Tag: Slavoj Žižek

Understanding McGilchrist Through Paul, Hegel, and Lacan

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, in his approach to left brain/right brain theory, presumes “each hemisphere is involved in everything” but nonetheless he argues there is a predominant form of thought attached to the different spheres of the brain.[1] It is not that there are absolute differences or that the two spheres of the brain are not continually interdependent, but this does not mean that there are not necessary differences. Afterall, as he points out, “every known creature with a neuronal system, however far down the evolutionary tree one goes, and however far back in time, has a system that is asymmetrical.” This raises the question of his research, “Why on earth would that be, given that the world they are interacting with is not asymmetrical?”[2] This asymmetrical world shows up continually in “subject versus object, alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,” with either the objective and impersonal or the subjective and personal, tending to win out.[3] What I demonstrate throughout is that the categories in which McGilchrist sets his dichotomies (between the two hemispheres) easily convert to the Pauline differentiation between law and Christ with the “incarnation” overcoming “alienation” in the “particular life” of a “singular” man in which the antinomies posed by the two hemispheres, or simply by life, are overcome. I also make the case that the completion of McGilchrist’s theory, the ultimate right-brain synthesis, lies in a particular theological understanding toward which his theory points. Throughout the second half of the book he describes two forms of thought or two ways of “being” reflected in the brain and the mind, one of which I argue, culminates in Hegel’s notion of “absolute knowledge” in and through Christ.

The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[4] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.[5]

Ideally the master or the right side of the brain is served by the left side of the brain, but there is a tendency in history and in the individual to cut short this integrating holism and to become focused on dissecting the details as an end in itself. Modernity, with its focus on scientism, industrialization, mechanics, materialism, information processing, or perhaps a neuro link in which the machinery is inserted directly in the brain, demonstrates how the servant can usurp the role assigned by the master.

As with illness or brain damage, there is a general trend for the left brain to close in on itself and to shut out the world beyond its own projections:

But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings—so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering, not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.[6]

The mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis can become terminal, in its focus on the self, to the exclusion of all else. Rene Descartes is a key example of one who turns to focus on his own thought, attempting to get at the “thinking thing” behind the thought, dissecting, isolating, refusing the body, and focused completely on interior thought. His philosophical focus follows the pattern of modernity, and betrays the same characteristics of (new) forms of mental illness which would arise in this period. In Pauline terms one is enclosed and isolated in the sinful orientation to the law.

One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ. The sickness of the left brain, the bureaucratic disease that would achieve perfection and power seem perfectly illustrated by Pharisaical Paul: one can be a perfect Jew and keep the law blamelessly (Philippians 3:6), which Christian Paul explains, was what made him the chief of sinners (I Tim. 1:15). Power through language or law presents the possibility of a limited whole which can be manipulated, but to maintain this realm it is necessary that it be complete in itself. The tendency is to see all of reality, even God and Christ, as constituted in a closed space, so that there must be an obstacle, warding off the right brain or warding off the limited nature of language and law. In McGilchrist’s description this gives rise to violence and in the case of Paul it accounts for his arresting and killing Christians. The letter, or primary attachment to Scripture and law, functions as an obstacle, killing off the unlimited vagaries of the spirit, in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 3:6).

Rather than an embodied and social language (as in Wittgenstein) the tendency is toward a disembodied Platonism, Cartesianism, or legalism. In a Lacanian sense the symbolic order becomes a realm unto itself, with language taking the predominant role over the imagination, reducing the ego to an object. The symbolic register is the organizing center – the possibility of a subject. The “obstacle cause of desire” is the impossible desire of a desiring self. That is, one is blocked from achieving the desired object and this creates the frustrated agon, that for Lacan is the very definition of the human subject. In Paul’s picture, one serves the law, and imagines law is an end in itself, and there is a basic confusion between God and the law, which is inherently alienating. Paul describes an irresolvable split within himself (Rom. 7:15). This Pauline bilateralism within the ego is reflected in McGilchrist’s picture of how it is that we become an obstacle to ourselves. The left brain cuts off the integrating powers of the right brain in the same way the law cuts off from the person of God or the absolute personal reality of Christ.

The work of Christ, is to suspend the law, sublating or suspending while also preserving and fulfilling. Through Christ Paul escaped the delimited world of the law as in Christ the law is delimited (pointing beyond itself), and human brokenness is not a failure in regard to the law, but the failure, and incompleteness of the law as a guide. Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

The fact that McGilchrist uses the Pauline word describing the suspension of the law in Christ (aufgehoben) indicates that imposing a Christian or Pauline understanding is not foreign to his project. He uses the word in the context of the Hegelian synthesis, in which Hegel deploys Luther’s translation of Paul’s καταργηθῇ, which is a suspension of the punishing effects of the law and its simultaneous preservation. The right brain cannot function apart from the left brain but at the same time it tends to pose an obstacle to its integrating powers. Christ is recognized through the law, through Judaism, through the Scriptures, but taken as their own end these are an obstacle to Christ. The ill effects of sin are when the emissary is thought to be the master. The sin condition, which is a misorientation to the law or a reification of the law, amounts to something like the obstacle the left brain often poses to the right brain. One cannot get rid of the law, any more than function with half a brain, but the ill effects of the law can be suspended in Christ (while the law and Judaism are preserved).

By the same token, it is not that a more holistic (right brain) Romanticism abolishes the Enlightenment or that any particular age is a complete departure from the one that preceded. McGilchrist specifically sights the Hegelian synthesis to express the full integrating power of the right brain. “The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ hold (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis – synthesis).”[7] Elements of the Enlightenment are found in Romanticism, just as elements of the Hebrew Scriptures frame understanding of Christ. This synthesis found in Christ is precisely not supersessionist or anti-nominalist, though in the thought world of the left brain and the law this must necessarily be the case.

As Jordan Wood notes, Hegel distinguishes two kinds of thinking: there is finite thinking in which antinomies such as subject/object (along with all of the Kantian antinomies) hold as the one always implies and depends upon its opposite and this “permanent opposition” is definitive of the terms.[8] In Lacan and Žižek’s Hegel, this antagonism and ultimate negativity (death drive) is what gives the appearance of truth and a human Subject. Truth inheres in a lie and the subject arises as a result of this power of negation. In McGilchrist’s definition, this would be the ultimate left-brain materialism and sickness (which Žižek would acknowledge in his notion that the best we can do is “enjoy our symptom”).

Jordan provides a more orthodox reading of Hegel: “Infinite or “rational” thinking is thinking in itself—or better, thinking thinking itself—since here the thinking subject and the object thought are one, and are directed to an inward identity that brooks no definite term.”[9] Hegel has in mind the divine Subject and his thought, shared in Christ, in which there is a move from finite to infinite thinking. As Jordan describes, the theological picture of Hegel’s “knowing” is not the finite but an infinite ground, both subjective and objective. In the subjective, “human reason ‘from below’ is in truth God’s self-knowing “from above” as the Spirit in us.” The objective ground is “God’s Incarnation as a single human individual establishes the conditions for intuitive certainty that the divine nature is such that it can communicate its entire identity as the concrete oneness of abstract opposites, of the infinite and the finite, subject and object, etc.—and this communication is also the form of speculative logic.”[10] This integrating unity of the knower and the known is Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” the goal and means of his “speculative thinking.” That is, this absolute is not closed but open to continual speculation, incorporation, and synthesis.

McGilchrist describes a left-brain failure in theology – reification of the word, focus on the book or the letter as opposed to the integrating factors of the right brain. He argues, the Reformation is a refusal of the metaphorical, and in this the Reformation preserves the Enlightenment rejection of the mysterious and a turning of the imagination to the word. “In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.”[11] There is a loss of a sense of the “real presence” of Christ in “an endlessly repeated and deferred” symbolism, devoid of its signified. Though he does not explicitly connect the fulness of the right brain with the person of Christ, he does note the “real presence is displaced by a sign, “re-presentations not presentations.”[12]

Where the Greek and Hebrew logos or the law is an entity apart from God, the incarnation enfleshes the Word – which seems unthinkable in the left-brain world. The incarnation of the Word is the ultimate synthesis which personalizes all things and which demands an infinite openness to the new, the unique, and the different. The Word is not that which reduces to sameness but it preserves difference. As long as the left brain, the law, or the symbolic order is predominant, subject-object opposition, bilateralism, dichotomy, dualism, or what Hegel refers to as finite knowing, are clearly in place. Synthesis, integration, or participation in the Word does not obliterate difference but it passes beyond, not through sameness or obliteration of difference, but through recognition that God has made himself available to thought. This Hegelian picture of the role of Christ seems to be the natural implication toward which McGilchrist’s theory points.

For McGilchrist, perhaps in the spirit of Maximus or Origen, we are cocreators, in many senses, of the world we inhabit, as our understanding or perception is shaped by our perspective, our theory, our hypothesis, or even the apparatus of the brain through which we apprehend but this this means of apprehending is not neutral but is itself shaped by our thought. That is there is continual feedback between the mind and brain, and it may be impossible to separate the interplay between the two. McGilchrist recognizes that his theory may serve only as a metaphor, which floats free of cerebral hemispheres, and point to two ways of being in the world. As he puts it,

If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these.[13]

His work is pointing to the primacy of metaphor, connectedness, and synthesis, so he is content if his work serves this purpose. The Christological conclusion, which he does not name but which seems a natural extension of his work, is the Personalism of Hegelian Christology.

Afterall, it is the refusal of the primacy of the personal, of narrative, of metaphor, of openness, that describes the human disease. Only in brain damaged patients, or those who suffer mental illness, can it be said the physical brain is controlling thought but what can be seen in these instances (such as autism or schizophrenia) is the trend which McGilchrist sees as characteristic trends of modernity; narrow focus, reification of language, and depersonalization, but these are precisely the symptoms Paul describes as entrapment to the law. In Christian terms, the disease is addressed and cured in the Person of Christ, as the personal depth of creation, and participation in personhood open up the left-brain to infinite knowledge and synthesis of the right-brain.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Thank you to Jim for acquiring this book for me.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 462.

