Ageing and the Technological Imaginary: Living and Dying in the Age of Perpetual Innovation

Introduction

A few months ago, I got some terrible news. I found out that a man whom I loved and respected killed his wife, and then killed himself. Their son was in my high school class. Robert and Gloria had been married for 53 years. Gloria had been diagnosed with some sort of brain tumor, and was having a good amount of pain. Together, they had decided to end Gloria’s life; Robert decided to end his own life rather than to age alone, waiting for his own death.

I knew Robert much better than I did Gloria. Robert was the principal (headmaster) of the local middle school, and he became the superintendent of the state school district in my hometown. They were a beautiful couple: kind, generous, loving toward each other. Gloria was quick to smile, quick to see the best in people. Robert was a firm educator and disciplinarian, but was fair and kind at the same time. Whenever you spoke to him, you felt that he genuinely cared about you. Everyone respected him. In fact, it is hard for me to call him Robert in this article. We all knew him as Mr. H, ¹ not because he demanded it, but because of his character. Though I did not see him as often after leaving my hometown, when I did make visits back home, I would occasionally run into him on the streets, or at sporting events at the school. We would stop and talk on the sidewalk for as long as an hour. He was curious about the work I do, and when you talked with him, he made you feel important in the world.

To hear of this tragic news cut me deeply. I was tearful whenever I thought of Robert, Gloria, their son, and their grandchildren. Robert was not a rash man, or a man given to emotional action. I cannot imagine him doing this at all—no one could. His love for Gloria was so deep and earnest, and he did not have a violent bone in his body. It shakes me to my core to ponder the depth of the despair that a man of such deep character and virtue must have felt to be driven to do such a thing.

The report in one of the local papers added insult to injury. The paper was not my hometown newspaper: they would never have published such a piece. Rather, it was the newspaper in another larger city about 30 miles from my town. The journalist reported the facts, as they had been given to him by the local authorities. Yet, in the fourth paragraph, the reporter began an interview with the founder of Texas Death with Dignity, an advocacy group focused on changing the laws in Texas that would permit patients to end their lives legally. The article was 23 paragraphs long. Eleven of the 23 paragraphs were devoted to an apology for the right to die, to be killed legally, or to kill oneself legally.

I was outraged that the people from my hometown—all those who loved Robert and Gloria—were not reading about Robert and Gloria. Instead, they were reading a thinly veiled apology for assisted death and state-sanctioned suicide. I was puzzled by the fact that assisted killing—legalized euthanasia, state-sanctioned suicide, whatever we want to call it—was the interpretative frame for Robert’s and Gloria’s deaths. Could the frame have been something else, such as the lack of palliative care in rural Texas? Or perhaps something like the fact that elderly people living in rural parts of Texas are often isolated from friends or family? Or perhaps the frame could have been the failure of the local parish to truly offer care to Robert and Gloria? Or the way in which the radical individualism that plagues Texas has become toxic, making it impossible for Robert to ask for help? Why was legalized suicide the frame? Why was it so obvious that Robert should have been allowed to kill Gloria legally, and then to kill himself, or to have himself killed legally? Why were Robert’s and Gloria’s lives reduced to this frame?

In what follows, I will not address Robert’s or Gloria’s death in particular. I do not wish to judge them. I love them, and I trust in God’s providence that all will be well for them. However, I will speculate on the way that death—particularly suicide—has become the horizon against which living and dying are understood; that is to say, ageing is understood in light of the possibility of suicide. I will argue that technology, or what I will call modern technics, creates that temporal horizon that brings self-death, suicide, as the most reasonable of choices. Modern technology, the logic of techne, brings one to the logical conclusion that death is the most reasonable of answers. It does so for two reasons: 1) Technology shapes cultural temporality because the temporal horizon is perpetual innovation, a sense that death can be deferred perpetually. Thus, the logic of techne shapes the way time is perceived, the way meaning is made, or is not made, or is at least made differently. It promises a seemingly open-endedness to time that leaves one swimming in indeterminacy; but death is not indeterminate. 2) The logic of modern techne shapes the moral subjectivity of human actors, elevating the will to choose, the will to power to exert god-like power in choosing death. Finally, I will conclude with a reflection on Divine liturgy as the ars moriendi par excellence, as it is the technique of living.

