Prologue. The aphorisms that follow are thought experiments working through a number of philosophical and spiritual challenges related to Agamben’s phrase, “living a relation to the inappropriable.” Such a disposition to otherness as inappropriable comes with many traps. We actually have to understand and embrace the traps as part and parcel with living a relation to the inappropriable.

Why? Because the inappropriable cannot be purely reduced to space. Thinking like Henri Bergson, we should attend to duration and our experience of time. By undertaking “a certain displacement of our attention” we broaden our ability to perceive. This displacement of attention requires the recognition of traps while never fooling ourselves into believing that we can be free of all traps. The latter would be to turn the inappropriability of duration into the appropriability of our own self-determined salvation.

Spatialized thinking sneaks in imperceptibly because it is how we get on in the world. We can’t do without it. However, it sets traps for us when we think that this practical aspect of thought corresponds to reality. In other words, we get on in the world by making the inappropriable into the appropriated. We do this through thousands of acts of reification every moment of our lives. How we organize our homes; how we set repetitive schedules and ritutals for ourselves; and occasionally how we seek to rearrange the furniture of these reifications to “shake things up.” For Bergson, this is all the practical work that, underlying all of it, admits that we are living in the flow of time.

We must be clear on this point however: We are under no obligation to believe that the way we think is symmetrical with reality. We have to go backwards through this assumed symmetry to find a broader perception of our experience:

I repeat, there is nothing more natural: the breaking up of change into states enables us to act upon things, and it is useful in a practical sense to be interested in the states rather than the change itself … I shall not press this point. Let each of us undertake the experiment, let him give himself the direct vision of a change, of a movement: he will have a feeling of absolute indivisibility. (Bergson: Key Writings, The Perception of Change, my emphasis)

I believe, with Bergson (and many others), that philosophy before the Enlightenment was much more tuned into duration as the basis of experience. Thus we can find in those texts prolonged attempts to “have a feeling of absolute indivisibility.” To be sure, they often will resolve into spatial thinking. Stoicism will seek the self-contained and smug virtue of the sage and call it apatheia. Augustine will ultimately find the Church to be the permanent incarnation of the Kingdom of God in the civitas terrena.

Yet these texts help those of us who wish to “undertake the experiement” and to “give himself the direct vision of a change, of a movement” to find in those texts moments where the traps are set and avoided, even if sometimes they don’t succeed.

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The Augustinian Threshold. In the middle of Augustine’s long meditation on time in Confessions (Book XI), he arrives at a crucial moment which is the echo of a Socratic question:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know. (Confessions XI.xiv.17, 242)

Laches gave Socrates substantially the same answer when asked repeatedly for the definition of courage: “I still think I know what courage is, but I can’t understand how it has escaped me just now so that I can’t pin it down in words and say what it is” (Laches 194A-B). Both demonstrate the problem of words and the poverty of logical explanations shot through with futility when trying to grasp the Eternal. It is the emergence of the perennial problem of Western institutions of all kinds: the problem of giving an explanation — logos, account, argument, reason, justification — as a response to a conspicuously Socratic formulation: “What then is _____?”

The poverty of an adequate explanation constitutes a threshold between the Eternal and the world in which we live. For Laches, it will amount to a perplexity (aporia) that gets him stuck between defining the eternal eidos of courage and teaching boys the earth-bound art of war. For Augustine, it will amount to far more than Socratic aporia as the frustration of an interlocutor. It will become the terror of the possibility that humanity is cut off from Eternity. This terrifying threshold, and the variety of ways it is experienced, is the substance of Augustine’s life’s work. Though I am not an Augustinian scholar, I believe it is plausible to ask somewhat rhetorically, “Which of his extant texts does not deal with this threshold between the Eternal and the time into which humanity is consigned?”

I could push this further: Which of his extant texts does not seek to create this threshold as human experience stretched between the Eternal and the earth-bound?

