Abstract

BETWEEN St. Augustine and Plato, as between St. Thomas and Aristotle, there are significant analogies. If Whitehead exaggerated only pardonably little in describing Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, one could point to a similar relationship between Christian thought and Augustine. Plato and Augustine were fertile in inspiration, Aristotle and Aquinas were systematizers on the grandest scale. Augustine is often styled the Christian Plato; this is true in part because he was a Platonist, but perhaps even more because both men were great artists, who have scarcely had rivals in the whole of Western philosophical history. Even in their manner of artistry they agree, for both were censorious of art, and indeed for analogous reasons; yet each manifested in his writings an artistry that somehow achieved the goal for the attainment of which he disputed with art itself. The difficulty of disengaging from the thought of Plato, or of Augustine, a series of views, a synthesis of arguments, a statement of acquired conclusions, is notorious; the expositor who, like myself, undertakes to explain the Augustinian view of time cannot hope simply by excerpting a series of propositions from the living dialectic of the Confessions to present them as a remainderless rendering of the original, any more than one can translate poetry into prose and expect to retain its meaning, without remainder. If the attempt is made, there remains, despite all disclaimers and warnings, an ineluctable element of betrayal. I offer what I do, neither in the guise of an accurate summary of Augustine's views on time, nor as a rebuttal of other interpretations of Augustine's mind, but simply as an incitement to the reading of the Confessions, and as a provocation or stimulus to philosophical mimesis.