CHAPTER 1

Religion and the Intimate Universal

Neither Cosmopolis nor Ghetto

Opening on the Intimate Universal and Religion

Why open on the intimate universal with religion? In our culture, do we not come across a diffidence, even allergy, toward respectful rumination on the religious? Beginning with, say, art might seem a more easeful path, more playful with possibilities, less fraught with ultimate allegiances. And yet our being religious carries something of the richest resonance of the intimate universal, in an intensive and extensive sense. Intensive: in going most intimately into the depths of our being, indeed in being constitutive of what it means to be distinctively human. Extensive: in carrying us beyond ourselves, in promise of community with all others, human and nonhuman, but also with the divine origin, as giver, sustainer, and consummation of all that is. All of this precipitates our philosophical perplexity: perplexity, if not entirely to be dispelled, at least to be alleviated.

I propose we begin via a question frequently posed, namely, the question as to what comes after modernity. Broad responses have been made, among which the contrast of cosmopolis and ghetto is certainly of relevance.¹ For we can take cosmopolis and ghetto as emblematic of two fundamental orientations to the universal and the intimate. Cosmopolis suggests universality beyond particularity, ghetto a particularity intractable to subsumption into the universal. Each seems to offer us a different “either-or” between the universal and the intimate. Both possibilities have their attractions, and yet one might hesitate to endorse either. This hesitation is itself significant. It testifies to an uncertainty, both about our current situation and about what is to come, testifies to diffidence about commitment to any simple “either-or” that appears to cut rather than untie the Gordian knot. Is there a “neither-nor” that is not a fudge of choice but a tantalizing harbinger of a being-between that cannot be confined to either alternative?

What comes after modernity? Who would dare prophesy? Certainly not I. One need only (re)state the obvious: the relation of religion and politics, religion and public life, has to be rethought. How rethought? Beyond the “either-or” between cosmopolis and ghetto: universality blind to the particular, particularity truculent to the universal. Religion, long thought taken care of, or neutralized, or liquidated, or suitably privatized by secular agenda setters, has returned, not with a whimper, but a bang. Of course, it never went away, to those who were mindful. And even when sent into cultural Coventry by the advanced intellectuals, it often oscillated between periods of being driven into recess and periods of return with new vitality—return to public life. After the French Revolution we can read tales of such oscillations throughout the nineteenth century.² The history of the relation of religion and secularity in modernity is immensely complicated and answers in no univocal sense to the narrative of a necessary secularization with advancing modernization.³ Neither cosmopolis nor ghetto: “neither-nor” seems wishy-washy, but our wonder about the intimate universal points us to something more positive. The intimate might suggest a privacy that precludes public communicability, while public life might suggest merely a transcendence of the private. And yet there is a universality that is radically intimate; there is an intimacy of being that calls into the community of the universal; and being religious, as both public and private, has to do with both.

The question here bears on a pervasive characteristic of modernity in theory and in practice, namely, its strong stress on immanence. In theory: no reference to transcendence as other is allowed into its various schemes of intelligibility, be these scientific or philosophical. In practice: inner-worldly action sets to work to transform this world here, this life now, in accord with immanent directives dictated by the human being’s autonomous will. One can see how forms of immanent universality are thereby generated: on the one hand, theoretical universals without a more ultimate why, there as just there, either as groundless or as stipulated or projected by our thinking, without deeper foundations; on the other hand, practical generalities that have force or persuasiveness in virtue of the determining will of humankind, and again without further grounding or indeed constraint. The connection with religion, or disconnection, is evident. One might call these immanent universals Godless universals—unless, of course, nature is rebaptized as God (as with Spinoza), or the human being reconfigures itself as the man-God (as with some of the left-Hegelians). I do not want to deny the importance of the immanent universals but would ask whether with those just mentioned we end up with an ultimate solitude of immanence: immanence circling around nothing but itself, alone in a self-regarding holism, ultimately alone and not porous to what transcends immanence. Do such immanent universals produce the counterfeit of the intimate universal? They do testify to the inability to erase universality; but in their deepest ontological intimacy, do they communicate with nothing, nothing but themselves? And hence perhaps do they short-circuit, just by their immanent self-circling, the unconstrained communicability of the true universal?

What I am calling the intimate universal takes us beyond the solitudes of immanence, even in the solitudes of immanence. Can we, in the final accounting, make sense of the intimate universal without reference to religious transcendence? Religion communicates in the space of the intimate universal: not a ghetto turned into itself, risking a questionable intimacy closed off from others beyond its own circle; not quite a cosmopolitanism that risks being a universality lacking the intimacy of embodied community, or perhaps risking even a self-circling immanence closed to all beyond it. The intimate universal asks us to address the rightful claims of singularity and universality, while not being just the homogeneous, neutral universal of traditional philosophers. At the same time, it is not quite the concrete universal of Hegel, itself the consummation of self-circling immanence. Nor yet is it the sheer assertion of individuality or singularity, outside the universal, of some post-Hegelians. Does the event of monotheistic religion point us in this direction of the intimate universal? A question to which we will come.

Cosmopolis and Ghetto

Consider, as a first foray, how the meanings of cosmopolis and ghetto suggest a certain contrast of the inclusive and the exclusive. Cosmopolis, it seems, is open to the whole, tolerant of all, fostering, as an ideal, the universal citizen of the totality who can live on terms that accept, within that whole, heterogeneity and diversity. The ghetto, by comparison, is inhabited by dwellers who are turned into a confined community that, though it might be seen as a kind of whole, is marked by a certain (perhaps forced) clinging to its own identity, and this over against a potentially hostile otherness or strange whole beyond itself. The attraction of the first seems to be the space of the relatively anonymous autonomy that it seems to offer an individual; the attraction of the second is the sense of intimate belonging to community that it might provide in a more face-to-face encounter with one’s own kind. Put the contrast thus: anonymous generality versus engaging exclusivity.

Interestingly, one finds some invocation of universality present in both these possibilities. This is evident with the notion of the cosmopolitan. Consider the case of Roman Stoicism: the whole is to be likened to a polis, the individual to a citizen of such a whole, likened to the degree that the rational powers in the singular person are in tune with the more universal logos that holds the cosmos together in the harmony of the whole. The invocation of universality is less obvious in the case of the ghetto, but the historical origin of the ghetto refers us to the Jewish people, the people of the universal God. This people of the universal, as claiming election, as claimed for election, cannot but suggest specialness. But how can one universalize specialness and still maintain universality? A certain exclusivity is the perennial temptation. Inevitably also discord can arise between different communities claiming to be the people of the universal. There arises dissonance between different claims to represent the universal between the different monotheisms. At times in the family quarrel between Christianity and Judaism, the latter tended to be defined in terms of, indeed confined to, exclusive particularity, embodied perhaps in the enclosed spatiality of the ghetto itself. While “ghetto” has strongly negative connotations, not least due to the horrible evils visited on the people so confined, being contained within one’s own community can be a more complicated happening: paradoxically it can be emblematic of something radically universal, something beyond all containment. The ghettoed community, to the degree that in its immanence it strikes through to the transcendent God or the transcendent God strikes through to it, can become a social embodiment of the intimate universal. A witness to the intimate universal, it can be this only if sustained in the hope of a divine transcendence beyond the solitudes of immanence. Does this look like a paradoxical bond between the transcendence of God and the intimate universal? And why paradoxical? Because to all appearances that divine transcendence seems so “beyond” that it undermines the here-now-living happening of intimate communication. And yet that communication happens; it happens in finitude, though there is no containing its communication within finite conditions.

I mention this further oscillation between ghetto and cosmopolis. In the modern period the people of the ghetto were often persecuted as cosmopolitan, signaling their lack of allegiance to the native land and its people, among whom they were guests or strangers or worse. The Jew was cosmopolitan because lacking in the appropriate piety of the native people. I mean the piety of place, the loyalty to this country and not that, the autochthonous familial piety, expressed in worship of the gods of the hearth, of this people, and so on. The very universality of the transcendent God forbade the worship of strange gods, gods not at all strange to the paganisms of the modern nations. In this light one situates something of the hatred of the cosmopolitan Jew, their suspect loyalty, a hatred found not only in fascism but also on the left. One thinks of the significant number of Jews in the communist movement, and their falling foul of the infernal suspicion of Stalin.⁴

The putative universality of the modern nation, under the bewitchment of nationalism, often turned its own imperial quest into an unintended mimicking of a ghetto that was no ghetto, a particularity counterfeiting the universal. One thinks of how modern nations extend their particular will to power beyond themselves, in the process hiding from themselves the fact that they are fundamentally obsessed with their own, even when they travel to the land of the other, more often than not to exploit and plunder it. The particular will to power of this or that nation claims cosmopolitan imperium, but this is the hypocritical complement paid to universality by self-absorbed and self-absorbing will power.

