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NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

NS: To what extent do you consider your work constructive philosophy, and to what extent is it of what I’ve sometimes heard philosophers call “antiquarian interest”?

PLM: That dismissive attitude you’ve noticed toward “antiquarian interest” stems from several sources, but the main one nowadays, it seems to me, is the confusion of philosophy’s method with that of natural science. In the sciences, after all, there is a genuine distinction between those who do experimental science and those who study its history. Thinking of philosophy as a sort of natural science, some analytic philosophers make a similar distinction between those who try to solve philosophical problems directly and those who merely study the solutions of predecessors. But that has always seemed to me to be a false dichotomy. I was fortunate to have two teachers early on—first Charles Taylor, then Alasdair MacIntyre—who expose it as such by philosophizing in a way that solves philosophical problems by recounting philosophical history.

NS: How have you applied the method you learned from them in Becoming God?

PLM: The book tells a history of ideas, explaining how certain philosophical theses came to seem inevitable after Plato. There’s some purely antiquarian stuff in there, particularly in the sections on the Pythagoreans, whose numerological views are pretty weird. But I found it crucial to include that weird stuff in order to understand how the history of early Greek philosophy turned out as it did. I tried to show how entangled Plato’s philosophy is with Pythagoreanism, but more importantly the Parmenidean notion of reason—that is, consistency. This notion of reason is still the dominant one among philosophers, so my effort to present and defend the Heraclitean alternative was constructive, or at least tried to be. That said, I doubt the significance of this alternative could be appreciated without a historical approach. I myself couldn’t appreciate Heraclitus until I saw, first, how consistent reason failed to accommodate time, and then how the Heraclitean alternative both succeeded and put its rival’s failure into clear focus.

NS: Could you say more about why time leads to inconsistency? Philosophers today find ways of upholding consistency as well as time, don’t they?

PLM: Time is inconsistent if it is composed of moments. Thanks to the paradoxes of Zeno, Parmenides’ student, Aristotle saw this very clearly. If time is composed of moments, each one must come into being and then pass away. But when? A moment cannot be born in itself, nor can it die in itself, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Neither can a moment be born or die in another moment, for that, too, would be contradictory. So, the principle of non-contradiction forbids moments, as Aristotle saw, yet it also requires them—a consequence he did not recognize. “The same thing,” he writes, “cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time.” Now, referring to fire’s relation to its fuel, Heraclitus called it “need and satiety.” Consistency demands that we analyze this apparent contradiction by distinguishing the duration of fire’s burning into different times. But no matter how finely we do so—ultimately, to the point of moments without duration—the contradiction persists. And likewise for other temporal processes; fire is just a particularly vivid illustration of the problem.

Although philosophers today overlook it, Hegel thought this problem serious enough to develop a new logic. British Hegelians were thus also worried about it. Bertrand Russell began in this tradition, but later rebelled against it to found analytic philosophy—which would venerate, not coincidentally, a logic without tense.

NS: In the ancient world, who won the debate, Heraclitus or Parmenides and Plato?

PLM: The stock answer is that the winner was Plato. This was Nietzsche’s point in his clever parody of Marx: “Christianity is Platonism for the masses.” But that’s too simple. Christianity blends the eternity of Platonism with the temporality of the Hebrew Bible. Time can be holy. Think of the liturgical calendar: there is a whole Week called Holy. That’s a departure from Platonism wide enough to have prompted Augustine, otherwise so deeply indebted to this philosophical tradition, to devote a whole book of his Confessions to rehabilitating time. Like all subsequent Christian theologians, moreover, he had to depart from Platonism’s logic of consistency in order to make sense of the Incarnation, among other paradoxical mysteries. So, in a way rarely recognized, Christianity preserved Heraclitean reasoning about time and its relation to eternity.

To answer your question, then, I don’t think anyone won out exclusively. There are quarters of our culture—analytic philosophy comes to mind, as do mathematics and the natural sciences—where the principle of non-contradiction is a shibboleth. But there are other quarters—continental philosophy, as well as Christian theology—where tolerance, and even celebration of contradiction persists. Come to think of it, that’s what a Heraclitean should expect: conflict about truth, yet truth in that conflict.

NS: Does Heraclitus represent, somehow, a more modern—even secular—view in his affirmation of time?

PLM: Well, it depends what you mean by “modern” and “secular.” No easy task, as The Immanent Frame makes clear! If “secular” means the separation of the divine from ordinary time, then Heraclitus is far from secular—the operation of time is for him the divine itself. “Modern” is a very difficult notion to apply here, which isn’t to say we should give up trying. After all, there are Greek philosophers who seem eerily modern. Many historians of philosophy locate the beginning of the modern era in philosophy with Descartes and Hobbes, who self-consciously revived the ideas of ancient Greek Atomists, Sophists, and Skeptics. But if you locate the high modern in the nineteenth century, as some others do, then it’s significant that the great German philosophers of this period spoke of Heraclitus reverently, presenting him as the inspiration for their own philosophies. “There is not a single aphorism of Heraclitus,” wrote Hegel, “that does not appear in my Logic.” Nietzsche added, “The world will always need the truth, hence the world will always need Heraclitus.” This is an influence historians of philosophy are only now beginning to appreciate. Heraclitus’s best days may be ahead.

NS: Is Heraclitus reminding us—as some might chastise—that secularity carries in it the arrogant, even dangerous aspiration to become a god?

PLM: If he is reminding us of this, then so too is nearly every other pagan Greek philosopher. Many of them saw philosophy as a quest for divinity. First, though, we have to be clear what we mean by “secularity,” as before, reminding ourselves of the threat of anachronism when we’re using it to discuss ancient Greeks. With that proviso, though, we can ask something like this: Was Reason untethered to traditional religion liable to promote megalomania? There were certainly advocates of traditional Greek piety who said so. Pindar, for example, wrote: “Do not, my soul, strive for the life of the immortals.” Such a warning could explain the story of Bellerophon, who plummeted to his death after attempting to reach the dwelling of the gods on his winged horse.

The Greek philosophers largely ignored the warnings of the poets. Their arrogance—which we see reflected in modern philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger—makes us nervous, and rightly so. We become still more nervous when we detect it in our political leaders. The French revolutionaries substituted a statue of Reason for the altar in Notre Dame, right around the time that heads started to roll. That said, there was a parallel arrogance in the Divine Right of Kings, which arguably caused as much suffering as did the revolutionary zeal, so I’m not so sure the secular version is any worse than its religious counterpart.

NS: Couldn’t there also be dangers in embracing contradiction, as you do? How can one be both rational and, when necessary, contradictory?

PLM: Carefully! For one thing, we should not ignore the principle of non-contradiction and accept contradictions whenever we like. Aristotle was right that such logical insouciance would forfeit rationality. But neither should we revere this principle as “the firmest of all things,” as he called it, anticipating many philosophers who have since shared his reverence. Paying close attention to time and any process in time, we have to acknowledge that it is contradictory at every moment. There should therefore be a higher-order logic that accounts for the operation of reason whenever it thinks about time or itself. This is what I call chiasmus. Consistency and analysis are still important components of this higher-order logic, but they must be united with their opposites, synthesis and inconsistency, to complete accurate thinking. For most practical purposes, this higher-order logic isn’t necessary; the limited logic of consistency often suffices. Analogously, for most engineering purposes, Einsteinian relativity theory is not necessary; the limited mechanics of Newton will do. But there are occasions when physicists need Einstein, just as there are occasions when philosophers need Heraclitus. Whenever we wish to understand anything as temporal, including ourselves, chiasmus is needed.

NS: What does Heraclitus tell us about chiasmus?

PLM: The short answer is that it is how we should think and speak, because it’s the way the world is. Many of his best aphorisms have the structure of this literary figure (A : B :: B : A). For Heraclitus, this crosswise structure is shared by accurate thinking and the world contemplated by our thought. All three of these domains—speech, thought, and world—come condensed in one difficult and obscure aphorism that stands at the summit of Heraclitean philosophy. In my book, I call it the “principle of chiasmus”: “wholes and not-wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” Focusing on thinking, we can see in this aphorism two movements of thought: one brings the objects of thought together (wholes, convergent, consonant, from all things one), the other takes them apart (not-wholes, divergent, dissonant, from one all things). In cognition, taking things apart is the activity of analysis, whereas bringing them together is the activity of synthesis.

NS: What is the significance of chiasmus for you?

PLM: Chiasmus, for me, is a way of thinking, as it is for Heraclitus, but I’ve tried to broaden this to include emotional intelligence as well as logical rigor. The emotions perform the activity of synthesis, whereas consistent reason performs the activity of analysis. The higher-order activity of chiasmus, then, is the joint performance of both. That’s a sketch of the ethics I have in mind: not the separate excellence of reason on one hand and emotion on the other, but their joint activity.

NS: Why did you decide to open the book with a poem which has that as its title?

PLM: The poem was my first effort—unconscious though it was—to communicate this chiasmus. That wasn’t its title when I wrote it in 2008. In fact, until I decided to include it in the book, just before sending in the manuscript in 2010, I called it “Sic et Non.” It’s full of oppositions—starting with a No, for example, and ending with a Yes—inviting you to analyze them rationally as inconsistent. Stepping back from those basic oppositions—between thinking the difference in time and feeling the summons of eternal unity—you might even experience the higher-order unity that is chiasmus itself. But I didn’t see this when I wrote the poem. To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing then, beyond procrastinating on the book I was supposed to be writing! Later, though, it helped me to structure the book’s contents and, finally, to distill its conclusion. It’s no exaggeration to say that the poem expressed the idea of the book long before I knew consciously what that idea would be.

NS: You often refer to Nietzsche as a faithful Heraclitean. But, considering how much changed in the millennia between the two, how faithful could he be?

PLM: Nietzsche shared Heraclitus’s most distinctive feature: a respect for time that refused to denigrate it as an inferior derivative of eternity. Moreover, Nietzsche’s most famous doctrine, the eternal return (or eternal recurrence of the same), first appears in Greek philosophy with Heraclitus. The meaning of this doctrine is not at all clear, neither for Nietzsche nor for Heraclitus, but I believe they share the same interpretation of it: each thinks that eternity is present at every moment of time; there is “eternity in an hour,” as Blake put it. There are other doctrines shared between these two philosophers; also, Nietzsche uses Heraclitus’s aphoristic style.

With these similarities in mind, you are nonetheless right that much changed in the millennia between them. The biggest philosophical rupture, in my view, was Christianity. Of the many novelties it introduced into the Greek philosophical tradition, I find the deepest to be this set: the value it places on the emotion of love, the insoluble individuality it grants to every human being, and the injunction to direct this love toward a human individual (who is also divine). Both Heraclitus and Parmenides—who together pose the most basic conflict of early Greek philosophy—agree that the best life is purely rational, and that whoever achieves it surpasses individuality to become divine reason itself. Christianity changes that. Augustine funnels these novel ideas into the subsequent tradition of European philosophy. His revolution is so successful that even anti-clerical philosophers, such as Nietzsche, who openly despises Augustine, are unimaginable without him.

NS: The Immanent Frame is mentioned in your acknowledgements. Can you tell me about what part the site had in the development of your thinking?

PLM: It was essential. The book was not originally even going to include Heraclitus. But after I’d finished the poem you asked about, I found a better way to procrastinate on the book: I wrote some posts for The Immanent Frame. The first was on psychoanalysis and took issue with Taylor’s denial that it is a spirituality. This led to another, contesting his assertion that death frustrates our quest for meaningful lives. Lurking in the background of both of these posts was Heraclitus. I wasn’t sure that readers of this site would be interested in him, but the kind editors here gave me the chance to present his spirituality nonetheless. William Connolly read these posts, and he wrote to thank me for them, adding that he’d decided to incorporate some Heraclitus into his forthcoming book, A World of Becoming. This got me thinking afresh about my own book. Why not include Heraclitus in it too? He didn’t fit into the story it was supposed to tell, but maybe I could change the story. Whereas, before, I was recounting a uniform tradition of pure reason from Parmenides through Plotinus, I decided instead to present a rivalry between two main traditions, showing that there was an early alternative to Platonism in Heraclitus.

Thanks no doubt to my immersion in The Immanent Frame, I saw this rivalry as one between transcendence and immanence, a rivalry that characterizes much of the writing here, just as it frames the narrative of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. But as I reworked the Heraclitean spirituality posts into a Heraclitus chapter, and thus came to understand this obscure philosopher better, I saw that his notion of reason—chiasmus, again—managed to synthesize immanence and transcendence. In this way, the book was no longer just about a rivalry between two irreconcilable options; it now argued for the superiority of the Heraclitean option because it sublated these antitheses. In the terms of your earlier question, the book went from largely antiquarian interest to offering some constructive philosophy as well.

