In this penultimate chapter, we take up the philosophical question of whether immortality is truly desirable, seeking to establish an important difference between existing for a finite and for an infinite stretch of time by introducing the following important consideration. If it remains possible for an event to occur, then even an extremely unlikely event is certain to occur, given infinite time. I shall suggest that this consideration leads to insuperable problems with the most popular scenarios currently being envisioned for achieving immortality by techno-scientific means. These problems, moreover, motivate us to think more deeply about death and thereby rethink the requirements of a genuinely meaningful human life. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and other existential thinkers, I suggest that human beings’ most abiding sources of meaningfulness come not from endlessly repeating certain profound experiences (which sometimes does wear out their appeal) but, instead, from our struggle to stay true to and so continue to creatively and responsibly disclose what such momentous events, often rare and singular, only partly reveal to us in the first place, as we often come to realize only in retrospect – much as Heidegger came only retrospectively to recognize and then spend his life creatively disclosing the seemingly inexhaustible ontological riches of that ambiguous “nothing” Being and Time first glimpsed in the momentous experience of existential death, but in a way that Heidegger only partly understood at that time.

This chapter discusses noetic contemplation proper, that is, seeing Intellect as he sees himself by virtue of our vertical participation. We see the entire intelligible world, consisting of the Forms, and we see the unfolding of the Great Kinds, the highest of the Forms in it. Our contemplation of Intellect has an unfolding character, although this doesn’t mean that we see Intellect as being in time. Plotinus shows the limitations of our individual perspective on this and other cosmic principles in contemplation. We see both the unity and the multiplicity of Intellect but in a way that transcends dialectical, discursive, and conceptual thinking. Contemplation doesn’t abolish our ability to think discursively but rather enriches that ability. Dialectical search for the truth is harmonised with a direct, intuitive vision of Intellect. On the one hand, the vision is expressed through dialectic and, on the other, dialectic leads us to and strengthens our intuitive, noetic experience of reality. Philosophy and contemplation become two sides of the same life.

Boethius’ initial question in the Consolation of Philosophy is why God, who orders the natural universe beautifully, would allow human affairs to proceed in a chaotic fashion, even permitting the wicked to trample on the virtuous and go unpunished. Lady Philosophy responds that God governs everything well. What seem to limited human beings to be misfortunes can all be turned to good. This introduces the importance of human free will and a perennial question for Christian philosophers: If God foreknows future choices, can they be free? Human foreknowledge is a sign that the foreknown event does not happen voluntarily. God, being eternal, sees all time as present, and so divine foreknowledge does not impose or indicate any necessity that would conflict with free will. Boethius concludes by expressing theist compatibilism: Even free choices fall under the absolute sovereignty of God.

Boethius, like his Neoplatonic predecessors, poses a challenge to contemporary readers of the Consolation seeking to understand the world he thinks we occupy. That world involves a timeless, simple, but all-knowing creator god and a time-bound, infinite creation that is patterned from the ideas in the divine mind. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a modest illumination into the world as it is conceived in the Consolation by examining two fundamental Boethian categories and their relationship: the eternal and the temporal. The chapter examines the extent to which we should see these categories providing guidance as to the nature of beings rather than expressing the epistemic perspectives those beings have. By noting the limits, we will draw conclusions about the persistence of temporal beings; the ontological status possessed by future, present, and past states of affairs; and what characterizes eternal existence.

Chapter 5 argues that the identification of the form in the mind of the artisan with art amounts to ascribing it the role of efficient cause. As the chapter explains, the form in the mind of the artisan is responsible for both qualified and unqualified coming-to-be. Art is the only form that is an efficient cause, in contrast to the form inherent in the artefact. By resorting to Aristotle’s biological works, the chapter clarifies how artefacts come to lack an inner principle of their behaviour and how this is connected with their lack of an inner principle of unqualified coming-to-be. Two theses in particular are challenged. The first is that the form is transmitted from the mind to the object and, as a result, the form of an artefact is potential, because this is the status of the form in the mind in the artisan. The second thesis is that artefacts are not substances because their forms are not principles of changes. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relation between eternity and substantiality.

Time, and how we relate to it, is a persistent theme throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Particularly striking is the way in which Kierkegaard depicts various pathologies of temporal experience, showing how various strategies for dealing with time are ultimately self-defeating. Either/Or is perhaps the single best example of a text in which Kierkegaard problematizes time and our responses to it. The book is famously presented as staging a clash between two views of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. But it can also be understood as presenting and critiquing two different ways of relating to time: one that tries to evade the responsibility entailed by living in time and one that tries to anchor itself in an eternity that is ultimately a denial of finitude. The text suggests both approaches to time are doomed, and that a different, specifically religious relation to time is required.

