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The name of St. Augustine has been considered to be the name of one of the most outstanding of the Fathers from a literary standpoint and from theological point of view; he is the personality that stood in the center of Western thought until the thirteenth century and his name will can never lose its significance. St. Augustine was a person of greatest importance for the development of Christianity, a theologian and philosopher who made a considerable agnostic contribution to Western philosophy. The book under the title Confession is the famous work by St. Augustine. It consists of thirteen books and it is difficult to define its genre because it is a complex literary and theologian work that presents autobiographical account of the early life of the author, his philosophical and theological views, and exegesis of the Bible. The last four books are of great interest for us because they are meditations on the philosophical problems of memory, eternity, and time. One of the main merits of St. Augustines work is his philosophical analysis of the problem and the nature of time as the key to the secret of Creation.
At the beginning of the eleventh book of Confessions Augustine justifies his analysis of the problem of time by means of referring to the act of creation of the book itself, saying that he analyzes past events of his life that are present in his memory, and this fact arouses the question about the nature of time. In the first place, Augustine tries to define the interrelation and connection of God and Time. He asks the Almighty: May I her and understand how in the beginning you made heaven and earth (Saint Augustine and Chadwick 223). The philosopher states that God does not belong to time, because time was created by him. In the beginning there was only God and Word, which was his instrument for creation. Answering the question: Why was the world not created sooner , Augustine asserts that sooner did not exist, because time and the world were created simultaneously. He repeats the idea that can be found in the previous books, it says that God is timeless. God has no ties with time; all time is present to Him. What is more, God did not exist before His creation of time because that would imply his presence in time, while he is absolutely free, he is eternal and everlasting: No times are coeternal with you since you are permanent (Saint Augustine and Chadwick 230). Time is for people only.
On solving the philosophic question of establishing the position of God above time, Augustine passes to the next problem: the definition of the nature of time. In order to do this, the philosopher resorts to the analysis of the past, present, and future. He says that time is constantly moving to non-existence because it depends on the things that are going to appear, exist and vanish. However, the next idea of Augustine is that the past does not exist because it has gone already, it exists only in our memory, the future does not exist as it has not yet come, and it exists only in our expectations (Saint Augustine and Chadwick 243). Thus, time may be only in the present, in a single undurable moment.
As soon as he produces this idea, the philosopher understands its absurdness. Finally, he decides that if time is subjective and it concerns only people, it should exist inside a person, in a persons soul. He touches the problem of human memory again, stating that the past and the future exist inside a persons memory only. The philosopher says that time is present only in the mind of a human being that waits for something, analyzes, and remembers the past experience.
In conclusion, it should be mentioned that it is clear that for Augustine time is a very problematic question. It may be explained by the correlation of time and primitive material nature of people in comparison with God. Using his theory of time, St. Augustine shows the primitiveness of human being and eternal, boundless, endless power and wisdom of God.
Works Cited
Saint Augustine and Henry Chadwick. Confessions. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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