The phrase “eschatology and utopia” combines two concepts that are quite far apart in content and in origin. They seem to have nothing in common but the reference to a possible better world in the future and the consequent stimulus to hope. The task of comparing the two concepts, which I undertake in this article, demands that I first of all clarify the exact content of the two words. In this effort I shall rely largely on the analyses of Wilhelm Kamlah, who has already investigated their import in his study of utopia, eschatology, and the teleology of history.[1]
According to Kamlah, utopia, as a literary and philosophical genre, originated in the humanistic philosophy of the Renaissance, with Thomas More as its first classic author. Utopia became a form of political philosophy, one which might be more exactly described as Platonism with Christian elements. Thus it can be asserted that utopia takes up again that task which Plato first set for himself with his plan for the ideal state. This shows us clearly the presuppositions and goals of the classic utopia. Utopia in this restricted sense is not tied to a philosophy of history: it does not assume that there is a forward-moving dynamic in history or that its own role is to sketch out future goals and thereby help to bring about their realization. Ernst Bloch’s understanding of utopia as the revolutionary goal that inexorably prods the historical process onward is thus seen to be conceptually inexact. As our reflections proceed, we shall see how his model can be better integrated into the history of thought. Utopia, we repeat, does not grow out of a dynamic philosophy of history but out of Platonic ontology.[2]
Kamlah defines the basic idea of the classic utopia as “the rational model of the optimal happiness-enabling institutions of a community”, which “are proposed as a critique of existing abuses”.[3] This definition leaves out an important factor. More speaks of instituta et mores. In other words, he does not treat institutions as self-subsistent regulatory mechanisms; rather, he views them only in closest association with the custom on which they are based, that is, with a tradition of human responsibility. The significance of this is clearly brought out by de Tocqueville’s portrayal of democracy in America. But this connection is not for the moment the object of our inquiry.
In clarifying the concept of utopia, it is important, first of all, not to take it as a future reality. Instead, we must relate it to the concrete existing civil society much as we relate the pure mathematical forms to their empirical realization. And thus the design of utopia will have approximately the same significance for the concrete civil society as the meaning of mathematical operations has for the understanding of reality: here is where the ideal norm of the law, namely, justice, is thought out and formulated as purely as possible—a theoretical experiment that provides norms by which to measure political reality. The aim is not to bring about utopia in the future but to measure present politics against the highest norms and thus to achieve the optimal approximation of civil society to the norm of justice. Accordingly, we can sum up by saying that utopia is political philosophy in the sense of the activity of the practical reason within the framework of ontological thought.
Eschatology, by contrast, is a statement of faith. Based on the confession of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, it announces the resurrection of the dead, eternal life, and the kingdom of God. I myself would not, as Kamlah does, identify eschatology with the proclamation of this statement of faith.[4] It would be much better to call eschatology the product of the fusion of Christian faith and the Greek searching for the Logos, that is, for the “reason of things” that holds them together. It means the effort of thinking through the inner logic of the Christian dogmas about eternal life, probing this logic from the inner unity of the whole of the Christian message about God, world, and man, and thus bringing its content to bear on human thinking in a meaningful way. This quest for a logic of faith allowed the Church Fathers to call the faith a philosophy, in the sense of a meaningful overview of reality.[5] Such a quest certainly takes the bite out of the radical opposition of eschatology to utopia that is found in Kamlah’s portrayal of the latter as the rational model of institutions and the former as the proclamation of the end of all distress.[6]
Still, there is a difference that is so great as to make it seem hardly possible to connect the two concepts in a meaningful way. For utopia is an appeal to human action guided by the practical reason, while eschatology addresses itself to the receptive patience of faith. The difference would be in fact unbridgeable if faith and reason, receiving and acting, were mutually impenetrable. Hence the decisive question for our inquiry is: Can the eschatological message, which directs men primarily into the passivity of a receiver of gifts, become also a practical statement, one that is oriented to action? And can it engage the practical reason? Since a statement that would relegate a human being to the strictest passivity would leave its receiver without any concrete content, it would thereby become meaningless in fact and could not be maintained for long. For this reason if for no other, from the beginning the search was on for a practical meaning of the eschatological proclamation. This means that eschatology of its very nature demanded to be coupled with something else, as it is in the title of this article. This synthesis of eschatology with models of action appears, it seems to me, in four basic forms, each of which stands in a different relationship to “eschatology and utopia”.
