Basically, the Christian God is trinitarian, its being self-giving and active receiving of love, communion itself, which Hegel should have paid more attention to, since it would have rendered unnecessary the need of his god to create a finite world in order to express himself and come to know himself through an Other. This was already achieved in the Trinity, thus protecting both utter transcendence, *because God is immanent in all things....
Also a trinitarian God gets rid of Hegels mythology of "necessities", which is merely the the old pagan idea vs the Christian notion of existence as gratuitous gift, Creation ex Nihilo, and therefore irreducible to grounds or premises or God needing to be determined, rather God is radically free in his self offering in love.
And there is only one "mechanism" of determination: the eternal priority of form - of image, of very likeness - and infinity as an infinite texture of harmonious supplementation; it is this boundlessness of the "bad" infinite that God called good in the beginning, thus, we ought to see that the pure transcendence, and therefore the generosity, of the first principle offers a surer ground for the positivity of difference, the “justification” of the otherness due to production, than one can find in Hegelian dialectics.
"One should begin, says David Bentley Hart, “from the recognition that God is the being of all things, beyond all finite determination, negation, and dialectic not as the infinite "naught" against which all things are set off (for this is still dialectical and so finite), but as the infinite plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates. Again,
"this is to say that both existence and nonexistence in the realm of the ontic - both "position" and negation - equally require this act in order to be. Nor is it enough to see this transcendent movement of being, yielding being to both the "is" and the "is not;' as a primordial convertibility of being and nothingness in need of the tragic solution of the finite - Hegel's "becoming;'
Being, simply said, cannot be reduced to beings or negated by them; it plays peacefully in the expressive iridescence of its welcoming light, in the intricate weaving of the transcendentals, even in the transcendental moments of "this" and "not this;' which speak of God's simple, triune infinity: his coincidence within himself of determinacy ("I am that I am;' "Thou art my beloved Son") and "no-thing-ness" ("Wherefore he is all;' "In him we live, and move, and have our being")."
John Milbank remarks,
“In Aquinas, dialectics yields to analogy, to the tripartite logic deriving from Thomas's commentary on the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, of which Hegel's negative dialectics is the degradation. In Dionysius, affirmation (God is good) yields to negation (not good in the way we know) which passes into eminence (but with a higher goodness). The finite and competing worldly goods we experience derive from and analogically resemble the infinite and mysterious goodness of God, where justice and mercy, freedom and providence, are identical because they are found there eminentiore modo. In Augustine, the war of all with all (amor sui) in the city of man yields to a metaphysics of relation and person in the city formed around the love of God (amor dei), where there is no such thing as one person, where a person is a subsistent relationship among persons, who do not form an exclusive relation of two, but an inclusive community of tripartite open-ended love.
He does not dismiss, because he does not even consider, the Thomistic alternative: namely that being qua being might be an embodied plenitude, identical with the infinite realization of all actual and possible essentialities. In other words, that it might be everything in its absolute fullness, while further taking this realized fullness to be (to put this deliberately in rather Hegelian terms) itself paradoxically all along at one with the original source.This perspective gives no ontological weight to nothingness, or at least not in Hegel’s nihilistic mode. It therefore avoids the most drastic of all contradictions: speaking of nothing qua nothing as something.
And the crucial thing to see is that analogy understood that way is actually much more dynamic than dialectic. Dialectic is going to end in identity, or, in difference in the end and will, thus, not keep that play open. One of the things that we are needing to recognize, that again Agamben partially recognizes, but Desmond fully recognizes is this: That there is not really any mediation in Hegel. A lot of modern French thought has been about trying to escape from the dialectical because it is seen as mediatory and, therefore, on the side of identity. But what one needs rather to see is that Hegel is not really talking about mediation, but a progress towards identity, and that genuine mediation is no nearer identity than it is nearer to difference."
Milbank points to Leibniz by way of contrast, who “conceived logic as a ‘series,’ which unfolded by infinitesimal steps such that every act of analysis of a ‘single’ thing revealed a slightly ‘different’ aspect of possibility.” That is, difference does not arise negatively, by way of contradiction, but unfolds.
