Peace in the Face of War

It is not only a mistake, but also actually harmful to imagine this earthly
world to be in sharp opposition to the other world beyond the grave. In such
a case, the realisation of Christian truth is entirely transposed into the world
beyond the grave. For this world, there remains the law of beasts, receiving its
highest sanction from ‘eschatological pessimism’. In reality, ‘this world’ has
absolutely no inviolable boundaries, it is not an enclosed world, it is not at
all a stable, ‘realest of all possible worlds’; it is possible to break through into
it, to penetrate it from ‘another world.’ In ‘this world’, the actual mode of
existence is experienced as ‘heaviness’. But a transfiguration of this world is
possible. In Kant’s terminology, it could be said that ‘this world’ is appearance,
and it corresponds to a certain structure of consciousness; the ‘other
world’ is something in itself which opens up under a different structure of
consciousness. But the-thing-in-itself, contrary to Kant, is not at all enclosed
by any inviolable barrier; it manifests itself within phenomena, is active in a
world of phenomena. What Kant calls ‘intelligible freedom’ is active within
the world. For that reason. one can say that in this world there are two
‘worlds’. There is, in a particular sense, both this fallen world, and another
world, active within this world. The fundamental dualism is essentially not
a dualism of two worlds, where every truth ends up being transposed into
the other world, but rather a dualism of freedom and necessity, of spirit
and nature understood as real, causal connection. But freedom performs
acts in the realm of necessity, the spirit performs acts in the realm of
nature. A struggle of spirit and freedom is possible against humankind’s
enslavement to the world, against the enslavement of the world itself. From
this perspective, the End of the world constitutes a spiritual revolution of the
world, a revolution of spiritual freedom. And it signifies first of all a change in
the structure of consciousness. There has to be a dispersing and overcoming
of a petrified and restricted consciousness, corresponding to the condition
of ‘heaviness’. If there is a false dualism, then it is the dualism that asserts
that eschatology has no kind of relationship to historical reality, to the social
order. Eschatology has a relationship to everything; it has a relationship to
every significant act of life. Seeking the Kingdom of God takes over the whole
of life, not only the personal, but also the social. Seeking the Kingdom of
God cannot be understood as simply seeking the personal salvation of one’s
soul. A reduction of Christianity to personal salvation of the soul betrays the
whole world to falsehood, evil and the devil, and would be a distortion of
Christianity, an adjustment to the condition of the world and a catastrophic
failure. An exclusively ascetic Christianity, despite its heroic manifestations
in the past, is opportunist, a refusal to tread the path of transfiguring reality.
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