What Is Time?

The medieval answer to an unanswerable question

POZZO: Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
—Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

A discussion of time has begun, and it must continue.

Last week we explored the medieval monastery, and medieval culture more generally, as a place of material time rather than abstract time—a place where the passage of hours was poetic immersion in Creation rather than mechanical submission to the almighty clock. That discussion explores time in its more pragmatic dimension. Whether seen on a sundial or a wristwatch, pragmatic time is an experiential phenomenon that governs the daily cycle of personal and social activity. Time in this sense is always cyclical, since day follows day and year follows year, and always dynamic, since it is, as Aristotle taught in Book IV of the Physics, essentially the “number, or measure, of motion.”

But what about time on a grand and metaphysical scale? How exactly is the thread of time woven into the fabric of the universe, or into the vast tapestry of human civilizations? What is the true nature of this mysterious cosmic principle that casts so dark and relentless a shadow over human life? “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?” If time is and has forever been utterly fundamental to our existence—more constant than the sun, more omnipresent than the air we breathe, more regular than the beating of our own hearts—why does it psychologically oppress us? “It’s abominable!” Does our faculty of memory negate time, by blending past with present and future, or confirm time, by consigning the past to fleeting images in the mind? “One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf.” Is the span of a human life wondrously and excruciatingly long? Or dreadfully brief? Or no span at all but rather a single moment, which is enclosed like a drop of water in the great sea of Eternity, and in whose end is found also its beginning? One day we were born, one day we shall die—the same day.

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in agèd things,
To wake the morn and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right,
To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours
And smear with dust their glitt’ring golden towers.
—Shakespeare, “Lucrece”

As is our wont here at Via Mediaevalis, we’re going to look at this topic through the lens of medieval thought. But as we’ve seen in previous discussions, the understanding of time in the Middle Ages was not an entity unto itself. It was, rather, the Christianized growth and fruition of ancient thought, and in some ways the precursor of modern thought. Thus, we need to take our time (pun intended) with this topic, stepping back and looking at the big picture before we return to the Middle Ages. This week we’ll explore prevailing theories of time in Antiquity and Modernity, and next week we’ll see how these theories converge in the uniquely spiritual, and richly temporal, culture of medieval Europe.

What is the true nature of time as a transcendent chronological force in human history? The modern answer will generally imply that time is linear and teleological. Keep in mind that this is not necessarily the postmodern answer, which would be more complex; “modern” here means from the Renaissance into the twentieth century. Nonetheless, modern conceptions of time still predominate in the cultural artifacts and educational materials that have formed our ways of thinking about the world and about ourselves. If you are reading this essay and are less than three hundred years old, it is very likely that you think about time, at least subconsciously, as a linear and teleological reality.

“Linear” comes from the word “line,” and in geometry, lines are uniform, one-dimensional figures that extend in both directions, as far as the eye can see. Thus, by “linear time,” I mean time that moves steadily forward through history, from a distant and unobservable origin (in modern science, the Big Bang) toward a distant and unpredictable endpoint (the destruction of the Earth, or the extinction of the human species). By “teleological,” I refer to the belief, perhaps well defined or perhaps rather vague, that there is an ultimate purpose in this movement—that history is not only moving toward an endpoint but progressing toward a superior state, or an objective, or a consummation. In the words of the postmodern philosopher Julia Kristeva, this model of history is “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival.”

Many Via Mediaevalis readers will recognize strongly Christian elements in this model of time. But therein we also glimpse the Renaissance humanists’ quest for human perfection through Classical culture, and the Enlightenment philosophes’ quest for social perfection through Reason, and modernity’s quest for global perfection through Technology. It is an ambivalent model.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease.
—E. E. Cummings

To fill with worm-holes stately monuments,
To feed oblivion with decay of things,
To blot old books and alter their contents,
To pluck the quills from ancient ravens’ wings,
To dry the old oak’s sap and cherish springs,
To spoil antiquities of hammered steel
And turn the giddy round of Fortune’s wheel.

The concept of linear, teleological time is so deeply embedded in modern thought that it sometimes passes unnoticed. Think for a moment about our system of historical dates: it works just like a number line. The zero point, nowadays mostly for the sake of convenience, is taken as the birth of Christ. Before that point, we have negative numbers (years “BC” or “BCE”); after that point, we have positive numbers (years “AD” or “CE”) that will increase steadily and forever, or until no one is around to count them. We take this system for granted, and yet it is built around weighty assumptions. As Dr. Anthony Giddens, whom I quoted in the previous post, has pointed out, “Even history as dating, the charting of sequences of changes between dates, is a specific way of coding temporality.” All those dates that we learn in high school history classes are not just a burden on the memory and the bane of test-takers. They are also a statement about the nature of time itself.

Another source and manifestation of linear, teleological time in modern consciousness is found in the books that we’ve been reading for the last two-and-a-half centuries. What do most people think of nowadays when we speak of “literature”? It is, despite its novelty, the novel—Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Brontë, Hugo, Twain, Hemingway, etc. Epic poetry had been circulating through human societies for thousands of years when novels burst onto the Western literary scene, and with them came not only a fundamentally new reading experience but also a narrative structure that mirrors modern time: the plot—or what we might call the “storyline,” a term first used in the early twentieth century—develops through sequential actions organized mostly in chronological order and building steadily toward a climax and resolution.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this narrative structure—real-life events often seem to transpire in this way, and as the semiotician Roland Barthes observed, it naturally appeals to the human intellect (or at least to the modern human intellect…). There is something wrong, however, when this structure becomes so dominant and pervasive that everything else feels somehow “unreal.” As we will see in future posts, there is much more to reality than linear time.

To show the beldam daughters of her daughter,
To make the child a man, the man a child,
To slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter,
To tame the unicorn and lion wild,
To mock the subtle in themselves beguiled,
To cheer the plowman with increaseful crops
And waste huge stones with little water drops.