Chronos and Kairos

Yesterday an exhange with Donn Johnson on his blog started me wondering about the venerable distinction between "chronos" and "kairos."

The lie of modernism is that chronos is a god worthy of worship.

The lie of postmodernism is that we can each create our own kairos.

The truth of premodernism is that chronos is of lesser importance than kairos, and that kairos is always a gift, not something we are able to produce of ourselves. Rather, it is something which we can only receive from God.

( "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." -- James 1:17)

Fr. Patrick Reardon in his article, "Chronos and Kairos" explains the distinction between these two ways of understanding time in terms of "quantity" and "quality." See http://orthodoxytoday.org/articles5/ReardonChronos.php.

I see them as related to two ways of knowing: ratio (discursive reason) and intellectus (intuitive, non-discursive reason). Ratio can only take place in chronos time, because it moves step by step, from premises to conclusion. Intellectus transcends chronos time, thus the seeming "timelessness" and "fullness" of that sort of knowledge.

We live in a world that operates according to twisted notions of time; either idolizing it or idolizing ourselves through it. Josef Pieper gives the ratio-intellectus distinction in his Leisure the Basis of Culture; I wonder if he ever made the connection to these two ways of understanding time?