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 Fr Aidan Nichols

Recentring on the End

(Chapter 15 of Christendom Awake by Fr Aidan Nichols)




The '
horizontalism' of much contemporary Western culture, and its partial invasion of a Church inevitably subject to that culture's inroads through a policy of 'openness to the world', must necessarily affect our view of time. The time of history, on the Christian view, is essentially apocalyptic. History is a creative movement towards an incalculably great and yet by no means unknown issue. And in every moment of its time each human situation has a qualitative novelty about it. Both aspects of history as apocalypse - the unveiling of a End to the total process, and the unveiling of abiding meaning in each of its distinct moments - suggest a relation between the temporal and the eternal. Yet nothing is more characteristic of cultural immanentism - the confidence of a secular culture that human resources are or shall be sufficient unto themselves - than the suppression of interest in the relation between eternity and time. The notion that time is best symbolised as an arrow in flight, albeit to no known target, is, however, philosophically as well as theologically naïve. The issue merits underlining in a period when the Churches are celebrating the bimillenium of the Incarnation of the Logos, that unique rerelating of the Eturnal with time.


The Eternal in time

The crucial point to grasp is that time cannot simply be known
from within time. Time moves in precipitate fashion from future into past (at every moment the future becomes past) and does so in a way which involves ourselves. That is why the understanding of time we have from within that movement can only be highly relative. But if time, in its constant disappearance, raises the question of whatever it can be that grounds time's beginning sustains tmes's course and achieves time's end - and in this sense presses time toward its own self-transcendence in the eternal, so for Christian faith the Eternal - answer to the philosopher's question - is constantly entering into tim by its presence and power. God and the world are not to be thought as opposites. And so when we conceive them as respectively the Eternal and the temporal, we must say that eternity's transcending of time is creative. Eternity does not cancel time but redemptively reveals its potential.

With the Russian Christian philosopher-theologian Evgeny Lamp we must take care not to fall into a kind of Monophysitism on these matters, supposing that the Eternal swallows up time, such that goal of those who live in time must in every sense be non- or suprtemporal - just as Monophysite Christologies so affirm the divinisation of the humanity assumed by the Word as to leave no continuing room for its creaturely integrity. Neither, following Lampert's other warning signal, must we go to the other extreme of the Christological spectrum and adopt a Nestorian manner of thinking through this inte-relationship. It is not enough to have eternity and time side by side juxtaposed. Rather, revelation's claim - and so the claim echoed by the orthodox - is to uncover time's hidden transcendent meaning.

The deadly ambiguities of time cry out for an answer beyond its own limits: it aspires at each and every point towards a moment where it is coincidentally transcended and fulfilled. This moment is, as it were, a final point in time if seen from one angle and it is eternity if seen from another. . . Man's creatureliness, that is, his very relation to God and God's relation to him, is existence in time, and peace is given to man through the final leap into the beyond which does not annul time but fulfils it. [1]

The key, then, is the Incarnation, which reveals to us that the reaI subjects of history are God in relation to man, and man in relation to God. Thus personal initiative and personal creativity (whether divine in God himself, 'theandric' - divine-human - in Christ, or human in ourselves) are history's primary agencies. This saves us from dreadful errors about history: from the pessimism which views the historical process as a naturalistically predetermined evolution which we should just allow to happen since there is nothing very much we can do about it; from the complacency which declares that history has now 'come to an end', for we are all to be consumerist democrats now; from the optimism which (à la Hegel) treats history as the progressive self-expression of a corporate mind immanent in the world process and
experience; from the militancy of racialist, nationalist or class-based aggression. Over against these dystopias or delusions, Christ was able to reveal time's true
telos, its end and goal, through the Word's divine entry into time, his never to be abandoned assumption of it. After Jesus Christ, humankind continues to exist, true, in a perpetuum mobile, but the flux of events is no longer bewildering. Insight is now available into time's divine-human significance, into - accordingly - both time's tragedy and its promise. That is why the Christian conception of history is apocalyptic, that of an 'unveiling'. The fulfilment of history ir, the divine reign in Jesus Christ has been disclosed as already hiddenly present in history's course, and is nonetheless also still to come by an astounding vindication of the power of that hidden presence - that final 'show-down' with the disintegrative forces in the temporal process which the word 'apocalypse' more commonly conveys.

