Time, will and the inward turn

A message still unsent

Imagine Maya recording an apology to a friend. When she listens back, one pause seems too long, so she records the message again, and then she leaves it unsent. She wants to make things right, and she also wants to avoid the embarrassment of admitting she was wrong.

Her hesitation raises two questions. How can Maya compare pauses that have already vanished? And how can she want to act while holding herself back? Augustine pursues both questions by paying close attention to the workings of his own mind.

A North African voice

Augustine lived from 354 to 430 CE. Born in Thagaste, in Roman North Africa, he studied in Carthage and eventually became bishop of Hippo, in present-day Algeria. His intellectual life crossed the Mediterranean, with a formative stay in Milan, and his African churches belonged to a world of competing religious communities, including Christians who disputed one another’s teachings. [3]

The Confessions, written around 396–400, retells his earlier life in the light of his Christian commitments. It is addressed to God, yet written for other people to read: in XI.1, Augustine says that recounting his troubles and God’s mercy is meant to awaken love, both in himself and in his readers. Confession, for him, includes praise as well as the acknowledgment of fault. [2]

Remember our source lesson: evidence that a writer understood an event in a certain way does not make that interpretation true. We can examine Augustine’s questions without making his prayer our own.

Why can I want to act and still hold back?

In book VIII, Augustine describes his struggle to embrace an ascetic Christian life, one disciplined by renunciation, including sexual abstinence. He judges that life better, yet he remains attached to his former one. Will here means wanting and consenting to a course of action, and knowing which course he approves does not make him wholeheartedly willing to take it. [1]

He notices that his hand obeys at once when he wishes to move it and nothing prevents the movement. Why, then, can he not simply command himself to want differently? His answer is that the command itself comes from an incomplete will: part of him wants the change, and part resists. Earlier choices have hardened into habits that pull against his wish to change.

Both inclinations are his own. Some opponents explained such conflict by two opposed natures within a person; Augustine replies that we can also hesitate between several things we regard as good, so inner conflict alone cannot prove that two separate beings inhabit us. [1]

The book’s garden scene ends with a voice that he takes as an instruction to read, and then a passage from Paul. Augustine presents the change that follows as grace, God’s help making his new commitment possible. His story offers a religious interpretation of change; it is not a technique guaranteed to cure indecision. [1]

Could time itself be created?

Book XI turns to creation and time through an interpretation of the opening of Genesis. [3] Suppose someone asks what God was doing before creating the world. Augustine refuses the mocking answer that God was preparing punishments for people who ask such questions. He takes the question seriously, and then challenges its assumption. [2]

If time itself belongs to creation, there was no empty stretch of time during which God waited. That is what created time means: time itself depends on God. Divine eternity, on this account, is not an endless succession of years, and God does not pass from yesterday to tomorrow. On Augustine’s premises the question is answered, though a reader can still ask what supports those premises.

Where is the time we measure?

His next puzzle begins with an ordinary fact: we compare durations, and judge that one pause lasts longer than another. Yet the past has gone, the future has not arrived, and the present seems to have no room for a duration at all. [2]

Take a minute. The whole minute is never present at once, since some of it has elapsed and some remains. Divide it into seconds, then into smaller intervals, and the same problem returns, because any interval has earlier and later parts. A strictly present instant seems to have no length.

How, then, could we measure an interval? While a sound continues, its length is not yet settled; once it stops, the sound we wanted to measure is gone. Pointing to a clock gives a useful measurement, but it leaves Augustine’s question unanswered: how do we grasp a duration while it passes?

Three ways of being present

Augustine’s answer turns to memory, present attention and expectation. A remembered sound is past, but the remembering happens now; an expected sound has yet to occur, but the expectation already exists. These are different ways in which the mind relates to time. [2]

His own example, developed in XI.28, is reciting something you know by heart. Before you begin, you anticipate the whole of it. As you speak, what remains to be said shrinks and what you have said passes into memory, while your attention holds the action together as it happens.

