Chalice of Eternity: A Look at Orthodox Christian Theology of Time
In this article Dr Brandon Gallaher describes
the major elements of an Orthodox theology of time, with particular reference
to the theology of Fr Alexander Schmemann and St Gregory of Nyssa. Dr Gallaher
asks what we mean by time in relation to creation and to God; what the nature of
time is as experienced by us as fallen beings, as 'growth unto death'; and how
time can be experienced as renewal, as 'growth unto life in Jesus Christ',
referring in particular to the concept of the liturgical Eighth Day.
This
morning during Matins I had a ‘jolt of happiness, of fullness of life, and at
the same time the thought: I will have to die! But in such a fleeting breath of
happiness, time usually ‘gathers’ itself. In an instant, not only are all such
breaths of happiness remembered but they are present and alive—that Holy
Saturday in Paris when I was a young man—and many such ‘breaks.’ It seems to me
that eternity might be not the stopping of time, but precisely its resurrection
and gathering. The fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of
eternity. Maybe the words of Christ are about time when He said: ‘…not to
destroy anything but will raise it all on the last day.’ The thirst for
solitude, peace, freedom, is thirst for the liberation of time from cumbersome
dead bodies, from hustle; thirst for the transformation of time into what it
should be—the receptacle, the chalice of eternity. Liturgy is the conversion of
time, its filling with eternity. There are two irreconcilable types of
spirituality: one that strives to liberate man from time (Buddhism, Hinduism,
Nirvana, etc.); the other that strives to liberate time. In genuine eternity,
all is alive. The limit and the fullness: the whole of time, the whole of life
is in each moment. But there is also the perpetual problem: What about the evil
moments? Evil time? The terrible fear before dying of the drowning man, of the
man falling from the tenth floor about to be crushed on the pavement? What
about the tears of an abused child?
(The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann
1973-1983, p.78)
***
Time
cannot be understood as a part of the Doctrine of Creation, but only from
within our recreation in the Body of the Living Christ, the Church. Christ came
to recreate all things by His cross in the Church and time itself is the space
within creation wherein this re-creation takes place. Systematic theology in
the Eastern Orthodox tradition is very underdeveloped; indeed, the actual
writing of Systematic Theologies has been something attained with little
success until now except by Frs. Sergii Bulgakov and Dimitru Staniloae. If a
tradition of systematics is to be developed in Eastern Orthodoxy, one that
begins to speak from and for the whole Christian Church, and if it is to begin
with the Doctrine of the Word of God, as arguably, after Karl Barth, has become
a theological necessity, then one must first theologize the space within which
the cross of Jesus Christ stands. This essay will attempt to give, in broad
strokes, an Eastern Orthodox theology of time with particular emphasis on the
thought of Fr. Alexander Schmemann and St. Gregory of Nyssa.
This
study begins with a quotation from Schmemann, the rare Orthodox theologian who
has developed a systematic theology of time. The quotation will be helpful to
us in our attempt to understand time as the space of our creation and
re-creation in Jesus Christ, for it brings together a number of themes central
to our enterprise: (a) time as understood in its relation to the Church as a
receptacle of the eternal Kingdom of God; (b) time as woundedness (what Schmemann
calls “evil time”); (c) the relation of time to eternity as the spiritual mode
of the created where time is not understood, like Plato, as a moving image of
eternity, but eternity is understood through time as the co-presence and
indwelling of distinct moments (past, present and future); (d) and memory in
liturgical remembrance as the restoration of time to the wholeness of a
temporally understood eternity. This essay attempts to elaborate the broad
themes central to an Orthodox theology of time under three equally broad
headings:
(I) Nature of Time: What is
time? Do we only know time in knowing the things that are contained in time?
What is its relation to God’s mode of being?
(II) Time as Decay: How do
we primarily experience time? Do we experience it as change or, more precisely,
mutability, that is, a growth unto death?
(III) Time as Renewal: If time
is the change inherent in being created then can we experience our life as
other than a growth unto death? Can we experience life as perhaps, a growth
unto goodness in Christ in His Church?
(I) Nature of Time: What is time?
What is
time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend
this even
in thought so as to articulate the answer in words?
Yet what
do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time?
We surely
know what we mean when we speak of it.
We also
know what is meant when we hear someone else taking about it.
What then
is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.
If I want
to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. (Confessions,11.14.17, p. 230)
Following
these famous lines from Book XI of the Confessions St. Augustine goes on to
meditate on the intricate connections between past, present and future in human
consciousness. Unlike at least one tendency in Augustine, seen in Book XI of
the Confessions, I think that it is a mistake to try to understand the nature
of time abstractly, that is, I come to understand time by abstracting myself
from the stream of life and thereby think of time as something ‘out there’ as
the object of my intellect. This object of time is observed by the thinker as a
neutral observer who steps back from himself and meditates upon the object
thrown before his consciousness. However, Augustine also is concerned with the
relation of time to creation and eventually concludes, as the quote indicates,
that the thinker is always implicated by time since he is in time. In other
words, time itself is meaningless unless it presupposes created things in time
including the thinker. Indeed, Augustine’s meditation on time in the
Confessions begins with the attempt to understand the relation of God to the
world He created. Augustine attempts to respond to the question: ‘What was God
doing before He created all things?’ To which Augustine responds: nothing as
doing (sc. creating) implies time. Time came to be with God’s act of creation,
for God is timeless or immutable and changeless unlike creation, which is
temporal, mutable or changing.
