Wieczność teraźniejszości. Psychologiczne ujęcie czasu w kontekście istnienia Boga według Augustyna z Hippony
Eternity of the present. Psychological approach to time in the context of God’s existence according to Augustine of Hippo

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the concept of eternity and temporality in the perspective of the early medieval thinker, philosopher and Latin-language writer Augustine of Hippo in the context of the existence of God. It explains how the author distinguished eternity from time and emphasizes that eternity is a condition for the existence of temporal reality. In the first place, when discussing the author’s thoughts, conclusions are described about how he grasped eternity in contrast with the temporal world. Augustine describes eternity as immutability, distinguishing it from the changeability of time. Then, the experience of temporality by human consciousness was analyzed and the subjectivity of experiencing the passage of moments was emphasized. Augustine saw the impancy of the present and at the same time the impossibility of staying in it permanently. He understood time as a form of our mentality and distinguished three areas of time: the presence of the past, the presence of the present, and the presence of the future. Like most of his contemporaries, he misunderstood time linearly by giving it a specific direction, i.e. an arrow, which in fact is our cognitive illusion. The article uses the classic works of Augustine of Hippo, such as “De civitate Dei” and “Confessiones” and on their basis presents the concepts of the thinker from Tagasta and additionally expands them with reflections on the subjective experience of transience, which is experienced in human consciousness based on psychological knowledge.

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