Between Eschaton and concept

If it is only the eschatological truth as an integrating and reconciling factor

of history that can help us understand the whole truth and it is only us who can
confess it, then the eschatological truth has to be contained in the present state of
our confessions, therefore to exist an original affinity between the eschatological
future and the present of my being; between time and self, in general. Hence, the
Eschaton, as well as the way to reach this time must find its place in the
ontological structure of the self. The concepts of self and time cannot be divided.
How the self succeeds in suppressing the liniar externality of time, by capturing it
inside a moment (configuration, property) of self-consciousness is a philosophical
problem. Formally speaking, it is the same problem that Christian theology faces
with in its endeavour to bring the past and future events under the same universal
unity of self-consciousness.

I wil try, in the following lines, to highlight the Hegelian connection between
time and spirit, showing how the spirit as an absolute ideea as an original and
universal freedom, instills infinite negations in its own meaning, enstranging itself
and creating the time as a premise of its becoming, the purpose of thiese
oppositions being that through their suspension and conservation, the self
approaches progressively its own ideality and, finally, reaching its own concept, a
moment in which its freedom and universality will be conquered entirely, any
alterity being completely supressed and impropriated. The self can no longer create
new oppositions to suppress them later, as its matter is entirely synthesized. There
is no other foreign body, heterogeneous of its entity, to externalize under the form
of negations which, it will suppress, bringing it under the synthetic unity of
consciousness. Nothing matters more for the spirit than the self, claims Hegel.
If the essence of the spirit is concept, then time is concept in its most
abstract form, the most remote from the self; it is the pure self which relates
outwards to the self, it is sheer intuition, it is the place from where the self,
burdened with all the concepts tension, sets out on its quest for self. To some
extent, we can say that time is the freedom indicator of the spirit. As long as time is
not cancelled, the spirit reaches its goal and the interiority manifests a unity with
itself. The absolute reason of the spirit is the confession of the spritit itself and not
of the miracles or its historical confirmation, Hegel maintained once. The miracles
or the historical events maintain an external relation between the self and the
object, between the self and its own entity, therefore the unity of the spirit with its
own self is compromised. It is thus necessary to suspend and internalize history
(and time in general) within the synthetic unity of its own self-conscience. The
process of synthetizing the objective reality with the aim of reaching the concept of
the spirit is dialectical and its anagogic becoming brings forward inadequate forms
of the concept, forms which the self suppresses and preserves, enriching itself
further and building a more defined universality and freedom. As the synthetic
configuration of the conscience becomes more universal, the presence and reality of
the divine time ontological becomes more and more dimmed. I will insist upon
these moments in order to demonstrate how the transfer is made from the finite
certainty of the self which allows the difference between the self and object to
become thinner to its truth, which adequately conciles the self with its own
concept (the self that reached the ideality of its own self), thus reaching its state of
freedom; the freedom to be what is appropriate with its original destination. It is
about an ontological freedom, one that reinstates the self in its own universal form,
freeing it from the opposition with the objective reality of the space and time where
everything is defined by necessity, making it available for relations which are
subjected to gratuity or unconditionality.
Hegel shows that mans need for transcendence does not originate in himself,
but the transcendence itself instills this need in man, trying to find itself through
him. Hence there will be two positions under which the relationship between man
and God can be regarded: from man towards God and from God towards man. The
relationship determined by the first position is rendered by religion, the subjective
side, the one in which the consciousness is purified of its own subjectivity and builds
the object (God), dependant on its freedom to receive him. This freedom is
progressively conquered under the tension of the concept, which, permeating and
assimilating the forms of conscience, strives to reach full self-awareness, revealing
and restoring its originality, burdened with the infinite negation of its moments.
It is very important to notice the organic relationship between the way in
which God is known and through this the way in which the subject knows
himself. A similar way, determined by the concept, the same spirit, transgresses and
works both positions. Without a prior transcendent unity, the subject may not
initiate a dynamic and enthelechial relationship, that of an oriented assimilation of
the subject. Man finds his real image in God only that, initially, God took a pieace of
self, planted it at the indentitary root of man and made His searching and finding
possible, the same way in which man, through his freedom, understands to open
himself to God through what God has already planted in him. Therefore, the
openness to God conincides with an openness to himself. They cannot be divided.
When one finds God in whole which is the case of the Christian religion, where God
is manifest, revealed one finds himself in whole.
Therefore, Hegel will ask himself: how can I find God in the way in which he
returns himself to his real content, and returns myself, through rebound, my real
identity? Where can I find God in myself in order to be able to initiate a real
knowledge of him? Which is the place [in the self] where this content is at home?