I. The Chiliastic Model
The most striking attempt to synthesize eschatology with action is the experiment that history labels chiliasm. The name is derived from Revelation, chapter 20, where it is announced that Christ and the saints will reign on earth for a thousand years before the end of the world. The term refers to a conception that is indeed based in eschatology, that is, in the expectation of a new world of God’s making, but is not satisfied with the eschaton beyond time and beyond the end of the world. Instead, it virtually duplicates eschatology by expecting God to achieve his purpose with man and history in this world as well as in the next, so that even within history there must be an end-time in which everything will be as it should have been all along. This entails a confusion of the intra-historical and the metahistorical categories. Chiliasts are waiting for something in history, but in forms that per se do not belong to historical thought; the metahistorical becomes miraculous by being expected in a historical form.
Such a schizoid expectation has its roots in the plurality of meanings and the plurality of forms taken by the Old Testament and Jewish hope of salvation. In the coronation oracle of Psalm 2, as in the whole line of the Davidic tradition (first clearly formulated in Nathan’s prophecy), it appears as a preview of a second David and Solomon,[7] as what Martin Buber called a theopolitical statement. It is to be a political entity, a kingdom of David and Israel, but with the power, security, and success that presuppose the unmediated political activity of God himself. In apocalyptic, this theopolitical blueprint fades out and is transferred to the transcendent realm; in addition, apocalyptic developed a philosophy of history that made the end somehow datable and said that it would follow by a logic of historical evolution.[8] Thus apocalyptic brought about the intensification of the theopolitical thrust that we call apocalyptic or chiliastic politics. Both are clearly exemplified in the Bible.
Jeremiah finds himself faced with a theopolitical attitude that he would like to replace with a rational policy based on theological responsibility. His opponents are theopolitical: they are convinced of an absolute divine guarantee that neither the Temple nor Jerusalem nor the House of David will fall, and they treat this guarantee as a politico-military entity, although their feeling of security finds no basis in rational political thought. In opposition to this thinking, Jeremiah demands a rational policy, which would deal with Babylon according to what the actual distribution of power will allow; this is what he regards as an expression of faith in God and of responsibility toward him. We have here two clearly different conceptions of the relation between faith and reason, between faith and realism—and ultimately two different conceptions of God. The partisans of one cannot but charge those of the other with unbelief and misbelief. The course followed by the prophet’s opponents confused two different realities and thus abandoned rationality. It led to the fall of Jerusalem and the temporary loss of Jewish independence. It was clearly theopolitical, but not quite chiliastic, for, while it was based on the certitude of the Davidic oracle as well as of the Temple prophecies, it was not tied to a determinate historical design.[9]
In contrast to this, the Qumran War Scroll contains an unabashedly chiliastic political doctrine. On the one hand, the forty-year war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness is described with a love of military detail that suggests that the author used a Hellenistic military manual;[10] on the other hand, this is all woven into the apocalyptic design for history, in which God the warlord, with his troops led by Michael, establishes the indestructible kingdom. The figure of Jesus must be viewed against this background. His position is that of Jeremiah, predicting the final destruction of Jerusalem for such a confusion of faith with politics. His failure, historically speaking, corresponds exactly to that of the prophet. To this extent, the synthesis of eschatology and politics, which is formulated in chiliasm, is eliminated from the options open to those who decide to follow Christ; in individual historical situations, of course, it was not so easy to draw the line. If today a disguised chiliasm presents itself as the basic pattern for Christian behavior, this is not the first, but only the most logical, attempt to receive the old idea and with it to make Christianity into a practical power in the struggle for the present and the future.
