Understanding the Aidios-Aion-Aionios Distinction for Christian Theology
One
I love realizing that I’ve been wrong, especially when I’ve missed something important and beautiful that was hidden in plain sight. When the mistake is basic enough, correcting it can cause a lot of other pieces to suddenly slide into place, like a puzzle box suddenly springing open. That’s why deep mistakes are my favorites, even if they are also the most challenging to fully address. This article is about the wonderful experience of spotting a deep mistake, on my own part. It is written for those of us who love discovering old things that are new to us.
It is the story of how, in spotting my own mistakes, I came to understand the ancient language of temporal limits with a new level of nuance and practical depth. Here I’ll help unpack some of the ancient Greek terms that were used to discuss time, specifically “aidios” and “aion” and “aionios”. Together they provide a coherent, profound, and reasonably simple way of talking about time that will hopefully give you as much joy as this study has given me.
I feel a special urgency around this work because we are facing a substantial risk of imminent national death in the United States, and this language helps us see how the New Testament speaks into this situation. The nation that was born in the fires of the Civil Rights Movement is being choked off and the odds are good that it will die in a couple of years. Something else, grim but also perhaps hopeful, might be born from the ashes. I don’t know if it will go that way, but a moving train has its tendencies unless spectacularly derailed. Given these urgent practicalities, it might seem incredibly eccentric to respond to this situation with some fairly technical analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and Matthew 24–25. Still, if you pay close attention, I think you can find some real hope and insight here that is especially helpful in times like these.
The reading that develops here is encouraging in two ways. First, I think it provides practical advice and intergenerational hope, even when facing near term catastrophes. Second, I think that this sort of Biblical theology can provide a profound and powerful response to the spiritual abuse systems that substantially mobilize these texts in controlling and harmful ways, and these abuse systems are at the heart of the current attack on our democracy. Reactionary religious authoritarians constantly use the threat of endless torture to control people in their groups, and to induce extreme and aggressive behavior from them. If we read their prooftexts better, in ways that encourage faithfulness to the loving way of Jesus, I think we can provide a helpful replacement for their enormously harmful approach to Scripture. If we can replace spiritual abuse with an honest, reconciling, peaceful and just spirituality, I think we can cut off the power of many of these abuse systems at their deepest root, which is their deadly slander against God and against God’s image-bearers.
Although my hopes here involve some very practical considerations, I think that the arguments stand up well under rigorous scrutiny. I’ve shared my interests plainly, because I believe in accountability. I believe that we all have interests and that we should try to be honest with ourselves and with each other about them. Although there is a vulnerability to this, especially in contexts where people are in denial about their own interests, I think it is only fair for you to know where I’m coming from, including possible biases that might bring. Nonetheless, I would also invite any reader (skeptical or sympathetic) to carefully scrutinize the arguments and demonstrations offered here on their own terms, instead of simply grouping me as an enemy or a friend, cherry picking some reason to dismiss or support me. That is, unfortunately, the way these things usually go. For your sake, for the sake of the world, and for my sake please don’t do that.
In the spirit of continued accountability and integrity, especially when it comes to disclosing my interests, I will tell you where this started. I wanted to deeply understand a common prooftext for the view that non-Christians will be tormented forever when they die. When we’re done, we will be on our way towards reading the passage well, in context, in a way that I think is deeply coherent, challenging, inspiring, and surprising. The passage comes at the end of Matthew 25:
He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
Then they will go away to eternal (aionic) punishment, but the righteous to eternal (aionic) life.
The word translated as “eternal” here is “aionios.” Heleen Keizer, whose work I will use extensively here, helpfully transforms this Greek adjective into a suitably strange English adjective: “aionic.” This raises the question: what’s an aion? By some strange grace, good fortune or design, the word aion occurs in Matthew 24–25 and so it provides us with an example of the word in our immediate context:
“Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age (aion)?”
You can see why a straightforward ‘literal’ translation of the end of Matthew 25, in light of the pericope’s beginning (and remember that beginnings and ends are meant to be read together), might translate “aionic” as “ageic.” But ageic is not a word in English, and it would be a strange choice for any but the most brutally literal translator. It’s unsurprising that many translators have therefore tried to take a different approach, and I do think “ageic” is a fairly unhelpful translation in most cases. In part, as we will see, that is also because “age” is itself a questionable translation of “aion”.
Instead of using the word “ageic”, most translators opt for “eternal”, in part because the word apparently originates with its earliest known use in Plato’s Timaeus. However, the relevant passage from Plato is deeply perplexing when this translation is used, and the passage makes far more sense if we don’t read Plato that way. If a translation is enduringly perplexing, this suggests that we may have gotten our translation wrong. Uncovering how the word works in the Timaeus will provide us with a powerful alternative way to understand this language. Heleen Keizer’s magisterial study of the key words, “Life, Time, Entirety” is very helpful here and she has generously made her work freely available online. She exhaustively and brilliantly analyzes “aion,” “aionios” and its Hebrew parallels, and I’ll draw on key parts of her work throughout this project.
In a passage whose significance it took me a long time to internalize, Keizer convincingly shows that “aion” means “lifetime” even in Plato’s Timaeus. The word “lifetime” here refers to an entire life, a whole life, or life taken as a whole. Whenever you think about your life as a whole, notice how it is kind of frozen in your mind: you’re not really thinking about the movement from moment to moment, but of all of those moments and memories together … all of the laughter and sorrow and joy and disconnection and shame and delight and pain … all drawn together into a cohesive whole. That’s a lifetime.
Your lifetime isn’t a moment that gets sequenced for us all, like days or weeks, but is instead a different kind of time category. It is a bit like a container that can hold all of those moments, all of the minutes and seconds and hours, but it isn’t a clearly demarcated, numbered period of time. After all, how many minutes are in an hour? 60. How many minutes are in a lifetime? Ah, well that depends. And relatedly: does one lifetime end just as another lifetime begins, as happens with each dying hour? No. Lifetimes overlap in a way that the 24 hours of each new day do not.
Insofar as our own lifetimes enter a kind of sequence it is the movement from one generation to the next, but these generations are always overlapping in time. Generations do not proceed in an orderly way like minutes, because wise people and suckers are always being born before the old suckers and old wise people die. In contrast, the death of one minute on the standard clock is precisely the birth of the next, and each is just as long as the other. Some lives are tragically cut short. And the lives of tyrants are sometimes tragically long. This can’t happen to the hours that constitute time unless the sun itself dies.
This helps us understand what Plato is talking about in the Timaeus, when he talks about the emergence of time and the created order that comes alongside it. He explicitly views the entire cosmos as a living being that has its own lifetime, and so “aion” is used quite literally to talk about the lifetime of the entire universe, the order (cosmos) that is marked out by the stars. In this way, the lifetime of the universe intuitively refers to all of the time given with this creation. The universal lifetime is the whole container of the moments that transpire within this massive collection of stars and galaxies where we have found ourselves. In contrast to “aion” and its adjective form “aionios”, Plato also uses the term “aidios” to refer to that which is beyond time. The text concerns itself with the problem of how a good Creator can mediate the chasm between timeless eternity (aidios ‘time’) and the lifetime of the living universe (its aion).
This background can help you parse this crucial section of the Timaeus, which we will be discussing in some depth. Here is the most important section for the argument we are exploring here:
Since the entire structure of the soul (ψυχῆς) had been formed according to reason by the creator (συνιστάντι), the creator then constructed every bodily form within it [36e], and gathered the middle with the middle, fitting them together. The soul, stretching out from the center to the outermost heaven, enfolded it from the outside with a circle, revolving within itself, and began an unceasing and intelligent life (βίου) for the whole of time (χρόνον). The visible body of the cosmos was thus formed, while the soul itself remained invisible, partaking of reason (λογισμοῦ) and harmony (ἁρμονίας), being the best of all created (γεννηθέντων) things from the realm of the intelligible, always existing (ἀεί) by the best and most perfect source.
Since it was formed from the same, the other, and the nature of the three substances, and had been proportionately divided and connected, the soul, revolving back upon itself, whenever it touched some divisible substance, and whenever it encountered something indivisible, spoke, moving through all of itself, about what is the same and where it is different [37b], in relation to whatever, wherever, and however it most likely occurred, according to what was happening to each individual thing and how it was affected by the things that always remain the same. True reason (λόγος) about the other and the same, existing without sound or echo, is carried within the moving soul, whenever it is about the perceptible and the circle of the other moves straight, announcing through the entire soul, forming beliefs and stable, true convictions [37c]; but when it is about the rational, and the circle of the same moves smoothly, revealing the truth, understanding and knowledge necessarily come into being. If anyone ever calls this something other than the soul, they will speak far from the truth.
