On Time, Change, History, and Conversion

In 2018, Audi struck marketing gold with a popular ad for the latest model of their R8 Spyder. In the commercial, a stylish middle-aged man, living at some indeterminate time in the future, tries and fails to relax as he is ferried along in a self-driven car. As he relaxes in the back seat with a cup of coffee, the man complains to his Alexa-like AI chauffeur that life just isn’t like it used to be. In the old days, he was in control, even if that meant taking his life into his own hands. But now, all too comfortable in a driverless car, his upcoming journey strikes him as far too secure to be worth enjoying.

The climax of the commercial comes when the man sneaks out of his Parasite-style mansion and drives off in an Audi R8 Spyder, smiling as he slams the gas pedal to the floor. The screen smash-cuts to black, and we’re greeted with the sales pitch: “Progress is seizing every moment.” Like most good ad copy, the meaning of the chosen words is not obvious in this context. Isn’t it the self-driving car that represents technological progress? And is the middle-aged man really living in the moment? Isn’t he racing off into the excitement of an unknown future?

What this ad highlights is the fact that our talk about time—Seize the day! Time is money!—often sounds good when we say it, even if it doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. If pressed, we would have a hard time explaining what it is we were actually trying to say about vague notions like “moments” and “progress.” How would we venture to explain what “time” really is? We would hesitate to pose such a challenging question even though we structure each day around our clocks and calendars (both now conveniently located inside the phones in our pockets).

The emptiness of our talk about time is not only a problem for twenty-first-century marketing departments. Augustine of Hippo pointed it out sixteen centuries ago:

What, in fact, is time? Who could explain this easily and briefly? Who could comprehend this in thought or offer up a word about it? And yet what do we mention more familiarly and knowingly in speech than time? Of course we understand it when we say it, as we do when we hear it from another. What, then, is time? If no one asks me about it, I know. If I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I don’t know.[1]

The fact that this problem already occurred to Augustine in late antiquity suggests that the slipperiness of temporality is not just a consequence of our heightened anxiety over push alerts and email notifications. Even in the era of the sundial and the water clock, thinking about time tended to lead more often to tricky questions than easy solutions.

Still, Augustine’s comment was not meant to leave us with nothing to say. As the eleventh book of his Confessions shows (assisted by other works like the City of God and the Gift of Perseverance), Augustine had a lot more to say about both the physical nature of time and the philosophical rabbit-holes of humankind’s temporal experience. Along the way, he realized that the problem of time was not some abstract puzzle for ivory-tower philosophers. It had real-life consequences for how we should live. This led him to weigh in, much like modern psychologists have, on the question of whether the goal of a healthy life should consist in pursuing endless progress or living happily in each moment. In Confessions 11.14-15, for example, Augustine pushes back against the very idea that there might exist a present moment in which we could safely dwell. The fact that he even ‘wasted time’ paying attention to this question has flummoxed many of his readers, both then and now, who expected the memoirs found in the first nine books of the Confessions to simply carry on to some sort of autobiographical postscript in the closing books of that work.

Augustine, however, had other issues in mind, from spelunking the caverns of memory in Book 10 to clarifying the details surrounding angelic existence and prime matter in Book 12. Book 11, which arrives smack dab in between, operates as the hinge by which we swing from the subjective realm of our own remembrances to the higher truths of the heaven of heavens and the lower truths of base materiality. Despite the obvious idiosyncracy of Confessions 11, we should not assume that Augustine’s concern with the present time was merely some passing fancy. Later in his life, Augustine used City of God 13.11 to further advise us that “the present is sought in the course of times but is not found.” In the Gift of Perseverance, meanwhile, he makes the case that real ‘progress’ in life is something we cannot truly track until the race has been run right through to the finish line (at which point we will, sadly enough, be dead). “Let no one say that any perseverance until the end has been given,” writes Augustine in Gift of Perseverance 5.10, “unless the end has come and someone, to whom it has been given, has been found to have persevered to the end.”

In my book On Time, Change, History, and Conversion, I demonstrate how relevant Augustine’s insights into temporality remain even in the twenty-first century. Part of Bloomsbury’s Reading Augustine series, edited by Miles Hollingworth, the book takes its lead from that series’ mandate to put Augustine into conversation with modern thinkers and issues on the widest possible range of topics. In my case, that meant bringing Augustine into closer contact with atomistic physics, clinical psychology, and revolutionary politics.

