Tag: William Desmond

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.

There is a Crack in Everything: Reading William Desmond and Slavoj Žižek with Flannery O’Connor

Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. There is a crack in everything God has made. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”[1]

We may imagine we are invulnerable, but then a wound opens. A world that seemed complete, cracks open so that both darkness and light flood in through the gaps. Flannery O’Connor, in various forms and characters, describes how the gaps can open, revealing the dark suturing point holding our world together, and this inevitably is conjoined with enlightenment. In her story Revelation, Ruby Turpin’s visit to the doctor has her reflecting on her good fortune relative to those she surveys in the waiting room.[2] There is the rude child who will not make room for her to sit down, the leathery old woman in a cotton print dress with the same print as sacks of chicken feed, the woman in wine colored gritty-looking slacks with a yellow sweatshirt, the ugly girl with a skin problem. She judges their shoes, their socks, and besides the pleasant looking lady and the common girl, she concludes they are mostly white trash “worse even then n….” “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home and land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.”

While she surveys the various low-grade humans by which she is surrounded, a gospel hymn was playing and Mrs. Turpin mentally supplied the final line, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.” The ugly girl, Mary Grace, seems to read Ruby’s thoughts (and clearly picks up her demeaning racist conversation), and at a moment in which Ruby is thanking Jesus for her own good disposition and circumstance, Mary Grace heaves her book and hits Ruby over her left eye. “The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she whispered.” Ruby Turpin’s world cracks apart as she comes to terms with the opening of this fissure, which she takes as a revelation.

Both Slavoj Žižek, the atheistic philosopher, and William Desmond, the Irish Catholic philosopher, speak of a “crack in everything.” Both are engaging the Hegelian reflection on the Kantian antinomies and coming to different conclusions about the significance that our world does not hold together but is somehow out of joint. The One does not correspond with itself; the subject can be its own object; thought does not arrive at the thinking thing; I and me do not entirely align. This discord may be taken as an indicator either that reality is incomplete or that it opens onto something beyond. With Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality. O’Connor reaches a depth of darkness on the order of Žižek, but she combines this realization as only being exposed in the light of revelation. The discord between atheistic materialism and philosophical theism points to the “between” we all occupy. The disease of being stuck, of desire which gives rise to drive, may be the predominant force in our lives, but this force, which seems to be for evil, is the gap through which the light potentially shines.

Žižek calls this the “parallax gap” and he defines it as “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”[3] He notes, Kant referred to this as the “transcendental illusion,” in which one can describe the same phenomena from two different perspectives between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. This gap exists all around us, though our tendency is to “balance” or “harmonize” binary opposites, imagining the out-of-jointness is temporary, and it is best if we are not over-focused on the problem. We are surrounded by binary opposites such as masculine and feminine, liberal and conservative, wave and particle, nature or nurture, freedom and determinism, mortality and immortality, the individual or the group, or in Kant’s summary of the problem “phenomena and the noumena.” Everything from the colors of the rainbow (wave length and the appearance of color) to mind and brain are disjointed, posing a gap. “Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip.”[4] There is a minimal difference within a singular thing in which it is divided against itself. Reality cannot be completely synthesized, so it might seem that Kant has named the problem for which there is no solution; that is, it may seem as if Kant has the final word over Hegel.

In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, antinomy is not the problem of reality but its basis. Where Kant exposes the structuring principle of the world in antinomies, Hegel presumes this is not a problem to be solved, but the very nature of reality and this is Žižek’s point of departure. “And does not Hegel, instead of overcoming this crack, radicalize it? Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”[5] Psychoanalytically the divided self (the split within Paul’s I) may seem to be the primary problem but this problem for Žižek is also the cure. There is no escape from the conflict of drives or the antagonism between the registers of the self (symbolic, imaginary, and real), but recognition of this reality is the first step to controlling it. The perceived gap or difference is constitutive of “reality” and closure of the gap or dissolution of dissonance, the exposure of the primordial lie, would amount to a dissolving of this perceived reality. The goal is not to overcome the gap but to conceive it in its “becoming” and thus manipulate it.[6] So, one should learn to enjoy their symptom rather than cure it, as sickness is the reality of the Subject.

