Mythic History and Contemplative Prediction: Against the Perils of Deductive Determinism and Predictive Grasping

 

Mythic History and Contemplative Prediction

Against the Perils of Deductive Determinism and Predictive Grasping

• Introduction

• Temporal Meditation as a Methodology for Coming into Relationship with God

• Dividing Reality and Dividing gods

• God’s Territory: “The God of Time”

• Existential Bifurcation and Sacred Time Skills

• Relating to the Past: Deductive Determinism and Redemption

• Determinism, Slavery to Sin, and Freewill 

• History, Etiology, and an Analytical Shift Toward Redemption

• History or Myth: Data or Teleology?

• Relating to the Future: Predictive Analytics and Mindfulness

• Limitations and Possibilities of Predictive Analytics

• Dangers and Use of Predictive Analytics

• Contemplative Prediction Techniques

• Conclusion

Introduction

One of my favorite past professions was as a short order cook.  Every Tuesday a customer would come in and order a steak and ask for it to be “held” until he was ready.  This was not the type of establishment that one would usually indulge in such extravagance.  Through the server, he would call for his steak to be put on and when it was delivered, without fail, send it back with some harsh criticism and a demand that it be recooked.  One day he came in and demanded his steak be held.  When he called for it to be put on I was so overwrought with orders I simply forgot.  After a good long while, a waitress came to the window and relayed the customer’s demand for his steak.  At that point, I cursed and threw it on the grill.  The standard strategy would be to push off another of the same steak already on and cooked to the correct temperature, but alas there was none.  I had to cook it from scratch.  Shortly the server came back to the window expressing the customer's outrage at having to wait, to which I responded with arrogant expletives.  She had to come back a few times, each time with more earnest expressions of his rage.  I finally sent the steak out slightly undercooked and a curious thing happened, he didn’t send it back.  From that day on I never got a steak back from this customer and everyone marveled at my abilities as a grill cook because no one else could send this man anything without him sending it back.

Actually, my skills weren’t related to the grill, they were psychological.  I deduced that he sent steaks back every week so as to look like a “big man” in front of his wife and children.  I honestly felt sorry for him and his family and wondered what his lot in life must be that he needed to perform this ritual every Tuesday.  When I forgot to put the steak on, I was forced to send it out extremely late, but undercooked.  I when it didn’t come back  realized that he couldn’t send it back as “undercooked” even though it obviously was because he had spent the last ten minutes demanding that “it must be done by now!”  The situation left him powerless.  Every Tuesday thereafter when he called for his steak to be put on, I waited till he called for it to be sent out and then I finally put it on.  I made him demand it at least three more times before sending it out undercooked, and I was only met with silence thereafter.  

My success was not in cooking skill, it was in the observation of historical data and analysis of that data in order to predict and manipulate the future.  But this treatise will question my action which, though pragmatic, may not be the best view and use of my relationship to that very mysterious phenomenon “time”.          

The purpose of this treatise is to garner skills for summoning our selves to the only time that God will meet us, the present moment.  We will seek to achieve this by practice of a via affirmativa exercise which defines God as the God of Time.  We will analyze how we relate to the past and to the future and attempt to sculpt ways that will allow our concepts of time to serve the present moment as an encounter with God. 

In the first section, we will begin by discussing our human tendency to compartmentalize God.  We will start with how the ancients compartmentalized the gods geographically and functionally.  We will then point out how modern Christianity has made peace with God’s absolute geographic dominion but has a hard time with God’s functional dominion.  We will then attempt to show how the first story of creation seeks to solve these problems by framing God as a “God of time” in order to maximize God’s sovereignty, even over time itself.  Next, we will lay out three differing methodologies for understanding the nature of time, measurement by standardized rhythmic motion, act and potentiality, and the matrix of phenomenological experience.  This analysis will give us an understanding of the existential bifurcation that we feel because of our culturally dominant understanding of time and give us a possible solution by means of the temporal interpretive paradox in order to make “all time” serve a present encounter with God..

In the next section, we will start by discussing how our view of the past shapes a culture that sees freewill as absolutely limited.  We will discuss both material and psychological determinism.  Then we will point out the Christian understanding of how the past limits free will as slavery to sin, a concept that allows for the exercise of will in the present while admitting its limitations.  Next, we will attempt to shift the understanding of history from etiological to narrative in order to begin a twofold recalibration of our relationship with time.  The new relationship to extra-experiential time (the past and the future) will be seen as a potential gift of redemption, the gift of forgiveness regarding the past and the gift of grace regarding the future.  We will attempt to reshape our view of history from etiology to a teleological narrative or “mythic history”.  We will also attempt to show how the typologies of the Bible are calibrators of meaning for historical narrative and tried to offer useful ways to engage in historical transmission beyond data driven history to the end of predictive analytics.

In the last section, we will begin by demonstrating the inability to engage in absolute prediction.   We will discuss the extra-experiential time nature of the future.  Next, we will discuss the nature of prophecy in the scriptures and focus on how the Bible does not treat prophecy of the future as a demonstration of power or a skill to be used for personal manipulation.  Rather prophecy is meant to wake listeners up to the present moment. And summon them to the proper use of their will. We will attempt to draw out the current use of predictive analytics, showing how they are used to grasp for control of the cosmos as an object to be manipulated.  We also show how they succumb to demonic influence, channeling the observer away from God and toward false gods.  Concupiscent inflammation and idolatry are the dangers of prognostication and current predictive analytics tend to both of these.  We will end the treatise with the positive skill of contemplative prediction, a skill that notices the rhythms of the cosmos and uses those rhythms to be aware of the moment, supplies a theodicy for temporal suffering, and inform one's moral and spiritual attitude at the moment.  We will conclude with an analytic application of both predictive analytics and contemplative prediction to the Book of Revelations and tarot cards in order to demonstrate that technique and technology are not the problems of prognostication.  Rather, the problem is lack of beatitude. 

Temporal Meditation as a Methodology for Coming into Relationship with God 

In the first section, we will expound upon our unhealthy relationship with time and seek to frame an understanding of time more in keeping with the Christian life.  In the next section, we will seek a particular understanding of the past that breaks away from determinism and focuses one on redemption. In this last section, we will focus on our understanding of the future and shift away from seeing prediction as a manipulation, but rather a present centering activity for exercise of will and moral growth.

Dividing Reality and Dividing gods

In this first section, we are generally seeking to understand how to use our experience and conception of time as a means of coming into relationship with God.  It is common to take the path of the via affirmativa when considering one’s relationship.  The methodology of this path was discussed in the treatise The Three Tiered Integration of Self,

First, one assigns an attribute to God or defines God in the way that seems most fitting.  Then one seeks God by means of one’s attribute or definition.  This is done by exploring God’s creation and trying to find there the fullest understanding of definition one has come up with.  For example, a good attribute of God is “God is beautiful”.  This is an excellent starting point and by itself has many different routes one could take to explore one’s understanding and experience of God. 

This type of relation to God is simple and effective.  It can become a dangerous form of idolatry if one becomes exclusive about one's methodology.  For example, it is very common in our scientifically minded culture to conceive of God as the creator or the “uncaused cause”.  But to conceive of God this way exclusively leads to a deistic picture of God that has little resonance with the God of Christianity.  

If we go back to the narrative of the Old Testament, it is clear that the paganism takes great joy in dividing reality into spheres and assigning gods to exemplify those spheres.  This is a fractured polytheistic manifestation of the via affirmativa.  Since much of the Old Testament is the story of a nation, the competing gods are national gods and early on, from Abraham to Moses, it seems when the Israelites are paying attention to God at all, they perceive of him as the deity of their people, “the God of Abraham”.  God’s existence is in conjunction with all of the other national, cultural and familial deities out there which exert their will upon humanity.  This only begins to change with the exodus.  In that narrative, the Israelites come to see that their God, a God of slaves and wilderness bests the great gods of Egypt and they begin to suspect that, though the other gods exist and have power, they are subject to the God of Israel. 

The fact that the other gods don’t “disappear” in Hebrew cosmology, hints at why they so often kept those gods around as a back-up. If they recognized their God as the highest God, why keep Astartes and Baals around?  The answer is that they felt those gods existed, were powerful, and they got the job done.  The treatise Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety noted that even in Christian cosmology, those gods continued to exist, and often we have made note of Augustine’s methodology for the discernment of celestial spirits as laid out in  Book X of City of God.  in the treatise Modern Slavery and the Mercedarians it was pointed out that we moderns hold a host of false, or shall we say lesser, gods in positions of honor exceeding their merit.  Economy and Nation are the main false gods we have discussed.  In modern times we hold the same tension that the Hebrews did.  We put the one true God in a place or a territory and hold him there while we worship other gods according to their territorial powers.  

For the modern Christian, Monday through Friday is dedicated to the god Economy and an hour on Sunday morning is dedicated to the one true God.  It is not wrong to dedicate time to economic survival.  That god does have power.  But Economy must be calibrated to its proper palace.  Any dulia it deserves must be subject to and seen in relation to the latria offered to God alone.  Any work we do sustains by the power of Economy, but that power ultimately derives from God, and therefore our work is “for God” not Economy.  Our work offers him glory.  

Our ability to compartmentalize various deities speaks to the overarching atomistic cosmology of the west. But as was noted in the treatise Christian Ontology reality is both simple and manifold.  Economy may have a “territory”, but that territory, while truly distinct, is part of the greater reality subject to the one true God.  Part of the ritual mission we played out in Modern Slavery and the Mercedarians was aimed at recognizing this configuration.  For this treatise, we are more interested in the compartmentalization itself.  Most Christians these days overarchingly worship the god Economy.  But this allows us to feel like we are worshiping the one true God because we give him his hour every Sunday. There is no shortage of homilies and sermons meant to inspire us to take our faith into the rest of our week.  But that is often interpreted by the faithful as “praying more” during the week.  This “praying” means cognitive or rote engagement with transcendent reality, not praying with one’s life as we discussed in Modern Slavery and the Mercedarians.  We noted there,

The idea that a vocation makes one’s life, including the actions of one’s body,  prayer is all but lost to modern spirituality (hence the label “spirituality”).  One’s vocation may seek to make the world a better place, but that is “morality”, not prayer, because our new focus is on effecting this world “for this world”.  But if one realizes that a vocation is a ritual form of life, and ritual is prayer, then one regrounds one’s vocation back into higher meaning than simply service for the physical betterment of the terrestrial world, though that betterment is certainly a good effect.

Our compartmentalization of God makes this move to living for God as prayer nearly impossible.  It renders the phrase “pray ceaselessly” impossible.  It is this same compartmentalization that was present in the Biblical narrative, but for them, it was as much geography as it was a function.  For us, we recognize God as the one true God territorially (geographically), but we still very much compartmentalize by function.  This is largely done under a nieve deistic model of divinity.  We approach God through his function as creator.  He creates reality, therefore he is powerful, so we approach him to create solutions to our problems.  Another function we attribute to God’s creative ability is law.  So God functions as the lawgiver, by which we judge each other morally.  The way we “pay God back” is to follow his rules, one of which is to go to church on Sunday.  But this view glosses over a profound meaning of worship on the seventh day, and how the used this sacred time to make a statement about the nature of God.

God’s Territory: “The God of Time”

There are many heroes of the Hebrew scriptures who remind us that God is the God of all people.  Examples would be Melchizedek, Ruth, Job, Uriah the Hittite, Naaman the Syrian among many others. The treatise Anthro-Expansivity and the Natural Next Step of The Great Commission, noted how the prophet Jonah exemplifies the universality of God’s dominion.  

In the book of Jonah, it is clear, Jonah’s plan to escape God consisted of leaving Israel and going as far as he could from God’s “territory” so as not to have to spread a message of repentance to the heathen Assyrian capital Nineveh.  His aim is to get all the way to Spain, then considered the “end of the world”.  Jonah’s anthro-exclusive attitude saw the Assyrians as bloodthirsty animals, and any attempt to convert them would be like an attempt at converting a lion or bear.  Here is a typology that is extremely useful for understanding anthro-expansivity.  Because on the way God demonstrates himself as sovereign of all creation by having Jonah swallowed by a whale during a storm at sea . . .

One major point of the book of Jonah is that God is creator, sovereign, and father of all creation and all nations even to the end of the world.  Jonah’s failed escape by sea and inability to escape in Spain shows that God’s power is all encompassing. It included mercy for the merciless Assyrians and the repentance felt spread across their empire and was so extensive in its breadth that even the animals invested themselves in the penitential rites.  

        

Though Christians often understand that God is not bound by geography, we are still able to compartmentalize God by function.  For example, a function of God is salvation.  A Christian could know that God is (or should be) sovereign of a foreign land geographically.  Even then they may reason, if the population is not Christian he is not functioning, so the land is “godless”.  But the land is not godless, God is very active there, even if Christianity is not, and this scandalizes some Christians.   