[4] Ibid, 430.

[5] Ibid, 408.

[6] Ibid, 386.

[7] Ibid, 353.

[8] Jordan Wood, “Hegel as Alexandrian Christian: Or, Against False Piety,” from his Substack: Words in Flesh, Sep. 3rd,2025. This wonderful piece just appeared as I was writing.

[9] Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline [Enc hereafter], Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Dnaiel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 28. Cited in Wood.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] McGilchrist, 315.

[12] Ibid, 317.

[13] Ibid, 461.

A Conversation on Why I Am a Christian

Jessica: What’s ur biggest reason for believing Jesus is the way. The most compelling reason for believing jesus is the best.[1]  

Paul: Meaning!

Jessica: Can you Elaborate!

Paul: You ask for the “biggest reason” and so I use the word “meaning” in the broadest sense. Personal meaning is either partial, absent, or wrongheaded apart from the depth of meaning in Christ. We can find all kinds of meaning apart from Christ, and that may be good or bad or indifferent. Meaning in work, family, or even a variety of religions may give us personal satisfaction. Perhaps our skill at sports, or art, or some other area provides levels of meaning. But these will remain partial apart from a broader ground of meaning. For many, there is no meaning, and Christ is the entry point into meaning. For others, they may find meaning in the military or the mafia or a false religion, but this is the wrongheaded sort of meaning.

Beyond personal meaning but tied to this is just the possibility of meaning in the areas of philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics. Meaning systems derive from a meaningful ground and these various explorations of meaning systems ultimately find their possibility in Christ. Philosophical nihilism, pragmatism, phenomenology, etc. have the same issue as personal meaning. They may be good but incomplete, or wrong and dangerous, or they may simply conclude there is no meaning. So, the term can be applied in every area. No area of human endeavor is complete in itself, though every area may be good or bad, but will always remain partial. Of course, this is not a coercive meaning to be foisted onto us personally, scientifically, or philosophically, but it is like the word itself. It is there to be grasped and to lead us on a journey, but it is not insistent or fear inducing. Like meaning, Christ is healing, completing, and fulfilling. This is my humble attempt at the “biggest” reason.

Jessica: So, the fact that there is meaning at all convinces you of Gods existence?

Paul: I prefer meaning. This is not to say that meaninglessness is not also convincing. Most days I ward off the nihilism, the evil, the cruelty, or the seeming meaninglessness of everything. On these days or these small snippets of time, you might say I am “convinced” of God’s existence. But that does not sound exactly right. I am committed to meaning, to living a meaningful life, to being loving, and to the beauty and goodness of the universe which entails God, but my personal capacity for belief or being convinced is not very great. I feel I can make the moral commitment to the Truth (just the possibility of truth in the Truth) without being personally inclined toward a strong sense of conviction. I am well acquainted with a lack of personal spiritual devotion, with doubts and disbelief, but my own proclivities are not the point. I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt as primary. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of salvation or moral engagement. The focus on individual belief misses the New Testament meaning of faith, which does not refer to my faith but to Christ’s faithfulness, of which I can partake. I have no faith in my faith or in faith in general, but the faithfulness of Christ is salvific. Saving, not in the sense of going to heaven and missing hell, but in the sense of delivering from bondage: bondage to my capacity, my thought, myself and the values of my culture.

This is a form of belief and of being convinced, but it is not the form in which we usually discuss these things. Most are thinking of historical and scientific proofs, but this will only lead to the endless need for more and stronger proof. Belief and faith are largely moral commitments that engage us more holistically than typical proofs. I am full of doubt, but this doubt is not the kind that many may find so disturbing, as my faith embraces doubt as part of the reality in which I believe.

The doubt that many have, is grounded in an ultimate trust in reason, in which there is no room for doubt. Thus, apologetics must be airtight. The Bible must be inerrant. Tradition cannot contain fallacy. Doubt is not part of the possibility of this form of faith. Undeniable philosophical arguments and the absolute historical trustworthiness of the texts is required. This foundationalism and Biblicism is focused on rationalism or Scripture rather than Christ. It trusts the authority of history and reason more than Christ. This sort of foundationalism has displaced Christ with reason, Scripture, history, or some other authority as foundation.

Jessica: I think I understand, but you are saying too much too quickly. I have been reading Sam Harris and he has many convincing proofs that Jesus never existed and that God does not exist.

Paul: Sorry, my wife tells me I overcomplicate things.

The issue is not between different sorts of meaning or levels of meaning, but whether there is meaning or no meaning. The new atheists, such as Sam Harris, like fundamentalists, liberals, and modernists of every stripe presume a foundation of meaning and this is their starting point. One can use this foundation to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible, the truth of secular humanism, the self-contained truth of science, or basic principles (“I Think”, there is cause and effect”) or whatever, but all share the modernist foundation. The way in which they build upon this presumed philosophical rationalism varies, but they all share the modern rationalist presumption of a given meaning. This presumed foundation is a parasite on the meaning set forth in Christianity, but it is incorrect (in its atheistic, fundamentalist, and liberal manifestation) in that its imagined meaning floats free of the person of Christ.

Jessica: I have started reading David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions.

Paul: Excellent! Hart quickly and accurately debunks the New Atheists.

I prefer a more hard-core atheism, such as that of Slavoj Žižek, who recognizes the construct of meaning (and self) are easily deconstructed. As a true atheist, he does not argue on the basis of meaning, but he makes the case that beneath the structure of “self” is the reification of language which fabricates the self (and meaning) through the interplay of language – on the order of the Cartesian cogito (“I think therefore I am”). Žižek is Cartesian, not because he believes Descartes is correct in his foundationalism, but because he considers the Cartesian error or lie, the basis for “truth.” That is, there is no Truth, but only the lie which gives rise to truth. This is a better understanding of the choice with which we are faced. True nihilism and atheism do not hold to meaning of any sort, other than that which can be fabricated.

So, I prefer meaning as opposed to no meaning. I prefer love, beauty, and goodness as opposed to hatred and evil, and this entails the world revealed by Christ.

Jessica: But what about the contradictions in the Bible?

Paul: The focus of the Bible is not on itself or its own authority, but it is a witness to the authority of Christ.The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture). This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. The images of God in the Bible (Old and New Testaments), require the Gospel, require that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ.

As Origen put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.” The Gospel (Jesus Christ) makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other things). As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives. Apart from Christ there is no Bible, there is no authority, there is no meaning, but only a bundle of contradictions. In light of Christ, the contradictions do not completely disappear but they are relatively unimportant in light of the fulness of meaning revealed in Christ.

Jessica: I think I am beginning to grasp some of what you are saying, but have you written anything that might help?

Paul: I will recommend a few of my blogs, which I have referenced above and which expand on the topic.[2]

(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument.  The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)

[1] This question arose through messenger and continued on the phone, and I have taken liberties with how it unfolded and have changed the name of the inquirer, but it is based in reality.

[2] Here is a piece on reading Scripture through Christ and the Gospel https://forgingploughshares.org/2025/02/06/the-scriptures-gospel-and-the-exegesis-of-jesus/ I have done several on Hermeneutics. This one is on Origen’s approach: https://forgingploughshares.org/2022/09/22/the-peaceful-hermeneutic-of-origin-the-end-of-deicide/ As is this one: https://forgingploughshares.org/2024/11/07/finding-the-center-in-the-midst-of-despair/

Deliverance From the Cloud Economy

In Paul’s depiction of the law, we are bound to serve some form of the Law (e.g., the Master, the superego, the conscience, the father) but this authority, even in Paul’s description is amorphous. We mistake the law for God, or we imagine that the symbolic order holds out life, while it offers only death and a futile servitude. The ultimate master, the force behind all fear and striving, is fear of death, but as in the Garden, the symbolic order, the knowledge of good and evil, the manipulation of the law, seems to hold out the possibility of life through the law. We would inscribe ourselves into the law, so as to attain life, but as Paul notes, “the law deceived and killed me” (Rom. 7:8). As Slavoj Žižek describes, “we are condemned to domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of the Master.”[1] With the internet and information technology dominating the economy, the symbolic order (the desire of the law) threatens to shape desire in a more controlling and explosive manner. The techno-oligarchs presume to have access to the mind and soul of the masses, such that they can manipulate desire through controlling the algorithms of consumption and want. No longer is it a straightforward master/slave sort of exploitation, or exploitation of workers by owners, but the enslavement is more insidious. It is a psychological enslavement and exploitation based on personal choices and production of data. It is no longer the body of the slave as commodity, but the mind and identity of the individual that is exploited.

Among the key theorists who have recognized this process is Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that capitalism is morphing into techno-feudalism.[2] We are toiling away in the fields staked out by Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, but what is ultimately being mined from our toil, along with our identity, is our wants and desires. We are data-producing subjects confined to an infinitely reflexive world of personal choices. Our desire is the commodity that is being mined and shaped. “Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”[3]

Capitalism depended upon profit and markets, which the techno-fiefdoms have replaced with digital platforms; all who enter pay a form of rent, what Varoufakis calls “cloud rent.” The owners in traditional capitalism, owned the land, the machinery, the buildings, and the means of transport, but the owners of cloud capital own and control digital information. Just as modern physics, after Einstein, recognized that the physical universe is mostly a dynamic of information, so too in the modern economy, information is capital. Whoever owns or controls the code is the final arbiter of power.

