Other difficulties are suggested by time. One, perhaps the greatest that of synchronizing each person’s individual time with the general time of mathematicians-has been greatly vociferated by the recent relativist scare, and everyone remembers it, or remembers having remembered it until very recently. ( I retrieve it by distorting it in the following way: If time is a men tal process, how can it be shared by thousands of men, or even two different men?) The Eleatic refutation of movement raises another problem, which can be expressed thus: It is impossible for fourteen minutes to elapse in eight hundred years of time, because first seven minutes must pass, and before seven, three and a half, and before three and a half, one and three-quarters, and so on infinitely, so that the fourteen minutes will never be completed. Russell rebuts this argument by affirming the reality and even the triteness of infinite numbers, which, however, by definition occur once and for all, and not as the “final” term of an endless enumerative process. Russell’s non-normal numbers are a fine anticipation of eternity, which also refuses to be defined by the enumeration of its parts.
None of the several eternities men have charted—nominalism’s, Irenaeus’, Plato’s—is a mechanical aggregate of past, present, and future. Eternity is something simpler and more magical: the simultaneity of the three tenses. This is something of which ordinary language and the stupefying dictionary dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente [whose every new edition makes us long for the preceding one] appear to be unaware, but it was how the metaphysical thinkers conceived of eternity. “The objects of the Soul are successive, now Socrates and now a horse”—I read in the fifth book of the Enneads—”always some one thing which is conceived of and thousands that are lost; but the Divine Mind encompasses all things together. The past is present in its present, and the future as well. Nothing comes to pass in this world, but all things endure forever, steadfast in the happiness of their condition.”
I will pause to consider this eternity, from which the subsequent ones derive. While it is true that Plotinus was not its founder-in an exceptional book, he speaks of the “antique and sacred philosophers” who preceded him-he amplifies and splendidly sums up all that those who went before him had imagined. Deussen compares him to the sunset: an impassioned fi nal light. All the Greek conceptions of eternity, already rejected, already tragically elaborated upon, converge in his books. I therefore place him be fore Irenaeus, who ordained the second eternity: the one crowned by the three different but inextricable beings.
Plotinus says with unmistakable fervor,
For all in the Intelligible Heaven is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal, plant and man. For spectacle they have a world that has not been engendered. In beholding others they behold them selves. For all things There are translucent: nothing is dark, nothing im penetrable, for light is manifest to light. All are everywhere, and all is all, and the whole is in each as in the sum. The sun is one with all the stars and every star with the sun and all its fellows. No one walks there as upon an alien earth.
This unanimous universe, this apotheosis of assimilation and interchange, is not yet eternity; it is an adjacent heaven, still not wholly emancipated from space and number. Another passage from the fifth Ennead exhorts us to the contemplation of eternity itself, the world of universal forms:
Whatsoever man is filled with admiration for the spectacle of this sensible universe, having regard to its greatness and loveliness and the ordinance of its everlasting movement, having regard also to the gods which are in it, divinities both visible and invisible, and daemons, and all creatures and plants; let him next lift up his thoughts to the truer Reality which is its archetype. There let him see all things in their intelligible nature, eternal not with a borrowed eternity, but in their proper consciousness and their proper life; their captain also he shall see, the uncontaminable Intelligence and the Wisdom that passes approach, and the true age of Kronos, whose name is Fullness. For in him are embraced all deathless things, every intelligence, every god, every soul, immutable forever. It is well with him: what should he seek to change? He has all things present to him: whither should he move? He did not at first lack this blessed state, then win it: all things are his in one eternity, and the true eternity is his, which time does but mimic; for time must fetch the compass of the Soul, ever throwing a past behind it, ever in chase of a future.
The repeated affirmations of plurality in the preceding paragraphs can lead us into error. The ideal universe to which Plotinus summons us is less intent on variety than on plenitude; it is a select repertory, tolerating neither repetition nor pleonasm: the motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes. I do not know if mortal eyes ever saw it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote Greek who devised it ever made its acquaintance, but I sense something of the museum in it: still, monstrous, and classified. . . . But that is a bit of personal whimsy which the reader may disregard, though some general notion of these Platonic archetypes or primordial causes or ideas that populate and constitute eternity should be retained.
A protracted discussion of the Platonic system is impossible here, but certain prerequisite remarks can be offered. For us, the final, solid reality of things is matter—the spinning electrons that cross interstellar distances in their atomic solitude. But for those capable of thinking like Plato, it is the species, the form. In the third book of the Enneads, we read that matter is unreal, a mere hollow passivity that receives the universal forms as a mirror would; they agitate and populate it, but without altering it. Matter’s plenitude is exactly that of a mirror, which simulates fullness and is empty; mat ter is a ghost that does not even disappear, for it lacks even the capacity to cease being. Form alone is truly fundamental. Of form, Pedro Malón de Chaide would write much later, repeating Plotinus:
When God acts, it is as if you had an octagonal seal wrought of gold, in one part of which was wrought the shape of a lion; in another, a horse; in another, an eagle, and so for the rest; and in a bit of wax you im printed the lion; in another, the eagle; in another, the horse; and it is certain that all that appears in the wax is in the gold, and you can print nothing but what is sculpted there. But there is a difference; in the wax it is of wax and worth little, but in the gold it is of gold and worth much. The perfections of the creatures of this world are finite and of little value; in God they are of gold, they are God Himself.
