William Desmond on Vladimir Soloviev and Shestov

William Desmond has been called the modern day Pascal, here I reproduce his essay, 

God Beyond the Whole: Between Solov’e ̈v and Shestov :

For and Against ‘‘All-unity’’ 

The idea of the whole has immensely influenced the thinking of God in the wake of German idealism. This is not unconnected with the claim that we live in a ‘‘post-theistic’’ time, and that if we are to have a God, it should take some pan(en)theistic form. Yet there are fundamental ambiguities attached to the idea of the whole, especially in relation to God. I want to explore some of these philosophical and religious ambiguities, with the aid of Vladimir Solov’e ̈v and Lev Shestov. Solov’e ̈v (1853–1900) is considered by many to be the greatest of Russian philosophers to seek a harmony between religion and philosophy. By contrast, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) was a Russian religious thinker who bitterly excoriated dubious collusions between religion and philosophy that masked nonnegotiable differences between the two. The contrast of these two figures epitomizes something of the essential difficulty, as well as allowing us to state more explicitly the fundamental issues at stake.

The issue between them seems clear. Solov’e ̈v wants philosophically to affirm an ‘‘All-unity [vseedinstvo],’’1 claimed to be compatible with the traditions of revealed religion, including Christianity. Shestov acknowledges the first about Solov’e ̈v’s philosophical ambition, while denying the second claim to compatibility with revealed religion. He holds that any surface resemblance between these two belies a deep distortion of the biblical God. Against the ‘‘All-unity’’ (and against what he calls ‘‘omnitude’’2) Shestov protests on behalf of the free singularity of the human, and the personalism of the creator God. If the speculative notion of ‘‘All-unity’’ were the ultimate truth, that God would have to be rejected as a merely relative anthropomorphism. 

First, I want to outline some general considerations in relation to what I will call the holistic God. I want to counterpose the sense of the transcendence of God as creator and the more pan(en)theistic sense of the divine whole. I want to underline some considerations of the former difficult to accommodate on the terms of the latter. Second, I will focus on Shestov’s criticism of Solov’e ̈v, and its justice. There is a truth to Shestov’s critique; nevertheless, at times it does run the risk of caricature. Caricature has its justified uses, especially if one feels it is urgent to highlight the slippery seductions of certain ambiguous notions. But there are also dangers—and Shestov did not always heed them—of simplifying certain unavoidable demands made on philosophical reflection in relation to the divine. 

One worries that his protest does not guard sufficiently against relapsing into too simple a dualistic opposition to the God of the philosophers. Is this the best way to the God beyond the whole? Does Shestov help us open up a way between, and beyond, on the one hand a reductive totality, and on the other, an affirmation of divine transcendence insufficiently purged of dualistic opposition? Do we need more than an existentialist protest against the idealistic proclivity to absolutize the whole? What would that ‘‘more’’ entail? Does Solov’e ̈v’s view point us toward a God beyond the whole? 

Shestov’s struggle to highlight a sense of singularity beyond the whole helps us with these questions, and this will be my third consideration. A fourth consideration will concern whether Solov’e ̈v is quite as philosophically hostile to the idea of divine transcendence as someone like Hegel. 

Openness to divine mystery is not attenuated in Solov’e ̈v. Yet for all that, the question still must be posed as to whether his ‘‘All-unity’’ does lend itself to being interpreted as a counterfeit double of God. Overall, there are considerations in the God of biblical personalism that are difficult to account for on Solov’e ̈v’s notion of ‘‘All-unity’’ and any metaphysical metaphorics of ‘‘organism.’’ 

What would it mean to say that the otherness of transcendence is irreducible? Must we do more than protest in Shestovian terms? Is the more systematic treatment of a Solov’e ̈vian sort by no means to be repudiated as per se inimical to thinking the God of the religions of revelation? If we are to do this, however, must we not reflect more thoroughly on the dialectical equivocities about the divine that are the legacy of the idealistic thought of the whole? 

Fifth, in my final remarks I will offer some thoughts on why we are pointed to a God beyond the whole. Can we think of creation as what I call agapeic origination? Rather than a speculative unity do we need a logos of the metaxu: a metaxology of the between rather than a dialectic of the whole? What sense of human singularity goes with this? Is there a between that holds open the space of qualitative difference of God and creation, which enables creation to be as other while yet allowing communication between the two? Do we need more than ‘‘All-unity’’ and rather a community of open wholes that is not itself a totalizing whole? Is not some sense of the intimate universal of religion implicated here? 

Idealism and the Holistic God 

Idealism occupies a crucial importance for Solov’e ̈v and Shestov, though the importances are opposed. Modern idealism tends toward what I will call a holistic God. It sets itself against any dualism of immanence and transcendence, nature and supernature, and returns to an old view, older than Christianity and its heritage. Hen to pan: One the All. This view, profound with meaning both for philosophy and religion, is not only ancient: it names a perennial possibility, resurfacing in modernity in relation to Spinoza, connected to the Pantheismusstreit, inspiring great thinkers to revivify the ties binding the divine and the whole. Not surprisingly, Hen kai pan (One and All) was the spiritual rallying cry of the youthful Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel, the sign of their new ‘‘Church Invisible.’’ None of them were ever really apostate to this church. We also find resonances of this holistic God in Solov’e ̈v.3 One might say also that a good deal of contemporary panentheism has more of a family likeness to this approach than it seems willing to acknowledge. 

A particular formation of the dialectical way of thinking is important here. For dialectic allows us to think about the many without tarrying with merely dispersing diversity. It claims to let us address oppositions without trapping us in dualism. It claims to open a mediated pathway beyond dualism in the direction of the togetherness of the opposites, and hence toward a more encompassing unity of being that embraces manyness within itself. Overall, it encourages comprehension in terms of wholes which are not reducible to the sum of their parts. At the same time, it claims to allow us to view the partiality of limited wholes as themselves contributions to more encompassing wholes, all the way to the whole of wholes, the absolute unity of the many. 

What is stressed here is less a denial of manyness as a placing of manyness within what is said to be its fuller context. The true context of all contexts is, on this view, the whole of wholes. The negative, it will be said, is not contradictory to this. Quite the contrary, exposure to contradiction serves the development of a more concretely rich truth wherein the one-sidedness of opposed positions are held together in the comprehensive unification of the embracing whole. God is identified with the whole of wholes. 

This view of God as the ultimate whole suggests the ring of rings that completes all finite integrities of being. Nevertheless, we must also speak of origin in appropriate terms. The mode of origination in this holistic view tends to favor some form of emanation over creation. Why? Emanation stresses the continuity of the world and God, creation seems to underscore their discontinuity. The first suggests the immanence in the world of the divine, and the whole, or of the world in the divine; the second suggests the transcendence of the divine, hence the nondivinity of the world. The danger of the former is the conflation of the world and God; the danger of the latter is the deflation of the worth of the finite world, thought to follow if we infinitely inflate God in value. 

The holistic God stresses the sameness of world and God, the God of creation the difference. Most famously, Spinoza will speak of Deus sive natura; the sive will be seen by some as the deflation of God to the world, and by others as the inflation of world to God. Sameness may become an identity robbed of any dialectical difference, and hence also of the ‘‘otherness’’ between the two. The elements of the divine as this ‘‘otherness’’ is eternally mediated into the togetherness of the two.

Hegel is famous for his claim that ‘‘the whole is the true’’ (Das Wahre ist das Ganze) but he also took pains to disentangle himself (as did Solov’e ̈v) from an unnuanced version of such pantheism. He claims that no thoughtful person ever was guilty of ‘‘pantheism’’ in the sense of identifying God with finite things. 

Some of Hegel’s disentanglements I find dialectically disingenuous.4 Hard questions do remain, even if we do place on ice an unsophisticated ‘‘pantheism.’’ In particular, the question of transcendence does not go away. It never goes away, even when we want to think the community of the origin and creation. Just as there may be an unsophisticated pantheism that lives off an undiscriminating identity, so there may be an unacceptable sense of transcendence that lives off an unsustainable dualism. But—and this is important—to identify transcendence with that dualism does as little service to the truth as to fasten, from the opposite direction, on the identity of pantheism. 

Yet, if we ask about what is ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ the whole, it seems we must answer that there is nothing finally ‘‘outside’’ the holistic God. To be ‘‘outside’’ is to be absolutely nothing. To be ‘‘outside’’ is only a relative condition that signals more internal relations within the divine whole, rather than any external relation between the divine and the finite creation. Being ‘‘outside’’ is being ‘‘inside,’’ but ‘‘inside’’ in a manner that does not fulfill the truth of ‘‘being within’’—it is ‘‘being within’’ that does not recognize that it is within, and that, as within, is nothing apart from being a part of the absolute divine whole. One sees here the Eleatic view: ‘‘outside’’ of absolute being there is nothing, and it makes no sense to speak of that nothing, for just as nothing, it is nothing. Hence speech about it is speech about nothing: empty sound. And yet astonishingly the sound said to be nothing is yet something—somehow. And seems to have some meaning. 

