The End of Time and the Possibility of World: Between Divinity and Nature

Abstract

Eschatology is central to Christian theology: the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ is the promise of the “kingdom of God”. This paper takes up this idea in discussion with contemporary Christian theologians and discusses it phenomenologically by recourse to Husserl’s account of “horizon”. The horizon is both finite and infinite: always limited in its actualization but with an infinity of potential actualizations. This is explored with respect to time and its relation to the eternal, as well as the dispositions of hope and fear with respect to the eschaton. The final section draws these insights together in a discussion of the eschaton to understand the eschatological destiny of nature in a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelations, 21: 1) and conceiving of eschatological justice as a harmony of horizonal perspectives.

One of the major contributions of phenomenology has been to show the centrality of “world” as a philosophical concept. This is true of Husserl and Heidegger, and is manifest also through the following generations of phenomenologists. The peculiarity of world phenomenologically is its horizonal nature, as a horizonal world itself does not appear. Nevertheless, all appearance is in its appearing horizonal, i.e., is worldly. Phenomenology, in turning away from the mundane, in its withdrawal from the natural attitude, allows the world as such to become its theme. In its emphasis on this theme, phenomenology brings to light a fundamental context of Christian theology. The Incarnation is the appearing in the world—and as such the worldly appearing of—Christ, God become human. However, world here is a place of unknowing—“the world did not recognize him” (John, 1: 10)1. In its acknowledgment of Jesus of Nazareth as God–man, theology turns from the mundane, but in its case turns towards Christ whose contradictory presence is itself a promise, the promise of resurrection and of ending (eschaton).

Eschatology, it may appear, marks not so much the play of intersection as the limit of any dialogue between phenomenology and theology. The theme of ending, indeed of world-ending, is nevertheless not necessarily foreign to phenomenology The phenomenological reduction is a turning towards the world as the horizon of appearance, but is by the same token a turning away from the world as the mundane arena of the everyday. This turning away leads in its extreme form to the annihilation of the world (Husserl) and the nothing which “nothings” (Heidegger). The motivation for such a turning can be found in a peculiar desire: a desire which the world in its mundanity cannot satisfy. It is not alone that the mundane does not satisfy; the mundane shows itself to be a surface hiding the strange. That alone can justify phenomenology, which begins with a sense that the everyday obscures, that we generally see through things rather than being aware of them in their appearing. In the practice of phenomenology, the table in front of me loses its self-evidence, becoming an interplay of appearing and non-appearing in relation to the embodied presence of the perceiver and the room as the space of co-present objects (chairs, walls, crockery, etc.). For theology, the broken, crucified body of Jesus of Nazareth shows itself as the promise of the resurrection, which in turn heralds the coming of “the kingdom of God”.

The figure of Christ contradicts the basic sense of generational time, namely that the dead give way to the living, that the dead remain dead. In Christ the dead are not reduced to the shades of memory, but rather remain open to a new life. The event of Christ manifests the event as “not yet”, that is, that the event happens between a past not yet passed and a future not yet to come. This temporal caesura is the condition of all transcendence: the passing away of the world is also and at once a promise of memory—that nothing will be forgotten, but all things will be remembered. Such memory is manifest in judgement. Indeed, eschatology is a discourse on judgment: the final judgment. This judgement is not simply an intervention in the world, but a claim to justice which the world fails to instantiate. The Christ-event, in promising the resurrection of the dead, also promises the fulfilment of the beatitudes. A reading of those beatitudes in the Synoptic Gospels shows a temporal ambiguity: the kingdom has come (Matthew, 5: 10; Luke, 6: 20), the kingdom is to come (Matthew, 5: 19; Luke, 6: 23), justice is enacted, justice is to come. In that sense, the judgement has already fallen and yet remains to happen. What this suggests is that the judgement in question is not a chronological event but is the interpolation of the eternal into time—the “eternal is judgement” (Pannenberg 2004, p. 610)—the eschaton is not an event of history but a transcending of history. However, the eternal is not foreign to time but rather arises in time while disturbing and transforming the temporal flow.

These theological themes are a provocation for phenomenology. They address phenomenological concerns, but appear to undermine phenomenological insights. While phenomenology opens up the world as the happening of appearance, Christian theology seeks to show that which the world cannot contain; while phenomenology stresses the temporality of experience, Christian theology finds within that temporality an eternal calling which transforms the temporal. This is, however, a fruitful provocation, one which remains mindful of Derrida’s claim that “all genuine questioning is summoned by a certain type of eschatology.” (Kearney 1984, p. 119.)

This article is divided into three sections. The first sketches the concept of world starting from “horizon” (Section 1). The second section approaches the eschaton within the context of the relation of time and the eternal (Section 2). The final section concentrates on the place of nature within eschatology and examines this in the context of the Christian account of creation and incarnation and a renewed phenomenology of nature (Section 3).

