Decreation

The Last Things of All Creatures

Paul J. Griffiths

• Editorial: Baylor University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781481303460
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Teologia cristiana

Death is not the end—either for humans or for all creatures. But while Christianity has obsessed over the future of humanity, it has neglected the ends for nonhuman animals, inanimate creatures, and angels. In Decreation, Paul J. Griffiths explores how orthodox Christian theology might be developed to include the last things of all creatures.

Griffiths employs traditional and historical Christian theology of the last things to create both a grammar and a lexicon for a new eschatology. Griffiths imagines heaven as an endless, repetitively static, communal, and enfleshed adoration of the triune God in which angels, nonhuman animals, and inanimate objects each find a place. Hell becomes a final and irreversible separation from God—annihilation—sin's true aim and the last success of the sinner. This grammar, Griffiths suggests, gives Christians new ways to think about the redemption of all things, to imagine relationships with nonhuman creatures, and to live in a world devastated by a double fall.

PART I

The Grammar of the Last Things

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

§1

Lexicon

Every investigation needs a lexicon; the more exacting the investigation, the more precise the lexicon. In theology, as is the case for most fields of thought, no lexicon is agreed upon by all workers in the field; and even when one does appear to be largely agreed upon, significantly different understandings of particular items in it are often in play without acknowledgment or understanding. The result is bewitchment, or at least a good deal of verbal wheel-spinning. The following definitions are intended to minimize this bewitchment, without supposing that it can altogether be removed.

The work under way here is theological, so the words needed are also theological in the sense that they take their meaning from the relation they bear to the fundamental and essential word, which is a name.

The LORD: the name of the god of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mary, and Jesus; a triune name that designates Father, Son, and Spirit. He, this triune LORD, is the one who creates everything other than himself out of nothing by giving the gift of being, who redresses the devastation brought about by the angelic and human falls, who elects a people for himself in the person of Abraham, who guards and guides that people as the means of healing the devastated world, who takes flesh in Mary’s womb as Jesus the Christ, who is, as the incarnate one, crucified, resurrected, and taken up into heaven, and whose astringently and painfully healing presence in the world is now most fully present in the words and works of the Jewish people and in the sacrament of the world that is the church. He guides the world toward its consummation, its last thing. I do not use the word “god” in this work as exchangeable with (the) LORD, or in any other way, except occasionally as a category-word for a kind of being, a kind to which the LORD does not belong, and when it appears in the words and works of others. If the kind designated by “god” has members, they are all creatures; and while it may be said that the LORD is the god of Abraham, and so on, this is only by courtesy, to indicate that the relationship he has with Abraham, and so on, bears some analogy to the relation the peoples have with their gods (Zeus, Siva, Superman, and so on), each of whom is, to whatever extent they exist in a mode other than the purely fictional, necessarily a creature.

A creature: any particular thing brought into being and thus given itself by the LORD’s creative gift; thus, a creature. There are inanimate creatures, which are any that lack a soul, an anima; they do not live and cannot die, and are always bodies (see below) of some sort. There are animate creatures of many kinds, all of which, except the angels and the discarnate souls in the intermediate state, have fleshly bodies. Among enfleshed animate creatures, the human holds a special and central place, as image and likeness of the LORD, and as the kind whose flesh the LORD took.

Cosmos: the beautifully ordered and gorgeously ornamented ensemble of creatures, brought into being with and as timespace, and therefore as intrinsically spatio-temporal—timespace in every aspect and mode of its existence. The cosmos is all there is other than the LORD; and it is surpassingly beautiful.

World, also, and exchangeably, called in this work the devastation: This is the damaged cosmos, the cosmos as it has become since the double fall, of angels and humans. The principal signs of the world’s devastation are death (of animate creatures), annihilation by destruction (of inanimate ones), pain and suffering (for animate creatures), and chaotic decay-toward-destruction (of inanimate ones). Traces of the cosmos’ surpassing beauty remain, some evident to human creatures and some not. But for the most part, the world appears to human creatures as it is: a charnel house, saturated in blood violently shed; an ensemble of inanimate creatures decaying toward extinction; a theater of vice and cruelty.

