]

Polanyi would be obscured as Kuhn’s more postmodern notions were embraced in nearly every field of human endeavor. As Moleski writes, “After immersing myself in the story of Polanyi’s life, it seems to me that I can feel his anguish at seeing a limited and inadequate philosophy of science sweep the field, bring Kuhn the accolades and fame that Polanyi never enjoyed in his own lifetime.”[28] Polanyi wanted to change the worldview of his scientific peers in such a way that science could be carried out with a teleological purpose, which it often lacks, but Kuhn’s a-teleology has won the day.

[1] William Paley. Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Parker, 1802.

[2] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983) 112.

[3] Query 31 of the Opticks (1718).

[4] Stephen D. Snobelen, Newton’s Heterodox Theology, 1.  https://isaac-newton.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/newtons-heterodox-theology-and-his-natural-philosophy.pdf

[5] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966) 4.

[6] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, ( Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962) Preface.

[7] Ibid,  4-5.

[8] Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning, (University of Chicago Press 1975), 3.

[9] The Tacit Dimension, 3.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society, (London: Oxford University Press) 7.

[12] The Tacit Dimension, 92.

[13] Science, Faith, and Society, 19.

[14] Ibid, 20

[15] Ibid, 21.

[16] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Translated by Brian E. Daley, S. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 148.

[17] Ibid, 283.

[18] Science, Faith, and Society, 20

[19] Ibid, 21.

[20] Ibid, 22.

[21] Ibid, 23.

[22] Ibid, 23.

[23] Ibid, 23

[24] Cited in David K. Naugle, “Michael Polanyi’s Tacit Dimension and Personal Knowledge in the Natural Sciences” Summer Institute in Christian Scholarship, 5. mp_eerdmansbook.pdf (dbu.edu)

[25] Personal  Knowledge, 267. Cited in Naugle, 6.

[26] Martin X. Moleski, “Polanyi vs. Kuhn: Worldviews Apart” in Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 33:2, 21. https://polanyisociety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD33-2/TAD33-2-fnl-pg8-24-pdf.pdf

[27] Moleski, 22.

[28] Ibid.

The Stunting of the Imagination and its Renewal

But the human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg. Karl Barth[1]

The sharp contrast between the early church and late modern western Christianity centers on the different sensibility surrounding the body and the world. The meaning of bodily resurrection and the kingdom of God is obscured by western notions of a body/soul dualism and the rational autonomous subject. Theology is often focused on interiority (upon propositions, and rational foundations), which has led to a split between doctrine and ethics, faith and works, and ultimately, I would claim, to a loss of theological imagination. The tendency toward a disincarnate form of the faith shows itself in failed practices of discipleship and a failure to develop or even talk about the virtues. The world, the body, the virtues, but perhaps most profoundly, a speculative and imaginative theology are left no place in this atomistic, interiorized faith.

Meanwhile, in a mostly eastern Christianity, there has been a preservation and development of the implications of incarnation, bodily resurrection, and a participatory ontology (theosis, apocatastasis) which might be described as a continuation of incarnation (the Church). A key thinker in the preservation (of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and a Johannine theology) and development of this embodied Christianity is Maximus the Confessor. Maximus’ Christocentrism is cosmic, as he thinks the entire world must be conceived in relation to the Trinity. God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself and this unity is not in some disembodied bliss: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[2] As Maximus explains: “it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[3] Maximus’ starting premises light up every aspect of the God, human, cosmic relationship.

For Maximus, the Word is present and revealed in the Christian in a manner analogous to the hypostatic union. The situatedness of this Word in the body of Christ, the body of the Christian, and the cosmic body, equates embodiment with truth. The embodiment of the Word in the incarnation and in the Christian is truth incarnate – the meaning, the communication, the realization of this truth in and through the body.

For Maximus this is the truth about God. As Torstein Tollefsen puts it, “When Maximus says that God ‘always’ has this will to embody Himself, it means that God willed His embodiment from eternity. Even the historical Incarnation, according to Maximus, has its origin in the super-infinite plan that infinitely pre-exists the ages of time.”[4] Creation and incarnation are God’s eternal plan as Creator and Father are who God is. As Maximus writes, “God will be wholly participated (in) by whole human beings, so that He will be to the soul, as it were, what the soul is to the body, and through the soul He will likewise be present in the body (in a manner that He knows), so that the soul will receive immutability and the body immortality.”[5] This embodiment includes pursuit of virtue, squelching of the passions, or a life of ethics as part of being in Christ. “The aim is that what God is to the soul, the soul might become to the body.’”[6] Or as he says to Thalassios, the Word first creates faith within us, and then, becomes the son of that faith, from which he is embodied through the practice of the virtues.”[7]

While the body, in Maximus, is the means to participation in the person and work of Christ, in the west the body has often been made an obstacle. Body/soul dualism is the background to much western Christianity, and unless contrasted with the view of the body in the early church and in the east, this may not be obvious.

Fergus Kerr, in his discussion of the of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, has written the classic work detailing the pursuit of certainty in modernity, beginning with the Cartesian turn toward interiority. In Descartes’, The Meditations, the proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul is part of an interlocking argument which only needs thought or soul to arrive at God. Descartes, in his first Meditation, wipes away the embodied world: “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he (the devil) has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”[8] Descartes concludes that he can doubt everything other than his doubting, even if the devil is deceiving him, which leads to his famous conclusion:

“In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

At last I have discovered it — thought; this alone is inseparable from me…I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or  intelligence, or intellect, or reason … a thinking thing.”[9]

Descartes thinks away not only his embodiment but his humanity, he no longer thinks of himself as a man or even a rational animal, as he is a “thinking thing.”

Immanuel Kant, a devout Lutheran, will incorporate Cartesian rationalism into the heart of his Christianity, presuming he must attend to reason even before he looks to Christ. The problem with Kant and Descartes and pure thought, is that there is no content to this thought other than an imagined self-presence, but this presence is ephemeral, impossible to grasp, and always on the point of disappearing. It is upon this sandy foundation that modern theology would build. Kerr provides multiple examples of the continuing impact of Cartesian dualism and why Wittgenstein’s questioning of the view of language is key for future western theological developments.

Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with Augustine’s view of language. Augustine’s understanding of how he learned to speak “secretes the myth that the infant arrives like an immigrant in a strange land, already able to speak but completely ignorant of the alien language” which his parents and those around him speak.[10] “Gradually I realized where I was, and I decided to display my wishes to those who might fulfil them, and I could not, because my wishes were inside and they were outside, and powerless to get inside my mind by any of their senses.”[11] The little guy would shake his hands and try to gesture so as to make his wishes known, and this would end in a fit of rage. It is as if he has landed in a far country, arriving with a Platonic like power of thought preexisting within himself. At some point he is able to make himself understood in his parents language, and looking back, he realizes how he acquired language: “I was no longer a speechless infant, I was a talking boy. I remember this, and I afterwards saw how I learned to speak. For the grown-ups did not teach me, by offering me words, according to a standard method of teaching, as they were soon to do with the alphabet. With the mind that you gave me, my God, I decided to exhibit the thoughts of my heart so that my will might be obeyed. . .”[12] The capacity was already present in his heart it was simply a matter of translation:

When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.[13]

Thought and desire precede language, such that one’s primary mental state is a worldless wordless pinpoint. The infant arrives knowing what he thinks and wants, yet his primal conceptuality is devoid of words.

Wittgenstein starts here, with perhaps the most important of western theologians, as it provides an insight into the reigning understanding of the time. As Kerr explains, “For this picture of how an infant learns to speak, and hence the idea of language and communication, and so of how one human being is related to another, seems very much tied up with the idea of the self-transparent and autonomous subject. . . .”[14] Throughout, Wittgenstein clearly has the Cartesian ego in his sights, and as he notes he could have started with any number of philosophers (perhaps even his Tractatus) but Kerr thinks there is special significance in his choice of Augustine. “To probe the epistemological predicament of the soul in the Confessions was to open up a seam in the theological anthropology that has shaped Christian self-understanding since the fifth century. It is difficult to believe that Wittgenstein did not know what he was doing.”[15]

The story of Wittgenstein’s untangling of this understanding is well-known, with his picture of language as embodied, communal, and inseparable from thought and all that it means to be human, but this is only slowly appreciated. By starting with Augustine and ending with his own philosophical contemporaries, Wittgenstein challenges the form of thought which has thoroughly saturated the west. He concludes, “Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity.”[16] Meaning is not some occult state inside the head, anymore than a person or an ego is concealed inside the body. He sees the problem as arising around the concept of the “I.”[17] “From the first-person perspective it is very easy to generate a sense of oneself as a thinking thing which shows obvious kinship with the portrait of the infant Augustine’s travails.”[18] The problem is a failure to understand relationship to language, and the relationship of language to the body:

This simile of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the mind is pernicious. It is derived from ‘in the head’ when we think of ourselves as looking out from our heads and of thinking as something going on ‘in our head’. But then we forget the picture and go on using language derived from it. Similarly, man’s spirit was pictured as his breath, then the picture was forgotten but the language derived from it retained. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture when we use it.[19]

Kerr thinks the problem arises with ancient notions of the myth of the soul (the Apostle Paul locates the problem in an even more ancient and primal understanding of the relation between the individual and the law). The longing to escape the body, to free the self of constraint from what Plato called the prison house of the body, is the most ancient and instinctive drive. The desire to pass directly into impassable transcendence, to establish the self, is the desire to shed the body, escape the confines of language, and to know without the mediation of the world. As Kerr describes, in this understanding “the face becomes a veil, a mask that needs to be manipulated from behind, while the production of meaning retreats from the materiality of signs into the recesses of the invisible mind. In effect, a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman.”[20] The desire is ultimately the desire for death, which Wittgenstein slowly and painfully uncovers, as he privately confides to his diaries his dawning belief in Christ.[21]

Nonetheless, in popular understanding and in the predominant forms of theological understanding the Cartesian ego remains. “As recently as 1967, for example, Karl Rahner reaffirmed that there must be no going back on ‘the transcendental—anthropological turn in philosophy since Descartes.’”[22] As he says, “The original self presence of the subject in the actual realization of his existence strives to translate itself more and more into the conceptual, into the objectified, into language, into communication with another.”[23] Rahner describes an ”original knowledge” and its concept which works its way toward language, as if the original thinking occurs outside of language. As Kerr summarizes, “Rahner’s natural assumption — that communication comes after language, and language comes after having concepts — is precisely what the Cartesian tradition has reinforced. His example suggests that, when I am in pain, I first have the thought that I am in pain, I then put it into words and finally I find someone to whom to communicate it.”[24] In some way we have an original non-linguistic experience, which we then translate into words.

