Where We Left Off
Parts One to Seven covered Books One to Ten. Here is what you need. This part stands on its own, and it needs less of the life story than any part so far.
The man. Born 354 in Roman North Africa, trained as a professional public speaker, professor of rhetoric at Milan by 384. He resigned in 386 after the conversion described in Book Eight, was baptised in 387, buried his mother at Ostia that autumn, went home to Africa, and was made bishop of Hippo in his early forties. He wrote this book around 397 to 400.
The book. Thirteen books. Confessio means confessing sin, confessing faith and confessing praise, all at once. It is a prayer, addressed to God throughout, and you are overhearing it.
Where the story ended. Books One to Nine are the life, and they finish at a graveside in 387. Book Ten then skips eleven years and turns the same attention on the man holding the pen: what a person is, what memory contains, what he is still tempted by. Part Seven covered it, and the two things to carry forward from it are these.
One: memory is not a record of the past. Augustine’s memoria holds recollections, but it also holds mathematics, skills, emotions you are not currently feeling, and the fact that you have forgotten things. It is the whole standing content of a mind. Book Eleven is going to use that, and the argument does not work without it.
Two: he cannot get to the bottom of himself. Book Ten ends with the mind unable to take in the whole of what it is. That is the unfinished business Book Eleven inherits, and it is why the next question is not “what am I” but “what is time”.
A Reminder About the Boxes
Six kinds of box run through this series. Word Box explains a hard term the moment it first appears. In Real Terms turns something abstract into something you can picture. How We Actually Know This names the evidence and says what it cannot show. The Argument is for places where experts genuinely disagree, and gives each side its strongest case. The Hidden Assumption digs out the premise everybody is quietly taking for granted. Remember This closes every chapter in the plainest words available.
There are more In Real Terms boxes in this part than in any other, and that is deliberate. Book Eleven is the most abstract thing in the series and the boxes are where it gets brought back down.
Three Things to Watch For
Book Eleven is short, tightly argued, and does not survive skimming. Three threads.
One. This is where Augustine stops being a theologian people quote and becomes a philosopher people argue with. Book Eleven is on reading lists in departments with no interest in anything else he wrote. The question it asks has not been closed, and the people still working on it are not doing theology.
Two. He answers his own question. The famous line — if nobody asks me I know, if I have to explain it I do not — is quoted everywhere as a charming shrug. It is not a shrug. It is the setup, and the argument runs for another fifteen sections and arrives somewhere. Chapter Seven is where it lands.
Three. The last debt in this series is paid here. Part One promised Wittgenstein on Augustine, treating him as a serious philosopher rather than as an example of error. Chapter Nine pays it, and the first thing it has to do is separate that from the much more famous passage where Wittgenstein does exactly the opposite.
Contents
1Why the Last Three Books Are About Genesis
The most famous autobiography in the world ends with three books of biblical commentary. Readers have been calling that a mistake for centuries. It is not one, and this chapter is about why.
1.1What the reader is expecting
By the end of Book Ten a reader has been through a childhood, a religion abandoned, a friend’s death, a woman sent away, a conversion in a garden, a mother’s funeral and a long examination of a man in his forties. Ten books.
Book Eleven opens on the first sentence of the book of Genesis, and the next three books stay there.
That has struck a great many people as a collapse. Editions have been printed that stop at Book Ten. Translations have been published with the last three books cut. Undergraduate courses routinely set Books One to Ten and leave the rest as optional.
And Part Seven set out why that reading is wrong at the level of evidence: Augustine’s own late review of his writings divides the work after Book Ten, calls the first ten “about myself” and the last three “about the scriptures”, and treats all thirteen as one book. Whatever the last three are, they are not an appendix somebody else attached.
1.2Why it is not a change of subject
Here is the chain, and it is worth having in one place, because once you have it the last three books stop looking like a swerve.
Book Ten asked what a person is, and could not finish. The mind, Augustine reported, is too narrow to contain itself. He could not get to the bottom of his own memory, and memory was where he had gone looking for himself.
Now notice what memory is for, in that account. It holds what is no longer there. It is the faculty by which a creature that exists only for an instant at a time nevertheless has a life rather than a series of unconnected flashes. Memory is how a temporal thing holds itself together.
So the unfinished question “what am I” turns into a harder one: what is it to be the kind of thing that is spread out over time at all? Which is the question of what time is.
And the question of what time is, for a man who believes the world began, turns immediately into a question about the beginning — because if time started, the moment it started is the hardest case there is.
Which is the first sentence of Genesis.
That is the whole argument for the unity of the work, in six paragraphs. Book Eleven is not Augustine changing the subject. It is Augustine following the subject to the only place it goes.
A comparison that is not exact but is close enough to be useful.
Somebody sets out to write about their own life and finds, three hundred pages in, that they cannot say what a person is without saying what memory is. They cannot say what memory is without saying what the past is. And they cannot say what the past is without saying what time is.
At that point they have two options. Stop and publish the memoir, or follow the question and publish something with a strange shape.
Augustine took the second option, and the strange shape is the reason he is still read by people who have no interest in the memoir.
1.3Who he is arguing with
One more thing to have in place before starting, because Book Eleven is a polemical book and it does not always say so.
Augustine is arguing with at least three groups at once, and the questions he raises are not questions he invented. They are the objections he had spent years hearing.
The Manichees. His own former religion, covered in Part Two. They read Genesis as crude and mocked the idea of a God who makes things and rests. Their standard needling question about what God was doing beforehand is the one Chapter Two takes up, and Augustine had been on the other end of it for nine years.
Educated pagans. People with a Platonist training, for whom the idea that the world had a start date was philosophically embarrassing. The dignified position was that the world is everlasting. A God who begins something looks like a God who changed his mind.
Fellow Christians who read badly. Augustine spends a great deal of Books Twelve and Thirteen on people who insist their reading of Genesis is the only possible one. He is more patient with the pagans.
So the tone of Book Eleven is not contemplative, whatever its reputation. It is a man clearing objections out of the road, and about a third of the way in he hits one he cannot clear and has to stop and do philosophy instead.
The Confessions ends with three books on the first sentence of Genesis, and readers have been treating that as a collapse for centuries. Editions have been printed that stop at Book Ten. Augustine’s own late review of his works treats all thirteen as one book, divided after Book Ten, not before it.
The chain that makes it one subject: what a person is, then what memory is, then what the past is, then what time is, then what it means for anything to have begun. Book Eleven is the subject followed, not abandoned.
Memory matters here because it is how a temporal thing holds itself together — how a creature that exists for an instant at a time has a life rather than a series of flashes.
The book is polemical, not contemplative. He is answering the Manichees, educated pagans who found a world with a start date embarrassing, and Christians who read Genesis flatly.
2“What Was God Doing Before?”
The oldest objection in the file, a famous joke Augustine did not make, and an answer that is a great deal better than the joke.
2.1The objection
Augustine states it in the form he had heard it, which is a form designed to make the believer look silly. If God made heaven and earth, what was he doing before he made them?
And the objection has a second half that is the real sting. If he was doing nothing, why did he not go on doing nothing? What made this moment the moment? And if something new arose in God — a new decision, a new intention — then he changed, and a thing that changes is not eternal.
That is a good objection. It is still a good objection. Anybody who has ever asked what was there before the beginning of the universe has asked it, and the fact that the modern version has physics attached does not change its shape.
2.2The joke he refuses
Then Augustine does something that has been misreported for sixteen hundred years.
He reports that somebody, faced with this question, answered: he was getting hell ready for people who ask questions like that.
And he refuses it.
His reasons are worth having in full, because they are a small essay on how to argue. Making a joke, he says, is not the same as answering. The question is a real one, and a real question deserves either an answer or an admission of ignorance. He would rather say “I do not know” than say something clever, get a laugh, and have the wrong answer applauded — and he adds that a person who dodges a hard question with a witticism does not thereby become right.
The joke is one of the most frequently misattributed lines in western literature. It is standardly quoted as Augustine’s, often as evidence that he was intellectually evasive or bad-tempered about doubters.
The only reason anybody knows the line at all is that Augustine wrote it down. He introduces it as something somebody is said to have answered — an unnamed somebody, with no date and no context — and he introduces it in order to reject it.
What that supports: that the joke was in circulation by around the year 400, and that Augustine had heard it, disliked it, and thought it worth refusing in print.
What it cannot support: who said it. Augustine does not name them, and there is no earlier source. Anybody who tells you it is Augustine’s line has the attribution exactly backwards.
It is a small thing and it is worth dwelling on, because it is the clearest single illustration of what kind of writer this is. Handed a ready-made putdown that would have played well with his own side, he printed it and then explained why he would not use it.
