Sense and Nonsense: Wrestling with Time

Jean Guitton, the 97-year-old French writer and philosopher, died in Paris on March 27, 1999. In his New York Times obituary, Eric Pace writes, “After imbibing basic religious and ethical principles, Professor Guitton was able to square his Catholic faith with the teachings of science and history in his day” One cannot help but be amused by that sentence. It sounds like Guitton was involved in some latter-day squaring of the circle. Le Monde had an equally entertaining remark: “Guitton was the last of the great Catholic philosophers.” Probably more great Catholic philosophers are alive today than when Guitton flourished—but the media take a while to catch up. Though I had noted his death before, it was this notice that made me attentive to his name. While reading a book by Josef Pieper, the following footnote struck me: “`Sine dolore non vivitur in amore.’ Quoted from J. Guitton, Vom Wesen der Liebe zwischen Mann and Frau [Freiburg 1960], 168.” The Latin citation, evidently from St. Thomas, means that no love is possible without some suffering or grief. True love concerns real human beings, forever subject to the ordinary conditions of mortality and finitude. If we expect otherwise, we will never love or know another human being.

I have Guitton’s 1961 book, Man in Time. The book’s original French title was Justification du temps. The two titles strike me as rather different in emphasis. The French title seems more concerned with defending God, as it were, for creating in time. The first chapter is entitled “Eternity.” Guitton wants to keep the mystery of time, not to absorb it all into changelessness in such a way that no relation survives between the being in time and the same being in eternity.

No doubt, wrestling with time and our presence in this “flow of the now itself” is of particular difficulty. Time, to recall Augustine, is the most perplexing of realities one can ponder. Guitton keeps the many aspects of time together. Now that he himself has completed his journey in the kind of time we are experiencing now, it is striking to read why he thought we still needed some instrument like a body, even in eternity. Some think it better not to be encumbered by a body.

Guitton’s reasons are noteworthy:

But without an analogue for what biology calls the body—or at least without the subsistence of our consciousness and consequently without the persistence of what has been in time—how could the finite being offer that unresisting opposition to the infinite being which it needs in order to enjoy the presence of the infinite without being absorbed in it?

Guitton is speaking as a philosopher. He is not asking about the resurrection of the body, by far the best alternative. He asks what it would mean for a being created in time actually to encounter the infinite. He sees that the ideal is not that being should be re-absorbed into the divine and therefore not be itself any longer. To allow the finite being to remain what it is shows a greater wisdom. Aristotle implied something like this principle when he suggested that in friendship we did not want to stop being ourselves. We would not want happiness if it meant that we ceased to be who we are.

“The first condition of beauty,” Guitton wrote in Man in Time, “is that it corresponds to and is sufficient unto itself.” This is the same point: If God can be described as “beautiful,”—quod visum placet—he must have the option of creating what is beautiful, even if it is not itself God.

Just a few pages before the foot note, Pieper had remarked about joy, “Man can (and wants to) rejoice only when there is a reason for joy. And this reason is, therefore, primary. The joy itself is secondary.” We do not cause our own joy; we receive its cause. The finite human being remains himself even before the divine Beauty. This is man’s joy.

“The idea of the brevity of time serves as a seasoning for pleasure; enjoyment would turn into suffering were it to last, and would perhaps not be bearable if we knew we could have it without hindrance or risk.”

This is the same explanation Chesterton gives for why Christ does not laugh in the Scriptural accounts of Him. For if we knew His “mirth” before the appointed hour, we would despair, even though we are destined to it.

Author

  • Fr. James V. Schall

    The Rev. James V. Schall, SJ, (1928-2019) taught government at the University of San Francisco and Georgetown University until his retirement in 2012. Besides being a regular Crisis columnist since 1983, Fr. Schall wrote nearly 50 books and countless articles for magazines and newspapers.

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