3.2 Eschatology as a Condition of Revelation
3.2.5 Eschatology and Holiness
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structured economically through language and power, with vulnerability and nakedness. It
opposes power with weakness, willing to die in the hopes that others might find freedom and true life. Prophetic, Pauline, and messianic flavors linger in the passing of these words.
For Augustine, the creation of humanity occurs at the beginning of time with sovereign, all-powerful liberty – God’s free act freely creates the free human being, who is first a libero arbitrio. For John Duns Scotus, only a completely unlimited being can be a perfectly free being.
Scotus rejects Aquinas’s use of exemplars because he sees them as a limitation of the divine freedom.65 Nature, including the intellect, lacks the continency of creative liberty, but humanity possesses it in its free will. In Christian theology, liberty stands at the beginning as the
beginning. Liberty motivates and directs even the divine will. It is the Good even for God.
Prophetically, even messianically, Levinas suggests that the call to responsibility is the call to a freedom that “is not its own beginning. Its redemption lies in its association to others. . . . The word of the Other is the origin of truth.”66 Levinas’s freedom does not stand at the beginning directing the labor of God and pitting humanity against nature from the outset. This ethical, eschatological freedom instead calls the Same out of itself into relation to the Other, into holiness.
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from beyond or from the non-linear future, ensures that time is not reducible “to the time of (constituting) consciousness.”67 The Same cannot voluntarily gain access to the time of the infinite demand so as to anticipate, optimize, or manage it. Rather, when confronted by the infinite in the face of the Other, the Same finds itself already to have been guilty, always to have been called to responsibility, and always already passive. This call is not a new event in the sequence of linear time, which would be one more point of contact. Rather, it is eternal and incommensurable in the sense that it is beyond the time of the Same. Because the eternal time of the infinite is incommensurable, it has no point of contact with the Same. The Same experiences the time of the infinite as a surprising inbreaking into the totality that is history.
One might get the sense that the inbreaking of eschatological time would come from the future of linear time, as if we could just wait a little while longer and perhaps catch up to the time of the infinite. That notion would place the time of the infinite withing the same sequence and order of linear, finite time. While in Totality and Infinity, Levinas does seem to associate eschatological time with the future, in Otherwise than Being he more often emphasizes the immemorial past – a time out of mind.68 The time of the infinite would, then, be better
understood as being of a different temporal order, which I am calling the eschatological order.
What marks the eschatological order as different from linear, sequenced time is surprise.
Eschatology surprises the Same. It is unanticipatable because it is not linear and thereby not accessible to progress, benchmarking, or management (economics). There are no sequences of
67 Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013): 81.
68 “The immemorial is not an effect of a weakness of memory, an incapacity to cross large intervals of time, to resuscitate pasts too deep . . . Behind being and its monstrations, there is now already heard the resonance of other significations forgotten in ontology.” Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2002): 38.
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causal relations that must be followed and that could be mapped to create predictive systems. If there is a relation at all in eschatological time, it is the ethical relation between the Same and the Other that marks this temporal order. That is to say, eschatological time follows ethical relations rather than causal ones. To alleviate Moltmann’s concern, this claim does not eliminate the future as the time of hope.69 It simply establishes time ethically rather than ontologically through space-time. This innovation is not dissimilar to Moltmann’s own uses of the terms Novum and Adventus as theological modes of the future.70
The temporal ethical relation bears on the Same such that “when I seek my final reality, I find that my existence as a ‘thing in itself’ begins with the presence in me of the idea of Infinity.
But his relation already consists in serving the Other.”71 The primitive intersubjectivity, more primitive than egolatry, is experienced as desire rather than need. Levinas differentiates these two terms as the neediness that emerges from a fundamental lack, which might possibly be satisfied if the need were fulfilled, and the desire born of unquenchable hunger. Here we might seem to find some connection with Smith whose concern for ‘Gnosticism’ potentially maps with Levinas’s rejection of need based on the issue of lack. Of course, the two thinkers are pursuing very different ambitions. For Smith, lack cannot be constitutional to finitude. For Levinas, the Other cannot just fill a lack, thereby satisfying a need in the Same. From this perspective, we discern that while there are accidental similarities, ultimately the two projects do not map at all.
Returning to Levinas, the insurmountable distance of the Other is the source of desire, a desire nourished by its own hunger for the Other. In desire, we experience eschatological time as
69 Jurgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, Margaret Kohl, trans. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996): 22.
70 Ibid., 25-29.
71 Levinas, Totality, 178-79.
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the absence of the Other, but an absence marked by anticipation. Marion will develop this idea into his concept of erotic time.72 Levinas says it is the absence that is time.73 We should note that
‘absence’ is not reducible to ‘separation.’ Through anticipation and desire, we remain connected to the Other even in the Other’s absence.
Linear time is marked by the labor of the Same, establishing itself in being. The future is born of this labor and the past is (re)claimed through the labor of recollection. In fact, the past can be revised through labor, because facts no longer speak. Of this time, Levinas can say that
“now is the fact that I am master.”74 Neal DeRoo summarizes the character of linear time: “The present is the very establishment of the existent, of its sovereignty, its self-possession in
identity.”75 In contrast, whether the future or the immemorial past, eschatological time is the time of “absolute surprise.”76 Eschatological time is beyond the grasp of the Same.
