"Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. "
Gentle reader,
Bless you and all of the rest of our readers for having the fortitude to wade through these studies, there is a point and a end, but as well, all know (or should know) it is the goal to leave this place a wee bit better off than we received from those who went before. In my case after 1500 + church groups who are determined to hide in the dark about what they believe and refuse to acknowledge “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet by William Shakespeare: Act 1 Scene 5) So we try to bring to your attention truths which having a scriptural implication also will expand your mind to new horizons.
Concept of time reflected in grammar
Non-Western man's sense of time is thus apt to be very different, and it is in fact nearer to the truth perhaps.
We know now (since Einstein) that time does not have a fixed flow rate either in the personally experienced sense or even in the absolute clock-bound sense. Natives have 'known' this for years. For us it is a veryrecent re-discovery, based upon the strictest and most rational interpretation of scientific laws which are now being experimentally verified in remarkable ways. It is apparent that time does not flow as a steady current. Our clocks keep time with our time, not our time with our clocks. Native people have for centuries made time coincide with events, not events with time. The clock is set by their activities, not their activities by the clock.
Because events do not happen in time but time is determined by events, there is a real sense in which future time is simply non-existent since future events have not yet happened. Western man is very future conscious. We live in the future — for this evening, for to-morrow, for the weekend, for when we grow up, for when we get old, for the time when our children will take over from us, for when we are gone.
Non-Western man has tended to live now, in the present: indeed, so indifferent to the future is he apt to be that we characterize him as improvident. We ourselves take out all kinds of policies to cover future eventualities — sickness insurance, unemployment insurance, annuities of all kinds for old age and life insurance for after death. The future which may never happen eclipses the present, and we think this is proper and normal.
Other cultures have even refused to speak of the future unless they are so certain about what will happen that it can be spoken of as actually happening now.
The Hebrew language of the Old Testament has no future tense in its verbal system like Latin or French. In Latin "I love" is amo; "I shall love" is its future tense: amabo. French has its future tense: English managesit by using the compound form, "I will. . ." or "I shall. . ." and so on. But like the languages of many primitivepeople, the future is not specifically expressed in Hebrew. If one wishes to say "I shall kill," one uses a verbal form which really means "I am killing." The Hebrew people were quite aware of this and consciously made certain modifications in the rules when speaking of the activities of God. Man's intentions for the future are precarious and he cannot strictly speak of what he is going to do in the future, so in that sense he does not need a future tense. God, on the other hand, can speak with absolute certainty of the future — with such assurance, in fact, that the future is a fait accompli. Thus God's declared intentions for the future are oftenexpressed in Hebrew not in the present tense but in the past tense. When God speaks of what He will do in the future, man can refer to it as already done. When man speaks of what he intends in the future he has to put it the present tense, as though to say this is his present intention. Many non-Western people do just this, and it becomes highly disconcerting to theWesterner who assumes that the speaker is looking at time as he does himself. A good illustration of the confusion which such ways of thinking can create is given by Edward Mack who related the following incident:
A desert traveller went with a missionary friend to visit one of the 10,000 mud villages in theValley of the Nile. The night was not a restful one in a native home. The next morning the
traveller wished to return as soon as possible to the boat on the Nile. The missionary however,knowing the demands of courtesy, insisted that they must not go until after breakfast but expressed the hope that breakfast might be expedited. "Oh," said the host, "breakfast is just ready." One hour and a half after that time by the traveller's watch, a match was struck to kindlethe fire to cook the breakfast. And sometime later still, a cow was driven into the court of the house to be milked to provide the milk to cook the rice to make the breakfast. Was the host untruthful? Not at all; he did not reckon by time, but by events. He had no way of determining thepassage of time. When he said, "Breakfast is just ready," he meant it was the next thing in the household economy, that they would do nothing else until that thing was done, and thateverything done was to that end. That is to say, he reckoned only by events.