Žižek, unlike Desmond, argues that Hegel’s was not a closed synthesis, while Desmond develops his metaxological understanding presuming he is moving beyond Hegel, though both are developing the significance of the gap, which Desmond dubs the “metaxological.” According to Desmond, “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[7] As he explains, “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[8] While Žižek presumes this tension is inherent to Hegel, Desmond thinks Hegel’s synthesis goes beyond the tension, which he sees as a continual resource. The “mystery” of the middle draws us toward it.  “The strangeness is not that of a hostile stranger, but rather of an intimate from which one has been estranged, which estrangement now begins to be slowly overcome.”[9] Desmond describes an awakening on the order of O’Connor’s: “Our ears, long caked with misunderstanding, hear sporadically only a faint echo of song. We have been deaf for too long. This deafness can last centuries, as with Western modernity that has systematically closed its hearing to ‘It is good.’”[10]

In a passage that sounds very much like Hegel, Desmond describes truth both as the enabling reality and the impetus toward a deepening of reason: “Self-determining thinking is released into its own freedom to think for itself by an enabling resource that is not self, a source not captured in terms of this or that determinate thought, or by thought’s own determination by and for itself. There is more that allows thinking to be itself more than itself.”[11] In the “crack” there is a mystery which does not speak of absence or lack but an excess which the theologian recognizes as Logos. Desmond does not explicitly identify the Logos but this is implicit. He speaks of “a call” more primal than self-assertion in which through the process of conversion (metanoia) we feel an indebtedness which endows us to move beyond the self and self-glorification to a sense of gratitude. “There is reverence for what has been given rather than arrogance for what is claimed as one’s own.”[12]

The wakening up of this reverence occurs in the “godsend” which frees from obsession with the self, working through the gap: “there are graced communications when self-transcending is freed from self-circling and an energy of generosity is released towards the otherness of the between, into the givenness of creation as good, into the neighborhood of others as good. A godsend of generosity visits us in the between.”[13] The between of self and other, work toward a realization or enlightenment opening up to reality: “We start in the midst of things, and we are open to things. We are open because we are already opened. Before we come to ourselves as more reflectively thoughtful, we already are in a porosity of being, and are ourselves as this porosity of being become mindful of itself.”[14] This mindfulness is a personal realization of what Hegel might call “spirit” becoming aware of itself in the individual. For Desmond, the godsend opens up the crack in reality, exposing the darkness and letting in the light.

Desmond appeals to O’Connor’s Revelation, as an example; the exposure of the racism by which Ruby Turpin orders her world, and then her godsend literally strikes her in the face in the form of the book and the girl’s harsh words. Her dark reality is exposed. She looks at the girl who had thrown the book, “‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath waiting, as for a revelation.” Long past the events, after the girl is gone and Ruby and Claud have returned home, she silently carries on the conversation. “Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.” She answers the girl’s accusation: “’I am not,’ she said tearfully, ‘a wart hog. From hell.’ But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now.” She recognizes from whence this godsend has come and complains directly to God: “‘What do you send me a message like that for?’ she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. ‘How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?’” She rages at God, “‘Why me?’ she rumbled. ‘It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.’”

As the sun is setting and the light is fading, “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’” The question reverberates back, putting everything she knew into question. Then she catches a vision: “Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She sees a vast swinging bridge stretched toward heaven, and on it were companies of white-trash, black folk, “battalions of freaks and lunatics” “clapping and leaping like frogs.” And then she sees her own kind at the back, marching with all the dignity they could muster. “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

This seemingly random act of violence, for Ruby is a revelation about herself and her world. Her sense of self, her invulnerability, her station in life, which she thought free of illusion turns out to be a lie. Like the prodigal son who comes to his senses among the pigs, like Peter caught in the midst of denying Christ and suddenly broken, like the two on the Road to Emmaus who encounter a stranger who turns their world upside down, the godsend, Christ, may come in any number of forms, through which one world is undone in opening another. Could it be that something like Žižek’s dark hopelessness necessarily accompanies Desmond’s godsend? As Ryan Duns writes, “The ‘crack’ in everything renders philosophy and theology, or at least a metaxological philosophy and theology, porous to one another. The theological layer is not imposed but exposed and revealed by the godsend and our response, in faith, is to live according to the logic of these depths.”[15] There is a speculative darkness eclipsed by joy in the theological turn to philosophy; a path opened by Žižek’s Hegel which comes alive in Desmond.

Ruby’s vision fades but the realization it brought remained. “At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(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. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] Ryan Duns deploys Emersons quote for his opening epigraph. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 76.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, Revelation, included in her collection titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” but also available online https://andrewmbailey.com/oconnor_revelation.pdf.

[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 4.

[4] Parallax View, 4.

