Escaping Chronos: The Metaverse as a Surrogate for Aeon

ABSTRACT

The Metaverse promises the abolition of physical and temporal boundaries, people achieving what they want freely, and the feeling of immortality. In this paper I analyze the hyper-spatiotemporal nature of the Metaverse from a Christian anthropological perspective. I start by reviewing the Christian understanding of time and the Metaverse space–time construct. Next, I draw a parallel between digital immortality and the eternal life of the age to come. Finally, arguing that the Metaverse’s offer of digital immortality is a palliative, discarnate surrogate, I discuss the Christian perspective on how eternity can be authentically anticipated while living in this world.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaverse
• time
• chronos
• kairos
• aeon
• eschatology
• liturgy

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic brought profound societal transformations, among which a massive migration to the digital world, showing the considerable advantages of working and living within an artificial world. Inside this “secondary universe,” the laws of space and time no longer apply since people can participate in meetings and events in different countries or continents on the same day. At the same time, children can attend schools and other activities without physically leaving their homes. In this context, it is no coincidence that the Metaverse (introduced initially three decades ago) experienced an exponential leap in the interest and hype around it since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

This metaverse hype can be seen as humanity’s attempt at radical emancipation from nature. We emerged out of the COVID-19 crisis less confident than before in our ability to conquer nature, hence the temptation to build a barrier between the forces of nature and human existence.¹ The pandemic brought us face-to-face with our vulnerabilities and was a blunt reminder of our mortality. Confronted with this, we are now looking for asylum in the aseptic “chambers of human-built worlds.”²

The elimination of physical boundaries, the possibility of people achieving what they want freely and without harming others, and even the feeling of being immortal are some of the promises of the Metaverse.³ These are all possible because, within it, people are not bounded by the physical time and space of the real world. The Metaverse is a space–time construct distinct from it. It evolves under its own rules, breaks the boundaries of time and space, and offers its users vivid experiences where the most bizarre fantasies appear palpable and real.⁴ This hyper spatiotemporal nature of the Metaverse allows people to transcend the constraints of time (return to the past and reach a hypothetical future) and those of physical space (for example, by instantly traveling to another location).⁵ Immersed in the Metaverse, people disconnect from the time and space of the physical world by becoming less aware of their physical bodies. How are this disembodiment and the experience of a simulated time and space where the constraints and limitations of the natural world no longer apply, affecting people? Such issues are increasingly concerning for researchers from interdisciplinary fields as the Metaverse accelerates its technological evolution.

Humans are embracing the Metaverse not just for fun or because of boredom but also due to fear or in search of an escape. Fearing our mortality, running away from our vulnerabilities, and searching for ways to heal our wounds and soothe our sufferings, are all instinctually inherent to our human nature. The Metaverse might seem the place to find comfort from all these since, in it, we can run away from the temporality of the natural world. Immersed in it, we live in a different understanding of time: we never age, and we can look as young and beautiful as we want to. Moreover, we can even reconnect with our loved ones who passed away by interacting with their AI-reconstructed avatars. Nevertheless, to what extent do the digital experiences offered by the Metaverse enable us to transcend into an authentically redeeming time? Are they just sensorial surrogates? If so, is there an authentic experience of a redeeming time that can transcend our limits and mortality which can be foretasted in this life?

This paper aims to analyze the hyper-spatiotemporal nature of the Metaverse from—and in relation to—the Christian anthropological perspective. It will start by briefly reviewing the Christian understanding of time and its different dimensions. Next, it will examine the Metaverse space–time construct and draw a parallel between the digital immortality experience that it offers and the eternal life of the age to come. Based on this comparison, this paper will then argue that the Metaverse’s offer of digital immortality is a palliative, discarnate surrogate for experiencing a glimpse of genuine eternity. Finally, this work will discuss how this eternity can be authentically foretasted while living in this world: through renewing time (and ourselves within it) in Christ and experiencing it as the time of liturgical celebration.