1. World as Horizon

Characteristic of Christian theology is a problematization of world—cosmos—that was foreign to Greek philosophy. To overcome the world is, already for St. Paul, the Christian task, and it is so because this world is coming to an end. The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is that which fulfils the promise contained in the resurrected Christ: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ cannot have been raised either” (Romans, 15: 13). Nevertheless, the world is still there, the end is not yet, so St. Paul introduces an “as if not (hos me)”: live in the world, but “as if not” of the world. This is explicitly stated in the context in which “time is becoming compressed (kairos sunestalmenos estin)” (1 Corinthians, 7: 29). The withdrawal from the world exhorted here by Paul is a kind of ascetics of the eschaton, but should not, however, be misconstrued as a Gnostic rejection of the world. Crucial, nevertheless, is the eschatological context and it is very much in the spirit of Paul that Karl Barth, in his commentary on the “Letter to the Romans”, declares a Christianity, which is not wholly and utterly eschatology, as having nothing whatever to do with Christ (Barth 1968, p. 314).

The Christian scriptures are accounts of happenings, of actions, of relations between beings in the world. The Bible has many protagonists and these are not by any means confined to the human. If the world is a world toward end, it is a world arising out of beginning too. The believer, like the witnesses who wrote the scriptures, finds herself in medias res, between beginning and end, between God as creator and God as redeemer; within a world constituted by, incarnating, inspired by, but also hiding, the divine as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While the Gospel continually proclaims that “what you seek, you will find”, in finding the kingdom of God, they find that which the world cannot contain and does not recognize. When Paul speaks of “this world” passing away, he speaks of “cosmos”. When Plato speaks of world in the Timaeus he uses two words as if synonymously, “cosmos” and “Ouranos”, the heavens which arose out of the Earth (Gaia). The heavens is that opening which gives space and time to appearance, lets things appear, while itself is always withdrawing from view. World in this sense is not an object of experience, but rather the horizon of any experience. The time of the eschaton cannot be specified because to do so would be to place it within the horizon of time and history. We will return to the question of time in the next section, but here what is important is that if time is the horizon of appearance, the eschaton necessarily escapes that and any other possible horizon. But if this world is passing away, that does not mean that the eschaton is without horizon; it may rather mean the opposite, namely that the eschaton is the horizon of any Christian appearance.

The centrality of the notion of “horizon” in phenomenology is clear already in Husserl. If phenomenology is the discourse on phenomena, it is concerned not with phenomena simpliciter but rather which the manner of coming to appearance of phenomena. Such coming to appearance is never isolated but happens within a “misty and never fully determinable horizon” (Husserl 1983, p. 52). The object appears—is given—only ever in part, aspectivally. But while certain aspects of an object may not appear, their non-appearing is contingent and provisional; turned away from me, the back of the house will be appearing to me when I walk around to that side. The aspectival nature of things which allows for such adumbrations with respect to those beings perceiving them depends on that which does not appear, the non-appearance of which is non-contingent and absolute, namely the horizon of such appearing, which Husserl refers to as a “halo of emptiness with respect to appearance.” (Husserl 2012, p. 42). This is central to the very project of Husserl phenomenology, and it is through working out the implications of the phenomenological sense of horizon that we can fruitfully return to the theological problematic of eschatology. The object is given in terms of its horizon in respect to its own aspectival appearing, to the perceiving subject attending to it, and in relation to other objects co-given with it (see Geniusas 2012, p. 149). The sense of the object, both in objective terms and with respect to the subjectivity of the perceiver, cannot be understood except in terms of such horizonality for Husserl. It is through such horizonal structures that an endless potential of sense arises in the object and its interrelations (see Husserl 2008, pp. 127–28).

In the context of this paper, I want to emphasize horizon as the surrounding world of co-given objects and the aspects of the object both as being perceived and as “empty” horizons co-present in any act of perception (Husserl 2012, pp. 43–49). These two senses of horizon are closely related. In formal terms both are indefinite, both are infinite, both are invisible, and both mark the limits dividing the visible and the invisible. Furthermore, in both senses, horizon refers necessarily to intentional consciousness; the inner horizon of the thing is that which correlates to the intentional consciousness, while the noematic core of that consciousness is constituted also by the infinite empty horizons of the object. Husserl speaks of the inner horizon, as he says “suggestively”, as if objects were performing a dance of the seven veils: “Draw closer, closer still: now fix your eyes on me …You will get to see even more of me that is new …” (Husserl 2012, p. 43). The object draws in the perception, but in so doing shows up a pretention of external perception to accomplish what it cannot do, namely to (literally understand) comprehend the object. The object remains always partially hidden and by that same token never mine, always given to another, indeed potentially to an infinity of others. This promiscuity of the object is its fundamental relationality.