Hegel is more “conservative” in rooting his logic and his myth of negation in the principle of identity. Given A:A, “difference cannot here result (as for neo-Platonism, stoicism and Leibniz) from analysis, or the unfolding of a series, but must imply contradiction, or denial of the ultimate identity.” Hegel could have avoided this only by removing himself from his “panlogicism” and admitting “‘other’ identities,” but that wouldn’t do. Difference arises from negation, a position that, Milbank points out, “coalesces nicely with the fiction of a polarity between subject and object,” which for Hegel are “comprehensive, totalizing genera” that can only relate “in terms of opposition.”
Only on the basis of this oppositional logic is Hegel able to claim that negation is “determinate negation.”
Hart continues, and this all come from his Beauty of the Infinite,
“What Hegel could not abide, though, was the notion either of a God who possesses sesses within himself differentiation, determination, community, joy, and perfection in complete liberty from the world, or of a world left thus devoid of meaning in the ultimate speculative sense of "necessity" and so "reduced" to a "needless" and thoroughly aesthetic reality: as an unforced, additional expression sion of the love that God enjoys in absolute self-sufficiency. Hegel's trinity is the God of totality, and the Hegelian system is a war of totality against the Christian infinite, against a theology that makes difference and its endless serial particularity good in itself, embraced by a divine boundlessness that is not altered by or involved within a more essential core to history and its tragic probations. Divine infinity, conceived as trinitarian, *already differential* and determinate, requires no determination within being, and so makes of all created being an unnecessary, excessive display of its glory precisely by setting difference free in its "aimless" particularity.
The Christian infinite is its own exteriority, without need of another, negative exteriority to bring it to fruition; even evil is only a privation, a transgression from being, a nothingness given shape by a desire that gives itself shape only as the rejection of love. And without the majestic mythology of necessity governing the realm of the absolute, the comforting pathos of necessity disappears from the realm of history too. The thought of the Christian infinite - in which difference is always difference, beauty always beauty, and in which peace and being are equiprimordial - leaves philosophy bereft of any final power of adjudication over history and history bereft of any inner structure of tragic rationality. Theology disfranchises the philosopher, and exposes Dionysus as a bore.
The triune God is not that which negates - or is unveiled through negating - difference; he has no dialectical relation to the world nor any metaphysical "function" in maintaining the totality ity of being. He is not the high who stands over against the low, but is the infinite nite act of distance that gives high and low a place. As the God who gives a difference that is more than merely negative and that opens out analogically from the "theme" he imparts (the theme of free differentiation, oriented in love toward ward the other and all), he shows that difference is - still more radically, more originally - peace and joy. This is a thought of difference that lies outside any "metaphysical" scheme (Hegelian for instance), an ontology without need of determinate negation and without any inherent tendency toward ward opposition or rupture: in neither sense need it ever cross the interval of the negative.
For Hegel all determinacy must be regarded as a posterior concretion, a negation, for otherwise being has been objectified as an entity.
This is the Hegelian distinction between the bad infinite and the infinite of reconciliation, between an infinite defined in opposition to the finite and an infinite that is really the negation of the oppositions of finitude (the negation of negation), while still distinguishing between this infinite and God , this redoubles an economy by sealing it from within; Hegel’s "God" is a banality: the bare negation that sets free, invoked upon every object or subject, the absence displayed as the "otherwise" of every "I am.’ For Hegel pure being is convertible with nothingness and becomes determinate in actively negating nothingness, and so the freedom of creaturely being consists in that unmasterable negation, God is a negation in perpetual advent."
But, notes David Hart, “the sort of opposition of finite and infinite being he describes is a danger only for a truly univocal ontology, or for the sort of dialectical theology such an ontology permits. In truth, it is only the ontology of infinite being that can elude the dialectic, the religious tradition that speaks of God as infinite being and creatures as finite beings that exist through participation is one that has thought through the genuinely qualitative difference between being and beings, and between the infinite and the finite.
