Another very weighty proof to show its perpetuity is supplied by time. If time is uncreated, the world also necessarily must be uncreated. Why? Because as great Plato says time is indicated by days and nights and months and successions of years, and none of these can subsist without the movement of the sun and the revolution of the whole heaven. Thus people who are accustomed to define things have correctly explained time as what measures the movement of the universe, and since this is sound, the world is coeval with time and its original source. But nothing can be so preposterous as to suppose that there was a time when the world was when time was not. Time by its nature has no beginning or end, since these very terms “was, time when, when,” involve the idea of time. From this it follows that time also did not exist of itself when the world was not, for what does not subsist does not move either and time has been shown to be what measures the cosmic movement. It is necessary therefore that both should have subsisted from everlasting without having any beginning in which they came into being and things which are from everlasting are not susceptible of destruction. Possibly some argumentative Stoic quibbler will say that time is explained as the measurement of the movement not only of the world of the present cosmic order but of that postulated at the conflagration. The answer to this is, “My friend, you are transferring your terms and give the sense of Cosmos to the negation of Cosmos, for if this world which we see is very fitly called Cosmos in the proper sense of the word being ordered and disposed with consummate craftsmanship, which admits of no improvement, one may rightly describe its change into fire as the negation of Cosmos.”
On the Eternity of the World 10
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