Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/h₂ey-

I recently heard a homily in which a Roman Catholic priest said that people generally misunderstand the full meaning of "eternal life" in God, believing it to mean only "everlasting life" -- i.e., we regard only the atemporal meaning of the term, while overlooking that "eternal" also has a vertical, immediate meaning; that "eternal life" is also "intense life," a life lived fully in the here and now.

While provocative, I doubted the linguistic precision of this construction. However, I am intrigued to see it claimed on this site that the hypothesized proto-Indo-European nounal root of the word "eternal" ("*h₂eyu-") may indeed have meant "vitality," or perhaps even have meant "life" itself. 70.39.231.116 15:04, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't think the precise meaning of some Indo-European root has any particular bearing on the definition of religious concepts in Roman Catholicism... But anyway: Eternity in the religious sense is not so much "never-ending time" as "absence of time", something we can't even begin to comprehend. You already correctly used the word "atemporal". So based on that, I'd say the priest was quite right. 90.186.72.208 21:47, 4 April 2022 (UTC)