Butif
Augustine does acknowledge the connection of time to creation, for him this
meant our consciousness of creation, which led him to collapse time past and
future into the eternity of the present moment. In the present moment, I am
aware of myself as made in the image of God so that time, as the triune reality
of past, present and future, becomes unreal next to the eternal image of the
Trinity. This eternal image is in the mind as a present moment of self-consciousness.
I don’t think this solution should be accepted because it essentially says that
all change is unreal since whatever is real is wholly eternal and only God is
wholly eternal and we share in Him through our unchanging meditation on him. In
short, the past and future, according to one traditional theology of time, are
unreal and only the present moment as an image of eternity is real.
It is
arguable, however, that if God created all things very good and to be created
is to be mutable or changeable then change as variation (past, present and
future) must be good in itself. Thus the Platonic tendency to see time as a
moving image of eternity should be avoided theologically insofar as it leads to
‘unreal creation’ being collapsed into ‘real eternity’ thereby ending creation’s
variable createdness. This collapse of time into eternity is believed by some
thinkers to be necessary because temporal creation is viewed as ‘metaphysically
evil’ insofar as it is not eternal which is to be good, real and invariable. On
the contrary, it is arguable that the division between past, present and future
in time does not point to the unreality of physical creation as time bound, but
instead, as Fr. Pavel Florensky argued, to real otherness, distinction and
difference in God himself as the Holy Trinity. God's life as Trinity is
"perichoretic" (i.e. indwelling, co-inherent) with each person being
in the other person and all being in each and each existing in all and all
subsisting in all and all being one in this division in the perfect unity of
love. Therefore, in contrast to a certain tendency in Augustine and both
Eastern and Western theologies, perfection, for the created, is not to be
collapsed into the one presence of the Uncreated, insofar as God is one,
present and invariable and so that time finds its true end in its negation.
Rather, the created images the Uncreated’s perfection in creaturely otherness
and movement towards goodness, that is, man reflects His Creator precisely in
his temporality and mutability which are "very good."
Time is
often connected to physical creation insofar as physical creation is
characterized by change (mutability) and the ability to change—as the mode of
being of creation—being often contrasted with God who is changeless, immutable
and eternal. But I think this conceptual movement needs further clarification,
for are there not angels and are they not said to be created but eternal and
immortal too? But we know that Satan and those fallen angels who followed him
made a choice to change from goodness to evil, from light to darkness, yet we
still call them ‘eternal beings’ possessing 'immortality' albeit by grace and
not of their own posession. We have then in the angel a sort of oxymoron: a
changeable eternal being.
Therefore
some Fathers, including Sts. Basil the Great and Maximus the Confessor, spoke
of three modes of being (i.e. time (chronos), age or creaturely eternity (aion)
and the everlasting or uncreated eternity (aidios, aidiotes and sometimes
aioniosandoften evenproaionios or the pre-eternal which is ateleutetos or
without an end)), not just the two of time and eternity. I will attempt to
adapt these broad and rather slippery categories, in a contemporary context,
based on the fundamental distinction between the Uncreated and the created.
First,
everlastingness or everexistingness (aidiotes) that is the mode of being of God
who is utterly beyond the distinction between time and creaturely eternity,
being and non-being since He is the pre-eternal (proaionios) God who is
"endless" in the sense of being beyond duration. Everlastingness is
essentially a negative or apophatic category emphasizing God’s unknowableness.
God’s unknowableness is best expressed by darkness —“He made darkness his
covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water” (Ps. 18:
11)—since He is unlike all else that is in being Uncreated not created. That
which is everlasting is eternity in its proper sense as it is the natural mode
of God not creation. Thus Basil speaks of the everlasting, the ‘mode’ of God,
as being “older in being to all time and eternity [or 'age': aionos]” in that
He is the one who created the ages. Maximus likewise writes that “God is simply
and indefinably beyond all beings, both what circumscribes and what is circumscribed
and the nature of those [categories] without which none of these could be, I
mean, time and eternity and space, by which the universe is enclosed, since He
is completely unrelated to anything.” God is indefinable as the ho pro aionon
Theos (Slavonic: prevechnyi Bog) which can be translated as ‘the pre-eternal
God’ or ‘God before the ages.’ As the Kontakion of Christmas puts it:
Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is
above all being [ton huperousion], and the earth offers the cave to him whom no
one can approach; Angels with Shepherds give glory, while Magi journey with a
star, for to us there has been born a little child, God before the ages [ho pro
aionon Theos].
