The world is a temple, not a machine. This might all sound esoteric, perhaps only helpful when reading the Bible or other works of the past to better understand how they understood the world around them. I contend and continue to that it really matters, and as we start to grasp it everything begins to change.

We think of time in a very distinctive way, which many of our forebears did not. We think it’s linear, we think it’s homogenous—progressing in ordered sections we call days or years or hours—and we think it’s largely ‘empty,’ a container that is indifferent to what we fill it with.

I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s massive and thoughtful, A Secular Age. One of the first distinctives he pulls out when comparing 1500 to the year 2000 is the way we think about time as ‘homogenous’ and ‘empty.’

Once upon a time… people spoke like that, for a start. Taylor demonstrates that people thought of time as knotty and a bearer of meaning. The word ‘secular’ comes from the Latin saeculum which means an ‘age’ or ‘century.’ It’s a term, originally, about time.

It was used to describe those who weren’t ‘religious.’ Though probably not in the way you think, saeculum was used to describe priests who weren’t monks, because they lived out in the world in ordinary time, rather than having turned away to live nearer eternity. Secular time is roughly what we think all time is. There was also a higher time, such a medieval thinker could think two things that sound whackadoodle to us.

Firstly, that Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac  and the Crucifixion are closer to each other in time than they are centuries apart—in God’s time these two events happen at the same time as they are drawn into eternity.

Secondly, that Good Friday 2022 is closer to the Crucifixion than to the day you’re reading this post. (I’m following Taylor’s argument on 54-61 in these paragraphs.) Neither of these seems obvious to us, we don’t think of the Universe like that at all, and why that’s the case is what Taylor unpacks over the next thousand or so pages.

The medieval conception doesn’t have time as a container, indifferent to what fills it, but instead elevated (and perhaps also demoted) by its content. I don’t necessarily want to argue for the metaphysic that underpinned this different way of viewing the world, but I think we can pin some of the symptoms of our modern malaise on these features.

Two themes in my writing have been the importance of rest and our inability to actually rest. I named the blog after this problem, nuakh is the Hebrew word for rest. One of the reasons that we struggle with rest, thinking it means the same thing as relaxation and that to slouch on a sofa watching TV could have anything at all to do with resting, is that our sense of time has slipped.

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