In every order of knowing, Rahner pictures layers of “knowing”: there is the original act of knowledge, the self that is “co-known” with the object of knowledge – one’s self presence (all pre-linguistic), and all of this has to occur so that an object can make itself manifest to the mind of the knower. Kerr concludes (after more extensive examples) that “there surely is a prima facie case for suggesting that Rahner’s most characteristic theological profundities are embedded in an extremely mentalist—individualist epistemology of unmistakably Cartesian provenance. Central to his whole theology, that is to say, is the possibility for the individual to occupy a standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”[25]

Hans Kung, who may be more widely read than Rahner, likewise concludes that “The history of modern epistemology from Descartes, Hume and Kant to Popper and Lorenz has — it seems to me — made clear that the fact of any reality at all independent of our consciousness can be accepted only in an act of trust.”[26] We must doubt everything, following Descartes, so as to arrive at the nugget of knowing which is the inward “thinking thing.” He concludes, “Every human being decides for himself his fundamental attitude to reality: that basic approach which embraces, colours, characterizes his whole experience, behaviour, action. Innocent of all anti-Cartesian suspicions, he goes for individual decisions as establishing the foundations for belief in the reality of anything outside one’s mind: It is up to me to choose the basic attitude I adopt towards this radically dubious reality with which I am surrounded. I simply decide to trust the reality of other people and all the rest of the rich tapestry of life.”[27] There is no logical proof for a reality outside the body or for the reality of God. Belief in either is a decision sunk deep within the recesses of the Kantian will. It is not that belief in God is any more irrational than belief in anything else outside of the mind; all of it depends on interior decision.

Don Cupitt, another widely read theologian argues, “the principles of spirituality cannot be imposed on us from without and cannot depend at all upon any external circumstances. On the contrary, the principles of spirituality must be fully internalized a priori principles, freely adopted and self-imposed. A modern person must not any more surrender the apex of his self-consciousness to a god. It must remain his own.”[28] Certainly one can agree religion should not be imposed, but Cupitt argues the world, or all external circumstance, should not be imposed, as if one can check out and resort to his inward Cartesian realm.

Likewise, Schubert Ogden pictures the world of bodies, acts and deeds, as preceded by private purposes and decisions. Indeed, it is only because the self first acts to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being, that it ‘acts’ at all in the more ordinary meaning of the word; all its outer acts of word and deed are but ways of expressing and implementing — the inner decisions whereby it constitutes itself as a self.”[29] Ogden is not speaking metaphorically, but imagines the thinking thing and his world is prior to the world, and necessary for constituting the world.

As Timothy O’Connell has put it, in his attempt to reconstruct a moral theology (through a Cartesian ego): “In an appropriate if homely image, then, people might be compared to onions … At the outermost layer, as it were, we find their environment, their world, the things they own. Moving inward we find their actions, their behaviour, the things they do. And then the body, that which is the ‘belonging’ of a person and yet also is the person. Going deeper we discover moods, emotions, feelings. Deeper still are the convictions by which they define themselves. And at the very centre, in that dimensionless pinpoint around which everything else revolves, is the person himself or herself — the I.”[30] As Kerr notes, at least Descartes had his “thinking thing” but O’Connell is not only apophatic about God but about his own dimensionless inward self. His need to reconstruct a moral theology may itself be a sign of the sickness.

As Stanley Hauerwas notes, “To assume that a ‘relation’ between doctrine and ethics needs to be explicated unjustifiably presumes that something called ‘ethics’ exists prior to or independent from ‘doctrine’.”[31] Hauerwas argues, “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behaviour. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between life and doctrine impossible.”[32] As he points out, this correlate between ethics and doctrine is the premise of the faith: Paul’s formulation in Romans 12:1-2 encapsulates the New Testament vision: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God. And do not be conformed to this age; but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Theology often presumes a rational, disembodied foundation as it did in my theological education and that of my generation, which was an understanding I was not aware of. The stark contrast between modern western theology and Maximus and the early church, accentuates the strangeness of modern presuppositions and the need to pursue an imaginative reengagement with the body and the world. The exciting developments in western theology and philosophy, such as Karl Barth’s Christocentrism, Stanley Hauerwas and friends’ development of narrative theology, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s slow discovery that language is an embodied capacity, and Bernard Lonergan’s focus on embodied conversion, parallel and are often an unwitting rediscovery of Maximus’ form of thought. Maximus has played a direct role in the renaissance in Russian Orthodoxy (e.g., George Florovsky and Sergius Bulgakov) and in the ressourcement of the Nouvelle théologie movement. Hans Urs von Balthasar sees him as a bridge figure for east/west or ecumenical dialogue. Maximus is both a corrective and indicator of the need for further development of an embodied faith and recovery of an embodied imagination.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. Ill, part 1, p. 81.

[2] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7.22.

[3] On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (abbreviated as QThal.) 60.3.

[4] Torstein Theodore Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 58.

[5] Ambigua 7.26.

[6] Ambigua 7.31.

[7] QThal. 40.8.

[8] Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. ll, p. 15. Quotations are from Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986) 4.

[9] Descartes, 18.

[10] Kerr, 39

[11] Augustine, Confessions, Book I, chapter 6. Cited in Kerr, 39.

[12] Confessions, Book I, chapter 8. Cited in Kerr, 41.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Kerr, 42.

[15] Kerr, 42.

[16] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) 693. Cited in Kerr, 42.

[17] He could very well have pursued the problem back to Paul’s entanglement with the “I” and the law, as this is the most ancient and universal of problems.

[18] Kerr, 43.

[19] Wittgenstein’s Lectures Cambridge 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) 25.

[20] Kerr, 46.

[21] The Japanese translator of Wittgenstein’s diaries, Akio Kikai, characterizes his philosophical quest, given the spiritual journey detailed in his diaries, as more of a theological quest to rid himself of pride and to become a humble follower of Jesus. The diaries reveal his continual struggle both at Cambridge and then alone in the cabin in Norway to rid himself of his arrogant tendencies and it is in his philosophy that he puts forth his greatest effort in this regard, finally admitting in his diaries, only recently found, his belief in the resurrection.

[22] Kerr, 7.

[23] Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 16. Cited in Kerr, 10.

[24] Kerr, 11.

[25] Kerr, 14.

[26] Hans Kung, Eternal Life? p. 275. Cited in Kerr, 14-15.

[27] Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, p. 432. Cited in Kerr, 15.

[28] Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, p. 9. Cited in Kerr, 16.

[29] Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God, p. 177. Cited in Kerr, 18.

[30] Timothy O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality, p. 59. Cited in Kerr, 20.

[31] Stanley Hauerwas, On Doctrine and Ethics, in the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 22.

[32] Ibid.

Apologies to Hegel: Knowing God is Essential

One thing we all know to be true about Hegel – he is presumptuous, assigning too much weight to philosophy and human knowing, and thus he is pitting philosophy against Orthodox Christianity.

Whatever else one might say about Hegel, the presumed consensus is precisely wrong, both in its reading of Hegel and most likely in its understanding of the Christian faith. One does not have to read much of Hegel to recognize he is challenging the presumptuousness of Enlightenment thought, in particular that of Immanuel Kant, as it has impacted theology. He is arguing for a biblical, doctrinal, Trinitarian, Alexandrian, Christianity, in which Christian dogma, and not human reason takes first place. He is not displacing Christ or Christianity but working from the axiom of the incarnation, very much like Maximus the Confessor. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, Hegel is a thinker on the order of Maximus, sharing focus on synthesis, on Trinity, on escaping a finite dialectic, and even on developing the Chalcedonian formula. As Balthasar puts it, “Maximus looks straight in the eye of Hegel, who clearly derived his synthetic way of thinking from the Bible-more precisely from the anthropological antitheses of the Old Testament and from that between the Bible and Hellenism, as well as from the reconciling synthesis of Christ, understood principally from a Johannine (and thus, in effect, from an Alexandrian) perspective.”[1] Balthasar here pictures the singular difference as Maximus being more open in his Christology, “everyone recognizes that his ontology and cosmology are extensions of his Christology, in that the synthesis of Christ’s concrete person is not only God’s final thought for the world but also his original plan.”[2] Yet, he pictures them as directly reflecting one another. Maximus’ focus on synthesis and not confusion and his bold application of “theological truth to philosophical, ontological, and cosmological thought” is directly taken up by Hegel (it is here that Maximus is looking into the eyes of Hegel).[3] As Balthasar notes in private correspondence concerning his work on Maximus, “This morning I put the finishing touches on a new two hundred-page book about Maximus Confessor, the ‘Hegel’ of the Greek fathers and ‘father’ of Eriugena.”[4] Could the problem be that, like Maximus, Hegel is developing a form of thought so centered upon Christ that it is beyond the common notion of reason. At a minimum, to accuse Hegel of presumptuously displacing Christ is misdirected.

