Summary: Confessions (page 4)

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

Saint Augustine chooses 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 are entrusted to memory, having passed, as it were, through this stomach, they may remain within, yet they have lost their flavour. ³.

Memory, then, is undeniably part of the Ego:

There is a terrifying je ne sais quoi, O my God, in its profound and infinite multiplicity. And that is the mind, and that is myself! ⁴

And yet, is it truly in memory that we shall encounter God, since animals possess it as well? Saint Augustine asserts that within each of us lies a memory of happiness, a mark of God's presence within us.

In Book XI, Saint Augustine raises the problem of time, now that the problem of evil has been resolved. He formulates it as follows: What did God do before He created heaven and earth? Or: If He was idle, if He did nothing, why did He not always abstain from all work, both in the continuation of time and in the time preceding it? ⁵.

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

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

It would be wrong to think that You precede time from within time. Rather, 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 it cannot be that there was ever a time when time did not exist ⁸.

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

This problem gives rise to another: the definition of time. What is time? Augustine observes:

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 occurred, no time would pass ¹⁰.

This recalls a paradox already formulated by Aristotle: 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—suggesting the very non-existence of time: Thus, what allows us to affirm that time exists is precisely that it tends towards non-existence ¹¹.

To resolve this problem, Augustine develops the famous 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 accessed through memory, the second through direct intuition, and the third through expectation.

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