John Panteleimon Manoussakis
The Anarchic Principle of Christian Eschatology:
The Things-themselves and the Things-to-Come
in the Eucharistic Tradition of the Eastern Church
(College of the Holy Cross)
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 not
any more one branch of theology among others but lay at the center of our
understanding of the Christian faith.[2] My purpose in this essay is to go a step
further than this rearrangement in theological discourse and examine a reversal
within the theological understanding of eschatology itself. In the wake of the
work of Zizioulas and Pannenberg a different understanding of eschatology has
come forth, one that recognizes in the Parousia not only the event that stands
at the end of History (the apocalyptic closure of time with which certain
Christian groups have always had a fascination), but also as that event that,
grounded in the Eucharist, flows continuously from the eschata 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 the
Metropolitan of Pergamon John Zizioulas and certain insights that recent
research in phenomenology has placed, as I would like to show, at theology’s
service. This association might seem strange to the reader: what does the
theology of the things-to-come have in common with the philosophy of the
things-themselves? I would like to propose that phenomenology, especially as it
has been recently formulated by a new generation of phenomenologists like
Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Richard Kearney,[3]
can be a very helpful instrument at the hands of eucharistic eschatology in its
effort to rescue eschatology from the twin risks of either immanetizing it or
relegating it to an end-of-times utopia. Furthermore, the structure of an
‘inverted intentionality,’ as exemplified by certain liturgical aspects such as
hymnology and iconography, will be suggested as the precise point of
phenomenology’s convergence with eucharistic eschatology. I write with the
conviction that eschatology is in essence a ‘liberation’ theology (freeing us
from the moral and social constellations of this world) and that, as my
concluding remarks try to summarize, it has real, practical, day-to-day
consequences for the ways we conduct our lives and our relationships with
others.
* * *
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 an undeniable authority as facts,
as the 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 that 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 each institution that they represent, the police, the academy, the market,
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 it is impossible to get rid of
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. Against this archeological
logic the Church retorted with 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.[4]
The reason for our society’s obsession with the past is
the fact that our epistemology is entirely protological (in giving
ontological priority to what 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 Critique of Pure Reason), and experience
is always experience of what has been and has come to pass, what, in other
words, can be measured, observed and written down in files and records like
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 in 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 differently? The beginning
functions as the cause of what has thereby its beginning—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 in the protological paradigm of causality that we 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 what
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 ‘cause’ of the crucifixion. And 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).’[5]
And Jean-Yves Lacoste concurs when he writes that the Hegelian understanding of
History as progress and progression towards the future ‘could only be right,
finally, if the resurrection of the Crucified did not have to be interpreted as
a promise, and was nothing but the meaning of the last fact—of the reconciling
Cross.’[6]
Theologically speaking then, the cause of the things that happen and have
happened lies not in their beginning but ‘in the end’—for they do come from
the kingdom of God, for it is the kingdom that is, properly speaking, their origin.
‘It is not at the beginning (in the morning of consciousness and at the dawn of
history) that man is truly himself.’[7]
For, as Heidegger would say, the beginning determines man and history only
insofar as it ‘remains an advent.’[8]
‘Meaning’ Lacoste writes, ‘comes at the end.’[9]
In this respect, eschatology is anarchic through and through, for it
alone can effect such a radical subversion of the arche: of principles
and beginnings.
Eschatology, as we shall see, reverses the naturalistic,
essentialist and historistic models by making the seemingly improbable claim
that I am not who I am, or even less, 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 (skia) is properly reversed as in the Letter to
the Hebrews (8:5 and 10:1) and in the Colossians (2:16-17): the
shadow now does not follow but rather precedes reality, so that, in Christian
typology, the present condition as the things-themselves is merely an
adumbration of the things-to-come.[10]
This implies, at the very least, that the validity of the things-themselves
depends upon the things-to-come and, therefore, the former have no intrinsic
value of their own.[11]
* * *
I. Christian Eschatology
Most religions share some form of an eschatological vision: more
commonly it is a vision that anticipates the end of the physical world, 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 look away from the narrations of cataclysms
and catastrophes.[12]
The particularity of Christian eschatology, I believe, is best summarized by
three statements (although, it is in no way exhausted in them):
a)
The eschaton is not the End of History,
b)
The eschaton is the
Incarnation, and
c)
The eschaton is the Incarnation
as unfolded in History through the celebration of the Eucharist (we will treat
this last statement on the third part of this essay).
