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Theological Essays and Other Papers v1

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Theological Essays and Other Papers v1







ON THE SUPPOSED SCRIPTURAL EXPRESSION FOR ETERNITY.

[1852.]


Forty years ago (or, in all probability, a good deal more, for we
have already completed thirty-seven years from Waterloo, and my
remembrances upon this subject go back to a period lying much behind
that great era), I used to be annoyed and irritated by the false
interpretation given to the Greek word _aion_, and given
necessarily, therefore, to the adjective _aionios_ as its
immediate derivative. It was not so much the falsehood of this
interpretation, as the narrowness of that falsehood, which disturbed
me. There was a glimmer of truth in it; and precisely that glimmer
it was which led the way to a general and obstinate misconception
of the meaning. The word is remarkably situated. It is a scriptural
word, and it is also a Greek word; from which the inevitable inference
is, that we must look for it only in the _New_ Testament. Upon
any question arising of deep, aboriginal, doctrinal truth, we have
nothing to do with translations. Those are but secondary questions,
archaeological and critical, upon which we have a right to consult
the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known by the name
of the Septuagint.

Suffer me to pause at this point for the sake of premising an
explanation needful to the unlearned reader. As the _reading_
public and the _thinking_ public is every year outgrowing more
and more notoriously the mere _learned_ public, it becomes
every year more and more the right of the former public to give the
law preferably to the latter public, upon all points which concern
its own separate interests. In past generations, no pains were taken
to make explanations that were not called for by the _learned_
public. All other readers were ignored. They formed a mob, for whom
no provision was made. And that many difficulties should be left
entirely unexplained for _them_, was superciliously assumed
to be no fault at all. And yet any sensible man, let him be as
supercilious as he may, must on consideration allow that amongst
the crowd of unlearned or half-learned readers, who have had neither
time nor opportunities for what is called 'erudition' or learned
studies, there must always lurk a proportion of men that, by
constitution of mind, and by the bounty of nature, are much better
fitted for thinking, originally more philosophic, and are more
capaciously endowed, than those who are, by accident of position,
more learned. Such a natural superiority certainly takes precedency
of a merely artificial superiority; and, therefore, it entitles
those who possess it to a special consideration. Let there be an
audience gathered about any book of ten thousand one hundred readers:
it might be fair in these days to assume that ten thousand would be
in a partial sense illiterate, and the remaining one hundred what
would be rigorously classed as 'learned.' Now, on such a distribution
of the readers, it would be a matter of certainty that the most
powerful intellects would lie amongst the illiterate ten thousand,
counting, probably, to fifteen to one as against those in the
learned minority. The inference, therefore, would be, that, in all
equity, the interest of the unlearned section claimed a priority
of attention, not merely as the more numerous section, but also
as, by a high probability, the more philosophic. And in proportion
as this unlearned section widens and expands, which every year it
does, in that proportion the obligation and cogency of this equity
strengthens. An attention to the unlearned part of an audience, which
fifteen years ago might have rested upon pure courtesy, _now_
rests upon a basis of absolute justice. I make this preliminary
explanation, in order to take away the appearance of caprice from
such occasional pauses as I may make for the purpose of clearing
up obscurities or difficulties. Formerly, in a case of that nature,
the learned reader would have told me that I was not entitled to
delay _him_ by elucidations that in _his_ case must be supposed to
be superfluous: and in such a remonstrance there would once have
been some equity. The illiterate section of the readers might
then be fairly assumed as present only by accident; as no abiding
part of the audience; but, like the general public in the gallery
of the House of Commons, as present only by sufferance; and
officially in any records of the house whatever, utterly ignored
as existences. At present, half way on our pilgrimage through the
nineteenth century, I reply to such a learned remonstrant--that it