To summarize the pertinent features of the chiliastic program, we can say that the decisive thing about it is the expectation of a historical golden age, which in itself surpasses the possibilities of political action but is to be established by political means. Its possibility is guaranteed by the logic of history, which adds something to political means, so that it seems right to employ political means according to a metapolitical logic and to hope that this will produce something that political means by themselves cannot produce. If you want historical examples, take Marxism—this is where it belongs, not in the realm of “utopia”. The two schemata in Marx, as presented by Daniel Bell,[11] are astonishingly close to the methodical mixing of the Essene War Scroll. Marx gives the most exact economic analysis, but he connects it with a prophecy to which the analysis itself gives no support whatever. The only difference is that in place of God and Michael he puts the logic of history.
II. The Model of the Great Church: Synthesis of Eschatology and “Utopia”
Both the historical evolution of the motive forces and the flow of the images make it tempting to try to turn eschatology into a practical and even partly rational statement by means of chiliasm. Thus the suggestive power that the chiliastic model has gained today, especially in the form of theologies of liberation, becomes somewhat understandable. Nevertheless, what we have here is no synthesis between the hope of faith and the rationality of political action, but only a combination that in truth corrupts both sides. It is astounding how the mixture of an almost abstruse military exactitude with wild-eyed theological expectations, which we encountered in the Qumran War Scroll, is to be found in the literature of liberation theology. Anyone who considers the matter soberly must concede that theology’s only contribution here has been to connect irrational goals and grounds with political reasoning in such a way as to give rise to a course of political action that is carefully planned in detail but as a whole is profoundly irrational. There is no real connection between the promise and the approaches to it; particular projects are meaningful, but the scheme as a whole must be branded a delusion.[12]
The Church and true believers could never find a solution in militant chiliasm: the political situation in which the movement originated made that impossible. Jesus had taken up Jeremiah’s doctrine and had suffered the same fate. The execution of James, the brother of the Lord and the first bishop of Jerusalem, perhaps belongs in this context: exactness in fulfilling the Law could not have been a source of conflict; the question of the political commitments of faith was. For example, the Christian community stayed out of the Jewish war; they claimed that Jesus himself had advised them to leave Jerusalem (Mk 13:14). The notion of a kingdom of Christ on earth as a preliminary to the final kingdom of the Father is found in the Apocalypse and in Irenaeus, as well as in other orthodox Fathers. In neither case does the idea have any political bite. For Irenaeus, it is really only a postulate of his Christology and concept of God.[13] Controversy in the early Church made it more and more clear that this kind of chiliasm, while as such it does not violate the basic Christian design and to this extent is not heterodox, nevertheless has no further relevant statement to make and to this extent is worthless as a temporal model. That finished chiliasm’s career as an attempt at synthesis in the realm of Church doctrine.
Mainline orthodox thought has always found its key interlocutor, not in apocalyptic literature and its philosophy of history, but in Plato and his ontology. This means that Christians turned from the militant realization of eschatology through chiliastic politics to the relations between eschatology and “utopia”. What form did this take? What reasons were adduced for it? If we look closely, we will see first of all that Plato’s political philosophy is not so alien to the thought patterns of eschatology as it might at first seem. In the stereotypes of Plato, which are common in philosophical and theological treatises, one finds two completely different and generally irreconcilable impressions. On the one hand, we have the dualistic Plato, the teacher of otherworldliness; on the other hand, we have Plato the politician, with his theoretical and practical attempts at the reconstruction of the critically ill Greek polis. Now sketching Plato’s thought has its limits because we can only guess at his “secret doctrine”, and that found in his writings only takes the form of different kinds of parables and adumbrations, which cannot ultimately be systematized.[14] Still we can be fairly sure of two things: one, that Plato’s philosophizing pivots around the philosophical martyrdom of Socrates and, two, that this philosophizing, ever mindful of the death of the just man in conflict with the laws of the state, is constantly in search of the rightful, righteous state.[15] And this is precisely where we find the connection between “eschatology” and “utopia” as furnished by Plato: the individual and the community can continue to exist only if there is an overarching just order of being from which they can derive their standards and before which they stand responsible. “Reality” can be structured meaningfully only if ideals are real; the reality of the ideal is a postulate of experienced reality, which thereby shows itself to be a second-class reality. Plato’s otherworldliness and his theory of ideas, while not invented for mere political purposes, are definitely parts of a political philosophy: they represent the standards that are presupposed by every effort to organize the political community. In this connection, Helmut Kuhn has spoken of the Socratic difference between goods and the Good;[16] this difference uncovers both the core of Plato’s doctrine of ideas and the core of his political philosophy and, thereby, reveals the relationship of one to the other. Starting from this difference, Plato worked out his “utopia” as regulative of the political reason. Whereas chiliastical politics mix faith and reason in a way injurious to both, Platonic thought succeeds in making a real synthesis: politics remains an affair of the practical reason, the polis remains polis. But reason gets more room to operate by being given a glimpse of what is truly just, namely, Justice itself: the Good has not less but more reality than particular goods have.
