{438} (cont’d)
3) However, this concept is not sufficient. There is a third concept we must clarify. Just as the concept of communion made the concept of the dynamic sameness of Christianity more precise, we now have a third concept that will sharpen the concept of personal communion. Because, even after a brief consideration the concept of personal communion is not a vague metaphor. I have mentioned that personal communion is communion of the persons among themselves, but in addition personal communion with Christ. I have used these two expressions ex aequo. But there is an important nuance we must emphasize. That the communion of persons among themselves, insofar as Christians, does nothing but reproduce, and be numerically identical to the very life Christ had. That is why the communion of persons is founded precisely on a reference, not only repetitive, to what the life of Christ was, but rather numerically and formally identical. And this numerical and identical belonging of the communion of persons to the reality of Christ is precisely what the concept of body expresses.
The Church is an unum, a hén, but a hén constituted into sameness, into community and corporeity. The Church is the incorporation of the whole of humanity to Christ. And then Christ has a very precise function within that corporeity. St. Paul clearly mentions it, to be kephalé, to be head (Cf. 1 Cor 12:4-31; 11:3). And then we ask, {439} what is this corporeity? That the idea of body may be applied to the Church is no invention of St. Paul. To apply it to Christ, yes, obviously. But to use sóma in this sense is not his invention. In the whole of Hellenism the term sóma has always meant what we might call the internal dependency and coherence of persons among themselves. But this concept of sóma is merely social and political. Here it is a question, not of a solidary organization, but something much more profound.
From my perspective (I already insisted on this, but I think it is essential), a sóma, primarily if this Greek expression is used by someone who is not Greek, but an Israelite as St. Paul was, means three things. In the first place that something confers an actuality of presence to that of which it is a body. In the second place, not only does it confer an actuality of presence, but in addition gives it internal consistency, it impedes that something may be diluted in a kind of circumjacent vagueness. And in the third place, not only confers a consistency and gives an actual presence, but is a moment formally pertinent to the very reality of which it is a body, that reality is somatic. In this sense, the body primarily and radically consists in being expression. With respect to the Church as body of Christ, this is rigorously exact. It is rigorously exact because, in the first place, the Church is the actual presence of Christ who is constantly present in the Church. Christ is, in second place, what gives it consistency; the communion of persons would not exist if it were not founded precisely on the fundament Christ is. And it is, in the third place, the expression. Because, actually, the expression either in the case of Christ (in a substantial manner) or in the case of the Church (in a participated manner), consists in being sanctity. That is why the Church constitutes a true body with Christ.
{440} This term and this concept of body have appeared in different contexts throughout these pages. In the first place, when we considered Christ. It goes without saying, when he was in this world he had a body just like ours. On the other hand, when he resurrected I mentioned that the body of Christ has a different character. It is a sóma pneumatikón, as St. Paul said. He can enter a room with all the doors closed, and leave through the walls, something the bodies of this world cannot do, etc. And as a body that formally belongs to Christ, regardless how spiritual it may be, it is what confers to him a particular actual presence. In the second place, it confers to Christ an internal consistency. And in third place, it is an expression, the wounds on his side and from the nails are not scars in the resurrected body of Christ, they are an expression of what the oblation had been on the cross.
On the other hand, we have the Church as body of Christ. Here the body of Christ appears in a second dimension. It is the body of Christ because, in one form or another, in and through the community of the Church, Christ has an actual presence. In the Church Christ also has a consistency throughout history. And in third place, the Church expresses as sanctity what the presence of Christ is. All this is true. Will these concepts cease being different? What is the relationship between these two concepts, the body that constitutes Christ, and the Church as body of Christ? Is it the case of a mere metaphor in the spiritual order or in the purely mystical order? Definitely not, between both senses of the term body (which are not senses, but dimensions) there is an intrinsic, radical, and profound unity, given by Christ himself, precisely his Eucharistic body.
