Second Meditation: What Is Judgment? 123dispensation: this present age of the world, for instance, or the
age of the world to come, or a heavenly sphere of reality be-
yond this world altogether (as it seems to do in John's gospel).
On the whole, however, by the time of the New Testament the
word's meanings were far too diverse to reduce to any single
term now in use in modern languages. Occasionally it could
refer to a kind of time, occasionally to a kind of place, occa-
sionally to a particular kind of being or substance, and occa-
sionally to a state of existence. For educated Jewish scholars
of Christ's time (or thereabouts) who wrote in Greek, such as
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE-c. 50 CE) and Josephus (37-
c. 100 ), an aeon was still understood as only a limited period
of time, often as brief as a single lifespan, occasionally as long
as three generations.
Neither did the derivative adjective aionios-as d"£ows
(ai'dios) or aTEAEvT17Tos-(atelevtetos) did-have the intrin-
sic meaning of "eternal." It could be used defectively to indi-
cate eternity, in much the way that English words like "endur-
ing" or "abiding" can do today. But it generally had a much
vaguer connotation. And the term's plasticity was certainly
fully appreciated by the Christian universalists of the Greek
and Syrian East in later centuries: Clement, Origen, Gregory
of Nyssa, Makrina, Diodore of Tarsus, and so on. As I noted in
my introduction, Basil the Great reported that the great ma-
jority of his fellow Eastern Christians assumed that the aionios
kolasis, the "chastening of the Age" (or, as it is usually trans-
lated in English, "eternal punishment") mentioned in Matthew
25: 46, would consist in only a temporary probation of the soul;
and he offered no specifically lexicographic objection to such
a reading. John Chrysostom (c. 349-407) once even used the
word aionios to describe the reign of Satan over this world pre-
cisely in order to emphasize its transience, meaning thereby