Theology in the 20th century witnessed a shift in emphasis: The talk about the last things did not have to come last any more as the traditional handbooks of systematic theology would have it; eschatology was no longer one branch of theology among others but lay at the center of our understanding of the Christian faith.
1This change of orientation in theological thinking is usually set in the year 1900 with the second publication of Johannes Weiss's Die Predigt Jesu vom Reich Gottes. It was then carried out by a number of German-speaking Protestant theologians (Albert Schweitzer, Paul Althaus, Ernst Troeltsch and, of course, Karl Barth, among others) before it spread among Roman Catholic circles both in France (Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou) and in Germany (Karl Rahner).
and permeates every moment in history. In the following discussion I wish to trace and spell out the implications of such a novel understanding of eschatology for our theologies today. As my guides in this exploration, I take the theology of John Zizioulas and certain insights that recent research in phenomenology has placed at theology's service. This association might seem strange to the reader: What does the theology of things-to-come have in common with the philosophy of things-themselves? I would like to propose that phenomenology, especially as it has been recently formulated by a new generation of phenomenologists, such as Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Richard Kearney,
2All of the three authors engage, each to different degrees, a eucharistic eschatology in their phenomenological analysis (although sometimes it is difficult to tell whether it is not actually an eschatology engaging phenomenology). None of them, however, draws the concrete conclusions that I formulate here. Marion treats the eschatological character of the Eucharist in his God Without Being (trans. Thomas A. Carlson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, esp. 169–76), but no ecclesiological or ethical implication is drawn as a result of it. Kearney is aware of the ethical significance of such an eschatology, but his understanding of the Eucharist is rather weak and therefore his analysis lacks a firm theological grounding. Lacoste, in his Experience and the Absolute, comes closer to the perspective presented here, but his preoccupation with refuting Heidegger and Hegel gives an altogether different color to his discussion. Needless to say, the work of these authors remains crucial to this study.
Nothing oppresses us more than the weight of an irrevocable past. In front of the past we are powerless; the things we have done and the things done to us assume undeniable authority as facts, as things-themselves that, furthermore, give shape to who we are. Nothing undermines our freedom more than a predetermined and given nature, our fixed facticity. Most of us understand ourselves as who we have been—our identity is like a record in which every action, every deed and thought, is written down indelibly. Think here of police records, credit records, academic transcripts, professional résumés and medical files. In all these cases, and for the various institutions that they represent—the police, the academy, the marketplace, and the medical establishment—we simply are our past. This archival orientation is best illustrated by the example of the shadow: The past, like a shadow, follows us and grows on us and we are unable to avoid it. It is only in the Church, as I would like to argue in this essay, that we are not who we have been but who we will be. In place of the archaeological logic described above, the church offered a new logic—the logic of the new, the novum, the doctrine of de novissimis. In Revelation (21:5), the “new things” coincide with the last things and together they form what is known as eschatology. Against the things-themselves stand the things-to-come.3
The references here are, of course, to phenomenology and eschatology. “Back to the things themselves” was the battle cry of the father of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, at the beginning of last century. By that he meant the return to the reality that Kant had denied to things as a result of the bifurcation of the world into phenomena and noumena. The bridge that Husserl had discovered between phenomena and noumena was consciousness itself, specifically the intending character of consciousness, what became known in phenomenological parlance as intentionality. What could be, if any, the relation between eschatology and phenomenology, between the things-to-come and the things-themselves? At first it seems that any possible relation is exhauste in their antithesis—the two have nothing to do with each other—not only because presumably they come from two different worlds, that of faith and that of reason, but because of the fundamental difference between their orientations: the things-themselves are precisely not the things-to-come. In spite of this opposition, I would like to suggest that reconciliation is possible in the retrieval of the things-to-come in the things-themselves.
The reason for our society's obsession with the past is the fact that our epistemology is entirely protological (giving ontological priority to that which comes first). In other words, our knowledge is based by necessity on experience (one needs only to refer to the opening lines of Kant's Introduction to the Critiqueof Pure Reason), and experience is always experience of that which has been and has come to pass, that which, in other words, can be measured, observed and written down in files and records such as those mentioned earlier. In everyday life, we reason according to such protological paradigms—the origin holds the truth of the thing or the person in question. A careful examination of the violence directed toward the Other (in the many forms of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.) would reveal that at the root of such violence lies the simple prejudice that gives priority to what has been, either in terms of a biological beginning (nature, essence) or in terms of one's own history. It is the beginning, after all, that determines the end and not the other way around. And how could it be otherwise? The beginning functions as the efficient cause of that which it begins—and does not the cause come always before its effects? Not for theology. The chronological and ontological primacy of the cause is challenged by a series of events, such as the creation, the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. These events do not fit into the protological paradigm of efficient causality described above. What would be, for example, the “cause” of the crucifixion? Does the cross make any sense at all if seen by itself, that is, as the effect of that which has preceded in the life of Jesus? We would argue that the cross becomes the cross only once it is seen from the future, that is, from the point of view of the resurrection that follows it. Theologically, then, it is the resurrection that is the “final cause” of the crucifixion. As for the resurrection itself—would it make any sense to say that the resurrection is the “result” or the “effect” of Christ's passion? “In Paul's mind,” John Zizioulas writes, “even the historical event of our Lord's resurrection would make no sense if there was not to be a final resurrection of all human beings in the end: ‘If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ was risen’ (1 Cor 15:13).”
4Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas), “Towards an Eschatological Ontology” (unpublished paper delivered at King's College, 1999).
Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man (trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan; New York: Fordham Univeristy Press, 2004) 138.
Ibid., 137.
Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin's Earth and Heaven,” in Elucidations of Hölderlin's Poetry (trans. Keith Hoeller; New York: Humanity Books, 2000) 195.
Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 137.
, of principles and beginnings.
Eschatology, as we shall see, reverses naturalistic, essentialist, and historistic models by making the seemingly improbable claim that I am not who I am, let alone who I was and have been, but rather, like the theophanic Name of Exodus (3:14), I am who I will be. Eschatological theology is deep down a liberation theology. The protological example of the shadow (
) is properly reversed as in Hebrews (8:5 and 10:1) and in Colossians (2:16–17): The shadow now does not follow but rather precedes reality, so that, in Christian typology, the present condition of things as the things-themselves is merely an adumbration of the things-to-come.
9Zizioulas, “Towards an Eschatological Ontology.”
What is implied here is the Lutheran doctrine of the “orders of creation”(Schöpfungsordnungen) that regarded such worldly institutions like nations and states and civil conventions like marriage as belonging intrinsically to the creation and thus “good.” This doctrine gave rise to a Theologie der Ordnungen that did not hesitate to support Nazi ideology (since the Third Reich could be seen as part of God's creation). Dietrich Bonhoeffer criticized such theories by changing the terminology from “orders of creation” (which would imply a permanent validity) to “orders of preservation,” making them, thus, part of the transient scheme of this world, which has its justification only in relation to the eschaton. See Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall (trans. Douglas Stephen Bax; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997) 140. The same notion is expressed by Bonhoeffer's eschatological concept of the “penultimate.” See Ethics (trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) 160.
Christian Eschatology
Most religions share some form of eschatological vision. Usually, it is a vision that anticipates the end of the physical world and the coming of a better world. Such apocalyptic events are usually structured around the coming of a messianic figure. None of these elements of eschatology, however, is particularly or properly Christian. In order to find what is proper to Christian eschatology we need to turn away from the narrations of cataclysms and catastrophes.11
Moltmann, after going through a list of similar apocalyptic visions and prophesies, concludes: “All these ideas and fantasies are certainly soundly apocalyptic, but they are not Christian. The Christian expectation for the future has nothing at all to do with final solutions of this kind, for its focus is not the end of life, or history, or the world. It is rather the beginning.” See “Is the World Coming to an End or Has Its Future Already Begun?” in The Future as God's Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) 130, and also his preface to The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) xi.
- a) The is not the end of history,
- b) The is the incarnation, and
- a) The is the incarnation as it unfolds in history through the celebration of the Eucharist (I will treat this last statement in the third part of this essay).
What these three statements have in common is refutation of a rather dominant tendency in Christian theology of assigning eschatology to a semi-utopian time at the end of history—a time that might one day come but most likely not during our lifetime. This tendency is reflected by the arrangement of the articles in the Nicene Creed—the phrase “I expect the resurrection of the dead and the life to come” is, fittingly, it would seem, last. Similarly then, the talk about the last things always comes last: Eschatology has traditionally been the last chapter of any systematic exposition of theology. And it is against this tendency that I would like to argue: By relegating eschatology to a realm beyond experience, we have come up with the perfect alibi for getting all too comfortable with the world in its current state. We have found the ideal justification for forgetting that this is not our home, our goal, our destination; that the categories of this world are not and should not be the paradigms and the concepts of our thought. By exiling eschatology to a time beyond time, we have precluded ourselves from the wonderfully subversive effects of the future, of the reversals that the new might bring. Without an eschatological awareness in our interaction with the everyday, we cannot but become immune to surprise and, therefore, to the kingdom of God, which has surprise as its very mode of manifestation (Matt 24:27, 50; Mark 13:36; Luke 12:40; 17:24).
a) The is not the end of history
A common mistake that one finds even today in manuals and handbooks of systematic theology is the identification of the
with an end (the end of the world
12It is highly problematic, I think, to speak of the “end of the world” from a Christian perspective. Revelation, in all its apocalyptic imagery, presents us with the transformation of the world and its renewal (“Behold, I make all things new,” Rev 21:5) but not with its annihilation or destruction. Whether the world, as God's creation, can be destroyed is questionable, especially after the event of the incarnation, given that God has united the world with the godhead in the human nature of Christ as the doctrine of the ascension implies.
