Reflections On the New Year
The bachannalian and overcommercialized celebration of the New Year with the attendant resolutions to make ourselves better people in the coming year stands somewhere between comedy and farce. “Give me one last night this year to make a fool out of yourself and I’ll straighten up for good tomorrow” seems the thought running through the mind of the typical roisterer as the tapster draws her another sapid drink.
Beneath the superficiality of our celebrations, however, there remains a profound sense that something is happening that requires our attention, that the marking of another year around the sun somehow says something to us about who we are, where we’re from, and what we’re destined for. Looking in both directions, backward and forward, we see the yawning abyss from whence we came and to which we will return, and we take measure of the in-between by our days and our years, accompanied by an anxiety that how we fill that time may have no meaning or purpose against time’s grand scope and all-destroying nature. We may survive much, but we cannot survive the movement of time. So we ask ourselves: what does this calendar event actually portend?
New Year’s celebrations may debase the questions that haunt us as we consider what it means to move either through or in time, but they also suggest that things have a beginning and in our resolutions we sense that somehow time itself begins again and that, furthermore, we can shape our own destinies in such a way that they give us a sense of purpose and meaning, not because time swallows us whole but because time itself suggests not just repetition but forward movement toward a conclusion. Just as it all had a beginning, so too it will have an end; and though the beginning was a real beginning, the end is not real in the same way. This is to say that our concept of time and beginnings and renewals and ultimate purpose still exist within a system of explanation that owes its power to the Judeo-Christian theophany. The secular nature of the festivity may occlude its spiritual origins, but it still draws its enthusiastic energy from them. Festivals, such as New Years celebrations, are intended to be suspensions of time by which time and reality itself is renewed.
Primitive humans experienced themselves as linked to the cosmos, not to time. They were suspicious of the transitory and ephemeral character of events as they happened in time – the quotidian affairs by which we typically define our lives and desperately hope give life meaning. Indeed, primitive persons found the concept of life so defined intolerable, regarding the daily passage of time as “profane” and sought to eradicate these events through the retelling of myths and the performance of periodic rituals. In many ways, our New Year’s celebrations are profane reenactments of these once sacred rituals by which people were renewed in the bringing the origins of things back to the present. The scholar Mircea Eliade referred to this as in illo tempore (in those times) where the origin stories are reenacted and revivified, resetting the cosmic clock. This return to the present of in illo tempore was the festive event that renewed the world and freed us from the burdens and disappointments of profane time. What was real for primitive man, Eliade argued, was the imitation of those first days, and everything we (foolishly) regard as “the real world” was all vanity and a striving after wind. Just as a certain magic was required to bring a thing into being, so too that magic is re-released and re-acquired through the ritualized reclaiming of the cosmic beginnings. Indeed, the ritual actually carried us back to in illo tempore, reabsorbing our lives into the sacred and carrying us away from the profane world into which we will be cast once again and from which we will once again need relief.
Our New Year’s rituals have vacated any connection to the sacred, meaning that they simply deepen our immersion in the profane. Whatever our resolutions are, they seldom involve thinking about sacrality and its central importance to the human search for meaning and the answers it provides concerning existence itself. For ancient man, the re-creation of in illo tempore was a giant cleansing of the world, the reestablishing of the reality of the sacred at the expense of the profane. It allowed primitive people to free themselves from the terror and meaninglessness of events, "one damn thing after another" (as attributed to the historian Toynbee), but also to endure them. What did the pointlessness of our daily struggles matter when we ecstatically engage the ultimately real? Aristotle observed that not even the gods could undo what had been done, and this irreversibility suggested a limit, but also cause for despair. How many of us yearn for second chances, or to undo the wrong we (or others) have done?
Eliade wrote:
Basically, if viewed in its proper perspective, the life of archaic man (a life reduced to the repetition of archetypal acts, that is, to categories and not to events, to the unceasing rehearsal of the same primordial myths), although it takes place in time, does not bear the burden of time, does not record time’s irreversibility; in other words, completely ignores what is especially characteristic of and decisive in a consciousness of time.
In his journals – themselves a prophylactic against the ravages of time – Eliade described how toward the end of every day he would suddenly feel himself overwhelmed by a deep and profound melancholy. He came to realize this preternatural sadness resulted from the experience of loss, that something essential and irreplaceable was gone forever. This “inexplicable sadness” came from knowing that things that were are no more, such as his own youth or the loss of his father. Death swallows up all (Mahler in his 2nd Symphony calls death “the conqueror of all things) and the awareness of it can either create despair or compel us to marshal resources that shore us up against it.
