Tag: William Desmond

Appreciating the Similarities and Differences Between William Desmond and René Girard

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

Girard Against Metaphysics

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

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

Desmond’s Reworking of Metaphysics

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

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

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

The Theological Import of Metaphysics

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

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

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

Desmond’s Philosophical Theology

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

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

The Convergence of Girard and Desmond

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

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

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

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

An Appreciation of the Difference Between Desmond and Girard

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

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

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

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

[4] Bartlett, 97.

[5] God and the Between, xi.

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

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

[8] Things Hidden, 265.

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

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

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

[12] God and the Between, xii.

[13] God and the Between, xii.

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

[15] Duns, 352.

[16] Duns, 352.

[17] Duns, 352.

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

[19] Duns, 355.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Metaxological Dialectic

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

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

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

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

The Four Ways as the Movement of the Subject

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

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

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

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

Divinization Through the Agapeic Origin

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] God and the Between, 85.

[3] God and the Between, 88.

[4] God and the Between, 85.

[5] God and the Between, 85.

[6] God and the Between, 85.

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

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

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

[10] God and the Between, 122.

[11] God and the Between, 145.

[12] Reader, location 314.

[13] God and the Between, 92.

[14] Reader,  location 295.

[15] Reader, 302.

[16] God and the Between, 86.

[17] God and the Between, 86.

[18] God and the Between, 86.

[19] God and the Between, 86.

[20] God and the Between, 149.

[21] God and the Between, 149.

[22] God and the Between, 89.

[23] God and the Between, 90.

[24] God and the Between, 186.

[25] God and the Between, 149.

[26] God and the Between, 149.

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

[28] On the Edge, 4.

[29] God and the Between, 120.

[30] God and the Between, 120.

[31] God and the Between, 121.

[32] God and the Between, 121.

[33] God and the Between, 121.

[34] God and the Between, 187.

[35] God and the Between, 187.

[36] God and the Between, 196.

[37] God and the Between, 196.

[38] God and the Between, 297.

[39] God and the Between, 297.

The Development of Dialectic in Eriugena

Reference to the Logos as developed by Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and Maximus, for many if not most just means the development of Neoplatonism, so it is no surprise that John Scotus Eriugena, who specifically takes up the mantle of Origen, Gregory, and Maximus is also read as a Neoplatonist. What may be refused by this insistence, is that Christianity is introducing a new way of thinking, a different logic, or a new order of understanding, which Eriugena will refer to and explain as “dialectics.” It is impossible to correctly read his understanding, and its constructive use of “contradiction,” through a Neoplatonic lens, which has no notion of contradiction as the means of breaking through to a unified understanding, devoid of duality.[1] For Eriugena, dialectic is not simply a mechanism of understanding, but is at once an epistemology and ontology which unifies being and non-being (his “fundamental division”). This is not just more Neoplatonist metaphysics. As Sergei Sushkov, notes, “no matter how attractive a metaphysical schematism might seem to be, it is in fact utterly irrelevant to a dialectically coherent way of thinking of the living whole, and for this reason can hardly be imposed upon Eriugena’s discourse.”[2]

Of course, neither Origen nor Maximus can be reduced to Neoplatonism either, as both are specifically developing an alternative to a Greek metaphysics, while like Eriugena, each deploys Greek resources. Origen identifies Christ as a unique and new order of understanding. “All who believe and are assured that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ, and who know Christ to be the truth, according to his saying, I am the truth, derive the knowledge which leads human beings to live a good and blessed life from no other source than from the very words and teaching of Christ.”[3] Christ is the singular source of this Truth. Origen notes specifically, that his principle is a departure from a Greek understanding and is a turn to Christ as first principle (see my blog on Origen here): “For just as, although many Greeks and barbarians promise the truth, we gave up seeking it from all who claimed it for false opinions after we had come to believe that Christ was the Son of God.”[4] Origen is clearly working within a Christological frame. He is setting forth an alternative world-view, a Christ centered logic, or a Christian metaphysic. The problem is that very few may have been up to the task of following the subtlety of Origen.

Beyond the fact that the name of Eriugena’s major work, Periphyseon, is taken directly from Origen, he is developing Origen’s apokatastasis or the notion of a universal return and divinization. According to Ilaria Ramelli, The noun ἀποκατάστασις, related to the verb ἀποκαθίστημι, “I restore, reintegrate, reconstitute, return,” bears the fundamental meaning of “restoration, reintegration, reconstitution.”[5] She argues that “this doctrine was abundantly received throughout the Patristic era, up to the one who can be regarded as the last of the Fathers: John Eriugena.”[6] She considers Eriugena “to have been the last great Patristic philosopher, whose thought was nourished by the best of Greek Patristics.”[7] There was nothing heretical about apokatastasis. It was deployed by Origen, Gregory, and Eriugena to combat the heresies of the Gnostics, Marcionites, and predestinationists.[8] As she explains, Eriugena is consistent with Origen’s idea “that precisely participation in the three Persons of the Trinity will bring every rational creature to its restoration. For rational beings receive their existence from the Father (who is the Being par excellence and the Good, so that progress toward the Good is also a greater and greater acquisition of being and existence), their rationality from the Son-Logos, and holiness from the Holy Spirit (Princ. 1,3,8).”[9] Book V of the Periphyseon, demonstrates the deep continuity between Origen and Eriugena, as here he deals with the reditus of all beings to God. As Daniel Heide argues, Origen is the greatest ancient advocate of apokatastasis and Eriugena its greatest mediaeval proponent.[10]

Eriugena is also developing Maximus’ picture of Christ being “all in all”, which is thematic for him. Jordan Daniel Wood has laid to rest the notion that participation, in the Greek sense, adequately encompasses Maximus understanding of divinization, and it is Maximus notion (for the most part, along with Augustine) that Eriugena is developing (see my blog on Maximus here). [11] The logic of Origen’s apokatastasis is summed up in Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). The union of divinity and humanity, the bringing together of the contrary pairs, God/man, or hypostasis, involves a new order of understanding grounded on total identity between God and human. This is not just true in the case of Christ, but according to Maximus, the Christian becomes Christ: “they will be spiritually vivified by their union with the archetype of these true things, and so become living images of Christ, or rather become one with Him through grace (rather than being a mere simulacrum), or even, perhaps, become the Lord Himself, if such an idea is not too onerous for some to bear.”[12] He “draws near to us in his humanity” while bearing the fulness of his divinity, and “having given the whole of Himself, and assuming the whole of man” he witnesses to perfection of humanity and deity “bearing witness within His whole self—by the perfection of the two natures in which He truly exists—to the unchangeable and unalterable condition of both.”[13]

Maximus (and Eriugena) will deploy Origen’s notion of logoi, which makes Christ the ground of the developing dialectic:

The logoi stemming from the Body of Logos will concur anew according to the divine administration in order to form new souls (i.e. the logoi will be ‘embodied’ afresh), in accordance with the Universal Causality which originates in the Body of Logos (i.e. in the will and judgement of Logos) and determines what the new cosmic setting will be for the drama of History (i.e. the dialectical relationship between creaturely and divine will) to take place.[14]

This dialectical exchange is no mere rhetoric, but is descriptive of the taking place of cosmic theosis. Sushkov explains, “According to the dialectical understanding of unity (with a strong appeal to a dialectically coherent treatment of contradiction) that Eriugena does adhere to, the reality of creation cannot be thought of, and therefore known, otherwise than in the way of being inseparable from the universal Principle of all.”[15] The universal principle of the logoi, stemming from the body of Christ, is the ontological ground of this dialectic. As Eriugena claims, “a logical dialectic can lead us to a clear knowledge of spiritual things.”[16]