. Christian eschatology, however, is not a teleology. Such a teleological eschatology has no place in theology but only in cosmology. The
can be found on either side of the end of history, or on both sides, before it and after it, but it should never be identified with that end itself. Hence the impossibility of telling when the kingdom will come. This impossibility is not based on lack of knowledge but rather on the unknowability of the kingdom's coming. It is not so much that we do not know when the kingdom will come, but rather that we cannot know, because its coming is necessarily situated outside time and history, where the question of ‘when’ has no meaning. The kingdom of God does not coincide with the culmination of history, that is, with a totality, but it signals a breach in the body of history, a rupture occasioned by the encounter with the Other. By placing the coming of the kingdom either after history or within history, we avoid identifying it with history, as in the (ontotheological) eschatologies of Hegel and Marx.
13Wolfhart Pannenberg regards these eschatologies as fundamentally anti-Christian and thus as structures of the anti-Christ. See Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) 3:636. As their common characteristic, Pannenberg identifies the tendency to place value on the general, or the abstract, over and against the particular and the individual.
As Levinas writes, “eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history.… It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality” of history. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Pittsburgh:Duquesne, 1969) 22. And as he writes later, “When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history” (ibid., 52).
b) The is the incarnation
This statement distinguishes Christian eschatology from its monotheistic counterparts in the Abrahamic tradition. Whereas Judaism and Islam have one eschatological center, fixed in the future, Christian eschatology unfolds as this tension between two eschatological nodal points: between the already of the incarnation and the not yet of the Parousia. This tension finds expression in the formulation of the fourth gospel: “the hour is coming and is now here” (John 4:23; 5:25). John's eschatology is realized
15See Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel of John and Epistles of John: A Concise Commentary (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1988) 19.
See Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (vol. 1 of Collected Works; Belmont, Mass.: Notable & Academic Books, 1987) 35–36.
into two: The
of the present (at the end of times) and the present of the
(in the everyday).
17Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 138. “Reconciled existence,” Lacoste writes on the next page, “takes place therefore in an interim between the eschatological blessings already granted and the eschatological blessings that still remain within an economy of promise” (emphasis in original). It is this bifurcation of the eschatological that enables what Richard Kearney has described as a micro-eschatology. See Richard Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology,” in After God (ed. John Panteleimon Manoussakis; New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) 3–20.
The Biblical experience of God in both the Old and the New Testaments is characterized as a whole by the fact that the essentially “invisible” and “unapproachable” God enters the sphere of creaturely visibleness, not by means of intermediary beings, but in himself…. This structure of Biblical revelation should neither be sold short nor overplayed…. It could be overplayed by the view that all that God has instituted for our salvation, culminating in his Incarnation, is in the end only something preliminary which must finally be transcended by either a mystical or an eschatologico-celestial immediacy that would surpass and make superfluous the form of salvation, or, put concretely, the humanity of Jesus Christ. This last danger is not so far removed from the Platonising currents of Christian spirituality as one would hope or want to believe: the impulsive search for an immediate vision of God that would no longer be mediated by the Son of Man, that is, by the whole of God's form in the world is the conscious or unconscious basis for many eschatological speculations…. The Incarnation is the eschaton and, as such, is unsurpassable.18
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: Seeing the Form (trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; 7 vols; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998) 301–2.
, one would have been justified in anticipating a time in which I could have a more direct, full, unmediated understanding of the Other.
19Paul's phrase about seeing now “through a glass, darkly” while then “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12) concerns only the mode of the manifestation but not its content. What I see now sub specie temporis, i.e., the Other in the person, will also be the eschatological manifestation of the personal Other sub specie aeternitatis (see Acts 1:11).
beyond incarnation would offer me a metaphysical alibi to overlook the Other in front of me, to ignore, neglect or underestimate him or her in expectation of a more authentic encounter with another Other (perhaps the wholly Other, tout autre) at the end of history, conceived as some metaphysical totality à la Hegel.
Eschatology and the Forgetfulness of the Spirit
Eschatology's reduction to the time of the Parousia and to the apocalypse associated with it might have been the result of disassociating eschatology from pneumatology. Luther complained once that most of his contemporaries made “fine Easter preachers but very poor Pentecost preachers” because they preached “solely about the redemption of Jesus Christ but not about the sanctification of the Holy Spirit,” or, as he put it on another occasion, they had “devoured the Holy Spirit, feathers and all!”20
Martin Luther, “On the Councils and the Church,” Luthers Werke 41–114 and “Against the Heavenly Prophets,” Luthers Werke 40:83, as quoted by Jaroslav Pelikan in Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) 7–8.
