The Beginning and End Are the Same

Cheoeum-gwa Najung-i Gateun Geot (처음과 나중이 같은 것 / The Beginning and End Are the Same): The Temporal Criterion of Goodness in Unification Doctrine

처음과 나중이 같은 것 · 始終如一 · Constancy, Temporal Identity

What Is the Doctrine That “The Beginning and End Are the Same”?

“The beginning and end are the same” is the Unification criterion of goodness: a being, an act, or a love is good to the degree that its end remains identical with its beginning.

The formula states that moral quality is not a property a thing possesses at a single moment but a relation it maintains across time — what a thing was at its origin and what it becomes at its conclusion must agree.

In the system of the Exposition of the Divine Principle, this criterion belongs to the same conceptual field as the definitions of goodness and evil, for it supplies the measure by which the two are told apart.

The criterion is deceptively simple and easily mistaken for a familiar piece of devotion. Christians have long confessed that God is “the first and the last,” and a casual reader hears in “the beginning and end are the same” only a restatement of that ancient predicate of divine eternity.

This entry argues that the phrase is not a predicate of God but an operational test of goodness — a measure one can apply to any being and that any being can fail — and that Rev. Sun Myung Moon develops it by fusing a characteristically East Asian ontology of goodness-as-constancy with the biblical confession of the Alpha and the Omega.

The strongest single statement of the relational form of this criterion is also its most economical:

Truth and goodness do not begin from ourselves or end in ourselves.

— Sun Myung Moon (“기도와 생명” / Gido-wa saengmyeong, 06/07/1970; vol. 31, sermon 15) Cheon Seong Gyeong

In the surrounding passage, Rev. Moon completes the thought: goodness comes about only when something begins in one party and bears its result in another, so that origin and outcome are bound into a single uninterrupted relation.

The point that goodness has both a beginning and an end, and that the two must answer to one another, is grounded systematically in the doctrine of goodness within the Exposition of the Divine Principle, to which the next sections return.

The Phrase Names a Test, Not a Predicate

The grammar of the phrase already signals that it is a test rather than an attribute. 처음 (cheoeum) means “beginning” or “first”; 나중 (najung) means “later,” “the end,” or “last”; 같은 것 (gateun geot) means “that which is the same.”

The expression therefore reads, with stark literalness, “the thing whose beginning and later-state are one.”

It is built from native Korean words of ordinary speech, not from a technical theological vocabulary, and this plainness is part of its force: the criterion is meant to be applied by anyone to anything.

Behind the everyday Korean stands a classical Sino-Korean idiom that supplies the prior semantic field, 始終如一 (sijong yeoil) — “from beginning to end, as one” — and its near-twin 始終一貫 (sijong ilgwan), “consistent from start to finish.”

In Confucian moral usage, these idioms name the virtue of the person whose conduct does not shift between the first day and the last, and the East Asian moral imagination has long treated such unwavering constancy as the very signature of integrity. Rev. Moon’s formula inherits this field directly: where common Korean uses 始終如一 to praise a reliable character, his teaching elevates the same structure into the defining mark of the good as such.

The gap between the everyday sense and the theological sense is therefore one of scope rather than meaning.

Ordinary usage praises a constant person; Unification doctrine claims that constancy of beginning and end is the universal criterion that distinguishes good from evil at every level of being, from a single act to a marriage to a nation. The remaining sections trace how that elevation is argued.

Goodness Is Measured by the Agreement of Beginning and End

Within the Exposition of the Divine Principle, goodness is the realization of the purpose of creation through proper give-and-take, and evil is the result of give-and-take that severs a being from that purpose (DP 1996).

The “beginning and end” criterion translates this structural definition into a temporal one: because the purpose of creation is fixed at the origin, a being is good precisely insofar as its later condition still expresses the purpose it carried at the first. Goodness, on this reading, is the temporal stability of a being in relation to its original purpose.

