Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 121
than the difference between this age (in Hebrew, 'olam ha-zeh)
and the Age to come ('olam ha-ba). Much depends, naturally,
on how content one is to see the Greek adjective alwvws, aio-
nios, rendered simply and flatly as "eternal" or "everlasting." It
is, after all, a word whose ambiguity has been noted since the
earliest centuries of the church. Certainly the noun alwv, aion
(or aeon), from which it is derived, did come during the classi-
cal and late antique periods to ref er on occasion to a period of
endless or at least indeterminate duration; but that was never
its most literal acceptation. Throughout the whole of ancient
and late antique Greek literature, an "aeon" was most prop-
erly an "age," which is simply to say a "substantial period of
time" or an "extended interval." At first, it was typically used
to indicate the lifespan of a single person, though sometimes
it could be used of a considerably shorter period ( even, as it
happens, a single year). It came over time to mean something
like a discrete epoch, or a time far in the past, or an age far off
in the future. Plato in the Timaeus used it to indicate a kind of
time proper to the highest heavenly realm, radically different
from sublunary xpovos, chronos, the terrestrial time of genera-
tion and decay. He also, incidentally, may have been the first to
give the word the adjectival form aionios. One has to exercise
some care even here, however, in making sense of any of these
terms in Plato's special usage. It is customary in translations of
the Timaeus to render the noun chronos simply as "time," the
noun aion as "eternity," and the adjective aionios as "eternal,"
and credit Plato with the claim therefore that "time is the mov-
ing image of eternity"; but these are all, arguably, misleading
translations.
For Plato, chronos and aion were not, respectively, time
and eternity, but rather two different kinds of time: the former
is characterized by change, and therefore consists in that sue-