Revelations from the Underground: Trinitarian Metaphysics and the Underground Church

Abstract

The ancient concept of the underground is mainly associated with the outdated triadic cosmology. In modernity, some authors such as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche have dialectically referred to the underground as an alternative to the principle of reason or ground. Others—such as Hegel or Heidegger—have more radically linked this dialectic to the abyssal unground, recalling Boehme and Hölderlin. However, all these modern dialectical constellations of ground, underground, or unground have failed to provide a philosophical vision that would overcome the aporetic relationship between metaphysical grounding and phenomenal appearance. They have left aside the reality of the Marian underground, overshadowed by the Spirit and Cross and marked by Christ’s descent into the underground, by which the powers of the ancient underground were apocalyptically drawn into the liturgical celebration of a persecuted Church. In this article, I will link Jan Patočka’s phenomenology of the underground experience and Zdeněk Neubauer’s Marian metaphysics to prove that, in the apocalyptic horizon of suffering and persecution, the Sophianic and Marian revelations spell out the created form of Trinitarian being, that becomes a miraculous rescue of all relations and phenomena as the ground shining from within the underground, and the underground within the ground.

1. Introduction

It may appear that one who descends into the political, social, or metaphysical underground is destined to be deprived of all relations. A persecuted dissident is excluded from the network of political participation. A person who has lost his job, home, and health, also loses his social relations. And a man who dies, seemingly even a child, remains, despite all possible efforts at effective attention, communication, and treatment, nothing more than an isolated and lonely, bare underground existence. The knowledge of all grounds and causes, and the knowledge of all words, do not diminish the great silence of the underground, in which no utterance seems to have any substantial meaning anymore. “Our inability to be with our children in their deaths, an inability that results in our children dying terribly alone, is but the result of our inability to deal with our own deaths” (Hauerwas 2004, p. 146). Do these nihilistic “revelations from the underground” mean that all relations, signs, and phenomena around us are mere functional illusions governed by a superficial eidetic structure with no metaphysical grounding in being? That in the face of destruction and death they will not stand, but reveal their intrinsic void and nothingness? Or dare we hope that much more will eventually be revealed, that much more has in fact already been revealed, which allows us to insist that there is, after all, a common reality of shared memory, thinking, and willing between us that is grounded in being as an image of a supernatural primordial ground?

This is not merely an ethical question seeking a common Welt-Ethos through the transcendental schemata of practical reason (Küng 1998, p. 246), nor is it a question after the transcendental grounding of intersubjectivity as it unfolds in the dialogical situation of dialectical reason (Hösle 2020, pp. 462–65). This question is metaphysical: it concerns the metaphysical difference of the phenomenon and its ground in terms of the shared reality of relations, as discovered through the common everyday life of human communities that care, cultivate, and offer the very ground of all that they are. This question is also theological as it is posed in a quite unique way in the context of the Trinitarian grounding of Christian metaphysics, for it is in the analogical setting of the Church’s transmission of the revealed supernatural life of the Trinity that a non-relativistic conception of essential relations was discovered. And it arises most urgently in the underground situation of marginalization and persecution, when the specifically ecclesial setting of the Trinitarian grounding of Christian metaphysics has apparently lost all possible theoretical and practical justification—until it seems that all real relations, overflowing with a mysterious reality irreducible to the univocal structure of being and the totalitarian structure of power, are simply nothing.

From the first century of the Christian era to the present, the powers of this world have sought to exploit the apparent metaphysical weakness of relations and annihilate the common relational being of the persecuted communities. In such situations, the marginalized Church loses the political and theoretical ground under its feet—it goes underground. However, what does it actually mean to descend into the underground? What is, if it is anything at all, that strange revelatory nature of the underground as a metaphysical and theological modality that governs the meaning of the very grounding invoked in every ground, especially when the ground is phenomenally unreachable or even lost? In the first part of this article, I will briefly discuss two modern strategies for dealing with the problematization of the metaphysical grounding; first, the dialectical conception of the underground in the works of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, and second the radical invocation of the abyss of the Boehmean unground in the writings of Hegel and Heidegger. I will argue genealogically that these modern dialectical accounts of the underground or unground overlook, or even displace, the Sophianic and Marian revelations of the mysterious ground shining from within the underground, as theoretically grasped within the tradition of Christian metaphysics and experienced in various forms of natural and supernatural interconnectedness, human solidarity, friendship, or unexpected hospitality in the marginalized and persecuted communities, or even between them. In the second part of this article, I will show how Jan Patočka’s phenomenology of the modern underground experience (the “solidarity of the shaken”), when reconsidered in the light of Zdeněk Neubauer’s Marian metaphysics, can nevertheless point towards these forgotten Sophianic and Marian “revelations from the underground” as the source of a new Trinitarian metaphysics. Through such Trinitarian metaphysics, the real relations that the builders of the structures have rejected can become a cornerstone again (Mark 12:11), for relations may ultimately be the same as revelation when its apocalyptic horizon will be finally opened by the gratuitous emergence of the “mystery kept secret for long ages” (Rom 16:25), by the unexpected emergence of the ground from within the underground, and the underground within the ground.

