How Augustine Thought about Time
In his ‘Confessions’, Augustine wrestled with two opposing notions of time.
‘What, then, is time?’ writes Augustine in Book XI of his Confessions. ‘If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’ That riddle points to the paradoxical nature of time. Fundamentally, we live time subjectively. It gives shape to our actions. Yet the moment we try to grasp it, to understand it, it vanishes like smoke.
On the the one hand, time flows like a river. It is unbroken and always moving. Bergson called this durée, the time we live. But time is also something we break down into seconds, minutes, hours. It is something we measure. Bergson called this temps. How we see time, as a series of moments or an unbroken flow of experience, has real-world effects. The former promises control; but the latter may bring us more peace.
On the the one hand, time flows like a river. It is unbroken and always moving.
In the Confessions, Augustine wrestles with these ideas. He confesses to his perplexity. He finds it difficult to square the idea that time is the measure of change in the outside world, as Aristotle thought, with his own belief, that time exists only in the mind, tied to our consciousness. For time, for Augustine, is a mental construct. The past, present and future are products of our thinking. There is no time ‘out there’.
Of these three moments — past, present, future—only the present exists. The past is gone, the future yet to come; the present is so fleeting we can hardly grasp it before it goes too. The present is real, Augustine says, but it is always on edge of slipping into the unreal. Time exists because our mind stretches or ‘distends’ itself across these three states. He calls this distensio animi, the ‘stretching of the soul’, without which time would have no form or shape. Time, then, is how we order and structure our experience of being. And in this way, we can make sense of our lives.
The past is gone, the future yet to come; the present is so fleeting we can hardly grasp it before it goes too.
And God? God exists outside of time. He is eternal, unchanging. Time is past of the created world, bound up with change. For God, all time—past, present, future—are present. Eternity, then, is not an endless stretch of time but its absence. It is the moment that never passes; Eliot called it the ‘still point in a turning world’. It is Bergson’s durée, not unlike Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow state’, in which we are engaged so fully with a task that time seems to vanish.
In contrast to his classical forebears, Augustine sees time as starting with creation. For Aristotle, time was tied to the never-ending movement of the stars and planets, an enduring part of the cosmos. For Augustine, time started when the world was made, and it will end with the final judgement. There was no ‘before’ the universe, for there was no time. Time was constructed by us. This aligns with his belief in creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing): God made both space and time when He made the world, Augustine says. Because the world is finite, time is finite. But we can escape it. Indeed, Christians should aim to. To live well is to live in eternity, the ever-present now, where ‘past and future are gathered’, Eliot said. Hence why Mary, Queen of Scots made her motto: ‘In my end is my beginning’ (and why Eliot starts ‘East Coker’ with: ‘In my beginning is my end.’)
There was no ‘before’ the universe, for there was no time. Time was constructed by us.
Augustine’s thoughts on time are not just abstract musings. They serve a moral purpose. Augustine stresses that we must aim to live in the present. The future is unknown; the past cannot be changed. Only in the here and now can we act. We might put off moral reform; it was Augustine who once prayed ‘Lord, make me chaste — but not yet.’ But we shouldn’t. Since the present is the only true moment of existence, the present is the time to act. In the present, that is, now, is when we must grow in hope, faith, charity.
So what, then, is time? Time, as we commonly understand it, is the linear sequence of events, a construct of human consciousness. It is how we structure and order our experience. Before Bergson, Husserl, McGilchrist and others, Augustine realised that time starts and ends with us. But we can escape it. And when we do, when we live fully in the present, we can glimpse eternity — where all moments are gathered into one.
