On the Coming Age of the Rose, Facticity of the Cross, & Divine Revelation

For my Lady Down by the Harbour

May 30, 2026

La **chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours (Montreal)**

Abstract

Cadell Last and Daniel L. Garner’s (O.G. Rose) 2026 anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, brings together three primary currents of postmodern theology: Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian project, Peter Rollins’s Protestant-Pyrotheology, and the Postmodern Theology of Mark C. Taylor. These perspectives converge to explore the nature of Christianity in the wake of the death of God. My own contribution to the volume, A Rosy Cross of a Book, sat as an interlude between Part One and Part Two and mapped the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last. The present paper takes up the volume’s second titular question: the Truth of Christianity.

The central inquiry concerns the persistence of Christianity as a revealed and divine religion. Authentic divine revelation is not merely a philosophical deduction; it is an ontological event — a face-to-face meeting with the living God. On this view, the sacraments not only symbolize divine life but also invite one into the Paschal Mystery: they effect what they signify (sacramenta efficiunt quod significant). This process culminates in the sanctifying grace identified by the Catholic Church, a substantive ontological and experiential reality validated by two thousand years of contemplative practice.

The analysis begins with a Kierkegaardian critique of the Žižekian framework, identifying two structural constraints: its limit on the religious-existential depth Christianity can carry, and its restricted capacity for pluralist engagement with non-Christian traditions. It then turns to the work of Sean McGrath, whose “both/and” philosophical and theological system integrates depth-psychology with a rigorous form of contemplative theology which offers a counterpoint to the “either/or” logic of the volume’s other strands.

The constructive framework also draws on the broader Catholic intellectual landscape — specifically the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — and converges on the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical synthesis of Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism. The result is a post-secular and pluralist horizon within which real Catholic theological content can be held alongside the distinct traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the non-religious alike, each on their own terms.

Drawing upon the IACT (Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy) methodology — a praxis designed to facilitate contemplative and psychological flexibility while respecting the distinct developmental pathways of religious, atheist, and humanist subjects — I examine the work of three contributors: Bryce Nance (Nance) , Edie Hitchcock, and John Feldmann, who occupy critical thresholds regarding pluralism and divine revelation that the volume’s primary framework is unable to traverse. By reading these voices through an integral lens, I aim to engage perspectives that sit at the very boundaries of the current discourse.

The paper closes by juxtaposing Benjamin Studebaker’s vulture with Leonard Cohen’s Bird on the Wire. I argue that Cohen — through his lifelong interests in Jewish-Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue and through the theological content he carried in song for over fifty years — represents the pinnacle and embodiment of the integral pluralism and integral humanism advanced here.

Finally, the closing diagnostic acknowledges, with appropriate honesty, that Slavoj Žižek, the postmodern-theological movement, Sean McGrath, and Cohen each fall short of meeting the post-metaphysical challenge in their own characteristic ways. Nevertheless, the poetic and embodied vision offered by Cohen represents a vital and ongoing labor for the future. This paper serves as both an appreciative critique of a significant volume and a strategic declaration of what this historical moment demands — asserting that the divine and revealed reality under discussion is far too vital to be limited to the domains of philosophical, psychological, or political theory.

Tags: Leonard Cohen, Mt. Baldy, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, Rinzai Zen, Cadell Last, Philosophy Portal, Rosy Cross, Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism, Peter Rollins, Pyrotheology, Mark C. Taylor, Postmodern Theology, Death of God, Søren Kierkegaard, Sean McGrath, Schelling, Heidegger, Continental Philosophy of Religion, Carmelite Tradition, German Mystical Tradition, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theological Aesthetics, Glory of the Lord, Nouvelle Théologie, Sarah Shortall, Charles Taylor, Charles Davis, Gregory Baum, Marc Lalonde, Michel Despland, Canadian Catholic Critical Theology, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Democracy to Come, Bryce Nance, Edie Hitchcock, John Feldmann, Benjamin Studebaker, Bird on the Wire, IACT, Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy, Integral Political Praxis, Steven Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, Divine Revelation, Paschal Mystery, Sacramental Life, Cognitio Dei Experimentalis, Post-Metaphysical, Post-Secular, New Integral Humanism, Metapattern Institute

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Suzanne takes you down to her place, near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she’s half-crazy, but that’s why you wanna be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer
That you’ve always been her lover

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And you wanna travel with her
And you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

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And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
 Forsaken almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

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And you want to travel with him
 And you want to travel blind
 And you think you maybe you’ll trust him
 For he’s touched your perfect body with his mind

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Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the Harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

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And you want to travel with her
You want to travel blind
And you know that she will find you
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

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— Leonard Cohen, Suzanne (1967)

I. Introduction

The Death of God in Postmodern Theology

The death-of-God question in postmodern theory and contemporary continental philosophy of religion stretches back more than sixty years. Gabriel Vahanian’s The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (1961) named the cultural-historical fact: modern secular life had lost contact with the sacred. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton’s Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966) carried the question into an explicitly theological register, with Altizer drawing on Blake, Hegel, and Nietzsche to articulate a Christian-atheist gospel in which God’s death is itself a central salvific event. Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz (1966) carried it into the Jewish tradition through the catastrophe of the Shoah (Holocaust).

The academic postmodern theology that took up the question in the 1980s extended this Continental-philosophical reception into a deconstructive register. Mark C. Taylor’s 1984 work, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, established a critical foundation for examining the death of God through the lens of Derridean deconstruction. This academic trajectory was institutionalized in 1989 with the launch of the Religion and Postmodernism series at the University of Chicago Press. John D. Caputo’s deconstructive philosophy of religion — culminating in The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (2006) and The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (2013) — developed a strand into what he calls a weak theology which challenges traditional classical theism by asserting that God’s true power lies in powerlessness and the call to love and justice. Peter Rollins’s Pyrotheology — articulated through the Belfast-based Ikon Collective from the mid-2000s and in books such as How (Not) to Speak of God (2006) and The Fidelity of Betrayal (2008) — translated the Caputo-Derridean and Žižek-Lacanian currents into practical religious-communal form, building a/theistic communal practice grounded in death-of-God thinking. The connection between Pyrotheology and scholarly postmodern theology is overt: Rollins explicitly cites Caputo, Žižek, and Jean-Luc Marion as major influences.

Slavoj Žižek’s intervention into this conversation is structurally distinct from the deconstructive-postmodern lineage. Where Taylor and Caputo work through Derrida, the apophatic-mystical tradition, and negative-theology, Žižek works through Hegel and Lacan. And where Caputo’s weak theology renders God’s “weakness” as a poetic-deconstructive event without a real ontological substrate, Žižek’s materialist-Hegelian reading renders God’s death as the speculative-dialectical truth of Christianity itself, with the Pauline community and the Mystical Body of Christ recast as a form of communism on the horizon. His sustained engagement with Pauline Christianity — across The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, with John Milbank), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012), and most recently Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024) — has been the most ambitious contemporary attempt to read Christianity through Hegelian-Lacanian categories. By prioritizing Pauline Christianity, Žižek has managed to revitalize the philosophy of religion for a new generation of aspiring scholars and philosophers. For several decades, the academic study of religion and philosophy of religion was dominated by either structural language theory or Derridean deconstructive methods. These frameworks frequently diluted the core theological essence of Christianity into abstract textual analysis, thereby masking any concrete contemplative and divine reality.

Cadell Last has situated the Žižekian intervention as a cornerstone of the philosophical and theological project at the Philosophy Portal. This was clearly demonstrated during the Philosophy Portal course on Christian Atheism, which organized its study around a historical lineage of Kant and Hegel to Žižek and Rollins. The program further synthesized these viewpoints by featuring guest contributions from Slavoj Žižek himself, Peter Rollins, and Barry Taylor.

Where This Essay Sits

The central inquiry of this paper addresses the critical tension opened by the Žižekian turn: the fate of Christianity when divine reality is interpreted through philosophical, psychological or political frameworks rather than as an actual ontological and transformative theological event. Cadell Last and Daniel Garner explore these themes in the second part of their 2026 anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, focusing on the “Truth of Christianity”. While my earlier interlude, A Rosy Cross of a Book, traced the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last and examined the friction between Žižekian-Hegelian thought and right-wing critiques, I purposely delayed my commentary on Christian Atheism. This was not due to indifference, but rather a perceived need for a more rigorous engagement with Slavoj Žižek’s evolving work on the topic, an engagement that this present paper now undertakes.

The structure of this inquiry mirrors the volume’s own thematic arc: a movement from the Coming Age of the Rose through the Facticity of the Cross, concluding in divine revelation. I am aligned with the core premise of this work: Christianity must be approached as the faith that confronts the death of God with absolute gravity. It must recognize the Cross as the essential threshold for divine revelation along with rejecting any retreat into pre-modern metaphysics that ignores the twentieth-century catastrophes and the unavoidable reality of religious pluralism.

My central contention regarding Part Two, however, is that its three primary philosophical movements, despite their rigor, capture only the form of the Cross while missing the actual divine and revealed reality at the root of the Christian tradition. For Christianity to exist as a revealed religion, it requires divine revelation as a living experience, the presence of Christ as a living divine person, and the sacramental life of the Church as a genuine conduit of divine reality. Without this substance, Christianity ceases to be itself. Whatever else it transforms into, it is no longer the divine and revealed religion two thousand years of Christian theology has held it to be

The scope of this inquiry is defined by the two distinct problems identified in the title of the Rosy Cross volume. The “Question of Right” engages the Hegelian framework established in the Philosophy of Right (1820), focusing on political-philosophical issues of legitimate authority, public reason, and the institutional standing of Christianity within the pluralist public sphere of modernity. Conversely, the “Truth of Christianity” addresses the theological essence of the faith — the nature of divine revelation and the content maintained by the sacramental and contemplative traditions.

While my initial work in the political-philosophical domain, On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist and the Problem of Romantic Liberalism (May 2026), served as my attempt to address the Question of Right and outlined a new and emergent model of integral humanism, this paper turns directly toward the Truth of Christianity. While this project examines the profound theological foundations preserved by the contemplative and mystical traditions of Christianity, it also considers the existential and systematic requirements such a reality necessitates.

Genealogy and the Argument Ahead

This paper seeks to build a positive theological case rather than merely oppose the Žižekian turn. The shift in continental philosophy of religion this turn has sparked is a vital intellectual milestone. My argument is that the German Idealist resources the turn deploys actually point toward integration with the contemplative-revealed tradition at the heart of Christian thought — and that the Žižekian framework, taken on its own terms, does not pursue that integration because it does not take the contemplative dimensions of Christianity seriously. Rather than being received as an actual and contemplative-theological event, these dimensions are minimized to psychological categories and utilized as instruments for the framework’s specific political-philosophical goals. Drawing from the Canadian Catholic critical-theological lineage of Charles Davis, Gregory Baum, Marc Lalonde, and Michel Despland, this inquiry engages with Sean McGrath — a contemporary continental philosopher of religion who integrates depth-psychology and full theological content into a unified architectural framework. The following argument is developed across six primary sections (Section I - Introduction).

Section II maps the three strands the Rosy Cross volume gathers — the Žižekian centre, the Protestant-deconstructive Pyrotheology of Peter Rollins, and the academic postmodern theology in the lineage of Mark C. Taylor — and names two structural limits in the volume’s central Žižekian-Christian-Atheist commitment. The first is Kierkegaardian: the reduction of Christianity from its religious-existential dimension to a purely ethical and universal dimension, which dissolves the substantive divine and revealed reality of the Christian contemplative tradition. The second is the pluralism limit: the elevation of Christianity to the unique level of universality on which Žižek’s framework structurally depends, which forecloses genuine engagement with other religious traditions on their own terms.