Waiting for Death

A theologian friend recently said to me, ‘My mother told me that all there is left for her to do is to just wait on death’. Her mother—now in her mid-80s—was not actively dying. She was just old, living mostly independently in an assisted living facility. My theologian friend went on to say that it seemed to her that all of our cultural resources in the past were focused on death as an event, and the funeral was designed for those remaining behind. ‘We don’t know how to deal with death as a process. What we need’, she said, ‘is a new ars moriendi [art of dying]’.

I think my friend is mostly correct. She is correct, on at least two points. First, there were a lot more sudden deaths at younger ages before the rise of contemporary medicine. So, it makes sense that our cultural and theological resources are not aimed at helping us to live with ageing as a process, as a kind of winding down of life. Her mother was just waiting and, in a way, longing for death to arrive. Second, my friend is also correct that our ministries to the elderly are woefully lacking. Christian churches tend to do a good job with ministries for children and young families, but we do a bad job with ministries for young adults and the elderly, especially those who are extremely old.

Where I think my theologian friend gets it a bit wrong is in her call for an up-to-date ars moriendi. The problem is that we have a contemporary cultural ars moriendi shaped by a technological imaginary. Yet, I will argue that it is not actually an ars moriendi, an art of dying—which means it is an art of the living—so much as it is an ars ad mortem, a technique toward death. Let me explain a bit more about the ars moriendi in order to make my point about what I will call the modern ars ad mortem.

The ars moriendi manuals were popular from the late Middle Ages until well after the Protestant Reformation. The manuals were developed in response to the plague that arose in the fifteenth century. Priests and pastors, not being immune to plague, were themselves dying off, which meant many people were dying without spiritual counsel. The ars moriendi was a solution to this problem.

The manuals served as a kind of spiritual technique for those whose time was short. For the illiterate, they depicted death-bed scenes, replete with drawings of angels and demons attempting to sway the dying person respectively toward heaven or hell. The ars moriendi depicted a spiritual struggle and those ill with the plague knew that their time was short and that their souls hung in the balance. For the literate, on the opposite page of the scenes of death-bed spiritual warfare, there would be an exhortation with quotes from Scripture and famous spiritual masters. There was encouragement to remain steadfast in faith; ² to avoid despair; ³ to avoid impatience as one awaits one’s death; ⁴ to be on guard against vain gloriousness—one should not become arrogant if one had remained faithful and avoided despair and impatience; ⁵ and to avoid avarice, longing for the good old days of one’s bodily health. ⁶

With the plague, people were dying rather quickly at all ages. While these deaths were not the sudden deaths of stroke or heart attack, they were also not deaths of dwindling in old age. People would become ill, and within a 7–10 day period, the person would die. Plague victims were in the midst of actively dying, unlike the mother of my friend. They were more like Gloria, than like Robert. Gloria was actively dying of her disease; Robert would have dwindled alone in old age, waiting on death. The ars moriendi was created for those who were actively dying. Death was not some far-off horizon. It was right there bringing one’s life into stark relief. And there is something about how death, up close and personal, focuses the attention, changes how time is perceived, and that changes what one thinks is important. I tell my students that if they knew they were going to die in the next week suddenly my lectures would lose any meaning for them. Death captures one’s attention, highlighting what is important in one’s life, and in one’s projects.

Martin Heidegger built an entire philosophy around the idea that the knowledge of one’s death serves as the horizon for living life authentically. ⁷ Each of us is not merely a transcendental subject with the a priori forms of the intuition—space and time—that shape our experience of the world. Rather, Heidegger immanentizes time; time becomes immanentized and highly particularized; ⁸ we are beings thrown into a history, a family, a country not of our own choosing and a history we have not ourselves lived. The beginning of my time is not really mine; yet it holds sway over me. The end of my time is my own death, but it too is not something that I will experience as mine, for I will not be there to experience it. The horizon of the past and the future of my death shape my time and my being, right now, in this moment of living. For Heidegger, then, to live authentically is to own in the present the abyss of the beginning and the end of my time—my death—and to bring those into existence for my living now, letting them shape my projects and purposes and meanings. Heidegger had a lot more to say in Being and Time, but for our purposes the horizon of death—the end of my time—shapes what each person takes to be important for living: her projects, her purposes, and the meaning of her life.