When the creator/father (γεννήσας πατήρ) saw that the living (ζῶν) image of the eternal gods (ἀιδίων θεῶν) was set in motion, he rejoiced and, being well pleased, decided to make it even more similar to the model (παράδειγμα).
[37d] Just as the Living Being (ζῷον) itself happens to be eternal (ἀίδιον), the Creator (δημιουργός) attempted to make this entire world (κόσμος) in such a manner. The nature (φύσις) of the Living Being happened to be eternal (αἰώνιος), and it was entirely impossible to attach this property to the created (γεννητῷ). He conceived an image (εἰκών) of a moving eternity (αἰών), and while organizing the cosmos (κόσμος), he created a heaven (οὐρανός) with an eternal (αἰώνιος) image moving in a single number, which we call time (χρόνος) [37e]. For days, nights, months, and years did not exist before the creation of heaven (οὐρανός). At the same time, as it came into being, he devised their genesis (γένεσις). All these are parts of time (χρόνος), and the forms “was” and “will be” are in time, which we mistakenly transfer to the eternal (ἀίδιον) essence (οὐσία). We say that it “was,” “is,” and “will be,” but truly, “is” (ἔστιν) alone is appropriate according to the true account (λόγος) [38a]. “Was” and “will be” should be spoken of only concerning the genesis (γένεσις) that occurs in time (χρόνος), for they are movements. What always remains the same, immovably, is neither older nor younger due to time, nor did it ever come into being, nor is it now, nor will it ever be. All that genesis has brought to those carried in perception (αἰσθήσις) is nothing at all, but these forms have come to be through the imitation (μίμησις) of the eternity (αἰών) of time (χρόνος) moving in a circle and by number [38b]. In addition to these, we say that what has come to be (γεγονός) is what has come to be, what is coming to be (γιγνόμενον) is coming to be, what will come to be (γενησόμενον) will come to be, and what is not (μὴ ὂν) is not. We speak of none of these things precisely. Concerning these matters, there may not be a suitable time for a thorough investigation at present.[1]
As Keizer notes, in Greek the word cosmos refers to some ordered arrangement, but it doesn’t necessarily refer to the whole universe in each particular use. In typically sweeping fashion, in the Timaeus Plato extends the idea of any order to the most cosmic scale possible: he uses it to refer to the ordered heavens and by extension all of the ordered Creation. Importantly, cosmos (ordered thing, especially perceptibly ordered) and aion/aionios (lifetime, lifetime-ic) are basic words with pretty basic and restricted meanings, and Plato is turning them up to 11 here. But this doesn’t mean that the word “cosmos” or the word “aion” therefore mean “all that is ordered” or “the lifetime of the universal cosmos” on their own. Plato hasn’t redefined any of these words. Cosmos just means “something (perceptibly) ordered” and when it is applied to the heavens (and by extension, everything), it draws the ordered nature of everything into view. Similarly, aion just means “lifetime”, but if we talk about the whole lifetime of the universal cosmos, understood as a living being, then we are talking about something truly huge. We are imagining something as nearly endless as anything within this universe could be. It is the cosmic scope of application that gives “cosmos” and “aion” their cosmic feel in the Timaeus, and it is thanks to the deep influence of that discussion that “cosmic” sounds cosmic to us today, instead of sounding orderly. (“Cosmos” is therefore a false friend to us in English: we think we know what it means in Greek because we have borrowed it into English, but we are subtly and importantly wrong.)
Still, this doesn’t involve any kind of redefinition of “aion” at all. For example, the waiting line on the phone with your private health insurer might be intolerably long, for a waiting line, and a universe might be long for a universe. But this doesn’t mean that “long” has suddenly lost its normal meaning, and that the word, on its own, now just means “universally long”. The same should be said for cosmos and aion and aionios, especially in the Timaeus. Plato is not, here, cycling around special terminology in a confused jumble of assumed conclusions; he isn’t starting from “aion” as eternity… it only comes to seem that way to us, far on the other side of what he is actually doing. He is, rather, taking basic words with basic meanings (cosmos, aion and the novel term aionic) and stretching them to the grandest reaches of meaning. We can similarly try to stretch almost any word. For example, what would “Vegetable” mean, stretched to its greatest possible extent? What is the universal Vegetable? The idea invites us to try to hold an enormous branch of the tree of life in our minds, and from there we might press even more deeply into pondering what kind of universe we must be in, if it is one that has the potential for vegetables. It’s that sort of thing.
So if “aion” means “lifetime” in the Timaeus, then what is going on with this weird word “aionic”? What could “lifetimic” mean, especially in the context in which Plato apparently invented the word: his discussion of the lifetime of the universal cosmos? This is the question that I had gotten subtly wrong for a long time. It is the crucial moment in our story. First, I’d like to illustrate my partial (and therefore mistaken) understanding of what was going on with “lifetimic”, so that you can understand how the incomplete analysis relates to the more complete analysis that holds it all together. The analysis below is only subtly wrong, but it is the kind of subtle mistake that keeps many other things from sliding precisely into place.
So here was my mistake, which suffers from a crucially excessive narrowness. What if we understand aionios as being like “lifetimely”, so that lifetimely is to life as daily is to day? Consider an analogy to “day” or “year” (a unit of time). What happens when you turn “day” into an adjective, like “daily”? You don’t just talk about one day, but you can now talk about the pattern of days: I might eat broccoli one day, but if I eat it daily then I eat it every day. The adjective of a time word therefore describes the general form of the unit of time, while the noun describes a single differentiated instance of it: the time adjective refers to the general One, and the noun names the many specific instances that copy it. As Keizer notes, a number of scholars have drawn a similar inference. We can also put it this way. Consider that “yearly” is a more general form, and so each year can be understood as a copy of what is yearly. After all, you don’t have any years unless you have a cycle of years and you can take one year out of whatever it is that is happening yearly. Specifically, unless you have the seasons that are shaped by our planet’s relationship to the sun, there’s no yearly cycle from which you might derive the idea of a year at all. There is no year without The Yearly. This is why we can talk about doing something next year, but it doesn’t make sense to say we’ll do it next Yearly. This is why “yearly” isn’t a temporal word, in the sense of being part of a sequence of things. There is no next “yearly” unless, perhaps, we’re talking in a way that Plato couldn’t because he didn’t have Copernicus: we might get another “yearly” with the next planet we colonize. Another planet will have another yearly because it will circle its star at its own rate, but even this sequence of planetary colonizations is not about a sequence of units of time. It is a sequence between systems of years (corresponding necessarily to planet-sun relations), and after Einstein we have to note that even here, with all of my revolutionary heliocentrism, I am still talking about time in a naïve way. The point is that the relationship between “aion” and “aionic” would make a ton of sense if aionic is beyond temporal sequence in just the same way “yearly” is beyond sequence. This could explain why a particular, moving and living creature cannot instantiate the general reality named by the adjective. After all, how do you move from one yearly to the next? In Plato’s cosmos where chronological time is instantiated through the movement of the sun, you don’t.
In just the same way (thinking Platonically), each cat you might encounter is like a copy of the general model of “Cat”. I follow a standard convention when I capitalize Cat when I’m talking about its general form. “Cat” is the universal form of all cats, and “cat” indicates the “copies” of it, much like we could cast a bunch of bronze cats (each with their own little accidental differences) using the sculptural mold of the Cat to produce them all. (This analogy is an analogy between the “form” and its “copies”; Plato doesn’t seem to envision this too literally, and precisely not in a reductively fleshy way.)
In putting together my lovely (but flawed) analysis, you get something like this: Yearly is to Cat as a year is to a cat. In just this way, Aionic is the general form of aion too. Really, this is about as nice as it gets. The annoying thing that Keizer points out is that insofar as Plato’s usage is concerned, this isn’t quite it. As she says (p71):
It is remarkable that of the two instances of aionios in the Timaeus the one applies to the model (37d3) and the other to the copy (37d7). This has troubled commentators who considered aionic as a property of the model qua model, and interpreted it as eternal in the sense of ‘supra-temporal’, which amounts to non-temporal, while the corresponding property of the copy would precisely be its temporality. Along this line of thought, aion and chronos tend to be true contraries — something which is hard to reconcile with their relationship as model and copy. In the context of Plato’s doctrine of Ideas (Forms), however, it need not be a problem that model and copy are both called aionic, since according to this doctrine both the Idea in the intelligible realm and its representation in the material world bear the same name: Good and good, Horse and horse, etc. This point is made explicit in Timaeus 52a, where the copy is said to be ‘homonymous’ with the model. Thus, when the model is called aionic, the copy can be predicated accordingly. We may note however that although the copy is called aionic (the derived adjective), we never hear it being called aion (the noun).
