ETERNITY

ETERNITY is the condition or attribute of divine life by which it relates with equal immediacy and potency to all times. The notion emerges at the point of contact of three distinct religious concerns. The oldest of these is the question of the state of life after death, especially in light of the continuing presence of the dead among the living as acknowledged in the various forms of the cult of the dead. A later-developing speculative concern is the question about divine creation, especially when creative power is seen as the production in a divine mind of a world of ideas, a logos or paradigm made present in this world as in an image. Finally, there is the concern with contemplative or mystical experience, especially when regarded as a way of partaking of the divine life within the conditions of present existence. Reflection on these themes converges upon the notion of a dimension of life that is "vertically" related to the "horizontal" flowing of time, that transcends time without being apart from it.

Because eternity touches each and every time, it is easily confused with the closely related concept of what "always was, is, and will be," or, in a word, the everlasting. But in its own proper concept, the eternal only "is"; only in the present tense can it be said to be or act in any way. Exempted from all having-been and going-to-be, eternity is familiarly defined as timelessness, in distinction from the everlasting (sometimes also called the sempiternal). The everlasting antecedes and outlasts everything that begins and ends in time, but because it is just as much given over to being partly past, partly future as are things that come to be and perish, it is therefore just as much in time. Eternity, on the other hand, does not transcend finite spans of time extensively, but intensively. It draws the multiplicity of times into a unity no longer mediated by relations of precedence and posteriority and therefore, at least in this specific sense, no longer timelike.

Yet it oversimplifies to call eternity timelessness. Though eternity excludes pastness and futurity, it remains correct to speak of it as presence, which after all is one of the three fundamental determinations of time. In the Platonic tradition, which gave the concept its classical development and passed it on through Muslim and Christian theology to modern European philosophy, the present tense retains its temporal sense in affirmations concerning eternity. In this way the Western notion of eternity differs from some Buddhist accounts of nirvāṇa, into which not just pastness and futurity but presence as well are dissolved. Platonic eternity by contrast is a paradigmatic presence, and the present in time is its partial but authentic image.

The present is called the "now." Latin metaphysics spoke therefore of eternity as nunc stans, a "standing now," and of time as nunc fluens, a "flowing now." Since the now of time, which is always experienced as having a certain duration, converges under logical analysis toward the limiting concept of the instantaneous, the dimensionless moment of transition, the problem arises whether the eternal Now is itself a kind of frozen instant, a durationless simplicity about which no experiences of life in time are instructive. Remarkably, the single feature most vividly affirmed of eternity by its classic expositors is that it is life, and not just life but divine life, "a god, manifesting himself as he is," as the third-century ce Neoplatonist mystic Plotinus says in one place (see the following). How does one incorporate a religious discourse in which eternity is divine life into the stark conceptual analyses of pure metaphysics, which seem to lead to a static, almost mathematical abstraction?

The synthesis of logical, psychological, and theological analyses into a rigorous conception of eternity is proprietary to the Platonic philosophical tradition, and is in many ways the single-handed achievement of Plotinus. There are rather complete analogies to the concept in some of the Upaniṣads in India, but in Asia one finds in the main only partial parallels; the metaphysical cake that is the complex Western idea is there cut apart in different ways, so to speak. Pending the outcome of more penetrating philosophical study than the Asian texts have so far received from Western translators and historians, the story of eternity remains at present the story of the Plotinian synthesis, its sources and its influences. The discussion that follows reflects this situation. It reviews, in decreasing detail (1) the classic Platonic conception of eternity as Plotinus understands it, (2) the place of this conception in its own, mainly European, spiritual history, and (3) those points in Indian and Asian philosophy where search for analogous intuitions most plausibly might begin.

Platonic Eternity in Plotinus

In the Platonic tradition, eternity and time are regularly considered together. They make up in fact a single topic, in the old literary sense of the Greek term topos ("place"), where it refers to a particular place in a canonical text. The discussion of eternity invariably proceeds among Platonists as a meditation on the place in the Timaeus of Plato where eternity is described as "abiding in unity" and time as an "eternal image of eternity, moving according to number" (37d). At a minimum, this passage imposes the idea that eternity and time are in some respect comparable to one another. But Neoplatonism makes a stronger claim for a vision of eternity and time as extremes of a continuum. Life itself, the interior life of the soul, bridges the gap according to Plotinus, and this makes possible an account of the experience of eternity itself.

In some ways it is an extremely familiar experience. Consider reading a book that one finds completely compelling, that draws one along in apparently inexhaustible attentiveness and interest. Hours can pass unregistered; it can be shocking to discover how much time has passed, and how meaningless that fact seems compared with the inner composure and vividness of the interval. Any activity that is intensely self-collected, full of purposiveness and power, can generate this effect—not just intellectual but also aesthetic, even physical activity such as dancing or athletics.

