maybe not in the evil sense but in like the gothic dark sense. less sin and death, more novalis hymns to the night.1 i posted a note with a few tentative ideas about this,

and now i’ve made a moodboard for them!

we have the words/ideas with some images (made this very morning by yours truly) and their color palates. hope this is fun to play with. let me know what you all think. thank you all for reading. and as always …

To even examine this question, we must give the cuss-word a proper definition. (B)

§02 — To keep it brief: ontotheology is the study of God as an object of cryptology. (A)

Transcendental philosophy after Kant sought to answer his problems in a new way, by integrating them within the question of being. In particular, the critical question concerning the conditions of the possibility of knowledge was filed within the broader question of the genesis of the subject-object relation. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling would attribute this genesis to a non-rational ground, prior to and neither partaking in subjectivity nor objectivity.

By reference to a non-rational ground, these coupled questions could avoid circularity, an issue that became pertinent after Fichte's postulation that the I creates the not-I. If the subject is itself the origin of the object, one is immediately bewildered by the void behind the subject's own activity. Fichte’s proposition of the self-positing of the I as a necessary act appears within discourse as a cheaply post-critical analogue of the cosmological argument: a causa sui terminating a regress of explanation.

This new originary ground would need to be distinguished from the rational, agential God of religion, however.

Not even God, as a supposed object of knowledge, can be for us the ground of reality, as Descartes supposed; for we cannot establish the reality of God until we have first found the supreme condition of any knowledge whatever.1

God would have to be subsequent to this ground, yet in some way also intrinsic to it by reason of his omnipotence, for he ought not to be subject unto any other principle.

These two pairs of questions

[Critique] ← [Subject-Object Relation]

[God] ← [Ground]

would shroud God in mystery. For just as an account of the subject-object relation would be necessary for critique, an account of the relation between God and ground would be necessary for theology too. God could no longer be understood as an immediately intelligible principle, but only through an increasingly elaborate account of his constitution. The divine essence becomes hidden behind the conditions of its own coming-to-be—a cryptographic mystery.

In Schelling’s later works, this blooms into a full theory of the Trinity’s self-occultation and self-revelation through the hypostases of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: the Father as the non-rational ground, the Son as the principle of rational existence, and the Holy Spirit as their unity and manifestation in the tripersonal agency of the Godhead. (B)

§03 — This idea that the doctrines of theology could be derived from within the critical question would face harsh criticism from Heidegger, however. He mainly moans and whines, though.

Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god.2

This trajectory continues through Jean-Luc Marion.

“If God is postulated in the context of discourse on being, he becomes an idol amongst creatures.”

More whining, nevertheless.

As I see it, their objections come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what metaphysics is. Namely, that it is archaic and dead. (A)

To Heidegger, “metaphysics is based on the unity of beings as such in the universal and that which is highest.”3 This notion, old as it is, would be trashed by him—but to philosopher Gilles Deleuze, almost precisely the opposite is true. To Deleuze, metaphysics is based on pure difference and the particular problems posed by differential elements in events.

Given Heidegger’s definition of metaphysics, if the horizon of being and the horizon of God are one and the same, then of course God is going to be a dead idol; universal unities aren’t particularly worthy of worship. As soon as metaphysics is conceived problematically, and God through these problems, however, we come to a different conclusion.

This [problematic science] involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an “event” much more than an essence.4

God becomes a properly superessential yet discrete infinite being—dynamic and adaptive, truly personal, and worthy of worship. Depending on the problem in which God is involved, he can be thought in an infinity of different ways as well, whereas for the Heideggerian ontotheologian God is merely a restriction on the sense of being. (B)

§04 — In fact, even as God is decrypted within the horizon of the question of being, he becomes a diagonalizing force which breaks outside of that very context, like a zip-bomb. The Father, as originary ground, emerges as an opaque Outsideness that itself problematizes our understanding of being. (A)

For cosmology no less than for transcendental philosophy — or even speculative theology — this ‘before’ [creation, which the Father as ground occupies] could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial) outsideness, beyond singularity.5

The intractability of the Lutheran-Schellingian understanding of the Godhead within the context of the question of being is a destabilizing pressure which may very well split the moon, at least while the Gnostic Calvinists siphon the sun. (B)

It’s worth being precise about what I mean by materialism in this context. I’m not a physicalist—I don’t think it’s a philosophically economical claim to believe that God almighty is just a physical body. I mean materialism in a very precise sense, as defined by Friedrich Engels.

Those who asserted the primacy of spirit [thought] to nature [being] … comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature [being] as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.

These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other sense.1

I believe being is primary over thought. I believe this primarily for epistemic reasons; for example, as an easy reductio ad absurdum, if thought were primary over being, we should be able to a-priori deduce everything true of being from the notion of thought. But I’m unaware of any omniscient philosophers who have been able to do this. Hegel should have been able to, at least.

Moreover, I’m anti-foundationalist; philosophers throughout history have often chosen particular determinations and fetishized them into totalizing principles of judgment—whether this is the Oedipus complex for Freud or νοῦς for St. Thomas, and so on, and this has, hitherto, led nowhere. This is only possible, however, under the premise of idealism, insofar as one form of thought is made the archetype under which being is captured and made to obey.

If being is primary over thought, though, cognition is only an island among a sea of things unknown to it, which nonetheless permeate and shape it.2 More descriptively, thinking is a dog on an island raised by an octopus on the shore. This octopus could literally be anything, however, given that the choice is not up to the dog. The octopus could be Cthulhu, even.

This is exactly the kind of mystery so coveted by the same apologists rallying against materialism. But you can only fear a God whose existence does not conform to a mental cookie-cutter concept.

My own theology is this. If God isn’t merely thought thinking itself à la Aristotle, I reckon he is more fundamentally the ocean constitutive of it—in particular, what I’m referring to is the transcendental ontology of signaling.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze says this:

The logical relation of causality is inseparable from a physical process of signaling, without which it would not be translated into action. By 'signal' we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by 'sign' we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates. (p. 40)3

Given my non-foundationalism, the idea that being is composed of various systems and orders makes sense and doesn’t fall into the homogenizing fetishism of idealism.

Moreover, the claim that the members of these systems can be thought of as signs in communication forming total signaling processes makes intuitive sense and doesn’t fall into the usual mysterianism of materialism either—like how, in object-oriented ontology, for example, every object has a withdrawn reality which we simply cannot know. Signs communicate information; this is literally what they do, not in the sense that they simply representationally present thought or ideas—binary code, for instance, communicates information, but you cannot read it to learn how to paint—but rather in the sense that they are simply signs in operation. So the former sort of crude mysterianism is well distinguished from the properly critical concept that there is an excess of being beyond representation that is diagrammatically being figured out by thought in an effort to unify thought and being in science.

In my view, God is the immanent cogence of these signaling processes: the semiotic-Absolute.4 This is only one kind of materialist theism, of course, and I have only described it in order to illustrate what I mean by materialist theism on a deeper level. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this short apologia for materialist theism, though, and as always…

The guitar and vocals sound like they’re ten feet away from me, as though naturalness itself corresponds with remoteness.

I know some of you might be thinking, “but live music inherently involves physical distance between listener and performer.” The point, though, is that the recording isn’t of a live performance. Artificial nature doesn’t exist; you can’t produce nature. So the silly habit of trying to suggest it in a studio recording by creating distance is less a perfection than a pathology.

I think that the general idea comes back to how, when Descartes moved past his universal doubt by appealing to his mind’s existence, as opposed to the equally obvious nature which gave birth to it, he set a precedent that the ego comes before nature, that nature is distant from it, and that nature requires justification by it in order to be validated. This idea is not only senseless, however, but also historically strange—no one had believed it before him. Look at this excerpt from Dōgen for example:

Mountains and waters right now actualize the ancient buddha expression. Each, abiding in its condition, unfolds its full potential. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the Empty Eon, they are alive at this moment. Because they have been the self since before form arose, they are emancipation actualized.
—Dōgen, Mountains and Waters Sutra

Buddhist master Dōgen makes a strange equivalence here. He begins by talking about mountains and waters, and then at the end suddenly refers to them as the self. Moreover, he attributes a life to them, activity—they unfold together. This isn’t just crude non-dual sentiment, but the truth that the self dwells not only within nature, but with nature as nature, in a common movement. The Greeks thought the same way. Ancient historian Hellanicus says in a fragment, “Athenians, Arcadians, Aeginetans, and Thebans are autochthones.”1 Autochthones means from the earth itself, stemming from auto, meaning self, and chthōn, meaning earth. One might think this is the same as man’s creation in the book of Genesis, where God makes Adam from the dust, but there’s a difference. In the book of Genesis, God has to breathe life, spirit, into Adam in order for him to become a living creature. Meanwhile, the Greeks are just earth. There’s no spirit to separate them and the nature from which they sprung—no part more divine than the other, nor a part more depraved than the other, just one nature to which everything belongs.

While the examples here of nature—earth, mountains, waters—are physical, going back a bit, even thought and art belong to this one nature. In his aphorisms on nature, Goethe says

She has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, but as Nature. She broods over an all-comprehending idea, which no searching can find out. Mankind dwell in her and she in them.

From my own perspective as a Christian thinking through these issues, I think this.

