Between Eshaton and Concept

If it is only the eschatological truth integrator and conciliator of history as a whole

that brings the complete truth and if we are those that confess to it, it is necessary that the
eschatological truth be somehow included in the present time of our confession, that a certain
original affinity between the eschatological future and the present of my being exists; generally,
between time and self. It is because of this that the time of the Eshaton, as well as the road
that leads up to it, need to find a place within the ontological structure of the self. The concept of
self and time cannot be separated. It is in itself a philosophical issue how the self manages to
suppress the linear exteriority of time, synthesizing it into a moment of self-consciousness.
Formally though, Christian theology faces the same issue in its attempts to gather the past or
future events within this universal unit of the self-consciousness.
Dan Sgarta, Timisoara, Romania
Email: dansara2002@yahoo.com
In the following pages I shall be trying to emphasize the Hegelian bond between time
and spirit, demonstrating how the spirit - as an absolute ideea in the virtue of its original
universality and liberty infinitely denies itself, alienating itself and thus creating time as a
premise of its own becoming, the goal of these oppositions being that through their suspensions
and conservations the self progressively nears its own ideal and, finally, reach its own concept.
That is the moment when its universality and unity shall be absolutely conquered, any alteration
having been utterly suppressed and impropriated. The self cannot create any more oppositions
for suppression, its substance being fully synthesized. There is no alien element any more,
foreign to its constitution to be exteriorized as a negation and which to subsequently suppress,
integrating it within the synthetic unity of the consciousness. Hegel ponders For the spirit, there
is none other, except itself.
If the essence of the spirit is the concept, then time is the concept in its most abstract
form, the furthest away from the self; it is the pure self which relates outwards to the self, it is
pure intuition, it is the starting place from where the self, bearing the whole tension of the
concept, begins the search for the itself. One can say that time is the freedom indicator of the
spirit. As long as time is not nullified, the spirit did not reach its concept the interiority that
reveals towards itself, the unity with the self. Hegel once states that The absolute foundation of
the spirit is the confession of the spirit itself, not the miracles or the historical confirmation.
Miracles or historical events hold an exterior balance between the self and the object,
respectively between ego and itself, thus compromising the spirits unity with the self. Therefore
the suspension and the interiorize of history (of time in general) within the synthetic unity of
self-consciousness is needed. The process of synthetizing the objective reality in light of
reaching the concept of the spirit is dialectical and the road toward its becoming involves
inadequate forms of concept, forms that the self suppresses and conserves, enriching itself and
building thus a universality and freedom ever so determined. As the synthetic configuration of
the consciousness becomes more universal, times reality and presence become ontologically
more and more faded. I shall insist on these moments in order to show the passage from the finite
certitudes of the self that keeps the difference between the self and the object to its own truth,

which adequately conciliates the self with its own concept (the self reaching the ideality of its
own self) thus earning its freedom; the freedom to become that which is appropriate to its
original destination. It is about an ontological freedom, one that restores the self to itself in the
form of universality, freeing him of the opposition with the objective reality of space and time
where everything takes place under the auspices of necessity, thus rendering it available to
relations that reside under the sign of gratuity and the unconditional.
Hegel shows that mans need for transcendence does not sprout from himself but
transcendence itself poses this need inside the man, thus searching itself through him. Therefore
there shall be two directions from which the relationship between man and God needs to be
regarded: starting from man towards God and from God towards man. Religion is the first
determinate direction, the phenomenology of the religious consciousness, the subjective side, the
one in which the consciousness relieves itself of its own subjectivity, constructing thus the object
(God), according to his freedoms ability to receive him. This freedom is gained progressively
beneath the tension of the concept which permeating and assimilating the forms of the
consciousness, attempts to reach the complete self-consciousness thus revealing and restoring its
origin, burdened with the infinite negation of its moments.