Section III situates the constructive case within the twentieth-century Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu on the European side; the Davis-Baum-Lalonde-Despland Canadian Catholic critical-theological lineage on the North American side — showing the wider Catholic landscape that has been engaging the death-of-God reckoning for a century while holding the divine and revealed reality of Christianity intact.

In Section IV, I articulate the core theological argument of this paper: that divine revelation is an actual ontological event, the Paschal Mystery is truly mediated through the Church’s sacramental life, and the life of grace signifies the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I position Sean McGrath’s scholarship as a vital contemporary contribution that integrates psychological depth with theological substance in a “both/and” architecture, providing a necessary alternative to the “either/or” logic found in the volume’s three postmodern theological currents.

Section V directly explores the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical landscape. Drawing on Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism (2010), it outlines an integral horizon where the religious traditions — Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and others — can be engaged on their own terms. This framework encompasses divine revelation in its diverse forms, while also accommodating the full non-religious commitments of Enlightenment-humanist, materialist, and atheist subjects who do not follow a contemplative-religious path. Central to this is Dallmayr’s Derridean-influenced concept of the democracy to come — a vision of a real intercultural and interreligious public life that, though not yet realized, serves as the orientation and possibility for the future.

Section VI examines the work of three contributors to the Rosy Cross volume — Bryce Nance, Edie Hitchcock, and John Feldmann — whose chapters illustrate, from three very different positions, the limits of the volume’s central Christian-Atheist and materialist framing. None of the three articulates or defends the integral-humanist horizon I have been developing and working towards. I analyze each of their contributions through this specific lens, highlighting how every chapter maps out territory that an integral perspective can effectively occupy, even in instances where the authors themselves refrain from doing so.

In Section VII, I present a comparison between the vulture of Benjamin Studebaker and the Bird on the Wire of Leonard Cohen. I contend that Cohen — through his enduring engagement with Jewish-Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue and the profound theological substance he articulated in song across five decades — serves as a contemporary exemplar of the integral humanism and integral pluralism defended in this work. The paper concludes with a diagnostic assessment: while Slavoj Žižek, the postmodernist thinkers, Sean McGrath, and Cohen each address aspects of the post-metaphysical challenge, they ultimately fall short in unique ways.

II. The Wider Landscape and the Volume’s Postmodern Register

The death-of-God theology that emerged in the years after the Second World War is much wider and theologically more complicated than its most recent Žižekian uptake suggests. Anyone who came of age intellectually in the wake of the catastrophes of the twentieth century — the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the colonial violences whose unraveling defined the postwar order — had to reckon with what theological language could still mean after Auschwitz. The first generation of self-identified death-of-God theologians — Thomas J. J. Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren — formulated the question sharply enough that Time magazine could put it on its cover in April 1966.

But the question itself was older, and the responses to it more varied, than the Time cover and its New York correspondents knew. The Nouvelle Théologie of Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, and Marie-Dominique Chenu had been engaging secularization for decades by then — the death-of-God event in the strict sense Bonhoeffer named when he wrote of a world come of age — and engaging it with the full theological content of the Christian tradition intact. That wider Catholic landscape I return to in Section III. Here I want to focus on the volume’s specific postmodern theological register.

The second part of the Rosy Cross anthology, implicitly engaging with this expansive tradition, is rooted in a particular postmodern theological framework that surfaced in the early twenty-first century. That said the landscape of continental philosophy of religion was significantly transformed during this period by Slavoj Žižek’s foundational works: The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), The Monstrosity of Christ (2009, co-authored with John Milbank), and Less Than Nothing (2012). Collaborative environments like Belfast’s Wake Festival further catalyzed this intellectual evolution by merging Hegelian and Lacanian viewpoints. More recently, Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal has become an essential center for synthesizing and propelling this dialogue through its seminars and community engagement. In its final form, the Rosy Cross collection integrates three major currents of this postmodern theological field into a cohesive volume.

The first strand is Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian position, and it is the volume’s animating centre. Cadell’s chapter The Necessity of Christian Atheism articulates this strand most fully: Christianity is the religion in which the gap between humanity and God is transposed into God himself; Christ on the Cross is the moment when the God-of-the-beyond dies, opening the community of believers — what Žižek calls the Holy Spirit — onto a freedom abandoned to itself, sustained by nothing but the love of its members for each other. Cadell formulates this as a double axiom: Christianity is the truth of religion, and atheism is the truth of Christianity. The axiom is meant to be read, he tells us, as a non-orientable surface, a Klein bottle in which the two propositions never resolve into one another but generate the dialectic of Christian Atheism as a project. The strand draws its philosophical authority from Hegel and Lacan, its political horizon from a left tradition that runs from Marx through the Frankfurt School into the present, and its appropriation of theological language from a reading of Pauline Christianity that takes the kenosis of the Cross as the structural-philosophical core of what Christianity is for.

The Žižekian intervention in continental philosophy of religion is substantial work, and it is worth being precise about what it does. It refuses the postmodern dissolution of theological content into deconstructive negation. It insists, on Hegel’s own ground, that the Cross is the structural event in which the divine itself enters the abyss of finitude. It holds Pauline Christianity — the kenotic Christ, the Cross as scandal, the ekklesia as the body of the resurrected Lord — at the centre of contemporary continental philosophical attention. And it has opened a conversation between Hegelian-Lacanian categories and the deepest currents of Christian theological reflection at a scale no other contemporary continental project has reached. Cadell’s chapter in this volume — his work with the Klein-bottle structure, his patient working-through of the Žižekian materials, his sustained commitment to taking the Christian-atheist project further than its progenitors have themselves taken it — is a real extension of this project.

The second strand is the Protestant and deconstructive technology of Pyrotheology, which has its own ground and lineage. Peter Rollins is the central figure here. His How (Not) to Speak of God, The Idolatry of God, and Insurrection come out of the Belfast emerging-church movement — the early-2000s Protestant evangelical attempt to engage post-modernity from inside congregational practice. Rollins’s later collaboration with Žižek — visible in The Divine Magician and in the Wake Festival programming — layered Žižekian categories onto a pre-existing Protestant deconstructive theology that drew on Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Caputo’s-reading of the death-of-God theologians. In the volume, Rollins’s Introduction to and Speculations on Pyrotheology presents Pyrotheology as a technology for the death of God in the life of the subject, deploying parable, liturgy, performance, and art. The strand is distinct from the Žižekian commitment. Pyrotheology has Protestant roots and operates as a practice of deconstructive faith from inside congregational structures. It is theology, but theology of a particular post-evangelical and Protestant-deconstructive kind.

The third strand is the academic postmodern theology in the lineage of Mark C. Taylor. Barry Taylor’s chapter History-Heart of Radical Theology and the Theological Unconscious names this lineage explicitly. Mark C. Taylor — author of After God and Erring, one of the principal figures who brought Derrida’s religious turn into dialogue with theology — is the architect of what within academic circles is called postmodern theology, and Barry Taylor declares himself, plainly, a Taylorian. “Postmodern theology and radical theology,” he writes, “are sometimes bedfellows, and not even strange bedfellows; they sleep side by side in the same cot.” He goes further: “For my take, to do theology is not always to be thinking about God. In fact, I seldom think about God.” Religion’s function, he tells us, is destabilising rather than stabilising. The disappearance of God is God’s “final revelation.” The question: “do you believe in God? “ is, he says, “the most uninteresting question there is about the notion of God.”

The three strands have distinct genealogies. Žižek’s Christian Atheism operates inside the Hegelian-Lacanian-post-Marxist matrix and reads the Cross as the structural event of the divine’s own self-emptying into finitude. Rollins’s Pyrotheology emerges from Belfast’s post-Troubles emergent-church milieu and treats Christianity as a deconstructive technique for collapsing the certainty-structures of belief. Mark C. Taylor’s academic postmodern theology, working out of the Yale-Chicago lineage that has shaped a generation of religious studies departments, has translated Derridean deconstruction into a theology-after-the-death-of-God in which the religious is dissolved into pure textual operation, with no divine reality left to be received as actual content. The volume’s force comes from gathering these three into a single conversation about what Christianity becomes after the death of God. They share, across their differences, a theological lack — and what it is, and why it matters, is the diagnostic this section sets down.

The Kierkegaardian Diagnostic: Christianity Reduced to the Ethical

The diagnostic I am offering against the volume’s three strands is Kierkegaardian in its source and Protestant in its theological commitments. To make it land, I have to recall the architecture Kierkegaard built — the schema of the stages, or spheres, of existence — because the whole force of the diagnostic turns on a single distinction drawn within it. Across his pseudonymous authorship Kierkegaard distinguishes three such spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. They are not biological or psychological phases that unfold automatically with age; they are rival forms of life, fundamental ways of organizing a self, each defining the good life by its own criteria and each a standing possibility a person may inhabit or refuse. The aesthetic sphere is the life of immediacy — the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, and the interesting, lived without reference to good and evil, and collapsing in the end into boredom and despair because the moment it lives for cannot be made to last. The ethical sphere is the life of the universal — the self that realizes itself by binding to moral law, duty, and the obligations of family and community, becoming a self precisely by becoming what is required of everyone. The religious sphere is the life of the single individual standing in direct relation to God: a relation that at its limit can require the individual to stand higher than the universal, and which therefore cannot be reduced to the ethical.

That last clause carries the whole argument, and it names exactly what Hegel forecloses. Hegel’s philosophical articulation of Spirit had absorbed Christianity into the universal-rational-ethical: Christianity as a moment in Spirit’s self-development, and the Christian life as participation in Sittlichkeit — the ethical substance of the Christian community, in which the individual is at home as a member of the universal. On this reading the religious simply is the ethical raised to its highest cultural form, Christendom.

Kierkegaard’s authorship is one long refusal of this absorption, and it refuses on two distinct fronts. The first is Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Its question — posed through Abraham on Mount Moriah, commanded to sacrifice Isaac — is whether there is a teleological suspension of the ethical: whether the religious can require the single individual to suspend the universal moral law for the sake of a higher telos, his relation to God. If Hegel is right that the highest human task is surrender to the ethical, then Abraham is merely a would-be murderer. If Abraham is instead the father of faith, then faith is a category that exceeds the ethical altogether, and the knight of faith is the individual whose faith cannot be communicated — cannot be mediated, justified, or even explained — because it is his relation to God in a passion for which the universal has no terms. De Silentio, tellingly, examines all of this from outside: he confesses that he cannot himself make the movement of faith. He describes the threshold he has not crossed.

The second front is the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, where the polemic against Hegelian Christianity reaches its most concentrated form and where the decisive distinction for my purposes is drawn. Within the religious sphere itself, Climacus separates two forms. Religiousness A is immanent religiousness — the religiousness of inwardness and subjective passion, exhibited paradigmatically by Socrates, requiring no historically specific revelation and able, on Climacus’s own account, to be present even where there is no Christian confession at all, in a paganism that may be agnostic or atheist. It has God “in its ground,” but it reaches God by deepening the self’s own inwardness. Religiousness B is the religiousness specific to Christianity, and it does not extend Religiousness A but breaks with it. Its content is the Absolute Paradox: that the eternal God entered time as a single human being, that there is no natural kinship between the eternal and the temporal and yet eternity has appeared within it. This cannot be reached by intensifying inwardness, because it is not a truth already lying within the self to be uncovered; it can only be received, by a leap of faith — the passionate appropriation of a paradox that offends reason and dissolves into no system. Climacus, like de Silentio, writes as one who has not himself arrived: a self-described humorist, standing short of Religiousness B and describing the paradox from its edge.