gives me pain to annoy him by superfluous explanations, but that,
unhappily, this infliction of tedium upon _him_ is inseparable
from what has now become a duty to others. This being said, I now
go on to inform the illiterate reader, that the earliest translation
of the Hebrew Scriptures ever made was into Greek. It was undertaken
on the encouragement of a learned prince, Ptolemy Philadelphus, by
an association of Jewish emigrants in Alexandria. It was, as the
event has shown in very many instances, an advantage of a rank rising
to providential, that such a cosmopolitan version of the Hebrew
sacred writings should have been made at a moment when a rare
concurrence of circumstances happened to make it possible; such
as, for example, a king both learned in his tastes and liberal in
his principles of religious toleration; a language, viz., the Greek,
which had already become, what for many centuries it continued to
be, a common language of communication for the learned of the whole
οικδμενη (_i.e._, in effect of the civilized world,
viz., Greece, the shores of the Euxine, the whole of Asia Minor,
Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and all the dependencies of Carthage,
finally, and above all, Rome, then beginning to loom upon the
western horizon), together with all the dependencies of Rome, and,
briefly, every state and city that adorned the imperial islands of
the Mediterranean, or that glittered like gems in that vast belt
of land, roundly speaking, one thousand miles in average breadth,
and in circuit running up to five thousand miles. One thousand
multiplied into five times one thousand, or, otherwise expressed,
a thousand thousand five times repeated, or otherwise a million
five times repeated, briefly a territory measuring five millions
of square miles, or forty-five times the surface of our two British
islands--such was the boundless domain which this extraordinary
act of Ptolemy suddenly threw open to the literature and spiritual
revelation of a little obscure race, nestling in a little angle of
Asia, scarcely visible as a fraction of Syria, buried in the broad
shadows thrown out on one side by the great and ancient settlements
on the Nile, and on the other by the vast empire that for thousands
of years occupied the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the twinkling
of an eye, at a sudden summons, as it were from the sounding of
a trumpet, or the oriental call by a clapping of hands, gates are
thrown open, which have an effect corresponding in grandeur to the
effect that would arise from the opening of a ship canal across
the Isthmus of Darien, viz., the introduction to each other--face
to face--of two separate infinities. Such a canal would suddenly
lay open to each other the two great oceans of our planet, the
Atlantic and the Pacific; whilst the act of translating _into_
Greek and _from_ Hebrew, that is, transferring out of a
mysterious cipher as little accessible as Sanscrit, and which never
_would_ be more accessible through any worldly attractions of
alliance with power and civic grandeur or commerce, _out of_
this darkness _into_ the golden light of a language the most
beautiful, the most honored amongst men, and the most widely diffused
through a thousand years to come, had the immeasurable effect of
throwing into the great crucible of human speculation, even then
beginning to ferment, to boil, to overthrow--that mightiest of all
elements for exalting the chemistry of philosophy--grand and, for
the first time, adequate conceptions of the Deity. For, although
it is true that, until Elias should come--that is, until Christianity
should have applied its final revelation to the completion of this
great idea-we could not possess it in its total effulgence, it is,
however, certain that an immense advance was made, a prodigious
usurpation across the realms of chaos, by the grand illuminations
of the Hebrew discoveries. Too terrifically austere we must presume
the Hebrew idea to have been: too undeniably it had not withdrawn
the veil entirely which still rested upon the Divine countenance;
so much is involved in the subsequent revelations of Christianity.
But still the advance made in reading aright the divine lineaments
had been enormous. God was now a holy spirit that could not tolerate
impurity. He was the fountain of justice, and no longer disfigured
by any mode of sympathy with human caprice or infirmity. And, if
a frown too awful still rested upon his face, making the approach
to him too fearful for harmonizing with that perfect freedom and
that childlike love which God seeks in his worshippers, it was yet
made evident that no step for conciliating his favor did or could
lie through any but _moral_ graces.

