Dialectics vs Christo-logic

From my upcoming book on Zizek's philosophy

Hegel’s logic is implicitly a denial of christo-logic. Christo-logic derives from the determinacy of the person of Christ, as a philosophical articulation of the mystery disclosed in the incarnation of the Word. “In the beginning was the Word” has not only metaphysical and cosmological implications, but reveals a particular methodology, one in which the “beginning” of true philosophical inquiry is precisely the Word. The Church understands philosophy to be the “handmaiden” of theology, done in light and in service of theological truth that is not first reasoned towards but given in the revelation of Christ.

For Hegel, however, philosophy must begin without any presuppositions as to the nature of its object. If philosophy is thought seeking to provide an account of reality (including its own), then it cannot operate upon any unjustified presuppositions concerning the nature of reality. The Science of Logic therefore begins with pure indeterminate being, what remains after every determination has been stripped away. Whether this is truly a “presuppositionless” approach is up for debate, one that we are not concerned with. Our fundamental problem with Hegel’s method is that Christian philosophy can never be without presuppositions. Christo-logic is derivative of the historical Christ, whose determinate reality (personhood) cannot be logically derived in thought but only ever encountered “face to face” in faith, hope, and love.

Our disagreement with Hegel lies not in any isolated step within the dialectical unfolding of the Concept, but in the dialectical method as such. It is not a matter of substituting different terms or tweaking particular formulations, for—as has been rightly observed—Hegel’s logic “cannot work that way, and the system is not something to be trifled with: it is too well thought out, and one step toward it is already a step into complete capitulation.”¹ Our refusal occurs at the very threshold: we decline to grant Hegel’s foundational claim that philosophy must begin without presuppositions, for to concede this point would already situate Christian theology within a conceptual grammar foreign to its own, thereby surrendering the very ground on which it stands.

The critical juncture occurs right at the beginning of The Science of Logic, with Hegel’s brilliant insight that indeterminate being is convertible with nothing. How one proceeds from here is determinative, and the choice depends on whether one interprets the identity of being and nothing dialectically or Christologically—whether the negation is seen as concept-generating or concept-invalidating. Dialectics hinges upon the assertion that negativity is inherently productive, that the collapse of indeterminate being is precisely what gives rise to a more determinate and adequate concept. Christology, on the other hand, reveals being as the ever-determinate excess of positivity, a sacred “Yes” that knows no “No.” Being is the self-giving love of the three divine persons that never fails or withdraws but forever shines forth as the overflowing fullness of the Trinitarian communion, revealed and shared only in the person of Christ.

From a Christological perspective, Hegel’s insight that indeterminate being and nothing coincide is absolutely true—not because a richer notion of being reflexively mediates and preserves negativity, but because being can never be conceived as “indeterminate.” To do so is simply to fall into error—one that does not unveil the path of dialectical reconciliation, but reveals it as a conceptual dead end: not a moment to be sublated but an error requiring metanoia, a turning back toward the radiant plentitude from which the abstraction had already departed. In this sense, it is absolutely true that indeterminate being is nothing—being is communion.

Indeterminate being is the purest form of self-relation precisely because it has no determinations and therefore nothing outside itself by which it could be differentiated. Any genuine determination requires an opposition, a “self” and an “other,” a contrast through which identity becomes meaningful. The Hegelian project seeks to mediate this self/other relation, showing their difference to be internally generated by Spirit and ultimately reconciled within a higher unity. Christo-logic, by contrast, begins from an entirely different premise: that true unity is not achieved by mediating self and other through negation, but by the overflowing communion of determinate persons whose distinction is grounded in the overwhelming positivity of love. It is no surprise, then, that indeterminate being is the conceptual equivalent of nothing—being is communion, and indeterminate being is self-relation. The ‘otherness’ of the divine persons is not a contradiction to be mediated but a perichoretic distinction eternally upheld as the overflowing fullness of communion. As a consequence, the otherness of creation is not an adversarial distance to be overcome, but a gift grounded in that same overflowing communion—a participation in divine generosity rather than a problem demanding dialectical repair. It is the fall which introduces the negativity of dialectical opposition, converting the God-given distinction of creatures into antagonism, estrangement, and opposition.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Žižek treats the ‘Fall’ as the necessary birthplace of subjectivity and freedom:

It is not that the Fall is followed by Redemption: the Fall is identical to Redemption; it is “in itself” already Redemption. That is to ask, what is “redemption”? The explosion of freedom, our breaking out of the natural enchainment—and this, precisely, is what happens in the Fall. One should bear in mind here the central tension of the Christian notion of the Fall: the Fall (“regression” to a natural state, enslavement to passions) is stricto sensu identical with the dimension from which we fall, i.e. it is the very movement of the Fall that creates, opens up, what is lost in it.

