Book XI

Your Today Is Eternity

Lord, since eternity is Yours, are You ignorant of what I say to You? Or do You see in time what passes in time? Why then do I lay before You so many things in order? Not, truly, that You might learn them through me, but to stir up my own devotion and my readers' toward You, that we may all say: "Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised." I have said it already, and will say it again: for love of Your love do I do this.

O Lord my God, give ear to my prayer, and let Your mercy attend to my desire; for it is not anxious for myself alone, but would serve the love of the brethren. I would sacrifice to You the service of my thought and tongue. Give me what I may offer You. For I am poor and needy; You are rich to all who call upon You. Circumcise from all rashness and all falsehood both my inward and outward lips. Let Your Scriptures be my pure delights; let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive others out of them.

Behold, the heavens and the earth exist; they proclaim that they were created; for they change and vary. Whereas whatever has not been made, and yet exists, has nothing in it which was not there before — and this is what it means to change and vary. They proclaim also that they did not make themselves: "Therefore we exist, because we have been made; we did not exist before we existed, so as to make ourselves." Now the evidence of the thing is the voice of the speakers.

You therefore, Lord, made them — You who are beautiful, for they are beautiful; You who are good, for they are good; You who are, for they are. Yet they are not beautiful, nor good, nor do they simply exist, as You their Creator do. Compared with You, they are neither beautiful, nor good, nor do they exist at all. This we know — thanks be to You. And our knowledge, compared with Your knowledge, is ignorance.

Before Time, There Was No Time

They are full of their old confusion who say to us, "What was God doing before He made heaven and earth?" I say that You, our God, are the Creator of every creature; and if by "heaven and earth" every creature is understood, I boldly say: before God made heaven and earth, He did not make anything. For if He made something, what did He make but a creature?

But if any restless mind ranges over images of past time, and wonders that You, God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, refrained for countless ages from so great a work before You chose to make it — let him wake up and consider that he wonders at what is false. For how could countless ages pass by, which You had not made — You, the Author and Creator of all ages? What times could there be that were not made by You? Or how could they pass by, if they never existed?

You do not precede time by time — otherwise You would not precede all times. But You precede all things past by the heights of an ever-present eternity; and You surpass all things future, because they are future, and when they come, they will be past; but You are the same, and Your years do not fail. Your years neither come nor go; whereas ours both come and go, that they may all come. Your years stand all at once, because they stand; they are not pushed out by years arriving, for they do not pass away. But ours will all exist only when they all have ceased to exist.

Your years are one day; and Your day is not daily, but Today — seeing Your Today gives no place to tomorrow, for neither does it replace yesterday. Your Today is Eternity.¹

What Then Is Time?

And no times are coeternal with You, because You abide; but if times abided, they would not be times. For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in conversation do we mention more familiarly and knowingly than time? And we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know.²

Yet I say boldly that I know this: that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were coming, there would be no future time; and if nothing existed, there would be no present time. Those two times then, past and future — how can they be, seeing the past now is not, and the future is not yet? But the present — should it always be present, and never pass into the past — truly, it would not be time but eternity. If time present, to be time, only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how can we say that it exists, whose cause of being is that it shall cease to be? So that we cannot truly say that time exists, except because it is tending toward not existing.

The Present Has No Duration

Let us see then, O human soul, whether present time can be long. Are a hundred years, when present, a long time? See first whether a hundred years can be present. For if the first year is now running, it is present, but the other ninety-nine are to come. If the second year is running, one is already past, another present, the rest to come. And so if we take any middle year of this hundred to be present, all before it are past; all after it, to come. Therefore a hundred years cannot be present.

But see at least whether the one year now running is itself present. If it is the first month, the rest are to come; if the second, the first is past and the rest not yet. Therefore not even the current year is entirely present. Nor is the current month. Nor is one day present as a whole, for it is made up of twenty-four hours; and each hour passes in fleeting particles. Whatever has flown away is past; whatever remains is to come. If any instant of time is conceived which cannot be divided into the smallest particles of moments — that alone is what may be called present. Which yet flies with such speed from future to past that it has no duration at all.

The present has no length. Where then is the time we call long?

Three Presents

What now is clear and plain is that neither things to come nor things past exist. Nor is it properly said, "there are three times: past, present, and future." Yet perhaps it might be properly said: there are three times — a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future. For these three exist in some way in the soul, and I do not see them elsewhere: the present of things past is memory; the present of things present is direct perception; the present of things future is expectation.³

The Psalm

I am about to recite a Psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the whole. But when I have begun, whatever portion of it I have already spoken passes into my memory. The life of this action of mine is divided between my memory — as to what I have recited — and my expectation — as to what I am about to recite. But attention is present with me, through which what was future is carried over, so as to become past. The more this is done again and again, the more the expectation is shortened and the memory lengthened, until the whole expectation is at last used up — when the whole action, being ended, shall have passed into memory.

And what takes place in the whole Psalm takes place also in each portion of it, and in each syllable. The same holds in the longer action of which this Psalm may be a part. The same holds in the whole life of a person, of which all that person's actions are parts. The same holds through the whole age of the children of humanity, of which all the lives of all people are parts.⁴

Until I Flow Together into You

But because Your lovingkindness is better than all lives — behold, my life is but a distraction, and Your right hand upheld me, in my Lord the Son of Man, the Mediator between You, the One, and us, the many — many also through our many distractions amid many things — that by Him I may take hold of Him in whom I have been taken hold of, and may be gathered together from my former ways, to follow the One. Forgetting what is behind, and not scattered but reaching forward to those things which are before — not distractedly but with full attention — I press on for the prize of my heavenly calling, where I may hear the voice of Your praise and contemplate Your delights, which neither come nor pass away.

But now my years are spent in mourning. And You, O Lord, are my comfort, my Father everlasting. But I have been scattered among times whose order I do not know; and my thoughts, the very inmost depths of my soul, are torn and mangled with tumultuous changes — until I flow together into You, purified and melted by the fire of Your love.

And now I will stand, and become firm in You, in my true form, Your truth. Oh how high You are, and yet the humble in heart are Your dwelling place; for You raise up those who are bowed down, and they do not fall, whose exaltation You are.

Footnotes

¹ "Your years are one day; and Your day is not daily, but Today. Your Today is Eternity." God does not experience time as we do — past slipping away, future not yet arrived. He has one day, and that day is always. His "today" is the same "today" in which He created the world, the same "today" in which Le reads these words before dawn. All of our days pass through His one day.

² "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know." One of the most quoted sentences in Western philosophy. Augustine captures the universal experience: time is the most familiar thing in the world, and the most mysterious. We live in it every moment, and we cannot say what it is. 1,600 years later, physicists are still wrestling with this sentence.

³ "The present of things past is memory; the present of things present is direct perception; the present of things future is expectation." Augustine's solution to the puzzle: the past and future don't exist as realities — they exist only in the soul, as memory and expectation. All three "times" are modes of the present. We never leave the present; we only remember and anticipate.

⁴ The Psalm analogy is Augustine's most beautiful image for time. As you recite a Psalm you know by heart, the portion you've already spoken flows into memory, and the portion still to come shrinks in expectation — and you, the singer, stand in the present, carrying the past forward and drawing the future into being. Your whole life is like that. Every human life is like that. History itself is a Psalm being recited by God.