What Time Really Is (And Why It Matters Who You Love)

Imagine trying to catch a moment. You’re sitting in class, and the clock ticks past 2:14. By the time you think “2:14,” it’s already gone. The past doesn’t exist anymore. The future doesn’t exist yet. And the present? The present is so thin—just a knife-edge between what was and what will be—that you can’t really grab it either. So when you say time is real, what exactly are you talking about?

This isn’t just a riddle for bored students. A man named Augustine, who lived about 1,600 years ago, got obsessed with this puzzle. And the strange answer he came up with—about time, memory, and what we love—would shape Western thinking for centuries.

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Asking Why

Augustine was born in 354 in what’s now Algeria, to a Christian mother and a pagan father. As a teenager, he stole pears from a neighbor’s tree—not because he was hungry, but just for the thrill of doing something forbidden. He later wrote about this endlessly, trying to figure out why people do bad things when they know better. This was the kind of person he was: someone who turned everyday life into a philosophical investigation.

He spent nine years as a follower of Manicheism, a religion that taught that the world was a battlefield between two equal forces: Good (spirit, light) and Evil (matter, darkness). This explained a lot—if evil was a separate substance, then when you did something wrong, it wasn’t really you doing it. Some part of an evil world-stuff was just acting through you. But Augustine eventually decided this was a cop-out. It let people off the hook for their own choices.

Around age 32, he had what he describes as a crisis. He was a successful professor of rhetoric in Milan, with a career path to the top of the Roman Empire. He had a mistress he’d lived with for fourteen years and a brilliant son. And he was miserable. The story he tells is that he was sitting in a garden, torn between his old life and a new one as an ascetic Christian, literally crying about his inability to choose. Then he heard a child’s voice chanting “Take up and read.” He opened the Bible to a random page, read a passage about giving up worldly desires, and—suddenly—he could choose. He quit his job, got baptized, and eventually became a bishop in North Africa.

But here’s the thing: Augustine never stopped being a philosopher. He just became a philosopher who thought the Bible was the deepest philosophical text there was.

The Puzzle Nobody Solved

Let’s go back to time. In his book Confessions (which is basically a long prayer to God that also works as a memoir and a philosophy treatise), Augustine asks: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to someone who asks, I don’t know.”

Here’s why it’s hard. We talk about time as if it has three parts: past, present, future. But:

The past doesn’t exist anymore.
The future doesn’t exist yet.
The present has no duration. By the time you say the word “now,” that now is over and a different now has taken its place. You can never actually catch the present in your hands.

So either time is a kind of illusion, or our normal way of talking about it is deeply confused. Augustine goes for the second option.

His solution is genuinely weird and really clever. Time, he says, isn’t “out there” in the world. It’s “in here”—in the mind. The past exists as memory. The future exists as expectation. And the present? The present is attention—the act of holding past and future together in consciousness.

Think about reciting a poem you know by heart. When you start, you’re anticipating the words that will come. As you speak, each word passes through your attention. When you’re done, the whole poem exists in your memory. But at any single moment, you’re only aware of a tiny slice. Yet somehow you experience the poem as a unified thing over time. That’s because your mind stretches—Augustine calls it a “distention”—to hold all these moments together.

This is what time is: the stretching of the mind. Without a mind to remember, attend, and expect, there would be no time.

This part gets complicated, but here’s what it accomplishes: Augustine has made time into something deeply personal and subjective, but he hasn’t made it unreal. Your memories are real. Your anticipation is real. Your attention is real. Time is real, but it’s real in you, not as a property of the universe independent of consciousness.

The Bigger Problem: Why Are We Miserable?

Augustine didn’t care about time just because it was a cool puzzle. He cared because he thought our experience of time reveals something painful about human existence.

Here’s his picture. There are three levels of reality:

God: totally unchanging, eternal, perfect. Not in time at all.
The human soul: changeable over time, but not located in space. We can remember, learn, grow, decay. We’re stuck in time.
Bodies: changeable in both time and space. Ordinary physical stuff.

We’re in the middle. And the problem is that we’re constantly being pulled apart by time. We remember past hurts. We worry about the future. We try to hold onto good moments that are already slipping away. Augustine describes this as a kind of sickness of the soul—a distention, a being-stretched-out, a failure to be unified.

