Resurrection Now!

            [. . .] No honest Old Testament prophet ever promised eternal joy to his nation save on the other side of disaster. Much less can an honest New Testament prophet, using the cross of Christ for his understanding of human fate, predict for men and societies immortality without judgment. To show up as clearly as may be the potentiality of catastrophe in our lives is as much a function of reason using revelation in our day as in any ancient time.

            Yet in the light of the revelatory occasion the Christian discerns another possibility; it is not his own possibility in the sense that it is implicit in him. But it is possible to the person who reveals himself in the historic occasion as the lord of life and death. It is the possibility of the resurrection of a new and other self, of a new  community, a reborn remnant.

The above citation comes from “Reasons of the Heart,” the third and next to last chapter of Richard Niebuhr’s book, The Meaning of Revelation.[1] Richard Niebuhr was the younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr. Both Richard and Reinhold were important Christian theologians. Reinhold, the elder brother, is most widely known for authoring what is called the “Serenity Prayer,” which is used widely, including often in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step communities.

The citation immediately below comes from the fourth and last chapter of the same book by Richard, the younger brother. That chapter is entitled “The Deity of God”:

[. . .] Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith. It is revolutionary since it makes a new beginning and puts an end to the old development; it is permanent revolution since it can never come to an end in time in such a way that an irrefrangible knowledge about God becomes the possession an individual or a group. Life in the presence of revelation in this respect as in all others is not lived before or after but in the midst of a great revolution.[2]

It was not until fall of last year that I first read The Meaning of Revelation, and when I first read the passage cited first above, at the start of today’s post, it struck me that the “resurrection” at issue not only in that passage but also in the Christian Bible and Christian tradition themselves, is not an event in what could be labelled clock-time, the time of datable historical occasions that occur once and then sink into the past. That is the sort of time in which, for example, in 732 at the battle of Tours Charles Martel defeated the Moors, to use an old line. Rather, it struck me, the resurrection at issue is something the happening of which is permanently recurring, occurring not “in” some already constituted time but rather in such a way as to “set out or forth” time as such, that is, as truly revealing just “what” time itself truly “is, was, and ever will be once and again forever,” as it were.

The same revelation about resurrection that so struck me when I read the first citation above, struck me anew yet again when I read the second citation above some fifty pages later. What dawned on me when I was reading the first passage dawned on me yet again when I read the second one — just as the sun dawns anew every morning.

*     *     *

What calls out to be kept in mind here is the difference between chronological time, from Greek khronos, and what we might call kairotic time, from Greek kairos. Those were the two words and senses of “time” in the culture and language of the ancient Greeks — from whom, be it noted, the entire occidental tradition of thought called “philosophy” also  derives.[3]

The Greek noun khronos means time in the sense of a defined, measurable temporal  extension, such as someone’s lifetime, a season of the year, a year itself or multiples thereof, decades, centuries, millenniums, and so forth. We might well put the point this way: khronos is clock time.

In contrast, the Greek term kairos means an opportune, decisive moment of critical change. We might well put it colloquially that kairos is the time when the hour has finally struck and the bell has been rung. It is the moment when conditions are there for the accomplishment of crucial action. As Wikipedia puts it: “In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.” In other words, kairos is always now!

Thus, according to its etymology, kairos is the “fit” time for happening as such. It is a moment of vision, when all becomes clear and arranges itself in its full entirety. When such a moment at last occurs, nothing has changed — that is, no one thing or combination of things has been altered — yet everything has changed.

One can often hear that very refrain in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step Groups concerning what has happened when someone “bottoms out” in their addiction, thereby reaching what in the book Alcoholics Anonymous and elsewhere in Twelve-Step literature is called “the turning point” and “the jumping off point” where, if and only if they do indeed take a turn and make the jump, they are “reborn,” to use the very word used in that same literature.

Such turning points, such jumping off points, are kairotic moments of vision.

Kairos, the ancient Greek god of the opportune moment

*     *     *

The sun is new every day.

                                    — Heraclitus

This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.

                                                                                    — Maya Angelou     

The words resurrection and rebirth at root say the same thing. The former derives from the past-participle stem of Latin resurgere "rise again, appear again." The latter derives ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bher-  “to carry,” which comes also and especially to mean “to bear children.”[4]

The sun itself is resurrected each day. It is reborn daily.

That Heraclitus, born in Asia Minor in the Greek colony of Ephesus in Ionia sometime during the 6th century BCE, and Maya Angelou, the African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist who was born and died in the United States during the 20th century CE, could see to share that same observation is proof that both were once visited by Kairos, god of the opportune moment.

Neither Heraclitus nor Maya Angelou let that moment of vision pass. Instead, they simply spoke the truth that moment had given them eyes to see and ears to hear.

So, I pray, may Kairos — like the sun — come right now yet again ever anew to us all.

Let Kairos come!

[1] Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1941), pp. 130-131.

[2] Ibid., pp. 182-1983

[3] The word philosophy, heard to its etymological roots, means “the love (Greek philein, “to love,” in the sense of feeling “friendship or affection for/toward”) of wisdom (Greek sophia, “wisdom”). Just as in ancient Greek there are two different words for “time,” so are there two different words for “love”: philos and eros. I will explore that latter distinction and the relationship between those two senses of “love” in my next post on this blog, “Erotic Friendship,” which I will post two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.     

[4] That not all children so borne are infant animals will be one thing under consideration in my next post, “Erotic Friendship,” set to go up two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.

Reanimations, Reiterations, and Resurrections

Archimedes was literally resurrected.