The organic overlapping that exists between the ways God is known and through this
the way the subject knows himself is to be highly observed. A similar determinate method of the
concept, the same spirit, crosses and intertwines both directions. The subject could not be able to
initiate a dynamic, entelechial relationship, an object oriented assimilation, without a precursive
transcendental unity. Man finds his real image within God only because at his origin, God, taking
a part of himself placed it at the root of mans identity thus triggering the search and discovery of
Himself, just like man, through his freedom, understands to open himself up to God through
what God already planted in him. Thus, the opening toward God signifies within the same action
an opening of man toward himself. They cannot be separated. When you have found God as a
whole the case of Christianity, where God is revealed in its entirety - you have found yourself
wholely.
Therefore, Hegel will come to ask himself: how can I find God in the way that restores
himself to his original content, respectively the way in which it grants me the veritable identity?
Where inside me can I find God so that I may initiate a true knowledge of Him? Where is this
place (within the self) where this content is at home? God, being the universal by excellence,
cannot be found, determined and restored to himself, only through something that can assume,
metabolize and return his universality, which is reason. We put aside the positions in which God
is directly perceived in the subjective form of the feeling I know, I am certain that God is
connected with my being, as well as the one of the abstract representation the form which,
initially, I give to Gods own existence, to His objectivity. Within reason however, as Hegel
states, the pure form of the feeling is linked to the transposed form of the representation, thus
managing to capture the object within an horizon where determination unmediated/mediated
finite/infinite, subjective/objective are not just oppositions and heterogeneous, but also
interlinked, each including the other, which in their mutual determination, will allow the
complete passage of one into the other, each reflecting the other in the full sense, capturing the
other from within its deepest interiority. Thus, the apparent relation between subject and object
will actually disperse into the relation of the subject with itself through the object and into the
relation of the object restored to itself by the subject: the man that discovers himself assimilating
God and God who through the God-touched man restores himself to him receiving his glory as
well. It is highly important that we understand the identity, the difference as well as the unity of

the identity and difference of the terms. Only within reason, in its infinite unity with itself, does
the subject fits perfectly with the object, the universal is for the universal. Only through reason
can we restore God to Himself ontologically uncompromised, states Hegel.
Judging by the way it treats the balance between finite and infinite, reason shall reach its
conceptual identity after it shall undergo two positions, two necessary forms of inadequacy
which it suppress, assimilates and, transforming the negative momentum into a positive one,
overcomes them. Thus we reach the following: the abstract reason, the one which rigidly
encompasses the determination of the object, as a matter of consciousness. There is a total hiatus
between finite and infinite, between man and God. God is seen as subsisting and being for
himself, separately, outside. The way in which man regards his relationship to God, to infinity,
reflects the inner principle of reason, its abstract identity, the simple reduction to the self.
Reflexive reason, attempting a more precise determining of God, defines Him as being what is
beyond man, what surpasses his limits. In this manner God, being just the abstract negation of
man, is given a boundary which limits Him, thus making Him finite. As finite as finity (the man)
that made him infinite. This type of reasoning seems to state that where man ends, God begins,
but the boundary that separates them is, alas, mutual, thus the infinite is turning into finite. It
becomes obvious that keeping for themselves the finite and the infinity, confirmed just for
themselves, the relationship between them can only be exterior, mutually-exclusive, shut off
from an intimate harmonization. It is an endless loop, a vicious circle, impossible to escape. The
finite can never meet the infinite, which is to say man can never meet God. From this tragic
aporia man is left observing that he is the one to set the finite and the infinite, he is their source,
their affirmative. By setting himself as finite, he designates a God to reside beyond him. This
designation is also his. God is his product, his outcome. Beyond the self, his pure alterity, that
which overcomes him, is part of himself, he is their source. Thus the first opposition between
finite and infinite has disappeared, transgressing into the self, but in more subtle, more difficult
