Confessions 11.36–12.22

It is in you, my mind, that I measure my times. Do not interrupt me; that is, do not interrupt yourself with the crowds of your impressions. In you, I say, I measure times. The impression which passing things make in you, and which remains when they have passed, that is what I measure as present, not the things that passed to make it; that is what I measure when I measure times. So either this is time, or I do not measure times. What of when we measure silences, and say that this silence lasted as long as that voice lasted? Do we not stretch our thought to the measure of the voice, as if it were sounding, so that we can report something about the intervals of silences in extent of time? For even when voice and mouth are still, we go through poems and lines and any speech in thought, and any measures of motions, and we report on the extents of times, how long this is in relation to that, just as if we were saying them aloud. If someone wants to utter a rather long sound and has settled beforehand how long it is to be, he has certainly gone through that extent of time in silence, and entrusting it to memory he begins to utter that sound, which sounds until it is brought to the end set for it. Or rather, it has sounded and will sound; for what of it is already completed has certainly sounded, and what remains will sound; and so it is carried through, while the present attention transfers the future into the past, the past growing as the future diminishes, until by the using up of the future the whole is past.

But how is the future, which does not yet exist, diminished or used up, or how does the past, which no longer exists, grow, unless it is because in the mind which does this there are three things? For it expects, and attends, and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what it attends to into what it remembers. Who, then, denies that future things do not yet exist? But yet there is already in the mind an expectation of future things. And who denies that past things no longer exist? But yet there is still in the mind a memory of past things. And who denies that present time lacks extent, since it passes in a point? But yet attention endures, through which what will be present passes on into being absent. So it is not future time that is long, for it does not exist; but a long future is a long expectation of the future. Nor is past time long, for it does not exist; but a long past is a long memory of the past.

I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation is stretched out over the whole; but when I have begun, whatever of it I have plucked off into the past, my memory too is stretched out over it, and the life of this action of mine is distended into memory, because of what I have said, and into expectation, because of what I am about to say; yet my attention is present, through which what was future is carried over so as to become past. And the more this goes on and on, the more memory is lengthened as expectation is shortened, until the whole expectation is used up, when that whole action is finished and has passed into memory. And what happens in the whole psalm happens also in each of its parts and in each of its syllables; the same in a longer action, of which that psalm is perhaps a part; the same in the whole life of a man, of which all a man's actions are parts; the same in the whole age of the sons of men, of which all men's lives are parts.

But because "your mercy is better than lives," see, my life is a distension, and "your right hand has upheld me" in my Lord, the Son of man, the mediator between you, the One, and us, the many, in many things and through many things, so that through him I may lay hold of him in whom I have also been laid hold of, and may be gathered from my old days to follow the One, "forgetting what lies behind," not distended toward things that will come and pass away, but extended toward "the things that are before," not by distension but by intention, I press on "toward the prize of the upward calling," where I may "hear the voice of praise" and "contemplate your delight," which neither comes nor passes away. But now "my years are spent in groaning," and you, my comfort, Lord, my Father, are eternal; but I have been scattered into times whose order I do not know, and my thoughts, the inmost bowels of my soul, are torn apart by tumultuous variety, until I flow together into you, purified and melted by the fire of your love.

And I will stand and be made firm in you, in my mold, your truth; and I will not endure the questions of men who, by a penal disease, thirst for more than they can hold, and say, "What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?" or "How did it come into his mind to make something, when he had never made anything before?" Grant them, Lord, to think well what they are saying, and to find that "never" is not said where there is no time. When, then, he is said never to have made anything, what else is said but that he made nothing at no time? Let them see, then, that there can be no time without creation, and stop talking this vanity. Let them also reach out to "the things that are before," and understand that you, before all times, are the eternal Creator of all times, and that no times are coeternal with you, nor any creation, even if there is some creation above times.

