reached its goal. Only when it is certain that nothing new will happen any more may God discard the initially intoxicating, but later on compromising attribute of “omnipotence”; this attribute had indeed become increasingly embarrassing and superfluous. At the actual end of history there is neither anything to create nor anything to preserve. Everything that is is there for the sake of what ultimately will be. The dossier of creation is closed. The end God drapes himself in the robe of omnipotence. As soon as knowledge that has become complete is no longer confronted with new tasks on behalf of creativity (or of the “event”), God surveys the universe in its totality. He serenely looks straight through everything that was the case.
In the old European tradition, “apocalypse” designates this moment of looking through things in a comprehensive retrospection. In the strict sense, this means: uncovering all things from the perspective of the end. If everything is complete, everything becomes transparent. The so-called revelations that were available to mortal observers in certain high cultures in the guise of “holy texts” are like vistas into the static beyond that have been fixed at the halfway point. They testify to the fact that higher religions don’t work without rushing things.3 Such pre-haste [Vor-Eile] is subject to the temporal schema of impatient faith: already now, but then all the more! Yet, as a rule, religious apocalypses do not deal with real “ultimate concerns.” They wallow in the depiction of tumults before the advent of the great tranquility.
Whoever accepts such messages as truths is able to imagine leaping ahead and partaking of the total view from the end of time. The spheres of such representations are called “worlds of faith.” They are created in order to bridge the gap between nowness [Jetztzeit] and eternity. The believer nevertheless remains subject to the law of being on her way, in the realm of the temporary [im Vorläufigen]. She knows she can catch up with God only by attaining the same ontological rank in death. This is the case for the ancient Indians as well as for old Europe, and for the domains of Islam no less.
There was a name for those groups of believers who were convinced they could achieve the apparently impossible task of catching up with God media in vita [in the midst of life]. They were called mystics. Thanks to their efforts, transcendence has not remained a completely empty word. These virtuosi of self-renunciation attempted to eschew every sort of separate life outside of God. In this way they devoted themselves to the idea that they had already entered into the beyond here, in this life. Indeed, to die means to give back one’s soul – as the French idiom rendre l’âme expresses it in such a metaphysically fitting way. Yet only when everything has in fact died – whether in advance, or whether at the proper or improper time – will everything that was destined to exist be freed from the compulsion of becoming and of innovation. If we had to say in one sentence what classical metaphysics had in mind, it would be this: it wanted to convert the “world” into participants in the stasis of God’s omniscience. This end was served, among others, by the Stoic and Christian doctrines of providence (Greek pronoia, Latin providentia), which were supposed to secure for the future God’s exposed flanks.
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The modern world exists because this attempt at conversion failed. Included in modernity is anyone who rejects the idea of a complete emptying of the future into the past and votes for the inexhaustibility of the future, even if this vote excludes the possibility of an omniscient god who, “after all time,” bends back, in a comprehensive retrospective on creation.
The “world” – a word that, as Nietzsche knew better than anyone, was for a long time a “Christian insult”4 – resisted the invitation to empty the future into total pastness, because it renounced the ontological precedence of the past. It offered resistance because, in its struggle with itself and through an autodidactic exertion of remarkable coherence, it had learned to give time its due. Ironically, this new attempt at a deeper understanding of time was carried out on European soil, of all things, the homeland of resolute stasis metaphysics and convulsive apocalypticism. In the philosophical thought of modernity, the fundamental openness of the future was appropriately grasped for the first time. At the intersection of will and representation, the world assumed the form of a project and undertaking. It is not the merchants and seafarers who are responsible for reforming the world into an ensemble of projects, but rather the thinkers who undid the metaphysical paralysis of the future. Thus figures such as Schelling, Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger, Bloch, and Günther, perhaps even Cusa, too, all assume prominent positions in the pantheon of “contemporary” philosophy. Above all others, it was these authors who put an end to the eviction of time and novelty from being. They burst the dead enclosures of ontology by placing time and the new at the heart of being.
II
Ancient Greek mythology had, from afar, anticipated the revenge of time against eternity. It did so when it took the liberty of suggesting that even the immortal gods must reckon with a disaster of a higher order. The Greeks called this power of destiny moira. It embodied an unspecified variable in the background of structural being. Working from the invisible realm, it allotted to all variables what was proper to them. It possessed complete power over the arrangements, the portions, the lots, the destinies. It “prevailed” as a power prior to power, as justice prior to justice, as destiny prior to destinies. It allowed the regime of the Olympians to come into being by effecting a division of powers at the level of the absolute; it demarcated each of the jurisdictions of the chief gods from one another. Hades is appointed ruler of the underworld, Poseidon ruler of what is covered by water, and Zeus ruler of the visible realm under the heavens. When each is allotted his portion from the whole, a decisive step has been taken in the civilizing of the gods.
Look how far removed we are, already at this stage, from the crude power monsters of the pre-Olympian forces, which always wished to dominate everything en bloc! We are still just as far removed from the god of the philosophers and his cyclothymic, now merciful now wrathful doppelganger, the god of theologians! Little is known, even today, about the damage that theologians caused when they elevated “the One” at the expense of “the many.” With their disastrous distinction between God and idols they gave rise to a theodicean epidemic that has still not died away. Didn’t Isaiah already deal with the gods of other peoples by depicting them as painted pieces of wood?5 Didn’t Nietzsche remark, still in the tonality of monotheistic religious satire, that “[t]he world has more idols than realities”?6 After the One had pushed the others to the margins, the gods faded into the twilight of exile. The appointed theologians nevertheless continue to believe that they have done the world the greatest service by making a large portion of humanity dependent on an intrinsically riven god, whose uniqueness was paid for by the cleverly masked incompatibility of his highest attributes.
In their supremacist zeal, the religious theologians had insisted on garbing God with the most radiant attributes: omnipotence and omniscience.7 They did not consider that their simultaneous proclamation of these attributes implanted a real and highly explosive contradiction into the Highest. Either God is omnipotent, in which case his creative will is always free to introduce novelty and can be mirrored by his knowledge only after the fact; or he is omniscient, in which case he must have used up all his creative power. Only in the latter case can he take an eternal holiday and look back on the universe of what has been.
Old European thought needed one and a half thousand years to detonate the contradiction concealed in the monotheistic concept of God. The bursting of this contradiction, which had been disguised for so long, was for the most part misunderstood as the atheistic crisis of the modern age. In truth what happened was that power and knowledge, both the higher and the lower forms, were interwoven and reconfigured. However, while the younger theologians, the Protestants above all, embraced modernity’s openness toward the future and, more or less tacitly, reconciled themselves to the loss of God’s omnipotence,8 contemporary Islam continues to make much ado about Allah’s omnipotence. Yet, because even Allah has long since become incapable of novelty and remains fixed in his past as creator, he can allow his allegedly still virulent omnipotence to be proven