What these three statements have in common is the desire to refuse a
rather dominant tendency in Christian theology of assigning eschatology to a
semi-utopian time at the End of History, 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, the last one.
Similarly then, the talk about the last things comes always 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 today: by relegating eschatology to a realm beyond experience, we have
come up with the perfect alibi for our getting all too comfortable with the
world in its current state. We have found the ideal justification for our
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 Eschaton 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 Eschaton with
an End (the end of the World[13]
or of History), that is, the confusion of the eschaton with the telos.
Eschatology, however, is not a teleology. Such a teleological
eschatology has no place in theology but only in cosmology. The eschaton 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 the unknown but rather on the unknowablility 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.[14] By
doing so, we guarantee history its own freedom. History is then allowed to unfold
in its own ways—without being constrained by a predetermined route, leading to
a predestined outcome. History has no program, and even less a program already
known and given before the ages. That idea would condemn God to boredom and
humanity to a fatalistic passivity. To presume such a right for either God or
for humanity is to turn the eschatological dream into the nightmare of either a
theocratic or a secular totalitarianism.[15]
b). The Eschaton 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 formula of the Fourth Gospel
“the hour is coming and is now here” (John 4:23, 5:25).
John’s eschatology is realized[16]
in the revelation of Christ, or, better yet, inaugurated[17]
by the Word’s coming to the World (the judgment takes place ‘now’: John 12:31
or ‘already’: John 3:18; the resurrection of the dead is also taking place in
the ‘now’: John 5:25). In that, Lacoste is right, I think, to speak of a
‘splitting’ of the end or of the eschaton into two: the eschaton of the
present (at the end of times) and the present of the eschaton (in the
everyday).[18]
Inaugurated eschatology seems to be also the principle through which the author
of the Letter to the Hebrews understands his own times (1:2, 9:26),
while it is not unknown to Paul either (1 Cor. 10:11). Von
Balthasar summarizes it in the following words:
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.[19]
For if it was otherwise, if incarnation was not the
unsurpassable eschaton, one would have been justified in anticipating a time
where I could have a more direct, full, unmediated understanding of the Other.[20]
In anticipation of such a time, however, I begin cheapening (relativizing) my
encounter with this Other, my neighbor, as it is given in the here and
now of everydayness. Such an eschaton beyond incarnation would offer me
the metaphysical alibi to overlook the Other in front of me, to ignore, neglect
or underestimate him/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.
II. 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 in another
occasion, they had ‘devoured the Holy Spirit, feathers and all!’[21]
One could say perhaps that, from Origen to Barth, theology has become almost
exclusively Christocentric, and at times even Christomonistic. There is,
of course, a good reason for that: almost all doctrinal controversies in Church
History, from Arianism to iconoclasm, have been christological. And it is
through such controversies that doctrine and dogma is clarified, defined and
promulgated. Indeed, the creedal definition of Nicea-Constantinople gives only
one line to the Holy Spirit, and an incomplete at that, as it focuses
exclusively on the language of the Old Testament (‘And in the Holy Spirit…who
spoke though the prophets’) with no reference, as one might have expected, to
the role of the Spirit in the New Testament and in the life of the Church.
This forgetfulness of the Spirit by theology and her
domination by Christology (becoming thus a mere logology[22])
has had a number of theological repercussions on ecclesiology and soteriology.
As far as liturgy is concerned, however, the emphasis of our worship on Jesus
Christ (a historical person) and, subsequently, on a series of (historical)
events related with his life on earth (crucifixion, resurrection, ascension)
bound our worship to history and oriented it permanently towards the past. The
original experience of doxology gave its place to the kerygma, our reading of
Scripture became evidential and didactic, even 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 eschata.
After all, pneumatology and eschatology are intimately
interconnected. It is the Spirit that announces the erchomena, the
things-to-come (John 16:13). In a manuscript variation of Luke’s account of the Lord’s prayer,
the phrase ‘you kingdom come’ is replaced by the phrase ‘your Holy Spirit
come.’[23]
The ‘kingdom of God’ is theologically synonymous to ‘the Spirit of God.’ And when Paul
speaks of ‘the spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15:44) he is not using an
oxymoron but simply refers to the eschatological reality of our bodies after
the common resurrection.