With this schema in view, the diagnostic can be stated exactly. What Kierkegaard set down against Hegel in the 1840s anticipates, with extraordinary precision, what the Žižekian articulation of the Holy Spirit as community-of-believers-in-solidarity now performs. Žižek’s Christian Atheism is, in Kierkegaard’s own terms, the most rigorous contemporary articulation of ethical-stage Christianity — a Christianity that has absorbed the death-of-God reckoning with full philosophical seriousness, that has articulated the structural-dialectical truth of the Cross with unparalleled precision, and that has built from these resources a community of solidarity in the absence of the Other. Read in religious rather than ethical terms, it reaches at most Religiousness A: an immanent religiousness of inwardness and shared commitment, available precisely because it requires no transcendent revelation — which is exactly why it can be held, without contradiction, as an atheism. It is profound philosophical work. It is also, in the precise Kierkegaardian sense, the ethical sphere and Religiousness A articulated as Christianity, and never Religiousness B.

For the leap of faith does not occur in this framework, and cannot, because the framework’s structural commitments do not allow it. The leap is the face-to-face individual encounter with the living Christ as divine person — the death-with-Christ that opens one to divine revelation as an actual event — and it is precisely the paradox of Religiousness B that Žižek’s axioms convert into something else. Christ is read as the structural moment of subjective destitution, the kenosis of the divine ego into the void of the Real; he is not received as the living divine person who meets the soul in the actual sacramental and contemplative-revelation reality the Christian tradition has held for two millennia. The Holy Spirit is read as a community-of-solidarity in the absence of the transcendental guarantor and facticity of divine revelation; it is not received as the actual third divine person who indwells the soul — the Pneuma who makes the soul a temple of God in the actual sacramental sense when Paul asked the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16).

What Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian project finally does to Christianity is more than the philosophical reduction Kierkegaard diagnosed in Hegel. It is the conversion of Christianity into something the secular and post-religious left can use: a purely therapeutic method for managing the existential conditions of late capitalism, a community-of-solidarity in the absence of any theological commitment, a deconstructive technique for managing the residue of metaphysical certainty in subjects who can no longer believe but who still need the ethical-aesthetic and cultural identity Christianity provides.

Pyrotheology and academic postmodern theology, in their own registers, do related work. Rollins’s Pyrotheology offers a technique-for-deconstruction of the certainty of belief. Taylor’s genealogy of postmodern theology dissolves the divine-and-revealed content into pure textual operation without a divine reality. The Žižekian, Rollinsian, and Taylorite trajectories each dilute the fundamental essence of Christianity. At its most animated historical moments, Christianity was a radical and anarchist faith that announced the end of all terrestrial sovereignties before the Kingdom of God. It preserved a substantive divine reality verified by two millennia of contemplative practice and has shaped the lives of Saints through a direct encounter with the living God and facticity of Christ. However, the Žižek-Rollins interpretation domesticates this revolutionary DNA, repurposing it as a therapeutic-political project for a secular, post-religious left — essentially offering a therapeutic culture for the disenchanted. My Kierkegaardian-Protestant interpretation categorically rejects this domestication. Christianity, viewed as a divine and revealed faith, possesses a radicality that the Žižekian lens fails to grasp. It is inherently more anarchist in its dismissal of modern sovereignty than any Hegelian-Lacanian-post-Marxist analysis can permit. Furthermore, its actual divine essence — what it truly holds — surpasses what any instrumentalization for political purposes can ever hope to capture.

The Pluralism Limit and Other Religious Traditions

The first structural boundary of the Žižekian project is defined by the Kierkegaardian diagnostic: the thinning of Christianity from a robust religious-existential reality into a merely ethical and universal-rational system. Beyond this lies a second, distinct limitation within the philosophical architecture. While the first boundary dictates what the framework can extract from Christianity, the second governs what it is fundamentally unable to accommodate regarding other faiths. Within the Žižekian frame, the commitment to Christian Atheism is a structural axiom rather than a personal preference, and this commitment inevitably restricts the framework’s ability to genuinely encounter other traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism on their own terms. This constraint is a direct consequence of the framework’s foundational logic.

Žižek’s treatment of Buddhism is the most diagnostically clear case. Across multiple works he treats Western Buddhism as the “perfect ideological supplement” to global capitalism — the meditative inwardness that allows late-capitalist subjects to maintain composure while participating in a destructive economic system, the “cool” void that Žižek opposes to the “hot” trauma of the Cross. The argument has a polemical edge that does work against certain forms of mindfulness and therapeutic lifestyle enclaves. What it fails to engage is Buddhism as a full religious tradition with its own contemplative-philosophical depth, its own millennia-long testing of soteriological claims, and its own metaphysical and post-metaphysical resources for the very questions Žižek’s framework is attempting to address. Siddhartha Gautama’s articulation of anatta preceded the Council of Nicaea by more than seven centuries. The Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions developed the philosophical articulation of the same depth-structures across two millennia of textual and lived-contemplative testing. The Japanese Zen tradition holds disciplines of contemplative practice with structural rigor comparable to the Carmelite tradition that has done analogous work in the Christian sphere. Žižek’s dismissal of Buddhism as an ideological-supplement does not engage any of this. It cannot engage it on the framework’s own terms.

The structural reason is the Christian-Atheist axiom itself. Žižek’s project elevates Christianity to the unique level of historical-philosophical universality — the Cross as the singular historical event in which the divine enters its own self-emptying and through which the post-religious community of believers becomes possible, the one event that achieves what every other religious tradition, on Žižek’s frame, only gestures toward and fails to reach. To reach the dialectical Universal on this frame, one must pass through the specific historical-narrative content of Golgotha — the hill outside Jerusalem where, according to the Gospels, Christ was crucified. Other religious traditions, when they enter the framework at all, do so as material for a form of Christian-Atheist genealogy rather than serious interlocutors who might be addressing the same depth-structures from their own historical genealogies, their own language, and their own experiences of the Divine. The pluralism failure is not from a malicious intent on Žižek’s part; it’s built into his philosophical framework and system. And as long as Christianity is held in this position of unique universality, the other traditions cannot be received as real and valuable in their own right.

The architectural response to this structural limit is what Jacques Maritain, in 1936, called integral humanism — and what Fred Dallmayr, in 2010, articulated as integral pluralism on the political-philosophical side. The position is neither syncretism nor relativism. Syncretism would blend the traditions into an undifferentiated mystical substrate, dissolving the substance each tradition has held. Relativism would treat each tradition as merely a provisional cultural formation, equally available for adoption or revision. The integral position refuses both moves. Its commitment is that the post-secular pluralist public sphere requires real engagement with the religious traditions on their own terms — Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and the others — held within a philosophical-anthropological horizon (Maritain’s integral humanism, the full Christian humanism that holds the human person as imago Dei within a pluralist civilizational frame) and a political-philosophical horizon (Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, the post-Habermasian articulation of dialogue across civilizational substrates without flattening into procedural-rational consensus).

The integral-humanist stance I am advocating for establishes a horizon where religious traditions and secular commitments coexist, each respected on its own merits. This framework facilitates communication across the pluralistic gaps of post-secular society — a reach the Žižekian model cannot achieve on its own. Because Žižek structurally depends on elevating Christianity to a singular status of universality, his framework is precluded from accessing this broader pluralistic horizon. What our current era demands is an integral humanist and pluralist perspective, which Žižek’s system — by its very design — is unable to offer.

These inherent constraints function in tandem: a Kierkegaardian restriction on the existential depth of religious content and an integral-pluralist barrier to engaging with diverse faiths. The Žižekian approach is fundamentally limited by these commitments. In contrast, the expansive Catholic intellectual tradition — represented by the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors — has spent a century demonstrating how to engage seriously with the death-of-God concept while upholding a revealed and divine reality. This context now sets the stage for Section III and Section IV, where we will finally examine the work of Sean McGrath as an alternative to the Žižekian philosophical system.

III. The Catholic Wing and the Canadian Lineage

Sarah Shortall’s Soldiers of God in a Secular World is the most careful recent history of mid-century French Catholic political theology, and it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Catholic engagement with the death-of-God reckoning across the twentieth century. The book traces the Nouvelle Théologie from its origins in the 1930s Jersey-exile period — when the Jesuit refugees of Vichy France found themselves rebuilding theological scholarship from inside the experience of resistance and occupation — through its mid-century controversies, its central role at Vatican II, and its long afterlife in liberation theology, radical orthodoxy, and the contemporary post-secular philosophical conversation.

What the Nouvelle Théologie gave the Catholic intellectual tradition was a way of engaging secularization with full theological seriousness — without either capitulating to it (the Concilium error, in Communio‘s reading) or retreating from it into neo-scholastic insulation. De Lubac’s Surnaturel unsettled the neo-scholastic distinction between nature and the supernatural. His Drama of Atheist Humanism engaged Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Comte as serious philosophical interlocutors whose challenges Catholic theology had to absorb. His Corpus Mysticum became one of the foundational texts of post-secular political theology, taken up by Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet for their accounts of secularization as a process internal to Christianity. Chenu’s work on Aquinas and on the worker-priest movement gave Catholic theology a way of taking the autonomy of the natural order seriously without abandoning the supernatural horizon. Congar’s three-volume I Believe in the Holy Spirit opened the theological vocabulary in ways that prepared for Vatican II. These theologians took the death-of-God reckoning with full seriousness and held the full theological content of the Christian tradition intact — divine revelation as actual event, the sacraments as actual mediation of divine life, Christ as a living divine person whose Death and Resurrection are the central event of the world’s redemption. They did not see these as opposed commitments. They saw them as the only honest way to be Catholic in the twentieth century.

Shortall’s epilogue makes a further point that bears on what I am arguing here. The current renewal of interest in theology among continental philosophers — Marion, Badiou, Žižek, Agamben, Vattimo — is not, as some accounts have it, a return of theology to philosophical respectability after a long absence. It is the visible surface of an interaction that has been continuous across the entire twentieth century. The Nouvelle Théologie and the secular Hegelians of the École Normale Supérieure read each other. Fessard read Hegel; Chenu read Marx; de Lubac engaged Comte and Feuerbach. The death-of-God questions Žižek engages now have been inside Catholic theological reflection for the entire postwar period, addressed there with the divine and revealed reality intact, addressed from the Cross-and-Resurrection horizon that the Nouvelle Théologie never let lapse.

Shortall makes this point most directly in her discussion of Charles Taylor. Taylor, she observes, came of age intellectually as a Catholic in the 1950s, reading de Lubac, Chenu, and Congar. His A Secular Age is at once a phenomenology of secularization and a Catholic engagement with the death-of-God landscape. Taylor’s account of the buffered self, his diagnosis of the immanent frame, his sense of something missing in the modern world that cannot quite fulfill the natural human yearning for transcendence — all of this presupposes a theological anthropology that the Nouvelle Théologie taught him to inhabit. Taylor is doing death-of-God theology in the constructive postwar sense. He is doing it from a Catholic philosophical vantage point that engages Hegel and Heidegger and the secular phenomenological tradition with the seriousness those traditions deserve, while holding full theological commitment intact.

This is the wider Catholic landscape my own work belongs to. The Canadian Catholic intellectual lineage I have been tracing across several recent essays — Charles Davis at Concordia, Gregory Baum at Toronto and McGill, Marc Lalonde at Concordia under Davis, and Michel Despland also at Concordia — is all part of this lineage and tradition. It is not a parochial Canadian sidebar to a properly European story. It is one of the genuine continuations of the Nouvelle Théologie into a North American context, with its own institutional history and its own intellectual contributions.

Davis’s departure from the priesthood in 1967, after the publication of A Question of Conscience, was one of the largest and most public crises of the postconciliar period in the Anglosphere. His arrival at Concordia inaugurated a serious Canadian engagement with Catholic theology — engaging Habermas and the Frankfurt School, developing what would become his Theology and Political Society, training a generation of scholars including Marc Lalonde, my own Concordia teacher, whose 1999 Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas built the bridge between Davis’s theology and the broader Frankfurt-School engagement that has informed my own work. Baum, who took the opposite path from Davis — remaining within the Church while developing his own critical sociology of religion at Toronto and McGill — became the Canadian theologian who most fully integrated critical theory with Catholic social teaching, producing across a long career the most substantial Canadian Catholic engagement with the modern condition. The Davis-Baum rupture, which I engaged at length in Truth and Relevance: Revisiting the Charles Davis and Gregory Baum Debate, marked the Canadian culmination and ongoing debates across the Concilium and Communio fault line.

What I take from this wider landscape — and from the Canadian Catholic lineage that’s shaped my thinking — is that the death-of-God reckoning the Rosy Cross volume engages has been worked through for the better part of a century by theologians who held the substantive divine and revealed reality of Christianity intact, who knew the cognitio Dei experimentalis by sacramental life and contemplative discipline, who therefore could articulate divine revelation as an actual transformative event and the supernatural life of grace as the actual ground of faith and salvation in the modern condition. The volume’s postmodern theological strands are not the only response to the death-of-God event. They are one response, articulated in a particular philosophical register with its own genealogy and its own commitments. The wider landscape — the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian inheritors — has been showing for decades how the death-of-God reckoning can be taken with full seriousness while the divine and revealed reality is preserved and lived.

It is also the landscape that has held genuine engagement with the divine and revealed reality of Christianity — divine revelation as an actual ontological and transformative event, the Paschal Mystery, the supernatural life of grace — across the entire postwar period. That full theological articulation, and the contemporary continental philosopher of religion whose scholarship engages it most rigorously, is what Section IV turns to next.

IV. The Facticity of the Cross, Divine Revelation, & the Future of Christianity

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I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

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Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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Your faith was strong, but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and cut your hair
And from your lips, she drew the Hallelujah

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Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

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Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

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— Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah, from Various Positions (Columbia, 1984)

Divine Revelation and the Paschal Mystery

To ensure the reader understands the paper’s direction, I will explicitly define divine revelation as I conceive it. Authentic divine revelation is a direct, face-to-face meeting with the living God. This is the cognitio Dei experimentalis that the contemplative lineage has meticulously preserved for two millennia. Such revelation is not a mere product of dialectical insight or philosophical deduction; it is an ontological and transformative event that radically reorients one’s way of being in the world.

The path to this opening is found in what the contemplative and mystical tradition identifies as the dark night of the soul. Formulated by John of the Cross and refined through centuries of contemplative practice, this journey involves the soul undergoing an analogous death with Christ. Through the dark nights of the senses and the spirit, a rigorous contemplative discipline strips away every comforting attachment until God alone remains. It is through this profound death-with-Christ that one becomes receptive to the actual facticity of the cross and the divine. In this light, the Cross transcends the abyss to become a sacred site and encounters the living presence of God known within the tradition as divine revelation.

The sacramental life of the Church mediates this divine reality through participation in the Paschal Mystery — Christ’s Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Salvation. The Eucharist is the participation in Christ’s Death and Resurrection: sacramenta efficiunt quod significant, the sacraments effecting what they signify. Baptism is the opening to the believer to the face of God through Christ. Confession is the ongoing reception of mercy that keeps the believer in communion with God and the Divinity of Christ. These are not just hermeneutical symbols. They are the actual sacramental participation in the Paschal Mystery through which divine life is communicated to the faithful and the Church becomes the Body of Christ in lived sacramental reality.

The supernatural life of grace that follows is what the Christian tradition has called gratia gratum faciens, sanctifying grace — the divine life that the soul, having met Christ, now lives by, in participation in the Paschal Mystery the Church makes present in her sacraments. From this grace, and only from this grace, comes the call to holiness that the Saints have heard across two millennia — Anthony of the Desert, Francis, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux, Edith Stein, Maximilian Kolbe, and the unnamed millions whose holiness was lived in obscurity.

This paper addresses and upholds the facticity of the Cross and divine revelation. Consequently, it functions as both a review and a theological position. As a review, it is appreciative, acknowledging that Last and Garner have compiled an exceptional volume where contributors engage their inquiries with profound earnestness. As a theological and positioned work, it asserts that the divine and revealed truths in question are far too significant to be restricted to purely philosophical and reductive psychological content for political ends.

McGrath’s Both/And

In On Sean McGrath’s Lost Road and the Post-Metaphysical Challenge (February 2026), I made the case for McGrath’s recovery of the Western contemplative tradition as one of the most timely and courageous scholarly moves in contemporary continental philosophy of religion. The Lost Road is a book whose existential weight is inseparable from its philosophical contribution — McGrath’s autobiographical witness and Carmelite formation are not external to the disciplined rigor of the argument; they are its ground, and the book serves as a powerful introduction to the Western contemplative tradition for the contemporary reader. The earlier essay situated McGrath’s project within the distinctly Canadian philosophical lineage that runs from Armour and Trott’s “philosophic federalism,” through the Davis-Baum theological rupture, to McGrath’s own Fackenheim-Nicholson formation at the University of Toronto. And it proposed what I have been calling a new integral humanism as the framework within which McGrath’s contemplative position becomes communicable across the pluralist divides of post-secular public life.

Rather than revisiting that argument, what I want to do here is mark how McGrath’s project intersects with the core commitments of the Rosy Cross volume. I will do this in two steps. First, I want to introduce McGrath’s scholarship on its own terms, across three works in Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger studies that together constitute the body of work the present argument leans on. Then, with that scholarship in view, I will turn back to the Rosy Cross volume to mark how the both/and architecture of that scholarship stands against the either/or logic that organizes the volume’s three primary postmodern-theological currents.

Sean McGrath stands out as one of the preeminent Schellingian scholars in the English-speaking world. His 2012 work, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious, provides the definitive modern analysis of how Schelling’s Freedom essay and subsequent positive philosophy grew out of a German Idealist engagement with depth-psychological themes that predates Freud by nearly a century. The book’s central thesis — that the concept of the unconscious originates with Schelling rather than with Freud — is one of the more consequential philosophical-historical claims in recent Schelling scholarship. Several Rosy Cross contributors register the impact; few work through its full implications. The “dark ground of Spirit” — Schelling’s name for the pre-rational ground from which conscious life emerges — is an ontological-theological category before it is a psychological one, rooted in the German mystical tradition of Eckhart and Böhme.

This Schellingian substrate carries directly into McGrath’s reading of Hegel. The volume’s Hegelian foundations — and specifically Cadell Last’s own Hegelian commitments — rest on a reading of Hegel rooted in the same German mystical-contemplative tradition that the Lacanian lens of contemporary Žižekian analysis frequently obscures. Hegel was a Lutheran with substantial training in German mysticism; the Phenomenology and the Logic are formed within the intellectual landscape of Eckhart, Böhme, and Schelling. When Hegel is read through Lacan, that mystical-contemplative layer becomes structurally unutterable — present in the source but unreachable in practice. McGrath’s contribution has been to preserve the visibility and ground of this substrate. By reading Schelling, and through Schelling Hegel, with the mystical heritage held intact, McGrath engages Žižek from inside the German Idealist conversation rather than from outside it — and keeps in view exactly the mystical-contemplative core that the Lacanian turn in Žižekian scholarship has rendered hard to see and experience.

McGrath has also contributed one of the most vital contemporary interpretations of the link between the Christian theological tradition and Heidegger. In The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (2006), he contends that the hermeneutics of facticity in Heidegger’s thought actually surfaced through a deep encounter with the theology of the Cross in Luther. McGrath suggests that the entire Being and Time endeavor represents a secularization of this specific theological-existential structure. Consequently, the Heideggerian facticity referenced in the title of this paper possesses a fundamentally Christian and theological substrate, despite Heidegger’s own rigorous efforts to sever those connections. The “facticity of the cross” — the specific terminology chosen for this inquiry — operates simultaneously as a Heideggerian concept and a theological reality. It is McGrath’s scholarship that prevents these dual registers from collapsing into mere psychology or philosophy, allowing them to remain and held together in dialogical tension.

With McGrath’s scholarship now in view, the structural shape of his contribution can be named — and what it does that the Rosy Cross volume’s collective frame cannot perform comes into focus. The three postmodern theological strands the volume gathers each operate on an either/or that flattens the depth-psychology/philosophical-theological architecture. Žižek’s framework collapses theological substance into political philosophy via Lacanian psychology, with the contemplative and mystical tradition reduced to psychological material for the political work. Rollins’s Pyrotheology operates a deconstructive practice that brackets theological commitment in favour of a Lacanian-inflected group and psychological technique. Mark C. Taylor’s lineage dissolves the divine-and-revealed content into textual operation, with the theological dimension of After God and Erring preserved as deconstructive surface without a divine referent.

McGrath’s scholarship, however, functions through a different logic. The depth-psychology genealogy and the concrete theological substance of the contemplative-revelation tradition are held together as a “both/and” architecture within a single scholarly project. Divine reality is received through lived practice, and the sacramental and mystical dimensions are upheld as theological content in their own right. This integration is precisely what the collective framework of the volume, bound by its internal “either/or” commitments across all three strands, remains unable to achieve.

The Secular Christ podcast that McGrath produces with the Jungian analyst Jakob Lusensky brings these threads into direct conversation with the contemporary theological landscape. Across three seasons, McGrath has engaged Peterson (Episode 3), Žižek (Episode 4), and the broader cultural reception of Christianity in the present moment with a philosophical rigor that few academic theologians have matched. His engagement with Žižek is the load-bearing one for my argument here, because it is in this engagement that McGrath, as a scholar, articulates clearly what the Žižekian framework does and does not engage as actual theological content.

McGrath’s diagnosis of Žižek in Secular Christ Episode 4 is precise and unsparing. Žižek, McGrath grants, has a better purchase on the essence of Pauline Christianity than Peterson does, precisely because Žižek takes the tragic ground of human existence with full seriousness. The Cross is not, for Žižek, an archetypal image of psychological transformation; it is the structural event in which the divine itself enters into the abyss of finitude and there discovers its own self-othering. Žižek’s reading of Hegel and Pauline Christianity, on its own structural-philosophical terms, is rigorous.

What Žižek does not do — and this is the diagnostic that matters for the present argument — is engage the actual contemplative and mystical sacramental dimensions of the Christian tradition as theological content in their own right. The contemplative tradition’s lived reality — Eckhart’s Gottheit, Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, John of the Cross’s nada, the Carmelite cognitio Dei experimentalis — does not appear in Žižek’s framework as theological content. It appears, when it appears at all, as material instrumentalized for the political work the framework is doing. The death of the divine ego on the Cross is, for Žižek, the unveiling of the void; for the contemplative and mystical revelatory tradition, the same emptying is the unveiling of the luminous depths in which divine revelation occurs as an ontological and transformative event of the soul that has been transfigured by Christ. The Žižekian framework does not engage the second reading because, on its own terms, it does not take that reading seriously.

The core theological argument advanced here is that Christianity, as a divine and revealed religion, necessitates the substantive reality maintained by the contemplative tradition: an actual transformative event of the soul mediated through the Church’s sacramental life. This is encapsulated in the principle sacramenta efficiunt quod significant — the sacraments effect what they signify. Thus, the Eucharist represents real participation in the Death and Resurrection of Christ, baptism serves as an initiation to the path of Christ and an opening towards our resurrection, and confession facilitates the ongoing reception of divine mercy.