In postmodern times, an animus toward the universal seems dominant in many intellectual circles. The will to totality is identified with the history of reason in the West and criticized as perhaps culminating in a figure like Hegel. Hegel: thinker of the universal, claimed by not a few of his postmodern critics to be a violent universal, to the degree that it seems to privilege identity over difference, sameness over otherness, even in the granted dialectical interplay of identity and difference, sameness and otherness. If now we want to celebrate difference qua difference, we seem to be more on the side of the ghetto rather than the cosmopolis. However, we ruefully come to discover that difference qua difference can easily mutate back into the despised identity we thought we had deconstructed or long abandoned. When everyone mouths the rhetoric of difference, everyone begins to sound exactly the same, and we are swallowed up by the sameness we continue blithely to denounce. There is the fact too that, in the interplay of special interest groups, differences, be they ethnic, sexual, religious, or other, revert to the will to power alleged to circulate secretly in the despised economy of totality or the universal. Having executed the traditional One, difference reverts to a violent state of nature, but stands in service to a one, perhaps more sly than the old tyrant, since the rhetoric of this masked master is one of the tolerance of difference. What better way to keep people in tow, hold them in the same old line of the same, than to console them with the noble lie of difference?

Can we do away with the search for the universal? The obvious answer is “no,” as we witness in thinkers who mostly have little or no time for religion qua religion.⁵ The answer is “no” even when we consider the “return” of religion to huge public, indeed political, prominence. In this return, of course, the intransigence of some fundamentalists is met with and matched by the obtuseness of some secularists. An important part of the problem here is an intermingling of political will to power with more universal claims, often looking to a religious orientation for some justification more ultimate than will to power alone. And this is something we see happening on different sides of current conflicts. There is also an implicit claim to universality, even if one’s claims are intended to be purely secular. For the projects of secularism, to the extent that secularism feels the need to justify itself, must appeal to universal norms, as it does, and did in the past, in opposition to what it perceived were the vested political interests of the aristocratic and religious orders. The conflict and possible conversation here too are between different understandings of the universal. Nazism, I suppose, is the most notorious of modern ideologies explicitly to appeal to a putative racial particularity as providing political and cultural justification for imperium. Yet the prestige of the universal was not abjured, since the race theory was presented as scientific and historically justified. Science and heritage were taken to dovetail with the particular gods of historical volkisch immanence. The fascist project itself embodies an expansion of the particular toward the universal, or toward the truer embodiment of the universal in the particular, on the basis of a claim to justified superiority—the superior human, the superior race. There is no escaping some universal implication or imputation.

With regard to philosophy itself and the universal, traditionally it was never a simple matter of totalizing sameness. The issue was always one of the interplay of sameness and difference. We think of cosmopolitanism as a political and cultural formation that arose due to confluences between the inheritances of monotheistic religion and the universalism coming from Athens in the reflections of the philosophers and the long seeping of these confluences into Western civilization. Athens and Jerusalem—two singular places, but each naming the universal in its own way. Pope Benedict made much of the happy confluence of these two streams for the early formation of Christianity. In his claim Christianity is a rational religion: a providence with inherent rationality is the coming to time of the logos that is the embodied Christ, a coming in the time of the philosopher’s logos and its quest for truth by reason. Of course, Benedict is a German Catholic, and many Germans of high culture since the late eighteenth century have loved Greece, though most of these German lovers of Greece were unruly children of Luther and sometimes loved Greece because they were prohibited from loving Rome.

We need to look at these different claims to universality, for we are invited in the direction of the intimate universal, and this from the side of philosophy as well as religion. Cosmopolitanism at its best also reminds us of the intimate universal—the ethical task was to bring the individual soul as rational into harmony with the rational cosmos as encompassing other-being. Though this harmony might seem to lie too much under the hegemony of the cosmos, the fact is that it not only fostered a discipline of inner equanimity, but generated an élan for ethical and legal transformation, as well as inspiring an immanent political project. Likewise, ghetto life might be seen to offer the promising occasion for the fostering of the intimate universal, reminding us of a community that, despite the suffering and confinement of its members, generates a prodigious spiritual deepening and maturation, educating us to the witness of the universal God. That God does not call us to quantitative room or even Lebensraum but to qualitative communion between the soul and itself, this person and others, the soul and God, the community of humankind and God. Are we in the neighborhood of the promised land of the intimate universal?

Philosophical Universals, Piety, and the Intimacy of Being

Suppose we look at some philosophical aspects of the matter, given that the question of the universal in relation to religion has always been close to the heart of philosophy itself. One thinks of the Platonic dialogue Euthyphro, often classed as the first of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates and Euthyphro enter in conversation about the nature of piety (to hosion: “the holy,” “pertaining to divine things”). They meet on the portico of the king archon, Socrates anticipating his own trial to come for atheism, corrupting the youth, and inventing new gods, Euthyphro bringing a charge against his father for killing one of the household servants/slaves. Euthyphro asserts a kind of privileged knowing of the gods, even claiming that, in prosecuting his father, he is merely imitating Chronos as castrating Uranus. Castrating the father—a cut to the most intimate place of perhaps the most imposing other. There is also something intimate when Euthyphro in his first answer to the question “What is piety?” replies: “Piety is what I am doing.” At the same time, there is also the hint of something more universal in this act of likening himself to the gods. Justification is in mimesis of the divine, though the mimesis is my mimesis, that is, it is a singular simulating of the divine. Note how the meaning of the singular mimesis is articulated in terms of family resemblances, not neutral generalities: it is the intimate likeness of family relations, between sons and father, whether human or sacred, that supplies the terms of discussion. Euthyphro tilts to the side of the intimacy of the sacred rather than the universal that favors no particular singular. By contrast, Socrates drives the conversation with Euthyphro relentlessly toward an essential definition of piety, a definition to be expressed universally and in terms as univocal as possible. We need not here look at the different definitions attempted, beyond noting that the Socratic drive for the universal must answer to a logos amenable to being held for all. This definition is not to be determined by examples or by narratives of what either Euthyphro or the gods have done or are doing. It is not to be portrayed in the mythoi, the stories of the gods that are intimate to a particular people or culture, in this instance, the Greeks. Socrates tilts to the side of a universality that seems to look with no special favor on all these intimate particulars.

The dialogue presents us with the interplay of these two tilts, and we might think of it as exemplifying, without thematizing, the issue of how intimacy and universality can be brought together in dialogue. We might think of Plato as the philosophical artist who, in the dialogue form itself, wants to name something of both the intimacy and the universality. The Platonic dialogue offers an iconic concretion (eikon) of the intimate universal: the conversation of thought that draws on what is most intimate in the interlocutors, even as it seeks the community of logos beyond each that is most universal.

One should not forget, however, that the Socratic drive for the universal comes to itself out of an originating occasion wherein philosophical perplexity is precipitated just in an intimate encounter with the special religious claim of the oracle at Delphi that Socrates is the wisest of the Greeks (see Apology, 20d–21b). There is nothing neutral, there can be nothing neutral, about the philosophical quest of the universal. Of course, even in the dialogue Euthyphro, we do wonder if Socrates sometimes fails to hear the particularity of his interlocutor, so strongly is every answer of Euthyphro reconfigured in terms of the standards of a universal definition. One can well understand the charge against Socrates that he invented new gods. These gods are not new mythic powers but transmythic principles accessible to a more impersonal logos. The new god is indeed logos itself in its universality and (we wonder) in a disembodied form.⁶ In truth, it seems to be nothing but disembodied form. The new God has no face. A great religious problem already strikes us in this: Even if we drive up to the universal, how do we come back down again, and live in the messy half-and-half light, or dark twilight, of daily life? The latter has a lived intimacy that the former seems to forsake. Religion as the practice of a kind of life is inseparable from this lived intimacy. If then there is a secret universality at work in this practice of life, might there not be more to it than philosophy can do justice? For Socrates philosophy always entails a way of life, a practice of being mindful. As a way of life, it is quite clear that Socrates thinks that there is a kind of intimacy to the universal sought in the philosophical quest. Perhaps this intimacy is known by the philosopher alone. The nonphilosopher tends to see only the spirit of abstraction. The nonphilosopher is not altogether wrong: the detachment of the abstract universal can be potentially treasonous to the intimate religious life of a people.

Of course, the problem of universals is almost synonymous with the tradition of philosophy and has been taken up by philosophers in other modalities. One thinks of the problem of the famous chorismos, the separation of the forms in the Platonic way of thinking. The response of Aristotle and his like is germane to the intimate universal: if the universal is not in some sense immanent, it fails to provide the intelligibility it is supposed to offer. After all, the point of invoking the universal is to make intelligible sense of what particularly presents itself, here, now. This issue has significant repercussions for the nature of conceiving community—whether religious or secular, cosmopolitan or ghetto, or something other again. The Platonic transcendence of the universal might well nurture a cosmopolitanism that is either otherworldly, utopian, or interventionist in a manner that might be destructive of the fabric of common life. By otherwordly I mean a decamping from common life to a higher community with the eternal beings or realities. By utopian I mean that the rational dream of a perfection calls out to be effected, perhaps not now, perhaps only by a kind of divine intervention and deliverance that will free us from the chiaroscuro of the Cave. By interventionist I mean the imposition of a theory on practical life, with imperious insistence that the theory has the true way, and there are no two ways about it. We can see in this insistence the lineaments of a kind of visionary fundamentalism, against which Aristotle warned us (see Politics, book 3) that there was too much of unity in the Platonic vision, not enough of manyness, and perhaps not enough of the difference between theōria and praxis.