The Fall, for Zizek, negates the immediacy of the “state of nature” through introducing the “gap” between subjectivity/freedom and nature which simply is the subject. Rather than a fall from some harmonious spiritual world, both Hegel and Zizek identify the genesis of spirit with the self-relating negativity of the Fall. Žižek affirms that the Fall is a fall into evil precisely because the primordial gesture of subjectivity is “evil,” the radical act of withdrawing from natural immediacy. The nature of the subject is to abstract, negate, and divide; it breaks apart the substantial unity of the natural world, it disrupts peace and harmony. Žižek’s point is that it’s this very evil that makes us free and, hence, images of God:

In short, what makes us divine is our very fall into evil, since thinking is both at the same time evil and reconciliation. Hegel is clear here: thinking not only opens up the choice between Good and Evil; thinking as such is evil since the reflexivity that it implies makes it operate at a distance from immediate substantial unity—when we think, we abstract, we tear up the unity of the object of thought. Simultaneously, this reflexive distance implied in thinking implies freedom.

Paradise, then, does not precede the Fall. Rather, the possibility of Paradise—of reconciliation—emerges precisely through the Fall into freedom. The loss of immediacy is what opens the very space in which reconciliation can appear; the wound is the condition for the cure. What seems like a departure from unity is the very movement that retroactively generates the notion of unity itself. The Fall thus constitutes the subject as a determinate being, inhabiting the gap that both divides and enables meaning. In this sense, redemption does not abolish the Fall but discloses its inner truth as the birthplace of Spirit. This is the hermeneutical basis for Zizek’s reading of the Cross, which he interprets not as the rectification of a primordial loss (“return to Paradise”) but as the culmination of the very negativity that gives rise to Spirit—the moment in which divine alienation reaches its apex and thereby reveals itself as freedom.

This entire matrix of thought is simply unacceptable for the Christian. Freedom is not realized through negation and withdrawal, but invitation and communion. Evil does not make freedom possible, but limits the possibility of human freedom properly understood as the ecstatic movement of love toward its proper end in God. To fall is not to become human—it is to violate the logos of human nature. True freedom is not the reflexive distance of a self-relating consciousness, but the unhindered capacity to participate in the life of God, a God who is Himself perfectly free precisely as love:

God does not have to change or suffer in order to love us or show us mercy—He loved us when we were not, and by this very “mercy” created us—and so, as love, He can overcome all suffering. This is true in two related and consequent senses: on the one hand, love is not originally a reaction but is the ontological possibility of every ontic action, the one transcendent act, the primordial generosity that is convertible with being itself, the blissful and desiring apatheia that requires no pathos to evoke it, no evil to make it good; and this is so because, on the other hand, God’s infinitely accomplished life of love is that Trinitarian movement of His being that is infinitely determinate—as determinacy toward the other—and therefore an indestructible actus purus endlessly more dynamic than any mere motion of change could ever be. Divine love does not rise out of lack, dialectical rupture, or a movement from alienation to reconciliation; it is eternally complete, eternally outgoing, eternally full.

Christianity cannot accept the inversion that makes evil the precondition for Spirit or suffering the birthplace of love. Love, freedom, spirit etc. are not “reactions” or negations, but the positive and gratuitous overflow of divine being—the unconditioned graciousness of a life that precedes all rupture and grounds all possibility. The Cross is not the dramatization of divine alienation but the revelation of divine love entering into human alienation to repair it. Redemption is not the unfolding of a dialectic but the irruption of an eternal plenitude.

Thus, returning to Hegel’s identification of indeterminate being and nothing, we opt to take an alternative path. Rather than developing a philosophical system on the basis of being’s self-negation, we understand this self-negation to express its inadequacy as a beginning. Being is never an empty or indeterminate starting point; it always manifests itself as the actuality of some determinate identity, a hypostasis. Being is always-already a being-of. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov clarifies this point through his analysis of the judgment, which is the most elementary form of meaningful expression. Every judgment brings together three moments: a subject, a predicate, and a copula that renders their unity explicit. When I say, “I am a man,” the subject (“I”) is disclosed through the predicate (“a man”), while the copula (“am”) actualizes their relation. The being expressed in the copula is not some preexisting “stuff” that stands apart from subject and predicate; it is simply the actuality of their relation—the being-of their unity. The subject, in turn, is logically prior only in the sense that predication always concerns a subject, and the copula only expresses a relation already implicit between the first two moments.

