Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures 9781481302296, 1481302299

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Decreation The Last Things of All Creatures

Paul J. Griffiths

Decreation

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Decreation

The Last Things of All Creatures

Paul J. Griffiths

Baylor University Press

© 2014 by Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas 76798-7363 All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press. Scripture quotations, where not an author’s own translation, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Cover Art and Design by Hannah Feldmeier Book Design by Diane Smith eISBN: 978-1-4813-0231-9 (ePDF) This E-book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who encounter any issues with formatting, text, linking, or readability are encouraged to notify the publisher at [email protected]. Some font characters may not display on all e-readers. To inquire about permission to use selections from this text, please contact Baylor University Press, One Bear Place, #97363, Waco, Texas 76798.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Griffiths, Paul J. Decreation : the last things of all creatures / Paul J. Griffiths. 408 pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4813-0229-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Eschatology. 2. Catholic Church—Doctrines. I. Title. BT821.3.G75 2014 236—dc23 2014010731

This book is for Del, as a token of friendship

Présence de Dieu. Cela doit s’entendre de deux façons. Pour autant qu’il est créateur, Dieu est présent en tout chose qui existe, dès lors qu’elle existe. La présence pour laquelle Dieu a besoin de la cooperation de la creature, c’est la présence de Dieu, non pas pour autant qu’il est le Créateur, mais pour autant qu’il est l’Esprit. La première présence est la présence de création. La seconde est la présence de dé-création. (Celui qui nous a créés sans nous ne sauvera pas sans nous. Saint Augustin.) (Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 43)

From Archaeology one moral, at least, may be drawn, to wit, that all our school text-books lie. What they call History is nothing to vaunt of, being made, as it is, by the criminal in us: goodness is timeless.

(W. H. Auden, “Archaeology,” coda)

Among time’s images, there is not one Of this present, the venerable mask above The dilapidation of dilapidations.  

(Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” from stanza xvi)

⫸

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Part I The Grammar of the Last Things §1 §2 §3 §4 §5 §6 §7

Lexicon Last Things Defined Annihilation: The First Last Thing Simple Stasis: The Second Last Thing Repetitive Stasis: The Third Last Thing Epektasy: Denying Last Things Iconicity: Representing Last Things

3 7 15 19 21 25 29

Part II Doctrine about Last Things §8 §9 §10 §11 §12

Theology and Last Things Doctrine and Last Things The Doctrinal Schema The Narrative Arc Patterns of Thought

35 39 45 55 59

Part III Timespace §13 §14

The Lord’s Eternity The Chronic Temporality of Creatures

vii

71 81

viii

⫷ Contents

§15 §16

Time Damaged: Metronome Time Healed: Liturgy, Systole, Fold

89 95

Part IV Angels §17 §18 §19 §20

Thinking about Angels What Angels Are Angelic Fall Angelic Last Things

111 117 131 137 Part V Humans

§21 §22 §23 §24 §25 §26

Human Flesh The Discarnate Intermediate State Human Last Things (1): Annihilation Human Last Things (2): Heaven Hell Reconstrued The Church’s Last Thing

151 173 191 215 241 251

Part VI Plants, Animals, Inanimate Creatures §27 §28 §29 §30

Plants and Animals The Last Things of Plants and Animals Inanimate Creatures The Last Things of Inanimate Creatures

267 273 297 303

Part VII The Last Things in the Devastation §31 §32 §33 §34 §35

Opus Domini Trembling Delight Lament Quietus

315 317 321 327 339 Part VIII Bibliography

§36 §37

Bibliographic Essays Bibliographic List

Index

361 369 385

⫸

Preface and Acknowledgments

I

try in this book to display a Catholic Christian way of thinking about the last things of all creatures. I aim to show readers something, not to argue or otherwise coerce them into thinking something. What I display is one theologian’s attempt to understand and re-present Christian doctrine about the last things, and to speculate about the various things that doctrine might reasonably be taken to mean. This interplay between doctrine and speculation is what makes theology what it is: theologians accept with gratitude and delight what is given, which is doctrine; and then, as a means of returning the gift to its giver, who is Christ the LORD in the person of his beloved spouse, they think and write about what they have been given, freed for the delights of speculation by the acknowledgement of gift given and received. My book fails to comprehend its topic as do all books of theology, and for the same reason: it is about the LORD, and the LORD is not to be comprehended. But the failure proper to works of theology does not remove their necessity. By reading them, pagans can be instructed in how Christians think; and Christians can be moved toward greater intellectual intimacy with the LORD; their existence is an essential, even if minor, part of the church’s work; and those who write them can sometimes say, as Augustine said about his own work, Confessiones, thirty years after writing it, that when they read their own work the act of doing so rouses their mind and affections toward the LORD (Retractationes, from 2.6.33). If writing theology and reading it can do this, it needs no further apology.

ix

x

⫷ Preface and Acknowledgments

I’m grateful for various kinds of help with this project to Carole Baker, Jennifer Benedict, Brendan Case, Sarah Coakley, Stanley Hauerwas, Douglas Hedley, Judith Heyhoe, Reinhard Hütter, Del KiernanLewis, Bruce Marshall, Chuck Mathewes (special thanks for Dickey’s “The Heaven of Animals,” and Auden’s “Archaeology”), Stephen Mulhall, Francesca Murphy, Catherine Pickstock, Lyra Pitstick, Mike Root, Carlo Rossi, Kevin Schilbrack, Bernard Schumacher, Janet Soskice, Sameer Yadav, Carol Zaleski, Colum Dever for preparing the index, and no doubt many others whose particular contributions I no longer remember even if their traces remain in what I’ve written. I am also grateful to the students in a course on eschatology at Duke Divinity School in the spring of 2014. They were kind enough to work through the text of this book at a late stage of its composition and to help me see what is good and what is not. None of these people should be held responsible in any way for the positions taken here: I couldn’t have written the book without their help, but the errors are all mine and the truths all theirs. The Dominican fathers and novices (and Leo the cat) at Blackfriars in Cambridge, England, very kindly provided me a place to live during the early months of 2013. The peaceful rhythm of the house permitted me to write a first draft, and I am deeply grateful for the hospitality offered me there. The Luce Foundation granted me a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology for the calendar year 2013, and this made it possible for me to bring the work to completion with relative dispatch; I am grateful to the Foundation and to the Association of Theological Schools for their support, and for their nurture of this project. Additionally, Alonzo McDonald’s Agape Foundation supported a gathering of Catholic scholars to discuss eschatological matters at Duke Divinity School in October 2013. This helped me to bring the work to a conclusion, and I’m grateful to Al and to the Foundation for that support, and especially to Al for his personal involvement with the project. Ancestors of various parts of this book have been delivered as lectures: namely, the William James Lecture at Harvard Divinity School in 2009; the keynote address at the Boston Colloquy on Historical Theology in 2012; the annual Thomas Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars in Cambridge in 2013; the Stanton Lectures in Cambridge in 2013 (my thanks are due in this case to Eamon Duffy and the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University for inviting me to give them); and a lecture for the Center for Catholic



Preface and Acknowledgments ⫸

xi

and Evangelical Theology in Baltimore in 2013. In all cases I’m grateful for and have benefited from the discussion those lectures received. More or less distant precursors of some parts of this book have appeared in print, as follows: “Self-Annihilation: A Disputable Question in Christian Eschatology,” Pro Ecclesia 16/4 (2007): 416–44 (reprinted in somewhat different form in Liberal Faith: Essays in Honor of Philip Quinn, ed. Paul Weithmann [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008], 83–117); “Purgatory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 427–45; “The Liturgical Drowse,” Commonweal (February 27, 2009): 15; “Nirvana as the Last Thing? The Iconic End of the Narrative Imagination,” Modern Theology 16/1 (2000): 19–38 (reprinted in Theology and Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium, ed. James J. Buckley and Gregory L. Jones [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 17–37); “Is There a Doctrine of the Descent into Hell?” Pro Ecclesia 17/3 (2008): 257–68; “What to Say about Hell,” Christian Century (June 3, 2008): 22–23; “The Quietus of Political Interest,” Common Knowledge 15/1 (2009): 7–22. Copyright © 2009, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu; and “Tears and Weeping: An Augustinian View,” Faith and Phi-

losophy 28/1 (2011): 19–28.  

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Part I The Grammar of the Last Things

Christian doctrine about the last things has a lexicon and a syntax, which is to say a grammar. I set forth the elements of that grammar in this first part of the book, paying brief and stipulative attention to the lexicon necessary for this work (§1), then expanding this with a more detailed analysis of what it means for a creature to have a last thing (§2), a description of the three possible last things (§§3–5), and some comment on how to deny a last thing to a creature (§6) and how to represent a last thing (§7)—with special interest in this last case to the limits and incapacities of narrative representation.

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§1

⫸

Lexicon

E

very investigation needs a lexicon; the more exacting the investigation, the more precise the lexicon. In theology, as is the case for most fields of thought, no lexicon is agreed upon by all workers in the field; and even when one does appear to be largely agreed upon, significantly different understandings of particular items in it are often in play without acknowledgment or understanding. The result is bewitchment, or at least a good deal of verbal wheel-spinning. The following definitions are intended to minimize this bewitchment, without supposing that it can altogether be removed. The work under way here is theological, so the words needed are also theological in the sense that they take their meaning from the relation they bear to the fundamental and essential word, which is a name. The LORD: the name of the god of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mary, and Jesus; a triune name that designates Father, Son, and Spirit. He, this triune LORD, is the one who creates everything other than himself out of nothing by giving the gift of being, who redresses the devastation brought about by the angelic and human falls, who elects a people for himself in the person of Abraham, who guards and guides that people as the means of healing the devastated world, who takes flesh in Mary’s womb as Jesus the Christ, who is, as the incarnate one, crucified, resurrected, and taken up into heaven, and whose astringently and painfully healing presence in the world is now most fully present in the words and works of the Jewish people and in the sacrament of the world that is the church. He guides the world toward its consummation, its last thing. I do not use the word 3

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“god” in this work as exchangeable with (the) LORD, or in any other way, except occasionally as a category-word for a kind of being, a kind to which the LORD does not belong, and when it appears in the words and works of others. If the kind designated by “god” has members, they are all creatures; and while it may be said that the LORD is the god of Abraham, and so on, this is only by courtesy, to indicate that the relationship he has with Abraham, and so on, bears some analogy to the relation the peoples have with their gods (Zeus, Siva, Superman, and so on), each of whom is, to whatever extent they exist in a mode other than the purely fictional, necessarily a creature. A creature: any particular thing brought into being and thus given itself by the LORD’s creative gift; thus, a creature. There are inanimate creatures, which are any that lack a soul, an anima; they do not live and cannot die, and are always bodies (see below) of some sort. There are animate creatures of many kinds, all of which, except the angels and the discarnate souls in the intermediate state, have fleshly bodies. Among enfleshed animate creatures, the human holds a special and central place, as image and likeness of the LORD, and as the kind whose flesh the LORD took. Cosmos: the beautifully ordered and gorgeously ornamented ensemble of creatures, brought into being with and as timespace, and therefore as intrinsically spatio-temporal—timespace in every aspect and mode of its existence. The cosmos is all there is other than the LORD; and it is surpassingly beautiful. World, also, and exchangeably, called in this work the devastation: This is the damaged cosmos, the cosmos as it has become since the double fall, of angels and humans. The principal signs of the world’s devastation are death (of animate creatures), annihilation by destruction (of inanimate ones), pain and suffering (for animate creatures), and chaotic decaytoward-destruction (of inanimate ones). Traces of the cosmos’ surpassing beauty remain, some evident to human creatures and some not. But for the most part, the world appears to human creatures as it is: a charnel house, saturated in blood violently shed; an ensemble of inanimate creatures decaying toward extinction; a theater of vice and cruelty. Eden: the paradise in which human creatures and some others are at first located, and from which they are ejected consequent upon the human fall. Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-becomeworld already devastated by the angelic fall.



Lexicon ⫸

5

Body: the capacity for location in timespace, and thus for availability and responsiveness to other creatures with such location; any creature with such capacity has, or is, a body. Among bodies there are, first, fallen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures (save the angels) in the devastation. Then, second, there are risen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures in heaven after the general resurrection; the ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary are paradigmatic so far as the risen flesh of humans goes, and the only instances of this kind of body at the moment in existence. Third, there are temporarily discarnate animate bodies, which belong to humans between the separation of the soul from the fallen fleshly body and the general resurrection; these bodies may be purgatorial or heavenly. Fourth, there are permanently discarnate animate bodies, which are those of the angels. Fifth, there are inanimate material bodies of various kinds; these have weight and continuous extension in timespace, and include things such as rocks and bodies of water. Sixth, and last, there are discarnate inanimate bodies, which include quarks and other subatomic particles. Heaven: the timespace in which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and indefectibly intimate with the LORD and with one another. Creatures are in and at heaven: both prepositions are needed to indicate, in English, that heaven is timespace—not just a place and not just a time, but a place creatures are in and a time they are at. It is a locus-tempus in which defect, lack, damage, and distance are all absent to the extent compatible with (particular varieties of) creaturehood. It is a timespace in which creatures capable of heaven, in their various kinds, find the damage that separated them in the devastation from the LORD and from other creatures finally and irreversibly healed. Hell: the timespace during which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and irreversibly separated from the LORD and from one another. The speculative position taken in this book is that such a timespace is utopia, timeless and placeless, and that creatures who enter it therefore come to nothing as creatures who are necessarily spatio-temporal must when they become timeless and placeless. Last Thing, used interchangeably in this work with novissimum: to mean a condition entered by a creature without possibility of future novelty. This is—these are—the central topic of this work.

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§2

⫸

Last Things Defined

T

he topic of this work is the last things. Formally speaking, the last thing of any creature, or any ensemble of such, is the state or condition it enters after which there is no novelty for it. This understanding of what a last thing is reflects one aspect of the meaning of novissimum, a word used frequently in the Latin versions of the canon of Scripture, and, as a result, in the long Western Christian-theological tradition. The word is a superlative derived from novum, meaning “new.” Novissimum, therefore, means “newest” or “freshest” or “youngest.” To call something—some state or condition of a creature—“newest” is exactly to say that there will be no newer state or condition to follow it. If there were a newer thing to follow a putatively newest thing, then the putatively newest thing would thereby be shown as not the newest thing and so not the last thing. If, then, a creature has a novissimum, it has a last thing in the sense of a condition or state after which there is no novelty, no new and different state or condition for it yet to come. The last things are the novissima; and to treat them as a theological topic is to treat the last things of particular creaturely kinds, of their individual members, and of the ensemble of creatures that is the world. In this work, I use “last thing” interchangeably with novissimum. The last things, so understood, are a subset of the theological topics that Christian thinkers have treated since the fourteenth century or so under the label novissima. Between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, many treatises de novissimis (on the last things) were composed by Christians, and such treatises typically embraced four topics, in the

7

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following order: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Of these, only the last two are creaturely novissima in the strict sense, for the second item in the list, judgment, follows, according to the standard Christian narrative, the first (death) and is itself followed by the third and fourth (heaven and hell). Death and judgment, for the creatures that undergo or may undergo them, are therefore not novissima because something new and different follows them. Heaven and hell, on some understandings of them, are last things, however, because there is nothing new to follow them. They are, or have often been understood to be, states that once entered are not left and are beyond change. No novelty belongs to them, therefore, and those who enter them thereafter undergo nothing new. The earliest treatise of this sort known to me—that is, a treatise with de novissimis in its title, organized according to the fourfold schema—is Denys the Carthusian’s (1402–1471) Liber utilissimus de quatuor hominis novissimis (A Most Useful Book on the Four Last Things of Human Creatures), composed probably around 1450. There are considerably earlier works that cover much of the ground worked by Denys, among which Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticum futuri saeculi (Forecast of the Future Age) from the late seventh century is probably the earliest separate treatise on the topics that would later be corralled under the de novissimis rubric. And, of course, every topic treated in Denys’ Liber utilissimus is treated also in the high-scholastic works of the centuries preceding his. But the answer to the question of when the title de novissimis came together with the fourtopic arrangement to prompt the composition of freestanding treatises appears to be the fifteenth century. After that, the genre is widely evident among both Catholic and Protestant writers, until the early twentieth century, when it gradually grinds to a halt. A representative example of Catholic conventional wisdom on the subject as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth is Louis Billot’s much-reprinted and much-revised Quaestiones de novissimis, first published in 1902, and continuously in print thereafter until at least 1946. The English word “eschatology” came into gradual use only in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Latin word eschatologia was, so far as I know, first used as a technical term in theology in 1677 by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius [Calov] (1612–1686), who used it in the title of the twelfth and last volume of his systematics: Systema locorum theologicorum tomus duodecimus et ultimus eschatologia sacra (The Twelfth



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and Last Volume of a System of the Theological Loci, on the Sacred Last Things), published in 1677. Only since the third quarter of the nineteenth century or so has the word (Latin or English) been a standard term in the theological lexicon. As late as 1865, such a distinguished and systematic Catholic thinker as Matthias Scheeben (1835–1888) could treat the last things in his Mysterien des Christentums (Christian Mysteries), first published in 1865, almost entirely without using the (German) word Eschatologie, and certainly without using it as a technical term. His approximate contemporary in England, John Henry Newman (1801–1890), is also almost entirely innocent of the (English) word “eschatology.” The Greek eschaton has novissimum as its ordinary Latin rendering in Scripture, and so it might seem that “eschatology” ought exactly to be reasoned discourse about the last things as defined in this work. But in fact the word has become diffuse in meaning, and is now used promiscuously to label much more than discourse about the last things. It is used to indicate discussion of and thought about such things as expectation of a last thing, depiction of events that presage the end of things as they are now, hope for an end, world-negation by way of end-expectation, and so on. None of this has directly to do with the last things properly speaking. This capaciousness of “eschatology” is now a fact about its usage, and it means that the word cannot effectively be used to label discussion of the last things stricto sensu. Christian thinkers have sometimes responded to this state of affairs by distinguishing final eschatology from transitional eschatology, taking the latter to deal with matters preparatory for or indicative of last things in the full and proper sense, and the former to treat the novissima. Following that division, consideration of heaven and hell belong to final eschatology, because there is nothing new to follow them; but death, judgment, purgatory, and the apocalypse belong to transitional eschatology, because there is something new to follow them. That is a possible solution. But in this book, I eschew “eschatology” altogether because of its vagueness and its tendency to divert thought from consideration of the novissima. Treatment of the last things is not speculation about the future; it is not hopeful anticipation or anguished dread directed toward some last thing; and it is not reserve toward the realities of this world in light of the thought that they will come to an end. It is certainly not apocalyptic (itself a difficult word): anything included under that head is at best an antechamber

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to the last things. Consideration of the last things is, rather, doctrine and speculation about what belongs properly to the novissima, the ends-as-lastthings of individual creatures, of particular creaturely kinds, and of their ensemble that is the cosmos. Last things—whether of individual creatures, of entire creaturely kinds, or of the world—may be glorious or inglorious. A creature’s glorious last thing is the end for which it was made; this may also be called its proper culmination or consummation. But there may also be inglorious last things, novissima that meet the definition in being creaturely conditions beyond which there is no novelty, but which are opposed to and therefore incompatible with glory. Such last things are inglorious; they are the indefectible endings-up of creatures that have, for one reason or another, failed to consummate, failed to reach their glory, if there are any such. Some creaturely kinds—angels and humans, at least, according to Christian orthodoxy—are capable of both glorious and inglorious last things: their members may, that is, be damned or saved. Perhaps this is true, as well, of other creaturely kinds: a book, made to be read and reread, may reach its last thing in the annihilation of the book-burner’s furnace without ever having been read. A jasmine vine, in whose seed is the possibility of luxuriantly blossoming sweet-smelling growth, may be crushed while yet a new shoot, never to bloom. Those are inglorious last things. In the case of human creatures, who are intended, Christians think, for eternal loving communion with the LORD, some may find their novissimum in a changeless and irreversible state of separation from the LORD. The same is true of angelic creatures. This is a state beyond which there is no novelty, a condition, that is, that remains indefectibly what it is. But in no case is it a creature’s glory. It is an instance of damage and loss of a profound and painful kind; it is an inglorious novissimum. There is no intermediate category between glorious and inglorious last things. A novissimum that lacks even one of the goods proper to a creature’s last thing is thereby inglorious; one that has all the relevant goods is thereby glorious. This picture yields the following formal distinctions with respect to creatures and last things. (I do not mean that all these conceptual possibilities are instantiated, however, and some cannot be; I indicate them only to lay bare the contours of the conceptual terrain.) First, there is a distinction between creatures capable of a last thing and those not so capable. In the case of those belonging to the latter category,



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there can be no question about the nature of their last thing, for they cannot in principle have one; there is something about them that makes them incapable of it. For them, there is a question only about why they cannot, what it is about them that makes a last thing impossible for them. I argue below, in extenso, that there are no creatures like this, and necessarily so: it is proper to creaturehood to be capable of a last thing, and this is so even though some Christians have thought otherwise, have imagined, that is, creaturely kinds or particular creatures incapable of novissima. Second, among those kinds of creature capable of a last thing, there may be individual members of that kind that reach it, and individual members that, for one reason or another, do not. That is, being capable of a novissimum and attaining it are capable of analytical separation. Suppose, for example, that inanimate creatures—stellar bodies, for example—are capable of annihilation, which is to say of coming to nothing. Suppose, too, that annihilation is a last thing. And then suppose that by divine fiat, or for some other reason, some among (or all) the stellar bodies are granted endless existence without ever entering a condition free from future novelty. Such planetary bodies will then be among those capable of a last thing without reaching it. But, there are no creatures like this either, as it seems to me; all creaturely kinds, and all their members, both do and must reach a novissimum. This too is part of what is meant by creaturehood. It is a corollary of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Third, among those creatures capable of a last thing that do reach it (all of them, in fact, I argue in this work), there may be those capable of more than one last thing, and those capable of just one. Suppose, for example, that some nonhuman fleshly animate creaturely kinds (dogs, perhaps) are capable of two last things: annihilation, coming to nothing without remainder; and life eternal in a renewed heaven and earth, in endless and novelty-free relation with other animate creatures (see §§27–28). All dogs would then be capable of two last things, and each would inevitably reach one of them. Or, suppose that human creatures are capable of both a glorious and an inglorious novissimum, as the Christian tradition has, for the most part, affirmed. These two last things might be called, for short, “heaven” and “hell,” and each human creature would, on this view, inevitably reach one or the other. There are, I argue, such creaturely kinds—creaturely kinds capable of more than one novissimum—just as there are some capable of only one last thing.

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Among those creatures capable of more than one last thing, some are capable of both glorious and inglorious novissima. Humans belong here, certainly, as do angels—and perhaps others. About these creaturely kinds there are further distinctions to make. Perhaps all their members in fact arrive at a glorious last thing; to assert that, in the case of human creatures, would be to assert universalism, the view that all human creatures in fact enter heaven, even though it was possible that some might not. Some Christians have thought this, and some have affirmed it not merely de facto but as a necessary feature of the created order. Or, perhaps all human creatures in fact arrive at an inglorious last thing—enter hell, that is—even though it was possible that some might not have done so. This would be to assert universal damnation, a view that has no serious Christian defenders, whether in an indicative mood or necessitarian version. Or, perhaps some do one thing and some the other, which is to assert that both heaven and hell are de facto inhabited. This has been the usual Christian view, in the sense that most Christians who have thought about the matter have taken it, and have also taken the tradition’s authoritative sources to assert or imply it. Some have taken a still-stronger view, which is that it does not just happen to be the case that both heaven and hell are inhabited—that some human creatures arrive at a glorious novissimum and others at an inglorious one—but that it is necessarily so. The right view about these matters is, however, I argue, none of those just canvassed. It is, rather, one of skepticism about our capacity to know, in the case of creatures (human and angelic) for whom more than one novissimum is possible, whether both of the possible novissima are in fact arrived at by any of them. In the case of human and angelic creatures, the Christian tradition is precise and unambiguous in its teaching that some humans and some angels consummate the gift of their lives in a glorious novissimum. There is no such precision, and no such definitiveness, with respect to the question of whether any consummate their lives ingloriously by attempting the expropriation of those lives, though there is just such definitiveness about the fact that this is possible, and about the fact that some among both humans and angels have fallen, in the sense of having rejected the LORD’s gift to them of themselves, or (more commonly “and”) inherited the damage caused by others having done so. But doctrinal definitiveness on those matters entails nothing about whether any humans or angels have an inglorious last thing.



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The distinctions just made, together with the positions on them asserted but not yet argued, yield the following picture: all members of all creaturely kinds are capable of a last thing; all members of all creaturely kinds reach a last thing; members of some creaturely kinds are capable of more than one last thing, and some among those are capable of both glorious and inglorious last things; and among these last, some arrive at a glorious last thing, but we do not know whether any arrive at an inglorious one. There are, formally speaking, only three possible last things, whether glorious or inglorious, for any creature or creaturely kind. They are annihilation (§3), simple stasis (§4), and repetitive stasis (§5).

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§3

⫸

Annihilation The First Last Thing

P

ermanent annihilation is a novissimum. That is because it is an instance, perhaps the clearest possible instance, of a condition without future novelty. An annihilated creature whose annihilation is permanent and irreversible has no future at all, novel or otherwise, and has therefore entered a novissimum in the full and proper sense. For a creature to be annihilated is for it to come to nothing, to move ad nihilum (the Latin phrase lies at the root of the English word “annihilation”), and eventually to arrive there. When it arrives at nothing, has come to nothing, what it was is no more. What was denoted by its personal proper name, if it had one, is now absent. A comprehensive list of the contents of the world, postannihilation, no longer yields the name of the annihilated creature, while that same list, preannihilation, did yield it. There are always traces, however: a creature’s having been brought to nothing does not mean there are no remains. It means only that it, whatever it was, is not among those remains, and that they do not conjointly constitute it. A creature’s traces are not the creature, and when a oncepresent creature is found only in its traces, it has been annihilated—and if it is never reconstituted or resurrected, then its annihilation is permanent. This account of annihilation applies as much to human and angelic creatures as to other kinds. If such a creature is permanently annihilated, this means the bringing to nothing of everything except its traces. Any annihilated human creature or angel therefore finds its novissimum exactly in that annihilation.

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Decisions about whether a particular creature has been brought to nothing are sometimes difficult to make. This is because such decisions depend upon understandings of what constitutes a particular creature, where its boundaries are, how it is individuated from other creatures, and what, therefore, the difference is between the presence of a creature and the presence of its traces or remains. Sometimes, these matters are clear enough: it seems reasonable to say that a heap of marble fragments produced by taking a sledgehammer to a statue constitutes the remains or traces of that statue, which is also to say that the wielder of the sledgehammer has succeeded in bringing the statue to nothing by disaggregating it. It seems almost equally reasonable to say that a rabid dog whose brains have been blown out by a shotgun has thereby been brought to nothing, and that what remains—the bleeding body—is the dog’s traces. But suppose a large quantity of granite is detached from a mountain by explosives and pulverized. Is what remains still the mountain in question, or only its traces? Has the mountain been brought to nothing by the explosion, or, rather, altered? Or, suppose a bacterium living in a mammal’s digestive tract is brought to nothing by an antibiotic introduced into the gastric environment; ought it be said that the mammal, too, has thereby been brought to nothing, and that what remains are its traces (this might be true if the bacterium is an essential constituent of the mammal, like, in this respect, its brain)? There are no obvious answers to questions such as these, and perhaps no good ones. This means that decisions about when a particular creature has been brought to nothing may sometimes be impossible for us to make, just because it is unclear to us how to individuate one creature from another. Nevertheless, there are clear cases; and the analysis of what annihilation is remains good even when it is unclear how to apply it in particular cases. Some, perhaps all, annihilation is in principle reversible. A creature brought to nothing can sometimes be reconstituted so that the world once again contains it. The marble fragments can be reassembled into the statue they once made; the dead dog can perhaps be resurrected; the bacterium can be reinserted into the gut temporarily bereft of it; and the billion tons of granite removed from the mountain can be laboriously replaced so as to reconstitute the mountain. If a particular instance of annihilation is reversed, then it turns out not to have been a last thing for the creature that underwent it. That is because there is, for that creature, the benison



Annihilation ⫸

17

of the novelty that is reconstitution (or resurrection). Whether some creature’s annihilation is also its novissimum depends principally on whether reconstitution-resurrection is possible for members of that creaturely kind. If not, if for some creatures it is the case that once they are brought to nothing they necessarily remain annihilated, then their annihilation, when and if it happens, is inevitably their last thing. If, as some Christians think, the ensemble of creatures that is the world reaches a last thing, a condition without future novelty, then it will follow that any creatures previously brought to nothing that have not at the time of the world’s consummation been reconstituted will never be so—their annihilation, too, will turn out to have been their last thing. Christian orthodoxy has not much to say about most of these questions. It does, however, clearly affirm that some creaturely annihilations, notably those brought about by human death, are not permanent. Most Christians who have thought about these matters deny the possibility of self-annihilation, even if not annihilation per se, to humans and angels; I discuss those matters in their proper place (§20, §23). But Christian thought has been and remains hospitable to the idea that some among nonhuman creatures might find their last thing in annihilation. In the case of animate nonhuman creatures (plants, animals, and so on), it is the majority view to say that when they die such creatures do and must come irreversibly to nothing. The same is true, though with reservations and exceptions, for Christian discussion of the last things of inanimate creatures such as rocks and stars and seas. I return to these matters, too, in their proper place (§§27–31).

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§4

⫸

Simple Stasis The Second Last Thing

S

imple stasis is a possible creaturely novissimum, the second of the three possibilities. Whether as a last thing of a particular creature, of all the members of a creaturely kind, or of the ensemble of creatures that is the world, this is deeply different from annihilation. A creature whose last thing is simply static enters a condition without novelty, as is the case for all last things. In addition, the condition of such creatures is everlasting and without change of any kind; its description at the moment of entry into it remains always its description, without alteration or adjustment. Creatures whose last thing is of this kind do not cease to be. They are not like the tree drawn out by the root and consumed by fire, or the last dodo falling to the hunter’s bullet. They are, rather, everlasting and unchanging. They are not eternal: they do not enter an atemporal condition. Such a condition is, according to Christian orthodoxy, possible only for the LORD. Consider, as illustration, an animate creature flash frozen at a time into a lake of ice and locked there forever, somewhat like Dante’s Satan at the end of the Inferno (34.28–29): Lo ‘mperador del doloroso regno / da mezzo ‘l petto uscia fuor de la ghiaccia—The emperor of misery’s kingdom / from chest upwards emerges from the ice. Dante’s Satan is not immovably frozen; he continues, among other things, to masticate sinners. But he is frozen sufficiently that Dante and Vergil can climb out of hell between his wings. He serves as inspiration for my illustration of simple stasis. Suppose, too, that the lake, after the moment of freezing, never changes in any particular, and is coextensive with the boundaries of the cosmos: in that

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world, there is nothing other than an ice-lake and a single animate creature frozen into it. Narratable history ends with the moment of flash freezing. After that moment, there is no novelty and no change of any kind. Instead, there is simple, undifferentiated stasis, with a beginning in time but without an end. The only means by which such a world can be depicted is the tableau, and that is because narrative has no purchase on worlds of that kind, should there be any. Many, perhaps most, Christians have understood the salvation and damnation of particular creatures consequent upon the final resurrection on something like this simple-stasis model. Salvation, so understood, is a creature’s perfection, its condition when it has indefectibly and unchangeably become what, in the mind of the LORD, it has always been. This condition differs for different kinds of creature: the salvation of a hummingbird, if it can be saved, cannot be the same as the salvation of a human or an angel; and while Christian doctrine is clear that salvation is possible for at least humans and angels, there are difficulties and controversies about whether it is possible for members of other creaturely kinds, and if so for which. But whatever the solution of these difficulties, on the simplestasis understanding salvation as a creature’s last thing is changeless and everlasting, the condition better than and other than which there is none, and into which there is no novelty to come, nor change of any other kind. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for damnation, so some Christians have thought. That, understood as simple stasis, is an indefectible condition of maximal separation from the LORD, or, in an alternative formulation, an indefectible condition of maximal damage. A damned creature on this understanding reaches a condition in which whatever damage it has suffered and continues to suffer, however caused, remains with it without change and forever. Positions such as these are speculatively elaborated rather than doctrinally given. I give reasons in §§23–25 and §§27–28 for rejecting them as understandings of the last things of any animate creatures. Matters are rather more complicated in the case of inanimate creatures, and I discuss that topic in §§29–30. The importance of this way of thinking about the novissima lies not in its defensibility as a speculative possibility for Christian thought, but rather in the broad and deep purchase it has upon the way many Christians have thought about and imagined the last things.

§5

⫸

Repetitive Stasis The Third Last Thing

R

epetitive stasis is the third and final possible novissimum for creatures. This is a state of affairs that begins and ends and then begins again, repeating itself without end, recycling forever. A recitation of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633) provides an example. This sonnet sequence begins with “La Corona” and ends with “Ascention.” The first line of “La Corona” (“Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise”) is also the last line of “Ascention.” To recite the entire sequence is, therefore, to arrive at the beginning as you reach the end, and if the rule of procedure in the recitation is always to recite the next line, then the recitation will never end, continuing in saecula saeculorum. There is no novelty here either— the same words are said again and again—but there is internal complexity: the stasis here is cyclically repetitive rather than frozen. The last thing of a creature whose end is repetitively static in this way is the first moment of the cyclically endless recitation of the Holy Sonnets. The ring form, ourobouros-like, is a common literary device. George Herbert’s “Sinnes Round” (1633), for example, has three six-lined stanzas, the last line of the first two stanzas being the first line of the one immediately following, and the last line of the third (“Sorrie I am, my God, sorrie I am”), which is also the last line of the whole poem, being the first line of the first stanza, and thus of the poem as a whole. The poem’s structure images its topic, which is the compulsively repetitive nature of sin: “my offences course it in a ring.” A more complex repetitive cycle is evident in Natasha Trethewey’s “Myth” (1977), an eighteen-lined poem in which the first and

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last lines are identical, as are the second and penultimate, the third and antepenultimate, and so on until the ninth and tenth lines are reached, which are identical. The whole poem, therefore, is ordered around a Janusfaced mirror-glass placed between the ninth and tenth lines. Here too the poem’s structure reflects its topic, which is the mirror-repetition of the memory of a beloved who died while the lover was asleep—“I was asleep while you were dying.” I discuss the liturgical correlates to literary forms such as these in §16 and §24. If, as some Christians have thought, what those resurrected to eternal life endlessly do is sing the Sanctus—Et requiem non habebant die et nocte, dicentia, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus omnipotens, qui erat et qui est et qui venturus est” (Rev 4:8)—then the end of such a creature is the first moment of that song, which, too, then endlessly repeats itself. Simple stasis and repetitive stasis, considered as possible last things of creatures, are both static in the sense that each is endlessly more of the same. But they differ in that repetitive stasis is internally complex, while simple stasis is not. Repetitive stasis is stasis with respect to types of event, but not with respect to their tokens. That is, there is only one type of event in the repetitively static last thing of Holy-Sonnet-recitation, and that is exactly such recitation. But there is a kind of novelty, novelty with respect to tokens of such a type: there is the first Holy-Sonnet-recitation, the second, the third, and so ad infinitum. These tokens, however, are distinguished from one another only by being such tokens. They have no other kind of novelty, whether in the order of being or in the order of seeming. The time of the liturgy (§16) aims at, though here below never quite achieves, the production of tokens of this sort—tokens, that is, distinguishable one from another by those who enter them not at all, and identically participatory in the events they re-present. If the only thing that differentiates one token of a type from another in a repetitively static heaven (or hell) is succession (being located somewhere in a series of such tokens), and if, moreover, the only kind of temporal succession there is in an epektatic heaven is that kind of token-succession, then an account of time in such a heaven will not be metronomic, but will, rather, be systolic—to use distinctions to be elaborated in §6 and §§15–16. Even here in the devastation, the novelty present in a series of indistinguishable tokens of a type, such as repeated iterations of a software routine, is sufficiently etiolated as scarcely to be



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worth the name; and in the case of those token-repetitions that contain explicit structural signals as to their goal of eliminating novelty, as in the poems already mentioned, it is more etiolated still. Damnation, too, can be understood as repetitively static rather than as either simply so, or as annihilation simpliciter. If it is so understood, then it is still a last thing, even if an internally complex one. Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whirled with the other adulterers forever by the circling hellwinds in the second circle of hell (Inferno, 5.88–142), are certainly damned, but they are not in simple stasis. They ride a repeated circuit, always the same, and yet with an internal order. Dante’s picture is not perfectly repetitively static because it does permit occasional novelty—such as the conversation he and Vergil have with Paolo and Francesca. But in its essentials it does depict repetitive stasis, as is also the case for those in the lower circles of hell. As with simple stasis, repetitively static last things are beyond narrative representation, and for the same reason: there is no plottable trajectory. Every token is indiscriminable from every other for the creatures involved in them; and the only difference among them in the order of being is exactly their tokenhood, their occurrence before this token and after that one. The position taken in this work is that the glorious last thing of animate creatures ought, speculatively, to be understood as a kind of repetitive stasis. There are several reasons for this, having mostly to do with the nature of time and its relation to the LORD’s eternity (§13), and especially with the nature of liturgical time (§16). Inglorious last things, however, ought not be so understood: they are without remainder to be understood as annihilation (§20, §23, §30). And the case of the last things of inanimate creatures is more difficult, glorious and inglorious; those matters are discussed more tentatively at §§29–30.

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§6

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Epektasy Denying Last Things

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very creaturely last thing falls under one of these three heads: annihilation, simple stasis, or repetitive stasis. There is no fourth possibility. To deny all three of these to a creature is exactly to deny it a last thing. The same is true of the last thing, if there is one, of the ensemble of creatures that is the world: that will be either its annihilation or its entry into one of the two kinds of stasis. A creature with an endlessly novel future lacks a novissimum. It has, that is to say, no last thing. The future of such a creature is always, at least in principle, narratable, because there is always something new yet to happen to it. If there are any creatures of this sort, they do not belong in a treatise de novissimis. Lacking a temporal end point is not enough by itself to avoid having a novissimum. Such a lack means that novelty is always a possibility, and the idea of endless temporal extension is separable, analytically, from the idea of novelty. Consider, for example, the difference between the endless repetition of the fraction one-third expressed as a decimal (.33333 . . .). That is an endless series, but it is novelty-free; instead, it is endlessly more of the same. It is reasonable to say that this endlessly repeated generation of the number three is the novissimum of that series: it is a condition without novelty. Quite different is the series of prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 . . .). That is also an endless series, but it is constantly novel. Every addition to it—and there is always an addition, number-without-end—is a new item, one not previously found in the series. Endlessness in this case goes with novelty,

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indeed requires it. The prime-number series never reaches its novissimum, and in principle cannot do so. Or, imagine the ideal baseball game, one that fulfils the possibility proper to the game, which is to go on forever, world without end. Baseball is not played by the clock, and can end, barring external accidents, only when (once the ninth inning has ended with the score tied) the home team goes ahead in an uncompleted inning, or the visitors are ahead at the end of a completed inning. This need never happen, though in practice it always eventually has. Imagine, too, that each inning of this game is better than the last, its pitches and hits and runs increasingly elegant and ordered without that elegance and order reaching or having a maximum. That game would be endlessly extended in timespace, and would also contain endlessly novel states of affairs, from which it follows that it would be endlessly capable of narrative characterization, at least in principle. Here too there is a distinction between endless extension in time, which the perfect baseball game has, and entry into a last thing, which it does not. Theologians sometimes call such never-ending movement forward “epektatic,” following the Greek verb epekteino, which means “to extend toward [something]” or “to reach forward toward [something].” (“Epektasic” is a variant adjectival form sometimes found, but “epektatic” is closer to the Greek and also sometimes used in English.) This verb is found in Scripture only at Philippians 3:13 where Paul writes of himself as “forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward [epekteinomenos] to what lies ahead.” (The Vulgate renders epekteinomenos by extendens.) The word has no immediate reference to the last things in Philippians, and is more naturally read there as anticipating, rather than denying, a terminus. Nevertheless, the word, understood as indicating forward movement without terminus, has been applied to the heavenly condition of human beings, and when it is, this amounts to a denial that there is—and perhaps that there can be—a heavenly novissimum for humans. An epektatic heaven is, like my sketch of the ideal baseball game, one in which creatures endlessly extend and intensify their intimacy with the LORD, approaching him ever more closely and finding ever-new embraces to exchange with him. This process has no temporal end and no maximum, and those who defend it—they hold an important, if minority, place within the scheme of Christian thought—therefore deny that there is a heavenly novissimum. The opposed, majority view is that the life of the world to come is static,



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not epektatic, and that therefore it is proper to call it a novissimum for those who enter it. Damnation also need not be understood as a novissimum. It too could be understood and depicted epektatically, as an ever-deeper suffering and separation that never reaches a maximum, and that can therefore in principle be characterized narratively. Damnation on this view would be everincreasing distance from the LORD, an endless series of self-damaging and self-diminishing gestures by means of which the damned deepen and widen the gulf between themselves and the LORD without ever reaching a final and static condition of separation from him. That condition, were it to occur, would be epektatic damnation, and would be the mirror image of epektatic salvation. It is harder (perhaps impossible) to find serious Christian attempts so to depict and understand damnation than it is to find epektatic depictions of salvation. But it seems reasonable to think that advocates of epektatic salvation might also advocate its counterpart in damnation; and some have thought that it is possible coherently to offer an epektatic understanding of damnation. I raise questions about this in §25. Any creature that does not have a novissimum, a novelty-free last thing, must, ipso facto, enter into an epektatic state, whether heavenly or hellish or baseball-like (which would be heavenly) or mathematical. Novissima and epektasies are contradictories: if future novelty without end, then no novissimum; if a novissimum, then no future novelty without end. There is no third thing, no last thing, which is not one or other of these. There is here a fundamental distinction: for every creature, its terminus is either a novissimum or an epektasy. The position taken in this work is that all creatures reach a last thing, and that, therefore, none have an epektatic future. It might seem that the examples given of mathematical epektasies— infinite series, that is, of abstract objects, every additional member of which is new—provide a counterexample. They indeed would, if abstract objects like numbers and sets were creatures. But they are not. They are best thought of as constituents of the LORD’s nature, and the fact that from our viewpoint they seem epektatic is among the more important clues that they are not creatures.

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§7

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Iconicity Representing Last Things

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nderstanding creaturely last things in this way, as novissima, has implications for how such ends can be represented. Narrative representation is ruled out in principle, because there is no story to tell about a novissimum. Any state of affairs about which there is a story to tell has a temporal order: first this happens, then that, and then something else again. That is in the nature of narratable states of affairs. They are what is told of in the book before “the end” is written. Every novissimum lies outside the scope of narrative representation, just because it is without temporal order—and this is true whether it is glorious or inglorious. This does not mean, however, that ends cannot be represented at all. Narrative representation is far from being the only kind of representation there is; states of affairs incapable of narrative representation may be shown—set forth, staged, illuminated, framed—both formally and iconically. As to formal representation: to represent an unnarratable state of affairs, such as a mathematical one, in this way, is to depict the creatures and relations that constitute it more geometrico, by stating definitions and entailments as abstractly and precisely as possible. Consider, for instance, the state of affairs imagined in Goldbach’s Conjecture, which states that every even number greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two primes. I can represent that state of affairs formally by saying what is meant by “even number,” by “prime number,” and by the relation of expression. Or consider the state of affairs conjectured in the broadly Augustinian claim that every act of the Most Holy Trinity that establishes

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relations between the trinitas quae deus est, the Trinity that God is, and the cosmos is performed in indiscriminable union by all three divine persons. I can represent that state of affairs formally in the same way as with Goldbach’s Conjecture, by defining the terms of the Trinitarian claim (“Trinity,” “divine person,” “Deus,” “act that establishes relations,” and so on), together with the relations specified in it (“in indiscriminable union,” and so on). This is a rather more complex enterprise in the case of the Augustinian conjecture than in the case of Goldbach’s; but the activity is in essentials the same in both cases, and yields the same kind of artifact, namely a schema of definitions and entailments without narrative structure because without temporal progression. As to iconic representation: to represent a state of affairs in this way is to depict (visually, verbally, musically) it statically, so that its components together with their relations are shown all together and all at once, totum simul. Consider the tableau vivant, like that in which Lily Bart appears in Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth (1905; the tableau is described in part 1, ch. 12). Lily appears on stage as part of the after-dinner festivities at a country-house weekend in New York State in the 1890s. She is posed motionless, in costume and with scenery, as Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd from Joshua Reynolds’ painting Mrs. Lloyd (1775–1776). Mrs. Lloyd (Lily Bart) wears a gauzily clinging dress, emphasizing especially the curves of her hips and belly and thighs, and has flimsy jeweled sandals on her feet. She is in a heavily shaded grove of trees, and she rests her buttocks against a piece of marble furniture while leaning forward to carve something on the trunk of a tree close at hand. She has thrown off some outer clothing, it seems: it lies in disarray on the furniture behind her. She is intent on what she is doing, pensive, perhaps, and full of longing and memory and desire. The picture is redolent of passion remembered; its erotic charge is strong. Reynolds seems to have intended Mrs. Lloyd to be carving her husband’s name, and it is probable that the painting was well-enough known in the New York circles in which Lily Bart (and Edith Wharton) moved in the 1890s that this would have been understood by those who watched Lily in tableau. Lily’s decision to appear in the tableau is certainly read by other characters in the novel to signal her sexual availability, whether as wife or mistress. Nothing is narrated in the tableau: Lily does not move; there is only display, a short-lived showing. Much is implied, narratively and



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otherwise, by the tableau, both for the characters in the novel, and for the novel’s readers. But the tableau itself has no narrative structure. It is, by courtesy at least, an icon: it simply shows Bart/Lloyd, arrayed and placed. Or, consider the conventions governing iconic depictions of the nativity of Christ. The Christ-child is, in the Orthodox tradition, shown in a manger (or on an altar), which is in a cave, accompanied by an ox and ass; Mary is usually at the center of the icon, and is by far the largest figure in it. Joseph, ordinarily, sits dejectedly off to the right, sometimes being tempted by a demonic figure; there are angels above, hymning the event; at the bottom left, there are two women preparing water to wash the Christ-child; the magi are shown bringing gifts, as is a shepherd or shepherds. Most of these details are not in any surface sense scriptural, but are, in one way or another, deeply rooted in tradition. There is no temporal progression shown in the icon: there is, instead, a snapshot of events occurring simultaneously, but not (or not yet and not directly) interacting with one another because at least some of them are separated in space from one another: the shepherds and the magi are on the way but have not yet arrived, and the women preparing the water and Joseph being tempted are, likewise, not immediately contiguous with the Christ-child. The space of the icon is in this way hospitable to events that occur far apart in space—and this hospitality is extended in some iconic traditions to events separated also in time. This is true in a way even for the standard nativity icon: the cave in which the Christ-child lies is also the tomb from which he will be resurrected, even though the first and second births are temporally distant from one another. Iconic depiction of this kind also presents all its components together so that they can be seen totum simul; and these components may be separate one from another in both space and time. Last things, therefore, understood as novissima, while incapable of narrative representation, can be represented both formally and iconically, and only in those ways. To say of a particular creature that it has a last thing, a novissimum, is, figuratively speaking, to write explicit or finis at the end of its novelty-threaded temporal course, the course that began with incipit—or, cosmically, with in principio. Printed books, following earlier manuscript conventions, used sometimes to have “the end” printed on the last page of text, usually centered and in an ornamental typeface. Those words do to the text whose last

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thing they mark just what the entry into a last thing—whether annihilationist, simply static, or repetitively static—does to the narratable course that is the life of a creature. That is, the words “the end” provide the book’s words with a shape and meaning they could not otherwise have, and they do so exactly by telling the reader that there is, now, nothing new to come. The book has assumed its unalterable shape: what was open-ended, capable of possible new developments and a new ending, has now realized all its possibilities and become unalterably actual. The last page has come off the press, and the book is now what it will always be. Readers, should they turn back to the beginning after having read “the end,” can read only what they have already read, the only words that can now be there. They may understand what they read differently; they may deploy what they read in unprecedentedly new ways; but what they understand and deploy is, in the future, just what it became when “the end” was written at its end. The narratable, novelty-threaded fabric of the text has been decisively rewoven by those words, and has been reconstituted as something it could not have been without them. By way of its entry into its last thing, it has become to its readers, analogically and mutatis mutandis, what the temporal course of a creature always is to the eyes of its LORD and maker.

Part II Doctrine about Last Things

Christian doctrine about the last things has substance as well as form: that is, it makes particular claims by deploying the grammar depicted in Part I. In this second part of the work, I show, in bare outline, what that substance is, by distinguishing theological speculations about the last things from doctrinal claims about them (§§8–9), by setting forth the schema of Christian doctrine about the last things and the narrative arc within which that schema finds its life (§§10–11), and by indicating the implicit patterns of thought that inform both the schema and the arc (§12).

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§8

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Theology and Last Things

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hristian theology is reasoned discourse about the god who is the triune LORD. Its data, the material upon which it works, are what the LORD has revealed of himself to humans generally, and to the church in particular. Theology’s first purpose is elucidation: to make clearer (never finally clear) what the LORD has revealed. That is done by explaining the content of revelation; clarifying the lexicon and syntax appropriate for thinking about it; ordering, more or less systematically, what it reveals; and proposing, speculatively, conclusions implied by but not yet explicit in it. Theology’s second purpose is devotional: it is a work of service to the church designed to bring her to closer intimacy with the LORD by clarifying and extending her understanding of him, and thus provoking her appetite for him. Theologians, therefore, those who do theology, are at once exegetes of an authoritative tradition and speculators about the meaning and implications of that tradition. Their first and last audience is ecclesial, but they welcome, sometimes with enthusiasm, eavesdroppers; and they are, or should be, eager to learn what the pagans can teach, greedy for the gold of alien learning not only for its intrinsic beauty, but also for the elegance with which it can ornament the theological enterprise. Augustine puts this last point with elegance: The Egyptians had not only idols and other heavy burdens, which the people of Israel hated and avoided, but also golden and silver vessels and ornaments, as well as clothes. When the people of Israel left Egypt they secretly took these things for themselves in order to put them to better use, and

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⫷ Decreation they did this not on their own authority but at God’s command. . . . In the same way, the whole of pagan learning contains not only false and superstitious fictions combined with a heavy weight of entirely useless labor, which every one of us, led by Christ as we go out from pagan society, must abominate and avoid; but also liberal disciplines better suited to arriving at the truth, as well as some most useful moral precepts; and there are to be found among the pagans some truths having to do with the worship of the one God. These things are their gold and silver which they dug out, as it were, from the mines of divine providence which is everywhere infused. (De doctrina christiana, from 2.40.60)

Augustine here provides a standard patristic interpretation of Exodus 3:21-22 and 12:35-36, according to which the Israelites are commanded by the LORD as they leave Egypt to despoil or plunder (spoliare) the Egyptians of their gold and silver. These spoils serve Christian thinkers as a symbol for the good things to be found in the intellectual enterprises of the pagans, which is to say those untouched by Jewish or Christian learning. These are goods Christians cannot do without; we should be eager for them, even if also wary of them: the Israelites, Augustine thinks, used the gold and silver they took both to ornament the ark of the covenant and to gild the golden calf. Christian theology can do similar things with what it gleans from the pagans. But that there are these dangers and difficulties does not in the least mean that Egyptian gold should be shunned. Christian theology has many topics. Their definition, labeling, and ordering is itself a theological topic, and a difficult one: there is no more than broad consensus about these matters, and considerable change over time in the details of the topical arrangements found most persuasive and useful for the work of theology. It is part of the tradition’s consensus, however, that among the theological topics is the course of events that runs from beginning to end, from creation to last thing. The canon of Scripture opens with what the LORD did in the beginning, and ends with a vision of the new Jerusalem whose descent and ornamentation are among the things the LORD will do close to the end. At the beginning of this course, there is creation, the things that come first; at the end, there is the consummation of the created order, the things that come last. These two are difficult to separate. Any conclusion, dogmatic or speculative, about the first things has implications for conclusions about the last things, and this is also so in the reverse direction. And conclusions or arguments about either matter are inextricable from positions on other theological



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topics—about Jesus Christ, about the Trinity, about the church, and so on. Every theological topic, however they are individuated and separated, is intimate with every other. Nevertheless, a theology of last things can, to some extent, be separated from one of first things, as can both from other theological topics. Expository and speculative separation is possible, to a degree, even if conceptual separation is not. A Christian theology of the last things therefore takes as its topic the novissima of creatures. Such a theology asks, most fundamentally, what last things are possible. And it asks of each creaturely kind, and of its individual members, whether it is capable of a last thing; if it is, whether it is necessarily bound to a particular last thing, capable of more than one, or if capable (but not bound to) a last thing—or more than one—whether also capable of avoiding a last thing; and whether any individuals or creaturely kinds have already entered upon their last things. A Christian theology of the last things will advert to what doctrine there is on these questions (there is not much), and will attempt, to the extent possible, to discriminate between what is doctrinally given and what is speculatively open. The work done here is mostly speculative, but always, in intention at least, in accord with and in response to the content of Christian doctrine about the last things.

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hristian doctrine is church teaching. It instructs Christians in what belongs to the content of the faith, which is to say in what the church has come to understand, definitively and with certitude, of the revelation entrusted to it. Doctrine provides a grammar—a lexicon and a syntax— for Christian thought and talk about the LORD and the LORD’s creatures. This grammar is nonnegotiable for Christians: to contradict it or ignore it when a topic treated by Christian doctrine is under discussion is to leave Christian discourse behind and to replace it with some other. To do that is to become a heretic. Heresy is a spectrum-concept rather than a toggle-concept. That is, it is a matter of more or less, not either-or. There are clear cases of heresy, just as (and in much the same way as) there are clear cases of offense against the grammar of a natural language. If I use the verb “to mitigate” in English sentences where “to militate” would have expressed to most users of the language what I meant to say, I will be fairly far along the spectrum of lexical heresy—far enough that most users of English will mistake my meaning. It will be as if I said, while apparently using Christian discourse, that the LORD begets the cosmos: puzzlement verging on incomprehension will result, for this is just not the kind of thing that can be said in Christian language (the correct verb is “to create”). But there are also unclear cases. If I ignore the ordinary practice, in English, of placing a pronoun that is the subject of an infinitive in the accusative case, and put it instead in the nominative (Does she want I to leave?), my meaning is unlikely to

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be mistaken, but most readers will have the same sort of response to my sentence as well-formed Christians are likely to have to the claim that the second person of the Most Holy Trinity is a creature. This is not the kind of thing that English-speakers, in the one case, and Christians, in the other, say or can easily make sense of when it is said. The boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy in the case of Christian doctrine are, in the order of knowing, fuzzy, in much the same way that they are in the doctrine of supply-side economics or counterterrorism. This is not to say that the concept of heresy has no application or use. Rather, it is in all these cases essential and unavoidable, even if other names are used for it. The more skilled in the use of Christian grammar one becomes, the closer one’s formulations will be to orthodoxy and the further from heresy. Christian doctrine is a traditional discourse, which is to say that its past is important to it: new doctrinal formulations are typically explicit about their roots in and relations to earlier ones. Most bodies of doctrine (legal, military, economic) are like this: instruction in them is induction into a particular specialized discourse to which precedent is vitally important and whose development over time and conclusions at a time are a proper part of what is learned. Studying and being able to talk about the content and meaning of Christian doctrine is not a duty for every Christian to the same extent and in the same way. This is in large part because the body of Christian doctrine is too extensive to be comprehended by any individual. No Christian can be required to know and give explicit assent to all of it because of this. It is also because the body of Christian doctrine as a whole is taught and held by the church corporately, and not by any one of its members. It is doctrine for Christians that the church is Christ’s body, and that it has many individual members. The body as a whole, with Christ as its head, is the subject that believes and teaches the body of Christian doctrine as a whole. Its individual members, by virtue of their baptisms and confirmations and the gift of faith that comes with them, are disposed by that faith to understand and assent to the whole body of Christian doctrine; but this does not mean that they do so, or could do so, explicitly or occurrently at any particular moment. An unlearned Catholic faced with the subtleties and precisions of the Council of Trent’s canons on justification—which include, as number 28, the excitable claim that si quis dixerit, amissa per peccatum gratia simul et fidem semper amitti, aut fidem, quae remanet, non



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esse veram fidem, licet non sit viva, aut eum, qui fidem sine caritate habet, non esse christianum, anathema sit (those who say that when grace is lost by sin faith too is always lost; or that the faith which remains is not true faith, even if it is not living; or that one who has faith without love is no Christian—let them be anathema)—is more likely to respond with puzzlement and annoyance than with comprehending assent, and is very unlikely to be able to say anything at all about what is defined and rejected by the anathema. This is not a problem. Comprehension of and capacity to deploy the technicalities of Christian doctrine, while a good and a particular skill the church has need of, is not one of much relevance to the living of the Christian life, and not one, therefore, that most Christians need trouble themselves with much. Theologians, however, do have a special interest in church doctrine. If Christian theology is reasoned discourse about the god who is the triune LORD, and if its data are, paradigmatically but not exclusively, what the LORD has revealed of himself to the church, then theologians— those who practice theology—must pay attention first to church doctrine because it is in that doctrine that the church, under the guidance of the Spirit (it is by ecclesiological doctrine that the church is thus guided), formulates, reliably and indefectibly (it is a metadoctrine, a doctrine-aboutdoctrine, that doctrinal formulations are like this), what the LORD has revealed of himself to her. Theologians need to know what the church teaches about their particular topics—in this case the topic is the novissima—in order to be able speculatively to further the church’s corporate understanding of that doctrine. And so, any theological study, no matter how speculative, has a grounding in church doctrine as proper to it. This grounding may be present with varying degrees of explicitness; but the extent to which it is absent or explicitly rejected as a desideratum is the extent to which a particular study fails to be theological. There are other ways to fail to be theological; but this is certainly one, and in some ways the most important one. It is not among the theologian’s tasks to establish church doctrine. That is essentially an episcopal function. Theologians may and should teach church doctrine by ordering it, systematizing it, writing books and essays in which it is set forth, giving lectures on it, and so on. But that is not the same as establishing what the church’s doctrine is. Doing that requires an authority theologians lack: the authority to pronounce, performatively,

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on the question of what it is that the church teaches about this or that, and in the act of pronouncing to make it so. Historians and analysts of the baseball book of rules may certainly depict, analyze, and offer speculative suggestions about the definitions of “ball” and “strike”; but they have no power to rule on the field of play that some pitch is a strike. That power is reserved to umpires, and it is a performative power: when the umpire calls a strike, the umpire’s act suffices to make it one; when the church’s bishops define doctrine, the bishops’ act suffices to make it such. There are, of course, complications here on questions of detail: it is not always clear just when the church’s bishops have defined doctrine; and the category “doctrine” itself is internally complex—there are kinds and degrees. But the schema given remains valid and important even if it is not always easy to see just how to apply it. Clarifying its application is among the tasks of theologians. This picture of the theologian’s work is, or ought to be, productive of speculative work of a daring and radical kind. If it is incumbent upon theologians to get as clear as they can about the difference between church doctrine, on the one hand, and speculative proposals about and elaborations upon that doctrine, on the other hand, then theologians are freed from anxiety about whether their speculative proposals are right. It is not up to them to decide this; whether any element of a particular theologian’s speculative proposal is incorporated into church doctrine is a decision made by the teaching church over time, with the college of bishops playing an essential role in arriving at that decision. And usually the time taken is so much that the theologian is safely dead and (perhaps) enjoying a preliminary version of the beatific vision before it is clear how the decision has gone. In this way, the theologian is relieved of anxiety about her own rightness and her own influence, at least if she is Catholic; the picture is very different for Protestant theologians, on whose shoulders a heavy weight is placed. Speculative theological work can proceed in many ways. Three among them are usually present, and are certainly so in this work. The first is the offering of interpretations of doctrinal statements. Determining that some claim is doctrinal—for example, that ingredient to the last thing of human creatures is carnis resurrectio, the resurrection of the flesh—does not by itself yield conclusions about what the claim means. What, the theologian may reasonably ask, is the meaning of caro in the phrase carnis resurrectio?



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No claim, doctrinal or otherwise, exhaustively specifies the means of its own interpretation or the conclusions of interpretive acts, and it is part of the theologian’s task to make proposals about these things. Second, the theologian will ordinarily make proposals about the juxtaposition and ordering of particular doctrinal claims as among the means of determining how they should be construed. To juxtapose and interpret in terms of one another doctrinal claims about creatio ex nihilo and vita aeterna yields a speculative theology different at least in emphasis from that produced by unremitting effort to read vita aeterna through and next to the doctrine of the assumption of Mary’s flesh into heaven. And third, the theologian will typically use conceptual material whose origin and elaboration is entirely extra-Christian as devices for the systematization and speculative extension of Christian doctrine. For example, the lexicon and syntax of Buddhist or capitalist eschatology might be placed into speculative conversation with the materials of Christian doctrine about the last things, and used to extend it. In the application of all these methods—and there are many more—the conversation with Christian doctrine remains primary for Christian theology. Confession is Christian speech to the LORD in the double mode of praise and lament. It is primary Christian utterance, the performance of which marks Christians as such and shows their intimacy with the LORD. Doctrine is Christian speech about the LORD authoritatively transmitted by the teaching church. Its grammar is what marks Christian speech about the LORD as Christian, and the skill that individual Christians show in using it is an index of the extent to which habitual grace has infused their habits of speech. Such use does not require understanding. Theology is the church’s attempt to specify the meaning of its doctrine, and to speculatively extend its scope and claim. Theology does require understanding, even though that understanding is enigmatical and with a weak grasp on what it propounds. This book is a work of theology, responsive to doctrine’s grammar, but distant, as all such works must be, from confession. The content of Christian doctrine on the last things is set forth in abstract fashion in §§10–11. Some working principles for extending this doctrine speculatively are given in §12, and I suggest there that these principles themselves approach the status of doctrine. Guidance to the principal doctrinal statements of the church on matters having to do with the last things can be found in the bibliographic essay on Part II in §36.

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§10

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he schema of Christian doctrine about the novissima can be briefly set out under five headings: life eternal (vita aeterna), immortality of the soul (animae immortalitas), resurrection of the flesh (carnis resurrectio), restoration of the world (renovatio mundi), and beatific vision (visio beatifica). The first of these, life eternal, is expressly mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed, and has an essential place in Christian talk about the last things. The phrase is primarily a descriptor for the last thing of human creatures. It indicates at least a possible novissimum for each of us, and perhaps something more, perhaps a last thing we shall all enter. The last thing in question is positive, which is to say desirable, something hoped for and anticipated; that is evident in each of its constituent terms. It is a kind of life rather than a kind of death; and it is a life without end, a condition that once entered can never be lost or left. The possibility of such a life is among the promises that together weave the fabric of hope for Christians; this particular promise is given in Scripture and endlessly repeated and elaborated in the church’s liturgy, its theological speculation, its hymnody, and its architecture. Some, at least, among those who have suffered physical death, the promise says, have been brought neither to nothing nor to further suffering by that insult, but have, rather, been translated and transfigured into a new and better kind of life, a life of intimacy with the LORD and with others who have been similarly reborn. And this claim is not a merely abstract one: it is part of Christian doctrine to say that we know

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the names of some of those who now have eternal life. They are the saints, and the church sings their names in memory and anticipation, encouraging those among its members who have not yet died to nurture awareness of their continuing relations with the saints, and the saints’ love for them. Eternal life is, doctrinally speaking, not only a promise, therefore, but also an acknowledgment of and participation in a current reality. And, as a final positive point, it belongs to Christian doctrine to say that eternal life is a possibility not only for human creatures, but also for the angels: they too may enter into a life of endless intimacy with the LORD and with other creatures capable of eternal life. Affirming vita aeterna as doctrine, as a phrase that belongs to the fundamental and essential syntax of Christian talk about the last things, rules out some ways of talking. It is not open to Christians to say that death, understood as separation of soul from body, is necessarily the last thing of those who undergo it. Neither can it be said that what follows death is inevitably and universally unpleasant, something to be dreaded rather than hoped for. Those views are not accommodatable into Christianity. Rather, a delightful and temporally endless postmortem life is a possibility and a hope, for at least humans and angels. But not much more work than this is done by the phrase. Speculative questions remain, including at least the following: How should “eternal” be construed? What, exactly, does “life” mean, and what are the similarities and differences between life eternal, and the death-bounded and death-directed life we know at the moment? Are there creatures other than humans and angels capable of eternal life? Are all humans and angels capable of eternal life, or only some? Do or can we human creatures know of any particular creatures, human and angelic, that they have not entered or will not enter eternal life—is there, that is to say, a list of the names of those barred from eternal life of a kind similar to the list of the saints’ names, those who have already entered into eternal life? What effect should hope for eternal life have on attitudes to and concerns for the particularities of death-bound life here in the devastation? Closely connected to the affirmation of vita aeterna is that of the soul’s immortality, animae immortalitas. If life eternal is an object of hope for all human creatures, if all undergo physical death, and if the resurrection of the flesh does not occur immediately at death (all these are doctrinal



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claims for Catholic Christians), then, so the doctrinal schema goes, something of what a human creature is must live during the interim between physical death and the flesh’s resurrection, and that something must be nonfleshly—which is not, as we shall see, necessarily to say bodiless (§§21–22). “Soul” (anima) is a convenient shorthand for this. Animae immortalitas, then, serves at least to indicate the possibility of continuation without flesh. The phrase, however, is negative in form: it denies death to the soul rather than affirming life of it. This is no small thing: it opens a path for speculative thought. The human soul does not die, the phrase suggests, in the flesh’s absence; but neither, properly, does it live. For human life—life as a human creature—to take place, flesh is necessary; the quasilife of a fleshless human soul is at least not death, but it also cannot be full human life. The phrase animae immortalitas understood in this way is therefore not, properly speaking, one that belongs to talk of the last things. It serves, instead, as an indicator of a condition, that of fleshless quasi-life, which is a preliminary to something else, life eternal in the proper sense. The doctrine that the (human) soul is immortal does more work than this, however. It rules out, as in a different way does the affirmation of life eternal, the thought that an exhaustive account of the human can be given by appeal to the flesh. There is something nonfleshly about human creatures, the doctrine says, and that, whatever exactly it is, does not, or need not, come to nothing when the living flesh becomes mere body at the moment of death. So far, and not much further, the doctrinal place of the affirmation of the soul’s immortality in discussion of the last things of human creatures. Many speculative questions open up here, most of them about the nature of the anima as such and therefore not directly relevant to analysis and depiction of the last things. One that is relevant to the novissima, however, is the question of whether affirming the soul’s immortality should be taken to mean that it is a necessary feature of souls that they cannot die in the sense of coming to nothing, entering the last thing of annihilation; or whether it might be taken to mean that souls need not die, but may. On the second construal (see §23), to say that the soul is immortal is to say that it is not necessarily mortal; on the first, it is to say that the soul is necessarily not mortal. There are voices on both sides in the Christian tradition; and the rhetorical affirmation, at least, of the possibility of the soul’s final and irreversible death is deeply rooted there. Augustine, for instance, often writes of the second death, and calls it mors animae,

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the death of the soul that occurs when it is abandoned or deserted by the LORD. Doctrinally speaking, so far as the schema of doctrine about the last things goes, we should not go further than the weaker second position: that the soul is possibly not mortal, and, when united with the resurrected flesh, may enter into vita aeterna, the first item in the doctrinal schema. The third item in the doctrinal schema of the novissima is the resurrection of the flesh, carnis resurrectio. This too is a doctrine principally about human creatures, and it is a thread in the fabric of Christian doctrine equal in importance to the affirmation of life eternal. As with that doctrine, so also with this: it occurs in the Apostles’ Creed, is written deeply into the liturgy, and is therefore a nonnegotiable item of Christian speech. Minimally, it means that the last thing of human creatures is and must be a matter of the flesh. The doctrine of the flesh’s resurrection complements that of the soul’s immortality: since human creatures are enfleshed souls or ensouled flesh, their last thing must be, if it is to be the last thing of a human creature, one that includes the flesh. Talk and thought about the last thing of a human creature, whether glorious or inglorious, is therefore in part thought and talk of the flesh. That is Christian doctrine. Of doctrinal weight, too, is the claim that the resurrection of the flesh does not happen, for human creatures, immediately at death. Instead, it happens for all the dead at once at some future time (there are difficulties here about the nature of time, for discussion of which see §§13–16), and is therefore a collective event as well as an individual one. There may be some exceptions to this postponement of the flesh’s resurrection to the time of a future collective event: Matthew’s account of the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus speaks of multa corpora sanctorum qui dormierant surrexerunt—many of the bodies of the saints who had been asleep arose (Matt 27:52); Enoch (Gen 5:22) and Elijah (2 Kgs 2:11) are both said to have been taken bodily into heaven by the LORD; and Mary, according to church doctrine, was assumed bodily into heaven when the course of her earthly life had ended. These exceptions have their importance, certainly. They mean that there is already human flesh in heaven, prior to the general resurrection. But the essential function of the doctrine of the flesh’s resurrection, the work it does in the schema of doctrine about the last things, is to affirm that the last thing of human creatures involves flesh, and to deny that the flesh will be



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resurrected immediately upon death. The positive face of that denial is to make of the flesh’s resurrection a collective event. Perhaps it is possible to call it a social event. This comports well with, though certainly does not require, the view that the flesh of any particular human creature is constituted in part by the relations it bears to the flesh of other human creatures. My resurrection, or yours, does not occur alone, but rather, in relation to the resurrection of others. The speculative avenues opened for thought about the last things by the affirmation of carnis resurrectio are many. First, there is the question of what account to give of the relation borne by the living flesh of the devastated world to the resurrected flesh of life eternal, whether that resurrected flesh is glorious or inglorious, heavenly or hellish. Speculative theologians like to say that the relation in question is one of sameness, even that the devastated flesh and the resurrected flesh are one and the same (idem numero). Certainly, the affirmation of carnis resurrectio has consistently been taken by the tradition to mean that your resurrected flesh is yours and mine mine, which is to say not someone else’s and not a randomly assembled mass of matter given life. The principle is that the resurrected flesh is as intimate with the devastated flesh as the devastated flesh is with itself at different moments in its earthly career. Since it is not easy to say what the relation is between the matter that constitutes my flesh now, at age fifty-eight, and the flesh that was mine at age twenty (it is certainly not that any of the cells present then are present now), it will be no easier to specify the relation that obtains between the resurrected and the devastated flesh in such a way as to make it reasonable to say that each body of flesh is mine. All that is necessary for Christian doctrine is that whatever that relation is, it is taken to obtain also between the devastated and the resurrected flesh. Your resurrected flesh will be as intimate with your devastated flesh as that flesh is with the flesh that was yours two decades ago. Saying that does not require commitment to any particular understanding of how to specify that relation, and in fact that question is rather easier for contemporary theologians than it was for premodern ones. Our richer and more precise understanding of the nature of living flesh does not require us to say that there is a single aggregate of matter that constitutes a particular human creature’s flesh, and that therefore every component of that aggregate must be present in both the devastated and the resurrected flesh in order for it to be proper to say that they

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are the same, or that they belong to the same human creature. Contemporary theologians do not, therefore, need to exercise themselves as much as premodern ones did in constructing scenarios whereby the LORD reassembles widely dispersed bits of matter into a single, renewed fleshly body. We can simply say, with respect to the identity question, that the resurrected flesh is to the devastated flesh at any point in its earthly career as the devastated flesh at any point in its career is to the devastated flesh at any other point in its career—and so defer the technical question of just what that relation is to the sphere of philosophy proper. Theology has nothing positive to contribute to the solution of such questions. Second, there are speculative questions about the nature of human flesh. What is it? How is it to be differentiated from the flesh of nonhuman living creatures, on the one hand, and from inanimate matter, on the other? If the flesh of an individual human creature is in part constituted by its relations to other enfleshed humans, can the same be said—even though the nature of the relations must be different—about the significance of nonhuman flesh for the constitution of the human variety? And, what is to be said about the significance of place, which is to say of location in an ensemble of inanimate objects, for the constitution and maintenance of human flesh? None of these questions is answered by the doctrinal assertion of the flesh’s resurrection as proper to human last things, but that assertion provides the context for speculating about them all. I take speculative positions on these questions in §§21–22 and §§27–28. Third, there are questions about how affirming the flesh’s resurrection does or should affect thought about which of the three last things—annihilation, simple stasis, repetitive stasis—is possible for human creatures. Also, might carnis resurrectio move thought toward or away from an epek­ tatic denial of last things for human creatures? At first blush, there are no strong connections here. While there are certainly difficulties in coming to understand what endlessly static (whether repetitively or simply so) flesh might be like, they are not of a kind to rule such a possibility out. Conceiving the flesh’s annihilation is a simple matter: if flesh is by definition living, then it is brought to nothing as flesh at death, by being transmuted without remainder into lifeless body. This is a matter of ordinary experience. Affirming annihilation as a possible last thing for human creatures is therefore compatible with carnis resurrectio—if, that is, the flesh’s resurrection is taken as a possibility rather than an inevitability. Certainly,



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if (some) human creatures have a last thing other than annihilation, then the flesh is involved in it. But this does not by itself rule out the possibility of annihilation as a last thing. Carnis resurrectio, as a doctrinal claim, is a conditional: if a human creature has a last thing other than annihilation, then that last thing is fleshly. The fourth item in the doctrinal schema of the last things is the renovatio mundi, the world’s renewal. That is the world’s healing, its restoration to the condition of being a cosmos, a beautifully ordered whole participating in harmony with the LORD, its creator. This claim is rather less central to the doctrinal schema than vita aeterna, animae immortalitas, and carnis resurrectio. It does not occur in the confessions of faith belonging to the ecumenical councils, and is less prominent than the other items in the church’s doctrine as a whole. Nevertheless, it has scriptural support, and a considerable presence in the deliverances of the teaching church; it is a nonnegotiable part of the doctrinal schema of the last things. Negatively, it rules out limiting the application of the doctrine of the last things to the human and angelic orders; positively, it requires consideration of the possible last things of inanimate creatures, and of nonhuman enfleshed animate ones—for the members of those two sets constitute, when taken together, the world (when devastated) and the cosmos (when renewed). To affirm that the world will be renewed does not say anything about what that renewal will be like. It simply says that the world’s creatures may have a last thing—that the LORD’s bringing of a cosmos into being is no temporary matter, even if it is a temporal one. The affirmation of renovatio mundi does rule out the possibility that the world’s nonhuman and nonangelic will, without remainder, come to nothing. Heaven will not consist only of human and angelic creatures gathered around the LORD’s throne. But affirming renovatio mundi does not suggest anything very much about what the last things of the world’s creatures will be. May some among the world’s creaturely kinds come to nothing? If so, which? Are different accounts to be given of the novissima of animate and inanimate creatures, and if so what are the differences? Answers to these questions are not determined by anything in Christian doctrine, though that they can be asked and speculatively answered is. I address them below, at §§27–30.

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The fifth and last item in the doctrinal schema is visio beatifica, the delightful vision of the LORD as ingredient to the glorious last thing of humans and angels. This phrase, like renovatio mundi, does not occur in the confessions of faith of the ecumenical councils; but it is deeply woven into the fabric of Christian doctrine, and certainly belongs to the schema of doctrine about the last things. It is close to a purely formal phrase: nothing is specified about what makes the vision beatific, other than (by implication) that it is a vision of the LORD. And beatitudo is a word that—while it certainly indicates the ideal goal of human life, what everyone ought to want—does not specify its own content. The word carries with it the connotation of blessedness as well as happiness, and if this is taken seriously then the phrase carries on its face the idea that human happiness comes from a source external to those who receive it, for blessing is always a gift from without, and in this case a gift from the LORD. The other significant implication of the phrase is that the blessing of a glorious last thing for humans is a matter in large part of seeing, of being related to the LORD by vision. Specifying the meaning of the phrase further is largely a speculative question. The only other claim with doctrinal weight about the visio beatifica is that it cannot be had in its fullness here in the devastation, nor after death prior to the resurrection of the flesh. Rather, it follows upon the resurrection, and is an element, therefore, in the life eternal. And since the flesh’s resurrection is an element of the world’s renewal, this means that the beatific vision, too, belongs within the renewed cosmos. The glorious last thing of human creatures, therefore, includes the delightful vision of the LORD on the part of an enfleshed immortal soul living eternally in a renewed world wherein (at least some) other creatures also find a place. That is one way to coordinate the elements of the schema of doctrine about the last things. Beyond that, with respect to the visio beatifica, there are a number of speculative questions. How is the vision of the LORD related to or coordinated with the relations that link those humans in a glorious novissimum with others similarly located? How is the vision of the LORD inflected by the fact (implied by the renovatio mundi) that those enjoying it are located in a cosmos? Since those who see the LORD are enfleshed—they have eyes of flesh as well as eyes of the mind—what is to be said about differences and relations between the intellectual and fleshly visions of the



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LORD? Does the trope of vision rule out other sensory modes of relating to the LORD? I speculate about these questions in §24. Christian doctrine about the last things is focused remorselessly on the glorious last things of human creatures. Four of its five constituent elements—vita aeterna, animae immortalitas, carnis resurrectio, visio beatifica—have exclusively to do with this. They can certainly be extended beyond it, as has already been suggested and will be explored in detail later in this work (§§17–20, §§27–30). But the interest evident in their formation is, almost without exception, in the last things of human creatures. There is nothing of doctrinal weight about the last things of the angels, and almost nothing, other than what might be suggested by the idea of renovatio mundi, about the last things of nonhuman creatures. Addressing these matters is, therefore, a matter of speculation, which is not to say that such topics are unimportant for the tradition—only that it has taken the teaching church a good deal of time to begin to see their importance and their weight. It is striking, too, that the doctrinal schema shows almost no interest in the inglorious last things of human creatures. The teaching church did come, with time, to teach, emphatically, that an inglorious last thing is possible for human creatures—that we may enter hell, that a glorious last thing is not our only possibility. But that is a matter of secondary interest, largely absent from the confessions of faith formulated at the ecumenical councils, and receiving much less speculative attention than questions about our glorious last thing. It is a question of some speculative theological interest in its own right why, for example, there is no litany of the damned by analogy with the litany of the saints, and why there has been so little doctrinal and speculative concern in the Christian tradition about the last things of nonhuman creatures.

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§11

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nderlying and embracing the doctrinal schema about the last things, there is a narrative about how the cosmos, everything that is other than the LORD, approaches its novissimum. Not every element in this sketch has identical weight, doctrinally speaking; and certainly not every element is equally present to the Christian literary and theological imagination; but this is, in essentials, the Christian picture. It does not, by itself and as given here, have doctrinal status; but it contains many elements of Christian doctrine, and serves as the frame for particular doctrines about the last things. The narrative is through and through scriptural, Catholic certainly, and to a considerable extent Protestant as well. The cosmos comes into being ex nihilo by the LORD’s creative act. It is constituted by a vast range of creaturely kinds, including both animate (living, ensouled) creatures and inanimate. It is, for an ictus at least, an eye blink or lightning flash, good and beautiful, undamaged and gorgeous, as it was made and intended to be by the LORD. But then it suffers damage, first because of the fall of some among the angels, and then because of the fall of the first human creatures, Eve and Adam. The damage effected by these falls, these turnings away from the LORD’s face and toward the void, is deep and universal; it is evident not only in the animate creatures who initiate it (angels and humans), but also in all others, animate and inanimate. Its principal sign is death; its associated indicators are chaos and violence. Almost no creature escapes these (the sole exception is Mary, who is, according to Catholic doctrine, conceived immaculately

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and remains thereafter without sin of any kind), and their effect is to turn a transcendently beautiful cosmos into a devastated world in which there are only traces of glory. The LORD begins to heal the devastation—to return the world to cosmos—by electing Abraham for special intimacy with him, and through that election making the Jewish people his own. That peculiar act of love finds its culmination in the LORD’s taking of flesh as Jesus the Christ, and in the slow transfiguration of the devastation begun by the death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate LORD. The principal loci of this transfiguration are, since the resurrection, the people of Israel and the community of the baptized, the church. The transfiguration of the devastation into a cosmos then proceeds in history, overcoming gradually the violence of chaos and death. It arrives at its end, its last thing, when all the dead are resurrected and judged, and when all inanimate creatures take their proper place in the new heavens and the new earth, which will restore the cosmos. The novissima of all creatures, whatever exactly those last things turn out to be, are consequent upon and subsequent to judgment and transfiguration; and once entered upon they will—just because they are novissima—involve no subsequent novelties. The world will then have become once again a cosmos, only now in condition immeasurably better than it would have been had it not undergone damage by way of the double fall, of angels and humans. Every creature capable of a novissimum will find its place therein as a consummation, as fulfilling its proper end in which all the marks of the falls have been transfigured, and in which there is peace eternal. Within this big picture, there is a smaller story to tell about human creatures. We begin our decay toward death as soon as we come into being at our conception, and for almost all of us that decay reaches its culmination in death. Our death separates our souls from our flesh, thus bringing us (temporarily) to an end as human creatures; that is because such creatures are, by definition, fleshly. The flesh of most of us begins to rot or be otherwise consumed immediately upon death. And each of our souls undergoes a judgment immediately upon death that will destine us either for a novissimum of eternal and ecstatic intimacy with the LORD, or for one of eternal separation from him. Our separated souls begin, at death, to move toward our allotted novissimum, whether by entering at once into preliminary and partial loving intimacy with the LORD, and with others



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in like case, that finds its consummation at the general resurrection, or by finding ourselves in preliminary and partial agonizing separation from the LORD that also finds its consummation at the general resurrection. These conditions are not, properly speaking, last things, novissima, because there is something yet to happen, a novelty yet to occur. That is our reconstitution as human creatures by taking flesh again, which we do at the general resurrection—if, that is, our separated souls remain capable of that. Only if our flesh is resurrected can we enter into a glorious novissimum; what comes before is an anticipation of it but not the thing itself. Most versions of the narrative say that an inglorious last thing also requires flesh, and that it is a last thing different from both heaven’s repetitive stasis and annihilation; but some suggest that an inglorious last thing for human creatures might consist in annihilation. Only when we arrive at a glorious or an inglorious last thing can we write “the end” beneath the text of our lives. And only when that happens will the shape of those lives have become final. What was implicit in our lives will then have become explicit, fully and finally; and the Latin word explicit is exactly the word written at the end of texts to mark their consummation. A glorious last thing does not remove us from the new heaven and the new earth that is the devastation reconstituted as cosmos, while an inglorious last thing necessarily does, whether it is interpreted as repetitively static damnation or a coming to nothing. The beauty of the world reconstituted as cosmos is figured by the beauty of the daughters born to Job: their beauty is greater than that of the daughters who died during the time of his tribulation, and the text is explicit in allotting these new daughters to Job’s last things: Dominus autem benedixit novissimis Job magis quam principio eius (42:12). Our glorious last thing, like Job’s, permits us to take our proper place in the renewed cosmos, among all the other creatures who can find a place there.