One could look for examples of eschatology’s
interrelation with pneumatology in other fields beyond scripture—in Mahler’s 8th
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 that he brings them together by setting them in
music within one single composition, but even more interestingly by exposing
their inner relatedness. For at the very end of the Symphony, as the chorus
mysticus sings in rapture the accomplishment of an eschatological vision[24]
(‘Das Unzulängliche hier wird’s Ereignis, das Unbeschreibliche hier ist’s
getan’), the orchestra repeats tutti the theme of the Symphony’s opening
line: Veni Creator Spiritus.
III. Eucharistic Eschatology
In Eucharist, however, this link between eschatology and
Pneumatology is preserved— most importantly perhaps in the epiclesis.
That makes the Eucharist the most genuinely eschatological event and
eschatology the most authentic interpreter of the Eucharist. It is needless, of
course, 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. The question of
the Eucharist’s eschatological character raises inevitably the question about
the nature of the Eucharist. The
predominant interpretation of the Eucharist—already attested by the Marcian and
Paulian tradition—places at its heart the anamnesis, 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.[25]
Things become even more clear when we turn to the Eucharistic tradition as
recorded in the Didache, where there is no mention of the passion but,
in its place, one finds an acute eschatological awareness (‘…just as this
broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and then was gathered together
and became one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the
earth into your kingdom…’ and again ‘remember you church, Lord…and
gather it, from the four winds into your kingdom which you have prepared
for it…’). These prayers testify to a yearning for the coming of God’s kingdom
that culminates with the eschatological as well as Eucharistic exclamation
‘Maranatha!’[26]
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 and never towards 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 St. Basil the Great and St. 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 ‘blessed is 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 anaphora, 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”?[27]
The Eucharist is thus more of a prolepsis than an
anamnesis, 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 anamnesis
as recollection (essentially a Platonic concept) with anamnesis as
repetition (as Kierkegaard understood it).
The Greeks knew of two different phenomena of temporality that have
come down to us as chronos and kairos. 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 kairos 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[28]).
Chronos 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.[29]
Every present ‘now’ thus comes from nothing and rolls back to nothing. Hence the homonymy between chronos
and Kronos: 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 chronos (the
passing of time) stands a different understanding of temporality as kairos.
If chronological time is seen in a horizontal way, that is, as sequence and
duration, kairos could be represented as vertical and dis-continuous. If
chronos is measured in minutes, seconds, hours and years, kairos
cannot be measured at all, since it occurs only in the moment. What we call
here “the moment” is nothing else but what has been known as the Augenblick[30]
or the Platonic Exaiphnes. For even if it were possible to put all the
kairological moments together that still would not give us any measurable sense
of kairos, since each moment of kairos (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]
Kierkegaard was right to see in repetition a new temporal category—that is to
be juxtaposed over against Platonic recollection. Recollection, he writes,
allows us to ‘enter the eternal backwards,’ while repetition is decisively
futural, or better yet, adventitious, and in its advent-like character pushes
us to ‘enter eternity forwards.’[32]
It is by means of such temporality that the faithful in celebrating the
Eucharist enter God’s kingdom. Every time that Christians gather together
around the altar the kingdom of God comes a little bit closer, the basileia
becomes a little more possible.
In the New Testament the ‘when’ of the kairos corresponds
to the ‘how’ of the exaiphnes:
…you do not know when the appointed time [kairos] 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 [exaiphnes] and catch you
asleep. (Mark 13:33-36)
Allow me to dwell a bit more on the semantics of the term exaiphnes,
as it is solely on this term that the connection among eschatology, incarnation
and liturgy depends. The passage from the kairos to the exaiphnes
marks a passage from temporality to phenomenality: exaiphnes 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 (ex=out of, aphanes=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’ Enneads (e.g., V 3 17
36, VI 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 exaiphnes 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 Bultmann’s
kairological eschatology[33]).
All three events share the same structure, so to speak, of the exaiphnes
and all three are to some extent referenced in the New Testament (although
these connections continue to occur in texts well beyond scripture[34]):
the first is Mark 13:36, that we have already quoted, which links the exaiphnes
with the eschaton; Luke 2:13 relates the exaiphnes with the moment of
Jesus’ birth[35] and in particular with the so-called ‘celestial liturgy’ of the angels; the other two
occurrences of the exaiphnes in the New Testament are found in the book of the Acts
(9:3 and 22:6), both times describing the light that blinded Paul on his way to
Damascus[36]:
As he traveled along and was approaching Damascus, a light from the
sky suddenly (exaiphnes) 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., exaiphnes)
turns the things-themselves (the visible) into nothing—the very nothing that
Paul sees. In the moment of the exaiphnes 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 eschaton—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 futural, 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]
The future is
present in the present, hidden like the mustard seed in the soil (Matt. 13:31)
and thus, already underway to its surprising transformation. The
things-themselves, therefore, can be opened up so as to expose ‘hidden in them’
the things-to-come only by a means of radical reversal—what I have
called elsewhere, following Levinas and Marion, ‘an inverted intentionality’
analogous to the inverted perspective that characterizes the Byzantine icons.[38]
The invention of perspective by Late Medieval thinkers and Renaissance artists
gave rise to modernity, subjectivity and the Enlightenment.[39]
This is the point made by Karsten Harries in his Infinity and Perspective.