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Logos, logoi, Terror. For Augustine, humanity speaks in a different language than God. God’s Logos, adamantly singular in its grammatical appearance in John 1:1, emerges out of Eternity. As it flows, it creates a threshold that stands between Eternity and duration even as the singular Logos creates a multiplicity of durations. Because time is created out of God’s Logos, giving a human account of what time is may not be answerable by human logoi. The Logos flows one way out of Eternity, and human logoi cannot retrace the path even though both are God’s creations. This is the source of the poverty of human logoi, and it is the source of Augustine’s terror. It will be his lifelong struggle, which will continually oscillate between the theoretical/logical and the dramatic/tragic.

We must be clear: this is not a problem of mere translation of one set of semantic structures (God’s Logos emanating from Eternity) to another (human logoi “uttered in time”). This utterance is the threshold between human experience as duration and God’s Eternity as the complete absence of duration. God and man inhabit two entirely different realms. The realm we inhabit, at God’s behest, is experience, and experience is duration. God, on the contrary, has no duration and therefore no experience. “You are the Eternal Creator of all times, and that no times are co-eternal with You…” (Confessions XI.xxix.40, 256). The question “What was God doing before he made the world?” makes no sense because He does not experience before and after.

Human experience is thus always already within a threshold between the Eternal and duration. Peter Brown cautioned us about characterizing this state of being as fallen. “It had not just ‘run out’ ineluctably from some higher perfection, as Plotinus had thought” (Augustine of Hippo, 327). He reminds us that the threshold between the Eternal Civitas Dei and civitas terrena is constituted, in Augustine’s later works, as the wholesale acceptance of a gift from God in its entirety. We cannot, like the Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians, pick and choose what we want to keep and what we want to jettison. We do not judge the gift but merely accept it.

We must be clear on this point when reading Augustine for spiritual (and political) guidance today, a point that he lost in Book XX of City of God: the Eternal cannot be pulled across the threshold into the temporal. The civitas terrena is not perfectible. Full Stop.

By keeping perfectibility contained within Eternity and thus completely outside of human time, Augustine focuses us on what can be achieved while we sojourn here on earth.

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True Philosophy. Keeping the threshold as threshold means accepting the gift of the threshold totally and completely. This scope and acceptance of the gift must be total — it contains everything including Logos, logoi, predestination, free will, grace, suffering, afflictions, miseries, duration, the longing for Eternity — all of it. The threshold is not empty. It is full.

Coming to terms with this is “true philosophy.”

Moreover, if true philosophy, the sole defense against the miseries of this life, is divinely given only to a few, it becomes very clear from this that the human race has been condemned to the punishment of those afflictions. But just as this, on the pagan’s admission, is the greatest gift of heaven, so we must believe that it is given by no other god but the one God to whom even the worshippers of many gods ascribe a position of pre-eminence. (City of God XXII.23, 1068)

How, exactly, is true philosophy “the sole defense against the miseries of this life”? Must we read sole defense as the accepting of the gift of suffering as a burden against which we need to defend ourselves? Possibly, but there is no sense of burden in this passage. What if we choose to read true philosophy’s defensive power as an unwillingness to take refuge in ressentiment or indifference? What if, instead, we choose to find a shared inspiration, paradoxically, in Nietzsche’s affirmation and Yes-saying? What if Augustine’s true philosophy and Nietzsche’s affirmation share this simple transformative thought: Everything must be accepted as a gift that is not a burden.

We will have to dive deep into the relationship between affirmation and negation. In doing so, we will find that overhauling our experience of time will be fundamental to reworking this relationship and its various traps.

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Predestination and eternal recurrence. “If this thought were to gain power over you, it would transform and perhaps crush you as you are…” (GS 341, “The Greatest Weight”). You can respond to Nietzsche’s thought in two ways. You can be powerfully and positively transformed by it or you can embrace a deeply seeded ressentiment. The first is the acceptance of the greatest weight as a gift that you cannot refuse. Get on with it. The second becomes the occasion for self-justification — I deserve (or don’t deserve) this.

What if predestination is Augustine’s greatest weight? Seen this way, would it not be the equivalent of Nietzsche’s eternal return? Don’t both concepts keep us from justifying this world and ourselves in terms of how it treats us? Don’t both thoughts say to us, “it would transform and perhaps crush you as you are…"? Don’t both concepts invite us to say to ourselves, “Your eternal fate is not up to you, so get on with the business of living.”

