Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures

§1

Lexicon

Every investigation needs a lexicon; the more exacting the investigation, the more precise the lexicon. In theology, as is the case for most fields of thought, no lexicon is agreed upon by all workers in the field; and even when one does appear to be largely agreed upon, significantly different understandings of particular items in it are often in play without acknowledgment or understanding. The result is bewitchment, or at least a good deal of verbal wheel-spinning. The following definitions are intended to minimize this bewitchment, without supposing that it can altogether be removed.

The work under way here is theological, so the words needed are also theological in the sense that they take their meaning from the relation they bear to the fundamental and essential word, which is a name.

The LORD: the name of the god of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Mary, and Jesus; a triune name that designates Father, Son, and Spirit. He, this triune LORD, is the one who creates everything other than himself out of nothing by giving the gift of being, who redresses the devastation brought about by the angelic and human falls, who elects a people for himself in the person of Abraham, who guards and guides that people as the means of healing the devastated world, who takes flesh in Mary’s womb as Jesus the Christ, who is, as the incarnate one, crucified, resurrected, and taken up into heaven, and whose astringently and painfully healing presence in the world is now most fully present in the words and works of the Jewish people and in the sacrament of the world that is the church. He guides the world toward its consummation, its last thing. I do not use the word god in this work as exchangeable with (the) LORD, or in any other way, except occasionally as a category-word for a kind of being, a kind to which the LORD does not belong, and when it appears in the words and works of others. If the kind designated by god has members, they are all creatures; and while it may be said that the LORD is the god of Abraham, and so on, this is only by courtesy, to indicate that the relationship he has with Abraham, and so on, bears some analogy to the relation the peoples have with their gods (Zeus, Siva, Superman, and so on), each of whom is, to whatever extent they exist in a mode other than the purely fictional, necessarily a creature.

A creature: any particular thing brought into being and thus given itself by the LORD’s creative gift; thus, a creature. There are inanimate creatures, which are any that lack a soul, an anima; they do not live and cannot die, and are always bodies (see below) of some sort. There are animate creatures of many kinds, all of which, except the angels and the discarnate souls in the intermediate state, have fleshly bodies. Among enfleshed animate creatures, the human holds a special and central place, as image and likeness of the LORD, and as the kind whose flesh the LORD took.

Cosmos: the beautifully ordered and gorgeously ornamented ensemble of creatures, brought into being with and as timespace, and therefore as intrinsically spatio-temporal—timespace in every aspect and mode of its existence. The cosmos is all there is other than the LORD; and it is surpassingly beautiful.

World, also, and exchangeably, called in this work the devastation: This is the damaged cosmos, the cosmos as it has become since the double fall, of angels and humans. The principal signs of the world’s devastation are death (of animate creatures), annihilation by destruction (of inanimate ones), pain and suffering (for animate creatures), and chaotic decay-toward-destruction (of inanimate ones). Traces of the cosmos’ surpassing beauty remain, some evident to human creatures and some not. But for the most part, the world appears to human creatures as it is: a charnel house, saturated in blood violently shed; an ensemble of inanimate creatures decaying toward extinction; a theater of vice and cruelty.

Eden: the paradise in which human creatures and some others are at first located, and from which they are ejected consequent upon the human fall. Eden is distinct from the cosmos because it is not the place of the angels, and because it is a paradisial enclave within a cosmos-become-world already devastated by the angelic fall.

Body: the capacity for location in timespace, and thus for availability and responsiveness to other creatures with such location; any creature with such capacity has, or is, a body. Among bodies there are, first, fallen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures (save the angels) in the devastation. Then, second, there are risen fleshly bodies, of the kind common to all animate creatures in heaven after the general resurrection; the ascended flesh of Jesus and the assumed flesh of Mary are paradigmatic so far as the risen flesh of humans goes, and the only instances of this kind of body at the moment in existence. Third, there are temporarily discarnate animate bodies, which belong to humans between the separation of the soul from the fallen fleshly body and the general resurrection; these bodies may be purgatorial or heavenly. Fourth, there are permanently discarnate animate bodies, which are those of the angels. Fifth, there are inanimate material bodies of various kinds; these have weight and continuous extension in timespace, and include things such as rocks and bodies of water. Sixth, and last, there are discarnate inanimate bodies, which include quarks and other subatomic particles.

