Supplement at the Origin: Trinity, Eschatology and History PETER J. LEITHART*

Supplement at the Origin: Trinity,Eschatology and History

PETER J. LEITHART*

Abstract: The Christian scriptures, in contrast to many ancient and modernmythologies, present a comic eschatology, in which history moves from agarden to a glorified garden-city. Christian faith is also unique in confessingfaith in a Triune God. This article explores the systematic connections betweenthese two confessions to raise the question, Is the Christian account of historycomic because the Christian God is Triune? After establishing the uniquenessof the comic vision of history found in scripture, the article makes use of Jacques Derridas writings on origin and supplement to argue that the Triunelife itself has a comic structure. There is no tragic degeneration from the Father(origin) to the Son (supplement), but perfect equality in power and glory; indeedthe Son glorifies the Father. So also in history there is no tragic degenerationfrom origin to supplement, but a comic progression from glory to glory, fromFirst to Last Adam, from garden to city.

I begin with two observations, both of which, particularly the first, will requiredetailed defense.

Viewed as a whole, firstly, the Christian account of history is eschatological notonly in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sensethat the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. The ChristianBible moves not from garden lost to garden restored, but from garden to garden-city. God gives with interest. To say the same in other words, though the Bible givesfull recognition to sin and its effects on creation and humanity, the Christian accountof history is ultimately comic. The story ends in cosmic joy and celebration, everyloss regained and every tear dried. As I shall argue below, this comic eschatologicalvision of history stands in contrast to most mythical renditions of history in antiquity.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, ancientand modern.

This article is an effort to discern a connection these two unique or at leasthighly idiosyncratic features of Christian faith. Is Christianity eschatologically

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International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 6 Number 4 October 2004

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comic because it is trinitarian? Is history moving toward a comic climax as arevelation of the nature of the Triune God? To ask the question from the other end:Is there an eschatological moment in the life of the Trinity? Is the life of the Trinitycomic?1 Below, I sketch the outlines of an affirmative answer to these questions. Iftrinitarian theology is centrally an answer to the question, Given the gospel story,who must God be for this to be possible? I wish to broaden the question beyondthe narrative of Jesus life, death and resurrection to ask, Given the biblical visionof history, what must God be for this to be possible? The answer is the same in bothcases: the immanent Trinity is manifested in and is the ontological ground not onlyfor the death and resurrection of the Son, but in and for a world-history that movesfrom Eden to New Jerusalem.

The argument proceeds in several stages. First, I examine a single classical mythof history, Hesiods myth of the four (or five) ages and its later uses, to suggestthat the classical world had a predominantly tragic vision or sense of history. Some writers have suggested that there are tragic features to the biblical view ofhistory as well, and I will address these while arguing that the Bible presents a fundamentally comic vision. At that stage, the argument shifts from anhistorical/mythological plane to a metaphysical plane, as I examine Derridastreatment of the problems of writing and supplementarity, especially as they arise inPlato, to point out homologies between ancient conceptions of history and Platonicmetaphysics and theology. As Derrida shows, it is axiomatic for Plato thatsupplementarity is degenerative, and this finds its analogue in mythical views ofhistory for which temporal supplementation necessarily means degeneration.2 ForPlatonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics, the lower is always lesser; for Hesiod, Ovidand other mythographers and myth-historians the later is always lesser. Finally, Iwill argue that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms an originary supplementbut a supplement that emanates without degeneration from its origin. Derrida opensthe way for this trinitarian solution by treating the relationship between speaker andtext, or between origin and supplement more generally, as a fatherson relation.Derridas FatherSon, however, is heretical, but an orthodox trinitarian theologyavoids the problematics of Platonic supplementarity and provides an ontologicalgrounding for a view of history where the passage of time does not necessarily meandecay. For a trinitarian theology, time can be redeemed and brought to comicconclusion. For trinitarian theology, the Second is fully equal to and even the glory

370 Peter J. Leithart

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004

1 I make no attempt in this article to offer a rigorous definition of comic or tragic, bothhighly contested terms among literary critics, philosophers and theologians. My looseworking definitions are as follows: A view of history (or a narrative) is comic if it positsthat the end will be better than the beginning, and tragic if it claims that the end islesser than or a simple return to the beginning. A metaphysics is comic if it makes roomfor the possibility of a derivative or supplement being equal to or superior to an origin,and tragic if there is no such possibility.

2 The argument could be extended to scientific theories as well, both ancient and modern.The apparently common-sensical axiom that a cause is always greater than its effectreflects the same ambiguity toward supplementation.

of the First, and therefore for the Bible, the golden age is always before and infront. Here, as elsewhere, the dominical axiom about protology and eschatologysubverts the common sense of antiquity: the last first and the first last (r k r, Mt. 19:30).