Lord my God, what is that depth of your deep secret, and how far from it have the consequences of my sins cast me? Heal my eyes, and let me rejoice together in your light. Certainly, if there is a mind endowed with such great knowledge and foreknowledge that all past and future things are known to it as one very familiar psalm is known to me, that mind is exceedingly wonderful and astonishing to the point of awe, since whatever of the ages has been completed and whatever remains is no more hidden from it than it is hidden from me, when I sing that psalm, what and how much of it has gone by since the beginning, and what and how much remains until the end. But far be it that you, founder of the universe, founder of souls and bodies, far be it that you should know all future and past things in that way. You know them far, far more wonderfully and far more secretly. For it is not as with one singing a known psalm, or hearing a known psalm, whose feeling varies and whose perception is distended by the expectation of words to come and the memory of those past; nothing like this happens to you, who are unchangeably eternal, that is, the truly eternal Creator of minds. As, then, in the beginning you knew heaven and earth without any variation in your knowledge, so in the beginning you made heaven and earth without any division in your action. Let him who understands confess to you, and let him who does not understand confess to you. O how high you are, and the humble of heart are your house! For you raise up those who are bowed down, and they do not fall whose height you are.

My heart is much troubled, Lord, in the poverty of this life of mine, when it is struck by the words of your holy Scripture; and so, for the most part, the poverty of human understanding is abundant in speech, because seeking says more than finding, and asking is longer than obtaining, and the hand that knocks works harder than the hand that receives. We hold the promise: who will make it void? "If God is for us, who can be against us?" "Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks will find, and to him who knocks it will be opened." These are your promises; and who would fear to be deceived when the Truth promises?

The lowliness of my tongue confesses to your loftiness that you made heaven and earth: this heaven which I see, and this earth on which I walk, from which comes this earth that I carry. You made it. But where is the heaven of heaven, Lord, of which we have heard in the words of the psalm, "The heaven of heaven is the Lord's, but the earth he has given to the sons of men"? Where are you, heaven which we do not see, to which all this that we see is earth? For this whole bodily world, whose base is our earth, has not received a beautiful form everywhere in its entirety, down to its lowest parts; but compared with that heaven of heaven, even the heaven of our earth is earth. And it is not absurd to call both these great bodies earth in comparison with that heaven, whatever it is, which is the Lord's and not the sons' of men.

And certainly this earth was invisible and unformed, and a kind of depth of the abyss over which there was no light, because it had no form; therefore you had it written that "darkness was over the abyss." What else is that than the absence of light? For where would light be, if it existed, except above, standing out and shining? So where there was not yet light, what was the presence of darkness but the absence of light? So darkness was above, because light was absent from above, just as where there is no sound, there is silence. And what is it for there to be silence but for there to be no sound? Did you not, Lord, teach this soul which confesses to you? Did you not, Lord, teach me that before you formed and distinguished this formless matter, there was nothing, no color, no shape, no body, no spirit? Yet it was not absolutely nothing: there was a certain formlessness without any form.

What, then, should it be called, so that it might be conveyed in some way even to slower minds, except by some familiar word? And what can be found in all the parts of the world closer to total formlessness than earth and the abyss? For in their lowest rank they are less beautiful than the other, higher things, which are all bright and shining.

Why, then, should I not take the formlessness of matter, which you had made without form so as to make from it a beautiful world, to have been so suitably conveyed to men that it was called "invisible and unformed earth"? So that when thought seeks in it something for the senses to reach, and says to itself, "It is not an intelligible form, like life or justice, because it is the matter of bodies; nor is it perceptible, because there is nothing in the invisible and unformed to be seen or perceived": while human thought says this to itself, it may try either to know it by not knowing it, or not to know it by knowing it.

But I, Lord, if I were to confess to you with my mouth and my pen all that you have taught me about this matter (whose name I used to hear before without understanding, when those who did not understand it spoke of it to me), I used to think of it as having countless different forms, and therefore did not think of it at all. My mind turned over foul and horrible forms in disordered array, but forms nonetheless; and I called it formless not because it lacked form, but because it had such a form that, if it appeared, my senses would turn away from it as strange and unfitting, and human weakness would be disturbed. But what I was thinking of was formless not by the lack of all form, but by comparison with more beautiful forms; and true reason was persuading me that I should strip away altogether every remnant of any form whatever, if I wanted to think of the wholly formless; and I could not. For I would sooner judge that what was deprived of all form did not exist than think of something between form and nothing, neither formed nor nothing, a formless almost-nothing. And my mind stopped questioning my spirit about this, filled as it was with images of formed bodies, changing and varying them at will; and I turned my attention to bodies themselves and looked more deeply into their changeableness, by which they cease to be what they had been and begin to be what they were not; and I suspected that this passage from form to form takes place through something formless, not through absolutely nothing. But I wanted to know, not to suspect. And if my voice and pen were to confess to you all that you have unraveled for me on this question, which of my readers would have the patience to grasp it? Yet my heart will not therefore cease to give you honor and a song of praise for the things it cannot put into words. For the changeableness of changeable things is itself capable of all the forms into which changeable things are changed. And what is this? Is it mind? Is it body? Is it some form of mind or body? If one could say "a nothing-something" and "an is-is-not," I would call it this; and yet it already existed in some way, so as to receive these visible and composite forms.

