Augustine of Hippo

Key ideas

In Book XI of the Confessions Augustine asks what time is, and finds he cannot say. The past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present has no length. His answer is that time is a stretching of the mind, held together by memory, attention and expectation. The passage is the classic starting point of the nature of time entry.

Against the sceptics of his day he argued that even if he is mistaken, he must exist in order to be mistaken: 'if I am deceived, I am'. The argument anticipates René Descartes's cogito by twelve centuries.

He also wrote at length on free will and evil, arguing that evil is not a substance but a lack of good, and that it enters the world through the misuse of free choice. His later views on grace and predestination fed debates about determinism for a thousand years.

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions XI.14, trans. E. B. Pusey

Life, briefly

Augustine was born in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, to a pagan father and a Christian mother. He studied in Carthage, taught rhetoric in Rome and Milan, and spent years among the Manichaeans before converting to Christianity in 386.

He returned to Africa, became bishop of Hippo Regius in 395 or 396, and wrote prolifically for the rest of his life. He died in 430 while the Vandals were besieging the city.

Major works

• Confessions
• The City of God
• On Free Choice of the Will
• On the Trinity

Schools of thought

Platonism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Augustine of Hippo
• WikipediaAugustine of Hippo