Tempo social na filosofia de Agostinho: a interpretação indicial retrospectiva de uma história sagrada linear

The present essay focuses on ‘social time’, distinct from comprehensions of this phenomenon scope of physics, social time inhabits the discourse, the habitus, expressed by means of practice as a medium over which human actions are formulated according to the logical possibilities it provides. Christianity knowingly propounded a linear history, as a continuous process, albeit sacred, punctuated by divine interventions. However, this linear sacralized history could only be properly understood with the exegetic medieval system; a set of intellectual rules rationally organized for the reconstruction of history through dormant signs and similes. Biographically, the work of Augustine of Hippo provided tools for these interpretations. There, we can find some of the foundations of a Christian model of social time, being ‘indexicality’ a meaning-creating process based on retrospective reading of the linear history as an open book prone to be interpreted. Augustine’s formulations about a psychological time, as a founding father of Christian theology, provide some important cues to this social notion of indexical time, and how it became so central to Western culture.