Published in Returning to Eden

The present article is dedicated to trace thoughts about some identifiable correspondences between Augustine of Hippo's conceptions of evil and of time through the indication of a relation between the movements of the voluntary defection of the will and the dispersion in the temporal mutability of the human creature in its link with non-being. To this end, some aspects of these conceptions will be examined both as worked out in De libero arbitrio and those elaborated in the Confessions, more specifically in Book XI (and to a certain extent in X), both works of the hyponensis where they appear, we believe, mutually implicated through the notions of conversio ad creaturam and distentio animi respectively.