2. On the Ground, Unground, and Underground

When we speak in philosophy, theology, intellectual history, or religious studies of the chthonic underworld, netherworld, or underground, we usually think of one of the main realms and domains involved in the traditional triadic mythical worldview and hierarchical social order. “We can still recognize, in various formulas, in divine groupings, in the general division of the mythology, that great triple division of cosmic and social functions: magical sovereignty (and heavenly administration of the universe), warrior power (and administration of the lower atmosphere), peaceful fecundity (and administration of the earth, the underworld and the sea)” (Dumézil 1988, p. 121). This supposedly outdated ancient triadic cosmology and social ontology situated the underworld or underground in a blurred hierarchical contrast to everything higher (reason, power). It could be argued that this contrast was never quite fully exacerbated: the underground remained the domain of a certain weakened and enigmatic kind of existence, not sheer and abyssal nothingness, as such. According to Heraclitus’s Fragment B 98, “souls smell in Hades” (αἱ ψυχαὶ ὀσμῶνται καθ’ ῞Aιδην). In a less traditional translation of this fragment, the souls become actively smelling or perceiving, so even in death they are still in some rudimentary and lowered sense alive (Mills 2014, pp. 5–6). This specific ontological position in the hierarchical order of the world made it possible to connect the underground with topological and metaphysical ideas about the afterlife and to set it in katabatic motion within narrations of the soul’s journey towards its final destiny. These narratives preserved the memory of meaning in the face of dying and destruction. They were even, by their openness and porosity in relation to the ontological nature of the underground, available for revision, counternarrative, and countermovement: the anabatic narratives of return. The contrast between being and non-being was, therefore, not sharp and irreconcilable here. The proper dialectical potential of the underground as an absolute contrasting moment in relation to the ground of being could only fully manifest itself when these mythopoetic narratives and counternarratives, including the radical and ultimate descensus Christi ad inferos, became historically problematic and lost their grounding in the triadically ordered reality: in the modern separation and dualism of the supernatural and the natural, ontological and ontic, spirit and body, faith and reason, future and past (Dupré 1993, p. 178). Only when the world—kosmos—has been lost (Brague 2006, pp. 241–44), and the symbolic meaning of the old hierarchical triadic order is forgotten, including, as John Milbank argued in his “Sacred Triads” essay, its Trinitarian transformation and temporalization in the thought of the Church Fathers such as Augustine (Milbank 1997, pp. 465–68), can a modern underground man appear.

Now, who is this modern underground man? Whereas Augustine recast the premodern pagan realm of underground as the past, which, because of its corruption by sin, became the setting for the Son’s redemptive descent and thus the trace of the Father’s productive love in time (Milbank 1997, p. 465), the modern anti-Trinitarian conception of subjectivity has only allowed for an underground existence that is radically deprived of its past, its traditions, its natural and supernatural community, its childhood, and real relations. “Since we began life as infants, (…), there are many preconceived opinions that keep us from knowledge of the truth. It seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these opinions is to make the effort, once in the course of our life, to doubt everything which we find to contain even the smallest suspicion of uncertainty” (Descartes 1984, p. 193). The attempt to find a completely certain new rational ground a priori presupposes a dialectical negation of the confused raw given, which perhaps allows the confused givenness to be reformed and reconstructed again from the “unshakable ground” (fundamentum inconcussum) as something that is eventually freed from “the smallest suspicion of uncertainty” and rationally possible, but completely obscures its analogous character of the gift given in and through real relations involving non-reducible complexity of personal and ontic constellations. By upholding the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason, modern metaphysics or ontology declares that, “nothing takes place without sufficient reason, that is, that nothing happens without it being possible for one who has enough knowledge of things to give a reason which is sufficient to determine why it is thus and not otherwise” (Leibniz 2014, p. 274). As if the phenomenal givenness of being no longer contained within itself a mysterious and gratuitous reason or ground for its being, modern ontology assumes that there is only an extrinsic relation between phenomena or givens and their reason or ground. There is a gulf between the appearances and the things themselves, manageable only by the mastery of reason and its transcendental structure. This external eidetic relational structure, hypostatized as an absolute spirit or subject “who has enough knowledge of things to give a reason which is sufficient to determine why it is thus and not otherwise” (Leibniz 2014, p. 274), supersedes and replaces older forms of relational and intimate mediation between the phenomenon and its metaphysical ground, such as the shared and embodied spiritual tradition of substantial forms, hierarchical participation, metaphysical childhood, and real relations. In this sense, not only the shadowy obsolescence of everything premodern, but especially a new obsolescence of everything real is precisely the ever-deepening underground of progressive modernity (Schindler 2017, p. 283).