This is why the criterion can be stated as a demand for sameness across time. The ideal, by definition, cannot drift:

That which is ideal must be the same in any place and at any time.

— Sun Myung Moon (CSG, 08/25/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The axiology of Unification Thought makes the same point in the register of value theory: an act realizes the value of goodness when it accords with the purpose of creation, and value so realized is not transient but enduring, because the purpose it serves is itself unchanging (Lee 2006).

What the Exposition of the Divine Principle states as structure and Unification Thought states as value, the “beginning and end” formula states as time. The three are one doctrine seen from three angles, and together they secure the central claim: to ask whether a thing is good is to ask whether its end has kept faith with its beginning.

The Criterion Derives From God’s Own Constancy, Not From an Abstract Rule

The temporal criterion is not a free-standing maxim; it descends from the nature of God and is binding on creation only because creation is meant to resemble its Creator.

God is described in the canonical texts as absolute, unique, eternal, and unchanging, and the human being, as God’s object partner of love, is called to mirror exactly those attributes.

If God is unchanging, I must also become unchanging. If God is eternal, I must also be eternal.

— Sun Myung Moon (CSG, 10/20/1973) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The logic is one of resemblance. Because God’s love does not begin in one disposition and end in another, the love that resembles God must likewise hold its beginning and end together; a love that changes has, by that very change, ceased to resemble the eternal God and so ceased to be good. This is the hinge of the whole doctrine: the criterion of temporal sameness is the ethical shape that divine immutability takes once it is required of a created, time-bound being.

The same address insists that without this inherited constancy the human attributes of love, life, and ideal would be “in vain” — a sharp way of saying that a goodness that does not last is no goodness at all (CSG, October 20, 1973).

That the standard rests on God and not on human convention also explains why it is non-negotiable. A rule invented by a society could be amended when circumstances changed; a criterion that simply spells out what it means to resemble the unchanging God cannot be amended without abandoning the resemblance. The next section shows the criterion doing the work it was made for — convicting what fails it.

A Thing Whose End Betrays Its Beginning Stands Convicted as Evil

A predicate cannot fail, but a test can, and the decisive evidence that “the beginning and end are the same” functions as a test is that Rev. Moon repeatedly uses it to convict particular things of falsehood.

The clearest case is conjugal love. A couple in love at the outset who arrive at divorce have produced an end that contradicts their beginning, and the contradiction is itself the verdict:

Love itself has not changed, but their minds changed.

— Sun Myung Moon (CSG, 07/19/1970) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The diagnosis is precise. True love, like God, does not change; what failed was the spouses’ fidelity to the love they began with, and the divergence of their end from their beginning marks their love as false rather than true.

In the same teaching, Rev. Moon presses the test to its limit with the case of a man disabled shortly after marriage: a love that withdraws because its object has altered reveals that it was never indexed to the person but to a passing condition, and so was false from the start.

The end exposes the beginning. This is the criterion operating exactly as an operational measure should — adjudicating a concrete case and returning a verdict.

The same logic scales upward. Just as a marriage is judged false when its end betrays its beginning, an individual life, a family line, and a nation are each measured by whether what they become still answers to what they were created to be.

Evil, in this frame, is never a substance; it is a trajectory that has bent away from its origin, a beginning and an end that no longer coincide. This sets up the late-period extension of the criterion, where the agreement of beginning and end becomes the very logic of permanence.

In the Cheon Il Guk Era, the Criterion Becomes the Logic of Eternal Settlement

The criterion is articulated consistently across Rev. Moon’s ministry — relationally in 1970, by resemblance to God in 1973, as the unchanging ideal in 1991 — and its very stability across the decades performs the claim it makes.

In the late providential period after 2001, the same structure is recast as the logic of Cheon Il Guk, the realm whose distinguishing mark is that it is settled, eternal, and unchanging.

Where the early teaching applied the criterion to acts and loves, the late teaching applies it to the permanence of a realized order: a settlement is genuine only if its end will remain identical to its founding.