Second,
we have creaturely eternity/age (aidiotes), which is the creaturely mode of
being of the supra-cosmic or spiritual creation of God—angels. This mode of
being is not one that excludes change but it is not bound by the distinctions
of our present time’s version of change. The past is not utterly past but it is
contained in the present as is the future and the future in the past and the
past in the future so that eternity is a sort of perichoretic version of time.
This, I would argue, is what Schmemann was getting at when he wrote that points
in time can be gathered together and encountered simultaneously:
In an
instant, not only are all such breaths of happiness remembered but they are
present and alive—that Holy Saturday in Paris when I was a young man—and many
such ‘breaks.’ It seems to me that eternity might be not the stopping of time,
but precisely its resurrection and gathering.
Moreover,
there is in the Kingdom of God, which is an eternal Kingdom not of this world,
an enduring quality of being where one forever praises God from one moment to
the next—a sort of sempiternal or eternal duration—without in any way being
trapped in growing old or being trapped in the inexperience of youth. In such
eternal duration, the goodness of God is always desired and always held in its
fullness at the same time as that goodness continually increases our capacity
and desire for it although we never possess this goodness in its fullness. The
nature of eternity can be traced to the nature of spiritual or eternal being
where the spiritual ‘body’ is both faster and lighter than the physical body
and so is not constrained by the divisions of space or time at the same time as
those divisions are never abolished. Thus I am arguing that creaturely eternity
cannot be understood without temporal characteristics like the triune reality
of past, present and future. Temporality comes in two forms: creaturely
eternity or spiritual time and time proper which we humans now experience.
Temporality is the mark of what is created whereas what is Uncreated—God
alone—is everlasting being marked by uncreated eternity.
Thirdly,
we have time (chronos) proper which is the mode of being of the sensible
cosmos, that is, our present sensible creation that has man at its summit. Time
in physical creation, as we now experience it under the weight of sin, is
understood as a reality with a strict division between past, present and future
where the person in time, who has turned his back on God’s grace in Jesus
Christ, is prevented from being present to more than one division at once. Thus
when I err under the weight of sin I cannot be present to here and there at
once since I am bound to here.
To
summarize, I am arguing that in an Orthodox theology of time we should speak of
two (not three) modes of being based on the fundamental distinction between the
created and the Uncreated: temporality in the dual form of time (sensible
creation: chronos) and creaturely eternity/age (supersensible creation: aion)
in contradistinction to the everlasting (aidiotes), uncreated divine eternity
before every age (proaionios), as a negative or apophatic category emphasizing
God’s unknowableness.
The
admittedly rather laboured distinction I have made between temporality and the
everlasting is a necessary prolegomenon to any systematic theology of time
since we can then begin to understand who Jesus Christ is as the God-Man,
created and Uncreated at once, insofar as His theandric energies are
simultaneously temporal and everlasting. The cross, using our distinction, is
an everlasting act of God that is love but it is such an act of love only in
time. In contemplating the cross, as a theandric act, we come to understand
that Christ is the one who in showing us the brokenness of time also reveals to
us what time may become through its healing by the everlasting. Christ heals
our time (chronos), and indeed the time of the invisible creation (aeon), by
making it His time of opportunity for our salvation in Him (kairos). Time, as
Christ’s time, becomes a means to our perfection in Him rather than the
ultimate expression of our rejection of God’s grace. Through Him in His Body
the Church we come to partake in the mode of being of the invisible creation,
creaturely eternity, but this eternity or time of the invisible creation
becomes wedded with our sensible time, remade for an embodied being like man,
through participating in the everlasting life of God. Time is, therefore,
remade and renewed in the Church as the Kingdom of God and we have a foretaste
of this renewal in the liturgy. We shall return to this renewal of time in
Christ below.
Furthermore,
Jesus Christ is the source by which the temporal is defined and the everlasting
is illumined. If creation’s mode of being is best seen in movement, in the
interval between two points, then God’s mode of Being is best expressed by His
enduring darkness since the mode by which ‘He is’ is unlike all else that is in
being Uncreated not created. Following this line of argument, we can say that
the best description of God’s mode of Being (outside of saying that He is
Trinity) is to say that He is not created—Uncreated. Thus when God became man
in Jesus Christ it was, as it were, a ‘movement of darkness.’ But how do we
perceive this ‘movement of darkness’ that is the God-Man as the union of time
and the everlasting? We can only understand Jesus Christ by contemplating God’s
grace that is perfectly manifest in the weakness of the cross, “E’lo-i, E’lo-i,
la’ma sabach-tha’ni?” (Mark 15:34), of God crying for man to God from the
depths of hell: “I called to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice” (Jonah 2:2).
We shall return to the key role Christ plays in the theology of time throughout
this essay.