As a result of this situation, some modern authors such as Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Nietzsche (1844–1900) have dialectically referred to the underground as an alternative to the modern principle of reason or ground. In the first part of his “Notes from the Underground” (1864), Dostoevsky invented an underground man who, by descending into the social underground, resists the modern rational “crystal palace” (Dostoyevsky 1961, p. 109), the principle of reason, but is not able to—as Augustine did in Milbank’s interpretation—travel via the labyrinth of underground to the ground within the underground, namely into the Sophianic depth of the Triune God’s created image, by gathering himself again through memory and repentance. Whereas Dostoevsky left this Augustinian redemptory and revelatory underground path open by preserving in even the deprived existence of the underground man a consciousness, which is “of a much higher order” than “twice two makes four” (Dostoyevsky 1961, p. 118), Nietzsche, in his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (1883–1892), had his underground or ugly man, who inhabits the realm or valley of death, dialectically kill God as a metaphysical ground (Nietzsche 2006, pp. 213–16). Then, in a new dialectical move, directed him into Zarathustra’s cave as to a renewed nihilistic underground beyond any ground and any metaphysical grounding. In his essay on “Underground Metaphysics”, René Girard rightly interpreted the dialectical nature of the “resentful” underground life in early Dostoevsky or Nietzsche as a mere repetitive imitation of the modern rational ground, including its predictable desires (Girard and Williams 2012, p. 50), but he failed to see that the underground itself could possess a revelatory and metaphysical nature “beyond” the modern logic of the dialectical mimesis.

This “beyond” was, in Hegel’s (1770–1831) or Heidegger’s (1889–1976) thought, seemingly more radically identified with the abysmal unground, recalling Boehme (1572–1624) and Hölderlin (1770–1843). According to Hegel’s congenial interpretation of Boehme laid out in his “Lectures on the History of Philosophy” (1837), Boehme strived to conceive in everything the divine Trinity, so that it would be the original grounding principle in which and through which everything is. “His principal thought, indeed we can say his sole thought, is the Trinity [Dreieinigkeit]: it is the universal principle in which and through which everything is, and it is indeed that principle in such a way that everything has this Trinity within it, not just as a Trinity of representation but as real” (Hegel 1990, p. 121). According to Hegel, in Boehme, the scope of this Trinitarian grounding includes nothingness and evil:

“So this Ichts is the Separator, what instigates, what draws distinctions. He also calls this Ichts Lucifer, the inborn Son of God and magistrate of nature. But this Lucifer has fallen, and this is the origin of the evil in God and from God himself. Here we have Jacob Boehme’s greatest profundity. The Ichts, the self-knowing, the egoity or selfhood, is what forms images of, or imagines, itself within itself, it is the fire that consumes everything inwardly; this [fire] is what is negative in the Separator, it is the wrath of God, and it is hell and the Devil.”

(Hegel 1990, p. 127)

In this way, as Hegel pointed out with undisguised philosophical pleasure, Boehme discovered the source of evil in a primordial Trinitarian unground, which is the self-causing absolute power generating itself in self-opposing eternal strife. We could certainly critically point out the theological and philosophical limits of Hegel’s interpretation of the unground in Boehme. Cyril O’Regan noted that, “in suggesting in some texts at least—and perhaps more than suggesting in a few—that the Unground remains outside the process of divine self-differentiation, dynamic development, and agonistic self-constitution, Boehme sets limits to an exclusively theogonic or narrativity reading of the divine” (O’Regan 2002, p. 134). However, the very identification of the source of the dialectical self-generation with the abyssal unground (although it rests outside the process per se) is itself the presupposition of such an absolute, totalitarian concept of the ground of being, which includes both the modern rational principle of the sufficient ground or reason and its underground nihilistic opposition.

Whereas Hegel, albeit dialectically, still recapitulated in his totalitarian notion of being the Boehmean memory of the Trinitarian grounding of the unground, Heidegger no longer admits any past, any Trinitarian grounding of being in a logical, dialectical, or analogical sense. In his “Freiburg Lectures on the Highest Principles of Thought” (the principle of identity, non-contradiction, and ground), he proposes a leap from the Western tradition of philosophical logic and dialectics, a leap (Ab-Satz) from the predicative order of thought towards the abyss (Ab-Grund), in which thinking and being are together in the simple futural relationality of speech (Heidegger 2012, pp. 165–66). According to Heidegger, the question of the ground of thinking and being thus requires, first, an abrupt neglect of all partial ontic reasons and grounds that lead the thinking of the Western tradition to an ontotheological conception of metaphysics and modern technology, and second, a thinking that listens to the self-revelation of being from its primordial realm of speech; that is, the abysmal unground itself. Here, “ground” is understood as “abyss” because the essence of the ground itself can no longer be a ground. “Grounding-principles now mean leaps into the abyss (…). At the abyss, thinking finds no more ground. It falls into the bottomless, where nothing bears any longer” (Heidegger 2012, p. 145).