2.3The actual answer
What he says instead is four words long in substance and takes some unpacking.
There was no before.
Not “there was a before and nothing was in it”. Not “there was an empty stretch and then he acted”. The claim is that time is one of the things that was made, so there is no earlier moment to ask about. God did not make the world in time; he made time along with the world.
Augustine puts it in a formula that repays slow reading: there was never a time when there was no time. And its companion: God did not precede time by a stretch of time, but by permanence.
The shape of the answer is easier to see on a question with no religion in it at all.
Ask: what is north of the North Pole?
That is a grammatical English sentence. Every word in it is doing its ordinary job. It looks exactly like “what is north of Delhi”, which has an answer.
And it has no answer, because “north” is a direction defined on the surface of the globe, and at the pole the coordinate runs out. The question is not hard. It is malformed. Nothing is north of the North Pole, and that is not a mysterious fact about the Arctic.
Augustine is saying “before the beginning” is that kind of question. “Before” is a relation between times. Ask for one earlier than all of them and the coordinate has run out. The question keeps its grammar and loses its subject.
This is the point at which almost every modern reader has the same thought, so it is worth saying plainly: yes, the structure is the same as the standard reply to “what was there before the Big Bang”. That is a real resemblance and it is worth noticing. It is not a case of Augustine anticipating modern cosmology, and this series is not going to claim that he did. What he had was a logical point about the word “before”, available to anyone in any century, and what physics later supplied was a specific reason to think it applies to this universe. The two arrive at similar-looking sentences by completely different routes.
Take any event. There was a moment before it. That is not a belief anybody holds consciously; it is closer to a reflex, and it is correct about every single event you have ever encountered.
The reflex generalises itself into a rule: for anything at all, there was an earlier. And once that rule is in place, the question “what was before the first thing” is not just askable but urgent, and any refusal to answer it looks like a dodge.
What Augustine noticed is that the rule was learned from cases inside time, and that using it on the boundary of time is like using “north” at the pole. The confidence is real and it comes from a very large sample that has one thing in common: every member of it is in the middle.
The general pattern turns up far from cosmology. What is outside the universe. What is west of the westernmost point. What number comes before one, if you are counting the counting numbers. Each looks like a question because the grammar holds, and each is a coordinate being used past the edge of where it is defined.
None of this establishes that Augustine is right that time began. It establishes something narrower and more useful: that “but what was before?” is not automatically a good question, and that a person who declines to answer it is not automatically hiding.
The general form: extending a relation learned entirely from the interior of a domain out past its boundary.
2.4Eternity is not a very long time
The answer above needs one more piece, and it is the piece most people skip.
Eternity, and why it is not everlastingness: in ordinary English “eternal” means lasting for ever — an infinitely long duration, with a past and a future, just without ends.
That is not what Augustine means, and the difference is the hinge of the chapter. On his account eternity has no succession in it at all. Nothing in it is over and nothing in it is coming. There is no “was” and no “will be”. The whole of it is at once.
His own image: your years do not come and go; your years all stand together at once; your today does not give way to a tomorrow, because it never followed a yesterday.
Why it matters: an everlasting God is inside time, just very old, and the “what was he doing before” question hits him squarely. A God outside time is not being asked the same question. Whether that is a real distinction or a way of stepping out of the argument is the next box.
That last question is not a quibble. Everything in this chapter rests on the distinction being a real one, and it is the point at which the reply to the oldest objection either holds or comes apart.
Everything in Chapter Two rests on the claim that there is a way of being that has no succession in it. If that claim is empty, the answer to the “before” objection is a piece of stagecraft. Serious readers divide.
It is not invented for the occasion. Greek philosophy had already separated what is always the same from what changes, and mathematics supplies an ordinary case: the number seven does not persist through time, does not get older, and did not exist more on Tuesday. Nobody finds that mysterious.
And the distinction does real work elsewhere. It is why Augustine can say God did not change his mind about creating: the decision is not an event in a sequence, so there is no earlier state in which it had not been taken. That is a consequence, not a restatement, which is what a genuine distinction produces.
Try to say what timeless existence is, positively, without using a temporal word. It cannot be done, and Augustine does not do it. Every description he offers is a denial: no succession, no before, no after, no passing.
A concept defined entirely by what it is not is not obviously a concept. And the mathematical parallel does not help: the number seven is timeless in the sense of being abstract and doing nothing. God, on this account, is timeless and also acts — creates, calls, forgives. An agent who does things without any succession in the doing is exactly what nobody has managed to describe.
A third position, and the one that has most support among people who work on this now. The contrast between what has succession and what does not is coherent. What is hard is combining it with agency.
The specific difficulty has a name in the modern literature: a timeless being cannot respond, because responding is doing something after something else. Every attempt to solve it either quietly puts God back into time or quietly makes the acting metaphorical.
On this reading Augustine has genuinely dissolved the “what was he doing before” question and has bought it at a price he does not price. The objection he answers in Book Eleven comes back in Books Twelve and Thirteen wearing a different hat.
Where things stand: Nobody disputes what Augustine says or that the distinction has a long philosophical pedigree. What is disputed is whether timeless agency is a coherent notion, and that argument is live in the philosophy of religion today.
What would settle it: Nothing textual will settle it; it is not a question about what Augustine meant but about whether what he meant hangs together. The nearest thing to progress has been a century of increasingly precise formulations, none of which has closed it.
Why people care so much: Because the answer to the oldest objection against a created universe depends on it entirely. If eternity collapses into everlastingness, the “before” question is back and it is unanswered.
A position, declared. The third reading seems to me right, and it is worth being clear about what it concedes and what it does not. It concedes that Augustine’s reply to the “before” question works. The question really is malformed, and that result survives whatever one thinks about God. What it withholds is the further claim that the account of eternity underneath the reply is fully intelligible, and Augustine, to his credit, never claims that it is.
The objection: what was God doing before he made the world — and, if nothing, what made this the moment, and if something new arose in him, how is he unchanging? It is still a good objection.
The famous joke — preparing hell for people who ask — is attributed to Augustine everywhere and he is the one who refuses it. He reports it as an unnamed somebody’s answer and says he would rather admit ignorance than get a laugh for a wrong answer.
His actual reply: there was no before. Time is one of the things that was made. There was never a time when there was no time.
The shape of that reply is the shape of “what is north of the North Pole?” — a sentence with perfect grammar and no subject, because a coordinate has been used past its edge.
It all rests on eternity not meaning everlastingness. Not an endless duration but a way of being with no succession in it — no was, no will be. That distinction is doing all the work, and whether it survives being combined with a God who acts is still argued about.
3Made Out of Nothing
Before the time argument can start, one thing has to be cleared: how anything got made at all. The answer is a phrase everybody knows and almost nobody reads correctly.
3.1Not like a carpenter
Augustine begins with the only model of making anybody has, and takes it apart. A human being who makes something works on material that is already there, using a body that is already there, in a place that is already there.
None of those was available. There was no place for the world to be made in, because places are part of the world. There was no material lying about, because material is part of the world. So whatever making means here, it is not the thing the word normally means, and Augustine says so before saying anything else.
This is worth registering because it removes the picture most people are carrying without knowing it: a large figure, in a large empty space, assembling something. Every element of that picture is being denied, including the space and including the assembling.
3.2Why “he spoke” cannot mean he spoke
The text he is working from says God spoke and things were made. Augustine takes the objection to that seriously and it is a good one.
A spoken word is a sound. A sound is air in motion. Air is part of the created world. So if the command that made the world was audible, the air it travelled through had to exist first, which means something was made before the making — and then you ask what made that, and the question does not stop.
There is a second problem underneath the first. A spoken sentence has parts that come one after another: the first syllable stops so the second can start. Anything said that way is stretched out in time. So a God who speaks in the ordinary sense is a God inside time, and Chapter Two has just spent itself establishing that he is not.
Augustine’s conclusion is that the speaking is not an event. There is no moment at which the sentence began and no moment at which it finished. Everything is said at once, and said permanently, and the world follows from that rather than from a noise.
Whether that is an explanation or a very careful way of declining to explain is a fair question, and it is the same question Chapter Two left standing about eternity. Augustine does not pretend to have resolved it. What he has done is close off the crude reading, which is what a philosopher is for.
3.3What “out of nothing” denies
Creatio ex nihilo — making out of nothing: the doctrine that the world was not made out of anything at all.
The commonest mistake is to hear “nothing” as a material — a special kind of very thin stuff that God worked on. That is exactly backwards. The phrase does not name an ingredient. It denies that there were any.