And I would like to say that it is this very notion of perspective that has
distorted in a decisive way our understanding of eschatology. A genuine
eschatology operates by surprise, in allowing a counter-movement of history,
not only toward the kingdom but also from the kingdom.[40]
This structure of counter-movement in the flux of History needs to be paired on
the personal level with a counter-movement of perception and understanding. The
from-the-kingdom movement that runs against the forward current of pro-gress,
but also propels it by exercising an irresistible attraction towards itself,
has as its aim the disarmament of our predictability, that is, our prejudice.
The eschaton is like the new wine that cannot be contained in the old wineskins
because we all know what happens then. The old wineskins are nothing else but
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 a
Jewish it would be the Jewish perspective that becomes 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 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 eschata 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 everyday that, 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). When this
happens, when my perspective is countered, inversed, 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 this ‘to whom’ the world, as the world-to-come, is given. For only then
can be there a world given, when I make myself available as a receiver, as
gifted with the gift of givenness (need I remind us that the ‘energies’ of the
Holy Spirit are always characterized as gifts?) Without such a change of
attitude, without an inverse perspective, without an eschatology, which enables
us to receive, there would be no charisma or charis, that is, grace
received.
The paradigm of inverted 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 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.
IV. Conclusion
This reversal
alone is enough to justify placing eschatology—as it has happened in recent
years—in the center of our theologies. 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 eschata (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
deciding 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 eschata 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 study-case 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 begin from the present difficulties and
differences towards communion with each other, but with the reality of our
common hope for a Church that will be reunited although 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’[41]),
then eschatology necessitates a re-examination of protology. If the kingdom
holds the final word about who we are, about our identity, because it alone is
the cause of every thing,[42]
then sin and evil should be redefined, not as a deviation from a supposedly
perfect beginning—as in the traditional language of the ‘fall’—but as a
‘failing’ to become who we are expected to be.[43]
As a result of this shift in emphasis, from the past to the future, eschatology
shows that there could have never been such a perfect, Paradisian state at the
beginning, because that would have rendered the kingdom of God superfluous.[44]
The beginning as beginning cannot claim perfection; it is only the end (the telos)
that can be perfect (teleion). 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 in light of eschatology liberates us from two
pathologies: a) the illusion 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]
Let me close these thoughts 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]
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]
But in order to see it, we have to hold each person up, as Kierkegaard advices
us, to the light that shines from a future unknown and unseen, refusing thus to
decide about the definite being and the definition of the person on the grounds
of who he or she is or has been. The truth of the other is not determined by the
things-themselves but by the wonderfully unpredictable and surprising
things-to-come.[48]
Notes
[1] An earlier version of this paper was delivered on February 2, 2006
at Yale Divinity School.
[2] This change of orientation in theological thinking is usually set
in the year 1900 with the second publication of J. Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu
vom Reich Gottes. It was, then, carried out by a number of German
Protestant theologians (A. Schweitzer, P. Althaus, E. Troeltsch and, of course,
K. Barth among others) before it spread among Roman Catholic circles both in
France (H. de Lubac, J. Daniélou) and in Germany (K. Rahner).
[3] All of the three authors engage, each at 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 that is the case). None of them, however, draws the concrete
conclusions that we formulate here. Marion treats the eschatological character
of the Eucharist in his God Without Being (in particular pp. 169-176)
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)
is closer to us here but his preoccupations against Heidegger and Hegel give an
altogether different color to his discussion. Needless, of course, to say that
their work remains crucial to this study.
[4] 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 refused 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, and 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 exhausted 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 reason, but because of the fundamental
difference in their orientation: 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.
[5] Metropolitan of Pergamon John D. Zizioulas ‘Towards an
Eschatological Ontology,’ unpublished paper delivered at King’s College in
1999, (p. 7 in the ms).
[6] Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed
Questions on the Humanity of Man, Mark Raftery-Skehan (trans.), (New York:
Fordham Univeristy Press, 2004), p.138).
