Podcast
Philosophize This!
In his Confessions, Augustine reflects on his past sins, even those committed in infancy, expressing deep self-condemnation and highlighting his belief in personal accountability for all actions from birth. He details his journey from Manichaeism to Christianity and the pivotal moment of his conversion.
Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.
— Episode: Episode #016 ... Saint Augustine
Episode: Episode #016 ... Saint Augustine
In his Confessions, Augustine reflects on his past sins, even those committed in infancy, expressing deep self-condemnation and highlighting his belief in personal accountability for all actions from birth. He details his journey from Manichaeism to Christianity and the pivotal moment of his conversion.
Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.
I went to Carthage where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust, bodily desire like a morass and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists which clouded over and obscured my heart so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust. This was the age at which the frenzy gripped me and I surrendered myself entirely to lust which your law forbids but human hearts are not ashamed to sanction.
But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.
My soul speaks with truth when it confesses to you that I do measure time. Is it the case then, Lord my God, that I perform the act of measuring but do not know what I am measuring? I measure the motion of a body in time. Is it the case that I do not measure the time itself?
It is inaccurate to say there are three tenses of time, past, present, and future. Though it might properly be said, there are three tenses of times, the present of past things, the present of present things, the present of future things. These are three realities in the mind, but nowhere else as far as I can see, for the present of past things is memory, the present of present things is attention, and the present of future things is expectation. If we are allowed to put it that way, then I do see three tenses or times, and I admit that they are three.
