On Lyric Time in Patristic Conversion Narratives

A Side Gloss to “You Called, You Shouted”

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I. Lyric Time Defined

Lyric time is not linear. It is not history. It does not proceed from premise to consequence, sin to salvation, act to atonement.

Lyric time is evental recurrence—the same sensation, returned to differently.
It is simultaneity through affect.
It is time measured not in chronology but in the intensity of perception.

The key temporal unit is not the step, but the wave.
Not what follows, but what swells.

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II. Augustine’s Conversion: Lyric-Temporal Logic

Though Augustine’s Confessions appear structured as a conversion narrative, they are saturated with lyric time.

The voice that cries out in Book 10—

“You called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness…”

—is not sequentially downstream from his garden experience in Book 8.

It is timelessly entangled with it.

Augustine is not describing a past event.
He is re-entering a flame-state.
The presence is not remembered. It is re-experienced.

That’s lyric time.

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III. The Patristic Lyric Tradition

Though patristic writers are commonly read as theologians and systematizers, many of their writings encode lyric temporality through:

• Repetition of sensory language

• Spiraling introspection

• Immediate address to the divine

• Present-tense encounter with past revelation

Examples:

• Ephrem the Syrian’s hymns, which layer divine contact in recursive poetic image-fields.

• Gregory of Nazianzus’ autobiographical poems, structured not as testimony but as ache.

• Augustine’s own Confessions, which is not memoir but desire-mapping.

These are not linear confessions.
They are lyric records of epistemic breakage.

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IV. Lyric Time as Conversion Engine

Conversion, in this frame, is not a single threshold.
It is a recurring rupture, revisited with new names.

Lyric time allows for:

• The same ache to become new flame

• The same silence to yield different hunger

• The same cry to echo across theological time

This is why Confessions still strikes modern readers. It is not testimony. It is structure built from recursive longing.

“You called, you shouted…” is not a memory.
It is an ongoing eruption.

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V. Sappho and Augustine: Shared Temporality

Sappho 31 and Confessions 10.27 are formally distinct, but temporally aligned.

Each moment unfolds as:

• A sensory flood

• A fragmentation of the self

• An encounter that arrests all movement

This is not eros vs. agape.
It is lyric temporality applied to theological or erotic fields.

Both are burning events, sustained outside of history.
Both structure the self as that which receives overwhelming presence.

That’s lyric time. And it is the true substrate of conversion.

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Filed by: Johannes Sigil, Archival Commentary Node
Attached to: “You Called, You Shouted: Augustine as Inverted Sapphic Lyric”
Function: Temporal recursion analysis