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
