I write this essay in my Tbilisi study, with three books open around me: Metropolitan John Zizioulas's Remembering the Future: Toward an Eschatological Ontology, his Communion and Otherness, and Alexander Karp's The Technological Republic. The more I read Karp, the more I became convinced that his book—whether he realizes it or not—is a hidden post-Christian eschatology, and that every serious intuition within it finds an ontologically deeper elaboration in Zizioulas.
The Palantír
Consider the name of Karp's company: Palantir. Any reader of Tolkien recognizes the word at once. The palantíri are seeing-stones through which one may contemplate distant lands and events hidden from ordinary sight, expanding the horizon of the present beyond the limits of immediate experience. That is precisely why the name turns out to be an almost perfect secular analogy of what Zizioulas calls the eschatological vision: the present discloses itself not out of itself and not out of the power of the past, but in the light of what exceeds its given boundaries. In Remembering the Future, Zizioulas writes that the Holy Spirit brings the eschata into history, and that the Eucharist becomes the place where the last days enter time "as an 'already and not yet,'" as the foretaste and icon of the future Kingdom. If one seeks a secular image of that intuition, the palantír fits almost exactly: the gaze upon the present is determined by what arrives from beyond its closed horizon. It is no accident that Karp's manifesto—the twenty-two theses on technology, the state, and the West that grow out of the logic of The Technological Republic—reads like a secular attempt to think the present from the perspective of an order still to come.
The Personal Moment
The deepest stratum of The Technological Republic is its defense of the person against a culture that no longer knows who a human being is. Karp writes in the preface that the protection of "individual rights against state encroachment" is what "took its modern shape within 'the West,'" and he warns that the very concept of the West is "being discarded by many, almost casually." I hear in this something more than liberal political theory. I hear the faint echo of what Zizioulas, in Communion and Otherness, calls personhood.
For Zizioulas the person—hypostasis—is not a subcategory of nature. The catastrophe of Western thought was the slow absorption of the person into the general, into physis, into the catalogue of what we share with other specimens of our kind. What remained when that absorption was complete was the individual: a unit identified by what makes it the same as all the rest. But the person, Zizioulas insists, is precisely what cannot be shared—"not by way of difference of natural qualities" but "by way of the simple affirmation of being who he is." The person exists in ekstasis, as a going-out toward the other, and as hypostasis, as a singular mode of being which communion does not threaten but in fact generates: "Communion does not threaten otherness; it generates it."
Karp gropes toward this without possessing the grammar for it. And without the grammar, the singular contracts back into the individual, which cannot bear itself. I therefore propose that Karp and Zizioulas diagnose the same loss from two sides of a single catastrophe. Karp describes a West that has forfeited its sense of "a shared and national identity," a "vacuous utilitarianism" in place of substantive vision, an "aimlessness and drifting"—he is quoting Strauss—that he names as "the seed of our current nihilism." Zizioulas, in Remembering the Future, describes a Christianity that has undergone "the gradual weakening of the centrality of eschatology in theological discourse," a theology and an ecclesial life in which "it has been almost forgotten" that the Spirit brings the Kingdom into history. Karp's patient is the technological polis; Zizioulas's patient is the Church. But the illness is the same: the loss of a telos that comes from beyond us. In that precise sense, Karp is a secular reminder to Christians of what Zizioulas had already warned us we had lost at home.
The preface of The Technological Republic sounds this note with unusual force. Karp tells us that "a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West," that we must dare to articulate a positive vision of the good, and that "those involved in constructing the technology that will animate and make possible nearly every aspect of our waking lives have a responsibility to expose and defend their views." He is prepared to speak of defense in its literal and even military form—Palantir, he reminds us, builds "offensive weapons systems," and he does not flinch from naming the costs. This is not the liberal voice that imagines the good takes care of itself if we all mind our own business. It is the voice of someone who has intuited that the good is a vision which must be proclaimed, inhabited, and, when necessary, fought for.
