Part III: Time, Eternity, and The Everlasting God
An Orthodox Theology of Time
Defining Time
Misconceptions surrounding the nature of time and eternity have resulted in a proliferation of false teachings - even among Christians. While this may appear at first to be little more than just philosophic inquiry or vain speculation of little spiritual benefit, the Orthodox Church’s teaching on time and eternity is incredibly profound- as you may have gathered from our teleological inquiry into time in part II - and of immense spiritual benefit.
Time, and in truth all other aspects of our reality, cannot be understood apart from the incarnation of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and the revelation He delivered to His Holy Church. To attempt to do so would be an exercise in futility. The Orthodox Church has had nearly 2,000 years to articulate a dogmatic definition of time, and yet, has not done so. This is precisely because for the Orthodox theology cannot be divorced from the mystical experience of God - in this case the purpose and use of time by God for man’s salvation.
It is for this reason that we, in order to explain effectively the Orthodox theology of time, have begun with an investigation and explanation of why time was created, what its purpose is, etc. It is clear from our investigation that the telos of time, its purpose or end goal, is to act as a space or interval in which man can respond to the proclamation of Divine Love. However, this does not explain time’s relation to eternity. In this article, we will focus on defining time and eternity based on the evidence we have gathered of God’s purpose for time, as well as their relation to one another and to God.
Time, Eternity, the Ever-Existent
In our modern obsession with simplicity and dialectic, we have reduced things down to time and eternity: the material existing in time, God and the spiritual world being in eternity. This oversimplification is highly problematic for a number of reasons.
Certainly we could say that time is associated with the world of sense experience. But it’s important here that we remember that the spiritual realm in which the heavens, angels, and saints are is within creation. Only God is uncreated. The angelic or spiritual real, the eternity of the eons is a created eternity, what the Fathers call the Aeon.1
And so we have our first distinction: time (Chronos) and the created eternity (Aeon), the former pertaining to the sensible creation, the latter to the spiritual creation.
As we stated in part one, the Aeon is not “where God was” before the divine pronouncement. John’s prologue confirms that “In the beginning,” meaning prior to the divine pronouncement there was only the Holy Trinity. All things were made through Christ.2 This includes the angels, who are not eternal by nature but by grace, as well as the heavens, or spiritual realm, which will themselves pass away before being made new.3
And so, before the divine command, God was not in the Aeon because like all temporal things it did not yet exist. Anywhere we try to place God before the divine pronouncement would be a created place. Thus, God’s eternity must be something else altogether. While often speak of both the life of spiritual things and God as eternal, they are not eternal in the same way. This is why the fathers and hymns of the Church often speak of God as pre-eternal.
But this is not always practical, nor sufficient to describe the radical otherness of God. The Church Fathers therefore speak of a third concept, Aidion, meaning ever-existent, or more practically, Divine Eternity.4 This is not a place but God’s mode of being, as we will discuss shortly.
And so we have a threefold distinction or three modes of being: Chronos, Aeon, and Aidion; or, time, created eternity, and Divine Eternity.
The Aeon: Created Eternity
“When it ceases motion, time is aeon, and when the aeon is measured, it is time carried by motion. Thus the aeon is, to put it briefly, time at rest or without movement, and time is the aeon measured through movement.” - Saint Maximus the Confessor5
Some have criticized St. Maximus’ statement claiming it to be a platonizing model which “leads ‘unreal creation’ to be collapsed into ‘real eternity,’ thereby ending creation’s variable createdness.”6 But this is to force a whole set of Platonic presuppositions onto Christian thought which simply don’t exist in Christian thought.7 Time is not a car driving on the road of the Aeon towards rest in the uncreatedness of God.
Instead, the Aeon is an image of God’s infinite life and love. This is precisely what Plato was speaking of in his description of the Aeon as an eternal moving image of eternity placed in the heavens. He was correct in saying that while this eternal image moved, its archetype was a unity at rest - though without Divine Revelation he could not recognize that this unity at rest was the Holy Trinity. So while the Aeon is an image of God’s infinite life and love and the receptacle in which we will partake of that infinite love and life, time is the space or interval in which we progress into that infinitude.
The Aeon is not merely time at rest or history with the ends cut off. While creaturely eternity is certainly a part of the Aeon’s structures, it also contains the unchangeable structures of the cosmos, the geometric and symphonic mathematical processes predestined to order the cosmos and make up the fullness of our perceived reality. For matter to come into existence at the same instance as time would require the simultaneous ordering of matter - giving order to primordial creation.