Yet, for our technological era death seems far off. Why is it so different for us in the technological era? The obvious answer, and I think the most simplistic answer, is that we have compression of morbidity and mortality due to our technological advances. We delay death, and so it does not occupy our minds until we come to the bitter end. We are not presented with our deaths or failing health until we are very near death. Death is deferred because technology keeps us alive longer. It does not often enter into my mind, and thus does not shape my being. Yet, this fact alone does not tell us why the meaning of death, and therefore the meaning of living, and therefore the meaning of ageing, leads to this emptiness that so many feel at the end of their lives, such that they feel that waiting on death is so unbearable. Something deeper and broader is at work, I think. I shall argue that modern technics shapes the temporal horizon and thus what is possible for us to imagine about the purpose and meaning of my life. I will call this the technological imaginary.

Technical Objects, Technocratic Apparatuses, Technological Imaginary

In his book, Technics and Time, Volume 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Bernard Stiegler sheds light on the way that technology, or rather technical objects (what he calls modern technics), shape our being. Heidegger argued that temporality is the result of a historical inheritance of a past that I have not lived, which projects me forward into a future I shall not live. Stiegler claims that it is only through technicity (language, books, works of art, machines, modern science) that I have access to that past as it projects me into my future; technical objects have their own tendencies. One of Stiegler’s most important points is the way that technical objects shape the temporal horizon of being human. Following the work of Bertrand Gille, Stiegler states, ‘Industrial civilization rests on an ever more intense development of the process of permanent innovation. It results in a divorce, if not between culture and technics, at least between the rhythms of cultural evolution and the rhythms of technical evolution’. ⁹ In other words, it is not simply that death is deferred in modern technological life. Rather, the temporal horizon made possible by permanent innovation is expanded beyond any human capacity to imagine one’s own being because of the open-endedness, the indeterminacy of modern life. There is no sense of the end of time, and thus no way for my projects, purposes, and meanings to emerge.

Technics evolves more rapidly than culture, disrupting the way that the human being is imagined. At the cultural scale, rather than death shaping the projects, purposes, and meanings of a human life, modern technicity—the open-endedness of an indeterminate future—leaves the human without bearings for the direction of her life. Whereas Heidegger had argued that my death—the end of my time—shapes the temporal horizon, in the modern technical world it is not merely that death is deferred, but rather that permanent technological innovation gives a kind of horizon-less openness that leads to an emptiness resulting in a kind of meaninglessness of one’s projects and purposes.

A second point that Stiegler brings into relief for our purposes is that technological beings disrupt the way that we have imagined the world. In the history of Western metaphysics, we have preferred to think of beings as living or nonliving; we have thus relegated technical beings to the realm of the nonliving. We believe that we have reign over them, and thus that we wield a god-like power over them. Still, while technical beings are artificial, they are not merely inert things. Even though they are nonliving beings, technological beings—machines, scientific projects—still have a kind of directedness akin to living beings. They are designed to act in accord with human will and intention. But there is another dimension to them; they have their own tendencies: the more advanced artificial, nonliving, technical beings have intentions and purposes, teloi built into them that push in directions beyond their intended design. They are, thus, distinct from natural nonliving beings, because they contain something of agency, albeit a different kind of agency from human purposes and intentions. Or as Peter-Paul Verbeek notes, they have morality built into them. ¹⁰ Thus, in a way, technical beings have a kind of agency, and a kind of freedom, as they operate to enact automatically the historical purposes for which they were built. And these built-in tendencies take on a life of their own.

For example, a common piece of medical technology is the ventilator. With the ventilator, the breathing of a patient becomes an activity independent of the patient’s natural, biological drive to breathe. Also, the ventilator extends the practitioner’s ability to keep the patient breathing. In taking over the automaticity of breathing, the machine acts independently of both the patient and the practitioner. Both because the patient is so ill and because the technical object is so complex, the patient has to be in a specialized technical unit—the ITU, or ICU—where she can be monitored constantly, which changes the space within which the patient is cared-for. Thus, the technical object with its technical space changes the relationship of the patient to the practitioner, and it changes notions of agency and control. It changes how both patient—if she is conscious—and practitioner imagine their possibilities.

First, the practitioner is somewhat marginalized. Instead of the intentionality of the physician, the intentionality of the machine operates independently of the will of the physician. Rather than the technological tool submitting to the will of the caregivers, the nursing staff and the physician are on-call to the machine. There is more of a relationship between the healthcare providers and the machine and technical space than there is between the healthcare providers and the patient: the practitioners are there to support the smooth functioning of the machine. Thus, operating at an implicit level, the technical object mediates a different kind of relationship between the patient and the practitioners.