Wilhelm Kamlah has come to the conclusion that “utopia” is not a medieval (or an early Christian) but rather a “modern undertaking of human thinking, speaking, and writing”.[17] He is correct in the sense that the formal genre named utopia is a creation of Renaissance humanism. It undoubtedly constituted a step forward in political self-critique and in the quest for a rational structuring of political action. But it is no reason to deny that the medieval political treatises, such as, for example, the pertinent passages in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa and commentaries on Aristotle, remain substantially faithful to the theme of the Platonic utopia, filling out and remodelling its basic idea with material from the political philosophy of Aristotle and from Christian tradition.[18] This is not the place to analyze the historical progress of this Greek-Christian synthesis. Instead I would like to attempt a brief sketch of its essential elements as I see them. It seems to me that three viewpoints are decisive here.
a. The idea of history’s being brought to its consummation within history forms no part of the eschatological expectation; rather, quite the opposite: it expresses the impossibility of perfecting the world within history. The various items in the depiction of the end of the world actually express a renunciation of the expectation of salvation within history. Besides, this denial that history can contain its own consummation seems rationally intelligible to me insofar as such an expectation is irreconcilable with the perpetual openness and the perpetually peccable freedom of man. Nevertheless, chiliasm conceals an even more profound error. In chiliastic constructions, the salvation of the world is to be awaited, not from the moral dignity of man, not in the depths of his moral personality, but from mechanisms that can be planned—which inverts the values that support the world. The implementation of a-rational hopes with rational strategy, which we met before, probably proceeds from this deeper inversion of values.
b. The negative message of eschatology, that is, the renunciation of the intrinsic perfectibility of history, does not need to be proved to us nowadays. If that were all eschatology had to say, the only conclusion one could draw would be complete resignation and naked pragmatism. But we need to pay attention to the positive message, too: eschatology asserts, together with the intrinsic imperfectibility of history, its perfectibility, although, admittedly, outside itself. But this completion outside itself is, in spite of that, really a completion of history. What is outside it is still its perfection. From the logic of this idea it follows that the rejection of the chiliastic attempt and the adoption of eschatology as eschatology is the only way to maintain the meaningfulness of history. For, while history cries out for a meaning, it cannot contain within itself its meaning for good and all. Thus, either it is meaningless, or it is consummated as itself outside itself and then has meaning in transcending itself. This leads to the insight that eschatology, precisely because it is not a political goal, functions as guarantor of meaning in history and makes possible the “utopia” that in this ideal model constructs the maximum of justice and elevates it as a task for political reason.
c. Accordingly, eschatology is not necessarily bound to any particular philosophy of history but only to ontology. Since it does not put its own logic of history into execution, it can be allied with a philosophy of decadence as well as with one of progress.[19] Its pivotal point is not a scenario for the rest of history but a concept of God that becomes concrete in Christology. The absorption of eschatology into Christology, which occurred in principle with the decision to believe in Christ, means that it was also absorbed into the concept of God and that the apocalyptic pattern of the theology of history retreated into the background. This new location of eschatology within the theological system is surely the central reason why its thrust could be combined with the tradition of Platonic thought.