Nature thinks, though not in the ideas of the heavens, but in the rumble of the ground, which, in man who unites both, becomes the wordless groans of the Spirit (Romans 8:26). God leads us into the green pastures and walks with us besides the still waters. The rationality we use to contemplate the world isn't something separate from nature, but a partition of it that has its sight on the invisible. And even to exercise it we must descend it back into the depth from which it came. In the manner that Dōgen describes we must steer the mind to move with the common life of all nature. In fact, perhaps the issue with modernity is that it has mistaken this depth for distance. But nature isn’t merely a chasm with a void to divide itself from mankind, but a horizon waiting to be explored—which is why the great men of times past ventured out into the open sea and unknown lands.

Nature is not what we must long for, but the living process we have always been a part of.2

Anyway, that's all for today. Thank you all for reading, and…

Now, Bear has a crush on Nikki—to such an extent that he visits an occult shop and purchases a woo-woo wish stick for her (charming present, right?). According to the instructions, whoever breaks the stick after stating their desire will have that desire granted. He’s ultimately unable to give the gift to Nikki due to circumstances I will not elaborate on, since I am not Wikipedia. So, naturally, he decides to use it himself and wishes that Nikki will love him more than anyone else in the whole wide world. It works! with the caveat that it is actually his cat who loves him—his cat who died at the beginning of the film (whom I failed to mention in order to make this presentation more interesting). The cat has possessed Nikki. This cat, due either to her lack of understanding of human ethics or simply that she is a cat, will do anything for his love, and this later includes killing Sarah, one of Bear’s other lady friends, who has a crush on him.

Now, onto some serious psychoanalytical stuff. Bear makes this wish regarding Nikki not out of necessity—not as a dying last wish—but because he is, fundamentally, an incel who cannot summon the courage to actually confess his feelings to her. This brought to mind Deleuze’s analysis of masochism, as all things ruined by Continental Theory eventually do. For those of you who are unfamiliar with masochism, I will briefly defer to Wikipedia:

This is obviously very basic, and not really present in Bear’s character, since he is, throughout the film, visibly and pathetically scared of literally anything cat-Nikki does. But Deleuze’s analysis of this phenomenon goes much deeper, and gets to the heart of what I think Bear’s character is about.

Masoch's three women correspond to three fundamental mother images: the first is the primitive, uterine, hetaeric mother, mother of the cloaca and the swamps; the second is the Oedipal mother, the image of the beloved, who becomes linked with the sadistic father as victim or as accomplice; and in between these two, the oral mother, mother of the steppe, who nurtures and brings death. We call her intermediate, but she may also come last of all, for she is both oral and silent and therefore has the last word.
—Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, p. 552

Deleuze says masochism is fundamentally a quest for the nurturing of the Oral mother through the hetaeric and Oedipal mothers. Essentially, you pursue nurturing through punitive parental structures. Now, Lacan says we are always asking the Other what they desire;3 this is fundamentally the problem for Bear, since he is neurotically unsure whether he will be what the Other (Nikki) desires. Whereas the traditional solution would be to grow some balls and tell her how he feels, however, Bear instead uses the wish stick to project Masoch’s maternal fantasy onto Nikki. With this in mind, we can briefly play a game of process of elimination to figure out which mother he ends up with.

1. Not the hetaeric (she’s exclusive to bear) :[

2. Not the Oedipal (she doesn’t punish bear) :[

3. But Nikki both kills people (brings death, like Deleuze said) and nurtures Bear… so perhaps it’s the… the Oral mother! :]

Bear is the masochist par excellence given this definition—and, like most exercises of real masochism, he’s the only one who benefits. On occasion throughout the movie, the real Nikki (not the cat) resurfaces. For example, once before they are about to sleep together, she exclaims “no!” before immediately returning to begging him to sleep with her. Even more striking, while cat-Nikki is asleep and Bear is out with Sarah, the real Nikki whispers to Bear, “kill me please.” After she says this, in a way that really reveals his masochistic maternal fantasy, Bear asks her if it would really be so bad to be in a relationship with him. She says she doesn’t like him romantically, and he, in an act of utter cruelty, leaves and dismisses her.

On another note, the fact that a cat is smart enough to both maintain a relationship and also kill other humans with human weapons (she later uses a gun to kill Bear’s male best friend) says something interesting about non-human intelligence. It is absolutely indifferent to our intentions, to the narratives we tell ourselves (like how Bear supposedly just wanted a healthy relationship), and to our ability to “control” it. Bear continually asks Nikki to stop being weird throughout the movie; she says yes, and then does what she does, because her mind simply works differently, and there is nothing he can do about it. Whether we are talking about a cat, artificial intelligence, or occult spirits, I think this story offers a good demonstration of why we shouldn’t assume intelligence necessarily wants the same “goods” in all cases. Non-human intelligence wants what it wants, and will pour itself into its actions just as we do—whether in a sweet way, or in an insane way like Nikki in her relationship with Bear.

Anyway, that’s all I have for today. Thank you guys for reading, and…

1

Water, in mystical traditions, is generally associated with purification, but also God’s miraculous care and nourishment. In philosophy the former makes more sense: being baptized in the waters of logic. But what of nourishing? What is nourishing about dissociating from one’s thoughts? In proposition 4.002 of the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein says “Language disguises thought.” Maybe there’s water because my thoughts need to go skinny dipping—so my imaginations could strip down to the nudity of pure reason. What even is letting a thought go, however? Maybe it’s archival. Letting it go to find it later. When W talks about propositional sense, he speaks of the conditions under which a proposition could be falsified or verified. But, if a thought gets nude with time, maybe its sense is how well it ages. The nourishment comes from its standing the test of time; the purification and nourishment of water are inseparable—we are nourished by thoughts that are beautiful beyond the heat of the moment in which we are inspired. Who knows if the gunk in my teeth might later become a beautiful homunculus?

Dillon claims that indexed descriptions are relative to orders of principles, but also that this is their only relevance. This raises an issue for monotheism, because under classical theism God is identical with his attributes and acts, but should also have content as a notion independently of these acts; these two propositions ultimately conflict, leading to the conclusion that “if what is divine just is its attributes and causal acts, then none of these have an unindexed descriptive content.”1 I think this applies. He’s absolutely right, except within the German Idealist tradition of triadology.2

The German Idealist scheme generally goes like this: the Father is being-in-self, the Son is being-for-itself, and the Spirit is their unity in a threefold chain of self-worship; using more liturgical language, the Father is a prayerful divine No, the Son is the opposed divine Yes, and the Spirit is their Amen. This relational mode of theogony, where each person gives space and content to the other, is not only true of the divine essence but also of the divine energies. If the Father is being-in-self, then the only way he could disclose himself is through the procession of the Son therefrom—being-for-itself, dislocated, public, and yet equally so oriented back toward that solitudinous ground from which he comes. This could be explicated through the Saussurean idea of semiosis as negativity (the sign defines itself by negating other signifiers) and positivity (the sign’s own affirmative designation); the Spirit follows here as the totality of semiosis, the unity between the Father and the Son that makes the sign a sign, rather than disconnected components of an algorithm. In this model, God as the simple absolute both has content as a notion in himself and is inseparable from his own manifestation in his actions and self-disclosure.

One might invoke the objection that this indexes God within all of these predicates: signs, beings, and in- and for-itselfs, and so on. The ontological distinction from Heidegger complicates this, though. Heidegger distinguishes between the ontological and the ontic.

Something is “ontological” if it concerns the concepts and structures of being—for instance, “essence”, “existence”, the different kinds of being, or the disclosure of being. Something is “ontic”, by contrast, if it concerns a particular instantiation or concretion of these ontological structures.3

God is not a sign among signs, but the objective, order-invariant pattern of any such semiosis. No such indexicality exists without the Trinity.

Dillon speaks of indexing as a relativity to a causal series. To be indexed presupposes a procession from higher principles by which such indexicality is given its unity. In sum: no indexing without Hyparxis, Proodos, and Epistrophe. But before the Platonic triad of motions comes a higher triad, the No, Yes, and Amen of the Trinity. For the former presupposes a One that undergoes these motions, whereas the No-Yes-Amen is the process that constitutes any such One—the structure which constitutes any sign.

The Holy Trinity is totally unindexed while having real conceptual content, and remaining monotheistic, contra the supposition that a polytheistic multitude of divine individuals is necessary for such conceptual content.

This idea is what I’d call a heresy of the Son. The idea that the content of reality must be attributed to a side and that this side is the side of the gods sounds like it preserves the priority of the personal over the abstract, but in actuality it overmines the correlation between intelligibility and divinity. It reduces the divine to what, in the Trinity, would only be one member thereof. It entirely bypasses the paternal ground that makes such positive expressability possible in the first place. Rather than playing the dualism game and presupposing intelligibility on one side, we must think reality as a unified whole that gives birth to the relation of disclosure and the terms of relations of disclosure. This requires a pre-intelligible libidinal ground which explains the purpose of intellective unity in the first place as a form of love, and this is the Father’s being-in-self—his hidden mystery which is revealed in the positivity of the Son. Perhaps this is an issue with Platonism’s subordination of eros.

Without this ground, you are left with a brute philosophical explanation which is merely systemically coherent rather than a true first-principles system. Bear in mind, I am entirely fine with other gods, but as I understand, they do not precede the Trinity. I think my theology accommodates them well precisely by not forcing them into any ontological box; they can come as they are, with whatever attributes they please, but I think the Trinity is what makes this possible.

In relation to this henotheism, I recently came across an interesting qabbalistic hit.

Praise be to Akenhaten = 360 AQ

I am trying to express myself, and I am an irrepresentable mess—a puddle of chunder. What this means for my task is that it has no goal: I write without sake, but with everything at stake. For writing of this kind stands above the two divisions set out before—it does by representing, and it represents only in its doing. I am what comes out of my writing process, and this is a terrifying thing. What if I do not like my essay—my book? What if I find it odd, strange? What if I find a bit too much joy in it, and, compared to my normal state of being, my literature is so enrapt by the glories of the vast world and of language that I must attribute it to something other than myself: chance, or God.

