ALL science requires theology

Joshua Moritz has a great essay, Christian Theology of Creation and the Metaphysical Foundations of Science, found HERE

Below are some extracts from that essay, I leave the footnotes in, check out the paper to search them.

 First Moritz explains what these presumptions are, and then why they are theological :

These presuppositions are non-empirical philosophical beliefs about things such as the orderliness and regularity of reality, the ontological objectivity of reality, the intelligibility and contingency of existent structures and entities, the agential passivity of non-conscious nature, the unity and uniformity of the physical universe, and so on....As preconditions they are absolutely required for science to take place and are not open to experimental confirmation or falsification by scientific experimentation. The nature of these general presuppositions is such that “for science to develop, these beliefs must be held, at least implicitly, by society as a whole and by scientists themselves.”

 A Belief that the Order of the World is Contingent Rather than Necessary

According to physicist and philosopher of science Mariano Artigas, “Science shows us an order that is both rational and contingent (that is, its laws and initial conditions were not necessary). It is the combination of contingency and intelligibility that prompts us to search for new and unexpected forms of rational order.”75 Trigg explains that “it was the constant temptation of ancient thinkers, such as Aristotle, to work out how the world had to be from first principles and to discount the need for a rigorous program of empirical observation and experiment.”76 

The empirical focus of modern science contrasts with the mental and mathematical investigations of the ancient Greeks. “The genius of modern, empirical science, as compared with mere speculation about the nature of the world, is the realization that the physical world does not have to be as it is. It is contingent.”77 While necessary order could be discerned through pure introspective thought (like the truths of mathematics, geometry, or logic), contingent or dependent order can be discovered only by making experiments and through investigating what the world is really like.

In this way the early scientist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) derived from his faith in the
contingency of the cosmos a “conviction that empirical methods are the only way to acquire knowledge about the natural world and that the matter of which all physical things are composed possesses some properties that can be known only empirically.”78 The concept of contingency “is essential to science because contingency demands an empirical method.”79 Yet, the contingency of the rational order of nature may not be investigated or established through empirical investigation. “The comprehensive presupposition upon which the whole contingent order of things reposes in order to be what it is . . . cannot be established in any way from within the rational frame of the contingent order” itself.

A Belief in Metaphysical Realism

“Metaphysical realism,” says philosopher of science Nicholas Rescher, is not the result of an inductive inference, but is rather “a regulative presupposition that makes science possible in the first place.”81 Metaphysical realism is “a precondition for empirical inquiry,” and “a presupposition for the usability of observational data as sources of objective information.”82 In this way, says Rescher, “We do not learn or discover that there is a mind-independent physical reality, we presume or postulate it.”83 Trigg explains, “Science has to assume that it is investigating a world that has an independent existence. Otherwise it is a mere social construction reflecting the conditions of particular societies at a particular time.”84 The reality of the material world places crucial constraints on scientific theorizing, so true theories must match up with the structures and relationships already existing in nature.

A belief in the unity and uniformity of the physical universe.
The assumption that physical reality at some deep level is consistent, and that nature functions uniformly, is a fundamental presupposition of all scientific activity. “The idea of the general uniformity of nature,” says Trigg, “underpins the conduct of science, and the alternative is to give up science. Discovering it by scientific means begs the question.”87 The “scientific method,” explains philosopher of science Karl Popper, “presupposes the immutability of natural processes, or the ‘principle of the uniformity of nature.’”

This principle of uniformity, says Popper, is a “metaphysical faith in the existence of regularities in our world” that necessarily underpins the scientific method as a whole.88 According to historian of science Reijer Hooykaas “it was not experience alone but also a belief in an order as yet undiscovered—that is, in a certain uniformity of nature—which played, and still plays an important role in science.”

A Belief that the World is Orderly and Rational

If physical reality were assumed to be unstructured, disorderly, or fundamentally chaotic, science would be impossible.66 The presupposition that order exists in nature is thus a necessary condition of scientific inquiry because if one did not believe that order existed at all in nature, then searching for it scientifically would be pointless.67 For example, Einstein’s development of the general theory of relativity was premised on the assumption that the universe is a puzzle to be solved, and his lifelong search for a unified field theory (to unify general relativity with electromagnetism) assumed that there is a deeper cosmic rationality waiting to be discovered.

As physicist Paul Davies comments,

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

A Belief that the Order of the World is Open to the Human Mind
Scientists assume there is an order and rationality behind the universe that science studies and at the same time they assume that the human mind is able to access and understand that rationality. According to philosopher of science Roger Trigg, “an absolute presupposition of science is the human ability to recognize what is true and reason about what could be true.” This is a metaphysical presupposition because it necessarily precedes the study of the nature of the world.

As physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne elaborates,

We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that most of the time we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality which was inaccessible to us. . . . There is a congruence between our minds and the universe, between the rationality experienced within and the rationality observed without. This extends not only to the mathematical articulation of fundamental theory but also to all those tacit acts of judgment, exercised with intuitive skill, which are equally indispensable to the scientific endeavour.71

Physicist James Gates explains that in order to do science “one has to have a kind of faith that the universe is understandable.” Science, says Gates, “is in fact a conversation, and you have to have faith that the universe is willing to have that conversation.”72 Every new scientific research venture assumes that the order present within the universe will lend itself to being understood by the human mind. Because this assumption that the universe will “talk back” is based on faith and cannot be given a scientific explanation, many scientists have found this relationship between our minds and the universe to be surprising and mysterious. Considering this metaphysical mystery, Einstein once reflected, “the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible.”73 Indeed, remarks Trigg, “the intelligibility and intrinsic rationality of reality cannot be taken for granted” because “this is presupposed within science and cannot be given a scientific explanation.” The presumed rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos is a “metaphysical fact, and the explanation for which, if there can be one, must come from beyond science.”

