Part I: The Experience of Time
What the experience of archaic religions and Scripture tell us about time.
This is the first installment of a larger series on time. This article focuses on time as experienced among the pagan nations of antiquity and within the Old Testament. The second installment focuses on time and the cosmic scope of Christ’s redemption as well as the Church in time and history. The Third will discuss time, eternity, and God’s eternality from a more metaphysical perspective.
“For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time? And we understand, when we hear it spoke 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.” - Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book XI
Most often in our experience, today in the twenty-first century, time is experienced in the sense of counting down more than anything else. The weight of aging and the approaching end (ie., Death) weigh heavily on the minds of modern man. With this in mind I started this journey, this discovery of the meaning of time, with the supposition that time is the experience, or our conscious awareness, of the death of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics seems to confirm that as heat dissipates into cold - which is just the lack of heat - life dissipates into death, the lack of life.
But I believe this is only part of the picture. Surely this is how we experience secular time. But time is not so much an objective fact as it is, to use the words of Georgios Matzaridis, a profound existential process; less to do with physical objects and phenomena and more with human existence and life itself.1 If we take St. Paul seriously when he insists God did not abandon the nations, but left seeds of Truth among them to lead them to Him and combine this with David’s proclamation that the heavens […] and the firmament proclaimeth His handiwork, then by exploring man’s experience of time across the ages we can come closer to understanding God’s designs for time.2
Cyclical Time
For the pagan peoples of antiquity, time was cyclical. This is explained by simple observation of the natural world: the days, seasons, lunar cycles, solar and lunar years, all work cyclically - this is in part why so many scientists are favorable towards Hinduism and other Eastern cults. Plato speaks of this cyclical movement of the heavens as the divine Chronos, a living and ordered reflection of eternity in which time is a moving, albeit imperfect, image of eternity.
“Wherefore he [God, or the One] resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity rests in unity; and this image we call time.”3
This cyclical view of time and its relation to the cosmos is near-universal in the ancient world and is why the zodiac in one form or another is found around the world. Time’s circularity in archaic religion is perhaps best typified in the near universal symbol of the snake or dragon eating its tail, an image of death and rebirth.
For these people and for archaic religion, the dawning moment of creation was the true, authentic moment of time, when heaven and earth were close, allowing man easy passage and communion with the Most High God. Time and eternity were considered to be one in this moment. This was the time in which the gods communicated the rules of the divine order to man, producing the myths of archaic religions. But a fall, a great cataclysm occurred which separated the earth and heavens.
Man fell away from his the Most High, and time from eternity, causing all things to progressively degrade as they moved further from that authentic moment of a rightly ordered cosmos. This falling away is usually summed up in two distinct events: the giving of light (knowledge) to man such as that of Prometheus, and a Great Flood which ends the original age of mankind.
For this reason, the ritual life of archaic religions was focused on a nostalgic return to that authentic moment of paradise. After this fall, the gods reveal things only in part to specific persons, through a series of personal and communal rituals of purification and reenacting of cosmic events.
“We must do as the gods did in the beginning.” - Catapatha Brahmana
Through ritual, man attempts to participate, through recapitulation, in the paradisiacal moment; this serves to reinfuse the present with cosmic/divine energy. The past - with its greater concentration of divine energy - comes again through the cosmic cycle, as we see in New Years’ rituals the world over. These rituals are the killing of the old year, and a warding off of the demons which afflict mankind - these even persist in European celebrations such as those seen in Bulgaria, where men dress as large beasts to ward off the demons who cause war, pestilence and famine. In this way, every new cycle becomes a rebirth, a reconnecting of time and eternity in which all things are made new.
But this is not a resurrection - a true rebirth - as time is merely being recycled within space, where death and suffering reign supreme. The new year arises only by the death of the old, the new day dawns only with the passing - the death - of the former and never to the original state. Krishna says, “I am all-powerful Time which destroys all things,” and in the “vast cycles of life and death” he hurls sinners down to be “reborn in a lower life, in darkness birth after birth… because thou art in the bondage of Karma.”4
As creation moves away from that Paradisaical moment, it moves ever more into imperfection and annihilation. This conception of a decaying of reality and its reinfusion with divine energy, results in the four ages of humanity we see in both Hesiod5 and the Hindu mahayuga, the grand age consisting of four lesser ages.
