From this it seemed to me that time is nothing other than a distension; but of what thing, I do not know, and it would be a marvel if it were not of the mind itself. For what do I measure, I beseech you, my God, and say either indefinitely, 'This time is longer than that,' or even definitely, 'This is double that'? Time I measure, I know; but I do not measure the future, because it does not yet exist, nor do I measure the present, because it is stretched out into no span, nor do I measure the past, because it already is not. What, then, do I measure? Is it passing times, not past ones? For so I had said. Press on, my mind, and attend strongly: God is our helper; he made us, and not we ourselves. Attend where truth begins to grow white.
Behold, suppose a bodily voice begins to sound, and it sounds, and still it sounds, and behold it ceases, and now there is silence, and that voice is past and is no longer a voice. It was future before it sounded, and could not be measured, because it did not yet exist, and now it cannot be measured, because it already is not. Then, therefore, it could be measured, while it was sounding, because then there was something that could be measured. But even then it did not stand still; for it was going and passing away. Was it therefore the more measurable? For in passing it was being stretched out into some span of time by which it could be measured, since the present has no span. If, then, it was measurable then, behold, suppose another begins to sound, and still it sounds in continued tenor without any break: let us measure it while it sounds;
for when it has ceased to sound, it will already be past, and there will be nothing that can be measured. Let us measure it plainly, then, and say how long it is. But it still sounds, and it cannot be measured save from its beginning, at which it began to sound, to its end, at which it ceases. For it is the interval itself that we measure, from some beginning to some end. Wherefore a voice that has never ended cannot be measured, so as to say how long or short it is, nor can it be called either equal to some other, or, with respect to some other, single or double or anything else. But when it shall have ended, it will already not be. In what way, then, will it be able to be measured? And yet we do measure times—neither those which do not yet exist, nor those which already are not, nor those which are stretched out by no duration, nor those which have no bounds.
Neither future, then, nor past, nor present, nor passing times do we measure, and yet we do measure times. 'Deus creator omnium'—this verse of eight syllables alternates short and long syllables: the four shorts, therefore, the first, third, fifth, and seventh, are single in relation to the four longs, the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth. Each of these has double the time of each of those; I pronounce them and report it, and so it is, as far as is perceived by manifest sense. As far as sense is manifest, I measure the long syllable by the short one, and I perceive it to have just twice as much.
But since one sounds after another, if the short first, the long after, how shall I hold the short, and how shall I apply it in measuring to the long, so as to find that it has just twice as much, seeing that the long does not begin to sound unless the short has ceased to sound? And do I measure the long itself as present, when I do not measure it save as finished? But its finishing is its passing away. What, then, is it that I measure? Where is the short by which I measure? Where is the long that I measure? Both have sounded, have flown away, have passed, and now are not: and yet I measure, and confidently answer, as far as a practiced sense is trusted, that the one is single, the other double—in a span of time, that is. Nor can I do this, except because they have passed away and are finished.
It is not, therefore, those very syllables, which now are not, that I measure, but something in my memory which remains fixed. In you, my mind, I measure my times. Do not make an uproar against me—that is the truth; do not make an uproar against yourself by the crowds of your affections. In you, I say, I measure times. The affection which passing things produce in you, and which remains when they have passed away, that very affection, present, I measure, not the things which passed away in order that it might be produced; that very affection I measure, when I measure times. Therefore either these affections are the times, or I do not measure times.
What of it, when we measure silences and say that a certain silence lasted as much time as a certain voice lasted? Do we not stretch our thought to the measure of the voice, as if it were sounding, so that we may be able to report something concerning the intervals of silences in a span of time? For even while voice and mouth are at rest, we go through, by thinking, poems and verses and any discourse, and dimensions of motions of any kind, and concerning the spans of times—how much this is in relation to that—we report no differently than if we were uttering them by sounding.