When the Israelites were exiled in Babylon they had a particular opportunity to contemplate the omnipresence of God.  Their temple, the place that God “lived”, had been destroyed and Ezekiel had a vision of God expansively leaving Israel and going with them to Babylon.  It is in this land that the Hebrew Scriptures are compiled.  It is here that the first story of creation is sculpted as a response to the Babylonian myth the Enuma Elish.  Any compare and contrast between the two stories always prove fruitful.  Our simple contrast will start with the first line.  The first line of the Enuma Elish is, “When in the height heaven” and the story famously (and typically) relates a war between the old gods and the new.  The earth is created out of the carcass of the dead goddess Tiamat.  This cosmology assumes much that is pre-existing to Marduk, the god-hero who founded the Babylonian civilization.

To contrast, the first chapter of Genesis begins, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth”.  God first creates light and darkness out of a void or abyss.  This act concludes with “the first day”.  There is then a series of five more days where God creates reality from the most basic and general to the most complex and specific.  What leads us to our meditation of this treatise is the “medium” in which God creates everything.  Any first-year theology student can tell you that in the first story of creation the Father creates through the Word (Logos / Son) and in the breath (Spirit).  But there is a medium that the first of many separations and compartmentalizations in that story takes place and that medium is not of the divine essence.  The medium is “The Day”.  God creates in six days and rests on the seventh day.  It seems that one of the tropes of the story is to contrast the Babylonian deity, Marduk, with the all powerful deity of the Israelites.  Marduk creates out of existing reality and has his existence in the medium of time and fate.  The Elohist source seems to think of God’s primary creative material as “time”.  Being in the midst of the Babylonian captivity, it is important to emphasize that God has no “territory” that is geographic.  So instead of being the God of this or that patriarch, or the God of Israel, two confining territories, the Elohist source implies that God’s territory is “time”.  This is a brilliant maneuver that puts God outside of the fates, which operate through time.  This is a direct contrast to most other pagan deities who must wrestle with fate.

Most any other territory can be escaped.  If you don’t like your family deities, abandon them and those deities die.  If you don’t like your mountain god become a mariner.  If you don't like the gods of Egypt move to Mesopotamia.  If your god seems expansive, go to the end of the earth, like Jonah tried to do.  But Jonah found out that the God worshiped by the Israelites is of a different character.  If you want to escape the God of Time, the only place to go is out of existence.  Our via affirmativa is to approach God as the creator of time as opposed to space or law.   

Regarding space, one of the things that made the land of Israel geographically special is that it contained the Temple of the Lord, first in Shilo then in Jerusalem.  If anything made the promised land “God’s territory” it was the existence of this structure as the central place of ritual sacrifice to the one true God.  But in the situation that this story is authored in there is no temple, the Babylonians have destroyed it.  So the Elohist source sculpts a  “sacred space” out of God’s primally created material, “time”.  That space is not measured in height, length, and depth. It is measured in time, the seventh day.  This way even if a worshiper can’t get to a physical temple, one can always count seven days and worship the Lord your God.  The seventh day as a sacred space is the innovation that makes the Jewish religion “exportable” and able to survive the successive exiles experienced by the Hebrew people.  It also demonstrates a deep understanding of the union between space and time, a theological complexity that is often lost on modern worshipers.  To end this section, it will be helpful to survey some basic understandings of time in order to reinvest in the utilization of this experience for the enrichment of our spiritual lives.  God as the God of Time summons us to the present, which is his gift of life to us, so we can meet him here.  God summons us to the only time we can experience, “now.  He does not summon us to any time which is extra experiential, such as the past of the future.   

Existential Bifurcation and Sacred Time Skills

I remember asking a physicist once, “is time travel possible?”  his answer was, “yes, but only into the future.”  His answer seemed “four year old obvious”.  He then explained to me that time travels slower for an individual as they travel at greater speed and to travel at or close to the speed of light for long periods of time would “give the impression” of time travel relative to the rest of reality.  I was proud of myself for understanding, but that’s about as far as I got in terms of the nature of time in modern physics. That anecdote is a disclaimer.  I think philosophically and am not exceptionally fluent in the language of science (mathematics).  So my musings on the nature of time will be philosophical and probably laughable.  But the ultimate goal of this treatise is phenomenological, so my infantile understandings of temporal existence, probably at the intellectual level of “flat earther”, should serve enough, because, after all, for most of our day to day experience the earth does seem flat.

“Time” is a very mysterious reality. When Saint Augustine grapples with the nature of time and eternity in Book XI of his Confessions he states,

  

Who shall hold it, and fix it, that it be settled awhile, and awhile catch the glory of that ever-fixed Eternity, and compare it with the times which are never fixed, and see that it cannot be compared; and that a long time cannot become long, but out of many motions passing by, which cannot be prolonged altogether; but that in the Eternal nothing passeth, but the whole is present; whereas no time is all at once present: and that all time past, is driven on by time to come, and all to come followeth upon the past; and all past and to come, is created, and flows out of that which is ever present? Who shall hold the heart of man, that it may stand still, and see how eternity ever still-standing, neither past nor to come, uttereth the times past and to come? Can my hand do this, or the hand of my mouth by speech bring about a thing so great?

I actually doubt whether mathematics gets much better of an angle on this deeply mysterious thing we call time.  When one couples time with the concept of eternity, it becomes harder to comprehend.  One starts to get into the complication of the meta-paradox as was discussed in the treatise Paradoxes and Disorders.  Augustine is famous for grappling with this self-same paradox,

Nor dost Thou by time, precede time: else shouldest Thou not precede all times. But Thou precedest all things past, by the sublimity of an ever-present eternity; and surpassest all future because they are future, and when they come, they shall be past; but Thou art the Same, and Thy years fail not. Thy years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they all may come. Thy years stand together, because they do stand; nor are departing thrust out by coming years, for they pass not away; but ours shall all be, when they shall no more be. Thy years are one day; and Thy day is not daily, but To-day, seeing Thy To-day gives not place unto to-morrow, for neither doth it replace yesterday. Thy To-day, is Eternity.

Generally, our modern, common, understanding of time comes from a mathematical measurement of observable standardized rhythmic motion.  The understanding manifests a standard paradox which Zeno could point out, yet we will stick with Saint Augustine,

I said then even now, we measure times as they pass, in order to be able to say, this time is twice so much as that one; or, this is just so much as that; and so of any other parts of time, which be measurable. Wherefore, as I said, we measure times as they pass. And if any should ask me, "How knowest thou?" I might answer, "I know, that we do measure, nor can we measure things that are not; and things past and to come, are not." But time present how do we measure, seeing it hath no space? It is measured while passing, but when it shall have passed, it is not measured; for there will be nothing to be measured. But whence, by what way, and whither passes it while it is a measuring? whence, but from the future? Which way, but through the present? whither, but into the past? From that therefore, which is not yet, through that, which hath no space, into that, which now is not. Yet what do we measure, if not time in some space? For we do not say, single, and double, and triple, and equal, or any other like way that we speak of time, except of spaces of times. In what space then do we measure time passing? In the future, whence it passeth through? But what is not yet, we measure not. Or in the present, by which it passes? but no space, we do not measure: or in the past, to which it passes? But neither do we measure that, which now is not.

That paradox points to the inaccessibility of measuring the present and the weakness of measuring time in general.  The way time is measured usually amounts to standardized rhythmic motion.  This is time as science defines it and what we will call physical time.  As these motions occurred in the past and are repeated in the present we get a sense of “measurement”.  The ancients pragmatically used the most standardized change available to them, the heavenly bodies, the sun for a day, the moon for a month and the stars for a year.  They offered a motion at regular intervals such that time could be measured.  Regarding these Augustine had his doubts,

I heard once from a learned man, that the motions of the sun, moon, and stars, constituted time, and I assented not. For why should not the motions of all bodies rather be times? Or, if the lights of heaven should cease, and a potter's wheel run round, should there be no time by which we might measure those whirlings, and say, that either it moved with equal pauses, or if it turned sometimes slower, otherwhiles quicker, that some rounds were longer, other shorter? Or, while we were saying this, should we not also be speaking in time? Or, should there in our words be some syllables short, others long, but because those sounded in a shorter time, these in a longer? God, grant to men to see in a small thing notices common to things great and small. The stars and lights of heaven, are also for signs, and for seasons, and for years, and for days; they are; yet neither should I say, that the going round of that wooden wheel was a day, nor yet he, that it was therefore no time.

But what if Augustine’s “potter’s wheel” was also standardized?  By the 14th century mechanical clocks we starting to be developed that imitated the motions of the heavens.  Early on they were not precise, but as the mechanisms advanced from balance wheel to the pendulum, to quartz, to atomic there came into being timekeeping devices more rhythmically standardized than celestial bodies.  With the better accuracy of these devices, we have lulled ourselves into believing that they are “measuring” some “thing”.  By now humanity is so solidly in agreement on temporal measurement that our view of time as an objective reality which we can somehow experience “wrongly” is set in our minds.  “I thought it was an hour, but it was really only forty-five minutes”.  By varying our understandings of time, we can start to break free of these notions as the only notion.  Diversification of temporal analysis gives one a better ability to invest in a multivalent cosmology.  We are seeking a multivalent cosmology in order to better practice our via affirmative, seeking God by defining God as the creator of Time.  The more ways we can understand and apply time, the better we will understand God’s complete dominion of reality, because God is the God of all time, both in scope and variety.  To that end, it may help to look to a time before precision timepieces.

To get a differing angle on time we may note that Saint Thomas Aquinas makes an interesting maneuver in his first argument for the existence of God.  The “Argument from Motion” is probably only outmatched by the “Argument from Degrees of Perfection” for most ignored argument.  Their neglect is unfortunate.  Both have much to teach concerning the nature of reality, and for the ponderance of “time”, the argument from motion is helpful. 

As we noted, physical time sees “time” as a measurement of standardized rhythmic physical motion.  Physicists today make the point that time and space are integrally related and time is a separate reality from phenomenological experience.  But if one measures time by motion, of course, one would come to the conclusion that time and space are integrally related.  This treatise is not aimed at denying that relationship, simple expanding notions of time.  We will start this process by taking a look at motion and time as conceived of before the Newtonian revolution defined the terms of discourse.  Aquinas’ argument for the existence of God from motion which he adapted from Aristotle in Sum P1 A2 Q3 runs thusly,

The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

With a pared down view Aquinas’ and Aristotle’s notion of motion seems outstripped by modern Newtonian physics.  They understand that something needs to be acted upon in order to move, but don’t grasp that objects in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force.  Thus if your “big argument” for the creation of the universe is that something had to “get it moving” then you don’t understand that it could have always been moving.

The popularization of Newtonian physics relegated the first argument to a dusty back shelf.  But it need not have.  This argument is still as powerful as any other.  The five arguments each point to an aporia and end with an agnostic, “whatever the solution is, that’s what we call ‘God”.  The mystery here is a little deeper than just physics and physical motion.  It has everything to do with flux and change as a principle of the cosmos.  Aquinas’ categories for “motion” (imitating Aristotle) aren’t limited to physical motion measured in defined relation to increments graded by an agreed upon standardized rhythmic motion, for the purpose of seeking something “objective”.  His categories for motion are “act” and “potential”.  These categories could apply to physical motion, but can just as easily apply to spiritual (psychological?) motion, they could be applied teleologically on an individual or cosmic scale.  Aquinas applies them to a completely different tactile sensation, temperature.  The concept of potentiality refers to any "possibility" that a thing could conceivably have.  Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense.  If one thinks of or pictures “the moment”, “now”, and pictures the future, whatever mysterious interface between the two that must happen for time to move and develop is “act”, and whatever possibility it is (or could) developing into is “potentiality”.  

Aquinas and the ancients are not talking here simply about physics, they are talking about flux in general. How is it that there is change (period) in the universe?  It is easy from “inside the machine” to say, physical change is regulated by causality, and there could be an eternally moving “situation”, a circle or mobius of space-time and causality.  However when one adds to that “machine” all the complexities of a cosmology that calculates by act and potential, then how does one get from stagnation to flux, how does change happen, is not so easy a question to supply an answer for.  That cosmology includes, how does one think and perceive?  How does one learn and psychologically grow?  These experiences are personal and not objective.  They fly in the face of the myth of objectivity, a myth which generally fails to takes the “explainer” of objective reality into account.

