 All this is the framework of Augustine’s famous meditation about time in the Confessiones (11.17–41), whose context is an exegesis of Genesis and which constantly presupposes the distinction of time and eternity (much has been written on this text, but particularly illuminating treatments are Flasch 1993; Mesch 1998: 295–343; Matthews 2005: 76–85; Helm 2014; Hoffmann 2017). Augustine opens the section with the question, “What is time?” (Confessiones 11.17) but in fact has no intention of giving a definition of time. Whereas his accounts outside the Confessiones center on cosmic or physical time, he here focuses on how we experience time from a first-person perspective and what it means for us and our relationship to ourselves and to God to exist temporally. In this sense, the purpose of the book is ethical rather than cosmological. Augustine begins by observing that though of the three familiar “parts” of time, past, present and future, none really exists (the past having ceased to exist, the future not existing yet, and the present being without extension), time doubtless has reality for us. This is so because time is present to us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present attention to the present and our present expectation of the future (ib. 11.26). The phenomenal proof of this claim is the experience of measuring time by comparing remembered or expected portions of time to each other or of repeating a poem we know by heart, when, as we proceed, the words traverse our attention (the present), passing from expectation (the future) to memory (the past; ib. 11.38). We would thus be unable to relate past, present and future events, to remember the history of our own lives and even to be aware of our personal identity if our being in time was not divided into memory, attention and expectation and, at the same time, unified by the connectedness and the simultaneous presence of these. This ambivalent state Augustine calls “a distention of the soul” (ib. 11.33; 38–39, perhaps echoing Plotinus, Enneads III.7.11.41); this is the closest Confessiones 11 comes to a definition of time. The stability of this precarious unity is however dependent on the higher unity of the eternal God—as the whole narrative of the Confessiones teaches, we cannot make sense of the memory of our life unless we perceive the ceaseless presence of God’s providence and grace in it. Toward the end of the book, Augustine introduces the Pauline “straining forward to what lies ahead” (Philippians 3:12–14)—as he reads it, the orientation or “intention” of the soul toward God—as a counterpoint to the soul’s distention in time and concludes with an exhortation to turn from the dispersion of temporal existence to the timeless eternity of God which alone guarantees truth and stability (ib. 11.39–41).