Mankind cannot solve this problem on his own, he can only forestall it by ritual means. The nature gods ruling the nations - who have all rebelled against the Most High God who created the universe - are themselves created, and therefore powerless to stop it. On an individual level, man can only overcome the decay of time - in the thought of archaic religion - by elevating himself and being dissolved into the Cosmos, which they mistook for God on account of the divine energy working in creation.
Even the continuity of history dies with the succession of ages. We see this in the Great Flood accounts of the nations, which severs any connection mankind had maintained to the time of paradise, leaving only the testimony of the gods, inscriptions of its occurrence in the temples of old, as Plato relates in the Timaeus. The problem with these accounts is that if the man of today is not connected to the paradisiacal man and is still fallen - as he clearly is - then there is no hope for overcoming the decay of death.
Unlike these archaic accounts the Biblical flood account shows that while God wrought destruction upon the earth, the best of man and animal alike was preserved. This is important because while the creation - and mankind in particular - is purified of evil it preserves the historical and ontological continuity between Adam and the rest of mankind. This will enable mankind’s ultimate redemption.
In the Christian understanding, death is the gateway to rebirth, but that rebirth would not be possible until Christ, the God Man, would Himself go under the waters of death to restore mankind. Now, when each man goes under the waters at baptism, he emerges from them reborn, clothed in the deified humanity of Christ, the New Adam. This promise of redemption was given to the first created man during his expulsion from Paradise. But the demonic powers and principalities - the gods of the nations - distorted this promise, perverting the truths of old. This distortion of the truths is precisely what we see in the archaic accounts of creation and the flood.
Linear & Western Time
Time in creation is certainly experienced cyclically, but also linearly. Linear time is expressed in expectation of the Torah and prophets; Israel’s gaze was reoriented from the past to the future, awaiting the fulfillment of the promises of God. Instead of a time of nostalgia as in the archaic conception, linear time unfolds into a time of expectation. Israel’s ritual cycle is less an attempt to participate in the past as it is a reminder of the promises of God which will be fulfilled, a memory of the future.
Western civilization inherited this linear conception of time, but having lost its Christian foundations, this linear biblical time does little to assuage the anxiety of death’s approach.
In previous times, the doubling of human knowledge was in and of itself inconceivable. With the coming of the industrial age and the proliferation of modern science, the collective acquisition of human knowledge began to accelerate, resulting in a restructuring of society. By the 1970s the doubling of human knowledge was occurring not less than once per decade. This period of human history has also seen the atomization of the human person and innumerable shifts in familial, societal and global changes at a rate never before seen in history. Mankind as a whole is struggling to come to grips with the sheer scale of knowledge we’ve aggregated and its even worse at the personal level.
In effect this rapid acceleration in change is an acceleration of time itself.
At the personal level, we are incapable of cataloging and putting to use this exponential increase in information and the resulting changes in social order. The constant bombardment of new information and social change leaves us disoriented. We live in a world where the only thing we can be sure of, is death.
A sort of escapism emerges which manifests itself in a variety of modes. For the true believers in Scientism, this leads to the transhumanist dream of technological human augmentation and immortality. For those of us living in a linear and ever accelerating time the future itself becomes a form of tyranny, an expectation of a better tomorrow we will never see.
And so, linear time in the West offers no more consolation than time eating itself in the East. Time and space are inextricably linked. Whether time is thought of more as cyclical or linear, it is space - the realm in which we live - which is shackled by death. Time in the fallen world, or fallen time, is therefore the experience - and recognition of this experience by human persons - of the ontological exhaustion of material reality, the painful forced march towards total annihilation.
The Origins of Time & the Time of Presence
We have spoken a fair amount about the cyclical and linear aspects of time. In reality they are one; circular cycles progress one after another creating a sort of corkscrew of time. So far, our conversation has focused on how time has been experienced since the fall of man.