If anyone should wish to utter a somewhat lengthy sound and should determine beforehand by premeditation how long it is to be, that man has assuredly gone through a span of time in silence and, committing it to memory, has begun to utter that sound, which sounds until it is brought to the appointed limit: nay rather, it has sounded and it will sound; for that part of it which is already accomplished has assuredly sounded, but that which remains will sound; and thus it is carried through, while present attention conveys the future over into the past, the future being diminished and the past increased, until, by the consuming of the future, the whole becomes past. But how is the future diminished or consumed, which does not yet exist, or how does the past increase, which already is not, save because in the mind, which does this, there are three?
For it both expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects may pass, through that which it attends to, into that which it remembers. Who, then, denies that future things do not yet exist? And yet there is already in the mind an expectation of future things. And who denies that past things are now no longer? And yet there is still in the mind a memory of past things. And who denies that present time lacks span, since it passes in a point? And yet attention endures, through which that which will be present goes on to be absent. It is not, then, future time that is long, which does not exist, but a long future is a long expectation of the future; nor is past time long, which does not exist, but a long past is a long memory of the past. I am about to recite a song that I know:
before I begin, my expectation is stretched out over the whole; but when I have begun, however much of it I have plucked off into the past is stretched out also in my memory, and the life of this action of mine is distended into memory on account of what I have said, and into expectation on account of what I am about to say; yet my attention is present, through which what was future is conveyed over to become past. And the more this is done and done, by so much, as expectation is shortened, is memory prolonged, until the whole expectation is consumed, when that whole action, finished, shall have passed over into memory.
And what takes place in the whole song, this takes place in each of its particles and in each of its syllables; this in the longer action, of which perhaps that song is a particle; this in the whole life of a man, of which all the actions of the man are parts; this in the whole age of the sons of men, of which all the lives of men are parts.
But since your mercy is better than lives, behold, my life is a distension, and your right hand has upheld me in my Lord, the mediator, the Son of man, between you, the One, and us, the many—amid many things through many things—that through him I may apprehend in whom I have also been apprehended, and may be gathered up from my old days, following the One, forgetting the things that are past, not distended toward the things that are to come and pass away, but extended toward the things that are before, not according to distension but according to intention; I press on toward the prize of the supernal 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 are my consolation, O Lord; you are my eternal Father;
but I have been shattered apart into times, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts, the inmost bowels of my soul, are torn asunder by tumultuous varieties, until I may flow together into you, purified and made limpid by the fire of your love. And I shall stand and be made firm in you, in my mold, your truth; nor shall I endure the questions of men, who by a penal disease thirst for more than they can hold, and who say, 'What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?' or 'What came into his mind, that he should make something, since before he had never made anything?' Grant to them, O Lord, to think well what they say, and to find that 'never' is not said where there is no time. He, therefore, who is said never to have made, what else is meant but that he made at no time?
Let them therefore see that no time can exist without a creature, and let them cease to speak that vanity. Let them also be extended toward the things that are before, and let them understand that you, before all times, are the eternal Creator of all times, and that no times are coeternal with you, nor any creature, even if there be some creature above times. O Lord my God, what is that recess of your deep secret, and how far away from it have the consequences of my offenses cast me? Heal my eyes, that I may rejoice together in your light.
Certainly, if there is a mind endowed with such great knowledge and foreknowledge that all things past and future are as known to it as one song is most familiar to me, that mind is exceedingly marvelous and astonishing to the point of awe, in that nothing of whatever has been accomplished and whatever remains of the ages is hidden from it, even as, while I sing that song, there is not hidden from me what and how much of it has gone by from the beginning, what and how much remains until the end. But far be it that you, the Maker of the universe, the Maker of souls and bodies, far be it that you should thus know all things future and past. Far otherwise, far more marvelously, and far more secretly do you know them.
For it is not as with one who knows a song, whose affection is varied and whose perception is stretched out by the expectation of notes to come and the memory of notes gone by; not so does anything happen to you, who are unchangeably eternal, that is, the truly eternal Creator of minds. Therefore, just as in the beginning you knew heaven and earth without any variation in your knowing, so in the beginning you made heaven and earth without any distinction in your acting. Let him who understands confess to you, and let him who does not understand confess to you. O how exalted you are, and yet the humble of heart are your dwelling! For you lift up those who are cast down, and they whose loftiness you are do not fall.