Experiences of this kind are a threshold for the pure experience of eternity, contemplation. It is important to notice that they are not without duration, indeed they are rich in inner activity and movement. One experiences something like time in them, but a time that arises more than passes, that gives rather than takes. An inexhaustible power seems to well up within oneself. When, as is inevitable, the spell is broken, one speaks of having fallen away from that power, not of the power itself having lapsed.

Plotinus calls this power the life of the Mind, and in order to express its inexhaustibility says that it is infinite, limitless. In earlier Greek philosophy, to be infinite was to be indefinite, without form or intelligibility, wholly a negative condition. Plotinus too portrays the intelligible world of Platonic Ideas as finite, formally and structurally. But grasped within the living Mind that is its origin and substrate, it is limitlessly vivacious, a world "boiling with life" (6.7.12). The living and dynamic quality of eternal Mind is as central a theme in Plotinus as its simplicity and composure, and is expressed in a remarkable passage where he says that "its nature is to become other in every way," accomplished in a "wandering" (planē, as of the planets) within itself that is like a ceaseless adventure on the "plain of truth" (6.7.13).

For the soul that awakens to this presence of mind, the experience is like a homecoming, a coming into oneself rather than a journey to another self or state of existence. The old Platonic image of this movement as an anamnēsis, an unforgetting, depended on the Orphic mythical theme of the preexistence of the soul and was therefore easily understood to be a recollection from elsewhere and elsewhen, so to speak. But in Plotinus anamnēsis is altogether what it is in Augustine also, an interior conversion of the soul completed in contemplative immediacy—conversion both in the sense of a turning, from distracting cares to tranquil insight, and of a transformation, from the condition of life that is soul to that of pure intellectual apprehension or Mind.

Because the condition of the life of the soul is time, humans fall away from presence of mind in a recurrent downward movement that makes one's encounter with eternity multiple and episodic. Yet, "if you look attentively at it again, you will find it as it was" (3.7.5). In that contemplation one will be one's self again, self-possessed and self-contained, puzzled by the vulnerability to scatteredness and confusion into which the soul falls in time. A traditional term for the self-possession of eternal life is stasis, still used in English, and especially in the familiar complaint that the eternity of Greek metaphysics is "static." This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

Stasis means "staying, standing rather than falling, holding together rather than lapsing into dispersion." One can get the sense of eternal stasis best from the English word homeostasis, as used in biology to name the dynamic composure that the very diverse movements of metabolism and organic activity maintain within a living system. The simplicity and unity of eternal life is that of a homeostasis, a self-enveloping completion that is at the same time the space for an unlimited enjoyment of activity, purpose, and power.

"Hence," Plotinus writes, "eternity is a majestic thing, and thought declares it identical with the god." He goes on: "Eternity could be well described as a god proclaiming and manifesting himself as he is, that is, as being which is unshakeable and self-identical and always as it is, and firmly grounded in life." From this follows the definition: Eternity is "life that is here and now endless because it is total and expends nothing of itself" (3.7.5).

Familiar in the Latin West through the paraphrase of Boethius, "interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio" ("the all-at-once total and perfect possession of endless life," The Consolation of Philosophy 5.6), the Plotinian experience of eternity marks the divine life as a presence and opens the route of human approach to this life through contemplative mysticism.

Historical Background and Consequence

The Greek term that translates as "eternity" in Plato and Plotinus is aiōn, and this has given many students of the history of the notion pause. Aiōn survives in English in the Latinized spelling aeon, and here retains much of its original meaning. Aiōn means "life, span of life, lifetime; epoch, aeon." While it never suggests duration simply on the level of measure or standard interval, even the Homeric places where it comes closest to meaning "inner life force" include strongly the suggestion of power to perdure, of life reaching out to take up its proper span of time. It seems a very timelike term, not only because of its connotation of span or duration, but because beginning, middle, and end belong so much to the kind of totality or completion it expresses still in English.

The term first occurs in surviving fragments of early Greek philosophy in the fifth-century bce writer Heraclitus, in the gnome "Aiōn is a child playing a board game; the kingly power is a child's" (Heraclitus, B52). The translation "eternity" is clearly inadmissible; those translators who instead supply "time" have good cause. Heraclitus's theme is the spontaneity and immanence of the laws or patterns manifest in the give-and-take of natural processes; the intelligibility of constant change is not outside nature like a god, but the cosmos is in and by itself an "Everliving Fire, flaring up by measure, dying down by measure" (B30). Under the control of this ruling image, aiōn again means a form of completion embracing birth and death and the process that weaves them together.