[5] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 8). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[6] Parallax View, 6-7.

[7] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[8] Reader, 199.

[9] William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY, 1995) 205.

[10] Being and the Between, 205.

[11] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC:CUA Press, 2012), 217. Cited in Duns, 349.

[12] William Desmond, “Consecrated Thought: Between the Priest and the Philosopher,” (Louvain Studies, 30, no. 1-2 (2005): 92—106), 97. Cited in Duns, 350.

[13] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition), loc. 4207.

[14] Desmond Reader, “Wording the Between,” loc. 3730.

[15] Duns, 351.

Agapeic Love Versus the Antichrist: William Desmond’s Resolution to this Age of Nihilistic Christianity

The Antichrist in the biblical description is a false duplicate, imitating and perverting Christ in a near mirror image, which perverts the original enough so as to create the opposite effect. This distortion turns the spiritual into the demonic, love into hate, and peace into war. Living, as we seemingly are, in the age of the Antichrist, Christians have made a Faustian-like bargain with the political powers and popular religion. Christ’s admonition regarding the stranger is turned into exclusion rather than inclusion, his admonition of nonviolence is displaced by extreme violence, and his admonition of love – love of enemy, the stranger, the alien, has become a vehicle of hatred. This “masculine” form of the faith sees viciousness as a virtue in bringing about the “rule” of Christ through a bullying grab for power.[1]

This blunt statement does not get at the subtlety and means of how it is that the Truth has been displaced by a lie, but William Desmond, through his life-long philosophical engagement sets forth a key description particularly through the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, exposing this displacement of the Gospel. The temptation may be to frantically point out the Antichrist serving in place of Christ, and imagine that everyone can see the obvious, but there is a blinding logic at work which is not dispelled by the pronouncement. Where hate has displaced love there is a need for a depth of engagement, a transformation of the mind, a grounding in truth, which can account for the lie. If we cannot name or describe the truth (in depth), we may not understand how we might be implicated in the problem. It is not enough to declare the stink to those at home with the odor.

Nietzsche recognizes the rot in German Christianity, and as “a philosopher of the nose,” as he calls himself, “he claims to smell out, in high ideals, through subtle traces and trails, the secret stains of rottenness.”[2] Desmond, a subtle reader of Nietzsche, points out that reading him as a “secret (Christian) fellow traveler” or as univocally Antichrist (his self-description), misses the fact that neither captures his equivocation. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, says, Christians will have to “sing better songs to make me believe in their Redeemer.” It is not enough that they roll their eyes to heaven invoking love of neighbor, a “command that secretly enforces one’s own sweet will?” This “categorical imperative reeks of cruelty.”[3]

G.W.F. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness and Nietzsche’s Will to Power describe how in our own self-division we bow down to a power we conjure up and project, evacuating the world of meaning. “God as our own beyond is the source of the devaluation of the earth and ourselves.”[4] We are unhappy, self-punishing and cruel, because we have projected our own self-image onto God. This God needs crucifying if true humanity is to be recovered. Zarathustra exults in the freedom killing God produces, but what seems obvious is that any semblance of the Christian God is already dead, and the Christianity that Nietzsche is describing is already a practical atheism.

Nietzsche is recommending an atheistic resolution to the problem of God, but this solution of working within an immanent frame already describes German Christianity. Absolute transcendence and the loss of divine immanence is the result of a Christianity that has reversed the meaning of the cross. Luther’s “death of God on the cross” (which Nietzsche plays upon) aimed to defeat the metaphysics of scholasticism, affirming an empty nominalism, so that Nietzsche is only carrying out the logical implications of a God rendered inaccessible. The Nietzschean reversal of the meaning of the cross resonates with a Christianity in which immanence is the only practical possibility. His recommendation of the Übermensch, which Hitler took personally, is of the same order as a Christianity which needs their thugs to gain control in an immanence divided from transcendence.

