Chapter 27
Eternity and everlastingness; timelessness; what is without beginning or end.
147 passages · 25 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Eternity names what has neither beginning nor end, but the books gathered here mean at least two different things by it. Sometimes it is endless duration, time stretched without limit in both directions. Sometimes it is something stranger, a present that has no past or future at all and stands outside time altogether. Between these two senses lie most of the great questions. Is God eternal in the first way or the second? Can the world share his eternity? How can a mind that lives from moment to moment know or touch the eternal? And should the brevity of a human life be measured against an eternity that awaits it? Few ideas reach so widely across these volumes. It appears in Hebrew psalmody and Buddhist dialogue, in Augustine’s prayers and Pascal’s wager-haunted notes, and in the poetry of the Romantics. Because it marks the boundary of what thought can hold, it also tests the limits of each author’s philosophy.
The sharpest statement of eternity as a timeless present belongs to Augustine. For him God’s years are one “to-day.” God does not change, and all that is past and all that is to come are done in that single present1. Sir Thomas Browne renders the same doctrine in his own idiom. Eternity is indivisible and has no tenses, and God’s duration is one permanent point. Browne even corrects the familiar saying that a thousand years are as a day to God: a thousand years are not even a moment to him2. Dante extends this present to the blessed, to whom all times are present in God’s sight3. Byron lends a darker version to the spirits of Manfred, who claim to be eternal and for whom past and future are alike present4.
Against this stands an older and more imaginable sense. The Psalmist praises a God who is from everlasting to everlasting, before the mountains and the earth were formed5. Job speaks of the number of his years as unsearchable6. Here eternity is unmeasured length, not the absence of length. The Stoic Marcus Aurelius thinks in the same terms, but without the God. He contemplates boundless time before birth and after dissolution7, and change running on forever in both directions through the generations8. Poets use the language loosely. Dante’s gate of Hell claims to endure eternally, made only after eternal things9, and Coleridge calls a mountain a habitation from eternity10. Darwin turns the usage toward science. He likens the effort to grasp geological time to the vain effort to grasp eternity, while warning that the impression is partly false11. Elsewhere he calls the ocean the stones’ eternity12.
Many authors resolve the tension by picturing time as a fragment set within eternity. For Marcus Aurelius the present is a point in eternity, and whoever has seen the present has seen all that was and will be13. Milton describes time as applied within Eternity to the motion of created things14. His Adam is shown time measured to its end, beyond which lies an abyss no eye can reach15. Addison’s Mirza sees time as a portion of the great tide of eternity, bounded by mist at either end16. Wordsworth calls our noisy years moments in the being of the eternal Silence17. Shelley’s image is the most famous: life, like a dome of colored glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity until Death shatters it18. Carlyle gives the figure a moral cast. Man’s fraction of time is encircled by Eternity19, and whatever is truly great has its basis in Eternity, appearing only in a vesture of Time20. In older ages, he thinks, Eternity looked through Time more plainly21. Whitman makes eternity the bond of all periods, giving them their likeness and rising in the form of today22. Schiller adds a philosophical twist: representing any single instant would require infinite time23.
That God is eternal is the common conviction of the religious traditions represented here. The Koran names God the Eternal, who has no like24. The Psalms declare his kingdom everlasting25. Dante calls the Godhead sole and eternal26. What these texts chiefly emphasize is contrast. Man’s days are a shadow and grass, while Jehovah abides through all generations27. The heavens will perish like a garment, but God is the same and his years have no end28. In Luke, heaven and earth pass away while his words remain29. The Koran says that all on earth is transient but the face of the Lord endures30. The hymns of the Church31 and Burns, speaking of vast periods as yesterday32, carry the psalm into later devotion. Augustine refines it philosophically. God is never new and never old, ever working and ever at rest33. Nothing succeeds him34. All times pass through his abiding35, and he knows changing things in an unchanging way36. In him, the Self-same and simple Essence, there is rest from things that time wastes37. To know the Truth is to know eternity, which is God as I AM38. Browne says pointedly that he admires not antiquity but Eternity, which is God39.
The moderns keep the attribute but confess more strain in holding it. Rousseau’s vicar finds God doubtless eternal, existing before, with, and after all things, yet he admits he cannot conceive eternity40. Pascal sets the self, which is not eternal, against an eternal Being in nature41. Berkeley needs an eternal Mind to sustain things before their birth and after their annihilation42. Schiller states, almost tautologically, that divinity is eternally what it is because it is eternal43.
The doctrine of God before creation raises the most intricate puzzles. Augustine holds that God lives before every “before,” and that in him abide the unchanging first causes and eternal reasons of temporal things44. The Son, he teaches, is co-eternal with the Father, above all times45. Dante answers the old taunt about what God did before making the world: creation was not preceded by idleness, for God dwells in his own eternity beyond time’s limit46. Browne carries the doctrine to himself, saying he existed in God’s idea and decree from all eternity47. Bagehot reports that Milton rejected the traditional teaching that the Son was begotten before all time as an eternal fact, because Milton refused such notions of time and eternity48. Berkeley states the puzzle most directly. If things exist eternally in God’s mind49,50, how can they be created in time? His Hylas presses the objection. Philonous replies that nothing is new in respect of God’s mind, and that things begin only relative to creatures51. Hobbes, from a different direction, calls the laws of nature immutable and eternal52.
