Paradox
In Book XI of his Confessions, Saint Augustine muses: “What, then, is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know what time is. But if I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.” Plotinus contemplated time over a century ‘before’ Augustine did and, I confess, writing as I do ‘now,’ ‘before’ the Third Sunday of Easter in ‘AD 2021,’ I too know perfectly well what time is…provided that no one asks.
To be sure, responding to an inquirer, I will offer the platitude, though seeming psychological necessity, that there is a (1) future, which becomes (2) present, and which, in turn, becomes (3) past. Without this necessity, I struggle to perform the most banal of tasks, such as brushing my teeth, to say nothing of more Herculean tasks. But psychological necessity does not beget veridical states of affairs. If it did, my adopted England would have won the FIFA World Cup many times over. More importantly, ‘past, present, and future’ all seem to require eternity…though I further confess that ‘eternity’ falls into the same category as ‘time’ (i.e., words that I can say but not define). The most I can do is say that ‘past, present, and future’ in some sense need the fullness/completion of time in order to be spoken or thought of together. Time and eternity are thus paradoxical, the one seems to “flow” (‘sometimes’ at a snail’s pace, other ‘times’ at breakneck) whereas the other, as James says (v. 1:17), is unchanging, and my experience contains traces of both.
And so, stumbling through the wilderness of the quotidian and the more momentous alike, I do so without even remotely satisfying answers as to what time and eternity are, how they relate, and why it should be that things which are so foundational to my experience are the most paradoxical. But when I read my Bible, I perceive that ‘paradoxical’ is just how I would choose to describe the things which occupy me and, I suspect, others, and not just ‘during’ Eastertide, the most. “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life,” says Solomon (Proverbs 4:23), to which Jeremiah (it may be argued) paradoxically replies, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (v. 17:9). What’s more, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, wherein the Eternal entered, departed, and transformed time as a human being, are further paradoxes still. As the paradoxes stack up and compound one another (or is it really just one overarching, single paradox?), I ‘often’ wish that I had more answers than I do.
Dallas is a student reading for his DPhil in modern theology and Christian ethics at Magdalen College. He enjoys going for walks with his wife and two dogs and, being from Canada, hopes to be able to travel to, what are still considered ‘exotic,’ destinations around the United Kingdom.
