Читать книгу 1 John - L. Daniel Cantey - Страница 6

We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true—even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.

The mountain dominated the countryside, puncturing the sky like a needle, peaking in the heart of the heavens. It loomed over a village, separating the people from points east with such height that they endured its shadow until late morning. The people complained that the darkness delayed production, that it stunted the growth of crops, and that it hindered their fullness of life. They longed to be out from under the mountain.

At length a man of unusual ability arose among the people, surpassing his companions and their ancestors in discernment, knowledge, and strength. His fellows envied him, the elders respected him, and the women sought him. The villagers made him their leader and he promised them an age of prosperity and justice. He made plans to improve the common way of life, but found time and again that the darkness hindered his pursuits. “If only I could bring my people into the full light of day,” he thought. “We shall never advance while this mountain hangs over us.”

He expressed his frustration to one of the women who courted him, and she responded with a way that he could draw the town out of darkness. “You, who are like a god among us, must become a sun for yourself and bring your light down for the rest. Listen to what you must do: ascend the mountain, arriving at the summit before dawn and hiding yourself there. When the sun rises just above the mountain’s topmost point, seize it with your hands. Wrestle with the sun by laying hold of it, and though you melt from its heat, do not let go until it gives you its blessing. At that moment you will become the light of the sun, and when you return to the town as walking light, you will bless us all by your glow until we, too, have become our own suns. Then there will be no more darkness, and our people will make progress.”

The man decided upon this idea at once, setting out for the peak. For days he scaled cliffs and endured the wild, descending into his depths and testing himself there. He reached the apex in darkness and hid himself. Dawn came and evolved into late morning, and the sun slowly awakened to the western lands. At the moment of total exposure, just as its light neared the village below, the man leaped out and grasped the sun with both hands. He immediately caught flame, his fingers and forearms turning black, his whole body shaking. Fire darted all around, the peak trembled, the sky rolled. The horizon twisted and coiled, and the man felt his feet dissolve into the earth. But he would not let go. “I will have your blessing!” he shouted, and with all his energy he held tightly and impeded the sun’s course across the heavens. At last the sun was exhausted and gave in. A dazzling and concentrated beam flowed into the man and swelled in his flesh, an eternal light received. He let go and fell to his knees, where he noticed that all the colors, all difference and vivacity, fluttered within him and illumined his body. Smiling at his blessing, he looked at the sun to find that it was no longer bright in the same way, but had become another moon. “It is no matter,” he thought as he stood up. “I do not need the sun. I am now my own sun!”

But then his light withered in a gasp and retreated beneath his skin, abandoning him to the dark. His skin began to ripple and crawl, his fingernails grew into claws, and hair sprouted on his face, hands, and feet. He looked again at the moon and howled with lust. The man that he had been departed; the people never saw him again. In his place they knew perpetual night, and fear of the monster that roamed the mountain.

“We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps him safe, and the evil one cannot harm him. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

“Amen, the word of God is truth. The whole world lies under the evil one, and all men are born not of God but of the deceiver. Where now are those kept safe by the one born of God, who have not sinned with the world but who worship Jesus Christ?”

“We know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.”

“Amen, the word of God is love. But where today are men of understanding, who are coming to know Jesus Christ the Son, who abide in him and obey his commandments? Where are those who recognize Jesus as the true God and seek him as eternal life? The light of men has nearly left the world, and the hour is dark.”

“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”

I

The nature of man so exemplifies his social world that a rough congruence holds between the elements of his being and those of his society. As the higher and spiritual element most oriented to the worship and contemplation of God, the soul corresponds to the church. As the lower element more oriented to the temporal world and its necessities, the body corresponds to the kingdom, which includes various forms of social organization not immediately referred to the ecclesia, especially the political. The soul rules over the body not as another body but spiritually, delivering the moral guidance needed to humble the body toward immortality; so also the church’s guidance of the kingdom. Attendant to both church and kingdom and representative of the mutability by which soul and body might rise or fall in their fellowship with one another and with God, not an element but an aspect of the two elements, are the individual man and groups of men as abstracted from their institutional homes. The individual-group so abstracted and universalized into a mutability that stands above all law, then tacitly declared as the ruling element in man’s nature and his interactions, is the social meaning of the scattering. That man might justify this universality by reference to the name of Jesus is the essence of the Christ-Idol, the savior who invites man into the scattering both within his nature and as the principle of his social order. The Christ-Idol deceives by coaxing man into formlessness as though it were the beatitude of God.

The historical rise of the Christ-Idol conforms in a general way to the anthropological pattern exemplified at the fall. Through various personalities, political intrigues, machinations, and misunderstandings between well-meaning men, in short, in and through the details of history and men freely willing their place in history, Docetism accomplished its purposes as a guiding dialectical spirit, goading man to rise before compelling his fall. This transformation occurred over the medieval era, intensifying and proceeding from hints, unforeseen implications, occasional brazen announcements, and critical periods of corruption, schism, and war, until the infinitizing dialectic had opened the chasm necessary for the Christ-Idol. Just as the soul in deciding to eat the fruit exceeds its measure and rends its nature away from its proper form, so the papacy in its excessive assumption of primacy divorced the Western church from the East. Just as the soul achieves this rending in the grasp toward infinity, so the medieval papacy raced after the infinite in a plurality of ways. From the desire to reform the world to the papal excommunication of Eastern patriarchs; from claims of universal jurisdiction and theories of world-monarchy to the Crusades; and, most importantly, in the transformation of ecclesiastical law away from liturgy and theology and into a distinct system of statutes, with the church established as a legal institution; through all these the church seized the infinite and abandoned the law of its being. Just as the soul dies in its distance from God at the fall, suffering the loss of its being at the same time that it struggles under the flesh, so the papacy lost touch with its spiritual purposes as a prelude to falling to the French kings and eventually enduring the Western Schism. All the while the scattering, the universal man, germinated in consciousness and power until the docetic dialectic culminated at the Reformation, the breakthrough in which the infinite law was exhausted, divine law annulled, and the Christ-Idol raised on high.

The first cycle of rise and fall began with the crowning of Charlemagne by Leo III, a stratagem by which the pope secured a protector for Rome against the Lombards. Leo never intended to have a hand in docetic processes, not foreseeing the claims of papal power that later arose on the authority of his action. Nor did he desire a break from the Eastern church, taking care on other fronts not to offend the Eastern sees by including the filioque in the Western creed. Yet in establishing a new emperor Leo brought to life the docetic dialectic in both the Roman Church’s break from its ecclesiastical nature (i.e., its union with the other sees) and its dismissal of a stable form for the transition of the greater-lesser. Though one should not overstate the impact of his action at the Constantinopolitan court and among the Eastern patriarchs, none of whom considered it schismatic, they were dumbfounded that their Roman brother should concoct a new emperor in an unheard-of assertion of papal prerogatives. The application of that prerogative symbolized the docetic dialectic at this embryonic stage, for after crowning the emperor as one authorized to institute his empire, Leo paid homage by humbling himself. Some say that Leo knelt before Charlemagne and others that he kissed the ground, but in either case the spiritual authority that had risen above the temporal proceeded to fall below it. In a most surreptitious and obscure way, the crowning of Charlemagne set in motion the series of events by which the church would fall and the scattering would rise.

Only occasionally does the docetic dialectic concentrate in a single event or individual man, more often tracing its arc from rise to fall over generations and centuries. Here the rise of the church and of Western lands continued from Charlemagne through the Carolingian Renaissance, with the papacy asserting its power under Nicholas I (858–867). Bolstered by confidence in his office as God’s representative on earth, Nicholas initiated that separation and confusion between the church and the kingdom that approximates the corruption of soul and body at the fall. On one hand he decreed that no secular authority could appoint men to ecclesiastical office, fighting in particular cases to overturn a practice common at least since Charlemagne. In this way Nicholas announced the separation of the church as independent from the kingdom. Nicholas simultaneously exercised his power to force the hand of kings and discipline them when they did not pay him respect, invading their affairs in order to safeguard the dignity and interest of the church. “By me kings reign, and princes decree justice; by me princes rule, and nobles, and even all the judges of the earth,” Nicholas wrote to Charles the Bald, manifesting the papacy’s rise above its limits.10 The rhetoric of separation that justified Nicholas’s reasoning regarding ecclesiastical appointments, and which would defend the distinct position of the church, combined with a supposed right of supervision over temporal affairs whose rationale allowed the pope to interfere in the lower order, to include judging temporal laws and mandating the resistance of clerics against kings when he deemed it necessary. Whereas it would define itself as a higher spiritual authority, the church confused its jurisdiction with the temporal, lording over the business of the body as well as the soul.

Events during the reign of Nicholas also temporarily rent the Western church from its Eastern brethren, introducing issues of lasting importance for the Great Schism. The sudden appointment of the lay scholar Photius to the patriarchate of Constantinople dismayed Nicholas, who considered the controversy that developed between the two sees as an opportunity to assert the primacy of Rome. Though he at first refused to recognize Photius as the legitimate patriarch, Nicholas later offered to accept his title on the condition that the lands of Sicily and Illyricum be handed over to the supervision of Rome. Neither Photius nor the Eastern emperor would yield to these terms, which so incensed Nicholas that he excommunicated Photius without consulting the other patriarchs. At the Lateran Council of 863 Nicholas ordered that Photius step down, declaring the supremacy of Rome over the whole church in spite of the protesting emperor. These actions put Rome and Constantinople in a temporary state of schism.

The rivalry that soon developed between Rome and the Byzantines over the lands of Moravia and Bulgaria intensified the breach. Both parties believed that they possessed the right to proselytize these lands, with the Byzantine missionaries first arriving and establishing their churches. When the Roman missionaries followed, they were reported to have attacked Eastern clerical customs regarding marriage and to have insisted on inserting the filioque into the Nicene Creed. Photius and the other patriarchs would not tolerate this doctrinal addition, considering it mistaken and unauthorized by the councils. In light of these developments Photius convened a synod in 867 that deposed and excommunicated Nicholas, who passed away before news of the decision arrived at Rome.

Though the schism did not last long, it highlighted questions of papal authority and the legitimacy of the filioque that would eventually lead to permanent division. Indeed, the course of the papacy under Nicholas represents the dual movement at the heart of the docetic dialectic. The separation of the Western church from its natural union with the East as exemplified in the schism, a break resulting on the Western side from unwarranted claims of papal power, is the break of the soul from its nature as it grasps for a knowledge beyond its limit. At the same time, in Nicholas the papacy manifested the upward movement of the docetic dialectic in which the soul leaps away from the temporal body—the political kingdom—before becoming confused with it, the latter a sign of the fall below that body that is to come. For in Nicholas the papacy ascended to a height from which it would soon descend.

The initial fall of the Western church occurred not long after Nicholas, when from the second half of the ninth century into the eleventh the papacy suffered devastating corruption. With the decline of the Carolingian Empire the popes found themselves without an external protector, with the result that they became the victims of local power brokers. Prominent Roman families and their factions engineered sedition against pope after pope, occasionally submitting the pontiff to brutal treatment. The popes themselves collaborated in plots to preserve their position while indulging in various immoralities. There were many low points during the nearly two centuries of the fall, with perhaps the lowest coming during the reign of Stephen VI (896–897). The pope ordered that the corpse of his predecessor Formosus be exhumed and placed on trial for numerous crimes, finding lifeless flesh guilty and punishing it for infractions supposedly committed during Formosus’ pontificate.

Though still respected by the church throughout Europe as the throne of Saint Peter, during this era the papacy became practically irrelevant to wider religious and secular affairs. Europe faced external enemies from multiple directions and lacked rulers with the strength to maintain peace on the local level. The people lived under a more or less constant threat of conflict, while congregations continued under local military aristocracies that reigned through a combination of military and spiritual authority. In this context the appointment of local clerics by temporal rulers took a turn toward the overt subordination of the church to the kingdom. The buying and selling of bishoprics by local rulers introduced morally unworthy characters into the service of God, sullying the sanctity of the spiritual office under political affairs. The priestly ranks swelled with simoniacs who cared predominantly for their livelihood with little thought for delivering grace to parishioners. Just as Leo had placed the crown on Charlemagne’s head before bowing in homage, the church descended from papal superiority over temporal rulers in Nicholas to the decay of the papacy and the servitude of the church before local magnates.

