'In what different shapes do living beings move upon the earth! Some make flat their bodies, sweeping through the dust and using their strength to make therein a furrow without break; some flit here and there upon light wings Page 160which beat the breeze, and they float through vast tracks of air in their easy flight.'Tis others' wont to plant their footsteps on the ground, and pass with their paces over green fields or under trees.Though all these thou seest move in different shapes, yet all have their faces downward along the ground, and this doth draw downward and dull their senses.Alone of all, the human race lifts up its head on high, and stands in easy balance with the body upright, and so looks down to spurn the earth.If thou art not too earthly by an evil folly, this pose is as a lesson.Thy glance is upward, and thou dost carry high thy head, and thus thy search is heavenward:
then lead thy soul too upward, lest while the body is higher raised, the mind sink lower to the earth.
'Since then all that is known is apprehended, as we just now shewed, not according to its nature but according to the nature of the knower, let us examine, so far as we lawfully may, the character of the divine nature, so that we may be able to learn what its knowledge is.
'The common opinion, according to all men living, is that God is eternal.Let us therefore consider what is eternity.For eternity will, I think, make clear to us at the same time the divine nature and knowledge.' Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life.This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal Page 161things.All that lives under the conditions of time moves through the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime.It cannot yet comprehend to-morrow; yesterday it has already lost.And in this life of to-day your life is no more than a changing, passing moment.And as Aristotle 1 said of the universe, so it is of all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will ever cease, and its life is co-extensive with the infinity of time, yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal.
For though it apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the future.
What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fulness of unending life, which acks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself the infinity of changing time.Therefore, people who hear that Plato thought that this universe had no beginning of time and will have no end, are not right in thinking that in this way the created world is co-eternal with its creator 2161:1 -- Aristotle, De C?elo , 1.
161:2 -- Boethius speaks of people who 'hear that Plato thought, etc.,' because this was the teaching of some of Plato's successors at the Academy.Plato himself thought otherwise, as may be seen in the Tim?us, e.g.ch.xi.38 B., 'Time then has come into being along with the universe, that being generated together, together they may be dissolved, should a dissolution of them ever come to pass; and it was made after the pattern of the eternal nature that it might be as like to it as possible.For the pattern is existent for all eternity, but the copy has been, and is, and shall be, throughout all time continually.' (Mr.
Archer Hind's translation.) Page 162
For to pass through unending life, the attribute which Plato ascribes to the universe is one thing; but it is another thing to grasp simultaneously the whole of unending life in the present; this is plainly a peculiar property of the mind of God.
'And further, God should not be regarded as older than His creations by any period of time, but rather by the peculiar property of His own single nature.For the infinite changing of temporal things tries to imitate the ever simultaneously present immutability of His life:
it cannot succeed in imitating or equailing this, but sinks from immutability into change, and falls from the single directness of the present into an infinite space of future and past.And since this temporal state cannot possess its life completely and simultaneously, but it does in the same manner exist for ever without ceasing, it therefore seems to try in some degree to rival that which it cannot fulfil or represent, for it binds itself to some sort of present time out of this small and fleeting moment;but inasmuch as this temporal present bears a certain appearance of that abiding present, it somehow makes Page 163those, to whom it comes, seem to be in truth what they imitate.But since this imitation could not be abiding, the unending march of time has swept it away, and thus we find that it has bound together, as it passes, a chain of life, which it could not by abiding embrace in its fulness.
And thus if we would apply proper epithets to those subjects, we can say, following Plato, that God is eternal, but the universe is continual.
