Eternity in Time—Time in Eternity: Temporality and the Human Self in the Eschaton

‘Eternity in Time’: Karl Rahner’s Plea for a Renewed Theological Concept of Time and Eternity

Although both Rahner and Balthasar—commenting on the Christological consequences of God’s loving self-bestowal in Jesus Christ—come upon the same idea that eternity manifests itself in time; nonetheless they outline the actual content of this insight in significantly different ways. ² Over against what he sees as the traditional theological concept of eternity understood in terms of duration (whether endless succession or the Boethian ‘non-temporally extended possession of existence’), Rahner pleads for a different model, one better disposed to grasp the essentially timeless nature of eternity. ³

What one infers from his statements concerning possible human experiences of eternity in time is an account that aims to overcome the idea of duration by highlighting once and for all the perfect and definitive nature of God’s eternity in contrast with created temporality. With the help of three examples—the unified life-history of a living organism, the mental experience of unity holding together past, present, and future (a very Augustinian idea, though apparently developed independently of Augustine’s reflections), and the experience of making a free, totally committed, and irrevocable decision—he illustrates how the perfected finality and the definitive consummation beyond time give us a foretaste even within temporal existence of what eternity is like. ⁴ It is as if these experiences allow for a certain detachment from the continual succession of time, anticipating thereby eschatological fulfilment which, for Rahner, is conceived in terms of definite and irrevocable finality, the completion of all that is transient during earthly existence. Of these three examples, he clearly favours the last for being the most illuminating concerning both the way time contains the gist of eternity and the way the central feature of the human condition is manifest in the capacity for freedom.

One must be aware that Rahner’s account of the relationship between time and eternity can only be adequately interpreted in the wider context of his anthropological assumptions, which in turn are defined by his doctrine of God and Christology. What then characterizes Rahnerian anthropology of human temporality? Drawing on innovative philosophical reflections concerning time (Bergson, Heidegger), Rahner maintains that temporality intrinsically defines the human subject at a deeper level than the external condition of the changing material world. Consequently, the idea of external physical/material time (understood in terms of bodily motion, or change of place) must be complemented with the idea of the time of the human personal spirit, who is more than a mere element of the material world. As a unity of matter and spirit/body and soul, the human being is at once subject to the ‘external’ material processes of constant change and is, at the same time, master of it through her capacity for freedom and responsibility. It is in fact through the act of free decision and responsible self-commitment that one stands apart from the binding necessity of physical time and is able to transcend the limitations of earthly temporality. The following formulation pithily sums up the central idea underlying Rahner’s entire anthropology: ‘the world must be such that man can be that which he is: a being endowed with a freedom to be exercised in time and history which attains to the definitive finality of God in the definitive finality of his own free decision.’ ⁵

The key intuition here is the idea that the exercise of human freedom in time is directed to a definitive goal, a final destination in God where, time, temporal self-determining acts, and history as a totality are brought to ultimate completion. And here we come upon Rahner’s doctrine of God and creation, where time is tied, in a traditionally orthodox manner, to creation. ⁶ God creates time together with creation and so time belongs to the otherness of the world which comes from God and which God establishes and also freely assumes in the act of loving self-bestowal. The relationship between God’s eternity and creaturely time is envisaged by Rahner in an asymmetrical way: while there is no time (understood as an open-ended flow of duration) in eternity, there is, however, eternity in time because God ‘causes his own eternity to be the true content of time.’ ⁷ Rahner sees no reason why time should be grounded in the timelessly eternal life of the immanent Trinity; it belongs for him solely to the teleological process of the economy of salvation and God’s operation ad extra. ⁸

This is backed by Rahner’s pure Chalcedonian Christology which lays stress on the unity of the two natures as ‘inconfused,’ thereby implying a clear distinction between the temporal character of the earthly existence of the human Jesus and the eternal divine Logos, while keeping the dimensions of eternity and time likewise safely apart. ⁹ Jesus’ humanity in this scheme does not offer any basis for inferences about the immanent Trinity and so his life lived in the creaturely condition of time and space does not provide any helpful clues concerning his inner Trinitarian life. ¹⁰

All these factors contribute, then, to the special shape of his theology concerning the fate of the individual after death. Deep at the heart of his eschatological vision there is but one ultimate concern, steering a middle course between the two extremes: conceiving after-death existence as the direct continuation of earthly time (in Rahner’s image, as if one simply changed horses and carried on the journey in a different way), and the opposite error of imagining life after death without any reference to the time lived on earth, as if time suddenly stopped still and ceased to matter. To counter the errors of these extremes, Rahner uses the biblical idea of resurrection, the general human (and also biblical) experience of the ripening fruits of one’s actions, and the idea that with death time ‘is subsumed into its final and definitive validity’: ¹¹ time is changed, transfigured, and resurrected in eternity. Eternity is the ripened fruit of time where time does not continue, and yet its essence is forever conserved in the lasting finality of fulfilment.

