His Name is John
The naming of John the Baptist (Luke 1:57-68) is another example of how the works of the NT challenge historical time by showing us a human capacity for suspending the given to find another way of being in the world with others. In this meditation, I’d like to spend some time connecting this story to Keiji Nishitani’s elaboration of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, which is elaborating the same capacity. As a student of Heidegger in the late 1930’s, Nishitani was familiar with his lectures on this topic. The echoes are clear when one reads them side-by-side. For the purposes of this mediation, I’d like to focus on a couple of lines from Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness:
To recap the main point, in newness without ceasing, we see two simultaneous faces of time: one of creation, freedom, and infinite possibility, and one of infinite burden, inextricable necessity. Newness is essentially equivocal; thus, so is time. (221)
For Nishitani, this is karma — the recognition that time has two simultaneous faces. One face is the incessant repetition of newness that has a fundamental openness of possibility in its movement. This is one form of Eternal Recurrence — the constant repetition of the newness of the now. The other face is the accumulation of the past in the present. If time were only an infinite openness to possibility, then time would not be possible. The only thing that would recur is newness itself untethered from the past. The past would truly be in the past and it would have no impact on the present.
This is not just the personal accumulation of the time of my being, nor is it even limited to the accumulation of human historical time. It is the accumulation in the now of everything that has ever been or will be. Trace this time back, and we end up moving through human history to cosmological durations: “…our existence comes about from within an infinite nexus, reaching back into the past from our parents to their parents, back before the appearance of the human race, the constitution of the solar system, and so on ad infinitum, even as it extends equally without limit into the future” (238). We are in the Buddhist experience of sunyata (emptiness) and pratityasamutpada (dependent existence). We are also in the experience of Serres’ Grand Récit as the wholeness of all durations with nothing outside nor in the calm center as the guiding force or principle.
For Nishitani (as for Serres), the innovation is to de-spatialize these concepts and to make them fundamentally temporal. When we do so, we come to a recognition that the life we live in all its moments is interwoven with the whole, but simultaneously we realize — or should realize — that the decisions we make in each recurring now are additive to this wholeness. We do not sit outside this wholeness looking at it from the sidelines. We are not subjects looking at “other people’s affairs” from the outside. Zarathustra says angrily to the fool, “You spirit of gravity, do not make things to easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height” (Zarathustra, “The Riddle and the Vision” Kaufmann trans.). Zarathustra’s anger is that the fool can only experience Eternal Recurrence as an abstract concept. He has resolved time to a circle, and in this he takes comfort in the smooth repetition of time. He simply sits on the side of the lane looking at Augenblick without understanding its implications for experience.
And if everything has been there before — what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore — itself too? For whatever can walk — in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more. (Zarathustra, “The Vision and the Riddle”)
The gateway of Augenblick (translated by Kaufmann as Moment) is not a neutral now disconnected from the past and the future. Augenblick is the freedom of orientation to the future and the burden of the past accumulating into the present. “Must not this gateway too have been here before?” This accumulation that is open to the future is a knotting together of all of the past into the now such that all of the past is present and the now becomes an ever present burden of always having to act — i.e., the past delivers the capacity to act to us as our burden. “For whatever can walk — in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more.” We do not choose our capacity to act; it is given as the burden and the possibility by Eternal Recurrence.
Let’s make this concrete. My decision to move from Long Island to Denver, to get married, and to start a family are not just decisions made in the past. They are decisions that are fully present in every single now of my experience. These decisions thus eternally recur: they are part of the karma that has built up in the accumulation of time. But these decisions were never possible outside of the cumulative network of durations that made them possible — from the human reproductive system to the spatial configuration of the United States that made it possible to imagine Long Island and Denver as part of the same networked culture through which I could move. Tracing further backward, I will find myself engaged with the whole of time that has made all of this possible.
This does not mean, however, that those decisions we pre-programmed into the movement of time from the Big Bang forward. For Nishitani’s Eternal Recurrence, both faces of time are simultaneously true: nothing is possible without the accumulation, but the accumulation does not rigorously define the next move in the endlessly recurring possibilities and burdens of the now. This means that time is neither purely circular nor purely linear. Both must be true for the two faces of time to be eternally recurrent. If time were simply a line, then there is nothing guaranteeing that the progression from moment to moment would be continuous. The metaphor of the line disables any capacity for accumulation. If a line is truly open ended on either side stretching into eternity, then what guarantees from one moment to the next that the past remains present? Wouldn’t we have a succession of nows disconnected from each other?
