The Memory of Paradise (Part I)
Africa's underdevelopment is related to her notion of time, to which Augustine's notion of time as memoria might serve as a necessary correction.
Photo by Nick Moore on Unsplash
We moderns ordinarily think of time as the passage of calendar days – days that can be reduced to the constant tick-tock of a clock or the digital pulses of our smartwatches. Time seems to have lost its former contact with the harmonious rhythms of the wider cosmos. In most primal societies, time was conceived of as a cosmic reality. It was determined by the movement of the heavenly bodies – the rising and setting of the sun or the waxing and waning of the moon. One could argue that ancient peoples were more in touch with the language of creation and the voice of their creator. Catholics and Muslims still use such cycles to determine major liturgical seasons in their religious calendars – Lent, Easter, Ramadhan, and Eid al-Fitr being the most prominent.
Psychic Time vs Physical Time
English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) once stated that St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was the first philosopher to truly understand time. Born in North Africa in Thagaste (located in present-day Algeria), Augustine achieved a unique synthesis of the Greco-Roman culture with Christian wisdom. He lived at the pivotal intersection of two historic epochs – classical antiquity and medieval Christianity – and witnessed the death throes of the former and the birth pangs of the latter.
Dawson noted several times in his writings that no one before Augustine, in the ancient or medieval Western worlds (or elsewhere, for that matter), considered history as progressive. Instead, most who thought about history at all—East and West—thought of it as cyclical: A thing began, it aged, it died, and the cycle started all over again.
Before Augustine, Aristotle had defined time as numerus motus secundum prius et posterius: the measure of motion according to a before and an after. Augustine, who died when his native North Africa was being besieged by Vandals, believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will. Dawson, following Augustine, taught that history was:
… moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel.
We find St. Augustine’s rather complex expositions on the nature of time (prompted, no doubt, by the events of his time) in the 10th and 11th Chapters of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Confessions, and his epic work, The City of God. Augustine understood time as a phenomenon of human consciousness. He claimed that neither the past, present, or future exists. In his Confessions, he says:
Time is present to us as past in memory, as present in attention, and as future in expectation.
In other words, the past is nothing but the human mind as it remembers; the present is nothing but the human mind as it considers the “here and now”; and the future is nothing but the human mind in expectation.
There is, for Augustine, a psychological and interior dimension to the time that governs man in particular, according to which that section of reality that man grasps as present (the “now”) is determined not solely by the calendar or by the movement of heavenly bodies, but primarily by mental attention. Time is precisely “the flow of the ever-present now” – a flow held in place by our mental attention or by the consciousness of the present moment.
Augustine referred to the flow of this “now” using the Latin term memoria. However, the English rendering of this term by the similar-sounding word “memory” is inaccurate. The memoria Augustine was talking about is not a recollection of the past as past. Instead, it is a past that makes itself felt in the present and points toward the future. It links what we nowadays distinguish into three distinct time portions (past, present, and future) into one cohesive reality that fundamentally relies on the springboard of a past so wholesome that it encapsulates and inspires both the present and the future.
To the “Augustinian now” belong our hopes and fears, i.e., what is chronologically future, as well as our fidelity and gratitude, i.e., what is chronologically past. Therefore, this “now” is not just “the present”; it is that peculiar trait of our stream of consciousness that unites the chronological past, the actual present, and the possible future into a singular elusive yet flowing moment.
In our more perceptive moments, each of us can get a glimpse into what Augustine meant by the term memoria. We glimpse it, for instance, whenever we hear certain people (especially old people) talking about the “Good Old Days”. Such expressions contain a certain vivid nostalgia for the past that can inspire the present so that we do not lose track of the future. We can also sense the psychological intensity of memoria as a present moment whenever we get sucked into what some of our contemporaries have called “the zone”. Such moments of concentrated activity normally involve a precarious balance between a heightened sense of present-ness while engaging oneself in an activity that relies on having mastered habits based on the distant past.
In summary, for Augustine, time is more of a human phenomenon than a cosmic event. As humans inhabiting the cosmos, we are located more where our spirit is than where our body is located. As free beings with desires and motivations, we are where our hearts or greatest loves are “located”. In temporal-spatial terms, we can say that a human being is not only located where his feet are but where his heart is. This last idea is simply another way of restating the Ubi Thesaurus Cor principle, which we can translate as: “A person’s treasure is found where his heart dwells.”
Memoria as Anamnesis
The Greeks in the Platonic tradition used a linguistically clear and philosophically deep term – anamnesis – to refer to humanity’s original memory of the true and the good. They spoke of it as an inherent capacity to recall, an inner sense present in each of us from the moment of our conception. Augustine picked up on this Platonic insight in his reflections:
We could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us. (De Trinitate VIII, 3 (4), PL 42, 949)
The Greeks understood that, from his origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. For the Greeks, this anamnesis of the origin is not a conceptually articulated knowing – a store of retrievable concepts. Rather, it is an inner ontological tendency within all men that directs them towards the divine. It is the ground of man’s existence – a deep subterranean memory that ran as a substratum in the subconscious stream of all men. Augustine must have had at the back of his mind just such a deep notion of memory when referring to what he later translated into Latin as memoria.