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here is a doctrinal schema about the last things (§10), and a narrative arc with broadly doctrinal weight about the course the created order follows from its beginning to its last thing (§11). There are also patterns of thought about last things sufficiently pervasive in the Christian tradition to be treated as indispensably ancillary to the interpretation, justification, and speculative engagement of explicit church doctrine. These patterns of thought are the topic of this section. First among them is the conceptual weaving-together of beginnings and ends, of creation and its consummation. Creation is necessarily out of nothing: the LORD, since he is not a being among beings, necessarily bears to his creatures the relation of having brought them into being out of nothing. This is a corollary of the essential point that the predicate “exists” is applied analogically, rather than univocally or equivocally, to the LORD and his creatures. Were there to be anything at all about creatures, collectively or severally, that the LORD did not create out of nothing, then the LORD’s existence would be univocal with respect to the existence of whatever that remainder might be. And that would be just another way of saying that the LORD is not the LORD. It is definitional of the LORD, in Christian discourse, that the LORD creates out of nothing. Saying so is central to making and keeping in mind the distinction between the LORD and creatures. Creation out of nothing is therefore the beginning of all creatures, considered severally or collectively.

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Attention to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo acknowledges that all creatures, animate and otherwise, are radically contingent. They did not need to be; their existence adds nothing to the LORD’s goodness; and there is nothing about them, nothing intrinsic or essential to them, that guarantees them a future, novel or otherwise. They came from nothing, ex nihilo, and may return there, ad nihilum. Annihilation is a permanent possibility for all creatures; it belongs to their nature exactly as creatures, and is part of the meaning of the word in Christian discourse. Creatures hover always over the void of absence, and the hearts of human creatures, unteachably seeking the lack that is evil, tug us toward that void. That is the nature of sin: not, most fundamentally, to seek a lack misapprehended as a good, but exactly to seek a lack seen and known as such, to seek to return whence we came, to nothing. If, then, creatures do and shall continue to be, it is not because of anything about them, but rather because of something about the LORD. Attending to creation as out of nothing shows us that the fact that there is anything at all is accountable only by appeal to grace; and this awareness, if kept lively, presses us toward seriousness about the possibility that at least some creatures, perhaps including ourselves, might return whence they came, which is to say, to nothing. It is important to distinguish the condition of having come from nothing, which is a necessary feature of creaturehood, from the condition of seeking to return to that nothing, which is what precipitated the fall and is, in origin and continuation, nothing but damage. Hovering over the void is not, by itself, either sin or sin’s damage; seeking to leap into it is. The LORD does not create damaged creatures, but he does create creatures capable of self-damage. Thinking about last things from the perspective of creation out of nothing provides the essential trajectory of Christian thought experiments about the end. This trajectory begins by attending to the cosmos as created and as yet undamaged—as Edenic, we might also say. It moves then to the devastated postlapsarian world, the world as damaged by the fall. And it concludes by thinking about heaven, the world as perfected, its devastation transfigured into perfection. As undamaged cosmos, as devastated world, and as heavenly: those, in Christian thought, are the three modes under which creation is typically considered, and the three modes under which the ensemble of creatures that is the world may exist. Now it is devastated; once it was Edenic; eventually it will be heavenly.



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The Edenic world is deeply different from the devastated world; and both Eden and the devastated world are deeply different from the heavenly world. To think about heaven is to think about a last thing properly speaking: it is thought about the world as it is when each particular creature with a last thing has reached it, and the epektatic endlessness of each particular creature without a last thing (if there are any) is manifest. Such thought typically proceeds, within the Christian tradition, by attending to the differences between heaven, Eden, and the devastation. The devastation is what we know directly, and bitterly. Discerning which of its features belong to its condition as devastated, and which are remnants of Eden or anticipations of heaven, is one important mode of such thought. Considering, with respect to Eden, which of its features are attenuated or removed in the devastation, and which recapitulated or intensified in heaven, is another vital mode of such thought. And considering, with respect to heaven, which of its features are absent in both the devastation and Eden is yet another. This is the characteristic shape or pattern of Christian thought about the last things. The idea—indeed, the dogma—that creation must be thought of as out of nothing if the creator is to be the LORD and not an idol, a creature, a being-in-the-world—provides, then, a first pattern of Christian thought about last things. A second pattern of thought about last things deploys an anthropocentric principle. Thomas Aquinas gives eloquent and precise voice to this pattern of thought in the 148th chapter of his Compendium theologiae (Compendium of Theology—I return to this text in §28). He begins by saying that all creatures are ordered to or directed toward (ordinentur) the LORD’s goodness as their proper end (finis), but that some are more intimate (propinquiora) with the LORD than others, and those participate more fully in the divine goodness than do those more distant (magis remota). Those most intimate with the LORD are, save the angels, human creatures; after them come, in descending order, animals, plants, and inanimate creatures. And then the key move: in omni enim ordine finium—in any hierarchy of ends—quae sunt propinquiora ultimo fini sunt etiam fines eorum quae sunt magis remota—those creatures more intimate with the last end are themselves ends for those creatures less intimate with the last end. The relation “being an end” is, on this view, mediated: human creatures and

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oak trees both have the LORD as their final end, but if human creatures are more intimate with the LORD than oak trees, then oak trees find their ultimus finis not in the LORD directly, but rather mediatedly, in human creatures. And since all creatures are in fact more distant from the LORD than humans because they are less like the LORD, it follows at once that humans are the mediate end for all other creatures. Nonhuman creatures, with only the exception of the angels, bear a relation of ordinatio to human ones: they are ordered to or exist for the good of human creatures, which point Thomas also puts in simple prepositional form by saying that they are “for” (propter) us. And so the conclusion is: ex consummatione igitur hominis consummatio totius naturae corporalis quodammodo dependet— therefore, the consummation of the entirety of corporeal nature depends in a certain way upon the consummation of human creatures. Thomas adds the adverbial modifier quodammodo (in a certain way), not because there is anything about the consummation of nonhuman creatures that bypasses or is independent of the consummation of human creatures, but because the consummation of oak trees (and all other nonhumans) is not found in humans simpliciter; it is rather found in the LORD, to whom oak trees have access as their last thing only by way of humans. We give glory to the LORD directly, and find our glory in the LORD unmediatedly; they give glory to the LORD indirectly, and find their glory in the LORD mediatedly. That is the anthropocentric principle. The last things of nonhuman creatures (again with the exception of the angels) are to be thought about and described in terms of the contribution they make to the last things of humans. Nonhuman creatures have and can have no last things otherwise understood, and so in that limited but still very capacious sense they are for us, and are so in a sense that we are not and cannot be for them. The LORD, on this view, brought the entire cosmos into being for humans. It has no independent reason for being, differing, again, in this respect from the angels. They are the only creatures whose glorious last end is the LORD in a way (almost) entirely independent of us. This principle is extremely, almost violently, implausible on its face to most Christians now, and even more so to most pagans. This is largely because—since the seventeenth century at least, when Pascal identified with precision the dizziness produced by textured awareness of the double infinity (that of vast size stretching out beyond us, the reach of our own



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planet and solar system and galaxy, and of the galaxies beyond ours; and that of minuteness, extending within a waterdrop or a cell, inside which there are animate and inanimate creatures of a number and complexity beyond our comprehension)—most of us have not been able easily to make sense of the idea that all this, this vast strangeness with which we are surrounded and within which we live and move and have our being, is propter nos, for our sake. Most of all that is seems to have nothing to do with us; it seems to have its own integrity and life (when it lives) quite independently of ours; and when we and it do come into contact, it more often seems hostile to or massively unaware of us than in any way intimate with us or created for us. Why then affirm the anthropocentric principle? Thomas offers broadly Aristotelian reasons: that nonhuman creatures find their finis in us and their ultimus finis in the LORD only mediatedly, through us, is, for him, an instance of a general principle, which is that when there is a final end shared by different creatures, and when some among those creatures are more intimate with that final end than others, those less intimate arrive at it only through those more intimate with it. The general principle has more everyday instances. Thomas likes to use medicinal ones: if you want to become more healthy by losing weight, and if you use medicine to purge yourself with that purpose, then the ultimus finis is health, and the state of affairs most intimate with that end is losing weight. The other things in the example (medicine, the purge) have health as their ultimus finis, too; but they do not arrive at it directly. Medicine produces (arrives at) the purge; the purge arrives at (produces) weight loss; but only weight loss arrives at health, the ultimus finis. But this model assumes what it is supposed to show: that nonhumans have no possibility of giving glory to and finding intimacy with the LORD other than through us. This is evident by looking at the example of the angels. They are in some ways more intimate with the LORD than we—in Thomas’ terms they have greater propinquity with him than we in several ways (see §§17–20), and we are in some ways more intimate with him than they, having the image and likeness of the LORD in ways that they do not. And Thomas, along with the mainstream of the tradition, does not want to say either that we are their fines, or that they are ours. Rather, members of each kind, the angelic and the human, arrive at the LORD as their last end without finding their relations with him exhausted by their relations with

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members of the other kind. We do not glorify the LORD in and through the angels, without remainder; and neither do they glorify him in and through us, without remainder. Instead, members of each kind arrive at the LORD as their last thing, their final end, along with (but not in and through) members of the other. That is because humans and angels each have qualities that permit them unmediated intimacies with the LORD, intimacies that could not occur or be realized were either of them to arrive at the LORD only through the other. Why can this not be true for nonhuman creatures and humans? Why can it not be the case that (some) nonhuman creatures are capable of intimacies with the LORD that are independent of their intimacies with human creatures? To say that humans are, in general, more intimate with the LORD than nonhumans does not yield the conclusion for which Thomas argues. Even in the case of the purge-producing medicine, it is possible that the medicine might have health-producing properties independent of and additional to its capacity to purge. And in such a case, medicine would be related to the ultimus finis of health not only by intermediaries (purge, loss of weight), but also directly. To say that human creatures are closer to the LORD than nonhumans does belong to the grammar of Christian thought; but it does not follow from this affirmation of human intimacy with the LORD that nonhuman creatures can give glory to the LORD only through the relations they have with human creatures. But perhaps there is another reason for saying that the anthropocentric principle does belong to Christianity’s grammar, and is a pattern of reasoning that should be used by Christians in thinking about the last things. If there is, it is christological. Two axioms are important here. The first is that Jesus Christ, the incarnate LORD, is at the center of everything: everything animate and inanimate was created by him (in ipso condita sunt universa in caelis et in terra, Col 1:16), is sustained by him (omnia in ipso constant, Col 1:17), and is redeemed by him (per eum reconciliare omnia in ipsum, pacificans per sanguinem crucis eius, sive quae in terris sive quae in caelis sunt, Col 1:20). This is not just a claim about the second person of the triune LORD, abstracted as logos asarkos, a fleshless word, from the incarnation. It is a claim about that person as incarnate, as Jesus Christ, verbum incarnatum, born from Mary’s womb at a time and in a place according to the economy of timespace. It is the incarnate LORD who is the heart of the created order in all its aspects, in its deep double infinity; and it is the



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incarnate LORD who reconciles this world in all its particulars by healing its devastation and making it once again into a cosmos. That is the first axiom: the centrality of Jesus Christ to the order of things, no matter how complex and variegated and extended that order turns out to be. The second axiom is that the flesh of the incarnate LORD is human flesh. It is not the flesh of any other creaturely kind, and not some divine, noncreaturely flesh. Rather, it is human flesh, conceived in a woman’s womb, born from her, ritually and judicially murdered, and then resurrected and ascended. It is this flesh that stands at the heart of things as creator, sustainer, and redeemer. These axioms taken together provide a rich sense of the intimacy of the human with the LORD, an intimacy different not only in degree but also in kind from all other creaturely intimacy. If the heavenly assembly is arrayed around the flesh of Christ at its center—it is part of the grammar of Christian discourse to say so—then, perhaps, the resurrected flesh of human creatures is the inner circle of that array, and other creaturely kinds there (if there are any, other than the angels; see §§27–30) are related to Christ’s ascended flesh only indirectly and mediatedly, by way of the relations they bear to human flesh; and perhaps then it can also be said that they are for the LORD only as and to the extent that they are for us. This is possible. The christological reason for it is more powerful than the broadly Aristotelean hierarchy of being canvassed earlier. That is in part because the christological reason lies much closer to the center of the Christian view of things than do the Aristotelean reasons. But it is also because it provides at least the beginning of a sense of what it might mean to say that creatures find their last thing in the LORD, yes, but that they find the LORD only in and through intimacies of one kind or another with human flesh. Jesus Christ’s flesh, incarnate and ascended, provides a paradigm: if the entire created order is brought into being per ipsum carnem, and finds its last renewal in the same way, then perhaps the prima facie implausibility of the idea that nonhuman creatures find their last thing in dependence upon and by way of us, we humans, is reduced. It is reduced; or at least it can be seen more clearly how the grammar of Christian discourse can conduce to the anthropocentric view. But it is still not the case, Thomas and the majority of the speculative tradition notwithstanding, that the radically anthropocentric view of the last things of nonhuman creatures is a constituent of Christian orthodoxy. Even given

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the christological considerations just discussed, it is possible that nonhuman creatures have unmediated intimacies with the triune LORD. It is also possible that they have no such intimacies, that their last thing is the LORD only as given to them through their relations with us, and that the extent of their intimacy with him is the extent to which they support us in our intimacies with him. In this situation, and given also the importance of the anthropocentric pattern of reasoning to the Christian tradition, the best way to proceed, when speculating about the last things of nonhuman creatures, is to begin by seeing how things go, what the picture looks like, when radical anthropocentrism is assumed, and then to see how it goes when a less radical anthropocentrism is used. That is the approach I take in this work. There are advantages to beginning with the radically anthropocentric pattern of thought. The clearest among them is that its prima facie implausibility—How can all this be propter nos? How can all that is, visible and invisible, be brought into being for our sake and find its consummation, its glorious last thing, in the relations it bears to ours?—matches and resonates deeply with the shocking implausibility of the Christian claim about Jesus Christ. Christology is anthropocentrism of the most radical kind conceivable, and thinking about the last things according to a pattern that harmonizes with it may have a greater speculative yield than bowing at once to the prima facie implausibility of the anthropocentric principle as a pattern of thinking about the last things of nonhuman creatures. The last pattern of Christian thought about last things takes devastated life as its object and tries to discriminate artifacts of the fall from harbingers of heaven. The former can belong only to inglorious last things if to any, and will be magnified and intensified there to the extent possible; they will be excluded from glorious last things, even though their traces might remain as do the scars of their wounds in the resurrected flesh of the martyrs. The latter can belong only to glorious last things, and will find their full and final intensity there; they are excluded from inglorious last things except, perhaps, in their traces, as there might be agonizing memories of bliss among the damned, recollections on Satan’s part of now-lost intimacies with the LORD. This pattern of thought is the most difficult to engage in among those discussed in this section, and the most likely to produce disputed results among Christians when it is used. There are some clear cases, certainly.



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Death, there is good scriptural warrant for saying and broad Christian agreement about, is an artifact of the fall; it will therefore be absent in glorious last things. But how to think about death in connection with inglorious last things? Is it absent there too, or is it somehow analogically or metaphorically intensified there? What about sex and other physical intimacies exchanged among humans, and among other animate embodied creatures? Do these belong to heaven (they can sometimes seem, in the devastation, like heaven’s harbingers), or are they artifacts of the fall? And language: Does it endure in glorious or inglorious last things, and if so what is it like? Or should it be regarded as an artifact of the fall, and thus brought to an end in heaven, where we shall have better means of communication? And what about time? Is there heavenly and hellish time? Are they the same as or different from one another? I take positions on all these questions in what follows, but they are of necessity highly speculative ones. No answer to such questions is a constituent of Christian orthodoxy. There is, however, one particular guide to the question of what are the harbingers of heaven here below. We Christians have a form of life given to us that we know to be supremely good for us here in the devastation, and know therefore also to foreshadow more fully than can any other what a glorious last end will be like. This is the liturgical form of life. It is our foretaste of heaven, and attending to its structure, purpose, meaning, and effects upon those who engage in it tells us something about what heaven is like, and about what it will seem like to human creatures to be there, to arrive at a glorious last thing. Thinking about the liturgy, then, is very helpful for arriving at conclusions about what are the goods proper to human creatures. Thinking in this way, however, also does not yield easy conclusions. We must, for example, try to discriminate what is proper to the liturgy from what is accidental to it; we must also make some ticklish decisions about what it is that the liturgical life does to those who live it. It is easy to be wrong, substantively or by way of emphasis, about matters such as this. Nevertheless, attending to the liturgy is the closest we can get, here below, to attending to heaven. In examining it, we approach as close as we can get to examining the life of the saints in heaven as it is once they are resurrected and enjoying both sensory and nonsensory modes of knowing and seeing the LORD. This is because most of the elements of the life of the world to come are present in nuce in the worshipping

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assembly: the ascended LORD is present in the flesh; the gathered people is an assembly of those who know and love him as he is, at least to some degree; and the fabric of the event is woven from the threads of love exchanged—love given preveniently by the LORD, whose creature the church is, and love given responsively by the people, who have collectively and individually been brought into being by the LORD. The leitmotif of the words and actions of the liturgical gathering is adoration. All this is also true of the gathering of the resurrected saints around the LORD’s ascended flesh in heaven.

Part III Timespace

The topic of this part is time and space. An account of two of the three last things, simple and repetitive stasis, needs an account of time. That is not the case for annihilation, the third last thing. A creature’s coming to nothing is an event in time, certainly; but since, after that event, there is no more to say about the annihilated creature, nothing need be said about the time of its last thing. Time, whatever it is, proceeds as it does, however that is, without the creature that has come to nothing. But in the case of the two kinds of stasis, an account is needed. The fundamental question is, when novelty is ruled out, as it is by definition when creaturely last things are defined as novissima, can creatures still be temporal, and if so how? The answer requires an account of time, and its correlate, space, and that is what I provide in this third part of the book. I indicate the inseparability in Christian theology of the ideas of time and space by using the locution “timespace” throughout this part. In §13, I elaborate and defend the idea that the LORD is eternal, which is to say that no temporal predicates are properly applied to him. In §14, I show that creatures, individually and as a whole, are temporal by definition: the created order comes into being not in time but cum tempore, with temporality as an essential feature; and so, any last thing of creatures (other than annihilation) is also, and necessarily, temporal; were creatures to cease to be time-creatures, creatures

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for the time being, they would cease to be creatures at all. A last thing is, when glorious, the consummation of the mode of participation in eternity proper to a particular creature or to the members of a creaturely kind; it is not and cannot be a simple exit from time. Achieving that would achieve divinity, which is impossible for creatures. In §15, I analyze the idea that the devastation of the cosmos by the double fall has damaged time and space as well as everything else, and speculate about how best to describe that damage; the key idea here is that of metronomic time. And in §16, I argue that our best guide in the orders of discovery and understanding to what the unfallen time of the cosmos is like, and what the redeemed time of heaven will be like, is the time of the liturgy, and that this does indeed tell us a good deal about what undamaged time is like. The key idea here is that of systolic time.

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he LORD is eternal and the LORD is triune. These are axioms of Christian theology; discourse about the LORD that denies or sidesteps either of them is, to exactly the extent that it does those things, not Christian discourse. The LORD’s eternity is constituted by his tri-unity, and his tri-unity by his eternity; to think about the one is therefore to think about the other, and to gloss the one is best done, and in the end only possible, by appeal to the other. Further, the LORD’s eternity is ingredient to, which is to say another way of thinking about, his simplicity: there is no distinction in the LORD between what he is and what he has. Every property or attribute or action spoken of as the LORD’s by us is, in the order of being, what the LORD is. The LORD, as Christian speculative theologians like to put it, is not something other than an addition to his justice, his mercy, his power, his bringing the cosmos into being out of nothing, his election of Abraham, and his taking of flesh as Jesus Christ. All this—the LORD’s properties and his actions—just is the LORD; he is not divided, not composite, not partly here and partly there, partly this and partly that, partly now and partly then. He is eternally (which is neither always nor everlastingly) just what he is. And that is because he is the LORD and not a creature. All creatures, all realia other than the LORD, exactly are complex (not simple) in these ways. It is definitional of creaturehood to be like that, because to be complex is also to be contingent, to be capable of not being as you are at the moment, and to be capable of not being at all. The

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butterfly sucking nectar from the buddleia did not always have the wings it has now, was not always where it is now, will soon be elsewhere, and will soon die. Complexity and contingency belong to creatures; neither belongs to the LORD. His mode of being is in this way not even analogically like that of creatures. What analogy there is between creaturely being and the LORD’s being is to be found only in the categories of gift and participation: all creatures are what they are, have the mode of being they have, by gift from the LORD and by way of participation in him. In this way, all creatures are alike; in every other way they differ from one another, both according to their kinds, and in the differences that separate individuals one from another. The relations among the persons of the Trinity that together constitute the divine economy ad intra do not begin or end and are entirely free of change. The Son is atemporally begotten by the Father, just as the Spirit atemporally proceeds from Father and Son. These inner-Trinitarian relations are, in their lack of temporal location or temporal relations, like the relations that atemporally subsist among the numbers one, two, and three. The state of affairs labeled by 1 + 2 = 3 has no history, no change, no beginning, and no end, and just the same is true of the state of affairs labeled by the credal affirmations about the relations among the divine persons. This is the standard Christian view about the LORD’s temporality: the vast majority of Christians to have written and thought about the matter these past two millennia have affirmed it. Augustine, for example, writes that the LORD does not have a future, for that would entail expectancy in him; and that he lacks a past, for that would entail memory in him; and that he is therefore not in any way distended or spread out in time (Confessiones, from 11.12.14). Thomas, borrowing from Boethius, defines the LORD’s eternity as the complete and perfect possession all-at-once of a life without end (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio; Summa theologiae, 1.10.1 obj.1). Augustine, explaining the intuition that underlies such claims, writes, in a representative passage: Anything whatever, no matter how excellent, really is not if it is changeable; for it is not possible for something truly to be if there is in it also nonbeing. Whatever changes is changed into what it was not; and if it is not what it was, there is a kind of death in it. Something that was there has been removed and no longer is. The color black is dead on an old man’s



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white head; beauty is dead in an old man’s feeble and stooped body. . . . In anything that changes and is what it was not, I see a kind of life in what it is, and a kind of death in what it was. When we ask about someone dead where he is, the answer is: he was. O truth, you truly are! I find two times in all our actions and movements and in every motion of any creature: the past and the future. I look for the present, and nothing stands still: what I have already said is not, and what I am about to say is not yet; what I have already done is not, and what I am about to do is not yet; the life I have already lived is not, and the life I am about to live is not yet. I find past and future in every motion of things, but in the truth which remains, I find no past and no future, but only the present, and that incorruptibly, which is lacking in every creature. Analyze how things change and you will find “was” and “will be”; consider God and you will find “is,” where “was” and “will be” are necessarily absent. (In evangelium iohannis tractatus, from 38.10)

Mutability, on this view, entails lack: anything that changes comes to lack a good that it previously had, and so mors quaedam ibi facta est, “there is a kind of death in it,” which is also to say a kind of nonbeing. The LORD’s life is without lack, and, therefore, also without change. In him is solum praesens, et hoc incorruptibiliter, “only the present, and that incorruptibly.” In the LORD’s life, then, in an elegant formulation, fuit et erit esse non possit, “ ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are necessarily absent.” The claim that the LORD is eternal in the sense that in his life— in the life he is, in the Trinity he is—there is no division according to timespace is among orthodoxy’s key elements because it is ingredient to the proper drawing of the distinction between the LORD and the ensemble of creatures that is the world; their temporality is a constituent element of their creaturehood, providing the framework and horizon of the modes of their relation to the LORD. Were the LORD also to be temporal, subject to change, then temporality would not be a constituent of creaturehood—a mode under which creatures relate to the LORD—but would instead be a horizon within which both the LORD and creatures are found. That is one way to misrepresent the LORD by replacing him with an idol. Another way to put this view of the LORD is to say that he is an atemporal state of affairs of vast internal complexity. This complexity is given by the fact that he is triune: the three persons of the Trinity are related one to another in many more ways than those specified by the language of the creeds, but those relations are all, first, last, and always, relations of love.

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The persons are lovers, eternally and intimately intertwined; the baroque complexity and variety of human loves, sexual and other, is a pale reflection of and participation in the divine loves that are the LORD. Mathematics is another window into the range and depth of the complexity of the atemporal state of affairs that is the LORD. The relations that obtain eternally among such abstract objects as numbers and sets are infinite, and accessible only in part to human intellects. Such relations are, in respect of atemporality and complexity, like the inner-Trinitarian relations. Of course, there are respects in which mathematical and inner-Trinitarian relations differ profoundly; but in these ways they are importantly alike, and it is probable that the best account to give of this likeness is one that understands mathematical objects to subsist in the LORD. The LORD’s eternality is unique to him: eternity is constituted by the divine Trinity, and since everything that exists other than the LORD is a creature and belongs to the created order, whose distinctive feature is that it is temporal, it can belong only to him. It is, moreover, to be distinguished from everlastingness: that is a condition without end, but one that may be subject to change. The LORD may be understood as everlasting in the sense that the predicate “having a temporal end” cannot be predicated of him; but so may creatures, and so “everlastingness” is not proper to the LORD. Thomas puts the matter with his usual clarity, following Aristotle’s definition of time as “the enumeration of movement according to before and after” (numerus motus secundum prius et posterius; Summa theologiae, 1.10.1, from the corpus, quoting Aristotle, Physics 4.11 ) : In what lacks movement and is always the same, before and after are not found. Just as, therefore, the definition of time consists in the enumeration of before and after in movement, so the definition of eternity consists in the apprehension of the uniformity of what is in every way without movement. . . . Eternity is thus known by two things: first, in being interminable, which is to say lacking both beginning and end; . . . and second, in lacking succession, which is to say existing all at once. (Summa theologiae, 1.10.1, from the corpus)

Anything that is eternal—and only the LORD is eternal—lacks a temporal beginning, a temporal end, and any succession or alteration. He exists all at once, semper eodem, “always the same,” changelessly. Evident in this quotation, as also in earlier ones, is the intimate connection between time and space. If tempus is the measure of motus (movement),



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then “movement” occurs indifferently and indiscriminably in time and space—hence, again, “timespace”—and the LORD is extra motum, “without movement” in time or space. Understanding the LORD’s life, his life as the Trinity he is, as happening tota simul means that there is no succession in that life, no before and after. Every event in that life is simultaneous with every other, though even that way of putting it disposes creatures for the time being such as ourselves to think this means that there can be no separation in the events that constitute the LORD’s life, that because they are not differentiable by appeal to timespace they are not differentiable at all because that is the only way in which events can be differentiated. It is true in the spatio-temporal order that identity in timespace means identity simpliciter. If one creature or state of affairs is here-now, and another is also, and identically, herenow—or, to put the same point differently, if two creatures or states of affairs have exactly the same spatio-temporal coordinates—then this just means that they are the same creature. They occupy the same timespace. We might think, following this pattern of reasoning, that if the LORD’s life is tota simul, then this must mean that it is self-identical, without any real distinctions of differentiations. And that is one part of the intuition behind the idea of the LORD’s simplicity. But simplicity (and eternality) do not rule out every kind of differentiation or distinction. They deny only those kinds that suggest composition, and thereby the possibility of division. Differentiations such as those that relate the persons of the Trinity one to another need not do this, and that is because those relations (begetting, proceeding, and so on) conjointly constitute the LORD, making him, as Augustine likes to say, the trinitas quae deus est—the Trinity that God is. It is not that the LORD is a being who has those relations; it is that those relations, taken together, exhaustively constitute the simplex Dominus, the LORD who is simple. That the LORD is triune, however, does mean that his eternity is not that of an unextended spatio-temporal period, like, in definition, a Euclidean point. It is, rather—and here we have to use metaphors—an extended but not compounded all-at-onceness, an enduring, but not spatio-temporally enduring, present. This extended all-at-onceness is what the LORD’s eternity is. Temporality, by contrast, is everything that this is not. It (temporality) is the life of the fallen world, and, though differently, of the prelapsum cosmos, and of

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heaven. By analogy with the LORD’s eternity, which just is the set of relations that makes the three persons he is what they severally are, the world’s temporality just is the set of relations creatures bear to one another. These relations are what makes the world what it is, spatio-temporally speaking, and they are all at least (if not only) spatio-temporal relations, each construable through the categories “before,” “after,” and “simultaneous with.” Every creature, every ensemble of creatures, and every state of affairs is temporal in the sense that it bears an enormous number of relations of this kind to other such creatures. The temporal order as a whole, timespace properly considered, just is this set of relations, and all of them perdure. I say more below (§§15–16) about how best to construe the nature of time in the temporal order, and about the difference between fallen and redeemed time. Before doing that, however, I need to clarify in a preliminary way the nature of the relations between the LORD—who just is the eternal order, the order without succession even though with differentiation—and creation, which just is timespace. The best way to approach this is to begin with what Christian doctrine requires be said about the LORD’s relations to the created order, and then to see what is suggested by this about the more general question. The first thing that must be said is that the LORD creates everything other than himself ex nihilo, and that what he creates—a beautiful cosmos, unfallen—comes into being with timespace as a distinguishing feature. This already shows that the eternal LORD can act in such a way that the effects of what he does are felt in the temporal order. The act itself is of course not temporal, not to be qualified with the adverb “temporally”; nothing the LORD does is or can be of that sort. But it is perfectly coherent to say that atemporal acts can be felt for the time being, rather as a purely physical act, such as a tree branch falling, can be felt in the nonphysical order as pain by a human creature on whom it falls. Some of the LORD’s acts are like that, and in the special case of creation, it is not only that the atemporal act is felt in time, but that it brings time into being. Creatio ex nihilo is also tempus/motus ex aeternitate. The act of creation, therefore, is for the LORD something done eternally; for the cosmos, it is the constitution of the temporal order, and in that sense also the “beginning” of that order. There is, for the LORD, no before to the act of creation,



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and no after; there is just the atemporal state of affairs that we might call “being a creator.” The created order depends for its temporality on the atemporal state of affairs that the LORD is a creator. Time’s beginning is causally dependent upon eternity in this sense. But there is another atemporal act of the LORD of at least equal importance to time. I mean that act whereby the second person of the Trinity is eternally conjoined with a particular human nature, thus constituting the person Jesus Christ. That person, an indissoluble union of human and divine, is eternal; Jesus says, in John’s Gospel, antequam Abraham fieret, ego sum (8:58), and, to the Jews (also to we Christians, who now hear it directly as verbum Domini and ought take it to heart most deeply), vos de mundo hoc estis; ego non sum de mundo (8:23)—you are of the world; I am not of the world. Jesus is, therefore (note the present tense), before Abraham was made, and therefore also in some sense before the virginal conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb; and he is also not of this (devastated) world, and not (even) of the beautiful cosmos unfallen. These texts, and many others like them, are coherent with and suggestive of Jesus’ eternal-atemporal existence (ego sum, resonating with the LORD’s ego sum qui sum of Exodus 3:14, here indicates the atemporal present, the tota simul of the vita Domini) understood as the union between the second person of the Trinity and the human nature of Jesus. But there is also, of course, a temporally ordered vita Christi, evident to time-creatures as such, beginning with conception in Mary’s womb and ending with the ascension of Christ’s risen flesh. This life, unlike the LORD’s life, is replete with temporal relations, relations, that is, of before and after and at-the-same-time-as. The events of that life in the temporal order are the way in which the eternal union of the LORD and the human are felt in creation. This is true not only of the acts of the incarnate LORD between conception and ascension, but also since, in his real presence in the sacramental life of the church. These events—the life of the incarnate Christ and the presence of that life in the church’s sacramental activity—are the principal and fullest instance of the contemporaneity of the LORD’s eternal life with the temporal order, the mode under which the LORD is felt most fully in time. But these temporally ordered events, like all others, are simultaneous with the atemporal life of the LORD, which is lived tota simul.

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Creation and incarnation are the LORD’s fullest presence in time. Without the former, there would be no temporal order; and the latter stands at the heart of the temporal order, sustaining it and redeeming it and healing it: Quia in ipso [filio] conplacuit [patri] omnem plenitudinem habitare et per eum reconciliare omnia in ipsum [filium] pacificans per sanguinem crucis eius sive quae in terris quae in caelis sunt (Col 1:19-20). The Father, according to this text, reconciles and brings peace to everything, every creature—that is the ordinary sense of the phrase “what’s on earth and what’s in heaven.” And it is not that the incarnation is separated from the creation. Immediately before the words just quoted, the Letter to the Colossians says that in him, the very same one through whom everything in heaven and on earth is reconciled, condita sunt universa in caelis at in terra (1:16), everything in heaven and on earth is created. In the LORD’s eternal life, these two, creation and incarnation, are not separate (tota simul, again). But something more than that is being said here, namely that there is an immediate connection between creation and incarnation in the temporal order as well as in the eternal. Creation is “before” incarnation in the narrative order, certainly, and according to the timeline’s measure (on which more in §§14–15); but it is also the case that incarnation is implicit in creation and that creation is proleptically consummated in incarnation even in the narrative order. To use a metaphor to which I will return (§16), creation and incarnation are folded together in the temporal order, and are so because of their intimacy in the LORD’s life. Time itself finds its center in the events of the incarnation. All the events that constitute the temporal order, together with all the relations they bear one to another, are identically and fully present to the LORD in his eternality. That is a principle of equivalence that follows at once from the nature of the relations between the two orders, eternal and temporal. But not all events in the temporal order bear the weight of the LORD’s glory identically. In extreme cases, this is something close to obvious. Murderous violence performed by one human being on another, mass creaturely death caused by changing conditions in the world, even the quotidian injustices of the pagan city in which we all participate as agents and patients—these are present to the LORD, but they bear his glory only to a minimal extent. The call of Abraham, the pregnancy of Sarah, Ruth’s pilgrimage, the martyrdoms of the saints, everyday acts of charity—these, by contrast, are suffused and instinct with the LORD’s glory. Creation and



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incarnation bear the heaviest weight of that glory: they are glory through and through, their temporality as transparent to the LORD’s radiance as was the skin of Moses’ face after his meetings with the LORD on Sinai, and as was the transfigured person of Jesus on the mountain with Moses and Elijah, his face shining sicut sol, and his clothes brilliant white sicut nix (Matt 17:2). The LORD’s glory is, then, both distributed unevenly within the temporal order (a claim in the order of being), and evident unevenly therein to time-creatures (a claim in the order of knowing). The fabric of time is not flat, regular, smooth; it is bunched, folded, resistant to metronomic measure. This position is an unavoidable concomitant of the LORD’s eternity. He acts always, eternally, but some of his actions are felt in time; and the nature of those actions, all of which are the overspill of an excessive Trinitarian love, means that the glory of the LORD is unevenly distributed in timespace. This in turn means that timespace, once it has been devastated by the double fall, is rough ground. That is a metaphor taken from Wittgenstein (Philosophische Untersuchungen no. 107: “Zurück auf den rauhen Boden!”), and I mean it to prompt thought in a sacramental direction: the rough ground of timespace is given it by the LORD’s uneven presence on and in it.

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The Chronic Temporality of Creatures

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he positions taken so far about the LORD’s eternity are far from providing answers to all possible questions about the nature of the temporal order. They rule out some possibilities, certainly, but many others are left open, and they are almost entirely within the speculative realm. This section offers a further line of thought about the temporality of creatures, a line that will serve and support a particular position on time’s novissimum, and therefore on the last things of creatures. The created order, by contrast with the LORD (which contrast is exactly what makes it the created order), is chronically temporal. That is, temporality is a feature of it in much the same way that an inability to metabolize sugars and starch is a feature of diabetes mellitus, or the presence of a double X chromosome is of female mammalian cells. A sine qua non of creaturehood, whether in Eden or in the devastation or in heaven or in hell, is temporal relation to other creatures; if you have no temporal relations to any other creature or creaturely ensemble, then you are, by definition, not a creature. This, to a first approximation, is what it means to say that the created order is chronically temporal. It is saturated with temporal relations as a chronic condition. Furthermore, a Christian theological account of temporality cannot be undertaken without adverting to the LORD: if temporality is a constituent of creaturehood, and creaturehood is definitionally a relation with the LORD, then temporality, too, must be such a relation. There is no logic of time nor any account of time that is not also a logic and an account of the LORD and his relation to what he

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has created. Nonetheless, we can begin with some uncontroversial claims about the nature of time and duration. First, and uncontroversially: Every event that belongs to your life is simultaneous with some events external to your life, as my birth is simultaneous with whatever else happened at 2 a.m. GMT on November 12, 1955; it is subsequent to others, as my writing these words is to the celebrations of Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee in 2012; and it is prior to yet others, as my death will, I assume, be to the heat-death of the sun. A life without any such temporal relations could not be a life, and certainly not a creaturely one: ineluctable relational temporality of this sort is a fundamental and chronic feature of creaturehood. Next, and rather more controversially: Every event that occurs and every state of affairs that obtains in the created order is temporal in the sense that it is temporally related to other events therein; and all such events and states of affairs have no temporal properties other than those relational ones. That is, every event is simultaneous with some other events, prior to some, and subsequent to some. But events have no additional location on a one-way timeline: it is not that some are past, some present, and others future simply in virtue of occupying a particular place on such a timeline. There is no such timeline, and thus also no fact of the matter about which events are present, which past, and which yet to come. No event is indexed to any such condition, and so no description of or reference to it need be so (other than for pressing practical purposes), either. Events do not change their temporal location, moving, as it were (the spatial analogy is unavoidable), from the future into the present and then receding into the past. No. Instead, all events and states of affairs have atemporally all the temporal relations they have. My birth is always (atemporally) simultaneous with whatever else happened when it did; my writing these words is atemporally (always) subsequent to Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee; and my death is forever prior to the sun’s heat-death. This means that I, like you and like every other creature, am best thought of as a four-dimensional being, where my fourth dimension is constituted by the infinite set of my temporal relations. I am a creature extended in timespace and located there by my relations to other creatures also so extended and also so related. This is not to say that I am only partly present—present as a timeslice, as is sometimes said—at each moment of my four-dimensional



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existence. Four dimensionalism does not require any such view, any more than three dimensionalism with respect to space requires that when I act physically, the only agent is the part of my body that performs the action. When I receive the body of Christ on my tongue, it is not the case that only part of me (my tongue) is so receiving. In that case, even though I have physical parts other than my tongue, and not every part of my body is at first identically intimate with the consecrated host when it begins to dissolve on my tongue, the proper thing to say is that I—the creature I am— receives Christ. The same account applies to everything I do: my physical parts act only when I do; my agency as a creature embraces what all my physical parts do. Similarly for temporal parts, which, according to a fourdimensionalist view of time, we all certainly have. When you act at a time, an hour from now, say, you are the one who acts, not just a timespace-slice of you. Your agency is not sliced up by temporal distance any more than it is by spatial distance, and that is because in both cases creaturely agency comprises and unifies spatio-temporal parts. You, with all your temporal relations, are the one who acts whenever and wherever you do. Four-dimensionalism means that sentences such as “it is happening now,” or “it happened a while ago,” or “it will happen soon,” or “thank goodness that’s over,” each of which appears on its face to be indexed to a place on a putative timeline, are unavoidable façons de parler: we cannot help but talk in that way, just as we cannot help but say that the sun rises in the east or that the winter is now behind us if we want to communicate with others. But such talk can easily bewitch us into thinking that temporal indexicals (“the thirteenth century,” “five minutes ago,” “next month”) pick out points on a timeline rather than being convenient and shorthand means for indicating temporal relations. When I say, “I met you five years ago,” the correct interpretation is not that there is a timespace location called “five years ago” where we met. It is, rather, that the event of our having met is prior to the event of our identifying that meeting, and that by the calendrical metric we share, the extent or degree of its priority can rightly be identified by the phrase “five years ago.” This is, at least, to say that tensed sentences can all be given tenseless truth-conditions. We do not, of course, ordinarily offer such interpretations of what we say in this line as we speak, either to ourselves or to our interlocutors. We need to make such specifications rarely, and only when philosophy or theology is in play. Almost all of us almost all the time can get by perfectly well

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without deciding whether to interpret our time-talk and duration-talk according to location on a timeline or according to specification by way of atemporally obtaining temporal relations; and almost all of our ordinary time-talk can be interpreted in either way. Deciding for the temporalrelations-only view therefore requires no adjustment to our ordinary habits of talk—any more than does deciding for the there-is-really-a-timeline interpretation. This point also disposes of one common theologians’ objection to this relational, four-dimensional view of time and duration, which is that it somehow calls into question the narrative shape of human identity. This rests on a confusion: the temporal properties that we human beings have are, on the view defended here, real and always with us. The four-dimensional shape of our lives remains what it is, and that shape can, in significant part, be narrated. But if the temporal-relations-only view of chronic creaturely time is right, then there is no fact of the matter about what is now, what is past, and what is future. There are facts of the matter only about what is before what, what is after what, and what is simultaneous with what. And all those facts of the matter are themselves atemporal: the temporal pattern of the created order is constituted atemporally and is representable (in theory) iconically, as a whole, all at once—only the LORD could manage this fully, of course, but we Christians can and do try. It is a commonplace of premodern (and some postmodern) Christian visual art, for instance, to depict within a single frame events widely separated in time: a single icon may show, for instance, the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus; or the conversion, imprisonment, and execution of Paul; or the trial, vision, and death in the arena of Perpetua. Such practices do not remotely suggest the unreality of time and succession and change; but they do suggest—they sit very well with, are harmonious with—the view that the reality of all those things is relational, and that there is a perspective from which the nature of those relations appears and can be seen all at once, tota simul. What is shown in icons and altarpieces and other visual artifacts that use this convention is an asymptotic approximation to what the LORD sees. To him, the temporal constitution of Eden and the devastation is fully present, all at once, in all its particularity and complexity. The iconic content of his vision has Melchizedek and Abraham and Sarah and Ruth and Isaiah and Daniel and Mary and Jesus fully present before it all at once, in their chronically



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temporal wholeness. The atemporal truth about the temporal relations we all bear to one another is participant in the atemporal simultaneity (an expression that barely, but sufficiently, avoids being an oxymoron) with the LORD that is an essential feature of every event in creation’s chronic time. And so, the LORD’s eternality and the exclusively relational nature of the temporal comport well. I have written that the created order is chronically temporal, and that this is not true of the LORD. Such a view limits temporality to the created order: event-constituted lives that bear relations one to another of a real temporal variety occur only in that order. Only there—only here—can we use the language of “before” and “after” with conviction. Temporality, therefore, is not only a chronic feature of creation, but a feature of it alone. It is important to see that the LORD’s eternity entails neither rejection of a real timeline, nor, concomitantly, rejection of the idea that there are temporal facts about creatures independent of and additional to the facts about the temporal relations they bear one to another. The LORD’s eternity does not rule out all members of this family of views. It could be that there are facts about creatures, such as “existing now” or “existing in the past,” that are eternally present to the LORD, and that cannot be translated without remainder into claims about temporal relations among creatures—even though a good deal of work has to be done to make such a position plausible. But there are reasons for thinking some variant of four dimensionalism true that have nothing directly to do with theology, Christian or otherwise. Important among these is the fact that Special Relativity rules out the possibility of absolute time, time, that is, independent of some inertial frame of reference. General Relativity probably does so as well, though less clearly. For Special Relativity, absolute simultaneity does not and cannot occur. All simultaneity, on these views, is relative to particular inertial frames of reference: two events that appear simultaneous from within one such frame need not do so from within another. This means that nowness—the property of occurring at an absolute now, a now-time independent of any inertial frame of reference—is one that no creature can have, because such a property, were it instantiated, would require absolute simultaneity. And if there is no such simultaneity, then there is no nowness and no such time as now, if that word is understood to denote an absolute now. There is only simultaneity relative to particular

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inertial frames of reference, and, therefore, also only beforeness and afterness relative to such frames of reference. The question “What is really happening in the Crab Nebula right now?” is, on this view, just like the question “Is Chicago really to the left of New York City?” (assuming a spatial rather than a political sense of “left”). That is, it is a question whose answer depends entirely upon the frame of reference within which it is being asked. As there is no absolute left, so there is no absolute present. Special Relativity might be false; or it might be capable of a construal different from the one now ordinarily given it; in either case it would provide no reason for denying presentism. But for the time being, it contributes to the plausibility of four-dimensionalism, and comports well with what Christian theology suggests should be the case about the nature of time. Another point deeply woven into the fabric of Christian thought about time’s nature, and also congruent with the ordinary interpretation of both Special and General Relativity, is the exchangeability of space and time. To put the matter more precisely, location in time is always also location in space; there is no possibility of creaturely location in one that is not also creaturely location in the other. My earlier brief discussion of Thomas’ appropriation of the Aristotelian definition of time as motion’s measure implies this position: the point is not only that all motion in space can be measured temporally (28 days is the measure of the time it takes for the moon to circle the earth; 70 years is the time it takes, ordinarily, for a human creature to move from conception to the first death), but also that without motion in space there is, and can be, no temporal extension. In a nonphysical cosmos, one in which there are only immaterial objects, there can also be no time. And in a nontemporal cosmos, without temporal extension, there can also be no space. “Location,” as word and concept, is always both spatial and temporal. A full answer to the question “Where are you?” asked of an enfleshed creature, requires specification of both space and time, just as does an answer to the question “When are/were/ will you be?” The chronic temporality of creatures, then, is also inevitably spatial. We are in timespace, not just in time and not just in space. Bringing these points together with what Christian doctrine requires be said about timespace yields the following picture. First, the LORD’s act of creation out of nothing brings into being a timespace manifold that rests upon and is ordered to an eternal act. The cosmos’ existence—cum



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tempore and cum spatio, as spatio-temporal—is the first and most fundamental way in which the LORD’s acts are felt in timespace. That spatiotemporal mode of existence, because it is ex nihilo, hovers always over the void of the nonexistence from which it came. Grace, the free unmerited act of the LORD, is the explanation for the fact that it is as it is, and for the fact that it continues to be, that its spatio-temporality does not collapse into nothing. The spatio-temporal existence of the cosmos (now a fallen and devastated world) and everything in it is in this sense tenuous. Second, the spatio-temporal center of the fallen world (and of the unfallen cosmos), the place in which the LORD’s glory rests most heavily upon it, is the place of Jesus Christ, which is the course of events that begins in Mary’s womb and is consummated in the ascension. These events, spatio-temporal as they must by definition be, are those upon which the entire spatio-temporal extension of the world is centered and folded. Their timespace is the only timespace capable of real presence to all other timespaces. They are (or can be) folded upon it and transfigured by it. In them, chronic creaturely temporality finds its damage healed, its chronic deathliness transfigured. This way of talking, as yet suggestive and inchoate rather than worked out, implies that the world’s timespace is damaged, like everything else reduced and warped by the double fall. Further specification of this damage is the topic of the next section.

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§15

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Time Damaged Metronome

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o get at the nature of time’s damage, its fallen condition, we need to distinguish the kinds of time and duration, for they are not all of one kind. There is, to begin with, the world’s time, or time in the order of being, which is the set of temporal relations as they are, independently of how they do or might appear to or be experienced by animate and conscious creatures. Cosmic time is a set of relational facts as they stand before the LORD: the fact that Napoleon’s death occurred more than a century before Putin’s birth, for example; or the fact that the last dinosaur on earth died some millions of years before the first human lived; or the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was born a few months after John the Baptist. There is also psychic time, which is the variety of modes under which temporal relations are experienced by sentient creatures. The passage of five minutes, for instance, might seem unbearably long to a man awaiting sentence in court or one expecting his lover’s arrival; it might seem short, vanishingly so, to a woman in a hurry, already late. Leaving aside for the moment the question of psychic time, even cosmic time is not all of one kind. We may distinguish, for the purposes of this investigation, two fundamental types of cosmic temporality, the difference between them being given by the different relations they bear to the LORD. These two kinds of cosmic time I call metronomic and systolic. The former, metronomic time, belongs to the devastation in which we live, and is the only time in hell; and the latter, systolic time, is proper to Eden, where, however, it always had the potential to become metronomic, is

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coexistent with and gradually transformative of metronomic time here in the devastation, and is the only time there is in heaven. Metronomic time, as the name suggests, is regular and measurable: its law (nomos) is measure (metron). The means of measuring it are various, and include the movements of the sun or other heavenly bodies relative to the earth, and the rates of growth and decay of material substances. The former give us days and nights and months and years; the latter provide smaller intervals, down to and beyond the zeptosecond or the ictus. But all these means of measure are derived from—or just are—kinds of creaturely motion. The constellations wheel; the moon circles the earth; the tides surge; the shadow of night’s darkness moves westward across the planet’s globe; the human body ages and changes and moves; atoms of carbon decay; the gluon and the lepton and the hadron and the boson orbit and connect and disconnect, forming and reforming; the sand sifts softly through the hourglass’ throat; the psalm-syllables are chanted with tongue and lips and vocal chords and intakings and expellings of breath; digestion’s peristaltic rhythm proceeds, making nourishment possible; the pulse beats and the eyes blink—all these are creaturely movements in space that are also, or may also be, means of measuring duration. Each of our duration-metrics is a derivation of one or another of these kinds of creaturely motion, and there is no other way available to us (and no other way at all) of measuring duration. These are the means of measurement we do and must use when we specify temporal intervals (last week, 2500 BC, next year, when I was young): all such specification assumes and attends to a cosmos in motion, divides that motion into discrete periods, and measures one such period against another. “What,” Augustine asked in one of his sermons, “are times, my brothers? They are the spaces and folds of the ages. The sun rises; after twelve hours it sets on the world’s other side; on the next day it rises again in the morning and then again sets. What is the number of such occurrences?— Those are times” (from Sermo 311.8). Times (tempora) are here assimilated to spaces (spatia), which in turn are likened to folds (volumina). They are the units or parts or folded aggregates by means of which the ages (saecula) are ordered and structured, and they are evident to us, assessable and definable and measurable by us, only by way of observable, end-stopped, and repeated cycles, such as that of the sun’s rising and setting. On this view, talk about particular periods of time—the hour, the week, the



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month, the year—is talk about what can be measured and, thus, divided into periods. In similar vein, Thomas writes in the Summa theologiae that time is the measure of motion (tempus vero est mensura motus) as eternity is the measure of what perdures (aeternitas est mensura esse permanentis) (1.110.4, from the corpus). Metronomic time, therefore, is measurable duration. It is cosmic, regular, repeating, providing duration that is what it is independently of how it seems to creatures such as ourselves. Every event—and therefore all states of affairs, each of which is an event-ensemble—occurs within the manifold of creaturely motion, and can therefore have its temporal relations to other events and states of affairs by way of duration measured. The metronome’s arm sways back and forth, hypnotically and regularly, slicing the temporal relations of the music it measures into regular parts; Job’s days and nights, he tells us (7:6), are like a weaver’s shuttle, alternating the black of night and the white of day with a rapidity and regularity that he finds unendurable; the cicadas and katydids order and measure the night’s duration by the rhythmic rubbing of their legs and wings. All these are instances of duration whose law is measure: they are instances of the weight of metronomic time, a weight that bears all creatures that labor under it down into death. Metronomic time is time whether you like it or not, the heartbeat of a damaged but still beautiful cosmos, the hammer that knocks all coffin-nails firmly and finally home. The creatures whose lives are measured and brought to death by metronomic time are, without exception, brought into being by and beloved of the LORD; that is always and necessarily true. Time itself, as a defining feature of creation, is intended and loved: spatio-temporal presence to himself is what the LORD intends for creatures, and the spatio-temporal relations we bear to one another are therefore also features of us that are loved. But time-as-metronomic is nevertheless an artifact of the fall. It is what time is like when it has been devastated. The principal mark of that devastation for us—the sign that shows us most clearly that metronomic time is time devastated—is that time is a metronomic countdown to death. To observe any creature for long—whether ourselves or others, human or otherwise, animate or otherwise—is to observe its decay, its ineluctable loss of goods it has now as it approaches its last loss, which is of life if it is animate, and of continued existence if it is inanimate. The minutely subatomic particle—the hadron, the boson—fits this picture: its existence is

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brief in the extreme, and to observe it, which we can do only with great difficulty, is to observe something about to cease to be. The large bodies that constitute the heavens fit it, too: stars are moving relentlessly toward supernova and heat-death, and planets toward destruction. And everything between is under the sway of metronomic time’s death-measure. It is not that decay toward death or nonexistence is the only thing visible to the close observer of creatures. We can also see in them, as the LORD certainly does, evidence of growth and beauty, increase in order and love, occasional and unanticipated (certainly irregular) responses to grace that bring those creatures that make them closer to the LORD rather than closer to death or annihilation. But these are the exception, not the rule. The rule, in the devastation, is the tick-tock that brings death. The other things, the acts of life and growth, do not belong to the metronome, and they are, now, in the devastated world, occasional contradictions of it, signs that it is not everything. The metronome’s omnipresence and unavoidability, its literal unendurability—the fact, that is, that we cannot live long with it, cannot put up with it, cannot survive it—is, exactly, time’s devastation. This characterization of metronomic time depends upon the view that death is an artifact of the fall. Not all Christians have thought this, but most have: it is almost a universal feature of Christian discourse, and it is a position I endorse. It means, among other things, that the motions and the time of creatures in Eden did not mark a path toward death; they began to do that only after the banishing of Eve and Adam from the garden. The temporal course of unfallen creaturely life, though still properly temporal, was therefore not measurable in the same way that devastated creaturely life is, and that is because the essential feature of temporal measurability, of the act of timing, is that one thing with motion-duration is held up against another, and that both are end-stopped, which is to say that they constitute a period in the sense that the motion-duration of each comes to an end. If one motion is endless and the other is not, then timing the duration of the endless one by means of the end-stopped one is impossible: imagining measuring the duration of the life of a tree that never dies by a clock. The reverse is equally problematic: you cannot time (measure the duration of) a period by means of an endless duration. And if both the measurer and the measured are endless, matters are even worse. In either case, metronomic time, the time whose law is measure, is impossible. In



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an Edenic world in which there is only creaturely motion without end because there is no death, there is nothing end-stopped to use as a measure or to be measured. There are no periods, and especially not the final period that is death. Death and the metronome are therefore inseparable: the absence of the former in Eden entails the absence of the latter. Edenic duration was not end-stopped because it was not death-bound. The same must be true of heavenly time, for there, by definition, death is not merely absent, but impossible (in Eden, by contrast, death was absent but possible). The metronomic possibility, then, which is to say the possibility of duration measurable according to an end-stopped series, belongs solely to the devastation. Time devastated is metronomic time. It is interesting that the conceptual temptation to think of duration and temporal location in terms of points on a timeline that exists independently of and in addition to relations of before and after is intimate with the possibility of measurement according to the duration of end-stopped series. Measurement by calendar and clock fosters the thought that yesterday and last week and half an hour ago are places on a timeline. And such measurement is, in turn, a feature of the metronome. And all that is death’s kissing cousin.

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§16

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ut we must now begin to face some serious difficulties. If creaturehood implies temporality, and if metronomic time belongs only to the devastation because of its intimacy with death, then there must be a kind of temporality that is not subject to the law of measure, and that therefore does not require death. This would be Edenic and heavenly time, which two need not (and indeed cannot) be identical with one another in every way, but must be so at least in this, that their temporality is not metronomic. How then to characterize Edenic and heavenly time? A good label for this, following a cue from St. Paul, is systolic time. The systole, physiologically speaking, is the regular contraction of the heart as necessary prelude to the driving of blood outward from itself; it is a contraction that prepares the organism for a movement essential to the sustaining of its life. To call time “systolic,” then, is to suggest that it is contracted, gathered, tensed, ready for life-giving action. This sounds mysterious; Paul will help us to understand it better. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, as part of a discussion of what the marriage practices of Christians should be now, since the ascension of Jesus, Paul writes that it is good for Christians to remain as they are with respect to marriage (if married, then married; if not, then not); and that there should also be changes in the way those states of life are lived—those who are married, for example, should live as if they were not. The reason for these changes is that time, now, is systolated (sunestalmenos)—ruched, pleated, tensed, furled, crouched like a cat for the spring, tight-wrapped

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in grave-clothes like a corpse prepared for resurrection, swaddled like a newborn being carried toward the baptismal font (1 Cor 7:29). The Greek verb here, sustellein, lies at the root of the English “systole,” which is among the reasons for choosing that English equivalent. In the Corinthian correspondence, the participle, when applied to time (kairos in this instance), does not mean that time has grown short, as most English renderings of this word have it. Paul is not grounding the claim that those who have spouses should live hos me, as if they did not, upon the claim that there is not much metronomic time left. That would be an uninteresting claim; it would mean that the principal reason for Christians to live differently is that metronomic time is about to run out, and that we should change because we expect its imminent end. This is the same pattern of reasoning that informs calculation about the dates of the rapture and the Parousia, and that supports throwing caution and money and spouses and jobs and children to the winds once the date and time of the metronome’s final tock is known, or thought to be known. I take Paul, and with him the Christian tradition in its more thoughtful moments, to be suggesting something more interesting. What might that be? That the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus lie at the heart of time. That time is contracted by those events, pleated and folded around them, gathered by them into a tensely dense possibility. By and in those events, the events of the passion, metronomic duration, the regularly measurable fabric of timespace, is systolated: it has folds or gatherings in it because of its contraction. The principal fold is exactly that provided by the passion: there, time is folded most thickly, pleated most delicately and intricately, contracted—systolated—most tightly; there (then) eternity’s relation to the devastation’s metronomic death hammer is most intense and most transformative; it is that death hammer that drives the nails through the flesh of Jesus and the spear into his side, and it is the hyperdurational events that follow (death, deposition, burial, descent ad inferos, hell’s harrowing, resurrection, ascension) that remove them, and provide the necessary conditions for the casting of Christ’s blood out into the cosmos and into our hearts. The passion is to the fabric of timespace just as the heart’s systole is to our bodies. Time receives its proper order in the passion, and it is an order opposed in every significant way to the time of the metronome.



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The systole figure for this pattern of thought in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is not the only possible one, certainly; but it is a powerful one that has found much resonance in the long Christian tradition, and which has considerable implications for Christian thought about time’s end. Peter’s correspondence, too, provides resources for thinking about time’s healing, the gradual absorption of the metronome by the systole. In the First Letter of Peter, as part of an exhortation to holy living in participatory imitation of the LORD’s holiness, Peter writes that Christians should “conduct [yourselves] with fear during the time of your visit” (1:17). The Greek noun here, paroikia, occurs frequently in Scripture, and always means a visit to an alien place, a place in which the visitor is not at home. The visitor does not know local custom, perhaps; or is ignorant of events the locals know all about; or is in some other way out of place and out of time. The visit, the paroikia, may or may not be of short metronomic duration, but it is not the point of the word to emphasize this. Rather, the point is to emphasize that the mode of being of the visitor, the paroikos, is markedly distinct from that of the locals. They are at home and the visitor is not. They know what they are doing and the visitor does not. Strikingly, a verbal form of the word (paroikeis) is applied to Jesus by Cleopas in Luke’s story (24:18) of the resurrected LORD on the road to Emmaus. Jesus, at this point unrecognized, is taken to be a visitor to Jerusalem just because he does not seem to know what all the locals know, which is that Jesus has been crucified and that there are now reports of his resurrection. Ordinarily, you visit a place, not a time, unless you are indulging science-fictional fantasies about time travel. But in the text from Peter’s first letter just quoted, emphasis is placed on the temporal aspect of a visit undertaken as a stranger or an exile, and this is entirely in accord with the exchangeability of space and time already discussed (§§14–15). The chronos of a visit, Peter may be read to say, is affected exactly by the fact that it is a visit—a time of exile, of being in a place to which the visitor does not quite belong and whose customs and language she does not understand; it is time gathered and intensified, a period of tensive duration pulled away from the repetitive violence of metronomic time’s regularity and toward intimacy with duration of a different kind. Peter says that this temporal gathering-up should produce fear, by which he means the timor Dei that is the beginning of wisdom. That makes good sense if we can see through the scrim of Peter’s words to those of Paul. Tensive fear is among the results

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of the systolic gathering-up of time, but is not an exhaustive account of it. Life is the more fundamental feature: the systolic contraction of the heart is what forces the blood through the aorta and the pulmonary artery, and this, in turn, is what sustains the body’s life. The fear of the LORD that properly belongs to the time of our estranged visit to the chronically metronomic duration of the devastation is the beginning not only of wisdom but also of life. Fear is a characteristic of the tension between metronomic and systolic time; as the latter absorbs the former, fear is etiolated. A pause is necessary at this point to rule out a possible misinterpretation of this discussion of systolic time and the time of the visit. It might seem that the distinction is only at the level of seeming, which is to say that it has to do with how duration—the interval, the period, the systole— seems or might seem to Christians. If that were the case, then systolic and metronomic time would be differentiated only at the psychic level, as an element in the subjective sense of duration. Systolic time would, on that understanding, be like the time of a lover’s expectation of the beloved’s return, or the bored student’s sense that the lecture’s duration is infinite, or the rapidity of time’s passage for the condemned man hoping to stave off his imminent execution. But that is not what I mean. No, systolic time belongs to the same order as metronomic time: each is a real feature of the created order, and just as the created order came into being not in time but with time, out of nothing, with metronomic duration as an ineluctable feature of it in its devastated condition, so also the systolic contraction of time, its pleating and folding and bunching, is a real feature of the created order, centered upon the passion. Metronomic time is the temporal mode of the created order’s participation in eternity consequent upon the fall; it is death-time, the time, too, of radical boredom; systolic time is the temporal mode of the created order’s participation in eternity consequent upon the passion; it is life-time, the time in which the temporal texture of creaturehood becomes as fully responsive as it can to the LORD’s eternal kiss. Each alike is real, independent of the various modes in which duration appears to creatures like us. And this gives us our first real hint of how time’s last thing may be thought about: as the absorption without remainder of the metronome by the systole.



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Systolic time, I have suggested, belongs to the created order, which is in the metronomic temporal order prior to the events of the passion. This is not a difficulty. The act of creation, like all the LORD’s acts ad extra, is a work of the Trinity the LORD is, and is attributed especially to the Word, the second person of that Trinity. If, as I have suggested, such works are without exception atemporally present to the LORD who is the sanctissima trinitas, then the Trinity’s second person is not only atemporally the Word in and by whom the created order comes into being, but also the one who is incarnate as Jesus Christ. Systolic time in Eden, then, guaranteed by the absence of death and the metronome, is as much gathered in to the events of the passion as is systolic time that is metronomically subsequent to the events of the passion. Or, to put this in terms perhaps more familiar, the time of the church is proleptically present in the act of creation, as the perfectly systolic time of heaven is proleptically present in both Eden and the devastation. The systole’s paradigmatic presence within the devastation’s timespace is the events of the passion. It follows from this that the other place-times in the devastation where the systole’s inbreathing and transfiguration of the metronome occurs most fully are liturgical. The church’s liturgical work, the opus domini (§31), has as its defining feature the recapitulation and representation of the passion; and, at least on a Catholic view, every Mass—every token of that type of liturgical celebration—participates in and makes really present the events it recapitulates and represents. Those who partake in the celebration are entering as fully as it is possible to do here in the devastation into the temporal order as it will be in heaven. They are enfolded by time transfigured and thereby made into participants and agents in the repetitive stasis of the LORD’s passion. Those events are an eternal feature of the LORD’s Trinitarian life; our relation to them in the sacrificial celebration of the Mass occurs in—or, following Augustine’s interpretation of the “in the beginning” of creation, occurs with—the time of the systole. The liturgy in the devastation has to work to transfigure the metronome. Consider the liturgical calendar, centered exactly upon the three days of the passion. That calendar reaches back, temporally speaking, behind Easter to the time of Advent and Christmas, and forward, in front of it, to Pentecost and the ascension. It is intertwined with the events of the incarnate life of Jesus, and with the events of the life of his mother.

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Those are its fabric, and that fabric is then further ornamented with commemoration of what has happened to the LORD’s people before and since the passion—the litany of the saints, for example, in which their intercession is implored by the LORD’s people, is chanted at the Easter Vigil, and at other times during the church’s year, and it enfolds those doing the chanting into contemporaneity with those whose intercession is being requested, whether they lived hundreds or thousands of years ago according to the metronome’s measures. But the liturgical calendar in the devastated time of the metronome has to run alongside another, that of lined-up, end-stopped periods (hours, days, weeks, months, years); there is tension between them. Mass might begin at 9:15 and end at 10:30 according to the metronome; but in the systole it participates in a cycle that has neither beginning nor end. The systole has in fact overcome and absorbed the metronome, but this fact is only occasionally evident to those embraced by the systole. We can look at our watches and consult our cellphones during the liturgy. And even if we do not, we are being done to death by the metronome even as we participate in the systole. That tension will not be over until the metronome’s last tock sounds. Systolic time does and must, since the fall, coexist with the time of the metronome. The liturgy transfigures metronomic time by way of repetition. Repetition is clearly central to the liturgy, and that in multiple senses. Within each celebration there is repetition of central elements and actions; and the celebrations are themselves many, repeated thousands of times over the course of a long liturgical life here below. Liturgy’s transfiguration of metronomic time requires repetition, but repetition does not suffice. Consider the analogy of poetical time, of the time it takes to read a poem aloud or to hear one read. That time is not metronomic, not subject to the death-measure of the metronome. Rather, it is time in which what counts and what is counted is a tensive, systolic recurrence: the reader’s breath and body are, metaphorically, and actually, ordered to and by the poem’s form. That form is, or may be, highly formal and rule-governed, but is also playful and, when it works, beautiful. The poem’s playful beauty, if it is attended to, reorders the attentive reader to itself and thereby gives her entry into systolic time in which all that counts is the time the poem takes to come to an end as a poem. So also, mutatis mutandis, for liturgical time. Each performance, each celebration of the Mass or recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, is formalized, responsive play in which, just like the



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time of poetry, what counts and what is counted is tensive gratitude for what is played out in it, gratitude ordered to a culmination that prepares the liturgized subject for beginning the whole thing again, anew, in the endless cycle to which all liturgy properly belongs. The church’s liturgy, what the LORD’s people do when they are gathered together to praise and worship him, is the clearest and fullest ordinary foreshadowing of heavenly existence given to us. In examining it, we approach as close as we can get to examining the life of the saints in heaven as it is once they are resurrected and enjoying both the sensory and nonsensory modes of knowing and seeing the LORD already distinguished (§12). This is because most of the elements of the life of the world to come are present in nuce in the worshipping assembly: the ascended LORD is present in the flesh; the gathered people is an assembly of those who know and love him as he is, at least to some degree; and the fabric of the event is woven from the threads of love exchanged—love given preveniently by the LORD, whose creature the church is, and love given responsively by the people, who have collectively and individually been brought into being by the LORD. The leitmotif of the words and actions of the liturgical gathering is adoration. All this is also true of the gathering of the resurrected saints around the LORD’s ascended body in heaven. Not every feature of the liturgical assembly here below can serve as a guide for thought about the nature of the heavenly assembly, and that is because the liturgy is celebrated in a devastated world, and is itself therefore damaged and imperfect. At any particular assembly, there are those present whose lives and thoughts are ordered in such a way as to place a great distance between themselves and the LORD; and this is recognized in the very order of the liturgy, which stutters and stammers, constantly underscoring in its very form its own impossibility, repeatedly approaching the LORD with eagerness, and then withdrawing by confessing its unworthiness. The non sum dignus is repeatedly interwoven with the vere dignum et iustum. None of this will be true of the heavenly assembly. If sin and suffering are present only as memory traces, there is no need to confess the one or lament the other. The texture and structure of the liturgical assembly here below, then, is an imperfect guide to that of the heavenly assembly, but it is by a long way the best we have. We can, with care and deep epistemic humility, extrapolate from the one to the other, by removing all those elements proper to the devastation, and by intensifying and

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purifying those elements that foreshadow what is proper to heaven. For example, the LORD’s flesh is present to the senses of the faithful in both assemblies; but the mode of its appearance here—as bread—is proper to the devastation; it is a work of the passion which itself makes sense only in a devastated world. The presence of the flesh is a constant, then; but the mode of its presence is not—that presence in heaven will be as a fleshly man, about the particulars of whose appearance we have no idea, other than that we will find them (and they will be) unsurpassably beautiful. The LORD’s flesh will not be veiled in heaven as it now necessarily is; and it will not, after the general resurrection, be invisible to the saints, as it must be in their bodilessness during the interim. An essential deep-structural feature of the liturgy here below is its cyclical repetitiveness. There is a cycle of the day, of the week, and of the year: the assembly, ideal-typically, does the same thing every sunrise and sunset and noon, every Friday and every Sunday, every Easter and every Christmas. And each kind of liturgy (the Mass, the celebrations of the canonical hours, the life-cycle liturgies of baptism and confirmation and marriage and death, the rite of penance, the rite of ordination), whether performed once in the life of an individual or a very large number of times, is a type of which there can be endlessly many tokens. A Catholic Christian who goes to Mass daily for fifty years will have participated in something close to twenty thousand masses by the end of that time. Even if attendance is weekly, or approximately so, three thousand masses will have been lived through. There are few activities in life done as frequently. The only rivals are the ordinary diurnal bodily activities of eating and sleeping and defecating and breathing. Such liturgical frequency is suggestive, in several ways at once. First, it means that much of what is done liturgically is written on the body in such a way that it does not, and to a considerable extent cannot, come to the surface of awareness as an element in the kaleidoscope of experience. Liturgical agents, for much of the time, are not aware of themselves as such: they speak the formulae, they genuflect, they approach the altar, all without its seeming to them like much—or indeed like anything—to do so (more on this in §24). Liturgical action, in part because of its frequency, is deeply habituated in something like the same way as acting in accord with whatever the local rules of etiquette happen to be. I do not have to think about whether I ought to shake your hand or utter the formulae of first meeting when I’m introduced



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to you for the first time; much less, usually, does the fact of doing these things seem like anything to me. This is a good thing. Were it not so, had I to decide whether to shake your hand, the gesture would exactly not be one of politeness, but instead something worse. Exactly the same is true of a good deal of what goes on at Mass. To have to make decisions, with all their occurrent seemings, about when to rise, when to kneel, when to speak, when be silent, when to genuflect—that would imply, first, that I could act otherwise, an, second, that there could be an equally good, but different, way to do things. And if any of that were the case, I would be related to my liturgical actions as their orderer and master—their author, with authority over them—rather than as their creature, one made by them. The considerations just mentioned are external to the particulars of the liturgy. That is, they belong to liturgical action understood as a simple instance of frequent and habitual action. Similar claims can and should be made about other things we do with this degree of frequency. But such external reasons are not the only ones for thinking that liturgical agency has as its proper goal, its culmination, the endlessly repeated iteration of variation-free tokens of a type. Instances—tokens—of liturgical performance here below already present themselves in this way. The eucharistic liturgy, for instance, contains in its text, both rubrical and otherwise, repeated emphasis on the fact that it—each and every token, that is—participates identically in its type. The type is the earthly career of the LORD Jesus Christ, from conception to ascension, with special emphasis on the events of the passion. It is this that each liturgical token participates in identically. It is exactly such participation that makes liturgy of it, and not a human performance. It is just such participation that separates liturgy from theatrical spectacle, and it is realization of this that frees liturgical agents exactly to be theatrical. If the difference between liturgy and theater were to lie in the methods used to perform it, it would be important to make it seem to the nonparticipant eye different from other performances. But that is not where the difference lies, and realization of this makes every human theatrical resource appropriate for liturgical celebration. The variations that belong to each liturgical token here below (variations of language, of participants, of place, of time, and so on) are accidents; the goal toward which every liturgical celebration points and toward which it asymptotically tends is indiscriminable identity of participation in what it is about, in the events that make it what it is.

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This line of reasoning is powerfully supportive of the view that the right way to think about the end of human creatures in heaven is that it is repetitively static. It rests principally upon the assumption that liturgical action and liturgical agency provide, in the devastation, the fullest and best image of what heavenly action and heavenly agency will be like for human creatures. What we shall do if we are fortunate enough to attain such an end is enter upon an endless cycle of adoration, each iteration of which is indiscriminable (by us) from every other, and the rhythmic repetition of which will have no end. Each iteration of the cycle will have a structure, but it is beyond the scope even of speculative theology to say what that structure is like, except in the most abstract fashion. At the highest level of abstraction we can say that the internal structure of each cycle will be like that of the liturgy—it will be liturgy without the stutters and stammers introduced into it by the devastation, liturgy whose cycle of adoration is seamless. We can also say that the liturgy of heaven will be bodily: it will involve our senses—we shall look with love upon the face of Jesus Christ, and will constantly receive from him the caress of the prevenient look that makes our look possible. And so, mutatis mutandis, for the other senses. And we can say, though this is more speculative, that the heavenly liturgy will have no room in it for the sense of self, the sense that it is me doing this. When we are fully happy, when we experience beatitude, when we are filled with the love of the LORD, there is no space for first-person awareness, which is a paraphrase of Simone Weil’s beautiful sentence, “La joie parfaite exclut le sentiment même de joie, car dans l’âme, emplie par l’objet, nul coin n’est disponible pour dire ‘je’ ”—”Perfect joy excludes even the sentiment of joy, because in the soul filled with its object there is no corner available for saying ‘I’ ” (Oeuvres completes, 6/2:251). That will have been overwritten. And, finally, we can say that metronomic time will have been finally abolished in the liturgy of heaven: there will only be the time of the systole, the time in which human action is fully enfolded into the life of the Trinity. I have used the figure of the fold to describe the relation that sacramental ensembles of creatures have to the passion, and to describe the nature of systolic time as folded around the time of the passion. The figure applies, then, to both space and time. These can both be folded, and what they are folded on or into is in all cases the same: the passion. This is a trope, which



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is to say a figure; and while it sounds good, it may also be more or less baffling, dazzlingly obscure, perhaps. Is it possible to say more about what it means? Suppose we consider the figure spatially: Imagine a large, crisp, cotton bedsheet, ironed flat and spread out smoothly on an unblemished flat surface. The surface of that sheet is uniform, or almost so; it can be gridded, and every point on it can be indicated with precision by the specification of a pair of coordinates. There are no folds, and every point on the sheet maintains without variation its distance from every other point. That is a figure for metronomic timespace: each locus preserves a measurable metronomic distance from every other. Now, imagine a disturbance, more or less cataclysmic, that bunches and folds the sheet’s smooth surface. Several places on the sheet’s surface now touch one another. Perhaps a dozen of them are layered one on top of another, while other points on the sheet remain distant from that bunched and layered central node, still relatively smooth and unruffled. That’s a figure for systolic timespace: the smooth sheet is now rough ground, and some places on it are sites of concentrated activity while others are isolated, separated, devastated, smoothly distant from the central, ruched node. The illustration has its limitations, but also its uses. Its central purpose is that it serves to illustrate how timespace-events metronomically distant from one another can become systolically intimate by being folded; the inbreathing of the systole is the action of folding or bunching, and the result is a transfiguration of timespace. Applied theologically, the example shows something of how it is that a particular celebration of the Eucharist can be spatio-temporally contiguous with the events of the passion—how, that is, such a celebration can be sacramental. Some care is needed at this point. It is not that there is anywhere totally free of the LORD’s presence. Such a place would be no-place, a spatial black hole, for the Augustinian (and generically Christian) axiom that the extent to which something is is also the extent to which it is good holds here as well. The death camps and the killing fields are not no-places; they are devastated places, on the way to being no-places, utopias (and their existence is usually fueled by utopian dreams). And not only this. Those devastated places may become folded closely into the place of the passion, transfigured in part by the presence there of Christ’s flesh. This, after all, is what happened paradigmatically at Golgotha, the skull’s place, which is a good general name for the world’s devastated places. That place of

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death was also the place at which the LORD was most fully present in the devastated world, and the same happens to a lesser degree when the saints are present in other devastated places—when Maximilien Kolbe or Edith Stein are martyred in the Nazi camps, when Paul Miki and his companions are tortured or crucified in sixteenth-century Japan, and so on. Devastated places are never without some degree of the LORD’s presence, and never without the possibility of being folded back onto the LORD’s passion and thus being transfigured into places of sacramental presence. The two things must be held together: the LORD is not uniformly present everywhere in the devastation, exactly because it is the devastation; and every devastated place can be transfigured by being folded up into the nodal point of the passion. To lose either of these claims is to lose something fundamental to Christian thinking. Sacramental thinking, then, is thinking about the rough ground of presence and absence. Walking that rough ground means a lot of stumbling. The unevenness of the LORD’s presence is a feature and result of the fall. In Eden there was no rough ground, and in heaven there will be none. In both those timespaces, the LORD’s presence was uniform. In Eden it is obvious that there could be no local foldings of timespace into the passion because there was not yet—or not in Eden anyway—any devastation. The human fall had not yet occurred, even though the angelic fall already had. And it was only after the human fall that the LORD could walk in the garden in the cool of the day, and that Adam and Eve could hide from him. And in heaven, too, it seems that there can be no rough ground, no dialectic of presence and absence, for the LORD is then and there all in all. Systolic time, the time proleptically present in the liturgy, cannot be measured by metronomic time. It is a temptation to think that it can, that, somehow, metronomic time is more fundamental, more real, than systolicliturgical time. We are likely to think that the pleated and folded time of the liturgy is parasitic upon the evenly distributed time of the clock, and that the question “How long did that take?” when asked of a liturgical celebration, gets its only real answer in hours and minutes. But that is a mistake, which there is no reason to make. Metronomic time is devastated time, and, according to the axioms of Christian theology, to be devastated is to be damaged, to be lacking a good or goods that would, absent devastation, be present. The damage in question is exactly loss of intimacy



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with the LORD. Time intimate with the LORD is folded upon his passion and inspired by the LORD’s creative breath. It is instinct with the LORD. As time loses the fold and the inspiration, it is smoothed out and begins to assume the properties it would have were there merely a world without the LORD. It begins, that is, to move toward nothing, which is the only possible condition of a world without the LORD, and it does that by progressive etiolation. It becomes thin, regular, capable of clock measurement, entropic, moving toward its own demise by becoming capable of measure. Metronomic time has annihilation as its only possible last thing, as is the case for all creatures whose separation from the LORD becomes definitive. If, as I have suggested (§15), it is definitive of metronomic time that it involves end-stopped periods—only in that way can it become capable of measure, which is what it means to be metronomic—then there are immediate prima facie problems with the idea of endless metronomic time, and therefore also with the idea of an endless hell. Time in hell would have to be metronomic; and it would have to be free of relation to the systole; that is, it would have to be merely metronomic. If it retained traces of the systolic, it would not yet be fully and finally fallen, not yet metronomic-without-remainder. And yet, any trace of the systole is a trace of the LORD. Time with such traces would not, by definition, be Domino deserta, deserted finally and completely by the LORD. When all trace of the systole is gone, the inevitable result is annihilation. Time’s last thing in hell, then, is to come to nothing, and with it any time-bound creature in hell. This has immediate and important implications for the very idea of hell, to which I return in §25. Heaven’s time, by contrast, maintains and intensifies to the maximum the signs of temporal grace evident in the devastation, and removes all unendurability. This is to say that heaven’s time is exclusively nonmetronomic; all that, an artifact of the fall as it is, has been burned away. What remains is the systole perfected, the tensive, gathered time of the liturgy now extended to infinity. Just as the passion-centered liturgical calendar is cyclical and repetitive here in the devastation, so too is systolic time in heaven: it is the indrawn breath of the LORD, which concentrates time around the sacred heart, the beating heart of Jesus, and which is drawn in again and again, gathering and folding the temporal into itself. But the systole implies, as well, a diastole: the heart’s contraction, as preparation

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for forcing blood through the arteries, is followed by a dilation or relaxation, which is what does the forcing. Systole and diastole go together, and together they form a repeated, life-giving cycle. My account of the systole so far was in terms of the healing of time in the devastation. There— here—time was contracted or folded or gathered, but not yet expanded. The church was encouraged by Paul to live as if time had been folded, but not yet opened out. We were told, by Peter in his first letter, that we are visiting here in the devastation, apparently ignorant and certainly unknown, like Jesus on the road to Emmaus. The diastole, the life-giving expansion consequent upon the contraction of time, had not yet happened, and could not finally happen until metronomic time had been without remainder gathered in to the systole. In heaven that has happened. The annihilation there of metronomic time is coincident with the full expansion of the systole into the diastole. The indrawn breath is exhaled; the resurrected and ascended flesh of Christ sits now, fully present, at the center of the faithful; and the time of heaven is a constant, endless, back-and-forth of praise and love between the saints and the LORD, an inbreath and outbreath of gift-given and giftreceived-by-being-returned. This endlessly repeated but temporally structured cycle is the temporal form of the beatific vision: it is how temporal creatures see the LORD, the maximal extent of creaturely participation in the LORD’s eternity.

