ETERNITY

This is sort of a continuation of the previous post, but it gets a brand new title anyway.
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But basically, what is Time? I visualize time as a sort of envelope enclosing the material universe, creating the possibility of an entirely different mode of existence within the all-encompassing Being of God. Time is measured by motion, (preferably regular) and motion is sequentiality; even if nothing material existed, if there was a human-like intelligence, and it thought something, then time would be divided into the epochs before the thought, and after the thought. And, of course, as thought elicits thought, soon there is an entire intellectual history, a long, sequential chain of before and after; Time exists as soon as there is sequentiality.

But then, what is Eternity? Certainly not sitting on clouds strumming harps, as in the popular image of Afterlife. We cannot imagine anything that is not sequential, except stasis, and cannot imagine stasis except as tedium. Surely the Life of God is beyond that, or we could not truly desire it.

C.S. Lewis has an interesting image in the book "The Last Battle". Aslan, standing at the doorway, calls for "Time", and the giant who had been seen sleeping in a cavern of the Underworld in "The Silver Chair" stands and throws his shadow over Narnia. Aslan says "While he lay dreaming, his name was Time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one". Those words intrigued me when I re-read the book recently, though I had never particularly noticed them before. In this image, Time and Eternity are seen as the same entity, but Time is unconscious, a state of diminished energy. What it will be like at the awakening is unimaginable, but it will be real Life. No doubt we will then realize that all our previous life has been a working our way through the rind, and only now for the first time getting a taste of the real fruit. To participate in the Life of God will be a dynamic, not a static experience.

When the Fathers say that Time is an aspect of the Fall, I do not take it to mean that there was no sequentiality in the first-created world; in this sense, there are two aspects of Time, one the law of sequentiality, which applies to all material things, and the other the condition of Corruption, in which decay is the universal principle, and all things are subject to change, for nothing can endure. What the Fathers mean by Time in this sense is this condition of ceaseless change, but there is a transcendence of Time which is beyond the simple overcoming of the Corruption our First-Father was made subject to, and that is in the experience of the Uncreated Light of God, in Eternity.

TIME

This post really should have appeared earlier in the series; I think I'm getting a little tangled up in the roots, if not yet strangled by them.
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One of the things I think as Human Beings we get most confused about is Time. In the Evangelical/Community church I used to attend, one of the things that made up the theological ping-pong matches of the various Faith traditions represented was, "Free Will!" (smash) "No, Predestination!" (volley), back and forth, and back and forth. Even at the time, I thought I could hazily discern the form of a reconciling position in the No-Man's Land between the contending parties; when I came to Orthodoxy, I recognized, in a much clearer form, many of the hazy intermediate positions I had begun to articulate in the Orthodox teaching.

The substance of the confusion was that it seemed if God foreknew everything, then the events of a human life couldn't really be determined by the choices that the individual makes, for good or ill. It was this that led my Calvinist friends to say that the Damned were damned from all Eternity. I knew that didn't sound right, but given their starting presuppositions it was hard to argue with them; I had heard the position argued that though God forsees everything, he does not control, and though for a time, I accepted this, it seemed to me unsatisfactory. I didn't want to say that there was anything beyond God's control! For me, the key to the dilemma was realizing that, in essence, the entire controversy was a confusion over the nature of Time.

Imagine that you are inside a train, standing at one end of a long line of connected cars; each car having one large window looking out on the surrounding countryside. As you walk from one end to the other, you see various scenes through the windows; here a brook, there some trees, here a cow scratching itself against an old wooden fence, here a pleasant meadow, there a herd of feeding pigs, there a muddy bog. To you, all these scenes are disconnected, and sequential; the one coming after the other in order. But to someone sitting on a hill overlooking the same country, all the scenes which you see sequentially are seen at the same time, and the relations between the objects are clear; he will see that the herd of pigs is heading to the bog, that the cow is about to escape through a gap in the fence invisible to you, and that the patch of trees are on the bank of the stream, and overhang it.

