Maimondes’s comments about time are typical of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance thought in that they make of every life a great drama. The old pagan gods of the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East were fickle and violent, easy to offend and hard to placate, but they weren’t dull. And the fact that people attempted interaction with them means they thought of themselves in relation to their own creators and the creators of the universe.
The exclusion of a religious understanding of being had been simultaneous with a radical narrowing of the field of reality that we think of as pertaining to us. This seems on its face not to have been inevitable. We are right were we have always been, in time, in the cosmos, experiencing mind, which may well be an especially subtle and fluent quantum phenomenon. Our sense of what is at stake in any individual life has contracted as well, another consequence that seems less than inevitable.
We have not escaped, nor have we in any sense diminished, the mystery of our existence. We have only rejected any language that would seem to acknowledge it.
