Where Time Goes When the Body Stops

One honest question remains, and it is worth answering rather than leaving hanging: what is the intermediate state actually like, from the inside? If it is conscious, if it is real, what does duration mean for a soul that no longer has a body moving through a physical day?

Augustine of Hippo, writing his Confessions at the end of the fourth century, spent an entire book of that work wrestling with the nature of time itself, and arrived at a conclusion worth carrying into this question. Time, he argued, is not an external container that souls move through the way a river moves past a fixed bank. Time is a property of the soul's own experience — what he called the distension of the soul, the stretching of consciousness across the tension between memory of what has passed and expectation of what has not yet come. The past exists, for us, only as present memory. The future exists, for us, only as present expectation. Only the present moment actually is — and for a soul still embedded in a body, still moving through biological and historical sequence, that present moment is a knife-edge, squeezed thin between what has already happened and what has not happened yet.

This matters for the intermediate state because it suggests that what Paul calls "far better" is not simply more of the same kind of time, continuing on without a body to inhabit it. It is very plausibly a different mode of existence altogether — not duration stretched thin between memory and anxiety, but presence, undiluted, unsqueezed by the fractures that a body moving through fallen time imposes on ordinary human consciousness. The soul who departs to be with Christ does not sit in a waiting room counting days. It rests in a presence that this book's Part Five will describe more fully, using the ancient theological category of aevum — existence with succession but without decay, without the erosion that time inflicts on everything still embedded in a body. Whatever that presence is like from the inside, Paul's own word for it remains the most reliable guide available: far better.