All in all, however, he remains ambiguous on how time may be subsumed into its final and definitive finality. One may wonder what exactly is preserved from temporality itself? Why not say, then, that time stops once and for all at death? What one registers is the notable fact that Rahner takes more distance from the former position (that time is somehow continued in the eschaton), than from the latter view (that it disappears on leaving earthly existence). While he rightly takes great pains to correct a too naive notion of temporal existence after death, he is less equipped to show the validity of the need of some kind of analogous temporality in the intermediate state and the final fulfilment. ¹² Might it be the case that he works with an implicitly extrinsic view of temporal existence, and so time, for him, belongs to the burdensome conditions of earthly life, which one leaves behind at death when, in his words, one’s existence is ‘consummated’ and made ‘complete,’ and one’s personal history is ultimately ‘rounded off’ in the presence of God? ¹³ What remains unclear is the way temporal existence endures as an intrinsic anthropological feature, as an abiding given of human existence.

There is an apparent contradiction between Rahner’s claim that temporality is intrinsic to the human being and our hypothesis that for Rahner temporality is not a lasting intrinsic characteristic of created humanity. Can these two assertions be reconciled? The key to this problem may lie in the way Rahner understands the relationship of the two dimensions of human temporality: physical/world time and the intrinsic time of the subject/spirit. Time is intrinsic in this scheme only to the extent that it makes mastery over the external, physical processes of change possible; it provides the necessary unity of the human subject whereby life’s free decisions can be made over against the tide of the ceaseless succession of fleeting moments. One could say that it is not intrinsic temporality as such, but its fruits as free and determinative decisions which make up one’s abiding humanity by accumulating, through one’s personal history, to a consummated and completed final form made definitive by death. Apparently, Rahner stops halfway on the road he had himself mapped out: temporality, although claimed to be intrinsic, in the end remains somewhat external to the eschatologically abiding human self. Moreover, his vision is dominated by an implicit preference for once and for all static perfection over against the dynamism of eternal becoming.

‘Eternity in Time’: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Plea for a Renewed Trinitarian Concept of Time and Eternity

Might the idea of an eternal ‘becoming’ be better suited to describe God’s eternity and its relationship to human time? While Rahner’s concept of eternity has rightly been criticized for being too static and too strongly in the grip of an idea of God as a transcendental and immutable limit and goal for human fulfilment, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s account, on a first approach, offers a diametrically opposed solution to this problem. ¹⁴ In contrast to Rahner, who notably works with an essentially formal concept of person and a formal, impersonal, and non-dialogical idea of the Trinitarian inner processions, Balthasar takes great pains to elaborate a dialogical and interpersonal account of the immanent Trinity, one which aims to draw out all the consequences of the biblical idea of God as eternal community and ‘life.’ ¹⁵ In addition, his eschatology is, at first sight at least, easier to approach since—unlike Rahner, who, apart from a concise systematic treatment in the Foundations of Christian Faith, touches upon eschatological themes in various individual essays—Balthasar’s fully fledged eschatological vision is available in a systematic form as The Last Act of his Theo-Drama, the second work in his enormous trilogy. ¹⁶ What then characterizes Balthasar’s idea of God’s eternity and, in conjunction with it, human temporality?

Over against Rahner’s reluctance to consider the idea of duration with regard to God’s eternity, Balthasar establishes it as the key concept of his own Trinitarian theology. In his view, the Triune Godhead is eternal in the sense of being a community of eternal happening, a becoming, an event and never a mere static present (a nunc stans). ¹⁷ The divine life is characterized by an essential openness to the infinite, an ‘ever-greater’ surplus of endless acts of love and a certain ‘elasticity of duration.’ Eternal here means being free from temporal limitation, a superabundant duration which is, however, by no means pure timelessness. Taking a clear stand against those who prefer to speak about non-time in connection with God’s eternity (such as Bultmann and the early Barth), Balthasar coins the term ‘super-time’ to describe the timeless temporality of the Trinitarian community of loving life. ¹⁸

What makes it possible for Balthasar to speak about temporality at the heart of the immanent Trinity? As a direct consequence of the Trinitarian perspective dominating his theology of creation, Balthasar takes seriously the biblical, and, more important, the patristic idea of creation as the image of God: if the entire created world bears the traits of its Creator, then every element of its actual ‘shape’ must somehow be founded within the way the Triune God immanently is. Thus, space and time too must have safe moorings in eternal Trinitarian life.

