Augustine and Time

(Hardback)

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This collection examines the topic of time in the life and works of Augustine of Hippo. Adopting a global perspective on time as a philosophical and theological problem, the volume includes reflections on the meaning of history, the mortality of human bodies, and the relationship between temporal experience and linguistic expression. As Augustine himself once observed, time is both familiar and surprisingly strange. Everyones days are structured by temporal rhythms and routines, from watching the clock to whiling away the hours at work. Few of us, however, take the time to sit down and figure out whether time is real or not, or how it is we are able to hold our past, present, and future thoughts together in a straight line so that we can recite a prayer or sing a song.

Divided into five sections, the essays collected here highlight the ongoing relevance of Augustines work even in settings quite distinct from his own era and context. The first three sections, organized around the themes of interpretation, language, and gendered embodiment, engage directly with Augustines own writings, from the Confessions to the City of God and beyond. The final two sections, meanwhile, explore the afterlife of the Augustinian approach in conversation with medieval Islamic and Christian thinkers (like Avicenna and Aquinas), as well as a broad range of Buddhist figures (like Dharmakrti and Vasubandhu).

What binds all of these diverse chapters together is the underlying sense that, regardless of the century or the tradition in which we find ourselves, there is something about the puzzle of temporality that refuses to go away. Time, as Augustine knew, demands our attention. This was true for him in late ancient North Africa. It was also true for Buddhist thinkers in South and East Asia. And it remains just as true for humankind in the twenty-first century, as people around the globe continue to grapple with the reality of time and the challenges of living in a world that always seems to be to be speeding up rather than slowing down.

Reviews

In Augustines Confessions, the saint famously uncovers timethat most familiar experienceas a rich vein of inquiry. The chapters in this volume mine that vein, showing anew its depth and breadth, through engagement with an unusually broad group of thinkers and themes. Materialist, Buddhist, and Reformation texts refract Augustines thought in illuminating new directions, while conventional Augustinian themes like sin, grace, creation, and eschatology are productively reexamined. Above all, these chapters remind us that an investigation of time is, at bedrock, always an investigation of ourselves.

-- Erika Kidd, University of St. Thomas

Drawing on an array of disciplinary perspectives, Augustine and Time offers a wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and ambitious collection of essays that brings together historical and thematic approaches to examine Augustine's views on time, the Medieval reception history of his views, and possibilities for inter-religious dialogue.

-- Matthew Drever, University of Tulsa

This fine essay collection offers something rare. An international team of established and emerging scholars write from multiple perspectives, offer close readings of Augustine, fan out into reception history, and bring different disciplines and religious traditions into conversation. That breadth combines with the depth of focusing upon a single topic (time) while diving especially into one famous text (Book 11 of Confessions). The result is at once a dimensional and fine-grained take on Augustines thought. Augustine and Time is a suggestive, absorbing group of essays.

-- Michael Cameron, University of Portland

Author Bio

John Doody is Senior Visiting Professor at Arizona State University. He is a member of the School for Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

Kim Paffenroth is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Honors Program at Iona College. He has written extensively on Augustine, the Bible, and on the interface between Christian belief and popular culture. In the last category, he produced Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romeros Visions of Hell on Earth (Baylor, 2006), which won the Bram Stoker Award and led Dr. Paffenroth to write several popular zombie novels. His newest work on Augustine, On King Lear, The Confessions, and Human Experience and Nature, is due out in 2021 from Bloomsbury.

Sean Hannan is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His first book, On Time, Change, History, and Conversion, was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. With W. Ezekiel Goggin, he is currently co-authoring Mysticism and Materialism in the Wake of German Idealism (under contract with Routledge).