The framework of “act and potential” allows for both elements of a temporal interpretive paradox.  This paradox toggles between the interpretation of time as something that can be objectively (externally) “measured” and understanding time as synonymous with the perceiver's phenomenological experience of time.  Together these two interpretations form a temporal interpretive paradox which can be dealt with as “substantial”.   The treatise Paradoxes and Disorders laid out three ways of approaching paradox and the substantial approach to paradox as a method approaches paradox ontologically and assumes hypostatic relationships. Meaning the dualities are approached as individual things, treated or viewed possibly as “substances” or “objects”, that must be worked into a compatibility or are present in a complementary way.  In this case, the two “substances” are the objective “outside world” and the subjective “person”.  With this wider view, we can now move to an alternate view of temporal analysis that is phenomenological.

  After analyzing various approaches to understanding time in Book XI of his Confessions Saint Augustine finally lands on a phenomenological view,

It is in thee, my mind, that I measure times. Interrupt me not, that is, interrupt not thyself with the tumults of thy impressions. In thee I measure times; the impression, which things as they pass by cause in thee, remains even when they are gone; this it is which still present, I measure, not the things which pass by to make this impression. This I measure, when I measure times. Either then this is time, or I do not measure times. What when we measure silence, and say that this silence hath held as long time as did that voice? do we not stretch out our thought to the measure of a voice, as if it sounded, that so we may be able to report of the intervals of silence in a given space of time? For though both voice and tongue be still, yet in thought we go over poems, and verses, and any other discourse, or dimensions of motions, and report as to the spaces of times, how much this is in respect of that, no otherwise than if vocally we did pronounce them. If a man would utter a lengthened sound, and had settled in thought how long it should be, he hath in silence already gone through a space of time, and committing it to memory, begins to utter that speech, which sounds on, until it be brought unto the end proposed. Yea it hath sounded, and will sound; for so much of it as is finished, hath sounded already, and the rest will sound. And thus passeth it on, until the present intent conveys over the future into the past; the past increasing by the diminution of the future, until by the consumption of the future, all is past.

Augustine draws the reader to a recitation of poetry within one’s head as an indicator of the intimately personal nature of the flow of time.  In this interpretation “time is life”.  It is one’s perception and experience as it happens.  There is no quantification.  This introspective understanding of time is not subject to physical motion at all.  Instead of physical time as standardized rhythmic motion, there is phenomenological time.  Phenomenological time can also be measured by two varieties of rhythm.  The first is circadian time which notes the phenomenological rhythm of transition between the waking world and the dream world.  The waking world also presents subjective time , which is a phenomenological temporal rhythm of conscious awareness and habitual slumber.  The more we can tune into the conscious present, whether by conscious waking life or lucid dreaming, the more one can approach God in the place he comes to meet us, in the present.  This deeply mysterious understanding of time is much more likely to engage in a multivalent cosmology.  It is much more likely to invest in the dream world, or aspects of the waking world than those who only invest in the physical world would shy away from, such as visions.  It also tends toward solipsism, as opposed to objectification.  But to provide a balance, as a multivalent cosmology does, can be fruitful for developing a spirituality of temporal engagement.

A conscious spirituality of temporal engagement is necessary because of the existential bifurcation that permeates our modern world. The treatise Somnium Spirituality discussed this bifurcation,  

         

If there is no “use” to the knowledge, if it doesn't produce other physical things or make production more efficient, there is no reason to pursue such knowledge.  The scientific method has been very helpful in alleviating certain types of suffering in the world and for that it should certainly be commended.  But it is rare that people play out what the complete set of philosophical implications would be if this were the only valid type of knowledge out there.  Instead it is just assumed that this is the only way to access valuable knowledge, and therefore many important aspects of human life that have been deeply ingrained in our human experience are beginning to fall by the wayside in cultures that imply scientific method as the only means of acquiring sound and useful knowledge.

At the very least over focus on this view of knowledge has lead to an existential bifurcation of the human who wholly buys into it.  One exists in the past, in that there are past experiences that one draws on for knowledge.  One exists in the future in that one seeks in a reproducible way to demonstrate one’s own past experience to others by means of controlled experimentation.  All of this uses past experience to help shape future events, especially to the ends of shaping the future world regarding productivity and efficiency.  At the same time, this worldview completely ignores the “existential moment”, that is, this epistemology has no accounting for the present, the inability to “be still and know that I am God.”  Thus the modern secular minded individual lives under the constant assumption of a split in their sense of self between their past experience, which is inaccessible, and their future expectation or calculation thereof, which is only potential.  While recognizing all the good the scientific method has brought to humanity, it is worth noting that this existential bifurcation has certainly lead to a particular type of unsatisfactory life in the modern world, which springs from not being able to live in the present.   

This existential bifurcation springs from the interpretation of the past as a provider of useful knowledge, data, for predictive analytics.  A phenomenological approach is certainly an antidote to this problem but at the risk of solipsism.  Existential bifurcation springs from how we developed a measurement of time determined by physical observation.  The phenomenon of existential bifurcation is a legacy of this view of time and the inculturation of the scientific method.  Our task is to use the present as the lens to interpret the past and future, not vice versa.  To use the past and future to interpret the present is in one way the very definition of existential bifurcation.  The solution of reordering our temporal interpretive priority will allow us to use the present to interpret the past and the future.  This will better facilitate the ability to meet God in the present moment.  

One thing that may be helpful for our current problem is comfort with the temporal interpretive paradox.  Discomfort and angst caused by our relationship with time can be helped first by a recognition that there is a substantial interpretive difference between what we may consider physical time or, and phenomenological time.  That these “times” are different and the same is completely succinct with true Christian ontology.  One can come to a holistic experience of this if one practiced some of the methodologies laid out in the treatise The Three Tiered Integration of Self.  In that treatise, we defined the three tiered integration of the self as a technique which allows for, “an expansive giving of self to the “other” in a way that is binding, even to an ontological level.  The purpose is to heal the divisive alienation (broken relationships) shot through creation by original sin.”  We explained that it is a collapse of three tiered field of experience into self, the inner self, the bodily  (auxiliary) self, and the external world.  By the practice of integrating techniques, one experiences Christian ontology as a reality.  One understands or experiences that all of reality is simple and manifold at the same time.  In the three tiered integration of the self one’s interior life, one’s corporeal life and what one had perceived of as “the external world” are all now perceived of as one’s self.  In the same way, an awareness of time as both interior experience and an external stream allows one to account for causality, yet at the same time live in the moment.  Buying into this compatibility is another antidote to existential bifurcation.  In the end, we have a process of integrating time by way of bringing the future and the past to the present and integrate interior and exterior experience of time, altogether giving the practitioner a sense of God’s vast domain of time all in the present moment.  

We have hints of tension between exterior and exterior sense of time in other treatises, especially revolving around sacred ritual and sacred time.  The treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, discussed in detail the curious effect of ritual on one’s sense of time.  We defined sacred time thusly,

Sacred time is measured in the same way that distance is measured in the ritual, meaning it is not considered a separator but a unifier, sacred time transcends and binds all time into one.  If someone can perform passover rites in Ephesus and be part of the same sacrifice as the one in Jerusalem, then one can perform rites in 2017 C.E. and they are participating in the same rite as the one done in 32 C.E. and these and all other passovers are the participations in the same rite done in 1446 BCE.  For calculated sacred ritual, the divisive nature of time and space dissolves and one gains access to the myth and the heroes whose narrative give meaning to the ritual and to the participant.  

This passage sums up an analysis of the Passover as a unifying ritual for the Jewish people and draws conclusions about the nature of ritual and sacred time in general that develop out of the deep human investment in the meta paradox between time and eternity.  If eternity exists as an experience of God then all time can be bound into one “event”.  In as much as we can transcend ourselves and our situation, we can transcend time.  Fascinatingly this is done in “the present moment”, by a keen awareness (mindfulness) of immediate existence simultaneously connected to “the stream of time”.  Our current existential bifurcation is a result of a skewed over focused and over pragmatic view of time that has alienated it from our being as temporal creatures.  Again, our goal is to use experienced time (the present) to interpret extra-experiential time (the past and the future) as well as integrate inner and outer experience of time to effect an awe for the God of Time and and to use time according to His purpose.  For the remainder of this treatise, in two parts, we will examine our relationship with the past and the future in order to quell the alienation and search for integrative skills by which we can seek the divine life.      

In this section, we began by discussing our human tendency to compartmentalize God.  We started with how the ancients compartmentalized the gods geographically and functionally.  We then pointed out how modern Christianity has made peace with God’s absolute geographic dominion but has a hard time with God’s functional dominion.  We then attempted to show how the first story of creation seeks to solve these problems by framing God as a “God of time” in order to maximize God’s sovereignty, even over time itself.  We then laid out three differing methodologies for understanding the nature of time, measurement by standardized rhythmic motion, act and potentiality, and the matrix of phenomenological experience.  This analysis gave us an understanding of the existential bifurcation that we feel because of our culturally dominant understanding of time and gave us a possible solution by means of the temporal interpretive paradox in order to make “all time” serve a present encounter with God.

In the next section, we will start by discussing how our view of the past shapes a culture that sees freewill as absolutely limited.  Next, we will attempt to shift the understanding of history from etiological to narrative in order to begin a twofold recalibration of our relationship with time.  We will attempt to reshape our view of history from etiology to a teleological narrative or “mythic history”. 

In this last section, we will focus on our understanding of the future and shift away from seeing prediction as a manipulation, but rather a present centering activity for exercise of will and moral growth.

Relating to the Past: Deductive Determinism and Redemption

In the first section, we expounded upon our unhealthy relationship with time and seek to frame an understanding of time more in keeping with an encounter with God in the present moment. 

 In this section, we will start by discussing how our view of the past shapes a culture that sees freewill as absolutely limited.  We will discuss both material and psychological determinism.  Then we will point out the Christian understanding of how the past limits will as slavery to sin, a concept that allows for the exercise of will in the present while admitting its limitations.  Next, we will attempt to shift the understanding of history from etiological to narrative in order to begin a twofold recalibration of our relationship with time.  The new relationship to extra-experiential time (the past and the future) will be seen as a potential gift of redemption, the gift of forgiveness regarding the past and the gift of grace regarding the future.  We will attempt to reshape our view of history from etiology to a teleological narrative or “mythic history”.  We will also attempt to show how the typologies of the Bible are calibrators of meaning for historical narrative and tried to offer useful ways to engage in historical transmission beyond data driven history to the end of predictive analytics.

In the last section, we will focus on our understanding of the future and shift away from seeing prediction as a manipulation, but rather a present centering activity for exercise of will and moral growth.

Determinism, Slavery to Sin, and Freewill 

In these last two sections, we will contemplate the past and the future.  Of the two the past seems more accessible.  Memories we have of the past are far more numerous than premonitions we may have of the future. Since we believe we experienced them we trust them more than premonitions, which past experience tells us do not always come true.  These are the exact calculations that demonstrate our existential bifurcation.  Our relationship to the past as it is now, so shaped by empirical pursuit, looks to the past for data about how to relate to the future at the expense of the present.  It is not a new way of looking at the past.  Marcus Aurelius noted, “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”  But it’s all pervasiveness in our empirically geared culture accentuates our data driven view of history.  This overemphasis can lead to an underlying current of determinism that infects our assumptions and relationships with the past.  

Following our culture’s obsession with cartesian dualism, we are going to distinguish between two types of determinism, physical and psycho-spiritual.  Physical determinism can result if the tools and methodologies of empiricism are taken too exclusively.  Our basic understanding of the physical world depends on a belief of causality, and in a scientific view physical causality especially.  We assume that all phenomenon we observe is caused by some previous phenomenon.  In this view history is etiology.  It is so ingrained in our modern consciousness, that when we experience a phenomenon that appears outside our immediately graspable frame of causality it piques our interest.  When this happens our first question is not “why did this happen”, but “how did this happen?”               

Christian believers often fall into at least soft material determinism because of an over focus on God as “creator” couched in a deistic cosmology.  We noted in Sacramental Cosmology,

The hybrid of empiricism and rationalism that gave rise to secularism began to view the cosmos more as a mechanism, a bunch of physical objects running by the set rules of physics.  This played out theologically in the deistic movement, where God is seen as the creator and his creation works like clockwork, which runs itself.  God, having pressed the “on switch”, need not engage with his creation.  This is born out of the over emphasis of God as Creator (the uncaused cause), and fosters with a fixation on causality, which is one of the chief scientific dogmas.  Thomas Aquinas describes God in the Summa thusly,

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

One can see here that how something came into being is a priority, and all of creation is seen as a mechanical string of causal connections.  Each instance is particular, even God himself, each analyzable. 

The force of causality is irresistible once all of physical reality is brought under its preview.  But doing so is necessary for the endeavor of science.  If there are any conceivable exceptions to the rule of causality then the entire methodology is under question.  And because the tools of science are sense data, what is observable is caused by what is observable.