Ok, there are more, but you get the picture. Now Moritz shows the theological origins of these presuppositions. He says :

These general presuppositions about the nature of reality—the orderliness and regularity of reality, the ontological reality of reality, the intelligibility and &contingency of existent structures and entities, and the unity and uniformity of the physical universe—necessarily precede and underpin all scientific experimentation

Each of these presuppositions developed within a specific religious context and all were supported and affirmed by particular religious concepts within a particular religious culture.

“Christian theology provided several of the beliefs on which science is based.” - Hodgson

Physicist, philosopher, and theologian, Ian G. Barbour explains that a number of key metaphysical presuppositions of science are grounded in “the basic theological affirmations in the first chapter of Genesis.” Among them are the convictions that “the world is essentially good, orderly, coherent, and intelligible,” that “the world is dependent on God” and thus contingent because “God is sovereign, free, transcendent, and characterized by purpose and will.” Barbour points out that “these are all assertions about characteristics of God and the world in every moment of time, not statements about an event in the past. They express ontological rather than temporal relationships.”101 

Artigas explains how these presuppositions became deeply embedded within the intellectual milieu that gave rise to science:

“The development of empirical science as a self-sustaining enterprise required . . . a kind of faith in the rationality of the world and also in the human capacity to know that world. In short, empirical science is possible only if our world possesses a strong kind of order and if we are capable of investigating it. Actually, after sharing the Christian faith for several centuries, Medieval and Renaissance Europe was built on a common ground that included, as a basic tenet, the doctrine of creation with all its implications: that the world had been created by an omnipotent and wise God and that, therefore, a natural order exists; that the natural order is contingent, because God’s creation is free and thus the world cannot be a necessary product of God’s action; that human beings, as creatures who participate in God’s nature, can reach a knowledge of that natural order; and finally that owing to the contingent character of the world, in order to reach that knowledge we must not only think, but also perform experiments that allow us to know how our world really behaves.”

That God Created an Orderly and Rational Cosmos

The orderliness and rationality of the natural world were similarly assumed by early modern scientists on the basis of the Christian doctrine of creation that was part of their cultural matrix.111 “The very idea of rationality has certain theological origins, and science as we know it arose in the context of a belief in the rational structure of reality mirroring the higher wisdom of a Creator God.”112 The concept of God’s creation of all material reality out of nothing (Latin: creatio ex nihilo) “allowed the scientist to approach nature with the expectation that the divine rationality would be reflected in its structures and workings.”113 According to Hooykaas, “The faith in order, law, simplicity, harmony, beauty has often been connected with the faith that there is logos, reason, mind at work in the universe.” The idea that the universe is deeply rational emerges from a “belief in a Mind to which the human mind has, however remotely, some resemblance, so that it is able to recognize these attributes in a creation which is the work of that Mind.”114

Past interpretations of the history of science attributed the rationality underlying the scientific endeavor to the influence of the ancient Greeks. This idea that natural science came to the modern world as a legacy from ancient Greece, says Harrison, “continues to exercise a tenacious hold on the popular imagination and still informs many nonspecialist accounts of science and its history.” However, he continues, “historians of science have now largely abandoned much of this narrative.” A “significant deficiency in this common reconstruction of the history of science lies in the assumption that these ancient Greek accounts of the cosmos partake of the ethos of modern science, and that they share to a significant degree its goals and methods.”115 

While the various Greek philosophical schools employed logic in their speculative understandings of the world, they did not generally see the structure of the cosmos as an expression of a rational plan that could—and should—be investigated on a more practical and empirical level.116 Hooykaas explains that “although the Greek atomists made Chance into Necessity (ananke), it was a blind necessity, not representing a rational plan. They were not looking for a fixed order (though they did have to admit some fixed principles in nature such as the indivisibility of atoms and the intrinsic heaviness of matter). Their system did not purport to further scientific creativity.”117 

Thus, says Ratzsch, the “general Greek view was in various ways philosophically fruitful, but it did not directly result in any enduring tradition that was identifiably scientific, in the sense of the later Scientific Revolution. In fact, several of the aspects of Greek thought . . . may have hindered development of anything like modern science.”118 In contrast to the Greek philosophical mindset, Jews and Christians believed that the ways of nature, as the product of the Divine Mind, were reflections of reason and that “even those aspects of nature that threatened human safety were not lawless in themselves. They served God’s purposes and had laws of their own, even if unknown to humans (Job 28:25-27).”1

That God Created the Human Mind to Comprehend God’s Cosmos

Since God’s creative activity in the cosmos reflects the rationality of the Divine Mind, Christians believe that the inner workings of the cosmos “are open to human comprehension, at least in principle.”120 As historian of science Christopher Kaiser explains, “The creation of all things by God, the consequent order and rationality of the cosmos, and the ability of human reason to comprehend this order all stem from the Judeo-Christian belief in creation, dating back at least to the second century BCE.”121 In this way, says theologian Alister McGrath, “human rationality thus bears a created, contingent relationship to—but is not identical with—divine rationality.”122 Affirming that the natural world could be comprehended, “early Christian scientists sought intelligible order in nature, regarding it as an indication of God’s rational plan for the universe.”

