What Is Time?

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 90:2-4: "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God... For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night."

Then read 2 Peter 3:8: "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

Augustine's Insight

Book XI of the Confessions contains Augustine's most celebrated philosophical meditation: his inquiry into the nature of time. The question arises from reading Genesis — "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" — which prompts Augustine to ask: What was God doing before the beginning? And what exactly is time?

His opening observation has echoed through sixteen centuries of philosophy:

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know."

We all live in time. We all feel its passage. But when we try to pin it down, it dissolves. The past no longer exists. The future does not yet exist. The present is a knife-edge with no duration — the instant you try to hold it, it has become the past. Where, then, is time?

Augustine's answer is revolutionary: time exists in the mind. The past exists as memory. The future exists as expectation. The present exists as attention. Time is not a container we move through but a distension of the soul — the mind stretching itself across past, present, and future.

"It is in you, my mind, that I measure time... The impression which passing things make upon you remains, even when the things themselves have passed. It is this impression that I measure when I measure time."

Reflection

The psalmist and Peter both point to the same truth from the divine side: God is not in time. A thousand years are as a day to Him. He does not remember the past or anticipate the future — He holds all reality in an eternal present.

This means that our experience of time — the constant slippage of now into then, the anxiety about what is to come, the regret about what has passed — is a feature of our createdness, not of reality as God knows it. We are, as Augustine says, "distended" — pulled apart, stretched thin between memory and anticipation.

This is not merely an abstract philosophical point. It describes the felt experience of human anxiety. How much of our suffering comes from reliving past failures or dreading future ones? How rarely are we fully present — to God, to the person before us, to the beauty of this moment? We are always somewhere else in time.

Augustine's analysis suggests that one of the deepest forms of spiritual maturity is learning to gather the scattered self into the present — what the contemplative tradition calls recollection. Not ignoring past and future, but holding them within a deeper attention to God, who holds all time in His eternal now.

Going Deeper

Peter uses the relativity of divine time to counsel patience: God is not slow in keeping His promises, even when our clocks tell us otherwise. Augustine would add that our impatience and anxiety are symptoms of our distension — our inability to rest in the present moment because we are perpetually stretched toward a future we cannot control.

The antidote, for Augustine, is not better time management but deeper trust. If God holds all time — if the past is safe in His memory and the future is secure in His purpose — then the present moment is the only place we need to be. Today, practice what Augustine struggled toward: being fully here, fully now, in the presence of the One who is eternal.