Rev. Moon gives this a memorable spatial image in the post-2001 teaching on the “Settlement of Noon.” At noon, the sun stands directly overhead, and a vertical object casts no shadow; the person whose mind and body are perfectly aligned with God likewise casts no shadow, because no part of the self deviates from the original direction. A shadow is precisely a divergence — a beginning and an end that no longer coincide — and its absence is the visible sign that the criterion has been met (CSG, January 1, 2002).

The Cheon Il Guk language of eternal settlement is thus the “beginning and end” criterion raised to the level of an established world: the Kingdom is good, and therefore lasting, because its consummation keeps faith with its origin in the ideal of creation.

This developmental arc does not show the criterion changing; it shows it deepening in application from the moral act to the eternal order.

That the formula itself remains stable from the 1970 addresses to the Cheon Il Guk proclamations is, for a doctrine whose content is precisely the value of remaining the same, a quietly fitting confirmation.

Inter-Religious Resonance

The criterion sits at a rich crossroads, drawing on the divine-eternity confessions of the Abrahamic traditions and on the East Asian ethic of constancy, while converting both into something neither quite says.

Christianity confesses the risen Christ as the one who holds beginning and end together:

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

— Revelation 22:13 (KJV)

In Christian usage, this is a predicate of divinity, a confession of who God is. Rev. Moon receives the same Alpha-and-Omega language and, in a 1989 address, names it as the standard against which all else is measured:

Love is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. This became the ideal standard.

— Sun Myung Moon (“하나님을 해방하자” / Hananim-eul haebanghaja, 02/26/1989; vol. 188, sermon 3) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The shift is exact: what Christianity confesses about God, Unification doctrine restates as the standard (“the ideal standard”) by which created love is judged. The Alpha and the Omega cease to be only a name for God and become a criterion for goodness.

Judaism anchors the same confession in the Tanakh, where the LORD declares Himself “the first, and with the last” (Isa 41:4 JPS) and announces, “I the LORD change not” (Mal 3:6).

Here divine immutability grounds covenant fidelity: because God does not change, His promise from beginning to end can be trusted.

Unification doctrine keeps this grounding but extends the demand outward, asking the covenant partner to mirror the same constancy.

Islam preserves the structure with unusual economy in the divine names:

He is the First and the Last, and the Outward and the Inward.

— Qur’an 57:3 (Pickthall)

Al-Awwal and al-Akhir, the First and the Last, name God’s encompassing of all time. As in the other Abrahamic traditions, the language is doxological rather than ethical; the move that makes it a measure of created goodness is distinctively Unification.

Confucianism supplies the closest structural parallel — and it is striking that the parallel lies not in a name of God but in a definition of moral reality. The Doctrine of the Mean teaches that sincerity (誠) is the very being of the morally real: “Sincerity is the end and beginning of things; without sincerity there would be nothing” (Zhongyong 25, Legge).

Here, as in Rev. Moon’s formula, the moral term is defined through 終始, end-and-beginning, and a thing’s reality is made to depend on the integrity that joins them.

The Confucian 誠 and the Unification criterion converge almost word for word; the divergence is that Unification doctrine personalizes the constancy as the resemblance of a child to an eternal, loving Parent, where the Confucian 誠 is the impersonal authenticity of Heaven-and-earth.

Buddhism marks the genuine point of contrast and so guards the comparison against forced agreement. The Buddhist analysis of conditioned things is that all of them are impermanent (anicca), “like a dream, a bubble, a shadow” (Diamond Sutra, Conze), and clinging to permanence is itself the root of suffering; changelessness belongs only to the unconditioned.

Unification doctrine agrees that the fallen, conditioned world is one of ceaseless change, but parts company by locating an authentic, abiding constancy within created relational love rather than only beyond it.

Where Buddhism counsels release from the craving for permanence, Unification doctrine commends a love whose beginning and end are the same as the created mirror of God’s own constancy.