The Created Contingency of the Cosmic Order

According to the Christian theological context within which the natural sciences developed, “God is the creative ground and reason for the contingent but rational unitary order of the universe.”124 The “Christian doctrine of creation” affirms that “the universe is both inherently intelligible and inherently contingent, its intelligibility reflecting its contingent origins in the rationality of God.”125 The belief that the order of the world is contingent rather than necessary is ultimately grounded in the Christian conception of the freedom of God.126 Inherent in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which provided the conceptual matrix for early modern science, is the belief that God was free to choose how to create the universe. “Biblical thought held that the world’s order is contingent rather than necessary. If God created both form and matter, the world did not have to be as it is, and one has to observe it to discover the details of its order.”

Given this understanding of nature, one can never say a priori (independently of observation) how God must have acted, and thus one can never say a priori how God’s creation must behave. To obtain true knowledge about God’s creation one must proceed in an a posteriori manner—by studying the material creation and by conducting experiments.129 Thus early scientists such as “Gassendi described a world utterly contingent on divine will. This contingency expressed itself in his conviction that empirical methods are the only way to acquire knowledge about the natural world and that the matter of which all physical things are composed possesses some properties that can be known only empirically.”130 More recently, the essential affirmation of the contingency of the cosmic order “can be seen as lying behind both James Clerk Maxwell’s insistence that there exists an inner relation between the laws of the mind and the laws of nature, and Albert Einstein’s belief in a ‘pre-established harmony’ between the intelligibility of the independent world and the perceiving subject.”

The Unity of Creation as Grounded in the Unity of God
The affirmation of the unity and uniformity of the physical universe was likewise a core belief emerging from a Judeo-Christian understanding of the unity of creation as the product of a single Creator. While many ancient schools of thought “drew a sharp line between the starry heavens and the terrestrial realm,” the Christian tradition insisted on “a single physics for both heaven and earth.”

When early modern scientists, such as Isaac Newton, argued for the universality of the laws of nature they justified this principle in theistic terms. Newton says, “If there be an universal life and all space be the sensorium of a thinking being [(God)] who by immediate presence perceives all things in it, [then] the laws of motion arising from life or will may be of universal extent.”143 In the nineteenth century, the “quest for a unification of electricity, magnetism, and optics, culminating in the work of James Clerk Maxwell, was still inspired by this theological ideal.”144 

Theological presuppositions about the unity of creation also clearly motivated Michael Faraday in his scientific quest to discover the fundamental principles underlying electromagnetism and electrochemistry. As historian of science Colin Russell says, “No doubt Faraday’s belief in the unity of the forces of matter was reinforced by his faith in a Creator who made the whole universe work together in harmony.”145 The influence of this theological affirmation also played a vital role in the development of cosmological theory in the 20th century. According to Brooke, “the inculcation of a Jewish monotheism early in life had a lasting effect in the way Einstein was driven, as many physicists still are, to seek a theory that would unify the fundamental physical forces.

Many of the values and presuppositions that the practice science is founded upon come either directly or indirectly from the specific theological context of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, it would seem that the Judeo-Christian understanding of a real and unified cosmic physics with an intelligible, orderly, and rational structure that could and should be discovered was a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the rise of science.1
For the present, the vast majority of science is produced under the guiding light of theistically derived philosophical presuppositions. 

As Davies says, “Science began as an outgrowth of theology, and all scientists, whether atheists or theists accept an essentially theological worldview.”163 Whether or not there can be a different science, however, a science with alternative— non-Judeo-Christian or atheistic—guiding assumptions, and whether or not such a science can thrive as a knowledge producing enterprise, will remain to be seen if and when individual scientists decide to give up the classical philosophical assumptions of science in exchange for a novel set of assumptions.”

There’s even more, check out the whole essay HERE

‘Reason’ in the proper sense is the recognition of Beauty.

Stephen R.L. Clark was a marvelous essay, "Going Beyond Our Worlds to find the World: What "Reason" is Really For,"below are some excepts followed by a few thoughts :

"Theoria offers us something more than notions: we may, or at least we hope we may, encounter a real presence, Nous, which contains whatever can be understood as rationally required. That noetic realm is at once the explanation of phenomena and of our being equipped to grasp their meaning.

"Nous is our king. But we too are kings when we are in accord with it; we can be in accord with it in two ways, either by having something like its writing written in us like laws, or by being as if filled with it and able to see it and be aware of it as present."

 - Plotinus

Things as they are and as they seem to us to be are different. This is at once so obviously the case and so difficult to remember or to act upon as to constitute a puzzle. Platonists especially (and very oddly) are routinely mocked for dividing the world into two (or more), a merely material and an ideal world. But the division is at once more detailed and more certainly correct than is supposed. First (and most obviously) the images presented to me (of wife, daughter, cat) are not the full realities of those same entities. The images come and go, but the entities themselves are always present to themselves. Nor do I see (hear, smell, touch) everything that is true about them. Indeed I do not even sense all that is true of me. Whatever it is that ‘reason’ shows me I am it is not exactly what I ordinarily sense or feel is so.

We never sense more than a segment even of what is in the abstract ‘sensible’ – and far more, we are assured by ‘reason’, is going on in the world than we could ever sense. Visible light – once we have identified light and electro-magnetic radiation – is only a tiny segment of all such radiation, even of such radiation as makes visible sense to other creatures (bees or birds). We hear and smell far less than dogs, even if we also claim to know much more than they do. So the phenomenal worlds that each of us inhabit, and partly share with others of our species or some broader taxon, is no more than an echo or reflection of the fully imagined world we equate with ‘the material’. Our ordinary lives, as Aurelius insisted, are ‘a dream and a delusion’.