The demiurge makes a copy of aion, of “life(time)”. This lifetime is qualified as “remaining at one” (37d6) — a qualification in ready agreement with the notion of completeness. The copy by contrast is said to be “in motion” (37d5) and “proceeding according to number” (37d6–7). We will now take a closer look at the copy.
And this particular point, which has annoyed me for about a decade, is what really jumped out for me when I reviewed the text again. (And as it turns out, this is fantastically helpful for reading Matthew 24–25.) What if instead of thinking of aionic as “aionly” we read it as “aion-ish” which helps highlight the squishiness of “aionic”? Aionly works sometimes, but aionish works both times, and is even better if it informs our thinking on aionish copies.
We may note however that although the copy is called aionic (the derived adjective), we never hear it being called aion (the noun)…The copy by contrast is said to be “in motion” (37d5) and “proceeding according to number” (37d6–7).
I had it backwards, at least in one of the two earliest known uses. (Quite likely the earliest uses). The aionic isn’t necessarily the more general Aionly form, of which each aion is a copy. Rather (on this reading) aionish can describe the model (which is an Aion) but it can also easily run just the other way: aionish things can also be copies of the original. They are, you know, kind of like the original aion, ish. The same term is being used in a more precise and logical way (in negating the possibility of translating this into lifetimes like ours), and in a squishier and less precise way that corresponds precisely with the descent from the realm of pure logic and towards the realm of pure sensation and matter.
In just the same way, the form of Cat is cattish (in the most proper sense) and each cat is also cattish (in a more variable and less precise sense), and cattishness also marks the mediation from form to copies that makes sequence possible. Why? Because it is also the bridge from one to many. The form of Aion is aionish and all of the littler aions are also aionish. The adjective is precisely what mediates and connects the form and the copies. The word is useful because it allows us to precisely name the similarity (the nature or essence) that is shared between form and copies, and because the punning elision from unitary precision to variation and division formally reflects the procession from pure idea to the messy world of application.
So what is it that the forms and their copies share? Their cattishness. What is it that the universal lifetime and all of our little lifetimes share in common? Their lifetimeishness. Now this kind of linguistic clarity can seem hollow and unsatisfying from a certain scientific standpoint. Have we really learned anything about cats here by saying that the thing they share is that they are cattish, in two subtly distinct senses that coincide in a single homonym? Not really. But we have made some vocabulary that can be helpful for describing future investigations, and which records and encodes this formal insight within it. What is valuable here is that we can now remember that what is cattish about them describes something significant about their shared model, while variants between them that are only accidental, or incidental, are not precisely that which is cattish. Suppose, for example, that you have only ever seen striped cats; you might think that being striped is something intrinsically cattish, something that characterizes all cats. But then you find some spotted cats and you can adjust your general model of a cat; now you know that stripes are only incidentally and not necessarily cattish. The general development of this abstract vocabulary is generally useful for structuring future empirical investigations like that.
Hold onto that, because this is going to get good.
If we follow Plato’s Timaeus, then Aion must be the original. But aionish can describe both the Aion and the aion-ish copies of the original, which are all of the other littler aions or lifetimes. The word “aionish” is the bridge that mediates between the form and the copies. And as the bridge between sequenced time and the lifetime of the cosmos as a whole, it can describe the many copies (there are many generations), but is not yet a strict sequence that can mark time (generations overlap, rather than rigidly proceeding like days), and it can also describe the prototypical Aion on which the copies are based.
So in Matthew 24–25, what is the original Aion, the original complete lifetime in view? Here I would submit for your consideration that the prototypical Aion that Jesus has in view in Matthew 24 is the Lifetime of the Kingdom of Judah, the national project that he and his people were involved in, as it is represented by its King’s own lifetime. So what, exactly, is dying when the disciples ask when the Aion, the Lifetime, will end? The nation that was born through its devotion to God in the Second Temple, just as the nation’s Messiah will also die. Nonetheless, in a complex way that is explored beautifully in Levenson’s “Sinai and Zion”, the Temple is also an axis mundi that represents and instantiates the universal cosmos. And with the death of this Temple for a second time, we follow the general diadic form of so much of the Hebrew Bible: we have two events that allow us to be edified by comparing and contrasting them carefully. So the Second Temple finishes the One-and-Two of Temple and Temple, like a musician going “one and two and …” (one and two and one and two). The double death lays down the terrifying beat. The completion of the first illustrative cycle of a pattern is an end, of sorts, but it is hardly the great synthesis (synteleia) of a song.
So then when we get to Matthew 25 and the word aionic, it fits perfectly when we are shown a judgment not on one nation but on all the nations, represented by Sheep and Goats in a way that beautifully echoes the Ram and Goat of Daniel 8. What is the point of calling the punishments and rewards lifetimish at the end of Matthew? It isn’t that these things transcend time, especially time as given in the lifetime of the universal cosmos. Instead, the point is that they constitute time: they are the copies of that nation’s lifetime that carry the story of time forward. This is a transcendence that supervenes, rather than escapes. What is being said is that what happened here will happen there, again and again and again and again. The just will be just and testify against the cruel in their generations, as I did here. The nations will rise and fall. And I (Jesus) will be there to say: only generosity to the poor (the constant cry of the prophets), as represented by my poor little ones who cry this message in solidarity, will save you. For all the time going forward, everything will be a copy of what happened here until God is all in all and justice is done in the end. This is the structure of the lifetimes of nations, precisely because it reflects the structure of the lifetime of the universal cosmos, which is what temples have always drawn together. This is what is properly lifetimeish. One and two and one and two and one and two.
So let’s pull this together into a translation of our key texts. There is more going on with the language in Matthew 24–25 than a single translation can bear. But here, if we’d like to be Greek about it, I think this is the winning translation:
“Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the lifetime (of our nation)?*
*The disciples had their national life in view here: the lifetime of the social organism born around the Second Temple, and perhaps more broadly the traditional national Temple system. It was common in Greek to talk about the lifetime of the whole cosmos, which was seen as a living being, and so the lifetime of the heavenly cosmos was a way of talking about the full time that would transpire in this particular ordered state of affairs as marked out, temporally, by the stars.
…
He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
Then they will go away to their lifetimes’ punishment, but the righteous to the life of lives.
In this translation we use two different genitive constructs in English to translate the close of Matthew 25. The use of the genitive is especially justifiable because the underlying Aramaic and Hebrew use the genitive phrase ‘ad-‘olam. We aren’t Greek, so we haven’t inherited Plato’s own neologism of “lifetimeish” (aionios), and we don’t generally share the precise philosophical system in which that term is deeply embedded. Still, “life of lives” has the benefit of being able to play with a heritage we have in English and Hebrew: phrases like King of Kings and Lord of Lords use the genitive to intuitively express this one-to-many relationship. At various points, English is closer to the underlying Aramaic or Hebrew than the Greek in how it gets at this, so it is eminently justifiable to use a familiar Hebraism over an unfamiliar Hellenization to intuitively convey the one-to-many relationship.
We end up with a translation that is reasonably clear and also quite literal. In crucial ways, it is much more literal than the confused muddle of “eternities” that we have become accustomed to. We could also take a more brutally consistent approach and translate “life of lives” as “lifetimes’ lives.” But I think the likely Aramaic background and the complexity of the topic can justify the inconsistency. We might also play around with “lifetime of life” and “time of their life” here, even as these aren’t exactly what is happening in Greek. But they are close English adaptations that reflect the sort of play that really is happening here: aion really does just basically mean lifetime, and aion-ish (in Plato’s original coinage) refers to the Lifetime copied and to its copies, bridging from the big Aion to the smaller lifetimes that imitate it. The aionic bridge concept perfectly describes the transferal of “Lifetime” from singular to multiple, but not in the strict sense that numerical time units like days are sequenced.
Interestingly when Matthew 25 is read in this way it fits spectacularly well with an inaugurated eschatology. The point in this passage could be summarized as “Jesus will come back.” But here at least, we should probably hear that as “Jesus will remain, but will also keep coming back again and again and again, as he will be with us until the end of the age, scarred but whole and alive, approaching us from the margins in his need but also reigning at the right hand of the Father who lives and reigns forever and ever, amen.”
The point of Matthew’s Gospel is not that Jesus will be enthroned at some future date. Yes, when all is said and done Christian theology must envision a completion that we do not yet know. However, as Christian liturgy has always attested, he is already enthroned and seated at the right hand of the Father where he lives and reigns in glory. And so the movement of witness by the poor that Matthew 25 envisions, rooted in prophetic discipleship, is empowered by the fact that he is already enthroned. Lifted up on the cross and then lifted up to the highest heaven to reign for all time, no one can stop him from sending his messengers in each generation. In just this way, he will carry forward the prophetic vocation of Israel to all nations. He is urging us to build on his foundation of enemy love, solidarity with the poor, and participate in his reconciling work, or else our nations will fall just like all the others … just as the Kingdom of Judah fell in the first century.