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Affirmation without Burdens. In the sixteenth footnote to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze tells us that “Nietzsche never ceases to denounce the assimilation of ‘affirm’ with ‘bear.’” To assimilate these is “to remain enslaved to the negative.” We must understand how enslavement to the negative is the fundamental challenge posed by Nietzsche’s affirmation.

There are more than a few traps.

Separation. It is too easy to say that affirmation and negation must be kept absolutely separate — that we can and should have one without the other. The two are entangled, and we should not pretend that they are not. Pretending that they are separate entraps us within as if brands of morality that smuggle in ressentiment thinking that it is pure affirmation.

We see this in the recourse of the Absurdist who “must imagine Sisyphus happy.” When we operate as if, we install absurdity as our fundamental reality. To overcome this reality, we must behave as if something else is true, which traps us into a realization that the as if is necessarily the pursuit of a delusion. If this is true philosophy, it is based on the embrace of a negative representation that reveals, eventually, its futility: “the subject while wishing to indefinitely maintain himself in a similitude (in the as if ), while contemplating his ruin, simply loses the wager” (Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains, 42). If we believe that true philosophy is an illusory defense against a very real nothingness at the heart of being, then we are just pretending, and we are conscious of our pretense. The result is that our affirmation is fundamentally built as a defense on top of and against our own self-imposed illusion as illusion, which at some point in time will collapse into nihilism.

Becoming as the futility of permanence. The philosopher of the as if, insofar as he is “wishing to indefinitely maintain himself in a similitude,” holds onto a preference for permanence — for being over becoming. When we long for permanence, we long for something to become relatively stable in time — like a possession or an identity that endures the ticking of a clock. We must be clear on this. Permanence is not necessarily the complete absence of duration, which is how Augustine formulates Eternity in Confessions XI. Permanence arises within time as a desire to hold onto something for a long time. Permanence is, therefore, a conditioning of time and is closer to the concept of immortality as never-ending time, but it remains the experience of stabilized duration nonetheless.

The desire for permanence manifests itself in many ways: as preferences for ownership, certainty, continuity, stability, identity, essences, measurement over their opposites. As such, these manifestations carry with them implicit admission that time is a problem to be overcome. This is where the temptation of the as if becomes compelling. If we install the as if as a permanent desire for becoming over being, we delude ourselves into thinking that we’ve replaced being with becoming. We think we’ve changed states to find true freedom in the embracing of the as if. We haven’t. We’ve simply preserved the affirmation of becoming as a negation of being.

We should sit with this for a while: we’ve founded Nietzschean affirmation on the recognition of becoming as a desire for a lack of being. We want the emptiness of the illusion to fuel the will that rides on top of the illusion. Affirmation will install long-term ressentiment as the motor of this permanent state of becoming that is fueled by the repetition of a desired lack: “Affirmation is indeed produced, but in order to say yes to all that is negative and negating, to all that can be denied” (Difference and Repetition, 53).

Ressentiment. We have just laid another trap for ourselves. It is too easy to say that affirmation that starts with “as if” negation is ressentiment. Nietzsche is clear on this point: ressentiment is not spatial; it has no essence. It is not an origin that resides in the will through its own power. To mix terms from Nagarjuna and Girard and Bergson: it is simply the dependent conditioning of mimetic desire and thus can only be understood as a long-term experience of duration. “The man of ressentiment” becomes so after a prolonged embrace of an affirmation that constantly negates and denies in order to strengthen affirmation. In this way momentary physiological reactions are hardened into a psychology and an instinct as the result of prolonged practices of denial. Ressentiment becomes psychology not because its starts as negation but because it continues as habituated negation. Ressentiment cannot be thought without duration.