Whether you believe in “religion” or not is largely irrelevant to the conversation we’ve been having, as time and its relation to death are inevitable whether you accept their causes or not. But as Georgios Mantzaridis reminds us, “since death then constitutes an essential feature of human life, man only finds the universal meaning of life when he manages to include death in it as well.”6 Right faith gives us freedom, and this freedom breaks the bonds of death.7 That our perception of time is a sort of march towards death wasn’t always the case - nor is it totally true today. To explain why this is so, we need to discuss the origins of time.
Time is capable of change because time is a created reality. If it were not part of creation, it would be uncreated, and if it were uncreated, it would be God - for only God is uncreated.
One might object by saying that time is part of or in God. But if time was part of God’s being, he could not have mastery over it, just as I have no mastery over my brown eye color. Additionally, time passes away, it is ever in flux while God is the same yesterday, today, and forever - meaning ever the same. Therefore, time could not exist in actuality until the Divine Proclamation initiated creation.
Some have argued that time did not exist until the fall, but that’s absurd, the mere musings of modernist attempting to reconcile their belief in evolution. We know that time had to exist in some capacity within Paradise because otherwise the events of the fall would have been impossible. Man, by virtue of being temporal, moves within and requires time; movement requires time and space.
“In the beginning, God created,” reveals that the world (or space) and time came into existence simultaneously. Everyone from Plato, to Augustine, to Newton and beyond has understood this to be the case. The Genesis account speaks of the world as “formless and void.” This doesn’t mean that the world was like a glob of goop in science class. If something is without form it doesn’t exist. The void in particular really draws out the notion that prior to the divine proclamation, there was nothing. This void cannot be objectified, it is non-being, non-existence.
“Let there be light” is the creative moment. It is not that God prior to this was in some other place or realm - a blank white background or something - doing things. To conceive of prior to this moment is beyond human understanding, but St. Augustine - in his often-underappreciated sarcasm - tells us that “God was not idle - He created hell for those who ask too many questions.” The beginning of a path is not yet the path, and so the beginning of time is not time. This instant when all began - what Plato calls the sudden in his conception - is the all-powerful will of God bursting forth in a creative influx from the Being of God Himself which, from outside of time (which did not yet exist) gave birth to that which begins, becomes, and endures - this is the movement from nonbeing to being.
Paradisiacal Time
The flow of the Genesis account reveals to us that time preexists death, so this paradisiacal time could not be created for death. The creation days reveal time's purpose to us. With the passing of each evening into day, God created and pronounced His creation to be good. Day to evening manifested a cycle of birthing, nourishing, and growing in the endless depths of Divine Love. St, Gregory of Nyssa, in a clever word play, takes genesis and turns it into gennesis: perpetual birth.8
So, whereas fallen time is the movement towards death, time in its original state was the movement towards life, the constant expansion of life through temporal space. Mankind was called to participate in this cycle, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it.
In other words, man’s vocation was to bring the whole earth into Paradise as a love offering to God - a priestly function.9 This is the vocation which man abandons in the fall, and which Christ restores to man at Pentecost.10 Time before the fall then, was the expansion of God’s creative love coming into contact with a creation striving towards Him through the active, reciprocal love of Man.
Time, creating a space in which man could move towards (or away from) God, allows a dynamism, a synergy, of the divine and human wills. In time this synergy was to bring the creation to fulfillment; without death, the created would partake ever more in the uncreated, and time would open up into eternity.
Man, like all created things, was created good. Yet he is insufficient before the glory of the Uncreated One and is sustained only by Divine Life. Time in this sense is a gift to man in which his insufficiency would be made sufficient by God’s love and His uncreated energies (energeia or ενέργεια).11
This dynamism was meant to lead man from non-being, to the fullness of being, his eventual state in which man would be made a god ( one of His holy ones) by God’s grace.
“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are sons of the most High.”12
There’s a lot packed into this verse that isn’t brought out in the English rendering - and which we don’t have time to draw out. But suffice to say that man, being the image of God and sons of God, brings with it a participation in what God is, not by becoming God in His essence, but by relation, by His Energies, His grace.
The Fall of Man, Time, and Space
“God knows that when you eat of the fruit, you will be like him.”