History is time in the process of acquiring meaning. Other animals live in time Man alone, owing to his peculiar concern with meaning, lives m history - in a time which indicates relations with others, and with the Other, God. Though, manifestly, historical events are exposed to influence from geography, climate, physiology and a host of physical factors, they are lived out by a species which has assimilated its own environment and goes beyond that environment's limits. A civilisation will always be an act of creation.

But what is the task actually addressed to human freedom and creativity? Human capacity is undermineded by the disintegrative temporality of our specific mode of existence. God calls on man to appropriate the End - time's telos - by uniting the world to the Father in the way that the Incarnation of the Son made possible and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit actually achieves. God in Christ created in the fullness of time in his own incarnate,crucified and glorified person that centre from which all that lives must be approached, and not only approached, or understood, but transformed. History is now not only that from which God calls us into his Kingdom; it is also where in Jesus Christ he has come to be with us entering within our limits and into our sufferings, to burst them from within. The poet Hopkins knew this:

Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt -
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt -
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

It dates from day
Of his going in Galilee
Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey;
Manger, maiden's knee;
The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat:
Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be...
[2]

Meaningful time - history - is, we may say, both 'vectorial' and 'punctual'. Pace the simplistic 'arrow of time' model typical of NeoPositivism, it needs to be symbolised not only as a directed line receiving its orientation from its end (vectorially) but also (punctually) as a series of points whereby each historic moment on the directed line enjoys its own relation to God, unique, unrepeatable - a relation which may of course be negative, representing judgement, not positive, representing promise - and indeed the cross of Messiah Jesus is supremely both.

Jewish consciousness - the consciousness of Israel - is therefore historical consciousness par excellence just because it conceives history as Providence, a story of divine acts by which God gives meaning to the destiny of his people and, through them, to humankind as a whole, all in view of an ultimate End which will resolve the chronic or 'systemic' problems of life on earth - and notably those which the apocalyptic literature of the Bible itself addresses, evil (its virulence yet stimulus to heroic good), authority (its necessity yet oppressiveness) and time itself (its provision of opportunity, and yet limitations). [3]

Notice how Israel does not present as unilateral the purposive acting of God. Rather, in her perception, does God allow his own omnipotence to be conditioned by the freedom of human response - though this does not mean that God fails to exercise real power over all things leading them to their appointed End (else he would not be God). What it does mean is that God's determination of events is not mechanistic but personal - allowing for the factor of reciprocity. In no way does the New Testament depart from this picture, except of course by the dramatic breakthrough in which it registers God's new deed in Christ as the revelation of his sovereign will no longer just in message or in providential activity but in the personal hypostasis of the Son. The heart of the New Testament proclamation is that through the Son the Father is leading the whole created universe - cosmos and history - to the ultimate fulfilment of the Kingdom (cf. Eph. 1.9-10). Thus the Fathers of the Church could conceive Providence anew as a Christological 'economy' - a design of the Father to sum up all things in Christ.


Cosmos and the End


Though the Christian hope is focused on persons - human persons, in their relation to divine - it is not without a care, then, for the wider cosmos in which human lives are set. It follows that the animal creation - in its setting in the vegetable and mineral! - comes likewise within its purview. In apocalyptic perspective, care for the environment and its animal occupants means the stewardship of an earth which must be handed back in its maximum richness of life for transfiguration by the Creator - now the Redeemer - God.

The American Lutheran theologian H. Paul Santmire has set out two rhetorical questions, the first of which expects a negative, the second an affirmative, reply.

Is the final aim of God, in his governance of all things, to bring into being at the very end a glorified kingdom of spirits alone who, thus united with God, may contemplate him in perfect bliss, while as a precondition of their ecstasy all the other creatures of nature must be left by God to fall away into eternal oblivion?

Or is the final aim of God, in his governance of all things, to communicate his life to another in a way which calls forth at the very end new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, a transfigured cosmos where peace is universally established between all creatures at last, in the midst of which is situated a glorious city of resurrected saints who dwell in justice, blessed with all the resplendent fullness of the earth, and who continually call upon all creatures to join with them in their joyful praise of the one who is all in all? [4]


Humankind is the pinnacle of creation, not its centre - only God can be that - and in a world where man is not the be-all-and-end-all of things, we can and should say that animals, and with them the organic and inorganic worlds without which their life is unthinkable, really matter. The importance, however, of locating ecological concern within the eschatological framework that Santmire indicates is that, deprived of this framework, it easily becomes a distraction from the '
centering on the End' - an alternative to sharing in the divine venture of bringing all things together under Christ and not a form of it. [5]