Temporality,
then, as the fallen time of the physical world and temporality as the eternal
mode of co-presence of past, presence and future are both understood by their
contents, but if we talk about a ‘content’ in time or eternity then we are
thinking of time and eternity in terms of space. A content can be measured and
that which can be measured can be placed so that if that which is temporal
exists insofar as to be is to be measurable then the temporal has being insofar
as it takes up a place in the hierarchy of being in which God has created the
world. So a man has a natural place in God’s cosmos just as does an angel
whereas God is outside this hierarchy as completely beyond it as its, to borrow
a phrase from Maximus, “unoriginate origin.” All of us seek our true place in
this hierarchy through our inner desire or love for God implanted by the same
Uncreated God who created us. Therefore, time, as Basil defined it, is “the
extension [diastema] coextensive with the existence of the cosmos”, that is, all
created being (sensible and supersensible) is characterized as temporal which
is to be in an extension of createdness reaching towards the end of the love of
God.
(II) Time as Decay: Growth unto Death
He [the
passionate man] is like those who toil endlessly as they climb uphill in sand:
Even
though they take long steps, their footing in the sand always slips downhill,
so that,
although there is much motion, no progress results from it. (Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Moysis, §244, p.117)
The first
stop in our theology of time is our fallen experience of time—time as found in
the sensible world; not, that is, that sensoriness makes for fallenness. On the
contrary, the demons are fallen but they are supersensible eternal beings that,
like us, experience, in eternity, temporality in a fallen mode. However, how
exactly the fallen experience of eternal time of the demons differs from the
eternal temporality of the unfallen angels or the time bound fallen temporality
of man or the temporality of the garden which Adam and Eve experienced is
impossible to say. What we can express fairly exactly is how we presently
experience temporality as fallen time or growth unto death, that is, our
present fallen time is as Shakespeare’s “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To the last syllable of recorded
time,/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. […]
it is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”
First we
experience fallen time as constant change or ceaseless movement in a cycle of
death that can be seen cyclically in the seasons, which move in a circle like a
snake swallowing its tail. Winter follows Autumn and Spring follows Winter just
as death follows old age and old age is not the end, for out of our death comes
the birth of our descendants. Thus all of time is a perpetual repetition of
death since the moment that things come into existence, changing from
non-existence into being, they straightway move back again from existence into
non-being. This experience of fallen time is what Pozzo, in Waiting For Godot,
expresses when he cries furiously at Vladimir:
Have you
not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When!
One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went
blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the
same day, the same second, is that enough for you? [Calmer] They give birth
astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
Second,
we experience fallen time as unending desire. Once we desire something it
lacerates our whole being until we possess it and our desire for that thing is
then satiated until the thing possessed tempts us into some new perversion and
the vicious circle begins all over again. Man’s life, then, is like this
vicious circle insofar as he is continually turning around while facing his own
self like it was a household idol, as The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete
puts it: “I am become my own idol, and have injured my soul with passions.”
Luther expressed this fallen circularity of time well when he says that homo in
se incurvatus or man is turned in on himself.
St.
Gregory of Nyssa writes of negative change as what characterizes our fallen
time. It is characterized by biological duration or, in physical terms,
negative ‘motion’ which Gregory in a nice figure, borrowed from Eph. 4:14,
describes as the character of being “tossed about.” With negative motion one
never meets one’s object, but one is always in a process of slipping away from
that object even as one thinks that one possesses it. In terms of bodily
desires (good in the unfallen condition) this means that one is caught in a seemingly
endless cycle of temptation and satiation where one desire merges into another
as soon as it is satisfied (if it is ever truly satisfied). Gregory has a nice
image, with which we opened this section, to convey this hopeless cyclical
perpetuum mobile.It is of a man fruitlessly attempting to climb uphill in sand
and never making any progress. It is the spiritual life where one’s house is
built not on the rock of Christ but on the sand of spiritual illusions:
He [the passionate man] is like those who toil
endlessly as they climb uphill in sand: Even though they take long steps, their
footing in the sand always slips downhill, so that, although there is much
motion, no progress results from it.
Third, we
see time as decay in memory—Schmemann’s “evil time.” In evil time, we remember
the past as perpetually lost like a ghost that must relive its own murder. Thus
we remember continually and cannot change the death of our spouse, our mother,
our child, or worse, a moment of humiliation by our spouse, our mother, by us
of our own child. We cannot choose our past, for deliberation is a mark of
future action in the present, the choice between what we would like to have
happened and what actually happened remains only an undying craving for another
world, as T. S. Eliot acknowledged: “What might have been is an abstraction/
Remaining a perpetual possibility/ Only in a world of speculation.” Perhaps
this is what the ancient Greek poet Agathon meant when he wrote that “For one
thing is denied even to God/ To make what has been done undone again.”