One question, however, still needs further clarification. That creation belongs to God and is, therefore, grounded in God is a point, as we have seen, Rahner too makes clear. Yet, why not stop at the traditional distinction he likewise favours between the otherness of the world as created and assumed by God and the Triune God in themselves beyond creation? In other words, why make inferences from the world itself for the way the Trinitarian persons should be; and, most important of all, why seek a way for grounding time and space directly within the immanent Trinity? An answer to this question may be given if one considers Balthasar’s Neo-Chalcedonian type of Christology, where there is a tendency to treat the principle of the communication of properties as suggesting a close unity, a source of continuous exchange between the human and divine natures of the incarnate Logos. By embracing such a Christological stance, Balthasar is able to maintain that through Christ one gets real access to the eternity of the Triune life, because he is for us the actual and genuine ‘presence of eternity in time.’ At the same time, he can also suggest that the temporality of the earthly life of Christ, on returning to his Father, has an abiding place within the Trinitarian life. ¹⁹

He can likewise argue that temporality is not tied exclusively to creation, and the economic activity of the Trinity, but has an analogue within the immanent life processes of the Trinitarian processions. Balthasar is convinced that what one learns from Scripture about the Incarnation and the relationship between the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Father (and also the Holy Spirit) can be read back, in turn, into the immanent Trinity and reveals the eternal ‘happenings’ of inner Trinitarian life processes.

It is at this point that Balthasar’s famous idea of inner Trinitarian kenotic distance assumes an important role with regard to our question, the analogous temporality of the eternal Trinity. Unlike Rahner, Balthasar does not stop at the idea of ‘otherness’ being bound up with the idea of creation, but places it directly into the heart of the Trinitarian perichoresis of persons: the primal difference between the persons, as the origin of all created otherness, is overcome by their loving kenotic self-bestowal across the ‘distance’ of their differences. In a similar manner, just as Trinitarian ‘distance’ grounds created otherness, so Trinitarian ‘time’ too makes room for an acting area for the persons in which they mutually realize themselves according to the order of Trinitarian processions and within the ‘drama’ of eternal events of love.

Leaving aside the intricacies of Balthasar’s distinctive account of the immanent Trinity, what is important for us here is his claim that created temporality is rooted in the divine inner-Trinitarian life processes and that even the transitory is a reflection of eternity because there is a deep analogy between time and eternity, so much so that ‘the very duration of transitory time is an analogy of the eternal.’ ²⁰ Yet one may wonder how one should understand the idea of analogy here. The similarities highlighted by Balthasar seem to be clear; however, in my view, the even greater difference remains somewhat murky. In what way does divine duration differ from earthly temporality? And, more important, how is divine ‘super-time’ related to earthly time? What is the relationship between the two? Balthasar’s account (based heavily on Adrienne von Speyr’s mystical insights) remains rather unclear on this point. He introduces two suggestive ideas which, however, do not solve the riddle. On the one hand, he posits an essential simultaneity between God’s time and earthly time: the earthly and the historical are simultaneously present in heaven and the heavenly appears in earthly temporality. On the other hand, he claims that the reciprocity and interaction between the two spheres is realized through Christ, who is seen as achieving and being himself the concrete ‘exchange’ between the two modes of temporality (divine and human) and as carrying out a ‘translation’ between them. This is made possible because on entering earthly time he does not leave eternal divine life behind. And—to complete Balthasar’s analogy—we could add that because we only speak the language of earthly temporality, and therefore can only access divine temporality when translated into our terms, we are not able to tell the difference between them either.

Eventually one may wonder whether Balthasar’s account of the reciprocal relationship between divine ‘super-time’ and created world time is more accommodating towards an anthropology of intrinsically human and abiding temporality, one which is able to reckon with historicity and time after death. Curiously, despite the sharp differences of their respective visions, Balthasar arrives at strikingly similar conclusions to Rahner concerning the possibility of intermediate time, even if he takes a distinctively different route. For Balthasar, the idea of intermediate time after death is likewise a superfluous construction, because on dying one immediately enters Christ’s time which is at once the site of exchange and transition between earthly and heavenly temporality and, at the same time, the centre of salvation history. ²¹ Christ’s time is eternally simultaneous with earthly time and so there is no need for ‘waiting’ till the end of history. This is at least what one may infer from Balthasar’s suggestive but conceptually less coherent account.

If Rahner’s theology can be viewed as positing the ultimate incompatibility of earthly time and God’s eternity, Balthasar represents the other extreme of almost entirely blurring the difference between them. One reason for this may lie in the fact that his theology lacks a proper anthropology of the human condition as such, apart from his Christological vision of Christ’s humanity. Any anthropology of human temporality is absorbed here by a Neo-Chalcedonian Christology of exchange and translation taking place in the unity of the two natures. ²² And although Balthasar clearly opts for the idea of the abiding autonomy of creation, maintaining that both the world and human beings retain their distinct created realities in the final ‘homecoming’ when everything is gathered up once again in the eternal community of Trinitarian life, the origin of all that is (and which, in this scheme, humans had never really left), the exact nature of such a distinct existence in heaven is more difficult to grasp. ²³ Ultimately, one has the impression that in his theological universe the distinctive temporality of the human subject is stifled by the emphasis on divine super-time.