Because of these dogmas of empiricism time becomes a medium for determining causal connection through verification.  In fact, the way the scientific endeavor views time itself relies on strict causality in order to create observable standardized instruments of rhythmic motion.  Without these, and the causality they assume, then time cannot be “observed” and therefore cannot exist.  In this cosmology, time is knowable by (subject to?) causality as opposed to vice versa.  That is to say, the experience of time is knowable because of causal connections.  One’s priority effects one’s cosmology.  In a worldview where we see that God is the God of time, the time and the reality that presents according to it are under the creative and loving will of God at all points.  Whereas a worldview that sees God as the initiator of the meta-causal chain, by which one can observe time, sees time and phenomenon that is fixed according to the law of causality.  Time itself, as a matrix of reality, is simply a medium to express casualty.  God seems rendered (voluntarily?) powerless in relation to time, space, and matter.  The creation of the matter and laws are set “outside” both God and ourselves.  This creates a two-fold alienation from God.  He is alienated from creation and so are we.  In that “mutual alienation” creation becomes the alienating buffer between God and ourselves.  Add to that the alienating factor of “creation” happening in the past as we just discussed and now we have an alienating temporal factor.  All of these factors make it hard to meet God in the present.  Our Via Affirmativa of defining God as the God of Time binds the past to the present as binds both environmental time and phenomenological time.  As we noted all of this can be facilitated through ritual aided by sacred space and a sense of sacred time.  All of these techniques allow us to experience God as the all enveloping God of time, and the living God as opposed to a mechanical God of the past.         

An etiological view of history as “causality that determines”, effects our engagement with the present and causes further alienation in our relationship with God.  In a culture of existential bifurcation, the present is reduced to historical analysis for predictive purposes.  A view of determinism allows for absolute power of predictability if one can access the necessary historical data and analyze it appropriately.  The lust for the power of predictability is what reduces history to etiology and subjugates experience to calculation.  This same lust is responsible for expanding the reaches of causality beyond observable reality in the physical world into the psycho-spiritual world. As one takes observable causality and begins to draw inferences on personhood one begins to construct psycho-spiritual determinism.

The most “scientific” type of psycho-spiritual determinism is behaviorism.  This type of determinism reduces the psyche to observable action elicited by stimulus (a cause).  Anyone who has taken a taken an introduction to psychology class knows that the program of behaviorism was based on this self same lust for using past data for in order to garner predictive power.  Employing a reductionist cosmology, behaviorism disavowed any factor save the physical world and sought to control human behavior by manipulation of stimulus on the “person” (actually the human body).  This anthropological reinterpretation was ultimately a failure.  Behaviorism alone could not account for necessary deep human expressions such as trust, joy, culture, beauty, love etc.  For example, in behaviorist terms, the only way to “calculate” love is by measuring the amount of time spent together, which, anyone who works a full time job knows, is not a reliable indicator of love.  Philosophically behaviorism fails because in it the subject seeks to control the object, but if behaviorism is universally true, there is no “subject”.

More likely a strict materialist today will seek to put a human psycho-spiritual reality under the absolute preview of causality by diving micro, either with neurological chemistry or genetic determination.  This reduction appears more palatable to modern westerners because there is something “inner” or “personal” to it that allows the believer to still garner a sense of individuality, personhood and maybe even control.  But make no mistake, if determinism proves true, then any action a human does is not personal, it is cosmically determined.  In such a cosmology there is no “control” even though the entire agenda of implementing such a cosmology is born out of a grasping for control through analysis of the past and predictive analytics.  As is often the flaw with “objective science” the observer is not put into the calculation applied to the observed.  This inconsistent flaw leaves the observer isolated from environment and from God.  It robs us of a personal relationship with God.                    

More likely a person will subscribe to a soft, selective, determinism usually discussed in terms of nature versus nurture.  This timeless debate looks to both observable and unobservable factors bearing down on a person and unsystematically allows for some sort of cartesian dualism.  In this dualism, the psycho-spiritual dimension is also determined, if not by neurochemical and genetic factors, then by some ethereal laws of psychology.  In any of the multifaceted ways that a nature nurture debate may play out, the basic question is whether one's determined behavior is environmentally learned, or personally determined.  Such debate treats psychological reality in the same way that physics treats the material world.  In each case, causality is seen as the chief interpretive factor for understanding flux.  If this is true of the human psyche then there is no free will, and no ability to personally relate to God.  

It is not our purpose here to argue for absolute freedom of will.  However, there is a need in any tradition that has a moral view for some sort of free will that allows one to choose the correct option.  “How free” varies from tradition to tradition or philosophy to philosophy.  But, if one is to have a view of morality, then some sort of free will must play into one’s anthropology.  In this treatise, we can easily admit that there are serious physical limitations to personal free will at play in the cosmos.  More interesting are the psycho-spiritual limitations, which we will define as a gradation between habit and character.

The past does bear down in a powerful way to limit our psycho-spiritual person.  A first major limitation to human free will is habit.  This is an action that one has done in the past and becomes, through repetition, a stock response without the use of will.  At the end of every workday, I enter my front door and place my bag next to the door, where it most likely stays until morning.  The next day I pick it up before I leave. As these things are going on I do not consciously choose to place the bag or pick it up.  This is done habitually.  Our brains simply cannot make every one of the infinite choices available to us at any given moment.  Most of our day is spent in habit mode.  If the reader drives somewhere most every day and is there now, try remembering driving there this morning.  The actual memory of this mornings drive may not readily come, because terrifyingly enough, it was probably an experience facilitated by habit.  This is why sometimes when one starts a drive on the weekend that begins the same route as the work commute at work commute time, if one is not mindful, one will be halfway up the interstate ramp before one realizes one is headed to work instead of the intended destination.  

But this leads to the difference between our two psycho-spiritual limiters habit and character.  A habit can be immediately broken once it is realized and once one desires to.  For example, sometimes I want to remind myself to bring something to work, so I will purposely set my bag elsewhere in the evening.  That way when my habit pushes me to get the bag and I realize it’s not there I am summoned to a higher consciousness and reminded to bring whatever it was I needed to.  Now, this only works by force of will each time and without further reflection, one falls back into habitual action.  But by repetitious and constant use of will one can reshape habitual behavior over time and form new habits.          

Unlike habit, character is not immediately changeable by an act of will, though over a much greater period it can change.  Character is when one’s habitual behavior has formed into one’s personality in such a way as to be immediate irresistible or compulsory.  For example, when driving down a busy two lane highway most of us would not be able to choose to steer into oncoming traffic. In this case, it is not a matter of making a good choice, our character of self-preservation would not allow us to do it.  The school where I teach rarely has serious discipline problems.  I would tell the students, you are “free” to get up and leave this class right now as an act of rebellion, but your character prohibits you.  I would even push it a bit further, you are “free” to go across the street to the grocery store, buy a dozen eggs and egg me on my way to the car this afternoon.  Thankfully I was correct about the character of the student body and for all the years I taught morality I was never egged.  There are many actions and behaviors that, though there are no physical limitations on our freedom, we cannot bring ourselves to do, or not do.  Character can change, but it is a much more gradual process and implies a slow degradation starting with much smaller steps. 

All this speculation to say that we are bound in very serious ways by the past. That binding is not just by the “past of physics” deduced by observation of standardized rhythmic motion.  Rather the past is some sort of continuum of our use of our own personhood.  We have immediate use of our will regarding habits but must rely on these habits so as not to be paralyzed by the constant and infinite influx of choices.  Standardized habitual behaviors become our character, which is immediately irresistible.  It is in this way that we become “slaves to sin”.  Because of the tendency, by original sin, to fall into bad behavior, we tend, when we are unreflective, to fall into bad habits.  If left unchecked, they become bad character, and it is a much longer road to reform.  As Saint Paul said in Romans Chapter 7, “We know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin.  What I do, I do not understand.  For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” 

There are ways of dealing with this slavery, but in Christianity, they are not solitary ways.  First, we must understand that we are not absolutely determined by nature and/or nurture. We do have free will.  Free will is not the past or the future, it is now.  In this section, we are discussing the past so in relation to the past, and our existential bifurcation, free will is the mysterious ability of a “person” to resist or submit to the apparent chain of causality.  If we are, as Christians believe, enslaved to sin, there are two options.  The first is to throw ourselves onto the person of Christ and accept his grace.  The second is to slowly over time form a new character, by immediately shaping our habitual actions.  The past may determine the present, but not necessarily.  In fact, the present may in some ways be defined as that moment when one can resist the chain of causality, “time is life”.  If time is act and potentiality as opposed to physical time measured by standardized rhythmic motion, then we have a chance to will and act in order to activate our potentiality.       

History, Etiology, and an Analytical Shift Toward Redemption

An improper relationship with the past can hold one more limited in the present than necessary.  An over reliance on the deterministic nature of the past could lead one to a sense of despair or hopelessness, whether it be from a traumatic experience one cannot seem to escape, a scrupulous soteriology, or as a justification for stereotypes and prejudices.  One can easily lose faith in the ability to act effectively in the present if one cannot see the present as anything but the situation of causal relationship between the past and the future.  Trauma, habit, and character do limit one’s ability to exercise one’s will, but they are not absolute factors.  Human will is limited, but it exists as the gift of God where the past meets the future.   

While recognizing the limitations of human will, it may help to shift the understanding of the past.  There is no reason to abandon an analytical posture toward the past but, to thwart existential bifurcation, it may be helpful to remember that such analysis need not always be aimed only at the future.  In effect, the past does not “exist” for the present self.  It is an extra-experiential time.  Only memories of the past exist and they themselves are a present reality.  When “the past as present” is meditated upon, the past becomes a gift to the present self.  This gift is not data for public verifiability and causal analysis, but an experience to analyze for the exercise of personal will through moral action and in relationship with God.  As we stated, will is the resistance to causal flow.  In the moment one may well regard the past in order to “learn a lesson” (resist the past) or draw inspiration (imitate the past).  

       The analytical shift from casual to moral/soteriological becomes as much about the present as it is about the future.  In this case, our analysis of the past does not diminish our will, but focuses the analysis upon use of it.  It makes an epistemological maneuver similar to the three tiered integration of the self.  In this case the three tiered field of experience, which includes a temporal dimension that could be treated as either the external world or the interior self, because “history” is memory as opposed to etiology when defined phenomenologically.  In a sense, one is integrating the past and the future in order to act according to one’s will.  In fairness, any empirically minded person who seeks to manipulate the physical world, even a behaviorist who denies free will, is doing a similar maneuver.  It is just harder to admit that the analysis is in order to choose a manipulation of the external world when one’s cosmology gears deterministic. Out via affirmativa of approaching God as the God of time should be an aid to remedy to this problem.    

Christianity has a healthy interplay, or one may say tension, between how one relates to the past as determined, and the freedom of will to resist causality and activate any of a host of future potentialities.  A key message of the Gospel (good news) is freedom from the past.  This past is a past of enslavement to sin, the law (a causal view of morality), and various other poor alternatives.  The gospel frees one to act in good faith as a son or daughter as well as sister or brother of God.  The attitude one gains from the gospel is not manipulation of the future by the past, but acceptance.  The acceptance of the gospel is two fold, acceptance of forgiveness and acceptance of grace.  Forgiveness relates to past action and grace regards use of will toward the future.  The grand acceptance of the gospel can be framed as a keen temporal awareness that our redemption is a past event.  Faith grants us this awareness, which gives us the great hope of salvation. 

The first place one sees God’s forgiveness starkly displayed in postlapsarian reality is with the mark of Cain.  After Cain murders his brother he is afraid that anyone will murder him on site.  “Not so! the Lord said to him. If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged seven times. So the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one would kill him at sight.”  God offers mercy and protects Cain.  Cain, for his part, felt God had banished him from his sight, though God had not.  Assuming God’s wrathful posture, Cain actually leaves God’s sight, not the other way around.  The assumption of God’s irrevocable wrath generally does not go well in salvation history.  Cain’s line is ended in the flood.  We see the same assumption of wrath by Lot’s daughters.  After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, “The firstborn said to the younger: “Our father is getting old, and there is not a man in the land to have intercourse with us as is the custom everywhere.”  The assumption that God had destroyed humanity, not out of bounds considering he had in the past, leads to incest and the creation of the Israelite foes, Ammon and Moab.  Yet throughout the Hebrew Scriptures God is constantly offering forgiveness and patiently waiting for it to be accepted.  Even in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham talks God down to ten just men in the entire city, allowing for God’s patience in letting those good men have an effect on thousands.