Inasmuch as the personal sóma of Christ is present {441} in the Eucharist it fundaments the characteristic of corporeity the Church has with respect to Christ. That is why I mentioned that the sacrament of the Eucharist is formally a sacrament of unity, by being the primary coherent unity in which the body of Christ consists. It is the unity of sameness, of personal communion, and of incorporation to Christ, which he confers to the Church. It is in addition, a unity that consists in referring the body of the Church to the body of Christ. This is the reason why the body of Christ, insofar as Eucharistic, is what confers its unity and its sameness to the ecclesial body. Reciprocally, the ecclesial body is what constitutes the ambit of the theological possibilities (sit venia verbo) that Christ has to be present among men, in humanity itself. The body of the Church from this point of view is the system of possibilities that Christ has available, insofar as corporeal, to exist among men. That is why it is not a mere metaphor. Of course, Paul said it was a case of sóma pneumatikón. Shall immediately point out what this means more concretely. But at least we understand from now on that the sóma of Christ, his strictly corporeal body, that in which he consists, is precisely the spiritual place of all men insofar as vivifying for them. The Eucharistic body expresses, therefore, the deiformity in which Christ consists, and the deiformity in which the Church exists through its incorporation to Christ. The Church is nothing but that, Christ and the Christianity of some for others, and of some through others.
The unity in Christ is a strictly and formally sacramental unity through the effusion of his intimacy. And this unity is expressed in three concepts. It is sameness of Christianity, it is communion of persons founded on Christ, and it is corporeity. In the end, the Church is purely and simply the derived deiformity of Christ.
{442} Certainly, it is a deiformity that as every deiformity the first line refers to the I, the substantive being, which man makes. Each one of us is I in the measure in which we live with our stomach, with out brain, with our psychism, with our free decisions, etc. We live with all this, but what we do, if we are Christians, is the deiformity as a character of the I, of our own substantive being we acquire in the course of our own life. Therefore, this deiformity is a deiformity of an essentially vital order. It is something, which I acquire, which I can increase, diminish, and can ultimately lose. But, in second place, precisely because it is the case of a substantive being, the substantive being of the I reverts by way of intimacy to the substantive reality of whom this I is its being. And this reversion makes that in one form or another the characteristics we have described with respect to the I come to be characteristics that affect my own substantive reality.
At any rate, this deification as a vital process is not simply the deiformity; it is something in which the unity of all Christians consists, that by which some make others Christian in the same Christianity. It is that through which they have personal communion with others, founded on Christ; and that through which this fundament is possible, by the incorporation to Christ. And in this sense, the deification certainly is something real. But it is something that will be consummated in the individual and also in the personal communion. Precisely this “is real”, and this “will be consummated” (as everyone now loves to say, the synthesis of the “is already” and the “not yet”) is what constitutes the essence of eschatology.
{443}
§ 2
ESCHATOLOGY
This is the second aspect of the question, in what does it consist, and what is this éschaton, this eschatology? The ecclesial process, as vital process (a process of Christian living), which reverts on the substantive realities, but is acquired in a life of sameness in personal communion, and in corporeity with Christ, is precisely a process. Hence, Christ repeated constantly, and it appears primarily in the Gospel of St. Mathew (not by chance, but because it is the one that most refers to the Israelite community before Christ) that he had come to preach the basileía ton ouranón, the Kingdom of Heaven, actually the Kingdom of God.
Indeed, the Kingdom of God is the dominion of God over man. Therefore, the Church cannot be identified with the Kingdom of God at all. There is no formal identity. The Church is not the Kingdom of God, but is precisely the process by which the Kingdom of God is made, which is a different matter. The Kingdom is present processably in a certain way realized, but inchoated, in many individuals. It still needs a consummation. In the same manner that the initiation to the body of Christ, and to Christianity in general by baptism is ordered towards Eucharistic fullness, likewise the processable presence of the Kingdom of God inchoated in the Church is called to consummation.
The processable unity of both moments (of Kingdom of God and of presence) is given at two very precise points of the New Testament. One was given at the institution of order, and {444} Christ might not have repeated it, but he did, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (Jn 20:23; cf. Mt 16:19; 18:18). This exousía, the power of the keys, given with the power of order is precisely one of the aspects of the unity between the Church and the Kingdom of God. The Church, insofar as personal communion that has one Christian sameness, and is incorporated in Christ has the power of being the one to open the right ways towards the constitution of the Kingdom of God, and leaving aside what does not fit those ways. There is another passage in the New Testament, equally significant, where St. Paul tells us, writing about the resurrection, that the bread of which we all participate is precisely a token or promise of eternal life1. St. John in his Gospel repeats this constantly when writing, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (Jn 6:54).
