The cosmos is still to be created, and it must be created; it will make its appearance as a result of the transformation of the world.
– Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End

I’m grateful to Brendan Case for his brief response to my article “Time’s Transfiguration: A Reply to Jordan Wood.” As usual, Case shows himself a sharp and supple intellect. It’s a delight to have merited his exacting attention. And, as usual again, he plays the champion of the logically possible—a necessary but, to my mind, perilous role when attempting to think the full truth of Christian mysteries. Case says he “fears” my insistence that the past, as it appears to us, will in the Parousia become what God intended it to be requires my readers to “adopt the White Queen’s discipline of believing six impossible things before breakfast.” That’s true, and actually it’s good. The White Queen is on my side. In Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass it is after all she—not Alice—whose nonsense prevails as the true sense of Wonderland.

Case addresses two specific claims I make. The first, which he supports and wishes to strengthen, is that the Incarnation entails what I call the “mutual constitution of events across time.” The second, to which Case objects, is that time’s transfiguration in the Final Event, the Second Coming, will perfect even past events and thus redeem all events by making them true events. I won’t here tarry too much with the first except to show that, even here, Case misapprehends the radical nature of my position. I’ll then address the second with more gusto.

I

I might improve the case for the first point, Case proposes, by noting its philosophical plausibility outside and below “the speculative heights of Christology.” McTaggart’s tenseless theory of time (the B-series) restricts itself to efficient causality. But, Case observes, “not all causes are efficient.”  A good old-fashioned sense of Aristotelian final causality, à la Wyclif, say, could easily demonstrate what I’m after. Nature, and presumably all discrete events in time, seems to aim at some end or purpose. And this suggests that the telos of an event is already potentially present within the agent herself, lest it fail to serve as a rational end at all (for how could one act toward an end which was wholly unknown, even virtually, to the agent from the original moment of the act?). So Case thinks it likely that my “mutual-constitution of events” describes more or less what any decent Aristotelian would abide. Event A has event B as its final cause such that B, though it occur after A in the series (tenseless or not), co-constitutes A as A’s immanent purpose or end. Without B, then, A wouldn’t be A, even though B hasn’t yet come to pass. Opening the ice box to grab a White Claw (A) is the kind of event it is only because one desires to drink a White Claw (B).

Well and good, that. But it’s not the phenomenon I meant to observe. Actuality, not teleology, was the principal matter of my examples. It’s not that Christ on Maundy Thursday needed simply to intend to be crucified on Friday, resurrect on Sunday, and ascend some fifty days after that. Rather he needed to be crucified, resurrected, and ascended. For what is the Eucharist but the actually broken body and actually spilled blood of Christ? The very body which would not break until the next day was nevertheless really and actually present at the Last Supper. Otherwise it wasn’t a sacrament; it was merely the symbolic representation or rational conceptualization of a sacrament that would not be logically possible until quite awhile after that evening.

Still less does Aristotelian teleology account for the second example, Mary’s Immaculate Conception. Clearly the actual merits of Christ were not present at Mary’s conception as her own intention for them to occur (partially) as outcomes of her future fiat. Did she intend anything at her conception? I doubt Case would allow it. That’s one of the White Queen’s impossibilities, no doubt!

Not all causes are efficient, surely, but the ones I proposed are. In each case it’s not enough to explain the co-constitution across time by appeal to final causes. In each case A does not occur merely for the sake of B. Rather, A occurs only because B occurs—a true, actual, existing eventuation. Not even a vague appeal to Wyclif’s “nature” or God’s instantaneous knowledge of all events will do here, since, of course, God’s eternal knowledge of temporal events is exactly not the same thing as the actual occurrence of temporal events. That God knows all events atemporally means only that his knowledge of time is not itself temporal; it offers no explanation of the inter-temporal relations of temporal events themselves.¹ Case’s reduction of the mutual-constitution of actual events to teleology indicates, I think, that he has not grasped the depth of the matter: time’s truth, what and how its manifold events actually are, cannot be confined to its phenomenological seriality—to how time, that is, appears to us.

II

No surprise, then, that Case’s main objection rests content merely to reassert the finality and permanence of the past qua passed. He cites Bonaventure: “what was, cannot be thought not to have been, if it is understood to have been.” This reminded me of Léon Bloy’s remark that while “Souffrir passe, avoir souffert ne passe jamais.” Which is precisely what Case claims. Tragedies that “we and the LORD alike lament” are simply fixed events, congealed just because they appeared. God himself (apparently) cannot change them:

For God to transfigure this series of events so that they are no longer sins—so that they, as locally-plotted in spacetime—conform to his best intentions for them, would simply be for him eternally to create other events in their place. This would not be the redemption of the actual, fallen world, but rather its replacement by an immaculate one.

Case here assumes sins are true events. But why think that? The assumption strikes me as odd, since I would think a true event—an actual effect of God’s creative agency—would merit the designation only if it were a perfect expression of God’s will. Or does God create what stands opposed to God’s will? If so, does this mean that God also wills to will against his own will by willing to create an event which is sinful? That’s only one impossible thing, true; and as I write this, we’ve long since passed breakfast. But it’s a rather difficult thing to discipline myself to believe.

