Eternity

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ETERNITY

The word eternal is derived from the Latin aeternus, a contraction of aeviternus, which, in turn, is derived from aevum, a word from the same root as the English words ever and aye. In Greek the corresponding adjectives are even more obviously connected with the notion of everlasting existence. This is the original sense of the word eternal and probably also the sense that is still the most common in ordinary language. But in certain philosophical contexts the notion of everlasting existence is expressed rather by "sempiternal," "eternal" being reserved for the sense of "timeless."

The "Timeless Present" in Science

In English and other Indo-European languages there is a usage described by grammarians as the timeless present. When, for example, we say, "Seven is a prime number," we do not intend our use of the present tense to convey anything about the present as distinct from the past or the future. For this reason we find something very curious in the sentences "Seven was a prime number" and "Seven will be a prime number." Existential statements of a mathematical kind do not refer to the time of speaking. An assertion such as "There is a prime number between 5 and 10" could never be countered sensibly by the remark "You are out of date." For this reason the entities discussed in mathematics can properly be said to have a timeless existence. To say only that they have a sempiternal or omnitemporal existence (that is, an existence at all times) would be unsatisfactory, because this way of talking might suggest that it is conceivable they should at some time cease to exist, an absurdity we want to exclude.

Mathematics, however, is not the only study in which use of the timeless present is appropriate. The same idiom can be found in all studies that are concerned with necessary truths as distinct from matters of fact. It may occur, for example, even in empirical studies when the propositions we formulate involve the notion of necessary connection. Thus, we say "The hydrogen atom contains only one proton" because we do not wish to allow that hydrogen atoms may in the past have contained or may in the future come to contain more than one proton. Here, however, our use of the timeless present is certainly not intended to suggest that hydrogen atoms exist out of time. What we wish to call timeless is simply the connection between being a hydrogen atom and containing a single proton. Sometimes such connections have been called eternal verities, most commonly when it has been thought they could be known a priori, as in mathematics.

Greek Thought

A different conception of timelessness appears in Parmenides' poem "The Way of Truth," where he says of the One, "It neither was at any time nor will be, since it is now all at once [ὁμου̑ πα̑ν ] a single whole." Since Parmenides and his pupil Zeno argued against the reality of change, we must suppose that this remark does not represent the One as existing merely for a moment but says rather that the One cannot be described in a language that employs tenses. The One exists all at once because it involves no temporal succession of earlier and later. But why should anyone talk in this way? Perhaps Parmenides accepted the religious teaching of Xenophanes, that the Whole is an everlasting god, and tried to defend it against Heraclitus's doctrine of universal flux by maintaining that the Whole is spherical in all respects—that is, temporally as well as spatially. For such a Whole could not itself be in time, and if we talk about it at all we must employ the timeless present. This is only a guess, but there is evidence to show that a conception of cyclical time order was current in the Pythagorean school with which Parmenides is said to have been connected in his youth.

From Parmenides the notion of a mode of existence that allows no distinction between past, present, and future passed to Plato, who applied it to his Forms, or Ideas. The most influential passage of his works dealing with this subject is in the Timaeus (37e6–38a6), where he contrasts the created world with the eternal living being, its timeless archetype.

The language of the passage is poetical, and it seems that we are not expected to take all the details seriously. In particular, Plato can scarcely have meant us to believe that time was an afterthought of the creator. Rather, we are to understand that time is to the perceptual world of becoming what eternity is to the intelligible world of being. For Plato said later (Timaeus 38b5), "Time was created with the heaven," and he seems to have held that it is identical with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which are commonly said to measure its passage. In many of his works Plato glorified the eternal and spoke of the temporal as something inferior, but he did not, like Parmenides and Zeno, deny the reality of time. The most he said in this regard is that temporal things never have being but are always in a state of becoming, as Heraclitus had argued. However, this seems to be no more than a recognition that we cannot talk of temporal things in the timeless present as we talk of Forms and mathematical objects.

