Time as “Distension of the Mind”: the Concept of Saint Augustine and Its Interpretations by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Paul Ricœur

Abstract

In Book 11 of the Confessions, Augustine thinks of time as “distension of the mind”. He understands distentio animi both as an extension of the mind that reaches out in opposite directions in order to measure duration and as a spreading out and scattering of the mind occupied and distracted by the multiplicity of temporal things: the existential and spiritual meaning, inspired by Phil 3:12-14, is thus added to the philosophical meaning of distentio as an act of the mind that strives to grasp duration. In his reading of Book 11 of the Confessions, Balthasar favors the second meaning: the distension of the spirit is “the fragmentation of existence” that characterizes the time of the fall which we can hardly dissociate from the time of creation in our experience. Ricœur, on the other hand, gives priority to the first meaning: what he is interested in is the enigma of the measurement of time which manifests the impossibility of a pure phenomenology of time.