FROM THE EDITORS - Talking about Time and Eternity: A Reconnaissance (A.M.W.)

Time is a paradoxical reality, one that is both obvious and non-obvious. In talking about time we fall into the difficulty expressed already by St. Augustine: “But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

The difficulty in talking about time results from the fact that time is a relational reality. It has a beginning and an end. Variability is its mark, and it flows the way a river does. While it remains outside us, it nevertheless creates our inner identities. It is finite, but it opens us onto the infinite. Physics understands time as relative to space; while studying the phenomenon of time, religious thinkers discover that to God time must be different from what it is to human beings. “A thousand years in your eyes / are merely a day gone by, / Before a watch passes in the night, / you wash them away [...]” (Ps 90: 4-5). “[…] with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day” (2 P 3: 8). One cannot speak about time using one language only, yet the various languages one uses for this purpose must not be mixed. Therefore, a precondition of the discourse on time is to determine with which language the phenomenon in question will be addressed. Subsequently, it must be explained why a single, chosen language does not suffice to deal with time. While one may well compare the languages that attempt to grasp it, one needs to remain cautious so that they are not translated into one another in too hasty a way.

The problem of time is of epistemological nature, but it remains an existential issue as well. Therefore it is the poets who are able to express, better than others, the most important things concerning time.

                 Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

In time, the drama of our human condition unfolds: one becomes oneself through one’s perceptions and actions, all of which take place in time. Time determines the contingency of human existence. As contingent beings, humans are born and they pass. Moreover, throughout their existence they experience the vulnerability of the human condition: while living in time they may accomplish truth, the good, beauty and holiness, but they may well fail to do so since the flow of their lives is determined by time. However, owing to their spiritual acts, human beings may transcend time. Accomplishing a value – notes Roman Ingarden – introduces the extra-temporal axiological dimension into the temporal existence of a human being. A similar insight was apparently shared by William Shakespeare, who considered the work of an artist as a struggle against time:

But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?
And fortify yourself in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rime?

After the passing of Wojciech Chudy, one of the founders of Ethos, an exhibition of his drawings was held. He had made them occasionally, usually on his memorandum cards on which he listed his monthly duties and plans. The heading of each of those cards was the word “Memo” accompanied by the month and the year. Chudy used to call that practice memo-art: the art of keeping memoranda. The idea behind it was certainly practising the art of managing time, but also, in a way, that of «raising time to a higher power.»

Wojciech Chudy’s accomplishments during his relatively short life were admirable. His memo-art demonstrates the strict self-imposed discipline of a disabled person who succeeded in being an inspiring and seminal philosopher as well as a hard working and deeply respected professor and master. His memo-art shows him as a person of deep concentration and having a charming sense of humor. From behind the many cards with his drawings, a hidden smile shows.

Memo-art may be seen as a «diary in a nutshell.» The philosopher’s research plans, the books on which he was working, the articles, feuilletons and lectures he was in the process of preparing were usually listed vertically with a categorical annotation: “To be written” or “Write!” Right beside the memos, one can see the telephone numbers of persons and institutions to be contacted. Sometimes there appears a shopping list. In September 2000, for instance, the philosopher was preoccupied with such trivia as: tea, mugs, beer, flowers and cards. In June 1994, the entry called “Balance” appears with an arrow pointing at the two summer months, July and August. Interestingly, he was planning to spend more in August than in July. One may expect he was planning a holiday trip. The drawing on this card shows a worried man. The characteristic beard suggests it was a self-portrait. An essential element of this new art is lettering. The Latin letters are majuscule styled. The first letter of the word “memo” (Polish dyspo) is always the Greek Delta. Thus one might say that the cards relate the philosopher’s secret exchange with the Greek masters and founders of philosophy. Their presence, symbolized by the Delta, shows a possibility or even the necessity of intergenerational dialogue: of the dialogue between epochs. Chudy held that philosophizing at the close of the 20th century was still a continuation of ancient Greek philosophy.

There is also the symbolism of the Latin letters. In the memo card for January and February 2003, there appears the word FIAT which is underlined. It may have referred to the car make. But maybe it was the shortest possible prayer invoking the Annunciation and the Incarnation of the Son of God. The religious sense of the drawing on this memo card is suggested by the fact that that the face of the lucid human shape it shows is obscured.

The experience of time leads one towards the encounter with eternity. Liturgy and prayer combine the temporal order with the eternal one, they invoke and unveil the ultimate horizon of time. The combination of work and prayer in the rule of St. Benedict was the foundation of Western civilization, which will abandon its vital point of reference whenever it sets time against eternity, whether advocating radical spiritualism or promoting hedonistic culture.

The contemplative attitude enables a momentary discovery of the eternal within the temporal. The root of the Latin word contemplatio comes from the Latin templum (temple), which is related to the word tempus (time). However, time and temple, which in Latin were considered as related, have become, in the modern mentality, separated or even set against each other. Secularization is tantamount to the closing of the history of mankind within the temporal, within the horizon of a particular age (saeculum), while the originality of Christianity as a historical event consists in its procalmation of the presence of God in the history of mankind: of the presence made concrete in the Incarnation. It will be proper at this point to quote some more verses from Eliot’s Four Quartets, again ones vibrating with music:

                           But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint –
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

In the midst between God and man, between eternity and time, stands Christ. The grace of faith makes it possible for the human being to discover the meaning of time. “The Limitless takes limit,” says a verse from a Polish Christmas carol. God becomes man so that man might participate in Divine eternity. The Gospel is good news for man, because it proclaims the presence of the eschatological within the temporal.

The current volume of Ethos offers a discourse on time and eternity referring to the philosophical, theological, cultural and scientific aspects of the issues in question. They were chosen as the leading theme of the volume, which, however, by no means exhausts the problems they inspire. Rather, it is intended as a tentative attempt to approach these most essential, in a way perennial, questions from the perspective of modern discourse.

The editors of Ethos wish to dedicate the articles collected in the present volume to the memory of the late Most Reverend Józef Życiński, Archbishop of Lublin and Grand Chancellor of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. In his extremely rich output, Abp. Józef Życiński explored both the mystery of the Universe and that of human culture within the paradidgm of the evolution of the Universe and the cultural oddysey of the human being, in which the pursuit of meaning is accompanied by building a human community. Abp. Józef Życiński held that neither the Promethean myth nor the Dyonisian one, both of which have reappeared in the humanities in modern times, explains the essence of the human condition, in which suffering and the need for salvation are inscribed. Thus Abp. Józef Życiński made continuous efforts to guide the modern Odysseus, disillusioned by the Promethean revolution and nevertheless tempted by the fragile Dyonisian happiness, onto the path of faith which demonstrates that the history of humanity from Abraham to Jesus confirms God’s infinite and eternal love for human beings.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska