ABSTRACT
Eternity is that tranquil state envisaged by Barrow, when all the stars were still and only the perfect mind of God perceived the passage of time. To understand eternity therefore people should not think of it as timeless or changeless, but as free from all those imperfections that make the passage of time for people a matter for regret. Eternity is not temporal because with God good things do not all have to come to an end. All time is present in the divine mind, in the sense that none is remote or far away or absent, but not in the sense that all is simultaneous, nor that eternity is a timelessness in which nothing ever happens nor can be conceived of as happening. Eternity is not timelessness. For eternity is an attribute of God, and God is a person, a conscious personal being, and time is an inevitable concomitant of consciousness.