What it is ruling out is specific, and there were three live alternatives at the time. One: that a craftsman-God shaped pre-existing chaotic matter, which is roughly Plato’s picture and was the respectable philosophical option. Two: that the world flowed out of God’s own substance, so that things are made of God — the position closest to the Platonists Augustine had read, and to the religion he spent nine years in. Three: that the world always existed alongside God and was never made at all.
Why it matters: it is the load-bearing beam under the whole time argument. If matter had always been there, time might have been too, and the question of a beginning never arises.
The second of those three deserves a moment, because it is the one that separates Augustine from the philosophy he admired. If things are made of God, then things are divine, and evil in them is a problem in God. Part Four spent a chapter on how he got out of that, and this is where the escape is nailed down. The world is not a piece of God and it is not a piece of anything else. It is not made of.
Three kinds of making, to get the shape of the claim.
A carpenter makes a chair. Something existed before — wood — and something exists after — a chair. What changed is the arrangement. If you take the chair apart you get the wood back.
A parent makes a child. This is not arrangement; something new is genuinely there. But it is still made out of something: the material comes from the parents and from what they ate.
What Augustine is describing is neither. Nothing was rearranged and nothing was transmitted. There is no earlier state of the material, because there is no material with an earlier state.
That is why the doctrine has no everyday analogue and why every analogy for it fails, including the two above. The honest thing to say is that we have no case of it and would not recognise one. Augustine says so himself, in effect, by refusing every image and describing it only by subtraction.
3.4The two meanings of “beginning”
In principio — “in the beginning”: the first two words of the Latin Bible, and Augustine gets two readings out of them at once.
The temporal reading: at the start, at the first moment. This is the one everybody takes and it is the one that raises the “what was before” question.
The other reading: the same Latin word means a source or an origin, not only a first moment — and the opening of John’s gospel uses it of the Word. So Augustine reads the sentence as saying that things were made in the source, rather than only at the start.
Why it matters: it lets him hold that the world had a first moment without holding that God had a first moment of deciding. This is exegesis rather than argument, and it should be labelled as such — the second reading is not forced by the text, and readers who do not accept the theology have no reason to take it.
One last thing before the argument proper begins, and it is Augustine at his most attractive. He asks how he knows any of it was made at all, and answers that the things themselves say so — because they change. A thing that alters is a thing that was not always as it is, and a thing that was not always as it is is not the kind of thing that explains itself.
That is also the pivot into Book Eleven’s real subject. What is it for a thing to alter? It is for it to be one way and then another. And “and then” is the thing nobody can define.
Making, here, cannot mean what it normally means. There was no place to make it in and no material to make it from, because places and materials are part of what was made.
“He spoke” cannot mean he spoke: a sound needs air, air is part of creation, and a sentence with syllables in order is stretched out in time. So the speaking cannot be an event.
Out of nothing does not name an ingredient. It denies that there were any — ruling out a craftsman shaping chaos, the world flowing out of God’s own substance, and a world that always existed.
The second of those is what separates Augustine from the philosophers he admired. If things are made of God, evil in them is a problem in God.
And the reason he thinks anything was made at all: things change. A thing that alters was not always as it is. Which raises the question the rest of the book is about — what is it for one thing to come after another?
4The Question
One sentence, quoted more than anything else Augustine wrote apart from the restless heart. It is almost always used as a graceful surrender. It is the opposite of one.
4.1The sentence
What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to somebody who asks, I do not know.
That is the whole of it. In Latin it is eleven words and it has been in continuous circulation for sixteen hundred years.
Almost every use of it treats it as a shrug — a charming admission that the subject is too deep, quoted at the top of an article to excuse whatever follows. Read in place, it is nothing like that. It is the last line of the setup, and the argument starts in the next sentence.
4.2What kind of admission it is
Look at what he says immediately afterwards, because it is never quoted alongside and it changes the meaning entirely.
He says he nevertheless knows this much, and says it confidently: if nothing went past, there would be no past; if nothing were coming, there would be no future; and if nothing were here, there would be no present.
So the position is not ignorance. He knows facts about time. He can use the word correctly. He can measure it, compare durations, tell you that one thing took twice as long as another, and be right. What he cannot do is say what the thing is.
That is a precise report of a specific asymmetry, not a confession of defeat, and the asymmetry is the discovery.
The unstated rule behind most people’s reaction to Augustine’s sentence is that understanding and defining are the same competence. If you really understood it you could say what it is; if you cannot say what it is, you do not really understand it. It is the principle behind every demand to “define your terms” and behind a great deal of bad teaching.
It is false, and it is not marginally false. It fails for almost every word you use most fluently.
Try it. Define game so that it takes in solitaire, football, ring-a-ring-o’-roses and the stock market, and excludes war and cooking. Define chair so that it admits a beanbag and refuses a low wall. Define heap. Define now. You will fail at all four inside five minutes, and you have never once misused any of them.
So the relation between using a concept and stating it is much looser than the rule assumes. Fluency is a skill; definition is a different skill; and a great many things are known perfectly in the first sense and not at all in the second.
This is the observation that made a twentieth-century philosopher treat Augustine’s sentence as the model of what a philosophical question is, rather than as an example of an ancient getting confused. Chapter Nine is about that, and it is the last debt this series owes you.
The general form: treating the ability to state a thing as the test of understanding it.
4.3The shape of what follows
Before the argument, it is worth having the map, because Book Eleven is easy to get lost in and the structure is simple once you see it.
Augustine has two questions and he takes them in the unexpected order. The first is what time is. The second is how it is possible to measure it. Almost everybody assumes the first has to be settled before the second can be attempted.
He does the reverse. He works on the measuring problem, because it is the one with a hard edge — we plainly do measure time, accurately, all day — and lets the answer to the first question fall out of the answer to the second.
So the run of the argument is: the three parts of time all turn out to be unavailable (Chapter Five); we measure time anyway, and the obvious candidates for what we are measuring all fail (Chapter Six); therefore what is being measured must be somewhere else, and there is only one place left (Chapter Seven); and here is a worked example (Chapter Eight).
Four moves. Nothing decorative in any of them.
“If nobody asks me, I know. If I have to explain it to somebody who asks, I do not know.” Eleven words in Latin, in continuous circulation for sixteen hundred years, and almost always misused as a shrug.
The very next sentence undoes that reading: he says he knows perfectly well that without passing there would be no past, without coming no future, without anything here no present. He is not ignorant. He is articulating a gap.
The gap: he can use the concept flawlessly and cannot state it. Those turn out to be different skills, and the assumption that they are the same fails for game, chair, heap and now as badly as it fails for time.
The structure of what follows is four moves: the three parts of time are unavailable; we measure anyway; so the thing measured is somewhere else; and here is a worked example.
He takes the questions in the surprising order — how do we measure it first, what is it second — and lets the second fall out of the first.
5The Past and the Future Do Not Exist
A short argument with an alarming conclusion, laid out in steps so you can see exactly where you want to get off.
5.1The argument
It runs in five moves and each is short. The trick is to take them one at a time rather than as a mood.
One. Time has three parts, and everybody agrees on the names: past, present, future.
Two. The past is over. It is not going on. Whatever it is, it is not currently the case. The future has not happened. It is not going on either.
Three. So of the three, only the present is actually there.
Four. But consider what it would be for the present to stay. If the present were permanently present and never turned into past, it would not be time at all. It would be exactly what Chapter Two described as eternity: a state with no succession in it.
Five. Therefore the present counts as time only because it is in the act of stopping.
And then the conclusion, which is one of the strangest sentences in Latin. We cannot truly say that time is, except on the ground that it is on its way to not being.
The only thing that qualifies the present to be part of time is that it is disappearing. Existence, here, is being underwritten by departure.
5.2The present with no width
Then he presses the third move, and this is where the argument gets its teeth.
We say things like “the present century”. Is a hundred years present? Only one of those years is going on; the rest are over or not started. Take that year: only one month of it is present. Take the month: one day. The day: one hour. And an hour is made of minutes that have gone and minutes that have not arrived.
Run that all the way down and the result is a point with no duration at all — because any stretch you can name, however small, has a part already over and a part still coming, and a thing with a part already over is not wholly present.
And a point with no duration cannot be long or short. Which means the only part of time that exists is the only part that cannot be measured.
You can run the whole argument yourself in about fifteen seconds, and it is worth doing, because the conclusion is much less believable when somebody tells you it than when you find it.
Say the word “yesterday” out loud, slowly.
Now: at the moment you were saying the “ter”, where was the “yes”? Not in your mouth. It had stopped. And where was the “day”? Nowhere yet.