To perceive an object is to perceive it as already in relation to others, to infinite others, and to perceive that relationality as fundamental to its being. It is always more than “my” object; rather, that which in facing me is constitutively turned away from me, in being exposed to my vision and my engagement, is also beyond me, removed from me. The object’s being in relation to another transcends my being towards it. While an infinity of the object’s horizons remain empty to me, they are, some at least are, being “filled out” by other beings which stand within these horizons of the object. My own being is not only accidental to the being of the object, but I stand within the horizon of that object only through the prior orientation of the object itself. Whether standing in the easterly shadow of Mount Brandon on an evening or surprised by the flight of a pheasant out of the long grass before me or silenced by the stern look of an audience member as a concert is about to begin—in each case while I may have moved into a position (understood both locomotively, but also behaviorally and aspectivally) with respect to an object, that object places me, displaces my imperious gaze, by locating me within a particular horizon of itself.

The inner horizon of the object drawing me to it is a self-binding to the object. In perception, I bind myself to be the one for whom the object is and to form a community with all those other beings (human and non-human) who find themselves similarly bound to the object. This self-binding is for the most part passive; in remaining with the object, I am its witness and the object is exposed to me. As the one to whom the object is exposed, I am simultaneously exposed to it and to an infinity of potential witnesses within the inner horizons of my own being. As an embodied being, I am already exposed to others, and that exposure is the condition of my own possible perception. The temptation of the ring of Gyges is precisely to escape this primordial situatedness of my horizonal being.

These intertwining and overlapping horizons constitute both the foreground and background of my being. Above all, they are the coming to being of the situatedness of my experience. All these horizons are relations of exposure, relations of action and passion, in which differing practices are possible and which are themselves constituted by those practices. A missile launch pad 500 km from Kyiv is within the internal horizon of that city, due to the technological capacity of these weapons and the enmity of military and political forces. The latter open up that horizon, but in so doing make themselves subject to it. This intersection of material capacity and practical orientation constitutes being of relevance that Heidegger understood as the worldliness of the world (see Heidegger 1996, pp. 77–81).

The temporal ambiguity of the eschaton (already realized/still to come) is reflected in the ambiguity with respect to world: destruction of world and transformation of world. The destruction of the world is not the negation of world but rather the affirmation of the world which is hidden in the instantiation of this world. For any perceiving subject, the world is instantiated in the interplay of horizonal relations, but those relations point beyond themselves to that which is qualitatively other; these finite relations indicate an infinite which remains hidden, but in terms of which the finite horizons have meaning. Furthermore, as the reference to the ring of Gyges suggests, constitutive of horizonal reality is responsibility; each being is what it is in its emplacement in respect of others and is responsible for its own being in such relation. It is precisely this responsibility that the eschaton articulates and enacts universally in the judgement which answers the cry for justice. Finally, the horizon is absent and its absence is constitutive of the present; the horizon is that which can never be present, it is that emptiness which makes possible a filling out. The eschaton names that ultimate filling out making eschatology, in Moltmann’s terms, “the universal horizon of all theology” (Moltmann 1967, p. 137).

2. Time, Eternity and the Eschaton

The end of the world is also the end of time. The Christ-event heralds that end of time, the time as Agamben puts it, to end time (Agamben 2005). The ending of time is not a temporal event—if it were, it would be an event in time with a future that was still to come—but time as ending, that is, the ending of time, is constitutive of time itself. In “being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode)” we experience this temporal relation to ending as mortal time, where the time that is ended becomes transformed into the mortal remains of which we in various funerary traditions regard as being beyond time. World-time is not mortal-time, or rather mortal-time is at once generative time; the one who dies can also procreate and in death give way to those who issue from them (see Held 2005). Yet, the end of time is also the end of generativity, and the resurrection of the dead is also the end of birth, that is the end of becoming mortal.

Already in the Jewish apocalyptic thinking, there is a distinction between personal eschatology and communal, if not cosmic, eschatology (see Pannenberg 2004, pp. 546–49). This is centered on the coming of justice. Experience tells us that the just do not receive the rewards they deserve in this life while the unjust often prosper. Personal eschatology, in the form of the “afterlife”, gives the possibility of personal redemption while tacitly accepting the lack of justice in the world. However, the “kingdom of God” proclaims not merely the redemption of the just, but the transformation of the world, a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelations, 21: 1). The latter account seems to require an understanding of time and history as more than simply backdrops to the actions and happenings of human beings and their worlds, but rather as being themselves agents of transformation. In that sense, history can no longer be understood in terms of recurring cycles, but as being subject to the eschaton as judgement: time and history understood as open to the possibility of radical transformation.