[7] Ibid., p. 137.
[8] ‚Der Anfang bleibt als Ankunft.’ Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry,
Keith Hoeller (trans.), (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 195.
[9] Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 137.
[10] John D. Zizioulas, ‘Towards an Eschatological Ontology.’
[11] What is implied here is the Lutheran doctrine of the ‘orders of
creation’ (Schöpfungsordung) 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 Ordungen 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’
(that would imply a permanent validity) to ‘orders of preservation’, making
them, thus, part of the transient scheme of this world that has its
justification only in relation to the eschaton (see, Creation and Fall,
translated by Douglas Stephen Bax, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997, p. 140).
The same notion is expressed by Bonhoeffer’s eschatological concept of the
‘penultimate’ (see, Ethics, translated by Reinhard Krauss, Charles C.
West, and Douglas W. Stott, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005, p. 160ff).
[12] 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,
David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot (eds.), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), p.
130 and also his Preface to The Coming of God: Christian
Eschatology, Margaret Kohl (trans.), (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996),
p. xi.
[13] It is highly problematic, I think, to speak of the ‘end of the
world’ from a Christian perspective. The Revelation, in all its apocalyptic
imagery, presents us with the transformation of the world and its renewal
(‘Behold, I make all things new,’ 21:5) but not with its annihilation or
destruction. It is questionable if the world as God’s creation can be
destroyed, especially after the event of the Incarnation, given that God has
united the world with Godhead in the human nature of Christ as the doctrine of
the Ascension would imply.
[14] Wolfhart Pannenberg regards these eschatologies as fundamentally
anti-Christian and thus as structures of the anti-Christ (see, Systematic
Theology, vol. III, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998, p. 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.
[15] To remember Levinas, ‘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, see Totality and Infinity:
An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
Press, 1969), p. 22. And as he writes later, ‘When man truly approaches the
Other he is uprooted from history’ (ibid., p. 52).
[16] See, Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel of John and Epistles of John:
A Concise Commentary, (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1988), p. 19.
[17] See, Georges Florovsky, ‘Bible, Church, Tradition’ (volume I of the
Collected Works), (Vaduz: Belmont, 1987), pp. 35-6.
[18] Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, p. 138.
‘Reconciled existence’ Lacoste writes in 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 the 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, John Panteleimon Manoussakis (ed.), (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2006), pp. 3-20.
[19] Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological
Aesthetics, vol. I: Seeing the Form, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis
(trans.), (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998, p. 301-2).
[20] Paul’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 tempore, i.e., the Other in the
person, will also be the eschatological manifestation of the personal Other sub
specie aeternitate (cf. Acts, 1:11).
[21] Martin Luther, ‘On the Councils and the Church,’ LW 41-114
and ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets,’ LW 40:83, both passages as quoted
by Jaroslav Pelican in Bach Among the Theologians, (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1986), pp. 7-8.
[22] Sergius Bulgakov uses the term rather contemptuously (see, The
Comforter, translated by Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), in a
different sense is used by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology
(see, Christ the Center, translated by E. H. Robertson, San Franscisco:
Harper, 1978).
[23] In particular, uncial codex 162 and 700, also attested by Marcion
and Gregory of Nyssa (PG 44, 1157).
[24] It is of interest, I think, to read how Mahler himself understands
those closing lines of Goethe’s Faust, in helping us to understand the
eschatological character that permeates them. As Mahler writes 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 8th
Symphony by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 23, 2004).
[25] There 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).
[26] The Apostolic Fathers J. B. Lightfoot and KJR. Harmer
(trans.), (Grand Rapids: Baker Books. 1989), pp. 154-5.
[27] This is only one of the many instances in the Eucharistic prayer
that an experience, and not any more 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.
[28] For an assessment of their eschatologies see J. Moltmann, The
Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, Margaret Kohl (trans.),
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), pp.7-13).
[29] See Sartre’s remark: ‘ce qui
sépare l’antérieur du postérieur c’est
précisément rien’ (L’Être et le Néant,
p. 64). Before Sartre, Augustine had said, ‘But the two
times, past and future, how can they be, since the past is no more and
the future is not yet? On the other hand, if the present were always present
and never flowed away into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity.
But if the present is only time, because it flows away into the past, how can
we say that it is? For it is, only because it will cease to be. Thus we
can affirm that time is only in that it tends towards not-being.’ (Confessions,
XI, xiv, p. 219) See also, M. Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by
Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York, 1996), p. 391.
