Outside of God: A Theanthropic Scrutiny of Nietzsche’s Concept of Chaos and Berdyaev’s Notion of the Ungrund
Research Fellow, Orthodox Theology Faculty, University of Belgrade, Serbia
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine and compare Nietzsche’s concept of chaos and Berdyaev’s notion of the Ungrund, bearing in mind the ontological problem of human freedom and the context of the ‘God after metaphysics’ debate. Nietzsche and Berdyaev introduce their respective concepts in trying to overcome the impasse of onto-theology caused by the view of God as actus purus. Chaos and the Ungrund stand for the idea of the posse reintroduced in our days by Richard Kearney. The primary cause of onto-theology, for Kearney, is the classic metaphysical tendency to subordinate the possible (posse) to the actual (esse). I identify posse with Godhead, which is the first principle in God, the ‘unapproachable intensity of his being’ and the ‘inexhaustible ground’ from which everything originates. But during the past centuries rationalism has deprived God of this first principle. ‘The power of the Godhead has disappeared.’ Berdyaev reminds us that there cannot be a valuable theodicy without ontological anthropodicy. God ceases to be actus purus when, as the result of his becoming, there is more being than there was before. God and the human being are more than just God. Humans must possess potency similar to the divine, which implies that at the end of their action there is more being than there was before. God cannot be the living God if his creature is not alive. The overcoming of onto-theology, therefore, requires a theanthropic hermeneutical method.
Nietzsche is the forerunner of a new religious anthropology. Through Nietzsche the new humanity moves out of godless humanism to divine humanism, to a Christian anthropology. Nietzsche is an instinctive prophet of the religious renaissance of the west.
– N. Berdyaev
In this paper I shall critically examine and compare Nietzsche’s concept of chaos and Berdyaev’s notion of the Ungrund, bearing in mind the ontological problem of human freedom in the context of the ‘God after metaphysics’ debate. Given the immense role the issue of liberty has played in the history of philosophy, it is surprising, lamented Paul Tillich, how little ontological investigation into the meaning of freedom is carried out by modern thinkers.[1]
Nietzsche and Berdyaev introduced their respective concepts in trying to overcome the impasse of onto-theology caused by the view of God as actus purus. Chaos and the Ungrund stand for the idea of the posse reintroduced in our days by Richard Kearney. The primary cause of onto-theology, for Kearney, is the classic metaphysical tendency to subordinate the possible (posse) to the actual (esse).[2] I identify posse with Godhead, which is the first principle in God, the ‘unapproachable intensity of his being’ and the ‘inexhaustible ground’ from which everything originates. During the past centuries, rationalism has deprived God of this first principle. ‘The power of the Godhead has disappeared’.[3]
But how does the posse as the inexhaustible ground manifest itself? If God-actus purus is fully actualised, then God-posse must be the infinite actualisation. ‘The nature of life is actualisation, not actuality’.[4] Life is the infinite actualisation of the inexhaustible ground. The ground is limitless because it is an abyss of potency or newness, which God could never domesticate. The principal trait of God’s potency is that it allows for the creation of a living creature, and the creature is living insofar as it continues the augmentation of being. God is alive insofar as he can create the living being. God is posse because he can create the being capable of enriching him. Berdyaev reminds us that valuable theodicy depends on the ontological anthropodicy.