NS: It was only after finishing Becoming God—and here on The Immanent Frame—that you explicitly go into the Christian theological consequences of these ideas: the “Crosswise Christ.” How much were these concerns in your mind all along?

PLM: Not one bit—that is, not until I edited the final proofs. A friend who had read a draft of the Heraclitus chapter pointed out that, although I discussed chiasmus throughout, and even made it the main idea of the book, I never once explained what the literary figure was. Not every reader would be familiar with it, so I decided to illustrate it with some canonical examples from English literature. The ones I found were from Shakespeare and Milton. Gradually, I came to appreciate that Milton’s example has theological significance. It’s about the Incarnation: “Love without end and without measure Grace.” The literary figure of chiasmus got its name from the Greeks, whose letter “Chi” is shaped like our letter X, and thus exhibits the crosswise pattern of the figure itself. For Christians, this was a potent symbol not only because of the crucifixion but also because the first letter of “Christos” is “Chi” (which appears in the venerable English abbreviation for Christmas, “Xmas”). From antiquity, then, chiasmus has been used as a symbol of Christ.

As I put it in my introduction—with gratitude to my indulgent typesetter, who allowed me to make the comparison explicit after the proofs were already done—Milton uses chiasmus to communicate his God. But that’s exactly what Heraclitus is doing with his aphorisms! Could the God be the same? I decided to write a series of posts here, “Crosswise Christ,” to test the possibility. So, what began as a convenient way to explain a literary figure evolved into the idea that Heraclitean philosophy could underwrite a new Christology. It’s new for me, at least, and I’m eager to see how it’s received by readers of The Immanent Frame. That’s one of the great things about this site—scholars can test ideas, getting instant feedback from a much wider readership than we could hope for from our specialized journals.

If we are to love the world ourselves, or at least understand the “calling and mode of inspiration” of someone who has been supposed to do so pre-eminently (Jesus), we should join the great German philosophers of the nineteenth century in their effort to revive this paradoxical logos. Not only Nietzsche, but also Hegel made this a goal: “There is no aphorism of Heraclitus,” he wrote, “that I have not adopted in my Logic.” Becoming God joins this effort, recounting how the clash between Heraclitus and Parmenides over the correct way to think about the world made its way into the dialogues of Plato, who decided in favor of Parmenides and his logic of consistency, thereby occluding Heraclitus and his superior logic of chiasmus. The early Christian theologians were primarily Platonists, however, and so the crosswise interpretation of Jesus available to the Heraclitean tradition was overshadowed by the logic of consistency that would strive but fail to understand a human god. This fourth post aims in the end to present this interpretation.

More immediately, its purpose is to show how evenly Heraclitus straddles the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Before adducing the relevant aphorisms, let us recall the necessary conditions of a philosophy that is as immanent as it is transcendent: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that this world is transcended by the supernatural and eternal divine; and (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Two words for each of the three conditions will recall their contradictory concerns: for the first, these are virtue and the good; for the second, the cosmos and god; for the third, life and death. Accordingly, we shall organize a few of the Heraclitean aphorisms around these three concerns. But we shall take them in a different order, starting with the second about cosmos and god. Connecting this fundamental contradiction to the other two will be the self we discover whenever we go in search of ourselves.

First, then, the natural and temporal cosmos. That it is the ultimate reality—rather than being a product of an eternal realm, say of Platonic Forms, let alone some mythic time, such as Hesiod depicts—is the account of two aphorisms we considered in the previous post. One spoke explicitly of a world that “no god nor man has made,” adding that “it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” Nothing superior to this temporal world could have created it, in fact, because for Heraclitus there is no vantage of eternity above time from which such a creation might occur. This is not to say that eternity does not exist for him—on the contrary, it does—but only that it holds no higher rank than time, the everliving fire, whose moments are simultaneously kindled and quenched. Nothing transcends fiery time, reports another aphorism we examined earlier, because “all things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.”

So immanent is Heraclitean cosmology, in fact, that this requital and exchange of everything in the natural world is none other than “the god (theos): day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” The quoted list of nouns is the first half of the only aphorism that explicitly defines the Heraclitean god. As if its succession of natural states were not temporal enough, the second half says of this god that “it alters, as when mingled with perfumes it gets named according to the hēdonē (scent, pleasure) of each.” Approaching the altar fire of a god, Greek worshippers threw upon it various perfumes: myrrh, cyprus, rose, and so on. The names they gave this fire depended on the scents it consequently produced, just as the names worshippers gave the divine depended on the pleasures associated with it. Day and night, for example, are among the many gods named by Hesiod, as are others listed in the first half of this aphorism, no doubt because they affect human life, bringing us pleasures (and pains).

“The teacher of most is Hesiod,” Heraclitus wrote with scorn; “it is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: they are one.” Naming according to superficial pleasures, or pains, Hesiod failed to recognize the concealed nature of the divine. The one god Heraclitus reveals may be defined by a list of these superficial names, but it is not any one of these pleasures or pains, nor all together in an indiscriminate mixture. Instead, it is the concealed structure of their values to mortals. Day and summer are safe, winter and night threaten; war and hunger are destructive, satiety and peace preserve. The chiastic pattern of mortal pleasures (+) and pains (-) in the first half of the aphorism is thus: + – - + | – + + – . This is another Heraclitean fugue, ingeniously weaving misunderstandings of the divine into a complex pattern that nevertheless reveals its concealed structure. This theo-logos, like so many other Heraclitean logoi, thereby exhibits what it reports—the divine logos itself.

“Crosswise logic” argued that this logos is chiasmus, an eternal cross in the midst of time. “All things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” Heraclitus writes, yet “this logos holds forever.” God may be the alternation of “day night, winter summer, war peace, hunger satiety,” but also divine is the eternal structure of that very alternation. Both immanent (as the natural world in time) and transcendent (as the eternal logos of that world), Heraclitean theology is thus contradictory. But inconsistency is not the vice for this logos that it would be for other theologies and philosophies. Indeed, this particular contradiction is its chief virtue. This is not to say that everything is permitted to it, recall, because the principle of non-contradiction and its correlative activity of analysis remain essential to its harmonic structure. Whenever it turns upon itself, however, to contemplate the divine order (kosmos), it surpasses the inadequate logic of consistency with the synthetic activity of its own chiastic principle.