‘Memoria time’: Joseph Ratzinger’s Anthropological Sketch of Temporality

It is at this point that Ratzinger’s eschatology may be seen as entering into a constructive dialogue with both Rahner and Balthasar concerning the significance of time for one’s lasting self in the eschaton. ²⁴ Interestingly, despite the obvious (and by him openly admitted) fact that his eschatological vision owes much to Balthasar’s forceful account, on the issue of temporality Ratzinger, in my view, takes equal distance not only from Rahner but also from Balthasar.

It may not primarily be in defence of traditional Church teaching that he argues against models which do away with the idea of temporal duration between death and the final fulfilment (such as the resurrection in death model and the concomitant idea that the individual and the last judgement coincide). ²⁵ His discontent concerns a deep-seated lack of coherence at the level of their implicit anthropologies, and so what he does is draw on both Rahner’s and Balthasar’s key insights, and at the same time he corrects their shortcomings in the area of anthropology. First, he continues and completes the trajectory initiated by Rahner concerning temporality as an intrinsic feature of our humanity. Next, he complements Balthasar’s Christological vision by outlining a fitting anthropology. For all this, he finds the theoretical basis in Augustine’s reflections on the nature of time in the 11th book of the Confessions. ²⁶

Ratzinger calls for a profounder grasp of what temporality means for the human being: the intrinsic nature of our existence in time must be adequately spelt out and its consequences examined more fully. Just like Rahner, Ratzinger too has recourse to the idea of the essential unity of body and spirit which determines the way the human person lives in time, yet he also emphasizes the multi-layered nature of our temporality. Insofar as we are bodies, we belong to the physical world and share in the movement characteristic of physical time; but insofar as spirits, we are temporal in a deeper manner manifested by our consciousness which is, in his words, ‘temporal in a way all its own.’ ²⁷ While Rahner likewise mentions the example of a unifying mental experience holding past, present, and future together, in order to show how detachment from the flow of physical time is possible as a space for free decisions, Ratzinger goes deeper by making the human mind the paradigm of his distinctive account of the essential and abiding temporality of the human self which continues to exist even beyond death. The central question for him is ‘how time belongs to man precisely as man?’ ²⁸

This is why he rejects the idea of aevum (the time assigned to angels in scholastic theology and used in modern models for explaining the special temporality of intermediate time, or glorified existence); and this is also why he dismisses the idea that time ceases completely after death, when one enters God’s eternity. ²⁹ His central assumption is that there must be a distinctively human temporality, which is a constitutive element of one’s lasting existence and which cannot be lost without losing one’s specific identity. To share in the modality of aevum would mean becoming angels, whereas to share in God’s eternity would imply becoming like God.

Ratzinger views Augustine’s sustained reflections on the nature of time (in Book XI of Confessions) as clearly demonstrating how external physical time only makes sense anthropologically, as constructed by our human consciousness through memory which brings about the present by holding together the fleeting moments of the past and the oncoming moments of the future in a meaningful unity. ³⁰ Without such unifying work of the memory the external process of ceaseless physical change would dissolve into pure and shapeless transiency. Memory alone is able to create the present by standing over against the external movement of bodies (of which, obviously, it also makes part) and by giving shape to the continuous flux of the future as it is becoming past. In memory the past is present ‘in its quality as past’ and the future is likewise at hand in anticipation. All this reveals for Ratzinger the double relationship the human being has to the world, since, on the one hand, one’s conscious awareness is shaped by one’s rootedness in the corporeal world and, on the other, it also stands over against physical reality by not dissolving into it and not being wholly tied to it.

From his brief survey of Augustine’s account of memory Ratzinger then concludes that temporality characterizes our humanity in two important ways. First, beyond physical temporality one’s existence is shaped by anthropological time: ‘memoria-time’ (a term he coins drawing on Augustine) marks the special temporal nature of human consciousness deep at the heart of the person. ³¹ Second—and this seems to be Ratzinger’s own contribution to the line of thinking initiated by Augustine—temporality is also closely bound up with relationality in the manner it has been spelt out in personalist philosophical thought. Since one becomes oneself through interpersonal relationships realized in time and carried out by bonds of love—where the love of others precedes or even outlives one—one is intimately tied to the temporality of others, therefore, as Ratzinger puts it: ‘[t]he fabric of shared humanity is a fabric of shared temporality.’ ³²

Apart from ad hoc reflections, Ratzinger has not elaborated a more systematic treatment of memoria-time, and so the exact relationship between the earthly function of such anthropological time and its operation after death has not been spelt out in detail. ³³ He takes up again the idea of anthropological time in the encyclical Spe Salvi, in the section on the teaching concerning purgatory, where he employs the terms ‘the heart’s time’ and ‘the time of passage’ to signify the ‘duration’ of the state of purification, which need not be measured according to our earthly categories, but might be conceived as a ‘transforming moment’ in the encounter with God. ³⁴ Moreover, he apparently reckons with temporality as an abiding feature of one’s humanity even in a glorified existence in heaven. ³⁵ What underlies these recurring ideas in his thought is the assumption that the human being has an irreplaceable and irrevocable capacity for existence through time, one which is constitutive not only of her earthly but also her enduring eschatological self.

