Three Concepts of Eternity

       The most obvious meaning of eternity (if not the current pandemic) is one-damn-thing-after-another. I'll call this Eternity-1, one tick of an imperishable clock and then another ad infinitum. This makes sense in closeup, looking at moment such as death. But if we back off and keep on backing--and backing and backing up more and more--we begin to see why Aristotle doubted that actual infinities exist. Some concepts, of course, don't impose limits. The future, as far as we know, has no definite end-point, but time may not be endless. Infinite doesn't follow from indefinite.

  Suppose we define A as the age of the universe in years--over 13 billion--and run a chain of calculations. Let the square of A equal B, the square of B equal C, and so forth. Keep calculating, using A' after you reach Z, A'' after you reach Z', and so forth. Fill a million libraries the size of the solar system with books of calculations (nearly all containing nothing but prime marks) and take a rest. The duration you will have calculated will be, in the words of Marcus Aurelius, "a pin-prick of eternity" (Meditations 6:36). We can try to tame this craziness with Nietzsche's myth of eternal recurrence by assuming that a finite series of events repeats itself in circular time ("We'll meet again; don't know where, don't know when"), a view held by the ancient stoics and many other schools. This gives the imagination something to hang onto, but it's still Eternity 1, still an infinite series of clock ticks, even if the clock is circular.  An everlasting succession of identical aeons only postpones the perplexities of infinite regress.

Eternity-1 is impossible to conceive or worry about. Most of us would welcome a mere billion years of paradise. But endless historic time seems to be the idea in the New Testament. One way or another, depending on what verses you read and how you read them, the dead will be on hold for an indefinite period of time, either as sleeping corpses or as disembodied souls, until the Second Coming, when they will receive incorruptible bodies and live everlastingly on a new and perfect earth. The Greek word aionios ('age-long') is the one translated eternal. Living for an age, an aeon, is much easier to grasp than an infinite life-line. It's so long you shouldn't worry and avoids crazy mathematical infinities.

A second sense of eternity (Eternity-2) is not infinitely long time, but timelessness. Eternity transcends time. God exists outside of all time. He may move in dualistic moments, egos, and other contingent things, but that isn't where he lives and has his being. Vedic philosophy, the oldest practiced tradition, sees Brahman as unity that subsumes all temporal and spacial duality. In the ancient West, Plato situated real being in the eternal forms outside the shadow-world of changing things. Boethius (480-524) described eternity as "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life." It is not the endless passage of time, but "everlasting life in one simultaneous present" (Consolation of Philosophy, 5.6). This view is consistent with Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus and is a prevalent theological position today. Augustine (354-430), foundational to both Catholic and Protestant traditions, wrote that "a long time does not become long except from the many separate events that occur in its passage, which cannot be simultaneous. In the eternal, on the other hand, nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present" (Confessions 11.11.13).

In Newtonian physics, time was distinct from the dimensions of space, but early in the 20th century, Einstein's Special Relativity described a block universe in which events are geometric points in four-dimensional space-time. Before and after are as relative as below and above. Only our being on the greased slide of time projects yesterday as more absolute than to my left. The future and past coexist. Evidence for this is the fact that the equations of physics are reversible along four dimensions. If you see cups fall to the floor and break but never see fragments leap onto a table and assemble cups, that's an artifact of your entropic body and brain.

I can visualize the block universe by situating all locations on a flat map, a Mercator projection of the earth. If I ignore anomalies such as staircases, airplanes, cellars, and graves, every event in my life is located at a point defined by three variables: latitude, longitude, and time. Imagine the map rising steadily along the vertical (time) dimension as the seconds tick by, leaving planar representations of itself behind. All of my life-events are tracked as a vertical line. As years pass, my line will weave lazily over the American South, occasionally making sharp jags to Europe or California as I travel. If your line and mine almost intersect, we're together. If not, we are apart. Of course, if time and space are infinite, there's no place outside the block, but cut out a transparent cube representing, say, my lifetime and the western hemisphere, and everything I have done or will ever do might be seen from outside the cube on a line within it. Such a perspective is Eternity 2. God, gazing into my cube in the fourth dimension, sees my whole life simultaneously as having already happened from the (non)beginning of eternity.