One sees the point: the beyondness of the universal, dualistically understood as opposite to the intimacies of time, can give birth to significant negative consequences to immanent community here and now, and this despite its claim to ennoble rather than debase already given community.⁷ Be that as it may, the “beyondness” of the universal is not something we can entirely dismiss. Plato is not to be put out. For we seem drawn to something universal but it is never, perhaps never can be, absolutely realized in time and history. Part of piety is this draw to the holy, draw of the holy. There is always more to us in our intimate depths and to the universal in its spread, and to forget this “more” is to risk the collapse of philosophy into ideology, politics into will to power or huckstering, religion into a ruse of the ruling powers. A certain otherness of the universal keeps open a necessary difference. And while the temptation is to fix this difference as a dualism, it might better be seen as the space of a more fundamental intimacy between the human soul and the good, in a community of participation that can never be reduced to immanence as such. See in this here a family relation of philosophy with monotheistic religion.⁸ The One to which we turn (uni-versum) is never reducible to immanence as such, though communications across the difference are the core of the issue at stake. How, even granting the otherness, does the transcendent universal participate in time, without violence to the immanent intimacies of our dwelling in time? Putting the issue that way means we must as much stress the metaxu, the between, as the terms of the universal and the immanent intimacy. Without the metaxu it is hard to see how we could talk about the intimate universal.

If we look at the issue from the other side, namely, the immanence of the universal, one can sympathize with the broadly “Aristotelian” option as I have called it. For given the immanence of the universal we can make intelligible sense of the becoming of process. We can see the form of a community as a forming that takes shape from within out. It is not an ab extra imposition of an extraneous universal—it is the immanent emergence of the universal from the social formation of community itself, an emergence marked by a complex relation of identity and difference, an interplay of sameness and otherness, a confluence of unity and multiplicity. Why not rest happy with this? Because a question can be put to the exclusive stress on the immanent as such: Might this, while seeming to open up the universal from within, actually contribute to distorting, perhaps even counterfeiting, the intimate as such? For we can so stress this immanence as if it exhausted the intimate universal that communications with anything transcendent are compromised or cut off. There might be immanent universals that are counterfeit doubles of the intimate universal: so alike, it is almost impossible to detect the difference, and yet the difference is crucial—and especially if indeed it is true that the intimate universal is not finally intelligible without reference to divine transcendence.

At an extreme we might meet here a certain pantheism of the immanent universal. Needless to say, a variety of forms of Spinozism come to mind, from the god-intoxicated man himself to the intense Deleuze. With such a pantheism of the immanent universal there is nothing other than immanence, nothing over and above. Turning away from perplexity about Platonic transcendence seems to solve a problem but it might well turn out to be the evasion of the question. If the universal is so immanent that the particularities are to be gathered entirely within its horizon, this horizon becomes one beyond which nothing greater is to be thought. We put Anselm’s definition of God to a use that is potentially godless. Immanence is defined as the absolute horizon, but within that horizon nothing is truly absolute, and beyond that horizon there is no absolute, since a God beyond would threaten the putative unconditionality of the immanent whole. The godless whole is God, or God is the godless whole. Then there is no God and there is nothing but God; and in both instances, the space between the given and the God seems to be collapsed as an intermediating metaxu.

If there is nothing beyond, different options are possible. We might be more pluralistically inclined and thereby tempted with a kind of polytheism of the social. We might be more monistically inclined and thereby tempted with a kind of social pantheism. Social and political formations answering to these options are not hard to identify, though the secret gods they worship are more elusive. If there is nothing beyond, the immanent universal so understood can contribute to the divinization of states as they diversely exist, just because they exist—for to be at all is to embody the immanent universal. There is a connection with modern historicism that stands out. Rather than a polytheism or pantheism of nature, we make the claim that it is history that is the process of the immanent universal. We might have a pantheism of history, as with Hegelian historicism, or a polytheism of history, as in postmodern historicisms (one thinks of Lyotard and the “polytheism” of small stories or myths). A difficulty here, as we know from nineteenth- and twentieth-century historicisms, is that the universal seems to dissolve in immanent process as such. Putting aside for now the Hegelian universal of the pantheism of history,⁹ the evident facts of immanence show a multiplicity of formations, and it is not easy to see one universal that is forming itself in these many processes. More often than not, we are likely to think of that darker hydra, the polymorphous will to power. We move to a historicist polytheism, now, however, without any piety or gods. The historicized immanence manifests simply the secularized processes of human will to power and nothing else beside. Into this immanence we dissolve the universal. Chronos eternally returns to devour the children of time.

The Platonic perplexity comes back. The dissolution of the universal is something that clearly happens with Nietzsche, for instance, in the way the Platonic Idea becomes merely a projection of will to power beyond flux, itself formless, now to be reclaimed by that same formless flux. Were this true (what would it mean to say that?), the same would hold for all the rational universals of the philosophers. They are formations of polymorphous will to power. And since there seems nothing now but will to power, does it not now become the universal—a universal that is both intimate and strange, exhilarating and horrifying, building up and tearing down? Of course, because will to power as the immanent universal is both creative and destructive, we seem to be back less with the innocence of becoming and more with the slaughter bench of history of the despised Hegel—and without Hegel’s consoling rationalization. Perhaps indeed the innocence of becoming is indistinguishable from the slaughter bench of history. We are enjoined to sing a Dionysian Te Deum to the immanent Minotaur that at last has come forth from its labyrinth to stalk without guilt the blood-soaked earth. In this way of thinking, there is something beyond cosmopolis and ghetto and it is this devouring monster.

This monster has stalked the universal of Enlightenment reason since the time of Kant. It is a large tale but I mention one expression of it. I think of Schopenhauer, who makes claim to be the true heir of Kant, while also acknowledging Plato as his other major philosophical debt. Though he wants to retain the Platonic Idea, the principle of sufficient reason is nevertheless derivative from something more primordial, namely, the Will. Schopenhauer wrote in the high noon of idealism, but nocturnal perplexities arise in that noon concerning what is other to reason’s claim to be entirely at home with itself. We return to Plato’s Cave, but there we now begin to tunnel below the floor of the Cave, rather than simply climbing up above it or out of it. With the Ideas Schopenhauer takes us above the Cave, with the Will he takes us below. But the dark Will that is below is more ontologically intimate than the universal Ideas that are above.

The Platonic Cave is marked by a mixed interplay of light and darkness. We find ourselves not only in the Cave; we ourselves are a second cave, a darker underground. There might be some light shining for the intimate soul in the chiaroscuro of the Cave, but even this seems quenched as we pass into the obscurity of an ever-deeper darkness. This is the intimacy of the night before the dawn of reason. There is something more radical still for Schopenhauer—radical as at the root of all things. This is Will—a dark origin, subterranean even in that underground, whether of the first Cave, or of the cave we ourselves are. This dark origin is more primordial than the half-and-half world of phenomena, the Cave in the first sense, more primordial than ourselves, double creatures of will and representation, the second cave. In the “light” of this root origin, in whichever cave we are, Schopenhauer’s vision of things is so dark that we are perplexed as to whether we can see at all, and not just as to what we can see. In the half-light, half-darkness of the Cave, or of our own half-light, half-darkness, what can we see at all by the “light” of the root darkness?

This dark vision, this vision of darkness, has consequences for the intimate universal. There is a kind of inscrutable intimacy, maybe obscene intimacy, before all universality. When we burrow into the underground of the underground Cave, we are forced to consider something more ontologically intimate than the Platonic Idea: a dark origin below the Cave, not a bright Sun above it. The title of Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will and Representation, is revealing. Will, he claims, is the thing itself, the original, while representation is its image. Suppose we liken the world as representation to Plato’s Cave—could we then liken Schopenhauer’s Will to Plato’s Good? Surely it is rather the reverse. Will is no sun, is no good, but as original is darker even than the shadow land of representation. If it is ultimate as well as original, it bears the marks of the other underground, beneath the first underground. It is not above the underground as the ultimate Good. It is not clear we can speak meaningfully any more of what is above, above either the “normal” Cave of everyday life, or above ourselves as denizens of that Cave? Despite Schopenhauer’s declared debt of gratitude to Plato, and long before Nietzsche, Plato is already being reversed here—reversed more radically than with Nietzsche.

Extreme consequences follow for both intimacy and universality, both of which here are enfolded in an ultimate and impenetrable darkness. If our representations are shadow images of the Will, then they are not shadows of light, not even shadows of shadows, but shadows of this original and ultimate darkness. A shadow of original darkness is all but a self-contradictory kind of shadow, since without light there are no shadows. From whence comes the light? The original darkness is not the light. This original is a root darkness that casts shadows that are only apparently lightsome. It is a desolate original (de-solatus: “without sun”) or an original that desolates. To know the Will in intimate self-knowledge would be to “know” an “original” that is no original, and that ultimately is as vanishing as the “shadows” it casts of “itself.” This thing “itself” is impenetrable; there is no “itself”; and these “shadows” seem to redouble the darkness, not dispel it. The desolation of the original means there is also no consolation (con-solatus: “with sun”). What could art, or religion, or philosophy do to “console”—show we are con-solatus? Art, religion, and philosophy would themselves be ultimately “shadows” of the “original” inscrutable darkness. Were philosophy, say, to claim to “know” the “shadows” and the original “thing itself,” its claim would be an inexplicable “light,” emitted from a root darkness that would finally engulf the “shadows” and the “light” and the “knowing” itself. And yet, despite all that root darkness, there is light and the mystery that there is light at all.¹⁰ How to make sense of this light?

