This week, Alastair, Derek, and Matt take the time to talk about, well, time. I know that wasn’t a good joke, but I don’t have time to think of another one. Any time spent only leads to worse jokes. I’ll stop now. Enjoy the show.
If you enjoyed the show (AND ONLY IF), leave us a review at iTunes. If you didn’t enjoy the show, let us know and we’ll work to make it better. Or we’ll ignore you. And if you want to subscribe by RSS, you can do that here.
If you’re interested in supporting the show (you know, with money), you can check out our Patreon here.
Finally, as always, follow Derek, Alastair, and Andrew for more tweet-sized brilliance. And thanks to Timothy Motte for his sound editing work.
[…] MERE ORTHODOXY Mere Fidelity: Time […]
Best episode ever.
Awe inspiring.
This moved me to worship.
My attempt at a footnote comment …
… albeit incomprehensibly ‘other’ than our chronological experience of created time, there seems to be a sense of ‘time’ rather than ‘timelessness’ in Eternity, as there seem to be sequence and eras.
‘Before’ creation The Godhead lived in perfect self contained community.
‘During’ creation, the incarnation brought The Godhead into creation and humanity, within our experience of time and human history.
In Eternity ‘future’, part of the Divine is/will now be human, and the body/bride will now perfectly and indivisibly accompany The Godhead.
So there seem to be sequences involving change, and part of the miracle of the incarnation is to change the nature of The Godhead to be ‘one of us’ eternally, whilst also making us connected to The Godhead in Eternity ‘future’.
I was wondering about similar things while listening to the podcast. What are the implications of our deification and participation in the Trinitarian relations (i.e. are adoption as Sons and Daughters of God) for our temporality?
[…] our latest Mere Fidelity episode, Matt, Derek, and I take up the theme of time, exploring, among other things, some of the issues […]
Paul Griffiths, in one of his more recent books, Decreation, offers some really wonderful reflections on time. If you’re not familiar, the book is about eschatology, and I think some things that he observes there shed a great deal of light and are able to hold together a lot of the seemingly contrary positions explored in this conversation. In particular, I think it well complements what I’ve heard of Begbie’s claims about music and time from you, Alastair. Early versions of these reflections might also still be found in online postings of the Stanton Lectures given by Griffiths at Cambridge a few years ago.
He begins with the question of what it could mean for a creature to reach its end, to come to a point where there is no more novelty for it (reflecting on “novissimum” from the Vulgate, though I don’t remember the passage, thinking that this question fits well the broadest tradition of about the end of creation as all things being brought to rest). There are three options, he contends: annihilation, simple stasis, repetitive stasis. Sounds cramped at first, at least to me, but then he does beautiful things with this notion of repetitive stasis.
He suggests first that time (and space together with time) does not have a life of its own. It is a feature of creatures, it belongs necessarily to anything finite, only the Lord is properly eternal (which he wonderfully roots in the eternal relations of the Trinity), and so time (and space) come into being with the whole ensemble of creatures.
Alastair mentioned “fallen time,” which Griffiths makes much of. He calls this the time of the metronome. A bit more colorfully, he describes it as “one damn thing after another.” This isn’t simply a faulty experience of time. It’s a result of the fall; time itself is literally devastated. It’s the kind of time that is a feature of the Lord’s creation marred by death, given over to entropy, is only discernible in terms of decay, and marks the creation’s ordering towards nothingness.
Time is certainly complicated at this point, though, because some manner of devastated time comes about with the fall of many angels (though I’m guessing he would agree that some form of undamaged time persists in the unfallen angels?). At any rate, time is definitively redeemed in Jesus’s death and resurrection. When Jesus’s body is resurrected, the time belonging to that body is resurrected as well. Griffiths calls this “systolic time,” drawing on St. Paul’s comment that time has been “systolated,” drawn together, tensed like an animal ready to pounce, folded like a garment around Jesus’s resurrected body, no longer a mere succession of events or one damn thing after another, but all things being gather and released, gather and released along with the beating of Jesus’s risen heart. (I’m trying to give an impression that’s something like the impression Griffiths’ writing gives, but I’m just not very good at it; read the book to see these speculations worked out with their full elegance.)
Redeemed time tends towards repetition. Discrete moments are not desperately separated from one another, past moments irrecoverably buried in the past, but they interpenetrate. I think the stuff he says here works well with the musical metaphor that Begbie works through. Properly speaking, it’s not yet fully arrived at its repetitive stasis, though it proleptically enacts that repetition. (We still have to have to have the resurrection of the dead and the renovatio mundi for the final repetitive stasis to be fully in place.)
He gives the illustration of the icon, which may be another helpful metaphor to supplement that of music. In some icons you’ll seeseveral events displayed in one frame, with any sense of succession nowhere to be found. Seemingly separate events are gather together in the icon. This might be helpful for the observations MLA was making near the end of the conversation. In the folding of time, an array of events might be gathered together. But I think Griffiths would suggest that this is not in any sense a shedding or sloughing of time, but is something like what Alastair described as the transfiguration of time, where time resumes its place as an analog of the Lord’s eternity, while eternity itself remains something only properly enjoyed by the Lord. (Griffiths defines eternity as atemporality; creatures might be everlasting, but never eternal.)
I think this account gains the most traction for me in the connections Griffiths draws with the cyclical repetition of liturgy, especially the Eucharist, as an advanced participation in the repetitive stasis of heaven. I don’t remember what Griffiths says about this, but for me this connects easily, though, to the Church calendar, through which we really encounter and are drawn into the events we celebrate. So when we celebrated the Paschal mystery the other week by observing the Triduum, we didn’t simply renew our baptism by absent-mindedly saying the words of the Apostles’ Creed again, but our death and resurrection with Jesus were refreshed in and through the rites of the Church.
Oh and he also has great things to say about Space. But this has gone on way too long as it is. Really enjoyable conversation. I think a lot of this stuff was brought up one way or another, but to my mind Griffiths draws it together in a particularly coherent way. If you read the book, just know that he’s wrong about angels–they don’t have bodies. Also, I’m reposting this comment from Alastair’s blog.