Aurelius Augustine the Blessed

Aurelius Augustine the Blessed (354 – 430) is one of the outstanding thinkers and fathers of the Catholic Church, canonized by it. Born in Tagaste, in the province of Numidia (North Africa) of the Roman Empire. He showed great aptitude for science, studied rhetoric in Carthage, then taught eloquence in Rome, and later in Mediolan (Milan). In 387 he converted to Christianity. The following year he returned to his hometown and became the head of the local Christian community. In 395 he was ordained bishop of Gipon, leading the entire African church. Died during the siege of Hypon by the Vandals. In his ascetic activity, with exceptional mental energy, he defended the purity of teaching in the fight against various heresies, among which he considered the most dangerous Manichaeism, whose representatives professed the duality of principles, that is, they attributed to the devil, or evil in general, an independent existence on a par with God. A. B. substantiated the unity of the divine principle, the omnipotence of grace, and the doctrine of predestination. He wrote a large number of theological works, the main of which, “On the City of God,” develops the idea of ​​the church as a sacred institution connecting heaven and earth; Christian philosophy of history began with this work. He had a great influence on the theological thought of the Middle Ages. He left a special treatise on musical metrics, in which he reflected his experience of using the so-called Ambrosian church singing during worship. A.B.’s “Confession” is widely known, where he described his life and the foundations of his faith with deep psychologism and utmost sincerity. In it, A.B. talks a lot about the problems of time and space with unsurpassed intellectual ingenuity. A. B. poses bold theological questions: could God have created this world earlier or later than he did? What did God do before he created the world? How does God relate to the concepts of time and eternity? In solving them, A.B. adheres to Plato’s interpretation of time, that is, he considers time to be a created substance. The world was not created in the current time, says A. B., but time begins to flow from the creation of the world. God is in eternity, and therefore temporal concepts are not applicable to it: “earlier”, “later”; it is unlawful to ask God what he did when there was no world. “When there was no time, there was no “then”... You created all time, and before all time You were, and there was no time when there was no time at all” (Confession, p. 326). Therefore, God could not create the world either earlier or later than he created it, that is, time begins to pass only immediately with the creation of the world. A. B. restores the Aristotelian understanding of time as a measure of movement, and opposes the everyday identification of these concepts. “I heard from one learned man that the movement of the sun, moon and stars is time, but I do not agree with this. Why then not consider the movement of all bodies as time? If the heavenly bodies stopped, and the potter’s wheel continued to move, then there would not be time by which we measure its revolutions?” asks A. B. (ibid., p. 335). When Joshua, says A.B., in order to complete victory in the battle, asked the sun not to set, and through his prayer it happened, did time pass then? Yes, time moves at its own pace, regardless of the movement of celestial or any other bodies, because we believe that time passes even when they are at rest and we say that such and such a body stood for so and so, thereby implying the independence of time from the movement of bodies. A. B. discusses the issues of longitude and shortness of time, the duration of the past, the measurement of time, psychological approaches to time? Time is divided into past, present and future, and the first is no longer there, the third is not yet, and the present is elusive, continuously passing. “Time, becoming the present from the future, comes out of some kind of hiding place, and the present, having become the past, goes into some kind of hiding place” (ibid., p. 333). However, we could not measure some kind of illusion, therefore, time is some kind of reality. What do we measure in time if we cannot grasp its essence in any way? he asks. Reality can be called both the past, which was once the present, and the future, which is yet to become the present. Each of us carries the image of the past in our soul and remembers it. Forecasters see the future. This means that all three hypostases of time actually exist and do not have a dreamy existence. In our soul there is that hiding place or source of duration with which we measure the depth of the past, which does not exist on its own, but only in connection with the depth of memory. Nothing more than memory carries words and images of things. The number of specific memories for us is equal to the strength and depth of impressions. In the same way, prediction, preliminary thinking based on the images that are inside us, in memory, draws us the appearance of the future. Consequently, says A.B., there is neither the future nor the past in themselves, but there are three faces of one time - the present of the past, the present of the present and the present of the future, associated with memory and impression, which are the most important tools for understanding time. God wants to tell us that we should not allow our attention to wander; Our duty in relation to existence is to remember everything that has passed and keep it in our soul. More clearly than the philosophers of antiquity, A. B. highlights the concept of space, which was then mainly called place. For him, just like time, space has some reality regardless of the things that fill it. He calls space a non-moving vessel, that is, not coinciding with the boundaries of bodies. A. B.'s reasoning significantly cleared the tradition of Plato and Aristotle of layers and developed a substantial concept of time, the adherents of which strive to justify the independence of the flow of time and the existence of space from the movement of material bodies. A.B.'s logical constructions and unexpected formulation of questions about time and space have always aroused philosophical interest; they can still serve as a source of new images and associations today.