A Very Brief History of Eternity.
Marty, Martin E.
A Very Brief History of Eternity. By Carlos Eire. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2010. xv + 268 pp. $24.95 cloth.
A Very Brief History of Eternity is not a very brief history of
eternity. Author Carlos Eke, a Religious Studies Professor at Yale
University, knows that, in relation to eternity, everything is very
brief, but his 268-page work is substantial enough not to necessitate
the use of the word "brief" in relation to page lengths and
scope. While his style is relaxed, he covers so much ground--can
eternity be "grounded"?--that readers will find and feel that,
in its own way, the book is weighty. The word in the title at which more
properly to pause is "history." Eire knows that we know that
one cannot think or write historically about eternity. So his book is a
history of human questionings, ponderings, and sometimes foolishly or
frighteningly bold dealings with the concept. What he finds and details,
yes, briefly, should enrich the reflections of historians as they deal
with time.
Eire quotes Augustine's word about when he was questioned
about what time was. "Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I
want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know" (62). The author
implants a similar question about eternity, and knows that neither he
nor readers know or can know how to respond satisfactorily. Never mind:
what he does in the face of the abyss of eternity is what matters, and
this he treats brilliantly and memorably. What (Western) people thought
about afterlife and what was their thought about its impact on life
determined much of their action, and as their reflections changed, so
did their actions. They still do.
"Eternity" elicits very different kinds of treatment from
historians than it would from philosophers, theologians, or
cosmologists, though historian Eire draws effortlessly on what
philosophers and theologians have said, and relates space and time
sufficiently to give confidence that he knows something of the bearing
of cosmology on his subject. He writes modestly about the future--about
which historians as historians by definition know nothing. They work sub
specie praeteritorum, in the scope of "the past." None could
be so bold as Yogi Berra, who said "I have seen the future--and it
is very much like the present, only longer!" Yet Eire knows that
how people think about the future colors their view of the present and
of eternity.
Augustine is quite legitimately seen as a decisive reflector on
time-and-eternity, and Eire uses him to frame much of what follows in
the millennium of Christendom, "Eternity Conceived." In a
section on "Eternity Overflowing," the author shows the
consequences of power related to uses of the future, at least in respect
to the afterlife in Christendom. How the Church invented particular
hells and heavens and applied imagery related to these to keep people in
line is a subject he treats dispassionately. He quotes generously from
horrendously hard-to-take descriptions of hell, letting these quotations
do the work from him. It is easy to conjure in the imagination some
sense of what people in those centuries were taught and why they did all
they could to follow Church law, pray to favored saints, and pay for
services rendered at masses for the dead. He also reckons with the
consequences of the purgatorial policy by mentioning how much wealth,
especially in land, became the Church's for centuries.
In reaction to such teachings and policies, people across the
Western Catholic world grew restless and began to dissent.
"Eternity Reformed" features Martin Luther who, in the face of
his own fears of purgatory and hell, turned them into creative reformist
action against sellers of indulgences, which signified a shortening of
the time spent in the tortures of purgatory. The Reformers did not do
away with hell, but the fears and fires of purgatory were quenched, and
the joys of eternity in heaven were made more immediately attractive and
available.
As the Enlightenment, modem criticism, and feelings or claims of
liberation followed the Reformation, people of the West did not stop
speculating about eternity but now, instead of dealing with the earlier
versions of "afterlife," they succumbed or were forced to
contemplate ways to chop up the future into programs, policies, and, in
the title for chapter 6, "Five-Year Plans," which, as he
describes them and we all had better know by now, were often
this-worldly analogues to the afterlife. Eternityitis, if we can name
the virus, has not stopped afflicting or inspiring people of
conventional Christian belief or those around them.
A welcome addendum on "Common Conceptions of Eternity" is
a helpful review statement of the whole book, beginning with
"Sempitemity," which is "time without a beginning or an
end" and moving on to states which "transcend time" or
"includes time but precedes and exceeds it." There are more,
for example "Platonic Eternity: the Intelligible Realm," which
Eire marks "obsolete, but influential." Finally, he mentions
how "eternity" is often associated with infinity, and hauls in
the Oxford English Dictionary to take over the definitions from there.
doi: 10.1017/S0009640710002027
Martin E. Marty
University of Chicago, Emeritus