By contrast, the view emphasizing creation—if it is creation from nothing—stresses the difference of nothing, as not within the divine life, rather as between world and God. God is, and is not the world; the world is, and is not God. And while this ‘‘not’’ separates, it also brings together; for this is an ‘‘outside’’ that conditions communication of a different sort from holistic self-communication. It is communication between others—an intercommunication, not a self- communication, though it is not exclusive of self-communication. 

The world is not relatively ‘‘outside’’ God, it is essentially ‘‘outside’’ God. Admittedly, it is hard to find adequate words for this ‘‘outside,’’ for once one names this ‘‘outside,’’ one immediately has to add that the world is nothing ‘‘outside’’ of God, hence nothing without God, and so even in its being something as ‘‘outside’’ God, it is still in community with God, for were it not, it simply would not be at all.5 Yet, by contrast with the holistic ‘‘reassimilation’’ of world to the source, world does not ‘‘disappear’’ into the creator. 

Assimilation invokes similitude, likeness, but we can push likeness to the verge of merging into identity. Similitude is a form of participation also but in the holistic view participation verges on the disappearance of difference, like drops falling back into their source, the fons et origo.6 With creation, likeness and participation keep open an essential difference. World and God are not of the same essence; creation is not the self- creation of God. God cannot be cloned. 

The question we come to then: Within the limits of this dialectic of the whole, can it make any sense to speak of God beyond the whole? To be beyond the whole seems paradoxical, if not outrightly contradictory. For this beyond seems again to be within the whole, since nothing is beyond the whole: there is no beyond at all. This is the point of idealism generally, and especially in Hegel, where finally any Jenseits (residual in religion) is completely sublated in the philosophical concept, entirely at home and at one with itself.

The defect of the religious consciousness is said to be just that residual Jenseits, even though the claim is made that the truth of Christianity, as the consummate religion, is just the overcoming of the dualism of immanence and transcendence, time and eternity, the human being and God. To try to make sense of a God beyond the whole seems either to perpetuate nonsense, or else to bring this God back within the whole, and hence not to think the God beyond the whole. It seems a doomed enterprise. 

Suppose you object to contradiction here? But what of dialectical thinking, which claims to unify opposites? Why fear contradiction then? Why fear contradiction especially if the being of God cannot be determined in a logic of exclusive opposites, more suitable to finite determinate things? One might equally say: Just the difference of God to finite entities, indeed to the entire totality of finite entities, might point to what cannot be captured in univocal logic.

This would signal the necessity to risk the contradictory—contradictory from the standpoint of univocal logic. God cannot be made intelligible in terms of finite, univocal things. My question: does dialectical thinking itself recur to a univocity at a higher speculative level, when it claims there is nothing beyond the whole? Must we not also risk the contradictory relative to this ‘‘higher’’ dialectical-speculative univocity of the whole?Would this not be needed if there was, so to say, a metalogical otherness of God beyond the whole, a metalogical otherness that calls for a thinking not only beyond univocal finitude, but beyond a speculative dialectic of whole and part? 

This would have to be a logic of a different between: between finite creation and its origin as other: a logos of the metaxu, not only relative to the immanences of the given metaxu, but also with respect to the beyond of the given metaxu: for God beyond the whole is not the metaxu, but its original creative source. 

Singularity Beyond the Whole: Shestov 

In light of the above, what of Shestov’s interpretation of Solov’e ̈v?7 Shestov is a provoking and inspiring thorn in the flesh of rationalistic philosophy and its saner securities. He attacks what he takes to be the idolatry of philosophical reason. When philosophical reason claims absolute autonomy, in one sense it is autocratic, but in another sense it is not sovereign at all but servile to a fate indifferent to the singular person. It is indifferent to the person in agony about ultimate good in the midst of often tragic circumstances. Its rational universality ends up hostile to the intimate singularities of life. If there is no standard beyond or higher than autonomous reason, religion and the God of biblical revelation will have to present their case before its tribunal for justification and approval, and perhaps condemnation. Condemnation is the more likely. 

Hence Shestov’s repeated engagement with Spinoza: father of the subordination of the biblical God in modern philosophy, source of a modern Eleaticism, followed in the essentials by all the major thinkers. Where religion seems to be exonerated, as in Schleiermacher, and indeed in Solov’e ̈v, Shestov might be seen to suggest that it is a changeling that has been patted on the head. It is a philosophical twin of religion that superficially looks the same. It is a false double. I take this to be central to his accusation against Solov’e ̈v. The false double of philosophically reconstructed religion is one that sheers off the beyond of the God beyond the whole, brings that God into the whole, hence makes Him part of the whole, or perhaps the whole itself, but thereby makes God not God. The God that is not God is, of course, an idol. This too, it seems, is the secret sin of the pious Solov’v. 

I will return to the problem of the false double, or the counterfeits of God, but first I note the connection of reason and the whole. The whole is said to be marked by the immanences of worldly intelligibilities: rational necessities to which reason must submit, such as 2􏰄2􏰅4, the dead cannot be brought back to life, and so forth. These worldly intelligibilities, when absolutized, are the self-evidences against which Shestov inveighs. These are the necessities of the whole; and while reason, our reason, seems to master them, in fact they master us: we submit to them, eager to extirpate our singularity. We seem to be kings but in fact we are the serfs of the whole. 

Shestov liked to cite the adage of Cicero, repeated by Seneca (SR, 67; see also 39, 245): Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt—Fate leads the willing, the unwilling it compels. Shestov humorously likens the philosopher of fate to the drunken man being dragged off to the police station. Is it too mischievous to add a thought like the following? 

One imagines some philosophers (say, Kant) still trying to keep their dignity as they are dragged; and they say, ‘‘Now, now, I am coming. . . . ’’ They consent, as if (als ob) they really wanted to go. But at a deeper level, they are pretending they want to go. They have no choice, but they want to rescue their dignity by dressing up coercion as free consent. 

When Shestov bridled against such submissions to fate or necessity, I think it was in the name of an ultimate God beyond the whole. Shestov names his own endeavor to be beyond the immanences of the whole as a struggle for the impossible. One can see the point if the only logic available is one of univocal unity, or even perhaps a more sophisticated logos that speaks of the dialectical self-becoming of the one or the whole, such as we find in Hegel. The possible, then, seems exhausted by what happens, or what might happen within the whole. There is no possibility beyond the whole. Beyond the whole impossibility reigns—that is to say, nothing reigns, there is nothing possible beyond the whole. 

This certainly would be the death-knell of any revelation. For this comes to us within the whole but not from the whole: within the whole but from beyond the whole. That it comes within the whole might easily be converted into a claim that is it just another part of the whole. But then it is not revelation in a genuinely irreducible sense. 

This is the perennial difficulty: revelation must come within the whole, if it is to come from beyond the whole. Even if it erupts in the whole, and comes from beyond the whole, the medium of its communication is the within of the whole. Hence, even if we defend a God beyond the whole, we cannot be satisfied with a mere dualism of the whole and this beyond. More is required, and Shestov is not always attentive to the problems here, since his style of thinking tends to be ‘‘either/or.’’ This will not entirely do, relative to the communication of the God beyond the whole to the whole. 

Of course, dialectical thinking, as in Hegel, claims to address this problem, and from within the whole. It claims that since the God beyond shows itself in the within of the whole, it is the latter that is the ontological reality fuller than the God beyond. This last is an empty Jenseits prior to communication, and hence once again is as nothing without its immanences in the whole. I could show in detail how this move represents Hegel’s position, but that is not the point here.8

The point is that there is a predilection to think the communication from the God beyond just in terms of the immanent whole, and this risks contracting, distorting the truth of the beyond that is being communicated. It is just the miscommunication that forgets the beyondness of this beyond, and assimilates it to the worldly self-evidences and intelligibilities, and indeed to human-all-too-human desires, will to power, and so forth. But clearly this is to step on the path toward the idol; that is, if the truth of this beyond is not to be assimilated to the evidences of the immanent whole. What then is the truth of the communication or revelation beyond the immanent whole, or the whole of immanences? 

This question—not quite in this form—is rightly pressed by Shestov. His questions are intended to unsettle the complacency of thinkers of the whole and the autonomy of reason, and quite rightly. But it is one thing to unsettle, another thing to address the unsettling question. Shestov: a voice in the wilderness of idealistic, rationalistic self-satisfaction; but a voice calling us into another wilderness; and a voice that seems to grow progressively silent as we approach the borders of this other desert, albeit that this wanderer carries the Bible in his hand. 

This may be all Shestov thinks we can do at this verge, at this entry into a darker beyond. But there may be more to say about that extreme edge, more beyond the oscillation between idealistic hubris and religious protest, and more beyond the powerful complacency of one and the tortured dissidence of the other. Undoubtedly in Shestov’s eyes Solov’e ̈v represents the first option, while Job, Paul, Luther, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche represent the second. But is it so simple? 

