St. Augustine

A detailed Summary of St. Augustine

In his Confessions, St. Augustine gives an absorbing analysis of time. He unleashes a complex discussion about the relevance and validity of the notion of time. He raises some interesting questions that force a more detailed investigation of current presuppositions that encircle this subject. He uses a very careful examination of time to explain and prove God's existence. His argument follows several very important themes; 1) nothing existed before God created it. 2) The phenomenon of time is greater than man because he has no understanding of it and therefore could not have created it. 3) He also examines paradigms of past and present and its relationship to the time continuum. He concludes that the past flows in to the present, and if the past ceases to exist after it has ended, then the past no longer exists. Since the observation of time can only exist in the context of the past, then time itself does not exist. With this observation he surmises that God must be responsible for the creation of time, because only he is powerful enough to create something that can defy all logic and have the presence to exist and yet not exist simultaneously.

One of the first points that St. Augustine raised is that nothing existed b

St. Augustine proceeds logically in his intellectual quest. If time exists and is tangible and so encompassing, why is it so difficult to define? " What then is time? Is there a short answer to that? Who can put the answer into words or even see it in his mind? Yet what commoner or more familiar word do we use in speech than time"(Pg. 219). Augustine grapples with definitions and themes of boundaries and origins. He understands that the more questions that are asked about the subject of time, the more perplexing and confusing it becomes. He argues that his lack of definitive knowledge on the subject is a sign of his profound conjecture on the subject. In his quest for knowledge, he examines how the human mind deals with the structure of time. He argues that people "strive for the savor of eternity, but their mind is still tossing about in the past and future moments of things" (Pg. 217). This analogy is very interesting because it harkens to man's search for the eternal afterlife. Augustine realizes that many cannot comprehend eternity because they are brewing in the quagmire of the past, or alternatively, overly concerned with future events, leaving the present to deal with itself. If the present only becomes the past, if people dealt with the present, it would leave them less to worry about in the past. Due to a combination of a lack of understanding about time, and thinking about time in past and future tenses, both concepts that only exist within the mind, can only lead to incorrect conclusions.

The fact that God is above all time, eternal, an idea which people don't give full weight to or fully comprehend, is what harkens to the crux of his argument. God defies time because he has created existence. St. Augustine marveled in this powerful vision and he saw his exploration

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Approximate Word count = 1217
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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