The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that God “has made everything beautiful in its time. He has… set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end…  everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it” (Ecclesiastes 3:11,14). As a philosopher trained in mathematics and theology and preoccupied with foundational questions in physics and cosmology, my heart frequently ponders these themes of time and eternity, finiteness and infinity, mathematical reality and physical reality, beginnings and never-endings, the Mind of God and the limitations of man.

Not surprisingly, these themes sometimes find their way into my classroom, as they did last week when a discussion of Aristotle’s cosmology in De Caelo provoked reflection on the timeless existence of the Prime Mover beyond the sphere of the fixed stars. A small step in this conversation lands us in Christian theology and the eternal nature of God as the “the Creator of all things in heaven and earth, things visible and invisible… [who] is before all things, and in whom all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). This step is as small and easy as the concepts themselves are big and difficult.

The richness and fullness of these concepts is unassailable in this short essay. What can be done, however, is to frame them in a way suitable for meditation on the greatness of God. Aristotle argued that “the All” of our reality was spatially finite but temporally infinite, without beginning or end, even as the existence of the unmoved Prime Mover transcended this reality timelessly and immutably.  But considerations weighing against spatial infinity can be turned against temporal infinity, and considerations against temporal finiteness can be turned against spatial finiteness. We must therefore ask: how is that which is timeless related to the temporal, and does timelessness shed any light on the metaphysical possibility of an infinite reality?

Enter St. Augustine of Hippo. In his Confessions, especially Book XI, he emphasizes that when God created the heavens and the earth, he did not do so in the heavens, for these were part of creation. Similarly, he did not create in time, but rather imbued creation with time, in fact, with all the time that it has, from its beginning to the limitless future. God, as the necessary ground of all being, speaks the whole of spatiotemporal reality into existence in one timeless act. It is a profound thought that anticipates Einstein’s revelations—minus the mathematical complications of tensor calculus—by sixteen centuries. All of spacetime exists timelessly as an externalized expression of the Mind of God. But Augustine went further: each moment of time, in human experience here and now, is a distention of the human mind. The present of time past is memory, the present of the now is perceptual reality, and the present of time future is anticipation. The flow of time is an artifact of the human mind, perceived in the now, not a fundamental feature of the universe. The nature of Creation, qua creation, is a relation of absolute timeless dependence on God as the indispensable condition of all existence; he alone is the ultimate without whom not.

Created reality is thus timeless, but is it infinite? It must be, if not spatially, at least temporally, for the Kingdom of God is everlasting, and his gift in Christ to those who love and seek him is everlasting life. God, in his omnipotence and omniscience, has laid the foundation of a limitless reality. And indeed, we see here the power of unbounded timeless intelligence: a timeless omnipotent and omniscient personal being controls the impasse between timelessness and infinity. While infinity cannot be mastered sequentially, it can be mastered timelessly. An unlimited, timeless, omniscient and omnipotent being swallows infinity whole, circumventing its paradoxes, and grounding the consistency of an infinite reality in his self-consistent unlimited Being. The greatness of God, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), is unsurpassable, and it inexorably leads to doxology. In the words of Joachim Neander’s famous hymn:

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation!
All ye who hear, now to His temple draw near;
Praise Him in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires e’er have been
Granted in what He ordaineth?

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee;
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,
If with His love He befriend thee.