Nobody more than the Puritans murdered the whole church calendar and emasculated it so as to consist of 52 sabbaths; today this austere colorless Judaising has lost its hold on the community more and more. But their negative success is with us. The canonical hours are forgotten. We are the heirs of a great catastrophe (or a rebirth; we call it the Renaissance) which did away with a previous order of time-bettering days. When I hear the Humanists sneer at the downfall of ecclesiasticism, I often wonder how the humanists can overlook our own frailty. . . .
What the pre-Franklin, the pre-pragmatic mind called “time” was not a quantity, but a melody. Any particle of time could be lived as eternity and that it was lived as eternity was expressed by the 7 parts into which it was subdivided . . . .
Since we have lost this immediate power to accept a particle as the representative of a whole, most of the language of Church and Synagogue, of antiquity, is lost on us. It is analogous to modern man’s hesitation in speaking of God’s finger or womb or eye or smile or of the Church as His bride. Modern man calls such expression embarrassedly “similes” or metaphors. But he may rest assured that his own finger only got its name from its quality of there also being God’s finger, and the Day only was observed because it stood for eternity. “Metaphor” so called is the genuine source of all speech and language of our race, and the languages of anatomy and dictionaries are much later layers of language, derived by abstraction from the “Day of Days” and the Back of God. The parts of our body as well as the parts of time have received their names only after and because they proved serviceable to express some divine and eternal meaning. As metaphor for our experience of calendaric times, high and low, our language has been born, and is reborn. Scientific language is rundown, expired, murdered language. If you do not reconcile yourself to this origin of our words in potent speech, you will never understand the order of monastic life or of liturgical living. For the hours in a monastery shifted in their lengths according to the seasons of the year. In other words, on no two days in sequence did the word “hour” signify the same length of time. This, to modern man borders on the insane. Our hour has this one and only merit—that always it is sixty minutes long. This would have been to its disadvantage in antiquity. For the ancients, pious pagans, pious Jews, pious Christians, all were in agreement that man could not abstract time out of the hands of the God who sent each day, each moon, each cycle of the firmament. It would have been blasphemy to teach the times our own minds’ lesson that they had to behave according to our abstract scheming. In the continuation of the unanimous reverence of five thousand years, the monk’s seven canonical hours observed God’s time. Therefore, the hours could not help running from the actual sunrise to the actual sunset as observed “here”, let us say, in Monte Cassino, and “now” on October 1, 529 A.D. Only in this way could prayer enter upon God’s real times as they ringed the eons of eons.
Both aspects of the pre-Renaissance time sense are lost on us. For instance the King James Version mistranslates the organic flow of the eons by its heretical space concept “world without end”. But the Church suggested the organic flow of times after times, epochs of epochs, and nobody today can share the time experience of the apostles unless he casts out the abstract dead time of “world without end”. The genuine formula says the very opposite. It says that the end of the world must be experienced at the end of an epoch as much as the beginning of the next. Only by living through the end of one eon first and the beginnings of the new eon first, and thanks to this experience, the end of the previous eon, later, can we realize the times. Eons are like links in a chain. We have to hold on to the next eon as it shapes up in catastrophe, and let go the previous, a ring completed in a catastrophe. How else can we realize the Lord of the eons of eons? For God survives the end of time, with the revealing words, “And the end of the world was long ago”, which begins a great song. God survives ends as well as beginnings. Now exactly this truth we have lost and so we mock and are mocked by the believers in Armageddon. The end of the world, the monks realized every night. Time died. The day died. And then it rose again. For this great existence of the death and resurrection of Christ in their canonical hours, they joyfully paid the price of shortening and lengthening the twelve hours. These twelve hours themselves after all were there in honor of the twelve months during which the great year of atonement, the great New Year’s Day was brought back over 360 degrees. In other words, the number twelve, in the hours system, was as much an organic reference to the twelve months as in Shakespeare’s play “Twelve Nights”. The Twelve were meaningful with reference not to the single nights but to them as they were reminding us of the twelve months. (Eugen Rostenstock-Huessy, Time Bettering Days and Other Essays, 250-256)
I gotta have my orange juice. 