I3

The classical form of the degenerative myth is the myth of the five (or four) metallicages found in Hesiod. In Works and Days, Hesiod tells the story as a regression fromthe age of gold, through the age of silver, to an age of bronze. The sequence ofmetallic ages is interrupted by an age of heroes, but then resumes in the fifth age,the age of iron, in which Hesiod found himself. The contrast between the two endpoints of this sequence is particularly striking. Hesiod describes the golden age asfollows:

The race of men that the immortals who dwell on Olympus made was first ofall of gold. They were in the time of Kronos, when he was king in heaven; andthey lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery. Wretchedold age did not affect them either, but with hands and feet ever unchanged theyenjoyed themselves in feasting, beyond all ills, and they died as if overcome bysleep. All good things were theirs, and the grain-giving soil bore its fruit of itsown accord in unstinted plenty, while they at their leisure harvested their fieldsin contentment amid abundance. Since the earth covered up that race, they havebeen divine spirits by great Zeus design, good spirits on the face of the earth,watchers over mortal men, bestowers of wealth: such is the kingly honour thatthey receive.4

The iron race is quite different: Now it is a race of iron; and they will nevercease from toil and misery by day or night, in constant distress, and the gods willgive them harsh troubles. Nevertheless, even they shall have good mixed with ill.Before it is all done, the iron age will degenerate into social and political chaos:

Zeus will destroy this race of men also, when at birth they turn out grey at thetemples. Nor will father be like children or children to father, nor guest to host

Supplement at the Origin 371


3 Much of the material in the following paragraphs is drawn from E.R. Dodds, AncientConcept of Progress and others Essays on Greek Literature and Beliefs (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1973), ch. 1. See also the classic study of J.B. Bury, The Idea ofProgress: An Inquiry into its Growth and Origin (New York: Dover, [1932] 1955), pp. 720. Robert Nisbet mounts a vigorous and partially successful attack on theconventional wisdom that the classical world lacked an idea of progress in History ofthe Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), ch. 1, yet even Nisbet can onlysay that the classical writers did on occasion refer to a future in which civilization wouldhave gone well beyond what it was in their own time (p. 11).

4 Hesiod, Works and Days. The translation is that of M.L. West (Worlds Classics; Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 40.

or comrade to comrade, nor will a brother be friendly as in former times. Soonthey will cease to respect their ageing parents, and will rail at them with harshwords, the ruffians, in ignorance of the gods punishment; nor are they likely to repay their ageing parents for their nurture. First-law men; one will sackanothers town, and there will be no thanks for the man who abides by his oathor for the righteous or worthy man, but instead they will honour the miscreantand the criminal. Law and decency will be in fists.

Hesiod continues in this vein for several more lines, before concluding abruptly bysaying that these grim woes will remain for mortal men, and there will be no helpagainst evil.5

Several commentators suggest that the myth should be read as something otherthan a pure myth of degeneration. The metals that characterize the ages get lessvaluable as the sequence progresses, but in some senses they get more useful andtougher. Besides, Hesiod ends the whole with the lament, Would that I were notthen among the fifth men, but either dead earlier or born later!6 This suggests thatHesiod expects the degeneration of the iron age to issue in a renewal, perhaps arenewed golden age.7 M.L. West has responded to this line of argument bysuggesting that the system as [Hesiod] expounds it is finite and complete; kkr, he said, and if the had had a hopeful ending he would surelyhave not omitted to mention it. Though Hesiod may personally hope for a renewedage, it is not necessarily the case that Hesiods inner convictions coincide with the myth he is telling.8 Wests comment is sensible, and cyclical interpretationsnecessarily extrapolate beyond the myth as Hesiod gives it. Yet, even if Hesiod isassuming a cyclical view of history, the larger argument of the present essay wouldstand, since this myth gives no hope for a movement toward an eschatologicalgolden age that would never end. For Hesiod, every golden age, however manythere may be, will eventually degenerate into a silver age.9

For different reasons, Robert Nisbet argues that the myth is not properly a mythof degeneration, since the bronze age is markedly better than its silver predecessor,and the next succeeding race, that of hero-men, is better yet. Further, the iron



5 All quotations in this paragraph from the Worlds Classics edition, p. 42.6 Hesiod, Works and Days, p. 42.7 Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1983), p. 6: This remark is incomprehensible in the context of human time that iscontinuously degenerating, but it makes perfect sense if we accept that the series of agesis a recurring renewable cycle, just like the sequence of the seasons.

8 Hesiod, Works and Days (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 197.9 Thus, in Vernants cyclical reading, each cycle in itself traces a decline. Responding to

criticisms of J. Defradas, he writes that my view was that the sequence of the racesmade up a complete cycle of decline. Starting off with an age of gold where youth,justice, mutual friendship, and happiness reign, all in their pure state, we end with anage which is its opposite in every respect: it is entirely given over to old age, injustice,quarrelsomeness, and unhappiness (Myth and Thought, p. 39).

race is not as monolithically evil as conventional interpretation would have it.10Nisbet is correct that Hesiod explicitly describes the heroes as superior to the bronzemen, and also right that the iron men are mixed of good and evil. His claim that the overall trajectory of Hesiods myth is not degenerative cannot, however, besustained. The antithesis between the golden and iron races is too precise and acuteto be anything but the framework of a decline.

In the classical world, in any case, Hesiods myth was understood asdegenerative. Hesiods basic framework were taken up by Ovid (Metamorphoses,1.14150) who tells the story in four ages, apparently to bring out thecorrespondence with the four seasons. For Ovid, the decline was to be arrested byZeus with a great flood that wipes the slate clean.11 Juvenal, likewise, understoodthe myth as a description of decline, though one that was insufficient to account forthe corruption of his own first-century ad situation:

A ninth age is in motion, period worse than the timesOf iron, for whose viciousness has Nature herselfNot found a name to impose after any metal.12

Greek poets such as Theognis of Megara, Empedocles and Aratus, and Roman poetslike Lucretius and Catullus, all make more or less explicit use of the metallic mythand treat it as a myth of decline.13 The age of sons is always worse than the age ofthe fathers, and the more distant the fathers the more superior they are.