Shestov’s protest is drummed out again and again. Like the drumming of an elemental beat, it has a hypnotic effect. We fall into its rhythm, the rhythm of Shestov’s passion. This is the danger: a different kind of enchantment, a different kind of bewitchment under which one can fall. The flood of his passion is moderated by a superb intelligence and an ironical tartness, not to say bitterness. But there seems no stopping this flood once the stream is set in motion. There is something right about this, and one does not want to ‘‘tut-tut’’ Shestov for the fire in his soul when it comes to the religious urgency of ultimacy. I agree: When philosophers smugly assume the role of Job’s comforters it is hard to hold one’s patience. Yet religious fire does also need philosophical finesse—finesse beyond the sometimes sophisticated rationalizations of Job’s comforters. 

Consider the suspicion of an element of personal bitterness in some of Shestov’s remarks about Solov’e ̈v. There is something about Solov’e ̈v he finds hard to forgive: his seeming moralism in relation to Pushkin’s fate, when Solov’e ̈v pontificates about the light of providence evident in his justified death, justified because Pushkin was morally flawed. Shestov shows a raw irritation with any suggested moralization of geniuses like Mozart. One might say: The philosophers (shall we say the Kantians?) always seem to have more sympathy with the Salieris than with the Mozarts. The Salieris have worked for their reward—they earn it through their own labors, their own autonomous work. They have a right to say—‘‘It is mine.’’

The Mozarts, in a way, are helpless through themselves alone. The Mozarts are gifted: finally they show—‘‘It is not mine.’’ They play or are the playthings of a power beyond. They are singular exceptions but blessed by gifts beyond the measure of human earning; perhaps also cursed by such gifts. Kant revealingly said: Plato is play, Aristotle is work . . . and Kant clearly valued work the more. The satisfying works of immanence are superior to the sudden gifts of a blessing beyond. If such philosophers were asked to choose between the wages of work and a godsend, I fear they would disdain the godsend. 

There are other ironies here. Shestov sometimes counterposes thunder and philosophy. When he despises Solov’e ̈v’s judgment against Pushkin, he hates Solov’e ̈v’s moralistic thundering. But does Shestov not himself thunder against Solov’e ̈v, and in a manner not unreminiscent of the judge who condemns? Moralistic thunder, religious thunder, philosophical thunder: but the divine flash of lightning brings a humbling silence. Nor is the thunder free from equivocity—a point to be remembered. 

Between ‘‘All-unity’’ and the Counterfeits of God: Solov’e ̈v 

Shestov is right, of course: Solov’e ̈v’s thinking was deeply touched by idealistic currents. Furthermore, Spinoza was a lifelong influence, even unto Solov’e ̈v’s later lecture ‘‘The Concept of God,’’ in which he comes to the defense of Spinoza and his concept of God. Though imperfect, this concept is nevertheless indispensable for Solov’e ̈v. Shestov seizes on these commitments (see SR, 74ff.), and relentlessly excoriates them not only for their questionableness generally but, in Solov’e ̈v’s particular case, for lack of self-consciousness of what for Shestov is the great issue dividing the God of the philosophers and the God of the Bible. 

Solov’e ̈v was of the party of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as were all the philosophers since. At times one almost thinks that for Shestov philosophy was the original sin, certainly the most deceptive temptation insinuated by the serpent. Knowledge is chosen over life—and God. 

We can get in better perspective the idealistic influence in Solov’e ̈v’s holistic approach to the idea of God. Thus his notion of the God-man (Bogochelovek) takes up the claimed reconciliation of the human and the divine in Christianity, and he sees this in terms of a movement toward ‘‘All-unity’’ and divine humanity (Bogocheloveches- tvo). As with idealism, opposition and fragmentation are not denied, but they are situated within the compass of a more inclusive unity, toward which differences and manynesses themselves point as their telos. The becoming of immanence shows this movement toward the ‘‘All-unity’’ and the eschatological realization of divine humanity. 

In the God-man (Bogochelovek) the divine and the human are one, and the divine transfiguration of the human into divine humanity (Bogo- chelovechestvo) is already prefigured. And one can find numerous instances in which the model Solov’e ̈v uses to describe the final community, or the ultimate telos of divine-human interaction, is one of organism (see the citation in note 3), in which the different parts or members are to be assimilated to the integral governing power of the whole. 

Admittedly, this ‘‘All-unity’’ is not the block unity or absorbing God that we might ascribe to more univocal and unsophisticated Eleaticisms. Solov’e ̈v, like Hegel and others, tries to grant some qualified independence to the members of the ‘‘All-unity’’: differences are said not to be done away with, though they are nothing outside their being what they are within the whole. Indeed, the original sin seems to be primarily the self-assertion of difference and singularity over against the whole. In a line of inheritance stretching from Anaximander, the original ontological guilt of being is expressed in the daring that affirms individuality for itself over against the whole. 

By contrast, the true whole preserves the differences of the many within itself. Evil is the usurpation of the absoluteness of the whole by the singular part. Salvation from evil consists in the sacrifice of this false absoluteness and submission to the truth of the immanent movement of the whole toward the consummating ‘‘All-unity’’ which will be all in all.9 

One notes here Solov’e ̈v’s continuity with the more progressive historical teleologies such as we find in idealistic thought. One is also struck by the song of praise he raises to August Comte in which he comes close to identifying his own divine-human ‘‘All-unity’’ with Comte’s Great Being—Humanity as the Grand Eˆ tre. This absolutization of humanity might strike some of us as a supreme idolatry of the human, but such a worry seems not to have strayed enough across Solov’e ̈v’s mind (though, as we shall see, this is not true of his sense of ominous foreboding toward the end of his life). 

He is intent on relating Comte’s Grand Eˆ tre to his own claim about the suprapersonal character of the divine being. I think Solov’e ̈v’s blindness to the idolatry of Comte’s Grand Eˆ tre is analogous to Shestov’s blindness to the idolatry of Nietzsche, whose will-to-power he astonishingly identifies with Luther’s sola fide. I return to this below. 

Nevertheless, there are some indications counter to the undoubted influence of the holistic God on Solov’e ̈v. One detects significant differences of tonality from Spinoza, as well as Hegel and Schelling. I mean especially Solov’e ̈v’s explicit religious commitment to a community of worshippers—proximately the Orthodox Church and more inclusively the universal church.

 While his language describing that community might rely too heavily on the idealistic whole, and the God of the whole, something of these other commitments produces (in my mind) quite a different effect than the reading of Spinoza and other philosophers of the whole. I would say that participation in the intimate universal of a worshipping community puts brakes on the temptation to render the ‘‘All-unity’’ in terms closer to a homogeneous, neutral, impersonal universal. Solov’e ̈v might seem to be innocent of some of the more intractable difficulties here, but Shestov in no way adverts to this dimension. Solov’e ̈v’s commitment is to the Christian community, expressed in his challenging effort to think the ecumenical community. It is closer to this that his heart lies rather than to the idol of rational necessity or indeed the holistic God of idealistic philosophy. 

This other unity distinct, though inseparable from God’s primary unity, is in relation to God a passive, feminine unity, for in it eternal emptiness (pure potency) receives the fullness of the divine life. But though at the basis of this eternal femininity lies pure nothing, for God this nothing is eternally concealed by the image of absolute perfection that He bestows upon it. This perfection, which for us is still in the process of being realized, for God, i.e., in truth, actually is already. The ideal unity toward which our world is striving and which is the goal of the cosmic and historical process cannot be merely a subjective idea (for whose idea could it be?), but truly is the eternal object of divine love, as God’s eternal ‘other.’ ’’ 

There is a genuine tension of these two: not only in relation to the irreducible character of robust otherness and the inherent worth of plurality itself in the ecumenical community, but also relative to the belief that there is a God beyond the whole. I mean if the ecumenical community is thought as ‘‘All-unity,’’ then we risk shortchanging the otherness of the divine; and maybe for that reason also, we might not be able to do justice to the full affirmative worth of difference and plurality within the ecumenical community itself.

Likewise, the ultimate transcendence of God might be so radically immanentized in the worldly ‘‘All-unity’’ that the putative ecumenical community becomes but the seeming of the most exalted: a community that poses as the highest, but its posing is imposture, and hence this highest risks really being the lowest, that is, an idol. I think this is the problem that Solov’e ̈v began to suspect. It is not as simple as Shestov’s reason versus revelation, or the God of philosophy versus the biblical God. It is the perplexity, perhaps even more intractable, concerning the counterfeits of God, and the counterfeits of the absolute community.10 

This is related to the problem of the anti-Christ, a problem more intractable than the terms of Shestov’s critique allow. Here it has to do with the holistic god usurping the God beyond the whole. This is not simply the usurpation of rational philosophy, but a more intimate and radical usurpation of spiritual superbia. This is a superbia that takes worldly form in the claims to initiate the absolute, the ultimate community within the whole of immanence itself. Solov’e ̈v’s sense of Apocalypse, and immanent catastrophe—and the foreboding of some such catastrophe seems to have overtaken him toward the end of his life—is with respect to the suspicion that the god of the whole is really this monstrous idol. The idol is incarnate in the projected ideals of certain forms of worldly community itself, forms that in mimicking religious community threaten its corruption. 