God's foreknowledge isn't like prophecy; it's not knowing what will happen, it's knowing what happens. Lest this distinction seem too obscure, (is that possible?) I will try to further elaborate. One reason I didn't like the idea of God not compelling anyone to take a certain course of action, but just knowing beforehand which course they will choose, is that it still made it seem I wasn't free; that everything is already set in stone, and I am just walking a path already laid out. This is because I am thinking of God as an entity entirely inside of time, who sees the path that is already there, but in reality, God sees from an eternal perspective, because He is not encompassed by Time, as are we; so Past, Present, and Future are not separate, they are just Now, or rather, (since now is a designation of Time) they are just what is. God's being outside of Time means that, although he sees the path that, to me, I have yet to walk, this does not mean that these paths yet exist for those inside of Time. Furthermore, God's being outside of Time means that His control over the unfolding of events in Time is not threatened by free will, or, conversely, that free will is not threatened by God's continuous control over events unfolding in Time. The Fathers say that many aspects of our present world are because God knew Man would sin, and therefore made provision for it in shaping His Creation; Adam was not forced to sin by a capricious God who then punished him for it, but allowed to sin by a God who in mercy prepared the world for this eventuality. So we also must believe that many of the circumstances of our present lives are provisions for choices we have not yet made.

Of course, we must believe that God is not entirely outside of Time, or we will be Deists, and will not save our souls; though God is outside Time, He nevertheless walks with us through the long, dreary corridors of Time, to counsel, help, and heal us.

MOST LIKE AN ARCH THIS MARRIAGE

This was sent by Mehitabel, along with a bunch of others. I had forgotten to mention it previously, but I would prefer to receive submissions one at a time.
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Most Like an Arch This Marriage
by John Ciardi

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

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FAITH

When I was growing up Evangelical, I thought I knew what faith was. Faith meant things that should never, ever be questioned; that it would be impious, even blasphemous, to drag down into the sordid arena of inquiry. Consequently, as I grew to the age of inquiry, it seemed to me that Faith and Truth were necessarily in conflict; in late adolescence I decided that I couldn't have Faith, because I wanted Truth.

But I discovered that Faith isn't closing your mind; as "The evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for", it is instead that particle of information which causes Truth to emerge from the disordered sea of fact. When I went out "Looking for (Truth) in all the wrong places", I could not find it until I returned to Faith; all the truths I laid my hands on added up to a senseless universe. I had been bashing my head against the solid wall of materialistic determinism, not noticing there was a door in the wall the whole time close by. Faith is the golden key which opens that door. The wall is just as solid as before, I have not stopped believing in matter or reason, but the wall no longer obstructs my passage to the enclosed garden of the soul.

Perhaps I should speak a bit more of the precise nature of this revelation. What closed the door of Faith for me was that I identified reason so closely with the techniques of modern Science; though it established for me many things as true, it could not point to a purpose behind all the universe of marvels it paraded before me. So I sailed the vortexes of nihilism with the lodestone at the center of my soul spinning crazily, but when the Pole Star of Faith rose above the horizon, my direction lay clear before me.

What caused me to be able to accept the faith I had rejected in adolescence was firstly the realization that Faith was not contrary to Reason, but was rather the very Soul of Reason. The soul of the Body is different from the Body, and invisible; but it is not contrary to the Body, and it is the Soul that makes it live. So Reason lives only when in possession of its soul. Secondly was the place that Beauty gained as an indicator of purpose. I had previously followed the teachers of modernism in regarding beauty as irrelevant to the search for Truth; I have written previously of Being as an absolute value, which cannot be argued either for or against. This realization changed everything for me; before, I was at war with my heart, and felt that as I valued Truth I must put everything that I intrinsically felt to be valuable to trial before the august tribunal of Reason, which my training had taught me to regard as brutally materialistic. Now I thought, for the first time, "Why not? Why should not my perceptions of beauty be regarded as the central datum which influences the ordering of all other information? Why must the eyes of the body be regarded above the eye of the soul?". I suppose it was a persistent regard for Truth which saved me from abandoning truth altogether at this point, (as many do) thereby becoming degenerate, but it really never occurred to me that a beauty which was not simultaneously true could be truly beautiful. All the modern world regards Truth and Beauty as a duality, but they are one.

