ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any philosophical system, it was Messiaen's personal theology and music's role in the spiritual that led him to find a point of view that could accommodate the flow of duration, the abstraction of number, the time of nature, and eternity itself. Each sense of eternity functions differently in Messiaen's music, and these differences help to contextualize similar concepts that are found in his students, notably Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen. His reliance on a reconstruction of Messiaen's own sense of mimesis, however, brings to light a centrally problematic tension within the historical meaning of time and eternity he will expand on later. Rather, the apprehension of the nonmoving gives us the idea of the unchanging eternity of the divine: stasis is a metaphor for timelessness in general, but ultimately (via a dialectic that continues along in this section of the Summa Theologiea) it describes the unchanging, permanent and uniform God.