These remarks do not pretend to be exhaustive but show the philosophical and theological genealogy of the modern nihilistic “underground existence” and the reasons for its unsatisfactory, constantly antagonistically incomplete outcomes. Why did all these modern constellations of ground, underground, or even abyssal unground fail to provide a philosophical vision that would overcome the aporetic relationship between ontological grounding and relational ontic appearance, and thus avert the permanent war at the heart of reality? The desperate, resentful, lonely existence of Dostoevsky’s underground man, who resists the modern principle of ground or reason, cannot be redeemed from within the God-murdering, underground dynamics of Nietzsche’s will to power, nor from within Hegel’s totalitarian dialectical integration of the entire horizon of modernity from the nothingness of the unground to the absolute spiritual ground or reason. Both involve the “underground” only as a dialectical moment, not a peculiar reality of a revelatory nature. Even Heidegger’s fundamental ontology merely states the inauthentic existence of that “das Man” accompanying the modern world, determined by the principle of ground or reason, without really revealing the depth of being hidden within the persecuted human community and endangered everyday life, the ritual, the sacramentality, the common being in relations. Pointing to an absolutely futural rescue from beyond the ontological abyss leads nowhere, because the traditional sense of the ontic means nothing to Heidegger. It seems that there is no escape from the labyrinth of modern constellations of ground, underground, and unground, which would not, at the same time, mean a complete forgetting of the past, childhood, everyday life, and community. Is existential play without childhood, the pure appearing of appearance without the essential reason or ground, in fundamental phenomenological ontologies the only possible answer to those haunting “revelations from the underground”?

3. Jan Patočka’s Phenomenology of the Underground

The work of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka (1907–1977) leads to a certain substantial qualification or even revisions in relation to the analyzed possibilities of modern philosophy and especially of phenomenology, facing the problem of the underground or, in other words, the radical loss of the existential, social, political, and theoretical ground. As is well-known, Patočka drew on the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, but his distinctive phenomenological approach gradually moved away from Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and Heidegger’s existentialism through negative Platonism toward attempts at so-called “asubjective phenomenology”, involving relational ontology of space, intersubjectivity, and history (Karfík 2009, p. 46). This development of Patočka’s thought is significantly related to the fact that it was only fully formulated and enacted under the historical conditions of totalitarian persecution in communist Czechoslovakia. Roger Scruton (1944–2020), in his novel “Notes from the Underground” (2014), portrayed Prague’s underground parallel polis in terms of Dostoevsky’s modern underground existence and post-Kantian philosophical sensibility as a derivative form of life dialectically linked to the normalized everyday life (and which in the later conditions of the post-revolutionary world of “freedom” could not mean anything tangible and real, only a ”literary invention”) (Scruton 2014, p. 242). Patočka, however, was able to understand the underground situation of persecuted intellectual and Church communities phenomenologically as an expression of the loss of metaphysical security and the call to regain an authentic relationship to existence, which does not have to necessarily be interpreted as anti-metaphysical if it consists in ever retaining the original insecurity within the essential movements of human existence. This puts Patočka’s restatements of the Heideggerian critique of ontotheological metaphysics in a new light.

Where is this post-metaphysical rather than anti-metaphysical character of understanding the underground as a loss of ontotheological security most evident in Patočka’s thought? His late major work “Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History” (1976) is crucial here. The sixth essay, called “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War”, thematizes the philosophical interpretation of the radical dramatization of man’s historical existence in modernity in the sense of the complete, forceful absorption of reality by war. “The first world war is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars” (Patočka 1996, p. 124). According to Patočka, the Second World War, the Cold War, the atomic threat to destroy global civilization, and the totalitarian persecution in the Soviet bloc states are, on the one hand, a continuation of this trajectory manifested in the First World War, understood as the transformation of being into pure force through the technological organization of war; however, on the other hand, they are already an attempt to reverse something that was unexpected in the midst of the technological self-assertion of force. At the very bottom of the wars of the twentieth century, Patočka recognizes an eschatological moment of a radial stepping out into the Night of being in the so-called “frontline experience” (and refers to its description in the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Jünger). The question of how these horrors of the frontline are possible is transformed into the awareness that if these horrors are possible, it is impossible for the world to endure. It is at that point, where all the powers of the Day culminate and force man to sacrifice himself in the name of progress and future everyday life, that the absolute eschatological event of the Night takes place: in the abyssality of the sacrifice itself, man is freed from the powers of the Day.

