From the Greeks to the Christians
“Who could find any quick or easy answer to that? Who could even grasp it in his thought clearly enough to put the matter into words? Yet is there anything to which we refer in conversation with more familiarity, any matter of more common experience, than time? . . . What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.”1 Could there be a more lucid presentation of the aporia that constitutes time? This is an aporia in the strictest sense—no road leads to it. Augustine’s formulation of the question interests me more than his answer, namely, that time is the “distension” (distensio) of the spirit. For him, the issue is strictly the psychological conception of time, which he felt he might link to a quantified cosmological time. This meant rejecting Aristotle, for whom motion was the measure of time; Augustine believed that time itself, that ability to extend the mind, made measuring time possible. For Aristotle, by contrast, “we apprehend time only when we have marked motion, marking it by before and after; and it is only when we have perceived before and after in motion that we say that time has elapsed.”2
INTRODUCTION
F OR WHAT is time?” Augustine’s meditation, which opens with these words, is so often cited that it has become the emblematic reflection on time, effectively closing the book on the topic.
As much as it is aporetic, the Greek word Chronos can refer to the site of a puzzlement or the moment of a revelatory quid pro quo. And we have both Chronos, whose etymology is unknown, and Kronos, the mythical figure. Kronos, the son of Uranus and Gaia, famously castrated his father (after his mother had told him to). Having thereby come to power, he wed Rhea, taking care to devour his children as soon as they were born to stave off the possibility one might topple him from power. The outcome of the story is well known. By subjecting Kronos to the same fate he had reserved for his father, Zeus came to rule over gods and humans. We find ourselves in the realm of myths of rulership, myths lacking any connection to time, or only a negative connection, inasmuch as swallowing one’s children is the best way to arrest time. Yet a contamination between Kronos and Chronos has meant that Chronos, ordinary time, has long been seen as the devourer or the scyther, depicted as Saturn devouring his children or Father Time equipped with his scythe.3
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The Greeks had more to say on the subject, and there was an entire mythology that cast Chronos as a primordial god at the origin of the cosmos. We find him in the Orphic theogonies. But, as Jean-Pierre Vernant pointed out, the time thereby sacralized is a time “that does not age,” immortal and indestructible. A principle of unity and permanence, it functions as “the radical negation of human time,” which is, by contrast, always unstable—erasing, sinking into oblivion, leading to death.4 For Anaximander, a pre-Socratic philosopher active in Miletus in the sixth century BC, Chronos is not a god, yet there is an “order of time” (taxis) linked with justice. Tracing a line from creation to destruction “according to obligation,” he declares that “beings . . . pay the penalty [dikê] and retribution [tisis] to each other for their injustice [adikia] according to the order of time.”5 Here we find the earliest indication of a cyclical time that renders a judgment. A link between time and justice would contribute, after many centuries, to the notion of history as the world’s tribunal, though from Anaximander to Hegel extends the whole of Christianity’s temporal mechanism, culminating in the Final Judgment.
Such mythological configurations set out to capture Chronos by deploying a doubled time, combining an immortal, unchanging, atavistic time that encircles the universe with a transitory human time.
While Aristotle formulates a definition that deviates from this, his teacher Plato acknowledges it in his definition of time as the “moving image of eternity.” On one side we find the world of the immortal deities, while on the other is “our world,” created by the demiurge working with the former as his model. But in his effort to improve the likeness, Plato ran into a paradox, the opposition between an immortal life and a created life. The best compromise is to think of time as a mobile image of eternity, its mobility due to a numerical advance. This leads to the birth of the sun, the moon, and the other heavenly bodies; all “have come into being to define and preserve the measures of time.”6Augustine draws on the elements of this Greek background that suit his argument: the doubling of time and the contrast between eternity and time. So, in order to get at time, he deploys a twofold strategy. As we have just recalled, he considers time—posing the question, “What is time?”—through a phenomenological approach. He also considers it by contrasting the eternity of God with human temporality, itself the outcome of Adam’s sin and the sign of the resulting limits to humanity. The Fall is a fall in time.
