Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Novak

Novak’s line is a quiet grenade tossed into our most basic habit: treating time as a hallway with doors labeled “past” and “future.” By insisting that “before and after” don’t exist for God, he’s not offering a poetic comfort so much as repositioning the entire drama of moral life. The human story runs on suspense, regret, and anticipation. God, in Novak’s framing, doesn’t. That asymmetry is the point.

The intent is philosophical and theological: to defend a classical view of divine eternity in which God isn’t merely very old or very well-informed, but categorically outside the temporal sequence. “Simultaneous” does heavy lifting. It borrows the language of physics and common sense (things happening at once) to gesture toward something that ultimately breaks both. The subtext is a challenge to the way modern people domesticate God as a character inside history, reacting, updating, learning. Novak pushes back: God isn’t watching the parade from a taller building; God isn’t in the parade.

Context matters. Novak wrote as a Catholic public intellectual in late-20th-century America, often trying to reconcile faith’s metaphysical claims with a culture obsessed with progress, timelines, and historical “turning points.” This view makes providence legible without turning it into micromanagement: if all moments are “present” to God, foreknowledge doesn’t have to mean predestination in the crude sense. It also reframes suffering and justice. A wound that feels permanent to us is, to God, held alongside its healing. That doesn’t solve the problem of evil; it changes the camera angle, insisting the frame is bigger than our clocks.