Heaven: the timespace in which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and indefectibly intimate with the LORD and with one another. Creatures are in and at heaven: both prepositions are needed to indicate, in English, that heaven is timespace—not just a place and not just a time, but a place creatures are in and a time they are at. It is a locus-tempus in which defect, lack, damage, and distance are all absent to the extent compatible with (particular varieties of) creaturehood. It is a timespace in which creatures capable of heaven, in their various kinds, find the damage that separated them in the devastation from the LORD and from other creatures finally and irreversibly healed.

Hell: the timespace during which creatures, according to their kinds, are maximally and irreversibly separated from the LORD and from one another. The speculative position taken in this book is that such a timespace is utopia, timeless and placeless, and that creatures who enter it therefore come to nothing as creatures who are necessarily spatio-temporal must when they become timeless and placeless.

Last Thing, used interchangeably in this work with novissimum: to mean a condition entered by a creature without possibility of future novelty. This is—these are—the central topic of this work.

§2

Last Things Defined

The topic of this work is the last things. Formally speaking, the last thing of any creature, or any ensemble of such, is the state or condition it enters after which there is no novelty for it. This understanding of what a last thing is reflects one aspect of the meaning of novissimum, a word used frequently in the Latin versions of the canon of Scripture, and, as a result, in the long Western Christian-theological tradition. The word is a superlative derived from novum, meaning new. Novissimum, therefore, means newest or freshest or youngest. To call something—some state or condition of a creature—newest is exactly to say that there will be no newer state or condition to follow it. If there were a newer thing to follow a putatively newest thing, then the putatively newest thing would thereby be shown as not the newest thing and so not the last thing. If, then, a creature has a novissimum, it has a last thing in the sense of a condition or state after which there is no novelty, no new and different state or condition for it yet to come. The last things are the novissima; and to treat them as a theological topic is to treat the last things of particular creaturely kinds, of their individual members, and of the ensemble of creatures that is the world. In this work, I use last thing interchangeably with novissimum.

The last things, so understood, are a subset of the theological topics that Christian thinkers have treated since the fourteenth century or so under the label novissima. Between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries, many treatises de novissimis (on the last things) were composed by Christians, and such treatises typically embraced four topics, in the following order: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Of these, only the last two are creaturely novissima in the strict sense, for the second item in the list, judgment, follows, according to the standard Christian narrative, the first (death) and is itself followed by the third and fourth (heaven and hell). Death and judgment, for the creatures that undergo or may undergo them, are therefore not novissima because something new and different follows them. Heaven and hell, on some understandings of them, are last things, however, because there is nothing new to follow them. They are, or have often been understood to be, states that once entered are not left and are beyond change. No novelty belongs to them, therefore, and those who enter them thereafter undergo nothing new.

The earliest treatise of this sort known to me—that is, a treatise with de novissimis in its title, organized according to the fourfold schema—is Denys the Carthusian’s (1402–1471) Liber utilissimus de quatuor hominis novissimis (A Most Useful Book on the Four Last Things of Human Creatures), composed probably around 1450. There are considerably earlier works that cover much of the ground worked by Denys, among which Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticum futuri saeculi (Forecast of the Future Age) from the late seventh century is probably the earliest separate treatise on the topics that would later be corralled under the de novissimis rubric. And, of course, every topic treated in Denys’ Liber utilissimus is treated also in the high-scholastic works of the centuries preceding his. But the answer to the question of when the title de novissimis came together with the four-topic arrangement to prompt the composition of freestanding treatises appears to be the fifteenth century. After that, the genre is widely evident among both Catholic and Protestant writers, until the early twentieth century, when it gradually grinds to a halt. A representative example of Catholic conventional wisdom on the subject as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth is Louis Billot’s much-reprinted and much-revised Quaestiones de novissimis, first published in 1902, and continuously in print thereafter until at least 1946.