The technical object also shapes the moral subjectivity of both the patient and the practitioner. The practitioner must decide whether to put the patient on the machine, and the patient must decide whether she wants to go onto the machine. Both of these moral questions demand a kind of choice on the part of the patient, ‘Do I go on the machine, or not? Do I stay on the machine, or not?’ Yet, the patient is somewhat passive before the machine, not only because she has to surrender her life over to it, but she becomes even more passive because she is often placed on sedating medication. Inversely, the practitioners become more active because the patient is more passive, but as we have said, the practitioners are somewhat more passive before a technology that makes demands on the practitioner.

Moreover, with the ventilator’s moral demand that the patient make a choice, we find other apparatuses of support become essential to the relationship between the patient and the technical object. The relationship becomes more formal. This formalized relationship is ensconced in formalized processes, formalized techniques, like that of informed consent, or in the patient’s living will, or in the patient’s advanced directive, which now participate in the governance of the relating of the patient to the physician. Thus, a decision made in the abstract comes to govern the concrete particulars of the case. The technical object demands a moral choice, and the moral choice demands a formalized set of social techniques that govern the moral subjectivity of both patient and care providers. Thus, the ritual—or rather the liturgics—of informed consent, advanced directives, and do not attempt resuscitation (DNAR) orders is born, a new set of techniques. These social technics also mediate the relationship between the patient and the technical object, and the patient and the care providers.

Soon, the specter of being in the ICU/ITU changes the way we think about medicine. The liturgies that surround these technical objects, the signing of forms at the patient’s arrival at the hospital, seems not to happen soon enough. New demands are placed on all of us to know how we want our lives to relate to these technical objects. We need to begin thinking about the use of these technical objects well before we need them. We even want to create new techniques like the Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) forms and the out of hospital DNAR forms, so as to maintain some highly mediated form of moral agency. ¹¹ Soon, the moral subjectivity of the entire technological culture of medicine comes to shape moral subjectivity and moral agency for the culture itself. It is this that I mean by the term, technological imaginary. Here I draw on Charles Taylor’s definition of social imaginary, by which he means ‘the ways people “imagine” their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’. ¹² By technological imaginary, I mean the ways that technics shapes the possibility for how things fit together, how purpose and meaning shape what one imagines one’s future to be like. ¹³

So, even while we construct ventilators and the ITU/ICU, and grant them some dimension of agency and freedom, they reflexively come to shape the entire moral imaginary of our being toward death, and thus our being toward ageing. Even while I am not in the ITU/ICU at this moment of my life, these techniques come to shape my own moral subjectivity, and even my relation to my family. The technical objects and apparatuses demand social apparatuses, creating for us an entire cultural apparatus of technocratic dying. This whole social apparatus—the ventilator, the ICU, the novel moral techniques of informed consent, living wills, advance directives, POLST, and out of hospital DNAR forms—soon transforms into a set of cultural practices—call them cultural liturgies—that shape the cultural imaginary around our death: this is the technological imaginary.

What is true of the ICU/ITU, and the social apparatuses and the liturgies that enact them, is true at the larger societal level. The immediacy of all decisions, the idea that technology will not only solve our problems of living and dying, but that technology will solve even the problems created by technology, promises a kind of permanent innovation. Part of the technological imaginary is the idea that there will be permanent innovation in all sectors of life, and all of this shapes the temporality for the human being.

For our purposes, these medical technical apparatuses shape the temporal horizon, not just because they force a choice about life and death, but because they participate in the constitution of the temporal dimension of a larger technological imaginary, leaving us in indeterminacy, in open-endedness. Yet, the technological temporality of permanent innovation cannot innovate death into life. And when one has deferred death, deferred thinking about death, and when death presents itself as inevitable, life itself becomes absurd. It is this technological imaginary that brings into relief the logic of taking one’s own life, and the absurdity of waiting for what one can achieve for oneself. Let me further unpack what I mean.