Read in this way, “aionic” doesn’t indicate the end of a process, but its beginning. But “aionic” is not the general form. Rather, the “Aion of Judah, centered on the Temple” is the typological prototype, and the aionic copying mediates the general form of the Aion of Judah to all of the nations. Their lives and deaths carry forward that form again and again and again in history. Just as our lifetimes last for a while and end, so too do the nations have lives that last for a while and then end. Just as our lifetimes overlap and go for an indefinitely long period of time, the nations’ lives overlap and go for an indefinitely long period of time. It is not a mere sequence, but the creative patterning of the lives, and it is these lives that really make the numeric sequence of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years meaningful.
Non-coincidentally, this is just the sort of thing that needs to be done to establish a Year 0. Jesus has found the grand container for the years, and within this we now mark out the rotations of the sun and the moon.
This reading then connects Christ’s Temple-based “time-holding” with star-based time-keeping in a critical way. This also helps illuminate this passage in Matthew, an evocative Isaiah reference:
The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
No, Matthew 24–25 says, the stars are not eternal. They will not last forever or mark out time forever. But this Temple’s rise and fall and Phoenix-like rise (talking about Jesus here) will be the way of marking out time from now on and for all time, because this is the pattern of which everything is a copy.
And here we are in 2022. Story checks out, at least so far.
So if the nation born in the Civil Rights Movement falls, and it may happen soon, I think the reason is clear enough. We have not pressed deeply enough into the work of reconciliation and enemy love and solidarity with the poor.
Is it too late? I don’t know. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.
Two
Today’s journey toward the judgment in Matthew 24–25 will have three steps: I’ll explain my maternal method of reconciliation, and then illustrate it through Keizer and Ramelli’s work on aidios, aion and aionios (terms that get confusingly turned into ‘eternity’). This will provide a framework for an oracular apocalyptic reading of Bob Dylan’s “It’s Not Dark Yet.” In section one above I offered readings that connect with the aion of the song and its aionic elements. Today, we’ll journey into the aidios. Briefly, there are good reasons to think that “aidios” refers to that which is ‘outside’ of time and properly atemporal, while aion and aionios reach their greatest extension in those cases where they address the lifetime of the universe as a whole.
But first, maternal method, because it will help us understand how Keizer’s work comes to hold Ramelli and Konstan’s.
Imagine there’s a mother with a crying toddler, still of nursing age. She is going to explain to you what she does in this situation, as she does it, so you will both see what to do and understand what it all means. Oh and this mother’s name is Sophia and Logos: her name is wisdom and understanding. Already you may be wondering if the Logos is Jesus or if, as in Clement of Alexandria, perhaps the Logos is still the Holy Spirit. The answer, of course, is that there is a time when mother and child are one. We have to get back to remembering that insight if we’re going to resolve all of our attachment issues, which produce non-reconciling behaviors.
So the baby is crying, and Sophia explains: she can tell that he is hungry and he is too far from his secure base. So she scoops him up in her arms, tipping him over gently while whispering to him. “This is called Aufhebung,” she explains. “In German, it refers to a lifting up and an overturning all at once. The one who does the uplifting has to be the bigger one in the room at the moment, equipped with a gentleness rooted in strength. Sometimes, it is almost as if the little ones have forgotten that their mother is always here for them.” She soothes the child gently for a bit, continuing the whispering and smiling and cooing. She explains, “This is called parrhesia. We cannot persuade the child that things are going to be okay if his autonomic nervous system is overly activated. So we have to soothe him before he can nurse. In the same way, adults can be frightened when an uplifting-overturning happens, so there comes a time when you need to be polite in an exaggerated way until their nerves relax. Then they can hear truths, bold and elementary.” Finally after hushing and hushing and hushing long enough, she starts to nurse the child. “This creates secure attachment,” she explains as they gaze at each other, smiling. “He came from me and returns to me, at least until he is ready to go out and do the work of reconciliation on his own. If a child loses this connection he can go out into the world far too aggressively. When he encounters conflict, instead of remembering this and being equipped for reconciliation, he will slander and accuse and his moral exclusion system will be activated. That is not the way. But this child I will call Logos, after myself, and I will always be with him in every moment.” This is the way of wisdom and reconciliation. It always remembers how the Logos proceeds from Sophia, and those who reject it will tell you by their rage at this suggestion. They’ll even call this heresy, if you can believe it. I sort through their confusions about the Trinity and the senses of procession here.
What is this method properly called? It isn’t Socratic or Platonic or Hegelian: it is not held in these various dialectics, but it holds them in a way that is pre-linguistic, while also enabling discursive language. It holds them all with ease because they were all hearing an echo of their mothers’ distant voice even as they’d forgotten and effaced the attachment-work of the mother. Let’s punningly call this method Sophism: not meaning empty rhetoric, but instead referring to dialectic redeemed by attachment. So it’s true that sophism can refer to something bad and I agree that empty rhetoric is bad. But here Sophism enacts the Seraphic mode of engagement (remember that the serpent is a de-winged seraph): we must see past the overgeneralized image of the enemy and the threat it produces if we’re going to use this method at all. So remember that Socrates, too, was called a sophist. This is why the method is called Sophism, with a distinction that is only visible in writing: the good form is Sophism, the parodic ‘copy’ that sheds its essence is sophism. When speaking, the written distinction needs to be made explicit because they’re homophones but opposites, although within a speech community the implicit distinction will often be obvious. There are a lot of reasons for this and if you’re too impatient for it that’s okay. Shhhh. You’re going to be okay. Just calm down and take deep breaths and that’s all we need you to do. Rest your head and don’t worry about anything at all.
Which brings us to Heleen Keizer, who plays the mother to Illaria Ramelli in helping unfold the aidios-aion-aionios distinction for us clearly. Interestingly, I’ve encountered a lot of different men over the last decade who have tried to read the interaction between Keizer and Ramelli here and who have been entirely unable to understand Keizer’s Sophistic response, her maternal Aufhebung. What they see, I think, is that Keizer offers a lot of powerful critiques of Ramelli and so they perceive her as the one who takes down Ramelli. They process it like this: “Ramelli came and threatened our understanding of the terms for eternity, and Keizer took her down. So we can just go back to the way things were and ignore and dismiss Ramelli, because Keizer shows how inadequate and dumb she was.” This is a very strange way to perceive a mother picking up a child, but you can see how Aufhebung looks that way if threat responses have overwhelmed you so that the work of reconciliation is shut down. Serious attachment problems are at work in that misreading. Without secure attachment, the work of reconciliation is consistently misread as cruelty. But what actually happened was this: Keizer saw that Ramelli had wandered a bit too far from her secure base and her argument was encountering frustrations. So she tipped her right over and picked her up, then soothed her and reminded her of who she is and carried her even farther. Keizer strengthens Ramelli, like a good parent strengthens a child. She does not degrade or dismiss or defeat her. That’s what’s really happening in this review.
None of the insight I’m going to share here belongs to me at all. I’m not a mother or scholar of Greek, but I’ve watched them at work, and now I’m going to try to describe what Keizer did. Hopefully if I say it, some of the dudes I’ve met will finally be able to understand what was going on there. I’ll carry forward their work by a few inches, but really all I have done is learn a bit from my betters in this.
In Plato’s Timaeus there is an extremely important and precise procession in the use of time words, and it seems that there is an unbroken chain of people who understood the text rightly. This chain runs through the time when the NT was written and into the patristic period when it was canonized, but the speech community degrades as they move deeper into violence and Empire. A sense for the Greek, and for how to read well in general, also slowly slips away among influential Latins like Augustine, which adds intellectual degradation to the more fundamental problem of moral degradation. It is therefore eminently reasonable to think that the author of the book of Matthew was a Hellenized Jew like Philo who could straddle these worlds and words: they could understand the Greek philosophical usage of the language and then surpass it, as Jewish literature has been doing for so long. Much as the Torah heaves and lifts Babylonian and Egyptian ideas, it seems that the author of Matthew has picked up the Timaeus, tipped it over, and soothed it until it can nurse.
