Remembering Augustine

The Confessions themselves represent an attempt to adopt a stance to the past that avoids the nostalgic vision for the pre-conversion self. Augustine attempts not so much to have done with the past but to order it aright by narrating it as confessio - adopting a stance critical of his former self. What is intriguing in relation to our current discussion is the philosophy/theology of memory he gives in book X of the Confessions. Memory was described by Plato in terms of the soul’s reminiscence of its own origin within the world of ideas. Augustine baptises this conception;[1] and because the origin of the soul which it remembers is now the eternal and living God, the capacity of memory is found to have a indescribable depth. Commenting on 1 Cor 2:11 (‘no man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of a man that is in him’), he explains that it is only through God, whom man himself does not know, that man can know himself (X.5-6). God, then, lies within his memory, and yet is not contained by his memory.[2] This tension is replicated in the human subject itself: the vast caves of the memory hold immensities that are not conceivable even to the soul that contains them. Augustine’s subterranean journey through the caverns of his own memory leads to encounter with his own past self:

…in my memory too I meet myself – I recall myself, what I have done, when and where and in what state of mine I was when I did it. X.8

However, this strange meeting is partial and fleeting:

In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? X.8

How shall he then find the God for whom he searches? He equates the search for God with the search for ‘the happy life’ (X.20). This longing for the happy life is universal, he says, even amongst those who cannot consciously remember being happy, strictly speaking. Yet this longing for happiness is evidence that in fact all human beings have known the happy life – for if it were not in their memories they would not know it to love it.[3] God has never been absent from his memory, in fact; he always deigned to dwell in it:

Certain I am that You dwell in it, because I remember You since the time I first learned of You, and because I find You in it when I remember You. (X.25).

[1] Roland Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 150
[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study (London; Sydney: Sheed & Ward, 1968), p. 2-3
[3] Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," p. 154; Balthasar, Man in History: A Theological Study, p. 5