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Zeno’s Paradox. From the perspective of time, the purely linear model opens only two possibilities. First, no change is at all possible — i.e., Zeno’s paradox. If each present stands alone, then they are disconnected from each other. We would find it necessary to invent something else that intervenes between points to cause movement from point to point. This is one way in which Eternal Recurrence has been interpreted. “What I am speaking of here is something other than the endlessly recurring system of identical time, in which the same world-process returns again and again in Eternal Recurrence” (219). The linearity of time is Eternal Recurrence as Ground Hog Day where experience as impossible because time is merely the unchanging “successive repetitions” of what has already occurred. The repetitions are so minute and so tightly bound that no experience is ever possible because time is not accumulating, it is merely repeating itself identically. This is the absurdity that Zeno’s paradox leads to. By staring more deeply into the line of motion and by breaking it up into discreet points, we lose the ability for experience to be possible because time and motion are not possible. No point can ever lead to a different point because there is no bridge. Bergson captured the impossibility of this model to provide any notion of time or experience: “The two instants could not be separated by an interval of time since, by hypothesis, you reduce time to a juxtaposition of instants. Therefore they would not be separated by anything, and consequently they would be only one: two mathematical points which touch are one” (Key Writings, “The Perception of Change,” 320).
Second, the pure linearity of time as a succession of instants allows us to equally imagine a chaos of infinite possibilities because the past does not accumulate from one moment to the next. Each new instant is completely independent and therefore completely untethered to a past that would provide any constraints whatsoever on the pure newness of the now. Movement would be a leaping through a spatial void — however small — that takes nothing with it from point to point. In other words, this would simply mean that nothing lasts. Thus the phrase, “infinite possibilities” is meaningless because the past does not endure into the present. How can we learn anything? How can we make decisions without some assumption that the decision we make will have lasting consequences? Experience and perception as having some minimum continuity from the past lasting into the present and therefore the future would not be possible.
We need a concept of recurrence as accumulation in order avoid insanity. This requires that “Time is at once circular and rectilinear” (219). Nishitani captures this simultaneity of the circular and the linear in an awkwardly translated phrase: “openness at the bottom of time.” All this means is that Eternal Recurrence is not a closed system, nor is it a purely open one. It is a cumulative movement of multiple durations where the past is preserved in the present without that preservation being turned into the closed system of a hard determinism. Such a closed system requires an ontotheological God (i.e., God as a Being not subject to time) whether we think of that God as Aristotle’s unmoved mover, the God of the Israelites who makes a binding promise, Augustine’s God who guarantees the existence of time as non-chaotic, Kant’s various transcentals, Darwin’s God of Natural Selection, or the knee-jerk Marxist’s God that reduces the movement of history to Class Struggle playing itself out. All of these modes of thinking time purport to open our perception to the movement of time, but they do so at very big cost: they limit the thinking of time by placing some thing beyond time as its controller. This thing allows us to stave off the Death of God by projecting within time a fundamental force that allows us to turn time into something to be observed rather than authentically experienced.
Thinking time as controlled by a thing also cuts off the cumulative power of time. These concepts of time are simply absorptive and self-reinforcing. Everything is absorbed back into a time that is always only the expression of the underlying thing. Eternal recurrence, thought as the absorptive expression of an unchanging logic of time, leaves behind the newness of the now. All we have is the unending expression of sameness as the thing expresses itself as the governor of time. To think, as Bergson and Nishitani did, that time (dureé, karma) is cumulative, is to expand the absorptive model to a breaking point because it makes the newness of the now count as additive and therefore meaningful, however minute, to the accumulation of the past into the present.
Without the simultaneity of the two faces of time — the openness of possibility and the accumulation of the past into the present — time will always be reduced to an object that we assert as background to a narrative of being and becoming. That object can be neutralized into complete passivity — as in Newtonian time — or it can be active as in Darwin’s evolution where time does actual work in the world. In either case, time is neutralized by fundamental Natural Laws that are beyond the control of time and function as its master.
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Historical consciousness and Eternal Recurrence. The two faces of time — and thus Eternal Recurrence — are arguably at the heart of the New Testament. The stories that make up the NT are unthinkable without the accumulation of the historical past into the present and the emptiness at the bottom of time that makes this accumulation open to new possibilities. This experience of time is embedded in the importance of the term katargeo (to render something inoperative without destroying it) that is an anchor of Paul’s letters, which are our earliest Christian texts: 26 of 27 occurrences of the form of this word in the NT appears in Paul’s letters. It is also crucial in the first recorded words of Jesus in Mark 1:15 (our earliest Gospel), which hinges on the Greek word metanoia — a conversion that orients oneself to a truth that will be perceived in the future: “Metanoiete and believe in the euangelion.” Nishitani finds metanoia at the heart of the two faces of time: “The essential ambiguity in the meaning of time means that time is essentially the field of fundamental conversion, the field of a ‘change of heart’ or metanoia (pravritti-vijnana)” (222).