III. The Utopian City of the Monks
Kamlah’s thesis that utopia is a modern undertaking stands in need of yet another restriction: Christian monasticism is nothing other than the attempt to find utopia in faith and to transfer it to this world. The expression βίος ἀγγελιχός, which monasticism used to describe itself, expresses this purpose very accurately—to live the life of paradise now and thus to discover u-topos as topos.[20] This is why monasticism takes its beginning from the utopian saying of Jesus, “Sell what you have, give it to the poor . . . and follow me” (Mt 19:21).[21] The monk knows that Jesus’ own life, which he proposes to imitate, was quite literally a utopian life: “The foxes have their dens and the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Mt 8: 20). The practical effect is that the monks withdraw from the inhabited world to go into the un-world, the desert. This existential reversal, which is what fuga saeculi amounts to, has been beautifully formulated by Cyril of Scythopolis when he says that the monks made the desert into a civitas, the nonworld into a world.[22] Here we have a pneumatic revolution, which shows itself in the earthly self-expropriation of the convert, chiefly by providing him with a new standard of living, disclosing to him in the face of the old world and its civitates a new civitas. This struck people of the Roman Empire most forcibly when they saw the ineradicable class differences of their world automatically fade away as one crossed the threshold into the monks’ world: the difference between slave and free, which perdures in the “world”, is here, in accordance with Galatians 3:28, abolished.[23]
This new form of utopia differs from the Platonic form, first, by considering utopia partly realizable in the power of faith and, second, by not looking to the world as such or to its political bodies for realization, but rather looking to the charismatic nonworld, which is engendered in the voluntary turning away from the world. On the other hand, some relation to the world was inevitable, and in Western monasticism, which followed Benedict and his rule more than any other, it soon became evident. The monastic community showed people how to live together and offered them islands of survival in a stormy age. Paradoxically, the result was that the monks’ existence gradually became very “topian”, a part of the world that everyone took for granted, an established institution instead of an alternative to life in the world. Anton Rotzetter paints a compelling picture of how, in reaction to this, Saint Francis’ idea for his order was wholly shaped by the passion for utopia and how in its manifold expressions it was held together precisely by the idea of the realized utopia.[24] Surprisingly, the question of relations with the world, with established human communities, now became more clearly defined. Chiefly by the fact that now it was the cities that constituted the “desert” into which the monks moved in order to change them from deserts into the real City. More important, it seems to me, for the way in which we put our question, is the idea of the Third Order, which contains the attempt to transfer the utopian life-model of the monks to the worldly life in the normal vocations. The Third Order means the attempt, you might say, to move the whole City of Man some distance along the road toward utopia and thereby to make a comprehensive reform of the real by the utopian ideal. It must be admitted that this was attempted essentially by appealing to individuals, or at most by forming people into associations: the movement did not have a properly political ethos.
In this context one must remember the figure of Joachim of Flora, who made the fateful connection between monastic utopia and chiliasm. Originally they had nothing to do with each other. Joachim reversed the pattern found in Irenaeus of Lyons and made the trinitarian God himself the principle of progress in history. The old notion that to be a monk was to anticipate the world of the spirit now took on a chronological meaning: to be a monk meant to anticipate the next phase of history. In this manner utopia was historicized and made into a historical goal to be striven for actively.[25] Medieval and monkish as Joachim’s statements are when taken individually, structurally they open the way to Hegel and Marx: history is a forward-thrusting process, in which man actively works at his salvation, which cannot be known through the bare logic of the present but is guaranteed by the logic of history.