I ask this because it seems that in some post-Enlightenment currents of thought this sense of unremitting darkness at the heart of the intimacy of being tells against any way of bringing the intimate and the universal into accord. Every universal is outside this dark intimacy and its mask. I would connect this sense of the monstrous intimacy with perplexity about the goodness of being as such and our participation in a fundamental sense that there is a good to the “to be.” In this present scenario of intimacy, it is the evil of being that seems more likely to suggest itself, mirrored in the way Schopenhauer and Nietzsche cited the Greek Silenus who said: first, if possible, best not to be at all, and second, if in being, best not to be, as soon as possible. The real intimacy of being now means: the monstrous origin at the heart of darkness.

This monster has cooped up the ghetto and stalked the gulag. Yet when in extremis we face this monster, the animating impulse of the transcendent universal can be resurrected in its potentially saving power, for those lost either under the underground or in the above-ground labyrinth of everyday life, or indeed in the inner labyrinth of the human heart seeking to be above ground and to stand on the surface of the earth. The question of religion and more generally the sacred must come back to haunt us. The monstrous is the dark angel of religious happening. Its home is the religious, and not the less so, though we deny the possibilities of the infernal at the heart of our intimate being. Our denial of the infernal aids the infernal.

Between Hegelian Universality and Kierkegaardian Singularity

I will come to religion more fully but I want to mention one other important expression of the issue of the intimate universal, especially relevant in the postmodern context, and connected to the immanent universal of the pantheism of history. The matter might be put by means of the contrast between the immanent universality of Hegel and the protesting singularity of Kierkegaard. There is a view of the universal that refuses the transcendence of the Platonic Idea, and hence rejects a cosmopolitanism that retains any irreducible acknowledgment of the beyond, and the most systematically articulated version of this view is Hegel’s. Not only does Hegel criticize the dualism of the Platonic Idea, he speculatively reconfigures the strong sense of transcendence as other that we find in monotheistic religions, Christianity included, notwithstanding its robust incarnational immanence. Hegel also criticizes Stoicism for its retreat into the fast inwardness of the interior soul. Rather than reigning cosmopolitan universality, the Stoic soul secludes itself in ghettoed inwardness. Instead of resolving the alienation between humanity and the world, this retreat refigures alienation within rational inwardness, since this is defined by its negative over-againstness to what is outside and other. Whether this is fair to Stoicism is a question,¹¹ but clearly Hegel thinks there is a universality that need not decamp above or retreat within. There is an immanent universality that realizes itself in the world. This is the concrete universal.

Thus think of Hegel’s triadic logic of the concept (Begriff): the universal, the particular, the individual. This triadic logic is closely related to another triad: the indeterminate, the determinate, the self-determining. The abstract universal is indeterminate; it must particularize itself and become determinate; the universal is most absolutely concrete, most truly the individual, when it is self-determining. In the concrete universal, the determinate is the self-particularization of the indeterminate, and hence the universal is self-determining since it knows itself in the determinations that are its own. Is this concrete universal the intimate universal? I would say that Hegel’s concrete universal points in helpful directions relative to the critique of the abstract universal, but its sense of immanence is not easily reconcilable with all the significant dimensions of the intimate, and this limitation has something to do with being religious insofar as it exceeds every logic of immanent self-determination. For Hegel, the intimate is too indeterminate, too nebulous. One might say it is too pietistic for him. In an illuminating treatment in his Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, Hegel claims that, while seeming to be opposites, Enlightenment and what he calls Faith (Glaube) are really in a kind of collusion.¹² Enlightenment rationalism holds fast to the abstract universal, the Pietistic heart compensates for the empty indeterminacy of this abstraction with the intimate feeling of faith in the divine. Both alike dissolve into indeterminacy. Thus Hegel excoriates the indefiniteness of religious feeling, which Pietistic theology opposed to the deracinated abstraction of Enlightenment Verstand and theology. In the divergence of their determinate views, they converge on a shared indeterminacy. Whether this is fair to Pietism, there is no doubt of Hegel’s limited ability to deal with the intimate. The intimate as mere feeling is a seed, but a seed is all but nothing till it becomes determinate as the fully developed organism it is destined to be. There are mustard seeds, there are also seeds of the monstrous.¹³ The intimate as feeling is a mere immediacy, suspended, if not lost in the inarticulate, till it is mediated by the universal and properly brought forth into publicness. The concreteness of the Hegelian idea is not the intimate universal. The intimate universal, qua intimate, is not an indeterminacy. Prior to and beyond the triad of indeterminate, determinate, and self-determinate, there is something overdeterminate about it: a surplus of singular communicability. The intimate universal, qua universal, is not self-determination. It too is overdeterminate as endowing sacred community in which there is no univocal opposition of the public and the private. The public is as much intimate as universal; the private is as much universal as intimate.

One might propose Kierkegaardian singularity as the counterweight to the Hegelian universal and I think there is much to this. It is not insignificant that this singularity is inconceivable without the transcendent God, again the incarnational stress of Christianity notwithstanding. Incarnation may be the most absolute in terms of intimacy with immanence, but absolute intimacy is not the death of irreducible transcendence but the communication of its agapeic gift. If the singularity is only protesting, there is a ways to go toward the intimate universal. Nevertheless, there is in Kierkegaard a stress on the intimate in which one might see something of a resurrection of the Augustinian claim: God is more intimate to me than I am to myself: interior intimo meo. In many ways, Augustine allows us to put more forcefully the inseparability of the intimacy and communicability in its sacred ontological stress. This is a double intimacy, a redoubled intimacy, one might even say a hyperbolic intimacy. It is not simply our own intimacy raised to a second power, as if we were doubling ourselves—rather, there is a second other, more intimate than we are even to our own inner otherness. This hyperbolic other is intimated also: God is superior to my highest height, Augustine suggests. By this other power I am raised to a higher power, but I do not do this through myself alone. The heightening is graced and I am the intimate recipient. The grace is confided to me. I am the singular recipient but anyone might be that singular recipient—and be so in their deepest intimacy of being. The gracing is confided to humans in the intimate universal.

The hyperbolic sense of divine transcendence is not jettisoned by Kierkegaard. There remains a difference between immanence and transcendence that no immanent universal entirely articulates in the form of our rational logos. The difference of time and eternity is not abrogated, even if the alienation of one from the other is said to be divinely overcome. Mortals, creatures of the day, have to live with the chiaroscuro of immanence, not necessarily with despair about the absence of the universal but with trepidation as to how it is to be approached and understood, approached and understood in a manner that is faithful to its approach, faithful to its transcendence, faithful to its irreducibility to immanence as immanence—and this even in its approach to immanence.

Some have criticized Kierkegaard’s claim that truth is subjectivity as, so to say, too vacuous an intimacy, and there are undoubtedly questions to be raised. Kierkegaard rightly challenges us to think beyond the moral universal with regard to the religious, and with regard to the singularity, that is, intimacy of the relation of the person to the divine. I am not sure if he would accede to talk of the intimate universal in connection with being religious. The intimacy seems to verge on incommunicability, if we consider his stress, say, on the silence of Abraham. Not to the fore is the sense that the intimacy is itself an enabling of communicability in a field of communication, a metaxu of the soul in a metaxu of relation more ultimate than the moral relation, whether it be in the religious community or in the communication of the divine.

My point here is not the hermeneutics of Kierkegaard—a formidable task. There is no doubt that Kierkegaard reminds us of a sense of singularity that is not woven into the texture of Hegel’s system, just because there is something about its idiocy that is at the source of, and in excess of, all system. This holds even when Hegel claims (a claim raising its own disputes) that the modern state has the “prodigious strength and depth” to allow subjectivity to progress to the extreme of personal particularity, while bringing it back to substantial unity (see Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, §260). The danger: this immanent universal not only abrogates the otherness of transcendence, but sucks up into self-sublating totality the immanent otherness of the human self, in the interior opening of its abyssal soul to God. Kierkegaardian singularity is not quite the extremity of particularity that the concrete universal brings back to substantial unity with itself. I say this not in critique of the intent of the concrete universal but in terms of its understanding of the dimensions of both the universal and the singular—the community and the intimate. Religion has everything to do with the difference. For that matter, we can easily underestimate the communal dimensions of Kierkegaard’s mission, at times so hidden from view behind the slogans of subjectivity that we think there is no communal dimension at all. In fact, everything must be approached from the community of the human and the divine, understood in a Christian sense, where the intimate universal is just that community.¹⁴ The intimate universal is not the concrete universal, not quite the intimate singularity—it is beyond them, as between them, and so is neither the one nor the other, and there would be neither concrete universal nor intimate singularity if the intimate universal did not offer the allowing field of between-being within which they are covenanted.¹⁵

Monotheism and the Intimate Universal

On the religious side of the issue, I would underscore the importance of the personal God for any understanding of the intimate universal. The impersonal principle or absolute seems more convenient for the tastes of many philosophers, but as has often been religiously pointed out, this gets us the abstract universal, or at most the concrete universal. (Thus, for Hegel the personal God would be a representational form of the absolute, not fully true to the full truth of the absolute. A striking contrast here is William James in his remarkable postscript to The Varieties of Religious Experience.)¹⁶ The intimacy in question is one inseparable from communication between the human and the divine, signaled perhaps most deeply in the happening of prayer. If the intimate universal is other than both neutral generality and the Hegelian concrete universal, the universal itself must be such as to enable communication in the intimate sense meant here. This must mean that religion cannot be subordinated to philosophy, as if the latter completes what the former intends, as if the former intends what the latter desires in terms of impersonal system. If we subordinate religion to philosophy, we may have consigned the intimate universal to the relative place, and hence lost the game already, even while claiming to be completing the so-called deficiency of the intimate universal—namely, that it is intimate and not universal, universal in the sense of the impersonal. This line of thought has implications in a number of different ways.

