The way people experience time is a major theme in the film Doctor Strange, which traces the spiritual metamorphosis of the title character as he moves from self‐centered materialism to selfless spirituality. The revolutionary philosopher Henri Bergson argued that time had suffered from the scientific rationality of the late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth centuries, because scientific approaches to time failed to get at time's essence. For Bergson, scientifically closed mechanism, which views reality as nothing more than the inner workings of a clock, (...) distorted the truth of time and eliminated the possibility of living meaningfully within it. According to Bergson, the purpose of life is to move from Doctor Stephen Strange's experience of time to the Ancient One's, to go from what Bergson called quantitative multiplicity to qualitative multiplicity. Kaecilius' rejection of time serves to emphasize Strange's qualitative progression, which reaches a tipping point at the film's emotional apex, the Ancient One's moment of death. (shrink)

The task of theologizing literature in the twentieth century -- Bergonsian conceptions of time : duration, dualism, intention -- Meeting the eternal in the present : Bergsonsism and the theology of present time in C.S. Lewis's The great divorce -- T.S. Eliot's Bergonsian "always present" : incarnation and duration in Four quartets -- W.H. Auden's themes of time and dualism : the Bergsonsian theology of "kairos and logos.".