Virgil is the first to make belief in a restored golden age explicit and also thefirst to claim that the dawning of the new age was immanent.14 In his Fourth Eclogue(the so-called Messianic Eclogue), Virgil wrote of the birth of a child throughwhom the new golden age would be born. Initially, while the child is still young,the golden age will come only in part, but as the child grows and reaches manhood,the golden age will dawn in earnest. When, like a latter-day Hercules, he assumesfull humanity, not only war but commerce and farming will cease, because the earthwill be as fruitful as it was in the long-ago days of the original golden age:



10 Nisbet, Idea of Progress, pp. 1617. Vernant makes the same argument concerning theage of heroes (Myth and Thought, pp. 3940).

11 Nisbet, interestingly, does not cite Ovids version of the myth.12 Satire 13.2830; in Juvenal, Sixteen Satires Upon the Ancient Harlot, trans. Steven

Robinson (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1983, p. 179). Without referring to themetallic ages, Horace expressed a similar sense of the tragic decline of Rome: Damnosaquid non imminuit dies?/ Aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit/ nos nequiores, mox daturos/progeniem vitiosiorem (Odes 3.6; Horace, Odes of Horace, trans. David Ferry (NewYork: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1997), p. 181). Variations of the four/five age scheme,correlated to metals, appear in Sumerian, Babylonian, Zoroastrian and Indianmythologies (cf. Wests notes in the Oxford edition of Works and Days, pp. 1747).

13 For details, see Patricia A. Johnston, Vergils Agricultural Golden Age: A Study of theGeorgics (Leiden: Brill, 1980), pp. 1540.

14 So Dodds, Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 21. Johnston, Vergils Agricultural GoldenAge, claims that One of the crucial distinctions between Vergils conception of a goldenage and that of his predecessors is the fact that Vergils golden age can recur (p. 8).

when the years have confirmed you in full manhood,Traders will retire from the sea, from the pine-built vesselsThey used for commerce: every land will be self-supporting.The soil will need no harrowing, the vine no pruning-knife;And the tough ploughman may at least unyoke his oxen.We shall stop treating wool with artificial dyes,For the ram himself in his pasture will change his fleeces colour,Now to a charming purple, now to a saffron hue,And grazing lambs will dress themselves in coats of scarlet.15

Virgil comes closer than any in the classical world came to a conception of aneschatological resolution to history. But two observations will indicate the distancebetween Virgil and Christian eschatology. First, Virgils renewed golden age isliterally a return to the origin, not a supplement or advance from the origin. Allcultural supplements to nature are to be removed in the golden age. Virgil imaginesno garden-city nor even a literal return to Eden, but a world scoured of commerce,agriculture, labor, travel and trade. Second, Virgils apparent optimism in the FourthEclogue and elsewhere is crossed by his persistent melodramatic sentimentalism.Aeneas establishes a purported imperium sine fine, but does so through tears andlaments, so that Aeneass sunt lacrimae rerum, uttered as he examines the depictionsof the Trojan War on the walls of Junos temple in Carthage, is something of aVirgillian motto. Virgil is nowhere more himself than when he is wringing thereaders heart with a vision of fallen youth (Marcellus in Aeneid Book 6, and Pallasin Book 9).

The older and wiser Virgil of the Georgics recognized that the golden age hadnot materialized, that there was no going back to the age before the age of Jupiter,and that tilling the soil remained the arduous price of survival:

The first rule in farmingIs that you are never to hope for an easy way.



15 Virgil, The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), p.24. For a concise overview of this poem, and its Christian use, see Wendell Clausen, ACommentary on Virgil, Eclogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 11930. Clausennicely summarizes this portion of the Eclogue: During this period of military expansionin the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, the Golden Age will insensibly be merged, asthe boy grows to manhood, with the age of heroes; like the golden, in Hesiod, an age ofpreternatural felicity, but, unlike the golden, immune to deterioration (p. 125). Virgilscelebration of the peace brought by the Augustan empire in the Aeneid rings the changeson similar themes, as does Horaces celebration of restored Roman virtue in the CarmenSaeculare. In a somewhat similar vein, Horaces Sixteenth Epode describes the BlessedFields and Wealthy Isles where the golden age continues into the present. Those islandsare lands of fruitfulness, but not of cultivation: where every year the land unploughedgives grain,/ and vines unpruned are never out of flower,/ and olive shoots unfailing budand set their fruit,/ and dusky fig ungrafted graces its own tree (Horace, Complete Odesand Epodes, trans. David West (Worlds Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997), pp. 1820).

The land demands your effort. Body and mindAre sharpened, that undisturbed would grow vague with sloth.Before Jupiters reign the fields had no masters.Even to mark out land and divide it with boundsWas unlawful. No one took thought of yours or mineWhile the generous earth gave enough for every need.Jupiter first put the poison in black snakesSent wolves marauding, set the clam sea heaving,Shook honey off the leaves, took fire away,And stopped the wine that ran everywhere in streams.16

Richard Thomas comments:

The passage places the cultural setting of the Georgics after the Fall, and it isa passage which Virgil intends the reader to apply throughout the poem; wherethe language of the golden age is found, it either creates a conflict with therealities of the poem (2.13676, 458540nn.), or it is applied with irony(3.53745n.). The agents of Jupiter are toil and want, toil which is insatiableand pervasive, and want which presses when times are hard.17

Patricia Johnston argues, on the contrary, that Jupiters imposition of labor and wantis for the good of men, since freedom from work led to dulled wits and lethargy.In the Georgics, on her reading, Virgil renounces the metallic myth as he told it inthe Eclogues and subverts the traditional meanings of the metals, but this does notlead to despairing nostalgia. Instead, the farmers life is itself a kind of golden age.The golden age is no longer an age before cultivation but is transformed into the ageof agrarian simplicity, one that the farmer can help to usher in by diligent labor.18Johnstons is an interesting and perhaps correct thesis, but even on her reading thegolden age of the Georgics is profoundly chastened.

The preceding paragraphs hardly count as a demonstration of the mentality ofthe classical world, but these indications are sufficient to illustrate how widespreadand deeply rooted tragic conceptions of history were.

II

Against the classical nostalgia for a golden age lost and unlikely to be revived, the Bible, and particularly the prophets of Israel, hold out the promise of a future



16 Georgic 1; Virgil, The Georgics, trans. Robert Wells (Manchester: Carcanet New Press,1982), pp. 323.

17 Thomas, ed., Virgil Georgics, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),1.17. Thomass pessimistic reading of the Georgics has been challenged by LlewlynMorgan, Patterns of Redemption in Virgils Georgics (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999).

18 Johnston, Vergils Agricultural Golden Age, pp. 4761.

age of glory, peace, justice and abundance. The biblical passage that (perhaps)alludes most explicitly to the Hesiodic myth of the declining and degeneratingmetallic ages is Daniel 2, and there the myth is radically subverted.19 In a dream,Nebuchadnezzar sees a statue consisting of a head of gold, a torso of silver, thighsof bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with clay being struck by a stone cutout without hands, which crushes the statue to powder (Dan. 2:3135). Once thestone has demolished the composite statue, it became a great mountain and filledthe whole earth (v. 35). Daniel interprets this as a vision of the coming of thekingdom of the God of heaven that will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms,but it will itself endure forever (v. 45). Even if the vision is somehow alluding tothe Hesiodic myth, which is doubtful, the vision ends with a new and greaterkingdom that will be everlasting, challenging both the cyclical and the degenerativereadings of Hesiod.

Isaiahs prophecies are similar. Instead of looking back in regret to a lost Davidickingdom and the tarnished glories of Solomon, Isaiah is full of the promise of afuture golden age, when the lion will lie down with the lamb (Isa. 11:110), whenthe mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as chief of the mountainsand become a place of pilgrimage for the Gentiles (2:24), when the glory of Yahwehwill be revealed to the nations (40:5), proving all idols to be nothing and less thannothing. Rather than look back nostalgically to the exodus from Egypt, Isaiahprophesies that Yahweh is going to act with such power and splendor that Israelherself will forget her founding event (43:1421). Isaiahs visions, to be sure, arestructured by Israels past. Hope is placed in a new David (a Branch from Jesse),and redemption from Babylon is imagined as a new exodus. But the keynote is notcyclical, as if Israel were simply going to go through the same thing all over again.The keynote of the prophecy is Yahwehs declaration that, Behold, I do somethingnew (43:19; cf. 42:9; 48:6).20 The other major prophetic books of the Old Testamenthave a similar structure. As the personification of the remnant and the sufferingservant Israel, Jeremiah experiences intense anguish at the fall of Jerusalem, but at the center of his prophecy is the promise of a new and better covenant (Jer.31:2738),21 which Jeremiah announces with a repetition of the announcement thatdays are coming (31:27, 31, 38). Ezekiels prophecy begins with Yahwehsabandonment of the temple (Ezk. 811), moves through a series of severe judgments



19 For discussion of the sources for Daniels vision, see, for instance, John E. Goldingay,Daniel, WBC 30 (Waco: Word, 1989), pp. 3641, 4951.

20 Isaiahs repeated emphasis on the fact that the Creator-God Yahweh is doing the newthing suggests that only a doctrine of creation, with implied eschatology, can providetheological ground for real newness and invention. Without an inexhaustibly infiniteGod, there is always going to be some limit on human creativity. Since God is trulyinfinite, there is no bar to infinite progression of the new. Humanity will end still facinginfinite horizons yet to achieve which is to say, it will not end.

21 For a structural analysis showing that chapters 3033 form the chiastic center ofJeremiahs prophecy, see David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament:A Commentary on GenesisMalachi (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), pp. 23645.

toward return and resurrection (chs 3637) and the construction of an awe-inspiringtemple-city (chs 4048).22

The New Testament turns this prophetic perspective into a framework for thewhole of human history. As noted above, this comic story provides the overallframe for the Christian Bible, which begins with the garden of Eden and ends witha city that is a glorification or enhancement of the original setting. Like Eden, theNew Jerusalem is a well-watered place (Rev. 22:2; cf. Gen. 2:1011; 13:10). In placeof a single tree of life in the midst of the garden (Gen. 2:9), the New Jerusalemsriver is lined with trees of life, bearing twelve fruit, yielding fruit every month; andthe leaves were for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:2). The alternation of nightand day that was determined on the first day of the creation week (Gen. 1:35) isreplaced by an eternal day in which there shall no longer be night. The sun, createdon the fourth day (Gen. 1:1419), will be replaced by the direct radiance of theuncreated light of God: they shall not have need of the light of a lamp nor of thesun, because the Lord God will illumine them (Rev. 22:5).23 Like the days ofcreation, which move from evening to morning, the biblical history moves fromdarkness to light, from the darkness, emptiness, and formlessness of the originalcreation (Gen. 1:2) to the lighted and teeming city of Revelation. History movestoward day. One of the basic structures of Pauline theology the contrast of firstand last () Adams makes the same point (Rom. 5:1221; 1 Cor. 15:45). Jesusfirst sign in Johns Gospel (Jn 2:111) is a symbolic announcement of the samereality. The wedding guests are perfect classicists, who think that things must getworse as time passes. Reversing common practice, Jesus gives better wine at the endof the feast than he gave at the beginning. The later is better.24



22 For a more detailed discussion of this narrative flow, see Peter J. Leithart, A House forMy Name: A Survey of the Old Testament (Moscow, ID: Canon, 2000), pp. 21522.