Capitalism is already a departure from traditional economies tied to materiality, in that capital is not just another commodity, but its exchange value is intrinsic to human desire and activity. Capitalism decoupled power from land or various material goods. As is evident with Bitcoin and its offspring in the digital age, capital “is, above all else, a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies; i.e. the means and the ways in which we transform matter.”[4] The step from capitalism to techno-feudalism is that as in the feudal age, the techno-barons own information just as the landed gentry once owned and controlled the land but the difference is that there is no end to the capital to be generated. There is no end to the depth of exploitation and control.

Varoufakis illustrates the difference with the common household tool Alexa:  

It means that what begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its Capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.[5]

This infinite loop in the algorithmic network, an unseen force in the cloud, guides our behavior and choices, such that owners, manufacturing and curating our desires, directly profit through this manipulation.[6] Our identity is literally relinquished, through ID codes, purchasing records, familiarity (on Facebook and X) with whom and what we like. Every thought, every thing you have paid attention to, every opinion, is tracked, such that Apple, Google, Facebook, and X, know you and remember you better than you do.

The constant surveillance, the presumption of ownership over one’s life, the daily indignity of giving up something of oneself, and ultimately the fact of being rendered servile and brainwashed, describes a form of impoverished enslavement. It is as if the techno-oligarchs have claimed ownership of the law, and benefit according to how many cycle through the sequence of desire, sin, and death, Paul describes in Romans 7. The biblical picture of the loss of identity is not dissimilar though more exhaustive, in that pursuit of life through the law not only renders one a subject of the law but it identifies the deadly emptiness. The more one attempts to gain control the tighter the bind to the symbolic order, which contains only death in spite of or due to the effort expended. This also means that the salvation which Paul describes, perhaps more than at any other time, is a literal suspension of the economy which binds us in this modern age.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 20). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (New York: Vintage, 2023). Thanks to Matt Welch for pointing me to Varoufakis.

[3] Varoufakis, x.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 54-55.

[6] Ibid, 55.

Recapitulation (with a difference) as Opposed to Repetition (of the same)

The summing up, bringing together, recapitulation, or synthesizing of all things (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι) in Christ (Ephesians 1:10), in the earliest development of atonement theory by Irenaeus (A.D. 120-203) and several of the early church fathers, captures the New Testament picture and the early church’s understanding of the work of Christ. As in the context of Ephesians, this recapitulation is at once cosmic and directly concerned with personal salvation: “We have redemption” in Christ (Eph 1:7), but so too do “all things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:10). The all-inclusive nature of recapitulation, includes elements such as the life of Christ, which will come to be neglected (Irenaeus is focused on Christ’s life of obedience as opposed to Adam’s disobedience). Later traditional theories of the atonement, and even early confessions (the Apostle’s creed) skip over the life of Jesus, to say nothing of the cosmic and the historical. The focus on the legal aspects of the death of Jesus tend to center on his birth and death, and the practical, experiential, and psychological, even in the nature of his death, are not addressed. In the developments of Anselm and Calvin, death is reduced to a payment, while in Paul, the obedience of the Son to death on the cross (Phil. 2:8) is not simply a legal condemnation nor a single historical fact, but it takes in the totality of what God has done in Christ through the whole movement from the incarnation of the gift of the Spirit.[1] Recapitulation plays out in the texture and details of the life of Christ, tying together the life of Christ with the manner of his death. Likewise, the believer in imitating and being joined to the life of Christ, is taking up the quality of eternal life (a lived reality and not simply a legal abstraction).

Being joined to Christ, the head of a new humanity, is not a consequence but the substance of salvation. Where legal theories separate the life of Christ, ethics, and the lived reality of the Christian life from salvation (focused as they are on divine satisfaction), recapitulation is a practical salvation, in that being in Christ, being joined to Christ, living the Christian life, putting on the mind of Christ, is the content of salvation. In turn, the problem or condemnation of sin, is not simply a future punishment but a present form of humanity, as in the first Adam (Romans 5, a focus of Irenaeus). Thus, the difference between the first and second Adam is one way of depicting the content of what it means to be saved, and what exactly one is saved from.

Repetition in the trinity of Self Versus Recapitulation in the Trinity

Though being in the first (Adam) or the second (Christ) type of humanity, entails a form of imitation and repetition, recapitulation describes a repetition with a difference rather than a repetition of sameness. In the simplest terms, Jesus did not repeat the failures of the race of Adam. He identified with sinful humanity, with suffering, pain, and death. He traversed birth, childhood, adulthood, Jewishness, maleness, and death, but he took this to a new place and experience, and did not repeat the failures of the former race, but summed it up, so as to become the head of a new race. The difference between these two is the difference between the trinity of ego, law, and the body of death, and entry into participation in the Father, through the Son by the Spirit.

Repetition captures the relationship to the law or the symbolic order, which Paul describes as an antagonism between the ego, the law, and death. Where the law is made primary, as in forbidden desire or in the notion that life is in the letter of the law, the relationship is to an object and the image it holds out (the ego or “I”) is one of lack. Not just that one cannot keep the law, but life or the self is lacking. Deceptive, death-dealing desire overtakes the will in compulsive repetition, attempting to obtain the object of desire. The trinity of law, absence or loss (“I”), and desire define the Subject of sin.

A key difference between living death and life in the Spirit, is that the death of the “I” divides and alienates, while life in the Spirit is a communion founded by the Father who has sent his Son (Ro 8.3) who leads by his Spirit (Ro 8.14). The Father is the primary agent who subjected creation in hope (Ro 8.20), who makes all things work to the good for those who love him (Ro 8.28), who has foreknown and predestined those he called (Ro 8.29) and these he has justified and glorified (Ro 8.31). This communion is “in Christ Jesus” who was sent to free from the law of sin and death (Ro 8.2,3) by condemning sin in the flesh (Ro 8.3), who gives his Spirit of life (Ro 8.9) so that those who suffer with him will be glorified together with him (Ro 8.17) and who died and was raised and intercedes so that nothing can separate from the love of God (Ro 8.34-35). Recapitulation founds the new race in life in the Trinity.

In the recapitulated form of this relation, the child of God relates directly to Abba, through the Spirit, with the image of the Son before him. The Trinity, fills in the trinitarian absence. Through the work of the Trinity, relation with the Father is no longer mediated through the law but through the Son, and the Spirit is the enabling power of righteousness (Ro. 8.10). The law marked a covenantal relationship fulfilled in Christ who makes it possible to keep the covenant relationship with God through participation in the Trinity.

The Power of Death in the word and Life in the Word

The stark difference in the two Adam’s of Romans 5, is that one introduced death, and the other introduces life. “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Ro 5:17).

The power of death to produce sin, has been largely obscured due to the Augustinian misreading of the problem, but the power of death is identifiable in multiple ways. The power to kill, to sacrifice, and to oppress is the obvious form of death’s power. But the law of sin and death can also be described psychologically, as mistaking the human word for the Word of life.

The power of death in the law, is death denied, obscured, or covered over. The law poses the possibility of an eternalizing repetition of the same, in which the inanimate letter, the law, language, does not suffer or die. Interpolating oneself into the law, being a law keeper or even identifying with the letter, poses an escape from death through extracting the self from life. This orientation to the law (or to death), is the drive behind destructive compulsions, addictions, or repetitions, which rely upon the letter, or the word, to repeat the self.

The lie which the serpent tells in Genesis, and Paul’s explanation of that lie (Ro 7), pictures absence (of God) and presence (of the symbolic order or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) as its own kind of false power (attaining divinity). The negative (death, absence) does not take an obvious or conscious part in the binary of language (or the knowledge of good and evil), but symbolic features are dependent on presence and absence. To imagine the symbolic contains a real presence is to miss the absence upon which it depends.

Freud illustrates this with his grandson, who learned to talk while playing with a spool. In Freuds estimate the spool was functioning in place of relationship to mother. The boy could make it appear and disappear, accompanied by the German equivalent of “Here/Gone.” He was in control of the spool, but his mother continually left him. According to Jacques Lacan, words are always “a presence made of absence.”[2] The law, the knowledge of good and evil, or perhaps every child’s entry into language would produce life and being through absence.

Recapitulation entails at its heart, the recapitulation in and through the Word, which brings about life and presence through the Spirit. The Spirit can be equated with life (Ro 8:2,10-11), and with the introduction of the Spirit, Paul’s question of 7:24 is definitively answered: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

The Law of the Father Versus Abba, Father

Rather than a relationship with a person, the impersonal law poses as father (in the role of God). The insistence to be through the law, is the repetition of death or the letter that kills. That is, the compulsion to repeat is a product of the attempt to establish the self like an object, to repeat the self, in and through a medium (the Scriptures, the letter, the symbolic) that is inherently impossible. There is no life in the law.[3]

The ego or I in the mirror of the law, is a false construct, and the father in this relation is the superego or the law taken up into the self. “The father, the name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of the law.”[4] In Freudian theory, the Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration or passage through the Oedipus complex). “Sacrifice is a guarantee that ‘the Other exists’: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice.”[5] In other words, there is an inherent hostility towards the Other of the law (the symbolic or superego or father) as this Other demands continual service and sacrifice.

The inheritance of life in the Spirit, is indicative of the ontological shift from being one’s own father to being a child of God. The former inherits alienation and death while the latter will be glorified with Christ (Ro 8:17). The former is a slave serving the law of sin while the latter is enabled to please God (Ro 8:8). This status of being the sons of God means that “you put to death the deeds of the body” (Ro 8.13). Pleasing God, and not simply serving the demands of the law, is the goal, but this entails true righteousness (and not simply the imputed kind).

Righteousness is not individual, but it is to be made right in relationship. God’s covenant faithfulness to his people is the fulfilment of his righteousness, and in turn the faithfulness of his children to this relationship is their righteousness. Righteousness is being brought into a right relationship with God and overcoming the alienation and hostility towards God, and this resolves the alienating conflict with the self and others. God is fulfilling and has fulfilled this righteousness in those he has called in Christ (Ro 8.30).

Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15). The God who was known through the law previously (Ro 7) is “Abba” in the recapitulated relationship. This difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself” who “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). Christ, as the firstborn son of this new family (8:29), provides the perspective of the successful outcome of a justification or righteousness already received. There is a recapitulation of relationship.

Recapitulation as Salvation

In recapitulation there is a positive repetition with a difference, and this allows for “following Christ”, or putting on Christ or being imitators of Christ. Repetition and imitation (as in Girard), may describe the seat of neurosis and violence, but in Christ imitation does not give rise to mimetic rivalry, and repetition is not focused on an object but on a person. The root cause of sin is addressed in the very term of salvation (recapitulation displaces repetition).

Recapitulation (anakephalaiōsasthai) is to change the head (kephalé), to sum up, synthesize, so as not simply to repeat but repeat with a different outcome.[6] The root word occurs in describing the summing up of the law in love (Mark 12:31), and those united under his headship are united with him in this loving recapitulation. Resolution to the alienation of the Subject of the law is to become a child of God. Where the sinful mind is “hostile to God” and cannot even recognize God, the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the law (Ro 8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). Those who miss the summing up of love in Christ, get stuck on the letter, pitted against love.

Though fully human, Christ is obedient unto death, without sin, and with this comes peaceableness, love, non-violence, and a new ordering of the human psyche. To say he died for your sins, may miss that he lived and died to defeat evil, recapitulating human life so as to break the bondage of the law of sin and death. Christ incarnates a new form of human experience, and in being adopted into his family or joined to him, Christians enter into this alternative human experience.

[1] Theological dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 3, 1964- (G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley and G. Friedrich, ed.), 951 – 2.

[2] Ecrits: Selection, 65.

[3] Where Freud grounded the compulsion to repeat in a biological need to return to the stable material realm, Lacan explains the compulsion as arising from dissonance between the two registers (the imaginary and the symbolic). The image or ego is a visual static image, and the symbolic (the repeated “I”) is the means of establishing it.

[4] Jacques Lacan,  Seminar XI , 34.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom , 56.

[6] David T. Williams describes the various word studies of recapitulation in “Another look at recapitulation,” Pharos Journal of Theology (ISSN 2414-3324 online Volume 101 – (2020) Copyright: ©2020 Open Access/Author/s – Online @ http//: www.pharosjot.com) 3.

Paul with Kant, Sade and Lacan, on the Source of Evil

Paul warns in 2 Corinthians that “scripture slays” (2 Cor. 3:6) in that it is not grounded in Spirit. This could be stated as the law, the symbolic order, principle, letter, or language, slays if it is taken as an end in itself. The problem Paul is addressing is the relationship between the written word, whether in the form of letters of recommendation, the Scriptures, or Torah, and the reality of embodied humans. Paul does not need letters written with ink, as he has the Corinthian believers as living letters bearing the living Word in their heart. Words or laws inscribed on stone, even if put there by the finger of God, by angels, or by the highest law giver, cannot possibly compare to the Spirit of the living God written on the heart. The former is a “ministry of death” in that it does not pertain to flesh and blood and spiritual reality. Paul refers to it as a “ministry of condemnation” or a “ministry of death” which is “from death to death” in that it is a fading reality which “veils” its own transitory nature. This ministry of death obscures or veils its own reality but it also veils the truth or the true glory which comes from the Spirit.

The thinker who unwittingly stumbled over Paul’s equation of death, emptiness and deception, with the law, was Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality”[1] which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[2] The beauty of the Kantian maxim, in his own estimate, is that it does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[3] The problem Kant stumbles upon, is that if his maxim is completely enclosed in the will, then there is no determinate content to it, and it may give rise, not to the supreme principle of morality, but to what Kant calls radical evil. This radical evil, like its counterpart in the good, is completely enclosed in human will. “So we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and because we must always accept the guilt for it we can call it a radical innate evil in human nature, though one we have brought upon ourselves.”[4]

This radical evil is a necessary possible result of Kant’s anthropology as reason and freedom are not dependent upon anything outside of the self: “Now the human being actually finds in himself a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason.”[5] The faculty of reason provides simultaneous access to absolute freedom and to the choice of evil, for no reason (outside of the will). As Alenka Zupančič explains: “Evil, radical evil, is something that can be defined only in paradoxical terms as the ‘free choice of unfreedom’. In other words, here, too, a genuine negation of freedom proves impossible. The subject is free whether she wants to be or not; she is free in both freedom and unfreedom; she is free in good and in evil; she is free even where she follows nothing but the trajectory of natural necessity.”[6] Reason, the law, the categorical imperative, all arrive at a pure form or pure idea, which does not depend upon anything but itself.

Paul exposes the inherent fault or evil in this orientation to the law, locating it in the drive or desire which stands behind it. As he describes in Romans 7:7, the law gives rise to desire or covetousness: for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Rom. 7:7). In Paul’s description, the law generates the desire it forbids.

The Freudian explanation or the ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics, which accords with Paul’s description, is that “what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego.”[7] The superego is not God, the will, or a rational moral imperative, but is the individual’s attempt to be a law unto themself. Rather than the law being inscribed on the heart, the transgressor of the law, would inscribe themselves into the position of the law, thus obtaining what the law obstructs or forbids. In his drive to freedom (from the law of the father) he enslaves himself to this law (the law of the father or superego taken up into his own identity). The moral imperative, as Freud recognized, is a “moral masochism” in which the individual subjects himself to his own “cathected” father image – which gives rise to the worst forms of evil.

The superego serves in place of the law, and proves itself in relation to the ego. Thus, Freud pictures the superego as the seat or medium of the death drive; the law or the letter kills in giving rise to a dynamic of death. As Zupančič describes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honourable’ inclinations of the subject.”[8] The superego is, in Freudian terms, the attempt to be one’s own father. In Pauline terms, this orientation to the law is a displacement of the true Father.

Interestingly, Kant’s critique of the biblical notion of evil aligns with Paul’s universalizing of the problem of the law. This is not simply a historical problem which humanity inherited from its progenitors, but is the problem which every individual faces. The problem of evil is not a historical but a logical problem, though Genesis seems to present the problem as one residing at the beginning of history. For Kant, evil presents itself as part of his understanding of freedom. “The propensity to birth evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).”[9] Kant posits an original freedom at the heart of every human, but if the original innocent pair were irresistibly seduced or tricked, then this is not true freedom. For God to punish what they could not and did not have the power to resist means God is unfair.

According to Kant, humans are not subject to determinations beyond their control, yet they do evil, which demands an explanation. “Kant’s solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom. This ground itself has to be considered as an act of freedom [Aktus der Freiheit]. In this inaugural act, I can choose myself as evil.”[10] There is the possibility, in Kant’s own estimate, that the categorical imperative may be grounded in a perverse will, in which the service of the seeming good is actually pure evil: “It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found with it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned), and the man is hence designated as evil.”[11] But by Kant’s own criteria, it is not clear how the individual might sort out radical evil and the good.

Jacques Lacan adds a problematic layer onto this Kantian/Freudian dilemma, with his own categorical imperative: “Don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire as it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty.”[12] As Dylan Evan’s notes, “The very centre of Lacan’s thought … is the concept of desire.” Lacan argues that “desire is the essence of man” (Seminar XI, 275), and the goal of therapy is to articulate and recognize the nature of desire (Seminar I,183). Lacan’s three registers (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) intersect with and emerge from his symbol for desire – objet petit a (Seminar XX, 87) and the conscious and unconscious dialectic occurs in and around the medium of desire (Seminar II, 228).[13] Lacan links desire with the life force and “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”[14] To give way on desire is to give up on life and subjectivity as the structure and dynamic which gives rise to the desire for the self is precisely the dynamic necessary for subjectivity to occur. The impossibility of desire is the necessary structuring principle against which desire (jouissance) forms.

Likewise, in Žižek’s understanding, apart from desire for self or the compulsion to obtain the self there is no self. He uses Paul’s terms for sin to describe the rise of the Subject. The “hermeneutical” procedure of isolating the letter of the law creates a frontier or “coast-like” condition between the real (with the obscene superego) and the symbolic and out of this tension jouissance or forbidden desire arises. The letter and jouissance describe the form and substance of life under the compulsion to repeat – the letter being that which “returns and repeats itself” in the life force of desire.[15] The problem is now double layered, in that the moral law, the will, duty, or reason, taken as an end in and of themselves, are without any recourse to circumstance – the world. In turn, Lacan’s jouissance (or evil desire) is indistinguishable from that desire necessary for life.

We are surrounded by examples of those who perform the most evil deeds, due to their form of the categorical imperative. Paul counts himself blameless in regard to the law as a Pharisee, and for the same reason he persecuted and killed Christians, and thus considers himself the chief of sinners. Adolph Eichmann appeals to the Kantian categorical imperative (doing his duty, obeying the law) while on trial in Jerusalem, as reason enough for killing Jews. The Marquis de Sade appeals to the categorical imperative as a call to universal sadism – each one is duty bound to pleasure himself through his neighbor. He has one of his novelistic characters propose as his maxim to murder anyone who gets in his way: “With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms . . . what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes.”  This is the law of universal metamorphosis, and murder is simply part of this universal principle.

Both Kant and Sade need an eternity to pose the possibility that the highest good (the holy will, or the diabolical will), though not now attainable, might be attained in an eternal future. In Sade, this clearly translates into the worst form of evil (eternal sado-masochistic torture chambers), but the point is Kant is aligned with Sade in putting into place the machine of compulsive repetition. Desire, the good will, the categorical imperative must be pursued and it must be pursued endlessly into eternity. “This then necessarily leads to the exclusion of (the possibility of) this object (the highest good or ‘diabolical evil’), an exclusion which, in turn, supports the fantasy of its realization (the immortality of the soul).”[16] The categorical imperative requires a bad infinity (no longer simply desire but drive), giving rise to the depth of the human sickness, the compulsion to repeat. Here we no longer have to do with life, but the pure form of the death drive. Kant cannot imagine that someone would want their own destruction, but Lacan pictures this, not as an extreme, but the human situation; “on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not.”[17]

My point is not to refute either Sade or Kant, but to indicate how the worst forms of evil might be associated with the law. To call this “radical evil” is obviously as mistaken as to imagine that there is a highest moral principle obtainable through the will. Both are mistaken, but the lie of this mistake is the universal deception which Paul equates with the sinful orientation to law.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392).

[2] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:421).

[3] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:420).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Jonathan Bennett, 2017 )15. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf

[5] Metaphysics of Morals, 68 (Ak 4:452).

[6] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 39.

[7] Ibid, 1.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 88.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25. Cited in Zupančič, 89.

[12] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 153.

[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 36.

[14] Zupančič, 2.

[15] Evans, 100.

[16] Zupančič, 100.

[17] Ibid.

The Uses of Language: Julia Kristeva and Kenotic Love

Language is the medium in which we live and move, and what we make of or do with language, is determinative of the reality in which we live. In this post-theological age, it may not occur to us to consider that we have an orientation toward or within language. Psychoanalysis, or the talking cure (as Freud described it) is nearly the last realm in which what we do with words, linguistic exchange (even in dreams), how we linguistically constitute ourselves towards others and ourselves (transference and countertransference), is an object of study.

Psychologists have noted that young children pass through a fundamental depression just prior to acquisition of language. Julia Kristeva describes the passage into language as an abandonment by the mother or the narcissistic paradise in which all needs are met, and entry into the symbolic world of the father. “The child must abandon its mother and be abandoned by her in order to be accepted by the father and begin talking … [L]anguage begins in mourning …”[1] Both death and abandonment and the establishment of the self are implicated in language acquisition.

In the description of G. W. F. Hegel, language brings simultaneous awareness of death and its refusal. As he describes, inasmuch as he is speaking and mortal, man is, the negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.”[2] The “faculty” for language and the “faculty” for death arise together, but of course the peculiar faculty for life, at least in the Christian understanding is interwoven with this “faculty” of death and language. Which is to say, this focus and enquiry into language is first and properly the domain of theology.

As Kristeva describes, the work of the cross is to address us at this most basic and deep psychological level: “The ‘scandal of the cross’, the logos or language of the cross … is embodied, I think not only in the psychic and physical suffering which irrigates our lives … but even more profoundly in the essential alienation that conditions our access to language, in the mourning that accompanies the dawn of psychic life. By the quirks of biology and family life we are all of us melancholy mourners, witnesses to the death that marks our psychic inception.”[3] Yet it is through this passage, from out of blissful narcissism, that we discover the other. We form connections, not simply warm support in an extension of the life in the womb, but the possibility of love and hate, life and death, self and other, through entry into language. Kristeva depicts this slightly hellish condition as precisely the place in which Christ meets us: “Christ abandoned, Christ in hell, is of course the sign that God shares the condition of the sinner. But He also tells the story of that necessary melancholy beyond which we humans may just possibly discover the other, now in the symbolic interlocutor rather than the nutritive breast.”[4]  Language is for finding the other, for recognizing and negotiating mortality, and yet it can also be deployed as a refusal of this reality.

The matrix of language can be made to constitute its own reality, and can act as an obstacle rather than a bridge. In this understanding, attaching ourselves to the law, the immovable symbolic order, is simultaneously a means of inscribing ourselves into stone (becoming immortal) but the stone is an epitaph. Meaning attached to language per se, to the occurring of the sign, mistakes the letter of the law for its meaning. Kristeva raises the example of Chinese reification of the word: “In classical Chinese (for example, the I Ching), ‘to believe’ and ‘to be worthy of faith’ are expressed by the word xin, where the ideogram contains the signs for man and speech. Does ‘to believe’ therefore mean ‘to let speech act?’”[5] In the case of Japanese, being a speaker of the language conveys the spirit of Japanese identity. Much like the Jew, marked by Hebrew speaking and law-keeping, attachment to the sign conveys an immovable essence, which Paul characterizes as deadly. The reification of the word seems to be the universal tendency.

The philosopher often uses words much like the mathematician employs numbers, as a coherent symbol system which is or produces truth. In this understanding, language works within a closed system, in which words and symbols constitute their own reality. Thinking is being, as the thought contains the essence of reality. Rather than language leading from death to resurrection, we can be haunted by negativity, rejection, castration, death drive. In the language of the Apostle Paul, we can be caught between wanting and doing, between the law of the mind and the law of the body, and we can find ourselves overwhelmed with the ego, that ungraspable “I” in the mirror. The ego cogito is ever allusive, and yet pursuit of the ego poses as salvation.

To pass from death to resurrection requires a relinquishing of the ego. What Paul describes as kenotic self-giving love, is a relinquishment of stasis, being, and position, so as to reach out to and exist with and in the other. This kenotic lover does not insist upon his status or position in the symbolic order. This deadly attachment to law, is a futile attempt to have existence within the self – to establish the self-image as distinct from and not subject to the other. The ego is preserved at the cost of love. In the description of Graham Ward:

To be redemptive, to participate in the economy of redemption opened and perfected by Christ the form of God’s glory, our making cannot be in our name. Our making cannot, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, make a name for ourselves. Our making cannot reify our own autonomy. Such making is only death and idolatry. Our making must be in and through an abandonment to an operation that will instigate the crisis of our representations. Our making has to experience its Passion, its descent into the silent hiatus.[6]

The recognition of mortality, forsakenness, alienation, is the first step toward life. According to Kristeva, “It is because I am separate, forsaken, alone vis-àvis the other that I can psychologically cross the divide that is the condition of my existence and achieve not only ecstasy in completion (complétude: reunion with the father, himself a symbolic substitute for the mother) but also eternal life (resurrection) in the imagination.”[7] She is specifically thinking of life in Christ as completing the journey to love. ”For the Christian believer the completion of faith is real completion, and Christ, with whom the believer is exhorted to identify, expiates in human form the sin of all mankind before achieving glory in resurrection.”[8] The passage through death with Christ enables, through tarrying with the negative, kenotic love.

As Slavoj Žižek explains I Corinthians 13, this love necessitates self-emptying:

the point of the claim that even if I were to possess all knowledge, without love I would be nothing, is not simply that with love I am ‘something’ – in love, I am also nothing but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than completed knowledge.[9]

Žižek’s negation rests upon an atheistic reading of Hegel, but the Christian Hegel sees negation, not as an end in itself, but as the merging of the infinite and finite. The infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[10] As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[11] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. God in Christ emptied himself, not of deity, but of the presumption of infinity. “He existed in the form of God, [but] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men” (Php. 2:5–7). Paul is recommending Christ as the model for the Christian, who obviously cannot empty themselves of deity, but they can “have this attitude” of self-sacrificial giving. They can “hold fast to the word of life” (Php. 2:16) in taking up this self-emptying Word.  

Language is made for love, for connection to the other, such that all true dialogue is an act of love. Speaking as a reaching for the other is a relinquishment of the isolated ego. All true discourse is an act of love. According to Kristeva, “The speaking subject is a loving subject.”[12] But at the same time, “Love is a death sentence which causes me to be.”[13] As Ward explains, “All representation is a kenotic act of love towards the other; all representation involves transference – being caught up in the economy of giving signs.”[14] We gain access to both God and the neighbor through transferential (mutually indwelling) discourse of the kenotic Word. The task of theology, the work of the Christian, is to recognize how it is that the language of Christianity shapes us according to a different order of desire – (as Hans Frei describes) the unique “cultural linguistics of the Christian religion.”[15] In the vivid explanation of Ward:

As such, Christian theology is not secondary but participatory, a sacramental operation. It is a body of work at play within the language of the Christian community. Our physical bodies are mediated to us through our relation to other physical bodies and the mediation of those relationships through the body of the signs. Thus we are mapped onto a social and political body. The meaning of these signs is mediated to us through the body of Christ, eucharistic and ecclesial, so that we are incorporated into that spiritual body. Transcorporality is the hallmark of a theological anthropology. [16]

The deep grammar of the body of Christ inducts into an alternative linguistic community, in which lack and negation become the opening to love and entry into the corporate body of Christ, sharing a body, indwelling one another, through the “transcorporality” of Christ.

[1] Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Colum[1]bia University Press, 1988) pp. 40. Cited in Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 207.

[2] According to Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, Translated by Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) xii.

[3] Kristeva, 41.

[4] Kristeva, 41.

[5] Kristeva, 35

[6] Ward, 215.

[7] Kristeve, 35.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute  — Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London/New York, Verso 2000) 147. Cited in Ward, 264.

[10] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019), 12.

[11] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[12] Kristeva, 170.

[13] Kristeva, 36, Cited in Ward, 212.

[14] Ward, 212.

[15] Types of Christian Theology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 20. Cited in Ward, 217.

[16] Ward, 217-218.

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.

Christian Championing of Jordan Peterson Exposes a Perverse Form of the Faith

The popularity of Jordan Peterson as part of a conservative backlash to this supposedly postmodern moment is surprising in its scope and in the fact that many Christians have found a champion in Peterson. This however may say more about the shape of modern Christian faith than it does about the depth of insight of Peterson. A faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, this is not the Truth of Christ.[1] But Peterson is not confused about his stance (he does not identify as a Christian and he does not hesitate to interpret Christ and the Bible according to his definition of truth).[2] The confusion arises with Christians who imagine law, the symbolic order of culture, the structural hierarchies of state, society and church, are definitive of the gospel.