The old doctrine according to which God created man and the world, having in no respect any need of them and creating them only for His own glory, ought to be abandoned as a servile doctrine which deprives the life of man and the world of all meaning.[5]
The overcoming of onto-theology, therefore, requires a theanthropic hermeneutical method. I have coined this expression drawing on Berdyaev’s idea of God-humanity. This idea suggests that our philosophising should start neither from God nor the human being but the vision of God-humanity. Onto-theological thinking takes for granted a misbalance between the importance given to God and the human being. However, as Heidegger noted, ‘one being always keeps coming to the fore in this questioning: the human beings who pose this question’.[6]
Nietzsche’s ideas of freedom and chaos
For Levinas, Ricoeur, and Derrida, the totalitarian ontology that proceeds from the notion of God as actus purus is one of the leading causes of atheism.[7] God’s all-embracing causation means that the otherness of the ‘I’ is fused with the Totality of Being and, ontologically speaking, the creation of the world cannot be justified.[8]
So the ‘Christian theme’ by which Nietzsche was ‘wounded’[9] was the literal interpretation of divine omnipotence that eliminates human otherness. Berdyaev stresses that Nietzsche detested God because he believed that if God exists, human creativity is impossible. Nietzsche, indeed, exclaims, ‘Away from God and gods this will lure me; what would there be to create, after all, if there were gods?’[10] Berdyaev approved of Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of transcendental infinity, demonstrating, however, that Nietzsche was incapable of imagining a union of the uncreated and created in which the latter not only would not be devaluated but would possess the power to enlarge the former.[11]
Ontological freedom, as explained by John Zizioulas, ought to be distinguished from the freedom of will. Freedom is the question of ontology or ‘freedom is to be other in an absolute sense’.[12] Nietzsche, while using different vocabulary, also believed in the ontological character of liberty. Freedom, for Nietzsche, is one’s undetermined otherness. Deleuze writes that, according to Nietzsche, what one will want is to affirm its difference. There is a pleasure in knowing that we are different; difference produces enjoyment.[13]
Nietzsche argued that divinities should be able to engender their own opposites out of themselves.[14] He understands nature as chaos, but chaos is the freedom that is abounding with subjectivities and wills: ‘every centre of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder, i.e., its own particular valuation, mode of action, and mode of resistance’. The organic world, for Nietzsche, ‘is the interviewing of beings with invented little worlds about them: in that they impose upon outer experience their power, their desire, their habits as their external world’.[15] Furthermore, ‘every centre of force [in nature]—and not only man—construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint’.[16] This is what is usually called Nietzsche’s perspectivalism. To see the nature ‘from the inside’, in a disinterested Kantian sense, and not from the perspective of our interest, would be to construct the object subjectively—to see as subject what traditional metaphysics has always viewed as an object.[17]
Everything in nature, and the human being in particular, is a subject that invents its ‘little world’, projecting its subjectivity and will as its ‘external world’. Freedom is here regarded as the power of subjectivity to break the necessity of the given world by creating a new world.[18] The essence of every being is what Nietzsche famously named ‘the will to power’.[19] Nietzsche’s philosophy inaugurates the problem of creativity as the defining trait of modernity. It creates a rupture in the cultural history of the West by giving new status to the human being, who now from the creature becomes the creator.[20]
Defining chaos
If there were gods, there would be nothing for us to create, asserts Nietzsche, rejecting God and introducing chaos. The primary role of chaos is to allow for unencumbered human creativity. ‘I tell you’, says Zarathustra, ‘one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’.[21] Some authors suggest that we should understand Nietzsche’s chaos in the archaic Greek sense as physis: that which brings forth of out of itself. Since Nietzsche identifies chaos with nature, the meaning of chaos might also be self-generative nature or ‘she who will be born, she who will bear’.[22]
Jean Granier stresses that nature, as chaotic being, should not be identified with an intelligible being or with a cosmos. Nature is not a book written by a superior intelligence, but it is merely chaos in the Greek sense of the word. Nietzsche rejects nature as the book of God because he sees it as a fixed manuscript to which we could not add anything. But if nature is not divine creation, how should we understand it? Granier tells us that for the Greek gods, the world was an ever-changing veil that hid the most terrible reality. For the Greeks, the phenomena dissimulated what they showed, because what they showed was the most terrible, i.e., chaos. Nietzsche suggests that the real constitution of things might be so hostile towards life that we needed to create a mask to be able to live). This masking Nietzsche calls art. The naïveté of the Greeks was in their determination to interpret the text of chaos in such a way that its absurdity appears as beauty. Truth, therefore, is what is most terrible. It defines the chaotic being of bottomless depth. To continue living despite that fact, the profound person must embrace the intentional superficiality, the naïveté that characterised the Greeks. Life and art are synonyms for the single creative act of ordering chaos, of stabilising becoming.[23]
In contrast to Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, Nietzsche introduces chaos sive Natura and de-deifies nature. He is aware that the human being needs the groundless other as the infinite source of life. This is why, apart from de-deifying nature, he also strips it of its rational grounding and its commensurability with human cognitive faculties. For Nietzsche, the inherent self-generative character of nature is the artless art of nature, to which he opposes all-too-artful human art. Nietzsche’s objective is to recover the innocence of nature’s artlessness, of its natural, unconscious art, as an infinite potential for human creativity. Humanity needs to be re-naturalised, but this is possible only via de-humanised nature, which is redeemed to its chaos.[24] Nietzsche’s chaos is less a lack of order than an excess and impossible abundance.[25]
While the human needs re-naturalisation, chaos is still intrinsic to his nature because he is a part of that nature. The human is a part of nature and yet ‘outside’ of it. But also, nature is part of the human and ‘outside’ of him. This is the paradox of Nietzsche’s dialectics. Once we approach nature as chaos, we can create ex nihilo out of its impossible abundance. To be human means to find it impossible to accept any form of givenness. The human, for Nietzsche, is a liar by nature; he is by nature an artist who is opposed to the scientific or theistic ‘truth’ of the cosmos. The artist is the one who flees from ‘truth’, and the one who violates reality.[26] Nietzsche’s original idea is ‘to take what we need from [nature], to dream above and beyond the human’. And not only above the human; we should also be able to go beyond nature. ‘Something more grandiose than the storm, and the mountain range, and the sea should arise—and yet born of humanity!’[27]
With his idea of inexhaustible chaos, Nietzsche re-inaugurates the question of the power of being to the Western philosophy. After Nietzsche, there was no returning to the old metaphysics. One could either follow his path in rejecting lifeless divinity or create a radical paradigm shift in our understanding of God.