Here’s how the transition from aidios to aion to aionios works:
Let’s begin at the beginning. Aidios refers to whatever is truly atemporal, although even words like ‘whatever’ start to break down here. It refers to the sublime darkness before any kind of time, the brilliance invisible, the unseen and unseeable from which all things arise, simple, primordial, perfect, the truly Spiritual, the deepest depths, the unnameable name, and so on. It is the timelessness that must somehow, implicitly, hold all time. You don’t have to like this, but it is worth noting that this kind of concept has played a big role in the history of religion in general, including Christianity. Importantly, “aidios” really is rigorously atemporal. It doesn’t mean endless here (although it holds endlessness as well) and it doesn’t ‘contain’ sequencees of time in a non-sequential way, like a container would. (Aion does that work next.) Rather, it is true timelessness, uncontainable. It refers, in other words, to whoever or whatever is there even before light or its containers emerge (like the sun and stars and fires). Aidios is talking about this, the darkness before the light that also somehow uncontainably holds the potential for all the light:
And the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said…
Which brings us to aion, which simply means lifetime, even in Plato’s Timaeus. (You can go back to One if you need to). But the term is used by Plato to talk about the lifetime of the entire cosmos (cosmos, meaning order) of the heavens. By heavens, I literally mean sky, where the sun and moon and stars turn in ways that literally allowed the ancients to make calendars. (Our calendars still depend on their work, by the way). But no self-respecting Jewish thinker could allow the stars to be the ultimate marker of time. A different cosmos, the order of the Temple as a microcosm of the universe, was clearly more important than even the stars. This is the kind of chutzpah it takes, in the ancient world, to call astrology-astronomy a bunch of bunk. (And the view is consistent from the prophets through Daniel and through Enoch: it’s a bunch of bunk, a bunch of false teaching from the fallen Watchers who brought us all this violence and death and makeup.)
So where Plato connects the lifetime of the universe with the stars, those of us steeped in the Hebrew tradition are bound to a more audacious claim: no, even the stars (and gods) will fall, and time itself is marked instead by the lifetime of our Temple. In all of these cases, note that aion means “whole lifetime” and these grand examples stretch the original term dramatically by talking about the whole lifetime of a living cosmos (meaning a living order). In giving birth to such big thoughts, the word ‘lifetime’ is left with some universe-sized stretch marks, but it never stops being itself. The core question here is whether the lifetime that marks out the entirety of the time that concerns us is the time of the stars, or the still greater time of the Temple.
You get here by letting Keizer tip over Ramelli’s argument. Ramelli’s argument, at points, hinges on reading “aion” as “age” rather than “lifetime”. The trouble with Ramelli isn’t that she’s a stupid little child who should shut up and get out of here, because she sometimes leans into the standard translation of “aion” in the Bible today. (Bizarrely, the men who I have met who misread Keizer somehhow think this reinforces the very status quo that Keizer is in fact hebing auf much more deeply than Ramelli.) No, Keizer isn’t your abusive uncle. Instead, she picks Ramelli up and tips her over: the concept of “ages” doesn’t seem to attach to aion, Keizer shows us. Instead, the basic meaning of “lifetime” or “whole life” remains consistent and is just being extended and used in different ways to talk about vast stretches of time, even all of some order of time.
This brings us to aionios, which you’ll recall is just the adjective form of aion. It means “lifetimeic” or “lifetimely” which sounds funny. It also probably sounded funny in the Timaeus, which is why we have to unpack Plato’s usage. This is philosophy; sometimes you make up new terms to communicate big new thoughts. It seems to me that Plato is punning with “aionic” as carefully as I have punned with Sophism here, if differently. It is, crucially, a mediating term between “aion” taken as a kind of frozen whole, on the one hand, and time as we experience it, moment to moment. If that was hard, I’ll help you get it here: think of your lifetime as a whole. Doesn’t it seem strangely frozen in your imagination as you look over all of it together at once? Taken as a whole we might say that your lifetime is the soul of your soul, all of you together through time. In other words, just as your soul is the whole of who you are (maybe just in a single moment of time, but united under your consciousness) the whole of who you are over the whole course of your lifetime is your aion. So it makes sense that both your aion and your soul might be weighed “when all is said and done”, as Warren Zevon beautifully sings it.
So we need something that can carry us from the visible (non-aidios) ‘timelessness’ of a whole lifetime, and into our lifetimes as we experience them as a series of moments. Aionic is this mediating term: it is the next link in the chain of analysis that we started with aidios, which lead us to “the aion” as it is mediated through the “aionic” and now leads to the aionic copying that generates all lifetimes. As an adjective, aionic can describe multiple things simultaneously. It can describe the universal aion that serves as a kind of “form” or “mold” from which copies (our lifetimes) are cast AND it can also describe the way the copies imitate the mold. (All of this talk of molds and copies must be taken with a large grain of analogical salt.) Our personal lifetimes reflect the lifetime of some bigger cosmos, in which they are scooped up and held.
Think about the social order (cosmos) that is the lifetime of a nation, from its rise to its fall. That kind of order shapes and forms us in so many ways. Or think about the order (cosmos) marked out by the stars: the days and months and years that make us who we become. So our personal lives are aionic: they’re lifetimish, in the sense that they’re kind of like the lifetime of bigger lifetimes that hold ours (and, ultimately, hours), and they’re lifetimely, in the sense that the sequence of lifetimes makes up the big lifetime of the cosmos.
And now you have in view the progression from aidios to aion to aionic that Keizer and Ramelli, together, help us see. It is there in the Timaeus, and it seems that there are people who understood at least parts of this into the patristic period. Specifically, Ramelli shows us something that Keizer hadn’t seen on her own, but which Keizer refines substantially by lifting Ramelli up to where she is: together the two reveal the relationship between “aidios” and “aion” in this system of technical philosophical distinctions. Of course, not everyone follows philosophy, but philosophers do. I think that Keizer’s uplifting of Ramelli reveals what the most competent readers of Matthew always saw, and what I strongly suspect the author of Matthew saw as well in Matthew 24–25, with its aion and aionic and its (suitably unspoken and invisible) aidios.
Which brings us to “It’s Not Dark Yet” which is perfectly sung by the (white?) voice of the Civil Rights generation. As Whoopi Goldberg has recently reminded us, Jewish Bob Dylan might be white here in the US (although if you ask plenty of prominent Jews here today, the constant death threats from Stormfront tell a different story). But there is absolutely no sense whatsoever in which Bob Dylan was white in Germany in 1944. Whiteness, it turns out, is a product of nations even as nations have their own distinct time-keeping systems. As Cohen put it at the dawn of our new era: you want it darker, we kill the flame. And now that the lights are dim enough we can begin the song.
Shadows are fallin’ and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
The line immediately reminds me of Bob Dylan’s awkward and agonizing evangelical Christian phase. He wasn’t doing okay, that much was plain. Did Jesus, the Son, heal him? (Here, I’m also reminded of how Constantine connected Apollo and Jesus, itself an echo of Judah’s ancient coins using an Egyptian solar disk above the Seraphic serpents around the throne of YHWH.)
On the face of it, the answer is no. But look a little closer. The Son’s scars also weren’t healed, but the scars are also a sign of the healing that happened. The promise of Jesus, at least, isn’t a life without scars, nor is it a fleshy life that goes on forever. Rather, it is spiritual life that endures. Cold comfort? Maybe. It is steel-cold, to be brutally Teutonic about it all, hard as Kruppsteel, like the doomed generation of the Hitler Youth. Then again maybe there is a kind of comfort that is also cold, especially when its too hot to sleep.
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there
Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
The next verse carries forward the honest and dis-assembling (not dissembling) movement of the song. On its face, it is cramped and we can’t breathe, death is near, we’ve become as cold and cruel as this steel ring in some hotel sink, and we can cynically look at every artifact of civilization (with Walter Benjamin) and say: that’s barbarism.
All true, and not to be diminished in the upheaval that comes next. Now look at it all again, these last two verses together.
What rises when shadows fall? Here we are talking about Genesis and its estranged sister the Timaeus, and our song is starting with the aidios: that eternal light-bursting darkness above the crown. Time itself has left, here in the timeless realm beyond it all, where the heat death of the universe in deep time (perhaps) bursts out into the Big Bang. (If you wait long enough in a state of perfect entropy, some have suggested, a cosmos is bound to burst out. And even here at the outer edges of what might look like atheism, we have to ponder how remarkable it is to be in a cosmos bound by such rules that even there in that endless roiling sameness, all of this would break out. Where do such rules come from?) And gazing here at the aidios our whole being, our soul, becomes strong, equipped to face whatever may come. If your soul is steel, you’ll stand there in Tiananmen Square and the tanks can destroy your body but your soul lives on, memory eternal. The scars now remind us of the healing that they have always already witnessed.
So yes, here in the aidios there is no space or extension. There is not room for a being to be anywhere, because we have ascended to the unity of Being itself. (It should be noted that I have no problem with any of this. My problems are entirely with the notion that this is advanced, rather than basic. See my discussion of the univocity of non-beings for more detail. The trouble is if you see this as the metaphysical pinnacle, rather than the basis of not just building more straw on straw.) We have not yet seen into the depths of this perfect light-birthing darkness, but as we press into the work of reconciliation we are always moving that way. Already we move from God and into God in ways that go beyond time. But it isn’t all beyond time, because here we are. So aionic beings like us are always journeying into God again. For us it is never dark yet, but it is always getting there: we are returning from the aionic to the aion to the aidios. As with childbirth in general, beyond pain there is every beautiful thing.
