A colleague claims that time spent playing chess is time wasted. Nay, sir, I respond, “Chess is an art disguised as a game.” Golly, I’ve been playing chess since middle school. Game or art, it can be a source of delight and dismay.

In recent days, I’ve been following the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championship tournaments. In rapid chess, each player has 15 minutes total time, plus 10 seconds additional time per move. In blitz chess, each player has 3 minutes total time, plus 2 additional seconds per move. Tempus fugit, right? If a watched pot never boils, an unwatched chess clock means a lost game.

With the coming of the new year, it’s easy to be more time-conscious. Never mind what happened to last week. What happened to last year? But hold on. What’s the big deal with a year? Maybe it’s just another social construction, with a technological boost. (If anyone asks how Superman winds his watch, the answer is Clarkwise.)

Feeling intellectually adventurous? Let’s shoot for the moon! What is time, anyway? Homo economicus, call him Boris Bottomline, tells us that “Time is money.” But such bluff and bluster won’t suffice. Far better is the circumspection of St. Augustine. In his Confessions he reflects, “If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know” (Bk. 11, Ch. 14).

Since philosophy can run interference for theology, it behooves us to consult Aristotle. In the Physics, he tells us that “Time is the numbering of motion according to before and after.” Some unpacking helps. First, time depends on change. Second, time implies a unity that implies a consciousness of before and after, both of which are relative to now. Third, time is measured in reference to a process of change. So it is that Norris Clarke, SJ, an eminent Thomist, defines time as “a synthesis of real and mental being, founded in reality.”

Some theological context is in order, and Augustine is ready to supply it. For a start, God never changes. By definition, change would bring a variation in qualities or substance. Note, too, that absent creation, there is no time. God, to be sure, does not exist in creation; rather, He exists eternally. Nor are there two things, God and eternity existing as a quality of God. Just as God is Love, so also He is eternity. In this regard, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that “Eternity is nothing else but God Himself. Hence God is not called eternal as if He were in any way measured” (ST I, q. 10, art. 2, ad 3).

To be sure, coming to theological terms with time stretches our minds about as far as they can reach. Augustine himself takes a “time out,” as it were, to tip his hat to the puzzled chap who asks, “What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?” A jokester might reply, “He was getting hell ready for people who pry too deep.” But Augustine is more charitable. He explains that before Creation God made nothing, since to do so would already be to launch Creation. So let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Enough said, gentle reader, for a blog post. I’ll only add, for the already keenly interested, that the theologian Frank Sheed, a translator of Confessions, teaches that the saints in heaven experience a distinctive temporal mode of existence, aeviternity. There the usual time limits do not apply, even for blogs. Hope to see you there!