There is this intrinsic and sacramental unity between the personal communion of the people of God, and the Kingdom of God. It means that the effective and factual realization of the Kingdom of God is a realization essentially and constitutively historical. Creation constitutes the first phase of the constitution of the Kingdom of God; it is the projection of the Trinitarian life ad extra. In the second place, there is the living experience of this Trinity ad extra in the form of sin. In the third place, there is the form of a berit, of a Covenat with Israel. In the fourth place, there is a different fundament for that Covenant, the life of Christ, which afterwards continues in the Church, constituted first by twelve persons where some are making others Christian, with a universal mission. {445} Creation is the first historical act of the process of the people of God, and the Kingdom of God. What is the structure of this process?
A) History, at least from my point of view, it is not just a succession of realities. History is an opening and closing of possibilities, which is a different matter. That is why history is not formally constituted by facts; facts will be the actualization of capacities things have. History is constituted by events, which are the realization or the failure of possibilities. History is in this sense constitutively successive and eventual. Hence, the characteristic of unity between the people of God and the Kingdom of God is precisely what constitutes the intrinsic historicity of the Church. History as history is nothing but the event of the possibilities of the Kingdom of God. Possibilities that are not always increasing, many times they fail where one might least expect them to fail. Consequently, to say that the realization of the Kingdom of God upon Earth has to be consummated means that the final terminus of this historical process, its éschaton, is precisely the Kingdom of God. Here we have the first dimension of eschatology, the Kingdom of God is the communion of the in the body of Christ, and therefore, the deiformity of all men in the unity of Christ.
B) Have not written the word “all” in vain. Certainly, not all men are going to enter the Kingdom of God. But it is not because they have not been baptized. The famous phrase “there is no salvation outside the Church” that gave so much trouble and pain to the medieval theologians does not mean that the only ones that will be saved are those who have explicitly belonged to the Church. Not at all, what is meant {446} is that all who are saved (belonging to the Catholic Church or not) are saved ultimately because since they derive from Christ, they also derive from the Church. Every salvation is Christic (Sp. crística), which does not mean that all those Christically saved belong to the Christian faith. The good Buddhist is saved Christically precisely because he is a good Buddhist, and not despite having been a good Buddhist. Therefore, there is a universal moment that is essential. The Kingdom of God is, in the first place, the éschaton, the terminus towards which the historical process of the people of God tends. In the second place, it has a characteristic of unity, of a unity, which is the deiformity of all men. And this means that historically the Kingdom of God is the historical unfolding of that, which radically constitutes the very origin of humanity, the projection ad extra of the Trinitarian life. Needless to say, the Kingdom of God (and therefore, the communion that formally constitutes the Church) is purely and simply the deiformity of the personal communion in and by the Trinity.
C) But this éschaton must be reached. And this only occurs in a personal manner. Precisely because it is the case of a personal communion it only occurs if it occurs in each of the persons that are in that communion. For that reason this éschaton has to be reached through the process by which each one realizes in himself that in which the Kingdom of God consists. The deiformity in Christ is initiated by baptism, and made into fullness by the Eucharist. And the Eucharist is, in the first place, a full incorporation to Christ. In the second place, it is an intrinsic and formal assimilation of the reality of Christ. And in the third place, a deiformation, which makes us live religiously. Therefore, in these three dimensions, taken at the same time, is what consists in each individual the processable characteristic through which {447} each person makes its own éschaton, its own ultimateness.
1) Of course, this makes us reflect upon what we are individually. In the first place, each human being is one of the finite ways God has designed to make that his Trinitarian life may exist outside of him. Each man is a finite way of being what God is. And there is no exception to this at all, not even for the lowest of the condemned. We all are a molding ad extra of the Trinitarian life, which consists in being finitely what God is.
2) But there is a second aspect that belongs to the question, but is another side of it. The projection ad extra of the Trinitarian life is not simply to be finitely what God is, but also to be like God. And the finite way to be like God is precisely the freedom. That is why freedom is essential to the projection ad extra of the Trinitarian life. And here is where that internal drama is played, which consists in the different possibilities man has of Trinitarially having an éschaton. Man, by virtue of his liberty, can live in this world in two ways. He can live conversely (sit venia verbo) towards God, i.e., immersed in the Trinitarian life. And he can live in an aversive way, turned away from God. Sin, even the one that most separates us from God, never stops being a kind of negative likeness of the Trinitarian life; it is to live the very Trinity aversively. Conversio and aversio are the two modes of the substantive being determined by freedom in the formal structure in which every man consists, i.e., in the projection ad extra of the Trinitarian life.