Nietzsche however, recognizes that Christianity has powers of enchantment which need to be utilized in his project of recovering a masculine will-to-power. “The Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ” in The Will to Power, describes his project of educating rulers, who will need to “master even one’s own benevolence and pity,” and not put it to work in the childish forgiveness of the enemy: “the affect of creator’s must be elevated” so that a new kind of master arises. Not one set to craft artificial power but one which comes fully into power. “[T]he exceptional situation and powerful position of those beings (compared with any prince hitherto): the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.”[5] What is needed is a Caesar who is no longer constrained by any servile residue of pity or forgiveness. The Christian God has stolen the power of creativity from rulers who do not recognize that they can be the Creator. This Uber ruler will exceed the power of princes of any previous age, through taking on a spiritual superiority exceeding hatred or forgiveness of the enemy. “This ‘above, this ‘über,’ seems to embrace the extremest promise of human creativity: highest superiority of spiritual power.”[6]

This Caesar with the soul of Christ will combine the attributes of the lion (with his strength of will) with the characteristics of a child. Nietzsche describes a three-stage metamorphosis of spirit, first is the camel, representative of a strong servility, then a lion who asserts its own will (though it is not fully creative) but opens space for the fully developed child. “The child is the third: the self-affirming spirit that is a sacred “yes” and self-propelling wheel; it is a new beginning of the will willing itself.”[7] Here is pure unfettered will, which will focus only upon the self, breaking any obstacle or constraint (whether legal or the human other).

There is complete repudiation of reliance on the other. “Thus Nietzsche/Zarathustra will confess to not knowing about receiving. He knows about giving; and giving out of an abundance. This giving out is in the form of self-affirming; it is not for the other as other; it is the fulfilled power of the child simply overflowing, through being full with itself.”[8] This Caesar with the soul of Christ will seek only his own glorification. Like Christ he is creator and creation – a self-creation – exercising full self-determining autonomy. Obviously, Nietzsche does not mean “child” in the sense that Christ uses the term, but this is his Antichrist who takes on a resemblance to Christ, parodying the sacred with its enchanting creative possibilities.

Caesar with the soul of Christ moves in the opposite direction to Christ’s command to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. Christ would separate the two while Nietzsche fuses them, but he also wants to reproduce the power of Jesus to evoke the inner presence of the kingdom. “He did not know the ‘no’-he was innocent of the will that stands against, that negates, and in that sense empty of ressentiment and revenge.”[9] Though Nietzsche is inconsistent, with Jesus sometimes suffering from being too Jewish, here Christ is the ultimate anti-Semite: “Jesus uttered his ‘no,’ his ‘anti,’ not only against the ‘Church’ and the ‘priests’ but against the ‘Jewish Church.’”[10]

He is unconstrained by the law and even unconstrained by the neighbor. Nietzsche would also have us say “no” to the neighbor, as if the neighbor is more important than I am. He “is clearly intent to break with any subordination of the ‘I’ to the ‘thou.’ Zarathustra says: the ‘thou’ is older than the ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ is to be the crowning achievement of the creative individual.”[11] We need friends, but only in our self-attainment. “May the friend be to you a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Superman.” “In your friend you should love the Superman as your principle.” “What finally comes back is my own self!”[12]

Desmond questions if distinguishing the self in this way or outranking everyone else is of any value. “If all value is projection of will-to-power, how do we establish rank? For if all is will-to-power and there is no inherent value (as Nietzsche believed), the whole is valueless and the truth of rank in value is actually homogeneity, since high and low are each a projection of will-to-power.”[13] For Nietzsche this will to power is all there is, but one wonders what is the point, in a world drained of meaning. What is being created and to what end in a world in which ultimate power is only one more form of controlling obedience?

This is Jacques Lacan’s argument against Dostoevsky’s “if God is dead everything is permitted.” Lacan counters, if God is dead nothing is permitted, as the weight of power ultimately crushes all who would gain it. The weight of the law taken into the self does not relieve oppression but multiplies it. Being the law (power for powers sake) is the ultimate servitude of nothing, and it exacts everything in draining life of its depth and beauty. For Nietzsche there is no escape as absolute freedom seems to also picture a crushing servitude to self: “For me-how could there be any ‘outside-me’? There is no outside!”[14] Nietzsche is not unaware of the hell he would create: “But I live in my own light, I drink back into myself the flames that break from me. I do not know the joy of the receiver; and I have often dreamed that stealing must be more blessed than receiving. It is my poverty that my hand never rests from giving. Oh wretchedness of all givers!”[15]

Nietzsche’s atheistic musings which include a failure of Christian thought, points to the possibility of a reinvigorated Christianity, more mature than a striving for control or sovereignty, beyond a willful willing of self. Desmond notes that it is not a matter of setting aside erotic love but a surpassing and fulfilling of eros and sovereignty, desire set upon self.