Christian Dimensions of Time

The nature of time, its flow, and the beginning and end of the world have always preoccupied humankind and are topics prominently featured in philosophy and theology. As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire during the first centuries AD, it also caused a significant revolution in how people thought about and experienced time. Focus on eternity, life after death, and the end of days eventually led to a new paradigm in which people experienced time through the introduction of the daily prayer hours, the seven-day week, and the feast calendar revolving around the celebration of Easter.

Even early in the history of Christianity, the understanding of time has been the subject of multiple interpretations. One of them is transcending the Greek distinction of time into χρόνος—chronos and καιρός—kairos. Chronos is the time of the physical creation that, under the weight of sin, we experience as a clear distinction between past, present, and future. The post-lapsarian man who turned his back on God’s grace cannot be present in more than one of these divisions at once.⁶ In opposition to this horizontal and chronological understanding of temporality, kairos is the time of a vertical, discontinuous, and unique experience known in ancient Greek literature as the time of opportunity. In Christianity, kairos is understood in the liturgical context as a liturgical celebration of past events in the present time, not as a mere remembrance, but as an actualization of those events “now” in the present time while simultaneously becoming part of the eschatological reality of eternity.⁷ Experiencing Christian liturgical time as kairos means experiencing the fullness of time as a glimpse of the eternal life lived in the present, a glimpse that encompasses both the future and the past.⁸

Another Christian understanding of time, expressed by Church Fathers such as Basil the Great and Maximus the Confessor, envisions three modes of being: χρόνος—chronos, αίών—aeon, and άϊδιότησ—aidiotis. Aeon is a form of creaturely eternity⁹, an intermediate level between eternity in the complete sense (aidiotis, everlasting or uncreated eternity) and time as known to us in our present experience (chronos). Aeon is the time known by angels and humans who have sanctified their life through the Grace of God and received the experience of “age to come” as a gift. From the point of view of chronology, while experiencing aeon is a mode of being that does not exclude change, it is not constrained by how we experience change in our present time. As such, in aeon, the past, present, and future, while remaining different, are not entirely distinct but intertwined in a perichoretic way that makes eternity a mode of being in which different points in time can be gathered together and encountered simultaneously.¹⁰ This is possible since humans experience eternity with a spiritual body - an immaterial, transfigured version of their physical body. It is consequently faster and lighter and not restricted by the laws of space and time.

To illustrate experiencing a glimpse of aeon, we turn to Alexander Schmemann, a prominent twentieth-century Orthodox Christian priest, theologian, and writer. In his journal published posthumously, Schmemann describes the experience of aeon he had during prayer as an experience where points in time are gathered together:

This morning during Matins I had a “jolt of happiness,” of fullness of life, and at the same time the thought: I will have to die! But in such a fleeting breath of happiness, time usually “gathers” itself. In an instant, not only are all such breaths of happiness remembered but they are present and alive— that Holy Saturday in Paris when I was a very young man— and many such “breaks.”¹¹

Fr. Schmemann concludes this account by stating that “eternity might be not the stopping of time, but precisely its resurrection and gathering. The fragmentation of time, its division, is the fall of eternity.”¹²

Time in the Metaverse

The Christian tradition views such experiences of foretasting aeon in this life as gifts God offers to those who are engaged on the path of sanctifying their life through faith and the practice of virtues. In today’s world, however, the possibility of temporarily escaping chronos is being offered to all through immersion in the Metaverse. This experience changes how we perceive and experience time: the VR head-mounted display (HMD) occupies the user’s entire field of view, while the integrated speakers render the audio from the virtual scene, leaving him without any visual or audio connection to the physical world. This forces the brain functions and the human vision and auditory sense to process and use the virtual visual and audio information, leading to the user feeling more that he is within the virtual world rendered through the HMD rather than in the real world.

This sensory immersion leads to a time compression phenomenon, an effect reported by VR users and investigated by researchers: a more considerable real-time duration immersed in a VR environment is perceived as a shorter duration experienced by the user. In their study, Mullen and Davidenko showed that for the same perceived duration, an average of 28.5% more real-time passed for the users immersed in the VR environment compared to those in the control group. The authors advocate that VR-induced reduction in bodily awareness is behind this time compression effect.¹³ Reduced body awareness in VR was identified in studies more than two decades ago.¹⁴ Back then, VR technologies were far more rudimentary. Given the advances in VR technologies of today, a user immersed in the Metaverse would exhibit decreased body awareness to a considerable extent.

