Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.
Eckhan
Rejoice in God all the time, says St. Paul. He rejoices all the time who rejoices above time and free from time. Three things prevent a man from knowing God. The first is time, the second is corporeality, the third is multiplicity. That God may come in, these things must go out—except thou have them in a higher, better way: multitude summed up to one in thee.
Eckhan
Whenever God is thought of as being wholly in time, there
is a tendency to regard Him as a ‘numinous’ rather than a moral being, a God of mere unmitigated Power rather than a God of Power, Wisdom and Love, an inscrutable and dangerous potentate to be propitiated by sacrifices, not a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit. All this is only natural; for time is a perpetual perishing and a God who is wholly in time is a God who destroys as fast as He creates. Nature is as incomprehensibly appalling as it is lovely and bountiful. If the Divine does not transcend the temporal order in which it is immanent, and if die human spirit does not transcend its time-bound soul, then there is no possibility of * justifying the ways of God to man.’ God as manifested in the universe is the irresistible Being who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, and whose emblems are Behemoth and Leviathan, the war horse and the eagle. It is this same Being who is described in the apocalyptic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘ O Supreme Spirit,’ says Arjuna, addressing himself to the Krishna whom he now knows to be the incarnation of the Godhead, ‘I long to see your Isvara-form’—that is to say, his form as God of the world, Nature, the temporal order. Krishna answers, ‘You shall behold the whole universe, with all things animate and inanimate, within this body of mine.’ Arjuna’s reaction to the revelation is one of amazement and fear.
Ah, my God, I see all gods within your body; Each in his degree, the multitude of creatures; See Lord Brahma seated upon his lotus, See all the sages and the holy serpents.
Universal Form, I see you without limit, Infinite of eyes, arms, mouths and bellies— See, and find no end, midst or beginning.
There follows a long passage, enlarging on the omnipotence and all-comprehensiveness of God in his Isvara-form. Then the quality of the vision changes, and Arjuna realizes, with fear
and trembling, that the God of the universe is a God of destruction as well as of creation.
Now with frightful tusks your mouths are gnashing, Flaring like the fires of Doomsday morning— North, south, east and west seem all confounded— Lord of devas, world’s abode, have mercy! . . .
Swift as many rivers streaming to the ocean, Rush the heroes to your fiery gullets, Moth-like to meet the flame of their destruction. Headlong these plunge into you and perish. . . .
Tell me who you are, and were from the beginning,
You of aspect grim. O God of gods, be gracious.
Take my homage, Lord. From me your ways are hidden.
‘Tell me who you are.’ The answer is clear and unequivocal.
I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples, Ready for the hour that ripens to their ruin.
But the God who comes so terribly as Time also exists time-lessly as the Godhead, as Brahman, whose essence is Sat-Chit-Ananda – Being, Awareness, Bliss; and within and beyond man’s time-tortured psyche is his spirit, ‘uncreated and uncreatable,’ as Eckhart says, the Atman which is akin to or even identical with Brahman. The Gita, like all other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, justifies God’s ways to man by affirming —and the affirmation is based upon observation and immediate experience—that man can, if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfness and so come to union with timeless Spirit. It affirms, too, that the Avatar becomes incarnate in order to assist human beings to achieve this union. This he does in three ways—by teaching the true doctrine in a world blinded by voluntary ignorance; by inviting souls to a ‘carnal love*
of his humanity, not indeed as an end in itself, but as the means to spiritual love-knowledge of Spirit; and finally by serving as a channel of grace.
God who is Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and for his own sake; but God in time is normally worshipped by material means with a view to achieving temporal ends. God-in time is manifestly the destroyer as well as the creator; and because this is so, it has seemed proper to worship him by methods which are as terrible as the destructions he himself inflicts. Hence, in India, the blood sacrifices to Kali, in her aspect as Nature-the-Destroyer; hence those offerings of children to ‘the Molochs,’ denounced by the Hebrew prophets; hence the human sacrifices practised, for example, by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Druids, the Aztecs. In all such cases the divinity addressed was a god in time, or a personification of Nature, which is nothing else but Time itself, the devourer of its own offspring; and in all cases the purpose of the rite was to obtain a future benefit or to avoid one of the enormous evils which Time and Nature for ever hold in store. For this it was thought to be worth while to pay a high price in that currency of suffering, which the Destroyer so evidently valued. The importance of the temporal end justified the use of means that were intrinsically terrible, because intrinsically time-like. Sublimated traces of these ancient patterns of thought and behaviour are still to be found in certain theories of the Atonement, and in the conception of the Mass as a perpetually repeated sacrifice of the God-Man.
In the modern world the gods to whom human sacrifice is offered are personifications, not of Nature, but of man’s own, home-made political ideals. These, of course, all refer to events in time—actual events in the past or the present, fancied events in the future. And here it should be noted that the philosophy which affirms the existence and the immediate realizableness of eternity is related to one kind of political theory and practice; the philosophy which affirms that what goes on in time is the only reality, results in a different kind of theory and justifies quite another kind of political practice. This has been clearly recognized by Marxist writers,* who point out that when Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a ‘revolutionary religion,’ and that when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture are but symbols, it becomes politically ‘static’ and ‘reactionary.’
This Marxian account of the matter is somewhat oversimplified. It is not quite true to say that all theologies and philosophies whose primary concern is with time, rather than eternity, are necessarily revolutionary. The aim of all revolutions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past. But some time-obsessed philosophies are primarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world—in a future, where everyone will be happy because all are doing and, thinking something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, something old, traditional and hallowed. And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it. The Inquisition burns and tortures in order to perpetuate a creed, a ritual and an ecclesi-astico-politico-financial organization regarded as necessary to men’s eternal salvation. Bible-worshipping Protestants figbt long and savage wars, in order to make the world safe for what they fondly imagine to be the genuinely antique Christianity of apostolic times. Jacobins and Bolsheviks are ready to sacrifice millions of human lives for the sake of a political and economic future gorgeously unlike the present.
And now all
- See, for example, Professor J. B. S. Haldane’s The Marxist Philosophy and the Europe and most of Asia has had to be sacrificed to a crystal-gazer’s vision of perpetual Co-Prosperity and the Thousand-Year Reich. From the records of