Across these traditions, the shared inheritance is clear — the divine that holds first and last together — and so is the distinctive Unification move: the transfer of that structure from a name for God onto an operational, falsifiable criterion of goodness for every created being.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis advanced here is that “the beginning and end are the same” is not a devotional restatement of divine eternity but an operational criterion of goodness, and that Rev. Moon constructs it by fusing an East Asian ethic of constancy with the Abrahamic confession of the Alpha and the Omega.

The body sections have assembled the case: the phrase is grammatically a test (始終如一) rather than a predicate; it translates the Exposition of the Divine Principle’s structural definition of goodness into the language of time; it descends from God’s own immutability by way of resemblance; it convicts particular things — a divorce, a love that withdraws from a disabled spouse — of falsehood; and it deepens in the Cheon Il Guk era into the logic of eternal settlement.

The strongest internal objection to this reading is the predicate objection: that the phrase merely echoes “I am Alpha and Omega,” a confession of who God is, and that to call it an operational criterion overreads a piece of worshipful language.

The objection deserves its full weight, because the Christian and Islamic parallels show that the beginning-and-end language is, in its native habitat, doxological.

The evidence nonetheless favors the operational reading over the predicate reading, and decisively. A predicate of God cannot be failed by a creature, yet Rev. Moon repeatedly applies the formula to creatures and returns verdicts of failure — the divorcing couple whose end contradicts its beginning is judged to have had false love, not true.

A predicate admits of no degree, yet the criterion is explicitly graded: a being is good “to the degree that” its end keeps faith with its beginning. And a predicate has no use in deliberation, yet the formula is put to work as a daily measure, from the marriage bond to the “Settlement of Noon” that leaves no shadow.

The 1989 address settles the matter by naming the Alpha-and-Omega language as “the ideal standard” — a standard is, by definition, something things are measured against, not merely a description of God.

The predicate is real and is even the source of the criterion, but it does not exhaust it; Rev. Moon takes the predicate of God and makes it the measure of goodness.

What the argument entails is that, in Unification doctrine, morality is irreducibly temporal: no act is good in the instant, abstracted from its trajectory, because goodness is the kept agreement of beginning and end.

What it does not entail is that the criterion is a human convention or that it floats free of God; on the contrary, its whole authority is that it spells out what it means for a created, time-bound being to resemble the eternal, unchanging God of love.

Key Takeaway

• “The beginning and end are the same” is the Unification criterion of goodness: a being or act is good to the degree that its end remains identical with its beginning, making morality irreducibly temporal rather than momentary.
• The formula is an operational test that things can fail, not merely a devotional predicate of God’s eternity — its repeated use to convict false love is the decisive evidence.
• The grammar of the phrase, rooted in the classical idiom 始終如一 (“from beginning to end, as one”), already frames it as the virtue of constancy raised to a universal criterion.
• The criterion translates the Exposition of the Divine Principle’s definition of goodness — the fulfillment of the purpose of creation — into the language of time, since a being is good insofar as its later state still expresses its original purpose.
• The standard descends from God’s own attributes of being eternal and unchanging, and binds creation only because the creature is meant to resemble the Creator.
• Rev. Moon fuses the Abrahamic confession of the Alpha and the Omega with an East Asian ontology of goodness-as-constancy, the closest parallel being the Confucian teaching that sincerity (誠) is “the end and beginning of things.”
• In the Cheon Il Guk era, the same criterion becomes the logic of eternal settlement, where a realized order is good, and therefore lasting, only if its consummation keeps faith with its origin.

References

Exposition of the Divine Principle. 1996. New York: Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.

Lee, Sang Hun. 2006. New Essentials of Unification Thought: Head-Wing Thought. Tokyo: Unification Thought Institute.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1970a. “기도와 생명 ” Sermon delivered June 7, 1970.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1970b. “참다운 인생길 The True Path of Life.” Sermon delivered January 16, 1971.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1989. “하나님을 해방하자 [Hananim-eul haebanghaja / Let Us Liberate God].” Sermon delivered February 26, 1989.