Throughout Christian theological reflections on eschatology—and this takes up elements of Judaic apocalyptic thinking also—there has been a constant warning against predicting the time of the eschaton. St. Paul warns the Thessalonians against such speculations (1 Thessalonians, 5: 1–3) and Karl Rahner distinguishes between “false apocalyptic” and “genuine eschatological assertion” as between a predicted future event and “knowledge of the eschatological present”, which he understands in terms of the “finalizing fulfilment of the whole human being” (Rahner 1974, pp. 330–33). This has two meanings: first, that the eschaton cannot be understood as simply a moment in time, but secondly, that for that very reason the eschaton must in some sense characterize time as such; time needs to be understood eschatologically. A clue as to how this may be is to be found in the story of creation, in particular the emphasis put there on the seventh day, the Sabbath.

It is significant that the holy day in the Hebrew Scriptures is the final, not the first, day. On this day, as Moltmann points out, God does not bless any living thing but rather time itself (Moltmann 1967 p. 232). In Moltmann’s terms, the significance of this is an eschatological one: the weekly day of rest is not merely a making-present of creation in the beginning; it is also a making-present of redemption at the end, a time of remembrance and a time of hope. Beginning and end are present on this day on which time and eternity touch. On the Sabbath, transitory time is abolished, the time of death is forgotten, and the time of eternal life is perceived. It is the liberating interruption of transient time through eternity (Moltmann 1967, p. 233).

This “liberating interruption” is accentuated in the Christian celebration of the Sabbath as the “eight day”. The Christian Sabbath is neither the final nor the first day of creation, but stands outside of any such chronology. In celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ, it reinterprets the Jewish Sabbath as kairos and in so doing transforms the relation of eternity to time. In Plato’s Timaeus, the cosmos becomes more similar to the eternal model by becoming temporal (Plato 2008, Timaeus, 38b-c). The regular circularity of time gives an order to the universe characterized by repeatability and constancy. Within the kenotic discourse of the Gospels, however, there occurs an unrepeatable event that transforms time—recapitulates the story of what is from the origins to the end of time—and opens up the promise of eternal life.

The Sabbath is first and foremost a day of rest. Such rest is also giving a rest (as the English phrase says, “give it a rest”), that is, not engaging with things. In resting, I am not acting toward a goal to be achieved. But rest is still an activity. To rest is to remain with things, to allow things to be and to perceive them as they are. It is not a seeking to complete, but is a tarrying with things as if they were already complete and fulfilled. Such a tarrying-with is still a temporal process and as such is characterized by continual movement, the continual movement of passive synthesis, whereby the present moment is constituted by the flow from protention to retention. That flow is dynamic in the sense that the retained past itself contains past protentions as constitutive of its meaning and protentions are constituted by retentions of protentional direction (see Husserl 2001, p. 34). Time is, in the sense adverbal, is a quality of experience, and such experience happens between passivity and activity: first drawn in by the allure of an appearance, attending to it with the protentional directedness manifest in the appearing thing itself; a kestrel in flight, a river in full flood, a trumpet player sounding a long note. But that very being called to attention, the allure which happens in the appearance, challenges the continuity of time, invests it with qualitative difference. This challenge takes many forms: the kestrel flight awakens in me a past memory of another time which now seems joined with the present beyond all the banalities of the more immediate past moments; the river in flood seems ominous, symbolic of tumult and ruin; the trumpet sound provokes a melancholic sense of some transcendent meaning. In each case, the moment in time claims a significance, which addresses me not as a fleeting presence, but as that which draws together the disparate threads of my life—perhaps only for a moment—in something transcending the chronological measurable instant.

This kairological sense of the moment concerns world. The thing appearing is attended to as in excess of its appearance. Being called to attend to the thing appearing, I sense it as that which only accidentally appears to me, but is an expression of itself and, as such, an expression towards an infinity of horizons of its appearing. By the same token, in its appearing, it appears in its relation to the world. In appearing, the thing is what it is due to the happening of the world as it appears. In so doing, it shows the horizon of the world as that which is exceeded; the thing as appearing in the happening of the world does not exhaust its possibilities in such a happening. Rather, as memory, anticipation, or symbol, the thing shows itself to be that which could be in a multiple of possible worlds, indeed as that which is not confined to the temporal flow of this world. In such a sense, the thing shows itself to be in excess of time. This excess is responded to in the way in which we tarry with the thing in its appearing. This tarrying-with, while itself temporally constituted, is a form of delay, lingering with the appearance as the happening through which there is meaning.

