exist outside of human nature. Animals may affectively experience change, but they do not experience time or historicity. Time is the unity which occurs when a being resides on the horizon between eternity and time, where the soul acts from eternity in order to raise its own being into freedom above change and succession. Historical being demands the impossible: the human person is the totalizing unity of the embodied as the spiritual, while still pointing to the spiritual which the embodied craves; the temporal is realized as the eternal while pointing to the eternal which it lacks and needs in order to fulfill itself. If we do not merely take up some “space” between time and eternity but are the beings whose natures reside on the confinium itself, then our temporalizing actions must reveal our eternity as history, history which itself points to the eternal which it desires as other. We see this in the union of spouses and of parents to their children who are others-as-other, but yet seek to be that other contemporaneously. These unions exceed knowledge, while at the same time seeking out knowledge to express and complete themselves. As we act from eternity when we act in time, time itself alone reveals to us that we act from the eternal. And how we realize this temporalizing revelation of the eternal is through an incarnated intentionality whereby I know and love myself only by being the other who in turn is capable of being the other who I am. When Adrienne von Speyr remarked that the I who receives the sacrament is not the I who I think I am,68 we see the dramatic newness of souls that are in and yet not-in time. To another intentional agent I reveal the other that I have taken in and become. What I have become is the other—that agent’s self. Thus, what the agent takes in, when knowing his self, is the unity of the illumination of my own I who reveals the agent’s self. This illumination is twofold, each in and for the other. This dualizing unity reflects that knowledge is, in a way, all things. More still, when I first reveal to the intentional agent his or her own self, I do so only because the soul knows itself only in the face of Otherness, because the other has revealed my own self as illuminating his or her self in me. The only origin of this infinitizing mutual dependency would be that each acts from eternity when acting in time. With Levinas, who recognizes how our pre-cognitive union in the eternal places us, in a way, closer to the infinite than to the finite:
The sense of the human is not to be measured by presence, not even by self-presence. The meaning of proximity exceeds the limits of ontology, of the human essence, and of the world. It signifies by way of transcendence and the relationship-to-God-in-me (l’a-Dieu-en-moi) which is the putting of myself into question. The face signifies in the fact of summoning, of summoning me—in its nudity or its destitution, in everything that is precarious in questioning, in all the hazards of mortality—to the unresolved alternative between Being and Nothingness, a questioning which, ipso facto, summons me. The infinite in its absolute difference withholds itself from presence in me; the Infinite does not come to meet me in a contemporaneousness like that in which noesis and noema meet simultaneously together, nor in the way in which the interlocutors responding to one another may meet. The Infinite is not indifferent to me. It is in calling me to other men that transcendence concerns me. In this unique intrigue of transcendence, the non-absence of the Infinite is neither presence, nor re-presentation. Instead, the idea of the infinite is to be found in my responsibility for the Other.69
With Pegis:
Merely to juxtapose the spiritual and material within man, by simply relating soul and body to one another as form to matter, was not enough since it left the internal unity of man unexplained. Like the world of Aristotle, he still remained a two-part anomaly; he had no integrity and there was no meaning to the role of organic matter within his nature—unless that meaning were no more than the perpetuation of the anomaly itself. What was needed was nothing less than the total inclusion of the material within the spiritual in man’s nature, so that what the human body contributed as an organic and material instrument was already present within the soul in a spiritual form and as a spiritual exigency.70
Fallen time—that time inextricably aligned to the experience of death—often obscures the eternal at the heart of all temporal experience. In fallen time, we tend to see time as something existing outside the primordial experience of our existential comportment. In a word, we conflate time with change. There is order, structure, beauty to the world whether we see it or not. But when it is seen and experienced, this is the temporalizing action of existence.
Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.71
In a way, time is relative as related to consciousness as consciousness of. If nothing is conscious of time, then there is no time to be had. To have time is to be making, wasting, fleeing, or recovering time. We have falsely bifurcated body and soul, and time and eternity: these are hallmarks of fallen time. The repercussion of such divisions is most pernicious in the knowing union of two beings capable of intentionality, and, as we shall see, in the moral ordering of political society.
The human soul has the capacity to become the other as other in knowledge and to know the real thing itself. What happens if the other that I seek to know in itself is not an object enclosed in matter, but another self who acts from eternity when acting in time, and who becomes the other as other in his or her own act of knowledge? Am I becoming the other of myself when I take on the other self who has become me in otherness? Does the other take on his own self which I have taken on when I became all things and became the other as other? And in this dualizing intentionality, are acts of knowledge without end, or rather, never completed, because to be a knower requires that the soul act from eternity when acting in time?
Time presents itself as the solitary instant, as the consciousness of solitude . . . If being is conscious of itself only in the present instant, how could we not realize that the present instant is the sole domain in which reality is experienced? If we were eventually to eliminate our being we should still have to start from ourselves to prove being . . . If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer, and that a young or tragic novelty—always sudden—never ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of time.72
What do we know when we know the other which is capable of knowing us? Must all knowing of the intentional other demand an infinitization, whereby all termini are revealed to be intermediaries? In this dualizing intentionality, we are required to re-visit, re-know what we have already grasped and yet already exceeded us each time it is grasped. Is this what is meant by Plato when he describes human beings as the moving image of eternity?73
Is there a double intentionality that we have lost when we exiled time from eternity through sin, vice and the other falls into knowledge? Is there the capacity for either a heightening or a diminution of the integral reality of selves each time we revisit knowing the other as other? Have we reduced intentionality to an act which cannot transform the human person because it reduces the human dimension to an entitative form of sensory intentionality? What happens when we bypass the radical truth that the human person is transformation-in-act:
The notion of intentionality cannot be reduced to a connection with an object. In other words, taste is always taste of something, and similarly thought and other intentional acts must have their corresponding objects. This way of presenting intentionality has a grain of truth but it is nonetheless reductive since it does not take stock of the most decisive point of the intimate union between knower and known.74
Since the other is eternal, no single temporal intentional act can know the other, it becomes a revisiting of that other as self, and turns into a heightening of the other. The reality of such dualizing intentionality is that I am truly myself only when I am always more in the other, and this alone unveils the earthy transcendence befitting our embodied spirituality.
But it is important to understand that because of the proper function of the will, and its un-materiality which is certainly not less pure in itself, but less ‘separated’ from things, and entirely turned towards their concrete state (cp. Sum. theol. i, 82, 3), intentionality here plays an entirely different part. The intentional being of love is not, like the intentional being of knowledge, an esse in virtue of which one (the knower) becomes another (the known), it is an esse in virtue of which—an immaterial but wholly different process—the