Book contents
- The Christian Invention of Time
- Greek Culture in the Roman World
- The Christian Invention of Time
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
- Introduction
- Part I
- Chapter 1 God’s Time
- Chapter 2 The Time of Death
- Chapter 3 Telling Time
- Chapter 4 Waiting
- Chapter 5 Time and Time Again
- Chapter 6 Making Time Visible
- Chapter 7 At the Same Time
- Chapter 8 Timelessness and the Now
- Chapter 9 Life-times
- Chapter 10 The Rape of Time
- Part II
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
Chapter 9 - Life-times
from Part I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2022
- The Christian Invention of Time
- Greek Culture in the Roman World
- The Christian Invention of Time
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
- Introduction
- Part I
- Chapter 1 God’s Time
- Chapter 2 The Time of Death
- Chapter 3 Telling Time
- Chapter 4 Waiting
- Chapter 5 Time and Time Again
- Chapter 6 Making Time Visible
- Chapter 7 At the Same Time
- Chapter 8 Timelessness and the Now
- Chapter 9 Life-times
- Chapter 10 The Rape of Time
- Part II
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Subject Index
Summary
This is the first question that Augustine asks about himself in the Confessions, and it begins with a stumbling into speech. He does not know where he comes from. This is the question which stalls Sophocles’ Oedipus in his domineering argument with Teiresias, starts his search for his parentage, and thus begins his downfall into knowledge and self-destruction. Oedipus does not know where he comes from, an ignorance displayed even and especially when, with multiply-layered ironies, he calls himself ‘the know-nothing Oedipus’. It is also the foundational question for Freud, reader of Oedipus, who insists that for all the productive work of analysis of the self we can never fully and properly know our own self, and certainly not the answer to where the self comes from. Augustine specifies huc ‘to here’, which he immediately glosses as ‘this life that dies or death that lives’. The horizon of expectation is defined – in a way that is alien to Sophocles or Freud – by this definition of a life-time as a hesitation between a journey towards death, or an already living death: a theologically defined time shaped between the already and the not yet.
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- The Christian Invention of TimeTemporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity, pp. 181 - 205Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022