The English word eschatology came into gradual use only in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Latin word eschatologia was, so far as I know, first used as a technical term in theology in 1677 by the Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius [Calov] (1612–1686), who used it in the title of the twelfth and last volume of his systematics: Systema locorum theologicorum tomus duodecimus et ultimus eschatologia sacra (The Twelfth and Last Volume of a System of the Theological Loci, on the Sacred Last Things), published in 1677. Only since the third quarter of the nineteenth century or so has the word (Latin or English) been a standard term in the theological lexicon. As late as 1865, such a distinguished and systematic Catholic thinker as Matthias Scheeben (1835–1888) could treat the last things in his Mysterien des Christentums (Christian Mysteries), first published in 1865, almost entirely without using the (German) word Eschatologie, and certainly without using it as a technical term. His approximate contemporary in England, John Henry Newman (1801–1890), is also almost entirely innocent of the (English) word eschatology.

The Greek eschaton has novissimum as its ordinary Latin rendering in Scripture, and so it might seem that eschatology ought exactly to be reasoned discourse about the last things as defined in this work. But in fact the word has become diffuse in meaning, and is now used promiscuously to label much more than discourse about the last things. It is used to indicate discussion of and thought about such things as expectation of a last thing, depiction of events that presage the end of things as they are now, hope for an end, world-negation by way of end-expectation, and so on. None of this has directly to do with the last things properly speaking. This capaciousness of eschatology is now a fact about its usage, and it means that the word cannot effectively be used to label discussion of the last things stricto sensu.

Christian thinkers have sometimes responded to this state of affairs by distinguishing final eschatology from transitional eschatology, taking the latter to deal with matters preparatory for or indicative of last things in the full and proper sense, and the former to treat the novissima. Following that division, consideration of heaven and hell belong to final eschatology, because there is nothing new to follow them; but death, judgment, purgatory, and the apocalypse belong to transitional eschatology, because there is something new to follow them. That is a possible solution. But in this book, I eschew eschatology altogether because of its vagueness and its tendency to divert thought from consideration of the novissima. Treatment of the last things is not speculation about the future; it is not hopeful anticipation or anguished dread directed toward some last thing; and it is not reserve toward the realities of this world in light of the thought that they will come to an end. It is certainly not apocalyptic (itself a difficult word): anything included under that head is at best an antechamber to the last things. Consideration of the last things is, rather, doctrine and speculation about what belongs properly to the novissima, the ends-as-last-things of individual creatures, of particular creaturely kinds, and of their ensemble that is the cosmos.

Last things—whether of individual creatures, of entire creaturely kinds, or of the world—may be glorious or inglorious. A creature’s glorious last thing is the end for which it was made; this may also be called its proper culmination or consummation. But there may also be inglorious last things, novissima that meet the definition in being creaturely conditions beyond which there is no novelty, but which are opposed to and therefore incompatible with glory. Such last things are inglorious; they are the indefectible endings-up of creatures that have, for one reason or another, failed to consummate, failed to reach their glory, if there are any such. Some creaturely kinds—angels and humans, at least, according to Christian orthodoxy—are capable of both glorious and inglorious last things: their members may, that is, be damned or saved. Perhaps this is true, as well, of other creaturely kinds: a book, made to be read and reread, may reach its last thing in the annihilation of the book-burner’s furnace without ever having been read. A jasmine vine, in whose seed is the possibility of luxuriantly blossoming sweet-smelling growth, may be crushed while yet a new shoot, never to bloom. Those are inglorious last things. In the case of human creatures, who are intended, Christians think, for eternal loving communion with the LORD, some may find their novissimum in a changeless and irreversible state of separation from the LORD. The same is true of angelic creatures. This is a state beyond which there is no novelty, a condition, that is, that remains indefectibly what it is. But in no case is it a creature’s glory. It is an instance of damage and loss of a profound and painful kind; it is an inglorious novissimum.

There is no intermediate category between glorious and inglorious last things. A novissimum that lacks even one of the goods proper to a creature’s last thing is thereby inglorious; one that has all the relevant goods is thereby glorious.

This picture yields the following formal distinctions with respect to creatures and last things. (I do not mean that all these conceptual possibilities are instantiated, however, and some cannot be; I indicate them only to lay bare the contours of the conceptual terrain.)

First, there is a distinction between creatures capable of a last thing and those not so capable. In the case of those belonging to the latter category, there can be no question about the nature of their last thing, for they cannot in principle have one; there is something about them that makes them incapable of it. For them, there is a question only about why they cannot, what it is about them that makes a last thing impossible for them. I argue below, in extenso, that there are no creatures like this, and necessarily so: it is proper to creaturehood to be capable of a last thing, and this is so even though some Christians have thought otherwise, have imagined, that is, creaturely kinds or particular creatures incapable of novissima.