In practice, Eternity 2 is the goal of mysticism. The One, called by various names in various religions, is timeless. Time that passes as a series of events, one replacing another, is the duality transcended in mystical identity with the One. The eighth-century Indian sage Shankara taught in Crest-Jewel of Discrimination that "from the standpoint of the illumined soul, Brahman fills everything--beginningless, endless, immeasurable, unchanging" (p. 110). Five hundred years later in Germany, Meister Eckhart wrote in The Book of Divine Consolation, "Join yourself to God, for then a thousand years will be like a single day," and in England a century later, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing excluded "time, place, and body" from all spiritual work (60).

Finally, there's Eternity-3, the Eternal Now. A good place to start is with a Thich Nhat Hanh quotation attributed to the Buddha: "The past is already gone, the future is not here; there is only one moment for you to live; that is the present moment." This idea permeates New Age thought. The goal is mindfulness, not letting memories and worries or ambitions distract from the only time we can ever experience. Even if now sums up pasts and imagines futures, even if it seems elusive, it is the only time that exists. Thus, it is eternity. The blog Zen Thinking says succinctly: "Anything outside of the here and now is non-existent" (April 1, 2016). This seems incontrovertible at one level, but its lesson is ambiguous. It points toward an tranquil Thich Nhat Hanh but also toward a doomed Janis Joplin, who riffed from the stage, "If you got it today, you don’t want it tomorrow, man, ’cause you don’t need it, ’cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day, man" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z-nCePq80Q&feature=share). In old age and Covid-19 isolation, I'm drawn to my inner Vietnamese monk but have to acknowledge my Texas diva.

Eternity-3 isn't just Buddhist. In this brief space, I can't do justice to Paul Tillich's brilliant sermon, "The Eternal Now," in his book by the same name (1963). He rejects Eternity-1 and Eternity-2: "If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time." Tillich wants us to stop looking for a time after time, and experience eternity above time. Transcendence, the eternal Alpha and Omega, is accessible as a supplement to the now, but this requires that we cease to struggle with past and future and enter "the eternal rest which stops the flux of time and gives us the blessing of the present." Tillich especially rejects the idea of eternity as an endless future, repetitious action toward no end, a teleologically pointless process. It loses the present--and the presence of salvation--to an imaginary Sisyphus-like repetition that is like an image of hell.

In practice, Eternity-2 and Eternity-3 blur into each other. The two models seem different--(1) an eternal ground outside of time and (2) present time experienced as eternal ground--but, when a living person experiences eternity now, which one is it? What is it when eternity is felt rather than intellectualized? Think of a mystic in nirvana, a Celtic Christian at a "thin place" where eternity shines through, or Richard Jefferies writing in his autobiography, “It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life." Is this present transcended or presence realized? Is it a particle or a wave?

I see an analogy with particle physics, where we can know only one of two complementary traits, the one we decide to measure, but this duality happens in ordinary measurements too. Zeno's Arrow, a paradox mentioned by Aristotle, notes that at any given point of time a flying arrow is at only one location, so at any actual point in time (assuming points in time are actual) the arrow is not moving. If we measure its location, it is stationary. But, if we measure its speed, that measurement is along a continuum. The arrow has no measurable speed at any one location. Zeno offered this to disprove motion, but experience (the fact that things do move) exposes it as an artifact of measurement. There's no need invoke quantum weirdness here. This applies to Toyotas as well. Police radar pings a car at two locations and calculates average speed between them, but that may not be the actual speed of the car at either location. Imagine eternity from the point of view of Boethius' God, and a fixed block of space-time appears. But then reverse angle to us, creatures trapped on time's ever-moving now, and the picture changes.