Messianic: Coincidence
In the last two posts (here and here), we had a glimpse into the political valence of the messianic perspective on history, favoured by elements of the political left.
The first dealt with Benjamin’s messianism as one that brings the drone of history to a standstill, creating a zone of possibility where new beginnings can emerge. The second, flowing from the first, looked at how the messianic opens up horizons that those standing within the horizons of present history might dismiss as “utopic”, impossible to implement in real life. Part of the reason why it is considered impossible, as Stephen Bronner put it, is because it coheres what hitherto has been experienced only in fragments. As such, from the standpoint of one inhabiting the fragments, it is a cohesion that is impossible to see.
The question then becomes, what kind of messianism can provide a vital underwriting for this cohesion to what history has fragmented?
This is where a third type of messianism comes in, one that is supplied, not by philosophy, but by the theology of St Bonaventure. More particularly, it is Bonaventure’s concept of Christ as the coincidence of opposites.
Bonaventure grounds the coincidence of opposites in the mystery of the Trinity, where two opposite poles (Father and Spirit) are united by a common center (the Son or the Word). The Son holds together the seemingly opposing poles because the center bears the characteristics of both. In his Journey of the Mind Towards God, Bonaventure writes that:
Christ, the Son of God, who is the image of the invisible God by nature [is] . . . the first and the last, the highest and lowest, the circumference and the centre, the Alpha and Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and creature
Within the Trinity, the Son has the same generative powers of the Father, since both Father and Son, as we profess in the Creeds, are the source of the Spirit’s procession. However, like the Spirit, the Son is generated by the Father, born of the Father before all ages. While the Trinity is conceived as the ground of relationality writ large, what holds that relation together is the Word.
In light of Christ holding all things together, as Paul writes in his Letter to the Colossians (1:17), everything and its opposite ultimately cohere, insofar as each is in relation to the Word.
In the Word, the union in relation between things holds right up to the end of all things, for at the end of all things, things would not have ended, but instead have arrived at the Word who is the last thing par excellence, and in whom all things reach the pinnacle of their actuality precisely in their convergence with their opposites.
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