3) However, this life is not only made freely in conformity with these two modes, but it has an essential {448} and unappealable characteristic, which is precisely its limit, death. What is death? What is that limit?
One might simply think that it is a limit, and that life ends there. This may or may not be from natural reason, but from the point of view of Christianity that is not the case. That limit is not a limit, but a limitation, something different. It is a limitation of the state of life here on Earth. Therefore, as a limitation, which man is, man has an intrinsic and formal characteristic, immortality; he does not die in that death. Certainly, this is a truth purely of faith. At least, I agree with the theologians that have thought that way. I mentioned many years ago that man is immortal because his life is eternal. And his life is eternal because it is Trinitarian. For this reason it is a truth of faith, because it is founded precisely on the Trinitarianism of that in which the very creation of man consists.
Death is not a limit, but a limitation of a state of life in this world. It is a limitation of the processability. Therefore, death has a second characteristic; it is fixation. Death is fixation to the manner of being that one has definitely acquired and has freely achieved. The éschaton, what is last and final, is something decided through freedom. What will happen to me in the next world is what I have desired to be (through an efficacious will, of course) in this world. It is an éschaton, which consists in a fixation into that, which I am now engaged in wishing to be.
Nevertheless, fixation is not some kind of stubbornness because that, which constitutes the presence of God in the human spirit (whether conversely or aversively) is, as I mentioned when discussing the baptism and the life of Christ, a power, the power of God. Therefore, that in which man is fixated is in the seizure that man {449} suffers, bears or experiences of that which seizes him. Fixation is seizure. The fact of the matter is that this fixation and this seizure are not univocal. That is the question. Death as limitation, as fixation in the éschaton, and as seizure, does not have a univocal sense for the one who dies seized conversely or for the one seized aversively. The phenomenon is univocal from the point of view of an organism that disintegrates; that is another question. But from the point of view of the characteristic with which it affects my personal reality it is essentially different.
The power that seizes the one living aversively towards God, and is fixated in the aversion is precisely the power of sin. That is why the éschaton of these persons is precisely what we call hell. Hell is not a jail where sufferings and punishments are imposed. God does not impose sufferings or punishments on anyone, not even the condemned. That is absurd. The sufferings of someone condemned are something different. The fact is that the one condemned is really and actually wishing with all his freedom, but also with his entire fixation the seizing of sin in which his situation consists. If someone condemned could say, “well, the truth is that I have been an imbecile, why have I done these things? If God would only forgive me...”, at that moment God would forgive him, and he would enter heaven. What happens is that he cannot say it, simply because he is seized by the power of sin. The one condemned does not suffer pains that have been imposed on him, but suffers the pains in which his situation consists. That paradoxical situation is to live Trinitarially the aversion to the Trinity, and therefore, to be really and actually wishing to be in the situation he is.
The case of the one that dies conversely, i.e., of the one that dies seized by the power of God is different. Then, death has a different sense; it is an incorporation to the very death of Christ. The sacrifice of the Cross precisely consisted {450} in that, in overcoming the power of sin, which had taken him to the cross, by the power of God, to whom he made the oblation, and the offering of his life as expiation for all sins. For the one that accepts death seized by the power of God, Christ took on himself that death, and made and makes for each one, what his own death was for him, a step from Earth to Heaven. But, in what does Heaven consist? Heaven consists purely and simply in being fully and eternally what we have wished to be in and for Christ. After all, condemnation or Heaven does not consist in anything but giving us the being that really, actually, and freely we have acquired and are wishing. In the case of Heaven it is the full and positive deiformity. That deiformity is expressed, from my perspective, in three concepts.
a) In the first place, to know God. This is mentioned clearly by St. John, “Now this is eternal life, that they should know (ginóskosin) you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (Jn 17:3). But here ginóskosin translates a Hebrew and Aramaic verb, yada’, which means to know, but in a very radical sense as when it is said “I have not known sickness”; “I have known misfortune”; “I have known woman”. Here to know is not an intellectual gnosis, but a knowledge through intimacy with a personal reality. And certainly to know God as intrinsic and formal moment of Heaven is not an objective vision, but a knowledge through intimacy. It is an intimacy, which is the effusion of the Holy Spirit of the Son to the Father. This immersion in that radical Trinitarian structure is what constitutes the intimateness in which Heaven, in the first place, consists.