Aufhebung. If affirmation that starts as negation is one trap, affirmation that seeks a rising up sets the same trap. In either case, negation becomes the center of gravity of one’s universe. We simultaneously pull in negation as our centripetal force while we push out negation as the centrifugal force of Aufheben, at least as Deleuze understood it (which is not to say he got Hegel right): “Of all the senses of Aufheben, none is more important than that of ‘raise up’. There is indeed a dialectical circle, but this infinite circle has only everywhere a single center; it retains within itself all the other circles, all the other momentary centers” (Difference and Repetition, 53). It is a relentless endeavor of conservation, preservation, and permanence. Deleuze immediately delivers the punch line: “The reprises or repetitions of the dialectic express only the conservation of the whole, all the forms and all the moments, in a gigantic Memory.” The man of ressentiment never forgets because he orients everything to himself, judging everything based on how it affects him. He is the self-rotating circle that creates and consumes all the other circles, which he holds in the orbit of his negative affirmations. From his own perspective, the man of ressentiment does not appear to orbit anything.

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Deute opiso. When Matthew’s Jesus calls [legomenon] Simon (Peter) and his brother Andrew, he simply says, “Come after me [deute opiso], and I will turn you into fishers of people” (Matthew 4:19). Central to this Gospel is what it means to “come after me” (duete opiso). It is repeated throughout as a legomenon (a call) that does not come from another place. It is a call that does not pull Peter and Andrew across a threshold. The call simply suspends them from what they are doing — fishing — and invites them to come after me, which has only a metaphorical definition that comes out of the suspension of the literal meaning of fishing. In other words, what it means to be “fishers of people” (halieis anthropon) is completely unclear — fishing has become a metaphor that opens a new possibility without defining the result of the legomenon ahead of time.

If we are witnessing an early formulation of Aufheben, it is not a Hegelian logic embedded in History, but an open ended call to dislocate oneself from the familiar to come after (duete opiso) a promise without definitive content. Matthew’s challenge to his reader will always be how one responds to the call to “come after me.”

The call to Simon and Andrew comes immediately after Matthew tells us of Jesus’ main message: “From that time Jesus began to preach this message: ‘You repent [metanoeite], for the kingdom of heaven is near’” (4:17). Is 4:18-22 a demonstration of “metanoeite”? Is Matthew telling us what he thinks the action of metanoeite looks like? If so, then we have an example of an alternative practice of negation and affirmation.

We must be attentive readers of Matthew. The calling does not require a hostile negation of the present. Neither, however, is it a guarantee that it won’t turn into that over time. If we wish to find some value in Nietzschean affirmation, it will be in our ability to not let this initial negation turn into either ressentiment or indifference. This non-hostile negation can and must remain the occasion for the transvaluation of values. This revaluation is, arguably, exactly what duete opiso promises, but one must first leave behind the familiar, not as denial but as suspension of the given.

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Metanoeite. This is the Greek term that Matthew uses in 4:17 translated as “repent.” Strong’s Concordance emphasizes the temporal sequence of perception marked by this term. It is contrasted with pronoeo. “Metanoeo, lit., ‘to perceive afterwards (meta, ‘after,’ implying change,’ noeo, to perceive’ … in contrast to pronoeo, ‘to perceive beforehand.” The sequence matters, and when we understand this sequence, we see how the legomenon to metanoeite shifts the Messianic calling from spatialized experience to durational experience.

The call to repent is a call to perceive something in the future, which can only be achieved by duete opiso. It is a promise without definitive content or destination. Thus the proximity of the words metanoeo, legomenon, and duete opiso must be treated seriously. Peter and Andrew are called to duete opiso, which is only actualized as a leaving behind of a place full of built-up meanings. If this is a demonstration of repentance (metanoia) for the reader, then all that has happened is a current way of living has been negated without a clear alternative that activates the negation. Jesus does not tell them what he means by “I will make you fishers of people.” All that he does is take the accepted practice — fishing — and suggest the possibility of a different meaning to that occupation, which will most certainly not be a professional occupation. Nor is he inviting them to throw nets to catch and eat people. Yet we don’t have any proclaimed meaning that could negate their current practice by invoking Aufhebung or ressentiment or as if . Repentance and “come after me” don't seem to be automatically caught in the traps we’ve specified above in thinking the relation of affirmation and negation.