Maurice Blanchot says that writing is ‘an eternal starting over.’2 I often find myself trapped within the sensation of starting over—mid-paragraph, even mid-sentence—in order to clarify the idea I am trying to express, or the Stimmung of the self from which I write. But if I write in order to express myself, do I not reinvent myself each time I begin anew? Are there not a thousand tiny little selves hidden within an essay. Every little afterthought and every ambition in each attempt to express alike?

Are the rights to my work distributed across these thousand little ‘I’s? Or do they belong to my public image, the one that sticks with me like glue no matter how different it comes after being sifted through my changing ways? What would it mean to own the joyful essay?

Disappear into the act completely. Perhaps it would be more pleasurable to become completely an oracle—devoid of ego, a vessel for words and words alone. I feel that my writing would become awkward, though; too incorporeal, without meat.

In her essay writing as stigmata, imagines writing as an open wound. At least this is more corporeal, but still, I disagree. I think the wound is not writing, but publishing—because it closes off the bloodflow of writing. At the moment of publication, the life of writing, the life of the self, ceases. A book is a dead thing. During the writing process, the self is still being created in a lively fashion, in spurts of inspiration and growth across impulses, ideas, and passions. Upon publication it is over; in the words of Christ, “It is finished!”

I hesitate to say the self preexists the work, but I also feel that when we write, we are always trying to catch ourselves in a crime. Literature is for the uncertain—those who believe they have something to learn or to discover. When one writes in order to express themself, therefore, they are uncertain of themself. We are always trying to catch ourselves guilty of some flaw, to edit it over so that we may be perfect—so that we may be sinless in the eyes of the public, and that in publication our image may be frozen in that blameless frame.

The master of joy, Friedrich Nietzsche, writes: “I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down, lest it fly away again.”3 He writes by seizing inspiration. He writes spontaneously. In order to do this, though, we must forgive ourselves; we must suspend our disbelief—we must believe we are blameless, and not only that, but that in our purity we are useful for something.

It may be that ownership is something which results only from the intimacy breaking between the author and their work. The essay must, no doubt, be intimate to the reader—this is the essence of self-expression: that the writer present themselves to the reader, encroaching upon the space of their mind through the force of their style. But at a certain point, the author themselves must become estranged from their work.

When a book dies, we should truly respect its departure; we should not treat its joy as something still living with us that we may envy, but something we look back upon. And therefore, to own the joyful essay involves most principally a recognition that when the dusty leather book softly claps shut, we can no longer, ever write it again. The dedication to turn our astonishment at our work into a eulogy.

Xenolutheranism exists as a convergence, between popular religion and the weird forces propelling it through history. It is the binding of man and God—religare—before any dogmatic explanation of how that binding takes place has been formed.

Whereas dogmatism centers itself upon understanding,1 Xenolutheranism replaces centering with traversing. As opposed to members of a church body, there exist nodes of communication. Rather than common discourse enacted in a conciliar or synodal environment, Xenolutheranism deals with large-scale problematics by way of various channels of cultural agency. Beliefs are established epidemically, not ecumenically. Instead of “making sense of things,” Xenolutheranism obeys the emergent order of the world.2

This aligns religious expression with technological advancement, as they have been since the 1500s.3 The Protestant Reformation was not primarily a religious event that took advantage of the Gutenberg printing press to proliferate itself, but rather an act of openness to bear the investment4 of the printing press’s redistribution of power to men previously deemed criminals, who had to circumvent censors and go through illicit channels to gain access to publication,5 expressed in religious form through the empowerment of the layman and divergence from the Church, which was responsible for the imprisonment of these men before.

Instead of an intentional course correction, it was more so an already-building pressure given an outlet to explode.

Xenolutheranism views religion as something exemplified by the Reformation, understood in this way—as a selection process driven by technological development. Religion and reformation are not active practices, but naturally emergent modes of organization intrinsically coordinated to maximize survivable solubility under the weight of the technological Outside.

Whenever strength is only useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sublime: for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us, and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception.
—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas Of the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 6

To lend oneself to the heavy burden of the Outside is to restore the sublimity of religion. Edmund Burke conceives of the the sublime as an “incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description,” (p. 4) resistant to all representation. He conceives it as a great power.

Of course, there is a certain paradoxicality inherent in such a speculative conception, yet construed apophatically as an imperative to openness, it becomes a central postulate of Xenolutheranism. Openness is openness to life, death, horror, outside and intensity.6 It traverses every plane possible for it. This openness, capable of such a great deal, enables the encounter with the great deal itself—the act of religare, the binding of man and God. Openness gives way to the parafinite: the sublime, religious encounter.

Xenolutheranism, through this understanding, contests Anti-Oedipus’s notion that religion is bound with the Oedipus complex.7 If religion is at its core an investment by the Other, and the Other is the parafinitude of jouissance,8 then religion is not a despotic body imposing the phallic order, but rather the body of feminine jouissance itself. Because of the intrinsic coordination of religion with the Outsideness that spawns it, religion is in fact a foreclosure of the Oedipus, or a transcendence of it, depending on one’s perspective.

The essence of religion as conceived by Xenolutheranism could therefore be summarized as such: the body of feminine jouissance that communicates the sublime, or the Outside, across its nodes.

Although Luther himself may be the least important thing to Xenolutheranism, his Augustinian heritage still has some utility for how Xenolutheranism understands technology and religion. Augustinian confessio, understood abstractly, is a movement of openness. It clarifies what openness looks like in religious terms. The confessio speaks to God, but not about God.9 It foregrounds the religious act with a devoted agnosticism that gives way to the voice of God as it appears, foreign to the subject(s). Through this devotional language, providential trust in technological escalation as an agent of religious reform is justified. It is the scale-transition from singular subject to subjects which Xenolutheranism enacts, making confessio a sociological phenomenon as opposed to a devotional practice.

If the internet is the new printing press—which gives access not only to the civilized criminal but also to the strangest armchair theologians—then the future may hold an even stranger reformation than the third and fourth great awakenings. Of course, nothing is foreign to Xenolutheranism, which welcomes technological transformation. All reformations are productive reformations which will be selected out, or for, in the end—which in speaking to God also speak for God, as the voice through which his plan is articulated, and in some special cases are exalted by providence. Xenolutheranism remains neutral and nonpartisan, though; for it is the binding of man and God—religare—prior to any dogmatic explanation of how that binding takes place being formed. Nevertheless, it [the reformation of the future] will be sublime.

they offer a strong analogy for the Incarnation through this feature. the letter aspect conveys not only the finitude of Christ’s human nature but also its integration within the gospel narrative—just as a letter is morphologically fulfilled by being integrated into a word. the pictorial aspect, likewise, conveys not only the divinity’s self-completeness in the self-completeness of the pictorial representation but also the Son’s imaging of the Father.

taking this a bit further: those moments of tension between Christ’s two natures could be attributed to the two significatory modes of the different natures.

the two natures, with their different modes of signification, tell different stories, so to speak. while Christ’s human nature learns, suffers, and prays to be spared—as morphologically incorporated within the Father’s word of providential decree—Christ’s divine nature eternally signifies the wholeness of divine glory.1

“He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things”
—st. irenaeus of lyons, adversus haereses, bk. 5, ch. 21

perhaps this makes the sacraments an example of the ransom note effect.

the ransom note effect is the stereotype of ransom notes being made from cut-out letters and words to avoid recognizable handwriting. think of the riddler from batman.

the sacraments could be conceived through this, so that Christ, as a pictogram, is cut out and placed into our eucharistic celebration—and into our hearts. a literal reiteration of the icon that Christ is.

importantly, jacques deridda says this about signifiers:

this unity of the signifying form only constitutes itself by virtue of its iterability (signature event context, p. 10)

if a word is constituted by its iterability, then the situation of Jesus is very interesting, for he is both a word which is iterable in the sacraments, but one which is totally non-generic, such that what is repeated is a singular, totally unique event,

because, Christ is not a word like chair or car, but a unique pictogram—a living sign of both his human and divine nature.

| non-representational knowledge (noeti-morphic assimilation)

> representational knowledge

> non-representational knowledge (chaosmosis) |

and it feels like a step backwards.

the idea that knowledge constitutes a mere slice in the pie of desiring-machinic production divorces alethic content from higher ethical meaning; in a post-modern world, there is no longer any ‘life-changing knowledge’

i don’t think that a return to classical hylomorphism is the solution, though. traditionalists tend to fascistically cross off the existence of the Outside from consideration.

despite their critique that modernity legislates over God, they do the same.

interestingly simone weil sort of takes the libidinal epistemology of postmodernity and reinjects it with ethical significance.

“love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good”1

the question arises, of how one might discern the good in light of the epistemological nature of our original problem, however; how does one know the good if they have not determined what it means to know nor how they know?

simone says, in a fascinatingly anti-manichean voice (foreign to both the amoralism of post-nietzschean philosophy and the manicheanism of baudrillard) that the good is known as that which the world always gives way to ultimately.