In Luke’s story of John the Baptist’s birth, we find the accumulation of history concentrating into a moment of metanoia as the naming of a child. This kairos of John’s birth marks the beginning of a fulfillment of history as well as a suspension of the expectations of that fulfillment. This is the power of the message of early Christianity as a message of Eternal Recurrence as the two faces of time.
To be sure, this formulation of Eternal Recurrence is not a metaphysical assertion of the nature of time. It simply points out to us how malleable our experience and configuration of Eternal Recurrence can be. The birth of John the Baptist, as told in Luke’s Gospel, occurs within the historical consciousness documented in the Hebrew Bible. This historical consciousness envisioned time as an in-between duration bookended by God’s promise to Abraham and its fulfillment. Hans Blumenberg captured the essential feature of this historical consciousness: “following the Babylonian exile, compensations for a destroyed national existence developed whose consoling effect was counterbalanced by their highly indefinite nature; their purpose was to make history tolerable, to bestow on it a surrogate of meaning” (“Secularizatoin” in History, Metaphors, Fables, 60).
Paul’s letters and the synoptic Gospels suspend this historical consciousness of time by saying that its indefinite nature is coming to an end. As such, we are reading texts whose main purpose was to suspend the given meaning of the Hebrew Bible’s historical consciousness by reworking its expectations. This reworking had a double temporal movement. The first is retrospective: Jesus was the promised messiah, and you missed it. We find this in the opening lines of the first Gospel: “Arche tou euangeliou Iesou Christou, Holou Theou.” [The beginning of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, Son of God”] (Mark 1:1). The provocative nature of this announcement (euangalion) is unimaginable without the larger historical consciousness this euangelion enters into.
The second temporal movement is the engiken (has drawn near) of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:15). The euangelion orients the reader to an imminent end of time that intensifies historical consciousness while “exploding history and stripping it of any relevance” (Blumenberg, 60). In other words, historical consciousness remains, it’s just that human salvific action has no bearing on when the end will occur. Consciousness remains and is in fact intensified in its attention to behavior, but historical time is emptied as the Kingdom’s arrival is imminent. (Paul’s letters are the expression of exactly this intensity of consciousness untethered from the indefinite nature of how long one needs to keep this up.)
To summarize: We are reading of the need for an intensified historical consciousness untethered from its historical agency. God has set the time of the end, which is imminent. There is still time to save your self, but your actions will have no control over the timing of the end. Blumenberg again: “It is something radically different on the one hand to impose on history a framework of boundary notions, with creation at the beginning and judgement and apocalypse at the end, and on the other to do away with any meaning that an image of history might have by rendering what happens in the world insignificant against what happens to it” (60). This is a crucial point: the salvific behavior required in the time that remains has no bearing on God’s choice of when to end time. His decision is made, and all that you can do is behave in a way that gains you access to eternal life after the apocalyptic judgement. Prior to this moment, it was quite plausible that collective behavior (keeping the law of Moses) would influence God’s choice of timing. Early Christianity definitively broke this connection between collective action and eschatological timing. In its wake, it left an eternally recurring debt that we live with today. As Blumenberg rightly pointed out, this legacy left behind questions that it was ill-equipped to answer. As time dragged on, the historical consciousness emptied and reworked by the Christian euangelion left behind an intensified consciousness of history emptied of the fulfillment it proclaimed was imminent. We should emphasize the consciousness of this historical consciousness. These early Christian texts are emptying the consciousness of its indefinite nature — the end is imminent — but in doing so consciousness of one’s place in history had to become a question once the imminent nearness of the kingdom proved hard to believe. Without an imminent end, the consciousness remains, but its confidence in the trajectory of history turns into an open question about that trajectory. The answer will have to come from another source because early Christianity had no need for long-term answers that could reground consciousness in an understanding of how history was moving.
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His name is John. To return to Luke’s story of John’s birth: the story starts with an announcement that time (chronos) has been fulfilled: “Te de Elisabet eplesthe ho chronos tou tekein auten kai egennesen huion.” [Now the time was fulfilled for Elizabeth to give birth, and she had a son.”] To be sure, this fulfillment of time (eplesthe ho chronos) could simply mean that Elizabeth had reached the end of a nine month term. But that would be a quite narrow reading. The story is framed within the larger narrative of the fulfillment of the promise God made to Abraham: it is immediately followed by Zechariah’s prophecy of the coming fulfillment of God’s promise.