As Gregory the Theologian—briefly presiding over that council—would have liked. See his Fifth Theological Oration (Patrologia Graeca [PG] 36, 136–71). Instead, the fathers of the council aligned themselves with Basil's less daring pneumatology as developed in his De Spiritu Sancto (PG 29, 68A–217A). See also Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006) 178–96.
This forgetfulness of the Spirit by theology and its domination by Christology (becoming thus a mere logology
22Sergius Bulgakov uses the term rather contemptuously. See The Comforter (trans. Boris Jakim; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses it in a different sense in his lectures on Christology. See Christ the Center (trans. E. H. Robertson; San Franscisco: Harper, 1978).
, our reading of Scripture became evidential and didactic, and even the Eucharist itself became strictly or overwhelmingly a memorial. What was lost in all this was the opening up of the Christian community to what lies beyond history, to the
.
After all, pneumatology and eschatology are intimately interconnected. It is the Spirit that announces the
, the things-to-come (John 16:13). In a variant reading of Luke's account of the Lord's Prayer, the phrase “your kingdom come” is replaced by the phrase “your Holy Spirit come…”
23In particular, uncial codex 162 and 700, also attested by Marcion and Gregory of Nyssa (PG 44, 1157).
One could look for examples of eschatology's interrelation with pneumatology in other fields beyond scripture—in Mahler's Eighth Symphony, for example. There, the creative imagination of the composer combines two texts that might seem prima facie unrelated: The Latin hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, and the last act from Goethe's Faust. He combines them not only in the sense of setting them to music within one single composition, but also, even more interestingly, by exposing their inner relatedness. For at the very end of the symphony, as the chorus mysticus sings in rapture of the accomplishment of an eschatological vision24
It is of interest, I think, to read how Mahler himself understood those closing lines of Goethe's Faust, in helping us to understand the eschatological character that permeates them. As Mahler wrote to his wife (in June 1909): “All that is transitory (everything that I have presented to you here on these two evenings) is nothing but images, inadequate, of course, in their earthly manifestations;but there, liberated from earthly inadequacy, they will become reality, and then we shall need no paraphrase, no figures, no images. What we seek to describe here in vain—for it is indescribable—is accomplished there. And what is that? Again, I can only speak in images and say: The Eternal Feminine has drawn us on—we have arrived—we are at rest—we possess what we could only strive and struggle for on earth” (quoted in Michael Steinberg's program notes for the performance of Mahler's Eighth Symphony by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 23 October, 2004).
Eucharistic Eschatology
In the Eucharist, however, this link between eschatology and pneumatology is preserved, most importantly perhaps in the
. This makes the Eucharist the most genuinely eschatological event and eschatology the most authentic interpreter of the Eucharist. It is needless to emphasize here the importance of the Eucharist, for it is in the fellowship of breaking the bread and sharing the common cup that the church, in her catholicity, takes place. Here we should focus only on what the Eucharist has to teach us about the church's eschatological orientation, which inevitably raises the question of the nature of the Eucharist. The predominant interpretation of the Eucharist—already attested by the Marcian and Paulian traditions—places at its heart the
, i.e., the remembering of Christ's sacrifice: “Every time that you eat this bread and drink from the cup, you offer witness to the death of the Lord until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). Besides the fact that the early Christian communities did celebrate the Eucharist prior to the development of this theologia crucis, and thus the interpretation of the latter cannot limit the understanding of the former, the Q Sayings, among other sources, testify to a different tradition, more eschatological in its orientation, and quite innocent of the passion narrative.
25There might even be a connection between the Q document (as reconstructed by modern scholarship) and the structure of the Eucharist itself. For this argument, see Petros Vasileiadis, Lex Orandi (Athens: Indiktos, 2005).
!”
26The Apostolic Fathers (ed. and rev. Michael W. Homes; trans. J. B. Lightfoot and K. J. R. Harmer; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989) 154–55. 1 Cor 16:22.