IV. The Evolutionist Design of Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard de Chardin’s contribution was his attempt to connect Christian eschatology with the scientific theory of evolution by defining Christ as the Omega point of evolution. Natural history and human history are for him stages of one and the same process, whose characteristic he sees in its movement forward from the simplest elements of matter to ever more complex units in the direction of the Ultracomplex, that is, of the amalgamation of man and the cosmos in an all-embracing unity. The image of the body of Christ and of Christ as the head of the cosmos, as it is sketched out in the Letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians, allows Teilhard to identify this vision with the confession of Christ and Christian eschatological hope. Although there are certain parallels between this scheme and Marxist thought patterns, it must be noted that Teilhard has neither a real philosophy of history nor a concrete political program. For this reason he can hardly be classified as a chiliast. His idea is rather that technical progress, in spite of the statistically inevitable quota of breakdowns that it shares with evolution as a whole, continues the purposeful activity of evolution, in which its part is to build the Noosphere over the Biosphere as the next-to-last stage of complexity. If evolution is going in the direction of technical progress, then the most suitable form of politics would seem to be one directed by technocrats. Thus science builds utopia in virtue of its immanent progress, though not without relapses. Here faith in science takes on mythical traits; if we think of things this way, we are always on the verge of plunging into resignation, which restricts itself to the feasible.
This brings us to the present problem, which consists in having to choose between chiliasm with its irrationality and positivism with its rationality and its hopelessness. Faced with this dilemma, it could be the function of the Platonic-Christian-humanist “utopia” to insist that the concept of reason be broadened and that not only the demand for what can be empirically verified, but also the demand for the values by which the empirical is set in order, be seen as one of the tasks of reason—which therefore must always be going to school with the great religious traditions of mankind. Thus I hope that I have made clear what the function of eschatology is in this context. Obviously, it should not be viewed as a kind of theological supplement to the penal code, as was frequently the case in the authoritarian states of modern times, when the pastor was the policeman who had to apply to human conduct the otherworldly sanctions decreed by the church in alliance with the state. That would be a negative utopia of fear and egoism. The point is rather to perceive a wider spectrum of reality. Empirical reality and the rationality that confines itself to this empirical reality can only end up demanding the withdrawal of man, who not only de facto in the present state of our knowledge but in principle transcends the merely empirical. The point is to recognize, not only usefulness, but also values as realities, so as to make possible reasoned humane conduct.
Meanwhile, it is beyond question that the traditional humanist-Christian utopia is deficient in many respects. Its designers knew that reality touches on justice only asymptotically, but they were not sufficiently aware that knowledge, too, keeps approaching its goal without ever reaching it. The result was that they took their models too statically and definitively, as we see in the case of Catholic natural law doctrine, which is a classic form of “utopian” thought. When we become aware of this, we see that in this area knowledge can arise only out of a perpetual alternation of theory and practice. When we start to apply “utopia”, we immediately see how little we understand of it; we are forced to make new designs, which in turn make new practices possible, and so on. The static element in Platonic thought is thereby changed in favor of realistic historical thinking, which absorbs the correct insights of the philosophy of history without allowing them to become the foundation of an autonomous logic of history.
A second problem seems to me to lie in the right ordering of instituta and mores to each other. The tradition of the Christian doctrine of the state, in contrast to Plato’s search for the best state, has done little to develop the critique of institutions and the creative search for better institutions. At present, however, the threat comes from exactly the opposite direction—from a complete oblivion of the second basic ingredient of political life, the mores. We are talking not about morality but about custom or life-style, that is, a complex of basic convictions that express themselves in ways of living that give shape to the consensus about the basic values of human life. Alexis de Tocqueville has impressively demonstrated that democracy depends much more on mores than on instituta. Where no common persuasion exists, institutions find nothing to lay hold of, and coercion becomes a necessity. Freedom presupposes conviction; conviction, education and moral awareness. Wherever “utopia” becomes a mere treatise on institutions, it forgets the decisive truth that the management of the forces of the soul determines the fate of a community more than the management of economic means. A complete design for “utopia” must try to answer not only the question of which institutions will be best, but also the question of how the forces of the soul will be managed. How can we make sure that basic values can be realized in common? The stronger the underpinning of mores, the fewer instituta will be needed. The question of education, that is, of opening up reason to the whole of reality above and beyond the merely empirical, is not less important for “utopia” than the question of the proper distribution and control of power. The neglect of mores does not enlarge freedom; it prepares the way for tyranny: this prognosis of de Tocqueville has been confirmed only too exactly by the developments of the last hundred years. Perhaps we should look for the eschatological dimension of “utopias” in the acceptance of values as realities rather than in the sanction. In the mores, politics, which “utopia” is meant to serve, points beyond itself; but without the mores, the “utopia” that describes only instituta becomes a design for a prison instead of a search for true freedom.
