Hegel – Forging Ploughshares

Metaxology as an Extension of Sophiology

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

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

The Synthesizing Possibility Between Infinite Life and Death

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

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

Inspiration and Deification in the Between

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

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

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

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

The Iconic Aesthetics of Sophia and the Potency of the Middle

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] René, 27.

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

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

[6] Sophiology of Death, 4.

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

[8] The Gift of Beauty, 60.

[9] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[10] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[11] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

[12] Milbank, 17.

[13] The Sophiology of Death, 128.

[14] The Sophiology of Death, 129.

[15] The Sophiology of Death, 123.

[16] The Gift of Beauty, 33.

[17] Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (p. 123). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

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

[19] The Gift of Beauty, 50.

[20] The Gift of Beauty, 26,

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

[22] The Gift of Beauty, 27.

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

[24] Philosophy of the Name, 314,

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

[26] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[27] The Potencies of the Ethical, 65.

[28] The Gift of Beauty, 21

[29] The Gift of Beauty, 21.

[30] The Gift of Beauty, 24.

Appreciating the Similarities and Differences Between William Desmond and René Girard

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

Girard Against Metaphysics

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

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

Desmond’s Reworking of Metaphysics

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

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

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

The Theological Import of Metaphysics

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

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

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

Desmond’s Philosophical Theology

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

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

The Convergence of Girard and Desmond

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

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

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

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

An Appreciation of the Difference Between Desmond and Girard

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

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

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

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

[4] Bartlett, 97.

[5] God and the Between, xi.

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

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

[8] Things Hidden, 265.

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

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

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

[12] God and the Between, xii.

[13] God and the Between, xii.

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

[15] Duns, 352.

[16] Duns, 352.

[17] Duns, 352.

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

[19] Duns, 355.

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

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

William Desmond’s four ways might be read as the passage from fall to redemption in which the human failure is the attempt to be their own origin (univocity) through an implicit and denied plurality or difference (equivocity), and this fall into metaphysical striving (dialectics) is the common human passage toward realizing the fulness of personhood (in the metaxological). As Desmond describes in God and the Between, “By eating the forbidden fruit one assimilates its otherness to oneself, one seeks to have a radical source within oneself, the source of the primal division between good and evil.”[1] The drive to be in oneself and displacing the life from God describes a metaphysical pursuit gone bad. The displacement of the mediating presence of God, or the tree of life, means taking up the difference of good and evil in the self. One constitutes the difference, perhaps with the goal of overcoming it, but rather than being able to digest this equivocity, one is consumed in the dialectic, resulting in shame. That is, all three of Desmond’s ways are captured in his depiction of the fall: the grab for univocity, results in equivocity and dialectic. He captures the necessity of these ways in his description: “The turn to self that turns the self into an original being for itself is equivocal, because in being for itself as power to be itself, it can refuse the necessity of the other for just its being itself.”[2] There is an attempt at univocity through equivocity that is an obvious lie: “To insist that humans are measured by univocal truth is to be in the untruth, that is, to be in the equivocal that one has denied. . .”[3]

To accept the gift – the gift of life or the gift of being – entails accepting that the gift is not mine to control, and rightly acknowledged it is to be open to the other. We can either accept the gift in gratitude or refuse to acknowledge the origin. To be the origin, to be the singular, univocal, giver and receiver, results in a fracture. “But our claim to undo the equivocity absolutely through ourselves alone is just again the fatal equivocity redoubled. For this undoing is the will to undo gift, to undo porosity, to undo our passio essendi. We ourselves cannot be absolute sources of control or certainty concerning the gift and its source.”[4] The passion or patience of being rightly received does not grab for it so as to secure it and make it one’s own.

The grab for being (conatus essendi) undoes the gift or would deny it. “For we would then only accept what we have given to ourselves. But any such self-giving is a rebuff to the more original giving: everything we give to ourselves is only thus because we have first been given to ourselves. Our being for ourselves is also first given to ourself; we do not give ourselves to ourselves; we only begin to give ourselves to ourselves, subsequent to being given to ourselves.”[5] This acknowledgement of the metaxological, the givenness of being, recognizes the drive to exploit equivocity (otherness) in the drive to univocity. We would do away with the gifting Other in the attempt to be both bestower and beneficiary. “This taking does not consent to the other, does not wait upon the consent of the other. Taking like this is thus like stealing or sacking or raping. We speak of ‘taking’ in another person, or being ‘taken in,’ that is, deceiving or being deceived. ‘Taking’ is thus also at the origin of deceit and being false. Is this not one reason why Satan was called ‘the father of lies’?”[6] Out of greed for eternal life we create hell, and refuse the gift as the offering that it is. “Hell is the will to be one’s own creator and creation in one, and by the denial that anything at all is given to one, least of all one’s own self. Hell is the fiction of absoluteness that ontological ingratitude secretes.”[7]

Desmond’s fourfold way of thinking about metaphysics is a definition or overall description, but also what might be described as orientations or misorientations when presumed to be isolated or singular ways unto themselves.[8] As he puts it, “They are not to be understood purely chronologically, though phases of human self-becoming may dominantly give prominence to one rather than the other. They give expression to orientations to being, communications from being, potencies of our being in the between, each with a promise that can be more or less realized or developed.”[9] They are a description of a dynamic interplay. “As formings they have their own dynamic but they can pass into each other, appear and recede, interrupt and continue, diminish and augment each other. The promise of one or each may be recessed but is not necessarily negated by the overt predominance of another.”[10] With passage through these ways, there is the possible development of a discernment, or a certain finesse or fitness for living, but this life is not without its passage through death. “We each may have to sweat blood with this tormenting question, urgently and as singulars, each of us suffering, like Jesus, our own night in Gethsemane garden.”[11]

