St. Augustine’s Conception of Time: An Analytic Perspective

This paper discusses three different conceptions of time that appear in St. Augustine’s works The City of God and Confessions. In some critical reviews of his work, these theories of time are held to contradict one another, leading to a suggestion that the theory espoused in The City of God is the more mature version, which is better at reflecting St. Augustine’s thought. This paper argues that the theories not only have no contradictions between one another, but, instead, are actually compatible, since the ontological commitment contained in their assumptions is restricted. To support this position, the paper draws on St. Augustine’s own works and on the approach of the analytic philosophy of time in order to show the compatibility of the various conceptions of time. Finally, although St. Augustine did not construct a single, unified theory encompassing several conceptions of time, this is not a shortcoming of his philosophy – and the creation of such a theory remains problematic even today. It is concluded that a general theory of time was not St. Augustine’s intention, that the theories in question are mutually compatible, and that neither is more mature or more important than the other.