The Personal Dimension of Time
An excerpt from Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros , trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), 133–34. Aristotle was the first, in consequence of his understanding of time as numbered movement, to define the “between” of before and after as the indivisible unit of numbered time, the “now,” which being indivisible is also unmoved—the nothingness of movement and time [ Physics ]. But Aristotle also interprets the now as a “middle-point” which at the same time includes the beginning and the end (“the now is a kind of middle-point, uniting as it does in itself both a beginning and an end”) and this definition permitted Byzantine thought to see in the now the continuous present of personal immediacy. John Damascene defines the now as time “without quantity,” [ Dialectica 40.52] and Basil the Great refers the now to the divine “perception” of time, which knows no motion or change [ On Isaiah 119]. Maximus the Confessor sees in the now the truth of “un