The forgiveness of the gospel, once accepted, allows one to place the past in perspective.  It could be that the past needs to be forgotten.  As the oracle in Isaiah says, “It is I, I, who wipe out, for my own sake, your offenses; your sins I remember no more.”  Acceptance of this allows us to forget the trauma of our sin and be free from the control.  It could also be that acceptance of forgiveness allows us to see our past as the growth process of the cosmological paradox, as salvation history flows from Eden to the Eschaton.  “All things work to good for those who love God.”  So even though evil action or even sin happened in the past, God can turn them to good. This is not a license to do sin, but an assurance of faith which helps in acceptance of the forgiveness of the gospel with trust instead of fear.  God is more powerful than our evil or sin.  Though the firstborn daughter of Lot came up with a plan of incest because of the assumption of a wrathful God she gave birth to Moab.  The line of Moab begat Ruth, Grandmother of King David, the greatest king of Israel.  

The second acceptance concerning the gospel is grace.  As one presently recognizes the past one simultaneously faces the future.  In this acceptance, one recognizes that will is not absolute, and that God is the only true power of creation.  This first regards salvation itself won in the past by the cross of Christ, not our own action.  This pivotal event in history is effective as a reverberation through the scope of salvation history by means of the meta paradox.  Then a recognition that the gift of will is only effective to its true purpose when it cooperates with the grace of God.  A person’s disposition to the future should not be one of manipulation, but of bending one’s will, to the best of our ability, to the will of God.  The fruits and gifts of the Spirit are in God’s control.  The two fold acceptance of forgiveness and grace allows us to relate to God and to time itself in proper fashion, recognizing our limitations, as opposed to perceiving ourselves as masters.

This acceptance is the difference between them being “under the Law” (as Paul would say) and the gospel.  When one is under the law one is more oriented to a data driven view of history.  The law was revealed in the past.  One needs to study the data and manipulate the future in order to “obtain salvation”.  Thus the rich young man asks Jesus, ‘what good deed must I do to obtain eternal life?”  That story ends with the acceptance of God’s dominion as the gospel proclaims, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus looked at them and said, “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” 

The cycle of sin and the entire flow of salvation history set us up for the ability to accept the gospel in our lives.  This redemptive rhythmic process is the calibrator for how we view history, as a struggle with God (Israel) and as God’s free gift of salvation for us through Christ.  In as much as we struggle with the past and the future under the acceptance of the gospel, we are struggling with God as perfect striving in the cosmological paradox.  In as much as we struggle in a grasping manner to exert our own will on the future and even the past, we are doing harm to ourselves.  Salvation history is the calibrator of how we view the past as related to the present.  Salvation history is the story of action and meaning for humans and this gives us our general disposition toward history.

Thus far in this part, we have focused mostly on moral action, but engagement with the past is not simply future focused.  A phenomenological view of history is as much present focused as it is past.  The past, especially as narrative gives us meaning as much as data.  We can break this down in three different ways, a cosmological meaning, (our place in the universe), which leads to anthropological meaning (why humans act), and this helps us garner moral meaning (how to act).  All of these interpretations meet in the present moment and bear down on the use of will.  By resisting causality we are able to ask ‘what do I as a human mean?’ ‘what do the cosmos mean and what is my relationship to the cosmos?’ and then finally “what can I do?”, which is a moral calculation.  It is by this relationship to the past that we are better able to use our will in the present.  It is a more coherent relationship to time, then one which assumes determinism for every aspect of the cosmos except the perceiver, who inexplicably has a will.  A narrative focus allows the actor to participate in and be part of the narrative and exhibit meaning, instead of being a meaningless point in the chain of causality.

History or Myth: Verifiability or Teleology?

One way to neutralize history as causally determined is to draw a connotative difference between history and myth.  The distinction is connotative because the past is an extra-experiential time, inaccessible in any empirical way, so in the end, history and myth may come to denotative equivalence.  Once one views time only as physical time measurable by standardized rhythmic motions, one begins to place time in the physical world and treat it similarly to physical phenomenon.  Instead of a phenomenological approach which sees time as “life”, a matrix of experience, one sees time as a matrix of objectively verifiable measurement.  At this point, history becomes a set of verifiable facts to be analyzed.  As we have commented this leads to an existential bifurcation, where the modern sees historical facts as data for predictive analytics in order to manipulate the future at the expense of being in the present moment.  Our goal is to bring about a view of time that integrates and harmonizes the three temporal assumptions, past present and future and allows for meaning as opposed to objectification.  The meaning we are seeking points beyond mere manipulation of the future for physical survival or efficiency, but meaning as it relates to our place in and relationship with the cosmos and whatever is transcendent to that. The best matrix for this is narrative as opposed to data.  

The scientific process itself is the most stripped down version of objectified history as data for analysis.  History, as it is taught in schools, is generally less objectified and begins to take the character of narrative.  Once narrative is applied, meaning is implied.  At this point, history moves from descriptive (with the purpose of prediction) to prescriptive (with the purpose of aiding willful choice).  The shift from facts to narrative as a shift to meaning is why the “Theory of Evolution” draws such controversy.  It is a way of doing science that combines fact and historical narrative that runs a deep risk of going beyond simple predictability to applying meaning to the human condition.  Anyone who outright dismisses this fails to grasp the power of narrative.

History textbooks relay facts in order to bolster narrative.  They seek to tell a story such that a people can validate their experience more so than record data.  There is a reason why blood pressure of a general, or variance percentage of eye color of the soldiery doesn’t make it into the narrative of a battle in a textbook.  It might yield predictive data, but it certainly has nothing to do with meaning.  If troop placement is placed in a textbook it is to demonstrate the intelligence of military leaders to bolster cultural myths and meaning. This treatise would argue that the history textbook is engaged in myth rather than deductive determinism.  History as “data points of the past” is history objectified.  Myth regards the past for meaning and is less concerned with data.  The complete divorce of the two is the difference between absolute fiction and absolute boredom.

Because of the processes of good science, history seeks data that is verifiable.  The “verifiability” of myth is meaning that is useful to the largest cross section of humanity.  If the teleologically affected population is not large enough, the myth runs the risk of disappearing and being replaced by better, more meaningful, myth.  The difference between verifiable historical data, and mass meaningful, possibly partially historical, myth is why the existence of four, at times contradictory, gospels does not bother the believer.  It is why the constant varying repetition (through borrowing) in genesis and the complete rewrite (and “clean up”) of 1 Samuel - 2 Kings under the guise of 1-2 Chronicles does not bother the believer.  That someone historically sold their wife to a bad end, whether it be Abraham or Isaac, is good enough, now we can look at the variance to understand deeper meanings.  That the Hebrews escaped Egypt with the aid of a water event, whether is be Reed Sea with balled up water or Red Sea with walled up water shows the meaning behind human slavery and God’s salvation.  That Jesus preached, taught, worked, miracles, and died as a fact of history is important.  But as simple data, it is meaningless, until we weave the masterful narratives of the four gospels and related the to the meta-narrative of the entire Bible. 

That there are four gospels and none of them were written by the hands of Jesus as he walked this Earth says a lot about the Christian understanding of history.  The idea of an objectified past as data that is verifiable is simply not a Christian way to understand the past.  Even the past as one experiences it one’s self is open to interpretation by the subject and by their peers.  So in the New Testament, we have four angles on the Jesus event, and they are all equally valuable.  They do not intend to record data, but to express Truth “so that you may believe”.  That believe regards the gospel (good news) and the acceptance that comes with it, not a set of data points.    

Simply put, the past is as inaccessible as the future.  Both the past and the future are extra-experiential time, they are time beyond human experience because human experience takes place in the present alone.  Once one can see how both the past and the future are extra-experiential time one can see how our current existential bifurcation is such a robbery.  It robs us of the one reality we can know, the present, and replaces it with two vague, extremely imperfectly (re)constructed realities.  And most tragically it robs us of the place we meet God.  There is actually no way to access the past or the future by any means similar to “observation”.  But then again, all the data of science was experienced past, the only thing experience in the present is the record of it.  History is in no way a “hard” science, but because of that and science’s reliance of reproduction, of history, the scientific method is put in a rather embarrassing situation if one relies on that method to answer all of the deep questions of life. 

Thus any attempt to bring science to bear to “disprove” the Bible, should be met with patient amusement.  When I am teaching Hebrew Scriptures and a student asks, “was Noah real?”  my answer starts to get complex.  “Real? Do you mean 100% historically accurate?”  That is usually what they mean, and the answer is, who could ever even know that.  The past is extra-experiential time.   The best guess is “probably not”.  If the question is, “is the Noah story it true?”  the answer is, probably not as historical data points.  But regarding the use and meaning, absolutely 100%.  If a student persists about historical accuracy I usually wrap up with, “look, in a prehistoric world where you walk everywhere you go, and there are no satellite images, a fifty square mile flood is a flood of the entire earth.  Any lingering memory of this, overlayed with mythic meaning, is not a lie, it is true historically and mythically.”  

The myth as narrative is important because it allows for narrative appropriation.  Myth as historical myth is important because creation is sacramental.  The sacramental nature of the cosmos allows for the existence of calculated ritual, in order to queue into the deeper meaning of existence and to connect to transcendence.  The history contained in the scriptures, give us the interpretive key to our own sense of history and the structure for our ritual lives.  Narrative appropriation by historic myth and effective calculated ritual is what allows for the time binding effect of sacred time.  As was pointed out in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment, ritual space is arranged to bind participants together. The repetitious uniformity of the across varying ritual sites also bind scattered participants across space.  The repetitious nature of temporal location allows time to bind together as well, such that all participants across space and time are participating in the same ritual toward the same meaning. 

 

Sacred time is measured in the same way that distance is measured in the ritual, meaning it is not considered a separator but a unifier, sacred time transcends and binds all time into one.  If someone can perform Passover rites in Ephesus and be part of the same sacrifice as the one in Jerusalem, then one can perform rites in 2017 C.E. and they are participating in the same rite as the one done in 32 C.E. and these and all other Passovers are the participation in the same rite done in 1446 BCE.  For calculated sacred ritual, the divisive nature of time and space dissolves and one gains access to the myth and the heroes whose narrative give meaning to the ritual and to the participant.

We can add that the perceiver in the present can both connect to those in the past and future.  Though some facts of the binding narrative may not be historically accurate, they are historically functional within the ritual system.  Just as physical time measures time in the modern era by standardized rhythmic motion, salvation history measures time by narratively rhythmic meaning.  These are the typologies found in the Hebrew Scriptures that are fulfilled in the person of Christ.  The repetitions queue into how humanity conceives of existence archetypally.  In its repetitive nature, the revelation of salvation history in scripture manipulates archtypology to create an interpretative lens for all other cultural histories to be calibrated and in our own personal histories. The easiest example of this is the cycle of sin and redemption/captivity and freedom exhibited in salvation history and leading to our redemption and liberation in Christ, as an act of history and as a personal experience for each Christian.  This is not the past as causal determinism, but the past as recognition of limitation and opportunity for freedom.

As individuals, we experience the passage of time and garner memories.  We trust that the memories of our culture is born out of a similar experience.  What mythic history does is give us a place in our environment (the present) to experience and exhibit our place in the cosmos and our relationship to each other as persons and to transcendence as a person (God).  The sacred scriptures are God’s historical craft for meaning.  Time itself is God’s art piece to give us relationship and meaning.  So in as much as we are present in the present, we reflect on the past to find joy and meaning.  In as much as we can record the past, the data is important because the flow of space and time is God’s and he creates for a reason.  But equally as important is the recording of meaningful relationships beyond simply manipulation of physical reality in the future.  

As a “historian” one must craft an edifying cultural meaning that cues into salvation history. As a person, one may then draw on both cultural history, salvation history, and personal to find meaning in life.  This means a reason to exercise will, as calibrated by one’s place in the cosmos, one’s place in one’s microcosmic environment, one’s relationship with one’s neighbors and one’s relationship to God.  A major part of this crafting is the ability to find redemption in history and once found apply it to ritual through history affecting rituals time binding effect.  Whether the historical data is accurate is only important in as much as one understands that God is the eternal God who shapes time (including history) and he uses space and time to convey meaning, grace, and redemption.  As history is practiced now, a historian may be locked into a causal understanding of historical flow.  However, to be creative with history for the right purpose without deception is laudable.  To presence meaning and redemption through a historical lens recognizes’ God’s promise of redemption through history. To be true to the historical data is to recognize the sacramental nature of time and space.  But the lack of certainty regarding history allows for legitimate creative crafting of history that can take many forms.  It can be near caricatured focus and downplaying.  It could be an exploitation of the necessary vagary of language to a poetic end.   A culture or person that does this type of history will better facilitate a healthy ritual life with intuitive ritual investment because narrative appropriation is easier.   

