Gnon-Theology and Time¶
A discussion of Gnon-Theology and Time deserves a preface, on Gnon-Theology, but there are several reasons to leap-frog that. Most obviously, it would be yet another prologue to an introduction to the first part of a promised series, and readers of this blog are quite probably thoroughly saturated (to the point of ~~mild~~ nausea) with that. It’s a cognitive disease, and it would be presumptuous to expect anybody else to take the same morbid interest in backward cascades that this blog does.
The more interesting reason to avoid prefacing the question of time, along any avenue of investigation, is that such methodical precautions are grave errors in this case. There is nothing more basic than time, or preliminary to it. In naming a preface or prologue, it is already introduced. Time is a problem that cannot be conceptually pre-empted.
Gnon suspends ontological decision about God. It begins from what is real, whether God exists or not. A Gnon-trance is unsettled. It is not yet agnostic, any more than it is decidedly theistic or atheistic. It concerns itself primarily with that which has been accepted as real before anything is believed, and subsequently with whatever can be attained through methodical negation of intellectual haste. Since suspension is its only positive determination, it collapses towards a raw intuition of time.
Evidently, Gnon-Theology cannot be dogmatic, even in part. Instead, it is hypothetical, in a maximally reduced sense, in which the hypothesis is an opportunity for cognitive exploration unshackled from ontological commitments. The content of Gnon-Theology is exhausted by the question: What does the idea of God enable us to think?
And ‘the idea of God’? — what in the name of Gnon is that? All we know, at first, is that it has been grit-blasted of all encrustations from either positive or negative faith. It cannot be anything with which we have historical or revelatory familiarity, since it reaches us from out of the abyss (epoche), where only time and / or the unknown remain.
Glutted on forbidden fruit, Gnon-Theology strips God like an engine, down to the limit of abstraction, or eternity for-itself. Does any such perspective exist? We already know that this is not our question. All such ‘regional ontology’ has been suspended. We are nevertheless already entitled, through the grace of Gnon (which — remember — might (or might not) be God), to the assumption or acceptance of reality that: for any God to be God it cannot be less than eternity for-itself. Whatever eternity for-itself entails, any God will, too.
What it entails, unambiguously, is time-travel, in the strong sense of reverse causation, although not necessarily in the folk/Hollywood variant (which has also had serious defenders) based on the retro-transportation of physical objects into the past. Knowledge of the future is indistinguishable from counter-chronic transmission of information. This is perhaps the single most critical insight in realistic time-travel research — we’ll get back to it. (If anyone finds it less than logically irresistible, use the comments thread.)
To accelerate this discussion with bloggish crudity, on a heading out of Gnon-Theology into Occidental religious history (and to the possibility of sleep), we can jump to one simple, certain, and secure conclusion: No Christian can consistently deny the reality of time-travel. The objection ‘if (reverse) time-travel if possible, where are the time-travellers?’ is annulled by the Christian revelation itself. Messianic Incarnation (of God or eternity for-itself), along with all true prophecy, providential history, and answered prayer, instantiates time-travel with technical exactitude. There can be no truth whatsoever to the Christian religion unless time-travel has fundamentally structured human history. Whatever else Christianity might be, it is a time-travel story, and one that at times appears to be peculiarly lacking in clear self-understanding.
(Time-travel, it should perhaps be noted explicitly, has no obvious dependency on Christianity, or even upon the God of Gnon-Theology. That is a topic for other occasions.)