What if the oldest mistake in the history of human thought is not believing in God, and not disbelieving in Him, but the strange, persistent conviction that behind God there must be another God - a deeper one, a realer one, a God behind the curtain?
Boris Kriger - former Orthodox priest, physician, and theoretical physicist - puts that conviction on trial. His central defendant is Meister Eckhart, the brilliant fourteenth-century Dominican who preached that the soul could break through past the Trinity itself into a silent, nameless Godhead, and who became the only major theologian of the Middle Ages to be condemned by a pope for it. But Eckhart does not stand alone in the dock. Behind him stretch the Gnostics, who stacked thirty floors of divinity above the Creator and demoted Him to a bungling demiurge; the late Neoplatonists, who kept postulating one more Absolute behind the last one until the honest Damascius admitted the ladder never ends; and ahead of him stands Hegel, who tipped the whole ladder on its side and called the endless regress History.
Against them all, Kriger sets a forgotten fourteenth-century answer - Gregory Palamas and the distinction between God's unknowable essence and His knowable energies - and a modern one: the boundary of attribution at the heart of the author's own information substrate theory. The result is a verdict, delivered with wit, personal candor, and no reverence for great reputations: the absolute behind the absolute is not a depth. It is a category mistake - and it is still being made today, in philosophy, in theology, and in Silicon Valley.
This is intellectual history as courtroom drama: erudite, irreverent, and unafraid to say that some of the most celebrated minds in the Western canon were simply, magnificently wrong.
KEYWORDS
Meister Eckhart, mysticism, heresy, Gnosticism, Hegel, Gregory Palamas, metaphysics
