The Essential Augustine
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 235 short one." We both say and hear these things, and we understand and make ourselves understood by others. They are
very obvious and most familiar, but on the other hand they are deeply hidden and their discovery is a present problem.
I have heard from a certain learned man that the 29. movements of the sun, moon, and stars are times, yet I did not agree. For why are not times rather the movements of all bodies? As a matter of fact, if the heavenly bodies stopped moving and a potter's wheel were moving, would there be no time by which we might measure these turnings and say that they go on in equal intervals; or if it were moved sometimes more slowly and sometimes more quickly, that some intervals are longer and some shorter? Or when we should say this, would we not be speaking in time, and would there be in our words some long syllables and others short, except that some sounded for a longer time and others for a shorter?
O God, vouchsafe unto men the ability to see in a small thing the common conceptions of things both small and great. There are stars and shining bodies in the heavens, "for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." There are, indeed. But while I should not say that the revolution of that little wooden wheel is a day, on the other hand that scholar of ours would not say then that time does not exist.
I desire to know the meaning and nature of time, 30. by which we measure the movements of bodies and say, for example, that this movement is twice as long as that one. My question is: since a day is spoken of, not only as the period when the sun is above the earth, in the sense that day is distinguished from night, but also in terms of its complete circuit from the east back to the east—as when we say: "so many days went by" (for we speak of a certain number of days as including the nights, not as excluding the length of the nights)—and since a day is made up of ibe movement of the sun in a circuit from the east back to the east, my question is: whether this movement is itself the day, or is the duration in which it goes on, or both.
For if the first [the movement of the sun] were the day, then it would be a day, even if the sun completed its course in just an hour, If the second [the duration], then it would not be a day if the duration from the rising of the sun to its next rising were so brief as to take but one hour—tather, the sun would have to go around twenty-four times to make a day.