Second, among those kinds of creature capable of a last thing, there may be individual members of that kind that reach it, and individual members that, for one reason or another, do not. That is, being capable of a novissimum and attaining it are capable of analytical separation. Suppose, for example, that inanimate creatures—stellar bodies, for example—are capable of annihilation, which is to say of coming to nothing. Suppose, too, that annihilation is a last thing. And then suppose that by divine fiat, or for some other reason, some among (or all) the stellar bodies are granted endless existence without ever entering a condition free from future novelty. Such planetary bodies will then be among those capable of a last thing without reaching it. But, there are no creatures like this either, as it seems to me; all creaturely kinds, and all their members, both do and must reach a novissimum. This too is part of what is meant by creaturehood. It is a corollary of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

Third, among those creatures capable of a last thing that do reach it (all of them, in fact, I argue in this work), there may be those capable of more than one last thing, and those capable of just one. Suppose, for example, that some nonhuman fleshly animate creaturely kinds (dogs, perhaps) are capable of two last things: annihilation, coming to nothing without remainder; and life eternal in a renewed heaven and earth, in endless and novelty-free relation with other animate creatures (see §§27–28). All dogs would then be capable of two last things, and each would inevitably reach one of them. Or, suppose that human creatures are capable of both a glorious and an inglorious novissimum, as the Christian tradition has, for the most part, affirmed. These two last things might be called, for short, heaven and hell, and each human creature would, on this view, inevitably reach one or the other. There are, I argue, such creaturely kinds—creaturely kinds capable of more than one novissimum—just as there are some capable of only one last thing.

Among those creatures capable of more than one last thing, some are capable of both glorious and inglorious novissima. Humans belong here, certainly, as do angels—and perhaps others. About these creaturely kinds there are further distinctions to make. Perhaps all their members in fact arrive at a glorious last thing; to assert that, in the case of human creatures, would be to assert universalism, the view that all human creatures in fact enter heaven, even though it was possible that some might not. Some Christians have thought this, and some have affirmed it not merely de facto but as a necessary feature of the created order. Or, perhaps all human creatures in fact arrive at an inglorious last thing—enter hell, that is—even though it was possible that some might not have done so. This would be to assert universal damnation, a view that has no serious Christian defenders, whether in an indicative mood or necessitarian version. Or, perhaps some do one thing and some the other, which is to assert that both heaven and hell are de facto inhabited. This has been the usual Christian view, in the sense that most Christians who have thought about the matter have taken it, and have also taken the tradition’s authoritative sources to assert or imply it. Some have taken a still-stronger view, which is that it does not just happen to be the case that both heaven and hell are inhabited—that some human creatures arrive at a glorious novissimum and others at an inglorious one—but that it is necessarily so.

The right view about these matters is, however, I argue, none of those just canvassed. It is, rather, one of skepticism about our capacity to know, in the case of creatures (human and angelic) for whom more than one novissimum is possible, whether both of the possible novissima are in fact arrived at by any of them. In the case of human and angelic creatures, the Christian tradition is precise and unambiguous in its teaching that some humans and some angels consummate the gift of their lives in a glorious novissimum. There is no such precision, and no such definitiveness, with respect to the question of whether any consummate their lives ingloriously by attempting the expropriation of those lives, though there is just such definitiveness about the fact that this is possible, and about the fact that some among both humans and angels have fallen, in the sense of having rejected the LORD’s gift to them of themselves, or (more commonly and) inherited the damage caused by others having done so. But doctrinal definitiveness on those matters entails nothing about whether any humans or angels have an inglorious last thing.

The distinctions just made, together with the positions on them asserted but not yet argued, yield the following picture: all members of all creaturely kinds are capable of a last thing; all members of all creaturely kinds reach a last thing; members of some creaturely kinds are capable of more than one last thing, and some among those are capable of both glorious and inglorious last things; and among these last, some arrive at a glorious last thing, but we do not know whether any arrive at an inglorious one.