These are not merely symbolic gestures but the actual mediation of divine life, resulting in a supernatural life of grace — the gratia gratum faciens, theological virtues, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Without these essential elements, the faith is reduced to an approximation: a philosophical construct, an ethical system, or deconstructive form of technology and tool. While such intellectual interpretations hold value, they fail to reach the true substance of Christianity as a revealed religion.

McGrath’s scholarship is the contemporary continental philosophy-of-religion work that engages the contemplative and revelatory tradition as actual theological content. The authority of his work is scholarly: he is an academic Schellingian and a philosopher of religion working in the contemporary academy, not a saint or mystic. What his work shows is that rigorous engagement with Christianity’s full content, including its contemplative and mystical sacramental dimensions, is possible in contemporary continental philosophy of religion — and that this is a different project from the Žižekian one. The Žižekian project does its political-philosophical work well on its own terms. McGrath’s project is the other thing the present moment is asking for: engagement with Christianity’s actual content as contemplative-revelation and theological content in its own right, with the depth-psychology genealogy held alongside in the both/and architecture the volume’s three strands cannot perform from inside the either/or that organizes them.

The viability of Christianity’s future depends on the profound revealed truths maintained by the contemplative and revelatory tradition. Central to this is the acknowledgment of divine revelation as a tangible event — a grace-filled engagement with the divine life that the Christian faith has honed over two millennia. Progressing this legacy requires expressing these essential truths through contemporary philosophical concepts, embedded within an integral-humanist and integral-pluralist structure. Such a framework enables Christian substance to be shared meaningfully in a post-secular world alongside traditions like Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. Sean McGrath’s scholarship provides the necessary theological depth for this path, rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition described in Section III — the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors. His work serves as a bridge toward the philosophical-anthropological and political-philosophical landscape detailed in Section V.

V. Integral Humanism, Integral Pluralism, & Democracy to Come

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The light came through the window
Straight from the sun above
And so inside my little room
There plunged the rays of love

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In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see
Out of which the nameless makes
A name for one like me

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I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone

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All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance

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I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone

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Then I came back from where I’d been
My room, it looked the same
But there was nothing left between
The nameless and the name

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All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance

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I’ll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
Until it reached an open door
Then love itself
Love itself was gone
Love itself
Love itself was gone

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— Leonard Cohen, Love Itself, from Ten New Songs (Columbia, 2001)

Section IV established the necessity of substantive theological content: the reality of divine revelation as an ontological and transformative event that reorients one’s being in the world and the mediation of this mystery through the Church’s sacramental life. However, the remaining challenge is defining the horizon where this content can be communicated within a post-secular, pluralist public sphere — a space where it is neither relegated to a private form of religiosity nor forced into a particularist Christian or cultural framework that is untenable.

The broader Catholic intellectual landscape, specifically the Nouvelle Théologie and its Canadian successors — the Davis-Baum-Lalonde-Despland lineage influencing my own research — has preserved this horizon throughout the post-conciliar era. This architectural framework is anchored by two key pillars: Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936), addressing philosophical anthropology, and Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010), addressing political philosophy.

Maritain’s Integral Humanism

Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1936) names the philosophical-anthropological horizon. The book was written against two threats at once. On one side, the bourgeois-liberal humanism of the inter-war period, which Maritain read as a humanism that had absorbed the surface of Christian moral commitments while severing them from their theological ground — a humanism without the imago Dei, the human person reduced to economic individual or rational subject without the transcendent ordering toward God that the Christian tradition had held since the Patristic period. On the other side, the totalitarian humanisms that were already visible in 1936 — the Marxist-materialist humanism that would reach its catastrophes in the Soviet experiment, and the racial-nationalist humanism that would reach its catastrophe in National Socialism. Maritain’s wager was that a robust Christian and integral humanism, drawing on Aquinas without retreating into neo-scholastic insulation, could hold the human person as imago Dei within a pluralist civilizational frame that engaged the modern condition with full seriousness.

The integral humanism Maritain named is integral in a precise sense: it integrates the supernatural and natural dimensions of the human person rather than letting either be absorbed by the other. The natural dimensions — reason, freedom, embodied life, the structures of family and political community — are real, are good, and are taken with full seriousness as natural goods. They are not absorbed into the supernatural in the way a triumphalist Christian humanism would absorb them; the autonomy of the natural order is preserved. But neither are they autonomous in the bourgeois-liberal sense that severs them from their transcendent ordering. They are oriented toward God as their final end, and the human person flourishes only when both dimensions are held together. This is the philosophical anthropology that the Nouvelle Théologie would carry forward, that Charles Taylor would inhabit, and that the present paper takes up.

What I have been calling, across the Lost Road essay and On Enchanted Flatland, a new integral humanism — new in the sense that it engages the death-of-God reckoning the twentieth century made unavoidable and holds the religious traditions on their own terms in the post-secular pluralist public sphere — extends Maritain’s project rather than replaces it. Maritain’s Christian humanism remains. What is added is the explicit pluralist horizon: the integral humanism holds Christian substance alongside the full contents of Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious traditions, with divine revelation of all stripes and flavors held as actual content where each tradition has been tested across centuries. And it holds robust non-religious commitments — Enlightenment-humanist reason and freedom, materialist commitment to embodied flourishing, the universal-rational-emancipatory inheritance of the post-Enlightenment moment — alongside the religious traditions as their own real contribution.

Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism

Fred Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010) names the political-philosophical horizon. Where Maritain works at the level of philosophical anthropology, Dallmayr works at the level of political philosophy — what does real engagement across civilizational and religious substrates look like in the post-Habermasian moment, after the failure of procedural-rational consensus to deliver the intercultural understanding it promised? Dallmayr’s wager is that genuine pluralism requires full engagement across the traditions rather than the bracketing of theological-philosophical content in favour of a thin procedural framework. The actual contents of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions are not obstacles to dialogue; they are what dialogue is for.

The integral pluralism Dallmayr names is integral in the same precise sense Maritain’s integral humanism is integral: it refuses both syncretism and relativism. Syncretism would blend the traditions into an undifferentiated mystical or political substrate, dissolving the substance each tradition has held. Relativism would treat each tradition as merely a provisional cultural formation, equally available for adoption or revision, with no real truth-claims at stake. Dallmayr refuses both moves. The Christian tradition makes truth-claims about divine revelation through the Cross and Resurrection. The Buddhist tradition makes truth-claims about anatta and śūnyatā and the Bodhisattva path. The Jewish tradition makes truth-claims about covenant and Torah and the messianic horizon. The Islamic tradition makes truth-claims about the prophetic revelation and the sovereignty of God. The Hindu tradition makes truth-claims across its many lineages. Each of these can be held in its own full form and engaged dialogically without being dissolved into the others or relativized away.

Dallmayr’s horizon inherits the Derridean register of a democracy to come — a democratic horizon that is not the actually-existing procedural-liberal democracy of the present moment, with its impoverished public reason and its constitutive bracketing of theological-philosophical content, but a democracy oriented toward genuine engagement across substrates, oriented toward a future of real intercultural and interreligious life that the present has not yet realized. The democracy to come holds the religious traditions on their own terms within a political-philosophical horizon that lets them speak to each other and to the wider public sphere as full interlocutors. It is the alternative to both the secularist exclusion of religion from public reason and the religious-particularist domination of the public sphere by one tradition’s terms.

The Integral Horizon and the Living Traditions

Together — Maritain on the philosophical-anthropological side, Dallmayr on the political-philosophical side — they articulate the horizon within which the theological case Sections II and III have been building becomes communicable across the pluralist divides of post-secular public life. The Christian content I have been defending — divine revelation as actual transformative event, the Paschal Mystery as actually mediated by the sacramental life of the Church, the supernatural life of grace as actually present in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit — is held within this horizon as one full tradition’s substantive content, alongside the analogous full contents of the other religious traditions.

Buddhism enters this horizon not as Žižek’s “ideological supplement” to global capitalism, but as the full religious-contemplative tradition that has tested anatta and śūnyatā and the Bodhisattva path across two and a half millennia, with its own contemplative-revelation receptions (Zen kensho, Tibetan dzogchen recognition, Theravāda awakening) held as actual content in their own forms. Judaism enters as the living tradition of covenant and Torah and the messianic horizon, with its own mystical-revelation lineage (the prophetic encounter, the Hasidic devekut, the Kabbalistic ascent through the sefirot) held as actual content. Islam enters as the living tradition of prophetic revelation and divine sovereignty, with the Sufi mystical lineage (fanā, baqā, the Akbarian articulation of the unity of being) held as actual historical truth claims. Hinduism enters as the living tradition of darshan and dharma and the manifold paths, with the Advaitic non-dualist recognition and the Tantric realization-traditions held as their own contemplative and revelatory historical truths. Each tradition holds its own full contents on its own terms, in its own grammar, with its own contemplative and revelatory truth claims and tested practice across centuries.

The horizon also holds full non-religious traditions. Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason, freedom, and emancipation as universal-rational human capacities — the inheritance from Kant to Hegel through Marx and the Frankfurt School and into the present — is preserved as a real contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment, alongside the religious traditions rather than against them. The materialist commitment to embodied human flourishing in the conditions of the present, as a robust ethical-political horizon, is similarly held. The integral horizon does not require its inhabitants to be religious.

Democracy to Come & Integral Political Praxis

The integral-humanism and integral-pluralism horizon is not only a philosophical-anthropological position; it requires operational articulation in the political-philosophical register as well. The democracy to come names that political-philosophical horizon — the horizon within which full religious commitments and full non-religious commitments can be engaged on their own terms, in the same public sphere, without either being reduced to the other and without the public sphere itself being captured by any one tradition’s particularist terms.

Integral political praxis is the operational layer that lets this horizon become workable in the conditions of the present. The work I have been developing across the IACT research program — Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy — names this operational scaffold. IACT draws on Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and its underlying Relational Frame Theory, on the integral human developmental tradition, on the depth-psychological substrate, and on the philosophical-conceptual frames of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism that I have articulated across the recent essays in this series. IACT is open to all the religious and contemplative paths — Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and others — and to the full non-religious commitments of Enlightenment-humanist, materialist, and atheist subjects for whom no contemplative-religious path is operative. Its strength is the integrative architecture itself rather than any particular religious commitment: depth-psychology, the integral framework, and operational praxis held together as a single clinical methodology within which whatever lived path the user holds becomes traversable.

The democracy to come and integral political praxis name two sides of what the horizon requires for its full articulation. The democracy to come is the political-philosophical horizon toward which the integral position is oriented. Integral political praxis, operationalized through IACT and grounded in the philosophical-conceptual work of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism, is what lets the horizon become operative not only as the position a scholar or contemplative subject inhabits, but as an institutional and intellectual reality in the post-secular pluralist public sphere. That is the demand the post-metaphysical challenge names, and that is the work the integral-humanist position I am defending takes itself to be in service of.

Having established this conceptual horizon, I will now examine three contributors to the Rosy Cross anthology who engage the boundaries of the collection’s primary framework from unique vantage points. These individuals include Bryce Nance, who stands at the threshold of pluralism; Edie Hitchcock, who brings a background in psychoanalysis to her exploration of Christian Atheism; and John Feldmann, who investigates Christian Atheism through the lens of the “Žižekian Trifecta”. While their respective chapters do not explicitly advocate for the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist perspective I am proposing, I intend to analyze their work through this specific lens. By doing so, I will demonstrate how their insights reveal areas that an integral position can effectively address, even when the authors themselves do not adopt that stance.

