The Everlasting and the Eternal

J. Kellenberger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137553294
• eBook ISBN: 9781137553300
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Logic in Philosophy

The subject of this book is the relationship and the difference between the temporal everlasting and the atemporal eternal. This book treats the difference between a temporal postmortem life and eternal life. It identifies the conceptual tension in the religious idea of eternal life and offers a resolution of that tension.

1

The Eternal and the Everlasting

I Introduction

There is a distinction between the eternal and the everlasting that has been recognized by philosophers and religious thinkers for more than two millennia. Our main effort in this chapter is to present and elaborate the distinction between the timeless eternal and an everlastingness that is within time as it was understood and may be understood today. Before we do that, however, it will be useful to reflect on a deep-running intuition, held by many, that encourages one to draw such a distinction: the intuition that what is most real is not the world we daily encounter but another realm that lies beyond it. Once we have done this in the next section, we will in the third section bring forward and discuss the distinction between the timeless eternal and the temporal everlasting as it is found in philosophical and religious thought.

Although this distinction can be traced to philosophical origins well before the advent of Christianity, it came to have special importance for Christian thinking in the early centuries of the Common Era; and in more than one way, it will be argued in this book, the timeless eternal continues to have significance for religious sensibilities even to this day. Yet there are some in the Christian tradition who reject this idea of the eternal, rejecting it as a metaphysical import from philosophy that has no religious significance. Their reservation and animadversions will be noted in the fourth section.

In the fifth and sixth sections, we will examine respectively St. Augustine’s understanding and St. Thomas Aquinas’ understanding of the distinction between the eternal and the temporal, with attention to how Boethius, who lived later than Augustine but preceded Aquinas, thought of the eternal and time.

In the chapter’s last section, we will turn to Søren Kierkegaard’s use of the distinction between the eternal and the temporal in one of his pseudonymous works. After identifying problems and paradoxes that accompany the distinction as Augustine and Aquinas understood it and which, some would argue, make it untenable, we will see how Kierkegaard not only acknowledged an even deeper paradox regarding the relation between the eternal and the temporal in Christian belief but also insisted upon it as the sine qua non of Christian faith.

II The unseen real

We all must negotiate our way in the familiar world of the senses – going to our work, going from place to place, meeting our material needs, and more – yet many over the centuries have seen the world of our daily round as masking the true reality. The face we see in the mirror and the mountains, stars, and galaxies are all subject to change. They have no lasting reality and will wither and pass from existence. For some religious traditions, there is a doctrine of the illusion of the world, as in the Hindu teaching of maya; and in the Buddhist tradition, there is the idea, prominent in the Diamond Sutra, of the delusion of appearances. In the Christian tradition, there is the religiously informed sense that this ‘vale of tears’ is impermanent. Although the world may be a manifestation of Brahman or God’s creation, it is most real in its divine dimension, which transcends the seen. In these religious traditions, there is the sense that what is most real is unseen or transcends the world of appearances. This intuition, though at home in more than one religious tradition, is not exclusively religious. The idea that if there is a permanent reality, it must be of a different nature from the world we perceive can be arrived at philosophically.

Plato and the real

Plato, whose philosophical thinking in the fifth century BCE has been seminal for a lasting conception of the real in the West, regarded the world of the senses, the world we perceive, as related to the real but distinct from the real or the realm of transcendent reality. What is real in the transcendent sense, for Plato, exists in a realm apart from the sensible world, the realm of what he called ‘ideas’ or ‘forms.’ In several of his philosophical dialogues, Plato is concerned with ideas or forms. In his metaphysics, there is for each kind or class of thing that we perceive or utilize a form beyond the world we perceive, which gives things in each particular class their nature. To use two of Plato’s examples, this holds for reclining couches and tables.¹ For Plato, the form for the class of tables, which gives tables their nature, is real in a more significant sense than are individual tables. Moreover, this is true for virtually every kind or class of thing in our experience, including humanly made things, such as tables, but also natural objects, like apples and trees. Importantly for Plato, it is true as well of the higher things, such as beautiful objects and morally right actions. Plato distinguishes between beautiful objects, which we see or hear, and the form of beauty, beauty itself, which we cannot perceive with our senses. We may see a beautiful natural setting, hear a beautiful melody, or encounter a beautiful thought, which we may either read or hear. They all are beautiful, but the beauty they share, Plato reasoned, is neither visual nor auditory. And it is this form of beauty that is real, while beautiful objects are beautiful only because they participate in that form and carry its reflection. We can destroy beautiful paintings or statues, but we do not thereby destroy beauty itself, just as in destroying a particular couch we do not destroy the form for couches. So too for all the kinds of things in our experience, ranging from the quotidian and material to estimable and revered higher things such as beauty, moral rightness, justice, and knowledge.

The forms of beauty, moral rightness, justice − or of anything − are not perceived by the senses, but they are perceptible to reason, Plato believed. For reason, if properly developed, could perceive what the senses cannot. Thus, for Plato, reason in his special sense could penetrate to the real and perceive the true and immutable nature of beauty and justice.

