Time&Eternity

90 chapter 2
Duchrow concludes that “Augustine’s so-called psychological concept of
time” does not represent any essentially new solution to the problem of
time. 217 Duchrow faults Augustine’s lack of interest in connecting physical
time to his psychological theory, which resulted in the abandonment of nature.
He also criticizes the inconsistency of Augustine’s statements on salvation
history. Thus, on the one hand, the past tends to dissolve into nothingness;
on the other hand, however, it establishes salvation. The future does
then indeed promise eschatological redemption, but this redemption is simultaneously
defined as the eternally existing present. 218 Duchrow understands
both shortcomings as the disastrous fruit of the combining of important
elements of Greek ontology and Roman rhetoric; and, due to the
pressures of this combination, Augustine was “not innocent in the development
toward a modern diastasis between the subject and a world abandoned
by the Spirit.” 219
Dalferth, in turn, deals with Augustine by proceeding from his preconception
of the fateful superimposition of the ontological time difference on
the eschatological. He accuses Augustine of domesticating the eschatological
time difference, which in fact makes the timeless God irrelevant for orientation
in time and abandons the world to a secular notion of progress. 220
By contrast, Gilles Quispel, who believes that it is clearly evident in the
church fathers “that the pathos of progress is a secularization of primitive
Christian ideas,” 221 describes Augustine’s theology as just the opposite. Augustine’s
theology, he says, is “demythicized eschatology,” 222 because Augustine’s
key terms for his theology of time—distentio and intentio—are “the
primordial words of Judeo-Christian eschatology.” 223 Quispel is not concerned
with a relation of eternity to time, as Manzke is, but rather with the
individual human soul, which can come into contact with eternity by
means of withdrawing from the external world via intentio. 224
Four interpreters and four interpretations: I do not wish to add a fifth
here, but rather ask how Augustine may have understood the ontological
difference between time and eternity. Linked to this is the question of
whether, or to what extent, it is adequate or fruitful to consider time and
eternity as having different natures. For this purpose, I shall concentrate on
the eleventh book of the Confessions.
For Augustine, eternity is semper stans, that is, unlimited stability. 225 It is
also totum esse praesens, complete simultaneity. 226 Furthermore, as the constant
present, it is the timeless foundation of all temporal things because
time cannot create unity and wholeness out of itself. 227 No possibility exists
for comparing eternity to the temporibus numquam stantibus (the times that
never stand still). 228 Time as the past exists no longer; time as the future
does not yet exist; time as the present becomes time only when it moves