With the Parousia, for Augustine of Hippo, the whole biophysical realm - the material-vital world - will become transparent to the presence of God as the almighty creativity who originated it, sustained it, and, after its travail in the history of nature, grants its renewal. [6] For Francis of Assisi the eschatological consummation is anticipated, in a life of childlike simplicity, loving all the creatures of the earth (we note his solicitude tor the less obviously attractive, like worms). Possibly the making of the Christmas crib (a devotion, so historians report, he did not initiate, yet fostered) commended itself precisely as a parable of the 'peaceable Kingdom', with men and beasts in company around the Christ. [7]


Many species of animal and plant are lost to nature's history (most, of course, before the appearance of Homo sapiens on earth, others without our less informed predecessors' knowledge - so this is not necessarily an indictment of man). Again, many delicate webs of interdependent life among species have been rudely ruptured by the invasive expansion of human populations who are now, in their new habitats, largely here to stay (and the making of cities is a precondition for that civilisation which makes possible nature's reworking in culture in its highest forms). Very often, then, spilt milk cannot be put back (by us) into bottles - and some of the milk was cream. But we can still perform significant gestures of stewarding care for animals and plants and the environment at large. And the knowledge - born of divine revelation -that such gestures are '
sacraments' of God's final restoration of the creation in a new Jerusalem where nature's vitality and luxuriance are enhanced (thus the vision of the biblical canon's last book) prevents such gestures from merely suggesting countryside or zoological 'theme-parks'. Hope that.the losses of the history of nature (including man) will be redeemed can only be supernatural.

Furthermore, it remains the case for many of those millions who do not live in the English Home Counties, or other analogues thereof, that raw nature (nature neither cultivated in horticulture, agriculture and the taming of beasts, nor fabricated in culture) remains as awesome and fearful as ever it was. There is still a struggle with nature, the earth and the animals, to survive, exercising all man's gifts of ingenuity and not always succeeding then. Here too, when the conflict is unequal in another direction the vision of the pacific kingdom of the End is an incentive to hope.


Millennium and apocalypse

At any '
millennial' celebration of the first coming of the incarnate Lord in history, we think especially of the final Apocalypse, his definitive coming to consummate God's creative and redeeming purpose for time, at 'the End'. Throughout the history of the Church, Christians have scanned historical events and noted what appeared to be significant dates and anniversaries, just in case these might be 'signs' of the End. Given the view of early Christians that the 'fullness of time' in which the Incarnation had happened was in part defined by the providential diffusion of the pax romana throughout the Mediterranean basin of which Palestine formed a (peripheral) part, the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 and various natural disasters that followed in the succeeding decade gave rise to speculation - whether anxious or hopeful - along these lines. In an interesting exchange of letters between bishop Hesychius of Salonae (the modern city of Split in Croatia) and St Augustine, Augustine's correspondent complained that too many people were treating the Lord's Parousia as a topic to be avoided, whereas in reality it was something to be 'loved and longed for'. Augustine agreed, but warned against all attempts to calculate or predict the consummation of historical time through the advent of the Kingdom. It is, he argued in letter 199,

not the one who affirms that the Lord is near who 'loves his coming' any more than it is the one who affirms he is not near; but rather is it the one who waits for him, whether near or far away, with sincere faith, with unshakeable hope, and with ardent love.

As a Jesuit specialist in the 'eschatology' - the doctrine of the ultimate realities - in the Fathers has commented:

The Christian always believes that the end is near, [Augustine] could assure Hesychius, because Christ is the end of our history and Christ is always near; yet to translate that sense of his nearness into precise temporal terms, to calculate the date and the manner of his final appearance and history's final transformation, would be to violate the mystery, the hiddenness of his Kingdom. [8]

Augustine's caveat did not prevent his fellow Catholics from doing what he advised them against - for instance the German hermit Bernard of Thuringia in the decades before the first millennium, the year 1000. But on the whole the sacramentalism of Catholic doctrine (the incarnate Lord is already present in history, communicating his holiness through the Church and her sacraments and redeeming, in the transfigured humanity of his saints, soul and body, the original creation) meant that Catholicism has been less hospitable to the more excited forms of apocalyptic speculation found in some kinds of Protestantism.