First of all, Hegel is concerned to recover Christ as the true import of the Bible. He recognizes that all parties might appeal to the Bible, but philosophy, theology and reason are implicitly undermining Scripture. He describes a form of exegesis that “has taken counsel with reason” and “pretends only to lay stress on the understanding of the word, and to desire to remain faithful to it” but empties it of all spiritual value and content.[5] He describes a system in which “in downright earnest” exegetes imagine “the Bible is made the foundation” but due to the very categories of thought and reason with which Scripture is read “the thoughts of the interpreter must necessarily be put into the words which constitute the foundation.” In turn, “Commentaries on the Bible do not so much make us acquainted with the content of the Scriptures, as rather with the manner in which things were conceived in the age in which they were written.”[6] The “most contradictory meanings have been exegetically demonstrated by means of Theology out of the Scripture, and thus the so-called Holy Scriptures have been made into a nose of wax.”[7] This form of exegesis, a “Theology of Reason,” “is put in opposition to that doctrinal system of the Church,” though it “pretends only to lay stress on the understanding of the word, and to desire to remain faithful to it” in reality it “takes possession of the written word” and bends it to its own shape.[8]

Hegel notes that all heresies appeal to the Scriptures. So too the “Theology of Reason,” claims to keep to Scripture as foundation but is a form of reason alien to the Bible.  The end result of this approach is not encounter with God, but the knowledge of God made impossible. “It no longer gives our age any concern that it knows nothing of God; on the contrary, it is regarded as a mark of the highest intelligence to hold that such knowledge is not even possible.”[9] Hegel is attempting to bring about a return to the faith of the Bible, by refuting the negative understanding associated with the Theology of Reason.

He sees his philosophy as a counter to the arrogance of those who would “dispense both with the content which revelation gives of the Divine nature, and with what belongs to reason.”[10] This form of thought (the very form of thought accusing him of arrogance), he accuses of the “blind arrogance which is proper to it.”[11]

If, then, those theologians, who busy themselves with their argumentations in exegesis, and appeal to the Bible in connection with all their notions, when they deny as against philosophy the possibility of knowledge, have brought matters to such a pass, and have so greatly depreciated the reputation of the Bible, that if the truth were as they say, and if according to the true explanation of the Bible, no knowledge of the nature of God were possible, the spirit would be compelled to look for another source in order to acquire such truth as should be substantial or full of content.[12]

Hegel describes the plight of theology in his age (which sounds so familiar), as denying the dogmas and doctrines which once served as the center of the faith. In place of dogmas there is a “widespread, almost universal, indifference towards what in earlier times were held to be essential doctrines of the faith.”[13] Though, according to confession, Christ “continues to be made the central point of faith as Mediator, Reconciler, and Redeemer; but what was known as the work of redemption has received a very prosaic and merely psychological signification.” The old “edifying words have been retained,” but they have been emptied of significance – “the very thing that was essential in the old doctrine of the Church has been expunged.”[14] Depth of faith has given way to a “devotional bent” leaving aside the doctrines on which the early church focused: “the weighty doctrines of the Trinity, of the resurrection of the body, as also the miracles in the Old and New Testaments, are neglected as matters of indifference, and have lost their importance. The divinity of Christ, dogma, what is peculiar to the Christian religion is set aside, or else reduced to something of merely general nature.”[15]

 In particular, Hegel notes the neglect concerning the Trinity, with those of the Enlightenment or those given to theological piety concluding, “the Trinity was brought into Christian doctrine by the Alexandrian school,” or “by the neo-Platonists.” Whether Trinity is essential-Truth no longer matters, “that is a point which is not examined into, and yet that doctrine is the key-note of the Christian religion.” As Hegel sums up, “If an opportunity was given to a large number of these theologians to lay their hand on their heart, and say whether they consider faith in the Trinity to be indispensably necessary to salvation, and whether they believe that the absence of such faith leads to damnation, there can be no doubt what the answer would be.” First of all, such a one would shrink from such words as “damnation” and though he might not want to deny the Trinity, “he would, in case his being directly appealed to, find it very difficult express himself in an affirmative.” [16] He continues in this train with indictment of religious books and sermons, in which one might suppose “the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion are supposed to be set forth” and yet, he concludes it is highly doubtful they perform this basic task.[17]

Far from Hegel displaying an arrogant dismissal of Christ, doctrine and the church, he can be read as providing a zealous indictment of this very dismissal. So much of what he writes could serve as tract against the contemporary church, not least of which is his dismissal of those who are solely concerned to recover the history of the New Testament. Such theologians are no better than “clerks in a mercantile house, who have only to keep an account of the wealth of strangers, who only act for others without obtaining any property for themselves. They do, indeed, receive salary, but their reward is only to serve, and to register that which is the property of others.” The faith passes through them, like a reward of which they are not the direct recipients. “Theology of this kind has no longer a place at all in the domain of thought; it has no longer to do with infinite thought in and for itself, but only with it as a finite fact, as opinion, ordinary thought, and so on.” A theology focused on history, imagining it enough to recover the historical Jesus, is not encountering and possessing the truth, but is content with what served as truth for others. “With the true content, with the knowledge of God, such theologians have no concern. They know as little of God as a blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame.”[18]

The end product of the Theology of Reason is a denial of the basic premise of the New Testament and the life of Christ. While one might refer to this negative knowledge as a form of reason, Hegel’s point is it is not true reason. True reason is grounded in the Spirit given through Christ. Thus, it is not a Spirit “beyond the stars, beyond the world. On the contrary, God is present, omnipresent, and exists as Spirit in all spirits. God is a living God, who is acting and working. Religion is a product of the Divine Spirit; it is not a discovery of man, but a work of divine operation and creation in him.”[19] God is reasonable and has shared his form of reason in the Spirit, but humankind abandons this reason and abandons the particularity of the Spirit (of incarnation) in grasping for the absolute and universal apart from the concrete.

In particular, Hegel notes, that finite conceptions of the infinite (abstractions), exercise dominance.  “For the doctrine concerning God goes on to that of the characteristics, the attributes, and the actions of God. Such knowledge takes possession of this determinate content, and would make it appear that it belongs to it. It, on the one hand, conceives of the Infinite in its own finite fashion, as something which has a determinate character, as an abstract infinite, and then on the other hand finds that all special attributes are inadequate to this Infinite.” The infinite becomes defined by what it is not, in relation to the finite. “By such a mode of proceeding the religious content is annihilated, and the absolute object reduced to complete poverty.” [20]

Hegel describes the Enlightenment as the “consummation of finite knowledge,” but in imagining it is exalting God by regarding “all predicates” as “inadequate” (mere “unwarranted anthropomorphisms”) in “reality, it has, in conceiving God as the supreme Being, made Him hollow, empty, and poor.”[21] As Balthasar notes in regard to Maximus, “only when Christ appeared did it become irrefutably clear that the creature is not simply pure negation with respect to God and, thus, cannot be saved simply through mystical absorption in God, but rather-however much he is elevated to share in God’s being, however much he dies to the world-the creature is saved only in the express preservation and perfection of his nature.”[22] This is Hegel’s point in regard to the Enlightenment, which ends with a purely negative notion of God and thus misses the concrete reality of Christ due to its misplaced focus on the infinite.

In the typical understanding of the infinite, it takes on its characteristics as the opposite and negative of the finite. As Hegel remarks, this is the foundation of human knowing. Human thought is grounded on difference, such as subject/object or north/south in which the terms are understood in contrast, but as he notes, they are different but “inseparable.”[23] What Kant and the Enlightenment thinkers missed was the inherent negativity in the dualism between infinity and finitude. “The further step which speculative philosophy had to take was to apprehend the negativity which is immanent within the universal or the identical, as in the ‘I’ – a step the need for which is not perceived by those who fail to apprehend the dualism of infinity and finitude, even in that immanent and abstract form in which Fichte understood it.”[24] Thought grounded in the ‘I’ is inherently dualistic. There is no bridge between thought and the thinking thing. Likewise, infinity and finitude contain this same inherent dualism. The infinite is no more accessible than the noumena or the thinking thing. “But this indeterminacy is itself merely a negation with regard to the determinate, to finitude: ‘I’ is this solitude and absolute negation.”[25] What this form of thought misses is its own inherent negativity. As Jordan Wood and Justin Coyle summarize, “We know the Ding an sich [thing in itself] only as unknowable, as that which eludes our grasp. Hegel wants to know exactly how Kant knows all this. How, for instance, does Kant know for certain that what is a priori and so subjective cannot also prove objective? Here Kant’s very attempt to scrupulously police the boundaries of thought betrays a deep presumption. Kant has somehow mapped an unnavigable trench before he’s crossed it.”[26]

As Hegel argues, “This logical knowledge, which comes first, must lie behind us when we have to deal with religion scientifically; such categories must have long ago been done with. But the usual thing is to employ these as weapons against the Notion, the Idea; against rational knowledge.”[27] Hegel is contrasting this “logical knowledge,” with his development of the Christian “Notion” and his new order of reason and science. “In religion it is not, however, with phenomena that we have to do, it is with an absolute content. But those who employ this argumentative kind of reasoning seem to think the Kantian philosophers have existed only to afford opportunity for the more unblushing use of those categories.”[28] Reason must pass beyond the Kantian antinomies and his presumed delimitation of knowledge.

