From Eternal to Everlasting

The Middle Ages witnessed a shift inthinking about the way God is related to time. For most of the earlier MiddleAges, scholars had followed an earlier patristic tradition of describing God aseternal and thus as timeless or outside of time. In the early thirteenthcentury, however, members of the Franciscan order, who played a significant rolein the development of the recently-founded universities, re-defined God’srelationship to time in terms of his everlastingness. On their account, God isinfinite in temporal duration, rather than simply ’timeless’, since he has nobeginning and no end. So construed, God encompasses and is able to relate toevery moment in time in a way that the Franciscans believed was not possible onthe eternalist account. This book will discuss some of the factors thatcontributed to their shift in thinking about God as everlasting instead ofeternal. Among these, the book will identity a transition in defining the basicnature of God as either simple (for proponents of eternity) or infinite (forproponents of everlastingness) as well as the Franciscan adoption of themetaphysics of the eleventh-century Islamic philosopher,Avicenna.