Iain Atkinson

Political thought.
Apocalyptic Spirit.
Revolutionary Metanoesis.
Israel Palestine.
Climate Crisis.

I write post-apocalyptically. I sense the end as having happened, as an end of endings, apocalyptic films and fears having grown wearisome to me. The city has descended, and every tear I see is one that will be wiped away. Yet all around is a lake of fire.

How to think politically here and now? One guiding light, David Leahy, writes so much that upsets and upends the basis of the conceptual life of modern self-consciousness. He address Marxist thinking (beginning of Foundation) and “post-modern” ethics (Beyond Sovereignty), but where is his political thinking? Now that all modern political dualisms (Right and Left, East and West, Conservative and Progressive, Capitalist and Socialist) have exhausted us, where does our political thinking stand? Is our post-modern situation post-politics?

Today thinking is finally absolutely political. To think itself is to create the body politic that we are. The apocalyptic “I” is a revelation that deep within the I, within and beyond the sense of self, within the notion of God, within the notion of all humanity, is a set of neighbours who are the city of God. You are absolutely the descending New Jerusalem. You, Lord, are Israel and Palestine at war. Reader, Christ, you are Iranian refugees sinking in the English Channel. Holy Spirit, you are North Africa in famine and civil war.

The apocalyptic “I” is conversely a revelation that deep within the We, within its unities and disunities, its common spaces and its war-zones, is a negotiation of history that is resolved in Jesus Christ’s understanding of His role in the story, its very motive and centre. We are all fighting over who we are, our story, our identity. That fight is who the “I” am, who Jesus is. All of humanity is a single person, all of existence is people, the people who are the Trinity revealed — this is revelation — apocalypse.

This is absolute Spirit as Hegel saw it, the reconciliation of subjective and objective spirit, of I and We. The picture with which he ended the Phenomenology of Spirit, as if it best represented “absolute Spirit” for him, was of foam (he quotes Schiller, see p348 here). The substance of bubbles is all the soapy liquid between them. They are air or void after that. Hegel tried to think the identity of the soap and the void, of substance and nothingness. It was all a foaming forth of forms for him in the end, a child’s play of ephemera blowing off into the sky.

Leahy’s thinking ends in the mathematically exact picture of a new foundation of logic. It is a set of nine figures in an ordered relation that represents a genuinely post-binary, trinary thinking. It is the exact picture and lasting foundation of a new thinking at this beginning of our post-apocalyptic era. Again, what is its politics? Well, it is the political thinking of the body now occurring. What we, the body, are thinking, is a new post-apocalyptic thought. Look, here we are, thinking “what shall we now think politically?” And in the clarity of thinking we are seeing that we are thinking “what shall we think?”. What shall we think? We shall think this “what?” that we are thinking! Are these sentences a nonsense blowing off into the sky, or is the space that is left full of creative potential for the earth?

Let’s think. We are the new body politic thinking. Body, let’s think this novelty. Let our political work be to think anew. Almost as long as I have been interested in philosophy, I have been taken by Slavoj Žižek’s imperative to think a new politics. For him, late modernity’s Marxist political imperative was “enough thinking, time for action!” It was given to him to sit in the leftist political world like a madman shouting “Marxism is dead and we have killed it! Enough action, time for thinking!” Body politic, community, here reading what we are, let us think anew. Let our communal definition of who we are be thought anew.

In the beginning of Foundation, Leahy enters the thinking of “revolutionary metanoesis“. The latter term is essentially a form of the Greek word for “repentance”, which in the New Testament is “metanoia“. According to Chat GPT: “”Metanoia” and “metanoesis” are related terms. Both convey the idea of a change of mind or a transformative shift in thinking. “Metanoia” is more commonly used and directly translates to “repentance,” emphasizing a change of heart or mind. “Metanoesis” is a less common variation that also carries a similar meaning, focusing on a change in thinking. It’s possible that the philosopher you are reading prefers the use of “metanoesis” to express the concept of profound intellectual change.”

After the failure of all revolutions, not least Jesus’, here we are failed revolutionaries repenting of it all. But this is revolutionary repentance. Repentance is revolutionary. ”Repent’ and “Revolt” each of course mean to turn around. Revolution implies turning a system around, repentance implies turning oneself around. We have turned around from ourselves. Who are we then if not ourselves? We are the very system having turned around. We are repentant revolution.

So if the revolutions have failed, is it just our thinking that is revolutionary, as “metanoesis“? Our thinking spins round and round. But thought is embodied, and we sense our subtle and inner bodies as energy spinning, vibrating, and circulating. Consider this embodiment of repentance: Jesus washed Peter’s feet. Peter refused, but Jesus washed. Peter said give me a bath, but Jesus washed. Washing is the effect of repentance, and this effect is the cause. God’s kindness leads us to repentance.

Peter’s stubborn heart came to repentance, letting God in Christ clean him. His heart turned to God in repentance. He turned around and faced God in front of him, no longer looking off to the side for where he could go in order to run away from God’s love. Then he wanted a bath! Suddenly feeling overwhelmed by his sin, he wanted a full scrub-down. Jesus insisted that “those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet” (John 13). In having left his boat to follow Jesus, and having sunk beneath the waves (Matthew 14), he had already had a bath. Jesus tells him that his sensed need for continued repentance does not require a bath again. It does not require repentance again. Having done a 180, he should not do a 180 again to end up where he was. His coming to Christ is done, his faith is received, he is welcome, he belongs to the kingdom.