Freedom ‘outside’ of God
We recall that ontological freedom is about absolute ontological otherness. To be free means to be utterly unique. Etienne Gilson stated that to be is to act, and to act is to be,[28] to which we add that to act is to create. Action must amount to creation; it must have ontological consequences.
The ‘terrifying ontological ultimacy’[29] of the human person requires the actualisation of our uniqueness in our creative acts. I am unique only insofar as the result of my actions is also unique. Unique, in this case, means that what I create is an absolute newness in being. There is more being after my acts than there was before. Following the logic of ontological ultimacy, Zizioulas concludes that the authentic person must be uncreated, that is, unbounded by any ‘necessity,’ including God.[30] It follows that we can actualise our ‘uncreatedness’ only if we can create out of uncreated freedom. Uniqueness is impossible without uncreated freedom. John P. Manoussakis maintains that ‘the real problem appears to be located in our inability to imagine freedom prior to existence. We have to imagine (no matter how unthinkable this is) a God who not only is free in His existence but also a God who is free from and before His existence!’[31] Berdyaev did not shun away from thinking the ‘unthinkable,’ and he argued that ‘freedom is the power to create out of nothing’. [32] The ‘nothing’ from this definition does not imply that we create without a medium, but that we create from a potency or undetermined freedom before being.
Potency and non-being
Potency is always a kind of trace of non-being within Being.[33] To build a new paradigm of God, to inaugurate God as the posse, we need to introduce non-being to the divine being. As Paul Tillich claimed,
If God is called the living God, if he is the ground of the creative processes of life, if history has significance for him, if there is no contrary principle in addition to him which could account for evil and sin, how can one avoid positing dialectical negativity in God himself? Such questions have forced theologians to relate non-being dialectically to being-itself and consequently to God. Boehme’s Ungrund, Schelling’s ‘first potency,’ Hegel’s ‘antithesis,’ the ‘contingent’ and the ‘given’ in God in recent theism, Berdyaev’s ‘meonic freedom’—all are examples of the problem of dialectical non-being exerting the influence of the Christian doctrine of God.[34]
This kind of reasoning prompted Berdyaev to borrow the concept of the Ungrund from Jacob Böhme (1571–1624), whom he regarded as the ‘greatest of all mystics’.[35] According to Berdyaev, Böhme was ‘the first in the history of human thought [who] has made freedom [i.e., posse] the first foundation of being [:] freedom is to him deeper and more primary than all being, deeper and more primary than God himself’.[36] According to the German mystic, the Ungrund dwells deeper than God; it is the Godhead ‘prior’ to God. The Ungrund is ‘the uncausable and uncaused … an eternal nothingness, and the cause of an eternal beginning’.[37] The Ungrund is nothing craving for something, similar to Nietzsche’s will to power. Böhme goes beyond the confines of Greek thought and starts a new epoch in the history of human thought.[38]
Although Böhme was the first to make freedom primary to God, commencing a whole new epoch, Berdyaev was not entirely satisfied with Böhme’s ground-breaking theory. Berdyaev felt he needed to introduce a seemingly minor and yet fundamental amendment. ‘According to Böhme’, explains Berdyaev, ‘this freedom is in God; it is the inmost mysterious principle of divine life; whereas I conceived it to be outside of God’.[39]
If freedom is ‘in’ God, this implies that freedom is created and given to us by God. But God cannot give what he does not have, that is, he cannot give something that is ultimately different from him. God can give only what he possesses. To manifest his potency by creating his absolute ontological other, the person capable of broadening his being, God would need to have something he does not have. Let us, therefore, ask a question, seemingly mere sophistry: How can God have something that he does not have? Berdyaev’s answer to this question is probably his most important contribution to the history of philosophy.