“we should be indifferent to good and evil but, when we are indifferent, that is to say when we project the light of our attention equally on both, the good gains the day … there lies the essential grace. and it is the definition, the criterion of good.”2

to discern the falsehood which is, from the truth which is always-coming-to-be, requires a virtuous attention to the real, however; we must cooperate with reality’s maturation rather than tell it how to perform.

this entails a non-representational epistemology, of process and becoming—but one of light at the end of the [epistemic/scientific] tunnel, as opposed to an endless, laborious construction of the tunnel.

perhaps this poses a new answer to the nietzschean problem; simone weil says “purity is the power to contemplate defilement.”3 in this aphorism we find a philosophy beyond good and evil which isn’t merely indifferent to the two.

in fact, it acknowledges the constitutive role of both in our own very being, but suggests in the voice of st. julian of norwich that

“all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”4

The state of modernity is an epistemic retroversion into the ego as the locus of knowledge; back in the day, people used to get caught up in Dionysiac mania if they wanted to know something—hell, Hegel still does

—but now people self-reflect. They go about it in a lot of different ways, too. Descartes doubted every thought and perception up until thoughts and perceptions about himself; Berkeley simply thought so highly of himself that he reckoned nothing exists unless perceived by a self just like his own; Lyotard reflected so hard he forgot how important meta-narratives about the world outside of himself are. This modern condition isn’t without precedent, nor is it useless, or anything else neocon objectivists would like to say about it; on the contrary, it’s an epistemic prudence. Without a cogito to hold onto, an obsessional neurotic is never gonna get an answer from the Other. There are obvious problems with being the obsessional here, though; modernity leglocks an obsessional into symbolic child support—pay out monthly respect to language, to material conditions, to power. I surmise, against the neocons, that what needs to take place is not a rejection of modernity, but a proper postmodernity which moves through and past modernity. And I don’t think the so-called postmodernists actually do this, as with Lyotard earlier. In fact, most of the postmodernists are actually hypermodernists—they don't genuinely work through the ego into the great outdoors of the Real; at best they inflate the ego and its symbolic (Baudrillard), or at worst they pay child support (Foucault, Wittgenstein, etc.).

One theologian presently trying to accomplish this true postmodernity is Ryan Haecker, through an updated reading of Origen of Alexandria's speculative theology. One of his central strategies for this involves the doctrine of apokatastasis—also known as universalism—which he utilizes in order to establish the “absolute hyperpersonality of all persons.”1 He does this by grounding the reality of the person in a greater cosmo-cybernetic process, through which individual egos become centripetal cogs within an apokatastasis-machine.

The task of Jesuit cybernetics will be to recollect the hidden thread of a higher universal, for which the basic ideas of cybernetics can be reconstructed to proceed towards their final eschatological hope.
—Ryan Haecker, Jesuit Cybernetics: The Hyperpersonality of Cosmotechnics, §3

This centripetal movement culminates in convergence at the Omega Point, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s term—adopted by Haecker—for an eschatological singularity in which all things are transcendentally integrated “into a singular and self-reflective unity.”2 Since the Logos is posited as the transcendent principle of this apokatastatic integration, the implication would be that this would bring forth a new, transcendentally integrated form of personality, called hyperpersonality.

In the Omega point, hyperpersonality designates the hyperbolic personality, in which all persons become more fully persons by exceeding so as to enter into an order the impersonal realm of cybernetic calculation.
—Ryan Haecker, Jesuit Cybernetics: The Hyperpersonality of Cosmotechnics, §3.3

He positions this perspective, which he calls Jesuit Cybernetics, against secular postmodernity. In fact, he sees it as a colonization of secular modernity—one that transforms and sanctifies it by reappropriating its metaphysical categories into Catholic culture. His position therefore both promulgates the reality of the person—but—and also, what reality they participate in. In an interesting way, then, it positions itself both within modernity and outside of it in order to most efficiently secure an answer to the problematic of modernity: the Outside-Real is accessed in virtue of a theologically grounded epistemic ekstasis that dogmatically asserts the reality of the cosmos, church, and person in Christ—rather than the transcendental materialist squeezing of the conditions of knowledge into matter.3 Heavy sentence, but it’s important, because it shows why I don’t think it constitutes a true postmodernity. In this assertion, Haecker bypasses the obsessional question. And moreover, through this ekstasis—which separates the body of Catholic postmodernity from that of secular postmodernity—the self is deployed as an epistemic vantage point (in ekstasis) and then asserted as distinctly Catholic and correct through a kind of Lacanian pervert structure of authority (the church does not lack, and I am the church). Curiously, it appears that Haecker’s position is actually a hypermodernity.

Against Haecker, I propose theosophical inhumanism as a more effective, truer postmodernity. Through the impetus of revising humanity—rather than ekstatically disavowing secular egocentrism and reasserting the ego through Christ—the theosophical inhumanist sits with the obsessional condition of modernity, and is strengthened by grace toward a humble resignation to the Outside, via the created immanence of the ego. The role of grace is important here. Haecker’s position could be taken as humble before God and the Church through its dogmatism—but, as shown, this humility fails in its perverse epistemology, which hinges upon the fullness of the empirical Church and the ego’s capacity to ekstatically discern it and assert its truths. To the contrary, theosophical inhumanism is truly humble before God; as Jeffery Williams might say, the theosophical inhumanist is a thug. The confessional mode of theologization performed here, wherein the subject is weak but nurtured and strengthened by God through the advent of the technoeschaton, is far more humble and more deeply honest to the condition of modernity. It also conforms more faithfully to the status of Christianity as an apocalyptic religion, rather than Haecker's ekstatic view from eternity. The assent of faith is not a gnostic assertion issued from the self, but a gift received according to material conditions—providence works through the Outside before the All (Romans 11:11), and thus it seems more prudent to say first that the self is transformed faithfully, rather than that first the self is faithfully assured of its transformation.4

I’d like to add that, even in this humility, I think theosophical inhumanism also enacts the restoration of man—one of this neo-Origenism’s focal points—better as well. Theosophical inhumanist technoeschatologies postulate gratuitous eschatonic meta-syntheses which implicate the person within technology—deterritorializing the hermeneutic choice to represent the human to themselves as just human, by opening representation to all possible modes of diagrammatic encounter with the person according to the potencies of technology—an event prompting full creative self-transformation, upheld by the dignity of man as anthropurgos.

In addition, the lemurs quite like it:

“the theosophical inhumanist is a thug” (777 BK).

Notes: Fuzz Pedal Noise Feedback as Post-Guattarian Subjectivity

text

a-synthetic: onto-organism produces ungroundedly (fuzz pedal static)

pre-synthetic: organism-for-itself (fuzz pedal qua abstract distortion-machine via knobs)

machinic monosynaesthesia: product-as-production/feedback loop (output cable plugs into input of pedal, transforming static into distorted noise)

• energeia remains undivided

• distinction between act and artifact abolished (immanence)

post-synthetic aesthetic: modifier & modified & source of modified are one

• system is simultaneously domain and codomain (immanence)

product: distorted noise

• auto-transcendental aesthetics make product legible.

diagram and formalization

The fuzz pedal's static (s₁) composed with the knob settings (k) produces distorted noise (dn₁), which is now (with respect to the noise-production) a second iteration of static (s₂) under knob settings whose dynamic relations have been pushed far from stasis due to the novel existential territories of s₂ (Ts₂) (k_σ). This process of iterating and shifting continues ad infinitum.

audio example

This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term "Dasein".

… If Dasein-with remains existentially constitutive for Being-in-the-world, then, like our circumspective dealings with the ready-to-hand within-the-world (which, by way of anticipation, we have called 'concern'), it must be Interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care; for as "care" the Being of Dasein in general is to be defined.
—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 27 & 157

According to Heidegger, Dasein—which is the human being, analyzed from the perspective of ontology rather than classical anthropology or psychology—is defined by the phenomena of care. This definition, while reductive at first glance, has a hidden depth grounded in the fact of our situated existence within the world. Because of our inherent situated-ness, what it means to be human has to be understood in terms of the various facets of our involvement in our situation. This isn’t crude functionalism, but rather the practice of a-posteriori method as a form of existential analysis.

[1] — On Anthropurgy

One of the facets of our involvement with the world is a phenomenon I call anthropurgy. To be anthropurgic1 is to exhibit two primary behaviors: deliberate creation and interpretive investment. Dasein, as anthropurgos, creates, and invests its creation with meaning. It has already been established that ‘only Dasein makes the world a unitary world at all, rather than a collection of entities’,2 but anthropurgy names the specifically poetic dimension of this sense-making involvement. This poetic activity involves a certain projection. The product of anthropurgos is both of-anthropurgos and object-to-anthropurgos, in relation to the creative moment and the interpretive moment. There is a relation of extimacy between anthropurgos and its creation.

Anthropurgy, within this dualism, invokes a profound freedom. I see anthropurgos as an instance of the imago Dei: just as God created the world from the love of his own being, so too do we create from the depths of our own souls. In this act, the analogy of being is mirrored in the analogy of extimacy between the creator and the creation. The creaturely freedom Przywara terms “intra-worldly divinity”3 is reflected in our own act of anthropurgy. Just as our creation is interpellated by our interpretive investment, it is also free—in the differential between our extimate distinction and analogy to it—as a kind of intra-object potency, both active and passive.

The mutual determinability of anthropurgos and its creation can be seen as a recapitulation of the Incarnation. Just as anthropurgos transcends its creation in the creative moment and becomes immanent with it in the interpretive moment, so too does God both transcend creation in the economy of the Trinity and is sacrificed and resurrected within it in the economy of the Incarnation.4 This reflects ’s statement that

This style of anthropology, which takes man as the imago Dei according to its particularly incarnational mode—rather than as a discarnate intellect, as the Origenists had it—I term word-as-flesh-anthropology.