The Metaxological Dialectic

For example, an over-determinate focus on the univocal might consign to a distant God, the transcendent, or simply the law, the singular significance of being, so that sameness or unity overrides immanence and difference. This could be describing a form of theology, in which the significance of the incarnation is overridden by God’s sovereignty, or in a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame it describes one of the primary forms of human sickness – a punishing servitude of the superego, the law, or the perverse father figure. It is not that the univocal is always sick, but the drive for determinate solutions might result in a science or a person reduced to absolute law. On the other hand, the equivocal, focused as it is on difference and diversity might so focus on absolute difference or opposition that being itself is thought not to cohere, or in personal terms the self is divided against itself in continual agonistic opposition. A religion built on dualism, or a philosophy split within itself, or a house divided, cannot stand. The third way, the dialectical sense is focused on mediating and reintegrating difference, such as that between mind and being, but as a self-mediated effort this tends to lead to a stress on self-determination, and as in the philosophy of Hegel it falls, according to Desmond, completely in the immanent realm or upon the notion of complete synthesis or sameness.

These three ways, as Desmond emphasizes, are not really discrete, but facets of an interlocking way which, when truncated, tend to reduce to the same thing. Absolute difference is an impossibility that collapses back into sameness. That is, there is an inevitability in these three ways that imply the others, no matter if there is an attempted suppression. The “attempt” of the metaxological is to not give way to absolute sameness or difference, nor to imagine these can be self-mediated. This is not onto-theology nor foundationalism in the modern sense of reduction to a univocal reason, nor is it a postmodern relinquishment to difference and deconstruction, nor is it the Hegelian mode of dialectics, which would reduce to total synthesis and immanence, but it is an acknowledgement of the truth and inadequacy of each of these ways. Taken all together, “The fourfold sense of being offers an interlocking set of articulations of transcendence—both the transcending of mind and the transcendence of being, and without the closure of either to ultimate transcendence.”[12] This seems to be on the order of a dialectics, that in Desmond’s description takes us beyond dialectics.

Desmond has a deep appreciation for Hegel’s dialectic, and as I have traced it in Eriugena (here), the presumption that dialectics can be done rightly. Hegel, in his estimate, has missed the mark, but Hegel helped him appreciate that dialectics draws out a necessary relation even in seeming contradiction. “Dialectic quickens mindfulness of this togetherness, intermediating a more faithful vigilance of the ontological promise of the ethos. We must explore dialectic’s ‘thinking beyond’ of opposition.”[13] Dialectics can help dissolve a false univocity or a misunderstood absolute difference and come to a new appreciation, with Hegel, of the subject. God however, cannot simply be equated with the powers of dialectic or equated with the between, so the metaxological appreciates the power of dialectic and its limitations.

In short, Desmond’s fourth way, the metaxological is an embrace of the dialectical, but with a difference. It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[14] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context. Desmond describes the metaxological as referencing the immediacy of the happening of being. It is the circumstance of finding ourself in the world, so it is our immediate circumstance, but it is the openness to the other or different mediations beyond the self. As he sums up, “The metaxological sense keeps open the spaces of otherness in the between, and it does not domesticate the ruptures that shake the complacencies of our mediations of being.”[15] The astonishment of being is not to be domesticated or reduced, but is to be kept alive as the truth of metaphysics.

The Four Ways as the Movement of the Subject

Though Desmond’s first three ways may describe discrete periods of history, or a focus in philosophy or religion, psychoanalytically they would seem to reduce to the same problem, and that is the loss of the mediating and transcendent other. That is, described as movements within the self, the drive to being or univocity creates the Big Other of God or the law or the punishing superego, which splits the self in an antagonistic dualism, which one spends their life attempting to dialectically mediate. One would like to get rid of this obscene Other, and escape the fracturing of the world this entails, but the physician simply cannot heal herself. Ontotheology, foundationalism, modernism, and postmodernism are certainly discrete epochs, but they share the problem of the human sickness which, as Desmond describes the fall, is the collapse of a metaxological openness, and the attempt or event of being one’s own mediator.

We have been “taken,” by ourselves perhaps, but what is lost is realization of the agapeic origins of life, the sanctuary of nature in its divine givenness, or simply the astonishment of being. In striving to be gods we become our own tormenting devil. “In the turn to self, what has turned up is the devouring worm in innerness itself. We ourselves are consumed by this worm, consumed by ourselves. We are the inversion: the power that dedivinizes itself in the very act of divinizing itself.”[16] Desmond describes it as the opening of the rapport with death as we have realized not the power of divinization but of negation. “Do we create death or are we created by death? Does it matter how we answer, if death is the truth of being when the face of God has faded?”[17] Death becomes the controlling impetus in a life of self-consumption. “There closes in on itself the circle of self-laceration and torment. Look what strange animals we humans have become, we who tear the flesh of our own being into strips, we who eat ourselves in this monstrous evening, we who even this bright morning went forth from our caves glowing with ourselves as our own sun?”[18] It is not that other people are hell; this misses the infernal nature of the I turned upon itself. “I am hell. I am the excremental self that eats excrement, myself as excrement. Lucifer, son of the morning, bearer of light, excretes not light but an infernal equivocity.”[19] Grounding the self in the self, metaphysical striving, brings equivocity into play in the drive to univocity, and this dialectic of death is the descent into hell in my would-be heavenly ascent.