“The wise is one,” writes Heraclitus, “knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.” Several other aphorisms attest in this way to the transcendence of god, but of them all the most paradoxical and richest with hidden meaning is the following: “The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.” Set apart from all things, alone, this god should not be called by the name even of the most powerful Greek divinity—so perfectly does it transcend all things. And yet this god is no less within all imperfect things, so that it may be called by the name of Zeus among other things more mundane: day night, summer winter, etc. Named according to the pleasure of each worshipper, furthermore, the divine acquires an infinite variety of forms according to the infinitely various anxieties brought to the altar of time, this vale of tears. The Heraclitean god may reveal itself to us in time through these anxieties, but to know it fully we must also recognize it as the concealed and eternal structure of that perpetual revelation.

This proves also to be the structure of the self that we discover whenever we contemplate ourselves. “I went in search of myself,” reported Heraclitus, as though simply describing the beginning of his own philosophical quest. But the apparent simplicity of this aphorism conceals a deep philosophical contradiction, one that resides likewise in the Delphic imperative to know thyself, not to mention the appropriation of this imperative by Plato to characterize the beginning of philosophy. Here in brief is the puzzle it generates: if I am to search for myself, I must somehow be absent from myself; for anything to be absent from itself, though, it must both be and not be itself. (Here is a fuller account of the puzzle, which Becoming God elaborates further.) Thanks to this contradiction, the self appears opposed to itself, not-whole, divergent, and dissonant. Whatever unity it may appear to have before we consider its inner conflict, in other words, the self now fragments into an inconsistent plurality. Yet this is only one half of its inquiry, for the lesson of this puzzle turns out to be the same one learned earlier from the paradox of fire and the temporal cosmos it symbolizes.

Self-inquiry may be contradictory at each moment, according to our quick analysis, but as with fire the momentary opposition of a self in search of itself is united through the flow of time and our emotional engagement with it. After all, turning our contemplation outward to the relation of our self with others—the hope and fear, anger and lust, love and hate we experience in community—we appear to others and ourselves rather whole, convergent, and consonant. Whatever plurality may have been revealed by our analysis of inner conflict now achieves a consistent unity. No sooner is this fragmentation and opposition overcome, however, than our new unity generates a fresh opposition for self-inquiry: between opposition and unity, whole and not-whole, convergence and divergence, consonance and dissonance. Once this new synthesis is analyzed, in other words, it produces a further contradiction (between analysis and synthesis), until this fresh conflict is in turn reconciled by time and a fresh emotional engagement with it. And so on.

Or so it goes for the consummately reflective self, sharing with the temporal cosmos its eternal structure: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” Chiasmus is therefore the logos of the self as much as it is the logos of time. When self-inquiry directs this principle inward rather than outward, therefore, it discovers the activity of chiasmus to be the self sought. This surprising discovery—that the self is not only one and many, but the active principle that makes such a contradiction intelligible—is required by the logic of self-knowledge. For in self-knowledge, properly speaking, the knowing subject must be the same as the object known, otherwise the knowledge would not be of self but of other. Seeking self-knowledge, accordingly, we reveal our self to be this very same chiasmus. Far from the purely intellectual feat of navel-gazing it might at first appear to be, this activity of genuine self-inquiry would be as affective as cognitive, as loving as rational, as much about the world and its god as about oneself. Practiced well, crosswise logic reveals the concealed structure of all three.

“Thinking well,” Heraclitus thus writes, “is the greatest excellence.” Thinking crosswise, that is, we perfect the divine in our selves. Although its logos is already ubiquitous, it is only imperfectly realized whenever we become preoccupied with an immanent world of time, or for that matter a transcendent and eternal heaven. The typical result of such preoccupations, as “Love and reason” argued, is resentment. If we wish to love more purely, therefore, we should cultivate an impure devotion both to the divine immanent world and to the god who nonetheless transcends it. Living in time, we already participate in its chiasmus, just as a fire must do to burn. But some fires grow weak, whether by excess need or satiety, whereas other fires grow thanks to their more perfect synthesis of this characteristic conflict. A later Heraclitean, Marcus Aurelius, makes this analogy explicit, twice comparing the virtuous self to “a bright fire that appropriates whatever you throw into it and from it produces flame and light.” Such a light would shine in the dark, and no darkness could ever extinguish it. Heraclitean ethics enjoins us to become such a light to the world.

The perfect realization of this light would be a self who incarnates a cross of immanence and transcendence. Both the good sought and the life lived by such a self would thus reveal it. With divine conflict, his highest good would be the immanent flourishing of human excellence, the cardinal virtues celebrated in naturalistic philosophies from antiquity to the present; but his highest good would also be the superhuman life of god, the theological virtues, now understood as the chiasmus of love and reason. Distinct from this perfect divine activity, as human, he would nonetheless be identical with it, as god. Here, for instance, is how his dual and contradictory nature would manifest itself. Emotionally, his all-too-human weeping over our mortal limits would reside alongside his supernatural confidence in our transcendence of these limits. Intellectually, his surprise over the peccadilloes of his friends would reside alongside his knowledge of every hair on their heads.

Living these contradictions, he would likewise die them, because such a self would have to be mortal insofar as he was immanent. Dying in time with bodily corruption, then, he would nevertheless have to be immortal as well, living in eternity with divine activity. Heraclitus unites these opposing demands in his masterpiece of form and content: “Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the other’s death, in the others’ life having died.” Presenting a semantic chiasmus in the first half, then a syntactic chiasmus in the second, this logos replicates and thus recalls the complex chiastic structure of the aphorism that defined god (+ – - + | – + + -). Whereas that theo-logos reported a natural world of time that was ultimate but transcended by god, this bio-logos (or thanato-logos) consigns us to an irrevocable death in time that is superseded by eternal life. In other words, the corruptible shall put on incorruption, and the mortal shall put on immortality, but death cannot be swallowed up in victory. Fortunately. For if ever it were, along with it would go meaningful life.

The self incarnated in this way would be both fully immanent and fully transcendent. Thinking so, living truth in the midst of conflict, he would be free to love the world perfectly. Not resenting the temporal world as an obstacle to an eternal paradise, he might reveal the kingdom of god to be within you. Not resenting time as an inexorable thief of our beloveds, he might say today you will be with me in paradise. This twin revelation, his crosswise logos, would communicate the love’s knowledge he would himself embody. Such a logos, or word of god, would be the Heraclitean Christ. Whoever confesses him would try to imitate him, living a Christian life, with most of the anxieties this paradoxical vocation has always provoked. Is this genuine prayer or sophisticated idolatry? Is this authentic meditation or simply self-help? Is this chastity or repression, courage or pride, charity or vanity? Heraclitean Christianity offers the anxious believer no special solace but one.