Therefore, all in all, it seems that as the children of Adam the Transgressor
we have buried the image of God under several feet of mud. What can we do, if
anything, when the judge of all comes at the end of time? The Great Canon of
St. Andrew of Crete puts this aspect of time’s and man in time’s judgement in
the following manner: “The mind is wounded, the body is feeble, the spirit is
sick, the word has lost its power, life is ebbing, the end is at the doors.
What then will you do, wretched soul, when the Judge comes to try your case?”
But what is the theological characteristic of all these faces of fallen time?
Each of these faces of fallen time points to our fundamental need, in time, for
time’s renewal in Jesus Christ.
(III) Time as Renewal: Growth unto Goodness
in Christ
Therefore,
let not a person be grieved by the fact that his nature is mutable; rather,
by always
being changed to what is better and by being transformed from glory to glory
(2 Cor
3.18), let him so be changed: by daily growth he always becomes better
and is
always being perfected yet never attains perfection’s goal.
For
perfection truly consists in never stopping our increase towards
the
better nor to limit perfection with any boundary. (Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection, p.379)
Decay
unto death can be renewed as a growth unto life in Jesus Christ. It was argued
above that memory for man can be the awareness that he cannot change the past.
In other words, in the fallen experience of time man is impotent in the face of
the seemingly invincible movement of time so that Agathon could claim that even
God could not change the past. However, as a Christian I believe otherwise in
confessing Jesus Christ. Indeed, Christian faith rests upon the belief that
Agathon was and is wrong. Time, as a fallen reality crushing the being of man,
seen perhaps most clearly in the tragedy of lost time, can be redeemed, saved
and liberated. Our time is renewed in the living, real memory of Jesus Christ
in whose death and new life in His living Body, the Church, we are baptized.
Put otherwise, in baptism, our fallen memory is ‘justified, illumined,
sanctified and washed in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit
of God.’ Our everlasting God has come down into the broken temporality of time
and renewed our memory in the saving event of Jesus Christ, God as Man and Man
for God.
Memory
needs to be healed not destroyed. Often the greatest difficulties in our lives
are the result of being plagued by evil memories, which wound and lacerate us
as persons. Indeed, we pray at Great Vespers that God will protect us “from
vain thoughts and from evil memories.” An image exists for this ‘weight of
memory’ at the end of the Purgatorio when Dante, after confessing to Beatrice,
first drinks of the river of Lethe forgetting all the evil and sin of his past
life then drinking of the river of Eunöe (‘good remembrance’ or ‘good mind’)
and remembering everything but from the perspective of the grace and love of
God. Forgiveness, then, is a process of progressive confession and absolution
where we gradually let go of the past (are freed from its chains) by
confronting the past and then giving it up in forgiveness (forgetting it
without repression) so that we can regain it back from Jesus Christ through His
remembrance in love. This healed or forgiven memory is paradise regained, that
is, “radical innocence” as Yeats termed the state of learned childlikeness
after our dreaming innocence has gone through the fire of experience.
We are
given this renewal of our memory, this reality of memory shining forth with the
light of the new age of the coming Kingdom of God fulfilled once for all time
on the cross (‘It is finished!’/’Behold I make all things new’), in the
perpetual rebirth—perpetual Pentecost—of the Church in its praise of God. In
praising God, the Church is given the gift of the eternal Memory of the Spirit
whereby we remember the life of Christ as our very own thus redeeming all
memory under the sign of His cross. Such ‘eternal remembrance’ renews the face
of the earth and makes of it, as Schmemann put it, a “liturgical paradise.”
Schmemann’s theology of time is in many ways a theology of memory. For
Schmemann, memory, in the Church, becomes an ingathering of the past and future
in the present worship of the Church so that we can presently sing of Christ’s
salvation on the cross and His triumph over history in His second and glorious
coming again as “the ultimate and all-embracing today of Christ”, that is,
“Today, a sacred Pascha is revealed to us” or “This is the day of resurrection”
or yet again “On Mount Tabor, O Lord, Thou hast shown today the glory of Thy
divine form unto Thy chosen disciples” or finally, with Ephrem the Syrian, on
Christ’s passion as our salvation now:
Open
your heart,
learn in detail
his sufferings
and say to yourself:
God who is without sin
today was given up,
today was mocked,
today was abused,
today was struck,
today was scourged,
today wore
a crown of thorns,
today was crucified,
he, the heavenly Lamb.
In
Christ, as the Lord of Time, is realized the ingathering of all moments in one
moment of what we might call an 'eternal temporality' and which Schmemann calls
temps immobile, that is, the co-inherence or co-presence of each part of time
to each other in the present happens in Jesus Christ. Christ is Himself the
Lord of Chronos or time proper because He is the Kyrios Kairou, Lord of the
appointed time of our salvation. In Him, our broken mode of temporality,
chronos, is renewed and sanctified, ascending with Him to the Father and
becoming a spiritual mode of time through its marriage with creaturely eternity
(aeon). But when He returns to us in His Body and Blood in the liturgy, which
is both our ascent to God and His descent to us, we see that our new mode of
time, eternal temporality, is something radically new to creation, sensible and
spiritual at once, as it has partaken of the very mode of God Himself as
everlasting Trinity (aidiotes), God before the ages. Therefore, the central
locus of this ingathering of time is our Lord’s anamnesis or His recollection
of His own saving actions in the liturgy in which His living memory becomes
life everlasting by renewing all time in the new age of His Kingdom. This
Kingdom of Jesus Christ is the very same life we will receive at the
resurrection on the last day. It has been variously described as the ‘eighth
day’ or ‘liturgy without end’ and it is granted as a gracious foretaste to us.