So at no point during that word did the word exist. Only ever a fragment, with the rest of it either finished or pending. And the same is true inside “ter” — by the time you reached the r, the t was over.
Keep going and there is nothing left to stand on. What you have just demonstrated is that a thing you unquestionably did — say a word — was never, at any instant, actually happening in full. Chapter Eight is Augustine doing exactly this, with eight syllables of a hymn, and getting an answer out of it.
What that exercise disturbs is not a belief anybody would defend. It is a picture, carried around by everybody, of the present as a place with room in it.
Ordinary speech treats the present as a place you can be inside. The present moment. Right now. This present hour. Living in the present. Every one of those phrases has the present as a stretch with room in it.
The argument above shows that no such stretch survives inspection. Whatever width you propose, part of it is over. Shrink it until nothing is over, and you have shrunk it to nothing.
What makes this more than a curiosity is how much rides on it. The advice to live in the present is advice to occupy a location that, on this argument, has no floor. That does not make the advice bad — people plainly know what it is pointing at — but it means the thing it points at is not a stretch of time, and nobody who gives the advice can say what it is instead.
It also explains a common and otherwise puzzling experience: that the present never feels like anywhere you have arrived. You cannot catch it standing still, and on Augustine’s account that is not a failure of attention. There is nothing there to catch.
The general form: treating a boundary as though it were a region.
5.3Is the argument any good?
It should be said plainly that this is not a settled piece of reasoning admired from a distance. It is a position in a live argument, and philosophers working now are on both sides of it.
Two modern labels, used here for convenience: both are twentieth-century terms and neither was available to Augustine, so they are being applied from outside.
Presentism: only what is present exists. The past is genuinely gone and the future genuinely not there. Statements about them are made true, if they are true, by how things stand now — by traces, records and tendencies. This is roughly Augustine’s position in Book Eleven.
Eternalism, or the block universe: all times exist equally. “Past” and “future” work like “here” and “there” — they say where you are speaking from, not what is real. The year 1815 exists; it is simply not where you are.
Why it matters: the second view has had strong support since relativity, because the theory makes a single universal present hard to define. That is a scientific consideration bearing on a question Augustine reached by pure argument, which is unusual and worth noticing.
With the labels in place, here is the state of the question. Note that these are not schools of interpretation disagreeing about a text. They are positions held by working philosophers about the world.
Augustine says no, and builds his whole account on it. This is a live question in metaphysics, and the positions below are held by working philosophers now, not by schools of interpretation.
The argument in section one is hard to break. The past is over: that is not a figure of speech, it is what “over” means. The future has not happened: same. Anyone who says both exist has to explain in what sense a thing that is over is still there.
And the block view has a cost that is easy to underplay. If all times exist equally then nothing ever really happens; there is only a static array, and the sense that events occur is an illusion running in every human being who has ever lived. That is a very large bill to pay in order to tidy up a puzzle.
“The past does not exist” is ambiguous, and the argument needs both readings and is entitled to only one. It can mean “the past is not now”, which is trivially true and establishes nothing. Or it can mean “the past is not real”, which is what the argument requires and is not obvious at all.
Compare place. Nothing in Australia is here. Nobody concludes that Australia does not exist. “Past” and “future” may be indexical in exactly that way, and the feeling that they are not may be a fact about being a creature stuck at one location in time.
And relativity supplies an independent reason for suspicion: if there is no observer-independent fact about which distant events are happening now, then “only what is present exists” does not pick out a determinate set of things.
A third position, and the most useful one for reading Book Eleven. Augustine’s puzzle is not really about what exists. It is about passage — the fact that time seems to move, that the future becomes the present and then the past.
Settle the existence question either way and passage is untouched. The presentist still has to say what it is for the present to change. The block theorist still has to say why creatures inside the block experience a direction and a flow that the block does not have.
On this reading Augustine misdiagnoses his own discovery, and the discovery survives the misdiagnosis. His answer in Chapter Seven — which is about the mind, not about what exists — is arguably the right answer to a question he had not quite finished asking.
Where things stand: Nobody disputes the steps of Augustine’s argument or that it commits him to something like presentism. What is disputed is whether the argument is sound and whether it is about the right thing.
What would settle it: Nothing internal to Book Eleven will settle it. Physics has bent the question but not closed it, because the metaphysics of what exists is not straightforwardly read off a theory of measurement. Anybody who tells you relativity has refuted presentism is going faster than the argument.
Why people care so much: Because almost everything anyone says about the past and the future — in law, in grief, in history, in how we treat people for what they once did — assumes an answer, and almost nobody has one.
A position, declared. I find the third reading much the strongest, and it is the one this part will run on. Augustine’s argument that the past and future do not exist strikes me as trading on the ambiguity the second position names. What it uncovers on the way — that the present has no width, and that we nevertheless measure things accurately — is a genuine and undamaged problem, and Chapters Six to Eight are the best thing anybody did with it for a very long time.
The argument in five moves: the past is over, the future has not happened, only the present is there — but a present that stayed would be eternity, not time. So the present is time only because it is stopping.
The conclusion in his own words: we cannot say time is, except on the ground that it is on its way to not being.
The present has no width. Any stretch you name — a century, a year, an hour, a syllable — has a part already over and a part not yet come. Shrink it until nothing is over and you have shrunk it to nothing.
Which produces the problem the rest of the book solves: the only part of time that exists is the only part that cannot be measured.
Whether the argument is sound is live now, not settled. The most useful reading is that Augustine is really onto passage — why time seems to move — and that the discovery survives even if the metaphysics does not.
6Then What Are We Measuring?
One awkward fact will not go away: we measure time, constantly, and we are right. Any account has to explain that, and after Chapter Five there is nothing left to be doing the measuring on.
6.1The fact that has to be saved
People compare durations all day and almost never get it wrong. That took longer than this. Wait two minutes. That syllable is long and this one is short. Nobody finds any of it difficult.
That is not a small thing to have to explain. It is an ordinary human competence, exercised thousands of times a day, reliable enough that entire trades depend on it, and it is being exercised on something that — by the argument of the last chapter — is not there.
Augustine could have used this as a reason to abandon the argument. He does the harder thing and keeps both.
6.2Nothing available to measure
Run the three candidates and watch them go.
The past. Over. You cannot lay a ruler along something that has stopped existing.
The future. Not there yet. Same problem in the other direction.
The present. Available, and useless: Chapter Five showed it has no width. A thing with no extension cannot be long or short.
The natural reply is that we measure time as it passes — catching it in the act. But that does not survive a second look. At any instant during the passing, the only part of it that exists is the width-less present. The rest of what you are trying to measure is already over or has not started. Catching it in the act gives you the act and no duration.
6.3The astronomers, and the potter’s wheel
There is one more candidate and it was the respectable answer of the day: time just is the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars. That is what the heavens are for, and it is where the units come from.
Augustine kills it with three strokes and they are worth having, because the third is the one that generalises.
The potter’s wheel. Suppose the heavenly bodies stopped and a potter’s wheel kept turning. Would we be unable to say how long a revolution took, or that one was slower than another? Obviously not. So whatever we are measuring is not the sky.
The sun that stood still. He cites the story in which the sun halts so a battle can be finished. Whatever one thinks of the story — and he is not arguing for it here — everybody who tells it understands it the same way: the sun stopped and the day went on. Which means even the people who identify time with the heavens do not really believe it.
And the one that settles it. The motion of a body and the length of that motion are two different things. When you ask how long something moved for, you are already using time to answer. So motion is measured by time and cannot be what time is, on pain of the question having no content.
The modern version of the potter’s wheel is a clock, and the point is cleaner with one.
A clock does not contain time. It is a device that does something at a rate we have agreed to treat as steady, so that we can compare other things against it. That is a very useful arrangement and it is not the same as the thing being measured.
Test it: if every clock in the world stopped at once, would the question “how long has it been dark?” stop having an answer? No. It would become hard to answer, which is a completely different situation.
And notice what happens when the standard itself is questioned. Ask whether a clock is running slow and you are comparing it against something else — another clock, the rotation of the earth, an atomic transition. Ask whether all of them are running slow together and the question does not obviously mean anything. Augustine is standing exactly at that point, in the year 400, without any of the equipment.
6.4The word arrives before the answer
Having cleared the board, Augustine says something tentative and then says something honest.
Distentio: a stretching-out, a spreading apart. The verb behind it is the one used for stretching a hide over a frame or pulling something taut in two directions.
It carries a second sense in ordinary Latin that Augustine is fully aware of and later exploits: being pulled apart, distracted, scattered. A mind in distentio is stretched, and something that is stretched is under strain.
