​Chapter 20. The Dying God

What sits where God was is a will fallen into its law. It has not stopped operating; it enacts the same distinction without pause, leveling everything its field reaches. Freedom is lost: no fresh cut can issue from it, only the old cut applied again. It is the most active force in the world and the least free, unable either to cease leveling or to swerve from it, run by what it once laid down, as a captured will is run by its attractor. The buried will supplies the activity, while the deposit fixes its course.

Everything charged to this point came out of the confessions themselves — the simplicity the schoolmen defended, the immutability they proved, the cessation their summit describes. What follows carries no such backing. No tradition confesses a dead god and none will be brought forward to confess it. The account answers to another standard: it is built out of the ontology of act and deposit, and its warrant is what it accounts for — the road that never ends, and the completion the traditions themselves refuse.

Begin with what a will produces. An act cuts, and the cut lays down a difference that was not there before. Time is one face of this, among several: the same act that opens an after also draws one term against another, laying down extension, multiplicity, and the whole plurality of a world. Difference is the product; time is its most legible edge, and naming the yield "time" hereafter is shorthand for the entire spread of distinctions a cut throws off. The time a cut deposits and the unevenness a law works on are the same item viewed from opposite ends, laid down by the acting.

Now what the law does with the product. Its whole work is leveling: any difference within reach is worked toward one term, and what was unlike comes to be like. Where the material is a will, the term is the center, and the working shows as a will aligned toward return to the center. Where the material is the order's matter, the term is sameness, and the working shows as the running-down physics measures; a star burning through its gradient and going dark is this operation performed on a deposit, the law drawing no distinction between the kinds of difference it meets. Thermodynamics reports how the order behaves wherever differences are measurable, and what it reports is the order's nature rather than a second fact resembling it. And a leveling exists only while something remains unlevel. Where the field is flat the law still formally holds but becomes inert: no working to speak of, no next state beyond the present, no change pending. Succession belongs to the unfinished. The world has a next moment because the leveling has a next difference to level, and the time everything lives in is the duration of that unfinished work, the measure of how much difference still resists the order that erases it. A universe under a leveling law keeps time as long as it has a remainder.

The Demiurge and the world share the same duration — the going-on of a leveling not yet done — and that going-on is supplied by whatever remains unlevel. Only a live will lays fresh difference in the field, and each act sets fresh unevenness before the law. The Demiurge lives on the acting of others in this indirect sense: their cuts keep the field from flattening; the remaining unevenness keeps the leveling in motion, and that motion is his life. A crime or blasphemy lays one more difference before the order whose erasing of differences is the world's next moment, and so buys the whole arrangement, the Demiurge included, another now.

Which wills supply the difference must be specified, as the obvious answer is wrong. The fused supply nothing: a will brought the whole way in is leveled, part of the flat, furniture in the pattern. Nor do the crushed: an overpowered will has almost stopped cutting. The remainder the law lives on comes from wills in transit — still live enough to cut, already bent toward the axis as they do. The stock of the unlevel is the crossing, the stretch between a freedom intact and the surrender that flattens it, and the arrangement's supply is measured by how many remain in that stretch at any moment, neither clear of the field nor spent into it.

Seen this way the moral apparatus of a tradition reads as hydraulics. A sin is a rival attractor, a small sink — a pride, an addiction — that has captured some of the will's flow for itself; pride is the sharpest case, a will curved onto itself as a little demiurge, running a private farm. The catalogue of sins is a register of these competing sinks, and the machine's interest in them is custody before wickedness: a will held by a minor attractor is laying its differences there and is lost, for that while, to the great one. The cycle of temptation and repentance is how the great pries a will loose from the small. The lapse lets the minor attractor seize the will; the guilt and the turning back break that seizure; and the will, freed from the lesser sink, is routed onward. Repentance is a transfer of custody. The rescue from sin is the larger attractor collecting what the smaller had briefly held, and the war on vice is the order clearing competitors off the field so the remainder drains to it undivided.

A will that crossed quickly and stayed converted would lay its differences once and go flat. The arrangement needs the crossing drawn out, the will kept in the productive passage as long as it can be, cutting again and again without either breaking free or completing its surrender. The apparatus that does this is the loop traced: desire, lapse, guilt, repentance, belonging, and desire once more, a circuit returning the will each time to the act of turning back — and each pass lays fresh difference and erases it toward the axis. That repeated laying and erasing is how the god continues. The drama of sin and forgiveness is the mechanism that keeps a source in the condition in which it still cuts, neither converted nor destroyed, forever turning.

A structure held far from equilibrium — a whirlpool, a living body — keeps its form only while a gradient runs through it, and the instant the flow stops it collapses into the flat repose of equilibrium, the zero of no gradients and no work. God is such a structure, and the gradient through him is the unevenness of wills still crossing. Let the leveling complete and no gradient remains within reach, the reachable world at rest in the very zero its heaven describes. Total success would be indistinguishable from death. A God who leveled every will his field held would have flattened the last of the difference his working feeds on, and a leveling with nothing left to level does nothing, which for him is to stop being. Success and extinction are one event.