And from where did it exist in some way, so as to receive these visible and composite forms, and from where did it exist in any way at all, unless it were from you, from whom all things are, insofar as they are? But the more unlike you a thing is, the further it is from you; not in place. And so you, Lord, who are not one thing here and another there, nor otherwise here and otherwise there, but the Selfsame and the Selfsame and the Selfsame, "Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty," in the Beginning, which is from you, in your Wisdom, which is born of your substance, made something, and made it from nothing. For you made heaven and earth not from yourself; for then it would be equal to your only-begotten, and so to you as well; and it would in no way be right that anything should be equal to you which was not from you. And there was nothing else besides you from which you could make them, God, one Trinity and threefold Unity; and so you made heaven and earth from nothing, something great and something small, because you are almighty and good to make all things good: a great heaven and a small earth. You were, and nothing else, from which you made heaven and earth, two things: one close to you, the other close to nothing; one to which you alone would be superior, the other to which nothing would be inferior.

But that heaven of heaven is yours, Lord; while the earth, which you gave to the sons of men to see and touch, was not such as we now see and touch. For it was invisible and unformed, and there was an abyss over which there was no light; or "darkness was over the abyss," that is, more than in the abyss. For this abyss of waters, which are now visible, has even in its depths a light of its own form, perceptible in some way to the fish and creatures that crawl on its bottom; but that whole was almost nothing, since it was still wholly formless; yet it already existed, something that could be formed. For you, Lord, "made the world from formless matter," which you made from nothing, an almost-nothing, from which to make the great things that we, the sons of men, marvel at. Very wonderful is this bodily heaven, the firmament between water and water, of which you said on the second day, after the creation of light, "Let it be made," and so it was made. This firmament you called heaven, but the heaven of this earth and sea, which you made on the third day by giving visible form to the formless matter which you made before any day. For you had already made a heaven before any day, but the heaven of this heaven, because "in the beginning you made heaven and earth." But the earth itself which you had made was formless matter, because it was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss. From this invisible and unformed earth, from this formlessness, from this almost-nothing, you would make all these things of which this changeable world consists and does not consist; in which changeableness itself appears, in which times can be perceived and counted, because times are made by the changes of things, while the forms vary and turn, whose matter is the invisible earth spoken of above.

And so the Spirit, the teacher of your servant, when he records that you made heaven and earth in the beginning, is silent about times, says nothing of days. For surely the heaven of heaven, which you made in the beginning, is some intellectual creation, which, although in no way coeternal with you, the Trinity, yet shares in your eternity; it greatly restrains its changeableness through the sweetness of its most blessed contemplation of you, and, clinging to you without any lapse from the moment it was made, it surpasses all the turning vicissitude of times. But that formlessness, the invisible and unformed earth, was not itself numbered among the days either. For where there is no form, no order, nothing comes and passes away; and where this does not happen, there are certainly no days, nor any vicissitude of temporal intervals.

O Truth, light of my heart, let not my darkness speak to me! I slid down to these things and was darkened; but from there, even from there, I loved you. I went astray, and I remembered you. I heard your voice behind me, calling me to return, and I scarcely heard it for the tumult of the restless. And now, see, I return, burning and panting, to your fountain. Let no one stop me: may I drink of it and live by it. Let me not be my own life: I lived badly from myself; I was death to myself; in you I revive. Speak to me, talk with me. I have believed your books, and their words are very deep. Already you have said to me, Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear,

that you are eternal, "who alone have immortality," since you are not changed by any form or motion, nor is your will varied by times; for a will which is now one thing and now another is not immortal. This is clear to me in your sight; let it become clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in that manifestation let me abide soberly under your wings. Likewise you have said to me, Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that you made all natures and substances which are not what you are and yet exist; that only what does not exist is not from you; and that the motion of the will away from you, who are, toward what is less is not from you, because such a motion is a fault and a sin; and that no one's sin either harms you or disturbs the order of your rule, either in the highest or in the lowest. This is clear to me in your sight; let it become clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in that manifestation let me abide soberly under your wings.

