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LESSON 2 - Second Part / First Part
ACHILLES' GRIEF - From Homer's Iliad

by George Valsamis

Future, the Greek μέλλων, is what will happen or will be happening - it may express duration or not. "I will learn" may mean that I will learn something tomorrow, or that I will be learning my lessons for the whole year or all my life. It is very interesting, that, while Greek has so many tenses describing all nuances of the past, while it developed even a second aorist, a second perfect and a second pluperfect, it doesn't have a distinct tense for duration in the future - you can not say "I will be learning" using a distinct grammatical form, a distinct tense (although you can say it in modern Greek - *Ancient/Byzantine Greek: μαθήσομαι = I will learn or I will be learning, *Modern Greek θὰ μάθω = I will learn, θὰ μαθαίνω = I will be learning).

Older Greek left the future (much) more unspecified than past, and/or it saw in time a move to the past, more than a move to the future. Time, movement, change - death, is really important here, so important, that is present even in the verb system, in the very absence of a future continuous!

 

Present Perfect in Greek is called Παρακείμενος. Can you recognise the name? It comes from your known verb κεῖμαι described by the preposition παρὰ (beside, near to, next to). Παρα‑κείμενος is a participle meaning a time that lies beside. Beside what? Beside present time. You can think of this as a kind of counterpoint, where παρακείμενος colours present time with a completed action, the consequences of which last until now. This co-existence of present and past that makes time relational in the way a field is relational, is the reason why present perfect is not identical with present nor with aorist.

E.g. in the first letter of St. John we read: "Love is in this: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son". The King James version translates the original παρακείμενος (we have loved - ἠγαπήκαμεν) with an aorist (we loved), destroying thus the sense of the original.

What the original text does, is to connect love with both our present perfect (ἠγαπήκαμεν-we have loved) and God's aorist (ἠγάπησεν - He loved [us], ἀπέστειλεν - He sent [His Son to us]). The text says: I know that you loved and continue to love God (this is the παρακείμενος, our past love accompanies and affects our present life - we still love God), but be carefull: because our love has a past, has a duration, it is tested and is still strong and active we must not be misled so as to think that it is self-sufficient. Don't think that in this and only in this can love exist. No, love, properly speaking, is in God's aorist, in a particular instant undecided by us, where God first loved us and out of this love sent His son to us. This aorist is the beginning and foundation of our present perfect.

There is no time in God. There wasn't a time when God did not love us and a time when He started loving us. This exactly happened with us. No matter how perfect we are, to us our perfection has a start. In time, Love comes in an instant, the instant of the aorist, the instant that reflects God's eternal instant, that cuts time and marks the beginning of our love in time. This coming of Love in an instant that belongs equally to time and eternity, is the incarnation and sacrifice of God's son - the source of our love. And this is what the King James translation destroyed by confusing our aorist with eternity's coming into that aorist.

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/lessons/lesson2b.asp?pg=6