VI. Voices at the Threshold: Nance, Hitchcock, and Feldmann

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Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know
Show me the place, for my head is bendin’ low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

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Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began

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The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave

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Show me the place where you want your slave to go
Show me the place, I’ve forgotten, I don’t know
Show me the place, for my head is bendin’ low
Show me the place where you want your slave to go

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The troubles came, I saved what I could save
A thread of light, a particle, a wave
But there were chains, so I hastened to behave
There were chains, so I loved you like a slave

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Show me the place
Show me the place
Show me the place
Mmm, mmm

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Show me the place, help me roll away the stone
Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone
Show me the place where the word became a man
Show me the place where the suffering began

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— Leonard Cohen, Show Me the Place, from Old Ideas (Columbia, 2012)

Žižek’s framework of Christian Atheism is anchored by a structural commitment that positions Christianity as the sole historical and philosophical gateway to the universal. By treating the Cross as an exclusive, proprietary event, this perspective frequently marginalizes other faiths — most notably Buddhism — resulting in a triumphalist Christian particularism. In contrast, the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist models, influenced by Jacques Maritain and Fred Dallmayr, oppose such needless clashes. This approach asserts that traditions such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, as well as non-religious viewpoints, must be understood according to their own distinct integrity rather than being dissolved into a single religious hagiography. Such a commitment to balanced preservation serves as the definitive trait of a genuine post-secular pluralism.

Bryce Nance challenges this pluralist boundary from a radical materialist vantage point. He argues that the death of God was not a theological event in Judea but a material and intellectual one driven by the Cogito, the Critique, and the Commodity. Nance critiques Žižek’s Christian Atheism as a fetish — a melancholic attempt to salvage Christian particularism while pretending to transcend it. He uses Buddhism as a primary counter-example, noting that Siddhartha was already realizing the Void and deconstructing the self centuries before Nicaea, a depth Žižek’s framework is unable to acknowledge.

Meanwhile, Edie Hitchcock and John Feldmann skirt the boundaries of contemplative revelation. Hitchcock, utilizing her clinical psychoanalytic experience, argues that Žižek’s reduction of the Holy Spirit to a “solidarity-community” ignores the physical body and its raw psychic intensities, rendering it a form of wish-fulfillment. Feldmann, identifying as an “Andy Warhol Catholic,” contrasts a “maximalist” Pyrotheology that replaces sacramental life with the Real against a “minimalist” approach that holds the Real in tension with the Symbolic Order of liturgy. He insists that the material reality of Roman Catholicism should not be evacuated. When viewed through this integral horizon and the operational framework of IACT, the contributions and omissions of these voices become visible.

The Pluralism Threshold: Bryce Nance

Bryce Nance’s The Corpse in the Machine — Interlude 2, immediately following my own A Rosy Cross of a Book in the architecture of the volume — sits at the pluralism threshold. Nance’s chapter is a sustained materialist critique of Žižek’s Christian Atheism from a position more radically committed to the death of God than Žižek himself is willing to be. Nance’s diagnosis of where God was killed is explicit and material: not on a hill in Judea but by the Cogito, the Critique, and the Commodity. By Descartes’s displacement of the Subject’s anchor from divine authorship into self-reflexive interiority. By Kant’s exile of God from knowledge to a “practical postulate.” And above all by the material forces of industrial capitalism that, as Marx had it, melted all that was solid into air. To focus on the theological dialectic of atheism, Nance argues, while ignoring the material reality of the steam engine, the assembly line, and the fibre-optic cable is “a failure of basic historical literacy.” The chapter is bracing in its directness, sharper than most of the volume on the structural-philosophical specifics of where Žižek’s frame gives way, and genuinely important for the argument I am making here.

Nance’s positive resolution and mine differ profoundly in their content. He resolves the structural critique of Žižek not toward integral pluralism but toward a radical Inhumanism — what he calls “the capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that transcends our biological and cultural programming,” explicitly against both “the Human of the Renaissance” and “the Human of the Gospels” as “weights around our necks as we try to navigate the twenty-first century.” His positive program goes further: total negation of “Substantial Identity,” abandonment of inherited cultural-religious heritage as just another set of “brands of slavery,” and a cosmic-materialist orientation toward “going forth to multiply among the stars.” Nance reads Christian Atheism alongside Singularitarianism, RSAI cults, the Simulation Hypothesis, and UFO Disclosure as all flights from the Death of God — all attempts to “rebuild a Big Other in the vacuum left by the Enlightenment.” The position I am defending is the integral-humanist horizon: a horizon that holds the substantive divine and revealed reality of the Catholic contemplative tradition alongside the divine and revealed contents of Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious traditions, each on its own terms — divine revelation of all stripes and flavors included — and alongside an Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason, freedom, and emancipation as real contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment. Nance’s Inhumanism, taken on its own terms, would refuse the integral horizon too — as one more attempt to rebuild a Big Other out of inherited traditions. What Nance and I share is not the resolution but the diagnosis: where Žižek’s frame fails.

Nance’s central critical move is to read Žižek’s Christian Atheism as a fetish — a melancholic preservation of Christian particularism in the very gesture that claims to overcome it. Žižek, Nance argues, “creates a proprietary gateway to the universal,” requiring the seeker to “first don the mask of the Christian tradition” This, Nance says, is not universalism. It is “a melancholic preservation of the European symbolic order... the theoretical equivalent of keeping your ex’s sweater just to keep smelling their perfume, a refusal to move on.” The diagnosis is sharp because it operates structurally and functionally. Žižek’s commitment to Christianity as a unique historical and philosophical achievement of the universal — Christianity elevated to a universality that every other religious tradition on his frame fails to reach — re-installs the very particularist hierarchy his framework claims to dissolve. The Universal, on Žižek’s frame, is reached only by Christianity; therefore the framework cannot meet other religious traditions as full interlocutors who might be addressing the same depth-structures from their own traditions and cultures.

The diagnostic test-case Nance presses is Buddhism. Žižek, across multiple works, dismisses Western Buddhism — and by extension the Buddhist tradition more broadly — as the ideal ideology for global capitalism: a “cool” void of meditative inwardness that allows late-capitalist subjects to maintain composure while participating in a destructive economic system. The “hot” trauma of the Cross, Žižek argues, is what is required to shatter the Symbolic Order; Buddhism’s psychological-meditative space offers only escape. Nance’s response is to name what the dismissal misses. “Siddhartha Gautama,” Nance writes, “was deconstructing the self, staring into the Void (Sunyata), and realizing that there is no Big Other (Samsara) long before the Council of Nicaea ever sat down to argue about whether or not to canonize the Trinity.” The Buddhist tradition’s millennia-long testing of soteriological claims, its philosophical articulation of depth-structures the Christian Atheist project is attempting to address, its actual contemplative and philosophical resources — none of this enters Žižek’s framework as actual theological content. From Nance’s side this is “Žižek’s failure of nerve” — the framework’s inability to engage the religious traditions on their own terms and other pathways rather than just Christianity.

This is exactly the pluralism failure Section II named from the integral-humanist side. Nance’s positive resolution moves in a different direction from the integral-humanist position I am articulating — toward an Inhuman universal in which the Universal is reached through the refusal of all inherited cultural attachments, both religious or humanist. Nance writes that “the Inhuman — the capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that transcends our biological and cultural programming — is the only thing that can save us”; that contemporary culture-war identity politics is the logic of Capital itself (”Capitalism abhors a Universal... It thrives on fractal segmentation. It loves Identity because Identity is a product”); and that the “Human of the Renaissance” and the “Human of the Gospels” alike are weights around our necks as we try to navigate the twenty-first century. His Buddhism reference, it is worth being precise about, is not pluralism-friendly either: Buddhism enters Nance’s argument not as a religious tradition deserving engagement on its own terms but as historical evidence that “Siddhartha Gautama was deconstructing the self, staring into the Void (Sunyata), and realizing that there is no Big Other (Samsara) long before the Council of Nicaea ever sat down to argue about whether or not to canonize the Trinity” — Buddhism instrumentalized as Inhumanist precursor against Žižek’s claim that Christianity uniquely achieves universality. The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating preserves an Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason and freedom as real contribution within itself.

Nance’s positive position — the embrace of an Inhuman capacity for reason, negation, and freedom that explicitly transcends both biological and cultural-religious heritage as what the death of God leaves available — is more radical than what my integral horizon can include without distortion. The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating preserves the Enlightenment-humanist commitment to reason and freedom as a genuine contribution from the post-Enlightenment moment; it does not preserve Nance’s full Inhumanist position, which would refuse the integral framework as one more attempt to rebuild a Big Other out of inherited cultural-religious material. What it does preserve from Nance’s chapter — and what I am genuinely grateful for in his contribution — is the diagnostic precision. Nance registers, from his radical-materialist Inhumanist side, exactly the structural failure of Žižek’s frame the integral-humanist diagnosis also registers: the elevation of Christianity to universality that forecloses genuine engagement with religious traditions on their own terms. Same diagnosis; profoundly different positive resolutions; partial convergence on the route into the failure of Žižek’s frame, with deep divergence on the route out. IACT itself — open as it is to atheist and humanist users for whom no contemplative-religious path is operative — is the integral political praxis that an Enlightenment-humanist position concerned with reason, freedom, and emancipation could operationalize without compromising those commitments. Whether Nance’s full Inhumanist position could operationalize IACT or would refuse it as one more inherited framework is an honest question; the integral framework leaves room for the answer to be Nance’s to give.

The Psychoanalytic Mirror: Edie Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s A Dangerous Curiosity: A Christian Atheist Response to Overwhelm operates from inside a long history of psychoanalytic practice. She is a practicing psychoanalyst whose own intellectual development was shaped by escape from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing, by long psychoanalytic training, and by a sustained reading of Žižek and Nietzsche. Her chapter is the most autobiographically grounded in the volume, and the most psychologically perceptive. She traces the dynamics of overwhelm as a psychic place-event that produces three characteristic responses — defensive numbing, narcissistic over-identification with God, and mastery-through-optimization — and she develops an account of tarrying with overwhelm as the ethical and clinical alternative.

What makes Hitchcock’s chapter genuinely important is her direct critique of Žižek’s pneumatology. She writes that Žižek concludes his argument in Christian Atheism with an overly clean faith in what he terms the Holy Spirit — a community of believers in solidarity who achieve co-responsibility in caring for one another in the absence of God. She is unflinching: this solution, she says, rings of simple wish-fulfilment. She is left dissatisfied with its facile presumption of universal ethical commitment when, as Nietzsche argues, so much aggression is disavowed, then either directed inward in resentful melancholia or split off and projected outward onto the Other who must be punished with exile. Žižek’s idea of vulnerability, she observes, rests solely on the Lacanian notions of constitutive lack and the fantasies of the big Other. What it leaves out is the vulnerability of being an embodied subject, who, when weakened, may react viciously in destructive self-protection. The body falls out of Žižek’s framework, and with it the actual psychic substance that the Holy Spirit, in any tradition that has taken the Holy Spirit seriously, has had to address.

Hitchcock identifies a particularly modern failure mode in what she names the culture of mastery-through-optimization — the contemporary male wellness landscape exemplified by Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Tim Ferriss. She reads this culture as a sophisticated Christian-Atheist defense mechanism that disavows the body’s vulnerability through an endless accumulation of “protocols” and “habit stacks”. The optimizer frantically polishes the mirror of biometric data — tracking sleep cycles, measuring cortisol, quantifying supplement intake — yet remains utterly trapped within what the mirror reflects: an ego desperately trying to escape its own fragility and death.

