Sempernity
= also called 'Aevum', a temporal mode (lesser eternity ?)
Discussion
Deep Noetics:
"The first instinct of the medieval scholars was to introduce more nuance into the concept of eternity. If the universe was truly created at one point in time, it implies that ‘before’ creation there was either no time or ‘time’ meant something fundamentally different. In a Platonic fashion, this pre-cosmic timelessness was regarded as true eternity. After the deliberate act of creation, time itself was created in the way that intervals of time became countable, like during the six days of creation in the Bible. This created time of perpetual countable motion could be conceptually extended indefinitely into the future and past. In order to distinguish this temporal infinity from the pre-cosmic and transcendent eternity, we shall refer to it as perpetuity. The medieval thinkers recognised the necessity to define a separate kind of temporal infinity that would come between the true eternity of God and the transience of man. Hence, some Scholastics employed the term aevum or sempeternity as an in-between, a temporal mode characteristic for angels or other entities that were immortal but beneath supreme godhood.
- Time is indeed the topic which is most broadly discussed in Nicolaus’ [of Strasbourg] Summa, and there can be no doubt that he tried to portray as many different positions and theories about specific questions and aspects of the philosophical problem of time as possible. In the only surviving version of the manuscript the treatise De tempore consists of the following divisions: De tempore nostro, De nunc temporis, De tempore angelorum, De aevo, De aeternitate. From a more systematic point of view, Nicolaus’ treatise De tempore can be divided into two parts, the analysis of human time — tempus nostrum — and of the instant — nunc temporis — on one hand, the analysis of the different types of temporal duration, i.e. the hierarchy of tempus, tempus angelorum, aevum, and aeternitas on the other hand.
[…]
Thus, the angels — and angelic ‘spiritual time’ — occupy a very specific place in the chain of being, in the ordo rerum. This place is nothing else than the position of a necessary medium, an element of connection by means of which the universe can be understood and seen as a whole. Mediating between divine atemporality and corporeal temporality, the angelic operations form a bridge of communication between aeternitas and tempus, between full infinite actuality and finite beings. Some of the angelic operations are measured by continuous time, some by discontinuous time; some partake in the eternal.
(Porro, Pasquale (Hg.). The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2001.)
The aevum was a foreshadowing, a trial run, of what would characterise the tensions within modern mathematics between the potential and actual infinities. As shown by Cantor in 1874, infinite sets of numbers can be distinguished in at least two ways: one is the countable set of infinite numbers that derives its infinity from the fact that each number n has a successor n+1. In the same way, temporal perpetuity is marked by the fact that each countable motion succeeds another. The other form of infinity is the uncountable set, also referred to as the continuum. There is no way of counting the elements in this set and it can always be infinitely subdivided and extended as it itself represents and undifferentiated overflow of infinity. This is eternity.
- From the absolutely continuous being of space there follows the absolute infinity of space-time — and of every posited point of space-time — on account of its original indistinguishability from matter/substances, posited punctual quantities, temporal relations, etc., and on account of its infinite divisibility. […] This shows how uncertain, how arbitrary the situation is beyond the finite. […] The infinite was and remains transcendent, even though we deal with it every day.
(Mühlenbeck, Cordelia. „Die absolute Unendlichkeit des Raumzeit-Kontinuums als grundlegende Fundamentalontologie.“ In: META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 13, Nr. 2 (2021): 343–366.)