This trick will be keeping them from becoming the traps.

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Following without lack. There is no as if in Jesus’ calling of Simon and Andrew. Matthew’s Jesus has offered no illusory status to becoming fishers of people. Simon and Andrew are really going to be fishers of people, though that is as yet undefined. All that has happened here is the suspension of meaning of fishing so that come after me becomes the pure dislocation that results only in a movement away from that which is familiar — clearly the family business — to reside in the dislocated non-space of following Jesus.

Nor has any lack been installed as the substance of the call to follow me. Jesus has not said anything like, “Your life stinks because you are mere fishermen. Follow me and I will show you how to overcome the current poverty and ignorance of your situation.” Repentance and “come after me” simply offer an invitation to suspend current literal meaning to enter into a metaphorical fishing. The movement is from literally being fishermen to becoming something other that is not explained.

This otherness need not resolve into lack, negation, and ressentiment toward that which is being left behind.

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Deute Opiso as pure dislocation. Yet there is a trap of which we must be careful. We will repeatedly return to this trap to avoid it as we are stepping into it. René Girard pointed it out as he reworked Nietzschean ressentiment for a nuclear age. Girardian ressentiment is “a no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge” (A Theatre of Envy, 284). Hamlet falls into the trap when he finds himself unable to generate new values on which to address the murder of his father. Stuck in the no-man’s land of ressentiment, Hamlet finally finds his model in Laertes:

‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do.
Woo’t weep? Woo’t fight? Woo’t fast? Woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.” (V.i. 274-279)

In Hamlet’s plea to “show me what thou’lt do,” we have a perverted version of duete opiso. We have in Hamlet a duete opiso that is a strict imitation that denies the fundamental aspect of Nietzschean affirmation: the no man’s land of ressentiment and indifference can only be overcome by a commitment to the transvaluation of values within the no man’s land.

This is the new trap that we have discovered: the duete opiso that is only a promise without content — that is a metanoeo that is only the promise of something that will be perceived later — must not become an end in itself. Becoming must not entrap itself in the no man’s land of the as if, the empty Aufhebung of the now that seeks its realization in the raising up, the belief that emptiness and nothingness is a ground on which we turn becoming into a desirable mode of absent being.

As we move into this dislocated duete opiso, we cannot treat it as a place of indifference and inaction. It must become the affirmative duration in which new values emerge.

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Duration and affirmation. In the pure dislocation of Peter and Andrew being called to come after me, repentance has become the experience of pure duration. There is no where that following is leading to. It’s not “Follow me to Jerusalem where truth will be revealed in my being crucified.” It’s simply “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” None of this can be resolved in spatialized concepts of being or becoming as a lack of being.

What have we learned? What has been demonstrated? If there is an imitation of the Messiah, what is it that we are to imitate? Simply this: we cannot do without some forms of negation if we are to practice affirmation. The trick is to think both affirmation and negation within duration and within the challenge of the transvaluation of values. This goes beyond being versus becoming. We must dwell in the threshold to find neither a separation nor a simplified Aufhebung nor the self-imposed illusion of as if — nor any other mode of repetition and representation that defines a priori how affirmation and negation must work. The practices of affirmation can only take off from within the durations we inhabit.

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Civitas Peregrina. Augustine’s Civitas Dei is not a spatialized opposition to the civitas terrena. Augustine repeatedly refers to the City of God as peregrina — translated as the pilgrimage as a foreigner in someone else’s homeland: “the Eternal City, while on pilgrimage in this world” (XV.5, Bettenson trans.). The Civitas Dei is not yet a place. It is a hope and therefore the experience of duration within the civitas terrena.

We should not mistake duration as endurance. The peregrina of the Civitas Dei is best represented by Enos, the son of Seth, who displays the disposition of hope that one has while sojourning in the civitas terrena: “For this calling upon God is the supreme business, the whole business of this mortal life, the City of God while on pilgrimage in this world” (XV.21). “It is in hope, therefore, that a man lives, as a ‘son of the resurrection’; it is in hope that the City of God lives, during its pilgrimage on earth” (XV.18).

