Here's a question:
Why do temporal experiences, those moments of pleasure, of insight, of joy, so often awaken desires that temporal existence cannot finally satisfy?
In simple terms we can say that human beings are capable of experiencing finite things as if they disclose something infinite. Beauty, love, memory, achievement and moments of profound presence are genuinely good, but they are all subject to time.
Yet our response to them can exceed their temporal boundaries: we do not merely enjoy them; we want them to last. We want to possess what cannot be possessed, to return to what cannot be recovered, and to make permanent what is passing.
Here I explore the proposition that this is not simply a psychological defect. It may be a clue to what human beings are. We are creatures living in a time bound state, who nevertheless have an orientation towards the eternal. Thus the failure of finite things to satisfy us completely may not mean that they were inadequate gifts.
Here are six writers who give us six different versions of that proposition.
Augustine — the restless heart
In Confessions, Book I, we read: 'You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.'
Augustine gives us perhaps the simplest theological formulation. The problem is not that we desire too much. We desire the wrong things as ultimate things. The heart moves from one finite satisfaction to another because nothing finite can finally provide the rest for which it was made. Thus the human capacity for desire is larger than any temporal object capable of satisfying it.
Kierkegaard — the temporal and the eternal
In his Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard makes the distinction explicitly:
'But the Eternal is that which is set over all.'
And in his opening prayer he describes the problem even more starkly: 'What is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee?'
Here the issue becomes one of orientation. A human life may accumulate experiences, possessions, knowledge, accomplishments and relationships and still remain fragmented. The temporal world gives us many things, but Kierkegaard asks whether our lives have a single centre capable of holding those things together.
Thus meaning cannot finally be produced by accumulating more experiences; it requires an orientation towards something that transcends them.
Proust — paradise is already lost
In Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust gives us perhaps the most beautiful secular expression of the paradox:
'The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.'
This is particularly important because Proust does not simply say that pleasure disappears. Something much stranger happens.
A moment from the past can suddenly return through taste, smell, sound or sensation. For an instant the past seems present again. The experience is extraordinarily powerful precisely because it has escaped ordinary chronological time. Proust describes the moment as producing an experience of renewal; yet the paradise is simultaneously recognised as lost. And most strikingly:
'I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal'
It is in the famous 'Madeleine moment ' described in Swann's Way, the first book of Proust's epic where this assertion is made. The experience does not merely remind him of a pleasant childhood Sunday. It temporarily alters his relationship with mortality and time.
So for Proust, our deepest experiences may derive some of their intensity from the fact that they cannot be permanently possessed. And that introduces the extraordinary possibility that loss itself can reveal the nature of our desire.
T. S. Eliot — the still point
Eliot takes the problem into poetry: here are the opening lines to his Burnt Norton:
'Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present'.
Eliot is especially interesting because he does not simply contrast time with eternity. He explores the possibility of an intersection between them.
And here, in Dry Salvages:
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts
The 'unattended moment' is not an escape from temporal existence. It is a moment in which the ordinary movement of time seems to disclose something beyond itself.
That connects interestingly with Proust, for whom a sensation can suddenly make the past present.
For Eliot, the present can become the place where time and the timeless intersect. The moment in time may become transparent to something beyond time.
C. S. Lewis — desire as evidence
In his 'The Weight of Glory' Lewis approaches the question from another direction. He asks why particular earthly experiences can produce a longing for something that earthly experience cannot quite provide. He says: 'The earth can offer some scent of the beyond.' and he describes our deepest desire as a longing for a country we have never visited.
Perhaps the fact that finite things repeatedly awaken an apparently infinite desire is not evidence that the desire is absurd. Perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps the desire tells us something about the object for which we were made. Lewis therefore points us to the possibility that the experience of longing may itself be evidence that human beings are oriented towards a reality beyond the finite world.
Ecclesiastes — everything beautiful, everything passing
Here we arrive at the Biblical declaration which names the issue in clear terms:
'He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.' -Ecclesiastes 3:11
Everything beautiful — in its time. Not everything beautiful forever. The beauty is genuinely there. But it belongs to time.
And then: 'Eternity in the human heart'. We encounter something beautiful in its time, but we respond to it with a longing that seems to reach beyond that time.
The human problem is not that temporal things are insufficiently beautiful. It is that we have been given an appetite for eternity while living within time.
And Ecclesiastes refuses to solve the problem by telling us to despise temporal pleasures. Instead, it repeatedly tells us to receive them as gifts. The failure of pleasure to become ultimate meaning does not invalidate pleasure; it reveals that pleasure was never designed to carry that burden.
I might mention here, that as I researched for this discussion, I found that perhaps the Hebrew is more difficult than that English translation , here using the NIV version, suggests.
We find that the key Hebrew word, Ężolam', can bear meanings associated with an indefinite duration, age, perpetuity or eternity. Some translations therefore render the passage rather differently. The NET, for example, has “ignorance” rather than “eternity”, with a substantial textual note explaining the difficulty. But my discussion follows the NIV, which carries the majority interpretation.
Temporal experiences do not fail because they are unreal, nor because they are insufficiently beautiful. They fail when we ask them to become what they cannot be: permanent, ultimate and self-sufficient.
Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 has it clear: 'Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. 8 Always be clothed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. 9 Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun—all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labour under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.'
The paradox is that the very experiences which reveal the goodness of temporal existence can awaken a longing that temporal existence cannot fulfil. A beautiful landscape, a piece of music, love, friendship, memory, achievement or a moment of profound happiness may seem to give us something beyond time. But the moment passes. We remember it. We long for its return. And sometimes, in remembering it, we discover that what we really wanted was not simply the experience but the permanence of what the experience seemed to disclose.
It is that permanence which can only be found by recognising its source and opening ones heart to that source - the Giver outside time.