[30] Here
are some key references to the concept of the ‘moment’ (Augenblick) from
Being and Time: ‘The Moment brings existence to the situation and
discloses the authentic “There”’ (p. 319). ‘The present, as the Moment,
discloses the today authentically’ (p. 362), ‘…the Moment that lies in
resoluteness…’ (p. 353). Der Augenblick is Luther’s translation of
Paul’s ‘twinkling of an eye’ (I Cor. 15:51) that undoubtedly belongs to an
eschatological context.
[31] “The Virgin today gives birth to the one who is beyond
being” (from the kontakion of the feast of the Nativity); “today
the nature of the waters is being sanctified” (second idiomelon of the
feast of the Epiphany; “today is lifted on the tree He who suspended the
earth among waters” (antiphonon of Good Friday’s Passion service). The
examples, of course, abound.
[32] The Concept of Anxiety, (Howard V. Hong και Edna H. Hong, trans.,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 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.
[33] R. Bultmann, History and Eschatology, (Edinburgh, T&T
Clark, 1957).
[34] Golitzin mentions—besides Dionysius—the Acts of Judas Thomas,
Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, and Ephrem the Syrus’ 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’; see, ‘ “Suddenly, Christ”: The Place of Negative Theology in the
Mystagogy of Dionysius Aeropagites,’ in Mystics: Presence and Aporia,
Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (eds.), (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2003), p. 24. Beyond the milieu of early Christian literature, one finds
frequent references to the exaiphnes 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, Jeffrey Bloechl
(trans.), (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 99-118.
[35] The entire Third Letter of Dionysius the Aeropagite attests
to the relation of the exaiphnes with the Incarnation. Here is Dionysius’ Third
Letter in its entirety: ‘ “Suddenly” [exaiphnes] 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 superessential 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.’
[36] For an analysis of the exaiphnes in these texts, see
Alexander Golitzin, “Suddenly, Christ”
(cited above).
[37] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic
Theology, vol. III, p. 605, emphasis added.
[38] See, ‘The Phenomenon of God: From Husserl
to Marion’ in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 78:1
(2004), pp. 53-68.
[39] Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: 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
loosing the spatiality of three-dimensionality (representative of sculpture),
freed itself from the constraints of universality. For painting as a the
“Christian” paradigm of art, effected by the Incarnation, see, G.W. Hegel, Aesthetics:
Lectures on Fine Art, vol. II, T.M. Knox (trans.), (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975).
[40] This is the groundbreaking insight of the eschatology of the
Metropolitan of Pergamon John Zizioulas, see ‘Towards an Eschatological
Ontology’ (quoted above) and his ‘Church and the Eschaton’ (in Greek) in Church
and Eschatology, Pantelis Kalaitzidis (ed.), (Athens: Kastaniotis
Publishers, 2001).
[41] Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas), ‘Eucharist and the
Kingdom of God’ in Synaxis (in Greek), issue 52 (1994): 81-97, at 92.
[42] The reference here is to the paradigm switch introduced by the
Metropolitan of Pergamon John 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.
[43] After John D. Zizioulas (‘Towards an Eschatological Ontology’);
also see the commentary on this text provided by Douglas Knight, in his
‘Zizioulas on the Eschatology of the Person,’ The Future as God’s Gift:
Explorations in Christian Eschatology, D. Fergusson and M. Sarot
(eds.), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
2000), in particular pp. 192-3.
[44] For a further discussion on how one could read Genesis
eschatologically, see Ilias Papagiannopoulos, Beyond Absence: An Essay on
the Human Person on the Track of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Athens:
Indiktos, 2005, pp. 57-90 (in Greek).
[45] John D. Zizioulas, ‘Towards an Eschatological Ontology’ (p. 13 in
the ms.).
[46] Works of Love, p. 89.
[47] This was the conclusion of a paper on Marion that Prof. Westphal
read at The Breakthrough of Phenomenology and Theology Conference
organized by Boston University’s Philosophy Department on April 27, 2001.
Forthcoming in the International
Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
[48] ‘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 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.’ Metropolitan of Pergamon John (Zizioulas), ‘Eucharist
and the Kingdom of God’ in Synaxis (in Greek), issue 52 (1994): 81-97,
at 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, ‘Church and the Eschaton’ (in
Greek) in Church and Eschatology, Pantelis Kalaitzidis (ed.), (Athens:
Kastaniotis Publishers, 2001), p. 43.
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