Part IV Angels

The topic of this part is the nature and possible ends of angels, which are the first among the orders of creation, brought into being first by the LORD, and most intimate with him. In it I address first, and briefly, the benefits of thinking about the angels (§17). Then I take a speculative position on the nature of the angels (§18), with special reference to the question of their bodies and their timespace locations, and with a brief engagement with Thomist thought on that question. In §19, I depict the angelic fall and emphasize the importance and implications of affirming it; and in §20, I argue that the novissima possible for angels are annihilation and repetitively static beatitude.

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Thinking about Angels

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ngelology is not a prominent topic in contemporary academic or ecclesial theology. In the 1970s I read theology as an undergraduate at Oxford without the topic ever being raised, so far as I recall. Much the same is true, I should think, in theological education in Europe and North America today. I teach in a school of divinity in the United States, a place where young men and women are trained for ordained ministry in one or another Protestant denomination, and, for the most part, they go through their training without ever being called on to give theological thought to the question of the angels, or to attempt an account of these interesting beings. The presence of angels (and demons) in the texts of the Christian archive is of course acknowledged, especially their prominent place in Scripture; and the thought of this or that person—Augustine, Denys, Bonaventure, Thomas, even Protestant divines and poets—on the subject is acknowledged and treated when it comes up. But by and large, it is treated historically rather than theologically, and often with some embarrassment. Angelology is not thought of by many theologians working today as a locus of importance for theological thinking. Things are very different among Christians on the ground in most of the world. The catalogs of publishers of devotional material, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, in the United States, offer an enormous body of literature about the angels; and purveyors of Christian goods display a cornucopia of angels—statues, images, books of prayers to them, guides to how to arrive at intimacy with your very own guardian angel, and so

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forth. Much of this is deeply sentimental: the angels are guides and protectors and confidantes; they are always kind; they never offer anything other than support; they provide parking places when needed; and they protect from harm. Among Christians in the global south, by contrast, angels are more likely to be treated as real and sometimes frightening powers to be implored, deployed as protectors when possible, and guarded against when not. If North American Christians tend to be sentimental about angels, Christians from the global south tend to be magical about them. But for both, they are real and important, and in this they are closer to the long tradition than is academic theology, for which angelology is, typically, either irrelevant or embarrassing or both. There are causes, even if not reasons, for this embarrassment. A prominent element in the early modern critique of Christianity was contempt for angelology and demonology as useless speculation. The presence of those modes of thinking was often taken to be a clear instance of misapprehending what reason is and can do, as well as of the Christian tendency to make incoherent claims about the existence of such things as incorporeal substances; this critique was often connected with the view that angel­ology and demonology are instruments of priestcraft, used to cow the superstitious into obedience. Better, Descartes and Spinoza thought, to think about optics than angels; and that example provides an apt sense of the movement of thought from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Thomas and Bonaventure, by contrast, had no doubt about the importance of angelology to Christian theology, and no doubt about the capacity of speculative reason to arrive at likely conclusions about the angels. In this they are representative of Christian thought in general until the early modern period. Canonical early modern thinkers tended to have unreflective epistemological tendencies that encouraged them in a parsimonious attitude toward speculative thought, and the angels were among the first topics to be pared. We, poststructuralist and postpositivist as we inevitably and properly are, are no longer burdened, at least in theory, by such worries; but theologians are, as usual in the late modern period, among the last to realize what follows from lifting the positivist veil from thought. That kind of conservatism is in large part why angelology is not much practiced by contemporary theologians.



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There is another set of worries about angelology exhibited by early modern theorists. It has to do with the idea that angels are incorporeal. Thomas Hobbes provides a vivid and representative example: I was inclined to this opinion, that angels were nothing but supernatural apparitions of the fancy, raised by the special and extraordinary operation of God, thereby to make His presence and commandments known to mankind, and chiefly to His own people. But the many places of the New Testament, and our Saviour’s own words, and in such texts wherein is no suspicion of corruption of the Scripture, have extorted from my feeble reason an acknowledgement and belief that there be also angels substantial and permanent. But to believe they be in no place, that is to say, nowhere, that is to say, nothing, as they, though indirectly, say that will have them incorporeal, cannot by Scripture be evinced. (Hobbes, Leviathan, from ch. 34; see also ch. 45, on demons)

The difficulty here is not about angels per se, but about whether it is possible to think that beings who interact with fleshly beings and who have agency in the world can be thought of as entirely incorporeal. Everything depends here on how “incorporeality” is understood (on which see §1 and §18); as will become apparent, I am largely in sympathy with this aspect of the modern critique of angelology (and it is important to remember that a large majority of Christians who have thought about the topic concluded that angels have bodies of some sort)—though not to the thoroughgoing ban on the enterprise that the critique of angelic incorporeality was sometimes taken to imply. High-modern doubts that angelology can be useful or interesting or adjudicable do not any longer provide an in-principle ban upon engaging in it. Positively, the witness of Scripture and liturgical practice and the Christian archive is deeply imbued with the angels: no liturgical celebration occurs without noting their presence and invoking them; it is difficult to read more than a few pages of the canon of Scripture without them showing up in one form or another, whether as guards of the garden from which Eve and Adam have been banished at one end of the story, or as the bringers of news to Mary about her impending pregnancy at the other; they are a central presence in many of the pivotal events of the story of the church; and their portrayal has been among the principal topics of Christian art. Address to them and thought about them is essential to the theological enterprise.

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But this is not the only reason to think about them. In thinking about the angels, a nonnegotiable datum of the tradition, we are thinking about a mode of creaturely being unimaginably (though not inconceivably) different from our own, and, more importantly, a mode of creaturely being unmediated in its relations to the LORD by any relations to us. In §12, I discussed the anthropocentric pattern of thinking evident in Christian analyses of the last things. This pattern of thought can, in its less nuanced forms, be taken to suggest that all creatures other than the human are related to the LORD only by way of their relations to us, that we are for the LORD alone and they for the LORD in us, as Milton wrote, wrongly, of Adam and Eve (Paradise Lost, 4:299), or even that they have no goodness or reason for being other than the benefits they provide us, and when those benefits are exhausted they simply cease to be. This pattern of reasoning is evident in what many theologians have written about the last things of nonhuman (and nonangelic) animate beings (see §§27–30). Such ideas have considerable prima facie implausibility: almost everything about the created order (the moons of Jupiter, deep-sea life on earth, distant galaxies, the depth and weight of geological time on the small planet we inhabit) seems on its face to have no interest in us, to do nothing for us, and to have whatever beauty and worth it has independently of any relation it has with us. Nevertheless, the anthropocentric pattern of thought is deep in Christianity, and cannot be easily dismissed, not least for the christological reasons already mentioned. Whatever may be speculatively concluded about the relation that creatures other than the human have to the LORD and to us, even within the Christian tradition there is virtual unanimity that the angels are not to be thought about in this anthropocentric fashion. They are not for us as the rest of the created order is, or may be. They are for the LORD, directly, created before and without us, and with capacities for knowledge and love of the LORD in most ways greater than ours. They were part of the heavenly choir before we existed, and they see the LORD’s face without needing to look at, or have anything to do with, us. To think about them, therefore, is to think about an aspect of the created order in its relation to the LORD without having to think about the human. The angels are the only clear instance of this, and they therefore provide possibilities for Christian thought unavailable otherwise. Jean-Louis Chrétien puts the matter precisely in his study Le regard de l’amour: “To consider the various



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capacities and significances of the human as finite intelligences is not only to confront them in their origin and end with divine infinity; it is also to differentiate them from another finitude, that of the angels, equally capable of knowing and willing, equally present before God, even if in other ways” (125). For my purposes, the question of the last things of the angels needs address for the sake of completeness as well as for its intrinsic speculative fascination, and for the other reasons already mentioned. The angels are not inanimate creatures (like planetary bodies), they are not animate nonrational creatures (like birds), and they are not animate rational creatures in the image and likeness of the LORD (like us). They are something different, another order of creation; and the question of whether they have a last thing is therefore a question additional to and in some important respects independent of those about the last things of the other orders of creation.

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§18

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What Angels Are

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he Christian tradition has generated an enormous speculative and controversial literature on the question of what the angels are. There is, by contrast, little developed doctrine about this. It is, certainly, Catholic doctrine that there are angels; that at least three of their names (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael) and some among their actions are known to us; that they are creatures of a distinct kind; that they can be and have been involved causally with us; that they can be, and some among them are, worshipers of the LORD, singers of his praises; and that some among them have fallen and are corrupt—those are called demons. But all these things are little more than can be found in Scripture’s plain sense, and, in part because of that and because the claims just mentioned have not been controversial, they tend not to be explicitly taught in magisterial texts, but rather to be assumed and to make occasional appearances as obiter dicta in them. There are a few magisterial texts of some interest, however. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), though certainly not directly concerned with the angels as a dogmatic question (the council was largely directed against the Albigensians and the Cathars), does offer a definition of the Catholic faith in which angels figure more largely than usual: [The three persons of the Trinity are] the creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal. By their omnipotent power from the beginning of time, they made at once and out of nothing both kinds of creatures, spiritual and corporeal, which is to say angelic and worldly; and then the human, which, as it were, shares both, constituted of spirit

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The grammar of this is clear enough: creation is a two-stage affair, with stage one comprising the angels and the mundane-worldly (angelicam videlicet et mundanam), and stage two comprising the human. The angelic is the spiritual, and the mundane the corporeal; the human a blend of both. All of it is created good by nature (natura creati sunt boni), including even the demons, whose sin is self-generated (ipsi per se facti sunt mali). Even though this text may be considered an obiter dictum, a by-the-way restatement of what everyone thinks rather than a deliberate attempt to define something about the angels, its presence in the Fourth Lateran’s definition makes the existence of the angels and their location in the world of spirits a matter of faith. It also provides, as nonnegotiable, a particular vocabulary for speculative theological thinking about the angels—especially their allocation to the spiritual order, and the contrast between that and the corporeal order. Firmiter—the Latin title of the document—does not, of course, interpret itself, which means at least that it does not specify how these terms are to be taken. That is a task for speculative theologians. A second instance of a magisterial text that opens some pathways for thought about the angels can be found in Benedictus Deus, a Constitution promulgated in 1336 by Benedict XII. The topic of this Constitution is the condition of holy souls immediately following their separation from the body and before the general resurrection. In the course of defining a position on these questions, Benedict wrote: After the ascension of our LORD and savior Jesus Christ into heaven, before [the holy separated souls] take up their bodies again and before the general judgment, they have been, are and will be with Christ in heaven, in the heavenly kingdom and paradise, in consort with the assembled holy angels. Since the passion and death of the Lord Jesus Christ, these souls have seen and see the divine essence with an intuitive vision, and even face to face, without the mediation of any creature as thing seen; rather the divine essence shows itself to them immediately, plainly, clearly and openly, and in this vision they enjoy the divine essence. (From the Latin in Denzinger, no. 1000)



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This suggests at least the following: that the location, spatial and temporal, of the separated souls of holy human creatures between death and general resurrection is the same as that of the holy angels—they are sanctorum angelorum consortio congregatae. They are, in at least this limited sense, temporary angels: temporary because their mode of being will change at the general resurrection, when they will become once more enfleshed— incarnate—as human creatures. What is said about their location and mode of relation to the LORD ought then at least to be like, and may even be the same as, what is said about the location and mode of relation to the LORD that belongs to the angels. The holy separated souls consort with the angels, and share with them an immediate intuitive vision (visione intuitiva) of the LORD. The grammatical point is that whatever is to be said about the spatio-temporal location of the angels, and therefore also about the sense in which (if any) they can be said to have bodies, should cohere and be intimate with what is to be said about the spatio-temporal location (and bodies, if any) of the separated souls—and may even be identical with it. It is certainly the case that Benedictus Deus marks no difference between the capacity of the angels for the vision of the LORD, and the capacity of the holy separated souls for the same. It has been the dominant position of the tradition at least since the thirteenth century that the angels have no bodies (that, to put this in Latin, each of them is a creatura spiritalis with no corpus), and that whatever account is given of their capacity for location in timespace should not require attributing corpora to them. This position occasionally rises almost to the level of Catholic doctrine, as, for example, in Pius XII’s Humani Generis (Denzinger, no. 3891), though only as obiter dictum, and in the 1992 Catechism (nos. 328, 330), where angels are said to be purely spiritual creatures, though without any gloss on what that means—without, that is, specifying just what it is that angels lack in lacking bodies. But speculative elaborations of the view that angels are noncorporeal, such as those found in the Thomist tradition, have no such weight, as is evident from Benedict XV’s 1917 letter Quod de fovendo to the superior general of the Jesuits, Wladimir Ledóchowski, in which Benedict wrote that the Thomist theses proposed at that time to the Congregation of Studies— which included one on the nature of spiritual creatures (Denzinger, no. 3607), under which rubric the angels (for Thomists) fall—should be taken as ad dirigendum normas (norms for the direction of thought) rather than

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as theses whose substantive content is to be accepted by all. And there is, on the other side of the question, considerable scriptural and magisterial evidence that angels must be thought of as capable of timespace location in virtue of having bodies of some sort (Gabriel, for example, appears as himself, at a particular place-time, to make the offer to Mary); and much speculative effort has been devoted, especially by Thomists, to accounting for how angelic spatiality and temporality might be affirmed without also affirming corporeality. Angelology became a topic in systematic theology only with the composition of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the mid-twelfth century, where it is treated in the second book (distinctiones 2–11, with angelic corporeality presented in the eighth distinction). Peter’s position on the topic is underdeveloped with respect to the key technical terms. By contrast, the Franciscan commentators, beginning with Alexander of Hales (1186– 1245), generally affirm angelic corporeality of some sort (Bonaventure is especially clear on this), and they do so in considerable part because they think that any other position tends toward compromising the distinction between creator and creature. In the Collationes in Hexaemeron, for instance, Bonaventure writes that it is “less dangerous to say that an angel is composite [and therefore composed of form and matter] . . . than to say it is simple: for I attribute composition to the angel because I refuse to attribute to it what belongs to God, and this out of respect for the reverence I have toward God” (from 4.12). Thomas of course shares this desire to preserve the creator-creature distinction, but thinks it can be done even while denying corporeality of any kind to angels. The disagreement continued, and, to the extent that angelology remains a lively topic of theological debate, continues now. The participants in this discussion do not, however, think about matter and mass in the way that contemporary physicists do, which means that they also do not think about what it means to attribute corporeality to a creature in the range of ways made possible by contemporary physics. Doing so makes a version of the broadly Franciscan position on angelic corporeality more plausible than the broadly Thomist one. It is also the case that the Franciscan family of views on this question does maintain the creator-creature distinction with greater clarity than the Thomist one. If the created order is by definition spatio-temporal, and if the LORD is by definition not, then angels, being creatures, must be located firmly within the created order, and that



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is best done by clarity about their spatio-temporality and (therefore) the fact that they are bodies. The church’s doctrine on all this is undeveloped. We must say, if we are to think with the church, that angels lack bodies if by “body” is meant a solid, fleshly body like that of animals, including humans (angels are not incarnate; they have no caro); we must also say that they lack bodies if by that is meant the continuous extension in space of aggregated inanimate matter (angels are not in this way like rocks or bodies of water). We must also say that they are not eternal (angels are not the LORD), which is the same as to say that they are part of the created order, and thus temporal in some sense, and that they can, again in some sense, occupy or appear in space. And if spatio-temporality implies body, which is the position entertained here, then there must be a sense in which angels have bodies, or are embodied. The speculative question, then, is, in what sense might angels be said to have bodies? We need some clarification of terms here (see §1 for a preliminary version). In ordinary English usage, terms like “body,” “flesh,” “matter,” and “mass” are not clearly distinguished, and we affirm the existence of many kinds of thing (electrons and quarks, for instance) whose capacity for spatio-temporal location is very unlike that of enfleshed animate bodies. In ordinary Latin, too, the distinctions among corpus, caro, materia, and so on are not clear or well marked. I suggest, then, more or less stipulatively, the following distinctions. “Body” names capacity for spatio-temporal location, and thus for availability and responsiveness to other creatures with spatio-temporal location; any creature with that capacity has, or is, a body. Bodies come, however, in many kinds. There are, first, fallen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures (save the angels) in the devastation. Then, second, there are risen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures (save the angels) in heaven after the general resurrection; the ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary are paradigmatic so far as the risen flesh of humans goes. Third, there are temporarily discarnate animate bodies, which belong to humans between the separation of the soul from the fallen fleshly body and the general resurrection; these bodies may be purgatorial or heavenly. Fourth, there are permanently discarnate animate bodies, which are those of the angels. Fifth, there are inanimate material bodies of various kinds; these have weight and continuous extension in timespace,

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and include things such as rocks and bodies of water. Sixth, and last, there are discarnate inanimate bodies, which include at least quarks and other subatomic particles. The bodies of the angels are always discarnate, in this like inanimate bodies such as quarks and electrons. Discarnate animate bodies, though fleshless and with capacities for apparently (and perhaps really) discontinuous motion in time and space, are nonetheless bodies precisely because they have spatio-temporal location—which, in terms of contemporary physics, is just what it means to have mass. Angelic bodies, according to this definition, have mass, but not, or not necessarily, matter. “Matter” is a word that has no generally agreed definition in contemporary physics, and no consistent pattern of use in ordinary English. “Mass,” by contrast, names, in the discourse of physics, a body’s resistance to acceleration by a force acting upon it (inertial mass), and its gravitational attraction to other bodies (gravitational mass). These may be properties of bodies without matter, which is to say of bodies consisting only of energy; I had this in mind when writing above of availability and responsiveness as proper to bodies, indeed, definitional of them— availability and responsiveness name, at the level of theoretical physics, these two specifications of the concept of mass; to speak of a body’s mass, then, is another way of speaking about its availability and responsiveness to other bodies, without necessarily attributing to them the weight and aggregated extension in space characteristic of animate fleshly bodies. Angelic bodies, I should think (in this like the bodies of the separated souls), are bodies whose mass is immaterial, where this means certainly discarnate, and with small gravitational and intertial mass—but not with no mass, because then they would be incapable of spatio-temporal location, which, so far as I can see, the entire Christian tradition, speculative and magisterial, takes them to be, exactly because they are creatures. Is attributing discarnate bodies of this approximate kind to the angels (and to the separated souls, a matter addressed in more detail in §§22–24) compatible with Christian doctrine? I think so. There is terminological tension, certainly, because of the standard rendering of corpus with “body,” and the affirmation that angels are noncorporeal, which seems at first blush to mean that they are without bodies of any kind. But if “body” is understood as in the preceding paragraph, then there is no problem. The magisterium provides almost no guidance as to how the term corpus is to be understood in the few places in which it denies corpora to the angels,



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and it is certainly possible to take the kinds of bodies I attribute to angels as not falling under corpus in the magisterial denials. There are, of course, some Christian speculative specifications of what angelic noncorporeality comes to with which what is written in the preceding paragraph is not compatible. But this by itself is no problem; it simply leaves us with some speculative work to do. And, on the other side, there are some speculative analyses of angelic existence—and most depictions and renditions of them in Christian literature and art—with which what I have written is not only compatible, but resonantly concordant. The trajectory that runs from Bonaventure to Scotus, for example, essentially takes the line I defend here; and the picture given by Dante in the Commedia does, too— as is especially clear in his treatment of purgatorial bodies. Further, if angelic bodies are discarnate but nonetheless located in timespace (perhaps discontinuously), then some traditional difficulties about them vanish, or at least move in the direction of vanishing. One is Thomas’ view, and after him that of the majority of Thomists, that each angel is its own species exactly because each angel is a forma simplex abstracta a materia (a simple form separated from matter), which is to say an incorporeal nature; and since (Thomas thinks), it is only material/corporeal accidents that permit there to be multiple particular creatures sharing a single nature, it follows at once that it is not possible to differentiate Gabriel from Michael and Raphael as members of the single kind “angel.” Thomas’ position is, then, that each of those proper names denotes an individual who is also a single-membered species; they cannot individually be members of an angelic species. This is a consistent position, no doubt; but it is also a desperate one. It means that all talk of angels as a kind is a façon de parler. On the understanding of angelic bodies given above, none of this is necessary. I can happily say that there is an angelic species, and that individual members of it can be distinguished, at least in principle, by specifying their spatio-temporal accidents. Gabriel interprets Daniel’s visions (Dan 8:15ff.; 9:21ff.), foretells the birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:11), and announces Jesus’ conception to Mary (Luke 1:26ff.); those are among his spatio-temporal and bodily accidents. Michael, by contrast, is the one who disputes with the devil (himself a fallen angel) over Moses’ body (Jude 5:9), and fights the dragon in the book of Revelation (12:79); those are among his. Angels, on this understanding, are individuals, each with an angelic nature and each differentiable from the others by

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spatio-temporal particularities that are properly thinkable as bodily on the understanding of “body” in play here. If bodies are modes of spatio-temporal availability and responsiveness to other bodies, then the fundamental and essential fact about angelic bodies is that they are available and responsive to the incarnate LORD, which is to say to the flesh of Christ from his conception to his ascension here in the devastation, and also in heaven after his ascension. Most of what Scripture has to say about the angels emphasizes this: they announce the incarnation of the Son and the birth of Jesus (Matt 1:2024; Luke 1:11-120); they minister to Jesus during the desert temptations (Matt 4:1-11); they support him during his agony (Luke 22:43); and they are the first witnesses to his resurrection (Matt 28:2-7; John 20:12ff.). The angels are also arrayed around Jesus’ ascended flesh in heaven, and as a result they are a constant presence in our worship of that same ascended LORD. No act of worship here below occurs without their bodily presence. I’ve already noted what Benedictus Deus has to say about this, and the same point is made again and again in liturgical and magisterial texts. Where we worship, so do they; where they worship, so do we; and the worship is in all cases centered upon the flesh of Christ. If the primary availability and responsiveness of the angelic body is to the flesh of Christ, the secondary one, immediately derived from the primary, is to the flesh of the human worshipping community, both here in the devastation, and there in the heavenly assembly in which there are now mostly discarnate human bodies, but in which there will later, after the general resurrection, be fleshly ones. The angels are not, however, present to us bodily only in worship, where we cannot ordinarily hear and see them. They are also, sometimes, evident to our eyes and ears. The shepherds, for instance, see and hear the heavenly host, as do Mary and Zechariah (Luke 1:11-20; 1:2638; 2:8-14). So, it is at least possible to assume, do Abraham and Sarah (Gen 18), along with many others in Scripture and in the long history of the church. It remains a question how a discarnate body can be seen by fleshly eyes; but this question is of the same kind as questions about how we can see quarks and their like. The answer in both cases is that ordinarily we cannot; but in special circumstances, and with appropriate help, we can. Subatomic particles leave traces visible to us in cloud chambers under certain conditions; that is a property of the availability of the



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kind of discarnate body they have to the kind of fleshly body we (now, as fallen) have. Angelic bodies—by analogy, we may say, with speculative grace and quite without certainty—are visible to some of us under equally specific conditions, conditions made providentially possible by the LORD. They are, or may be, patterns of energy that are lives with a history, capable, under certain conditions, of coalescence and visibility to us. This way of thinking about angels sits better with the traditions about the presence of angels at worship, here below and in heaven, and with those about angelophanies in the devastation in general, than does the view that they are in every way bodiless. Thinking of the angels as living creatures with discarnate bodies of energy and particular histories also permits relatively easy interpretation of other significant threads in the tradition’s depiction of them. One among these is that angels, and therefore also demons, are capable of discontinuous motion in space, and therefore also in time: they can appear to us and then at once vanish; they can be here at one moment in metronomic timespace and somewhere else, far distant, at an immediately subsequent moment. This is not difficult to understand if the angelic body consists of quanta of energy; such bodies are in principle not subject to the metronome, and thus not limited by the requirement that they move continuously in timespace. Another is the angelic capacity to interpenetrate, occupy, and sometimes compel the fleshly bodies of other creatures. Scriptural accounts of demonic possession are mostly of this kind, and the most spectacular among them, that of the Gadarene swine (Mark 5:120), is abundantly clear that demons can and do affect causally the actions of particular fleshly bodies, even if different accounts should be given of how this works in the case of nonrational fleshly creatures such as pigs, on the one hand, and rational ones such as humans, on the other. Augustine argues in De divinatione daemonum (On the Divination of Demons) that demons cannot compel human action as they (apparently) can that of nonhuman nonrational animate creatures. He also, not infrequently, discourses on the angelic body in airily suggestive terms, as in the following passage from a letter: I think that every motion of the mind has some bodily effect, but that [such effects] reach our senses, which are so obtuse and slow, only when the motions of our mind are intense, as when we are angry or sad or delighted. From this it is permissible to suppose that when we think something which

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Augustine is writing here about the angels. All mental events, he thinks, have bodily effects (aliquid facere in corpore), even if these are not usually apparent to human beings: we are corpulent, after all, and dense; our senses are not good at registering the bodily correlates of what we think and intend and want. Angels—with airy-aethereal bodies, bodies less dense and slow than ours—have senses that are good at this (quorum est sensus acerrimus). This means that they might know what we think and intend better than we do, not by reading our minds, but by seeing what is written on our bodies. Also, the kinds of bodies they have might—Augustine confesses that he speculates (nequaquam est absurdum . . .)—permit them to do what everyone knows angels do, which is to interpenetrate and affect fleshly bodies like ours. There is not exactly a theory of the angelic body here, but there is patristic conventional wisdom about it: everyone knows that it is natural to angels to be able to affect the movements of bodies of flesh; and for that they need bodies of some kind. For Augustine, as for most of the fathers, this does not need to be argued. It is taken for granted as the standard speculative position, and as entirely compatible with calling the angels spirits, and thinking of them as such. It is also important to the tradition that angels are immortal in the sense that they are not subject to the separation of soul and flesh that ends the incarnate life of most fleshly creatures, and this position too is easy to accommodate on the view of the angelic body taken here. The immortality of unfallen angels follows at once, of course, from the very fact of their unfallenness: death is an artifact of sin, unfallen angels have not sinned and are exempt from the damage produced by sin, being in that unlike every other creature. Unfallen angels therefore cannot die, and that would be true whatever account is given of the nature of their bodies. Bodies of energy are not subject to the metronome in the same sense that fleshly bodies are, and so there is nothing proper to such bodies that requires their decay toward death, and nothing about them that



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requires their implication in the devastation that defines the fallen world. Unfallen angels belong always to the cosmos, the created order unfallen and undamaged, and it is this fact about them that prompts the tradition’s emphasis on their immortality. Asserting immortality in this sense, which the tradition consistently does and which is in any case implied by the view of the angelic body taken here, does not entail that angels cannot come to nothing, which is to say find their last thing in annihilation. I discuss that question in §20. If angels do come to nothing, however, it cannot be because they die. Angels are not just discarnate bodies. Were they only that, they would be in kind like quarks. What differentiates them from quarks is that they live: they are agents, capable of intentional action; and they are intellectual agents, capable of knowing and understanding what they do, and of responding with knowledge and understanding to what they are faced with. They have, according to the long tradition, unmediated intellectual vision of the triune LORD of a kind largely impossible for enfleshed beings like us. Since they have no fleshly eyes, they cannot see the LORD’s risen flesh as we do; their mode of availability and responsiveness to that flesh is instead that characteristic of a body of energy. We humans can say little about what that might be like; it is, and must remain, about as phenomenologically opaque to us as the bat’s capacity to locate itself in threedimensional space by responding to echoes. It is not, however, entirely opaque. We too are intellectual beings, and we too have modes of awareness of and responsiveness to what there is that has little or nothing to do with our fleshly sensory apparatus. We can, for example, see the truth of mathematical expressions or the validity of forms of argument intuitively in ways that cannot be fully accounted for by any process of abstraction from what is given to us sensorially. When we do this, we are doing something properly analogous to what angels do when they see the LORD, even though the substance of what is known in each case is very different. What the two instances share is that in neither their phenomenology nor their nature are they subject to the sequential demands of the metronome. It does not seem to those who know in these ways that they are doing so by way of a clock-measurable sequential process; and neither are they in fact doing so. Rather, they are doing so faciali, by direct response to what is, in an unbodily and atemporal way, before them. Mathematical truths

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are like the LORD in being free from temporal properties, whether of a metronomic or systolic kind, and that is because they subsist in him, as do (and must) all eternal states of affairs. This is true of neither the angels nor us, but it is possible for us, and (I assume) normal for unfallen angels, nonetheless to come to know truths that are atemporal and to do so in a way that participates in the atemporality of what is known—which is to say, in the LORD’s atemporality. Sequential processing is the norm for arriving at knowledge on the part of fallen creatures in a devastated world. That is in part because the temporality of such creatures participates in the damage brought to the cosmos by the double fall, of angels and humans, damage that turns systolic time metronomic (§§15–16). One result of this is that almost all human cognition in the devastation is distended in and by metronomic time: we reason sequentially, by the clock; and when we come to know we do so for the time being, under the sign of inevitable eventual forgetfulness. And since, apart from Mary, there have been and are no human persons in the devastation undamaged by the fall, all human cognition here below is, to some degree, metronomic. Matters must be different for unfallen angels, exactly because they are unfallen. To be unfallen is not to be damaged by the proliferating effects of the angelic and human falls, and with respect to timespace this means inhabiting fully, according to their kind, the temporal order gathered and furled around the risen LORD and around the eternal economy of the Trinity. The unfallen angels know what they know, therefore, within this temporal order according to their bodily and intellectual kind. So much can be said with formal certainty. To go beyond this toward a more substantive account of angelic knowledge, as the tradition has often done, is unnecessary for this study. But it is worth noting on that topic that there is a deep affinity between the denial of bodies in every sense to angels, and the tendency to assimilate their mode of cognition to that of the LORD, and thus to create difficulties in maintaining the creaturehood of angels. It is possible to identify two families of thought within Christianity about the nature of angels. One, the broadly Thomist, emphasizes the difference between angels and humans, abstracting the angels altogether from the body and denying to humans here below any possibility of cognition independent of the senses. This family of views moves the angels uncomfortably close to the LORD, and its characteristic difficulty is to



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differentiate them from him. The second, the broadly Franciscan, brings angels and humans closer together, providing bodies for both, and permitting cognition independent of the senses to both. The position I take belongs to the second family; it has, so far as I can see, fewer conceptual difficulties, and a longer and more respectable lineage within the Christian tradition. It is also how most Christians think about angels. Taking it has effects upon how the angelic novissima are thought about.

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he angels, being creatures, are, to the extent that they exist, good. That is an application to the angels of the fundamental Christian principle that anything is good just to the extent that it exists. But—and again this is derived from the consensus of the long tradition—angels are not in principle and by definition indefectibly good. That is, they can fall, in the only way that the fall of any creature can occur, which is by deliberate self-separation from the LORD with consequent damage, which always and necessarily means loss of some among the goods gifted them by the LORD. The tradition is clear not only about the possibility of the angelic fall. It is clear, too, about its actuality. Some angels have fallen, and have as a result become demons; principal among them is the adversary, Satan, also called Diabolus, or the devil. But he is not the only one. There are many other fallen angels, each of whom is a demon. The ordinary view of the tradition is that angels, fallen and unfallen, and humans are the only rational creatures there are in the cosmos, the only rational creatures the LORD saw fit to create. There is a standard Western narrative about the angelic fall. It emerges in its full form in the work of Augustine, and can be seen with clarity in his City of God and his Genesis commentaries. All the elements were there before the fifth century, of course, and Augustine is aware that not much of what he writes about this is novel. But the form of the narrative, the force and elegance with which it is put, and the speculative and constructive uses he makes of it are his. It is because of the power of the narrative, and

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because of Augustine’s attentiveness to his own legacy, that it is the Augustinian story of the angels in general and the angelic fall in particular that became the standard Western story at least until the Reformation. Matters are different in the non-Latin-using parts of the Christian world, and what follows has less purchase there. The angels are first among creatures—first, that is, in time, and first, also, in intimacy with the LORD. When the created order comes into being by the LORD’s fiat, the light that exists before the lights given by the heavenly bodies is angelic light, participant intimately in the light that belongs to the Trinity. The angels are, severally and collectively, that first light, and in and as it they have a direct, unmediated, intellectual vision of the three persons of the Trinity. They are living, rational, numerous, and individuatable, located spatio-temporally, and discarnate. Their location in timespace is a feature of their status as creatures. If creation is cum tempore, with time, then it follows that the created order as a whole and every particular creature within it is necessarily temporal, and the angels are no exception to this. Once brought into existence, the angels are everlasting—so thinks Augustine, and with him most of the Christian West. Once existent, located in the systolic time that is the temporality of the cosmos unfallen, the angels delight in their vision of the LORD. Or most of them do. Some, however, immediately upon being created, do not. They, Satan being chief among their number and the representative figure of them all, avert their intellects from the LORD’s light, turning their gaze toward the only other thing there is, which is darkness, the absence of being which is the void mentioned in the first verse of the book of Genesis. As they do this, they fall, interlacing their light with darkness, losing intimacy, though never completely, with the LORD, and beginning to seek, vainly of course, for a mode of existence independent of the LORD’s. They become, that is to say, demons: a Christian demonology is part of angelology because all demons are fallen angels. Demons, in their legions, are, then, discarnate beings impelled toward nothing, doing much damage as they use their remaining powers to seek it. An analogy: consider a host of heavy iron objects, magnetized toward a lodestone, orbiting it and forming beautiful and symmetrical patterns because of that attraction; when some among them cease to be attracted by the lodestone for whatever reason, they fall to earth, spiraling down in



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chaos, damaging whatever gets in their way. Or, think of fireworks, bottle rockets designed to take off into the heights and beautify the night with patterns of flame; the defective among them barely make it off the ground, and whizz about laying waste to everything around them until they fizzle into darkness. The malice and destructiveness of the demons is an epiphenomenon, but an unavoidable one, of their willed aversion of themselves from the LORD, for intellectual intimacy with whom they were made. For Augustine, the angelic fall must be immediately consequent upon the angelic creation. He gives many reasons for this, and we need not follow him in them all. But we should note at least the following: Augustine thinks that attributing a long temporal course of unfallenness to angels who will at some future time fall makes little sense. During that time of unfallenness, they would lack what the angels who won’t fall have, namely certitude as to their own endless blessedness, which means that they would already be, in that significant sense, different from the angels who will not fall. And so it is better, cleaner, more appropriate and elegant, to say that if an angel is to fall it does so at once, without interval, in ictu, in a lightning-flash, as Augustine likes to say. In the terms I prefer, the point can be put differently. The time of the unfallen angels is that of the systole: they have no subjective sense of time’s linear metronomic passage, and, still more important, there is no such passage for them. The metronome is the systole damaged, and without the angelic fall there is no damage of any kind, including damage to time. Time, then, when the heavenly host sings the LORD’s praises in unison, without any of its members having looked elsewhere than at the LORD, is exclusively systolic. There is only the endless repetition of the systole-diastole, not extended in metronomic time, but rather endlessly and identically repeating. With Satan’s fall and the fall of his retinue comes the tick-tock of the metronome, which is nothing other than the systole ravaged, moved entropically toward nothing. This picture applies the Augustinian grammar of creation’s time to the time of the fall. Just as there is no course or passage of time prior to creation, but, rather, creation is brought into being cum tempore, as temporal, with time, so there is no metronomic or clock-measurable time prior to the fall, but, rather, the fall occurs cum metronomia (if this, barbaric, Latin may be permitted), as metronomic, with the metronome. The fall of the angels, then, is at least in

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part a fall into metronomy. I take this position to be a proper extension of the Augustinian view, and a defensible Christian position (see §§15–16). Taking the angelic fall seriously means taking seriously the thought that the created order is damaged, fallen, devastated, as soon as it is brought into being. All those creatures brought into being metronomically after the angels come into an already devastated world. This is as true of the human creation as of the rest. The angelic fall provides the context and the frame for everything that is to follow. In the case of the human creation, and the experimental project of Eden (for Augustine does tend to present it as experimental), the picture is of an enclosure, exempt from death and suffering and from the metronome, into which humans are put, together with other creatures, to see whether they will replicate the angelic fall. As Genesis already suggests, the worm—the serpent—is already in the bud, and the human couple fall as the angels already have, responding to the serpent’s temptation by believing what it says and doing what it has done, replicating in the flesh what the angels have already done in intellectu and in their discarnate bodies. And then the story goes on in the familiar way, with demons and angels constantly interacting with one another and with the mass of fallen humans, a chaos of darkness and violence and death healed, eventually, by the people of Israel and the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. This reading of the Genesis narrative—and it is important to emphasize that Augustine consistently represents his version of the angelic fall as exegesis of Scripture, and especially of the opening chapters of Genesis— has a number of advantages for contemporary Christians. One is that it has no difficulty with the presence of nonhuman animals long prior, in the metronomic order of timespace, to the creation of human ones—this is, of course, already the plain-sense reading of Genesis, deepened by an Augustinian frame. A second is that it has a ready explanation for the massive presence of death among nonhuman animals prior to the human fall, as well as of chaos and entropy in the inanimate created order. There is a difficulty, perhaps, in accounting causally for angelic sin. How is it possible that creatures gifted with a capacity for unmediated vision of the Trinity should choose to turn their gaze away from it? The tradition, especially the broadly Thomist tradition, has devoted a good deal of effort and ingenuity to explaining this, or trying to. It is preferable to do as Augustine usually does, and eschew the demand for such an account.



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That sin is possible for free rational creatures, whether angelic or human, is an absence or lack best understood as definitional of such creatures, and as a facet of their origin ex nihilo. Seeking a causal explanation of sin’s possibility (and of its actuality when it happens) tends unavoidably toward elevating the sin, as both capacity and act, to the level of a something to be explained instead of a lack for which no causal explanation is possible. And that, in turn, approaches rapidly and dubiously the conclusion that there is something positively wrong with humans and angels, rather than something negatively wrong with them. Christian orthodoxy can accommodate only the second view.

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§20

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ow we can ask and speculatively answer the question about the last things of the angels. The three possible last things, recall, are annihilation, simple stasis, and repetitive stasis. Which among these are possible for angels? Or is it that they have no last thing? Or do some among them have one last thing and some another? Recall that the angels are already, and always, metronomically speaking, divided into two classes, fallen and unfallen; this state of affairs suggests already that it is at least possible, and perhaps likely, that not all angels have the same last thing—that a different account is needed for angels than for demons. May an angel find its novissimum in annihilation, the first last thing (§3)? May, that is, an angel go altogether and irreversibly out of existence, leaving in the world nothing but its traces? The speculative position taken here is that this is possible; there is a consistent, persuasive, and elegant Christian position, according to which this is so. The position is informed by three axioms. The first is that the LORD brought angels, like all creatures, into being from nothing, which means that they are, and can be, only as participants in the LORD. This is the doctrine of angelic creation as it should be rendered. The second is that the fallen angels fall by their sin, fall as they become sinners; and what their sin amounts to, in this like all sin, is the active attempt to return themselves to the nothing from which they came by attempting to extricate themselves from participation in the LORD. This is the doctrine of angelic sin as it should be rendered. And the third is that there is nothing about the fallen angels or about the

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LORD that requires their failure at the annihilation they constantly and effectively attempt. From these axioms it follows that they may succeed at their enterprise of self-annihilation. They may come to nothing. It might be objected that there is something distinctive about angelic existence, something that prevents angelic self-annihilation. But this does not seem prima facie plausible. Angels share creaturehood with humans. They share with us the possibility of sin. In the case of fallen angels, they share with us, too, its actuality. These, collectively, are the conditions that make it possible to go out of existence. If sin is possible, and if sin is understood as diminution of being, and if there is no in-principle reason why that diminution should not find its term, which is annihilation, then annihilation is possible. And all that is so for the fallen angels: they may take themselves out of existence, and the proper end of what they do is, in the order of being, exactly that. The long tradition, however, is almost without supporters of this speculative position. The doctors of the church after Augustine and Denys are unanimous in their view that angels do not and cannot take themselves out of existence, and that, therefore, they do and must remain forever. We may take Thomas as representative on this question. For him, the question about the possibility of angelic self-annihilation is an instance of a broader question, about the self-annihilation of intellectual substances. Angels and human souls are the only instances of these for Thomas, and the arguments against the possibility of self-annihilation for the one apply, as he sees it, with equal force to the other. The question about angelic annihilation, as it presents itself to Thomas, is about corruptio: Is it possible that an intellectual substance can be corrupted? Corruption, in turn, he takes to be something’s transformation or alteration (transmutatio, mutatio) away from being and toward nonbeing. Corruption may be complete, in which case the thing corrupted ceases to be, as when formed matter loses its form in the death of an animate creature or the pulverization of an inanimate object; or it may be partial, as when the corrupted thing loses some of its being, for example in the amputation of a limb from an animate body, or the removal of some part of an inanimate one. Can such things happen to intellectual substances, such as angels? Thomas’ answer is both no and yes, and the two answers can be reconciled only with some difficulty.



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The dominant answer is the negative one. Corruption is contrary to the definition of an intellectual substance, Thomas thinks, which means that intellectual substances are not and cannot be subject to it. If every intellectual substance subsists in its own essence, which is a standard definition offered by Thomas, this is just to say that existing is proper to it, and that it is not dependent upon anything external to or other than itself for that existence. It follows from this definition that substances of this kind cannot lose being, which, put differently, is also to say that they have no potential whatever for nonbeing—proprium naturis intellectualibus est quod sint perpetuae, as he writes in the Summa contra gentiles (2.55.4). Once such things are, they necessarily continue to be. They cannot be reduced or brought to nothing by anything other than themselves, and there is nothing intrinsic to themselves that permits or forces them to tend toward nonbeing. Were there anything of this sort, the incoherent result would be separetur a seipsa, that it would become separated from itself, as he writes in the Summa theologiae (1.75.6, corpus). This is a piece of broadly Aristotelean metaphysics. If a particular substance (a particular existent that bears properties) is intellectual, this means, for Thomas, that it has no necessary dependence upon anything corporeal. And what it is for a particular substance to be intellectual, capable of having knowledge, is exactly for it to be noncorporeal. Angels, like human souls, are, by definition, intellectual and therefore noncorporeal substances, from which it follows that they have no necessary dependence upon anything corporeal. The final move is then to say that corruption belongs only to bodies, to the corporeal. This series of definitions yields the following summary position with respect to the separated souls, of which Thomas says that it is the one quam fides nostra tenet, the one held by our faith: That the intellective soul [the soul capable of understanding] is a substance not dependent on a body; that there are as many intellective substances as there are bodies; that they continue as separated [substances] when [their] bodies are destroyed without passing into other bodies; and that in the resurrection each [separated soul] assumes again a body numerically identical with the one it had laid down [at death]. (Scriptum super sententiis, 2.19.1, from the corpus)

This is about the anima intellectiva, the intellective soul, but it applies just as well to the angels. Thomas here (and in many other places) affirms an

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in-principle incapacity on the part of such creatures to come to nothing. That is his negative answer to the question of whether an intellectual substance—an angel, in the case under discussion here—can undergo corruption. It is the dominant answer. But there is also a positive answer. Consider the following objection (a position Thomas will rebut), given as the nineteenth in Quaestio disputata de anima: “Furthermore, everything that comes from nothing is capable of returning to nothing (vertibile in nihil). But the human soul is created out of nothing, and is therefore capable of returning to nothing. And so it follows that the soul is corruptible (et sic sequitur quod anima sit corruptibilis).” Thomas answers that, yes, of course it is true that whatever came from nothing can return to nothing “unless it might be kept in being by the hand of the one who rules it. But it is not said to be a corruptible thing because of this; [it would be so described] if there were some principle of corruption intrinsic to it (habet in se aliquod principium corruptionis). It is in this sense that ‘corruptible’ and ‘incorruptible’ are essential predicates (praedicata essentialia).” Thomas acknowledges here that intellectual substances, like every other creature, are vertibile in nihil, capable of returning toward nothing, which is to say, capable of approaching annihilation. He squares this with his insistence that intellectual substances are by definition incapable of being corrupted by claiming that calling something “corruptible” is claiming that it is essentially so, while to say intellectual substances can be brought to nothing if the LORD does not continue to preserve them is to attribute their loss of being not to themselves but to something extrinsic to them. And since this is not to predicate essentially, it follows that even if we allow that intellectual substances can be brought to nothing by the LORD’s action, which Thomas does want to allow, this does not amount to saying that they are corruptible. Fair enough. The upshot, however, is that even though on Thomas’ usage it remains proper to say that intellectual substances, including the angels, are not corruptible, this remains quite consistent with the claim that they can be brought to nothing. It is interesting to note, too, that Thomas’ way of responding to this objection commits him to the claim that being created out of nothing is not essential or proper to the anima humana and to other intellectual substances such as the angels. This is what makes it possible for him to speak of the human soul as an intellectual substance without also speaking of it as brought into being ex nihilo by the LORD. This is to give altogether too



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much independence to natura—Augustine’s epigram about the Pelagians, that the enemies of grace hide themselves in the praise of nature, begs for application. The most direct and clear treatment by Thomas of these difficult questions is in the 104th question of the first part of the Summa theologiae. This question discusses the LORD’s conservatio of the cosmos, and the first point made is that yes, of course, every creature must be “conserved,” maintained or kept in being, by the LORD. If it were not, it would cease to be: sine eo [sc. Deo] esse non possit. All creatures (and this includes us) receive esse from the LORD as the air receives light from the sun: so long as the sun shines (the LORD conserves) the air is full of light (beings continue to be); when the sun doesn’t shine (the LORD ceases to conserve) darkness falls (beings cease to be). But angels—since they are, on Thomas’ view, noncorporeal rational beings, which, for the reasons already canvassed, have no natural capacity for nonbeing—can come to nothing only if the LORD ceases to conserve them. The LORD’s so ceasing would be both necessary and sufficient for the annihilation of angels. Thomas then asks whether the LORD is able to return any creature to nothing (aliquid in nihilum redigere), and answers that the LORD’s freedom means that he could at any time take any creature out of existence. Just as he is not constrained by the necessity of his nature to create anything in the first place, but does so freely, so he is not constrained to conserve any particular creature. Any angel, or all of them, could, therefore, come to nothing. But question 104 does not end at that point. Having established that the LORD’s ceasing to conserve would be both necessary and sufficient for any creature’s coming to nothing, Thomas goes on to ask whether as a matter of fact anything is brought to nothing. And the answer to this is no, so far as rational creatures are concerned. In rational creatures non est potentia ad non esse, as we’ve already seen, and the LORD will not cease to conserve any of us because to do so would not belong to the showing of his grace—that is, it would oppose even to the point of contradiction the public evidence of the Lord’s grace (non pertinet ad gratiae manifestationem). The conclusion is that no rational creature (and therefore no angel) comes to nothing because the only condition that could bring this about lacks convenientia: it is, that is to say, something the LORD would not do, something inappropriate to his nature.

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Thomas is forced in this question to approach a self-contradiction. In the response to the first objection in the third article of question 104, he says that creatures without exception possess intrinsically a tendency toward nonexistence insofar as they are created out of nothing (which they all are): Sic igitur Deus non potest esse causa tendendi in non esse; sed hoc habet creatura ex seipsa inquantum est de nihilo. And then in the body of the fourth article, he says that rational creatures have no potential for nonexistence: in eis non est potentia ad non esse. It is perhaps possible with some work to resolve this apparent contradiction, but the presence of the two claims in the same question certainly dramatizes the tension in Thomas’ position. On the one hand, angels have no tendency toward (no possibility of) coming to nothing because they are noncorporeal intellectual substances, and lack, by definition, any such tendencies. But on the other hand, being created out of nothing as they are, they must have such a tendency, and this is again because of the kind of being they are. The upshot is that the angels are beings who in one respect find nonbeing impossible and in another tend exactly toward it. The position just expounded, dubiously coherent though it is, remains the dominant Western one on the question. The counterposition, affirmed here, holds that angels, while discarnate, are bodies with mass (if not matter) just because they are locatable in timespace. Such bodies, unlike those without mass of any kind, are subject to the ordinary constraints of creaturehood, among which the most important is that of being, as we have seen Thomas sometimes to admit, vertibile in nihil. This is a property that belongs to all creatures just because they were created out of nothing; they—we all—remain uneasily in being, hovering over the void from which we came. For creatures capable of sin, the angels and ourselves at least, this situation is intensified. The demons have sinned, and sin is exactly a turning toward the nihil: the grammar of Christian thought does not permit it to be anything else. Such turning diminishes those who perform it, and while it is possible to understand angelic sin as an act without further ramification, an act that damages those who perform it without that damage being capable of increase or proliferation, that is not the only way to understand it, nor the most likely. The position preferred here is that sin is typically proliferative: turning oneself toward nothing is a habit that ordinarily increases in range, intensity, and depth over time. Such damage therefore does not result in a static condition. Once performed it



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is likely to be performed again and again, with ever-greater intensity, and so the demons damage themselves more and more, moving themselves closer and closer to the nothing from which they came (for a fuller depiction of this understanding of sin, see §23, in the discussion of human sin, and especially of acedia). But perhaps the LORD does not permit angels to remove themselves from existence. Even if the doctrine of creation out of nothing and the doctrine of sin, taken together, make self-annihilation possible, perhaps the LORD’s love for his creatures, or his desire that they suffer the results of their sin rather than avoid them by ceasing to be, or some such, does not permit them to cease to be even though they are capable of it. Perhaps, that is, it is always better for angels to continue in being, in no matter how degraded and damaged a condition, and even if that damaged condition is irreversible. Judgments like this are judgments about convenientia, judgments about what it is more fitting that the LORD should do. Such judgments are notoriously difficult to assess, this one as much as others. It is possible that the LORD’s justice and love do not permit angels to take themselves out of existence, but the opposed position, that the angels can do this and that the LORD does not inevitably keep them in being, is altogether more plausible. This position makes sense of the fundamental grammar of Christian thought much better than its competitor: it takes seriously what creation ex nihilo means; it takes sin seriously; and it takes angelic creatureliness seriously. Its competitor has difficulty with all these: with creation ex nihilo because it has to struggle to permit annihilation as a possibility for angels at all; with sin because it limits the damage that sin can do; and with angelic creatureliness because of its attempt to abstract the angels from the created order by denying them bodies of any kind and the tendency therefore to assimilate them to the LORD. I conclude that—while the speculative question about the possibility of angelic self-annihilation remains open, and is likely to do so—one possible novissimum for the fallen angels is annihilation. We should now look a little more closely at how this might come about, and at what can be said about angelic beatitude, the other possible novissimum for an angel. Angels (and, therefore, demons) are temporal creatures. In the terms of this study, Satan has subjected himself to the metronomic time of the devastation, in whatever way that is possible for discarnate creatures.

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Indeed, he has been instrumental in damaging time so that it becomes metronomic. But metronomic time is by definition symbiotically related to systolic time, the LORD’s time, folded around the events of the passion. Metronomic time has no integrity of its own; it is what it is solely by way of damage to and reduction of something other than itself. It is, to borrow Miltonic language, temporal “darkness visible,” temporal absence tangible. How might this apply to discarnate beings like the angels? Their intellectual vision is of the eternal order. That is, its content is paradigmatically the ad intra economy of the Trinity, which is strictly eternal (§13). But, the angels do not see this as does the LORD, contemplating himself. Were they to do that, they would be indiscriminable from the LORD, and would not be creatures. Rather, they see it sub specie temporalis, much as we shall when we have the intellectual vision of the LORD in heaven. Saying what this comes to is of course difficult. Trying to say it led Thomas, for instance, to speculations about the time of the aevum, and the difference between that and the temporal order that follows the order of concepts. I should like to attempt the same task in a rather more homely way. The angels see, intellectually, the eternal order of the LORD. When they fall, they turn their intellects away from that vision and toward its absence, which is nothing. As a result, their intellectual vision is in part obscured—not completely, for if that were so, they would cease altogether, but in part. With that obscurity comes awareness that it is there. When I look at a mathematical argument, a proof for example, and follow it only in part, proper to such a condition is also seeing that I do not see. Parts of the proof are obscure to me, like redacted government documents that are made available only with parts inked-out so they cannot be fully read. The redacted parts are evident exactly as lack, as obscurity. So also with the obscurities present in and to the vision of demons. They know that they now know only in part, and that is an element proper to their torment. But this is not a toggle-concept; it is exactly a continuum-concept. A demon may, we can think, do what I do when faced with obscure mathematics, which is to focus exactly on the invisibilia, the obscurities, with mounting rage. I should be able to get this, but I cannot. The blacked-out parts expand as I focus upon them, taking up more and more of the content of my visual field, moving me closer to a condition in which the only thing present to me is what I cannot see. At that point, I have no intellectual



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vision; at that point, the demon, having embraced lack fully, ceases altogether to be. If something like this is right—and we are at a speculative height now that will not be exceeded in this book—then demonic existence need not be seen as Augustine and the long tradition mostly do, which is as a kind of simple stasis. Rather, it may be seen as a continuum along which individual demonic angels may move, whether by embracing lack or by struggling against it. And if that is right, the most radical, fully Satanic, embrace of lack would inevitably lead to nonbeing, to angelic annihilation. This seems a possibility. And if it is, it carries with it another, which is the possibility of demonic redemption. Angelic beatitude is what the unfallen angels already have. They have nothing to wait for. They will not and cannot die; they will not and cannot go out of existence; they have no bodies of flesh whose resurrection they must wait for. They already are, therefore, everything they will be. If Mary had queried Gabriel as to what he was doing out of heaven, where angels are supposed to be, when he appeared to her to announce the good news, he would, presumably, have replied, “Why, this is heaven, nor am I out of it”—as Marlowe’s Mephistopheles said about hell when Faustus asked him how he could leave it in order to visit Faustus. Angelic beatitude is repetitive, systolic stasis of a discarnate kind. The angels see what they see of the LORD, and love what they see, according to a repetitive rhythm of in- and out-breathing, returning in that rhythm the gift of being and of vision and of love granted them by the Trinity. They do not, because they cannot, receive the fleshly embrace of the risen Jesus; and though they are aware of the risen flesh of Christ, the assumed flesh of Mary, and (when it has been resurrected) the risen flesh of the saints, they are aware of these things only by direct intellectual acquaintance, not faciali, by contact or connection. They know its presence and its history; and they know the LORD in much the same fashion as the separated souls of the saints do before their flesh is returned to them. In all these ways, I think, the broadly Augustinian view can be defended. But there is a difficulty that Augustine’s view does not solve, and may not even have the capacity adequately to represent. It has to do with the modes of angelic knowledge of temporal events. Since they are creatures, they must be temporal. That is nonnegotiable. And so their knowledge is in some sense temporal, as well. Were it without remainder not so, it would

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be hard to distinguish angelic knowledge, in mode at least, from that of the LORD. Further, angelic knowledge cannot be purely metronomic, a simple matter of distension in timespace, as some human knowledge is since the fall. That is incompatible with the intellectual vision of the LORD they possess by definition. What is the intermediate position, and, more particularly, how do they know metronomically locatable events and actions? If the angels are always-already subsumed into the systole, then how can they know—indeed, do they know?—the succession of events measured by the metronome? The answer, I think, is that the temporality of their knowing—and, thus, the means by which they know, respond to, and interact with broadly historical events—is a love. Love is the motive force of the systolic rhythm of the LORD’s time, which is also, for us, the time of the liturgy. The unfallen angels are enfolded into the systole with intellectual and affective perfection, and it is from that repetitively static form of movement that, for instance, Gabriel speaks to Mary, and the host of the unfallen angels surrounds the flesh of the risen Jesus in heaven. And that, I should think, is as far as we can go in thinking about the temporality of angelic beatitude, and, thus, of their mode of knowing and relating to the temporal devastation of the world. What this means is that Gabriel’s approach to Mary is deeply different from the LORD’s. Gabriel approaches Mary as one beingin-time approaches another; he traverses timespace in a discarnately discontinuous fashion to get to her by way of the systolic-diastolic rhythm; or, if you prefer, he approaches her by way of the fold (§16). He is folded before her, and knows himself to be so; his words and her response then form part of the intensely bunched and folded timespace of the passion; and of course he knows this, too. The LORD’s relation to these events is of a different kind. He, being eternal, is not folded into anything and does not traverse anything. Rather, he is the condition of the possibility of timespace’s folding, and when Mary says yes to Gabriel, her womb is folded into the Trinity in a manner unprecedented, and not seen again. The unfallen angels do, then, in a sense that does not preclude motion of a repetitively static sort, already and always have the beatitude they have. They have nowhere to go but the systole in which they already find themselves. But the fallen angels, to return to our earlier unfinished discussion of the possibility of Satan’s redemption, can change in a different way. Because they have fallen into the lack that is the metronome, their



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timespace movements can be located more fully and really in that measurable continuum than can those of the unfallen angels. But there is no reason that I can see to think that the degree of their fall into metronomic timespace remains constant according to the metronome. Once there, they too may look more closely at lack and thus be further reduced; or they may find their gaze wrenched away from the void and toward the plenum that is the LORD. In that possibility stands the hope even for the salvation of Satan. The angels, like us at least in this, may, therefore, end in annihilation, or in their own peculiar kind of repetitive stasis. Those who end in the latter remain a constant presence in the liturgy of heaven, even if they lack, as they must, the capacity to respond in a fleshly way to the risen flesh of Christ. These differences between them and us mean that angels and humans complement one another at the heavenly banquet. Theirs is the fullness of creaturely intellectual vision and love of the LORD; ours is the fullness of creaturely intellectual vision when combined with fleshly exchange. The heavenly host is properly constituted by both kinds. It is a fundamental Christian hope, evident in Scripture (1 Tim 2:4) and expressed often in liturgical prayer, that all will be saved. This hope applies to the salvation of Satan as much as to that of the most enterprisingly consistent human sinners. Dante represents Satan as half frozen into the ice of hell at the very bottom of the Inferno, and that is a powerful representation of what repeated angelic sin comes to if this is understood as subjection to metronomic time—an increasing inability, brought about by the entropic decay of a discarnate body, to move discontinuously through timespace as a discarnate creature ought. But even here there is an opening: Satan’s almost immobile body lies in a cavern from which there is an exit—un pertugio tondo, a small round opening (Inferno, 34.138)—through which the stars can be seen. Satan lies close, like all creatures, to the LORD’s face; he lies close, too, as we all do, to the void from which he came.

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Part V Humans

Human creatures are second in the order of creation, lower than and after the angels, but higher in the order of being—more like and more intimate with the LORD—than all other animate creatures. The central questions of this part are, What are human creatures, and what are their possible last things? Christian doctrine requires that if a human creature has a novissimum other than annihilation, the flesh is involved; human creatures do not and cannot exist discarnately, without flesh, and so, in §21, I explore the nature of human flesh as a first step in understanding human creatures as fleshly creatures in the image and likeness of the LORD; I analyze the nature and principal characteristics of human flesh by way of a discussion of the resurrected and ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary. Human flesh is mortal, and death, understood as the separation of soul from flesh, is for almost all inevitable; §22 depicts the soul in the discarnate intermediate state that follows upon death for humans, distinguishes that separated soul from the human creature of which it was once (and may again be) a part, and argues that it is possible for such separated souls to come to nothing and thus never to undergo fleshly resurrection. In §§23–24, I analyze and depict annihilation as one possible last thing for human creatures, and repetitively static heavenly existence as the other. In §25, I argue that hell as a place for endlessly suffering flesh is a utopia,

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a no-place, and that while it can be said that suffering discarnate souls are preparing themselves for heaven or for hell, those in the latter case are in fact readying themselves for annihilation; hell, rightly understood as permanent and irreversible separation from the LORD, is nonexistence, and to enter it is to bring oneself to nothing. I argue that it is possible to do this. In §26, I present the church’s last thing as another way of thinking about heaven.

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ne of the central patterning devices of Christian thought is christological (§12). That is, thought about some creaturely kind’s nature and novissimum typically resonates with and is illuminated by thinking about Jesus Christ. That is especially the case with the question of the nature and last thing of human flesh, for it is a central claim of Christian doctrine that the Word, the second person of the Trinity, became exactly that, became enfleshed and lived and died as a person with human flesh. Considering the career of this flesh—if we may so call it, its beginning and end especially—is an essential move in thinking about the nature of human flesh per se. In the career of Christ’s flesh, the possibilities of human flesh are perfected. This is not to say that everything about the flesh of Christ can be thought to belong to human flesh generically; some of what happened to his flesh is proper only to the flesh of a human creature who is also the LORD. But some of what his flesh underwent reveals possibilities that are exactly proper to human flesh as such, and discriminating these from what belongs to the flesh of the double-natured incarnate LORD is the task of christologically patterned thought about the nature and possible last things of human flesh. Jesus Christ was conceived, which means came into being as a fleshly creature in Mary’s womb but without a human father. He then grew as human children ordinarily do, increasing in knowledge and wisdom, his flesh maturing from a childish state of complete dependence upon the flesh of his mother to, eventually, the relative fleshly independence of a

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mature man. He ate and drank and breathed and talked and walked as fleshly humans do; he had a distinctive fleshly appearance, though no clear or certain image of it remains, and in every fleshly way appeared to his family and contemporaries as like any other man. His flesh, too, was fragile: it could be coerced, scourged, and beaten, and it could suffer as a result of these things. It did not however have a chance to grow old or to undergo much of the decay that begins to bite in the fourth decade of a human fleshly life. That is because he was killed, by the torture of crucifixion, not much after his thirtieth birthday, his flesh thereby reduced to inanimate body, to the condition of a corpse entombed. After forty hours or so, that inanimate body became flesh again, and spent a short time, weeks perhaps, in commerce with various among his followers, altered enough in appearance that sometimes he was easily recognized by them and sometimes only with difficulty and after prompting. During this time he touched the flesh of others, and sometimes encouraged them—while sometimes also forbidding them—to touch his flesh. His risen flesh was marked by what it had undergone before death. Specifically, the marks of the wounds of his crucifixion remained on it. And then, at the end of this short period of his earthly fleshly resurrection, his risen flesh ascended to heaven, no longer to be seen by the eyes of those left behind in the devastation. There it remains, as it will until Jesus comes again in the flesh to this devastated world, and rolls it up like a scroll. Then, his risen and ascended flesh will take its place again in heaven, now together with the risen flesh of all the saints, and will remain there forever, world without end. This understanding of Christ’s flesh serves, according to Christian doctrine, as a template for understanding some of the possibilities of human flesh like ours, human flesh that is not the LORD’s. The key points of similarity are these: first, our flesh, like Christ’s, is fragile and mortal, and, unless we are in the generation of those alive here in the devastation when Christ returns, it will die, whether violently or because of sickness or decay; second, our flesh, like Christ’s, will be resurrected, and, like his, it will be the selfsame flesh we had when alive; third, like Christ’s, once our flesh is resurrected it will be immortal at least in the sense that it will not die again; fourth and finally, our resurrected and immortal flesh will—because it is the same flesh that died and thus became, for a while, inanimate body—be marked with souvenirs of its time here below in the devastation, marked, that is, as ours.



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It is also important to consider the flesh of Mary as a means of better understanding human flesh. Her flesh serves as the principal instance of human flesh that arrives in heaven without spending time in a discarnate intermediate state (§22); this is so, anyway, on a particular reading of the dogma (for Catholics) of the Assumption. The dogma was promulgated by Pius XII in 1950, in Munificentissimus Deus, where it is written that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven when the course of her earthly life was completed. That is what the dogmatic definition of the Assumption explicitly says. The central rationale for this dogmatic claim, certainly the one given most often in Munificentissimus Deus, is to assure the separation of Mary’s flesh from any postmortem corruption, which is to say the rotting of the flesh ordinarily immediately consequent upon death. There are ancient affirmations of this point in the Christian tradition, as there also are about the dead bodies or body parts of some other saints. This element of mariology, then, is a settled part of Catholic dogma. Mary’s flesh does not decay—is incorrupt—and is unlike all other flesh in having been taken into heaven without having to wait upon the general resurrection. Mary’s flesh, assumed incorrupt, is established in heaven as the precursor or forerunner of what the flesh of each of us will eventually be. But whereas our flesh will have had its corruption and dispersal overcome by resurrection, Mary’s entered upon its heavenly state without need for any such overcoming. This formulation of the sense of the dogmatic definition, and of the traditions underlying and informing it, leaves a speculative question unanswered. Did Mary die? More exactly, did her soul separate from her living flesh, making that flesh into a corpse to be assumed into heaven and there to be rejoined with her separated soul to reconstitute her as the creature she is? Or—this is the other possibility—was Mary’s flesh assumed alive into heaven? On this second possibility, Mary never died, her soul was never separated from her flesh, and so there was never a Marian corpse. On this view, there was neither need for nor possibility of the rejoining of Mary’s soul to her flesh in heaven, and understood in this way, Mary’s transit from earth to heaven is deeply different from ours: her flesh never became a corpse, unlike in that respect that of Jesus or that of all those who have died to this point.

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On the first reading of the dogmatic definition, according to which she did die, the difference between her and us has to do not with death but with corruption, for according to this way of understanding the dogmatic definition, Mary does die as we do, and differs from (most of) us only in that her dead flesh does not rot and is taken into heaven before the general resurrection. “Mortalism” is a good label for the first view, and “immortalism” for the second. Mortalism is the view that Mary did die; immortalism the view that she did not. The vast majority of Catholic theologians who have addressed this topic have been mortalists, and this is also the position most often taken or implied by devotional literature and liturgical practice. Munificentissimus Deus is, according to its plain sense, largely neutral between mortalism and immortalism, though with a bias toward immortalism. The text makes a strong connection between Mary’s Assumption and her Immaculate Conception: she won a complete victory over sin by means of her Immaculate Conception (immaculata conceptione sua peccatum devicit; no. 5), we are told, and it is because of this that her flesh was not subject to the usual law of corruption, and that she did not have to wait for its redemption. The heart of the matter, Pius XII writes, and what the faithful already believe most firmly, is that Mary was never liable to the corruption of the grave (sepulcri corruptioni obnoxium fuisse numquam; no. 14). By contrast, the faithful do not find it difficult to believe that she died (ex hac vita decessisse; no. 14), and Munificentissimus Deus quotes the Sacramentum Gregorianum, which explicitly says that she did die (sancta Dei Genitrix mortem subiit temporalem; no. 17). Most of the liturgical, theological, and homiletical precedents quoted and discussed in Munificentissimus Deus, however, have to do not with whether Mary died before her flesh was assumed, but rather with the appropriateness of the idea that her flesh was not subject to corruption. Sometimes this appropriateness—convenientia, elegance of fit—is said to be with Mary’s perpetual virginity: just as her flesh’s integrity was not broken in conceiving and giving birth to Jesus, so her fleshly integrity was not corrupted in the passage from life here below to life eternal (nos. 21, 32, 34). Sometimes it is in terms of intimacy with and likeness to the dead flesh of Jesus, which was also not subject to corruption (nos. 21–22). Sometimes it is in terms of the Ark of the Covenant’s incorruptibility as a type of and for the incorruptibility of Mary’s flesh (no. 26). And sometimes it is in terms of the unlikelihood that the risen



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Jesus would wish to be apart from his mother in body as well as in soul (no. 38). This does not exhaust the reasons given in Munificentissimus Deus for the view that Mary’s body was assumed incorrupt into heaven. Most of the reasons have nothing to say to the question of her mortality. Some, however, do rather strongly suggest immortalism, as with Albert the Great’s claim that Mary was exempt from the fourfold curse laid on Eve, which includes that of death (mentioned in the text’s note 30). In this line too is Munificentissimus Deus’ own claim, mentioning the Protevangelium of James as precedent, that calling Mary “the Second Eve” implies that Mary overcame not only sin but also death (no. 39). But others among the reasons given and precedents cited rather strongly suggest that Mary did die. In this line is Francis de Sales’ claim that any good son would bring his mother back to life if he could (no. 38) or Alphonsus Liguori’s that Jesus did not wish to have his mother’s flesh corrupted after her death (Iesus Mariae corpus post mortem corrumpi noluit; no. 38). When Munificentissimus Deus ends its review of precedent and Pius XII begins to write in his own voice, all the formulations are carefully neutral about whether Mary’s soul was ever separated from her body. The text says that Mary arrived at a complete victory over sin and death (plenissimam deventurum erat victoriam de peccato ac de morte; no. 40), and then that these two (sin and death) are always conjoined in Paul’s writing (semper in gentium Apostoli scriptis inter se copulantur; no. 40). A victory over sin, on this view, is also one over death, and this suggests, even if it does not quite imply, immortalism. And, notoriously, when Pius gives the solemn definition of the dogma, he writes: Immaculatam Deiparam semper Virginem Mariam, expleto terrestris vitae cursu, fuisse corpore et anima ad caelestem gloriam assumptam (no. 44)—“When the ever-virgin Mary Immaculate, Mother of God, had completed the course of her earthly life, she was assumed, body and soul, to heavenly glory.” The phrase “[when she] had completed the course of her earthly life” is equally friendly to mortalism and immortalism. The phrase “she was assumed, body and soul, to heavenly glory” is rather more friendly to immortalism, however, for it suggests that there had been no separation between flesh and soul, that when she was assumed into heaven it was with flesh and soul still together, and that therefore when she was assumed to heavenly glory she was still living. This last point about the text of the solemn definition is not

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often made; I make it because one of the characteristics of those lives of Mary that do assert and describe her death is that they make a good deal exactly of the fact that her soul ascended before her body was assumed— and, therefore, that her soul and body were not assumed together, as they would have been had she been still alive. This distinction can be seen, with baroque detail, in the life of Mary attributed to Maximus the Confessor, for example, and in many other lives of Mary. On a mortalist view, it is odd to speak of Mary’s Assumption as pertaining to her body and soul together, for they must have been separate when the body was assumed, and, therefore, were not assumed together. On an immortalist view, it is not in the least odd to write in this way. And that is the principal reason why the solemn definition is marginally more friendly to imortalism than to mortalism. About Munificentissimus Deus, then, we can say that some among the authorities and precedents it cites are clear that Mary died before being assumed; that some, though fewer, imply strongly that she did not; and that yet others are neutral. And Pius’ own dogmatic definition, while more friendly to immortalism than otherwise, is itself not explicitly committed on the question. Since 1950, there has been no significant development of doctrine on the topic. The church, therefore, has no dogmatic position on the question. Discussion of it remains within the scope of speculative theology. Mary’s flesh, on the immortalist reading of the Assumption, always remains flesh since she does not die. She, as the living creature she is, is assumed whole into heaven. And this is most fundamentally because her sinlessness—her immaculate conception and her consequent freedom during the course of her earthly life from all particular sins—means that she is exempt from death, which is exactly the separation of soul from flesh so that the flesh becomes inanimate body and is then subject to decay and dispersal, therefore no longer available or responsive to other fleshly bodies. Consideration of Mary’s flesh shows that devastated flesh’s fragility and mortality—evident most clearly in its tendency toward premortem corruption, its unavoidable movement toward death, and its postmortem decay—do not belong to flesh as such. Human flesh as such is absent these things; and consideration of Mary’s flesh gives us a foretaste of what that might mean.



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With the flesh of Jesus and the flesh of Mary in mind, we can now turn to human creatures in general, and to a consideration of their—our—flesh in particular. A first definition of humans: fleshly creatures in the LORD’s image and likeness. Understanding such a definition requires attention to its constituent terms; it also requires keeping in mind that the definition, if it succeeds, should suffice to distinguish the human from all other creatures. That is, all and only those creatures that meet this definition are human. Definitions such as this are always heuristic in nature; they may be more than that, but they are always at least that. That is, they open a path for thought by drawing attention to one aspect or another of the definiendum. The definition just offered, for instance, directs thought differently than would a definition of the human as a featherless biped; or, following Augustine, as a substantia rationalis constans ex anima et corpore (De trinitate, 15.11); or, following Pascal, as a roseau pensant (Pensées, no. 186). This is true even though those definitions might do as well in differentiating the human from all other creatures. There is no wrong or right here, or if there is it is beyond our devastated intellectual capacities consistently and reliably to distinguish the one from the other in such matters. The terms of the definition advocated here have deep roots in the tradition, which gives it a prima facie defensibility as a properly Christian understanding of human creatures; and, like all definitions, it moves thought in certain directions while foreclosing others. Those directions will be followed below, and the definition’s usefulness depends in large part on whether the thoughts prompted by it are of use. Further questions, about whether there are natural kinds whose definitions can be known by us, for instance, have no bearing on the project in hand here. One further prefatory point before turning to the definition’s constituent terms and their importance for this project. The definition is not intended as one of the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens. There are intractable difficulties with species definition approached biologically; it remains very unclear what the necessary and sufficient conditions for (biological) membership in the species in question, or in any species, might be, and it is equally unclear whether there are any such conditions. Neither are there any especially good reasons for thinking that theologians should take the extension of the terms anthropos-homo-human (in the credal phrase “became [hu]man”) to be identical with that of Homo sapiens

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sapiens. What matters for the purposes of this study, and what matters for the purposes of theology understood more broadly, is how creatures of the sort defined by the phrase fleshly creatures in the LORD’s image and likeness are to be thought about, and what might be said about their novissima. Can we easily or ordinarily judge with certitude that a particular creature before us is of that kind? Might there be creatures we would not think of as belonging to the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens that are nevertheless creatures of flesh in the LORD’s image and likeness? These questions, and their kin, are attended to in passing later in this section, but it is beyond the scope of this investigation to give them systematic attention. It is clear enough that ordinarily (though by no means always) we do know whether a particular creature with which we are faced is in the LORD’s image and likeness, and that there is no good theological reason to think that such creatures belong only to the biological species Homo sapiens sapiens. The most general term in the definition is “creature.” This suffices to differentiate humans from the LORD. Everything other than the LORD is a creature, brought into being out of nothing by the LORD. Humans meet this criterion, certainly. Other creatures cooperate with the LORD in bringing such creatures into being, of course, typically a man and a woman whose intercourse conceives a child. Their work, important as it is, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the coming-to-be of a human creature, and alters in no way the creaturely status of the baby they conceive. The parents are secondary causes, at the service, knowingly or not, of the LORD who is the primary cause of the coming-to-be of each and every human creature. Humans are creatures, then, and in this are no different from anything else that is not the LORD. What kind of creature? A fleshly one. Flesh is living or animate body extended continuously in timespace, and in that distinct from other kinds of body, such as the inanimate, whether or not continuously extended in timespace, and the animate but discarnate, which is the best way to think of the angelic body (§1, §18). This way of distinguishing flesh from body is stipulative; it does not reflect ordinary English usage, which is in any case much too amorphous and complex to be captured by any such stipulative distinction; neither is it adequate to the distinctions made in Christian discourse—consider, for instance, the complexity evident in the use of pairs such as sarx/soma in Greek, or caro/



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corpus in Latin; these patterns, too, cannot easily be reduced to system. Nevertheless, the distinction between animate and inanimate bodies is real and important, perhaps the most important distinction in the world of creatures; it will prove convenient, and perhaps more, for the purposes of this study to have it consistently labelled in the terms given. What then, in more detail, about the flesh in general, and human flesh in particular? The expression “dead flesh,” according to the usage suggested here, is an oxymoron: flesh is by definition living, animated, ensouled. It comes in kinds, depending upon the life, or soul, that makes it flesh. There is mammalian flesh, fishy flesh, avian flesh, insect flesh, plant flesh, and so on, and these differ in profound ways one from another, so profound that we cannot imagine in the least what ant-flesh or salmon-flesh is like. We can analyze the physical properties of such flesh, which is to say the properties they have as matter, as inanimate body; and we can even do this as, or while, they live, by subjecting ant- or salmon-flesh to various investigative procedures. But whether we probe and slice inanimate bodies or living flesh, we treat what we study as inanimate body only, and learn little or nothing from so doing about what it is like to be enfleshed as ants or salmon are, which is to say little or nothing about what ant- or salmonflesh is like. What all flesh has in common, then, is that it is inanimate body ensouled, which is just to say inanimate body informed—given a particular form—by a soul. All flesh post lapsum, in the devastation, is also fragile, corruptible, and mortal: its matter can be separated from the soul that informs it, and when this happens it becomes an inanimate body, a corpse or mere corpus. But apart from these significant commonalities, there is only difference, and very deep difference at that. To speak of “soul” is to use explicitly Christian language. It is not to speak as biologists speak. They do, however, because they must, use words that do the same work as “soul.” To distinguish things that live from those that do not, whether or not this can be done with conceptual precision, is to make the same distinction that Christians make in demarcating creatures that have souls from creatures that do not. “Soul,” for the purposes of this study, needs no more precise or technical sense than this. To speak or write of the soul of a fleshly creature is just to speak of what informs it by making it live, of what makes flesh from what would otherwise be

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inanimate body and that becomes inanimate body when death occurs— which is to say, when the soul is separated from the flesh it informs. “Soul” means here nothing less than what gives life (see the discussion of the separated souls in §22). Inanimate bodies are by definition dead, which is to say soulless. Those extended continuously in timespace are capable of disaggregation at any moment (a star explodes, a rock is pulverized, a corpse is burned), or further aggregation with other aggregates (one piece of metal is welded to another, atoms of hydrogen are joined with atoms of oxygen, another brick is mortared into the wall), or various other transformations (melting, freezing, vaporization, and so on). All these things may happen to an inanimate bodily aggregate all or part of which was once flesh. But they do not happen to flesh in the strict and proper sense: they happen only to flesh that has died—flesh that has become an inanimate body—or, in more limited ways, to inanimate body-parts that were once flesh-parts. When nails are cut, beard is shaved, or a limb amputated, the parts thus removed at once become inanimate, bodies no longer soul-informed. The flesh of which this detritus was once a part does not die as a result, or at least it need not: it can often survive such subtractions. It dies only when soul and flesh are separated, leaving behind an inanimate body and a separated soul, neither of which is or can be fully human. There are inanimate bodies not continuously extended in timespace (§1). These include such things as electrons and quarks, and perhaps also individuatable bodies of dark matter-energy. Flesh (animate, ensouled) does not resolve itself into a body or bodies of that sort when the soul is separated from it; it becomes, rather, ordinarily extended inanimate body. But the soul, when discarnate, separated from flesh, becomes an animate body of something like that kind, in that respect akin to an angelic body (§18; see also §22). On the understanding of “body” and “flesh” and “soul” in play here, a fundamental distinction in the world of creatures—for most purposes it can be treated as the most fundamental distinction—is between fleshly creatures, necessarily ensouled, and inanimate bodily creatures, necessarily not. Ordinarily, we can tell the difference without difficulty, even though there is the occasional case in which we are not sure what to say: Is the speaking voice emanating from a smartphone living, ensouled, or is it a collection of (strictly bodily) circuits and metal and software? Are



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self-replicating crystalline creatures inanimate body or flesh? There is always a right answer to such questions, even if it is not clear what it is. Usually, however, we do know what it is, and we do and should respond very differently to creatures of flesh than we to do creatures that are (mere) bodies. The world’s creatures, then, are all bodily, some discarnate and some enfleshed; both kinds are divided into the animate and inanimate, with no overlap between the two. In the case of creatures continuously extended in timespace, all are either organisms or inanimate bodies; the death of an organism brings a new inanimate body or collection of bodies into existence, as when a raccoon or a snake or a human dies; and the coming-to-be of an organism makes what was previously inanimate body into flesh, as when a woman’s egg is fertilized by a man’s sperm. And so far as human flesh is concerned, it is always animate, always ensouled, whether in the devastation or in heaven. When it ceases to be so, as Jesus’ flesh became on the cross, then it is a corpse, a soulless inanimate body, and no longer human flesh. As to human flesh in particular—locatedness is intrinsic to it in all its states. Being enfleshed as humans locates us—gives us a place—in the world, whether in this devastated world, in the Edenic one, or in heaven itself. To be flesh is to be here, somewhere particular, not everywhere, and not somewhere else. This is not to say that fleshly creatures are located in, or find themselves in, timespace as inanimate bodily creatures continuously present in timespace do. For those latter, in the devastation at least, locatedness is exclusively spatial, and a complete account can be given of it by specifying Cartesian coordinates of space. A good local map can, it seems, locate any particular fleshly creature with complete spatiotemporal accuracy at a particular moment. But locatedness, as flesh, means something more than this. It means, also, an erotic relation, one of desire or delight or their opposites, to timespace. The spatial location of inanimate bodies is evenly distributed, mappable geometrically by coordinates and representable with mathematical precision on a grid. But the being-inplace of human flesh is always uneven, stumbling, incapable of adequate representation on a grid. For human flesh, there is holy ground and unhallowable, the soft and welcoming place and the place of despair; and the distance between such places is not capable of measure by rule or by grid. When the flesh is located by GPS at a place in the world, and represented

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by a glowing blue dot on the Google-mapped screen of a smartphone, it is being shown as an inanimate, even if moving, body; showing it—locating it—as flesh rather than as inanimate body is beyond the skill of software. That would require a device that could show timespace gathered and furled and concentrated and distended, a panorama of shrines and altars and places of pilgrimage as well as of death pits and bomb sites and concentration camps. Flesh genuflects here, is embraced there, is fed elsewhere, and flees in horror through desert places elsewhere again. The map of its locatedness would be more like a weather map of isobars unevenly concentrated into zones of high pressure and low than like a gridded plan on which all places are alike. Inanimate body is undifferentiatedly present in all the furled and folded spaces of the flesh—the glowing Googlemapped dot of location is the same for all of them, even though the flesh knows the difference. The extent to which we are fleshly rather than inanimate-bodily is the extent to which timespace is given to us under the signs of desire and delight. The analogy here is with the account of time as pleated and ruched and furled, given already in §16. Space and time, being intimate in every way, are coordinated in this one, too. And flesh in heaven has its locatedness in a constant awareness of its place before the risen flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary. Fleshly locatedness in heaven is, then, a matter of repetitively static ecstasy, in the strict etymological sense of that word. The flesh’s erotic character—desirous and delighting, or repelled and disgusted in all its states and condition—is not, as we perhaps most often and easily think of it, a drive or appetite internal to itself by means of which it relates itself to a world external to itself. On that model, the flesh’s eros is what moves it toward the world, what motivates it to ingest, touch, and enter into the world. A lover, on that understanding, begins as a self-enclosed monad, and seeks contact with other such monads: she is a lonely aspirant to love until she finds other flesh with which to connect. But this way of thinking has it backward. The flesh’s eros is received as gift, not possessed as aspiration: it is only by being caressed, for example, that fleshly creatures are capable of caressing; it is not that we are brought into being as caressers, awaiting occasion for the exercise of that potency. No, in order to be lovers, those capable of caressing (rather than merely touching) the flesh of another, we need first to receive the other’s caress. That is, the lover becomes such only by receiving the gift of himself as beloved.



