Time&Eternity

114 chapter 2
consists of moments of equal value. It becomes senseless to speak of directions,
long-term projects, and implementation. Immortality—the goal of
the modern age—basically becomes boring: “[N]ow, .l.l. it is immortality
that has been ‘tamed’—no more an object of desire, distant and alluring; no
more the remote and high-handed God, commanding ascesis, self-immolation
and self-sacrifice.” 396 Concepts such as mortality and immortality lose
relevance. “With eternity decomposed into a Brownian movement of passing
moments, nothing seems to be immortal any more. But nothing seems
mortal either. Not in the old—supra-human, sinister, awesome—sense of
‘once-for-allness,’ of irrevocability, of irreversibility.” 397 The only constancy
is transitoriness; the mortality that is repeated daily becomes immortality; 398
and recycling becomes the ideal. Identities no longer exist; there are only
transformations. 399 The belief in the Western variant of reincarnation that
seems to grow in attraction can clearly be understood as an attempt to tame
the constancy of transitoriness by changing it into a transformation that has
a certain degree of continuity, but no actual obligation. 400
Life does not resemble a carefully constructed novel with a plot of numerous
layers of relationships in time and space; rather, it disintegrates into
disconnected episodes. 401 Sacrifices for the sake of the future are not worthwhile.
Equality is attained when everyone enjoys the present to the maximum,
since the now is the only place of happiness. 402 The collapse of time
as a totality and the splintering of the constant into an infinite series of
transitory moments make both self-identity and authority a problem.
Nothing lasts “for an entire lifetime” anymore, neither skills and the place
of residence, nor work and one’s partner. 403 What remains is death: “The
paradoxical outcome of modernity’s project is that the work of modernity is
being undone. Death is back—un-deconstructed, unreconstructed. Even
immortality has now come under its spell and rule. The price of exorcising
the spectre of mortality proved to be a collective incapacity to construct life
as reality, to take life seriously.” 404
If the description of death as transition could result in the eternalization
of time and the eroding of eternity by its loss of character as time’s Other,
then the conception of death as exit and end would lead to a complete loss
of eternity, causing time to disintegrate within itself and, ultimately, permitting
only death to remain. The end appears to be a dead end. Both understandings
of death highlight the questions that a theology of time must confront
if it wishes to formulate and establish a dynamic relation between
time and eternity. Both of them suffer from the fact that they, in different
ways, absolutize time and therefore remain incapable of conceiving eternity
as the Other of time.
Before I attempt to deepen our understanding of eternity as the Other