John’s theories carry disturbing implications in light of the docetic logic, which they exemplify in a nascent but striking degree. For the universalization and distinction of the church and the kingdom, institutions designed to train man in his finitude, implies their foundation in the negative infinity of appeals to the people. Their growth toward the infinite in principle matures as they realize their legitimacy in the moment when law has not yet become concrete, in the will of a people unconditioned by an understanding of their lives as embedded in that law. John did not explicitly conceive of the people as so unconditioned, but in the constitutional principles that he helped set in motion the law in its divine and natural expressions eventually became detached from and subordinated to the community rather than the community being embedded in it. By this inversion the law relinquishes its validity inasmuch as it falls beneath a principle of change. Isolated and extracted in a way that would develop out of John’s constitutionalism, the people are that uninterrupted motion that is the abolishment of law and the fulfillment of its universalization. To base both temporal and spiritual institutions in the people is thus to base natural and divine law in the scattering. Such a direction prepares the way for Docetism’s annulment of law as the prerogative of man and his social world.
That world appeared, in the fourteenth century, to have relinquished the last vestiges of beneficent order. When the popes returned to Rome from Avignon, the Western Schism erupted as a new punishment. In the schism the papacy descended into jaw-dropping legal and practical confusion, with a multiplicity of popes advocating for the throne. That each made his case with cogent arguments presented a unique threat to papal legitimacy, undermining the viability of the office until the schism’s resolution in the fifteenth century. The same age saw Europe’s entrenchment in the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1475), a conflict in which the papacy lacked the moral authority to criticize participating nations. Defined in the fourteenth century by papal alienation from Rome and the onset of war, not to mention the horrors of the Black Death (1348–1350), Western Christendom had fallen into such disrepair that rebirth might not have seemed possible.
During this age theological transformations emerged that mysteriously resonated with the foregoing legal changes in the Church. When the institution developed a new and ever-expanding law in canons distinct from theology and liturgy, it unintentionally introduced a new ontology and a new nature into the Church in contrast to the old. In earlier periods the mystery of the sacraments limited the reach of the law, but the legal apparatus knew no such limits, affirming in their place a systematic striving for perfection. The rest of the Church’s nature in the habit of grace thus came under threat from the infinite, and how long would it take before a new understanding of God took hold that mirrored the ontological shifts in Christ’s institutional body? If the Church could adopt a nature based on an infinitized law, could men not conceptualize God in the same manner? Could they not imagine him as an infinite law unbound by rest and reason, by the habit and pattern of nature? The nominalist God envisioned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries does just this. The essence of this God as absolute power extends without boundary over all things, asserting itself beyond reason as well as good and evil. If something is good, it is so because God decrees it and not because of the thing’s intrinsic rationality. A thing is evil likewise because God decrees it, not because of the corruption of a nature that is good as rational. The meaning of the thing moreover lies not in its nature but in the use to which God puts it, so that the form of the nature becomes immaterial to its content as an object of use. God himself arguably has no limiting nature or reason, but is an infinite will.
If men conceived of God as an infinite law, they could equally well portray themselves in his image. The Renaissance thus introduced the third rise in Docetism’s ongoing dialectic, a period of apparent resurrection unto life, of pride in man’s capacities after the preceding time of suffering. A few men of genius towered at the Renaissance’s cultural peak, determining the tastes and sensibilities of countless others across Europe. The universal man, the man of the Renaissance, mastering as many activities as he could, dedicating himself to various and unbounded pursuits, manifested the heights latent within the human spirit. Painter, engineer, and anatomist Leonardo da Vinci exemplified the ideal. He enjoyed the life of unlimited possibilities praised by Pico della Mirandola, who stressed the choice of man in reaching his potential while lauding him as a chameleon who could change for the better. So does the scattering deceive, so does it lead its captives into the hope of betterment through paths that conceal decline. What appears as his freedom and his exaltation unto universality belies the ontology of formlessness. The man of possibility is man scattered, a man celebrated in the Renaissance by those who lacked a consciousness of his deeper meaning. That new depth’s bottom, however, would not be touched until the Reformation, where man’s religious orientation suffered perhaps its profoundest blow. It was not the Renaissance but the Reformation that catapulted man into formlessness, that launched the scattering into domination of man and his world. There, and there alone, came the revelation of the Christ-Idol.
II
Docetism’s Grand Dialectic undermined the papacy as a channel of divine law in a number of ways. The collapse under Boniface VIII diminished the popes into puppets of French kings in the same era that John of Paris defined papal legitimacy in terms of the pope’s administrative responsibility to Catholic believers, suggesting a novel theory of ecclesiastical constitutionalism. While the church relinquished spiritual authority under the supervision of a particular nation and as its partisan, on the level of theory the grounding of the pope’s legal authority in substantive appeals to the people based his right in the collective as an entity subtly distinguished from the law and granted the power to judge it. These two challenges to a Catholic law grounded in the supreme rule of God joined hands in the early fourteenth century with the silent and more stunning transformation in which the practice of confession grew to require the enumeration of absolutely all of one’s sins in order for one to receive assurance of pardon. If in the prior two developments Docetism lay coiled and ready to strike, in the latter it delivered the venom. For the infinite law imposed upon the conscience in confession, the inward parallel to the multiplication of the church’s legal canons, served only to undermine that law’s viability. From the Christian’s imprisonment in this confessional cocoon would be born the Christ-Idol as the god of man liberated and universalized, indifferent toward and without the law. Thus Docetism unveiled the dagger supposed to bear the name and power of Christ, a weapon that executed its first strike in the Reformation.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Western man grew increasingly anxious over the state of his soul, fomenting that anxiety through a progressively burdensome requirement in confession. Theologians and church officials deemed it necessary that man count what lies beyond counting, that he present each and every sin to God so that the Savior might wipe it away, cleansing the conscience and relieving guilt. The Christian pursuing salvation embarked upon the most stringent inner examination, holding up the smallest sin as much as the greatest in order to expose and eliminate it in the grace of God. This trajectory flowered as the infinitizing of the law in the conscience and the consequent demolition of natural righteousness, and at its apex it dominated the minds of two men. Towering above the preceding age as its paradigmatic product is Martin Luther, the melancholy monk who obliterated the bonds of man’s spiritual being. Luther brought the docetic dialectic to a new pitch, redefining the spiritual freedom of man as the necessary maturation of inner tyranny under the law. At his side stands John Calvin, the mastermind who applied the dialectic of the liberated conscience to man as such, energizing powers that have alienated him from his neighbor, his society, his natural environment, and from the law of his being qua man.
As a young monk, Luther took up the law with unusual vigor, trusting in it as a way of righteousness. His years of confidence