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 “unmoved time,” that is, of “eternity,” since “eternity…is time when it ceases from movement, and time is eternity in motion, so that eternity…is time deprived of movement, while time is eternity measured by movement” [Ambigua]. “Eternity” is the time of the fullness of the personal relationship between man and God, because time “is deprived of movement” only when “nature is united immediately with Providence.” 

At the non-dimensional boundaries of this “union,” that is of the fullness of the personal immediacy of man and God, nature “finds Providence a principle (logos) which by natureis simple and stable, and is not subject to any circumscription at all, and therefore is entirely without movement.” Circumscription signifies a boundary, a barrier, a limitation. It signifies objective individuality and, consequently, movement “from something to something”—it signifies the limitation or the destruction of non-dimensional personal immediacy. Consequently, in the physical world of objects, the personal ec-stasy of nature is necessarily measured as time and “movement in accordance with life has become a source of change for what exists in time,” because the world is a “limited stasis” in comparison with the unbounded and non-dimensional immediacy of personal relation with God. The movement that causes change in temporal nature refers to a breaking of relations—not to the natural condition of “him in whom the monad has come to be”—and is revealed as the “estrangement” of time and decay. Only “when it has come to be in God” does nature transcend time, transcend stasis and movement, “and will possess an ever-moving stasis and a stable ever-movement, having come to have its being eternally that which is same and one and alone” [To Thalassius].


An angel holding an image of time—Church of the Holy Saviour, Chora. 

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