Thoughts on time

Thomas

Thomas

So it goes ...
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The great Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov says this about the Fall in Genesis 1-3:
"An event is described that lies beyond our history, although at its boundary. Being connected with our history, this event inwardly permeates it. But this event cannot be perceived in the chain of empirical events, for it is not there. It took place, but beyond the limits of this world: After the expulsion of our progenitors from Eden, its gates were locked, and an angel with a fiery sword protects this boundary of being that has become transcendent for us. But this event took place precisely in this world, or at least for this world."
(Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (2002), 170)
 
From Paul Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures
Metronomic (Fallen) time, as the name suggests, is regular and measurable: its law (nomos) is measure (metron). The means of measuring it are various, and include the movements of the sun or other heavenly bodies relative to the earth, and the rates of growth and decay of material substances. The former give us days and nights and months and years; the latter provide smaller intervals, down to and beyond the zeptosecond or the ictus. But all these means of measure are derived from—or just are—kinds of creaturely motion. The constellations wheel; the moon circles the earth; the tides surge; the shadow of night’s darkness moves westward across the planet’s globe; the human body ages and changes and moves; atoms of carbon decay; the gluon and the lepton and the hadron and the boson orbit and connect and disconnect, forming and reforming; the sand sifts softly through the hourglass’ throat; the psalm-syllables are chanted with tongue and lips and vocal chords and intakings and expellings of breath; digestion’s peristaltic rhythm proceeds, making nourishment possible; the pulse beats and the eyes blink—all these are creaturely movements in space that are also, or may also be, means of measuring duration. (p.90)

Fallen time is decay in movement toward nothingness. Its weight: “bears all creatures that labor under it down into death ... the heartbeat of a damaged but still beautiful cosmos, the hammer that knocks all coffin-nails firmly and finally home.” (p.91)
 
The author counters this metronomic, fallen time, with time before the fall, which he refers to as systolic:

The systole, physiologically speaking, is the regular contraction of the heart as necessary prelude to the driving of blood outward from itself; it is a contraction that prepares the organism for a movement essential to the sustaining of its life. To call time “systolic,” then, is to suggest that it is contracted, gathered, tensed, ready for life-giving action. (ibid p.95)

Griffiths borrows the image of the systole from St Paul. In 1 Corinthians 7:29, Jesus Paul speaks of time now being 'made short', is systolated (sunestalmenos) – pleated, tensed, furled, crouched like a cat for the spring, tight-wrapped (in grave-clothes) ... the Greek verb is the root of the English 'systole'.

The crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus lie at the heart of time. That time is contracted by those events, pleated and folded around them, gathered by them into a tensely dense possibility. By and in those events, the events of the passion, metronomic duration, the regularly measurable fabric of timespace, is systolated: it has folds or gatherings in it because of its contraction. The principal fold is exactly that provided by the passion: there, time is folded most thickly, pleated most delicately and intricately, contracted—systolated—most tightly; there (then) eternity’s relation to the devastation’s metronomic death hammer is most intense and most transformative; it is that death hammer that drives the nails through the flesh of Jesus and the spear into his side, and it is the hyperdurational events that follow (death, deposition, burial, descent ad inferos, hell’s harrowing, resurrection, ascension) that remove them, and provide the necessary conditions for the casting of Christ’s blood out into the cosmos and into our hearts. The passion is to the fabric of timespace just as the heart’s systole is to our bodies. Time receives its proper order in the passion, and it is an order opposed in every significant way to the time of the metronome. (p.96)
 
Heaven’s time, by contrast, maintains and intensifies to the maximum the signs of temporal grace evident in the (metronomic) devastation, and removes all unendurability. This is to say that heaven’s time is exclusively nonmetronomic; all that, an artifact of the fall as it is, has been burned away. What remains is the systole perfected, the tensive, gathered time of the liturgy now extended to infinity. Just as the passion-centered liturgical calendar is cyclical and repetitive here in the devastation, so too is systolic time in heaven: it is the indrawn breath of the LORD, which concentrates time around the sacred heart, the beating heart of Jesus, and which is drawn in again and again, gathering and folding the temporal into itself. But the systole implies, as well, a diastole: the heart’s contraction, as preparation for forcing blood through the arteries, is followed by a dilation or relaxation, which is what does the forcing. Systole and diastole go together, and together they form a repeated, life-giving cycle. My account of the systole so far was in terms of the healing of time in the devastation. There—here—time was contracted or folded or gathered, but not yet expanded. The church was encouraged by Paul to live as if time had been folded, but not yet opened out. . . .

In heaven that has happened. The annihilation there of metronomic time is coincident with the full expansion of the systole into the diastole. The indrawn breath is exhaled; the resurrected and ascended flesh of Christ sits now, fully present, at the center of the faithful; and the time of heaven is a constant, endless, back-and-forth of praise and love between the saints and the LORD, an inbreath and outbreath of gift-given and gift- received-by-being-returned. This endlessly repeated but temporally structured cycle is the temporal form of the beatific vision: it is how temporal creatures see the LORD, the maximal extent of creaturely participation in the LORD’s eternity. (p. 107-108)
 
Is time a river we can't step in twice?

We experience time differently eh? Each from our own perspective....mostly having to do with how we experience it.

Your quotes definitely make me think..(the blue font makes me struggle to read)
 
wil said:
Is time a river we can't step in twice?
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Well we're bing carried along by Metronomic time. We're in the river.

wil said:
We experience time differently eh? Each from our own perspective....mostly having to do with how we experience it.
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That's true of time generally. What seems a fleeting moment for one might seem an eternity for another.

Time seeming to accelerate as we get older is a psychological/physiological phenomena

I think it's a case of trying to get our heads ropund time as he's talking about it, which is something different, rather than wrapping what he's saying round what we think.

wil said:
(the blue font makes me struggle to read)
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Thanks for that ... I'll stop doing it.
 
wil said:
does that mean more than it ticking by?
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Nope ... just that ... we are born, we live we die ... we're dying from the moment we are born.

Tick-tock
Tick-tock
 
Thomas said:
..we're dying from the moment we are born.
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I've heard that "life begins at 40". :)
On a scientific basis, I would say that it is around 40, that our bones begin to deteriorate..

..that is, on average .. naturally, through malnutrition or disease, it is much earlier.
 
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