Man attempts to seize the state he is destined for - to be like God - for himself, before the time. In his attempt to seize self-sufficiency for himself, he disobeys God and introduces death into creation, making time a slow march towards annihilation, towards non-being. This is the time we know today.
With the introduction of death into creation we hear God say, “cursed is the ground because of you.” Temporal space was now infected by death by man’s action. God is the source of life and Sin, properly speaking, is a willful separation of oneself from the source of life. The law in this respect is therefore a divine warning, a guardrail, meant to keep man from taking a particular action which will sever his connection to He who is Life.
Since man was created to rule and tend to creation, he is the bridge between creation and its source of life. God warns man, “on the day you eat of it, you will die by death.”13 This is exactly what happened. The moment man eats of the fruit his soul, the life God breathed into him, dies because it is severed from the fount of life; the body slowly dies because of this. Like an old flashlight that slowly fades away once the battery dies, Adam’s soul died instantly, and his body slowly died thereafter.14
Once death entered the creation, creation could no longer strive towards God but instead became engulfed in decay. Instead of man living off the abundance of the fruits of the earth, it now bears thorns and thistles, bearing fruits only by the sweat of man’s brow. The creation no longer striving towards God and being in decay completely negates any possibility of evolution after the fall; since the theory (or should be say fantasy) of evolution necessitates death, neither could it have happened prior to the fall.
Genesis: Setting the Record Straight
And so, the Scriptures correct the twisting of the truth which the many powers and principalities have given to mankind - from ancient times to our own. It’s not that the stories were wholly false, but that key details and roles were changed so that man would worship those who had “seized” power (who seized the worship due to God) from the Most High. We see now that time was created for man’s benefit, and was not intended to be the slow march towards death which fallen time clearly is.
While the Old Testament seeks to correct the myths of the nations - which we have described as a sort of demonic propaganda - they do so looking forward in expectation of their completion, to the fulfillment and recapitulation of all time and history in Christ, the Logos of God and of all creation. Christ - He who is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end - takes the time of absence which descended on to the world is turned into a time of Presence which opens up to eternity. How He does this and how we enter into this time is what we will explore in the next article in this series. Until then, you too are in a sort of time of waiting.
Georgios Matzaridis, Time & Man, pg. 24; Saint Tikhons’s Seminary Press, 2014
Psalm 19 (LXX)
Plato, Timeaus, pg. 451 in Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 7; Encyclopedia Britannica (University of Chicago, 1952
The Bhagavad Vita, 11:32, 16:19-21, 18:60; Penguin Classics, 1962
Hesiod, Theogony
Georgios Mazaridis, Time & Man, pg. 29
Saint Macarius of Optina, Elder Macarius of Optina, pg. 47; St. Herman of Alaska Press, 1995
St. Gregory Nyssa, the Life of Moses; Paulist Press, 1978
This will be of immense importance in the next article. So, make a mental note of it.
The structure of Paradise and the creation of man are described in the same manner as the creation of ancient temples. But whereas the nations placed an idol of a deity in their temples (or sacred groves) and performed a ritual of breathing/opening the nostrils of the idol, God breathes life itself into His image, who serves Him in a priestly function. This again reveals how the gods of the nation twist the truth, mocking the goodness of God in their rebelliousness, and how God uses those images as a guide back to Truth.
Later we will see this fulfilled in the one human being to attain to the fullness of manhood, the Theanthropos or God-Man Jesus Christ, who in His moment of peril in the garden says, “not as I will, Lord, but as you will.”
Ps. 82:6
Gen 2:17
St. Symeon the New Theologian, The First Created Man (The Sin of Adam), pg.44-45; St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2001
Fascinating. I know this isn't the main point of your article, but is there an underlying supposition that in spite of the different details in each people's systems (names of gods, the details of the narratives, etc..) that they share certain metaphysical principles, over-arching narratives, depictions of beings, hierarchies, etc... because they are all operating in the same spiritual world essentially? By that I mean that the gods of the Hindus, Greeks, Babylonians, etc are actual beings and have actually relayed these accounts to man, and are in reality the fallen angels simply deceiving mankind?