That is the Analogy of Being, many misunderstand it, they wrongly posit it as a discrimination between creatures and God as two kinds of existents, who subsist in the shared abstract quality "being;' of which creatures are finite instances and God is the sole "infinite" instance. But then such an “analogy” leaves being in a state of vacuous and ungraspable imprecision, and can serve only to obscure the way God is near to creatures .
But the analogia entis (in its developed form) does not concern a grasp of being at all; rather it introduces an analogical interval into being itself, because it has al- ready grasped that the God Who Is is nonetheless no being among beings. Because the ontological difference has been thought (which in Christian thought begins, correctly, from the thought of creaturely contingency, the whylessness of the creature's being), the thought that finite being might have been different from what it is (and so is different from the original actuality that grants it) is conceivable.
Thus theology can imagine an analogy between an esse that is participated in by what subsists, without diminution or constriction, and a transcendent act of being that is also subsistence: the life of God. Being itself is different in God, because God is not a being, yet is; he does not belong to being, but is being, and yet subsists. And if from a Heideggerian vantage this idea of an actus essendi subsistens is merely "onto-theologic;' a conception of God as an entity, this is only because the thought of subsistence will always appear to be the thought of an "entity'' when one has not allowed for the analogical interval that is introduced into subsistence as such by the analogia."
What warrant is there, that is to say, for attempting to rescue God from the lowly station of a mere being, quantitatively inferior to being as such, by setting the divine over against both the ontic determinacy of beings and the ontological indeterminacy of "being as such;' unless a metaphysical decision has been reached in advance that being is abstract and univocal?
For Hegel, as was said earlier, all determinacy must be regarded as a posterior concretion, a negation (or "nihilation"), for otherwise being has been objectified as an entity.
Yet what if being - as first and foremost the life of the God who is Trinity and, as such, always a gift that is shared, determined toward another - is *not the most *pure, the most *abstract, the most *empty, but the most *concrete, the most determinate, the most beautiful?
Or if what is imparted analogically to creatures is a being always already determined toward *otherness, always already form and light and beauty? What if, in the very calculus of infinite determinacy, being is set off qualitatively from beings not as empty indetermination, but as *ontological plenitude, supereminently exceeding beings?
This is an aesthetic and an ontological question at once, and - still more importantly- a theological question: Does the thought that God is not a being among beings necessarily forbid the thought of a dynamic, acting, self- revealing God, as evidently Hegalians believe it must? "
To repair again to that very unfashionable estaminet, "necessary being;' if being is not plenitude - the original fullness of a determinately infinite act -then there can be no finite beings, neither actually nor possibly (for nothing, to be precise, is possible).
If though one is not moved to embrace the notion that finite being is only through a prior negation, an opposition that defines it, and if one has not set out from an understanding of being as abstract and empty prior to negation, one needs no god of dialectical idealism.
Indeed, talk of "negation" (rather than simply "limitation" or "finitude") has a formidable power of mystification in it. There is, though, a purely positive account of finite being, as the analogical expression of a positive and determinate infinite act of being. The terminations, transitions, and intervals that define finite being are not determining negations, but are the effects of a coinherent "musical" expression in which each moment is not "opposed" or "negated" by what differs from it, or by being as such, or by God, but is "extended;' "deepened" in the scope of its participation in the infinite.
Nor is the ontological difference a kind of negation - in fact, if one thinks about it, the notion that it could be depends on a desperate confusion of the ontic and the ontological; rather, it is the expressive play of being, whose infinity *is* expression.
This is not to deny that there is a kind of "relative negativity" in the oscillation within finite being between existence and nonexistence, and between "this" and "not this"; but in this oscillation nothing is actually negated: for beings are ex nihilo and so even their limits are positively emergent over against, literally, nothing at all; and being as such, in God, is infinite eminence, concretely transcending and embracing the existent and nonexistent both in its infinite act, and is negated by neither.
As God pours forth the abundance of his being, kenotically, in beings - in finite instances of his determinacy, in finite intensities of those "transcendentals" that are convertible with his essence - he remains the purely positive act of what, in finite experience, has the form of a synthesis between positivity and negativity: both these poles participate in and analogically manifest the transcendent coincidence in God of his perfect trinitarian "I am" and the "not-any-being" of his infinite essence.
God is, as Nicholas of Cusa says, the most concrete and determinate, the coincidentia oppositorum (which should not be taken dialectically): he em- braces all ontological "opposites" not as oppositions or negations, but as series that, extended into his peace, belong together and unfold into the same music. Such a thought is surely free of every confining fideism regarding substances, and truly introduces the dynamism of successiveness - seriality or repetition - into the philosophy of being; it is a thought that conceives "determination" not as the issue of the negative, but as first and foremost difference, in the concreteness of its differing (after all, negation's logic is one of identity).
By preserving the absolute idealist distinction between quantitative and qualitative infinity (rather than seeing both as participating in the same transcendent act) and the notion of the probation of the negative, this leads Hegealins to treat God's transcendence as a dialectical counter to the world, and according to a dialectic of absence at that.
Here, though, Gregory of Nyssa grasped the genuinely Christian difference long ago: he overcame this division of infinities, which is a division implicit in Platonism, and in every pure idealism from Plato's to Hegel's.
More to the point, Gregory was able to think of finite difference as genuine difference.
Gregory's thought becoming requires no probation by nothingness, no sacrificial economy of contradiction and sublation: movement within what is, within the good, is eternal, because negation is neither the necessary condition of difference nor the source of its fecundity; difference can be forever remodulated as difference through the interminable analog- ical interrelatedness of finite existence because God's plenitude of determinacy is both truly transcendent of the ontic play of this and not this, and truly Trinity. The soul, whose inmost truth is trope and kinesis, is for that very reason open to this infinite that expresses itself in the sequences of creation's purely positive and "fitting" supplements, its variations on the theme of divine glory. Creation, says Gregory, is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music, in which human nature can glimpse itself as in a mirror
Whereas Hegel conceives of the freedom of finite being in terms of God-as-negation, so that there must always be within the finite a tension that is also inevitably the negation of its own particularity (in a "univocal" ontology, beings "say being" always in the same way, and so in the privative mood), Gregory's thought allows for an infinite in which the particularity of difference occurs as the free and open expression of the God who is, and so in which every being, uniquely, "says more" of God's infinite Word. This is the primordial analogy.
The God who is infinite and no being among beings is also the personal God of election and incarnation, the dynamic, living, and creative God he is, precisely because being is not a genus where under God as "a being" might be subsumed, but is the act through which beings are given form by the God who is never without form and beauty. The acts of God are not "symbols" of the "history" of God's advent as absence, but actions of the God who comprehends being, who abides in the interval while embracing all that falls on either side. God is always "being God;' transcendent and yet present as the one who is and shows himself, indifferent to metaphysical demarcations between transcendence and immanence, infinity and finitude, being and beings: precisely be- cause God transcends and makes possible these categories, in their being, he in- habits them simultaneously without contradiction.
For a trinitarian theology, in command of its proper analogical ontology, God is not touched or limited by the ontological difference, not because he is simply beyond being altogether or because he comprises being and nonbeing (or God and not-God), but because, inasmuch as he is the actus of all beings, the "fold" of the ontological difference is unfolded in him from the first: and so he exceeds this difference in creation, makes it his mystery or the occasion of the showing of his mystery. God's "ever greater" lies not in his "negative transcendence" but in being the trinitarian context of being and the truth of being as always determined, always differing, such that nonbeing is truly for him - as it cannot entirely be for the creature - nothing at all.
God exceeds beings as the ever greater, the more beautiful, radiant, and full of form, and so the ontological difference cannot limit what is said of him: for it is merely the contingency of that quantity, its freedom as expression, bounty, and gift (which is what being always al- ready is). The Trinity exceeds being, not like a Neoplatonic monad dwelling beyond being, but by comprising being in the essential act of triune love. In that living unity, difference is without need of departure from the One to the many, without need of blossoming from the indeterminate into its negation in form, but subsists within the interval opened by God's infinite "self-determination" in the other.
