Apostasy: The Future

“Death is indissociable from community, for it is through death that the community reveals itself...”

Jean-Luc Nancy

The future. Perhaps this is the critical aspect that separates the apostate from the community: the community is oriented toward the future (ad futurum). There is movement, direction, end, purpose… meaning. The apostate, on the other hand, partakes of a different sense of time. A centerless time, non-linear, directionless, without motivation or purpose. His presence (presence as absence, for the two are always at play within the community) disrupts the community, upsetting the very sense of time (which is the fundamental element in the community), creating an anarchic chaos. This much Judas does — he both assists in fulfilling the telos (the movement toward a meaningful end), and he disrupts it, creating a rent in it. What follows with the apostate, however, is a moral or ethical judgment. He remains outside the community because he disrupts the movement of meaningful time, of purpose, of progress. Apostasy is a standing outside, not moving, not progressing, waiting perhaps for a time to come, but not moving any closer to it in the waiting.

Time is not neutral. It does not just happen. It does not simply exist – there is no “outside” of time. We experience time through judgment and interpretation, and perhaps this is why we cannot settle into the present – we cannot abide that which resists judgment. So we project forward to the future and reflect back onto the past.

The ethical permeates our relation to time, thus the need for reward in the future. The future does not merely come; it must arrive with reward or punishment, with a knowledge that our ethical deficiencies have been addressed one way or another – either they have been atoned for or punished.

But what of the past? Do we not occasionally (or perhaps, sometimes obsessively) turn our gazes back with pleasure? Perhaps, yet to do so is to forget Christ’s injunction – to drop one’s former life and to pick up the Cross. Thus we can only look at our former pleasures as temptations, as that which is to be overcome.

Christ resolutely points his finger toward the future; the past is that which must be redeemed. It is precisely the security that we feel in the past – the comfort of a mother’s breast, the gentleness of her touch, the warm camaraderie of childhood friends, the loving patience of the father – that must be exposed and overcome. “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.”

The past must be abandoned in order for eternal reward to be achieved.

The apostle, the apostate, has no time apart from the future, a future that will never come, a future that will never become present.

But what about Judas? What about the exception?

“It would have been better for him if he had never been born.”

Judas, without past, without future, without present.

Obstinately hanging from a branch outside of time,

An eternity outside of eternity

Without reward, without a life to look back on,

Lifelessly searching for a life that would bring him back to a life he never had.

What type of language rules over the community? Is it the bold, audacious strokes of the pen or magnificent speeches that galvanize its members. No, such linguistic manipulation is always secondary, regardless of the power that rhetoric may wield. Power emerges most strikingly, on the contrary, in the smallest, most insignificant particles. The community is built not on rhetoric, logical argument or persuasion, not in words themselves but in the prefixes that introduce them -- In (into), ex (out of), ad (towards), ab (away from), pre (before), post (after), among so many others -- a list of prefixes and the words that derive from them would be seemingly endless. These small, almost nondescript words place us in a relation of time and space, a relation of power and powerlessness— they define our relation to the human community and to the other, the apostate outside of the community. They modify and inscribe the space of human relations. And yet we pass them by everyday, unnoticed. They carry no stigma, they simply function within language, defining spaces and portioning out time, a space and time which within the community will become fully vested with meaning.

Those unconscious thoughts, desires, and gaps in memories which come out unintentionally in slips of the tongue can be said to come out equally by the use of these linguistic particles. They are so common, so banal, so forgotten that they guide language and human thought without us even recognizing it. Prefixes locate us and project us away from the present, away from a fixed space, away from the still permanence of the common. They are the emblem of spoken language: once we speak, we stray from the common. Yet language is the price we have to pay ahead of time (prix fixe) in order to engage in the community.

Because of this, we project our meaning as a community not into the present (which is itself an impossibility) but into the future. We have already paid the price, and now we await a future in which meaning will be revealed. The game is, as they say, fixed.

The community works toward a goal (ad finem), whatever this goal may be. Christ announces imminence: the Kingdom of God is at hand (engiken — has drawn near). What does this mean? Is it here or is it to come? What is this “nearness – Is imminence a presence or only a proximity? Is there even the possibility for it to be present?

These questions are further obscured by the fact that this announcement is accompanied by a command — “Repent!”. What happens to this community when they reach their goal, a goal that is renunciation? What do they hold in common apart from the fact that they have given up what makes them common?

The goal is never reached. When it becomes imminent it recedes. To borrow a phrase from Maurice Blanchot, “the apocalypse is disappointing”. The “at hand-ness” of imminence is near, but never near enough. It is near, but at a distance. This distance allows us to see it, to think about it, to contemplate it and bathe in its joys – the glories of heaven and the eternal. The one thing we cannot do, however, is participate in it. Even in imminence there exists a space, one vaster than the entire sum of human experience, a distance or delay that is its nearness. The nearness of imminence is agonizingly distant. Yet it is not so far that we cannot see.

