1 John. L. Daniel Cantey

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.

      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.