Time is a concept deeply connected to human life, raising complex questions about the relationship between subjective experience and objective reality. Augustine philosophically explores the nature of time and discusses eternity in relation to God, but his theories have a number of limitations.

What is time?

This question is one of the oldest since human thought, as time is an integral part of human existence. Time is closely linked to our lives. In our daily lives, we always say that we don’t have enough time or that time passes too quickly. At the same time, when we watch a boring movie, we say that time passes too slowly and try to calculate how much time is left. This experience of time is a good indication of how we understand the concept of time. But what is time really? Is it simply a subjective concept that changes according to our senses and experiences, or is it an entity that exists as a fundamental order of the universe?
Is time something that passes quickly or slowly, and can it be quantified and measured in numbers? In this blog post, we’ll explore Augustine’s views on time, and then explore the limitations of his theory of time. Time is a very broad term and is used differently in different fields, including physics, philosophy, and science. In physics, we associate time with motion. Knowing that motion exists is what we call time. The fact that we see the second hand of a clock move and feel that time has passed is a prime example of this physical concept of time. In philosophy, on the other hand, time is often thought of metaphysically, in relation to space, and can also mean change. This philosophical conception of time requires a deeper examination of the nature of time, exploring its reality and meaning.
Time often comes with the predicate “flows”. If time flows, it means that time exists, but is it real and can we perceive it? Augustine’s philosophical discussion of time often begins with this question.
“What is time? If no one asks me, I know what time is, but if I try to explain it to someone who asks me, I honestly don’t know what time is.” When we think about time, it seems to be real when we think about it alone, but the reason we have difficulty explaining it to someone is that time is different in the two situations. The time in the first situation is my perception of time, which is subjective, and the time in the second situation is my perception of time, which is quantitative and objective. But is time really real?
“If nothing had passed, there would be no past; if nothing was coming, there would be no future; if nothing existed, there would be no present time.” In response, Augustine is convinced that time ‘exists,’ because if something had already passed or was not coming, the past and future would not exist, and if time did not exist, the present would not exist. But we know that time has already passed, that time is coming, and that we live in time, in the present. So time must exist.
If we think that time exists, we must now look at what time is. We need to consider whether time is one continuous entity, meaning each moment, or whether it is divided into three parts: past, present, and future. Augustine has this to say about this
“Nor is it proper for us to say that there are three kinds of time, past, present, and future; perhaps it would be more correct to say that there are three kinds of time: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.” (Confessions of St. Augustine, Book 11, Chapter 20, Section 26) In other words, he sees the existence of three aspects of time called ‘the present,’ as opposed to the way we commonly perceive time as divided into past, present, and future. At first glance, his reasoning seems to make sense. If we consider that time is passing, and that we cannot know the past or the future, the only thing we can truly perceive is the present. But if the past, present, and future are indistinguishable and are three parts of the present, how can we know the present? And can we say that the past and future are unknowable because they have simply gone by and have not come?
As we’ve seen, Augustine recognizes the existence of time. But time passes from the future, which is yet to come, through the present, which is a fleeting moment, and into the past. In this case, it is questionable whether we can say that time exists because, contrary to what Augustine says, it goes to “non-existence.” He also says that time does not have three entities, past, present, and future, but that they are all three parts of the present. But does the present really have an existence? If the present continues to exist, it is not the present, but forever. Then the past and future would not be parts of the present. Unless there is a distinction between past and future, there would be no present, only eternity. We often think of the present as just a point in time. I’m writing this now, and in one second, I’ll be in the past. Our perception of the present is only possible because there is a past and a future. If there is only an eternal present, as Augustine said, then I would not be able to say that it is the present.
On the contrary, is the present a succession of moments? In a similar vein to how Kant criticized Hume’s epistemology of perception as a “bundle of perceptions,” even if moments are repeated, they are only “moments. Since moments are not consecutive, but only fragments of time, they cannot be combined to create a “present,” even if, as Augustine says, there is only a “present,” the time that actually exists now is a day, an hour, a minute, and a second. But we can’t call them the present. As soon as we try to identify a second of the present, we realize that it can be infinitely divided into much shorter units, so any attempt to measure time in measurable units is doomed to failure. Augustine seems to have considered this as well. To solve the problem of measuring time, he answered that time exists only in the mind, calling it a prolongation or extension of the mind. By extension, he means the temporal expansion of consciousness.
He perceives time subjectively: “These three kinds of time exist in some way in our minds, otherwise I could not know them anywhere else.” He considers time as an internal activity of consciousness. He considers time as an internal conscious activity. But the extension of the mind here does not refer to the source of time or to time itself. The measurement of time is now also internal. The previously enigmatic “the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future” is now somewhat explained. The past literally means “moments that have passed”. Humans, who are always standing in the present moment, remember the past in their minds, in the awareness of the present moment, which is called the present. Therefore, the past is a “memory or recollection”. The present, on the other hand, is the time that is now being conscious, the moment that is now captured by consciousness. Therefore, the present is “looking now or being aware now.” The future is a time that has not yet come, but is about to come, i.e., we stand in the present and anticipate the time to come. Therefore, the future is “expectation or anticipation.”
To summarize, for Augustine, to measure time is to perceive the forms of time as dilations in the time of the mind, which the mind remembers, intuits, and anticipates. In other words, the past has already passed and no longer exists, but we see the memory of the past in the present moment. But here is an error in the measurement of time: my memory (which is the present of a past event) does not exist only at a moment in the past. My memory is not continuous in time and cannot be measured. Horrible memories, such as trauma, don’t just exist in the past, but also affect my behavior in the present and future. In this case, my memories can only be considered persistent in time and cannot be measured. In response, he says that memories and predictions are merely markers of past and future time and are not present. This begs the question of how, from a non-existent past and future, they can be said to be part of the present and something that can be measured and distinguished from the present. The attempt to measure time is clearly made in the present. The question again arises of how to measure the future, which has not yet arrived in the eternal present, and the past, which has already passed.
Augustine looks to God for the answer. The problems we discussed earlier, such as the measurement of time, are all aporia that arise because there is no substance to time. Augustine says that time exists in the mind, but the mind has no substance, and so does the past, present, and future, which are merely extensions of the mind. The question of the existence of time is answered by saying that it is merely a conceptual phenomenon of human consciousness in the present, i.e., a phenomenon of consciousness within the consciousness of time. But this aporia arises because we are finite. God, on the other hand, has no time or space. God sees the eternally unmoving present moment; whether he sees it from the past, present, or future does not make any difference. Augustine therefore escapes this aporia by relying on God. In his analysis of the nature of time, he goes beyond our everyday concept of time and tries to define it in relation to eternity and in relation to God. Time has meaning only in relation to eternity. Here, eternity is not time. Eternity is an attribute of God, who is eternal and immortal. On the other hand, time here is human temporality, which contains the uncertainty of existence. Therefore, through the orientation of the human mind toward eternity, the prolongation and scattering of the human mind, which is divided into past, future, and present, is overcome by the human being’s faith in God. This will overcome human existential limitations, such as the fear of death, and transcend the limitations of temporality and be liberated from the problem of time. This means salvation: our souls are resurrected and find rest in the eternity of God by participating in the eternity of God, despite the aporia of perception. This is what Augustine is ultimately saying in his discussion of time.

