End Times
by Kenneth Smith
2. Time, History and Nature
The very clash of meanings of the millennium illustrates the cleavage of ideological dimensions that besets moderns. Nietzsche wrote, "Not only the reason of millennia, but their madness too, breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir." Indeed schizoid incoherence is what moderns are liable to. We fluctuate from one way to another of trying to make sense of our cornucopia of technology or our myopic doom. But these diverse optics can be sorted out, each lens-system with its own historical origin and its internal logic, however much it disrupts and is disrupted by the others. These worldviews belong in place in a later argument about civilizational ethoi, but here we give a foretaste of how they conceive differently the meaning of history, time and life:
ANCIENT
(1) The ancient worldview is naturalist, "physiocratic": nature is a dynamic order of existence that rules and runs itself on its own, that is, carries on autonomously like our breathing or digestive processes, or the evaporation and condensation of water through its meteorological cycles, or the regeneration of species by propagation. The genius of nature lies in its organic structure, the weave of parts into a whole that sustains itself: the cells make tissues and organs, and these organs make systems; individual organisms at another scale require the complement of families, mates, allies, clans. Cities and economies as well answer to this primal logic of nature dictating that whatever cannot subsist on its own must perish: autonomy (autarkia or self-rule) and self-sufficiency amount to a value inscribed in natural existence. Nature orchestrates the phases of things, so there is a seasonal cycle of growth and decline, and a child by cumulative overlay of masteries scales up to the full powers that are an adult's. Time and history from the standpoint of nature are cyclical, as one regime of order dovetails into another: all things in natural time are transient, they become and pass away as finite lives. Every death makes way for new life, and every growth is the death of what has fallen away in the process. Only the essence of what has passed on is retained, implicit in higher forms.
Nature has laid this regime and logic on everything living: every being and every system is either ascending toward its prime or decaying, descending into moribundity. Grow or die: renew oneself or ebb away into staleness and feebleness. The millennium is not exempt from the order of nature, nor is the ingeniously contrived modern order. All ever generated out of nature owes its existence to nature, as a debt to be repaid: All things deserve to perish, that is natural justice. There is a degree of wisdom just in realizing we are mortals who cannot pursue our manias forever but must eventually pass back into the natural oblivion we arose from. There is more wisdom in realizing that what endures is the whole of things, not individuals, and it is futile as well as evil to sacrifice the whole for the limited interests of a part.
The ancients believed all that was in the world, including the whole cosmos itself, had been born and had grown out of chaos into its present evolving state. The more mystical philosophers held that the entire world-order periodically collapsed back into a purging cataclysm of fire (ekpyrosis) which like a forest fire cleared the earth for new growth, a new system of nature and civilization, and a new eon. But the cosmos that for the Greeks arose out of darkness and chaos had truly no beginning in a radical or absolute sense: seeds of potential order that had always lain dormant grew to make larger and larger regions of organized life. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It is the inescapable logic of life that it cannot arise out of nothing: every living species presupposes its own kind, chicken proceeding from egg proceeding from chicken.... Life presupposes itself and cannot just happen spontaneously or by accident; it is organic beings that inherit accomplishments of metabolic order from their ancestors. "If they had not been, we could not be": so the Greeks understood the duty of natural piety that bound them to respect not just their parents but the traditions that composed their language, their polity, their values and literature, their religion. To lack this piety toward one's own human roots, like the all-too clever Oedipus, is to be a subrational idiotes.
All human life rests on the preconditioning order of nature, of which every individual is a particular extension, the branching of a great tree. "Like generations of leaves are the children of men," Homer graphically characterized our condition: no one exists alone or utterly of his own will. We are all derivatives, dependents and descendants of an order in which we have as transient a role to play as the leaves by which a tree keeps itself alive for another season. Ancient biographers designated a writer's place in history not by the actuarial finitude of birth and death dates, but by the date when he floruit or "flourished," as a natural life at its prime or akme. All human life is played out against a primal natural reality of transience: ephemeroi, "creatures of a day," is Homer's epithet for humans. Hesiod had been even more contemptuous of our nothingness: "Man is but a shadow in a dream."