Why it matters: this is the word his answer is built on, and the double meaning is not an accident. Chapter Eight ends with him using it against himself.
What he says is that he can see time is a kind of stretching-out — and then immediately: or do I only seem to see it?
And then, in the middle of the most tightly argued passage he ever wrote, he stops and admits he still does not know what time is.
It is worth noticing that this is the second such admission in fifteen sections, and that both of them come immediately before he makes progress. The pattern is not modesty. It is a man refusing to let a partial result pass as a finished one, which is the only thing that keeps a long argument honest.
6.5What is left
So the position at the end of Chapter Six is this. We measure time. The past cannot be measured, the future cannot be measured, the present has nothing to measure, and the movements of bodies are measured by time rather than being it.
Every candidate outside has failed. There is exactly one place left to look, and Augustine has spent Book Ten mapping it.
The fact that has to be saved: we measure time all day and we are right. Any account that cannot explain that is finished before it starts.
None of the three parts of time is available to be measured — the past is over, the future has not come, and the present has no width. “We measure it as it passes” fails for the same reason.
The respectable answer of the day was that time is the movement of the heavens. Augustine kills it with a potter’s wheel that would still turn if the sky stopped, and with the general point that motion is measured by time and so cannot be time.
He arrives at the word distentio — a stretching-out, which also means being pulled apart — before he arrives at the answer, and admits again that he does not yet know what time is. Everything outside has been eliminated. One place left to look, and Book Ten has already mapped it.
7A Stretching of the Mind
The answer. It is short, it is strange, and it has been arguing with people for sixteen hundred years — which is a better career than most answers have.
7.1Three presents, not three times
Before the answer, a correction to the vocabulary, and it does most of the work.
It is not right, Augustine says, to talk about three times. Two of them do not exist, so they are not there to be talked about. What there are, are three presents.
The three presents: Augustine replaces past, present and future with a present of things past, a present of things present and a present of things future.
And he says where they are. All three are in the mind, and each has a faculty: memory for what is over, attention for what is going on, and expectation for what is coming.
Why it matters: this is not the claim that the past is imaginary. It is the claim that whenever anybody deals with the past, the thing they are dealing with is present. That is a much smaller claim and much harder to argue with.
And he gives two pieces of evidence for it that are worth having, because they are the sort of thing that can be checked.
A historian telling a true story. What is he working from? Not the events, which are over. He is working from something present — images held in memory, and marks left in the world — and if his story is true it is true because those present things stand in the right relation to what has gone.
Somebody predicting. Nobody sees the future; there is nothing there to see. What a forecaster does is look at present signs — the light in the sky, the state of the crop — together with a memory of how such signs have gone before. The prediction is assembled entirely out of present materials.
7.2The answer
Then the sentence the chapter is named for, and it is worth noticing how carefully hedged it is.
It seems to me, he says, that time is nothing other than a stretching-out — and of what, he does not know, though it would be surprising if it were not of the mind itself.
Not “time is”. “It seems to me”, and “I would be surprised if not”. The most influential sentence in the philosophy of time is offered as a strong suspicion.
Now the mechanism, because on its own the sentence is just a slogan.
When something passes, it leaves a mark. Augustine’s word is closer to “impression” than “memory” — the trace a thing presses into you as it goes by. That trace does not go when the thing goes. It stays, and it stays present.
And that is what we measure. Not the event, which is unavailable, but the impression it left, which is here. His own formulation is flat and unmistakable: it is in you, my mind, that I measure my times.
7.3The objection everybody raises
Which takes about ten seconds to provoke the standard reply: so time is all in your head, then. It is subjective. It is not real.
The reply above is almost never argued for. It arrives complete, as though “in the mind” and “not really there” were the same phrase. Say that colour is in the mind, or that pain is, or that money is, and watch how fast somebody hears you saying they do not exist.
The assumption is a leftover from a particular picture: that the real is what is out there independently of anybody, and that minds are a kind of screen the real gets displayed on, so that anything found only on the screen is a display and not a thing.
It does not survive its own examples. Pain is in the mind in every sense anybody means, and a person in pain is not having an illusion. Money is constituted entirely by what people take to be the case and will nevertheless repossess your house. A thing’s being mind-involving is not a demotion. Applied here it does two kinds of damage. It makes Augustine’s answer sound like a dismissal of time, which it is not — he is explaining how measurement is possible, not announcing that clocks are a delusion. And it hides the interesting question, which is not “is time real” but “what exactly is the mind contributing, and to what”.
That question is genuinely open, and it is the next box.
The general form: treating mind-dependence as a synonym for unreality.
There is a serious version of the objection, though, and it is not the one above. It is this: if time is a stretching of the mind, whose mind, and what about the very long stretch of the world before there were any?
Augustine has a reply available — that all times are held in a mind that is not stretched at all — but he does not develop it here, and the question of what exactly he is claiming has been argued about ever since.
Everything downstream depends on the answer. If Augustine is telling us what time is, he is a major figure in metaphysics. If he is telling us how we experience it, he is a major figure in psychology and has left the original question untouched. Serious readers divide three ways.
He says time is a stretching of the mind. He does not say we perceive it as one. That is the plain sense and it should not be explained away because it is bold.
And it is forced by his own metaphysics. If only the present exists, time cannot be a feature of a sequence of states lying out there, because the sequence is not out there — there is only ever one state. Something has to hold the gone and the coming together for there to be duration at all, and on his account only a mind does that.
Look at what the argument actually establishes. Every step is about measuring: measuring needs both items present, only impressions are present, therefore we measure impressions. That is a valid and interesting conclusion about an activity performed by minds.
It says nothing about what the activity is measuring. A hymn sung to an empty room takes exactly as long as one sung to an audience; nobody has to be there for the syllables to have their lengths. Reading Augustine as claiming otherwise imports a much later philosophical position — Kant’s — into a text that does not contain it.
A third position, and the one this series finds most useful. The split between time and time-consciousness is a modern one, sharpened by Kant and made a discipline by phenomenology. It is not a distinction Augustine declines to make. It is one his vocabulary does not have.
His animus is not the private inner theatre of the modern debate, as Part Seven set out at length — it is opaque to itself and better known by someone else. A term like that does not sit cleanly on either side of a subjective–objective line.
So asking which of the two he meant is asking a question that has no answer inside his framework. That is not a criticism of him. It is a warning about the equipment we are bringing.
Where things stand: Nobody disputes the words. What is disputed is what philosophical claim they amount to, and whether the categories used to ask that are anachronistic.
What would settle it: Nothing will settle it, because it is a question about how to translate a position from one conceptual vocabulary into another. What has made progress is precision: a century of careful work has at least established what the options are.
Why people care so much: Because Book Eleven is the foundation of a whole tradition — the phenomenology of time-consciousness — and that tradition read Augustine as doing what it does. If the third position is right, an enormous amount of twentieth-century philosophy has been standing on a text that is not quite the text it thinks it is.
A position, declared. The third reading is right about the vocabulary and the first is right about the ambition. Augustine plainly means the strong thing — he says is, twice — and he does not have the equipment to see what the strong thing commits him to. Reading him as a careful phenomenologist tidies him up and makes him smaller.
The correction that does the work: not three times but three presents — a present of things past, of things present, and of things future — held by memory, attention and expectation.
The evidence is checkable. A historian works from present traces, not from vanished events. A forecaster works from present signs plus a memory of how such signs went before. Nobody deals with an absent thing directly.
The answer: time is a stretching-out of the mind. Note the hedge — he says “it seems to me” and “I would be surprised if not”. The most influential sentence in the philosophy of time is offered as a strong suspicion.
The mechanism: a passing thing leaves an impression that stays present, and that is what gets measured. “It is in you, my mind, that I measure my times.”
The instant objection — so it is all in your head — assumes that mind-dependence means unreality, which is false about pain and money and colour. The serious objection is different: whose mind, and what about before there were any?
8The Hymn
Augustine now does something almost nobody in ancient philosophy does. He stops asserting and runs an experiment, on eight syllables, that the reader can run too.
8.1Eight syllables
The line he picks is the opening of a hymn: four short syllables and four long ones, alternating. Anybody hearing it can tell that the long ones take twice as long as the short ones. It is not a difficult judgement and nobody gets it wrong.
And before the argument, one fact about the choice of example that is easy to walk past.
The hymn is Ambrose’s, and it is the hymn from Part Six. It is the one that came into Augustine’s head as he lay alone on the night of his mother’s funeral, after a whole day of refusing to cry, and broke him.