“You are ever the same,” says Augustine in his dialogue with God, “and your years fail not. Your years do not come and go. Our years pass and new ones arrive only so that all may come in turn, but your years stand all at once, because they are stable: there is no pushing out of vanishing years by those that are coming on, because with you none are transient. In our case, our years will be complete only when there are none left. Your years are a single day, and this day of yours is not a daily recurrence, but a simple ‘Today,’ because your Today does not give way to tomorrow, nor follow yesterday. Your Today is eternity.”7
INTRODUCTION: FROM THE GREEKS TO THE CHRISTIANS 3 DOUBLED CHRONOS
The Christian order of time owes everything to this handful of sentences. With God, the “I am that I am,” we find eternity, an unending
At the end of his long investigation into time and narrative, Paul Ricoeur, that acute reader of Augustine, acknowledges “the inscrutability of time.” Is this, he wonders, an admission of defeat? No, rather an acknowledgment of the limitations of narrative, whose brief “consists less in resolving these aporias [of time] than in putting them to work, in making them productive.” He continues, “This aporia springs forth at the moment when time, escaping any attempt to constitute it, reveals itself as belonging to a constituted order always already presupposed by the work of constitution. That is what is expressed by the word ‘inscrutability.’ ”9 All time thought is time narrated—that much he had shown. But narrative itself must encounter its own limitations. Ricoeur casts his thoughts back to the ending of Proust’s book: “Nor is it an accident that Remembrance of Things Past ends with the words ‘in the dimension of Time.’ ‘In’ is no longer taken here in the ordinary sense of a location in some vast container, but in the sense . . . where time contains all things—including the narrative that tries to make sense of this.”10
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today or an absolute present, while with man it is quite the opposite— the years come and go, one on the heels of another, until all have been spent. The result is a near paradox: time exists only because it very nearly does not. Thus the past has ceased to be, the future has yet to be, and the present would, if always present, be eternity. Time is both destroyed and created by the same action. Only faith, which holds out the hope of returning to eternity’s permanence, offers a refuge from the scattering across time, “where all,” writes Augustine, “is confusion to me. In the most intimate depths of my soul my thoughts are torn to fragments by tempestuous changes.”8
I shall preserve only the conclusion of Ricoeur’s long meditation, a work that begins as a dialogue with Augustine and Aristotle and goes on by casting countless narrative nets in which the author hopes to trap Chronos, forcing a showdown. I shall not revisit the key moments of the battle, nor shall I discuss the outcome; I shall only note it. “Time seems to emerge victorious from the struggle, after having been held captive in the lines [or net] of the plot.” And here, in pursuing the thought, Ricœur sets out his philosophical position: “It is good that it should be so. It ought not to be said that our eulogy to narrative unthinkingly has given life again to the claims of the
“The word kairos may refer to a crucial moment, a strategic location, or a vital part of the anatomy where a wound may prove lethal. Each of these involves a cleavage, a rupture in the continuity of space and time.”12 Poseidippos of Pella, in a well-known epigram, gives voice to Lysippos’s sculptural embodiment of Kairos as a young man (ca. 330 “WhoBC):and from where is the sculptor?” “From Sicyon.” “And his name?” “Lysipposs.” “And who are you?” “Kairos, the all-subduer.”
constituting subject to master all meaning.”11 On that note ends philosophy’s most sustained and powerful recent effort to investigate the ultimate “inscrutability” of Western time. CHRONOS, KAIROS
Elusive and inscrutable, Chronos may escape, but simply pointing that out was never the plan. As our hasty survey has shown, humans labored incessantly, resorting to strategies simple and elaborate, to weave what they took to be the nets most likely to provide a glimpse of him, or at the least to negotiate a compromise with him. The Greeks also developed a strategy, that of doubling Chronos, that deserves attention since it will allow us to initiate the inquiry at the heart of this book. I have previously noted the doubling of time by contrasting an “unaging” time with the unstable time of mortals. Mediated by Plato and neoPlatonists, this is the backdrop against which Augustine develops his cogitations on time and eternity. But now we have a different strategy— the splitting of Chronos into chronos and kairos—with a more practical outcome due to its impact on our everyday chronos time and actions. For here is a remarkable invention: the Greeks were able to seize time by fabricating a net (to employ a venatic device) from the chronos and kairos pair. Kairos differed fundamentally from chronos, which is our measurable, flowing time; it opens on the instant, the unexpected, but also the opportunity to be seized, the crucial opening, the decisive moment. By bestowing a name on kairos we grant it a status, and we acknowledge that human time, which is to say that of wellregulated action, is a blend of chronos time and kairos time.
