The tranquility of a placid lake or the vibrating rays of...

The tranquility of a placid lake or the vibrating rays of the morning sun shining upon the mountain peaks evoke in man a sense of peace and the joy of a beauty which melts the hardness of the human soul and quells the agitations of a being caught in the tumultuous tides of the sea of becoming, of what Buddhism characterizes so powerfully as samsāra. This joy and sense of peace are none other than the mark of eternity as it touches the human soul.

Pontifical man lives in time but as a witness to eternity. Traditional teachings throughout the world are replete with references to the mysterious relationship between time and eternity both within man and in the objective order. Since all religion is concerned with the sacred, it is also concerned with the Eternal, for the Eternal is the Sacred as such and also all that is sacred bears the stamp of eternity.

Moreover, man lives in time; his actions are determined by time; and he is finally devoured by time, for to be born in time is to die. Hence even archaic religions which, as we shall shortly see, have a very different conception of history and the march of time than do the Judeo-Christian ones, are as much concerned with saving man from the withering effect of the temporal process and enabling him to be saved from all-becoming as the Judeo-Christian traditions.

To be seriously concerned with the human state, as all the traditions are despite the many differences between them, is to have to deal with a being living amidst temporality but who is marked by the signature of eternity, a being who is mortal yet made for immortality.

In the same way that intelligence is made to know the Absolute and can know only the Absolute absolutely, the knowledge of all other orders of reality partaking of an element of māyā which characterizes those states, it is easier for intelligence as previously defined to grasp the meaning of eternity than of time. Eternity is associated with immutability and permanence. It is an attribute of that reality which is but does not become and in fact transcends even Being.

But this first veil upon the face of Absolute Reality shares with that Reality the attribute of eternity, for Being like Non-Being, in the metaphysical sense already defined, does not become. To gain an intellectual comprehension of the meaning of the Absolute is also to understand the Eternal.