THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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(l.c., XXII, 30). But on the path towards this Augustine remains the greatest discoverer right up until Leibniz of the objective function of time: furthermore as a function
of the world itself, despite the mythologically fixed connections. For Augustine ultimately stressed, in a distant vision of process which was unavoidable again and again,
nothing less than the mutability of the world which makes this process possible. And this in the literal, both negative and ultimately complex positive sense of the concept
of changeability — as a fall into the transitory (corruptio, defectus), but above all also as a progression (augmentatio, profectus) of deliverance. Though here
Augustine's concept of time (and this first philosopher of history was accordingly also the first to think deeply about time) is strangely shackled both to mere reality
based on experience and to the image of the hour­glass simply trickling down. Time trickles as it were out of the retort of the future through the narrow crack of the
present incessantly, inexorably into the retort of the past; whereby an image of gravity, an image of anti­flight simultaneously gets under way. In this respect the
depraving element, indeed the character of death in the lapse of time now also predominates, seen from this standpoint, the transport out of vague future through the so
narrow actuality of the moment down into an increasingly accumulating No­Longer­Being of the past. Changeability, conceived along these lines predominantly as
corruptio and defectus, therefore signifies in its time merely an imperfection in Being, a defect, indeed a downright evil; Augustine thinks he is able to devour this kind of
changeability with the nothingness out of which the world was created and into which ‘all things can also pass away, quae ex nihilo facta sunt’* (l.c., XII, 8). But
Augustine advances from the falling of this hour­glass time thoroughly dialectically to time as a pilgrimage, to movement out of the defectus into nothingness towards the
profectus into expectant fullness. If the temporal being of creatures and the world sinks into the past again and again because of their share of nothingness, temporal
being as unfolding proceeds into the future again and again, from which its existence and ultimately an ever truer one accrues. According to Augustine's mythology, of
course, only the creator mundi himself, i.e. God, keeps us above the abyss and ultimately saves us from the abyss; otherwise there would not be any process upwards.
But this is also the way in which events, instead of merely flowing away into the specific nothingness of the past, move into the unfolding of the future, into the realization
of its possibilities, especially of the possibilities of salvation pre­arranged for it. Though their content lies for Augustine once again totally
* ‘which are made from nothingness’.