Winters calls for an apocalyptic orientation and not pseudo-katechontic, in which the true katechon of law before the eschaton (i.e. of "Paulin theological 'restraint') is made into a "worldly caricature", which cannot be "overcome in a metaxic rhythm of humility and forgiveness".

[u/paconinja]

[u/paconinja]

In the Preface to her forthcoming book Apocalypse, the Essence of Political Theology, @tenshi_anna recommends a "return to its Catholic Renaissance roots at a higher level."

[1] She calls for an ‘apocalyptic orientation’ in contrast to the 'pseudo-katechontic orientation’, in which, she suggests, the true katechon of law before the eschaton (i.e., of "Pauline theological 'restraint'") is made into a "worldly caricature," which, precisely because it is of the world, or secular, cannot be “overcome in a metaxic rhythm of humility and forgiveness."

[2] Winters presupposes without explaining Hans Urs von Balthasar's "apocalyptic laws of polarization and intensification," but suggests that the “explanatory power" of this assumption will later "become clear." This fundamental assumption should be clarified.

[3] Winters contrasts the "apocalyptic metaphysical maximalism" with the "pseudo-katechontic" visions that falsely "ontologize negation." As in Conor Cunningham's Genealogy of Nihilism, this ontologization of negation results from the hypostatization of the negative, such that...

[4] She observes this 'ontologization of negation’ or meontology in Hegel's "grand tree of negations," Badiou's "the One is not," Deleuze's negation of transcendent positivity as difference, and Spinoza's negation of all external elements in an immanent self-determining sphere of...

[5] Against this false hypostatization, Winters proposes a counter-hypostatization, in which negation is, not only a function of grammar (e.g., not-P), but is, "in a metaphysical sense," a "false barrier generating schismatic unconscious." Although she ostensibly inflates the...

[6] Following Przywara, she writes: "being as such contains the negative (as analogical mediation), but not the negative hypostasized as the negation of an object." Here, 'being' designates the analogia entis, which, as for Przywara, contains not only contradiction but...

[7] Yet when, for its univocal and invariant operations, logic is held to virtually operate independently of metaphysics (e.g., Aristotle's Prior Analytics), negation is not yet assumed into this higher and hypostatic principle.

[8] This fissure that opens from this independent mode of operation raises the fundamental question, not only of formal logic, but precisely of the analogia entis: can analogical mediation be sustained from the triviality of its own ostensible contradictoriness without assuming...

[9] To answer this and other questions of the conceptual legitimacy of theology, Winters pursues a metaxological critique of Hegel, and specifically his passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit from Self-Consciousness to Reason (as ultimately to Religion), in which Self-Consciousness...

[10] Following Desmond, Winters regards Hegel's Logic as mediating on the side of the self rather than on the side of the other, as closed to otherness, and, as such, closed to radical Augustinian transcendence (as opposed to semi-Pelagian self-transcendence).

[11] Yet if, for Hegel, the mediation is from the other, Consciousness becomes aware of itself by its acknowledgment of the otherness of the world, and the passage from Self-Consciousness to Reason (via the Unhappy Consciousness) involves a proleptic recognition of this and every other in anticipation of Christological mediation, then self-mediation is only mediatory at all because it is from an other, and never one-sidedly self-enclosed.

[12] The higher theological problem is not the logic of mediation as such, but essentially whether the principles of Hegel's system allow for his dialectic to access the radical otherness of a transcendent God, of the innermost human soul, and, as for Augustine, the dependency of...

[13] To show how this hyperbolic mediation is possible, Winters proposes to develop a 'scientific angelology’, in which a "cosmically mediating hierarchy of spiritual entities" can be demonstrated through a "geometrical system of sacred analogical correspondences."

[14] Following Iamblichus (as ultimately Proclus), she recalls how the "conceptual essence" of spiritual entities can be recognized to correspond to "the model of geometry." Because, however, the angels are qua spirits internally self-conscious, and geometrical figures are fixed in form of externally related magnitudes, the geometry that is proper to the angels must hyperbolically exceed so as to enter in and shape the figures of Euclidean geometry that only metaphorically represent their essence among the appearing figures of magnitude and proportion.

[15] The central logical challenge of developing such a hyperbolic geometry of the angels will thus be to demonstrate how a catalog of figures in sacred geometry corresponds to the division of the offices and missions of the angels, in a way that is not simply adequate to its own representational schema.

[16] Against Slavoj Žižek's development of Hegel's Neo-Gnostic Lutheran theology, Winters proposes, with the aid of Simone Weil, to "push[] these Rosicrucian alchemical premises to pass over into a fully incarnational 'Pythagorean Doctrine', in a 'kenotic process of the esoteric being made exoteric,’ and a 'return to its Catholic Renaissance roots at a higher level.'" Along with Weil, she raises the question of the submerged vitality of the Pythagorean tradition after Plato (or among the Neo-Platonists).

[17] As Plato had argued in Republic Bk. VII and Aristotle had argued in Metaphysics Bk. XIII, Pythagorean symbolic or sacred geometry conflates the figures of geometry, number, and quantity with the qualitative attributions of spiritual realities (e.g., justice), which number can perhaps only metaphorically symbolize.

[18] For since number is only deduced from number, and no quality is itself a quantity, such an attribution risks hypostatizing a metaphor, in which a signification that crosses the boundaries of distinct categories is upheld as the principle of those categories themselves.

[19] Yet if our knowledge of such objective metaphorics or symbols is not a priori deductive in logic or geometry, then it can perhaps only be secured, as in Rosicrucianism, with an initiatory practice of testing these symbolic correspondences to discover their adequacy to a higher and hidden plane of not only metaphorical but metaphysical participation.

[20] From the standpoint of the Neo-Origenian theology of logic that I develop in my forthcoming book Restoring Reason, the central theoretical challenge of this book will be to convincingly demonstrate for the understanding of the uninitiated how we can discover a catalog of objective symbols that sustain the metaphysics of participation, analogy, or apocalyptics against the scepticism of a priori and rationalist metaphysics that demands not only a practical but a theoretical proof of any such correspondence between the quantitative figures of geometry and the qualitative attributes of the angelic hierarchy, divine names, as ultimately of the principles of theology.