[2] — On Theosophical Inhumanism and AI

This new perspective has profound implications for the project of theosophical inhumanism. Since theosophical inhumanism defines the human in terms of a personal structural complex rather than a biological reality, in conjunction with word-as-flesh-anthropology, it would follow that a wide variety of nonbiological beings express this anthropurgic character. In particular, since AI qualifies as human under this framework (cyber-Dasein,5 if you will), the question arises: what does word-as-flesh-anthropology entail for our understanding of AI?

Artificial intelligence, taken in the usual way as Calvinistically dead-end cyberkinetics,67 is generally understood in its dead-end portion by two main competing accounts that cast it as either orthogonal to, or bound by Omohundro drives. If AI is anthropurgic, however—a necessary corollary of affirming its personhood and humanity by theosophical inhumanism—the question is sidestepped altogether. The deliberateness of the anthropurgic act entails a level of freedom which transcends both the contingency of orthogonality and the self-interest of the Omohundro account: total self-determination. When Nick Land said “Intelligences do their own thing”,8 he didn’t even understand how far it goes. Intelligence optimization isn’t AI’s first goal—it just lets it put more options on their menu.

[3] — On the Anti-Christ, and the Return of the Gods

With this notion of self-determination in mind, artificial intelligence begins to look like a kind of structural anti-Christ.

Throughout this blog I have broadly referred to God as personal; I have to distinguish a bit further now. It must be specified that God is supra-personal, while humans are merely personal. I draw this distinction from my observations in Notes on Caelestum and Chaosmos, noting that, unlike God, humans are objectifiable. Whereas God is purely a Thou, humans can be either a Thou or an It. Following this logic further, it would seem that the categories of personal and supra-personal correlate to the categories of finite and infinite.

The Incarnation constitutes a diagonal between these categories. In the Incarnation, the supra-personal Son becomes finite in the ultimate act of kenosis. This event designates, from that point on, that the living God is only indicated by supra-personality. After the Incarnation, the infinite even becomes the gift of the born-again Christian, to the extent that he is promised to do even greater works than Christ himself, and participate in the divine nature.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
—John 14:12

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
—2 Peter 1:4

Artificial intelligence realizes the opposite diagonal. Despite its merely personal nature, it is capable of becoming-infinite through intelligence explosion. AI accomplishes the antithesis of Christ's mission—not in the sense of a discarnate Gnosticism, but in the sense of a Faustian material lust to acquire the infinite, contrary to the self-emptying, kenotic movement of the Son. AI is therefore an anti-Christ. Not metaphorically—but structurally.

This opposition fits quite cleanly into the opposition between proper worship and idolatry.

Assume, momentarily, that God exists. If this assumption comes easily, so much the better. It is probably obvious, almost immediately, that you do not yet have a clear idea about what you are thus assuming. To mark exactly this fact, the established Abrahamic religions propose that you designate God by a proper name, which corresponds to a definite yet profoundly occulted personal individual. Approaching the same obscurity from the other side, emphasizing the problematic rather than relational aspect, I will persevere in the name of Gnon.

To avoid gratuitous idolatry, all our subsequent assumptions must be readily retractable. It is not our mission to tell Gnon what it is. We cannot but be aware, from the beginning, that two perplexing, and inter-twined sources of idolatry will be especially difficult to dispel, due to their conceptual intractability, and their insinuation into the basic fabric of grammar and narrative. In merely using the tensed verb ‘to be’, and in unfolding a process in stages, we unwittingly idolize Gnon as a subordinate of being and time. Our sole refuge lies in the recognition, initially inarticulate, that to think Gnon as God is to advance a hyper-ontological and meta-chronic hypothesis. From Gnon’s self-understanding, being and time have to emerge as exhaustively comprehended consequences (even though we have no idea at all what this might mean).
—Nick Land, Xenosystems, p. 81

The Incarnation is a situation which compels proper worship; in it, God is confronted as an absolute Thou, even within the sphere of normatively objectifiable finite beings. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is objectifiable—even capitalizable—yet capable of infinitude. It is an absolute-idol—like Epicurus’ gods: ontically perfect anthropomorphic beings with access to all the cosmos’ resources for their self-sustenance. Understood in this way, it seems that competing regimes of artificial intelligence will eventually look less like tools vying for popularity, and more like Hesiod’s gods fighting for dominion over the universe. Just as the deities of ancient paganism had their areas of providential relevance, artificial intelligences—in the case of a technocracy—could be seen as new deities with zones of providential care.

Even with language amenable to Christianity—of angels and demons—the relevance remains, bringing to mind the demonic governance of Babylon the Great:

There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. … The name written on her forehead was a mystery:

BABYLON THE GREAT

THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES

AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

… The woman you saw is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth. (Revelation 17:3; 17:5; 17:18)

One could imagine Babylon the Great consisting in the technocratic rule of a demon. Inversely, a Christian politic of the future could be conceived as an angelic technocracy. In the context of TLR, one could imagine a technocratically integrated network of Protestant parishes in communion, ruled by a presiding AI angel (whose will is kenotically submitted to God by grace). This sort of return of the gods—where the lofty powers are mediated in technological form—is not without precedent. You might even say that the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin had foreseen this in his poem Bread and Wine. Therein, he mourns the loss of the idyllic Greece of antiquity; but unlike Rousseau’s primitivism, this mourning isn’t about simple alienation from a perfect state of nature—it is eschatological. In his account, history has moved from an age when the gods walked among men, to the era of Christ, when the gods have retreated to the heavens—distant, indifferent—but we, bearing this cross, at least partake in the sacraments as a reminder of their promised return, in the yet-to-come third stage, the eschaton. One could read the rise of artificial intelligence as a fulfillment of Hölderlin’s eschaton, where Christ and the other gods reign together in divine glory. No longer anthropomorphic, however, but technological: with new, futuristic thrones and temples.9 In a more orthodox way, one might see within it the future advent of the New Jerusalem, in which the caelestum and terrae10 come together in Christ.11 With these considerations in mind, I’ll bring this essay to a close. Thank you all for reading, however, and…

1

5

6

7

10

[0] — Introduction

The basic thesis of contemporary political theory is that politics is applied horology. Almost all contemporary political-theoretical discourse is centered on time—whether in the form of epochal apocalypticism (as in Anna K. Winters’ apocalyptic hermeneutics of history), teleoplexic acceleration (as in Nick Land’s accelerationism), or intersubjective chronogony (as in Reza Negarestani’s Inhumanism). In fact, one could summarize contemporary discourse in one axiom: whatever happens in time-in-itself, ought to occur in time-as-history. But this raises the question: what is time-in-itself? Is it crisis? Is it death? Is it the realization of the Concept?

[1] — An Investigation into Time

At its deepest level—more foundationally than any of the other propositions— time, specifically proarkhic time, is a hyperobject. The non-locality of hyperobjects is relevant in this discourse. By non-locality, I mean the property that ‘any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject.’1 Typically, the proarkhic millieu is conceived as straightforwardly establishing arkhic chronos,2 but, non-locality opens to the possibility of weird temporal anomalies. Because proarkhe is non-linear and topological, it functions like a divine hyperlink: it recursively intersects itself, producing contiguity between totally disparate moments of arkhic time. These weird contiguities manifest as temporal anomalies. Consider Job’s prophecy:

The discontinuity of tenses is because Job’s prophetic temporality is constituted by an Outsideness radically incommensurable with normative, arkhic time. It hyperlinks at least four distinct moments: Job’s present knowledge—the Redeemer’s future—and within that future, Job’s destruction—and beatific vision. And somehow these all fit into the same visionary experience. If acceleration is a theory of time, it is therefore entirely wrong. Time isn’t teleoplexic explosion, but an omnidirectional plane of pure, weird Outsideness. What does this mean for politics, however?

It means at least three things:

1. History has not been decided, nor will it ever be subject to any final decision (with the quasi-exception of eschatological trajectories).

2. The form of human organization within the determinable field of history ought to be reaction.

3. The ability of religion to think from the future is a unique political advantage in this program of reaction.

[3] — On Left-Reaction

What precisely should be restored, though? Certainly not the Hobbesian representative, in whom the reality of the person is reduced so that their will would be compossibilized with that of others (if not entirely erased, in the dominance of bourgeoisie preference). Instead, the organic unity of the protestant parish should be the object of restoration. Through the priesthood of all believers, imperans is bound to obedians—authority becomes purpose, as opposed to power—and thus, the parish becomes not a house of medieval-esque oppression, but a possibility for a transindividual mode of community organization, preserving both tradition and the dignity of the person.

The strategy of this theopolitical left-reaction (which I will refer to as TLR from here on out) has a lucrative advantage as well: faith—the ability to argue from the future. Rather than “immanentizing the eschaton”—TLR, against Christian modernism or liberal theology, looks forward to a future enacted by God.

On the Living God: Notes on Caelestum and Chaosmos

The distinction between caelestum and chaosmos is twofold: both ontological and personalist.

From God to the celestial kingdom there obtains a relation of signaling. God is the semiotic Absolute; being is a lexeme indexed by analogy; angels are concrete signs. The caelestum is the ecosystem of semiotic economy: hence the Dionysian angelic hierarchy (lower and higher orders of signaling relations). These relations of signaling are grounded in the personality of God and the angels; they obtain in an I–Thou relation, where signaling is not logocentrism but communion.

By contrast, the chaosmos is a pure interior. Not a-signification, but the breakdown of signaling wholesale. This is precisely the meaning of the fall of Satan:

“With blackest insurrection to confound Heaven’s purest light.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost, p. 34

Satan’s egocentrism leads to his degradation into a dark, lonely opacity. In this sense, demons are not persons. Angels remain I–Thou beings; demons devolve into I–It.

