Could a being in time be eternal in Boethius' sense?

Famously, Boethius says that an eternal being, unlike a merely temporally everlasting being, embraces all of its infinite life at once, “possess[ing] the whole fulness of unending life at once”. What’s that mean?

Our life is strung out across time. Sitting right now I as I am I do not embrace the past and future portions of my life where I am lying down or standing up. If I fully and vividly knew my past and my future, I would be a little closer to being eternal, but it would still not be true that I possess the fullness of that life at once. For it would still be true that I now only possess the property of being seated and not the property of lying down or of standing up. So I think epistemic things are not enough for eternity. And this seems intuitively right—eternity is not an epistemic matter. (Could you have an eternal being that isn’t minded? I don’t see why not.) A necessary condition for being eternal is being unchanging.

But being unchanging is not sufficient. Suppose I were everlastingly frozen sitting in front of my laptop. It would still be true that in addition to the present part of my life there is the future part and the past part, and further subdivisions of these, even if they happen to be boringly all alike. The life of an eternal being does not have temporal divisions, even boring ones. It is all at once.

Here is a weird thought experiment. Imagine you are an everlasting point-sized being with a rich and changing mental life. Suppose all your life is spent at the one spatial location (x₀,y₀,z₀). But now imagine that you get infinitely multilocated across all time, in such a way that your numerically same life occurs at every x-coordinate. Thus, you live your everlasting and rich mental life (x,y₀,z₀) for every possible value of x, and it’s the very same life. Your life isn’t spatially divided. The life at x-coordinate  − 7.0 is not merely qualitatively but numerically the same life as the one at x-coordinate  + 99.4.

Now, one more step. Your life is within a four-dimensional spacetime. Assume that spacetime is Galilean or Minkowskian. Now imagine rotating your life in the four-dimensional spacetime in such a way that what was previously along the x-axis is along the t-axis and vice versa. So now your rich and temporally varied mental life becomes temporally unchanging, but all the variation is now strung out spatially along the x-axis. Furthermore, whereas previously due to multilocation you had your life wholly at every x-coordinate, now you have your life wholly—and the numerically same life—at every t-coordinate. Thus, you have an infinite life all at once at every time for everlasting time. Your life isn’t temporally divided: tomorrow’s life is not simply just like today’s, but it is the numerically same as today’s, because your life is fully multilocated at all the different times.

Here is an interesting thing to note about this. This “sideways life”, varying along the x-axis, satisfies the Boethian definition of eternity even though the life is found in time—indeed at every time. If this is right, then having an eternal life in the Boethian sense is compatible with being in time!

Of course, God is not like you are in my weird story. In my story, your life includes different instances of consciousness strung out along the x-axis, though not along the t-axis. Still this kind of inner division is contrary to the undividedness of the divine mind. An eternal God would not have such divisions either. Nor would he be spatial. Perhaps an argument can be made that if God possesses Boethian eternity, then he has to be timeless. But I think that’s not going to be an easy argument to make.

If this is right, then I have overcome an obstacle to combining classical theism with the A-theory of time. I am convinced that an omniscient being has to be in time if the A-theory is true. But if a being can be in time and yet eternal in the Boethian sense, then a classical theist may be able to accept the A-theory of time. After all, Boethius is paradigmatically a classical theist.

That said, my own view is that the above argument just shows that Boethius has not given us a fully satisfactory characterization of eternity. And I have other reasons to reject the A-theory besides theistic ones.

Immutability and split brains

The traditional Christian view that God is unchanging has been accused of being a fruit of Greek ideals of perfection (and what's wrong with that?). Here I want to motivate this view by thinking about our mental life.

But our conscious states are divided between times in much the way that the two centers of consciousness of a split-brain patient are divided from each other. My present state of consciousness only includes shadowy reminders of what I was aware of five minutes ago and vague premonitions of what I am about to be aware of. My temporality makes me like a patient split into untold numbers of centers of consciousness associated with different times (perhaps in a continuous way, with overlapping between close-by centers, since many of our mental states themselves persist over short amounts of time). We are deeply internally disunited--our "transcendental unity of apperception" is quite limited. Such deep internal division and disunion is surely not what the perfect being would experience (at least not in his proper nature—an Incarnation might make for such an experience, and the above reflection should make us grateful that he took up this deeply divided existence for our sake). This is not a matter of some "Greek ideal" of perfection. It is simply the intuition that mental division within oneself is an imperfection.