to detect form. The progress that this determination brings is the fact that, formally, the finite
discovers the infinite within itself, man discovers God within himself. The infinite is within the
finite. Hegel calls this position the supreme summit of subjectivity, because the proposed
infinite has the shape and limitations of the finite that designed it and from which it hails.It is a
finite infinite, a man-touched God created by man himself. The man becomes the supreme
criteria, through him everything is set and gains value. It is the absolute self confirmation, the
absolute subjectivity. But, being finite, everything that results from the setting and confirmation
of the self bears this touch of finite, thus the missing element is the counterbalance of objectivity,
of infinity set through itself and not through the particular subjectivity of the subject. I, being
finite, need to give up my finity, inorder to find within me a position where infinity is perfectly
fitted and restored to itself without my subjective interfering which will inevitably limit and alter
its expression. Thus, the self has to be determined as universal, exactly as the substance it
receives within itself. This is the most difficult position within the self because through its own
freedom requires the total abandoning within the object it related to and by which is has to be
embraced. Its freedom in itself is replaced by a greater freedom, the freedom to be relieved of the
burden of decision. One is taken over and inhabited by the object.The object replaces ones life
and precedes harmonically throughout all the gestures, delivering one from the drama of any
problematic choice. This is the conceptual (speculative) reason, the one which in the same
action - binds the subjects renouncing finity with the veritable appearance of the object in its
universality. It is an appearance, aface to face meeting. It is only now that the intertwining and
difference between the subject and the object are being valued and restored to themselves: the

subject by assuming the object becomes subject-object, and the object by assuming the
subject - becomes object-subject.
Only now does the subject looks towards the object in itself, in full transparency, without the
deceiving shadows of an abusive subjectivity, he sees in itself its own uniqueness, its own
idealized image.
More so, the infinite by means of mans freedom which recognized its superiority and
surrendered to it in order to be impregnated by its dimension rejoins itself through a shape that
truly reflects it. The intertwining, but also the difference between the two is obvious. As seen,
formally, the subjects relation to the object, of man to God, is actually a relation of man with
himself through God, but also a link of God with Himself through man. But man, having been
created and sealed by God, his intercession with himself implicitly becomes, within the same
action, an intercession of God with Himself, thus an affirmation. Man, digging deep within
himself in search of his image, strikes godly source. Thus, man starting from himself dicovers his
real image in Other, in God. The keener he listens to the voice of his alterity, the more obvious
his own identity becomes. We have to highlight the manner in which the progressive
onthological interiority of the self includes a necessary objectivity of the one it assimilates. The
more you have God within you, the more He becomes, paradoxically, more distinctive, more
visible, more objective, which means that the subjects subjectivity has filled with the objects
objectivity, which will allow God to rise through man, exactly the way He is, thus to be revealed
to Himself. Obviously, Godobjectivity becomes subjective. He allows Himself to be assimilated
by the one that received his gift. If there is anything that can be said against Hegel, it is the fact
that he considers this gift only in its positivity, whereas on this unilateral positivity he has built
his whole subject-object dialectic. Hegel states that reason, being universal for the universal, can
establish, by means of a necessary progressive determination immanent to both the subject and
the object, their real image, as a whole.
Starting from the gift of God, man rebuilds God while building himself. However, what
Hegel leaves out, and what fatally affects his onthological premises, is the fact that behind the
gift resides an initiative that makes it possible, and that is Gods love and gratuity, His original
initiative. If reason, through the intrinsec rigour of concept, rebuilds the path up to God, the
resulting God is one of necessity, of logical inferrence, of conceptual summoning. Because of
this, the absolute Spirit that Hegel reaches is shut within itself, onthologically self-sufficient,
God being perfectly suppressed and consumed. God Himself, even though he possess objectivity,
has no freedom left, He is fully asimilated conceptually.
But God did not create man out of necessity, so that reason can bring man back to God,
through the dynamism of certain (ontho)logical structures, but out of filantropy, nobleness and
goodwill.
