NOTES for Dan 8:15-27

The meaning of the vision shown to the author of the Book of Daniel is, in essence, completely transparent. But this does not make it any less significant. Indeed, before us is apocalypse in its genuine sense, not the kind we most often speak of today, but the biblical kind. For us today, apocalypse usually means the end of time, a worldwide or even cosmic catastrophe, in short, what people usually designate by the capacious expression "the end of the world."

Yet in the biblical sense, apocalypse is not the end of the world, but the end of darkness. More precisely, it is the end of the power of the dark forces over the world. But apocalypse is not a single instantaneous act; it is a process. It is both a historical and a metahistorical process.

It is historical because it does not simply exist within world history; it defines that history. Indeed, the world was originally conceived as God's Kingdom. On the first day of creation it was entirely permeated with light, the light of God's presence, which determined its existence. Only later, after the spiritual catastrophe known to us and mentioned in the Bible as the fall of the devil, did it become what we know it to be: divided and subject to chaos.

With the fall of the human being, this chaos burst into the human world as well. The garden of Eden disappeared, giving way to the reality so familiar to each of us from birth. Yet for God, His world always remained the Kingdom. And He always wanted to restore the fullness and wholeness of the created universe. For this purpose the world now exists, at least from God's point of view. Therefore all processes in it, including world history, have only one meaning: the return to the fullness of creation, the restoration of its integrity.

But then the history of humanity can exist only in an apocalyptic perspective. It has meaning only when it is finite. And in this case one must speak not of an end as the natural completion of a process, but of its interruption. In a natural way, the history of humanity, if it can end at all, can end only through its gradual fading from some natural or social causes, or from a complex of such causes; this does not change the essence of the matter.

That in itself by no means excludes the possibility that on planet Earth or somewhere else another humanity could appear, whose path in the fallen world would hardly differ substantially from the path of present humanity. But its transformation and renewal are possible only if God intervenes in the natural course of history, intervenes directly, interrupting the bad infinity of the fallen world. Apocalypse is not the completion of history, but its rupture. And through this rupture the Kingdom enters the world that has been separated from the fullness of God's creation, joining it to that fullness. A new life begins with God, who, according to the word of the Bible, is "the same forever."