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fulfillment, which lends meaning to relative and conditioned fulfillment.
The other element implied in the ultimate is decision. Decision means that the realization of
meaning in history is possible only by freedom. If there were necessity in the process of
historical fulfillment it would be neither history nor fulfillment at all. It would be nature and
the circular motion of everything in servitude to its own nature. History, since it depends on
freedom, implies decision. But every historical decision remains ambiguous. It is always
decision for and against meaning at the same time. Therefore the ultimate, being fulfillment,
must be decision at the same time, definite, unambiguous, unconditioned decision. The
ultimate, from this point of view, is that which is decided, and consequently is not subject to a
new decision as is everything in history. So we must say that the ultimate is the unconditioned
decision intended in every ambiguous decision in history and the unconditioned fulfillment
intended in every ambiguous fulfillment in history. And both qualities of the ultimate belong
together: no fulfillment without decision, since freedom is the presupposition of history; and
no decision in which fulfillment is not affirmed or denied, since meaning is the content of free
decisions.
Through this consideration, human activity received absolute weight; history, absolute
meaning.
History in its relationship to transcendent fulfillment and decision receives absolute
seriousness. It is not the realm where man acts without relationship to God. There is no such
realm. History is the realm where the ultimate is intended. There is nothing in the ultimate
that is not in history. In the ultimate there is no fulfillment that is not intended in history. In
the ultimate there is no decision that is not prepared in history.
The ultimate is that which is fulfilled, which is decided. That does not mean that the ultimate
is a state of existence which brings the end of time. A concept of an end of time, in a temporal
sense, cannot be maintained. It would not be an end, but a discontinuance. The thought of a
discontinuance of time, however, is itself a time-determined thought, and therefore contradicts
itself. The end of historical time is its relation to the ultimate. Thus the ultimate stands equally
close to and equally distant from each moment of history. The ultimate is end-catastrophe, is a
mythical conception, in which, to be sure the absolute weight of history in decision and
fulfillment is expressed in very plastic images. We have to interpret those images, however,
not keep them as dogmas. The religious names for the dual quality of the ultimate are the Last
Judgment and the Kingdom of God. Last Judgment expresses the character of decision
implied in history. The Last Judgment is the transcendental meaning of every historical
decision. Therefore the Gospel of John emphasizes that the judgment is going on in history,
wherever the "light" becomes visible and is accepted or rejected.
The Kingdom of God is the fulfillment intended in history and implied in the ultimate. The
Kingdom of God is the transcendent fulfillment, the name for the ultimate from the point of
view of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God therefore embraces everything in the course of
history as its transcendent meaning. We do not know where real history is. We do not even
know it in the events whose subjects are men. We know it still less in the events that are
enacted by the other creatures. We actually know of history, only as we stand active within it,
and as we are able to transform every foreign history into our own history through our own
decisions. Therefore we cannot say a priori which elements of reality are related to the
ultimate as having history. In myth nature also reaches fulfillment in the ultimate. And,
indeed, not only in the sense that without nature there is no realization of meaning at all, since
pure spirit is an empty abstraction, but also in the sense which modern natural science has
revealed to us. For science shows us the single direction in the development of nature, from
the destruction of atoms and the dying of the stars to the death of the species and the
transformation of psychical abilities. Of course, we cannot understand this development as [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]