One of the amazing things about religion, especially monotheistic religion, is its power to marry the universal and the singular.¹⁷ The human being’s relation to God and God’s relation to us are intimately singular. In relation to God we are not mere instances of a class called “humanity” or specimens of a species. As intimately singular this divine relation is offered to all humans; it is universally on offer. It matters not whether we move up or down, strike in or strike out, ascend to the heights or descend into the darkest depths. To cite just one verse from the marvelous Psalm 139:

Where can I hide from your spirit?

From your presence, where can I flee?

If I ascend to the heavens, you are there;

If I lie down in Sheol, you are there too.

If I fly with the wings of dawn

And alight beyond the sea,

Even there your hand will guide me,

Your right hand holds me fast.

If I say, “Surely darkness shall hide me,

And night shall be my light”—

Darkness is not dark for you,

And night shines as the day.

Darkness and light are but one.

How pedestrian after this to speak of religion in terms of the intimate universal! And yet it is clear that religion is neither for merely privatized subjectivities nor for objectivized generalities. For the universal to be truly catholic, it must be universal and intimate at one and the same time. A great challenge is to live up to both the universality and the intimacy, and hence to embody the divine relation in the flesh of different cultures, and in a manner that does justice to both the universality and the intimate singularity.

I mentioned prayer, and in some ways there is nothing more intimate, so intimate that it is hard to draw attention to it, hard to fix what is happening in an exhaustively determinate way, impossible to fix when the other in communication is no thing.¹⁸ And yet to think of prayer as inverted into a self-retracting subjectivity could not be further from the truth. It has to do with the most released form of communication, in which porosity to the divine endows the soul itself as a sanctified metaxu. At a more obvious public level, the practice of religion has to do with communal worship, the rituals of a community, and the entire ensemble of symbolic acts in which a sometimes secret sense of sacred ultimacy touches on, impinges on, all the significant aspects of social life, politics included. The public side of religion is not the universal in the fullest sense since, as we know, one might be at ease with a certain civic religion and yet in one’s heart be an atheist, just as also one might go to church not to pay one’s respects to the Most High but to look at the pretty girls. The impingement of religion on public life has been fought, and fought about, in modernity, not least because religions have brought their not so divine will to power and its ferocity to public life as to a field of war. The privatization of religion is said to follow. But just as the more social publicity is not the universal, so also the privatization is not what the intimacy implicates.

The relation of religion and philosophy is again important here. There is a strong trend in modernity for philosophical reason to claim to relativize the absolute claims made on behalf of religion. The latter, it is argued, are too enmeshed in equivocity, and only the univocity of philosophical reason will yield the requisite universality of the concept. Among others, I think of Spinoza and Hegel. For Spinoza piety has to do with obedience to the political sovereign, not truth. For Hegel the philosophical concept is the true form of the absolute, while religion remains at the stage of the absolute relative to its merely representational expression, with all the equivocities that go with representation, not to mention the still-not-overcome reference to divine transcendence as other. With Hegel, one recalls, the modern state supersedes the religious community, for the latter is a community of spirit, while the former is the most consummate, truly worldly embodiment of immanent freedom. The modern state is the more absolute worldly embodiment of social self-determination as the immanent universal. This, of course, is to risk an idolatry of politics and the state. Hegel is not unrepresentative of modern secular thought on this score, though he understands the need of religion in a more robust way than most secular thinkers. Nevertheless, I would suggest that there is a misunderstanding of the universal of religion, as well as the intimacy. Of the universal, since this has to do with communication with a God who, while manifest in immanence, retains an irreducible transcendence. This transcendence need not be formulated in the modality of a Platonic dualism, and yet there can be an irreducible doubleness between time and eternity. Between these can be a metaxological intermediation that is not a dialectical subsumption into a more unitary totality. Of the intimacy, since this is not a matter of inarticulate feeling, lost in indefinite immediacy, to be rescued for the light of rational day only by the mediations of the concept. It is the communication of the ultimate love, the agapeics of the divine.

Put in Augustinian terms, Hegel claims to mediate between the cities of God and Man but in the end he collapses their difference in one immanent self-mediating universal. He conceptually covers, covers over, the mysterious hiddenness of the universal community as pilgrim on earth, and never absolutely at home in the state, in any political state. This not-being-completely-at-home in the political universal points to something of the qualitative difference that is communicated in the intimate universality of the religious. It also points to the religious community as witness to the transpolitical, even while enmeshed in political circumstances. Living prayer is enlivened in the communication of that intimate universal as a being-at-home in not-being-at-home—witnessing to a happiness, so to say, incomprehensible to Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, and to Hegel.

Hegel’s universal, of course, is not a mere public generality, and he sees a truer universality to religion. Only humans have religion, he holds, because human are reasonable, and this might well be expressed plurally throughout history, culminating in Christianity. Religion spans history, but as manifested within history, it culminates for Hegel in the immanent God, the immanent God-man. Given the immanent apotheosis of the God-man, it is not surprising that it mutates into the man-God. But without the qualitative depth of the intimate universal, the hyphen does not have the speculative power to hold the two together in their difference and interrelation, and they collapse into each other. The God-man becomes the Man-god. This is dialectically dissimulated in Hegel, “mystified,” as Marx would say. I would say the “mystification” is the equivocation of the concrete universal as if it were the intimate universal. Nor do Hegel’s “religious,” right-wing successors come back to the intimate universal, though they counterfeit its piety. They are cozily in collusion with the reigning collusion of the religious establishment and political power. His left-wing successors turn this equivocation in a more revolutionary and violent direction later in the nineteenth century and beyond into the century just past. They call that collusion to account, not to release the intimate universal into its free ultimacy, beyond all political power, but to free political power into the revolutionary transcendence of all religious patience. Patience to them is sacred servility, not divine service. The God-man mutates into the Man-god of a secular, rational postreligious humanism in which the highest being—humanity—comes to immanent social self-determination. You might object that now Marxists have lost their historical faith and postmodern antihumanists writhe in the self-lacerations of an autonomy grown old and cold. Yes, but this also would be to underestimate the sullenness of post-Marxist unbelief whose dead shadow is still cast on the cave walls of politics. It would be to underestimate the intimate disappointments of human autonomy lurking in the postmodern lacerations of still-unreleased freedom.

This left-Hegelian line of inheritance presents us with an honest, if crude, clarity—honest and crude by contrast with the circumlocutious ambiguation of postmodern evasion. This crude clarity concerns the human-centered project historically to dissolve the transcendence of the monotheistic God. There is then no such transcendence finally and, if we are differently honest, no basis for the kind of singular, personal intimacy that is at issue in biblical monotheism. As more recently Žižek, the Lord of Misrule of post-postmodernism, proclaims in echo of Lacan: “There is no big Other” (Il n’y a pas de grand Autre). A slogan to be sure that only seems to hit the nail on the head, and certainly does not get to the heart of the matter. For without the divine transcendence as other, it is hard to see any basis for an intimate universality that is not dissolved, indeed dispersed on the flux of differences or relativities that constitute the becoming of time. One reason why recurrence to Augustine is relevant is because he retains humility before this divine transcendence. There is a divine service that is patient: it is freed beyond servility and sovereignty. It is in virtue of the personal providence of this divine transcendence that it is universal in the hyperbolic dimension—hyperbolic to time, though communicative to and in time; hyperbolic to every claim on our part to determine the meaning of time or reduce it to our own self-determination; hyperbolic also to the social projects that we build up to create homes for ourselves in time, and that we are tempted to invest with the status of the ultimate divinity. These projects can even be our “religions,” though we do not call them religions, and it might be more honest to call these achievements our crystal palaces. They are not the ultimate universal. When they displace religious community and claim to be its successor and completion, with the ultimacy proper only to the religious, they construct counterfeit doubles of the intimate universal.