This flight from vulnerability via optimization is, at its root, a refusal of what we must term integral facticity. Facticity is the heavy, unyielding, and unalterable baggage of the relative-embodied subject: our specific genetic wiring, our personal histories of childhood trauma, and the inescapable somatic limitations of a physical form that breaks, ages, and dies. While optimization culture seeks to bypass these limits through technological and behavioral mastery, an integral approach uses present-moment awareness to anchor the subject directly within them. One does not practice psychological defusion to float away from their facticity; one defuses precisely so they can look at the raw, messy, and unvarnished truth of their conditioned somatics without blinking, and without fleeing into the defensive numbing or hyper-optimization Hitchcock diagnoses.

From this vantage point, Hitchcock’s clinical prescription of “tarrying with overwhelm” emerges as the lived manifestation of enactive fallibilism. When the raw psychic intensities of overwhelm strike, the ego’s immediate structural reflex is to generate a masterful narrative or a detached spiritual script to restore control. Enactive fallibilism acts as the sudden, sobering interruption of this defensive loop. It is the visceral acknowledgment that the mind’s attempt to map its way out of distress is inherently partial, biased, and structurally defensive. When we tarry with overwhelm through an enactively fallible lens, we strip away the illusion of the “Master Mind-Controller”. We accept that our current interpretation of our suffering — and even our frantic attempts to mindfully observe it — is fundamentally limited. It forces a radical somatic humility, preventing mindfulness from mutating into a highly sophisticated, intellectual armor.

Hitchcock finds the sacred — and she preserves the sacred as a live category — inside the strict ritual of psychoanalytic practice: regular fixed sessions held multiple times per week, the rules of neutrality and abstinence and free association that suspend ordinary social relations, and the asymmetry of analyst and analysand. Here, the body acts as a transformer of unmetabolizable intensity through the disciplined trial of embodied speech. Her closing self-description is precise about what her chapter does and does not affirm: “I have,” she writes, “mostly unconsciously reimagined Christian values, transforming them to forms that can tolerate the lack of not-knowing, the terror of the new and different, and the humility of valuing above all else the subject’s singularity”. Her faith, she writes in her chapter’s last lines, is “not faith in a God who will save me from present-discomfort; it is in presence, following, listening, and speaking with as much honesty as I can muster”.

When read through an integral lens, this psychoanalytic ethics can be directly operationalized by the IACT (Integral Awareness and Commitment Therapy) framework. IACT bridges the gap between deep psychoanalytic excavation and behavioral agility by mapping Hitchcock’s relative-embodied subject onto the practical architecture of the ACT hexaflex. The functional loop of this praxis operates as a real-time defense against the ego’s self-deceptive “stinking thinking”: it begins when somatic overwhelm hits the subject, prompting the ego to immediately spin an “advanced observer” fantasy to escape the threat; IACT interrupts this loop as enactive fallibilism unmasks the defensive lie, allowing the ACT present-moment anchor to drop the subject back into the heavy, unvarnished reality of the embodied self and integral facticity.

Through the IACT scaffold, the components of self-as-context and present-moment awareness are stripped of any New Age or hyper-optimized detachment. Instead, they become the precise operational tools required to execute Hitchcock’s “tarrying with overwhelm” on a second-by-second basis. When the mind catches itself playing a highly sophisticated, “Master-Controller” game to escape discomfort, enactive fallibilism exposes the ruse, and present-moment awareness drops the anchor back into the heavy, physical reality of the body. IACT thus democratizes these clinical insights, offering a systematic methodology for anchoring the subject in raw reality without requiring a decade-long residency on a psychoanalyst’s couch.

What the integral horizon finally adds to Hitchcock’s clinical precision is the capacity to hold both the relative-embodied subject and the absolute-unitive subject within a single architecture. The relative-embodied subject Hitchcock articulates is real, and constitutive: the body that lives, mediates, suffers, and dies. The integral position holds this fully. But it is also open to the absolute subject that contemplative and revelatory traditions have tested across millennia as a structurally nondual and unitive layer — what the integral architecture names as the I of Spirit, and what Christian apophatic mystics, Zen Buddhists, Sufis, and Hindu non-dualists have each tested in their own traditional forms.

Hitchcock invokes Cleo Kearns toward her chapter’s close on the question of apocalyptic deferral and the incapacity to tarry with the sacred. She refuses the simple solidarity-as-Holy-Spirit move that Žižek offers, and she insists that the body is the mediator without which the symbolic-real dialectic cannot be lived. Her reformulation of Christian values at the level of process rather than content is honest about what her chapter does and does not articulate. The integral-humanist horizon holds Hitchcock’s embodied-clinical contribution with profound gratitude, placing it alongside the tested, substantive depths of the world’s great contemplative-revelation traditions within a single pluralist framework that honors the singularity and nuance of praxis.

Pyrotheological Minimalism: John Feldmann

Where Hitchcock works from inside Christian Atheism via long psychoanalytic practice, Feldmann works from what he calls the Žižekian Trifecta — Roman Catholic aesthetic formation, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis — and articulates from this substrate a Pyrotheological minimalism that holds the productive Symbolic Order of the Roman tradition against the maximalist Pyrotheological drive toward the pure Real. He, too, refines Christian Atheism rather than refusing it, but from a substantially different angle than Hitchcock takes.

Feldmann describes himself, in his chapter’s opening pages, as an Andy Warhol Catholic — a Catholic who sometimes frequents the Mass but does not receive Communion and does not dare call himself a believer. His self-described ground, which he is careful to name, is what he calls the Žižekian Trifecta: “the three primary discourses which live inside my head” are “the Roman Catholic interpretation of Christianity, Marxism as communist politics and psychoanalysis of the Lacanian variety.” His architectural move within Pyrotheology is the distinction between maximalist and minimalist approaches. The maximalist Pyrotheologian treats the Real of subjective destitution as another sola — to be radically pursued, to be substituted for traditional ecclesial practice, to be evangelized as the truth of Christianity in a way that displaces the Church’s sacramental life. The minimalist, by contrast, treats Pyrotheology as a technique that operates alongside and within the Church’s existing liturgical and sacramental practice, as an internal critic that deconstructs the logics of certainty and satisfaction from within rather than substituting for the structure that holds them. Real plus Symbolic, in Feldmann’s formulation, against the maximalist temptation to Real minus Symbolic. He quotes Yves Congar — that “the whole of Christianity is contained in a sign of the cross; no theory of the Redemption expresses half as much as a simple crucifix hung on a wall” — and the quotation matters to him. The materiality of the Roman tradition — the incense, the rosary, the votive candles after Mass, the beads of the rosary in one’s hands — is, in his phrasing, “the very substance of faith for the Roman subject,” not its accidental ornament. Pyrotheology at its best, in this minimalist register, is a technique for tarrying with the abyss of the Cross within this sacramental Symbolic Order, not for its abolition.

Feldmann’s chapter contains, I think, the most theologically sophisticated diagnosis of what has gone wrong with Pyrotheology. He reads the maximalist position as the secular afterlife of Protestant subjectivity — the same sola logic that drove the Protestant Reformation, now operating as the iconoclastic desecration of the Church as Symbolic Other in a register that has lost even the Protestant theological commitments that originally justified the iconoclasm. The maximalist Pyrotheologian, in this reading, is Protestant subjectivity without Protestantism: pursuing the purity of the Real with all the iconoclastic intensity of the Reformation tradition, but without the theological grounding that made the Reformation’s iconoclasm something other than mere subjective negation. Feldmann’s diagnosis here is sharper than I have seen made anywhere else.

What Feldmann’s minimalism preserves — and it is important to be precise here, because the chapter is easy to misread as moving toward full Roman Catholic sacramental theology when it does not — is the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order against a maximalist Pyrotheological drive toward the pure Real. Feldmann reads Congar through a Lacanian-psychoanalytic frame in which the Roman tradition’s materiality is “the very substance of faith for the Roman subject” as productive Symbolic Order, not as actual sacramental mediation of divine life. The Symbolic in his reading is precisely not what the full Catholic contemplative tradition holds it to be — the means of grace, sacramenta efficiunt quod significant, the actual conduit of divine reality. It is, in Feldmann’s framing, the productive fiction, the masquerade, the Wizard-of-Oz Signifier that continues to substitute for the Real even after the curtain has been pulled back. His Wizard of Oz closer makes this explicit: even after Toto reveals the Wizard as a man, the Wizard continues to function in his role, bestowing a diploma on the Scarecrow, a heart on the Tinman, a medal on the Lion. “God is not only God of the Real, but also the God of the Symbolic.” For Feldmann, both registers are productive — productive emptiness at one register, productive masquerade at the other — and the mirror of the Symbolic Order continues to function as mirror even after the curtain has been pulled back and the man revealed. Pyrotheology in the minimalist register, in this reading, is the discipline of holding the mirror — the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order in which the Roman subject sees herself reflected — against the maximalist temptation to shatter the mirror in pursuit of an unmirrored Real that, in Feldmann’s Lacanian-psychoanalytic frame, was never available as Real to begin with. He places the Church and the Communist Party in explicit structural parallel as productive Symbolic Orders, each requiring its quilting points to function.

Feldmann’s contribution is therefore real and serious within its own register, and I want to be honest about preserving it as he has articulated it rather than as a reading convenient to my own argument. He preserves the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order with seriousness and pastoral generosity against the maximalist temptation to abolish it. He is careful to mark the distinction between his Lacanian-psychoanalytic-Marxist framing and full Roman Catholic theological commitment. He does not call himself a believer; he does not receive Communion; he holds the Žižekian Trifecta as his actual ground.

The integral-humanist horizon I am articulating makes room for what Feldmann is preserving — the Roman tradition’s productive Symbolic Order held with the seriousness Feldmann’s chapter testifies to — and it also holds, alongside that preservation, the actual contemplative-revelation reception of divine reality through the body that the Carmelite tradition has tested across centuries: what John of the Cross articulated in The Dark Night of the Soul and The Spiritual Canticle, what Teresa of Ávila articulated in The Interior Castle. The integral horizon holds these together with the analogous contemplative-revelation traditions Buddhism (Zen, Tibetan), Judaism (Hasidic, Kabbalistic), Islam (Sufi), and Hinduism (Advaita, the Tantric traditions) have each tested in their own full forms — divine revelation of all stripes and flavors, each on its tradition’s own terms. The integral horizon does not require Feldmann to occupy full contemplative-revelation territory in order to preserve the Roman form he preserves, and it does not require the contemplative-revelation traditions to accommodate Feldmann’s Lacanian-Marxist framing in order to preserve their actual work towards divine revelation. Both are held — together with the analogous substrates and traditions across the religious and non-religious world — within a single integral-pluralist framework that is a democracy to come rather than a forced unification. IACT, as integral-developmental praxis architecture, is the operational scaffold that holds the territory open for subjects in the present moment — whether they hold the Roman aesthetic-Lacanian-Marxist substrate Feldmann does, or a lived contemplative-revelation substrate from any tradition, or no contemplative-religious path at all.

Beyond the Threshold

Ultimately, Nance, Hitchcock, and Feldmann emerge as the volume’s most diagnostically illuminating witnesses precisely because they crowd the very edge of the threshold. Each, from a distinct and unyielding angle, maps a structural rupture that Žižek’s framework is fundamentally unable to heal: Nance exposes the stubborn, provincial particularism of a Christian-Atheist engine pretending to be a universal machine; Hitchcock unmasks the bloodless, phantom solidarity of its pneumatology, demanding a return to the vulnerable, heavy reality of the flesh; and Feldmann clutches the material architecture of the Roman Symbolic Order, refusing the maximalist urge to dissolve historical form into an iconoclastic vacuum. They do not refuse Christian Atheism; they refine it from within, holding its broken pieces up to the light.