                                                —Alain Badiou 

Badiou spoke those words in a session of his two-year long weekly seminar of 1996-1998, on his “axiomatic theory of the subject” (as opposed to the “object”), the text of which seminar has only recently been published.* Badiou made the remark  in the context of discussing the European recovery during the Renaissance of ancient Greek mathematics. Europe had long before lost that entire tradition, but it had been preserved throughout the many intervening centuries by the great Islamic scholars of Arabian civilization, who eventually returned it to the Europe from which it had first come. 

Early in his session of March 4, 1998, Badiou observed that when, during the 16th and 17th centuries C.E.,  “the works of Archimedes, who represents the stupefyingly creative culmination of Greek mathematics,” were at last recovered during the 16th and 17th centuries “Archimedes was literally resurrected”—that is brought back from the dead. In that recovery Archimedes, after being buried for many centuries, returned to dwell among the living: Archimedes—not just some equivalent of Archimedes, but Archimedes himself--came back from his grave. 

In understanding Badiou’s remark, it is important to remember that, as Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng observed almost half a century ago concerning another return from the dead, what is involved in such literal resurrections is no such thing as a mere “reanimation of a corpse.”** Especially in the case of Archimedes, who lay dead for many centuries not just for a few days, on the day of his resurrection there would, in fact, have been no corpse left to reanimate. It would have returned to dust long before.

Resurrection is not reanimation.

Archimedes Thoughtful, a painting by Domenico Fetti, 1620

2.

[T]he presence of the master in the work is the only genuine one. The greater the master, all the more purely does the master’s person vanish behind the work.

                                                                                    —Martin Heidegger***

 Even less is resurrection reiteration.

To reiterate is to produce again and again instances of one and the same type. Reiterations of a given type are struck from a template, as coins are struck at a mint. 

It is worth noting that the word type itself comes from a root meaning “to strike,” just as we strike the keys on a “typewriter” to reproduce printed letters from the keys. Every strike of the same key produces a new iteration of that key’s embossed letter, just as every strike of the coin-press at a mint produces a new reiteration of the coin at issue. At its core, the process of reiteration is the production of multiple versions of one and the same type, kind, or sort of thing, versions that differ from one another only in inessential ways, such that all the reiterations are interchangeable one with another.

Such interchangeability means that, for all essential purposes, any one reiteration is a good as another—and, as the old saying has it, “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Every 2017 Kia Sorento, to use my own current automobile as an example, is as good as any other, aside from such accidental factors as personal color preferences, or number of scratches from prior usage, and the like.

Any given iteration can always be replaced, should it break or wear out of be lost, just so long as the mold remains available to strike off another instance of the same kind. Any given iteration can in that way be replaced by another iteration of exactly the same type, struck from the very same template, or another template of the same type, as was the broken, worn out, or lost iteration. That remains so, unless all the templates for whatever is at issue have themselves been broken or worn out, of course. However, even in that case another iteration of the very same type of template could itself still be struck, unless the template for making that type of template had itself been broken, worn out, or lost—and so on endlessly. 

However, what is absolute in its singularity and uniqueness—as is, for example, every human being, whether Archimedes, Jesus of Nazareth, or the kid down the block—can never be reiterated. No replacement of the same type, kind, or sort can be made, because what is singularly unique in never an instance of a multi-instantiable sort, kind, or type. 

Thus, each unique singularity is un-reiterable. 

Each and every unique singularity is “one of a kind,” as we put it, and not an instance of a type for which there is any template or mold from which new instances of the same type might be struck. 

That is precisely what is so striking about anything uniquely singular: No replacements can ever be struck for what is truly one of a kind. If what is one of a kind comes back again after having once gone, then it is that singular, unique one that returns, not another thing just like it. That applies to coming back to life from the dead—that is, to resurrection, “taken literally.”

3.

What does it mean to take something literally? Specifically, what does Badiou mean when he says that, with the recovery of Greek mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, “Archimedes was literally resurrected”?

Well, taken literally literal means “by the letter” (from Latin littera, “letter, alphabetic sign”), but the common usage of the term means the same as “not metaphorically or allegorically or the like,” that is, not just “rhetorically,” for oratorical effect. What Badiou means is that when Europe recovered ancient Greek mathematics, Archimedes—Archimedes himself, the one and only, and not any mere simulacrum, copy, or other instance of the same type of person, mathematician, or whatever: Archimedes himself, and none other—was resurrected, that is, brought back to life, after being dead for centuries.

4.

In thinking of resurrection, we all too easily fall prey to superstition and idolatry. Perhaps if we combine Badiou’s and Heidegger’s remarks above we can find valuable pointers to follow in order to avoid such superstitious idol worship.  Let us take Badiou literally—just as he tells us he means to be taken—when he observes that Archimedes was himself resurrected with the recovery in and for Renaissance Europe of the ancient Greek mathematics of which his work was the “stupefyingly creative culmination.” Let us also take no less literally Heidegger’s observation that the “genuine presence” of those who are masters of the creative arts is to be found in the works themselves that those masters create. Joining together those two observations from those two philosophers might let us at last see the truth of such things as the remark Jesus makes, according to the Christian Gospels, that wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, there he is in the midst of them. 

We may thus come at last to see that in saying such things Jesus is using no metaphors.  We may hear at last that he is speaking quite literally.

Archimedes Mirror Used to Burn Roman Ships, a painting by Giulio Parigi, c.1599

* Théorie axiomatique du sujet (Paris : Fayard, 2019), pp. 281-282, my translation. 

** Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, translated by Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 104-105. I discuss the passage at issue in greater detail in “What Is a Christian? A Gentile Inquiry”—an essay I wrote in or around 1984 that is published as an appendix to my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available elsewhere at this website. 

*** “Gelassenheit,” in Gesamtausgabe Band 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 517, my translation.