A Face Before Him, and a Face Behind: Part 3, Walk With God
The emblem books, beginning with Alciato, covered a range of subjects from the sublime to the satirical and many offered advice or insights somewhere along this spectrum. The take away from this emblem featuring Janus is practical on its surface, but upon more ponderous reflection comments much deeper into our humanity.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
There are many well known quotes demonstrating the practical wisdom of giving heed to the past and future. The central theme of the emblem displaying the forward and backward looking faces of Janus illustrates this as we discussed in part 2, and also the limitations such a temporal vision might have. In researching and knowing the past, we make assumptions about our current and future actions, since by our observations things appear to follow patterns often repeating or showing cause and effect consistencies. If things happened a certain way in the past, more than likely, given the same circumstances, a similar course of events will unfold in the future. Likewise, a reasonable vision of future happenings will better inform a present course of action.
The sight of Janus then has its ends, not in the future or the past, but in the present. For all his looking and despite his prominence among the Roman pantheon, Janus is deficient and has the flimsiest grasp of the present moment, just like we do. The ability to experience and be in the present is kind of our blind spot since it’s always fleeting; it is the shut door. We’ve all had the briefest experiences of kairos, which is a term the ancient Greeks used for the opportune time or the eternal present. It’s the very rare moments when our thoughts are not on what will happen, what we plan to do, or what we’ve done in the past and is usually accompanied by a sense of peaceful being. It is those times when we’ve felt completely in the moment of doing something, being somewhere, or with someone else—as if the rest of the world falls away and the here and now are all that exists.
It’s true we once “walked with God” in the Garden, and there lived with Him in His eternity—a constant state of existence in the present similar to the brief experience of kairos that only now comes ever so seldom. The door was at one time open and we stood in the doorway content to look neither way. However, in the depraved condition humanity finds itself since the expulsion, Janus steps in to facilitate a kind of makeshift illusion of the state of being we had and have lost. An accurate understanding of the past and a clear sight of the future are materially helpful to life navigating and succeeding in the world, but it is insufficient and carries with it much troubles. Thinking about the past causes grief, shame, and guilt while considering the future brings anxiety, worry, and fear. Life in the Edenic present is free from these troubles.
Janus and Bellona, Johann Wilhelm Beyer 1773–1780
The two faces of Janus being explicitly associated with the dilemma of past and future experience (chronos) versus present being (kairos) is beyond the scope of this particular emblem, but the connection is fitting. Despite being the ideal state, we find it almost impossible to live completely in kairos yet move further away from peace and contentedness the more we are consumed in chronos. It may just be another one of those secrets locked behind the door—maybe one to be unearthed in a future analysis. For now I can only suggest the next time you move through a threshold linger a while in the luminal space and wonder about the figure of two faced Janus before a heavy locked door.