Time and Theodicy
Religion and philosophy emerge when we descend into our experience of time
Composing Time
It is a metaphysical premise of Time as Practice that experience is a composition of time. Descending into our experience leads into time, which leads to physics, which leads back to ourselves.
This descent is philosophical and religious experience. For myself, at this particular time in my life, I have found that this descent requires an engagement with scientific thought. Why? Because this is where time and experience are being rethought with great intensity.1
Engaging that intensity can open perception and experience into a more that need not be a desire to posses a transcendent thing or chase a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor do I wish to justify it as a pursuit of pleasure or beauty for their own sakes. If at any point I arrive at a new-found equilibrium or “a-ha moment,” my commitment to the fundamental temporality of experience ought to treat the arrival as a weigh-station from which to start a new movement of curiosity into more.
This is not an inconsequential undertaking. Nor is it about finding my special purpose or meaning in an indifferent universe. Curiosity need not be driven by these lack-based versions of a self. My motivation is far more pragmatic than that: how we orient our experience to time governs how we live and legislate.
On the planetary scale: can we make the planet habitable again, or is the changing climate just a feature of an already-determined future?
On a national scale: some think (not like me) that America needs to be made great again; some think (like me) that open-ended progress is still a worthy composition of time, even if it is difficult and must be pursued with great care and sensitivity.
On an individual scale: Can I change my habits to become a better person, whatever “better” might mean at the given moment?
How we answer these questions is a composition of time at all of these levels.
Theodicy
Questions like these come down to us through a long history of thinking about time within the problem of theodicy — if the world is the creation of an eternal, omnipotent and loving God, why did he make us live in a temporally structured world that is in need of redemption from suffering? Our Modern consciousness of time has mostly jettisoned the God part while keeping the redemption part. Humanity thinks it can do the job on its own.
Theodicy’s legacy is powerful. It asks us to focus on how we compose our time in this world.2 Whether conscious of it or not, whether invoking God or not, Modernity’s lived experience of time is structured by how religion, philosophy, and science have sought answers to the problem of redeeming human experience within historical time.3
Keeping religion, philosophy, and science separate has obscured and weakened this legacy. Is this changing? Are we riding on the uneven edges of science, religion and philosophy pushing and extending each other once again? I think Yes, and I feel compelled to be participating in my own small way.4
Stuck in Time
When Augustine writes in Book XI of Confessions, “nor did You make the universe in the universe, because there was no place for it to be made in until it was made,” he is setting forth a fundamental question of modern physics — what is the origin of space and time? Today, this is a professionalized and well-funded scientific question, but here we see it emerging within a deeply religious practice of Christian confession at the end of the fourth century.5
Questions of time have a habit of cycling through Book XI, partly as an historical artifact, but mostly as our contemporary. There Augustine articulated the essential feature of Christian time after the era of Paul’s letters and the writing of the Gospels: time is completely God’s creation with no guarantee of measurability or that it will last. This is a full departure from Aristotle’s Physics where steady, measurable time was guaranteed by the never-ending rotation of the heavens driven by an unmoved mover.6
It is hard to overemphasize how deeply our Modern lives unfold within this basic difference in the composition of time. Our experience of time is unthinkable outside of the history of how Christianity dealt with it.7
For Aristotle, time was neither a mystery nor a problem. It literally surrounds us as the rotating heavens. It is self-evident and readily observable from our anthropocentric and geocentric vantage point. The heavens rotate around us and things reveal themselves to us as phenomena. The gnomon (Greek for “the one who knows”) of a sundial is simply revealing the truth of the intimate and measurable link between time and motion. The cosmos readily appears to have been made for us.8
For Augustine, time is very confusing. It is fully God’s creation, and there is a distinct boundary between His eternity and our living in created time. We are exiled into time with only a faint, discontinuous trace of the divine will crossing the boundary: “What is that light which shines upon me but not continuously, and strikes upon my heart with no wounding?”9Augustine lives in a theocentric universe, not an anthropocentric one. Theocentric: To be fully committed to an omnipotent creator God prohibits any claim we might wish to make on God that he made the world for us.
