Time and Eternity in Christian Thought : Bampton Lectures-, 1936.
By F. H. Brabant, M.A. (Longmans. x5s.)
UNTOUCHED ETERNITY
MR. BRABANT, who is already well known for some admirable
studies in the philosophy of religion, has chosen for his Bampton Lectures a subject which—though it may seem at first sight to be chiefly of academic interest—is closely related to the dominant spirit of the age. Is succession, history, process, real and sufficient in its own right ; or does man's deep instinct for the Unchanging point to an eternal perfection which alone gives the world-process meaning and worth ? In the doctrine of God's Eternity the whole problem of the nature of reality is involved. " Amid the inescapable flux, can Man find and hold on to anything that abides ? " As the pace of temporal life increases, this problem is forced more and more upon the reflective soul ; and faith itself is compelled to realise that without its metaphysical background religion easily declines into a mere system of sanctions and consolations. Mr. Brabant's subject then is actual in the deepest sense, and he shows it to have been a primary interest of Christianity from the first ; sometimes obscured for a time, but always emerging in those periods when the tyranny and futility of succession is most strongly felt. Then the Eternal " shining to saints in a perpetual bright clearness " begins again to exercise its attractive power.
The Church has received her concept of Eternal Life from two chief sources : Plato and the Bible._ In _St. Augustine these streams meet ; and Mr. Brabant rightly gives considerable
space to a discussion of Augustinian teaching on eternity and time in the Coufessions ; a teaching which successfully har- monises " the Greek view of God as changeless, and the Hebrew view of history as purposeful."
" No analysis can do justice to the triumphant march of the argument, interrupted by constant supplications and prayers for light to the Giver of Life; from the famous epigram ' If no one asks me what time is, I know ; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know,' to the cry of joy as the solution glimmers on the horizon : See where the truth dawns.' " From .St. Augustine, with a glance at Boethius and the idea of the Totum Simul, we go on to Aquinas. For St. Thomas,
Eternity is the property of God alone, who is without succes- sion, and incapable of becoming, since there are no unrealised capacities in Him. Man, though created in Time, and subject to succession, can yet taste eternal life because of his possession of an " intellectual soul " capable of the Vision of God. The fourth lecture reviews the development of the subject in modern philosophy, from Descartes through Spinoza to Kant, Hegel and their followers ; and closes with an account of the treat- ment of the problem of time by Bergson, Alexander and White- head. Here the general movement towards exalting history and becoming as against Being, and regarding Change a good thing in itself, is noted as a characteristic of the age ; and, so far as it tends to discredit the concept of achieved Perfection, as a cause of real spiritual impoverishment. This movement begins as a reaction against the Hegelian tendency to belittle the time-process, blazes up in Nietzsche, with his furious attack upon " the doctrine of the One, the Perfect, the Unmoved, the Sufficient, the Intransitory " as hostile to mankind, and through Bergson philosophy of 'duration has affected many aspects of modern thought, including theology. We can recognise its influence in the notion of God Himself as being susceptible of chinge and even of suffering, in the shifting of Christological emphasis from the entrance of the Eternal Logos into time to the actual life and growth of Jesus as a Jew of the first century, in " Modernist impatience with outworn' formulae " and in the popular discontent with concepts of heaven as " a place where we do nothing."
The last and most' interesting half of Mr. Brabant's book gives us his own theory of the relation of the temporal to the eternal ; a theory in which he strives to conserve all the values inhering in man's persistent instinct for . a Transcendent Perfect, whilst taking account of the best findings of modern philosophy. Starting from a discussion of the nature of time, and first' its indubitable' reality as directly experienced in our owp lives—" the popular mind always grasps. change and happening, and feels uneasy about the unchanging and eternal " —he goes on to the actual_witness of succession to the existence of the eternal. " For the Christian thinker the conviction that the world is imperfect, finite and changing is in itself a ground for believing in the Perfect and Infinite." So, too, in aesthetic experience, " Our very recognition of perfection is a recognition that it is not full perfection." The problem of the beginning of the world order, creation and predestination, is next considered ; and, finally, its consummation in Eternal Life. Mr. Brabant brings his fine book to an end by a discus- sion of the spiritual value of the doctrine of Eternity, and the real loss, the cheapening of life which would result from its abandonment. He finds in it the source of that rightful awe, that penetrating sense of mystery which gives power and beauty even to the simplest embodiments of faith. " Every- where in us and around us the incomplete yearns towards what is perfect and has glimpses of it." And, in and through these glimpses, the soul again and again renews its innate assurance ".that beyond the changing appearance of Time there lies a life which does not change and which is our home."
EVELYN UNDERHILL.
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