Three centuries after this great epoch of the _publication_
(for such it was) secured so providentially to the Hebrew theology,
two learned Jews--viz., Josephus and Philo Judaeus--had occasion
to seek a cosmopolitan utterance for that burden of truth (or what
they regarded as truth) which oppressed the spirit within them.
Once again they found a deliverance from the very same freezing
imprisonment in an unknown language, through the very same magical
key, viz., the all-pervading language of Greece, which carried
their communications to the four winds of heaven, and carried
them precisely amongst the class of men, viz.--the enlightened and
educated class--which pre-eminently, if not exclusively, their wish
was to reach. About one generation _after_ Christ it was, when
the utter prostration, and, politically speaking, the destruction
of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation, threw these two learned Jews
upon this recourse to the Greek language as their final resource,
in a condition otherwise of absolute hopelessness. Pretty nearly
three centuries _before_ Christ it was (two hundred and
eighty-four years, according to the common reckoning), when the first
act of communication took place between the sealed-up literature
of Palestine and the Greek catholic interpretation. Altogether,
we may say that three hundred and twenty years, or somewhere
about ten generations of men, divided these two memorable acts
of intercommunication. Such a space of time allows a large range
of influence and of silent, unconscious operation to the vast and
potent ideas that brooded over this awful Hebrew literature. Too
little weight has been allowed to the probable contagiousness, and
to the preternatural shock, of such a new and strange philosophy,
acting upon the jaded and exhausted intellect of the Grecian race.
We must remember, that precisely this particular range of time was
that in which the Greek systems of philosophy, having thoroughly
completed their evolution, had suffered something of a collapse;
and, having exhausted their creative energies, began to gratify
the cravings for novelty by re modellings of old forms. It is
remarkable, indeed, that this very city of Alexandria founded and
matured this new principle of remodelling applied to poetry not less
than to philosophy and criticism. And, considering the activity
of this great commercial city and port, which was meant to act,
and _did_ act, as a centre of communication between the East
and the West, it is probable that a far greater effect was produced
by the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, in the way of
preparing the mind of nations for the apprehension of Christianity,
than has ever been distinctly recognised. The silent destruction
of books in those centuries has robbed us of all means for tracing
innumerable revolutions, that nevertheless, by the evidence of
results, must have existed. Taken, however, with or without this
additional result, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in
their most important portions must be ranked amongst what are called
`providential' events. Such a king--a king whose father had been
a personal friend of Alexander, the mighty civilizing conqueror,
and had shared in the liberalization connected with his vast
revolutionary projects for extending a higher civilization over
the globe, such a king, conversing with such a language, having
advantages so absolutely unrivalled, and again this king and this
language concurring with a treasure so supernatural of spiritual
wisdom as the subject of their ministrations, and all three
concurring with political events so auspicious--the founding of
a new and mighty metropolis in Egypt, and the silent advance to
supreme power amongst men of a new empire, martial beyond all precedent
as regarded _means_, but not as regarded _ends_--working
in all things towards the unity of civilization and the unity of
law, so that any new impulse, as, for instance, impulse of a new
religion, was destined to find new facilities for its own propagation,
resembling electric conductors, under the unity of government and
of law--concurrences like these, so many and so strange, justly
impress upon this translation, the most memorable, because the most
influential of all that have ever been accomplished, a character
of grandeur that place it on the same level of interest as the
building of the first or second temple at Jerusalem.

There is a Greek legend which openly ascribes to this translation
all the characters of a miracle. But, as usually happens, this
vulgarizing form of the miraculous is far less impressive than the
plain history itself, unfolding its stages with the most unpretending
historical fidelity. Even the Greek language, on which, as the
natural language of the new Greek dynasty in Egypt, the duty of
the translation devolved, enjoyed a double advantage: 1st, as being
the only language then spoken upon earth that could diffuse a book
over _every_ part of the civilized earth; 2dly, as being a language
of unparalleled power and compass for expressing and reproducing
effectually all ideas, however alien and novel. Even the city,
again, in which this translation was accomplished, had a double
dowery of advantages towards such a labor, not only as enjoying a
large literary society, and, in particular, a large Jewish society,
together with unusual provision in the shape of libraries, on
a scale probably at that time unprecedented, but also as having
the most extensive machinery then known to human experience for
_publishing_, that is, for transmitting to foreign capitals
all books in the readiest and the cheapest fashion, by means of
its prodigious shipping.