This chapter examines Augustine’s account of the eternal God’s creation of, ordering of, and presence within creaturely temporality, a presence perfected in the Incarnation.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

Caroline Humfress explores the distinctive relationship between sacred (Christian) temporality and (Western) ‘hermeneutics of the state’, through a focus upon the founding texts of the Civilian legal tradition: the sixth-century CE Digest, Code and Institutes. Part 1 analyses the Emperor Justinian’s claim that these law-books were to be ‘valid for all eternity’ through a series of close textual readings of the same law-books’ prefatory constitutions. Part 2 contextualises Justinian’s lawyerly invocation of ‘eternity’ within contemporary Eastern Christological disputes, including a set of theological debates, orchestrated by Justinian himself, that took place at the same time (and location) as his law-books were being compiled. Part 3 concludes by arguing that the ‘timeless’, rational, universal, authority of the Civilian Legal tradition – as explored in the chapter by Ryan – was in fact underpinned by a specific Eastern (‘Byzantine’) sacred temporality.

This essay provides basic exposition of GC II 11; for though the upshot of this difficult chapter is by and large clear, the argumentative details are often hard to make out. The question of the chapter is whether there is anything that comes to be of necessity; its answer, briefly put, is that there would be if there were anything whose coming to be was everlasting, which there would be if there were anything whose coming to be was cyclical, which in point of fact there is (e.g., solstices). The argument fails, of course; the reason, I suggest, is that it does not follow, from the fact that (say) solstices come to be cyclically, that they are always in process of coming to be.

Bodily images – smiles (especially those of Beatrice), music, and silences – are key elements of the language of this celestial pedagogy that are also those of Heaven’s essential nature. Smiles: It was in Purgatory that Beatrice reprimanded Dante for his grim seriousness (see Chapter 5). In Paradiso 33 Dante learns why: It is that smiles originate in the Trinity itself: They are what make God to be a trinity. And silence: Now Satan’s silence is seen as the opposite of Heaven’s and the two “apophaticisms,” of Heaven and Hell, embrace the whole of language, and all poetry, that finds its place between those two silences. And for Peter Damien Heaven’s silence is that of music, reflecting Boethius’s belief that each of the cosmic spheres emit a note, the conjunction of which is a celestial silence. And the last of word of all, Dante says, the word that moves his will, is the Word made flesh. For what moves his will is what that moves the sun and the other stars, the Word made human.

This chapter unpacks the dense statement that Kierkegaard gives of his ontology of the self at the start of The Sickness unto Death. It considers the claims that the self is a synthesis of factors that stand in tension with one another (the finite and the infinite, etc.); that it is not simply a relation but a dynamic, continuing process of relating to itself; that it is only able to be this because it relates to another (God); and that selfhood, so considered, is a goal which human beings fall short of attaining. Throughout, Kierkegaard’s thought is explicated by comparison and contrast with other philosophical accounts of the self, referring to Descartes, Locke, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre and Frankfurt; and the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard’s account to recent discussions of selfhood, the relation of the self or person to the human being, and the extent to which the self can be thought of as self-constituted is emphasized.

The Sickness unto Death presents a startlingly modern view of the self as non-substantialist, emergent, and process-driven. Instead of an immaterial soul or metaphysical essence, Kierkegaard’s self is a state of the human body and mind in “synthesis,” something human beings can become (or fail to become) through relating to themselves in a particular way. But the self is also presented in this work as an essentially eschatological being. While the self may be formed in and through its social context, Anti-Climacus returns again and again to the idea that the self is at heart the subject of an eternal judgment. This has significant implications both for what Kierkegaard takes selves – and by extension each of us – to be, and how we understand the temporality within which beings like us live.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

Cavendish displayed a lifelong fascination with one of the hardest of the “hard” problems, the nature of infinity. In an age which saw the birth of calculus as well as revolutionary developments in cosmology, a consistent theory of infinity was generally regarded as an illusory goal. Cavendish tackled this vexing scientific problem, which represented a radical departure from the cosmological and theological consensus of the 1660s; it anticipates a new worldview which emerged toward the end of the century, in which biblical revelation was eventually subordinated to empirical science, the Copernican hypothesis triumphed over rival theories, and the notion of a plurality of worlds became commonplace rather than shocking. From the playful speculations of the 1650s, Cavendish’s confident analysis of the nature of infinity had evolved into an essential ingredient in her prescient “theory of everything.”

Numenius (second century AD), the only witty Platonist after Plato himself, memorably described Plato as ‘Moses talking Attic’. He did not mean thereby to rate Eastern wisdom more highly than Platonic philosophy, as is sometimes suggested, but to recognise in the words ‘I AM THAT I AM’, spoken to Moses by the God of the Hebrews, an anticipation, unique in Eastern lore, of the conception Numenius championed of the Platonic first principle One or Good as Being itself. This paper proposes that his further exploration of that idea shows him to have construed the Timaeus account of such being as an eternal present, or in Boethius’s words ‘the complete possession all at once of an infinite life’, not as timelessness (the Timaeus interpretation advocated by Richard Sorabji). It is argued that this was both a correct interpretation of Plato’s text, and one shared in much subsequent ancient and medieval philosophy, including Plotinus, Augustine, and Aquinas. From our own human perspective, a present tense without past or future connections might be considered ‘a kind of logical torso’, a defective remnant of ordinary time. For Plato that human conception of present time is itself a mere image of eternity.

There is an extraordinary moment in the history of the translation of the Bible, that opens a vista not just on to the cultural politics of translation but also on to the way that theories of time-frame scripture’s narratives of God.