In addition to the subordination of the spiritual beneath the temporal, the fall during this time was characterized by externality in the religious life of the individual. As late as the eleventh century practices of penance, which followed confession and preceded absolution, had no noticeable emphasis on inward sorrow. This is not to say that the individual’s motives were irrelevant, but that the idea of reconciliation with God consisted principally in bodily activity without a complimentary recognition of the turning of desire to God’s will. Confession occurred rarely and possessed a character more communal than individual, concentrating on obvious and heinous infractions against God’s law and the well-being of the group. The idea of searching one’s heart to its depths, discovering the multitude of one’s sins and laying them before God for pardon, had yet to flower in the Christian mind. In the 900s, officers in the church would have considered such an exercise unnecessary if not impossible. The practical understanding of the religious life and its devotion, in its diminished attention to the inner man, resonated with a social reality in which the kingdom trampled over the church and local clerics had scant regard for the qualities required by the religious office.

By the first half of the eleventh century the initial rumblings of a second iteration of rise and fall, the medieval Grand Dialectic, had begun to appear. The monastic tradition of the tenth century typified by the monks at Cluny had advocated a life of withdrawal into the cloister, discipline according to the Rule of Benedict, and prayer for a disordered world. The monastery during that century provided a singular alternative to the chaos of secular existence, and during the eleventh century much of that singularity remained. But an alternative also grew to prominence during the early 1000’s that embodied the docetic dialectic in both its arc as the greater-lesser and its tendency to strife. Energized by the disease of simony and driven toward the reform of society, independent monks and occasionally entire monasteries appeared that modified the tradition of Benedictine and Cluniac monasticism in favor of a more active engagement with the society beyond the cloister.

The monks advancing the new perspective saw themselves as paradigms of Benedictine obedience, practicing a severe eremitical life or hailing from monasteries that maintained an unusually strict observance of the Rule. They were not dropouts or apostates from the Benedictine way but its perfecters, super-monks whose rigor outperformed the common monastic habit. The attitude of moral superiority inherent in such self-recognition ironically justified contact with the laity, a practice forbidden by traditional interpretations of the Rule. The confidence of being the greater coincided with the practice of the lesser as those supposedly above the Rule granted themselves the liberty to break it. Citing caritas as their motivation, the new monks poured over the boundaries of the monastery, leaving the neighbor-love enclosed within it in order to purge the secular church of simoniac clergy. Their harangues against tainted representatives of Christ threw the church into turmoil in various places, threatening it with local schism as the price of purification.

The attitude and activities of the reforming monks illustrate the contradictions inherent in the docetic ethos. On one hand they viewed themselves as justified in preaching to society because of their moral holiness, but on the other their arguments in support of their activities referred to the duties of Christians considered in general. The monks therefore appeared as a higher and distinct order vis-à-vis other monks and the laity at the same time that they defended their activities by reference to “universal” Christian principles. The ideological paradox that joins the especially separate and holy to the universal and common went hand-in-hand with the monks’ habit of contact with the laity in breach of the Rule. The monks are among the earliest examples of the higher lawbreakers that reappear as Docetism’s vanguard of social conflict and division, a group so possessed of its superiority that it can fuse with average men without sacrificing its sense of privilege. This pattern of confusion and separation emerged on a larger and more destructive scale as the Grand Dialectic matured into the war of the church against the kingdom, a conflict in which the church affirmed its distinction from the temporal order only to use that distinction as a rationale for lording over temporal affairs.

The interests of reforming monks and the papal leadership intersected only occasionally, but found a mutual champion in Leo IX (1049–1054). Two months after assuming the pontificate he convened a synod in Rome that denounced simony and violations of clerical marriage, the first papal proclamation regarding these issues in the eleventh century. Yet the most important events ascribed to Leo’s reign do not concern the denunciations, which he did not vigorously enforce, but the divisive affair in Constantinople involving legates acting in his name.

The controversy included intransigent and volatile figures on both sides, with Cardinal Humbert sent as a Roman legate to negotiate with Michael Cerularius, the patriarch in Constantinople. Cerularius had heard that Roman leaders in Norman Italy were prohibiting Greek forms of worship in their territories, and used this as an excuse to return the favor by prohibiting Roman-style worship in the Byzantine capital. The papacy dispatched its legates in response, hoping to settle the differences between the two sees. Their efforts resulted in a series of miscommunications and inflammatory exchanges that worsened the conflict, which culminated in July of 1054. Fed up with Greek insouciance and led by Cardinal Humbert, the legates strode into the Church of Saint Sophia and presented a Bull excommunicating Michael Cerularius and his high officials. The Bull refused the title of patriarch to Cerularius and accused him of multiple crimes, condemning him for failing to insert the filioque into the Greek version of the Nicene Creed. When news of the Bull spread through the city, the people exploded into riots. The emperor then demanded that the Bull be publicly burnt and the legates anathematized in order to restore calm. By this time the legates had embarked for Rome, declining to return to negotiate a new concord when summoned by the emperor.

The Eastern emperor and Cerularius did not envision a permanent break with the papacy in the wake of these events, pinning the blame on the legates rather than the papal office per se. A later pope could have acted to reverse the growing ill will between the two sees without losing face as the patriarch of Rome, still regarded as primus inter pares by the remaining sees. The officials at Rome interpreted the matter differently, lending to it the centrality that it has maintained in the Roman tradition as the beginning of the Great Schism. The legates had friends of high rank in Rome, including the future Pope Gregory VII, and from this circle the view took hold in the West that the pope’s representatives had acted with righteousness and that the excommunication of Cerularius was legitimate. The legates, it was thought, had acted upon the authority of the pope as ruler among the patriarchs, justly expressing the papacy’s qualitatively higher position. Though the papal team had not included the church in Constantinople in the excommunication of its leader, the West would come to see its Eastern counterpart as continuing to elect and approve of schismatic bishops. The West had a stronger consciousness of its break with both the leaders and the laymen of the East, a consciousness that bore tremendous significance for the vigor of Docetism.

The Grand Dialectic presumed the break of the church from its nature not only in the growing chasm between West and East, but in the West’s confirmation of that distance as righteous on the grounds of its ecclesiastical superiority. At the fall, the soul breaks from its limit in an unwarranted and disobedient grasping for knowledge, an illegitimate attempt to rise above its station. In like manner, the papacy broke from the East in an assertion of authority unwarranted in light of the tradition of the councils. Thus the papacy initiated the first aspect of the double movement in which the church, like the disobedient soul, becomes divided from its nature at the same time that it rises as a prelude to its fall. With the debacle in 1054 Rome unwittingly turned its attention toward the infinite, a trajectory raised to violence during the reign of Gregory VII.

The dialectical rise and fall began in earnest during the reign of Gregory, who initiated the church’s laborious and painful division from the kingdom. Taking up the problem of simony with a determination well beyond his predecessors, Gregory rejected the lay right of investiture as the solution to the church’s ailment. In February of 1075 he issued a decree making lay investiture illegal, and in the next month the papal register records the Dictatus Papae, a series of proclamations that asserted unheard-of powers for the pope in the spiritual and the temporal realms. The Dictatus proclaimed that “the pope alone can depose or reinstate bishops,” that “the Roman Pontiff alone is rightly called universal,” that “the Pope is the only one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes,” and that “he himself may be judged by no one.” These affirmations signaled the elevation of the papacy to a power in excess of its limit and representative of the infinitizing dialectic, summoning the spirit of Nicholas I while declaring the supremacy of the pope before spiritual and temporal authorities. Nor did the Dictatus stop with these pronouncements, going on to declare that the pope “may depose emperors” and that he “may absolve subjects of unjust men from their fealty.” Gregory’s affirmation of these rights insulted Europe’s royalty and threw society into an uproar, consequences he tolerated in light of the authority he believed that God had bestowed upon his office.

Lay investiture remained the principle point of contention, bringing the pope and the kings into direct conflict. Temporal rulers were used to installing men they trusted as bishops—often relatives and cronies—and did not look favorably on having local bishoprics, with their land and wealth, transferred to papal control. In this context, Gregory’s proclamations split local officials of the temporal and spiritual orders according to their loyalty: would they side with the local temporal ruler or, in the case of Germany, with the emperor? Or would they join the reform instigated by the pope? The emperor Henry IV refused the pope’s demand to invest German bishops, and Gregory answered by deposing and excommunicating him. Henry’s enemies in Germany then took the side of the pope, using papal policies as grounds to incite a revolt against the emperor. The friends of the deposed ruler subsequently viewed the lord of Rome as having facilitated civil war across German lands, castigating him as a disingenuous and belligerent pontiff whose severance of the church from the kingdom had provoked the flow of blood.

Gregory defended his program of reform by assembling a team of legal advisers and tasking them with the development of arguments that would substantiate his agenda. From roughly 1080 forward the pamphlets distributed in support of papal claims display a preoccupation with grounding the pope’s positions in reputable authorities. Both the papists and the imperialists soon showed a concern to bolster their rationale by appeal to biblical verses and canonical traditions. The papists produced the “Collection in Seventy-Four Titles,” a compilation of ecclesiastical rules culled from the Church Fathers and presented as a guide for settling disputes in Germany. In the archives of the Lateran the pope’s advisors also found the tomi, accounts of early papal correspondence that made their way into Cardinal Deusdedit’s Collectio canonum. Similar collections took shape in the hands of papal advocates like Anselm of Lucca, whose work gathered the rules of the Fathers and the early councils into a single book of laws. In this manner the pope’s legal specialists sowed the seeds for the most insidious and devastating form of infinity that struck the church. The development of the ecclesia as a legal institution with codices distinct from theology and liturgy, a tendency that ran amok in the twelfth century and beyond, defined the church’s alienation from its nature and its path toward indefinition. It laid the groundwork both for man as the scattering and for the Christ-Idol who validates him.

Shades of the scattering were outlined in the work of Manegold of Lautenbach, a supporter of Gregory’s excommunication of Henry and of the papal right to release subjects from unjust kings. In Manegold one finds the scattering intimated from the perspective of both the individual and the universal, though in each case in an understated and embryonic way. In the first instance, whereas a generation earlier Peter Damian had employed the notion of officium to justify the power of the office over potential moral lapses in the individual holding it, claiming that the grace of the priesthood overcame the deficiencies of those who gained their position by simony, Manegold reversed the logic with respect to temporal rule such that morally insufficient individuals negated the power of good order inherent in royal station. He shifted the crucial consideration to the moral worthiness of the office-wielder rather than the good of the office, subtly denying the efficacy of the office to correct the wayward holder. Such an attack suggests the new consciousness of man qua individual that flowered in later centuries in both religious affairs and in society on the whole, witnessing to the gestation of the scattering in the Gregorian era.

Manegold introduced another important shift by altering the theoretical relation of the people to their temporal rulers. The notion of contract, which based royal authority upon the will of the people (that is, the nobles) rather than divine ordination, had already appeared in the writing of Bernhard of Hildesheim, a member of Manegold’s circle. This development was momentous on its own, but Bernhard restricted it by arguing that in the wake of choosing the king the people had no right to remove him. Manegold denied a permanent rule based in the contract in favor of the people’s judgment on whether and when the king might have broken the agreement through injustice, at which point they could legitimately overthrow him. By this theory Manegold justified revolution in temporal affairs given appropriate circumstances, a rationale that he exploited in support of Gregory’s conflict with Henry. In addition to suggesting an advanced awareness of the individual as office bearer in lieu of consideration of the office borne, Manegold fought for a new consciousness of the popular will as sitting in judgment on temporal rulers. He abstracts both the individual person and the collective from the outward office or law that would prescribe the boundaries for action, empowering the abstraction as an element potent enough to overturn its limits. Man rises above the law that would contain him in a logic that foreshadows the fuller emergence of the scattering.