Eden: the paradise in which human creatures and some others are at first located, and from which they are ejected consequent upon the human fall. Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-become-world already devastated by the angelic fall.

Body: the capacity for location in timespace, and thus for availability and responsiveness to other creatures with such location; any creature with such capacity has, or is, a body. Among bodies there are, first, fallen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures (save the angels) in the devastation. Then, second, there are risen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures in heaven after the general resurrection; the ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary are paradigmatic so far as the risen flesh of humans goes, and the only instances of this kind of body at the moment in existence. Third, there are temporarily discarnate animate bodies, which belong to humans between the separation of the soul from the fallen fleshly body and the general resurrection; these bodies may be purgatorial or heavenly. Fourth, there are permanently discarnate animate bodies, which are those of the angels. Fifth, there are inanimate material bodies of various kinds; these have weight and continuous extension in timespace, and include things such as rocks and bodies of water. Sixth, and last, there are discarnate inanimate bodies, which include quarks and other subatomic particles.

Heaven: the timespace in which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and indefectibly intimate with the LORD and with one another. Creatures are in and at heaven: both prepositions are needed to indicate, in English, that heaven is timespace—not just a place and not just a time, but a place creatures are in and a time they are at. It is a locus-tempus in which defect, lack, damage, and distance are all absent to the extent compatible with (particular varieties of) creaturehood. It is a timespace in which creatures capable of heaven, in their various kinds, find the damage that separated them in the devastation from the LORD and from other creatures finally and irreversibly healed.

Hell: the timespace during which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and irreversibly separated from the LORD and from one another. The speculative position taken in this book is that such a timespace is utopia, timeless and placeless, and that creatures who enter it therefore come to nothing as creatures who are necessarily spatio-temporal must when they become timeless and placeless.

Last Thing, used interchangeably in this work with novissimum: to mean a condition entered by a creature without possibility of future novelty. This is—these are—the central topic of this work.

§2

Last Things Defined

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

The last things, so understood, are a subset of the theological topics that Christian thinkers have treated since the fourteenth century or so under the label novissima. Between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, many treatises de novissimis (on the last things) were composed by Christians, and such treatises typically embraced four topics, in the following order: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Of these, only the last two are creaturely novissima in the strict sense, for the second item in the list, judgment, follows, according to the standard Christian narrative, the first (death) and is itself followed by the third and fourth (heaven and hell). Death and judgment, for the creatures that undergo or may undergo them, are therefore not novissima because something new and different follows them. Heaven and hell, on some understandings of them, are last things, however, because there is nothing new to follow them. They are, or have often been understood to be, states that once entered are not left and are beyond change. No novelty belongs to them, therefore, and those who enter them thereafter undergo nothing new.

The earliest treatise of this sort known to me—that is, a treatise with de novissimis in its title, organized according to the fourfold schema—is Denys the Carthusian’s (1402–1471) Liber utilissimus de quatuor hominis novissimis (A Most Useful Book on the Four Last Things of Human Creatures), composed probably around 1450. There are considerably earlier works that cover much of the ground worked by Denys, among which Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticum futuri saeculi (Forecast of the Future Age) from the late seventh century is probably the earliest separate treatise on the topics that would later be corralled under the de novissimis rubric. And, of course, every topic treated in Denys’ Liber utilissimus is treated also in the high-scholastic works of the centuries preceding his. But the answer to the question of when the title de novissimis came together with the four-topic arrangement to prompt the composition of freestanding treatises appears to be the fifteenth century. After that, the genre is widely evident among both Catholic and Protestant writers, until the early twentieth century, when it gradually grinds to a halt. A representative example of Catholic conventional wisdom on the subject as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth is Louis Billot’s much-reprinted and much-revised Quaestiones de novissimis, first published in 1902, and continuously in print thereafter until at least 1946.