There is only one "mechanism" of determination: the eternal priority of form - of image, of very likeness - and infinity as an infinite texture of harmonious supplementation; it is this boundlessness of the "bad" infinite that God called good in the beginning, thus, we ought to see that the pure transcendence, and therefore the generosity, of the first principle offers a surer ground for the positivity of difference, the “justification” of the otherness due to production, than one can find in Hegelian dialectics."
Finally, if one wishes to flesh out more fully what this Christian metaphysics, Analogy of Being looks like, Hart offers these thoughts,
"To put it simply, the analogy of being does not analogize God and creatures under the more general category of being, but is the analogization of being in the difference between God and creatures; it is as subversive of the notion of a general and univocal category of being as of the equally "totalizing" notion of ontological equivocity, and thus belongs to neither pole of the dialectic intrinsic to metaphysical totality: the savage equivalence of univocity and equivocity, Apollo and Dionysus, pure identity and pure difference (neither of which can open a vantage upon being in its transcendence).
One should begin from the recognition that God is the being of all things, beyond all finite determination, negation, and dialectic not as the infinite "naught" against which all things are set off (for this is still dialectical and so finite), but as the infinite plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates.
...this is to say that both existence and nonexistence in the realm of the ontic - both "position" and negation - equally require this act in order to be. Nor is it enough to see this transcendent movement of being, yielding being to both the "is" and the "is not;' as a primordial convertibility of being and nothingness in need of the tragic solution of the finite - Hegel's "becoming;' Heidegger's "temporalization;' Derrida's differance - as this very convertibility would already be an ontic opposition within the absolute, a finite, intrinsic indetermination subordinate to its own limits and still requiring an ontological explanation of the prior act of simplicity in which its unresolved, essential contradiction must participate in order to constitute a unity (in order, that is, to be).
Being, simply said, cannot be reduced to beings or negated by them; it plays peacefully in the expressive iridescence of its welcoming light, in the intricate weaving of the transcendentals, even in the transcendental moments of "this" and "not this;' which speak of God's simple, triune infinity: his coincidence within himself of determinacy ("I am that I am;' "Thou art my beloved Son") and "no-thing-ness" ("Wherefore he is all;' "In him we live, and move, and have our being").
And the analogy, most importantly, should be seen as an affirmation of God as Trinity: as the source of all being, and yet the living God of creation, redemption, and deathless love; it is the metaphysical expression of the realization that the very difference of creatures from God - their integrity as the beings they are, their ontological "freedom" - is a manifestation of how God is one God.
The analogy of being begins from the belief that being always already differs, within the very act of its simplicity, without any moment of alienation or diremption; to be is to be manifest; to know and love, to be known and loved- all of this is the one act, wherein there is no "essence" unexpressed, no contradiction awaiting resolution.
Thus the analogy always stands beyond the twin poles of the metaphysics of the necessary: negation and identity; it reveals that purely dialectical and purely "identist" systems are ultimately the same, imprisoning God and world within an economy of the absolute, sharing a reciprocal identity.
I f God is thought either as total substance or total absence, foundation or negation, "ground of Being" or static "Wholly Other;' God appears merely as the world's highest principle rather than its transcendent source and end (this is why I say the only way of speaking of God beyond the categories of "metaphysics;' in the malign sense, must be analogy).
The triune God is not that which negates - or is unveiled through negating - difference; he has no dialectical relation to the world nor any metaphysical "function" in maintaining the totality ity of being. He is not the high who stands over against the low, but is the infinite nite act of distance that gives high and low a place. As the God who gives a difference that is more than merely negative and that opens out analogically from the "theme" he imparts (the theme of free differentiation, oriented in love toward ward the other and all), he shows that difference is - still more radically, more originally - peace and joy. This is a thought of difference that lies outside any "metaphysical" scheme (Hegelian for instance), an ontology without need of determinate negation and without any inherent tendency toward ward opposition or rupture: in neither sense need it ever cross the interval of the negative.
