Time Untethered from Motion

In Book 11 Section XV of Confessions, Augustine’s meditation on time and eternity lands on a version of Zeno’s paradox. If time is the passage from the present to the past with the future flowing into the present, then the logical conclusion is that the past and the future do not exist and neither does the passage of time. The more you divide and subdivide, the more you cut out the possibility of motion. Ultimately you end up suspending the arrow in an infinitesimally small point that cannot be conceived as moving at all. In Bergson’s terms, the reduction of time to space is so complete, that time and motion don’t even exist. The trick with understanding time as passing is that you have to start with motion, not with compartmentalized units of time.

In this meditation, I want to focus on how Augustine’s own meditation on time and Genesis is a direct consequence of abandoning Aristotle’s essential connection of time with the motion of the heavens. This observation is not mine. Hans Blumenberg made this argument in The Genesis of the Copernican World, which I would like to unpack with respect to Augustine. The consequence is this: by untethering time from motion, Christianity (as exemplified by Augustine’s Book 11) was forced to make time into subjective experience.

For these three things exist only in the mind and I find them nowhere else: the present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, the present of things future is expectation. (11.XX, my emphasis)

This statement is only possible because Augustine has pulled apart several different concepts that held together Aristotelian metaphysics: time, motion, and measurement are all given to humanity by the Heavens (caelo). As the caelo uniformly and steadily rotates around the fixed Earth, it is easy to associate time with that motion. Because the motion is steady, it is easy to break it down into measurable units. Time presents itself as an ontological reality that is difficult to question. Humanity’s experience of time is given to it by the rotating cosmos around the fixed Earth.

Christianity completely undid these connections when it offered a new myth to explain time. Christianity says that time is part of God’s creation, which is bookended by Genesis and Redemption. Christian time therefore has nothing to do with the rotation of the Aristotelian caelo, only with God’s will, which has no inherent measurability and absolutely no relationship with steady motion. In the days of Jesus, Paul, and the Synoptic Gospels, Redemption was envisioned as an historical event, and humanity was living in a hos nyn kairos (“the time of the now” or “the time that remains”) to use Paul’s phrase. Giorgio Agamben pointed out that Paul’s use of kairos signified a contraction of chronos such that humanity has moved into a new age that is compressing the past into the present in anticipation of an apocalyptic end of history. From this we must understand Christian time as emerging from within the problem of theodicy — why did God create a world in need of an apocalyptic redemption? I don’t want to undersell this point. Christian time is inseparable from this problem of creation and redemption and thus embeds within time a series of problems related to living in a fallen world where its creator and redeemer are the same omnipotent Being.

By the time we get to Augustine, the apocalyptic Redemption (capital R) is giving way to individual redemptions (lower case r). The consequence for time, which is made clear in Book 11, is that everyone is living in their own time of creation and redemption. The Confessions is not possible without this concept of time. This concept, however, should not be treated as mere intellectual curiosity. The heart of the Confessions is a practice of time as the necessity for each of us to tell our own story in the individualized time of creation and redemption. This comes to a head in the theoretical discussion of Book 11 where Augustine seeks to use abstract reasoning to find some foundation for time that is not completely individualized. The only way it works is to generalize time as Bergsonian duration at the level of individual experience stretched (disentio) between birth (individual creation) and redemption:

But now my years are wasted in sighs, and Thou, O Lord, my eternal Father, art my only solace; but I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts and the deepest places of my soul are torn with every kind of tumult until the day when I shall be purified and melted in the fire of Thy love and wholly joined to Thee. (11.XXIX, my emphasis)

The debt to Plotinus is obvious, but it should not blind us to how deeply and completely time has been reconfigured in this expression of theodicy by Augustine. Paul’s letters were all about collective Redemption in the time that remains. His ekklesiae were living in the end times and had to hold themselves together, with Paul’s help, to remain in the scheme of salvation: “Brothers and sisters, if a person is discovered in some sin, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness…. Carry one another’s burdens and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:1-2). Communal restoration is central to Paul’s ministry, and it is an expression of his own struggles with theodicy. Paul addresses his ekkesiae collectively, not as isolated individuals. An individualized Confession as a personal narrative is only a small glimmer of possibility in Paul’s letters but not a full reality or even necessary. On the contrary, Augustine’s redemption is purely individualized down to the level of personal experience. More than that, a personal narrative is required in Augustine’s salvational schema. How he theorizes and practices time is not incidental to this requirement. To see time as the very structure of one’s personality is the innovation within theodicy and soteriology that Augustine brings about.

We must be careful with this narrative, however. Christian time does not hatch out of thin air. It is an extension of the temporality built into the Old Testament and the Judaic Tradition that sees time as the unfolding of God’s promise to His People. Because Christianity is not a hermetically sealed set of concepts and practices, we have to treat it as a movement that synthesizes other movements as it stretched out to become a globally dominant religious institution. In the ensuing meditations, I am not going to cover the ins and outs of every move that blended Ancient Greek thought with Judaic Tradition to form Christian Time in follow-up essays and mediations. I am not well-versed enough in this history to do justice to such an analysis. However, it is possible to trace the specific challenges and consequences that arise when time is untethered from the eternal motion of the heavens. This untethering leads to practices of time and human experience that we continue to deal with today. The purpose is not to restore an Aristotelian unity of time and motion as a nostalgia for a better past. My purpose is to continue to show that time is always already out of joint and that this is nothing to be inherently afraid of. Rather, by throwing practices of time into relief, we potentially make new time available to grasp other ways of existing and attending to the complexities of the world in which we live without reducing those complexities to oversimplified judgements about how to fix our ailing planet.