Augustine’s View of God & Time

Augustine’s beliefs about God and time have been highly influential in Western civilization, especially among Christians. Scholars often cite his beliefs about divine immutability and impassibility. But Augustine’s belief in a timeless God and waffling about the reality of time powerfully shaped the history of theology.

The Confessions may be the most influential book from the most influential theologian whose writings aren’t in the Bible. In it, Augustine describes key moments in his Christian conversion and his intellectual development. The book is written as a conversational prayer, as Augustine asks God to help him make sense of life, reality, and the divine.

We Know Time Well

In a major section, Augustine reflects upon time and God’s relation to it. “Is there anything to which we refer in conversation with more familiarity, any matter of more common experience, than time?”^[1] he asks rhetorically. “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [time], and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it.”^[2]

Despite the fact that we all experience and know time, Augustine says he’s unable to explain what it is. Past time is no more, he observes, and future time is not yet. In a real sense, therefore, neither past nor future exist.^[3] We experience time in the present, although it quickly becomes the past. “We cannot really say that time exists,” Augustine concludes, “except that it tends toward non-being.”^[4]

Augustine divides time conceptually into smaller and smaller units: years, weeks, days, instants. The present moment, he says, can be “reduced to a vanishing point.”^[5] Measuring time precisely is difficult, because we only see changes in the phenomena of the universe.^[6] Time itself cannot be seen.^[7]

Time is Just in Our Heads

What began with Augustine saying we all experience time ends in him claiming time is only an aspect of our subjectivity. It’s just in our heads. Past, present, and future are not objectively real, he says, but “three realities in the mind.”^[8] The past is in our memory, the present has our attention, and the future is our expectation.^[9] “Time is nothing other than tension,” says Augustine, “and I would be very surprised if it is not tension of consciousness itself.”^[10]

Why would Augustine give up believing in the objective reality of time? A major part of the answer seems to be his view that the unchanging is better than the changing. “I saw quite plainly and with full conviction that anything perishable is inferior to what is imperishable,” he says, “and what is constant and unchanging [is] better than what can be changed.”^[11] Augustine’s convictions are influenced by Neo-Platonic philosophy’s preference for the changeless and timeless.

Augustine’s conclusion that time is not real and that the best is imperishable aligns with him thinking God is timeless. God is “before all things past and transcends all things future in the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present,”^[12] he says. In God’s “eternity nothing passes but all is present.” “Nothing can happen to you,” he says to God, “in your unchangeable eternity.”^[13] For God is “above all temporal change.”^[14] And deity “knows all at once,” says Augustine, “without any succession of time.”^[15]

In fact, Augustine believes God made time.^[16] “You made all eras of time and you are before all time,” he says to God, “and there was never a ‘time’ when time did not exist.”^[17] In other writings, Augustine says time is a “creature.”^[18] However, he never explains how God creates time and yet it not be objectively real.

Obstacles to a Timeless God

The claim that a timeless God created time leads to numerous problems. A critic might ask, for instance, what God was doing before creating time. This is a problem, because “doing” is a time-oriented word. Augustine responds to this worry by calling it nonsense. There was no time before God created it, he says, so God wasn’t “doing” anything.^[19]

Augustine’s response doesn’t solve problems that arise from thinking God is timeless. After all, creating is also a timely activity. To say God created before time was created makes no sense, because “timeless creating” is oxymoronic. Augustine admits to having no solution to this problem.^[20]

God’s creating also implies a change in God: from not creating, then, to creating. But Augustine believes God can’t change in any way. He acknowledges this problem but has no answer. “What I do not know,” Augustine says, “I do not know.”^[21] We can appreciate Augustine admitting he’s ignorant but, as I will argue, reject his views about God and time.

Criticizing Augustine’s Ideas about God and Time

Had Augustine accepted the truth of his own experience, he may have seen the virtue of thinking time is an experiential non-negotiable. By “experiential non-negotiable,” I mean a truth about reality we inevitably live out in practice, even if we deny it with our words. Rather than thinking time is merely in our minds, we’re better off believing it an essential element of existence. Living temporally is an experiential non-negotiable, because we all experience the reality of time.^[22]

Second, Augustine mistakenly thinks time is a creature. Time is not an object existing in the universe, or a substance inside our bodies. It’s not something in addition to what exists but a constituent factor in or of all that exists. This is partly why physicists speak of “space-time” to describe actually existing entities. What exists is in process.^[23]

Third, we are wise to think time is a factor in God’s experience too. The becoming Spirit of love is inherently time-oriented. God has a history, in the sense that deity has a past.^[24] God experiences in the present moment, because time is a necessary feature of the Spirit’s ongoing becoming. God’s experiencing is temporal and sequential.

God, Time, and Scripture

Had Augustine paid closer attention to the ways biblical writers describe God, he may have abandoned his Neo-Platonic belief that God is timeless. The overwhelming majority of writers describe God as timefull rather than timeless, as temporal rather than nontemporal, as a personal Experiencer rather than changelessly impassible. The God of scripture is not timeless.^[25] (See the essay, “A TimeFull God of Providence”)

Fourth, saying that God always experiences time allows one to say God existed before our universe began. A timeless God can’t exist before creating, because there is no “before” for a timeless God. “If there is no time prior to creation,” explains R. T. Mullins, “then one cannot make the biblical affirmation that God exists before creation.”^[26] Both those who embrace creatio ex nihilo and those who reject it should say the Spirit acts timefully — in the sense of a succession of moments — rather than timelessly.

Fifth, Augustine’s preference for the immutable and timeless led him think a time-oriented and changing creation is not worthy of love. As we saw in earlier chapters, Augustine believed that only the most valuable, timeless, and immutable deserves love. That’s God. We should not love creatures for their own sake, he says, and God does not love creation for its own sake. This world-devaluing perspective has negatively influenced countless believers.^[27]

Internal Inconsistency in The Confessions

Finally, The Confessions has a recurring internal inconsistency. Over and over in the book, Augustine prays in conversation. He famously says to God, for instance, “Give me what I love, for I love, indeed, and this love you have given me.”^[28] And he says, “You, Lord … have taken pity on us who are earth and ashes, and so it was pleasing in your sight to give new form to my deformity.”^[29] And so on.

Here’s the internal inconsistency: it makes no sense to ask God to “give” something or “have pity” if God is unchanging and unemotional. An immutable, impassible, and timeless deity can’t respond to a creature’s request, and it cannot have pity. And we cannot please a God who feels no emotion. Augustine’s God can’t change from not giving to giving, from not having pity to pity, or from not being pleased to pleased. The Confessions is a contradiction.

(This is a portion of chapter eight of the systematic theology of love in progress. Free subscribers to my Substack get a portion of this chapter; paid subscribers get the entire chapter and all others. In addition, paid subscribers [only $8 a month] will be mentioned in the published book’s acknowledgements and get a signed copy. Consider subscribing here!)