Ars ad Mortem: Technique toward Death

These technocratic apparatuses create a kind of technocratic liturgy. One would imagine that these technocratic liturgies would bring death into relief for us, such that it could operate in the way that Heidegger imagines. Seemingly, one would think, following Heidegger, death could be re-appropriated for authentic living when forced with the choice of living or dying. Yet, I have claimed that in fact it does just the opposite. It leaves one’s life meaningless. I shall have to turn to Heidegger’s critique of technology in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in order to describe how this is the case. Technology is not the ventilator; the ventilator is a technical object. Technology is not the ITU/ICU; the ITU/ICU is a technical space. Technology is a way of seeing, or perceiving; it is a way of taking up with reality. Technology is the logic of techne, of techniques. These techniques bring into relief certain aspects of reality, but they at the same time constrict and circumscribe for us what comes into relief. Technology constricts our vision such that we only see power.

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is that the question of being is made up of two questions. The first question of being is the question of what a thing is. This first question seeks to uncover the most general ground of an entity and that which it shares in common with all other entities. This first question is the ontological question. The second question of being is the question of the existence of the whole, all that which is. The second question asks about the being of the whole, the highest entity and the ultimate ground of all beings. The second question is the theological question. As noted by Iain Thomson, the various answers to these two questions are the limits that set out each epochē of history, and in our modern epochē the answers to these questions create what Heidegger calls the enframing. These questions are the questions concerning technology. ¹⁴

For Heidegger, it is Nietzsche that sets out the limits of the modern answers to these metaphysical questions for our epochē. To the first question of being, Nietzsche responds that the most fundamental unit of being is the will to power. John Richardson calls this Nietzsche’s power ontology. ¹⁵ The non-agential will to power—the creative power of all that there is—throws up beings toward no particular telos. Those beings exist for a time in a particular set of circumstances, only to fall back into the abyss of nonexistence. To the second question of being, Heidegger claims that Nietzsche’s answer is the eternal return of the same, that highest moment of all being is the moment just before its collapse into the abyss of eternal becoming. As Iain Thomson notes, Nietzsche destroys the foundationalist metaphysics of the older epochēs, and establishes ‘the ontological understanding of the being of entities for our own historical age’. ¹⁶ Heidegger here proclaims Nietzsche to be a nihilist. Each human, who is the being that wills its own being—and thus wills its own willing—gathers up her own will to power, drawing on reason to build for herself her own being, what she wills herself to be. She wills for the sake of willing. She is the measure of all things, and sets out the being of all things as useful for herself. Thus, when we humans turn to decide our own being, measuring our own usefulness to ourselves through the mediation of the liturgics of technics, we finally become our own standing reserve of power to be deployed for—and even against—our own wills to power. ¹⁷

As Thomson notes, the result is our nihilistic modern era. We human beings come to treat ourselves in these nihilistic terms which ‘underlie our technological refashioning of the world’. ¹⁸ Our own subjectivity turns to the self as its own object of mastery. Life itself becomes meaningless as we ourselves become the raw material, the resource ‘to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency, whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or even cybernetically’. ¹⁹

We can take it one step further in medicine. As my colleague Kimbell Kornu argues, when a human being comes to understand her being as the being that masters her own becoming, she becomes a resource for her own self-aggrandizing becoming. ²⁰ Put differently, as I have said elsewhere, she becomes her own sovereign subject. ²¹ That is to say she is both sovereign and subject, subject and object, or as Foucault has called her, her own transcendento-empirical doublet. ²² In the ITU/ICU the will to power, this will to will itself into existence in overcoming death, she ‘becomes another dead, meaningless resource among other dead resources. The essence of modern medicine reveals an ontology of death. Indeed, death is medicine’s transcendental and unveils the nihilism of medicine’. ²³ I have elsewhere argued that when death cannot be overcome, the final act of willing—the most sensible act of all—is to will one’s own death, to become one’s own god that has to be killed in order to be god. ²⁴

Thus, in the modern technological imaginary, waiting means being passive, it means failing to be the Nietzschean god of power. Waiting is the deferral of the establishment of one’s own godlikeness in willing one’s death; why not reach the highest pinnacle of the Nietzschean theology, and become the god that kills itself and returns to the bliss of the abyss? The technological imaginary with its technical objects and technical apparatuses sets out a life that must will its own existence and in the final act it must will its own nonexistence and the eternal return. Thus, the technological imaginary establishes an ars ad mortem, a technique toward death, a technique that aims at death, and that elevates one to the status of a god. It is not an art of dying, but an art—a technique that creates its own god that wills its own death.

