Thursday, June 27, 2024

αιων aion being used for the "eternity" of created beings in Maximus the Confessor, The Ambigua

  

[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)