The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection

8. From Time to Eternity

  From Time to Eternity§. The Instant of Eternity It has been said, and has been widely believed, that we cannot but go “from time to time”—Heidegger (see chapter ). What is true of “birth down here below” remains true always but is, however, only relatively true of “rebirth from on high”—passed through the crux of metamorphosis of God (chapter ) and of mankind in him (chapter ). Moreover, Thomas Aquinas himself, too respectful of things down here below to draw them directly from on high, understood this: “As we attain to the knowledge of simple things by way of compound things, so must we reach to the knowledge of eternity by means of time [per tempus].” In theology also, then, one does not go simply from eternity to time but from time to time, or rather from time to eternity after such a transition is given by God and produced in God (see part II). The perspective here still differs, however, from that of philosophy. Because if the closure of time remains necessarily a given from the point of view of human beings (chapter ), only God possesses the capacity of transfiguring the structure of time and our relationship with him, because he did so “once for all when he offered himself” (Heb :). Since what makes time, as we have shown (§), is not its objective measure (time by the clock) but its subjective truth (lived time), it is in our subjective relationship to time that the transformation of time takes place—in the same way that it is in our subjective relationship to the world that the world “becomes other” (chapter ). This does not mean, certainly, that neither From Time to Eternity ■  the world nor time are themselves affected by the act of resurrection, but solely that there is not in itself a transformation of world and time unless it appears first of all for me, as a subject that has been transformed (that is, in phenomenology, the transition from physis to the world [§]). To explain this new lived experience of time, it was necessary for St. Augustine , who was first in this field, to recognize the merit of a definition of the dimension of different times as a “drawing out of the spirit [distensio animi]” (§). But, taking the lead from Heidegger, we have been denied any position in eternity, in the name of a trouble (molestia) or an anxiety (cura) from which man on his own cannot liberate himself: oneri mihi sum—“I am a burden to myself” (§). This is what brings about the resurrection , however, understood here as metamorphosis of the world and of time. Certainly, to reduce to the present the experience of the dimensions of time in St. Augustine (past, present, future) is to run the risk of a making present of time, in which the presence is such that it works a substantification . A reading and textual critique of St. Augustine remains valid here. What answers to Being is the present, as a modality of presence: “If nothing existed [si nihil esset], there would be no present time” (see §). But to emphasize this is not to take into account the important act of transformation in the Confessions. Although the problem is not formulated as such in book , in book  we read of the transformation that the Transformer (God resurrected) works on his transfigured disciple (St. Augustine) in the act of his conversion (Conf. ): “‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ At once [statim] my countenance changed. . . . At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” The present moment, “at once” [statim], of the conversion does not indicate, in the experience of the saint, a simple moment of the unfolding of time in some sort of reduction of the present to presence. The change of “countenance,” or the dispelling of “shadows of doubt,” does not show a simple shock to his unchanged substance— permanent in what he remains or solipsist in subjectivity. The “at once” of St. Augustine’s encounter with God becomes, on the contrary, the urgency of all time for him—not a point in time but the point at which his transformation takes place, and by which all time is then measured. “You converted me, in fact, so effectively to yourself that I did not now seek a wife and had no ambition...