Part I: Augustine on Memory
I recently re-read book X of Augustine’s Confessions for a class that I am teaching this Fall. Since it’s likely that I will have very little time to blog this Fall, I have decided to start a mini-series based on my summer study of Augustine and memory.
To set the context for book X, let’s do a brief and cursory review of the previous nine books. In books I-IX, Augustine gives an account of his life. He begins with his earliest childhood and moves through his adolescent and early adult wanderings (I-VI). Then we have his encounter with the Platonists (VII), the famous Garden scene in which he tells the story of the transformation of his will (VIII), and finally the account of his baptism (IX). Book X, then, brings us to the present, to Augustine’s life as Bishop of Hippo. One can also think of book X as an account of the mind’s journey to God (as dualistic as that might sound, he seems to describe it as a very non-bodily kind of activity). Also, throughout the book (X), Augustine re-iterates themes that he had introduced in book I (e.g., what is God’s nature, how can we seek after God if we don’t know him).
In 10.6.8, he asks, “What am I loving when I love you?” (Conf., Boulding translation, p. 242). This question leads Augustine to an inner exploration of himself (his mind and its faculties) in order to find out what he loves when he loves God. First, Augustine attempts to understand what the mind is, which is difficult because we typically start our inquiries with what’s closest to us, corporeal objects. Though he concludes that he is not loving anything bodily or sensory when he loves God, nonetheless, he writes: “And yet I do love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a certain fragrance, a food and an embrace, when I love my God” (10.6.8; p. 242). However, he is quick to add that these semblances of light, food etc. are found in his “inmost self, where something limited to no place shines into my mind, where something not snatched away by passing time sings for me, where something no breath blows away yields to me its scent, where there is savor undiminished by famished eating, and where I am clasped in a union from which no satiety can tear me away” (10.6.8; p. 242). So in order to “find” God, who is immaterial, Augustine turns inward. Interestingly, or perhaps paradoxically, even though God is above imagination and sense, Augustine’s only way of describing God is by way of sense. For example, “You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped, and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace” (10.27.38; p. 262).
Why, we might ask, should one take this inward journey? Why not begin with the extra-mental world and seek the cause of the effects we encounter in the world? Augustine, perhaps given his Platonic leanings, wants to find something that will provide him with a more stable starting point than the ever-changing world of sensory experience. Perhaps we could even say that he turns to his mind because he seeks immediate rather than mediated knowledge, as the former is in his estimation, more secure and certain. Rather than travel to admire mountains, oceans and stars, and “leave [oneself] behind” (10.8.15; p. 247), Augustine turns inward, seeking a journey “closest” to himself, which he believes affords the greatest certainty. Having concluded that nature, though pointing to God, cannot be identified with God, he now begins his examination of memory (10.6.9; p. 242). Given that in books I-IX Augustine has just finished a selective re-telling of his life up to the present-a re-telling dependent of course on his own memory-a discussion of memory at this point makes sense with regard to the overall structure of Confessions.
In part II, I shall discuss what Augustine claims are the “contents” of our memory.
6 Responses so far
6:00 pm
One quick remark: does the turn ‘inward’ necessarily exclude non-intellectual things? Or again, isn’t the soul-body complex itself a created entity; and if so, then why couldn’t one examine the soul as an imago Dei? If we have a notion of our ‘extended minds’, then a turn inward isn’t exclusive of external things, but it just qualifies external things in a certain way.
8:53 am
Hi Scott,
I agree that the soul-body complex is itself part of creation, but doesn’t Augustine come to be convinced in book VII via his reading of the Platonists that the mind is not extended and hence immaterial–the crucial insight that helped him get rid of his Manichean baggage (i.e., thinking of God as corporeal, which made it impossible for him to think of God as omnipresent)? Would Augustine say that we have a notion of our mind as “extended”? It seems to me that he would not. Perhaps, I’ve missed your point.
Best,
Cynthia
1:04 pm
Does not Augustine find that he must finally look “inward” — and not at the other created things, each of which tells him, “I am not your God; I was made BY your God — because only there will he be able to find the “image of God,” something that resides in no other kind of creature/creation, but only in the human heart?