Notes
[1] Wilhelm Kamlah, Utopie, Eschatologie, Geschichtsteleologie: Kritische Untersuchungen zum Ursprung und zum futurischen Denken der Neuzeit (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1969).
[2] In history, of course, the borderline cannot be drawn exactly. It would probably be hard to make Campanella’s City of the Sun fit the above distinction (cf. Kamlah, Utopie, 32); in the eighteenth century it becomes well-nigh impossible, as in the case of Pietism (cf. Kamlah, Utopie, 19 and 32f.). Strictly conceptual distinctions, such as we try to make in this article following Kamlah, remain therefore problematic. Not least in importance is the custom, already very deep-rooted, of using the word with quite a different thrust from that of the definition we have here tried to derive from the word’s origin. For this reason “utopia” always, from this point on, appears in quotation marks whenever I use it in the technical sense defined above and contrary to this customary usage.
[3] Kamlah, Utopie, 23; cf. 18.
[4] Ibid., 26: “Eschatological proclamation is not just an expression of hope but a call to hope. . . . The proclamation of the end. . .—that is eschatology.”
[5] See, among others, J. Leclercq, “Pour l’histoire de l’expression ‘Philosophie chrétienne’ ”, Mélanges de science religieuse 9 (1952): 221-26; Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism”, trans. Fr. Brian McNeil, C.R.V., in Spouse of the Word, Explorations in Theology 2 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 333-72. Instructive also is E. R. Curtius, “Zur Geschichte des Wortes Philosophie im Mittelalter”, Romanische Forschungen, Zeitschrift für romanische Sprachen und Literatur 57 (1943): 290-309.
[6] Kamlah, Utopie, 26.
[7] On Psalm 2: Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalmen, 1 vol. ed. (Neukirchen: Erziehungsverein, 1960), 11-22. On Nathan’s prophecy: Hans Wilhelm Hertzberg, I & II Samuel: A Commentary, trans. J. S. Bowden (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 281-88. On the messianic hope in general: Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 1:472-511; Friedrich Dingermann, “Israels Hoffnung auf Gott und sein Reich: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung der alttestamentlichen Eschatologie”, in Wort und Botschaft, ed. Josef Schreiner, 308-18 (Wurzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1967); Martin Buber, Kingship of God, trans. Richard Scheimann (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
[8] Bibliography and a good summary of the recent state of research into the history and significance of apocalyptic are given in Ulrich Duchrow’s Christenheit und Weltverantwortung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1970), 17-55.
[9] On Jeremiah, see especially Arthur Weiser, Das Buch Jeremia, 5th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966); Josef Scharbert, Die Propheten Israels um 600 v. Chr. (Cologne: J. P. Bachem, 1967), 61-295, 459-78; Curt Kuhl, The Prophets of Israel, trans. Rudolf J. Ehrlich and J. P. Smith (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960), 104-20. On the kinship between Jeremiah’s attitude and the positions taken by Isaiah and his successors, see Otto Kaiser’s instructive explanations of Isaiah 22:1-14 in his Isaiah 13-39: A Commentary, trans. R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1974), 136-47. Jesus’ prophecies about Jerusalem (Lk 19:41-44, Mt 23:37-39 with parallel passages, and Mk 13:14-19) must be understood as continuations of Jeremiah and Isaiah.
[10] Martin Hengel, Victory over Violence: Jesus and the Revolutionists, trans. David E. Green (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 14. This little book and Hengel’s related study, Was Jesus a Revolutionist? trans. William Klassen (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), are basic to the questions we are studying.
[11] Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 54-63.
