The very transiency of time becomes a stately procession of images across a background of eternal truth. This day of ours does not pass within thee, and yet it does pass within thee, since all these things have no means of passing, unless somehow thou dost contain them all.'1

The natures of Time and Eternity are so diverse that it is very difficult to bring them into vital relation with each other. We might have expected that Plotinus would have resorted to his favourite expedient of introducing an intermediate category which should ‘partake of the nature of both.' I do not find that he has done so.2 But the Christian schoolmen of the Middle Ages, who on this subject are in direct descent from the Neoplatonists through the highly respected Boëthius, did make this attempt. The analysis of the concept aevum, which · stands between Eternity and Time, is of great interest to the student of Neoplatonism. The following summary is taken mainly from the work of the very able and learned Jesuit, Bernard Boedder.3

In the strict sense, he says, Eternity implies an existence which is essentially without beginning and without end. But no creature can be essentially without beginning and end and internal succession. If such a creature exists, it owes its eternity to the will of God. But God is essentially eternal. As the First Cause, He can have had no beginning. Absolute necessity of existence must be identical with His essence; He can therefore never cease to be. And His existence is unchangeable; therefore it cannot contain any different successive phases or modes of being. Boëthius defines Eternity as 1 Id. 10. 27. We miss in Plotinus what Augustine (Confessions, 7. 20, 21) also missed in him, the lesson of Divine love and human humility which the descent of the Eternal into time suggests to the Christian.

2 Proclus does draw distinctions in his treatment of eternity. The One is poaivios (as it is po-everything else); and rò átdiov (perpetuity) is a lower form of rò alwvov (eternity). There is an åïdibтns which is xarà Xpóvov. There are ovra which are not in the full sense alvia. This doctrine may have been one of the foundations of the scholastic doctrine of aevum.

• Natural Theology, p. 243 sq.

'a simultaneously full and perfect possession of interminable life.' Eternity, thus defined, is identical with the highest life conceivable, the self-activity of infinite intellectual will. This life is interminable,' because it endures of absolute necessity. It is simultaneously possessed ' because it is neither capable of development nor liable to defect. In God is neither past nor present nor future. As Boëthius expresses it, 'the passing Now makes time, the standing Now makes eternity.' The duration of God is one everlasting state, the duration of temporal being is liable to a succession of states really distinct from each other.

In

The duration of created Spirits is called aevum. aevum there is no succession, as regards the substantial perfection of a created Spirit. Nevertheless, Spirits are not quite above time or succession; for though the specific perfection of their substantial being is unalterable, they can pass from one thought and volition to another, and the Creator may cause in them now one and now another accidental perfection. Their essential being is above time, but they are liable to accidental modification of temporal duration. The duration called time belongs properly to Matter. St. Thomas Aquinas says: 'Time has an earlier and a later; aevum has no earlier and later in itself, but both can be connected with it ; eternity has neither an earlier nor a later, nor can they be connected with it.' 'Spiritual creatures,' says Aquinas again, as regards their affections and intellections, are measured by time; as regards their natural being, they are measured by aevum; as regards their vision of glory, they participate in eternity.'

Baron von Hügel1 has yielded to the temptation to find in the notion of aevum an anticipation of Bergson's durée. But as Bergson is far from holding the doctrines about Time and Eternity which are common to Neoplatonism and to the Catholic Schoolmen, it is not likely that he should need or acknowledge a conception which

1 Eternal Life, p. 106.

was expressly designed to mediate between them. The scholastic aevum is something which 'participates' (in the Platonic sense) in Time and Eternity, as these words are understood by St. Thomas. It is, in fact, the form which belongs to Soul-life, as Time belongs to the changes of Matter, and Eternity to the life of Spirit. A modern Neoplatonist may find the conception useful in explaining the relations of the Soul to Time and Eternity, though it is of little or no value in bridging the chasm between temporal succession and the totum simul. 'We prefer to confess,' says another modern interpreter of the Schoolmen,1 'that we do not know how to effect the translation of Eternity into Time.' Eternity is above and beyond us, though in it we live and move and have our being. If we understood it, we should understand Time also, and the relation between them. But this cannot be, without transcending the conditions of our finite existence.

Eternity is, on one side, an ethical postulate. Without it, the whole life of will and purpose would be stultified.2 All purpose looks towards some end to be realised. But if time in its course hurls all its own products into nothingness—if there is no eternal background against which all happenings in time are defined, and by which they are judged, the notion of purpose is destroyed. The existence of human will and reason becomes incomprehensible. Our minds travel quite freely over time and space; they are not confined to the present; whether we realise it or not, in every thought we imply that Reality is supratemporal. Both Time and Eternity are involved in every act of our moral and rational life. And it is through our experience of Time that we come to know Eternity. As Baron von Hügel says, 'Time is the very stuff and

3

1 John Rickaby, General Metaphysics, p. 214. 2 Cf. Rothe, Stille Stunden, p. 219. He who believes in a God, must also believe in the continuance of life after death. Wit out this, there would be no world which would be thinkable as an object (Zweck) for God.'

Eternal Life, p. 386 sq.

means in and by which we vitally experience and apprehend eternal life. . . . A real succession, real efforts, and the continuous sense of limitation and inadequacy are the very means in and through which man apprehends increasingly (if only he thus loves and wills) the contrasting yet sustaining simultaneity, spontaneity, infinity, and pure action of the eternal life of God.' Duration is not eternal life, though in its entirety and meaning it is very near to it. It may be called the eternity of the phenomenal world. This thought has been very nobly expressed in a fine sonnet by Sidney Lanier :

'Now at thy soft recalling voice I rise

Where thought is lord o'er Time's complete estate,
Like as a dove from out the grey sedge flies
To tree-tops green where coos his heavenly mate.
From these clear coverts high and cool I see
How every time with every time is knit,
And each to all is mortised cunningly,
And none is sole or whole, yet all are fit.
Thus, if this age but as a comma show
Twixt weightier clauses of large-worded years,
My calmer soul scorns not the mark: I know

This crooked point Time's complex sentence clears.
Yet more I learn while, friend, I sit by thee:
Who sees all time, sees all eternity.'

Eternity is that of which duration is the symbol and sacrament. It is more than the totality of that which strives to express and 'imitate' it. But Time 'resembles it as far as it can.' All that we find in Time exists, in an eminent sense,' in eternity. We must therefore beware, when we tread the mystic's negative road, lest we cut ourselves off from knowledge of God. When we say that God, or eternity, is 'not like this,' we mean that Reality is glimmering through its appearances as something higher than they, but not as something wholly alien to them. Therefore we need not discard those modes of envisaging eternity which clearly depend on temporal and spatial imagery. Such imagery cannot be dispensed with; for the symbols of substance and shadow equally

belong to this world, and do not take us much further than those of co-existence and succession.

Nevertheless it cannot be denied that popular religion, by insisting on its local and temporal imagery, has not only impeded the progress of natural science, but has sadly impoverished the idea of eternal life, and in the minds of very many has substituted a material fairyland for the true home of the Spirit. The Jewish tendency to throw the golden age into the future has its dangers, no less than the early Greek tendency to throw it into the past.