Thinking the Unknowable

Of all the burdens man has to carry through life, I wonder whether any weighs heavier than the transient nature of all experience. All life inevitably moves toward decline and death. The continuous passage of time allows no phase of human existence ever to reach a definitive meaning. Transitoriness and oblivion mark life as a whole as well as each one of its segments. In his theological anthropology, De hominis opificio (On the Creation of Man) the fourth-century Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nyssa describes existence in time as an imperfect condition that, after the fall was introduced into the plan of creation to forestall the inevitable punishment of the human race’s instant destruction. At the end of the world, however, time will be abolished. The futility of a life in time continues to oppress our contemporaries as much as Gregory’s and the countless generations that preceded him. Nietzsche said it well. That what was no longer is, and that what is will soon no longer be, is the condition from which man most urgently desires to be saved. “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call salvation.” Through the idea of an eternal return Nietzsche attempted to salvage something stable from the all-dissolving impermanence of time. With others I doubt whether he succeeded. Only in utopian dreams have humans ever envisioned the return of an ideal age in which the efforts of history will at last be crowned with an enduring new beginning. As Virgil sang in his Fourth Eclogue: “Then shall a second Tiphys be, and a second Argo will sail with chosen heroes: new wars shall arise, and again a mighty Achilles be sent to Troy.”

Even historical faiths such as Judaism and Christianity, which consecrate the passage of time by assigning to each event a permanent significance, postulated at the end of history a return to the beginning. Endzeit ist Urzeit (the final time is the original time). Nor have the secular dreams of our own age abandoned the eschatological hope of ever arresting the motion of time. Marx’s vision of the future, however far removed from a sacred age, still recalls that fullness of time in which human efforts will at last reach completion. Meanwhile men and women of all ages have felt the need to order and structure the flux of time by recapturing, again and again, the founding events of the beginning. By recalling the past in archetypical gestures interpreted through sacred words, they hope to convey at least a permanent form to the continuous indefiniteness of the present. What is it that gives ritual, particularly when interpreted by myth, this mysterious power to regain, even in the midst of time, the awareness of an irreversible present? Which bond links the ancient narrative to the enduring gesture?

(excerpted from chapter 12)