A political-theological work on eternity, in dedication to the legacy of Reiner Schürmann

Premissa Propositio

Once upon a time there were human beings,
and they lived happily ever after…

Being

I like being with everyone so much. We are nothing but each other’s happiness.
We are not time, and the future does not matter if one grasps the eternal moment.

God

We don’t fear God anymore,
and this is the cause of our benothinging.

Life and Death

Where we feared God, we felt death.
Without the feeling of death, and thus without God,
reality became an unreality in the name of the ‘real’.
Let us turn towards life and death again.

Introduction: Time and Eternity

The future: whose time is allowed to cast it? Which time matters? For if the future is a time, it must be measured! But what if time is just bad eternity? Aye! If that were so, there would be no need for all its categories of measure. With no time, there is no future, no pessimism or optimism, no progress or decline. Time is the judge and the telos. But eternity, not even opposed, but wholly affirmed, is always (all ways), the good forever affirmed. Aye!

Science Won’t Save Us…

You can learn all the science you want, but things of ‘reason’ and ‘cause’ have their ends. You can learn all the science you want: it won’t make you a ‘good’ person! How you ought to live and how we ought to live with one another have little to do with it, at least not in the sense that there is some rigid moral order: ‘if only we could just find it’. No! What did Heidegger learn when he closed the case on Being? Ahh! What a blunder! The only morality is thus: leave open the question of being; be worthy of it. If not, in any moment of distress (and each moment is always distressed at some scale), we devastate and resent. But science could never allow such ‘open mindedness’. Those scientists are detectives – always closing cases. Unfortunately so, for it will be our permanent openness, truly wide-eyed and guileless, that saves us.

…but Religion

Let us say our future will be met with disaster. It doesn’t matter how, but let us say there is significant distress on people that causes mass migration and mass unrest (this is already our plight, no?). What will likely happen then? The destitute will intrude upon ‘privately owned’ resources. They will ‘steal’ and ‘illegally’ cross borders. State forces will produce additional crises. They will protect property owners and their borders. Here’s my solution to doomsday, and this is my answer for any doomsday – imagine the worst as you like! My solution is stupid and simple: be Christian.

Christianity?

I don’t fear our ‘time’ and its supposed travesties. I fear people. I fear those with any interest in the future of the human being. I fear the minds of metaphysics and the sciences. That amounts to saying I fear their instrumentalism, theticism, and reason. With metaphysics and science, one can benothing anything, even nothing! To think the vulgar, bastardized children’s games of what are called economics and international relations could ever be called science. Everywhere realism manifests itself is a moral void, but a moral void does not make a science, despite too many at university being taught just that! When veritable plight arrives, the ‘scientist’ will reach the telos of their ‘rational mind’ and become an inhuman brute (that is, a ‘scientific consequentialist’, and the supposed ‘social’ scientist already doctrinally is this brute), but the righteous will not succumb to laying waste to this earth ‘in the name of…’. The latter will suffer as true Christians do. They will not dehumanize. They will sacrifice in absolute self-denial. They refuse to benothing a thing, even nothing! For all is creature of God, nothing in itself, but God.

Christianity

Should there still be history and should we have regret for adding a few more ‘cides’ to this history, we will see we’ve learned nothing throughout it. The Christian: murdered like a sickly and stupid mutant in our darkest moments, exalted posthumously.

Religion I

Christianity is somewhat a case, and the above could be written for a number of well-established religions. Most religions, it is true, may lead us out from that abyss of self-certainty in metaphysics and science (that includes their uncertainty!). Most religions may teach us to find God and ultimately the Godhead. It is religion that makes us who we are, for it strips us of everything and gives us nothing else.

Religion II

But let me stop with the nonsense! I’ll be homely, earnest, and even a realist if it suits you. A practical example is what you want! Why should we place faith over logic and technology? Where have these latter brought us, us having once been so firmly rooted by faith? Why is it Leftists, typically well-educated and privileged by their own measures, demonize the religious? Leftists have criticized religion (and outright persecuted the religious) for being bourgeois. Yes! The thing that unites most of the global destitute and powerless is bourgeois! This has been Leftists’ greatest failure, the one thing for which they most greatly need to atone.

Religion III

I will only give a partial answer to what religion ‘is’. For now, I will say this: we are to love others as oneself, but our truths are only our own. To be a religious one, is to live in truth, which has no reference or ‘for’ beyond itself. The child is the truth. Children have no reason for anything that they do (any answer they may give to the contrary is only intellectual, a mediator introduced only in retrospect, or a forced and thus false confession), yet they know exactly what they ought to be doing, and they do it without reference to anything external. They do not mediate. Whether we cite Jesus or Nietzsche, the (Dionysian) child is the religious one. Jesus invites us to be a child of God as he himself is a child of God.

Bad Religion

However, undeniably there are those who claim to be religious – in name only! They are likely the majority. Religion would not be so off-putting otherwise. Allow me simply to point to where I am worried. Beware the rise of conservative Evangelical Christianity (the world’s fastest growing ‘religion’), and anything that resembles it in other religions.