23 For more extended reflections on the literary and theological connections betweenGenesis 12 and Revelation 2122, see William J. Dumbrell, The End of the Beginning:Revelation 2122 and the Old Testament (Moore Theological College Lecture Series;Homebush West, Australia: Lancer, 1985), ch. 5.

24 This principle has significant social and political consequences, in questions of sexualequality and difference, for example. For Aristotle, woman was a defective man,derivative and secondary and hence inferior. Paul may appear at times to endorse this:Eve was created second to Adam, and Paul cites this order to argue that women shouldnot teach or exercise authority over a man (1 Tim. 2:1215). Yet, the genuinely Paulineteaching about a mans headship is combined with the claim that the woman is the gloryof the man (1 Cor. 11:7), just as the man is the image and glory of God. The fact thatEve comes second in time does not make her a tarnished Adam; rather, Eve, the secondhuman, is, like the Last Adam, a glorified Adam. Strikingly, but not surprisingly,Christian heretics denied the eschatological trajectory of apostolic preaching. Believinglike their classical forebears that the later was necessarily worst, they concluded that theworlds history was tragic, or that it could be made comic only by a reverse movement,only by a return to the origin. Gnosticism is the key illustration, for Gnostics considercreation itself a tragedy (if not a travesty). Similar motives run through the christologicalheretics, who could not conceive that a second person in God could be anything butan inferior being.

The gospel story itself, centrally a story of humiliation giving way toglorification, is the most obvious source for the comic vision of the New Testament.Death is not the final word, and the latter state for Jesus is better than the first, forby the resurrection Jesus enters into the life of the age to come, into the immortality,power, glory of a Spiritual body. At the same time, the gospel narratives, becausethey include the ineradicable moments of betrayal, torture, injustice and cross,prevent the Christian understanding of history from becoming trivially comic. Resurrection does indeed follow the cross, and swallows up the sorrow inastonished surprise and joy, but, as David Bentley Hart has argued, the light of theresurrection intensifies the pain of death by destroying the comforting illusions ofancient resignation. Resurrection opens up another, still deeper kind of pain: itrequires of faith something even more terrible than submission before the violenceof being and acceptance of fate, thus throwing the believer out upon the turbid seasof boundless hope and boundless hunger. Because the resurrection vindicates theCrucified, not the crucifixion, the gospel story undercuts any easy moralism orsentimental liberalism.25 Yet, the story remains ultimately comic, wildly and insanelycomic.

This account of the comic shape of the gospel narrative has been challenged by several theologians in recent years, most notably by Donald M. MacKinnon.26According to MacKinnon, the gospel should not be read as a narrative with a happyending, nor should the resurrection be seen as Jesus belated response to thechallenge to come down from the cross. Every doctrine of atonement orresurrection fails if it encourages the believer to avert his attention from the elementof sheer waste, the reality of Christs failure. Most especially, this failure is seen inJesus abdication of responsibility for his peoples welfare in the way he chose toaddress the doom that he saw looming over Israels future. By choosing the path hedid, Jesus involved many of his contemporaries in a terrible guilt and providedinevitable an excuse for his followers in later years to fasten responsibility for thecrucifixion upon the Jewish people and their descendants. This anti-Semitism,already evident in the New Testament, comes to fullest expression in the final



25 David B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (GrandRapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 392.

26 Several works in biblical studies have likewise argued for a tragic dimension inscriptures narratives. See, for instance, J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative:Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Exums firstchapter contains a superb overview of this movement within biblical studies. PhyllisTrible also adopts the term tragic to describe the fate of Jephthahs daughter (Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Overtures to BiblicalTheology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 93116). Alternatively, some recent bookshave stressed the comic features of biblical stories: J. William Whedbee, The Bible andthe Comic Vision (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); Francesca Aran Murphy, The Comedyof Revelation: Paradise Lost and Regained in Biblical Narrative (Edinburgh: T. & T.Clark, 2000).

solution.27 Victory though it may be, Christs work is also tragic, in the sense thatthe victory comes at an appalling cost.28

In order to sustain this tragic telling of Jesus life, however, MacKinnon mustdelete or ignore portions of the gospels that he finds overly apologetic. Particularlyin Luke and Acts he finds Christian writers succumbing to the devastatingintellectual and spiritual temptation . . . of presenting the catastrophic course ofevents as expressive of the working of a traceable providential order.29MacKinnons hostility towards the evangelists apologetic efforts depends on hissupposition that the doctrine of the atonement is projected from the raw data ofhistory.30 Obviously, the facts of the gospel narrative do not come to us naked, butclothed in the theologically charged language of the gospel writers themselves. Byassuming that he is working with raw data that can be given a variety of differentconstructions, MacKinnon simply substitutes for the gospel narratives a differentnarrative more in keeping with MacKinnons tragic sensibilities. To do that,however, is to change the theological force of the gospel itself. And MacKinnonshandling of the gospels supports John Milbanks suspicion that MacKinnon does notdiscover history to be tragic but also emplots history within a privileged tragicframework.31

Both MacKinnon and Nicholas Lash use tragedy as a weapon with which toattack totalizing schemes that would smooth out the angularities of actual humanhistory, but Hart shows that the ancient tragic vision was itself a totalizing scheme,in which the sacrifice of a scapegoat restored stability to the city. If, as in Lashsreading of the gospel, the resurrection simply eternalizes the cross, then the cross isnot the beginning of a new creation, and not a critique of existing ideologies andsocial structures but takes the God of Israel as the underwriter of the sacrificialeconomy of ancient tragedy, which can only mean that the sacrificial order iseternally validated.32 MacKinnons and Lashs tragic reading of the gospel, therefore,cannot be accepted without undoing the gospel itself.

