Misha PedanEternal Presence (signed copy)

The Return of Eternal Presence

Eternity, presence—the two terms have just as often appeared as opposites as they have been taken as mutually implicative: opposites, because the present is already gone when we attempt to grasp it, whereas the eternal is the unchanging, that which never comes to be or passes away; implicative, since what is present somehow always aspires to step out of the flux of time, as if the Now would of itself demand to be sustained in view of the eternal that is always there, always present, as if fulfilling the promise inherent in the now. Together these two terms have thus been taken as the very summit of temporal experience in a way that escapes ordinary time, or forms the non-temporal kernel of time itself. In the language of medieval theological discourse this would be God as a “standing now” (nunc stans): a God who is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead.

------Sven-Olov Wallenstein-------