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The flesh’s eros, on this more adequate view, is received as gift, and necessarily so. This is an implicitly theological view of the flesh’s eros. But it is also a view that coheres well with what we know of the growth and change of human infants. Babies receive the gift of their flesh as erotic, as desirous of and erotically responsive to the flesh of others, only by being caressed, usually, at least in the first instance, by their mothers. Absent the maternal caress, the eros of the baby’s flesh remains surd, unvoiced and inactive, a possibility unrealized. Babies and small children—and the young of other mammals—systematically deprived of the fleshly caress fail not only to be eroticized themselves, but also to flourish in other ways. Rapid death is the ordinary outcome of such deprivation. It is also the case that newborns do not have a good sense of the boundary between their own flesh and both the inanimate world of objects that surrounds them and the flesh of others. This is evident in a baby’s surprise when it gums or sucks its toes with sufficient energy that it feels the result. The sense that the flesh has boundaries, and that the erotic is the principal mode of the flesh’s interaction with what is outside itself, is learned, and is learned by receiving the caress given by the flesh of others, and the touch provided by inanimate bodies. Eros, then, is received as gift, and once received is intensified, shaped, and ornamented by repetition. Consider, in this connection and for example, the kiss. Becoming one who kisses is dependent, causally (and indeed definitionally), on being kissed. The impress of the lover’s lips on one’s own provides the gift of being one who, in virtue of being kissed, can kiss. Kissing is not a possibility for the unkissed; the flesh’s eros, concentrated in this case in the lips, is without remainder received from without—and the extent to which the flesh’s eros appears to function nonreciprocally, not in response to gift but rather by autonomous self-generation, is the extent to which it is a simulacrum of eros rather than the real thing. This account could be extended without much difficulty to all the other aspects and dimensions of the flesh’s eros. The key point is that the flesh’s trembles of desire before the flesh of others are possible for it only if and as it is first desired. To say, “I love you,” then, is to return a benison received, not to make an offer. It is, ideally, something said simultaneously, lip to lip and eye to eye, in harmonious counterpoint, not a tentative word-bridge thrown across the gulf between one human creature and another. On this model, unrequited

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love is something close to an oxymoron, and when it appears to occur, that appearance is always evidence of erotic damage or confusion of one kind or another. The theological version of the flesh’s receipt of itself as erotically charged is not far to seek. Its charter text is 1 Corinthians 4:7, where Paul asks what he has that he has not received. He expects the answer “nothing.” The gift in this case is the LORD’s to us; the kiss, too, is the LORD’s, as the opening verse of the Song of Songs says: “Let me be kissed with your mouth’s kiss.” And if the addressee of these words is the LORD, and the petitioner a representative of us all, then what is being asked for here is the gift of the flesh as erotically capable because itself loved and desired. This is the erotic version of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Our flesh—we as fleshly—is not properly thought of as autonomously or by nature possessed of the capacity to desire, a capacity that can seem then be actualized by receiving the gift of being desired. Rather, our very fleshliness, eroticized, is brought into being ex nihilo by the LORD’s kiss. The only thing we can do about it is to open our mouths to the kiss, or to turn our faces away from it. And in heaven’s ecstatic locatedness we endlessly, repetitively, open our mouths for that kiss and thus return it, kissing the LORD as we are kissed, knowing as we are known. Fleshly locatedness, understood as ecstatic eros, is, as the discussion of the last few paragraphs should have made clear, essentially and constitutively social. That is, it is constituted by gift from other humans, themselves of course fleshly, and cannot come to be or maintain itself without constant social intercourse and constant fleshly exchange. The flesh’s ecstatically erotic locatedness is proper to it in all its states and conditions—here in the devastation, and after its resurrection in heaven. But fleshly ecstasy is moderated and partly overwritten in the devastation by two other characteristics. The first is mortality; and the second, closely associated, is fragility. The first, and in most ways the most fundamental, contrast between devastated and heavenly flesh (§24) is found in the former’s mortality and the latter’s immortality. Immortal flesh is strictly unimaginable for us: we have and can have no imaginative grasp of what immortal flesh might be like, for all our experience of flesh, ours and that of others, is deeply



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inflected with movement toward death. But it is possible to offer a formal characterization of what the contrast is. The first formal point to make is that devastated flesh’s mortality can be characterized with complete formal adequacy as its constant tendency to become inanimate body, to lose, that is, the animation that is its life, and to become simply matter continuously extended in timespace, which is to say a corpse. Subjection to decay belongs to flesh from its beginning in conception, and while explicit knowledge of this does not belong to the flesh of infants or children or adolescents, by the time the age of thirty or so is reached, fleshly being is irrevocably inflected not only with the fact of decay-toward-death, but with awareness of that interesting set of facts. Memory is of central importance here. As the flesh ages it bears within itself the knowledge of what it could once do and can do no longer. It begins increasingly to seem unresponsive, burdensome, and ugly in comparison with its quondam quick beauty. Those growing old begin to see and feel the approaching inanimate-bodiliness of their flesh, and the older they get the more like an unresponsive body their flesh becomes. The flesh of the very old seems, both to themselves and to others observing it, to be almost inanimate body, almost to have ceased to quiver with life. And although there is always a moment of transition from life to death, a moment when the soul separates and what was flesh becomes inanimate, there is also a continuum from flesh to inanimate body at the far end of which the one is almost indistinguishable from the other; it is mostly because of this that we, the observers, cannot always discern the moment of death. This subjection to decay-toward-death can also be expressed as the flesh’s subjection to the mortal violence of metronomic timespace (§§15– 16), which is the time of the devastation, the measurably regular time that marks the progress of creatures in the devastation toward death, and that reduces their locatedness to spatiality, replacing ecstatic mobility with placement on a Cartesian grid. Human flesh is always marked by this and is sometimes aware of being so marked. That mark produces in us a kind of desperation, in the etymological sense of striving that carries with it a certainty of its own at best temporary success, and at worst utter and immediate failure. Metronomic timespace has fleshly decay as its principal mark, and that mark is clearly evident to us; but its effects are deeper and wider than that. Metronomic timespace pressures human creatures into trying to fill it with fleshly satisfactions, and does so with an urgency of which

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we are not ordinarily occurrently aware, but which shapes and orders the movements and desires of the flesh nevertheless. Human creatures seek gratification eagerly, desperate for new experience, unable to endure boredom, grasping always for the next thing, certain, implicitly, that if it does not come into our possession now, it may not do so at all. Devastated flesh is not only mortal; it is also fragile. This is evident in the constant possibility that it will return to inanimate body as a result of violence, of force exerted upon it from without. In the womb the flesh may be dismembered by abortion; once born it may be damaged or disfigured or killed—transmuted without remainder from flesh into inanimate body—by any number of external forces. This aspect of fleshliness does not inevitably carry with it any sense on the part of the enfleshed that their flesh is indeed like this. Even for humans, the sense that the flesh tends toward body has to be learned, to some degree by repeated experience and to some degree by explicit instruction. The child falls, bruises itself, cuts itself, is beaten or burned; and it learns, quickly enough, the fragility of its flesh and the reality of pain. As this is learned, habits of being result. The flesh is guarded and protected, insulated from needless risk; that it can be made into a bodily object by external force becomes, in these ways, a permanent and deep part of the flesh’s sense of itself. It shrinks when faced with this possibility, and it walks warily through the world of bodies in chronic fear that its fleshliness may be damaged or taken from it by force. To be flesh in this devastated world is constantly to tremble before these possibilities. And there is not only the threat of damage from without; there is also illness, the flesh’s unpredictable failures and pains and transmutations that seem to come from within: fevers, sweats, boils, tumors, infections, wasting diseases, and all the other shocks of sickness. Awareness of the constant possibility of these also gets incised deeply into the devastated flesh’s fabric over time. The flesh’s social eros, properly constitutive of it, is also seriously malformed in the devastation. Central to most of these malformations is the devastated flesh’s attempted expropriation of the flesh of others, and of inanimate bodies. To expropriate is improperly to take something from its proper owner and make it your own; and to expropriate under the sign of domination is to attempt to make something, some particular creature, your own as its dominus, the one who has complete and sole rights over its



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control, sequestration, destruction, abandonment, and indeed anything else the dominus might wish to do with what she expropriates. In short, then, to expropriate as dominus is to attempt to usurp the place of the LORD with respect to some particular creature, to behave as its LORD. This attempt can take many forms. They include chattel slavery; murder, whether on a small or large scale; rape; and various other forms of physical abuse. Informing all these, and many less dramatic instances, is the flesh’s inability to rest content with receiving the gift of itself as flesh and returning that gift to its giver. In the case of ordinary physical intimacies, for instance, whether as everyday as the exchange of etiquette’s courtesies, or as profound as giving birth or making love, the desire for expropriative domination is ever-present. It shows itself in the desire to be the only agent in the exchange by compelling the other’s response. This fails, of course— or, rather, the extent to which it succeeds (and it can sometimes succeed all too well) is the extent to which the exchange of fleshly intimacy is torn from its proper configuration in the systole of folded and tensed time and the rough ground of fleshly space, and pegged out flat with unbreakable bonds, like Gulliver’s enormous body by the Lilliputians, on the flat plain of Cartesian-metronomic timespace. Flesh thus expropriated and dominated inevitably ceases to be flesh and approximates, for the one doing the expropriating, inanimate body. The expropriative attempt is in this way performatively incoherent: attempting it guarantees its failure. But that makes it no less widely done. Every fleshly act here below is inflected to some degree with this expropriative-dominating tendency, which is another way of saying that no such acts here in the devastation are altogether free from sin. The flesh’s eros under the metronome gets bored quickly. Driven by desperation though it is to enact its desires, always with a tincture of expropriation and domination, it finds what it wants and what it does repetitive. This, again—this fine dinner, this beautiful body, this subtle and elegant wine, this beautiful bouquet, peony-plump, this . . . this . . . this . . . What was once, the first time or the first dozen times, an almost unmixed delight, received at least in part as the gift it is, becomes with the deadening repetition of the metronome no longer enough, or even something no longer pleasing at all in its first form. The boredom of repetition in the sphere of the flesh’s eros has in part to do with the attempt to expropriate and dominate. The extent to which an object of fleshly eros is subjugated

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in those ways is exactly the extent to which it becomes a bore because it cannot any longer offer what is really needed, which is the free response of the unsubjugated. But that is far from the whole story about boredom. It is also an ordinary feature of the damage suffered by the flesh in the world, a feature of the flesh’s subjugation to the repetitions of untransfigured metronomic time. This ordinary ennui—we might also call it acedia, to use a more traditional Christian word—is evident in the desire for staging, for producing a spectacle that may absorb the eyes of the flesh without remainder, at least for a time. Spectacles may be of violence—the staged lynchings of the American South until recent times, or the staged public hangings of Victorian England. They may also be sexual: much so-called erotica, whether using visual or verbal devices, is of this sort, and the complex and baroque fantasies and fetishisms of sexual desire enacted involve staging, as well. Essential to staging is that it uses artifice to attempt to make a spectacle of the gift, where a spectacle is exactly something that absorbs the gaze without remainder, and has no freedom to address or caress those who gaze upon it in any other than choreographed ways, ways whose course is alike already known to spectators and those frozen into the spectacle’s tableau. Staging the spectacle is inadequate, however, as a device to overcome boredom. It, however imaginative and detailed and precise, works only for a time; then it, too, is subsumed into the dry and despairing rhythm of acedia, and must be superseded by the next, more imaginative and elaborate, spectacle. The eros of the flesh carries with it a sense of the other—all human others—as also enfleshed, fleshly like oneself. This is not a conclusion of reason. It is not possible to do what Descartes represented himself as doing with respect to other minds, which is first to experience oneself as flesh, then to observe other bodies in appearance like one’s own, ambulatory in local timespace, and finally to conclude by inference that they, too, are flesh like oneself. Rather, because one’s own flesh is received as such, constituted as such by the gift of the other’s caress, the very fact of being flesh at all is already implicated in the fleshliness of the bodies of others. You may of course forget this, and have the fleshliness of others become a puzzle that has to be reasoned away; you may even become a solipsist of the flesh, thinking and acting as if the only flesh in the world were your own. But such states are rare, and usually the product of bad philosophy



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coupled with deeply habituated sin. Ordinarily, it is sufficiently obvious to humans beyond the age of seven or so that their own fleshliness is an artifact of the fleshliness of others, and of the gratuitous kindness of those others in bestowing it upon them. And even when, in the order of knowing, these states of affairs are obscured or denied, they obtain necessarily in the order of being. To be flesh is to be given yourself as such by other fleshly creatures, and thereby to be placed, ineluctably, in a web of fleshly connection. The world of the flesh is a world of intimacy with others, and so the idea of solitary flesh, as much as that of dead flesh, is an oxymoron. It is, however, an oxymoron whose realization is implicitly sought by many. The two malformations just discussed—the desire to dominate by expropriation, and to overcome boredom by staging spectacles—have their proper and intended end in the erasure of all flesh other than one’s own. This is because the extent to which they succeed is the extent to which they transform the flesh of others into something other than flesh, into an object for the gaze when the spectacle is staged, or a wholly owned body when expropriation is performed. Those things are flesh no longer. They have nothing to give. That was the point of transforming them in these ways. And so it should be easy enough to see that the implicit, though unrealizable, goal of the fallen flesh of the devastation is to be the only flesh there is. Expropriators are solipsists even if they do not seem to themselves to be so. With this characterization of human flesh in mind, we can now return to the definition of the human given in §21: fleshly creatures in the LORD’s image and likeness. How can fleshly creatures, understood in this way, be understood as in the image and likeness of the LORD, the triune one who is eternal (§13), and thus by definition not located in timespace in the way that flesh ineluctably is? A first step into this question is to distinguish between image and likeness, which is to say between the imago and the similitudo of Genesis 1:26, where the LORD is depicted (in the Vulgate) as saying, faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram—let us make humans in our (that is, the triune) image and likeness. This text can be read in many ways, and there is in the Christian tradition a vast quantity of speculative commentary on the significance of the distinction between “image” and “likeness.” “Image” suggests, in everyday English, a more intimate relation

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and a closer similarity than does “likeness”; “image” conjures mirrors and photographs and indiscriminable replication; “likeness” suggests sketches and simulacra, resemblance-with-difference, recognizable similarity (an English word derived from the Latin similitudo) that is very far from identity. We can read this text, then, to suggest different ways in which the human is like the LORD, different degrees of likeness between him and us. How to further specify these differences? In the flesh, as flesh, formed as we are, continuously extended in timespace, we cannot image the eternal LORD. He has no flesh and is not continuously extended in timespace. Our particular form—erect, bipedal, large-brained, reversible-thumbed, expressively faced, sweaty, emotional, occasionally thoughtful—is no image of the LORD’s, who has no form at all, and certainly not ours. But, the incarnate one, the second person of the Trinity inseparably but unconfusedly one with a human creature in such a way as to constitute a single person, was and is and will be flesh formed as we are. That flesh grew in a womb, was born as we (most of us) are, sucked milk from his mother’s breasts, grew, and had all the physical features we have. He was human, which means flesh; and his flesh is the paradigmatic human flesh. We can say, then, speculatively but with the kind of conviction that convenientia brings (limited conviction, that is, but not none), that our flesh is in the likeness of his, that ours is related to his as the sketch is to what is sketched, and that our adoration of him in flesh— as he was in Galilee and Jerusalem, and in flesh as he is in the liturgy now, and eventually, consummately, as ingredient to the human heavenly last thing—implies a recognition of those facts. To be fleshly creatures in the likeness of the LORD is exactly to have flesh that is like his, in the likeness of his. That is the first aspect of our relation to him. There is also the image, which is not and cannot be a matter of the flesh. In what sense can it be said that we are in the LORD’s image? A full answer to this would require a Trinitarian theology, since the LORD in whose image we are is a triune LORD, and his image in us must therefore also be triune. What needs to be said at this point is only that the triune image is not a matter of the flesh, and that this underscores at once the importance of emphasizing that we humans are not only fleshly, even if we are always at least that. Even here in the devastation it is clear enough that we are in part constituted by states of affairs that are not fleshly: we think and feel and hope and remember, and such states of affairs, while they may



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have fleshly correlates and even necessary conditions that are states of the flesh (states of the brain, perhaps; synapses firing; electrical discharges in the nerve endings; and so on), are, definitionally and in terms of their phenomenology, not fleshly. Such things are bodily in the extended sense of “body” already given and argued for (§1, §18), and are so because they have temporal—and therefore also spatial—location; but they are not fleshly because they are not continuously extended in timespace, and therefore cannot be accessed by the fleshly senses as can things that are so extended, whether animate or inanimate. This bodily-but-not-fleshly aspect of the human is (what is usually called by the tradition) the anima, or soul. An exhaustive account of it cannot be given by way of phenomenology. That is, the soul is not only what appears, occurrently, in the patterns of human experience. Those patterns are its evidence, the nature of its presence in timespace, its trace there. But the soul has, and must have, a triune constitution that exceeds and is the necessary condition for that evidence, those modes of presence. That triune constitution is the fact about us that serves as necessary condition for what appears to us in experience. And it is in that fact about us that the imago, the image of the triune LORD, is found. It is what it is because of its participation in the one who is. A fuller Trinitarian theology, and its correlate in the provision of a more complete analysis of the soul, is beyond the scope of this work. What more needs to be said about the soul in order to come to speculative conclusions about the possible novissima of humans will be found in the next section, §22, where there is a brief treatment of the question of the intermediate state between death in the devastation and the general resurrection—not, of course, as a last thing, which it is definitionally not, but rather as a prelude and aid to the understanding of the humans, last things proper: namely, annihilation (§23), heaven (§24), and hell (§25). Fleshly creatures in the LORD’s image and likeness—we now have a preliminary sense of what this definition means. That understanding can be sharpened by considering what the tradition affirms as doctrine, which is that there is a fleshless intermediate state of the soul, in which, for a time, the human is absent.

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n §§10–11, I provided a schema of the content of Christian doctrine on the last things, and an outline of the arc of the Christian story about what happens to the cosmos and its creatures as they approach their last things. A reminder is in order about one part of this narrative arc, the part that deals with what happens to human creatures upon their deaths in the devastation. Death in the devastation is the separation of soul from flesh; each of our souls undergoes a judgment immediately upon death that will destine us either for a novissimum of eternal and ecstatic intimacy with the LORD, or for one of eternal separation from him. Our discarnate souls begin, at death, to move toward our allotted novissimum, whether by entering at once into a preliminary and partial loving intimacy with the LORD that reaches its heavenly perfection at the general resurrection when they again become fully human, or by finding themselves in preliminary and partial—usually painful—separation from the LORD as a means of preparation for full intimacy with him in heaven following the general resurrection (the shorthand for this second alternative is “purgatory”). And then, as a third alternative, there is the fleshless soul’s postmortem agonizing separation from the LORD that will find its consummation at the general resurrection in hell, which is to say an eternal and indefectible fleshly separation from the LORD (on which see §25). These discarnate conditions are not, properly speaking, last things, novissima, because, for each of them, there is something yet to happen, a novelty yet to occur. That is our reconstitution as human creatures by taking flesh again, which we do at the general resurrection. 173

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In the intermediate state there are, properly speaking, no human creatures. That is because such creatures are, by definition, fleshly, and the intermediate state is, by definition, a place without flesh. It follows by entailment that whatever is there is not and cannot be a human creature. That conclusion is sufficiently intimate with the body of explicit doctrine that it approaches membership in that body. Some interesting speculative corollaries are suggested by it, among which three can be easily distinguished. The first has to do with the possibility of human annihilation; the second with the possibility of a Christian understanding of reincarnation; and the third with an understanding of the body (not the flesh) in the intermediate state, which is also to say of the capacities of the soul in that state, understood as discarnate body and, therefore, as not belonging to the category of the human. First, affirmation of a discarnate intermediate state, which is de fide for Catholic Christians because of the 1336 Constitution Benedictus Deus, discussed already in §18. A Catholic theologian’s task would be easier than it is were there no doctrine about the intermediate state, but there is, and so the task is to see what conceptual riches thinking about it can yield. Affirmation of a discarnate state for every human creature just means that every human creature is temporarily annihilated—following the analysis of what it means to be annihilated given in §3. Why? Because the doctrine of the intermediate state requires that there be a period of time during which humans brought to nothing by the separation of soul from flesh continue to be absent from the world, being present during that period only in their traces, which comprise a decaying corpse, flesh-becomebody, on the one hand, and a discarnate soul on the other. These are traces, not the thing itself, and that is because a human creature is by definition animate flesh. Flesh or soul alone, separated, each is to a human creature approximately what amputated limbs are to a fleshly body: disjecta membra, that is. Whether traces, or parts, or traces-understood-as-parts, neither the flesh separated from the soul nor the soul separated from the flesh can constitute a human. And so, the doctrine of the intermediate state just is a doctrine of the temporary annihilation of those human creatures who enter it. Christian thought need not have gone in this direction. Had the flesh’s resurrection been understood to occur immediately upon its death in the



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devastation, which is a position that some Christians, ancient and modern, have held, so that there was no interval between the one event and the other, there would also have been no time, metronomically speaking, when the world was absent the human creatures so resurrected, and thus no doctrine of temporary annihilation. But that was not the way things went, and so there is a doctrine of temporary annihilation. Every human creature ceases to be at death: that is Christian doctrine. Notice that to say that a human has been brought to nothing when soul and flesh separate is not to say that nothing at all has been left behind when such an event occurs. The traces—body and soul—are certainly not nothing; the former is lively in many ways, not least in the case of saintly bodies understood as relics; and the latter has many powers and capacities, as already briefly discussed (§21). The term “annihilation” is predicated not of these, but rather of the human creature constituted by their conjoining. The principal importance of this annihilationist implication of the intermediate state is that it shows decisively that orthodox Christian thought does allow that a human creature may be brought to nothing, in spite of the strong presence in the tradition of arguments to the contrary. Some of these arguments have been explored already in the case of the angels (§20), and it was shown there that those arguments are not decisive, and that it is possible within the constraints of orthodoxy to affirm the possible self-annihilation of the angels. The ground under that position is firmer in the case of human creatures: the doctrine of the intermediate state not only permits this position but requires it. The annihilation affirmed by that doctrine is temporary rather than permanent because the intermediate state is followed by the flesh’s resurrection and the reconstitution of humans by the animation of that flesh—its ensouling. Whether permanent annihilation is possible for humans is another question, discussed in §23. Clear understanding of the doctrinal weight of the temporary annihilation of humans does, however, vitiate some of the standard arguments against the possibility of permanent human annihilation. It does not, however, address the question of whether the discarnate soul may come irreversibly to nothing; that question is also addressed in §23. The second corollary of the discarnate intermediate state is that Christian orthodoxy implies a kind of reincarnation.

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The term “reincarnation” labels a family of theories about humans, human flesh, and the significance of physiological death for humans. Theories in this family assume that to be faced by living flesh of a certain sort is to be faced by a human creature. These theories also recognize that flesh of the relevant kind ordinarily becomes inanimate body in death, and that when it does, the human creature who faced us when that flesh faced us is no longer there, no longer where the inanimate body is. To be in the presence of a corpse is not to be in the presence of a human creature. Most who have spent time in the presence of corpses know this intuitively and with certainty. But, reincarnation-theories go on to claim, the death of a particular fleshly body, with the result that the human who used to embrace us when that fleshly body embraced us is no longer where the corpse now is, does not mean that it is impossible to be faced with and embraced by that very same human creature again, at some time in the future. The possibility that this might happen is the possibility of reincarnation; its actuality is the actuality of reincarnation. Reincarnation needs to be distinguished from metempsychosis. The term “metempsychosis,” literally “ensoulment afresh” or “ensoulment differently,” is sometimes taken to be an approximate equivalent of “reincarnation.” Some thesauruses do that. But to take the terms as equivalents is to obscure an important difference. The Greek “metempsychosis” would, if made Latinate, be “transanimation”; it would certainly not be “reincarnation.” “Metempsychosis” places the emphasis on the wandering soul, alighting in or clothing itself with one fleshly body after another; “reincarnation” places the emphasis on human flesh, and says that the selfsame human can be physically present to us again after the death of the fleshly body in or as which she was once present to us. On this understanding, defenders of metempsychosis (which itself comes in varieties) are defending a variant or subkind of reincarnation. It is not the kind offered by Christian orthodoxy; and when magisterial and speculative texts within the tradition reject any kind of reincarnation-theory, it is affirmations of metempsychosis that they reject, not reincarnation in all its varieties. On this generic understanding of reincarnation, the vast majority of people in the past and now have been believers in it. Orthodox Christians of all stripes affirm it; Buddhists affirm it; Hindus affirm it; some Jews affirm it; most Muslims affirm it; and adherents of various forms of paganism affirm it. It is one of the favorite fantasies of both Hollywood



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and Bollywood. Materialists, those who think that an exhaustive account of what there is in the cosmos can be given by listing only bodily creatures continuously extended in timespace, can in theory affirm it too, though perhaps not many do; it is coherently possible, certainly, to have a materialist theory about what gives identity to a particular human creature, and also to think that more than one fleshly body, successively rather than simultaneously, can face the world as one and the same human. And it is certainly possible (and much easier) to affirm reincarnation if you think, as most Christians do and all ought, that where there is no flesh there is no human creature. Those who deny every version of reincarnation, then, are few, and are likely to be those who identify a particular human creature without remainder as a particular fleshly body, and take it that the death of that fleshly body is the end, the terminus, of that human creature without possibility of subsequent reconstitution, or those who have what they take to be insuperable conceptual difficulties with the specification of criteria for continuity of human identity across multiple fleshly bodies. But those with such difficulties are very few. Everyone else believes in reincarnation, as well they should. It may sound a little odd to say that orthodox Christians are believers in reincarnation, since many Christian thinkers from the early centuries onward inveigh against one or another variant of it, and the term is explicitly rejected as an appropriate one for Christians in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 1013). Nevertheless, it is easy enough to see that, on the understanding of reincarnation in play here, Christians are and must be defenders of it. The New Testament accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are accounts of reincarnation. Jesus underwent physiological death on the cross, and as a result, when his flesh was pierced by the spear, taken down from the cross, and buried in the rock-hewn tomb, he, Jesus, was not where that now-inanimate flesh was. Its death guaranteed his absence from the place of its remnants, its traces, as will be the case for us all. But later that same flesh—even if sometimes also unrecognizably different— is seen to be alive again, and in its liveliness to converse and otherwise interact with other people as exactly the human Jesus of Nazareth. It is true that the new fleshly body, the resurrected fleshly body, is not in fact new but rather the same as the old one, the one that died on the cross. But that does not alter the fact that this is a case of reincarnation according to the definition given.

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As usual, thinking about Jesus provides a pattern that can be used in thinking about ourselves, about all humans other than him. When our souls are separated from our bodies of flesh, we come temporarily to nothing, awaiting, as discarnate souls (not as human creatures), reunion with the flesh, which has been taken from us. When we are reunited with that flesh, we are reincarnated, moved from the discarnate to the incarnate, and thereby returned to ourselves. That is, exactly, a doctrine of reincarnation, different from its Hindu and Buddhist cousins only in the specification of the relations between the premortem body of flesh and its postgeneral-resurrection cousin. For Christians, that relation is one of identity, though with a range of possible answers to the question of how to specify the nature of that identity. That is a topic sufficiently difficult within the continuous metronomic timespace of the devastation—what makes the fleshly body I was at age ten the same as the fleshly body I now am, at the age of fifty-eight?—and it becomes still more so when a time gap is involved, as it is in the case of the fleshly body at the first death and at the time of the general resurrection. For Buddhists, by and large, there is no need of any such specification. And all doctrines of reincarnation are distinct from those particularly Platonist understandings of human last things that separate them altogether from the flesh, and that therefore do not understand human creatures as definitionally and necessarily fleshly. The third corollary of the speculative position taken here on the intermediate state has to do with the nature and capacities of the soul therein, understood as a kind of body, and as the only trace of the human remaining in the intermediate state. Benedictus Deus, once again, is both doctrinally binding and conceptually suggestive on these matters. It establishes that there are three different conditions entered into by discarnate souls immediately upon their separation from the flesh. The first, suitable to the discarnate souls of the saints, broadly understood, is the heavenly. Such souls are “with Christ in heaven . . . [where] they see the divine essence with an intuitive vision and even face to face (visione intuitive et etiam faciali).” This, the Constitution says, is what it means to enter into life eternal. The second, suitable to the discarnate souls of the saints that still stand, however, in some need of purgation (they have aliquid purgabile, something separating them from the LORD that needs yet to be purged from them), is the purgatorial. In it,



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those souls are purified, in some way not specified by the Constitution, of whatever it is that separates them from the LORD and makes the intuitive vision already mentioned not yet possible for them. Benedict is clear that the discarnate souls in this second state will, should they have been purged before the general resurrection occurs (cum post mortem suam fuerint purgatae), enter into the first, heavenly, state. Third, there are those discarnate souls that are separated from the flesh in a state of mortal sin (in actuali peccato mortali); suitable for them is descent into hell, there agonizingly to suffer the painful punishments proper to that place (ubi poenis infernalibus cruciantur). The Constitution says nothing explicit about whether those in this third condition do or must remain in it until the general resurrection—this is different from those discarnate souls in the second state, of which it is said that they can leave the second state for the first, even before the general resurrection. Each of these states, it is important to emphasize, belongs to discarnate souls, those separated from the flesh, and to them only. Considering this can show something of what such creatures are and can do, recalling always that they are not, properly speaking, human creatures exactly because they are discarnate. Each discarnate soul is intimate with the human creature of which it is a trace. This is most obvious in the case of discarnate souls in the purgatorial and hellish states—the second and third of those specified by Benedictus Deus. They are in those states exactly because of actions (or failures to act) of the human creatures whose traces they are, and so they are the proper, if temporary, inheritors of those actions. This means that a discarnate soul is what it is, at least in part, because of the actions of a creature with whom it is not identical. In this respect, a discarnate soul is in something like the same condition as a baby who suffers bodily pains because of the actions of its mother. Fetal alcohol syndrome is the result of the mother’s actions during pregnancy; in a similar way, the discarnate soul’s blissful intellectual vision of the LORD or painful separation from the LORD in the intermediate state is the result of things done or not done by the human creature of which it was once a part and is now a trace. The discarnate soul, then, is in close continuity with its human predecessor, even though it is a creature of a distinct kind. A more precise specification than this of the relation between the discarnate soul and its human

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predecessor is perhaps not possible and is certainly not necessary for the purposes of this study. The discarnate soul is capable of pain and pleasure—or, perhaps better, of grief and joy. Benedictus Deus is explicit about this; some among the discarnate soul’s lacks, specifically and explicitly its separation from the LORD, are evident to it and unpleasant for it. The discarnate soul is, then, capable of affect and of all that accompanies and is presupposed by such a capacity. There are many theoretical positions on the question of what those corollaries and preconditions are; all that needs to be said here is that whatever they are, the discarnate soul has them, and has them without need of flesh, though not without body, as defined and discussed in §1 and §18. The discarnate soul is capable of change over the course of metronomic time. This is clearly implied by what the Constitution says about souls in the purgatorial state. Their purification can be completed before the general resurrection (mox post . . . purgationem praefatam in illis, qui purgatione huiusmodi indigebant . . . sunt . . . in caelo, caelorum regno et paradiso caelesti sum Christo—immediately after the purgation spoken of above, those who were in need of it are with Christ in heaven, the paradisial heavenly kingdom), and when it has been completed, they at once—immediately, without further delay—enter into the same state as the discarnate souls that have no need of such purification. That is, they have the intellectual vision of the LORD, and thereby are in heaven. A process with a beginning and an end is thus located in the life of the discarnate soul. This means, given the understanding of metronomic timespace in play in this work (§§14–16), that the discarnate soul has a nonfleshly body of some kind, as do all creatures. This is, of course, not said in Benedictus Deus, but it is a direct implication of what is said there, given a particular understanding of space and time. The exact nature of the separated soul’s discarnate body need not detain us here, except to remind ourselves, following §1 and §18, that it must be spatio-temporally discontinuous. This view has certain advantages. Most important among them is the reconfiguration of traditional questions about the location of discarnate souls in the intermediate state. A Dantean geography of hell and purgatory and paradise, which provides locations for them in metronomically mappable timespace, is not necessary; the bodies of discarnate souls, being discontinuously present in that kind of timespace, cannot have a location



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of that sort. Asking where they are in that sense is like asking where an electron is at the moment: a malformed question. The best answer to it is that they are, discarnately, more or less intimate, depending on their state—those in hell very much less, those in heaven very much more— with the locus-tempus that is the LORD (§24). Discarnate souls are also, still following the Constitution, capable of seeing the LORD’s essence, which means seeing what the LORD is. And since the LORD is the Trinity, the trinitas quae deus est as Augustine likes to put it, this can only mean seeing the three persons of the Trinity in their eternal relations: the Son being begotten by the Father, and the Spirit proceeding from both. The discarnate soul has, then, properly intellectual capacities. It can see and respond to what belongs to the eternal divine order (§13), and can enjoy—have complete and unalloyed intellectual beatitude in—what it sees. This was not something possible for incarnate souls in the devastation exactly because they were then in the devastation and were therefore subject to the effects of sin that make such vision impossible. Discarnate souls, at least those of the saints, are also available and responsive to one another, and to fleshly creatures such as ourselves here in the devastation. They are not, that is to say, isolated monadic substances, occupied only with the intellectual vision of the LORD. Benedictus Deus does not say this, and it is a point underemphasized by the magisterial and speculative tradition. But Christian doctrine requires it, for it is an ordinary part of the church’s liturgical practice that we pray for the dead, which means for discarnate souls, with the idea that we can, in so doing, affect their condition. It is also the case that we pray to the saints with the idea that they can respond to our prayers by interceding for us with the LORD. Two-way interactions of various kinds occur, therefore, among discarnate souls and incarnate ones. This is the doctrine of the communion of saints, and it requires that social relations among discarnate souls, and between them and incarnate ones, be affirmed. The doctrine of the communion of saints also requires that we think of discarnate souls as bodies. It is definitional of bodies (§1) that they are available and responsive to other bodies, capable, that is, of entering into spatio-temporally locatable relations with them. Since discarnate souls can do this (the doctrine of the communion of saints entails it), they must do so as bodies of some kind. This is another, and very important, reason for thinking of discarnate souls as bodies.

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It should be apparent from all this that discarnate souls in the intermediate state are much like human creatures: they are located in timespace; they have a history and a telos; they can undergo pleasure and pain; they can know, intellectually; and they can will and intend. But they are also, and at the same time, very unlike human creatures, principally because they lack flesh. They are much more like angelic persons in this respect, and in all the other respects just mentioned, and it is perhaps reasonable therefore to think of them in some extended analogical sense as temporary angels. They are like angels, too, in being variously intimate with the LORD, some very close to him and some very distant from him. Their kinship to human creatures is provided, on the other hand, by their inheritance of what fleshly human creatures have done, and by the fact that they will eventually again be enfleshed, and thus again become fully human. And so their temporary angelhood is a pause or hiatus in the career of a human creature, one that preserves many of the qualities of humanity, but without those that make creaturehood into human creaturehood. This is a peculiar condition. So far, then, an account of a peculiar, distinctively Catholic doctrine. The peculiarity of the doctrine, and of the account, reflect, however—and this suggests that the account is on the right lines—the complexity of the ways in which we fleshly human creatures experience and perform our relations with these discarnate, quasi-angelic persons. In the case of the dead we have known, our parents and siblings and children, for example, we relate to them primarily as absent, ordinarily under the sign of regret and lament, and as prospectively present to us again, ordinarily under the sign of anticipation. In both cases, however, when we imagine them as present to us once more, or recall them as once face-to-face with us, we do so with an imagination of the flesh and its concomitants—the smell of a body, the sound of a voice, the feel of skin, the character of the step in the hallway. We do not—partly because of the weight of the past (we have always, before their deaths, had to do with these human creatures as bodies of flesh), and partly because of the poverty of our imaginations (we have no image of what a discarnate creature might be like)—anticipate reunion with a discarnate creature, and do not imagine the now-discarnate soul, whether in a purgatorial, a heavenly, or a hellish condition, as anything other than flesh. On the few occasions when we do, or try to, we



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arrive at fantasies of ghosts, either frightening or risible, and in any case not what we want. Matters are not quite so clear in the case of the dead we have never known in the flesh. There is no weight of fleshly acquaintance in such cases. But even there, I should think, most of us, when we pray to Mary or Augustine or Perpetua—all human creatures about whose fleshly physiognomy we have almost no idea, and no idea at all other than that provided by their sex—we do so with some fleshly image in mind. The church encourages us in this by providing images for us, images that, in some cases, participate iconically in what they image. Our relations with discarnate souls, manifold and essential as they are, seem to us to be fleshly relations; they are certainly mediated by fleshly fantasies. This is true even when it is perfectly clear cognitively that the dead really are discarnate, that whatever kind of body they may have, it is not a fleshly one. This oddly tensive nature of our relations with the discarnate dead—we know them to be fleshless, but their flesh is what we yearn for and what we imagine in our prayers to and for them—mirrors very well what they are, which is creatures of a sort, causally intimate with the fleshly past and future of the human creatures they were and will be, and yet emphatically not human creatures. None of the three states of discarnate souls envisaged by Benedictus Deus is a novissimum because souls in each await a novelty marked and partly constituted by the resurrection of their flesh. Each of the three states, too, is marked by lack. In the case of the second and third—the purgatorial and the hellish—this is obvious enough. Souls in the purgatorial state lack the intuitive intellectual vision of the LORD, which is a great good, indeed the greatest of all goods; they also lack, presumably, the joy and peace that the Constitution says belong to those in the first, heavenly, state. Purification, or purgation, is, too, a trope of pain; something is removed from those who undergo it with and by means of suffering (though the Constitution does not emphasize this). And souls in the third, hellish, state (§25) lack utterly the most profound good in the order of being, which is the love of the LORD—they are, Augustine likes to say, animae deo desertae, (discarnate) souls deserted by the LORD. The lacks of souls suffering purgatorially will eventually be made good, for they, when their purgation is complete, whether before or simultaneously with the resurrection of the flesh, enter heaven. But the lacks of souls suffering hellishly will not be made good, for

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even when the resurrection of the flesh occurs and they become thereby human creatures once again, they remain enduringly separate from the LORD (the question of whether it is essential to Christian doctrine to say that there must be some human creatures in this condition is discussed in §25). What then of souls in the heavenly state, the first adverted to by the Constitution? In what sense is their condition one of lack? There is one obvious sense in which holy souls seeing the LORD are in a condition of lack. They lack flesh, and so, in the order of being, they lack something essential for, first, adoring intimacy with the LORD in heaven, and, second, for properly human intimacy with other humans. All such intimacies include, necessarily, a fleshly aspect. The intimacy of discarnate holy souls with the LORD has therefore not yet arrived at its consummation, and this is true even though, as the Constitution says, the divine essence—the eternal economy of the Trinity—shows itself to them nude, clare, et aperte. Their intellectual vision of the LORD, which means at least their knowledge by direct and unmediated acquaintance of what the LORD is like, may have reached its consummation; that is certainly the most natural way to read Benedictus Deus. But even if this is the right conclusion to draw, nothing much follows from it about what the rejoining of discarnate soul to fleshly body might effect for fleshly vision of the LORD—a topic treated more fully in §24. Dante approaches this question in the fourteenth canto of the Paradiso. There, following a long discourse by the discarnate soul of Thomas Aquinas, Beatrice intuits that Dante still has questions, among them one that has to do, by implication at least, with the relation between the discarnate soul and the resurrected flesh. Will, Beatrice asks on Dante’s behalf, the light that adorns the discarnate souls in heaven prior to the general resurrection (for Dante, as also in this study, these discarnate souls have body of a sort, even if not a fleshly one) remain as radiant as it is now when the soul is enfleshed once more (Paradiso, 14.13–15)? The answer comes not from Thomas, even though the question appears to be put by Beatrice to him, but from an unnamed voice in the heavenly assembly, which some textual clues suggest may be Solomon’s (most commentators think so). Here is part of Solomon’s answer to the question: When glorious and holy flesh Clothes us again, our persons Will be more pleasing because complete



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So that the light gratuitously given By the highest good shall increase— The light that disposes us to see him From which our vision must increase As must both the ardor it kindles And the radiance born from that ardor Like a coal that makes flames And yet conquers them with its white glow Preserving thereby its own appearance— So this effulgence surrounding us now Will be overcome by the flesh’s brightness— All which flesh is now earth-covered. (Paradiso, 14.43–57)

The resurrected flesh, Dante writes, is gloriosa e senta, glorious and holy, and when our separated souls are rejoined with it, we will be complete in every way (tutta quanta), and thus more pleasing to the LORD than we were as discarnate souls. Not only this: we shall see the LORD more clearly then than we did when we were discarnate because the graciously given light by means of which we see him increases (s’accrescerà) when we are once again enfleshed. The trope of increase runs through these lines: vision, ardent love, and radiance all increase and become more intense as we take on resurrected flesh. Most strikingly, the flesh’s radiance outdoes or overcomes or dominates or has sovereignty over (soverchia) the radiance with which the discarnate souls have been accompanied prior to the resurrection of the flesh. Everything will, after the resurrection, be more intense, better, fuller, more perfect—all of which is another way of saying that the discarnate souls in heaven are, in the order of being in a state of lack, and severe lack at that. This is not to say that they lack goods proper to discarnate souls; but it is to say that they lack a meta-good, which is to cease to be a discarnate soul by becoming, as Dante puts it, rivestita— revested, reclothed, redressed—with flesh. And they lack all the goods associated with that one, which include the modes of seeing the LORD proper to the flesh, and the modes of human social existence proper to the flesh. Dante has little to say about those goods, but that they exist is a corollary to what he does say. Dante is not a theological authority on these matters; he is, rather, a provider of beautiful language for an unavoidable theological point, and

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an instance of something very common in the Christian tradition, which is exhibition of some uneasiness about how to account for the state of lack that discarnate souls must be in, while at the same time saying that they are experiencing the fullness of the beatific vision, the vision of the LORD. This tension is especially evident in Thomas’ thought, and in that of his epigones and commentators. The Thomist tradition does not, so far as I can see, find a good solution. Dante is to be preferred, even if, as is inevitable for poets, what he writes is suggestive rather than precise. The discussion of the various lacks that characterize all discarnate souls has so far been about deficits proper to them in the intermediate state. It has not been about what it seems like to discarnate souls to be in their various states of lack, which is an altogether different matter and a very much more speculative one. What can be said about that? Magisterial texts and speculative theologians do often use affect-language to describe what purgatorial or hellish lacks seem like to discarnate souls. They feel these lacks, this language suggests—Benedictus Deus contains some of this language—and it is commonplace. Discarnate souls have, the tradition is virtually unanimous in saying, capacity for feeling as well as for knowing and willing. The phenomenal properties of such feelings—how they seem to the discarnate souls undergoing them—is a difficult matter, certainly, and not one capable of close or detailed depiction. The following comments are meant only to be suggestive, and to serve a theoretical position to be developed later (§§24–26) about the nature of the differences distinguishing discarnate souls in one state from those in another. The discussion in what immediately follows is only about discarnate affective responses to lack—pain and so forth; discarnate pleasure, felt in response to the presence of the LORD and to other discarnate (humanly speaking dead) and incarnate (humanly speaking living) souls is left aside until §§24–25. Suppose that discarnate affect is affect whose intentional object does not enter into fleshly exchange with the affected subject. All affect, whether experienced by a fleshly body or not, is not itself only a matter of the flesh. That is, an exhaustive accounting of the fleshly condition of the affect-laden subject at the (metronomic) time of the affect’s occurrence— the patterned firing of synapses, alterations in skin temperature, varying heart rate, fluttering of nerves, and the like—will not and cannot capture the affective phenomena, the feelings of pleasure, pain, nostalgia, regret,



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excitement, anticipation, and the like, with which they are causally or concomitantly associated. Such phenomena are by definition not fleshly, and that is the case whether or not their subject is. And so, it suffices to distinguish discarnate affect from fleshly affect to say that instances of the latter have intentional objects that enter into fleshly commerce with the affected one, while instances of the former do not. So, for example, the affective delight produced by a kiss from the beloved—the present pressure of her fleshly lips on mine—is carnal affect; the delight, perhaps tinged with nostalgia, produced by a memory of a kiss from a long-lost beloved, is discarnate affect. All the affect experienced by discarnate souls is discarnate in this sense; even if, as nonfleshly bodies, they can in special circumstances make themselves available to bodies of flesh—perhaps appearing to our eyes and ears as Gabriel did to Mary, or to our tactile sense, as the angel did to Jacob at the Jabbok (recall that angelic bodies and those of discarnate souls are alike in respect of capacities like these)—this does not alter the fact that they cannot enter into fleshly exchange with whatever it is that prompts affect in them. No discarnate being, angelic or once-human soul, presses his lips on yours, or feels the pressure of yours on his. Souls joined with fleshly bodies may also have discarnate affect. An example, already mentioned (§20), is the frustration and annoyance whose intentional object is the inability to understand a mathematical proof or a philosophical argument. Such things—proofs and arguments—do not and cannot enter into fleshly commerce with human creatures. Their signs and accompaniments of course may: an argument may be presented in written or spoken form, and those sensory stimuli, when they occur, may produce, or be correlated with, various brain states in those who look at or hear them. But none of that, not the squiggles on paper or the vibrations in the air or the synapses firing or the nerve endings quivering, is what is thought about when the proof or the argument is attended to. And so, the pain of failure to understand an argument is discarnate affect in the sense that its object does not enter into fleshly exchange with those who feel it. Discarnate affect is, therefore, not limited to discarnate souls in rather the same way that sitting in wheelchairs is not limited to legless people. With this understanding of discarnate affect in mind, together with the observations already made about the nature of the discarnate soul and about its unavoidable condition of lack in the intermediate state, we can now ask with at least a little more clarity how the distinctions among

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the different conditions of discarnate souls in the intermediate state might be thought about. Benedictus Deus, we have seen, presents the three states—heavenly, purgatorial, hellish—as if, in the order of being, they are mutually exclusive and with nonporous boundaries. The Constitution does not quite say this; but it is a ready and natural-enough way to read it, and is certainly the way it has ordinarily been taken in the tradition, both magisterially and speculatively. Suppose, for the moment, we accept this reading, according to which every discarnate soul’s last thing is set for it already at the moment of its separation from the body of flesh, and there is no possibility of movement from one state to another—the question of whether this is the right way to think about the matter, even in the order of being, is discussed below; but we can accept it for the sake of argument for the moment. However, distinctions in the order of being are not the only distinctions there are; there are also distinctions in the order of seeming, distinctions, that is, in how the three states of discarnate souls seem, or might seem, to those in them. About this question there are some suggestive speculative possibilities. As already argued, in the order of being each of the three states of discarnate souls is ineluctably one of lack—not lack of the same goods in every case, but lack nonetheless. Lacks, when they come to awareness as such, typically produce pain. To understand oneself as lacking a good proper to one’s condition—especially if that lack seems not to be remediable by anything one can do (the beloved is ten thousand miles away, and I cannot conjure her at once into my arms)—brings with it, again typically, the pain, more or less intense, of its seeming that things are out of joint. Assuming, then, as Benedictus Deus does, that there is at least some degree of occurrent awareness on the part of discarnate souls of the state they are in, and assuming, too, as Benedictus Deus does not (but there is nothing in it to contradict this view), that discarnate souls are not aware of any fixity about their condition, and much less of any impermeability separating their condition from that of others, it then becomes possible to see the three conditions of discarnate souls as belonging in the order of seeming to a continuum or spectrum of pain rather than to three rigidly distinct places of pain. Each discarnate soul, on this view, is aware of its lacks and suffers the pain of the irremediability of those lacks by its own efforts. All suffer the lack of their flesh, perhaps with something like the intensity, phenomenally speaking, of the pain felt in amputated fleshly



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limbs here in the devastation. Some add to that pain the pangs of their vices and impurities being burned away by the prevenient and—to those yet incapable of bearing it—agonizing love of the LORD. And yet others add to the pain of lost flesh a sense of separation from the LORD without prospect of that distance being removed. Absent certainty as to final outcome or last thing, discarnate souls are at one with each other in being in pain they cannot remediate; and each of them shares an identical pain, which is that of the absence of their flesh without which they have ceased to be the kind of creature they once were and have become something different. In the early stages of dementia here in the devastation, sufferers are often aware of what they are in the process of losing. Their memories and hopes and relations with other humans are being stripped from them, and when and to the extent that they are aware of this, their suffering can help us see what the suffering of discarnate souls in the intermediate state might be like. They lament their lost flesh without certainty that it will be found again. It is true that the discarnate souls of the saints—those separated from the flesh without the kinds of damage that prevent them from seeing and knowing the LORD as fully as is possible for such creatures—have the joy of seeing the LORD as well as, and along with, the pain of longing for their flesh. The tradition, magisterial and speculative, has chosen to emphasize this joy and to pay little attention to the pain. This choice should be taken seriously. The pain of separation for saintly discarnate souls is framed by joy that may include anticipation of the future resurrection of the flesh. Perhaps the vision of the LORD carries such anticipation with it. This is no necessity, however; and if the tradition is to be true to its own grammar, it needs a speculative push in the direction of emphasizing the pain and lack that does and must belong to all discarnate souls in the intermediate state. This pain and lack may also, without offending against anything in orthodoxy’s grammar, be analytically separated from phenomenal certitude about what will follow the rejoining of the separated soul with the flesh. That is, it is perfectly possible that discarnate souls are united not only in their pain, but also in the absence, for each of them, and whatever the degree and kind of the lack by which they are bound, of certainty about whether, when, and how that lack will be made good. The discarnate souls in the intermediate state may be as opaque to themselves on this matter, as we, in the devastation, are to ourselves about whether, finally,

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we belong to the civitas terrena or the civitas dei. Uncertainty about one’s own last thing is a handmaiden of lack and pain; and if discarnate souls are subject to such lack and pain, then it is reasonable to think that they are also subject to such opacity.

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uman creatures are constitutively and definitionally fleshly (§1), from which it follows that no nonfleshly creature can be fully human. This is why the grammar of Christian thought requires affirmation of a doctrine of temporary annihilation and a doctrine of reincarnation with respect to human creatures (§22). But neither temporary annihilation nor reincarnation as resurrected flesh is properly speaking a novissimum, a last thing. Something novel follows each of those events. The governing question of this section is, Can human creatures have annihilation as their last thing? The speculative position entertained and argued in this section is that they can, that this is both logically and practically possible. The formal analysis of annihilation given in §3 is assumed here, as also is the rebuttal given in §20 of objections to the idea that rational creatures can, as a matter of principle and as a requirement of Christian orthodoxy, come to nothing. Much of that discussion applies here, to the question of the possibility of human annihilation. But there are also difficulties specific to the question of human annihilation, and those are the central topic of this section. Consider the following passage, from the fifth chapter of the book of Wisdom: What profit is there for us in pride? What has boasting in wealth brought us?

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⫷ Decreation All these are transient—like a shadow—like a messenger passing by—like a ship passing through the moving waters, whose trace, the path of its prow, is not found once it has passed—like a bird flying through the air, whose passage leaves no mark but only the sound of its wings beating and splitting the air with the force of its passing; with beating wings it flies through, and afterward no mark of its passage is found—like an arrow shot at a target, behind whose unknown path the divided air closes at once. We also having been born at once cease to be without being able to show any mark whatever of virtue; we are consumed in our wickedness. Sinners in hell said things such as this, for the hope of the wicked is like wind-scattered dust, like transparent spume, storm-dispersed, like wind-blown smoke, and like the memory of a day-guest who is gone. (Wis 5:8-15)

This is a hymn to transience and extinction. The tropes are of transient passage (transire in many forms), and of passing away (praeterire, also in various forms), and of nothing left behind but indiscernible traces (nullum signum invenire). All this is said of the impious, the wicked: we are “consumed” (consumpti sumus); we “at once cease to be” (continuo desivimus esse), which might more literally be rendered, “abandon our being”—which is to say bring ourselves to nothing. Our past vanishes, and our future is nothing. This is poetry, not theology; but it points thought toward a consideration of sin as self-damage whose goal is annihilation. Sin perfected brings hope to nothing, making it like the memory of a day-guest who is gone; and if hope is proper to human creatureliness in the devastation, then its replacement by hopelessness without remainder brings human creatures exactly to nothing. A consideration of the possibility that humans can have annihilation as a novissimum ought to begin with an analysis, however brief, of human sin. It is axiomatic for Christians that if any creature comes to nothing, this is never because the LORD brings it to nothing. The LORD is creator ex nihilo, not the bringer of his creatures ad nihilum. Destructive activity is not what the LORD does; and destruction is not what he effects. Any movement toward nothing, whether on the part of humans or other creatures, is a result of sin and nothing else; and sin is an action of free, rational agents, whether human or angelic or other. From which it follows at once that if any creature finds its novissimum in annihilation, it does so as a result of sin, whether its own or that of others. It is a corollary of this



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position that the damage to the cosmos that has made it into a devastated world is also the result of sin. And it is another that in respect of particular human creatures, the damage each of us has undergone, evident in our deep and recurring proclivity to seek the nothing that is the proper end of sinful action, is in considerable part not our own doing. We are damaged by inheritance, subject to death’s temporary annihilation simply because we are conceived and born as human creatures in a devastated world. The nature and effects of human sin are quite straightforward. Since the double fall, of angels and humans, the cosmos has been damaged, indeed devastated. The principal signs of this devastation are death, in the case of animate creatures, and entropic chaos, in the case of inanimate ones. The secondary signs of devastation in the case of human creatures are, first, the proclivity to seek separation from the LORD rather than intimacy with him; such seeking defines human sin in the devastation, and each of sin’s manifold varieties and particularities has that fundamental character; it is what lies at the root of all particular sinful acts. Sin, furthermore, proliferates by habituation: each particular sinful act disposes— that is, forms—the one who performs it into the kind of agent who will, as a result of having so acted, find it easier so to act again. This proliferative tendency of sin can be checked; but checking it requires action against the powerful stream of habit. Sin, like all actions, conforms its agents to the intentional objects of their actions. But sin’s intentional object is unlike that of all other actions. Sinners seek, when they sin, an object that has no existence. The idealtypical sin is an action directed without intermediaries or simulacra toward the nothing from which the sinner came, and since that nothing is in every respect other than the LORD—it is not the LORD himself, and is nothing he has made—it is and must be pure absence, pure lack. What sin seeks in its pure form is evil unadulterated; and, it has been evident to Christians at least since the fourth century, as an essential and nonnegotiable component of Christian orthodoxy, that evil unadulterated is just and simply nothing at all. In seeking that, sinners seek what is not; and in seeking what is not, they seek their own annihilation. It is this pattern of thought that underlies and explains the view that suicide is the best image of the perfect sin here in the devastation. The suicide seeks the nothing by the gesture of self-annihilation, a gesture that is temporarily successful, as argued in §22; and that gesture is implicit in all particular sins, even those

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that seem to those who perform them to have nothing at all to do with suicide, and indeed to be profoundly opposed to such an act. Almost all (perhaps all) actual sins—sins that real human creatures perform—do not seem to those who perform them to be grasps at nothing. They seem, rather, to be grasps at some particular created good (examples will shortly follow). This is true, ordinarily, even when a particular sinner is able to categorize her act as sinful at the moment of its performance—the thief or the adulterer or the liar or the blasphemer or the murderer will usually understand herself to be seeking a real good even if she understands her seeking of it to be sinful, and will take her seeking of it to be sinful because of circumstances that make it inappropriate as an object for her to seek now. Kissing those lips, driving that car, eating that food, achieving that victory—these are all goods, but seeking them and enjoying them may nevertheless be in certain circumstances illicit, and, therefore, sinful. This is all reasonable enough as far as it goes: sin ordinarily is the grasp for a created good that circumstance makes illicit for the one doing the grasping. But this is an inadequate and incomplete analysis because it does not attend sufficiently (or, often, at all) to what makes an action illicit, and to what part its being illicit plays in the attraction it has for the sinner. Were that matter attended to, as it sometimes is by reflective sinners (no oxymoron, that; the capacity for reflection is as likely to be turned to vice as virtue), it would become apparent that the skull beneath the skin of the beautiful but illicit good really is the absence that is the void. An exhaustive accounting for sin as directed toward misplaced and misinterpreted goods is not possible. This is implied by the church’s hierarchical orderings of sin. The worst sins, those in which sin’s nature is most fully apparent and in which sin therefore subsists, are the mortal sins. In these, sinners who are cognizant of what they do exactly as sin, and fully and without reservation intend to perform the act in question under just that description, do something malum in se, something intrinsically evil, which is at least to say something that should under no circumstance be done by any human creature. These sins are the worst sins, sins in their purest form, because in them the nature of sin is most evident; it is not veiled by the scrim of beauty or shrouded by the appetite for some particular good. To do, or attempt to do, something malum in se is to do, or attempt to do, something nihil in se, something intrinsically absent,



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intrinsically nothing. That is because malum and nihil are exchangeable in Christian thought; to be nothing-but-evil is to be nothing-but-nothing; that is just an alternative and equivalent formulation of the claim, nonnegotiable for orthodoxy, that every creature is good just to the extent that it is. Knowingly to seek to perform an act that is nothing-but-nothing is, then, to perform sin’s gesture as a virtuoso. And, the final turn of the screw, virtuoso sinners are conformed to the intentional object of their sin over time with increasing intimacy. The intentional object of virtuosically pure sins is nothing; and so habitually vicious virtuosos (sin’s habit being vice) become conformed, more and more as the bite of habit deepens, to nothingness. Sinners become progressively less, moving themselves by their sin back toward where they came from, which is the nihil. Ideal-typical sinners, therefore, are those who remove themselves altogether from existence. This is the sense in which mortal sin kills. Understanding sin in this way also gives sense to the idea that suicide encapsulates the point and purpose of sin with an elegance of public precision that no other action can. Consider invidia, or envy, as an example. Those who perform this sin identify a good possessed by someone other than themselves—beauty, perhaps; or wealth; or reputation. Then, they do whatever they can to ensure that the envied person is relieved of that good. The envious might throw acid in the face of those whose beauty they envy, not so that they might have that beauty for themselves, but only so that the one who has it is disfigured, and so loses it. Or, the envious might start a scurrilous rumor to destroy someone’s good reputation, not so that they might gain such a reputation themselves, but just so that the one who has it loses it. The point of this sin—almost universal among humans, though of course in different degrees of intensity—is erasure. The envious want to remove goods from the world, and the consummation of that desire is the erasure of all goods other than those held by the envious. The finally successful envious one is the sole inhabitant of the world—she has succeeded in removing the good of being from everyone other than herself. And in doing that she succeeds, too, in removing herself, because her own existence is received by her as gift from others—the LORD’s gift first, but the gift of other humans, too—and in removing all others, were she able to do that, she would arrive at the proper end of the sin of envy, which is self-erasure. No

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one is ever finally successful at being envious; but envy is a sin that shows, with peculiar, cold elegance, sin’s essential nature. Or, consider acedia, a word sometimes Englished as “sloth.” Thomas defines it in the Summa theologiae (2-2.35.1, corpus) as tristitia de spirituali bono, which is sadness about what is spiritually good. He thinks of it as a vice, a habitual sin opposed to delight (gaudium). Acedia’s sadness is directed toward what ought to yield delight; that is its special perversity, and it is the mark of those sufficiently habituated to looking at nothing that when they look at something—and most especially at the LORD, the supreme object of delight—they can only sigh, shake their heads, and close their eyes. Acedia’s sadness is not pain, exactly; it is not intense enough for that. Neither is it disgust or fear. It is, rather, weariness: long looking at nothing saps the energy and dulls the perceptions so that when sinners are faced by something they lack the energy to respond to it with the joy that all somethings—good and beautiful just because they are something— require of the gaze that sees them for what they are. Acedia is a kind of exhaustion: the deep tiredness of those sufficiently reduced by intimacy with the void that they cannot muster the energy to do anything at all. Thomas understands acedia as a sin contrary to the commandment that one should keep the Sabbath holy. He writes in the Summa theologiae (2-2.35.3 ad 1) that insofar as that commandment is a moral one, it requires rest in the LORD (secundum quod est praeceptum morale, praecipitur quies mentis in deo), and that acedia is opposed to this because it finds only sadness in the good things of the LORD (cui contrariatur tristitia mentis de bono divino). Sadness and rest are treated as opposites by Thomas in this context, and this suggests another connection important for understanding both sin’s nature and its phenomenal feel. Joy in the LORD’s good things brings rest and peace, both in the order of being and in the order of seeming. That is, it both seems restful to those who can rejoice in this way, and actually is so. Gaudium de bono divino is shorthand for the systolic rest the saints find in heaven (§16, §24), a rest whose principal prolepsis in the metronomic devastation is the Sabbath’s liturgy. The contradictory of this rest is the restlessness of the bored, those who find the desert of metronomic timespace unendurable (as we all should; it cannot be endured because its end is death and it does not itself endure), and as a result seek distraction from that desert by turning their gaze from it and toward what they take to be something more appealing—the cold



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contempt of power, the hot hatred of violence, the gross gourmandizing of gluttony. Pascal is, among Christians, the most exacting and precise analyst of the varieties of divertissement the bored seek. All these share a common structure, which is to seek peace by a method that guarantees its loss. The attempt to overcome the horror of metronomic boredom by embracing something other than the LORD as if it were the LORD is to seek a cure where, by definition, it cannot be found. This mistake bears the evidence of its mistakenness on its sleeve. The bored seeking boredom’s cure in diversion find that it is not enough to seek a created good—the pleasure of the flesh, say, or the delight of the intellect, or even the intimacies of love exchanged with another human being. Those created goods, which are always ingredients in particular diversions, must, in order to serve temporarily as diversions, be framed and staged in such a way as to cancel the created good they seem to seek. For example, the other’s flesh may be staged pornographically in such a way as to indicate its inadequacy as flesh: it is made into a spectacle for its user, commodified and objectified and fetishized like flesh windowframed in a redlight district. When this is done, what is framed ceases to be desired as flesh by the one who thinks he wants it, and becomes instead inanimate body incapable of giving the caress that brings its lover into being as such, and therefore incapable of providing the ecstasy it could give were it to be contemplated and responded to as creature rather than as possession. When he embraces flesh thus staged and framed, the diversion-seeker is disappointed. This is not what he wanted. It does not and cannot overcome his boredom. His response, the ordinary response of the bored, is to restage what he thinks he wants with more energy than before. Where at first cosmetics and silk were enough, now rubber and whips become necessary—and yet, however imaginatively baroque the staging of the spectacle, its unsatisfactoriness as a remedy for boredom becomes more and more evident. This is not accidental or remediable; it is intrinsic to the act of staging for spectacle. The spectacular tableau presents what it stages as an object for the delectation of its consumers and owners, and since what is presented as a spectacle is always in fact a creature, never reducible to the status of a staged object, the act of staging inevitably removes the delights it can give from what it stages. Staging kills; the spectacle freezes the creature in simple stasis; and so the ineluctable result of diversion seeking

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is intensification of exactly the boredom the diversion was supposed to overcome. The diversion seeker, the stager of spectacles, becomes increasingly aware of this, and finds, over time, his boredom intensified rather than reduced by his diversion seeking. He loses energy because he is himself reduced by his attempt to reduce creatures to objects; and as he loses energy for the enterprise of making spectacles, he finds it no longer interesting even to seek diversion. What remains returns us to the tristitia of acedia. The practitioner of pornography finds himself reduced to the sadness of finding nothing interesting and being therefore unable, eventually, to act. His attempt to freeze others into spectacles brings himself to the same condition. He moves closer to the nothing from which he came. This brief analysis can be applied to other kinds of sin. Any created good can be made a spectacle in this way, and when it is, the same spiral of self-damage occurs. The phenomenal feel of sin’s death-spiral is familiar to most human creatures, and that feel is, in essence, the sadness of acedia. As sinners become more deeply enmeshed in sin, they feel themselves increasingly without interest in action and burdened by the actions they cannot avoid. The beauty present even in the devastation is bleached, for them, to the point of imperceptibility; and even the self-canceling gesture of staging becomes increasingly difficult, to the point where it no longer seems worth performing. Deeply habituated sinners are no longer able even to change the channel by clicking the remote. They are in a place of hunger and devastation in which they will starve before finding any of the food in front of them worth putting into their mouths. The depiction of sin’s damage by way of images of ontological loss, of decrease in being, is everywhere in the fathers of the church. Augustine depicts it often, and lyrically: [The rational soul] does many things because of perverse desire, as though it had forgotten itself. It sees in an interior way certain beautiful things which are in that more eminent nature which is God. And although it should keep still so that it might enjoy them, it wants instead to make them subject to itself, and not to be like him [God] because of him, but to be what he [God] is all by itself. And so it turns away from him [God] and slips and slides into what is less and less, which it imagines to be more and more. Neither itself nor anything else suffices for it as it moves away from that one [God] who alone suffices. In its destitution and difficulty, it becomes



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increasingly intent upon its own actions, and upon the disquieting delights it gets from them. (De trinitate, 10.5.7; cf. De trinitate, 12.9.14)

Elsewhere (De immortalitate animae, 7.12), Augustine writes explicitly that the soul can tend toward nonexistence: this is what lack means (id ipsum esse minus habet, quod est deficere). All this is talk about diminution toward nonexistence, the dying fall of a diminuendo that will (or may) end in silence. It involves error: the sinner takes to be more what is in fact less. But it also and more importantly involves will or intention: the sinner wants to move away from the LORD and toward himself, and does what is necessary to bring this about. The language of destitution (egere, egestas) is scriptural—that is, it is found in the Latin versions of Scripture read by Augustine. He is echoing the story of the Prodigal Son from Luke’s Gospel, and that story, uniquely in the New Testament, uses the language of substance (substantia; Greek, ousia) to depict the process of loss involved in sin. What the prodigal demands from his father (from the LORD) is the portion of substantia due him. This is (Augustine thinks) to demand ownership or control over what he is: your substantia is what you essentially are, what makes you you. It is a gift freely given by the LORD, and to demand it for yourself is to make it less than it is by turning it into an object wholly owned instead of a gift freely received. The result is loss, and not just the simple loss of an object, but rather a cumulative process of loss, loss piled upon loss— labitur in minus et minus, “[the soul] slips and slides into what is less and less”—loss tending exactly toward nothing. The prodigal becomes destitute: he has consumed his substance (dissipavit substantiam suum . . . omnia consummasset; Luke 15:13-14) until there is almost nothing left. And this is just what it would mean to go out of existence altogether: to be devoid of substantia is to be annihilated. The prodigal turns back from the brink: he repents, and has his substance returned to him as a result. His destitution leaves him still the capacity for repentance, a sole remaining human capacity as he lives with the pigs and eats what they eat. And when he exercises that capacity, everything else—all the rest of his substance—is returned to him by the merciful father. This language of loss and diminution clearly suggests the possibility of coming to nothing, of annihilation stricto sensu. That is what gives it the undeniable power it has. For Augustine, as for most of the fathers of the church, the possibility of self-annihilation is suggested by a grammar of

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participation and gift. On this view, the fact that you are is sheer unmerited gift, and what you are is a participant in the LORD. Sin is the rejection of gift, and thereby the rejection of participatory being. The result is loss of a properly ontological sort, and it is a loss that proliferates and multiplies as the sinner, the loser, attempts to grasp ever more firmly what is not there at all: the illusion of a mode of being independent of the LORD. This proliferative loss eats away at the soul, causing the progressive loss of its distinctive properties (freedom, choice, judgment, understanding, virtuous habit, and so on) to the point where the soul returns to that from which it came: nihil, nothing, the void, simple absence. The prodigal approaches this condition. All that is left to him is the capacity to repent and ask the father to be given once again the substance he has consumed. Were he to have lost even that capacity, he would have ceased to be, for that was the last remaining capacity that distinguished him from the pigs, the last remaining property that distinguished him from nonhuman existence. When the flesh is sufficiently corrupted, it dies; when the soul is sufficiently corrupted, it ceases to be. In both cases, what remains is the trace, what Augustine calls the vestigium. For the flesh, that means decaying material components; for the soul, it means psychic detritus of various sorts. But in either case, it means annihilation on the definition in play here. Augustine, along with most other Christian thinkers, does not accept this conclusion even though his language and his assumptions suggest that he might—suggest, that is, not only that the soul’s definition permits the possibility that it come to nothing, but also that there is much about the soul and its powers that suggests that it inevitably does tend toward the nothing from which it came. He is representative of most Christian thinkers in this refusal, but unlike many, his language often undercuts this refusal even when it is being explicitly offered. Consider the following passage: The human soul is truly said to be immortal, but it nevertheless has its own kind of death. To call the soul immortal is to say that it does not cease to live and to experience, no matter how little. But the body is mortal because it can be abandoned by all life since it does not at all live from itself. The death of the soul happens, therefore, when God abandons it, just as that of the body happens when the soul abandons it. And so the death of both together, which is to say of the whole human being, occurs when a soul deserted by God deserts the body. For then the soul does not live from God, and the body does not live from the soul. In this way there occurs



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the death of the whole human creature, which the authority of divine eloquence calls the second death. (De civitate dei, from 13.2; in referring to the divinum eloquium, Augustine has in mind the use of the phrase mors secunda in Rev 20)

The central analogy that Augustine uses to link the first death with the second in this passage is that of desertion or abandonment. When the body is abandoned by the soul, it is left behind completely and irreversibly. That is what abandonment means. When the body is left in this way, death is the result, as Augustine explicitly says. This death is the death of the body; it is also, in the terms of this study, the annihilation or bringing to nothing of the body. The body’s lifelessness just is its annihilation. All that is left of a soulless body is the physical trace. The dead human body is no longer a corpus humanum, a human body, at all; neither is it a corporeal substance. It is detritus, to be scattered, pulverized, buried, or burned. By analogy, one might expect Augustine to say, when the LORD has completely or irreversibly abandoned the anima humana, the human soul, it too is brought to nothing, annihilated. Augustine does say that the soul dies, and he gives no reason in the quoted passage not to read the LORD’s desertion of the human soul in the same way as the soul’s abandonment of the human body. The language is strong: the mors of the whole human creature (totius hominis) occurs upon the desertion of the body by a soul deserted by God—cum anima Deo deserta deserit corpus. If the soul’s desertion by the LORD is read in the same way as the flesh’s desertion by the soul, the conclusion is that the soul bereft of the LORD no longer exists as such. On this interpretation, the second death would be the bringing of the soul to nothing, its annihilation. And the plausibility of this reading is deepened by recalling the pervasiveness in Augustine of emphasis upon the idea that the anima humana is brought into being out of nothing and has a constant tendency to damage itself by losing being, by tending toward the nothing from which it came. A soul bereft of the LORD would necessarily be nothing, for only the LORD’s graceful act brought it into being, and only the LORD’s graceful act sustains it in being. Without these, it comes to nothing. The second death does to the soul what the first death does to the body: brings it to nothing. But Augustine resists this conclusion, in the passage quoted and consistently elsewhere. And he does so in spite of the fact that the grammar of his thought strongly supports it. “The human soul is truly said to be

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immortal,” he says, which is to say that it never ceases to live (vivere) and to experience (sentire). But why is this so? Why is it necessary to say that an anima humana related to the LORD as a dead body is to a soul separated from it continues to be a subject of experience, and does so without end? What sustains, in Augustine and in the later tradition, the view that the human soul is necessarily immortal, no matter what damage it does to itself? Sin, on a broadly Augustinian understanding, reduces sinners by moving them toward what they seek, which is the nothing from which they came. Repeated sin, as it approaches the necrophiliac purity of invidia or acedia, may bring sinners to the point where they lack the energy—the very being—to turn their gaze toward the LORD who is the only possibility of re-creation, of setting sinners on a path of remaking, away from the nihil and toward the LORD. The speculative position taken here is that the reductive self-damage that is sin may, in some cases, find its proper terminus, which is the bringing of the sinner to nothing; that this annihilation may in some cases be permanent, which means that once sinners have gone out of existence they will not be reconstituted; and that this coming to nothing, when it happens, occurs only in the intermediate state, which is to say that some self-damaged discarnate souls, already not fully human because discarnate, will not be rejoined to their flesh at the general resurrection, but will, rather, have been judged (the tense is important) by the LORD incapable of such rejoining, with the result that the human creature whose trace they are remains forever inexistent. All resurrection, on this view, is to and for life; all human flesh after the general resurrection lives in the systolic rhythm of liturgical time before the LORD; and those discarnate souls that are not resurrected go quietly and eventually out of existence because they have consummated the project of sin, which is that of extricating themselves from intimacy with the LORD. There are objections to this speculative annihilationism. The first has to do with what is claimed in or implied by Christian doctrine: Is speculative annihilationism of the kind just set forth compatible with the grammar of the faith? I treat it briefly in what follows. The second has to do with objections to the very idea that a human creature can go out of existence. Some of these objections are the same as those brought against the idea that angels may go out of existence; I have already discussed these (§20),



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and those results should be assumed here; they deal with objections to the idea that a spiritual substance of any kind can go out of existence. But there are also objections to the idea that a human creature in particular can bring itself to nothing, and those are taken up later in this section. The view presented and defended here, according to which one possible end of humans is self-caused and permanent annihilation, such that those who suffer it do not emerge from the intermediate state, is speculative. It is one that Christians would do well to entertain, but it is not entailed or otherwise required by orthodoxy. It has many advantages, and is on the whole preferable to its major competitors. It ought not, however, be assented to without reservation: no fully detailed proposal of this sort about novissima can have the kind of credibility that commands assent from Christians. What we need here is a balance between speculative daring and epistemic modesty about the content of our speculative proposals. C. S. Lewis, in the preface to his theological fantasy The Great Divorce (1945), wrote: “The transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish to arouse is factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.” And the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in Recentiores episcoporum synodi, a 1979 letter on some questions in eschatology, wrote: Neither Scripture nor theology provides sufficient light for a proper picture of life after death. Christians must firmly hold the two following essential points: on the one hand they must believe in the fundamental continuity, thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit, between our present life in Christ and the future life. . . . On the other hand they must be clearly aware of the radical break between the present life and the future one. . . . Our imagination may be incapable of reaching these heights, but our heart does so instinctively and completely.

Each is making the same point about the importance of epistemic modesty in this sphere of theological speculation. First, as to the content of Christian doctrine on the question of human annihilation in general, the possibility of self-annihilation by humans in particular, and, still more particularly, the idea that the annihilation brought about by the soul’s separation from the flesh at death might, for some, be permanent, and that for such souls, there will be no resurrection,

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and no reconstitution of the creature brought to nothing by the death of the flesh. The magisterium has consistently claimed that the soul is immortal, and has sometimes clearly defined as doctrinal error the view that it is or may be mortal. Such magisterial teaching has, however, not usually made a clear distinction between the thesis that every soul is necessarily incapable of coming to nothing, on the one hand, and the thesis that every soul is possibly incapable of coming to nothing, on the other. There are also magisterial texts that appear—by their apparent affirmation of the view that there are two, and only two, final ends (eternal beatitude and eternal suffering)—to rule out the possibility of annihilation. Prominent among magisterial texts of this latter kind is, once again, Benedict XII’s 1336 Constitution, Benedictus Deus (§18, §21). Benedict’s central purpose in this text was to exclude the possibility that the saved are elsewhere than heaven and the damned elsewhere than hell during the intermediate period between their deaths and the day of the final and general judgment. Instead, those who die in actuali peccato mortale descend at once (mox) to hell, where they suffer the pains of hell until, at the day of judgment, they appear enfleshed before Christ to get what is finally coming to them, which is eternal enfleshed life in hell. Those who are prepared for it find themselves upon death at once enjoying the beatific vision, and those who will eventually enjoy that vision but are not yet quite ready for it enter at once upon death into a purgatorial state in which they are made ready. Benedict’s interest here is not in the possibility (or impossibility) of annihilation; it is only in emphasizing the importance of thinking, first, that everyone’s final end is set at their death; that there is no lag between death and the experiential beginning of that end; and that among the possible ends is endless enfleshed suffering. This last point does not contradict my suggestion that annihilation is possible; it would do so only if the categories into which Benedict divides human beings were exhaustive, which the Constitution does not say. It does contradict the view that the only two last things possible for us are the beatific vision and annihilation, but since the Constitution does not say that as a matter of fact anyone meets the conditions for eternal enfleshed suffering, it remains compatible with the view that, first, annihilation is possible, and, second, that no one in fact suffers eternally. In this it is typical of magisterial texts on hell and damnation; and there are many scriptural and magisterial texts that affirm



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the possibility that no one is damned much more forcefully than the bare possibility of this state of affairs provided by a strong reading of Benedictus Deus. A representative scriptural text on this question is 1 Timothy 2:4, which says that the LORD wants everyone to be saved, which implies, with only a little conceptual work, the possibility of that result. A representative recent magisterial text on the subject is John Paul II’s Redemptoris missio (1990), in which “the real possibility of salvation in Christ for all mankind” (nos. 9–10) is affirmed. And the best extended argument for universal salvation’s possibility can be found in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? published in German in 1986 and in English in 1988. This work spawned a vast and polemical response in all the major European languages, which continues. But the question of magisterial teaching on the possibility of hell’s emptiness is not the central issue here, for every position on that question is neutral to the question of whether annihilation for some is possible. Of more interest is what the magisterium has to say about immortality, whether of soul or human creature; for if all such creatures are necessarily immortal, then annihilation is not possible. And on that question there are some interesting materials, among which is the discussion at the eighth session of the Fifth Lateran Council, held in December 1513, of the mortality of the soul. The council fathers identified as among the perniciosissimi errores introduced by the ancient enemy the view that the anima rational (also called the anima intellectiva) is mortal (quod videlicet mortalis sit). In opposition to this view, the council fathers claimed that the soul is immortalis, quoting Matthew 10:28 (“They cannot kill the soul”) and John 12:25 (“Whoever hates his soul in this world will keep it in eternal life”), and saying that if the soul is not immortal Christ’s promises of eternal reward and punishment would be empty and the saints would be miserabiliores cunctis hominibus. Rejected here is the view that the soul is necessarily mortal, that it belongs to its definition to cease to be. This is principally because, were this true, the eternal rewards and punishments spoken of by Christ would not be possible. The scriptural verses quoted say that no one other than you can kill your soul. This is the surface meaning of the clause from Matthew 10:28 quoted at Trent. The whole verse, “And do not be afraid of those who kill (occidere) the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy (perdere) both soul and body in Gehenna,”

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does appear to say that the soul can be killed. Augustine would interpret this to refer to the soul’s second death, which on his view is not identical with its annihilation. The scriptural verses also say that there is an eternal reward for those who merit it. These claims certainly entail the falsity of the claim that the soul inevitably comes to nothing. But they are neutral with respect to the claim that the soul is possibly capable of (self-)annihilation, which is to say that there are circumstances under which it may come to nothing. The Fifth Lateran’s claims are, then, at least prima facie compatible with the position that self-annihilation is possible, as they are also compatible with the position that it is not actual. The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, too, is explicit in its support of the claim that the soul is immortal, which it glosses to mean that “[the soul] does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection” (no. 366). Authorities quoted in support of this claim are the Fifth Lateran, already discussed; Paul VI’s Professio fidei (1968), which merely says that human beings (homines) are created by God with spiritual and immortal souls (no. 8); and Gaudium et spes, a document from the Second Vatican Council that uses the same phrase (no. 14). These texts, while explicit and clear and most naturally read to rule out the possibility that any human soul can come to nothing, are, once again, obiter dicta. Their claims about the soul’s immortality (and again, the distinction between the soul’s necessary mortality and its possible or conditional mortality is not made) occur, by the way, in contexts in which the argumentative focus is elsewhere. But the texts do show at least that it is almost a routine rule of composition that whenever the anima humana is mentioned, it must be characterized as spiritalis and immortalis. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1979 letter on some questions in eschatology, already quoted, was prompted, it claims, by a concern that the church’s teachings about eternal life have been to some extent undermined in the minds of the faithful—that even where they are still believed, they are not paid much attention. It reiterates the church’s central claims on these matters, among which is the following: The Church affirms that a spiritual element survives and subsists after death, an element endowed with consciousness and will, so that the “human self ” subsists, lacking, however, for a while, the complement of



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its body. To designate this element, the Church uses the word “soul,” the accepted term in the usage of Scripture and Tradition.