The sabbatical sense of time is a tarrying-with that is intrinsically festive, is a festive openness to being. It is a time of gratitude, both for creation and for redemption. In such festive openness, things appear as if already fulfilled. And yet, the experience of Sabbath can turn from the festive to boredom. It is not by accident that Heidegger gives as an example of deep boredom walking the streets of a town on a Sunday afternoon (then as now in Germany all shops would be closed, nothing would be “happening”) (Heidegger 1995, p. 135). This situation is one of been left empty, while all entities seem indifferent to us. Heidegger stresses here the lack of power to counter this all-encompassing sense of indifference; Michel Theunissen understands this as the experience of being dominated by time, where we suffer from time, and time confronts us in its nakedness (Theunissen 1991, p. 45). This sense of time as dominating and as a meaningless sequence of nows is the extreme of chronological temporality, which the sabbatical can open up precisely by removing all forms of “pasttime”, all modes of passing the time. The interruption by the eternal can be experienced as much in boredom as in ecstasy because it shows up the implacability of time which is always passing but never passes, and makes present the temporal as remainder without loss. In theological terms, Pannenberg understands this as contained within the eschatological reality: to understand the eschaton as divine judgement means that what takes place in time can never be lost in God’s eternity (Pannenberg 2004, p. 606).

There is no interruption of time. It is true that when I sleep, I am no longer conscious of the world around me; however, sleeping does not remove me from the world, but deepens my responsibility in terms of its eschatological meaning: “stay awake, because you never know when the time (kairos) will come”. (Mark, 13: 33) The tree I see outside my window has a time of its own generation recalling the seed from which it came and recalls immemorial pasts out of which it emerged. My experience of this tree is an experience of it as it came to be from the soil of an immemorial past. Similarly, the monuments of my own and past civilizations I see around me trace the genius of those who conceived them and the toil of those who labored to construct them. To tarry with them in a moment is to be open to that messianic time of which Benjamin speaks in which we make a “tiger’s leap” into the past (Benjamin 1968, p. 261). The objects of perception are themselves memories of the past; to perceive a sparrow or a mountain or a building is to perceive hiding within it pasts which are traced upon it. All of these pasts are gathered together in the eternal, eschatological kairos.

This eschatological memory is at its core a promise: the promise inherent in the resurrection of Christ. The nature of this promise is one which is a matter of not a little controversy in Christian thought. The crucial question is how to understand the event of Christ; is it the fulfilment of creation such that the “time which remains” is simply one of waiting for the second coming, or is it rather the opening up of a new time, a time of the spirit, as the thirteenth century monk Joachim de Fiori understood it (on the latter see Rosemann 2023). The problem for Christian thought is to understand the status and significance of this time following the death and resurrection of Christ. If Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, why did his coming not immediately herald the end of the world? The question is one which is easier to respond to in Jewish thinking, as the Messiah yet to come. But what is the nature of messianism after the Messiah? The theological debates on this issue are complex, but the question it raises phenomenologically is the relation of hope and its connection to fear.

A promise indicates a future in a manner that is significant for the addressee of that promise. In that sense, promise and threat are in close proximity with one another. While promise is generally understood as positive and threat as negative with respect to the future significance, like the kairos, the same event can be both even for the same person or community. We see this with the eschaton. Already in St. Paul, we find counsels against worry with respect to the ending, and it was a commonplace in the Medieval church to interplay hope with fear in the face of apparent signs of the Apocalypse (see Walker Bynum and Freedman 2000). Both hope and fear are emotions of uncertainty: the hope for something or the fear of something is the anticipation of what is still hidden but is nonetheless sensed. In both cases, we experience in entities the indication of a future giving a certain sense and meaning to the present. The death and resurrection of Christ is understood in Christian theology as a promise. However, this promise is itself stated in fearful terms. The narrative of the passion itself is one of suffering, cruelty, and oppression, and this is reflected in the so-called “eschatological discourse” in chapter 13 of St. Mark’s Gospel and in the symbolism of the Book of Revelations. There is an ambiguity here between promise and threat. The latter is for us today particularly pertinent when we think of climate change and nuclear threat; the apocalypse can seem frighteningly close and catastrophic.