The above argument presupposes eternalism. But presentism only introduces even greater limitation in our mental life by making the future and past conscious states not be ours.

So we have good reason to think of God's mental life as all-encompassing, of God living an infinitely rich mental life all at once, as Boethius said. But God is a mind and surely all of his mental states are conscious. This gives us good reason to think God is unchanging.

The value of punishment

Boethius gives a striking thesis:

The wicked are happier in undergoing punishment than if no penalty of justice chasten them. And I am not now meaning what might occur to anyone—that bad character is amended by retribution, and is brought into the right path by the terror of punishment, or that it serves as an example to warn others to avoid transgression [...] .
Surely, then, the wicked, when they are punished, have a good thing added to them, the punishment which by the law of justice is good [...]. (Consolation, IV)

The brief argument seems to be:

1. What justice calls for is good.
2. Justice calls for punishment.
3. So, punishment is good.

Unfortunately, the conclusion that we want is not (3) but:

4. Punishment is good for the person undergoing it.

Can we fill in some plausible steps between (3) and (4)?

Perhaps Boethius takes it as clear that justice does not call for punishment simply because "bad character is amended by retribution ... or as an example to warn others" or in any other easy reductive account that "might occur to anyone" (e.g., Nietzsche's "account" on which punishment gives compensatory pleasure to the victims, or accounts on which criminals are simply taken out of circulation by being jailed, for the protection of society). Such benefits are there, but they aren't the benefit that justice is primarily aimed at.

Plausibly, the benefits of justice are to persons. Well, the relevant persons seem to be:

• the criminal
• the victims
• other members of society
• the punisher
• God.

Which of these are such that justice's primary aim is at a benefit for them?

Let's start by ruling out options from the bottom of the list. Everyone benefits, in an extrinsic but important way, when those they love benefit. God loves all. So any benefit to anyone is an extrinsic benefit to God. God is love and is immutable and simple. It plausibly follows that all contingent benefits to God are such extrinsic benefits. Thus, a contingent benefit to God will require a benefit to someone else. So choosing the option of God doesn't get us out of the puzzle. Moreover, when we aim at a benefit for God in this way, we should also be aiming non-instrumentally at a benefit for the creature.

While the punisher may receive some pleasure or the good of excellence in a job well done, surely that's not what justice aims for. It seems clear that just punishment does not require other members of society. Imagine someone has killed every other member of her society. She deserves punishment—say, from another society, or from a self-imposed life of penance.

The victims? There is an intuition that punishment is a way of honoring victims, perhaps posthumously. One problem with this is that criminal punishment appears just even when the criminal was forgiven by the victims. But when the criminal was forgiven by the victims, the criminal should not be punished for the sake of the victims, since by forgiveness the victims relinquish claims to punishment on their behalf. But I worry that this argument is not sufficient. After all, it could be that all of society counts as a victim in the case of a crime, since society's laws have been unjustly violated, so forgiveness by the more particular victims is not yet forgiveness by all of society. (This also shows how "victimless" crimes aren't victimless.)

Here is perhaps a more telling counterexample to the victim theory. Suppose Patricia notices a planet with rudimentary unicellural life but where she has very good reason to think intelligent life will evolve. She leaves behind a device which will kill off the intelligent life on the planet as soon as there are a million intelligent beings. A week later, Darth Vader tests the Death Star on the planet. Patricia has committed attempted murder, but there are no victims: there never was and never will be any intelligent life on this planet. Yet Patricia is clearly deserving of punishment as having committed a species of attempted genocide. Moreover, even if she broke no society's law, there is some sense in which justice calls for her punishment—this is the sort of thing that there ought to be a law against, and this "ought" is an "ought" of justice.

Another worry about locating the benefit in the victims is that may seem problematic to impose such great intrinsic burdens on the living for the sake of what appear to be merely extrinsic benefits to the dead (apart from somewhat dubious theories of the afterlife on which the dead rejoice in seeing their malefactors punished).

That leaves the criminal as the recipient of the benefits of punishment.

I think the most serious challenge to the argument is one on which justice leads to goods that are not the goods to any persons. Maybe justice benefits "the moral order of the universe". I am sceptical, though, of goods that are not derivative from goods to fundamental entities, and on my ontology the universe and its moral order are not fundamental entities.