I will come back to this, but I want to continue to ask if there is more to Solov’e ̈v’s doctrine than the ‘‘All-unity,’’ and hence some sense of the God beyond the whole. What of the doctrine of Sophia here? Putting to one side a number of complex issues of its meaning and justification, does not the formulation of such a doctrine testify to a power between God as the ultimate other and the finite between as the milieu wherein the community of the human and the divine is coming to be? Is not the doctrine of Sophia a pointer to a middle between utter transcendence and an otherwise godless immanence?11

One might wonder if the doctrine of the Mother of God, Theotokos, perhaps takes up some traces of mother religion, even the pagan love of Gaia, over against an utterly aloof father who simply stays aloof, as a God beyond the whole. This latter beyond is easily set then in opposition to immanence, resulting perhaps in either an utterly unmediated transcendence of mystical negation or the finally redundant transcendence of the deistic divinity. The mother Sophia—one suspects this would be for Shestov just another idol. But why not a name for a community of wisdom and love between the God beyond the whole and the divine-human community coming to be within the finite whole?

That aside, the focus in Solov’e ̈v is not on the beyond of the beyond suggested as the necessary other side of this Sophia. The focus is on this side. But then is not the doctrine of Sophia, especially in its feminine and maternal metaphorics, as intimately personal as the dominant paternal metaphorics of the Old Testament transcendence that seems to be Shestov’s preferred emphasis? 

Some might call this pagan idolatry, but is not God the divine mother also an image appealing to the deepest intimacy of our being as singular persons, loved personally and intimately and singularly? One can call upon one’s mother as much as on one’s father. Indeed the love, in a sense, is more in a fleshed bond, hence has an incarnational dimension that is mediated through less intimate embodiment, as via the father. Solov’e ̈v: love of the mother, and the feminine? Shestov: love of the absent father? 

And Solov’e ̈v in his spirituality had an intensely aesthetic, embodied sense of the feminine Sophia. One recalls his visions of Sophia and their life-changing power for him.

 I think of his final vision in the desert. Solov’e ̈v answered a call in a manner that makes no rational sense: he decamped from the British Museum and its sober civilities for the dry deserts of Egypt, where he was captured and robbed by Bedouins, and then granted, upon being released, his third vision of Sophia.12 

Such an adventurer does not quite answer to Shestov’s depiction of the philosophers as risking the idolatry of the rational concept. Shestov praises the prophets and others who had a ‘‘God- craziness,’’ but surely if we take note of the extraordinary influence of Solov’v’s visions, we must at least ask if his name too must be entered in the lists of those set on fire by a theia mania. And this, even though Solov’e ̈v might then try to make sense of this fire and mad- ness in the idealistic language of the ‘‘All-unity.’’ 

These existential and spiritual, indeed mystical sources of Solov’e ̈v’s quest are not really taken into account by Shestov. Solov’ev knew poverty—he owned nothing, and lived often as a wanderer, the beneficiary of the generosity of friends. Perhaps he knew something of the poverty of philosophy. 

Moreover, he was sometimes seen to be in the Russian tradition of the ‘‘Holy Fool’’—touched by idiot wisdom. There are times when one wonders if Solov’e ̈v has more claim to be listed among the madmen of God than Shestov: I mean as the recipient of a godsend, one touched by a blessing of spiritual and philosophical gifts, a blessing that always brings its torments too. The blessing of gifts in Shestov’s case seems to arise more in torment than in vision, since it is his deepening dismay with the perceived blindness of philosophers that is his blessing and curse. Solov’e ̈v seemed to see beyond dismay. I agree that the language of the whole is not adequate to this beyond. But to find the better language may be as much a task for philosophy as it is a matter of willingness to listen to the sacred languages of holy scripture. 

Perplexity About the Anti-Christ 

Dismay brings us back to the problem of the anti-Christ, as it does to the God beyond the whole.13 Shestov briefly grants at the end of his essay that there is a generally acknowledged ‘‘change of mood’’ in Solov’e ̈v’s last writings. He spends little time on it beyond suggesting Solov’e ̈v’s complete repudiation of his earlier work, and his discovery that the God of speculative philosophy was dead and not the source of life. Shestov is willing to grant that a new going out into the darkness and the desert is suggested, like Abraham not knowing where he is going, and not asking either. I think this is to the point, but the matter is more complex still and indeed full of peril. 

First one has to grant here a certain continuity in Solov’e ̈v’s thought, in the following regard. One has to take account of Solov’e ̈v’s concern for the church and its claim to be the ultimate community. The church may claim to be this community in spirit but it is also a worldly reality, and always has been. Here there may be opportunity, but also always tremendous danger. If this community is beyond the whole of immanences, it is also resident within the midst of these immanences: it is within and without; it is a meta in the double sense of the Greek: in the midst but also beyond. 

These are not the terms of either Shestov or Solov’e ̈v, but they help us to see the present difficulty. The intertwining of spiritual community and forms of worldly power is also inseparable from Solov’e ̈v’s lifelong concern with ecumenical community. One might say that the problem of power takes its most ultimate form with regard to the anti-Christ. The problem of the anti-Christ is the problem of superbia as the usurpation of spiritual power. 

This is not the question of the ‘‘All-unity’’ as putatively reconciling the human and divine. It is the production of the counterfeits of God and the usurpation of reconciliation in the form of communities that have all the appearance of being ultimate and unsurpassable. Think here of how there is nothing beyond that is envisaged by the last Emperor of the world in Solov’e ̈v’s story of the anti-Christ. There seems nothing beyond this nec plus ultra of spiritual-worldly power. Those who will not bow to this last Emperor do so in the name of a Christ beyond this nec plus ultra. Their faith is in a God beyond this power claiming ‘‘nothing beyond.’’ 

If we consider the three temptations of Christ in the desert we are here primarily concerned with the third temptation—this I think of as the temptation to spiritual power, or the usurpation of spiritual power. First temptation: Turn stones into bread. This might be called the first temptation of will-to-power to minister to human desires for contentment and domestic comfort. Call this the will-to-power of Nietzsche’s last men. Maybe today we might call it the temptation of perfected technology. 

Second temptation: The tempter shows Christ the cities of the world: You will be master of these. Call this the second temptation of will-to-power: dominion over the earth, expressed in political rule. You will become Caesar. Third temptation: Throw yourself down and the angels with bear you up. This is will-to-power as commanding the powers: this is the temptation of spiritual pride. It is higher and more perilous than the will-to-power of the last man and the will-to-power of the political lords. It is beyond the rule of Caesar, and the cities of man, and in struggle with the ultimate powers: this is the highest struggle, spiritual struggle. This last temptation of Christ is also, I think, Nietzsche’s great temptation.

 It is a temptation that he felt in relation to Jesus: namely, to decide the issue of superiority of spirit. As we know, Jesus refuses the temptation, saying one should not tempt the one Lord and God. There is a freedom from spiritual pride, as well as consent to the ultimate. There is a more ultimate other: God as an agapeic giver of all, but not the all. There is none of this in Nietzsche: No God and no man above me! And no Christ above me either! Non serviam! 

Relative to this third temptation, there can be a spiritual violence involved that even the storm of Shestov’s polemic cannot quite match. One wonders if he fully appreciated this, not least because he seemed incapable of seeing Nietzsche as anti-Christ: this means as incarnation of this temptation to spiritual superbia that claims a superiority to Christ, as well as claiming to be Christ’s higher successor and replacement (on this, see Chapter 6). But this is the concern of Solov’e ̈v: he clearly indicated that the issue with the last Emperor, this superman, is spiritual pride, growing out of the absolutely extraordinary character of his gifts. It is at the highest level of blessing that the greatest danger of curse and corruption emerges—and the greatest struggle also. 

Solov’e ̈v’s last Emperor also sees himself as Christ’s successor and replacement. Indeed when he receives no confirming sign from heaven, his admiration of Jesus turns into envy and hatred. When the last Emperor freezes into despair, he throws himself from a cliff; but he is then unexpectedly saved and borne aloft by a power who anoints him as his only son. That power is not the power of God. We are dealing with a double of the third temptation and the giving of powers that save but do not save.14 

It is impossible not to think of Nietzsche when reading Solov’e ̈v here. In the last years of his life Solov’e ̈v was disturbed by implications stemming from Nietzsche’s thought.15 Solov’e ̈v is concerned with the equivocal promiscuity of spiritual power and worldly dominion, concretely embodied in a counterfeit of ultimate power and absolute community. This is not discontinuous with his previous work, though perhaps some of the dismay comes from a blindness to, or underestimation of, or even earlier complicity with what was at play here. One cannot but wonder if Solov’e ̈v is doing some penitential work for himself in writing his story of the anti-Christ. 

