Notes on Confessions Book XI

Confessions
St. Augustine

Book 11

Ch. 1

Why confess? It is God's will we confess. "For love of thy love", Augustine confesses.

Ch. 2

"Let thy Scriptures be my chaste delight. Let me not be deceived in them, nor deceive others from them"

God sought us that we could seek him.

Ch. 3

Augustine prayers for understanding.

Ch. 4

Things exist because God exists. Things are good because the Creator is good.

Ch. 5

Augustine questions how God created anything and everything.

Ch. 6

God created what he created out of nothing.

Ch. 7

Everything God spoke into existence He did so eternally. It was not sequential.

Ch. 8

God is the beginning and the beginning is immutable.

Ch. 9

Through hope in God is one saved.

Wisdom, God's creation, shines through everything because it is through wisdom all things were made.

Ch. 10

The Will of God comes before creation. The Will of God pertains to the essence of God.

Ch. 11

The eternal and the temporal are "incommensurable".

In the eternal everything is simultaneously present.

Ch. 12

Augustine admits it is better to say, "I don't know" then to mock someone trying to learn the answers to hard questions.

Ch. 13

God wasn't doing nothing before creation because time is a part of creation. There was no "before" creation. Thus, one can't ask, "what was God doing before creation?"

Ch. 14

"There was no time, therefore, when thou hadst not made anything, because thou hadst made time itself"

Ch. 15

The present has no extension; it is at once only before becoming past. It is anticipated as future but only exists immediately as present.

Ch. 16

Yet, we compare lengths of time and have understanding when we do the comparison.

We measure the passage of time by perception.

Ch. 17

There must be past and future times because we have memories and men can foretell the future.

Ch. 18

But if times past or times future exist they must exist somewhere in the present. If the future things existed in the future they'd exist as "not yet" and therefore, not exist. If past things exist in the past they exist as having passed away and therefore, don't exist. Yet times future and times past exist and they exist in the present.

Ch. 19

What about prophecy? How does God teach men of future things if they don't exist in the present?

Ch. 20

There isn't really a past or a future, but a time present of past things, a time present of things present and a time present of things future: memory, direct experience and expectation.

" There are but few things about which we speak properly-- and many more about which we speak improperly--though we understand one another’s meaning" This is an interesting thought on language.

Ch. 21

We measure time and understand that we measure something that exists. But if the time we measure comes from the future, the not yet, it can't be measured because not yet isn't existence and non existence cannot be measured. Same for the past.

Ch. 22

We communicate things about time to one another in commonplace and ordinary language to understanding ears, but still the meanings of these things lies hidden deeply.

Ch. 23

Time is a sort of extension.

Ch. 24

Time is not the motion of a body.

Ch. 25

Augustine calls on God to enlighten him.

Ch. 26

"Time is nothing other than extendedness; but extendedness of what I do not know"

Ch. 27

Look up T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, especially "Burnt Norton". Maybe he'll make it clearer...

Ch. 28

What is measured of time is measured by our attention of it. The not yet becomes the passed away through our current experience of it.

Ch. 29

Life is but a stretching out and through the mediation of Christ one is no longer stretched out but pulled together and stretched forth to the eternal things.

Ch. 30

God does not merely know all things past and future like its a familiar tune. It's much more mysterious than that.

Ch. 31

"Let him who understands this confess to thee; and let him who does not understand also confess to thee!"

I confess. I confess.