My heart is busy with many things, O Lord, in this neediness of my life, being struck by the words of your holy Scripture; and therefore for the most part human understanding is rich only in its poverty when it speaks, because inquiry speaks more than discovery, and the asking is longer than the obtaining, and the hand that knocks toils harder than the hand that receives. Yet we hold the promise: who shall corrupt it? If God be for us, who can be against us? Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened. These are your promises, and who could fear to be deceived, when it is Truth that promises?
The lowliness of my tongue confesses to your loftiness, that you made heaven and earth—this heaven which I see, and the earth on which I tread, from which comes this earth that I bear about with me. You made it. But where is the heaven of heaven, O Lord, of which we have heard in the voice 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, O heaven which we do not behold, to which all this is earth that we do behold? For this whole bodily creation, not everywhere a complete whole, has received its beautiful form in its lowest parts, of which the foundation is our earth; but in relation to that heaven of heaven, even the heaven of our earth is but earth. And both these great bodies are not absurdly called earth in relation to that I-know-not-what heaven which belongs to the Lord, not to the sons of men.
And without doubt this earth was invisible and unformed, and there was an I-know-not-what depth of the abyss over which there was no light, because it had no form at all; whence you commanded it to be written that darkness was over the abyss. What is that but the absence of light? For where would light be, if it were, save by being above, by overshadowing and illuminating? Where, then, light was not yet, what was it for darkness to be present but for light to be absent? Therefore darkness was above, because light above was absent—just as where sound is not, there is silence. And what is it for silence to be there but for sound not to be there? Have you not, O Lord, taught this soul which confesses to you?
Have you not, O Lord, taught me that before you formed and set in order that formless matter, there was nothing—no color, no figure, no body, no spirit? Yet not utterly nothing: there was a certain formlessness without any form. By what name, then, could it be called, so that it might somehow be conveyed even to slower minds, except by some familiar word? And what in all the parts of the world can be found nearer to utter formlessness than earth and abyss? For according to their lowest rank they are less comely than all the other higher things that are translucent and shining.
Why, then, should I not accept that the formlessness of the matter which you had made without form, out of which you might make a comely world, was so suitably conveyed to men that it should be called earth invisible and unformed—so that, when thought seeks in it what the senses may reach, and says to itself, 'It is not an intelligible form, like life, like justice, since it is the matter of bodies; nor is it sensible, since in the invisible and unformed there is nothing to be seen or felt'—while human thought says these things to itself, it may strive either to know it by being ignorant of it, or to be ignorant of it by knowing it?
But as for me, O Lord, if I should confess to you with my mouth and my pen all that you have taught me concerning this matter—whose name I formerly heard without understanding it, from those who told me of it and who did not understand it either, while I imagined it with countless and varied forms, and therefore did not imagine it at all: my mind kept turning over foul and horrible shapes in disordered ranks, yet shapes nonetheless; and I called formless not what lacked form, but what had such a form that, were it to appear, my senses would turn away from it as something unwonted and incongruous, and man's weakness would be confounded;
but that which I was conceiving was formless not by the privation of all form, but by comparison with more beautiful things; and true reason urged me to strip away utterly whatever remnants of form of any kind remained, if I wished to conceive the absolutely formless—and I could not; for I judged that what was deprived of all form would sooner not exist at all than that I should conceive something between form and nothing, neither formed nor nothing, formless and next to nothing;
and my mind ceased to question on this matter my own spirit, which was full of the images of formed bodies and changed and varied them at will; and I directed my attention to the bodies themselves, and looked more deeply into their mutability, 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 a certain formlessness, not through utter nothing. But I longed to know, not merely to suspect. And if my voice and my pen should confess to you all that you have unraveled for me concerning this question, who among my readers will endure to grasp it? Yet not for that reason shall my heart cease to give you honor and a song of praise concerning those things which it is not able to put into words.
