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The ancient concept of the underground is mainly associated with the outdated triadic cosmology.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.