It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that Catholicism is not waiting for an apocalyptic End. For a true climax to history, a genuine consummation of all things, must necessarily involve a divine actlon which crowns the saving interplay of divine freedom and human freedom redeemed in Christ, that interplay which gives time its eternal significance along the line of its course. If for Augustine it is true both that 'the End is already here' (concealed, yet really present, in the power of Christ's Godmanhood) and that 'the End is coming', we must, conclude that for him the 'way to the End is in the End itself'. [9] What we celebrate, at this bimillennium, in the Incarnation is precisely the coming of the One who is at the last to consummate all things. Eschatology is not so much about ta eschata, the 'final realities' in the neuter plural, as it is about ho eschatos, the 'ultimate one' in the personal singular, Jesus Christ. Time for us is moving, in the power of the Spirit of the Son, sent from the Father, to that goal, within time and yet beyond it, which is the final revelation of God's glory. Because we live from the Christ who is personally the End and therefore in the End, we should be perfectly familiar with the notion that he will declare himself for what he is at the end of time likewise. At the moment God's Kingdom, present sacramentally in the Church, in her preaching, in the holy signs of her worship, and in her saints, is hidden 'kenotically' - like the Christ of the Nativity, the ministry and the cross - in the ambiguities of time. But then the veil will be rent, and the hitherto invisible presence become plain. We already share in the transfigured cosmos whose nucleus is Christ's risen and ascended body and are activated by its energies. But then we shall see the glorified Saviour as the Lamb of the new temple, the new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells so as never more to abandon the human (and cosmic) city. Because God is God he must come into his own. He cannot ultimately be defeated. And yet the divine plan for the world, made in the eternal counsels of the Holy Trinity, whose first act is exclusively divine (the creation), and whose second act (the redemption) is exclusively 'the work of God in the incarnate Lord' (though Catholics see a role for a representative woman in the consent thereto of the Blessed Virgin Mary), cannot be fully realised until by a third and final act all time, all history, is taken up into the Eternal through a final resolution of the drama of human freedom in its confrontation with the divine Creator of that freedom (the Trinity) and its divine-human Liberator (the Trinity in Jesus Christ). And as history enters the Kingdom, so, as we have seen, will nature likewise, for human beings are never intended to live without their bodies (both the soul and the body are the 'I') and so in separation from their material environment.

This is the truth which the inspired writer of the Book of Revelation, the last and climactic work of the New Testament canon, wished us to know. Reworking images and scenes from the prophetic books of the Old Testament - 'bright images from earlier prophetic works laid alongside powerful new icons of a sovereign God and his redeemed people', [10] St John presents the crucified and risen Christ as the centre of a 'New Jerusalem' in a universe refashioned, when the 'Lamb' - who revealed, by enacting it, the father's sacrificial love in his Incarnation and on the cross - will show himself victorious over evil by his glorious Parousia, and streams of living water flow from his throne for the healing of the nations.

The Great Jubilee: what must be done

In considering the practical lessons we might usefully draw from contemplation of the redemptive Incarnation in its relation to the Parousia, the End of time, the present holy father - Pope John Paul II - invites us to work out a programme for the universal Church via the idea of
jubilee. In the Old Testament, the jubilee year was an important example of the sanctification of time. Every fifty years, the Lordship of the God of Israel over his people, and over the Land he had given as their own possession, was acknowledged in a particularly striking way as the poor were (in principle at least) reinstated as sharers of the riches of Israel, and slaves and prisoners (once again, in principle) set free. And this was done - at any rate, it was partly done - for God's sake, in obedience to him and for his glory. When the Saviour, at the beginning of his ministry in Nazareth, according to Luke, [11] declares that an oracle of the prophet Isaiah which ascribes to the Messiah the proclamation of a unique jubilee, a 'year of the Lord's favour', [12] is now being fulfilled in his listeners' hearing, he sets the tone for his own forthcoming messianic activity. All the work of Christ will be 'jubilee'. Hence, to recall that work to her children the Church too, like the People of God of old, has, during history, celebrated jubilees of the Incarnation and the Atonement calling Christians to renewed rejoicing in salvation, as well as to deeper conversion, and, in particular, urging those in need of reconciliation with each other, in the name of Christ, to make peace.


