oa Eschatology and Philosophy: the Practice of Dying

The great discovery of the Classic philosophers was that man is not a “mortal,” but a being engaged in a movement toward immortality. Not everybody, however, is willing to attune his life to this movement. Quite a few dream of a shortcut to perfection right in this life. The dream of reality transfigured into imperishable perfection in this world, therefore, becomes a constant in history as soon as the problem has been differentiated. In the modern period, the expectation of divine intervention was replaced by the demand for direct human action that will produce the new world, thus giving birth to totalitarian ideologies.