Christianity and the Structure of Being– 4: The Intimations of Destiny Within the Christian Tradition

How the Eternal Structure Continues to Emerge

Despite centuries of metaphysical dualism, Christianity has never fully surrendered to nihilism. Even while shaped by a Platonic framework that casts the world as impermanent and the body as perishable, the Christian tradition has continued to bear witness to something more: the silent but insistent truth that what is, cannot not be. That the world is not a detour or error, but the luminous appearing of eternity itself.

This truth does not always appear in systematic theology. More often, it emerges as a kind of pressure — a tension within doctrine, a flash in mystical experience, a radical affirmation embedded within the language of faith. It is, as Farotti suggests, the structure of destiny (destino) that continues to break through the inherited shell of becoming.

Mysticism and the Indestructibility of Presence

Throughout the Christian centuries, mystics have often carried the flame of this deeper vision — even when official theology hesitated to follow. In the language of Meister Eckhart, we hear of a God who is not outside the world, but who gives birth to the Son in the soul. The divine is not a distant will but the inner ground (Grund) of all things.

Eckhart does not speak of annihilation, but of recognition — the soul awakening to what has always been. He writes:

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

This is not dualism. It is not even mystical union as fusion or overcoming. It is the recognition of identity in Being, a gesture closer to the eternal structure Severino describes than to classical metaphysics.

Likewise, other mystics — John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Hadewijch of Antwerp — speak not of flight from the world, but of its transfiguration. Their visions often burn through the notion of disappearance and loss, affirming instead a hidden eternity within the temporal, a light that does not fade but becomes visible to those with eyes to see.

The Resurrection of the Flesh — A Doctrine of Eternity

Amid doctrinal ambiguities and Platonic influences, one dogma has never been abandoned: the resurrection of the body. However interpreted, this affirmation resists the idea that the body is simply a vessel to be discarded. It insists that what is truly human — body, form, face, gesture — is not transient, but somehow preserved.

The resurrection, in this light, is not the creation of a new body, but the eternal affirmation of the body that is — the body as it truly is in the structure of Being. Not lost and replaced, but revealed as eternal. This aligns with Severino’s insight (and Farotti’s echo of it) that nothing that is can ever cease to be — not even the most fragile appearance.

The Christian insistence on the resurrection, then, is not a mythic addition but a metaphysical rupture in a system that otherwise speaks the language of loss. It is a sign that Christianity, even under the weight of Platonic logic, remembers something it cannot forget: that the person, in body and soul, is not dissolvable.

Paul: The Tension Between Future and Fulfillment

Nowhere is the tension more visible than in Paul. On one hand, Paul speaks apocalyptically, placing salvation in a dramatic future: “the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.” But on the other, Paul makes bold metaphysical claims that collapse time:

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

These are not promises of what will be, but proclamations of what is already the case. In Paul, Farotti sees a tension between a temporal drama and a metaphysical truth struggling to appear. Salvation is spoken of as coming—but also as present. The believer is waiting—but also already raised.

This tension cannot be resolved by pushing Paul into eschatology or mysticism alone. Rather, it shows that Christianity, from the beginning, bore a fractured metaphysics: one voice repeating the logic of becoming and loss; another voice whispering the truth of Being’s eternity.

Bonhoeffer, Vannini, Gentile — Prophetic Fractures in Christian Thought

Farotti draws attention to modern Christian thinkers who, knowingly or not, began to crack the surface of inherited metaphysics.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from prison, wrote of a “religionless Christianity” in which God is not the one who explains gaps or acts from outside, but the depth of the world itself. God is not a distant ruler, but the presence that suffers and endures within.
• Giovanni Gentile, often misunderstood due to political associations, proposed a radical immanence: that the divine is not elsewhere, but in the act of thought itself—the unfolding of Spirit as history.
• Marco Vannini, a contemporary voice, speaks of the “mistica della presenza”—a mysticism not of flight, but of absolute presence. For Vannini, influenced by both Eckhart and Severino, the divine is not a being among beings, nor the cause of beings, but Being itself, the necessary appearing of all that is.

In these voices, we begin to see a return to the origin: not the origin in time, but the origin as structure—the eternal necessity of Being that Christian faith has always intuited but never fully claimed.

The Eternal Insists

Through mysticism, through the doctrine of resurrection, through the deepest affirmations of the New Testament, Christianity has never entirely submitted to nihilism. The eternal has continued to insist—not only in heaven or afterlife, but here, in the appearing of the world, the body, the face, the other.

Farotti shows us that this is not an accident. It is the pressure of destiny: the necessary structure of Being that Christianity cannot help but gesture toward, even through the veils of Platonism and dualism.

The time has come not to suppress that pressure, but to recognize it. Not to resolve Christianity by diluting it into mystical metaphor, but to let it arrive at the truth it already contains.

In the next article, we will follow this pressure to its conclusion: how Christianity, to fulfill itself, must overcome the metaphysical contradiction it inherited — and recognize that what-is cannot not be.