Unlike Rahner, who emphasizes the ultimate incompatibility of earthly time and God’s eternity, and differing also from Balthasar, who lays too much stress on their similarities, Ratzinger joins Augustine in maintaining an analogical relation between various modalities of temporality: earthly time, glorified human time, and God’s eternity. ³⁶ The princeps analogatum here is Augustine’s concept of memoria, the activity of holding past, present, and future together in one meaningful unity. This capacity remains even after death, when the person leaves earthly time and history. And this is what also characterizes God’s eternal present, which for Augustine and Ratzinger likewise is not without a certain duration, but is life without beginning or end, as Scripture suggestively intimates. God is in an eminent sense ‘pure memory’: the ultimate source of temporality and identity realized in eternity.

Ratzinger’s anthropological sketch awaits further elaboration, since it remains embryonic with regard to the conceptual potential of Augustinian thought for the human self as temporal. It is at this point that Jean-Luc Marion’s attempt at a creative phenomenological re-reading of Augustine’s Confessions in the light of the broader Augustinian corpus and from the vantage point of modern phenomenological reflection might prove particularly instructive. ³⁷

Jean-Luc Marion’s Reading of Augustine’s Temporal Self

Joining in a long tradition of commentaries on Augustine’s intriguing masterpiece, Jean-Luc Marion has recently proposed to read it as an early groundbreaking construal of a model of selfhood akin to his own understanding of the non-metaphysical self. His perceptive and close reading of Augustine’s Confessions is done from the viewpoint of contemporary philosophical analyses of both Augustine’s work and the modern self. Keeping in mind that Marion’s commentary reveals as much of the hidden import of Augustine’s text as his own specific phenomenological project (so much so that at times the two can hardly be distinguished), and leaving aside the much-debated issue of whether such a non-metaphysical reading does full justice to Augustine’s original intention (or whether Marion even eventually succeeds in carrying out his project in a sufficiently consistent manner), ³⁸ we will restrict the discussion here to just one particular segment of this complex issue. What Marion finds in Augustine may be taken as suggestive evidence for a possible theological anthropological vision that is able to incorporate into itself the aspect of temporality as a determining and eschatologically lasting given, and that lays open, at the same time, the philosophical-theological foundations underlying such a vision—irrespective of the fact that it results from the intersection, across a long span of time, of two markedly different philosophical projects. Thus, aware that one is dealing here with a shared space of interaction, rather than a simple one-way commentary on the Confessions, let us survey briefly what we see as the key insights regarding the issue of human temporality for our specific (and therefore necessarily limited) theological perspective. ³⁹

First of all, and contrary to a long tradition which reads the 11th book of the Confessions as an essentially philosophical text, Marion argues that Augustine’s meditations on time can only be adequately understood in their original theological context: as posed in the framework of creation and as articulated together with the question of God’s eternity. This is what Marion claims as his own hypothesis concerning Augustine’s notion of time. In Marion’s view, Augustine’s daring theologically inspired project establishes an unusual link between time and eternity, going against the grain of Greek philosophical assumptions common at the period, where eternity is diametrically opposed to time in a manner mutually exclusive of one another and without any common ground. Time in the Greek scheme offers no access to the divine sphere, but rather forbids it. Within Augustine’s Christian perspective, however, time has an asymmetrical relation to eternity; it is not its antagonistic counterpart, but—as itself a creature—receives existence from the eternal Creator, whose eternity is primordial with regard to time and therefore, strictly speaking, cannot be defined in temporal terms, such as, permanence or non-fleeting endurance. Since time is a creature, it must have a link to the Creator and must give access to God’s eternity. Therefore, as Marion suggests with a covert allusion to the Chalcedonian Christological principle, Augustine’s tour de force is to think time and eternity together, without confusion or separation, thereby imagining a space for the ego that is neither closed off from God’s eternity or abolished in it, but makes the creature’s passage towards God possible. For Augustine—Marion tells us—the question of time is not simply a philosophical conundrum concerning a neutral sphere of available beings, but arises within the specific theological horizon of relationality: the relation to God. The temporality of things can only be rightly articulated in a theological setting, where the world is interpreted as created and which, therefore, makes one aware that time comes from God as a gift and exists in relation to God’s eternity. This is what Marion, following Augustine’s logic, terms ‘cosmic confessio’ (the cosmic praise of the Creator) which articulates its own temporality not over against but together with an acknowledgment of the eternity of God. ⁴⁰

