Neither Answered Nor Absorbed: The Irreducible Antinomy of Personal Address and Impersonal Ground in the Theology of Recovery

Research Article

Abstract

A previous study argued that the spiritual trajectory of the Twelve Steps, read alongside the Hasidic recovery of relational address, resolves the ancient quarrel between a personal God who is addressed as Thou and an impersonal Infinite into which the self is absorbed; it proposed that Hasidism reorients mystical depth toward relational responsibility rather than dissolution.¹ The present essay revisits and partly recants that conclusion. It argues that the resolution was premature, and that the deepest honesty available to the theology of recovery is not synthesis but the steady inhabitation of an antinomy that cannot be closed. Drawing on William James’s account of the wider self through which saving experiences arrive, Martin Buber’s insistence on the irreducibility of encounter, Elliot R. Wolfson’s apophatic phenomenology of identity-in-difference, and the Chabad doctrine that the divine Essence transcends the categories of being and non-being, the essay reads Step Eleven’s movement from a transcendent Higher Power toward ‘conscious contact’ not as a passage from transcendence to immanence but as the moment at which the two grammars—address and ground, Thou and depth—become simultaneously unavoidable and mutually irreducible. The recovering self does not discover that it is God, nor that God is merely the floor of its own interiority; it discovers that it cannot say which, and that its sobriety, and its capacity to remain present at the bedside of another’s suffering, depend on not deciding. The argument is developed through the author’s framework of hermeneutic medicine and therapeutic tzimtzum and is offered as a contribution to philosophy of religion, Jewish mystical studies, consciousness studies, and the still-unwritten theology of recovery.