What is at play is not outside the churches, but intimately in them, to the extent that they are less servants of God as they are incarnations of a ‘‘god’’ tempted with the usurpation of God. If we have some presentiment of God beyond the whole, and of the qualitative difference between finite creation and the absolute origin as other, then this dismay will never entirely leave us. Just in that difference there is given the promise of the highest freedom but also the most infernal temptation; and both are granted to freedom by the allowance of the agapeic origin or God. 

Put differently, against the dialectical-speculative overcoming of their difference as claimed by the idealistic philosophies of the whole, there is here (for Solov’e ̈v perhaps) a realization of the difference of the City of God and the City of Man (Augustine). In time, these two cities will be always promiscuously mixed. Time is just that mixture, or the medium of that mixture, of weeds and wheat, sheep and goats. The last judgment is not the judgment of time (contra Hegel who, borrowing from Schiller, said that die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht). Apocalypse is the realization of the truth of that difference. The problem is not only the counterfeits of God but of the City of God. These counterfeits are now made by man for man: autonomously, with repudiation of transcendence as beyond and other to our autonomy. 

The counterfeits seem to look just like the divine original, or seem to realize in truth the promise of the divine original. For they are made historically concrete in the name of the highest moral ideals. 

Thus in Solov’e ̈v’s story, the last Emperor is unimpeachable in terms of his highest moral intent to realize on earth all that is best. But these ideals are inwardly corrupted by the will-to-power of superbia. This is also what one fears corrupted Nietzsche. Contra Nietzsche, the problem of the anti-Christ does not bear on the transvaluation of values out of the inversion of the highest values. It has to do with simulations of the highest values, which have been inwardly hollowed out. The simulations look exactly like the true thing, but in seeming the same they are radically other. They are false originals, so to say. 

They look like absolute originals, and pass for true currency, but they are without any ultimate resources to back their claim. There is no credit or faith to be invested in them, though they present themselves as the most credit-worthy. They appeal for confidence, but work a confidence trick rather than deliver true reliability. Lucifer is the bearer of light (lux) who, as light simulating the light, becomes the ape of God, and does so at the highest level of spiritual mimicry. 

Parodia Sacra 

What is here enacted is a parodia sacra: a parody of the sacred that may not even know or acknowledge that it is such a parody. This parody of the sacred rebounds on itself, if it is the aping of God. The perplexity of the anti-Christ revolves around just such a parodia sacra. Nothing is more full of holy irony than the fact that Nietzsche enacted just that parodia sacra, all the while thinking that his message was spiritually superior to the teaching of the holy he parodied. The anti-Christ is the sacred parody of Christ, but there are sacred parodies that are also desecrations. 

Solov’e ̈v had developed an idea of the superhuman (sverkhchelo- vecheskoe) well before Nietzsche’s U ̈bermensch, and before Nietzsche’s idea had gained currency in Russia from the 1890s onward. The superhuman Good (sverkhchelovecheskoe Dobro) is to be associated with God, and the appearance of the superhuman in the God-man (Bogo- chelovek).16 

The question of counterfeit doubles emerges here, and it troubled the later Solov’e ̈v. The fact is that Solov’e ̈v’s idea of the superhuman (sverkhchelovecheskoe) and Nietzsche’s Ubermensch seem to be very like doubles of each other. Yet while seeming very close, they are entirely opposed: in the refusal of God in the second, and in the impossibility of the first without God. 

One thinks of Dostoevski and the mirroring between those who seek the God-Man and those who seek to realize the Man-God: the mirroring can mask a qualitative difference in seeming likeness. A parodia sacra can be a mirroring likeness that reflects an original, but the directionality of the spiritual energy is reversed between the two. Shestov seemed to have been entirely asleep to the possibility that Nietzsche’s will-to-power, in terms of just such a reversal, might have harbored a form of spiritual monstrousness. And this from the standpoint of faith in the God of biblical personalism to whom Shestov wants to recall us. Nietzsche himself, in fact, was much more aware of what is at stake and indeed one fears that he went more than halfway to embrace the monster. 

The problem of counterfeits is a major one with forms of postmodern thought that deny any originals and affirm only images. The images are images of nothing but other images and there is no original. What results? If there is no original, is there any image then? Or is it that the image seems to image only itself, and hence mimics an absolute being for itself? Or if there is no original as other, and the image is the image of nothing but itself, is it not then just the image of nothing? Is not then the image that mimics absolute being for self nothing but an image of nothing? But is this not an idol: an image that seems everything and is nothing? If so, does not this postmodern issue bring us round again to religion, even while we seem to be going away from religion? 

The idea of an idol makes no sense finally outside of religion. And the question comes to us: What do we love as ultimate and original? If the answer is nothing, we are still in the condition of nihilism. How then do we read the equivocal images? Nietzsche is said to have brought us to the twilight of the idols, but did he? Or did he manufacture a new idol? 

I think one can connect this deep equivocity with the import of Solov’e ̈v’s last vision: the corruption of moral good (universal community turned into its counterfeit double) through spiritual type.’’ By contrast, the German prefix u ̈ber points to what is ‘‘above,’’ ‘‘over,’’ ‘‘beyond’’; hence the Ubermensch can refer to something higher above humanity, or beyond humanness, in which the merely human is somehow overcome. 

corruption (spiritual superbia as the counterfeit double of spiritual power). In its own way, postmodern thinking might be seen to beckon back to an elemental condition: being in a glass darkly. This is our religious condition—as seeking God. The problem of the counterfeits, one might say, is not at all the ‘‘death of God’’ but blotting out the light in the dark glass, and it is not that we no longer see, but that we no longer seek. For one might be in the dark and seek even while not seeing. But not to seek at all: this would be the attempted closure of our porosity to the divine. Something like this thought appalled Shestov, though he blamed it too much on ‘‘philosophy.’’

There are forms of postmodern thinking, deriving from Nietzsche mainly, that seem so to exult in equivocity that they no longer seek. We must seek the finesse needed to discern the divine in the equivocity. Otherwise we lack any intimation of the divine. We lack the urgency that what we most require is what we most lack: true divination. 

Comte provides an illuminating illustration of this matter of the sacred simulacra or parodies. Solov’e ̈v, as I mentioned, was once taken in by Comte’s vision of Humanity as the Grand Eˆ tre. Comte is famous, or infamous, for his efforts to propagate the final religion, the religion of Humanity. There will be a consummation of religion in the new positivist ‘‘Church,’’ the last and ultimate community of Humanity, and this will be the scientific successor of Catholicism, with its priesthood of scientists, its liturgical calendar of the great heroes of Humanity, and the supreme positivist Pontiff above it all, Comte himself. Perhaps Solov’e ̈v, at the end, was doing penance for being taken in by something of this parodia sacra. 

Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor, of course, also brings up the issue of the counterfeit doubles of Christ. Solov’e ̈v was himself intimately related to Dostoevski who, it seemed, attended his lectures on God- manhood, and who took Solov’e ̈v as the original for his character Alyosha Karamazov. Solov’e ̈v’s story of the anti-Christ is impossible to read without thinking of the Grand Inquisitor. And this despite the fact that Shestov derides his silence about Dostoevski after his death. Yet clearly the Grand Inquisitor is also bound up with the perceived Caesarism of the Roman Pontiff. I think of Nietzsche’s image of the highest will-to-power, the Ubermensch: A Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ. The Grand Inquisitor: A Roman Pontiff without the soul of Christ. (I come more fully to Nietzsche’s image in the next chapter.) 

Once again one cannot gainsay Solov’e ̈v’s longtime concern with the relations of the Eastern and Western churches, and his views of the primacy of the See of Rome. These concerns are not merely ‘‘ecclesiastical’’ in a narrow sectarian sense. Quite the opposite, they have to do with catholic community beyond sectarianism, in image of the God who is beyond all sects, and cannot be reduced to the terms of any particular human community. Solov’e ̈v is on the side of those who refuse the gifts and temptations of the last Emperor. Yet their resistance seems senseless, since this ruler has got the whole world in his hands, and there seems nothing else beyond. He is the worldly god of the whole. (Hegel says one must honor the state as an earthly-divinity—ein Irdisch-Go ̈ttliches.) This worldly god seems to have all moral justification on its side: its ideals seem morally noble in the highest sense, for it is the good of the whole that it is working toward and is in the process of realizing here and now. This seems senselessly rejected in terms of a faith in Christ and the God beyond this whole, whose kingdom is not of this world. Is this the apocalyptic realization that seems to have struck Solov’e ̈v, and with an intimation that catastrophe might have been in the making? 

You might say Nietzsche also had this intimation, but his own prognosis and cure contribute to and embody the coming catastrophe. I mean the mushrooming of the will-to-power to monstrous proportions. Shestov is incredibly blind to the potential for corruption contained in this Nietzschean view, and indeed the corruption that is already there, if one accepts that there is finally an absolute qualitative difference between Christ and Nietzsche’s anti-Christ. Nietzsche succumbs to the third temptation that Christ rejected with the words that affirm there is only one God. 