Of course, the powers of the Day seek to suppress, reverse, and dialectically exploit these “revelations from the frontline underground”: the protest against the horror of war, implying the awareness of the impossible possibility of the eschatological, is to become the new possibility of man, the motive for another struggle, this time a war for peace, a war against war. “The war against war seems to make use of new experiences, seemingly acts eschatologically, yet in reality bends eschatology back to the ‘mundane’ level, the level of the day, and uses in the service of the day what belonged to the night and to eternity” (Patočka 1996, p. 127). The absolute eschatological event is to be relativized again in relation to the future everyday. However, because this relativization of the absolute is internally contradictory, it manifests itself in a series of ideological phrases, images, and plans that are unable to completely obscure the present eschaton of the absolute event. The powers of the Day are in a sense already powerless. “The motives of the day which had evoked the will to war are consumed in the furnace of the front line, if that experience is intense enough that it will not yield again to the forces of the day. (…) All everydayness, all visions of future life pale before the simple peak on which humans find themselves standing” (Patočka 1996, p. 130). The absolute character of the frontline experience means that, “…the night comes suddenly to be an absolute obstacle on the path of the day to the bad infinity of tomorrows” (Patočka 1996, p. 130).

The first and most immediate consequence of the frontline experience is that we recognize the war enemy as a participant in the same absolute event, and therefore as someone with whom we are more intimate than with the one who sent him to the frontline as a servant of the supra-individual ideological powers. This is why the absolute event of the frontline experience is not only liberating from the powers of the Day and problematizing all their plans, but also foundational and grounding. Patočka sees a new eschatological relationality that results from the sharing of an absolute event. The so-called “solidarity of the shaken” is grounded in the underground persecution and self-sacrifice as in its underground ground. The “solidarity of the shaken” is such a form of the absolute event of the frontline experience that can become the historical ground of a new polis, overcoming the tragedies of the 20th century. It is the only way to resist falling back into the individualistic everyday life. As Patočka points out, the bare frontline experience did not change the course of history because:

“…it is the experience of all individuals projected individually each to their summit from which they cannot but retreat back to everydayness where they will inevitably be seized again by war in the form of Force’s plan for peace. The means by which this state is overcome is the solidarity of the shaken; the solidarity of those who are capable of understanding what life and death are all about, and so what history is about. That history is the conflict of mere life, barren and chained by fear, with life at the peak, life that does not plan for the ordinary days of a future but sees clearly that the everyday, its life and its ‘peace,’ have an end. Only one who is able to grasp this, who is capable of conversion, of metanoia, is a spiritual person.”

(Patočka 1996, pp. 134–35)

It would seem, then, that the personal restitution of the ground, in the form of what allows that which is shared in the “solidarity of the shaken” to be truly shared, saves all “shaken” relations and phenomena deprived of their ground in the situation of the underground when the powers of the Day are being exhausted encountering the absolute obstacle of the Night. The question is, however, how the nature of this “solidarity of the shaken” is to be understood and to what extent we can speak of a “restitution”. and even to what extent a restitution of the “ground”. This question is closely linked to the way Patočka appropriates the tradition of Christian thought. On the one hand, we have seen that he uses categories such as the eschatological, the sacrifice, or metanoia, to describe the frontline experience and the “solidarity of the shaken”. On the other hand, he clearly thinks of them in a context that is not exclusively determined by their actual theological meaning. What is the relation between the absolute event of the self-giving of Jesus Christ on Golgotha and the absolute event of the frontline experience? What is the relation between the new relationality of the persecuted Church, which is historically grounded in the absolute event of Golgotha and perpetuated within the sacramental life of the Church and the everyday sanctity of the Christian life, and the new relationality that is associated with the “solidarity of the shaken”? Although Patočka is very cautious in this context, it is clear that he would find any direct theological grounding of what makes possible the “solidarity of the shaken” through an analogous appropriation of the Trinitarian or Christological mysteries problematic (to say the least), and evidently dogmatically limiting the phenomenological openness of the open soul or reason, as in his critique of Comenius’ Trinitarian metaphysics (Patočka 2022, p. 101). Patočka insists on the enduring insecurity and un-anchoredness of the exceptional “solidarity of the shaken” and its dialectical contrast to everyday life. He could, therefore, be interpreted as a thinker who implicitly captures the way in which history is intrinsically negative-theological: historical “Christianity” is always what it is only kenotically in the situation of an unsecured being “after Christianity”. Martin Kočí interprets Patočka in this vein:

“In what Patočka calls the solidarity of the shaken, we find the possibility of a concrete historical incarnation of living Christianity after Christianity. Christianity after Christianity offers an insight into the problematicity of being-in-the-world. It calls us to live in un-anchoredness. But the main point is not problematicity or shaken meaning, but an invitation to those who are shaken—Patočka calls them spiritual persons—to share this experience with one another. The emphasis is not on the shakenness, but on the solidarity. And solidarity creates community.”

