Murmurandoms from the Future

Well, the virus made a bit of a comeback over night, so this post will be… best I can do. Maybe we can at least knock down some preliminaries. I think I can manage that.

First, some confirmation of our suspicions about temporal symmetry in the book Transfiguring Time: "eternity is enmeshed with time so that there is a simultaneity of time and eternity at every moment,” and “the future is integral to nature’s becoming, or better yet, nature’s transformation." 

We might say that in the Word becoming (not merely became!) flesh, the future becomes now so that the now might realize its futurity, its fulfilled potential. 

Likewise, the otherwise grammatically nonsensical “Before Abraham was, I am,” makes perfect nonsense in the context of temporal symmetry. After all, the Alpha is the Omega, and vice versa. Ultimately, "The Incarnation breaks open this profound reality of time" and reveals “the capacity for radical transformation in God”:

The destiny of the cosmos is entwined with time so that just as the cosmos is oriented toward fulfillment in God, so too time is oriented toward fulfillment in eternity.

There’s even some good insultainment that is similar to what we’ve said about the left being simply an unconscious inversion (and perversion) of Christianity: 

The modern myth of progress is a naive secularized form of the biblical expectation of the Messiah…. the Hegelian dialectic, inherited by Marxism, is merely a degraded form of Trinitarian theology.

Still, even I didn’t predict the emergence of trannies as their new messiah, so give them credit for progressing all the way to the bottom of the cosmos. 

Back to From the Dust of the Earth, Ratzinger writes that 

From the standpoint of the Christian faith one may say that for history God stands at the end, while for being he stands at the beginning. 

Therefore, we must always be In Between. I suppose we could say that with the Incarnation, being reaches its destination via our “becoming” with Christ. 

Which again very much reminds me of Voegelin, who characterizes “open existence” as “the mode of existence in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.”

And this tension is pricisely that which abides “between poles of immanence and transcendence, finite and infinity, imperfection and perfection, and so on.” A Christian would say between image and likeness, with progress toward the latter being measured in increments of divination or theosis. 

So, that is where we are and always are: In Between. But not between two nothings, especially now that the telos makes house calls. In other words, 

Christ the Last Adam is also the “Final Adam” in the sense of creation's final cause: last in the order of execution, yet first in the order of God’s intention.

Which is what I meant yesterday about the fall being regarded symmetrically and seen as a consequence of its remedy, so to speak. Traditionally we tend to regard the timeline of salvation history in the same way we do secular history, which shouldn’t be surprising. But

Ratzinger places the accent on the telos of humanity in Christ and from there looks backward to gain insight into man’s origins. 

It occurs to me that the moment of hominization some 70,000 years back must coincide with a sense that something is wrong, with the world or with man, i.e., outside or inside. I don’t want to necessarily equate this with the fall, but suddenly awakening to the tension of existence isn’t all fun and games.