This is a clear affirmation that the soul continues after death. The Congregation’s main interest in affirming this, however, is not to combat the view that the soul (and therefore the human being) is conditionally immortal, but rather to combat the view that it is not possibly immortal, that no interim discarnate state is possible. The document goes on to emphasize the importance of keeping the word “soul” as a lively item of churchly vocabulary; of avoiding doctrinal positions that “would render meaningless or unintelligible” prayers offered for the dead together with other modes of relating the living to the dead; and of avoiding claims about what happens to people when they die that would render incoherent the doctrine of the assumption. None of these matters has any direct bearing on the question of conditional immortality. The letter continues: In fidelity to the New Testament and Tradition, the church believes in the happiness of the just who will one day be with Christ. She believes that there will be eternal punishment for the sinner, who will be deprived of the sight of God, and that this punishment will have a repercussion on the whole being of the sinner. She believes in the possibility of a purification for the elect before they see God, a purification altogether different from the punishment of the damned. This is what the church means when speaking of hell and purgatory.

The phrases of relevance here are those that treat hell. These phrases, especially “eternal punishment for the sinner,” can be read in such a way as not to contradict the view that the ordinary meaning of damnation is annihilation. What, after all, could be more punishing for a being made for the eternal happiness of the visio Dei than to eternally lack that delight? Such lack would certainly be entailed by annihilation. And this interpretation is certainly compatible with the phrase “this punishment will have a repercussion on the whole being of the sinner.” However, it must be admitted that the reading just suggested is unlikely to be the one the Congregation had in mind. It is much more likely that the term “punishment,” thrice repeated in the paragraph quoted, was intended to imply that the damned continue to exist and to suffer, not that they go out of existence. However, the plain sense of the text does not immediately rule out the view that

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some human beings may go out of existence. The letter certainly does not make the distinctions between conditional and necessary immortality necessary for full discussion of this topic. One element of the speculative position entertained here, however, may seem to be in more direct contradiction to magisterial teaching than anything yet mentioned. That is the claim that if any discarnate soul does bring itself permanently and irreversibly to nothing, in that way guaranteeing that the human creature of which it is a trace also finds its novissimum in annihilation, this happens in the intermediate state, prior to the general resurrection, with the upshot that such souls, if there are any, are never rejoined to the flesh from which they were separated at death. Many magisterial texts seem simply to assume, and sometimes explicitly to state, that all discarnate souls are enfleshed at the general resurrection. Benedictus Deus, again, is representative. “On the day of judgment,” Benedict XII writes, “all humans (omnes homines) appear with their bodies ‘before Christ’s tribunal’ to give an account of what they have done (de factis propriis) ‘so that everyone might receive what is appropriate according to whether they have acted well or badly in the body’ ” (the texts quoted in the Constitution are from 2 Corinthians 5). The key interpretive question here is what the opening phrase omnes homines may reasonably be taken to mean. I have already argued (§22) that according to Christian doctrine, there are no homines, no humans, in the intermediate state: discarnate souls are not that. And so the phrase cannot refer to them. It should be read, instead, to refer to those among the discarnate souls who are reconstituted as human creatures by being rejoined to their flesh in the general resurrection. Those, now fleshly and therefore human, are all the humans there are at that time (save Maria assumpta and Jesus ascended), and it is they who form the subject of what follows, they who will be judged according to their deeds while enfleshed in the devastation. I discuss this matter further in §25; for now it is enough to say that Benedictus Deus, and the many other magisterial texts like it on this point, neither entertains nor rules out the speculative possibility being entertained here. There is, then, little conciliar teaching of direct relevance to conditional immortality, and what little there is has other concerns. Other magisterial teaching is somewhat more expansive, but even here, although there is considerable interest in rejecting the view that immortality is impossible for humans and in affirming the view that damnation is possible, there is not much that speaks directly to annihilation as a form of (or



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as coextensive with) damnation. It remains possible for a Catholic thinker to speculate along these lines, and to affirm, speculatively, the view that resurrection is only for life. What, however, of theological and philosophical reasons for thinking that humans cannot bring themselves to nothing, and cannot find their novissimum in annihilation? A first important objection of this kind centers upon the idea that annihilationism does not treat free human action with sufficient moral seriousness. If, it might be said, self-annihilation is possible by way of sin’s self-diminution, then sinners do not have to live with the consequences of their sin, and this makes that sin less serious than would be the case had they to suffer its consequences eternally. This objection will be powerful for some. They will think that coming to nothing does not count as an eternal consequence of moral seriousness, or at least that it counts as less of one than would eternal torment of body and soul. Who, such objectors might say, would not choose annihilation over torment? The answer is that many would not. Many find the idea of coming to nothing vastly more frightening—and, thus, vastly more serious—than the idea of eternal torment. Consider Philip Larkin’s lines, from Aubade: The mind blanks at the glare . . . . . . at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Nothing more terrible . . . Larkin’s understanding of the void of annihilation is widely shared. Many human creatures do not like to contemplate the thought of the world absent themselves, and some, at least, cannot do so: their sense of their own importance has such weight that the world without them is a book incapable of being opened. For those who do share Larkin’s sense of things, the objection under discussion here will not carry much weight. Those who take the possibility of their own annihilation as seriously as Larkin does (he takes it to be inevitable), and who think of it as causally related to their own sinful acts (he does not), do not find the objection that the possibility of self-annihilation removes moral seriousness from human action to have much purchase. It is, too, an ordinary and

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very widely held opinion that even here in the devastation capital punishment is worse than lifelong incarceration, and this conventional wisdom supports, by analogy at least, Larkin’s position. Among the reasons for thinking capital punishment worse than life in prison is exactly that it is worse for life to be taken away than for it to remain, even in bad conditions. By analogy, it might reasonably be thought that going completely and irremediably out of existence is worse than eternal suffering—and worse not just for the order of things in general, but also for the sufferer. If this were not so in the devastation, why is the ordinary response to a choice between execution or imprisonment to choose the latter? The convertibility of being and goodness in Christian thought, too, which is to say the view that whatever is is good just to the extent that it is, and that whatever is good is good just to the extent that it is, supports a Larkin-like judgment. To go altogether out of existence is to remove, finally and irremediably, the good of being, a good that remains, however attenuated, in the case of those who suffer. And so, if one worry about annihilationism is that it removes responsibility for the consequences of sin—that it permits sinners to escape that consequence—then the best response to that worry is to indicate that annihilation just is the consequence, and a dire one. A second objection is that it is always better for human creatures to continue in being, even without the possibility of salvation, than for them to bring themselves to nothing. This objection is incompatible with the first, for that one depended upon the view that it is worse for humans to continue in being than to come to nothing if their continued existence means that they will suffer endlessly. This objection reverses the judgment, and that judgments about this matter vary so widely shows that no position on the question of whether humans can come to nothing is per se notum within the grammar of the faith (or indeed in any other sense). To pursue this second objection. Perhaps it is the case that it is always better for humans to continue in being while suffering endlessly than to go out of existence—though our confidence in our own or anyone else’s capacity to judge which of two dreadful alternatives like these is better in the eyes of the LORD ought to be so small that the “perhaps” needs emphasis. But even if, per impossibile, it were to be established that it is better for someone to be damned to eternal suffering than to cease to be, it still does not follow that the LORD would not permit self-annihilation. There are many cases in which the LORD does not prevent (and



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thus permits) the occurrence of a state of affairs worse than other possible states of affairs—for example, the fall of Satan and all consequent sins, including Eve and Adam’s. If, then, the LORD would not and does not permit self-annihilation, this might be for reasons other than that damnation is in his eyes better. And it remains obscure, to put it mildly, what such reasons might be. Yet a third set of possible objections in this area appeals to ideas about justice and punishment. Both Scripture and magisterial teaching often use this language. An objector along these lines might then say that justice requires the LORD to punish sinners for their sin, and that such punishment requires at least that the one receiving it continue in being so that its flavor can be agonizingly tasted. There are large and difficult questions here, not least about the LORD’s nature and the nature of punishment, some among which will be left aside; but on the question of punishment it is clear enough at first blush that if it is defined as the loss of some good that would otherwise have been possessed, brought about as direct result of the actions of the one punished, then annihilation meets the criterion as well as eternal suffering. The good lost, which is beatitude, is the same in both cases, and the losing of it is a loss greater than which none can be conceived. To claim that pain experienced is, for the sufferer, worse than annihilation, returns us to the previous objection, which is not remotely decisive. The only other difference in play might be one of agency. Perhaps, the objector might say, the LORD must be involved as the direct agent of punishment, one who requires and brings about pain rather than annihilation; and since speculative annihilationism makes the principal agent of annihilation the sinner rather than the LORD, and annihilation does not involve pain, so much the worse for speculative annihilationism. This is a deep and important objection, but it cannot finally be sustained. Sin, the averting of sinners by their own actions from the LORD’s loving face, has nothing whatever to do with the LORD. It is an absence, a horror, a grasp at nothing that succeeds in moving the graspers toward what they seek. The LORD has nothing to do with the privation that sinners seek. He cannot. He is the LORD who spoke the beautiful cosmos into being out of nothing, and his causal involvement with attempts to return it to nothing is and must be exactly zero. For the LORD to inflict pain, eternally or temporarily, upon nothing-seekers, would be for him to recognize an absence as a presence, and to respond to it as if it were

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something. The pain that we suffer is always the result either of the damage to which the fall subjected the cosmos, or of the particular sins we commit in that devastated cosmos. The LORD does not punish us, if that means inflicting pain on us in retribution for the wrongs we have done. The only sense in which he can be said to punish us is that we, because we are damaged and sinful, may find his caress painful. But such pain is epiphenomenal to love, and has the presence of damage (the presence of an absence) as its necessary condition. The LORD, therefore, does not and cannot intend the infliction of pain, and has no causal implication with its occurrence. Pain is, without remainder, the felt component of an absence being reduced by presence. What the LORD does is enter into and pass through that absence by incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, thus remaking the cosmos away from the absence introduced into it by sin, and toward the harmony of ordered beauty. The doctrine of the harrowing of hell, implicit already in the Apostles’ Creed and one of the earliest scenes to find representation in Christian art, can stand as a symbolic representation of this view: the LORD makes and remakes; he does not unmake, and the infliction of pain as punishment would be to contribute to unmaking. An objector who wishes to defend the necessity of the LORD’s agency in pain-producing punishment for those who attempt to unmake themselves is insufficiently serious about what it means to say that the LORD is creator and redeemer, and therefore all too likely to make of him a local idol engaged in a cosmic battle with dark forces. Better, altogether more Christian, to say that the only thing the LORD does for sinners is remake them (by baptism, by killing the fatted calf to return their substance to them) when and whenever they ask, and that the only thing sinners can do for themselves is unmaking. Necesse est quod anima deo deserta in nihilum cadat, we might say; and since the LORD does not change, remove himself, punish, or condemn to hell, this must occur as a result of the sinner damaging himself sufficiently that the LORD no longer sustains him— and can no longer sustain him without refusing his freedom to seek the end he prefers, even if that end is nothing. Permanent and irreversible annihilation, then, is possible for human creatures. If it occurs, it is brought about by sin and should be understood as the consummation of the project of sin. And if it occurs, it makes permanent the bringing to nothing of human creatures that was achieved



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temporarily by the first death, the separation of soul from flesh. The mors secunda of Revelation 20, on this reading, is not incarceration in hell but dissolution into nothing. It is what happens when the discarnate soul is finally and irreversibly separated from the LORD, when, as Augustine has it, the anima is finally Deo deserta. That desert, that egestatis regio, is a place from which there is no exit because in it devastation has reached its consummation, which is to empty the cosmos of order. The best way to think about this diminution into nothing is that it occurs during the discarnate intermediate state: souls in that state are already separated from the flesh; they therefore already lack something essential to human creatures. Some among them, it might be said, diminish further during the sufferings of the intermediate state. Their trajectory is downward, toward nothing, and they diminish sufficiently that they are incapable of rejoining with resurrected flesh. Their flesh, then (the flesh with which they would, counterfactually, have been rejoined had they not become so diminished), cannot be resurrected. That is because resurrection entails ensoulment: human flesh is always living flesh (§21), and if a particular soul is no longer such that it can provide life to a body, then resurrection cannot occur. Resurrection, on this view, is always to and for life, as the paradigmatic resurrection, that of Jesus, shows. This speculative conclusion, that we can bring ourselves to nothing and that some of us may already have done so, is not a matter for rejoicing. It is, however, one that might help those of us who care to look to examine the patterns of our lives and thoughts here in the devastation—a condition that in so many ways foreshadows and anticipates the true devastation of a locus inanis et vacuus (cf. Gen 1:1), a timespace without remainder empty and void—with an eye to what there is about them that conduces us toward nothing. If we gain clarity about that, we shall also gain clarity about what we do and think that is, strictly and properly, damnable— which is to say vacuable, productive of emptiness.

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eaven is a timespace for resurrected human creatures, and for angels. It may be that other kinds of creature are there too (see §§27–30), but the topic of this section is only heaven as a novissimum for human creatures. If annihilation is one possible last thing for such creatures, then heaven is certainly another. In Augustine’s fourth exposition of Psalm 30, commenting on verse 21, which reads, in the Latin he had before him, abscondes eos in abscondito vultus tui (you will hide them in the hidden place of your face), he writes about what kind of place (locus) heaven is: What sort of place is that? He [David, the psalmist] did not say, “you will hide them in heaven,” or “in paradise,” or “in Abraham’s bosom.” The future place of the saints is called by many names in Holy Scripture, but whatever is other than God should be held in contempt. May the one who protects us in the place of this life be the very same who is our place after this life. (Enarrationes in Psalmos, from 30(4).8, on Ps 30:21)

Augustine describes the LORD as locus noster, our place, after the end of this life, and collapses the many scriptural names of the loca futura sanctorum, the future place of the saints, into the name of the LORD. The LORD and heaven, on this view, cannot be discriminated easily, and this means that when we find ourselves in heaven we find ourselves in him. And although it is unclear whether Augustine means this claim to apply to the intermediate state only, to the resurrected condition of the saints only, or to both (he does not have these distinctions in mind in this comment), 215

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what he says provides stimulus to think about what it might mean to say that the LORD is the timespace in which the resurrected saints find themselves. The LORD’s presence, we might say, constitutes heaven; he is its timespaceness; its location, temporal and spatial, just is his presence; and the location of creatures in and at it just is their spatio-temporal relation to him, and to one another as related to him. This is a relation more intimate than which there is none. If there were greater intimacy yet to come, heaven would not be a novissimum, which is no more than to say that it would not be heaven. The LORD’s presence in heaven has, necessarily, a double modality. One mode is fleshly presence: the flesh of Christ is there, resurrected and ascended. That, like all fleshly presences, is a spatiotemporal presence, folded most tightly into the eternal pattern of interpersonal love that is the Trinity. Another mode is nonbodily, which is to say presence as the eternal economy of the Trinity. Recall that according to the language in use in this work (§1, §§18–20), the LORD is differentiated from all creatures, severally and collectively, in being nonbodily, which in turn means eternal and also without spatio-temporal location. Creatures are creatures exactly in not being these things; he is the LORD precisely in being them. Restricting our attention for the moment to human creatures, and to resurrected fleshly human creatures at that, this double mode of the LORD’s presence is heaven-for-us; it is the timespace in which we have the life of the world to come, and in which, therefore, we find the quies, the rest, which is promised to us as a possibility. Augustine writes at the beginning of the Confessions (1.1.1) that each of our hearts is restless (inquietum) until it finds quies in the LORD, and this understanding of heaven as novissimum is why we inscribe requiescat in pace on headstones and other memorials of death. Heaven’s timespace is the LORD in his double mode of presence to us, and it is a timespace characterizable for humans above all as pax and quies. Heaven for humans is, in the language of this work, a repetitively static novissimum in which we arrive at and remain in unsurpassable intimacy with the LORD in his double mode of presence—fleshly and nonbodily—to us. A traditional Christian word for this is beatitude: heaven, the LORD as our timespace, is our beatitude, which is our glorious last thing, the novissimum for which we were made. What more can be said about heaven in the order of being (what it is), and heaven in the order of seeming for human creatures (what it is like



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for us to be there)? Three topics, at least, need elaboration. The first is the nature of the heavenly timespace; the second, the nature of human relation to the LORD as that heavenly timespace—what is ordinarily called the beatific vision; and the third, the nature of human experience in and at the heavenly timespace, which is to say what it seems like to resurrected humans in heaven to be themselves, and to be related to others. It goes almost without saying that there is little or no dogma on these matters. The lineaments of the vita venturi saeculi are left undescribed by Christian doctrine, which is just what calls the attention of speculative theologians to them. In §16, I argued that the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus lie at the heart of time. Time, I suggested there, has been systolated, ingathered or infolded, by the events of the incarnation and of the passion; this systolation of time is in every significant way opposed to and transformative of the linear timespace of the metronome, which can be mapped on a grid and timed by a clock. I argued, too, that in the devastation the transfiguration of metronomic timespace is effected by the liturgy, which is (among other things) the re-presentation of the events of the passion in time. The repetitive nature of the liturgy’s celebration, whether at the level of the day (Prime to Prime to Prime . . . ), or of the week (Sunday to Sunday to Sunday . . . ), or of the year (Advent to Advent to Advent . . . ), is both transfigurative of metronomic time and proleptic of heavenly time. When the resurrected saints and the angels are congregated around the assumed flesh of Mary and the ascended flesh of Christ, what the liturgy foreshadows is fully and finally present. In the timespace that is heaven, therefore, the systolation of time is complete, and the repetitive stasis already evident in the liturgical life is brought to consummation. The sketch given in §16 should be assumed here. The systolation of timespace around the LORD reaches its acme in heaven, so that the LORD, triune and incarnate, is the timespace in which the resurrected find themselves. Heaven is, for the long tradition, a place—a locus—of beatitude for the saints, among whom are included angels as well as humans. Beatitude, in turn, is an umbrella-word for whatever it is that constitutes the final and unsurpassable good for human creatures. This final and unsurpassable good is depicted with different emphases by different strands in the

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tradition’s fabric, but common to most of them is the scriptural trope of vision, for which the charter text is from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: Now we see enigmatically through a looking-glass but then face to face; now I know in part but then I shall know as I am known. (1 Cor 13:12)

Seeing (videre) and knowing (cognoscere) are the essential figures here; and the contrast is between our vision and knowledge of the LORD here below, in the devastation, and that vision and knowledge in heaven. What was enigmatic—shadowed, partial, unclear, mediated—will then (and there) be direct, clear, unmediated, and complete—as complete, anyway, as is possible for creatures constituted as we are, which means always short of comprehension but incapable of being exceeded. With this clarity, directness, and completeness comes happiness, or, perhaps better, felicity. The lack that is sin’s evil has been definitively and irreversibly removed; the death-directed pain that is the chief mark of the devastation remains only as memory trace; and the knowledge of the LORD that was had anticipatorily, by way of faith and hope and the abstractions of the intellect here below, is definitively transmuted into knowledge by acquaintance. That is one way of putting the force of Paul’s mention of the face. The vision of the LORD mentioned here is not the discarnate soul’s. That vision is not a last thing: it is followed by something new (and longed for) that is the rejoining of the soul with its flesh, and that rejoining has effects upon the means by which the vision is had, and, thus, also upon the content of the vision. So the vision of the LORD in question is the one that belongs to the ensouled resurrected flesh, consequent upon the general resurrection. Beyond that vision lies nothing new to come; those who have it enter into stasis of one kind or another. We may, again following the long tradition, distinguish two essential elements in this final vision of the LORD. The first is nonsensory: it is an intellectual apprehension-by-acquaintance of the essential nature of the Trinity, which is to say of the three persons and the relations among them in which the Trinity consists. The elements of that apprehension are mentioned in the church’s creeds. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, for instance, summarizes (without exhausting) the work ad extra of each of



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the three persons—the Father is maker of everything that is not the Trinity; the Son is the one through whom this making is done, who becomes incarnate from Mary, who undergoes the earthly career that culminates in the ascension, who is now seated at the Father’s right hand, and who comes as judge in the future; and the Spirit is the one who speaks through the prophets and who is adored and glorified along with the Father and the Son. The creed also mentions, again nonexhaustively, the relations ad intra that connect and differentiate the persons: the Son is begotten or born from the Father, of course eternally, and is of the same substance as the Father; the Spirit proceeds, or comes, from both. This, schematically, is the content of what is known intellectually by acquaintance in heaven. These things are known already now—here in the devastation, but only propositionally—as claims that seem true to the extent that they are understood, which is never far; as claims whose truth is confessed in the appropriate liturgical settings; and as claims in which faith may be had and whose content believers hope eventually to understand more fully. All that is to say that the Trinitarian claims are knownseen enigmatically now. They are not known as the saints resurrected for eternal life know them. They have no need to assent to the propositions that represent these truths, for they see directly the states of affairs so represented. Suppose we take the analogy of a mathematical truth—Fermat’s Last Theorem, or Goldbach’s Conjecture, or what you will: the best most of us can do with these is assent to them as true, usually on the basis of authoritative testimony. The mathematical saints, however, see directly that they are true, and with that seeing comes also a nonpropositional vision of their proofs and entailments and so on. So also with the saints stricto sensu and the beatific vision—mutatis mutandis, of course. All this is nonsensory. It is the kind of vision-knowledge that may be had by amateurs watching a game of chess being played by professionals: amateurs watch the moves with their eyes, hear the clock being punched with their ears, and perhaps smell the players’ sweat with their noses, and all that is sensory; but sometimes, too, they see, intellectually, the strategy that informs a particular move, and have a vision of a five-moves-ahead unavoidable outcome. When they do that, they do it nonsensorily. That is a figure for the intellectual vision of the LORD; it may be had by discarnate souls, but they cannot have what those resurrected for eternal life have, which is the sensory part of the vision. And what is that? What do we

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see when we see the LORD with the eyes of the resurrected flesh? It is in answering that question that we can begin to approach, very speculatively, a proper answer to the question of the repetitively static nature of heavenly existence for those fortunate enough to undergo it. There are fleshly bodies in heaven. These include at least the resurrected and ascended flesh of Jesus, and the flesh of Mary, which was, according to the dogma of the church on the matter, assumed into heaven, perhaps without dying first (that is a possible reading of the dogmatic definition of the Assumption). There may be other human flesh as well— Enoch’s, perhaps; Elijah’s, maybe; even, conceivably, Melchizedek’s. These are people whom Scripture or tradition suggest may have entered heaven without dying, and are therefore there with the flesh they had while alive in the devastation—transfigured, no doubt, and spiritual, certainly but also fleshly, extended in space as well as in time. But they are few; the vast majority of heaven’s inhabitants, the angels and the saints, are fleshless: the humans among them are, related to their yet-to-be-resurrected flesh by hopeful and perhaps painful expectation because that flesh is not yet with them (§§21–22). It will be, though: there will be a time when the saints in heaven will be flesh as well as soul. And when that has happened, consequent upon the general resurrection, heaven will have many enfleshed beings in it. Even then, however, there will be fleshless (if not bodiless; §1) presences in heaven as well: the angels, and the Trinity, which, apart from the fleshly presence of the incarnate LORD, is without both flesh and body. The fleshly bodies in heaven provide the clue to the difference between what the enfleshed saints see when they see the LORD, and what discarnate souls see. Those with a resurrected body have eyes of flesh; and those eyes see the resurrected flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary. (They also see the resurrected flesh of the other saints, but for the moment it will be enough to focus on the fleshly bodies of Jesus and Mary.) If the vision of the LORD that discarnate souls have is nonsensory knowledge by acquaintance, then the saints with their resurrected bodies add to this a direct vision of the flesh of the LORD Jesus. No one can see the face of the LORD and survive having done so, Scripture says (Exod 33:20); but those alive when Jesus was incarnate in the devastation did, and Paul, in the text from the Corinthian correspondence just discussed, promises that vision to all Christians: then we shall see face to face. When we do, we shall have



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fleshly acquaintance with the LORD’s flesh, and this is something profoundly different from, and additional to, the intellectual vision of the nature of the Trinity had by discarnate souls and angels. Consider having perfect, unmediated understanding of every detail of the psycho-physical nature of a human beloved and of everything that conjointly constitutes her or his four-dimensional existence—knowing by intellectual acquaintance the nature and function and history and future of every cell, every neuron, every thought, every intention, every feeling. That may serve as a partial analogy for the saints’ intellectual vision of the LORD. Now consider being face to face with the beloved, eye to eye and lip to lip, gazing into her eyes, kissing his lips, caressing her skin. This is something different and additional. It serves as a partial analogy for the sensory knowledge the enfleshed saints have of the ascended LORD. They will be able to ask for and receive the kisses of his mouth—osculetur me osculo oris sui (Song of Songs 1:1). The triune LORD knows us in the first way; the incarnate LORD knows us in the second as well; and we, when we are resurrected for the blessings of salvation, will know, to the extent possible for human creatures, the LORD in both ways. That is the promise and the hope. What has all this to do with the question of stasis, and especially of repetitive stasis, as the best way to characterize the heavenly end of human creatures? The clue lies in the liturgy. Sensory—fleshly—knowledge of the LORD is no new thing for Christians. It began when the flesh of Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb. She knew him then by touch, and later by all the other senses. Those to whom Jesus was present in the flesh between the moment of his conception and that of his ascension also had sensory acquaintance with the LORD’s flesh, whether or not they would have identified what they saw and heard and touched under that description. And such sensory knowledge has not ceased since the ascension: we see and touch and taste the body and blood of the LORD in the Eucharist, and in the para-eucharistic liturgies such as benediction and adoration. What is exposed to the eyes of the faithful in the monstrance on the altar is every bit as much the LORD’s flesh as what is consecrated at the epiclesis, distributed, and consumed. The principal and ordinary context for sensory acquaintance with the risen LORD since the ascension is, then, liturgical.

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As well as providing clues to the nature and importance of fleshly existence in heaven, the liturgy also has something to say about the nature of experience there—about, that is, what it will seem like to human creatures to be in heaven, whether as fleshly experience (available only after the general resurrection), or as intellectual-intuitive experience (available to discarnate souls before the general resurrection, and to the resurrected after it). There will be both fleshly and intellectual knowledge of the LORD in heaven; but it is possible to say more about what these ways of seeing and knowing the LORD will seem like to those who undergo them? Some discussion of what is meant by experience will help in clarifying this question about the heavenly last thing of human creatures. Experience is constituted exhaustively by qualia. That Latin word— singular quale, plural qualia—has a complex history; it was first given a specifically philosophical sense in the seventeenth century and, during the past two generations or so, has become a technical term in anglophone philosophy of mind. In that discourse, qualia are mental entities, differentiated one from another by, first, their phenomenal properties, which is to say how they seem, and, second, by the subject to whom or for whom they appear. So, for example, there are blue qualia typically produced by looking at something blue; or qualia of boredom produced by the metronomic time of the devastation; or anger-qualia or qualia of delight or anticipation or regret or pain. Qualia are specific to particular human creatures, and are among the criteria we use to individuate one human creature from another: my qualia are not yours, and that is part of what makes me me and you you. This is not to say that qualia are incommunicable: my being in pain or in ecstasy can be known to you, and, by way of empathy, to some degree participated in by you. But still, my pains and delights and anticipation and fears are peculiar to me, and their history is central to mine. There are difficult questions about qualia. These include, How are they to be individuated? What kinds do they belong to? What accounts, causally, for their occurrence? What relations do they bear to states of the brain? And so on. But these questions do not need to be explored for the purposes of this study. For those purposes it suffices to assert the evident truth that there are qualia and stipulatively to identify experience with them. Our interactions with the devastated world seem like something to us; they have a feel and a flavor, a tone and a taste. Our lives are saturated with qualia, and we are ingenious in devising ways to increase their



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number, kind, intensity, duration, and layered complexity, and in constructing methods to avoid those we find unpleasant and seeking those that delight us. A further distinction is necessary. Some sentient creatures, certainly most human creatures and perhaps some others (though nothing here hinges upon whether there are others, or, if there are, what they are like), are capable of qualia of a peculiar kind, qualia unlike any of the instances mentioned so far. Human experience can be not merely of a certain firstorder phenomenal kind—pleasant, unpleasant, blue, hot, hungry, musical—but can also, and at the same time, include various second-order phenomenal properties, or seemings, whose object is exactly the firstorder seemings just noted. That is, some among our experiences are layered or stratified, and when they are, they come to have a certain density. Two among the many kinds of layering are of importance here. The first occurs when a quale occurs to some human creature as itself—as, say, blue or high-pitched—and is also noted by that creature, whether simultaneously with its first occurrence or subsequently, as occurring (or having occurred), and as belonging to a certain kind. This can be called categorial layering. The vast majority of the qualia that occur to us lack categorial layering. They simply occur, come and then go, without being noted or categorized or observed. A sense of what a difference categorial layering makes can be had by thinking about the ordinary experience of having heard something without paying attention to it, and then, following a need to figure out what has just heard, replaying, as it were, the sound-sequence. The undergraduate in her room might hear the chapel clock chime the hour without attending closely to the number of chimes; she can then, as it were, replay in her head the number of chimes she had just inattentively heard in order to know what time it was. That involves categorial layering. The first hearing of the clock’s chimes involved the occurrence of auditory qualia but not their categorization. When they are rerun they are categorially layered—a layering that includes the count— and thus made available for further use. The second kind of layering occurs when a quale is noted or felt as occurring or belonging to some particular creature, as being, that is, his or her own. This is possessive layering, and it is most clearly evident in states such as boredom, embarrassment, delight in praise, and response to threat. Consider, for instance, the qualia produced when an eavesdropper

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overhears a conversation about himself. What is overheard might be an anatomy of defects or an encomium to virtues. In either case, there are ordinary auditory qualia: the eavesdropper hears some words. There is also categorial layering: to the extent that these auditory qualia are attended to (most qualia pass without being attended to) they are noted not only as auditory and as being spoken by the people being overheard, whoever they are; they are also categorized as being about the eavesdropper, which is to say as having a first-person reference, and thereby as providing him with an opportunity to come to know what others think of him when they are not constrained by his presence; and, finally, there is also ordinarily possessive layering: the eavesdropper notes that this conversation is about him, not about someone else, and is therefore profoundly different from a conversation about persons unknown casually overheard on the subway or the bus. The affective feel of the eavesdropper’s response to this categorial and possessive layering will ordinarily be quite intense, and may include such things as smug self-satisfaction, anger, embarrassment, and revulsion. These affective qualia are layered on top of the auditory qualia that are the means by which the words overheard appear to the eavesdropper as words; and they are intertwined with the categorial layering that is the eavesdropper’s identification of these words as about himself. The layering of qualia categorially and possessively in these ways is both necessary and sufficient for the curtain to rise on the inner theater, the stage upon which we play out the drama of what it seems like to us to be us. When, and only when, our qualia are layered in these ways can we observe the drama of our experience as ours, our own; then, and only then, can we become its subject, the one to whom and for whom it occurs, and whose subjective identity is largely given by it. It is not that we are the spectators and the surge of categorially and possessively layered qualia what we look at for entertainment. It is rather that we lay hold of the qualia surge in order to make it ours, and are thereby constituted as those who are this particular continuum of layered qualia. We are the theatrical performance, spectators and players both; and we ordinarily feel at home there, making of that theater our own place, whether hellish or heavenly, or more often something altogether less clearly marked than either. Most of the time we do not layer our occurrent qualia either categorially or possessively: we do not categorize them as this or that, and we do not make them ours. The surge of qualia simply occurs. When it does,



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when we hear or see or touch without categorial or possessive layering, we are like nonhuman animals. This, very likely, is how it is for dogs and cats. They experience, certainly, in the sense that qualia occur to them; but they cannot layer their qualia in the ways that we can, and this is why, for the most part, they cannot be embarrassed, or ashamed, or take delight in adulation, or fear the suffering that will be theirs in their old age. They have no inner theater, and much of the time neither do we. That we can have it—and that sometimes we seek it, ornament it, intensify it, and desperately resist its attenuation—is among the distinctives of human creatures. It may be that angels, too, intentionally layer their qualia; and it is likely that some nonhuman animals do so to some degree as well; if so, then there is an angelic inner theater, and perhaps one that belongs to apes or dolphins or dogs. But not much hinges here upon those questions. It is clear that human creatures do these things, and that in the doing of them their inner theater gets staged and propped and lighted. The inner theater takes time to develop. As infants we do not play in it because we have not yet developed the capacity for categorial or possessive layering of the qualia that occur to us. It is probable that most of us have developed a rich sense of what it is like to be ourselves—of what it seems like to us to be us—by the time of adolescence; and thereafter the inner theater usually remains with us, on and off (more off than on: consider all that dreamless sleep, and all that deeply habituated automaticity that threads our days), until death. But there are local variables of importance here. At some times and places, the inner theater is valued highly, sometimes even to the point of being taken to be what is most important about us. That is approximately true for middle-class Americans and Europeans now. But at other times and places, it is given little significance, and what is important about being human is located elsewhere, most commonly in action, in what we do. Action is possible for human creatures—indeed, not just possible but common, the usual thing—in the occurrent absence of anything inwardly theatrical. To locate what is important about us in one or the other, then, is to assert a real difference and to suggest radically different régimes of discipline. Advocates of the importance of action are likely to encourage habits that diminish the importance of the inner theater’s spectacles; and this, as will be argued in more detail below, is what the liturgical life does. Advocates of the importance of layered experience, of its seeming like

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something to you to be you, will fertilize and cultivate attention to those seemings, whether or not they issue in action; they will thereby indulge and ornament and burnish the inner theater’s layered qualia. But doing those things is neither necessary nor inevitable; it is perhaps not even commonplace in the long history of human creatures. One useful index of the local importance attributed to the inner theater is the extent to which that theater is displayed and attended to in local literature. For us, such display is the norm, and is sometimes undertaken with virtuosity, as, in different ways, by Henry James and James Joyce among the sacred monsters of literary modernism. Consider the following, from James, retailing here the qualia of Merton Densher, one of the protagonists in The Wings of the Dove: “He woke up one morning with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to gainsay” (from bk. 10, ch. 2). Densher is remembering what has happened the previous day, categorizing it as an instance of dramatic performance—he has “played a part”—and is noting to himself that he needs self-respect to counteract the regrettable fact of that role-playing. This is complex, as is usual for at least the later James: Densher’s qualia are categorially and possessively layered and self-referentially stratified to an extraordinary degree, and deeply connected to his—Densher’s—sense of who he is, has been, and may yet be. James’ late novels occur almost entirely on the stage of their characters’ inner theater, and the set is gorgeously complex, if also, and for the same reason, sometimes oppressively airless. Even at the popular level, we are interested in knowing what literary characters think and feel, which is to say in their layered qualia, even if we do not usually want our literary characters’ inner theaters—or our own—depicted with Jamesian precision and depth. So much is this so that when a writer attempts to depict human character and activity without also depicting the inner theater, we are surprised. The attempt seems experimental, precious, odd—as for example in William Gaddis’ novel A Frolic of His Own, in which exactly this is attempted, and with a consistently astringent discipline. Gaddis is very nearly consistent in portraying his characters, bringing them on stage and showing what they do and say, without depicting or mentioning their inner life in his authorial voice, and very largely without having his characters mention it, either. That is, he says nothing, or almost nothing, about what it seems like to his protagonists to be themselves, while yet succeeding admirably in depicting them



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as fully idiosyncratic characters by way of showing what they do and say. That this seems odd to most contemporary readers of Gaddis shows how deep our own interest in the inner theater goes. It is, by contrast, easy to read large tracts of premodern European literature in which the inner theater is largely or entirely absent. They, our ancestors, were less interested in it than we are—which is not at all to say that they did not experience as we do, but simply that, for them, the contribution of possessively layered experience (of the inner theater) to character was less important, less interesting, than it is for us. The inner theater takes time to develop; it can also be lost. The easiest way to lose it is to replace it with habit. Habit is the inner theater’s enemy, and it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the extent to which we are creatures of habit is the extent to which we are not creatures of the inner theater. A few examples will suffice to suggest this. The first comes from William James’ discussion of habit in the fourth chapter of the Principles of Psychology: The writer well remembers how, on revisiting Paris after ten years’ absence, and, finding himself in the street in which for one winter he had attended school, he lost himself in a brown study, from which he was awakened by finding himself upon the stairs which led to the apartment in a house many streets away in which he had lived during that earlier time, and to which his steps from the school had then habitually led.

Habit is here depicted as effectively erasing all layered qualia. Various sensations no doubt occurred to James as he walked along the Parisian streets: the feel of the pavement under his feet, the smells and sounds of the people and the cafés. But he did not layer them: he neither identified them as being of a kind, nor classified them as belonging to himself. This did not at all prevent him from walking with dispatch and efficiency from one place to another. Earlier in the same chapter of the Principles of Psychology, James writes that “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed,” which generalizes the point. A great deal of the time, perhaps most of it, we do what we do in a condition much like that described here by James. It is a condition in which layered qualia are mostly absent. The habits of etiquette provide a second example. The gestures of etiquette are the local customs of courtesy, whatever they happen to be. These are necessarily habitual. Not to be habituated to them is exactly

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not to be able to perform them as gestures of etiquette. If I have to think about whether to shake your hand when I am formally introduced to you in a place where that is the ordinary thing to do on first meeting, that just means that I am not a creature of local etiquette. Extending the hand occurs as a gesture of etiquette without deliberation and without requiring categorial or possessive qualia. These may occur; but they do not belong to etiquette, and when they do occur concurrently with the performance of an etiquette gesture they stand in tension with it. If, as I extend my hand to shake yours, or reach out to embrace you for the air-kiss, I am occurrently aware of myself as a hand-shaker or an air-kisser by placing that action upon the inner theater’s stage, identifying it as mine and adverting to myself as performer of it, the habituated spontaneity of the gesture is compromised. I become, instead of one habitually polite, one whose selfawareness pushes etiquette to the edge of becoming something else. To perform the gestures of politeness as such, therefore, requires that it not seem like anything to those who do them to do them. The extent to which it does so seem is the extent to which practitioners have not yet learned how to be polite, or are in the process of forgetting it. Ordinarily, the gestures of etiquette pass unnoticed and unregistered by all concerned: it does not seem like anything to perform them or to receive them. They do not cross the threshold of layered experience, and may produce no, or almost no, occurrent qualia of that kind. The absence of courtesies in situations where they are normal and expected, were it counterfactually to occur, would be a different matter: that would at once produce qualia, and would brighten the inner theater’s lights to an almost unbearable intensity. A second example of habit as experience’s enemy, this one perhaps a little more controversial, is the activity of writing. This is often, perhaps ordinarily, done largely without qualia, being in that like speech. Certainly no qualia layered categorially or possessively need occur to writers as they write: it need not, and often does not, seem to them as they write that they are writing, that this writing is theirs; neither, ordinarily, do they note and categorize the first-order qualia that do occur to them—the feel of fingers on keyboard, for instance, or the changing visual patterns as words take form on the screen before the eyes, or the tactile stimulus of the pen between the fingers. The qualia that do occur when writing, first-order and unlayered, pass mostly at a low level of intensity, demanding and receiving little attention. Some of them can be reconstructed retrospectively



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without too much difficulty: it is possible to recall, later, when the writing is done, that the telephone rang while it was happening, or that the writer paused when no antonym for “categorical” came rapidly to her fingers. But at the time of writing, there is, or may be, little layered-qualia-constituted experience, and few occurrent qualia attended to. This may seem odd. Does writing not involve searching for the appropriate word or phrase, imagining the balanced syntax of a well-ordered sentence in advance of tapping that sentence out on the keyboard, actively considering various lexical alternatives, and so on? In some sense it must involve all these, and more; but in terms of what seems to the writer to be going on, experientially, there is nothing like this. The sentences are formed in very much the same way as the gestures of etiquette are performed; and the processes that permit their formation are about as evident to writers as they write as are the causally connected chains of physical events that make it possible for polite people to shake the hands of those they meet—which is to say, not at all. There is, instead, a period of preparation leading up to the writing; and then there is the process of writing itself, during which writers have little or no sense of themselves as doing anything or being anything. There is, that is to say, no, or very little, inner theater as words move from fingers to screen. Were there to be—and sometimes there begins to be, especially as tiredness begins to hamper action—the act of writing would go less well than it does. Writing, on this account, is not a matter of embodying one or another aspect of the inner theater in words on the screen or the page; it requires little or no consultation of or participation in the inner theater. It is, rather, an activity of the fingers. It can be done, sometimes for as much as an hour at a time, with little or no occurrent experience. The principal reason for this lack of qualia is, again, habituation. As writers become more habituated to—and thus more skilled at—generating sentences and paragraphs in this way, it will, other things being equal, come to seem less and less like something to them to do it. The words flow; sometimes there are accompanying qualia, but more often not; and, after a while, something has been written. An advantage of this way of thinking about the phenomenology of writing is that it moderates our tendency to think of what we have written as ours, which is, theologically speaking, pure gain. Much of what we do is like this: deeply habitual and largely without the categorial and possessive layering that gives to the agent a sense that

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it is she who performs this. Experience is always attenuated by habit, and when the bite of habit is deep, it vanishes almost entirely. But this has no effect upon the possibility of action. Quite the contrary—the more deeply habituated a pattern of action is, the more possible it is that its performance will be subtle, complex, elegant, and unshakeable. There is, however, one very important result of the progressive attenuation of layered qualia by habit, and that is the narrowing of the range or scope of possible actions. As linguistic and conceptual and bodily habits deepen, we become people who speak in a particular way, move in a particular way, think and write in a particular way. We come to have, that is to say, a style signature that is the habit of being by which we can be recognized. None of that requires occurrent experience; and the greater the habituated depth with which a signature of style is written on the body, the fewer the options we have for occupying a different mode of being. This is not to say that formed habits are beyond alteration; but it is to say that such alteration will be difficult, will take time, and will largely have to be brought about by replacing old habits with new ones. If formed habits are good ones, this difficulty in shaking them off, reforming them, will also be good. Those possessed by good habits will have become, in virtue of being so possessed, those who unreflectively do the right thing. Staging an inner-theatrical performance is much less reliable as a source for and predictor of right action than deep habituation. Given this discussion of experience and habituation, we need now to ask about what the liturgical life does to experience. Answering that question—or at least beginning to sketch an answer—will serve thought about the nature and significance of experience in the beatific vision, the statically repetitive positive end of human creatures. Living the liturgical life requires, like any other complex communal practice extended over time, the establishment of habits of body and speech on the part of its practitioners. It is much less clear that it requires the establishment of habits of thought. Developing the required habits of body and speech may require that explicit instruction be given by those who are already practitioners to those who would like to be. The church has recognized this, and provided it by catechizing adults preparing to undertake the liturgical life by way of baptism’s ritual death and rebirth. But even when such instruction is given, it plays an insignificant part in



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becoming a habituated liturgical agent, that is, someone who knows how to live the liturgical life, how to go on, what to do next. Much more important is simply living it, doing what those who are already living that life do. Pascal, as usual, is a reliable and vivid guide here. In answering those who say they would like to have faith but find themselves without it—those, we may say, whose inner theater does not include scenarios in which they are faithful worshipers of the triune LORD, those whose layered qualia lack any such self-identification—he says that if you are in that situation you should imitate those “who know the way you would like to follow and have been cured of the sickness you would like to be cured of: act as they did when they began, which is doing everything as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, and so on. Precisely this will bring you naturally to belief and will make you like an animal” (Pensées, no. 397). To be made like an animal is abêtir in French, and the word is precise: Pascal means exactly that undertaking the liturgical life will—should you do it for long enough, and without confusing yourself by attempting to reconfigure the inner theater independently of it—make you into one who acts as nonhuman animals do. That is (and this is my language, not his) you will begin to act without the layered qualia of the inner theater, with experience properly attenuated in the direction of erasure. It is also important, in Pascal’s view, not to think that belief in or asssent to the claims of Christianity is a precondition for undertaking the liturgical life. Rather, undertaking the liturgical life comes, ordinarily, first: those who want to have faith should do tout comme s’ils croyaient, everything as if they believed—and then they will. What Pascal says is true of any complex and repeated practice: it is just as true of becoming an accomplished saxophonist or baseball player or speaker of English as it is of becoming a liturgical agent. It might seem, then, that the attenuation of experience is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of habit, and has nothing particularly to do with the liturgical life. But this is not so. Liturgical habits have particularities that make the attenuation of experience that accompanies them not epiphenomenal but proper to them. The first of these particularities is that liturgical agents, those who have become habituated to the worshiping work of the Christian people, have learned to act as do those who accept a gift of love. They have, that is, learned what it means to respond gratefully to a loving gift given freely

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outside the economy of exchange: a gift given without establishment of obligation, without expectation of return, and without calculation about the merits of the recipient. There is reasonable debate about whether gifts of that sort are possible. Ordinarily, perhaps always for us, gifts are given within the economy of exchange: the transfer of a good from one person to another carries obligation with it and, when it is accepted, establishes a bond of reciprocal intimacy between giver and recipient that permits return of the gift. Do ut des: I give to you in order that you might give back to me. That is the economy of exchange, and it is extraordinarily difficult for exchanges among humans to leave it behind. But the liturgical life is a performance rich with signs that what is being celebrated in it is exactly the pure gift, the gift that establishes no debt and expects no return. The LORD owes us nothing, as Pascal’s teachers taught him to say (they got the idea, if not the phrase, from Augustine); and to that we might add that the LORD demands nothing from us. He simply, preveniently, and endlessly, gives. The liturgical life is in very large part a training in how to act as one who has been given such a gift as that. For example, when Catholics enter the sanctuary, they bless themselves with holy water from the baptismal font and genuflect before the sacrament reserved in the sanctuary’s tabernacle. As the drama of the mass unfolds, they stand to listen to the Gospel proclaimed; sit to receive its exposition; stand again to begin participation in the sacrifice performed upon the altar; kneel after the Sanctus as the elements are consecrated; stand again to recite the prayer given by Jesus; kneel to confess their unworthiness to receive Jesus into their house, in imitation of the centurion appealing to Jesus to heal his sick servant; and then receive the body of Christ on their tongues. This constant up-and-down writes upon the bodies of those who perform it frequently a habit of acting as an unworthy recipient of a prevenient gift. This is not to say that those whose bodies have been written upon in this way can, as a result, provide an account of what has happened to them, or of what that overwriting may be taken to mean. The capacity to do that will be as common among liturgical agents as is giving an account of their language’s grammar and syntax among those who speak it well—which is to say vanishingly rare. But whether or not the skill of theoretical articulation is present, permitting the body to be overwritten by the LORD’s sentence of eternal life as given in the formalized play of the liturgy is a



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beneficent version of the bloody bodily overwriting described by Kafka in In der Strafkolonie; it alters those who undergo it by making them into agents of a different kind no matter what their accompanying experience is like. The liturgy constitutes its participants as agents whose bodies and words are conformed to the truth that they are simultaneously capable of receiving the divine gift, and utterly unworthy to receive it. Standing, worthiness to lift your face to the LORD is dramatized; kneeling, radical unworthiness to do any such thing is shown. And the one is followed by the other in rapid succession, so that neither attitude, neither posture, can maintain itself without the other. At the culmination of the Mass, the non sum dignus comes immediately before the reception of the Eucharist, and neither is cancelled by the other. It is only in the affirmation of unworthiness that worshipers become worthy; the one shows, palimpsest-like, through the scrim of the other. And all this is a matter not of cultivating effective qualia—not, that is, of trying or learning to feel unworthy-andworthy—nor of the layering of qualia into an inner-theatrical performance in which worshipers knowingly perform liturgically before a mirror lined with your own eyes. No, it is a matter simply of doing and saying these things, and, over time, of becoming the kind of person who does and says these things. There is also the question of liturgical time. The liturgy transfigures metronomic time by way of repetition (§§15–16). Repetition is clearly central to the liturgy, and that in multiple senses. Within each celebration there is repetition of central elements and actions; and the celebrations are themselves many, repeated thousands of times over the course of a long liturgical life here below. Liturgy’s transfiguration of metronomic time requires repetition, but repetition does not suffice. Consider the analogy of poetical time, of the time it takes to read a poem aloud or to hear one read. That time is not metronomic, not subject to the death-measure of the metronome. Rather, it is time, in which what counts and what is counted is a tensive, systolic recurrence: the reader’s breath and body are, metaphorically, and actually, ordered to and by the poem’s form. That form is highly formal and rule-governed, but also playful and, when it works, beautiful. The poem’s playful beauty, if it is attended to, reorders the attentive reader to itself and thereby gives her entry into systolic time in which all that counts is the time the poem takes to come to an end as a poem—so also,

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mutatis mutandis, for liturgical time. Each performance, each celebration of the Mass or recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours, is formalized, responsive play in which, just like the time of poetry, what counts and what is counted is tensive gratitude for what is played out in it, gratitude ordered to a culmination that prepares the liturgized subject for beginning the whole thing again, anew, in the endless cycle to which all liturgy properly belongs. These relatively formal points about the habituation of the liturgical agent by the liturgy’s nonidentical repetitions can be deepened theologically, and in that deepening it can be shown why liturgical habituation is more deeply inimical to experience than other kinds of habituation. It is proper to the liturgy to attenuate experience in the direction of erasure in a way not true of other habits—and that, if true, suggests that the place of experience in the beatific vision is also insignificant, if not more. First, there is the matter of radical gratitude. The liturgy performs exactly this by way of the stammering back-and-forth between worthiness and unworthiness, written on the body and voiced in words. Gratitude is, however, a matter of ecstasy in the precise, etymological sense of that word: the grateful one, even when her gratitude is for something as small as a birthday gift or an unexpected compliment, in receiving what has been given as a gift stands momentarily outside herself, with her body and speech directed toward the giver. She becomes, momentarily, constituted as one whose gesture and speech turns away from the inner theater and toward the one who has given to her the gift of being a recipient—for that is the deep structure of what all giving gives: it is not a matter of the particular thing given, but rather of the gift, which by definition cannot be self-generated or self-given (autodonation is an oxymoron); it is a matter exactly of being one who has received. Being that, however, is cancelled by noting that one is that, that one has been constituted in that way. If, innertheatrically, and with the usual complex of possessively layered qualia, we know ourselves as grateful, we thereby cease, to just that extent, to be so. Writing gratitude’s structure on the body as the liturgy does, then, has the attenuation of experience as an essential feature. The more habituated we become as liturgical agents, the shallower and more attenuated our qualiaconstituted experience. Vere dignum et iustum est. Second, there is the matter of the liturgy’s imperialistic omnivorousness. Its very structure performs a complete embrace of those who



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undertake it. This is evident throughout: the rite of entry, of baptism, is performed as a death, a drowning in the waters of chaos from which the baptized rise naked; there is renaming, reclothing, the gift of something radically new. That happens, for most Christians, only once, and for many it lies beyond the reach of memory. But it is reenacted again and again in the renewing of baptismal vows, and in the individual’s participation in the baptism of others. The central liturgical acts, too—the reading and proclamation of the word, and the consecration and consumption of the body and the blood—depict and endlessly repeat the subsumption of the individual into, first, the community, and then, second, the LORD. The individual’s language is overtaken and framed by the language of the canon of Scripture: he is written into its margins as an ornament to the illustrated capitals of its pages. And the individual’s very physical life is shown to him to be given its meaning by his membership in the communion of saints, a body of people extending far in time and space beyond what he can directly sense. The liturgy constantly signals that there is nothing external to it, nothing belonging to the individual that cannot be taken up into it, and nothing anywhere that will not, finally, be embraced by it. The inner theater, to the extent that its performances continue at all, is gradually transformed by participation in the liturgy from a private spectacle into an iteration of a public drama. It becomes an instance of the liturgy that claims it. Full and repeated engagement in the liturgy is, therefore, inimical to experience because it refuses to allow that experience to remain outside itself. It requires ecstasy of the liturgical agent. Third, and most deeply, there is the matter of the name at the heart of the liturgy. I mean the name of the LORD. The liturgy spirals around that name—the name of the triune LORD who brings the cosmos into being, who calls Abraham, who covenants with the people of Israel, who becomes incarnate as Jesus the Christ, who inspires the church. That name is given in the liturgy principally as a word that calls those who participate in liturgical response to it out of themselves, places them beside themselves, and, by that undemanding but omnivorous call, makes insignificant the theatricality of experience. Hearing the call of that name makes attentiveness to and cultivation of the layered qualia of experience trivial. What matters is response; and that response is given in action, not in attention to the inner theater’s spectacle.

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It is a commonplace of Christian theology to say that the difference between Adam and Eve in the garden and the saints in heaven is that the former were able not to sin (posse non peccare), while the latter are unable to sin (non posse peccare). The saints lack a possibility—it cannot be called a freedom, but only a possibility—that Adam and Eve had. And, we might go on to say, the reason why the saints cannot sin is that they have been liturgized: liturgy is what they do, and it is incompatible with sin, being both necessary and sufficient for sin’s avoidance. This suggests another, I think elegant, theological speculation. Perhaps experience—the occurrence to us of possessively layered qualia, of its seeming like something to us to be us—is itself an artifact of the fall, being in this like death. And perhaps, then, our interest in it—our seeking to analyze, observe, intensify, and ramify its modes—is necrophiliac, a love of and desire for the texture of rotting flesh. The proper end of the liturgical life, then, is the radical attenuation of experience. Experience, the categorial and possessive layering of our qualia, is at best epiphenomenal to the liturgical life, which is also the Christian life, and at worst inimical to it. What that life points us to, and what it provides a real participation in, is a condition in which the one thing we will then do, which is to praise the LORD who gives, has no significant place for experience. The end of experience, for those resurrected for salvation, is its erasure. It will not seem like anything to the saints in heaven to be who they are. They will not categorize the qualia-flood that constitutes the nonphysical aspect of their heavenly life (speaking now only of the lives of the saints after the general resurrection) as belonging to any kind; and they will most emphatically not identify that qualia-flood as belonging to them, being their own. Their existence will, grammatically, be entirely dative—they will be constantly addressed by the LORD’s voice, and constantly confronted by his face; and their response will be exclusively one of adoration, to which experience does not and cannot belong. They will have become habituated to the repetitive stasis of the praise-filled gift-exchange in such a way and to such an extent that the self-reflexive understanding of themselves as such is impossible, and would be a trivial distraction if it were possible.



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This is what the speculative position about heaven entertained here suggests. But there are some difficulties, and they must be briefly addressed. The first, and most obvious, is that this vision of heavenly life is not attractive to most who hear it. Almost everyone responds with distaste or anger: If it does not seem like anything to me to be me, if the curtain has come down on my inner theater, then how is that different from the erasure of me? Why should I be interested in, much less seek, a life of that sort? So run the objections. They are forceful. The response to them must be both phenomenological and ontological. In the order of being, the ontological sphere, it is a mistake to identify what we are—who we are—with our layered and grasped qualia. Those are not us: they are an artifact of the fall, carefully wrought and eagerly ornamented. Our reluctance to acknowledge their unimportance is a sign of the extent to which we are bound by the results of the fall. The sense we have of who we are, creatures possessive of our own sense of ourselves, is no part of what we will be. Just as in heaven metronomic time is absorbed without remainder into systolic time, so also what it seems like to us to be us will be absorbed into what we actually are, which is a creature who adores the LORD in company with others doing the same. In the order of seeming, the sphere of phenomenality, the response to the objection is the one already sketched in the course of this discussion of heaven. It may become less counterintuitive to say that the layered-qualia seemings upon which we place so much emphasis are of only negative significance if it can be more clearly seen how much we do, and can do, without those seemings, and especially if we can come to see what repeated participation in the liturgy does by way of erasure of those seemings. Difficulties still remain. Do the speculations of this book suggest that individuality is erased in heaven, that if all the saints arrayed around the throne are doing just the same thing, and without a self-differentiating inner theater, there is no way to differentiate among them? No, each of us, should we be resurrected for eternal life, will be exactly who we are, formed by our particular histories, bearing the marks of those histories on our resurrected bodies, just as Jesus does on his. We will be discernible in our particularity to the LORD’s eyes, certainly, but also to one another’s. We remain distinct; we have the style signature that is ours. This distinctiveness extends to the particular mode and flavor of our return of the gift

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to the LORD. The symphony of voices requires difference; it does not require the ownership of particularity. Finally, there is a difficulty of vocabulary. The lexicon of heaven, used by the long tradition to describe the beatific vision, seems on its face to be deeply affective. There is beatitudo, there is felicitas, there is laetitia, there is gaudium: these terms seem to be affective. They seem to label states of feeling. The vision of the LORD in which the lives of the saints definitively consists has, of course, infinite room for happiness and blessedness; but those are not experiential terms in the sense here given. As has already been noted (§16), when we are fully happy, when we experience beatitude, when we are filled with the love of the LORD, there is no space for firstperson awareness. Such happiness is, therefore, deeply different from what we ordinarily call happiness and pleasure and delight and joy in the devastation. Those feeling-states are to a considerable extent saturated with possession: part of what makes them what they are is that they seem to me to be ours. But that aspect of them will be erased in heaven, and it will then become apparent, only without us needing to or being able to make the relevant judgment, that affect in the devastation participates only analogically in heavenly affect, and that among the imperfections then removed from it is exactly the sense that it is mine. Heaven, for human creatures, is a fleshly assembly whose center, both spatially and temporally, is the ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary. Around this center, in a repetitively static circle of love and praise, are the saints, resurrected in the flesh, sexed and marked with souvenirs of their lives in the devastation, variously intimate with one another, and each as fully intimate as they are capable of being with Jesus and Mary. Heaven’s timespace is, after the general resurrection, the only timespace there is; all creatureliness is in and at it because there is nowhere and nowhen else to be. The intimacy of this timespace with the LORD means that no trace of the metronome remains. Heaven’s timespace, along with all the creatures in it, goes nowhere; it has already arrived. The quietus of the metronome just is the repetitively static timespace of heaven. In it, human creatures find their rest and their delight, a delight so full that there is no room to be found in it for categorially and possessively layered experience. There and then we are so filled with the delight of intimacy that it does not seem like anything to us to be us; there is only delight. That delight



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is centered upon the LORD: our fleshly eyes are turned to his flesh, and the eyes of our minds to the perpetual exchange of gifts that constitutes the life of the Trinity. But our delight is also a social one. Attentive as we shall then be to the LORD’s kiss, our lips open for it and responsive to it, that openness and readiness and attentiveness is deeply and delightfully inflected by a sense of ourselves as constituted by relations with others— certainly with those who have been closest to us here in the devastation, whether as friends or enemies or lovers or parents or children, but also with those from whom we were distant in the devastation. Our delight in the LORD is, in this respect, like the intense attentiveness paid by orchestral players to the conductor. He is the one at whom they look and to whose gestures they respond. But their look and their responsiveness is attuned and resonant to the looks and the responses of their fellow players. That attunement and resonance is constitutive of ensemble playing. So also, mutatis mutandis, for the heavenly ensemble. In that ensemble, it is likely that we are as close to those who were, in the devastation, our enemies as to our friends and lovers. The murderer’s and the torturer’s and the rapist’s victims may—should they all have avoided annihilation and found themselves resurrected for life eternal—find themselves shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand with those who injured and insulted them in the devastation; Christians pray for their enemies, and implicit in those prayers is the hope for unity with them in the timespace of heaven and in the praise and love of the LORD. There will, it seems likely, be many surprises about these matters: our understanding of who was, in the devastation, the victim and who the offender is likely often to be reversed in heaven’s economy. Such reversals weave the fabric of heavenly delight as much as do recovered intimacies with our beloveds from the devastation. Injury and insult in the devastation is not erased in heaven; its tokens remain, written on the bodies of the injured as the marks of the crucifixion remain on Jesus’ ascended flesh, and the scars of their wounds remain on the martyrs’ resurrected flesh. The marks of what torturers and murderers and rapists have done remain, too, in ways difficult to imagine, on their resurrected flesh. But in no case do these tokens produce pain; they will have been transfigured, and they will be present as identifying marks— we remain in heaven who we were in the devastation, and our devastated pasts are part of who we are—that belong now to the delight that is the only kind of experience available in heaven.

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Human creatures are not alone in heaven’s timespace. Angels (§§17– 20) are there, and have harmonious and delightful relations with us of a kind whose particulars evade even the most speculative of theologies. The most frequent specification of the nature of human-angelic relations in the devastation is liturgical: we humans worship the LORD even in the devastation with the angels and archangels, and we can therefore say at least that the heavenly assembly revolving around the LORD includes a harmonic resonance of angelic and human voices of a kind such that each responds knowingly to the other, rather as baritone and tenor voices may in a choir. More than that it seems impossible to say. In addition to humans and angels, there may also be other creatures in heaven. Discussion of those, and of the relations they might bear to human creatures in heaven, is found in §§27–30.

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A

ccording to the speculative position taken here, there are, for human creatures, only two possible last things: heaven (§24) and annihilation (§23). The long Western tradition has also, and decisively, affirmed a third, usually called hell; and it has, though with considerably less decisiveness, depicted hell in ways that make it distinct from annihilation, and in ways that require those who inhabit it to be enfleshed (in the terms of this work, if there are humans in hell, they must necessarily be enfleshed, so that is not a surprising addition). And because hell is depicted as a novissimum, this means that it must be one or other of the two kinds of stasis (§§4–5); were it anything other than these, it would not be novelty-free, which is just another way of saying that it would not be a novissimum. Christian doctrine requires that hell be a possibility for human beings; that it be a last thing for those who enter it; and that it be understood to consist in maximal separation from the LORD for those who enter it. These affirmations need interpretation, however; they must be speculated about. The speculations entertained here constitute a minority report, at best, but one that is at least possibly consistent with orthodoxy. The speculative position contains the following elements. First, that hell cannot plausibly be understood as a fleshly condition following upon the general resurrection. Attempts so to understand it are certainly unconvincing; worse, they tend toward the incoherent. And since it is not Christian doctrine that hell be so understood, even though many, perhaps most, speculative theologians have taken just that position,

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the critique given in what follows of hell under that description is not aimed at Christian doctrine but at a particular speculative reading of it. Second, that hell can and should be understood as a condition of maximal separation from the LORD, and that, so understood, it exactly is permanent and irreversible annihilation. Third, that hell’s anticipations and foreshadowings are present here in the devastation, even though they can never reach their term—which is annihilation—here. Fourth, that the sufferings of discarnate souls following the first death, the separation of soul from flesh, are for some purgatorial in the sense that they purify and prepare for the resurrection of the flesh into the life of the world to come; while for others, such sufferings are properly hellish in the sense that they anticipate and point to the annihilation that is their proper goal, and in the sense that discarnate souls undergoing postmortem sufferings of that kind will never be rejoined to resurrected flesh. They will, instead, come to nothing. There is, too, a fifth point to consider: Are there reasons to think that any human creatures either already have or at some time will bring themselves to nothing? This is the question about whether hell is inhabited, now properly construed. I treat these five elements of the speculative position seriatim, and briefly, in the remainder of this section; some among them have already made an appearance in §§21–24. First, what is wrong with the idea that human creatures might exist as such in hell—that is, as ensouled flesh subsequent to the general resurrection subject to endless torment? The quick answer is that pain is a feature, an artifact, of the fall, and as such belongs properly to the devastation; its occurrence for human creatures is inseparable from the metronomic time that belongs to the devastation, and to say that it can continue after the general resurrection is just to say that the devastation is not fully and finally healed. The enfleshed inhabitants of hell, should there be any, inhabit what remains of the devastation, and their sufferings are therefore the principal sign of the failure of the LORD’s passion to heal that devastation. This is reason enough by itself to pause before the doctrine of an inhabited hell. But there is more. There are real difficulties with the very idea of endlessly tormented flesh, pinned to its sufferings on an endlessly extended plain of metronomic timespace. Treatments of this idea—the idea of fleshly human creatures tormented endlessly in metronomic timespace—in the tradition generally



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have the following features: first, an acknowledgment of the prima facie implausibility of the idea; second, an affirmation that the authoritative sources of the Christian tradition (Scripture, magisterium) unambiguously affirm it as possible; third, the provision of some conceptual machinery for weakening or overcoming the apparent difficulties. Augustine is representative. In his longest ex professo treatment of the idea that human flesh can suffer endlessly, timespace-without-end, in the twenty-first book of the City of God, he begins with the observation that it seems more incredible (incredibilius videtur esse) that flesh might endure torturing pain forever (in aeternis) than that it might remain forever in beatitude (21.1). The central difficulty that people have in assenting to this, Augustine thinks, is that we all ordinarily take intense physical pain to be unendurable in the strict and proper sense of that term: we cannot put up with it and it cannot last. Either such pain ends with healing, or it ends with death, we think; and so we cannot easily bring ourselves to believe that it can go on forever, time without end (21.2–3). In the terms preferred by this study, we find it difficult to separate the idea of devastated flesh—which is the only kind that suffers pain, pain being an artifact of the fall—from the idea of death as terminus. Augustine provides a double response to this difficulty. The first element of it is to say that we find the idea of imperishable suffering flesh incredible in large part because we have seen no instance of such a thing. In fact, however, he thinks, there are many instances of flesh that does not rot or decay or in other ways come to nothing. He instances the peacock’s flesh, the flesh of the salamander, the corporeal nature of fire, quicklime, and so on (all these in 21.4)—none of which is in fact an instance of what he needs, which is human flesh that does not decay or rot while yet continuing to suffer. There are other difficulties with the examples, too: Augustine appears, for instance, to think that roasted peacock meat is exempt from corruption (21.4). But even if his empirical observations were defensible, they would still not meet the epistemic need he identifies, which is instances of (human) suffering flesh that continue without end whose relatively everyday occurrence might moderate our skepticism about them. Augustine’s second response is to say that the LORD is omnipotent, which means that he can bring about whatever he wants (quidquid vult potest; 21.7), and so he can surely make it so that the bodies of the damned

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are tortured with eternal fire (igne aterno crucientur corpora damnatorum; 21.7) if he chooses to do so. Has the LORD not, after all, done greater things than this? And—a point closely linked to this, and one that Augustine often makes—we should not assume that the natural regularities we are accustomed to seeing are exceptionless. If we have not seen endlessly tormented human flesh, that alone does not mean that it cannot be found or that it is an impossibility: the LORD institutes what he wants (quas voluit instituere; 21.8), and if the transmutation of mortal suffering flesh into flesh capable of endless torture is what the LORD wants, then that is what will happen. The conditional is true, certainly; but whether the antecedent is true depends upon whether it is a constituent of Christian orthodoxy to say that there are, or may be, human creatures suffering fleshly torments forever. Augustine thinks the antecedent true; it is, however, false. The most we can say is that Christian doctrine requires that eternal, irrevocable, and maximal separation from the LORD’s prevenient love be a possibility for human beings, and that condition is met as well by postulating annihilation as a possibility for human creatures as by postulating a fleshly and torturous hell as a possible last thing for them. Another example of theological speculation about this matter—the endless fleshly suffering of human creatures—is to hand in M. J. Scheeben’s Die Mysterien des Christentums (1865). In the ninety-seventh section of this learned and thoughtful work, titled “Die negative Verkläring oder das Mysterium des höllischen Feuers” (negative transformation, or the mystery of hellfire), he treats exactly this question, with considerable attention to whether the fires of hell ought be understood as material. Scheeben assumes that the LORD’s justice means and must mean that he punishes the wicked directly for their sins, that every soul is necessarily immortal, and that the souls of all the damned are rejoined to their resurrected flesh at the general resurrection. Reasons have been given (§§21–23) for doubting that any of these claims is intrinsic to Christian orthodoxy. Allowing them to Scheeben for the purpose of expounding his argument, however, the following picture emerges. First, that there is a deep and necessary parallel between the graceful action of the LORD to elevate the saved beyond what is possible for them in their natural condition, and the punitive action of the LORD to “degrade them [the damned] below their nature, to devastate and consume them.” The language is very strong: zu vernichten, zu verzehren; the



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first of the verbs has the connotation of bringing to nothing (a Vernichtungslager would later be a term used for an extermination camp, a place whose inhabitants were to be extinguished, slaughtered, annihilated), and the second connotes consumption without remainder. Language of this kind runs like a dark thread through Scheeben’s analysis of the punishments of hellfire. The LORD’s punitive power reduces the damned bis an den Rand des Nichts (almost to the edge of nothing), and, later, den Leib an den Rand der Vernichtung bringt (brings the body to the edge of annihilation). And this intense punishment, carried out by the LORD with a material fire (Scheeben makes a good deal of this, unconvincingly), is a necessary concomitant of the LORD’s saving grace: Die unendliche mächtige Kraft der Gottheit muß . . . and muß is repeated again and again. The LORD must punish the wicked with torments that bring them almost to nothing. Justice demands it. For Scheeben, privation is not enough. The final and irreversible separation of the damned from the LORD, which is what would happen if they were to go out of existence (as his language suggests they almost do) in the intermediate state before the general resurrection, would not satisfy the LORD’s honor, which has been damaged by the supernatural offence of sin. Such satisfaction requires endless fleshly punishment, thinks Scheeben—there is poena sensus as well as poena damni—which is the umgekehrte Bild der göttlichen Verklarüng, the reverse picture, or mirror-image, of divine transformation, meaning the grace given for the supernatural glorification of the enfleshed saints. Scheeben goes so far as to say that for the damned the LORD’s love is transformed without remainder into wrath (in diesen Zorn sich verwandelt hat . . .); this is a transformation that he seems to take to mark a real change in the LORD rather than a self-wrought change in the human creature. Scheeben’s thought is motivated by an intuition about the necessary parallel between eternal life for the saints and eternal life for the damned, and that parallel extends, for him, to the necessity of the flesh. The picture he offers of the endlessness of fleshly torture involves him in some dubious speculations about the necessity that the fires of hell be themselves material, largely in order to make the torment of a fleshly body by them possible. The LORD must, on this view, deploy a corporeal instrument—fire—to bring about his desired goal of debasing and degrading the human creature, soul and flesh together. That material fire can do this, torment flesh and soul together endlessly, is, Scheeben thinks,

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ein Wunder der Strafgerechtigkeit Gottes—a miracle of God’s punitive justice; it is, he writes, a Mysterium der Qual, der Pein und des Schreckens—a mystery of agony, of pain, and of fear. For both Augustine and Scheeben (and on these matters they are representative figures; most of the speculative tradition is with them), it is taken as axiomatic, whether because of Scripture or tradition or both, that hell is real and inhabited, and that it must involve fleshly torture. They both, therefore, feel the need to address the difficulties associated with such an idea. Neither is convincing. The Augustinian position is that the LORD can bring this about, and that since we know the state of affairs to obtain, the LORD must, somehow, have brought it about. Scheeben’s position is that the LORD deploys fire in order to torment the damned soul in its intimacy with tormented flesh. Both use strong language about the LORD’s wrath, and about his deliberate punishment of sinners. Scheeben, in particular, uses the language of honor and dishonor: sinners have dishonored the LORD, and therefore they merit punishment by the LORD. Augustine’s and Scheeben’s axioms do not need to be accepted by Christians (§§21–24); they are themselves speculations, as much as any of the positions entertained in this work; they are theologoumenal, we might say, rather than properly theological. Nonetheless, it is important to be clear about how positions like these appear in light of the conceptual machinery used in this work. Such positions entail that metronomic timespace is not fully redeemed. The timespace that hell is must, on views like these, be metronomic without remainder. It stretches endlessly into the future without any tincture of the repetitive stasis that can only be given liturgically (there is no liturgy in hell), and awareness of that fact about it is an element proper to the torment in which it essentially consists. Second, a closely associated point, not all pain is redeemed. The damned continue to suffer in a timespace separate from heaven. The LORD, then, is not all in all: there remains a realm separated from him even after the general resurrection, a state of affairs that does not change. Third, there are human creatures so reduced that they lack, irreversibly, the capacity for repentance. This means at least that such a capacity is not proper to humans. Fourth, and last, the LORD acts deliberately to maintain the effects of evil in being (pain is a paradigmatic instance of such an effect), and indeed to ensure the existence of an entire realm separate from himself. Scheeben’s language, noted above, is especially interesting on this



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point. The results of sin, he clearly sees, are negative without remainder, and this means that the natural result of sin is to reduce sinners, to move them toward nonbeing simpliciter, toward, as he writes, the edge of nothing. It is only the LORD’s deliberate and supernatural intervention that prevents sinners from ceasing to be; and it does this exactly by establishing and maintaining a domain of endless pain. This is not a pleasing picture. It has difficulty in meeting its own principal desiderata, which include providing an account of endless fleshly torment that makes sense of such an idea, and relating that account adequately to other, more fundamental, Christian convictions about the nature and effects of sin, and about the nature of evil. The speculative picture in Augustine and Scheeben—and it is that, every bit as speculative as the one provided in §§21–24 of this work—of what hell might be like has greater disadvantages than those involved in the speculative defense of annihilation given here (§23). It is important, however, to emphasize also what both pictures have in common, which is what makes them both, barely, possibly Christian. They share a seriousness about sin’s nature and effects; they share, too, a deep sense of the importance of the flesh for human creatures. They are both, therefore, possibly Christian speculative positions, even if one of them appears more beautiful and more fully articulated with the tradition’s deep grammar than the other, and even though the endless-torment position suffers from a profound ugliness in the order of knowing. The novissimum that is hell for human creatures may be understood as permanent and irreversible annihilation. As already noted, this condition is one of complete and final separation from the LORD. This condition amounts to success at the project of sin, which exactly is a project of self-extrication from the LORD, who is the condition of the possibility of continuing in being for all human creatures. The English word “hell”— together with the complex of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin words (sheol, gehenna, inferus) that lie behind it—is so deeply ingrained in Catholic thought and speech at every level that it cannot be abandoned. But it can perfectly well be interpreted to mean, without remainder, annihilation produced by sin. So understood, hell’s anticipations and foreshadowings are evident already in the devastation. Death is one: although the separation of soul and flesh that is human death does not by itself guarantee

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the permanent and irreversible extinction of those who undergo it, it does bring about the temporary extinction of the human creature, and in that way foreshadows and anticipates, as the first death, the second death that may come, in which the discarnate soul, having deserted the body, is finally and irrevocably separated from the LORD, and in that way comes irreversibly to nothing. Pain in the devastation, too, is a foreshadowing of hell understood as extinction: it reduces those who suffer it, even if it may also providentially bring them closer to the LORD. And the reducing effects of sin, already discussed in §22, serve as anticipatory reminders in the devastation of what the proper end—the last thing—of sin really is. There is a final point to consider about hell understood as annihilation: Are there reasons to think that any human creatures either already have or at some time will bring themselves to nothing? Or is it possible, within the warm constraints of orthodoxy, to hope that all human creatures (and perhaps all angels, too) might avoid this final separation from the LORD, and be resurrected at the end for eternal life? This is the question about whether hell is inhabited, now properly construed as a question about whether any human creature has yet, or will in the future, bring him- or herself to nothing. The weight of the speculative tradition is clear: hell is inhabited, which is to say, if the speculative position of this work proves acceptable, that there are those who have come to nothing or who will do so. Not all human creatures, on this view, will enter into eternal life with the LORD. The position entertained here (see, already, the discussion in §10) is that, while this is a defensible speculative position, it is only that. There is no authoritative doctrine on this matter, and it is entirely typical of church teaching on these matters chastely to avoid indicative-mood claims about whether there are (or are not) any who are damned, and even more chastely to avoid claims about the damnation of particular human creatures. The speculative tradition is of course much less chaste; Dante names many of those in hell, and exhibits no doubts about his reasonability in doing so. The same is true of many other theologians, and, perhaps, of most Christians. It appears to be a deep-seated desire among Christians, even if an unedifying and unnecessary one, to name the damned. A representative instance of doctrinal restraint about the damned can be found in Lumen gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic



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Constitution on the Church. Sections 48–51 of that work treat the eschatological character of the pilgrim church. Jesus Christ, this text says, constitutes the church as the universal salutis sacramentum, and uses it as a means to draw people to himself and thus to begin the renovatio mundi, the renewal of the world. There is a detailed treatment in number 48, deploying the usual scriptural texts (Matt 25 and 2 Cor 5), of the awful possibility of damnation, and of the importance of conforming oneself more closely to Jesus Christ in this life in order to be worthy of salvation in the next. But nothing is said about the actuality of damnation for anyone. Rather, Christians are divided into three categories in number 49: those who are pilgrims here below (alii e discipulis eius in terris peregrinantur), those who are being purified after they have left this life (alii hac vita functi purificantur), and those who are already in glory (vero glorificantur), seeing the LORD with clarity even now. There is no mention of a fourth category, those who are already damned; and the language of this part of Lumen gentium is, throughout, that of hope. None of this is to say that Lumen gentium teaches universalism, whether in indicative or subjunctive mood; neither is it to say that the actuality of damnation for some is ruled out. But it is certainly to say that there is no affirmation of that actuality, no indicative-mood claims about the occupancy of hell. The wicked, certainly, are headed for hell; but are there actually any who are wicked enough? Lumen Gentium does not say, and is in that entirely typical. The horror of eternal separation from the LORD is often affirmed, as is the importance for the living of contemplating that possibility. But neither its actuality for anyone already dead nor its inevitability for anyone now living is affirmed with clarity by the texts of the Second Vatican Council. It is likely, indeed beyond reasonable dispute, that most of the bishops and theologians gathered at that council between 1962 and 1965 thought it clear enough that Scripture and tradition require the rejection of the kind of subjunctive universalism entertained here and given forceful expression by Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dare We Hope? But that does not elevate the position to the status of Christian doctrine. The position entertained here on this question combines subjunctive universalism with a modest and tentative judgment that universalism is unlikely. That is, universalism’s possibility can be entertained by orthodox Christians, but only as a possibility rather unlikely to be actualized. We pray for it under the sign of hope in something like the same way that

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we pray for peace in the world—that is, as something we do not expect, but which is not in principle impossible. This analogy is only partly valid: certainty that universal peace will eventually be established belongs to the grammar of Christianity (that is the nature of heaven), even if it is not expected here in the devastation; but there is no such certitude about the salvation of all. Nevertheless, it must be hoped for: even Satan may be saved, as may the worst of human sinners. Whether they have been or will be is not known to us, and we have strong reasons for doubting it, though not strong enough to produce certainty. Annihilation, which is hell under its proper name, is, then, a possible novissimum for human creatures (and for angels), though not one whose actuality is known for any individual. Any humans who arrive at it do so by failing to be resurrected for eternal life; what is, for the saved, a temporary loss of self during the intermediate state, a loss produced by the absence of the flesh (§§21–22), becomes for the damned permanent and beyond the possibility of reversal. The postmortem sufferings the damned, those approaching nothing, undergo as discarnate souls progressively reduce those souls beyond the point at which reunion with flesh is possible, and at that point it will have become the case that those sufferings were hellish, hell-bound. They are then truly dead souls, animae deo desertae. By contrast, there are discarnate souls whose postmortem sufferings purify them and ready them exactly for reunion with resurrected flesh. When this happens, it will be apparent, to them and to others, that their postmortem sufferings were purgatorial rather than hellish.