This returns us to a radical monotheism, but this One is not the ‘‘All-unity’’ of the becoming of immanence toward its own self-completion. It is God beyond the whole, as always qualitatively other to finite entities, even while being with them in the most intimate of communities, even in the undergoing of death itself. I take this to be part of what the word ‘‘Father’’ means. There is One beyond the whole, yet more radically intimate to the whole than any being within the whole, who cannot be captured in the languages of the holistic God. 

Nietzsche speaks the language of a superior will-to-power rather than the pan(en)theistic language of idealism. But he is not averse to the latter in so far as he seems (in Will to Power) very sympathetic to a new pantheism. This is not the rational whole of idealism, but the rhapsodic Dionysian whole of will-to-power and Amor fati. The world is this ring of rings with nothing beyond, this self-differentiating and self-gathering ‘‘monster of energy’’ (ein Ungeheuer von Kraft), as he puts it in a very revealing image. We glimpse the other side of this monster at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (‘‘The Intoxicated Song’’) when Zarathustra speaks of all things being enchained with each other, in love with each other. How this monster and this love join together, or are perhaps the same, remains a mystery ringed around by two riddles.17 

In sum, the anti-Christ has to do with the equivocity of the divine, raised to the highest pitch of spiritual tension. This equivocity cannot be separated from the beyond of the divine. In other words, transcendence is not transparent in the whole: it shines in and through it, as in a glass darkly. In a glass darkly: but all this darkness seems to evaporate in the holistic God (see, for instance, Hegel’s Aufhebung of religious Vorstellung). To attend the dark glass in the spirit of truth: this is the struggle for watchfulness, for mindfulness of the God beyond the whole, in and through the equivocal signs within the immanent whole. 

Pascal is right in relation to disproportion: there is no one whole of the human being and God; for that whole would then claim to be more than God, and there is no such ‘‘more.’’ God is the unsurpassable ‘‘more,’’ beyond which nothing can be thought, but which is beyond all our human thought of the whole. We are between the finite whole and this unequal ‘‘more’’: between the finite world as an open whole, and a more radical transcendence that is always itself in its own otherness, even when its being gives to be the finite between as the place of given promise where human community with God is offered. 

What do we need to read these equivocities? We need singular finesse (Shestov is so far right). But we also need some systematic understanding. This will not save us, but it will help save us from false identifications within the matrix of the equivocal mixture of finite being, save us from the indiscriminate identification of opposites (such as Shestov’s foolish identification of Nietzsche’s will-to-power with faith alone in the God of the Bible). Solov’e ̈v may not save us here, but he may help. 

Shestov’s too indiscriminate attack on philosophical reason is not finally helpful in relation to seeing through the counterfeits of God. 

We need finesse to do that; but philosophical thought is an indispensable aid also. For there can be a philosophical finesse that is also troubled by the idolatries of reason, such as troubled Shestov, tormented him. Shestov has his own philosophical finesse, but his polemic against the idols of reason can have the effect of simply abandoning us in a wilderness of equivocity. There it is as likely, more likely, that another idol will take shape to quell the chaos or fill the vacancy. This may not be the philosopher’s idol but some more infernal monster. One can be led into the desert, but there are different deserts. It is just in the desert that the torment of the counterfeits of God makes itself most felt; for it is in our deepest emptiness that idols seem to appear as if from nothing, and tempt us with their different salvations.18 Who will show us the difference between salvation and salvation, salvation and perdition? This is another side of the radical perplexity the issue of the anti-Christ raises. 

To put it another way: we can connect our reading of the equivocal signs in relation to God to the question of the false prophet. The question is not, as with Shestov, just a matter of thunder against philosophy; it is also a matter of thunder against thunder.19 This latter problem is also raised to the highest pitch of tension in light of the radical equivocity of the anti-Christ. Radical equivocity: the fact that the ‘‘sameness’’ of Christ and anti-Christ is absolute difference. 

How then tell the difference, if the ‘‘sameness’’ seems to comprehend all, seems a kind of ‘‘All-unity’’? If that is the last word, there is no way to tell the difference. Shestov stops us in our philosophical tracks when he sets the prophets over against the philosophers. But what when we have prophet against prophet (think of Zarathustra against Jesus)? Our quandary then is not merely that of philosophers who substitute themselves for the prophets. It is of war among pretenders to prophecy. 

What guidance does Shestov give us then? I am not sure he can give us much. He can recall us to prophets in the Jewish-Christian tradition now recognized as such. But when it comes to the equivocal ethos of our own time, what then? Once again I find it thought provoking when I contemplate what I see as the disastrous misidentification of Nietzsche. In my view, Nietzsche is right to call himself the anti-Christ. If we take seriously all that this entails, Shestov seems unable to distinguish between Christ and anti-Christ: that is to say, he is himself enchanted by the spell of the equivocity of ‘‘prophecy.’’ Within the war of the ‘‘prophets,’’ he seems to be as analogously vulnerable as he claims philosophers are in relation to prophets. 

This indeed is why we cannot give up philosophy. No doubt, we need better philosophy: truer to the prophets, more open to the disturbing message of Jerusalem. Can we see Solov’e ̈v as doing this? Shestov seems so to define the essence of philosophy that it must pervert the communication from Jerusalem. Even if that were necessarily true, which is open to question, one still cannot sidestep the above quandary. More things besides thought may be needed to address this (sojourn in the desert, a radical reorientation of life, say, a conversion . . . ), but we also certainly need thought, and hence philosophy. 

God Beyond the Whole? 

In a final reflection, let me try to gather together the threads of what we have learned of the limitations of the holistic God, as suggested by Shestov’s protest on behalf of the God-impassioned singular, as well as by the counterfeits of God called to mind by the last work of Solov’e ̈v. I will put the matter in terms of six questions, which also connect with my remarks at the beginning about the general character of the holistic God. My remarks will echo some reflections elsewhere on God as the agapeic origin. The language of the whole is insufficient to this God, though maybe we might speak of God as ‘‘over-whole,’’ namely, as in excess of every determinate whole, even the absolutely self-determining totality of Hegel and idealism. There is a hyperbolic dimension to this over-wholeness of the agapeic origin.20 

First, what about the origin of difference? If difference is described as a fall from the One, we see it too negatively, or at most as a provisional reality, vanishing as it is arising; and then we see too negatively the prodigious plurality of the world. The very plurality that roused us to thought of the One is put into the pale by the One. Being put in the pale is not entirely wrong, but we want a One that will lead us out into the sun, and give us to affirm, reaffirm the plural. 

Second, why the so-called fall into time at all? This has been a question put to Solov’e ̈v, as indeed to the longer metaphysical and theological tradition which resorts to this notion. Does not this too degrade the temporal, instead of elevating it as the gift of finite be- coming in the between? Why does the One have to alienate itself at all, if it is the absolute it is? Why not be one with itself from eternity? Why then temporal differentiation at all? 

Suppose there is no fall, only the giving of being to the other, being-other as good. Clearly, the language of fall is not adequate to this good. To the contrary, we talk about the arising of being in the between. It does not fall; it arises into being; it is an elevation, a floating on nothingness, a lifting to the heights, a glorification of creation. Arising is as if every moment were a resurrection from the dead; or a preserving from the threat of death, a guarding the goodness of beings; as if God were torn by grief for every death, and yet on the instant resurrected the beloved this into the goodness of life. We do not see this steadily in present life; we get glimpses of it. And they do not come on command; they arrive as godsends. 

Suppose one were to venture that time is supported on the love of eternity, what kind of love might this be? Is it the love of the agapeic origin that frees time into the goodness of its own otherness? Is it the love of an erotic origin that needs time to be itself the consummated absolute? The holistic view tends to eschew the first for it introduces a pluralism not reducible to a monism of the whole. In The Meaning of Love (in A Solovyov Anthology, 175), Solov’e ̈v talks of amor ascendens and amor descendens, as Plato’s two Aphrodites: the ouranian and the pandemic.

It is hard, however, to see his view here as fully an agapeic understanding. Yet it is not simply an erotic view as instancing a movement from lack to completion. There are traces of this view: thus within the Godhead there is the eternal overcoming of nothing; within the cosmic and historical process, there is the temporal overcoming of lack and fragmentation, and the dynamic toward completed unity. But the agapeic release of finite creation as other? And the ‘‘nothing’’ between God aand world? And the community within creation and between creation and God—as not to be mapped onto holistic terms? These emphases I do not find here. 

Third, what of the necessity of the arising of the many? Are we restricted to a more standard juxtaposition of sheerly univocal determinism and equivocal indetermination? Is God simply identified with an impersonal necessity that must be as it is, and such that things must be as they are? This is Shestov’s protest. In many traditions God has been defined as the necessary being: the being who cannot not be, the being whose essence involves existence.