It is not at all clear to what degree Plato distinguishes between the adjectival form aiōnios, "eternal," and another term aïdios, "everlasting." Because in fact he inclines to the (false) etymology that takes aiōn from aei ōn, "always being," he gives place to the very confusion the Neoplatonists are most concerned to prevent. In the very text in Timaeus that becomes decisive, he says of aiōn that "its nature is everlasting [aïdios ]" (37d).

Among consequences of this situation is a protracted controversy among the Hellenistic Platonists of the centuries around the beginning of the common era concerning what is called "the eternity of the world." The question was whether, as Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics (12.6), the world is everlasting and has no beginning in time or whether, as Timaeus would suggest if its mythical form were given substantive import, the world began to be at some definite time. Alexandrian Jewish and later Christian Platonists tended to join the argument on the latter side, partly through their effort to coordinate the story in Timaeus with that of Genesis. It should be clear that once the rigorous nontemporal concept of eternity had been established, it was a mistake to call this question the question of the "eternity" of the world, but only Augustine (Confessions 11) diagnoses the category mistake with full philosophical precision.

The antecedents of the Neoplatonic conception of eternity lie not in the lexicography of the term's classical philosophical usage, but in the associations it takes on through the constant interaction of Platonic image and argument with popular religious consciousness. This includes first of all the concern with immortality and afterlife, the context for talk of the eternal life of the soul. Because this concern is profoundly rooted in the archaic, mythological sensibility and its experience of the structure that Mircea Eliade has called "eternal return," it made available the notion of another time, a transcending and divine time that could intersect with mundane time, embedding life in a dimension that surpasses birth and death. The eternity that can be abstracted from this archaic experience is an eternal past more than the eternal present of the proper concept; fundamental imaginative possibilities were appropriated from this origin. The mediating religious context was in large measure the emergence of the mystery religions in the Greco-Roman world, among them the mysteries of baptism and of table blessing central to Christianity.

Aiōn in the New Testament is principally an apocalyptic term, qualified as "this aeon" as against "the aeon to come" (synoptic Gospels, Paul). It shares with the rest of the apocalyptic scenario a Persian, Zoroastrian background, and in a few Pauline or deutero-Pauline places (e.g., Col. 1:26, Eph. 3:9) seems to be personified in the sense of an equation of Aion with Zurwān, an equation that sets the stage for the florid multiplication of such personified aions in the gnostic literature of the second century ce. Though there has been speculation that this kind of connection between Mediterranean and Near Eastern symbolism contributed to the emergence of the novel Neoplatonic sense of aiōn, it seems preferable to portray this as a digression.

A richer question is whether "eternal life" in the Gospel of John is consonant with the radical Platonic idea, or already on common ground with it. The predominance of present-tense statements by the glorified Son in that text ("Before Abraham was, I am," Jn. 8:58, et al.), its transformation of apocalyptic into realized eschatology, and its eucharist of epiphany and participation ("He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him," Jn. 6:56) made it possible for Christian Neoplatonism of the Augustinian type to embrace the strict nontemporal eternity without sensing any violence in its interpretation of scripture.

The story of the appropriation of Plotinian contemplative mysticism by later Christian and Muslim theology defeats summary. Suffice it to say that the Neoplatonic system was adapted to biblical monotheism with considerable penetration and accuracy, especially by Augustine and the Latin tradition through Boethius and Bonaventure, by the apophatic tradition from Dionysius the Areopagite through John Scottus Eriugena to Meister Eckhart, and by Ṣūfī philosophy. The close connection between the theoretical role of eternity as an attribute or name of God and its experiential richness as an element of contemplative spirituality remained characteristic of these traditions.

A certain purely logical interest in the eternity/time contrast, detectable already in Boethius (responding more to Porphyry than Plotinus) and Thomas Aquinas, was amplified by the new mathematical spirit of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, resulting in the reduction of eternal presence to a kind of schematic simplicity illustrated particularly clearly in the system of Spinoza. The effect was to dissociate the speculative notion from its experiential basis, producing in the end the degraded conception of eternity as lifeless stasis or logical tenselessness that has been the target of complaint in historicist, existentialist, and process theologies of the past century.

Eternity in Non-Western Thought

It is a commonplace that the religious themes of afterlife, divine creation, and the nature of the soul are drawn together in different patterns by non-Western traditions. The Buddha is represented as holding that speculation on none of these furthers one toward enlightenment. It is no surprise to find that a concept like eternity, which emerges at the intersection of these themes in Platonism and then becomes influential precisely through its adaptability to biblical theology, does not always have strict analogies in other religious discourse.

The exegetical and hermeneutical complications that derive from this situation have not always been registered in the translations of non-Western sources. Only some preliminary pointers about other treatments of eternity are here appropriate.

