@LMSacasas @pauljpastor @jeff_bilbro Yes. Bretherton exposes secularism’s economic-juridical ordering of life. Pressing on, its totalizing administration of life subjects time itself to total administration. Taylor names the frame; Panikkar its temporal ontology; Benjamin, Illich and Agamben reopen it messianically.
@Plough 1/3 The distinction between recovering “higher times” (Taylor) alongside ordinary time, and ordinary time itself as internally open to eternity, is worth sharpening. This, after all, is the messianic counter-move: time broken open to its eternal depth. Panikkar, not unwise, here.
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Except from thread here: 1/3 Taylor's "immanent frame" names a world intelligible on its own terms, where the transcendent is optional, contested, eclipsed. As you note, the seculum arises from repressed ethical and spiritual sources—cosmic meaning-making it cannot admit without destabilizing itself. 2/ Panikkar radicalizes the diagnosis. Secularity's deepest feature, he says—its final idol, its ultimate corruption of Being—is its absolutizing of temporality itself: empty, mechanical time enthroned as the exhaustive measure of Being’s ‘real’ character and horizon. Besides and beyond sociological and historical contingencies, the deepest aspect of secularity is the positive and definitive importance it gives to Time experienced as a constitutive dimension of Being; of Being and Time as inextricably connected. Temporality, that is, belongs to the very essence of Being; the seculum, or ‘real world’ is a temporal world, and temporality its ultimate character. Sacred secularity is an expression meaning that this very secularity is inserted in a reality that is not exhausted by its temporality. Being is temporal, but is also “more” and “other” than this. Now this “more” is no mere juxtaposition—as if eternity, for instance, would arrive “after” time, or as if a supra-temporal Being were temporal “plus” something else, or merely atemporal. Similarly, this “other” is not another Being which does not share temporality. I would use the word tempiternity [radically dissimilar words, ‘temporality’ and ‘eternity’, are juxtaposed and fused to produce a new word] to express this unity. The Cosmotheandric Experience, 1993 Raimon Panikkar
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