The Liturgics of Aesclepius and the Liturgy of the Risen Christ

In an essay titled, ‘Asclepius against the Crucified’, my colleague, Kimbell Kornu announces a great battle between medical technology—the modern-day Aesclepian god of health—against the Crucified God. ²⁵ He is, of course, playing on the battle announced by Nietzsche between the Dionysian will to power and Christ the Crucified One. ²⁶ Kornu shows that even Heidegger’s own critique of Nietzschean nihilism results in the nihilistic embrace of death, offered by the god, Asclepius. Following the work of Sean McGrath and Judith Wolfe, Kornu shows the indebtedness of Heidegger to theology, and then shows us how Heidegger evacuates Christian theology of God—a God who exceeds beings—by immanentizing the transcendental. Drawing on Edith Stein, Kornu notes that Heidegger’s Dasein—his term for human being—is a ‘little god’, insofar as Dasein is the only being for whom being is a question. ‘Dasein’s essence is its existence’, for Heidegger, applying to Dasein what Thomas Aquinas had said of God. ²⁷ Dasein is ontologically different from other beings because it can die, and because it knows it will die. Thus, the ontological difference, traditionally reserved for God, is now held by Dasein. Dasein takes the god-position.

Death—the end of Dasein’s existence—actually constitutes its being as becoming, for it is only the death of Dasein that gives it its purposes, projects, and meanings. Dasein, in knowing its death, is ontologically different from all other beings. ‘Death belongs to Dasein itself even when it is not yet whole and not yet finished, even when it is not dying’ and ‘Dasein is essentially its death’. ²⁸ Death (nonbeing, nothing) then, as Kornu notes, is the a priori condition for the being of Dasein. ²⁹ Death is the already and the not yet of Dasein, as Kornu notes and thus, as Judith Wolfe notes, Heidegger’s being-toward-death is eschatological: Heidegger’s thanatology is ‘eschatology without eschaton’. ³⁰ Heidegger offers ‘a metaphysics of death that is essentially an ontology of Nothing’. ³¹ Death and the possibility of its Nothing are at the very core of Dasein. Thus, as Kornu notes, the logic of Nietzsche’s nihilism is present in Heidegger, and there is no escaping that logic for to become truly ontologically different, to become the true god of one’s own existence, one must be master over one’s own death. Heidegger is overcome by the nihilism he critiques in Nietzsche. And thus, the liturgics of technics, the technological enframing of our living and our dying, is thus an ersatz liturgy that sets the horizon as death, nonbeing, nothing. It is an ars ad mortem that frames everything against the horizon death. It is nothing, and waiting for nothing is an impossible task.

Kornu offers Maximus the Confessor as the antidote to Heideggerian nihilism. Death and nothing evoke ‘fear and anxiety, not wonder and desire’. ³² Wonder and desire are only evoked by beauty, and beauty is not a possibility without creation ex nihilo. One’s being is not founded in the abyss of an indeterminate past, but founded as gift of being itself having come from non-being, ex nihilo. ³³ Human being does not arrive when it owns its own death in taking its own life, as it does in the modern technological imaginary. The gift of being has its fulfillment not in the non-being of a being that wills its own death, as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, but in desiring the God that exceeds beings and being, the God who is the origin of one’s being and one’s ultimate destiny. God is no-thing, not a creature, from which all things come and to which all things return in that God is not a thing, a being among other beings. Of course, this mystery of the Being of God is made manifest in the mystery of the Incarnation. God in Christ overcomes death by death, giving life to those in the tombs.

Suffice it to say that Kornu offers Maximus the Confessor’s reflection on creation ex nihilo, as the antidote to Nietzschean power ontology, and to the nihilism that sits at the heart of Heideggerian temporality. Yet, creation ex nihilo is not sufficient. One’s body must become one with the body of the crucified; one’s body must become one with the Resurrected one, and it must really do so, lest we be engaged in just so much philosophical theorizing. We must turn to the realm of the reality and practicality. That practical level of theology is the level of prayer and liturgy. As Evagrius notes, true prayer is true theology; to pray truly is to do theology. ³⁴ Liturgy is the work of praying, and the liturgy par excellence is the Eucharistic Divine liturgy. I have argued that there is a kind of liturgics to modern technics, in which the social apparatuses put before us a choice of death, creating for us our own moral subjectivity—what I have called an ars ad mortem, techniques toward death, a liturgy of death. We are made into gods in that we have the will to power through the mediation of technology, which tells us we must choose. I have argued that when death is the horizon of choice, choosing one’s death appears to be the most sensible of choices. The modern liturgics of technology is no art of dying, but a technique toward death. The alternative then is not an ars moriendi, but an ars vivendi, and the ars vivendi par excellence is the Divine liturgy itself.