Having thus indicated to the _unlearned_ reader the particular
nature of that interest which invests this earliest translation
of the Hebrew Scriptures, viz., that in fact this translation was
the earliest _publication_ to the human race of a revelation
which had previously been locked up in a language destined, as
surely as the Welsh language or the Gaelic, to eternal obscurity
amongst men, I go on to mention that the learned Jews selected for
this weighty labor happened to be in number seventy-two; but, as
the Jews systematically reject fractions in such cases (whence it
is that always, in order to express the period of six weeks, they
say _forty days_, and not, as strictly they should, _forty-two
days_), popularly, the translators were called 'the seventy,'
for which the Latin word is _septuaginta_. And thus in after
ages the translators were usually indicated as 'The LXX,' or, if the
work and not the workmen should be noticed, it was cited as _The
Septuagint_. In fact, this earliest of Scriptural versions,
viz., into Greek, is by much the most famous; or, if any other
approaches it in notoriety, it is the Latin translation by St. Jerome,
which, in this one point, enjoys even a superior importance, that
in the Church of Rome it is the authorized translation. Evidently,
in every church, it must be a matter of primary importance to assign
the particular version to which that church appeals, and by which,
in any controversy arising, that church consents to be governed.
Now, the Jerome version fulfils this function for the Romish Church;
and accordingly, in the sense of being published (_vulgata_),
or publicly authorized by that church, it is commonly called _The
Vulgate_.

But, in a large polemic question, unless, like the Romish church,
we uphold a secondary inspiration as having secured a special
privileged translation from the possibility of error, we cannot
refuse an appeal to the Hebrew text for the Old Testament, or to the
Greek text for the New. The word _aeonios_ (αιωηιος),
as purely Grecian, could not connect itself with the Old Testament,
unless it were through the Septuagint translation into Greek.
Now, with that version, in any case of controversy, none of us,
Protestants alike or Roman Catholics, have anything whatever to do.
Controversially, we _can_ be concerned only with the original
language of the Scriptures, with its actual verbal expressions
textually produced. To be liable, therefore, to such a textual
citation, any Greek word must belong to the _New_ Testament.
Because, though the word might happen to occur in the Septuagint,
yet, since _that_ is merely a translation, for any of us
who occupy a controversial place, that is, who are bound by the
responsibilities, or who claim the strict privileges of controversy,
the Septuagint has no virtual existence. We should not be at
liberty to allege the Septuagint as any authority, if it happened
to countenance our own views; and, consequently, we could not be
called on to recognise the Septuagint in any case where it should
happen to be against us. I make this preliminary _caveat_, as
not caring whether the word _aeonios_ does or does not occur
in the Septuagint. Either way, the reader understands that I disown
the authority of that version as in any degree affecting myself.
The word which, forty years ago, moved my disgust by its servile
misinterpretation, was a word proper to the _New_ Testament;
and any sense which it may have received from an Alexandrian Jew
in the third century before Christ, is no more relevant to any
criticism that I am now going to suggest, than is the classical
use of the word _aeon_ (αιων) familiar to the learned in
Sophocles or Euripides.

The reason which gives to this word _aeonian_ what I do not
scruple to call a _dreadful_ importance, is the same reason, and
no other, which prompted the dishonesty concerned in the ordinary
interpretation of this word. The word happened to connect itself--but
_that_ was no practical concern of mine; me it had not biassed
in the one direction, nor should it have biassed any just critic
in the counter, direction--happened, I say, to connect itself with
the ancient dispute upon the _duration_ of future punishments.
What was meant by the _aeonian_ punishments in the next world?
Was the proper sense of the word _eternal_, or was it not?
I, for my part, meddled not, nor upon any consideration could have
been tempted to meddle, with a speculation repellent alike by the
horror and by the hopeless mystery which invest it. Secrets of the
prison-house, so afflicting to contemplate steadily, and so hopeless
of solution, there could be no proper motive for investigating,
unless the investigation promised a great deal more than it could
ever accomplish; and my own feeling as to all such problems is,
that they vulgarize what, left to itself, would take its natural
station amongst the freezing horrors that Shakspeare dismisses with
so potent an expression of awe, in a well-known scene of 'Measure
for Measure.' I reiterate my protest against being in any way
decoyed into the controversy. Perhaps I may have a strong opinion
upon the subject. But, anticipating the coarse discussions into
which the slightest entertainment of such a question would be
every moment approaching, once for all, out of reverential regard
for the dignity of human nature, I beg permission to decline the
controversy altogether.