Eriugena, like Hegel, recognizes that God is in no way excluded from finitude (which would be a form of finitude), but God’s eternality is inclusive of the finite. For Hegel, “God becomes man generically, universally, essentially.”[17] Likewise for Eriugena, “God cannot be known as a finite being, and cannot therefore be thought of by means of predicating attributes of His essence.”[18] Rather, “The infinite is only conceivable by means of contradiction dialectically treated.”[19] Knowing the infinite involves a complete transformation of the mind through which the unity with God restores human integrity, and dialectic pertains to entering this reality. “The combination of dialectic interpreted as a science of being, capable of expressing truths about the sensible world as well as about discourse, with an ontological interpretation of logical concepts allows Eriugena to develop his metaphysical theory, a strong realism.”[20]

One of the examples Eriugena deploys of dialectic contradiction is “man is an animal” and “man is not an animal.” “When taken together in their integrity as the two inseparable aspects of a truly simple (undivided) and therefore really subsisting human nature, in which the inner and the outer cannot be severed, these predicates are to be rightly understood as mutually complementary or, as Eriugena himself puts it, ‘entirely suitable’ (755b).”[21] There is a real contradiction residing in human nature, where man is in one instance bound by an animal state, but he surpasses himself through a dialectical exchange. It is not simply a negation or denial of the body or animality but a revealing or coming to his true nature, in which God Himself is revealed, not through a disconnection but an integration with the flesh. According to Eriugena, “For everything which her Creator primordially created in her” (i.e. human nature) “remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, ‘awaiting the revelation of the sons of God.’”[22] As John puts it, humans were made to be born of God to become “children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1, 12-13). People are to be twice born, of the flesh and the spirit.

Just as Christ is divine and human, so too the apparent duality in human nature – the “contradictory and mutually opposed predicates” taken separately are contradictory but this contradiction describes a potential wholeness so that each is said to be “everywhere a whole in itself.”[23] Humans are both animal and not animal. “This finally means that man’s proper nature can neither be conceived in its truth nor actually affirmed in reality without the negation, which in fact is but the negation of the one-sided finitude of his being, leading to the restoration of its proper wholeness.”[24] “Not animal” must be understood along with “animal” as both true, but neither of which alone captures the fulness of the truth.

The dialectical treatment of the opposition arrives at a new logic: “This is the reality which is embraced by the contraries and is therefore approached when coherently thought of by means of contradiction, aimed at overcoming all dichotomies between the opposites, including the ultimate ones of being and non-being.”[25] This dialectic logic which accords with a dialectic reality enables a restoration of the mind and human nature as a whole, unified with divine reality. The person “becomes at the same time one with the whole of the substantial reality of God’s creation, where the universal contains the particular, and the cause gives rise to the effects, but not vice versa.”[26] The dialectically shaped mind is restored to the reality of the image by which it was created.

Along with other medieval scholastics, Eriugena takes the “image” in Genesis to refer to the natural capacities and the “likeness” to refer to the supernatural endowment, and concludes that through dialectic man is both the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26).

For just as God is both beyond all things and in all things – for He Who only truly is, is the essence of all things, and while He is whole in all things He does not cease to be whole beyond all things, whole in the world, whole around the world… – in the same way human nature in its own world (in its subsistence) in its own universe and in its visible and invisible parts is whole in itself….[27]

For Eriugena there is not a Neoplatonic hierarchy, but “even the lowest and least valuable part, the body, is according to its own principles whole in the whole man, for the body, in so far as it is truly body, subsists in its own reasons which were made in the beginning of creation; and since human nature is so in itself, it goes beyond its whole.”[28] We are made to “cleave” to God, as Eriugena explains. As the Gospel tells us, “Where I am there is My servant also” (Jn. 12:26).“But He is above all things: above all things therefore is the man who cleaves to Him, and above himself in so far as he is in all things.”[29]

Through a dialectic very similar to that of Hegel, Eriugena pictures how it is that Christ is “all in all” or why “incarnation is creation.” As Sushkov concludes, “All this convinces a careful reader of the Periphyseon that the logic Eriugena is pursuing is all about the transformation of the entire human being (brought about through the cardinal change of the way the mind operates) and bringing it into the substantial reality of creation as it truly is in union with God.”[30] He argues that Eriugena’s dialectic through contradiction, which does not seek a Neoplatonic harmony (a mere difference), marks this new order of logic and reality, through which a true uniformity of subject is realized.

Eriugena’s purpose is not to abolish the Greek logic of non-contradiction, but his aim is to escape the finitude of this thought. Contradiction is not a sign of error but a way of thinking and realizing wholeness spread between being and non-being. “Understood like this, contradiction becomes for the human mind nothing other than an effective instrument of uncovering the infinite nature of things as they genuinely are beyond their one-sided appearance, while belonging to proper (unconfined) being and actually participating in it.”[31] Or the way Eriugena puts it, “Let it then not trouble you that it is said of human nature that it is everywhere a whole in itself, that the Image is whole in the animal, and that the animal is whole in the Image. For everything which her Creator primordially created in her remains whole and intact, though remaining hidden until now, awaiting the revelation of the Sons of God.” Through this dialectic is realized “the unity of substance with Him.”[32]

[1] See the dissertation by Sergei N. Sushkov, Being and creation in the theology of John Scottus Eriugena: an approach to a new way of thinking (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2015)

[2] Sushkov, 11-12.

[3] Origen, On First Principles, trans, John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Preface, 1.

[4] Ibid, 2.

[5] Ilaria Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2013), 1.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 2.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 140.

[10] Daniel Heide, Ἀποκατάστασις: “The Resolution of Good and Evil in Origen and Eriugena,” Dionysius, Vol. XXXIII (Dec. 2015, 195-213) 195.

[11]  Jordan Daniel Wood, “That Creation is Incarnation in Maximus Confessor,” (Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy, Boston College, 2018).

[12] Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Maximos Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014), 21.15.

[13] Ambigua 31: paragraph 8.

[14] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 358.

[15] Sushkov, 2.

[16] John Scoturs Eriugena, Periphyseon: The Division of Nature, Trans, John O’Meara (Saint-Laurent: Bellarmin, 1987),  Book V, 865B.

[17] James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (State University of New York Press, 1983) 120.

[18] Sushkov, 39.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Christophe Erismann, “The Logic of Being: Eriugena’s Dialectical Ontology,” Vivarium (45 (2007) 203-218) 203.

[21] Sushkov, 150.

[22] Periphyseon, 761b. Cited in Sushkov, 151.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Sushkov, 152.

[25] Ibid, 153.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Periphyseon, 759a-b. Cited in Sushkov, 154,

[28] Periphyseon, 759b. Cited in Sushkov, 154.

[29] Periphysion, 760a.

[30] Sushkov, 154.

[31] Sushkov, 159.

[32] Periphyseon, 761a.

Understanding William Desmond Through John Scotus Eriugena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid, 95.

[3] Ibid, 96.

[4] Ibid.

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

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

[7]  John Scottus Eriugena in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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

[9] Wayward, 30-31.

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

[11] Wayward, 138.

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

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

[14] Wayward, 31.

[15] Wayward, 30.

[16] Wayward, 31.

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

[18] Stanford Encyclopedia.

[19] Wayward, 31.

[20] Ibid, 30

[21] Ibid,31.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 32.

[28] Ibid, 32-33.

[29] Ibid, 33.

[30] Ibid, 32

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

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

William Desmond on Being Between: Irish-Wise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peaceful Realism: “Peace I Leave with You”

“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful” (John 14:27).  