At the end of the day, it is the Eucharist itself that should instruct us as to its meaning and interpretation—and the eucharistic text, once the layers of superimposed interpretation are removed, leaves no doubt about its eschatological character. At the eucharistic gathering, the faithful assemble in order to re-enact the coming of God's kingdom. Their orientation, therefore, is always towards the future, as the following remarks will clarify, even when they recall the salvific events of the past. There is no text that speaks more eloquently of the eschatological character of the Eucharist than the prayers of the two ancient liturgies that have been handed down to us under the names of Basil the Great and John the Chrysostom (still in use today by the Orthodox Church). Both liturgies begin with a telling doxology: “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (as opposed to “blessedis our God,” that commonly opens the services of the divine office, or the “in the name of the Father” formula that we find in the Roman Missal and the rites that are influenced by it). At the very beginning of the liturgy, then, the kingdom is proclaimed as a reality and not as an expectation. It is this bold experience of the kingdom that enables the celebrant to say during the
, that is, the consecration prayer: “Remembering … all those things which came to pass for us: the cross, the grave, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the sitting down at the right hand, the second and glorious coming” (PG 63, 916). Here, logic is violated and history is left behind. How could it be that we remember the “second, glorious coming”?
27This is only one of the many instances in the eucharistic prayer in which an experience, rather than an expectation, of the kingdom is indicated: Earlier we hear the celebrant saying, “Thou didst bring us from nonexistence into being, and when we had fallen away, didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst bestowed upon us thy kingdom to come” (PG 63, 915). Notice the past tense of the verbs.
The Eucharist is thus more of a
than an
, since the events that we recall lie, from the historical perspective, in the future—a future made present in the Eucharist and by the Eucharist. To remember the future, to have already experienced what is still to come, this is something that goes against our protological categories of thinking. To grasp what is at stake here we need to implement and juxtapose
as recollection (essentially a Platonic concept) with
as repetition (as Kierkegaard understood it).
The Greeks knew of two different phenomena of temporality that have come down to us as
and
. Our difficulty in grasping what is essential in the experience of the future in the Eucharist lies precisely in lacking a distinction between these two terms. An understanding of liturgical temporality (and by implication of eschatology) that lacks the category of
is bound to run into all kinds of impossibilities and, therefore, to revert to a vulgar understanding of both liturgy and temporality (I mention here only the names of Albert Schweitzer and Oscar Cullman).
28For an assessment of their eschatologies, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) 7–13.
is time seen either as sequence or duration—invariably constituting a chronology: Every minute passing by accumulates in those layers of dead time that compile the chronicle of our lives. This time is nothing more than an indefinite series of “nows”: The present is the “now” that “is,” the future is the “now” that one day will be but is not yet, and the past is the “now” that once was but is no more. But between that which “is not yet” and that which “is no more” there is nothing.
29See Sartre's remark: “ce qui sépare l'antérieur du postérieur c'est précisément rien.” L'Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1977) 64. Before Sartre, Augustine said, “Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet, if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.” Confessions 11.14 (trans. Henry Chadwick; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 231. See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. Joan Stambaugh; New York: SUNY, 1996) 391.
and
: The Greeks saw in this chronological experience of time the mythical figure of Kronos or Saturn, the god who devours his children. Nothing could be farther removed from the eschatological spirit than this view.
Against this concept of time as
(the passing of time) stands a different understanding of temporality as
. If chronological time is seen in a horizontal way, that is, as sequence and duration,
could be represented as vertical and discontinuous. If
is measured in minutes, seconds, hours, and years,
cannot be measured at all, since it occurs only in the moment. What we call here “the moment” is none other than that which has been known as the Augenblick
30Here are some key references to the concept of the “moment” (Augenblick) from Heidegger, Being and Time: “The moment brings existence to the situation and discloses the authentic ‘there’” (319). “The present, as the moment, discloses the today authentically” (362); “the moment that lies in resoluteness” (353). Der Augenblick is Luther's translation of Paul's “twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:51), which undoubtedly belongs to an eschatological context.
. For even if it were possible to put all the kairological moments together, that still would not give us any measurable sense of
, since each moment of
(contrary to different units of time) is, in a unique way, always the same, in the sense that it recurs in repetition. This is evident in how the church presents liturgically events of the past (such as the birth of Christ, his crucifixion, etc.) as always taking place “today”—a survey of the hymns of the church will show that the church knows of no other temporal category than this “today.”
31“The Virgin today gives birth to the one who is beyond being” (from the
of the feast of the Nativity); “today the nature of the waters is being sanctified” (second
of the feast of the Epiphany; “today is lifted on the tree he who suspended the earth among waters” (
of Good Friday's passion service). The examples, of course, abound.
The Concept of Anxiety (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 90. However, there are times in Kierkegaard's analysis of repetition that his inability to distinguish between repetition as continuity and repetition as recurrence becomes clear. One could protest that we are splitting hairs by pursuing this kind of distinction; I believe, though, that it is essential not to confuse repetition with a crypto-metaphysical sense of eternity. Repetition is not realized by a continuous moment (in the way that eternity is “made up” by the nunc stans), but by a recurring moment.
becomes a little more possible.