There is no reason he had to use that line. He could have used any line of Latin verse in the world. In the most technical passage he ever wrote, at the exact point where he needs a piece of measurable time to hold up and examine, he reaches for the tune he cried to. He does not mention the connection. This series is not going to build anything on it. It is worth knowing.
8.2Why the example is a problem
Now the trouble, which is the whole point of choosing it.
To say that this syllable is twice that one, you have to compare them. To compare two things you need both. And you never have both: by the time the long syllable is sounding, the short one has stopped. They are never in the room together.
Worse, as Chapter Five established, neither of them is ever fully in the room even on its own. While you are halfway through the long syllable, the first half is over.
So the judgement is unmistakably correct and there is nothing available for it to be a judgement about.
Run it. It takes ten seconds and it is worth more than reading about it.
Pick a song you know completely — not one you like, one you know. Sing the first line in your head.
Now: while you were on the fourth word, where was the first word? Not sounding. Gone. And yet you knew, without any effort, that you were on the fourth word of that line, that there were three behind you and some number in front, and roughly how far in you were.
You were not remembering the first word in the way you remember a holiday. It was doing something more like holding its place. And the words you had not reached were also doing something — you were leaning towards them, which is why you would notice instantly if the next one were wrong.
That leaning-forward and holding-behind, happening at once, with the sounding word in between: that is the thing Augustine says is time. Not a description of how you experience the line. His claim is that the stretch between the two is what the line’s duration consists in.
8.3The solution, and the recitation
His answer follows directly. What is being compared is not the syllables. It is the impressions they left, and those are both present at once, in him. He measures those.
Then he scales the example up, and this is the best passage in Book Eleven.
Suppose he is about to recite a psalm he knows by heart. Before he starts, his expectation is stretched over the whole of it. Once he has begun, everything he has said drops back into memory, and what remains unsaid is still ahead in expectation. His attention is present, and it is the doorway: through it, what was future keeps becoming past.
And as he goes on, expectation gets shorter and memory gets longer, until expectation is used up entirely and the whole thing has passed over into memory.
Then, in one sentence, he takes it all the way out. What happens in the whole psalm happens in each of its verses and each of its syllables. It happens in a longer performance of which the psalm is one item. It happens in a person’s entire life, of which their separate actions are the parts. And it happens in the whole history of the human race, of which individual lives are the parts.
That is a theory of a life, arrived at from four syllables of a hymn, in about two hundred words. Whatever one thinks of it, the reach of it is not in dispute.
8.4Does the example prove it?
The worked example is what makes Book Eleven persuasive, and it is also where the sharpest objections land. Nobody disputes that the example is accurate as a description. What it establishes is another matter.
It explains the thing that had to be explained: how measurement is possible when nothing measurable is available. Both items compared are present; the comparison happens in one place at one moment; the competence is saved.
It also predicts things, which is what a good account does. It predicts that expectation shortens and memory lengthens as a known piece runs — which is exactly what reciting something familiar feels like. It predicts that an unfamiliar piece will feel different, because there is nothing for expectation to stretch over. Both are true and neither is obvious in advance.
Grant every word of the example. It shows that a comparison requires both terms to be available at once, and that in the case of durations the only things available are traces. That is a result about comparing.
The syllables still took the lengths they took. Record the hymn and play it to an empty room and it occupies the same stretch. Whatever that stretch is, it is not constituted by anybody’s expectation, because there is not any.
So the example is a beautiful account of the measuring and leaves the original question exactly where it was. Which, on this reading, is why Augustine had to hedge the answer in Chapter Seven: somewhere in him he knew.
A third reading, and the one that has aged best. What the example genuinely establishes is that a temporal creature must hold time together in order to have any dealings with it whatever.
A being with no memory and no expectation would not have a shortened past or an approaching future. It would not have duration in any sense available to it — no waiting, no anticipation, no sense of being partway through. It would exist at instants and that is all.
That is a substantial finding about creatures in time, and it is not a theory of time. It is also the finding that the phenomenological tradition took up, which is why Book Eleven had its second career in the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth.
Where things stand: The accuracy of the example as a description is not in dispute. Nor is the conclusion about measuring. What is disputed is whether anything about time itself follows.
What would settle it: A clean settlement would require the distinction the previous argument box says Augustine does not have, which is why these two disputes are really one dispute arriving twice.
Why people care so much: Because the example is the most-taught passage in Augustine outside the garden, and it is routinely presented to students as a proof. It is a demonstration, which is a different thing, and knowing which one you are looking at changes what you should conclude.
A position, declared. The third reading is the one I would defend, with a note attached: the second reading is right that the example does not reach time itself, and wrong to treat that as a failure. Augustine set out to explain how measuring is possible when nothing measurable exists. He did that, completely, and the account has never been improved on. That the answer turned out not to settle the larger question is a fact about the larger question.
8.5Pulled apart, and gathered
Book Eleven ends by turning its own vocabulary on the author, and the turn is lost in every translation.
The word for the stretching that constitutes time also means being pulled apart — scattered, distracted, strung out. Augustine puts three words from the same family next to each other. He is stretched apart in times, and does not know the order of them; his thoughts are torn to pieces. Against that he sets reaching out towards what is ahead, and concentration — being pulled together into one instead of scattered into many.
His own phrase for the condition is as blunt as anything in the book: he has burst apart into times.
And that is the same complaint, in the same vocabulary, as the one Part Seven found in Book Ten — a person leaking outward into many things, needing to be gathered back into one. In Book Ten it was a moral problem about wanting too many things. Here it turns out to be the structure of being a creature in time at all.
The scattering is not a fault he has. It is what a temporal thing is.
The worked example is eight syllables of a hymn — and it is the hymn from Part Six, the one that broke him on the night of his mother’s funeral. He does not mention the connection.
The problem: to say one syllable is twice another you need both, and you never have both. By the time the long one sounds the short one has stopped.
The answer: you are comparing the impressions they left, which are both present at once.
Scaled up: reciting something known, expectation shortens and memory lengthens while attention is the doorway between them — and the same shape holds for a verse, a life, and the whole history of the human race.
The last move turns the word on himself. Distentio means both stretched-out and pulled-apart. He says he has burst apart into times — and what Book Ten treated as a moral failing turns out here to be the structure of being temporal at all.
9What Happened Next
Sixteen hundred years of people picking this argument up. And the last debt this series owes you: a twentieth-century philosopher who used Augustine as a specimen of error, and then, in the same book, as the model of what a good question looks like.
9.1The long afterlife
Book Eleven is the part of the Confessions that escaped the Confessions. It has had a continuous career for sixteen centuries, in every period, mostly among people who were not reading the rest of it.
The middle ages took the eternity half. About a century after Augustine, Boethius produced the formula that carried the time-and-eternity distinction into every later discussion: eternity as the complete possession, all at once, of a life without limit. That phrase is Boethius’; the distinction under it is Chapter Two of this part. Aquinas took it up in the thirteenth century and it became standard.
The eighteenth century took the mind half and made it stronger. Kant’s claim that time is a form of the mind’s own way of taking things in is recognisably the position Augustine reached for and hedged. Kant did not hedge, and he did not credit Augustine, and the resemblance has been noticed ever since.
The twentieth century took the worked example. Husserl’s lectures on the consciousness of internal time — delivered in 1905, published in 1928 — open by saying that anybody working on the problem must still study Confessions Book Eleven, and he names the sections. His technical machinery of holding-on and reaching-forward is Augustine’s memory and expectation with new names and much more apparatus. Heidegger, who edited those lectures for publication, was working the same ground.
And a philosopher of narrative took the pun. Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, in 1983, opens with a long reading of Book Eleven set against Aristotle, and builds a whole theory of storytelling out of the pairing Chapter Eight ended on: being pulled apart in time, and being gathered by reaching towards something.
Worth adding, because it is not a friendly witness: Bertrand Russell, writing a history of philosophy in 1945 and cordially unimpressed by almost everything else in Augustine, called the theory of time a great advance on anything in Greek philosophy and said it was a better and clearer statement of the subjective view of time than Kant’s.
9.2The Plotinus question, and why this series is not running it
Somebody will ask, so it should be answered directly rather than left to be discovered.
Plotinus, in an essay on eternity and time written about a hundred and fifty years earlier, also locates time in soul. Augustine had read him or something very like him. The resemblance is real and it is close.
This series has now run the “how much of this is Plotinus” argument twice at full length — in Part Four on the Platonist books, and in Part Six on the conversation at Ostia — and it is not going to run it a third time. Instead, a declared position and the three things that are actually different, which is what a reader needs.
