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Eternity & Time
Dumitru Staniloae
A brief but profound Orthodox meditation on time as God’s gift: the arena in which human freedom learns to answer divine love and temporal life opens toward eternity.
About This Book
Eternity & Time Translated by the Editors of SLG. SLG Press, Oxford, 2001.
Time is not merely something that passes, something we measure, manage, or lose. For Dumitru Stăniloae, time is God’s gift to creation: the arena in which persons exercise freedom, learn to love, and move toward communion.
Eternity, therefore, is not simply endless duration. It is the fullness of personal communion rooted in the life of the Trinity and opened to humanity through the Incarnation. Temporal life matters because love cannot be forced; it must be freely offered and answered, moment after moment.
Brief in length but expansive in vision, Eternity and Time teaches us to receive each moment as an opportunity for relationship, transformation, and movement toward God.
What This Book Forms
Stăniloae reframes time as God’s gift rather than a commodity to spend or an enemy to defeat. He trains the reader to inhabit each moment patiently and relationally—as an arena in which freedom answers love and persons grow toward communion with God and neighbor.
From Dr. Doom's Shelf
I remember first reading this little book while leading a retreat at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison, Kansas, on the campus of Benedictine College. I had already encountered C. S. Lewis’s reflections on time, but Stăniloae opened that vision further for me, placing time within the great movement of freedom, love, incarnation, and communion. I was blown away.
Now I am returning to it while writing The Long Road, an essay about vocation, time, and the slow work of becoming. Once again, Stăniloae is helping me see that time is not merely empty distance to cross or a problem to master. Instead, it's the gift within which we learn to answer love, grow toward communion, and allow the road to continue working on the traveler.
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