Common to both hope and fear is an interrelation of passivity and activity; to hope for something is strive for it, while recognizing that the fulfilment remains dependent on that over which one had limited control (see Steinbock 2014, pp. 167–71). Hope in a promise is to be open towards a future fulfilment through another’s agency. It does not involve complete passivity; indeed, the Christian practices of sacraments, prayer, and vocation are all actions directed towards that fulfilment. However, the fulfilment is in the gift of another. The actions are taken to prepare oneself to accept or be worthy of that gift. A very similar dynamic occurs in the case of fear. A threat is responded to with fear because the unwanted suffering is anticipated from the agency of another which—to the extent to which I fear it—is beyond my control. Again, this is not simply a relation of passivity: I act to protect myself as much as possible from such future suffering. Both emotions, hope and fear, are ways of living with respect to futuricity. To live in hope or in fear is to live in relation to signs of a possible future. In both the future is hidden, but the present signifies a future in the present. The temptation is to attempt to negate the passive relation to the heteronomous by creating the hoped-for future or destroying the source of fear. One must distinguish here between relative and absolute hope and fear. There are sources of fear and hope which can and are overcome in daily life: a hoped-for exam result is achieved in the final exam and one may never have to depend on favorable exam questions again; a predator is caught and put behind bars and is no longer a threat. However, the distinction between what is in my power and what is outside it is a constant, and as such, the relation of hope and fear at that absolute level cannot be overcome. The attempt to do so, through the creation of Heaven on Earth or the destruction of all enemies, is self-defeating, as can be seen not alone from the history of the past hundred years or so, but also on the principled basis that the infinite cannot be given finite form.

3. Creation, Incarnation and Nature

Promise and threat are not merely anthropological trajectories, but are ubiquitous with the horizonal reality of entities in the world. A tree trunk or the eave of a shed is promising for a swallow constructing its nest, but a sparrowhawk is a threat to it; a westerly wind is promising for a sailor, but stormy seas a threat to her. A promise need not be uttered nor intended; it suffices that a future is opened up which may be hoped for. A threat similarly need not be a matter of strategy: a virus presumably does not seek out to harm its would-be “host”. This is not to make a move from social relations to nature, but rather to indicate the horizonal reality of interrelation, which is not simply a matter of intentional relation, or rather intentional relation is the mode of relation of entities to each other in terms of those adumbrations, which place them and towards which they place themselves.

It is an abstraction to speak of “mere things”: a thing is always already in relation and in encountering things we do so by bringing a new disturbance into these relations. Such a disturbance is not simply causal, although it is necessarily so, but also in Husserl’s terms “motivational”: my presence indicates further relational possibilities (Husserl 1989, pp. 228–34). As I sit down in a garden with my lunch, for the curious robin, I become a possible source of food, to be approached surreptitiously; for an oak tree, predator insects are a threat to which its neighbors receive warning through fungal networks around their root tips (see Wohlleben 2016, pp. 49–55); the marble in a sculptor’s workshop lies passively before the chisel which, in reshaping it, transforms it into an artwork. In each case, these relations can be described causally, but the causal account is not exhaustive or rather it depends on a prior apprehension of significance: relations of nourishment, predation, and making. The robin and arguably the oak tree “perceive” their situation in a significative sense, i.e., they respond to a contingent happening with the horizons of their being; the same cannot be said of the marble. The marble does not sense, and yet it is only because the marble is receptive to the sculpture’s chisel and prior to that appears as promising to her, can the sculptor find in it the possibility of new experiences and new actions.

The above sketch of a phenomenology of nature is important for us here, because the eschaton in Christian theology is a time of ending not only for human beings, but for all of nature. This is so because eschatology cannot be understood in isolation from the accounts of Creation and Incarnation, which each relate dialectically to the eschaton. The drama of Christianity is that dynamic of creation and fall, of redemption and rejection, reconciliation and strife. This drama is already at play in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis and remains with us today. Through all of this we see the centrality of nature: the result of the Fall was conflict of human beings and material nature, both their own (childbirth, manual effort) and that of their surroundings (brambles and thistles) (Genesis, 3); the covenant with Noah is first a covenant with nature—“never again will I strike down every living being as I have done” (Genesis, 8: 21); throughout the later books of the Hebrew Scriptures, non-human nature has significant agency, and then in the Gospels the recurring motif of Christ as reconciling all things in nature, e.g., Colossians, 1: 19–20: “through him to reconcile all things to him, everything in heaven and everything on earth”. It is crucial here to recognize that this account gives an understanding of nature irreducible either to the scientific or the mythological: nature is neither meaningless and indifferent nor is it full of gods (see Crowell 1996). The Christian account of nature shares with the scientific the sense of nature as articulatable through the spiritual, in the sense of ideas, whether those of mathematical physics or those in the mind of God, but in its account of creation affirms all nature as receivers of life and as turned (albeit in the case of human beings through grace) in praise towards its creator. In this context, the eschaton is the final reconciliation of creatures and creator, a reconciliation which is only possible for beings whose value and significance is first acknowledged.

