Do not take this book with you to the beach this summer. I thought this was going to be an easy read, and while that expectation got shot down after the first few pages, it is well worth the effort in the end.
The author is an expert on the meaning of time. François Hartog is a professor emeritus at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. In 2015 Columbia University published his book Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. Like this book, Chronos, it is part of their European Perspectives series. Chronos was translated from French by S. R. Gilbert.
First, to the title of the book. Hartog’s brief definition of Chronos is ‘ordinary time.’ For the ancient Greeks, Chronos was the primordial god at the origin of the cosmos. For human endeavours, our point of origin is Anaximader in the 6th century BCE. For him, “Chronos is not a god, yet there is an ‘order of time’ linked with justice. Tracing a line from creation to destruction ‘according to obligation,’ he declares that ‘beings pay the penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the order of time.’”
So what does this mean? Hartog tells us in stark terms. “Here we find the earliest indication of a cyclical time that renders a judgement.” This cyclical nature of time would eventually clash with the Christian concept of time, but both paths lead to a judgement. Which, in Christian terms, is the infamous Last Judgement. Many people have believed for centuries that it is immanent, with many ‘seers’ even in recent times so bold and so foolish as to give us a date when it will happen.
Hartog puts his finger on St. Augustine as a Creator of sorts. It traces to a few lines he wrote in The Confessions around 400 AD. But what is AD? The very construct of our Western sense of time is the grand subject of this book. Augustine posed the pregnant question “For what is time?” To answer it, he doubled Chronos by “combining an immortal, unchanging, atavistic time that encircles the universe with a transitory human time.” In effect, he “contrasts the eternity of God with human temporality, itself the outcome of Adam’s sin. The Fall is a fall in time.” This is the first of several bombshells that Hartog detonates in front of the unwary reader. While it may not be an entirely new thought for theologians who spend their lives on these matters, the description of the Fall as a fall in time is enough to make anyone sit up and take notice. And all this comes before the first chapter of the book! (I hesitate to use the word ‘before,’ as even that is likely freighted with meaning in such a book).
Augustine was not the first to double Chronos: the Greeks themselves split it into chronos and Kairos. Hartog describes this as a “remarkable invention: the Greeks were able to seize time by fabricating a net 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 decisive moment.” Now as every physicist knows, the relationship between objects, such as a star and an orbiting planet, can be described with precise mathematics. But add another object and we are confronted with the three-body problem, which has no precise solution.
Just as the reader is getting comfortable with the chronos-kairos pair, Hartog add krisis. “Although not in itself temporal, it affects time. Krisis pertains less to the crisis itself, in our modern sense, than to a judgement and its consequences…What will become Europe’s time, then the time of the Western world, long bore the marks of this Greek trio.”
Now, it is time to move on to a consideration of chapter one! (Please excuse the drollery). Here we start to get into the weeds of Christian thought. As Judgement Day (Krisis) approaches, “Kairos takes on the role of the blast of the apocalypse.”
The very use of the word ‘day’ in conjunction with Judgement does not escape the author’s notice. “To speak conventionally of the ‘day’ of judgement is to insert it into ordinary time – yes, a day is coming – except that it will be the final day (at least, of the ordinary chronos time) and the beginning of another time, the time of kairos…Within the orbit of Krisis, Kairos gives a name” to the time between the ‘now’ and the Final Judgement.”
The next bombshell detonates on the appropriately numbered page 13. Hartog looks to the time between AD 70 and 90, when the Gospels were drawn up. “How were they going to use Kairos and Krisis?” he asks. His answer is to quote Jesus from these texts. “Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” So much for the Prince of Peace! I bet you won’t hear that quote next Christmas.
On a calmer note, I found Hartog’s description of history to be pertinent. “History is predictive, so long as it knows how to listen and see. The present is the key to grasping the past – more precisely, the events of the present reveal past events unrealized until then.”
Moving along, people started to create calendars. “Calendrical time,” Hartog tells us, “divides the year into positive and negative days, directly linking God to days. In other words, chronos intersects with Kairos.” The Christian calendar was in fact a liturgical calendar: “it obeys a sequence of holy days that energise calendrical time by replacing cycles with a time centered on a single point.” This is key. “Ancient cyclical times is antithetical to Christian time.”
Gradually, he writes, dating practices shifted from Anno Mundi, the Year of Creation, to Anno Domini (AD), Year of the Lord. (In modern scientific texts, AD has been replaced by CE, the Common Era, reflecting its break with religious-based time.) “How did Kairos becomes chronos?,” asks Hartog. It may come as a surprise that the “evangelists were unconcerned about chronology,” but when people felt the (utterly pointless) need to date the Crucifixion or the Creation, chronology became big business. “As Anno Domini gained supremacy, Chronos, pinioned in the mesh of Kairos and Krisis, looked utterly defeated.”
The status quo pretty much held until the age of Enlightenment. Thanks to the French philosopher Condorcet, the Christian system lost control. “He traces human perfectibility to the cardinal ability to receive sensations, declaring ‘truly indefinite’ a ‘progress’ that has ‘no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.’” Hartog gives us a key revelation in this. “While Concorcet wrote of ‘progressions,’ soon enough the singular collective ‘progress’ prevailed, the nineteenth century’s god of progress, emblematic of modern time.” And thus we find ourselves in the present, the Anthropocene, which Hartog discusses quite brilliantly.
He notes that Chateaubriand concluded that his era (the late 1700s) was situated within a double impossibility: that of the past and that of the future.
“Today we may feel that we find ourselves, in our turn, caught in a double impossibility of past and future.” As Hartog writes in his Introduction, “Nothing truly human is foreign to time – nothing escapes from its grip, its domination.” If you have time, I recommend reading Hartog’s book.
The book has one typo. On pg. 144 “do no harm” should read “does no harm”
CHRONOS: The West Confronts Time is by Columbia University Press. It lists for $35 hardcover.
Image: Creator: Brankospejs | Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