Thus, the antithesis between ancient tragic and Christian comic historyremains. In the following section, I indicate links between these differences anddifferences between ancient and Christian metaphysics.



27 D.M. MacKinnon, Atonement and Tragedy, in Borderlands of Theology and OtherEssays (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968), p. 103.

28 D.M. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1974), pp. 1313.

29 MacKinnon, Problem of Metaphysics, p. 129.30 MacKinnon, Atonement and Tragedy, pp. 1023.31 J. Milbank, Between Purgation and Illumination: A Critique of the Theology of

Right, in Kenneth Surin, ed., Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of DonaldMacKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 178.

32 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 383, 386, 389.

III

In several recent works, David Bentley Hart has pointed to the tragic character ofancient philosophy. European antiquity, he argues, was characterized by an ethos ofglorious sadness. Within the city, these opposing forces were kept under controlof a sacrificial mythos and praxis, which warded off the destructive powers of natureand yet also won the divine favor necessary to keep the order of the city functional.The same opposition of order and chaos, and the same sacrificial control, are evidentin ancient philosophy. For the pre-Socratics reality was a kind of strife betweenorder and disorder, within which a sacrificial economy held all the forces in tension.Platonic dualism, too, was ultimately tragic, for the world, for all its beauty, is therealm of fallen vision, separated by a great chorismos from the realm of immutablereality. Aristotelianisms effort to combine act and potency is inseparable for earthlythings from an inevitable process of decay and death, and Stoicism further illustratesthe tragic character of ancient philosophy by positing a vision of the universe as afated, eternally repeated divine and cosmic history, a world in which finite formsmust constantly perish simply in order to make room for others, and which in itsentirety is always consumed in a final ecpyrosis (which makes a sacrificial pyre, soto speak, of the entire universe).

Neoplatonism, Hart suggests, furnishes the most poignant example:

its monism merely inverts earlier Platonisms dualism and only magnifies themelancholy. Not only is the mutable world separated from its divine principle the One by intervals of emanation that descend in ever greater alienationfrom their source, but because the highest truth is the secret identity betweenthe human mind and the One, the labor of philosophy is one of escape: allmultiplicity, change, particularity, every feature of the living world, is not onlyaccidental to this formless identity, but a kind of falsehood, and to recover thetruth that dwells within, one must detach oneself from what lies without,including the sundry incidentals of ones individual existence; truth is oblivionof the flesh, a pure nothingness, to attain which one must sacrifice the world.33

Sacrifice was a system for maintaining the status quo or restoring a status quo ante,and thus was hostile to every motion outward, beyond the sentineled frontier, andreinforces the stable foundation of the totality.34 Thus, in the sense I am using theterm, the sacrificial order of antiquity was tragic, assuming that later and furtherwere necessarily worse.

No contemporary writer has captured this particular aspect of tragicmetaphysics as fully as Jacques Derrida, though he tends to use the terminology ofsupplementarity in place of the dramatic metaphor Hart employs. On Derridasreading, Platonism (and by this he means the entire Western metaphysical tradition)



33 David B. Hart, Christ and Nothing, First Things (October 2003), pp. 4951.34 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, p. 386.

assumes that any departure from the pure origin is necessarily a regression, an exile,a fall.35 Derridas fullest treatment of supplementarity arises in connection with theWestern philosophical traditions treatment of the relation of speech and writing,which takes its cues from Socrates account in the Phaedrus. Speech is the origin,while writing is considered a derivative and somewhat degenerate supplement. Toexplain the problems of writing, Socrates appealed to the Egyptian myth of Theuth(or Thoth) concerning the origins of written letters:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name wasTheuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventorof many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomyand draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now inthose days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and hedwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes,and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showedhis inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have thebenefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their severaluses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved ordisapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus saidto Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters,This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them bettermemories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied:O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the bestjudge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. Andin this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of yourown children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannothave; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners souls,because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external writtencharacters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have



35 Jacques Derrida has discussed the problem of supplementarity in many works,particularly Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins, 1976), passim; Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge,1978), esp. ch. 4; Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1981), pp. 63171. I will be concentrating primarily on the last of thesesources. In this essay, I am not concerned with the accuracy of Derridas reading of theWestern tradition; I am more interested in Derridas Socrates and Derrida himself, andthe way he exposes the tragic mentality underlying Platonism and the open door he leavesfor a trinitarian response.