It is a sort of liturgical in-breaking of the life to come in our crooked and
wounded time.
It should
be noted that when, in Scripture, Christ remembers His own Body and Blood
broken and shed for the life of the world, it is prior to the actual sacrifice.
In other words, in Christ’s remembrance, memory is not merely retrospective, in
that it looks back at a life of sacrifice, but it is also simultaneously
prospective in actuating prophetically the sacrifice of the cross before it
happens. Likewise, our Lord as our Great High Priest remembers us and all time
before the Father in heaven when at the Anaphora on the Lord’s Day the priest
says both retrospectively and prospectively at once: “Remembering this saving
commandment and all those things which have come to pass for us: the Cross, the
Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting
down at the right hand, and the second and glorious Coming.” Christ's memory is
eschatological, a remembering of the future life to come. Thus the Christian
life is one of memory eternal where we live in the liturgical ingathering of
all moments by remembering, with Christ, the saving acts that have accomplished
our salvation now and to come. In the Christian life lived as anamnesis, past
and future converge in one another in the present moment of our loving memory
where we taste of the new age given in our midst. Eternal memory is not the
destruction of the past as past and the future as future but their
clarification and illumination in encountering each other in our present
consciousness of Jesus Christ who gives us eternal life. To borrow a phrase
from Berdyaev, “Immortality is memory made clear and serene.”
Christ,
then, as our renewed memory effecting salvation has, as Schmemann put it,
“power over time” because He makes time His own as its Lord and does not
destroy it but burns away, with healing fire, its wounds, making it itself
through contact with Himself insofar as “Eternity is not the negation of time,
but time’s absolute wholeness, gathering and restoration.” But if the Pascha of
the Lord is the fulness of all saving events in Christ’s Kingdom not of this
world and these events are manifested in the Church’s worship, preeminently at
the passing over from death to life of the Lord at Easter, then we must say
that each year we return to Pascha, Pascha does not return to us. Furthermore,
the cycle of the services in which we remember our Lord, punctuated by the
liturgy at any time, for the liturgy is not a part of any of the cycles and may
be celebrated at any time, is the restoration of cyclical time to an eternal
temporality which renews the seasons as no longer movement unto death but
movement unto life and eternal growth in Christ through the Holy Spirit by the
will of the Father.
Time need
not lacerate our life now that it is renewed in Christ because as an eternal
temporality, in the liturgical seasons, it sanctifies and ever renews the
temporality of creation in the liturgy. The liturgy is, to cite Schmemann once
again, “the chalice of eternity” where we become receptacles of Christ’s coming
again by holding in our thankfulness the new paradise gifted to us at Golgotha.
Golgotha has become a garden in the memory of God and this garden is the
Church. Gregory of Nyssa, therefore, argues that the Church is the world
recreated and this new world is paradise regained: “Now the resurrection
promises us nothing else than the restoration of the fallen to their ancient
state; for the grace we look for is a certain return to the first life,
bringing back again to Paradise him who was cast out from it.” Yet the
recreation of the world must be received in contrition, in conversion of our
minds to the form of the mind of Christ, if Christ’s cry to “Return again to
Paradise!” is to be effective for us. Yet, and here we wish to go a little
further with these ideas, we should not view our return to paradise as simply a
reversion to an idyll of the simplicity and innocence of Adam that denies our
previous experience as if God wiped out of all the events in the past. Rather,
our new mode of being is a "radical innocence" (in Yeats' phrase)
that takes into consideration our fall and redemption but now sees all of the
past wounded life from God's unending grace as necessary paradoxically to
become something new in the cosmos. This "newness" is the life of
eternal temporality to which we are called in the Church, a synthesis of the
sensible and the spiritual, chronosand aeonin a living interanimated tension,
where they are united and differentiated through their mutual and total dependence
on God's everlasting mode of Being.
But how
does this renewal of time take place? A renewal, as we have described it, where
memory is an ingathering of all time and the Church, in its services, is a
glorious non-tyrannical cycle of joy that shows us what the seasons of the
earth were meant to be. We can trace this conception of the renewal of time by
turning once again to the thought of Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory sees time as the
growth into goodness in Jesus Christ manifested each Lord’s Day that is the
eighth day of Pascha ‘foretasted’ to us in the liturgy. Gregory’s retrieval of
time depends on his positive understanding of change.