According to us, Hegel needed to complete the onthology of concept that which, formally,
through mans godliness restores God to himself with an onthology of the unexplainable, of
grace, of love which seeks Gods freedom of initiative, His onthological generosity, His
inappropriable archaicity. The connection between subject and object, between man and God is
not onthologically simetrical. Formally, even the Orthodoxy accepts mans godliness (Theosis),
but in his godliness, man does not consume God, but through Euharistia (communion)
restores His dimension, dignity and the original Principle eloquence, to He who from within His
hidden innerself creates and sets a begining to all, thus respecting and cultivating the absolute
alterity of His Paternity. Thus, the onthology of the concept needs to be completed, in the sense
of originality, with a gracely, mysterical onthology.

In order to avoid the confusion with the platonic emanatism, where God is still under the
sign of necessity at the moment of His onthological flow, we need to add that, as the Capadocian
parents teach, the cause of the Trinity godliness is the the Father. The Father wanted the Son not
out of necessity, as means of an egocentrical self indulgence, but out of love. That is why, in the
economy of the Holy Trinity, the Son, even though of the same being as the Father, appears, in
comparisson to the Father, in the shape of a distinct alterity, gifted with freedom. The love of the
Father becomes a primordial onthological concept, and his first expression, where the
communion and freedom are perfectly twinned, is the Holy Trinity. The fathers absolute
freedom of initiative corresponds to the Sons absolute freedom of answer, through the Holy
Spirit. The onthological support for the Holy Trinity is loves plenitude, its eternal call and
answer, its infinite dynamics that springs from its hypostates.
Godlinessis is defined by its personal relationship, not by its nature. The persons freedom and
alterity give force to the communion. We shall not get into dogmatic details, mentioning just that
when the Father causes the Holy Trinity, this must not be conceived in the shape of temporal
succession as is the case of created things. The person does not follow to nature. The prioritising
of one meaning over the other needs to be avoided. The Father Himself has ordained this when
He wished his Son, placing in him all His love and freedom underneath the hypostatical alterity.
The onthological priority of the Father is given to the Son, that is why in the divine oiconomy
one cannot speak of one meaning over the other.
Going back to Hegel, it needs to be stated that which triggers the self to develop, reaching
the absolute self revelation - the absolute Spirit - is the concept. The concept, a tool for the
Absolute Idea, compares the phenomena of consciousness (its relation to the object) with its
universal nature, and the difference that stands out is suppressed and preserved within the self,
the denied moment becoming a property of consciousness, and thus overpassing it. In virtue of
these successive suppresions, the selfs exteriority shall dissappear in the sense of spiritual
transgression having been integrated within the conscience as a passed moment. It is true, the
self has within itself the whole richness of substance, it is the epitomy and peak of creation. It is
for this reason that the self can establish unitary reports, of an anagogical assimilation with the
object, thus raising creation and its own being to their ultimate dignity (union with God), but, if
together with this received richness, the self does not sense, deeper, the ineffable mystery of
godliness, its absolute unknowingness, then the nobleness and purity of the gift received which
ultimately constitutes it are onthologically compromised. The gift, as an expression of alteritys
generosity and freedom, needs to be absorbed together with its donor. Otherwise, the exclusive
validation of the gift, setting aside the mysterious divine initiative and its absolute alterity,
deliveres an incomplet deiform concept of the self.The godly image incrusted within the self will
always position itself ahead of it, preceeding it and accompanying it in all its determinations
until, after this whole distinction and assimilation of the formations of the consciousness, shall
receive the complete expression of the fulfilled concept, respectively of the absolute spirit. The
historicist and determined character of the Hegelian concept, the necessary and interlinked
development of its moments are becoming obvious. God is perfectly recognisible and receivable,
there is no alterity unsupressable by the consciousness, Hegel seems to ponder. Any alterity is
relative, and its meaning is to be perpetually suppressed, so that the subject and the object
recognize each other, assimilate each other, thus fully develop one through and into the other.
Hegel hints there is no absolute alterity. Even in the introduction to The Phenomenology of
Spirit he notes: The object seems to be specific to it [to the consciousness] only in the way it

knows it; the consciousness cannot go beyond the object, in order to examine it as it is not for
her.
As seen, the Hegelian concept, as an expression of the absolute divine alterity from which
it hails and which it has to rebuild, is missing its graceful, its escathological dimension, founding
but also free from history. On the margin we can say that there were and probably shall be
moments when the Spirit will have to act alone because history reaches a state where the action
of man is no longer operative, it stalls. This is also valid for mans individual destiny.
It should be mentioned, without further developing the subject, the merit of Orthodox
theology a keeper and bearer of the patristic tradition which has always felt the mistery of the
absolute divine alterity, its ineffable fundamental component. Unfortunately, Hegel - we can only
surmise that his information was incomplete and incorrect saw in the openness of Orthodoxy
towards mistery only the culture of the exterior miracle, always requested for itself, Orthodoxy
being a faith in a content that is not divine, it is not a confession of God on to Himself as spirit
within spirit. On the contrary, no confession surprises or confesses God out of an deeper and
adequate interiority, capturing, - due to a remarkable pneumatic realism its apophatic antinomy
which transcends the limits of conceptual logic, seizing both His alterity and absolute freedom of
endless mistery, as well as the relative one, of a supressable alterity, given to man so that he may
grow and become, with the participation and under the decisive guidance of the Holy Spirit, God
through grace.
Asking itself the issue of knowledge, of realization and possession of the supreme Being,
Orthodoxy distinguishes into the Godly Being two mysterious means of the presence: 1. The
abyss of the divine essence, its inscrutable alterity eternaly inaccessible, untold and
incomprehensible (Deus Absconditus the Donor) 2. The external (ad extra) manifestations
of God the outcomings, as stated by the philocalic Parents His multiple and multiformal
energies, told and comprehensible to the creature.(Deus Revelatus the Gift man fully
intrusted to himself by God, with the power to know and endure Him, thus restoring and
fulfilling his being). Though radically distinct, the godly energies are unseparable from the
essence, being the expression of trihipostatic mutual nature. Here one can see fully manifested
the apophatic, antinomical dimension truly a crucification of digressive, conceptuale thinking
of the connection between creation and Creator. God reveals and manifests himself while still
hiding, remaining absolutely transcendent and heterogenous to the creature, still permeating and
assimilating it inside up to the point of transforming it, through grace in what He is by nature.
The apophatic structure, absolutely antinomical and - stating its incompatible terms, yet
necessary one to another - absolutely equal to itself within this antinomy, is substantial for any
essential theological truth and is found, for example, in the dogma of the Holy Trinity where
the antinomy between trinity and unity coexist in harmony, within the christs teandrism where
the antinomy between the duality of states, divine and human, and the unity of the being do not
contradict each other but, on the contrary, bears their mutual affirmation etc. The source of such
an understanding, which the current logical categories cannot encompass being of the primordial
and unqualifiable domain, can only have one pneumatological, unexplainable origin, thus only
the eschatological perspective surpassing this century through bringing the future into the
present, constraining history and transfiguring it after its most proper meaning, which comes
from the future can bring light and realism to the essential milestones, because they hail from
the source iself. Even the supreme dignity of man (Gods image within him ), naturally offered to
the creature along with its concrete origin, is a hint that through a constant effort of likeness, he
can lively and immediate participate towards the divine being. There is a dialectical and

antinomical relationship between the image and the likeness, each term revealing and concluding
the other. It needs to be stated that as an expression of the absolute freedom and alterity of the
divine being a certain anteriority of the image towards the likeness, in the sense of origination,
is imposed, the human being having always set God as an asymptotic limit.
An absolute likeness with the Creator may never be achieved. The apophatic Spirit
emphasizes a specific ontological difference between man and God, between image and likeness,
thus restoring both the autonomy of the object and the recognition of his inexorable mystery,
which in counterbalance, will allow the creation an infinite growth and enriching through God.
