Like Nietzsche, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 March 1887, quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) Unlike Nietzsche, I
appreciate that the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is no solution.
The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.
But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillment, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity. So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life. Our spokesman is Boethius, inspired by Philosophia herself:
Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite
life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal
things. 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 tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost.
And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing,
passing moment. And as Aristotle 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 coextensive 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 fullness of unending
life, which lacks 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. (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
V; the Latin below the fold)
Aeternitas igitur est interminabilis uitae tota simul et perfecta
possessio. Quod ex collatione temporalium clarius liquet. 5 Nam
quicquid uiuit in tempore id praesens a praeteritis in futura
procedit nihilque est in tempore constitutum quod totum uitae suae
spatium pariter possit amplecti, sed crastinum quidem nondum
apprehendit hesternum uero iam perdidit; in hodierna quoque uita
non amplius uiuitis quam in illo mobili transitorioque momento. 6
Quod igitur temporis patitur condicionem, licet illud, sicuti de
mundo censuit Aristoteles, nec coeperit umquam esse nec desinat
uitaque eius cum temporis infinitate tendatur, nondum tamen tale
est ut aeternum esse iure credatur. 7 Non enim totum simul
infinitae licet uitae spatium comprehendit atque complectitur, sed
futura nondum, transacta iam non habet. 8 Quod igitur
interminabilis uitae plenitudinem totam pariter comprehendit ac
possidet, cui neque futuri quicquam absit nec praeteriti fluxerit,
id aeternum esse iure perhibetur idque necesse est et sui compos
praesens sibi semper assistere et infinitatem mobilis temporis
habere praesentem.