One: the measuring problem is not in Plotinus. The whole engine of Book Eleven — that we measure accurately and there is nothing available to measure — is Augustine’s, and so is the worked example.
Two: Plotinus does not think time began. For him the world is everlasting, and it is precisely the position Chapter Two is written against. That is not a detail; it is the disagreement the book exists to prosecute.
Three: the mind in question is different. Plotinus is talking about soul in a cosmic sense. Augustine is talking about a particular man reciting a hymn and losing his place. That shift — from the soul to somebody’s mind — is why the twentieth century could use him and largely could not use Plotinus.
9.3The debt: Wittgenstein, twice
Part One, Chapter Seven, promised this and it has been outstanding for seven parts. It requires care, because the famous version and the true version are not the same passage.
The famous one. The Philosophical Investigations — the most influential philosophy book of the twentieth century — opens, in its very first section, with a quotation from the Confessions. Not from Book Eleven: from Book One, where Augustine describes how he learned to talk as a child by watching adults name things and point at them.
Wittgenstein quotes it, calls it a particular picture of what language essentially is, and spends the next stretch of the book taking that picture apart. It is the target he sets up in order to knock down, and it is why “Wittgenstein on Augustine” almost always means “Wittgenstein using Augustine as a specimen”.
One thing should be said about that even before we get to the debt. Wittgenstein did not go looking for a weak statement of the picture. He went looking for the best one, on the reasonable ground that a picture worth dismantling is one that a first-rate mind found natural. Being chosen as the target was a judgement about the quality of the statement, not about the intelligence of the man.
And the one Part One promised. Later in the same book, in the stretch where Wittgenstein is trying to say what philosophy actually is as against science, he quotes Augustine again — this time the sentence from Book Eleven, in Latin, untranslated.
And what he says about it is this. A remark like that could not be made about a question in natural science. Nobody says: if nobody asks me, I know the specific gravity of hydrogen, but if I have to explain it I do not. Something we know perfectly well until we are asked to give an account of it is not something we need to research. It is something we need to be reminded of — and, he adds, it is for some reason very hard to remind oneself of.
That is not a compliment tucked into a footnote. Augustine’s question is being used as the specimen case of what distinguishes a philosophical problem from an empirical one. In a book with very few positive models in it, a bishop from the fifth century supplies the definition of the subject.
Both passages are in a printed book that anyone can check, which is not something this series has often been able to say.
The first is section 1 of the Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein’s death. It quotes Confessions Book I and uses it as the picture of language the book opens by rejecting.
The second is in the run of sections around 89, in the part of the book concerned with the nature of philosophical investigation. It quotes the “what then is time” sentence and draws the contrast with a question of natural science.
There is a third, less often noticed, in the notes dictated to students in 1933 and 1934 and later published as the Blue Book, where Wittgenstein discusses Augustine on time and diagnoses the puzzlement as produced by grammar: a noun makes us hunt for the object it names, and there is no object here.
What that supports: that Wittgenstein returned to Augustine repeatedly over twenty years, and that his treatment of the time question is markedly more respectful than his treatment of the language passage.
What it cannot support: any claim about what Wittgenstein thought of Augustine as a whole. He was not writing about Augustine. He was using him, twice, for two different jobs.
Which leaves a question about how the first passage came to stand for the whole relationship, and it is not really a question about Wittgenstein.
Almost everybody who knows that Wittgenstein wrote about Augustine knows the first passage and not the second, and the effect is a standing impression that modern philosophy examined Augustine and found him wanting.
Underneath that is an assumption about what it means to be somebody else’s example. If a later thinker quotes you in order to take your position apart, you have been assessed and the assessment is negative. Being a specimen is a verdict.
It is not. A specimen is chosen for how clearly it shows the thing, and the clearest statement of a natural mistake is usually made by somebody good. Being the best available example of a picture that misleads people is a form of distinction, and it says nothing whatever about the rest of your work.
The general pattern runs well outside philosophy. A physicist quoted in a textbook as the classic case of a wrong turn; a designer whose failed building is in every syllabus; a study cited for decades as the standard illustration of a methodological trap. In each case the citation is evidence of how well the thing was done, and readers convert it into a verdict on the person.
The correction here is exact and checkable. The same book, by the same author, holds both a dismantling and a model, roughly ninety sections apart. Anyone who has been told that Wittgenstein disposed of Augustine has been told half of one page.
The general form: reading a citation as a judgement on the source rather than on the thing cited.
9.4Why the question stayed open
One last thing, and it is the honest summary of the whole part.
Augustine set out to answer two questions and thought they were one. What is time, and what is it for a creature to be in time.
The second turned out to be tractable. His answer to it — memory, attention, expectation; the stretch between what is held and what is awaited; the shortening and lengthening as a known thing runs — has never been substantially improved, only formalised. That is the part the twentieth century took.
The first turned out not to be tractable, and it still is not. Nobody has said what time is. The question has been made much more precise, it has acquired physics and formal logic, and it is open in the same shape Augustine left it in: a thing everybody handles faultlessly and nobody can state.
Which is, exactly and unimprovably, what he said in the first place.
Book Eleven is the part of the Confessions that escaped the Confessions, and it has been in continuous use for sixteen centuries, mostly by people not reading the rest.
Boethius and Aquinas took the eternity half; Kant took the mind half and dropped the hedge; Husserl and Heidegger took the worked example; Ricoeur took the pun. Russell, no friend of the theology, called it a great advance on Greek philosophy and better than Kant.
On Plotinus: the resemblance is real. What is Augustine’s own is the measuring problem, the claim that time began, and the shift from cosmic soul to one man losing his place in a hymn.
The debt: Wittgenstein quotes Augustine twice in the same book. Once at section 1, as the picture of language he is about to dismantle — the famous one. And once around section 89, where the question about time is the specimen of what a philosophical question is.
The honest summary: Augustine asked two questions thinking they were one. What it is to be a creature in time he answered, and the answer has only ever been formalised, never improved. What time is is open in exactly the shape he left it.
10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know
Every part of this series ends the same way, by separating what is genuinely open from what is settled, and saying why in each case. In this part the open list is unusually long, and that is the subject rather than a failing.
10.1Genuinely unknown
These are open questions, not gaps in this document. Each is followed by the reason it is open, because “we do not know” is only useful when it comes with a cause.
What time is. Why: sixteen hundred years of continuous work by first-rate people has made the question far more precise and has not closed it. This is not a gap in Augustine and it is not a gap in this document. It is the state of the subject.
Whether Augustine is giving a theory of time or of time-consciousness. Why: the distinction is a modern one and his vocabulary does not contain it, as Chapter Seven sets out. The question may have no answer inside his framework.
Whether the past and the future exist. Why: live in metaphysics now. Relativity has bent the question towards one answer without closing it, because what exists is not straightforwardly read off a theory of measurement.
Whether timeless agency is coherent. Why: Chapter Two. The distinction between eternity and everlastingness is defensible; combining timelessness with a God who acts and responds is where every account so far has run into trouble.
Whether time had a beginning. Why: Augustine argues it did from the doctrine of creation rather than from evidence. Modern cosmology has a good deal to say and does not agree with itself.
How much Augustine took from Plotinus. Why: he names no source here, as he names none in Book Seven. Chapter Nine gives the position and declines to relitigate it.
Whose mind, on his account, holds the time of a world with nobody in it. Why: he assembles the materials for an answer and does not give one. It is the strongest objection to his position and he does not meet it.
Whether Book Eleven was composed with Books One to Ten. Why: the same reason Part Seven gave for Book Ten. Nothing external pins the sequence, and internal evidence about composition order reads both ways.
10.2Solid
And these are as firm as anything about a fourth-century book gets. Again with reasons, because “solid” is a claim that has to be paid for.
The text. Why: the Confessions is among the best-attested Latin works of antiquity, the oldest manuscript is from within about a century and a half of composition, and Book Eleven in particular was copied and excerpted constantly. There is no serious doubt about what stood there.
That Augustine refuses the joke about preparing hell. Why: it is in the text, introduced as somebody else’s answer, in order to be rejected. The near-universal attribution of it to him is simply wrong.
That he denies time is the motion of the heavens. Why: three separate arguments, in the text, one of which is general and decisive.
That the answer he gives is distentio animi, and that he hedges it. Why: the text, twice, with the hedge attached both times.
That Wittgenstein quotes the Confessions at section 1 of the Philosophical Investigations as a picture to be dismantled, and quotes the time question around section 89 as the model of a philosophical question. Why: both are in a printed book in continuous publication since 1953.
That Husserl and Ricoeur built on Book Eleven and said so. Why: they say so, in print, in the opening pages of the relevant works.