One step in the Platonic and Pythagorean argument is actually now commoner amongst cosmologists than ever in the past. Nowadays we ‘understand’ the material universe as the expression of mathematical relationships: we can expect the world to be homogeneous because it is everywhere, as it were, a hall of mirrors, reflecting the True World of numbers. What is lacking in the modern cosmologists’ thesis is any clear account of what those ‘numbers’ are, and how the merely mathematical and formal system can issue in material and phenomenal reality.

"What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?"

 - Stephen Hawking

Well, on the ancient view, perhaps that is exactly what theoria does! But we should not mistake theoria for a theory.

Merely abstract formulae, ‘laws of nature’, are only descriptions, not explanations. And neither are ‘material bodies’ as ordinarily conceived adequate explanations of the worlds that we experience. How can a merely ‘material’ world (hypothesised, exactly, as lacking all merely subjective properties) possibly explain the emergence of those properties, in conscious life? Our predecessors were wiser in positing the One, the necessarily unknowable origin of all that is, present in its entirety at every point and eliciting – from mere possibility – the manifold forms of beauty. It is from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth spring.

In one way this is to acknowledge that there are many worlds: in another it is rather to insist that there is one world only, multiply realized and mirrored in our sense and imagination: ‘a thing all faces, shining with living faces’. What the tradition asks of us is to realize the presence of that one world – and to pass in thought beyond it to the One that is its origin. ‘Reason’ is the route we take to it, but its recognition transcends all reasoning.

"Intellect … has one power for thinking, by which it looks at the things in itself, and one by which it looks at what transcends it by a direct awareness and reception, by which also before it saw only, and by seeing acquired intellect and is one. And that first one is the contemplation of Intellect in its right mind, and the other is Intellect in love, when it goes out of its mind ‘drunk with the nectar’; then it falls in love, simplified into happiness (haplotheis eis eupatheian) by having its fill, and it is better for it to be drunk with a drunkenness like this than to be more respectably sober."

 - Plotinus

Like ‘the wise men of old’, as Plotinus tells us, we create these images in the hope that the gods will infuse them with their life, that we will be awakened to a real and lucid assent to marvels. ‘The wise men of old … made temples and statues in the wish that the gods should be present to them’.

All other things, perhaps, are more in touch with Nous than we are, precisely because we are talking all the time, and so obscure the vision. Why, after all, is it a sign of our superiority (as so many human traditions say) that we can get things wrong? Knowing good and evil, in the story, was actually a mistake! The serpent’s suggestion was that we would be ‘as gods’ if we could discriminate between ‘the good’ and ‘the evil’. The alternative answer is that we should prefer to see all things as good, or at least to refrain from judgment. According to Muslim tradition, ‘One day Jesus was walking with his followers, and they passed by the carcass of a dog. The followers said, “How this dog stinks!” But Jesus said, “How white are its teeth.”’. ‘To the pure all things are pure’ – which does not, of course, deny the possibility of corruption: on the contrary, for those who are ‘defiled and unbelieving’ everything is ‘impure’. 

‘Reason’ in the proper sense is the recognition of Beauty. If once we can see ‘as the All’ we will ‘stop marking [ourselves] off from all being and will come to the All without going out anywhere’. - Plotinus

Clark's essay reminded me of this by David Hart :

"As opposed to the positivistic view of truth so prevalent today, the more ancient Platonist model of truth is one of disclosure: the radiance by which the object of reflection really shows itself–gives itself–to the subjective intention.

“Love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that in-tends the world as beauty and can so receive it ..

…this much we must admit: anyone suffering a profound grief, in which love's joy has been transformed into sorrow, knows how utterly oppressive and imprisoning seems the brute immensity of the world, its unforgiving impersonality, its callous grandeur and vapidity, its hideous persistence . . .. "

This, I think, is because, as both the ancients and mystics of today tell us, it is not from metaphysics that one is "inspired" to see the meaning of nature, perception must be morally conditioned -the senses rendered rational to mirror the rationality of the world, the Platonic axiom that “Only like can know, and be known by, like.”

There is still this strain even in Christian thought, in the Orthodox East. Two fundamental forms of the education of the senses: liturgical and ascetical. Each provides the essential context for the other.

The cumulative effect of this process is that the senses are “rendered rational,” and the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, is more attentive to actual reality, now able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.

Nietzsche : terrified of others, his own humanity, and life

For all his brilliant insights, both philosophical and psychological, Nietzsche was a failure as a man,  on his own terms, he failed to appreciate the full horror of human suffering.

For although he envisions redemption as being achieved by some almost super-human act of heroic affirmation, ‘Yes saying’ to life in all its horrific fulness, the truth, according to Giles Fraser, is that Nietzsche’s conception of horror, of suffering and indeed of the nihil itself are the imaginings of the comfortably off bourgeoisie. ‘An armchair philosopher of human riskiness’ is what Martha Nussbaum has called him,

The following excerpts are taken mostly from Fraser’s Pious Nietzsche, noting Nietzsche's extreme individualism, he writes,

“Indeed, isn't his `kind of denial of an existence shared with others' linked to `the murderous lengths to which' Nietzsche will go in order to repress the claim the other has upon him? Could it be that Nietzsche's unwillingness to enter into the suffering of another, that is, his objection to the empathic projection involved with pity, represents an unwillingness not simply to see, but to be seen? Karl Barth seems to be tracking Nietzsche down in precisely this way when he writes:

"And the true danger of Christianity . . . on account of which he had to attack it with unprecedented resolution and passion . . . was that Christianity - what he called Christian morality - confronts the real man, the superman . . . with a form of man which necessarily questions and disturbs and destroys and kills him to the very root. That is to say, it confronts him with the figure of the suffering man. It demands that he should see this man, that he should accept his presence, that he should not be man without him but man with him, that he must drink with him at the same source. Christianity places before the superman the Crucified, Jesus, as the Neighbour, ignoble and despised in the eyes of the world (of the world of Zarathustra, the true world of men), the hungry and thirsty and sick and captive, a whole ocean of human meanness and painfulness. Nor does it merely place the Crucified and his host before his eyes. It does not merely will that he see Him and them. It wills that he should recognise in them his neighbours and himself."