‘Positive
change’ is what the Apostle described as “forgetting what lies behind and
straining forward to what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13). The operative word in this
passage for Gregory is epekteinomenos or straining forward to which is related
to epektasis (an important concept for Gregory) which is usually translated as
‘stretching out of towards’, but might be translated much more literally as ‘at
out of extension.’ It combines two seemingly opposite conceptions: rest (to be
at) and movement (to be out of extension). ‘Rest’, in epektasis, refers to the
fact that in Jesus Christ one is at or towards or facing the Son of God. In
being in Christ in the Church, we become like Adam who, had he obeyed, could
have walked in the garden in the cool of the day with God as it were with a
true friend thereby moving in an unfallen way integrating his experience into
his innocence. ‘Movement’, in epektasis, refers to our moving towards what lies
ahead as renewed beings and what lies ahead is the endless mercies of the
goodness of Jesus Christ who is “the same yesterday and today and for ever”
(Heb. 13: 8). Thus to be changing in its positive sense is to be always making
progress into the goodness of Jesus Christ of whom one partakes of
personally—indeed each of us is communed by our baptismal name—rather than as
an alien reality battering one’s being. As Gregory puts it: “For the perfection
of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.” And Christ
Himself, for Gregory and the Fathers, is Goodness itself. When in Christ we
strain forward to what lies ahead our desire is no tyrant which returns to
lacerate our being to only leave us as soon as its power is momentarily
vanquished. Rather desire, in Jesus Christ, always impels one to draw closer in
love to the end of one’s being which is the infinite life of love of the Holy
Trinity we are gifted with by our adoption as sons in Christ. Desire, then, in
the positive movement towards Christ, does not vitiate the human person but
ever reintegrates it into the everlasting life of its Lord God Creator and
Redeemer—Jesus Christ. Innocence is regained but experience is integrated into
it and not jettisoned as we are living as spiritual-physical beings who ever
change for the good as we move towards the everlasting God.
Change as
change per se, for Gregory, is, “in a sense, always coming to birth”, but in
the new age of Christ’s resurrection this birth is not into an endless cycle of
passion, but rather it is to face God as new radically innocent beings, having
tasted of experience but returning as children to God, remade in His Son, that
is, positive movement is to be “constantly being recreated, ever changing for
the better by its growth in perfection.” The positive motion or change of this
new age combines rest and movement in returning to God. Maximus the Confessor
describes this movement as “an ever-moving stability and a stable and
changeless form of movement generated eternally round that which is one, unique
and always the same,” namely, the love of God, that is, the Holy Spirit of our
agathos kai philanthropos Theos who is forever given to each of us personally
at the chalice. Furthermore, the love of God’s Spirit in Christ is recreative
of our nature and this recreation, being of God, is everlasting, which, in
creaturely terms, means that growth into Christ is infinite in dimension, as
Gregory says of Moses:
He still thirsts for that with which he
constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never
partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to
partake, but according to God’s true being [...] the true sight of God consists
in this, that the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire”.
In being
created by God out of nothing creation moved from non-existence into being, but
this movement very soon turned into a growth unto death where creation slipped
back from existence into the very nothingness from which God drew it. In the
gracious growth unto life in Christ things are similar but different, for like
initial fallen creation there is a movement from non-existence into being, but,
differently, with this gracious perfection, creation never stops moving from
non-being to being, as God fills one up continually ever recreating and
enlarging one’s capacity for goodness in Jesus Christ. Moreover, although in
growth unto goodness one forgets what has gone before, insofar as dwelling on
sin impedes one’s continued growth, this does not, as we have been repeatedly
saying, negate the stages that have gone before. Rather what went before is a
necessary foundation for what comes to be in spiritual growth. Thus sensible
life is taken up into interanimation with supersensible existence, to adapt the
Chalcedonian definition to a different purpose, ‘without confusion, without
change, without division, without separation’ as a necessary foundation to the
gains achieved in our growth into God. Gregory writes accordingly in De Hominis
Opificio: “The intelligent being cannot be incorporated in any other way than
by intermingling itself with sensoriness” and “Sensation does not exist without
matter, nor does spiritual action exist without sensory activity.”
Epektasis
or positive movement is the unfallen time of eternal becoming that Paradise was
made to be in its creatureliness but fell from the possibility of becoming and
which is now reclaimed in the life of the Church given in our common worship in
the liturgy. In Vita Moysis, Gregory characterizes this state of stretching out
towards as a dynamic stasis or rest where the everlastingness of God is married
to the temporality of eternity. In facing God on the solid rock of goodness,
which is, to mix metaphors, the cross of Jesus Christ, Moses can ascend
eternally the scala paradisi from glory to glory:
In another Scriptural passage the progress is
a standing still, for it says, You must stand on the rock.This is the most
marvelous thing of all: how the same thing is both a standing still and a
moving. For he who ascends certainly does not stand still, and he who stands
still does not move upwards. But here the ascent takes place by means of the
standing. I mean by this that the firmer and more immovable one remains in the
Good, the more he progresses in the course of virtue […] if someone, as the
Psalmist says, should pull his feet up from the mud of the pit and plant them
upon the rock (the rock is Christ who is absolute virtue), then the more
steadfast and unmovable (according to the advice of Paul) he becomes in the
Good the faster he completes his course. It is like using the standing still as
if it were a wing while the heart flies upward through its stability in the
good.
