This Rhythm of What Passes Away

The final note is, at first hearing, the rhythm of what is passing away. To be sure, the creaturely is a "cascading torrent" ("a torrent...is gathered, overflows, thunders, runs and in running runs off," [Augustine]); indeed, one could even say that it only "was" or "will be," but never "is" ("before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they have fled they no longer are," [Augusgtine]). But it is just this "passing away" that gives the "whole" its particular resonance: just as a spoken work of art depends upon each verse, each syllable, each letter "passing away."...The only appropriate posture, then, is that of "flowing with what flows" to the point of an ever more rapid "trickling away."

But the final clarification of this "rhythm of what passes away" is based in this: that this rhythm is, more profoundly, a manifestation of the mystery of God: the God who works through and sustains this rhythm in its entirety; the God who hereby joins its "nothingness" to an "is"...

—Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis (1932)