The etymology behind certain names of the Abrahamic god indicate “unfathomable melancholy”, the presence of a melancholic dimension haunting Being itself. Indeed he is no narcissist that he would ask us to return his love: that love is an expression of the paradoxical One, the One denied to itself, which generates multiplicity. God is the painful longing that weighs down every flower with drops of rain and dew in its desperation for the Sun, it is a melancholy radiated in the entire order of Nature, in all of this multiplicity of matter.
True ethos is constituted by so many dechirures ethicques or ‘ethical tears’ wrought by ‘the movement of Being in the fixity of essences’, reversing the primacy of Kantian transcendental synthesis, or, in Hegelian language, that of essence over existence, re-submerging Being in the shadow of its ‘missing Totality’ or absconditus, ie. the pure negation left behind (occupying the “melancholic dimension” of ‘a separation internal to the paradoxical One’) in the wake of all dialectical exchanges,- exchanges which, unlike those of the Hegelian system, stand in their contortive eternity as unresolvable agonisms between vocal pluralities, [Andrew Gibson on Christian Jambert. See: “The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy”; Intermittency, p. 130.] as eternal recurrences, not of Nietzsche’s interpretative assemblages of active-passive drives, but of the singularity of the One denied to itself, of the Monon denied by the Mone, of the One denied by the Remainder. This, the impossibility of God’s returning to himself, (a continual withdraw from himself which we experience asymmetrically, namely as the flow of time toward an indefinite future, an empty continuum that swallows up all existence as so many “partial lights”, citing Valery) which Schelling calls the “Remainder”, the dark Un-Grund of Being, the burial of the primal Will in matter, the ‘divine unconscious’ or God’s forgetting of himself through the creation of the World, etc. is his love; a melancholic dimension occupied by messianic revelation and the portent of a missing Totality that promises to rebind multiplicity together. Our love, however, (on the other side of this melancholy, on the rational or philosophical side of the paradox, counter-posing revelation and messianic consciousness, which exists on the other) which we return to him, is just that; our re-submerging Being in the shadow of its own missing Totality, expressing these ‘ethical tears’ that prevent Multiplicity from returning to the One, that prevent the individual souls of men from returning to God. In this way, the tragic sense of life is fully realized, which is an ultimate teaching of Christian ethics. The Greeks did not know tragedy. The eternal return of the self to itself in the wheel of change and multiplicity is an inversion of the eternal self-separation of a God who cannot return to himself in the Unity of the One; this reciprocation is the great aporia of philosophy, of the shadow of Being’s missing Totality.