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he church in the devastation is the sacrament of the world’s healing. In its liturgical work the church provides the fullest foretaste of heaven to be had in the devastated world, and that is because the liturgy is where (and when) Christ the healer is most intensely present. The church, understood as Christ’s visible body, has, like the world, been damaged by the double fall; its members—the baptized—suffer the effects of sin and are themselves sinners, and so they, too, like the unbaptized, deepen and intensify the world’s damage when they sin. The church limps and stammers and picks at the scabs of her wounds. But she also has the salve for those wounds, and the wherewithal slowly to knit together the rents and tears in the fabric of the world. That salve is sacramental, and the central question of this section, the last in the treatment of the novissima of human creatures, is this: What are the last things of the sacraments? Alternatively put, what is the last thing of the church? This topic belongs to the treatment of the last things of human creatures because the church is, essentially, Christ’s focused and concentrated presence in the devastated world by way of the thoughts, words, and actions of the human members of his body. Do the sacraments have a novissimum? If some or all of them do, is it the same for all of them? And which among the novissima is possible for them, severally or collectively? Christianity is, fundamentally and essentially, a sacramental system, where “system” is understood to mean ordered and beautiful whole, each

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sacrament related organically to every other and together forming a single action, which is the action of Jesus Christ. When Christians do Christian things, what they do is always in some sense sacramental, and what marks the church off from other communities of practice in the devastated world is exactly sacramental practice. The way into the church is by means of the sacrament of baptism, and the way out of it in the course of this life is likewise sacramental, by way, that is, of sacramental preparation for and marking of the passage from life to death that is extreme unction. The link between these two is evident in by the recapitulatory use of the white garment with which the newly baptized are clothed as a corpse shroud. The practice of the church is sacramental at the beginning and at the end and at every point between. Informing this remorselessly sacramental practice—all those masses, all those baptisms, all those weddings, all those confessions and absolutions and ordinations—is an understanding, a way of seeing and relating to and transfiguring the devastated world. John Henry Newman called this way of seeing and understanding the sacramental principle, a phrase that occurs in his work as early as the 1820s (he was born in 1801), and that recurs even in his very last works, spanning, therefore, his Anglican and Catholic periods, the dividing-line between which occurred in 1845, almost exactly half-way through his life. Newman tended to construe this principle in terms of a relation between the visible and invisible worlds. In a passage from the Apologia, composed in 1864, he wrote of what may be called in a large sense of the word the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen—a doctrine which embraces in its fullness, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about the Sacraments properly so called; but also the article of “the Communion of Saints”; and likewise the Mysteries of the faith. (Apologia, 18)

This is entirely typical of Newman’s understanding of the sacramental principle throughout his writing life. There is, so far as I can tell, no significant change on this matter as a result of his reception into the Catholic Church. There are three elements in Newman’s understanding of the sacramental principle, and they capture what is essential to that principle and to the system of practice it establishes. The first is the idea that two worlds coexist here in the devastation. Newman tends to put this in terms of the



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visible and the invisible, each of which he takes to be real and to be intimately related to the other. The second is that the constituents of one of these worlds, the visible one, are representative of and capable of making fully present (some of) the constituents of the other—that is what Newman means when he writes of “types” and “instruments” in the quotation just given. And the third is that understanding the sacramental principle is both essential for and instrumental in understanding the articles of the Christian confession as a whole—in the passage quoted Newman makes explicit mention of the communion of saints; but it is clear from his writing elsewhere, both in the Apologia and in his corpus as a whole, that he thinks the sacramental principle informs and makes comprehensible almost the entirety of Christian doctrine—at least all those parts that have to do with the relation of the LORD to the created order. The first element in Newman’s understanding of the sacramental principle is essential. The devastated world we inhabit is not coextensive with what there is. Cataloging its features and inhabitants therefore does not yield an inventory of all that is. But it is not, or not exactly, that there is another, different, world behind or outside this one. It is rather that the world, understood as everything there is other than the LORD, has been badly damaged, both as a whole and in each of its many parts. Newman often calls this damage the result of primordial cataclysm; he thinks it obvious even to pagans that the world is not as it should be. This damage conceals, while sometimes also revealing, the world as it would be were the damage made good. Imagine, for example, a badly wounded and gangrenous human limb. The wound seethes with maggots, perhaps, and the flesh has rotted so that the whiteness of bone shows through. But there is still enough of the limb left that its shape as it would be were it healed and whole is, from certain angles of vision, evident; the limb’s possessor has still enough vitality that she can move the limb with some vigor, and when she does, it can seem for a moment that a healthy limb is moving. If the world is like this, then it is not that there is a devastated world behind which there is another, undamaged and beautiful; it is rather that the very idea of damage presupposes a locus for that damage that is not itself damaged without remainder, not something whose every element has been so damaged that there is no residue of wholeness. The apple that falls from the tree and begins to rot on the ground maintains, for a while, the shape of a whole and healthy apple, just as the devastated world maintains, now,

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traces of what it was and would be like were it undamaged. When the rotting apple loses any semblance of its apple-shape, it has ceased to exist as an apple; and the damaged world, though indeed very badly damaged, has not reached that point. Suppose we apply to this analysis of the first element in the sacramental principle the depiction of timespace already given (§§13–16). Timespace, I argued there, is of two fundamentally different kinds, metronomic and systolic. The first, the metronomic, is flat, uniform, subject by definition to the law of measure; locations in metronomic space are given, ideal-typically, by coordinates on a grid, and in terms of our contemporary technology they are made available by means of the interactions between orbiting satellites and ground receivers of various kinds; and locations in metronomic time are given in terms of intervals measured by a universal chronograph, perhaps a clock calibrated to the rates of decay of microscopic corporeal things. Each of these is, mathematically speaking, a function of the other, which is roughly to say that each is expressible in terms of the other. To be located in metronomic time is to be located in metronomic space, and vice versa. Metronomic time is, above all, regular and repetitive; it is best measured by machine; and it has, for creatures like us, the character of a tyrant. It does to us what it does, without respect to or for us; and it does not differentiate between us and other corporeal creatures, animate or inanimate. What it does, mostly, is bring us down to death. Metronomic timespace is, from a theological point of view, what space and time become when they are damaged; they are to timespace as it should be, was, and will be again, as gangrene is to the healthy limb in our earlier example. The metronome is a blight upon systolic timespace, which is timespace gathered, folded, and pleated around the events of Christ’s passion. Timespace so gathered is not subject to measure by rule or chronograph; it is the LORD’s inbreathing, and it permits—indeed, requires—the copresence of creatures widely separated by the metronome. In the Roman Canon there is a litany of the saints; the litany makes them present, not metaphorically or in terms of the subjectivity of those chanting their names, but really, even though they died centuries ago; and in liturgical speech and action, metronomic space, too, is taken up and transfigured—those who celebrate Mass in one place are really copresent



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with those celebrating it in another, even if the two places are widely separated according to the metronome. The transfigurative taking-up of the metronome into the systole is an act of healing, like the gradual removal of gangrenous rot from the infected limb. The condition of the possibility of such transfiguration is the eternal presence of the LORD to time, and, therefore, the redemptive work of the sanctissima trinitas, which the LORD is, in and through time. This is by way of specification of the first element in Newman’s sacramental principle. It is a way of talking about the “real things unseen,” about, that is, the real presence of the LORD in the devastation, the constant presence—and occasional evident presence—of the work of transfiguring damage. The second element in the sacramental principle is that corporeal “phenomena are both the types and instruments” of the things that are unseen and yet real, as Newman would have it. That is, the damaged corporeal things of the world can show, in a veiled way but nonetheless really, what they would be like were they healed, and, more specifically, that particular arrangements and concatenations of corporeal things show with a peculiar and intense perfection what the world would be like were it healed. This is to say, at least, that the “types and instruments” by which the world’s healing is both effected and made evident are not uniformly distributed. It is not the case that every ensemble of corporeal things is identically efficacious in these ways. Rather, the efficaciousness of such arrangements of corporeal things is given by the degree of their intimacy with the passion of Christ; the more intimate a particular concatenation of corporeal things is with that crucial set of events, which is the systole’s heart, the more it is capable of showing and effecting the world’s healing. This way of seeing the second element in the sacramental principle shows that the ensembles of corporeal objects and actions that most efficaciously show and effect the world’s healing are given historically, at locations in timespace that can, in the devastated world, be measured by the metronome. This is unavoidable, and is a feature of the way in which the LORD both does and must heal the world. The devastation, in all its metronomic bleakness, must be entered into at times and places that belong to it in order for its transfiguration to be possible. And this means spatiotemporal specificity, capable, as we are likely to want to say, of historical location. And so, the LORD calls Abraham, a particular man, to leave one

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very particular place and go to another, a journey with effects that affected the order of the world profoundly. The LORD speaks to Moses from the burning bush, again with a very particular commission; and so on, through the history of the Jewish people until the birth, passion, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus who is the Christ, the LORD incarnate. From that crucial set of events comes the church, the community of those incorporated into Christ’s body and commissioned thereby to be the presence of Christ in the world. And what that community most characteristically does, the actions it performs that constitute it most fully and exactly as Christ’s body, is precisely what the LORD does to show and to effect the world’s healing. It is in and through this community that the sacramental principle finds its fullest presence. This is of course not to say that it is only in the body of Christ so understood that the LORD acts to heal the world; many concatenations and arrangements of corporeal creatures are appointed by the LORD in a special way to show and effect such healing. Most dramatically and obviously, what Israel was and is, has done and continues to do, serves as a paradigmatic instance of particular, broadly sacramental action. But the fact remains that if we understand the sacramental principle as sketched here, it is what the church, the body of Christ, does when it is being most characteristically itself that participates most fully in the events of Christ’s passion; and the church, therefore, whose characteristic actions are most fully and properly sacramental, showing and effecting the transfiguration of the metronome by the systole. This picture of what makes an ensemble of corporeal creatures sacramental is a broad one, and therefore rather distant from the precise and technical teaching of the church on sacraments and sacramentality. I bring the two more closely together below, but before doing that, a few more words about the nature of the sacramental by way of preparation for a consideration of the possible ends of the particular sacraments, and, therefore, of the church as the paradigmatic sacramental community. Systolic timespace is not uniform. That it is to say, it is unevenly distributed. It is a matter of the rough ground. The passion, around which systolic timespace is folded (§16), has a particular timespace location, and those places and times enfolded most intimately by it are likewise particular; they are not found everywhere and everywhen alike. This is evident in Christian geography and Christian chronology. A Christian map of



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the spatial world would be nodal rather than grid-like, and its prominent nodes would be sites where the Eucharist is celebrated, where the relics of martyrs and saints are found, where the works of love are done, and in general where Christ is most fully present. This nodal unevenness of the distribution of Christ’s body, geographically speaking, has as its correlate the spatial presence of large tracts in which the body’s presence is etiolated because timespace is folded away from the passion and toward the nothingness, which is its absence. These tracts are places of devastation, places that have been made deserts of distance from the body. The ensembles of corporeal creatures found in such places are, because they are profoundly damaged, non- or even antisacramental. Places of massive and systemic violence, whether wrought by humans or not, are the paradigm cases of devastated antisacramental spaces, spaces enfolded on the nothingness that brings destruction: death camps, killing fields, places of murder and torture and dismemberment. These and their like are the crevasselike nodes of the geography of evil. And if the rough ground, a feature of the devastation and of it alone, is required for the sacraments, whether broadly or narrowly understood, then this should mean that there are no sacraments in heaven, that they find their novissimum in annihilation as a temporary feature of the divine economy, indexed only to the devastation. Is this a right thing to say? Do or may the sacraments come to nothing? Not quite. The sacraments in their essence are medicinal. They are responses to the devastation of the world, divinely instituted and ordered as means by which that devastation is moved, gradually and slowly, toward the final and irreversible healing the world finds in heaven. Their medicinal nature is obvious once their intimacy with Jesus is fully realized. If it is the case that sacraments are ensembles of corporeal creatures folded around the passion of Christ, then they are what they are because of the world’s devastation: the passion is the LORD’s healing of the world. Without the fall, no passion; and without the passion, no sacraments. There were no sacraments in Eden, because there the cosmos is as yet undamaged. There can be none in hell, because there the metronome is the only thing there is: there are no folds in timespace, which is exactly what makes it hellish (and which is what makes it, if construed as other than annihilation, empty; see

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§25). And in heaven, because the world’s healing has been accomplished, there are also no sacraments. That is the right picture in essentials. But it does not quite lead to the conclusion that the end of the sacraments is annihilation without remainder—that they will come to nothing both in hell and in heaven. To see why the absence of sacraments and sacramentality in Eden is not in every respect replicated in heaven, we need to attend to what differentiates the particular sacraments from one another, with special attention to the Eucharist. The church distinguishes seven sacraments as definitively such. They have in common that they are rooted in the earthly life of the incarnate LORD, that they are participant in the heavenly life of the ascended LORD, that their performance brings the life of the devastated world into intimacy with the economy of the Trinity, and that, as we have seen, they are means (types and instruments) by which the world’s healing is represented and effected. But they also differ one from another, and in ways that affect what may be said about their end. Sacramentality is of course not exhausted by these seven; but these seven represent the sacramental principle most fully and perfectly, and all the other sacramental ensembles of corporeal creatures participate in one way or another in these seven. So, attention to the particulars of these seven should provide what is needed for an account of the church’s last thing. Suppose we consider first baptism and confirmation. These are two moments in a single movement of incorporation into Christ’s body. The differences between them are real and important, and the history that informs their differentiation in the life of the church is complex and fascinating in its own right. But for the purposes of this study it suffices to treat them as two aspects of a single process. What is that process? It is the making of particular human creatures into members of Christ’s body by making them participant in his death and resurrection. The baptized are drowned in the waters of the Jordan, found now in the baptismal font. They emerge therefrom as new creatures, to be named and clothed as something they were not before but have now become. And the confirmed are anointed and sealed exactly as limbs of that body, now capable of confessing their membership in their own voices. This process is done only once, and once done cannot be reversed or undone. Those who have undergone it are marked as Christ’s own forever. That is not a claim about their last



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thing: they may yet manage to bring themselves to nothing (§23); or they may end in the repetitive stasis of heaven (§24). But for as long as they exist, and in whatever condition they are, the mark of baptism is on them. What is done in the rite is consistent in making this new and irreversible status evident, and in making it real. The fundamental assumption informing baptism and confirmation is that without them human creatures are distant from Christ, devastated and lost. That is the condition remedied by these sacraments. Those who have been baptized and confirmed were once citizens without remainder of a devastated earthly city, and are now, proleptically although without certainty as to final outcome, citizens of a heavenly one. These sacraments mark and effect a movement from one condition to the other, and they will come to nothing in the sense that in heaven there can be no room or need for them. Everyone there, everyone who has been resurrected for eternal life, will have been baptized and confirmed already, whether by the rites of the church here below, or by the sufferings of martyrdom here below, or by the purgatorial postmortem sufferings of those being prepared for the vision of the LORD for which they were not yet ready at the body’s death. Everyone there is, by definition, a member of Christ’s body, intimate with his ascended flesh. To speak of baptism and confirmation in heaven, therefore, is an oxymoron, and to speak of them in hell is foolishness. These were sacraments ordained for a devastated world, so that, as Jesus said to John in response to the latter’s unwillingness to baptize him, the two of them might bring all justice to completion (nos implere omnem iustitiam; Matt 4:15). Once all justice is completed, there is no more need for these sacraments. They find their last thing in coming to nothing. So much for baptism and confirmation, and for all their sacramental penumbras. Suppose we consider now the two principal sacraments of healing: the sacrament of penance, also called reconciliation, and the sacrament of extreme unction, also called healing. The purpose of the former is to reincorporate a member of Christ’s body who has become separated from it by sin. The central elements in its performance, confession and absolution, represent and effect this: the penitent says what, to the best of his understanding, has separated him from the LORD’s love; expresses contrition and the intention to amend his life so that this thing, whatever it is, will not be done any more; and, in confessing and receiving absolution and performing the penance that is a condition not of forgiveness but of its

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reception, is reincorporated into the body from which he has temporarily separated himself. And in the case of the sacrament of unction, the dying are prepared for the death of their bodies and the transition to the soul’s temporarily disembodied state that such death will yield. In this sacrament, too, any barrier or separation of the dying from the body of Christ is removed, and reincorporation is thereby effected. It is not, of course, that the soul is thereby assured of the immediate and beatific vision of the LORD; postmortem purgatorial suffering is much more likely for almost all of us. These sacraments, too, do and must come to nothing in heaven— and, obviously, in hell. This is for the same reason as with baptism and confirmation. They are, in their essence, sacraments of remedy and healing, and in heaven the remedies they signify and effect have been indefectibly established, while in hell they are beyond possibility. There are also sacraments of particular vocation, sacraments that set people aside for specific ecclesial purposes here in the devastation. These are the sacraments of marriage and ordination. They, unlike the four so far considered, are not for all Christians. Everyone needs the sacraments of initiation and healing, but not everyone needs those of marriage and ordination. Marriage sets aside two people for a lifelong, sexual, possibly procreative, and faithful relationship that participates in and is patterned on Christ’s indissoluble love for and delight in the church. Being married, according to a Christian understanding, is at least as much for the church and for the world as it is for the couple: the couple’s life is a public witness as well as, when things go well, a private delight. And its possible fecundity is patterned on Christ’s fecund love for the church. Marriage is no requirement; it is a daunting and difficult vocation, only for some. As with ordination, it is probable that many more people undertake it than should. Ordination is like marriage in that it sets aside particular people for specific roles in the economy of the church’s sacramental life. Christians differ widely in their understandings of the roles of the ordained, whether priestly, diaconal, or episcopal, and about who may be ordained. All that need be said here is that there is broad formal agreement among Christians that the principal locus of these roles is ecclesial. The ordained are incorporated into Christ in a way that makes it possible for them to represent him to and effect his work among the baptized and confirmed, those who have been incorporated into his body. And in this case, too,



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only a small subset of Christians does or should be transformed by this sacrament. These sacraments too, those of particular vocation, come to nothing. Their annihilation in hell is sufficiently obvious as scarcely to need comment: there is no church there to need the sacramental work of the ordained; and the sociality and intimacy signaled by marriage, as well as the participation of the married in Christ’s love for the church, is there impossible in principle. Things are a little more difficult, a little more speculative, so far as the absence of marriage and ordination in heaven are concerned. It is certainly true that many Christians eagerly await reunion with their spouses as spouses in the life of the world to come. They are mistaken to do so, though the mistake is easy to understand, and to excuse. If whatever is good for us and delightful to us will be present in perfected form in heaven, then why not say this, too, about marriage? The answer must be that the principal goods of marriage make sense only in a devastated world—at least, this is true if those goods are lifelong fidelity, procreation, and participation in and figuring of Christ’s love for the church. Procreation and all that goes with it does not occur in heaven; and the social relations of the saints will neither need nor benefit from the particular intimacies that distinguish marriage here below, and will all, without discrimination or difference, participate so fully in the indissolubility of Christ’s love for the church that the special witness of the married will not be needed. There is, too, a dominical word of special clarity about this, in Jesus’ response to a question about the woman who has had seven husbands in the devastation. He is asked whose wife she will be in heaven, and his response is that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, but, rather, human creatures will in that matter be like angels (in resurrectione enim neque nubent neque nubentur sed sunt sicut angeli; Matt 22:30). Marriage, too, then, like the other sacraments so far reviewed, is a sacrament of remedy and healing, relevant to and potentially delightful in a devastated world, but without purchase or meaning in heaven. It finds its last thing in annihilation. This is not to say that there are no particular intimacies in heaven (§24); it is only to say that the intimacies that define marriage in the devastation, and the purposes that properly belong to that state, have no purchase in heaven. What about the ordained? That sacrament, too, comes to nothing in heaven. The mark of ordination, incapable of removal in the devastation, is

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unlike that of baptism in that it will eventually come to an end, to nothing. But to explain this more—and on this point there is more disagreement within the Christian tradition even than about marriage—something needs to be said about the last thing of the seventh sacrament, the one around which all the others orbit, that of the Eucharist, and with it the last thing of the church. The Eucharist is the sacrament most intimate with the passion of Christ. In it, the events of that passion are re-presented, and in it they are made fully present to the community gathered before the altar. As it is celebrated, time and space are enfolded fully by the events of the passion as they took place within the metronomic time of the devastation; and as this happens, the metronome is transfigured into the systole as fully as it can be in the devastation. Time and space are folded, pleated, and tensed to a maximal degree. The Eucharist is, in a sense, a sacrament of initiation like baptism and confirmation. But it is unlike them in being celebrated repeatedly, not only in the life of the church, but also in the lives of individual Christians. It is unlike them, too, in leaving no mark on the bodies and souls of those who celebrate it, as baptism and confirmation do. Rather than doing this, the Eucharist is itself the fullest anticipation of what it is the resurrected do in heaven. It does not mark them; rather, it is what they shall be. The Eucharist, unlike all the other sacraments, therefore does not come to nothing in heaven—though it is of course unambiguously and completely absent in hell. In heaven, the Eucharist finds its culmination and perfection, and it does so because of the presence there of the risen flesh of Christ. The last thing of the church, then, is also the last thing of the Eucharist. The heavenly Eucharist just is the church’s presence in heaven. There is and can be no distinction between them. What is the heavenly Eucharist like? That is a question about which only a few formal comments can be made. I emphasized above (§21, §24) that the heavenly life of the saints is a matter of the flesh as well as of the soul, and that it therefore involves a fleshly relation with the flesh of the risen Christ and the assumed flesh of his mother Mary, as well as with the resurrected flesh of the other saints. I emphasized, too, that this fleshly dimension of the heavenly life is repetitively static, a matter of an endlessly systolic-diastolic cycle of inbreathing and outbreathing. The flesh of the resurrected centers upon and circles about the flesh of Christ and of Mary, receiving their kisses and caresses



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in endless rhythm. We reach here the limits of speculative thought, at least in prose, and we can go further only by contrasting the heavenly Eucharist with the devastated one. Here, in the devastated Eucharist, we see and touch and taste the flesh and blood of Christ under the veil, as bread and wine; there, in the heavenly Eucharist, we see and touch and taste and smell and hear (every sensory modality is necessary) directly, unveiled. Here, in the devastated Eucharist, the systolic transfiguration of the metronome is temporary: we are sent out from the celebration into the devastated world governed by the metronome, there to wander until the next time, subject to the metronome and its taking of us and everything else down toward death. There, in the heavenly Eucharist, there is no metronome, and we celebrate the Eucharist, the fleshly presence of Christ, without end or cessation. The systole and the diastole are all there is. And here, in the devastation, our relations with and awareness of human others occurs to a considerable extent outside the eucharistic celebration, and we bring the relations so constituted, with their enmities and imperfections and hatreds and incompletenesses, to the eucharistic altar. The very celebration itself, here below, is marked by imperfection, as its rubrics and confessions show. But there, in heaven, our relations with human others, perfected, have no other context but the Eucharist. We have no need of them or they of us; we will all see one another as we are, in Christ, with delight and without desire; and, as argued in extenso above (§24) about experience, we then have unmixed joy and delight, but without any sense that the joy is ours, that it is ourselves experiencing it. It will of course be us, with our particular histories and particular bodies, gathered around the flesh of Christ. But that is a far cry from its seeming to us that we are us.

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Part VI Plants, Animals, Inanimate Creatures

The world includes creatures neither human nor angelic. Some among these are animate: these may be divided into plants and animals. Others are inanimate: these may be divided into artifacts (things made by human creatures) and everything else. All these should be included in any complete consideration of the novissima. The double question of this section is, How should Christians think about such creatures, and what are their possible last things? These questions have been attended to less in the long Western tradition than any so far explored in this work, and there is less unanimity about the answers to them. I engage them first (§27–§28) by defining plants and animals and taking a speculative position on their last things, and then (§§28–29) by doing the same for inanimate creatures, attending in that case particularly to the difference between artifactual and given inanimate creatures.

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here is a terminological difficulty here: Is there a precise and brief way of labeling living creatures that are neither human nor angelic? “Animal” will not quite do; that word suffices to indicate that such creatures live, and therefore die. But it suffers from a double difficulty: humans, too, are, in ordinary discourse, animals, and we need a label that excludes them; and, in both ordinary and technical-biological English, “animal” excludes plants and other living creatures that lack locomotion and subsist on selfproduced nourishment, and we need a label that includes them, includes, indeed, every kind of living creature other than the two excluded. A shorthand, approximately defensible according to contemporary biological orthodoxy and according to contemporary English vernacular, is “plants and animals”: this phrase, in the usage of this work, covers every kind of living creature other than humans and angels. Can more be said about what distinguishes these living creatures from humans and angels? A theological line of thought suggests that one distinguishing mark is the capacity for sin. Animate creatures other than the angelic and human are without any such capacity; they are damaged by the double fall’s devastation like everything else, animate and inanimate, in the world, and are in that sense inheritors of the effects of sin. They are, therefore, immaculable, in the sense of being incapable of sin’s self-inflicted damage because incapable in principle of sinful acts; but they are not immaculate, undamaged in any way by sin.

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Maculae, in Latin, are spots, stains, or blemishes: they are instances of damage to something, damage usually evident to the observer. For something to be immaculate, therefore, is (etymologically speaking) for it to be unspotted and so on; this is roughly the meaning the word has in contemporary colloquial English. For something to be immaculable, which is certainly not a word with any colloquial use in English, is, following still this broadly etymological line of thinking, for it to be incapable of maculation, incapable, that is, of becoming stained or spotted or blemished. The dogmatically paradigmatic use of macula-derived words is the application of “immaculate” to Mary’s conception and to her person. Such application has had dogmatic weight only since Pius IX’s Bull of 1854, Ineffabilis Deus (and even there, the word does not occur in the dogmatic definition itself, though a denial of maculae to Mary is explicitly stated in the Bull’s preamble to that definition), but it is a term with a long lineage in this sense. What “immaculate” means in the Marian context is that she is conceived unstained by any effect of sin. This does not mean that she is immaculable, if we take that to mean incapable of sin’s self-inflicted maculae; she enters that condition, it should be said (the dogmatic definition does not), only after giving her assent—fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum—to Gabriel’s announcement that she is to become pregnant with Jesus the LORD. When she gives her consent to this, she becomes as all those resurrected to life will be, that is immaculable, incapable of sin as well as free from the effects of sin. Calling animate nonhuman and nonangelic creatures in the devastation “immaculable” therefore does not assimilate them to Mary in the devastation: she is there, initially at least, immaculate; they are immaculable. A fuller picture of how to apply the macula-lexicon to the world’s creatures then goes like this: human creatures in the devastation are, with the exception of Jesus and Mary, necessarily both maculate (spotted, stained, damaged by sin) and maculable (capable of further self-inflicted staining); Jesus in the devastation is necessarily both immaculate and immaculable; Mary is necessarily immaculate and, for a time, only possibly immaculable; some among the angels are de facto both maculate and maculable, already sin-stained and capable of further self-inflicted damage; others among the angels are de facto immaculate and, now, necessarily immaculable (having avoided the angelic fall, they are now indefectibly



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established in heaven); and all nonhuman and nonangelic creatures in the devastation are necessarily maculate and necessarily immaculable. There is one significant resonance of this way of sorting things that has been argued earlier. It is that the condition we human creatures aspire to and hope for is one in which we will be more like the devastation’s immaculable creatures than we are now. When resurrected, we shall in one vitally important respect be as dogs and oak trees and honeybees already are in the devastation, which is to say immaculable, incapable of self-performed and self-inflicted sin. The discussion earlier (§16, §24) of liturgical time, habituation, and the progressive etiolation of self-awareness by the liturgical life has given a fairly thick sense already of how to understand this. It is not that we shall in every way become as the ordinarily immaculable creatures are; we have a past they lack, and its marks remain with us in heaven. But we shall be like them in lacking self-awareness, the layered, first-personal sense we sometimes have in the devastation of what it is like to be ourselves. Plants and animals, therefore, understood as immaculables, are all and only those animate creatures without the capacity for sin. What is needed in order actively to sin (rather than simply to suffer the effects of sin)? That is no simple question, but we might say to a first approximation that among the necessary conditions for sin are some degree of freedom, understood as the capacity to choose this rather than that, and some degree of understanding, understood as the capacity to judge the nature of an action envisaged or undertaken. Without these, active occurrent sin is impossible. This is easy enough to see in clear cases. The wisteria vine planted in the garden is certainly capable of sustaining damage, whether inflicted from without (weather, soil, deer, humans), or suffered from within (constitutional incapacity to grow even when external conditions are ideal), but it cannot sin because it can do only what external conditions give it to do, and can (it seems reasonable to assume) make no judgments about what it is doing—so also, mutatis mutandis, for most animate creatures. Thinking in this way about the capacity for sin does not draw the line between immaculability and maculability in the same place as the line between members of Homo sapiens sapiens and members of all other animate species. This is for three reasons.

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The first is that there is no real clarity about how to individuate one species from another in biological terms, and what little clarity there is on that matter has no theological weight. The second is that there are no theologically weighty reasons to deny in principle that creatures other than members of Homo sapiens sapiens might have sufficient freedom and rationality to be capable of sin. Whether there are any such creatures is surely an empirical rather than a theoretical question, and while it seems possible that no nonhuman animate creatures currently known to us meet the criteria, that is a tentative judgment only. Even if it is true, it carries no implications about the capacity for sin of creatures other than humans not yet known to us, whether inhabitants of this planet or of some other. The grammar of Christian thought does require, however, that whichever creatures are capable of sin on their own behalf are also capable of receiving the redemption to be found in Jesus. Christian thought does not permit the existence of creatures capable of sin but incapable of redemption—that is a controversial claim, of course, and not one to be defended here. It will be assumed in what follows, and it means that if there are any prima facie nonhuman creatures capable of sin (and therefore of redemption), either they will have to be counted as human just in virtue of being so capable, or baptism will have to be extended to them anyway, without calling them human. The first solution is better: the second person of the Trinity takes flesh for and dies for all sinners, and they are also the ones to whom, without exception, the offer of redemption is made. The term homo can, on this view, be understood as a placeholder for “enfleshed animate creatures capable of sin and thus of redemption,” as well as for “enfleshed animate creature in the LORD’s image and likeness” (see §21 for a discussion of what that might be taken to mean). It need not be understood as a placeholder for “member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens.” The third reason for denying that all and only members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens are sin-capable is that very many members of that species, as ordinarily understood, lack, here in the devastation at least, such a capacity. This is true of all infants beneath a certain age: they are all conceived damaged by sin of course—human creatures can, post lapsum, conceive only new Adams and new Eves (with the sole exception of Mary), already laboring under the dead weight of sin inherited—but that is only to say that they are maculate, not that they are, after conception, capable of



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sin actively committed by themselves. When in the course of the ordinary development of children sin begins actively to be committed is a disputable matter on which no precision is possible; it happens quickly, certainly, but not immediately. Children in the womb, it seems reasonable to say, do not yet sin actively; and those in the world take at least a little while to get to the point where they can. Lying, to take a peculiarly widespread example of sin, is not much practiced by human children before the age of eighteen months or so. And a small, but not vanishingly small, portion of humans past the age at which sins ordinarily begin to be committed also lacks, whether for a time or for the entirety of their lives in the devastation, the capacities needed for active sin. Those with severe damage to cognitive and affective capacity should be included here, as should those who undergo severe degeneration before death, whether because of illness or because of some external cause. They are not few in number. It follows from this chain of argument that those creatures capable of sin in the devastation may be other than human, and that not all human creatures are so capable. But the discussion to follow (§28) of the last things of immaculable creatures should not be taken to apply to all such creatures, whichever they may be. It should, instead, be taken to apply to all and only those creatures that, in the ordinary course of things, do not have and cannot develop a capacity for sin. It should not be taken to apply to creatures that, even though immaculable for their entire lives in the devastation, are so only because of abnormal damage. Our wisteria vine belongs to the former category: a fully and finely flourishing one of those does not have and cannot develop the capacity for sin. Human creatures without capacity for sin belong to the latter category; without damage they will ordinarily develop just such a capacity. To reiterate: the discussion in §28 is about the possible last things of all and only those animate creatures incapable in principle of sin. It takes no position on whether any of the nonhuman and nonangelic animate creatures known to us now are excluded from that category; much less does it take a position on whether creatures as yet unkown to us all belong to that category.

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he first question to ask about the last things of plants and animals is, may they remain in the resurrection? May they take a fleshly part in the repetitively static life of heaven, joining there the resurrected flesh of the saints, the assumed flesh of Mary, and the ascended flesh of Jesus? Is it possible, or even necessary, that the saints resurrected for eternal life may continue to have lively relations with plants and animals? This question may seem hopelessly arcane, speculative beyond the reach of resolution, and even trivial in the face of deeply serious and pressing theological and moral questions. Perhaps it is. It is certainly true that it is not a question of central importance to the Christian tradition. It has a place therein as an ornament only. It is nevertheless the case that giving thought to it opens some windows into theological anthropology, into consideration, that is, of what we humans are like, and what, most properly, contributes to that felicity whether we hope, though do not expect, one day to enjoy. Consideration of that matter is always important: it can, among other things, help us to see how to live better now. Also in defense of giving time and attention to the question is the fact that when it is raised Christians who otherwise have to be persuaded into showing interest in any theological question whatever often become deeply engaged. Many Christians do, deeply and passionately, want to know whether they will continue to have relations with their beloved dogs and cats after death. Often they want to know the answer to this question for sentimental reasons, which I call into question below. But the fact that so many do want

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to think about the question is testament at least to the seeming depth of the relations that many Christians take themselves to have with plants and animals here in the devastation, a depth that makes the question of their continuation in the resurrection a lively one. The Christian tradition in general, and Thomas Aquinas in particular, who will be a principal interlocutor on this question, provide two trajectories for address to the question of whether members of some particular kind of creature—plants and animals, say, as in the question under discussion here, or inanimate creatures, such as the kinds of things cataloged by inorganic chemistry or astronomy—remain in the resurrection. The first is to ask whether the members of the kind in question have the right properties—whether the kind is, in itself, the right kind to have members capable of remaining in the resurrection. This trajectory of thought asks and tries to answer the question of whether this is the kind of thing that can survive death or other kinds of destruction in much the same way that a chemist might ask whether a particular type of bacterium can survive a temperature of minus one hundred degrees Celsius. Such a way of asking whether plants and animals remain in the resurrection directs the gaze toward what they are like in themselves, and asks whether what they are like permits this or that possibility. That is one way to go at the question. The second trajectory of thought is very different. It asks not about plants and animals considered simply as such, but rather about the nature of their relations with us and ours with them. Are they, those who follow this trajectory of thought ask, related to us in such a way that if we survive death they must too? Is there, or might there be, a symbiotic relation between us and them, such that we cannot flourish, or perhaps even exist, without them? Biologists sometimes ask these sorts of questions about the relations between microorganisms and their larger hosts, and the answers given sometimes do make use of the idea of symbiosis. Some bacterial microorganisms, for instance, can live only within a human body; and some among these are, it appears, necessary for the flourishing and indeed the continued existence of such bodies—here in the devastation, at least. In such cases, there is a bidirectional symbiosis: the bacterium’s continued existence is necessary for the existence of its host, and the host’s continued existence is necessary for the existence of the bacterium. Perhaps



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something of the same kind might be said about the relations human creatures have with plants and animals. Considering symbiosis requires thinking about a creature not in isolation, simply in terms of the kind of thing it is, but rather in terms of the kinds of relations it does or may bear to other creatures, and in most cases that means its relations to us, to human creatures. We can make this second trajectory of thought more precise by asking two intimately related questions. The first is, What part do our relations with plants and animals play in constituting us as the kind of animal we are? And the second is, What part do our relations with plants and animals play in making us fit for that final felicity which is beatitude? These questions are intimate with one another because, among other things, if we think, or come to think, that relations with such creatures are essential to us, if we could not be the kind of creature we are without having such relations, then we will have to say that it makes dubious sense to suggest that these relations might simply end—or, more strongly, that they must end in the resurrection. Consider a text from Thomas: Nonetheless, when the heavens cease to move and the elements to generate and corrupt, their substance will remain because of the immovability of God’s goodness: He created things so that they might be [Wis 1:14]. And so, those things which have an aptitude for perpetuity will remain in perpetuity. . . . In accord with this, [only] those things that have in any way at all an aptitude for perpetuity will remain in their substance in the world’s final state, for God supplements by his power what they lack because of their infirmity. But other things, animals and plants and mixed bodies, which are completely corruptible in whole and in part, will in no way remain in that state of incorruption. (Summa contra gentiles, from 4.9)

Thomas here says that for creatures to remain in the resurrection, in the final state of the world in which there is no further change, they need aptitude for perpetuity (aptitudinem habent ad perpetuitatem). That is, it must be the kind of thing that can endure in this way. Even such creatures (Thomas uses “things,” res, but “creatures” better signals the unavoidable intimacy with and dependency on the LORD that Thomas also affirms) need the LORD’s help to endure, however, because nothing can come into being or remain in being without such grace; but those things without

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such an aptitude cannot, in principle, endure. They “will in no way remain in that state of incorruption” (nullo modo . . . remanebunt in illo incorruptionis statu), which means that they will, without remainder, cease to be. This is a clear example of the first trajectory of thought: plants and animals simply lack, in his view, whatever it takes to be present in the resurrection. They are without remainder corruptible (totaliter sunt corruptibilia), being in this unlike human animals, whom he thinks corruptible in part (that is, in the flesh of their bodies) and incorruptible in part (that is, in their souls), and unlike, too, the heavenly bodies and the material elements, which, in different ways that need not detain us here, do in his view have aptitude for perpetuity, and therefore for remaining in the resurrection. On the view presented in this passage, what remains in the resurrection includes the heavenly bodies and human bodies; but it does not and cannot include the flesh of plants and animals. It is important to note the line in this passage that says, “God supplements by his power what they lack.” It is there to emphasize that aptitude for remaining in the resurrection is necessary but not sufficient for doing so. Those who lack such an aptitude will inevitably not so remain; but those who have it do not necessarily remain. In order for that to happen, the LORD must supplement the aptitude, and does so by removing whatever infirmities stand in the way of its realization. Even we humans need grace beyond that which brought us into being in order to remain in the resurrection. A slightly more detailed broadly Thomist presentation of this way of thinking about the exclusion of plants and animals from the resurrection is to be found in the supplement to the third part of the Summa theologiae. This, strictly speaking, is not from Thomas’ hand—he left the Summa incomplete, which means that some of the most interesting eschatological topics are not treated in it. But they are treated in the supplement, put together by some among his students almost entirely from Thomas’ own words, and so it is not unreasonable to treat the text as his. It seems that plants and animals will remain in that renewal. . . . But on the other hand, if plants and animals will remain, it must be either all or some. If all, then dumb animals who have previously died must rise just as people do. This cannot be said, because since their form has come to nothing they cannot resume an identical form. If not all but some, then since there is no better reason to think that one rather than another ought remain in



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perpetuity, none among them will do so. And, since whatever will remain after the world’s renewal will do so in perpetuity, given the cessation of generation and corruption, it follows that animals and plants will without remainder not exist after the world’s renewal. (Summa theologiae, 3.91.5, from the sed contra)

Here, Thomas addresses first the possibility that all animals and plants rise in that renewal (in illa innovatione), which is to say in the general resurrection, thus to become, indefectibly, inhabitants of heaven. This, he says, is impossible because their forms—which is to say their soul-formed flesh, making them deer or dogs or oak trees here below—have come to nothing (in nihilum cedat). This makes resurrection impossible for them because resurrection requires the resumption of just that form that is no longer extant because it has come to nothing. When we rise, we do so with the selfsame bodies we had here below. Animals and plants cannot do this because their forms have come to nothing; and this means that they cannot rise and cannot be present in the resurrection. Suppose that only some animals and plants rise? This, our text says, makes no sense because there do not seem to be any reasons why some should rise and others not. The conclusion, then, as in our first text, is that presence in the resurrection is ruled out in principle for animals and plants: plantae et animalia penitus post mundi innovationem non erunt. These points, often made elsewhere in Thomas’ work, can be generalized in the following way: aptitude for perpetuity is required, though not sufficient, for presence in the resurrection; such aptitude is possessed only by those creatures that are not entirely corruptible; and plants and animals are entirely corruptible, which means that they have no aptitude for perpetuity and, therefore, cannot remain in the resurrection. Why does Thomas think that human creatures have such aptitude while animals and plants do not? The short answer is that human creatures are made in the LORD’s image, and that this image is preeminently present in our rational souls. Animals and plants lack such a soul, which is to say that they are not made in the image. Notice that for Thomas this is not principally, and perhaps not at all, a claim based on evidence about the capacities of various kinds of animal. That is, he would still hold it even if there were good evidence that, say, dolphins can solve equations or dogs can read minds, and even if we came to know of extraterrestrial creatures whose capacities for things like music-making and mathematics and cookery and theology

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exceed ours. Rather, his position is that aptitude for immortality is in principle limited, among animate creatures, to members of the human species (and to angels), even if it may not always be clear to us where to draw the boundary of Homo sapiens sapiens. The fundamental reason for this limitation is christological: the LORD became incarnate as homo, and, therefore, only the members of that species can be incorporated into his body and conformed to him for eternity. Thomas’ first answer to the question of whether plants and animals can remain in the resurrection is, therefore, an emphatic negative. His discussion of this point belongs firmly to the first trajectory of thought about this matter, which considers plants and animals as they are in themselves. But Thomas also has things to say that belong to the second trajectory, which asks whether plants and animals might remain in the resurrection not because of what they are in themselves, but rather because of how they are related to us. He is, on this matter, a remorselessly anthropocentric thinker. His working principle here is simple: all and only those things are present in heaven that contribute to the blessedness or beatitude of the human creatures who find themselves there (a beatis nihil subtrahi debet quod ad perfectionem beatitudinis eorum pertinet; Summa theologiae, 3.94.1, from the corpus); or, to put the same matter slightly differently, whatever is pleasing or delightful to human creatures in heaven will be there superabundantly (quidquid enim delectabile est, totum est ibi [sc. in vitam aeternam] superabundanter; from the Collationes de credo in Deum). What does this principle come to? Roughly, that whatever is good for human creatures and delightful to them will be present to and available for them in the resurrection. Thomas has a lot to say in various places about what is good for and delightful to us. He includes the delights of social interaction with other humans among the blessed, because pleasures are intensified when shared; the vision of the sufferings of the damned in hell, which is pleasurable to the blessed not because of the nature of the sufferings, which are intense and eternal, but rather because of the witness of those sufferings to the LORD’s justice; and much else as well. The important point is that these goods proper to the resurrection are broadly social or relational. They have to do with the ways in which each human creature resurrected to eternal life relates to creatures other than him- or herself. Membership in the communion of saints belongs properly to heavenly life, as does continued relation with the damned, and both are social facts.



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Consider now another text from Thomas: It is beautifully appropriate that every natural defect be removed from risen bodies, for every such defect detracts from the integrity of [human] nature. .  .  . What is said about the integrity of the resurrected ought be understood to refer to true human nature. What does not belong to true human nature is not resumed by the resurrected. (Compendium theologiae, from nos. 158–59)

This belongs to a discussion of the resurrection, and has mostly to do with the nature of the resurrected human flesh, about which Thomas has many things of interest to say. The point of interest here, however, is the beautifully clear claim that resurrected flesh has whatever is proper to its integrity, and lacks every defect that would detract from that integrity. Thomas generalizes the point: “What is said about the integrity of the resurrected (de integritate resurgentium) ought to be understood to refer to true human nature (referri oportet ad id quod est de veritate human nature). What does not belong to true human nature is not resumed by the resurrected (in resurgentibus non resumetur).” The conditional Thomas here affirms is that if some property or relation does belong to human nature properly understood, then it will belong to all those resurrected to eternal life. And, contrapositively, if some property or relation is a defect of human nature—being sinful, perhaps, or being mortal, or rejecting the society of the saints—then none among those resurrected to eternal life will possess it. This opens the door to consideration of whether relations other than those with the LORD, with angels, and with other human creatures do in fact belong to the integrity of human nature. Such relations might include those with plants and animals. If it can be argued that such relations are of that kind, then it follows at once that whatever is necessary for them to obtain must be present in the resurrection. Staying with Thomas, we can say that whatever is proper to human nature remains in the resurrection; we can also say that included among those things proper to the nature of each individual human creature are relations with creatures other than itself—that is the point about relations with others among the saved, and with the damned suffering in hell. And we can say that whatever is properly delightful to us—whatever is properly delectable, provides us delectationes—is also present to us in the resurrection, present, indeed, in maximal degree. Still staying with Thomas,

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we can say that, saving the question of the angels, heaven is arranged for the benefit of human creatures. Nonhuman creatures that remain in the resurrection are there just and only because their presence is required for the felicity of human creatures. Such creatures, whatever they turn out to be—and Thomas thinks they include some inanimate creatures such as the heavenly bodies—remain in the resurrection not for their own benefit, but for a single reason: their presence is necessary for the felicity of the human creature, either because such presence is a human necessity, or because it contributes to human delight—and in fact these two reasons, being a human necessity and contributing to human delight, collapse into one, because in heaven all human necessities are also delights (§24). This is a remorselessly anthropocentric view of heaven. If any plant or animal is present there, it is only because of the nature of the relations it bears to us, not because of anything about itself independent of its relations to us. Thomas here splendidly represents what I called in §12 the anthropocentric pattern of thought, which is deep in Christianity’s grammar. Thomas is explicit about this last point: We see, therefore, that less perfect things serve the use of more noble things: plants take nourishment from earth, animals from plants, and those in turn serve the use of humans. It follows that the inanimate is for the sake of the animate, plants for the sake of animals, and those in turn for the sake of humans. And since, as has been shown, intellectual natures are superior to corporeal ones, it follows that the entirety of corporeal nature is ordered to the intellectual. Among intellectual natures, that most intimate with the body is the rational soul, which is the form of the human. Therefore, it is apparent that in a way the entirety of corporeal nature is for the sake of the human considered as a rational animal; the consummation of the entirety of corporeal nature depends, therefore, in a way, upon the consummation of the human. (Compendium theologiae, from no. 148; see also §12 for discussion of this text)

This is a standard and familiar representation and deployment of the hierarchy of being. At the bottom come inanimate creatures, then animate creatures without the capacity for self-movement (plants), then animate creatures that can move themselves (animals), then animate rational creatures, themselves divided into those with flesh (homines, which is to say humans) and those without (angels, as Thomas understands them). The relation of lower to higher at each stage is expressed by Thomas in three



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ways: first, by the phrase cedere ad usum, which means to serve the use of, or to give way to the use of, or (even) to self-abnegate in service of; second, by the verb ordinare, which in the quotation given is translated “ordered,” and which, when combined with the preposition ad, as in “the entirety of corporeal nature is ordered to the intellectual,” indicates a relation of ordered subordination—if x is ordered to y, then x is placed in hierarchical subordination to y; and third, by the preposition propter, which in contexts such as this means “for the sake of.” The conceptual point common to all these expressions is that those lower in the hierarchy have no purpose or goal or end other than and additional to the service they can render those immediately above them. The perfection or consummation of those lower in the hierarchy, therefore, is to be understood exclusively in terms of the contribution they make to those above them in the hierarchy. It is true that Thomas modifies this claim by his use of the adverb quodammodo, “in a way”; this opens the door a crack for the consideration that there may be some purpose for the entirety of corporeal nature additional to service of what is intellectual (I return to this in §§29–31), and some kind of consummation for the corporeal (which includes plants and animals) additional to their service of human consummation. But Thomas does not return to specification of this possibility. Thomas acknowledges that plants and animals do us many services here below, in the world devastated by the effects of the fall. But he does not think that any of those services will be needed in the resurrection. Plants and animals serve us here below by providing us food, whether with their bodies directly, as when we eat flesh, or with the products of their bodies, as when we eat eggs or milk. They also serve us by providing clothing, as when we use their skins or wool or hair to cover ourselves; and they serve us by providing physical strength to perform some function for us, as when they carry us on their backs or plough fields for us, or the like. When Thomas enumerates the services that nonhuman animals do us here below, he does not go beyond these: provision of food, clothing, and labor, all of which fall under the heading of material necessities. And since we will no longer have needs of this kind when we are resurrected, it follows, he thinks, that there is nothing that nonhuman animals can do for us then.

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So much, too briefly, for the shape of Thomas’ thought on the relations borne by human creatures with animals and plants. A first doubt about it is that Thomas offers too many arguments for the conclusion that there will be no plants and animals in the resurrection. The first argument is that, as a matter of principle, they have no aptitude for immortality, which means that as a matter of fact they cannot be resurrected; and the second is that their use for us can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of the material necessities they supply us, all of which are things we no longer need in heaven. The second point is superfluous if the first holds good. If it is really, metaphysically, impossible that plants and animals should be resurrected, then they will not be, whatever is the case about the nature of their relations to us, the nature of the services they supply to us. That Thomas makes both kinds of argument suggests that the first argument—that it is metaphysically impossible for plants and animals to be resurrected— does not appear to him to be decisive. If it were the case, the structure of his thought suggests, that something about the nature of the relations between humans and plants and animals implies that their presence in the resurrection is proper to, even essential for, our felicity, the fullness of our beatitude, then the metaphysical-necessity argument, the argument about lack of aptitude for resurrection, would fall away, or at the very least be placed in doubt. This provides an opening in the fabric of Thomas’ thought. A second doubt about Thomas’ position (and recall that his position is close to being the standard speculative Christian position, though without approaching the status of doctrine) has to do with his use of the anthropocentric pattern of thought. Should we think, and if so why should we think, that everything about the corporeal creation is for our benefit, is propter nos? That, in the case of plants and animals specifically, their only way of serving and glorifying the LORD is by way of their service to us? Many of our contemporaries, Christian and otherwise, do not think this, and even find the position morally and aesthetically repugnant (see the brief discussion in §12). This is not to say that the pattern of thought can easily be abandoned by Christians. There are christological reasons for holding to it. But there are also strong reasons to think about abandoning it, among which are its lack of prima facie plausibility. Even if we restrict attention to this small planet, there seems to be much about its flora and fauna that has nothing at all to do with us: there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of aquatic species no member of which has



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had in-the-flesh exchange with any human creature; and there are millions of now-extinct species all of whose members lived and died before there were any human creatures at all. And if we extend our thought beyond this planet and this solar system to other planetary systems and other galaxies, the prima facie implausibility of the anthropocentric pattern of thought is intensified. How could all this be for our use and benefit? Christian thought exhibits some tension at this point. That tension will not be resolved here. What theologians do, or ought do, when they find themselves in such a condition is not to throw up their hands, but rather to clarify the tension by accentuating it. With that in mind, what follows provides two speculative sketches about the last things of plants and animals, one of which, following Thomas and the vast majority of Christian theologians who have speculated on the matter, assumes the anthropocentric pattern of thought and offers a picture of the last things of plants and animals on that basis. The second also offers such a picture, but bases it on a rejection of the anthropocentric pattern, which is to say upon an affirmation of the thought that plants and animals may be able to glorify the LORD independently of what they have to offer us. In both pictures, there are animals and plants in heaven; but the reasons in each case are different. Suppose, then, that we follow Thomas’ anthropocentric pattern of thought, and yet affirm that there are nonhuman animals in the resurrection. This conclusion contradicts Thomas, and so the best we can hope for is that the position be broadly Thomist rather than more narrowly intimate with what Thomas says. But that can reasonably be hoped for: there is an opening in Thomas’ thought for the position about to be entertained. On this first speculative track, Thomas’ view that everything about the corporeal creation is for human benefit is accepted; accepted, too, is his claim that all and only what contributes to human felicity will be present in the resurrection; from which it follows that the conditional, if a plant or animal is to be present in the resurrection it must make a contribution to human felicity, is also accepted. The difference from Thomas lies in a speculative affirmation of the antecedent of that conditional—a tentative affirmation, that is, that there is indeed a contribution that plants and animals make to eternal human felicity, and a specification of what that contribution is, or may be.

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But first it is important to show what it is not. There are two aspects to this. First, plants and animals do not make a contribution to human felicity by possessing rich inner lives. Second, they do not make a contribution to human felicity by being like us. First, the question of the inner lives of plants and animals. Thinking that they have such a life is a sentimental error. Sentimentalists attribute to nonhuman animals inner lives like ours—feelings, hopes, doubts, aspirations, fears, and hatreds, among much else—imagining them to be like us in almost every respect other than that of form. This is a mistake. It is not a mistake because we know them not to have such a life, though it is clear enough that some among them do not (the inner life of a hibiscus or a honeybee must be minimal at best), and even among those who might (dolphins, bonobos, dogs), it is likely that they do not have much of one. Rather, it is a mistake because we have no idea of what that inner life is like even where there is or may be one, and we deceive ourselves if we think we do. Even those nonhuman animals most physiologically like us—other primates, for instance—are still deeply different from us physiologically, so different that we can imagine little or nothing of the quality of their sensory experience, and still less of their affective or intellectual life, should they have one. And when we move to animals much more physiologically different from us than the primates—dogs or horses or dolphins or bats, for instance—there is almost nothing we can reasonably say about what the fabric of their lives is like—about, that is, what it seems like to them to be them. The barriers are too great, and the enterprise of imaginatively entering into their lives thus effectively impossible. Wittgenstein identifies the error in all this with characteristic brevity: “It is sometimes said: animals do not talk because they lack the mental abilities. And this means: ‘They do not think, and that is why they do not talk.’ But—they simply do not talk” (Philosophische Untersuchungen, from no. 25). The first error, therefore, in thinking about the contribution plants and animals might make to our felicity is to locate that contribution in the richness of their inner lives. It is an error because we have and can have almost no idea about the texture of those lives. But even if we could have more of an idea than we can have about this matter, it still would not provide what we need for a broadly Thomist account of what they are for us, because it would be, in the first instance, about them and not about us. The inner lives of nonhuman animals become significant for us only if



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we waste our time imagining them, something we do not need to do. The contributions they make to our felicity are not to be found here. The second error in thinking about animals and plants is to assimilate them to us, and to locate the contribution they make to our felicity in such supposed similarity. This is a very widespread mistake. Attending to primates and dolphins and even to some dogs suggests to some that the differences between human and nonhuman animals are not so great. We and they feel pain, communicate, use tools, act altruistically, and so on, it is often argued. And it is surely the case that the capacities of many nonhuman animals are greater than those of human babies and those of some adult humans. What grounds, then, are there for defending a sharp and bright line between human and other animals? Why not simply acknowledge that observation of the continuum of animal life does not yield any very obvious way of establishing a difference in kind between us and them? There is a good deal in this. Observation of capacities for action does indeed strongly support the claim that nonhuman animals do many of the things we do, that it is difficult to point to activities we perform that are impossible for them, and that some nonhuman animals have capacities that exceed those of many humans even with respect to capacities that we value and take to contribute to our humanity. But if animals and plants contributed to our felicity just and only to the extent that they are like us, having capacities we value because we take ourselves to have them, this would mean that only a small subset of them could make such a contribution. The cicada and the cockroach and the wisteria have few or none of the capacities we have: they do not use tools; they are not altruistic; they do not perform well on tests of reasoning; they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror. And it follows, on the line of thought under discussion here, that they and their like—that means almost all animals and plants—cannot contribute to our felicity. If, then, we locate the contribution that plants and animals may make to our felicity in their likeness to us, we inevitably end in drastically limiting the range of kinds of animals and plants that may make such a contribution, and rule out completely the possibility that such a contribution might be made by animals and plants very unlike ourselves. If sentimentalism and assimilationism are mistaken ways of grounding the possibility that plants and animals may be apt for perpetuity because their continued existence is proper to human felicity, what is a

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better way? How may we ground this claim within the broadly Thomist track of thought laid out? Two possibilities suggest themselves, both speculative, but each in its own way compelling. Recall that what we need is an understanding of the significance of the relations plants and animals bear to human creatures, not an understanding of nonhuman animals simply as such. Only if we can understand those relations—ours to them and theirs to us—can we ground the claim that they may remain in the resurrection. The first suggestion is about what essentially belongs to enfleshed existence as a human creature. One essential aspect of that kind of existence, both in Eden and in the devastated world we now inhabit, is relationship to plants and animals. Often, perhaps usually, the relationship that any particular human creature has to plants and animals is constituted in part by active and direct commerce with them. We live with them, or see them often, or work with them on farms, or flee them in forests, or kill and eat them, or go to zoos or botanical gardens and marvel at them. These are all important, and for most of human history it would have been impossible to avoid such direct commerce as a fundamental feature of daily life. It is more possible now, certainly, at least for dwellers in the great cities of the world. But the relations in question are not constituted by and do not depend on direct commerce of this sort. They are, rather, a deeper and more structural feature of human creaturely existence. These relations are, first, of similarity: in the order of being we are constituted by the LORD’s creative act as enfleshed creatures among others like us, and we are related to them in a hierarchical order, as preeminent among them, alone among them in bearing the image and likeness of the creator (§21). We, like them, are enfleshed creatures—animals—and the world into which we come already has plants and animals in it. This is true both in an evolutionary account of creatures, and in the account given in the book of Genesis. Our peculiar mode of being as image- and likenessbearers is constituted, in part at least, by the specificity of the relations we are given to plants and animals that bear neither the image nor the likeness. This relation, again according to the Genesis narrative, is largely constituted by naming: we, in the person of Adam, give names to the plants and animals, and in so doing establish a relation with them of profound and unalterable intimacy. We are the namers and they the named; we are thus intimate with them, and come to know ourselves as the kind of creature we are by relation to and differentiation from them. To be a human



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creature, if we take this line of reasoning seriously, has as part of its definition to be related by similarity and difference to plants and animals other than and different from ourselves. We could not be the kind of creature we are in isolation from plants and animals: being intimate with them as namers to named—and different from them as image-bearers from those who, though living, are not in the image of the living LORD—is proper to the kind of creature we are. The scriptural account suggests still more about this theme of our essential, structural relation to plants and animals. When Adam has completed the naming of the animals, it is apparent that none of them is fit for true intimacy with himself, and so the LORD makes him Eve, from the flesh of his body, woman from man. She, too, is an animal, but her presence signals her and Adam’s difference from the rest: the two of them can be intimate and can eventually reproduce, which they cannot do with any other living creature. An essential point here is that the man and woman recognize one another as potential partners not just by attending to what they are like in themselves, but by attending to the contrast between themselves and other animals. Their knowledge that they can be lovers and parents, husband and wife, is in part constituted by both the fact of and their awareness of their fleshly (we might say genetic) difference from the other animals. Relation with plants and animals, then, on this reading, enters even, perhaps especially, into the fabric of human intimacy with other humans. This is the first element in a complex claim about the nature of the relations between nonhuman and human animals. It is that they are mutually coconstituting. The existence of neither can be what it is without the presence of the other. Existing as named carries with it an intrinsic and proper relation to the namer, as also in the reverse direction. And, being both similar to and different from other animals is among the proper constituents of seeing with whom it is possible to be intimate and reproduce. An analogy: consider the sexed human body. The standard Christian view is that resurrected human bodies maintain their identity as male and female. This is not because there will be sexual intercourse or reproduction in the resurrection. It is, rather, because part of what it means to exist as a human male is to be differentiated from the human female, and vice versa. That relation, then, is essential to, an ordering feature of, human existence, as is shown by its continuation in heaven. To use the Thomist

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language informing this discussion, the continuation of that relation is proper to the perfection of beatitude, and that is because it—the relation of similarity-in-difference in question—is a properly constitutive element of human existence as such. The same is true for relations between human and nonhuman animals, though in this case the relation is one-directional rather than bidirectional. The argument need not stop even there. There is a second suggestion to make about why the continuation of human relations with plants and animals may contribute to human heavenly felicity. It has to do with the devastated conditions of the world since the double fall. The devastation is a field of blood. The animal creation, humans included, kills and eats constantly. Dispassionate observation of any representative square meter of ground shows that it is a graveyard of the violent death of small animals and plants. And human creatures, being usually at the top of the food chain, have institutionalized and formalized the practice of killing with an efficiency and on a scale that makes the Nazi death camps look like apprentice work. These practices are a horror. They deepen the wounds on the face of an already profoundly damaged creation, and those who do not lament and regret them are blind to what they are. There are elements in Christian thought that support this view. If death is an artifact of the fall, this ought to apply not only to human death, but also to the death of nonhuman animals, and even of plants. Thomas never suggests that human killing of nonhuman animals for food or convenience is a bad thing, or a thing to be lamented; but if death as such, the primary result of the fall, is to be lamented, as it must be, then there is no good reason not to extend that lament to the deaths of animals and plants, and especially to those deaths brought about by humans. The coconstituting relations that bind humans together with plants and animals, then, are profoundly damaged: now, those animals capable of fear do or should fear human creatures, their namers, as their torturers and slaughterers. Now the final brushstroke in the picture: How are wounds such as this healed, damage such as this made good, in Christian thought? Not by erasure. The witness of the tradition is unanimous, or almost so, that wounds are healed by transfiguration rather than removal: the marks of Jesus’ wounds remain upon his ascended body, and the scars of the martyrs’ wounds remain on their resurrected bodies. What, following this pattern of reasoning, should be said about the healing of the wounds of blood



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that have damaged human relations with plants and animals? One possible option is to say that those relations continue in the life of the world to come—that plants and animals will be resurrected and transfigured there not primarily because of what they are, and certainly not because of any imagination about their capacity to enjoy the LORD or to become more like human creatures, but because of what they can do for human creatures, which is to permit the transfiguration of human blood-soaked relations with them, and thus to bring those relations to their proper perfection, a perfection that contributes essentially to the constitution of human creatures as the kind of animal we are. That, in brief compass, is the first speculative sketch. It yields the conclusion that plants and animals are resurrected for eternal life, but not because of anything about them considered as they are in themselves. Rather because, following Thomas, their presence in the resurrection contributes to human beatitude there, and does so in two ways—first, by providing a constitutive element of our existence as enfleshed human creatures, which is active relation to other enfleshed animate creatures, and second, by showing the healing of our devastated bloody relations with them and theirs with us. Without the first, we would lack something essential to our felicity; without the second, we would be burdened by damage unhealed. Neither kind of lack is possible in heaven. Now suppose—and this is the second speculative sketch about the last things of plants and animals—that animals and plants might glorify the LORD independently of anything they have done, are doing, or might do for humans. On such a view, might they, or must they, remain in the resurrection? Entertaining such a possibility does not mean jettisoning every element of the argument just offered. It is possible that plants and animals do service for humans of a kind that might or must endure in transfigured form in heaven, as has just been argued, and that they have something to offer to the LORD independent of and additional to all that. So, affirming this second speculative sketch need not require abandoning everything about the first, even though it does require abandonment of the anthropocentric pattern of thought. It is Christian doctrine to say that the LORD is creator of all that is, visible and invisible, animate and inanimate. It is also Christian doctrine to say that the LORD acts only out of love because that, most fundamentally

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and essentially, is what he is. The LORD, then, not only creates the manifold kinds of plants and animals, but also loves them in their particularity—in their appearance, their constitution, their mode of reproduction, their complex symbiotic relations with other such kinds, and so forth. If this is so, and it is hard to see how it is not, and if it is also the case that animals and plants exist on this planet now in an unimaginable abundance of kinds, and that the variety now present is only a small portion of the variety that has been present in the past, then it must be said that the LORD is profligate in his creativity and promiscuous in his loves; he is profoundly and frighteningly excessive in both. There is, however, one feature of the life of plants and animals here in the devastation that the LORD does not love. That is their ceaseless killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, the shocking sharkish business that Herman Melville describes with such vividness in his depiction of the whaling trade: men hunt and kill and slaughter whales, hoisting their steaming and bleeding corpses onto the decks of their ships even while sharks tear the whale-flesh from below. Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the decktable are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. (Moby-Dick, from ch. 64)



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Melville’s suggestion that seeing this shocking sharkish business can conduce to devil worship is entirely apposite, and we need to remind ourselves of it because ordinarily this circle of death appears natural to us. We find it difficult to imagine how it might be otherwise, how the tiger might be other than carnivorous, how the mosquito might be other than a bloodsucker, how, even, the cow might be other than a grass-eater. But we should say, with as much clarity and precision and force as we can muster, that the sharkish business of blood and death is without remainder an artifact of the fall, the clearest evidence we have of the beautiful cosmos’ degradation into a bloody world. The LORD does not love the deaths of any of his creatures, and this means that he also does not love their acts of slaughter. And so, even though we cannot imagine what it might be like for plants and animals not to kill and eat, not to be killed and be eaten, we can and must say that this is what it will be like in heaven. Death is there removed not only for human creatures, but also, if there are any of them there, for all others. And that is because every artifact of the fall, every product of sin, is without remainder absent in heaven. Imagination fails with respect to this, but language does not altogether fail. Scripture occasionally depicts it: Isaiah describes the consummation of all things that will happen on the day of the LORD as including the end of all death and all killing, whether done by human creatures or other animals (Isa 11:6-9). The wolf no longer kills the lamb, the leopard lies down with the kid, and so on. All violent death is at an end in that timespace. A contrasting, pagan vision, is evident in James Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals.” Here the vision is one of violence endlessly extended, a repetitive stasis of blood, where for the animals It could not be the place It is, without blood. The[y] hunt, as they have done, But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe.

Dickey thinks killing essential to the felicity of some animals, as being killed is to the felicity of others. Those who are killed know that their heavenly life, their reward, is to accept their killing

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Dickey’s depiction of the heaven of animals is everything that the Christian vision is not. It is a hardening, a reification, of damage, all the more disturbing because of its beauty. An endless cycle of death dealt and death received, delighted in by all participants: such a vision empties the death of Christ of significance and makes the LORD powerless. The felicity of animals, their heaven, is, in deep contrast to all this, bloodshed ended, a peaceable kingdom. The rat is no longer in the terrier’s jaws; the worm, no longer in the bud. Christ’s death has transfigured and brought to an end all that too, just as much as the death inflicted and suffered by human creatures. Just as we do not imagine the deaths of the martyrs endlessly repeated in the life of the world to come, so we should also refuse such a vision of the deaths of animals and plants. Dickie shows what it would mean to embrace such a vision; that is a pagan gift to the church of great price. Plants and animals transfigured by resurrection neither kill nor are killed. If, as this second speculative sketch of their novissima imagines, they have value to the LORD and can glorify the LORD independently of any relations they have with human creatures, then it is possible that they are, in all their manifold kinds, resurrected for eternal life. Their existence is a good; that is axiomatic. The harms they do, to human creatures or to one another—killing, causing disease, producing terror or revulsion, and so on—are removed by the transfigurations of the resurrection. And so there are strong reasons to think that they should all be present. Every kind of good gives glory to the LORD in its own way; plants and animals are a good; therefore they give glory to the LORD in their own way. This speculation has an implication of some importance. It is that human reactions to or judgments about this or that kind of creature in the devastation need not be replicated in heaven. Consider snakes. Their presence prompts revulsion and fear in many, perhaps most, humans in the devastation, and there are good reasons for this, biological, evolutionary, and scriptural. Snakes and humans cannot live easily together in the devastation: as Scripture puts it humans try to crush their heads, and they wait their chance to poison our heels (Gen 3:14-15). But reactions and behaviors of this sort are artifacts of the fall, and will not be present



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in heaven. Even in Scripture, the overcoming of such enmities and fears is already suggested. Jesus’ concluding charge to the disciples in Mark’s Gospel includes the promise that they will be able to handle snakes without harm (Mark 16:18), which is a sign of the peaceable kingdom to come. It is sentimental, on this view, to think that only those plants and animals that please human creatures in the devastation can find a place in the resurrection. Fear and disgust directed toward any creature by any other belongs only to the devastation; in the resurrection, humans are able, impossible as it seems, to delight in the mosquito as much as the hummingbird, the coyote as much as the lapdog, the rattlesnake as much as the newborn lamb. The idea that all plant and animal kinds have their place in the resurrection is supported by the fact that it gives proper credit to the excessiveness of the LORD’s creative action. Even leaving aside inanimate creatures (§§29–30), the variety of creaturely kinds in existence now is vast; even greater is the number of kinds that have existed in the past but are now extinct. Even casual and imprecise knowledge about these matters yields an immediate impression of a fecundity that exceeds by many orders of magnitude what human felicity requires, whether in a preliminary way in the devastation, or at last in the resurrection. The LORD, it seems, delights in such excess; the world is suffused with the evidence of it. Its existence glorifies the LORD; why should it not be present in the resurrection? If heaven is the world healed, the world made beautiful as cosmos, Eden transfigured by the presence of the flesh of Christ and of Mary, as well as by the resurrected flesh of the saints, and if excess is a mark not of the double fall but rather of the LORD’s delight, then all plant and animal kinds, with all their individual members, should be present there, transfigured as inhabitants of the peaceable kingdom. So far, two speculative sketches of the last things of animals and plants. According to both, there is no reason to rule them out in principle from presence in heaven. According to the first sketch, which hews to the anthropocentric principle, such creatures are there for humans, as providers of something essential to human felicity and as participants in the healing of the violent damage that infects relations among all creatures here in the devastation. According to the second sketch, which entertains the thought that plants and animals may be desired and loved by the

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LORD independently of anything they do for humans, they are there as transfigured witness to the LORD’s excessive creative gift. According to both sketches, they are there in the flesh as an essential part of the heavenly assembly, centered upon the risen flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary, joining angels and archangels and the saints in the praise of the triune LORD in whatever way is most appropriate for them. Neither of these sketches is such as to require assent of Christians. The particulars of neither belong to Christian doctrine. They are, in almost every element and aspect, speculation, responsive to this or that element in Christian doctrine proper. A combination of the two sketches may also be possible. Perhaps, as in the first sketch, it is all and only those plants and animals that we have named and with which we have interacted that are present in heaven for us, mediately related to the LORD through us, and with our violence to them and theirs to us healed; and perhaps, as in the second sketch, it is all and only those plants and animals with which we have had nothing to do that are present in heaven for the LORD directly, their violence to one another healed. It is also possible to suggest, as a majority of Christian thinkers who have given thought to the question have done, that neither of these sketches is right, and that the only novissimum possible for plants and animals is annihilation. This remains a possible view for Christians, though one with considerably less plausibility than either of the two sketches just given of plant and animal presence in heaven. On this view, the view that plants and animals necessarily find their last thing in annihilation, when they die, when their flesh returns to body and is dissolved into its constituents, there are only bodily traces left, traces that do not permit resurrection. The most common version of this position denies to plants and animals a soul capable of continuing in existence discarnately, and concludes from that denial the impossibility of the resurrection of plant and animal flesh in such a way as to reconstitute individual plants and animals in the same way that individual human creatures are reconstituted by the resurrection of their flesh. Such a denial certainly means that discarnate plant and animal souls are an impossibility, and that there are therefore no such creatures in the intermediate state.



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But the elements of this view, the view that all plants and animals inevitably come to nothing because they do not have the capacity for doing anything else, can be further teased apart. Suppose it to be true that discarnate plant and animal souls are an impossibility, and that they are therefore absent in the intermediate state, bearing no relation to the purgatorial, hellish (on the way to annihilation), or heavenly states of discarnate human souls. This does not by itself entail that plants and animals will be absent in the resurrection. It means only that they will not get there by the same means that human creatures do. Another possibility is that plants and animals leave behind only the bodily traces of their flesh when they die, and that when (if) they are resurrected, this is done by a de novo act of the LORD, as an element in the renewal of the world in which resurrected humans will then live. Such an act would involve a reconstitution of plant and animal flesh exactly as living, which is to say as flesh not body (§1, §21), but not by the rejoining of a still-existent soul to the resurrected flesh, as is the case for human creatures. A position of this sort has the advantage that it shows with clarity the exemption of plants and animals from the need for judgment. They are immaculable and immaculate (§27), and since it is only sin that requires judgment, they must, if they are to be resurrected at all, be raised without need for it. Humans, by contrast, being both maculable and maculate, need judgment and can be damned—in the sense of coming finally and irreversibly to nothing. Plants and animals cannot be judged in this sense, and if they do find their last thing in annihilation, that has nothing to do with their sin. This difference between human creatures and plants and animals sits well with the thought that they—plants and animals—arrive at resurrection without entering an intermediate state. And that in turn is resonant with the thought that they do not have souls capable of entry into such a state. It is possible, then, to affirm what most Christian theologians have said about the impossibility of flesh-independent animal and plant souls, without concluding that resurrection is impossible. Whether such a view is possible—a view that affirms animal and plant resurrection while denying discarnate animal and plant souls—depends on disputable understandings of the kind of life that animal and plants have here in the devastation, and on those questions no position is taken here. A further difficulty about plants and animals needs to be mentioned here, though certainly not resolved. It is that their individuation is difficult,

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certainly in the order of knowing, and perhaps also in the order of being. One aspect of this difficulty is symbiosis, which is the ordinary state of things among plants and animals. One way of putting this is to say that what seem to be two separate creatures, for example a mammal and a bacterium, may depend upon one another in such a way that one lives entirely within the other’s body and that neither can survive without the other’s continued existence and action. In such a case, and it is the ordinary case (it applies to all animals, including human animals, above a certain, very small, size), the criteria for individuating bacterium from mammal are unclear. Why not call the creature in question, mammal-plus-bacterium, just one creature, with what would otherwise be understood as the smaller separate creature understood instead as a necessary part or functioning subsystem of the larger one’s body? Such a move becomes especially plausible if, as is sometimes the case, neither mammal nor bacterium is ever found without the other. Or, to take a different kind of case, there are ensembles of what to the human eye look like separate creatures (bees or ants, say), individuals occupying separate spaces, each capable of life apart from the others, which in fact cannot live without the ensemble to which they belong, and whose very physiology may depend for its health and maintenance on continuing complex relations with others. In such cases, how are we to decide whether the creature is the hive or the worker bee, the ant-colony or the soldier ant? Our common sense decisions about such things are based, usually, on human needs and interests (we find it more convenient to think of the hive—or the worker bee—as an individual organism), or on gross morphological considerations (this occupies space not taken up by that; this looks very different from that), neither of which need be intimate with the order of being—with, that is, the truth about the individuation of plants and animals. It may be that there is a correct answer, in the order of being, to the individuation-question about such creatures; if there is, however, we very often do not know what it is. Even if one or other of the sketches given of the heavenly last things of plants and animals turns out to be correct, there are likely to be surprises about what counts, to the LORD, as an individual creature, and therefore about the nature of the ensemble of plants and animals in heaven.

§29

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Inanimate Creatures

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nanimate creatures are those without life. The boundary between the living and the nonliving is not always obvious to us, and the criteria usually used to mark it do not always do the job. Some apparently inanimate creatures are capable of self-replication for example; this is the case for some crystalline structures. Many inanimate creatures are, it seems to us, self-moved (fire, wind, bodies of water). And in the other direction, some animate creatures are capable of dormancy for long periods of time, during which it may be impossible for us to discriminate them from the inanimate context in which they live. In the order of knowing, there are no bright lines separating the inanimate from the animate. In the order of being, matters are easier. Creatures without life have no souls and therefore cannot die. They are bodies, some extended continuously in timespace and some not (§1, §14), but all necessarily bodily. They provide, taken together, the timespace in which animate creatures live and move and have their being; and when animate creatures die, their previously living flesh, separated by life from the realm of the inanimate, becomes body by returning to that realm. Likewise, when a new animate creature comes into being in any of the myriad ways in which that happens—a mammal in the womb, a bird in the egg, a seed in the bud—an ensemble of inanimate material becomes flesh, which is to say is moved from the nonliving to the living. There is constant exchange of this kind between the animate and inanimate orders of the world. The remarks that follow do not require the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for the discrimination

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of the living from the nonliving in the order of knowing; but they do rest upon the assumption that there is a clear distinction between the two kinds in the order of being, which is why inanimate creatures are treated here apart from animate ones. It should also be said that ordinarily, most of the time, we are not in much doubt as to whether a particular creature facing us is alive or not, and that almost without exception we treat animate creatures very differently than we do inanimate ones. There are at least two intractable difficulties about the sorting and classification of inanimate creatures. The first has to do with sorting them into kinds, and the second with individuating them one from another. As to kinds, one approach to this is to attempt reduction of all composite inanimate creatures to elements that cannot be further reduced, and then to sort composite creatures according to the elements of which they are composed. The best we seem able to do with this at the moment is the periodic table of the elements, which is intended as an ordered list of the basic constituents of all matter. Even if (which is not the case) all bodies continuously extended in timespace are composed of these elements in various collocations and proportions, this still does not mean that the periodic table, when it is completed, can account for all bodies. Some bodies are not continuously extended in this way (quarks, for example), and others, even if in some sense so extended, have properties that make it in principle impossible for them to be accounted for by the elements listed in the periodic table (dark matter, for instance). And even if we did have a complete list of irreducible elements, no very obvious means of ordering inanimate objects into kinds would follow from it. Would we classify together all composite creatures comprising more than five elements? Or all those composed of more than 90 percent carbon? There are no decisive answers to such questions. When we do attempt such orderings, as when we distinguish solids from liquids and both from gases, we most often use functional or morphological criteria: we classify together things that behave in a certain way (they flow, they expand to fill any available space, and so on), or that share a certain appearance or feel (they are hard, or soft, or invisible, or radiant). Sorting things in this way is unavoidable and useful; but there are many ways to do it—infinitely many—and no reason to think that the categories arrived at reflect anything other than the interests and sensory



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capacities of those doing the sorting. The sortings are none the worse for that; that is just the kind of thing they are. But are there natural kinds among inanimate creatures, kinds, that is, really distinct independently of human interests and concerns? There is no reason to think so. For the purposes of this study, inanimate creatures are divided into two kinds only: those in the making of which human agency is centrally involved, which are artifacts; and those to whose existence human agency is irrelevant, which are givens. Such a division makes possible an address to the question of what the novissima of inanimate creatures might be. Artifacts include everything that human creatures fashion: books, paintings, sculptures, roads, and so on. Givens include everything else: planets, stars, mountains, wind, fire, and so on. All artifacts are made (shaped, ordered, ornamented) from givens: human creatures bring nothing into existence ex nihilo, which is one of the ways in which we are unlike the LORD. Givens can become artifacts: this happens when they are worked on, combined, disaggregated, reordered, and so on, by us. And artifacts can, with time, effectively resolve themselves back into givens: this happens when something we have made is disaggregated so that our work no longer marks its components. Think of an unmaintained adobe house gradually losing its shape and returning to the clay from which it came. At some point—there is no way to specify exactly when—its artifactuality vanishes and it returns whence it came, to the realm of the given. Almost all the inanimate creatures in the devastation are givens. We have not touched, and as things are cannot touch, givens distant from us in timespace, which include everything beyond the bounds of the small solar system in which our planet orbits. And we have not touched almost all the givens even on our planet: those too small for us to get at, or too distant or difficult for us to touch. And our artifacts are all short-lived. Were human creatures to be removed at a stroke from this planet, almost all our artifacts would have resolved themselves into givens within a few hundred years, and all of them without remainder would have done so within a few million. Artifacts are therefore insignificant in number and extent among the givens, as well as being short-lived: there have been artifacts in the devastation only for the last few hundred thousand years or so, while there have been givens for at least thirteen billion. So much for kinds. What about individuation? This is still more difficult. I addressed difficulties about the individuation of plants and animals

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above (§27), and showed them to be incapable of easy resolution. Matters are considerably more difficult so far as the individuation of inanimate creatures is concerned. Fortunately, no resolution is necessary for the purposes of this study. It seems unlikely that inanimate givens—nonartifacts, that is—are individuated in the order of being. There is nothing in the canon of Scripture or in the magisterial teaching of the church to suggest that this ought to be so, and nothing, too, in current natural-scientific orthodoxy that supports such a view. We can and must individuate this mountain from that or this electron from that or this river from that for our particular purposes; but it is hard to see why, short of stipulative definitional distinctions, there needs to be an answer to questions such as “How many mountain ranges are there in the world?” or “Which is the world’s smallest sand-grain?” With respect to inanimate givens, then, the question about their last thing will be asked and answered without an answer to the individuation question. Things are a little different with the individuation of artifactual inanimates. Their existence as artifacts is entirely dependent on human agency, and, therefore, so is their individuation. The criteria that separate one artifact from another—St. Peter’s from St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, for instance; or Andrew Wyeth’s Winter 1946 from his Christina’s World; or this football jersey from that one—may therefore be given, unproblematically, by whatever interests are served in giving them. The mass of inanimate givens is vast. This is a small planet on which we live, made to seem even smaller by the rapidity with which we can move about it; a human creature at one place on the earth’s surface can, if resources permit, now arrive at any other place within twelve hours. But even if consideration is limited to it, the depth and range of the timespace in which we find ourselves is such that we can talk and think about it only formally because it exceeds our imaginative grasp. A week’s walk in any part of our planet not overwhelmed with artifacts shows us something of this depth and range; a little study and thought about the processes by which what we see and hear and touch and smell and taste came to be what it now is shows us more; the result is a deepening sense of the insignificance, in terms of metronomic timespace, of our presence on this planet. This sense is multiplied many times when we come to consider the extent of interstellar and subatomic timespace that is not in any direct way available to our senses. The result of such contemplation may be invigoration



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(we can understand this, the extent of timespace, and it cannot understand us), or anxiety (we are as nothing before this), or somewhere between— the place particular human creatures occupy on this spectrum depends upon temperament and intellectual prejudice. We impress ourselves with our artifacts, too: the press of buildings and artificial light in the Ginza, the mass of taxis and cars and bicycles and buildings and filth and noise in Mumbai, the mile upon mile of strip-mall sprawl that is Phoenix, the endless ranks of books on the open shelves in Cambridge’s neobrutalist university library, the sea-lapped miles of roadway that link Florida’s mainland to Key West, and so on. But, as a little thought shows, these are small and short-lived by comparison, and the sense that this is so is underscored by ruined remnants of artifacts that also lie all around us: the skeletons of medieval abbeys and the humps of pre-Christian dolmens that dot the English countryside, the remnants of Roman roads that mark Europe, the half-understood monumentally decaying Hindu-Buddhist artifacts scattered through Indonesia, and so on. It is underscored, as well, by the constant effort we put into preserving from decay the artifacts whose preservation we judge worthwhile. We human creatures in the devastation find ourselves, then, inextricably located among decaying inanimate things we did not make, as well as among decaying inanimate things formed by us, the former far outweighing and outmeasuring the latter, and the latter without exception shaped and polished from the material givens of the former. Our sense of what it is like to be the kind of creature we are is inseparable from a sense of location among creatures such as these. It will be important to keep this in mind below (§30), when the question of the last things of creatures like this is explicitly addressed. A final point about the nature of inanimate creatures, both given and artifactual, paralleling exactly the points made above (§27) about plants and animals. Neither kind of inanimate creature, not the artifactual and not the given, is maculable or maculate. Sin is a category that cannot apply to them, which is also to say that redemption is beyond them. They all do, however, show the damage done to them by the double fall, and while they cannot do this by dying, as do all animate creatures, they can do it by decay, by losing whatever form they have and leaving their traces behind. They do it, too, by violent destruction: there are earthquakes, supernovas, cataclysms of various kinds, endlessly repeated. Such

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phenomena—anything that causes destruction and disturbs the peace of the peaceable kingdom—are evidence and result of the fall. The usual note of caution is needed here too, however, and with special emphasis: what seems to creatures like us to be violence among inanimate creatures or other clear evidence of entropic chaos, may not be; we are likely to be as reliable in our judgments about that as we are in our judgments about the boundaries that separate natural kinds in the devastation, which is to say not very reliable at all. Even with that caution in mind, however, the formal principle applies: violence, destruction, and chaos are artifacts of the fall, and the extent to which they apply to inanimate creatures is the extent to which those creatures have been damaged by the fall. If artifacts or givens can have the repetitive stasis of heaven among their last things, they must, when they enter that novissimum, become such that damage of that kind is fully and finally healed.

