A Very Brief History of Eternity is not a very brief history of eternity. Author Carlos Eire, a Religious Studies Professor at Yale University, knows that, in relation to eternity, everything is very brief, but his 268-page work is substantial enough not to necessitate the use of the word “brief” in relation to page lengths and scope. While his style is relaxed, he covers so much ground—can eternity be “grounded”?—that readers will find and feel that, in its own way, the book is weighty. The word in the title at which more properly to pause is “history.” Eire knows that we know that one cannot think or write historically about eternity. So his book is a history of human questionings, ponderings, and sometimes foolishly or frighteningly bold dealings with the concept. What he finds and details, yes, briefly, should enrich the reflections of historians as they deal with time.
Eire quotes Augustine's word about when he was questioned about what time was. “Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (62). The author implants a similar question about eternity, and knows that neither he nor readers know or can know how to respond satisfactorily. Never mind: what he does in the face of the abyss of eternity is what matters, and this he treats brilliantly and memorably. What (Western) people thought about afterlife and what was their thought about its impact on life determined much of their action, and as their reflections changed, so did their actions. They still do.
“Eternity” elicits very different kinds of treatment from historians than it would from philosophers, theologians, or cosmologists, though historian Eire draws effortlessly on what philosophers and theologians have said, and relates space and time sufficiently to give confidence that he knows something of the bearing of cosmology on his subject. He writes modestly about the future—about which historians as historians by definition know nothing. They work sub specie praeteritorum, in the scope of “the past.” None could be so bold as Yogi Berra, who said “I have seen the future—and it is very much like the present, only longer!” Yet Eire knows that how people think about the future colors their view of the present and of eternity.
Augustine is quite legitimately seen as a decisive reflector on time-and-eternity, and Eire uses him to frame much of what follows in the millennium of Christendom, “Eternity Conceived.” In a section on “Eternity Overflowing,” the author shows the consequences of power related to uses of the future, at least in respect to the afterlife in Christendom. How the Church invented particular hells and heavens and applied imagery related to these to keep people in line is a subject he treats dispassionately. He quotes generously from horrendously hard-to-take descriptions of hell, letting these quotations do the work from him. It is easy to conjure in the imagination some sense of what people in those centuries were taught and why they did all they could to follow Church law, pray to favored saints, and pay for services rendered at masses for the dead. He also reckons with the consequences of the purgatorial policy by mentioning how much wealth, especially in land, became the Church's for centuries.
In reaction to such teachings and policies, people across the Western Catholic world grew restless and began to dissent. “Eternity Reformed” features Martin Luther who, in the face of his own fears of purgatory and hell, turned them into creative reformist action against sellers of indulgences, which signified a shortening of the time spent in the tortures of purgatory. The Reformers did not do away with hell, but the fears and fires of purgatory were quenched, and the joys of eternity in heaven were made more immediately attractive and available.
As the Enlightenment, modern criticism, and feelings or claims of liberation followed the Reformation, people of the West did not stop speculating about eternity but now, instead of dealing with the earlier versions of “afterlife,” they succumbed or were forced to contemplate ways to chop up the future into programs, policies, and, in the title for chapter 6, “Five-Year Plans,” which, as he describes them and we all had better know by now, were often this-worldly analogues to the afterlife. Eternityitis, if we can name the virus, has not stopped afflicting or inspiring people of conventional Christian belief or those around them.
A welcome addendum on “Common Conceptions of Eternity” is a helpful review statement of the whole book, beginning with “Sempiternity,” which is “time without a beginning or an end” and moving on to states which “transcend time” or “includes time but precedes and exceeds it.” There are more, for example “Platonic Eternity: the Intelligible Realm,” which Eire marks “obsolete, but influential.” Finally, he mentions how “eternity” is often associated with infinity, and hauls in the Oxford English Dictionary to take over the definitions from there.