Since the first Pentecost, and no doubt before that, Christians have struggled with contradictions. All religions must, of course, but the religion that confesses a human god assumes a unique burden in this regard. Tertullian famously shrugged it off with these words: certum est, quia impossible; it is certain, the immortality of mortals, because it is impossible. Such fideism has always tempted Christians, and it is arguably more tempting now—in an age even more diffident about philosophical truth than it is about religious doctrine. Theologians who have put aside the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, ironically for good reasons, reach instead for Kierkegaard or some more recent iteration of the fideist position. Yet this choice, between consistent or irrational faith, preserves the false dichotomy that has bedeviled Christian theology from its earliest Platonic forms: either Christian doctrines can be rendered non-contradictory and thus acceptable to reason, or their irrationality must be admitted, sometimes with a smug contempt of reason.

Heraclitean Christianity escapes this false dichotomy by denying its implicit assumption that reason is consistency. If the highest form of reason is instead crosswise, as this series of posts has argued, then Christian confession would be reasonable despite its contradictions. Not every contradiction is allowed; this cannot be emphasized enough; only those required by careful meditation upon this world are permitted. But according to the Heraclitean meditation of these posts, these permissible contradictions are the three just canvassed—between time and eternity, nature and god, mortality and immortality. As it happens, moreover, these are the same three contradictions which the Christian confesses in one person: Jesus Christ. Far from irrational, confessing him would instead be the summit of reason.

Many Christians worry less about irrationality than they do about orthodoxy, so a few words are in order about the fidelity of this interpretation to Christian tradition. Is it heretical to confess Christ crosswise? Here a philosopher must hand the baton to theologians, but only after quickly acknowledging important differences between this Christ and the one so deeply indebted to Platonism and its logic of consistency. As already mentioned, neither his death nor ours is swallowed up in victory. On the contrary, death remains as invincible as the natural and temporal world it presupposes. As a result, no final resurrection will erase death forever, no pure eschaton will put an end to this impure world, nor will any future time witness the separation of wheat from tares. Yet this is already happening now, so to speak, in eternity. Here in time, following the crosswise confession, we foresee no ultimate reconciliation of all contradiction. Conflict is everliving, just as the cosmic fire.

Nevertheless—and this is the only solace crosswise logic offers the anxious Christian—there is truth in conflict. Heraclitean philosophy permits us to speak this truth intelligibly, to think it reasonably, and thereby to feel it most maturely. The crosswise Christian, in sum, could sing this Polish Christmas carol (Bóg się rodzi) with not only the lips, but also the mind as much as the heart:

God is born, great powers tremble,
Lord of Heaven lies forsaken.
Fire is frozen, splendor darkens,
feeble nature God has taken.
Lowly born, yet Lord to Praises,
Mortal yet the King of Ages.
Now indeed the Word made Flesh has
come on earth to dwell among us.

Heraclitean logic is the logos. This Greek word condenses many English translations, of which three give a sense of its wide range: ‘speech’ (language), ‘reason’ (thought), and ‘structure’ (world). Whenever he invokes the logos, Heraclitus exploits this range and alludes to all three domains. Indeed, holding in mind at once all three—world, thought, and language—is essential to the Heraclitean way of thinking. Thus, when he insists that “all things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” he means that everything coming to pass—in the temporal world, that is—shares the same structure. But he also means that accurate reasoning about this world shares this structure, just as accurate speech must too. This accurate speech is presumably his aphoristic style, so to understand it, its characteristic way of thinking, and the world it describes, we must understand this shared structure. It cannot be consistency, as “Truth in conflict” argued; instead, as this post argues, it is chiasmus.

Chiasmus is usually known as the literary figure in which elements are repeated but in crosswise order (A : B :: B : A). Here is an example from Shakespeare: “Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.” A pleasant change of consonants adorns the reversal of meanings: strongly loving is doting; to suspect is to doubt. The elements reversed can also be syntactic, however, as in this example from Milton: “Love without end and without measure Grace.” Here, a noun and a prepositional phrase trade order.  Again, a substitution of words introduces some pleasant variety, though now it also adds layers of concealed meaning. By substituting ‘Grace’ for ‘Love,’ and thereby assimilating them, Milton suggests that divine love is freely given. By adding synonymous prepositional phrases, he suggests that the gift is eternal and boundless. For Christians like Milton, the sign of this love and grace is the cross. With this crosswise figure, then, he communicates a Christology—a logos, or account, of his God.

No figure could be more appropriate to the logos of Christ, for a cross has always symbolized this word, beginning as it does with a Greek letter that resembles one. Chi looks like our English X—so much like it, in fact, that we shorten “Christmas” to “Xmas,” usually without recognizing the Greek contribution to our abbreviation. The same letter appears more faithfully on the candles and vestments of Christian churches, where it joins the letter Rho to symbolize the Messiah. But before there were any Christian churches, the letter Chi symbolized the literary figure it names. Chiasmus comes from chiazō, which the Greek grammarians used to convey the crosswise pattern of its principal letter. The association between Christ and the pattern of chiasmus was thus natural enough, at least in the symbolic imagination of the Hellenistic world. The association is more substantial for Heraclitean philosophy, which reveals chiasmus as the concealed structure of the world, just as Christian revelation proclaims Christ as the truth of the world.

To appreciate the depth of this association, we must first understand how a literary figure could reveal the concealed structure of the world. Let us begin by recalling the polysemy of logos: in order to signify one chiasmus shared by world, reason, and speech, Heraclitus crafts aphorisms (logoi) that exhibit what they report. Here is an especially dramatic example of the technique: “All things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.” In this faithful English translation, the complex chiasmus of meanings shines through (A : B :: B : A ::: C : D :: D : C). Below this semantic pattern, additionally, is a dazzling arrangement of nouns whose syntax cannot be rendered into English. Their cases (Nominative and Genitive) and their numbers (Singular and Plural) make the following pattern, GS : NP :: NS : GP ::: GS : NP :: GP : NS. In the first half of the sentence is a chiasmus according to case (G : N :: N : G). In the second half, one according to number (S : P :: P : S). This is a fugue in Greek, weaving linguistic opposition into a complex unity, but what is its philosophical significance?