I always read the account that way and taught it that way, but I wonder, did you notice it in the text? Isn’t that why he perceives the I AM THAT I AM in his own depths and is able to ascend to that vision of God (via that “image”) in an instant?
P.S. On the apparent dualism — not that Augustine isn’t platonistic, because he is, but still the image of God is in his own soul and his own soul is something akin to Aquinas’s “form” (that is the very life of the body), and hence is not so dualistic as it seems. Augustine says to God, “You are the LIFE of the LIFE of my soul.” Doesn’t he ascend to God from life to life to life? (From living body to the life of that body to the life of that life of his living body?)
8:45 pm
Hi Janet,
Stay tuned for the remaining posts, where perhaps (or perhaps not), dualistic vestiges of Augustine’s (Christianized no doubt) Platonism manifest (e.g. soul/body relation).
What do you understand Augustine to mean by a human being created in the image of God? Aquinas’ teaching of the soul as the form of the body (following Aristotle) seems to me very different than what Augustine says (at least in this section of the Confessions) and seems much more akin to a Platonic understanding of the soul/body relation (again, no doubt Christianized).
Best wishes,
Cynthia
3:29 pm
I think that the key, perhaps, to Augustine’s understanding of the soul and the imagio dei within the soul is given in that powerful phraseology of his, couched in his beloved poetic and Ovidian Latin: “You are the life of the life of my soul.” I think that Augustine “visualized” the imagio dei as dwelling there inside of his soul dynamically and formally (so to speak, but certainly worked out with far less precision than in the Aristotelian Aqinas). The imagio dei is “literally” to be found INSIDE the very “life” (soul) of his body — or at the very core of his being, in other words. The name that is written in the heart.
It’s not so much that God created Man in the image of God as though according to a model, however true that may be, but instead Augustine places the emphasis on the way that God places the image of Christ (the Eternal Word) there inside of every human being from its very beginnings and “calls” to that true being even in the womb to develop into the true person God has designed, the one who IS always already in the image of God. The entire journey of Augustine (as everyman) is recorded in Confessions as the gradual and painful discovery of that “true” Christic selfhood at the heart and root of his conflicted and fragmented and adulterated and degraded “selfhood.” (”I made of myself a wasteland.”)
It seems to me that Augustine reviews his life, his own personal Genesis (which will be deeply like the Genesis he expounds as a preacher at the end of the book), with the eyes of faith that now belong to him as a mature Christian and preacher, in order to praise the ways that God has gradually removed all the layers of false and idolatrous selfhood over the years so that the deepest and truest Augustine could finally say “yes” in the Garden in Milan. God has untied the “knot” that cannot be untied by merely human means. But what is left there is the Christic person, the “becoming human” (humanitatis) of God’s Son that is declared by human preachers (such as Augustine himself, through the Christic Ambrose, for instance) — insofar as they themselves have become the cloudy firmament (only) through which Christ is to be seen by humans here below (Conf. 1.1 and 13.15, if I recall correctly).
George Herbert works within this Augustinian textuality in “The Temple,” in “Church Windows,” “Affliction (I),” and “The Collar,” for example. The holy spirit can build a temple in the human heart (as both Augustine and Herbert put it) only because that heart already bears the image of God written inside of it, however much that image may have been erased and forgotten through a life of wandering away into the waste places.
How else could Augustine know that sexuality, for instance, is intrinsically good and that to be married is as holy as to be celibate and that the body’s delight will be part of the heavenly wedding banquet, even though in this life he felt he had to deny himself even social contact with women…. But here too we still see that incessant war that is carried on within Augustine between the incarnational Good News and the dualistic legacy of received Platonism. It is fascinating to watch, and to think of Aquinas and Dante trying to transcend that warfare implicit in the Augustinian legacy, without ceasing to be Augustinian.
8:14 am
Well said, Janet! I like what you say about Augustine’s Confessions as his (as well as everyperson’s) journey to discover his Christic (true) self and how you related that to the imago Dei.
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