406, when the Mainz hordes broke through the frontier, and lived to see the dismemberment of Gaul, Spain and North Africa. Indeed, the backdrop of the empire’s slow collapse obviously influenced Augustine’s philosophical outlook, which favoured a secure, perfect ‘city of God’ over the faltering ‘city of man’.
Born just 17 years after Constantine’s death, Augustine grew up in the small provincial city of Tagaste, 40 miles from the coast of what is today Algeria. In a meteoric early career as a philosopher and teacher, he moved from his little town to Carthage, then to Rome, and finally in his early thirties to the imperial court at Milan, at that time the de facto capital of the Western empire. This was during the reign of Theodosius I (d.395), the last powerful emperor to reign over the entire empire. In his palace the young Augustine became the court teacher of rhetoric, a coveted position that might have led to high political office, power and wealth.
But Augustine was a troubled young man. Living a life he describes in his Confessions as one of near debauchery and moral vacuousness, he tried and rejected several of the religions popular at the time. Then in 386, at the age of 31, he was alone in a Milan garden when he says he heard the voice of a child when no child was there. The voice commanded him to open a nearby Bible, which told him to give himself over to Christ. He did, resigning his post in the imperial household and eventually returning to North Africa to become a bishop of the small port city of Hippo--today’s Annaba in modern Algeria, on the sea near the border with Tunisia.
Known as the last great intellectual of the classical era, Augustine set out to create a philosophical structure that linked his new religion to one of the giants of the ancient world, Plato, equating this long-dead Athenian’s ideas about a prime mover/creator with the Christian God, and Plato’s notion of a perfect universe, existing beyond our flawed world, with the Christian concept of heaven. Augustine borrowed from Plato’s conception of time as being by definition in motion. This makes it an imperfect attribute of an imperfect world, since the realm of the prime mover is a place of perfection that by its nature is timeless and immutable. It has no beginning or ending, nor any movement forward or backward, and therefore has no time to measure. Recast in Christian terms, this ideal is what Augustine meant by sacred time.
‘The world was made not in time,’ Augustine says in The City of God, ‘but together with time.’ This means that God the creator may have set in motion the idea of time as perceived by humans, but he himself exists outside of it, a concept that Augustine argues is ultimately a matter of faith. ‘Follow the One,’ he says, ‘forgetting what is behind, not wasted and scattered on things which are to come and things which will pass away . . . and contemplate Thy delight which is neither coming nor passing.’
A discussion of Augustine’s ontology may seem a bit abstract for a book about little squares marching along on a calendar, except that it represented a powerful current then forming in Europe and in the Church, which for centuries would cast a suspect eye on anyone who tried to delve too deeply into matters of time. Augustine understood the need for a simple calendar that kept track of holidays, legal days and birthdays. Nor did he oppose a philosophical discussion about the nature of time. What he opposed was an overemphasis on trying to quantify the past, particularly on issues such as the creation--something he considered a waste of time for those seeking the perfection of God. He was even more critical of those who tried to predict the future, which in his mind was the sole province of God. These included astronomers and mathematicians who used planets and other cues from nature to predict the future beyond the next harvest or the seasonal coming of winter and spring. ‘In the
Born just 17 years after Constantine’s death, Augustine grew up in the small provincial city of Tagaste, 40 miles from the coast of what is today Algeria. In a meteoric early career as a philosopher and teacher, he moved from his little town to Carthage, then to Rome, and finally in his early thirties to the imperial court at Milan, at that time the de facto capital of the Western empire. This was during the reign of Theodosius I (d.395), the last powerful emperor to reign over the entire empire. In his palace the young Augustine became the court teacher of rhetoric, a coveted position that might have led to high political office, power and wealth.
But Augustine was a troubled young man. Living a life he describes in his Confessions as one of near debauchery and moral vacuousness, he tried and rejected several of the religions popular at the time. Then in 386, at the age of 31, he was alone in a Milan garden when he says he heard the voice of a child when no child was there. The voice commanded him to open a nearby Bible, which told him to give himself over to Christ. He did, resigning his post in the imperial household and eventually returning to North Africa to become a bishop of the small port city of Hippo--today’s Annaba in modern Algeria, on the sea near the border with Tunisia.
Known as the last great intellectual of the classical era, Augustine set out to create a philosophical structure that linked his new religion to one of the giants of the ancient world, Plato, equating this long-dead Athenian’s ideas about a prime mover/creator with the Christian God, and Plato’s notion of a perfect universe, existing beyond our flawed world, with the Christian concept of heaven. Augustine borrowed from Plato’s conception of time as being by definition in motion. This makes it an imperfect attribute of an imperfect world, since the realm of the prime mover is a place of perfection that by its nature is timeless and immutable. It has no beginning or ending, nor any movement forward or backward, and therefore has no time to measure. Recast in Christian terms, this ideal is what Augustine meant by sacred time.
‘The world was made not in time,’ Augustine says in The City of God, ‘but together with time.’ This means that God the creator may have set in motion the idea of time as perceived by humans, but he himself exists outside of it, a concept that Augustine argues is ultimately a matter of faith. ‘Follow the One,’ he says, ‘forgetting what is behind, not wasted and scattered on things which are to come and things which will pass away . . . and contemplate Thy delight which is neither coming nor passing.’
A discussion of Augustine’s ontology may seem a bit abstract for a book about little squares marching along on a calendar, except that it represented a powerful current then forming in Europe and in the Church, which for centuries would cast a suspect eye on anyone who tried to delve too deeply into matters of time. Augustine understood the need for a simple calendar that kept track of holidays, legal days and birthdays. Nor did he oppose a philosophical discussion about the nature of time. What he opposed was an overemphasis on trying to quantify the past, particularly on issues such as the creation--something he considered a waste of time for those seeking the perfection of God. He was even more critical of those who tried to predict the future, which in his mind was the sole province of God. These included astronomers and mathematicians who used planets and other cues from nature to predict the future beyond the next harvest or the seasonal coming of winter and spring. ‘In the
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