"In time, meaning is broken into an incalculable diversity, which can come to a radical unity only in the religious centre of human existence. For this is the only sphere of our consciousness in which we can transcend time...We gain this experience only in the religious concentration of the radix of our existence upon the absolute Origin...How could man direct himself toward eternal things if eternity were not "set in his heart"?" (Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique I, p.31). William Young has suggested that "Dooyeweerd's appeal [here] to Eccl. 3:11 is highly questionable. 
may be rendered "eternity", it is true. Yet it can be rendered "world" as in the English Authorized version and by many commentators." He is of the opinion that "the rendering "world" would give the sense that God has placed all the rich diversity of time in the human heart, the very opposite of Dooyeweerd's sense" (William Young, Toward a Reformed Philosophy, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Piet Hein Publishers/T. Wever--1952--Franeker, p.144, n.31). Over against William Young's objection, however, we can point out that this Hebrew term combining both time/the temporal world and Eternity conveys exactly the sense that Dooyeweerd intended.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 has a definite anagogical and supratemporal ring about it which very much does convey the dynamic of Dooyeweerd's classical transcendental turn into inverse perspective. Literature written from this anagogic perspective "imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not the center of its reality...nature becomes not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind [Reformationals and Orthodox read "heart" - mmm] of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way...Anagogic criticism is usually found in direct connection with religion, and is to be discovered chiefly in the more uninhibited utterances of the poets themselves. It comes out in those passages of Eliot's quartets where the words of the poet are placed within the context of the incarnate Word..."(Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, pp.119,122).
January, 1988
mmm