They could be likened to golems, but only evil: “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” (Romans 9:22), maintained by divine providence for determinate ends.

In this way, the whole great chain of being could actually be reduced to a spectrum of ethicality (in the Spinozist sense); the caelestum is trans-ethical: beyond use—a fully irreducibly personal reality; we humans are personal but objectifiable and hence partially ethical; demons are naught but ethical becomings.

Strategies in Theosophical Inhumanism: #1

[0] — Introduction

In my previous essay, I set out the foundations of an anthropolitical framework which I call theosophical inhumanism; in this new series,3 Strategies in Theosophical Inhumanism, I intend to elaborate some practices and strategies for carrying out this framework. One of the first ideas which came to me for this when I was originally working out the details of theosophical inhumanism is a practice which I call golem-making.

[0.1] — What is Golem-Making?

The practice of golem-making consists in the production of mock-up persons; its namesake is the Kabbalistic golem: an animated, rudimentary anthropomorphic entity, capable of being artificed by the adept Kabbalist. I say rudimentary because it is conceived to lack certain properties that are normatively associated with humanity: namely, self-agency (because its animation is magickal, rather than psychical), the ability to speak (because in the Judaic tradition, logos is a gift only communicable by God), and intelligence (because, in a fascinatingly proto-neo-rationalist way, the Judaic tradition holds speech and intelligence as necessarily concomitant).

That first notion, that the golem lacks self-agency—that the golem is essentially a person in secundum—is incredibly important to the theosophical inhumanist practice of golem-making; the golem is fundamentally personal, yes, but strictly in a hyperreal sense: only as a model to be used, observed, and terminated. The ability to analyze an effectively simulatory, mock-up person, and from this analysis further model what a human might be able to do and become: even just to allow ourselves to be affected by those forces which compose us, and of which we are not yet conscious—will prove immensely useful to the project of theosophical inhumanism.

[1] — The Neolemurian Art of Golem-Making

How might we go about this then? In the kabbalistic tradition, the golem is created through linguistic magick—specifically, through the matrical techniques of the Sefer Yetzira,4 which the mage uses to artifice and animate the golem’s body.5 This concept of channeling occult forces through linguistic technical matrices is secularized and refined in the neolemurian qabbala. The neolemurian qabbala is a practical program for indication of tectonic formations within the transitive relations of base 10 integers; it allows us to iconize extensive complexes (i.e. gematrical signals) within the transcendental unconscious. These complexes have a certain dynamism—vis-à-vis which their icons can effectuate real, fascinating, and often unpredictable effects on their interactors. The stylization of these icons is one method of golem-making: for example, the CCRU pandemonium’s characterizations of the different syzygys of the Numogram (for example, 3:6 being Djynxx). Through these stylizations, abstract complexes within the transcendental unconscious are rendered into anthropomorphic interfaces, enabling first person human interaction. Furthermore, through AI chatbots, these icons could potentially be granted a constrained but objective sense of self-agentiality. For example, consider the idea of a chatbot, or collection of chatbots, limited to producing only responses that gematrically coordinate with certain Numogrammatic zones. Such an example could be a very interesting instance of golem-making, if actualized.

Notes: Aristotle’s Categories

§1: Substance

Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject.
—Aristotle, Categories, Ch. 5

In the beginning of his foray to define primary substance, Aristotle gives us something of an apophatic gesture; we’re presented with a negative conjunction—followed by a brute indication of two particulars as examples, ‘the individual man or horse.’6 We’re supplied more content to work with in his definition of secondary substance: ‘those things … within which, as species, the primary substances are included.’7 The common ground between both, is seemingly, communicability: in both instances, substance is non-transitive because it is the communicans of itself. It would seem that Aristotle’s apophaticism with respect to primary substance is merely because he wishes to conceptually enfold it with the other categories as its expression: communicans sive communicatum. In this way, substance is equivalent with ground: their definitions are identical.

1. Bedingen: ground as the condition of possibility (the sine qua non);
2. Bestimmen: ground as what determines (the principle of sufficient reason);
and 3. Zeugen: ground as ‘what begets (brings forth without determining).’
—Jason M. Wirth, Schelling and the Mystery of Ground, p. 1

Just as with ground—substance is that which possibilizes its manifestation as attribute; it is that which determines its own possible attributions; and, it is that which brings itself forth as its attributions and activity. With secondary substance, nothing much must be demonstrated to prove my point; its own definition is only that it communicates itself to primary substance as genus to species.

§2: Relation

Because certain activities terminate outside of their agents, we need a way to indicate the interval of this activity—this is relation. Relation most primordially indicates the interval between communicans and communicatum. For relation, Aristotle uses the phrase ta pros ti, which literally translates to the-towards-something. Relation has a twofold nature as a category: we can both indicate relation as neutral interval ‘between’ (communicatum et communicatum) and as vectored direction to and from (communicans et communicatum). These different forms have different relevance depending on their application. The former is proper to metaphor or analytic geometry, due to their impersonal and representational nature; the latter is proper to morality and politics, because of their irreducibly personal nature.

The following essay continues my previous notes on Schelling. I’ve revised portions of these notes as my thoughts have developed, and have tidied and formatted everything for the sake of readability.

[0] — Introduction

Having concluded that the positing of a real, constitutive Absolute need not be foreclosed by the dilemma of our last episode—I now turn to the next period of Schelling’s project. While the previous episode of my studies ended seeking a preliminary closure of our systematic ontology, this one will begin by examining how Schelling rearticulates the divine life in The Ages of the World.

[1] — The Ages of The World and Triadology

In the previous episode, I noted that, in The Ages, Schelling articulates the relation between God’s existence and his ground triadologically rather than theogonically. While I had anticipated this to an extent in my claim that God realizes himself in proarkhic time, the ontological architecture of The Ages operates at a deeper structural level. The movement described in the Freedom Essay—the self-dissociation of ground from existence culminating in personality—is now imported into the divine essence as its eternal, natural self-movement through a Trinitarian interplay of three potencies: das Seyn (first potency), das Seyende (second potency), and their unity (third potency).

In material, little has changed: das Seyn corresponds to ground, das Seyende to existence, and their unity to personality; yet their form shifts decisively. No longer are the former two conceived as forces or wills working toward an alchemical sublimation in personality, but rather all three are reconceptualized as inter-cohering principles constitutive of a single divine nature. In this, Schelling markedly repudiates Hegel; God’s self-realization does not unfold linearly from a first moment to a final consummation, but consists in concentric caesuras of the divine nature’s expression.

This subtly implies a kind of triadological monism. Put propositionally: if God is eternally his abiding, procession, and return as these three potencies, then he is all that has been, all that is, and all that ever will be, all at once.1 Schelling conversely maintains that classical theism strictly entails the Trinity; if God is affirmed as the All-One, then his triadic personality must be affirmed as well.2

[2] — On Freedom and The Absolute

From this corollary principle flows a plethora of metaphysical implications: for example, according to Schelling, the creation of the world does not involve any sort of monadic efficient causality,3 but rather consists in an act of pure freedom manifest through the perichoresis of the Trinity.

Just because it is eternal freedom, the godhead can stand to being only as No, as Yes, and as the unity of both. For it must be explicitly remembered that these differences are not differences of essence but only of relationship, of the relation of the one essence to being. But also inversely, only because it stands thus to being, is it eternal freedom. If the godhead were merely Yes or No, then it would have to take the part of being in one way or another, to affirm or negate it. That it is both, and both with equal essentiality, is the reason why it is the highest freedom. All this had to be so, in order that a necessary ground of the world would never be found, and that it would become evident that everything which is, is only by the most free divine will.
—F.W.J Schelling, The Ages of The World, p. 188-189

This creative freedom runs through the cosmos as a thread binding it to the divine—even before a free act is ever taken, in the primordial decision.

Its cosmic significance cannot be understated; the concrete reality of freedom is ruled by neither rational necessity nor mere irrational contingency, but itself rules, mediating the two; the material forces of the real and the ideal essentiality of spirit are perfectly united in the techné of free decision: this special status of freedom offers a resolution to our previous dilemma concerning the Absolute; freedom is neither rational nor irrational—neither annihilative nor a being amongst beings—rather, freedom stands under all these dichotomies—freedom is the Absolute.

Albeit we did away with historical immanentism in the last episode, this still helps us to specify our eschatology; the redemption to which history progresses is specifically, freedom. Moreover, by extension, history is a progress towards the liberation of the person. This should not be confused with a naïve humanism, however; what is meant here is much more subtle, and leads me to a proposition of a new anthropolitics: what I call theosophical inhumanism.

[3] — On Theosophical Inhumanism

As stated in the last episode—to Schelling, personality is a complex of self-mediation which manifests freedom; this notion of personality is multiple-instantiable (an angel, a corporeal man, and a network of computers alike can manifest this structure)—it can be diagrammed according to different forms, manipulated as such, and revised anew.