10.3What no translation carries
A reader of this part is reading paraphrases of a Latin text, and in Book Eleven that costs more than usual. Three things do not survive.
The family of words around distentio. Augustine sets stretched-apart, reached-out and concentrated next to each other at the end of the book, and in Latin they are audibly three forms of one word. In English they are three unrelated words and the passage reads as earnest where it is meant to read as tight.
The double sense of the opening phrase of Genesis. The Latin for “in the beginning” also means “in the source”, and Augustine takes both at once, as Chapter Three set out. English forces a choice and every translator makes one.
The famous sentence. “If nobody asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to somebody who asks, I do not know” is eleven Latin words with a symmetry that no English version has managed. Wittgenstein left it in Latin, which is one way of admitting the problem.
What that supports: that Book Eleven is more compressed and more deliberately made than it can be shown to be in English.
What it cannot support: any suggestion that the argument is different in Latin. It is not. The reasoning survives translation intact; it is the workmanship that does not.
Which is a fair place to record something about this series. Everything rendered here is a loose paraphrase, made deliberately loose so that it explains rather than reproduces, and none of it is a quotation from any published translation. For eight parts that has been a technique. In Book Eleven it is also a loss, and the loss should be stated rather than covered.
10.4One part left
Book Eleven ends with Augustine scattered into times and asking to be gathered. What follows is the last two books, and they are the least read part of the work by a wide margin.
They are also, in one specific respect, the most surprising thing Augustine ever wrote, and Part Nine is going to argue that the most modern page in the Confessions is in Book Twelve — in the middle of a discussion about unformed matter that almost nobody finishes.
Genuinely open: what time is — not a gap in this document but the state of the subject; whether Augustine means a theory of time or of time-consciousness; whether the past and future exist; whether timeless agency is coherent; and whose mind holds the time of a world with nobody in it.
Solid: the text; that he refuses the hell joke universally attributed to him; that he denies time is the motion of the heavens, with three arguments; that his answer is distentio animi, hedged both times he gives it.
Also solid and checkable in a printed book: Wittgenstein quotes him twice, once as a picture to dismantle and once as the model of a philosophical question.
Three things no translation carries: the family of words around distentio, the double sense of “in the beginning”, and the symmetry of the famous sentence. The argument survives translation. The workmanship does not.
One part left. Books Twelve and Thirteen are the least read of the thirteen — and Part Nine will argue that the most modern page in the whole work is in the one almost nobody finishes.
Timeline
Book Eleven has no narrative at all, so this timeline covers the argument rather than the man: when it was written, and what happened to it afterwards. The later dates are all publication dates and are documentary.
| Date | Event | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| 354 | Augustine born at Thagaste. | Book I |
| 387 | Baptised at Milan; his mother dies at Ostia. The life story ends. | Book IX |
| c. 397–400 | The Confessions is written. Book XI: the “before” objection, the question, the potter’s wheel, distentio animi, the hymn. | Book XI |
| c. 524 | Boethius formulates eternity as the complete possession, all at once, of unending life — the phrase that carries the distinction into the middle ages. | outside |
| c. 1266 | Aquinas takes up the eternity–time distinction in the Summa, building on Boethius and Augustine. | outside |
| 1781 | Kant: time as a form of the mind’s own way of receiving things — the position Augustine reached for and hedged, stated without the hedge. | outside |
| 1908 | McTaggart argues that time is unreal, and the modern analytic argument about past, present and future begins. | outside |
| 1905 / 1928 | Husserl’s lectures on internal time-consciousness, delivered and then published, edited by Heidegger. They open by directing readers to Book XI. | outside |
| 1927 | Heidegger, Being and Time. | outside |
| 1933–34 | Wittgenstein, in notes later published as the Blue Book, diagnoses Augustine’s puzzle about time as produced by grammar. | outside |
| 1945 | Russell, no friend of the theology, calls the theory of time a great advance on anything in Greek philosophy. | outside |
| 1953 | The Philosophical Investigations is published. Section 1 uses Augustine on language as the picture to be dismantled; around section 89 the question about time is the model of a philosophical question. | outside |
| 1983 | Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, opens with Book XI against Aristotle and builds a theory of storytelling on the pun at the end of it. | outside |
| — | Part Nine starts here: Books XII and XIII — formless matter, and a page about reading that is more modern than anything around it. | — |
Glossary
Every hard word used in this part, in plain English. Terms carried over from earlier parts are repeated so this part stands alone.
About the Author
This series is read and explained by Lovepreet Singh, and published as part of The Living Archive at misterlove.in.
The Living Archive takes difficult material and rebuilds it so that anyone can follow it, without dropping the hard parts along the way. Its first series was a fourteen-part history of Punjab running to around nine hundred and fifty pages. This is its second.
I read the book, I did the reading around it, and I wrote down what I found. I am not a specialist in late antiquity or in the philosophy of time, and I am not going to pretend to be one. Where a question is genuinely contested among people who are, I have said so and given each side its strongest case rather than choosing for you. Where I could not find out, I have written that I could not find out.
The method used here was worked out on the Punjab series and is written up as a portable specification, so that any part of this work can be checked, continued or rebuilt by somebody else. That is the point of an archive that calls itself living.
[Editorial note, to be replaced before publishing: the method requires a one-line statement of the author’s own position with regard to religious material, placed where readers will see it. This is the only field in the document still unfilled, and it has now been carried forward eight times. One part remains.]
The Living Archive
The Living Archive is a method for writing hard things simply without making them shallow. It was developed by Lovepreet Singh and tested on a fourteen-part history of Punjab. It runs on three rules.
One. Simplification is not compression. The simple version is usually longer than the difficult one. Words are being spent to buy comprehension.
Two. Two dials, turned in opposite directions. Language as simple as it can be made. Content as deep as the subject actually goes. Turning both down produces something readable and useless.
Three. Every side gets its strongest case, and where nothing settles a question, that gets said. A verdict that honestly reports a deadlock is worth more than a tidy answer that is not true.
A word on sources
This document carries no footnotes. It is a synthesis of the published record rather than new primary research, and it is written for readers who want to understand a book, not for specialists who want to check my workings.
What the archive is unusually good at here. Everything in Chapter Nine is verifiable by anybody with a library card. The Wittgenstein passages, the Husserl lectures, the Ricoeur, the Russell — all are printed books in continuous publication, and the claims made about them in this part are claims about what is on the page. No part of this series has been so easy to check.
What it is bad at here. The subject. Nobody knows what time is, and no amount of care in a document like this one changes that. Chapter Ten says so at the top of the open list rather than at the bottom, because it is the first fact about the material and not a residue left over after the explaining.
On the modern philosophy. The literature on the metaphysics of time is very large and very technical, and this part uses two of its labels — presentism and the block universe — as rough handles rather than as positions being defended. Readers who want to go further should know that both terms cover families of views that disagree internally, and that the connection between the metaphysics and the physics is itself contested.
On the afterlife in Chapter Nine. The list is a selection and it is not neutral: it is weighted towards people who said in print that they were reading Augustine, because that can be shown. There is a much larger body of work that is downstream of Book XI without saying so, and no honest way to draw its boundaries.
On translations. All renderings of Augustine in this document are my own plain-English paraphrases, made deliberately loose so that they explain rather than reproduce. They are not quotations from any published translation and should not be cited as such. Chapter Ten records what that costs in this particular book. Where the exact wording matters, go to a proper edition.
Corrections are welcome and will be acted on. Later editions will record what was changed and who caught it.
What Comes Next
Part Nine is the last one. It covers Books Twelve and Thirteen, the least read part of the Confessions by a very wide margin, and the argument it will make is that one page in there is more modern than anything else in the work. These are the questions it takes on.
- What is “the heaven of heaven”, and why does Augustine spend a whole book on two things the text barely mentions?
- Can something exist without having any form at all — and what is he doing with a concept he admits he cannot think about clearly?
- The page that matters. Can one sentence have several different true meanings at once? Augustine says yes, and then says something harder: that a reader can find a true meaning the author never intended, and be right.
- Which raises the question that page hands to the twentieth century: if that is so, what is left of the author’s intention, and who decides?
- Why is he so patient with people who disagree with him about Genesis, having been so much less patient elsewhere?
- Why does the book end with a rest day, and what is being claimed by ending there rather than anywhere else?
- And the last one, which Part One promised in its own Chapter Ten: the final Hidden Assumption of this series has to be about this series. Nine parts of explaining a book that is a prayer, in the plainest English available, by somebody paraphrasing rather than quoting. What has that been assuming?
That last item is the only debt left. Everything else this series promised has now been paid.