“…Time could not elapse before you made time. But if time did not exist before heaven and earth, why do people ask what you were then doing? There was no ‘then’ when there was no time. It is not in time that you precede times. Otherwise you would not precede all times. In the sublimity of eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future.”

This quotation is from Augustine’s Confessions and specifically from chapter 11, pp. 229. Augustine’s idea is that time is an illusion because past and future do not ever really exist. They are nothing tangible and we can do nothing with them. There is only the never-ending present through which we flow, although that is slightly incorrect as well as it seems to imply that that present is coming from somewhere on its way to somewhere else, which it is not, as it only exists for a moment before it becomes what we call the past, which, according to Augustine, does not exist. That present could not have existed before it reached us, either, as the future also does not exist.

This was a new idea in that the subject of the nature of time had not been brought up before, and so it is not contrary to any previous work, but decidedly definitive. Augustine’s arguments are concise and make sense, if one accepts the existence of God. Even if one does not, the idea that past and future do not exist and thus that time is an illusion is straightforward enough to be accepted without any religious justification. One needs only to accept God as existing if one wants to go further into Augustine’s arguments surrounding the question of what God was doing before It made the earth. Augustine answers that God was not doing anything “before” then as there was no “before”: since time is an illusion, there is only the now. In keeping with his religious beliefs, Augustine also throws in that there was no time before then, either, as God had not yet created it.

Perhaps one of the most clear-cut statements that Augustine makes pertaining to the nature of time is, “Who can measure the past which does not now exist or the future which does not yet exist, unless perhaps someone dares to assert that he can measure what has no existence?” (Augustine, Confessions, pp. 233). This is a clever and unique way of looking at time, especially since the subject itself had not yet come up in any major previous work. Another interesting thing that Augustine claims is that “both future and past events exist,” (Augustine, Confessions, pp. 233). This is interesting because, according to Augustine, the time in which these events should occur does not exist. Perhaps it can be said that all events that occur happen in the same instant. This could come from the idea that there are things happening now, there were once other things happening, and there will be still other things happening eventually, and how all of these happenings are, were, or will be valid and definite events. If such things are quite certainly in existence, but past and future are both unreal, then those things must be happening now, in the only time that is real: the present.

One obvious result of Augustine’s discussion of time might be the advancement of the subject by others. It is such an interesting subject upon which Augustine touched only briefly in his quasi-autobiography that others might wish to take it on to expand Augustine’s ideas, or argue against them to a different end. Another result might be, once again, the strengthening of the Christian viewpoint since Augustine’s work answers some disturbing questions about God, such as, what was God doing previously? Why did God stop doing that in order to create us? And, why did God change if It was already perfect? All of those questions involve the passage of time, which Augustine conveniently writes off, but only in the most logical and intriguing way possible. Thus Augustine’s work on time introduces new ideas to the world in an intelligent manner and gives more backing to the church. Though Augustine was more well-known for the autobiographical portions of his writing, this surely won him recognition as well.