Finding and Finishing Our Shared Pasts within the Life of God: Transfigured Time in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor
Two saints and church fathers who developed among the most profound accounts of time, eternity, and humanity’s unending participation in divine life were Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 to 395) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 to 662). There is good reason to think that both of them considered every moment within our current fallen experience of time to remain open to us in real ways for all the rest of eternity. In our final state of consummated communion with God and neighbor, every moment of fallen time will be known, gathered, healed, and related to its true end in Christ. The influential concepts of heavenly time from these two saints have strong similarities although separated by almost three centuries, and considering them together provides us with a clear picture of a continuous tradition of reflection on this topic during the first 600 years after Jesus Christ.
As Maximus writes: “Scripture speaks both of ages contained within temporality ...and of other ages liberated from temporality, beyond the present age.”1 As we will see for both Gregory and Maximus, this liberation from fragmented and misdirected time remains dynamic and growing and orderly as well as in continual contact with everything fruitful and purposeful from inside of our fallen history—in communion with all of created time as we are experiencing it now. It is not a sequential next step but a gathering up and expanding enjoyment of all that is good from our shared pasts.