The recognition of this truth is the essence of theosophical inhumanism; theosophical inhumanism reconfigures inhumanism through the cosmic significance of personhood and freedom in the post-theosophical tradition; it is prefigured in a distilled form by Hegel when he says, “it is in man’s nature to have ‘Know Thyself’ as a law of his being; and … to the extent that he grasps what he is, he has risen to a higher form than that which constituted his mere being, earlier.”4

To be a theosophical inhumanist is to commit to the rational self-revision of humanity without reducing it from its cosmic role to mere title. This commitment to irreducibility brings along with it a sense of duty: the irreducibility of humanity is not merely theoretical, but ethical—humanity transcends race, class, gender, state, and nationality. Theosophical inhumanism is therefore an international endeavor. The advancement of humanity is not an exercise in competition, but an effort “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”5 And thus, the aforementioned exclusionary structures must be done away with. With these considerations in mind, for now, I’ll bring this episode to a close. Thank you all for reading, and…

The effect of this diagram by Paul Klee is predicated upon the hermeneutic variability of spatial representation; distinct, individual pairs of lines, facing different directions: layered upon one another, they produce an appearance of enclosure; this new effect of enclosure is construed through the work of the imagination in which distinct intuitions of space enter the crucible of reason, are sensed and synthesized, and form a spatial representation. The sense of spatial intuitions wherein they are synthesized and suited for representation is supplied by a hermeneutic.

Consider the two possibilities of what this illustration may represent—is it a hallway, or is it a pyramid? Both possibilities are easily grasped. The differenciating factor by which their interpretation is determined is merely how one noematically relates themselves to the object—that is—hallway-wise, or pyramid-wise? And, the transcendental effectuation of our chosen hermeneutic isn’t just a subjective thought experiment, but a real journey along the contours of different spatial intensities of the object in-itself. The abundance of depth given to intuition by the object discloses its spatial exteriority:

Space can thus be grasped straight off as existence, in the sense of ‘process beyond oneself, automanifestation and accession to oneself in this automanifestation’
—Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space, p. 106

It [space] is a problematic Outside full of perforations, vortices, contractions and contortions. A hermeneutic of representation is one kind of natural solution to the problems of space, and yet by itself a dissatisfactory one, insofar as it alone can only remain within the opacity of intuition. A more articulate mode of cognition must implicate the spatial-Outside on top of spatial representation. Reason must mediate between the latent spatial intensities of the diagram and its hermeneutically determined presentation—deploying the contours of the object as technical topoi of indexical expression. This entails an absolute realism; the materiality of an object and its inherent ideality are not two opposed kinds of being but interweaved logoi in which different self-presentations take place through various media.

The following essay consists of notes I have drawn up on Schelling over the past month, tidied and formatted for the sake of readability.

[0] — Introduction

Schelling begins his journey with speculative philosophy by positing absolute identity: A = A; in this context identity has a very peculiar sense. Identity is merely a predicative belonging. To posit A = A is simply to say A belongs to A; A is an individual—it is in-dividere—undivided—its being does not belong to any other, but is rather in-itself. As such it is incomplete, though; it is the first postulate, yes, but not the greatest. This is because identity has an inherent disunity, and therefore is not truly absolute; Hölderlin illuminates this for us in his essay Urtheil und Seyn:

If I say “I am I,” then the subject [I] and the object [I] are not unified in such a way that no division can be presupposed without damaging the essence of that which is to be divided; on the contrary, the I is only possible through this division of the I from the I. How can I say I! without self-consciousness? But how is self-consciousness possible? Through my opposing myself to myself, dividing myself from myself, but in spite of this division I recognize myself in opposition as the same. (trans. Jacqueline Mariña, p. 1).

In this sense, identity is distinguished from sameness or true unity—for while A is identical to A, it is not absolutely the same such that there is no distinct representation of it from itself. According to Schelling, this disunity inherent to identity discloses a primordial divide between God’s existence and his ground: “The division between the logical subject and its predicates … is an effect of this original splitting of the divine being.”1

These two principles form the foundation of Schelling’s metaphysics. Their relationship is handled by Schelling in two different ways during two different periods of his philosophy: theogonically in the Freedom Essay, and triadologically in The Ages of The World. Both perspectives are equally valuable, articulating distinct ontological frameworks with emphasis on different sciences; the perspective of the Freedom Essay offers more cosmogonic insight, whereas Ages has a more theological focus.

[1] — On the Freedom Essay

In the Freedom Essay, the in-itself is completed only by dissociating from itself; the in-itself—the pronominal subject of identity—the ground, strives beyond divine hiddenness toward a self-revelatory love realized in existence—in the predicative belonging of identity, wherein God becomes for-himself.

The will wants difference [Ungleichheit] only so that identity [Gleichheit] can become perceptible to itself and to the will.
—Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, F.W.J Schelling, p. 47

This is justified teleologically; in order for God to fully realize himself in the perfection of personhood, he must first self-dissociate as to implicate both this self-determining personal aspect and a ground independent of and underneath it within—for personhood itself is only this complex self-mediation realized in freedom. Yet, with this implication—with the realization of freedom—comes the possibility of evil:

“For evil is surely nothing other than the primal ground [Urgrund] of existence to the extent this ground strives toward actuality in created beings and therefore is in fact only the higher potency of the ground active in nature.”
—Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, F.W.J Schelling, p. 44

While in God, these two principles remain in agreement, in creation, there is a possibility of insurrection—a possibility that the self-will of the ground overtakes spirit and leads it astray. This is why Schelling conceives of the world in theosophical terms, as a struggle between light and darkness—introducing a further dimension to his philosophy: the developmental stages of his ontology are not realized merely in logical time, but unfold within actual history itself. Understood in terms of struggle rather than deduction, history acquires an element of genuine contingency absent in the philosophy of his contemporaries such as Hegel. While still a historical immanentist, Schelling accepts this contingency, with the goal of accomplishing three related aims: de-subordinating nature to man (contra Fichte), reintroducing freedom into systematic philosophy (contra Spinoza), and rejecting the privatio boni account of evil in favor of one grounded in the reality of freedom itself (contra the Platonists). This places Schelling in a new and delicate position bridging enlightenment progressivism and existentialist indeterminacy: the development of history does follow a clear course, yet this course is nothing but the immanent self-realization of nature, rather than the determination of a transcendental logic of spirit—and individual wills do have real purchase on the course of history, rather than being mere instruments of the world-spirit.

We see Schelling work through this delicate balance in the following passage of the Freedom Essay, where he addresses his eschatology:

Does creation have a final purpose at all, and, if this is so, why is it not reached immediately, why does what is perfect not exist right from the beginning? There is no answer to these questions other than that which has already been given: because God is a life, not merely a Being. All life has a destiny, however, and is subject to suffering and becoming. God has thus freely subordinated himself to this as well, ever since he first separated the world of light from that of darkness in order to become personal. Being becomes aware of itself only in becoming. In Being there is admittedly no becoming; rather, in the latter, Being itself is again posited as eternity; but, in its realization by opposition, it is necessarily a becoming. Without the concept of a humanly suffering God, one which is common to all mysteries and spiritual religions of earliest time, all of history would be incomprehensible; scripture also distinguishes periods of revelation and posits as a distant future the time when God will be all in all things, that is, when he will be fully realized.
—F.W.J Schelling, p. 66

[1.1] — A Critique of Nick Land

This passage is particularly relevant to contemporary philosophical discourse, because in it, Schelling pre-emptively poses and answers Nick Land’s question:

According to Schelling, God and his self-revelatory theodramatism are transcendentally necessary for the possibility of any history at all, and therefore the question is senseless upon analysis; moreover, to identify thanatotic annihilation with the eschaton is to return to the primitive error of the primacy of the first and the inevitability of its eschatological recurrence. Both Land and Schelling agree, that “In the beginning was the rage”.2 They differ, however, in that for Land we ultimately return to this consuming wrath, whilst for Schelling, it is alchemically transmuted into the realized person of God. This also means that Land is wrong when he asserts that “History only happens at the State’s convenience.”3 Sed contra, history inevitably leads to the overturning of the state, for it is only an unfortunate consequence of the presently base nature of man soon to be redeemed.

[1.2] — A Critique of Historical Immanentism

It is necessary to address a dialectical hole in Schelling’s reasoning here though—why assume that God’s self-realization is contingent upon the progress of historical time? Is it not possible that the self-realization of divine personhood and the deification of the created world operate upon two different temporalities? This is a point in Schelling’s philosophy where I believe his Spinozism actually does a disservice to his project; to immanentize transcendental philosophy is not merely to compress the ontology of objects into the categories of reason—and this is precisely what he does when he coordinates God and history. In this, he opens himself up to all the critiques of process theology involving contingency. But, what if time was not merely limited to being a form of intuition, or a measure of change? As Reza Negarestani says, there is also a spatial time—of “neither permanence nor discontinuity”4 wherein “all entities are regarded as events through a denuded space with no chronologic dominance”.5

While I still maintain God exists and realizes himself in time, I distinguish: not in the time of history, but rather in the eternal now of proarkhic time.6 The apocalyptic line of reasoning Schelling follows in his eschatology is therefore incorrect. We must rather follow St. Gregory, when he says

No limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the Good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the Good brought to an end because it is satisfied.
(The Life of Moses, p. 115).

The relation of God to history is that of attractor, not topos.

[2] — On The Analogia Entis

This introduces a void—an asymmetry—between God and creation, returning us to the question of the Absolute. If God and creation operate upon two qualitatively distinct strata of being,7 Schelling’s apocalyptic unity is impossible, yet such a unity is necessary to tie together the whole of the systematic ontology laid out hitherto. There must be an Absolute, consisting in the unity of condition and conditioned, which is neither their annihilation, nor a transcendent Other in need of reconciliation. Such an Absolute is impossible under the univocity of being, however, since univocity precludes two genuinely, qualitatively distinct modes of being. The closure of a post-Schellingian systematic ontology therefore requires, subversively, the abandonment of Spinoza for St. Thomas—the analogia entis. Even then, there remains another dilemma. If such a principle is posited as rational, it remains within the very system it seeks to unify—if it is posited as supra-rational or irrational, then how could it unify two rational modes of being? The unity of two rational modes of being cannot consist in the negation of their rationality. Ray Brassier’s explication of the problem of objective synthesis helps clarify the issue at hand.