He calls this a distention of the mind, a stretching of it across memory, attention and expectation. So when Maya compares her pauses, she is not holding two vanished sounds side by side; she is comparing what they have left in her memory. Remembering makes the comparison possible even though the sounds themselves are gone.

What the inward turn establishes

Inwardness means attending to our own remembering, judging and willing, not only to the objects around us. Plotinus also asked the soul to turn inward, but Augustine’s inquiry belongs to his own account of a created life and its dependence on God.

A difficulty remains. Memory can mislead, while two clocks can agree, so an account of how we experience duration still has to say what distinguishes an accurate measurement from a mistaken one. The scholar Christian Tornau emphasizes the first-person focus of this discussion, and we should not hastily conclude that Augustine has shown physical time to be imaginary. [3]

In XI.29, Augustine looks to God for a unity that his scattered life cannot give itself, and his philosophical inquiry sits inside that hope. Understanding the hope is part of reading him; sharing it is a further matter. [2]

Try the distinction

A reader says, “Maya remembers the pause, so it must still exist somewhere. She knows she should send the apology, so her failure proves that someone else is controlling her.” Where does each conclusion go beyond what Maya’s situation establishes? Does correcting them require accepting Augustine’s belief in grace?

Read a possible response

Both conclusions go too far. A present memory does not establish that the past event continues to exist. Augustine locates what Maya can now compare in the impression the sound has left. Nor does recognizing a reason to act establish that she wills the action wholeheartedly, and her failure needs no outside controller to explain it, since the competing inclinations may both be hers. None of this requires accepting Augustine’s belief in grace: the distinctions clarify memory and divided willing without proving that belief, and Maya’s situation does not show that his particular religious commitment is right. We can understand an argument and still ask what would justify its further claims.

Carry this forward

Augustine shows that philosophical questions can arise inside prayer and interpretation and still remain open to readers who do not share his premises. In Translation as philosophical creation, a translator revises his own work and a philosopher adapts an inherited argument. Their examples help us distinguish carrying a text into another language from explaining or extending its reasoning.

Sources and limits

[1] Augustine, Confessions, translated and annotated by J. G. Pilkington, in Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, volume I, CCEL transcription, for the divided will and the garden scene. Read, with their displayed notes: VIII.5.10–12, VIII.8.19–20, VIII.9.21, VIII.10.22–24 and VIII.12.28–30. VIII.9.21 means book eight, chapter nine, section twenty-one. Augustine’s account of his opponents is polemical; it is not a neutral survey of Manichaeism.

[2] The same translation, for the purpose of the Confessions, created time and the measurement of time. The selected chapters were read complete, with their displayed notes:

• The purpose of the work: XI.1.1.
• Creation and time: XI.12.14–15.20.
• Past, present and future: XI.20.26.
• Measuring time: XI.26.33–29.39, especially XI.27.34–36 on measurement and XI.28.37–38 on recitation.

Intervening chapters were not read. Pilkington uses “protraction,” “consideration” and “distraction” where this lesson speaks of stretching, attention and distention.

The Confessions title page credits Pilkington; the volume title page names T&T Clark and Eerdmans but does not date that reprint. The series version was published in 1887. CCEL repeats editorial notes alongside the text and has some typographical defects; notes citing later writers were kept distinct from Augustine. No page image, manuscript or independent Latin text was checked. Neither book VIII nor book XI was read completely, and the whole work was not read.

[3] Christian Tornau, “Augustine of Hippo”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 25 September 2019, revised 26 April 2024, for historical, philosophical and interpretive context. The introduction and the complete §§1–4, 7.4 and 10 were read; the works it cites were not. Its account is specialist interpretation, not an independent review of this lesson.

Maya, the clock challenge and the optional response are original teaching material; the recitation example adapts Augustine. The lesson presents selected arguments in their North African Christian setting, not the beliefs of all Christians. No systematic second translation, independent specialist or learner review, or learner timing is claimed.