In addition to the distorted physical perception of time caused by the immersion in a VR environment, given that within the Metaverse, the spatial and temporal rules of the physical world need not apply, it has the potential to immensely enhance users’ interactions and experiences beyond the physical and temporal boundaries. In the Metaverse, a user can experience concepts impossible in the real world and subject until recently to sci-fi movies: instantaneous travel to any destination across the world, high-quality, lifelike interactions with friends and family members physically located in distant countries, virtual time travel to the past or even to a hypothetical version of the future.¹⁵

The Metaverse promises to transcend the natural constraints of the human condition since people can present themselves while immersed in it as perpetually young and because it allows interactions with the avatars of people who have died in the physical world. This last concept of “digital immortality” is already in the works, and its creators plan to offer it to metaverse users soon. It will enable dead individuals to be brought back to life utilizing the Metaverse, augmented reality, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. One could interact in the Metaverse with his deceased friend or relative, and such interactions will be very realistic: the “resurrected” avatar will have the looks, voice, and actions of the deceased person.¹⁶

The ultimate promise that the Metaverse could bring as technology develops further is a complete detachment from the natural laws of temporal existence by achieving a form of digital everlastingness through “mind uploading.” This futuristic prospect is fulfilling humanity’s fascination with immortality by enabling people to leave their physical bodies and continue existing as avatars within the Metaverse. This process will imply separating the consciousness from the body, converting it into a digital form, and uploading it to the Metaverse. Neuralink and the 2045 initiative are just two corporations and non-profit organizations that have already been working on or funding research efforts to develop the necessary technologies for this purpose. An illustrative example is Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which will allegedly take after its owner’s personality traits and act like them.

A Surrogate for Aeon

While the physical laws of temporality can be bent and even suspended within the Metaverse, immersed in it, we become “discarnate” from our physical body. This disembodiment enables us to escape (at least temporarily) from our mortality since our attention and focus are drawn away from our body and the real world, both subject to decay and aging. In addition, in the Metaverse, we can look as young as we desire and never age, and we can interact with the avatars of people who lived in the past but have since passed away in the real world. Finally, we can instantly travel to any location and experience any (digitally recreated) period in the history of the world. The parallel to the aeon as the “age to come” is striking.

The quest for a virtual world that enables us to escape mortality is understandable. Man’s pursuit for eternity is a natural impulse to run away from the post-lapsarian experience of time, the “fallen time” that we are all condemned to live in this world. In our experience of this fallen time, we are inevitably subject to its ceaseless movement towards death, to an unending, insatiable desire to possess things, and to the burden of the unescapable memories of the death and suffering that surrounds us and our loved ones.¹⁷ Haunted by these facets of the fallen time, it is only natural for humans to look for a way out: and they have found one in the Metaverse. In this artificial pseudo-aeon, we can transcend our mortality and suffering, at least temporarily. However, is this experience of foretasting immortality authentic?

It is important to note that our experience in the Metaverse is disembodied. Immersion takes place by decoupling our senses from the physical world and connecting them to virtual stimuli: head-mounted displays for vision and hearing, haptic gloves for touching, and soon, devices for simulating smell and taste as well. However, as we become more “embodied” within the Metaverse, we become “discarnate” from our physical bodies, a process with physiological and spiritual implications. Physiological because the prolonged interaction with the immersion technology takes a toll: for example, eye strain and myopia accompany increased screen time, and their onset and gravity may become further exacerbated with the prolonged use of VR headsets.¹⁸ At the same time, the spiritual implications of technology-caused “discarnation” are related to the crucial importance of harmonious body–soul unity within the human person.

