@jbralston end/ As for the planetary catholicity of God's coming and arrival, Heschel proffers a Judaic perspective on time itself as the transcendent realm through which concrete political reality is ultimately yoked to the redemption of the future from the power of history. God's Day.
@freddiesayers @EsmeLKPartridge @unherd Perspicacious. Strikingly lucid. Thank you. Traditionalism, ultimately perhaps, a paean to "an architecture of holiness" as Heschel, MLK's closest non-Black ally, describes it, in which the wholeness of reality includes our One Earth community in the unifying metaphysic of Time.
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The boundless continuous but vacuous entity which realistically is called space is not the ultimate form of reality. Our world is a world of space moving through time - from the Beginning to the End of Days. Space is exposed to our will; we may shape and change the things in space as we please. Time, however, is beyond our reach, beyond our power. It is both near and far, intrinsic to all experience and transcending all experience. It belongs exclusively to God. Time then, is otherness, a mystery that hovers above all categories. Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings. It is only within time that there is fellowship and togetherness of all beings. Abraham Joshua Heschel
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We should not speak of the flow or passage of time but of the flow or passage of space through time. Temporality is an attribute of the world of space, of things of space. Time is everlasting. It is the world of space that is perishing. Things perish within time; time itself does not change. A world in time is a world going on through God; realization of an infinite design. A world without time would be a world detached from God, a thing in itself, reality without realization. Time is the presence of God in the world of space, God's gift to the world of space. It is the dimension of time wherein man meets God. It was the vision of the Messianic day in which the hope of restoring the unity of all men was won. It is a moment in time - the Messianic end of days - that will give back to man what a thing in space, the Tower of Babel, had taken away. Abraham Joshua Heschel