Likewise you have said to me with a strong voice in my inner ear that not even that creation is coeternal with you whose delight you alone are, and which, drinking you in with most persevering chastity, never and nowhere shows its changeableness; and with you always present to it, to whom it holds with all its love, having no future to expect and transferring nothing into the past to remember, it is not varied by any change nor distended into any times. O blessed creation, if there is such, blessed in clinging to your blessedness, blessed in you, its eternal indweller and enlightener! Nor do I find anything I would more gladly call "the heaven of heaven, which is the Lord's" than your house, which contemplates your delight without any failing that would lead it out to anything else: a pure mind, most harmoniously one in the stable peace of holy spirits, the citizens of your city in the heavens above these heavens.

From this let the soul understand, whose pilgrimage has taken it into a far country, if it now thirsts for you, if its tears have now become its bread while it is asked day by day, "Where is your God?", if it now asks of you "one thing" and seeks it, "that it may dwell in your house all the days of its life" (and what is its life but you? and what are your days but your eternity, like your years, which do not fail, because you are the same?): from this, then, let the soul understand, as far as it can, how far above all times you are eternal, when your house, which has never gone on pilgrimage, although it is not coeternal with you, yet, by clinging to you unceasingly and unfailingly, suffers no vicissitude of times. This is clear to me in your sight; let it become clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in this manifestation let me abide soberly under your wings.

See, there is something formless in these changes of the lowest and weakest things; and who will tell me (unless it be someone who wanders and tosses about through the empty places of his heart with his own phantoms), who but such a one will tell me that, if all form were diminished and used up, and there remained only the formlessness through which a thing was changed and turned from form to form, it could display the succession of times? It cannot at all, because without variety of motions there are no times, and there is no variety where there is no form.

Having considered these things, my God, as far as you grant it, as far as you rouse me to knock and open to me when I knock, I find two things which you made without times, although neither is coeternal with you: one, so formed that, without any failing of contemplation, without any interval of change, though changeable yet unchanged, it enjoys eternity and unchangeableness; the other, so formless that it had nothing from which to be changed into any form, whether of motion or of rest, so as to be subject to time. But you did not leave this to be formless, since before any day "in the beginning you made heaven and earth," these two things I was speaking of. "But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss." By these words formlessness is suggested, so that those may be led on step by step who could not think of a total lack of form which yet does not amount to nothing; from which would be made the second heaven and the visible and ordered earth, and the beautiful water, and whatever else is recorded as made thereafter in the establishing of this world, not without days, since they are such that in them the successions of times take place because of the ordered changes of motions and forms.

Meanwhile, my God, this is what I understand when I hear your Scripture saying, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth; but the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss," and not mentioning on which day you made these things. This, meanwhile, is what I understand: that it is because of that heaven of heaven, the intellectual heaven, where understanding is knowing all at once, not in part, not in a riddle, not through a mirror, but wholly, openly, face to face; not now this, now that, but, as has been said, knowing all at once without any succession of times; and because of the invisible and unformed earth, without any succession of times, which usually has now this and now that, because where there is no form, there is nowhere this and that: because of these two, the one formed from the first and the other wholly formless, the one heaven, but the heaven of heaven, the other earth, but invisible and unformed earth: because of these two, meanwhile, I understand that your Scripture says, without mentioning days, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth." For it immediately added what earth it meant. And by recording that on the second day the firmament was made and called heaven, it suggests which heaven had been spoken of earlier, without days.

Wonderful is the depth of your words! See, their surface is before us, caressing little ones; but wonderful is the depth, my God, wonderful the depth! It is awe-inspiring to look into it: the awe of reverence and the trembling of love. I hate its enemies vehemently: oh, that you would slay them with the two-edged sword, so that they might be its enemies no more! For so I love them to be slain to themselves, that they may live to you. But see, others, not critics but praisers of the book of Genesis, say: "The Spirit of God, who wrote these things through Moses his servant, did not intend this to be understood by these words; he did not intend what you say, but something else, which we say." To them, with you as judge, God of us all, I answer thus.

