Even More on Time: Augustine's View
Yesterday, I tried something new and attended a lecture series from the humanities department. The guest speaker was a Jean-Luc Marion, Director of Philosophy at the University of Paris in Sorbonne and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology and member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who I am told is the leading Catholic philosopher and theologian alive right now. He was here to speak for three nights a lecture series entitled, "Saint Augustine: Contribution to a Post-Metaphysical Reading (Part Two)" The particular lecture I attended caught my eye because it was titled, "The Question of Time".
One of my problems with philosophy is that it has been divorced from science -- a topic I think I shall consider on Monday. Seeing as time is both a fascinating concept and one about which I know a somewhat large amount of scientific information, I thought it might be interesting to attend and see what Augustine's view was on the matter, since I'm sure he was oblivious to the now-proven fact that time is a dimension.
Well, the first problem was trying to decipher Marion's thick French accent. It did not help that the sound did not carry well in the room. The second was that I did not know to bring along a copy of Confessions in either English or Latin, from which he would constantly be reading and citing. But I tired my hardest to take notes of his on-the-spot Latin translations and paraphrases. Third, as my more long-time readers may know, I have never had a philosophy class. So all of the special terms and philosophers' names being thrown around were substantially daunting. Fourth, the man spoke for over two hours before saying, "Let's take a 10 minute break," (at which point I snuck out and escaped home to my wife).
But despite all those difficulties, I had an enjoyable time, due to the subject matter. Here's what I found interesting:
One of my problems with philosophy is that it has been divorced from science -- a topic I think I shall consider on Monday. Seeing as time is both a fascinating concept and one about which I know a somewhat large amount of scientific information, I thought it might be interesting to attend and see what Augustine's view was on the matter, since I'm sure he was oblivious to the now-proven fact that time is a dimension.
Well, the first problem was trying to decipher Marion's thick French accent. It did not help that the sound did not carry well in the room. The second was that I did not know to bring along a copy of Confessions in either English or Latin, from which he would constantly be reading and citing. But I tired my hardest to take notes of his on-the-spot Latin translations and paraphrases. Third, as my more long-time readers may know, I have never had a philosophy class. So all of the special terms and philosophers' names being thrown around were substantially daunting. Fourth, the man spoke for over two hours before saying, "Let's take a 10 minute break," (at which point I snuck out and escaped home to my wife).
But despite all those difficulties, I had an enjoyable time, due to the subject matter. Here's what I found interesting:
- Marion -- like me -- has a major pet-peeve with not studying works in their original languages. (That has nothing to do with time, I know, but I'm just throwing it out there.) He claimed that Augustine is constantly misunderstood because people are not reading him in the original Latin.
- Augustine believed that time is not eternal. In fact, he placed eternity in contrast to time with creation as a sort of mediator between the two separate realms. In Augustine's mind, the very substance of God is eternity, and God created time, so time cannot be eternal.
I would have to say that I agree 100% with Augustine on this point, and I've hinted at such in the past.[1]
The idea of creation as a mediator seems to me to be similar to what I believe about souls and how they interact with God and each other. I am not sure exactly what Augustine meant here, but I think that a created corporeal structure is required for a being in time to communicate with another being either in the realm of time or "in" eternity. - In response to this claim of Augustine's that God created time, the Greek philosopher's asked, "When and at what moment did God create the world? What did he do before that?" In book 11, section 40 of Confessions, Augustine answered, "Before creation, time did not exist; thus, the word 'before' is meaningless; the question cannot be asked."
I would say that I would have to agree with him on this one as well.
Of course it is rather difficult for us finite beings to comprehend an infinite God -- it is impossible. God just is.
This idea happens to match exactly with the scientific view of time, in which it is claimed that time did not exist at all until the moment of the Big Bang. Augustine was well ahead of the times on this point. - Augustine believed -- unlike the Greek philosophers -- that time is not parallel with eternity. There is a divide between the unchangeable and the changeable.
I found this to be profound, because it really gets to the heart of the difference between the mortal and immortal. God is in His very nature unchangeable. Yet, because we are changeable, we require time because we change. - Augustine uses an argument for God's existence that I could not follow all the way through. But basically, he argued that time must have a beginning, and since nothing may generate itself -- disagreeing with Descarte's view -- there must be a First Cause.
What I did not follow is his argument for how time must have a beginning. It seemed circular. I can see that if there is an unchangeable God, time must have a beginning. And I can see that if time has a beginning, there needs to be a First Cause. But you have to assume one of them first. - When asked by the Greek philosophers, "Why did God create the world?" Augustine respond similarly to above that one cannot ask that question. An eternal God does not have causes. Causality is defined by the relationship between finite things.
- He explained that to have a present thought, we must connect the thoughts of the past moments to those of the future moments. Thought is a temporal quality and memory is the experience of time as such. The present is infinitesimal.
Again, I think he is correct.
In this sense, he was speaking about time in spatial terms. I find it interesting, once again, that we now know time to be a dimension. - The last part of Marion's talk interested me less, but probably because I don't think Augustine was correct. Augustine was arguing against a Greek view that time is about the motion of heavenly bodies. He argued instead that time is an effect of the mind (and not the soul). He claimed that there is no representation of time, only the feeling/memory of time passing.
I had trouble following much of this, but I don't think this really gets at what time is. We can't see wind either, we only feel it, yet to say wind is just something our mind feels makes little sense to me.
Besides all that, there is of course the modern experiments in which we have proven that time slows down when people are moving at different speeds. If two identical clocks without minds run at different speeds and are observed by the single mind of an observer to have done so, this destroys what I think to be Augustine's argument.