The Eternity of God (Summa I, Q.10, aa.1–2): Boethius' Definition and the Via Negativa

Orientation #

He opens by noting that q. 10 “follows upon the unchangeableness of God” (the previous question) “just as time follows upon motion” (prev. lecture). He closes by announcing the exam next week. The previous class covered divine immutability (q. 9); the next continues with q. 10 aa. 3–5.

The class, in order #

1. Order of question 10 (“just as time follows upon what motion”) #

Point: the order of the question mirrors Aristotle, who treats motion in Book III of “Natural Hearing” and time in Book IV; Thomas treats unchangeableness, then eternity.

• As unchangeableness is a negation of what is found in motion, eternity will negate what is found in time: “we know more what God is not than what He is.”
• The six articles as he runs them: what eternity is (definition); whether God is eternal; whether being eternal belongs to God alone; whether eternity differs from time; the aevum (of the angels); whether there is one aevum as one time and one eternity. The language of the last two “is not altogether clear or fixed.”
• Aside: his old teacher Kasurik said one should make an act of will opening the mind to one’s guardian angel.

2. Boethius’s definition and the six objections (“every single word in a definition is essential”) #

Point: Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy, Book V) defines eternity as tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis, “the all at once and perfect possession of unending life” — “a hell of a good definition”; each objection singles out one word.

1. interminabilis is said negatively, but negation belongs only to deficient things; eternity lacks nothing.
2. Eternity is a duration, and duration regards being more than life; it should say “being,” not “life.”
3. A whole has parts; eternity is simple; so not tota.
4. Many days or times cannot be together, yet Scripture speaks of “days of eternity” (Micah) and “eternal times” (Romans 16); so not all at once.
5. Whole and perfect are the same (Metaphysics V, “whole” attached to “perfect”; Physics I says they mean almost the same); so “perfect” is redundant.
6. Possession does not pertain to duration.

• He tallies it: objection 2 against vitae, 3 against tota, 4 against simul, 5 against perfecta, 6 against possessio, 1 against interminabilis — “every single word has at least one objection.”
• Definition vs. spelling: leave a letter out, add one, or disorder them and the word is misspelled; likewise a definition, though spelling is arbitrary (Shakespeare couldn’t spell his own name) and a definition is not.
• Asides on the Consolation: a pseudo-Thomas commentary (in Migne, not authentic, “pretty good”; his brother Mark found it helpful at St Mary’s College); Lady Wisdom is a woman because sapientia is feminine and a woman consoles better; her torn garments are the philosophers who have dismembered wisdom; theta above (theoretical) and pi below (practical), like Mary above Martha, with a path upward — whereas the Aristotelians put math and natural philosophy before ethics and politics because of the experience ethics needs; Chaucer translated it, a royal translation was attempted (“King James… oh, she was”), and Washington Irving’s Sketchbook has the imprisoned Scottish prince reading it.

3. The body of the article: eternity through time (“come to a knowledge of simple things through composed”) #

Point: Thomas states the general principle (Aristotle, De Anima III) that we know the simple through the composed, then reaches eternity through the definition of time.

• Example: body, surface, line, point — body defined affirmatively (length, width, depth); each step adds negations until the point has none of the three. If this holds in imaginable geometry, “how much more so” with God.
• Time (Physics IV): “the number of motion according to the before and after.” Examples: the sun’s positions across the sky; Robinson Crusoe marking each sunrise, one circulation before another.
• Why Aristotle says there is no full time without the numbering soul: the chairs in the room are countable even if nobody counts them, because they exist together; three days or three minutes never exist together, so the mind must count yesterday (gone) with today and tomorrow (not yet). “Do I ever have three days?” — the two-week vacation is always partly gone, partly to come.
• Argument for the definition:
  1. Time = numbering of before and after in motion.
  2. In what lacks motion and is always the same, no before and after can be taken; so grasping the uniformity of what is outside motion is the notion of eternity.
  3. Things measured by time have a beginning and end in time (Physics IV), since in every motion a beginning and end can be taken; the wholly unchangeable, having no succession, has no beginning or end.
  4. So eternity is known from two things: it is unending (no beginning and no end — terminus covering both ends, as Metaphysics V notes we speak of the “endpoints” of a line), and it lacks succession, existing all at once.
• He stresses: most people, if they think of eternity at all, think of endless time. That is only half; “even Plato saw that eternity had no before and after.” Mozart (1756–1791) has beginning and end and a before and after within his life; if Berquist had existed every year back and every year forward, he would still not be in eternity, only in endless time. “You’ve got to negate both.”

