The One and the Many by W. Norris Clarke S.J

Author:W. Norris Clarke S.J. [S.J., W. Norris Clarke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI013000 PHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics
ISBN: 9780268077044
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2015-11-30T06:00:00+00:00

II. FURTHER QUESTIONS ON TIME

1. Human time as a continuous flow. The kind of time we humans live in because of our insertion in the material world, and so tend to identify with the meaning of time without qualification, is time as a continuous flow, an unbroken continuum of many phases succeeding each other without a break. The type of such motion is local motion, partly because all the changes we are familiar with in the material world involve some continuous local motion, partly because our public standards of measurement of time are all based on local motion (e.g., sun-time), which, at least as it appears to us in our world, is a continuous flow.

But we should not conclude that all time is, or must be, of the same continuous type. Outside of our material world, in a world of immaterial spirits (like angels), there would indeed be real change and succession. But it would consist in a series of instantaneous leaps of spiritual action (knowing and willing), which succeed one another but have no time flow within them, each coming to rest but without any internal motion between the instantaneous, indivisible acts. This would be a process of discontinuous change and time, quite unlike ours. It does not seem that such time could be measured by any outside standard, though it could be numbered internally (e.g., a five-act angel, a ten-act angel, etc.—the more powerful the angel’s mind, the fewer the acts needed and the richer the content in each one, according to St. Thomas’s and other medievals’ speculation). The medievals called these discontinuous phases in the life of a spirit, not an hour, or a year, etc., like our time, but an aevum (an epoch, or era), i.e., one instantaneous spiritual act, followed by a motionless rest, then another such act, and so on. Beyond this lies the timeless NOW of God’s eternal mode of being beyond all change and succession, present to all moments of change in their successive “nows,” but not pinned down within any, transcending all time-sequences of all types of change, material and spiritual alike. Thus we cannot properly “time” the duration in existence of either God or angels, though the acts of an angel’s spiritual life could be compared as before and after.

2. Flow of time not under our control. Why is it that the flow of time as experienced by us humans seems to flow at the same even, regular rate, outside of our control, so that we would like to speed it up or slow it down, according to our changing desires, but cannot? We must be resigned to waiting for things to happen in their own proper time, not under our control. This is because most of the real changes that are the basis of time for us are physical processes beyond our conscious control (growing up through fixed stages, biological and psychological, beyond our voluntary control, etc.) and also because all our public standards of reference for measuring time

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