In the eternity of time past, and assuming that everything that can be nonexistent is so at some time or other, there would be nothing now.
Even the most learned Aztec priests never reached the intellectual level of their Maya counterparts of the 1st millennium, nor did they conceive of the eternity of time and of its "bearers," the divinized time periods.
And so, implying that the primary body is something else beyond earth, fire, air, and water, they gave the highest place a name of its own, aither, derived from the fact that it 'runs always' for an eternity of time.
Again the area where this issue arose concerned proofs for the eternity of time.
He did not believe in the resurrection, affirmed the eternity of time, and that man is a plant; he had fun playing music.
As for Aristotle's third argument that there cannot be a first instant, hence nor a beginning of time or change, because an instant is a link between past and future, Grosseteste responds that this conception of an instant will appeal only to someone already committed to the eternity of time and change.
This work was published c. 530-534 and involved a close scrutiny of the first chapters of Aristotle's On the Heavens (his theory of ether as the fifth element, of which the heavenly bodies are made) and the eighth book of the Physics (arguing for the eternity of time and motion).
Experiences of the sheer immensities of things — "the unfathomable world of the sea, a far-reaching plain, the innumerable legions of stars, the eternity of time, every height and depth that exhausts us" (Philosophical Writings, p. 144) — sometimes make us tremble, but we still find them alluring.
It enlarges the tiny self -- perhaps six feet tall in the immensity of space, living for seven or eight decades in the eternity of time -- to link with the entirety of human experience.
This kind of education allows the self to expand from its tiny space and moment -- seventy inches, say, in the immensity of space and seven or eight decades in the eternity of time--to connect to the human totality, its past and future.
Grosseteste objects that although the first motion exists after not existing and that there was indeed a potential for that motion before it, in this context "was" and "before" refer to the relation of eternity to time and are used in a non-temporal sense.
