Augustine On God And Memory

Augustine оп God and Memory ELIE WIESEL in both his literaty work and his social activism has committed himself to recollection as а moral enterprise. ln the pri­ vate sphere created between his text and the reader, Wiesel explores his personal past to invoke the memory of charged presence-of loved ones, of lost worlds, of а silent God. ln the puЬlic sphere of humanitarian activity, Wiesel holds those present accountaЫe to the moral lessons of history, the communal past, creating from the mem­ ory of Jewish victimization an ethics of universal responsibllity. ln both endeavors, memory provides the matter for moral reflection. Wiesel's abllity to put his own, profoundly Jewish experience in service to his larger philosophical and ethical vision gives his writing its poignancy and power. ln so doing, he follows а tradition in Western letters that goes back at least as far as the fourth century, to the work of the profoundly Catholic Ьishop Augustine of Hippo. ln 397, look­ ing back over the external events and drastic inner reorientations that had ruptured his own past, Augustine composed his uniquely original work of autoblographical philosophy, the Confessiones. 1 Ву investigating 1. The most recent scientific text of the Confessiones, together with а commentary encompassing а tremendous range of secondary works, may Ье found in O'Donnell (1992). 1 use here the English translation of Chadwick (1991). the structure and argument of this work,we can see how the reflec­ tions of another introspective,religiously sensitive thinker,at а com­ pletely different cultural and historical moment,also put memory at the juncture between past self and present self,and at the juncture be­ tween Self and God. trapped in time,can know the eternal God. lts triple structure reca­ pitulates its theme, for the three uneven "panels" of Augustine's presentation have as their subject,respectively; the Past (books 1-9, his retrospect on events from 354 to 387), the Present (books 10 and 11, on memory and the nature of time),and the Future (books 12 and 13,on the beginning and, thus, the end of time). T he argu­ ment of the whole rests on the central argument of the central T he Confessiones has been called the first introspective autoblogra­ "panel": that memory is necessary not simply for recollection, but phy in history, and in one sense this is so.Constructed as а prayerful address to God, the work opens with speculations about who or her memory that the individual-time-bound,imperfect,mortal-is what Augustine was even before Ьirth,through blrth ("from the par­ enaЬled to kn_?W and to recognize both him/herself and,most espe­ also for cognition and perception. It is through the exercise of his or ents of ту flesh, him from whom and her in whom You formed me in time," 1.6, 7) and early education, up through the death of his mother Monica in 387 shortly after his conversion to Catholicism (9.13, 36). But once we conclude our reading of book 9, the final cially; Truth.Truth for Augustine relates immediately and necessarily narratively autoblographical section, we have some 40 percent of Augustine's story still to go: book 1О,on memory; book 11,on eter­ pronounced his creation good. Put simply: Memory is the site of our nity and time; book 12, on material and spiritual creation; book 13, on revelation and time' s end. Augustine тау Ье using his past to make his points, but clearly he has more than autoblography in to ourselves,and to God. mind. 1 find it more helpful to regard the Confessiones as а sort of medita­ tive triptych,conceived around the proЬlem of how the individual, Parts of the present discussion draw on two of ту earlier essays, Fredriksen (200Gb), "Patristic Prama and Pramal)a," and Fredriksen (2000а), 'Allegory and Reading God's Book." Those interested in а closer consideration of the dynamics of retrospection and knowledge in the Confessiones might consult the fine essay 'Augus­ tine: Reason and Illumination," Ьу R. А. Markus (1970). Peter Brown's now-classic Ьiography; Augustine of Hippo, has а valuaЫe discussion of the autoЬiographical as­ pects of the Confessiones ( 1967, 146-81). to God-not the God of the philosophers,toward which а11 this self­ conscious specu!ation might seem to tend; but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the ВiЬ!е, the God who created and illumination. Memory is our bridge to the world outside ourse!ves, How does man find God? Не turns first to God's creation, his mighty works: God made them,but is not of them. W hat is the object of my love? 1 asked the earth and it said, "It is not !." I asked all that is in it; they made the same confession.I asked the sea,the deeps,the living creatures that creep,and they responded, "We are not your God. Look beyond us." . ..I asked heaven,sun, moon,stars; they said, "Nor are we the God you seek." And I said to all these things, "Tell me of my God who you are not; tel1 me something about him." And with а great voice they cried out, "Не made us." Confessiones, 10.6,9 Having exhausted external possibllities,Augustine then turns in­ ward, to the soul. Не ranges past the vital force his soul shares in common with animals, past the consciousness through which they pecially vis-a-vis the divine. God continued transcendent and out­ complete tota] openness, face to face.... concurrent, without any side time; humanity's entire existence became temporally condi­ tempora] successiveness" ( 12.13, 16). God is not in time. tioned. Knowledge, most especially know]edge of God, which was Man's existence in time affects the nature both of experience and once immediate and unmediated, changed as man's soul, after the of language.Time constantly, literal1y, rushes Ьу him, too swift and Fall, became itself distended in time, fraught with disunity atomized to process: man's experience-by definition, sole]y of the The nature of time itse]f, Augustine maintains, underscores and present-constantly runs between the fingers of his sou] like sand. feeds this distension. Time is а