Hegel proposes a path around Kantian dualism, inherent to human reason, in worship of the Incarnate Christ: “Worship is thus, in fact, the eternal process by which the subject posits itself as identical with its essential being.”[29] In worship we become what we truly are and we escape the dualism inherent to abstract reason. “Through worship, unity is attained; what is not originally united, however, cannot be posited or made explicit as such. This unity, which appears as the act, the result of worship, must be recognised, too, as existing in and for itself. For what is object for consciousness is the Absolute, and its essential characteristic is that it is unity of its absoluteness with particularity. This unity is therefore in the object itself; for example, in the Christian conception of the Incarnation of God.”[30] There is a direct encounter with God in Christ, in which the Absolute is fused with particularity. “This self-existent unity, or, put more definitely, the human form, God’s becoming man, is in fact an essential moment of religion, and must necessarily appear in the definition of its object.”[31] Religion, in Hegel’s definition, is encounter with God, and thus the incarnation is definitive of religion.

However, if one is committed to reflection rather than incarnation as the central guiding point, darkness will prevail. There is no determinate content, but only abstraction devoid of spirit. In the incarnation, however, the darkness is lifted: “The content, it is then said, commends itself to me for its own sake, and the witness of the Spirit teaches me to recognise it as truth, as my essential determination. And, undoubtedly, the infinite idea of the Incarnation for example that speculative central point has so great a power in it that it penetrates irresistibly into the heart which is not as yet darkened by reflection.”[32]

The turn to the incarnation involves passage beyond abstraction to the concrete, or what can be known by faith. Faith, “actuated by the courage of truth and freedom, grasps the truth as something concrete, as fulness of content, as Ideality, in which determinateness the finite is contained as a moment.”[33] No longer is one given to the abstract negative of logical knowledge, but there appears its opposite, “thinking reason” grounded in God as Spirit. “God is not emptiness, but Spirit; and this characteristic of Spirit does not remain for it a word only, or a superficial characteristic; on the contrary, the nature of Spirit unfolds itself for rational thought, inasmuch as it apprehends God as essentially the Triune God.”[34] As I pointed out (here), Hegel’s notion of Spirit is Johannine in that it is a result of and continuation of the incarnation. All the members of the Trinity are made known in Christ. That is, in the first instance, Christ is God’s image known and being made known. “Thus God is conceived of as making Himself an object to Himself, and further, the object remains in this distinction in identity with God; in it God loves Himself.”[35] This love is then shared through the gift of the Spirit, which is the gift of God’s life and Spirit. “Without this characteristic of Trinity, God would not be Spirit, and Spirit would be an empty word.”[36] In this understanding, true reason and knowledge, the knowing of a determinate content within the human subject, are opened.

So, the choice is a theology, philosophy, and mode of reason on the order of nominalism, or accentuating the divide which marks the immanent and economic Trinity. As Hegel notes, most theologians would have no problem fudging on or relinquishing belief in the Trinity, and of course what they are simultaneously relinquishing is knowing God.

What is laid down by the Christian religion as the supreme, absolute commandment, “Ye shall know God,” is regarded as a piece of folly. Christ says, “Be ye perfect, as My Father in heaven is perfect.” This lofty demand is to the wisdom of our time an empty sound. It has made of God an infinite phantom, which is far from us, and in like manner has made human knowledge a futile phantom of finiteness, or a mirror upon which fall only shadows, only phenomena. How, then, are we any longer to respect the commandment, and grasp its meaning, when it says to us, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” since we know nothing of the Perfect One, and since our knowing and willing are confined solely and entirely to appearance, and the truth is to be and to remain absolutely and exclusively a something beyond the present ? And what, we must further ask, what else would it be worthwhile to comprehend, if God is incomprehensible?[37]

The point of biblical Christianity is knowing God, and apart from this knowledge it is not clear Christian faith survives. “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Such verses could be multiplied as they serve as the backbone of the faith, yet Hegel is accused of arrogance for taking this knowledge seriously, and in the meantime this simple and most concrete fact, the very point of Christianity, is passed over. As Hegel perceived it this is the height of arrogance and the last stage of the degradation of man. It is “all the more arrogant inasmuch as he thinks he has proved to himself that this degradation is the highest possible state, and is his true destiny.”[38] But of course this form of arrogant dismissal of the foundations of the faith is directly counter to the true faith. “Such a point of view is, indeed, directly opposed to the lofty nature of the Christian religion, for according to this we ought to know God, His nature, and His essential Being, and to esteem this knowledge as something which is the highest of all.”[39] Knowing God is the point of Christianity and Hegel is the thinker who has accentuated this truth.

[1] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, Translated by Brian E. Daley, S.]. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 207.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] In a letter from 1937, to Emil Lerch. Cited in Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (p. 217). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London:  Kegan Paul,  Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 28.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 29.

[8] Ibid, 28.

[9] Ibid, 36.

[10] Ibid, 37.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, 32.

[13] Ibid, 38.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 39.

[17] Ibid, 40.

[18] Ibid, 41.

[19] Ibid, 33.

[20] Ibid, 28.

[21] Ibid, 29-30.

[22] Balthasar, 207-208.

[23] On the Philosophy of Religion, 56.

[24] G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Tran. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 40.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Jordan Daniel Wood and Justin Shaun Coyle, “Must Catholics Hate Hegel?” Church Life Journal (June 8, 2018). https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/must-catholics-hate-hegel/

[27] On the Philosophy of Religion, 55.

[28] Ibid, 56.

[29] Ibid, 70.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid. 151

[33] Ibid, 30.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid, 30-31.

[37] Ibid, 36.

[38] Ibid, 36-37.

[39] Ibid, 37.

Bulgakov’s “The Tragedy of Philosophy” as Entry into Sophiology

MAN WAS CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF God. This means that the image of the Holy Trinity is imprinted upon every part of his spiritual nature. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26). So says the word of God, precisely pointing, by means of this plural number, to the trihypostaticity of the Divinity and the triunity of the image of God – which after all, is also the human image.”[1] Sergius Bulgakov

To attempt to describe the atmosphere or texture of Sergius[2] Bulgakov’s theology in doctrinal terms is in danger of missing the warmth and spiritual excitement of his theological project, and yet the attempt to simply restate or summarize his theology without reference to its doctrinal significance also falls short, as he is demonstrating a revolutionary shift in the very tenor of his writing. Rather than writing analogously about God (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) he presumes to speak directly of divine love (Sophia). There is no presumed gap or distance between creator and creation as Jesus Christ brings together the divine and human (Bulgakov sees Maximus as central to this development).[3] He is doing theology in a different key, and this shows up even (or especially) in his early work laying out his Trinitarian Sophiology in contrast to the philosophical project. Even as he describes the particular failings of philosophy, the failures illustrate the necessity of the Trinitarian Personhood reflected in the human image. His philosophical critique is so interwoven with his personalism and Sophiology, that this may be the place (his The Tragedy of Philosophy) to start with Bulgakov. Rather than beginning with being (or with presumptions of the economic and immanent Trinity, his description of the western failure characterized by Thomas Aquinas) or with reason, Bulgakov’s starting premise is the Trinity or a trinitarian holism necessary for reason, which cannot be subjected or reduced to reason but apart from which reason fails.

Presumed throughout is the eternality of the humanity of Christ, so that the truth of the intra-Trinitarian relationship is the truth of God and humans, and there are not two realms of truth (the presumption not only of philosophy – e.g., noumena/phenomena, act/being, – but of western theology, e.g., economic and immanent Trinity, Creator and creation, as a divide). There is one necessary realm of truth which reveals itself in human personhood, pointing to the Divine Person. What gets obscured, according to Bulgakov, and what he aims to recover is the focus on personhood (the person of God revealed in Christ and taken up in the human image) and the manner in which the person of Jesus Christ, in particular, bridges or brings together the antinomies of creator and creation (as developed in his Sophiology).[4] He presumes to develop a Chalcedonian orthodoxy (on the order of Maximus) but to more completely illustrate and define its parameters.

 His Sophiology develops as an overcoming of the antinomies of reason as expressed in philosophy, which provides a platform or insight (negative though it is), as spelled out in The Tragedy of Philosophy. The book traces the three characteristic mistakes found in philosophy, against the background of a Trinitarian theology and dogma, which in the description sounds fairly dry, but in the execution traces psychoanalytic and experiential reality such that human thought, perception, and experience, correctly perceived, is integrated directly with the reality of the Trinity. Philosophy is a tragedy but it is a tragedy awaiting and pointing toward the particulars of a Trinitarian solution.

Bulgakov applies Trinitarian theology, very much in the pattern of Paul in Romans 7, in that the tripartite reality of human experience and the human subject, absent the Trinity, does not hold together, but chapter 7 of Romans may be the necessary prologue to the heights of chapter 8, and so too Bulgakov’s philosophical engagement opens the path to his Sophiology. Throughout Bulgakov’s tracing of the problem, the light of the answer (the equivalent of Rom. 8) shines through. As Paul depicts in Romans, one might begin with the law, with the ego, or with the body of death, but what is specifically missing, as detailed in Romans 8, is the Trinity. The negative moment points to its singular resolution in Christ. Paul fills in the functioning of the human subject as a participation in Christ, by which we realize God as Father, and thus have life and being in the Spirit. Bulgakov carries out the same project in his depiction of the three-fold mistake of philosophy, and of course this Threeness is that of the Trinity absent this acknowledgement.