Even the great thinker Plato attempted to solve the problem of time through understanding its movement as occurring in cycles, and the essential cycles are revealed in nature itself by which birth and growth succumb to decay and death, and that which perishes becomes itself again fertilizer for new life. For primitive man, all things would lose vigor over the duration of their existence and be reabsorbed into the formless, primordial unity from which all things emerged. The Greek Philosopher Anaximander referred to this as the apeiron – that unlimited and boundless “thing” from which all things emerge and to which they would return. Indeed, Anaximander saw the return (death) as an act of justice for the injustice of each person having individuated him or herself from the boundless in the first place.
But what did it all mean? This refusal to ascribe any meaning to history testifies to the archaic thirst for that which is most real, but also the terror at being overwhelmed by the meaningless and pointless succession of events that marks profane time – “duration in vain,” as the German philosopher Nietzsche described it. This was all that time would ever amount to, primitive persons believed, without the cyclical realization and reenactment of the sacred.
Such primitive gestures are unavailable to us, for as I indicated the Judeo-Christian revelation permanently changed the way we think about time (modern ideas of “progress” are secular bastardizations of this religious insight). The Israelites recognized historical events themselves as carriers of divine presence and movement within time. Suffering was not simply meaninglessness from which we sought cultic relief, but a call back to the covenantal God who chose a particular nation to act as His agent within the historical process, thus giving the movement of time through history meaning as it all moved to a higher purpose. Eliade:
This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history, who reveals His will through events (invasions, sieges, battles, and so on). Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, with truth be said that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God.
The victory over the forces of chaos and destruction no longer occurred annually within cultic activity, but instead with regard to a Messianic future. This eschatological dimension, now identified, requires faith as the faculty which discerns the meaning of historical acts, and this faith is sustained itself by ritualized reenactments (particularly in the Christian eucharistic feast). The recognition by faith that history reveals and unfolds divine presence proves difficult to accept (the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen – meaning it has uncertainty as an essential feature) and maintain. The forces of secularism may alter the plausibility of the narrative meaning, but doesn’t necessarily offer much in its place. Eliade wrote:
…neither in Judaism not in Christianity does the discovery of this new dimension in religious experience, faith, produce a basic modification of traditional conceptions. Faith is merely made possible for each individual Christian. The great majority of so-called Christian populations continue, down to our day, to preserve themselves from history by ignoring it and tolerating it rather than giving it the meaning of a negative or positive theophany.
Because of the fragility of faith, and because it offers itself to each and every person and not to a specialized priestly caste as in primitive societies, regular ritual reenactments and communal liturgies are required to sustain it. The main difference between the Messianic theophanies of Judaism and Christianity and primitive cults is that the final regeneration that takes place at the end of time replaces the regeneration of creation origins. Indeed, Christianity takes this reimagining of the historical process a step further by having death itself destroyed. At the center of St. Augustine’s philosophy of history is Christ's resurrection, which not only vouchsafes eternal life to all believers but, through its inability to be replicated, breaks the possibility of historical cycles. “Death,” the chorus continues in Mahler’s 2nd, “now you are conquered.”
Perhaps the greatest significance of Nietzsche as a thinker is that he recognized the weakening of this Christian notion of time as history resulted in a world of nihilists and what he called “last men,” passive nihilists who seek only comfort and security. Nietzsche could respect people who took their nihilism straight, but had little toleration for the watered-down nihilism of mass culture.
Which, of course, is on full display in our New Year’s celebrations, for we too mark the passage of time because we too – no matter how much we anaesthetize ourselves against it – feel times terrors and burdens. For primitive man, chemical altering of the psyche was intended to clear the space and make possible the union with the sacred; for modern man such indulgences are meant to numb us and make us forget. Without the aid of alcohol the reality of the New Year and the passage of the old one and the seeming meaninglessness of it all might be too much for us to bear. Our resolutions, nodding as they do to the possibility of a renewal grounded in some inchoate notion of something higher and something just beyond our reach that we can always pursue but never attain, come off as a pathetic joke, not because we can’t improve ourselves but we can’t really explain why we ought to, or of what such improvement really consists. Perhaps, with a little more reflection, we can restore the sacred dimension to these holidays and make them something more than the deathless Dick Clark and his reincarnations eternally and hopelessly lowering a giant ball on Times Square.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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