But even to describe this descent in the way of Desmond, is to have the perspective of the metaxological. It is to recognize that falling into the pit may bring about metanoia, or a knowing beyond the self. To be driven to extremes and desperation is perhaps to be awakened through our wretchedness to that which is beyond us. “The horror is secreted in the inward otherness of our selving – here the excess in self of selving that turns to the infernal.”[20] Perhaps becoming a self requires some time in hell or purgatory, and isn’t this also part of the four ways? “Who doubts that human beings can be infernal, but can we make sense of the infernal outside of religion? Is being mindful of evil inseparable from being mindful of God: God as either violated, or horribly turned away, or withheld in the midst of being we otherwise would think of as good?”[21] Recognition of the possibility of evil comes with the recognition of God, for there is no evil in a universe devoid of absolute goodness.

The failure to master the equivocal holds the potential to awaken to what is beyond it. “Seen so, the purgatory of the equivocal helps create a new humility. Rocked back on ourselves as not God, we step on a thorny path to God, or from.”[22] We may learn to laugh at our hubris and to mock the idols we have constructed, such that the passage through the univocal/equivocal dialectic may turn out to be preparation for the mataxological. “Will we find ourselves? Find ourselves in ourselves but as awakening to a dialogue with God in innerness; find ourselves always beyond ourselves, and in what is beyond us, even as within us?”[23] There is the possibility, not in the Nietzschean sense, of going beyond good and evil, to a sense of overflowing mercy and justice. Desmond appeals to the parable of the vineyard to describe this beyond. “The Father of Jesus gives in excess of the measure; there is no measure that is proportioned to human exactitude; all are given their due, and more again – and in a sense, nothing is due, for all is gift.”[24]

Divinization Through the Agapeic Origin

The very possibility of the dialectic passage points to its ground in agapeic love. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic. That space of empowered openness witnesses to the porosity of the between and the allowance of both the passio essendi and the conatus essendi.”[25] The very possibility of the passion of being and the drive to control this passion point to a God-endowed freedom, which holds out both the possibility of refusal and acceptance and fusing with this agapeic origin. “Agapeic letting be creates a space of openness for finite freedom: finite freedom is empowered with the highest possibility of self-transcending, and so is itself the promise of being agapeic.”[26] As he describes in his article on eschatology, there is the promise of wholeness, a “threading together the middle, the beginning and the end” to which we must remain open, and this is why “the God of the between” must be thought of “as a God beyond the between, a God whose wholeness is agapeic.”[27] This God is not a conceivable wholeness but can only be approached in “wording the between.” “Such an agapeic God is other than and beyond the God of the whole, recurrently perhaps more consoling to philosophers.”[28]

Desmond likens the metaxological to divinization, and perhaps the entire course can be counted as fully entering into and appreciating that it is the agapeic God that is being communicated. We begin to “think God” as the
clogged “porosity” of our being opens up and we become mindful, open and patient to this communication, all the time recognizing these depths are not fathomable. There is no “apodeictic certainty” but only this patient minding on the order of prayer. “One starts there; one ends there; more determinacy is possible in the middle. With God one is always divining.”[29] So one remains in the middle, divining, realizing, but not determining. “There is no point at which divination of the gist gives over entirely to clear and distinct determination alone. One is always in the dark even as the brightness grows. One listens for the unspoken in the spoken, and the spoken beyond the unspoken, and the silence reserved in both the spoken and unspoken.”[30] Desmond describes an awakening or “resurrection of astonishment” which is an appreciation of the “too muchness” of being. The initial child-like wonder which gave way to pursuit of univocity and entrapment to equivocity also describes a spiraling into a kind of boredom with the world. The second astonishment is not like the first which we have unwittingly squandered. “The second refreshed astonishment is born out of the known and knowing pathos of the between. In despite of our being stressed by the extremities of receiving and loss, the gift of an overdeterminate joy in being flares up: primal passio essendi.”[31] We can call upon it as a form of prayer, but it is not to be commanded.

As a boy, I remember the frustration of times in the literal desert, which previously had imparted deep joy, but which could not be called upon at a whim. Desmond calls this desire to command, a kind of idolatry. We must patiently wait, perhaps in the midst of suffering in a literal or metaphorical desert. “When this joy comes it is offered as a godsend.”[32] We must be exposed to the darkness perhaps, to appreciate the light. We must have a prognosis of the disease to even recognize the cure. “The waters rise to our neck, and above it; the words of appeal we would were prayers come out instead as gurgled mumbles as we drown. In being shattered, is there ingression? In breakdown, breakthrough? In dying, life?”[33] Suffering and agony and even enduring evil, bear directly on realization of participation in agapeic love.

The goodness of being, specifically recognized in Gethsemane and Golgotha enact in the patience of Christ, divine redemption. “The last moments of Christ suggest that in the desolation of abandonment, and in being bereft, there is release beyond abandonment, a different abandon to the good of God. His life is given up to another, the final “yes” releasing self from clinging to its own absoluteness, giving itself over to the Father.”[34] In following Christ, participating in his redemption all that is asked is an affirmation a “yes.” “Yes: that our dying be our birth into gratitude for being as gift, gratitude no matter what comes in the narrow grave, perhaps nothing, perhaps resurrection, perhaps transfiguration. Love is entrusted to the goodness of the origin in trusting beyond the measure of finitude.”[35] We have the hope of an “infinite saving” or life beyond evil and suffering, and this is redemption: “Living the service of agapeic being, even in the undergoing of the ultimate suffering of death. God shows the living of agapeic being, in the ‘yes’ to the good of being, even in the nihilation of finite life which death brings. There is a ‘yes’ beyond death. Redemption is living beyond the threat of death: life beyond death, in life itself, in death itself.”[36] That is, this is not simply life after death, but life itself into which we “are reborn in the life of agapeic service.”[37]

In sum: the movements of Desmond’s metaxological metaphysics are grounded in this thinking of God as the eternal agapeic origin of being: “always already having given the other its being as for itself – and the giving of ‘coming to be’ is not its own coming to be but is given for the other as finite creation that comes to be.”[38] Agapeic love is the eternal source pouring out being into otherness, and this is the gift of time, of goodness, and of coming to be.[39] Movement through the metaxological dialectic has its end (and beginning) in agapeic divinization.

