Kairos

A view of time as a series of moments or opportunities.

Kairos is an ancient Greek term used by Jesus and St Paul to mean ‘the right time’. The early Church, and Jesus himself, believed that the end of the world was imminent and that Jesus’ appearance was the kairos moment around which the fate of the cosmos would turn.

In ancient thought Kairos was a mythical figure: a young man, usually naked, with winged feet and long hair hanging over his face. In some cases he is shown fleeing from a crowd who are trying to grasp him by the forelock. Kairos is often depicted carrying a pair of scales to show that we must use our judgement in order to make the best of life’s fleeting opportunities, because time is a series of windows for human decision, action and responsibility. There was, we are told, a statue to Kairos outside the stadium at Olympia. This was a reminder to the athletes to ‘seize their moment’.

In the Bible the concept of kairos is contrasted with the view of time as chronos. Chronos is clock time, the sweep of events from past to future. Kairos is the opposite of chronos: it is not time in general, but particular moments of time – the ‘hours’, ‘days’, ‘seasons’ of history. If chronos refers to time as a continuous line, then kairos refers to specific points on the line. The most famous description of kairos time in the Old Testament is the passage in Ecclesiates 3 that says there is a ‘season for everything, and a time for every matter under heaven … a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance … God has made everything beautiful in its time.’ So the wisdom of time is knowing what each moment is for.

When Jesus talks about time, he uses the word kairos rather than chronos. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he tells us to take each day as it comes: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin’ (Matt. 6:28). But Jesus also uses kairos to refer to the importance of his own appearance in human history: his life, death and resurrection is a kairos, a unique opportunity for humanity, if only we have the wisdom to seize it.

The view of time as kairos, or special moments of significance, is common among mystics and poets. Jean Pierre de Caussade’s concept of ‘the sacrament of the present moment’ described grace in terms of God’s gift to us of time. T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas were both fascinated by the idea of time as the present moment.

For the existentialists also, the immediate present was significant as the place where human existence happens. Søren Kierkegaard wrote about the importance of the moment of existential decision, an idea which Martin Heidegger developed into his own ‘moment of vision’ (Augenblick) when our existential situation becomes clear to us.

The view of time as kairos is now extremely widespread both in New Age religions and in popular Christian spirituality. A recent book by Eckhart Tolle called The Power of Now was an international best-seller. This fits in with the general trend in late capitalist cultures towards individualised and privatised religion.

THINKERS

Aristotle (384–322 bc) argued that the moving ‘now’ is the basis of all time.

St Augustine (354–430) was the first Christian theologian to attempt a theology of time. In his Confessions Augustine concluded that the past and the future are not real and that the only real time is ‘the present’. However, since the present can always be divided into a smaller duration, he concluded that ‘the present’ cannot be determined. Thus time is a mystery that only God can fathom.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751): an eighteenth-century Jesuit whose Self-abandonment to Divine Providence put forward the doctrine of ‘the sacrament of the present moment’: ‘What God ordains for each moment is what is most holy, best and most divine for us. All we need to know is how to recognise his will in the present moment.’

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965): a Christian poet whose Four Quartets affirms the vision of history as ‘a pattern of timeless moments’.

R. S. Thomas (1913–2000): a Welsh priest and poet who saw ‘the moment’ as a special aspect of time: ‘the moment is history’s navel and round it the worlds spin’. For Thomas the task of religion is to find ‘love’s moment in a world in servitude to time’.

Lysippos of Sikyon (fourth century bc): a sculptor whose statue of Kairos carried this epigram: ‘“And who are you, Kairos, who subdues all things, and why do you stand on tip-toe?” “I am ever running.”’

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) regarded the whole of the cosmos as a series of moments in an endless circulation which he called ‘the eternal return of the same’.

IDEAS

Epiphany: a Greek word meaning a moment of disclosure or ‘showing’. ‘Epiphany’ is used in a religious sense to describe a moment of divine revelation – and the appearance of the magi at Bethlehem is referred to as The Epiphany. But others, such as James Joyce, have used ‘epiphany’ in a secular sense to mean a moment of perception and insight.

Phronesis: a term, coined by the Greek philosopher Isocrates, for the ‘practical insight’ required to use each opportunity in life to the best advantage. As Cicero put it, ‘In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder to determine than what is appropriate.’

BOOKS

Phillip Sipora and James Baumlin (eds.), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (State University of New York Press, 2002)

Hugh Rayment-Pickard, The Myths of Time (DLT, 2004)