This is the Hegelian distinction between the bad infinite and the infinite of reconciliation, between an infinite defined in opposition to the finite and an infinite that is really the negation of the oppositions of finitude (the negation of negation), while still distinguishing between this infinite and God , this redoubles an economy by sealing it from within; Hegel’s "God" is a banality: the bare negation that sets free, invoked upon every object or subject, the absence displayed as the "otherwise" of every "I am.’ For Hegel pure being is convertible with nothingness and becomes determinate in actively negating nothingness, and so the freedom of creaturely being consists in that unmasterable negation, God is a negation in perpetual advent."
But, notes David Hart, “the sort of opposition of finite and infinite being he describes is a danger only for a truly univocal ontology, or for the sort of dialectical theology such an ontology permits. In truth, it is only the ontology of infinite being that can elude the dialectic, the religious tradition that speaks of God as infinite being and creatures as finite beings that exist through participation is one that has thought through the genuinely qualitative difference between being and beings, and between the infinite and the finite.
That is the Analogy of Being, many misunderstand it, they wrongly posit it as a discrimination between creatures and God as two kinds of existents, who subsist in the shared abstract quality "being;' of which creatures are finite instances and God is the sole "infinite" instance. But then such an “analogy” leaves being in a state of vacuous and ungraspable imprecision, and can serve only to obscure the way God is near to creatures .
But the analogia entis (in its developed form) does not concern a grasp of being at all; rather it introduces an analogical interval into being itself, because it has al- ready grasped that the God Who Is is nonetheless no being among beings. Because the ontological difference has been thought (which in Christian thought begins, correctly, from the thought of creaturely contingency, the whylessness of the creature's being), the thought that finite being might have been different from what it is (and so is different from the original actuality that grants it) is conceivable.
Thus theology can imagine an analogy between an esse that is participated in by what subsists, without diminution or constriction, and a transcendent act of being that is also subsistence: the life of God. Being itself is different in God, because God is not a being, yet is; he does not belong to being, but is being, and yet subsists. And if from a Heideggerian vantage this idea of an actus essendi subsistens is merely "onto-theologic;' a conception of God as an entity, this is only because the thought of subsistence will always appear to be the thought of an "entity'' when one has not allowed for the analogical interval that is introduced into subsistence as such by the analogia."
What warrant is there, that is to say, for attempting to rescue God from the lowly station of a mere being, quantitatively inferior to being as such, by setting the divine over against both the ontic determinacy of beings and the ontological indeterminacy of "being as such;' unless a metaphysical decision has been reached in advance that being is abstract and univocal?
For Hegel, as was said earlier, all determinacy must be regarded as a posterior concretion, a negation (or "nihilation"), for otherwise being has been objectified as an entity.
Yet what if being - as first and foremost the life of the God who is Trinity and, as such, always a gift that is shared, determined toward another - is *not the most *pure, the most *abstract, the most *empty, but the most *concrete, the most determinate, the most beautiful?
Or if what is imparted analogically to creatures is a being always already determined toward *otherness, always already form and light and beauty? What if, in the very calculus of infinite determinacy, being is set off qualitatively from beings not as empty indetermination, but as *ontological plenitude, supereminently exceeding beings?
This is an aesthetic and an ontological question at once, and - still more importantly- a theological question: Does the thought that God is not a being among beings necessarily forbid the thought of a dynamic, acting, self- revealing God, as evidently Hegalians believe it must? "
If though one is not moved to embrace the notion that finite being is only through a prior negation, an opposition that defines it, and if one has not set out from an understanding of being as abstract and empty prior to negation, one needs no god of dialectical idealism.
Indeed, talk of "negation" (rather than simply "limitation" or "finitude") has a formidable power of mystification in it. There is, though, a purely positive account of finite being, as the analogical expression of a positive and determinate infinite act of being. The terminations, transitions, and intervals that define finite being are not determining negations, but are the effects of a coinherent "musical" expression in which each moment is not "opposed" or "negated" by what differs from it, or by being as such, or by God, but is "extended;' "deepened" in the scope of its participation in the infinite.