Gregory died ignominiously in 1085, but the docetic spirit that had stormed through him continued after his passing. To the forms of infinity birthed during his reign, including claims of universal papal jurisdiction and the seeds of a distinct legal consciousness in the church, the papacy presently added a third. Under Pope Urban II, the Western church embarked on the first of its Crusades, the military and economic ventures that projected Western might over international boundaries in search of conquest. Of the forms of infinity that Docetism introduces into religious and temporal affairs, international expansion is perhaps the most obvious. The docetic spirit can hardly survive apart from such expansion, which has accompanied its development from these early centuries until the present day.

The First Crusade manifests Docetism’s recurring treachery, here personified in the high expectations of Urban. He believed that the Crusades would help mend the breach between Eastern and Western Christians, pleasing the Eastern churches and the Byzantine emperor while uniting Christendom against a pagan enemy. Urban did not understand the docetic logic and its deception. He did not comprehend the infinitizing content of international military action nor its destabilizing tendencies, but unintentionally used that which divides in the hope that it would bind Christians together. So the Crusades, developed with the best papal intentions, exacerbated the divergence between West and East. Besides engaging in a holy war whose concept was suspicious to the Greeks and conducting themselves in an unruly and disrespectful manner while traversing Byzantine lands, the Crusaders aroused the ire of the Eastern sees by forcing the sitting patriarch out of occupied Antioch and replacing him with a Latin bishop. Their supposed Latin benefactors consequently appeared to ecclesiastical leaders in the East as foreigners rather than fellow-Christians, an impression worsened by the expedition against Constantinople in 1107. The march on the city had the blessing of then-pope Paschal II, whose approval was viewed in the East as a declaration of Holy War on the empire. The venture was short and an unqualified failure, but it cast a long psychological shadow. In conjunction especially with the ousting of the Antiochian patriarch, the military threat against Constantinople heightened the antipathy of the East toward the West in the opening decades of the twelfth century. The advances begun with high papal hopes terminated in unforeseen and utterly contrary results, irritating the rift that Urban had hoped to close.

The twelfth century saw the maturation of the three modes of infinity initiated in the eleventh: the popes launched new Crusades from the middle of the century to its conclusion, intensifying the breach between West and East; they embraced exalted estimates of papal supremacy vis-à-vis temporal rulers and fought to impose their might in worldly affairs; and the Roman church progressively transformed into an institution with a distinct legal identity. The last of these stands above the others, for the expansion of ecclesiastical law beyond its roots in theology and liturgy constitutes the side of the infinitizing movement that most directly brings man to his consummation in universality. The detachment and growth of the law intertwines with the consciousness of the individual qua individual, who knows himself in abstraction from his public and institutional life to the extent that those institutions embrace an expansive legal platform. As the institution devolves through an alien and limitless law, so the individual regards his new self-consciousness with both delight and confusion. It comes as no surprise that the twelfth century embodied both sides of this phenomenon in a single age, boasting a burgeoning ecclesiastical edifice met step-for-step with a graduated emphasis on the individual.

In that time the Western church spawned a new kind of cleric concerned less with the administration of the sacraments than the business of administration. A managerial class swelled the ranks of Catholic officials, men trained in law and prepared for political careers as much or more than the holier duties of their order. They directed the Western ethos toward legal philosophy, system, and logic, dedicating their energies to the justification of the church’s political prerogatives as an institution at once set apart by its spiritual functions and licensed to weigh in on if not decide temporal disputes. As the church widened its distance from the kingdom, protecting the separation of the two spheres, it also broke with its own theological consciousness, infusing a new and evolving body of law into the institution through experts trained at universities. These new schools responded to the demand for men capable of constructing arguments that would validate the changing ecclesiastical order and its claims regarding the temporal realm. Soon the universities began supplying lawyers on both the papal and royal sides of political disputes, serving as centers of learning for an age confident in its ability to reform society despite persistent legal conflict.

The revolutionary upheavals that pitted the church versus the kingdom provoked a new method for solving the problems of law that they implied. The dialectical reasoning of the twelfth century, which seems innocent enough on the surface, stands as the first instance of a philosophical pattern that reflects the docetic dialectic as a systematic intellectual phenomenon. Mirroring the practical quandary of the law of the pope set against the law of the king, the dialectical method begins not with a single, indisputable authority but with questions raised by gaps or contradictions between authoritative legal texts or within the same text. The dialectic places the contradictions side by side in the effort to establish a new harmony, resolving the contrasting elements until rules that appeared broken or antithetical are reconciled within a broader synthesis. In this way the method hoped to find unity where there was discord.

The dialectical method presumed a view of the law largely unknown in the West. Whereas the Roman legal texts that medieval lawyers used as a starting point did not necessarily imply general maxims or a comprehensive understanding of law, handling particular cases in their particularity and without extending them into universal rules, dialectical legal philosophy sought a system defined by its universal scope and which integrated separate matters of legal doctrine into a coherent whole. This method found itself in a state of contradiction illustrative of the docetic logic. Beginning in the uncertainty of questions and contradictions, the method rises upward in the reconciliation of opposing cases into a new maxim. The new maxim, however, forms the first of two new competing principles that require adjudication, a recognition that submerges what had risen into discernible legal guidance under a new antagonism. While seeking a comprehensive, unified system of legal truth, the dialectic ends up with an asymptotic approximation of that truth that never achieves final answers. The psychological consequence of such an undertaking is not pride at the approximation but despair at a truth that appears more distant as it comes closer, for the comprehensive and systematic grasp of truth for which the system strives is increasingly understood as an impossible goal. In the process the law—and in medieval times this included both natural and ecclesiastical law—becomes seen as programmatic, growing, and reformable, but by that same standard also pliable and, in an implication with which the optimistic legal technicians of the day would not have agreed, unstable. The dissemination of laws in works such as Gratian’s Decretum (1140) testify to an age that hastened legal development while lacking a consciousness of its negative implications. These surfaced only later and in a more personal setting, leading to the dialectical innovations of the docetic genius Martin Luther.

The ballooning class of clerical administrators and lawyers did not ascend without opposition. Humanists of letters and learning, men of literature, poetry, and the arts whose activities define the twelfth century as a time of renaissance, looked on the managerial class with a mixture of concern and disdain. While religious humanists lambasted the new officialdom in satires, others indulged a novel awareness of the individual as seen in the development of self-portraits, deepened explorations of affect in troubadour love songs, and meditations on friendship between pairs thought to mirror one another’s soul. Through these practices the humanists cultivated new, inward attitudes and mores, offering a meaningful alternative to the careerism of ecclesiastical affairs.

The trend toward the individualized consciousness influenced religious no less than secular life. The concern for the judgment of the individual implicit in Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the increased devotional emphasis on participation in Christ’s sufferings, and the inward turn that permeated such writings as Hugh of Fouilloy’s On the Cloister of the Soul prove the presence of a religious personality conceived in relative detachment from the outward affairs of church and society. In the spirit of the worldly monks who preceded Gregory VII, Hugh argued that a holy man attentive to the thoughts and commitments of the inner cloister can engage in worldly activity without detriment to his soul. Like the institutional breach separating the kingdom from the church, the break between the body and the soul had progressed enough that the pious could posit a soul protected by its distance from bodily habits.

The new focus on man’s inner life as opposed to outward action also influenced the Western practice of confession. The popes in the eleventh century had altered the traditional pattern of confession, penance, and reconciliation so that reconciliation followed the admission of sin. This change preceded the twelfth century’s turn to inner sorrow as the crucial element in the sinner’s restoration before God, a stress that went hand in hand with a wider and more consistent adoption of confession among Christians. Though the church did not impose annual confession upon every member until the Lateran Council in 1215, the spirit that recognized its necessity had matured over the course of the 1100’s, advancing with an accent on the remorse of the penitent rather than the absolution given by the priest. In this age men became more concerned with the inner state of the confessing sinner, and in lieu of the focus on externals indicative of earlier penal codes one finds a penchant for self-examination among the devout. Men as prominent as Bernard of Clairvaux developed their conceptions of the spiritual life around the notion of intention, while Peter Abelard defined sin according to the individual’s inner aims in Ethics: or, Know Yourself. The confession booth became an important locus for the assurance of salvation at the same time that the purity of one’s conscience measured the soul’s standing before God.

The age had much to confess in the eyes of the satirists, who saw the ascendance of the managerial class as the betrayal of the church’s ideals. Viewing the technocratic order from the outside and despising the church’s machinery as an arena for opportunists, the satirists felt that things had gone mournfully awry in both the spiritual and temporal orders. They perceived the distortion of reality that lurches behind a society flushed with its sense of progress, whose optimism confuses the accumulation of worldly power with the advance of God’s will. Writing in the latter decades of the twelfth century, Walter of Châtillon contrasted the lawful order of the natural world with the disjuncture that man faced within his society and his nature:

God, who by a fourfold rule

Chaos regulated

Things unequal equalized

And by laws related

All interrelationships

Duly calculated—

Why do you leave only man’s

Nature dislocated?

The discontent inspired by social conditions and the felt fragmentation of man led Walter and his ilk to espouse eschatological views. It seemed to them that the disorder among men presaged the antichrist and the return of Jesus, for how could a state of affairs in which greed and ambition had run rampant go unpunished? How could the Lord not return to set right what had gone wrong?

More than others in this era the satirists apprehended the docetic spirit in their midst, recognizing the fraying of the form that holds man together. The law by which man knows his nature as embedded in institutions, those mediations meant to train him away from sin, was dissolving. By the twelfth century those institutions had lost sight of their purpose just as man felt his abstraction from them, an alienation manifest in his pronounced awareness of the inner life. Thus appeared that simultaneous experience of expectation and uneasiness that accompanies man as his form slides from solidity into possibility, the internal dialectic of raising and lowering that reflects the rise and fall of institutions that throw off their boundaries. The proliferation of ecclesiastical canons and their scholastic study, though they tempted him with the hope of a just society grounded in the rule of the church, signaled man’s ontological distance from the divine law and the undoing of the church’s institutional form as the body of Christ. Through these canons and their twin in the individualized consciousness one discovers man slouching toward universality, approaching the formlessness in which he celebrates his indifference to God’s command. Man imperceptibly melts into the scattering as the principle of his existence, though this movement had yet to achieve the religious validation that would enhance its assault.

That assault raised the war between church and kingdom to ecclesiastical crisis during the reign of emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whose decisions eventuated in dual popes for nearly two decades. From the 1150s into the 1170s one pope claimed authority under the emperor while another proclaimed himself the leader of an independent Rome. During these same decades papal jurists developed arguments that sought to augment papal rights over the temporal sphere. The claim that the church as the soul had priority over the kingdom as the body had been advanced since the time of Cardinal Humbert, with papists often grossly distorting the doctrine in support of Roman aims. They now argued that the “power of the keys” conferred to Saint Peter included the pope’s right to crown emperors, though historically this affirmation derived from Leo’s crowning of Charlemagne. By the end of the century some among the papacy’s advocates leaned toward a theory of papal world-monarchy in which the pope possessed complete sovereignty over temporal and spiritual government.

This theory found its nearest embodiment in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), whose rule presents the apex of the Grand Dialectic. In Innocent multiple forms of the infinitizing movement came to a head: his willful exercise of supreme authority in temporal as well as spiritual government, his push for the Crusade that finalized the Eastern schism, and his codification of a mountain of Roman laws dovetail in a singularly potent expression of the finite’s transgression of its limits. Innocent sums up the advance in which the church breaks from its nature by striving to bottle the infinite within the finite. He is the docetically-empowered giant whose height foreshadows the depths to which the papacy would fall.

