The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

7. The World Become Other

  The World Become Other§. The Earth and the Heavens The fiction of the other world, or of what Nietzsche thought of as an imaginary backworld (arrière-monde), is one of the by-products of Christianity and sometimes even of theology (in via/in patria). It is a fiction from which it is still difficult today to extricate ourselves. The problem is more obvious in that it was not always like this at the start, not even among those who are often accused of the “Platonization” of Christianity —St. Augustine foremost among them. The division into two cities (earthly and heavenly) does not in fact derive from such a dichotomy between these worlds. Or rather we might say that there is probably nothing less platonic than this famous distinction, precisely if one reads it in the light of the resurrection, which is the first article of belief and reflection for St. Augustine. “Two cities were created by two kinds of love: the love of self leading to contempt for God [amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei], the earthly city [civitatem terrenam]; the love of God leading to the contempt of self [amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui], the heavenly city [civitatem cealestem]. The two cities, it should be obvious, indicate less two places or two worlds—even supposing that they did so for Plato himself (world of things and world of ideas)—than two different and opposing ways of relating to God and to oneself. The earthly City represents the closing in on oneself and thus also to God, and the heavenly City an openness to God and thus also to oneself. In some respects these two cities are like the two  ■ Phenomenology of the Resurrection modes of being of the body (soma) in St. Paul: the body according to the flesh, or turned in on itself (sarx); and the body according to the spirit, or turned toward God (pneuma) [§]. Earth and heaven don’t point in this sense, as is often wrongly thought even in Christianity, to an opposition between an absolute “up there” and “down here” but solely to different ways of being in the world: the one as openness to God (heaven) and the other as closing in on oneself (earth). Put in phenomenological terms, heaven and earth are not places separated by some sort of divine geography but existentials or categories of the lived, through which we relate to God. “If the rationalists expended a good deal of ironic verve in putting the pre-Copernican character of the theological idea of heaven under the spotlight . . . ,” Gabriel Marcel says, “they do not seem to have understood that there are ‘categories of the lived’ that cannot be changed by any scientific discovery.” In short, the mode of being of our relation to God is what counts rather than the place in which we find ourselves and by which we believe ourselves related to him. One can be “of heaven” on the earth (adopting, in part at least, our mode of being resurrected) or “of the earth” in heaven (hell as a mode of “imprisonment”). And this is true whether one is “in heaven” or “on earth.” St. Thérèse of Lisieux famously says, “I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.” This is possible once one has understood, precisely by the metamorphosis of the resurrection (chapters –), that what we have undergone here and now below (immanence and time [chapters –]) we can henceforth live above (world and time transfigured [chapters –]). But heaven and earth in the orbit of the resurrection are not simply ways of being in the world. We shouldn’t consecrate the earth forever (in contrast to heaven) as the sinful mode of being of man. Rather the opposite—the earth implies also, and perhaps firstly, that in which we are. The earth is that from which we always start off insofar as we are part of mankind. The dialogue of Jesus with Nicodemus—a thread that runs right through the argument of my book—could not be more clear on this issue: “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (John :). It is not a question here of some kind of game of hide-and-seek by which the “Son of Man,” Jesus, “who descended from heaven” [John :], does his utmost to keep to himself a secret forbidden to the sons...