"What was God doing before he created the world?" is one of the oldest questions a reader of the Bible can ask, and Saint Augustine took it seriously in book XI of the Confessions. His answer fits in one sentence: there was no "before," because time was created together with the world. This article shows how he reaches it, which joke he sets aside along the way, and where the idea comes from.
The question and the joke Augustine rejects
In the Confessions, Augustine tells how someone asked, ironically, what God was doing before he made heaven and earth (book XI, chapter 12). The question is a good one precisely because it looks like a trap: if God spent all the earlier time without creating anything, why did he begin at that moment and not at another?
And there were those who answered with a joke: God was preparing hell for people who ask such things. Augustine rejects this way out. Paraphrasing the text, he says that one thing is to understand and another is to mock, and that he does not want to answer the curious person with a witty quip. Whoever asks deserves, in his view, a true answer.
The answer: there was no "before"
The serious answer carries one idea to its end. If time is a creature, made by God like heaven and earth, then there is no time prior to creation in which God could have "waited." The word "before" only makes sense within time, and outside of time there is no "before" or "after" (book XI, chapters 13 and 15, paraphrased). Time began together with the world.
The same formulation appears in the City of God (book XI, chapter 6): the world was not made in time, but with time. Noticing the preposition helps. "In time" would suppose a clock already running, with the world entering it. "With time" says that the clock and the world are born together.
This changes the question. The question assumed a waiting, and waiting belongs to those who are in time. The answer takes God out of that scene: he did not wait, because there is no waiting where there is not yet any time.
Where the idea comes from: the Timaeus
Anyone who has followed the Timaeus will recognize the ground. Plato writes that the craftsman of the world made a moving image of eternity, and that the name of this image is time (Timaeus 37d). Days, nights, months and years did not exist before the heavens: they were born together with it, and the Sun, the Moon and the planets were placed to mark time, like a clock (Timaeus 38b-c). From this comes an almost grammatical consequence: of the eternal we can only say that it is. "Was" and "will be" apply to what is in time (Timaeus 37e-38a). The article What is time for Plato? deals with this passage of the Timaeus.
Augustine accepts this idea and carries it to its end. What the Timaeus says of Plato's cosmos, he says of the creation of the God of the Bible: time is part of the work, not the ground on which the work rests. That is why, in the class, the answer appears as the point where the Christian reading finishes what Plato began.
What remains
The question of what God was doing before creating the world seems to ask for a story about what came before. Augustine's answer is more radical: there was no before to tell. If you want the other famous question from the same book XI, on what time is and why we know it yet cannot explain it, it is in What is time, according to Saint Augustine?. And for the path that leads from the Timaeus to Genesis, the starting point is Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Saint Augustine's Genesis.
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What was God doing before creating the world, according to Saint Augustine?
For Augustine, the question does not even make sense, because there was no before creation: time itself was created by God and began together with the world. To ask what was there before time is to ask about a moment that does not exist.
Did time exist before creation?
No, according to Augustine's answer. Time is part of creation, not the stage on which it happens. In the City of God (book XI, chapter 6), he says that the world was not made in time, but with time.
What is the joke Augustine rejects?
That God was preparing hell for people who ask questions like this. Augustine reports that some answered this way (Confessions, book XI, chapter 12) and prefers a serious answer to a witty way out.
Did Augustine take this idea from Plato?
The seed is in the Timaeus: Plato says that days, nights, months and years did not exist before the heavens, and that "was" and "will be" apply only to what is in time. Augustine carries this idea to its end, applying it to the creation of the world by the God of the Bible.
Continue: What is time for Plato? A moving image of eternity · Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Saint Augustine's Genesis · Did God create the world out of nothing? Plato's craftsman · Primaticcio painted the end of the Odyssey as a talk
Source class (YouTube): Timeu, de Platão | Por que existe um mundo, e não o caos