Innocent never bluntly argued that the pope possesses supreme temporal authority when justifying his interventions in international affairs, but his theological rationale and his actions imply this conviction. In addition to informing the emperor at Constantinople that the priesthood surpassed the kingship as the soul over the body, Innocent construed the position of the pope by reference to the description of Jesus as a priest of the order of Melchizedek, a man who had been both priest and king. By this argument and others like it Innocent reserved the supreme right of judgment in worldly affairs for the papacy, a right put to work in his resolution of the dispute between two aspirants to the throne of the Western emperor and in his arbitration of controversies between the kings of France and England. Innocent also deposed a king in Norway and had another established in Bulgaria, while laboring to enlarge the Papal States in Italy. Innocent wielded papal power with an authority relatively undisputed by the temporal dignitaries involved, as if all recognized that the augmentation of spiritual powers into temporal rule reflected the order desired by God. This is the unique achievement of his papacy, the height to which no pope before or after would ascend.

The expansion of Innocent’s power reached no less to the East, although the bad consequences of the Fourth Crusade resulted more from indecision than arrogance. Animosity had grown between average Byzantines and the Westerners who had settled in their lands, flaring in the massacre of Latins in Constantinople in 1182. The Crusade of 1204 returned the insult with an intensity not sought by Innocent but not stridently condemned by him. While Innocent had roused Europe to a Crusade meant to reassert the Christian presence in the Holy Land, the nobles who executed the assault turned their eyes upon the Byzantine capital. Prince Alexius, the son of the dispossessed Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus, had approached the Crusaders with promises of money if they should install him as ruler of the empire. The nobility did not consult the pope in taking up the prince’s cause, which failed with the riots that immediately followed his establishment by Latin hands.

Seeing that the coffers in Constantinople were empty, and that they consequently would not receive the expected payment, the Crusaders conspired to seize Constantinople and make it the capital of a new Latin empire. This plan was concocted again without notifying the pope. The three-day sack of the city ensued, in which the Crusaders perpetrated one of the most heinous and unruly crimes in the history of the West. They set the Byzantine libraries on fire, destroying ancient manuscripts and decimating collections of antique art, while committing outrages against Byzantine men, women, and children as well as monks, nuns, and priests. It is reported that a French prostitute strolled through the Church of Saint Sophia and sat on the patriarchal throne while Latin soldiers paid her homage. The Crusaders helped themselves to whatever they pleased, compiling a trove of booty so enormous that it included the city’s priceless treasures as a fraction of the take. The desecration of the city and its shrines grieved the Easterners deeply, especially as a crime committed by supposed brothers in Christ. The memory of Constantinople’s ruin and the sacrilege involved catapulted the dissonance of earlier disputes into overt schism, permanently severing the East from the West.

Innocent’s reaction to the seizure of the city exacerbated Eastern discontent. In fairness, the first report he received did not mention the horrors that the Crusaders had poured out upon the people. Innocent was frustrated to learn that the Crusade had diverted its focus from the Holy Land to Constantinople, but he exulted at the prospect of an eastern Latin Empire that seemed, for the moment at least, to bind the whole of Christendom under Roman rule. His congratulations of the new Latin emperor stung the Byzantine population, while his later dismay upon hearing the details of the sack did nothing to mitigate the resentment inspired by his initial reaction. Far from resolutely denouncing the Western assault upon the city and its churchmen, Innocent supported the imposition of a Latin patriarch in Greek lands, a sign that he accepted the overthrow of Constantinople despite the obscenities carried out during the conquest. The leaders of the Eastern sees and their parishioners could not help but conclude that the Romans were no longer Christian brothers, for how could the pope tolerate such abuses and indulge the illusion of a unified Christendom?

Neither Innocent nor his followers had a satisfying answer to such questions, soon turning from Rome’s relationship with the East to business more pertinent to the Western churches. About a decade after the Crusade Innocent headed the Fourth Lateran Council. Preceded in 1179 by the Third Lateran, together the two councils issued hundreds of new statutes that solidified the church’s grounding in a concept of law independent from theology and lacking an apparent limit to its expansion. With the councils the twelfth century culture of lawyers took a significant step forward, as from the 1190s into the first decades of the thirteenth century the church composed no less than five major systematic collections of decretals. Innocent thus stands at the center of the congealing of the legal consciousness so pivotal for the earlier century into a detailed codex of rules with the formal stamp of the papacy. In 1234 Pope Gregory IX completed the process by amassing a comprehensive collection of decretals including roughly two thousand sections. Joined with the Decretum of Gratian, Gregory’s collection served as the foundation for further political theory as well as the canon law that remains in force in the current era.

The hundred years after Innocent saw the decline of papal supremacy over the temporal sphere, a development ironically forwarded by the grand pope. When Innocent introduced prince Frederick II as the successor of Otto IV, the emperor whom he deposed in 1215, he unwittingly raised up an adversary who harassed the papacy until mid-century. As emperor, Frederick ruled a Sicilian government that operated with brilliant efficiency while setting his sights on subduing all Italy under his authority. Innocent, who died in 1216, would not have dreamed of allowing Frederick such power, and the popes who followed him shared the same aversion to the emperor. For the duration of Frederick’s reign they found themselves on the defensive side of political squabbles and military threats.

Aside from convening a council to condemn and depose Frederick in 1245, Pope Innocent IV used every means at his disposal to gain supporters from across Europe for his duel with the emperor. Spiritual claims and privileges were deployed to effect temporal ends, debasing the papacy in the minds of those it hoped to influence. The papacy was fighting for its political life and, in order to protect its position, had vigorously adopted the habits and attitudes of a temporal political establishment. The popes continued to argue for Rome’s supremacy, claiming that the papacy was imbued with both the sacerdotal and the royal powers of Christ, but their rhetoric was marred by the reality of an emperor determined to ignore papal assertions and annul Roman power.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas lent intellectual credibility to the distillation of the kingdom from the church that developed in the first half of the century. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas affirmed that political life derived from man’s nature as a social animal. Reflection on the nature of man provided a framework for a political life fit for that nature and that facilitates the kinds of activity inherent in its design. By this reasoning Thomas crafted a theory of politics without overt reference to the supernatural or divine law. This theory had a noticeable impact, for just as one could conceptualize the kingdom with lenses that were not self-evidently theological, so kings could justify their powers in distinction from popes. If the pontiffs pointed to the royal rule handed down to them by Christ, after Aquinas the kings could answer that the temporal order possessed legitimacy independent of such rationales.

The dispute over national sovereignty and the right of popes over the nation’s churchmen brought the papacy to its knees, pitting the French king Philip IV against Pope Boniface VIII (1295–1303). The first of their battles concerned the right of kings to tax the clergy. When Boniface announced that kings had no power over the persons and goods in their realms that belonged to the church, Philip answered by halting all exports of currency and precious metals to Rome. This decree deprived the papacy of its principle source of revenue, with the result that Boniface succumbed to Philip’s right of taxation. The second dispute arose over Philip’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment of a French bishop, a matter carried out in spite of canon laws stating that only a pope could put a bishop on trial. After a multitude of papal bulls against Philip that met with the king’s own propaganda campaign, Boniface proclaimed his unqualified supremacy as pope in Unam Sanctam. Promulgated in 1302, the bull affirmed that all the church’s sheep belong to one shepherd, lest they not constitute one flock. It also argued that “the spiritual power has to institute the earthly power and to judge it if it has not been good,” a perspective that elevated Boniface over Philip as a lord over his subject. The bull so emphasized the pope’s authority that it pronounced it “altogether necessary to salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” One could hardly imagine a more explicit and forceful combination of the papacy’s spiritual foundations with its supposed temporal authority.

Philip responded to Unam Sanctam by commissioning a military attack on the person of Boniface, who had recently taken up residence in his hometown of Anagni. In 1303 the king’s leading minister and an army of mercenaries assaulted the town in an effort to find the pope, discovering him after an afternoon of fighting. The minister and an associate entered the papal chambers and saw Boniface, an old man, dressed in pontifical attire and clutching a crucifix. The invaders insulted and mistreated him but could not finally decide what to do regarding their captive. A delay of three days permitted the people of Anagni to expel the mercenaries, with the pope escaping and returning to Rome. Yet the humiliation of the affair had done its work, with a shocked Boniface dying a few weeks later. His successors capitulated to Philip, even lauding the king for the piety he had displayed in his conduct with the earlier pope.

The opening of the fourteenth century intensified the fall initiated in the thirteenth. During this period, the Grand Dialectic hastened its descent as the papacy plummeted beneath the temporal power both in concrete circumstances and on the level of theory. Not long after Boniface the papal throne relocated to Avignon, where it stayed for roughly 70 years. The popes during this period amounted to little more than lackeys of the French kings, having been deprived of their independence and in complete contrast to the superiority of Innocent III. The hierarchy also fell prey to the ills that had troubled it prior to Gregory, permitting the practice of simony that had provided an immediate cause for the eruption of the Grand Dialectic. The fall of the papacy was nearly exhausted in the “Babylonian Captivity” in which the spiritual authority devolved into a partisan of a particular ruler while suffering internal corruption. Its sorry condition was obvious to monarchs both within and outside of France.

Changes in political theory in the early fourteenth century were delicate and profound, indicating Docetism’s maturation into a new phase in its progress toward the Christ-Idol. Some canonists continued to advocate papal world-supremacy in the time of Boniface, with Giles of Rome contending that the authority granted by the papacy’s spiritual functions implied that the pope owned all the world’s material goods. The ocean between the language of spiritual purity and the reality of worldly ambition that characterized papist arguments had rendered them unconvincing to European leaders for decades, and this was no less the case with Giles. At this point royal thinkers continued to take cues from the papists, as a theory appeared in France that mirrored Roman claims inasmuch as it dreamed of the consolidation of vast territories under French rule. The philosopher Pierre Dubois advanced a scenario in which France would gain control over Germany, Constantinople, and Rome in addition to England and smaller European provinces. The fantasy of papal world-domination met its twin in the illusion of a universal temporal empire standing over the West as well as much of the East.

At the fall the soul aspires toward infinity and so descends toward the formlessness of possibility, with the body as the lower imitating the higher in the same dynamic. In like manner the kingdom duplicated the theoretical errors of a church in steep decline, justifying royal rule in the direction of the limitlessness that had progressively characterized papal aims since Gregory. The royal theorists who posited an infinite kingdom found their precedent in the theoretical application of that infinity to the church. This conceptual confrontation of infinite versus infinite equalizes the spiritual and the temporal and so undermines the higher by negating its superiority. Just as in fallen nature the flesh wars against the spirit in order to subdue it, the late-medieval kingdom pressed the church under its heel both through the physical relocation of the papacy to Avignon and in its claims to royal universality.

Nor is this all. John of Paris, arguably the most sophisticated thinker in his time, also maintained that the church and the kingdom each possessed a distinct and universal dominion, the church in spiritual affairs and the kingdom in temporal government. John then proceeded to redefine the pope’s authority in terms of his administration of ecclesiastical goods that belonged in fact to the people. Like temporal rulers, the pope exercised power for the benefit of the community and gained legitimacy from the righteousness of that exercise. This view had been popular regarding kings at least since Manegold, and John’s innovation was to apply it to ecclesiastical rule. The point was not that popes and kings did not retain legitimacy from God, as they did for John and would for some time, but that in John’s thought pope as well as king owed a substantive debt of responsibility to the populace, who could depose the pope through temporal rulers if he failed in his duties. In John one therefore finds both the dualism of universalized and distinct spheres of temporal and spiritual government and the grounding of each in a constitutional responsibility to the people.

John’s theories carry disturbing implications in light of the docetic logic, which they exemplify in a nascent but striking degree. For the universalization and distinction of the church and the kingdom, institutions designed to train man in his finitude, implies their foundation in the negative infinity of appeals to the people. Their growth toward the infinite in principle matures as they realize their legitimacy in the moment when law has not yet become concrete, in the will of a people unconditioned by an understanding of their lives as embedded in that law. John did not explicitly conceive of the people as so unconditioned, but in the constitutional principles that he helped set in motion the law in its divine and natural expressions eventually became detached from and subordinated to the community rather than the community being embedded in it. By this inversion the law relinquishes its validity inasmuch as it falls beneath a principle of change. Isolated and extracted in a way that would develop out of John’s constitutionalism, the people are that uninterrupted motion that is the abolishment of law and the fulfillment of its universalization. To base both temporal and spiritual institutions in the people is thus to base natural and divine law in the scattering. Such a direction prepares the way for Docetism’s annulment of law as the prerogative of man and his social world.