[1] William Desmond, God and the Between (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) 85.

[2] God and the Between, 85.

[3] God and the Between, 88.

[4] God and the Between, 85.

[5] God and the Between, 85.

[6] God and the Between, 85.

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

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

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

[10] God and the Between, 122.

[11] God and the Between, 145.

[12] Reader, location 314.

[13] God and the Between, 92.

[14] Reader, location 295.

[15] Reader, 302.

[16] God and the Between, 86.

[17] God and the Between, 86.

[18] God and the Between, 86.

[19] God and the Between, 86.

[20] God and the Between, 149.

[21] God and the Between, 149.

[22] God and the Between, 89.

[23] God and the Between, 90.

[24] God and the Between, 186.

[25] God and the Between, 149.

[26] God and the Between, 149.

[27] William Desmond, “On the Edge: Philosophical Thoughts on Theology and Eschatology” in The Heythrop Journal (HeyJ 00 (2026), PP. 1–16), 4.

[28] On the Edge, 4.

[29] God and the Between, 120.

[30] God and the Between, 120.

[31] God and the Between, 121.

[32] God and the Between, 121.

[33] God and the Between, 121.

[34] God and the Between, 187.

[35] God and the Between, 187.

[36] God and the Between, 196.

[37] God and the Between, 196.

[38] God and the Between, 297.

[39] God and the Between, 297.

Understanding William Desmond Through John Scotus Eriugena

As I noted in my previous blog (here) in his intellectual autobiography, Wayward and Homebound,[1] William Desmond accounts for his thought of betweenness (metaxology) as arising from his Irish roots, but beyond the various circumstantial conditions of language, geography, and politics, the central figure in what it means to be philosophically and theologically Irish, not just for Desmond but for Irish intellectuals such as Richard Kearney and Thomas Duddy, is the Irish philosopher and theologian John Scottus Eriugena (c. 815-877). The thought of John the Irish-Irish (as both Scottus and Eriugena might be translated), is the opposite of and should not be confused with the later John Duns Scotus. His thought can be traced though Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Dionysius, and Maximus, and thus it is no surprise that it was the early Hegelians who were among those who rediscovered Eriugena. Here is the Irish version of the Eastern understanding of theosis, panentheism, and idealism. And perhaps for the same reasons (and accusations of heresy), Eriugena was excluded from the main western philosophical and theological tradition, helping produce a distinctive Celtic religious sensibility of betweenness. “He navigated between here and elsewhere, peregrine not only between Ireland and Europe, but between Greek and Latin, between Athens and Jerusalem. . . He is peregrine religiously and philosophically: between the Jewish exodus and the promised homeland of the Father; between the Neoplatonic going out and coming home, exitus and reditus, pro[h]odos and epistrophē.”[2]

It is not simply epistemology but ontology which is on the move for Eriugena: “Eriugena traces the etymology of theos to both ‘I see, θεωρῶ’ and ‘I run, θέω’ (Periphyseon, 452B15–452D32).”[3] “He makes all things run from a state of non-existence into one of existence” – suggesting divine energy is a dynamic field of theophany.[4] For Eriugena, the transcendent God or the unknown God is primary, and Desmond affirms God’s absolute transcendence as the “unknown” God, not only beyond being but beyond nonbeing. However, the Word/world is God’s self-articulation, the procession of God which can be termed a “self-creation”, or a procession from out of darkness and non-being into the light. Speaking the Word, who is at once eternal and filling all of time, there is an immanent universal available to every subject. “The whole of reality or nature, is involved in a dynamic process of outgoing (exitus) from and return (reditus) to the One. God is the One or the Good or the highest principle, which transcends all, and which therefore may be said to be ‘the non-being that transcends being’.”[5] This creation ex-nihilo is unfolding in the incarnation, and according to Dermot Moran, “Creation ex nihilo means God’s own self-creation, His self-manifestation in theophanies, His movement from darkness to light.”[6]

Following Maximus, the incarnation is the exitus that can be equated with creation: creation is incarnation (and vice versa, incarnation is creation). “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). Eriugena develops this understanding “to construct a deep correspondence between epistemology and ontology. Thus, Maximus’ cosmic Christology based on the Logos-logoi ontology, offers Eriugena a framework which allows him to expand the use of dialectic from mere method to a cosmic framework which underlies both epistemology and ontology.”[7] According to Moran, for Eriugena, “The process of creation is, at the same time, the process of the begetting of the Word, or the simple exclamation of the word in divine speech (clamor Dei). . . God is really ‘not other’ than the world, and creation is ‘not other’ than God.”[8] In turn, Desmond’s metaxology is both epistemology and ontology, which like Eriugena’s philosophy is a dialectic, bringing together what dualistic thinking separates into opposites. For John, “There is a companionable betweening of philosophy and theology” as “God is above all encapsulation, and hence transcendent, other than the finite world, and yet there is an immanence between God and creation. All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[9]

Eriugena, though, like Origen and Maximus, is in danger of being misunderstood, of working in the same manner (real or imagined) as Hegel, in that he speaks of God creating himself through the world. “It follows that we ought not to understand God and the creature as two things distinct from one another, but as one and the same. For both the creature, by subsisting, is in God; and God, by manifesting Himself, in a marvellous and ineffable manner creates Himself in the creature.”[10] As with I Corinthians 15.28 God will be all in all or John 1.3-4, all things are in God as life, are phrases that appear frequently in Eriugena, following Dionysius, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. Or as Echart and Nicholas of Cusa assert, God is in all things and all things are God. This is more than as assertion of God’s omnipresence but neither is it pantheism. If one recognizes with Origen and Maximus (and not Hegel, in Desmond’s reading) that transcendence is preserved along with immanence, then one can rightly speak of the “between” of creation as divine.