It is easy to imagine Augustine looking at the aimless and bloody chaos of the world around him and projecting his reflections on history toward the world of eternal realities from whence the world of sense derives all its significance. With Augustine, human time found its apogee –Eternity. Now, anamnesis not only opened up all men to the prelapsarian origins of time, as it had done for the Platonists; it also opened man up to his climactic fulfillment – the God whose very nature it is To Be.
Reflecting on the nature of this infinite God who, according to his Christian faith, condescended to dwell among finite men, Augustine got a glimpse of a hermeneutical key that would enable him to bridge the gap between time and eternity. If the eternal had truly entered time, it meant that the things of the future could spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future. This key enabled him to conceive of any present time touched by such a future presence as a continuous relationship or dialogue between the finite and the infinite – between the temporal and the eternal. Our earthly activities could echo into eternity just as God’s divine activity had reverberated in time.
Plato’s dualism was no longer sufficient to explain the relationship between the material world and the world of forms. The monolithic god of Aristotle was no longer adequate to make sense of movement and change. An “Unmoved Mover” could not afford to relate with finite activity lest such activity compromise his pristine and pure actuality. The Greek Fates, the elemental spirits, and the tyrannical cosmic forces of the universe were no longer in charge of our destinies. They had been deposed by a personal God who had overturned the worldview of that time. It was not the laws of matter or mathematics or evolution that had the final say, but reason, will, love – a Person. Time could finally be conceived of as an entity fundamentally shaped neither by despair nor presumption but by Hope.
To give a brief recap, Augustine’s new vision of time was built on the Platonic concept of Anamnesis but went beyond it. With the advent of Christianity, a new light was shed on the nature and trajectory of the cosmos and man. Nihilism was no longer an option. The world had a clear beginning and a clear end – an end which, though not present as an actuality (i.e., as an event that has already taken place in an “alternate universe”) was nevertheless truly present as hope – as a seed planted in the soil of time. In a crumbling world, this new virtue became a new mode of temporal existence because it granted men sure knowledge of a future world – a world potentially present in time as an oak tree is potentially present in an acorn. Each human action had significance, and collective human history had an overall meaning and direction. The providential umbrella of the Christian God covered all time – past, present, and future.
An African concept of time and the meaning of development
We have all come across the concept of “African time”. Foreigners, especially those from Europe and America, often accuse Africans of tardiness and a total disregard for schedules and programs—our reputation as “terrible time-keepers” precedes us.
Does the African place any value on time? Is there a peculiarly African concept of time? Is time, in any way, seen by Africans as a retrospective tool to reflect on the past so as to improve on the present and plan for the future? What is the general thought pattern of Africans about time?
John Samuel Mbiti (1931-2019), a professor of African Philosophy and Religion, discussed the African concept of time in the context of the religious thought system of Africans. According to Mbiti, time (especially in the traditional African setting) is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a very long past, a present, and virtually no future. This notion runs contrary to the linear time concept in Western thought, which also has a long past, a present, and an indefinite future.
Mbiti is one of the few African philosophers who has taken the trouble to elaborate on the concept of time vis-à-vis the morphology of language. Proficient in at least seven languages (English, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Kamba, and Swahili), Mbiti noticed that, in general, African languages had no adequate verb tenses to refer to the distant future. Focusing his research on two particular tribes in East Africa—the Akamba and Gikuyu of Kenya—but also drawing insights from peoples elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Mbiti concluded that, by and large, Africans had no time consideration of the future. Mbiti taught that the African’s concept of time might help explain beliefs, attitudes, practices, and the general way of life of African people, not only in the traditional setup but also in the modern situation (whether political, economic, educational, or religious life).
Mbiti called “Sasa” the time that covers the “now” period (the one imbued with a sense of immediacy and nearness). The Sasa period covers the recently experienced, that which is about to occur, or the almost realizable. Since it also has to do with the already experienced, it means that everyone has his own Sasa, and the older a person gets, the more profound his Sasa. As a measure of that which is about to occur, Sasa is also a term that covers an extremely brief future. Mbiti’s experience with local languages made him claim that if a future event was beyond, say, two years, it could not be conceived and spoken of since it had no place in the African’s consciousness.
The connection between the past and the present in Mbiti reflects the importance of the nexus between a similar past and present that Heidegger spoke of in his magnum opus, Being and Time. In the Heideggerian expression (vergagenheitsvergessenheit), if the present suffers this “forgetfulness of the past”, there would be the death of sein (present being) as well, for its life is inseparable from its past, and the forgetfulness-of-the-past leads to the decay of the present. Such an extension of the past into the present would help to explain why, when it comes to offering sacrifices in Africa, the eldest person with the longest Sasa period is usually charged with the task of offering sacrifices on behalf of the community since he remembers the ancestors to whom the sacrifice is offered more than others.
Besides the Sasa, there is also the “Zamani”, which Mbiti calls the “Macro-Time”. He declares that Zamani is the graveyard of time, the period of termination, the dimension in which everything finds its halting point. Zamani is the final storehouse of all phenomena and events, “the ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before”. From Mbiti’s perspective, the African’s concept of time is not linear and forward-looking; rather, it moves forward by spiraling backward, so to speak.
Admittedly, though such a concept of time does not place Africa in an advantageous position for development (given that little or no surplus can be produced for investment and expansion within such a worldview), it is undeniable that Mbiti was on to something. Nor is he not the only African thinker who has made such observations: Maurier1, Nyasami,2 and Mbeki3 (former South African President) have all made similar claims. While we may disagree with them, our nonchalant attitude towards time is indeed one of the main reasons for the continuing underdevelopment of our continent.
If we dared to be brutally honest with ourselves, we would also admit that we are still trapped in a cyclical, backward-looking, vision of time. Even a cursory glance at African myths reveals this. The myths of African peoples say nothing about the future but much about the past. Aren’t we often more concerned with the history that has passed than with a future that is full of opportunities? Could this be why Africans rarely undertake medium and long-term developments based on future economic projections? Don’t we still perceive the passage of time as the cycle of days, months, and seasons that are just enough to cover our basic subsistence needs? Do we have a futuristic theology or ideology that flows into an eternal future, as is the case with, say, Heidegger, or Teilhard de Chardin, or Western Christianity in general – a theology or eschatology that talks about a future or where there will be judgment, retribution, heaven, and hell?
Here are some honest questions we could ask ourselves: Do we have a concept of time that incorporates development? Did we ever have a futuristic vision of time before the colonialists came into the picture? Do we have one now? Just as there is a coming-of-age phase when a child matures and stops blaming his failures on his progenitors or his poor upbringing, there is an expiry date for blaming the Europeans and Americans for our chronic underdevelopment. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that underdevelopment in our continent is not fundamentally attributable to the effects of colonization. It is, first and foremost, a function of our vision of time and our corresponding inability to escape from a retrospective cycle of time.
A final valuable insight into the African’s concept of time comes from American theologian Brian Abshire:
"The problems facing modern Africa are due to the effects of paganism. Africa has a thin layer of Western materialism covering millennia of pagan philosophy. The endemic poverty, sickness, tribal warfare, etc., can be attributed to the paganism which continues to operate. The problem is not race but religion. The main difference between white Europeans and black Africans is not skin color but the influence of 2000 years of the Christian religion. ... Africa will continue to experience its cycles of poverty, warfare, and famine until this pagan orientation has been overcome by the Gospel.”
What Abshire is arguing here is particularly relevant to those Africans who are fond of blaming all the woes of the continent on the colonialists. Such Africans are almost always more concerned with how Europe underdeveloped Africa than with how they are themselves destroying the future of Africa through corruption, violence, laziness, and poor leadership – as if “the others” are the full-blown sinners whereas we were conceived immaculate.
Let us admit it. There is a glaring deficiency in our vision of time and life. And where there is no vision, there is no future, no development worthy of the name. Let us say it more clearly and in religious language. Our time-consciousness stands in need of redemption. We need a vision of time that does not lock us inside the prison of the past. We need mechanisms that will help us overcome guilt and hatred. We need a hopeful notion of the afterlife that will help us rectify past injustices. We need a vision of time that frees us from sliding into the abyss of death and despair. We need, to use the words of Mbiti, to be rescued from drowning inside that bottomless “ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before”.
If Africa must be like other civilizations that have taken advantage of temporal conditions to build artifacts that have stood the test of time and the vicissitudes of human history, she must change her mentality towards time. Africa’s development is tied to her vision of the future and her management of time. And if we are bent on dwelling on the past, perhaps the Saint from North Africa could provide us with some clues to help jump-start our journey of development.
References
Abshire, Brian (1997, December). Paganism and Modem Africa. Chalcedon Report. Reprinted in The Christian Digest (1998, November).
Aristotle (1941). The Physics. In R. Mckeon (Ed.). The basic works of Aristotle (pp. 292-293). New York: Random House. (Original work written in the 4th century BC.)
Augustine, St. (1963). The Confessions of St Augustine. R. Warner (trans.) NewYork: Mentor. (Original work published in 426 AD.)
Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson edited by Gerald J. Russello. Reissued by the Catholic University of America Press (1998).
Heidegger, M. (1983). Being and Time. London: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published in 1927.)
Malan, J.S., “The cosmological factor in development programmes“, South Africa Journal of Ethnology 11(2), 1999.
Maurier, H. (1984). Philosophie de L’Afrique Noire. St Augustine Anthropos Institute.
Mbiti, J. S. (1969). African Religions and Philosophy. Kenya: Sunlitho.
Nyasami, J. M. (2010). Philosophy of development: An African perspective: Reflections on why Africa may never develop on the Western model. Kenya: Consolata Institute of Philosophy.
Scarborough, D. (1999, May/June). Speech on Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance: African Spiritual Powers versus God's Word.
Maurier for instance observes that for the pasturing populations of Africa, time is concretized in the various seasons, the main ones being the rainy and dry seasons.
Nyasami wrote that “[no] meaningful progress can be achieved in the absence of a well-coordinated programme that is managed within the specifications of time and space”.
See his African Renaissance project: https://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/the-african-renaissance-project-of-thabo-mbeki.