The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

Part II: Toward a Metamorphosis

PA R T I I Toward a Metamorphosis Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep . . . God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. He took [Adam] by the hand and raised him up, saying, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.” —Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday (anonymous) in the Liturgy of the Hours  Our précis of finitude, seen not so much as the condensation of a doctrine but as of existence itself, has enabled us to arrive at three objectives. () Immanence remains impassable for all, including Christians. These latter, requiring first from all methods (of immanence) that they are taken to their limit (§), and then rejecting any preemption of the infinite over the finite, insist finally that we accede to the imperatives of a phenomenology, or a theology “from below” (§). () Taking this route, which is that of the ordinariness of the flesh as opposed to a phenomenology of the extraordinary , requires us then to pass from time to time and no longer derive time from a supposed eternity (§). It requires us to recognize on the other hand that, theologically, there is no creation other than the creation anew (resurrection [§]). And we need to avow finally that the burden of time is such for us that our temporality is primarily a question of the future—whatever that might imply for us in respect of sin (§). () This two-pronged enquiry into immanence and temporality therefore necessitates a return to what we have referred to as the drama of atheist humanism. The death of Christianity proclaimed by Nietzsche (“God remains dead”), rather than that of God himself (“God is dead”), bypasses any vision in the form of a “drama” once we stop viewing all non-theism as an a-theism or anti-theism, and once we accept the need for a common grammar and the possibility of love without faith (§). Rejoining our contemporaries on the basis of our common humanity means considering the implications, as an a priori of existence, of atheism, or of the hypothesis of humanity “without God in the  ■ Toward a Metamorphosis world” (Eph :). We shall refuse nonetheless to allow the “why” of the philosopher or atheist, to prohibit a “why” from the theologian or believer. This follows from the fact that neither the one nor the other (neither atheist nor Christian), at least in the first place and from a heuristic viewpoint, can make the arbitrary position of a God-creator, and the aspirations of human beings with respect to him, into the norm of all true existence. Believers, above all because they partake of humanity and because they see themselves within mankind before professing their faith, do have right of access to “the widest” and “most profound,” that “most originary” of questions : “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” One can see here, and it is not simply wordplay, that the summary, or précis, of finitude is as precise, as exactly poised as the precision of the watchmaker who coils a watch spring: The spring on one side (finitude as immanence and finite temporality) is counterbalance to the strength and force on the other (resurrection as metamorphosis of the structure of world and time). We must not, however, fool ourselves, and this is essential in what follows in this book as throughout all my argument: “Metamorphosis” is not a kind of guarantee of “finitude.” It is not like the praeambula fidei of Thomas Aquinas which prepares us for the faith. We must try to avoid an approach that emphasizes a purely intrinsic structure of continuity, like the method of immanence, which brings things to a conclusion, or restores them as they were before, without truly transforming anything. And at the same time we must avoid a completely extrinsic approach that sees a Deus ex machina (as we shall see, the method of Barth or Bultmann), where God is so exterior to the event that there is little or no reason for the why of the transformation. We are concerned here again with metamorphosis as a birth, applied analogically to rebirth (see the dialogue with Nicodemus); but there is a new perspective this time: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you...