God, being universal par excellence, cannot be found, determined and rendered to
himself as is, but through what can receive, metabolize and return its universality in
us, i.e. reasoning. We pass over the positions in which God is directly perceived in
the subjective form of emotion I know, I have the certainty that God is connected
to my being, as well as over the position of abstract representation the form
which, initially, I render to Gods own existence, his objectivity. Through reasoning,
says Hegel, the direct form of emotion is united with the indirect form of
representation, succeeding to capture the object in a horizon in which
determinations such as direct/indirect, finite/infinite, subjective/objective are not
only oppositional and heterogeneous, but also interconnected, each of them
including its counterpart. This fact, through its reciprocity, will allow the complete
transformation of one into the other, each reflecting the other in the most individual
way, by its deepest interiority. The apparent relationship of the subject with the
object is thus distributed in fact to the relationship between the subject and its self,
mediated by the object, and returned to itself by the subject: the man who
discovers his self by assimilating God, as well as God, who returns himself to him
receiving glory, through man. It is very important to understand the identity, the
difference, as well as the unity of identity and the difference between terms. Only in
reasoning, in its infinite unity with itself, the subject entirely coincides with the
object, the universal is for the universal. Only through reasoning we may return God
to himself, ontologically unaltered, said Hegel.
Judging by the way in which it approaches the relationship between finite and
infinite, reasoning will reach its conceptual ideality after it passes through two
positions. These are two necessary unfitted forms which it suppresses, assimilates
and, transforming their negative moment in a positive moment, it overpasses. Thus
we have: Abstract reasoning, the one which rigidly identifies the determination of
the object, as a fact of conscience. Between the finite and infinite, man and God,
there is a total hiatus. God is considered as existing for himself, separated, exterior.
The way in which man relates to God, to the infinite, reflects the inner principle of
reasoning, its abstract identity, its simple reference to self. Reflexive Reasoning, by
attempting a more precise determination of God, defines him as beeing what is
beyond man, what overpasses his limits. In this way, God, as only the abstract
negation of man, is given a limit which makes him finite - as finite as the finite
(man) who made him finite. This kind of reasoning seems to point at where the man
ends and God begins, but the limit that separates them is inevitably common, thus
turning the infinite into finite. It is clear that maintaining the finite and the infinite
rigidly to the self, ascertained only for the self, their relationship may not be
anything else but external, reciprocally-exclusive, closed to an internal
harmonization. It is a vicious circle with no way out. The finite will never be able to
meet the infinite, i.e. the man will never be able to meet God. From this tragical
aporia, man realizes that he is the one who designates the finite and the infinite, he
is their source and their affirmation. Designating himself as finite, he designates a
God who will reside beyond him. This designation belongs to him too. God is his
product, his outcome.Beyond the self, his pure alterity, what transcends him, is a
part of himself, is their spring. Thus the first opposition between finite and infinite
has disappeared, moving into the self, but in a more robust shape, more difficult to
detect. The progress brought about by this determination is the fact that, formally,
the finite finds the infinite in itself, the man finds God inside of him. The infinite is in
the finite. Hegel names this position the surpreme paradox of subjectivity,
because the proposed infinite has the shape and the limitation of the finite that
designated and initiated it. It is an infinite kind of finite, a God, manned by man.
Man becomes a supreme criterion, designated through himself and thus receiving
total worth. He is absolute self-affirmation, absolute subjectivity. However, the self,
being finite, has everything resulting from its designation and affirmation bearing
the sign of finiteness. Therefore, what misses here is the counter-balance of
objectivity, the infinite designated through itself and not through the particular
subjectivity of the subject. I, as a finite, must give up to my finiteness, to find in
myself a position where the infinite is perfectly received and related to itself,
without my subjective interevention, which, inevitably, will limit and alter the
expression. Hence, the self must be determined as being universal, similar to the
working that it receives in itself. This is the most difficult position in the self because
through its own freedom it brings about total abandonment in the object that it
relates to and by which it must let himself be overcome. Freedom itself is claimed
by an even greater freedom, the freedom to be absolved of this burden. You are
taken over and replaced by the object. It takes over your live and precedes you
harmoniously in all your gestures, releasing youself of the dramatism of any
problematic option. This is the conceptual reasoning (speculative), the one which, in
the same action, unites the abdication of finiteness of the subject with the true
instance of the object in its universality. It is a vision, a face toward face
encounter. Only now do the intercrescence and difference of the subject and object
become worthy and return to themselves: the subject through its intercession and
assumption of the subject it becomes subject-object, while the object through its
intercession and assumption of the subject becomes object-subject. Only now
does the subject refer to the object in itself, in its full transparency, without the
misleading shades of an abusive subjectivity, and sees its own alterity, its idealized
image. Likewise, the infinite through the freedom of the man who recognized its
supereminence and surrendered to it in order to be impregnated by its dimension
returns to himself through an adequate form. The intercrescence, but also the
difference between the two, is obvious. As shown, formally speaking, the
relationship between subject and object, between man and God, is basically a
relationship between man and his self through God, but also a relationship between
God and himself through man. However, man, being created and sealed by God, has
his relationship with himself turned in this action, implicitely, a relationship between
God and himself, i.e. affirmation. Man, digging deep into his own self, looking for his
image, discovers the Godly spring. Therefore, on one hand man, starting from his
self, discovers his real image in Other, in God. The more carefully he listens to the
voice of his alterity, the more visible his own identity becomes. There must be
highlighted the way in which the progressive ontological interiorization of the self
involves a necessary objectivation of the one whom he assimilates. The more one
has God in himself, the more, pradadoxically, it becomes distinct, visible, and
objective , which means that the subjectivity of the subject has filled itself with
the objectivity of the object, which allows God to appear, through man, as he is,
therefore to reveal to himself. Obviously, Gods objectivity becomes subjective itself.
