What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?1
I.
Today we grapple with Time - that alien force, impossible to define, always with us.
I believe that Time loves those of us on the Right, and us alone.
We must learn to love it back.
II.
You exist.
What does it mean that you exist in Time; that every decision that you make becomes immortal and irrevocable? That you cannot help but progress into an unknowable future?
“The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”2
Does this terrify you as it terrifies me? It should. The fear of Time is like the fear of God - and only those that fear God can face life fearlessly.3
III.
Why should we fear Time?
Spengler puts it thus:
As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming - the longing - touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final - our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like birth - our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear of the child - which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist - that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense-phenomena. The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming”, is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.4
As present turns to past, the boundless potential of the future is transformed into irrevocable history, the having-become. These events can be judged. Our worthiness is laid bare, our achievements shown for what they are.
No longer can we tell ourselves that we have potential. One cannot be optimistic about the past. We acted well or we did not. Time sees us for what we are.
IV.
Us Christians are offered no escape.
How can we have free will if God knows everything that we have done, are doing, and will ever do?
The answer is that God exists outside of Time, which is merely a part of his creation.
St. Augustine describes God dwelling “in the sublimity of an ever-present eternity.” He sees all things, not as past / present / future (as we do in Time) but as an eternal present.
Consider: if I watch you sit in a chair, I know that you choose to sit, but this does not mean that you are not free to stand up. I am merely seeing you as you are, as you choose to be at present.
Outside of Time, God views all of your actions in this mode. As St. Thomas Aquinas describes: “[God’s] glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality… His knowledge, which passes over every change of time, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views in its own direct comprehension everything as though it were taking place in the present."5
This revelation is both wonderful and terrifying. Our freedom is a gift; but our actions, our ‘having become’, will be stared upon by God for all eternity.
For the word of God is living and effectual, and more piercing than any two edged sword; and reaching unto the division of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and the marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature invisible in his sight: but all things are naked and open to his eyes...6
V.
Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.7
Fear of Time is the fear of God. I ask you to think of this fear as a blessing.
Unlike the Left, we do not believe that we are passengers on a predetermined arc of history, nor do we believe in the ‘end of history’. We do not believe that our existence is an accident. We do not believe in determinism.
We believe in the soul. In will. In freedom. In greatness and in failure; in good and in evil; in virtue and in sin. In duty and in the responsibility to act.
If we alone believe in the importance of individual agency, then Time is of unique importance to us. We each have but a short window in which to act. What will you do with yours?
This agency places a tremendous weight upon us, yes; and we should fear failing in the moment. But for the higher man, this terror becomes the ultimate source of motivation, of will.
“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”8
Time loves us. It gives us the opportunity to be great. The Right must love it back.
Just as God stares upon our sins for eternity, he bears eternal witness to our most glorious acts.
Have you ever heard anything more divine?
Please consider supporting the continuation of this project by leaving a like or upgrading to paid. It’s hugely appreciated.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Frank Herbert, Dune
Paraphrasing Richard C. Halverson
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Hebrews 4:12-13
Maximus, Gladiator
Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-worship