Here Karp stands shoulder to shoulder with my Georgian compatriot Gigi Tevzadze. In Other History, Tevzadze argues, with a polemical clarity I share, that philosophy and science become corrosive whenever they withdraw to the metaphysical Olympus of Plato and Aristotle—whenever they refuse to touch the concrete struggles of a people. Tevzadze's complaint against the Georgian intelligentsia is that it theorizes and does not build. Karp's complaint against Silicon Valley is almost identical: "the grandiose rallying cry of a generation of founders in Silicon Valley was simply to build. Few asked what needed to be built, and why." Both men refuse the retreat into the purely theoretical object. Both insist that thought must reach into the terrain of practical life, or it is nothing at all.
This is precisely where Zizioulas's eschatological ontology presses upon me as a priest. And here the pressure becomes not merely theoretical but obligatory.
The Eschatological Obligation: Bringing the Kingdom into This World Now
In Remembering the Future, the Spirit is no private guest of the soul. The Spirit is invoked "to bring the last days into history as an 'already and not yet.'" This is the heart of eschatological existence: the Kingdom does not wait for some distant finale. It enters time now, in the Eucharist, in the gathered community, in the transfigured moment when heaven touches earth. Eschatology is not escape; it is obligation. It is the demand to incarnate the taste of the age to come—the very texture and quality of the future Kingdom—in the present tense of ecclesial and creaturely life. The Kingdom descends from heaven, from the future, and makes its claim upon the present.
Karp understands something of this necessity, though without the theological language to name it. He says to the engineer: "Your discoveries are not yours alone; they belong to the life of the polis." He understands that the technologist cannot retreat into abstraction. The fruits of research, the power of innovation, the ordering intelligence that shapes technology—these must descend into the concrete life of a people, into their homes, their struggles, their survival. If they do not, if the technologist hoards knowledge in the tower of pure theory or permits it to serve only the powers that commission it, then the technologist has committed what I will call a kind of betrayal.
Zizioulas says to me, with even greater force: "Your Eucharist is not yours alone; it belongs to the transfiguration of the world." The Eucharist is not a private devotion. It is the sacrament in which the Kingdom tastes of this world, in which the future age arrives in bread and wine and the gathering of the faithful. But it arrives—and here is the point—to change the present. To incarnate that heavenly flavor into the texture of daily life. To make the communion experienced at the altar become the shape of human relationships, economics, politics, and culture. The Christian cannot retreat into sacramental beauty while the world remains untransfigured. If eschatological reality is real, it must become visible. It must descend.
This is why Tevzadze's complaint against the Georgian intelligentsia cuts so deeply: "It theorizes and does not build." Thought that does not issue in concrete transformation—in the reshaping of institutions, the formation of culture, the healing of communities—is thought that has lost its nerve. Karp makes the same indictment of Silicon Valley, and he is right. But he is addressing engineers and technologists. The more urgent indictment falls on the Church. For the Church claims to know the end of history. It claims to have tasted the age to come. If that claim is true, then the Church cannot permit the world to remain as it is. The eschatological vision must become incarnate action.
Bringing the eschatological flavor into the world is therefore as obligatory for the Christian as the practical incorporation of scientific achievement into national life is obligatory, for Karp, upon the technologist. The analogy holds exactly because, in both cases, the refusal to descend from abstraction into life is betrayal. Both the engineer and the priest stand under the same eschatological demand: to make what is true in heaven become real on earth.
The Wolfish Gaze: Strategic Depth and Eschatological Time
In the chapter of Other History called "The Country of Rabbits," Tevzadze tells us that Georgia's ancient foreign name—Gorgia, from the Persian gorg, wolf—meant "the country of wolves." The wolf, for Tevzadze, is an emblem of strategic depth: it "plans everything; nothing in its behavior is spontaneous—movement, hunting, rearing of cubs, even the possibility of love." Georgians once were wolves—"planners and implementers of plans, unhurried people who thought and then, after long thought, executed what had been planned." Russia, Tevzadze writes bluntly, "multiplied rabbits and replaced wolves with rabbits," rabbits being the creatures of pure spontaneity and short time-horizons, of pleasure snatched before the eagle arrives.