The transcendent universality of the monotheistic God that communicates the intimate universal of religious community relativizes all the claims to ultimacy we make for our crystal palaces. This is a point that can tell against religion as well as against secular debunkers or replacers of religion. This relativization is especially important when monotheisms usurp for themselves the claim to enact a project of God on earth, as if the gap between them and God had simply disappeared, and what they decide or determine is what God determines or decides. God provides the political-theological banner under which the will to power of this community marches and so seeks to extend its imperium to the world at large. The first commandment—God is God and nothing but God is God—tells against all such projects. Every such project is a collapse of the doubleness between the human and the divine into the Man-god rather than the God-man. One thinks of Christian communities in history, say, in early modernity, overtaken by a will to power presenting itself as the will of God. One thinks of Cromwell’s ethnic cleansing, if not genocide of Gaelic Catholics as the Anti-Christ.¹⁹ One thinks of the Ummah turned into a fanatical project of Islamic fundamentalism.²⁰

Have no strange gods before you—take this as a warning against counterfeit doubles of the intimate universal. I would also say here if the transcendent God communicates (in) the intimate universal, it must at its heart of hearts relativize the temptation to tyranny of will to power. The universality fitting for such a God must be a community of peace and love. It must be the God of agapeic service, not the God of erotic sovereignty. All the major religions point in the direction of agapeic service, but perhaps it is in Christianity that it has been most foregrounded. For all of these religions to remain true, remain faithful to the universal God they confess, it is very important to remember this difference of agapeic service and erotic sovereignty. The point is not to depreciate either eros or sovereignty, but to be guarded about sovereignty bewitched about itself in the form of eros turannos. The tendency to think primarily or only in terms of the latter runs the risk of a religiosity that has not purged from itself the secret temptations of will to power, one that is tempted to enter into collusions with political powers that make no apology for their will for erotic sovereignty and with it all the glory of worldly power, glory as will to power determines it to be. These collusions and these unexpurgated temptations are very relevant to the promiscuity of politics and religion that we confront in our world today. There are those in the “Christian” West for whom the religious universal is a means to an end. Press the political-religious buttons and you will get the people on your side. Atheist though you might be, you suddenly find something “interesting” about “Christianity” when confronted with what looks like the passion of the religious that comes at us, say, from an Islamic direction. These are contingencies generating opportunistic appropriations. As such, they are liable to produce the counterfeit double of the religious universal, rather than in fear and trembling to witness to the truer thing. Religious collusion with such counterfeit doubles seems expediently attractive, but in the long run it is disastrous for religion. It brings religion’s bona fides into disrepute, and it seems revealed simply as another formation of erotic sovereignty, just like all worldly formations of will to power. The universal of agapeic service has been betrayed. We have seen this happen again and again throughout history.

A small token that there is more at issue is evident in the fact that all the great religions, and Christianity not least, could and must speak to the poor and the outcast. The small token is the great thing, namely, witness to the charge of a universal intimacy with those who fall outside the officially sanctioned groups or generalities in many powerful cultures. Christianity in particular seems to take note of a strongly double character in being in the world but not of it, in necessarily being resident in a reigning regime of political power but not being identical with its culture of power—witness to the transcendent universal as intimate within the human community, while not being reducible to the human community. It lives not only within a particular culture of political power but on the precarious boundaries between the inside and the outside of such a culture, the downside of the immanent powers and the superior side toward which it pilgrims. In this double position, it is to be a witness to the immanent culture of what passes beyond the terms of its immanence: the communication between God and humans—the intimate universal.

The Intimate Universal and the Ghetto of Secular Privatization

On the positive side, one might grant that secularization since the Enlightenment is understandable as a corrective reaction to the madness of religion, a kind of ideological inoculation against this madness. But one can also inoculate against the greatness of religion in inoculating against the madness, thereby generating new forms of madness. The rationalist inoculant can function like a disinfectant, a DDT that tends to kill all life, the sick and the healthy. However, life and this life of religion cannot be entirely killed, since it is the life of our being. And what then can come back to life after this inoculation is not necessarily neutral health but rather a series of mutants, even monsters—not in overtly religious form but in, say, political form. I am thinking of the atheistic monsters of ideologies that would destroy all religion. Healing a sickness of spirit generates a new sickness of spirit and the cure is worse than the original curse.

We might ask what “intimacy” can now mean in light of post-Enlightenment efforts to privatize religion. I think the Enlightenment misconception of the religious universal can be matched here by a withdrawal from the public space of political community. Sometimes that withdrawal is conceived as a protest of recalcitrant singularity against the engulfment by the homogenizing generality of postreligious secularisms. After all, these secularisms allow privatization. More often, however, under the dictation of “neutral” public reason, religion is called on to withdraw into a more or less private ghetto. Religious reasons, it is stipulated, are not “real” reasons, universally communicable. Religion may be allowed as a private affair, an affair of the heart, let us say, but any claims it might make to be a public affair are to be enfeebled. If it tries to introduce itself into the public space, it is greeted with suspicion, if not hostility, and the accusation that it serves the fomentation of invidious conflicts. The allegedly disruptive power of religion in the public sphere must be domesticated by taking it altogether out of that sphere. There are sources of social power and sovereignty but these are based in humankind and in humankind alone. They are not to be backed up by any appeal to God.

There are different “privatizations”: some are merely enfeeblements of the passion of the religious; others are more thoroughgoing entries into the night of divine depth within the intimacy of the communicating soul. The latter is closer to what is more truly at stake with the intimate. I again invoke the Augustinian wisdom: God is interior intimo meo. As suggested already, this is intimacy raised to the second degree—intimacy hyperbolic to the first intimacy wherein we are privy to the secrets of our own hearts, to the extent that this is possible for humans. How can something be more intimate than what is most intimate to oneself, namely, one’s own self? That “something” seems like “nothing.” One is what one intimately is; there seems no gap of “nothing” between oneself and oneself; and yet in the solitude of intimacy there is no solitude. What is the “nothing” here? The gap of “nothing” is the between-space of porosity where the enabling communication of the power of being gives us to be what we are and are to be. There is an inward otherness marking one’s intimacy to self. There is also the communication of the incognito God in the deepest ontological porosity of one’s soul, so deep that it seems like nothing, since too the porosity is itself no thing—the open between space in which communication of the power to be is given and different selvings take determinate form. One is never alone, even when one is alone.

There is indeed something private about being religious in the sense of its being perhaps the most intimate thing at the heart of the human being. But least of all should we think of the intimate universal as a matter of privatization in line with, say, the ideological terms of private property. “Mine, mine alone”—these are not the words communicated in the intimate universal. The “privacy” of religion bears on the singular relation of the soul in communion with God, a communion inseparable from the community of other human beings, hence something neither merely subjective, nor simply objective. We are all that intimate singular. The intimacy suggested by Augustine is also, as we noted, superior to my highest summit, as well as more intimate to me than I am to myself. There is a height above us, within us—a superior power beyond us, in our intimate hearts. Without Augustine’s turn to the inward self, his own conversion would not be comprehensible. Yet that conversion is not a turn to himself but accession to the community of faith, at the core of which is the communication of God in the intimate universal. Augustine aptly pleaded: “Give me persons in love: they know what I mean. Give me those who yearn; give me those who are hungry; give me those far away in this desert, who are thirsty and sigh for the spring of the eternal country. Give me those kinds of people: they know what I mean. But if I speak to cold persons, they just do not know what I am talking about.”²¹

You might think that Nietzsche would, and should, love those who love thus rather than the cold, neutral ones, but he lapses into a remarkable lack of finesse, not to say hatred, when it comes to Christian love. Nietzsche on early Christians, in The Anti-Christ (§59): “The whole ghetto world of the soul risen to the top in a single stroke!—Just read any Christian agitator, Saint Augustine, for example, and you will realize, you will smell the sort of unclean people this brought to the top.” Elsewhere in On the Genealogy of Moral (third essay, §22), Nietzsche refers also to the Church Fathers as Christian agitators (christlicher Agitatoren) and goes into a mocking rant about the personages of the New Testament: “Presumption can go no further. An ‘immortal’ Peter: who could stand him? Their ambition is laughable: people of that sort regurgitating their most private affairs, their stupidities, their sorrows, and petty worries, as if the Heart of Being were obliged to concern itself with them; they never grow tired of involving God himself in even the pettiest troubles they have gotten themselves into. And the appalling taste of this perpetual familiarity with God.”²² And yet the treason and the tears of Peter witness more to the intimate universal than the presumption claimed by this rant. There are times when Nietzsche, in his going on about Christianity—especially in The Anti-Christ—seems to show symptoms of, so to say, spiritual Tourette’s. To begin, he clamps his hand on his mouth and is relatively restrained, but by the end he cannot hold his hand and a compulsion to curse overtakes him.²³

To return to the Augustinian theme: there can be turns to self that are not loving homecomings to the intimate universal but platforms for accentuating claims made for the powers of human self-determination, or indeed sheer self-assertion. The turn to self is then a turn from an other perceived as equivocal, as a possible curb on my own self-determination. This is something one notes especially in connection with the modern culture of autonomy. The turn to self takes on a different character from the religious turn toward porosity to the divine in the intimate universal.