Catherine Pickstock shows in her book After Writing, that it is only in Divine liturgy that philosophy is even possible. ³⁵ In fact, I would argue that Divine liturgy is the condition for the possibility of any activity that does not nihilistically collapse in on itself. Divine liturgy is the ars moriendi because it is the ars vivendi. Thus, contrary to my theologian friend, we do not need a new ars moriendi, we must reclaim the old one, Divine liturgy itself. As Pickstock notes, with the rise of secularity time became spatialized. In the Liturgy, there is temporalization of space, a lifting up of the political space into the eternity of the Holy One. But it is in liturgy in which the immanence of history and social space are lifted into the eternal present of God. Yet, this temporalization is no mere past, present, or future. Nor is it focused on the end of time, namely my own death. As Augustine’s Confessions makes clear, the temporality of my own particular life is brought into the eternal present and presence of the One who was, and is, and is to come. ³⁶ Every life has a past and anticipates a future in its own present. When I arrive at Liturgy, that which I bring with me, is the narrative of my life. But what I hear in Divine liturgy is a larger narrative that, while not my own, becomes intertwined with my own narrative. Thus, every Liturgy, while the same, is really a repetition with difference.

Let us take a look at Divine Liturgy, but let’s be specific about it. Let’s take Advent as an example. After all, Advent is the most temporal of seasons. It is the beginning of the church year for Western Christians, but the readings are about the end times. Advent is the season of waiting for the Christ-child, who has come, is coming now, and is to come. Let’s take a portion from the reading from the first Sunday of Advent last year, from the prophet Isaiah:

You, LORD, are our father,

our redeemer you are named forever.

Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,

and harden our hearts so that we fear you not? ³⁷

My story in all of its particulars becomes somewhat marginalized, as now I begin to interpret my story in light of this reading. Am I wandering and lost, with my own projects, purposes, meaning? Have I hardened my heart? Or has God hardened my heart because of my sins?

Let’s read a little further on in Isaiah:

No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you

doing such deeds for those who wait for him.

Would that you might meet us doing right,

that we were mindful of you in our ways! ³⁸

If I will but wait, if I will but put aside my own rushing about with my own projects, purposes, and meanings, what surprises await me? My projects are not the right projects unless I am mindful of God as I engage my projects. I find in these readings that the Christian cannot be the Heideggerian authentic man, who owns his own life. I must relativize my own time in order to wait for God in God’s time. Do I have ears to hear, or eyes to see, outside the technological imaginary?

And this reading from the 13th chapter of Mark:

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘Be watchful! Be alert!

You do not know when the time will come.

It is like a man traveling abroad.

He leaves home and places his servants in charge,

each with his own work,

and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch.

Watch, therefore;

you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming,

whether in the evening, or at midnight,

or at cockcrow, or in the morning.

May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.

What I say to you, I say to all: “Watch!”’ ³⁹

Time is linear here; it is pressing in on me. Watch! Watch now! Suddenly, there is something more urgent than my own projects. What am I watching for? What awaits me in the next moment, that I do not know, that I do not have mastery over?

Yet, time is not merely linear here. In the cyclical temporality of the church year, Advent comes right before Christmas. Yet, we are not reading of the coming of the Christ-child, but the second coming of Christ. How often as a kid did I want to read the story of the coming of the Christ-child, and now I am getting the coming of judgement. That ruins my childish desires. The readings are focused on the second coming of the Christ, that which is not yet, and which is still to come. Thus, at one level the liturgy in Advent gives us the sense that time is linear—it reminds me of a past, in the light of which my own past must be read, in anticipation of a future, to which my own future must align. My own sinful past distorts my vision of the future. I am in need of something. Yet it is not just my need; the world itself is longing for, has been pining for God all along. There is the present, where I am now, pining in this moment, for what is to come. Thus, Advent is both the season of waiting on the Christ-child’s return, pointing not to the Advent of death, but pointing toward the final arrival of God, in the eschaton.