“Time at first - in reality before that “first” was produced by desire of succession - Time lay, self-concentrated, at rest within the Authentic Existent… and [God] chose to aim at something more than its present: it stirred from its rest, and Time stirred with it.” -Plotinus, Third Ennead8
The bursting forth of God’s will at the divine proclamation set the internal structures of the aeon into motion; time, at this point existing only in potentia in the Mind of God, expanded to meet the awesome action of God’s will.
For the multiplicity of things in time and space to become, in the end, a unity at rest doesn’t mean their abolition - a pagan conception. “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Mat. 11:28).” Time is not abolished, but is transfigured with the rest of creation, opening up to the Ever-Existent One. This eternal present will be experienced by those who reciprocate God’s love as ruling with Him and the saints over the renewed creation - though as the Apostles tell us we don’t know exactly what this looks like - but will be experienced by those who hated God as eternal darkness.
Aidion:Ever-Existent
We, being temporal beings, struggle to comprehend this notion of God being Aidion. God is radically other than anything created and for this reason we can often only say what He is not.9 We as created beings are passable, we have a beginning and end; God is un-created, and without beginning or end - Ever-Existent, Aidion. God is Aidion, Eternity is in God. Aidion is, as we have said, the state of God’s existence, His mode of being.
Christ asserts that “Truly, Truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I Am.”10
This present tense affirms a reality which is not subject to any passing moment of time, but transcends any concept of time altogether. As Augustine tells us, “Thy day is not daily, but Today, seeing Thy Today gives no place unto tomorrow, for neither doth it replace yesterday.”11 He is, to Abraham, to Moses, to us whereas we were, are, or will be. In other words, God’s mode of being is in a sort of eternal present which is expressed as presence.
This Presence, is in many ways what the presentness of human consciousness is itself an image of - though we can only take this so far. Presence (that God is without pre or post, before or after, but in an everlasting moment) is the perfect reciprocity of the Divine Love shared internally between the three Persons of the Holy Trinity.
Love is the self-offering of one subject to another and the reciprocation of that self-offering by the other who received it. Love presupposes at least two “I”s. We could therefore say that the Eternity of the Godhead is the perfect reciprocating love of these three perfect subjectivities who are interior to one another.
Between human persons, and even between a human person and God, there is an interval between the offering of love - and even then not a perfect offering - and the reciprocation of that love. By contrast, each person of the Trinity is a perfect subjectivity and therefore offers itself completely, instantaneously and inexhaustibly. This love is given one to another and reciprocated in the same manner without interval - since they are interior to one another. There is no forward movement into which it could improve (future); there is no former imperfection onto which it could look back (past). The Three Persons are perfectly present to one another, dwelling in perfect life and love in absolute fullness. This love is, in a word: perfect.
“In the divine life there is a present with no reference to past or future, because life is always lived in fullness… eternity would be.. an unbearable boredom if it were the prerogative of a single consciousness, or an absurdity if it were the prerogative of a substance or a law that is aimless.” - Fr. Dimitru Stanilou
This fullness of Divine Love therefore manifests as an eternal present. This is in fact the only possibility. After all, love can only exist in temporal reality as a participation in Divine Love, and God can only be God if He is self-sufficient. This requires a Triadic God. But a strict monad, like that of Rabbinic Platonism or Islamic Aristotelian, would be incapable of seeing outside of itself to love another.12
A diad, like that which the Western Filioqueists mistakenly claim to be the Christian God, would be so perfectly invested in the other perfect subject, so singularly focused on them, that they would be incapable of escaping one another to see a horizon outside of themselves.13
The Three of the Holy Trinity experience a shared communal love in which the complete self offering of one into another is only perfect if the love of that other is shared with the third, therefore showing itself generous and capable of extending outside of itself. Only with the addition of the third is this community of love thus able to look outside of itself and to pour out that perfect love in an act of creation without taking away from its fullness. Thus, God’s will to create and to love us.
That this is the case is further revealed to us in the mystery of Christian marriage, which is man, woman, and God.
In Christian marriage, the mutual outpouring between husband and wife, one into another, is only made perfect in that same fullness being poured out into Christ. The husband’s love for his wife is perfected in her love for Christ, who perfectly loves each of them together as one flesh. In this fullness, Christian marriage looks to pour its love outside of itself, to bring another into this community from outside of itself, and begets children. It looks to pour its love into others as an expression and extension of the love within it. It is both internal and external at the same time.
Chronos
Time, or Chronos, we have discussed at some length. In summary we can say the following:
Time is the realm of the sensible part of temporal reality.
Time has been experienced since the fall as a sort of broken temporality.
Time, as our friend Plotinus has attested, is the life of the soul in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another.