For the mutability of mutable things is itself capable of all those forms into which mutable things are changed. And what is this mutability? Is it mind? Is it body? Is it the appearance of mind or of body? If it could be said, 'a nothing-something,' and 'it is, it is not,' I would call it that; and yet it already in some way was, that it might receive these visible and composite forms. And whence was it, in whatever way it was, that it might receive these visible and composite forms, and whence was it at all, in whatever way it was, except from you, from whom are all things, in whatever measure they are? But the more unlike you, the farther from you—for not by places.
And so you, O Lord, who are not at one time one thing and at another time another, but the selfsame and the selfsame, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, in the Beginning, which is of you, in your Wisdom, which was born of your substance, made something, and out of nothing. For you made heaven and earth not out of yourself: for then it would be equal to your only-begotten Son, and through this also to you; and in no way would it be just that what was not of you should be equal to you. And there was nothing else besides you out of which you might make them, O God, one Trinity and triune Unity: and therefore out of nothing you made heaven and earth, a great thing and a small thing, since you are almighty and good to make all things good, a great heaven and a small earth.
You were, and there was nothing else, out of which you made heaven and earth, two certain things: one near to you, the other near to nothing; one above which you alone were higher, the other below which there was nothing. But that heaven of heaven is for you, O Lord; the earth, however, which you gave to the sons of men to behold and to touch, was not such as we now behold 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 so than in the abyss. For this abyss of waters, now visible, has even in its depths a light proper to its appearance, somehow perceptible to the fish and creeping things that live on its floor; but that whole was near to nothing, since it was still entirely formless;
yet it already was something that could be formed. For you, O Lord, made the world out of formless matter, which you made out of no thing into almost no thing, that out of it you might make those great things at which we, the sons of men, marvel. For very marvelous is this bodily heaven, the firmament between water and water, which on the second day, after the founding of light, you said: 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 a visible form to the formless matter which you had made before any day. For you had already made heaven before any day, but the heaven of this heaven, because in the beginning you had 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: out of which earth, invisible and unformed, out of which formlessness, out of which almost-nothing, you were to make all these things of which this mutable world consists and yet does not consist—wherein its very mutability appears, in which times can be perceived and numbered, because times come to be through the changes of things, while their forms are varied and turned about, whose matter is the aforesaid invisible earth. And therefore the Spirit, the teacher of your servant, when he recalls that you made heaven and earth in the beginning, is silent about times, says nothing of days.
For without doubt that heaven of heaven, which you made in the beginning, is some intellectual creature, which, although in no way coeternal with you, the Trinity, is nonetheless a partaker of your eternity; and through the sweetness of its most blessed contemplation of you, it strongly restrains its own mutability, and without any lapse since it was made, by cleaving to you, transcends every rolling vicissitude of times. But that formlessness, the earth invisible and unformed, was not itself numbered among the days. For where there is no form, no order, nothing comes and passes away; and where this does not happen, there are surely no days nor any succession of temporal spaces. O Truth, light of my heart, let not my own darkness speak to me.
I flowed away to these lower things and was darkened; but from this place, even from this, I have loved you ardently. I went astray and remembered you. I heard your voice behind me, calling me to return, and I barely heard it because of the tumult of the unquiet. And now, behold, I return, burning and panting, to your fountain. Let no one hold me back: let me drink of this and live by this. Let me not be my own life: evilly did I live of myself, I was death to myself; in you I revive again. Speak to me, converse with me. I have believed your books, and their words are very deep mysteries. Already you have said to me, O Lord, with a strong voice in my inner ear, that you are eternal, alone possessing immortality, since you are changed by no form or motion, nor is your will varied by times—for that will is not immortal which is now one thing and now another.
This is clear to me in your sight, and let it grow ever clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in that manifestation let me persist soberly under your wings. Likewise you have said to me, O 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: this alone is not from you, namely, that which does not exist; and the motion of the will away from you, who are, toward that which is less—because such a motion is a fault and a sin; and the sin of no one either harms you or disturbs the order of your government, whether at the highest or at the lowest level. This is clear to me in your sight, and let it grow ever clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in that manifestation let me persist soberly under your wings.