This is not simply a rhetorical point, but describes a form of the faith which interprets the gospel through law, which understands Christ through the Old Testament (e.g., dying due to the law) and which attaches primacy to language, symbols, and law, rather than to Person or personhood. For Peterson the personal and personhood is subsequent to language, symbols, and culture – this is no surprise, given his worldview. What is surprising is that Christians would relinquish the primacy of the Person of Christ and God, and assign it to the structures of the social order. While one might agree (or not) that Peterson occasionally says something true, this is very different than confusing his truth with Christian Truth. One is evolutionary, dualistic, gradually unfolding, and ever aiming (never arriving) toward the arche contained in myth, while the other is the Divine Person.

Peterson has made it clear that he is not simply offering advice, self-help, or cultural critique, but is attempting the broadest of philosophical/scientific projects in which he is tracing the rise and function of truth. Peterson and Jonathan Pageau (an Eastern Orthodox Christian) describe the ground of truth as evolving through human attention: “Our own personal attention becomes organised in a more comprehensive and universally viable, rewarding, and stabilising sense when it is related to others; when it is given or offered up to our connection with our family, friends, and fellow citizens; when it is sacrificed to the social hierarchies we participate in.”[3] This attention then gives rise to the unity and coherence of truth.

He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[4] As Marc Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[5] The key point here is not that Peterson reworks the story of Moses, or questions whether the law came from God. Paul and the writer of Hebrews do as much, suggesting angels and not God delivered the law, and that it has a secondary function to Christ. The point is, Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization.[6] Every son can perform the inductive trick.

Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[7] The logos for Peterson, is not a person but a “leading principle” distilled from many human samples over a long span of time. “The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time.”[8] Human beliefs, for Peterson, “make the world, in a very real way – that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense.”[9] Human belief (the archetypes, the trues extracted from religion), evolved and tested through time provide a moral and metaphysical order (Peterson’s absolute).

Peterson claims “the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker.” He has learned “why people wage war,” which paradoxically revolves around “protecting and expanding belief” but he can tell us how to “ameliorate this tendency,” universal though it is. Unfortunately, in Peterson’s world it is life’s cruelty that produces life: “the terrible aspect of life might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence of life – and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in consequence, as comprehensible and acceptable.”[10] What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, in Peterson’s Nietzschean world. Life’s cruelty and evil is part of life’s necessity.

In terms of his field of specialty, psychology, Peterson is a Jungian, holding that the archetypes (a sort of basic truth) are uncovered in considering all religions, dreams, and myth, which also serve as the foundation of the human psyche. In psychological terms, this is a rejection of the Freudian/Lacanian understanding taken up by Slavoj Žižek, which while recognizing the primacy of language, notes that a fundamental lie must accompany the psychological structuring around language. Language, in this lie, must be reified, made substantive, and accorded a metaphysical reality. (This is precisely what Peterson sets out to do in each stage of his work.) The big lie for Žižek is that there is something substantive to the ego, while in fact the dynamic between the symbolic (the superego, law, language) the imaginary (the ego, the sense of self), creates a dynamic of death drive (the id, the real) which is a dynamic of death and nothingness. This aligns with Paul’s picture of the fallen self in Romans 7 (according to Žižek), but of course, Žižek is an atheist, who denies there could be anything more (he is a Romans 7, atheistic Christian). While Peterson may acknowledge something like God, it is the lying image of God (God as the one who holds the symbolic order together as Big Other, as Superego, as Law Giver) which Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament would rid us of. In both Christian and Žižekian terms, Peterson is a promoter of the lie, that language, society, the symbolic order, is truth per se, and this he equates with God. In terms of Genesis, Peterson is on the side of the serpent, advocating for the dialectic of the knowledge of good and evil as accessing the divine order.

He comes by this conclusion in the typical fashion of Platonists or dualists, by positing two primary forces, chaos and unity, as the dualistic poles which constitute reality. He says, “We are adrift in chaos and longing, in the absence of a firm identity, no foundation underfoot, nothing to strive toward, prone in our lacking conscious and unconscious to decomposition and strife. Something must unite our attention and our action, so that we are integrated, psychologically. Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collectively, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably.”[11] He points out the dangers on both the chaos and order side of the dualism, but suggests this is the engine of history driving toward extremes but eventual harmony: “It moves forward in time like a powerful motor, pistons cycling back and forth, driving the machine of modern identity toward ever-greater extremes.”[12]

The dialectical war between the state and individual is not one in which either can emerge triumphant over the other, as the dualism is the truth. Too much autonomy of the individual, “freeing himself from religion, family, nation. . . means the totalitarian state becomes more likely” to occupy all these “intermediary roles.” This becomes the opportunity (he uses Covid and the vaccine as an example) “to universalize the collective.” The pendulum swings between Weimar and Reich, between Revolution and Napoleonic empire, between Great Mother and Father, but as the book of Revelation describes, this war produces the heavenly City. “This may seem obscurely mythological to some, but the image of the heavenly city is in fact the ultimate representation of structured harmony, a vision of the reality that might obtain if the entirety of existence properly found its place, served what is highest, and integrated itself into a transcendent whole.” [13] The trick is to keep the Beast or Leviathan from consuming the individual through totalitarian control, and so “nation, gender, family, and religion,” pose the obstacle to totalitarianism. The dialectic must be kept alive, both by preserving the individual but by also preserving intermediate identities such as those found in heterosexual marriage and normative sexual identity. Too much relinquishing of these identities unleashes state control over identity.

Peterson references Platonism and Christianity as playing key roles in imparting this dialectic and keeping it alive. It is in fact, the secret behind the cosmos, the secret of God, carried within each individual. “This perspective is offered by the early Hermetic and the Neo-Platonic writings. It permeates the Christian mysticism running from St. Paul to Meister Eckhart. Within this tradition, the individual is understood as the active embodiment of and participant in the patterns of the cosmos itself—even of the God who created that cosmos—instead of a unity in contrast to or competition with the superordinate social order.”[14] The knowledge of good and evil, the dialectic, provides access to deity, and is itself the divine reflected in each individual. This, according to Peterson, is what St. Paul meant when he “describes the Church as the Body of Christ, he is similarly stepping into this domain of fractal conceptualisation, journeying between macrocosm and microcosm in a manner that is no mere literary trope.” It is like “the head of a city or a company, or of a body of laws, a body politic, or a corporate body we are, like St. Paul, employing this vision of a fractal identity or reality, attempting in that way to describe the very nature of our participation in reality.”[15] Paul, in Peterson’s estimate, had in mind Peterson’s sort of dualism, and the body of Christ, is just one example of how society can organize itself, and in doing so fully participate in reality.

Peterson’s God, and apparently the God of those Christians who align themselves with his metaphysics, is no bigger than the dualism of chaos and unity. Each side of the dialectic, as in the knowledge of good and evil, yin and yang, something and nothing, is required. Evil (suffering and human cruelty) is the means to the good (unity), and the good is never free of the evil. “Unity—purposeful essence— and multiplicity define each other.”[16] Chaos and multiplicity feed new information into unity, freeing it from a frozen totalitarianism. The building blocks of unity are forged in furnace of chaos. Error and fallibility are inevitable and perhaps, the desired constant of the human environment.[17] God needs the devil, just as unity needs the disrupting powers of chaos.

Real evil is to be found only in those who do not fight the good fight and take responsibility for themselves. “The best strategy for coping with the ignorance and suffering that result from our finite nature is to take personal responsibility for one’s hardships and constantly negotiate between sticking with one’s beliefs and revising them.”[18] This is the mode selected by Darwinian mechanisms and taken up in cultural dynamics. The very fact that certain forms of life have evolved and endured is testimony to their foundational role.

While a Christian might find some good advice in Peterson (get married, have a family, etc.), this is not all that is happening. Though he invokes God, Peterson’s metaphysics are at best atheistic or theism of the worst kind. If he is articulating what they see as essentially true, this may mean many Christians are functioning from an atheistic form of the faith or a deeply perverted understanding of God. A metaphysically shallow faith, attached to Christendom, social order and unified rituals and institutions, may need an unbeliever like Peterson to articulate the “conservative values” which now serve in place of the radical faith preached by Christ, but to mistake this for Christian Truth is on the order of fusing the law with Gospel or confusing Christendom with Christianity. It is a failure to grasp the foundational Truth of Christ, and to replace it with an alternative foundation.

[1] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[2] Which is not to say he may not be confused about the nature of Christianity.

[3] Identity, 1.

[4] Marc Champagne, Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 92) . Societas. Kindle Edition

[5] Ibid.

[6] Champagne, 1812.

[7] Ibid, 100.

[8]  Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, (Toronto: Random House, 2018) 104..

[9] Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 13.

[10] Maps of Meaning, Ibid.

[11] Identity, 1.

[12] Identity, 2.

[13] Identity, 3.

[14] Identity, 6-7.

[15] Identity, 7.

[16] Identity, 7.

[17] Maps of Meaning, 47.

[18] Champagne, 100.

Rereading Žižek’s Hegel in Light of the Spirit and Truth of Kenotic Love

Though Slavoj Žižek, reading Hegel as if he were an atheist must ultimately misread him, there is a great deal in Žižek’s atheistic reading which commends itself and acts as a guide, not only to Hegel, but to New Testament Christianity as understood by Hegel. The particular point where there is both convergence and divergence between an atheistic and theistic reading of Hegel concerns the meaning of Spirit and the death of God. As Žižek describes it, the Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” as definitive of the experience of God, and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). Indeed, this suspension of God as other, and the immediate experience of God as immanent is key to Hegel. But Hegel’s point of departure is not simply negation, but he is focused on the Pauline concept of kenotic self-sacrifice in which one arrives at the Spirit of Christ. The kenotic sacrifice simultaneously marks the death of something “beyond” humanity and this is realized in the Spirit through imitation of Christ’s self-giving love.[1] But it is not simply the negation of God as Other, but the bringing together of the infinite and the finite in Absolute Spirit as Concept [Begriff] or a new form of speculative understanding and Truth.

