[9] Or they learned that when God
truly appears within vision (to the extent that this is possible), everything that
comes after God has been created by Him, that is, the nature of beings and
time, is seen together with Him, for He is their cause and their maker. Of
these, Moses would be the figure of time, not only [1164B] because he is the
teacher of time and its reckoning (for he was the first to count time from the creation
of the world), but also as the leader of temporal worship, and because he did
not enter bodily into the divinely promised place of rest together with those
who were under his leadership. For such is the nature of time: by its movement
it neither goes before nor marches in step with those whom it sends into the
divine life of the age to come. For it has Jesus, who is the successor of all
time and every age [GK: τον
παντος οντα
και χρονου
και αιωνος], even if
the principles of time should abide differently in God, as is indicated by the
entrance of the law (which had been given in the wilderness through Moses)
together with those who entered the land promised to them. For when its notion is
stilled, time is the age [GK: Αιων
γαρ εστιν
ο χρονος], and the age is time [GK: και χρονος
εστιν ο αιων], as carried along
and [1164C] measured by motion, so that the age—in order to give its definition—is
time deprived of motion, whereas time is the age measured by motion [GK: τον δε
χρονον αιωνα
κινησει μετρουμενον]. (Maximus
the Confessor, Ambigua to John: Ambiguum 10, in On Difficulties in the
Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols. [trans. Nicholas Constas; Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], 1:263)
The age (aion) is the “eternity”
of created beings, a transcendent dimension that is distinguished from the
eternity that is proper to God alone. It is an intermediate state between
divine eternity and ordinary time, being a kind of synthesis of the two,
enabling the divinized creature to exist in divine infinity without obliterating
the limits proper to created being; see CT 1.5-7, 68-70 (PG 90:1085AC,
1108C-1109A); and Gregory the Theologian, Or. 38.8 (SC 358:118, II. 1-11). As Maximos
suggests, the logoi of time persist differently in God, indicated by the
entry of Moses’s law into the promised land: time itself cannot enter the final
rest, but its principles do enter in a new mode. In contrast to the Origenists
(see above, Amb. 7.2), Maximos argues that temporal movement is not the result of
a fall from God, but the very means of creaturely return to God; see Plass, “Moving
Rest.” (Ibid., 488, 52)
