Summary: Confessions (page 4)

He observes this astonishing phenomenon: we can recall a past sadness without becoming sad, or past joy without feeling it again: Sometimes, on the contrary, I recall my former sadness with joy, and my past joy with sadness ¹. This raises the question of whether memory is truly part of the self: Could memory be foreign to the mind? Who could claim such a thing? ².

Saint Augustine uses a metaphor to illustrate this phenomenon:

Surely, memory is like the stomach of the soul, and joy or sadness like sweet or bitter food; once these feelings have been stored in memory, having passed, as it were, through this stomach, they may linger there, yet stripped of their flavour. ³.

Memory, then, is undeniably part of the self:

There is something terrifying, O my God, in its profound and infinite multiplicity. And that is the mind—and that is myself! ⁴

And yet, can God truly be encountered through memory, given that animals possess it too? Saint Augustine asserts that within each of us there lies a memory of happiness— a trace of God's presence in the soul.

In Book XI, Saint Augustine turns to the problem of time, having, to his satisfaction, resolved the problem of evil. He formulates it as follows: What did God do before He created heaven and earth? Or again: If He was idle, if He did nothing, why did He not always refrain from action, both before and after the beginning of time? ⁵.

This problem seems to establish the contingency of divine Creation—that is, the idea that God acts not out of necessity, goodness, or intelligence, but rather by chance. Moreover, it seems to imply the paradox of a time before time—that is, before Creation.

Augustine offers a solution: God is eternal, yet in eternity nothing is successive; everything is present. [...] Eternity is neither future nor past, but determines both ⁶.

It would be wrong to think of God as preceding time from within it; rather, as Augustine writes, You precede all the past from the heights of Your ever-present eternity. ⁷.

Thus, Your day [...] is an everlasting today. [...] Your today is eternity. All time is Your work; You exist before all time, and there was never a time when time did not exist ⁸.

The problem is therefore meaningless, for it is fundamentally misconceived: At no time, then, did You stand idly by, for You had made time itself ⁹.

This leads to a further question: what is time? Augustine's answer is striking:

If no one asks me, I know; but if I am asked and wish to explain, I no longer know. Yet [...] I know that if nothing happened, no time would pass ¹⁰.

This echoes a paradox Aristotle had already identified: time appears to consist of the past, the present, and the future. Yet the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present can only exist by ceasing to be—thus suggesting the very non-existence of time: the very ground of time's existence is its tendency toward non-being ¹¹.

To resolve this problem, Augustine develops the well-known idea that neither the future nor the past truly exists. There are three forms of time: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future ¹². The first is grasped through memory, the second through immediate intuition, and the third through anticipation.

¹ X, 14
² ibid.
³ ibid.
⁴ X, 17
⁵ XI, 10
⁶ XI, 11
⁷ XI, 13
⁸ ibid.
⁹ XI, 14
¹⁰ ibid.
¹¹ ibid.
¹² XI, 20