Views of relationship of time and event
It may be thought that this attitude towards the passage of time is evidence of a primitive mentality which we have long since outgrown. But this is not really so. The Greeks themselves never seem to have entirely abandoned the view that there are really only two ways of viewing events. An event is either finished — or in process(4). They saw all action as being either imperfect (by which they meant not yet complete but currently in effect) or perfect (that is, complete and finished). In short, there were only two tenses, though
they embroidered them in different ways. Similarly, the Hopi gardener who intends to hoe his garden sometime in the future is already hoeing it, and he will tell you he is hoeing it -- not that he will be hoeing it in the future. He does not see the future as having any strict reality. Such people do not really think of thepast as an expanse of time as though it still had a real existence like a length of tape wound on the reel to the left while the future is a similar length already having a reality which is merely waiting to be unreeled from the right. They are aware only that NOW has real existence and that even IT is only a boundary, not a segment.
Augustine shared this view. He questioned whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of a period of ahundred years, for example. He asked, "Is a hundred years a long time? It is a good question! Is it a long time? Who can ever answer it, since a hundred years never exists . . ." Thus Augustine said:
First of all, see whether there can be a hundred present years. If the first of those years is going on, it is present but ninety-nine are still in the future and so they do not exist. But if the second year is going on, one is already gone, another is present, and the rest are in the future.And this is so no matter which of the intervening years of this century we take to be the present one. For that reason there cannot be a hundred present years.
But Augustine carried his argument one step further. He said:
Now, see whether even the one year that is going on to be itself present. If the first month in it is going on the rest are future; if the second is, then the first is now past and the rest do not yet exist. Therefore, one year which is now going on is not present as a whole and, if it is not present as a whole, then the year is not present. . . .
Yet neither is the month which is now going on present, but only one day. And so he continued his argument with relentless logic down to the hour and the minute, in each of whichonly the immediate moment has any reality. "That alone is what we may call the present and this too flies over from the future into the past so quickly that it does not extend over the slightest instant. For if it has any extension, it is again divided into past and future. But the present has no length at all." It is obvious therefore that we cannot speak of past time or future time as having any reality. The tape, of which we spoke above, which we assume is unwinding through the vortex of our consciousness, is not doing anything of the kind — unless we equate time with events, or more strictly with the succession of events. It does not stand apart as a thing in which events happen, but is rather created by the events themselves so that if nothing happened there would be no time. It is important to get this concept clearly in mind.
Augustine was wise enough to observe that creation was not in time like a bleep which is written on a tape that is already unwinding, nor a single exposure on a film which is already running through the camera.
Creation was with time, or better still, time was created when the Universe was created. Time is something which does not exist in its own right. It is not one of the "givens" of reality. This was known to Augustine and to others as well in those ancient times. It is only recently that it has been re-discovered.
Einstein put it this way:
If you don't take my words too seriously, I would say this: If we assume that all matter were to disappear from the world, then, before relativity, one believed that space and time would
continue existing in an empty world. But according to the Theory of Relativity, if matter (and its motion) disappeared, there would no longer be any space or time [my emphasis].
The Hopi Indians viewed the matter in precisely the same way. They did not see how it was possible to speak of ten days! One can have ten men at one time, but never ten days at one time. And so they considered the phrase inept and didn't use it. They might say, "after the tenth day. . . ." but they would not speak of a period of ten days. The past has gone, the future is not yet: only NOW has reality. To many Indians even the past is still present, time does not flow by at all. To this extent they live in the always-now. The Hopi, like
many other cultures which have not grown up within the traditions of the Western world, were far more conscious of their oneness with nature and were far less absorbed with things or with time.
They are nearer to Luther's concept of eternity as a reality which is totum simul, a phrase which is perhaps best represented in English by the words "the whole thing at once."Eternity is a unique kind of now-ness that persists. The past is not past: the past is present still.
Think about that Gentle reader and get back with me.....
Love,
Denis
No comments:
Post a Comment