Any human of course can live and pass away like detritus washed out to sea; we are by nature immemorable and by condition liable to forget all that life and time dissipate. Only an audacious few who achieve an excellence that emblazons itself indelibly on the hearts and minds of their fellows have found a way to combat the nihility into which mortal existence resolves itself. All beings in history are also still in the domain of nature; although it demands of men their utmost powers to try to accomplish something for the ages, nonetheless the ultimate chapter in the life of everything born has already been written in the very conditions of its naturalness or "natality" (physis or "nature" is the Greek gerundive or process-form of the verb to grow or become). A life without the courage to confront this fatality of nature's mortal claim is a life squandered in delusion and indulgence. Artificial obligations and duties can be evaded and disputed, but not the obligations natural law lays on us.
What does the millennium signify naturalistically? That modern order is an artificial stasis, a becalmed universe frozen or fossilized in contempt of all the natural and psychic forces that are suppressed or deformed by this order. What is natural in human beings demands evolution, the interminable adjustment of artificial forms to the turbulent forces of which we are composed. Cultural and moral forms mutate in their most profound premises or else persist at peril of utter irrelevance. Modernity prides itself on its accelerating turnover of technology, information and institutions; but what should be revolutionary — culture, moral perspectives, concepts, values, the inherent and intrinsically valid imperatives of creative nature — are in truth seized up and mummified among us. In terms of all that is vital and intuitive, modern order is stringent and uniformitarian, intolerant of profound deviations. The more modern order changes, the more it homogenizes itself, in an Apollonian fetishism of technical control and abstract methodology: a sterile abstractivism. Energizing values and principles are to it unruly irrationalities it hopes it has forever paved over. The millennium is the promise of release from this straitjacket whose dementing authoritarian order has been diagnosed and criticized, to no avail, for two centuries now.
MEDIEVAL
(2) The medieval or Christian worldview arose on contrary premises, of a God who was above and apart from Nature and who created this world out of nothing preexisting. The Greek Gods had been immanent in nature, at one with its forces, including its power to sway and intoxicate the psyches of men. The Gods of the ancients had been themselves subject to the overpowering order of nature, of birth, lust, natural character, and all the other vices that proto-Christian Plato reviled them for. Christianity for the first time conceived a God obligated to be holy or transcendent over such natural flux; a spiritual God radically self-empowered, who made the world to be utterly His artificial contrivance, His Logos or system of order. Not obscure Fate (to which Zeus and the Olympians had to defer as a higher power) but the rational and moral Will of a benevolent Divinity was now the ultimate source of order, the ruling arche that accounted for the way the world is. The timeline of Christian history and nature does not recede into vertiginous obscurity but fixes a true Beginning, an absolute initial point before which there was nothing at all. And being designed by a single-minded God and not a self-orchestrating polyphonic nature, this world-order unfolds linearly toward another unique and unrepeatable event, the coming of the reconciliatory God-man, the Christos or anointed one. This world will continue to play out the logic God has designed for it until the Second Coming when God's Kingdom will cast down sinful humans caught in the toils of nature.
The Jews had grasped well how different this new God was from the divinities of their neighbors. The ancient world was rife with fertility-religions, but Jehovah demanded ritual circumcision to remind all in fealty to Him that not nature but He is the ultimate source of life. Our generative organs are marked as His property, as all of nature is. Where ancient peoples understood they were bound congenitally — by birth or nature — to their various religions, the Jews grasped the relation of God and man as a willed and moral covenant or compact. Made in His image, man is definitively different from animals: the doctrine imago Dei does not mean that finite man resembles infinite God, but rather that he reflects in a limited measure the remarkable world-spawning powers God demonstrated in creating the world ex nihilo. In a strict sense, animals do not, cannot, act, but only react. For animals play the hand that nature has dealt them in making them one of their kind: their instincts are their innate patterns of reaction, their liability to see everything in the world — prey, enemy, food, bane, negligible, etc. — according to the perspective of their natural needs. Animals do not deliberate values or policies, do not format or discipline themselves; they adapt and gravitate to a habitat, or negotiate conflicts between instincts and environment. Animals frame no true language or laws and create no true societies or polities, because they have severely limited powers to reason or originate order on their own.