The first chapter sets the stage by juxtaposing Augustine’s account of time in Confessions 11 against some rather unexpected interlocutors: Graham Harman and Manuel DeLanda, two representatives of what has been called “speculative realism” and “new materialism.” Both philosophers are deeply invested in the reality of time, denying any attempt to render time a subjective construction imagined by the human mind. This provides an ideal backdrop for my presentation of Augustine as also defending an objective account of time, despite the fact that many past readers have seen in Book 11 an invitation to reduce time to the subjective temporal experience of the soul. An interpretation along these lines has doubtless proved attractive to a number of those readers due to the fact that Plotinus and other Neo-Platonic philosophers in late antiquity could indeed be read as reducing time as we know it to the psychological operation of a soul—not just any soul, of course, but the world-soul, by which the cosmic wheels of the universe themselves spin. While Augustine himself is happily Neo-Platonic in a number of respects (such as his preference for immutability over that which changes), he surprisingly opts to reject the Plotinian-subjectivist account of cosmic temporality in favour of a temporal flux that commences for every finite being—from humans and animals to plants and rocks—with the events depicted in Genesis 1. This is not to say that Augustine thinks that Genesis 1 is a literally true narration of an hour-by-hour creation. He reads it instead in a polyvalent fashion, incorporating both the allegorical and the literal layers of the text into his non-subjective account of how time came to be in the first place.

Clock in Leeds, England (Image courtesy of the author).

Having laid the groundwork for an objective sense of time in Augustine, I next explore the cosmological ramifications of such a reading. We have to remember that the eleventh and twelfth books of the Confessions announce themselves first and foremost as a joint exegesis of Genesis 1. In Augustine’s eyes, the whole point of accounting for time is to properly understand these words: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.” In the late fourth century, certain observers could undermine Gen. 1:1 by asking: “What was God doing before creating heaven and earth?” While in principle such a question could be posed by practically anyone, in Augustine’s case we should probably attribute it to the Manichaeans, for whom time needed no beginning since it simply extended infinitely into both the past and the future. This generally Manichaean sensibility has been well established by the work of Jason BeDuhn and Nicholas Baker-Brian. In the Manichaeans’ infinite past, we would find only the primordial separation between the goodness of the kingdom of light and the darkness of the kingdom of evil; turning our gaze to the infinite future, all we could hope for would be a salvific sifting-out of the particles of good from the particles of evil, despite the fact that these two substances have gotten all mixed up in our present era. In either case, there would be no need whatsoever for a radically punctiliar ‘beginning’ or principium of time as such. Rather than responding to this query (regardless of whether or not it originated in charges pressed by the followers of Mani) with a scornful joke, Augustine (himself a former follower of Mani) took the question seriously. His response was to say that there was no time before time. In other words: he pointed to a point-like beginning of time, thereby anticipating the “primeval atom” theory of the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, which in turn grounded the “big bang” theory of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking.

Once the first two chapters of my book have established Augustinian temporality as an objective aspect of cosmology, the third tackles the problem of how this all relates back to history. Audi, it turns out, is not alone in expecting history to conform to a paradigm of teleological progress. Even scientists like Steven Pinker continue to pump out books about how things are getting better, despite evidence to the contrary. According to Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History, this expectation of progression is ultimately rooted in a secularization of Christian eschatology. Pinker may not expect the Second Coming, but he does expect an asymptotic approach to heaven on earth. Augustine, for his part, occupies a curious position, insofar as he should theoretically serve as the model for Christian eschatology, but in fact debuts a theory of the saeculum which empties historical time (after the Christ-event) of any inherent meaning, direction, or progression. “Progress” fails to seize the moment for Augustine.

In the fourth chapter, fittingly, I move from progress to moments. The list of modern mindfulness advocates has only been growing over the last few decades, as even a cursory glance at Twitter will make clear. The CNN health page is happy to advise us to ‘be in the now,’ while public schools spend precious funds on programs that help students ‘live in the moment.’ Stoic present-mindedness keeps getting repackaged for us again and again in the wake of Hadot, even as the allure of dwelling in the present has begun to draw the critical ire of some scientific publications. Augustine, on the contrary, rejects an emphasis on the present time, treating it as little more than a distracting mirage. The past and the future are themselves of dubious quality, yet they both enjoy a stronger claim on reality than some point-like hinge between what has already happened and what may yet occur. As a result, therapeutic advice to ‘seize the moment’ finds little purchase in Augustinian temporality, since there is no moment to seize. All we need to do is recall his lines in City of God 13.11: “the present is sought in the course of time but is not found.”