But does this declinature involve any countenance to a certain
argument which I began by rejecting as abominable? Most certainly
not. That argument runs thus--that the ordinary construction of the
term _aeonian_, as equivalent to _everlasting_, could not
possibly be given up when associated with penal misery, because in
that case, and by the very same act, the idea of eternity must be
abandoned as applicable to the counter-bliss of Paradise. Torment
and blessedness, it was argued, punishment and beatification, stood
upon the same level; the same word it was, the word _aeonian_,
which qualified the duration of either; and, if eternity in the most
rigorous acceptation fell away from the one idea, it must equally
fall away from the other. Well; be it so. But that would not settle
the question. It might be very painful to renounce a long-cherished
anticipation; but the necessity of doing so could not be received
as a sufficient reason for adhering to the old unconditional use of
the word _aeonian_. The argument is--that we must retain the
old sense of _eternal_, because else we lose upon one scale what
we had gained upon the other. But what then? would be the reasonable
man's retort. We are not to accept or to reject a new construction
(if otherwise the more colorable) of the word _aeonian_,
simply because the consequences might seem such as upon the whole
to displease us. We may gain nothing; for by the new interpretation
our loss may balance our gain; and we may prefer the old arrangement.
But how monstrous is all this! We are not summoned as to a choice
of two different arrangements that may suit different tastes, but
to a grave question as to what _is_ the sense and operation
of the word _aeonian_. Let the limitation of the word disturb
our previous estimate of Paradise, grant that it so disturbs that
estimate, not the less all such consequences leave the dispute
exactly where it was; and if a balance of reason can be found for
limiting the extent of the word _aeonian_, it will not be the
less true because it may happen to disturb a crotchet of our own.

Meantime, all this speculation, first and last, is pure nonsense.
_Aeonian_ does not mean _eternal_; neither does it mean
of limited duration; nor would the unsettling of _aeonian_ in
its old use, as applied to punishment, to torment, to misery, &c.,
carry with it any necessary unsettling of the idea in its application
to the beatitudes of Paradise. Pause, reader; and thou, my favored
and privileged reader, that boastest thyself to be unlearned, pause
doubly whilst I communicate my views as to this remarkable word.

What is an _aeon_? In the use and acceptation of the Apocalypse,
it is evidently this, viz., the duration or cycle of existence which
belongs to any object, not individually for itself, but universally
in right of its genus. Kant, for instance, in a little paper which
I once translated, proposed and debated the question as to the age
of our planet the Earth. What did he mean? Was he to be understood
as asking whether the Earth were half a million, two millions, or
three millions of years old? Not at all. The probabilities certainly
lean, one and all, to the assignment of an antiquity greater by
many thousands of times than that which we have most idly supposed
ourselves to extract from Scripture, which assuredly never meant to
approach a question so profoundly irrelevant to the great purposes
of Scripture as any geological speculation whatsoever. But this
was not within the field of Kant's inquiry. What he wished to know
was simply the exact stage in the whole course of her development
which the Earth at present occupies. Is she still in her infancy,
for example, or in a stage corresponding to middle age, or in a
stage approaching to superannuation? The idea of Kant presupposed
a certain average duration as belonging to a planet of our particular
system; and supposing this known, or discoverable, and that a certain
assignable development belonged to a planet so circumstanced as
ours, then in what particular stage of that development may we, the
tenants of this respectable little planet _Tellus_, reasonably
be conceived to stand?

Man, again, has a certain _aeonian_ life; possibly ranging
somewhere about the period of seventy years assigned in the Psalms.
That is, in a state as highly improved as human infirmity and the
errors of the earth herself, together with the diseases incident to
our atmosphere, &c., could be supposed to allow, possibly the human
race might average seventy years for each individual. This period
would in that case represent the '_aeon_' of the _individual_
Tellurian; but the '_aeon_' of the Tellurian RACE would
probably amount to many millions of our earthly years; and it would
remain an unfathomable mystery, deriving no light at all from the
septuagenarian '_aeon_' of the individual; though between the
two _aeons_ I have no doubt that some secret link of connection
does and must subsist, however undiscoverable by human sagacity.

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