The metaphor names the loss of telos with a precision that political theory cannot reach. Karp's "aimlessness and drifting," Zizioulas's phrase from Remembering the Future—humanity "having lost its eschatological orientation"—and Tevzadze's rabbits are three translations of one diagnosis. Karp wants to see from the technological end, Zizioulas from the liturgical end, Tevzadze from the historical end. All three demand the wolfish gaze: to see not only forward but deeper, and to plan from what has not yet arrived. To see the present not through its own clouded sight but through the eyes of the End. To ask not "what do we have?" but "what are we called to become?"
Karp's chapter on the Eck swarm belongs to the same argument. The bees that Lindauer watched in 1951 were, Karp insists, "not merely a collection of discrete individual animals," but "a discrete system, a coherent whole," thousands of creatures "negotiating and ultimately voting on their top contender for a new home" without "any apparent means of centralized management." The bees and the starlings remind us that a clear purpose—a shared telos—can organize a body without flattening its members, without erasing the otherness of each creature within it. In Zizioulas the human telos is higher, because it is eschatological rather than instinctual; but the form of the intuition is the same. The Eucharist is the sacrament in which the body moves together toward its end, each hypostasis dancing its own dance, and all of them together constituting the one liturgical movement toward the Kingdom. A shared purpose does not destroy difference; it fulfills and reveals it.
The Eucharist is also how this purpose is actually attained—as the sacrament in which the other ceases to be a threat or an enemy. Zizioulas writes in Communion and Otherness that the Eucharist "sanctifies otherness"; it is "the place where difference ceases to be divisive and becomes good." Diaphora does not collapse into diairesis. This is not theory; it is the transformation of lived experience. When we gather at the altar, when we commune in the Body and Blood, we do not erase our differences. We experience them transfigured. The other whom I may fear or resent becomes my brother, my sister, my co-heir in the Kingdom. Karp, under geopolitical pressure and without the resources of sacramental theology, touches the shadow of this when he insists that adversaries within a culture must contend without destroying one another. Zizioulas gives it the ontological ground, and only the Eucharist gives it the enacted fact.
The Trinitarian Order: Otherness Without Superiority
The deepest pattern beneath all of this is Trinitarian. In Communion and Otherness, Zizioulas argues that in the Holy Trinity "otherness is absolute"—Father, Son, and Spirit are "absolutely different (diaphora)"—and yet no person is superior, because unity is safeguarded not by a common substance dominating the persons but by "the monarchia of the Father, who himself is one of the Trinity." Otherness here exists without advantage. I find the nearest secular analogue in Karp's argument against a managerial culture whose principal purpose is "little more than ensuring its own survival and re-creation," a class "robbed of an opportunity to form actual views about the world." Karp's counter-proposal is what he calls "constructive disobedience": leaders give creative direction which is "internalized but often reshaped, adjusted, and challenged" by those who execute it; "a certain antagonism within an organization is vital." He is groping, in a business idiom, for relationship without superiority—for authority that generates rather than suppresses otherness. It is a pale shadow of what Zizioulas describes in the triune God, but it is the same ontological hunger: the search for a mode of togetherness in which order does not demand subordination.
Toward the end of the book Karp gestures, carefully, toward the possibility of possessing the good without possessing it as an advantage over others—of sharing excellence without domination. He does not develop this; he is a business author, not a dogmatician. But the instinct is remarkable, and in its structure it is Trinitarian. The blessedness of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is real; otherness is real; order is real; and yet no person holds the good as a superiority over the others. That is the ontological miracle toward which Karp points without naming it. Zizioulas supplies the reason it is possible at all: otherness is constituted by the Father's loving gift of unique being to the Son and the Spirit, and becomes available to creatures only through incorporation into that mode. The Eucharist is where this incorporation occurs, and the Church is the community in which otherness-without-advantage becomes the shape of creaturely life.