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writin’ what was in her mind
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there
Who is writing this letter? Ah, now we ‘know’: The Holy Breath. Sophia wrote us all into being.
And we all have those days where the splendor and wonder of the ants and the grass and the moon and the sun, and of all the twirling galaxies, and the edges of the cosmic background radiation … when all of it just seems flat and dull. When the letter of being from Sophia to us just bores us to tears. How strange!
But there is another apathy as well, the Ignatian one. The one with a deep equanimity that is not quietistic, that does not surrender to evil or condone it, but that also does not fear failure. On the other side of that high indifference that some call fate (Cohen again) we know names more intimate. No, this isn’t fatalism. It is its opposite: the gateway to freedom that comes when a parent tells their child they will love them unconditionally whatever course they choose.
And that’s all for now. I cannot read the rest. But if you’ve managed to stay attached through this then you have what you need to finish the song. And there you will find the moving image of the form of a lifetime itself.
Our exploration of the Biblical language of time continues with a dive into ‘olamic language here.
[1] Translation with Greek terms provided by GPT-4, 4/2023.
Translation was based on the Greek text:
ἐπεὶ δὲ κατὰ νοῦν τῷ συνιστάντι πᾶσα ἡ τῆς ψυχῆς σύστασις ἐγεγένητο, μετὰ τοῦτο πᾶν τὸ σωματοειδὲς ἐντὸς [36e] αὐτῆς ἐτεκταίνετο καὶ μέσον μέσῃ συναγαγὼν προσήρμοττεν· ἡ δʼ ἐκ μέσου πρὸς τὸν ἔσχατον οὐρανὸν πάντῃ διαπλακεῖσα κύκλῳ τε αὐτὸν ἔξωθεν περικαλύψασα, αὐτὴ ἐν αὑτῇ στρεφομένη, θείαν ἀρχὴν ἤρξατο ἀπαύστου καὶ ἔμφρονος βίου πρὸς τὸν σύμπαντα χρόνον. καὶ τὸ μὲν δὴ σῶμα ὁρατὸν οὐρανοῦ γέγονεν, αὐτὴ δὲ ἀόρατος μέν, λογισμοῦ δὲ μετέχουσα καὶ [37a] ἁρμονίας ψυχή, τῶν νοητῶν ἀεί τε ὄντων ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀρίστου ἀρίστη γενομένη τῶν γεννηθέντων. ἅτε οὖν ἐκ τῆς ταὐτοῦ καὶ τῆς θατέρου φύσεως ἔκ τε οὐσίας τριῶν τούτων συγκραθεῖσα μοιρῶν, καὶ ἀνὰ λόγον μερισθεῖσα καὶ συνδεθεῖσα, αὐτή τε ἀνακυκλουμένη πρὸς αὑτήν, ὅταν οὐσίαν σκεδαστὴν ἔχοντός τινος ἐφάπτηται καὶ ὅταν ἀμέριστον, λέγει κινουμένη διὰ πάσης ἑαυτῆς ὅτῳ τʼ ἄν τι ταὐτὸν ᾖ καὶ ὅτου ἂν [37b] ἕτερον, πρὸς ὅτι τε μάλιστα καὶ ὅπῃ καὶ ὅπως καὶ ὁπότε συμβαίνει κατὰ τὰ γιγνόμενά τε πρὸς ἕκαστον ἕκαστα εἶναι καὶ πάσχειν καὶ πρὸς τὰ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχοντα ἀεί. λόγος δὲ ὁ κατὰ ταὐτὸν ἀληθὴς γιγνόμενος περί τε θάτερον ὂν καὶ περὶ τὸ ταὐτόν, ἐν τῷ κινουμένῳ ὑφʼ αὑτοῦ φερόμενος ἄνευ φθόγγου καὶ ἠχῆς, ὅταν μὲν περὶ τὸ αἰσθητὸν γίγνηται καὶ ὁ τοῦ θατέρου κύκλος ὀρθὸς ἰὼν εἰς πᾶσαν αὐτοῦ τὴν ψυχὴν διαγγείλῃ, δόξαι καὶ πίστεις γίγνονται βέβαιοι καὶ ἀληθεῖς, [37c] ὅταν δὲ αὖ περὶ τὸ λογιστικὸν ᾖ καὶ ὁ τοῦ ταὐτοῦ κύκλος εὔτροχος ὢν αὐτὰ μηνύσῃ, νοῦς ἐπιστήμη τε ἐξ ἀνάγκης ἀποτελεῖται· τούτω δὲ ἐν ᾧ τῶν ὄντων ἐγγίγνεσθον, ἄν ποτέ τις αὐτὸ ἄλλο πλὴν ψυχὴν εἴπῃ, πᾶν μᾶλλον ἢ τἀληθὲς ἐρεῖ.
ὡς δὲ κινηθὲν αὐτὸ καὶ ζῶν ἐνόησεν τῶν ἀιδίων θεῶν γεγονὸς ἄγαλμα ὁ γεννήσας πατήρ, ἠγάσθη τε καὶ εὐφρανθεὶς ἔτι δὴ μᾶλλον ὅμοιον πρὸς τὸ παράδειγμα ἐπενόησεν ἀπεργάσασθαι.
[37d] καθάπερ οὖν αὐτὸ τυγχάνει ζῷον ἀίδιον ὄν, καὶ τόδε τὸ πᾶν οὕτως εἰς δύναμιν ἐπεχείρησε τοιοῦτον ἀποτελεῖν. ἡ μὲν οὖν τοῦ ζῴου φύσις ἐτύγχανεν οὖσα αἰώνιος, καὶ τοῦτο μὲν δὴ τῷ γεννητῷ παντελῶς προσάπτειν οὐκ ἦν δυνατόν· εἰκὼ δʼ ἐπενόει κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος ποιῆσαι, καὶ διακοσμῶν ἅμα οὐρανὸν ποιεῖ μένοντος αἰῶνος ἐν ἑνὶ κατʼ ἀριθμὸν ἰοῦσαν αἰώνιον εἰκόνα, τοῦτον ὃν δὴ χρόνον ὠνομάκαμεν. [37e] ἡμέρας γὰρ καὶ νύκτας καὶ μῆνας καὶ ἐνιαυτούς, οὐκ ὄντας πρὶν οὐρανὸν γενέσθαι, τότε ἅμα ἐκείνῳ συνισταμένῳ τὴν γένεσιν αὐτῶν μηχανᾶται· ταῦτα δὲ πάντα μέρη χρόνου, καὶ τό τʼ ἦν τό τʼ ἔσται χρόνου γεγονότα εἴδη, ἃ δὴ φέροντες λανθάνομεν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀίδιον οὐσίαν οὐκ ὀρθῶς. λέγομεν γὰρ δὴ ὡς ἦν ἔστιν τε καὶ ἔσται, τῇ δὲ τὸ ἔστιν μόνον κατὰ τὸν [38a] ἀληθῆ λόγον προσήκει, τὸ δὲ ἦν τό τʼ ἔσται περὶ τὴν ἐν χρόνῳ γένεσιν ἰοῦσαν πρέπει λέγεσθαι — κινήσεις γάρ ἐστον, τὸ δὲ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχον ἀκινήτως οὔτε πρεσβύτερον οὔτε νεώτερον προσήκει γίγνεσθαι διὰ χρόνου οὐδὲ γενέσθαι ποτὲ οὐδὲ γεγονέναι νῦν οὐδʼ εἰς αὖθις ἔσεσθαι, τὸ παράπαν τε οὐδὲν ὅσα γένεσις τοῖς ἐν αἰσθήσει φερομένοις προσῆψεν, ἀλλὰ χρόνου ταῦτα αἰῶνα μιμουμένου καὶ κατʼ ἀριθμὸν κυκλουμένου γέγονεν εἴδη — καὶ πρὸς τούτοις ἔτι τὰ τοιάδε, [38b] τό τε γεγονὸς εἶναι γεγονὸς καὶ τὸ γιγνόμενον εἶναι γιγνόμενον, ἔτι τε τὸ γενησόμενον εἶναι γενησόμενον καὶ τὸ μὴ ὂν μὴ ὂν εἶναι, ὧν οὐδὲν ἀκριβὲς λέγομεν. περὶ μὲν οὖν τούτων τάχʼ ἂν οὐκ εἴη καιρὸς πρέπων ἐν τῷ παρόντι διακριβολογεῖσθαι.
Platonis Opera, Ed. John Burnet” (Medford, MA: Oxford University Press, 1903).
