metaxology – 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.

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.

William Desmond on Being Between: Irish-Wise

As an introduction to William Desmond and the upcoming course Desmond is teaching for PBI, I presumptuously excerpt a small vignette from his most recent work, Wayward and Homebound,[1] in which he describes his philosophy and autobiography as “being between” as part of his being Irish. This work demonstrates how it is Desmond’s philosophy brings together the transcendent and immanent, grounding experience of the infinite in the immanence of subjectivity. I was very taken with his phrase describing this, the “intimate universal,” which he here develops as part of his experience. However, if my reading is any indication, this should spark recognition in everyone. This is partly what he means by “being between,” which he acknowledges may be an off-putting description, but as he describes, it pertains to his Irish experience and by extension to every particular experience, and the universal:

This concern has many dimensions, some more local and intimately rooted in my being Irish, some less localized and crystallized out of wanderings in a more ecumenical space. Being between is itself defined by extremities of intimacy and universality. We are drawn again and again to the question: Is there something like an intimate universal? Is there something in the intimacy of life that, for all its localized character, has something universal about it? Likewise, is there something about the universal that is not sustaining enough food for the soul, if it is only abstract, placeless and faceless? Intimacy risks our being too much there, and we cannot see the wood from the trees. Universality risks being nowhere at all, and in claiming to hover over wood and trees, we come down nowhere, and see neither trees nor wood. Is there a “being between” that is both intimate and universal? How speak about both the intimacy and the universality? Must it be from a position neither inside nor outside, yet both inside and outside; from somewhere in the midst of life, and from a somewhere that is nowhere, since it touches the void whence thinking comes forth and sometimes fructifies?

Does “being between” constitute a condition of Irish thought? We speak of the human condition; or of having a condition, meaning an illness; or of being in condition, meaning being healthy. One might say “being between” is a condition of thought, in a more general sense, but are there Irish conditions of mind that show themselves intimately cognizant of “being between”? Many special offers in Ireland have the proviso attached: Terms and conditions apply. Is “being between” among the terms and conditions presupposed by Irish minding?

Desmond describes his metaxological philosophy as arising from the betweenness of being Irish, which put him between two languages, and then his struggle to learn Dutch in Belgium, causing Irish to rise to the surface, and the feeling of an otherness residing with him. There may be one world but in Desmond’s worlds of experience, Ireland/America/Belgium, he found he could no longer be at home.

I was in the space between, and the between was not to be overcome. It was to be lived with, lived in, and traversed. This space of the between became a leitmotif of my thinking, in which different poles, though there might be communication between them, could not be reduced to a univocal unity or subsumed into a dialectical whole.

Maybe it was my experience of being between multiple places growing up (some ten different moves), recognizing multiple ways of being, and then moving to Japan cast all of these experiences as alien, or what Desmond calls being other. In Japan the constant reminder is that one is a Gaijin, or foreign other. As Desmond puts it:

It was a descent into the marvelous and sometimes horrifying otherness within one, intimate to one’s own selving. Indeed, by being outside the first home, by being no absolute insider in the second home, one comes home to oneself differently, by not-being-at-home. By being thus outside in the between one becomes intimate to the irreducible intermediacy within oneself, within us all, and between us all in the most intimate communications that both bind us together and respect our singular solitudes.

The awakening to the intimate universal captured for me my realization as a young teenager on the Texas prairie, when awakened to God, prayer, and transcendence, a new order of subjectivity grounded in communion, or an infinite communication. Desmond provides a prolonged explanation of this intimate universal, which as with Christ brings together the human and divine, but this Christic experience, is human experience. Desmond doesn’t say it this way exactly, as far as I know, but this is how his description fit my understanding and experience. The discovery of communication with God is a discovery of the ground of thought and communication, which is living and moving in the between, in the intimate universal.

Desmond brings together the rich Irish rootedness of his experience to describe how human experience merges with the divine. If you have not discovered William Desmond, or if you have and want to dive deeper, this course with PBI is a unique opportunity for a life transforming study.

[1] William Desmond, Wayward and Homebound: Irish Betweenings, Philosophical Thought, and Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025) quoting from the section on “Being Between: Irish-wise.

William Desmond’s Completion of Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Taylor, 542.

[3] Taylor, 542.

[4] Taylor, 566.

[5] Taylor, 565.

[6] Taylor, 572.

[7] Taylor, 572.

[8] Taylor, 307.

[9] Taylor, 755.

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

[11] Logic, 33.

[12] Logic, 35.

[13] Logic, 35.

[14] Logic, 36.

[15] Logic, xiv.

[16] Logic, xv.

[17] Logic, 33.

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

[19] Logic, 48.

[20] Logic, 48.

[21] Logic, 48.

[22] Logic, 49.

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

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

[25] Ibid.

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

[27] Duns, 133-134.

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

[29] Duns, 124.

[30] Duns, 33-34.

[31] See Duns explanation, 25-26.

[32] Duns, 133.

[33] Duns, 132.

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

[35] Duns, 30.

[36] Duns, 131