Abstract

Book XI of his Confessions contains Augustine’s celebrated ‘treatise’ on time. In reality, however, the ‘treatise’ is no such thing, but rather an integral part of a discussion of God’s creation through the Word: if God creates by speaking, as Scripture affirms, then how can God speak, given the fact that he must be thought not to be subject to time? What is a timeless word? While these are the questions that Augustine explicitly addresses in Book XI, there is something very important that he does not justify at all: namely, the possibility of speaking the world into existence. My paper investigates the episteme within which such a claim can make sense. How must one conceive of the relationship between the world and words to be able to assume that the latter can ‘make’ the former?