Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

(like the formlessness mentioned in the last chapter) and recognised the need for ‘peras’ (an ordering principle).

Boethius (De Trinitate) made the distinction between ‘sempieternity’ (everlastingness) and eternity. He said: ‘For our ‘now’, as if running, creates time and sempieternity, whereas the Divine ‘now’ stays not moving, but standing still and creates eternity’. From this, it could be said that eternity is best described as an eternal now.

Parmenides of Elea had a concept of an ungenerated, imperishable, indivisible, perfect and motionless universe that has come to be known as the ‘Parmenidean One’. This is similar to some Eastern concepts of nonduality and maybe an influence of later philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy is often described as ‘footnotes to Plato’, but Plato could equally be described as footnotes to Parmenides. Parmenides’ and Plato’s concept of The One was taken forward by neo-Platonists, most notably Plotinus. (For both Plato and Plotinus, ‘The One’ is also ‘The Good’, though strangely, Plato did not seem to see the Good as the essence of the universe).

If time is just a feature of the physical universe then there is also a sense in which all moments are eternal — or, it might be said — both eternal but also lasting no time whatsoever. This is one of those paradoxes that arises when trying to think of the universe in its entirety, and it’s especially so when the universe is regarded as somehow ‘one thing’ — The One — as with Parmenides and Plotinus, and of which, more

75