Augustine on Time

St. Augustine looking up from

his writing to check the clock?

"There's no time like the present." Yes, but does that actually mean that the present is all that exists -- that the past and the future do not? Augustine would say that's so, based on what he learned from Plato, who believed that our current time is an incomplete imitation of "real" time -- that is, eternity. As a scholar who strove for precision, Augustine worked hard to eliminate ambiguity, writing:

Everything past now does not exist, everything future does not yet exist, therefore nothing past and nothing future exists.

Augustine felt that our current experience with time -- indeed, time itself -- is fallen. Humanity is trapped in this less-than-perfect prison of minutes and seconds ticking away in succession. Furthermore, our present time is dispersed out into the future and past, leading to change and chaos, witnessed in the fact that both our memories and expectations are imperfect. To Augustine, the only thing that is free from that chaos and change is that which is also free from time: God. Since God is the only thing that is perfect, and since God is eternal and not bound by time, then time itself cannot be perfect.

That logic is difficult to argue with. But it doesn't seem to account for the fact that an eternal God, who while not bound by time, nonetheless created time before the Fall. Genesis 1 states clearly that God created the universe in and with a succession of events, one thing following another: "And there was evening and there was morning, the first day." How does Augustine deal with the fact that God created as "good" this imperfect, ticking-away state of temporality, a state that existed even before the Fall? I'm not convinced that Augustine ever reconciled this tension.

Paul J. Griffiths, Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School, tries to explain time as both God-created and fallen by dividing it up into two categories: metronomic and systolic. Metronomic time is the tick-tock state of measurable duration (think hours, minutes, and seconds) in which we now live. This is not the time that God created -- it is an effect of the Fall that kicked in once death was introduced to the cosmos. In other words, we live in an age in which all things end in death. However, God intended a rather different variety of time -- that of the systole. This is the gathered-up, expectancy-laden kind of time that God wanted us creatures to experience from the beginning. Instead of being locked into the stop-watch-timed, calendar-driven, marching-to-death counting off of the metronome, the systole (think of the systolic measurement of your blood pressure) is a tensed-up, ready-for-action life-giving time. This Edenic and heavenly time is always pulsing, ready to draw us into God's loving presence. By making this distinction, Griffiths' book Decreation, helps us understand how time itself can be both created for good and corrupted by death.