After reading the “Confessions of St. Augustine,” I was very impressed to realize what his desire was, that is, to seek the truth in his own life; something that would help him later to find God and to make sense of many of the most complicated questions in human history. Something that really struck me was that many of these truths that are discussed in this book such as: existence; the creation of the world; eternity and time; were discovered from the point of view of faith. As mentioned in class, St. Augustine was predicting truths that would be “discovered” many years later.
In this case, the chapter that caught my attention the most was Book 11 of the Confessions, which deals with the existence of time and our ways of measuring it. I must confess that at the beginning of the book I was not quite sure how to relate it to the subject of class, but as soon as I began this chapter the relationship of St. Augustine’s thought to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity became completely clear to me. For both Einstein and St. Augustine, time is not an eternal reality that exists by itself, but in order to exist it is subject to the existence of space, that is to say, time began to exist from the creation of the world. It is truly impressive to know that this truth that Einstein “discovered” had already been revealed by God to St. Augustine.
Another point that draws my attention is the relation that St. Augustine makes between the existence of time and the existence of eternity. It all begins with the question: What did God do before creating heaven and earth? To this St. Augustine replies that one cannot speak of what God did “before” creation since that “before” did not then exist. He asserts that time began to exist from the moment “heaven and earth” were created, that means every reality. Because time only exists as far as there is something that exists within that span of time, if nothing existed, then, time did not exist either.
St. Augustine proposes that time only exists when there is a reality in which to measure and experience it. St. Augustine differentiates it from Eternity; because God created time, but is not subject to it, which is why for God there is neither past, nor present, nor future, but for God “time” is a continuous and eternal present. Our time comes and goes, it passes; God’s time does not pass, it only exists. That is why, for me, a good conclusion from these arguments would be to say that the Eternity of God is much more real than our time, in fact, it is Eternity that is the only “real” reality, since in our time the past and the future do not exist, because one already was and the other is not yet, and the present exists only for the purpose of ceasing to be immediately after it was. In fact, this was a very interesting conclusion that I really did not expect. Basically, his conclusion is that Eternity is real while our time is a constant coming and going; a continuum from “not yet existing” to “ceasing to exist.”
Later in the book, St. Augustine talks about how we are able to measure time when in reality time is something impossible to measure. When we want to measure the past or the future we can’t because both realities don’t exist, and the present can’t be measured either because when we’re willing to measure it we can’t because it’s already happened; he states that time can be measured in terms of its relationship to objects moving in space, these movements leave an imprint on our memory and since those realities that no longer exist, continue to exist and be present in our memory, that is the way we can measure something that is objectively impossible to measure.
St. Augustine asks: What, then, is time? He affirms that time is something that does not happen externally, but something that happens inside us; it is something that we perceive inside, and that is why he affirms that time is like an extension of the soul, since it depends on our way of seeing and measuring things, therefore time acquires a certain value that we also put on it. A very interesting example would be when a person is doing something fun and time flies by, while for a person who is doing something boring the time would be long for that person. Or when a person sleeps, they feel that time passes in a second.
This is why I find sense in St. Augustine’s theory that time is an extension of the soul because it depends on our perception, on our subjectivity, on our point of view. So here you can see that Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was very similar, if not influenced by the philosophy of St. Augustine. In this sense, the “Confessions of St. Augustine” is a book that could be called: “The forerunner of all modern theories on the relativity of time.”