The divine mystery must not be understood in its common sense, of an opaque, obscure or
irrational reality, but, in its fundamental ineffability, it remains intelligible, the being is able to
establish thanks to an apophatic paradox a relationship and a affirmative participation with its
negation, with what cannot be participated in, by definition. Therefore, the connection of man
with God is fostered and grown through the synergy resulted on one hand from the individual
effort to overpass ones self, and on the other hand from the participation and ontological
coherence with the Archetype from which it originates, knowing that what ensures the
divinization of the being is, first of all a reflection of the primordially divine initiative the
fruit of Gods grace. We must notice that the effort of man to self-transcend his limits and the
work of Gods grace are not added to one another in an external way. Being endowed with divine
dignity from birth, the mans action of transcending limits as a result of his fall is converted as
in a true negation of negation in returning to the godly quality of his origins. The contribution
of the Holy Spirit is definitory here, as non-foreign and non heterogeneous element, but its very
primordially constitution implies the divine alterity to contribute and aim at own being. To the
genuine openness of the man responds, in the same action, the fruitful alterity of the Holy Spirit,
which overtakes him, instills him with grace and returns him to himself, by divinizing him. The
pneumatological supereminence in the act of union between God and man is manifest. The man,
through his own self, separated from his constitutive alterity, cannot know and participate to
what is beyond and constitutes him. But, if after the communion with the baptismal spirit the
being creates a unity and an oppenness in accordance with its primordial destination, which
similar to an individual effort to selftranscend will convert, through a mysterious alchemy, into
capture in the eschatologic pleroma of divine grace. What constitutes man in a pneumatic
presence is this meeting between what he already is and what is beyond him but belongs to him
at the same time, the union between his destinal historicity and heavenly charisma. In order to be
saved, to become whole, he asks God to give him something that he already received from Christ
through the Holy Spirit. This does not mean the repetition or duplication of a gift, and it is not
just a formal or simple tautological confirmation, but, mediating this meeting between the Holy
Baptisman Spirit (the spirit involved in history, without confounding with it) and the
eschatological spirit (the spirit beyond the history) bringing the Holy Spirit to himself, even if
He is whole in each of the hypostases man fills with its presence, becomes co-actor, without
ceasing to be, ontologically, a human being. This plenitude of the being, constantly dependant on
the eschata introduced by the Holy Spirit, proves that the life of man must permanently be
eschatologically watered. The eshaton, as a tool of the Holy Spirit, frees the history from its tight
frames, turning it into an atemporal pneumatic presence.
Unlike the eshaton, the Hegelian concept, as seen, a means and expression of the
Absolute Idea, contains the ideal image of the self in its origin, in order to, constrained by the

concept in the phenomenological relation to the object progressively determine its own
interiority up to the moment when, developing all the differences within itself and suppressing
them in the synthetic unity of the consciousness, thus becoming universal, cannot go beyond
itself, the interiority of the self having been fully conquered and the concept fulfilled. Thus, the
self shall arise as an absolute spirit, as the complete master of all its possibilities. In Christian
theological terms, the image (concept) perfectly merges with the likeness (absolute spirit), or,
reversely, the likeness fully validates the ontological potential of the image. There is no specific
ontological difference between the two terms. God Himself, although objective, is perfectly
assimilated conceptually within the self, becoming one of its moments. The initial ontological
symmetry between the self and God, their original simultaneity predeterminately placed within
the concept, the absence of a more radical negation which may regard Gods absolute alterity and
freedom, as well as His position as the initiator of the relationship, can be traced into the double
anomaly of a history dependant God, and, finally when historys exteriority is suppressed
into the ontological equality of man with Himself. We must not forget that, for Hegel, the
purpose of history is that of becoming knowledge, which may mediate the return of the timeexteriorized Spirit to itself.