Will you say that what the Truth tells me with a strong voice in my inner ear about the true eternity of the Creator is false: that his substance is in no way varied by times, nor is his will outside his substance? So he does not will now this and now that, but once, and at once, and always he wills all that he wills; not again and again, nor now these things and now those; nor does he will afterward what he did not will, or not will what he willed before; because such a will is changeable, and nothing changeable is eternal; but our God is eternal. Likewise what it tells me in my inner ear: the expectation of things to come becomes direct attention when they come, and the same direct attention becomes memory when they have passed; and every attention which varies in this way is changeable, and nothing changeable is eternal; but our God is eternal. These things I gather and join together, and I find that my God, the eternal God, did not establish creation by some new will, nor does his knowledge undergo anything transitory.

What, then, will you say, you who object? Are these things false? "No," they say. What of this? Is it false that every formed nature, or matter capable of form, exists only from him who is supremely good, because he supremely is? "We do not deny this either," they say. What, then? Do you deny that there is a certain sublime creation, cleaving with such chaste love to the true and truly eternal God that, although it is not coeternal with him, it does not loosen itself or flow away from him into any variety or succession of times, but rests in the most true contemplation of him alone; because you, God, show yourself to one who loves you as much as you command, and are sufficient for it; and therefore it does not turn aside from you or toward itself? This is the house of God, not earthly, nor of any heavenly bodily mass, but spiritual and sharing in your eternity, because it is without stain for ever. For "you have established it for ever and for ever and ever; you have set a decree, and it will not pass away." Yet it is not coeternal with you, since it is not without a beginning; for it was made.

For even though we find no time before it (for "wisdom was created before all things"), certainly not that Wisdom which is fully coeternal and coequal with you, our God, its Father, through which all things were created and in which Beginning you made heaven and earth; but the wisdom which was created, that is, the intellectual nature, which is light by contemplating the Light (for it too, although created, is called wisdom; but as great as the difference between the Light that enlightens and that which is enlightened, so great is the difference between the Wisdom that creates and this which was created, as between the justice that justifies and the justice that has been produced by justification; for we too are called your justice, since a servant of yours says, "that we might become the justice of God in him"): so, since a certain wisdom was created before all things, the created, rational, and intellectual mind of your chaste city, our mother, which is above and is free and eternal in the heavens (in which heavens, if not those that praise you, the heavens of heavens, since this is also "the heaven of heaven, which is the Lord's"?), even though we find no time before it, because what was created before all things precedes also the creation of time, yet before it is the eternity of the Creator himself, from whom, having been made, it took its beginning: not a beginning in time, because there was not yet time, but the beginning of its own existence.

So it is from you, our God, in such a way that it is clearly other than you and not the Selfsame; and we find time not only not before it, but not even in it, because it is fit always to see your face and never turns away from it anywhere; so it is not varied by any change. Yet changeableness itself is in it, by which it would grow dark and cold, unless, clinging to you with great love, it shone and burned from you as in an everlasting noon. O house full of light and beauty, "I have loved your beauty and the place of the dwelling of the glory" of my Lord, your builder and owner! Let my pilgrimage sigh for you, and I say to him who made you that he may possess me too in you, since he made me too. "I have gone astray like a lost sheep"; but on the shoulders of my Shepherd, your builder, I hope to be carried back to you.

What do you say to me, you objectors whom I was addressing, who nevertheless believe that Moses was a devout servant of God and that his books are the oracles of the Holy Spirit? Is not this the house of God, not indeed coeternal with God, yet in its own way "eternal in the heavens," where you seek changes of times in vain, because you do not find them? For it surpasses all distension and every revolving span of time, since "it is good for it always to cling to God." "It is," they say. What, then, of the things my heart cried out to my God when it heard inwardly the voice of his praise, what do you finally maintain is false? Is it that there was formless matter, where, because there was no form, there was no order? But where there was no order, there could be no succession of times; and yet this almost-nothing, insofar as it was not wholly nothing, was certainly from him from whom is whatever is, that is anything at all. "This too," they say, "we do not deny."