(The full film is available on Amazon or Youtube rental.) This paper was given on Sept. 14, 7533 (Sept. 27, 2024 on the civil calendar) at the Nature, Philosophy, and Religion Society session of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy’s annual conference in Rochester, NY.
John Ford, one of classic Hollywood’s greatest directors, made a short film segment known as “A Minute’s Wait,” about 25 minutes long, as part of his longer 1957 anthology film The Rising of the Moon, which drew on actors from Dublin’s famed Abbey Theater in an effort to encourage Irish film-making. The segment was a kind of art-film sequel to his famous 1952 film The Quiet Man. Ford one called the whole anthology his favorite film, although he also said the same supposedly about his likewise brilliant but eccentric and little-known 1953 film The Sun Shines Bright. The latter also featured, in an American setting, a weird sense of temporality, different from Ford’s signature Westerns, melding Confederate Lost Cause, Lincolnian nationalist, and early Civil Rights era themes, strangely but somehow humanely. A Minute’s Wait as a segment of The Rising of the Sun opens awkwardly like the rest of the anthology in an introduction by Hollywood legend and Irishman Tyrone Power, with whom the mercurial Ford reportedly had a spotty relationship. Nonetheless, looking at this center of the three short films in that anthology, A Minute’s Wait, I’ll argue that we can put this film in relation to Christian existentialist ideas of time and Creation, and find in it a source of resistance to modern technocracy or rule by technology, the source of our globalizing administrative state and its affinity for what is called “workeness.”
Christian Existentialism and Orthodoxy
Christian existentialism, a label based in the work of Søren Kierkegard but even more for Orthodox Christians that of Fyodor Dostoevsky, has been defined as rejecting efforts to contain God in an objective, logical system, while focusing on existence rather than any essentialism about life. Rather, the focus of theology in it shines on a person grappling with subjective truth, rather than a set of objective claims. In an Orthodox sense of this, St. Basil the Great intimated that natural law was the spark of God’s love in the human heart, and this could be considered an ancient patristic basis for Christian existentialism, still living in the Orthodox Church. Contrariwise, C.S. Lewis presented the modern term technocracy (albeit critically) in opposition to Basil’s view, meaning a totalizing and ultimately totalitarian system that ultimately is transhumanist (The Abolition of Man). The 21st-century Anglo-Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth calls our current technocracy “The Machine,” by which the combined utilitarian and nihilistic assumptions of modern scientism come to shape all-encompassing realities through technology, as seen in cyberspace and artificial intelligence, and how so many people globally now spend much of their time on devices, much more than in prayer or worship, even especially those claiming to be Christians and even us Orthodox.
A Patristic View of Time
In Lewis’ view, technocracy while at odds with Christian existentialism, makes use of a parody or incomplete sense of it, in what becomes a postmodern sensibility. Focusing on a person grappling with subjective truth, the technocratic mindset seeks to obscure and forget the Person of Christ as that ultimate source of relationship, freedom, and personal dialogue, as Mikhail Bakhtin described the personal Christocentrism of Dostoevsky’s work. Thus unhinged, subjective truth is lured by impersonal claims to instrumentalize, manipulate, and from an insanely demonic sensibility according to Dostoevsky, in effect to blow up the world by will to power. The controversial Russian philosopher and polemicist Alexander Dugin, in his studies of Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western ontology as nihilist, argues that the West’s sense of reality has become hegemonic and virtual. By identifying individual beings falsely with both mystical Being and ideas, Dugin argues in effect that the Western lobotomizing of Christian existentialism left a self-willed struggle for power in virtual realities, which depend evermore on addictive technology to exert that will over the world. In short, the technocratic flip side of Christian existentialism has become for Lewis, Kingsnorth, and Dugin what the evangelist John called the spirit of Anti-Christ, denying that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. It fashions an emphasis on self-assertion through technology, which all becomes like Behemoth or Leviathan in apocalyptic scope. The paradox is that hyper-atomization of person becomes susceptibility to techno-totalitarian control, as the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger, noted in her The Origins of Totalitarianism. This all develops into a managed normality of evil, which she called “the banality of evil.”
The distinctive patristic Christian model of simultanous temporalities and non-temporality provides an antidote. Orthodox Christian modes of time and non-time resist any objectifying and instrumentalizing of Creation and also of man, and so resist technocracy. The patristic vision of time and beyond-time can be thought of in four aspects. (1) The first is the natural time suggested by St Basil the Great’s writings on the Six Days of Creation. This is the time of the stars and the plants and animals and the seasons. (2) The second is fallen human time, which attempts to fragment and measure this in human terms alone, ultimating in what we might today call cellphone time. (3) Then there is eternity of the created angels, demons, and immortal human souls. (4) Beyond that we find the uncreated beyond time, the everlasting, of the energies of God. This constitutes that spark of God’s love in the human heart that Basil indicated is natural law. Together all these modes entwine in human experience of Creation. That personal experientiality of the heart forms the subjectivity or personhood of truth in Christian existentialism, found by emptying self in the Person of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man. It resists objectification, essentialization, conceptualization, and utilitarianism or nihilism. That’s because here lies what the Anglican Christian phenomenologist Erazim Kohak called the Venn diagram of time and eternity, although even more than this in Orthodox cosmology lies the Venn diagram of time and eternity, in the context of the uncreated energies of God, the Holy Trinity, which models a mysterious meta-Personal relationship. This cannot be systematized or controlled by Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality.