Yet, as they stand at the absolute boundary of this discourse—a boundary shared by Cleo Kearns’s rare, deliberate reach toward the scriptural reality of a desiring God—a collective paralysis sets in. They track the fissure with immense precision, but they remain perched at its lip. None of them makes the radical, dangerous pivot toward a genuinely integral horizon. None is willing to hold the ancient, tested truth-claims of the religious-contemplative traditions on their own sovereign terms alongside the secular inheritances of the Enlightenment within a post-secular public square. They map the architecture of the trap, but they decline the leap. They leave the territory cleared, but empty—refusing to throw themselves into the void and prefer linguistic riddles or political metaphors, rather than embracing the disruptive event of grace and divine revelation.

VII. From the Vulture to the Bird on the Wire

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Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

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Like a worm on a hook
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee

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If I, if I have been unkind
I hope that you can just let it go by
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you

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Oh, like a baby, stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me

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But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee

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I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

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Oh, like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

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— Leonard Cohen, Bird on the Wire, from Songs from a Room (Columbia, 1969)

To understand why a theological interrogation of Christian Atheism must turn toward political zoology, one must look to the internal architecture of the Rosy Cross anthology itself. Having traced the theoretical limits of the volume—and having watched its threshold voices stall at the lip of a conceptual abyss—the book takes a sudden, metaphorical turn. It shifts from abstract doctrine to a visceral examination of the intellectual’s structural posture in a stalled world. This is where Benjamin Studebaker’s chapter, On Vultures, enters the frame, taking up the lineage of bird metaphors in political theory to diagnose contemporary cultural stagnation. Hegel’s owl flies at dusk; Marx’s rooster crows at dawn; both presuppose a history in motion—a sun traveling toward a predictable destination that the philosopher can interpret or announce. But for the stalled time of late modernity, an era in which historical progress seems to have ground to a halt, Studebaker introduces the vulture: a creature that tracks systemic malaise from a patient distance, declining vain political action while waiting for the modern state apparatus to slowly dehydrate. The intellectual’s task, on this account, is no longer to herald a new dawn, but to build more observation towers and prey on the weak and dying.

Read through the psychological and contemplative register this paper has been developing, Studebaker’s imagery exposes a deeper pathology. The vulture is the perfect proxy for the hyper-intellectualizing ego—the detached observer that secures its own safety by remaining cleanly above the field of decay, surveying the suffering and death of others without ever undergoing its own. This structural altitude functions as a defense mechanism; distance is preserved precisely so that the theorist is never truly touched by the historical realities he analyzes. In this view, there is no room for vulnerability, and therefore no open threshold through which an actual transformation or the gift of revelation could be received.

Against this temptation of intellectual detachment, Leonard Cohen introduces a radically different posture through his song Bird on the Wire. Composed on the island of Hydra as he watched wild birds settle on newly strung telephone lines, the image captures a subjectivity completely exposed to the elements. The position is explicitly fragile and precarious. The song confesses a history of wounding others, of stumbling attempts to be free, and of an unyielding vow to an unnamed beloved. It does not observe mortality from an invulnerable height; it sits entirely inside the mess of human exposure and devotion. Where Studebaker’s figure represents the intellect operating at a safe remove, Cohen’s imagery embodies the relative-embodied subject—the self that has surrendered protective distance for the vulnerable condition in which an event of grace can actually occur.

Cohen as Pinnacle and Master

Cohen is more than a poignant poet of modern displacement. He stands as the biographical embodiment of the integral pluralism and integral humanism this paper defends—not because he theorized the position, but because he lived it whole for more than five decades. His pluralism was not a theoretical stance reached by argument, but a lived reality.

He was born in 1934 into a prominent Westmount Jewish family of unusual rabbinic and communal weight, a Kohen of the ancient priestly line whose youth was steeped in Talmudic text and Hebrew grammar studied directly with his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline. This Jewish observance was constitutive, and it lasted; it was never something Zen came to replace. For onto that foundation, Cohen layered more than twenty years of rigorous Rinzai practice under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, including a five-year residency at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center and his 1996 ordination dharma name Jikan, or “Ordinary Silence”.

Crucially, this monastic ordination was not an act of religious conversion. Cohen never abandoned Judaism, nor did he ever convert to Buddhism, Christianity, or any other faith. He remained an unwavering, observant Jew until his death, famously stating from the monastery itself that he was not looking for a new religion because he was perfectly satisfied with his old one. For Cohen, Zen was a contemplative practice of silence and mental mechanics undertaken strictly within his Jewish life, not a replacement for it. The Torah did not foreclose the zazen; the zazen did not displace the Torah. Likewise, while he carried a third engagement—a sustained, serious dialogue with Christian theology, weaving Christological, scriptural, and sacramental content through Suzanne, Story of Isaac, and Hallelujah—this dialogue was held with the gravity of an artist exploring deep, shared theological content, never as a personal apostasy or conversion.

This is what the integral position looks like when a person holds it in the flesh rather than in a meta-theory: Judaism as the absolute religion of a whole life, Zen contemplative discipline practiced from within that Jewish identity, and Christian theological content carried across the pluralist public sphere in song. It reaches that public as scholarship cannot. What Cohen achieves is what Hans Urs von Balthasar named as the most catastrophically neglected dimension of modern theology: beauty, the third transcendental, the radiance of the form itself. Through the Gestalt of the song—the form whose great radiance from within draws perception before any discursive argument is possible—Cohen carried the substantive depths of the contemplative tradition to millions of listeners who never sat in a pew or opened a Talmudic commentary. He did not merely explain those depths; he made them alive.

The Post-Metaphysical Challenge Remains

And yet, an unsparing honesty requires the admission that every figure in this landscape ultimately falls short of the post-metaphysical challenge, each within the strict limit of the form its contribution took. Slavoj Žižek falls short by smuggling Christian particularism back into his materialism, positioning the Cross as the one proprietary historical gateway that every other tradition merely approaches. The postmodern theology of Rollins, Taylor, and Caputo hovers perpetually at the threshold of deconstructive negation, never crossing over into substantive theological content. McGrath recovers the contemplative-revelation tradition with rare and necessary rigor, but reaches only the insular reader already formed in its complex historical grammar. And Cohen, by the very form his gift took, embodied the synthesis without articulating it conceptually; he carried beauty across the world, but did not render its truth and its goodness as a systematic argument.

The shortfall is most precisely named through Balthasar’s own architecture. His major trilogy makes the structure explicit: The Glory of the Lord explores beauty, Theo-Drama examines the goodness of divine and human freedom, and Theo-Logic articulates the truth of being and revelation. These three constellations form the unified horizon through which substantive theological content reaches public life. When beauty is separated from her sisters, Balthasar warned, she departs, taking them with her “in an act of mysterious vengeance”. Cohen carries beauty in song. What the present moment asks for is the explicit articulation of truth and goodness that the form of song could not supply on its own: the philosophical-conceptual case, the integral-humanist and integral-pluralist horizon held as an intellectual argument, and the rigorous alignment of integral facticity and enactive fallibilism that our post-metaphysical era now demands and requires.

It is here that this paper has offered its own framework—IACT, grounded in enactive fallibilism and integral facticity—as an attempt at systemic integration. And it is here, at that exact word, that the framework meets its gravest temptation. For there is a way of supplying truth and goodness to Cohen’s beauty that betrays the entire undertaking: turning the framework into an elite meta-theory that surveys the other positions from a safe distance, congratulating itself on its own wholeness. This simply resurrects the detached observer posture in academic form. It reduces a living, somatic practice to a static conceptual edifice, rebuilding an illusion of mastery in the exact place where vulnerability is demanded.

Coming Age of the Rose

Therefore, the work still ahead is not the construction of a finished system, but the keeping of a discipline that actively refuses to close itself off. If the framework is to articulate truth and goodness without mutating into the fortress that betrays them, it can do so only as Cohen held beauty: in the flesh, across a life, and entirely exposed. Enactive fallibilism and integral facticity are not doctrines to be possessed from a position of security; they are the active mechanics of a second-by-second return to our humanity. They constitute the somatic practice by which the relative-embodied subject is dropped, again and again, out of the optimized map of its own awareness and back into the heavy, unvarnished reality it keeps trying to rise above. The present moment operates as the anchor that ruthlessly interrupts this intellectual ascent. Each time the mind catches itself refining the map or admiring its own flexibility, the discipline requires an immediate return to the precarity of the lived moment.

For the framework itself is nothing but a fragile position, not an invulnerable vantage point. It is a precarious position within an evolving world, anchoring the subject inside the biological, cultural, and spiritual facticity that breaks, ages, and dies. This is what the coming age demands: not an abstract mastery of wholeness, but the willingness to stand in the light, and always be exposed to the fall.

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You came to me this morning
And you handled me like meat
You’d have to be a man to know
How good that feels, how sweet
My mirrored twin, my next of kin
I’d know you in my sleep
And who but you would take me in
A thousand kisses deep

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I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see I’m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep

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I know you had to lie to me
I know you had to cheat
To pose all hot and high
Behind the veils of sheer deceit
A perfect born aristocrat
So elegant and cheap
I’m old but I’m still into that
A thousand kisses deep

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I’m good at love, I’m good at hate
It’s in between I freeze
Been working out, but it’s too late
It’s been too late for years
But you look good, you really do
They love you on the street
If you were here I’d kneel for you
A thousand kisses deep

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The autumn moved across your skin
Got something in my eye
A light that doesn’t need to live
And doesn’t need to die
A riddle in the book of love
Obscure and obsolete
To witness tear and time and blood
A thousand kisses deep

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And I’m still working with the wine
Still dancing cheek to cheek
The band is playing Auld Lang Syne
But the heart will not retreat
I ran with Dez, I sang with Ray
I never had their sweep
But once or twice they let me play
A thousand kisses deep

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I loved you when you opened
Like a lily to the heat
You see, I’m just another snowman
Standing in the rain and sleet
Who loved you with his frozen love
His second hand physique
With all he is and all he was
A thousand kisses deep

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But you don’t need to hear me now
And every word I speak
It counts against me anyhow
A thousand kisses deep

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— Leonard Cohen, A Thousand Kisses Deep (recitation arrangement, Live in London, 2009; cf. original on Ten New Songs, 2001)

Integral [+] Facticity

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Integral [+] Facticity

On the Coming Age of the Rose, Facticity of the Cross, & Divine Revelation

For my Lady Down by the Harbour

Abstract

I. Introduction

The Death of God in Postmodern Theology

Where This Essay Sits

Genealogy and the Argument Ahead

II. The Wider Landscape and the Volume’s Postmodern Register

The Kierkegaardian Diagnostic: Christianity Reduced to the Ethical

The Pluralism Limit and Other Religious Traditions

III. The Catholic Wing and the Canadian Lineage

IV. The Facticity of the Cross, Divine Revelation, & the Future of Christianity

Divine Revelation and the Paschal Mystery

McGrath’s Both/And

V. Integral Humanism, Integral Pluralism, & Democracy to Come

Maritain’s Integral Humanism

Dallmayr’s Integral Pluralism

The Integral Horizon and the Living Traditions

Democracy to Come & Integral Political Praxis

VI. Voices at the Threshold: Nance, Hitchcock, and Feldmann

The Pluralism Threshold: Bryce Nance

The Psychoanalytic Mirror: Edie Hitchcock

Pyrotheological Minimalism: John Feldmann

Beyond the Threshold

VII. From the Vulture to the Bird on the Wire

Cohen as Pinnacle and Master

The Post-Metaphysical Challenge Remains

Coming Age of the Rose

Further Reading from Integral Facticity

Suggested Reading

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