Distention and eschatology

In a 1957 essay in Man and Time , Gilles Quispel claims that Augustine’s views of time have been extracted from the “great struggle between a cyclical and a historical view of the world, between archaism and Christianity,” and therefore have been misunderstood. Augustine “comes to grips with the Neoplatonists and turns time inward in order to make room for eschatology.”

If time is distentio animi , then it dismembers the soul, breaking it on the rack of memory, expectation, and attention. As Augustine says, “I am divided up in time, whose order I do not know, and my thoughts are torn with every kind of tumult.” But the theme of distentio is set in the context of an intentio toward eternity. Augustine’s goal, according to Quispel, is “to show that his adversaries’ cyclical conception of time comprehends no true eternity but only a circular, static finiteness, and that eternity, or rather the all-embracing Eternal One, constitutes time and encompasses it in his incomprehensible otherness, and that man, if he withdraws from the outside world, can in some way, through his intentio , come into contact with this eternity, this original, genuine, creative time of God.”

Eternity itself is experienced in ecstatic moments. Quispel quotes from Jean Guitton’s classic work on Augustine and time: “Why might there not for some men be moments in which they would, through grace, be sufficiently present to themselves, not of course to coincide with God’s eternity, but at least to savor their eternity in God in hope and anticipation?”

Augustine himself describes such a moment in Confessions, when he sits with Monica overlooking (as always!) a garden in Ostia and has a taste of some “it” that transcends the world and time. Quispel suggests that the “it” is “the heavenly Jerusalem,” and this scene points to the reality that Augustine’s view of time is actually aiming for: “suddenly we see what lies behind the distentio and intentio : here we find a recurrence of those original themes of the Judeo-Christian eschatology – diaspora and return to Jerusalem – but in a new, more inward sense: only through the restoration of his relation with God, only by being overpowered by God, can man achieve his wholeness. The theme of the dispersio is transferred into the soul.” Distentio and intentio is subordinate to the already/not yet of standard Christian eschatology.