Catherine Jenkins (KCL) - 2024-25 Students
catherine.jenkins@kcl.ac.uk

The relationship of beauty and time in Augustine's writing and his 'poetic' solution to the aporias of time.

My research will explore the interdependence of time and beauty in the writing of St. Augustine (354-430 CE). I will argue that this connection underpins his objective understanding of time and his poetic solution to the subjective vicissitudes of living in time: anchored in God, we can integrate our life story as a meaningful narrative, which will be perfected after death.

This research will combine the study of literature, philosophy, theology and aesthetics to make new connections between time and beauty. As well as facilitating collaboration across Arts and Humanities, and potentially with philosophy of science, this reading could help frame pastoral responses to dementia. Augustine saw memory as crucial for self-identity, while recognising memory can fail (Paige Hochschild, 2010). For Augustine, integration of a life story does not rely entirely on the individual’s own memory, but neither is the individual’s story overwhelmed by God. He also recognises the power of music to connect a person with their memories, their community, and with the transcendent.

In Confessions Book 11, Augustine famously asks: ‘what is time? Provided no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.’ He suggests that past, present and future events exist in the mind as memory, awareness and expectation, and so time may be a kind of ‘stretching of the soul’ (‘distentio animi’) (11.20.26-26.33). This idea influenced Husserl and Heidegger and led to a prevailing view that Augustine understood time to be psychological, shared by Paul Ricoeur (Zachhuber 2022). Ricoeur (1984) argues that psychological and cosmological approaches to time mutually occlude one another even as they imply one another. Time-consciousness cannot provide any unit to measure time, while the succession of movements alone cannot account for the mind’s discernment of past, present and future. He seeks a resolution through poetics rather than speculation: time becomes human when organised as a narrative, and narrative is meaningful through temporality.

Other scholars argue that Augustine had an objective view of time as a phenomenon resulting from motion or change, in line with Aristotle (Gerard O’Daly 1987, Jason Carter 2011, and Simo Knuuttila 2014). I agree with these authors that the ‘distentio animi’ is an epistemological solution for how we measure time. But I think Augustine developed his own distinctive view of time as interdependent with form. In Confessions 12 he says that time appears in creation together with form (12.29.40) and that created things are subject to the progression of time according to the changes of movement and form appointed to them (12.12.15). In the Literal Meaning of Genesis, he describes God creating beauty by ordering forms in time and space (4.3.7).

Ricoeur thought that Augustine’s only real solution to the aporias of time is the ending of human narrative in an unchanging eternity. I will argue that Augustine develops a poetic solution, which like Ricoeur’s, is based on human narrative, but unlike Ricoeur’s, is anchored in God’s transcendence. Augustine uses the analogy of reciting a hymn. His attention holds together memory and expectation through the life of the performance. He presses ahead, recollecting himself by following God. What holds for the hymn holds in an individual human life and in the ‘whole age’ of humanity (Confessions 11.28.38-29.39). Augustine’s hymn analogy also evokes the power of music to transcend the passing moment through its temporal form (Jessica Wiskus 2020).

For Augustine, heaven does not mean the end of form and movement: ‘everything there will be lovely in its form, and lovely in its motion, lovely in motion and in rest…’ The body will perfectly obey the soul and the soul will never will anything but what is to bring ‘new beauty’ to soul and body (City of God 22.30). I will explore how Augustine reconciles this with the ending of time and change.

Primary supervisor: Professor Susannah Ticciati