The philosophical project (and the human project) is always striving to bring together that which, outside of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, cannot be made to cohere. Philosophy begins with a basic mistake, the premise of his book, in its focus on human choice (Greek hairesis), so that philosophy is by definition a heresy.  All philosophy bears the singular characteristic of “arbitrary election, the choice, of some single thing or part instead of the whole: that is precisely a one sidedness.”[5] Rather than beginning with the reality of God in Christ, philosophy begins with choices or perspectives or an elected portion of this reality. Rather than beginning with the reality of God and extrapolating reasonably from this reality, philosophy begins with reason and attempts to describe reality (inductively or deductively). As a result, there is a philosophical drive to reduce plurality (all things) to a singular thing (monothematism).

He raises the question as to why this should be, and answers, “It is the spirit of system and the pathos of system; and a system is nothing other than the reduction of many and all into one, and conversely, the deduction of all and many out of one.”[6] He describes the drive as the human sickness or a manifestation of original sin. As the title of this chapter indicates, “The Nature of Thought,” this chapter and the first portion of the book is about fallen human thought as evinced in philosophy, but philosophy is simply a case in point of the human predicament. The philosopher “has desired a system. In other words, he has wished to create a (logical) world out of himself, out of his own principle – ‘you shall be as gods’ – but such a logical deduction of the world is not possible for a human being.”[7] The philosopher, like every human, has taken up the appeal of the serpent, to make of the dialectic of knowledge a replacement for living reality. Reason or philosophy as its own origin and end betrays signs of the human malaise: “Sickness, corruption, the perversion of all human existence which presented itself in original sin, also, in other words, afflicts reason, and makes it impossible for reason to gain access to the tree of heavenly knowledge, since access is denied by the fiery sword of the cherubim – the antinomies.”[8] Philosophy puts on display, not a personal pride, but the objective role of hubris, in that the philosopher, like the legalist, has no sense of the limits of the system. This then gives rise to the contradictions or antinomies of the system.   

In Pauline terms, this starting point reduces God to the system of the law. In psychoanalytic terms (which is to say the same thing in different terms), the human sickness is to interpolate the self (and with the self, all of reality) into the symbolic order. The law, the logos, the symbolic, or philosophy, would serve as its own end, displacing the divine Logos with a human word. Bulgakov traces the philosophical impetus, but he has in mind the general human orientation toward deception, violence and sin: “Logical continuity, or, what amounts to the same thing, the continuous logical deduction of all from one, making the whole system circle around a single centre which can be passed through in any direction, and which admits of no hiatus or discontinuity of any kind: this is the task which human thought naturally and inevitably strives to complete, not stopping short of violence, and self-deception, of evasions and illusions.”[9]

Logical monism, or the attempt to bridge subject and object, subject and predicate, noumena and phenomena, or to create a synthesis out of the antinomies, demands a full investment of faith (a violent bringing down of reality to fit it into the system). Every philosophy “dimly or distinctly, instinctively or consciously, timidly or militantly” claims “to be the absolute philosophy, and each of which regards its own sketch of what is as the system of the world.”[10] Hegel’s system is the characteristic illustration of overcoming the antinomies: “Hegel – and in his person, all philosophy” supposes it can bind reality into a system.[11] It presupposes what is impossible – to begin from itself, or generate from itself what can only come from what truly exists. The impossibility shows itself in the characteristic failure of philosophy, of taking one arm of tripartite reality as an end in itself.

 As Bulgakov describes, philosophy will choose either “(1) hypostasis, or personhood; (2) the latter’s idea or ideal form, logos, thought; (3) substantial being as the unity of all moments or states of being, as the self-actualizing whole.” These three philosophical moments can be summed up in the formula, “I am Something (potentially everything).”[12] This is a true enough statement, but philosophy “incessantly” cuts apart this indisseverable statement. “Philosophizing thought produces heresies through the arbitrariness of these disseverations, and through its choices of discrete beginnings; and the style of philosophizing is determined by the way in which this dissection is made.”[13] Philosophy takes what exists and that which is a necessary component of human consciousness and attempts to enter into this reality by segmenting and privileging a particular component.

The classic example is Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking thing is privileged over being. Being is subject to question and doubt, and is presumed to be determinate only through the predicate of thought, the second I. The first I and the second, (the thinking thing and that which exists as the predicate) are only conjoined in thought. This presumption cuts off the subject from its predicate and copula, as if the subject precedes predication and existence. Descartes is using his formula as a foundation to arrive at the certain proof of his existence and the existence of God, performing a dissection of thought in order to reduce it to the parameters of reason.

 In one form or another, this dissection of subject, predicate, and being indicates the history of philosophy. “Every philosophical system . . . is governed by an attempt of this kind: the subject, or the copula, or the predicate is announced as the single beginning, and everything is made to derive from it or to lead towards it. Such a ‘deduction,’ whether of the subject from the predicate, of the predicate from the subject, or of both from the copula, in fact presents philosophy with its principal task, and, thereby presents an insoluble difficulty to philosophical thought, which strives toward monism, strives to reduce everything to a first unity, no matter what.”[14] Bulgakov’s book is mostly dedicated to proving this point in three philosophical moments or movements, through engaging a wide range of philosophical thought, but focused most intensely on Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (I will return, in future posts, to the specifics of his proofs).

Though Bulgakov is focused on philosophy’s denial or dissection of a triadic unity and the tragedy which results, the same story could be told in the register of psychoanalysis or theology. The psyche strives to unify the self, experienced as mind and body, or as the objective I in the mirror and the I of experience. For Jacques Lacan, the Cartesian dilemma is the human dilemma, in that every subject is split by language. The enunciating subject is split from the subject of the statement (the enunciated) and thus the subject is inescapably split or castrated by language. By taking up and defining the self through language, there occurs a three-way split between the symbolic (language), the ego or imaginary, and the dissonance of nonbeing or death drive created in the relation between the two. Here, the tragedy is not a philosophical or metaphysical mistake, but the human sickness and neurosis which arises from trying to make the self a synthesis out of an antithesis. The compulsion to repeat, the death drive, human violence toward the other and self-destructiveness, can be traced to the psychoanalytic sickness.

The point is universalized in Paul’s use of the law, which pits the subject against itself. “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). The philosophical and psychoanalytical is captured in Paul’s depiction of the I split by the law, but Paul includes the religious, the legal, the sexual and the social, or every aspect of the human predicament. What Bulgakov claims about philosophical systems seems to be a particular instance of Paul’s point, that could be described as the drive to a legal monism, in which the law is the system of the world, and the split between the two ‘I’s (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, mind/flesh, body/spirit) caused by the law would also be resolved through the law.

 Bulgakov, like Paul, will not so much resolve the dilemma of the split as address it through the reality of the Trinity. His presumption is that humans are created in the image of God and it is only on the basis of the divine image that the human image can be approached (if not comprehended). Like the Divine Person, the human person cannot be defined. “The essence of the hypostasis consists precisely in the fact that it is indefinable and indescribable; it stands beyond the limits of the world and of the concept, even though it continually reveals itself in them.”[15] It is not that the self cannot be named, but the I is not merely the subject of thought and reason, but thought and reason arise from the subject. The subject, transcendent as it may be, is revealed through the immanence of its predicates. “The subject, the hypostasis, is always revealed, always expresses itself, in the predicate. It goes without saying that the hypostasis in this sense is not the psychological I, psychological subjectivity, which already defines the hypostasis as a predicate, not as a subject.”[16]

The life force or spirit of the human subject is no more definable than the divine Spirit. Just as the Son bears the image of the Father, so too every child of God is defined in this relationship: “Eternity belongs to the hypostasis; it is eternal in the same sense as eternal God, who Himself breathed His own Spirit into humanity at the latter’s creation. The human being is the son of God and a created god; the image of eternity is an inalienable and indelible part of him.”[17] Humankind bears eternity in the image, and Bulgakov suggests that even suicide is not actually aimed at annihilating or extinguishing the I (“suicide attempts represent a kind of philosophical misunderstanding, and are directed not at the I itself, but only at the way in which it exists, directed not at the subject, but at the predicate”). As Bulgakov sums up, “The hypostatic I is the philosophical and grammatical Subject of all predicates; its life is this predicate, endless in its breadth and depth.”[18] The Father, Son, and Spirit, are the reality of subject, predicate, and copula of being. The Father is revealed through the Son, and this lived out realization is the work of the Spirit. This participation in the divine is the reality behind human thought and experience, and even a failure of thought points to its completion in this reality.

[1] Sergij Bulgakov, The Tragedy of Philosophy (Philosophy & Dogma), trans. by Stephen Churchyard (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020) 91. Many thanks Jim, for the gift of this book. It is a key into Bulgakov.

[2] Or Sergij, or Sergei, among some 9 possible variants.

[3] See Jonathan R. Seiling, From Antinomy to Sophiology: Modern Russian Religious Consciousness and Sergei Bulgakov’s Critical Appropriation of German Idealism (PhD Dissertation, Toronto School of Theology, 2008) 229-233.

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 35. Cited in Katy Leamy, “A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov” (2012). (Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 211. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/211), 36.

[5] Bulgakov, 3.

