Kairos and Continuity

In 1:15, Mark announces an imminent arrival of the kingdom of God:

“Peplerotai ho kairos, kai engiken he basileia tou Theou; metanoeite kai pisteuete en to evangelio.” (Mark 1:15)

“The time [kairos] is fulfilled [peplerotai] and the kingdom [basileia] of God is coming near [engiken]. Repent [metanoeite, attend to] and believe in [pisteuete en] the announcement [evangelio].”

I will undertake a far more detailed reading of this passage in another essay, but in this short meditation, I want to focus on Mark’s innovative use of the term kairos. To understand this, we need to understand how the Greek term kairos linked being and becoming, potentiality and actuality. Often translated as “opportune moment” or even as crisis, kairos signals an occasion that seems to suspend the measured movement of time to concentrate attention on a situation that requires action. Kairos signals that an outcome is at stake and can go either way depending on how we respond. In other words, how we assess and respond to the situation becomes the focus of our attention. Temporally considered, our attention oscillates between the desired outcome and the actions we take now. Rather than the linear march of time, kairos collapses the future resolution — the outcome — into the now to provide its context and motivation. The present moment gets its meaning based on the outcome we wish to achieve in the future.

There are different ways, however, of understanding the temporal relation between our actions and the outcome. Typically understood, kairos is structured as a continuity between the actions taken and the outcome. Let’s take an example from Aristotle. At the beginning of Book III of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers an example of a type of action that is difficult to classify as either voluntary (hekon) or involutary (akon):

Something comparable occurs when it comes to casting off cargo in storms; for, in an unqualified sense, no one voluntarily jettisons cargo, but when one’s own preservation and that of the rest are at issue, everyone who has sense [nous] will do it. These sorts of actions, then, are mixed, though they are more voluntary [than involuntary], for they are choiceworthy at the time they are done and the end of the action accords with what is opportune at the moment [kairos]. (1110a 9-12, Bartlett and Collins translation)

Aristotelian kairos always calls for a resolution through action, which maintains a continuity between what is happening — the ship is about to sink due to stormy seas — and the human actions required to bring the kairos to its resolution — the “choiceworthy action” of jettisoning cargo. This is very much in line with Aristotle’s way of thinking the temporality of being as potentiality-to-actuality. Kairos is a concentrated moment where potentiality must quickly become actuality — i.e., the potential for saving the ship from the storm demands certain actions be taken in order to bring about the outcome — “the end of the action” — contained in the kairos. In other words, the kairos contains in itself the set of potential actions that will hasten its resolution: the captain must lighten the ship, and the faster that happens the faster this whole episode is over. Kairos is thus still measurable by chronos because the speed at which the situation is resolved is essential to the actions called for.

In addition to potentiality and actuality, we should understand kairos through Aristotle’s related concepts of means and ends. In this episode of kairos on the high seas, the ends and means remain temporally separate but essentially related. In Aristotle’s worldview, we conceive of temporality as stretched linearly (thus chronologically) through the kairos as the ends attempt to orchestrate their own means. This is substantially what Aristotle means by “choiceworthy actions”: when actions align with the end that presents itself in the kairos, then the actions are choiceworthy. To be clear, humans can only exercise choice about means, not ends. Practical reason (phronesis), the primary subject of Book VI, is the human capacity for selecting means, but it is only activated when the end becomes apprehended, which is complete only when the desire (boulesis) for the end is formed. Once the latter occurs, phronesis kicks in to make choices about which actions will be most effective in bringing about the desired end.

We can see this in the etymology of the word translated by Bartlett and Collins as “choice”: proairesis. “The noun’s component parts suggest the act of taking or selecting (haireses) beforehand (pro-), i.e., before acting…” (306). The temporality is crucial to understand for my argument. Action is called for externally by the goal of the kairos — get the ship to safety. The choice of goal does not emerge from the free will of the captain. The goal (“the end of the action”) is contained within the kairos itself, which makes certain actions worthy of being chosen by the captain — jettison the cargo is one among many means that would be choiceworthy. Therefore, temporally considered, the action is dictated by the end presented by the kairos, and the choice of means comes after the necessary action is apprehended by the captain. That apprehension must come first in order for action to be 1) chosen and 2) executed. Desire (boulesis) creates the continuity between the goal (inscribed in the kairos) and the captain’s capacity to act. Desire does not originate with captain but arrives from outside himself when the captain apprehends the “end of the action” inherent to the kairos.

