Augustine's Struggle & Confessions

"What this is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know" (Augustine 15). The rhetorical question and its ponderous answer contain the essence of Augustine's struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible--the infinite immanence of God and His time. On the other hand, Husserl begins with the proposition: "We can make self-evident assertions concerning the immanent Object (God) in itself, e.g., that it now endures, that a certain part of the duration has elapsed . . . and an ever new point of duration enters into the now . . ." (32). In doing so, he has put aside some of the most difficult problems with which Augustine was most deeply troubled.

One of Augustine's most spectacular written works is his Confessions, from which much of Christian practice, both Catholic and Protestant, is derived. In "Book Eleven", he labors in an attempt to define the essence of time, to understand how time was created, to discover from whence it comes and to where it passes. In our twentieth century "wisdom" we can see at once the limitations of pre-medieval knowledge of earth and sky, space and time. But have we really advanced much beyond Augustine?

Augustine begins with the assumption that God is the first cause: "You are in eternity" (6), "at Thy will the moments flow and pass" (7), "It was You, Lord who made (the heavens and the earth)" (9). And he also recognizes that what limited understanding we have of things otherwise unknown to us

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complete its circuit is the day, then it would not be a day if between one sunrise and the next there were only the space of an hour: the sun would have to go round twenty-four times to make one day" (21). To his peril, Augustine asks of God: "Would You have me agree with one who said that time is the movement of a body? You would not . . . time is not the movement of a body" (22; 23). After thirty chapters of contemplation, the question still begs an answer. In the best religious form, Augustine pleads with God: "how far from (the abyss of Thy secret) have the consequences of my sins held me? Cleanse my eyes and let me rejoice in Thy Light" (28). The phenomenological method, founded by Edmund Husserl, proceeds from a position beyond what Augustine might have called a priori had he been a contemporary of Kant. Rather than merely accepting that which is "self-evident," Husserl's method goes beyond to become concerned with the "consciousness" of that which is, which has been, and which may be. For Husserl, the past is "those parts or phases of the duration, not sharply to be differentiated, which lie closest to the actual now-point with diminishing clarity, while those parts lying further back in the past are wholly un

Category: Philosophy - A