This distance comprises the very difference between human and divine judgment. Perhaps divine judgment is pure presence, a dream for which many stake their lives, and for which many have sacrificed them. And this may very well be the case — the divine luminescence in which judgment arrives as a fulfillment of knowledge. Moral praise or condemnation are merely secondary aspects of this judgment. What is important here is that these divine judgements are made with all of time, all space and all knowledge held together at the same glorious moment.

The human subject, however sadly, has been barred access to this divine judgment, regardless of any script that may have been passed down to him. The apocalypse is destined to remain covered and hidden from us, even after it has been revealed. God’s judgment cannot take place in the present – it is destined for a time to come, for a time to come that cannot come, inasmuch as it can never occupy a time of presence. It must always be delayed.

But why is His judgment clouded from the world? What is it about our experience that precludes revelation and judgment? Hope. It is hope that dissects the past, present, and it is equally hope that grants us our future. It embodies a space in time that remains open… that must remain open in order for it to have any existence whatsoever. It is precisely the future orientedness of human experience that is evidence of the rift in time, a time that does not exist in past, present or future (although it is these who give hope its clothing). Hope, along with its sibling, faith, share this removal from the temporal. Although they fully take place within the world, they are also uncannily removed from it; they have no proper place in the temporal.

As is said in the book of Ecclesiastes, the time for human judgment is never the correct one. There is a season for all things, and man’s gift is to miss the mark. The time of man is a time that is off track — it always seems to lack a present. Language robs us of the present in exchange for hope. Thus mankind points to the future, as the preacher says, because it lacks correct judgment; it always hits upon the wrong time to act. And this is not an accident; it is our nature. The present is thus an illusion, a specter, a ghost. Or at the very least, the present, given the presence of desire, is at war with itself.

Christ – and what is more important, the eschatology that he announces – is a corrective to this state of affairs: Christ corrects time, so to speak, by bearing the end of it. This end of time is by no means neutral; it carries the weight of the severest moral judgment. This judgment is as necessary as it is absolute. Time then does not merely end. It is actually given meaning. And by means of this process, the present is saved and given the name “Eternity”.

The Cross as a symbol… the promise of a new community… the future fulfilled.

The Cross, however, is not a closure, but an eternal opening to a future that cannot be met

An eternal receding, an eternal that cannot be approached.

An outside of both time and eternity.

The future as absent, an opening that will not be answered.

A risk… a gamble.

The Symbol. The Future. The symbol is never fully present; its meaning cannot be fulfilled. It always holds out the promise to mean more. It is forever distant, its meaning always running ahead of our understanding if it. Thus the paradox of the Final Day of Judgement: it must exclude the symbol and the Law. In its finality, it must exclude language; the meaning of the transcendent cannot be included within it. Yet there can be no judgment without language, without Law.

The Final Day of Judgement, then, is not a day, but a retreat ahead into an unforeseeable future, a time which escapes language, judgment...and time.

The community to come is its own apostasy. The totalizing community, the community judged and redeemed by the Law, stands apart from itself. It cannot be contemporaneous with itself, because separation is always inscribed in it. Temporality, language, judgment, and the Law itself, are this separation. The silent community, those dwelling within a silence that is infinitely distant from both language and silence, that community that perhaps could even approach a moment of redemption, is an impossibility. It is never silent enough to be given admittance to a redemption; such silence is inhuman.

“Judge ye not, lest ye be judged”: A noble sentiment, yet one that excludes forgiveness and reinstates the Law. It perpetuates the economy of judgment. Judge ye not, lest ye be judged. How much weight lies on the shoulders of this one word. The entire weight of forgiveness. Paradoxically, however, forgiveness is weightless.

Although it embraces the “eternal” (ideology, Law, God, State, etc.) the community is in actuality a flight from it. Language corrupts the eternal: to speak is to flee it. Community is, through language, a falling away from the eternal.

***

Hope as the eternal present: if this is indeed the case, then hope excludes the dissection of God’s judgment, which is itself the dissection of time. The eternal cannot permit this.

Tenth Tableau

Judas knew that everything had already been written. He always knew this in his heart, yet his mind refused to believe it.

He spoke to his own heart: “What Does Jesus mean? What does he suspect? What does he know? What can he know? Is my fate written? Does he know it? Has he read it?

“Does he read my fate in his book or in my eyes? Which is it? Can it possibly be both? Do my eyes contain the book of my fate?

“What I will do, what I have already done, I do alone. If the Lord will judge me, will He know my reasons? Will he know my heart?”

“Better I had never been born… Yes! Yes! I have, indeed, never been born. Had I been, I could never have been strong enough to bear the burden I had to bear. Only one who had truly never been born could commit this act -- only one who had never really entered into a community of others could have done this. No animal, no beast, no man could have ever committed so atrocious an act and defied the Eternal…”

His mind slipped away and he dreamt of a future in which he walked away from Christ, a future in which he wasn’t a betrayer. A future in which he refused the thirty pieces of silver.

Yet he knew that such a future could supply no dwelling for him. This future barred him access, and he knew that Christ knew at least this much.

There was nothing left for him. He could stay or he could walk away.

Judas then woke from his reverie.