Augustine

Augustine (354-430) narrates how he learnt to speak; “ It was not that my elders taught me words in a set order as they later taught me the alphabet; I learnt them by myself, with the intelligence which you gave me, my God. I did my best to express the feelings of my heart, by crying and making noises an moving my limbs, trying to get my way, as yet unable to express all I wanted to everyone I wanted. I took the words in to my memory: when they called an object by its name, and as they spoke turned toward it, I saw and remembered that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they wanted to draw attention to it. That this was what they meant was plain from the motion of their body, the natural language, as it were, of all nations, in their facial expressions, the direction of their eyes, the gestures of their limb s, and the tone of their voice, indicting the sentiments of the mind, seeking and possessing, or rejecting and avoiding. And thus by constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences, I gathered what they signified and once I had trained my mouth to make the sounds I gave expression to my wishes. Thus I began to share with those about me the signs of our wills, and so launched deeper into the stormy intercourse of human life.”

Not until the twentieth century did philosophers again take such a sensitive interest in the acquisition of language by infants. ~ Page 115-116

In the eleventh book of the ‘Confessions’ Augustine makes his celebrated inquiry into the nature of time. The peg on which the discussion hangs is the question of an objector: what was God doing before the world began? Rejecting the answer ‘Preparing hell for people who ask inquisitive questions’, Augustine responds that before heaven and earth were created, there was no time. We cannot ask what God was doing then, because there was ‘then’ when there was no time. Equally, we cannot ask why the world was not created sooner, for before the world, there was no sooner. It is misleading to say even of God that he existed at a time earlier than the world’s creation, for there is no succession in God. In him today does not replace yesterday, nor give way to tomorrow, there is only an eternal present.

In order to defend his account of eternity, Augustine has to argue that time is unreal. “What is time?’ he asks, ‘If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to one that asks, I know not.’ Time consists of past, present, and future. But only the present exists, for the past is no longer, and the future is not yet. But a present that is only present is not time, but eternity.

We speak of longer and shorter times; but how can we measure time? Suppose we say of the past period that it was long: do you mean that it was long when it was past, or long when it was present? Only the latter makes sense; but how can anything be long in the present, since what a present is instantaneous? No collections of instants can add up to more than an instant. The stages of any period of time never co-exist; how then can they be added up to form a whole? Any measurement we make must be made in the present: how can we measure what has already gone or is not yet there?

Augustine’s solution to these perplexities is to say that time is really only in the mind. The past is not, but I behold it in the present because it is, at this moment, in my memory. The future is not; all that there is, is our present foreseeing. Instead of saying that there are three times, past, present and future, we should say that there is a present of things past (which is memory), a present of things present (which is sight), and a present of things future (which is expectation). A length of time is not really a length of time, but a length of memory, or a length of expectation. ~ page 117

Throughout the Catholic Middle Ages, Augustine enjoyed grater authority than any of the other Church Fathers, and at the Reformation his influence increased rather than diminished. John Calvin sharpened and hardened Augustine’s teachings just as Augustine had sharpened and hardened that of Paul. Even at the present time, when many more people hate him than read him, Augustine’s influence on Christian thought is inescapable, and his genius continues to fascinate or repel many outside the Christian tradition. ~ page 120

Conceived in the Christianized language of Neoplatonic philosophy, Augustine’s early account of the search for happiness had not yet acquired the theological rigor of his late works. Yet it expresses vividly the truth of his own experience, providing an early account of his discovery that the turn toward God is not an end but a beginning. Pointing Augustine in the direction he would follow for the rest of his life, De beata vita paved the way for his greatest work, ‘The City of God Against Pagans.’ Begun in 413 when he was fifty-nine and completed when he was seventy-two, just five years before his death. ‘The City of God consisted of well over one thousand pages in modern editions and is without question. Augustine’s magnum opus. On one level an attempt to explain the unthinkable invasion in Rome in 410 -- the first violation of the “eternal city” by a foreign army in nearly eight hundred years -- the work is at the same time a ‘summa’, a summary of ‘Augustine’s thought. The same reason that explained how the Christian God could allow a calamity on the order of the taking on Rome -- and why the false gods of the pagans were helpless to stop it -- explained why men and women suffer in the world. ‘The City of God’ is an explanation of evil, and of why the earthly quest for happiness is doomed.

Augustine undertook this sweeping exposition in the number of ways. He provided, the example, a theory of history that accounted for human events in terms of providential logic, showing how
God’s hand was forever at work in the world, frustrating the pretentions of empires and individuals to independence. Rome had grown mighty not through its own initiative but because it served God’s plan. And now God was realizing his larger purpose through Rome’s fall, hastening time toward its final end in the duty of judgment. When that day would come, Augustine emphasized (like others before), no one could know, and his insistence on the point helped put an end to formal millennial speculation within the church. Still, one could be sure that behind the apparent chaos of human events lay a divine logic, not always discernible to the naked eye but giving order and meaning to the whole nonetheless. ~ Page 101/102 Excerpt” : “Happiness ~ A history” Author Darrin M. Mc Mohan