. . . the Cappadocians were especially
intent on adhering to the strict requirements of apophasis when speaking
about eternity in relation to time. In thinking about God, the language of “time
and creatureliness” was to be avoided. While in this created world “all order
and sequence of time and events” (Gr. Naz. Or. 25.17 [SC 284:198])
could be perceived “only in the aeons” and in their succession, that did
not apply to human thought about “the nature preexistent to those aeons”;
it was impossible for “reason to see in that divine and blessed life the things
observed, and that exclusively, in creation.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.361 [Jaeger
1:134]) As a consequence, Gregory of Nyssa warned, “Every discursive effort of
thought to go back beyond the aeons will ascend only so far as to see that
what it seeks can never be penetrated.” The reason for this was the apophatic
affirmation-by-negation: “No form, no place, no size, no reckoning of time,
nor anything else knowable is there; and so it is inevitable that our
apprehensive faculty, seeking as it always does some object to grasp, must fall
back from any side of this incomprehensible existence.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun.
1.365-69 [Jaeger 1:135-36]) Sometimes what came first seemed to be an
affirmation of eternity rather than a negation of time. “The eternity of God’s
life” meant that God was “to be apprehended as always in being.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun.
1.666 [Jaeger 1:217]) But thereupon such an affirmation almost immediately took
the more precise form of negation, on the basis of the principle, “The idea of
eternity is completed only by the negation both of an arche and of a telos.”
(Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.676 [Jaeger 1:220] Gr. Naz. Or. 38.8 [PG
36:320]) Although eternity was neither time nor part of time, because it could
not be measured, it was permissible to speak in the language of analogy and to
say: “What time, measured by the course of the sun, is to us, that eternity is
to the everlasting one, namely, a sort of timelike movement and interval
coextensive with their existence.” (Gr. Naz. Or. 45.4 [PG
36:628]) Eternity meant a God “transcending the limit of any telos, the
idea of any arche,” and a God, as “the possessor of the beyond [hou to
epeikena], presupposed before all existence.”
That apophatic recognition,
which was axiomatic, also according to natural theology if it could think
straight, served to define and to interpret the language of all theology and religion.
From the human perspective, time was “measured by a threefold division, past,
present, and future.” (Gr. Nyss. Or. dom. 1 [PG 44:1124-25]) But
when the spontaneous formula of religious faith applied that measure of time to
God by saying, “God always was, and always is, and always will be,” (Gr. Naz. Or.
38.7 [PG 36:317]) this was, on deeper reflection, seen to be naïve and imprecise:
“God always ‘is’; ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are fragments of our time, and of changeable
nature, but God is eternal being,” without beginning in the past and future—indeed,
without any past or any future as such. (Gr. Naz. Or. 45.3 [PG
36:625-28]) Both in natural theology and in revealed theology, God was spoken
of as arche, but even such a term was intended to mark the boundaries
beyond which human thought could not go, rather than to give precise information
about the existence that transcended time. (Bas. Spir. 6.14 [SC
17:290] Is 44:6) God was also spoken of as “the first [ho protos]” and as “hereafter
[meta tauta],” but that was only a way of declaring “by this means the doctrine
of a single divine nature, continuous with itself, and without interruption,
not admitting in itself priority and posterity.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun. 3.3.10
[Jaeger 2:110]) When such a term of temporal designation as “this day [sēmeron],”
was used in connection with God, (Ps 2:7) also in the language of Scripture,
that referred to an eternal now, in which there was neither today nor yesterday
or tomorrow. (Gr. Nyss. Apoll. [Jaeger 3-I:225]) Or when the creation
narrative presented its cosmogony as having taken place over a series of six “days,”
(Gn 1:5-31) that was to be interpreted in the light of the axiomatic apophatic
principle that such a sequence was not to be attributed to “the prime
nature, transcending all idea of time and surpassing all reach of thought.”
(Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.341 [Jaeger 1:218]) The “day” and the “week” of the
Genesis narrative were to be understood in the context of the relation of time
to eternity. (Bas. Hex. 2:8 [SC 26:178-80]) Applying ontological language
to the divine and speaking of the divine as “being [ōn]” (Heb 1:3) anything did
not imply encompassing it within time; on the contrary, it meant attributing to
it “continuity and eternity and superiority to all marks of time.” (Gr. Nyss. Eun.
1.637 [jaeger 1:209]) Gregory of Nazianzus frankly admitted the problem: “Such
expression as ‘when’ and ‘before’ and ‘after’ and ‘from the beginning’ are not
timeless, however much we may force them—unless indeed we were to take the aeon,
that interval which is coextensive with the eternal things, and is not divided
or measured by any motion, or by the revolution of the sun, as time is
measured.” (Gr. Naz. Or. 29.3 [SC 250:182]) But even with regard
to this term Gregory of Nyssa pointed out, though probably not explicitly in
response to Gregory of Nazianzus but to Eunomius or to the Macedonian heretics,
that when the psalm described the kingdom of God as “a kingdom of all the aeons,”
(Ps 145:13) the word aeons, too, referred to “every substance in them
created in infinite space, whether visible or invisible.” (Gr. Nyss. Maced.
[Jaeger 3-I:103] Gr. Nyss. Eun. 1.364 [Jaeger 1:134]) Thus it was vain
to “inquire with curiosity into the ‘priority’ of the aeons.” (Jaroslav
Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural
Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism [New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993], 115-16)