“Truth and conflict” adduced Heraclitean fire not only to humble the principle of non-contradiction but also to herald its more catholic rival. Analyzing fire’s burning into moments, we found it to be an opposition of “need and satiety” at each one. This came as a surprise, no doubt, because when we do not deliberately analyze fire in this way—whenever we use it to warm our hands or cook a meal; whenever we fear it as the destroyer of homes and cities; whenever, that is, its burning affects us in time, entering into the narratives woven by our emotional engagement with the world—we contemplate something whose unity appears undisturbed by the opposites it synthesizes. Analysis may reveal a fire that is in conflict with itself at every moment, but through the continuity of time it synthesizes these opposites into a unity. Whenever we relax our analysis, returning to affective engagement with fire, we overlook its momentary dissonance and appreciate instead this synthetic unity. Correlatively, whenever we disengage emotionally from fire by activating consistent reason, we lose sight of its continuity and consonance, foregrounding instead its opposition and conflict.

Were we to select one perspective exclusively—whether purely consistent cognition or purely emotional engagement—our comprehension of fire would be limited by omission of the other. Neither by pure cognitive analysis nor by pure emotional synthesis can we comprehend fully anything temporal. Neither by a narrow focus on its instantaneous opposition nor by attending to its temporal unity alone can we understand it. Its concealed structure reveals itself only through an impure chiasmus of both. Beginning with a unified flame, accordingly, we analyzed its burning into moments of contradictory opposition. Synthesis and unity were thus conjoined with analysis and opposition. Stepping back from this conjunction, we now recognize its fresh contradiction: consistency forbids the simultaneity of unity and opposition, synthesis and analysis. And yet their harmony is nonetheless accomplished—just as fire accomplishes its own burning—through the continuity of time. Conjoined with this additional analysis into opposites, then, is another synthesis into unity. And so on, world without end.

All told, our comprehension of fire reveals the following pattern. Unity : opposition :: opposition : unity (U : O :: O : U). This particular set of terms, and the artless aphorism it informs, puts the emphasis on the object of our comprehension, the structure of fire itself. Putting the emphasis instead on the structure of our comprehension, as subjects, we may switch to the following set of terms. Synthesis : analysis :: analysis : synthesis (S : A :: A : S). Whichever set we choose—one focusing on the world, the other on our thought of it—we find the same crosswise pattern. This is of course chiasmus, and it can be iterated infinitely (SU : AO :: AO : SU ::: SU : AO :: AO : SU …). More than a complex literary figure, however, this very iteration is the crosswise logic of the temporal world. “Kosmos,” writes Heraclitus, “the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” More than a mere figure of speech, in other words, chiasmus is the eternal structure of both our fiery temporal cosmos and the activity of comprehending it in thinking and speech.

Heraclitean philosophy is a meditation on this kosmos (Greek for ‘order’ or ‘structure’). Heraclitus consummates this meditation with a principle that has a more legitimate claim than non-contradiction to be the firmest of all: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” This principle describes a complex activity that is as synthetic as it is analytic. Wholes consonant and converging are synthesized into one from all things, while not-wholes dissonant and diverging are analyzed into all things from one. Exhibiting the structure of chiasmus it also reports, as Becoming God argues, this logos challenges the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, this principle of chiasmus appears to have been the target of Parmenides and the Platonic tradition founded upon his rejection of it. Thus, if we defy this tradition, emboldened by its failure to think the temporal world, if we adopt Heraclitus’s more capacious mode of reasoning, bolstered by its chiasmus of consistent thought and passionate longing, if we assimilate ourselves to this cross—a task that is by no means easy, requiring a spiritual discipline of its own—we can reasonably confess a philosophy that is neither immanent nor transcendent, but both.

Lest this mode of impure reason seem too abstract, complex, or even impossible, here are two analogies that might make it seem less so. First, we can compare crosswise logic to looking at the duck-rabbit drawing popularized in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Looked at in one way, the drawing appears to be of a duck; looked at in another, it appears as a rabbit. We alternate between seeing it one way and then another, back and forth, often quickly, and sometimes involuntarily. When we willfully contemplate not just the drawing but also these very alternations, we rise to a higher level of reflection, coming to see the drawing as duck-rabbit, a unity in opposition (or opposition in unity). Similar epiphanies occur, secondly, when we study contrapuntal music. Listening to a Bach fugue, for example, we can with disciplined effort discern not only one theme or its counter-point, nor only both in alternation, but both at once. Beyond this already difficult accomplishment, the highest comprehension of the fugue discerns the concealed structure of its harmonic conflict. To fully appreciate it, in other words, we must hear the unity in opposition as well as the opposition in unity that is Bach’s composition.

Music presents the best analogy to crosswise logic because it likewise touches our hearts as well as our minds. Whether listening to it attentively, performing it well, or composing it creatively, we must both think and feel deeply. To practice chiasmus, similarly, we must turn our emotion as well as our cognition toward the world of becoming. Engaging it emotionally, we affirm the continuity of time; cognizing it simultaneously, we affirm the conflict of its every moment. After recognizing the opposition between these activities, furthermore, crosswise logic unites them in chiasmus: a higher unity of the opposition between opposition and unity. And so on, ideally, although not all emotions will engage the world equally, nor is all cognition consistent.

Not everything should be permitted to reason. To think consistently, after all, we must practice the principle of non-contradiction, recognizing the conflict inherent in the temporal world. With this practice, notice, we show crosswise logic to be more generous than its rival. For although it dethrones non-contradiction, it installs it as the prince of all logical offices, second only to the king, namely, chiasmus itself.

Nor should every emotion be permitted to it. Resentment is forbidden because it disengages from the world that crosswise logic seeks to engage. For the goal of resentment is destruction. Anger and hatred seek to destroy, too, but for them destruction is always a means to preserve some other end, some thing considered good independent of the act of destruction. Resentment, by contrast, seeks the preservation of nothing but itself. In fact, according to Nietzsche, “nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” It destroys even the resentful self. Its ulterior motive, so rarely recognized by the soul being consumed by it, is destruction for its own sake, destruction of everything that opposes it, destruction ultimately of the whole world. Fortunately, as Connolly’s grid acknowledges, resentment is opposed by love, an emotion that engages more deeply with the world than any other because it is most open to its differences, least limited by defenses against its inevitable conflict, and most single-mindedly invested in the creation of independent good.

Requiring extraordinary strength of character, then, crosswise logic demands that we love the whole world of becoming while thinking consistently about it. Indeed, it is the supreme activity of loving and thinking together: Love without end and without measure Reason. This eternal cross thus manages to bind our deepest longings—which, Augustine rightly argued, cannot be satisfied by the temporal world—together with our intellectual powers—which cannot conceive a meaningful life in eternity without contradiction. Requiring a love so strong and pure that it remains undiminished in the midst of the world’s conflict, such an achievement would appear beyond any mere mortal. Confessing the immortal mortal, however, the Heraclitean tradition is uniquely “equipped to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.” Making this confession will be the aim of the next and final post.