Creation of mythic history could be a focus on symbolic connections to the detriment of data.  It could be the addition and exaltation of any number of unseen factors in reality that do not pass “historical” muster.  If these embellishments come off as bothersome, remember our goal.  It is not to record data for the sake of recording data.  It is not to record data for the sake of predictive analytics.  It is also important to remember just how limited a view of our current regard for data driven history is.  It does not take into account the waking world as opposed to the physical world.  It does not take into account the dream world, where symbology is the mode as opposed to causality.  It does not take into account the confluence of all of these as phenomenological time. Lastly, such worry does not take into account that both the past and the future are extra-experiential time, history itself is as inaccessible as the future.  The only gift God has given us is the present.  That gift is for use according to a purpose.  The rest is auxiliary.

The urge of this treatise is to develop practice of a present centered view of time that is able to phenomenologically synchronize an awareness and utilization of the four rhythms of time.  The first two of the four are environmental time, time that is external the observer. The first is physical time which notes the rhythms of the created order (such as seasons), physical time is measured by standardized rhythmic motion. Then there is mythic history which is measured by archetypal rhythms in humanity’s narrative.  Mythic history finds its meaning in the rhythms of salvation history (such as the cycle of sin).  The last two are phenomenological time that is, time as it is perceived by the subject.  So circadian time is the rhythm of time in the waking world and time in the dream world. And the last is the subjective time, which presents as a rhythm of conscious awareness and habitual slumber.  By synchronizing an awareness of all four of these rhythms of time one can create effective ritual in order to encounter God.

                     

In the first section, we began by discussing our human tendency to compartmentalize God.  We attempted to show how the first story of creation seeks to solve these problems by framing God as a “God of time” in order to maximize God’s sovereignty, even over time itself.  We then laid out three differing methodologies for understanding the nature of time, measurement by standardized rhythmic motion, act and potentiality, and the matrix of phenomenological experience.  This analysis gave us an understanding of the existential bifurcation that we feel because of our culturally dominant understanding of time and gave us a possible solution by means of the temporal interpretive paradox in order to make “all time” serve a present encounter with God..

In this section, we started off discussing how our view of the past shapes a culture that sees freewill as absolutely limited.  We discussed both material and psychological determinism.  We then pointed out the Christian understanding of how the past limits will as slavery to sin, a concept that allows for the exercise of will in the present while admitting its limitations.  We then tried to shift the understanding of history from etiological to narrative in order to begin a twofold recalibration of our relationship with time.  We framed the new relationship to extra-experiential time (the past and the future) as a potential gift of redemption, the gift of forgiveness regarding the past and the gift of grace regarding the future.  We proceeded to attempt to reshape our view of history from etiology to a teleological narrative or “mythic history”.  We attempted to show how the typologies of the Bible are calibrators of meaning for historical narrative and tried to offer useful ways to engage in historical transmission beyond data driven history to the end of predictive analytics. 

In this last section, we will begin by demonstrating the inability to engage in absolute prediction.   We will discuss the extra-experiential time of the future.  Next, we will discuss the nature of prophecy in the scriptures and focus on how the Bible does not treat prophecy of the future as a demonstration of power or a skill to be used for personal manipulation.  Rather prophecy is meant to wake listeners up to the present moment. And summon them to the proper use of their will. We will attempt to draw out the current use of predictive analytics, showing how they are used to grasp for control of the cosmos as an object to be manipulated.  We also show how they do succumb to demonic influence, channeling the observer away from God and toward false gods.  Concupiscent inflammation and idolatry are the dangers of prognostication and current predictive analytics tend to both of these.  We will end the treatise with the positive skill of contemplative prediction, a skill that notices the rhythms of the cosmos and uses those rhythms to be aware of the moment, supplies a theodicy for temporal suffering, and inform one's moral and spiritual attitude at the moment.  We will conclude with an analytic application of both predictive analytics and contemplative prediction to the Book of Revelations and tarot cards in order to demonstrate that technique and technology are not the problems of prognostication.  Rather, the problem is lack of beatitude. 

Relating to the Future: Predictive Analytics and Mindfulness                 

In the first section, we expounded upon our unhealthy relationship with time and seek to frame an understanding of time more in keeping with the Christian life. In the previous section, we sought a particular understanding of the past that breaks away from determinism and focuses one on redemption.  In this last section, we will focus on our understanding of the future and shift away from seeing prediction as a manipulation, but rather a present centering activity for exercise of will and moral growth.

Limitations and Possibilities of Predictive Analytics

In the last section, we discussed how the past is extra-experiential time.  There is no direct experience of the past, only memory, which happens in the present.  This lack of access is more obviously true of the future.  Generally one assumes that the past is real yet the future is only potential.  This assumption is the result of one of the contradictions of nieve determinism, that is that the observer of the objective (determined) world somehow escapes the determinism in the present moment and for the future.  B.F. Skinner reasoned out behaviorism in order to reform society, never suspecting that doing so implies free choice on the part of the reformers (if not the reformed).  This assumption of the ontological status of the two types of extra-experiential time gives the impression that the past is somehow more accessible than the future. But both the past and the future are beyond immediate access.  James points this out in chapter 4 of his Epistle,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit”— you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow.  You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.  Instead you should say, “If the Lord wills it, we shall live to do this or that.”

  

In the first section, we focused on Aquinas’ view that time and flux are assessed by the terms “act” and “potential” because they keep us focused on the present, placing the past and the future at the service of the present moment.  To achieve the same goal, a modern phraseology for experience of the past and the future in the present could be “memory” and “prediction”.  These terms keep the flow of our scientific agenda, but at the same time draw the speaker to the present moment as opposed to an existential bifurcation of calculation.    

Certainly, a person can experience memories of the past, but when it comes to prediction, the modern person often asserts suspicion or immorality toward prognostication.  The skeptic does not care about the morality of prognostication, because he does not believe in the possibility of it. The “superstitious” believer will often treat prognostication as dangerous if not outright forbidden.  Horoscopes and astrology or the use of tarot cards or Ouiji are deemed immoral.  But is prediction of the future always bad?  And if not when and why is it acceptable?

In the Bible, there are numerous warnings against divination.  But these warnings come with caveats.  In Deuteronomy Chapter 13 the author states, 

If there arises in your midst a prophet or a dreamer who promises you a sign or wonder, saying, “Let us go after other gods,” whom you have not known, “and let us serve them,” and the sign or wonder foretold to you comes to pass, do not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer; for the Lord, your God, is testing you to know whether you really love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul.            

For the Deuteronomic source, predictive abilities or technologies are only immoral if they lead one away from God.  That end would leave any technology or skill firmly in the camp of “morally neutral”.  Deuteronomy 18 gives a stricter prohibition of divination. 

When you come into the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the abominations of the nations there.  Let there not be found among you anyone who causes their son or daughter to pass through the fire, or practices divination, or is a soothsayer, augur, or sorcerer, or who casts spells, consults ghosts and spirits, or seeks oracles from the dead.  Anyone who does such things is an abomination to the Lord, and because of such abominations the Lord, your God, is dispossessing them before you.  

But even here one can see from the beginning that the prohibition has much to do with false gods.  It starts with passing through fire, a rite of passage to the god Molech.  The question here is what is being prohibited, the imitation of technique or the imitation of false worship?  Taken in conjunction with the prohibition from chapter 13, it would seem the answer is the latter.  Not only that but to read further one get a sense that the passage in chapter 18 is saying exactly the same thing as the passage in chapter 13,

Although these nations whom you are about to dispossess listen to their soothsayers and diviners, the Lord, your God, will not permit you to do so.  A prophet like me will the Lord, your God, raise up for you from among your own kindred; that is the one to whom you shall listen

     

It seems again that the prohibition against divination has everything to do with who is revealing the information, God or some other being, and how the information is being directed, towards God or otherwise.  By the way, just because some other being is revealing the information, does not mean that that being is not an agent of God.  Both prophets and angels reveal their information at the behest of God, so in effect, it is God doing the revealing.  There are two questions concerning prediction.  First, is the technology or methodology reliable?  Second, is the use of the technology or methodology morally appropriate, meaning, do they draw the user or benefactor toward God, or help one’s neighbor?  

Dangers and Use of Predictive Analytics

We are attempting to garner a healthy view of time that can aid in the participation of grace and facilitate recognition of God’s power in our life.  The past, as well as the future, must be considered.  When one considers the future in any respect one is predicting.  But there are legitimate dangers concerning predictive analytics.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church points out credible dangers concerning divination while instructing on the first commandment,

God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it. Improvidence, however, can constitute a lack of responsibility.

All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to "unveil" the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.

 

The passage demonstrates great wisdom in that it points to the root of existential bifurcation, “a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings”.  A lust for power by knowledge of the future can cause great psycho-spiritual misery.  But the techniques and methodologies themselves are not the problems unless they are under the auspices of demonic powers.  And as we have often noted, there are also angelic powers to be considered.  This is a situation where great caution must be taken, and to err on the side of caution is the best course of action.

I would argue that modern Catholics have wholly disregarded this warning to their great detriment.  Our disregard comes from the self same lust, but it is not because we buy into tarot or astrology.  The treatise Applied Remythologization engaged in a meditation of mythic-lens reconstruction concerning magic that directly relates to the topic at hand.  The reader will remember that applied remythologization is the practice of the ability to see the world with the modern empirical/materialist cosmology and at the same time see the world through a lens where mythic realities are present and active.   It is practiced by acquiring a multivalent cosmology through the techniques of mythic-lens reconstruction.  The reader will remember that mythic-lens reconstruction involves viewing reality in a different way in order to fully utilize myth in our moral, aesthetic, and ritual lives.  There are three ways to focus when practicing mythic-lens reconstruction, celestial mythic beings, terrestrial mythic beings, and magical powers.

In that treatise, our focus on magical powers included a section on future prediction.

  

What if one had a magical book that could tell or teach one’s owner to intuit the future?   . . .   Prediction of the future is always suspect in the sacred scriptures. Even the prophets rarely predict the future, and almost to a man distinguish themselves from the type of “prophet” who is a prognosticator.  The feeling is that time belongs to God.  To seek knowledge of the future is to seek to manipulate God’s providence and hold one’s self over God.  It also always leads to and feeds great anxiety.  We have a host of very accurate prognosticators on our culture from benign to manipulative.  Weathermen and market analysts are the two most obvious examples.  Weathermen are, no doubt prognosticators, they seek to tell one the future based on their ability to observe and use artifacts, some of which are attuned to heavenly artifacts: satellites.  Market analysts not only seek to tell the future, they use that ability to manipulate the minds of others.     

In current Catholicism, there is great suspicion of tarot, which as a technology of predictive analytics seems lacking.  If the reason is, the user is channeling “demonic powers” that condemnation is warranted.  But if the user is not channeling demonic powers, the cards seem licit.  If the condemnation is because it is “superstition” the condemnation basically asserts that the technology doesn’t work.  But that is not the foundation of condemnations either in the Bible or the catechism.  Those condemnations concern the misery of those (human or demonic) who set themselves against God’s power.  Sometimes their methodologies of future predictions are accurate.  Even so, they are still condemned because of the intent.

Does there need to be a condemnation of the meteorology?  The main reason that modern Catholics seem to accept this is that it works. Weather prediction is not superstition.  But that is not a good enough reason to accept it.  The Church’s condemnation has nothing to do with the ability, but the source, intention, and effect.  Weather prediction does not seem to be due to demonic cooperation.  But, how much is the ability to predict the weather a grasping for control of our personal circumstances in the future.  If I am planning a trip or outdoor event, how much do I stress about the weather, how much anxiety does it cause me?  How much do I rely on these prognosticators to give me the ability to control my destiny, as opposed to trusting God who has dominion over both time and weather?  Our relationship to weather predictors is a perfect example of why prognostication is forbidden.  If a person channeled demons through tarot to find out the weather or watched the news, and it was correct in both cases, the result would be the same, a person who is invested in existential bifurcation and experiencing the very anxiety that we pray to God to relieve us of at every Mass.  The demon’s goal is to try to lure us into this exact misery.  With the advent of the meteorologist, demons can go on holiday because now we have instituted self-service anxiety.               

Weather prediction and the predictive ability of science in general, not only seeks the type of environmental manipulation that causes existential bifurcation, it also demonstrates the lust for the “wow factor” hinted at in the quote from the catechism when it noted the, “wish to conciliate hidden powers”.  In as much as scientific method can predict, we are all mesmerized by the success and by the person doing the accurate prediction.  In this respect, superstition is inaccurate, which is annoying, but correct use of scientific method to predict the future leads to the exact pride that caused The Fall.  It is a constant temptation for humans.  One can see it demonstrated in the soldiers who mocked Jesus in Luke Chapter 22.  “The men who held Jesus in custody were ridiculing and beating him.  They blindfolded him and questioned him, saying, “Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?”  And they reviled him in saying many other things against him.”  He is mocked for his inability to know information.  Their use of the term prophet speaks to the corrupt view that a prophet is a soothsayer who “wows” for their own sake as opposed someone who utilizes their skill or experience of God to draw people to God.

The factor that has not been analyzed thus far is the channeling of demonic powers in order to garner predictive abilities.  With meteorology, the intention may or may not be poor, but the anxiety is definitely a reason from condemnation or at least caution.  But can we in the modern world really wipe our foreheads and say, “thank God we have at least avoided predictive analytics coupled with demonic commerce”?  Given the nature and result of predictive grasping and given some issues we have discussed concerning current dangerous principalities and powers in past treatises we may have more of a problem with this than we think.

The treatise, Modern Slavery and the Mercedarians, discussed the power and danger of two demonic principalities that seek undue latria, Nation and Economy.  In that treatise, we discussed how in modern times each of these powers seeks to enslave humanity to a miserable end bereft of a sharing in the life of God.  It was noted in that treatise,

In the celestial combat between Nation and Economy for dominance over humanity, Economy is on the rise.  One of the major tools the god Economy uses to enslave people, once a people give themselves over to Economy, is usury.  The ancient prohibition against usury adopted by all of the worshipers of the God of Abraham was not without reason.  It definitely inhibits slavery to the false god Economy.      

Yet there are many ways each of these gods enslaves as well as spreads misery.  Most of the stock market runs on an elaborate gamble concerning predictive analytics.  Through last century, when “the economy” was taking shape as a principality, the stock market was a force to be observed and used by means of predictive ability.  The crash of the stock market in 1929 facilitated the creation of the concept of “the economy”, a concept that, as a “thing”, didn’t exist previously.  When the government had to explain why burning crops was a solution to impoverishment and famine, “the economy” was the answer.  This was the first time in history where famine was caused by too much food, and the solution to hunger was the destruction of consumable nutrition.  The mind boggling inversion speaks of nothing less than demonic influence.  And since that crash (a mythic demonic death and rebirth experienced through suffering of the masses) the Economy has been a reality in our lives.  That reality is very often measured and summed up in the reality of the stock market.  

The way one makes money i.e. garners power from, the stock market is predictive ability.  In its best form, this is the ability to accurately predict what companies will be successful and pay out dividends from their profits. But ever more complicated predictive skills gave devotees more profits, the ability to predict the price of stocks and buy and sell them for profit.  Soon, with the advent of retirement funds in the form of mutual funds, index funds, etc. large portions of the population became invested in the predictive abilities of market analysts.  As American culture developed low grade analyst began to sell retirement funds by means of their ability to assure of their predictive abilities.  These analysts are directly comparable to the shister prophets of the Old Testament who speak soothing words but sell misery.  This type of prognostication causes anxiety on a mass scale while directing the populace toward inappropriate latria the operative false, Economy.

One last way that American culture has an unhealthy obsession with prognostication involving Economy is the insurance industry.  The insurance industry sells the American people fear.  Fear and anxiety are their only product.  Predictive analytics foments, drives and allow for profitability in this industry.  First, the fear of pain or suffering in the future and the ability to mitigate or escape it is what sells insurance.  A certain amount of suffering is inescapable and many varieties are nearly certain by common knowledge, even without particular skill with predictive analytics.  These are the first varieties of insurance to spring into existence, health, life, and auto.  Each of these is aimed at selling you your own anxiety about the inevitability of suffering and then profiting off of probabilities based on that inevitability.  However, those reserves of cash to pay out do not sit in a box somewhere waiting for disaster, they are invested for a return on the stock market.  This sets up a twofold investment in predictive analytics that compounds the misery involved.

All this to say that America has a serious fortune telling problem, but it involves the new gods not the old.  It does involve demonic powers that seek to spread human anxiety, misery, and suffering, but not by means of decks or boards made by the Mattel corporation.  Instead, the malevolent use of predictive analytics in our culture is so intuitive, that we do not recognize it as evil, most likely just as the cards and boards would have been in times past.  It is more dangerous that our unhealthy relationship with prognostication is so familiar.  The Catechism reminds us, 

Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself . . . The repetition of sins - even venial ones - engenders vices, among which are the capital sins.               

          

This seems to have happened with our unhealthy relationship to prognostication.  We have developed a cultural resistance to all of the Levitical laws that seek to teach us acceptance of God’s providence.  The rest laws and the laws that teach us to trust the future to God, such as the sabbatical, where we are prohibited from tilling the land and the land rests, the prohibition against collecting fruit of a tree for the first years of its life.  These laws teach us to shut down our lives, trust God’s providence and be in the present, to “be still and know that I am God”.  Conversely, have become so familiar with the dangerous consequences of prognostication that we fail to even acknowledge the evil in it.  Instead, we hurry after red herring prognostications such as astrology or I-Ching.  The anxiety and fearing of inaccurate “occult” predictive instruments is doing our faith little good.

 Contemplative Prediction Techniques

Perhaps the reason that modern Christians are so comfortable with prognostication of the weather is that Jesus himself engaged in that very activity in Matthew Chapter 16,

The Pharisees and Sadducees came and, to test him, asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He said to them in reply, “In the evening you say, ‘Tomorrow will be fair, for the sky is red’; and, in the morning, ‘Today will be stormy, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge the signs of the times.  An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Then he left them and went away.

There seem to be two types in predictive analytics at play here, both of which are accurate, but one of which is used for “the better part” eschewing anxiety.  As we end this last section and wrap up this treatise it is useful to develop skills that allow us to form a healthy relationship with extra-experiential time.  If Jesus himself understands predictive abilities as useful and edifying then there must be merit to them.  

In Matthew 16 the religious authority demanded a sign because they are anxious that their authority is being challenged.  A large focus for us in this treatise is the ability to stop grasping at control of time and the cosmos and accept God’s providence.  So Jesus’ response is to offer a predictive analytic, a sign of extremely pragmatic import, how to tell the weather for the following day and then undercut the true importance of that by offering a powerful religious sign, which involves mythic history and contemplative prediction. 

Jonah was a prophet to the city of Nineveh.  The important point for our purposes is that this city is the capital of Assyria, a bloodthirsty gentile empire advancing out of Mesopotamian, known for harsh cruelty in war.  The Assyrians were no friends of the Israelites.  Just before arriving in Nineveh Jonah is famously swallowed by a large fish.  If you pay attention to his prayer in chapter 2, it transitions from how God saved him from the “whale belly situation” that he was in, to how God saved him from the “death situation” that he was in, praying as if he had actually died.  This is not an out of place literary leap given that there are many references to sub-aquatic states being death states in the Judeo-Christian tradition, not the least of which is full immersion baptism, where one dies to this world and rises in Christ.  And indeed Jonah emerges from the whale after three days, just as Christ emerges from the tomb after three days, so it would seem that the “sign of Jonah” is the resurrection.  Here is what seems to be a prediction of the resurrection as a miraculous sign of God for the Jewish authority.  

But there is a more biting and uncomfortable sign that Jesus may be referencing.  That is, the full conversion of the wicked gentile city of Nineveh.  Jonah only makes it one third of the way through the city before the entire town converts from the king to the cattle.  In fact, Jonah is the only Prophet in the entire Bible whose is successful in his mission while he is performing his mission.  He is the only prophet who lives to see the fruit of his labor, fruit that ripens in absurdly rapid fashion according to the narrative.  The prediction here is that the “favored place” of Judaism is true, but expansive, and envelops the gentiles.  This is a challenge to the exclusive authority of the Jewish religion itself and thereby the specific authorities of that religion.  This is comically embodied by Jonah’s reaction to the reform of Nineveh.  He is literally bitter about God’s mercy toward the reformed gentile.  This prediction is the prediction of the conversion of the Gentiles to worship of the God of Abraham.

This prediction is not just for a “wow factor” which seems to be what the authorities were seeking.  “Impress us so we can see you're from God, who is powerfully impressive.”  Neither is this prediction meant to make you regard the future as something to be manipulated by your knowledge of it.  The prediction is meant to help you understand a better way to be consciously aware in the present and start to instill beatitude in your person.  “Don’t be bitter about God’s mercy and other’s acceptance of it.”  This is a different regard for prediction than empirical predictive abilities that foment existential bifurcation.  Jesus makes this direct contrast in the quote, “You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge the signs of the times.”  In each case, there is a rhythm that allows for prediction.  For the weather, it is a rhythm of physical indicators, a read sky.  For salvation, salvation history allows for cycles such as the cycle of sin to allow for some sense of redemption and some indicator.  Yet at the same time in this passage, there is a prediction of a radical break, the conversion of the Gentiles.  

This curious notion of history as both cyclical and linear results in the combination of phenomenological time, which is experienced linearly and mythic time presented as salvation history, which is cyclical.  The cycles represented in the Old Testament are typified by typologies and type scenes.  They form a rhythm to the narrative that is somewhat standardized, much like physical time where the standardized rhythmic motion which is used to measure time from an empirical point of view.  Such rhythms would be, as we just noted, the cycle of sin, or the cycle of captivity and liberation, the appearance of typologies, such as the barren matriarch, the second son, the father sacrificing the son, etc.  Then there are more specific repetitions in the type scenes, for example, the often repeated “well scene”.

Each of these typologies and scenes do rhythmically repeat, but each one varies from the last.  The variance comes out of each character as they experience or exemplify the typology.  Each one is a unique person, imperfect and striving with their will.  The linear aspect comes from the fact that these characters abide in physical time and live by the experience of phenomenological time.  Their acts of will as they present the typology gives variance, a thing abhorred when measuring physical time, which seeks standardized rhythms.  For mythic time  the variance is part of the beauty and a reminder of the linear aspect of the combination and our ability to willfully participate in the myth though our linear experience of conscious awareness in subjective time.  The repetitions of typologies themselves have a narrative trajectory that forms a crescendo of fulfillment in the narrative of the life of Christ.  From that point, the narrative changes, from people participating unknowingly in the unfolding of perfect revelation to people participating by will in perfect revelation.  From the incarnation on those involved in salvation history no longer prefigure, but conform in anticipation of a universal conformity.  Previously use of will conformed to revelation in salvation history appropriate to that point in history, but without full awareness of what was being prefigured.  From the incarnation on, conformity to the life of Christ is also a temporally rhythmic reality, with the same variance according to personality and use of will.  That trajectory is leading to the eschaton where reality moves beyond individual human fulfillment to the fulfillment of humanity itself in Christ.  Then the meta cycle of history, what we have previously framed as the meta paradox, is complete.  All of this is a “ narrative” but the narrative is the reality of history as mythic history for Christians.  It is truth as expressed or revealed by God across time.  The objective metrics are less valuable to us than the truth expressed, truths that offer faith, hope and a context for love through beatitude.  This approach to history does offer a soft determinism, through the observable repetition of the cycles and the fact that God has a plan, which will be fulfilled.  But the linear nature of the narrative and the variance within the cyclical narrative structure allows us to shift from data driven history that allows for predictive analytics (the sky is red) to mythic history.  Mythic history is narrative based, uses cycles, but is also linear and invests the participant in that myth with will in order to strive for relationship, beatitude and meaning (the sign of Jonah).

In this little passage about signs and future prediction Jesus shows the divine bias for personhood and will over objective determinism.  God is not the god of philosophical deism.  This framing of time allows skills of memory and prediction to facilitate use of the present moment.  The entire scope of salvation history, from past to present to future is presented as revelation in order to allow the observer to mindfully recognize and utilize their own will.

Matthew Chapter 24 offers a perfect example of proper Christian contemplative prediction.  It begins with the disciples admiring the Temple and Jesus pointing out that one day, not one stone will be left on another.  The disciples see this as a “wow factor” prediction and pressed him for the exact date.  But this is a mistake.  The reader will remember that there are still stones standing on stones of that temple in Jerusalem today.  Even if the author meant to reference the destruction of that Temple in 70AD, it could not have been meant as “wow” prediction, or Jesus would simply have said “destroyed” not “no stone on another”.  The prediction is not made from secret knowledge or predictive analytics, but out of a cosmological belief about inevitability which Jesus asserts in verse 35, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”  Even if the wailing wall exists now, there certainly will come a time when it does not.  His assertion was meant to wake the listener up to their temporality and finitude.

In that chapter as the disciples press him, Jesus proceeds to lay out a complex theodicy and expound on the dual nature of time as cyclical and linear.  Jesus first recounts all of the types of things that one is not interpret as eschatological indicators.  They are horrible things that happen all the time, war, famine, natural disasters, etc.  Jesus likens these to labor pains, rhythmic pains that climax with an expression of life and goodness (one of the common biblical theodicies).  These are his data points to indicate the end of the world.