Since, then, no one who trespasses (and trembles!) in these most difficult matters can really avoid enjoining belief in the “logically impossible,” I prefer to follow Origen, Nyssen, and Maximus over Bonaventure here. For the former sin and tragedy and death are not true events. These “events” are unworthy to claim God as their cause, at least to the extent that they are evil. They disfigure creation, render it imperfect; they do not hold fast, acrimoniously fixed as the lamentable “series of events” whose very perdurance could not but stand as a demonic testament to and memorial of God’s failure to finish the good work he alone began in me, in you, in the entire world.

Since “the first human being fell away from the superior things and desired a life different from the better life,” writes Origen, “he deserved to be a beginning neither of something created nor made [oute ktismatos oute poiematos], but of something molded by the Lord, made to be mocked by the angels.”² Adam’s race and history, what appears to us in this “world,” is from the serial start a mixture of futility and fullness, existential void and positivity, unreality and reality—of what is illicitly “made” by us and licitly created by God with us.

This absurd concoction of true and false creation—a corpus permixtum, if you like—is the “futility” of the present life of which Solomon speaks in Ecclesiastes, Nyssen says. “The present condition is called ‘futility’ precisely because in the present that thing [which exists in the arche and telos of creation—its perfection] does not exist.”³ For how could something truly be if it were not God’s effect? Distinguishing primary and secondary causality doesn’t help much here. Even on the privation theory of evil, sin does not enjoy “being” to the degree that it is not essential. And yet sin “happens” by the efficient will of rational creatures. Sin has real effects—so real, Case seems to think, that these constitute veritable “events” before which God is helpless to act, doomed instead to weep perpetually over their ineradicable existence. But for Nyssen these events are not true events precisely because they depart from creation’s origin and end. That is, they depart from being actual creations of the divine will. “Unless something exists in its original state,” he writes, “it does not exist at all, but is only thought to exist.”⁴ Hence Nyssen closes this homily with a nearly unbelievable eschatological vision:

For I think this is the meaning of the text, in which he says, ‘There is no memory for the first, and indeed for those who come last there will be no memory of them.’ It is as if he were saying that the memory of events which followed our blessed state at the beginning, through which humanity has come to be among evils, will be obliterated by what again supervenes at the End. For ‘there will be no memory of them with those who have come to be at the last.’ That means, the final restoration will make the memory of evil things utterly vanish in our nature, in Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.⁵ 

Maximus too teaches that post-lapsarian “history” is comprised of events and acts and phenomena which certainly appear, but that “were not created by God.” Sin occurs always under the veil of delusion, of fantasy, so that in our stupid fits of passion we imagine a “truth” and then, through our own existence, attempt to make the untruth true. Thus sinful passions possess only “parasitical subsistence” (parupostasis).⁶ Our sin “hypostasizes pleasure,” a pleasure born of error about our own true origin and ultimate delight—God himself, principally in and as Jesus Christ—so that “through pleasure sin affixed itself to the very foundations of our nature.”⁷ 

And so all that appears in history is not by so appearing necessarily created—certainly not sin or tragedy or death (Wisd 1.12–14). These are the misbegotten byproducts of our foolish efforts to make the true world into our deluded fantastical “worlds.”⁸ When I sin, Christ does not dwell in me as my creative origin and end (Gal 2.20). Rather I, with insane self-delusion and self-love, try to live in and through myself. I give my flesh for a lie. Sin, then, is on this account a false incarnation. Its destruction would not, as Case thinks, mean that God replaces one event with another—not any more than the crucifixion of my “old self” with Christ spells the destruction of me (Eph 4.22). It means that God brings to completion—to actuality—an event that I prevented from ever occurring for the sake of some mad fantasy. In fact, cleaving so tightly to this “series of events,” these sins and tragedies, in the name of the so-called “logically possible” unwittingly rehearses the very error which enables sinful acts at all; it is to believe that these fantasies can be made into actual events by my sheer will. Sins do not issue in true events (though they certainly contain the seeds of true events). And so their eschatological obliteration doesn’t replace one event by another, since they were never events to begin with. Case’s “actual, fallen world” is an oxymoron—and yet another impossibility he doesn’t mind believing.

To return to Bonaventure: “what was, cannot be thought not to have been, if it is understood to have been.” Sic et non. Yes, insofar as “what was” is “understood to have been,” it seems logically impossible that it might be “thought not to have been.” But that’s a tautology. Of course understanding something to have occurred means I cannot not think it to have occurred. The real question, which Case’s use of this passage never countenances, is whether what I understand to have been is actually “what was.” There are two immediate reasons to doubt this. First, I might have misapprehended what appeared in the past. Second, and more to the point, what appeared in the past (even if rightly apprehended) might not yet be what God intended for the past to be. That history appears as a corpus permixtum of sin and salvation, evil and good, fantasy and reality, ugliness and goodness, false and true Incarnations—all this is enough for me to accept not only the first but also second reason for resisting Case’s easy equation of what “is understood” with “what was.” That equation misses the fundamental question, which is not, “Can God change the past?” but rather, “Is the past yet the past?”

So, no: it is not evident to me that just because something has passed it is truly the past. In the End—which is also the perfection of all creation, of all events, of all actions, of all God’s logoi in and for the one true world—we will hear the great voice declare that there exists no longer any cause for tears, regrets, sorrow, or weeping, neither God’s nor our own, “for the former things are passed away” (Rev 21.4). We will recognize in that very moment, and in all moments, that Wonderland was the only true world there ever was. We will see, too, that the White Queen’s discipline was the very thing Alice needed to make sense of something as seemingly impossible as the mystery of the fullness of time, of God’s becoming, in and as Jesus Christ, “all in all.”