Unconditional Love

So we meet again. Let me practice my fingers and exercise my mind, it's been a long time.

Time stands still? Eternity? Unconditional love is unchanging, unalterable, and one? Well, as human beings, we are subject perpetually in part to change, it cannot, as we say, be unchanging but as to the nature of the question, let us ponder.

For time to stand still, a thing must remain forever itself, forever active but occupying no space nor time. A thing must be so completely itself that it could not be another thing, and it must be a thing that occupies no space and if time is the measurement of changes, let us propose that it cannot be moved by time.

St. Thomas Aquinas proposed the state of aeveternity, I believe. Physical things occupy physical space and are wholly a slave to time. God is eternal and is not subject to time, for He cannot change, He is what He is and He could never be another thing. So it is said, is the soul, however, it can change in process not in it's nature, so it is neither a slave to time, nor is it eternal, thus we introduce a third state of existence.

Ah perhaps, we shall break this down into a few more pieces, key note from Aquinas:

" And, therefore, in order that generation (coming-to-be) come about, three things are necessary: namely, a potential something which is the matter, and not-being in act which is the privation, and that through which it becomes in act, namely, the form. Let us take an example: when a statue-is made from bronze, the bronze which is in potency for the form of the statue is 'the matter'; the privation is the shapelessness or the lack of the form (of statue in the molten bronze); the shape by which we call it a statue is the form. The form of statue, however, is not the substantial form, because the bronze before the coming-to-be of this form (of statue) has being in act, and its being does not depend upon this shape (of statue) which is an accidental form. All artificial forms are accidental forms. For art only operates upon those things already constituted in being by nature."

Nature is the question of what a thing "is", accidents are better compared to what that thing can do. A thing, a soul for instance, is capable of loving or not loving, caring or not caring, hoping or not hoping. For comparison, a rose plant can grow from a seed, into a thing with leaves, into a budding thing with leaves, into a supportive rose plant. Or whatever, haha. The rose plant, unless in it's nature, it's not really a rose plant, can only produce roses. However the original seed could have deteriorate prior generation, and it can equally decompose. A rose is not a rose. You can say it has the nature of a rose, but it's accidents are in a perpetual state of change, so you can never really say that a rose is red or a rose is blue or green. A rose at it's peak is red perhaps, with green leaves. Upon death, it is brown until it's non-existence. So it's accidents change, and it's being ceases to exist, completely subject to time.

My point, you say? Let us get back to the notion of the soul which is capable of loving or not loving. It can never, in my belief, deteriorate like the rose, it can never become dirt, it will not decompose into minerals which will feed something else. Supposing that is true, let us say that we cannot be beyond what we are, and we cannot "do" beyond what we are, so can we love and love eternally? We can love aeveternally, perhaps? Hehe, much better than corporeal'ly', at least. So, I agree, for the most part. ;)