[6] Ibid. To miss this point will not only amount to missing the thesis of the book, but is the characteristic theological mistake. The issue is on the order of that of Jordan Wood in his departure from David Bentley Hart, or the tradition through Origen to Maximus, taken up by Bulgakov. The antinomies of heaven and earth, God and human, subject and object, are only resolved in the concrete case of the God/Man Jesus Christ. Reason cannot overcome these antinomies but Christ (in reality), in who he is, brings them together. Thus, reason begins with Jesus Christ as ground. Otherwise, it is not clear what a subject or reason might be.  

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid, 3.

[10] Ibid, 3-4. Bulgakov has passed through commitment to Marxist Hegelianism, then with his conversion and the Russian Revolution, at this writing, he is without a job or a library in Crimea.

[11] Ibid, 6.

[12] Ibid, 9.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 10.

[15] Ibid, 11.

[16] Ibid, 12.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

Jordan Daniel Wood and Maximus on the Answer to Hegel

I have described entry into the holism of the Gospel (see my The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation) by engaging the theory of Slavoj Žižek who is working in the multiple registers of philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, and theology. Žižek takes as his point of departure the Kantian critique of the Cartesian Subject deployed by Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in which Hegel depicts the Subject as arising in conjunction with the empty X of the “thinking thing.” That is, this failure of the Cartesian cogito (as depicted by Kant) is not a failure but the foundation of the Subject in Žižek’s Hegel. The nothingness at the center of the Subject makes for the very possibility of a Subject. Žižek boils this down in his self-description as a Pauline-Hegelian theorist. He sees Hegel as a development of Paul’s theology (primarily Romans 7) and considers Hegel the summation of philosophical thought and the ground of Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. That is, Hegel (according to Žižek and others) is the summation of human thought and the human project. For Žižek there is no escaping Hegel as Hegel says it all, capturing the true atheistic essence of the gospel.

 My point, in the concluding chapter of my book, is that the gospel and Paul offer an alternative world, an alternative psychology, and an alternative theology to Hegel – not claiming that Žižek/Hegel are simply wrong but picturing theirs as the singular alternative sublated and resolved through the gospel. Mine, however, is primarily a negative description of the all-inclusive nature of Žižek/Hegel, to get at the all-inclusive nature of the gospel. Jordan Wood, in his reading of Maximus, sets forth a fulsome positive picture of this alternative.

Jordan hits upon the truth in Maximus’ theology (a development of New Testament theology through Origen) which, I am convinced, is the proper ground for the peace and love of the gospel to be fully recognized. To begin with, he sees Maximus as recognizing the pervasiveness of Hegel’s description (obviously, before Hegel) and then moving beyond, while taking into account, this understanding (sublation):

Thus Maximus knows what Hegel claims few do: “That these forms [e.g., finite vs. infinite, subject vs. object, and so forth] are different everyone knows; but that these determinations are still at the same time inseparable is another matter.” You cannot meaningfully predicate infinity of God without simultaneously referring to infinity’s negation, the finite. The abstract meaning of infinity is itself negatively determined by the concept of finitude. Abstract infinity remains a finite predicate, since it positively depends for its sense on its not being whatever we mean by “finite.” While these categories are indeed different, they are also inseparable. Their very difference unites them.[1]

Maximus recognizes what Hegel will also spell out, namely that what are taken to be absolute differences amount to interdependent relations. Being and nothingness, life and death, or good and evil are interdependent antitheses through which a synthesis can be attained. Hegel reads Genesis 3 and “the knowledge of good and evil” as the prototype of all human thought. The good has its existence over and against evil and evil has its existence over and against the good. Hegel’s point is that antitheses, like good and evil or infinite and finite, are not simply known in tandem but have their being in tandem. Maximus, however, recognizes that what is meant by difference is not difference at all, but a form of interdependence.

So, step one in Maximus’ depiction of the created and uncreated is a depiction of these categories (e.g., creator/creation, finite/infinite, divine/human) as absolutely different, such that when they are brought together in Christ this bringing together is not on the order of a Hegelian dialectic and synthesis. Maximus’ reason for rejection of dialectical difference is inadvertently illustrated by Hegel. Death, for Hegel, is the source of life, while nothingness is the source of all that is:  

The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. … This is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this nonactuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. . .. Spirit is this power … looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.[2]  

The Subject arises through the power of death and negation. Hegel is fusing thought and being, making of psychology an ontology. He is taking the Kantian problem with the Cartesian cogito, (the empty X of “I think” in Kant’s estimate) not as an irresolvable problem, but as the ground of an alternative metaphysic and psychology. In this understanding nothingness and death are the absolute resources against which life and being are derived. In short, this is the abstraction which may best express Paul’s depiction of the law of sin and death.

 Due to Maximus’ recognition of the dialectic of difference as the ground of human thought (the human failure of thought) he makes of difference, not a dialectic, but an irreconcilable absolute. “Maximus never disputes— that, for instance, since the uncreated is not the created, God could never enjoy essential identity with the world he makes from nothing. Maximus even intensifies their natural contrast by denying any commonality between them whatsoever.”[3]  As Hans Urs Von Balthasar describes, Maximus duel with the Monothelites caused him “to take seriously and to apply, in all its consequences, the formula of the Council of Chalcedon, which asserts the “unconfused” character of the two natures of Christ and which prevents any dissolving of the human substance in God.”[4] For Maximus the divine and human difference is absolute and theoretically irreconcilable. As a result, “Maximus looks straight in the eye of Hegel,”[5] who “recognizes a kindred christological instinct to synthesize created contraries but he outstrips Hegel by insisting that Chalcedon’s Definition govern every synthesis.”[6] This is not a formal theory, an abstraction, or something on the order of an analogy of being. This is the accomplishment of the person of Christ that cannot formalized:

For the superessential Word, who took on himself, in that ineffable conception, our nature and everything that belongs to it, possessed nothing human, nothing that we might consider “natural” in him, that was not at the same time divine, negated by the supernatural manner of his existence. The investigation of these things exceeds our reason and our capacity for proof; it is only grasped by the faith of those who reverence the mystery of Christ with up right hearts.[7]

Christ does not provide a pattern for formal understanding or a Hegelian example of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. “We believe that He Himself, by virtue of His infinite transcendence, is ineffable and incomprehensible, and exists beyond all creation and beyond all the differences and distinctions which exist and can be conceived of within it.”[8] What is accomplished in the person of Christ is ineffable, precisely in that two absolutely different natures reside in one person:

For the mystery remains concealed by Jesus, and can be drawn out by no word or mind, for even when spoken of, it remains ineffable, and when conceived, unknown” (according to Gregory). Beyond this, what could be a more compelling demonstration of the Divinity’s transcendence of being? For it discloses its concealment by means of a manifestation, its ineffability through speech, and its transcendent unknowability through the mind, and, to say what is greatest of all, it shows itself to be beyond being by entering essentially into being.[9]

The “ineffable manner of union” of the two natures in Christ is beyond  comprehension (or dialectical synthesis or true knowledge for Hegel). The one who “transcends being” entered into being, and he who transcends human nature subjugated himself to this nature but “He elevated nature to Himself, making nature itself another mystery, while He Himself remained entirely beyond comprehension, showing that His own Incarnation, which was granted a birth beyond being, was more incomprehensible than every mystery.”[10]

Where Hegelianism sees the movement of history, in its synthesizing possibilities, as bringing about Spirit (in Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel, this movement is endless – never arriving at Spirit), Maximus sees Christ as the end of a synthesizing dialectical possibility. The movement of time and history is not intrinsically salvific, but Christ makes of this movement “a weapon for the destruction of sin and death, which is the consequence of sin.”[11] For Maximus the rule of sin and death is the constituting “condition of passibility.” From the false beginning in Adam humankind is thrown into a downward spiral which Christ turns into a weapon of destroying judgment. The simultaneous judgment and creative providence found in the incarnation are key in the dimensions of the work of Christ:

If, as we just read Maximus saying, “the perfect re-formation” comes to be “within Him, according to the ineffable union,” if “the whole mystery of Christ” is precisely that “all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning and end in Christ,” and if indeed our very potential to resist the Word’s Incarnation and thereby illicitly hypostasize a counterfeit creation— if, I mean, even this slavish passion to sheer finitude— is itself made possible by God’s veritable act of creation in and as Christ, then we should expect to find Maximus making explicit this concrete reciprocity or simultaneity at every level of his contemplation of the historical.[12]

The reciprocity or simultaneity of creation and judgment through incarnation is a point Maximus illustrates at length. Christ does not depend upon negation and death, but judges and defeats these categories while simultaneously bringing about creation. The passage in Christ is not toward an endless dialectic, as Christ presents an immovable essence and a final stability which brings the agony of dialectic to an end:

For the union of the limit of the age and limitlessness, of measure and immeasurability, of finitude and infinity, of Creator and creation, and of rest and motion, was conceived before the ages. This union has been manifested in Christ at the end of time, and through itself bestows the fulfillment of God’s foreknowledge, so that creatures in motion by nature might find rest around that which is absolutely immovable by essence, departing completely from their movement toward themselves and each other, so that they might acquire, by experience, an active knowledge of Him in whom they were made worthy to find their stability, a knowledge which is unalterable and always the same, and which bestows upon them the enjoyment of the One they have come to know.[13]

Where in Hegel, time, history and movement save (through dialectic and synthesis), for Maximus Christ is the immovable center of history. In the person of Christ what is distinctly different has been brought into union, not through a dialectic, but through both providence and judgment rendered in the incarnation. Maximus sees providence and judgment as part of the singular power of Christ, exercised in the multiple dimensions of the incarnation. “Providence is the union itself, the God-man; judgment is the Passion, the suffering God.”[14]

In Maximus explanation:

On the right, then, is the mystery, according to providence, of the Incarnation of the Word, which by grace brings about divinization in a manner transcending nature for those who are being saved. This mystery was predetermined before the ages, and absolutely no principle of beings can approach it by nature. On the left is the mystery, according to judgment, of the life-giving passion of the God who willed to suffer in the flesh. This mystery brings about the utter destruction of all the properties and movements contrary to nature that were introduced into nature through the primal disobedience. It also produces the perfect restoration of all the properties and movements that were previously in nature, according to which absolutely none of the principles of beings can ever be adulterated. From these, by which I mean providence and judgment, that is, from the Incarnation and the Passion, there came forth—because of the stability, purity, and incorruptibility of courageous virtue and immutability on the level of practice, and because of the clarity and brilliance of mystical contemplation and knowledge there came forth, I say, like horse-drawn chariots racing “through the middle of two brass mountains . . .[15]

The stability, incorruptibility, and immutability of Christ in the incarnation is at once bringing about natural potential and judging and destroying the unnatural incarnation of falsehood. Thus, the incarnation is the enacted judgment and outworking of God’s providence bringing about divinization in those who are being saved. This mystery is simultaneously destroying all that is contrary to nature while restoring and bringing to fulness the potential in nature. Maximus is clear about the fundamental reciprocity between creation and judgment characteristic of the whole mystery. “The union reveals divine goodness and “will” (θέλησις), God’s absolute desire, while the Passion evinces Christ’s concrete love for human beings in his “consensual” (καθ’ ἑκούσιον) or voluntary response to a determinate phenomenon— our transgression, the actual sins of all persons.”[16]

This is not a dialectic dependent upon death, but is salvation from death wrought in the person of Christ. God wants human beings to be divinized, made into his image, but humans resist God’s creation in Christ. “In his divine counsel God knows Adam’s true and false beginnings because— and this is truly critical— God knows and wills Adam. Which is to say, God wills and thus creates not an abstract arrangement of essences or mere instances of nature but actual, individual, free persons, the very persons who in themselves freely hypostasize something other than themselves.”[17] Thus “human persons make God a suffering God-man. The Passion at once establishes and responds to actual persons, since, of course, God’s judgment sustains the singularity and distinctiveness of all persons— even in and through the depths of their deluded self-destruction.” Rather than dialectic giving rise to the Subjest, there is the outworking of providence and judgment in Christ who “concretizes, in himself, the essential paradox of human freedom, the possibility of both our primordial error and our eventual embrace of God, our “initial” and “perfect” formation.”[18]

In Maximus most fulsome explanation:

For in truth it was necessary—necessary, I say—that the Lord, who according to His nature is wise and just and powerful, should not, in His wisdom, ignore the means of curing us; nor, in His justice, despotically save humanity when it had fallen under sin by the inclination of its own will; nor, in His omnipotence, falter in bringing the healing of humanity to completion. He therefore made manifest the principle of His wisdom through the mode by which He healed humanity, namely, by becoming man without undergoing any kind of change or alteration. He showed the equality of His justice in the magnitude of His condescension, when He willingly submitted to the condemnation of nature in its passibility, and he made that very passibility a weapon for the destruction of sin and death, which is the consequence of sin, that is, for the destruction of pleasure and the pain which is its consequence. And He did this because the rule of sin and death had established themselves in our condition of passibility, along with the tyranny of sin associated with pleasure and the oppression associated with pain, for the rule of pleasure and pain over our nature subsists within our passibility.[19]

Maximus describes something approaching psychoanalytic masochism, in which one takes pleasure in their own destruction as pleasure has been fused with death (or as in Hegel, death is the primary resource of life). He pictures death as being mothered by pleasure such that “Adam’s life of pleasure is the mother of death and corruption.” The death of Christ brings an end to this fusion of pleasurable dying, bringing about the possibility of eternal life: “the death of the Lord, which came about for the sake of Adam, and which was free of the pleasure associated with Adam, is the progenitor of eternal life.”[20]  

He explains how and why this is the case:

It seems to me, then, the word of Scripture has rightly distinguished between how, on the one hand, generation from Adam accompanied by pleasure, in tyrannizing our nature, was providing food for the death that arose in consequence of that pleasure; and how, on the other hand, the birth of the Lord in the flesh, which came about because of His love of mankind, eliminated both of these things, by which I mean the pleasure associated with Adam and the death that came about because of Adam, eradicating Adam’s punishment along with his sin. That is, it was not possible for the Lord’s generation as man—which was in no way touched by that beginning whose end was death—to be conquered in the end by corruption through death. This is because, as I said, the word of Scripture has distinguished these things from one another, because for as long as our nature was being tyrannized solely by the characteristic marks of Adam in its beginning and end, by which I mean generation and corruption, it was “not the time for the judgment” enabling the complete condemnation of sin “to begin.” But when the Word of God appeared to us through the flesh and became perfect man but without sin, and in the flesh of Adam willingly bore only the punishment of Adam’s nature, and when He “condemned sin in the flesh,” innocently suffering as “righteous for the sake of the unrighteous,” and converted the use of death, reworking it into the condemnation of sin but not of nature, then, I say, “it was the time for the judgment to begin,” a judgment consistent with this conversion of death and leading to the condemnation of sin.[21]

In Maximus’ description, the dialectic of the law of sin and death has been defeated. The agonistic struggle Paul describes and valorized by Hegel is ended by Christ. The tyrant of death and corruption are judged and destroyed as Christ condemned sin and converted death into the means of destroying sin. As Jordan summarizes:

The judgment of the Passion thus restores my freedom and invites me to choose to be created, to be born of the Spirit rather than from my own primordial delusion. I must come to recognize the depths of God’s love in the fundamental God world reciprocity generated in the Word’s historical experience. That reciprocity creates the freedom to undo my own misuse of freedom exactly because the Word’s identification with the false world is simultaneously his identification with the true one. He made himself the hypostatic identity of bad and good infinities. That is, he received, in his Passion, the entire burden of the errant motions of every individual rational being, and by making them his own— he who is essentially God— endowed the very false “principles” our sin falsely incarnate, namely the “law of death,” with the deeper principle of providence, the complete deification of even this universe and of the “me” I make in vain. His true Incarnation, always and in all things, destroys all false incarnations from true beginning to true end— for he is both.[22]

Žižek (whose entire corpus is grounded in the notion of freedom) openly embraces the necessity of a deception as the condition for the Subject. While there is no alternative to the primordial lie in Žižek’s reading of Hegel, Maximus sees the gospel as specifically engaging this falsely incarnated Subject arising around a false dialectic and depicts the how and why of its dissolution and sublation in Christ.

[1] Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ (p. 198). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1977) 18-19.

[3] Wood, 198.

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor Translated by Brian E. Daley, S.]. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988) 207.

[5] Ibid. According to Balthasar he arrives at his synthesis on the basis of an antithesis between the Old and New Testaments arriving at a Hellenistic Johannine Christological synthesis.”

[6] Wood, 4.

[7] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1-2; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 5.15. Quoted in Balthasar, 209.

[8] Ambigua 7.16.

[9] Ambigua 5.5.

[10] Ambigua 5.5.

[11] St. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties In Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios; Translated by Fr. Maximos Constas, (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 61.6.

[12] Wood, 175.

[13] The Responses to Thalassios, 60.4.

[14] Wood, 183.

[15] The Responses to Thalassios, 3.19.

[16] Wood, 182-183.

[17] Wood, 183.

[18] Ibid.

[19] The Responses to Thalassios, 61.6.

[20] The Responses to Thalassios, 61.7.

[21] The Responses to Thalassios, 61.8

[22] Wood, 186.

God With Us: The Shattering of the “Idea of God” and Discovery of His Presence

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? … And most are offended by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.” CS Lewis[1]

Last night we finished a course on the Holy Spirit through PBI, and each of the participants (all seasoned pastors and theologians) described experiencing (at some point in their lives but reappreciated in our time together) something on the order of what Lewis describes as the shattering of former ideas and the realization of God’s presence in the realms of marriage, fatherhood, friendship, prayer and ultimately every order of being. The class brought home the recognition that centering, contemplative prayer opens a continual awareness of divine activity pervading our world. We are so attuned, in this secular age, to a disenchanted mechanical universe (the “God-forsakenness” of the world in Charles Taylor’s description) that it takes conscious effort to wake up to the endless iconic nature of the world. In continually looking for God to show-up, it may be we have missed the still small voice beckoning through friendship, contemplative prayer, and married love. The ordinary course of human suffering and love, the questions of a child, and even a rescued cat (continually present in class), testify, we realized, to the divine presence. The recognition requires a relinquishing of settled (limited) notions of God which then opens us to the unsettling realization of the pervasive presence of the Spirit.

The seeming tension between a settled idea of God and continually attempting to conjure up God’s presence are not opposed but consist of the same failure. To divinize an idea is to miss the enfleshed manner in which God comes to us. An “idea” is not enfleshed, it is not felt, it has no presence, and it gives no comfort but at the same time it offers no threat. Isaiah pictures Immanuel (God With Us) as shattering human ideas, human religion and human plans, precisely because they depend on death, darkness and absence. If the music is intense enough, the lights and smoke adjusted just right, and the medium is appealing, it may be that “whisperings and mutterings” may seem to conjure up God’s presence, but Isaiah warns the real thing shatters this conspiratorial belief system.

