The Space of Time: A Sensualist Interpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X to XII by David van Dusen (review)

The Space of Time is a thought-provoking book for scholars interested in postmodern readings of Augustine. David van Dusen regards all medieval and modern interpretations of Augustine’s proposal in Book 11 of the Confessions that time is a distentio animi as fundamentally misguided. Although Augustine’s distentio animi has traditionally been understood to be an activity of the mind or soul, thus providing a “subjective” account of time that complements rather than competes with physical or “objective” accounts found elsewhere in Augustine’s work (for instance, in book 12 of the Confessions), van Dusen disagrees. He proposes, instead, that Augustine’s distentio animi is equally physical and, therefore, consistent with these “objective” discussions of time.

Van Dusen believes that the correct interpretation of Confessions 11 and 12 rests upon a lexical distinction between the singular tempus (time) or ipsum tempus (time itself) and the plural tempora (times). Augustine’s rejection of the notion that tempora are the motion of heavenly bodies is typically understood to be a rejection of time as physical motion. But, as van Dusen suggests, this is not the case: Augustine believes that—to use van Dusen’s terms—tempora are “a condition of mutivity” that both is and is produced by the motion of all bodies (see 108–13, 245, 246–47). In other words, tempora are not in the mind or soul but in the world.

As for the singular tempus, or “time itself,” van Dusen believes that Augustine means “the condition of possibility of temporal mensuration” (113; his emphasis). That is, time itself is (perhaps counterintuitively) the ability to measure tempora accurately. The means by which the animus measures tempora is, as Augustine himself says, affectio (Confessions 11.27.36), which he defines earlier as emotion (10.14.21). Although Augustine indicates that affectiones (emotions) and imagines (memories; mental images) are separate genera (10.17.26), van Dusen believes that the terms are, as he says, unobjectionably substitutable (241). Accordingly, as imagines are infixed in the animus via the senses and depict external objects in the world, so affectiones—by which tempus measures tempora—are of external physical objects. In this way, van Dusen provides support for his claim that, by distentio animi, Augustine in fact means distentio sensuum: time is not a dilation of the mind or soul but rather a dilation of the senses (137–41).

Van Dusen claims that Plotinian influences were fathered into our interpretation of Augustine, and he takes particular issue with Teske on this subject (138n91). He also says that Augustine rejected both Stoic and Platonic conceptions of time. As a result, van Dusen concludes, Augustine’s conception of time is Epicurean, at least typologically. Although he does not argue for a direct influence of Epicureanism on Augustine’s conception of time, he suspects one and provides three pieces of evidence in support of this suspicion. First, he understands Augustine’s facetious counterfactual praise of Epicurus at 6.16.26 to be a genuine “confess[ion of] a predilection for Epicurus’ doctrines” (21) up to the time of his conversion. Secondly, he understands the dicens of 11.12.14, who asks what God was doing before he made heaven and earth, to be the Epicurean Velleius of Cicero’s De natura deorum. Thirdly, he sees Lucretius’s De rerum natura (along with Sallust’s Bellum Catilina) to be a confessional model for the Confessions.

Van Dusen states that his argument is “philologically valid and philosophically acute” (4). As several features of my summary suggest, not all readers will be convinced of this claim. Van Dusen takes great liberties when quoting, citing, and translating his sources, both ancient and modern. These liberties undermine the trustworthiness of his citations and therefore require the reader to confirm for herself the evidence provided. And if there is a coherent...