More appropriately, its purpose is to act as the interval between the proclamation of divine love and man’s appropriate response. This is true both in the broad scheme of the Divine Economy, as well as at the person level where it acts as the interval between Christ, the lover of mankind (Φιλάνθρωπος, philanthropos), knocking at the door of our hearts, and our letting Him in.
Lastly, by time coming into contact with He who is Aidion, time has been deified.
Time ascends with Christ to the Father and is reconciled with the aeon which interpenetrate one another by their mutual deification, having come into contact with God’s Aidion. This is experienced in the Church in the Mysteries, where Christ’s remembrance is both in time and transcends it, actuating events past and future in the unfolding present. This is the experience, or knowing in part, as if dimly in a mirror, of the things to come which Paul speaks of.14 They are a foretaste of the Kingdom to come when Christ returns. Unfortunately for Plotinus, he left the catechumenate before he could experience this for himself.15
“And this is the life everlasting, that they know You, the only true God and Jesus Christ, Whom you sent.” - Gospel of John, Chapter 17, Verse 3
To know God is to be in His presence and partake of His Love - what we call communion, a union of love. This is life everlasting. God gives us His Eternity - by uniting us with Himself in the Eucharist - as a gift, as a personal encounter which culminates on the eighth day, when “we will be like Him and we will see Him as He is.”16
To be saved is to have fully and appropriately responded to the proclamation of God’s love. But man was incapable of this on account of the darkening of his spiritual faculties after the fall. Christ closed the interval between the divine and human by the two being united in His Person, or hypostasis. As man, He perfectly responded to God’s love in total subjugation to His Father’s will. Thus, it is by uniting ourselves to Him that we partake of His perfect response to the Father.
Our experience of life in the present - the unfolding temporal moment - is itself an image of the eternal present of Divine Life.
This is true insofar as human consciousness is concerned - though consciousness is not limited to time - and that the present is the place in which we encounter God. God reaches out to mankind through what Saint Paul calls His energies, by which man ascends to God’s eternality.17 This process takes place in time. In the present, the unfolding temporal moment, we come into contact with the eternal present of Divine Love. But this unfolding moment of time is already passing away. Within it, however, is a bridge to the eternal present, to Aidion: the Cross.
In the present, each moment offers us a choice: to launch ourselves from the abyss of this passing moment to the Cross or to remain still and pass into non-being. When we make this leap at the prodding of God’s offer of love, we ascend towards Him, we respond to His love.18 To use a more properly biblical image: each tick of the clock represents the knocking of Christ at the door to our hearts, we have the response to answer or remain closed in on ourselves.
Moment by moment, answer by answer, He knocks again, harder and harder until one day, on that day, He simply breaks the door down and sweeps us off our feet to carry us to the wedding banquet. Human existence comes to an end in one of two eternities: the first in the infinite fullness of communion with God, or the second which is total isolation in the abyss of non-being. Time is the real movement of the human person to transcend the interval between himself and God. In this sense, time is very real, and deadly serious.
“Behold, the Bridegroom cometh in the middle of the night; and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching. Unworthy is the servant who He shall find being lazy. Beware, O my soul, be not overcome by sleep, so that you not be handed over to death and be shut out from the Kingdom. Come to your senses and cry aloud: Holy, holy, holy are You our God. By the power of Your Cross save us.” - Hymn from Bridegroom Matins.
The Eighth Day: The Mutual Kenosis of Chronos, Aeon, and Aidion
The Eighth Day is nothing less than the full self-offering of creation to God as a whole burnt offering. Time and Aeon, reunited in Christ, open up the infinite and everlasting life and love of the Holy Trinity. Likewise, The Holy Trinity comes to indwell His creation, pouring out His life and love, becoming all in all.
At the Parousia, Christ will come with the Father and the Spirit to make His home in us, the heavens and earth (chronos and aeon) will be purified by the fire of His love.19 Resurrected in our spiritualized bodies, we will enjoy at last the rest of Christ which he offers to all who are weary and heavy laden. In this rest we will have attained the fullness of what it means to be human. We will be full partakers of Christ’s deified humanity, or, as the Apostle John puts it, “we will be like Him.”20
The Hebrew word often translated rest, as in the rest which God took on the Sabbath in Genesis (וַיִּשְׁבֹּ), means to be seated. This is an image of being enthroned, of God seeing His living temple completed and being enthroned within it.21
The same such rest applies to us as adopted sons, who rule and reign with Him. In other words, at the Second Coming God will come to dwell in His creation as His home and we, as adopted sons of God, will join Him, seated with the King of All and united to Him. In this union of God we will transcend space and time, but they will not be abolished. Christ’s deified humanity after the resurrection shows this to be the case.
