Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology

Abstract

Eschatological and apocalyptic patterns of thought are today prominent in environmental discourse, across multiple disciplines and media. Yet some theologians criticise these thought patterns for their role in perpetuating and even causing the environmental degradation we now witness. This article argues that the construal of salvation and the Kingdom as a future state is rooted in a misinterpretation of the Gospel, and that this error led secularised Western modernity into its endemic preoccupation with progress, acceleration, and futural, secular utopias. Reading Maximus the Confessor, an alternative view of eschatology emerges, according to which eschaton and theosis constitute one and the same event in the life of the soul, and the advent of the Kingdom is considered inseparable from the soul's transformed perception of reality as she undergoes deification. If the Kingdom resides as a potentiality within the now of all times, accessible through the metanoetic transformation of consciousness, such realisation may lead to a more ecological way of living on the Earth: one less preoccupied with the future and individual survival, and more attuned to the cyclical nature of the cosmos and time, which became displaced by Christianity's and modernity's focus on historical and linear time.