There are, formally speaking, only three possible last things, whether glorious or inglorious, for any creature or creaturely kind. They are annihilation (§3), simple stasis (§4), and repetitive stasis (§5).

§3

Annihilation

The First Last Thing

Permanent annihilation is a novissimum. That is because it is an instance, perhaps the clearest possible instance, of a condition without future novelty. An annihilated creature whose annihilation is permanent and irreversible has no future at all, novel or otherwise, and has therefore entered a novissimum in the full and proper sense.

For a creature to be annihilated is for it to come to nothing, to move ad nihilum (the Latin phrase lies at the root of the English word annihilation), and eventually to arrive there. When it arrives at nothing, has come to nothing, what it was is no more. What was denoted by its personal proper name, if it had one, is now absent. A comprehensive list of the contents of the world, postannihilation, no longer yields the name of the annihilated creature, while that same list, preannihilation, did yield it. There are always traces, however: a creature’s having been brought to nothing does not mean there are no remains. It means only that it, whatever it was, is not among those remains, and that they do not conjointly constitute it. A creature’s traces are not the creature, and when a once-present creature is found only in its traces, it has been annihilated—and if it is never reconstituted or resurrected, then its annihilation is permanent. This account of annihilation applies as much to human and angelic creatures as to other kinds. If such a creature is permanently annihilated, this means the bringing to nothing of everything except its traces. Any annihilated human creature or angel therefore finds its novissimum exactly in that annihilation.

Decisions about whether a particular creature has been brought to nothing are sometimes difficult to make. This is because such decisions depend upon understandings of what constitutes a particular creature, where its boundaries are, how it is individuated from other creatures, and what, therefore, the difference is between the presence of a creature and the presence of its traces or remains. Sometimes, these matters are clear enough: it seems reasonable to say that a heap of marble fragments produced by taking a sledgehammer to a statue constitutes the remains or traces of that statue, which is also to say that the wielder of the sledgehammer has succeeded in bringing the statue to nothing by disaggregating it. It seems almost equally reasonable to say that a rabid dog whose brains have been blown out by a shotgun has thereby been brought to nothing, and that what remains—the bleeding body—is the dog’s traces. But suppose a large quantity of granite is detached from a mountain by explosives and pulverized. Is what remains still the mountain in question, or only its traces? Has the mountain been brought to nothing by the explosion, or, rather, altered? Or, suppose a bacterium living in a mammal’s digestive tract is brought to nothing by an antibiotic introduced into the gastric environment; ought it be said that the mammal, too, has thereby been brought to nothing, and that what remains are its traces (this might be true if the bacterium is an essential constituent of the mammal, like, in this respect, its brain)? There are no obvious answers to questions such as these, and perhaps no good ones. This means that decisions about when a particular creature has been brought to nothing may sometimes be impossible for us to make, just because it is unclear to us how to individuate one creature from another. Nevertheless, there are clear cases; and the analysis of what annihilation is remains good even when it is unclear how to apply it in particular cases.

Some, perhaps all, annihilation is in principle reversible. A creature brought to nothing can sometimes be reconstituted so that the world once again contains it. The marble fragments can be reassembled into the statue they once made; the dead dog can perhaps be resurrected; the bacterium can be reinserted into the gut temporarily bereft of it; and the billion tons of granite removed from the mountain can be laboriously replaced so as to reconstitute the mountain. If a particular instance of annihilation is reversed, then it turns out not to have been a last thing for the creature that underwent it. That is because there is, for that creature, the benison of the novelty that is reconstitution (or resurrection). Whether some creature’s annihilation is also its novissimum depends principally on whether reconstitution-resurrection is possible for members of that creaturely kind. If not, if for some creatures it is the case that once they are brought to nothing they necessarily remain annihilated, then their annihilation, when and if it happens, is inevitably their last thing. If, as some Christians think, the ensemble of creatures that is the world reaches a last thing, a condition without future novelty, then it will follow that any creatures previously brought to nothing that have not at the time of the world’s consummation been reconstituted will never be so—their annihilation, too, will turn out to have been their last thing. Christian orthodoxy has not much to say about most of these questions. It does, however, clearly affirm that some creaturely annihilations, notably those brought about by human death, are not permanent.