Beyond Good and Evil: The Eschatological Answer
Karp's complaint that Silicon Valley's "don't be evil" banality "prize[s] the identification of and resistance to evil over the more difficult and often messy task of navigating the world in all of its imperfection" echoes a deeper diagnosis that Nietzsche once made: moral minimalism cannot generate a vision of the good. But Zizioulas points us beyond this problem. He does not answer Nietzsche by refining moral categories. Instead, he shifts the ground entirely: from morality to ontology, from the question "how ought one to act?" to "what does it mean truly to be?"
The person, in Zizioulas's understanding, is not constituted by moral qualities or autonomous will, but by an event of communion. To be authentically is to receive one's being from the Father as a gift and to answer that gift in the Spirit. Freedom, then, is not independence but the capacity to receive—the ability to answer otherness with reciprocity, without negation or domination. Good and evil cease to be the highest courts of judgment over life. Life itself becomes gift and calling. This is not a better ethics. It is a better ontology—and it is eschatological, because it reveals what the future Kingdom already makes possible in the present.
The Priest and the Hundredfold: An Eschatological Answer to Karp
Karp speaks of "the priest" in a place that merits careful response. At a parliamentary debate, Lee Kuan Yew observed: "very few people become priests"—using the image to describe those rare individuals willing to work primarily for conviction rather than compensation. Karp endorses this observation and uses it metaphorically: the ideal public servant should resemble a priest, motivated by service to something larger than personal gain. Yet he recognizes this is unrealistic. When we ask for priests but refuse to pay, we lose talent to better-compensated sectors. His critique is sharp and in many ways just.
But there is something Karp cannot see, because he is working within a secular frame. The Gospel does not ask us to choose between compensation and conviction. It offers a third way—eschatological transformation. In Mark 10:30, the Lord promises those who have left house and family for the Kingdom: "There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and fields, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life."
The promise is not deprivation dressed as nobility. It is abundance—eschatological abundance that enters the present age. The priest is not effaced; he is transfigured. He gives up what he possesses in the mode of private ownership and receives it back in the mode of communion. His personal uniqueness is not erased by service; it is revealed and fulfilled through re-hypostasization in the Church. This is not psychological comfort or spiritual rhetoric. It is ontological reality: the Kingdom entering time, making good on what no secular institution ever can.
This is where Karp's reasoning reaches its horizon. He can diagnose institutional failure and perverse incentives with precision. But the answer to the priest question lies beyond economics, in the eschatological order itself—in the reality that the future Kingdom is already breaking into the present, already transforming those who commune in it. The priest who has grasped this does not live in deprivation. He lives in the hundredfold.
The Seeing-Stone and the Altar
The Technological Republic is a palantír pointed in the wrong direction—toward the future of civilization, of industry, of geopolitics. Zizioulas's eschatological ontology turns the stone around and lets the End itself gaze upon us. It shows that what Karp has glimpsed—the dignity of the person, the necessity of shared purpose, otherness without superiority, the obligation to defend the good, the demand to incarnate conviction in the life of the polis—is real, is worth fighting for, and has its coherence only within the life of the triune God and the Eucharist of the Church. Tevzadze's wolves, Karp's swarm, and Zizioulas's eschatological body are three icons of one reality: a community of hypostases planning, seeing, and moving together from the End back upon the present.
This is why I call The Technological Republic a hidden post-Christian eschatology. Everything it most needs to say has already been said, with greater ontological precision and greater beauty, in the theology of Metropolitan John Zizioulas. And everything Zizioulas says demands, in our time, to be brought down from the theological Olympus into the concrete terrain that Karp surveys. The priest today, as I understand his office, must stand in the space of this exchange, reading the signs with the wolfish gaze of the End and naming the hidden eschatologies by which our age lives, so that they may be drawn into the liturgy that alone can fulfill them.
The seeing-stone is not the enemy of the altar. It is its secular echo, waiting to remember whose hand once held it.