How can it be that there is something that God does not have, something ‘outside’ of him? God’s ‘external’, to provide absolute ontological otherness, cannot be the privation of being; it could not be the absolute non-being (οὐκ ὄν) of Christian theology. It must have full ontological reality. ‘If ex nihilo meant the absolute negation of being, it could not be the origin of the creature’, noted Tillich. Creatureliness entails non-being, but it is more than non-being since it carries in itself the power of being.[40]
The issue, therefore, is the ontological status of the ‘nihil’.[41] Can there be something ‘outside’ of God with uncompromised ontological status? Pondering the question of evil, Paul Ricoeur seems to be admitting such an assumption: ‘It is necessary to think of a nothingness hostile to God, a nothingness not only of deficiency and privation but of corruption and destruction’.[42]
Nicolas of Cusa rejected the classical metaphysical view about the possible as secondary and derivative to the actual. For Cusanus, absolute possibility co-exists with actuality in a co-eternal union. This is Cusanus’ idea of possest, of the union of posse and esse. But the coexistence of posse and esse leads Cusa to the conclusion that everything that exists already exists enfolded in God. If the possibility-to-be exists, argues Cusanus, then all things are already actualised, and nothing remains outside of it. Since there is nothing other than God, it follows that anything different from him is already contained in him, ceasing to be different. Drawing from his initial premise about the coexistence of possibility and actuality, Cusanus necessarily concludes that there cannot be otherness in God, for he is before non-being. If God were posterior to non-being, he would have been not Creator but creature. Consequently, God does not create ex nihilo but from himself.[43] The actuality side overrides potentiality. Pure actuality, or actuality free from any element of potentiality, is not alive. ‘Life includes the separation of potentiality and actuality. The nature of life is actualisation, not actuality. The God who is actus purus is not the living God’. Tillich stresses that, insofar as God is a living God, two elements in him must remain in tension.[44] This is a theological schema in which God and the ‘nihil’ become opposites, and it is more radical than the one in which God domesticates the ‘nihil.’ The ‘nihil’, in a sense, becomes God’s rival.[45]
We have defined onto-theology as the failure to understand human freedom from the ontological perspective. Now we can add that onto-theological is the concept of God that does not permit the ontological status of the dialectical non-being. As long as we endorse that the ‘nihil’ is the absolute non-being, we cannot overcome God as actus purus. Only if there is something both outside of God and in God can God create something that is not him. What could be concurrently outside of God and in God? If we understand uncreated freedom as Godhead or divine nature, we could think of freedom as both ‘in’ and ‘outside’ of God. Divine nature is external to God in the sense that God emerges from it rather than being its creator. In contrast to Cusanus, God creates not from himself but from his nature, which allows him to create ultimate otherness. Nature always remains outside God, and it can never be domesticated. But nature is at the same time ‘in’; it is God’s infinite power, without which he could not be the living God.
It was because he insisted on the externality of non-being, on the maximum tension between the divine polarities, that Berdyaev managed to produce the image of the living God. Life implies that one has something that one does not have. It is the absolute otherness of the non-being that generates the tension in the form of longing for what is radically different from us. We desire genuinely only what we do not have, but the power of our eros transforms the external into the internal, without ever being able to abolish the difference. Diaphora, or difference, Maximus the Confessor reminds us, is a primary ontological characteristic and it does not imply diairesis or separation.[46] But diaphora as the hypostatic ontological otherness in the Trinity or the particularity of the created is inconceivable without the freedom that is before and outside of every form of Being. Berdyaev suggested an image of God as the union of the inexhaustible and eternal ontological difference, which might also affect our understanding of the nature of the world. This model still awaits severe philosophical appraisal.
[1] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (further in the text ST), (Digswell Place: James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, 1968), 202.
[2] Richard Kearney, God Who May Be (GWMB), (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1.
[3] ST, 278.
[4] ST, 272. Philosophers who hate the idea of Becoming are, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘monotono-theists’. Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Antony M. Ludovici (London: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2007), 17.
[5] Nikolai Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human, (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2008), 7. Ekzistencialnaya dialektika bozhestennogo i chelovecheskogo (Moskva: Astrel, 2010), 360. Berdyaev’s words remarkably betray his awareness of the need for a new anthropology, which at the beginning of the 20th century was named ‘philosophical anthropology’. Max Scheler asserted that the ‘problems of philosophical anthropology have become the centre of all philosophical problems…’ Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Darmstadt: Otto Reichel Verlag, 1930), 11.
[6] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 4. See also Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 38.
[7] GWMB, 168.
[8] Richard Kearney, ‘Returning to God after God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur’, Research in Phenomenology 39.2 (2009): 174. Theodicy, Paul Ricoeur reminds us, is the flagship of onto-theology. Paul Ricoeur, Evil; A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, trans. John Bowden (London: Continuum, 2007), 49.
