From
The April 2004 St John's Eagle
“Of Time and Eternity" - By John Harcourt
We pretty
much accept the scientific conclusion that we live in a universe where
time and space are the principal dimensions. While we are immersed in
these realities, they are exceedingly difficult to define. This is especially
true of time, in its irreversible rush from the Big Bang to what?
Actually, we know only an endlessly changing present. We can only think
of the past by imagining ourselves as experiencing it now. And, likewise
for the future: it can exist only as we incorporate it into our here
and now. As the British historian Lord Namier wittily stated, we imagine
our past and remember our future.
Yet almost all people --- vaguely, it is true --- sense something different
from time and space as we know them. Most high religions talk about
eternity. Much of the time, this term merely means time without end.
But the greatest of religious thinkers have thought of eternity as somehow
being qualitatively different from time. They often resort to phrases
like the Eternal Now to express this difference. What can "the
Eternal Now" mean? All of reality reduced to a pinpoint of unimaginable
intensity? Does such a blinding flash change, develop, enlarge itself?
Does it "contain" our ordinary experience of time as a succession
of events?
No one knows, of course. We can manage only one world at a time, though
perhaps with intermittent and fitful glimpses of a world or worlds organize
on quite different principles. Or as an all encompassing vision into
which all the pieces fit:
Life,
like a dome of many coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity. (Shelley)
But it
is difficult to conceive of stepping "out" of time "into"
eternity. We inevitably drag along the language of space ("out",
"into") and the language of time ("then", "hereafter").
Some have maintained that eternity is, like time and space, a dimly
perceived dimension of our present life, life as we know it now. Death
ends this life as a progression limited by both space and time. Do we,
at the instant of dying, see our lives as a totality both in themselves
and in relation to all other lives, to all that is? Is this what the
mystics experience, what they are trying to tell the rest of us?
At the ending of the Paradiso, Dante has traversed the world
of space time, has seen all evil in the Inferno, all gropings toward
the light in the Purgatorio, all purified souls fixed in an eternal
Paradiso. At last, beyond all the saints, beyond Beatrice, beyond
the Virgin Mary, he attains a final vision of God. He seems to see three
concentric circles of light, but is baffled because the second of these
concentric circles seems "to be painted with a man's image."
The essential oneness of the Uncreated and the Created eludes him.
Like
a geometer wholly dedicated
to squaring the circle, but who cannot find,
think as he may, the principle indicated ---
So did I study the supernal face.
I yearned to know just how our image merges
into that circle, and how it there finds place;
but mine were not the wings for such a flight.
Yet, as I wished, the truth I wished for came
cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy
but already I could feel my being turned ---
instinct and intellect balanced equally.
As in a wheel whose motion nothing jars ---
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
This vision
presumably fades, and Dante returns to his ordinary world, though transformed
by the memory of what he has experienced.
Is that fleeting vision, encompassing yet that moves the Sun and the
other stars"? transcending time and space, our best approximation
of eternity? We shall not continue in life as we know it after
we die. But in our last moment, shall see life as it has always been,
in a context of total meaning, in relation to all that is, focused by
"the love that moves the Sun and other stars"?
Could we but capture it, in a comprehensive and unending fashion, would
our lives in time and space have disclosed their eternal significance?
The kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21)
Professor
Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emeritus at Ithaca
College.