For theological critiques of Derrida, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory:Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 30711; James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic(Downers Grove, Il.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), pp. 11529; Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is ThereA Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), pp. 4869; Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theoryand Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Part III.

discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give yourdisciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of manythings and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and willgenerally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show ofwisdom without the reality.36

Writing is problematic for a number of reasons. Theuths salesmanshipnotwithstanding, King Thamus recognizes that the effect of writing will not be toenhance or improve memory but to undermine it. Men who read books will not bewise, but pseudo-wise, having the appearance of wisdom without its reality. Writinglacks breath, , and thus is necessarily dead discourse. Writing detachesknowledge from immediate presence, which raises problems both practical andtheoretical. Practically, a written work wanders off to be read by any and everyone,regardless of their ability to read well, and who knows what horrors a bad readerwill concoct? Theoretically, for the Western tradition, the detachment of writing frompresence means that writing is two removes from reality. Derridas Plato imaginesa world where thought is uncontaminated by interpretation, writing, supplementalcommentary of any kind, where thought is pure thought. Speech and writingcontaminate thought. Derrida cites Aristotles famous formulation of the relationshipbetween ideas and signs, to the effect that spoken words are symbols of ideas whilewritten words are symbols of the aural symbols of speech. Derrida points out thatSocrates makes explicit connections between writing and painting, and what PlatosSocrates says elsewhere about tragedy, poetry, and visual art is applicable to writing:all of them, because they are two removes from the real, are distorting. Writing is necessarily a lie. So, for Derridas Plato, writing (and with it all forms ofsupplementation) are forms of violence against the origin.

Derrida rejects the Platonic privileging of speech to writing not in order toreverse the hierarchy but in order to demonstrate that the problematics ofsupplementarity apply as much to speech as to writing, that supplementarity is thehidden story of reality. Both in language and throughout reality, the supplement isequiprimordial with the origin, so that the origin is disturbed and disrupted from theoutset. Derrida cites Rousseaus insight that nature is not a complete system in itself,but has an originary lack that must be fulfilled by a supplement. A mothersnatural supply of milk may not be sufficient to feed her baby, for instance. Thus,the supplement, which seems an unnecessary addition to a complete origin, is in factnecessary to the completion of the original thing. Platos dream of pure thoughtwithout supplement, pure idea without speech or writing no more than a dream.Contamination has always already begun.

For Derrida, this supplementation of the origin is necessarily a violentsupplementation, an effacement and substitution for the origin. Expanding on theSocratic telling of the myth of Theuth, Derrida points out that this god was frequentlyinvolved in plots against his father and his brothers:



36 Text translated by B. Jowett, found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/phaedrus.html.

This process of substitution, which thus functions as a pure play traces orsupplements or, again, operates within the order of the pure signifier which noreality, no absolutely external reference, no transcendental signified, can cometo limit, bound, or control; this substitution, which could be judged mad sinceit can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of substitutes,of substitutes of substitutes; this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence. One would not have understood anything of this linguisticimmanence if one saw it as the peaceful milieu of a merely fictional war, aninoffensive word-play, in contrast to some raging polemos in reality. It is not inany reality foreign to the play of words that Thoth also frequently participatesin plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. He helps the sonsdo away with the father, the brothers do away with the brother that has becomeking.37

The god of writing (and hence of supplementation) is necessarily a parricide.38For Socrates, the written discourse is an orphan son, since the father does not

remain present to attend to it. Every son is necessarily a prodigal son, as Derridaexpounds in a vivid and important passage:

As a living thing, logos issues from a father. There is thus for Plato no suchthing as a written thing. There is only a logos more or les alive, more or lessdistant from itself. Writing is not an independent order of signification; it is weakened speech, something not completely dead, a reprieved corpse, adeferred life, a semblance of breath. . . . it is not insignificant; it simply signifieslittle, and always the same thing. This signifier of little, this discourse thatdoesnt amount to much, is like all ghosts, errant. It rolls . . . this way and thatlike someone who has lost his way, who doesnt know where he is going, havingstrayed from the correct path, the right direction, the law of rectitude, the norm;but also like someone who has lost his rights, an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed,a vagrant, an adventurer, a bum. Wandering in the streets, he doesnt even know who he is, what his identity if he has one might be, what his name is,what his fathers name is. . . . Socrates tone is sometimes categorical andcondemnatory and sometimes touched and condescending pitying adefenseless thing, a son abandoned by his father. In any event the son is lost.His impotence is truly that of an orphan as much as that of a justly or unjustlypersecuted patricide. In his commiseration, Socrates sometimes gets quitecarried away: alongside the living discourses persecuted and deprived of the aid



37 Disseminations, p. 90.38 A similar Oedipal/Freudian thematic is found in Harold Blooms notion of anxiety of

influence. Though two thinkers do not make a sample much less a proof, it is temptingto consider postmodernism and poststructuralism as thematizations of filial rebellion,filial rebellion exalted into a primordial ontological reality, almost a transcendental. Onceagain, we are back to Hesiod, though here the Hesiod of the Theogony rather than theWorks and Days.

of a logographer . . . , there are also half-dead discourses writing persecutedfor lack of the dead fathers voice. Writing can thus be attacked, bombardedwith unjust reproaches . . . that only the father could dissipate thus assistinghis son if the son had not, precisely, killed him.39

Throughout his treatment of supplement-as-son, Derrida is, probablyconsciously, playing with the traditional formulations of trinitarian theology. Heeven comes to the insight that the father necessarily has a son, in order to be father:

the father is not the generator or procreator in any real sense prior to or outsideall relation to language. In what way, indeed, is the father/son relationdistinguishable from a mere cause/effect or generator/engendered relation, if notby the instance of logos? Only a power of speech can have a father. The fatheris always father to a speaking/living being. In other words, it is precisely logosthat enables us to perceive and investigate something like paternity.40

For Derridas Socrates, the father is never approached directly (no man has seenthe father), but only indirectly in the son. According to Plato, we have no directface-to-face contact with the Good, but only with the image of the Good which isthe visible sun. But this son/sun exists to protect us from the face-to-face encounterwith the Good, which would leave us blind.