The English word “eschatology” came into gradual use only in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Latin word eschatologia was, so far as I know, first used as a technical term in theology in 1677 by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius [Calov] (1612–1686), who used it in the title of the twelfth and last volume of his systematics: Systema locorum theologicorum tomus duodecimus et ultimus eschatologia sacra (The Twelfth and Last Volume of a System of the Theological Loci, on the Sacred Last Things), published in 1677. Only since the third quarter of the nineteenth century or so has the word (Latin or English) been a standard term in the theological lexicon. As late as 1865, such a distinguished and systematic Catholic thinker as Matthias Scheeben (1835–1888) could treat the last things in his Mysterien des Christentums (Christian Mysteries), first published in 1865, almost entirely without using the (German) word Eschatologie, and certainly without using it as a technical term. His approximate contemporary in England, John Henry Newman (1801–1890), is also almost entirely innocent of the (English) word “eschatology.”

The Greek eschaton has novissimum as its ordinary Latin rendering in Scripture, and so it might seem that “eschatology” ought exactly to be reasoned discourse about the last things as defined in this work. But in fact the word has become diffuse in meaning, and is now used promiscuously to label much more than discourse about the last things. It is used to indicate discussion of and thought about such things as expectation of a last thing, depiction of events that presage the end of things as they are now, hope for an end, world-negation by way of end-expectation, and so on. None of this has directly to do with the last things properly speaking. This capaciousness of “eschatology” is now a fact about its usage, and it means that the word cannot effectively be used to label discussion of the last things stricto sensu.

Christian thinkers have sometimes responded to this state of affairs by distinguishing final eschatology from transitional eschatology, taking the latter to deal with matters preparatory for or indicative of last things in the full and proper sense, and the former to treat the novissima. Following that division, consideration of heaven and hell belong to final eschatology, because there is nothing new to follow them; but death, judgment, purgatory, and the apocalypse belong to transitional eschatology, because there is something new to follow them. That is a possible solution. But in this book, I eschew “eschatology” altogether because of its vagueness and its tendency to divert thought from consideration of the novissima. Treatment of the last things is not speculation about the future; it is not hopeful anticipation or anguished dread directed toward some last thing; and it is not reserve toward the realities of this world in light of the thought that they will come to an end. It is certainly not apocalyptic (itself a difficult word): anything included under that head is at best an antechamber to the last things. Consideration of the last things is, rather, doctrine and speculation about what belongs properly to the novissima, the ends-as-last-things of individual creatures, of particular creaturely kinds, and of their ensemble that is the cosmos.

Last things—whether of individual creatures, of entire creaturely kinds, or of the world—may be glorious or inglorious. A creature’s glorious last thing is the end for which it was made; this may also be called its proper culmination or consummation. But there may also be inglorious last things, novissima that meet the definition in being creaturely conditions beyond which there is no novelty, but which are opposed to and therefore incompatible with glory. Such last things are inglorious; they are the indefectible endings-up of creatures that have, for one reason or another, failed to consummate, failed to reach their glory, if there are any such. Some creaturely kinds—angels and humans, at least, according to Christian orthodoxy—are capable of both glorious and inglorious last things: their members may, that is, be damned or saved. Perhaps this is true, as well, of other creaturely kinds: a book, made to be read and reread, may reach its last thing in the annihilation of the book-burner’s furnace without ever having been read. A jasmine vine, in whose seed is the possibility of luxuriantly blossoming sweet-smelling growth, may be crushed while yet a new shoot, never to bloom. Those are inglorious last things. In the case of human creatures, who are intended, Christians think, for eternal loving communion with the LORD, some may find their novissimum in a changeless and irreversible state of separation from the LORD. The same is true of angelic creatures. This is a state beyond which there is no novelty, a condition, that is, that remains indefectibly what it is. But in no case is it a creature’s glory. It is an instance of damage and loss of a profound and painful kind; it is an inglorious novissimum.

There is no intermediate category between glorious and inglorious last things. A novissimum that lacks even one of the goods proper to a creature’s last thing is thereby inglorious; one that has all the relevant goods is thereby glorious.

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