This is the beauty and difficulty of Augustine’s thought — he is fully committed to the consequences of an omnipotent God on whom we can never make binding claims, even if we believe that he has made promises to us.10
Time and Experience
Augustine dove deep into the experiential problems of this untethering of Aristotelian time and motion in Book XI of Confessions. He does it explicitly:
I once heard a learned man say that time is movement of the sun and moon and stars. I did not agree. For why should not time rather be the movement of all bodies? Supposing the light of heaven were to cease and the potter’s wheel moved on, would there not be time which could measure its rotations and say that these were at equal intervals, or some slower, some quicker, some taking longer, some shorter? And if we spoke thus, should we not ourselves be speaking in time: would there not be in our words some syllables long, some short — because some would sound for a longer time, some a shorter?11
I could try to draw out the implications of this on my own, but Hans Blumenberg did it so much better:
For Augustine, time is a created thing like the material world and [is created] along with it. That dependence is what matters to him, and he heightens it even further when he refers to the rotating potter’s wheel as the minimal condition of time. For in this way time becomes the creature of a creature, dependent on man’s set of tools, and far removed from the danger of itself becoming an absolute.12
Once time is no longer ”an absolute” guaranteed by the readily observable rotation of the heavens, time becomes a problem and a mystery: humanity has to work out how to live in time on our own, completely exiled from God.13
The experience of this exile into time is inherently anxious:
But now my years are wasted in sighs, and Thou, O Lord, my eternal Father, art my only solace; but I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts and the deepest place of my soul are torn with every kind of tumult until the day when I shall be purified and melted in the fire of Thy love and wholly joined to Thee. (XI.xxix.39; my emphasis)
Cut off from a timeless eternity fundamentally different than Aristotle’s never-ending rotational eternity, the Christian self is left to figure out what time is and what to do with it while being barely connected back to God. To cope, we embed our own human-made times in rotating and rhythmic things (potters wheels, clocks, steam engines, the eternally recurring self) all designed to make us comfortable in our exile from God’s timeless eternity — at least while it lasts.
Augustine’s Theodicy
Augustine’s discussion of time is deeply woven into theodicy: throughout Confessions, he is concerned with the problem of how a loving God allows evil to exist. His solution: humanity is exiled into time with only our free will to guide us, and it is from this human will that sin and our bad habits emerge, but it is also our capacity to break those bad habits.14
Crucially for Augustine’s theology, our free will is not capable of saving us. It is God’s sole authority to bestow salvation through grace. With salvation not under human power, the will must make its home in the world, i.e., in this exiled time, because that is where it finds its natural efficacy.
Time is thus the province of this free will, which is our theodicean legacy.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, and whether we believe in a redemptive God or not, we continue to live within this composition of time as a creation that puzzles us and in which we need to use our capacity for action to get on with “our business in this common mortal life.”15 It is our legacy, and it is a fundamental problem in the entangled history of science, philosophy, and religion.
We Are Time
Quantum physics has brought us back to Augustine when it demonstrates that “we are time.” Carlo Rovelli, who expends a good bit of ink on Book XI, writes near the end of The Order of Time:
And we begin to see that we are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come. The clearing that is opened up in this way, by memory and by anticipation, is time: a source of anguish sometimes, but in the end a tremendous gift.16
Rovelli is explicitly invoking Book XI when he writes that we are time, and time is “entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and anticipation” (182). The traces of the past accumulate in us (memory) and our capacity for anticipation orients us toward the future.
With Augustine as our contemporary once again, we are re-learning that we are compositions of time. Our experience of this is necessarily blurred. We cannot directly perceive the elementary structures of the universe even as they form the conditions of possibility of our perception. “We observe the universe from within it, interacting with a minuscule portion of innumerable variables of the cosmos. What we see is a blurred image” (154).
We are very close, once again, to Augustine’s vision of time and experience:
What is that light which shines upon me but not continuously, and strikes upon my heart with no wounding? I draw back in terror, I am on fire with longing: terror insofar as I am different from it, longing in the degree of my likeness to it. It is Wisdom, Wisdom itself, which in those moments shines upon me, cleaving through my cloud. (XI.ix.11; my emphasis)
Our wisdom is blurred and cannot see everything all at once because we are time. It can only shine momentarily through Augustine’s cloud and through Rovelli’s blur, both of which mark our simultaneous exile and entanglement in time.
This is not to say that science justifies philosophy and religion. Nothing that I say here should be taken as re-establishing Modernity’s hierarchy of ways of knowing where science provides the template for what all truths should look like.
Gnosticism has been one solution to the problem of theodicy, which was and remains dangerous. It posits that this world is irredeemable because the god who created it is mischievous, if not downright evil. This is a different god than the all-knowing god Gnostics long to reconnect with. The Gnostic legacy is alive and well today. For the most succinct critique of modern Gnosticism with respect to global warming, see Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime, Catherine Porter trans., Polity Press 2018: “Each of us faces the following question: Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit?” (5). This is a shortened version of his more academic Facing Gaia, which is the book length treatment of his 2013 Gifford Lectures.
What do I mean by “Modernity”? Tricky question, but I generally mean a composition of time not reducible to a historical epoch isolated to the geography that we call the “Western world.” As a composition of time born partially out of the problem of theodicy, Modernity can be found anywhere this composition of time takes hold in experience. On the relationship of Modernity to theodicy, see Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
I don’t wish to assert that there is something like “science” essentially separate from “religion” and “philosophy.” These are retrospective impositions on the history of thought, largely in the service of creating the modern industry that we call “the university system.” If one actually reads only Copernicus’ preface to On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, you’d be hard pressed to separate the three disciplines. A little more than a century later, Descartes “discovers” the cogito by adapting a religious practice — St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Practices — in the service of philosophical certainty that became the foundation of Modernity’s scientific methods.