Eternity: Antithesis for a Non-Future

Kairos

As I say, there is no good future for that entails calculative ethics, ‘bad timing’. But there is still a good time: the kairos, the magnum tempus. But this ‘time’ is eternal, something that therefore has no past and no future as no action acted and no disposition disposed is either past or future. It can fall into no schema. The kairos only presents itself and is indeed always present. What it requires is simply its eternal affirmation. Aye! Most simply, the eternal affirmation means, no matter the time, no matter the circumstance, make all times good times.

Eutopia

The kairos relates essentially to a faultless disposition – the child’s disposition. Eutopia – the good place – is the complement of the good time. We ought always to have a good time regardless of place. Eutopia concerns what one calls the political or the social (which are both incorrect terms for the environmental). For the religious one, eutopia concerns the religious ‘some’ (which is ultimately a plural singlularity or ‘one’). Every good religious thinker knows that what is needed is permanence, or eternity. Thus, production in the good place must be indefinitely sustainable, without environmental consequence. Eternity is perhaps today the more challenging aspect of eutopia, as we live in a place that functions according to its near opposite, but it is not the only aspect.

The other is perhaps a conceptual impossibility and is thus better described through the history of several terms rather than any concept on its own. Take several groups of words: whole, healthy, and holy, on the one side, and host, gast, hospodar, and heer on the other side. These seem to have never been conceptually combined, although they are clearly combined without word (and perhaps this is for the best; the Orthodox theologian knows that all the conceptual understanding in the world is infinitely inferior to experience, nothing without pódvyh). What is wholesome became what is holy and revered. Host in English means a servant of guests: devoid of its capitalist misappropriation, one who is religiously welcoming or loving, if you like. Guest (gast in Dutch or German) has the same origin as host. In Italian, host and guest are the same word, ospite. Guest and host are thus essentially the mirror of one another: one is both a host and guest. In other cultures, one who is host is the Lord himself. In many places in Eastern Europe, this is either Gospodar or Hospodar (note the fluctuation between the ‘g’ and the ‘h’). In Dutch and German, host is heer, which also refers to the Lord (Dutch: de Heer). Thus, the most holy, is also the one who is host and guest. Strangely, an unrelated term captures this connection between wholesomeness and hospitality, and even sounds almost as if it were connected, hygge in Danish and Norwegian. Hygge originates in thinking and reflecting (Old Norse, hyggja, is ‘to think’; the modern Icelandic verb for ‘to think’ is hugsa), and again unrelated, Heidegger has elsewhere shown that thinking is thanking, a commemoration, and a feast (gedenken). Finally, if we really wish, we may also include ‘economy’, or oikos, which essentially refers to ‘homemaking’ or ‘family-making’.

All of these terms should be reflected in eutopia, and thus, the topos is good in that it is eternal, wholesome (as all are host and guest), and holy, for it is known that what is wholesome and hospitable comprises the intelligible whole of the highest good.

Just words! Yes? I only say thus: eutopia is no intellectual exercise. Become these words in action and in person and see how we settle into eternal life.

The Person

We exist amongst innumerable human beings and things, but where are the people? Place someone conceptually or numerically and they are nothing. Give them a name and a history and they become sacred. To ensure eutopia, one must abandon the concept and the quantity (i.e., calculation) and experience relations. Relations are simply real. We all have them. We call those in these relations friends and family. Many people also extend their relations to their communities or nations, that is, to a people. Alas, the person is absent! Look around you in this very moment. You are almost certainly in a building built by unknowns, which is filled with things made by unknowns, whose materials were also made by unknowns, and the things from which those materials derive is equally unknown. There is no eternity if one does not see the person in the thing and the thing as a person. Maxims for maintaining the ‘personhood of the world’ are two. One, the economic, is know who produced something and how (including with what). All being has a history, and all else is incomparably secondary. Two, the philosophical, is see things singularly, not conceptually as species, genus, ethnicity, statistic, etc. The life and death of the single person inherently resonates. Thinking is a thanking, and this is displayed when a loved one passes away or when something momentous (e.g., the birth of a child) occurs. This singular, personal vision must also extend to the earth. Every mineral, plant, and animal must bear the same personal relationship.

Finale: Eternal Life

The last enemy of freedom is chronos. Let us leave it. The call to eternal life is (always) upon us!

Epilogue

A place nearby
the sea in the woods
peaceful and serene
while the world around encroaches
They saw Good within
They knew where it dwelled
The eternal is
there, is the moment
and they found a Good Place
and found a Good Time
upon it

Mariah is a fish deity (distantly) related to Proteus who is shown minor reverence among the peoples who sought refuge from the Indo-Europeans millennia ago. Mariah normally dwells at the bottom of arctic lakes and is a quiet and peaceful god. Mariah is concerned for human beings (as a shapeshifter, Mariah too is human). Mariah hopes we will find our peace and is trying to help us reconcile with ourselves, one another, other creatures, the gods, God, and the Godhead. Mariah is flattered by all third-person pronouns. Mariah worries people have already forgotten the gods as it stands…