Limitations of Augustine’s discussion of time

In addition to the aporia on the conceptual perception of time discussed earlier, Augustine’s discussion of time has a number of limitations. First, there is the question of the measurement of time. As we discussed earlier, Augustine struggled with how to measure time for a past that has already passed, a future that is yet to come, and an eternal present that is not expanding. Therefore, he argued that time is an “extension that exists only in the mind” and can only be measured in the mind as a subjective sense of time. But weighing and measuring is the domain of the natural sciences. His notion of subjective time does not seem to take into account the time of nature, objective time. Can subjective time and objective time exist simultaneously?
Next, his discussion of the directionality of time is also limited. He says that time flows from the future, through the present, and into the past. “For what is it but that which comes from the future and goes through the present to the past? Time, then, flows from what is not yet, through what has no extension, to what is already.” However, Moltmann points out that Augustine’s conception of the passage of time is different
“If all future flows through the present into the past, would not the ‘past’ have the ontological primacy of time? The irreversible nature of the flow of time from the future to the past makes virtually everything past. Thus, there is only a past, a present, and a future past. If there is a time among times that is closest to eternity, then from this perspective it is not the present, but the past. The past is the end of all things.” This does not seem to have been taken into account by Augustine, who said that time is the eternal present. Unlike his theory of time, which envisioned an eternal life in which we would overcome the limitations of existence through unity with an eternal God, there is room for the interpretation that our time is the same as the past and that we are waiting for death. Also, although he described the future as an aspect of the present, an expectation, his explanation seems to eliminate the future. In the Confessions, he talks about the future as an expectation through prediction, but in practice, the future does not seem to play a large role in the expansion of the mind, unlike the memory of the past.
So far, we have seen Augustine’s theory of time: he constructed a subjective sense of time by apprehending it in our minds; he understood the existence of time spiritually in relation to God’s creation of the world; and he spoke of soteriology by saying that God’s time is eternal. His discussion of time stemmed from his religious interest, as God saved humans from the bondage of time. In his search for spiritual faith and meaning, he discussed time to explain the relationship between man and God, time and eternity. By doing so, he is trying to say that human beings, who always live with the anxiety of the annihilation of their existence, should live by relying on the eternal God. Therefore, even if his discussion of time is limited and falls into aporia, it still has philosophical significance in that it attempts to grasp the nature of time, an attribute of eternity that has been recognized only conceptually since Plato, and divides it into subjective and objective time.