This is what man's modicum of spirit means, that he is architected to take responsibility in some measure for the terms of his existence. The Author of all existence has deputized man to be the particular author over his lineage of actions. By virtue of these powers man has been assigned a humanly composed domain over which he is a kind of second-order God, a vicar or viceregent. Without spirit, man would have as little moral or rational accountability for his will and actions as an animal: he would be no ultimate locus of responsibility, because as a reactive creature he would merely reflect an energetic chain of actions he did not originate. We can trace his behavior back to his central self-determination, his subtle but often severely diminished inner rulership over his psyche, his appetites, his interpretations. Man alone has autonomy or self-governance: animals are subject passively or pathetically to the heteronomy of nature, and therefore can merely be what they are. Of man more can be expected, as a self-architecting and self-mastering creature. Spirit is the novel Christian conception of a principle of freedom from nature, freedom over nature. The Greeks had conceived such a power of self-mastery — extremized arete or excellence and logos or reason — as the cultivated privilege of an exceptional aristocratic personality-type, implying the many who were by nature deficient in that power were slavish and dissolute, structureless and pathetic: malleable and void of subjective authority over themselves.
Christianity invokes a new dispensation: not nature but God has dealt men their ultimate talents and powers, their potential and raw materials of soul, and therefore the seeds of self-mastery are arguably universally disseminated. Only how humans employ their own powers of will can determine who will make of himself a slave — natural fate is not ultimately decisive, but rather the benighted will that ratifies that condition for itself. (Yet Christ speaks of the futility of trying to teach those who are "stony ground" for the gospel of spirit, as if occlusive natures could shut spirit out, fatalistically.) In the domain of nature, men have become what they are in virtue of the hidden metaphysics of natural character, unfolding by an arcane logic; but Christianity purveys a new worldview of redemption from such slavery to natural necessity, and ultimately of a revolution too that hopes to overturn an entire society that has cast its economy, politics and law in the bronze chains of such natural fatalism.
In place of natural fate is now installed divine destiny, the design of God's will with man, nature and history. The world is reconceived as no longer natural and self-necessitating, but as the artifact of God's powers. Every organism is God's infinitely organized self-existing work of art, not a miraculous effect of blind nature: retail miracle is replaced with wholesale. Nature in its sway over our moral life is no longer taken as ultimate but can be appealed to a higher court. The tides of history and human actions were once a brute fact, the working out of a profound natural logic unimpeachable in its stolid reality; now a Christian metaphysical regime induces us to expect rational, moral justice from the world. There is a rational why now, where before the Fates could only mutely display the weave of lives into an epic pattern.
But when the world or its powers that be fail to dispense justice, doubts may arise. How can atrocious individuals or groups have risen to power under God's all-powerful rule? Unspeakable cataclysms or human evil may shake the very foundations of faith and challenge Christianity's theodicy, its justification or rationalization of the ways of God with men. As an individual's life unfolds, so too a people's: their history is their way of negotiating with God for their souls, and His way of variously forcing the issue of fealty on them. It is conceivable that the terrors and wrongs that befall an individual or a people are indeed God's way of chastening and inducing them to see what ought to be more important in their lives, as the Jews' Deuteronomic code laid out in its philosophy of divine history. Just as the Lisbon earthquake spurred many Europeans to question of their faith, so the Holocaust affected modern Jews. Where is the evidence of divine purpose, of a Captain steering history to its predestined port?
The Christian worldview is always taxed, tempted to doubt by the very ordeals that bring its virtues to the fore. Its faith is fated to be the paradoxical or contranatural "evidence of things not seen," a humanly groundless position. The millennial end of that era in which society is dominated by humans dominated by nature rather than spirit promises to be also the end of that liability of self-doubt: faith which throughout history has been airy and insubstantial, something irreal the Christian must make morally truer than evident reality itself, is promised its fulfillment in "the fullness of time." The millennium has of course come and gone already once on Christian faith, and Jesus himself supposed that many listening to him would not die before the coming of the Kingdom of God (Luke 9:27). But every such objective disappointment is seen not as disproof but as a test of faith. The millennium is a hoped-for resolution of what has been in suspension, the verification of what has been clung to as faith. It is revelation and evidencing, God's authority over this world made manifest.
MODERN
(3) The modern order defined its origination by a radically different modus, a way of arising and cohering that was neither natural nor divine. Its prophet was the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who contrived a new myth about the unique genesis of man: instead of being formed by nature or made by God, man was given the distinctive privilege of being left unfinished. Empowered to be his own creator, he could make of his life and character whatever he subjectively wanted. Pico conceived man's spiritual dignity not just to rule how he lived but also how he framed or shaped his original nature.
Pico accepted the ancient perspective in its domain, and the Christian in its realm. The laws of nature are valid for animals, and make every animal the determinate or specific kind of being it is. Nature endowed animals to bear a natural teleology, so like compasses they inherently point the right direction for a creature composed as they are. God made angels likewise to have a wholly spiritual teleology, a "higher" nature. But man was by design formed to be irresolute, not determinate but merely determinable. He is a sheerly potential being, an isometric creature in whom there is no natural or spiritual bias in any specific direction: he is microcosmic or omnipotential according to Pico, containing all the seeds of possibility that other animals possess. Man exists in an altogether unique metaphysical mode of virtuality, not definite or finite actuality as animals have: he sees himself therefore always in terms of what he has the potential to become, what is latent or promissory. Man is defined by his openness to self-definition, his distinctive willfulness or arbitrarial will. Man alone seems to be a radically artificial creature, the work of his own will: and he is necessarily also his own architect or legislator of his own laws. But such a unique position cannot be explained in terms of natural evolution or teleology, and of course Pico had to invent his own myth ad hoc to make it plausible. Invoking a convenient fiction — hypothesizing or stipulating a metaphysical or theological premise that tells one what one wants to hear — may be after all a characteristically modern way (sophistic, self-intoxicated) of making sense of how modern world-order is thinkable.
Man's will does not just reign over the acts, motives and institutions he may steer by means of that will. Modernly, his will is thought to reach into his own ultimate nature or character: he has the power not just to do but to make, and to make himself with as much authority as Nature or God sets up systems of order. Modern self-conceptions utterly confuse modes that ancient and medieval thought deemed radically discrete, namely praxis and physis, what man does and what he is. His willfulness or "subjectivism" has the power to corrupt everything that might be naively or intuitively given — his instinctive sense of what is good, his basal needs against which all artificial economic wants have to be measured, his sense of "normality" concerning sex, politics, religion, grounds of interpretation and evaluation. To modern man no binding force of natural constitution or preexisting normative laws seems to have jurisdiction over him. He lives autonomously, abstractedly, as if he were his own Nature or God.
Modern world-order disregards the inherent continuity of organic natures, the slow evolution of enduring forms under natural teleology; and it repudiates any burden of divine agenda encumbering what man might choose to do with his arbitrary freedom. Modernly taken, man's premier duty is that he should be free for his own self-employment, and his ultimate condition is to be free from all external influences: human "nature" and the human "condition" as classically comprehended are utterly invalidated by the modern standpoint. Nothing binding on human will from without, nothing extravoluntary or exogenous, can in principle have any moral authority over man; all morality is inner or autonomous impulse. Modern ego grasps itself thus as a pure or excised power, cut utterly out of context; it conceives itself to be self-capitalized, pulling decisions, insights, reasonings and "values" out of thin air. The incoherency of this mode of civilization is patent: it has no explanation of how such nonnatural human nature may have evolved, and it has no theological justification for such rebellious willfulness being God's cosmic design for the family of Man.