psycho]ogica] function: it exists Meaning is distilled on]y retrospectively, through the integrative within the sou]. While we speak of time as Past, Present, and Future, functioning of memory: it is only in recollection that the person can on]y the midd]e term has any "being" or reality The Past no longer actual1y understand what he has experienced and see true meaning exists; the Future does not yet exist. The present alone is. Yet of in it. Ву making this argument at the close of his book, Augustine what duration is the present? Reflection revea]s that the present it­ thus teaches us to see, retrospective]y, the point of his autoЬio­ se]f is an ungraspaЫe, elusive рипсtит. AII of man' s consciousness, his graphical narrative in the first nine books: he understood the mean­ memory, his entire aЬility to grasp truth exists within and is circum­ ing of а11 those events-stealing the pears, reading Cicero, joining scribed Ьу the present, а razor-thin slice of reality suspended be­ the Manichees, quitting Africa for ltaly, listening to Ambrose-not tween two infinitely receding types of nonbeing, Past and Future. as he was living them, but only retrospectively from the vantage Not even one day is entirely present.All the hours of the day add up to twenty-four.The first of them has the others in the future, the last has them in the past....А single hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments.... lf we can think of some Ьit of time which cannot Ье divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we call "present." And this time flies so quickly from the future into the past that it is an interval with no duration. Any duration is divisiЬle into past and future: the present occupies no space. (1 1.15, 20) point of his conversion, once God had revealed himself to him. His closing arguments teach us that, epistemo1ogical1y, this was the only way he could have understood his experience-that is, once his memory, "the stomach of the mind" ( 10.14, 22), had done its diges­ tive work. Language itself is tangled up in time, distended and thus itself in­ trinsical1y narrative, dependent on the linear passage from being (present) to nonbeing (past) before it can Ье understood. Conso­ nants and vowels alternate to create phonemes, words fol1ow words, This distension in time constitutes the great measure of dif­ nouns verbs, until we get to the end of а sentence, remember the ference and distance between our mode of consciousness and whole, and so understand what this unit of sound has meant to con­ God's. God, in eternity, knows all things simultaneous]y, as do the vey. (Like а11 ancient people, Augustine thinks of words and texts angels who dwell in the "heaven of heavens," the "intellectual, non­ oral1y, in terms of their being spoken and heard; compare 1 1.7, 9.) physical heaven where the intelligence's knowing is а matter of Memory is the means of the soul's contact with time, since memory, simultaneity-not in part, not in an enigma, not through а glass, but to function, functions only in the present. Meaning is thus necessar- ily mediated-through memory; images, signs, words. And just as time is not the same as the units we measure it Ьу, so meaning is not the same as those words we use in our attempts to convey it. This mediation is true even of scripture, God's word, conveyed as it is through the signs of contingent Ianguages. Though divine reve­ lation, scripture itself is infinitely interpretaЬle (12.23, 32), сараЬ!е of sustaining а diversity of truths whose validity cannot Ье limited Ьу the historically contingent intentions of their original authors ( 12.23, 32-30, 41). Scripture mediates knowledge of God; it bridges time and eternity. But since it (necessarily) describes God through narra­ tive, it measures the difference between God and us: О man [f\ugustine imagines God exp\aining to him], what ту scripture says, 1 say. Yet scripture speaks in time-conditioned lan­ guage [temporaliterdicti ],and time does not touch туWord, existing with те in an equal eternity. So I see those things which through my Spirit you see, just as I also say those things which through ту. Spirit you say. Accordingly, whi\e your vision of them is temporally determined, ту seeing is not temporal; just as you speak of these things in temporal terms, but I do not speak in the successiveness of time [ nonegotemporaliterdico]. (13.29, 44) Love of truth, knowledge of God, true perception of self and other mediated through memory; availaЫe through personal recollection made puЬlic through the written word-these convictions moti­ vated Augustine's Confessiones; they shape as well the work of Elie Wiesel. ln honor of ту colleague and his work, 1 have tried to share with you some of the grand themes that contour Augustine's. God 's Memory Why of course, we are tempted to respond; in fact, God has а perfect memory. But а moment's re­ flection reveals how proЬlematic such а notion would Ье. For to have а perfect memory-presumaЬly because past, present and future are all the same for а Being existing in an eterna] now-is to have no memory at all, since one does not remember the moment we call now; one simply lives in it. Perfect memory self-destructs into incoherence. The BiЬle knew better than that. lt endows God with а memory; but not а perfect one. God remembers Noah in the ark, but when he makes а covenant with Noah, he provides himself with а visual aid: "1 have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall Ье for а sign of the covenantЪetween me and the earth. And it shall соте to pass, when l bring clouds over the earth, and the bow is seen in the cloud, that 1 will remember my covenant" (Gen. 9: 13-15). So the rainbow jogs God's memory. lt is а kind of arched string around the divine finger. Using the same terms, ot brit-sign of the covenant-God provides another visual sign, that of circumcision, for his covenant with Abraham. And sometimes God writes notes to himself, а list of names to cherish and remember, worn on the garments of his special DOES GOD HAVE А MEMORY?