In archaic societies there was no questioning the cosmic principles. Submission to the “order of things,” however that order was conceived, was as good as it gets. Karma, the Law, the gods or God, or fate, were conceived as the given realities, and though one might act with boldness or try to manipulate within the given parameters, there was no sense of getting beyond those parameters to the basic mechanisms undergirding society and the world. As I understand the Christian message, it is exposing the supposed foundations which enslave to violence, false religion, mental sickness, and slavish, unquestioning obedience. The principalities and powers which seem to be an unbreakable force, ruling through the social order, politics, religion, law, or simply tradition, were shown, through the work of Christ, to be suspendable, if not supplantable.

The Christian revolution is still working itself out, but it has sparked a series of revolutions, each of which share the realization that the order of things is not just a necessary given. Medicine, economics, politics, science, and even psychology, have exposed access to the controls, if not complete understanding or control. Sickness is not always inevitable or incurable. The economic and political order can be rearranged, and capitalism and socialism are the proof. Science presumes to get at the basic structure of things, though that structure has proven elusive and infinitely deep. The fears and neuroses which seemingly control the mind have an etiology that is not inevitable or unbreakable. This is more or less common knowledge, but how to maintain this knowledge and what to do with it, is not immediately clear. Part of this lack of clarity, is the failure to recognize the undergirding power of the dark cosmos addressed by Christ. That is the revolution instigated by Christ, resulting in a series of revolutions, has not yet culminated in the final revolution.

Strangely, the power interwoven with every other, structuring the order binding the human condition, but which is left unquestioned and largely untouched, is precisely that power most directly addressed by Christ. The coercive violence of society, the “absolute necessity” of sacrifice, war, and capital punishment, and the general sickness of masochism and sadism, continue to reign, in spite of the fact that this dealing in death was exposed and defeated by Christ. The realization of this victory was clear to the early church in the realms of war and government servitude and the understanding that restorative possibility had replaced retributive justice (while it was less clear when it came to slavery and patriarchy), but these early gains were eroded. For most Christians today, slavery is wrong and war inevitable.

The sentimental account of the Christmas truce of 1914 illustrates the point. German and American soldiers, killing one another the day before and the day after, emerged from the trenches and exchanged gifts and food and sang hymns such as “Silent Night.” Though the carnage was only briefly interrupted, this story is often told, without irony. The absurdity that Christians, sharing in the Body of Christ, celebrants of his birth and incarnation, could only halt the slaughter momentarily, escaped the participants and those who retell the event in the “Spirit of Christmas.” The numbness (dumbness?), or the general passive submission to “inevitable violence,” is on the order of an archaic resignation to the powers. The sense that Christ has defeated these powers is a non-sequitor.

In the “real world” it is obvious that the one with the biggest weapon, wins. Vengeance, or its threat, is the only possible security. It is reinforced by the violent content of mass media and the passive parameters of the form of spectacle. Those who seek center stage through mass shootings and terrorist attacks, recognize that to garner attention requires spectacle. Dirty Harry and the Columbine killers are bound by the same matrix. The towering infernos (the movie or the terrorist attack), the overwhelming crime, the pleasure of revenge, the necessity of killing, overwhelms any sense of a peaceful counter-agency to violence. The art of film sets forth the received deep structure of the cosmos. The degree to which the form accommodates or creates the impassive lack of agency is unclear, but the medium testifies to the inevitable nature of violence. (Even portrayals of Christ in popular media, such as The Chosen, shape Jesus according to the myth of violence.)

The case of Japan indicates that it is not just life following art, as the atomic holocaust unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seemed to produce the peculiar art form of Japanese cinema. Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah, and Gamera, embody the monstrous threat of total destruction that the nuclear age stirred up. Prior to the nuclear age Japan was able to ward off every enemy, and the samurai, the divine winds, the Yokai, the magic of the islands, cast a spell that could not be broken. The archaic world was broken by the “Christian West,” not through the Gospel but through the destructiveness of its perversion. It was the “Christian Nation” (the United States), which would martyr more Japanese Christians in a day than had been killed in 200 years of persecution. Christianity did not cause Truman the Baptist, Byrnes the Catholic and one of Truman’s closest advisors, or Charles Sweeney (pilot of Bock’s Car) a devout Catholic, or any of the long list of Christian advisors and actors to pause or refuse. Truman reported sleeping soundly and never having a second thought. The faith simply served to ease the consciences of its adherents. Though the image of Christian slaughtering Christian in genocidal proportions forever exposed the emptiness of the predominant form of the Western religion, it was precisely faith that blinded to this conclusion (I write about this here).

The blinding nature of this faith was brought home to me as a boy when I first encountered Christian nationalism. As a new Christian I was worried for Johnny French, whom my father employed for odd jobs, but who was often so inebriated he could not move. I found him in a stupor one day, and wanting to help, asked if he was a Christian. He seemed to suddenly sober-up and was angry that I could ask such a question. He said, “Of course I am a Christian. Don’t you know I was a ball turret gunner in the war.” The piety of being American, of having participated in its greatest sacrament, was proof of his American form of the faith. The fusion of loyalty to country and to God and serving this ultimate power by making it ultimate, were completely melded.

I would like to think, that in my childish way, I was attached to a more direct route to God, and that I was never completely duped by religious nationalism. I felt myself enough of an outsider, even frightened of normal society, that my retreat to nature, no matter how twisted by my own suffering sensibility, served a more universal and intimate form of the faith. “Outside society” I had come to a profound sense of communion with God, as if self-awareness was only fully awakened in this divine fellowship. I had few human companions, no real church family, but it was a glorious time of communion with God and nature, bent inward as it was, but nonetheless an awakening to transcendence. It had not occurred to me before (this transcendence), and I was awakened to a different form of subjectivity.

William Desmond describes this awakening as the arrival of the “intimate universal,” the “ontological way of immanence.” “The meaning of the most intimate immanence is just transcendence as communicative being.”[1] I understood others were called into this communion, but I felt uncomfortable in church society. My communion did not fit with this communion, though I may not have been able to articulate this. “We do not think of God and then, after thinking, try to make up a community with God. The thinking is always and already in that community, though it may not know that, and even though it may not recognize that, or may indeed entirely reject the suggestion of being in that ultimate community.”[2] It was not isolation, or an isolated subjectivity, but a deep communication. Dog, horse, prairie, rabbit, were my only fellow congregants in this communion, but I felt it a fine fellowship in God. “The porosity of being is opened in an ultimate communication, and the passion of our being is our passion for God.”[3] Prayer was my conversation and even if not consciously directed at God, the dialogue was open. “Praying is thought awakening to its original ground, waking in the intimate universal to its own most intimate being as a love of the endowing origin.”[4]

This was not an undisturbed or continual peace, but peace must begin here, and it is in no way regulated by the political, mediated by the social, or grounded in the national. In fact, it may only be tangentially related to the church as institution. The peace won by war, the peace by compromise – a temporary cessation of conflict, the peace of mutually assured destruction, have nothing to do with this peace of the intimate universal. This peace does not depend upon peace gained in the immanent frame. The peace of Christ breaks into this immanence, and this is the form of Christian witness to the world. Christians are not bound by the cosmos, but where they begin with the immanent frame, the political, the nation-state, the peace of compromise, and willingly participate in gaining peace through violence, they betray their primary witness. The peace beginning with infinite subjectivity, is the witness of the church, the power and purpose of the Christian faith. This is the peace the world cannot give.

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

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader, (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) location 2514.  

[2] Ibid, 2520.

