Tempus Fugit and MCS

During the summer of 2010, I presented a lecture at the Third International Conference on Disorders of Consciousness at the Campus di Baronissi Facolta de Medicina e Cirugia just outside of Salerno, itself an important seat of medical knowledge in medieval Italy. The conference took place about an hour's drive from the spectacular Greco-Roman ruins of Paestum, the Latinized name given to a settlement named for the sea-god Poseidon. Now several kilometers inland, Paestum was fittingly once on the Mediterranean. The passage of millennia has landlocked the ruin and deprived the modern tourist of glimmering seascape vistas that the ancients once enjoyed. Today, the visitor can only imagine that the sea lies just beyond the next archaeological mound.

The conference's proximity to Paestum was fitting because the most famous of its findings is the ancient Tomb of the Diver. On a series of white slabs, from which his coffin is made, the tomb depicts the passage of a young man to the afterlife. En route, he attends a symposium, embarks on a procession, and – most remarkably – dives naked into an awaiting pool from the Pillars of Hercules (see Figure 3).

The image captures the diver in mid-flight suspended in a moment. Despite the image's flat relief, its ancient artisan depicts time as a fourth dimension. By freezing the young man between life and death, he is “forever overhead” as the archaeologists S. DiGregorio and M. T. Granese note. DiGregorio and Granese describe the diver's portrayal as “the unmeasureable interval between and unrepeatable before and unimaginable after.”

An Eternal Present

When I heard their account of the diver, I was reminded of Augustine's conception of an “eternal present” in which the deity is similarly suspended in all time. Like the diver's moment, this too is an “unmeasureable interval” because it is an infinite convergence of past, present, and future.