To map this back onto potentiality and actuality, time flows from the potentiality of the kairos to its actuality by way of the voluntary/involuntary choice of means made by the captain. So when Bartlett and Collins say that “Choice is the stating point (arche) of the action,” they must also mean that the worthiness of the choice starts from “the end of the action” (i.e., goal) flowing from the kairos to the captain, not in the goals of the captain as an agent with free will. The captain, to put it plainly, is not the author of the goal. The whole event is temporally structured as a flow from potentiality to actuality where the ship, the captain, the crew, and the storm are all woven together into a single drama that is kairos measured by the march of chronos. There is no subject-object dichotomy/dialectic in the Aristotelian kairos. There is the linear/circular playing out of a temporality structured by potentiality and actuality, means and ends. Humanity only has choice (proairesis) with respect to means, not ends.

This makes the Aristotelian kairos into a self-contained whole with a direct continuity between human action and outcome. We mark the same configuration of time when we find ourselves in situations where we say, “Time is of the essence.” Our attention is concentrated on the events happening around us, and we are processing information and responding rapidly. We may feel completely absorbed in the situation such that we may have no idea how much chronological time is passing when we are deep into a kairos. Our actions and the resolution we seek are intimately interwoven with each other to the point where some would say our selves are not recognizable as self-contained wholes because we are so deeply wrapped into the kairos.

We can now understand the important difference between Aristotelian and Markan kairos: Mark’s kairos breaks the continuity between human action and resolution. Kairos does call for a resolve, but that resolve has no power over the conclusion of the kairos. This is because there is no potential-actual connection between the actions we take and the resolution of the kairos. In fact, this is the crucial innovation that Mark makes within the experience of time in 1:15. Those who are called into the kairos have no control over its end because the kairos does not contain in itself the means to an end. Mark’s kairos is bound to imminence and is thus an experience of time that suspends any necessary continuity between action (activation of potentiality) and outcome (realization of actuality). Messianic kairos therefore cannot be reduced to chronos because the actions prescribed by the kairos — metanoiete and pisteuete and attending to the suffering of others — are not Aristotelian means to bring about the end of the kairos.

This is a crucial piece of the puzzle to understand — one that Hans Blumenberg captured in his lecture on “Secularization.” For Blumenberg, the “immediate expectation of the imminent apocalypse” empties the big picture of history “by directly confronting the individual with the care for his salvation, demands that he abandon all earthly ties, and renders all attempts at self-assertion and providing for the future objectless.”

It is something radically different on the one hand to impose on history a framework of boundary notions, with creation at the beginning and judgment and apocalypse at the end, and on the other to do away with any meaning that an image of history might have by rendering what happens in the world insignificant against what happens to it. (History, Metaphorss, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, 60)

We find here a separation of experience — an emptiness — that is completely driven by the introduction of the imminent fulfillment of the promise. Once it has been announced that the promise is about to be fulfilled, any sense in which human actions have anything to do with bringing about the eschaton (as promised end of history) is voided.

Yet, the actions are not completely irrelevant to the kairos. While our actions don’t bring about the end, what happens to us at the end (fully in God’s control) depends on how we behave with others in the time that remains. To more fully understand this, we must engage with the eschatology that is inherent in Mark’s re-imagining of kairos. We’ve established that the actions called for by peplerotai ho kairos have no power over the chronology of the eschaton. The end of history as the end of the kairos remains completely in God’s control as the omnipotent creator of the world in which we live. The eschaton is completely drained of any essential connection between the actions required and the potentiality of those actions to bring about the actuality of the eschaton. This must remain fundamental to the messianic experience of time if it is to avoid becoming a political program that tyrannically enforces its view of history. For this reason, the eschaton must remain wholly Other than human. To be sure, humanity has power in the kairos, but this power is attentiveness to suffering that never rises to the level of politically enforcing a permanent end. This power is also solely revealed to humanity by God’s intervention through the messiah.

To be sure, we can think of our actions within the kairos as enacting the kingdom of God here and now, in which case they have the ability to bring about the end of the kairos. But this end is not the same end that Aristotle envisioned — the end as permanent resolution of the kairos. The end is nearness (engiken) of the kingdom within the kairos, not its full presence. Thus the eschaton as the end of the kairos remains wholly in God’s control, which means that humanity can only live within the kairos as commanded by God, but cannot see its actions as bringing about of a permanent state of being or end of history.