[3] Ibid, 2525

[4] Ibid, 2525

The Trinity as the Foundation of Human Experience and Truth: Drawing Together the Thought of William Desmond and Raimundo Panikkar

The Trinity is not simply a complicated or obscure way of describing the Christian God, but the foundation of truth at the root of true human experience. Trinity as the guide into truthful experience goes beyond an objective and abstract correspondence theory of truth, which pictures human intellect as the adequation or correspondence of human intellect to things. It goes beyond a coherence theory, with its immanent self-consistency, beyond idealism, which would equate being and thought, or pragmatic theories in which truth is that which works. All of these theories hit upon a description of truth which may allow for a certain utility, but the full existential and personal dimension is left out, not only that ultimate truth is personal (Trinitarian) but the reception of this truth fills out human personhood (trinitarian).

Each of these other trues contain a drive to absolute possession and control, within the self, which belies their inadequacy. Truth may be absolute, but that form of truth that requires absolute possession is not absolute truth. Humans are not God, we cannot possess this truth as that which completely corresponds to us, or coheres in us. The human relation to truth is not as maker or possessor, as truth is divine. We can seek it, desire it, and participate in it, which already speaks of a relation that is sought (but not possessed). Both Raymondo Panikkar and William Desmond describe this relationship as being between.

According to Desmond, “This being in the between, the metaxu, defines our participation in the milieu of being within which our own middle being intermediates with the truth, truth that might well be beyond us, though not out of relation to us.”[1] The nature of our being is not as originators or makers or owners of truth as this truth, in its very constitution, is beyond us but this beyond is not beyond relation but constitutes our relation, both to ourselves and truth. It is prior to us, after us, surrounding us, permeating us, such that we are in this space of truth as the mediating reality of who and what we are. Just as God is constituted in the relationship of the Trinity, we too are who we are only in relationship. “There is a call of truth on us that is coeval with our being: it is constitutive of the kinds of beings we are. It releases us into a certain freedom of seeking, but this freedom and release are not themselves self-produced.”[2] Our relationship to truth, which is beyond us and calls us, is who we are.

Truth does not simply pertain to our search or simply to us, though it pertains to everything about us. Our pursuit calls for a fidelity to the form of truth, which will presume neither that it is absent nor that it can be manufactured or possessed. “Despairing nihilism” or an “intoxicated will to power,” miss that truth is granted through truthfulness to its form. We are neither completely ignorant nor totally in possession of truth, and our truthfulness is a testament to that condition. To be truthful is to answer the call of truth upon us: “to be open to something other than our own self-determination, something that endows us with a destiny to be truthful to the utmost extent of our human powers.”[3] One dedicated to the truth, to living truthfully, is called to a life of fidelity (faith) which shapes self and experience.

As Panikkar writes, we are between the created and uncreated, or between anthropomorphism (understanding everything in human terms), and theologism (understanding everything in divine terms). He calls this a theandric spirituality, which is both divine and human. “The proper balance of the scales is upset when one ceases to look at the centre; if one gazes at God one is blinded, if one gazes at man one is deafened.”[4] This betweenness is between “body and soul, spirit and matter, masculine and feminine, action and contemplation, sacred and profane, vertical and horizontal – in a word, between what one may continue to call divine and what one has been accustomed to call human.”[5] For Panikkar this “theandric” betweenness is determined by the realization of the Trinity in the God/man, and it is through this paradigm that he finds all human religious experience converging.

Trinity rules out both a completely immanent or transcendent God; a judging God above or a material God below. “The Trinity in fact, reveals that there is life in the Godhead as well as in Man, that God is not an idol, nor a mere idea, nor an ideal of human consciousness. Yet he is neither another substance nor a separate, and thus separable, reality.”[6] It is through Trinity that the unified nature of all reality can be accounted for without falling into pantheism or atheism. The place in which we necessarily encounter Trinity is in human experience, through which we can arrive at a model of a unified reality. A person is neither an isolated monolithic individual nor a corporate plurality. “A singular isolated person is a contradiction in terms. Person implies constitutive relationship, the relationship expressed in the pronominal persons.”[7] A person is constituted as I/thou or a We/you or a as a he/she, the place where the I/thou relation takes place. This is neither wholly objective or subjective but is between subjectivity and objectivity. “Modernist ‘subjectivity’ is erroneous when it eliminates objectivity; but even more erroneous is juridical objectivity – and legalism – when it stifles all true subjectivity.”[8] We can turn completely inward to subjectivity or completely outward in clinging to a law or proposition, and both are a betrayal of the self.

The subjective and objective, as realms apart, consist of the same category mistake as making God transcendent or immanent. In Christ the immanent and transcendent are given an ontological link (in his person). Just as God is himself only in conjunction with Christ so too, we are only ourselves in our integration into this conjunction. God is not enclosed either within himself or within us, in the subjective and immanent or the transcendent and objective. There is a convergence and overlapping of God with transcendence and immanence and humankind is located in and with this convergence. The fully human is “penetrated by this divine dynamism.”[9] This describes the place of the Son, but it also describes the human place in the Son.

Desmond refers to this place between subjective and objective as “transsubjective.” We are endowed with something beyond us and it is in this sense “objective,” but it is in intimate relation to us and fundamental to who we are. Being true involves a fidelity to this form of truth, which Desmond characterizes as “finesse.” This finesse is a readiness for an intimate knowing, an “embodied mindfulness” which is witnessed and imitated. “Finesse refers us to the concrete suppleness of living intelligence that is open, attentive, mindful, attuned to the occasion in all its elusiveness and subtlety. We take our first steps in finesse by a kind of creative mimesis, by trying to liken ourselves to those who exemplify it, or show something of it.”[10] Finesse is a realization of an ontological givenness and the recognition that truth is received – a patient reception. The acceptance of finitude is the recognition we are not our own fathers or our own creators, the rejection of which is a kind of self-hatred. Desmond likens it to a “flower trying to ingest its own ground – impossible, yet were it even conceivable, it would show the inner self-hatred of the flower that must only destroy itself in this way of absolutizing itself.”[11] It is no more possible to dig beneath the flower to discover its origins than it is to definitively name the Father apart from the Son.

We know the Father through the Son, as everything the Father is he transmits to the Son, and the Son returns to the Father. There is a mystery in this exchange. The Son in not the origin, as the Father begets the Son, but as Jesus tells Philip, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father” (John 14:9). The “Son is the is of the Father.”[12] As Panikkar puts it, “To know the Son qua Son is to realise the Father also, to know Being as such implies to have transcended it in a non-ontical way.”[13] God is the Father through the Son. He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To ask what he is beyond this, or in God himself, is nonsense, as it implies an origin, other than that of the Father of Christ. The Son does nothing on his own, yet he is the alpha and omega, the beginning and end. He is God made flesh, God made available, God made human, God made being. The Father causes the Son’s emergence but there is not another preceding the Son. “This of-God is precisely the Son. It is the Son who acts, who creates. Through him everything was made. In him everything exists.”[14] “The phrase ‘God in himself’ already implies a ‘reflection’ which presupposes already this ineffable God (whose ‘self’ we are asking for) and derives from there the notion of a ‘self’ of God which already has an origin and is thus no longer original and originating.”[15] This ineffable self-reflection is no longer the Father.

This sui generis origin, unrelated and totally transcendent, is the contradiction on the order of being one’s own father (the tormenting superego). This impenetrable god is beyond comprehension as he is a contradiction. There is no God alone, apart from the Son. The only approach to the Father is the Son. The Father has no “I” apart from his relatedness to the Son, and this is a primal insight into the human “I” or ego. Personhood is in relatedness, and it does not presume to get behind the origin of this relation or go beyond it, as the relation is the reality. God is not the ground of God, which would amount to an infinite regress, but the Father begets the Son and being of–God, which is definitive of the Son, is definitive of all created in his image.

