Guest Blog: Excerpts from Barfield and Eliade
Well, so much for the regular updates I promised you. Editorial Assistant Jack gave blogging a go between my last entry and this one, but he had some trouble with the keyboard.
At any rate, it's Friday, and in honor of how differently time is flowing for me now, I thought I would excerpt two short quotes about time from Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances.
Eliade
The mythical time whose reactualization is periodically attempted is a time sanctified by the divine presence, and we may say that the desire to live in the divine presence and in a perfect world (perfect because it is newly born) corresponds to the nostalgia for a paradisal situation.
Barfield
The Oriental concepttion of time was essentially cyclic. The picture was one of eternal repetition rather than of beginning, progress and end, and the path of the individual soul to the bosom of eternity was a backward path of extrication from the wheels of desire in which it had allowed itself to become involved. To reach, or to resume, the Supreme Identity with Brahma, with the Eternal, was the object and its achievement was a matter which lay directly between the individual and the Eternal. The Semitic way, on the other hand, was a way forward through history and it was a way, shared indeed by the individual, but trodden by the nation as a whole.
At any rate, it's Friday, and in honor of how differently time is flowing for me now, I thought I would excerpt two short quotes about time from Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances.
Eliade
The mythical time whose reactualization is periodically attempted is a time sanctified by the divine presence, and we may say that the desire to live in the divine presence and in a perfect world (perfect because it is newly born) corresponds to the nostalgia for a paradisal situation.
Barfield
The Oriental concepttion of time was essentially cyclic. The picture was one of eternal repetition rather than of beginning, progress and end, and the path of the individual soul to the bosom of eternity was a backward path of extrication from the wheels of desire in which it had allowed itself to become involved. To reach, or to resume, the Supreme Identity with Brahma, with the Eternal, was the object and its achievement was a matter which lay directly between the individual and the Eternal. The Semitic way, on the other hand, was a way forward through history and it was a way, shared indeed by the individual, but trodden by the nation as a whole.