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6 The Prophetical Metadrama THE FORCED RETURN If the idea of return is the least tragic concept in Greek thought, in biblical thought, on the contrary, it corresponds to the exact moment when the drama turns into a tragedy. Human time, in the true sense of the word, with its unique character and history, does not concern men, the form of whose lives is circular. The cyclical theme of the eternal return is the death of history. Conceivably, it eliminates pain: "Happy the man who, like Ulysses , has made a fair voyage and then returned ... " But at the same time it divests time of its rhythm and history of its content. Jonah also made a fair voyage. Sirens, fiercer than those met by Ulysses , it is true, tempted and delayed him in his journey towards Tarshish: a hurricane, a stormy plunge in the sea, an execution by drowning, three days in the Fish's belly. Wow! All's well that ends well. The embarkation for Tarshish was only a diversion. Jonah went back to Nineveh where he ought to have gone in the first place. So he too returned. Only, it was a forced return. When he finally reached Nineveh, Jonah was unhappy, even more unhappy than he had been among the lethal waves. He was unhappy to the point of wanting to die. It was because his voyage had turned out to be a tragedy. Before the return, there had been a rupture. Ulysses returned to the point to which he wanted to return and to which he should have returned. Thus, the circle was completed. This circle protected him against any new adventure, while Jonah, on the other hand, went back to the place which he wished to avoid and ought to have avoided. He wished to avoid it. His embarkation for Tarshish was a flight, an Exodus in the night, towards the antipodes, towards nothingness, in order to get away from God! He ought to have avoided it: His return to Nineveh proved to be useless. Come to proclaim the overthrow of Nineveh, Jonah learned what he most feared: Nineveh was saved! A journey for nothing, a missed return. The circle remains open. For Jonah, the return was a Genesis, something 87 88 THE SITUATION OF BIBLICAL MAN new-we shall never know what. The page has remained blank in the Bible . Perhaps Jonah himself was never able to read his fate in these non-lines in the Bible. This was the tragedy of the prophetic return. There can be no joining without a preceding rupture. There can be no joining without the risk of another rupture. It would be a continual tossing to and fro if the prophets had not placed this tragedy within the continuity of a discontinuous timescheme : that of conjugal knowledge which the prophets made the symbol of their personal history, of the history of Israel, and of the history, finally, of mankind and the world. I shall return to this later. THE KINGDOM OF A GOD WHOSE THRONE IS DOWN HERE Between the longing for non-being for which the cosmos is nothing and the aspiration towards being other, for which the human world is everything, the Covenant claims that the world with all its cosmic and human elements does indeed exist, but only through its relationship with God. Non-being and being other are reduced to the status of symbols, images, desires: They cannot have any reality in themselves, for God is co-present in everything. When they appear, they are modalities of this co-presence, tensions which express in an acute manner the presence of God, Being by means of God. This is the significance of the omnipotence of God, of the panentheism that is the cornerstone of the metaphysics of biblical man. The metaphysics of an encounter in which paradoxes spring forth with a prodigality which is as blinding as it is dazzling: fear and protection, the abyss and the bridge, the break and the connection, separation and reunion, exile and return. In order to describe the salient points of this encounter, one must first describe their forms, for these points are sometimes atoms and sometimes galaxies, and, nearly always, both of these at one and the same time. THE MORPHOLOGY OF RHYTHM "Frightened as a Jew" they used to say in the Middle Ages. Which Jew of the twentieth century has not experienced fear? The fear produced by history which has seized him by the throat, and the...

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