-
Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y That is God . . . What? A shout in the street James Joyce, Ulysses What if we were to return to epiphanies of the everyday? What if we could come back to the end (eschaton) in the here and now? Back to that end after the end of time that addresses us in each instant? What if we could rediscover ourselves again face-to-face with the infinite in the infinitesimal? Touch the sacred enfolded in the seeds of ordinary things? Such a return would invite us to experience the ultimate in the mundane. The first in the last. The most in the least. It would bring us into dialogue with those who seek the divine in the pause between two breaths. Transcendence in a thornbush. The Eucharist in a morsel of madeleine. The Kingdom in a cup of cold water. San Marco in a cobblestone. God in a street cry.1 In our rush to the altars of Omnipotence we often neglected theophanies of the simple and familiar. We forgot to attend to the germs of the kingdom manifest in what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘‘speckled, dappled things.’’ So doing, we tended to overlook the semaphore of the insignificant. For it is often in the most quotidian, broken, inconsequential, and minute of events that the divine signals 3 to us—‘‘to the Father through the features of men’s faces.’’ This insight into the sacred ‘‘thisness’’ of things is what Duns Scotus, the Celtic thinker, called haecceitas. The idea is that Creation is synonymous and synchronous with incarnation, that each moment is a new occasion for the eternal to traverse the flesh and blood of time. Ensarkosis , or enfleshment: the infinite embodied in every instant of existence , waiting to be activated, acknowledged, attended to. The one ablaze in the many. The timeless flaring in the transitory. The holiness of happenstance. And our calling, in the wake of such encounters , is nothing less than this: to give ‘‘beauty back to God’’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins). So that each of our responses serves, potentially, as an opportunity to transubstantiate flesh back into word. And by extension, word into action. Our highest human vocation, as Hopkins puts it, is to revisit the ‘‘inscape’’ of the sacred in every passing particular. This activity he calls variously ‘‘aftering,’’ ‘‘seconding,’’ ‘‘over-and-overing,’’ or ‘‘abiding again’’ by the ‘‘bidding’’ of the singular. This is what we might term ana-esthetics, heeding the semantic resonances of the Greek prefix ana: ‘‘up, in place or time, back, again, anew’’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). We are speaking of a refiguring of first creation in second creation. Re-creation of the sacral in the carnal. Against the Grand Metaphysical Systems that construed God in terms of formal universals and abstract essences, the Scotist poet invites us back (ana) to the first genesis—and at the same time forward to the final kingdom: to that eschaton dwelling in each unique, material instant, no matter how lowly or profane. Here and now the sacred ‘‘selves’’ and ‘‘instresses’’ through the most transient forms of flesh. ‘‘Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying what I do is me: for that I came’’ (‘‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’’). From such instantaneous and recurring incarnation no one and no thing, no single this or that, is excluded. All are invited to the table. And the table is laden. For ‘This Jack, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.’’2 Here the descent into the banal (katabasis) takes the form of a reascent to the precious (anabasis). And in the process the binary opposition between up and down dissolves. What, then, if we could return to the eschaton? What if we could embrace a philosophical gesture inspired by successive radicalizations of the phenomenological method, culminating in what we might call 4 Richard Kearney [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:09 GMT) a fourth reduction? Suppose we were to envisage an after-the-event return to the event. A move back to the everyday moment where philosophy first begins in wonder or pain. Would this not be the simplest of redirections? A recapture of those accidental events that escape the nets of essentialist inspection? This questioning...