Augustine is adamant about the temporality of Enos’ practice of calling upon God: “Notice that Scripture does not say, ‘He hoped in the Lord God’, or, ‘He called on the name of the Lord God’, but ‘He hoped to call on the name of the Lord God.’ The meaning of ‘He hoped to call’ can only be prophetic” (XV.18). “He hoped” and “He called on” indicate the present-tense desire to pull the Eternal across the threshold to solve the problems of the world permanently. This hope is an impatient desire for immediate permanence and would, therefore, turn the City of God into an oppressive political entity. By emphasizing the present hope as a prophetic disposition to the future, “the hope to call on” becomes a double emphasis on the irreducible temporality of peregrina within the time-bound civitas terrena.

For Augustine, this Civitas Peregrina is essential to Christian time — a duration that occupies a threshold between the civitas terrena and the Civitas Dei. It is an active time, not a passively nihilistic one. We should follow Peter Brown’s reading of the Civitas Peregrina: “What was at stake, in the City of God and in Augustine’s sermons, was the capacity of men to ‘long’ for something different, to examine the nature of their relationship with their immediate environment; above all, to establish their identity by refusing to be engulfed in the unthinking habits of their fellows.” As such the true Christian lives the imperfect life of a “vestigia, of an alternative to the normal, all-embracing aims of fallen men” (Augustine of Hippo, 322).

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Civitas Peregrina and affirmation. The inhabitant of the Civitas Peregrina is a vestigia that is simultaneously in the world but not fully so. It requires a powerful mindset and concomitant practices that can navigate the sin of ressentiment — the deep seated desire for vengeance that seeks the permanence of a City of God in the here and now. This desire is flanked by indifference as its bipolar twin — the renunciation of responsibility by taking refuge in a Stoic moral smugness that couldn’t care less about the reality of suffering.

This is the experience of peregrina as duration — sojourning and walking in a land as a resident alien, neither in the world nor wholly outside of it, yet fully engaged in it. The Civitas Peregrina is a city away from home, a city of the meantime, a city that is the threshold between the civitas terrena and Civitas Dei. It challenges the vestigia to embrace affirmation: “So the City of God, far from being a book about flight from the world, is a book whose recurrent theme is ‘our business within this common mortal life’; it is a book about being otherworldly in the world” (Augustine of Hippo, 324, quoting City of God XV.21). Whether or not Augustine fully holds onto the power of the peregrina as threshold remains to be seen. Plenty have not thought so. Brown’s reading is certainly optimistic and generous, but not altogether unhelpful.

Traps still remain.

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Peripaton. Matthew 4:18 begins with Peripaton. Jesus is “walking” when he calls Simon and Andrew. From this peripaton, the call to repent is issued and framed temporally: Apo tote erxato o Iesous keryssein kei legein, “Metanoeite, engiken gar he basileia ton ouranon.”(From that time, Jesus began to proclaim and to say, “Repent, has drawn near the kingdom of the heavens.’) On the front end, we have the announcement that there has been a temporal shift in Jesus’ ministry, which has now become the “proclamation and saying” (keryssein kei legein) of a message. On the back end, the message itself is about a change in the nature and experience of time: the time of the kingdom has drawn near (engiken gar he basileia ton ouranon).

What is the status of engiken (has drawn near)? This is not a spatial engiken. It is temporal. Its most vivid description comes in Matthew 25:31-46. Certainly all nations will be gathered at a place, and the good individuals will be divided from the bad ones. The former will be granted eternal life. The latter will be cast into eternal damnation. But this spatial phenomenon is still in the future. What has drawn near is the moment in which this will happen. This is the temporal configuration in which Jesus’ peripaton occurs.

All of the Gospels (and especially the letters of Paul) proclaim this temporality that is between the beginning of Jesus’ message and the ending of time. The end of time has not yet occurred. Time is ending, not ended. Our earliest Christian writings deal explicitly with how to live — how to come after (Matthew) and go ahead of (Luke) Jesus as the one who proclaimed and said (keryssein kei legein) that the time of the kingdom (basileia) has drawn near (engiken). He does so by explicitly and emphatically walking around (peripaton) without ever permanently inhabiting or dwelling anywhere in particular.