For Barth, what Nietzsche feared in the other was a reflection of his own suffering humanity. Nietzsche preferred fantasies of (super-human) strength and self-sufficiency to the recognition of human-all-too-human need and fragility. Throughout Zarathustra, Nietzsche's hero is haunted by the crippled dwarf, the little man, the small man. In one of the great emotional climaxes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as Zarathustra comes to feel the full force of eternal recurrence, that is, as he is faced with the reality of what he can and cannot affirm about himself, it is the weight of the dwarf (note especially that Nietzsche speaks of the eternal recurrence as `the greatest weight') that restricts his full self-affirmation. In the climax of the passage Zarathustra turns on the dwarf: `Dwarf! You! Or I!'

Stanley Rosen interprets this exclamation in this way: `The immediate sense of the image is as follows. Zarathustra can rise no higher until he overcomes the pity for humanity that still pulls him back to the earth below.' In this way Nietzsche's rejection of pity (in so far as Nietzsche and Zarathustra are of a common mind at this point) represents a rejection of, a refusal to acknowledge, any sense of identity between himself and the crippled dwarf figure, suffering humanity. Better to murder the dwarf, to oust him, to sacrifice him even, than to have him make me face my own dwarfness - thus spoke Zarathustra. In rejecting suffering humanity, in casting people as the herd, Nietzsche is seeking to set himself free from the earth below. This begins Nietzsche's disloyalty to the earth; a 'murderous' disloyalty which, for all Nietzsche's emphasis on honesty, is motivated by an unwillingness fully to face the pains and disappointments of his own humanity.

Nussbaum, for instance, accuses Nietzsche of having a specifically bourgeois conception of pain (a suggestion that would have been deeply threatening for Nietzsche):

We might say, simplifying things a bit, that there are two sorts of vulnerability: what we might call bourgeois vulnerability – for example, the pains of solitude, loneliness, bad reputation, some ill health, pains that are painful enough but still compatible with thinking and doing philosophy – and what we might call basic vulnerability, which is the deprivation of resources so central to human functioning that thought and character are themselves impaired and not developed. Nietzsche focuses on the first sort of vulnerability, holds that it is not so bad; it may even be good for the philosopher. The second sort, I claim, he merely neglects.

Nussbaum argues that, for all Nietzsche’s posturing about the needs and importance of the body and the physical, he fails to notice the obvious; basic bodily needs, and the pains associated with such needs not being met.

Does Nietzsche have to say about hunger? about being cold? about homeless- ness? about earning a living or bringing up a family? ‘Who provides basic welfare support for Zarathustra? What are the “higher men” doing all the day long? The reader does not know and the author does not seem to care.’ All of this, one might say, develops out of a ressentiment against ‘ordinary’ life. Nussbaum concludes:

"Nietzsche is really, all along, despite all his famous unhappiness, too much like the ‘famous wise men’: an armchair philosopher of human riskiness, living with no manual labour and three meals a day, without inner understanding of the ways in which contingency matters for virtue.

For the idea of the Übermensch-as- redeemer may seem plausible from within the fantasy world of Nietzsche’s adventures, but would one trust the Übermensch to shoulder the horrors of AIDS? Or is Nietzsche simply trying on costumes in the shopkeeper’s magic shop? Isn’t Zarathustra himself simply yet another costume? In just the same way one really wonders: isn’t Nietzsche’s preference for a mythos of war rather than a mythos of peace only possible for one who has not fully experienced the horrors of the battlefield, let alone those of mustard gas, carpet bombing or nuclear weapons?”

Nietzsche famously gives his vision of “salvation” in a fable about a camel, representing guilt burdened slavish everyman, who transforms into a mighty lion, saying NO to society’s moral systems and YES to his own ability to create new values, to, finally, an innocent child.

And yet here is Nietzsche premising his whole vision of salvation upon the new beginning of childhood. Nietzsche, it seems, takes the ‘born again’ metaphor more literally than was intended.Michael Tanner writes:

That phrase ‘a new beginning’ is dangerous. For it is usually Nietzsche’s distinction as a connoisseur of decadence to realise that among our options is not that of wiping the slate clean. We need to have a self to overcome, and that self will be the result of the whole Western tradition, which it will somehow manage to ‘aufheben’, a word that Nietzsche has no fondness for, because of its virtual Hegelian copyright, and which means simultaneously ‘to obliterate’, ‘to preserve’ and ‘to lift up’. Isn’t that just what the Übermensch is called upon to do, or if we drop him, what we, advancing from our present state, must do if we are to be ‘redeemed’?

Nietzsche’s recourse to the image of the child suggests a point of fundamental weakness in his overall salvation story.

One can understand the theory, but not how that theory can be implemented. It is like saying the prostitute can only be redeemed by virginity. One can see what that might mean metaphorically but not how it is possible in practice.

In this respect, Christianity operates a far more realistic sense of what it is to be redeemed. For the Christian, redemption is made possible by repent- ance and forgiveness. And while Nietzsche castigates this model as the very engine of ressentiment (asking one to view one’s past as sinful), the advantage it does have over Nietzsche’s alternative is that it is realistic enough to recognise that for salvation to be human salvation it must incorporate and face up to our past as well as our present. While Christianity requires repentance of one’s past the child image suggests its complete annihilation. And surely this represents a species of denial (a refusal to ‘face up to’) no less susceptible to the workings of ressentiment.

But if this is the case the child image breaks down completely, for surely the child represents the ultimate ‘No-saying’ to one’s past since, obviously enough, the child does not have a past. To be born again as a child is to born again as an amnesiac.

Another disturbing feature of Nietzsche’s celebration of the child is the idea that total unselfconsciousness is a sign of spiritual excellence. Nietzsche makes this point on a number of occasions. In a note recorded in The Will to Power he writes of ‘the profound instinct that only automatism makes possible perfection in life and creation’. Similarly in The Anti-Christ, when celebrating the spirituality of the Manu Law-Book, he writes:

"The higher rationale of such a procedure lies in the intention of making the way of life recognised as correct (that is demonstrated by a tremendous amount of finely-sifted experience) unconscious: so that a complete automatism of instinct is achieved – the precondition for any kind of mastery, any kind of perfection in the art of living."

Heller argues that Nietzsche’s idea that an unselfconscious automaton represents some sort of redeemed condition is forced upon him by his overly developed suspicion of all belief: ‘What haunted Nietzsche . . . was the pervasive suspicion that the self-consciousness of the intelligence had grown to such a degree as to deprive any belief of its genuineness.’Nietzsche speaks of ‘man’s ability to see through himself and history’ as something too well- developed to out-wit.And though it is precisely this talent for suspicion that has won out over Christianity, the price of that victory is the release of a corrosive spirit that no belief can possibly survive. Nietzsche’s capacity to knock down has thus exceeded his capacity to build up and he is consequently left, as he thinks Christianity is left, celebrating nothingness. For how different is the lobotomised automaton to the anesthetised Christian?

Indeed the idea that unselfconsciousness constitutes some sort of redemption sounds a little like the logic of the drunk for whom redemption is found in a bottle. But perhaps, by developing the capacity for suspicion above all else, Nietzsche has made the search for redemption impossibly difficult, so there seems little else but to retreat into drunkenness. And such is the intelligence of the drunk that he continues to persuade himself that salvation is to be found in that which helps him forget his failure (hence Nietzsche’s frequent celebration of forgetfulness).”

Nietzsche saw life as an art, a way to be truthful, and, if so, kitsch the, is art that is a lie, it wholly distorts reality by denying the perspective of the afflicted, by denying the horror, by denying shit. Kitsch is a beautifying gloss, and as a gloss a strategy of denial. As Kundera defines it ‘kitsch is the absolute denial of shit’

This idea that the problem with kitsch is that it fails to speak the truth, that it is insufficiently honest, that it prefers, wherever possible, sentimental fantasy to painful reality.

But, says Fraser, “…it is precisely through his depiction of pain and suffering that Nietzsche is most disposed to kitsch, then Nietzsche is shown to be a most dangerous thinker; one who writes of suffering in such a way that much of the reality of suffering is actually hidden.

For in tending towards the general and the abstract philosophy becomes intrinsically disincarnate. Human suffering, on the other hand, is always the suffering of a particular person at a particular moment in time.

Of course Nietzsche is hailed as resisting the metaphysical imperative to generalise wherever possible, but this instinct is preserved in his preference for dealing in types and tropes. The characters in Zarathustra always stand for generalised approaches to the world. They are little more than sophisticated cartoons representing types of human failure or weakness. Zarathustra himself has no history, no wider context. We do not find it appropriate to ask of his child- hood or of his sexuality because Zarathustra only exists to the extent that he expresses the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s spiritual journey. In such a milieu authentic thinking about suffering becomes all but impossible. For any thinking about suffering that does not attend to its incarnation thinks only the idea of suffering, that is suffering without pain.

For Christians the success of the attempt to think through the nature of suffering is bound up with the story of a particular person at a particular moment in time. Philosophy, of course, condemned this particularity as a scandal. However, I would argue that, precisely because of this attitude, philosophy is unable to generate a genuine encounter with the necessary particularity of human pain.

For in seeking to express suffering philosophically Nietzsche takes suffer- ing away from its locatedness in particular contexts and stories, thereby rendering it kitsch. When Zarathustra ascends to his mountain top he leaves the shittiness of the world far behind.

My overall objection to Nietzsche is that he glamorises suffering. His sense that suffering has the capacity to edify the noble spirit is only possible from the perspective of one who knows not the destructive power of excremental assault. Following the holocaust, Nietzsche’s prescriptions for redemption can only be looked on as those of a more comfortable age. The holocaust re-defines nihilism in such a way that Nietzsche’s strategy for overcoming it is rendered obsolete.

Does Christianity fare any better than Nietzsche in its capacity to encounter human suffering?

It is symbolically important that Christ was born in a stable, amid the stench and mess of animal dung (though, all too often, the nativity scene is imag- ined all cleaned up – and this act of cleaning it up is precisely the begin- nings of Christian kitsch). The prima facie offensiveness of the intimate juxtaposition God/shit recaptures something of the original offensiveness of the incarnation itself, which offence, incidentally, points to Athens and not Jerusalem as the original purveyor of kitsch. Neitzche mistakes(and hellenised Zoroastrianism) with authentic Christianity, Ultimately nothing is less kitsch than the idea of the crucifixion (Kundera has also described kitsch as ‘a folding screen to curtain off death’; that is, kitsch cannot face death, still less one as horrific as crucifixion).

The power of Good Friday is that as He is crucified Jesus meets and takes upon Himself the full horror and darkness of the world. The fulcrum of Christian soteriology is the point at which God and ‘shit’ meet.