Nor is the ontological difference a kind of negation - in fact, if one thinks about it, the notion that it could be depends on a desperate confusion of the ontic and the ontological; rather, it is the expressive play of being, whose infinity *is* expression.
This is not to deny that there is a kind of "relative negativity" in the oscillation within finite being between existence and nonexistence, and between "this" and "not this"; but in this oscillation nothing is actually negated: for beings are ex nihilo and so even their limits are positively emergent over against, literally, nothing at all; and being as such, in God, is infinite eminence, concretely transcending and embracing the existent and nonexistent both in its infinite act, and is negated by neither.
As God pours forth the abundance of his being, kenotically, in beings - in finite instances of his determinacy, in finite intensities of those "transcendentals" that are convertible with his essence - he remains the purely positive act of what, in finite experience, has the form of a synthesis between positivity and negativity: both these poles participate in and analogically manifest the transcendent coincidence in God of his perfect trinitarian "I am" and the "not-any-being" of his infinite essence.
God is, as Nicholas of Cusa says, the most concrete and determinate, the coincidentia oppositorum (which should not be taken dialectically): he em- braces all ontological "opposites" not as oppositions or negations, but as series that, extended into his peace, belong together and unfold into the same music. Such a thought is surely free of every confining fideism regarding substances, and truly introduces the dynamism of successiveness - seriality or repetition - into the philosophy of being; it is a thought that conceives "determination" not as the issue of the negative, but as first and foremost difference, in the concreteness of its differing (after all, negation's logic is one of identity).
Here, though, Gregory of Nyssa grasped the genuinely Christian difference long ago: he overcame this division of infinities, which is a division implicit in Platonism, and in every pure idealism from Plato's to Hegel's.
More to the point, Gregory was able to think of finite difference as genuine difference.
Gregory's thought becoming requires no probation by nothingness, no sacrificial economy of contradiction and sublation: movement within what is, within the good, is eternal, because negation is neither the necessary condition of difference nor the source of its fecundity; difference can be forever remodulated as difference through the interminable analog- ical interrelatedness of finite existence because God's plenitude of determinacy is both truly transcendent of the ontic play of this and not this, and truly Trinity. The soul, whose inmost truth is trope and kinesis, is for that very reason open to this infinite that expresses itself in the sequences of creation's purely positive and "fitting" supplements, its variations on the theme of divine glory. Creation, says Gregory, is a symphonic and rhythmic complication of diversity, of motion and rest, a song praising God, the true, primordial, archetypal music, in which human nature can glimpse itself as in a mirror
Whereas Hegel conceives of the freedom of finite being in terms of God-as-negation, so that there must always be within the finite a tension that is also inevitably the negation of its own particularity (in a "univocal" ontology, beings "say being" always in the same way, and so in the privative mood), Gregory's thought allows for an infinite in which the particularity of difference occurs as the free and open expression of the God who is, and so in which every being, uniquely, "says more" of God's infinite Word. This is the primordial analogy.
The God who is infinite and no being among beings is also the personal God of election and incarnation, the dynamic, living, and creative God he is, precisely because being is not a genus where under God as "a being" might be subsumed, but is the act through which beings are given form by the God who is never without form and beauty. The acts of God are not "symbols" of the "history" of God's advent as absence, but actions of the God who comprehends being, who abides in the interval while embracing all that falls on either side. God is always "being God;' transcendent and yet present as the one who is and shows himself, indifferent to metaphysical demarcations between transcendence and immanence, infinity and finitude, being and beings: precisely be- cause God transcends and makes possible these categories, in their being, he in- habits them simultaneously without contradiction.
For a trinitarian theology, in command of its proper analogical ontology, God is not touched or limited by the ontological difference, not because he is simply beyond being altogether or because he comprises being and nonbeing (or God and not-God), but because, inasmuch as he is the actus of all beings, the "fold" of the ontological difference is unfolded in him from the first: and so he exceeds this difference in creation, makes it his mystery or the occasion of the showing of his mystery. God's "ever greater" lies not in his "negative transcendence" but in being the trinitarian context of being and the truth of being as always determined, always differing, such that nonbeing is truly for him - as it cannot entirely be for the creature - nothing at all.