The
notion of constant change unto goodness can be seen in the concept of Sunday as
the eschatological day of the new age given in the liturgy—time renewed as the
eighth day without end. Christ comes both to fulfill the old things making them
new and to end the old things in orderto make them new. The Church very quickly
understood that Sunday as the Lord’s Day on which He rose as the first day of
the Jewish week following the Sabbath was not just a restatement of the Jewish feast
of God’s rest from creating the old creation of the old age, but the recreation
of this age in the new age of the Kingdom. Thus the early Christians spoke of
Sunday as the eighth Paschal day without end. As Orthodox Christians, we sing
of this eternal day at Pascha: “This is the chosen and holy day, first of
Sabbaths, king and lord of days, the feast of feasts, holy day of holy days. On
this day we bless Christ forevermore.” More explicitly, we see this (sans
mention of the term ‘eighth day’ but clearly alluding to it) in the liturgy: “O
Christ! Great and Holy Pascha! O Wisdom, Word and Power of God! Grant that we
may more perfectly partake of Thee in the never-ending Day of Thy Kingdom.”
Indeed, Bright Week itself is meant to be a living symbol of this one eighth
day of the Kingdom that will not end—the time of eternal temporality.
Christians
decided early on to not worship on the Sabbath as the day of creation but on
Sunday as the day of the fruit of God’s rest after having made the world. This
fruit is the end of the world, as we know it and the new day of the
Resurrection when all things are and will be made new, as the author of the
Epistle of Barnabas puts it:
He further says to them: Your new moons and
Sabbaths I disdain [Isa. 1:13].Consider what He means: Not the Sabbaths of the
present era are acceptable to me, but that which I have appointed to mark the
end of the world and to usher in the eighth day, that is, the dawn of another
world. This, by the way, is the reason why we joyfully celebrate the eighth
day—the same day on which Jesus rose from the dead; after which He manifested Himself
and went up to heaven.
Time,
then, is shown as renewed in the temporality of eternity given in Christ
crucified and risen and incarnated in His living Body, the Church. This reality
is gifted to us in the Eucharist each Lord’s Day. The seventh day of God’s rest
from creating the world as a temporal reality is recreated in the resurrection
as the dynamic reposing in God of His saints in the Kingdom of Christ not of
this world, as Augustine put it:
The Lord’s day was made known, not
to the Jews, but to Christians, by the resurrection of
the Lord, and from then it began to
have its own celebration. The souls of all the saints
are, of course, at rest before the
resurrection of the body, but they do not have that
activity which enlivens the bodies
they received. Such action is, of course, signified by
the eighth day, which is also the
first, for it does not take away that rest, but glorifies it.
Thus
positive movement, epektasis, is the time of the octave or eighth day of the
Lord where spiritual growth is an infinite unextended extension of the
spiritual rest of the Sabbath, in other words, in positive movement in Christ,
stability and growth coincide in our Sunday worship of the Father through the
Spirit in Christ. This ceaselessly renewed growth of Sunday is the fruit of
creation’s resting in God on the day of His creation, the Sabbath. The physical
is spiritualized without loss of its created character, which is, as we argued
earlier, to be temporal and to be temporal is to be in the extension or space
of createdness reaching towards the end of the everlasting love of God in Jesus
Christ.
Sunday as
the eighth eternal day (an instance of eternal temporality) is a radical
beginning but it is one which never negates what came before as worthless
insofar as it is the basis of the new life we have in Christ. Thus whether
fallen or in utero in Paradise the cosmic week of seven days in which we live
and work the liturgy is a good gift which God gave to man to become transformed
into the likeness of His glory in that same liturgical work of the eighth day.
In partaking each week on a fixed day of the Kingdom in the precious Body and
Blood of the King we are the very dynamic image of God’s intention in His rest,
and, indeed, act in that rest, of dwelling in His creation as His home. He did
this in making the womb of the Theotokos ‘more spacious than the heavens.’
Resurrection is the indelible stamp of this fundamental act of condescension.
This condescension of God in Jesus Christ is our rebirth into beauty. It is a
drinking of the ‘chalice of eternity’ in the Kingdom not of this world in this
world each Sunday that we meet to share in the mysteries, for God has wed
Himself to our temporality and now we are no longer in chains but one with Him
in Jesus Christ crucified, ever being perfected as age meets age, glory meets
glory and as God becomes all in all.
Source: http://www.bogoslov.ru/en/text/2668945.html
