St. Augustine and the Problem of Time: How the Great Christian Philosopher Addresses the Concept of Time in Chapter 11 of his Confessions.
The Confessions of St. Augustine : The Problem of Time
Augustine , in the eleventh book of the Confessions , analyzes the problem of time.
Saint Augustine said ” I know what time is, but when people ask me I cannot explain it .” The starting point is given by the biblical story that presents creation as a succession of operations and events. From this story it seems that creation occurs in time, that it is the result of a decision by God and therefore involves a change in his will. In particular, one can also ask what God did before creation. This question presupposes that God is also in time.
What is time for St. Augustine?
In reality, according to Augustine, God is outside of time , he is in eternity and does not create things in time. With the creation of things God also creates time, so there is no time before creation. But what is time? It would seem obvious to consider time as the sum of past, present and future: but the past is no longer and the future is not yet. It would seem, therefore, that only of the present can one say that it is. So what does it mean that it is? If the present were always present, it would be eternity. In reality it exists as present only on condition that it transforms itself into the past and is not yet future. Time then seems to exist only insofar as it “ tends not to be ”. In fact, however, it cannot be anything, since we perceive and measure intervals of time, distinguishing between short and long. Intervals of time are infinitely divisible; if we found that which is not further divisible, this would be the present. But if the present is an interval, it divides into something past and something future: the present has no extension; then there is only the continuous translation of the future into the past. To grasp the true reality of time one must look within .
St. Augustine, the past and memory
If the past is an object of memory, and this memory is true, whoever remembers it must see it and therefore in some way time must be. When we speak of the past we do not expound things that have passed, but we use words formed according to the images impressed in our soul of things as they happen. Memory has the faculty of retaining them; however, it is something that is possessed in the present. Memory is nothing other than the present of the past . A similar argument also applies to the other two dimensions of time: the future is nothing other than the present expectation of what will be and the present is present attention to what is.
The Confessions: The Three Dimensions of Time and the Soul
The 3 dimensions of time are therefore three “presents” in our soul: past, present and future events are as they are present in our soul. Usually, to measure the passing of time, the movements of the stars are taken as a reference point, but Augustine reverses the perspective: it is not these movements that determine the unit of measurement of time. Rather, it is time that is the foundation of the determination of the duration of these same movements; an astronomical movement, in fact, could change. Time, on the other hand, is “distensio animi”, a relaxation of the soul. It is this that gives us the measure of time.
What is measured by the soul are not, therefore, things in their passing, but the affection that they leave and that remains in our soul even when they have passed. The three dimensions of time are nothing other than three articulations of the relaxation of the soul:
- the memory
- paying attention to something
- the wait
The soul allows the three temporal dimensions to be connected in a unity. The consequence is that, if there were no soul, there would be no time. Divine unity , on the other hand, includes in the stable present of its eternity all that has been, is and will be. In this way, divine unity is the guarantee that time, which is a trace of our laceration and distance from it, does not drag everything towards non-being.
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