On these grounds the following question arises: if the difference between time and eternity cannot be stated in temporal terms—through an opposition between what incessantly passes and what permanently endures—how can one articulate their ultimate disparity? What would be an adequate phenomenological description of time vis-à-vis eternity? In Marion’s reading of Augustine (through the eyes of Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas), the notion of time makes sense only in and for the world; it ultimately unfolds as the world itself: ‘[t]ime comes with the world; it worlds and makes a world.’ ⁴¹ Seen from the perspective of creation, time equals created finitude, which in turn is understood as temporal belatedness—expressed in temporal terms, but in itself atemporal—over against God’s (extra-temporal) precedence: ‘the created is temporalized inasmuch as created and the question of time itself begins with the advent of the created.’ ⁴²

Of all creatures, such temporal belatedness characterizes the human ego in an eminent and multifarious sense, determining its entire mode of being, and—as Marion points out—it is not by chance that Augustine raises the issue of time from an existential stance and in the context of an existential question: the human subject’s identity (that is, the identity of the one who confesses) in face of the eternal God. Apart from the general temporal belatedness of the created order with regard to the Creator, the human being experiences a fourfold delay in Augustine’s account. First, one’s acknowledgement of the fact that one always comes late in a pre-set situation: one’s language of praise precedes one (its addressee is already there since one’s praise has the status of a response; and because one’s word is preceded by the words recorded in the scriptures which are in turn proffered by God). The second delay comes from the nature of human memoria, which in a certain sense is other to oneself; due to its ultimate inaccessibility within the immemorial it gives rise to the strangeness of one’s own cogitatio. Third, one experiences the same lateness with regard to one’s desire for happiness which constantly defers its object of desire, resulting in an unfulfilled protracted search. And, fourth, the disconcerting experience of the weakness of the will—a conflict between one’s willing and the powerlessness of the will—discloses the heart as a stranger to the self.

What is at work in this fourfold belatedness diagnosed by Augustine is identified by Marion (in Derridean fashion) as differance: an awareness of both difference and temporal deferral deeply inscribed in one’s existential knowledge of oneself prior to any theoretical questioning concerning the nature of time. It is the experience of such multiple differance—one’s non-coincidence or separation from oneself translated temporally, yet in itself non-temporal—that constitutes created human finitude and may be contrasted with God, whose eternity consists in being free from any such discrepancy, belatedness or differance. The equation between creaturehood, finitude, and temporality enables Marion to radicalize his argument by asserting that ‘[t]emporalization is not just a characteristic of man; it defines him as such, homo temporalis, who differs from God in that he differs temporally from himself, is delayed behind himself.’ ⁴³ Moreover, temporalization is also present as a positive precondition of the working of the human mind: the human being is temporal in a more radical sense than any other creature, and it is here that, in Marion’s terms, the properly temporal phenomenon comes visibly to the fore.

Marion’s overall project is to show that in Augustine’s scheme time is not just a circumstance or a condition of human existence, and therefore, one is not simply in or with time. Rather, time constitutes one at a deeper level; it intimately and individually belongs to us as creatures created in the image of God. If the created world temporalizes in general, then the human being must be seen as temporalizing in a way specifically her own and this becomes apparent on confronting the theoretical question concerning the nature of time itself. According to Marion, Augustine’s famous identification of time with the distentio animi (the ‘stretching’ of the soul/mind) teaches one several lessons. First, it reveals the unique and intrinsic relation time has to the human mind, a relation which, however, must not be thought anachronistically in terms of an opposition between subjectivity (the mind) and objectivity (the external world). By extracting temporality from the physical world and assigning it to the human mind, Augustine highlights indirectly their essential continuity, because both the external natural substrate and the internal spiritual mind temporalize as creatures in the same ‘objective’ manner, and are, therefore, finite and mutable on the same grounds. Time is assigned to the mind for the only reason that it has the privilege of realizing creaturehood in a pre-eminent manner through displaying an exceptional mutability and fragility, an aptness for temporalization and an ability to bear the mark of its creation most profoundly (as the image of God). In the human being creation is manifested in a concentrated way.

Second, it allows Augustine to elaborate the outlines of what one could dub a theological anthropology of temporality based on the insightful equation of time with the operation of memoria/mind. Cast in Marion’s terms, what Augustine does first is to identify the ‘properly temporal phenomenon’ as a matter of the paradoxical stability of transition and the constancy of change, rather than the persistence of the present. Then, he demonstrates the way such constant transition is perceived by memory playing the role of a ‘second order present’ which retains and reclaims the process of passage. As Marion argues, memory does not operate in the mode of a nunc stans, a static present, because through the distentio of continual self-dilation, an originary affection of the self or sensing, it carries out the change by itself going through a continual transition. In other words, the mind temporalizes things by temporalizing itself. And it is here that one can pinpoint an essential difference from any supposed forerunners of the idea of distentio (e.g. Plotinus, Aristotle, Gregory of Nyssa). While for these thinkers time arises only when the mind is directed to the world of natural things (such as the movement of the heavens, the stars, etc.), in Augustine’s account time is portrayed as the temporalization that the mind stimulates by itself in terms of its essential mechanism of differance manifested in the curious fact that ‘it never ceases to differ and defer, first of all with respect to itself.’ ⁴⁴ In Marion’s pithy formulation, homo temporalis (temporal man) is one who differs from himself temporally precisely in such a manner.