God is manifest in the Word, in creation, but this manifestation is not determinate or final. In the between there is the too-muchness or “the overdetermination appearing and receding in the determinate and the self-determining: because appearing communicated, because receding elusive, and yet always suggestive of more than every determination and our self-determination.”[11] Eriugena was wrongly accused of teaching the identity of God and the created world, which though mistaken, gets at the radical turn of his thought. As Moran points out, “This, of course, is only one side of Eriugena’s doctrine; his Dionysian negative theology also asserted the absolute transcendence of God.”[12] As he concludes, “Eriugena is not a pantheist, and his strong monistic statements concerning the identity of divinity and creation are always counterbalanced by assertions of the absolute difference between God and creation.”[13]

The theophanous manifestation of God occurs within a negative dialectic in which non-being, ex-nihilo transcends being. “We might speak of the nothing through excellence (nihil per excellentiam, nihil per infinitatem) and the nothing through privation (nihil per privationem), and still further a phrase that keeps recurring in his work is: plus quam, ‘more than.’”[14] This is not an absolute knowing but a humility always open to more, arising from nothing. God is beyond denial and affirmation, “an above God Godhead.” As Desmond notes, for Eriugena, “In some degree all being is theophanous”[15] but this theophany points beyond what is manifest, as “the world is God’s own self-othering, an intermediate moment in the circular process by which God is brought back into unity with self.”[16]

For Maximus, there is an ongoing synthesis in the body of Christ, which not only accounts for the deification of the Christian but is the means for cosmic deification: “The ‘body of Christ is either the soul, or its powers, or senses, or the body of each human being, or the members of the body, or the commandments, or the virtues, or the inner principles of created beings, or, to put it simply and more truthfully, each and all of these things, both individually and collectively, are the body of Christ” (Amb. 54.2). The body of Christ is the body of “each human being” it is the “virtues” or “the inner principles of created beings.” Eriugena’s anthropology follows Maximus’ insight that the human being, like Christ, synthesizes all aspects of creation as the “workshop of creation.”

He speaks of knowledge and training of the mind as a spiritual exercise, an understanding which might be said to characterize Desmond’s entire corpus.[17] The Periphyseon is a sort of spiritual exercise: “the goal of exercitatio is to contemplate nature in the right way in order to repair the fragmentation of creation by achieving a unified vision and thus realize the return of all things to their divine source.”[18] There is a synthesis in nature, for Desmond and Eriugena, as it intersects with the divine and is divinized, and though Eriugena, like Origen and Maximus, employs Neoplatonism, this is clearly an overcoming of the Neoplatonic distrust of fleshly reality. The human being mediates between the divine causes and the created effects, and Christ, the fully human one, assumes the full cosmic scope of mediation and unification: “through the incarnation of Christ the Logos, the universal human nature and through it the rest of creation is unified, redeemed and ultimately divinized.”[19] Though this is a historical and even a natural realization, (“All turns on the nature of this intimate between.”[20]) it is at the same time transcendent.

The distinction from Hegel, which Desmond brings out, is that in Eriugena God exceeds comprehension and does not even comprehend Himself, as to comprehend is “to render determinate, and God exceeds all delimitation, including all comprehensive determination.”[21] God is at once “no-thing” or nothing and more than all things. There is no final synthesis. This “more than,” for Desmond, “is indicative of a difference with Hegelian immanence, beyond which there is nothing more.”[22] John proleptically includes the Hegelian dialectic, but is not simply a philosopher of immanence, but the passage to transcendence from out of immanence is marked, like the thought of Desmond, as being between: between being and nothing, the apophatic and kataphatic, the transcendent and immanent. This betweenness is the movement of God, from out of Himself and returning to Himself, and it is not Hegel’s settled Wholeness or univocity, realized without transcendence. “In Eriugena there is exceeding transcendence as there is exceeding immanence.”[23]

Desmond notes that there may be the temptation with Eriugena’s dialectic, as with Hegel, to close the metaxu: “if the whole is only the betweening of God with Godself, we are tempted with a desire to close the circle of divine self-relating, such that the thought of absolute unity can overtake all other thoughts, even the thought of the between.”[24] Though there is exit from and return to the One “there is the always-ever-superlatively-surplus-more of the One”[25] and human participation in this One reflects this continual excess. “The idea of the human (homo) transcends any simple univocity of determinate essence. He exhibits the overdeterminate unity of contradictory determinations; as an image of God as beyond comprehension, man infinitely surpasses man (to echo Pascal).”[26] Humans created in the image of God found in Christ are realizing this image, and this process, is without end. “Wayward and homebound, metaxologically back and forth, going forth and coming back, within the whole, but yet opened beyond the immanent whole: can one think here of a relation to the Apocalyptic betweening of the ‘already and not yet’?”[27]

This betweening however is not to be resolved in a final realization (or synthesis), and this seems to mark Desmond’s departure from Eriugena. Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ. Eriugena envisions a final return which will abolish all difference but Desmond suggests the need to think metaxu differently: “does the between keep open the space of difference, and this now as the distance (di-stans: standing by two, bij twee, betweonum) wherein we can come to love all, even God, and be loved, even by God?”[28] He appeals to William Butler Yeats’ “Crazy Jane” to make the point: “Going outside or returning inside, passing along the way or passing away, being exiled or repatriated, there is a constancy in passage, a constancy in distance, and all things remain in God, not as in a circle closed into itself but as a porous intermedium of coming and going. I do not come across self-circling with Crazy Jane.”[29]

Desmond also sees it illustrated in Celtic crosses: “We are drawn to the circular patterns there, but the effect is more one of crisscrossing. There is a liminal in-betweenness of interwoven patterning in which beginning and end are hard to separate.”[30] As with Maximus, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. “Crossing oneself, one comes across oneself, and more than oneself.”[31] The movement of God and the movement of the self are eternal in their coming and going and being stretched out. Desmond also likens it to a labyrinth, “There is something infinite, beyond every whole, in the traversing. While amazing, the between as labyrinthine has no simple center and no circular closure. It has to be crossed, crisscrossed, again and again.”[32] There is no exiting desire and satisfaction in God, but only a continual growth in agape love or theosis.