In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, the concern is with the nature of ‘piety,’ and although the Platonic doctrine of forms is not advanced in this dialogue, presumably Plato thought that there was a form for piety.² By ‘piety’ Plato means something close to rightness or moral rightness, as the Euthyphro makes clear. For Socrates, speaking for Plato in the dialogue, the pious may be pleasing to the gods, but being pleasing to the gods is not what makes pious actions pious. They are pleasing to the gods because they are pious, as they are independently of any divine attitude toward them. So too for love and all the virtues, and so too for the good itself, Plato’s primary form in the Republic.³

Plato’s thinking about the forms and their reality is not religious. Although Plato did speak of ‘God’ or ‘the god’ creating the forms, this is seen as a heuristic or playful remark.⁴ The forms for Plato, then, are not divinely created. Later, in the first century of the Common Era, Philo of Alexandria would identify the forms with the ideas of God, but for Plato, the forms were independent of the gods. Plato lived in a polytheistic culture that had no belief in a monotheistic god, let alone the One God of the Abrahamic traditions. In the fifth century BCE when Plato lived, the Greeks had no contact with the religion of the early Israelites, but if Plato had known of the monotheistic (or henotheistic) God of Judaism, presumably his judgment would have been unchanged.

Plato’s theory of forms, he maintained, had implications for knowledge. Since sensible things did not have the reality of the forms, they could not give us knowledge. Of sensible things, we could have opinions or beliefs, but not knowledge. Knowledge is attained only by contemplating the real and immutable forms. Plato’s view is thus both metaphysical and epistemological. But it is also ethical. Knowledge of the good and of the true nature of love and the virtues is necessary to live well, not in the sense of comfortably but in the sense of living a fully realized life rightly oriented toward the real.

T. S. Eliot and the unreal

More than two thousand years after Plato, we find a similar intuition about the unreality of the world expressed in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, although Eliot’s intuition is not grounded in Plato’s metaphysical theory. In the twentieth century, Eliot in The Waste Land speaks of London, where he lived, as an ‘Unreal City,’ and later in the same poem he names Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna, as well as London, and says ‘Unreal.’⁵ It is not that he thinks Berlin, Tokyo, or Los Angeles escape unreality because he leaves them unmentioned. For Plato too, his sensible Athens, the city he saw and smelled, would be ‘unreal’ but in a different sense. Eliot’s inspiration is not Plato’s. Eliot in the early twentieth century had the sense that we human beings were living lives far from religious significance. As he put it in one of his poems, ‘we are the hollow men,’ and in another, we are living in a ‘dry season.’⁶ Yet both Plato and T. S. Eliot share the sense, arising in their two cases from different sensibilities differently grounded, that there is an unperceived reality beyond what confronts their eyes. For both, only within the unseen reality is there what is most significant. It is the realm of the immutable forms for Plato and of the religious transcendent for Eliot.

It would not be a great leap for either to identify the realm of the real with the eternal. And in fact, Plato does precisely this.

III The eternal contrasted with the everlasting

The essential difference

The everlasting is a familiar and intuitive notion. The everlasting is simply and straightforwardly that which has been and will be forever. It is without beginning or end. It is, that is to say, infinite in past and future duration.⁷ Duration is by definition over time, for a day or a year, or, if everlasting, for all of time. Everlastingness, then, is a temporal concept.

In ordinary parlance, ‘eternal’ is often used to mean ‘forever’ or ‘never changing over time.’ These meanings are established in popular usage and should be recognized as such. However, when the eternal is so understood, it is equated with the everlasting since what is eternal in this sense lasts forever in time and is unchanging within time.

Contrasting with the everlasting, and a temporal construction of the eternal, is the eternal conceived of as the timeless eternal. If the everlasting is an obvious and intuitive concept, the timeless eternal is a recondite concept, developed in philosophical and religious reflection. What is timelessly eternal has no beginning or end, and in this it is superficially like the everlasting. The eternal, however, has no beginning or end not because it has infinite past and future duration but because it has no duration at all. The concept of duration does not apply to it. Duration is over time and the eternal is not in time as days, years, and the everlasting are. The eternal is unchanging, but not unchanging over time. The timeless eternal by its nature cannot change, because change requires a before and an after, which are temporal. Eternity is an atemporal concept.

It is eternity in this timeless sense that Plato attributes to the forms in the Timaeus. ‘Was’ and ‘will be,’ he says, cannot be applied to the ‘eternal being’ of the forms. Only ‘is’ can be applied to it. ‘Was’ and ‘will be’ are tenses that apply to what is becoming in time, not to the eternal forms.⁸ Plato is not the first to give us the concept of the timeless eternal. Parmenides before him does so in his poem ‘Concerning Truth’ or ‘Way of Truth,’ in which he says of being or the One, ‘It neither was at any time nor will be, since it is now all at once, a single whole.’⁹ All that can be said o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The Eternal and the Everlasting
• 2  Things That Are Eternal
• 3  Eternal Life
• 4  Eternal Life in This Life
• 5  Interior Modes of Eternal Life
• 6  Active Modes of Eternal Life
• 7  Perigeal Modes of Eternal Life and Issues
• 8  Life after Death and Eternal Life
• Bibliography
• Index