In the New Testament, the “when” of the
corresponds to the “how” of the
:
You do not know when the appointed time [
] will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own task; and he orders the man at the gate to watch with a sharp eye. Look around you! You do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether at dusk, at midnight, when the cock crows, or at early dawn. Do not let him come suddenly [
] and catch you asleep. (Mark 13:33–36)
, as it is solely on the basis of this term that the connection among eschatology, incarnation, and liturgy depends. The passage from the
to the
marks a passage from temporality to phenomenality: '
is commonly translated as “suddenly,” and thus, as a term that denotes a temporal category. Its etymology, however, implies the phenomenality of appearing out of the invisible or the unapparent (
=out of;
=the invisible). The term occurs for the first time in Plato's Parmenides (156d–e) as a third category that defies all binary oppositions according to which metaphysics operates. We also find it in Plotinus's Enneads (e.g., 5.3, 17, 36;6.7, 36, 19–20) and in the Neoplatonic successors of Plato in the Academy (e.g., Damascius the Diadochos, in his Dubitationes et solutiones de primis principiis). Fascinating as the philosophical development of this term might be, we cannot follow it further here; what interests us instead is the usage of the
by Christianity as a technical term that punctuates three different “moments”: The enfleshment of the Word, the coming of the kingdom, and the celebration of the Eucharist in history (and thus we part ways with the exclusively existential understanding of Rudolf Bultmann's kairological eschatology
33Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957).
and all three are to some extent referenced in the New Testament (although these connections continue to occur in texts well beyond scripture
34Alexander Golitzin mentions—besides Dionysius—the Acts of Thomas, Athanasius's Life of Anthony, and Ephrem the Syrian's Hymns on Nature and Hymns on Paradise. An examination of these texts allows Golitzin to conclude with the following words: “thus, again, we find the term linked with the mystical vision, Christ, light, and the liturgies of both heaven and earth.” “ ‘Suddenly, Christ:’ The Place of Negative Theology in the Mystagogy of Dionysius Aeropagites,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia (ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) 24. Beyond the milieu of early Christian literature, one finds frequent references to the
as an indicator of the divine in the work of Philo of Alexandria (especially in De somniis, quod deus sit immutabulis, De sacrificiis Abelis et Caini and De mutatione nominum). For a recent treatment of the relevant passages, see Jean-Lous Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped for (trans. Jeffrey Bloechl; New York: Fordham University Press, 2002) 99–118.
with the
; Luke 2:13 relates the
with the moment of Jesus' birth
35The entire Third Letter of Dionysius the Aeropagite attests to the relation of
with the incarnation. Here is Dionysius's Third Letter in its entirety: “ ‘Suddenly’ [
] means that which has come forth unexpectedly and from the hitherto invisible into manifestation. And I think that here theology is suggesting the philanthropy [i.e., the divine economy] of Christ. The supere-ssential has proceeded out of hiddenness to become manifest to us by becoming a human being. Yet he is also hidden, both after the manifestation, and, to speak more divinely, even within it. For this is the hidden of Jesus, and neither by rational discourse, nor by intuition can his mystery be explained. But instead even when spoken, it remains ineffable, and when conceived, unknowable.” (Translation by Golitzin, modified).
in the New Testament are found in the book of Acts (9:3 and 22:6), both times describing the light that blinded Paul on his way to Damascus:
36For an analysis of the
in these texts, see Golitzin, “Suddenly, Christ.”
As he traveled along and was approaching Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly (
) flashed about him…. Saul got up from the ground and although his eyes were open he saw nothing. (Acts 9:3, 8)
That light was the light of Christ, or better yet, Christ himself—but notice how this moment of epiphany “out of nothing” (i.e.,
) turns the things-themselves (the visible) into nothing—the very nothing that Paul sees. In the moment of the
, the things-themselves have to retreat, and indeed “disappear,” in order to allow the unapparent and the unseen, (that is, the things-to-come), to show themselves.
The light of the
—of the consummation that has already begun—keeps reaching us at the present; the daybreak of that eighth day, still to dawn, sheds its light on the now, on the momentary and the fleeting, on the ephemeral and the arbitrary, and makes each and every thing visible—while itself remaining invisible.
I speak of light: it is of course an old metaphor but a telling one. As light that illuminates everything renders things visible while it itself remains hidden—or rather it is us who, by seeing only what thus comes to light, remain “blind” to light itself, so our preoccupation with the things-themselves “blinds” us as to the things-to-come, although it is in this expectancy that the things-themselves assume their proper shape and character.
