St Augustine: Time and Eternity

STo AUGUSTINE: Til\1E AND ETERNITY METAPHYSIC§ For that very time hadst thou made; nor could there any times pass over, before thou hadst made times. But if before heaven and earth there were no time, why is it then demanded, what thou didst? For there was no then whenas there was no time. XI, 13. this quotation from the Confessions, Augustine dearly the fact the "ereatmeliness" of time. The beginning of time. Creation was' at once,' rather it came time.1 clearly connected the created order of change and God's Being is one of "eterproblem is posed concermng change to and Rejection realization that of change as non-being, mean the investigation of time must the ultimate problem of the relation of non-being to being.2 Again, given the ens realissimum structure of being axiom that creation is essentially good,3 evil must therefore relegated to the order of non-being. The problem of the of to evil becomes also a part the investigation of time and eternity. In the tradition, moreover, the concepts of time and eternity entail the dialectical relationships of creation, history, and salvation" 1 St. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, in Opera Omnia, ed. Monachi 0. S. B. (Paris: Gaume Fratres Bibilopolas, 1836), I, 1077, part 4: Fecit enim Deus omne s1mul cum omnibus creaturis temporalibus. . . . • St. Augustine, Enchiridion, c. X, in Bas-ic Writings of Saint Augustine (New York: Random House, 1948), I, 66)!. 3 Ibid., St. Augustine, Faith and the Creed, c. II, 2, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, l!lMl), pp. 354-5. ST. AUGUSTINE: TIME AND ETERNITY 548 These then: the relation of the Unchangeable to the changeable , of Being to non-being, and of Salvation to history, formulate the metaphysical background and structure in the problem of time and eternity. With direct relevance to man, the creature in whom time per se is measured and from whom it has its point of reference and meaning, the time-eternity question becomes one of psychological and spiritual dimensions. I present this investigation of time and eternity by first delineating it in such broad and abstract metaphysical terminology , because I have concluded that in the Augustinian philosophy human existence and experience are part of and must be understood in the light of the entirety and structure of his ontology. God created the world of creatures, and hence is prior to it. Since time came with creation, He is prior to it not by a temporal pre-endlessness of time, but by his eternity; 4 that is, by virtue of his ontological priority as unchanging Being in "the sublimity of everpresent eternity." "In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram "; there are two created orders which, according to Augustine, are beyond time: heaven and earth.5 That is, the creature above time is "some intellectual creature " of form and contemplation which, although it is mutable, is above time by cleaving to and participating in God; thereby it renders itself " beyond all rolling interchange of times." The second order of creation beyond time is sub-temporal; this is the earth (corporeal creation) which is chaotic and without complete form and order. There" does nothing come and go." 6 From this it can be concluded that time is of an ontologically intermediate order between celestial duration, an abiding perpetuity beyond time categories, and material sub-temporality, which is not yet of the order of succession, but merely of inchoate flux. The objective possibility of time is established • St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XI, 18, trans. W. Watts (New York: Macmillan, 1912), II, 285-6 passim. • St. Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, op. cit., I, 1047-9 passim. 0 St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. XII, 19, op. cit., p. 808; Bk. XIII, 15, p. 817 544 MARILYN EKDAHL RAVICZ through an ontological status which participates both in the order of being (form) and non-being. The psychological actuality of time is a distentio which measures corporeal succession through a spiritual participation in the priority of Being; this enables it to be somehow autonomous from spatial categories, and from complete :fiux.7 The world had a beginning as did time itself. The...