At the same time, Derrida is playing trinitarian themes against orthodoxtrinitarian theology. For starters, for Christian trinitarianism the Son is not a veilover the Fathers face but the very image of the Father who is perichoretically presentin the Son. Thus, while John would seem to agree with Derridas Plato that no manhas seen the Father (Jn 1:18), his entire Gospel is designed to show that the Fatheris now seen in Jesus. By the end of Johns Gospel, it is clear that it is no longertrue that no man has seen God. On the contrary, Jesus says that those who haveseen him have seen the Father (12:45; 14:9), and claims that his words and worksdisplay the Fathers words and works (5:19; 12:49). For the same reason, the Sonis not seen as a displacement, effacement, or murder of the Father, but rather as hisexpress image and radiance of his glory. Further, Derridas critique of Plato does nottouch classical trinitarian theology, for in its better moments, when it has recognizedthat it has long ago left Plato behind, trinitarian theology has not dreamed of a worldof pure origin or pure thought. On the contrary, confession of the Trinity is preciselyconfession of an eternal supplement, even two eternally complicating supplements,at the origin. If there is indeed, as Derrida suggests, an analogy between Platonicmetaphysical speculations and Platonic privileging of speech to writing, trinitariantheology undermines both. A trinitarian account of language can accept nearlyeverything Derrida says about originary contamination, apart from the labelcontamination.



39 Disseminations, pp. 1434.40 Disseminations, p. 80.

This leads to the final question to be addressed here: Why does Derrida continueto consider the supplement a contamination of the origin? The most convincinganswer is that he has yet to be liberated from the grip of the Platonism that hecriticizes so trenchantly. Milbank suggests that Derridas dualism of transcendentalwriting and particular systems of signification and dissemination is no moreconvincing than other dualisms, and argues too that Derridas conclusion that writingis violent is a mere perpetuation of tragic ontologies of violence from antiquity. Itis equally possible to conjecture that the image reflects the original and that theoriginal is constituted through this imaging in an entirely peaceful, self-givingfashion. And this, Milbank suggests, is precisely what trinitarian theology posits.41

Trinitarian theology thus affirms with Derrida that there is no simple origin.There is in fact supplement at the origin, for the Father was never without his Sonand Spirit. But the supplement, the Son, is the express image of the Father. TheSon, the Second, does not replace or deface or supplant the origin, but is the gloryand extension (perichoretically) of the origin. Derrida can imagine only a prodigaland errant son, or a parricidal son who is a depletion, distancing, and effacement ofthe Father, but the son is a depletion only if one is still dreaming the dream of purepresence and unsupplemented origin only, that is, on the assumption of a Platonicmetaphysics. Christ, the necessary supplement, is the glory, not the deletion or theeffacement of the Father. Nor is the Fathers begetting of the Son an exile; the Sonis begotten from the Father, and goes out from him, but his departure is not tragicbecause it is immediately followed by a return, which is eternally simultaneouswith the departure. It goes contrary to trinitarian logic to suggest that the Second,the supplement of the Origin, is inferior to the First. The Son is equal to the Father,the glory of the Father, without whom the Father would not be wholly himself,wholly glorious Father. And indeed the Third is not inferior to the First and Second,but is the procession of their combined glory, which, returning, glorifies them.

We may even speak of self-giving (death) and return (resurrection) in the lifeof God. The Father loves and submits to the Son, and the Son to the Father, and Sonto the Spirit, and so on and on. But this self-giving of one Person to the others isalways met with a return gift: The Fathers gift of himself to the Son is met withthe Sons gift of himself to the Father. Their self-sacrifice is met with renewedfellowship. Death and resurrection, of course, is the comic theme, and there is thus a comic structure to the Triune life, an eternal story of emanation andremanation, of exile and return. Because this is the God who created and governshistory, history manifests the same structure, and it is a story not of a golden age



41 Theology and Social Theory, pp. 3089. James Smith comes to similar conclusions,though he traces Derridas interpretation of interpretation to the modern tradition ofimmediacy. He adds, writing was traditionally construed as fallen and violent becauseit sacrificed full presence. Derridas radicalization of this is to push it back to the originof language, to the very structures of language. But is that not to maintain full presenceas a horizon? (Fall of Interpretation, p. 128). Derrida remains, Smith argues, hauntedby the ghost of Platonism.

lost, nor even of a return to Edenic paradise, but a story in which the second moment,the final moment, is the glory of the first.

IV

My argument that there is an homology between trinitarian theology and Christianeschatology was articulated in its essential features by Basil the Great, who pointedout in his treatise On the Holy Spirit (section 47) that the superiority of the LastAdam to the First Adam has foundational implications for theology proper.Responding to opponents who argued that a Second Person of the Trinity wasnecessarily an inferior supplement to a First Person, Basil writes, If the second is[always] subordinate to the first, and since what is subordinate is always inferior tothat to which it is subordinated, according to you, then, the spiritual is inferior tothe physical, and the man from heaven is inferior to the man of dust!

All will be well. All manner of thing will be well: Because the First eternallybegets a Second who is consubstantial with him, who is the glory of the First, whoshares with the First in the glory of a Third.



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Supplement at the Origin: Trinity, Eschatology and History PETER J. LEITHART*