We do not have ourselves apart from this reality, but the human sickness expresses itself in dividing the Father from the Son, or in objectifying or splitting self from self. To “think my being” or to “have my being” is a refusal of life. We can refuse the gift of life, refuse to receive ourselves in our efforts at self-determination. The fear of losing life, in Panikkar’s description is already an indicator of the nonvalue of this life. “‘Life’ which can be lost is not Life. Nor is existence which can be lost real existence.”[16] This misplaced love of life is neither life nor love, as true life and love would relinquish all for love, and this is stronger than death. According to Desmond, “We can so insist that everything be subject to our self-determination that we betray the joy of this gift, in the overriding of our own self-affirmation.”[17] Refusal of mortality and finitude is a refusal of the gift of life from God, while consent to death is the reception of life. “None of us is exempt, and we will all come to the fearsome challenge of this harder consent. In a certain regard, we are always coming to this consent, or fleeing it, in every moment of our life.”[18]

We can build our life on a lie, fleeing mortality and finitude. “When we realize that we are not seen through entirely by human others, we make our bodies into masks. We become more adept at being liars.”[19] Shame can play a positive role in the feeling of being unmasked, but at the extreme, the mask becomes a complete façade of shamelessness. Both shame and laughter point to the porosity or received nature of the self. Both may expose the absurdity of the self-grounding lie. “There is ontological receiving before there is existential acting. As something ontological, this receiving is constitutive of our being as selving, but it is not self-constituted.”[20] As Desmond goes on to say, “Where the energy of laughing comes from is mysterious, and its ‘point’ often dissolves into nothing, beyond all self-determination. Laughter can be festive and can reveal an ontological affirmation at play deep in our being, preceding logic, exceeding logic.”[21] To be put to shame, or to recognize in laughter the absurd we may cling to, is not the worst thing that could happen. Perhaps there is a little death, an exposure or falsification in both laughter and shame, that opens us further to consenting to death.

In Panikkar’s picture, to consent to death is the reception of the Spirit: “The Spirit comes only after the Cross, after Death. It works in us the Resurrection and causes us to pass to the other shore.”[22] According to Desmond, “In this care, we may be released beyond ourselves in a minding of the other potentially agapeic.”[23] We can invest our lives in patient service of the truth, which relinquishes self-determination and is open to the divine. The Spirit enables this alternative perspective, in which one feels himself addressed by God, and is turned from an “I” to a “thou.” The calling of God is the granting of being (Is 42:6). “In so far as man has not had the experience, in one way or another, of being a Thou spoken by God, in so far as he has not discovered with the wonder of a child (because it is full of mystery) that he is precisely because the I calls him (and calls him by his name, the name representing here his self-hood, his being) he has not yet reached the depth of life in the Spirit.”[24] The deepest realization of self is one of porosity or openness to the Spirit, in which the absolute is relinquished for relationship.

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death . . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:2,15). The experience of the Trinity fills out personhood, as the “I” or ego is displaced by identity in Christ, which is the Spirit of adoption, by which there is direct relation to Abba! Father! This Trinitarian self is the reality of the self for which we were made.

[1] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2012) 188.

[2] Strangeness of Being, 189.

[3] Strangeness of Being, 190.

[4] Raymondo Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), 74.

[5] Panikkar, 73.

[6] Panikkar, xiii.

[7] Panikkar, xv.

[8] Panikkar, 3.

[9] Panikkar, 31.

[10] Strangeness of Being, 192.

[11] Strangeness of Being, 197.

[12] Panikkar, 46.

[13] Panikkar, 46.

[14] Panikkar, 51.

[15] Panikkar, 44.

[16] Panikkar,

[17] Strangeness of Being, 198.

[18] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[19] William Desmond, Godsends: From Default Atheism to the Surprise of Revelation (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 142.

[20] Godsends, 143.

[21] Godsends, 152.

[22] Panikkar, 66.

[23] Strangeness of Being, 201.

[24] Panikkar, 68.

Where Does Thought Begin and End: Mary Versus Martha

The most basic question concerns that with which we are always occupied, the why and how of thought. What is it, how do we best do it, and how does it shape who we are? We might picture thought as either a verb or noun, a doing or a receiving, a striving and working from lack, or a resting in a given and received abundance. It is like the difference between six days of work and the day of Sabbath, or the difference between Mary and Martha upon Jesus’ visitation. “Mary was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations” (Luke 10:39). If we think of the two women figuratively, with Martha representing the verb, the working form of thought, and Mary representing the Sabbatical resting form of thought, it not only illustrates two forms of thought but the perspective of each in juxtaposition to the other.

From Martha’s perspective, Mary is being lazy, and she is “left to do all the serving alone.” Martha’s response to Mary is not meant to devalue Jesus’ teaching, but there are “more pressing and practical matters.” In terms of thought, Martha might represent a kind of pragmatism, asking what work is being accomplished? Martha’s busy-ness (food and serving preparation) will result in a tangible product. We often picture thinking and life as a task aimed at producing. Thought is not simply to be enjoyed and indulged, but must justify itself, and show its value in some other coin. Martha is cleaning, getting a meal ready, and the value of her work is evident, but it does not occur to her that all of her preparations are subordinate to the “one necessary and good thing.”  

Mary, as a Sabbath form of thought, is thought for itself, and is not for something else. Our tendency is to put thinking to work, either in a neurotic compulsive repetition, or aimed at attaining (perhaps ourselves) in and through thought. Sabbath thought, is on the order of Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet and taking in his instruction. We may have the experience of insight or a realization occurring to us, in which we are the receptors of something beyond ourselves. This thinking is not like producing a meal but is more on the order of a form of art, to be enjoyed for itself. There is food for thought which has no object other than itself. In the case of Jesus teaching, so too with a certain form of thought, it is simply to be received with joy. According to William Desmond, it presumes an original ontological ground: “a vision of all things being what they are by virtue of an ultimate ontological peace —to be at all is to be in the gifted peace of creation as good.”1 Sabbath thought is a realization of this ground of thought outside of itself.

Given this ground, contemplation, study, meditation, and prayer, are for themselves, though they may infect and channel all that surrounds them, but thought which does not have this center, is all Martha and no Mary. Sabbath thought “rests” in the realization of the divine, presumes a dependence on God, a providential guidance, an opening to deeper insight. It is a waiting, expectation, and gratitude, while its opposite is pure distraction which never realizes its primary purpose. Sabbath thought bears peace, that is beneath and perhaps beyond articulation. Unadulterated appreciation of beauty, enjoyment, profound contentment, pervade this thought centered on receiving grace. It is the “very good” of God in his admiration of creation and it is our participation in that same realization.

However, before we too readily dismiss Martha’s accusation (or before Jesus’ dismisses it), we recognize that though sloth is not Mary’s problem, this is a real possibility. Isn’t it the case that Sabbath itself contains the possibility of a sort of bored laziness; that the day in which we are to sit at the Saviour’s feet becomes instead a groggy oppressiveness in which we fail to discern the Lord? Thomas Aquinas recognizes this juxtaposition and poses Sabbath as an exposure of slothfulness: “Sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. . . [, which] implicitly commands the mind to peace in God to which sorrow of the mind about the divine good is contrary.”[2] Aquinas defines sloth, as an oppressive sorrow, which, “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing. . . . hence sloth implies a certain weariness of work. . . a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.”[3] Sabbath sluggishness, describes a form of thought that is sorrowful, and having ceased activity (busyness), sorrow sets in as the mind turns in on itself. The lack of purpose, the despair, covered up by activity, may strike us in this moment. The wait for Godot, or for some larger explanation or purpose, is the opposite of Sabbath thought, in that it is all delay, anticipation, suffering, and there is no meaning. Sunday boredom may be much more pervasive than Sunday joy, but from this perspective Sabbath (the day of the Lord) is exposing something otherwise repressed. Sabbath may expose a sloth, a sorrow, a boredom which work hides.