The third lesson to learn from Augustine’s association of time with the distentio of the human soul/mind/memoria reveals the essential individualizing function of temporalization since time, removed from the context of the impersonal world soul (where Aristotle had placed it) and assigned to the mind, can be conceived as being individualized by and for the ego. ⁴⁵ Time therefore characterizes the individualized human being in the first place and not the universal cosmic soul.

Fourth, through the very term distentio and the concept it articulates, Augustine is able to disclose the essential ambiguity of finite temporal creaturehood which bears the marks and the burden of fallenness (as a consequence of original sin). The distentio of the soul does not operate solely as a neutral stretching, distancing or ecstasis in originary human temporality, but disperses and dissipates the ego, sensed as the inability to overcome the destructive sway of ever-scattering change resulting in a bad ‘temporality of distraction.’

Marion hypothesizes that for Augustine temporalization can be modified depending on the way one relates to the eternity of God; and that through the extensio of an ‘eschatological ecstasy’—eschatological because in such an ‘eschatological future’ the still-to-come is extracted from the passing flow of time by never turning into a passing past—one is liberated from the weight of dissipating temporality and is put into a continual advance toward God. As Marion explains, such a continual advance, which can be likened to running (as the scripture passage Philippians 3:13–14 suggests), avoids the illusion of ever attaining the eternity of God. One does not leave temporalization by ‘being frozen in eternity,’ because eternity is proper only to God. Nevertheless, by responding to the desire that God inspires in one’s soul, one can freely enter into the disposition where the distentio is converted into the ceaseless stretching out of the extensio, the continuous advance toward God, free from the bounds of distracted time and enjoying a new mode of temporality. In Marion’s rendering of Augustine’s phrase, ‘God extends desire by deferring it and differing from it, by desiring he extends the mind, by extending it he renders it more capable.’ ⁴⁶

Finally, Marion detects yet another mode of temporality in the section where Augustine speaks about the curious and difficult notion of the ‘heaven of heavens,’ the place of God’s accessible dwelling where intellectual creatures (humans and angels) can meet and praise the Creator as God. ⁴⁷ This highest form of temporality overcomes both distentio and space precisely at the point where these two dimensions essentially overlap, since time distended and distracting operates according to the model of the dispersal of space: in the mode of temporal distentio time is, as it were, spatialized. The temporality of the ‘heaven of heavens,’ by contrast, is liberated from even the beneficial temporality and spatiality of extensio, and is accorded the privilege of being capable of participating in God’s eternity, without, however, becoming co-eternal with God, or losing one’s creaturely status. This is what Marion calls ‘intentional temporality’: a disposition whereby one lets oneself be affected by God’s eternity (without actually ever possessing it). Such a loving adhesion to God also presents one with the additional gift of finding one’s inner cohesion as opposed to the dispersal of fallen temporality or the continuous advance of stretching out in the running movement of extensio. Here can one find the eminent site of confessio, the praise of God, where time and eternity are kept together eschatologically, without confusion or separation: created temporality is neither abolished in God’s eternity, nor is it deemed to remain in a state of ever detached contingent mutability. The new disposition of intentional temporality establishes and perpetually retains a mysterious and fruitful tension between creaturely time and God’s all-powerful eternity.

Concluding Remarks: Time in Eternity?

The shared space of interaction between the five accounts—along with Rahner, Balthasar, Ratzinger, and Marion, Augustine, too, obviously participates in the discussion, even if indirectly—highlights certain salient issues that must necessarily be addressed by someone wanting to construct a consistent anthropology of human temporality. At the same time, it also reveals important sources of weakness that inevitably threaten every attempt to articulate a neat system from insights concerning God’s ever-greater mystery. Their conversation not only reveals the need for a consistent (even if never neatly systematizable) account of how temporality shapes us as human beings at all stages of our existence (in earthly life, during intermediate time and in the final fulfilment of eternal beatitude or in the definitive failure of damnation), it also discloses the necessity of a sufficient grasp of the multidimensional character of temporality itself.