While the Apostles could handle Him, eat with Him, etc... He could appear and vanish at will and pass through walls. St. Maximus explains that, “the nature of created things will come to rest in God who is one in nature, and no longer have any limit (which anyone might reach or pass beyond) for in God there is no longer any interval.”22 This reveals to us, most importantly, that creaturely eternity and the age to come cannot be understood without temporal categories/characteristics like the triune reality of past, present, and future.23
So while we will be at rest this is not to be motionless, but to be seated with Him face to face. This is an image of being brought into the love of the Holy Trinity which we have spoken of.
The saints and members of the Church experience this, in part, right now as God includes them in the Divine Council. This is what allows them to hear our prayers and intercede miraculously for us.24 It is these same energies (often translated as gifts, and rightly so) which allow members of the Church on earth to heal the sick, to open the scriptures, to evangelize, to perceive clairvoyantly that which is hidden for others. But in the age to come when we attain full union with God through our entering more perfectly into the love of God, this will be experienced in full in a way we cannot even imagine.
This is a wholly positive movement as man, like a mad lover, soars ever further, ever deeper into the eternal and infinite love and life of God. St Gregory of Nyssa speaks of these opposed concepts of rest and movement being reconciled in the positive movement and change of man in God as Epektasis, a reaching out.25
Time continues in a transfigured way in the Eighth Day as finite man moves ever deeper, reaching further into the infinite abyss of God’s love, simultaneously at rest in the infinite fullness of God. As God is infinite - and man finite - we can never reach the fullness of Divine Love, and so this reaching out never ceases. This is not the nonsensical western conception of staring into the essence of God for all eternity, but the fullness of theosis in which man moves from glory to glory as he partakes in ever greater measure of God’s Energies, which make their home in him.26
Time, Freedom, and the Loving-kindness of God
“The fall of mankind reveals the enormous scope of its freedom to determine its own fate,” - Paul Evdokimov27
Love presupposes freedom. For man to reciprocate God’s love, he must be able to freely determine his own response. It is not love if one locks another person in their basement and forces a ring on their finger. Predestination of man thus makes a mockery of God’s love for man. What we see in actuality, is the desperate love of God, in which He is willing to condescend to man’s weakness, to take on the form of a servant and endure beatings, scourgings, and even death, so that just one human person can make the complete and appropriate response to the offer of divine love. Knowing our weakness, He lowers Himself to us, unites humanity to Him, and ascends on high to the throne of the Father
The Son of God, being eternally Theanthropos, is both perfect God and perfect man. In His divinity, He is in the infinite and everlasting perfection of Divine Love that is the Holy Trinity. In His humanity, He is at this very moment united to our temporality, our aspirations and difficulties. This means that Christ suffers with mankind in time, always awaiting our complete conversion.28
He knew this pain before the aeon even came to be, foreknowing all the pain of the fall, of sin, of death. He knew it would take the cross, the nails, the spear, the three days in the tomb, the ressurection and ascension, all this to return His beloved to Him. He was willing to endure that pain in His desperate love for mankind. He condescended to take temporal existence into Himself to give us the power to make a more complete response to the divine offer of salvific love. All so that we, the lowly and evil-disposed ones could partake of His divinity without stint. All that is required is our “Amen. Come Lord Jesus.”
Yes Lord, come!
A Closing Remark: I have done my best in this series to take readers on a journey through the richness of the Church’s teaching, touching on various theological topics and concepts along the way. These articles were submitted in advance to theologically astute clergy in the Russian Church Abroad to ensure the series would present the Church’s teachings accurately. While the flow and organization of the arguments presented are my own, the teachings are not. They belong the Holy Orthodox Church and can be found in the writings of our Holy and God-bearing Fathers consistently across the 2,000 years since the faith was delivered once for all to the saints.
In other words: the truth presented in these articles belong wholly to the Church, while the mistakes are my own. I take full responsibility for them and throw myself at the mercy of Almighty God, who wills for all men to be saved - even me.
Previous installments in this series:
The Experience of Time (Part I)
Time: Redeeming the Days (Part II)
Aeon; otherwise referred to as “created eternity” or “eternity” with a lowercase e.
John 1:1-3
Matthew 24:35; Isaiah 65:17, 66:22; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1
Aidion or αειιδιον meaning always (αει) the same (ιδιον). This is usually translated everlasting or ever-existent. For our purposes, this will either be most often expressed as Aidion or Divine Eternity.