Humble it, that is, but not reject it. For without it, as philosophers say, everything is permitted. Some recent ones have questioned it nonetheless, reviving the Liar Paradox of late antiquity: “This sentence is false.” It appears to be a normal declarative sentence, so it should be true or false. But which? If it were true, what it says must be the case, so it should be false. Yet if it be false, this is exactly what it says, so it should be true. Despite elaborate attempts to defuse it, this paradox persistently threatens an explosion, the logical equivalent of a nuclear detonation, destroying the principle of non-contradiction and thus the imperative to think consistently. But even those who champion the paradox recognize the incoherence of abandoning this principle altogether. Their goal is to humble it, not reject it. Similarly respectful of it, this post seeks only to demote it from the status Aristotle assigned it, namely “the firmest of all.”

Whether or not it can be saved from the Liar—which could perhaps be dismissed as an anomaly, radioactive uranium to be safely contained somehow, somewhere where it will not corrupt the rest of our thinking—the principle of non-contradiction exhibits a more serious flaw: it cannot accommodate anything in time, let alone time itself, where we live and breathe and have our being. Here, in brief, is the problem: this logical principle requires that everything temporal be consistent at a moment, although no moment is itself consistent. Aristotle formulates the principle this way: “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.” He adds that we may supply other qualifications as needed, but the most important of all he has already mentioned: time. Yesterday, for example, was not contradictory if it was both cloudy and not-cloudy; it may have been cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon; the attributes cloudy and not-cloudy belonged to yesterday at different times. If anything were to undermine the principle, then, it would have to do so at the same time—in other words, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

Now, ironically, Aristotle himself observed that if time were a succession of moments, each one would have to perish, for only so could these moments yield to one another and produce the flow of time. When, however, could a particular moment perish? In which moment could it do so? Not in itself, for then it would both exist and not exist; nor could it perish in any other moment, for then it would be simultaneous with a different moment. Both options, in short, would violate the principle of non-contradiction. So too would the same options available to any moment that is supposed to be born. It could only be born in itself or in another moment, and both are equally contradictory. Indeed, the paradoxical options available to anyone who freezes time into moments resemble nothing so much as the dilemmas produced by a student of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea.

Zeno’s most beguiling paradox, the Flying Arrow, invites us to imagine the flight of an arrow frozen in a moment. Were we to freeze a flying arrow in a ‘now’—catching it on film with a high-speed camera, so to speak—it would occupy a space equal to itself. For if it should occupy a space longer than itself, it would be moving, not frozen. In our photographic analogy, it would be as if our shutter speed were too slow; rather than catching the flying arrow at a moment, we caught it over several moments, creating a blur. Catching it in a ‘now,’ we would find it occupying a space equal to itself, which is to say motionless. In every ‘now,’ at every moment, it must be motionless. Yet at each moment it must also be moving. After all, it is a flying arrow: if it never moves, it cannot fly. In sum, then, at every moment it must be both moving and still. The flying arrow would seem to violate the principle of non-contradiction.

According to Aristotle, however, such an absurd “result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments: if this assumption is not granted, the conclusion will not follow.” In other words, if “time is not composed of indivisible nows,” but is instead infinitely divisible, there is no freezing the flying arrow in a moment. For if a motion happens over time that is infinitely divisible, every division of its duration should reveal it to be moving. While moving, it must always occupy a space longer than itself, only less so with each finer division. Because there is no final division, neither is there any moment at which the arrow turns out to be still. One solution to this paradox, therefore, is to claim that time is not composed of ‘nows’; instead, it is infinitely divisible, a flowing continuum rather than a particulate succession.

Is the same Aristotelian solution available to explain a related puzzle, the paradoxical change of everything in time? Consider an especially vivid instance of this change: fire. As a process, it is ever-changing, a sort of motion. Dividing the duration of its burning—where this burning is parallel to the arrow’s moving—we shall never reach a moment when it ceases to burn, anymore than we shall reach a moment when the arrow is still. The parallel is important to keep in mind, because the same photographic temptations arise for fire that arose for the flying arrow. We imagine capturing a fire on film, and with the image of such a fire before our minds, we are tempted to think that we have frozen it in exclusive satisfaction, the way we were tempted by Zeno to think of the arrow as perfectly still in a ‘now.’ But if time is infinitely divisible, however finely we divide the duration of the fire’s burning, it is no more static in this division of its duration than was the arrow perfectly still in its own. In every division, no matter how fine, the flying arrow is moving. Correlatively, in every division, no matter how fine, the fire is burning.

This burning is a satisfaction with fuel, lest it be extinguished, but it is also a need for fuel, lest it be static. Fire, wrote Heraclitus, is “need and satiety.” It cannot consistently burn in a moment, anymore than an arrow can fly in a moment, and so it should come as no surprise that any analysis that freezes it so creates a conflict. Thanks to the analyses of Aristotle and Zeno, though, we can say more precisely that the logical offense occurs only when we conceive of time as divisible into ‘nows.’ Yet there is a deep irony here that Aristotle himself does not seem to recognize: the principle of non-contradiction that he himself codified requires us to conceive time and change this way. It analyzes time into moments in order to insist, as a necessary condition of being and knowledge, that the attributes of everything so analyzed be consistent with one another.

Yesterday was both cloudy and not-cloudy, but this was no true conflict because its contradictory attributes belonged to it at different times. No such analysis is available when we use the principle to think fire, however, because its satisfaction and neediness remain forever intertwined in each moment. So likewise, it turns out, whenever we scrutinize anything else in time, which is itself both dying and being born, inextricably together, in every moment and forever. If the principle of non-contradiction really is a necessary condition of knowledge, as Aristotle claimed, knowing any object must require freezing it in a moment and finding it consistent then. But if everything in time—everything that undergoes process, change, and motion, albeit less visibly and dramatically than fire—must be inconsistent in each moment, nothing temporal can be known as such. Indeed, because Aristotle thinks that nothing contradictory can be, nothing temporal can ever exist as such.