Most Christians who have thought about these matters deny the possibility of self-annihilation, even if not annihilation per se, to humans and angels; I discuss those matters in their proper place (§20, §23). But Christian thought has been and remains hospitable to the idea that some among nonhuman creatures might find their last thing in annihilation. In the case of animate nonhuman creatures (plants, animals, and so on), it is the majority view to say that when they die such creatures do and must come irreversibly to nothing. The same is true, though with reservations and exceptions, for Christian discussion of the last things of inanimate creatures such as rocks and stars and seas. I return to these matters, too, in their proper place (§§27–31).

§4

Simple Stasis

The Second Last Thing

Simple stasis is a possible creaturely novissimum, the second of the three possibilities. Whether as a last thing of a particular creature, of all the members of a creaturely kind, or of the ensemble of creatures that is the world, this is deeply different from annihilation. A creature whose last thing is simply static enters a condition without novelty, as is the case for all last things. In addition, the condition of such creatures is everlasting and without change of any kind; its description at the moment of entry into it remains always its description, without alteration or adjustment. Creatures whose last thing is of this kind do not cease to be. They are not like the tree drawn out by the root and consumed by fire, or the last dodo falling to the hunter’s bullet. They are, rather, everlasting and unchanging. They are not eternal: they do not enter an atemporal condition. Such a condition is, according to Christian orthodoxy, possible only for the LORD.

Consider, as illustration, an animate creature flash frozen at a time into a lake of ice and locked there forever, somewhat like Dante’s Satan at the end of the Inferno (34.28–29): Lo ‘mperador del doloroso regno / da mezzo ‘l petto usciafuor de la ghiaccia—The emperor of misery’s kingdom / from chest upwards emerges from the ice. Dante’s Satan is not immovably frozen; he continues, among other things, to masticate sinners. But he is frozen sufficiently that Dante and Vergil can climb out of hell between his wings. He serves as inspiration for my illustration of simple stasis. Suppose, too, that the lake, after the moment of freezing, never changes in any particular, and is coextensive with the boundaries of the cosmos: in that world, there is nothing other than an ice-lake and a single animate creature frozen into it. Narratable history ends with the moment of flash freezing. After that moment, there is no novelty and no change of any kind. Instead, there is simple, undifferentiated stasis, with a beginning in time but without an end. The only means by which such a world can be depicted is the tableau, and that is because narrative has no purchase on worlds of that kind, should there be any.

Many, perhaps most, Christians have understood the salvation and damnation of particular creatures consequent upon the final resurrection on something like this simple-stasis model. Salvation, so understood, is a creature’s perfection, its condition when it has indefectibly and unchangeably become what, in the mind of the LORD, it has always been. This condition differs for different kinds of creature: the salvation of a hummingbird, if it can be saved, cannot be the same as the salvation of a human or an angel; and while Christian doctrine is clear that salvation is possible for at least humans and angels, there are difficulties and controversies about whether it is possible for members of other creaturely kinds, and if so for which. But whatever the solution of these difficulties, on the simple-stasis understanding salvation as a creature’s last thing is changeless and everlasting, the condition better than and other than which there is none, and into which there is no novelty to come, nor change of any other kind.

Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for damnation, so some Christians have thought. That, understood as simple stasis, is an indefectible condition of maximal separation from the LORD, or, in an alternative formulation, an indefectible condition of maximal damage. A damned creature on this understanding reaches a condition in which whatever damage it has suffered and continues to suffer, however caused, remains with it without change and forever.

Positions such as these are speculatively elaborated rather than doctrinally given. I give reasons in §§23–25 and §§27–28 for rejecting them as understandings of the last things of any animate creatures. Matters are rather more complicated in the case of inanimate creatures, and I discuss that topic in §§29–30. The importance of this way of thinking about the novissima lies not in its defensibility as a speculative possibility for Christian thought, but rather in the broad and deep purchase it has upon the way many Christians have thought about and imagined the last things.