Likewise you have said to me with a strong voice in my inner ear, that not even that creature is coeternal with you, whose delight you alone are, and which, drinking in you with most persevering chastity, nowhere and never puts forth its own mutability; and with you ever present to it, to whom it holds fast with its whole affection, having no future that it awaits nor casting into the past anything it remembers, it is varied by no succession nor stretched out into any times. O blessed creature, if such there be, by cleaving to your blessedness—blessed in you, its everlasting indweller and illuminator!
Nor do I find what I should more gladly call the heaven of heaven belonging to the Lord than your house, contemplating your delight without any defect of going out into another thing, a pure mind, most harmoniously one, in the establishment of the peace of the holy spirits, citizens of your city in the heavens above these heavens. Whence let the soul understand—the soul whose pilgrimage has become far off—whether it now thirsts for you, whether its tears have now become its bread, while it is said to it day by day: Where is your God? Whether it now asks one thing of you and seeks this, 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 selfsame?
Hence, then, let the soul that can, understand how far above all times you are eternal, since your house, which has not gone on pilgrimage, although it is not coeternal with you, yet by cleaving to you unceasingly and unfailingly suffers no succession of times. This is clear to me in your sight, and let it grow ever clearer and clearer, I pray you, and in this manifestation let me persist soberly under your wings.
Behold, there is something formless in these changes of the lowest and weakest things; and who shall tell me—unless it be whoever wanders and tumbles about through the empty places of his own heart with his own phantasms—who but such a one shall tell me that, when all form has been diminished and consumed, if formlessness alone should remain, through which a thing was changed and turned from form to form, it could then present the alternations of times? It cannot at all, because without the variety of motions there are no times; and there is no variety where there is no form. When these things have been considered, my God, as far as you grant, as far as you stir me to knock and open to me when I knock, I find two things which you made lacking in times, although neither of them is coeternal with you:
the one which is so formed that, without any defect of contemplation, without any interval of change, although mutable, yet not changed, it fully enjoys eternity and unchangeableness; the other which was so formless that it had nothing by which it might be changed from one form into another form, whether of motion or of rest, by which it might be subjected to time. But this you did not leave to be formless, since before any day, in the beginning, you made heaven and earth—these two things of which I was speaking. But the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss.
By which words formlessness is conveyed, so that they might be led on step by step who cannot conceive of an utter privation of form which yet does not arrive at nothing—out of which there might come to be another heaven, and a visible and ordered earth, and beautiful water, and whatever is afterward recorded as made not without days in the constitution of this world; for such things are of a kind that in them the vicissitudes of times take place, on account of the ordered changes of motions and forms. This for the present I perceive, my God, when I hear your Scripture speaking: In the beginning God made heaven and earth;
but the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss—nor does it recall on what day you made these things; thus for the present I perceive, on account of that heaven of heaven, the intellectual heaven, where it belongs to the intellect to know all at once, not in part, not in an enigma, not through a mirror, but as a whole, in manifestation, face to face; not now this, now that, but, as has been said, to know all at once without any vicissitude of times; and on account of the invisible and unformed earth, without any vicissitude of times, which is wont to have now this and now that, because where there is no form, there is nowhere this and that:
on account of these two things, the one first formed and the other utterly formless—the one heaven, but heaven of heaven, the other earth, but earth invisible and unformed—on account of these two things I perceive for the present that your Scripture says, without any mention of days: In the beginning God made heaven and earth. For at once it added what earth it meant. And because on the second day the firmament is recorded as made and called heaven, it conveys of what heaven the discourse had earlier spoken without days. O wondrous depth of your sayings, whose surface, behold, lies before us, alluring to little ones: but wondrous depth, my God, wondrous depth! It is dread to gaze into it—the dread of honor and the trembling of love. I hate its enemies vehemently: