A Time to Heal: Time as Gift in St. Augustine’s Confessions
By Micah Hogan
Through the happy accident of a Middle English abbreviation of an Old French expression, combined with its more traditional Latin usage, the English word “present” has at least three distinct usages. A “present” can refer to existence in a particular place (“he is present”), to a gift (“a birthday present”), or to time as it is experienced now (“that was the past, this is the present”). Such a felicitous homophone could not but be exploited by the baser kind of sentimentalism: "Yesterday's the past, tomorrow's the future, but today is a GIFT. That's why it's called the present." (1) While the sentiment is saccharinity itself, it also presents an intriguing thesis. Can one, with any philosophical rigor, claim that the present is a gift? The Augustine of the Confessions, I believe, would answer in the affirmative.
To distinguish Augustine’s creative theory of time expressed in the Confessions from other ancient models, commentators have anachronistically called Augustine's a “psychological” view of time. (2) This is because, according to Augustine, “time is not the movement of a body”; it does not occur outside the self. (3) Rather, says Augustine, time is a feature of the soul. (4) In fact, Augustine reaches the theoretical climax of his discussion on time with the tentative suggestion that time may well be a distention of the mind itself. (5) In Augustine’s view then, the location of time is inside rather than outside the subject.
Yet, crucially, time’s interiority does not equal time’s subjectivity. Time’s location does not exhaust, or even determine, the central theological aspect of time— that of objective givenness. Time, as Augustine says in sections vii-viii of Book XI, is ultimately not a construction of the self but the creation of God, rooted in the utterance of creation by the Word. God’s creative Word, says Augustine, “is spoken eternally, and by it all things are uttered eternally . . . everything is said in the simultaneity of eternity . . . Yet not all that you cause to exist by speaking is made in simultaneity and eternity.” (6) All things are creatively spoken in eternity, but some things come to be in time. Such a state of affairs is clearly counterintuitive, and Augustine asks why, if everything has its cause in eternal simultaneity, do all things not come into being in that simultaneity? Augustine’s answer is telling: each thing begins and ends its existence when in the divine reason “it is known that it is right for it to begin and end.” (7)
But here Augustine promptly ends what we would consider to be his philosophical line of questioning and sharply shifts over to theology. The divine reason which knows the right time for a thing to begin and end, Augustine says, is none other than the Father’s own Word sent to reconcile humanity. This Word, while remaining constant in its speech, “speaks through the flesh” and teaches divine knowledge, which takes time to learn because it can only be learned through “standing still and listening to him.” (8) Augustine has done something noteworthy here. He is still engaged with a metaphysical question, with the question of temporality, but this temporality is now existentially construed. The question is no longer abstractly why the effects of the Word did not immediately spring into being upon being spoken, but why the Christian, and hence why Augustine, spent so long wandering among sin and error before coming to listen to the truth. The question is no longer about time in the abstract, but about the temporal dimension of conversion and faith.
Time is thus the vehicle through which the Word is operative, but is also the vehicle of all the resistance, sluggishness, and sin of creatures that keeps them from following the Word. In Book VIII of the Confessions, Augustine speaks of the horror of the approaching “moment of time when I would become different.” (9) Time for Augustine contains both the approach of the moment of conversion, and also the horror fallen creatures feel at that approaching moment. Time is thus the mode both through which Augustine is drawn toward God and also the mode of his resistance. This is strange indeed: how could God’s good gift be used to resist His call?
To discuss the relationship of temporality and fallenness we must return to the question we asked above: why does it take time for Augustine to respond to the teaching of the Word? To ask and to answer this question forces us to engage not only with temporality, but with human fallenness. This is because, for Augustine, time is both given by God, but it also tends toward death: “we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.” (10) How could God’s good gift tend toward death and nihility? Here we see the theological cache of Augustine’s interiorization time into the human psyche: Augustine can maintain that time’s passing into non-being ultimately arises not from its being from God, but from the finitude of the human creature within which it is operative. Augustine is thus able to conceive of time from the divine perspective as a good gift given but also, from the human perspective, as yet another indication of humanity’s fallenness.
Augustine describes time according to this fallen aspect as a distentio, a distention. As we noted previously, the past and the future have no existence. There is only what Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) helpfully calls the Augustinian “ threefold present.” (11) When time is measured, according to Augustine, what is measured is not a stream of past events but the present consciousness as it extends itself, is distended, across the past through memory and into the future through expectation. (12) Distention is Augustine’s creative way of affirming both the phenomenality of past and future and at the same time his metaphysical claim that only the present has real existence.
Humanity’s failure to properly order their loves in time leads to the phenomenon of distention and a plethora of loves which vie for the devotion of attentiveness. Augustine can thus juxtapose dissipated distention with time’s single-minded extension, the active and single- minded listening to the Word— “not stretched out in distended but extended in reach, not by being pulled apart but by concentration.” (13) Because the Word is constant in His call, our response should be immediate, but we are given the time to learn to sit still and to listen to what the Word has to say. Such a reading of time in its fallen aspect, we must stress, is narratival and dramatic. As noted above, Augustine’s concept of time is ultimately not about time in the abstract but the time it took him to see the light and to love rightly.
How does one properly order one’s loves? As noted previously, Augustine views time as itself fundamentally graced as the mode of the Word’s divine pedagogy, and this would suggest that time must play a part in the healing of the soul, and thus in the healing of time itself.