Also, Liturgy relativizes not just time, but the whole of my story, my narrative, the narrative of my past, present, and future. It is the story of Israel, a past bigger than me; it is the story of the Church, a present bigger than my own present; and the hope of the new Jerusalem, a future much bigger than my own. Augustine in the Confessions makes it clear that he must reread his entire story in light of his conversion to Christianity. And as he notes in Book IX, ‘By your gift, I had come totally not to will what I willed but to will what You willed’. ⁴⁰ It is all of these at once. It is past and future at the same time. My control of time is relativized. There are layers upon layers of history and of time, of story and of narrative, and memory. These readings about the past of Israel and the future of the new Jerusalem are placed within the arch of the Divine liturgy itself. And the Eucharistic liturgy is the dramatic reenactment of the procession into Jerusalem, the crucifixion, and the Resurrection. Furthermore, the Eucharistic meal that we eat is itself another reenactment within the reenactment of Divine liturgy. It is a reenactment of that first Eucharistic meal celebrated by Christ before his death and Resurrection at the same time that it is the future Eucharistic meal eaten at the Triumphal banquet at the end of time. The past meal and the future meal exist in an eternally present feast.

Thus, when I have arrived here in Advent again, I find that the Messiah has not yet arrived, and that he has already come. He was here; he is here; he will come again. I arrive at Liturgy with a sense of my own projects, the things that I hope to bring alive in my particular future. Yet, in linking my own projects to the past, present, and future of the one who was, and is, and is to come, I am called to realign my projects with the work that is being called forth from me by the Holy One, who is to come. Whatever I am, in my particular time living, whatever is weighing on me in this moment, whatever history I have lived to that point, whatever project I am hoping to carry out, I arrive in Advent only to find that my time is not my time. Temporality belongs to God’s eternality. My time—my past, my present, and my future—are linked to Israel’s history, and the future of the new Jerusalem, through the mediation of the Church.

My story—my past, present, and future—is transformed and transcended by God’s story—God’s work in the past, in the present, and in the future; and that means, as Augustine notes, so is my will. ⁴¹ Likewise, Evagrius Ponticus notes that, ‘body, soul, and intellect will be one and the same, by means of the transformation of their wills’. ⁴² All of time is narratival, with a beginning, middle, and end. I must wait in God’s time, for God’s arrival, for my will to be transformed and so that my story can be oriented rightly. My story and my projects both are and are not mine in the Liturgy. Liturgy transects the arch of history, and forms and transforms my world and my will. Thus, Liturgy is also ahistorical, in that it transects history.

Thus, the work of the Christian theologian is not to sprinkle a little Christian wisdom, a little Christian morality onto the liturgics of the technological system. It is certainly not the role of the Christian theologian to change Christian theology to fit our modern technological times. The role of the Christian theologian then is to pray, such that she becomes a true theologian, whose world is transformed by the technics of Christian liturgy. The theological imaginary generated by Christian liturgy is a far cry from the technics of the technological imaginary of our epoch in which death is deferred until it cannot be deferred any more, resulting in the modern malaise of the meaninglessness of life, in which the only meaningful act is to nihilistically embrace one’s own death as one’s own god. Rather, we Christians must once again reenact the old ars moriendi, that art of dying, which is really an ars vivendi. And the ars vivendi is the Divine liturgy itself, an art of living, and an art within which ageing and waiting aligns my projects, and purposes, and meanings, with something that exceeds me.

I have argued that the technocratic liturgies are an ars ad mortem, a technique toward death. These ersatz liturgies shape the perception of so many people in technologically advanced cultures, such that waiting on death becomes unbearable, especially when one can become godlike by asserting power over life and death in the technocratic practices of legally sanctioned suicide. Why wait at all when death becomes inevitable? Divine liturgy offers a different temporal horizon than the technocratic liturgies with their horizonless openendedness, which I have claimed renders life meaningless as one anticipates death. Only the ars vivendi of Divine liturgy can serve as an alternative temporal horizon. It is in the eternal horizon of Divine liturgy that I am taught to see rightly, where I am taught to perceive the meaning of my own life, even as I age, even as I wait on death. For the Christian, new possibilities await us, even at the bitter end of life. And so we can say with the call to worship of the prayer book, ‘I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord’. ‘The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him’.