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“Why did the artist fashion you?” “For your sake, stranger, and he set me up in the portico as a lesson.”13 No doubt to inspire the athletes who competed there, the statue was set at the entryway to the stadium at Olympia. It has vanished, but copies have survived. It should be noted that Kairos was never a leading deity, and few traces of his worship remain. The challenge of fashioning an allegory of Kairos, every bit as elusive as Chronos, was resolved by Lysippos with brio, and he endowed the young man with all the attributes of kairos: agility, liveliness, the opening for seizing him by the hair (which must not be missed), the razor blade.
While tragic heroes also encounter kairos, they invariably serve as counterexamples, missing every opportunity at the very instant they were certain they had triumphed. Here is a crisis that must end in failure, as is clear from the outset. One by one every escape route is sealed, decisions misfire, and every effort goes awry. Many end up blind. So it is that in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, the city’s ruler, Eteocles, declares early on, “He must speak home [ta kairia] that in the ship’s prow watches the event and guides the rudder,” meaning, his words must be in keeping with present circumstances. He thereupon commits his city to a perilous path that leads straight to disaster. Throughout the play, Thebes is compared to a ship, its ruler the pilot—who will succeed if he seizes opportunities and follows the correct route. The Messenger therefore enjoins Eteocles to act by seizing “quickest opportunity [kairos].” Later on, the Messenger repeats that it is up to the king to decide what efforts need to be made.14
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The tragedies convey the feeling that escape is impossible, using the image of a net falling on the protagonists, encircling them, cutting them off. Time is the jailer, and it severs any links to the city’s everyday time—no one will seize time in a net by getting a bead on
“Why do you stand on tip-toe?” “I am always running.” “Why do you have a pair of wings on your feet?” “I fly with the wind.” “Why do you hold a razor in your right hand?” “As a sign to men that I am sharper than any sharp edge.” “And why is your hair over your face?” “For the one who meets me to grasp at, by Zeus.” “And why is the back of your head bald?” “Because none whom I have once raced by on my winged feet will now, though he wishes it, take hold of me from behind.”
A third concept, krisis, should be added to the chronos-kairos pair. Although not in itself temporal, it affects time. Krisis, meaning judgment, comes from the verb krinein, meaning to separate, to slice, to select, to submit to adjudication. Here again, as perhaps with the etymologies of chronos and kairos, we encounter the action of cutting, which is transformed into, as it were, a shrinking of time, the genesis of a before and an after. In Thucydides, krisis means an adjudication, by extension a trial, as well as the peculiar judgment rendered by battle. The Persian wars, he notes, were soon decided: two land battles and two naval battles.17 Krisis pertains less to the crisis itself, in our modern sense, than to a judgment and its consequences.18 Kairos and krisis can be allied, then, through their connection to the notion of the decisive moment.
The brothers Eteocles and Polynices come to believe that “if Gods give ill, no man may shun their giving” when they prove unable to shake off the verdict of Zeus or the curse hurled at them by their father, Oedipus.15 Broadly speaking, whoever lacks the ability to determine the right moment will never intervene effectively in the course of events. If they do manage to recover their sight, it is surely too late, and the battle has been lost.16 Tragedies play out as explorations of a place without kairos time, a world where characters are always out of synch, their relation to time unsettled. And never can they return to a proper chronos time, that standard guide for regulated urban life, because their every attempt goes awry.