That world appeared, in the fourteenth century, to have relinquished the last vestiges of beneficent order. When the popes returned to Rome from Avignon, the Western Schism erupted as a new punishment. In the schism the papacy descended into jaw-dropping legal and practical confusion, with a multiplicity of popes advocating for the throne. That each made his case with cogent arguments presented a unique threat to papal legitimacy, undermining the viability of the office until the schism’s resolution in the fifteenth century. The same age saw Europe’s entrenchment in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1475), a conflict in which the papacy lacked the moral authority to criticize participating nations. Defined in the fourteenth century by papal alienation from Rome and the onset of war, not to mention the horrors of the Black Death (1348–1350), Western Christendom had fallen into such disrepair that rebirth might not have seemed possible.

During this age theological transformations emerged that mysteriously resonated with the foregoing legal changes in the Church. When the institution developed a new and ever-expanding law in canons distinct from theology and liturgy, it unintentionally introduced a new ontology and a new nature into the Church in contrast to the old. In earlier periods the mystery of the sacraments limited the reach of the law, but the legal apparatus knew no such limits, affirming in their place a systematic striving for perfection. The rest of the Church’s nature in the habit of grace thus came under threat from the infinite, and how long would it take before a new understanding of God took hold that mirrored the ontological shifts in Christ’s institutional body? If the Church could adopt a nature based on an infinitized law, could men not conceptualize God in the same manner? Could they not imagine him as an infinite law unbound by rest and reason, by the habit and pattern of nature? The nominalist God envisioned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries does just this. The essence of this God as absolute power extends without boundary over all things, asserting itself beyond reason as well as good and evil. If something is good, it is so because God decrees it and not because of the thing’s intrinsic rationality. A thing is evil likewise because God decrees it, not because of the corruption of a nature that is good as rational. The meaning of the thing moreover lies not in its nature but in the use to which God puts it, so that the form of the nature becomes immaterial to its content as an object of use. God himself arguably has no limiting nature or reason, but is an infinite will.

If men conceived of God as an infinite law, they could equally well portray themselves in his image. The Renaissance thus introduced the third rise in Docetism’s ongoing dialectic, a period of apparent resurrection unto life, of pride in man’s capacities after the preceding time of suffering. A few men of genius towered at the Renaissance’s cultural peak, determining the tastes and sensibilities of countless others across Europe. The universal man, the man of the Renaissance, mastering as many activities as he could, dedicating himself to various and unbounded pursuits, manifested the heights latent within the human spirit. Painter, engineer, and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci exemplified the ideal. He enjoyed the life of unlimited possibilities praised by Pico della Mirandola, who stressed the choice of man in reaching his potential while lauding him as a chameleon who could change for the better. So does the scattering deceive, so does it lead its captives into the hope of betterment through paths that conceal decline. What appears as his freedom and his exaltation unto universality belies the ontology of formlessness. The man of possibility is man scattered, a man celebrated in the Renaissance by those who lacked a consciousness of his deeper meaning. That new depth’s bottom, however, would not be touched until the Reformation, where man’s religious orientation suffered perhaps its profoundest blow. It was not the Renaissance but the Reformation that catapulted man into formlessness, that launched the scattering into domination of man and his world. There, and there alone, came the revelation of the Christ-Idol.

II

Docetism’s Grand Dialectic undermined the papacy as a channel of divine law in a number of ways. The collapse under Boniface VIII diminished the popes into puppets of French kings in the same era that John of Paris defined papal legitimacy in terms of the pope’s administrative responsibility to Catholic believers, suggesting a novel theory of ecclesiastical constitutionalism. While the church relinquished spiritual authority under the supervision of a particular nation and as its partisan, on the level of theory the grounding of the pope’s legal authority in substantive appeals to the people based his right in the collective as an entity subtly distinguished from the law and granted the power to judge it. These two challenges to a Catholic law grounded in the supreme rule of God joined hands in the early fourteenth century with the silent and more stunning transformation in which the practice of confession grew to require the enumeration of absolutely all of one’s sins in order for one to receive assurance of pardon. If in the prior two developments Docetism lay coiled and ready to strike, in the latter it delivered the venom. For the infinite law imposed upon the conscience in confession, the inward parallel to the multiplication of the church’s legal canons, served only to undermine that law’s viability. From the Christian’s imprisonment in this confessional cocoon would be born the Christ-Idol as the god of man liberated and universalized, indifferent toward and without the law. Thus Docetism unveiled the dagger supposed to bear the name and power of Christ, a weapon that executed its first strike in the Reformation.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Western man grew increasingly anxious over the state of his soul, fomenting that anxiety through a progressively burdensome requirement in confession. Theologians and church officials deemed it necessary that man count what lies beyond counting, that he present each and every sin to God so that the Savior might wipe it away, cleansing the conscience and relieving guilt. The Christian pursuing salvation embarked upon the most stringent inner examination, holding up the smallest sin as much as the greatest in order to expose and eliminate it in the grace of God. This trajectory flowered as the infinitizing of the law in the conscience and the consequent demolition of natural righteousness, and at its apex it dominated the minds of two men. Towering above the preceding age as its paradigmatic product is Martin Luther, the melancholy monk who obliterated the bonds of man’s spiritual being. Luther brought the docetic dialectic to a new pitch, redefining the spiritual freedom of man as the necessary maturation of inner tyranny under the law. At his side stands John Calvin, the mastermind who applied the dialectic of the liberated conscience to man as such, energizing powers that have alienated him from his neighbor, his society, his natural environment, and from the law of his being qua man.

As a young monk, Luther took up the law with unusual vigor, trusting in it as a way of righteousness. His years of confidence in devotion, fasts, ceremonies, and worship as if these could save defined his early efforts toward salvation, in which he sought justification via the law. When this way of justification brought on anxiety, Luther felt the temptation to continue to trust in the law, promising God that he would fulfill all of the law’s commands while doubling his determination along that course. Looking back on this way of life in the Commentary on Galatians (1531), Luther observes that “those who perform the works of the Law with the intention of being justified through them not only do not become righteous but become twice as unrighteous . . . I have experienced this both in myself and in many others.” He then explains in some depth the dynamic of the conscience that seeks justification via obedience. This passage, a reflection of Luther’s personal development, hints at the docetic innovation in which the oppression of the conscience under the law precedes its liberation in the grace of the Christ-Idol:

“Therefore anyone who seeks righteousness through the Law does nothing by his repeated actions but acquire the habit of this first action, which is that God in His wrath and awe is to be appeased by works. On the basis of this opinion he begins to do works. Yet he can never find enough works to make his conscience peaceful; but he keeps looking for more, and even in the ones he does perform he finds sin. Therefore his conscience can never become sure, but he must continually doubt and think this way: ‘You have not sacrificed correctly; you have not prayed correctly; you have omitted something; you have committed this or that sin.’ Then the heart trembles and continually finds itself loaded down with wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely, so that it deviates further and further from righteousness, until it finally acquires the habit of despair. Many who have been driven to such despair cried out miserably in the agony of death: ‘Miserable man that I am! I have not observed the rules of my monastic order. Where shall I flee from the countenance of Christ, the wrathful Judge? If only I had been a swineherd or the most ordinary of men!’ Thus at the end of his life a monk is weaker, more beggarly, more unbelieving, and more fearful than he was at the beginning, when he joined the order . . . The Law or human traditions or the rule of his monastic order were supposed to heal and enrich him in his illness and poverty, but he became weaker and more beggarly than the tax collectors and harlots . . . Therefore neither past nor present works are enough for him, regardless of their quantity or quality; but he continually looks at and looks for ever-different ones, by which he attempts to appease the wrath of God and to justify himself, until in the end he is forced to despair . . . Therefore it is impossible for men who want to provide for their salvation through the Law, as all men are inclined to do by nature, ever to be set at peace. In fact, they only pile laws upon laws, by which they torture themselves and others and make their consciences so miserable that many of them die before their time because of excessive anguish of heart. For one law always produces ten more, until they grow to infinity. This is shown by the innumerable Summae that collect and expound such laws . . . ”

Though in it Luther describes the way of perdition by sustained trust in the law rather than justification as the transition from law to grace, this passage informally outlines the law’s transformation from presenting a temptation to seek one’s righteousness through it, which Luther elsewhere refers to as its abuse by the believer, to what he calls the law’s proper theological use, that of bringing the Christian to a robust knowledge of sin, reducing nature’s powers to nothing and denying their contribution to justification while nourishing despair of the law as the way of righteousness. Applied to Luther’s own experience and given a voice in the passage, the mediating term between man’s approach to the law as that meant to “heal and enrich” and its eventual terminus in despair is the recognition of the law’s infinite demands. Everywhere the Christian looks, good deeds required but undone swallow obedience performed. As the commands multiply, pressing down upon man by their uncontrolled expansion, he perceives that the law has become limitless, even infinite. The law mutates from a promised way of justification into a tomb and a prison because it lays an unlimited demand upon a finite creature. Yet in this movement the law also begins to perform its right theological use in convincing the believer of the utter insufficiency of works for justification, driving him to despair at nature’s “wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely.” So long as man continues to trust in the law despite this despair, a sinful agony consumes him. This is the docetic tyranny of the law over the Christian, the inward manifestation of an ecclesiastical power that transgresses its limits without restraint.

The passage implies an interaction between law and nature that moves in contrary directions. The law initially appears as the way to justification and man clings to it as such. This hope in the law remains present despite the contrary pressure exerted by the expansion of the commands to infinity, whereby the Christian finds that the law undermines its own lure toward justification and destroys confidence in nature’s power to procure that justification via obedience. The law holds out assurance of salvation and peace of conscience only to pull them back, submitting Luther and his believer to a deadly teasing from which there appears to be no escape.

The law’s growth to infinity undergirds its role in the “conflict of conscience” or spiritual trial, in which the contradictory vectors of the law attain their highest intensity. “It is the devil’s habit” in this conflict, Luther says, “to frighten us with the Law and to set against us the consciousness of sin, our wicked past, the wrath and judgment of God, hell and eternal death, so that thus he may drive us into despair.” As the product of its increasing boundlessness, the law’s tendency to annul its apparent offer of justification loomed over Luther’s consciousness in moments of angst, so that when he considered the law he immediately perceived its terror. At these times it seems “that the devil is roaring at us terribly, that heaven is bellowing, that the earth is quaking, that everything is about to collapse . . . that hell is opening up in order to swallow us,” in other words, that perdition is sure because nature has no available means to secure grace against its sin. Nature endures its “reduction to nothing” under a merciless law, experiencing its wrath as a “true taste of death.” This anxiety under the law presupposes the promise of justification via obedience toward whose annulment the law itself tends; the law’s ability to terrify depends upon its apparent validity as the way to salvation, a way that the believer endures as the limitless revelation of anguish.

The law’s limitlessness in application to a finite creature means likewise its limitlessness in the realm of being, an infinity achieved by the eradication of its limit in nature’s freedom of will. The law’s commands everywhere convincing man that he is under the curse, allowing no respite from their assaults and convicting him of multiple sins for each single act of righteousness, condemn nature before it acts. This ubiquitous and inescapable condemnation renders human freedom meaningless; it is the law as a tyrannical infinite victimizing the finite will that would hold its boundary. It is also the experiential source of Luther’s dictum that the will is powerless with respect to justification, which is to say that the will suffers the curse no matter what it has done or will do. The insufficient righteousness that the will might claim for itself dwindles into no righteousness at all, just as the individual in the midst of spiritual trial endures the law’s infinity as the roaring of hell and the devil. As the law progressively expands, squeezing its limit into insignificance, it simultaneously abdicates its form, casting off its definition in the believer’s experience as the loss of mercy. The law as a direction toward righteousness given for nature’s benefit transforms into something cold and cruel, a terror to the conscience.