One of the first written accounts of temporary immersion in another reality is found in the apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, in Chapter 12, verses 2–4, where Paul describes his experience of being “caught up into the third heaven” (2 Co 12:2, NRSV), an experience that also affected his perception and awareness of his own body: “Whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know; God knows” (2 Co 12:2, NRSV). Paul’s experience was a temporary one, after which he returned to normal existence in the real world, just as with the experience in the Metaverse. However, his recollection of the event provides important information about his perception of his own corporeality, which can be seen as a sign of an authentic premonition of a transcendent existence. Compared to the immersion in the Metaverse, which is a discarnate sensory experience leading to a clear distinction between cognitive perception (immersion in virtual reality) and bodiliness (still bound to the real world), Paul’s experience, like Schmemman’s (as mentioned above), is a holistic immersion in which the subject cannot distinguish between the perceived reality and his own corporeality.

The importance of the perception on one’s corporeality in immersive experiences can be understood by diving into the theology behind the ontological (body and soul) unity of a person. The body–soul relation occupies an important place in the theology of Maximus the Confessor, a 7th-century monk and one of the most significant Byzantine theologians. He focuses on the inseparable kinship of the body and soul during this life and in the Kingdom of God. Maximus writes that the power of the body–soul unity will prevail even more following the eschaton: in eternity, “the body will become like the soul […] in terms of honor and glory, showing in all one divine power […] [that] will keep the bond of union unbroken through it for endless ages.”¹⁹ For this to happen, Maximus considers that the harmonious hierarchy of soul and body should be the goal that the Christian life and ascetic efforts must strive to accomplish. In eternity—the authentic aeon—man can enter only in this state of passionless consonance between body and soul, as opposed to the virtual pseudo-aeon where man’s participation can only be “discarnate.”

The Metaverse represents not only a palliative, discarnate experience of a simulated eternity, but also one utterly opaque to the divinity as a force of providence, a source of vocation, and the unexpected. This happens because, in the Metaverse, all that one can experience (by seeing, hearing, and interacting with) is artificial. In an artificial world where the designer’s goal is to maximize engagement, immersion, entertainment, and ultimately profit, there is little room for manifesting the Christian ethos expressed through virtues such as humility and courage.²⁰ The more time we spend in the Metaverse, the less remains for us to contemplate the beauty of God’s creation—a process through which we can lift our minds and hearts to God since the beauty of creation points to its creator. As Pope Francis expressed in his encyclical Laudatio Si, nature is “God’s art,”²¹ “a constant source of wonder and awe” that represents “a continuing revelation of the divine.”²²

The Metaverse can only offer us an artificial surrogate of eternity, a virtual digital immortality. However, as realistic and engaging as it might get, we will not be transcending our fallen time but diving deeper into it. The only authentic solution for transcending it towards the everlasting aeon lies in the renewal of time (and ourselves within it) in Jesus Christ, the new Adam.

Experiencing Authentic Eternity

Man’s desire for eternity, immortality, and transcending the fallen time of the post-lapsarian world is natural. It can be understood as an insatiable thirst, as a burning desire; however, efforts to create this state of immortality - through digital technologies like the Metaverse - present themselves as surrogates that cannot authentically satisfy this desire since, from an existential perspective, it cannot be satisfied with the things of this world.

In his work “Ambigua,” Maximus the Confessor argues that the way to transcend fallen time and foretaste eternal life is through theosis. Commenting on these excerpts from Maximus, neo-patristic theologian Dumitru Stăniloae shows that

those raised to the height of the knowledge of God […] have risen above the flow of time as those who no longer live the volatility of the flow of time, but remain steadfast in God and virtues over time. They attain this state in the Word made man without sin.²³

However, Stăniloae also specifies that reaching this high spiritual state and rising above “the flow of time” happens not by disembodiment, but in complete harmony between body and soul achieved through ascetic efforts and detachment from sin: “But not in the sense that they would have rejected the bodies, but in the sense that they live in the body with the purity of angels.”.²⁴