Next, Jesus begins to talk about the signs of the end, but most of this section focuses the listener on mindfulness and judgment in the present, not looking to the future.  The signs are the appearance of some sort of false god that is very appealing, then God dims the celestial powers in the heavens and replaces them with the Son of Man, and finally, God collects his faithful.  These indicators could recount the end of time or the end of any given individuals life.  Did you follow your false god, whatever it may have been?  Or were you mindful enough not to follow that god or his false prophets and be collected as faithful to God?   Jesus the wraps that prognostication up with a rhythmic analogy, the fig tree which seasonally (rhythmically) bears fruit and makes the prediction extremely personal, “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” as if to say, “this is about you! Be mindful!” 

To belabor the point of present mindfulness, Jesus then launches into a series of agnostic statements about the future culminating in the command, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”   And finishing the chapter with the lesson on the faithful and unfaithful servant.  

What seems like it could be a prediction about the objective future is just as easily, and more likely, a meditation involving thanatosian piety, a reflection on one future certainty, the listener's own “end of the world” their death.  This contemplative prediction allows one to stay extremely present because the cosmology and narrative allow for will, not determinism.  The methodology of prediction for contemplative prediction is observation of the rhythms of mythic history.  Purpose of this prediction is to facilitate narrative appropriation of the flow of salvation history by exercise of the will.  Contemplative prediction relies on each variety of  phenomenological time and mythic time as it toggles between the two.  It uses the conscious awareness of the present and the symbology of the dream world to invest in myth, and see mythic history in the waking world.  And then by use of will the practitioner is summoned to the present to encounter God in the only time God has given them, the present time. 

To end this treatise we will take two sources that are meant for contemplative prediction, but which are abused as instruments of prediction under the cosmology of predictive analytics.  The first is biblical, the book of revelations, the second is cultural, tarot cards.  Taking the book of revelations first one can easily see it abuse by Christian as a predictive checklist, in the same way, that Matthew Chapter 24 is. But it is a poor predictive tool for the final end, just a Matthew Chapter 24 is, because of the repetitive nature of its signs.  The events are almost all cyclical and nonconclusitory, war, famine, natural, disasters, etc.  The structure of the Book of Revelations seems to build upon the stress of increasing suffering by the faithful by one means all the way to an almost breaking point, only to stop the narrative and start a new strain of the narrative.  The same theodicy is implied, labor pains,  this rhythm of suffering is building to a point of fulfillment.  The difference is that now the suffering is by the post-incarnational Church.  The book is a guide to communal and individual suffering which instructs its reader to put on the person of Christ through the church because the church is the body of Christ.  The Book of Revelations is a passion narrative, a story of redemptive suffering ending in glorification, just as the passion narratives of the gospel are.  But in this case, the body of Christ being tortured is the mystical body of Christ as the Church.  The narrative invites the reader to individually narratively appropriate Christ’s suffering through the communal appropriation already underway in the church.  Each disaster allows particular individual buy-ins out of a sense of unity because the disasters are pan-humanly common.  Their reference also allows for healthy development of ritual concerning such disasters in order to help people and cultures to grapple with them.  The methodology of investment in suffering as binding to the Church and to Christ is set up in the first chapter in the introduction, when the author stated, “I, John, your brother, who share with you the distress, the kingdom, and the endurance we have in Jesus, found myself on the island called Patmos.”

The book of revelations also offers the same agnostic view of the day and the hour as well as the signs as Matthew Chapter 24.  There is a pattern in the book of the spirit guide telling the narrator to look at something amazing or offering some amazing piece of information.  For example in chapter 5, One of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed, enabling him to open the scroll with its seven seals.”  But when the narrator looks, what he sees is something quite different.   “Then I saw standing in the midst of the throne and the four living creatures and the elders a Lamb that seemed to have been slain. He had seven horns and seven eyes; these are the [seven] spirits of God sent out into the whole world.”  This is a direct strike against those who would use the book as a count down indicator to the end of the world.  A major biblical theme is blindingly present in this work, “Things are not what they seem.”  “God’s ways are not man’s ways.”   

The predictive capacity of both Matthew Chapter 24 and the Book of Revelations is pedagogical.  They are not near as much about the facts of the future as they are about how to regard the future in the present.  They offer the reader this advice, prepare for short term suffering and long term hope, in order to be able to experience the fulfillment of that hope.  The balance of short term pessimism and long term optimism allows the reader to handle suffering but maintain faith hope and love.  Neither of these proclamations of the future employs predictive analytics working out of a historical view that assumes determinism.  Neither of these proclamations is meant to be used to convey facts of the future in order to allow the reader to manipulate those facts for personal gains.  They are each present directed.  The difference between contemplative prediction and predictive analytics comes down to two things.  First predictive analytics assumes a soft determinism.  Second predictive analytics is cosmologically manipulative, it seeks control of the cosmos as an object.  The cosmology of contemplative prediction assumes both cyclical and linear time coexisting.  That mutual tension allows for free will within the phenomenological matrix of existence. This is possible because even though the physical world presents an environmental rhythm of causality, phenomenological time presents it to the observer as linear. The beatitude of contemplative prediction is one of cosmological acceptance and cooperation with both God and nature as God constructed it.  Each of these New Testament sources is geared toward such acceptance and cooperation. 

This leads us to our last meditation, extra biblical prediction.  Reproducibility in the scientific method means predictive ability.  With regards to weather forecasting, for example, there is nothing objectively wrong with the techniques of science.  What is wrong is the implied determinism and the manipulative grasping at the cosmos.  The same is true for medicine, and even for economic situations.  If one can bring the proper beatitude of contemplative prediction to extrabiblical predictive techniques and technologies, then to utilize them is acceptable.  But it is dangerous, and the temptation to succumb to the lure of predictive analytics as a manipulation of pride is powerfully strong because most Christians do not see such prediction as “fortune telling” because the facts are accurate, therefore it’s not superstition.  Because of this assumed amorality, they are caught unaware of the danger of predictive analytics and are enslaved by concupiscent pride.  Jesus reminds us, “stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”

Superstitious fortune telling is marked as “evil” in the popular consciousness because “it doesn’t work”.  It is superstitious.  But as we noted above, that is actually not a moral problem, only a practical one.  Our question at the very end here is, can tarot, for example, be useful for contemplative prediction in a moral and effective way?  

If one is not channeling demons, but rather using tarot cards much like a psychological Rorschach meditation, there is the possibility that cards such as these can be put to quite good use.  It is not our purpose here to give a detailed illumination of the meaning of tarot cards.  But a brief overview may help us see how they could be useful in contemplative prediction. The images in such a deck are divided into two kinds, the major and the minor arcana.  The major arcana are indicative of abstract forms, universals, archetypes or typologies that the human experience queues into.  The images revolve around abstracts such as motherhood and fatherhood, life and death, creativity and authority, etc.  The minor arcana are divided into four types each type symbolizing an aspect of personhood and/or the cosmos.  They represent reason/cognition, will/desire, intuition/emotion and sensation/the external environment.  The images on the minor arcana involve the application of the abstracts in the major arcana to the world we live in day to day life according to the suite of the card.  Where one places the card in a pattern helps the reader contemplate all these symbols and experiences according to fields or situations in life and then apply it to the querent's life through dialogue.

Again the cosmology of contemplative prediction assumes both a cyclical (determined) view of time and linear (freewill) view of time.  As one flips a card and places it in a defined sphere if life, the pictures will be things that would naturally cyclically apply to any given situation in extra-experiential time.  And again, the object of contemplative prediction is not to wow someone with predictive abilities or reveal information so that one can manipulate the cosmos.  The purpose is to be awake to the rhythms of the creative order while one is aware of the present moment and how one can accept these rhythms and corporate with them toward fulfillment in Christ.  This variety of tarot reading, if practiced by all sides, seems compatible scripture and tradition and licit.  The danger of engaging with this type of prediction is real, but it is as real as any predictive methods or technologies.  The danger seems far less potent than the danger of succumbing to temptation when dealing with the predictive analytics of science, because the practitioner sees the methods of science as amoral, and therefore is more likely to behave immorally.  With something like tarot, the practitioner is already in a spiritual and moral frame of mind, these moral choices are in the forefront.  That doesn't give one immunity from danger, just a much better chance if one possessed proper beatitude.               

In the first section, we expounded upon our unhealthy relationship with time and seek to frame an understanding of time more in keeping with the Christian life. In the next section, we sought a particular understanding of the past that breaks away from determinism and focuses one on redemption.

In this last section, we began by demonstrating the inability to engage in absolute prediction.   We discussed the extra-experiential time of the future.  We then went on to discuss the nature of prophecy in the scriptures and focus on how the Bible does not treat prophecy of the future as a demonstration of power or a skill to be used for personal manipulation.  Rather prophecy is meant to wake listeners up to the present moment. And summon them to the proper use of their will. We went on to draw out the current use of predictive analytics, showing how they are used to grasp for control of the cosmos as an object to be manipulated.  We also showed how they do succumb to demonic influence, channeling the observer away from God and toward false gods.  Concupiscent inflammation and idolatry are the dangers of prognostication and current predictive analytics tend to both of these.  We then ended the treatise with the positive skill of contemplative prediction, the skill that notices the rhythms of the cosmos and uses those rhythms to be aware of the moment, supplies a theodicy for temporal suffering, and inform one's moral and spiritual attitude at the moment.  We concluded with an analytic application of both predictive analytics and contemplative prediction to the Book of Revelations and tarot cards in order to demonstrate that technique and technology are not the problems of prognostication.  Rather, the problem is lack of beatitude.             

   

Conclusion

In the first section, we began by discussing our human tendency to compartmentalize God.  We started with how the ancients compartmentalized the gods geographically and functionally.  We then pointed out how modern Christianity has made peace with God’s absolute geographic dominion but has a hard time with God’s functional dominion.  We then attempted to show how the first story of creation seeks to solve these problems by framing God as a “God of time” in order to maximize God’s sovereignty, even over time itself.  We then laid out three differing methodologies for understanding the nature of time, measurement by standardized rhythmic motion, act and potentiality, and the matrix of phenomenological experience.  This analysis gave us an understanding of the existential bifurcation that we feel because of our culturally dominant understanding of time and gave us a possible solution by means of the temporal interpretive paradox in order to make “all time” serve a present encounter with God.

In the next section, we started off discussing how our view of the past shapes a culture that sees freewill as absolutely limited.  We discussed both material and psychological determinism.  We then pointed out the Christian understanding of how the past limits will as slavery to sin, a concept that allows for the exercise of will in the present while admitting its limitations.  We then tried to shift the understanding of history from etiological to narrative in order to begin a twofold recalibration of our relationship with time.  We framed the new relationship to extra-experiential time (the past and the future) as a potential gift of redemption, the gift of forgiveness regarding the past and the gift of grace regarding the future.  We proceeded to attempt to reshape our view of history from etiology to a teleological narrative or “mythic history”.  We attempted to show how the typologies of the Bible are calibrators of meaning for historical narrative and tried to offer useful ways to engage in historical transmission beyond data driven history to the end of predictive analytics.

In this last section, we began by demonstrating the inability to engage in absolute prediction.   We discussed the extra-experiential time of the future.  We then went on to discuss the nature of prophecy in the scriptures and focus on how the Bible does not treat prophecy of the future as a demonstration of power or a skill to be used for personal manipulation.  Rather prophecy is meant to wake listeners up to the present moment. And summon them to the proper use of their will. We went on to draw out the current use of predictive analytics, showing how they are used to grasp for control of the cosmos as an object to be manipulated.  We also showed how they do succumb to demonic influence, channeling the observer away from God and toward false gods.  Concupiscent inflammation and idolatry are the dangers of prognostication and current predictive analytics tend to both of these.  We then ended the treatise with the positive skill of contemplative prediction, the skill that notices the rhythms of the cosmos and uses those rhythms to be aware of the moment, supplies a theodicy for temporal suffering, and inform one's moral and spiritual attitude at the moment.  We concluded with an analytic application of both predictive analytics and contemplative prediction to the Book of Revelations and tarot cards in order to demonstrate that technique and technology are not the problems of prognostication.  Rather, the problem is lack of beatitude.   

                 

This treatise has been a long and winding contemplation of our relationship with time.  We started at the very beginning with an anecdote from my past where I manipulated some basic psychological skills coupled with a data driven view of history in order to utilize predictive analytics.  This complicated process was used to make my life as a grill cook ever so slightly easier.  But such a manipulation is not the reason God gifted us the present moment. Our goal has been to help readers summon themselves to the present and meet God in that space.  To that end, it is hoped that we were successful.