Aquinas explains that sloth may pass from being a venial to a mortal sin, if it is deep ceded enough: “So too, the movement of sloth is sometimes in the sensuality alone, by reason of the opposition of the flesh to the spirit, and then it is a venial sin; whereas sometimes it reaches to the reason, which consents in the dislike, horror and detestation of the Divine good, on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit. On this case it is evident that sloth is a mortal sin.”[4] That is, the spirit may be willing but the flesh weak, or it may be that fleshly torpor also dominates thought and spirit. Sloth can become a way of thinking and Sabbath is meant to intercede in this downward spiral. According to Aquinas, sloth is opposed to joy, and as he explains “sloth can infect reason,” constituting its own joyless form of thought.

Thinking, of the Sabbath kind, the Mary kind, the received kind, is joyous. It is the thought God had on the Sabbath when he recognized, “It is very good.” There is an inherent pleasure in this recognition, which need not “do” something. This thought is an ontological ground out of which all thinking and goodness flows. There is no thinking, of any kind, apart from this origin. This goodness and peace are the basis of peace and goodness, making even defective forms possible. This thought need not wait till the end of history but is present throughout, the beginning and middle, as well as at history’s end. This goodness though, may be so pervasive that it is taken for granted, in that all possibility flows from this reality, making it difficult to recognize.[5] Martha-like busyness may not have time or inclination for this recognition.

We can hide from work, in the manner Martha projects upon Mary, but work can be a distraction, and this may be Martha’s problem: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things” (Luke 10:41). Jesus’ description of Martha captures life for many: worry and bother about many things but missing the point. According to Aquinas, “Now just as we do many things on account of pleasure, both in order to obtain it, and through being moved to do something under the impulse of pleasure, so again we do many things on account of sorrow, either that we may avoid it, or through being exasperated into doing something under pressure thereof.”[6] Martha is exasperated, and she seems to betray a sorrow, which according to Aquinas, she may be repressing. Sloth is a resistance, a dis-ease, the opposite of peace and joy, even where sloth is hidden by activity. Martha and her repressed kin may be missing the only thing necessary, “the good part.”

Martha wants Jesus to spur Mary into action, presuming she is avoiding work, but Jesus suggests Martha’s exasperation is causing her to miss what Mary has found (v. 41). He explains, “Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:42). Martha is misfocused, worried, anxious and bothered, and in the process may miss the good thing, the main thing, and to take it away from Mary would be tragic. Mary has found the peace that has escaped Martha. This peace and goodness give value to everything else. It is the original goodness that makes all the work and preparation an extension of goodness.

Jesus doesn’t tell Martha to drop everything and come and sit down, though we might expect she would finish what she is doing and not miss out. He doesn’t command her, or us, to stop working, and sit meditating, but the work is not going to produce goodness, but flows from and toward this goodness. Martha cannot whip up this thing in her kitchen. What is being imparted to Mary may be assisted by Martha, in that Mary is not taken away from what is necessary, but Martha’s worried, bothered, busy-bodyness, is not helping, but is a distraction from what is essential. “Mary has chosen the good part,” the part that gives value to what Martha is doing. Martha’s busyness is justified by what Mary is doing, but not her worry and bother.

To say her worry and bother are justified would be to justify her experience of exasperated futility. It would be on the order of saying war is necessary for peace, or evil is justified by goodness, or sin is essential to salvation. The two are not connected. Martha’s worry is for nothing, serves nothing, and accomplishes nothing, though it is connected to her service. The problem is, separating Martha and her worry, her service and her exasperation. Is worry or war a necessary means to an end? The one necessary and good thing Mary is experiencing is not aided but hindered by Martha’s worried interference. Mary does not need the worry of Martha. Jesus is immediately accessible, and the goodness and peace he brings are accessible. Nothing else is necessary, and certainly futility and sin in no way aid or serve the good. Paul can experience this peace in prison, John received visions of hope and peace while in exile and under torture, and Christ grants peace from the cross. This thought transcends context and potentially descends into every context.

Now if Mary had said to Jesus, “Excuse me, I must go into the kitchen and strangle my sister,” this would have been like the strategy of peace through war. There is a total disruption, a total break. The one is completely opposed to the other, though we understand the confusion. Life as war, or thought as a plague, killing as the means to life, all Martha and no Mary, kills off the goal in striving to achieve it. There is a basic negativity, nothing as ground, which is not simply a philosophical problem, but which philosophy exposes.

For example, Descartes would doubt his way to God, in a form of thinking which receives nothing which transcends it. Like Kant, he “wants to accept nothing he has not earned through his own work.”[7] Descartes gives more room to doubt and the demonic, (the possibility a demon is deceiving him), than he does to love of God. He considers the possibility that he is brain damaged, that he is dreaming, or that an evil genius is deluding him. Things are precarious, my head may be “made of earthenware,” or “glass,” or I may be insane, or a demon deceiving me. Every possibility must be equally entertained before the arbiter of doubt.[8] He aims for a sure thought, like mathematics, that cannot be doubted but which can be mastered. This suspicious doubt is aggressive to what is beyond its control, and has no room for wonder, astonishment, or love, none of which can be reduced to a mathematical formula. It is as if love of my wife needs a prior surety, perhaps a private detective to investigate, so as to relieve any doubt. In this thinking, love of God is not a possible starting point, but the detective of doubt must first be deployed. Doubt may seem the more rigorous form of thought, but it is by definition the refusal of received thinking (not just received tradition, received authority, received understanding, but the very possibility of reception), on the order of the Sabbath. I must be in all the thought as author and originator. Given Descartes’ starting point (radical doubt and the possibility of radical evil), Sabbath thinking is not possible. Things are too unsure. Tradition, Church authority, and faith, have their place, but not in the realm of serious thinking (the rational kind). It is no great leap from Descartes’ radical doubt to Nietzsche’s nihilism.

This Enlightenment thought promotes an empty autonomy, all Martha and unaware of the Mary form of thought. They will do for themselves: think the greatest thought after Anselm, think one’s being after Descartes, and accept nothing not earned with Kant. The fumes of a presumed autonomy render them unconscious to any alternative; all work and no resting-playful grace. This form of empty thinking brings on Nietzsche’s pronouncement, “God is dead,” and he is dead for this form of thought. It is as if Martha has gotten so caught up in her kitchen duties that she has forgotten the possibility of divine visitation (Jesus in the other room). Mary-like reception can be disrupted and broken, not due to lack of effort, but because of energy, effort, worry, and bother, all directed to attaining what can only be received.

In the same way, grasping the tree of the knowledge of good and evil excludes from the tree of life (they die unaware), but then they find they are naked and ashamed. This failed knowledge is a doing, a grasping, a divinizing through its own power, and at the same time it is a refusal of mortality. Adam is the original Descartes, imagining that in this knowing he has grasped immortal divine being. Busyness, business, war, philosophy, or neurotic thought, may distract and cover the reality (of nakedness, mortality, and frailty). The human impetus is to cover the nakedness without addressing the root problem. As Desmond describes the philosophical project, “preaches speculatively against nakedness and every beyond, and the system weaves its conceptual clothes to cover our naked frailties.”[9]

To cease one form of thought, to bring busyness to an end, to enter the Sabbath, is to give up on covering frailty. There is no activity, no thought, no system of knowing, that can cover this nakedness. All pretense of defense, all weapons, all notions of self-determination, all busyness, must be dropped, as there is nothing to be done, other than receive the gift of the Master. There is no working to get there, but the work of preparation, in the metaphorical kitchen, must cease so as to enter the metaphorical living room at the feet of Jesus. There is no warring our way to peace, struggling to gain rest, or working our way to salvation. You cannot get to Mary-thought through Martha-thinking, the one precludes the other.