St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius, pg 90
Dr. Brandon Gallahar, The Chalice of Eternity
This is a common mistake people make when reading the Church Fathers. They see a word used in philosophy or an image used by Plato or Porphyry and say “look, they were neoplatonists!” This is absurd. Clearly, when the Apostle John uses the word Logos in John 1 (in the beginning was the Logos) He does not mean what Marcus Aurelius means by logos. To assume so would be to make a word/concept fallacy. These were simply Greek words whose definition was based on who was using it. The same applies to images - such as the moving image of eternity or the Porphyrian Tree - used to explain Gospel concepts by the Fathers which may have originated in pagan literature. No one would say that because a modern preacher uses an image from The Matrix during a sermon, he is now a transhumanist. We regularly baptize concepts from the world for the sake of the Gospel. This is what the Fathers were doing, just like St. Paul and Christ Himself.
Plotinus, The Enneads; Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 17, pg. 126; Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952
This is called Apophatic theology. The idea that God is so radically beyond human understanding that we know him though a progressive negation, culminating in a kind of apprehension by supreme ignorance of He who cannot be an object of knowledge. See Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God; St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1974
John 8:58
St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, XI, XIII, 16
Being “sufficient in itself “and devoid of love - for love supposes two I’s as we have said - a strict monad is incapable of even creating, which must be an act of love.
Whether they want to accept it or not, the Filioque (latin for and the son, relating to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the son as from a single principle) makes the Holy Spirit a work of the Father and Son, thus forming a diad. While Western theologians will roundly deny this, their proclamations of believing in the full personhood of the Holy Spirit are shown to be completely empty when explained.
Prominent 20th century Catholic Theologian Herbert Muhlen gives us clear insight into this when he says “The Holy Spirit is the unity in person between the Father and Son; it is, so to speak, the interdivine perichoresis (compenetration) in person… The distinction of the Holy Spirit from the Father and Son consists in the fact that He is the absolute approach of two realities in one person.” In other words, the Holy Spirit is the mutual act of love, the act of unity, the we of the Father and Son acting, embodied in a person. In other words: Father+Son=the divine being=Holy Spirit. Thus, the Filioque is not Trinitarian, but Diadic, because it makes the Holy Spirit a work of the Father and Son, a person in name only.
1 Corinthians 13:9
Plotinus was a catechuman in Alexandria, but left prior to his baptism. It is said that his good friend tried to convince him to return to the church and be baptized, but he refused. This friend’s name, was Origen.
1 John 3:2
See: David Bradshaw, Divine Energies & Divine Action | Tikhon Pino, Essence and Energies: Being and Naming God in St Gregory Palamas
“This is love, that we walk according to His commandments.” 2 John 1:6
To respond to His love is to keep His commandments, as He reaffirms time and time again…1 John 2:3-5, 3:18, 5:2-3; John 14:15, 21, 23-24, 15:10; Romans 13:9; Ex 20:3-6; Deuteronomy 5:8-10, 7:9-11, 10:12-13, 11:1,13-14, 22-23, 19:8-9, 30:16; 1 Timothy 1:5; Matthew 19:17; Luke 6:46-49; Nehemiah 1:5-6; and many other places.
John 14:23; Revelation 21:1-5
1John 3:2
The creation narrative in Genesis plays out like the building of an ancient temple. This is intentional. Ancient temples, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, most often featured gardens ( sacred groves) atop a mountain - natural or man-made. In this garden would be placed an idol. The priest would ritually breath into the nose of the idol, called the opening of the nostrils, giving the idol life. This “life” was the deity coming to indwell the idol as its own body.
In the Scriptures, the four rivers flow from Paradise, telling us that it is a mountain. The Garden of Eden is set in the East, which is itself an image of the coming of the Son of God - see Mt. 24:27. This is why Orthodox Christians pray facing East, in expectation of His coming. God creates His own image, man, and breathes into him the breath of life. Man, as we discussed in part’s one and two, is to bring creation into Paradise, both as an offering to God and to extend His reign over creation. With the coming of the Parousia, God is coming to indwell His temple, creation.
St. Maximus the Confessor, Questions to Thalassius
Dr. Brandon Gallahar, Chalice of Eternity
Revelation 7:9-8:5
επέκτασησ, “to be, out of extension.” In our current world, movement and rest are in dialectical tension with one another. But in God, all paradoxes are reconciled.
John 14:23
Paul Evdokimov, Orthodoxy: the Cosmos Transfigured; Eighth Day Press
St. Basil the Great, First Precommunion Prayer; Jordanville Prayerbook, St. Job of Pochaev Printshop, 1996
Very thorough series. Good work Ben!