It is precisely this latter mutual acknowledgement of value and significance that is already implicit in the horizonal structure of all things. Materiality is the primary condition of such horizonal being: every material thing is in horizonal relation, is placed. To be flesh is to embody such material being and to do so in various degrees of sentience. As such, to be material is already to be within relations of promise and threat; to be flesh is to sense oneself within those relations. For Moltmann, Easter symbolizes the hope of reconciliation for all nature (quoted in Skrimshire 2014, p. 165). However, pending such an eschaton, the eternal is only glimpsed in the present and such reconciliation is deferred. In that context, nature is and remains duplicitous: it turns towards God and towards the creaturely perceiver. All things in this sense are doubly related: theocentrically and anthropocentrically. In Christian terms the theocentric is fundamental: neither humanity nor nature is the center of the world, but rather God is (Moltmann 1967 p. 142). Sin, in this context, is a turning away from God in the specific sense of being anthropocentric. Such anthropocentricity is not a forgetting of nature, but rather a becoming enraptured with nature as it satisfies human demands. In this sense, idolatry is a symptom of anthropocentricity. The response of asceticism to this situation has been a constant in Christianity as in many other religions. However, counsels against any extreme tendency in this direction have also been voiced. This is so because, ultimately pursued to its limit, asceticism is self-defeating: the most ascetic of practices still needs sustenance and material support; and more troubling is the tendency with asceticism of Gnostic disgust at the flesh, which is ultimately a refusal of the gift of creation.

The same tendency to asceticism is evident in phenomenology (see Ricoeur 1996, pp. 38–43; Lacoste 2018, pp. 40–41). The reduction is a refusal of playing along with nature, a withdrawal from the ebb and flow of engaged existence (Husserl 1983, p. 61). With the epoché, belief in the independent of the world is suspended and indeed the very existence of the world is “annihilated” (Husserl 1983, p. 110). However, this ascetic move is not a rejection of the world, but an allowing of the world to appear as it is. This is, to take up a theme from the last section, a “Sabbath for thought” (the phrase is taken from (William Desmond 2005)) where the self takes a rest from the world, not to escape it but rather to celebrate it as it is and further to think it in respect to its ending, its ultimate horizon.

As eschatologically understood, nature is created through divine love; the creator kenotically incarnated himself in nature and nature is to be redeemed not from itself but from the consequence of human sin. Understood in relation to nature and its redemption, the Incarnation should be understood not simply as a becoming human, but also as a becoming material, natural, of the divine; the word becomes matter in becoming flesh. What this means is that the Incarnation signifies the eternal logos binding itself with all vulnerable creatures (see Gregersen 2015, p. 17). So understood, the Incarnation rearticulates creation as an embracing of all of nature by the divinity. The figure of Christ as God in becoming a natural being, in becoming material, has become himself an expression of the horizonal reality of material things. The promise of the resurrection of the flesh is also a promise of reconciliation of the flesh, whereby fleshy existence will happen in harmony with all other existing beings.

Central to the Christian account of creation is that it is a creation out of nothing (see Deane-Drummond 2014, pp. 71–77). This latter doctrine essentially says that all things are dependent on God, i.e., not dependent on a material substrate, as a demiurgal account would suggest. Furthermore, as love is without why, so the divine creation is to be understood in terms of love: a gratuitous gift at the origin of things. Creation is that which comes before all agency, and is what we receive before we can respond to it (see Mannousakis 2009, p. 109). Before all response is reception; as with all things in nature, we are given to ourselves before we are subjects of any experience. This is not to deny the subjectivity of experience but to say that it depends already on what comes to be in us. That coming to be is twofold: it is a coming to be of that which we are not, as I come to be out of that which is not I; but then it is a coming to be of this being that has its own being. That primal fact of being is “re-incarnated” at every moment; my being that is my own depends on the air I breath, on the warmth that both climate and built environs provide, on the solid earth which supports me and mirrors my own origin and destiny (“until you return to the ground as you were taken from it” [Genesis 3: 19]), and on the liquidity which lubricates my bodily being.

The four elements of ancient cosmology (earth, air, fire, water) are central to my being and the possibility of all appearing; things appear in light, appear by virtue of their earthiness, appear in relations of apparent emptiness, can be sensed only through the fluidity of living bodies. This elemental being with things I share with all entities. In seeing a hosta bloom or an ash tree seek out the sun with its leaves, it is not a matter of emphatically feeling their vegetal being (even assuming that to be possible), but rather encountering them as beings relating with the elemental content of our shared existence. A summer rain shower for the alder trees under whose branches I seek protection is not anything I can emphatically experience, but as the rain relates to me in soaking me, so the rain relates otherwise to the trees. We are both there in relation to the rain due to our exposure to the elemental being out of which we both emerge. Elements, as Levinas already showed (Levinas 1969, pp. 130–34), are not things; they are not objects to possess, but rather that in which we bathe. They are qualities without substance, which we enjoy. But the elemental, as Levinas recognized also (Levinas 1969, p. 141), is that without definite form, the apeiron. The elements transform into one another as Plato already recognized (Plato, Timaeus, 52d2-58c3), and what was life-giving air can (as with the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden) become consuming fire. The elements as such remain beyond control and possession; it is in them that we encounter nature as it manifests itself.