(Kočí 2020, p. 238)

However, if we interpret the “solidarity of the shaken” as a communion in the willingness to sacrifice oneself and one’s everyday with its ontic grounds, is it not the case that the absolute event is an absolutization of the difference in metaphysical difference that does not admit a concrete analogical mediation between relations and phenomena and their metaphysical ground, because this mediation would always also have to be already bridged as part of the everyday and as ontic? Would not such an absolutization of the difference between the ontological and the ontic in the absolute event necessarily be the reason that, as in Heidegger’s writings, the absolute event of the self-communication of being cannot pass into the everyday, which from the beginning would always also have to conceal within itself as its ontic secret the relations implied in the salvation that now comes? It seems that relations grounded in the essential movement initiated by the “solidarity of the shaken” cannot cope with the most ordinary relations that make up everyday life, such as those of friendship and parenthood. The “solidarity of the shaken”, understood in this way, does indeed connect us with our enemies and all those who are different and distant, but it separates us from our fellow citizen, neighbors, friends, brothers and sisters, and children. The absolutized exceptionalism of the “solidarity of the shaken” thus indeed creates a community, but the real question is whether this community is not a substitute of the everyday for the endless series of antagonistic tomorrows (“the bad infinity of tomorrows” reappears) of historical polemics? We must not overlook that, at the end of his “Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War” essay, Patočka himself, recalling Heraclitus, recognizes war as:

“the father of the laws of the polis as of all else (…). War can show that among the free some are capable of becoming gods, of touching the divinity of that which forms the ultimate unity and mystery of being. Those, though, are the ones who understand that polemos is nothing one-sided, that it does not divide but unites, that adversaries are only seemingly whole, that in reality they belong to each other in the common shaking of the everyday, that they have thus touched that which lasts in everything and forever because it is the source of all being and is thus divine.”

(Patočka 1996, p. 136)

4. Underground Revisited: Zdeněk Neubauer’s Marian Metaphysics

In a Christian perspective, “the common shaking of the everyday” is the everyday. There is no everyday life, however natural, naïve, unproblematic, unauthentic, ordinary, or planned, it may first seem, that is not pregnant with underground mystery from the very beginning, and that does not entail the shaking drama of persecution, including the promise of its final revelatory resolution.

Although he never explicitly adopted this perspective in its concreteness, Patočka himself, as far as I know, came closest to it in the essay accompanying his German translation of the novel “God’s Rainbow” (1969) by Jaroslav Durych (1886–1962), a leading Czech Catholic 20th century intellectual and novelist. The novel narrates the Sophianic story of a meeting between an old wanderer and a strange but beautiful young woman somewhere in a deserted borderland landscape. He seeks a sign of purity that awakens repentance, she a new beginning in the midst of absolute humiliation. During the violent post-war expulsion of the Germans from this now abandoned place, she was repeatedly abused, and witnessed the self-sacrificing death of her mother. Meeting her after these tragic events of the frontline experience raises the question for a new, reconciled everyday. They bridge the abyss that separates them by revisiting the underground overshadowed by the Spirit and the Cross: they bury together an unburied body forgotten in an abandoned church. In this joint quasi-sacramental revisitation of the underground, he sees the woman as a sign of Marian glory and purity, even in the worst impurity of the world; she ceases to insist on her underground past, on the nothingness of the nothing revealed in her frontline experience. Patočka comments: “She is redeemed by his word of love for the mother; he renews in this upheaval his path to lasting repentance, aware of his own nothingness in relation to the woman who remained pure even in the filth of dishonor” (Durych 1991, p. 169). Patočka’s phenomenological attention here touches on what might be called a Marian metaphysics learned on the hardest borderland of finitude. Ontological repentance as a shaking of all the certainties of the everyday and a receptivity to the guilt associated with the finitude of human existence becomes a question for a new everyday of the child, born as purity out of purity in the deepest impurity of the underground.

This paradoxical virginal fruitfulness revealed in the midst of past underground sins is why, however unlikely it may seem, the theological transformation of the limits of Patočka’s phenomenology of underground experience could most fruitfully come from a rethinking of the philosophical meaning of Mariology. In Mary, the created reality with its ontic reasons becomes “overshadowed” (Lk 1:35) by a gracious gift of God’s own being so that the creatural vulnerability and limitations, eventually culminating in the radical loss of the existential, social, political, and theoretical ground, mean no more the problem of the aporetic dialectics of the ontic phenomenon in relation to the metaphysical grounding, the resentful underground, or the abyssal nothingness of the unground. Mary’s specific role in God’s salvific plan for humanity (John Paul II 1988, No. 47) shows that the vulnerability and limitations become the primary ontological expression of love. Mary’s place in relation to the incarnation and the absolute event of Golgotha is being “under”, being in the hiddenness, shadow, and self-giving patient withholding out of love. The uninteresting, poor, young woman among women becomes the everyday poverty that reveals the abundance of God’s presence, the subtle and invisible nothingness from which the uncreated God receives created visible expression. If we understand this expression ontologically (and not as supposedly merely an ontic data of religious history), the absolute event of Golgotha, including its Marian anticipations and retentions, may become the key to a transformation of metaphysical difference, in which the absolute event of the frontline experience will no longer be identical to the absolutized difference between the ontological and the ontic (and thus precluding any transition of ontological shaking via the “solidarity of the shaken” into a new ontic everyday), but by way of analogy with the essential relations of the Trinity (Maspero 2021, pp. 101–4). An absolute event does not cease to be absolute when it is relativized by relations that are essential in nature, so that the solidarity and relationality revealed in the underground frontline experience (such as Mary’s standing under the cross) can be the mysterious underground ground of the new everyday community of the Church that does not ever cease to be shaken on its way to holiness.