For Girard, what Nietzsche is pointing out is the way in which the instinct for vengeful reciprocity continues to assert itself when violent retribution is denied. I may respond to your striking me by turning the other cheek, but in my guts I still want to punch you back. That instinct may, of course, have all sorts of morally significant consequences, and Nietzsche is right to point them out. But even so, such consequences are surely a price worth paying for calling a halt to retributive violence. Girard puts it thus:

“Ressentiment is the interiorisation of weakened vengeance. Nietzsche suf- fers so much from it that he mistakes it for the original and primary form of vengeance. He sees ressentiment not merely as the child of Christianity, which it certainly is, but also as its father, which it certainly is not. Ressentiment flourishes in a world where real vengeance (Dionysus) has been weakened. The Bible and the Gospels have diminished the violence of vengeance and turned it to ressentiment not because they originate in the latter but because their real target is vengeance in all its forms, and they succeeded in wounding vengeance, not eliminating it. The Gospels are indirectly responsible; we alone are directly responsible. Ressentiment is the manner in which the spirit of vengeance survives the impact of Christianity and turns the Gospels to its own use.

Ressentiment is what is left of vengeance once one sets out on the road for peace. Nietzsche is at his best in seeking out and revealing the instinct for vengeance that hides behind the false Christian smile or the pathos of the victim. In times of peace and prosperity it is easy to miss the bigger picture and confuse this interiorised weakened vengeance with the real thing."

Girard continues:

“Nietzsche was less blind to the role of vengeance in human culture than most people of his time, but nevertheless there was blindness in him. He analysed ressentiment and all its works with enormous power. He did not see that the evil he was fighting was a relatively minor evil com- pared to the more violent forms of vengeance. His insight was partly blunted by the deceptive quiet of his post-Christian society. He could afford the luxury of resenting ressentiment so much that it appeared a fate worse than real vengeance. Being absent from the scene, real vengeance was never seriously apprehended. Unthinkingly, like so many thinkers of his age and ours, Nietzsche called on Dionysus, begging him to bring back real vengeance as a cure for what seemed to him the worst of all possible fates, ressentiment.”

Nietzsche and the Stoics.

A number of commentators use the following example: returning home to find his house on fire and his child inside, the Stoic sage seeks to save the child from the flames – because that is the virtuous thing to do. If, however, he is unable to save his child the Stoic sage will have no regrets. This for three reasons: ‘First, because the sage did the right thing . . . Second because death is not an evil but an “unpreferred indifferent” . . . And, third, every- thing that happens is ordered for the best by Providence.’ It is interesting to note, with Nietzsche in mind, that the ‘hardness’ of Stoicism is connected with a cosmological view which enables the sage to treat with equal affirmation whatever Providence might bring, even the death of a child. This is is the sort of state Nietzsche believes is suggested by the eternal recurrence: an affirmation of life in its totality, so-called tragedies and all. And it is no coincidence that the Stoics (arguing from the impossibility of a ‘first cause’) themselves believed that history endlessly repeated itself in identical cycles.

Giles Fraser comments,

“Here, then, is another way of breaking the cycle of violence and vengeance. What is to be made of it? Firstly, surely this: it must be the case that this sort of ‘hardness’ is some unrealistic fantasy. Can the Stoic sage really remain indifferent to the screams of his burning child? And if he does, if indeed he is prepared to affirm these screams as a necessary condition of the full affirmation of life, surely he is not to be admired. Nussbaum argues that the ‘hardness’ of the Stoics and Nietzsche is a symptom of their weakness, not of their strength. It is the ‘hardness’ of one who wishes to become, or fantasises he can become, something other than (more than? less than?) human. Deafness to the screams of the child is the deafness of one who has lost sight of humanity. Nussbaum argues:

“Finally, we arrive at what perhaps is the deepest question about the anti- pity tradition: is its ideal of strength really a picture of strength? What should we think about a human being who insists on caring deeply for nothing that he does not control . . . who cultivates the hardness of self- command as a bulwark against all the reversals that life can bring? We could say, with Nietzsche, that this is a strong person. But there is clearly another way to see things. For there is a strength of a specifically human sort in the willingness to acknowledge some truths about one’s situation: one’s mortality, one’s finitude, the limits and vulnerabilities of one’s body, one’s need for food and drink and shelter and friendship . . . There is, in short, a strength in the willingness to be porous rather than totally hard, in the willingness to be a mortal animal living in the world. The Stoic, by contrast, looks like a fearful person, a person who isdetermined to seal himself off from risk, even at the cost of the loss of love and value . . . He fails, that is, to see what the Stoicism he endorses has in common with the Christianity he criticises, what ‘hardness’ has in common with otherworldliness: both are forms of self-protection, both express a fear of this world.”

Nussbaum thereby charges the anti-pity tradition with a disloyalty to the earth; a cardinal crime in Nietzsche’s book, of course.

For all his condemnation of religious asceticism, Nietzsche continually sought out the habitat of monks; the empty wilderness or the solitude of the mountaintop. His whole energy seeks the cultivation of the individual self a cultivation that is premised upon a sense of scrupulous honesty about his own spiritual journey.

But is it, in the end, really possible to be fully honest about oneself without being honest about others and with others? What of the idea that many of us ‘become who we are’ in and through a relationship with others? What of the idea that relationships make possible (and require) a level of honesty about oneself that is not possible in isolation? If so, then Nietzsche’s self-focus, for all its inten- sity, may turn out to be a strange form of dishonesty. A dishonesty which, as Nussbaum suggests, is motivated by a fear of vulnerability, of dependency, of not being fully in control.

