On the Supposed Scriptural Expression for Eternity.
By De Quincey
Forty years ago (or, in all probability, a good deal more, for we have already completed thirty-seven years [1852] from Waterloo, and my remembrances upon this subject go back to a period lying much behind that great era,) I used to be annoyed and irritated by the false interpretation given to the Greek word aion, and given necessarily, therefore, to the adjective aionian as its immediate derivative. It was not so much the falsehood of this interpretation, as the narrowness of that falsehood, which disturbed me. There was a glimmer of truth in it; and precisely that glimmer it was which led the way to a general and obstinate misconception of the meaning. . . . The reason which gives to this word aionian what I do not scruple to call a dreadful importance, is the same reason, and no other, which prompted the dishonesty concerned in the ordinary interpretation of this word. The word happened to connect itself—but that was no practical concern of mine; me it had not biased in the one direction, nor should it have biased any just critic in the counter-direction—happened, I say, to connect itself with the ancient dispute upon the duration of future punishment. What was meant by the aionian punishments in the next world? Was the proper sense of the word eternal, or was it not? . . . That argument runs thus—that the ordinary construction of the term aionian, as equivalent to everlasting, could not possibly be given up when associated with penal misery, because in that case, and by the very same act, the idea of eternity must be abandoned as applicable to the counter-bliss of Paradise. Torment and blessedness, it was argued, punishment and beatification, stood upon the same level; the same word it was, the word aionian, which qualified the duration of either; and, if eternity in the most rigorous acceptance fell away from the one idea, it must equally fall away from the other. Well, be it so. But that would not settle the question. It might be very painful to renounce a long-cherished anticipation; but the necessity of doing so could not be received as a sufficient reason for adhering to the old unconditional use of the word aionian. The argument is—that we must retain the old sense of eternal, because else we lose upon one scale what we had gained upon the other. But what then? would be the reasonable man's retort. We are not summoned as to a choice of two different arrangements that may suit different tastes, but to a grave question as to what is the sense and operation of the word aionian. Let the limitation of the word disturb our previous estimate of Paradise, grant that it so disturbs that estimate, not the less all such consequences leave the dispute exactly where it was; and if a balance of reason can be found for limiting the extent of the word aionian, it will not be the less true because it may happen to disturb a crotchet of our own. Meantime, all this speculation, first and last, is pure nonsense. Aionian does not mean eternal; neither does it mean of limited duration; nor would the unsettling of aionian in its old use, as applied to punishment, to torment, to misery, etc., carry with it any necessary unsettling of the idea in its application to the beatitudes of Paradise. . . . What is an aion? In the use and acceptance of the Apocalypse, it is evidently this—viz., the duration or cycle of existence which belongs to any object, not individually for itself, but universally in right of its genius. . . . Under the old and ordinary view of the apocalyptic aion, which supposed it always to mean the same period of time—mysterious, indeed, and uncertain, as regards our knowledge, but fixed and rigorously certain in the secret counsels of God—it was presumed that this period, if it lost its character of infinity when applied to evil, to criminality, or to punishment, must lose it by a corresponding necessity equally when applied to happiness and the golden aspects of hope. But, on the contrary, every object whatsoever, every mode of existence, has its own separate and independent aion. The most thoughtless person must be satisfied, on reflection, even apart from the express commentary upon this idea furnished by the Apocalypse, that every life and mode of being must have hidden within itself the secret why of its duration. It is impossible to believe of any duration whatever that it is determined capriciously. Always it rests upon some ground, ancient as light and darkness, though undiscoverable by man. This only is discoverable, as a general tendency, that the aion, or generic period of evil, is constantly towards a fugitive duration. The aion, it is alleged, must always express the same idea, whatever that may be; if it is less than eternity for the evil cases, then it must be less for the good ones. Doubtless the idea of an aion is in one sense always uniform, always the same—viz., as a tenth or a twelfth is always the same. Arithmetic could not exist if any caprice or variation affected these ideas—a tenth is always more than an eleventh, always less than a ninth. But this uniformity of ratio and proportion does not hinder but that a tenth may now represent a guinea, and next moment represent a thousand guineas. The exact amount of the duration expressed by an aion depends altogether upon the particular subject which yields the aion. It is, as I have said, a radix; and, like an algebraic square root or cube root, though governed by the most rigorous laws of limitation, it must vary in obedience to the nature of the particular subject whose radix it forms. . . . As the upshot of my speculation, accept these three propositions:— (a) That man (which is in effect every man hitherto) who allows himself to infer the eternity of evil from the counter-eternity of good, builds upon the mistake of assigning a stationary and mechanic value to the idea of an aion; whereas the very purpose of Scripture in using this word was to evade such a value. The word is always varying, for the very purpose of keeping it faithful to a spiritual identity. The period or duration of every object would be an essentially variable quantity, were it not mysteriously commensurate to the inner nature of that object as laid open to the eyes of God. And thus it happens, that everything in this world, possibly without a solitary exception, has its own separate aion: how many entities, so many aions. (b) But if it be an excess of blindness which can overlook the aionian differences amongst even neutral entities, much deeper is that blindness which overlooks the separate tendencies of things evil and things good. Naturally, all evil is fugitive and allied to death. (c) I separately, speaking for myself only, profoundly believe that the Scriptures ascribe absolute and metaphysical eternity to one sole Being—viz., to God; and derivatively to all others according to the interest which they can plead in God's favor. Having anchorage in God, innumerable entities may possibly be admitted to a participation in divine aion. But what interest in the favor of God can belong to falsehood, to malignity, to impurity? To invest them with aionian privileges, is, in effect, and by its results, to distrust and to insult the Deity. Evil would not be evil if it had that power of self-subsistence which is imputed to it in supposing its aionian life to be co-eternal with that which crowns and glorifies the good.