In Hegel there is a double movement as the infinite negates itself and so arises in the finite and the finite negates itself and this is realization of the infinite.[2] But this is no mere feeling, but is the way of the Spirit, the way of love and of reason. As Hegel states it, “Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.”[3] In Kenotic love God incorporates the finite. As Hegel puts it, “If God has the finite over against himself, then he himself is finite and limited. Finitude must be posited in God himself, not as something insurmountable, absolute, independent, but above all as this process of distinguishing that we have seen in spirit and in consciousness—a distinguishing that, because it is a transitory moment and because finitude is no truth, is also eternally self-sublating.”[4] God is not limited by the finite or infinite, as this would be something less than God.

Žižek gets this understanding half right, in that he misses the movement of Spirit as arising from both God as infinite Father, and the immanent Son. As he describes it, the Hegelian “reconciliation” is the “redoubling of the gap or antagonism” as the gap that separates opposites “is posited as inherent to one of the terms” (Parallax View, 106). “The gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself” through the death of Christ, so “the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God” (Parallax View, 106). There is relief from the oppressive otherness of God as Christ makes God immanent, but in Hegel’s understanding there is not simply the relinquishing of the infinite for the finite, but a realization of the infinite in the finite. In “externalization” (Entäußerung), Luther’s rendering of “kenosis,” Hegel depicts the break from “immediacy” through self-sacrifice, which is the work of the Spirit experienced in the Eucharist, and in the Christian’s taking up the life and death of Christ. In Pauline terms, self-sacrifice or being crucified with Christ is to arrive at the self, and in Hegelian terms self-negation is at the heart of self-actualization.

In Žižek’s understanding, the focus is on the negative moment. The move from the legal, symbolic, totalizing religion of Judaism to Christianity, is due to the death of Christ which suspends the perverse relation to the law. In Žižek’s Hegelian/Lacanian notion of dialectic, Judaism and Christianity posit the gap either as a gap between man and God or as within God, respectively. Judaism posits the gap between God and man, as God stands outside the Law in that he cannot be properly represented within it. The holy of holies, the empty room, is isolated and separated from everyone by a series of walls emphasizing God’s absolute transcendence to the Law. God is the Other, outside of the symbolic, and yet the one who holds the symbolic together (Parallax View, 106). The death of Christ exposes the orbit of the oppressive symbolic in God as Other. In Žižek’s Hegel the death of Christ, the fulness of the work of the Trinity comes into effect as thesis/antithesis/synthesis. There is the suspension of the Other (thesis) in the death of God (antithesis). The Holy Spirit is “then posited as a symbolic, de-substantialized fiction” which exists in and through the “work of each and all” (synthesis) (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42).

Of course, the primary contention between a Christian and atheistic reading of Hegel, revolves around Spirit. In Žižek’s reading the Spirit is a fiction, which is not a dismissal of its importance, as the Spirit is an open fiction, where the movement of the Subject, in all of its phases prior to the gift of the Spirit is a necessary lie, but one that remains hidden. The hidden force of negation or death drive animates the Subject – giving life through death, but in therapy exposure of the lie, the death drive and its attendant categories, can be tapped as a source to unplug from perversion and to come to an understanding of Being as sustained in and through negation. The encounter with the death drive is a “limit-experience” which “is the irreducible/constitutive condition of the (im)possibility of the creative act of embracing a Truth-Event: it opens up and sustains the space for the Truth-Event, yet its excess always threatens to undermine it” (Ticklish Subject, 161). Behind the good, the true and the beautiful is the constitutive background of the death drive – “the Void that sustains the place in which one can formulate symbolic fictions that we call ‘truths’” (Ticklish Subject, 161). The means of manipulating the truth is through tapping into the underlying ground of the death drive and approaching the void of deception in which the symbolic truth is grounded. The death of Christ and dying with Christ provides access to this deception undergirding the truth. The truth inheres in a lie, so to refer to the Spirit as a fiction, is a new form of truth.

For Hegel, the Spirit is not a fiction but the absolute truth: “it is here maintained that this content, which the knowledge of absolute Spirit has of itself, is the absolute truth, is all truth, so that this Idea comprehends the entire wealth of the natural and spiritual world in itself, is the only substance and truth of all that constitutes this world, while it is in the Idea alone that everything has its truth, as being a moment of its essential existence.”[5] This truth, in the Spirit is a realized truth. Kenotic love unites the infinite and finite in the Concept (Absolute Spirit), which is the realization of presence (God’s and the self) and identity. Hegel slowly recognizes the inadequacies of other forms of sacrifice, which fall short of fostering the social relation, inherent to kenosis. Mere self-negation, apart from the establishment of a community of the Spirit, simply ends in self-defeat.[6] To be a living sacrifice or to “live” sacrifice is not simply a negation, but the arrival at one’s true essence.

A way to get at the divergence in regard to Spirit, is in Žižek’s focus on the death of Christ, which more or less sums up what he has to say about the gift of the Spirit and resurrection (unlike Hegel). Where for Hegel the death of Christ results in the immanence of God in the Spirit, Žižek has more to say about death, which he equates with resurrection and spirit. He repeatedly refers to Christ’s cry of dereliction: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk. 15.34; Mt. 27.46)., “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that ‘the big Other doesn’t exist’” (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). This negation or death opens up the possibility of life in the spirit.

In describing the death of Christ, Žižek equates life and death: “Life and death here are not polar opposites, contrasts, within the same global Whole (field of reality), but the same thing viewed from a global perspective” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). He concludes, “The (temporal) death of Christ is his very (eternal) life ‘in becoming’” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). Death and life are not in some sort of “pseudo-dialectic relation as utter loss/negation (death) and its reversal into absolute life” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 292). The death of Christ is the founding of the community of the Spirit and this community is his resurrection. According to Žižek, “That is to say that Christ’s death, in the Hegelian reading, is the disappearance of disappearance. It is in itself already what becomes for itself the new community.”[7]

Christ’s death reveals the psychoanalytic ground; the Freudian moment of madness which Schelling anticipates and which Žižek comes to understand Paul to describe in Romans 7. Radical negativity, the death of Christ or death drive, is the constitutive moment of the event which serves as the ground of a Subject no longer constrained by law or ideology (the significance of the resurrection Event). Resurrection can be identified with death as they both amount to the destruction of one’s symbolic supports and the emergence of a new form of subjectivity. This new form of subjectivity is the hysteric, which Lacan and Žižek equate with Hegel – “that most sublime of hysterics.” Where the masculine orientation identifies unquestioningly with the symbolic order of the law, the hysteric questions the status of the law. So, for example, Žižek identifies hysteria with the Paul of Romans 7. The feminine, hysteric position from which Paul writes describes the necessary passage through negativity and death drive as this is the road trod by Christ himself.

In my original reading of Hegel, through Žižek and Lacan, the role of negation was key to understanding the rise of the Subject in the dynamic interplay of the three registers of symbolic, imaginary, and real. The real is the engine of negation and death which explains the negative energetics dominating fallen personhood. I think this reading is a partially true reading of Hegel, in its diagnosis of the disease, much as Žižek’s is an insightful reading of Paul’s depiction of the problem in Romans 7. But both Paul and Hegel pass beyond this negative moment. But for Žižek, nothingness and death drive precede the Subject and are the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death drive and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil (Reader, 273). Lacan also describes the death drive as the attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle to the realm of excess jouissance, the pure substance of the death drive, which he also does not hesitate to call evil: “We cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil” (Seminar VII, 184–5). This evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good (in Žižek’s reading). The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive.

But of course, if one understands Hegel is working with negation, not in an atheistic sense as a point of origin, but in the Pauline sense of kenotic self-giving love, this will account for the illness of the Subject diagnosed as more or less incurable by Lacan and Žižek, and go beyond this privileging of the negative, to kenotic self-giving love, truth and unity in the Spirit.

[1] This is the argument of William Goggin, Hegel’s Sacrificial Imagination, (University of Chicago, PhD. Thesis, 2019).

[2] Goggin, 12.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 10.

[4] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition – The Lectures of 1827. Edited by Peter Hodgson. One-Volume Ed edition. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1988, 190. Quoted in Goggin, 273.

 [5] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 206.

[6] Goggin, 11.

[7] See On Belief, 106 – 51; The Puppet and the Dwarf, 171; The Parallax View, 106; For They Know Not What They Do, liii.

Beyond Žižek and Milbank to Hegel and the Salvation of Persons

Though G.W.F. Hegel is sometimes portrayed as focused on rationalism,[1] what holds his philosophy and his conception of Christianity together, is his focus on personhood. Knowledge and reason do not exist apart from the personal but are grounded in the divine Person: “Knowledge is here accordingly no immediate knowledge of a corporeal object, but knowledge of God; God is the absolutely universal Object; He is not any kind of particularity, He is the most universal Personality.”[2] In turn, the development of human personality is in conjunction with the Person of God found in the Trinity, in which God’s kenotic self-giving through the Son and Spirit immerses him in the life of the world. This is the truth of every personality: “In friendship and love I give up my abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete. The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other.”[3] Human personality knows itself as and through the divine Person as “by virtue of his fundamental nature,” man “knows himself as infinite Personality.”[4] Hegel equates Spirit and person but not with the abstract notion of person, as only in “love and friendship” does the person arise and maintain himself, thus achieving true subjectivity – “which is its personality.”[5]

In the argument of Robert Williams, for Hegel, personhood is central to understanding God and spirit.[6] Spirit is personhood for Hegel, and divine and human personhood united in Spirit is redemption. Divine and human personhood unified or synthesized in the Spirit unifies not only the Divine and human but overcomes the differences in which humanity is alienated from God. Forgiveness or redemption in reconciliation is the movement between divinity and non-divinity in which the gap separating them (evil, according to Hegel) is overcome. Reconciliation is movement from both sides of the gap, in which God indwells humanity and humanity is taken up into God. Christ as creator and creature inaugurates the movement completed in the Spirit, in which the divine indwells the non-divine and the non-divine inhabits divinity.