Back to the Film
Dugin argued that the atomization of postmodernity in the West yields to the importance of the subatomic, as he puts it. But Christian tradition can renew such a dreary particle view, by flipping the landscape to energy: the uncreated energies of God, grace–the field or landscape of God’s uncreated light. Now, finally, to return to John Ford’s film, an existentialist comedy by reason of its ending in an engagement between Paddy and Pegeen made in a moment and framed by talk of a cemetery. Their younger counterparts Mary Ann and Christy also end up by the end of the film segment in an engaged marriage that is also reflective of their own attraction to each other–fate meets free will in medieval weirdness in their relationship as well, sealed by bonus dollars from the American military in which her father had lost his life. Death frames both marriages.
Filmed in 1956 in Kilkee, and featuring a fictional form of the West Clare Railway, called the Ballyscran and Dunfaill Railroad, and based on a one-act play by Martin J. McHugh from 1914, “A Minute’s Wait” features a mythic old rural Ireland fallen between the cracks of time, with no specified year in the film. I’m tempted to think of it as existing somewhere in the 1921-1922 odd realm of Southern Ireland, a temporary partition of Ireland affected by the Government of Ireland Act, drifting between old Ireland as a British conquest and the Irish Free State hanging weirdly as a British Dominion but disputed with the revolutionary Republic of Ireland that claimed to encompass it. So temporalities of Creation here also can be contextualized with colonialist problems, while hanging in a form of created cinematic timelessness.
From the beginning, the Porter Paddy announces to the train that there will be one minute’s wait when it arrives at the Dunfaill station. But he also announces the refreshment room is open. And when asked by one of the passengers who knows his name whether he will have time to order and drink a pint, Paddy responds there will be lots of time, and more if he joins him in the middle. Then Paddy announces again to all that there will be one minute’s wait. As the film goes on and in its title, one minute’s wait becomes later called a minute’s wait, not so numerically defined but perhaps typing some sense of eternity. The railroad could be taken as representing human time run amuck or demonic as technological time, falsely laying claim to eternity. In this in a sense it could type prelest or delusion as demonic, polluting human time as in the time of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel and Babylon in technocracy, a reference made by CS Lewis in the title of his dystopian book That Hideous Strength, a poetic reference to Babylon and the hubris of technology. This is a time that ultimately for Lewis expresses that spirit of the Anti-Christ in the Evangelist John’s terms: A time that is a blasphemous parody of not just eternity but the everlasting of God’s beyond-time in its perverse and pervasive immersiveness. In it again human time really becomes demonic time in a misleading sense of eternity.
But arguably, the comedy also lies in the resistance here to globalization, and could be said symbolically to type the true eternity that lies in the human soul and in the angelic and demonic that influence it. But the immersiveness and homogeneous monolithic qualities of the railroad time indicate something more sinister too, despite the best efforts of the people to pay no mind. Perhaps it is also indicative of the passage to death, in which in the end like the hurling team people can only celebrate, but only authentically if Christians in hope of being with Jesus Christ. Could the transformation of railroad time yet still also type the sobornost or spiritual unity written about by another lesser-known philosopher counted as a Christian existentialist, the Russian Orthodox S.L. Frank? Sobornost at its root comes from a Slavonic term used as a calque on the Catholic in the Nicene Creed, but having the meaning more of deep solidarity and underlying connectedness rather than universality geographically. Sobornost can be thought of as the dynamic field of the uncreated energies of God, scrambling various temporalities.
Against this lies the technological will to power represented by the railroad. In The Coming Wave (2023), Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, attacks the notion of technological neutrality and declares that “Technology is a form of power.” The Orthodox Christian writer Rod Dreher summarizes how “Suleyman calls on governments and international organizations to develop a regulatory structure of “containment”—that is, to grant corporations like Microsoft monopoly power over technologies like AI and keep them from “bad actors” [dissenters and non-conformists resisting technocracy and globalization]. Such groups are deemed too dangerous to have a say over the technologies of “the future.” Such a judgment, openly made, suggests that an era of strife and force is not far off,” Dreher writes.
More primitively, cinematic time as of the black-and-white film A Minute’s Wait could be taken as symbolizing the technological time mentioned above as well as the railroad. A famous silent movie featured train headed toward scared yet enthralled audiences. Was it a precursor to the internet and cyberspace? The latter is based on a linear sense of progress likewise that paradoxically becomes strangely hegemonic.
