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 The Christ-Idol locks man in the from-to in which his nature knows no solidity and the law has rescinded into mist, so that man is all fluidity and motion.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.
1 John 1:3–4
We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.
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