Linear Time Gives Meaning

Eternal Life and the Value of the Individual

Time is eternal, time is a cycle, time is a river going ever forward.

Put aside the standard arguments surrounding the shape of time and consider what kind of story we are able to tell in each instance.

In all the stories we can assume that time is an image of Eternity, that change is only possible because of the unchanging. Some version of this explanation is common to all three. Here we deal only with possible accounts of Sacred Time, and not with contrasting time for the materialist with time according to metaphysical principles.

Time is eternal. The world has always existed. It must always exist. There is a tragedy to man’s efforts, but also a beauty in knowing everything is always in its place. Nature is a ray of an eternal sun, and whatever change we see is only a change of intensity of that light which cannot be born or die any more than the sun of Divinity itself can be born or die. There is a comfort in this story. Nature cannot be lost, cannot be corrupted. However far the world seems to fall from our ideals, Nature itself is semi-divine and will always reassert itself effortlessly. There is a despair in this story. Countless ages of heroes go before us, and they are lost forever. Their greatness lives on for a time in our memory, but their individual acts, all that made them uniquely themselves, is slowly lost by the endless plodding on of Nature. Individual substances fulfill their ends then vanish while Nature wanders ever on. Time reflects divinity for souls on their individual journey but itself does not move toward an end, and all the holiness and glory of lives brought to perfection are eventually consumed, erased, in the endless song: “this is how it’s always been. This is how it always must be.”

Time is a cycle. It has not always been like this, but it will always become like this again. History seems to decay because it is decaying. There is a meaning to these changes. Each new world manifests divinity as perfectly as it can at first, but as it becomes more and more turned in on itself, more and more fixed on its own structure rather than what it reflects, it spirals downward. Wisdom becomes difficult, and finally time is burnt up to begin anew from its undifferentiated Source. But why? What a thoughtless god this is, seeming to create all things by accident. The world reflects divinity, but only as an illusion, only because a primal act of self-knowledge gave the illusion of two when there can only be one. This is not a God who makes the world out of love, placing each thing in its place to serve some special purpose. Creation is an original act of ignorance. Creation is a fall from undifferentiated godhood. What goal is there for me in this world? I do well and perhaps am rewarded, or I do evil and am punished, but all things return to their source with or without me. Perhaps I am enlightened, I step outside the wheel of death and rebirth. Then why was I made in the first place? And what have I done when this wheel will spin ever on? A new time, a new illusion, will begin rolling no matter how I, in my small story, escape it. I escape time and come to perfection, and I am erased. The god begins a new world only to unmake it and begin again. The god is as blind and purposeless as I am, as is time, as are all things.

Time is linear. A concept I had difficulty with when I first received the Christian faith. Is not linear time the foundation of the false cult of progress, of endless social unrest, of novelty for its own sake? That is only linear time desacralized. It has nothing to do with the sacred time of Christians any more than the “brute fact” world of atheism can be blamed on the eternal time of the ancients. This is a hard teaching. There is a final accounting, heaven and hell, from which there is no escape. We want the endless play of nature. We want the good things of this life to last forever. We want cycles if it means endless chances. These are worries of those who, caught by pleasure or by despair, are unwilling to receive the light. Linear time alone gives meaning to all things. This is why the journey of the soul in all other configurations must still be described in linear terms, even if they are finally rejected. Linear time means God did not create the world by accident, out of an act of ignorance, out of the illusion of multiplicity when there is only unity. It does not mean the erasure of nature. All that is in nature, all that is wonderful in time, is taken up in the End, in a final accounting. The heroes of old are not lost, but are brought forth again freed from all limitations. The individual soul is not erased at the end of its journey. Nature does not plod on. The good things of the past are not lost when they are forgotten. All is taken up in a new Heaven and a new Earth. Every small thing you’ve done, whether you spoke kindly to your mother, whether you harbored bitter thoughts at night or practiced forgiveness, whether you let yourself be governed by fear or took great risks, is taken up in a final accounting. Learn to die well, because dying well matters not only for the honor of those who survive you. It is only in this way that the individual matters, not fading into an endless past nor vanishing to make way for an endless future. It is only in this way that creation has a purpose, that the truth of final causality applies to the making of the world itself and not only temporarily to the substances that inhabit it. All things are taken up again, God in all and all things in His divinity.