Augustine reflected: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I don’t know. One of them asked, “What was God doing before he made the earth?” He was tempted to respond, “He was preparing hell for those asking such questions!” But instead the ancient theologian used the opportunity to distinguish time from eternity in his classic work, Confessions.
He recognized that Yahweh [YHWH] was the new name of God introduced by the Israelites. That name, along with “I am,” another divine name revealed to Moses, is derived from the Hebrew verb “to be” [HWH]. Augustine interpreted them to mean that God should be associated only with the timeless present tense. While humans remember the past and anticipate the future, God, who is independent of time, has one synoptic vision of its entire extension. The creator of time existed before it began and will exist after it ends.
Basic to understanding time is recognizing the difference between real time and two ways of measuring it. Real time is simply the sequence of events that happen anywhere to earthlings–to the astronaut as well as to ordinary humans who do first one thing and then another. Being irreversible, there are no instant replays. To use hymn writer Isaac Watts’ simile, time is “like an ever-rolling stream.”
At this season much attention is given to the quantitative measure of time, which varies among cultures. Monk Dionysius the Runt calculated the birth year of Domini Jesus in order to replace the pagan method of historical dating from the legendary beginning of Rome or from a particular Roman Emperor. Subsequently Christians have for thirteen centuries measured time backward as well as forward from the alleged birth year of Jesus. The current scholarly consensus that Dionysius was several years in error has prompted this witticism by Glen Bowersock, a professor of ancient history at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, “Just remember the jingle ‘Hark the herald angels roar, / Christ was born in B. C. four.'”
Two millennia have passed on the Christian calendar, but that reckoning is unrelated to the official outlook in Islam and Judaism. Traditionally Muslims refer to 1 A. H. [anno hegirae], rather than to 622 A. D., the year that Muhammad migrated [Hijra] from Mecca to Medina. Also, since Muslims opt for lunar months of unvarying duration, their yearly calendar differs from the Western one, in which months vary as much as three days in length. Some literalistic Jews, after ascertaining what they thought was the date–more than five millennia age–for the world’s creation, used it for year one of their calendar. Also, according to the biblical creation account, a day begins in the evening, not at midnight.
The International Date Line in the Pacific was a convention agreed upon in the nineteenth century to make it easier to measure and thus deal with differences in the hours of daylight around the globe. Apart from China, most nations now also accept the scheme made in 1869 by Charles Dowd, a Presbyterian educator in New York, that time zones should change each fifteen degrees longitude. This of course creates an absurdity at the global poles.
Clock time was devised centuries ago to deal with circadian time, and it has achieved worldwide agreement. In the last century most Americans decided to shift twice a year between “standard” and “daylight” time. Another complication: some timepieces read 6:00 p.m. when others read 18:00. Then there are sports clocks that stop for time-outs, which is at fisticuffs with unstoppable real time.
The qualitative or psychological measure of time differs sharply from chronological time. Its duration varies according to an individual’s situation, or a group experience. “An hour of pain is longer than a day of pleasure,” as a proverb puts it. A holiday is “over in no time” for the person having fun. On the other hand, a person in an awkward predicament, or an inmate “doing time,” finds time to drag on endlessly. While engaging in the same activity, a bored person may want to “kill time” while an interested person may want to stretch it out. Age contributes to these subjective responses. Children have more limited attention spans than adults, and time seems to pass more rapidly as one grows older. If one is using both the quantitative and the qualitative measure, February is recognized not only as the shortest month but also, in cold climates, it may be experienced as the longest.
Attributed to Henry Van Dyke is this expression of Christian doctrine:
Time is
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice;
But for those who love, time is eternity.
Inscribed on a sundial at the University of Virginia is an adaptation of the wisdom of that eminent Presbyterian clergyman: “Time is too slow for those who wait, too short for those who rejoice … Hours fly, flowers die, new days, new ways pass by. Love stays.” Temporal vicissitudes can be contrasted with the abidingness of love, which is an attribute of the I am who dwells in the eternal now.
WILLIAM E.PHIPPS is emeritus professor of religion and philosophy, Davis and Elkins College, Elkins, W.Va.
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