The author puts forward a hypothesis related to the interpretation of the thought of Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI on the interrelation of time and eternity. Different religions offer different ways of departing temporality - the way of being within the confines of time - towards some extratemporal existence, commonly referred to as eternity or immortality. This perspective evokes a fundamental question: if time wants to reach beyond itself towards eternity, is it that eternity - in its turn - stays in a kind of interrelation to time, or is it a kind of negative atemporality? In its view of the matter, Christianity makes a clear statement that God has power over time, which implies that God participates in the temporal reality. This participation manifests itself overtly through the Incarnation of the Son of God. Consequently, this participation shows that man takes part in the eternity of God. In this sense, a Christian reaches eternity through his/her existence in the Person of the Resurrected Jesus. This ability to eternally remain in Jesus rests on the immortal element of the human being - that is his/her spiritual soul. The soul opens a path towards salvation and the relational eternity, that is a relationship of a Christian person with the Son of God and through Him with God as Trinitary Love. This is how Christianity – while respecting the linear nature of time – promotes a positive cyclical (yet not a reiterative) concept of time, which manifests itself in the exitus - reditus relationship. Exitus is an autonomous act of God’s creation, while reditus - is a human self-sacrifice as exemplified by the Son of God. Jesus’ self-sacrifice to God the Father is a model of how time can be projected onto a new way of existence: eternity. Therefore, Christ brings time to its fullness. His Event marks the beginning of eternity for the faithful
The article is an attempt to outline the theoretical and methodological reflection on public history in the context of some conceptual models and concrete examples of case studies. Considering discursive situations, suppositions, suggestions and interpellations on the enlightenment postulate with regard to public history (including the issues: magistra vitae, emancipatory project, affirmative history, emotive revolution, critical discourse in the public space, modus art based research) I deal with the issues: what is actually the content of public history: history or memory? Does the enlightenment postulate with regard to public history turn memory into history? Are we dealing with some project concocted by the intelligentsia and scientific elite? What are the current trends in the implementation of critical discourse in public history?
The starting point of the article is V. Ivanov’s epistolary statement and an expression included in it: “me, semper idem” as important for reflections on the question of “person and time.” Ivanov’s expression, considered within its context, was analysed taking into account other texts by the same poet (the poem Fio, ergo non sum, as well as others from the Prozrachnost’ cycle, author’s commentaries etc.), and S. Frank’s philosophical reflection and his idea of a person as a unity which encompasses continuing in time (“vremiaoblemlushcheje jedinstvo licznosti”). In analogous interpretation (lecture analogique) of both expressions included in the title of the article, two Paul Ricoeur’s conceptual categories were used: the idem identity and the ipse identity, as well as the thinker’s notion of their dialectic relationship. Referring to the European model of thinking about time (St. Augustine), taking into account its presence in Frank and Nikolai Berdyaev, author of the article considers two types of conceptualisations of the category of becoming, in its relation to the category of Being and the problem of transcending time in the reflections of the above- mentioned thinkers and in V. Ivanov’s poetry. Therefore, the article discusses situations in which a human as a person transcends the order of “horizontal” time, and in their existential experience enters the vertical dimension of Eternity (“moment-Eternity”). In relation to that, what turned out to be useful was another notional analogy: the concept of the “poetic moment” and “metaphysical moment” in Gaston Bachelard.
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