The work of William Desmond, understood against the background of Eriugena, locates his work as part of a distinct tradition, largely absent in the western context. Eriugena, like Maximus, is working out the details of Athanasius’ formula, “God became man that man might become god.” Apocatastasis or theosis seems to likewise characterize Desmond’s metaxology, the working principle of the cosmos and God in which transcendence and immanence are an unfolding realization, in which God would be all in all (creation is incarnation). Desmond may not venture as far as Richard Kearney, but they are on a similar path in their reading of Eriugena, in which humanity acts as God’s co-creator. As Kearney puts it, “The basic thinking was this: divinity possibilises, humanity realises. God is not but may be—on condition that we show up and respond to the unconditional call for love and justice on this earth.”[33] Desmond’s between, as I am understanding him, is this same disruption of binary thought, which with Eriugena and Kearney (to say nothing of John, Paul, Origen, Dionysius and Maximus) would remake our conceptions of God and reality.

(Register for the course, Metaxology, taught by William Desmond, which will cover the philosophy and theology of William Desmond as it applies to ethics, aesthetics, peace, and the Christian life. The course will run from 2026/6/20–2026/9/19. Sign up here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: Suny Press, 2025).

[2] Ibid, 95.

[3] Ibid, 96.

[4] Ibid.

[5] John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Thu Aug 28, 2003; substantive revision Wed Oct 30, 2019).

[6] Dermot Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 236

[7] John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

[8] Dermot Moran, “Nature, Man and God in the Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena,” in The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions, Editor Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985) 236.

[9] Wayward, 30-31.

[10] John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon, vol. 3, 678c, cited in Moran, The Irish Mind, 91.

[11] Wayward, 138.

[12] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 88.

[13] Moran, The philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, 89.

[14] Wayward, 31.

[15] Wayward, 30.

[16] Wayward, 31.

[17] This is the way Ryan Duns characterizes Desmond’s work. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018).

[18] Stanford Encyclopedia.

[19] Wayward, 31.

[20] Ibid, 30

[21] Ibid,31.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 32.

[28] Ibid, 32-33.

[29] Ibid, 33.

[30] Ibid, 32

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Richard Kearney, “My Way to Theopoetics Through Eriugena,”in Literature & Theology (Vol. 33. No. 3, September 2019, pp. 233–240 doi:10.1093/litthe/frz019) 233.

Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1909) 260.

[2] Ibid.

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

[4] Desmond, 325.

[5] Desmond, 326.

[6] Desmond, 326.

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

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

[9] Desmond, 322-323.

[10] Desmond, 323.

[11] Desmond, 324.

[12] Desmond, 325.

[13] Desmond, 325.

[14] Desmond, 332

[15] Desmond, 347.

[16] Desmond, 347.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid, 113.

[3] Ibid, 113.

[4] Ibid, 117.

[5] Ibid, 117.

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

[7] Ibid.

[8] Encyclopedia, 84.

[9] Ibid.

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

[11] Ibid, 233.

[12] Ibid, 85.

[13] Ibid, 87.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid, 206-207.

[16] Ibid, 66.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 221.

[2o] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, xiv.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid, xiv.

[24] Ibid, 224.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 256.

[28] Ibid, 224.

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

Eucharist as the Nonviolent Reality of the Temple Rite: From Anthony Bartlett to Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Jesus’ recapitulation of the Temple is taken up in the Lord’s Supper, in which the Passover and the Day of Atonement are transformed in the meaning of the Eucharistic meal. The synoptics are in agreement in their presentation of this last meal as a celebration of the Passover Seder (Mark 14:12-16; Matt 26:17-19; Luke 22:7-13). The disciples ask Jesus specifically, “Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?” (Matt 26:17). Whatever the various changes of meaning, changes in time, and specifics of the rite that are developed in Jesus’ version of the meal, it begins as a Passover meal. Jesus acts with a creative freedom in all of his activity and teaching surrounding Israel and the Temple, but the specific leverage and shift in meaning may be made most concretely obvious in his recapitulation of the Passover meal.

This helps explain John’s alternative account, in which the meal occurred before the Passover (John 19:14: Jesus’ trial and execution are on the day of preparation for the Passover). In the spirit of the liberty of Christ, John has Jesus dying while the Passover lambs are being sacrificed (after which is usually the Passover). Clearly theology and not chronology are the main point, and in each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[1] Matthew is probably following Mark, but he also makes several modifications, adding that the “blood poured out for many” (Mk 14:24) is for “forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). Both are echoing Isaiah 53:12, “he poured out his life unto death” setting the overall pericope in that of the suffering servant. The language of “poured out” is also an allusion to the sacrifices in the Temple (e.g., Lev 4:7, 18, 25, 30, 34)[2] but Matthew in linking the Passover meal specifically to the suffering servant and to the Temple cult, poses a different sort of forgiveness, which in the Temple rite is achieved through an atoning sacrifice.

The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ. The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. As Anthony Bartlett points out, “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the “life was in the blood” and the life belonged to God alone.”[3] Which may be part of the point; this is no longer a sacrifice, but it is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God.

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle. He is now the lamb sacrificed, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[4] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice, as even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[5]

Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love.

Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[6] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning is focused on its sacrifices but he is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[7]

The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[8] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ.

Martin Luther recognizes it is not the elements which are transformed but the human imagination and heart, which certainly involves embodiment. But with the Counter-Reformation, it may no longer be a point of disagreement but of emphasis. In the description of American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh, the body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[9] An over-spiritualized emphasis may imagine the event in terms of an inward reception, rather than involving a holistic, embodied performance.

On the other hand, focus on the material elements alone may also miss this embodied holism. As G.W.F. Hegel describes, it was a degraded understanding surrounding the Eucharist that spurred the Reformation. “The Church whose office it is to save souls from perdition, makes this salvation itself a mere external appliance, and is now degraded so far as to perform this office in a merely external fashion.”[10] Hegel recounts the selling of indulgences so as to build St. Peter’s, and he describes Luther as turning away from the mere sensuous and external, to issues of the “Spirit and the Heart” or what he calls “Absolute Ideality.” “Luther’s simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of Deity — infinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ — is in no way present and actual in an outward form, but as essentially spiritual is obtained only in being reconciled to God — in faith and spiritual enjoyment.”[11]

Focus is on the individual, who through faith and the Spirit, is filled with the “Divine Spirit” and not the external transformation of material elements. Ending external focus means “there is no longer a distinction between priests and laymen; we no longer find one class in possession of the substance of the Truth.”[12] The heart of every man can come into possession of the Truth, as an “absolute inwardness.” Hegel does not mean that this inwardness or “Subjectivity” is without its objective side, which is realized in an “actualized Christian Freedom.” “Time, since that epoch, has had no other work to do than the formal imbuing of the world with this principle, in bringing the Reconciliation implicit [in Christianity] into objective and explicit realization.”[13]

Faith and spirituality though, are not focused on a “sensuous object” serving as God, “nor even of something merely conceived, and which is not actual and present, but of a Reality that is not sensuous.”[14] There is the full presence of Christ, but as Hegel points out, this is not faith in a material object or even faith in historical events. “In fact it is not a belief in something that is absent, past and gone, but the subjective assurance of the Eternal, of Absolute Truth, the Truth of God.”[15] This is an achievement of the Holy Spirit, who alone brings about this Truth in the individual, constituting “his essential being.”[16]

For Hegel, this is true Catholicism, having taken away the focus on “externality.” But he is careful to point out that neither is this Calvinism, which reduces the Supper to a “mere commemoration, a mere reminiscence.” Luther’s view, according to Hegel, was that there is an “actual presence though only in faith and in Spirit. He maintained that the Spirit of Christ really fills the human heart — that Christ therefore is not to be regarded as merely a historical person, but that man sustains an immediate relation to him in Spirit.”[17] In Bartlett’s parallel description, “The anamnesis (remembrance) is then a work of semiosis,” that is, the mind and heart, in this mindful remembrance take on a depth of transformed meaning. It is “a day-by-day performance of divine meaning for the sake of human transformation.”[18] Bartlett, a former Catholic priest, sounds very much like Hegel’s Luther.

Jesus as Temple, in the Lord’s Supper, brings together the imagery of “death passing over” in multiple senses. No longer is there the necessity of violent sacrifice, whether that of religion or state, so as to avoid death. Death is no longer the impetus of control (over the Egyptians and humanity) and it is no longer the means of escape, as the Passover of Christ brings about a real deliverance from the clutches of death. The disciples find forgiveness, mercy, and love, through living out or being the body of Christ. This is the new non-ritualistic and non-sacrificial or “spiritual sacrifice” practiced in this new Temple of Living Stones (I Pet 2:5). As Bartlett sums it up, “At the end of the walk to Emmaus, and a dense catechesis showing the necessity of the Messiah’s suffering and non-retaliation, something happened; the living reality of this nonviolent Lord found its breakthrough point in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:35).”[19]

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 168.

[2] Norman O. Francis, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple and its Cult in the Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy Thesis: The University of Edinburgh 2020) 229-230. There are discrepancies between when exactly the Festival of Unleavened Bread and Passover occurred, but the consensus is that by the first century the two festivals may have been fused.

[3] Bartlett, 171.

[4] Ibid, 170-171.

[5] Ibid, 171.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 172.

[9] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 229.

[10] G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (Kitchener, Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001) 432.

[11] Ibid, 433.

[12] Ibid, 434-435.

[13] Ibid, 435.

[14] Ibid, 433.

[15] Ibid, 434.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Barlett, 173,

[19] Ibid.

Jesus as the Answer to Nothing or the Alpha and Omega: The Jesus Logic of Robert Jenson

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that he became “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name seems to me here not to ring true.”[1] He describes something like a feeling of disgust at religious jargon (he says “I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable”).[2] When I see billboards or bumper stickers advertising “Jesus is the Answer” or “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” I get a similar feeling. I am suspicious of the question Jesus might be thought to answer, or the “reason” behind such sloganeering. The language is largely unintelligible. As Robert Jenson has noted, this is true not simply of slogans but “That Christianity’s language about God has become unintelligible to its hearers is finally apparent also to us who speak it – in that we find it increasingly unintelligible to ourselves.”[3] The sloganeering like much of popular religion, seems to be on the order of “Coke is It” – spoken with enough force by enough smiling people the product is consumed for an unspecified “it” factor. To ask after the meaning is already to have missed the point. The implication is Coke/Jesus will bring on a certain toothy happiness, devoid of specifics and requiring a hollow intensity of “faith.” This Jesus answers nothing and does nothing, and yet rather than assume this name is a cipher, preachers and believers blindly committed to the faith, increase the intensity of the sloganeering. It cannot be admitted the meaning is uncertain, as this implies it may have no meaning.