When he was a young man, his best friend died. He writes about this with shocking honesty: he couldn’t stop crying, he found everything ugly, he wanted to be nowhere. He realized that he had been “enjoying” his friend—loving him as if he were an ultimate good, something that could make him happy forever. But no human being can do that. We all die, we all change, we all disappoint each other eventually. If you put your hope for happiness in anything that exists in time, you’re setting yourself up for misery.

The only thing that can actually make you happy, Augustine argues, is something that can’t be lost—something eternal, unchanging, beyond time. He calls that God. And he thinks the whole point of human life is to redirect your love away from temporary things and toward that eternal source.

This is what he means by “ordered love.” Virtue isn’t about following rules or being rational. It’s about loving the right things in the right order. You can love your friends, your family, your favorite food—but you shouldn’t love them the way you love God. You should “use” them (enjoy them as gifts that point beyond themselves) rather than “enjoy” them (treat them as if they were the ultimate point of everything).

This sounds harsh, and it is. But Augustine isn’t saying you shouldn’t love people. He’s saying: if you love people as if they can make you completely happy, you’ll destroy both them and yourself. The only way to love anyone properly is to recognize that neither of you is the source of your own existence. You’re both in this together, both dependent on something greater.

The Really Hard Part: Can We Even Choose to Love Rightly?

So far this sounds like self-help advice: just love the right things and you’ll be happy. But Augustine’s later thinking goes somewhere much darker and more complicated.

Around age 40, he started reading the letters of Paul very carefully. And he became convinced that human beings are not free to simply choose the good. Not naturally, anyway.

Think about the garden scene from earlier. Before his conversion, Augustine knew what he should do. He could describe the good life perfectly. But he couldn’t do it. His will was divided. He wanted to want the good life, but he also wanted his old pleasures. He was, in the technical sense, an addict.

Augustine concluded that this is the universal human condition. Because of the first sin—Adam and Eve’s choice to put themselves above God—human nature got broken. We’re all born into this broken state. We inherit something called “original sin,” which isn’t exactly a thing you did but a condition you’re born into: a profound inability to consistently choose the good, even when you know what it is.

This leads to a shocking conclusion: you can’t save yourself. You can’t even choose to save yourself, because your capacity to choose is damaged. Salvation, if it happens at all, has to be a gift. God has to “unstick” your will, heal your divided heart, make you capable of loving what you know you should love.

And God doesn’t give this gift to everyone. Some people are saved; some aren’t. And there’s no reason you can point to for why one person gets saved and another doesn’t—it’s not because the saved person was smarter or morally better or made better choices. Any good choice they made was itself a product of God’s grace. So the whole thing is circular: God gives grace to some, and those people respond to grace, and then God rewards them for responding, but the response was also God’s gift.

This is called predestination, and it’s one of the most controversial ideas in Western thought. Augustine’s critics then and now say it makes God seem unjust or arbitrary. Augustine’s defense is that nobody deserves salvation anyway—we all deserve punishment for our brokenness—so the fact that God saves anyone is an act of mercy, not injustice. The puzzle is why he doesn’t save everyone.

Augustine’s honest answer: nobody knows. He says this is a mystery that humans can’t penetrate. You just have to trust that God is just, even when you can’t see how.

The Two Cities

Toward the end of his life, Augustine wrote a massive book called The City of God. It was prompted by a historical catastrophe: in 410, the city of Rome was sacked by Gothic invaders. Pagans blamed Christianity for weakening Rome. Augustine wanted to show that this was the wrong way to think about politics altogether.

His argument is radical. There are really only two communities in the world, he says. They’re not nations or empires or churches in the earthly sense. They’re invisible communities defined by what people love:

The City of God: people whose ultimate love is for God. They “use” earthly goods but “enjoy” God.
The Earthly City: people whose ultimate love is for themselves. They treat earthly power, wealth, and pleasure as if they were ultimate.

These two cities are mixed together in history. You can’t look at any institution and say “this is the City of God” or “this is the Earthly City.” The Church contains sinners. The Roman Empire contained saints. Only at the end of history will they be separated.

This has a political implication that still matters today. Augustine thinks no earthly government can be truly just. True justice requires giving everyone what they’re due, and the ultimate thing everyone is due is—according to Augustine—God. A government that doesn’t worship the true God is, strictly speaking, unjust. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Earthly peace, even if imperfect, is still worth pursuing. Christians should work for the well-being of their societies, not because those societies will ever be perfect, but because even flawed peace is better than chaos.

This gives Augustine a surprisingly balanced view of politics. He’s not a revolutionary. He’s not a utopian. He’s not an anarchist. He thinks you should obey the laws, pay your taxes, serve in the army if necessary—but never forget that no earthly city is your true home.

Why This Still Matters

Augustine’s ideas are woven into the fabric of Western thought. When Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” he was using a version of an argument Augustine made first. When modern philosophers talk about the “subjectivity” of time, they’re building on Augustine’s analysis. When people argue about whether humans have free will, they’re often replaying a debate Augustine had with a British monk named Pelagius almost 1,600 years ago.

But the deeper reason Augustine matters is that he took seriously something many philosophers try to avoid: the fact that we are broken, that we often can’t do what we know is right, that we love things that hurt us, that we are creatures of time who long for eternity. He didn’t pretend these problems could be solved by being smarter or trying harder. He thought the human condition was genuinely tragic—and that the only solution was a gift from outside ourselves.

You might not believe in God. You might think Augustine’s solution is wrong. But the problems he identified—the puzzle of time, the fragility of the will, the difficulty of loving well, the limits of politics—don’t go away just because you reject his answers. They’re written into the structure of human experience.

And that’s why a man who died 1,600 years ago, as barbarians besieged his city, is still worth arguing with.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Distention	Augustine’s word for the way our consciousness is stretched across past, present, and future, making time possible but also making us feel fragmented
*Enjoyment (frui)*	Loving something for its own sake, as if it were the ultimate source of happiness—something only God deserves
*Use (uti)*	Loving something for the sake of something greater, recognizing it as a gift that points beyond itself
Original sin	The inherited brokenness of human nature that makes us unable to consistently choose the good, even when we know what it is
Predestination	The idea that God decides in advance who will be saved, not based on their merits but entirely as a free gift
Ordered love	The state of loving the right things in the right order—God first, then others, then things
City of God / Earthly City	Two invisible communities defined by what they ultimately love: God or self

Key People

Augustine (354–430): A North African bishop and philosopher whose writings shaped Western Christianity and philosophy for over a millennium. He spent his early life searching for truth in various philosophies before converting to Christianity, then spent the rest of his life arguing with heretics and refining his ideas about grace, time, and love.
Pelagius (c. 354–418): A British monk who argued that humans have complete free will and can choose the good without divine help. Augustine spent the last decades of his life opposing this view, arguing that Pelagius underestimated the damage of original sin.

Things to Think About

Augustine says we should “use” other people (love them as gifts from God) rather than “enjoy” them (love them as if they could make us completely happy). Does this make friendship impossible? Or is there a way to love someone fully without expecting them to be your entire reason for living?
If Augustine is right that our wills are damaged and we can’t freely choose the good, does that mean criminals aren’t responsible for their actions? Where do you draw the line between “they couldn’t help it” and “they chose to do wrong”?
Augustine’s analysis of time says that past and future exist only in our minds—as memory and expectation. Does this mean time is “just psychological”? Or is there a real external time that our minds are tracking? How could you tell the difference?
The idea of predestination—that some people are destined for salvation and others for damnation—has disturbed many readers. If you found out this doctrine was true, how would it change how you live? Would it make you more compassionate or more careless?

Where This Shows Up

Every time you think about how the past affects the present—in psychology, trauma studies, or just remembering an embarrassing moment—you’re dealing with Augustine’s idea that the past isn’t gone but lives in memory.
Arguments about free will in neuroscience, law, and ethics still replay the Augustine-Pelagius debate: are our choices determined by factors outside our control, or are we genuinely free?
Modern political debates about the limits of government echo Augustine’s idea that no earthly state is truly just and that citizens should be loyal to something beyond the nation.
Philosophy of time is still wrestling with Augustine’s insight that the “present moment” is hard to pin down—physicists and philosophers continue to debate whether time is fundamental or emergent.