How does, then, the Eucharist defy this blindness? By effecting a reversal. In order to make visible the invisible, that is, in order to make present the future, the Eucharist has to let the visible and the present sink into the background in order to allow what lies there, unnoticed, to become manifest. In other words, if the world in its worldliness were a photograph, the Eucharist would be its negative. It is this insight that Wolfhart Pannenberg elaborates in the following passage:
The eschatological truth is already a present reality even if in hidden form. Thus judgment as well as life is already present with Jesus Christ in the world (John 12:31, 47–48). Similarly the disarming of the forces of this world is already taking place. The hidden present of the eschaton is the present of salvation only for faith, but the truth of things that will be revealed in the future, their true essence that will come to light at the eschaton, generally defines already their present existence even though in one way or another this may still have a radical change ahead of it. Only within a general ontology of the present reality of beings as this is constituted by the eschatological future of its nature do the statements of theology about the eschatological present of salvation achieve full plausibility.37
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 3:605. Emphasis added.
See my article “The Phenomenon of God: From Husserl to Marion” in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (2004) 53–68; and more fully in my God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). On the other hand, however, it has been argued that perspective, by introducing the false impression of a third dimension, destroys the painterly character of the painting which is essentially two-dimensional. Thus, it cancels out the liberating effect brought about by painting, which, in losing the spatiality of three-dimensionality (characteristic of sculpture), freed itself from the constraints of universality. For painting as the “Christian” paradigm of art, effected by the incarnation, see vol. 2 of Georg W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (trans. T. M. Knox; Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
This is the groundbreaking insight of the eschatology of Zizioulas. See “Towards an Eschatological Ontology” (quoted above) and his “'
” in '
(ed. Pantelis Kalaitzidis; Athens: Kastaniotis, 2001).
is like the new wine that cannot be contained in the old wineskins. The old wineskins are none other than the concepts and categories of this world, the thinking process that we are used to and familiar with—let's call it our perspective. If I am Greek, it is the Greek perspective from which I judge the world, and if I were Jewish it would be the Jewish perspective that would become the measure of my judgment—there are many such perspectives that have become canonical over others (the white over the black, the male over the female, and so on), so much so as to lead us to forget that by coming to occupy this privileged locus that our perspective affords us we take up the place reserved for the kingdom, we become our own
and thus, in denying the kingdom of God for the sake of the kingdom of Man, we become the anti-Christ.
Thankfully, there are moments every day when, in anticipation of God's kingdom, our perspectives are confronted and reversed. When this happens—and it does happen—then we speak of a “transformation” (like the one that is undergone by Schönberg's verklärte Nacht) or of a moment of “epiphany” (like the ones described by Joyce). On such occasions, when my perspective is countered, inverted, returned to me, I am no longer the privileged subject that establishes and constitutes the objectivity of the world (the thinghood of the things), but merely a dative; I become the one “to whom” the world, as the world-to-come, is given. For a world can be given only when I make myself available as a receiver, as gifted with the gift of givenness. Without such a change of attitude, without an inverse perspective, without an eschatology, which enables us to receive, there would be no charisma or
, that is, grace, received.
The paradigm of inverse perspective, as exemplified by the Eucharist (where in receiving the gifts we also receive ourselves as gifted), in the hymn (that instead of being comprehended by us becomes amplified in chanting as to comprehend us), and in iconography (where we become the “objects” of the icon's gaze)—in all these cases, the structure of the eschaton is outlined as the future that flows into the present, as the moment that cuts an in-cision in the flux of time and therefore calls for a de-cision. It calls on us to decide either to refuse it or to receive it, either to accept things as they are and let them be what they are (the things-themselves) or to desire things otherwise, as the things-to-come.
Conclusion
This reversal alone is enough to justify placing eschatology at the center of our theologies, as has been the trend in recent years. In order to demonstrate how far-reaching the implications of eschatological thinking are for theology, I offer a number of points by way of conclusion.
1) If eschatology is given the central place that I think it deserves, then ecclesial structures are open to (self-)criticism on the basis of how well they symbolize the
(in Orthodox terminology, we would say “iconize,” that is, become icons of the things-to-come). To the extent that tradition disorients the church from her eschatological expectancy and binds her instead to the present age (the saeculum of secularism), tradition should never be taken as a criterion for determining the church's doctrine and practice. My intention is not to promote the idea of a church without a sense of history and tradition; the emphasis on eschatology aims at striking the right balance between historical continuity on the one hand and the openness to the reversals brought about by the
on the other. History and tradition do institute the church, but it is the coming of the kingdom that constitutes her truth. In this criticism of “tradition for the sake of tradition,” the Orthodox Church has a special place. The Orthodox Church can be seen as a case-study of a church that undercuts her theological future by falling victim to a narcissistic nostalgia for a glorious past. Symptoms of this pathology are to be found in the way theology is done by the majority of Orthodox theologians in the last millennium—a form of patristic Talmudism, a merely philological collection and exegesis of patristic fragments.
