Wednesday 15 June 2011

Montague Brown: Augustine on Precious Time

Given his Platonic heritage, one might expect Augustine not to be very interested in time.  And sometimes we do find this: the changing and temporal is hardly real compared to the unchanging and eternal. Yet for Augustine as Christian and priest, time is essential and precious.  The sacred activities of preaching and dispensing sacraments are temporal and spatial events, and the temporal sweep of salvation history is the truest account of reality. In this paper, I shall focus on Augustine’s discussion of time in the Confessions and his great insight in the City of God that history is ultimately a theological category, requiring (like time) an eternal viewpoint for its coherence and meaningfulness. Without a proper understanding of time, free choice and moral responsibility are unintelligible, and our participation in Christ’s salvation through the sacraments and the liturgical life of the Church is impossible.

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