The problem is not that too much is made of Christ. As Jenson has noted, much of Christian thought is falsely construed as part of a “possessed rationality” in which an idea, an image, or a mental picture serves in place of the person of the Logos and this results in human striving toward God, rather than a reception of the Word. From his Lutheran context, this is “works righteousness” – with focus on ascent to God, rather than on a relinquishing of human logic. The Logos is not received on the basis of an already possessed logic, as if the Word is one word among many. This Word which establishes all of creation and which is its fulfillment, is an order of reality which exceeds human speaking and thinking, as it is the summation and creation of reality. As Michael Brain has written of Jenson, “All of the disparate words of creation coalesce into one: the Word of God, whom Jenson identifies exactly with the person of Jesus Christ.”[4] This is not a Word subject to verification by other means, or testable according to scientific positivism, but is a Word that surpasses this sort of reason.

On the other hand, this Word is not an abstraction, an analogy or an image, but a person. Brain maintains, “Jenson emphatically taught the unqualified and exhaustive identity of the Word with this person, for the Word that establishes creation in the beginning is the exact history of Jesus in our midst and the Kingdom he enacts. Creation has its being from the historical life of Jesus Christ, from 1 to 30 A.D., so that statements of reality are true insofar as they narrate the story of Jesus as both the story of God and the story of creation.”[5] Of course, this makes no sense according to a reason built on the logic of cause and effect, in which the life of Christ is subsequent to the eternal life of God, but neither does a suffering God, a God that is human and is born, a God that experiences time and history, or a God who in Christ grows in wisdom and stature.

In Jenson’s reading and expansion upon Maximus, he maintains the Logos is “a triune identity” (tropos hyparxeos): “he is a subsisting relation to the Father, the subsisting relation of being begotten.”[6] Jenson recognizes that to follow Maximus, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[7] If God the Son suffered, then one of the Trinity suffered, and if one of the Trinity suffered, then God suffered. “We may still apprehend paradox in his position, but the paradox is now not that the presumed impassible Logos suffers, but that the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[8] As Maximus states it, he is “Suffering God.”[9]

Jenson, following Maximus and Origen and deploying a metaphor of Augustine, asserts a peculiar first century understanding, that the Trinitarian God is accomplishing his identity in Christ. Deploying Augustine’s psychological analogy, God the Father is like “consciousness” or the locus of awareness, while God the Son is as God’s “ego,” the “diachronically identifiable individual” while the Holy Spirit is God’s freedom. God in Christ is not a disembodied logos asarkos, but the historical person Jesus.[10] “The second identity of God is directly the human person of the gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[11] Jesus find his “I” “in the same way that other human beings do – or, rather, that other humans find their ‘I’ and are free” as he is and does.[12] “This human personality is then an identity of God in that before the Father in the Spirit he lives the mutual life that God is. . .”[13]

According to David Bruner, “A Father without a Son – that is, without an incarnate son of the kind Jenson specifies – would be the same as an apparatus of mental perception without any lived history.”[14] God would have no lived content or actuality and Trinity and theology are rendered abstract and unintelligible. For Jenson, apart from the historical Jesus, God would not be who he is, Trinity would not be a fact about God, and the love of God or the very definition of God would not be the case. This is a paradoxical logic which accounts for the synthesis found in Christ between God and human, between Creator and creation, which is definitive of the personhood and love of God. This paradoxical, cosmic, synthesizing, love of God found in Christ, is directly accessible and intelligible.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42. The title of this blog was inspired by Jordan Wood’s lecture 8 on Maximus at PBI, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-and-the-love-of-god-in-synthesis-personhood-and-humility/

[2] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[3] Robert Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 3.

[4] Michael Raymond Brain, The Metaphysics of the Gospel: Christ, Reality, and Ecumenism in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Toronto: Wycliffe College Dissertation, 2023) 70.

[5] Brain, 70.

[6] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 136

[7] Ibid, 137.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Maximus, Ambigua, 91:1037B, quoted in Jenson, Ibid.

[10] David Bruner, “Jenson, Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 21 Number 3 July 2019) 317.

[11] Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 137, Cited in Bruner, Ibid.

[12] Jenson, Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bruner, Ibid, 317.

Hegel’s Reconciliation: A New Form of Divine Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid, 61.

[3]Ibid, 61.

[4] Ibid, 64.

[5] Ibid, 62.

[6] Ibid, 63.

[7] Ibid, 64.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 65.

[10] Ibid, 171-172.

[11] Ibid, 206

[12] Ibid, 206.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 213.

[15] Ibid, 110.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 132.

[18] Ibid, 65

[19] Ibid, 66.

[20] Ibid, 31.

[21] Ibid, 42-43.

[22] Ibid, 45.

Reflections on the Impact of Jürgen Moltmann on My Theological Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Moltmann, 307.

[4] Ibid, 313

[5] Ibid, 307.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 312.

[8] Ibid, 313.

[9] Ibid, 1.

[10] Ibid, 3.

[11] Ibid, 5.

[12] Ibid, 7

[13] Ibid, 10.

[14] Ibid, 37.

[15] Ibid, 214.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 212.

[18] Ibid, 213.

[19] Ibid, 27.

[20] Ibid, 215

[21] Ibid, 216.

[22] Ibid, 223.

[23] Ibid, 23.

[24] Ibid, 14-15.

[25] Ibid, 16.

[26] Ibid, 17.

[27] Ibid, 19.

[28] Ibid, 20.

[29] Ibid, 291.