§5

Repetitive Stasis

The Third Last Thing

Repetitive stasis is the third and final possible novissimum for creatures. This is a state of affairs that begins and ends and then begins again, repeating itself without end, recycling forever. A recitation of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633) provides an example. This sonnet sequence begins with La Corona and ends with Ascention. The first line of La Corona (Deigne at my hands this crown of prayer and praise) is also the last line of Ascention. To recite the entire sequence is, therefore, to arrive at the beginning as you reach the end, and if the rule of procedure in the recitation is always to recite the next line, then the recitation will never end, continuing in saecula saeculorum. There is no novelty here either—the same words are said again and again—but there is internal complexity: the stasis here is cyclically repetitive rather than frozen. The last thing of a creature whose end is repetitively static in this way is the first moment of the cyclically endless recitation of the Holy Sonnets.

The ring form, ourobouros-like, is a common literary device. George Herbert’s Sinnes Round (1633), for example, has three six-lined stanzas, the last line of the first two stanzas being the first line of the one immediately following, and the last line of the third (Sorrie I am, my God, sorrie I am), which is also the last line of the whole poem, being the first line of the first stanza, and thus of the poem as a whole. The poem’s structure images its topic, which is the compulsively repetitive nature of sin: my offences course it in a ring. A more complex repetitive cycle is evident in Natasha Trethewey’s Myth (1977), an eighteen-lined poem in which the first and last lines are identical, as are the second and penultimate, the third and antepenultimate, and so on until the ninth and tenth lines are reached, which are identical. The whole poem, therefore, is ordered around a Janusfaced mirror-glass placed between the ninth and tenth lines. Here too the poem’s structure reflects its topic, which is the mirror-repetition of the memory of a beloved who died while the lover was asleep—I was asleep while you were dying. I discuss the liturgical correlates to literary forms such as these in §16 and §24.

If, as some Christians have thought, what those resurrected to eternal life endlessly do is sing the Sanctus—Et requiem non habebant die et nocte, dicentia, Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus omnipotens, qui erat et qui est et qui venturus est (Rev 4:8)—then the end of such a creature is the first moment of that song, which, too, then endlessly repeats itself. Simple stasis and repetitive stasis, considered as possible last things of creatures, are both static in the sense that each is endlessly more of the same. But they differ in that repetitive stasis is internally complex, while simple stasis is not.

Repetitive stasis is stasis with respect to types of event, but not with respect to their tokens. That is, there is only one type of event in the repetitively static last thing of Holy-Sonnet-recitation, and that is exactly such recitation. But there is a kind of novelty, novelty with respect to tokens of such a type: there is the first Holy-Sonnet-recitation, the second, the third, and so ad infinitum. These tokens, however, are distinguished from one another only by being such tokens. They have no other kind of novelty, whether in the order of being or in the order of seeming. The time of the liturgy (§ 16) aims at, though here below never quite achieves, the production of tokens of this sort—tokens, that is, distinguishable one from another by those who enter them not at all, and identically participatory in the events they re-present. If the only thing that differentiates one token of a type from another in a repetitively static heaven (or hell) is succession (being located somewhere in a series of such tokens), and if, moreover, the only kind of temporal succession there is in an epektatic heaven is that kind of token-succession, then an account of time in such a heaven will not be metronomic, but will, rather, be systolic—to use distinctions to be elaborated in §6 and §§15–16. Even here in the devastation, the novelty present in a series of indistinguishable tokens of a type, such as repeated iterations of a software routine, is sufficiently etiolated as scarcely to be worth the name; and in the case of those token-repetitions that contain explicit structural signals as to their goal of eliminating novelty, as in the poems already mentioned, it is more etiolated still.

Damnation, too, can be understood as repetitively static rather than as either simply so, or as annihilation simpliciter. If it is so understood, then it is still a last thing, even if an internally complex one. Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, whirled with the other adulterers forever by the circling hellwinds in the second circle of hell (Inferno, 5.88–142), are certainly damned, but they are not in simple stasis. They ride a repeated circuit, always the same, and yet with an internal order. Dante’s picture is not perfectly repetitively static because it does permit occasional novelty—such as the conversation he and Vergil have with Paolo and Francesca. But in its essentials it does depict repetitive stasis, as is also the case for those in the lower circles of hell. As with simple stasis, repetitively static last things are beyond narrative representation, and for the same reason: there is no plottable trajectory. Every token is indiscriminable from every other for the creatures involved in them; and the only difference among them in the order of being is exactly their tokenhood, their occurrence before this token and after that one.