KRISIS
Krisis has been extensively explored by medical science. Physicians of the Hippocratic school speak of “the crisis of an illness when it increased, diminished, resolved into another illness, or ended.”19 The term applies to both the death and the recovery of a patient. Every decisive—or at least every significant—moment in the course of an illness is therefore a crisis. The medical arts are a discipline devoted to crisis. After a diagnosis comes a prognosis, pinpointing the rhythm of the crisis, which must include determining or recognizing the frequency of those climaxes (akmê) or “critical days.” The practiced eye
INTRODUCTION: FROM THE GREEKS TO THE CHRISTIANS 7
good kairos .
of the physician detects, beneath the seeming chaos of the sickness, an order of time.20 This procedure renders an intervention possible, as the “suitable moments” (kairoi ) are seized. At first sickness seems to belong to a time that eludes all pursuit, medical science involves drawing that time toward chronos time, plotting the regularity of critical days and making a timely (en kairô) intervention possible. To grasp the true time of the illness, the physician must possess a keen sense of how to combine the three concepts— chronos, kairos, and krisis. Chronos is both the beginning point and the terminus. As to kairos and krisis, these are the troops whose canny disposition can mean victory over the chaos of the illness, so long as it is inscribed in a well-regulated chronos time.
What was the goal of this introductory orientation? To confirm the general sense that Chronos always eludes capture, but also to add that the effort to capture it has never ceased, which has generally meant splitting it in two. For some this division has produced time and eternity—or sempiternity (aiôn)—and for others, chronos and kairos, time and the decisive moment. Krisis has now joined the second pair, as the third operative concept. The fields of medicine and of tragic drama discretely indicate how krisis, which belongs to the same semantic field as kairos, draws on both chronos and kairos. Another justification for going from chronos-kairos to the trio chronoskairos-krisis is historical: as soon as we enter the universe of the Bible and the New Testament, Krisis becomes a central concept. And that is where we will now go, as Christian time becomes our first topic. Krisis advances to an eminent position, that of a final, incontrovertible judgment. Kairos, nearing Krisis, enters its sphere of influence, as it were, representing the decisive instant, Judgment Day. This trio will persist, but we shall see that the relations among its members will undergo a radical transformation. Outstripping Chronos, first Krisis then Kairos dominates the others, in keeping with the surging power of the Incarnation. That Greek preamble made possible a description of Christian time—what is was made of, what its texture was, how its warp and
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weft interwove. The transit from one universe to the other took place at a very precise moment, when seventy-two scholars translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. This momentous and quite contingent procedure opened a communications link between the two realms, the concepts that articulate time underwent a change, and soon a new net cast by the Christians will entangle Chronos—who will not soon break free. What will in due course become Europe’s time, then the time of the Western world, long bore the marks of this Greek trio, chronos, kairos, krisis, perhaps until today. Here is a new age of Chronos, an unprecedented reckoning with it.
—SIR GEOFFREY LLOYD, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK | PRINTEDCUP.COLUMBIA.EDUINTHEU.S.A.
—ETHAN KLEINBERG, AUTHOR OF HAUNTING HISTORY: FOR A DECONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH TO THE PAST
PRAISE FOR Chronos
“In this brilliant, original, and profound book, François Hartog takes further his critical analyses of the sources and legacies of modern Western assumptions about time. He brings to light their urgent relevance to us today as we face challenges such as climate change, the Anthropocene, and potential global geopolitical catastrophe.”
“This book, masterfully translated by S. R. Gilbert, will undoubtedly become a classic. A Christian ‘revolution in time’ led from Greek Chronos to Augustine’s self to modern change and to the Anthropocene. Beautifully written, this is a book for everyone who wants to know why our time is what it is.”
“With characteristic elegance, wit, and erudition, François Hartog, the master thinker of historical time, offers a panoramic view of the past to show how a temporal order (re)fashioned by Christianity endures to this day and shapes our crisis-ridden sense of the present. This is a longue durée perspective on the Anthropocene that only someone with Hartog’s learning and brilliance could have provided. An indispensable guide to the present.”
—DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, AUTHOR OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: POSTCOLONIAL THOUGHT AND HISTORICAL DIFFERENCE
—NITZAN LEBOVIC, APTER CHAIR OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES AND ETHICAL VALUES, LEHIGH UNIVERSITY
“Chronos is a magisterial book, breathtaking in scope and precision. I cannot think of another historian who could have written this book in this way. Hartog uniquely possesses the intellectual expertise and range to lead the reader through a sweeping history of the concept of time in the ‘West,’ beginning with the Greeks in antiquity and ending with our current periodization of the Anthropocene. It is an important work on one of the most pressing topics of our day.”