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  From Time to Time Finitude, as I have tried to show (§), “is not an accident of the ‘immortal’ essence of man, but the foundation of man’s existence.” We need to admit, moreover, and to welcome the notion, that a “précis of finitude” would go so far as to give up taking some kind of eternity for granted. And this is precisely where the shoe pinches—at least from the perspective of certain believers. Of course one could happily acknowledge (a) that we have “no other experience of God apart from that of mankind,” which would be only from the standpoint of this world (§); (b) that we should give up assuming the preemption of the infinite over the finite and stick rather to a “cross-section of immanence” (§); and (c) that the fleshly ordinariness of humankind belongs by rights to Christianity more than, or at least as much as, does the saturation of divine revelation (§). But to say that the eternal, or perhaps first of all the a-temporal, is not, or is no longer, our appropriate starting point doesn’t seem obvious to the believer, and it threatens the whole edifice of theology. Resistance to this notion is all the stronger because it touches on the “validity,” and shakes the foundations, of a Christian life. If I do not come from or have my origin directly in a first principle that governs me, how shall I be able to rejoin Him to whom I am supposed to owe my birth, even my conception? The question of the origin or creation, as we shall see (§), goes along with that of the end of things or with the resurrection. The insistence of our contemporaries on temporality should, however, be treated with caution. The goal is always the same, even though the  ■ Précis of Finitude means used to get there may be different. All such thinkers, each in his own fashion—from the “living present” of Husserl, to “care” in Heidegger , and to the “durée” in Bergson—eradicate nontemporal experience, although nothing guarantees, apart from second-hand accounts, that they have really taken the measure of its reality. “Sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse”—we feel and know that we are eternal (Spinoza). But this is a feeling that is no longer uniformly shared. Nor can we take it for granted that “time and eternity are not the same thing,” nor even that “eternity includes all times” (Thomas Aquinas). It is not that such solutions are worthless: far from it. But, as we shall see (§), they can only rely on the unique event of the resurrection. Only the resurrection is capable of breaking through the chains of both finitude and of temporality. Theological eternity, whether it is “a-temporal” (above time and including all time) or “intemporal” (an indefinite continuum of successive moments ), should therefore be a direct consideration of time starting from time itself, and not the converse—not the view that only an “outside-time” can legitimate time. Martin Heidegger complained ironically to an audience of theologians at Marburg () about the way this had been done; and we must also start from his viewpoint today, now that all phenomenology, like all theology, works “from below” (§). Heidegger says: “The philosopher does not just believe. If he poses the question of time, he is determined to understand time starting from time. . . . Our approach is not theological.” To understand time is then in a way, and we ignore for the moment the redundancy in the phrase, taking the time to “understand time starting off from time.” To do justice to this formula is to show (a) how temporality was always derived from eternity in theology (§); to show (b) to what extent temporality is not itself comprehensible other than in its own terms and starting from itself in its own passage (§); and to show also (c) how the burden of time carries us into a future of care, whose load we have, above all, to carry (§). With all this under our belts, and only then, do we come to understand what it implies for the philosopher, as for human beings in general (while remaining “fundamentally atheist” [chapter ]), to pose the question of time, being ourselves in time.§. The Drift of Time “What did God do before making the heaven and the earth?” St. Augustine ’s question is, from a theological point of view, highly pertinent. (It asks the meaning of a divine action independent of the created.) But...

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