In his encyclical letter
Tertio Millenio Adveniente (1994) the Pope proposes that the 'Great Jubilee' of the year 2000 be used not to launch a 'new millenarianism', an expectation of the Parousia as now imminent (that would expose him to the criticisms voiced by St Augustine), but to achieving an 'increased sensitivity to all that the Spirit is saying to the Church and to the Churches, as well as to individuals through charisms meant to serve the whole community'. The purpose, so the Pope explains, is to 'emphasize what the Spirit is suggesting to the different communities, from the smallest ones, such as the family, to the largest ones, such as nations and international organizations, taking into account cultures, societies and sound traditions'. [13] In what ways are our communities open to the End made possible by the Incarnation, when Eternity threw open time to God? 'Despite appearances', the Pope remarks, referring presumably to the phenomenon of secularisation in Western and Western-influenced societies, 'humanity continues to await the revelation of the children of God, and lives by this hope'. [14]

What is involved, as the Pope spells out, is confirming our faith (we can call this the intellectual challenge of the Jubilee); sustaining our eternal hope (we can call this the spiritual challenge of the Jubilee); and rekindling our charity (we can call this the moral challenge of the Jubilee).[15] Meeting these challenges is possible in the Jubilee-time if that time arouses in: Christians joyful confidence in grace founded, however, on a sober, realism about their own past failures and present shortcomings - a joy, then, based on conversion, on the grace of the forgiveness of sins. The Pope calls on the members of the Church to repent of the 'counter-witness and scandal' they may have given. Of course, some 'scandal' - literally, a stumbling-block - is evangelically necessary, for, as the Theologian of the Pontifical Household, the Swiss Dominican Georges Cottier, has pointed out, the gospel of the cross necessarily 'scandalises' by not only revealing the depths of the love of the self-humiliating God but also requiring us to transcend the limitations of our own self-enclosed identities in return. But here we are talking of 'the scandal of sin, incitement or bad example [which] brings with it the fall of our brother'. [16] In fact, the Pope is thinking especially of crimes committed by the sons and daughters of the Church in her name - and notably any actions which may have precipitated or hardened schisms, and expressions of intolerance which have harmed rather than served the cause of truth. At the same time, the Pope is evidently aware that confessing vicariously the sins of other people , particularly if they are dead and cannot reply for themselves, becomes all too easily a recipe for self-congratulation, and so he speaks also in this connection of present-day failings of the Church's members, and notably the collusion they can practise with a false secularism and ethical relativism (thus generating indifference to religious and moral truth), the spiritual uncertainty into which they fall by (often culpable) ignorance of the Church's theological doctrine, and the injustices which they can support through neglect of her social doctrine on fundamental human rights. But since excessive dwelling on these negative features of the Church's life is hardly congruent with the joy of jubilee, the Pope rounds off his account by reminding his readers of the many Christians who have joyfully achieved heroic sanctity, or happily given up life itself as martyrs, for the sake of the bliss that lay ahead of them when their creation reaches its consummation at the End, in Jesus Christ. [17]

As the present millenium draws to its close, the burning issues facing the Church differ, at any rate in part, so the Pope explains, in diverse segments of the earth's surface. He speaks, for instance, of the realisation of the jubilee by a Synod for the Americas, whose principal concern was evangelisation and economic justice, the sharing of resources; by a Synod for Asia, which addressed the elements of truth in, yet basic soteriological insufficiency of, Buddhism and Hinduism; and a Synod for Oceania to reflect on the existence of peoples who '
in a unique way evoke aspects of human pre-history'. [18] These are themes which will retain their high pertinence to these global regions long after the present anniversary is past.

However, the faith which the gospel houses is ultimately one, as is the human race itself. And so, in explaining the three-year structure of the preparation for the Jubilee, John Paul II can explain things relevant to everyone. In the year of the Son, all Catholics were asked to deepen their understanding of the Saviour, the knowledge of Scripture which speaks of him, their appreciation of the grace of their baptism which gave them entry into his life and a basis for unity with other Christians. That year, 1997, was to be par excellence a year of faith. In the year of the Spirit, they were asked to renew their confidence in the Holy Spirit - in his power, notably through the grace of confirmation, to activate the members of the Church for mission, to empower a new evangelisation and vivify our expectation of history's wondrous End. That year, 1998, was to be par excellence a year of hope. In the year of the Father, Catholic Christians - and all Christians who heed this call - are asked to live their lives more fervently as a pilgrimage with their neighbours to the Father's house, to become more deeply converted through the sacrament of penance, and to recommit themselves to being the Christian soul in human civilisation, currently in crisis as this is through the lack of clear moral foundations. The year 1999 is to be, par excellence, a year of charity: that generous, hospitable charity which the eleventh-century German historian and geographer Adam of Bremen considered to be so marked a feature of a people newly converted to the gospel - in the case he was considering, Iceland. [19]

The Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones wrote of Christ: 'It is easy to miss Him / at the turn of a civilisation.' [20] What will become of the civilisation of the Western world is a disputed question, but the turn of a millennium is at any rate a good point at which to take stock of the cultural resources that may support the threefold - intellectual, spiritual, ethical - renewal of the Church. For though on the eve of a new millennium we are to look forward, it is characteristic of redeemed time that it abandons nothing of which is precious from the past and carries it forward towards eternity.