He allows itself to be perfectly assimilated by the one who receives the gift. If there
is something we can turn against Hegel, that would be the fact that he considers
this gift only in its positivity, whereas on this unilateral positivity he built his whole
subject-object dialectic. Reasoning, Hegel claims, being universal for the
universalitys sake, may restore through a progressive determination, which is
inherent both to the subject and to the object, their real image, in whole. Starting
from Gods gift, the man rebuilds God, thus building himself. What Hegel fails to
observe, which fatally affects his ontological premises, is the fact that behind the
gift resides an initiative which makes it possible, i. e. Gods love and
gratuituousness. If reasoning through its intrinsic rigour of the concept rebuilds the
way to God, the resulting God is one defined by necessity, by logical inference, by
conceptual summon. Hence, the absolute Spirit to which Hegel hints is closed itself,
ontologically sufficient to itself, God being perfectly suppressed and exhausted. God
in himself, even if endowed with objectivity, has no freedom left, being totally
assimilated in concept.
However, God did not create the man out of necessity, so that reasoning
could return the man to God through the dynamism of some onto(logical)
structures, but out of philantropy, nobleness and goodwill. Hegel, in our opinion,
must have completed the ontology of the concept the one which, formally,
through divinization returns God to himself with an ontology of the ineffability, of
grace, of love which regards Gods freedom of will, His ontological generosity, His
inappropriable archaicity. The relationship between subject and object, between
man and God, is not symmetrical from the ontological point of view. Formally, and
the Orthodoxy agrees, the divinization of man (Theosis), but through his
divinization he does not consummate God through Eucharistia restores His
dimension, the dignity and eloquence of the original Principle, of the one who from
his own being created and began everything, respecting and cultivating thus the
absolute alterity of His Paternity. Thus, the ontology of the concept must be
concluded, in the sense of originality, with a sacramental ontology.
In order to avoid confusion with the Platonic emanationism, where God, in the
instant of His ontologic expression is still under the sign of necessity, we must state
that, in accordance with the Cappadocian Fathers, the cause of threefold
divinization is the Father. The Father wanted the Son not out of necessity, as an
egocentrical indulgence, but out of love. This is why, in the Holy Trinity, the Son,
even of the same being with the Father, appears in the form of a distinct alterity,
endowed with freedom. Fathers love becomes a primordial ontological concept and
His first expression, where communion and freedom are interwoven, is the Holy
Trinity. Gods absolute freedom of initiative corresponds to Son of Gods absolute
freedom to respond, through the Holy Spirit. The ontological support of the Holy
Trinity is the wholeness of love, its call and its eternal response, its infinite dynamics
which springs from its hypostases. Divinization is defined by the personal relationhip
and not by its nature. A persons alterity and freedom render power to the
communion. We do not wish to develop the dogmatic details here, we only wish to
mention that when God the Father causes the Holy Trinity, this should not be
understood as a temporal succession, like in the case of other things He created.
The person does not follow nature. Any prioritization of terms in the advantage of
another must be avoided. This is what God has done when He wanted His Son,
endowing Him will all His love and freedom, under the form of hypostatic alterity.
Gods ontologic priority is offered to the Son of God, hence in the divine oikonomy
we cannot speak of the priority of one term in front of another.
