Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 116

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Pétur Knútsson
instance pervasive in manuscript transmission between related dialects
in the medieval Germanic corpus (Pétur Knútsson 1993a), and can also
be seen as an essential element in networks of Old English and Old
Icelandic poetic formulae (Pétur Knútsson 1993b).
Not inffequently, echoic intertextual phenomena lie at the heart of
textual signification. A fine example of this is St. Augustine of Hippo’s
concept of the “distension” of time, which he discussed most fully
in Book XI of the Confessions, and for which he appears to have
introduced a new word into Latin: distentio. This is an essential aspect
of his concept of an extratemporal deity whose works are nevertheless
temporal, and to which he retums time and time again in the City of
God (“Nam temporalia movens temporaliter non movetur”, X.xii, PL
XLI:291).
Important for our understanding of this Neoplatonic concept is our
knowledge of the provenance of Augustine’s coinage distentio\ but it
would be a mistake to rely, like Taylor and Room, on the etymological
provenance. Henry Chadwick (1991:240n) suggests that he is influ-
enced by Plotinus’s term diastasis, ‘extension, dimension; separation’
(cf. Sleeman 1980:246). Here are the two terms in their contexts:
(7) inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam disten-
tionem; sed cuius rei nescio; et mirum si non ipsius animi.
‘For me, this means that time is nothing more than a disten-
sion; of what I’m not sure, but it could well be of the mind
itself’
(Confessions XI.xxvi (33), PL XXXII:822)
(8) ecce distentio est vita mea
‘clearly my life is a distension’
(Confessions XLxxix (39), PL XXXII:825)
(9) diastasis oun zðés khronon eikhe.
‘So the diastasis of life involves time’
(Enniades DI.7.11, Armstrong 1967:340)
The two words distentio and diastasis have a complex relationship.
The prefixes dis- and dia- are cognate; according to Emout and Meillet