Straining Towards the Eschaton
Theses towards a theology of history
History might be described as the struggle of the world to reach the eschaton. In the eschaton is history’s fulfillment and history’s end: in being fulfilled at the end of time, history will also be abolished. Which is also to say that the world’s struggle will cease—struggle itself will be abolished. History is the movement of a world still beset by internal separations, which amount to that world’s manifold separations from itself. Thus, history is the world’s struggle against itself, towards its end or fulfillment—the eschaton. And because the eschaton is the abolition of all struggle, it is the abolition of all those separations that are at the root of struggle. The eschaton is the moment at which all things formerly separated from and at war with one another are reconciled into a great unity, the All or the Universal. In the eschaton is abolished the separation of man from man, of nation from nation, of individual from society, of particular from universal, of Church from State, of Man from God, etc. In the eschaton, all men become one, all peoples become one, individual and society become one, Church and State become one, and Man and God become one. The world of the eschaton is not this world of separations, but One World: a universal theocracy, so to speak, in which every man is the God-Man.
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The eschaton begins with Jesus Christ. The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word is the mystery of the end of history. Jesus Christ is the end, or the beginning of the end, of history. He is the Last Man, the God-Man, the Prince of Peace, the Omega, the embodiment of the reunification of individual and universal, the living substance of the All wrapped in the body of one creature. In Christ, the separation of God and Man, of part from whole—and therefore every other separation—is healed and reconciled, and becomes instead an unbreakable and substantial Unity. As soon as Christ entered the world, the kingdom of God was already present. It had only to enfold and envelop the human race in its inexorable grasp. The rest, as they (do not) say, is (the end of) history.
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If history is struggle, and if Christ is the one who ends history, then Christ is to be declared the absolute victor of all struggle. The Prince of Peace is the warrior who ends all wars. To all other warriors, to the princes of this world, the onset of Peace is terrifying, as a war that they cannot win. And this is true, but not simply because of some banal principle such as that violence can only be overcome by greater violence. Rather, it is because from the standpoint of violence in the world of separations, peace and unity will always have the appearance of an enemy, and thus the appearance of violence. To a world of hate, even love itself is hateful. Christ as the last warrior overcomes all struggle and warfare by being the incarnation of Peace itself. He sends the violence of his Peace upon the world, paradoxically, by offering himself up as a victim of the world’s own violence, thereby proving in some manner that he himself owns even that violence. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, including that whereby he himself suffers the punishment due to humanity for its sins. That is, he turns the violence of the world upon itself as embodied in himself, becoming at once the agent and the patient of all violence, at once the conqueror and the defeated. It is only thus that he negates all violence (negates all negation), and is therefore Absolute Victor, and Peace incarnate.
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The destiny of the victors of all historical struggle is to become other Christs (alteri Christi), new instances of the God-Man, re-Incarnations. To be numbered among the ultimate victors of historical struggle, one must pass through the initatic rites whereby one is vested with the spiritual garments of Christ’s warriorhood. But this warriorhood is not only spiritual, just as Christ was not only God but man. In Christ, the separation between the spiritual and the temporal is healed. The warriors of Christ therefore are not solely concerned with spiritual warfare as something over and against material warfare. They are equally concerned with the conquest of matter and the reunification of matter with spirit. Physical warfare ultimately has meaning only in this broader context of the disciplining of the flesh and its reintegration with spirit as one harmonious whole. For this reason, it is not only necessary to pass through the Christian rites of initiation, being signed with the seal of spiritual warriorhood. It is also necessary to undergo the rigorous purgation of the Christian ascetical life, which involves the chastisement of the body—a warfare against rebellious flesh—as much as of the spirit. Like the training of an athlete, this asceticism makes the Christian warrior strong, able to do battle against the prince of this world even up to death. It makes him able to endure death itself, so much that death itself is no longer defeat to him, but victory, as Christ’s death was victory. In imitation of Christ, the Christian warrior turns the violence of the world upon itself, making himself both the agent and the victim—and going out to conquer the world by leading it likewise to imitate Christ.
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The eschaton heralds the triumph of a new, final, and universal society. Whereas societies and nations remain separated from one another as long as history continues, the end of history entails the ultimate and irrevocable gathering of all societies into one complete and universal society. In other words, the eschaton is the triumph of the Church over the world, and the final incorporation of the world into the Church—the gathering of all that was scattered and separate into a single social unity, which is constituted by a shared identity in Christ.