Returning to Hegel, we will say that what makes the self to advance,
reaching its absolute revelation in the absolute Spirit, is the concept. The
concept, as a tool of the Absolute Idea, compares the phenomenon of
conscience (its relation with the object) with its universal nature, and the
difference is suppressed and conserved into the self - the negated instance
becoming a property of conscience, and thus overpassing it. In the light of these
consecutive suppressing events, the exteriority of the self will disappear in the
sense of spiritual transfiguration - being integrated in the conscience as a passed
moment. It is true, the self contains the whole richness of substance, it is the
recapitulatoin and the culmination of creation. This is exaclty why it can establish
homogeneous relationships, of anagogical assimilation, with the object, raising the
creation and its own being to their ultimate dignities (unification with God), but if,
together with this wealth the self does not perceive, in depth, the ineffable sacrality
of divinization, with its absolute ineffable, then the nobleness and purity of the
received gift which in fact defines it are ontologically compromised. The gift, as
an expression of freedom and generosity of alterity, must be received together with
the donor! Thus, by considering and valorizing the gift, with the secret omission of
the divine initiative and its absolute alterity, it delivers an incomplete divine
concept of the self. Gods image instilled in itself will always come before it,
preceding and accompanying it in all its determinations, until, after all its revelation,
filtration and assimilation of the formations of conscience, it will receive the full
expression of the concept, and of the absolute spirit. The historicist and determined
character of the Hegelian concept becomes manifest, in its necessary and a
connected development of moments. God is perfectly knowable and appropriable,
there is no alterity which cannot be suppressed by conscience, Hegel seems to infer.
Any alterity is relative and its meaning is that of being suppressed, so that the
subject and the object admit themselves, assimilate themselves and, thus, fully
develop themselves in one another. There exists no absolute alterity, Hegel
suggests. Even in the introduction to thePhenomenology of the Spirit he notes:
The object seems to be meant for her [for conscience] only in the way in which she
knows it; the conscience cannot pass behind the object, in order to examine, the
same as he is not meant for her...
As it seems, the Hegelian concept, as an expression of absolute divine alterity
from which it originates and which it must reconstruct, connects it to the holy
dimension, eschatological, founding but also free from history. On the margin, we
may say there were and will probably be moments when the Holy Spirit will have
to act alone because history will reach a point where mans action will no longer be
valid. This statement is also valid for the individual destiny of man.
To conclude this, without developing on the subject, the merit of the Orthodox
theology as keeper and continuation of the patristic tradition which has always
perceived the mystery of the absolute divine alterity, its ineffable fundamental
component. Unfortunatelly, Hegel we supect that his information is incomplete
and incorrect has regarded in the Orthodoxys openness and appetence for
mystery only the cultivation of external miracle, always demanded for itself, the
Orthodoxy being a religion in a content which is not divine, is not the witness of
God about self as spirit in spirit. On the contrary, we believe, no other religion
captures and witnesses God from an internal, deep and adequate interiority -
thanks to a remarkable pneumatic realism the apophatic antinomy which
transcendes the limits of conceptual logic, discerning both His alterity and absolute
freedom, of an inexorable mystery, and the relative, suppressible alterity, given to
man to be fostered and become, through its participation and decisive care of the
Holy Spirit, God through His grace.
By questioning knowledge, observation and possession of the supreme Being,
Orthodoxy distinguishes in the Godly Being two sacred modes Gods presence:: 1.
The abyss of the divine esence, its inscrutable alterity forever inaccessible,
incommunicable and incomprehensible (Deus Absconditus -Donor) 2. The
manifestations outwards (ad extra) of God - Outings, as the Fathers of Philokalia
stated His mutiple energies, communicable and comprehensible to creation. (Deus
Revelatus - The Revelation man dedicated to himself by God, able to know Him
and suffer for him, restoring and glorifying his being). Even entirely different by
nature, the Godly energies are inseparable from Himself, being the expression of
the common tri-hypostatic nature. It is fully manifested here in the apophatic
dimension a real crucificatoin of the discursive, conceptual reasoning of the
connection between creation and Creator. God, manifests Himself, but also hides
Himself, remains transcendent and heterogeneous to being, penetrating and
assimilating through grace in what He is by nature. The apophatic structure,
absolutely antinomic and with incompatible but complementary terms abolutely
equal in this antinomy, is consubstantial to any essential theological truth and we
can find, for example, in the dogma of the Holy Trinity where the threefolded
antinomy and unity coexist harmoniously, in the Christs teandrism where the dual
antinomy of beings, divine and human, and the unity of the person, does not
contradict each other, but, on the contrary, reflect their reciprocal affirmation etc.