We may infer from this that matter is nothing. We hold this to be a poor, even incomprehensible criterion, yet we apply it continually. A chapter by Schopenhauer is not the paper in the Leipzig archives, nor the act of printing, nor the contours and curlicues of the gothic letters, nor an enumeration of the sounds that comprise it, nor even the opinion we may have of it. Miriam Hopkins is made up of Miriam Hopkins, not of the nitrogenous or mineral rudiments, the carbohydrates, alka loids, and neutral lipids that constitute the transitory substance of that slender silver specter or intelligible essence of Hollywood. These illustrations or well-intentioned sophistries may encourage us to tolerate the Platonic hypothesis which we will formulate thus: Individuals and things exist insofar as they participate in the species that includes them, which is their permanent reality.
I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen-all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals.73 Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: “the nightingale that devours time.” Schopenhauer-impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer-provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile:
Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in
the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely differ ent one.
And later:
It is the life and fate of lions to seek lion-ness which, considered in time, is an immortal lion that maintains itself by the infinite replacement of individuals, whose engendering and death form the pulse of this undying figure.
And earlier:
An infinite time has run its course before my birth; what was I throughout all that time? Metaphysically, I could perhaps answer myself: “I was always I”; that is, all who throughout that time said “I” were none other than I.
I presume that my readers can find it within themselves to approve of this eternal Lion-ness, and that they may feel a majestic satisfaction at the thought of this single Lion, multiplied in time’s mirrors. But I do not hope for the same response to the concept of an eternal Humanity: I know that our own “I” rejects it, preferring to jettison it recklessly onto the ‘‘I”s of others. This is an unpromising beginning, for Plato has far more laborious universal forms to propose. For example, Tableness, or the Intelligible Table that exists in the heavens; the four-legged archetype pursued by every cabinetmaker, all of them condemned to daydreams and frustration. (Yet I cannot entirely negate the concept: without an ideal table, we would never have achieved solid tables.) For example, Triangularity, an eminent three sided polygon that is not found in space and does not deign to adopt an equilateral, scalene, or isosceles form. (I do not repudiate this one either: it is the triangle of the geometry primers.) For example, Necessity, Reason, Postponement, Connection, Consideration, Size, Order, Slowness, Position, Declaration, Disorder. With regard to these conveniences of thought, elevated to the status of forms, I do not know what to think, except that no man will ever be able to take cognizance of them without the assistance of death, fever, or madness. And I have almost forgotten one more archetype that includes and exalts them all: Eternity, whose shredded copy is time.
My readers may already be equipped with specific arguments for dis crediting the Platonic doctrine. In any case, I can supply them with several: one, the incompatible cluster of generic and abstract terms coexisting sans gene in the storehouse of the archetypal world; another, their inventor’s silence concerning the process by which things participate in the universal forms; yet another, the conjecture that these antiseptic archetypes may themselves suffer from mixture and variety. Far from being indissoluble, they are as confused as time’s own creatures, repeating the very anomalies they seek to resolve. Lion-ness, let us say: how would it dispense with Pride and Tawniness, Mane-ness and Paw-ness? There is no answer to this question, nor can there be: we do not expect from the term lion-ness a virtue any greater than that of the word without the suffix.74
To return to Plotinus’ eternity, the fifth book of the Enneads contains a rather vague inventory of its parts. Justice is there, as well as the Numbers (how many?) and the Virtues and Actions and Movement, but not mistakes and insults, which are diseases of a matter whose Form has been corrupted. Music is present, not as melody, but as Rhythm and Harmony. There are no archetypes from pathology or agriculture because they are not needed. Also excluded are tax collection, strategy, rhetoric, and the art of government—though, over time, they derive something from Beauty and Number. There are no individuals; there is no primordial form of Socrates, nor even of the Tall Man or the Emperor; there is, in a general way, Man. Only the primary colors are present: this eternity has no Grey or Purple or Green. In ascending order, its most ancient archetypes are these: Difference, Identity, Motion, Rest, and Being.
We have examined an eternity that is more impoverished than the world. It remains for us to see how our Church adopted it, and endowed it with a wealth far greater than the years can transport.
II
The best document of the first eternity is the fifth book of the Enneads; that of the second, or Christian, eternity, the eleventh book of St. Augustine’s Confessions. The first eternity is inconceivable without the Platonic hypothesis; the second, without the professional mystery of the Trinity and the attendant debates over predestination and damnation. Five hundred pages in folio would not exhaust the subject; I hope these two or three in octavo will not seem excessive.