Philosophers who revere the principle of non-contradiction thus require true existence to be unchanging, timeless, and eternal. Plato’s Forms are but the paradigms of this requirement, showing most clearly how devotion to consistent thinking favors transcendence by rendering the immanent world impossible, unknowable, and even an evil illusion. If the argument of “Love and reason” was accurate—that a purely transcendent philosophy inhibits love of the world—the emotion associated most often with this way of thinking should be resentment. This was Nietzsche’s abiding critique of philosophers, principally those in the Platonic tradition; this critique drove him and those indebted to him, especially Heidegger, to seek a way of thinking otherwise. Finding his alternative in the philosopher whom Parmenides attacked for his “crosswise” way of thinking, Nietzsche wrote that “the world forever needs the truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus.” The next post turns to him, attempting to reveal his concealed logic before using it in a final post to answer Connolly’s invitation “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”

The result of Connolly’s division of traditions according to both belief and emotion is a four-point grid that neatly categorizes both traditions and the individuals who inhabit them. A horizontal axis stretches from immanence in the world on the left to transcendence of it on the right. The vertical axis descends from love of the world at the top to resentment of it at the bottom. In the top-right corner, therefore, are those who affirm a god that transcends a world they nonetheless love, whereas in the top-left are those who believe nothing transcends the world they love no less. In the bottom-right corner are those who resent the world transcended by their god, whereas in the bottom-left corner are those who resent the merely immanent world they profess.

Connolly recognizes that between these abstract cases are the infinite varieties of lived philosophy and religion. Few are pure, either cognitively or affectively. Yet the extreme corners of his grid reveal two insights. First of all, clashes of worldview—say, between fundamentalist preachers and the new atheists—become bitter less because their beliefs are in conflict than because their proponents share an affect: resentment. Secondly, diverse philosophical traditions—say Platonism and Freudianism, one teaching transcendence, the other immanence, but both aiming to promote love—begin to appear more as allies than as rivals in the history of ideas, so long as they seek to cultivate the same affect. With the varieties of lived philosophy and religion in between the extremes, Connolly’s grid helps us to see more clearly their unique combinations of cognition and emotion.

But can emotions and beliefs be mixed and matched so easily, or is there a tighter relationship between them? Are some beliefs more likely to produce love; others, resentment? To be sure, there are individuals who manage to love the world no matter what they believe, just as there are others who would climb any mountain to punch a shadow. Through chance and willpower, individuals seem to manage every possible combination of belief and emotion. Rather than focus on individuals, we should investigate whether divergent traditions constituted by rival beliefs about the nature of the world are more or less likely to foster love of it. Correlatively, are traditions of one sort more inclined than traditions of the other to foster resentment?

Augustine and Nietzsche thought so, although they disagreed about which was which. Augustine’s restless heart could not love constantly until he believed in a god transcending the limits of temporal goods. Only such a god, he argued, could satisfy the human longings for joy and peace, forgiveness and redemption. No longer frustrated by the imperfection of this world, Augustine’s love could at last see the world for what it truly was: the creation of a perfect god. Without God, however, he declared that this “life is a misery.” For his part, Nietzsche found devotion to this same god fraught with sadism and masochism, not true love. To love this world, according to his Zarathustra, we must forswear the hinterworldly fantasies that prompt us to despise it and everything in it, including ourselves. “No longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things,” he preached, “but bear it freely instead, an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth.” Despite their disagreements, then, both Augustine and Nietzsche agreed that the way we think about the world affects, for better or worse, the way we feel about it.

In their agreement, they were correct: the way we think about the world does affect how we feel about it. Or, at the very least, it should. On one hand, if you think this vale of tears is but a prelude to paradise, should you not resent the delay? Purely transcendent religions may prescribe practices of patience, especially prayer, but the longings for secure beauty, goodness, and communion cannot be postponed. Prayer may temper frustration, but it cannot eradicate it. Resentment becomes likely. (One of my earlier posts made this argument in more detail.) On the other hand, if you think this same world of brutality, ugliness, and death is all there is, should you not resent it for perpetually disappointing the same inexorable longings? Purely immanent worldviews may seek to silence these longings with spiritual practices, especially meditation, but their success (if possible) comes at too high a cost: dissolution of self. (The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or not-self, is a paradigm of this strategy.) Here, too, resentment becomes likely. (Another of my earlier posts was more hopeful.)

In an odd way, Augustine and Nietzsche were collectively correct in the midst of their critical disagreement: love is fostered neither by purely immanent worldviews (Augustine) nor by purely transcendent ones (Nietzsche). The common quest for purity produces instead resentment. Thus, for example, if Plotinus and Epicurus were in fact lovers of the world, they were so not because of their beliefs but despite them. In other words, if any worldview successfully promotes love, rather than resentment, it must be impure: it must be as transcendent as it is immanent. Whatever can this mean? To make this demand more clear, let us recall Taylor’s distinction between transcendence and immanence, helped by the editors of this volume. Speaking of transcendence, they outline its three dimensions as follows: “a good higher than human flourishing (such as love in the sense of agape), a higher power (such as God), and extension of life (or even ‘our lives’) beyond the ‘natural’ scope between birth and death.” Immanence is naturally the contrary of all three: a good of merely human flourishing, no power beyond the cosmos, and the finality of bodily death.

A philosophy that is as transcendent as it is immanent, therefore, must present the following, paradoxical profile: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that it is transcended by the eternal divine; (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Mere mention of such contradictions should exasperate anyone who must render a philosophy consistent in order to find it intelligible. This will include most philosophers nowadays, and indeed most Western philosophers since Greek antiquity. But their persistent demand for consistency above all has not been universally shared; revealing the early history of this demand—as I have tried to do in my forthcoming book, Becoming God—helps expose its weaknesses.

To codify consistent thought, Aristotle famously proposed a principle of non-contradiction, calling it “the firmest principle of all things,” and argued that anyone who tried to deny it would in fact assert it (implicitly), or become “like a plant.” Not entirely joking, he believed that anyone who failed to respect the supremacy of this principle would surrender reason and mimic the life of a non-rational organism. Although Aristotle gets the credit for this principle, it is already explicit in Plato; more primitively, it is present in the extant fragments of Parmenides. “Equally deaf and blind,” he called those who refused to think consistently, adding that they are “hordes without judgment, for whom both to be and not to be are judged the same and not the same, and the path of all is crosswise (palintropos).”

Exercising this ancient principle, we cannot accept the philosophy whose paradoxical combination of tenets—immanent and transcendent—is required to promote love of the world. Not without risking planthood. The supreme demand of this principle upon our minds opposes the satisfying promises of this philosophy to our heart. Were we forced to choose between them, then, our choice would be between thinking well and feeling well, between consistent cognition about the world and loving affection toward it. Must we choose? If we wish both to think well and to feel well, should we not consider another way of reasoning, even if it be crosswise? That will be the goal of my next two posts. The fourth and final post will use this Heraclitean way of reasoning “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”