Space and time are thus suspended in the peripaton that is the pilgrimage — being otherworldly while doing work in the world.

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Remnants, Vestiges, Sojourning, Coming After. This is the challenge of Christian spirituality that Augustine demonstrates throughout most of his life: how to live in the Civitas Peregrina without ressentiment and without indifference.

A life that is lived in the threshold is lived as a vestigia in the civitas terrena longing for the Civitas Dei without that longing becoming any form of ressentiment or whithering into Stoic indifference and apatheia. The vestigia consciously lives in a time that is neither perfectible nor completely fallen. This life learns to maintain the threshold between the civitas terrena and Civitas Dei without seeking to collapse either into the other.

Because Eternity must remain separate from duration — the threshold cannot be permanently crossed by human means — this life as vestigia can only be a peregrina — the life lived as an alien sojourner: “And God’s City lives in this world’s city, as far as its human element is concerned; but it lives there as an alien sojourner” (City of God XVIII.1, my emphasis). In Book XX, Augustine will explicitly declare this alien sojourning over — the Church will become the institutional embodiment of the City of God in this world. But at least at this moment in Book XVIII, we are not yet to this resolution — this appropriation of human history by the Church’s history.

I wish he wouldn’t have fallen into this institutional trap.

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Immanentizing the Eschaton. For Eric Vogelin, the twentieth century had become thoroughly Gnostic. He found the cure for political Gnosticism in Augustine’s resolution never to allow Eternity to cross the threshold. “Immanentizing the eschaton” is what he called any effort to turn the experience of the threshold into a political program that wants to bring the end of time into permanent being through institutional power.

This is a direct consequence of Christianity’s configuration of time, Eternity, and longing, but it is not its inevitable outcome. Rather, it is the outcome of misrecognizing that the uncertainty operating in threshold between Eternity and duration is how Christianity is supposed to work:

Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a ‘world full of gods’ is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith. (Quoted in Latour, Facing Gaia, Sixth Lecture, 201)

The moral and political danger is the Gnostic reduction of this threshold to certainty as the overcoming of the fear inherent in the experience of the threshold: “The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul is openness toward God,… trembling on the verge of certainty that if gained is lost — the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience’” (Vogelin quoted in Facing Gaia, 202).

Vogelin saw precisely this “trembling on the verge of certainty that if gained is lost” as the essence of Augustine’s battles against Gnostic doctrines of the Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians. This precarious threshold is, in fact, what Augustine’s practice of confession negotiates.

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Becoming is the new being. We are once again presented with another trap — uncertainty as our true value. Certainty and permanence cannot become our new enemies. We cannot simply flip the good-evil binary from being to becoming as our transvaluation of value. All this would amount to is making uncertainty and becoming the constant negation of any moment in which certainty and being make their appearance. We would be living in the negative as if — i.e., we must behave as if all certainty is an illusion and deny it the moment it appears. This would simply make denial into our redemptive practice. Uncertainty and impermanence simply become a new certainty. The likely outcome is a Stoic’s desire for apatheia as a permanent state of one’s own smug and self-contained virtue. It will turn into ressentiment when we realize that we can’t live this way for very long.

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Metaxu. It has become fashionable to talk about living in the in-between (the Greek is metaxu). Being in-between cannot become a permanent solution. It is also a quite elite and privileged desire that today goes by self-help names such as work-life balance and egolessness. If the metaxu is spatialized and made permanent (i.e., becoming is the new being), it will become Nietzschean decádence.

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Brief habits. Nietzsche writes of brief habits as a demonstration of affirmation. In just a few short words, he executes a powerful undoing of all as if philosophies. Brief habits (GS 295) is a beautiful expression of affirmation and the tragic as practices of time.