The source of such an understanding, that logic categories may not comprehend,
can only originate in the pneumatological, ineffable, therefore eschatological
perspective the survival of this century through bringing the future into the
present, stopping the history and transforming it in its proper meaning, which
comes from the future may bring light and realism to some essential points of
reference, because they come from the sourse itself. Even the supreme dignity of
man (Gods image in himself), but given to the being along with its concrete origin,
is an indicator for the constant effort of likeliness, which may have a living and
immediate contribution to the divine person. There is a dialectic and antonimic
relationship between image and likeliness, each term proving achieavable through
the other. It is worth mentioning that as an expression of absolute alterity and
freedom of the divine being anteriority of image as compared to likeliness, in the
sense of origin, is necessary, as the human being always has God as an asymptotic
limit. An absolute likeliness with the Creator may never be achieved. The
apophatic Spirit emphasizes an ontological difference which is specific between man
and God, between image and likeliness, thus restoring both the autonomy of the
object and the recognition of his inexorable mystery, which in counterbalance, will
allow the creation an infinite growth and enriching through God. The divine mystery
must not be understood in its common sense, of an opaque, obscure or irrational
reality, but in its fundamental ineffability, it remains intelligible, the being is able to
establish thanks to an apophatic paradox a relationship and a affirmative
participation with its negation, with what cannot be participated in, by definition.
Therefore, the connection of man with God is fostered adn grown through the
synergy resulted on one hand from the individual effort to overpass ones self, and
on the other hand from the participation and ontological coherence with the
Archetype from which it originates, knowing that what ensures the divinization of
the being is, first of all an effect of the priomordial divine initiative the fruit of
Gods grace. We must notice that the effort of man to self-transcend his limits and
the work of Gods grace are not added to one another in an external way. Being
endowed with divine dignity from birth, the mans action of transcending limits as a
result of his fall is converted as in other true negation of negation in returning to
the godly quality of his origins. The contribution of the Holy Spirit is definitory here,
as non-foreign and non heterogeneous element, but its very primordial constitution
implies the divine alterity to contribute and aim at own being. To the genuine
openness of the man corresponds, in the same action, the fruitful alterity of the
Holy Spirit, which overtakes it, instills it with grace and returns it to himself, by
divinizing it. The pneumatological supereminence in the act of union between God
and man is manifest. The man, through his own self, separated from his constitutive
alterity, cannot know and participate to what is beyond and constitutes him. But,
after the communion with the baptismal spirit the being creates a unity and an
oppenness in accordance with its primordial destination, which similar to an
individual effort to transcend and will convert, through a mysterious alchemy, into
capture in the eschatologic pleroma of divine grace. What constitutes man in a
pneumatic presence is this meeting between what he already is and what is beyond
him but belongs to him at the same time, the union between his destinal historicity
and heavenly charisma. In order to be saved, to become whole, he asks God to give
him something that he already received from Christ through the Holy Spirit. This
does not mean the repetition or duplication of a gift, and it is not just a formal or
simple tautological confirmation, but, mediating this meeting between the Holy
Baptisman Spirit (the spirit involved in history, without confounding with it) and the
eschatological spirit (the spirit beyond the history) bringing the Holy Spirit to
himself, even if He is whole in each of the hypostases man fills with its presence,
becomes co-actor, without remaining, ontologically, a human being. This plenitude
of the being, constantly dependant on the eschata introduced by the Holy Spirit,
proves that the life of man must permanently be eschatologically observed. The
eschaton, as a tool of the Holy Spirity, frees the history from its tight frames, turning
it into an atemporal pneumaitc presence.
Unlike the eschaton, the Hegelian concept, as noted a tool and expression
of the Absolute Idea contains the ideal image of the self in its germ, which will
then be pushed by the concept in the phenomenological relationship with the
object to determine its own interiority at the moment when, developing all the
differences in his self and suppressing them in the synthetic unity of his conscience,
becomes universal, may no longer reach beyond his self, and his interiority of his
self is conquered and manifest while the concept is fulfilled. He will thus become an
absolute spirit, as a whole and master of all his possibilities. In terms of Christian
theology, the image (concept) covers entirely the likeness (the absolute spirit), or,
the other way round, the likeness fulfills the ontologic potential of the image. There
is no ontological difference between the two terms. God himself, even if objectively,
is perfectly assimilated as a concept into the self, becoming his moment. The initial
ontological symmetry between self and God, their original concurrency found in the
concept, the absence of a more radical negation which may regard the absolute
alterity and freedom of God, as well as the quality of the initiator of the relationship,
are all found in the double anomaly of a history-dependant God, and, in the final
hours when the exteriority of history is suppressed the ontological equality with
Him. We must not forget that, for Hegel, the purpose of history is that of becoming
knowledge, which may mediate the return of the time-exteriorized Spirit to the self.