Saint Augustine's Memory - Rilegato

part i

Introduction: The Book of Memory

A friend of mine says he finds Augustine's stress on memory a great disappointment. It seems to orient the Bishop of Hippo toward his own past, while my friend looks to the future-he calls himself a progressive, and Augustine a nostalgist. That friend, I am sure, speaks for many. We tend to be critical of people "living in the past," who are by definition conservative or reactionary. They have closed off new ideas in order to fondle previously experienced (or imagined) glories. America, by contrast, is thought of as a country that has rejected the past and turned confidently to a future that will be greater than anything that went before.

A first impression of Augustine's Book Ten might be taken as confirmation of this judgment against memory. He introduces the subject with a venture into memory as a huge warehouse, the storage place of old experiences, a passive place of deposit, a kind of glorified dump. The imagery at times is of a filing system slightly jumbled, where pieces may be out of order but are nonetheless static things being slotted into stable repositories, "everything ticketed [commendatum] here and stored for preservation" [12]. "Here all these things are stored, individually and by type, according to their means of acces- sion . . . all received for deposit in or withdrawal from memory's huge vault" [13]. But these passing references, suggestive of a mental filing system, are belied in the general treatment of Augustine's memory. This memory is dynamic, constructive, predictive, constitutive of identity, the meeting place with other humans, and the pathway to God.

1. Memory as Dynamic

The interior that Augustine describes is far from having the air of an office or warehouse. Its "internal scenery" fluctuates as eerily as the landscape in Winsor McCay's Little Nemo comic strips.

The scope of memory is vast, my God, in some way scary, with its depths, its endless adaptabilities-yet what are they but my own mind, my self? Then what can that self be, my God? What is my makeup? A divided one, shifting, fierce in scale. In memory alone there are uncountable expanses, hollows, caverns uncountably filled with uncountable things of all types [26].

This is a place that recedes as he proceeds into it [65]. "I rummage through all these things, darting this way and that, plunging down as far as I can go, and reaching no bottom" [26]. It is a "terrain of trouble" [14]. He bumps into himself in this scenery [14]. His inner self, dwarfed by the mountains and star systems held in memory, has inner eyes and ears, even an inner hand [12], a mental mouth and stomach [22]. Augustine's inner Nemo crawls about in perilous situations that recall Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet "No Worst":

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.

The memories themselves are in motion, eluding him, flying in his face unbidden, like bats in a cave: "Jumbled memories flirt out on their own, interrupting the search for what I want" [12]. Laboriously pieced-together concepts deliquesce and must be reassembled:

[I]f I forgo their retrieval, even for brief intervals, they sink out of sight again, sliding deep into some inner windings, and they must be pressed up out of that place (for where else could they have gone?) and pressed again into knowable form. We must, that is, reconnect them after their dispersion [18].

The things deposited in memory do not just lie there passively. When they are not disintegrating from neglect, they are being reshaped by each recurrence to them. The Augustine remembering is different from the one who remembered any matter in the first place, or re-remembered in preceding recurrences to it; and the matter itself is being altered by cognate things all around it. Here, for instance, Augustine discusses the immutable truths of the numerical sciences:

All these things I not only remember but remember learning them. And many arguments against them I remember hearing; and however false the arguments may be, my memories of hearing them are not false. And I remember distinguishing between what was true and what was said against the truth-an act of distinguishing I remember one way now, which is different from the way I remember often going over the distinction while I was expressing it. I remember these frequent acts from the past, and what I distinguish and conclude now I am laying away in memory, so I can remember in the future what I concluded at this moment. So, just as I have a memory of past remembering, so in the future, if I recall what I conclude now, I shall be recalling it by the power of memory [20].

Remembering is a process that never rests. Things can never be fixed in memory-and no wonder: they were not fixed in the original experience that is being remembered. That too, was a process, one that Augustine considers in Book Eleven's treatment of time. If you commit a sentence to memory, it is not acquired as a single thing and then turned over intact to memory. When you pronounce the second word of the sentence, you are already remembering the first one, which is now in the past. Unless you remember it you cannot tell what the subject is or how the sentence should end. And so with each word, and each element of sound in each word.

If we suppose some particle of time which could not be divided into a smaller particle, that alone deserves to be called the present. Yet it flies in so headlong a way out of the future and into the past that no slightest moment of rest can reach itself out in pause. If it paused, its earlier part could be divided from its later. Thus the present itself has no length (T 11.20).

This process leaves a representation (imago) of itself in the mind, and that is what enters the memory. It is sufficiently detached from its cause to be recalled in isolation from the original experience. Yet it involves a kind of reliving of that experience, which was a temporal event, involving succession to reach completion. Imago in this context is usually translated (or transliterated) as "image," which gives a misleading suggestion that the sense-experience prints a facsimile in the mind, of the seal-in-wax sort. But Augustine remembers states and conditions that are temporally articulated and would not leave a single imprint. He speaks, for instance, of remembering happiness, his boyhood, health, sickness, and emotional reactions like fear and desire, and complicated historical developments. I choose the term "re-presentation" because the remembering is for him a literal re-presentizing, a living through again of what was a process at every stage of the mind's engagement. In fact, he argues that the past no longer exists except in representations of it in our minds. And that representation is always a present one when we have recourse to it. He would agree with the saying "The past is not dead, it is not even past."

What should be clear and obvious by now is that we cannot properly say that the future or the past exists, or that there are three times, past, present, and future. Perhaps we can say that there are three tenses, but that they are the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. This would correspond, in some sense, with a triad I find in the soul and nowhere else, where the past is present to memory, the present is present to observation [contuitus], and the future is present to anticipation (T 11.26).

The past, therefore, is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again. The original experience must be re-presentized by a rememberer, with all the accumulated alterations in that rememberer since his last encounter with the memory-with, perhaps, new insights, or with deeper prejudices. And the thing remembered is as charged with emotional content as is the person remembering. In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered. That is why conditions that surrounded the first acquirement come along with it, or even precede it-which is Proust's madeleine effect. Augustine instructs his own mind on this point:

So time is measured, my mind, in you. Raise no clamor against me-I mean against yourself-out of your jostling reactions [affectiones]. I measure time in you, I tell you, because I measure the reactions that things caused in you by their passage, reactions that remain when the things that occasioned them have passed on (T 11.36).

Affectiones in that passage is often translated "emotions" or "impressions," but those words give a wrong impression if they imply that an ad-fectio is something done to a a soul by the impact of other things on it. For Augustine the soul is always active. It "goes out" through the senses to apprehend things, for instance. It reacts to occasions given it (to learn, to feel, to accept, to reject), but the stimulation or provocation just calls up the soul's own action. So, in remembering, the soul actively relives its putting together of future and past in the first place.

This concept of the memory as a reliving of original experience helps Augustine with the mysterious fact that he remembers forgetting things. "What can forgetting be but a lack of memory? And then how can forgetting be present, for me to remember it, when its very presence makes me lack it?" [24]. Some sense of the process involved in the lost memory's acquisition or retention may persist as a kinetic tilt in the mind's motion, "as if the memory had some feeling that it was not moving with something it had moved with before, but was limping, as it were, from the lack of what it was used to, and trying to recover what was missing" [28]. What is important, and characteristic, is that Augustine thinks in dynamic terms, as if going through the motion of a memory would revive it-his way of eating the madeleine to find what it will bring back.

This dynamic view of memory can be read, today, as a destabilizing of...