[9] Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning and End (BE), trans. R. M. French, (San Rafael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 42.
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro, eds Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67.
[11] Ibid., 179. Paul Ricoeur also believed that the ‘death of God’ for Nietzsche signified the death of the God of onto-theology. Kearney, ‘Returning to God after God,’ 173. Not only did Nietzsche detest God, but he also cursed the good and the righteous because they hate those who create. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act (MCA), trans. D. A. Lowrie, ed. B. Jakim (San Raphael, CA: Semantron Press, 2009), 171. Smysl tvorchestva: Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka (STv) (Paris: YMCA Press, 1991), 122.
[12] John Zizioulas, Communion & Otherness (CO), ed. Paul McPartlan (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 39.
[13] Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 2010), 10.
[14] Babette E. Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura: Evening Gold and the Dancing Star’, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57 (2001): 229.
[15] Cited in Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 234.
[16] Cited in Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 235.
[17] Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 239.
[18] Freedom to be other, for Zizioulas, ‘involves the tendency to create a world other than the given one, that is, to bring about otherness in the radically ontological sense of the emergence of new identities bearing the seal of the lover’s or the creator’s personhood. This is expressed in art when it is not a mere copy of reality, and it is a distinctive characteristic of the human beings in creation.’ Being as Communion (BC) (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 40. See also John Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke Ben Tallon, (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 135–36. Italics added.
[19] ‘ Marie-Alix de Solages, ‘Nietzsche et Berdiaev,’ Revue Contact, XXXXIe année, N0. 147, 162
[20] De Solages, 170.
[21] Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra; Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), eds, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), Prologue, 5.
[22] Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 227–228. In Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, argues Babich, chaos is taken in its contemporary sense as impotent confusion. Indeed, Heidegger does say that Nietzsche understands the word chaos not in the primordial Greek sense, but in the later and in particular modern sense. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1982), Vol. III, 77. However, Heidegger adds that chaos, for Nietzsche, does not mean ‘a turbulent jumble’. ‘Rather, it means the concealment of unmastered richness in the becoming and streaming of the world as a whole’. Ibid., 80. Therefore, while it is true that Heidegger does not see a self-generative power in Nietzsche’s chaos, it is not entirely correct to say that he identifies chaos with impotent confusion. Emmanuel Falque confirms this, writing that chaos is not a disorder in contrast to cosmos. Chaos, in Falque’s words, is where we come from. Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 16.
[23] Jean Granier, ‘Nietzshe’s Conception of Chaos’, The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1985), 138–139. For Nietzsche’s Dionysius, life justifies and affirms suffering, while from the Christian perspective suffering accuses life and makes of it something that needs to be justified. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, 16–17.
[24] Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 235.
[25] Babich, ‘Nietzsche’s Chaos Sive Natura’, 242.
[26] KSA, XIII, 193.
[27] KSA, X, 415.
[28] Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 94. Charles Hartshorne entertains similar idea: ‘To be is to act; to be individual is to act individually, that is, as not fully determined by another individual or set of individuals.’ Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York, 1984), 21.
[29] CO, 235.
[30] 30 BC, 43. Since he does not envisage uncreated freedom, Zizioulas will have to admit that the human person cannot be ‘uncreated’, that is, it is impossible to say that the person is not determined. Determination, however, precludes uniqueness, without which the person is inconceivable.
[31] John P. Manoussakis, ‘From Exodus to Eschaton: On the God Who May Be’ Modern Theology 18.1 (2002): 98. Emphasis added.
[32] MCA, 144–46. ST, 179.
[33] George Pattison, God and Being; An Inquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 295.
[34] ST, 210.
[35] Nikolai Berdyaev, Dream and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950) (DR), 179. Samopoznanie (SP) (Moskva: Hranitel, 2007), 220.
[36] Nikolai Berdyaev, ‘Ungrund and Freedom’ in Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings (Michigan: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1958), page xxiii.
[37] Cited by Berdyaev in Spirit and Reality (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 130.
[38] BE, 18.
[39] DR, 99. SP, 124.
[40] ST, 281.
[41] Gavin Hyman, ‘Augustine on the Nihil: An Interrogation,’ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9.1 (2008): 39.
[42] Ricoeur, 60.
[43] GWMB, 103–4.
[44] ST, 272–73.
[45] Hyman, ‘Augustine on the Nihil’, 41, 48–49.
[46] ‘For Maximus, diaphora is an ontological characteristic because each being has its logos which gives it its particular identity, without which it would cease to be itself and thus to be at all. Without diaphora there is no being, for there is no being apart from beings.’ This ontology is also applicable to Trinitarian theology. Zizioulas, CO, 22–23, 23 n29.