not<\/em> from garden lost to garden restored, but from garden to garden-city. God gives with interest.<\/p>\nTo say the same in other words, though the Bible gives full recognition to sin and its effects on creation and humanity, the Christian account of history is ultimately comic. The classical world, by contrast, was dominated by a tragic view of history, in which history moved from a glorious beginning toward a tarnished end, and a tragic understanding of the constituent realities of life (a \u201ctragic metaphysics\u201d), manifested in a predominantly tragic literature. As it penetrated the Greco-Roman world, the Christian gospel challenged this tragic classicism (or classical tragicism) by presenting a fundamentally comic vision of history.<\/p>\n
\u201cTragedy\u201d here is used very loosely, as a story in which the characters begin neutrally or well, but slide inexorably to a bad end; \u201ccomedy\u201d is a story in which the characters may face dangers, perhaps dangers of great intensity, but ultimately rise to a happy ending.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeep comedy\u201d brings two additional nuances: First, in deep comedy the happy ending is uncontaminated by any fear of future tragedy, and, second, in deep comedy the characters do not simply end as well as they began, but progress beyond their beginning. Comedy may move from glory to glory restored, but deep comedy moves from glory to added glory. While the classical world did produce comedy, it did not produce \u201cdeep comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n
What I mean by \u201ctragedy\u201d and \u201cdeep comedy\u201d may best be captured by two biblical citations. \u201cThe last state is worse than the first\u201d \u2013 Jesus\u2019 saying can serve as a summary of ancient sensibility about history.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeep comedy\u201d is best exemplified by the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22, and particularly by Revelation 21:4: \u201cHe shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be death; there shall no longer be mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.\u201d<\/p>\n
My second observation is more straightforward: The Christian God is a Triune God. This stands in contrast to all other forms of monotheism and polytheism, ancient and modern.<\/p>\n
This small book is an effort to discern a connection these two unique or at least highly idiosyncratic features of Christian faith. Is Christianity eschatologically comic because<\/em> it is Trinitarian? Is history moving toward a comic climax as a revelation of the nature of the Triune God?<\/p>\nTo ask the question from the other end: Is there an \u201ceschatological moment\u201d in the life of the Trinity? Is the life of the Trinity comic? In this book, I sketch the outlines of an affirmative answer to these questions. If Trinitarian theology is an answer to the question, \u201cGiven the gospel story, who must God be for this to be possible?\u201d I wish to broaden the question beyond the narrative of Jesus\u2019 life, death and resurrection to ask, \u201cGiven the biblical vision of history and eschatology, who must God be for this to be possible?\u201d<\/p>\n
The answer is the same in both cases: The immanent Trinity is manifested in and is the ontological ground and condition for the possibility not only for the death and resurrection of the Son, but for a world-history that moves from Eden to New Jerusalem. Paganism\u2019s tragic view of history is allied with a tragic metaphysics and theology, while Christianity has a comic view of history because it has a fundamentally comic theology proper (doctrine of God).<\/p>\n
For Greek philosophy tragedy was woven into the fabric of existence, and also that these tragic obsessions are common elements of modern and postmodern thought as well. This discussion will be transposed into a more directly theological key as I examine Jacques Derrida\u2019s treatment of the problems of writing and supplementarity, especially as they arise in Plato, to point out similarities between ancient conceptions of history and \u201cPlatonic\u201d metaphysics and theology.<\/p>\n
As Derrida shows, it is axiomatic for Plato that supplementarity is degenerative; that is, anything added to an original, anything flowing from a source, is \u201cworse\u201d than the source itself, precisely because it has moved away from the source. This metaphysical assumption is parallel to mythical views of history for which temporal<\/em> supplementation necessarily means degeneration.<\/p>\nFor Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics, the lower is always lesser; for Hesiod, Ovid, and other myth-historians the later is always lesser. Such a metaphysics cannot support a comic view of history, much less deep comedy.<\/p>\n
Postmodern atheist though he is, Derrida opens the way for a Trinitarian response to the problem of supplementarity by treating the relationship between speaker and text, and between origin and supplement more generally, as a father-son relation. Derrida\u2019s father-son, however, is heretical or even pagan, rewriting Hesiod\u2019s myth of patricidal Zeus and Sophocles\u2019 story of Oedipus as if it were metaphysically necessary.<\/p>\n
An orthodox Trinitarian theology avoids the problematics of Platonic supplementarity in two ways. Orthodox Trinitarian theology asserts, first, that there is always a \u201csupplement\u201d (Son and Spirit) with the \u201corigin\u201d (Father), and, second, insists that the Son and Spirit, though \u201csupplemental\u201d to the Father, are \u201cequal in power and glory.\u201d There is no degeneration or \u201cleakage\u201d of glory or divinity as the Father begets the Son or, together with the Son, spirates the Spirit.<\/p>\n
Trinitarian theology thus provides theological ground for a view of history where the passage of time does not necessarily mean decay, where history can move from death to life rather than the (common-sensical) reverse.<\/p>\n
Thus, for a Trinitarian theology, time and history can be redeemed and brought to comic conclusion. For Trinitarian theology, the \u201cSecond\u201d is fully equal to and is in fact the glory of the \u201cFirst,\u201d and therefore for the Bible, the golden age is always out before us not behind us. Here, as elsewhere, the dominical axiom about protology and eschatology subverts the common sense of antiquity and modernity: \u201cthe last first and the first last\u201d (protoi escatoi kai escatoi protoi<\/em>, Matt 19:30).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following is an excerpt from the introduction to my Deep Comedy (Canon, 2006). Viewed as a whole,\u00a0 the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":19814,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1269,861,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedy","category-derrida","category-trinity"],"yoast_head":"\n
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