Lesson · 4 min Steady
What Is Time?
In one line Augustine found time hard to define, and placed it in the mind’s memory, attention and expectation.
Augustine was born in 354 in North Africa, taught rhetoric in Italy, and became bishop of Hippo. In his Confessions he stops to ask a simple question: what is time? If no one asks him, he says, he knows. If he tries to explain it, he does not.
The past no longer exists and the future does not exist yet. The present, if it stayed present, would not be time but eternity, and it has no length we can hold. So where is time? Augustine answers that it lives in the mind, as a stretching of the soul.
There are three presents: a present of past things, which is memory; a present of present things, which is attention; and a present of future things, which is expectation. Reciting a psalm, he says, the mind holds all three at once.
Go deeper
Augustine also asked what God was doing before creating the world. He reports a joke answer, that God was preparing hell for people who ask such questions, and sets it aside. His own answer is that time began with the world, so there was no “before.” Modern physics, which ties time to the universe, has made his answer look surprisingly current.
The melody
A pianist plays a familiar melody. At any moment only one note sounds, yet she hears a tune, not a string of separate notes.
Her memory holds the notes just played, her attention is on the present note, and her expectation leans into the next phrase. The melody exists in that span of mind, as Augustine described.
Try this today During a song or a talk, notice how memory of what passed and expectation of what comes shape what you hear now.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “What Is Time?.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/what-is-time. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Saint Augustine” — Covers his life, the Confessions and his account of time in book 11.
- Augustine, Confessions (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) — Book 2 tells the theft of the pears; book 11 asks what time is. Paraphrase.