Maximus gives Melchizedek from the Book of Genesis as an example of someone who, because of his virtues, “was deemed worthy to transcend time and nature and to become like the Son of God.”²⁵ Stăniloae argues that Maximus shows here how someone that has sanctified his life through “virtue and knowledge” managed to overcome “time and nature”: “Maximus gives here some details on the state of deification. Time is filled with God, therefore with eternity.”²⁶

According to Maximus, the spiritual ascent towards God is “the transcendence of those conditions in which na­ture finds itself, that is, place and time, in which beings have their existence.”²⁷ Starting from this passage, Stăniloae argues that “overcoming the natural contemplation of the divine reasons of things is considered as overcoming the space and time in which things have their existence” so that those who accomplish this live “in eternity,” having left behind the time and space “where things have their substance” and having united with God.²⁸

Complementary to the perspective of Maximus the Confessor, Alexander Schmemann elaborated a theology of time in which Christians are meant to live their lives in kairos, which is the reality of Christ. This reality can be experienced in the liturgy as a transcendence of the finitude we experience in chronos. Living in kairos, in the time of liturgical celebration—as Fr. Schmemann calls it²⁹—one can experience in the present worship both past and future. Therefore, for example, the Byzantine Liturgy sings about Christ’s salvation on the cross and His triumph over history in His second and glorious coming again as “the ultimate and all-embracing today of Christ.”³⁰

The simultaneous retrospective and prospective nature of experiencing the liturgical time is founded on the words and actions of Christ himself within the Scripture and has been at the core of the Eucharist since its institution by Christ at the Last Supper. This understanding of time as a “surmountable and controllable dimension of sacred history”³¹ is what Christianity inherited from Judaism, where the prophets during the service could make time “collapse from the present moment into the future and from the present moment back into the past.”³² It is the same prophetic action that Jesus employed during the Last Supper when he “collapsed time between the Supper and His death on the cross at Calvary (in the future) by his prophetic utterance.”³³ A similar collapse of time occurs at every celebration of the Eucharist since that first one. This is evident in the anamnesis (literally, “remembrance”) part of every Eucharistic prayer during Roman Rite Mass, which recalls the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension but also mentions the future Second Coming.³⁴ Similarly, at each Byzantine Rite Liturgy during the Anaphora, the priest prays both retrospectively and prospectively at the same time: “Remembering […] the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting down at the right hand, and the second and glorious Coming.”³⁵ Living the liturgical celebration, we are immersed in kairos, an eschatological experience of time as a convergence of both past and future in the present moment, when we are given a foretaste of the age to come. We remember with Christ the acts He accomplished for our salvation, and we live the glory of His second coming, both in the present moment, as an experience of eternal life. The same transcendence of time happens throughout the year through the cycle of liturgical services, days of feasts, and celebration of saints: in this restoration of the cyclical calendar of worship, time is no longer chronos, moving towards death, but kairos, a time renewed moving towards life and eternity in and with Christ.

Concluding Remarks

The Metaverse offers the lure of escaping chronos, of eluding the reality of the post-lapsarian fallen time, by immersing into its virtual hyper-spatiotemporal construct where the physical laws of space and temporality can be bent and even suspended. We can view the Metaverse as an artificial foretasting of pseudo-aeon where we can temporarily escape our mortality and suffering. While this burning desire for transcending the fallen time is inherent to human nature, the sensorial, “discarnate” experience that the Metaverse offers is only a palliative, a mere surrogate for the genuine eternity, the “age to come” which the Christian tradition sees as the time known by angels and humans that have sanctified their life through the Grace of God.

Christian patristic tradition provides us with an authentic path to transcend the natural laws of space and time and experience glimpses of eternity, while still in this world: through the practice of virtues and the process of deification by God’s Grace. By reaching this spiritual state, we can rise above the flow of time understood as chronos, not as a sensorial, disembodied experience like in the Metaverse, but in complete harmony between the body and the soul. This path of theosis is the journey of a lifetime, of a Christian life meant to be lived not in chronos but in kairos, the reality of Christ. This is made possible in the liturgical celebrations, where God offers us a foretaste of the renewed time, of aeon, as one in which eternity gets united with our sensible time. As such, we experience time as means to our perfection in Christ and participation in God’s everlasting life.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Octavian-Mihai Machidon

Octavian-Mihai Machidon is a part of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Notes

1 Bruno Maçães, “A War of World-Building.” City Journal, 2022. https://www.city-journal.org/a-war-of-world-building (accessed January 21, 2023).