As such, it would imply a kind of unselving, if you like, but not in terms of an innocent will-lessness before erotic will, but with a willing beyond willfulness and beyond will-to-power, and indeed beyond good and evil, in so far as these are defined by a determinate, humanized moral measure. This is to be, not in the innocence of becoming, but in the agapeic good beyond moral good and evil.[16]

There is a higher freedom and autonomy which is for the other which is already a participation in a love exceeding the self. There is a self-transcending agapeic service in which the glory of the self is not the point. Caesar will have to step down from his throne to take the name of Christ; Christ’s is not a spirit gained through sovereign power. In his temptation in the wilderness Christ refused sovereign rule, he refused to turn stone into bread, he refused rule over the world of men, he refused spiritual domination. In this, Nietzsche and his contemporary Christian followers need to understand Christ differently. The form of Christianity that would do evil that good may abound, is stuck in the finite necessity of evil.

Evil is only a parasite on the agapeic good and exists through the patience of the good. “It is not crushed because the good does not crush, for the good is not a master or an erotic sovereign; it is an agapeic servant.”[17] “Caesar with the soul of Christ” would fuse agapeic power of service with sovereign power, but sovereign power is already a failure of the undergirding reality of agape. Perhaps the most radical form of evil is not simply that of the lion or the typical sovereign, but the power which takes unto itself the spiritual power which exceeds all boundaries. This is the spiritual corruption of the Antichrist which would fuse the power of love with evil. The only power to counter the Antichrist is that of agape.[18]

[1] The phrase in the recent Atlantic article by Peter Wehner, “The Evangelicals Who See Trump’s Viciousness as a Virtue.”

[2] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 200.

[3] F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Nachgelassene Schriften in Werke, ed G. Colli and M Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), VI, 3, 253-372, § 3 of “Warum ich so weise bin”: ‘Diese doppelte Reihe von Erfahrungen, diese Zugänglichkeit zu anscheinend getrennten Welten wiederholt sich in meiner Natur in jeder Hinsicht,-ich bin ein Doppelgänger, ich habe auch das ‘zweite’ Gesicht noch ausser dem ersten” (Werke hereinafter referred to as I7.) Cited in Desmond, Ibid, 201.

[4] Is there a Sabbath for Thought, 203.

[5] The Will to Power, 513. Cited in A Sabbath for Thought, 206.

[6] A Sabbath for Thought, 207.

[7] A Sabbath for Thought, 207

[8] A Sabbath for Thought, 208.

[9] A Sabbath for Thought, 211.

[10] A Sabbath for Thought, 212.

[11] A Sabbath for Thought, 222.

[12] A Sabbath for Thought, 221.

[13] A Sabbath for Thought, 221.

[14] W, VI, 1, 268; Zarathustra, 234. Cited in A Sabbath for Thought, 222-223.

[15] Cited in Desmond, 227.

[16] A Sabbath for Thought, 216.

[17] A Sabbath for Thought, 215.

[18] Desmond lays out a more positive agapeic love in his development and correction of Hegel, not so much to distinguish types of love, self-love, eros, philia, and agape, but to show how every kind of love is undergirded by agape. In erotic and philia we find the self in the other, but “if divine love is agape, and if human loves can be graced with love of the neighbor and indeed the enemy, it would have to transcend the self-relation of the inclusive whole that comes to itself in and through the other. William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1988) 39. Even in self-love there is a delight to be found in being, and this is grounded and points to agape love. “In agape, there is a going towards the other but not from a lack in the lover but from an excess or surplus of good that gives from itself, gives beyond itself to the other. The point of the going towards and the giving is not the return of the giver to itself through the other that receives. The point is to be released to, or to release, the other in its own good as being for itself. Hegel’s God, 40.

William Desmond’s Completion of Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Taylor, 542.

[3] Taylor, 542.

[4] Taylor, 566.

[5] Taylor, 565.

[6] Taylor, 572.

[7] Taylor, 572.

[8] Taylor, 307.

[9] Taylor, 755.

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

[11] Logic, 33.

[12] Logic, 35.

[13] Logic, 35.

[14] Logic, 36.

[15] Logic, xiv.

[16] Logic, xv.

[17] Logic, 33.

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

[19] Logic, 48.

[20] Logic, 48.

[21] Logic, 48.

[22] Logic, 49.

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

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

[25] Ibid.

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

[27] Duns, 133-134.

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

[29] Duns, 124.

[30] Duns, 33-34.

[31] See Duns explanation, 25-26.

[32] Duns, 133.

[33] Duns, 132.

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

[35] Duns, 30.

[36] Duns, 131