In Ursula Roessiger’s account of Hegel, “By their respective involvement in other-being, both the divine and the non-divine are transfigured such that reconciliation (the winning back of one’s personality as concrete) is possible.”[7] This is the way Hegel launches his work on Religion, by bringing together human thought and Spirit as constitutive of persons: “Speaking generally, it is through thought, concrete thought, or, to put it more definitely, it is by reason of his being Spirit, that man is man; and from man as Spirit proceed all the many developments of the sciences and arts, the interests of political life, and all those conditions which have reference to man s freedom and will.”[8] Human freedom and creativity flow from the fact that humankind is Spirit, and by Spirit Hegel makes reference to the essence of God shared with humanity.

This essence, or the lifting up of the creaturely to the divine has God going outside of his transcendence (through Christ and the Spirit) to humanity, and humanity surpassing itself into divinity (through Christ and the Spirit). The terms “thought” and “consciousness” refer directly to the experience of God, in which humanity arrives at divinity: “God is the beginning of all things, and the end of all things. As all things proceed from this point, so all return back to it again. He is the centre which gives life and quickening to all things, and which animates and preserves in existence all the various forms of being.”[9] Hegel lists “human relations, activities, and pleasures, and all the ways in which these are intertwined; all that has worth and dignity for man, all wherein he seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride, finds its ultimate centre in religion, in the thought, the consciousness, and the feeling of God.”[10] The experience of God in human thought and creativity, completing what it means to be human, is through the Spirit. The spirit occupied with this end sheds the limitations of finiteness and is related to the infinite and to freedom (Personhood).

This is an unfolding and dynamic reality, but it is not, as Slavoj Žižek has pictured it, an emptying out of divinity. Žižek’s death-of-God theology is aimed at getting rid of the Otherness of God by getting rid of God, having Christ’s death signify the end of transcendence. But Hegel gets rid of this oppressive otherness by synthesizing transcendence and immanence, divine and human, in the kenotic love of God definitive of Trinity, which overflows to all of creation. This dawning of the Spirit over all things is the unfolding of creation and history, in which God’s Trinitarian self-relation gathers the world into its embrace.  

Žižek may accurately portray the common understanding of transcendence: a God who is immovable, impassable, Other, imposing, and beyond material reality. “Do those who call themselves ‘Christians’ not prefer to stay with the comfortable image of God sitting up there, benevolently watching over our lives, sending us his son as a token of his love, or, even more comfortably, just with some depersonalized Higher Force?”[11] Hegel, it is true, rejects this notion of transcendence, but not to get rid of the category, but to conceive of God as fulfilling his role as Creator through creation (how could it be otherwise). This introduces a dynamic possibility into God, but it is a simple acknowledgement of the reality portrayed in creation and redemption. Yes, God is becoming “all in all,” and this is a process, but one which does not negate eternality. God’s personhood is completed in Christ, the incarnation, the giving of the Spirit, but this is always who God is.

John Milbank, on the other hand, argues that Hegel cannot accept the paradox of the hypostatic union, and that with Protestant theology as a whole, seeks to immanentize God. He seems to accede to Žižek’s atheistic interpretation of Hegel:

So the crucial thing at issue between myself and Žižek is the question of the interpretation of Christianity. I wish to argue that he concludes that atheist Christianity is true Christianity only because he accepts a dialectical (Lutheran, Behmenist, Kantian, Hegelian) version of Christian doctrine as the most coherent. By contrast, I claim that there is a radically Catholic humanist alternative to this, which sustains genuine transcendence only because of its commitment to incarnational paradox.[12]

Milbank conflates Hegel, Protestantism, and atheism, despite Hegel’s appeal to a broad spectrum of thought, incorporating specifically Catholic theology (for instance, Eckhartian mysticism) and Catholic mysticism and spirituality into his thought. Yet, Milbank seeks to promote a paradoxical/Catholic logic which can maintain tension between contingency and necessity, while he claims Hegelian Protestantism will collapse into either of these two poles. As Roessiger argues, this reduction of Hegel by Milbank as well as Žižek, is mistaken: “there is room for transcendence and paradoxical reasoning in Hegel’s account, both of which suggest that Hegel’s account of religion is theistic, and even mystical, rather than atheistic.”[13] 

The way of the Spirit in Hegel, in spite of Milbank’s reduction of it to pure transcendence (closed within itself) and Žižek’s reduction to pure immanence, is Hegel’s attempt to mediate and synthesize these realities. Hegel would overcome the impasse of the Enlightenment, a problem with which Žižek and Milbank leave him. Hegel describes the work of Kant, Fichte and Jacobi, as giving rise to a faith which can only desire the absolute while denying any possible knowledge of it. As a result, “At the end of the enlightenment we are left with two corpses: faith and reason.”[14] Hegel describes the death of reason as a departure from religion or Christianity, which means “victorious Reason is no longer Reason. The new born peace that hovers triumphantly over the corpse of Reason and faith, uniting them as the child of both, has as little of Reason in it as it has of authentic faith.”[15] Reason limited to the finite is presumed incapable of knowing God, and faith is reduced to worship of the unknown. Faith without reason and reason without faith are both dead.

The attempt to rescue Christianity through rationalism, is not Hegel’s but the Enlightenment project, which reduces God to the abstraction of deism, completely rational, lawful and absent. The embrace of reason, not through faith but in scientism and natural theology, leaves an impersonal God of the gaps, in which God is ultimately excluded, as the gaps, in the workings of the machine, are closed. Hegel is attacking this negative theology (God as unknowable and beyond reason) and posing against it the revelation which constitutes Christianity (the revealing of a Person). Hegel, working from a Johannine and New Testament understanding sees Christianity as disclosing and sharing the divine reality (I have explained this here). God in Christ, through the Spirit, is open to being known and comprehended. “This knowledge of Spirit for itself or actually, as it is in itself or potentially, is the being in-and-for-itself of Spirit as exercising knowledge, the perfect, absolute religion, in which it is revealed what Spirit, what God is: this is the Christian religion.”[16]

As he goes on to explain, “revealed religion is manifested religion because in it God has become wholly manifest.” No longer does God dwell in darkness or secrecy, as in Spirit He is made known and this is the meaning of Spirit. “Here, then, is the consciousness of the developed conception of Spirit, of reconciliation, not in beauty, in joyousness, but in the Spirit.”[17] God and reality are not subject to caprice or darkness, but are revealed, manifest, and made known: “that is, in the eternal reason, wisdom of God; it is the notion of the reality or fact itself, the divine notion, the notion of God Himself, which determines itself to enter on this development, and has set its goal before it.”[18] God has entered into the world and made Himself, the ground and notion of reality, manifest, and human consciousness is the center of this manifestation, in which God shows himself in thought as Spirit. Knowing this Person is on the order of all personal knowing, in which the two become one united in a singular Spirit.

What distinguishes man from the animals is Spirit, that is “he is consciousness” but he attains to this consciousness or Spirit only “when he withdraws himself out of immediate identity with the particular state of the moment.”[19] Only by negating or arising above the natural and immediate to the Spirit does man come to God and to the fulness of his own personhood. As Roessiger describes, “the expression ‘God is love’ is meant to encapsulate the entire eternal movement of spirit by demonstrating that spirit’s activity is bound up with the special kind of reconciliation achieved within the loving exchange.” So too man in self-giving love comes to self-consciousness, not in the self, but through friendship and love of the other. Forgiveness and love are “immersion into other-being, the giving of oneself over completely to the other.”[20] This marks the passage into infinite personhood.

In so doing, man achieves the thought of God and it is in this thought that “all the distinctions of the arts and sciences and of the endless interweaving of human relationships, habits and customs, activities, skills, and enjoyments – find their ultimate center” that is “in the one thought of God.”[21] In the thought of this Person flows all personhood and creativity. “It is in thinking that humanity truly exists for the first time. The universal object, the essence of the object, is for thinking, and since in religion God is the object, he is such essentially for thinking.”[22] To be human is to think, and the highest thought, God, brings humanity into the fulness of personhood.

[1] Slavoj Žižek describes this view of Hegel in the following manner: “Hegel as the absurd ‘Absolute Idealist’ who ‘pretended to know everything,’ to possess Absolute Knowledge, to read the mind of God, to deduce the whole of reality out of the self- movement of (his) mind—the image which is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck- Erinnerung (screen- memory), a fantasy- formation intended to cover up a traumatic truth.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for a Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 27.

[2] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 121.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 3, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 285-6. Cited in Ursula Roessiger, A Metaphysics of Faith and Reason: Mystical and Trinitarian Elements in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, (University of Pennsylvania, PhD Thesis, 2017) 43. LPR 3, 1827, E285-286 G210-211.

[4] Philosophy of Religion 1, 230.

[5] Philosophy of Religion 3, 194, Cited in Roessiger, 43.

[6] Robert R. Williams, Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[7]  Roessiger, 18.

[8] Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion 1, 1-2.

[9] Ibid, 2.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Žižek, Monstrosity of Christ,  25.

[12] Milbank, Monstrosity of Christ, 117.

[13] Roessiger, 107.

[14] Ibid, 29.

[15] G.W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, translated by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 55. Cited in Roessiger, 30.

[16] Philosophy of Religion 1, 83-84.

[17] Ibid, 84-85.

[18] Ibid, 85.

[19] Ibid, 134.

[20] Roessiger, 51-52.

[21] Philosophy of Religion 3, 84. Cited in Roessiger, 29.

[22] Philosophy of Religion, 3, 189. Cited in Roessiger, 32.