Dostoevsky wrote that Beauty would save the World. On the face of it, that is an absurd thing to say; certain it is that many are damned by it. Perhaps it is true only for those who have themselves lain in the pit of Nihilism, on whose benighted brains it finally dawns that, perhaps if the world is only beautiful it is meaningful; and the dark tormented dreams disperse, leaving one free to walk in the morning of a new day.

When at the high-tide of youth and health I went looking for purpose, I had no hope, I wanted to die; now that I am not so young, and not completely healthy, I am sustained by Faith, and I believe I could rejoice in my being if I could see but one ray of light. There are times when I have thought that if I were deprived of all my faculties except the ability to breathe, it would be enough; I could rejoice in the possession of my life in the joy of breathing. If Love is the affirmation of Being, then Faith is the surrender to Love; it is this surrender which led me to the God who is Love, and from there to the Christ who saves, and on to the Scripture which records the truths of our Faith, and the purposes of God, and from thence, in the fullness of time, to that Faith "Once delivered to the Apostles".

REVELATION

It does not appear to me likely that we are going to be able to figure things out all by ourselves; by our own effort, we have two strategies open to us for attempting to make sense of the universe: the painstaking analysis of each grain of phenomena that enters our experience via our senses, or the articulation of general principles which we perceive to be behind all the various permutations of the phenomenal universe. These general principles, of course, are a kind of revelation; what the Apostle tells us is written on the heart of every man. If we depend only on the analysis of phenomena for our truth, we are like a child on the beach, examining the soil where he sits, justifiably concluding the entire universe is made of sand; of course, our senses are also a kind of revelation. Why else should we consider our senses as portals of Truth? If our senses are the result of random processes, why should not their report be equally random? It seems to me, we can trust our senses to the extent we regard them as endowed by a beneficent Creator; One who gives them for our instruction, not our confusion, but we cannot rely on them utterly. They are for the verification of truth, not its discovery. 'The Heart knows its truths, which Reason may not know".

Were it not for the grace of the beneficent Father, we would be sightless; deaf, dumb, and blind. The Creator of the Heart of Man is also the Lawgiver of Sinai, reinforcing these truths almost to the point of redundancy for the benefit of His dull children. Then, lest the point of these precepts be lost forever in the legalistic multiplication of irrelevant minutiae, Christ came as Teacher to remind us, "To Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself....this is the whole of the Law". Lawyers may be workers of evil, but the Law itself is a thing of beauty.

UNTO THE AGES OF AGES

This in from Sophocles:
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Unto the Ages of Ages

He who has conquered Death and is alive forevermore, unto Ages of Ages.

O humanity, having left your first estate, having become mortal, you are dead. Death is your reward. Death is the fabric of your existence, it holds you, it defines you, you breathe it as air. It you run from. It you strive to postpone. It you define life by. What is life but not death? What are you, o humanity but a slave to not death? Why, o death, do you hover over me? Why do you stick closer to me than a brother? Why do you separate me from love? Why, o death, do I have to not be? Sin is conceived in me, o death, and I die more so, and yet you are not satisfied. Die more you want me to. I sin and die once again.

And when this mortal frame expires, I will continue to die, o death, forever. I will forevermore not be in Him who is Life. My God, my God, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to you, o LORD. I a sinner, am to span eternity with You. You who have conquered death and who can die no more, I am to be found in You. You, o Lord Jesus Christ, in the community of Your Father and the Holy Spirit, forever, from eternity begotten by Him, you were when there was not any save You, o Triune God.

Thou hast been always loved by Thy Father, o Lord. Forever Thy Father has sent Him who testifies of Thee, proceeding from Him, the Fount, hovering above the waters, the earth null and void. And I, a worthless sinner, who has broken all Thy commandments, whom You have loved, but because Your love burned me I ran, seeking my own way, am called by Thee to dine with Thee. This brokenness only I have to offer Thee, o gracious Master, I have nought else, my beautiful Lord, lover of mankind. But I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips.

Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, o LORD

Unto the Ages of Ages,

Amen.

Lord have mercy on me a sinner.

-Sophocles Frangakis

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