God exceeds beings as the ever greater, the more beautiful, radiant, and full of form, and so the ontological difference cannot limit what is said of him: for it is merely the contingency of that quantity, its freedom as expression, bounty, and gift (which is what being always al- ready is). The Trinity exceeds being, not like a Neoplatonic monad dwelling beyond being, but by comprising being in the essential act of triune love. In that living unity, difference is without need of departure from the One to the many, without need of blossoming from the indeterminate into its negation in form, but subsists within the interval opened by God's infinite "self-determination" in the other.
There is only one "mechanism" of determination: the eternal priority of form - of image, of very likeness - and infinity as an infinite texture of harmonious supplementation; it is this boundlessness of the "bad" infinite that God called good in the beginning, thus, we ought to see that the pure transcendence, and therefore the generosity, of the first principle offers a surer ground for the positivity of difference, the “justification” of the otherness due to production, than one can find in Hegelian dialectics."
Finally, if one wishes to flesh out more fully what this Christian metaphysics, Analogy of Being looks like, Hart offers these thoughts,
"To put it simply, the analogy of being does not analogize God and creatures under the more general category of being, but is the analogization of being in the difference between God and creatures; it is as subversive of the notion of a general and univocal category of being as of the equally "totalizing" notion of ontological equivocity, and thus belongs to neither pole of the dialectic intrinsic to metaphysical totality: the savage equivalence of univocity and equivocity, Apollo and Dionysus, pure identity and pure difference (neither of which can open a vantage upon being in its transcendence).
One should begin from the recognition that God is the being of all things, beyond all finite determination, negation, and dialectic not as the infinite "naught" against which all things are set off (for this is still dialectical and so finite), but as the infinite plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates.
...this is to say that both existence and nonexistence in the realm of the ontic - both "position" and negation - equally require this act in order to be. Nor is it enough to see this transcendent movement of being, yielding being to both the "is" and the "is not;' as a primordial convertibility of being and nothingness in need of the tragic solution of the finite - Hegel's "becoming;' Heidegger's "temporalization;' Derrida's differance - as this very convertibility would already be an ontic opposition within the absolute, a finite, intrinsic indetermination subordinate to its own limits and still requiring an ontological explanation of the prior act of simplicity in which its unresolved, essential contradiction must participate in order to constitute a unity (in order, that is, to be).
Being, simply said, cannot be reduced to beings or negated by them; it plays peacefully in the expressive iridescence of its welcoming light, in the intricate weaving of the transcendentals, even in the transcendental moments of "this" and "not this;' which speak of God's simple, triune infinity: his coincidence within himself of determinacy ("I am that I am;' "Thou art my beloved Son") and "no-thing-ness" ("Wherefore he is all;' "In him we live, and move, and have our being").
And the analogy, most importantly, should be seen as an affirmation of God as Trinity: as the source of all being, and yet the living God of creation, redemption, and deathless love; it is the metaphysical expression of the realization that the very difference of creatures from God - their integrity as the beings they are, their ontological "freedom" - is a manifestation of how God is one God.
The analogy of being begins from the belief that being always already differs, within the very act of its simplicity, without any moment of alienation or diremption; to be is to be manifest; to know and love, to be known and loved- all of this is the one act, wherein there is no "essence" unexpressed, no contradiction awaiting resolution.
Thus the analogy always stands beyond the twin poles of the metaphysics of the necessary: negation and identity; it reveals that purely dialectical and purely "identist" systems are ultimately the same, imprisoning God and world within an economy of the absolute, sharing a reciprocal identity.
I f God is thought either as total substance or total absence, foundation or negation, "ground of Being" or static "Wholly Other;' God appears merely as the world's highest principle rather than its transcendent source and end (this is why I say the only way of speaking of God beyond the categories of "metaphysics;' in the malign sense, must be analogy).
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