1 John. L. Daniel Cantey
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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