But here in this kingdom Christ washes feet. The feet are being washed in the joy of Jesus, as an act that will teach the church forevermore. The bathed one needs a foot-wash. The repented one needs some kind of continued repentance. If not another 180, what? Well, to walk on water without being submerged, getting only the feet wet. The repentant walk of faith is on the water, towards Christ and as Christ.

Christ walks on water towards Christ. Christ walks on the water of human emotion, believing his neighbour to be Christ, and not failing in this faith. Christ washes the feet of his neighbour, Jesus. Christ’s feet continue to be washed in revolutionary repentance.

The monks of Mount Athos lead the way in the world amongst the continually repentant, as they pray “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”. They have fully repented, and have left their lives for the sake of Jesus. Yet they continue to repent in their minds and hearts. They call the inner and silent prayer of the heart “noetic” prayer. Continual focus on Jesus is the washing of the soul.

Friend, neighbour, know that this prayer is answered in the revelation that your neighbour is Jesus. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me for these blasphemous words that are noetic theology. This is the repentance that spins on the spot. Stand on a busy corner of your city and spin around. See every face as a neighbour who is Jesus Christ, asking you to wash their feet. See that in this seeing you do wash their feet. See that in this seeing, all our feet are in a water that is the river of God that flows from the throne. See that this walking on water, this site of sight, is the revolutionary hopes of humanity fulfilled in the simple recognition of the humanity of everyone on the street around you.

You, humble soul, are all that the wars of the world need. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Imagine there’s no heaven, no hell below us, above us only sky. Here before us is heaven and hell on earth. It’s a burning fire and a flowing river. It’s beautiful. So in this need of love, of simple humanity, what should our politics be? Let’s simply be humans. Let’s be simple humans beings. Let’s live simply.

This sounds like a refusal of politics. More religious monasticism that flies from a true engagement with this hurting world. Well, political thinking must be the thinking of the people and for the people about what is actually happening to the people.

Israel and Palestine are at war. Hamas, the UN-recognized terrorist group that is also the democratically elected ruling party of Palestine, killed nearly 1,500 Israelis in October 2023, and took at least 200 hostages. Israel declared war days later, and has within 20 days killed at least 6,000 people in Gaza, according to Al Jazeera. The initial terrorist attack on civilians was horrific. The retaliation has been brutal. Taking sides is truthless. Both-sides-ism is spineless. Where to stand? How to respond? What to do?

A friend posted a blurry photo of her infant daughter on Instagram today. The photo is a year or two old. The friend described holding her young daughter close in these days of war, remembering her even younger days as in the blurry photo. She described holding her daughter for all the mothers in Gaza who had lost their babies. She described walking around her city “looking at people passing on the street and wondering if they know and if they do, how they can just carry on … even though I’m doing just that”.

She “just carried on” while aching in pain for the mothers of lost babies. She “just carried on” while holding her own baby as if in relief for those mothers, as if, as a mother in Gaza, holding the dead body of a Palestinian baby that had been resurrected.

I say that these “as ifs” can go. My friend embodied the women of Gaza today. In her daughter were the babies of Gaza resurrected. This is the final judgment: the life of every baby is holy. Every human being is a baby in the arms of our loving God, who you are. My friend shared this embodiment on social media. Here and online is the thinking of a revolutionary repentance in which the dead are resurrected. On Instagram and WordPress is a post-apocalyptic political thinking. Here and now is the confrontation of simple humanity with simple humanity, in my friend’s blurry photo of her daughter. By the way, this is the same inspired child whom I wrote about elsewhere.

My friend wondered how we can carry on when Israel is bombing civilians in Gaza. She felt the need to do something, to live different. How do we live in these times of fire? But she carried on. How dare we all carry on “as if nothing happened”? Well, as my friend ached inside and posted on Instagram outside, so each of the people she passed on the street — wondering if they knew — may well know, may well ache on the inside just like her. They may well support Israel. They may well support Palestine. They well be planning the next terrorist attack against the West, or the next genocide in the East. How do we carry on? We carry on encountering the simple humanity of our neighbours, horrifically yet appropriately, “as if nothing ever happened”, yet as if this simple ordinary one we encounter may be anyone at all, even Jesus.

But something is happening. More civilians are being killed. Iran and Hezbollah are being roped in. Gaza is under siege and Israel is blocking the entrance of aid. Civilians cannot flee Gaza to Egypt. ——— The world is on fire. There is drought in the horn of Africa. There is oppression in Iran. There are wildfires in Australia and California. Ukraine is being invaded. Yemen is starving. Agriculture is not keeping up with population growth worldwide. Population collapse is coming in China. Ecological catastrophe is coming. Pandemics are just around the corner. The ice caps are melting.

But since we are revealed as the body of Christ, our agreements are effective. Let the warming northern world, Canada and Russia, open up to the refugees of the south. Let the BRIC countries be the building blocks of a de-westernized global economy. Let tyrants be deposed, let the weak be cared for, let orphans find homes. Let human beings flourish on earth and beyond.

Such is the specificity and effectiveness of our political thinking. The very end, wrapped up in the word ‘flourish’ above, to which anyone could work, has already come. And then this is our invigorated work, to feel the specific and effective thinking of the global body politic, and the universal body celestial, the church both triumphant and militant, at work in our words. With smiles and winks we display the apocalypse to others. Our merest intentions are granted, as we sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, reigning as philosopher kings in the kingdom of heaven come to earth.