Sam Ben-Meir
We are accustomed to thinking of ecological catastrophe as a crisis—something urgent and alarming, but ultimately manageable. Crises demand action: policy changes, technological innovation, political will. Even when we acknowledge climate change, mass extinction, and planetary destabilization, we often do so with an unspoken assurance that there is still time. The damage is real, but not final. Repair remains possible. This assumption runs deeper than politics or science. It quietly shapes much contemporary theology as well. However grave the devastation of the earth, it is often framed as provisional—awaiting redemption, restoration, or divine repair. Loss is acknowledged, but always with an asterisk. Nature will heal. God will intervene. History will bend back toward meaning.
But what if this is no longer true? What if we are not living through a crisis, but through irreversible loss? Vanished species. Collapsed ecosystems. Climatic thresholds already crossed. Futures foreclosed. Consider, for example, that the near-total collapse of coral reef systems in parts of the Indo-Pacific—where repeated bleaching has pushed ecosystems past recovery thresholds—marks a loss that is not awaiting repair. Entire marine worlds have already crossed into nonreturn. Or when permafrost thaw passes the point at which methane release becomes self-reinforcing, no future policy can undo what has been set in motion. A threshold has been crossed, and the world that existed before it is gone.
In other words, what if the damage is not merely extensive, but final? If that is the case, then theology faces a reckoning—not simply with environmental ethics, but with its deepest assumptions about creation, freedom, and redemption. To continue speaking as though history remains intact, or as though revelation guarantees repair, may no longer be an act of faith. It may instead be a form of consolation that reality can no longer support. Note that the claims made here require no religious commitment; theology functions only as a language for thinking loss and responsibility where secular optimism has failed.
What would it mean to think theologically after consolation—to speak honestly about a wounded earth without promising that everything will be made right in the end? An unlikely guide for such a task can be found in the late work of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Often grouped with the great optimists of German Idealism, Schelling’s final writings break sharply with the idea that history unfolds according to reason, necessity, or divine harmony. Against the comforting belief that freedom is always reconciled in the end, Schelling insists on something far more unsettling: freedom comes first—and freedom can go wrong.
In his later philosophy, revelation is no longer the smooth disclosure of divine order within history. It is a hazardous emergence from a primordial ground that includes darkness, conflict, and negation. Creation itself is not guaranteed success. It is an event that might miscarry. This is a radical theological claim. If creation is genuinely free, then it is genuinely vulnerable. Acts cannot always be undone. History does not necessarily converge toward reconciliation. Loss may not be redeemed. Revelation, in this view, does not cancel catastrophe but exposes it.
Seen through this lens, ecological devastation is not simply a human failure interrupting an otherwise meaningful story. It is the disclosure of what creation has always been: contingent, fragile, and capable of irreversible harm. The earth does not merely suffer damage; it bears the scars of freedom itself. Extinction, then, is not just an environmental problem to be solved. It is a metaphysical wound—a world erased, a form of life silenced forever. To treat such loss as merely “regrettable” is to refuse its depth. One of the most difficult implications of this perspective concerns grief. In many religious and secular contexts alike, grief—especially ecological grief—is quietly discouraged. Mourning is acceptable, but only briefly. It must not harden into despair or interrupt hope. Proper response, we are told, is resilience. But what if grief is not a failure of hope, but a form of truth?
From a Schellingian perspective, grief may be the most honest response to irreversibility. Climate grief does not arise because we lack faith. It arises because something has been lost that will not return. It refuses the comforting fiction that everything can still be fixed. In this sense, grief becomes a mode of fidelity—to what has vanished, to the earth as it was, and to the truth of what has been destroyed. It is not resignation, but refusal of false consolation. A theology that cannot make room for such grief—without rushing to redemption—risks becoming complicit in denial. It risks offering reassurance precisely where truth demands mourning.
At this point, an unexpected ally enters the conversation: the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who has argued that meaningful ethical action becomes possible only when we assume that catastrophe has already occurred. At first glance, this claim sounds nihilistic. But Žižek’s point is precisely the opposite. As long as we believe disaster can still be fully avoided, responsibility is endlessly deferred. We acknowledge the danger, but continue acting as if there is still time. Urgency becomes performative. Denial persists under the guise of concern.
Žižek proposes a different stance: we must act as if it is already too late. Not because nothing matters, but because only then do we abandon the fantasy that salvation is guaranteed. From this standpoint, ethics becomes retroactive. We ask not, “How can we still prevent disaster?” but “What should we have done differently—and what obligations does that failure now place upon us?” This logic resonates deeply with Schelling’s tragic theology. Freedom does not ensure success. History does not promise reconciliation. Revelation does not repair what has been destroyed. It discloses the cost of freedom, including catastrophic cost. To assume that it is already too late is to abandon what might be called eschatological insurance: the comforting belief that history—or God—will save us from ourselves.
What, then, does theology look like after the end, after the collapse of guarantees, after the recognition that some losses are final? Not a theology of optimism, to be sure. It does not promise that catastrophe will be overcome or that creation will be restored to balance. It refuses technological salvation and spiritual reassurance alike. But neither is it nihilistic. Meaning here is no longer secured by outcome. It does not depend on happy endings. It emerges instead through how we live in the presence of damage.
A predictable objection arises at this point: that to speak of irreversibility, of “after the end,” risks paralysis, despair, or moral abdication. If loss is final and redemption uncertain, why act at all? But this objection mistakes the refusal of consolation for the abandonment of responsibility. On the contrary, it is precisely consolatory narratives—whether technological, theological, or political—that have enabled delay, deferral, and bad faith. When we believe repair is guaranteed, action becomes optional; when we believe salvation awaits, responsibility weakens. The recognition of irreversibility does not negate agency—it radicalizes it. Care becomes more urgent, not less, when redemption is uncertain.
Such a posture has profound implications for ecological responsibility. Much contemporary discourse remains oriented toward prevention: limiting warming, preserving biodiversity, sustaining systems. These efforts are indispensable, but they are ethically insufficient if they presuppose reversibility as their ultimate horizon. To acknowledge this is not to abandon action. It is to purify it. When we act without guarantees, without the promise of redemption or repair, our actions are no longer justified by outcome. They are justified by fidelity—to the dead, to the damaged, and to the fragile possibilities that remain.
If theology remains possible after the end, it will not be because it promises restoration, but because it clarifies obligation. What follows from irreversible loss is not withdrawal, but a more exacting responsibility: to act without guarantees, to practice restraint where mastery once ruled, to care for what remains without pretending it can be made whole again. Fidelity means living in awareness of what has been destroyed—and refusing to let that knowledge be anesthetized by consolation.
