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.