Grace as “the righteousness of God” shatters this process by announcing a way of righteousness completely apart from works and by faith alone, with Luther turning to the righteousness of Christ given freely and received in total passivity. This new way of justification rescued Luther from the torment of the infinite law because it successfully negated that law’s presupposition, that he should take it up as the way of redemption. In the wake of justification grasped by faith alone, the law has lost all power to frighten because it has lost all power to tempt, with its validity as a path to heaven decisively denied. Faith accomplishes what the law’s expansion to infinity could not, overcoming the apparent acquisition of righteousness via the law by the realization of the total lack of righteousness, and thus the utter insufficiency for justification, of nature as well as the law. But in another sense justification by faith alone fulfills the law’s movement of self-annulment, completing the nullification of the law as a way to justification with a power greater than its own unbounded expansion. The total annulment of the law, and therefore the quieting of its terrors, is the passive righteousness that struck Luther as though he had entered “through open gates into paradise itself.” He construed this experience as the sigh of faith in the midst of spiritual trial: “In every temptation and weakness, therefore, just cling to Christ and sigh! He gives you the Holy Spirit, who cries ‘Abba! Father!’ Then the Father says: ‘I do not hear anything in the whole world,’ neither the terrors of the devil nor the threats of hell, ‘except this single sigh’” that is the Christian’s acknowledgment that justification belongs to Christ alone, and that nature and the law play no part.

The final deforming of the law, in which it loses all authority for justification at the same time that it relinquishes all limits, occurs at the hands of grace as a new and different power. Only through this new path of assurance, this justification grounded solely in the work of Christ, does the sabotage of the law’s authority begun in its infinite expansion find its explosive consummation. The law gives up all authority as a way of justification in the believer’s acknowledgment of Christ’s grace “for you and me,” the sigh of “Abba! Father!” that expressed Luther’s turn exclusively to Christ in abdication of the righteousness of the law and nature. In that moment, the law’s movement to infinity gains an equal footing with its temptation as a supposed means to heal and enrich, annulling the temptation and negating the law’s claim to compel. The growth into a tyrannical infinity that is the law’s annulment as merciful concludes in the annulment of the law per se.

In this latter annulment the limit that gave the law definition as law succeeds in its withdrawal at the same time that the law’s authority is abolished. Nature’s turn to Christ by faith alone entails the proclamation that the will is utterly powerless and thereby utterly bound, reducing its freedom as well as its supposed righteousness to nothingness. The free will squeezed by the law’s advance to infinity becomes the limit abolished by the individual’s own abdication of it. This abdication destroys the law’s object in the will, and the destruction of the will means the destruction of the law. The latter no longer has a limit because it has no will to limit it, just as it has no authority because it meets no will to receive its commands. The law no longer makes sense as law, both as uncontained and lawless in its boundlessness and as inchoate in its lack of strength to command. In this vein Luther writes of Christ’s grace as “the death of death”: “Thus in my flesh I find a death that afflicts and kills me”—the law and its punishment for sin—“but I also have a contrary death, which is the death of my death and which crucifies and devours my death,” that is, the death of Christ, appropriated by Luther through faith, that vanquishes the law’s terrors. “Thus the law that once bound me and held me captive is now bound and held captive by grace or liberty, which is now my law.”

The undoing of the law means the liberation of nature, which finding the accusing law accused and the condemning law condemned, grasps its existence under “the law of liberty.” And yet, because the law put to death by grace is also the natural law that gives nature its form, nature suffers a parallel devolution. Because the death of the law negates the principle by which nature possesses definition, one cannot distinguish nature’s liberty from law from its life apart from definition. The liberty realized through faith alone, the righteousness of God through Christ experienced as the gates of paradise thrown open, drives home the fiat in which the law melts into mist so that nature might follow it there. The same grace that proclaims “the death of death” for the law as the giver of nature’s definition announces “the law of liberty” for nature as deprived of form.

This is the work of the Christ-Idol, that man should scale the summit of a draconian demand and at its peak lay hold of a power thought to liberate him from darkness, breaking the bonds of his taskmaster and bursting his limit as if the sun’s light had permeated his flesh. But in his freedom from the law, in his indifference to its commands and his rejection of it as a way of righteousness, standing over it by the blessing of the Christ-Idol, man proclaims for himself a freedom in which he relinquishes his definition. Whereas man cannot absorb the infinite-unto-dissolution by his own power, crying out under the burden it impresses upon his conscience, the Christ-Idol delivers that power and dissolves the law at the same time that nature crumbles into the scattering. Justified by a righteousness acquired through faith alone, man arrogates universality as a curse concealed as blessing, a death concealed as new birth, a de-formation paraded as Reformation. Docetism unmakes his nature into the contradiction that believes in its conscience that it resides above the law when it cannot help but break the law, and indeed has nullified the law.

The Christ-Idol erupted from the dialectical innovation implicit both in Luther’s experience and in the doctrine of justification that he built upon it. The medieval age had developed dialectical reasoning as a juxtaposition of contrary legal cases meant to close the gaps between the principles they espoused, but it did not suggest the realization of one of those principles as accomplished in the movement through its opposite. Dialectics at that early stage acknowledged no intrinsic connection between the alternatives beyond their shared grounding in a more fundamental concept of law. Luther’s experience of the law in the matter of the justified conscience—the same law collected and ordered in the Summae of the preceding centuries—accelerated the interrelationship of the opposites at the same time that it redefined them according to universal categories. Rather than a single legal case or maxim set against another for adjudication, Luther set the oppression of the conscience under an infinite and dominating law against the freedom of the conscience as the total liberation from its oppression. The dialectic now called a comprehensive, inescapable, and merciless demand into battle against an indifference to law that renders its legal character obsolete. The genius of the dialectic consists in Luther’s assertion that man cannot know the liberty of Christ, cannot receive righteousness by faith alone nor assurance of pardon, until he has passed through the hell of the law’s limitless requirement. The law must crush man’s nature, including all his powers of reason and will, until he knows no natural freedom and no hope apart from Christ. The liberty of grace presumes man’s oppression under the law, germinating in the progressive tyranny in which man bows to the infinite demand. The dialectic concludes in the achievement of joy-through-terror, the explosion that Luther errantly understood as forgiveness and a new communion with his creator.

This explosion reveals the Christ-Idol in man’s experience as the validation of his universality. The whole process of docetic grace means man’s liberation from law natural and divine, a process crystallized in Luther’s conscience and brought to dialectical fruition in the electrifying discovery of Christ “for you and me.” For the dialectical expansion of the law divides man against his nature, rending him into two parts. One side of his nature stands with the infinite law, imposing the boundless demand upon the finite creature as if man were the infinite, as if his nature could absorb infinity. Cowering beneath this terror, oppressed and horrified like Luther before the Judge and Tormentor, is that same nature as hopelessly unable to fulfill the law’s demands. Man at once becomes executioner and victim, destroyer and destroyed. The interweaving of nature and law, two realities bound under the grace of form, splinters in a dual and antagonistic movement toward the infinite. The law and nature as its ally accept expansion to infinity as legitimate at the same time that each shrinks into nothingness, though the law better expresses the expansion and nature the diminution. Docetic man does not understand (and Luther never understood!) that the dialectical culmination of brutality in the grace of the Christ-Idol means man’s absorption into the infinite and the disintegration of his being. In the Christ-Idol man stands above the law because he renounces all law; he feels the exuberance of chains broken because he has torn his nature into pieces. Man confuses this advance toward the scattering with beatitude and assurance, with Luther trumpeting the deformity of the conscience as justification by faith alone.

If Luther introduced the dialectical intensification that provokes inner terror for the sake of man’s liberation from it, he did so primarily in the spiritual order. His breakthrough cast down the ramparts of an infinitized ecclesiastical and divine law, destroying the monastery and holding out a new way of life that called itself Christian though it rejected the habit of finitude. Luther nonetheless fancied himself no revolutionary, no disturber of the peace nor political gadfly, but saw himself rescuing sinners from a God depicted as hot with anger by the church. At least in his own mind Luther would keep the natural order and its political systems intact, and this despite his consideration of divine law as a restatement of the natural and as fundamentally synonymous with it. Luther did not rigorously press man into the annulment of the natural order either in its ecological or its political manifestations. It fell to John Calvin, the lawyer of Geneva, to wear the crown as ruler of the new age. Whereas Luther stood as the apex of the docetic movement to decapitate the divine law, summing up the trajectory of his medieval predecessors, Calvin transferred the docetic spirit into the natural order with a logical vivacity no less enthusiastic than the pride of Gregory VII and no less subtle than the philosophy of Manegold of Lautenbach. In the single move of the Reformation Docetism thus captured the queen and placed the king in check, turning its canons upon the natural order before the corpse of the spiritual had grown cold. For it was Calvin’s lot to take up the infinite law in the conscience in a way not far from Luther, but more importantly to unleash the mayhem of infinity into the ethical life of man.

Luther gives an account of man and the law: nature initially trusts in the law for justification; the law then grows into an infinite and merciless tyrant; finally the righteousness of God, given through faith alone, liberates the believer from the law’s horrors. Calvin provides an account of man before God’s judgment: the believer first takes confidence in nature’s abilities; one then comes under an infinite law in the form of God’s unyielding holiness, “descending into the self” until one recognizes nature’s “nothingness”; then the grace of Christ, again the resolution of the dynamic, announces the believer as justified by faith alone, propelling nature into a life of ceaseless obedience. Unlike Luther, however, Calvin applies the infinite character of the law to both the inner and the outer aspects of man’s nature and sees the law’s infinity as illustrative of its embedding in grace.

For Calvin, Christ grounds the law or Old Testament as its foundation; Christ is likewise at work, in a muted way, within the law through its ceremonies and the promises that point to him; and he is the law’s goal as the terminus in which it finds fulfillment. Man approaches the law in its proper context as enfolded within the gracious covenant established in Christ, whose delivery of justifying grace entails engagement in the non-justifying but necessary law allied with it. If, at this point, Luther should accuse Calvin of blurring the antagonism between law and gospel, Calvin would respond that while the law certainly does not justify, God is always one and unified. So also is his revelation through Christ’s grace and the law embedded within it one and unified, a revelation consistent throughout salvation history. Applied to the life of man, this revelation entails not only saving grace, but the uninterrupted obedience that accompanies it.

Calvin’s version of religious experience begins with nature’s temptation to ascribe righteousness to itself in light of its gifts, which include natural virtues and the goodness that men can achieve by human standards. Concentration on these gifts results in pride in one’s merit and a consequent sluggishness toward the obedience demanded by the law. Nature always wants to flatter itself, but this flattery is anathema to justification in Christ. For this reason Calvin directs the believer to the law, not that it should justify, but that by it men might “shake off their sluggishness” and be “pinch[ed] awake to their imperfection.” This “pinching” amounts to a terrifying confrontation with God’s holiness that decimates man’s former confidence. Calvin describes this “descent into the self” from two angles, one focused upon the holiness of God and the other upon the depravity of nature. This movement stands at the center of Docetism’s logic for the inner man, described by Calvin at various points in his writings alternately from the perspective of God and from that of the sinner:

Our discourse is concerned with the justice not of a human court but of a heavenly tribunal, lest we measure by our own small measure the integrity of works needed to satisfy the divine judgment . . . Yet surely it is held of precious little value if it is not recognized as God’s justice and so perfect that nothing can be admitted except what is in every part whole and complete and undefiled by any corruption. Such was never found in man and never will be . . . for [before God’s justice] we deal with a serious matter, and do not engage in frivolous word battles. To this question, I insist, we must apply our mind if we would profitably inquire concerning true righteousness: How shall we reply to the Heavenly Judge when he calls us to account? Let us envisage for ourselves that Judge, not as our minds naturally imagine him, but as he is depicted for us in Scripture: by whose brightness the stars are darkened; by whose strength the mountains are melted; by whose wrath the earth is shaken; beside whose purity all things are defiled; whose righteousness not even the angels can bear; who makes not the guilty man innocent; whose vengeance when once kindled penetrates to the depths of hell. Let us behold him, I say, sitting in judgment to examine the deeds of men: Who will stand confident before his throne? “Who . . . can dwell with the everlasting fire?” asks the prophet. “Who. . .can dwell with everlasting burnings?” . . . “If thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord, who shall stand?”