§30

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The Last Things of Inanimate Creatures

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he patterns of thought present in the two sketches of the last things of plants and animals in §28 are applicable to the question of this section as well, which is, what are the novissima of inanimate creatures? According to the anthropocentric pattern of thinking (§12, §28), the glory of inanimate creatures is found exhaustively in what they do for human creatures (and perhaps also angels), which means that inanimate creatures were created by the LORD solely for that purpose, and that their last things must be considered solely in that light. If, then, inanimate creatures have a last thing other than annihilation, it must be because they serve the felicity of human creatures in heaven. According to the second pattern of reasoning, inanimate creatures give glory to the LORD independently of what they do for us, which means that both their creation and their consummation can be considered independently of the glorious last end of human creatures. Each of these patterns of reasoning is possible for Christians, and neither is required. What follows provides, therefore, two speculative sketches, one for each pattern of reasoning. The division of inanimate creatures into artifacts and givens is also attended to: there are reasons to think that different conclusions should be arrived at about the last things of each of these. Suppose, then, that inanimate creatures are for us: their sole reason for being in Eden, in the devastation, and in heaven, should any of them be there, is that their presence is proper to our felicity. What can be said about

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artifactual inanimate creatures, leaving aside for the moment given inanimate creatures, on this view? In the devastation, these contribute to our felicity in two principal ways. First, they meliorate suffering and stave off death. We make clothes and cover our bodies with them in part to protect fragile flesh from a hostile environment. We make shelters to do the same thing. And we make tools of many kinds with essentially the same purpose. The heated and air-conditioned houses in which the privileged of the world live, stuffed as they are with conveniences and labor-saving devices, shelter us from the weather, make an intimately shared life with other human creatures possible, dispose of our waste products with relative efficiency, permit us to prepare food to stave off starvation, and make easier many of the repetitive tasks inseparable from the maintenance of fleshly existence in the devastation. Our automobiles and bicycles and airplanes and ships make easier the necessities of movement; our computers facilitate the necessities of communication and analysis; our economic systems—cash, credit, interest, investment, trade, and so on—smooth the necessities of exchange; our medicines and hospitals ease our pain and cure us of disease. And so on. None of our artifacts does its work perfectly. They fail, they decay, they have unintended negative consequences, they burden us with work sometimes as much as they liberate us from it, and their existence in vast numbers can damage the nonartifactual environment in deep and ugly ways. Nevertheless, without these protective artifacts most of us would suffer more and die sooner than we do. We put enormous effort into the making of such things here in the devastation, and these artifacts do contribute to our felicity here, even if mostly by protecting us, for a time and with limitations, from further damage. But it would be absurd to think that we make things here below only to protect ourselves and ease our lives. We also make things for delight and destruction, and sometimes the line between those two is difficult to draw. We make musical instruments and music; we make books and tell stories to fill them with; we paint pictures and sculpt statues; we build cathedrals and theaters and fairgrounds and rollercoasters and brothels and torture chambers and football stadiums and art galleries; we concoct drugs to narcotize and stimulate. We make, that is, many things whose principal purpose and effect is to amuse and to delight, to entertain and to decorate, to ornament and to astonish. These artifacts, like those made



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for protection and ease, are profoundly imperfect. Some incite to violence and hatred; others soothe and insulate their users by damaging them; and yet others are made in the service of utopian dreams that require destruction and killing on a large scale. There are places and devices designed to make killing easy and quick, slavery a quotidian and easily enforced reality, and the baroque infliction of pain a habitual delight for the inflictors. We put at least as much effort into the making of artifacts to delight and destroy ourselves as we do into the making of those that protect us and give us ease. And some among the things we make have all these effects at once. This is hardly a fully detailed or finely nuanced account of the kinds of artifactual inanimate creatures there are, or of the purposes with which they are made. Its broad division into artifacts made for protection and those made for delight does, however, identify the two principal ways in which artifacts serve human felicity in the devastation, and by doing that it sharpens the question about the last things of artifacts, for now it is easily possible to ask whether, and in what ways, these two kinds of felicity are needed by or possible for human creatures who have been resurrected for eternal life. With respect to artifacts made for fleshly protection the answer is easy enough. Human creatures in heaven have no need for such protection, and therefore no need for artifacts whose only purpose is to provide it. There is no need for devices to stave off death where death is not possible. There is no need for artifacts to protect against fleshly suffering in a devastated world where there is no suffering and no devastation. The inhabitants of heaven, therefore, have no need of hospitals or medicines or coffins; they have no need of houses or clothes, at least to the extent that those are protective; and they have no need of labor-saving devices where there is no work to be done. Artifacts of those kinds, on this pattern of reasoning, find their last thing in annihilation. They come to nothing because the needs they protected us from have without remainder been removed, and if protection from such needs is their only reason for being, then they will—with the consummation of all things that is the renovatio mundi, the remaking of the devastated world into a cosmos—come to nothing. Matters are a little more complicated with respect to the second category of artifacts, those made for delight or destruction. Certainly, heaven’s inhabitants have no need of, and no longer make, things aimed at or

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having the effect of damage. Those, like protective artifacts, find their last thing in annihilation. But what about beautiful things? What about things made for the praise and glorification of the LORD? Might those remain in heaven? Is it even possible that glorified human creatures, those resurrected for eternal life, might continue to be makers of such things? The answer to these questions, following the anthropocentric pattern of reasoning, is no: there are no such artifacts in heaven, and the saints do not continue to make them, or indeed anything artifactually inanimate, in that timespace. Seeing why this is the case demands a little more attention to the nature of human making, and of what heavenly human felicity consists in. The human act of making—of combining, shaping, and burnishing inanimate givens into a new thing—is not proper to human felicity. It is, rather, a response to the devastation produced by the fall. Among the results of that devastation were, at the human level, separation, opacity, and an unavoidable need for the mediation of symbol, image, trope, and ornament. Human communication as practiced in the devastation— whether it uses words, gestures, or is a function of simple physical presence—is, without exception, prompted by and responsive to the facts of opacity and separation. At the beginning, when we are born, we use the only device we have, which is the cry and the gestures that accompany it, to overcome these things by communicating to others that we need food or caresses. And as we grow, we make use of ever more ornamental means of attempting to make opacity transparent, and of dramatizing the impossibility of doing exactly that. We learn to lie; we learn to suggest and persuade and cajole and confess; we learn to write poetry and music, to seduce and to dominate by word and gesture and configuration, to stage and be staged (see the discussion of this in the realm of the flesh in §21). Beauty is a providential epiphenomenon of these enterprises, and is sometimes recognizable as such and as a forestaste of the beauties of heaven; then it is among the ways in which the last things are present in the devastation (§33). But when we make even the most beautiful things of which we are capable, we do so in the devastation always as a remedy for opacity and separation. In Eden, Eve and Adam made nothing in this way; and the saints in heaven will also make nothing. The reason is the same in both cases: that the separation and opacity that prompts the making of artifacts for delight are in that timespace without remainder absent. We are, there



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and then, transparent to one another in every way, in the flesh and in the intellect. We see and know one another directly, without the mediation of symbol and trope and ornament, and therefore without the mediation of inanimate artifacts, however beautiful. The most eloquently and beautifully self-revealing poem of love addressed by lover to beloved here in the devastation obscures as much as it reveals; it is otiose in heaven, where all lovers and all beloveds are known without remainder and without obscurity to one another. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for all other inanimate artifactual creatures of delight: they have no place in heaven, and those that exist now and here will find their last thing in annihilation. Saying so is no denigration of what is beautiful here below. The making of beautiful things is an essential response to the lack and damage of the devastation because it is a partial remedy for the opacity of separation; and it can be providentially blessed and used by the LORD to bring us closer to himself. How many people have been given the gift of a previously unknown intimacy with the LORD by a poem that begins, “Love bade me welcome . . . ,” or one that begins, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”; or by the iconic presence of Rublev’s Trinity or Caravaggio’s Madonna dei Palafrenieri; or by Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites? But such beauties are also dangerous in the devastation, and can as easily yield a fixed fascination with themselves as a transparency of themselves to the LORD, the source of all beauty. That is why there has always been an iconoclastic impulse in Christianity, in close intimacy with the iconographic: Michelangelo’s Pietà of 1498–1499, an icon of smoothly evident beauty, finds its counterpart in his Pietà of the 1560s, an icon of beauty’s necessary failure. The two should be looked at together in order to see what beauty can do in the devastation, and what it cannot. A particular comment is necessary at this point on the question of artifacts made for the worship and glorification of the LORD. These include such things as the carefully constructed ark of the covenant, the built and ornamented Jerusalem temple(s), the liturgical furniture and appurtenances of Christian worship, the music and words of hymns of praise, and even the words that constitute the canon of Scripture. These are all artifacts of the kind under discussion here, certainly: they are (ideally) beautiful, and they are made with human hands. Are there reasons that they should be exempt from the conclusions of the argument just made? No. All these things are also remedies for lack and damage, and in that

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sense artifacts of the fall. The arguments made in §26, on the last things of the church and its sacraments, apply here as well. Those resurrected for eternal life will not read Scripture; they will not use the chalice and the paten; they will not have baptismal fonts or the church buildings in which they stand. All those things will have become otiose because human creatures in heaven have the fleshly vision of the risen flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary, along with the intellectual vision of the eternal exchange of love that is the economy of the Trinity. They will not need to make anything less. And so, following the anthropocentric pattern of thought in play here, there are no inanimate artifacts of any kind in the life of the world to come because none of the limited felicities such things bring in the devastation have purchase or grasp in heaven. Human creatures there are not clothed with garments, no matter how gorgeous; their bodies are adorned with nothing except the marks of their past in their flesh; they have no books; they do not live in houses; they do not worship the LORD in churches; and, arguably, they speak no words in any natural language, any language subsequent to and consequent upon the separation of languages at Babel (Gen 11), for all those words are also inanimate creatures, artifacts responsive to damage no longer needed in heaven. The city is, for Christian thought, among the most important tropes for thinking about the last things. At least since the composition of the book of Revelation, the idea of the new Jerusalem has been inseparable from the idea of the renovatio mundi, the renewal of the world. In describing his vision of the new Jerusalem, John put it this way: And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the former heaven and the former earth had passed away, and the sea is no longer. And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride ornamented for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: “See God’s tabernacle with the people—he will live with them and they will be his people, and that very God with them will be their God. God will wipe every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will there any longer be crying or wailing or grief because the former things will pass away.” (Rev 21:1-4)

We ordinarily think of cities as artifactual. Do not texts such as this, together with the long tradition of commentary and liturgical use that



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stems from them, stand in some tension with the view that there are no artifacts in heaven because all artifacts find their last thing in annihilation? No—not if it is kept in mind who is the maker of this city, who adorns it and furnishes it, and how it is related to the earthly Jerusalem. It is the LORD who fashions the new Jerusalem; human creatures are not among its artisans, and nothing in it is made by human hands. All agency in this matter is the LORD’s: the city is his gift, and the human task is to receive it, as an element in the heavenly liturgy. And the gift of the renewed city is given only when the old one has passed away (abire), which means vanished without remainder. The same verb is used in the passage quoted of the passing away of the former heavens and the former earth and of “the former things” (prima abierunt), which means lament and all its concomitants. Just as they have been transfigured by what the LORD has done, so also the former heavens and earth, including the old Jerusalem, have been transfigured in the same way. The heavenly city therefore does not provide a counterexample to the claim that there are no artifacts in heaven. Not only is it not the case that human creatures make it, but the LORD also does not make it if that means fashioning it from preexistent material. Rather, as the LORD says later in the same chapter of Revelation, Ecce: nova facio omnia (21:5)—See, I make everything new. The new Jerusalem is created, rather than made, and is therefore not a divine artifact and much less a human one. On the same, anthropocentric, pattern of thought, according to which what finds its last thing in heavenly repetitive stasis does so just and only because of its contribution to human felicity there, what can be said about inanimate creatures that are not artifacts but, rather, givens, present in the devastated world not as creatures of human agency but rather as facts about the world independent of humans? Inanimate creatures of this kind—stars, rocks, oceans, dark matter, and so on—are brought into being ex nihilo by the LORD. This is not to say that secondary causes have nothing to do with their configuration, or with their change over time: wind and water shape rock; fire melts ice; particular chemical reactions contribute to the explosion of stars. But it is to say that the very existence of these kinds of things, whatever the epistemic difficulties about their classification and individuation, is what the LORD wants. These things form the fabric of the cosmos, which is to say of a

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gorgeously beautiful undamaged and unfallen world, and of a world without human creatures. The existence of such things is, therefore, not without remainder an artifact of the fall, and, therefore, not without remainder in subjection to the metronome (§15) with its entropic movement toward destruction. These inanimate creatures form the fabric of the world into which humans come. They provide the context for human fleshly existence at first in Eden, and then later throughout the metronomic history of the devastation. Human existence, always fleshly, is always located, always found in timespace, always responsive to a material environment other than and external to its own fleshliness. These relations are less intimate than, and altogether different in kind from, those we have with animate creatures (§28). But the two sets of relations are like in that each is essential to human existence, and each therefore a contributor to human heavenly felicity. Our fleshliness is in part constituted by its responsiveness to and limitation by material objects other than itself. In the devastation, that responsiveness and limitation is as often painful as not: we can be damaged by inanimate creatures not of our making. Violent interactions with them—the rock falling, the river flooding, the earth shaking—can hurt or kill us. But even here below, there are benign and lovely interactions of our flesh with given inanimate creatures. We can sleep in the desert under the sky and feel on our backbone the pressure of the sand, on our closed eyelids the pressure of the starlight, and on the skin of our face the caress of the breeze. We can smell the sagebrush blown to our nostrils from a distance. We can taste the sea-salt as we walk the beach. These interactions between human flesh and inanimate givens are pleasant, certainly; but they are more important than that. Without them, our flesh could not be what it is, and this means that we could not be ourselves. If we had only the caress of other humans and the touch of other animate creatures to constitute us as flesh, we would be impoverished because we would lose the given sense of kinship to and relation with a vast inanimate world. There would be a contraction in our sense of what it is to be flesh, a removal from it of a colder, harder, more alien presence than any that can be given by the flesh of others, human or not. What shows itself as the recalcitrance of inanimate givens here in the devastation—they do not respond to our desires; they cannot be persuaded; they cannot love us; they do not bend to our wills—is an instrument that teaches us a fleshly



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humility and a mode of fleshly being independent of love and dependent, rather, on responsiveness to alien particularity. All that is felicitous, and it remains in heaven, purified, of course, of the possibility of damage and death that always accompanies it here below. From this hyper-speculative position it follows that all the inanimate givens of this devastated world are present in heaven, healed of their damage, harmoniously coexistent with one another, and thereby able to contribute fully to human beatitude by being for us what we need in order to have our fleshly existence consummated. This is the renovatio mundi (§12) as it appears to the anthropocentrists. It is what John the Divine and the prophet Isaiah saw when they spoke of the new heavens and the new earth. It is the world-become-cosmos, the devastation transfigured into a beautifully ordered whole, free of conflict and destruction, in which human flesh can be fully and finally what it was created to be. The anthropocentric pattern of thought yields the following picture with respect to the last things of inanimate creatures. Among them, artifacts come without remainder to nothing. Those made in the devastation serve no purpose in the life of the world to come, and the saints have no cause to make anything once resurrected for life eternal. They receive all that they need as gift and return it as such. Making, a remedy for lack, has no place in this exchange of gifts. Inanimate givens, by contrast, are the furniture of heaven. They, without remainder or exception, are there in their fullness, transfigured and incorporated into the endless rhythm of systolic time, free from entropy and violence. More particular imaginations of how these inanimate givens look and feel and taste and sound and smell to the resurrected are possible only for poets, and scarcely even for them. Speaking formally, we can say that their contribution to our felicity is that they locate our flesh, and form it as resonantly responsive to inanimate givenness. How does the question of the last things of inanimate creatures appear if we leave aside the anthropocentric pattern of thought and entertain the possibility that inanimate creatures might glorify the LORD independently of what they do for us? In the case of artifacts, the conclusion is no different: since they are made by and for human creatures, they have no capacity to glorify the LORD independently of us, and do not, therefore, remain in heaven. Their last thing is to come to nothing. And in the case

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of givens, inanimate creatures that are what they are independently of us, the conclusion also remains the same, though for different reasons. These creatures remain, transfigured, in heaven, glorifying the LORD as they did when they were created before the double fall and without us.

Part VII The Last Things in the Devastation

Creaturely last things, which in theory may be of three kinds (annihilation, simple stasis, repetitive stasis: §1) but in actuality are of only two (annihilation, repetitive stasis), have a presence in the devastation. Heaven, the repetitively static and endless peaceful participation of redeemed and healed creatures in the glory of the LORD, is present here as traces and anticipations. The traces are of the glory of the cosmos and all the creatures in it as they were created, free from sin’s damage; the anticipations are of the much greater glory of the cosmos and its creatures as they will be when they are redeemed and healed, assembled in the worship of the triune LORD. Hell—the utopia of endless and irreversible separation from the LORD, which is the last thing of those creatures who succeed at sin’s project—has its presence in the devastation only as lack. Lack is what turns the cosmos into world, what makes systolic time into the time of the metronome, and what brings destruction to inanimate creatures and suffering and death to animate ones. Lack braids beauty and harmony and order with their counterpart absences: ugliness, disharmony, chaos. This weaving together of presence and absence, of glory and lack, is what makes the world (unlike heaven in this respect) rough ground, ground on which the glory of the LORD is not evenly distributed. At one extreme there is the intensity of presence found in the Eucharist, which is the

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fullest anticipation of heaven available in the world; at the other, there are deathcamps and bloodfields, slaughter and despair, desolation and devastation, which are the fullest anticipations of hell available in the world. There is much between these two; and there is no timespace in the devastated world that is, without remainder, hell’s presence-that-is-lack (such a timespace would cease completely to be), just as there is no timespace that is, without remainder, heaven’s presence (even the flesh of the incarnate one is wounded, even the flesh of the assumed one weeps, and even the Eucharist is celebrated by damaged creatures). From the double fall to the last judgment, the ground is, without exception, rough. All that is in the order of being. Things are rather more complicated in the order of knowing: because our cognitive and affective faculties are damaged, as everything is post lapsum, we can rely with confidence neither on our judgments about what glory’s traces are and where they are to be found, nor on our judgments about where and how hell’s nothingness is most fully foreshadowed. Trying to discriminate the two in particular scenes is difficult. Consider, for example, how to do this in the case of a typical scene of human desire (the open-mouthed kiss, eagerly reciprocated), or human violence (the polished brightshine of the sword bloodily slices an ear from the head), or animal violence (the echo-driven bats at dusk swoop to swallow a host of bloodsucking insects), or inanimate chaos (a sun explodes, pushing flame and energy outward, shredding planets, and then collapses into a dense and radiant dwarfstar). Where is the evil—the absence, the lack—and where the good—the presence, the glory—in each of these scenes? It is hard, though not impossible, to say; and we are often wrong in what we think about it. The ability to make such discriminations is a kind of virtue with intellectual and affective components, and like all such things it needs to be trained and nurtured over time. Even when well developed, it is not free of error. What follows in this part are sketches, necessarily impressionistic, of the presence and absence of the last things in the devastation. Recognizing the traces and anticipations of heaven and hell in the devastation is important for Christians because we are required to nurture and love the former and constrain and hate the latter. In doing these things we are agents in the devastation, and in the following sections (§§31–35) I make some suggestions about what this might mean in particular cases.

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Opus Domini

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he principal and most intensely focused trace of glory and anticipation of heaven to be found in the devastation is the eucharistic liturgy. In it, the life of the world to come is most fully present and evident, and by it the world is transfigured for a time into cosmos as systolic time’s reality overcomes, proleptically, the time of the metronome. The metronome is never left to itself in the devastation because the liturgy is always, in one way or another, being performed somewhere. It may be the case that Mass is always, at every moment of the metronome, being celebrated somewhere on this planet; it is certainly the case that the body of Christ in the form of the consecrated host is always present in multiple locations in this timespace, being adored; and it is likewise certainly the case that one part of another of the liturgy of the hours is always being said somewhere. These things, with all their accompaniments, are the principal presence of Christ in the devastation, which is just to say that they are the means, above all others, by which Christians participate in the LORD’s work, the opus Domini, of healing the world’s devastation. In §24, I treat in more detail the ways in which the liturgical life foreshadows heaven and how it may transform those who live it; all that needs to be repeated here is the formal point that the liturgy, in all its manifestations but with the Mass as its center and ideal type, is a work of the LORD in which human creatures participate and are healed by doing so; and that attention to the particulars of that transfiguration yields the most detailed understanding available to human creatures in the devastation of what heaven is like.

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he devastation is not static. It is a timespace in which human creatures move gradually and falteringly in one direction or another, toward heaven’s felicity or toward hell’s nothingness. We human creatures live under judgment: what we do and what we are thereby conformed to here in the devastation is directly relevant to the last thing we shall eventually arrive at, and this is a truth not only in the order of being but may also, to some limited extent, be known to those under judgment. Christians know, to varying degrees, what sin is and the nature and extent of their own sin. It is part of the Christian life to weave contemplation of these matters into the fabric of daily life and in that way deepen understanding of them. But to do that is exactly to know oneself as under judgment, as a creature capable of moving itself at speed and with relish away from the LORD and toward hell’s nothingness. For non-Christians, too, I expect, the sense of sin is widespread, even if not under that description. Most human creatures, probably, are aware of their capacity and proclivity for self-damage, and lament it. Hell is actively and really present in the devastation in this way, and this imparts a seriousness to what we do here. If we really can damage ourselves by what we do (it is difficult for anyone, Christian or pagan, to doubt this), and if among the ways in which we damage ourselves is to damage others (our capacity for that is altogether beyond doubt), then what we do matters, both for ourselves and for others. If the speculative position of this book is right, the judgment under which we find ourselves is still more

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serious, for hell, eternal separation from the LORD, is our own artifact. We, and only we (together with the fallen angels), are capable of effecting such separation; we, and only we, populate hell and prevent creatures from entering heaven. We should, and many of us do, tremble before these facts, and that trembling is exactly a mode of response to the presence of hell in the devastation. Such trembling can be efficacious as a means of arriving at recognition of what it is good to do and what it is not good to do, and as a means of encouragement to do the former and avoid the latter. Scripture itself sometimes notes this about the presence of the last things in the devastation. At the end of the seventh chapter of Ecclesiasticus, for instance, as the culmination of a long series of Polonius-like moral exhortations (don’t do evil, don’t seek high office, tell no lies, and so on), is written: in omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua et in aternum non peccabis (7:40), which can be rendered, “in everything you do, remember your last things and you will never sin.” Those who really do think that they can bring themselves to nothing and who would like nothing more than to avoid that outcome (“nothing more terrible”—recall the discussion of Larkin’s “Aubade” on this point in §23) are likely to take sin more seriously than those who obscure these facts from themselves, and more likely to do what they can to discern its nature so as to avoid conforming themselves to it. Trembling before hell’s traces and anticipations in the devastation in this sense is a well-formed Christian response. Depictions and commendations of it are deeply woven into the fabric of the Christian tradition. They are often combined with representations of the LORD as bringing about the damnation of the sinner by a punitive act of judgment, but this is not a necessary connection, as I have already argued (§23). Judgment is not necessarily punitive; it can instead be expressive in the sense that in it a judgment about a state of affairs now obtaining is stated. When, for example, a doctor says that someone’s drinking has caused irreversible damage to his liver and that he will shortly die as a result, the doctor is not punishing the drinker, but rather acknowledging and providing clarity about what the drinker has brought himself to. The judgments of human judges can, at least sometimes, be construed in this way as well. If someone has offended against the conditions of her parole, and if the penal code to which she is subject requires that she at once be incarcerated for having done so, then the judge’s ruling that she indeed be incarcerated is expressive: he describes



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what she has brought herself to given the conditions under which she lives. The LORD’s judgments, real and devastating as they are, should be understood in this way, as loving expressions of what we have brought ourselves to. It is therefore within the horizon of judgments of this sort that we live, and it is awareness of the reality of judgments of this sort that we ought to cultivate. Hell is present in the devastation really, as darkness visible and silence audible, a goad and a warning; but it is never present as a hammer in the hand of a vengeful LORD. Hell is what we can achieve for ourselves; heaven is available only as gift. This is a fundamental and important distinction to bear in mind for very many reasons. In the context of the present discussion, the distinction clarifies the difference between the presence of hell in the devastation and the presence of heaven there. Heaven is not something we can work for or achieve; its presence is instead given to us in a double sense, first as something that no one among us has access to except as received by gift from other human creatures (in this the gift of the liturgy is like the gift of language: no one learns to speak or to worship unless preveniently taught to do so), and second as something received by gift from the LORD (and in this the gift of the liturgy is unlike the gift of language: English and Latin are human creations, while the presence of Christ’s body and blood is not). The only human work that the liturgical (or the linguistic) life requires is the kind of open-handed and open-mouthed gratitude by which unexpected and delightful gifts are received. That is how you get to heaven: by grace. Arriving at hell, by contrast, is a long slog, done alone, by yourself and for yourself. No gift is given along the way, and no gratitude shown; those who get there may rightly be proud of their achievement because it is exclusively their own. Trembling before hell’s presence in the devastation is a well-formed Christian response. It involves the accurate understanding that sin and evil have no place in heaven, that one is oneself, like all Christians, riven by sin here in the devastation, and that if one is to enter heaven one will have to undergo a transfiguration of such depth and range that its particulars are unimaginable and deeply disturbing: What will be left of me when I am no longer a sinner? That is a question fundamental to trembling before hell’s presence in the devastation. Such trembling, however, like all well-formed Christian responses, can undergo malformation, and the most common malformation of trembling is despair, and its concomitant,

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scrupulosity. Those who despair of avoiding hell typically do so because they seem to themselves to be subject to repeated sin without hope of escape: they lie or blaspheme or torture or gossip again and again, without apparent end or amelioration; they commit adultery or fornication or murder or torture or gluttony in the same way; they see this, they see the results of it—their progressive self-damage and concomitant damage of others, their progress toward nothing, the increasing thickness and density of the veil between the LORD’s face and their own—and trembling becomes the only response available to them. Sin is then hyperreal, its glamour outshining what is also always there, which is the beauty of glory’s traces and heaven’s anticipation. They despair before that glamour, and become hyperscrupulous in the sense that the weight of their sin is so heavy on them, its burdens so unmanageable, that they cannot turn to the means of grace. For Catholic Christians, this hyperscrupulous despair may result in incapacity to receive the Eucharist because of a constant and overwhelming sense of sin; there may even be inability to receive the sacrament of penance and reconciliation because of a sense that one is unable sincerely to intend amendment of life. There are Protestant, and no doubt Orthodox, versions of these malformations. They are serious, and the only remedy for them is attention to the prevenience of grace and to the possibility that everyone, including even themselves, may eventually find themselves in heaven (§§23–26) no matter the apparent weight of sin. Trembling that removes hope is malformed, as is hope without trembling. Their union, each moderated by the other, is an appropriate response to hell’s presence in the devastation.

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Delight

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lory’s traces and heaven’s anticipations are present extraliturgically in the devastation as well as, paradigmatically, in the liturgy (§24, §31), and these extra-liturgical traces are proper occasions for delight. Such traces are evident to most human creatures principally as beauty, and this is evident in the nonhuman world, animate and inanimate; in relations among human creatures; and in human artifacts. That there are traces of the unfallen cosmos’ beauty in the nonhuman world is uncontroversial. Christians and pagans agree that the nonhuman world, animate and inanimate, is sometimes beautiful, and that delight is an appropriate response to that beauty, even though they disagree about how to describe and account for those beauties. Christians understand them to be a remnant of the ordered beauty of the cosmos, as an anticipation of that cosmos renewed as heaven, and, always and essentially, as showing the world, no matter how damaged, to be created by the LORD, spirit-infused and spoken by the word. Gerard Manley Hopkins provides an instance of response of this kind to the nonhuman world’s beauties that, although not typical in its own beauty, is entirely so in accounting for beauty by relating it to Christ: I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:

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The beauties in question are those of starlight and sunset and thunder. Hopkins kisses his hand to them, acknowledging and celebrating their beauty, delighting in it. But they are not delighted in as self-sufficiently beautiful things: the pagans can do that, and they do. No, they are referred beyond themselves. The “lovely-asunder / Starlight” is said to be “wafting him out of it,” and the “him” in question is Christ. The stars’ beauty shows his; they are beautiful because he is. He is “under the world’s splendour and wonder,” which means at least that he informs it, makes it what it is, and, to those with eyes to see, is evident in a veiled way in it. But the veiled must be emphasized, and Hopkins does that by writing that his (Christ’s) “mystery must be instressed, stressed.” “Mystery” here should be read as the whole mystery of the second person of the Trinity, which means, in Hopkins, as in Christian thought generally, not just the eternal begetting of the Logos by the Father, but also the sacrifice of the incarnate Son for the healing of the world and the culmination of that healing in the world’s renewal as cosmos. This mystery stresses the world in something like the same way that a geological fault stresses the rock in which it is found: the fault provides a line of cleavage along which future movements of the rock will occur, and the mystery of Christ’s incarnation and sacrificial death provides the inner line of tension, always a line of beauty, along which the world moves toward its transfiguration. Inanimate beauty’s traces—stars, thunder, sunset—are the evidence of this stress, and for the evidence to be appropriated and understood, to whatever limited extent is possible, it “must be instressed,” which is to say intentionally participated in by the Christian, made into the fault line that orders the existence of the perceiver of inanimate beauty in the same way that it orders the beauty perceived. Delight is among the means by which the world’s stress can be instressed—by which the world’s beauty can be seen for what it is and taken for what it means by human creatures who perceive it. It is not the only means, nor even the principal one (that is participation in the liturgy), but it is nevertheless important and should be cultivated by Christians. Delight should, that is, be made habitual, encouraged and celebrated and cultivated, as should its kissing cousins, wonder and joy. This is not difficult. It is a rare



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human creature who is utterly insensitive to the beauties of the nonhuman world, and much work has to be done in order to eradicate such sensitivity altogether. Christians ought not to undertake work of that kind: it moves us away from the presence of the LORD in the nonhuman order. Delight in relations among human creatures is even easier than delight in the nonhuman world to describe and defend as a trace of the cosmos’ beauty and an anticipation of heaven. I have written above (§21) about the ecstatic eros of human flesh, which is constituted by the fact of its fleshly relations to other human creatures and is in significant part a matter of delight. I have also discussed (§24) the place of human social relations in heaven, and the essential contribution they make to human felicity there. Here below, in the devastation, everyone recognizes that human relations are a proper source of delight: lovers delight in one another; parents delight in their children and children in their parents; friends seek out and take delight in one another’s company; and there is delight for the observer in seeing the delight that others take in their beloveds and children and friends. Delight is of course not the only element in human relations: sorrow, agony, and violence are at least as common; but that delight belongs there is recognized universally, or almost so. For Christians, such delight is understood best and most fully in the same way that Hopkins understands the delight we take in the nonhuman world. In our delight in one another we can see the image and likeness of the LORD’s delight in us, a delight given delicious form in the act of creation, by which we came to be as givers of delight to one another and to the LORD, and in the sacrificial act of our redemption and gradual sanctification, by which our damage is healed and the reciprocal delight we exchange with one another and with the LORD given fuller form. The cultivation of a sense of delight in human relations is, following Hopkins, to instress the stress already present in the human world by participation in the LORD’s delightful and delighting initiatives. A third kind of delight is in artifacts. I have discussed these above (§29) in connection with the last things of inanimate creatures, and I argued there that they inevitably find their novissimum in annihilation: they do not enter heaven. This does not mean, however, that they are not objects of delight here in the devastation; rather, they are and should be among our

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principal delights here, both when we enjoy artifacts made by others, and when we take pleasure in making them ourselves. Above all, the liturgy requires artifacts that delight every sense, and if the liturgy is our principal means of participating in the LORD’s gift, then artifacts are essential to that participation. We compose liturgical music for the ear; we design, build, and decorate churches for the eye; we make and burn incense for the nose and the eye; we prepare and consecrate bread and wine for the tongue; and all these, in various ways, engage the sense of touch. Outside the liturgy, we are constantly engaged in making. Much of what we make is to ease and protect our fleshly lives in the devastation, and is used without prompting or needing to prompt much in the way of delight. But some of what we make is delightful in intent and result: the poems scattered throughout this study, by Dante, Larkin, Auden, Hopkins, Dickey, and others, are of this kind. Whatever else they do, they delight; and it may be that this is their principal purpose. It is certainly the case that almost every human being feels and indulges an impulse to reshape the given inanimate creatures that surround them into artifacts that is additional to, even if not independent of, that of making for protection. Children do it as soon as they can, and even the poorest adults do it. Delight comes from doing it, and that is because in doing it we image and participate in the creative work of the LORD. It is beauty that makes it possible for artifacts to delight us, as is also the case with the nonhuman world and with relations among humans. But, as often, we need here to note a difference between the order of being and the order of knowing. No doubt there is a hierarchy of beauty in the order of being: some artifacts just are more beautiful than others. Bach’s first cello suite (BWV #1007) as performed by Pieter Wispelwey is, I have little doubt, more beautiful both in score and performance than a cocktailbar pianist’s hundredth rendering of the main theme of the score of the movie Titanic; and Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew is, I am at least equally confident, more beautiful than my three-year-old granddaughter’s latest offering in multicolored crayon. But because every human creature’s formation in the discernment of and delight in beauty is different, and because each of us is badly damaged with respect to our capacity to make reliable judgments about the presence and nature of beauty, we should not be very confident about the judgments we make, and should acknowledge that an artifact that seems to some human creatures crudely annoying,



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even repellent, may seem to others delightful in respect of its beauty. And if we put these two suggestions together we arrive at the (correct) conclusion that there is no hierarchy of beauty in artifacts obvious to all, or even most, human creatures. The temptation to establish such a hierarchy, and to try to argue those who differ—who do not see that high art is better than kitsch (Caravaggio’s painting being better than Norman Rockwell’s, the Bayeux Tapestry than any number of velvet Elvises, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s voice than Kylie Minogue’s)—out of their judgments, is very strong. But it should be resisted. Such arguments, even if the judgments about beauty enshrined in them are true, are inevitably instruments of class hatred offered by connoisseurs. The arguments are usually finely tuned and lovingly burnished. Christians ought to pause before succumbing to this. Christianity— Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—has been and remains among the great generators of kitsch, and that is because Christianity is and always has been largely a religion of peasants and proles. Most Christian art is and always has been kitsch: that is what most Christians like, and they like it exactly because it has the principal identifying mark of kitsch, which is to be free of nuance, lacking in subtlety. A kitschy artifact leaves those who interact with it in no doubt about how they should respond. The stations of the cross, present on the walls of every Catholic Church, are not subtle and are not supposed to be. They are there to conform those who contemplate them to the bloody sufferings of Christ. The connoisseur’s hushed, museum-trained gaze is not well designed for these purposes. That gaze values subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Its most characteristic grace note is self-congratulation at being the kind of person who likes this rare and beautiful thing, whatever it may be, laced always with contempt for those too crude, too uneducated, or too simple to be able do so. The general truth in these considerations is that contemplation of beauty in artifacts does and should lead to delight because it is an anticipation of heaven, a mode of heaven’s presence in the devastation; that such delight is a proper part of Christian existence here in the devastation; that it may, other things being equal, contribute to the sanctification of those who nurture it; but that there is no obvious hierarchy of beauty in artifacts here in the devastation, and that contemplation of kitsch may contribute to the sanctity of those who find it beautiful at least as effectively as contemplation of high art may to those who prefer it.

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ell is present in the devastation as an absence, as it must be if it is itself a lack. Sometimes, those absences are evident, to Christians and to others, and provoke responses. First among those responses is lament, by means of which we show that we recognize the marks of damage in the devastation for what they are. Lament may be accompanied by an affective response—fear, loathing, regret, hatred—to what is lamented; perhaps this is usually so. But it need not be so. Lament can occur without such affective concomitants because it is principally the expression of an understanding—an understanding that this, whatever is being lamented now, is not the way things should be; that it is an offense against order, beauty, and delight; and that it is important to acknowledge these truths about it. To exist in the devastation as a human creature is to exist in a realm of unpredictable but unavoidable death and violence and suffering (§15, §23), to be implicated in this charnel-house not only as one who suffers it but also as one who contributes to it, and, if one can see clearly, to be, therefore, a creature of lament. Christian commitments provide a particular angle of vision on lament, particularly because human death is understood not to be the last word about those who die, and because Christians look forward in hope to a last thing when all suffering, and therefore all lament, have been removed. This can sometimes lead to an insouciance about the sufferings of the devastation; but more commonly it leads to an ambivalence about them. This ambivalence, and the means for its overcoming, can clearly

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be seen in Augustine’s description and analysis of tears and weeping— among the principal signs of lament—in the Confessiones; a brief study of what he has to say about this permits the lineaments of a fully Christian understanding of lament, as a response to hell’s evidence in the devastation, to be drawn out. The first extended treatment of tears and weeping in the Confessiones occurs in the third book (3.11.19–3.12.21), where Augustine reports his mother Monnica’s laments over his adherence to the Manichees and his concomitant rejection of Catholic Christianity. She cries for her son the Manichee more copiously than do most mothers for their dead (amplius quam flent matres corporea funera), and her tears are a mode of address to the LORD, who hears and responds to them by giving her a dreamvision in which she sees Augustine converted, baptized, standing where she stands. In weeping, she communicates to the LORD a judgment or understanding of what is the case: that her son is confused, and that his confusion has separated him from the LORD’s love. Her tears are a form of prayer, which is to say of direct address to the LORD. It is a prayer answered proleptically by the dream-vision, and then later in reality when Augustine is baptized by Ambrose. Augustine depicts Monnica’s tears in this episode not principally as an outer manifestation of an inner feeling, but rather as an understanding of a state of affairs intentionally communicated to another—in this case to the Lord. Her tears are, as well, a communication answered: she speaks to the LORD in and by them, and he responds to her. In the fourth book (4.4.9–4.7.12), Augustine describes his tearfigured response to the death of an unnamed friend. The friendship—even though not, as Augustine sees it, vera amicitia because it is not between Christians (neither Augustine nor his friend is at this point baptized)—is intense. The two are perhaps twenty or twenty-one, and Augustine writes that their friendship was sweet to him beyond all the sweetness of his life to that point (super omnes suavitates illius vitae meae). The friend becomes seriously ill and is baptized without his knowledge. This matter, Augustine writes, was of no cura, no care or concern to him; and when his friend began to get well he tried to joke with him about what had been done, only, to his puzzlement, to be rebuked by his friend, who takes the matter more seriously than Augustine had thought he would. Augustine decides that



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he will conceal his motus, the movements of his soul, from his friend until he is completely well; but the friend relapses and dies. Augustine echoes Lamentations: dolor, sorrow, casts shadows over his heart (propterea maestum factum est cor nostrum; ideo contenebrati sunt oculi nostri; Lam 5:17), and he becomes to himself a great question (factus eram mihi magna quaestio). The only thing that comforts him is weeping: “Only weeping was delicious to me: it replaced my friend in my soul’s delights” (solus fletus erat dulcis mihi et successerat amico meo in deliciis animi). That tears can comfort puzzles Augustine, and he meditates on the question of why they do. Is it that our tears are a means of communicating our unhappiness to the LORD, and that they comfort because of the hope that we are heard (quod speramus exaudire te)? This could be true if, as we have already seen in Monnica’s case, tears are a form of prayer. But for the youthful Augustine, unbaptized and without faith, tears are not prayer; rather, they are for him simple misery, a bitter thing (res amara), comfortable only because they distract from awareness of the friend’s absence, which would be even bitterer. Tears, as the middle-aged Augustine sees it (he writes the Confessiones in his forties), show the youthful Augustine his true condition, which is one of unrelieved misery; but because he could not at that time understand this, he becomes attached to that very life of misery and dwells on and in it instead of upon his dead friend. The form of Augustine’s understanding of unregenerate tears is formally the same as his understanding of sin in book 2 (2.3.5–2.10.18). Just as sin, an absence masquerading as a presence, is there depicted as becoming a matter of interest in its own right, so also for tears here in book 4. He becomes more unwilling to lose his tear-soaked misery than he had been to lose his dead friend: “Although I wanted it to be different, I was more unwilling to lose it [my misery] than to lose him” (nam quamvis eam mutare vellem, nollem tamen amittere magis quam illum). Tears are the only things that provide a temporary escape from the agony of the dead friend’s absence, but when, Augustine writes, he stops crying, his soul is “weighed down with a vast weight of misery” (onerabat me grandis sarcina miseriae). These sections of book 4 are the only parts of the Confessiones that Augustine saw fit to comment on negatively in his Retractationes. There (2.6.2) he writes that his earlier statement that the only reason he wanted to continue living was that if he died the last remnant of his friend would also have died should be understood as declamatio levis, superficial

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rhetoric, rather than gravis confessio, serious confession. But this is already evident in the Confessiones, where it is clear that this opinion belongs to the Augustine of 376 (or so) and is not endorsed by the Augustine of 397 (or so). The Augustine of 427 (or so, when he wrote the Retractationes) is insufficiently sensitive to the temporally layered rhetoric of his own work of thirty years before. Here, as is so often the case for authors, the author is not the best reader or interpreter of his own text. Augustine’s youthful tears for his dead friend are in part different from Monnica’s for him, and in part the same. In both cases they are knowledge-bearing judgments about the state of things. For Augustine, it is a judgment of desolation: a world with death in it but without the LORD is a place of unremitting and unremittable grief, a hopeless place in which tears communicate desolation with no one to hear. For Monnica, it is a judgment that things are out of joint, but a judgment communicated to one who hears it and responds to it with a word of hope. Monnica’s tears are transparent: they can be looked through to the one they speak to. Augustine’s youthful tears are opaque: their flood shows only themselves, and that is why Augustine comes to prefer them to the memory of his dead friend. Their bitterness can become, if savored for long enough, half-sweet, a tangy flavor to be rolled around the tongue, puckering the tissues of the palate. The next major episode of crying in the Confessiones is in the account of the conversion in the garden (8.12.28–8.12.30). The young Augustine has, by the time this episode occurs, understood Christianity, and assented, intellectually, to its truth. But he is not yet ready to give himself to the LORD. He is held back by his old friends (antiquae amicae meae), especially his love for the fleshly delights of sex, and he cannot yet imagine letting these old friends go and permitting their transfiguration by the love of the LORD, even though he deeply and intensely desires this. He sees clearly the weight of his misery, and this prompts an ingentem imbrem lacrimarum, a great tearstorm. He is with his friend Alypius, but at this point moves away from him because, it seems to him, solitude is more appropriate than company for the business of weeping (ad negotium flendi). He goes away, lies down under a fig tree, and abandons himself to tears. The mention of the fig tree echoes John 1:47-48 (Jesus knows Nathanael before his call by Philip, when Nathanael was sub ficu), with Matthew 21:19 (the curse laid upon the fruitless fig tree) and Genesis 3:1-7 (fig leaves used to cover



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Eve and Adam’s nakedness) in the background. For Augustine, the fig tree is the place of the flesh, of the conditio carnis where the shadow of death falls heavy and our words bear no fruit. There, tears are better than words. And so, rivers flow from his eyes, and he takes these to be an acceptable sacrificial offering to the LORD. As he weeps, he hears the voice of a child from a nearby house saying tolle, lege (take and read). In response, he gets up after having checked the tearflood (repressoque impetu lacrimarum), goes back to where his friend Alypius is sitting, which is where he has left the codex containing Paul’s letters that he had earlier been reading, and opens it at random. What he reads—Romans 13:13-14—infuses his heart with a light of assurance and removes every shadow of doubt (omnes dubitationis tenebrae diffugerunt). He is able to proceed from this point toward baptism, and all his tears are gone. They return soon, as we shall see: baptism’s waters do not finally remove the water of tears, nor the need for lament. The point to emphasize here is that the tears shed in the garden are, like the tears shed at the friend’s death, a judgment. The judgment in both cases is one of despair: here, under the fig tree that bears no fruit and whose leaves were used to cover Adam’s and Eve’s nakedness, there is nothing but a desert of lament. But there is a difference between the tears shed for the dead friend and those shed for Augustine’s own sins and habits, for his inability to abandon his old loves. Those former tears were not a message: Augustine did not then see that there was anyone he could communicate his despair to, and so his tears became recursive (a bitter substitute for the dead friend), which, eventually and perversely, he came to savor and was unwilling to give up. But now, in the garden, he knows that there is a LORD to whom his tears can be offered, and he describes his tears exactly as a sacrifice acceptable to that LORD (acceptabile sacrificium tuum, echoing Ps 50), and so the tears become, as Monnica’s were, a prayer, an utterance directed to the LORD, and moreover a prayer answered. This was not possible in the case of the younger Augustine’s tears shed for his dead friend. It is interesting that weeping (fletus) is described by Augustine as a bit of business, a negotiation (negotium) best done in solitude. Weeping is work: negotium is the opposite of otium, which is exactly doing nothing, a holiday from work. And the work of tears is one of communicative exchange between the one who weeps and the Lord to whom the tears are offered as prayer. Why in solitude? Largely, probably, because of Matthew

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5:6, where Jesus exhorts those who pray to do so in solitude. Also, perhaps, because tears are a peculiarly intimate form of communicative exchange, better given in privacy, like a caress. And yet again, because the late antique man would likely have found weeping—especially his own—an embarrassment. Following his account of the tears in the garden, Augustine mentions (without describing) his baptism, and shortly thereafter describes the death of Monnica. The treatment of tears at and after his mother’s funeral (9.11.27–9.13.37) is the most complex and nuanced of any in the Confessiones, and in thinking it through it is important to keep in mind that these are postbaptismal tears. Monnica dies at the age of fifty-six, when Augustine is thirty-three; and immediately upon her death, a great grief, he writes, flows into his heart and threatens to flow out from there into his eyes in the form of tears. By a violent effort of the soul (violento animi imperio), he restrains the tears, drying (usque ad siccitatem) his eyes by an effort of will. His son, Adeodatus, does cry, and is rebuked for doing so. There is the implication of struggle: Augustine wants to cry and at the same time would prefer not to. He would prefer not to, he writes, because weeping at funerals might be taken to imply that death is miserable or that it issues in extinction, and these are judgments Christians should not make. Notice, once again, that tears are understood to be a form of judgment or understanding: they are, Augustine implies, appropriate when what they respond to is indeed lamentable; but since death, on a Christian understanding, is not, funerary tears are inappropriate. Were they to be shed, they would be a sign of Christian immaturity, like Adeodatus’ weeping (Adeodatus would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time). That, at least, is how the mature Augustine first represents his youthful self ’s initial reluctance to weep at his mother’s death. The understanding present in that reluctance is soon shown to be erroneous. Augustine is still puzzled at the intensity of his grief. If it is not grief at his mother’s extinction, or at the unhappiness of her postmortem condition, what is he lamenting? It is, he writes, the loss of the sweet pleasure (more affect-language) of the habit (consuetudo) of living with her and talking to her. That habit was powerful, and to have it suddenly broken is painful. In an attempt to cover up his grief, to make firmer and more reliable his mind’s restraint of it, he discourses to his friends upon the meaning



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of death. Offering these discourses—and it is not hard to imagine what their Polonius-like character might have been—soothes him, offers balm to his anguish. His friends listen to him with no sense that he is suffering (sine sense doloris me)—and indeed, for a while, as he discourses, he does not suffer. But then, in typically Augustinian fashion, he begins to reproach himself for the mildness of his feeling, his affectus. His grief has bowed to his will, and even that fact grieves him; and as it does, his first grief returns in flood, even in paroxysm. At that, he becomes unhappy that he is so moved with grief for his mother’s death: he now sorrows for his sorrow, just as he had earlier grieved for his lack of grief. The disturbance or turbulence of sorrow has become multilayered. Still, he does not cry, even though he wants to; and although he asks the LORD to take his sorrow away, this does not happen. Augustine comments that his sorrow provides a lesson in the power of habit, and that the LORD does not remove it exactly in order to drive that lesson home. The habit in question is, again, that of living happily with his mother. Monnica’s body is taken out for burial, and Augustine and his companions accompany it tearless (imus redimus sine lacrimis), even when the interment is done. Throughout the day, however, he finds himself oppressed with a hidden (occultus, here meaning not made outwardly manifest) suffering and disturbance of mind. Still hoping that his sorrow might be taken from him, he decides to take a bath, with the thought that this might expel the grief from his soul (anxietatem pellat ex animo). He offers etymological speculation on the meaning of the Greek word for “bath” (balanion) in order to explain this, a typical instance of the imbrication of his metaphysics with his understanding of language. The bath does not wash away his grief; but now he is alone, and he permits memories of his mother to return to him and press upon him. In doing so, he writes, he finally sets free or liberates the tears he had kept bottled up (dimisi lacrimas quas continebam), and their flow becomes a pillow for his heart. Once again, he cries in solitude, as a mode of address to the LORD: his tears, or at least his depiction of them, are a mode of address directly to the LORD. The tears heal his wound, his vulnus—that is, the wound of his separation from his mother, the shattering of that habit. The wound in question is a humanum, a human thing, part of the human condition; and tears, he now sees, are an element in the appropriate response to that wound, its salve or balm.

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In shedding tears, Augustine cries for all flesh and all fleshly wounds, and in giving an account of his solitary weeping for his mother’s death, he provides an account of what tears mean for Christians. This is worth quoting in full: I wept freely before you [that is, before the LORD] for her and about her, for myself and about myself. I let out the tears I had held in so that they might flow as much as they wanted, supporting my heart. It rested on them because your ears were there, not those of some man offering an arrogant interpretation of my weeping. And now, O LORD, I confess to you in written words which anyone who wishes may read and interpret as he wishes; if he discovers any sin in the fact that I wept for my mother for a small part of an hour, that mother who had died before my eyes and had for many years wept for me that I might live before yours, he should not deride me but should rather, if he has any love, himself weep before you, the father of all the brothers of your Christ, for my sins. (Confessiones, from 9.13.33)

Tears have an audience: they are communicative, and in thinking about what they communicate it is important to think about their audience. Augustine here distinguishes a critical human audience, Stoic or Platonist in tendency, whose members might interpret his tears arrogantly, as a sign of weakness or childishness. This is a tendency he is himself subject to, as his conflict about whether he should cry for his mother shows. But such hearers are not the real audience for Christian tears. That, rather, is the LORD: as Augustine strikingly puts it, his ears are in our tears (ibi erant aures tuas), and that is why tears provide a support for our hearts, our cordes. The play with eyes and ears in the passage is remarkable: our eyes weep; Monnica has died before Augustine’s eyes; she has spent a good portion of her life weeping with her eyes for him so that he might live before (in the sight of) the LORD’s eyes. And ears hear: the LORD’s ears are present in the tears the eyes weep, and that fact both provides comfort and shows the tears to be appropriate as understandings of the way things are; the ears of the arrogant, by contrast, mishear and take tears to be sin or childishness. The LORD listens to our tears and knows them for what they are, which is a form of confession. In the passage just quoted, Augustine draws closely together the act of weeping with the act of writing about weeping, and subsumes them both under the rubric of confession, which also provides the title for the work in which these episodes of weeping



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are described. Weeping is an appropriate, perhaps the most appropriate, response to an accurate, fully Christian, discernment of what things are like for us, and Augustine takes this interpretation up in book 10, just a few hundred words after the passage just quoted. There (10.1.1–10.4.5) weeping is assimilated to confession: both are means by which sinners open themselves more fully to the LORD, and in that way become more intimate with him. In weeping, as in confessing, we show that we understand what we are and what the world is. Not to weep would be to show that we misconstrue both; in restraining our tears we distance ourselves from the LORD. Augustine’s depictions of tears and weeping in the Confessiones are complex: he judges that both the presence of lament and its absence may be problematic, and that it is possible to respond affectively to affect—to grieve the absence or presence of grief, for example. He is consistent in his view that tears involve understandings, and that judgments as to whether or not the tears are in particular cases desirable cannot be separated from judgments about the understandings they involve. He is consistent, also, in the view that tears communicate understandings to others. And, lastly, he is consistent in depicting tears as responsive to an ascetical discipline of the passions: he can undertake, with struggle, not to cry even when moved by grief, just as he can undertake to yield to tears. And habits (consuetudines, usually) of greater or lesser persistence can be formed by one discipline or the other. What Augustine writes about tears in the Confessiones is in accord with the broader picture of the intellective and emotive (or, better, motile) aspects of human life in his work as a whole. The fundamental or governing metaphor in Augustine’s thought about the mental life—a metaphor that ties together its rational, appetitive, and affective aspects—is that of motion. The soul, the animus, moves toward or away from the things it finds in its environment; and its movements are both embodied and habituated. That is, the movements of the soul typically find a bodily correlate, as in Augustine’s tears at the death of his childhood friend, or those shed in response to Monnica’s death. These movements therefore do not occur simply as mental events, and they are typically habitual in the sense that they do not occur in punctual form as separate and unrelated responses to stimuli. The weight (pondus) of an affective or appetitive or rational habit—Augustine uses this trope of weight a good deal—is accumulated over time in such a way as to move us

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with an often-irresistible force toward or away from this or that. The grieving movement of Augustine’s soul toward the absence of his mother was weighted in this sense, as was that toward the absence of his dead friend. The difference in the two cases is that the former’s tears address only the one who weeps them—which is why the tears in that case become an object of independent fascination—while the latter’s tears address themselves to and find comfort in the LORD. Tears of either sort, like any other action, can become habits. Habits accumulate weight; weight produces movement; and the movements of the soul are, collectively, what constitute the soul’s life. The moving force of all these movements of the soul is most often labeled by Augustine with one of the words from his extensive and nuanced vocabulary of love: amor and dilectio are the most frequent. We are weighted by our habituated loves, and in those loves, woven together with them, is the knotted thread of desire and will: what we love is what we want, and what we want is what we love. The appetitive and the affective are so tightly linked in Augustine’s thought that separating them is effectively impossible. The movements of our soul are all, to somewhat different degrees, movements of love and will and desire all at once. The love-will-desire of solipsistic tears wants, finally, nothing; it is hell-bound, nothing-seeking. That of confessional tears wants the LORD. The movements of the soul, these habituated love-wills, generally (but not always) have a phenomenal feel. That is, they generally seem like something to their subjects, those who undergo them. But Augustine is not very interested in this: it is not possible, I think, to derive from his work a phenomenology of affect or appetite, interested though he is in giving an account of their importance. He is in this respect more interested in the categorial or grammatical than in the phenomenological. He wants to know how to think about appetite and affect, but not to provide an artist’s depiction of their flavor. In his depictions of tears in the Confessiones, he uses strong language for the movements of the soul involved in grief, as for the bodily movements involved in crying; but his language has to do with motion and desire and end, not with the shades and particularities of feeling, finely etched. Augustine is neither Proust nor Henry James. For Augustine, tears cannot be separated from the judgments and understandings in intimacy with which they occur. He writes elsewhere (De civitate dei, 8.16–17) that nonhuman animals cannot have passions,



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if these are understood as habituated love-wills. He thinks they cannot because they lack reason. Your dog is certainly, in Augustinian terms, an appetitive being: he is moved by appetites toward or away from things. But these amount neither to desires nor to passions (in Latin, they are not desiderium and not passiones) because they bear no relation to the intellect’s capacity to discern and judge what is good. Such relations may be complex and conflicted, as we have seen in Augustine’s account of his responses to his mother’s death. But the in-principle absence of such a relation means also the absence of passions. Passions are, for Augustine, rational or irrational (most often a complex mix of both); they can never be arational. And this is why, we might say (though Augustine so far as I know does not), nonhuman animals neither lament nor cry: tears, being rational or irrational but never arational, cannot belong to them. A particular movement of the soul, understood as a passion, may then be separated from reason in the sense of being intimate with a false understanding of what there is, and therefore active in opposition to true understandings. It may also be in accord with reason, and when it is it involves or is concomitant with a love of the good, which is also a love of the LORD. Our ordinary condition, in Augustine’s view, is, with respect to the passions, one of fluidity, malleability, instability, motility, and ductility. Our passions, when they are active in opposition to love and therefore to the LORD, are a flood that tends toward nothing—which is the only possible direction in which they can tend, given a standard account of evil as absence and lack (§23). But we may also, to the extent that our passions resound to the LORD’s love for us, be moved toward the solidity and eternity of union with the LORD. A rather different way to put the same point is to say that each of us (save only Jesus and Mary, according to Catholic doctrine) is inevitably subject to passiones contra rationem, and that this is true whether ratio is taken in the universal objective sense to mean what it is rational (and therefore good) to want, or in the phenomenological subjective sense, to mean what it seems rational to me at the moment to want. If our passions are irrational in the first sense but not the second, then we will have misidentified and misprized the good, as Augustine did when he cried for his dead friend. If in the second sense, then we will be in a condition of conflict apparent to us, as Augustine was about the death of his mother; in this condition it will seem to us that we are in disharmony with ourselves,

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and this is so whether or not we have rightly identified and prized what we ought to want. Our task, as Augustine sees it, a task we cannot accomplish without grace, is to order our passions so that they are in harmony with reason in both senses—that is, so that our habituated love-will draws us toward what is good for us, and at the same time so that we want what is good for us. When we are in this condition, we will often cry, and bitterly, in confessing what is lamentable about ourselves and the damaged world. Tears do not have to be understood as Augustine, and with him most of the premodern Christian tradition, understands them. They might be understood as a purely physiological phenomenon, occurring in response to stimuli and carrying with them no claim about the way things are; those who hold such a view might think of tears as produced by or evidence of some inner condition of sadness, or they might think of them as productive of such feelings; in either case it would be beside the point to ask of those who cry what their tears show about how they understand the world, or to criticize those who weep for doing so wrongly. Or, tears might be understood as indeed making a cognitive claim, but a false one that should not be taken seriously by anyone interested in the truth. Those who think this are likely to discipline their tears toward removal, as Augustine tried at first to do in his response to Monnica’s death. Augustine’s understanding of tears is in important respects different from these views. For him, it is common to all those who cry that they understand the world, or themselves, or both, to be in some respects lamentable. That understanding is accurate, but by itself insufficient; tears shed on such an understanding bring false comfort and thus further damage to those who shed them. Such tears end, as did Augustine’s weeping for his dead friend, by diminishing those who shed them and diverting attention from what is wrong with the world to the act of weeping itself. Those tears are opaque, but they do not need to be disciplined out of existence. They need, in order to be made transparent, to become communicative as an instrument of confession. When that happens, they contribute to the world’s transfiguration. This understanding of lament, as is typical of the Christian tradition in dealing with what we might call emotions and their signs, at once embraces and redirects them by catechesis.

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I

argued above (§6, §24) that what belongs essentially to the heavenly novissimum of human creatures is rest (quies). This aspect of heaven, too, has its signs and traces here in the devastation, and in this last section I treat one of them: an attitude—or perhaps better, a set of attitudes—to the social and political orders of the devastation. I mean quietism with respect to political interest, not with respect to politics simpliciter. The presence of such an attitude is, it seems to me, an anticipation of heaven, and as such to be both celebrated and sought. My principal interlocutor here is Pascal who, although he developed nothing approaching a systematic political theory, had very suggestive things to say about the nature of the interest Christians should have and show in the political and social orders. What I have in mind here is a quietism—a Bartlebyesque “I would prefer not to”—of consequentialist interest in the consequences of political advocacy, a cultivation of a sancta indifferentia to such consequences of such dazzling obscurity that nothing is visible in the act of political advocacy other than exactly the act of such advocacy. This quietist ascesis of interest in the consequences of what we advocate in the sphere of politics—the sphere, that is, of norms and laws governing the common life of some polis—is deeply unpalatable to most citizens of contemporary democracies. This unpalatability is rooted in the fact that most of us willingly inhabit a post-Fordist democratic polity whose political rhetoric is most often bound up with advocacy of opinion about the consequences of writing or failing to write this or that political

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proposal into law, or in some other way making or failing to make it the custom of the country. It is strange in such polities, wilfully and almost incomprehensibly so, to attempt the systematic replacement of such consequentialist advocacy with an advocacy that justifies itself in the face of opposition (there is always opposition) by appeal to something other than consequence—to the proposal’s convenientia, its appropriate beauty, say; or to its rooting in long-lived local tradition; or to its concordance with or entailment by the LORD’s explicit will; or to its principled rightness, and, hence, to the corrupt wrongness of those competitors with which it is incompatible. Such justifications of political proposals do occur in our post-Fordist ghetto-laced cornucopias; but when they do, they tend to appear as illiberal outcroppings in a sea of free public appeal to rationally assessable consequence, and it is difficult to imagine the replacement of that sea by a continent of political advocacy that is quietist with respect to interest in the outcome of what is advocated. Such a continent would seem a true desert to most of us, should we find ourselves abroad in it; and we should scarcely be able to recognize those at home in it as political agents. They would seem to us like cooks without interest in the taste of what they cook, or gardeners without interest in the bouquets of visual and olfactory beauty their work might bring into being. But perhaps the political world we inhabit is more like a desert than a garden—the Augustinian claim that the saeculum, which is approximately the sphere of the political, is a desert suggests this already; and treating deserts as if they were gardens does not magically make them lush. It will prevent cultivation even of the flowers and fruits proper to deserts. If this analogy has purchase—and it seems to me that it does, with only a few reservations—then it may be that political advocacy would be more fruitful if interest in its outcome were quieted than it would be were such advocacy to be encouraged and nurtured, as it remorselessly is by us. If this is so, a paradox looms: seeking good results cannot be the reason for quieting interest in the results of political advocacy. Good results, should they follow from such quietism, must be understood to be epiphenomenal to it, not as the reason or cause for adopting it. Pascal, although not ordinarily classified as a quietist in Christiantheological terms (those who were so classified in Spain and France, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, were typically profoundly



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opposed to the Jansenists, many of whom thought of Pascal as one of their own), is among the few to have expounded a quietism of political interest in clear terms. His most concentrated expression of the position is to be found in a very short letter he wrote in 1657, probably to his brotherin-law, Florin Périer. In that letter he provides a sketch of what political agency and political judgment would look like if it were thoroughgoing in its quietism of interest—if, that is, political proposals were made and political actions undertaken without interest in their outcomes, and if political agents were formed by a deep asceticism about political interest in this sense. The letter begins by placing the question of controversy and controversialists (frondeurs) in a theological context. You should, writes Pascal to M. Périer, understand opposition to a proposal you favor as an opportunity to suffer anything at all in the service of establishing (de souffrir quelque chose pour l’établissement) what seems to you to be the truth of the matter, and you should welcome this opportunity instead of rejecting or muttering against it. This is because the LORD (Pascal writes “Providence”) who has, as it seems to you, shown you the truth about the controverted question under discussion is the very same LORD who permits there to be obstacles to what you would like to happen, politically speaking (qui permet que des obstacles s’opposent à [votre] progrès). To oppose those who place obstacles in the path of enacting your preferred proposal is by implication to judge the barriers and those who place them inspired by some other power. But there is no other power. There is only the one LORD, who at the same time excites your support of the proposal and provides strength and energy to those who oppose it (donnât vigeur à ceux qui s’y opposent). When you encounter opposition to a proposal you favor, then, you should treat that opposition with the calm that is among the principal marks that you are working in accord with the Spirit (une des meilleures marques qu’on agit par l’esprit de Dieu). To do otherwise—to oppose those who oppose your proposal with passionate irritation or anger—is to exhibit esprit propre, which for Pascal is the fundamental error of identifying yourself as the origin and cause of the truth of your judgments (should they be true), and thereby, usually, coming to think them transparently true and those who oppose them as opposing not only the transparent truth, but also yourself as its propounder and guarantor.

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Pascal follows his advocacy of tranquility in controversy—you do not need to agitate yourself about whose proposal will be enacted if you are quite sure to begin with that it is one and the same LORD who inspires you to advocate your proposal and permits your opponents to advocate theirs, one and the same LORD in the palm of whose hand the outcome rests—with his usual skepticism about anyone’s ability, including his own, to discern their own rightness by introspection: In order accurately to judge whether it is God who makes us act, it is better to examine ourselves by attending to our outer actions than our inner motives. If we examine only the latter, then even if we find them good without admixture we cannot be certain that they really come from God. But when we examine ourselves externally, which is to say when we consider whether we suffer external opposition patiently, that signifies a uniformity of spirit between the one who inspires our passions and the one who permits resistance to them.

The distinction here, between actions available to the external gaze and motives available to internal examination, is, for Pascal, one between what can be confidently known and what is mysterious: you can be fairly sure about what you do, your comportements au-dehors; but you are no reliable guide to your motifs au-dedans. If you want to know, then, whether your advocacy of a particular controversial proposal is motivated by the LORD, you will do better to pay attention to the manner in which you suffer opposition to it than to the degree of certainty about its truth or rightness you seem to yourself to have. Given these assumptions, the purpose of advocating or opposing some political proposal is not victory but rather humble and tranquil support of the proposals that seem to you to accord with the LORD’s will, and a similar kind of opposition to those that do not so seem. Victory-seeking, that desire so natural, does not sit well with the double skepticism Pascal advocates: skepticism, that is, about whether what seems to you to be true is in fact so, coupled with skepticism about whether in advocating what you advocate you are LORD-inspired or self-interested. What does sit well with this double skepticism is an advocacy that cannot be discouraged by the prospect of defeat, and which is without concern about the results of victory. This is because, first, the defeat of the preferred proposal, should it be defeated, is itself permitted by the LORD, a fact of which you can be much more sure than that the victory of the preferred proposal is what the



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LORD wants, and, second, because the enactment of the preferred proposal is not the central point of advocating it: the point is, rather, to persist in advocacy of what seems true and (or) right. Pascal does not explicitly address, in this letter fragment, skepticism about our ability to know what the effects of victory will be, but such skepticism is entirely concordant with what he does advocate. And he does add a third kind of skepticism, in a remarkable throwaway comment: I cannot prevent myself from being angry with those who are determined that one should assent to truth once they demonstrate it, something that Jesus Christ did not do in his created humanity. This is a mockery.

Pascal here confesses his own subjection to the advocate’s anger that he has criticized earlier in the letter. What provokes this anger is the claim to transparent self-evidence in controversy, to the possession of arguments in support of a preferred proposal, whether political or otherwise, that should, because of their persuasive power, at once convince all those faced with them. Pascal hates (the word is not too strong) those who demand instant assent to what they claim upon the basis of demonstration: que l’on croie la vérité lorsqu’ils la démontrent. This is a mockery: it is not what Jesus Christ did in advocating what he advocated, and it is not, thinks Pascal, what we should do either. What he means by this, as is abundantly evident elsewhere in his work, is that Jesus Christ taught, performed miracles, died, and was resurrected; this complex pattern of action does not amount to an argumentative demonstration of the truth of any set of claims, and does not convict those who reject what it presents of blindness to what is self-evident. When it persuades, it moves those persuaded to that peculiar form of imitation that Christians call discipleship, and it does so by the transformative power of its presence. We, though we are not Jesus Christ, should, thinks Pascal, take the same line when we engage in controversial advocacy. There is in this point a deep skepticism about both the persuasive and the truth-conducing capacities of argument that attempts demonstration. Such argument, whether about political or theological proposals, rarely persuades, and when it does it generally ought not. This means neither that argument is always unpersuasive, nor that it ought never to persuade. As is evident from distinctions drawn elsewhere in Pascal’s work, he thinks that in the sphere of mathematics, for example, demonstrative arguments

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both can and should persuade, because the matters treated in that sphere are exactly those that reason is designed and equipped to treat. But in matters of theology beyond the elementary and politics beyond the extremely local, reason is not so equipped. If, then, on Pascal’s view, you become convinced that (for example) the pope can legitimately propound doctrine on matters of faith and morals but not on matters of textual exegesis, or that monarchy is preferable to republicanism, or that democratic polities are preferable to those ordered by Islamic law, it will rarely and perhaps never be the case that you have arrived at your view as a result of being persuaded by argument; and even when you have been so persuaded, your conviction about the matter ought to be inconstant and shallow because, if you are clear-sighted, you will know that whatever the argument that brought you to this view, it is sufficiently complex, opaque, and subject to challenge that you cannot be sure you have ever understood it, that you understand it now, or that you will continue to understand it in the future. You can always be more sure that your grasp of the arguments that have brought you to conviction on matters of this degree of complexity is imperfect than you can that the arguments are valid and their conclusions true. Ordinarily, however, argument is not an instrument of any significance in bringing people to conviction about such matters, and so these considerations need not come into play. You believe what you believe about these things, ordinarily, on the twin grounds of authoritative testimony and the formatively persuasive power of the company you keep. Pascal does, however, think that argument ought to be persuasive about the nature and extent of its own limitations. What I have written in the last several paragraphs by way of commentary on and exposition of Pascal’s letter is meant to provide an instance of such persuasion. There are good grounds, available and convincing to most, for judging that argument neither is nor should be convincing about matters of the appropriate degree of complexity (there can be reasonable disagreement about whether some particular matter reaches whatever the appropriate degree is), and, therefore, for judging that those committed to its sovereignty in such matters are thereby, and to the extent they do so, confused. Once the quietist ascetical renunciation of consequentialist, argument-imbricated political judgment has been made—a renunciation necessary only for those formed in a context where it is the usual thing, a context at whose entryway Pascal stood (he could see the prospect



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clearly enough)—becoming a frondeur, a controversialist, requires fixation of belief on other grounds. For Pascal, the most important among these grounds was an act of intellectual submission to the authority of the tradition and institutions of Catholic Christianity, of course under a particular interpretation. Quietists need not make just this act of submission; but they will have to make some such act. Pascal’s letter has two clear implications for controversialists, whether their controversies are political or not. The first is that they should engage in controversy with a level of energy and commitment appropriate to the importance of the topic and to the degree of certitude they have about the truth of their preferred position on that topic. When the topic seems important to you, and when you are deeply convinced that your position on it is the right one, and that, therefore, the extent to which your opponents advocate a position incompatible with yours they are wrong, then, other things being equal, you should engage in controversy with all the passion you can muster. Pascal’s own practice in the Lettres provinciales reflects this: when the topic seems to him of fundamental importance, such as the conditions under which Christians may or should inflict fatal violence on others, or the conditions under which they may or should lie to others, and when his Jesuit opponents take positions on these matters that seem to him fundamentally wrong, he opposes them with great vigor. The second is that they should have no concern for the outcome of their advocacy. That outcome, whatever it is—victory, defeat, victory with unanticipated bad effects, defeat with unanticipated good effects—neither prospectively motivates the controversialist’s advocacy nor retrospectively calls it into question. Controversy, Pascal thinks, should be undertaken on altogether different grounds and for altogether different purposes. Pascal’s letter advocates a form of quietism applicable to advocacy in any sphere of human life; but it is a quietism only of judgment and expectation—of interest, to put the matter briefly—not one of action, for Pascal has no doubt that advocacy is proper in some circumstances and required in others, and he was perfectly prepared to advocate, with vehemence, positions that we would naturally call political. Pascal is no Bartleby. Pascalian quietists of political interest may, however, be more or less radical. The most radical are those who seek to become political agents, which means at least advocates of political proposals, in the entire absence

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of occurrent judgments about those proposals. Ideal-typical political agents of this radical sort advocate their proposals in much the same way that they ordinarily speak their mother tongue. That is, they have a habit that permits or requires the performance of certain skills in the appropriate conditions, but they make judgments neither about what it is they do—about, that is, the texture of the skill’s performance, its rules and structure and boundaries and relations to other skills—nor about the point or purpose of performing the skill in question. And they are ascetical virtuosos of such absence: when an account of what they do and why (for what) they do it is demanded, they refuse to offer it; and when one suggests itself to them, they discipline it toward absence. They seek a form of political agency in which there are no occurrent judgments about such matters, and no disposition to form any. In the analogous case of speaking one’s mother tongue, there is little need for such asceticism: most of us lack the knowledge, the skill, and the disposition to offer accounts of why we speak, of what speech is for, or of how to discriminate good speechperformances from bad ones; and these lacks neither inhibit our capacity to speak nor (usually) our sense of security in that capacity. Speech is, mostly, a reflexive habit, and speakers, with few exceptions, see no need to make it anything else. For radical Pascalian quietists, political advocacy and action can and ought to be like this too: like a gesture of courtesy or reverence or intimate greeting (the handshake, the genuflection, the kiss) that is transformed into something quite different—and worse—if its agents have occurrent or dispositional judgments about what it is they do and why they do it. Pascal writes sometimes of humans becoming machine-like, and sometimes of them becoming like beasts (see the discussion of his views about the efficacy of the liturgy in §24): this kind of radical quietism of judgment is what he has in mind. Less radical are those whose ascesis of political judgment extends only to interest in consequence or outcome. For these moderate Pascalians, judgments about why a particular political proposal is to be advocated may be sought and nurtured, so long as such judgments are not consequentialist, not based on probabilistic assessments of outcome. A political proposal may be advocated, for instance, as more beautiful than its competitors; or as more concordant with some understanding of what humans are and are for; or as commanded by a source of unimpeachable authority. Pascalians of this sort are less thoroughgoing in their asceticisms of



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judgment than the radical kind; but both share a principled rejection of interest in the outcome of what they advocate in the political sphere, and it is this quietism that interests me and that I think (with some reservations) is at least capable of being seriously entertained by Christians. The warp of this political quietism is an asceticism—a progressive refusal—of properly political judgment; where judgment, dispositional or occurrent, does occur without being refused, it is judgment of a different, nonpolitical sort. Its weft is a nurturing of habitual political action, with the radical removal of judgment, dispositional or occurrent, as the ideal-typical goal, approachable only asymptotically. Political advocacy that is quietist with respect to interest requires of us a good deal of work. This is because prospective judgment as to the effects of writing some political proposal into law is for us ordinarily intimate with advocating or opposing that proposal, and so ascetical effort is needed to refuse such judgments and to nurture those of a different sort, or none at all, while remaining a political advocate. This difficulty is not natural: it is like neither the difficulties involved in refusing linguistic or physical intimacy with other human beings, nor like those connected with the refusal of food. There are virtuoso quietists of these kinds (the Christian desert ascetics, Kafka’s hunger artist, the Buddha’s ascetical teachers): they are virtuosos like Bartleby in these spheres of human activity. But they have to refuse an appetite or a disposition proper to all human beings, or at least to all those not so damaged as to separate them from those appetites. The “we” to whom these difficulties apply is all, or almost all, human beings. But severing political action from interest in its outcome requires an ascetical effort of refusal only when the presence of such a connection is the ordinary thing, as it is for the citizens of democracies in the twentyfirst century. Our political formation has been, for the last three centuries or so, democratic, and it is proper to that form of political life to nurture a strong connection between deliberation as to outcome and advocacy of particular political proposals. But nurturing this connection so that it seems obvious and inevitable is not proper to all forms of political culture. Arguably it is not proper to many premodern political forms, and it may not be proper to some contemporary ones. Perhaps, for instance, in a polis ordered by shariah, those who make a habit of connecting their advocacy of political proposals to prospective judgments about their effects would be as locally idiosyncratic as German tourists sunning themselves naked

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on Indian beaches: the locals keep their clothes on at the beach, and look askance, with a mixture of disapproval and puzzlement, at the visitors who take them off. But among us everyone sunbathes naked, and the result is that clothing ourselves in a quietism of political interest requires effort. The resulting get up feels uncomfortable and looks odd to the locals. This sense of oddity is on its face no different from any other produced by transgressing local custom and knowledge. I think, however, that clothing ourselves in a quietism of political judgment, whether of the preliminary kind in which we eschew ordinary, consequentialist judgment, or of the more radical kind, in which we seek to become political agents altogether without judgments, has some advantages over local custom that even the locals might be able to recognize and acknowledge. Nakedness, after all, can lead to epidermal carcinomas, and wearing clothes on the beach, odd though it may look to Europeans and some Americans, may be a cover-up with some good effects. The first advantage of quietism of the kind described is that those who arrive at it are likely to have a more accurate understanding of the limits of our capacity to make accurate prospective judgments about the results of enacting this political proposal rather than that than do those whose thinking hews to the ordinary consequentialist line. These limits are especially obvious, almost unarguably so, when the proposal under discussion advocates adjustment of a complex system. Adjusting such a system in one respect always has unanticipated and often undesired effects upon other aspects of that system’s behavior. This is true in economics, both microand macro-: no one appears able to predict the results of legislation (or the weather) upon the workings of financial markets, even though the rewards for successfully doing so are vast. It is true, as well, in ecological matters, even of a quite local kind: the introduction of wild parakeets into the ecosystem of Chicago forty years ago has had effects upon local bird, tree, and human life whose particulars were quite unanticipated. And it is true in matters of foreign policy: one country’s or international agency’s intervention in the internal affairs of another—whether militarily, diplomatically, or economically—always produces unanticipated ripples and blowbacks. Ordinary consequentialist discussion about the likely results of actualizing one political proposal or another is blind to this incapacity: it is very rare to hear mention of it in campaigns for elected office or floor debates



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because the grammar of political talk in democracies requires that it be occluded. If we were to acknowledge that we sometimes or often or usually have no way to assess the outcomes of the proposals we advocate, then we, as good deliberative democrats, would have to give up an essential element of our political self-understanding. This is why those committed to democracy as the preferred form of political culture will ordinarily avoid looking at this incapacity, and if they do look at it, do so glancingly, dismissing it as an unwarrantedly excessive skepticism or a cloak for some form of totalitarianism. It is not so difficult, however, to see that skepticism in this area is, in general, more accurate than epistemic optimism. It is not that skepticism about our capacity to predict the results of political proposals is always right; a more precise formulation is that the more complex the system to which a particular proposal advocates adjustment, the more likely skeptical disavowal is to be the right response to claims to know the results of the proposed adjustment. If, for example, a proposal is made to adjust a system as simple as the traffic pattern in a small town—perhaps by shifting the town’s only stop-sign from one intersection to the next—the chances of accurately predicting outcome are not too bad. But if a proposal is addressed to a system only mildly more complex, for example to change the red-light time from twenty to twenty-five seconds on all the stoplights along a major commercial artery in a city, then things become much more difficult. Drivers may become frustrated, and may in significant numbers abandon that route for others, which in turn may lead to the closure of businesses along the route, an increase in bankruptcy rates, rises in the price of commercial rents along other, now more heavily traveled, routes . . . and so on. And when proposals are addressed to systems at the national or international level—and it is now difficult to make political proposals at the national level that do not also have significant connections with and effects upon international systems—the number of variables in play increases exponentially and the chance of successful prediction correspondingly decreases. The simple and the local are intimate with one another, just as are the complex and the cosmopolitan, and that is why democracy’s preference for making and defending political proposals according to judgments about their outcomes makes more sense at the local level than it does at the national or international. The town’s selectmen, the village’s parish council, even, perhaps, the city council—these

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are venues in which deliberative democracy’s penchant for thinking politically about political proposals is not sunk hopelessly in self-deception. But with respect to systems of greater complexity, the honest thing to say is that skepticism about assessment of outcomes ought to be the default position because it is usually the correct one, and that therefore deliberative democracy cannot work as its advocates portray it as working—which is not the same as to say that it cannot work at all. Quietists of political interest, then, have a distinct advantage here. It is easier for them than for consequentialists to see that thinking in consequentialist terms about political proposals aimed at the adjustment of complex systems usually cannot successfully be done, and that therefore those who advocate it do so either confusedly or deceptively. Those committed to deliberative democracy in its ordinary forms will not want to see this, and will therefore usually avert their gaze from it. Close affinity to skeptical clarity about political prediction is not the only advantage of quietisms of political interest. An additional one is that quietists are not discouraged by, nor in any deep way concerned about, claims that the political proposals they advocate will have effects they do not want. Suppose, for example, that you advocate adjustment of the tax code in the direction of removal of tax relief on interest paid on mortgage loans. An objection to enacting this proposal might be that it would discourage home ownership, which in turn would have deleterious effects upon the stability and order of residential communities, which in turn would threaten a range of civic virtues . . . and so on. An argument in support of the proposal might be that by removing this particular federal subsidy for the middle classes more federal funds could be made available for the poor, which in turn might permit support of educational programs that would foster stability and order in towns and cities, which in turn would nurture a range of civic virtues . . . and so on. Quietist advocates of the proposal are neither discouraged by the opposing argument nor encouraged by the supportive one. Because the grounds upon which they advocate the proposal are divorced from consideration of its effects, these kinds of encouragement and discouragement are in principle irrelevant, and this separation yields a constancy of advocacy not easily available to those who support the same proposal on deliberatively consequentialist grounds.



