The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps

11. A Nihilism of Grace: Life, Death, and Resurrection

a nihilism of grace 223 e l e v e n a nihilism of grace Life, Death, and Resurrection Martha said to Jesus, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” —John 11:21–24 I return now to the hard hypothesis, that life is a passing feature of the universe, an interim phenomenon, not an ultimate or permanent part of the cosmic furnishings. An ineluctable fate lies in store for us—terrestrial , solar, galactic, and universal death in entropic disintegration, that point when there is no chiasm or poetics, no life or religion. What then of God, perhaps? We’re Still Here: Cosmic or Comic? Tothisendwecandonobetterthantoreturntothecold,disenchanted, demythologized, disappointing, reductionistic, realistic, rationalistic world view of one of the critics of continental philosophy, best encapsulated in all of its apocalyptic fury in the brassy materialistic brio and bravado of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. Let us unbind nihilism and let it all hang out. Let us expose ourselves to the terrible trauma of the real, our heads bloodied but unbowed by the degree zero of being-nothing, which boils away both substance and subject, art, religion, and philosophy, bios and zoë, physis and techne, dissipating everything fideistic and correlational. Let us leave behind the luxurious plenitude and lush planes of the Lebenswelt for the thermal equilibrium of entropy unbound, where being-in-itself is nothing-for-us, nothing to us, and we nothing to it. What is being degree zero to me or I to it that I should weep for being-nothing?1 Now what? 224 cosmopoetics: the insistence of the world Here we are. We are still here. Does death make a mockery of our lives? Does cosmic death matter? What exactly does it mean or matter for us, here and now, to take this entropic dissipation into account? Or is this cosmic matter ultimately a comic one? Johannes Climacus lampooned Hegelian speculation on world history while neglecting personal existence by referring to his hero Socrates. As a young man, Socrates studied astronomy and followed the early physicists but he gave all that up and turned to ethics. Socrates decided that, for fear of “being mocked by existence,” there was already plenty to do by staying at home and grieving over his own existence before he could get around to worrying about world history (let alone a trillion trillion trillion years hence). “But he had plenty of time and enough eccentricity to be concerned about the merely human, a concern that, strangely enough, is considered an eccentricity among human beings.”2 So is it indeed an eccentricity to be concerned with human beings? If so, what are we humans supposed to do in the meantime? What does the “meantime” mean? We have heard this question before, not only from the wicked wit of Johannes Climacus but from St. Paul. It was the same end-of-the-world question put by the Corinthians to Paul, which provided the occasion for Paul’s hos mē (quasi non) instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:25–31, to which we referred in our discussion of Žižek above. There is an odd parallel here which I was hinting at when in the previous chapter I described physics as an inquiry into reality “as if we were dead.” Physics gives a whole new meaning to Paul’s proclamation that the world in its present form is passing away and that we are living in a kairos, a pressing but opportune moment. Contemporary cosmology provides us with a corresponding cosmopoetic axiom for a provisional time. The difference, of course, is that Paul thought the time was quite short and that we were headed for the Parousia, whereas the cosmologists think the universe is headed for oblivion (perhaps, that matter is far from settled) and the time is immense and long, so long as to seem irrelevant. But either way, the fullness of time or the emptiness of entropy, long or short, it raises the matter of finding the meaning of the meantime. On either scale, the time is relatively short, even if only cosmically short, and time is exposed in its structural facticity, be it existential or cosmic facticity. Either way, we need a set of instructions keyed not to...