CCCLXXVIII – Understanding Aeviternity

I’ve been thinking a lot about angels recently and that leads naturally to contemplation of the kind of experience of existence Angels have in Aeviternity. What the heck is Aeviternity? What is it like? How does it relate to the Eternal God or the Finite universe?

Let’s see where we can get on our own power first. Eternity I don’t struggle with conceptually because I can state how it works simply. God is perfect, all creation rests upon and is sourced from God, so God must see all subordinate creation at once, in all its iterations. How that looks exactly is a mystery and may remain a mystery even after death, and anyway it is not exactly spiritually helpful to contemplate. It is enough, for me, to know that God is perfect, God is source, and so God can both see and experience everything as complete and specific events as occurring.

Finity I don’t struggle with either because it is my own experience. Life has a natural course, time pushes us inexorably forward. We take it as a given, like water to a fish.

Aeviternity splits the difference, and it boggles my mind because I don’t really know how to think about it. If I think about it like regular time–Angels live their days like we do, but just at a higher level–then in order for Angels to function the way we know angels function, they have to break all kinds of rules about time. Do Angels get bored by waiting? If there was a time before creation, how much time was that?

Aeviternity is also the domain of Heaven and Hell (before the Eschaton–which, by the way, presents its own questions). Heaven and Hell we can think of as places, but how do we perceive suffering if we do not perceive time? If we do perceive time, how do we perceive eternity?

St. Thomas Aquinas describes Aeviternity as the mean between time and eternity, but from what I have been able to find does not go into the daily life aspects of it. He says that Eternity has no beginning and has no end; Time has a beginning and an end; so Aeviternity has a beginning but no end. St. Thomas notes that time is a measure of change. Because our material created order is constantly changing, time marks those changes. Angels and perfected souls in Heaven (or tormented souls in hell) are unchanging in their nature but changing in their “choice, affections, places”.

We can imagine a perfected created order–earth, sun, animals, essentially Eden as described in Genesis. Devoid of flaws, perfect qua creation, but still free qua agency. But rather than marking time qua creation, they would mark some kind of time qua agency?

For example: If I say an hour has passed, we know that the world has irrevocably gotten one hour older. Some finite number of persons in the world has died, some finite number of persons in the world has been born, some finite number of events has happened. If we take a slice of one hour and sought to understand it perfectly, we would see the birth, death, decay, renewal all happening at once. We would see threads connecting that slice to every slice that came before it and threads connecting that slice to every slice that comes after.

In Aeviternity, time doesn’t matter because creation itself is not changing, but we as beings can change. If I were to say an hour has passed in Aeviternity, the world itself would be the same. There would be no life, death, decay, renewal–not any that is uninformed by God’s divine will anyway, not any that is a result of a fallen cosmos. So an hour would not be marked by changing stuff, but changing beings. An hour in Aeviternity might signify a specific set of choices.

For example, we know Angels get to choose whether they are for God or against God and their choices are irrevocable. Their choices are irrevocable–the way the life, death, decay, and renewal is irrevocable once it happens. So what if the first “moment” of an Angels life is that first choice–for God or against God. The second “moment” of an Angels life is, perhaps, to choose a vocation–this Angel chose to carry the moon, that angel chose to be a guardian to a soul. Between these moments, perhaps the Angel can move about the created order, so we would perceive their movement as being instantaneous. But once they exercise their agency, they have experienced a moment in Aeviternity, and when that moment has passed they cannot go back. It connects them with the past and with the future, because all their choices determine what choices are available in the future.

Purgatory is one such choice souls make at the last judgement, and it is painful because it is the purifying of our created substance. It is a reconciliation of our imperfect substance and our perfect aeviternity. Choosing heaven means we can honor and glorify God and can do so eternally in the space between aeviternal “moments”. The aeviternal moments, in heaven, would be things like asking for answers to pressing eternal questions, perhaps however it is prayers are received, that is how they can be sorted individually, because they exist for us in time but for them they are timeless so a lifetime of prayers can all be mediated by one person. Though prayers for the intercession of saints are just asking for saints to pray to God on their behalf, so that could easily be an Aeviternal moment–the choice to ask God to intercede on behalf of a petitioner. And we can do whatever we want in the meantime, but each instance is an aeviternal moment. Perhaps the praying and interceding aren’t even choices, they are just things that can be done to occupy that space between moments that we would consider time but which isn’t time because the created order is unchanging.

In Hell, I think part of what makes it an eternal torment is because there are no more aeviternal moments. You have chosen against God and are cast into the eternal fire where your substance can never be reconciled with perfection, yet is aware of perfection creating a kind of cognitive dissonance. You might say you are aware you chose wrong with perfect clarity, and you are aware of your sins with perfect clarity, and must endure that knowledge without ceasing because there are no Aeviternal moments awaiting you. There is no knowledge or affection or intercession. You are cut off from the font of life. You can’t die because you don’t experience substantial change, and you can’t live because you can’t become perfected.

The glorification and resurrection is the reconciliation of Aeviternity with creation-time, a division which originates with the fall of Adam. All people–heaven and hell both–are glorified and resurrected. But that fact contradicts what I just said about Hell–are the denizens of Hell perfected or just resurrected? So if you are resurrected but not perfected, your suffering is both corporeal and eternal in the way I just described.

The concept of Aeviternal “moments” helps me to understand the idea a little better which was the goal, so I hope it is helpful to you too.

AMDG