So the announcement that time (chronos is Luke’s choice of word) is fulfilled in Elizabeth’s pregnancy coming to term is woven into the fulfillment of historical time. As with all the gospels, this fulfillment suspends the expectation of what the messiah was supposed to be without destroying the expectation by rendering it an illusion. Like Mark and Matthew, Luke’s purpose for writing his Gospel is to make the strong claim that Jesus was the messiah, and most of Israel missed it. Thus in the Gospels we see the explicit suspension of the given meaning of the historical consciousness of time. In this particular episode of the naming of John, this suspension occurs immediately in verse 59: “On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they wanted to name him Zechariah after his father.” Two indicators of historical consciousness are invoked here. First, the circumcision on the eighth day is a provision of the law. Following the law is explicitly the participation in historical consciousness as the condition for collective salvation. When “they came to circumcise,” the anonymous and generic “they” are simply fulfilling their obligation to the law and therefore to historical consciousness as the cultural given of the Israelites. The second indicator is that this eighth day will also include the naming of the child according to tradition. He should inherit his name from his ancestors by force of tradition. We are not told if the child is circumcised, but we do get the emphatic refusal to play by the traditional rules of naming. His name will be Ioannes.
Everything in this story points to a break with the given historical consciousness without it being an outright rejection of it. Two further moments indicate this. In 62-63, “they” turn to Zechariah as the paterfamilias to override the decision of the mother. First, he not only refuses to override Elizabeth, but he strengthens his authority (and her decision) by asking for a writing tablet. In other words, he backs her up, and he solidifies the naming by writing it down — the written word, like the Gospel itself, suspends the given to send historical consciousness in a different direction.
Second, in verse 64, Zechariah immediately begins to speak the prophecy. We need to be clear that Luke writes in the passive voice: “aneochthe de to stoma auto” (literally translated: “was opened then the mouth of him”). Zechariah is not the author of these words. God is speaking through him as he does with all the prophets. It has to be this way. God is revealing himself as the two faces of Eternally Recurring temporality. This cannot be human nature reworking its own historical consciousness. This is not the revelation of humanity to itself. God is in the process of fulfilling His promise, but He is doing so in a way that is completely unexpected. This is the power of God as the power of suspending the culturally given to open new modes of perception toward the future: “All who heard these things kept them in their hearts, saying, ‘What then will this child be?’” (1:66). The fulfillment of the promise is the suspension of culturally given expectations of what that fulfillment would be. God reveals his power as precisely this power, which is available to human beings who hear “these things and keep them in their hearts.” It is a transformative message and it is not possible without Eternal Recurrence as the accumulation of the past in the present and the opening of the present to be something other than what the accumulation might otherwise dictate.
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The Power of God. To say it again: this story is not possible without a concept of time that is as complex as Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as Nishitani elaborated it and dureé as Bergson elaborated it. The Gospel presents and accumulating past in the form of a law and its traditions that must be respected: the child must be circumcised on the eighth day, and he must be given the name of a male relative because this is how it has always been done to keep the law and the promise in tact. Yet in the telling of this tale, Luke’s God reveals Himself as the power of accumulation and disruption: the accumulation of the past does not require that the present rigorously conform to a prior truth. The accumulated past merely takes the form of prior expectations for how newborns will become members of the community. God intervenes to upset these expectations and thus to reveal that the present is both the accumulated past and the openness of the present to set off in a different trajectory. “What then will this child be?”
Time can be out of joint, and this is God’s power to make it so.
More than this is at stake here, and we should be clear about this. Luke’s God is not merely revealing that we can make individual decisions that break with tradition. That is not a very compelling message by itself. It is at best a nice piece of self-help advice. All of history is concentrated in this “eplesthe ho chronos” that begins the story. At least two different durations overlap: the duration of historical consciousness is mapped onto the biological and genetic duration of human pregnancy. All of history is being loaded into this story in order to demonstrate that the power of God is this accumulation of time and its ability to be open to new possibilities: “What then will this child be?” To emphasize the point, John the Baptist is merely a precursor to the messiah, who is a precursor to the coming of the Kingdom. Jesus only announces the nearness (engiken) of the Kingdom, not its here-and-now presence. This story announces the nearness of a nearness.
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Accumulation of Durations. We need not stop the mapping of durations here. How did this passage from Luke get to me? I have a morning routine of listening to the daily mediation from Pray as You Go, which is a twenty-first century update of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises from the sixteenth century, which it modernizes in terms of intent (far less emphasis on inherent sinfulness) and delivery (it’s an app and a podcast). The selected passage was from the liturgical calendar for May 24, 2024: The Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The liturgical calendar itself is an innovation of early medieval Christianity as it sought to remake the “pagan” rituals spread throughout the Roman world in the service of an ascendent Christianity. This ascendency needed to stabilize the Christian calendar by proliferating cycles that could contain the inherent nihilism of God’s purely linear time. As Robert Markus put it in The End of Ancient Christianity, “By the end of the sixth century the Christian year was almost swamped by the new festivals” (99). He quotes no less a figure than St. Augustine who said pretty much the same thing: “Hardly a day can be found in the circle of the year on which martyrs were not somewhere crowned.”
We are never outside of Eternal Recurrence as the accumulation of layers of time. All of this history, and much more which could be traced infinitely, is present in this moment.