An example may help. The present portion of Christendom Awake was written originally to be spoken in Iceland. In that country one could think of those vital intuitions which the Gospel either confirme or introduced in Icelandic culture: the importance of law, since just rules for acting convey something of the divine mind whose revealed law . the Torah - became incarnate in Jesus Christ. Not for nothing were 'lawspeakers' the regents of the Icelandic Commonwealth. One thinks
too of the role of
merry-making and feasting in the ancient Norse, mythology. Perhaps assisted by the geographically dispersed character of Iceland's population, and the need for relief from a difficult climate, this theme gave a first glimpse of Christian eschatology, where the Kingdom is presented as a banquet, for the story of the world will turn out to be essentially a commedia: it has a happy ending. And finally there is the motif of a story itself: for the sagas which are Iceland's enduring contribution to the literature of the world are narratives, stories - and the Gospel confirms that the key to all reality is the story of one who was born of a virgin and suffered under Pontius Pilate, for the preconditions of that story are found in the Trinity, the only true God, and its consequences stream out through history ultimately to affect the order of the cosmos itself.

When in Snorri's Edda, Eilifr exchanges the worship of Thor for that of Christ, the latter is acclaimed as 'Rome's mighty king'. [21] May this initiative for the end of the millennium from the present bishop of Rome find a resonance in the Church, and among people not only in but also after the year 2000, wherever its rumour is taken.



NOTES

1. E. Lampert,
The Apocalypse of History. Problems of Providence and Human Destiny (London, 1948), p. 40.

2. G. M. Hopkins, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' in N. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (eds.),
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford, 1967), p. 53.

3. See S. D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse. A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York, 1994).

4. H. P. Santmire, The Travail of Nature. The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Minneapolis, 1985), pp. 217-18. Cf., D. Burrell, C.S.C. and E. Malits, C.S.C., Original Peace. Restoring God's Creation (New York and Mahwah, N.J., 1997), pp. 80-94.


5. At its worse: '
Instead of finding inBiblical tradition ample support for recognition of animal subjectivity, the careful tending of nature, and divine glory and sublimity as disclosed therein, [eco-theology] insists (after little historical reflection), on jettisoning orthodoxy, and constructing a more purely immanent, embodied, developing limited Godhead.. . [But] the Old Testament attitude which did not want to muzzle the ox too hard, that sought to embrace a particular symbiosis of humans, animals and plants within its notions of "cosmic order", was not in love with immanence and process, but rather with eternity and transcendence.' J. Milbank, The Word Made Strange. Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford, 1997), pp. 262, 261.

6. Augustine,
De civitate Dei XXII. 29.

7. R. C. Petry, 'Mediaeval Eschatology and St. Francis of Assisi', Church History
9.1 (1940), pp. 54-69.

8. B. E. Daley, 'Judgment Day or Jubilee? Approaching the Millenium', America 176. 19 (1997), p. 10. Cf. idem, The Hope of the Early Church. A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge, 1991).

9. Lampert, The Apocalypse of History, p. 44.

10. Daley, 'Judgment Day or Jubilee,' p. 16.

11. Luke 4.16-30.

12. Isaiah 61.2.

13. John Paul II, Tertio Millenio Adveniente, 23, with an internal allusion to Revelation 2.7ff.

14. Ibid.

15.
Ibid., 31.

16. G. Cottier, 'Counter-witness and Scandal', Tertium Millenium 1(1996), pp.
102-5.

17.
Tertio Millenio Adveniente, 37.

18. Ibid., 38.

19. Adam of Bremen, Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis, 35, cited in C. Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London, 1950), p. 114.

20. D. Jones, 'A, a, a, Domine Deus', in idem, The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (London, 1974).

21. Cited in D. Stromback, The Conversion of Iceland. A Survey (London, 1975), p. 54


Copyright T & T Clark, 1999


This Version: 18th July 2009



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