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Hello, Father,

I always read with great pleasure your answers and I derive great comfort from it.

I believe in everything that has been revealed.  If faith is a gift, then I got plenty of it…..

But there is something that I just cannot comprehend fully….and that is how God always existed…. how He never had a beginning.

We are bound to our nature.  If I think about when I was little, it seems to me that a very long time has gone by, but in reality only 71 years have gone by.

Instead, God alway existed.  Truly this thing I just cannot understand it fully, but I believe in it because I do have faith.

Instead, another thing scares me, it makes me gasp for air, is the word eternity.  It signifies never-ending!  

Furthermore, if I may, I would like to ask you:  what would our life be like if we were admitted into the presence of God ? Would we be subjected to the force of gravity? Would we see the sun rise?

Would we need to sleep?

But I think the answer is “we will see new skies….”.

Thank you so much for your replies.

Aldo

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The priest’s answer

Dear Aldo,

1. When talking about eternity there is the risk that we would come up with the wrong idea.

Since we live according to time, which in itself is the measure of movement according to a before and an after, we are inclined to say that God is eternal because He has always existed and forever He will exist.

When we say “ever since…for ever” involuntarily we introduce the notion of time. We conceive it as an endless duration.

2. But God is not like this.

For this reason, at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas says that our way of talking about God is more negative than positive, that is to say, we exclude in God what is proper of man or the creatures.

It is inevitable that happens this way because we talk about God always starting from the things He made.

And we talk about eternity precisely from the notion of time to conclude that in God there is no time.

3. Here are Saint Thomas’ precise words: “Once we have ascertained that a given thing exists, we then have to inquire into its mode of being in order to come to know its real definition (quid est).  However, in the case of God we cannot know His real definition, but can know only what He is not; and so we are unable to examine God’s mode of being, but instead can examine only what His mode is not.  Therefore, we have to consider, first, what His mode of being is not”  (Summa theologiae, I, 3, proemio). 

4. God’s eternity is postulated by the fact that God cannot go from potency to act.  If God would go from potency to act He would acquire something that He still doesn’t have.  But then, it would not be supreme perfection, it would not be God.

Saint Thomas writes that: “The idea of eternity follows immutability, as the idea of time follows movement, as appears from the preceding article.

Hence, as God is supremely immutable, it supremely belongs to Him to be eternal.  Nor is He eternal only; but He is His own eternity; whereas, no other being is its own duration, as no other is its own being.  Now God is His own uniform being; and hence as He is His own essence, so He is His own eternity” ( Summa Theologiae, I, 10, 2).

5. Saint Thomas also says that “this is the difference between eternity and the time, that the time has its being in a certain succession, while the eternity has it all together” ( IV Sent., d.49,1,1, ad 3).

“Eternity has no succession, being simultaneously whole” (Summa Theologiae, I,10, 1).

For this reason it makes it its own the statement of Boezio according to which eternity is

 “the total possession, perfect and simultaneous of a life without limits” (interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio”; De consolatione, 5).”

6.When talking about our future life, we must keep the same criteria as when we talk about God.

Since eternal life consists in participating “In the divine operation and also its eternity, which it is its measure, also man’s operation becomes eternal” (IV Sent., d. 49,1,1, ad 3).

 Therefore “this is done by the Divine power, which raises man to the participation of eternity which transcends all change” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, 5,4, ad1).

7. Your last specific questions are answered like this: since our bodies will be glorious and spiritual, there will be no need for the law of gravity.

Furthermore, we would not see the sun rising in a successive manner, like we see it here, but we will see all the sunrises of this world from its beginning to the end “ in a simultaneous manner’, in the proper way to know about eternity.

Wishing you the total possession of this gift for which we were created and redeemed, I bless you and I remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo