The measure of time

How rational do you think is it to fill the heavens with fireworks and celebrate, both in religious and profane modes, the beginning of a new calendar year?

There is certainly a discounting of the importance of artificial time-markers. Most evident is erasing the thresholds that used to mark turning points in the cycle of family life: birth and baptism, engagement and marriage, death and burial. Instead of sharp breaks between fairly long stable periods, they have become processes that take time to occur. Instead of a decisive stepping over a dividing line, there is now a sliding across by small successive moves.

For instance, take birth. Admittedly it was always preceded by the period of pregnancy, but the less there was to narrate about those nine months, the better. On the contrary, today ecographies, knowledge of sexual identity from early on, medical treatment of embryos do not allow the maternal womb to remain an obscure cavity; delivery of a baby is no longer a dramatic revelation.

Correlatively, an impressive development in the Church is the Neo-Catechumenal movement; its basic idea is that baptism, or birth in Christ, should not be a sudden boundary-crossing, but a progressive transition that requires time and stages for its proper enactment.

Likewise death. Previously, people talked of the moment or instant of death. But many today spend more or less long periods in coma or other states that closely resemble death, even though some slight electric current might still be detectable in their brain.

Instantaneous transitions from one status to another in life have become periods during which one is no longer something, but has not yet quite completely become something else. This indefiniteness may be part of a general tendency to reject conferred statutory identity in favour of one achieved by personal conquest. Of this tendency, the increasing habit of children referring to their grandparents or any elders by their Christian names could be another sign.

You also referred to marriage. Could you please elaborate?

Observe a common way in which cohabitation comes about both before marriage or when it has broken down. No explicit decision is taken, but it happens step by step.

It begins with someone sleeping for just a night at the other's place, then a toothbrush is left there, followed perhaps by a favourite teapot and then on a cold night a pyjama top is left in a wardrobe. That is often taken as the sign that the situation of cohabitation has been reached.

There are plainly some advantages in having 'soft' separations rather than abrupt breaches. Our society may be developing complex transitional procedures in the manner of the rites of passage in primitive societies that have been so fascinatingly described by anthropologists such as Van Gennep. After all, that is what 'engagement' was meant to be, and perhaps it could still be undertaken in a mode that really signified preparation for an irreversible, not a precarious, change of status.

Similarly, the expert mediators introduced in the legal process of separation have not proven themselves especially apt at preventing separation or even providing assistance to judges, but as facilitators of negotiated transition from one status to another of the separating couple.

Do you think that such changes in attitudes to time are peculiar to Malta, or are they universal?

That is really more a question for anthropologists than for a philosopher. As for myself, I have always been curious about the relation between the tenses in Maltese grammar and our attitudes to time, or perhaps I should rather say such matters as the meaning of history, fatalism and the like.

In Maltese, strictly speaking we do not have temporal tenses, as in English and most Western languages. As is typical of Semitic languages, we have 'aspect'; our main distinction is between 'perfect' and 'imperfect', i.e. between whether an action has been completed or is still underway. Naturally this has tended to get the 'perfect' associated with the past tense and the imperfect to be called the 'present-future'.

The present-future expresses present tendencies towards the future; it says what will happen if things go on as they are now doing. If there were no way to express a 'pure' future, i.e. a future that was not just the direct continuation of the present, it would clearly imply the philosophical view adopted by most Muslims that the future is not real, in the sense that nothing true could be said about it.

We Maltese Christians have, of course, devised ways, through devices such as the use of auxiliary verbs, to talk about the future-future (to distinguish it from the present-future). But I still think that there is inbuilt into the Maltese language the awareness that there is no absolute difference between past, present and future.

This relativist concept of time, which was set forth by St Augustine, was set aside in the scientific age culminating in Newton, but was rehabilitated after Einstein is the view that can most readily be expressed in the Maltese language. As Augustine said, "the present is made out of the future"; notably the meaning of a lifetime comes from its final moment - death.

Augustine also emphasises that the measurement of time is made in relation to the future. I have always been struck that in the Hail Mary we speak of "the hour of our death" - not the moment; but the word 'hour' and its equivalent in all Indo-European languages is derived from yor meaning 'year'.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.