Augustine Archives

Eternity again and again

I’ve posted before on eternity, but there is much to say on this endless subject. The first thing to figure out is what eternity is. There are two main contenders:

Eternity is time without beginning or an end, sometimes called sempiternity.
Eternity stands outside of time. It is a perspective on time, but not time itself. Eternity is nunc stans, from the Latin meaning remaining now, unchanging. Ordinary time is nunc fluens, time that flows or passes.

The second way of thinking about eternity is often attributed to Plato (Timaeus 37c-e), but it became theologically significant in the work of Augustine (Confessions, book 11). God, and only God, is eternal. Earthly time, temporal time, is so insubstantial and illusory as to border on non-being (Erie, p 62). Just as humans can only find fulfillment in God, so they can only find fulfillment in eternity. God and eternity are virtually the same thing.

Now is a ceaselessly moving point between past and future. It is ephemeral, and totally lacking in substance. For this reason, time has no value. I was going to write, “ordinary time just is,” but the thing about time is that its substance, moments, have no substance. They are gone the instant they have begun.

Eternity is the opposite. It is always present and everywhere. In eternity all time is now. How to make sense of this? I like the simple explanation of C. S. Lewis. He is answering the question how could God hear every prayer uttered by all who are praying at the same time.

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Are all religions basically the same?

The Perennial Philosophy is the title of a book by Aldous Huxley (1945), but it’s an idea that’s been around for a long time. It says that all religion is based on an original experience of oneness. In all its different varieties, from Protestantism to Hinduism, religion is an ineffable, inexpressible experience of one divine reality in which we all share. Not only do we all worship the same God, but we all seek to reach the one reality beyond all appearances. Most don’t succeed, a few do, and we should follow and learn from these few, who are sometimes called saints, or bodhisattvas. We are God, as the perennialists put it, in the sense that we know God only by becoming one with him.*

Christian mysticism frequently expresses this ideal.

My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself. (Saint Catherine of Genoa, in Haught).

God became man in order to make me God; therefore I want to be changed completely into pure God. (Saint Catherine of Genoa, in Haught)

In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself. (Saint Bernard)

The goal of life?

The ultimate reason for human existence, says Huxley, is “unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but what Huxley says it that this knowledge is available only to those who are prepared to die to the self in order to make room for God (p21).

What happens to the living? And to life? What happens to the hungry and the poor? It seems as if they hardly matter, that the goal of human existence is essentially and profoundly self-centered. Huxley says not one word about dying to the self in order to better care for others. That’s not what Huxley is about.

One can see this more clearly in a book he wrote almost ten years later, The Doors of Perception, an account of his experiences taking the hallucinogenic drug, mescaline.

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What’s so great about eternity?

For all its importance in Christian thought, the concept of eternity in the Bible is remarkably unclear. The two most important Christian thinkers, Augustine and Aquinas, place God outside of time, in what is called the nunc stans. Nunc stans is the opposite of the way we ordinarily think of eternity as time going on forever. In the nunc stans, you experience all of time in a single moment. Or you would if you were God.

As Augustine put it, we pass through God’s today. The experience would be something like seeing time as though it were space, a plane spread out before you. You might focus on one part of the plane or another, but all time is there to be experienced in a moment. The term is Latin (no surprise). Nunc means now, and stans refers to stand. In the nunc stans, all of time stands before you.

Not in the Bible

Trouble is, that this way of thinking about time is nowhere in the Bible (I’ll confine myself to the New Testament, but the problem is found in the Old Testament as well.). The Greek term aeonios, for which so many translations mistakenly use the word “eternal” is derived from the noun “aeon.” “Aeon” means “age” or “ages.” Thus, the word translated as eternal really refers to an aeon or age, not forever. When Jesus says “I am with you always, to the end of the age (αἰῶνος), he does not mean forever, but until the end of the present age—that is, until the eschaton. Aidios (αιδιος) is the ancient Greek term for eternal, and it is used only once in the Bible in reference to God (Romans 1:20). *

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