Modern ego knows itself as a self-begotten anomaly, like Baron von Munchausen pulling himself up by his own topknot: a groundless paraphenomenon outside the domains of nature and spirit, "pure ego" and "rational will" have consciously willed themselves into existence, a wondrous exception exempt from — defiant of — all larger systems of order. This isolated and nonpareil kind of existence dismisses as futile any attempt at philosophical self-comprehension; there can be no laws of any moral or subjective significance in which arbitrary will is embroiled, only the brute laws of physical-economic necessitation. If one is only what one consciously and willfully determines oneself to be, then one has no latent or covert nature to worry about, no unseen liabilities. Modern ego is utter consciousness or pure luminosity, that is its essence and its nature; any mysterious or arcane nature it must in principle dissociate itself from, out of the a priori concept of what it is in and of itself. Moderns are modally obliged to think of themselves thus, abstractly or in vacuo — as denatured and dispirited.
It was a liability of all human actions, well known to the Greeks and indeed a fundamental premise of their Gods' authority over men, that we set chains of consequences in motion that we can ill foresee. Humans are so narrowly purposeful that history, nature and divinity easily blindside them. What individuals abstractly mean or intend and what actually compounds and accrues collateral implications to itself in the world of real human interactions, are utterly different things. In the very process of enacting, we lose exclusive control or sovereign authority over the forces we discharge into the world. By that corpus of unforeseen effects and significances, humans were traditionally drawn into the shared or public cosmos and out of the private or idiotist inner world of their subjective imaginings. Modern order too knows the worlds of macroeconomics, war, mass politics, etc., by which individuals are borne away on tides they cannot steer as they like; but modern ideology coddles the idiotism of individual egos who are encouraged as sub-civic consumers to inhabit the cocoon of their appetites and pleasant imaginings. Modernity has an insidious climate of privatism or monadism — "atomic individualism" — giving individuals an apparent privilege of never having to emerge from the womb of their personal illusions and delusions: who as an individual has the right to disrupt the private cosmos of another person's cherished "beliefs"? And so modern order is a licentious culture, wracked with subjectivism, idiotism and nihilism not by accident but out of the very concept of arbitrary will so essential to its self-conception.
To modernity, saturated in the techno-domain of contrivances engendered by human will, the millennium like anything else can only signify what humans have potentiated it to signify. Meaning and implication are to moderns what we make them. Moderns inhabit an envelope of infinitely reverberating artificialities, games, languages, rules and roles that are of interest solely because we have willingly accepted their claim on our interests. The millennium is a congeries of invented problems whose repercussions may indeed be very real, but their causal origin can be nothing other than arbitrary will. Modern man is radically ipsilateral, morally and metaphysically solipsistic: all his works and institutions amount to a complex monologue with himself. The modern view does not refute the prospect that millennial crises may prove fatal for our form of civilization, but it interprets the issue as oblique or inadvertent suicide not the resurgence of Nature or Divinity as an irrational authority over Man. A radically artificial universe which entirely envelops moderns is like nature, virtually nature, but in a significant respect it is utterly not natural: this techno-universe depends entirely on the competence of human design, human maintenance, sustained standards of diagnostic-technical intelligence, and an enduring desire to remain all-sidedly, profoundly responsible for one's world and way of existing. Man is the Atlas on whom the modern world rests. Nothing is freely or passively given to him; nothing may be placidly taken for granted as natural. But modernity's consumerist culture lacks any values to induce its inmates to cultivate such an all-sided and critical intelligence and holist interest.
Just as ancient naturalism (fatalism) is a cogent a priori way of making sense of life and history, and just as medieval spiritualism (radical moralism) is also cogent or apodictic on its own terms, so the modern worldview of arbitrary will seems ultimate and logical within the ideological cosmos it propagates. Our cultural conditioning guarantees modern mentalities will be radically incompetent to think beyond the limits of that system, to criticize or transcend it, even to recognize its illusions, delusions and manias. What is only artificial has become for moderns as good as natural and divine: they have lost any vantage point for discriminating among these modes.