Mathew announces that Christ as Immanuel brings about this shattering presence of God, and it is Israel and her institutions who will stumble over God With Us. But is Jesus the same one who “will sweep into Judah” and “fill the breadth of your land”? Is God With Us on the order of water which “will overflow and pass through” reaching “even to the neck” and is it his metaphorical wings which will cover the land (Isaiah 8:8)? Mathew also quotes Isaiah to say the Messiah is one who will cause no disturbance: “He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; and in his name the Gentiles will hope” (Mt 12:19–21, ESV). How will he bring about a revolutionary justice and provide universal hope without causing a disturbance? How is it that from the womb of a humble peasant girl, as a baby in a manger, working in a carpenter’s shop, teaching a few disciples for three years, and dying on an implement of torture reserved for slaves, Christ changes the world order?

God With Us in the womb, in ordinary life, on a cross, and in the resurrection has, in Irenaeus image, recapitulated all things, so that the world is opened to Trinitarian fellowship. Hans Urs von Balthasar describes Christ as convening a “cosmic liturgy” as he has opened up the world to divine love: “the essence of all being has become visible in Jesus Christ” who reveals the Father, as “a wellspring of reciprocal love.”[2] The fellowship of friends, the love of marriage, the birth of a child, and quiet meditation bear the presence of Immanuel. As Julian of Norwich pictures it, “everything is penetrated, in length and breadth, in height and in depth without end; and it is all one love.”[3]

Many of us have tended, perhaps due to the combined influence of modernity and patriarchal religion, toward a settled idea of God. A static God, a stale theology, a world emptied of the grandeur of God, passes over the unsettling dynamic of God With Us. The incarnation opens to us the interdependent relations of the Trinity, and the fact that Jesus displays the dependence of an infant upon his mother, the dependence of a child on his parents, dependence upon other people’s generosity (e.g., the wealthy women who provided him support), and just the basic human dependence on culture, demonstrates an interdependent reality on a continuum that extends into the Trinity. To be dependent on God and others or to be an interdependent part of a community is part of the mediating reality of knowing God. In Jesus we see the divine in every area of human life: his healing touch, his thirst, his sorrow at death, his love of children, and his tiredness, are mediating realities in which he is known as “I am.” This relational understanding of God revealed in Christ is not a departure from the “I am that I am” revealed to Moses, but its completion; the fulfillment that goes ahead into Egypt and the world.

The Bible knows nothing of the Unmoved Mover but pictures God in dynamic interpersonal relationships such as deliverer, father, mother, husband, beloved, companion, friend, advocate, liberator, king, and judge. God is interpersonal relatedness and this reality extends to his relationship to the world. The God of the Bible gets his hands dirty shaping earth (adamah) into his likeness. Rather than God being unmoved, unoccupied, and settled he is pictured as a shepherd, farmer, laundress, construction worker, potter, midwife, physician, baker, artist, writer, nurse, and homemaker, busily going about the tasks which occupy people and in which we can recognize his activity. Far from an uninvolved patriarch or distant king, God is pictured as giving birth, nursing the young, and is particularly concerned with children, the poor and the weak. The world is alive with the activity and grandeur of God but it may be that the idea of God blinds us to the reality. The Bible points to the constellations, the wonders of nature, the constancy of the seasons, as bearing the fingerprint of God. A she bear protecting her cubs, a mother hen hovering over her chicks, the work of ants, the stealth of the badger, the fragility of birds or even inanimate objects such as running water, light, fire, rocks, or clouds point us to his presence and activity.[4]

Elizabeth Johnson lists the variety of names in the Mishnah as a further example of the dynamic identity of God. In this post-biblical Jewish usage he is the Living God, Friend of the World, Mighty One, Searcher of Hearts, the One who knows the thoughts of all, Lord of Consolations, Height of the World, Eye of the World, Life of the World, Beloved, the One who dwells in hidden places, the Heart of Israel, the One who understands, the One who spoke and the world was, Justice of the World, Home of the World, Rock of the World, the Holy One, Holy Spirit, the One who hears, Peace of the World, Strong One, Merciful One.

In the spirit of Paul on the Areopagus referencing an idol to the “unknown god,” God may also be approached through the myriad of names and activities found in traditional religions: Alone the Great One, the Powerful One, Wise One, Shining One, the One who sees all, the One who is everywhere, Friend, the Greatest of Friends, the One you confide your troubles to, the One who can turn everything upside down, the One there from ancient times, the One who began the forest, the One who gives to all, the Rain-giver, Highest of the Highest, Unknown, Queen of Heaven whose glory shines in mist and rainbow, Great Spirit, Great One of the Sky, Protector of the Poor, Guardian of Orphans, the Chief, the Almighty, Watcher of everything, Owner of everything, Savior of all, the One who loves, who gives birth to the people, who rules, who makes children, who embraces all; the One who does not die, who has not let us down yet, who bears the world, who has seen many moons, who thunders from far-off times, who carries everyone on her back, who is heard in all the world; the One who blesses. The world knows something of the God revealed in Christ, and just as Christ reappropriates and gives new meaning to the Hebrew names for God, he appropriates and fulfills human expectations of an ultimate interpersonal reality.

There is not one settled concept which is adequate for God but what is required is an inexhaustible variety of names and concepts which allow for a dynamic unfolding of the divine reality. Even “Abba,” the name revealed by Christ, does not sum up or amass the Truth in one stroke. As expressed in the metaphor of Henri de Lubac, one can only keep afloat in knowing God in the way that a swimmer keeps afloat, through a continuous stroking of the water. As Johnson puts it, referencing de Lubac, “They are forever brushing aside the representations which are continually reforming, knowing full well that these support them, but that if they were to rest for a single moment they would sink.” As Aquinas notes, if you imagine you have understood God, then what you have understood is not God. [5]

Even the world (in all of its parts), which is open to understanding, seems to require infinite exploration and explanation. I spent some twenty years teaching scientists English in Tsukuba Science City in Japan, and among my students, one was spending his career studying the circulatory system of the silk worm, another was studying the genome of rice, another was a specialist in the human intestine. Several meteorologists passed through my classes and I discovered there are forest meteorologists, desert meteorologists, and those who specialize in ocean currents, but there was no accurate working model of world wide weather as the variables and factors are too great. Tsukuba boasted a small particle accelerator but it was well known that the subatomic world was proving bottomless and the only hope was for larger accelerators. There was no area of science, no matter how small its area of study, that was settled or finished. Just the opposite, the tiniest realm, to say nothing of the rapidly expanding universe, is proving to have infinite depth so that the world seems to consist of an endless number of, what Jason Baxter calls, finite infinities.

In Baxter’s explanation, there was a window between the 12th and 15th century, prior to the secular age but subsequent to the reign of Greek notions in which infinity was equated with incomprehension, in which beauty began to be experienced in terms of the infinite. Where classical philosophers strove to whittle down diffuseness to a tapered and simple whole (the One despite the plurality), the “Gothic aesthetic,” as Baxter dubs it, found a new point of analogy between the world and its maker in the infinite. Thierry of Chartres, for example, discussed how each creature potentially functioned as a mirror of God, with the world consisting of an infinite variety of mirrors reflecting one face: “Just as a single face, when casting its reflection off many mirrors, is still one” (Commentum super Boethii librum De Trinitate, II,48), so God looks at the world and history and sees his face reflected in an infinite number of mirrors. Nicholas of Cusa, in his treatise, On Searching for God, “tells a spiritual brother that the path to God is a paradoxical ascent accomplished by a descent into the world.” He deploys the mustard seed as an example, which grows into a tree which then drops thousands of seeds, each potentially becoming a tree such that “if its potential should be unfolded in actuality, this sensible world would not suffice, nor indeed, would ten or a thousand or all the worlds that one could count.” Nicholas then performs a thought experiment unfolding the infinity immediately available in the mind:

All capacity of the whole sensible word, and not only of this one world but also of an infinite number of worlds . . . How great a magnitude there is in our intellect! . . . through similar ascents, you will be able to ascend from the power of the millet seed and likewise from the power of all vegetable and animal seeds. The power of no seed is less than that of the mustard seed, and there are an infinite number of such seeds. Oh how great is our God, who is the actuality of all potency!

As Baxter notes, “That last part is important, because even if all the potentialities in every seed were unfolded into their infinities, the world would still be but a shadowy explication of God.” [6]

If we settle upon a static image, an idea, a limited whole, a distant and perhaps patriarchal notion of God, then we miss the iconic dynamic of God With Us in the boundless finite infinities. He is with us in creation, in history, in time, in the human circumstance, which mirrors his infinity. We can see him at work in the infinite depth of friendship, in the ever unfolding love of marriage and in the bottomless fellowship and relationship in the world all around us. Immanuel, in shattering the settled finite idols, offers up the infinite icon of the world as the mirror of his image.

(Thank you to Allan, Matt, David, Rob, Dan, Trenton, and Justin for exploring these possibilities together.)

[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber, 1966), 52.

[2] Theo-Logic, III, 438.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 296-97; see Joan Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad Pub., 199 1). Quoted from Elizabeth Johnson, “Naming God She: The Theological Implications” (2000). Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics. 5. http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/5

[4] See Johnson, Ibid.

[5] Henri De Lubac, Discovely of God, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: I?]. Kenedy, 1960), 120-2 1. Johnson, Ibid.

[6] Jason Baxter, “The Nine Billion Names of God” in Church Life Journal (December 8, 2021) https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-nine-billion-names-of-god/?fbclid=IwAR22nJYREsZNhrTDkBOusl2B6OjvVUK36tOFiBUKZl0bKD4qiIMrRxRgXbk