And here is an “Interlinear” that follows the Greek grammar relatively closely, while maintaining an intelligible English word order. Produced by GPT-4 on Holy Saturday, 4/8/2023. May hell be harrowed:
Since (ἐπεὶ) indeed (δὲ) according to (κατὰ) mind (νοῦν) the whole (πᾶσα) composition (σύστασις) of the soul (ψυχῆς) had come to be (ἐγεγένητο) for the one assembling (τῷ συνιστάντι), after (μετὰ) this (τοῦτο) all (πᾶν) the body-like (σωματοειδὲς) [36e] within (ἐντὸς) it (αὐτῆς) was crafted (ἐτεκταίνετο) and having gathered (συναγαγὼν) the middle (μέσον) to the middle (μέσῃ) he fitted (προσήρμοττεν); and (ἡ δ’) from the middle (ἐκ μέσου) towards (πρὸς) the outermost (ἔσχατον) heaven (οὐρανὸν) stretched out (διαπλακεῖσα) all around (πάντῃ) and having enveloped (περικαλύψασα) it (αὐτὸν) from outside (ἔξωθεν) in a circle (κύκλῳ), itself (αὐτὴ) revolving (στρεφομένη) within itself (ἐν αὑτῇ), it began (ἤρξατο) a divine (θείαν) beginning (ἀρχὴν) of ceaseless (ἀπαύστου) and wise (ἔμφρονος) life (βίου) for all (πρὸς τὸν σύμπαντα) time (χρόνον). And (καὶ) the (τὸ) indeed (μὲν) visible (ὁρατὸν) body (σῶμα) of heaven (οὐρανοῦ) has come to be (γέγονεν), but (δὲ) the soul (ψυχή), itself (αὐτὴ) being invisible (ἀόρατος), participating (μετέχουσα) in reasoning (λογισμοῦ) and (δὲ) [37a] harmony (ἁρμονίας), of the intelligible (τῶν νοητῶν) always (ἀεί) existing (ὄντων) under (ὑπὸ) the best (τοῦ ἀρίστου), became (γενομένη) the best (ἀρίστη) of the generated (τῶν γεννηθέντων). As (ἅτε) then (οὖν) from (ἐκ) both (τῆς) its own (ταὐτοῦ) and (καὶ) the other’s (τῆς θατέρου) nature (φύσεως), both (ἔκ) from (τε) the substance (οὐσίας) of these three (τριῶν) parts (μοιρῶν), and (καὶ) having been divided (μερισθεῖσα) according to (ἀνὰ) reason (λόγον) and (καὶ) having been bound (συνδεθεῖσα), itself (αὐτή) revolving (ἀνακυκλουμένη) towards (πρὸς) itself (αὑτήν), whenever (ὅταν) it touches (ἐφάπτηται) a divisible (σκεδαστὴν) substance (οὐσίαν) of something (τινος) and (καὶ) whenever (ὅταν) indivisible (ἀμέριστον),It speaks (λέγει) being moved (κινουμένη) through (διὰ) all (πάσης) itself (ἑαυτῆς) to (ὅτῳ) whoever (τʼ ἄν) something (τι) is the same (ταὐτὸν) and (καὶ) wherever (ὅτου ἂν) [37b] different (ἕτερον), with respect to (πρὸς) whatever (ὅτι) is the most (τε μάλιστα) and (καὶ) how (ὅπῃ) and (καὶ) in what manner (ὅπως) and (καὶ) whenever (ὁπότε) it happens (συμβαίνει) according to (κατὰ) the things coming to be (τὰ γιγνόμενά) both (τε) for (πρὸς) each (ἕκαστον) individually (ἕκαστα) to be (εἶναι) and (καὶ) to suffer (πάσχειν) and (καὶ) with respect to (πρὸς) the things (τὰ) always (ἀεί) being in the same state (κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχοντα). The word (λόγος) indeed (δὲ) according to (ὁ κατὰ) the same (ταὐτὸν) true (ἀληθὴς) coming to be (γιγνόμενος) both (περί τε) concerning (θάτερον) the one (ὂν) and (καὶ) concerning (περὶ) the same (τὸ ταὐτόν), in (ἐν) the thing being moved (τῷ κινουμένῳ) being carried (φερόμενος) by (ὑφʼ) itself (αὑτοῦ) without (ἄνευ) sound (φθόγγου) and (καὶ) echo (ἠχῆς), whenever (ὅταν) indeed (μὲν) it becomes (γίγνηται) concerning (περὶ) the perceptible (τὸ αἰσθητὸν) and (καὶ) the circle (ὁ κύκλος) of the other (τοῦ θατέρου) going straight (ὀρθὸς ἰὼν) into (εἰς) all (πᾶσαν) its (αὐτοῦ) soul (τὴν ψυχὴν) announces (διαγγείλῃ), opinions (δόξαι) and (καὶ) beliefs (πίστεις) become (γίγνονται) firm (βέβαιοι) and (καὶ) true (ἀληθεῖς) [37c]; but (δὲ) again (αὖ) concerning (περὶ) the rational (τὸ λογιστικὸν) it is (ᾖ) and (καὶ) the circle (ὁ κύκλος) of the same (τοῦ ταὐτοῦ) being well-turned (εὔτροχος ὢν) announces (μηνύσῃ) these things (αὐτὰ), mind (νοῦς) and (καὶ) knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) necessarily (τε ἐξ ἀνάγκης) is accomplished (ἀποτελεῖται); but (δὲ) in (ἐν) this (τούτω) among (ᾧ) the things that are (τῶν ὄντων) come to be (ἐγγίγνεσθον), if (ἄν) ever (ποτέ) someone (τις) says (εἴπῃ) it (αὐτὸ) other (ἄλλο) than (πλὴν) soul (ψυχὴν), rather (πᾶν μᾶλλον) than (ἢ) the truth (τἀληθὲς) he will say (ἐρεῖ).
[37d] Just as (καθάπερ) therefore (οὖν) the very thing (αὐτὸ) happens (τυγχάνει) to be (ὄν) an eternal (ἀίδιον) living being (ζῷον), so (οὕτως) this whole (τὸ πᾶν) attempted (ἐπεχείρησε) to bring into power (εἰς δύναμιν) such a thing (τοιοῦτον) to complete (ἀποτελεῖν). The (ἡ) nature (φύσις) of the living being (τοῦ ζῴου) happened (ἐτύγχανεν) to be (οὖσα) eternal (αἰώνιος), and (καὶ) it was (ἦν) not (οὐκ) possible (δυνατόν) to attach (προσάπτειν) this completely (παντελῶς) to the generated (τῷ γεννητῷ); but (δ’) he thought (ἐπενόει) to make (ποιῆσαι) a moving (κινητόν) certain (τινα) image (εἰκὼ) of eternity (αἰῶνος), and (καὶ) ordering (διακοσμῶν) together (ἅμα) he makes (ποιεῖ) the heaven (οὐρανὸν) of the staying (μένοντος) eternity (αἰῶνος) in (ἐν) one (ἑνὶ) according to (κατ’) number (ἀριθμὸν) going (ἰοῦσαν) eternal (αἰώνιον) image (εἰκόνα), this (τοῦτον) which (ὃν) we have named (ὠνομάκαμεν) time (χρόνον). [37e] For (γὰρ) days (ἡμέρας) and (καὶ) nights (νύκτας) and (καὶ) months (μῆνας) and (καὶ) years (ἐνιαυτούς), not (οὐκ) being (ὄντας) before (πρὶν) the heaven (οὐρανὸν) came into being (γενέσθαι), then (τότε) together (ἅμα) with that (ἐκείνῳ) coming into existence (συνισταμένῳ), he devises (μηχανᾶται) their (αὐτῶν) genesis (γένεσιν); these (ταῦτα) indeed (δὲ) are all (πάντα) parts (μέρη) of time (χρόνου), and (καὶ) the “was” (τό τʼ ἦν) and the “will be” (τό τʼ ἔσται) of time (χρόνου) having become (γεγονότα) forms (εἴδη), which (ἃ) indeed (δὴ) bearing (φέροντες) we forget (λανθάνομεν) upon (ἐπὶ) the eternal (ἀίδιον) substance (οὐσίαν) not (οὐκ) rightly (ὀρθῶς). We say (λέγομεν) indeed (δὴ) that it was (ἦν), is (ἔστιν), and will be (ἔσται), but (δὲ) to the “is” (τὸ ἔστιν) only (μόνον) according to (κατὰ) the true (ἀληθῆ) account (λόγον) is fitting (προσήκει), and (τὸ δὲ) the “was” (ἦν) and the “will be” (τό τʼ ἔσται) concerning (περὶ) the genesis (γένεσιν) in (ἐν) time (χρόνῳ) going (ἰοῦσαν) is fitting (πρέπει) to be said (λέγεσθαι) — [38a] for (γάρ) they are (ἐστον) movements (κινήσεις), and (τὸ δὲ) the always (ἀεὶ) in the same way (κατὰ ταὐτὰ) holding (ἔχον) immovably (ἀκινήτως) neither (οὔτε) older (πρεσβύτερον) nor (οὔτε) younger (νεώτερον) is fitting (προσήκει) to become (γίγνεσθαι) through (διὰ) time (χρόνου) nor (οὐδὲ) to ever become (γενέσθαι ποτὲ) nor (οὐδὲ) having become (γεγονέναι) now (νῦν) nor (οὐδ’) again (εἰς αὖθις) to be (ἔσεσθαι), nothing (τὸ παράπαν) at all (οὐδὲν) of the things (ὅσα) genesis (γένεσις) attached (προσῆψεν) to the ones (τοῖς) perceived by senses (ἐν αἰσθήσει φερομένοις), but (ἀλλὰ) these (ταῦτα) things of time (χρόνου) imitating (μιμουμένου) eternity (αἰῶνα) and (καὶ) revolving (κυκλουμένου) according to (κατ’) number (ἀριθμὸν) have become (γέγονεν) forms (εἴδη) — and (καὶ) in addition to (πρὸς) these things (τούτοις) also (ἔτι) such things as (τὰ τοιάδε), [38b] that which has come into being (τό τε γεγονὸς) is (εἶναι) what has come into being (γεγονὸς) and (καὶ) that which is coming into being (τὸ γιγνόμενον) is (εἶναι) what is coming into being (γιγνόμενον), and further (ἔτι τε) that which will come into being (τὸ γενησόμενον) is (εἶναι) what will come into being (γενησόμενον) and (καὶ) that which is not (τὸ μὴ ὂν) is not (μὴ ὂν εἶναι), of which (ὧν) we say (λέγομεν) nothing (οὐδὲν) precisely (ἀκριβὲς). Concerning (περὶ) these things (τούτων), then (μὲν οὖν), perhaps (τάχʼ ἂν) it would not (οὐκ εἴη) be a suitable (καιρὸς πρέπων) time (καιρὸς) at present (ἐν τῷ παρόντι) to discuss in detail (διακριβολογεῖσθαι).