The striking parallels that are being discovered between Neoplatonism and Vedānta philosophy appear to hold also in the case of eternity. The Sanskrit nitya can be translated "eternity" with some confidence already in Upaniṣads, especially at the point where "immortality," amṛta, is pressed beyond the popular image of outliving death, or life after death, to the radical notion of mokṣa, "liberation," deliverance from the cycle of birth and death itself. The fundamental conception in the Upaniṣads that the authentic self, the ātman, gathered into its own interior unity from the levels of psychic life, is one with brahman, the universal spirit, is developed in ways that regularly parallel the account of the authentic self on the level of the Nous, or divine Mind, in Plotinus. It is less clear, however, whether the eternal present, self-consolidated beyond all passage through birth and death, is to be found in the Vedas.

Buddhism presents a much more complex situation. The negative assessment of timelike continuity and the rejection of substantiality and causality that are frequent in Buddhist philosophy lead to descriptions of enlightenment that often have a Platonic ring. In Buddhism, the parallels are particularly pronounced in the meditative traditions that emphasize "sudden enlightenment," where the unconditioned and spontaneous quality of transcendental insight (Skt., prajñā ) is stressed. In the Mahāyāna Pure Land tradition, the paradisical Sukhāvatī ("land of bliss") of the Buddha Amitābha is sometimes developed in ways reminiscent of the Platonic world of ideal presences, pervaded by divine mentality. If there is an authentic parallel here to the notion of eternity, this will have to be tested by careful analysis of the account of temporal presence itself, for it is this that is ascribed to eternity by Platonism, and in turn made the image of eternity and mark of authentic being for life in time. In those radical portrayals of nirvāṇa as release from all forms of temporal conditioning, not just pastness and futurity, but presence itself sometimes seems to be denied of awakened mind.

A focal problem in the search for analogy to eternity in Chinese thought is the proper account of the first line of the Dao de jing, often translated, "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao [chang dao ]." "Eternal" may overtranslate chang; the core meaning is closer to "steadfast," "constant," "abiding." The parallel seems strongest to aiōn at the stage it had reached in Heraclitus. It needs study whether the idealization found in the Vedānta or late Platonic pattern is appropriate for interpretation of this text.

Special wariness should be reserved for the use of the phrase "eternal life" in describing prephilosophical doctrines of immortality and afterlife, or "eternal return" for the transcendental relation of divine life to mundane in the experience of cyclical time that is fundamental in myth-using cultures. Most commonly what is meant by "eternal" in this context is "perpetual" or "everlasting." Whether the primordial time of beginnings, the transcendent past of divine creative action, is a predecessor of the eternal present is a separate question that needs careful consideration. While the proper notion of eternity may be very near the surface in Egypt, it is much less likely to exist in the preliterate cultures for which the cycle of death and rebirth is a naturalistic image more than a philosophical idealization.

See Also

Anamnēsis; Plotinus; Sacred Time.

Bibliography

The concept of eternity is still most accessible from primary sources, notably the treatise "On Eternity and Time" of Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.45, in Plotinus, translated by A. Hilary Armstrong, "Loeb Classical Library," vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), and book 11 of the Confessions of Augustine, for which there are many suitable editions. An instructive summary of the concept in the full technical development it received in medieval theology can be found in the article by Adolf Darlap and Joseph de Finance, "Eternity," in Sacramentum Mundi, edited by Karl Rahner (New York, 1968), vol. 2. Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History: The Myth of Eternal Return (New York, 1954) remains a standard introduction to the role of a transcending divine time in the religious experience of myth-using cultures. A very helpful account of eternity is incorporated into a sketch of the history of the idea of immortality in the ancient Near East and Christian Europe by John S. Dunne, The City of the Gods (Notre Dame, Ind., 1978). The classic exposition of the interior experience of eternity in Western mysticism is Bonaventure's "The Soul's Journey into God," in Bonaventure, edited and translated by Ewert Cousins (New York, 1978). For eternity in Indian thought, the edition of The Principal Upaniṣads by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (New York, 1953) is especially useful, both for its extensive introduction and its very rich annotations, which include frequent citation of Western parallels.

New Sources

Ashton, John. The Quest for Paradise: Heaven and Eternity in the World's Myths and Religions. San Francisco, 2001.

Bernstein, Alan. The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds. Ithaca, N.Y., 1993.

Dales, Richard. Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World. New York, 1990.

Futch, Michael. "Leibniz on Plenitude, Infinity, and the Eternity of the World." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (November 2002): 541–561.

Padgett, Alan. God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time. New York, 1992.

Rouner, Leroy, ed. If I Should Die. Notre Dame, Ind., 2001.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. "Goodness, Gracious(ness) Great Balls of Fire: Visions of Eternity Just Aren't What They Used to Be." Christian History 70 (2001): 38–42.

Walter, Tony. The Eclipse of Eternity: A Sociology of the Afterlife. Basingstoke, U.K., 1996.

Peter Manchester (1987)

Revised Bibliography