Opposites Converge

Over this past week, I’ve had the chance to do some further work on my draft conference paper for the upcoming conference on eschatology, organised by the University of Notre Dame Australia.

In another post, I wrote about how the theme of the messianic - as laid out by Marxists as well as in Judaism - could be a useful inroad to make sense of the experience of loss. In this context, two points were particularly helpful there. The first was Theodor Adorno’s concept of the messianic as a “standpoint of redemption”, a perspective within which the fragmented pieces of our history cohere. The second was Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the messianic as the tension between the opposing poles of beginning and the end. The carry over from this to our experience of loss is that, from the standpoint of the messianic, we who have lost can also come to take back that which was lost.

What became apparent as the research progressed was that the tension Agamben observed between beginning and end actually fell short of the resolution sought for. Metaphysically, there was a gap between the two opposite poles (which should not surprise us given the fully immanent frame the Marxist notion of the messianic presumed). However, so long as that gap persisted between the opposites, a full and proper redemption is not possible. Indeed, even Theodor Adorno, after extolling the standpoint of redemption, despaired at the possibility of this standpoint existing in the first place.

In overcoming this gap, I found a way forward in St Bonaventure’s notion of Christ as the “coincidence of opposites”, that is, the point of unity between two opposing poles which by right have no ability in themselves to unite. The reason for this, according to Bonaventure, is that the Logos overcomes the fully immanent frame of the Marxists. For Christ is the Word of the transcendent Father, who also incarnated into Jesus of Nazareth. While we say this so often, we often do not appreciate the implications of this in understanding who Christ is. Bonaventure addresses this oversight beautifully in a passage in his Journey of the Mind Towards God:

Christ, the Son of God, who is the image of the invisible God by nature [is]...the first and the last, the highest and lowest, the circumference and the centre, the Alpha and Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and creature…

and elsewhere:

If you are amazed because the divine Being is both first and last, eternal and most present, utterly simply and the greatest or boundless, totally present everywhere and nowhere contained, most actual and never moved…supremely one and yet all inclusive, containing all things in himself…

…in him there is joined the first principle with the last, God with man, who was formed on the sixth day; the eternal is joined with temporal man, born of the Virgin in the fullness of time, the most simple with the most composite, the most actual with the one who suffered supremely and died, the most perfect and immense with the lowly, the supreme and all inclusive one with a composite individual distinct from others, that is, the man Jesus Christ.

In other words, because Christ is fully transcendent as well as fully immanent, he is able to hold within himself all opposing poles, uniting them into a single moment. This is what closes the metaphysical gap identified in the Marxist notion of the messianic, and paves the way for us to consider the experience of loss and its opposite, the recovery of that which was lost.

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