In this respect Augustine remains an ever inspiring conversation partner by laying down the foundations of the most comprehensively nuanced perspective inasmuch as he can be detected to (implicitly) distinguish four distinct and interrelated aspects of time throughout his works: (1) time as a distension of the soul operating through memory (psychological time); (2) time as the distension resulting from physical-cosmic movement (physical time); (3) time as the distension of disintegration, suffering, and death due to the effect of original sin (moral time); (4) time as the linear teleological distension of gradually unfolding salvation history (historical time). ⁴⁸

Moreover, while in Augustine’s scheme psychological and physical time can be analysed by immanent reason, moral and historical time are objects for supernatural faith and belong to the order of grace. Only by keeping in view the fourfold Augustinian sense of time can one have a proper understanding of his Christological claim that Christ, the mediator, came to bridge the gap between God’s eternity and human temporality and, through the saving work of redemption, liberated the human being from time. Such a liberation does not concern temporality as such, but only one specific dimension: moral time, in other words, the moral effects of sin and suffering which turn time into a burdensome dispersal and make the human subject feel hopelessly lost. ⁴⁹ In contrast, psychological time and physical time are seen by Augustine as lasting features of the human condition which are not revoked in the eschaton either, when historical time will come to an end. ⁵⁰ However, since Augustine never developed a sustained account of his own fourfold perspective, and never applied it to a systematic eschatology, his views concerning temporality did not entirely inform his treatment of various eschatological themes and so could not serve as a unifying principle for a coherent vision concerning the last things (temporality after death, purification, damnation, and eternal life). ⁵¹

Such a nuanced view of fourfold temporality is likewise missing from the respective accounts of our modern interlocutors for various reasons. Rahner’s account seems to concentrate mostly on the burdensome effects of moral time—the dissipating sway and binding necessity of fleeting moments and the finitude, death, and suffering resulting from temporal existence—leaving the psychological aspect of lasting memoria-time and the implications for the relationship between created temporal existence and God’s eternity largely unexplored. For Rahner, physical-cosmic temporality ends on entering God’s eternity. Balthasar’s interpersonal Trinitarian model (as opposed to Augustine’s intrapersonal Trinitarian analogy of mind) likewise overlooks the inner human experience of temporality (psychological time), although it ably highlights the interconnection between relationality and temporality. His soteriology also reckons with the negative experience of fallenness as lived out in moral time. In his scheme, while historical time understood as salvation history comes to an end with the consummation of the cosmos, some kind of meta-history seems to continue in eternal life within the Trinitarian communion, which is, at the same time, the final ‘place’ of the entire creation.

Ratzinger’s notion of ‘anthropological time’ is the most appropriate rendering of the multidimensional nature of human temporality, and an especially illuminating modern account both of the intriguing experience and workings of psychological memoria-time, and of the way time and interpersonal relationships necessarily intertwine. It apparently lays no stress on the moral dimension, although one can detect its presence in his account of hell and purgatory. ⁵² Nonetheless, Ratzinger remains sketchy concerning the fate of cosmic-physical time and temporality within the final fulfilment. Marion’s account is particularly strong on highlighting the difference between psychological and moral time and showing the essential ambiguity in our experience of temporality.

There are also important contributions made by our modern interlocutors. One must always keep in sight Rahner’s injunction that time does not simply continue after death, but is transformed and so its transcendence must be taken seriously. His ideas are also suggestive for understanding the way the foretaste of eternity is already present in time. He forcefully warns against a too univocal understanding of eternity as endless temporality, and his perspective allows for a sufficient divide between created immanence and the transcendent Creator. Balthasar’s approach convincingly proves that a Trinitarian perspective is indispensable not only for a proper account of the final fulfilment in God’s eternity, but also because the issue of temporality cannot be adequately treated without a creation theological foundation, which is itself more deeply grasped within the context of Trinitarian theology. His interpersonal model of the immanent life of the divine persons also opens the way for a better understanding of relationality with regard to temporal created personhood. Ratzinger’s reincorporation of Augustine’s intrapersonal analogy of the temporal mind, grafted onto an interpersonal and relational perspective (in Balthasarian fashion, but not necessarily following Balthasar) and grounded in an explicit anthropology of temporality, opens up a new horizon for treating the issue in a more systematic manner. Finally, Marion’s phenomenological anthropology persuasively illustrates that on approaching the question of temporality, one should not simply work with an unconsidered or borrowed concept of time, but must elaborate a theologically informed account in the context of a theology of creation where time is recognized to be itself a creature. Moreover, his association of temporality and image theology, namely, the idea that the human being—as created in the image of God—is temporal in a specific manner, paves the way for a renewed eschatological perception of the lasting human self. ⁵³

What our five interlocutors have certainly shown is the fact that the issue of temporality requires a complex treatment involving several areas of traditional doctrine (the theology of creation, Christology, Trinitarian theology, teaching on the final fulfilment of the cosmos and the human person, eschatology concerning post-death existence), all of which are necessary for a balanced approach. Nevertheless, while several questions await further clarification, one thing seems certain: temporality—as an intrinsic feature of creaturehood—must have a lasting (transformed/transfigured/resurrected) existence within God’s eternity.