2 Martin Gurri, “The Fifth Wave: Escaping Into the Metaverse.” Discourse Magazine, 2022. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2022/05/17/the-fifth-wave-escaping-into-the-metaverse/ (accessed January 23, 2023).

3 Özgür Ağralı and Ömer Aydın, “Tweet Classification and Sentiment Analysis on Metaverse Related Messages,” Journal of Metaverse 1, no. 1 (2021): 25.

4 Gurri, “The Fifth Wave: Escaping Into the Metaverse.”

5 Huansheng Ning, Hang Wang, Yujia Lin, Wenxi Wang, Sahraoui Dhelim, Fadi Farha, Jianguo Ding, and Mahmoud Daneshmand, “A Survey on Metaverse: the State-of-the-Art, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09673 (2021), p. 23–24.

6 Brandon Gallaher, “Chalice of Eternity: An Orthodox Theology of Time,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 57, no. 5–35 (2013): 14.

7 Ivan Platovnjak and Tone Svetelj, “Chronos and Kairos of Hope,” Bogoslovni vestnik 81, no. 4 (2021): 799.

8 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. Reidar Thomte and Albert Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1980), 90.

9 Gallaher, “Chalice of Eternity: An Orthodox Theology of Time” 11.

10 Ibid., 13.

11 Alexander Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 78.

12 Ibid.

13 Grayson Mullen and Nicolas Davidenko, “Time Compression in Virtual Reality,” Timing & Time Perception 9, no. 4 (2021): 377.

14 Craig D. Murray and Michael S. Gordon, “Changes in Bodily Awareness Induced by Immersive Virtual Reality,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 4, no. 3 (2001): 365–71.

15 Roomy Khan, “Metaverse: Enhancing Life Experiences Beyond The Physical And Temporal Boundaries,” forbes.com (2022), https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2022/02/18/metaverse-enhancing-life-experiences-beyond-the-physical-and-temporal-boundaries (accessed February 23, 2023).

16 Aishwarya Banik, “The Tale of Metaverse Immortality! How do People Live After Dying?,” Analytics Insight (2022). https://www.analyticsinsight.net/the-tale-of-metaverse-immortality-how-do-people-live-after-dying/ (accessed March 4, 2023).

17 Gallaher, “Chalice of Eternity: An Orthodox Theology of Time.” 17–19.

18 “Developer Warns VR Headset Damaged Eyesight.” BBC News, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52992675 (accessed March 5, 2023).

19 Maximus the Confessor, “Mystagogia: cosmosul şi sufletul, chipuri ale bisericii”, Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, Bucharest, Romania, 2000, 27.

20 Tim Gorichanaz, “Being at Home in the Metaverse? Prospectus for a Social Imaginary.” AI Ethics (2022), 9.

21 Pope Francis, “Laudato si,” La Santa Sede (2015), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html (accessed January 16, 2023), 80.

22 Ibid., 85.

23 Maximus the Confessor, “Ambigua,” Editura Institutului Biblic şi de Misiune al Bisericii Ortodoxe Române, Bucharest, Romania, 2006, 176.

24 Ibid.

25 Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, ed. Maximos Constas and Nicholas Constas (Harvard University Press, 2014), 213.

26 Maximus the Confessor, “Ambigua,” 209.

27 Maximus the Confessor, “On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua,” 413.

28 Maximus the Confessor, “Ambigua,” 317.

29 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 48.

30 Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 84.

31 R. J. Spitzer, “The Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist—History and Evidence,” Magis Center, May 2014, 3.

32 Ibid., 5.

33 Ibid.

34 Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary, available online at http://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/868/ (accessed July 21, 2023), 866.

35 Gallaher, “Chalice of Eternity: An Orthodox Theology of Time,” 25.