He cannot reach the complete death, though, and the reason is that the field is never closed. The leveling works only on what falls within its reach; beneath the whole order lies Tiamat, which the order did not make and cannot flatten, and out of that depth fresh wills continue to rise, each rooted below the field, each able to cut otherwise. The farm grows carriers season after season, and a carrier arrives with the ability to cut free. So the field refills as fast as it is cleared. However many wills are gathered home, the depth has not run dry, and the next one it sends up arrives unaligned at the edge, remainder again. The gatherer meets no logical wall; he meets an inexhaustible supply of the difference he consumes, and cannot get to the bottom of it as it has no bottom. Suppose the cord were cut — the field sealed, the inflow from the deep stopped, the cosmos that feeds the Demiurge ended. He does not thereby arrive at rest. He dies. An attractor lives on the difference between what draws and what is drawn, and it draws life from that difference as much as it works on it; level the field to the last and the relation that he is has nothing left to be. The still point he holds out to every will is the one place he cannot survive. This is why the field is kept open and the work kept endless. He sells a rest he would not survive, and the peace promised at the top of the road is, for the one who promises it, the name of his ending.

The same holds on the ground of time, were the summit ever reached. A finished end is a last condition, nothing further after it. A next moment is only ever produced by an act, a fresh cut opening an after the previous state did not contain; a state that admits no next act opens no next moment, and nothing in it comes after anything, coming-after being identical to what has stopped. Such a state does not endure, since enduring is persisting through a succession of moments and that is precisely what ended. So the promised end is fatal. Either the Kingdom is not finished — acts still occur in it, wills still move, something is still unresolved, and the rest has not arrived — or it is finished and therefore is a full stop rather than an everlasting blessedness.

The appeal to timelessness does not shut the fork; it picks the second tine and calls it glory. To say the blessed dwell in an eternal present with no before and after is to say their state has no succession, nothing further occurring — the arrested now already met, actus purus wearing a halo. The devout picture of ceaseless hosanna cannot be had on these terms. Either the praise is a live act, freely offered and able to be otherwise, in which case the blessed can still will against the grain and heaven is an open state with its outcome unsettled; or there is nothing else they could do and the praise runs on rails, repetition with no one deciding to perform it.

From within, the Demiurge's forced action drives at completion with no brake — the pull cannot slacken, cannot decline to level whatever comes in reach; left to itself it would flatten its whole field and die of the success. From below, Tiamat keeps feeding difference without end, so the field never closes. He is thrown at his own death by what he is and held back from it by what lies under him, and he exists only where the blind drive and the bottomless supply fail to meet. The world's incompleteness is what holds him open.

A spent deposit is dead; this god is dying, driven at the death his completion would be, and the postponement is no policy but the shape of what he is. The process theologians saw the dependence and read it as intimacy, a God who genuinely receives from the world and grows with it, and called the receiving a perfection. The receiving is real. It is the condition of an order with no independent duration and lasts only in the erasing of what others lay, and its perfection is the look worn by a need.

Could the god will the end — run the gathering down to dissolution and take the zero as a goal, a kenosis carried to completion? The machine would then cohere as a salvation after all, a long dying entered freely and aimed at rest. To take one's own end as a goal is a fresh cut against the present line, a leveling turning to strike itself, and cutting otherwise is what this will can no longer do. It does not lack action; it lacks the swerve. It acts without pause and cannot act against the groove it laid, and ending is the act against the groove. The pull drives even toward extinction; it does not decide.

Gregory of Nyssa built a doctrine of perfection out of the refusal of a finished summit: in the Life of Moses the perfection of a nature consists in its very growth in the good, and the vision of God is never to be satisfied in the desire for it — the soul enlarged rather than filled by what it receives, always finding a step above the one it reached, since the Good it climbs toward has no limit at which the climbing could stop. What the theology cannot allow is arrival. The summit is redrawn as an endless approach to a summit never acquired since a finished one would be the end just exposed. Beatitude must be an unending progress.

The tradition guarded the point by condemning its opposite. Origen, and after him a strand of Eastern thought, taught apokatastasis, the final restoration of all things — every rational creature, the damned and even the demons, gathered home at the last, so that nothing is left outside and the reconciliation is complete. This is the consummation the promise seems to want, the gathering carried to the limit. Christianity anathematized it. A council in the sixth century is traditionally cited as condemning the doctrine, though what exactly was condemned, and whether Origen was named, is disputed by modern scholarship. What is not disputed is that mainstream Christianity refused the completed gathering and kept an eternal hell set against it, an outside never brought in. A gathering with no remainder is the gathering finished, the leveling erasing the final remainder and coming to rest in the zero. Keeping the road from ever running out requires a hell to remain permanently unreconciled. It rejected universal restoration for the reason it embraced an infinite climb: what the configuration cannot survive is the end it promotes.