4. Replies to the six objections (“negation or removing of the composition”) #

• Reply 1: simple things are customarily defined negatively — Euclid’s point, “that which has no parts” — not because negation is of their essence, but because our understanding grasps composed things first. De Anima III: reason’s own object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, always composed (natural or mathematical); “we never think without the image.” Thinking of God, we imagine a body and negate it.
• Reply 2: the truly eternal is not only a being but living, and life extends to operation, not just being. Double sense of “life”: for a living thing to be is to be alive, but what it does is also its “life” (bumper sticker “Music is my life”; “philosophizing is my life”; Monsignor Dionne near the end). “I lost my life” is the being-sense. Duration is noted more according to operation, “whence time is the number of motion”; the likeness of motion and doing (prev. lecture) means eternity is reached through God’s doing. God is alive not because he is but because he understands and wills; Thomas treats God’s life when he treats his understanding and willing.
• Reply 3: “whole” means not parts but nothing lacking — as “all at once” in English, or “omnipotent”/“almighty”: nothing lacking to his power.
• Reply 4: God, incorporeal, is named metaphorically by bodily names, so eternity is named by successive temporal names. Student supplies Psalm 101, “your years do not fail.” Perihermeneias: the noun signifies without time, the verb (runs, will walk) with time — so how speak of eternity? Because it coexists with every part of time, each tense is carried over: “God was and is and will be”; the Glory Be. A father Thomas quotes describes this as “stuttering” eternity [unclear in recording which father]. Thomas’s commentary on John: why “In the beginning was the Word,” no verb form adequate but “was” better than others.
• Reply 5: in time there are two things, time itself (successive) and the now of time (imperfect); “all at once” removes before and after, “perfect” excludes the now of time.
• Reply 6: what is possessed is had firmly and at rest, so “possession” designates the immutability and indeficiency of eternity. Perhaps influenced by Aristotle on wisdom as “not a human possession”: looking not doing knowledge, liberal not servile, not a human possession (we cannot pursue or use it whenever we want — unlike a book you own vs. one from the library, due back), and the most honourable, godlike knowledge.

5. The four negations and the now (“the now that stands still makes eternity”) #

Point: his own way of laying out the definition against our life yields four negations: two against time, two against the now.

1. Our life has a beginning and end in time; God’s has none (unending).
2. Even while we have our life it has before and after; God’s does not (all at once).

• In lacking before and after eternity resembles the now of time, which in the strict sense contains none of past or future, indivisible like a point dividing a line — otherwise before and after would exist together. Boethius: “the now that moves along makes time; the now that stands still makes eternity” — “a beautiful comparison.” Aristotle: the now is in one way always the same, in another always different; time is to motion as the now is to the moving body, which stays the same but is always here or there.

3. “Possession” negates the fleeting character of the now: every good thing comes to an end, the birthday moment never lasts; we cannot possess the moment.
4. “Perfect” negates the imperfection of the life we have in the now: the fairy-tale spell freezes the servants carrying dinner until Prince Charming’s kiss — how much life is in that frozen now? You cannot hear a Mozart melody, drink a glass of wine, or do an article of Thomas in the now.

• “A beautiful example of the via negativa.” Charles De Koninck ended his course on time (Physics IV) with a footnote on eternity; natural philosophy should be taught before theology. Providence: Thomas studied at Naples, the only university in Europe where the Physics was then available; he could not have written this without knowing time and the now.

6. Article 2: the objections (“the now flowing makes time”) #

Point: four objections that God is not eternal, and the sed contra.

1. Nothing made is said of God, but Boethius says the standing now makes eternity, and Augustine (Eighty-three Questions) calls God the author of eternity.
2. God is before eternity (Liber de Causis — Thomas commented on it, first thought Aristotle’s, later discovered its true author; authoritative but not correct in everything) and after it: Exodus 15, God reigns in aeternum et ultra. “Probably misunderstanding these texts.”
3. Eternity is a measure; God is not measured.
4. In eternity there is no past, present, future, but Scripture uses all tenses of God.

• Sed contra: he first says Dionysius, then identifies it as the Athanasian Creed: Father eternal, Son eternal, Spirit eternal. The Boethius text is from De Trinitate ch. 4, the definition from the Consolation — “those two texts nicely brought together.”

7. The body: eternity follows unchangeableness (“puts order into your thoughts”) #

1. The notion of eternity follows on unchangeableness as the notion of time follows on motion — “a very important proportion,” learned in physics: what moves is in time.
2. So you negate change before you negate time; God is considered unchangeable before eternal — this orderliness is what he likes in Thomas.
3. God is maxime immutabilis, so maxime eternal.
4. And not only eternal but his own eternity, as he is his goodness: nothing else is its own duration because nothing else is its own being; God is his own being uniformly, so as he is his essence, he is his eternity.