The dialectical intelligibility of the world, its oppositional antagonism, may in fact be more familiar, and may even provide a momentary satisfaction, but hunger will return. As Jesus explains at the well in Samaria, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about,” (Jn 4:32) and he promises a living water which “will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). Martha-thought may provide temporary sustenance but it cannot serve in place of what Mary receives. Mary takes the time given to receive what is not otherwise available, while Martha cannot make time.

Goodness and peace, like the thought they entail, require only sitting at the feet of Jesus. This is cessation of activity of the Martha kind so as to receive the Word in the way of Mary. This thought is from beyond us, just as every origin, including ourselves, transcends us. We cannot cook up this peace or create this goodness, but only receive it. The point is not to denigrate Martha and her work or any work, but to acknowledge that all work requires more than itself. Even God’s work days are followed by interludes recognizing the goodness and then an uninterrupted Sabbath day, recognizing and declaring this goodness. To enter into this divine recognition is the beginning of Sabbath thought. “There is nothing we can do, nothing we are to do; except to take joy in the gift of being, and to live divine praise.”[10]

So thought is that which pervades every waking and even sleeping moment of our lives, and it may not have occurred to us that there is a failed form, an inadequate form, and a redeemed form of thought. It is not that we can easily be continually absorbed into this reality, but the goal of this transformed, grateful form of thought, holds out the immediate realization of rest and peace, the fulfilled Sabbath rest of Christ.

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

[1] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 320.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa, ques. 35, art. 3, response, and ad. 1. Cited in  Desmond, 319.

[3] Summa, Question 35, Article 1: Whether sloth is a sin?

[4] Summa, 35:3.

[5] Desmond, 320.

[6] Summa, 35:4.

[7] Desmond, 341. This Lutheran rejection of works somehow preserved a toilsome thought, perhaps in making God so transcendent that his goodness was unavailable.

[8] René Descarte, Meditations 1 & 2.

[9] Desmond, 347.

[10] Desmond, 347.

Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Ibid.

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

[4] Desmond, 325.

[5] Desmond, 326.

[6] Desmond, 326.

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

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

[9] Desmond, 322-323.

[10] Desmond, 323.

[11] Desmond, 324.

[12] Desmond, 325.

[13] Desmond, 325.

[14] Desmond, 332

[15] Desmond, 347.

[16] Desmond, 347.

The Return to Metaphysics: William Desmond’s Deployment of Hegel to Answer the Postmodern Critique of Metaphysics

One of the most profound and insightful contemporary readings of the work of G.W.F. Hegel is that of William Desmond, who carries out a prolonged critique of Hegel, but Desmond’s critique is subsequent to a deep appreciation of Hegel, which will come to shape much of his work. To understand Desmond’s view of the failure of the postmodern critique of metaphysics (inclusive of Hegel) and his return to metaphysics, it is necessary to examine his earlier work in which he explains how deconstruction and “postmodernism” have misinterpreted Hegel. Even recently, when I raised the issue of deconstruction, Desmond pointed me to his early work on Hegel’s aesthetics to understand his take on deconstruction and the failure of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, who short-change Hegel.[1] They, along with a variety of their heirs, critique a kind of metaphysics, but fail to recognize Hegel preceded them in this critique, and that a full reading of Hegel indicates the metaphysics Desmond would recover.

In his work on Hegel’s aesthetics, Desmond undertakes exposure of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian legacy, working in the one-sided “anti-shadow” (negativity) of Hegel, so as to delineate both links and departures from Hegel, and then to show how Hegel’s dialectic can serve “as a fruitful foil to deconstruction.”[2] Desmond argues Hegel’s dialectic is based upon the resource of an original wholeness, which allows for the dynamic complexity appreciated by deconstruction, but which it would dissolve, not having understood its necessity. The Absolute (God) is written off: to “long for any such road is to be guilty of ‘nostalgia’ for metaphysics.”[3] This leaves only the absolute of deconstruction; “the absolute aimed at subverting all absolutes,” which fails to deal with the “intricacies in Hegel’s texts” and the necessary wholeness implicit to his dialectics.[4] Hegel’s affirmation “that the true is the whole” is at once basic to his philosophy and aesthetics. It is the necessary “teleological thrust” to his dialectics, enabling the “wholeness” of articulation. He is resisting the deconstruction of his day; “the forces of a dissolving negativity” which he “recognized as a mark of modern culture generally.”[5]

As Desmond puts it, “We can see here the shift wrought by this negative dialectics as first from God to man, and then from man to language itself as the cunning, indeterminable power that eventually mocks all simple human pieties.”[6] This shift of the modern consciousness, the secular negation of God supposedly allowing for self-determination, gives way to absolute indeterminacy. That is the “death of man” follows hard upon the heels of “the death of God.”  The initial liberation (the “horizon wiped clean”) will ultimately leave only agonistic destruction. Desmond notes, those uneasy with this conclusion, but acknowledging deconstruction, have offered no counter-theory (the point of his project). For Desmond there are no partial measures against loss of the whole (the complete destruction of metaphysics). “Better to put Satan behind one, than to sup with this devil, however long one’s spoon. The command to Satan, however, does not seem to carry much efficacy. This Satan is not a docile boy.”[7] To partake of the fruit of deconstruction, without succumbing to absolute negation, involves a deep engagement with the complexities of Hegel.

Desmond first notes, Hegel precedes Nietzsche in his pronouncement of the philosophical failure, the “death of God, in his depiction of the “Unhappy Consciousness.” The question is, how to respond to this desolation, without simply surrendering to it. Desmond points to Hegel’s defense of the wholeness of art, extrapolating to and from an original wholeness. Nietzsche was not originally unappreciative of this unifying wholeness. He saw both the Dionysian (representing chaos, emotion, passion and creativity) and the Apollonian principle (symbolizing order, reason, logic, structure and clarity) as balanced in art and life, but then the Dionysian comes to predominance in his Will to Power. Nietzsche characterized life’s antagonisms as boiling down to Homer versus Plato, art versus metaphysics, the substitution of an eternal other world (a world of pure Being, the forms, the ideas) for the world of poetry, art, and becoming. The dead world of stasis displaces the living world of Becoming and beauty. Platonism is nihilism, negating the wealth of a living reality for a dead univocity.[8]

The forms, in their dead stasis, must be dismantled so as to recover life in its “Innocence of Becoming.” Like a child, becoming is diverse, disunited, dynamic, but in Nietzsche’s estimate time must be privileged over eternity, the creative must begin with deconstructing illusions of soul, eternality, and permanence. Fixed forms need exploding. “I am not a man; I am dynamite.”[9] Cold logic has displaced the warmth of art, poetry and myth, in all of their diversity. They are traded for the illusion of a univocal language (Logos), a contradiction free, rule-bound structure. Nietzsche would explode this “logical ideal.” For man to be born, God must die, so that poetry displaces the heavy burden of this divine simplicity. As Desmond explains, univocal language is an impoverished version of a more primordial utterance. “If we can adapt the title of one of Nietzsche’s works, we need a Genealogy of Logic which will restore language from its deformation by the logic of univocity.”[10]

Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is that it smuggles in God in philosophical terms, such that the deity is controlled by the terms of philosophy. The God of metaphysics is not one that freely bursts on the scene in the Burning Bush or arrives as the God/man, but his work is determined by philosophical logic, serving as the ontotheological glue and ultimate cause. This determinant way to God stresses sameness, an unmediated objectification and an absolute univocity.[11] Heidegger develops Nietzschean themes, accusing the west of being “logocentric” or “onto-theological” and thus there is a “forgetting of Being” or a forgetting of the source of truth. The metaphysics causing this obscuring must be destroyed, to arrive at the truth of “being here.”