b) But, in second place, it is not only to know God, but in addition to be happy in that knowledge. It has generally been understood that beatitude is to feel happy, the fruition. It is the old argument between Scotus and St. Thomas Aquinas {451} on whether the ultimate root of Heaven is a knowledge (according to St. Thomas) or an act of fruition, an act of the will (for Scotus). I prefer to shade these two ideas with something more profound and radical, because Heaven as beatitude does not consist in feeling happy, not at all, but in something infinitely more radical. Let us remember what the term eudamonía meant for a Greek. A Greek would not call a child eudaímon, he would say he is fine or feels good. He would call eudaímon the mature man, the expert politician, the virtuous man, Socrates, for example. Talking about the gods a Greek would still use a more extreme term like makários, blessed, which Christ would apply to all the poor on Earth. In the end, happiness for a Greek, described in these terms, means to arrive to the plenitude of form, to what formally constitutes the morphé of man, to what is his nature. And this form displayed in the fullness of its formality is just what the Greek eudamonía would be, to be the fullness of what one is, and in this case, man. Nevertheless, I do not think that is the case of a Christian in Heaven. In the case of Christianity it is the case of something completely different. The one that lives and dies seized by the power of God not only tends towards one thing, but has a deiformity in himself. Consequently, beatitude in the next world does not consist only in being contented, happy and joyful. It consists, first and above all, in the full unfolding of the deiformity with which one has entered the next world. Man, in Heaven, not only feels happy for having a God one can possess and live, but for knowing oneself as deiform, for being a small god. That which had constituted the radical sin of pride as exordium of life, here it consists in a donation through the life and death of Christ, of the beatitude in the next world. Beatitude consists {452} in being formally and reduplicatively deiform in act, in being small gods.
c) In the third place, Heaven is not only knowledge through intimacy and beatitude in the sense of plenitude of deiformity. In addition, this beatitude is integral; it has a moment of integrity. The fact is that actually the I of man seized by God is an I in its own way theandric because it is deiform. That I is something that reverts, through the identity of the substantive being, which the I is, over my own substantive reality. Then, my substantive being, through the death and resurrection of Christ, and sacramentally in fullness through the Eucharist, is a regenerated and deiform being. Its reversion to my substantive reality makes in its own way of this substantive reality, through identity, a regenerated and deiform substantive reality. To put it more exactly, it is resuscitated. The repercussion of the deiformity of the being of the I upon the substantive reality in Heaven is precisely a resurrection. And here is where the character of the sóma pneumatikón appears. When I referred to the sóma pneumatikón in St. Paul (with respect to the resurrection of Christ, and now with respect to the resurrection of the dead) it might appear that one is referring to a kind of spiritual phantom. Nothing of the kind, sóma pneumatikón does not mean a sóma made of spirit (that would be a kind of phantasmic evanescence), but a sóma determined to be a body, and it is determined precisely by a spirit, something entirely different. This determination is to be a body vivified with eternal life, and not animated with terrestrial life. Of this body St. Paul said the Eucharist was a token or promise2. We will all resurrect with Christ because Christ has resurrected, and we precisely receive {453} the token or promise of our resurrection in the incorporation to the body of Christ through the ecclesial body.
And this is precisely the éschaton, to be what we freely have willed to be, in aversion to God or immersion in God. And the unity of all men in the immersion of the Church is precisely the Kingdom of God in this world, and also in the next. Thus, we have seen here what the Church is in its origin and fundament, what the Church is in the structural characteristic of its unity, and what the Church is insofar as a way to an eschatology. But we might leave a question hanging if we were not to say, in what follows, that Christ not only had promised to be with men, but that he had promised to be with them even to the consummation of the world (cf. Mt 28:20). This presents one last problem, in what does this permanence of Christ consist in the heart of the Church, a permanence, which has as an essential moment the evolution of revelation, and the evolution of dogma?
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1 Zubiri probably refers to 1 Cor 11:26, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes”, although here the context of the resurrection is missing. Other related texts are Rom 6:4, and 1 Cor 15:20-28, but in them the Eucharistic subject is missing.
2 The token down payment or promise of future payment is referred by St. Paul to the Holy Spirit (cf. Rom 8:23; 2 Cor 1:22; 5:5; Eph 1:14), to Christ (cf. 1 Cor 15:20; 15:23), to Israel or the Church (cf. Rom 11:16; 2 Tm 2:13), or to specific persons (cf. Rm 16:5; 1 Cor 16:15).