This argument bringing phenomenology, developed against the background of a critique of the older ontotheological metaphysics, back to a new form of theological metaphysics (Trinitarian and Marian) was formulated by Zdeněk Neubauer (1942–2016), a Czech biologist, Christian philosopher, and a key figure in the late underground philosophical milieu. Under the same underground conditions of totalitarian persecution in communist Czechoslovakia, Neubauer explored more ancient forms of the underground than just the modern political, social, or existential ones. By redirecting his attention from the “all too human” to the natural reality, he was able to understand the question of the underground as again a question of something real or involved in the event of creation. In this way, however, he did not simply return to the ancient cosmological triadism or the concept of the underground as something ontically spatial (which would be very modern), but he rather interpreted the underground as something related to nature itself, nurturing and embodying itself in each of its created manifestations as its own subjectivity. Neubauer understood this subjectivity inherent in all of nature ontologically—it is not the transcendental subjectivity of the modern subject, but an ontological subjectivity of which the metaphysical expression is the soul, understood as anima forma corporis. “What matters above all are metamorphoses of soul articulated, and present, in the body. Evolutionary (i.e., psychic) history is internal, intimate and unique because it is personal. Yet such metamorphoses are shared: that is why they belong to history, in an even fuller sense than the history of humankind” (Neubauer 2011, p. 119). This Neubauerian ontology of subjectivity was linked both to his own biological and biosemiotic research (in which he helped lay the foundations of what later came to be called epigenetics) and to the Trinitarian nature and subjectivity of the personal Logos of God, whose incarnation grounds the meaningfulness of all natural phenomena expressed in the dimensions of corporeality and narrativity: “(…) in the Christian belief in a Triune God, the same initial ontological experience is present which we have invoked elsewhere throughout our reflections; the trinitarian symbolism contains the same meaning and is imbued with the same spirit which underlies natural experience” (Neubauer 2020a, pp. 282–83).

However, this very Trinitarian and incarnatory grounding of subjectivity and nature is Marian in nature: Neubauer considered the defining form of created Trinitarian subjectivity to be that of the Sophianic and Marian. For him, Mary is an ontological statement about being. The ancient and modern Marian dogmas are therefore not just statements of supernatural faith but concern the nature of created reality. If modern romanticism sought inspiration in the pagan understanding of the abysmal underground as a counterbalance to scientific rationality, Neubauer proposes to abandon this dialectic by more radically embracing that which is the memory of the birth of the Logos of God in the underground of the earth and his Easter descent. Marian understanding of being “is deeper, more original than all conceptions of chaos (the abyss), that blind, primordial dimension of chance and necessity of pagan myths and modern scientism (…)” (Neubauer 2020b, p. 33). How can one understand this depth and originality of the Sophianic and Marian form of being? Mary gives a created bodily, visible, and finite form to the uncreated, invisible, and infinite God; she is the mother of an innocent savior, and therefore cannot herself be a creature whose corporeality, visibility, and finitude are in any sense connected with an underground non-being into which evil, guilt, or sin can enter. Mary’s overshadowed underground non-being is identical to the non-being revealed by her Son on the cross: nothing but love. As created but untouched by the nothingness of the chaos and confusion of creation, by those haunting “nihilistic revelations from the underground”, “Mary is immaculata sine peccato originali concepta” (Neubauer 2020b, p. 33). However, her purity is not the purity of radical separation from natural corporeality (such a radical separation, according to Neubauer, is in fact diabolical), but is on the contrary, as purity, the principle of corporeality and nature. “Mary herself is the embodiment of physis-nature-subjectivity, i.e., corporeal origination, emergence, the supernatural beginning-conception of all nature as such” (Neubauer 2020a, p. 300).

Here, finally, the underground man recognizes the underground, which has a peculiarly revelatory nature in that it reveals the divine sense of nature, including its phenomenality, as such. The specific underground experience of which Neubauer speaks was the illegal pilgrimage to the site of the Marian apparition at Turzovka, but his insight is of universal significance. He shows that the human soul, lost and shattered in the labyrinth of modern constellations of rational ground, social, political, and existential underground, or even radical unground, can perceive that the logos of its shattering is the logos of everyday humility, concealing within itself as its secret the relations implied in revelation.