The blurred political time of Ireland in the period depicted by the movie evokes de Valera’s unsuccessful attempt at a kind of agrarian Catholic republic. The Anglo-Irish were distinguished by Yeats in their own effort at a kind of timeless human time, but one ultimately dedicated like Yeats to esoteric globalization involving the occult, and with an ultimately off-key tone like the hapless English couple on the train. Another example, at this same time, very involved in the whole effort to create a federation of British dominion states in what became the Commonwealth of Nations, was the so-called Milner Group and its offshoots, traced by the Georgetown historian Carrol Quigley. The Milner Group was influenced by the Christian Science religion of several of its key members, notably the Astors and Lord Lothian, likewise tending toward the global occult. That was a gnostic mind-healing sect, ultimately discredited by alleged Appeasement and medical ineffectiveness, but with themes of British Israelism, the idea that the British Empire genealogically or spiritually marked the coming forth of the lost tribes of Israel, with enduring influence on Protestant Zionism and its impact on the Middle East. Such gnostic ways of thinking sought to disavow that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, in the spirit of Antichrist from the standpoint of traditionalists like Lewis. They emphasized a false transcendent beyond-temporality out of reach of embodied experience.
Rules and Timing for Orthodox Christian “Existentialism”
We can find as an antidote, in Orthodox time and Orthodox Christian existentialism, Blessed Seraphim Rose’s principles for his Orthodox teaching. Fr Seraphim, a 1970s Orthodox Christian writer in America who went from being a fellow traveler of the beatniks in northern California in the 1970. Three principles of his, according to his biographer:
- We are pilgrims on earth and we do not take anything with us in the sense that the worldly things that preoccupy us have no absolute significance.
- Orthodox Christianity is not academic but lived embodied experience.
- If Christ is not found by us in this life, He will not be found by us in the next.
These all imply a strong emphasis in the existential Christian model of Christian temporality already mentioned, with its elements on natural time, human time, eternity, and the everlasting, all entwined simultaneously. This can also be explained by a dive into the etymology of the term weird. Weird now rests as a term that was an issue in the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, in talking about which candidates were the oddest. But its ancient meaning in the era of Christian patristics was different than merely odd, and its queerness not about sexual preferences. Weird had a meaning of the otherworldly, the crucial moment where one’s destiny shaped by all the community of one’s life came into place with an opportunity for a decision. In a way this can be compared to being on a surfboard driven by a giant wave, when you can shift and steer your surfboard a bit to guide your trajectory of landing. This models too the operation of grace and being free in Christian existentialism of the old sort. For to be free in early English is to be generous, a term related to friend, having in it the meaning of Jesus Christ’s new commandment to love your neighbor more than yourself, to empty yourself in Him, rather than to assert yourself.
The Cosmic Symbolism of Christian Marriage
Those who would assert themselves seem most in line with the technology of the railroad in Ford’s short comic film. But even the scheming relatives of Christy and Mary Ann in their money-based matchmaking merely parallel most comically what is already organically happening with the young couple. Throughout, the film’s comedy suggests that temporality is not absolute, but by extension can become an ontological model related to experience.
The presence of the religious in the short film is directly in two areas, one being the pious conventions observed by the characters, tipping a hat in remembrance of the dead and suggesting a prayer. The other is the relation of the Catholic and Anglican Irish churches, indicated by Paddy’s tricksterish storing of the lobsters for the Catholic Bishop’s Golden Jubilee in the train care of the English couple. Religion per se is a matter partly for comedy, as in The Quiet Man at times. But in the background it also offers an experiential typology for how the everlasting of God’s beyond-time in His uncreated energies may be taken as the immersive film experience of the whole encounter of the train with this rural station and the effect on the viewer. To use an ecosemiotic model, the roles of filmmaker, film, viewer, and environment or context of the movie, all together could be seen as a typology of the sobornost or mystical unity formed by the beyond-time field of the uncreated energies of God.
Paddy and Pegeen’s engagement is interrupted by the train, after she says it would be lovely to be buried with his people, and gives him her hand like a noble lady. But the train when it leaves the station is transfigured, buoyed by boisterous Irish music, waving and shouts of goodbye, with practitioners of the supposedly ancient Irish art of hurling waving their sticks from the roofs of the train, as the English couple is left perplexed behind, having been lingering at their makeshift station tea table. It is as if the train transcends the utilitarian and the nihilistic, the worldly. Paddy is left behind too, to go back to talking to Peggy off screen, while there also is still the beleaguered station master at the little country stop, and Mary Ann and Christy on the train heading off to their agreed-upon marriage. The growing claim of an homogenous time for the railroad is superseded by the human and archetypal comedy of the happening at the station, in which the couples assume typological roles of the Bridegroom and the Bride, familiar archetypes in biblical terms, captured for a moment on film like the character shots of the villagers at the end of The Quiet Man. Symbolically, for a moment of grace, the whole claim to inevitable expansion and immersion of the Machine as a way of life becomes absurd and unreal, caught in an underlying personal energy akin to sobornost, the mystical spiritual unity of the uncreated energies of God’s grace. We are reminded of how we really come to life in a mysterious narrative of God in which we are in a sense but types ourselves. That we are watching all this typology, however, through the technology of cinema, and now on digital technology, nonetheless forms part of the sobering comedy of the railroad happening.