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The “separation of Church and State” was a senseless notion as soon as the Word of God became incarnate in human flesh. It is a concept utterly foreign to the end of history that is brought on by Christ, who heals all such separations. Before Christ, God and Caesar were often in conflict, and the nations rebelled and sought after false gods. Yet as long as God had not revealed himself to all peoples, this was an inevitable tragedy. But after Christ, they no longer had any excuse—not only because God had at last revealed himself to all the peoples, but also because Christ claimed the universal privileges of Caesar for himself. This is the riddle of Christ’s answer to the Pharisees: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Christ, being both God and Man, was therefore also both God and Caesar. The eschatological model of government is that of a theocracy.
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The separation of man from man has beset the human race ever since the first sin was committed. But it takes different forms at different times and places, showing a development of its own that corresponds to each stage of historical progress towards the eschaton—as if, with each step that the world takes towards unity and universality, the forces of strife and discord rebel only more violently. Hence, though it may initially appear discouraging in the extreme, it should not come as any great surprise that in our hyper-modern world characterized by a greater connectivity amongst the whole human race than has ever been achieved before, humanity at the same time suffers (arguably) from a deeper alienation and sense of isolation than ever before. The analysis of capitalist political economy provided by Karl Marx sheds some light on this paradox, though it requires some adjustment to the new conditions of the 21st century; but in general it is clear that capitalism exhibits two contradictory but mutually reinforcing tendencies: greater concentration and centralization of the productive process (including the process of “social reproduction”) on the one hand, and the increasing alienation of humanity and the dissolution of the more intimate social bonds on the other hand. The coexistence of these seemingly contradictory tendencies can be understood from an even broader perspective than that of political economy, such as the perspective of philosophical biology: the higher organization of life makes use even of death and decomposition. Indeed, in the material world, life is in some ways even a cause of death, which in turn supports and serves life. Death appears to be an essential part of the evolutionary process. Things fall apart in order to be gathered back into a higher unity, approaching by gradations a more rational unity, even the unity of pure spirituality. If this is true on the biological plane of the evolution of species, it is also true on the plane of human social evolution. Phases of higher social organization will sometimes be accompanied by, and even give rise to, deeper and more devastating forms of social decomposition. But we may expect that such phases of decomposition will only serve to pave the way for an even more intense reorganization of society in the next phase. What precisely that will look like and when the evolutionary process will come to an absolute end is not easy to say. However, from a theological and eschatological point of view, we can be quite certain that it will end. The eschaton will bring an end to human alienation; and therefore, as history approaches the eschaton, those forms of social organization and political economy which cause such alienation will necessarily meet their end as well.
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Even though we have just stated that it is difficult to know what the end state will look like, we can still know the rather banal truth that it will not be capitalist. Capitalism is simply incompatible with the universal connectivity of mankind under that will be achieved in the theocratic end state. Will that end state therefore be communist? This would be saying too much, for we cannot be too sure that new forms of alienation and separation would not appear under communism as under capitalism. However, we can perhaps have reasonable confidence that some point in the future will be communistic, or something like it, if only because we know that it cannot be capitalist forever. (Arguably, it is already no longer capitalist, though the vestiges of capitalism’s alienating effects still remain.) We don’t know if that will be quite the end of history.
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Communism itself is not sufficient to describe the absolute endpoint of human development that must one day be achieved when history reaches its terminus. For communism, without an absurd change in definition, cannot entirely account for the emergence of the God-Man and the transformation of every man into this God-Man. This is a metaphysical transformation of consciousness that far exceeds what can be achieved by a mere transformation of material conditions, which is all that is described by the revolutionary transformation of the means of production and the move from capitalism into communism. To be sure, material changes account for much in the progress of human consciousness towards universality; but they cannot account for the ultimate and absolute achievement of universal and divine consciousness. Indeed, in a manner of speaking, the achievement of this divine consciousness is contingent upon precisely the attainment of freedom from material conditions in the first place—a freedom which can only be attained at the end of history. It is a destiny that rests upon becoming freed from the materialistic constraints of history itself. To be historical is to be constrained by matter, and thus bound by a kind of materialism; but to dwell in the end of history is to be Spirit, Divine, free from matter, and Master over matter.