Time — what it is and how the soul stretches across it
Book 11 opens with Genesis: "In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth." But what was before the beginning? And what does "before" mean if time itself was created? Augustine's answer changed the philosophy of time permanently.
Summary
Book 11 opens with Augustine's desire to understand the Genesis narrative — not to exegete it yet, but to understand how to read it at all. He addresses God directly: teach me to hear Your Word. He stops to ask the objection that would have been raised by any educated reader of late antiquity: if God made the world, what was He doing before He made it? The objection implies that there was a time before creation, in which God was idle. Augustine's answer is sharp: the question misunderstands what time is. There was no "before" before the creation of the world, because time itself was created with the world. Asking what God was doing before creation is like asking what is north of the North Pole.
But this raises the harder question: what is time? Augustine examines the standard answers and finds them inadequate. Time is not the motion of the sun and stars — they could stop and time might still pass. Time is not the interval between events — the interval is itself measured in time. He presses toward his own answer: the past does not exist any more; the future does not exist yet; the present is the razor-thin line between them, too brief to measure. And yet we measure time. How? Because the soul holds the past in memory and the future in expectation, and the present is the soul's attention as it moves from one to the other.
He illustrates with the recitation of a psalm. Before I begin, the whole psalm is in my expectation. As I recite, what I have said slides from expectation into memory; what I am saying is the present attention; what I am about to say remains expectation. When I finish, the psalm is entirely in memory. The same structure governs a man's life, and all of human history. Time is the soul's own stretching. Eternity, by contrast, has no such stretching — it is a present that does not pass, a "now" that contains no before or after. Book 11 is the reason the Confessions appears in philosophy curricula; it is the ancestor of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger's analyses of temporality.
- Book 1The opening prayer, the paradox of calling on God, and the childhood years: infancy, the hated Greek, the loved Latin, the school...
- Book 2Adolescence in Thagaste, the first serious entanglements with desire, Monica's unheeded warnings — and the pear theft, which...
- Book 3Augustine at seventeen in Carthage: the theater's pleasurable grief, the shock of Cicero's Hortensius redirecting his ambition...
- Book 4Augustine teaching rhetoric in Thagaste, the dangerous years with the astrologers, and the death of a close unnamed friend...
- Book 5The long-awaited meeting with Faustus the Manichaean bishop, who is charming and admits he cannot answer Augustine's questions....
- Book 6Milan, Ambrose's sermons unlocking the scriptures, and the departure of the fifteen-year concubine — sent back to Africa by...
- Book 7The philosophical turning point. The Platonic books — probably Plotinus in Latin translation — give Augustine the concept of an...
- Book 8The conversion at Milan: the story of Antony, the garden, the weeping under the fig tree, the child's voice chanting tolle lege...
- Book 9Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387. Monica and Augustine's shared vision at the window in Ostia. Nine days later, Monica's death....
- Book 10The autobiography ends; the philosophy begins. Augustine examines his memory and finds it vast beyond comprehension — a hall that...
- Book 11What is time? Augustine works through the question forced by Genesis — what was there before the beginning? — and gives the answer...
- Book 12A close reading of Genesis 1:1–2. What is the heaven of heavens? What is the formless earth? Augustine reads the creation...
- Book 13A theological reading of the six days of Genesis: light, waters, land, the luminaries — each read as a figure of the soul's...