Escaping time

John Rist offers some important insights into Augustine’s view of time. He notes, as many commentators do, that Augustine is not aiming to provide a definition of time but to answer the question of how time can be measured. The dilemma is: If the past no longer is, and the future is not yet, and the present is constantly shifting, then it seems as if time is not available at all to be measured. Yet, we measure time; we speak of long or short time. How is this possible?

Augustine solves this dilemma by saying that past and future exist as memory and expectation in the soul. We measure past time because the past time we know is a present-past, and we can measure future time because future is a present-future. Rist says, “Thus Augustine is able to hold both that the past, and past events, do not exist, but did exist, and that their existence can be ‘vicariously’ prolonged by the mental act of retention or ‘distention.’”

He denies that this makes time subjective, or makes Augustine a precursor of Kant, as some have argued. Time “is not a product of the human mind; it is not an epiphenomenon of matter, for physical objects come into being ‘in’ it ( Conf . 11.24.31), and the first physical objects came to be ‘with’ it. It is a kind of property of things, or better a formal concept or ‘category” of the physical universe.” What continues to exist is not the past itself, but the impressions that the past has made on the memory.

Rist claims that Augustine sees salvation as a transcending or escape from time: “God does not live in time; hence it follows that in so far as we become like him, we too shall transcend or ‘escape from’ time.” He assembles a number of quotations showing that this is Augustine’s view, concluding that “we are called ‘out of time’ to share God’s divinity.” That last may be putting it too strongly, but there is certainly an impulse toward escaping from time.