The Confessions

In an interview on Time and Eternity

Tell me about your first book, St Augustine’s Confessions.

St Augustine is a good place to start because this is the oldest book that I have chosen. It was written between AD397 and AD398. St Augustine of Hippo was one of the first thinkers to struggle with the concepts of time, memory and eternity. The Confessions is the first real autobiography ever written and it has a very strong philosophical and psychological dimension. One of his obsessions in the book is looking at memory. He tries to remember his past life and to figure out how it is that the past and present and future are related, and especially how the past stays in his memory even though it has ceased to be. 

And this struggle leads him to the question of eternity – how it is that we are somehow already in eternity. But we only experience it sequentially one little bit at a time. Augustine is the very first person to try to dissect time and in one chapter he comes up with the insight that the present really doesn’t exist because the present is ever moving and by the time you say the word now and get to the last letter it is no longer now. So his take on it as a philosopher, and also by that time as a Christian theologian, is that the only real time is eternity. For human beings our minds and wills, every part of us is programmed not to live eternally, and time for him ends up being a great disappointment.