The connection with necessity that Plato had claimed for timeless eternity Aristotle claimed for sempiternity. For having rejected Plato's doctrine of the creation of time (Physics 251b14), he did not wish to say that anything was wholly severed from it. Thus, in one place he explicitly associated the objects of mathematics with the universe, which he certainly did not regard as timeless (Nicomachean Ethics 1112a22). In his view the objects of mathematics are eternal (ἄϊδια ) but only in the sense that they exist always—that is, are sempiternal. He held that among sempiternal things there is no difference between possibility and actuality and also that there is nothing merely accidental (Physics 203b30, 196b10). In one place he even said that sempiternal things, insofar as they are sempiternal, are not in time, because they are not bounded by time or subject to aging and the other conditions of time (Physics 221b30). Apparently he had in mind not only mathematical objects, such as numbers, but also God and the sun and stars and the whole heaven. For he said elsewhere that the heavenly bodies, unlike perishable things, are not wearied by their motion. The sun is active forever, and there is no danger that it will give out, as some philosophers feared (Metaphysics 1050b24). Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza may have been influenced, even if only indirectly, by Aristotle's doctrine when he used the word aeternitas to signify both necessity and sempiternity.

Christian Theology

The doctrine of Plato's Timaeus passed into Christian theology, with emphasis on the notion of timeless life. As early as the St. John Gospel (8:58) there is a curious passage in which Jesus is represented as saying, "Before Abraham was I am." But it is fairly clear that the author of this gospel knew something of Greek philosophy, possibly at second hand through the works of the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria, and also that his narrative is no mere historical record of the life of Jesus. By the end of the fifth century there was nothing at all strange in the use of Platonic thought for the exposition of Christianity, and St. Augustine, when commenting, in his De Civitate Dei (xi, 21), on the sentence in Genesis "God saw that it was good," referred to the passage of the Timaeus cited above. In his Confessions (xi, 13) he wrote also of God's "ever-present eternity" and said that for God "all years stand at once" (omnes simul stant ). A century later Boethius, in his De Trinitate (4), said that our "now," by running as it were (quasi currens ), makes time and sempiternity, whereas the divine "now," by abiding, unmoved and immovable, makes eternity; in the final chapter of his De Consolatione Philosophiae he discussed this at greater length.

Eternity is the complete possession of eternal life all at once—a notion that becomes clearer from comparison with things temporal. For whatever lives in time moves as something present from the past to the future, and there is nothing placed in time that can embrace the whole extent of its life at once. It does not yet grasp tomorrow, and it has already lost yesterday. And even in the life of today you do not live longer than in the transitory moment. That, then, which is subject to the condition of time, even if (as Aristotle thought of the world) it has no beginning or end and its life extends through endless time, is still not such as may be rightly judged eternal. For though its life be endless, it does not grasp and embrace the extent of it all at once [totum simul ] but has some parts still to come. … And so, if, following Plato, we wish to give things their right names, let us say that God is eternal, but the world everlasting.

All these notions reappeared in the Middle Ages. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, quoting Boethius as his authority, said in his Summa Theologiae (I, x, 1) that there are two marks of eternity, namely, that the eternal has neither beginning nor end and that eternity contains no succession, being all at once (tota simul existens ). This last phrase, though Thomas could scarcely have known as much, is a rendering of words Parmenides had used over seventeen centuries earlier. Not content, however, with the old distinction of time and eternity, medieval theologians sometimes spoke of aevum —that is, everlastingness—as something intermediate that was appropriate to the heavens and to angels. This was conceived by some as having a beginning but no end and by others (probably influenced in part by Aristotle's account of God and the heavenly bodies) as possessing earlier and later, but without innovation and aging. Thomas regarded the latter view as self-contradictory, since, he held, there could be no succession without aging. Aevum does not necessarily include earlier and later, according to Thomas, though these can be joined with it, as is the case with angels, who have changeless being as well as the capacity of change according to choice (Summa Theologiae I, x, 5).