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A third advantage, close kin to the second, is that while deliberatively consequentialist political advocates are likely to be discouraged when it appears likely to them that their proposal cannot be enacted, and are as a result likely to cease advocating it and begin advocating some associated proposal that they take to have a greater chance of being enacted—democratic politics is after all the art of the possible, and a good practitioner therefore does not continue to advocate a proposal that seems impossible—their quietist counterparts are less likely to engage in such substitution. Eschewing consequentialist judgments about a proposal’s enactment, as quietists of political interest do, may very easily be extended in the direction of eschewing such judgments about the likelihood of a proposal’s enactment. And if that move is made, the argument that there are not enough votes for this proposal, or that there are other apparently good reasons why it cannot be enacted, will have no purchase, however true these claims may be. Since quietists are not advocating the proposal on those grounds, they will not be troubled by such arguments—not even when they take it to be true that the proposal they advocate cannot be passed. Here too, as with the second advantage, there is a skeptical and a nonskeptical form of such a repudiation. In the skeptical form, quietists refuse to take account of arguments about the likelihood of enactment because they think that such judgments have a low probability of being true. In the nonskeptical form, they refuse because they do not care whether such judgments are true or not. Skepticism in this area is less attractive than it is in the area of judgment about the effects of enactment because the systems that govern passage or denial of a political proposal are many orders of magnitude less complex than those that proposals attempt to adjust: you stand a much better chance of predicting outcomes on the floor of the House than you do those of adjusting interest rates or ecosystems. This means in turn that quietism’s affinity to skepticism in this area is less clearly an advantage over consequentialism’s lack of such affinity. It is still an advantage, however. A quietist refusal of interest in political proposals, coupled with advocacy of such proposals on other grounds, permits, then, continued advocacy in the face of both consequentialist and utopian objections. This advocacy may be activist (barricades, protests, martyrdoms) or verbal (broadsheets, blogs, street-corner speeches); and it may occur within ordinary legal bounds (voting, running for office, lobbying) or without

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(civil disobedience, treason, fomenting revolution). In all its variants it is impatient with or indifferent to ordinary political deliberation. And it is often, though not inevitably, skeptical about the likelihood that predictive judgments about the effects of political proposals will yield truths. There is a fourth and final advantage that quietists of political interest have over their deliberatively consquentialist opponents. It is that pretense can be abandoned and consistency more easily embraced. For the ordinary, post-Fordist, democracy-advocating, consequentialist politician (whether running for office or voting), the absence of political interest must either be occluded or criticized when it surfaces. Almost never can it be embraced. A candidate for elective office cannot say that she has no idea what the results of writing her programs into law will be, even if this is true and she knows it to be true; neither, usually, can she say that she advocates what she advocates for reasons (and causes) that have nothing to do with the likely results of its becoming law. (The exceptions here are the occasional appeals to unadulterated principle—results be damned—that still survive in our politics.) Rather, she must say that she advocates what she advocates because of the good it will do, and because she knows that it will bring just that good about and carry no evils in its train. But the truth is almost always otherwise. Voters rarely vote because they are convinced of, or have thought much about, the matters just mentioned; instead, they vote because they like one thing or another about the features of the campaigning politician (sex, race, hair color, tone of voice, manner of speech, and so on), or because it is a matter of custom for them and the people with whom they identify to vote for a candidate who speaks in these ways, advocating proposals of these kinds. Voters, that is, are closet quietists of political interest in any case; and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for those who seek office. But they remain, by and large, in the closet because the public rhetoric of our polities requires this of them. And closets, when you have lived in them for long enough, begin to feel spacious, comfortable, and above all natural: a proper home. In the same way, lies can start to feel like the truth. Pascalian quietists of political interest, by contrast, need no closet and no lies: they can speak and act as they are. This is a deep advantage. The most radical and thoroughgoing quietisms of political judgment are theological, whether in the strict sense that they are informed by



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understandings of the implications of the LORD’s nature and demand for political advocacy and action, or in the ersatz one that their advocacy of political proposals is derived from an understanding of the human whose fulcrum is itself nonpolitical. Pascal’s theological version has already been briefly explored, and I bring this section to an end by commending, in three theses, a fully Christian version of political quietism of interest in the spirit of Pascal. The first thesis is that Christian advocacy of a political proposal assumes that justice in the political sphere is not attainable but must nonetheless be sought. The second is that Christian advocacy of a political proposal assumes that while Christian advocates can act unjustly, they cannot suffer injustice. The third is that Christian advocacy of a political proposal proceeds always without concern for outcomes. These theses are normative in the sense that they encapsulate a particular (controversial among Christians) understanding of the well-formed Christian political agent. They do not imply that every self-described Christian political agent is like this. In commenting upon them I will radicalize them so that their structure and telos can be seen as clearly as possible. The theses may be read to assume that the political order, the order of common life constrained by positive law, is at bottom the sphere of custom or convention backed by force. This means, among other things, that the political order does not belong to the order of reason, which in turn means that the local laws, whatever they are, cannot be justified by reason with sufficient translucent radiance to convince all comers that some particular law or ensemble of laws is just. This is perfectly compatible with the claim that some laws are just and others are not; what it means is that we are ordinarily not in a position to tell the difference with certitude, and that attempting to support the local laws by argument—to root them in something other than force-backed custom—has the inevitable result of making it clear that reasoned argument in this sphere cannot do what its advocates and users claim for it. Reason can do nothing here other than to recognize and make public acknowledgment of its own limits. Obeying the laws, then, whatever they are, is comme la mode, a matter of fashion and custom; and this comports well with an understanding of “law” to mean “that which you will be punished for not obeying.” A peaceful or harmonious city, on this view, is one in which the laws are obeyed by all—or at least most—without argument about their justice. The net effect of argument

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about the laws’ justice or reasonability is to make it less likely that they will be obeyed as a matter of consensus. The laws, in this respect, are just like the norms of local etiquette: as soon as you start arguing about whether it is better—more just, more proper, more pleasing, more elegant—to shake hands or to bow upon meeting someone new, etiquette has already lost its defining characteristic, which is to be acted upon unreflectively as a matter of local habit. Arguing about etiquette or political justice is, on this view, un jeu sûr pour tout perdre, as Pascal likes to say. It follows from this that success in effecting political change is not in reason’s gift. Such changes are brought about by force or by insensibly gradual changes in the custom of the country. The only contribution that reason can make when it enters into the political order is to sow doubt where there was certainty and discord where there was harmony. Reason cannot discern, much less effect, material justice in the order of politics. This view of the relations between reason and the political sphere illuminates the first thesis. This thesis does not say that justice is unattainable in the political order; it says that when Christians act in the political order they so under the assumption that it is not. That is, they regulate their political advocacy by this assumption, being careful to note that an acknowledged incapacity to discern what is just neither requires nor supports the nihilistic claim that there is no justice. Regulative judgments of the sort contained in the first thesis operate epistemically and pragmatically, not metaphysically: they provide first-order rules for conduct and attitude toward conduct, not claims about the way things are. The second thesis, which is that Christian political advocacy is (or should be) informed by the assumption that Christians cannot suffer injustice but can act unjustly, is of the same logical kind. It too is not a claim of a properly descriptive sort. It does not mean that the difference between Christians and everyone else is that members of the former group cannot suffer injustice while members of the latter can. It is, rather, a regulative assumption of the same formal sort as the first thesis: it tells Christians how to behave and how to regulate their behavior. It has a scriptural version in St. Paul’s claim he is the foremost among sinners (1 Tim 1:15). This does not mean that Paul has tabulated and enumerated all the sins of all those who have ever lived, compared his to theirs, and decided that his are worse, that he is the greatest sinner who ever lived. Rather, it means that in considering his own sins and those of others, he assumes, and therefore



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behaves as if he believed, that he is the foremost among sinners, that his own sins are of a different kind and gravity than those of anyone else. So also with the second thesis, which has two principal functions. The first is to prescribe for Christians a skeptical attitude toward the merits of their own political judgments. They cannot know whether they are right (recall the working assumption in the first thesis), and even if they are right they cannot assess the likely effects of the success of any political proposal they advocate. What they can be sure of is that they are, in any particular case, more or less self-interested, confused, corrupt, and so on; they can also be sure that the LORD permits the state of political affairs they oppose. These judgments encourage humility and its correlate, which is a refusal to divide the world into the forces of good and the forces of evil, into themselves and the étrangers. There are, on this view of the political order, only ignorant armies clashing by night; and the most dangerous among those armies are those whose troops are convinced of their own unimpeachable rightness and the concomitant wrongness of their opponents. And this signals the second principal function of the second thesis, which is to encourage Christians in a calm, even-minded attitude toward political opponents, an equanimity that obtains soit que la vérité soit connue, soit qu’elle soit combattue, whether the truth is acknowledged or opposed. Put briefly, the second thesis says that Christians should take themselves to be wrong before they take themselves to be mistreated, and it implies, too, that those who disagree with them are not fundamentally alien to them. It might seem that the first two theses taken together lead immediately to a radical and throughgoing quietism of political action as well as one of properly political judgment, which is to say of an exceptionless “I would prefer not to” in the political sphere. If it did, one result would be that the proper response to the local laws, whatever they are, would be only to obey them and never to try to change them. But the first two theses need not be so read, and to see why not, they need to be brought together with the third, which is that Christians advocating a political proposal do so without concern for the outcome of their advocacy. This thesis, like the first two, governs both political behavior and the agent’s understanding of that behavior. It specifies what you may hope for when you act politically. If, as the first thesis claims, justice cannot be known to be attained in the political order and you should act as if that were true, and if, as the second

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thesis claims, you can be more certain about your wrongness than you can that you are being mistreated, then it should be clear enough why you should not be concerned about the outcome of your political advocacy. You cannot know what the outcome will be; you cannot know whether it is the right outcome; and you cannot know the extent to which you are motivated in your advocacy by damnable desires (I use the strong word deliberately). All these matters are opaque. When you act politically, then, you cannot reasonably do so because you have deep concerns about the outcome: to do that would be to imagine that opacity is really transparent. Better, on a Pascalian view, is to act because it seems to you, under the constraints specified by the first two theses, right to do so. Christians do not (or ought not) suffer the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist because they think doing so has good effects on them, or because they think the world transformed by them, or because they think baptized people better than the great unwashed. Rather, they suffer them first and last because they are gifts to which the appropriate response is gratitude for their givenness and lament for the inadequacy of the gratitude of those who receive them. In responding to them in this way, Christians participate in the LORD they take to be their giver in a manner that illuminates and instantiates the first two theses. The principal point of participation in the sacraments is exactly the act of participation itself. Analogically, the principal point of political advocacy is exactly the act of advocacy itself. The third thesis replicates in its structure another fundamental feature of the Christian life. If your political advocacy cannot be discouraged by external circumstance, and especially not by calculations about the likelihood of success or the probable effects of success should it occur, then you will not give it up when it seems likely or certain that the results will be bad. The figure woven centrally into this tapestry of thought is that of the martyr: the martyrs would not accept the deaths given to them if they were acting in the world because of concern for the outcome of their acts. The three theses taken together, then, are not only not quietist with respect to political action, but make every other justification for political advocacy look as if it were. This Christian-theological intensification of quietism of political judgment makes the city, the sphere of politics, habitable by and strangely hospitable to those conformed to the bloody figure of Christ on the cross.



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That figure is opaque to Christians for many reasons, among them the fact that upon it the opacity of the inevitably blood-saturated political order was violently concentrated, and by it the political order of force-backed custom was redeemed by being shown for what it is. Christian political agents cannot, according to their own self-understanding, do what Christ did. But they can, again according to their own self-understanding, imitate Christ by refusing, as he did, to imagine that they can establish justice on the earth prior to the eschaton, that they can be treated unjustly, or that their political action requires concern for its outcome. The Christian-theological version of a quietism of political judgment just sketched has Pascal and Augustine, in some of his moods, as its tutelary deities, and it is one that I entertain with a seriousness approaching endorsement. The point of sketching it here is not however to argue for its truth or rightness, but to use it as an illustrative instance of how such quietisms ordinarily work, and to suggest that this kind of quietism sits well with an attempt to discern and respond to the traces of glory and the anticipations of heaven in a devastated world. Quietisms typically require an extrapolitical fulcrum coupled with a high degree of skepticism about reason’s prospective capacities in the political sphere; and they typically issue in a political advocacy beyond discouragement or encouragement by properly political argument. The particular flavor of the Christian (Augustinian-Pascalian) instance just sketched is provided by its particular way of construing the world as gift given by the triune LORD and damaged by human sin. Those particulars will not inform every quietism of this sort, of course, and since they are unlikely to prove either comprehensible or attractive to most of those not already formed by them, a depiction of them like the one given here will not make many converts. It remains true, however, that at least so far as the West is concerned the only quietism of political judgment to have had a significant presence and influence has been this Christian-theological version. It is also a version I take to be concordant with, though certainly not entailed or required by, thinking about the presence of the heavenly last thing in the devastation. The quietus of political interest in the sense entertained here resonates well and deeply with the quies of the last thing. Advocacy of the quietus of political interest in the devastation is a form of love for one of heaven’s traces here.

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Part VIII Bibliography

The bibliography that follows has two parts (§§36–37). First (§36), there is a series of brief bibliographic essays keyed to the principal parts of this book—one for Part I, one for Part II, and so on. In these essays, I mention works of special importance for the relevant part, giving only enough detail about each work to permit identification of it in the second part of the bibliography (§37), which is an alphabetical list of every work mentioned or quoted in the body of this book, including the brief bibliographic essays, as well as of others that have been especially helpful in preparing it. The bibliography as a whole has three purposes: first, to let readers see what I have read and consulted—or at least what I recall having read and consulted; second, to permit them to locate for themselves the works I mention; third, to discharge the debt of gratitude. Almost everything written in this book has been learned from other human creatures, living and dead, and I am deeply grateful to them for having taught me and, among those living, for enduring my errors and stubbornnesses.

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§36

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Bibliographic Essays

Part I—The Grammar of the Last Things

I

n addition to entries on eschatology and associated topics in the standard works of reference (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Catholic Encyclopedia, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, Dictionnaire de spiritualité), useful Catholic treatments of eschatological doctrine and eschatology in general include Augustine, De civitate dei, books 19–22; Balthasar, Last Act; Balthasar, “Some Points”; Billot, Quaestiones; Blignières, Fins dernières; Greshake & Lohfink, Untersuchungen; Guardini, Last Things; Levering, Demise of Death; Margelidon, Fins dernières; O’Callaghan, Christ Our Hope; Peter Lombard, Sententiae, 4.43.244–4.50.290; Pieper, Death and Immortality; Pohle, Eschatology; Rahner, “Eschatological Assertions”; Ratzinger, Eschatology; Scheeben, Handbuch, §§132–134, §§163–165, §§181–84; Scheeben, Mysterien, §§92– 97; Schmaus, Dogmatik, vol. 4/2; Thomas Aquinas, Collationes de “credo in Deum,” §§14–15; Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, §§144–50, §§153–168, §§169–71, §§176–84; Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super sententiis, ad 4.43–50; Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, 4.79–97; Thomas Aquinas [school of], Summa theologiae, 3.69–99; Vonier, Life; Zaleski, Life. These may be supplemented by Fergusson, “Eschatology”; Fergusson & Sarot, Future as God’s Gift; Fiddes, Promised End; Phan, “Contemporary Context”; Sauter, Einführung; Sauter, What Dare We Hope?; Volf & Katerbeg, Future of Hope; Walls, Oxford Handbook of Eschatology; Webster, “Eschatology”; and Webster, “Postmodern Eschatology?” 361

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Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending deserves special mention: although (perhaps because) it is not the work of a theologian, it remains essential reading for anyone interested in what it is to think of something’s having an end. And Hjelde’s study, Das Eschaton, is especially useful for its discussion of the terminological question. Part II—Doctrine about Last Things

For a more precise and technical analysis of the nature of Christian theology not in every way in agreement with the one given in §8, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1.1. Underlying the discussion of the theological enterprise in §8 is Donum veritatis, an instruction on the ecclesial vocation of the theologian issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1990. On this topic, see also the Congregation’s Doctrinal Commentary (1998), and John Paul II’s apostolic letter Ad tuendam fidem (1998). For a more expansive analysis of the trope of Egyptian gold, discussed in §8, see my “Seeking Egyptian Gold.” On the topic of the nature of doctrine, briefly discussed in §9, Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine remains essential; see also, on that topic, my “Is There a Doctrine?” and On Being Buddha, ch. 1. On this topic, see also Lamont, “Authority”; Mansini, What Is a Dogma?; and Rahner, “Dogmatic Statement.” Doctrine about the last things: carnis resurrectio and vita aeterna are mentioned in articles 11–12 of the Apostles’ Creed; the last things are entirely absent in the confession approved at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, but are present, as resurrectio mortuorum and vita venturi saeculi, in the confession formulated at Constantinople in 381. There is a rather more extended statement about the last things in the Quicumque Vult, with mention of judgment and the two eternal destinies. The church’s catechisms, when they come to expound the last things, typically follow the phraseology and order of the Apostles’ Creed—for example, Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1.12–1.13; Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§988–1060. The principal magisterial statements of importance on the novissima are the Synod of Constantinople (543) rejects apokatastasis (Denzinger, no. 411); the Eleventh Synod of Toledo (675) affirms the resurrection of the same flesh with which we now live (Denzinger, no. 540); Leo IX’s statement of the faith (1053) affirms the resurrection of the flesh (Denzinger, no. 684); the Fourth Lateran (1215) reaffirms the general resurrection, the judgment, and the two destinies (Denzinger, no. 801); the



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Second Council of Lyons (1274) teaches that the souls of those who die in mortal sin or are still under original sin go down at once (mox) to hell (Denzinger, no. 858); Benedict XII’s Benedictus Deus (1336) affirms the intermediate state at some length and in some detail (Denzinger, nos. 1000–1002)—see the discussion above in §18 and §22; the Council of Florence (1438) affirms the necessity of being in the Catholic Church for salvation (Denzinger, no. 1351); the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes (1965) affirms the doctrine of the new heaven and the new earth, and delineates it (no. 39); a letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Recentiores Episcoporum Synodi (1979), affirms the importance of holding to the credal affirmations about the last things, and the importance of the theological task of elucidating that teaching without imaginative excess—see the discussion of this text in §23 above, and in appendix I to Ratzinger’s Eschatology. Part III—Timespace

For Augustine on time, see principally, De civitate dei, book 11, and Confessiones, book 11. Among the many analyses of and responses to what he writes, especially useful are Cavadini, “Time and Ascent”; Chrétien, Regard, ch. 3; Knuttila, “Time and Creation”; Manchester, “Song”; Marion, Au lieu, ch. 5; McGrattan, “Augustine’s Theory”; Pranger, Eternity’s Ennui; Teske, Paradoxes; and Wetzel, “Time after Augustine.” For Thomas on time and eternity, see Summa theologiae, 1.10; Stump, Aquinas, chs. 3–4, gives a clear contemporary restatement of this position. Among other discussions of Thomas on time, see Clarke, “Being in Time”; Fox, Time and Eternity; Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting, 90–93; Kromholtz, On the Last Day; Leget, Living with God; MacIntosh, “Angelic Time”; and Peter, Participated Eternity. For the phenomenological treatment of time, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §§67–77; and Ingarden, Time, 99–156. On the current state of play in anglophone-analytic philosophy of time, Callender’s Oxford Handbook provides good and up-to-date coverage of all the major issues. Williams, “Myth of Passage,” is the classical treatment of the metaphor of temporal movement; it spawned an enormous responsive literature. Prior’s “Thank Goodness,” too, which argues that if the LORD is not temporal there are all sorts of things he cannot know and/or do, including things required of him if he is the LORD, has also

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produced a large responsive literature, among which see principally the works by Lewis and Oaklander in the bibliographic list below (§37). See also the works by Craig cited there, which treat issues in the philosophy of time, the theology of time, and the mathematics of time. In addition, see Leftow, Time and Eternity; and Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity.” Among the many theological treatments opposing in various ways the idea that the LORD is eternal, see Bauckham & Hart, “Shape of Time”; Begbie, Theology; and Gunton, Doctrine of Creation. For the distinction between metronomic and systolic time made in §§14–15, see, very helpfully and suggestively, the works by Agamben cited in the bibliographic list, especially Church and the Kingdom. For the analysis of timing and the metronome, see Sokolowski’s essential essay, “Timing.” There are some useful contributions from poststructuralist and postcolonial positions: Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Chakrabarty, “Historicism and Its Supplements”; and Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? are representative. Part IV—Angels

For Augustine on the angels, see De civitate dei, books 11–12, on angelic fall and creation; De Genesi ad litteram, book 4, on angelic knowledge; De trinitate, books 2–3, on theophanies and the angels; Epistulae 9.3, on angelic bodies; De divinatione daemonum, throughout, on demonic bodies and powers; Enchiridion, 15.58–59, on the limits of our knowledge about angels. Peter Lombard’s treatment of the angels is in Sententiae, 2.2–11. The principal medieval angelologies and debates about angels can be found in the various Sentence-commentaries; I have consulted mostly those by Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Thomas Aquinas’ other treatments of the angels include Summa theologiae, 1.50–64; Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, of which the first seven articles treat angelic bodies, and the eighth angelic species; De veritate, questions 8–18 (these questions are not exclusively about the angels, but various topics in angelology are found in them). More recent literature includes Bonino, Anges et démons, a concise and precise Thomist treatment; Bulgakov, Jacob’s Ladder, an excitable and outré Orthodox treatment; Chrétien, Regard, ch. 7, on angelic knowledge;



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Colish, “Early Scholastic Angelology,” on twelfth-century positions; Dondaine, “Premier instant,” on the angelic fall; Goris, “Angelic Doctor”; Journet et al., Péché de l’ange; Keck, Angels, on thirteenth-century debates; MacIntosh, “Angelic Time”; Madec, “Angelus,” on Augustine on the angels; Peterson, “Book on Angels,” on angels in the liturgy and in theology more generally; Quay, “Angels,” on the Fourth Lateran’s teaching on angels; Scheeben, Handbuch, §§135–42, on angels in general; Toner, “Angelic Sin,” contrasting Thomas and Scotus on the topic; Vonier, Angels, a popular treatment, broadly Thomist; and Wood, “Angelic Individuation,” on thirteenth-century views about this. Part V—Humans

On theological anthropology in general, Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence is unavoidable, even if compulsive in its preference for mapping the territory rather than laying claim to it. Spaemann’s Essays are lucid and beautiful, as is his Love and his Personen—these underlie several of the argumentative threads in §21, even though I do not explicitly engage Spaemann at all. My analysis of the flesh in §21 is deeply indebted to Marion’s Phénomène érotique, and to his treatment of the flesh in De surcroît. See also Chrétien, Symbolique, and my Song of Songs, both of which treat the grammar of the flesh in that text. On the discarnate intermediate state, the topic of §22, my discussion is partly exegetical of Benedictus Deus, and on the background to the composition and promulgation of that work, Trottmann’s Vision béatifique is the essential work. But most of what I argue in §22 is speculative and has no obvious precursors. On the understanding of sin as self-diminution expounded in §23 as preparation for the argument about self-annihilation’s possibility, see the discussion in the first half of my Lying. For sin’s solipsism, see Marion, “Evil in Person”; and for a more detailed treatment of acedia from a historical perspective, see Wenzel, Sloth. Compare Norris, Acedia; and Banks, Lost Memory, for a novelist’s treatment of the same topic in its relation to pornography. On boredom, divertissement, and staging, see Pascal, Pensées, nos. 132–39; and on the Prodigal’s sin and its remedy, see Marion, God without Being, 95–102; Shanzer, “Pearls”; and Henry, I Am the Truth, 163–64. On conditional immortality and the possibility of hell’s emptiness, see Kvanvig, Hell; Balthasar, Dare We Hope?; McCullough, “Darkling Lights.” Ross, “Aquinas on Annihilation,” is

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especially useful on that question. Powerful literary depictions of hell’s anticipations, even if not under that description, can be found in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Canetti’s Auto-da-fè, and Kraznahorkai’s Satantango. On heaven as a human last thing (§24), in addition to the standard treatments in the works mentioned above in the bibliographic essay on Parts I and II, Kreeft’s Heaven is a popular rebuttal of errors about heaven and a depiction of what it is probably like; three significant histories of the idea of heaven have appeared in recent years: McDannell and Lang, Heaven; Russell, Singing Silence; and McGrath, Brief History. Saward’s Sweet & Blessed Country is a theological treatment, heartfelt but softheaded. Walls’ Heaven is an analytic-philosophical treatment of the topic, abundantly clear and well argued. Zaleski and Zaleski’s Heaven is a lovely anthology of readings from various traditions (including non-Christian ones) and times about the theme. Garrigou-Lagrange’s Life Everlasting is a Thomist analysis, stimulating though often wrong, especially in its consistent refusal to take the fleshly aspects of heaven with sufficient seriousness. For a useful treatment of the social-corporate aspects of heavenly existence, see Fiddes, Promised End. On the phenomenology of writing discussed in §24, see Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 18; and, for treatment of an associated topic, Kleist, “Gradual Formulation,” on learning how to speak. This is a drastically understudied topic. Part VI—Plants, Animals, Inanimate Creatures

Andrew Linzey is the principal recent contributor to theological thinking about nonhuman animals. See his Animal Theology, Creatures of the Same God, and Why Animal Suffering Matters. See also Camosy, Love of Animals; Deane-Drummond and Clough, Creaturely Theology; and Webb, On God and Dogs. A different trajectory of thought focuses not on the nature of animals but on the nature of our relations with them. On this, much more important for the purposes of this study, see Agamben, The Open; Coetzee’s Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Lives of Animals; Mulhall, Wounded Animal; and Cavell et al., Philosophy and Animal Life. Part VII—The Last Things in the Devastation

Underlying §§31–35 is the question of what is often called eschatological reserve. Two useful recent works threading the same needle are



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Mathewes, Republic of Grace; and Biggar, Behaving in Public. Mathewes’ more systematic treatment is in his Theology of Public Life. My own guides to these questions are Pascal and Augustine. On Pascal’s political theory (if it merits that grand term), see Auerbach, “Political Theory” (a splendid and important essay far beyond its exegesis of Pascal). And on the questions about affect and lament in Augustine discussed in §34, see especially Byers, Perception; and Scrutton, “Emotion.”

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§37

⫸

Bibliographic List

I

list works alphabetically by author, except for magisterial texts, which are given by title, with date of promulgation immediately following. The texts of these, usually in several languages, can be found at www.vatican .va. I do not list scriptural works: all quotations from the canon of Scripture in the body of this book are in my own translation from the Latin text of the Vulgate given in the six-volume Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library edition produced under the editorship of Swift Edgar, and others, from 2010–2013. For each item listed below, I give details of the edition or version actually consulted, which may not be the latest or best. When I have consulted a work only or principally in a version found on the web, I provide the web address. All translations into English from works given in the bibliographic list in some other language are by me. Ad tuendam fidem (1998). Apostolic letter of John Paul II. Agamben, Giorgio. The Church and the Kingdom. Translated by Lelan de la Durantaye. London: Seagull Books, 2012. ———. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. The Kingdom and the Glory. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

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———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Auden, W. H. “Archaeology.” In Thank You, Fog: Last Poems, 14–17. New York: Random House, 1974. Auerbach, Erich. “On the Political Theory of Pascal.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, translated by Ralph Manheim, 101–29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Augustine. For all the following works by Augustine, I have consulted the Latin texts given at http://www.augustinus.it/latino/. ———. Confessiones. ———. De civitate dei. ———. De divinatione daemonum. ———. De doctrina christiana. ———. De Genesi ad litteram. ———. De trinitate. ———. Enarrationes in Psalmos. ———. Enchiridion. ———. Epistulae. ———. In evangelium ioannis tractatus. ———. Retractationes. ———. Sermones. Bach, J. S. Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. BWV nos. 1007–1112. Pieter Wispelwey, J. S. Bach: 6 Suites for Cello Solo. Evil Penguin Records, 2012. 2CDs. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Dare We Hope that All Men Be Saved?—With a Short Discourse on Hell. Translated by David Kipp and Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988. ———. The Last Act. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998. ———. “Some Points of Eschatology.” In Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh, 255–77. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. Banks, Russell. Lost Memory of Skin. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Bauckham, Richard. “Emerging Issues in Eschatology in the Twenty-First Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, edited by Jerry Walls, 671–89. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.



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Bauckham, Richard, and Trevor Hart. “The Shape of Time.” In The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Contemporary Theology, edited by David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot, 41–72. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. ———, eds. Hope against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Begbie, Jeremy S. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Benedictus Deus (1336). Constitution of Benedict XII. English and Latin texts in Denzinger, Enchiridion, nos. 1000–1002. Biggar, Nigel. Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Billot, Louis. Quaestiones de novissimis. 3rd rev. ed. Rome: Officina Polygraphica, 1908. Blignières, Louis-Marie. Les fins dernières. Bouère: Morin, 1994. Boersma, Hans. “Overcoming Time and Space: Gregory of Nyssa’s Anagogical Theology.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20 (2012): 575–612. Bonaventure. Collationes in Hexaemeron. French text in Marc Ozilou, Les conférences sur les 6 jours de la création de saint Bonaventure. Paris: Desclée, 1991. Bonino, Serge-Thomas. Les anges et les démons: Quatorze leçons de théologie. Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2007. Braaten, Carl E., and Robert W. Jenson, eds. The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives on Eschatology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. Bulgakov, Sergius. Jacob’s Ladder: On Angels. Translated by Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Byers, Sarah. Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Callender, Craig, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Calovius, Abraham. Systema locorum theologicorum tomus duodecimus et ultimus eschatologia sacra. Wittenberg: Hartmann, 1677. Cameron, Ron. “The Anatomy of a Discourse: On ‘Eschatology’ as a Category for Explaining Christian Origins.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8/3 (1996): 231–45.

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Camosy, Charles Christopher. For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action. Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2013. Canetti, Elias. Auto-da-fé. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi. The Calling of St. Matthew (1599–1600). Oil painting housed in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. ———. Madonna dei Palafrenieri (1606). Oil painting housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992). A systematic exposition of church doctrine promulgated by John Paul II. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566). A systematic exposition of Catholic doctrine promulgated following the Council of Trent. Cavadini, John. “Time and Ascent in Confessions XI.” In Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, edited by Joseph T. Lienhard et al., 171–85. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Cavell, Stanley, et al. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Historicism and Its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies.” In Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, 109–19. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. ———. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. Le regard de l’amour. Paris: Desclée, 2000. ———. Symbolique du corps: La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005. Clarke, W. Norris, SJ. “Being in Time: What Is Time?” In The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, 161–77. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg, 1999. ———. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003. ———, et al. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Colish, Marcia. “Early Scholastic Angelology.” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 62 (1995): 80–109.



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⫸

Index

Abraham, 3–4, 56, 71, 77–78, 84, 124, 215, 235, 255 acedia (sloth), 143, 168, 196, 198, 202, 365; see also sin Adam, 55, 92, 106, 113, 114, 211, 236, 270, 286–87, 306, 331; see also Eden; Eve Adeodatus, 332; see also Augustine; lament Advent, 99, 217 Albert the Great, 155; see also Mary Albigensianism, Albigensians, 117; see also Fourth Lateran Council Alexander of Hales, 120; see also angels Ambrose of Milan, 328; see also Augustine angels, angelic: annihilation of, 15, 17, 127, 137–38, 141, 143, 147, 175; in Aquinas, 111–13, 119–20, 123, 128, 134, 138–42, 144, 280, 364–65; in Augustine, 125–26, 133–34, 138, 145; in Bonaventure, 111–12, 120, 123, 129, 364; compared to intermediate state, 158, 160, 175, 182; corporeality of, 113, 119–24, 125–29, 139, 140, 144, 158, 160; dogmatic pronouncement on, 117–18, 119; fallen, 3–5, 55–56, 61, 106, 128, 131–35, 137, 142, 146; knowledge of, 145–46; last things of, 10, 12, 20, 46, 51–53, 62–64, 115, 137–47; in the liturgy, 113, 124–25; unfallen, 127, 128, 132, 133, 137, 145–47 animals: as animate creatures, 265; annihilation of, 17, 294, 295; within

anthropocentric pattern, 61, 282–83; in Aquinas, 275–78, 280–81, 288, 289; in Augustine, 336–37; death of, 288, 290, 291–92; flesh of, 121, 276, 294, 295; in Genesis, 286–87; as immaculables, 269, 295, 301; individuation of, 295–96, 299; inner life of, 284; in James Dickey, 291–92; last things of, 273, 283, 289, 293, 296, 301, 303; nonhuman, 134, 225, 231, 267, 283–86, 287–88, 336–37, 366; in Pascal, 231; relations with, 273–75, 279, 282, 286, 287–89, 366; similarity to human creatures, 285, 287; soul of, 294–95; symbiosis with other creatures, 296; in Wittgenstein, 284; see also plants animate creatures, 4–5, 11, 20, 23, 55, 121, 125, 193, 265, 267, 269–71, 278, 280, 289, 297–98, 301, 310; see also animals; plants annihilation: of angels, 109, 127, 137–38, 141, 143, 145, 147, 175; in Aquinas, 138, 140, 365; in Augustine, 199–202, 206, 247; of artifacts, 10, 305–6, 307, 309, 323; and damnation, 23, 150, 171, 207, 209, 211; and hell, 241, 242, 244, 247, 248, 250, 261; of humans, 149, 174, 191–93, 199–201, 203, 208, 209, 215, 239, 241, 247; of inanimate creatures, 4, 11, 303, 309, 323; as last thing, 11, 15–17, 19, 25, 32, 47, 50, 51, 57, 60, 69, 92, 137,

385

386

⫷ Index

171, 191, 215, 241, 247, 313; and magisterial texts, 204–5; and metronomic time, 107–8; of plants and animals, 294–95; of sacraments, 257–58, 261; in Scheeben, 245, 247; and sin, 191–93, 202, 209–10, 211–12, 247, 295, 365; as temporary, 16–17, 174–75, 191, 193; in Wisdom, 191–92; see also hell; sin anthropocentrism, 61–66, 114, 283, 289, 293, 303, 306, 308–9, 311; in Aquinas, 61–65, 278–83, 284, 286–89; see also Christology Apostles’ Creed, 45, 48, 212; see also Christian doctrine Aquinas, Saint Thomas: on acedia, 196; on angels, 111–13, 119–20, 123, 128, 134, 138–42, 144, 280, 364–65; and anthropocentrism, 61–65, 278–83, 284, 286–89; Collationes de “credo in Deum,” 361; Compendium Theologiae (Compendium of Theology), 61, 279–82, 361; in Dante, 184; on eternity, 72, 74, 363; on inanimate creatures, 274, 275; on plants and animals, 274, 275, 276–77, 278, 279, 280–81, 282–83, 288, 289; Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, 364; school of, 276, 361; Scriptum super sententiis, 139, 361; Summa contra gentiles, 275, 139, 275, 361; Summa theologiae, 72, 74, 91, 139, 141, 196, 276–78, 361; on theology, 362; on time, 86, 91, 363 Aristotle, Aristotelian, 63, 74, 86; see also Aquinas art: Christian visual, 84, 113, 123, 212; high vs. kitsch, 325 artifacts: of the fall, 66, 67, 91, 92, 107, 236, 237, 242, 243, 288, 291, 292, 302, 308, 310; of fleshliness, 169; hell as, 318; as inanimate creature, 30, 265, 299–302, 303, 304–7, 308–9, 321, 324–25; last things of, 305–7, 308, 311, 323; liturgical, 307–8, 324; of sin, 126; visual, 84; see also givens; inanimate creatures Auden, W. H., vi, 324; see also artifacts Augustine: on angels, 111, 125–26, 131–32, 133–34, 138, 141, 145; on Christian theology, 35–36; Confessiones (Confessions),

ix, 72, 216, 328–36, 363; De Civitate Dei (City of God), 131, 200–201, 243–44, 336, 361, 363, 364; on the death of the soul (mors animae), 47, 183, 198–99, 200–202, 206, 213; De Divinatione Daemonum (On the Divination of Demons), 125, 364; De Doctrina Christiana, 36; Enchiridion, 364; Epistulae, 126, 364; Ennarationes in Psalmos, 215; In evangelium iohannis tractatus, 73; De Genesi ad litteram, 364; on hell, 243–44, 246; on human flesh, 157; De Immortalitate Animae, 199; on lament, 328–36, 337–38; and the liturgy, 232; on the LORD’s temporality, 72–73, 75; on the LORD as Trinity, 181; on love, 336; on the place of the LORD, 215–16; on politics, 340, 357; prayer to, 183; Retractiones, ix, 329, 330; Sermones, 90; on timespace, 90, 99, 134, 243, 246; De Trinitate, 147, 198–99 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 307, 324; see also artifacts von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 205, 249, 361, 365; see also universalism baptism: artifacts of, 96, 232, 308; of Augustine, 331–32; and the Eucharist, 262; as initiation, 40, 235, 252, 258–59, 262; as gift, 356; liturgy of, 102, 230, 235, 252; last thing of, 258–60; of nonhuman creatures, 270; and ordination, 262; as renewal, 212; in systolic time, 95; see also sacrament Bartleby: see Melville, Pascal Benedict XII: Benedictus Deus 118–19, 124, 174, 178–81, 183–84, 186, 188, 204–5, 208, 363, 365 Benedict XV, Quod de fovendo, 119 Benedictus Deus: see Benedict XII Billot, Louis, 8, 361 Boethius, 72; see also Aquinas; timespace body: action of, 208; angelic, 121, 124–28, 158, 160; animate, 138, 158, 160; annihilation of, 245; of Christ, 40, 83, 101, 221, 232, 235, 251, 256–60, 278, 288, 315, 319; of Christian doctrine, 40, 174; death of, 201, 205–6, 259; discarnate, 124–25,

147, 174, 180, 183–84; of energy, 127; and flesh, 158, 160, 165, 171, 174, 178, 180, 220, 294, 295; fleshly, 5, 49–50, 121, 125, 176–78, 184, 186, 188, 245, 287; habits of, 230, 232; human, 90, 274, 287; inanimate, 152, 157, 158–60, 161, 162, 165–67, 176, 197; life of, 98; lifeless, 47, 50, 153, 201; of literature, 111; and the liturgy, 234; of Mary, 155–56; mass of, 122; of Monica, 333; of Moses, 123; order of, 100, 102, 233–34; ownership of, 169; resurrected, 220; and saints, 235; of Satan, 147; and soul, 46, 118, 155, 156, 160, 175, 200–201, 202, 206, 209, 213, 278, 280, 297; see also soul Bonaventure: on angels, 111–12, 120, 123, 129, 364; Collationes in Hexaemeron, 120; see also angels Buddha, Buddhism, 43, 176, 178, 301, 347, 362 Calovius [Calov], Abraham, 8 Caravaggio, Michangelo Mersi de, 307, 324, 325; see also art; artifacts Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), 119, 177, 206, 362; see also angels; soul Catechism of the Council of Trent, 40, 205, 362; see also soul Catharism, Cathars, 117; see also Fourth Lateran Council Catholicism, Catholic: Augustine as, 328; and art, 325; doctrine, dogma, 46–47, 55, 117, 119, 153–54, 174, 182, 247, 337; and intermediate state, 174, 182, 206; liturgy, 99, 102, 111, 232, 320; and Mary, 153–54, 337; Newman as, 252; Pascal as, 345; Tridentine canons on justification, 40–41; theology, theologian, ix, 9, 42, 174, 209; writings de novissimis, 8 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 114–15; see also angels Christ: in Augustine, 36, 334; blood of, 96, 263, 319; body of (see Church, Eucharist); flesh of, 65, 77, 105, 108, 124, 145, 147, 151–52, 216, 217, 262–63, 293; heavenly vision of, 118, 178, 180; in iconography, 31, 325; imitation of, 77, 357; incarnation of, ix, 3, 37, 56, 64–65,

Index ⫸

387

71, 77, 87, 99, 151, 235, 256, 322; as judge, 204, 208; life in, 203, 249, 357; in the liturgy, 103–4, 124, 147, 217, 251; as Logos, 64, 322; in Pascal, 343; passion and death of, 254–55, 256, 257, 262, 292, 322, 356; promises of, 205; as Savior, 205; see also Son Christology, christological, 64–66, 114, 151, 278, 282; see also anthropocentrism Christian doctrine: about angels, 121–22; and annihilation, 202, 203, 244; body of, 40; as Church teaching, 39–42, 43; about creation, 76, 86, 289; and death, 175, 18; extension of, 43; about hell, 184, 241–42, 244; and heresy, 39, 40; and human flesh, 48, 49, 149, 151, 152; and Incarnation, 151; about intermediate state, 208; about last things, ix, 1, 33, 37, 43, 45, 51, 52, 53, 55, 173, 294; and sacramental principle, 253; about salvation, eternal life, 20, 46, 48, 217; technicalities of, 41; as traditional discourse, 40; and universalism, 249 Christian orthodoxy: and annihilation, 175, 191, 203, 241; and Christian grammar, 65, 189; and eternity, 19, 173; and evil, 193, 195; and hell, 241, 244, 248; and heresy, 40; last things in, 10, 17, 65, 67; and the LORD, 173; and natural science, 267, 300; and reincarnation, 175–77; and sin, 135; and universalism, 248–49; see also Christian doctrine Christian tradition: on angels, 112, 114, 117, 119, 122–23, 125–29, 131, 134, 138, 145; on annihilation, 47, 138, 175, 202; and anthropocentricism, 53, 63, 65–66; and artifacts, 308; authoritative, 35–36, 345; and Eucharist, 262; on heaven, 216– 18, 220, 238, 366; on hell, 231, 242–43, 246–49, 318; on human creatures, 157, 169, 171, 175–76, 202, 207; on iconography, 31; on intermediate state, 180–81, 186, 188–89, 202; on lament, 338; on last things, 7, 11–12, 59, 61; on Mary, 153; as mode of discourse, 40, 168, 216, 238, 247; Orthodox, 31; on plants and animals, 273–74, 288; on resurrection,

388

⫷ Index

49; Thomist, 119, 123, 128–29, 134, 186, 274; on timespace, 96–97; Western, 7, 131–32, 142, 241–43, 265; see also, Christian doctrine; Scripture Christmas, 99, 102 Church: as baptized, 51, 230, 252, 259; bishops of, 42; as Christ’s body, 40, 251, 256; Christ’s love for, 260–61; and confession, 51; as creature of the LORD, 68, 99, 101; creeds of, 218; doctors of, 138; dogma of, 220; fathers of, 198, 199; and people of Israel, 51; last thing of, 150, 251, 258, 262, 308; liturgy of, 45, 46, 99–100, 101, 181, 230, 235, 251; LORD’s revelation to, 35; and Paul, 108; as sacrament, 3, 249–50, 251; sacramental life of, 77, 252, 256, 258, 260; and the saints, 183; and sin, 194; story of, 113; and theology, 35, 37, 41, 43; vocabulary of, 207; see also Christian doctrine confirmation, 258–59, 260, 262; see also sacrament Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 203, 206–7, 362, 363; see also Christian doctrine cosmos: angels presence in, 127, 131, 132; in Aquinas, 141; Christ’s presence in, 77, 96; as devastated (see world); in Dante, 19; as ensemble of creatures, 4–5, 10, 55, 60, 76, 173, 177, 309, 313; nonphysical, 86; relation to the LORD, 30, 39, 51, 62, 71, 76, 131, 211, 235; restoration to, 51, 52, 56, 57, 65, 212, 293, 305, 311, 315, 321–22; sacraments in, 257; time of, 70, 75, 76, 86–87, 90–91, 128, 132; traces of, 321, 323; see also world Council of Trent, 40–41, 205; see also Christian doctrine creation: angelic order in, 109, 115, 118, 133, 137; animal, 288; in Christian theology, 36; corporeal, 282–83; as damaged, 288; as eternal act, 76–77, 78, 99, 323; human order in, 134, 149; inanimate, 303; and incarnation, 78–79; out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), 59–60, 61, 86, 143, 164; orders of, 118, 149; and timespace, 76, 77, 78, 85, 91, 99, 132, 134

Daniel, Book of, 84, 123; see also Scripture Dante, Dantean: Commedia, 123, 180, 307, 324; Inferno, 19, 23, 147, 248; Paradiso, 184–86 David, 215 death: and angels, 126, 134; as annihilation, 17, 47, 174–75, 193, 201; as artifact of the fall, 4, 55, 67, 92, 126, 193, 218, 236, 247, 288, 291, 327; in Augustine, 72–73, 134, 200–201, 328, 330–35, 337– 38; in baptism, 230, 235; camps of, 105, 162, 257, 288, 314; of Christ, 56, 96, 106, 118, 152, 177, 258, 292, 322; in Eden, 93; and eternal life, 45; and extreme unction, 252; and flesh, 49, 50, 52, 163, 165, 176–78, 182, 204; and intermediate state, 119, 139, 149, 171, 204, 206–7, 260; and lament, 328, 330–35, 337–38; liturgy of, 102; of Mary, 153–56; of martyrs, 292, 356; and metronomic time, 91–93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 134, 196, 233, 254, 263; physical, physiological, 46, 47, 176, 177; of plants and animals, 138, 161, 273–74, 288, 291–92, 313; prior to human fall, 134; protection from, 304–5; removal of, 308, 311, 327; as separation of soul and body, 46, 56, 149, 160, 165, 173, 203, 206, 208, 213, 242, 247, 259; of the soul, 47, 48, 200–201, 206, 213, 248; and systolic time, 99; and timespace, 82, 84, 86–87, 165; in treatises de novissimis, 8–9 delight, delightful: and acedia, 196–97; affective, 187; in artifacts, 304–7, 323–25; and desire, 161, 162, 167, 198–99, 263, 278–80, 323; in devastation, 321–25; as emotion, 125; gifts, 319; heaven as, 46, 52, 132, 207, 238–40, 263; and lament, 327, 329–30; in marriage, 260–61; in plants and animals, 292–93; qualia of, 222–23, 225; see also lament Denys the Carthusian, 8, 111, 138; see also angels Denzinger, Heinrich J. D. (Enchiridion symbolorum), 117–18, 119 Descartes, René, 112, 168; see also angels; eros

devastation: see world Dickey, James, 291–92, 324; see also animals; death Donne, John, 21–22; see also repetitive stasis Easter, 99, 100, 102 Eden, Edenic: artifacts in, 306; creatures in, 81, 286, 303, 310; as experimental project, 134; location in, 161; as paradise, 4; sacraments in, 257–58; temporal constitution of, 84, 89, 92–93, 95, 99, 106; as transfigured, 293; as undamaged cosmos, 60–61, 106; see also Adam; Eve Egypt, Egyptian, 35–36, 362 Elijah, 48, 79, 220 England, English: animal in, 267; annihilation in, 15; body/flesh/matter in, 121–22; country, 9, 68, 301; epektasy in, 26; eschatology in, 8–9; as gift, 319; hell in, 247; image in, 169–70; prepositions in, 5; sloth (acedia) in, 196; systole in, 96; translation of maculae, 268; usage of, 39–40, 158, 231 Enoch, 48, 220 epektasy, 25–27 eros: ecstatic, 164, 323; of flesh, 162–63, 167–68, 323; as gift, 163; social, 166; see also delight; kiss; love eschatology, 8–9, 43, 203, 206 eternity: in Aquinas, 72, 74, 91, 278; in Augustine, 337; as glorious last thing, 69, 337; of the LORD, 23, 71–72, 74–76, 79, 81, 85, 108; and timespace, 76, 96, 98; see also timespace Eucharist: celebration of, 105, 257, 314; as gift, 356; last thing of, 258, 262–63; liturgy of, 103, 233, 262–63, 315, 320; presence of the LORD in, 221, 313; see also liturgy; Mass Europe, European, 111, 205, 225, 227, 301, 348, 364 Eve: creation of, 287; in Eden, 55, 92, 106, 113, 211, 236, 306, 330–31; and Mary, 155; in Milton, 114; see also Adam; Eden Exodus, Book of, 36, 77, 220; see also Scripture

Index ⫸

389

extreme unction (sacrament of unction): last thing of, 259–60; sacramental practice of, 252; see also sacrament faith, faithful: and angels, 117–18, 139; assembly of, 102, 108, 154, 206, 221; of Augustine, 329; and Christian doctrine, 39; confessions of, 51–53; definition of, 117–18; as gift, 40; grammar of, 202, 210; and knowledge, 218–19; in marriage, 260; and Mary, 154; in Newman, 252; in Pascal, 231, 344; in Tridentine canons on justification, 40–41; see also Christian doctrine; Church Father: attributed agency of, 219; as LORD, 3; reconciliation to, 78; as relational, 72, 181, 322 Fermat’s Last Theorem, 219; see also knowledge fold: angels within, 146; in Augustine, 90; and liturgy, 99–100, 104, 106, 262; and metronomic time, 105, 257; and the passion, 96, 98–99, 104–7, 144, 146, 256–57, 262; in Paul, 108; and systolic time, 105, 167, 254, 256; and timespace, 78–79, 87, 162, 216, 217; see also systolic time; timespace Fourth Lateran Council, 117–18, 362, 365; see also Benedict XII; soul Fifth Lateran Council, 205–6; see also soul Franciscan: see Bonaventure; Scotus Francis de Sales, 155 France, French, 231, 340 Gabriel, Archangel, 117, 120, 123, 145, 146, 187, 268; see also Mary Gaudium et Spes, 206, 363; see also Second Vatican Council Gaddis, William, 226–27 Gehenna: see hell General Relativity, 85, 86 Genesis, Book of: Abraham and Sarah in, 124; and Augustine, 131–32, 134, 330; Babel, 308; creation, 169, 213, 286; Enoch in, 48; relation of creatures in, 292; see also creation gift: artifacts as, 307, 309; of being, 3, 4, 12,

390

⫷ Index

72, 145, 163, 199–200, 294, 311, 357; of blessing, 52; and ecstasy, 234; of eternal life, 108, 134, 145, 236, 237–38, 239, 319; of faith, 40; of flesh, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 195; of goods, 131; of language, 319; of liturgy, 231–33, 235, 236, 319, 324, 356; of love, 162; of the magi, 31; from pagans, 292; of reason, 354; and spectacle, 168 givens: and artifacts, 265, 299–302, 303–4, 306, 324; last thing of, 309, 310–11, 312; see also artifacts; inanimate creatures grace, graceful: in Aquinas, 275, 276; in Augustine, 141, 338; in devastation, 107, 367; as free act of the LORD, 60, 87, 141, 201, 244; and habit, 43; means of, 320; responses to, 92; and salvation, 319; in Scheeben, 245; in Tridentine canons on justification, 40–41 gratitude, 101, 234, 319, 356, 359; see also gift Greek: bath (balanion), 333; epektasy (epekteino), 26; eschatology (eschaton), 9; flesh/body (sarx/soma), 158; metempsychosis, 176; substance (ousia), 199; systole (sustellein), 96; visitation (paroikia), 97 Germany, German, 9, 347–48 Goldbach’s Conjecture, 29, 30 Golgotha, 105; see also Christ; timespace Gulliver’s Travels, 167; see also metronomic time habit, habituation: in Augustine, 331–33, 335–38; of being, 166; and delight, 305, 322; and experience, 225, 227–28, 229–30, 269; and grace, 43; and liturgy, 102–3, 230–32, 234, 236, 269; in Pascal, 231–32; and political agency, 346, 347, 354; of sin, 142, 169, 193, 195–96, 198; of speech, 43, 84, 230; of virtue, 200; in William James, 227 heaven, heavenly: angelic presence in, 125, 133, 145–47, 240, 269, 294; anticipation of, 61, 66, 67, 101, 102, 251, 306, 314, 315, 320, 321, 323, 325, 339, 357; assembly of creatures in, 5, 51, 65, 67, 101, 114,

121, 124, 239; in Augustine, 215–16; Christ’s ascended flesh in, 3, 68, 101, 118, 124, 146, 152, 216, 220, 238, 293, 294, 308; and the Church, 150, 251; in Dante, 184–85; defined, 5; as gift, 319; human fleshly presence in, 102, 104, 153, 161, 164, 183, 220–21, 238; inanimate creatures in, 303, 305–6, 307, 309–10, 311–12, 323; as last thing, 11, 26–27, 49, 57, 60–61, 149, 170, 171, 173, 179, 182, 188, 215–16, 222, 241, 296, 302; and liturgy, 67, 104, 147, 217, 221–22, 262–63, 309, 314, 315, 321; Mary’s assumed presence in, 43, 48, 124, 146, 153–56, 217, 220, 238, 293, 294, 308; plants and animals in, 273, 277, 280, 282–83, 288, 289, 291–92, 293–94, 295, 296; qualia in, 224, 236, 237; renewal of, 56, 57, 308–9, 311; sacraments in, 257–62; saints in, 101, 178–79, 180–81, 184, 196, 204, 217, 220, 236, 237, 262, 278, 293, 294, 306; timespace of, 67, 70,76, 78, 81, 90, 93, 95, 99, 106–7, 108, 133, 149, 162, 164, 196, 204, 215–16, 217, 220, 237–39, 240, 246, 259, 262–63, 273, 309, 313; in treatises de novissimis, 8–9; and universalism, 12, 250; vision of the LORD in, 144, 218, 219, 222, 238, 308; see also epektasy; repetitive stasis Hebrew, 247 hell, hellish: as annihilation, 150, 207, 212–13, 242, 247–48, 250, 295, 317; anticipations of, 242, 247–48, 314, 318–20, 328, 336; in Aquinas, 278, 279; in Augustine, 242–44, 246, 247, 328, 336; in Dante, 19, 23, 147, 180; defined, 5; experience in, 183, 186, 224; flesh in, 149, 179, 182, 204, 241, 242, 244, 250; harrowing of, 96, 212; inhabitation of, 12, 205, 242, 248–49, 257; as last thing, 11, 12, 27, 49, 53, 171, 188, 204, 241–42, 250; and metronomic time, 91, 107, 246, 257; sacraments in, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262; in Scheeben, 244–45, 246, 247; separation from the LORD, 150, 173, 181, 204, 242, 313, 317–18; timespace of, 22, 67, 81, 107, 145, 246, 257, 314; in

treatises de novissimis, 8–9; in Wisdom, 192 Herbert, George, 21, 307; see also repetitive stasis heresy, 39–40; see also Christian doctrine Hindu, Hinduism, 176, 178, 301 Hobbes, Thomas, 113; see also angels Holy Spirit: attributed agency of, 219; and the church, 41; and eschatology, 203; the LORD as, 3; in Pascal, 341; as relational, 72, 181; see also Trinity Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 321–24; see also Christ; delight icon, iconicity, 29–31, 84, 183, 307 Immaculate Conception: see Mary inanimate creatures: in Aquinas, 274, 275, 280; defined, 4; within hierarchy, 61, 63, 280; as immaculables, 301–2; individuation of, 299–300, 301, 305, 308; last things of, 11, 17, 20, 23, 51, 56, 115, 265, 293, 297–98, 299, 303–4, 309–10, 311–13, 323–24; see also artifacts; givens Incarnation: see Christ Ineffabilis Deus: see Pius IX intermediate state, 4, 149, 153, 171, 173–75, 178–80, 182, 186–89, 202–3, 208, 213, 215, 245, 250, 294–95, 363, 365; see also death; soul invidia (envy), 195–96, 202; see also sin Isaiah, Book of, 84, 291, 311; see also Scripture Islam, Islamic, 176, 344 Israel, Israelites, 3, 35–36, 56, 134, 176, 235, 256 Jacob, 3, 187, 364 James, Henry, 226, 336; see also qualia James, William, 227; see also qualia Jansenism, Jansenist, 341; see also Pascal Jerusalem, 36, 97, 170, 307, 308–9; see also Revelation Jesus of Nazareth: see Christ Jews, Jewish: see Israel Job, 57, 91; see also metronomic time; world John the Baptist, 89, 123, 259

Index ⫸

391

John the Divine, Gospel of, 71, 124, 205, 311, 330; see also Revelation; Scripture John Paul II, 205, 362; see also theology; universalism Joseph, 31 Joyce, James, 226; see also qualia Jude, Book of, 123; see also Scripture judgment: and angels, 143; in Augustine, 330–32, 335–36, 357; in Benedict XII, 208; consequentialist, 348, 351; faculty of, 200, 269, 314, 324–25; general, 118–19, 204, 314, 362; by the LORD, 118–19, 204, 295, 317–19; of Monnica, 328, 330; in Pascal, 341, 345–47, 357; political, 341, 344, 346–48, 352, 355–57; regulative, 345; of soul, 56, 173; speculative, 210, 238, 249, 270, 292, 302; in treatises de novissimis, 8–9 Julian of Toledo, 8 justice: and baptism, 259; of the LORD, 71, 143, 211, 244–46, 278; political, 353–54, 355, 357; and punishment, 211; in Scheeben, 244–46 Kafka, Franz, 233, 347; see also liturgy; quietism kiss: of beloved, 187, 194, 221, 314, 346; and flesh’s eros, 163; in Hopkins, 321–22; of the LORD, 98, 164, 221, 239, 262; see also delight; eros; love knowledge: angelic, 114, 127–28, 139, 145–46, 364; of Christ, 151; of death, 165; in devastation, 128; imprecise, 293; and judgment, 330; of the LORD, 184, 218–19, 222; nonsensory, 220; sensory, 221 Kolbe, Maximilian, 106; see also martyr lament, lamentation: in Augustine, 328–29, 331–32, 335, 337–38, 367; in Christian speech, 43, 101; in devastation, 182, 288, 309, 317, 327, 356; of discarnate state, 189; see also Augustine; Monnica language: affect-, 186, 332; of Augustine, 200–201, 246, 332–33, 336; Christian, 159, 211, 235, 291; of the creeds, 73; and custom, 97; Dantean, 185; of destitution,

392

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199; grammar of, 39, 232; last thing of, 67, 308; in liturgy, 103, 319; of loss, 199; of Lumen Gentium, 249; Miltonic, 144; of Scheeben, 245–46; of substance, 199; and temporality, 85; Thomist, 288; see also English; French; German; Greek; Hebrew; Latin Larkin, Philip 209–10, 318, 324; see also annihilation Latin, Latinate: annihilation (ad nihilum) in, 15; appetite, 337; as artifact, 319; body (corpus) in, 121, 158–59; canon of Scripture, 7, 9, 199, 215; of Denzinger, 118; eschatologia in, 8–9; explicit in, 57; flesh (caro) in, 121, 158–59; hell (infernus) in, 247; likeness (simultudo) in, 170; maculae, 268; matter (materia) in, 121; metronomic time (cum metronomia) in, 133; qualia, 222; spiritual creature (creatura spiritalis) in, 119; transanimation, 176 Ledóchowski, Wladimir, 119; see also angels Leo IX, 362; see also resurrection Lewis, C. S., 203; see also theology Lieberson, Lorraine Hunt, 325; see also art Liguori, Alphonsus, 155; see also Mary liturgy, liturgical: and angels, 113, 147, 240; as anticipation of heaven, 67–68, 101, 251, 315, 321, 322, 324; and artifacts, 307, 308–9, 324; and discarnate souls, 124, 181; and eternal life, 45, 319; and experience, 104, 222, 225, 230–31, 232, 233–34, 235, 236, 237, 269; and flesh, 48, 104, 147, 170, 202, 217, 221, 230, 232; and habituation, 102–3, 231–32, 234, 269, 346; and Mary, 154, 217; in Pascal, 231–32, 346; and the passion, 99, 103, 217; and timespace, 22–23, 70, 99, 100–101, 102, 104, 106–7, 146, 196, 202, 217, 221, 233–34, 246, 251, 254, 315; and universalism, 147, 181 Logos: see Christ Lombard, Peter, 120, 361, 364; see also angels love: of angels, 114, 145, 147; in Augustine, 328, 330–31, 334, 336–37, 338; as gift, 162–64, 231; in Hopkins, 321–22; and

humans, 22, 74, 89, 98, 162–64, 167, 185, 187, 188, 197, 221, 239, 287, 307, 310, 314, 323; and the LORD, 56, 73–74, 79, 91, 92, 104, 108, 143, 146, 183, 189, 212, 216, 238, 239, 244, 245, 259, 260–61, 289–90, 291, 293, 308, 328, 330, 337; and necrophilia, 236; and political interest, 357; of the saints, 46, 108, 238; in Tridentine canons on justification, 40–41; works of, 257; of worshiping assembly, 68, 101, 104, 238; see also delight; eros; kiss Luke, Gospel of, 97, 123, 124, 199; see also Scripture Lumen Gentium, 248–49; see also Second Vatican Council Manichees, Manichaeism, 328; see also Augustine; lament Mark, Gospel of, 125, 293; see also Scripture Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus, 145; see also fold; timespace marriage: last thing of, 260–62; liturgy of, 102; in Paul, 95; see also sacrament martyr, martyrdom, 66, 78, 106, 239, 257, 259, 288, 292, 351, 356 Mary: Annunciation of, 120, 123, 145–46, 187; Assumption of, 5, 43, 48, 121, 124, 149, 153–57, 162, 217, 220; in Christian story, 3, 31, 64, 77, 84, 87, 113, 123, 124, 145–46, 151, 219, 221; death of, 153–55; flesh of, 5, 43, 121, 149, 153–54, 156–57, 162, 217, 220, 238, 262, 273, 293–94, 308; Immaculate conception of, 55, 128, 154, 268, 270, 337; prayer to, 183 Matthew, Gospel of, 48, 205, 330, 331; see also Scripture Mass, 99, 100, 102, 103, 122, 233, 234, 254, 315; see also liturgy Maximus the Confessor, 156; see also Mary Melchizedek, 84, 220 Melville, Herman: Bartleby, the Scrivener, 339, 345, 347; Moby Dick, 290–91; see also devastation; quietism metronomic time: and angels, 125, 126, 127–28, 133–34, 137, 143–44, 146–47; annihilation of, 107–8; and boredom,

98, 167, 196–97, 222; in devastation, 70, 89–93, 95–96, 97, 98, 105–6, 128, 133–34, 143–44, 165,178, 217, 242, 254, 300, 310, 313; and discarnate souls, 175, 180, 186; and flesh, 165, 167, 168, 178, 186, 242, 246, 310; healing of, 90, 96, 97, 99, 104, 108, 196, 217, 233, 237–38, 255–56, 262–63, 315; in hell, 89, 143, 246, 257; and liturgy, 99, 100, 104, 106, 233, 237, 262, 255–56, 262–63, 315; as measurable duration, 79, 91–92, 107, 254, 255; and systolic time, 22, 89, 98–100, 105–6, 107, 108, 128, 133, 144, 217, 237, 254, 313, 315, 364; see also timespace; systolic time Michael, Archangel, 117, 123; see also angels Michelangelo, 307; see also artifacts Miki, Paul, 106; see also martyr Milton, John, 114, 144; see also anthropocentrism; metronomic time Minogue, Kylie, 325; see also art Monnica, 328–31, 332–35, 338; see also Augustine; lament Moses, 79, 123, 256; see also Exodus Munificentissimus Deus: see Mary, Pius XII Nazism, Nazi, 106, 288 Newman, John Henry, 9, 252–55; see also sacrament Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, 218–19; see also Christian doctrine ordination: liturgy of, 102; last thing of, 260–62; and sacramental practice, 252; see also sacrament Orthodox Church, 31, 111, 176, 325, pain, painful; of acedia, 196; of animals, 285, 292; and artifacts, 304; in Augustine, 246, 332; in devastation, 4, 218, 242, 248, 310; of discarnate soul, 179–80, 182, 186, 187–90; and hell, 10, 179, 204, 211–12, 242–43, 246–47, 248; healing of, 3, 239, 246; of human creatures, 76, 166, 186, 220, 222, 285, 305; as purgative, 173, 179, 183; in Scheeben, 246; see also devastation; hell

Index ⫸

393

Parousia, 96; see also systolic time Pascal, Blaise: as controversialist, 345; on divertissement, 19; Lettres provinciales, 341–43; Pensées, 157, 231–32, 365; Quietism of, 339–43, 345–46, 352–54, 356–57, 367; Skepticism of, 342–44; see also liturgy Paul, Saint, 84, 108, 155; Colossians, 64, 78; I Corinthians, 95–97, 164, 208, 218, 220, 249; Philippians, 26; Romans, 331; I Timothy, 147, 205, 354; see also Scripture Paul VI: Professio fidei, 206; see also soul Pelagianism, Pelagians, 141; see also Augustine; grace penance (sacrament of reconciliation): liturgy of, 102; last thing of, 259; and trembling, 320; see also sacrament Pentecost, 99 Perpetua, 84, 183; see also martyr Peter, Saint: Basilica of, 300; First Letter of, 97, 108; see also Scripture philosophy, philosophical: and annihilation, 209; arguments of, 187; and experience, 222; and solipsism of flesh, 168–69; and theology, 50, 83, 209; see also theology Pius IX: Ineffabilis Deus, 268; see also Mary Pius XII: Humani Generis, 119; Munificentissimus Deus, 153–56; see also Mary plants: as animate creatures, 265, 267; annihilation of, 17, 294, 295; within anthropocentric pattern, 61, 282–83; in Aquinas, 275–78, 280–81, 288, 289; death of, 288, 290, 291–92; flesh of, 159, 276, 294, 295; in Genesis, 286–87; as immaculables, 269, 295, 301; individuation of, 295–96, 299; inner lives of, 284; last things of, 273, 283, 289, 293, 296, 301, 303; relations with, 273–75, 279, 282, 286, 287–89, 292, 294; similarity to human creatures, 285, 287; souls of, 294–95; symbiosis with other creatures, 296; see also animals Plato, Platonism, 178, 334; see also Augustine; lament; reincarnation post-Fordism, 339–40, 352; see also Pascal; quietism

394

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postmodernism, 84, 361; see also art postpositivism, 112; see also angels poststructuralism, 112, 364; see also angels Protoevangelium of James: see Mary; Pius XII Protestantism, Protestant, 8, 42, 55, 111, 320 Proust, Marcel, 336; see also Augustine; lament Psalms, Book of, 90, 215; see also Scripture qualia, 222–31, 233–37 quietism, quietist: and ascesis, 339, 344, 347; in Augustine, 357; and martyrdom, 356; in Pascal, 340–41, 345–46, 352, 353, 357; and political interest, 339–40, 341, 345, 347–48, 350–52; of political judgment, 346–47, 348, 352, 355–56, 357; and skepticism, 351, 357; see also Pascal Raphael, Archangel, 117, 123; see also angels Reformation, 132; see also Protestantism reincarnation, 174, 175, 176–78, 191 repetitive stasis: of blood, 291; complexity of, 22; in Dante, 25; of heaven, 23, 57, 99, 145, 147, 221, 259, 302, 309; as last thing, 13, 21–23, 25, 50, 69, 137, 241, 313; in the liturgy, 217–18, 236, 246; see also annihilation; simple stasis resurrection: and annihilation, 17; in Aquinas, 139, 275–83, 289; of Christ, 56, 84, 96, 97, 124, 177, 212, 213, 217, 258; final, 20, 206; of flesh, 42, 45–47, 48–50, 52, 96, 145, 149, 152, 153, 164, 174–75, 178, 183–85, 189, 202–4, 209, 212, 242, 287, 362; general, 5, 48, 57, 102, 118–19, 121, 124, 153–54, 171, 173, 178–80, 184, 202, 208, 218, 220, 222, 236, 238, 241, 242, 244–46, 277, 362; plants and animals in, 273–83, 286, 289, 292–95 Revelation, Book of, 22, 123, 201, 213, 308–9 Reynolds, Joshua, 30; see also icon Rockwell, Norman, 325; see also art Rublev, Andrei, 307; see also artifacts; icon Ruth, 78, 84

sacrament, sacramental: annihilation of, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261–62; celebration of, 105, 232, 258, 320, 356; church as a, 3, 249, 251, 256; ensembles of creatures, 104, 256, 257, 258; last things of, 251, 256, 257, 258, 262, 308; life, 77, 251–52, 260; as medicinal, 257, 259, 260, 261; pattern of thought, 79, 106, 252–53, 254, 255–56; presence, 106 Sacramentum Gregorianum, 154; see also Mary; Pius XII saints: and angels, 145, 217, 220, 294; bodies of, 48, 153, 175, 257; communion of, 181, 235, 252, 253, 278, 279; eternal life of, 46, 67–68, 101, 102, 108, 196, 215–16, 217, 219, 221, 261, 273, 306, 311; experience of, 236–38; flesh of, 152, 153, 189, 217, 220–21, 238, 245, 262, 293; in intermediate state, 145, 178, 181, 189, 205, 215; litany of, 46, 53, 100, 254; in liturgy, 101, 196; and martyrdom, 78, 106, 257; in Newman , 252, 253; prayer to, 181; in Scheeben, 245; see also heaven Sarah, 78, 84, 214 Satan, Satanic: in Dante, 19, 147; fall of, 66, 131, 132, 133, 143, 145, 211; redemption of, 146–47, 250; see also angels Scheeben, Matthias, 9, 244–47, 361, 365; see also Augustine; hell Scotus, John Duns, 123, 365 Scripture: angels in, 111, 113, 117, 124, 134; as artifact, 307–8; assumption in, 220; Augustine on, 134, 199, 215, 246; canon of, 7, 36, 199, 235, 300, 307; and epektasy, 26; and eschatology, 9, 203, 206–7; hell in, 211, 243, 246; hope for salvation, 147, 249; Latin version of, 199, 215; paroikia in, 97; promises of, 45; relation between creatures in, 292; restoration of cosmos in, 291, 293; Scheeben on, 246; Thomas Hobbes on, 113; trembling in, 318; vision of the LORD in, 220; see also Christian doctrine; Christian tradition Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 206, 248–49, 363 simple stasis: complexity of, 22; as

damnation, 20; in Dante, 19, 23; and demonic existence, 145; as last thing, 13, 25, 50, 69, 137, 218, 241, 313; representation of, 23; as salvation, 20; and staging, 197; see also annihilation; repetitive stasis sin, sinner: of angels, 118, 134, 137–38, 142–43, 147, 365; in Augustine, 202, 329, 334; capacity for, 267, 269–71 , 295, 301; consequences of, 209–10, 295, 301, 317, 318; in devastation, 167, 181, 192– 93, 212, 271, 319–20; effects of, 126, 181, 247–48, 251, 267–69, 291; and habituation, 169, 196, 198, 202, 320; of humans, 138, 142–43, 167, 169, 192–95, 198, 236, 270–71, 317, 357; and Mary, 55–56, 154–55, 268, 270–71; memory of, 101; mortal sin, 179, 194, 195, 363; nature of, 21, 60, 135, 137–38, 142–43, 194, 199–200, 236, 247–48, 365; punishment for, 211–12, 245, 247–48; repetitive nature of, 21, 202, 320; in Scheeben, 245, 247; in Tridentine canons on justification, 40–41; see also annihilation skepticism, 12, 243, 342–43, 349–51, 357; see also Pascal Solomon, 184–85; see also Wisdom Son: and angels, 124; attributed activity of, 219; as LORD, 3; as relational, 72, 181, 219; sacrifice of, 322; as second person of the Trinity, 77, 134, 151, 170, 270, 322; see also Christ Song of Songs, 164, 221, 365; see also kiss soul: and angels, 122, 138, 145, 160; anima, 4, 45–47, 51, 53, 135, 140, 155, 157, 171, 183, 199, 201–2, 205–6, 212–13, 250; annihilation of, 47–48, 183, 200–209, 213, 250; in Aquinas, 138–40, 276–77, 280, 294; in Augustine, 183, 198–200, 200–201, 206, 213, 246, 250, 329, 332–33, 335–37; in Benedict XII, 118–19, 178–81, 183, 186, 188; in Dante, 184–85; discarnate, 4, 150, 160, 173–75, 178–90, 202, 208, 213, 218–22, 242, 248, 250; and flesh, 48, 55, 159–61, 175–76, 187, 213, 218, 242, 262; immortality of, 45, 46–48, 52, 200, 204–7,

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395

244; judgment of, 56, 173; of Mary, 153, 155–56; of plants and animals, 276–77, 280, 294–95; in Scheeben, 244–46; separated, 56–57, 118–19, 122, 139, 145, 149, 160, 185; separation from body, 5, 46, 56, 121, 126, 149, 153, 156, 160, 165, 173, 175, 178, 202, 203, 213, 242, 247, 260; in Weil, 104; see also animate creatures; intermediate state Special Relativity, 85, 86; see also timespace Spinoza, Baruch, 112; see also angels Stein, Edith, 106; see also devastation; martyr Stevens, Wallace, iv Stoicism, 334; see also Augustine; lament Summa theologiae: see Aquinas Sunday, 102, 217 systolic time, systole: and angels, 128, 132– 33, 145, 146; in Eden, 89, 99; in heaven, 104, 217, 237, 262–63, 311; and liturgy, 70, 99, 100, 106, 107, 133, 144, 146, 202, 233, 262, 315; and metronomic time, 22, 89, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 128, 133, 144, 217, 237, 254, 313, 364; in Paul, 95–96, 97; and the passion, 98–99, 104, 107, 217, 254, 256, 262; in Peter, 97; physiological, 95–96, 98, 107–8; and the saints, 167, 196, 262; and transfiguration, 105, 108, 255, 256, 262, 263, 311; see also metronomic time; timespace theology, theologian, theological: and angels, 111–12, 113, 114, 120, 267; and annihilation, 209; and Aquinas, 277, 283; and biology, 270; and Christian doctrine, ix, 41–43, 71, 236; Dante as, 185, 248; on epektasy, 26; eschatology in, 8–9; and human flesh, 157–58, 163–64, 267, 270, 273; imagination, 55; of the intermediate state, 174; in Lewis, 203; lexicon of, 3; and liturgy, 234; and Mary, 154, 156; and pagans, 36; Pascal as, 340–41, 343–44, 352–53, 356–57; and phenomenology, 229; of plants and animals, 273, 277, 283, 295; purposes of, 35; at Second Vatican Council, 249; speculations of, 33, 42–43, 45, 49–50,

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53, 71, 104, 118, 156, 186, 203, 217, 236, 240–41, 244, 273, 283; and timespace, 69, 71, 81, 83–85, 105–6, 254; Trinitarian, 170–71; topics in, 7, 36–37; of Wisdom, 192; see also Christian doctrine; Scripture; tradition Thomist: see Aquinas token, tokenhood: of injury, 239; and the liturgy, 23, 99, 102, 103; and repetitive stasis, 22–23 timespace: angels in, 109, 119–20, 121, 123, 125, 128, 132, 142, 146–47, 240; in Aquinas, 74–75, 86, 91, 363; in Augustine, 90, 99, 134, 243, 246, 363; and body, 5, 121, 123, 142, 158, 160–62, 165, 167, 168, 171, 177–78, 180, 297–98; and cosmos, 4, 76; in Dante, 147, 180; in Descartes, 168; in devastation, 70, 79, 87, 99, 105, 165, 167, 178, 180, 196, 213, 217, 254–57, 297–98, 314, 317; and epektasy, 26; extension in, 5, 82, 83, 86, 121, 158, 160–62, 165, 170–71, 297–98, 310; flesh in, 158, 160–62, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170–71, 177–78, 242, 310; healing of, 96, 99, 256, 315; of heaven, 5, 105, 128, 215–16, 217, 238–39, 240, 246, 257, 291, 306, 314; of hell, 5, 105, 213, 242–43, 246, 257, 314; inanimate creatures in, 297–300, 301; incarnation in, 64; and liturgy, 70, 105, 217, 239, 255, 315; and the LORD, 69, 73, 74–76, 79, 87, 106, 170, 216, 217, 238, 254, 256; soul in, 171, 177, 180, 182; see also fold; metronomic time; systolic time Trethewey, Natasha, 21; see also repetitive stasis Trinity, Trinitarian: and angels, 117–18, 128, 132, 134, 144–45, 220–21; in Augustine, 29–30, 75; economy of, 128, 144, 184, 216, 258, 308; and eternity, 73–75, 77, 104, 128, 144, 146, 184, 216,

308; in the Fourth Lateran Council, 117–18; grammar of, 40; life of, 104, 239; as relational, 72–73, 75, 77, 181, 218–19; of Rublev, 307; and theology, 37; work of, 99l; see also Father; Holy Spirit; Son United States of America, Americans, 111–12, 168, 225, 348 universalism, 12, 249–50 utopia, utopian: dreams, 305; hell as, 5, 149, 313; as no-place, 105, 150; politics of, 351 Vergil, 19, 23; see also Dante Vulgate, 26, 169; see also epektasy; Genesis Weil, Simone, vi, 104; see also experience; timespace Wharton, Edith, 30; see also icon Wisdom, Book of, 191–92, 275; see also Scripture Wispelwey, Pieter, 324; see also artifacts; Bach Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 79, 284, 366; see also animals; timespace world, 3–5, 7, 9–10, 49, 56, 60–61, 75, 77–78, 87, 92, 101–2, 105–7, 113, 127–28, 134, 137, 146, 152, 159–61, 166, 193, 195, 209, 222, 251–53, 255, 258–59, 261, 263, 286, 305, 309, 311, 314, 357; as ensemble of creatures, 4, 7, 10, 15–17, 19, 25, 50, 60, 73, 76, 81, 104, 161, 255–58, 265, 267, 296; in John the Divine, 77, 205; restoration of (renovatio mundi), 45, 51–53, 57, 65, 249, 251, 289, 293, 295, 305, 308, 311, 315, 322–23, 338; see also cosmos Wyeth, Andrew, 300; see also artifacts Zechariah, Book of, 124; see also Scripture