Time, Eternity, and the Mind Theme Analysis

Throughout Confessions, Augustine occasionally introduces intellectual problems whose relevance to the book’s larger themes isn’t immediately apparent. For example, he spends most of Book X wrestling with how the faculty of human memory works, and Book XI is preoccupied with the question of what time is and how it is measured. He often proposes several alternatives for explaining a phenomenon like time, only to admit to God, when his theories are exhausted, that he is unable to reach a definite conclusion.

Augustine discusses the concept of time in the context of creation, in response to the hypothetical question of what God was doing before he created anything. It’s actually difficult to capture what is meant by time, Augustine acknowledges, since the present moment never lasts; time is constantly slipping away and becoming the past. Likewise, it’s difficult to understand in what sense the past and the future actually exist, except in the human memory. In the end, a human being can only really understand time in the mind by remembering the past, attending to the present, and expecting the future. And this is because of the fundamental distinction between mortal human beings and God—humans constantly change, but God does not, meaning that the past, present, and future are constantly present to God in a way that they cannot be to human perception. Certain things like the passage of time, in other words, can only be understood with reference to the limited human mind, and those limitations must be borne in mind when readers of the Bible consider the nature of creation, for instance. Human limitation evidently frustrates Augustine, and yet, there is a sense of awe and wonder in the way he entertains these subjects, and his questions are often interspersed with expressions of praise and gratitude to God. By exploring apparently insoluble questions about the nature of time and the human mind, then, Augustine models a style of particularly Christian intellectual inquiry for his readers. The puzzles he introduces are not mere exercises for him, to be pursued only for the pleasure of it, but a way of wrestling with the nature of the God whom Augustine longs to understand and ultimately draw closer to—even if there’s a limit to how close he can get to God in this mortal life.