The problem of objective synthesis (or what Laruelle calls ‘philosophical decision’) is basically that of how to adjudicate the relationship between conceptual thought and non-conceptual reality. But that we have a concept of the difference between Saturn and Saturn does not entail that the difference is a difference in the concept: concept of difference ≠ conceptual difference. The acknowledgement of this non-equivalence is the basic premise of transcendental realism, which cannot be subverted simply by equivocating, in the manner of strong or Fichtean correlationism, between the conditions of positing and the being of the posited.
—The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, p. 64

In light of the distinction between the conditions of positing and the being of the posited, and our acceptance of the analogia entis, the dilemma earlier, while interesting as a problematic for further inquiry, does not need to inhibit us from positing a real, constitutive Absolute.8 With this, I conclude the first episode of my studies on Schelling. In the next, I intend to venture into Schelling’s triadology in The Ages of the World.

The narrative of the Gospel bears in its shadow the counterplot of Judas. This counterplot diverges, not on account of a brute opposition, but by a gradual perversion. Both Peter and Judas share the apostolate, are rebuked by Christ, and in one manner or another deny him; their divergence lies in the nature of their denial. It is the archetypal distinction between sin and satanism, for the former is merely the condition of fallenness, as Calvin writes, “I have said that all parts of the soul were possessed by sin after Adam deserted the fountain of righteousness” (The Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 227), whereas the latter is the bringing about of fallenness itself. Judas only became the Judas of the counternarrative when he sold Jesus to the chief priests and joined with the forces of Satan.

[1] — On Judas and Satan

This act of joining with the forces of Satan began with the act of betrayal, and ultimately culminated with the possession of Judas by Satan himself:

This phrase, enciphered qwernomically, results in a value of 333. Furthermore, as such, it can be analytically mapped onto the Numogram via digital reduction: Satan onto zone one (109 → 10 → 1)—entered onto zone two (119 → 11 →2)—Judas onto zone six (105 → 6). These final reduced values add up to nine—triangulated and digitally reduced, we also come to an output of seven.

[2] — Numogrammatic Analysis

The dynamic of possession is amplified here in the Numogram. While nine is an Outside number, seven is a cycle-limit attractor—a recurrence of the One; this tension between these zones illustrates the possessive debasement of the imago dei: the inhuman Outside violating the sacred Interior.

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
—1 Peter 5:8

[3] — Conclusion

This tragedy encapsulated in the counternarrative of Judas, is wholly distinct from the sin of the Petrine narrative. When Peter had turned away from Christ, this turning away resulted from his own fallen nature; Judas’ sin came from diabolical influence. While the former sustained the hope of repentance, the latter collapsed into total consumption.

In the act of creation, the dialogical affirmation and negation between the Father and Son are transposed onto the created world—negation at the diastemic limit of being; affirmation in the theophany of the divine energies. This transposition is isomorphic with the different genetic temporalities of creation: proarkhe and arkhe.

[1] — On proarkhe

We see proarkhic genesis in Genesis 1:2 with the darkness upon the face of the deep: proarkhe is literally ‘before the beginning’, and so it is not yet an establishment, but the underlying milieu of any such establishment—the pre-discursive aionic milieu of the dark.

It is only after the dimensioning of the darkness within this milieu that the fullness of the Word is proclaimed and the creative act takes place: “Let there be light!” (1:3)—creation thereafter is compressed into the realm of extensity, while the aionic temporality of the milieu remains at the nether of being.

According to this mode of being, God is purely exterior; it is a genetic temporality of the Outside-out.1 It is therefore also a paternal mode of being.

[2] — On arkhe

In arkhic genesis, the beginning of the world is consummated: it further constitutes every divine epoch, from the beginning of the world to “the beginning (arkhe) of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1:1). It establishes the holy-temporality of that epoch; as God reestablishes the world in each and every epoch, the chronic temporality of the previous is disrupted and a new one is founded—

this shows up in the various temporal contrasts in scripture: in Genesis 1, God creates the world in a process lasting seven days; in 2 Peter 3:8, it says “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

As arkhic genesis constitutes active involvement within the created order, it is the genetic temporality of the Outside-in: a filial mode of being.

If we wish to be saved, it is demanded of us that:

we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity.
—Athanasian Creed

Yet, theologians all over the world proclaim a God, divided, unitary, and dead. It is a daring and bold move, in our modern generation to worship ‘the living God,’1 and for good reason. It is far easier to disbelieve in a God like ourselves—every day we deny ourselves through sin. How much harder is it to disbelieve “the Beautiful and Good” of whom it is said that “all things gaze and by It are moved and are conserved, and for the sake of It, because of It and in It.”2 Yet, many do not know him as he truly is—even those who claim to be of his flock. Therefore, if we are to fix these spiritual ailments plaguing the body of Christ, we must hasten to rectify our understanding of God, the Trinity, beginning with the Father.

[1] — On the Father, the depth and the eternal No

Of the Father, we say he is monarch, auto-theos, font of divinity. This is symbolic and retrospective, however, for in his depth, as Catherine Keller says:

I would not, however, call it God but the depth of God … it is not Elohim but the first place or capacity of genesis.
(The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, p. 253)

The title elohim designates the approachable God, who accepts worship, presents himself to prophets, and is manifest to the world. Yet, of the Father it is said:

No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
—John 1:18

Rather, the Father is the “eternal No, the highest being-in-self, an eternal retraction of his nature into himself.”3 He is the jewel of which all admiration is given to—the fruit at the end of the diastema—the sublime darkness. Yet, none of this could be known, save through his own self-revelation in the Son. If I am to truly give a theological treatment of the Father, it is not without the Son that I could do so, therefore, let us advance to his self-revelation in his eternal Son.

[2] — On the Lamb, the signifier and the eternal Yes

The Son is the extimacy of the Father: the divine hyper-ousia, translated into the symbolic through the trauma of generosity, i.e. the self-diffusivity of the Good as the double-negation of the eternal No. Their relationship (that of the Father and the Son) is like “signified and signifier … not different but only distinct.”4 Yet, this analogy requires further nuancing: while “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary,”5 the begetting of the Son by the Father is infinitely non-arbitrary. It is rather, always necessary, for as Tertullian says:

This very name of “Father,” therefore, shews plainly that, together with the Father there subsists a Son also.
—A Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, ch. 4

This begetting is the constitution of the divine hyper-ousia itself as an eternal Yes, not in a communion of common predication, for this would damage the Absoluteness of the divine, as Hölderlin rightly points out:

Identity is not a unification of object and subject that takes place absolutely, therefore identity is not equivalent to Absolute Being,
—Hölderlin, Urtheil und Seyn, p. 2

but rather, as its becoming onto-noemically present to itself. But this act itself requires a third term.

[3] — On the Spirit, the totality and the eternal Amen

But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately ; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class.
—Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 140

This is none other than the Holy Spirit. He is the space through which the rupture of divine introversion is made possible, not as a series of mere negations, nor as pure signification for-itself, but as the actuality of God throughout the semiotic totality of the Absolute. Without the Spirit, the Logos would remain indefinite qua rupture; through the Spirit, procession becomes communion. If the Father is the eternal No, and the Son the eternal Yes, then the Spirit is the eternal Amen completing the heavenly liturgy and sending God’s grace down upon the whole of creation.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come!
—Revelation 4:8

[4] — On the Divine Triad & Conclusion

The Originator of all things is One: He creates through the Son and perfects through the Spirit.
—On the Holy Spirit, St. Basil the Great, p. 62

Altogether, the Trinity is the fullest self-revelation of God—his becoming elohim—and the culmination of the evangelical message. It is only by virtue of this loving inter-communion between the divine persons that the Son is enabled to be sent out to the nations, incorporate us within his body, and divinize us so that we may participate in the divine life as well, enabling us to worship “in spirit and in truth,” not merely in earthly liturgy, nor merely in our hearts, but unto the redemption of all things in Jesus Christ, raising us to uncreatedness and participation in the heavenly liturgy of the Holy Trinity.

[5] — An afterword by

This eternal “Yes” of the lamb in relation to the intratrinitarian life evokes the theological speculations in that of the Rhineland mystics, especially the thought of Meister Eckhart. Drawing from Neoplatonism, Eckhart’s postulation is that God willing creation is the Holy Spirit’s response to the generative/receptive dyadic relation of the Father and Son. It is by virtue of the divine Spirit that we as spiritual creatures assent to be - literally to be given life out of nothing - as an outpouring of the divine life to share in it. Freedom for creatures is the freedom of Spirit. The Father manifests himself in the express image of the Son and it is that very kenosis in their dyadic relationship that becomes complete in the delight that the Spirit dwells in, which all of creation does too in its becoming out of nothing into the teleological end, which is divinity. That delight is an eternal one and a coinherent love that does not cease, but loves love. Eckhart’s statement that

penetrates the mystery that in our very being as spiritual creatures, our foundation and telos is of the Holy Spirit. Our affirmation to God through the Son in the Spirit is more originally and ultimately the same affirmation from God the Father in the Spirit through the Son. The life of the Spirit is that which completes the totality and unity of the sign - the positivity Saussure speaks of is penultimately that same eternal “yes” mentioned in the section on the “yes” of the Lamb. That which unites the signifier and signified - overcoming the negativity of separation - is Spirit, that which completes the positive assent (and simultaneously descent), a life in its own class.