Calvin’s vision from the vantage point of the Judge is calculated to inspire trembling and consternation. He elsewhere describes this vision from the perspective of the nature so judged:

[Under the teaching of the law] we must then . . . descend into ourselves. From this we may at length infer two things. First, by comparing the righteousness of the law with our life, we learn how far we are from conforming to God’s will. And for this reason we are unworthy to hold our place among his creatures—still less to be accounted his children. Secondly, in considering our powers, we learn that they are not only too weak to fulfill the law, but utterly nonexistent. From this necessarily follows mistrust of our own virtue, then anxiety and trepidation of mind. For the conscience cannot bear the weight of iniquity without soon coming before God’s judgment. Truly, God’s judgment cannot be felt without evoking the dread of death. So also, constrained by the proofs of its impotence, the conscience cannot but fall straightway into deep despair of its own powers. Both of these emotions engender humility and self-abasement. Thus it finally comes to pass that man, thoroughly frightened by the awareness of eternal death, which he sees as justly threatening him because of his own unrighteousness, betakes himself to God’s mercy alone, as the only haven of safety. Thus, realizing that he does not possess the ability to pay to the law what he owes, and despairing in himself, he is moved to seek and await help from another quarter.

These two passages capture the spirit of the observation with which Calvin opens the Institutes, that true wisdom consists in two parts, “the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” This knowledge elevates God to the highest while it strips nature of any claim to righteousness. The sinner comes before the God by whose power the earth was formed, and before whose wrath it quakes with anguish, with the result that he feels the full severity of the law and the unqualified powerlessness of nature to appease its Maker. To know the immeasurable greatness of God is to know the antithetically immeasurable smallness of man, and beyond this, the perdition awaiting sinners apart from grace. The knowledge of God for Calvin presupposes this dual realization of the justice and majesty of God and the worthlessness of his disobedient creatures, a realization constitutive of the descent into the self.

At the heart of this descent is man’s acknowledgment that nature’s powers are “utterly nonexistent,” the perception that immediately precedes the experience of grace. His consideration of that grace “will be foolish and weak unless every man admit his guilt before the Heavenly Judge, and concerned about his own acquittal, willingly cast himself down and confess his nothingness.” To be cleansed of its “thousand sins,” what can a nature that is nothing do? Thus the denigration of nature unto nothingness that Calvin repeats throughout the Institutes, illustrating the progress of the descent into the self until one “betakes himself to God’s mercy alone, as the only haven of safety.”

Looking to Christ out of nature’s depravity, man observes “a wonderful consolation: that we perceive judgment to be in the hands of him who has already destined us to share with him the honor of judging! Far indeed is he from mounting his judgment seat to condemn us!” The man stricken unto nothingness discovers a great solace, a righteousness imputed by the Son’s grace “that he may care for the consciences of his people.” This turn of events elicits the “feeling of delight” in which the heart throws off the threat of perdition just as it is remade in its eagerness to obey, now a heart of flesh rather than stone. The destined graced firmly stamped upon the will, the Christian sets about the life of ceaseless obedience with the zeal of an assured conscience.

The docetic logic pervades this account of inner religious experience. As for Luther, for Calvin the law and nature combine in an initial leaning toward form countered by their eventual reduction to shapelessness. Also like Luther, for Calvin the law loses its form via its expansion to infinity while nature suffers as the object of that expansion, with grace consummating the dissolution of both. The terminology of the story changes from Luther to Calvin, but its ontological meaning does not.

Nature’s initial estimation of itself as capable of some righteousness, relying on its powers of obedience as at least partially sufficient for justification, implies an ontological hope in the acquisition of form through obedience. Nature seeks to rise in form as it seeks justification via obedience to the law. Yet Calvin wants to destroy the impression that nature could add to its justification by completely denying natural righteousness. He insists that man abandon the “human tribunal,” coming before the unmitigated requirement of the law in the person of the divine Judge. Calvin’s descent into the self mirrors the growth of the law to infinity experienced by Luther, though couched in the language of the majesty and wrath of God rather than the multiplication of commands. In each reformer, the power and judgment of the law expand beyond all expectation that obedience could fulfill it. This produces, for Calvin as well as Luther, dual and antagonistic qualities within the law itself. The law promises to give life as the way of justification while its expansion to infinity would annul that promise, and by extension the law’s capacity as life-giver.

The increasing chasm between the righteousness of the Judge and the weakness of the believer presses in upon nature’s earlier confidence in its capacities. Where the will seemed capable of choosing the good, one finds that capability progressively neutered. Where one might have thought reason sufficient to discern saving truths, its conclusions evaporate as smoke and foolishness. For Calvin, the righteousness that nature would hold up as its achievement shrinks before the “thousand sins” that the Judge brings in accusation, just as, for Luther, each single act of obedience is dwarfed by nature’s “wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely.” Surveying the nature that tempts man to pride, Calvin finds it all but helpless before the immensity of God’s judgment. Like Luther’s exhortation that the law reduce the believer to nothing, imposing a “true taste of death,” Calvin insists that nature come to recognize its “nothingness” under a law that bears “the most immediate death.”

By this process both the law and nature reverse their assumed tendency toward form. The law loses definition in its growth to infinity at the same time that God appears unforgiving, severe, and bent upon punishment. Whereas Calvin elsewhere identifies divine law as a restatement of natural law, the identification of the same divine law with the character of God suggests an intriguing distortion, as if the nature of the creature should replicate the ineffability of the Creator. So the law’s infinity crushes the individual by a mercilessness in step with the looming holiness of the Judge. Terrified under this judgment, nature endures the opposite diminishment of form, shedding its definition in the lessening confidence that it possesses intrinsic righteousness. The law expands without boundary while nature contracts into the infinitesimal, with both progressively abdicating the form with which they were designed. The ontological pattern of growth to infinity and reduction to nothing by which Luther’s believer experiences the deformation of the law and nature resurfaces in Calvin.

When man at last releases the claim to natural righteousness in toto, acknowledging nature’s utter emptiness and submitting to the inevitable curse of disobedience, when the descent into the self hits bottom in a psychological hell, then one meets the grace that comforts the conscience, liberating the believer unto joy. Ontologically speaking, when the law has so expanded as to completely annul its support of nature’s inclination to form, its movement to infinity equaling and thereby conquering its appearance as a way of righteousness, nature sincerely perceives its own nothingness, that is, it is freed from form as freed from the law. Just as for Luther, Calvin’s law perishes in the equality in which the movement to infinity annuls the law’s claim to justify, an annulment that renders nature free from the law’s curse. Again like Luther, Calvin implicitly links this culminating ontological event to the appropriation of grace in the heart, the felt knowledge that the Christ, secretly redefined as Christ-Idol, justifies the sinner in nature’s total abdication of form.

This shared ontological story joins Luther and Calvin despite their differences, notably the latter’s embedding of the law within grace. In Calvin’s thought, the underlying ontology and the embedding combine in the ceaseless obedience that he requires of Christians. His calls to “unceasing progress” in and “unwavering attention” toward the law, with a heart “zealously inclined” to obedience by grace and on guard against all kinds of sloth, invest the infinity of the law into ethical life. In the descent into the self, the law expands to infinity as one approaches God’s judgment seat, while in the ceaseless obedience exhorted by Calvin man submits outwardly to the law so expanded. The law whose commands provide no rest, and that goads man on to an apparently limitless expectation of conformity, is the practical meaning of a law whose tendency to infinity is its participation in grace. This life of obedience, according to Calvin, is grounded in, oriented to, and in a muted way expressive of the grace by which God calls his children. It is the sanctification inseparable from the justification to which God destines his elect.

Herein lies the most significant difference between Luther and Calvin: Luther views the law’s infinity, experienced in the conscience, as the antithetical enemy that grace conquers by consummating the law’s regression from form, whereas Calvin, applying the law’s infinity to both the inner and the outer life, embeds a ceaseless obedience within the grace that consummates it. It is implicit in Calvin that the law in its tendency toward form, but especially in the infinitizing movement that annuls that tendency, springs forth from the promise of annulment in grace; that the law’s increasing unboundedness, by advancing toward annulment, expresses the destined abdication of form in an incomplete and muted way; and that grace, at its advent, fulfills the destiny of the law as the obliteration of the form that remains. The law’s fulfilled dissolution differs from its infinitizing progress toward that end, one might say, as a difference in “clarity of manifestation,” Calvin’s distinction between the law and the gospel. The law also meets that end as predestined in a way resonant with the procession of the elect to heaven according to God’s eternal decree. Both Luther and Calvin teach the believer to advance toward grace through an infinite law, a road by which both nature and the law begin to lose their form. Only Calvin makes the law’s inward and outward infinity a participant in grace, destining the law’s path in parallel with the chosen embarked upon it.

That path injects the infinite law into man’s dealings with the natural order, expanding the docetic advance beyond the conscience and the church to the political world as well as the natural environment. Under Calvin’s aegis, man strives to achieve freedom from political and natural law through the annulment in which the infinity that undermines the law equals and negates its authority. Along the way his social existence operates according to a frantic and chaotic intensity, with man sensing that he must perform all his works to their limit and beyond. His economic and scientific ethos push him to undreamed ingenuity in the accumulation of wealth and bodily comforts, while his political ethos celebrates the destruction of a well-ordered society in the name of democratic liberation. In both the divine and the natural orders the docetic spirit rules over man by enslaving him to an ethic that erodes his being, whipping him to reach further above his limit so that his form might descend further below it. Through so cherished and misunderstood an event as the Reformation, Docetism forwarded its reign under the name of Christianity, cloaking its deception under the Christ-Idol. Now disclosed, its principle is a grace that destroys the law, its promise a liberation in universality. Docetism is man’s well-meaning entanglement in the undoing of his world.

III

The spiritual element in man so determines the physical that he always strives to model his physical existence after the image of the god he worships. Man cannot exist apart from such an authority, he cannot live and move without unspoken and often unthought adherence to a divine ontology that both explains his nature and directs him toward conduct in conformity with the explanation. This unconscious adherence appears with full force in men who misunderstand the ontological foundations of their god, losing no potency even if man disavows all gods and declares himself an atheist. The ontology remains though the theological language has dried up, guiding man according to forces that, in the advanced stages of Docetism, he considers mythology and superstition if he recognizes them at all. If the divine ontology instills law and rest, mercy and peace, then man shall move in no small part according to these realities; if the ontology entails lawlessness, cruelty, and war, then man shall suffer their excesses. The ontology of Docetism, whose anti-god reigns over the contemporary world, is the formlessness of law dialectically annulled. Its image is an indefinite universality, its imprint upon man his unraveling as a nature.

Docetism does not work the truth as the conformity of being with its law but falsehood as the dialectical bifurcation of being and combat between its elements. Its god is at once the positing of the law and its negation, at once the construction of form and order and its being torn down. At one pole stands the docetic god as law, a form reminiscent of the eternal changelessness of the true God, of he who is mercy to man and all creation. Whereas the true God infuses grace into men so that they might come to the knowledge of the divine and better obey the law implicit in their natures, however, Docetism vilifies its law-god and announces him as the enemy. Justification by faith alone, the Christ-Idol’s doctrinal fortress, knows the law finally as wrath and cruelty and will not tolerate it. At the other pole the Christ-Idol trumpets a grace alienated from law and thereby from form, redefined as the adversary of both. Thus law and grace, form and formlessness, distilled and opposed within the docetic opposition-god, the divine war-in-act. All law, immutability, wrath, holiness, and authority, which man ought to know among the attributes of the true God’s being, represent one half of this bifurcated god. All grace, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and gospel, what man should also know as attributes of the true God, comprise the other half as the scepter of the Christ-Idol. Law stands against grace as sin against righteousness, two armies arranged for the battle in which the Son negates the negation that is the Father.

