Detail of Dawn
The Moving Image of Eternity
Whitehead on Michelangelo
Ideals fashion themselves round these two notions, permanence and flux. In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts.
The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence—Michelangelo's masterpieces of statuary, Day and Night, Evening and Dawn—exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 338). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
The four symbolic figures in the Medici chapel in Florence—Michelangelo's masterpieces of statuary, Day and Night, Evening and Dawn—exhibit the everlasting elements in the passage of fact. The figures stay there, reclining in their recurring sequence, of things. The perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing. The perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 338). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Touching the Eternal
In the Flow of Time
It is sometimes thought that Whitehead's philosophy is all about process and becoming, and that he is “modern” in the sense of eschewing ideals of permanence and eternity. But this is not at all true to Whitehead. He was keenly interested in how we human beings might experience something permanent and eternal amid—not apart from—the flux of life. Hence his interest in Michelangelo.
Art as the Implanting of Timelessness
In Process and Reality, Whitehead reflects on Michelangelo’s symbolic sculptures in the Medici Chapel—Day, Night, Evening, and Dawn. These reclining figures, carved in marble and arranged in a cycle that echoes the passage of time, are not merely depictions of temporal stages. For Whitehead, they achieve something more profound: they implant timelessness within the passing flow of reality. The sculptures do not simply exemplify the abstract and eternal; they do something far more powerful. They embed a quality of permanence into what is, by nature, transient. In doing so, they become symbols of an everlasting presence within the flux of becoming. This is what Whitehead means when he says that “the perfect realization is not merely the exemplification of what in abstraction is timeless. It does more: it implants timelessness on what in its essence is passing.”
From Perpetual Perishing to Eternal Image
Ordinary time, in Whitehead’s metaphysics, is marked by “perpetual perishing”—the relentless disappearance of each moment into the past. Time, unredeemed, is always slipping away. But in art, and in certain perfect moments of lived experience, time undergoes a transformation. It becomes what Plato once called “the moving image of eternity.” In this sense, Michelangelo’s sculptures are not merely frozen in time; they redeem time by revealing a stillness that is not static, but eternal. These works of art stand not as denials of time, but as deep engagements with it—capturing a moment so perfectly that it no longer perishes. The figures remain, reclining in their recurring sequence, bearing witness to the possibility that something fadeless can emerge from the evanescent.
Echoes of Whitehead’s Metaphysical Vision
This aesthetic insight is an embodiment of Whitehead’s broader metaphysical vision. In his process thought, the world is always in motion, always becoming, and yet within that becoming, there are moments of realized beauty that endure. While the actual world perishes, it is taken up into the consequent nature of God, where it is preserved, felt, and harmonized. Eternal objects—timeless potentials—become actualized in concrete moments of experience, and these moments, when harmonized with the whole, contribute to the divine life. Art, then, becomes a microcosm of this larger process: it captures fleeting experience and transfigures it into something of everlasting value.
Music, Memory, and Ritual as Timeless Lures
What Michelangelo accomplishes in stone, we often experience in sound, recollection, and sacred gesture. Music, for instance, unfolds in time, yet in its most powerful moments—an unresolved chord, a tender melodic return, a sudden silence—it transcends the forward march of seconds and minutes. It holds us in a now so rich and complete that time seems to vanish or glow from within. These musical moments implant timelessness in transition, echoing Whitehead’s idea of the “perfect moment” that is fadeless in the lapse of time.
Memory, too, can become a vessel of eternity. A remembered face, a scent, a phrase whispered long ago—all may return to us not merely as data from the past but as living presences. In memory, what once perished can feel, paradoxically, more real than the present. When suffused with love or longing, memory becomes a kind of sacrament: a re-entry into a moment that is no longer bound by its original occasion. It is preserved, not only in our minds, but perhaps, in Whitehead’s vision, in the very heart of God.
And ritual—whether religious or secular—offers yet another way in which time is deepened and re-patterned. Through repeated gestures, chants, meals, or acts of remembrance, we interrupt the monotony of linear time and invite a sense of the sacred. The lighting of candles, the passing of bread, the ringing of bells: these are not merely repetitions, but rhythmic thresholds through which eternal meaning is woven into temporal life. Ritual does not stop time, but it gathers it—folding past, present, and future into a moment of luminous coherence.
In music, memory, and ritual, we touch the eternal—not by leaving the world, but by entering it more fully. These experiences implant timelessness into the passing moment, offering us glimpses of a reality where, as Whitehead puts it, “time has lost its character of perpetual perishing.” They reveal, like Michelangelo’s sculptures, that even in the flux of becoming, there can be a beauty that abides.