Relative to this culture of autonomy, it is noticeable in debates about modernity that the only value that seems to pass muster in an uncontested way is that of freedom. Everyone is in favor of freedom, though what exactly is meant by freedom no one is completely sure. Tyrants sing some of the sweetest hymns to freedom. No other good is allowed to bask in the sun of our approval: God is not, happiness is not quite, virtue is not. Freedom is. Moreover, freedom is predominantly understood in terms of a certain notion of autonomy, so much so that for many today there is no difference at all between freedom and autonomy. That there might be other forms of freedom not defined by autonomy—such a consideration does not come to the fore. There might be freedoms beyond autonomy, and this will change the whole picture. The modern culture of autonomy, which tends to identify heteronomy with a curtailment of freedom, has been extended beyond the individual to diverse forms of social order, such as those expressing ecclesiastical power. The latter is seen as a bastion of heteronomy. Hence the need is felt to take an attitude of aggression against religion as a heteronomous threat.

Whatever the justice of this way of criticizing religion, “privatization” is also connected with the question of liberty within the sphere of religion itself, with respect to the freedom of religious choice. Among the great shames of religion in the past (to speak only of the West, though one thinks of hostilities between Sunnis and Shias) were the wars generated between Christians—putting religion into shame, and making some people think that only something entirely other than religion could prevent war. True religion requires freedom; the notion of a forced conversion is a contradiction in terms. What is greatest and noblest about being religious is that it is the most intimate thing relative to the communication between the human and the divine. No one else can be there for one in that space of communication, no one else can be religious for one. One is nonreplaceable, nonsubstitutable. But while there is a deep singularity in this, it is not to be opposed to the “public.” Perhaps religious community alone is able truly to reconcile the singular and the universal. There is something quite right about the “privatization” of religion in this intimate sense. Religion is, like love, the most intimate thing for the human being—love of God who is more intimate to me than I am to myself. This intimacy is not narcissistic or autistic. It is impossible to understand without communication and communicability.

Given this, it is impossible to agree with supporters of secularization who have advocated the utter privatization of religion, who would want to deny, or weaken as much as possible, any connection between religion and public life. This “privatization” sometimes mirrors an economic capitalist model: a private property, not a public service, religion must compete or be traded on the market. This is privacy without the intimacy of the religious passion. No one owns religion. It is more nearly true to say that one is owned by religion, at least claimed by its urgency of ultimacy. What of the political-economic model favored by communism: expropriate private property, bring being religious into public ownership, under state control? This is socialization that deprives religion of the intimacy of its sacred character, that not merely deprives but works to extirpate it, given that its public owners were zealous executioners of a political agenda of atheism. Needless to say, it is not only under communism that such a venture of political ownership or state control has been attempted.

The distinction I make between the communities of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service is here very relevant to the difference of the political and the religious.²⁴ The community of erotic sovereignty has to do with the social intermediations of worldly power and its immanent excellences; the community of agapeic service has to do with the intermediation of transcendent good beyond will to power, whether in the intimate intermediation between the soul and God or the communal intermediation of a religious people with God. Though there is something deeply intimate about religion, religion extends to the whole (catholic as kath’ holou), and hence it is very difficult to confine it to one domain among others. It is not that religion should exert hegemony over the whole: this would be a kind of totalitarian monism of the sacred. But if the spirit of religion lives in the community of agapeic service, then it is in this spirit of generous service that it places itself at the ready for the whole. It is available not just for this here or that there, but potentially is available for all, if need be without any condition, especially in circumstances where the poor and the needy, in material terms, in spiritual terms, ask our aid.

When secularization take the form of hostility to religion, in the longer run it can help the religious to see that its own concern is not worldly will to power and the dominion of erotic sovereignty. Religion is not politics, though it has implications for politics, precisely by standing at an angle that is vertical to the immanent economy of political power itself. The long process of secularization in modernity can be seen as purgatorial in that regard. And this not as a prelude to the regaining of worldly power, but as enabling the clearer realization within religion that there is something beyond the community of erotic sovereignty. This is the community of agapeic service. One might wonder, for instance, if Marxist-inspired liberation theologies do not make enough of this difference between the communities of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service, opening the latter to the corrupting temptation to trumpet primarily about worldly will to power—all in the name of social justice. In the name of agapeic service the community is diverted along another pathway of erotic sovereignty. Jesus convened no world summit of international opinion-makers. He fasted in the desert; he prayed; he endured temptation; he unequivocally rejected the dominion of erotic sovereignty as ultimate. There is no Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ. The soul of Christ is more than the will of Caesar.²⁵

We speak of the separation of Church (or Synagogue or Mosque) and State, but perhaps we should speak of distinction rather than strict separation, in that the latter can be energized by a logic of dualistic opposition or exclusion. Distinction (or separation) can be understood in different manners, not all of which possess sufficient finesse. We might distinguish, so to say, a projective from a phronetic secularization. The projective is a project of necessitated separation, not finessed distinction; the phronetic is one of finessed distinction, not necessitated separation. The projective separation easily turns into opposition, turns into war in extreme cases. It is a project after all—a desacralized will to power, a secular conatus that consecrates itself to achieving the completed separation of the political and religious communities. Separation turns to opposition when religion will not go quietly, and turns then to war, when religion stubbornly keeps being reborn. The separation can be a project of driving religion into privacy—into the intimate without any door to the universal—into an autism of the spirit whose slow torture will make even death appealing and religion plead for its own euthanasia. In the modern West there are many signs of that autism of spirit and euthanasia of religion. Repeatedly also the élan of religion is more passionately robust. And then projective secularization can well seek to extirpate religion, not only from public space but also from the private. Hence the torture of the intimate soul and its attempted destruction in atheistic regimes. These are forced secular conversions to a desacralized world and a deconsecrated soul.

The phronetic approach to secularization, by contrast, is a matter of distinguishing, not separating or opposing. In finesse, it is a matter of the fitting difference, a matter of what is appropriate to the political and the transpolitical community. Granting the pluralization of manifestation of the intimate universal, this allows the secular as a communal space where nonreligious and religious can live together. The phronetic may itself be a child of agapeic community in letting the other be as other, in nonviolent relation. Projective secularization is more connected with the community of erotic sovereignty and more inclined to insist on a monism of power. The phronetic is not areligious or antireligious but makes an allowance for nonbelief, and hence for that matter an allowance of belief. Practical wisdom has no algorithm to police the thresholds between religion and politics, and indeed their mixing and interpenetration, so it has to live by a certain esprit de finesse. This means attention to the nuance of singular occasions, as well as respect for the recurrent constancies. Analogously, the metaxological space of the intimate universal is always a communal setting for conversion, for metanoia. There is a metanoetics of the metaxological: being born again, a second birth in the dimension of the hyperbolic. Fundamentalism has something more in common with projective secularism—there is an “either-or” in both, defined by separation, opposition, exclusion. It too is not phronetic enough—it is too univocal. The transpolitical and the political are not seen in terms of more metaxological coexistence, even coparticipation in the intimate universal.

When necessitated separation is viewed from the standpoint of negative exclusion, it can further the marginalization of religion in society. In the guise of neutrality, it can foster an indifference to the most important ethical and spiritual issues. It can lame the religious community when that community feels it must protest on behalf of a higher measure. I particularly think of those for whom this separation means that the final judge is the State. We see this in the French Revolution. We find it in the understanding of indivisible political sovereignty in diverse thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza. We see it in Hegel for whom the State becomes god on earth. The Church is a merely spiritual community, it is said, while the State embodies worldly freedom in the immanent sphere—and this is the fullest realization of freedom, Hegel thinks. This is a separation that puts the Church beneath the State when it comes to the most important things. I have mentioned the communist efforts to écrasez l’infâme, but the Nazis were very suspicious of the churches where they resisted cooperation or cooption. The idolization of the Volk cannot but seem blasphemous to one who believes that God alone is God—and not all churches escaped the idolatry.

The separation can be viewed more positively, namely, in terms of our need to distinguish phronetically between different kinds of communities, and what is proper to each. This also means avoiding merely subordinating the religious community to secular power. The community of erotic sovereignty is not identical with the community of agapeic service, and the second is the more ultimate community, though not to be defined in terms of the sovereignties of worldly power. The community of erotic sovereignty deals with the governance of immanent power and, when it is just, it deals with the ethical excellences that come with the right uses of worldly power. The community of agapeic service is concerned with transcendent good, not simply in a “beyond” but with the faithful enactment of what it asks of us here and now. This does not mean that the here and now is all there is. There is something more ultimate than worldly will to power.