8. Replies to article 2 (“according to our apprehension”) #

• Reply 1: the standing now “makes” eternity according to our apprehension, as grasping the flow of the now causes our grasp of time. Augustine’s “author of eternity” concerns partaken eternity: in the beatific vision (SCG on seeing God as he is) there is no before and after, it is always fresh; God communicates eternity to those to whom he communicates unchangeableness — hence “eternal life” in prayers for the dead.
• Reply 2 (Thomas orders the objections so one leads to the next): God is before eternity as partaken by immaterial substances — the “intelligences” (angelic minds) are said to be made equal to eternity. In Exodus, aeternum stands for saeculum, the age, as another translation has (Thomas the scripture scholar); an age is the period of a thing (Aristotle, On the Heavens I); or God reigns beyond the eternal because, even if something else always was (the heavens’ motion, per some philosophers), his reign is all at once.
• Digression on lesser senses: “everlasting fire” at the judgment is unending but not all at once — eternity in a lesser sense. We define things in the fullest sense, then admit lesser senses by dropping a note. Porphyry’s property (Isagoge): belongs to one species only, to every member, always — “half of four” for two; “less than ten” drops “only.” Marriage: stable union of man and woman by mutual choice for children; shotgun weddings and marriages of the old are marriage in a lesser sense. So “eternity” as endless time is equivocal but not purely equivocal; as Aristotle can loosely call being a genus while denying it in the strict sense.
• Reply 3: eternity is God himself, so he is not measured; “measure” is taken according to our way of grasping — “what measures your life? Time. God’s life? Eternity.”
• Reply 4: verbs of different tenses are attributed to God because his eternity includes all times, not because he is past or future. Thomas elsewhere compares eternity to the centre of a circle and the nows of time to points on the circumference: they are before and after each other but all equally related to the centre; the now of time is not present to past and future, but the now of eternity is. Radio program “You Were There” (trial of Socrates as news broadcast): in eternity you will “be there,” for all is present to God; at death your whole life is laid out and you see the justice of your judgment — “pretty frightening.”
• Aside: exam next week.

His words #

• “Natural Hearing” — Aristotle’s Physics, “which the multitude call physics” [ed.: Physics].
• tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis — “the all at once and perfect possession of unending life.”
• interminabilis — unending: no beginning and no end, terminus covering both.
• time — “the number of motion according to the before and after.”
• terminus — end, applied to both endpoints of a line.
• “fifth book of wisdom” — Metaphysics V [ed.: Metaphysics].
• now of time (strict sense) — indivisible, containing none of past or future.
• possession — had firmly and at rest.
• partaking eternity — eternal life of the blessed, communicated with unchangeableness.
• saeculum / age — the period of a thing; sense of aeternum in Exodus.
• intelligences — the angelic minds.
• property (Porphyry) — belongs to one species only, to every member, always.
• via negativa — the way of negation by which the definition proceeds.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q. 10 a. 1 (objections, body, replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q. 10 a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies).
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Book V (definition of eternity).
• Boethius, De Trinitate ch. 4 (“the now flowing makes time, the standing now makes eternity”).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics III (motion), IV (time), I (whole and perfect); De Anima III; Metaphysics V (perfect, whole, terminus) and Metaphysics I (wisdom not a human possession, inferred); On the Heavens I (age); Perihermeneias (noun and verb).
• Euclid, definition of the point.
• Micah, Romans 16, Psalm 101, Exodus 15.
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions.
• Liber de Causis, with Thomas’s commentary.
• Thomas, commentary on John (“In the beginning was the Word”); Summa Contra Gentiles (seeing God as he is).
• Porphyry, Isagoge (property).
• Pseudo-Thomas commentary on the Consolation (Migne); Chaucer’s translation; Washington Irving, Sketchbook.
• Charles De Koninck, course on time.
• Athanasian Creed.

His questions #

• How many negations are there in the definition of eternity? Four: no beginning and end, no before and after, and against the now, its fleeting character (possession) and its imperfection (perfect).
• Is God alive because He is? No, because He understands and wills and loves.
• Do I ever have three days? No; part is always gone and part still to come, which is why the numbering soul is needed for time.
• Would I be in eternity if I existed every year before and every year after? No; one year would still be before another — endless time, not eternity.
• How much life do you have in that frozen now? Almost none; you cannot hear a melody, drink wine, or do an article in the now.
• What measures your life, and what measures God’s? Time; eternity — but only according to our way of grasping, since God is not measured.
• Is the everlasting fire “eternal” in the full sense? Unending but not all at once; a lesser, equivocal sense.
• Are old people who marry married? Yes, they are not living in sin, but not marriage in the fullest sense of the definition.