2) Eschatology can make significant contributions to our ecumenical efforts. It is interesting to note here that most, if not all, schisms and divisions have taken place for historical reasons. This is certainly the case with the Great Schism between East and West. Where history divides, eschatology unites. Unity in the church should be assessed on the basis of our common eschatological vision. Thus, the ecumenical process is reversed: We should not proceed from the present difficulties and differences towards communion with each other, but should rather begin with the reality of our common hope for a church that will be reunited even though it is presently scattered—precisely as the eucharistic bread was united from the “four winds,” as the Didache reminds us, into the kingdom of God. A church without an ecumenical commitment is a church with a falsified Eucharist, that is, not a church at all.
3) Perhaps nowhere else are the implications of eschatological theology more clearly seen than in the field of ethics. If the truth of things lies not in their past, that is, in their origin, but in their future (“for it is the future—that is, their place in the Kingdom—that gives to each being its true character”
41Zizioulas, “
,” Synaxe 52 (1994) 81–97, at 92.
The reference here is to the paradigm switch introduced by Zizioulas in his “Towards an Eschatological Ontology.” For Zizioulas, following Maximus the Confessor, the cause of a thing is not determined by its beginning and its past but by its end and its future.
After Zizioulas (“Towards an Eschatological Ontology”); also see Douglas Knight's commentary on this text, in his “Zizioulas on the Eschatology of the Person,” in The Future as God's Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) esp. 192–93, as well as his recent treatment of eschatology, The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
For a further discussion on how one could read Genesis eschatologically, see Ilias Papagiannopoulos, '
, (Athens: Indiktos, 2005) 57–90.
) that can be perfect (
). We are “fallen” from the beginning—redeemed only at the end. The metaphor of eschatology, then, is not that of Ulysses returning to his Ithaca, but that of Abraham leaving the land that was familiar to him for the new, the unknown, and the promised. The redefinition of protology inlight of eschatology liberates us from two pathologies: a) theillusion of a past perfection that we enjoined at some immemorial time but have now lost, and b) the nostalgia for a return to this perfect state that was never attained but always already lost. (Here eschatology, in dispensing with these two infantile illusions, assumes a therapeutic role similar to that of psychoanalysis.)
4) Finally, eschatology offers an epistemological lesson in humility with regard to our theological claims about God and ourselves. “If what one ‘is’ is determined not by one's past, but by what one will be in the end, human judgment is irrelevant, since it can only be based on the past. An eschatological ontology would lead to a non-judgmental attitude towards one's fellow men in ontological terms such as stereotypes and permanent characterizations. Every person is entitled to a new identity, to a future.”45
Zizioulas, “Towards an Eschatological Ontology.”
Let me close with a beautiful image that I think summarizes quite well everything that I have been trying to say in this paper. It is from Kierkegaard's Works of Love:
In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other—therein we are indeed different. But in being the neighbor we are all unconditionally like each other. Dissimilarity is temporality's method of confusing what marks every human being differently, but the neighbor is eternity's mark—on every human being. Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity's light when it shines through the dissimilarity.46
S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love (trans. H. Hong and E. Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 89.
What Kierkegaard calls “eternity's equality” is not any different from what I mean by eschatology—for indeed this likeness, the iconic reflection of the divine in each and all of us, shines more fully at the eschaton, but it has always begun to glimmer in the now. It is this glimmer that an eschatologically oriented theology should allow us to see, in other words, what Merold Westphal referred to in one of his essays as the “halo” that we often see emanating from the faces in van Gogh's portraits.47
This was the conclusion of a paper on Jean-LucMarion that Merold Westphal read at The Breakthrough of Phenomenology and Theology Conference organized by Boston University's Philosophy Department on 27 April, 2001. Forthcoming in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
“The crucial point in this discussion is that we ought to deal with the other, not as he appeared yesterday or as he is today, but as who he will be in the future and at the eschaton, namely, as a fellow and as a neighbor in the kingdom. For it is the future—that is, their place in the kingdom—that gives to each being its true character.” Zizioulas, “
,” 92. Zizioulas's commitment to eschatology forces him to distinguish between two ontologies, the protological ontology that is nothing else but the “worldly” attitude, and the eschatological ontology. According to the first, whatever has happened cannot be eradicated or erased; our acts and decisions form our facticity, which is, in this case, tantamount to our being. Thus, even God is constrained by our past. On the other hand, for eschatological ontology (which for Zizioulas is reflected in the Eucharist), it is not the past but the future, unseen, unknown and surprising as it might be, that determines our being and our existence: “the sinner is not ontologically determined by who he was [i.e., a sinner], but by who he will be [i.e., a saint].” See “'
in '
(ed. Pantelis Kalaitzidis; Athens: Kastaniotis, 2001) 43.