The position taken in this work is that the glorious last thing of animate creatures ought, speculatively, to be understood as a kind of repetitive stasis. There are several reasons for this, having mostly to do with the nature of time and its relation to the LORD’s eternity (§13), and especially with the nature of liturgical time (§16). Inglorious last things, however, ought not be so understood: they are without remainder to be understood as annihilation (§20, §23, §30). And the case of the last things of inanimate creatures is more difficult, glorious and inglorious; those matters are discussed more tentatively at §§29–30.

§6

Epektasy

Denying Last Things

Every creaturely last thing falls under one of these three heads: annihilation, simple stasis, or repetitive stasis. There is no fourth possibility. To deny all three of these to a creature is exactly to deny it a last thing. The same is true of the last thing, if there is one, of the ensemble of creatures that is the world: that will be either its annihilation or its entry into one of the two kinds of stasis.

A creature with an endlessly novel future lacks a novissimum. It has, that is to say, no last thing. The future of such a creature is always, at least in principle, narratable, because there is always something new yet to happen to it. If there are any creatures of this sort, they do not belong in a treatise de novissimis.

Lacking a temporal end point is not enough by itself to avoid having a novissimum. Such a lack means that novelty is always a possibility, and the idea of endless temporal extension is separable, analytically, from the idea of novelty. Consider, for example, the difference between the endless repetition of the fraction one-third expressed as a decimal (.33333 …). That is an endless series, but it is novelty-free; instead, it is endlessly more of the same. It is reasonable to say that this endlessly repeated generation of the number three is the novissimum of that series: it is a condition without novelty. Quite different is the series of prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 …). That is also an endless series, but it is constantly novel. Every addition to it—and there is always an addition, number-without-end—is a new item, one not previously found in the series. Endlessness in this case goes with novelty, indeed requires it. The prime-number series never reaches its novissimum, and in principle cannot do so.

Or, imagine the ideal baseball game, one that fulfils the possibility proper to the game, which is to go on forever, world without end. Baseball is not played by the clock, and can end, barring external accidents, only when (once the ninth inning has ended with the score tied) the home team goes ahead in an uncompleted inning, or the visitors are ahead at the end of a completed inning. This need never happen, though in practice it always eventually has. Imagine, too, that each inning of this game is better than the last, its pitches and hits and runs increasingly elegant and ordered without that elegance and order reaching or having a maximum. That game would be endlessly extended in timespace, and would also contain endlessly novel states of affairs, from which it follows that it would be endlessly capable of narrative characterization, at least in principle. Here too there is a distinction between endless extension in time, which the perfect baseball game has, and entry into a last thing, which it does not.

Theologians sometimes call such never-ending movement forward epektatic, following the Greek verb epekteino, which means to extend toward [something] or to reach forward toward [something]. (Epektasic is a variant adjectival form sometimes found, but epektatic is closer to the Greek and also sometimes used in English.) This verb is found in Scripture only at Philippians 3:13 where Paul writes of himself as "forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward [epekteinomenos] to what lies ahead." (The Vulgate renders epekteinomenos by extendens.) The word has no immediate reference to the last things in Philippians, and is more naturally read there as anticipating, rather than denying, a terminus. Nevertheless, the word, understood as indicating forward movement without terminus, has been applied to the heavenly condition of human beings, and when it is, this amounts to a denial that there is—and perhaps that there can be—a heavenly novissimum for humans. An epektatic heaven is, like my sketch of the ideal baseball game, one in which creatures endlessly extend and intensify their intimacy with the LORD, approaching him ever more closely and finding ever-new embraces to exchange with him. This process has no temporal end and no maximum, and those who defend it—they hold an important, if minority, place within the scheme of Christian thought—therefore deny that there is a heavenly novissimum. The opposed, majority view is that the life of the world to come is static, not epektatic, and that therefore it is proper to call it a novissimum for those who enter it.

Damnation also need not be understood as a novissimum. It too could be understood and depicted epektatically, as an ever-deeper suffering and separation that never reaches a maximum, and that can therefore in principle be characterized narratively. Damnation on this view would be ever-increasing distance from the LORD, an endless series of self-damaging and self-diminishing gestures by means of which the damned deepen and widen the gulf between themselves and the LORD without ever reaching a final and static condition of separation from him. That condition, were it to occur, would be epektatic damnation,