Whether the world itself is eternal was a dispute inherited from the ancients. George Long reports that the Stoics held both God and matter eternal53. Raleigh sets Aristotle’s eternal world against the eternal and infinite Being54. He argues that the infinite cannot be separated from eternity, and so he rejects eternal matter55. His conclusion is that the ideal world is eternal but the material world is not56. Browne judges that Aristotle could not prove the world eternal, and that Moses’ account of creation from nothing settles the ancient question57.
The Buddhist writings decline the contest entirely. Whether the world is eternal is one of the undeclared questions58,59, and any dogma on it is irrelevant to salvation60. The Bhagavad-Gita offers a third picture. Its eternity is cyclical, with Brahma’s Day and Night each lasting a thousand Yugas, set against an Unmanifest Life that endures unchanged when created things pass away61. Nature and Spirit there have no beginning, and God ends and re-creates all things at the End of Times62. Marcus Aurelius likewise sees all things from eternity coming round in a circle63. Pascal notes that nature’s endless repetition suggests eternity even though nothing in it is itself eternal64. Helmholtz brings the question into physics: the total force of the universe remains eternal and unchanged through every change65. In his version the eternity of the world returns stripped of theology.
If eternity lies beyond time, can a finite mind touch it? Augustine’s account of the moment at the window with Monica is the classic answer. Together they contemplate a Wisdom to which “to have been” and “to be hereafter” do not apply, only “to be”66, and for an instant they reach that Wisdom, which abides above all things that exist in passing67. The Romantics democratize the experience. Blake holds eternity in an hour68. Emerson’s spirit crowds eternity into an hour69, demolishes centuries70, and rends the finite to come out into eternity71. Browning speaks of the instant made eternity72. Shelley’s poet participates in the eternal and one, beyond time and number73. Whitman sees eternity in men and women74, and Schiller finds ideas of truth and right revealing eternity within time, though he cannot explain how75.
The kinship underlying such moments has an ancient root. Plato’s soul, reflecting by itself, passes into the pure, eternal and unchangeable76, and what is immortal, being eternal, cannot perish77. Ecclesiastes says that God has set eternity in man’s heart, yet man cannot find out God’s work78. Milton speaks of those who aspire by due steps to the key of the Palace of Eternity79, and Dante passes from time to eternity80. Vaughan finds in childhood shadows of eternity81. Byron’s Manfred, by contrast, turns this kinship into torment: his arts made his eyes familiar with Eternity82, and his consciousness remains unslaked by death83. Emerson’s closing question remains genuinely open. How do the coming and the past eternities meet in a human being84?
Eternity also serves as the measure of conduct. Pascal states it most starkly: life is a moment, death is eternal, and all conduct must be regulated by that end85. A life ten years longer is no nearer to eternity86, and the eternity of things in God astonishes our brief duration87. Montaigne agrees that a day and a century are equally ridiculous beside eternity88. Epictetus accepts the limit calmly, saying he is not Eternity but a human being, a passing hour89. Dante measures fame against eternity and finds it nothing90. Carlyle turns the point toward hope. Men are creatures of an Eternity and may work in any moment what will last91, and their choice, though brief, is endless92. Lessing finds consolation in the thought that a whole Eternity is his93.
Death is the hinge where eternity is either hoped for or feared. Socrates offers a gentle alternative: if death is dreamless sleep, all eternity is but a single night94. Calderón imagines waking life as a dream from which we wake in death into eternal life95,96, and Corneille sees life’s brief night merging in endless day97. Penn calls death a turning from time to eternity98. Pascal, though, sees two terrible possibilities, eternal annihilation or eternal unhappiness, without knowing which awaits99. Nothing is so formidable, he says, yet men remain indifferent100,101. Bunyan’s pilgrim cries out in dread of misery in Eternity102. Swinburne ends in eternal sleep in an eternal night103. Carlyle’s report of Schlegel dying on an unfinished “But—“104 stands as an emblem of the unresolved question.
The Christian writers turn this dread into exhortation. Paul declares that things seen are temporal and things unseen eternal105, and Bunyan repeats him106. Thomas à Kempis teaches that temporal things are for use and eternal things for desire107. Heaven, for him, is the day of eternity, which never changes108,109. Raleigh laments that we covet mortal things as though our souls were mortal110. Milton promises a long eternity triumphing over Death, Chance and Time111. Pascal counts an eternity of happiness to be gained112.
Finally, love claims eternity for itself. Cicero holds genuine friendships everlasting because nature is unchanging113. Faust insists the joy of love must be eternal114, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning hopes for love’s eternity115. Robert Browning trusts that the same self, love and God endure116, and that eternity affirms the conception of an hour117. Keats’s silent urn teases us out of thought as eternity does118. These poets leave unsettled whether such endurance belongs to love itself, as Pascal’s just subsisting in the object of their love suggests119, or only to our longing for it. Running through the whole tradition is the question whether eternity is a duration we may enter or a presence we may only glimpse.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Time 2a
See also: God, Time, Immortality, World, Soul, Life and Death