Saint Augustine's meditation on time, in book XI of the Confessions, is one of the most influential pages in philosophy. It all starts with a disarming sentence.
The question that everyone knows and no one explains
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; If I want to explain it to whoever asks me, I don't know.
We live in time all the time, and yet when we try to define it, it slips. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present, if it were always present, would not be time, it would be eternity. So what is time made of?
The answer: distension of the soul
Augustine's departure is brilliant. Past and future do not exist in themselves; what exists are three gifts in the soul: the present of the past, which is memory; the gift of the present, which is attention; and the present of the future, which is expectation. Time is a distensio animi, a distension of the soul, which stretches between what it remembers and what it expects. We measure time in the soul, not outside it.
Time and eternity
This prepares the decisive distinction: time is succession, a before and an after; eternity is a present without succession. God is not within time, waiting for tomorrow; It is He who creates time. In God there is no yesterday that passed or tomorrow that will come, there is a today that does not pass.
Augustine's reflection crosses all subsequent philosophy, from Husserl to Heidegger. It is one of the peaks of Confessions, the work studied in the context of ancient church history.
In-depth study
Church History Course, with Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Bitencourt
In-depth reading of the work of Daniel Rops, where Augustine's conversion and the world that formed him appear in full.
Discover the courseFrequently asked questions
What did Saint Augustine say about time?
In book XI of the Confessions he writes the famous phrase: what, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; If I want to explain it to those who ask me, I don't know.
How does Augustine define time?
Like a distension of the soul. Past and future do not exist in themselves; there is the present of the past (memory), the present of the present (attention) and the present of the future (expectation). It is the soul that measures time.
What is the difference between time and eternity?
Time is succession, before and after; eternity is a present without succession. God does not exist in time, but creates it. In God there is no yesterday or tomorrow, there is a today that does not pass.
Continue: Confessions: summary and analysis · Evil as the absence of good · I am me and my circumstance
Source class (YouTube): Confissões, de Santo Agostinho (NousCast)