That the docetic God proclaims itself fundamentally as grace, love, and compassion, affirming that man can know it through the Christ-Idol alone, means that it exists fundamentally as formlessness. Utter emptiness and indifference ground the docetic divinity as the putative void behind all that is, possessed of neither form nor content, subsisting in its purity as a cloud or a mist. This primordiality cannot continue its existence on its own, for it has no principle of continuity intrinsic to its indefinition. It is deceptive to think of it as an independent principle, as if non-being could claim actuality apart from being or evil were not dependent on the good. Docetism’s primordial abyss must therefore posit its negation, it must affirm the form that is its opposite, but it can do this only because from the start it relies upon the goodness of actual being, including its finite measure. The initial work of Docetism, which it accomplishes through deception, is to invite itself into this being, to become attached to it like a parasite and feed off of it, infinitizing the good measure of being unto mercilessness and fragmentation. Thus the docetic development through the medieval era presupposed the divine law as measured, gentle, and oriented toward salvation, invading that law and perverting it as a preparation for the Christ-Idol. Docetism then furthers the deception by redefining the law in terms of the perversion. Insofar as it is authoritative, docetic law has become this infinity, this terror, this assault upon man, and it cannot but be so. Docetism supposes this infinite law to have arisen from the infinity of the abyss, and in a sense it has. In the docetic logic, law and form burst forth from formlessness in an inexplicable and ultimately false vision of creation, for what Docetism construes as the birth of form from formlessness conceals its reliance on the givenness of nature. Hiding this foundation, Docetism’s god proclaims the evolution of form out of formlessness by an unnamed power, even the power of nothingness. Life, it would seem, evolves willy-nilly out of death, and light proceeds from darkness.

The dialectical advance of the docetic god projects a form, a “Father,” that at first appears congenial, even merciful, maintaining the harmony of being with its law, rising like the bell curve. The mist wavers as though its potentiality would bear fruit, producing a certainty that steadies its uncertainty and a knowledge that qualifies its unknowing. It seems that the unnatural and unlimited shall acquire nature and limit, achieving a higher reality. This is another deception, for the law that seems to bring limitation will later reveal its lack of limit. The infinity of possibility has only withdrawn for the moment to allow the growth of form, but it will reapply its hand. As the nascent form progresses it reveals that the law intrinsic to it knows no end, multiplying and reproducing its demands with each moment, disclosing the law’s intent to impose an infinite possibility upon a divine being supposed to have a definite and singular nature. The more harsh the application of the law, the more unflagging its persistence, the more the form sinks toward indefinition, the unnatural, and the ambiguous. The law increasingly appears cold, remorseless, magnificent, and cruel, pressing down upon form with the unattainable standard until both the form and the law descend toward the primordiality from which they emerged.

The Christ-Idol then appears as the void, unsheathing his sword and issuing the death-blow in which form finally collapses into the deep. This onslaught finalizes the liberation of being from definition in a devastating moment. Formlessness had evolved into form as its negation just as the promise of docetic grace presumes the encounter with the law, and now formlessness negates the negation just as the grace of Christ negates the terror of its legal antithesis. The form of the Son as an unmeasured release slays the content of the Father, bringing the latter’s loss of limit to its conclusion. Though the Father and the Son meet, they have neither communion nor rest and there is no Holy Spirit. In the place of mutual humility and love the combat rages until the Christ-Idol conquers. He receives glory for his victory as the bringer of freedom, the liberator of being from a law that lays an infinite burden upon its definition. He simultaneously receives praise as an equalizer who matches form’s previous rise toward discernibility with its full descent into shapelessness. Yet the Christ-Idol does not oppose the law’s terror but consummates it, he does not limit the infinite requirement and the slide of form into formlessness but brings being into full conformity with limitlessness, releasing it from the horror of the infinite burden only to subject it to universality. In the wake of its liberation this being has no definition, and so oscillates in suspension between being and nothingness, unstable and unsure, an unnatural internal turmoil.

The dialectic of the docetic god evolves into its dissolution: the infinite law comes forth out of grace because grace cannot exist but through this law; the law then ascends and descends in its progress along the infinite; lastly the Christ-Idol arrives to negate the negation, driving what was left of form into formlessness. Docetic man experiences his god and follows his commandments according to this general pattern, replicating its movements within his own nature as a dialectical creature.

The image of the docetic god that man appropriates as his nature and the foundation of his being is freedom. This is man’s unwitting secret, the haughty proclamation whose meaning he does not know, its message obscured like Hebrew read from left to right. Docetic man declares that he is free and stakes his pride upon this declaration, so embracing freedom that he would have it sprout into the largest and most prosperous of trees, defining his dreams, his activity, and his philosophy until it controls his whole way of being as man, until he wakes, moves, and returns to sleep with the unconscious recognition that what he is as man is freedom, and that to pilfer his freedom defaces his dignity. He does not understand, he is frighteningly deceived, because he has failed to uncover the reality underlying his freedom. He does not see that he rightly allies his nature with possibility only when the latter is subordinate and bounded, whereas to exalt possibility as the ground and assumption of his life implies a foundation of quicksand. His freedom is formlessness and indefinition not as a principle oriented to the acquisition of form but isolated as its own end, elevated to the annulment of form and the lawlessness of universality. To this freedom he sings his hymns and odes without realizing that it cannot fashion his being because it strives to liberate him from all fashioning principles. His foundational freedom is a boundless boundlessness, the unrestrained newly untethered to demolish all restraint, the unending positing of a nullity. The freedom that man identifies as his essence casts his origin into the wind. It is the popular word for his existence as the scattering.

Like his divine exemplar man-as-freedom subsists through positing freedom’s opposite, a process to whose inner mechanisms man is ever blind. He begins time and again with trust in the law born out of freedom, a law that has taken on various religious, cultural, and political manifestations across the era since the Christ-Idol. He believes here that through the law he will become what he is meant to be as a man, or there that by the law he can craft an existence shining with significance, or again that he can affirm his life in the face of absurdity through the grace of autonomy. In short, man believes that by positing the law he will find salvation and experience the totality of his nature as free. He believes with unshakable conviction that the law offers a way respectful of his freedom and destined to its fulfillment. He throws his energy into the law with the alacrity and meticulousness of the early Luther, or with the discipline and austerity taught by Calvin. Ignorant of the final antithesis between freedom and form, it appears to him that the law of freedom is an unequivocal form rising, that he is advancing, that life according to this law promises a higher vision of his being.

Yet just as freedom authorized the law’s growth to form, freedom also demands form’s decline. The law that appeared fertile continues along its path unhindered, increasing in intensity and demand at the same time that its benefits fade. Man experiences the dissolution of his form as terror under the law he trusted, whether that law imitates Luther’s anxiety under the internal whip or, in a later expression of the docetic logic, consists in the cruelty of a state constructed to liberate man from want. Man places his hope in a law that must become oppressive inasmuch as he grounds that law in freedom, for freedom achieves itself through the loss of form progressively accomplished as the law loses its limit. Thus the brightest hope of an earlier generation, or even the same generation in its younger years, morphs into a curse for those subject to its later stages. Though he might identify it with outward phenomena, this way of being fundamentally exists within man. It is always his law, his nature, his form that simultaneously expands and suffers under the expansion, that comes to revile what he celebrated a short time ago. To his mind something has gone wrong, and he wonders how plans joyfully laid should result in such ironic and devastating consequences. He fails to perceive that the law grounded in freedom must extend to infinity, undermining its authority through oppression. The law born out of freedom necessarily arrives at man’s fear of his own nature, a fear that, though it seems to contradict the expectation of liberty, proceeds logically from that expectation.

By this point man has assumed the image of the docetic god by bifurcating into two antithetical elements. He is fundamentally the promise of freedom, the child of god destined for a grace that is formlessness, but he is also nature experienced as an infinite and oppressive law, a self-annulling authority that enslaves him. Man endures his nature-as-law as sin and terror against the grace that he seeks, that is his liberation. The law’s self-annulment intensifies, it has not achieved its purpose, and it cannot do so on its own. The law cannot effect an annulment equivalent to and therefore superior over its positing as authoritative, but waits on a unique and special power in order to reach its conclusion as annulled. Man cries out for aid and the Christ-Idol appears with this power, imparting the docetic essence that passes through man as a participant. Man experiences this participation, the gates of heaven thrown open and the embrace of the grace of Christ, as the transfer of righteousness.

The Christ-Idol permeates man in his bifurcation by fusing with the divided elements, nature or man-as-law versus grace or man-as-freedom, and the meaning of the Idol’s arrival turns on the character of the permeation. The Christ-Idol, himself a putative form at war against a putative content, allies his form (the “righteousness” that is his power of total annulment) with man-as-freedom, so that the power of Christ and the possibility of man become a single element. The Christ-Idol simultaneously identifies his content (his name falsely presented as Christ) with man-as-nature or as possessed of form, a shape writhing under the infinite law as immediately identified with it. This bifurcation means that the name of Christ takes on man’s sin while man defines himself by Christ’s power or righteousness. Both man and Christ are present in the anguish of sinful nature under the law and the potential freedom of the law’s annulment, with man assuming the pole of righteousness as annuller while Christ stands at the pole of sin and form to be annulled. Man then channels the Christ-Idol’s power of annulment into an attack upon his content, sacrificing the name of Christ at the hands of Christ’s own righteousness. This channeling completes the dialectic of a divinity divided against itself, the dialectic of form or righteousness divorced from content or name that achieves its demise through man as its mediation. The same channeling turns man-as-freedom against his nature, his form, and the law, with all three subtly understood as his sin, and slaughters the latter in a qualitatively distinct expression of violence. Man executes his own dialectic, moving through the total annulment of his positing as form and nature in order to realize his freedom in formlessness. This double dialectic, presuming the bifurcation of both man and Christ-Idol, constitutes the transfer: man appropriates the Christ-Idol’s power against nature as the defeat of sin, and therefore as both the victory of Christ and the liberation of nature, but man achieves this annulment at the expense of Christ’s name and unto the exaltation of man as annulled or liberated. Both man and the Christ-Idol come to annulment, with name of Christ destroyed and man elevated to grace.

In the transfer the Christ-Idol and man swing from pole to pole, suspended in the equality of form and formlessness, of positing and annulment. There is no longer discernible being, no longer true form, no longer peace, because the instant those things are suggested the annulment equals and obliterates them. The Christ-Idol locks man in the from-to in which his nature knows no solidity and the law has rescinded into mist, so that man is all fluidity and motion. The severance of his being would confuse and overwhelm man if the Christ-Idol had not deceived him into believing that this freedom is blessing, that he has received eternal life and a profounder humanity. Man has become both the executor and the victim of a power of privation breathtaking in its universality, a force so grand that docetic man announces that God is known through Christ alone. Only the Christ-Idol offers grace as the annulment of form, only he redefines man as the freedom and equality whose purity is disintegration.

This is the basic ontological pattern by which man conforms to the image of the docetic god, but it is one multiple, diverse, and often discreet in its manifestations and development. For every distinct law, order, hierarchy, and form that man might assume as a permutation of the definition intrinsic to his nature, Docetism implements a distinct version of its dialectic to undermine and eradicate that definition. Nor does Docetism’s progress move with such strength that it can annul all law at once, but its advance reiterates the cycle of confidence in the law, horror at the law’s enormity, and destruction of the law’s rule. Since the advent of the Christ-Idol, Docetism has proceeded from the destruction of weaker and more peripheral forms of law in the natural order to more central ones, growing to the power of devastation needed to equal the law it wishes to conquer. In this way the docetic spirit has spread over peoples and lands who have never or no longer recognize the name of Christ, until it sets all men against the life given to them.

10. Nicholas adopts these words, spoken in Proverbs by the wisdom that is humble before God, and transforms them into an expression of hubris. The word of God may be on one’s lips while the heart is far from him.