That same intellectual intuition which makes available...

That same intellectual intuition which makes available through scientia sacra a principial knowledge of Ultimate Reality also provides a direct intuitive knowledge of the Eternal. It is from this principial, metaphysical point of view that the definition of time seems more problematic than that of eternity to the extent that Saint Augustine could assert that he knew what time was but had difficulty defining it when asked.

Modern analytical philosophers have tried to “solve” the problem of time by simply reducing it to a problem of language and of memory, as if one could explain the immediate experience of time by anything less immediate in such a way that the immediate experience would cease to exist.

The analytical philosophers now speak of before an utterance, with an utterance, and later than an utterance instead of past, present, and future, hoping thereby to deny once and for all the human experience of past, present, and future. They lay the blame for the impossibility of solving the problem of time in classical philosophy on the “myth of passage”2 which views time as a running river.

Some philosophers of science try to associate the very reality of temporality with asymmetrical boundary conditions of physics,3 while others as “idealists” have denied the reality of time altogether.4 There is such a bewildering range of views and opinions concerning time in modern European philosophy that one could conclude that once man loses sight of the Eternal he no longer has any sense of the profound significance of time which has become the alpha and omega of his existence.

He may talk about four-dimensional “world-lines” including and embracing time and space in a unity in the manner of modern physics but can hardly answer why, if he is located on only a limited segment of this four-dimensional complex, he can even speculate about what lies beyond this complex and “where” he as a conscious being will be when the world line about which he is speculating now will reach a point corresponding to the end of his terrestrial life.