[12] The most important survey of “liberation theology” is Roger Vekemans’ Teologia de la liberación y cristianos por el socialismo (Bogotà, 1976). I have tried to say something about what it presupposes in Church history and the history of ideas, in the article “Der Weltdienst der Kirche”, which I contributed to Zehn Jahre Vaticanum II, ed. A. Bauch, A. Gläßer, and M. Seybold, 36-53 (Regensburg: Puster, 1976).
[13] On Irenaeus, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 2, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press; New York: Crossroad, 1984), 92: “[Irenaeus] develops the idea of the thousand-year kingdom of the just on earth . . . because he takes seriously the Old Testament promises of a final, completely secure occupation of the land. . . . Irenaeus is the advocate of the new earth.” Incontestable historical interpretations of the martyrdom of the Lord’s brother (reported in Josephus, Antiquities, vol. 9, ed. Louis A. Feldman [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965], pp. 494-97) are, of course, not possible, but the James type of Christianity, on the one hand, and the contemporary political milieu, on the other, allow us to make a meaningful diagnosis of the kind attempted above.
[14] The limitations of every interpretation of Plato have recently been emphasized by Heinrich Dörrie, Von Plato zum Platonismus (Opladen, 1976); see especially the dialogue with Josef Pieper, 60ff. On the “secret doctrine”, see, among others, Konrad Gaiser, Platons ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1963), and Hans Joachim Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1959)
[15] With this attempt at interpreting Plato, compare Duchrow, Christenheit und Weltverantwortung, 61-80. Something can also be found in my Eschatology, Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, ed. Aidan Nichols, O.P., enlarged ed., vol. 9 in the series Dogmatic Theology, ed. Johann Auer and myself (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988).
[16] Helmut Kuhn, Der Staat (Munich: Kosel, 1967), 25.
[17] Kamlah, Utopie, 16.
[18] On Thomas’ political philosophy, see U. Matz, “Thomas Von Aquin”, in Klassiker des Politischen Denkens, ed. H. Meier, H. Rausch, and H. Denzer, 3rd ed., 1:114-46 (Munich, 1963); on the sources, see Marie-Dominique Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A. M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 336f.
[19] The profound difference between Augustine’s pessimism and the medieval idea of progress is beautifully presented by Alois Dempf in Sacrum Imperium, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1954), 116-398.
[20] On the question of the “life like that of the angels”, see especially Suso Frank, ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΟΣ ΒΙΟΣ (Münster: Aschendorff, 1964); on early monasticism in general, see H. Jedin’s Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. II/I, Die Kirche von Nikaia bis Chalkedon, by Karl Baus (Freiburg: Herder, 1973), 347-409; Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (New York: Desclée, 1963); and Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Das frühe Mönchtum (Essen: Driewer, 1964).
[21] Cf. Athanasius, Vita sancti Antonii, cc. 2-4 (Patrologia Graeca 26:824-46); The Life of St. Anthony, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 10 (Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1950), 19-22. Cf. the parallel action in the life of Saint Francis: I Celano 22; Legenda trium sociorum, 25; Bonaventure, Vita s. Francisci III, 1, and the comments of Omer Englebert, St. Francis of Assisi: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1966), 64ff.
[22] Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Sabae, c. 15, ed. Eduard Schwartz, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 49, 2, p. 98, lines 2f. Cf. Christoph von Schönborn, Sophrone de Jérusalem: Vie monastique et confession dogmatique (Paris, 1972), 25ff.
[23] Regula S. Benedicti 2, 16ff., rev. ed. (Beuron: Ed. Basilius Steidle, 1975), 64: “Non ab eo persona in monasterio discernatur. . . . Non convertenti ex servitio praeponatur ingenuus, nisi alia rationabilis causa existat.”
[24] Anton Rotzetter, “Der utopische Entwurf der franziskanischen Gemeinschaft”, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 37 (1974): 159-69. On the concrete difficulties of the Franciscan project, K. S. Frank, “Utopie—Pragmatismus: Bonaventura und das Erbe des hlg. Franziskus v. Assisi”, Wissenschaft und Weisheit 37 (1974): 139-59.
[25] On Joachim, see especially Dempf, Sacrum Imperium, 269-84, and compare my Theology of History according to St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971), 95-118.
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