Stanley Cavell uses ‘skepticism’ as a way of confronting what one might call the ‘problem of the other’. And this so- called ‘problem’ is not simply, or even primarily, a philosophical concern,

According to Cavell, the problem with the skeptic’s position is that it is a displaced and misplaced expression of a fundamental and genuine human concern.

Cavell argues that what is going on in thinking such as this is a translation of the complex demands of social intercourse into the language of philosophy, thus effectively de-problematising the emotionally sensitive questions of human contact by rendering them metaphysical or philosophical. In a sense, skeptical philosophy avoids the more difficult, one might say human-all-too-human ‘problem of the other’, by making the uncertainty inherent within human contact some sort of philosophical puzzle to be solved intellectually.

Thus Cavell writes:

"In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it. Doubtless such denials are part of the motive which sustains metaphysical difficulties.

The sense of a gap that divides us from our fellow human beings is generated by a desire to avoid the vulnerabilities, the openness and consequent risk, inherent within genuine human encounter. As one commentator has put it: ‘Our turning from others – and not, say, simply being uncertain about them – points to something in us (shame, for example, or embarrassment) and not something missing in them.’ Cavell dubs this ‘avoidance’.

Michael Fisher claims that ‘In Cavell’s account, the skeptic deprives himself of our ordinary links with the world and each other and then tries – unsuccessfully – to repair those links all by himself.’

Nietzsche’s outcasting is shown to issue from a certain sort of fear.

Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo: ‘At an absurdly early age, at the age of seven, I already knew that no human word would ever reach me.”

On his desperate need for the comfort of another:

"The last philosopher I call myself, for I am the last human being. No one converses with me beside myself and my voice reaches me as the voice of one dying. With the beloved voice, with thee the last remembered breath of human happiness, let me discourse, even if it is only for another hour. Because of thee I delude myself as to my solitude and lie my way back to multiplicity and love, for my heart shies away from believing that love is dead. I cannot bear the icy shivers of loneliest solitude. It compels me to speak as though I were Two.”

Nietzsche’s answer to loneliness was to imagine himself as two persons who can then comfort each other. Nietzsche became his own imaginary friend.

Fraser continues,

“The Pietist rejection of all that stands over against the sovereign human individual, its rejection of any authority other than the authority of the human heart, made a lasting impression upon Nietzsche. And Nietzsche’s ultimate rejection of God is nothing less than a continuation of Pietist logic; either God can be sucked into, and put in the service of, the human will, or God has to be destroyed. It wasn’t so much that God had to die in order for humanity to flourish (as so many followers of Nietzsche understand him to be saying) but that God had to die in order for the individual to assume what had been hitherto divine sovereignty.

Nietzsche claimed for the individual the place traditional Christianity had ascribed to God: ‘The “ego” subdues and kills: it operates like an organic cell: it is a robber and violent. It wants to regenerate itself – pregnancy. It wants to give birth to its god and see all mankind at his feet.’

Luce Irigaray (picking up the image of birthing) puts it another way. In setting up an imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche, and accusing him of ressentiment against life and specifically a ressentiment against women (as having a ‘womb-envy’ expressed in his desire to give birth to himself), she writes:

“To overcome the impossible of your desire – that surely is your last hour’s desire. Giving birth to such and such a production, or such and such a child is a summary of your history. But to give birth to your desire itself, that is your final thought. To be incapable of doing it, that is your highest ressentiment. For either you make works that fit your desire, or you make desire itself into your work. But how will you find material to produce such a child? And going back to the source of all your children, you want to bring yourself back into the world. As a father? Or child? And isn’t being two at a time the point where you come unstuck? Because to be a father, you have to procreate, your seed has to escape and fall from you. You have to engender suns, dawns, twilights other than your own.

But in fact isn’t it your will, in the here and now, to pull everything back inside you and to be and to have only one sun? And to fasten up time, for you alone? And suspend the ascend- ing and descending movement of genealogy? And to join up in one perfect place, one perfect circle, the origin and end of all things?”

This is a stunning (though perhaps characteristically, somewhat oblique) passage. Irigaray’s point and the argument that Nietzsche seeks and fails to find self-salvation are, at base, quite the same. Nietzsche’s attempt to give birth to himself is the ultimate logical consequence of his atheistic evangelicalism; that is, of his desire to be ‘born again’ but not ‘born from above’. “

Self-exposure is resisted even if it means (and it always does) that one has to deny, or refuse to acknowledge, another. The power of the resistance to self- exposure is such that one would rather will madness or the death of loved ones than be exposed.

In rejecting suffering humanity, in casting people as the herd, Nietzsche is seeking to set himself free from the earth below. This begins Nietzsche’s disloyalty to the earth; a ‘murderous’ disloyalty which, for all Nietzsche’s emphasis on honesty, is motivated by an unwillingness fully to face the pains and disappointments of his own humanity.

Truth can be had for Nietzsche by tough-minded determination, by a rigorous exercise of suspicion. But this suspicion, when pursued as an absolute demand, forecloses upon dimensions of honesty available only to those who are prepared to accept and trust the love of another. The one who is loved is more able to face the reality of their own pain and sense of worthlessness because admitting and facing all of that no longer seems so cataclysmic.

 Only thus is the wisdom of Silenus fully defeated. Williams sums up: ‘Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.’

Overcoming Hegel's God and the myth of negation, the trinitarian solution

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.

Hegel’s analogical dialectics in which contradictory differences are meant to be sublated into the ‘absolute middle’ of the Idea vs Christian dialectical analogy in which contrary opposites are meant to participate in the mysterious ‘suspended middle’ of God.

"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).