CONFESSIONS(BOOKXI) 281
*[This is the heart of the matter for Augustine. He pursues the argument relentlessly throughout the
rest of this Book XI, revealing time as something elusive that slips the more swiftly through our fingers the
more we try to analyze it or justify our habit of measuring it. The inexorable rush of time toward non-being
reveals the fragility of time-bound, time-conditioned creatures, whose only refuge from their native nothing-
ness is the eternity of God.]
God in Act of Creation, from a
thirteenth-century French Bible.
In the Confessions, Augustine argues
that God created the world ex nihilo
(out of nothing) and that God is
outside of time. (Corbis-Bettmann)clearly enough to put the matter into words? Yet is there anything to which we refer in
conversation with more familiarity, any matter of more common experience, than time?
And we know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of it, and understand just
as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is time? If no one asks me,
I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know. I can state with
confidence, however, that this much I do know: if nothing passed away there would be
no past time; if there was nothing still on its way there would be no future time; and if
nothing existed, there would be no present time.
Now, what about those two times, past and future: in what sense do they have real
being, if the past no longer exists and the future does not exist yet? As for present time,
if that were always present and never slipped away into the past, it would not be time at
all; it would be eternity. If, therefore, the present’s only claim to be called “time” is that
it is slipping away into the past, how can we assert that this thing is,when its only title
to being is that it will soon cease to be? In other words, we cannot really say that time
exists, except because it tends to non-being.*
15, 18. Nonetheless we speak of a long time or a short time, and we do so only of
time past or time in the future. For example, we call a hundred years ago a long time in