We shall only need to dwell on one parenthetical phrase to get the meaning: “even a brief habit has this passionate faith, this faith in eternity.” This is the undoing of all as if philosophies that embrace the permanence-of-impermanence as their redemptive dogmas. When we find a practice — a brief habit — that works for us, it feels eternal. This feeling is not fake: “I always believe this will satisfy me all the time now.” Brief habits are not illusions riding on top of a nothingness presumed to be our reality. We do not adopt our practices as if they are true, thus holding onto the absurdity of existence that will ultimately collapse. Brief habits are experienced as eternal — until they are not: “And then one day its time is up: this good thing takes leave of me, not as something that now makes me nauseous — but peacefully and sated by me, as I am by it, and as if we should be grateful to one another and so shake hands in parting.” Yes, he says it: “as if we should be grateful to one another.” But this it not the as if of a consciously embraced illusion. It is the as if of a similie that personifies the brief habit so as to drive home the human mutuality of an amicable parting.

Brief habits are eternal while they last, and this how they enact affirmation without negation: “and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads deep contentment all around and into me, so that I desire nothing else, without my having to compare or despise or to hate” (my emphasis). Again, this experience of the eternal is not fake or illusory. When we are in the habits, we are in them fully and without ressentiment — “without my having to compare or despise or to hate” in order to bring value to the practice.

Without the authentic embrace of the eternal — that declares itself no longer necessary when its usefulness has run its course — we are forced into the conclusion of a life lived in the ultimate chaos of the as if: “However, the most unbearable, the genuinely terrifying thing to me would be a life entirely without habits, a life that constantly demands improvisation: — this would be my exile and my Siberia.” A life stuck in permanence — “enduring habits” — is just as intolerable as a life without habits — improvisation.

Is this impermanence as the negation of all permanence? There is simply no way to read GS 295 as advocating this. It is one of the finest expressions of the tragic and the affirmative transvaluation of all values: “Indeed, I am gratefully disposed to all my misery and sickness, and to whatever is imperfect in me — from the bottom of my soul, because all this leaves me a hundred back doors through which I can escape my enduring habits.” This is the corrective to Zarathustra’s advocacy of impermanence: “Thus you are advocates and justifiers of all impermance” (Z II.2).

We should not read impermanence here as something we actively seek. This would be the supreme act of affirmation as negation and nihilism. Zarathustra’s impermanence is not a conscious embrace of the as if that rides on top of negation. Nor is it the as if that negates all desires for permanence as if permanence is fake and impermanence is real. It is the willingness to not become glum and nihilistic when our practices appear as brief habits of their own accord. It is the embrace of duration as our condition and thus the recognition that things come and go, including suffering and misery. Within this duration, we affirm the power of effort to steer and tack and otherwise navigate life with brief habits.

We become Michel Serres’ helmsman. This also is exactly the value of affirmation that Bergson found in “The Pragmatism of William James”: “the truth, which can be attached only to what we affirm about reality, is, for him, created by our affirmation … while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention” (Bergson: Key Writings, 332).

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Resolutions. My reading of Augustine here has been mostly charitable, and in many respects unjustified. In the end, Augustine seeks permanence and resolutions, and he pulls Eternity across the threshold he creates.

With respect to his meditations on time, it turns out that the Socratic question, “What then is time?” has an answer. He cannot stand the independence of the potter’s wheel. There must be a time that is so abstract and so dominant, that even if the heavens stopped — as they did for Joshua — time would still march on. In Book XX of City of God, all the complexities and affirmative power of the Civitas Peregrina are resolved into a fully immanentized eschaton: “It follows that the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven” (XX.9, my emphasis).

The trap is set. Certainty wins out over confession. Habits are not brief: they must be made to endure. This is the kind of institutional power that Vogelin (Augustine’s fan) found at the heart of fascism: “The thrones [of Revelations 20:4] are to be interpreted as the seats of the authorities by whom the Church is now governed, and those sitting on them as the authorities themselves” (City of God XX.9). In Augustine’s own words, the Church begins to transform its temporary pilgrimage — its status as vestigia — into a permanent residence and therefore must become concerned with creating an economy of its own power and glory.