According to Heidegger, language must be reconceived. “Man does not think through language, but language thinks with and through man.” Language means more than is intended and more than can be interpreted. “As Derrida puts it: the field of language lacks a center; rather language is defined by a free play of substitutions.”[12] Heidegger and Derrida consider Hegel one of the main culprits, in his drive to systematize and cognize God. Isn’t Hegel responsible for attempting to complete western metaphysics, and doesn’t he claim as much? “The real is the rational, the rational is the real.” The “Logic of Being” in his “Absolute Idea,” sounds like a compounding of Plato, an “absolutization of the Apollonian imperative.”[13] Hegel is accused of “grasping meaning” and deconstruction would disillusion the reader of this “naïve faith”; only partial, incomplete, or contradictory readings are possible. Logocentrism and univocity must be exposed and unsettled through the equivocal, through the multiplicity of meanings, and through contradictory meanings. “Difference, sheer difference, or multiplicity without an enjoining unity, is the keynote of this world. In this case the sheer difference means the reduction of univocity to the equivocal.”[14] The point of deconstruction is to show that equivocity is inherent to language.

Desmond counters this reading of Hegel (as the last metaphysician) with a more complicated picture. He notes that Hegel’s dialectic already contained themes picked up by the deconstructionists. Afterall, dialectics entails conflict: “antinomies,” “antithesis,” “opposition,” are part of Hegel’s equivocal. In addition, dialectic is descriptive of “linguistic acts” which pertain not simply to thinking or the “logical” but to Being or the “ontological” as it is connected to “Becoming.” These are themes in Hegel, absorbed by Nietzsche, but for Hegel this dynamism is not simply a formless flux, but is in the process of forming and structuring (both the Dionysian process and the Apollonian form). The one is necessary to the other, and neither can exist in isolation.

Hegel recognizes equivocity and univocity are inherent to language. The real is in process and cannot be frozen, but this process is not given over to absolute difference. Verstand (Understanding) abstracts from the flux so as to differentiate but this is not a final abstraction or a rigid separation. Verstand embraces antinomies, allowing for the return of the equivocal. “For through univocity the analytical understanding tries to conquer a given equivocation; but its conquering categories are themselves conquered by equivocation on the other side of established univocity. Dialectic, for Hegel, simply follows the flow of this development by which an initial unity, seemingly simple and hard set, breaks itself up into polarities, contradictions, antitheses, oppositions.”[15] We must tarry with the negative, stare it in the face. But this is not an end, but the opening to a fuller consciousness. “Each configuration (Gestalt) of consciousness disfigures itself, each form deforms itself, every construction deconstructs itself under the relentless power of the ‘negative.’”[16]

As with deconstruction, thinking wars against itself, generating contradiction and driving itself to a greater fulness and creativity. Hegel likewise uses the language of “negativity” and skepticism as essential to authentic thought. All absolute fixity fails and dissolves. But this is a generative process which touches upon reality and deconstructs partiality. Thus, Hegel turns to the peculiar properties of the German language, in its ability to capture this unfolding dynamic. “Richer language, language which contains a whole world within itself, a world inclusive of opposites, is required. The dialectical language of Hegel’s own philosophical discourse is his effort to live up to this requirement.”[17] As Desmond concludes, “negativity does not completely exhaust the process of articulation, but rather is itself completed by its balancing power. At the heart of the ‘negative’ we must affirm a positive.”[18] There cannot be pure dissolution or negativity, as the positive makes dissolving possible. The negative “makes the release of the positive power” which cannot be reduced to the negative. “For Hegel, after deconstruction, dialectic opens up to a moment of reconstitution.”[19]

This is the point of Hegel’s Aufhebung: something is suspended as we transcend what is simultaneously suspended and preserved. This suspension involves negation, transcendence, and preservation, as thought moves beyond the limitations of that which is suspended. But the suspended is not simply destroyed, but is recognized as a limitation, beyond which is a fuller realization. The suspended element marks the standpoint from which one is liberated. “In more popular terms, terms which Hegel himself did not employ, the breakdown of the thesis and its simplicity by its antithesis points further again to the synthesis of these two previous antagonists.”[20]

This “more embracing synthesis” is not simply deconstruction, though it involves the breakdown of univocity, while pointing to the possibility of opposites being held together in a more unified meaning. “Equivocal difference dissolves univocal unity, but for this ‘dialectical identity’ there is a reintegration of these differences beyond sheer equivocation. We are capable of thinking of the ‘togetherness’ of these differences, of embracing a unity of opposites.”[21] Dialectical unity embraces the equivocal, dissolving power, so as to “go positively beyond” negation. “That is, there is a complex unity, a dialectical identity which embraces both univocal unity and equivocal differences. This unity is absolute because it is absolving, freeing, not just dissolving.”[22] There is a reconstructing with Hegel, allowing for further developments involving the reality of limited articulations and understandings. Things are not simply disintegrated, but reintegrated which accounts for continued density and value, aimed at increased understanding and fulness. The original impetus and energy are not completely spent. “Through the process of dialectical formation the original dynamism is shaped and set forth into its different stages and gathered together into a rich whole.”[23]

The negative and absent are only realized out of an originary appreciation of wholeness. This wholeness may not be reducible to total comprehension but it points to the pleroma, an overflowing Being. Where deconstruction will not allow for synthesis, Hegel’s dialectic presumes this synthesis precedes and comes after suspicion. “Dialectic . . . allows the strain toward dissolution in every synthesis, but the given experience of the synthesis indicates that contraries are already contained within this original unity.”[24] The very possibility for art or understanding presumes an original beauty and understanding which does not simply end in dualism, irreconcilable opposition, or equivocation. Dialectic simply traces movement in and through this possibility of something more.

This reappreciation of Hegel allows for a new understanding of wholeness, not as a univocal and closed system, but as a complex and ever unfolding formation. The accusation of Hegel’s “closure,” Desmond argues is oversimplified by the deconstructionists. One cannot leap over Desmond’s appreciation of Hegel, as out of this deep engagement springs Desmond’s passage beyond, but through, Hegelian dialectics. Desmond does not leave us with an isolated equivocation or univocity but returns us to metaphysics, having appreciated the metaxological toward which Hegel, however inadequately and incompletely, pointed him. Desmond clearly has found in Hegel, inspiration for his life’s work in developing this metaxological understanding.

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

[1] William Desmond, “Dialectic, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

[2] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 83.

[3] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 79.

[4] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 80.

[5] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81. Indeed, the continued “cutting edge” “deconstruction of faith” is still working the Hegelian negative, not as Hegel intended (for its power to positively determine) but simply to reveal final indeterminacy.  

[6] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 81.

[7] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 82.

[8] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 84-85.

[9] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 85.

[10] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 86.

[11] William Desmond, Being Between: Conditions of Irish Thought (Galway: Arlen House, 2008) 317.

[12] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 88.

[13] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 87.

[14] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 90.

[15] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 93.

[16] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.

[17] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 94.

[18] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[19] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[20] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[21] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 95.

[22] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.

[23] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 96.

[24] Hegel’s Aesthetics, 98.