Time as Moving Image of Eternity

Time as the moving image of eternity (eikōn kinētos tou aiōnos) is Plato‘s formulation in the Timaeus of the ontological status of time: the demiurge, fashioning the cosmos in imitation of the eternal Forms, could not make the sensible world eternal — eternity being reserved to the archetypal order — and so made it, as nearly as possible, a moving image of that eternity, numbered according to the revolutions of the heavens.

The formulation is one of the most consequential sentences in Western philosophy. It fixes the classical position that time is not an independent container but the mode in which eternity shows itself to the world of becoming — a mobile reflection, through number and measure, of the immobile fullness of the Forms. Plotinus elaborates the doctrine in Enneads III.7, making time the life of the World-Soul as it unfolds what is simultaneous in the intelligible order into the sequence of the sensible. The position is foundational for the Seba-lineage reading of eternity and time as complementary registers of the one Real rather than as rival domains. See plato-platos-cosmology-timaeus and demiurge.

Relationships

• plato-platos-cosmology-timaeus
• demiurge
• anima-mundi