Hope of Heaven and Earth

Struggling to articulate the cosmic deliverance of Romans 8, Stanislas Breton (A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, 116-7) writes that “heaven and earth . . . are traversed by a visceral yearning orienting them toward and subordinating them to another kingdom, one that is more than human precisely by remaining human, of the children of God.” For Paul eros is of the very essence of all things, and by that driving desires, “living and inorganic beings alike tend toward their supreme humanization in a revelation by which they are made to participate in the unheard-of dignity of the Sons of God. All of nature is thus under a sign of a desire that pushes it beyond itself, a desire that would be the unconscious form of a hope.” In this way, “nature, history, and Church are taken together in a single selfsame movement called salvation history.”

Breton thinks we have to take Romans 8 as a statement about the being of creation: “The ontological depths of the real are defined not by an ensemble of properties, but by the sigh of a slave shaking off its chains, powerless to rid himself of them, yet animated in his impatience by the expectation of his future liberation. From the highest point to the lowest on the ontological ladder, a single groaning, transmitted from one level to another, proclaims that the essence of the world is simply freedom.”

Breathless enough, that, but he goes on. Apocalypses flourished in Paul’s time, but his “originality consists in the transfer of the apocalyptic eschaton onto the genesis and the very structure of things. Thus inverted in a ‘proton’ of hope, the eschaton is inserted into the very fiber of the universe.” IN this way, “the being of things is merged with the dynamism of their becoming.”

Lest we lose the concreteness of this vision, we can add this: In the midst of this groaning creation, a glimpse of eschatological human existence – sons of God revealed in union with God – has been established, specifically in the Eucharist. There the eschaton is already visible, humanity gathered in God’s presence, enjoying the fruits of creation and culture, in joyful communion in the Spirit of God: The revelation of the sons of God.