“And our soul, if it becomes truly humilis—close to the earth, earth-like, open, accepting and preserving—will itself become this Immaculate Conception. Then Truth itself will approach it as uncovered, as it is. It will be embodied through this soul as it wants to reveal itself freely, not made as I want it to be. Such a soul, freed from the possession of the devil and into which Christ has descended to overcome our self—the serpent at the source—becomes itself a flowing spring, the song of the loving one, the manifestation and source of the divinity of the world. From it truly pours forth the hymn of Mary, the Magnificat…”

(Neubauer 2020b, p. 39)

Mary is a symbol revealing that the ultimate mystery of existence is not nothingness (darkness, abyss, unground, chaos, evil, inertia, heaviness, struggle, or agonistical dialectics of the ground and the underground) but Wisdom at play in the everyday, mirroring the original play of the Trinity.

5. Metaphysical Difference Reconsidered: Trinitarian Metaphysics from the Underground Church

However unlikely it may seem, at a time when a political, social, or existential underground necessarily implied the annihilation of common political, philosophical, and ecclesial life and relations, there emerged a renewed philosophical and theological sensibility for the reality of Sophianic and Marian underground overshadowed by the Spirit and the Cross and marked by Christ’s descent, by which the powers of the ancient triadic underground were once apocalyptically drawn into the liturgical celebration of a persecuted Church hiding in caves and catacombs. This renewed philosophical and theological sensibility for the reality of Sophianic and Marian underground makes it possible to reconsider the modern problem of the loss of the metaphysical grounding of reality.

By genealogically and speculatively exploring the modern philosophical efforts to master the dialectics of the rational ground, irrational underground, or abyssal unground, we have demonstrated the main preconditions of this unexpected renewal. In particular, Patočka’s phenomenology of underground experience better than others showed that the response to the radical questioning of metaphysical grounding in metaphysical difference does not necessarily have to be revealing the nothingness of grounding or to be contradictorily dialectical, as if the underground were an irrational opposition to the rational ground or a moment of total synthesis of ground and unground. His notion of the “solidarity of the shaken” articulates the situation of persecuted communities as a setting of eschatological relationality grounded in an absolute event of the underground frontline experience. Within the underground loss of the ground, the shared question of the ground awakens the relational “solidarity of the shaken”. Patočka rightly perceives that this relationality can only be eschatological in character, and that it must not become an internally contradictory relativization of the absolute—as in the case of the eventual instrumentalization of the “solidarity of the shaken” in favor of a future planned everyday. For Patočka, the eschatological character of the new relationality must remain strictly negative and ontological: a community grounded in the “solidarity of the shaken” cannot express itself at the ontic level of the everyday relationality, communication, exchange, and institutions, or at the supranatural level of the religious rituals, signs, and imaginations. Patočka’s phenomenological concern with the pure finite reality, which is given as ever problematized in its very givenness, does not allow for the ontic mediation of the ontological. Metaphysical difference remains absolutized in the absolute event, and the absolute event must not be relativized, because Patočka’s eschatology associates the new ontological relationality with a radical discontinuity. Paradoxically, the new ontological relationality of the “solidarity of the shaken” becomes elevated but trapped in the absolute event. As a result, the pure finite un-anchored reality of the absolute event cannot express itself phenomenologically to the last depth of what purity means.

The renewed philosophical and theological sensibility for the reality of the Sophianic and Marian underground focuses on this last depth of purity, the utmost self-giving. Neubauer’s attempt to articulate something that, while never entirely forgotten in the tradition of Western Christian thought, has lost its relation to reality in the terms of modern discourse (Martin 2015), indicated that the pure finite reality of nature, shaken by the loss of its metaphysical ground, has to be interpreted as Marian because the relationality and solidarity implied in the underground ground of the pure finite reality of nature is both generative and virginal, creative and unspoiled by the creatural sin and chaos, as well as ontic and ontological. In the mysterious Sophianic and Marian “revelations from the underground”, we can recognize the logos of everyday humility, concealing within itself as its secret the real relations as disposed to be transformed by the revelation of Trinitarian relations. The absolute event of Incarnation culminating at Golgotha expresses itself in an absolute essential relationality, which is the metaphysical setting for the birth of a new everyday of the child, coming forth as purity from purity in all the impurity of the underground misery and malaise. As the apocalyptic horizon of suffering and persecution is the Christian everyday, the metaphysics overshadowed by the Spirit and the Cross implied in these Sophianic and Marian revelations spells out the created form of Trinitarian relations, that becomes a miraculous rescue as the ground shining from within the underground, and the underground within the ground.