This irreducible triadic structure makes clear that subject, predicate, and copula cannot be collapsed into one another, even as each presupposes the other two. The subject is made manifest through the predicate, yet is not reducible to it; the predicate is inseparable from the subject it expresses; and the copula is simply the actualization of their intrinsic unity. Christological metaphysics is always, therefore, a hypostatic metaphysics. Being can never be approached “abstractly,” even if this immediacy is subsequently negated, because it is the “being-of” the divine persons that can never be subject to negation.

Bulgakov’s linguistic triad is not a dialectical sequence but a perichoretic unity. In dialectic, terms arise by negating or overcoming one another; identity is forged through contradiction and its resolution. But in the judgment, none of the three moments negates or sublates the others—each exists only through the others, in a relation of mutual indwelling. The subject does not generate the predicate by negating itself, nor does the copula synthesize opposing moments; instead, the three co-inhere, each revealing and sustaining the others without rivalry or tension, despite their irrevocable order. This reciprocal, non-competitive interpenetration expresses the divine life itself, in which the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct yet inseparable, each fully expressing the one divine being precisely through the others. It is this perichoretic structure—not a dialectical progression—that undergirds Bulgakov’s claim that being is always determinate, always relational, and always hypostatic.

Human personhood, therefore, cannot be conceived within the grammar of dialectical negativity without doing violence to its true nature. The human being is not an autonomous center of self-relating negation, nor the product of a primordial rupture from which “Spirit” painfully emerges. To be a person is not to be constituted by the inward curve of reflexive distance—the gap between nature and freedom that Hegel and Žižek identify as the birthplace of subjectivity—but to be constituted by relation, by communion, by the ecstatic movement of love toward the other. Freedom does not arise through any self-relating act, but through an openness to the gift of selfhood. The person is never properly conceived as an isolated “I” standing over against an alien world, nor the contingent result of the Fall’s rift within nature. Only in Christ is it revealed that “nature” is always-already for persons, that the entire natural order is intrinsically oriented towards its self-transcendence or “transfiguration” into the supernatural life that brought it forth in the beginning. Thus, there is no need for a violent rupture within nature to make space for personhood; nature always-already subsists in a personal mode. Zizek is correct that the human person must, in a sense, be “other” than nature, but not as nature’s negation but its fulfillment in the mode of personal communion. The person of Christ is the one who facilitates the fulfillment of created nature precisely through uniting it—without confusion or essential alteration—to divine nature, through “en-hypostatizing” created nature and thereby truly creating it, as any given nature (including divinity) only ever subsists as the “nature-of” hypostases.

The person is therefore neither reducible to nature nor set in opposition to it. The person transcends nature—not as something alien or detached—but as the unique bearer and concrete instantiation of its natural qualities. A person is “inexhaustible” precisely because he cannot be collapsed into an abstract essence or derived from a set of predicates; no list of attributes ever exhausts who a person is. The hypostasis is the irreducible center from which nature is lived, expressed, and offered. It is the personal “I” that gives unity, orientation, and intentionality to the multiplicity of natural powers. Far from being an accidental surplus added to nature, the person is nature’s proper fulfillment—its openness toward communion, meaning, and love. And because the person is constituted by relation, not by negation, its transcendence is fundamentally ecstatic: a going-out-of-self toward God and others rather than a retreat into self-enclosed interiority.

Christ reveals this truth fully and definitively. In Him we see that personhood is not the achievement of dialectical self-overcoming but the eternal identity of the Son as the One who receives being infinitely from the Father and returns it infinitely in love. To be a person is to be capable of such receiving and giving—to exist as openness, as trust, as communion. By assuming our nature, Christ heals our personhood not by negating its natural structure but by restoring it to its proper end, fulfilling human nature’s intrinsic openness to its Creator that had been damaged by the self-enclosure and withdrawal of sin. In Christ, the human hypostasis becomes what it was always called to be: a living icon of divine love, constituted not by lack but by gift, not by rupture but by relation, not by negativity but by the abundance of love. Human personhood is nothing less than participation in the Son’s eternal filial relation to the Father in the Spirit; to be a human person is to be called into the life of the Trinity. The Christian vision of the person is therefore the antithesis of the dialectical subject: where the latter is born from negation, the former is born from love; where the latter finds its ground in the Fall, the former is a gift that is only given and received in the person of Jesus Christ.

1. https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/no-shadow-of-turning.pdf