“Tyrannical say so-ing Gods both reflect and produce tyrannical say so-ing humans”

The suspicion that God’s transcendence implies arbitrariness of divine power persists, nurtured by biblical stories such as the awful command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the Voice from the whirlwind silencing Job. How distinguish the divine from irrational will and avoid making creation just the absurd surd that atheists like Sartre have affirmed finite contingency to be and where the master of the world exchanges place with the slave master.

A dualistic orientation can yield this view, a metaxological approach need not. Certain forms of religious dualism do tend towards tyrannical divinities. Certain dualisms, we saw, can darken our attunement with creation, fostering a pessimism of corrupt nature overseen by a voluntaristic God that expresses and reinforces the radical precariousness of worldly being. The divinely arbitrary God produces an arbitrary deconsecrated world; produces its human image in a will to power, basing itself on the arbitrary will at the base of all being. What does it matter if it is this or that, thus or otherwise, so long as I will it so? All the better that I will it strongly and with sovereign say-so, instead of feebly and with the ontological blahs. Tyrannical say so-ing Gods both reflect and produce tyrannical say so-ing humans.

What we have here is a degeneration of the erotic absolute. The agapeic God is not to be defined in terms of such arbitrary will, nor indeed can richer versions of the erotic absolute. When the erotic absolute coexists with an accentuated feeling of ontological lack and a clouding over of the “It is good,” eros itself tends to change from eros ouranios to eros turranos, thence into will to power. We need to be cautious of speaking of “will” in God, modeled anthropomorphically on a determinate agent determining between determined options. This is closer to the demiurgic model than the creator view. If we are to speak of “willing,” we must think of a more primordial “willing” than just a matter of determinate will that wills this or that. Our willing wills a determinate realization of a possibility, or a self-determination of one’s own possibility. Divine “willing” as creating cannot be thus determi­nated or self-determined. We must think agapeic willing, as opposed to a determinate free will, or self-determining willing, or will to power. Determinate will in us, as well as self-determining will, are more proximately formations of the endeavor to be, the conatus essendi in us, but more primordial than this is the passio essendi, and the porosity of being. It is relative to the latter that a more agapeic sense of willing needs to be thought: an overdeterminate willing(ness) as much patient as active, as much letting be as intimately involved, as much self-reserving as self-communicating.

If the origin is beyond essence and determination, this does seem to ally its being with will, in so far as the movement of willing is itself not reducible to a determination or an essence: it is an open determining, an initiating determining that opens. Arbitrary will cannot be the way to talk of this superessential determining; arbitrary will is already in the space of determinations between which a choice is made. If there is a meaning to divine “willing” it is beyond this determination. It must also be a willing more than self-determining, since the willing of the good of the created other is the issue of its initiative. Beyond determinate will, beyond self-determining will, beyond will to power there is an overdetermined willing(ness): this is wise willing, the good willing. This exceeding willing(ness) is because its willing is goodness. There is no disjunction of this willing and the good being good. Good willing, highest willing is, wise will: the integral intimacy of being truthful and being good.

William Desmond