If eschatological time is one of absolute surprise emerging from the ethical relation of the Same and the Other, what about the rationality of holiness that began to emerge at the end of the previous section? Holiness is the metaphor that Levinas uses to indicate the new dimension of the ungraspable, insurmountable resistance to the Same, which is the ethical demand of the Other.77 The dimension that is holiness:
72 Marion, Erotic Phenomenon, 32-37.
73 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, Richard A. Cohen, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987):
90.
74 Levinas, Time, 72.
75 DeRoo, Futurity, 73.
76 Levinas, Time, 76.
77 It should not be lost on us that Levinas’s ubiquitous use of metaphors appears to be the application of formal indication, a resistance to the use of clear, delineated concepts. It is partially for this reason that I asserted in the first chapter that Levinas could help Smith better fulfill Smith’s own goals.
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opens in the sensible appearance of the face . . . The face, at the limit of holiness and caricature, is thus still in a sense exposed to powers. In a sense only: the depth that opens in this sensibility modifies the very nature of power.78
Because of this modification of power, this new dimension accomplishes an alternative
spirituality. It is not a spirituality based on labor, the spirituality of busy activity, domination, or even submission. Neither is it the a-spiritulaity based on separation, which is atheism. For Levinas, this spirituality is, instead, based on desire. Eschatology ruptures these broken spiritualities of labor and separation. Desire for the Other that is manifest as an infinite ethical obligation, modifying the very nature of power, establishes my freedom by calling me to holiness.
It is important that we differentiate between holiness and life at this point. Liberal theologies emphasize life, human flourishing, and human dignity. By doing so, they emphasize their continuity with the Same. The other is another like me. Consequently, due to this similarity, he or she or it deserves the same opportunities and rights and privileges as the Same. The nature of power is conserved rather than altered. William Cavanaugh has shown that tyrannical
governments will never be troubled by the rights of their victims, because those governments obtain their political authority from groups of citizens who already have rights and political capital.79 Citizens or aliens without rights have nothing that liberal governments need. It is only when those without rights begin to obtain power or political-economic authority that liberal governments begin to recognize their rights as citizens or as humans. It is only through power relations and economics that the disenfranchised attain human rights, trading in the power of the
78 Levinas, Totality, 198.
79 “One of the reasons that rights language can be ineffectual, therefore, is that it is founded in the same atomization of the body politic from which the state derives its power. Rights as they have developed in the West transfer power from particular social groups to the universal state and build a protective wall around the individual” (Cavanaugh, Torture, 4).
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state. In Cavanaugh, we find an example of why holiness must be a new dimension of ethical obligation, separate from spiritualities of life or rights.
If holiness is a new ethical dimension, a surprising dimension, then holiness must also shape how we understand revelation. It is to that topic that we now turn. What is revealed in divine revelation is holiness as the egress of the Same through fidelity to the apocalyptic ethical obligation. The eschatological call is revelation. What is revealed is the obligation. Faithfulness to that obligation is holiness. Faithfulness involves the movement out of the Same, echoing Abram’s egress from Ur, an egress motivated by God’s call and promise.
Does God, then, show up in a way we can understand God? In a sense, yes. God shows up in the command to love the neighbor and to welcome the weak and to consider others ahead of oneself. This is the call of holiness found in Matthew’s account of the Beatitudes, which concludes with the command to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”80 Humanity is no stranger to ethics. However, what is surprising is the scope of this obligation. “Do not murder.”
That is easily understood. “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement.”81 “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”82 Such commands are unexpected and surprising. Can we even understand such commands? Can we receive them? Jesus says that these commands are the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.83 His teaching on this topic ends with the command to be perfect, which John Wesley took to be the command to be holy.
80 Matt. 5:48.
81 Matt. 5:22.
82 Matt. 5:39.
83 Matt. 5:17.
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These teachings of Jesus have been rarely received even by those within the holiness traditions. In those traditions, the teachings have often been transformed from literal commands into metaphors, even while the poetry of Genesis or the apocalyptic writing of Revelation has been received concretely and literally. Why? Because a literal reading of seven-day creation creates a position of power against science. A literal reading of apocalyptic literature gives power over history. But a literal reading of Jesus’ holiness commands is disempowering. It is self-emptying. It places others on high over us. Therefore, to avoid disempowerment, when Jesus said to turn the cheek, it must really have been to show how powerful we are: “You think that hurt? Hit me again on this other cheek! I am powerful enough to take your best shot.” Can we receive the disempowering revelation of holiness? The disempowering revelation of God? It is troubling how difficult it is to receive the revelation of God’s holiness.
Holiness reshapes revelation by revising what it means to know God. Peperzak says that so long as we attempt to receive others from within a horizon, and he seems to have Heidegger in mind here, that understanding will be violent. The Other will lose its ability to “[refute] my egocentrism.”84 Smith insisted precisely that God show up within the human horizon. In this case, what it means to know God is what it means to know anything. In the modern and
contemporary West, the mode of knowledge is economic. What I am arguing is that rather than being a function of ontology, the unanticipatable, eschatological demand of holiness makes truth a function of ethics. What is true is holiness.
84 Peperzak, Other, 139.
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