If the arising of creation were necessary in the same sense in which God’s being is said to be necessary, it becomes hard to understand the contingency of finite beings in the between. If we recognize some contingency, we are tempted to redefine it relative to the more encompassing necessity. Hence arises the suspicion that contingency, such as we experience it in the between, is being shortchanged. This suspicion has been expressed relative to Hegel. For if contingency is thus redefined, is it really contingency, relative to the mark of nothing, and the openness of possibility to being other, and indeed to the singularity that cannot be fully rendered in the concept of a more embracing universal necessity? Creation as a happening ceases to be a happening; it becomes a necessity that could not be otherwise. And all that happens in it is not a happening, but is univocally as it is and could also not be otherwise. Amor fati—life becomes a fatalism in which the darker possibilities of contingent happening are canonized as them- selves the fated expression of the eternal laws of necessity. 

Shestov is engaged with this issue in terms of its repercussions in human existence. If this necessity rules, why do anything that will upset the ways things are? Indeed how do anything? Things are as they must be; and what we do counts only as expressing the necessity of which we are manifestations. Quietism, fatalism? These words can be too easily endorsed, as they can be too easily dismissed. For the acquiescence named here can draw on a recognition that there is a power in the deeper course of happening whereby things, as we sometimes put it, ‘‘come to right.’’ To speak of the fateful need not be entirely wrong, but it is wrong if it ethically neutralizes the ultimate power, and excludes our being cooperators in our destiny, which must be as much chosen, as well as in being chosen. 

The importance of the intimate universal is evident here. Destining and destined universality would be no more than a monstrous universality, a quiet indifference the resting face of an enemy, if it merely crushed the singular in its intimate being for itself. An agapeic destiny would communicate, in the intimate universal, the promise of a gift. We must accept the gift, though we can refuse; since the gift is itself a promise, we must serve the good to redeem its promise. Otherwise, the promise of being is crushed by univocal necessity in a resignation not reconciled but merely cowed or apathetic—just as certain sufferings take the light from one’s eyes, and make one want to die. Such necessity does not ‘‘come to right’’ but offers the poisoned chalice of death. No wonder then that, as a further response to this, there is often revolt. 

Fourth, what is the space for freedom in view of the holistic God? Where is the allowance for the unfinished and the open? Is the indeterminate not engulfed by the self-determining whole? Is not the indeterminate more than mere indefiniteness, offering rather the overdeterminate promise of a self-transcending that is to be realized most fully in the community of agapeic service: transcending to the others as the fullest freeing of human possibility, beyond any circular self-realization? Suppose there are spaces of openness embraced within the holistic God. But is there another freedom not so ‘‘within,’’ but released into its difference with all its hazards, as a parent frees the child to walk on its own feet, even as it watches with love as the child stumbles? Without the allowance of its own tottering, would the child ever weave itself into a dancing? 

Our notion of freedom is closely aligned with our understanding of God (see Sartre’s existentialist dualism and atheism, on just that issue). Is there a freedom beyond consent to holistic necessity? This might look like perverse anarchy to the rationalist, but perhaps it has the greatness of the idiotic in it. The God of holistic necessity frowns on the idiotic, as rationalists would rein us into line in terms of their idol of univocal or speculative necessity. The agapeic God loves the idiotic, and delights in the sweet singularity that dances or dares before it. The idiotic singular is the child of play, and the agapeic God laughs with its pleasure. 

Fifth, what of the status of the singular individual? In holistic views there is a tendency to define singulars through a network of differential relations with others, and hence the singular as irreducible center of distinct being is hard to uphold. Its singularity is idiotic in a bad sense, that is, merely idiosyncratic relative to the more en- compassing and general context of intelligibility.

The affirmative richness of idiotic singularity is hard to understand on this model, becoming something that is vanishing and that should vanish into the more encompassing whole. This also means we miss the promise of the intimate universal. Hence, relative to the holistic God, the singular tends to be associated with estrangement from the whole, indeed in some cases as the center of evil. In Hegel, for instance, the singular qua particular is the source of evil. The singular’s claim of absolute independence as turned against the more inclusive whole, this is the source of evil. The point is echoed in Solov’e ̈v. One can see the point: the singular as a being for itself can set itself in opposition to all other being, and hence deform the community of relations that still actually binds it to all the others. It can refuse its community with the origin, and with the others in the between. But to see this as evil is barely half the story. 

Put with maximum conciseness: The very power of evil shows a freedom from the whole that is hard to interpret in holistic terms. This is a metaphysical way of posing an essential perplexity connected with the anti-Christ and the counterfeits of Gods, as discussed above relative to the later Solov’e ̈v. How can light counterfeit light? How is it that a part within the whole sets itself up against the whole and asserts itself as the true whole? It cannot be a mere part to do this, and hence the language of part and whole is not itself true enough to the evil of the finite whole that stands against the more inclusive whole.

Evil testifies to a recalcitrant power that, looked at from the other side of the singular’s promise, is the power of a freedom to be for itself, and to be for itself rightfully. Singular selfhood is a kind of world unto itself, not a mere moment of a larger whole. The holistic way paradoxically undermines the fullness of that wholeness, turned in a different direction to the profound abyss of its ontological intimacy, that is, to its divine idiocy. We need a God who can turn the other way. 

The idiocy of the singular person is an overdetermined intimacy of being that is not to be rendered in terms of a neutral, homogeneous generality (Shestov’s ‘‘omnitude’’ again).21 The dialectical language of parts and wholes is not fully fitting for this idiotic intimacy. One needs something closer to metaxological terms to articulate a community of open wholes in the between. Nor need we view this matter with a typically Western emphasis on the individual as standing over against the other, and often with a kind of willful insistence on self. The holistic perspective, in common with other views, rightly sees a certain willful self-assertiveness as a block on the true mindfulness of the divine. The assertiveness hardens singularity into a mere knot of resistance to otherness beyond itself, or worse, it exploits the powers of being given to it to lord over the gift of creation as other, or other humans whose very existence offends its usurpation of absoluteness. In the East maybe the destructive truth of such self-assertion has been known better than in the too willful West. It has been known in the West, though within a horizon of interpretation where singularity is not an illusory center of being that must vanish for the truth of the whole to shine through. Such willful self-assertive humanity is not the truth of singularity. To come anew to the porosity of being it must pass through a penitential un-selving. 

The true idiocy of the singular involves its being as a communicative integrity of existence, and hence its communicative togetherness with others, even in the deepest intimacy of its inwardness. In that intimate idiocy the communication of the absolute other is most deeply felt, if and when it is felt at all. For it is in its awakening that we know the porosity of our being, and come to ourselves as passio essendi, prior to conatus essendi become will-full. Communicative being is not outside one, but both inside and beyond one, at one and the same time: most intimate to one, most solicitous that one step out of the confined selfhood curved back on itself. 

If there is a primal porosity to our being, it could not be simply either inside or outside itself, but gives passage between these, and in passing is both. If we must give up a certain willfulness, this willfulness is, in fact, one of the masks of idiotic singularity, whose promise as a porosity of being is here turned away from its community with the other into hollow self- glorification. Such an idiocy, as at the opening of our porosity to being in communication, finds its home as prayer in the intimate universal. 

Sixth, what of the character of community of God and creation? Obviously the holistic way does think in terms of community, but this is the embrace of a more inclusive whole. The model of the community is the whole that mediates with itself through its members. Ultimately community is (‘‘organic’’) self-communication, even if the ‘‘self’’ in communication is the divine, or the divine-human. Is this adequate to the communication between beings in the finite middle? Or between the origin and the beings in the between? Or indeed between the divine and itself? Surely, the other as standing in the integrity of its otherness is necessary for community as more than self- communication. 

But if so, there is a community of metaxological togetherness that is beyond dialectical self-mediation, and hence beyond the embrace of divine holism. Divine holism does not deny the oppositions in relations, indeed it turns them into the opportunity of a more reconciled community. But all otherness is not opposition, and there are othernesses even in the community of reconciliation that are not merely provisional; they are essential to defining the communication of reconciliation itself. The agapeic origin suggests a mode of communication that is self-communication yet more than self- communication, for it is communication of being to the other as other. This other communication is the opening up of creation in its finite integrity as given for itself, and not for the origin that gives it. 

Does not this relate to a traditionally noted difficulty, namely, that the holistic way suggests the absorption of the world into God? The world is ‘‘within’’ the life of the divine, and hence both the independence of world and the transcendence of God are put in question. What ‘‘within’’ means is hard to say, as hard or as easy as ‘‘independence’’ and ‘‘transcendence.’’ The latter terms, as we saw, do not have to be thought in dualistic fashion. Hence our choice is not between a dualism of the two, or a holism that asserts an identity more fundamental than their duality. There can be a community of the two that does not reduce their duality, without making that duality a dualism. There are doubles beyond dualism and counterfeit doubles, as there are communities beyond holism. There is a pluralism entirely resistant to absorption into a one, but not for all that a source of alienation, or void of the promise of community. This community of togetherness beyond dualism and not reducible to one is metaxological. 

In fact, this question of the absorption of world into God is only one side of a general problematic of the whole, the other side of which is the reduction of God to the world. For we can tilt the identity in the direction of a worldly evaporation of God, as equally as we can tilt it toward a mystical worldlessness which evaporates into God. Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura is again instructive. This sive is equivocal between the two sides. Thus Spinoza was the notorious atheist in his own time, Spinoza maledictus. The reduction of God to the world was suspected, especially since the idea of creation was despised by him, as well as the notion of a personal providence and deliberate free will. The one substance seems in the end to be indistinguishable from the mechanism of the materialists. The impersonal universal of geometry does not save the intimate person in his or her singularity. 

Now recall the turnabout toward the end of the eighteenth century, the time of the rising sun of modern pantheism: no longer maledictus, now Bendictus Spinoza, the Gott-vertrunkene Mann. Instead of reduction of God to world, the absorption of world in God, or God in world, it does not matter, for nature seems again divinized: instead of the godforsaken mechanism, the sacred organism that in its naturalness is the living body of the divine. This absorption of world into God, or God into world, shapes a new naturalistic piety of the whole, putatively free of the strain and discords of traditional transcendence and its dualisms. There might seem a kind of intimacy to this ‘‘warmer’’ pantheistic universal, but it finally too is a universal in which the intimate personal as an irreducible singular is also dissolved. 

The fact that Spinoza could engender these opposed interpretations, and continues to do so, indicates both a versatility and instability in the identity of God and world, which tells against the equilibrium of the whole. We seem to find what looks more like a dialectical equilibrium in Hegel, but given Hegel’s legacy we wonder if his speculative equilibrium conceals the difficulty in a new dialectical equivocity. The instability between reduction and elevation still persists. The metaxological way seeks to avoid both reduction and absorption, trying to find the right words for a sense of the One and the plural, beyond both dualism and the self-mediating whole. In this regard, it stands somewhere between Shestov and Solov’e ̈v. In appreciating these respective emphases, it is other than both in the way it seeks, beyond their respective exclusions or overemphases, in the between of the intimate universal, for the God beyond the whole. 

FOOTNOTES

1 In his introduction to A Solovyov Anthology, trans. Natalie Duddington, ed. S. L. Frank (London: SCM Press, 1950), 10, S. L. Frank claims that ‘‘the intuition of this unity determines the whole of Solovyov’s world-conception.’’ 

2 This follows Dostoevski’s use of the word ‘‘vsemstvo’’ in Notes from the Under- ground. 

3 Here is Solov’e ̈v, from the Lectures on God-Manhood, in A Solovyov Anthology, 36: ‘‘The eternal God forever realizes Himself in realizing His content, i.e., in realizing all. That ‘all,’ in contradistinction to the living God as absolutely One, is plurality— but plurality as the content of the absolute unity, as dominated by unity, as reduced to unity. Plurality reduced to unity is a whole. A real whole is a living organism. God as a Being that has realized its content, as a unity containing all plurality, is a even living organism. . . .  taken together, embrace the fullness of being; in that sense it is a universal organism.’’ 

4 See my Hegel’s God. An interesting study in contrast might be done between Solov’e ̈v and Deleuze, particularly given Deleuze’s notion of the ‘‘One-All,’’ his stress on immanence, his univocal notion of being, and his reverence for Spinoza. Solov’e ̈v makes some way for transcendence, though not radically enough for Shestov. Deleuze seems to be at one with Hegel at least in this one regard: there is no God beyond the whole. 

5 I discuss this complex ‘‘not’’ that separates and allows communication, this met- axological ‘‘not,’’ in ‘‘Hyperbolic Thought: On Creation and Nothing,’’ in Framing a Vision of the World: Essays in Philosophy, Science and Religion, eds. Santiago Sia and Andre Cloots (Leuven: University Press Leuven, 1999), 23–43. See also chapter 7 of Being and the Between. 

6 Something like this is one of the things that Levinas finds problematic about ‘‘participation,’’ identified with Le ́vy-Bruhl and ‘‘primitive’’ holism, animism. We can see Levinas as trying to think of a God beyond the whole. The very title of his work Totality and Infinity indicates this. See my ‘‘Philosophies of Religion: Jaspers, Mar- cel, Levinas,’’ in Routledge History of Philosophy: Contemporary Continental Thought, ed. Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1994), 131–74. 

7 This is contained in ‘‘Speculation and Apocalypse: The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov,’’ in Speculation and Revelation, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982). Hereafter SR in the text. This essay also reflects Shes- tov’s style, which touches on a wide range of thinkers, including Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche. See also my ‘‘Philosophical Audacity—Shestov’s Piety,’’ in the Lev Shestov Journal, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 45–80. 

9 From The Meaning of Love in A Solovyov Anthology, 173: ‘‘God as one, in distin- guishing from Himself his ‘other,’ i.e., all that is not He, unites that other to Himself, positing it before Him together and all at once, in an absolutely perfect form and consequently as a unity.

10 In A Solovyov Anthology, section 2, ‘‘The Essence of Christianity,’’ is an extract from the article entitled ‘‘On Counterfeits’’ (1891; see 253). Solov’e ̈v speaks of pseudo-Christians, and the counterfeits of Christianity (see 48–51). See also 68–71, where he speaks of the medieval worldview, pseudo-Christians and the casting out of devils; also 80ff. on the union of the churches where one might connect the issue of heresy with the finesse needed to discern the counterfeits of Christianity; and these again with spiritual power and worldly dominion. These all connect with the issue of the anti-Christ. 

11 Sometimes creation was viewed in a related way: the divine Word (Son) as exemplar; wisdom as similitude, eternal reason turned toward finite creation. This difference of the Word turned back to the origin (Father) and wisdom turned toward creation might be seen as intending to keep open the ontological difference of Creator and creation. 

12 See Frederick C. Copleston, Russian Religious Philosophy (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 82–83. These visions were felt as a call to explore the idea of ‘‘All-unity,’’ since Sophia as beauty holds all in one. If this is a speculative construction, one would also have to ask about its liturgical sources. See Copleston, 87–88, on the icons of Wisdom, and on Florensky relative to the seventeenth-century liturgical Office in honor of Sophia as divine wisdom at Nov- gorod—Feast of the Dominion of the Blessed Virgin on August 15. I cannot recall any reference in Shestov’s writings to the possible liturgical sources of some philo- sophical thoughts. One might look at speculative thought differently in this light. See Catherine Pickstock’s excellent book After Writing: On the Liturgical Consumma- tion of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 

13 Copleston notes in Russian Religious Philosophy, 47, n. 13: ‘‘According to his nephew, in the last year or so of his life Solov’e ̈v experienced several ‘visions’ of the devil or the principle of evil.’’ These visions of evil are perhaps the dark double or twin of his younger visions of Lady Sophia. 

14 See the story in A Solovyov Anthology, 231, on this incident. See also Chapter 6 below. 

15 See Nell Grillaert’s very helpful ‘‘A Short Story About the U ̈ bermensch: Vladi- mir Solov’e ̈v’s Interpretation of and Response to Nietzsche’s U ̈ bermensch,’’ in Studies in East European Thought 55, no. 2 (June 2003): 157–84. I want to thank Philip Gottschalk for his help on this matter. 

16 On this see Nell Grillaert’s art. cit., 159ff., and see also 178, note 11, where she points out that the Russian sverkh implies a qualitative elevation of the human, hence the word sverkhchelovek ‘‘signifies an improvement, a perfected state of the human 

17 On this see my ‘‘Eros Frenzied and the Redemption of Art: Nietzsche and the Dionysian Origin,’’ in Art, Origins, Otherness, 165–208; on Nietzsche’s claim that the world is will-to-power, and nothing besides, as a ‘‘monster of energy,’’ see 205–6; see also Chapter 6 below, note 23. 

18 In Solov’e ̈v’s story (A Solovyov Anthology, 246–47) it was after fasting and prayer on the desert heights of Jericho that ‘‘the union of the churches took place on a dark night, in a high and solitary place,’’ as night’s darkness was suddenly lit up with a bright light, and a great sign of the woman clothed with the sun. 

19 The magician Apollonius, apostate Catholic bishop, later to be made last Pope under the Emperor, possesses the power to bring down fire from heaven; he over- awes the waverers with this power, indeed with his ability to command the infernal powers. Thunder and lightning can also be on the side of the powers of darkness. The point again: the thunder is equivocal; it proves nothing univocally; it too requires finesse—philosophical, ethical-political, as well as religious. 

20 See Being and the Between, 207–22, on transcendence and the way of hyperbole; see also ‘‘Hyperbolic Thought: On Creation and Nothing.’’ An ‘‘over-whole,’’ ‘‘open whole’’—this is paradoxical language: a whole that is more than a whole: a whole beyond the whole: transcendence itself. It is present throughout my work since De- sire, Dialectic, and Otherness; it is even in Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), where I am perhaps too indul- gent of Hegel, and ventriloquize certain thoughts too much through him. \

21 On the idiocy of being, see Perplexity and Ultimacy, chapter 3. 196 Is There a Sabbath for Thought?