And here is a standard, widely respected scholarly translation from Donald J. Zeyl from the Hackett collection of Plato’s works:
After this he went on to fill the double and triple intervals by cutting [36] off still more portions from the mixture and placing these between them, in such a way that in each interval there were two middle terms, one exceeding the first extreme by the same fraction of the extremes by which it was exceeded by the second, and the other exceeding the first extreme by a number equal to that by which it was exceeded by the second. These connections produced intervals of 3/2, 4/3, and 9/8 within the previous intervals. He then proceeded to fill all the 4/3 intervals with the 9/8 [b] interval, leaving a small portion over every time. The terms of this interval of the portion left over made a numerical ratio of 256/243. And so it was that the mixture, from which he had cut off these portions, was eventually completely used up. {1240} Next, he sliced this entire compound in two along its length, joined the [c] two halves together center to center like an X, and bent them back in a circle, attaching each half to itself end to end and to the ends of the other half at the point opposite to the one where they had been joined together. He then included them in that motion which revolves in the same place without variation, and began to make the one the outer, and the other the inner circle. And he decreed that the outer movement should be the movement of the Same, while the inner one should be that of the Different.15 He made the movement of the Same revolve toward the right by way of the side, and that of the Different toward the left by way of the diagonal, [d] and he made the revolution of the Same, i.e., the uniform, the dominant one in that he left this one alone undivided, while he divided the inner one six times, to make seven unequal circles.16 His divisions corresponded to the several double and triple intervals, of which there were three each. He set the circles to go in contrary directions: three to go at the same speed, and the other four to go at speeds different from both each other’s and that of the other three. Their speeds, however, were all proportionate to each other. Once the whole soul had acquired a form that pleased him, he who [e] formed it went on to fashion inside it all that is corporeal, and, joining center to center, he fitted the two together. The soul was woven together with the body from the center on out in every direction to the outermost limit of the universe, and covered it all around on the outside. And, revolving within itself, it initiated a divine beginning of unceasing, intelligent life for all time. Now while the body of the universe had come to be as a visible thing, the soul was invisible. But even so, because it shares in [37] reason and harmony, the soul came to be as the most excellent of all the things begotten by him who is himself most excellent of all that is intelligible and eternal. Because the soul is a mixture of the Same, the Different and Being (the three components we’ve described), because it was divided up and bound together in various proportions, and because it circles round upon itself, then, whenever it comes into contact with something whose being is scatterable or else with something whose being is indivisible, it is stirred throughout its whole self. It then declares what exactly that thing is the same as, [b] or what it is different from, and in what respect and in what manner, as well as when, it turns out that they are the same or different and are {1241} characterized as such. This applies both to the things that come to be, and to those that are always changeless. And when this contact gives rise to an account that is equally true whether it is about what is different or about what is the same, and is borne along without utterance or sound within the self-moved thing, then, whenever the account concerns anything that is perceptible, the circle of the Different goes straight and proclaims it throughout its whole soul. This is how firm and true opinions and convictions come about. Whenever, on the other hand, the account concerns [c] any object of reasoning, and the circle of the Same runs well and reveals it, the necessary result is understanding and knowledge. And if anyone should ever call that in which these two arise, not soul but something else, what he says will be anything but true.
Now when the Father who had begotten the universe observed it set in motion and alive, a thing that had come to be as a shrine for the everlasting gods, he was well pleased, and in his delight he thought of making it more like its model still. So, as the model was itself an everlasting Living Thing, [d] he set himself to bringing this universe to completion in such a way that it, too, would have that character to the extent that was possible. Now it was the Living Thing’s nature to be eternal, but it isn’t possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten. And so he began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This number, of course, is what we now call “time.” For before the heavens came to be, there were no days or nights, no [e] months or years. But now, at the same time as he framed the heavens, he devised their coming to be. These all are parts of time, and was and will be are forms of time that have come to be. Such notions we unthinkingly but incorrectly apply to everlasting being. For we say that it was and is and will be, but according to the true account only is is appropriately said [38] of it. Was and will be are properly said about the becoming that passes in time, for these two are motions. But that which is always changeless and motionless cannot become either older or younger in the course of time — it neither ever became so, nor is it now such that it has become so, nor will it ever be so in the future. And all in all, none of the characteristics that becoming has bestowed upon the things that are borne about in the realm of perception are appropriate to it. These, rather, are forms of time that have come to be — time that imitates eternity and circles according to number. And what is more, we also say things like these: that what has [b] come to be is what has come to be, that what is coming to be is what is coming to be, and also that what will come to be is what will come to be, and that what is not is what is not. None of these expressions of ours is accurate. But I don’t suppose this is a good time right now to be too meticulous about these matters. Time, then, came to be together with the universe so that just as they were begotten together, they might also be undone together, should there {1242} ever be an undoing of them. And it came to be after the model of that [c] which is sempiternal, so that it might be as much like its model as possible. For the model is something that has being for all eternity, while it, on the other hand, has been, is, and shall be for all time, forevermore. Such was the reason, then, such the god’s design for the coming to be of time, that he brought into being the Sun, the Moon and five other stars, for the begetting of time. These are called “wanderers,” and they came to be in order to set limits to and stand guard over the numbers of time. When the god had finished making a body for each of them, he placed them into [d] the orbits traced by the period of the Different — seven bodies in seven orbits. He set the Moon in the first circle, around the earth, and the Sun in the second, above it. The Dawnbearer (the Morning Star, or Venus) and the star said to be sacred to Hermes (Mercury) he set to run in circles that equal the Sun’s in speed, though they received the power contrary to its power. As a result, the Sun, the star of Hermes and the Dawnbearer alike overtake and are overtaken by one another. As for the other bodies, if I were to spell out where he situated them, and all his reasons for doing [e] so, my account, already a digression, would make more work than its purpose calls for. Perhaps later on we could at our leisure give this subject the exposition it deserves. Now when each of the bodies that were to cooperate in producing time had come into the movement prepared for carrying it and when, bound by bonds of soul, these bodies had been begotten with life and learned their assigned tasks, they began to revolve along the movement of the [39] Different, which is oblique and which goes through the movement of the Same, by which it is also dominated.17 Some bodies would move in a larger circle, others in a smaller one, the latter moving more quickly and the former more slowly. Indeed, because of the movement of the Same, the ones that go around most quickly appeared to be overtaken by those going more slowly, even though in fact they were overtaking them. For as it revolves, this movement gives to all these circles a spiral twist, because [b] they are moving forward in two contrary directions at once. As a result, it makes that body which departs most slowly from it — and it is the fastest of the movements — appear closest to it.
Plato. Plato: Complete Works (pp. 1978–1982). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.