It can be stated, with an adequate margin of error, that “our” eternity was decreed only a few years after a chronic intestinal pain killed Marcus Aurelius, and that the site of this vertiginous mandate was the hillside of Fourvière, formerly named Forum Vetus, famous now for its funicular and basilica. Despite the authority of the man who ordained it—Bishop Irenaeus—this coercive eternity was much more than a vain priestly adorn ment or an ecclesiastical luxury: it was a solution and a weapon. The Word is engendered by the Father, the Holy Spirit is produced by the Father and the Word. The Gnostics habitually inferred from these two undeniable operations that the Father preceded the Word, and both of them preceded the Spirit. This inference dissolved the Trinity. Irenaeus clarified that the double process-the Son engendered by the Father, the Holy Spirit issuing from the two-did not occur in time, but consumes past, present, and future once and for all. His clarification prevailed and is now dogma. Eternity—theretofore barely tolerated in the shadows of one or another unauthorized Platonic text—thus came to be preached. The proper connection among, or distinction between, the three hypostases of the Lord seems an unlikely problem now, and its futility may appear to contaminate the solution, but there can be no doubt of the grandeur of the result, at least to nourish hope: “Aeternitas est merum hodie, est immediata et lucida fruitio rerum infini tarum” [Eternity is merely today; it is the immediate and lucid enjoyment of the things of infinity] . Nor is there doubt of the emotional and polemical importance of the Trinity.
Today, Catholic laymen consider the Trinity a kind of professional or ganization, infinitely correct and infinitely boring; liberals, meanwhile, view it as a useless theological Cerberus, a superstition that the Republic’s great advances have already taken upon themselves to abolish. The Trinity clearly exceeds these formulae. Imagined all at once, the concept of a father, a son, and a ghost articulated in a single organism seems like a case of intellectual teratology, a distortion only the horror of a nightmare could engender. Hell is mere physical violence, but the three inextricable Persons add up to an in tellectual horror, stifled and specious like the infinity of facing mirrors. Dante sought to denote them by a symbol showing three multicolored, diaphanous circles, superimposed; Donne, by complicated serpents, sumptuous and indivisible. “Toto coruscat trinitas mysterio,” wrote St. Paulinus, the Trinity gleams in full mystery.
Detached from the concept of redemption, the three-persons-in-one distinction seems arbitrary. Considered a necessity of faith, its fundamental mystery remains intact, but its use and intention begin to shine through. We understand that to renounce the Trinity—or, at least, the Duality—is to make of Jesus an occasional delegate of the Lord, an incident of history rather than the deathless and continual auditor of our devotion. If the Son is not also the Father, redemption is not the direct work of the divine; if He is not eternal, the sacrifice of having lowered Himself to become a man and die on the cross will not be eternal either. Nothing less than an infinite excellence could suffice for a soul lost for infinite ages, Jeremy Taylor admonished. . . . The dogma may thus be justified, though the concepts of the generation of the Son by the Father and the emanation of the Spirit from both continue to insinuate a certain priority, their guilty condition as mere metaphors notwithstanding. Theology, at pains to distinguish between them, resolves that there is no reason for confusion, since the result of one is the Son, and of the other, the Spirit. Eternal generation of the Son, eternal emanation of the Spirit, is Irenaeus’ superb verdict: the invention of a timeless act, a mutilated zeitloses Zeitwort that we can discard or venerate, but not debate. Irenaeus set out to save the monster, and did. W
e know he was the philosophers’ enemy; to have appropriated their weapon and turned it against them must have afforded him a bellicose pleasure.
For the Christian, the first second of time coincides with the first second of the Creation—a fact that spares us the spectacle (recently reconstructed by Valéry) of a vacant God reeling in the barren centuries of the eternity “before.” Emanuel Swedenborg (Vera Christiana Religio, 1771) saw at the outer limit of the spiritual orb a hallucinatory statue depicting the voracious inferno into which are plunged all who “engaged in senseless and sterile deliberations on the condition of the Lord before creating the world.”
As soon as Irenaeus had brought it into being, the Christian eternity began to differ from the Alexandrian. No longer a world apart, it settled into the role of one of the nineteen attributes of the mind of God. As objects of popular veneration, the archetypes ran the risk of becoming angels or divinities: consequently, while their reality-still greater than that of mere creatures-was not denied, they were reduced to eternal ideas in the creating Word. This concept of the universalia res [universal things] is addressed by Albertus Magnus: he considers them eternal and prior to the things of Creation, but only as forms or inspirations. He separates them very deliberately from the universalia in rebus [the universal in things], which are the divine concepts themselves, now variously embodied in time, and, above all, from the universalia post res [the universal beyond things], which are those same concepts rediscovered by inductive thought. Temporal things are distinguished from divine things by their lack of creative efficacy but in no other way; the suspicion that God’s categories might not precisely coincide with those of Latin has no place in Scholastic thought. . . . But I see I am getting ahead of myself.