That last point is sure to strike many as bizarre. If there is no present time, when am I now? If there is no moment to seize, how can I transform my own life by standing up in that moment and taking control of my own life? How am I to progress toward greatness, however I may conceive of it (e.g., as bodily pleasure, as intellectual certainty, or as career success)? For Augustine, the goal is not to seize control of anything, but instead to recognize the fact that we already find ourselves to be seized by God (in one sense or another). Even his own turning-point of conversion in a garden in Milan, so memorably recounted in Confessions 8, is not so much a carpe diem moment achieved by the ego as it is a reception of divine grace. “You converted me,” as Augustine says to God.[2] Grace, for Augustine, is not something that Christians reach out and grab, but instead a gift that is given to them from the outside. If that ‘outside’ happens to consist of the divine realm, then the best a Christian could hope for is to be found in a state wherein they are capable of receiving God’s grace. It is not so much a question of locating and securing oneself in the present as it is of awaiting a gift that, while it might seem like it is hovering somewhere out in front of—or in the future of—the human person, is actually being given by something (or someone) that is entirely beyond time as we know it.

The final chapter addresses the elephant in the room. If “progress” is a chimera and “living in the moment” is an illusion, how are we—not as isolated subjects, but as robust communities—meant to live in time? If I can’t pull myself up by my own temporal bootstraps, must I lie dormant? If I can’t grasp the present time in the claws of my own concupiscence, am I fated to remain storm-tossed in the ocean of time until the instant of my death? “Time is an ocean,” as Bob Dylan once sang, “but it ends at the shore. You may not see me tomorrow.”

There is no denying the stark realism of Augustine’s objective account of time, which resists our dreams of subjective mastery. Nevertheless, we need not accept only a quietist reading of Augustinian temporality. It is true that, for thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, what is needed to effect social change is the sense of a messianic kairos: a time of fruitful opportunity, which humankind can seize in order to revolutionize the world. But this is not Augustine’s way. The last kairos, for him, was the Christ-event: Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and resurrection taken as a whole. Now all we have is kenotic chronos: the empty time of the saeculum. But in that saeculum, change never ceases. The turbulence of history renders it hard for us to read, but potentially opens it up to change at any time. Martin Luther King, Jr., once spoke against what he called “a tragic misconception of time,” rooted in “the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.” The neutral homogeneity of the saeculum is no longer cause for despair, but an engine of hope.

In the R8 Spyder ad mentioned above, the self-driving car never crashed. Alexa the Autopilot, however uninspiring she may be as a conversation partner, got her job done. She was a manifestation of progress. But Augustine teaches us that our notions of progress aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. Sometimes cars (even smart ones) do crash. The idea that the best path forward consists of a series of clearly delineated steps—at each stage of which we need only ‘live in the moment’—might have struck him as an alluring deception at best.

What then can we learn from Augustine in our own era? What does a conception of time drawn from late antiquity have to say to us today, when self-driving cars already pronounce themselves to be two steps ahead of us at every turn? To answer that question in a responsible manner, we would have to attend not just to Augustine’s account, but to the rich tapestry of temporalities that coloured the ancient Mediterranean world. Consider the work of Helen R. Jacobus or Sacha Stern on ancient and early medieval Jewish calendars, or the careful attention paid by scholars like Ute Possekel to the tensions surrounding astrology in Syriac Christian authors. Both would make for fruitful conversation partners with Augustinian salvation-history and its anti-Manichaean rhetoric pertaining to astral influence. As mentioned above, Augustine forged his own doctrine of time in conversation and conflict with contemporary Manichaeans, many of whom viewed time as primarily a matter of calendrical cosmology and astrological prediction. And yet how can we properly appreciate the Augustinian revision of the ancient (and Platonically inflected) philosophy of time, unless we situate this revision within its proper context? Doing so would, of course, mean paying more sustained attention to century-by-century developments in Jewish calendrical measurements and Manichaean astronomical speculations in late antiquity. In this area, without doubt, much more work needs to be done.

Augustine’s comments about time, it must be admitted, have been frequently studied across the traditionally recognized academic channels that still tend to hold sway in places like Europe and North America. But his words were never meant to be the last word. It is time for us to open up the study of temporality in antiquity, recognizing the need not just for a more properly cross-traditional and interdisciplinary encounter with the topic of time, but even more so for a full cataloguing of the cultural and material contours in which certain questions surrounding time came to be posed in the first place.

[1] Conf. 11.14.17. All translations from Augustine in this piece are my own unless otherwise noted.

[2] Conf. 8.12.30. My translation.

Sean Hannan is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.