Saturday, March 26, 2016

Time in Heaven

Previously I wrote about Paul J. Griffiths' reckoning of the Augustinian perspective of time -- specifically, how the distinction between metronomic time and systolic time helps makes sense of the truth that time was both created to be good and is also currently in a fallen, corrupted state. The metronome describes present time -- the tick-tocking countdown to death; the systole describes healed time -- the life-giving, blood-gathering heartbeat of our lives being folded into God's light. By describing systolic time differently from metronomic time, Griffiths provides a way to think about life after death. In that future reality, which Christians call heaven, we remain temporal -- no creature can be eternal like God is, even in resurrected glory -- while being freed from the constraints of our present death-time. In short, the systole gathers up and heals the metronome.

Griffiths' work on last things is quite more extensive than this distinction between two kinds of temporality. His book Decreation, which attempts to describe the future state of all created things, is based on the premise that creatures -- that is, anything other than God -- can only have a future that is without novelty. To put it another way, after heaven (or hell), a creature cannot achieve anything else -- there is nothing newer than that to follow this state of "lastness." (Griffiths uses the Latin word novissimum, related to the English word for new, as an overall category for last things.)

According to Griffiths, there are only three possible last things for us creatures -- meaning, these are the only conditions without novelty: annihilation, simple stasis, or repetitive stasis. Annihilation is to come to nothing -- to cease to exist. The second last thing -- simple stasis -- has no movement or change at all. Simple stasis is not like the systolic heartbeat of worship; Griffiths doesn't spend much time explaining it, because this state is the precise definition of boredom and, eventually, death. Rather, his descriptions of the third state -- repetitive stasis -- make up the essential arguments of this book. Repetitive stasis is complex, cycling through a series of events, even if that cycle is repetitive and does not produce any novelty.

Some people understand Griffiths to mean that resurrected humans in heaven will not change. It seems that in one sense this is true, hence his use of the word stasis. However, I think that any movement, even if it is just back and forth between the same two places -- like the movement of a beating heart between the contraction and relaxation of its muscles -- implies change, and the "repetitive" part of Griffiths' formulation implies that heaven will indeed consist of changes. Griffiths' point is that these changes won't be novel -- after the resurrection humans will not experience new states of glory.

In my opinion, the option that Griffiths too-quickly rules out (something which others have noted) is that God might allow for resurrected human beings to develop and grow as part of their final state. Griffiths calls this condition "epektasy" and simply says that such a possibility is not compatible with Christian thought. After my first reading of the book, I'm still unconvinced. Indeed, it seems that there should be a way to both account for the healing of metronomic time and allow for post-resurrection growth "from glory to glory."

Stay tuned as I continue to work this out in future posts. It seems that music should be able to provide a way of understanding the cycles of time within an overall directionality.


Saturday, March 19, 2016

Augustine on Time

St. Augustine looking up from
his writing to check the clock?
"There's no time like the present." Yes, but does that actually mean that the present is all that exists -- that the past and the future do not? Augustine would say that's so, based on what he learned from Plato, who believed that our current time is an incomplete imitation of "real" time -- that is, eternity. As a scholar who strove for precision, Augustine worked hard to eliminate ambiguity, writing:
Everything past now does not exist, everything future does not yet exist, therefore nothing past and nothing future exists.
Augustine felt that our current experience with time -- indeed, time itself -- is fallen. Humanity is trapped in this less-than-perfect prison of minutes and seconds ticking away in succession. Furthermore, our present time is dispersed out into the future and past, leading to change and chaos, witnessed in the fact that both our memories and expectations are imperfect. To Augustine, the only thing that is free from that chaos and change is that which is also free from time: God. Since God is the only thing that is perfect, and since God is eternal and not bound by time, then time itself cannot be perfect.

That logic is difficult to argue with. But it doesn't seem to account for the fact that an eternal God, who while not bound by time, nonetheless created time before the Fall. Genesis 1 states clearly that God created the universe in and with a succession of events, one thing following another: "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." How does Augustine deal with the fact that God created as "good" this imperfect, ticking-away state of temporality, a state that existed even before the Fall? I'm not convinced that Augustine ever reconciled this tension.

Paul J. Griffiths, Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School, tries to explain time as both God-created and fallen by dividing it up into two categories: metronomic and systolic. Metronomic time is the tick-tock state of measurable duration (think hours, minutes, and seconds) in which we now live. This is not the time that God created -- it is an effect of the Fall that kicked in once death was introduced to the cosmos. In other words, we live in an age in which all things end in death. However, God intended a rather different variety of time -- that of the systole. This is the gathered-up, expectancy-laden kind of time that God wanted us creatures to experience from the beginning. Instead of being locked into the stop-watch-timed, calendar-driven, marching-to-death counting off of the metronome, the systole (think of the systolic measurement of your blood pressure) is a tensed-up, ready-for-action life-giving time. This Edenic and heavenly time is always pulsing, ready to draw us into God's loving presence. By making this distinction, Griffiths' book Decreation, helps us understand how time itself can be both created for good and corrupted by death.


Saturday, March 12, 2016

Music Endangerment & Disappearing Cultural Traditions

The Global Forum on Arts and Christian Faith has just published Todd Saurman's book review of Music Endangerment: How Language Maintenance Can Help by Catherine Grant. Todd is an ethnomusicologist who has worked in Asia for more than two decades, laboring beside musicians and artists of minority culture groups that fear the loss of their languages and artistic forms. Preservation of dying traditions has been a concern of ethnomusicologists from the beginning, but our discipline trains ethnographers to go into the world to analyze and describe musical performances -- we are not by nature community organizers or policy makers. Linguists and educators tend to be a little bit ahead when it comes to devising strategies for maintaining and revitalizing the world's dying languages. That's why we welcome Catherine Grant's attempt to bridge the worlds of language planning and music research, giving ethnomusicologists some tools for moving from analysis to advocacy.

Make sure to read Saurman's review for yourself, if not the entire book. But here are a couple of important points that I noted :
  • Frameworks are great, even necessary, for making plans with a local community. Indeed, Grant offers a twelve-step Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework, which prompts planners to investigate factors such as the degree of intergenerational transmission of music practices. Saurman notes that even with a comprehensive framework, an ethnomusicologist's tendency to view music holistically -- that is, touching on all aspects of people's lives -- helps prevent organizers and planners from taking a perspective that is too narrow. In traditional societies, music and dance often create the very cultural structures that allow for food production, trade, and warfare. Music is not just an "extra" component of culture.

  • Music, like language, is a form of communication. Of course a song doesn't communicate in the same way as a written essay, but ignoring the communicative function of indigenous music may cause a policy planner to miss an important aspect of music in the lives of the people. In many societies, music communicates important information -- some people even sing, rather than say, their most important messages. If a policy-maker wants to revitalize a traditional music system, then it would be a mistake to assume that music just traffics in non-essential, even elitist, meanings like it often does in Western societies.

A Manual for Personal Piety: The Book of Hours

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