Religious communities may have learned in the separation what distinguishes them more truly in relation to the second community, the community of agapeic service. This is not just a moral community. It has to do with the holy. It cannot subordinate itself to the State in the sense of accepting this as the last judgment. There is a divine measure above. This goes against the denial of any “above” or “beyond” in modernity generally. But religion is eviscerated without some sense of this “above.” The distinction of erotic sovereignty and agapeic service may help us to see more truly what is at the heart of being religious. Distinction cannot mean a mere opposition or dualism. There is relation even in what is separate. It is impossible to confine agapeic service to any one space or sphere—even though it is more than happy to abide as incognito. Distinction rather than just separation can point to the promise of an enabling difference, which itself can be the basis of a work of relation and community—community in the sense of being in communication. The truth of being in communication comes in bearing witness. A witness is one who stands there before the others, standing for something, not just standing there as himself or herself, but for something beyond himself or herself, taking an intimate stand in fidelity to the universal call of agapeic service. The work of witnessing in this regard must always be in the middle—in the between where distinction allows communication with what is other than oneself, in the between where, beyond separation, community can come to be, in the between where the secret strengthening of divine companionship has communicated itself in the midst of mortal struggle.²⁶

The enabling distinction of Church (or Synagogue or Mosque) and State points to the promise of a necessary worldly involvement for the Church (or Synagogue or Mosque), but the modality of the involvement is all important. It cannot be a secret will to power masked as agapeic generosity—this would be a perversion. It concerns bearing witness to the availability of the divine for the human. Most often this communication has again a certain incognito aspect—it does not insist on drawing attention to itself, it does not insist on itself. This does not mean capitulation to evil, for the need for witness can find itself placed in danger with regard to certain situations. Something is beyond negotiation. Were there to be negotiations, then the inner truth and humble greatness of the religious community would be corrupted. In circumstances of danger the witness draws fire upon himself or herself, as kingfishers draw fire, and as dragonflies draw flame. There is witness to the limit of martyrdom. This is the witness even unto death. When politics counterfeits the intimate universal it crucifies the true witness.

The Sacred Idiocy of the Intimate Universal

Returning one final time to what is neither cosmopolis nor ghetto, I would say that the religious intimacy is idiotic. It is not first a matter of the theoretical universals of the scholars and theologians. Its beatitudes are for the simple. It is more an idiot wisdom than a theory. But idiot wisdom is not mere unreason but a life beyond system and theory, in mindfulness of the intimate universal, lived in an agapeic service beyond servility and sovereignty. Idiocy: the religious intimacy is beyond the fixity of univocal determinacy; it is more than subject to our self-determination; it is not a nebulous and equivocal indeterminacy. Beyond objectification and subjectification, it is overdeterminate: too much and almost nothing, at once a poverty and a richness paradoxically together.

Religious intimacy moves on a threshold that may be turned inward into mysterious communication with the divine, or turned outward toward all others to whom it seeks to bring the good news of the divine communication. It is on a daring edge, beyond the range of any neutral, homogenous generality. Hence it is never exhausted by the public rituals and symbolics of civic religion. Indeed, we have known in history the resurgence of this passion of religious intimacy in times when the influence of the public religions has waned. One thinks of Roman religion and the revitalization of the mystery cults, as answering to a more immediate and personal relation between the human and the divine. Post-Enlightenment secularism thinks that this idiocy is a mere vacant silence, and its preferred “privatization” is often just simply endorsement or enforcement of the silence as an idiocy signifying finally nothing. But this is a momentous idiocy that never goes away, never went away. Just because the public generalities of the sociologists do not pick it up on their conceptual radar does not mean it is not there. And then mirabile dictu, there it is, this reemerging and communicating idiocy trying to find a name and a habitation for itself. It was nothing, it was to be nothing, it was to nought itself. But there is here a fertile void—a space of porosity in the most intimate soul in which the divine communicates with the human. This intimacy is in prayer most truly minded, but it is also out there in the midst of things.²⁷

The intimacy has much to do with the fact that with us there is a passio essendi prior to our conatus essendi—a patience of being prior to our endeavor to be. Both point back to the porosity that is primal—a porosity we easily cover over if we think only in terms of determinate things or the projects of our endeavor to be, and not in terms of the patience of being. This tends to happen when the modern turn to self configures itself in terms of an ideal of autonomous self-determination, set to overcome every patience of being and bring what is given or received within the control of our own determination. This turn to self turns away from the primal porosity, and hence also has great difficulty acknowledging the intimate universal. The primal porosity is the open space of communication between the human and what gives and enables it to be, God in religious terms. No sociological understanding or historicist thesis can ever approach and address this. It simply does not and cannot appear on such social and political radars, for it is nonobjective. Nor does it appear on the radar of a scientific psychology, since this too is objectifying, and the idiocy is trans-subjective. The intimacy is preobjective, and indeed in a certain sense presubjective. We are pointed to the idiocy of selving in communication that is prior to the determination of this or that formation of selving or community. There is an intimate singularity that is prior even to the particular self, though the determinate and self-determining selving do particularize and concretize it. This intimate idiocy does not betoken a kind of autism of being, nor does it mean that any communication of its significance to others is impossible.²⁸ This idiocy is rich with a promise, perhaps initially not publicly communicated, and yet available for, making itself available for, communicability. In communicability what is preobjective becomes trans-objective, just as what is presubjective becomes trans-subjective. Communication happens in the open porosity that enables transit. Communication itself would not be possible did not the porosity open up idiotically. Communicability itself cannot be confined to articulation in neutral generality, or homogeneous universality. Communication words what is elusive in the intimacy of being, hence that intimacy is at the heart of living communicability itself. Religious finesse, finding a worldly articulation in the wise judgment that bears on issues of public importance, bears witness to the intimate universal.

When the Enlightenment philosophers were attacking the particularity of religions in terms of their supposedly superior universal, they were also blind to this sacred idiocy. (On the terms proposed here, Lessing’s “broad ugly ditch” is not the problem it was for him and others.)²⁹ Their characteristic approaches, supposedly cosmopolitan, already had silenced this primal porosity. They accentuated an autonomous endeavor to be, sometimes frantically, sometimes fanatically, fantastically filling in the porosity with intellectual schemes, ameliorating projects and political ambitions. But none of these constitutes a dwelling with the essential poverty of the human spirit, a poverty that is not a miserable destitution but the void of our own nothingness as creatures, a void that becomes fertile when the divine spirit breathes on its liquid chaos. Out of this fertile void all great things come, but only because they are companioned by the giving origin in the surplus of its agapeic generosity.

Loss of reverent finesse for the intimate universal leads to the building up of communities that become counterfeits of universal community. There are dimensions of the current project of globalization that produce counterfeit doubles of the intimate universal. But at the extreme I think of communism and fascism as counterfeits of the universal community. These are social formations beyond the fertile void that have not purged the temptation to tyranny (technologically advanced) in their will to erotic sovereignty. In fascism, we find a hatred for agapeic service, reduced to a feeble pity that must be eradicated from the earth (Nietzsche alas had a hand in this fanaticism of “being hard”).³⁰ In communism, we find an appropriation of the charge of social justice, an appropriation amounting to usurpation, since every other community concerned with social justice was denounced or undermined as merely bourgeois, or social democrat, or even socialist. (Think of the polemic of the Communist Manifesto, which spends perhaps more energy vituperating against rival versions of socialism than attacking the evils of the enemy, capitalism.) The usurpation of the project of social justice was built up by the intensification of war, war of the classes, which produces nothing but a leveling equality in which spiritless social form masquerades as living community. Behind the mask of spiritless social form the tyrannical will to power of the leader(s) works steadily its destruction of the human spirit in grim, infernal ways.³¹ The intimacy at the heart of this counterfeit universal is monstrous again, indeed infernal.³² The counterfeits of community drive the human being into a hellish idiocy, rather than a heavenly one, and in large measure because heaven has been hated.

There is a dangerous doubleness, promising ennoblement but liable to generate corruption. The intimate universal is porous to heaven, but it can also be porous to hell. For, of course, the danger is there with the idiotic intimacy. It is daimonic in the double sense of being able to be turned to the diabolical side, as well as to the divine. As daimonic, it is a metaxu but this between space suspends us in the middle between blessing and curse. This is not only true with respect to political will to power; it bears on the ambiguity of our being religious. There is greatness to religion but also great danger. The corruption of the best is the worst (corruptio optimi pessima). Alas, it is the human condition that the best is always liable to corruption or never free from temptation. Why? Because even our best is never God. This is most important about religious wisdom, and the intimate universal reminds us of this—we are never God. It reminds us that we are creatures of will to power and erotic sovereignty prone to possession by eros turannos, that we are also beneficiaries of agapeic generosity, and called to a life of agapeic service. If the intimate sources are not purged, then this will to power springs up exultant when the opportunity presents itself.

I am not arguing for servility but there is a service both prior to and beyond erotic sovereignty. But one has to be released from will to power into a different willing of life and its good. The great religions in the past sought by ritual and prayer and ethical service to keep open this willingness and its porosity to the divine. The great religions did not always live the purgatory of their own will to power. They sometimes betrayed the intimate universal; they remade it, made their own universal to serve the mission of expanding their imperium rather than their available service to all that is. One of the religious lessons of secularization is that the distinction of politics and religion can enable us to see the difference of this purer service that must wander in the midst of the political powers and their deserts. In the midst of its wandering, it may find no resting place to lay its head, and not because it has not yet gained political power but because it is witness to a hyperbolic dimension of the intimate universal, a dimension that political community at its best may allow, even encourage, but can never constitute. It seems too often that we still have not learned enough of this difference. This difference points beyond the cosmopolis and the ghetto toward the intimate universal. It points beyond the collusion of religion and politics, beyond the opposition, points beyond politics, but points as witness of the God of the universal who can never be reduced to any historical formation and who yet calls every historical formation to the practice of worldly justice, transfigured by the promise of agapeic service.