We see time’s healing properties manifested perhaps most evidently in the Confessions with the death of Augustine’s friend in Book IV. When Augustine was a teacher in Thagaste, his childhood acquaintance, with whom he had begun to cultivate a deep friendship, fell ill and died. As Augustine recounts his past sorrows, he remarks that “with time my wound is less painful,” (14) which he explores just a few pages later. He notes that, on his journey from Thagaste to Carthage, he slowly began to experience some relief from his intense sorrow. The passage warrants being quoted at length:
Time is not inert. It does not roll on through our senses without affecting us. Its passing has remarkable effects on the mind. See: it came and went “from day to day” (Ps. 60:9), and by its coming and going it implanted in me new hopes and other experiences to be remembering. Gradually it repaired me with delights such as I used to enjoy, and to them my grief yielded. But these delights were succeeded not by new sorrows but by the causes of new sorrows. (15)
Thus we see it is through the passage of time that Augustine recovers from his wounded grief, but not to the extent that he is healed from the internal causes of his sorrow. In the story of the death of Augustine’s friend, the already- and always-graced and healing character of time is displayed, even if its full efficacy is impaired through distention. Jaroslav Pelikan aptly concludes from this episode that time as time, even distinct from the response of the will, can heal wounds, though it cannot cure vanity. (16)
For time to cure vanity, it seems, time must be supplemented by intentionality, by will. Near the end of Book XI, Augustine juxtaposes time’s current character of distention with this temporal ascesis sketched above, which he refers to here as time’s extension toward God. (17) Rather than life being “a distention in several directions,” Christ serves as the Mediator between the One and the many, calling us to extension. (18)
Because temporal extension serves as a purification of time, the act of extending one’s own time toward eternity in the mode of confession preeminently serves the purpose of temporal ascesis. At the opening of Book XI, Augustine asks why, if all things are present to God, he, Augustine, is engaged in the task of ordered recollection? In answering this question Augustine reveals the fundamental reason for his narrative project: “I am stirring up love for you in myself and in those who read this . . . so that the deliverance you have begun may be complete.” (19) It is thus through the careful tracing of time’s linerality that Augustine and his readers are healed. Rather than the future and the past being distractions from the present, graced time is the gathering together of the threefold present into a linear narrative extending toward the beatific vision. At least part of what is entailed in Augustine’s vision of temporal ascesis is the exercise of the linear untangling of time’s distended knot, in order that the narrative of a life might be fully extended toward its proper goal in God.
We can see the movements of this extension of time occurring through Augustine’s narration as preserved and magnified in the account of the mystical experience at Ostia in Book IX. Augustine prefaces this episode with a quotation from Philippians 3:13, the verse he uses to describe the workings of redeemed temporality in Book XI. (20) As Augustine and Monica discuss the superiority of eternity above “this physical world” they are “lifted up by an ardent affection for eternal being itself.” (21) Augustine uses the imagery of a ladder or stair to describe the effects of their conversation: “Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects” through internal reflection and dialogue. (22) Such a vision of eternity cannot be sustained indefinitely but arises from and descends back into time. Such a vision, we should note, was attained through timely communal meditation on eternity. This episode thus serves as a microcosm of Augustine’s wider narrative project, as Augustine seeks to lead his readers into a communal extension toward, and meditation upon, eternity through the ordering of his own times into a graced arrow pointing to the divine.
In conclusion, we see that time in Augustine’s Confessions is both given by God through the Word, but has been distended through the human psyche’s lack of attention. It is only through the process of time’s purification, which must itself occur in time, that time can be extended for the enjoyment of eternity. We can thus maintain that the present, for Augustine, truly is a gift, a gift meant to lead the wayward soul back to God’s eternal Word.
Micah Hogan is a residential Middler and sacristan at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, pursuing the M.Div. as a postulant for holy orders in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Micah fell in love with the “elvishness” of the Anglican tradition during his first Mass his freshman year of college and has never looked back. He was confirmed a year later and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. He is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University (Class of 2019), where he studied Theology and Great Books, in addition to spending a semester abroad studying philosophical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Micah is primarily interested in the doctrines of creation and sexuality, the practices of hospitality, and the writing of poetry. His accomplishments include serving as theology editor for The PQ Review and co-hosting the infamous Polycarp Pajama Party of 2016.
1) Bil Keane, “The Family Circus”, 8/31/1994. Accessed here: http://yesterdaytomorrowtodaypresent.blogspot.com/2015/08/yesterday-tomorrow-and-today-phrase.html.
2) See for instance Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 6.
3) Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 239.
4) Augustine, Confessions, XI.xxiv(31), 235.
5) Ibid., XI.xxvi(33), 240.
6) Augustine, Confessions, XI.vii(9), 226.
7) Augustine, Confessions, XI.viii(10), 226.
8) Ibid., XI.viii(10), 227.
9) Augustine, Confessions, VIII.xi(25), 150-151.
10) Augustine, Confessions, XI.xiv(17), 231.
11) Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 8.
12) Augustine, Confessions, XI.xx(26), 235.
13) Augustine, Confessions, XI.xxix(39), 244.
14) Augustine, Confessions, IV.v(10), 58.
15) Ibid., IV.viii(13), 60.
16) Jaroslav Pelikan, The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine. The Richard Lectures for 1984-85, University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 32.
17) Augustine, Confessions, XI.xxix(39), 243-244.
18) Ibid.
19) Augustine, Confessions, XI.i(1), 221.
20) Ibid., IX, x(23), 170; XI, xxix(39), 244.
21) Ibid. IX, x(23), 171.
22) Ibid., IX, x(24), 171.