We are about halfway through this book, folks. It’s always a good thing to stand up and defend your position against better educated people. Boman is not stupid, but he has his own biases. Mine have been discussed here often enough.
Chapter 3: Time and Space
Section A: The Greek-European Conception of Time
Some of you may recall when Catacomb Resident Blog reviewed the book by Matthieu Pageau about the symbolism of Hebrew language in Genesis. Space was building and bringing order, while time dissolved building and brought rest, and it was all a balance between two hands of God. Here, Boman notes that Hebrew culture seems to focus more on time while the Euro-Grecian thought more in terms of space. Indeed, the Hebrew depiction of man’s increasing depravity over time was told by the Greeks spatially.
Notably, the intrusion of spatial thinking in early church teaching represents the intrusion of Hellenism. Meanwhile, the reason the Greek philosophers spent so much effort dwelling on time is because it was challenging; space came naturally to them and was largely taken for granted.
Somehow Boman assumes that, because he embraces the JEPD Theory, folks in the Garden and shortly after were vegetarians, not eating meat until after the Flood. He discusses how the Greeks viewed human history as a myth of several stages of mankind from near gods to rather common folks we have today. The descent from one stage to the next was not a matter of fallen nature, but varied as Greek tales do. The races were gold, silver, copper, a race of heroes, and then a race of iron. With the Hebrews, it’s more of a steady decline.
There was also the Greek mythology of special places in the world where various levels of paradise can be found — again, the emphasis on space. The western conception of time is a straight line, and all our verb tenses are based on how near to or far from us things and events are. The future is in front of us and the past behind. About the only mention of natural cycles is used as a means of measuring the passage of time. It’s focused on the solar cycles. Notice how the view of time is itself spatial in description and how we talk about it — lines, circles, even the math that considers a 4th dimension.
Boman refers to Kant’s discussions of time as something of a climax for western notions. His main point is that Kant insists that time is entirely subjective in the sense that it cannot exist outside of a conscious being who senses it. He tries to merge scientific time with psychological time. Plato, on the other hand, distinguishes the two. For Plato, eternity is static and unchanging, while physical time is moving and can be segmented. But the sense of past, present and future is psychological time. Both physical and psychological time merge in our conscious awareness. And time is merely a shadowy reflection of eternity.
Eternity is perfect peace and beauty in Plato. It is untouched by the ravages of time as our world is. Thus, Plato and Aristotle agree that time is a bad thing, a destroyer. Pageau agrees in principle, but not in the full discussion of the Hebrew thinking about it. We’ll see if Boman gets it right.
One of the big takeaways I have after reading the Ground of History, is that Greeks clamored to live beyond death through the state. The state contuining beyond an individual’s death meant that the individual lived on in some way, into the future. I got the impression they took it very seriously, which is part of why Greek public figures were viewed as divine agents, able to mark history with their presence.