The elemental reality of our being is something that can be and has been forgotten. As Pope Francis stated: “We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2: 7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.” (Francis 2015, p. 1). Francis goes on to speak of an “ecological conversion whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them. Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue” (Francis 2015, p. 62). Such a conversion is not unrelated to the conversion away from mundanity from which we began: the phenomenologist and the theologian are turning away from the relation of possessiveness to things in the world and bracket all interest in possessing them; for both, a “life of virtue” is a life lived in openness to things as they are and towards nature as it transcends its mere facticity toward its meaningfulness. That meaningfulness is for the theologian to be found in Christ already in Paul’s Letters (see Colossians, 1: 17–20), where he is being understood as the “cosmic Christ”. The latter is best thought not to be understood as nature in microcosm but as Richard Bauckham suggests, “it is all creatures, not just individually but in their ecological interdependence and interconnectedness, that the exalted Christ brings into the relationship to God that has always been their created goal.” (Bauckham 2014, p. 52). Understood in elemental terms, Christ is that coming together of the divine with the qualities of being. However, as such, the divine shares in the vulnerability of matter being, its subjection to apeiron, formlessness. Levinas opposed the formless apeiron to the infinity of the other, but did so at the price of implicitly dividing the flesh of the other from its materiality. He thereby radicalizes a tendency already in Husserl, and which is equally radically if distinctly radicalized by Henry, of drawing an ontological gulf between Leib and Körper (see Falqué 2016, pp. 12–15). However, the body’s material being is that horizonal exposure and elemental dependence, which each being lives through in varying degrees of sentience. It is this exposure and dependence that Christianity understands Christ to have embodied and, in doing so, opened up the promise not of an end to exposure and dependence, but of gathering together of all suffering and joy in a final reconciliation of justice, where the cries of all mortal being are finally heard with sufficiency.

The eschaton is both end and beginning, which is not simply the destruction of world but a transformation that recapitulates and makes present the world in its created sense. Understood in terms of a phenomenology of world, this means that the horizonal reality of all things is affirmed, but now in its infinite reality. It is for this reason that the reconciliation of all of nature, which Isaiah makes vivid by speaking of a world in which “the wolf will live with the lamb, the panther lie down with the kid” (Isaiah, 11: 6), is so phenomenologically suggestive. The inner horizonality of anything is infinite and can never be made present to a perceiving subject. It is nevertheless an idea “in the Kantian sense” (as Husserl likes to say) which is constitutive of the reality of anything. Furthermore, in the appearing of anything, the infinite correlations of actual and potential perceivers are a constant happening. It is a happening of finite beings with their own temporal trajectories and meaning projections and interests. When these trajectories cooperate, they do so finitely and adversarially: my admiration for my hosta plant is one I share with other people, but which motivates me to hinder the slug for which it is a source of sustenance; a stretch of jungle is potential agricultural land for cattle ranchers or a habitat for indigenous peoples; a Cezanne still life is a source of contemplative bliss for an art lover, an object to keep secure for the gallery official. It is impossible to form the synthetic view of all these perspectives in actuality, that is, it is impossible to be both engaged with things and consider them in their infinity. Eschatological reconciliation is the actualization of all such perspectives within the world, that is, the totality of all such horizonal relations which are, were, or will be. It is this which St. Francis Assisi is indicating in speaking of “brother sun”, “sister moon”, “brother wind”, “sister water” (quoted in Francis 2015, p. 26). St. Francis was considered by St. Bonaventure as the angel of the Apocalypse (see Rosemann 2023, p. 38). He preached a relation to nature, which in phenomenological terms understood the horizonal constitution of things to be reconciled in relations of fraternity engaging all beings of nature. Such an actualization is not neutral, but rather is the gathering together of all horizonal relations in terms of the vertical relation of justice, which weighs them all. Such a reconciliation and gathering is never fully actualized, but the movement toward such actualization is a condition of nature understood in its phenomenological reality.

Phenomenologically, the theological account of eschatology indicates the actualization of infinite horizonality and the movement of meaning transcending, while constitutive of, material reality; theologically, the phenomenological account of nature, world, and time lays bare the phenomenal structures in which the appearing of the divine as both omega and alpha (eschaton and creation) can reveal itself within the world of appearance. The end and the beginning mark the eternal that suspends time without interrupting it through a vertical appeal of justice for which every moment is an eschatological calling to account.