Richard A. Muller makes a similar claim about Augustinian provenance of scientific time: “Augustine’s conundrum [that time is an experience that is difficult to describe] derives, in part, from his axiom that God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-everything. He makes an astonishing additional conceptual jump: that God must also be timeless. This remarkable thought sets the stage for modern physics — physics that describes the behavior of objects within time in space-time diagrams that make no reference to the fact that time flows or that a now exists.” (NOW: The Physics of Time, W.W. Norton 2016, page 18).
Many have found Aristotle’s unmoved mover to be a precursor to the Christian God. That’s a plausible argument, but there are important differences not the least of which is the their different scopes of power. Aristotle’s unmoved mover only has one power — to move another thing. It has an essence, and all it can do is fulfill its essence. Augustine’s God is omnipotent, which means he has no essence. He can do anything he wishes with impunity. There are many historical consequences arising from this fundamental difference in the scope of divine power. For a particularly lucid discussion of this, see Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, where he argues that this distinction sets in motion a governmental power that administers territory on behalf of God’s glory. In this way, he is correcting what he saw as a shortcoming in Michel Foucault’s work on gouvernementalité in the 1970’s, which ignored the function of glory in modern practices of administrative power. Agemben’s lectures on this can be found here.
I’m not saying anything that hasn’t already been said. Hegel saw Christianity as a pure linearizing of time.
Hans Blumenberg, in The Genesis of the Copernican World, discusses this disposition to knowledge and reality as “the onlooker at rest.” It is not so much a foundational commitment by Aristotle and his contemporaries as it is a convenience. For a deeper dive into these issues in Ancient Greece, Jean-Pierre Vernant is a formidable source. See in particular the final two chapters of Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Zone Books, 2006) and “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (Zone Books, 1990).
Confessions XI.ix.11
Grace and predestination, both fundamental to Augustine’s theology, arise from this total commitment to an omnipotent God. If we are saved by “works,” then humanity controls God by creating debts that he needs to pay. In Augustine’s theology, humanity cannot bring about its own salvation, which makes grace and predestination logical extensions of this commitment to an all-powerful creator God.
Augustine, Confessions, XI.xxiii.29, F.J. Sheed trans. There is a lot more to say here. Augustine’s deep dive into time does not come, like God’s creation, ex nihilo. Christianity inherits its understanding of historical time from the Hebrew scriptures. God has made a promise to a people. Historical time is structured by the expected redemption of that promise as an end of history.
The New Testament represents a “coming soon” version of that end of history. Within this worldview, time is not a systematic theological problem because it is quickly coming to an end. The focus is on what one needs to do in the time that remains in order to be included in the sorting of sheep and goats at the end of time (Mattew 25:31-46). As time moves on and the imminent end doesn’t arrive, time becomes a theological problem in need of a more systematic and coherent treatment: “For because the immediate expectation was directly and perceptibly disappointed by the continuation of history and the life of the individual, and by the continued existence of the world, it [Christianity] finds itself compelled to perform artful modifications to its content and to its acute threat.” (Hans Blumenberg, “Secularization,” History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, Bajohr, Fuchs, Kroll trans., Cornell University Press, 2020.). Augustine is the major theological and philosophical player in systematizing a way of living in this time that is increasingly appearing to be permanent.
Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copternican World, Robert M. Wallace trans. MIT Press 1987, pages 461-2. This is a long and difficult book, but it is worth the long-term engagement with its arguments. I’ve tried to unpack his analysis of time and motion in Part IV in my review of the book on my blog, Time as Practice.
Robert A. Markus has an excellent discussion on how this need for recurring cycles within Christianity’s composition of linear time led to an extensive proliferation of ceremonies and rituals as Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. See his chapter on “Kairoi: Christian Times and the Past” in The End of Ancient Christianity.
See VII.iii.5: “So I set myself to examine an idea I had heard — namely that our free will is the cause of our doing evil, and Your just judgment the cause of our suffering evil. I could not clearly discern this. I endeavored to draw the eye of my mind from the pit, but I was again plunged into it; and as often as I tried, so often was I plunged back. But it raised me a little towards Your light that I now was as much aware that I had a will as that I had a life. And when I willed to do or not do anything, I was quite certain that it was myself and no other who willed, and I came to see that the cause of my sin lay there.”
On the relationship of habit and will, see VIII.v.10: “Because my will was perverse it changed to lust, and lust yielded to become habit, and habit not resisted became necessity… The new will which I now began to have, by which I willed to worship you freely and to enjoy You, O God, the only certain Joy, was not yet strong enough to overcome that earlier will rooted deep through the years.”
City of God XV, 21, 15. Quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, Forty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, University of California Press 2000, page 324.
The Order of Time, Riverhead Books, 2018, page 202.