Criticism of the Theological Use

Anyone who, like Boethius, speaks of eternity as "the complete possession of eternal life all at once seems to be running together two incompatible notions, that of timelessness and that of life. For we can attach no meaning to the word life unless we are allowed to suppose that what has life acts. No doubt the word acts may be taken in a wide sense. Perhaps it is not essential that a living thing produce changes in the physical world. But life must at least involve some incidents in time, and if, like Boethius, we suppose the life in question to be intelligent, then it must also involve awareness of the passage of time. Purposeful action is action with thought of what will come about after its beginning. It is difficult to decide how much of this Plato was prepared to admit when he wrote the Timaeus. In his earlier works (for example, the Meno and the Phaedo ) he tried to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge by a doctrine of reminiscence, which involves the hypothesis that before this life the human soul lived among timelessly existent Forms and contemplated them directly as in this life it sees things belonging to the realm of becoming. But he probably came to realize that there is something absurd in the suggestion that a soul can pass part of its time in a timeless realm and then at a certain date enter the temporal realm, for he appears to have dropped the doctrine of reminiscence in his later dialogues, where instead of glorifying the soul by treating it as something akin to the timeless Forms he praised it as the source of motion.

In the Republic, which belongs to the middle of his literary life, he spoke of God, who is presumably alive, as having created one and only one Form of each kind. But the wording of the passage (Republic 597c) seems to be obviously playful, and it is unlikely that Plato ever meant to suggest seriously that the Forms had been created. In the Timaeus, as we have seen, the Forms are said to be the timeless model used by the demiurge, or craftsman, who made the temporal world. Yet this same timeless model is said to be itself alive (Timaeus 37e6). Is this to be taken seriously? Unlike medieval theologians, for whom things predicated of the eternal were to be interpreted analogically, Plato maintained (Timaeus 29b) that discourse about the eternal is to be understood in the strict and primary sense of the words it employs.

How did the theologians come to commit themselves to talk about timeless life? The influence of Plato's style counts for a lot, but not for everything. One might say in the case of Thomas that the surprising thing is that he held to Plato's account of time and eternity though he must have known it had been criticized by Aristotle. Probably the explanation is to be found in a peculiarity of Christian doctrine. Aristotle, though a theist of a sort, not only rejected the Platonic notion of the creation of time but also maintained the sempiternity of the heavens. To a theologian who had to produce a metaphysical scheme concordant with biblical revelation (which denied the sempiternity of the cosmos) this must have made Aristotle's criticism of Plato's doctrine of eternity seem unsatisfactory. But apart from that, Plato's doctrine had the positive merit of seeming to provide for the necessity of God's existence. If it is correct, once we have admitted that we understand the meaning of the word God and that it involves no inconsistency, we cannot sensibly deny that God exists. Another manifestation of this theological interest in the necessity of God's existence is Anselm's ontological argument. Admittedly, this was rejected by Thomas, but for epistemological reasons concerned with the limits of our capacities, not for the assumption it involves that divinity, by definition, entails existence. On the contrary, Thomas, following Boethius, said that God's essence and existence are one.

Other Philosophical Uses

In later European thought Spinoza and various idealist philosophers used the word eternity to describe the existence of their God or Absolute. Spinoza, for example, said in his Ethics (I, Definition viii), "By eternity I mean existence itself in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal. Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and therefore cannot be explained by means of duration or time, though duration may be conceived without a beginning or an end." Here there is no longer any verbal connection of eternity with life, but there is still a wish to maintain that something concrete exists with the timeless necessity of which we speak in mathematics. Similar assertions have been made in Indian philosophy, which does not in any way derive from Parmenides or Plato, and we must therefore suppose that they correspond to a widespread demand of religious thought. In modern times even the Pythagorean notion of a cyclical time order has again been considered seriously, by Kurt Gödel.

Bibliography

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Encyclopedia of Philosophy