In the forty-eight years when I taught college students, I was able to teach Augustine's Confessions, at least in part, about every two years. Influenced by French structuralism, I would point out the binary oppositions that drive the book. Prominent among them was that between time and eternity, and I would note that there seemed to be two mediators between them. One is memory, which gathers the life of Augustine, scattered across time, into a unity before the eternal God. The other is Jesus Christ, the eternal Word incarnate in time. I would ask my students, What is the link between memory and Christ for Augustine? I never answered this question to my satisfaction, and if my students did, they didn't tell me.
In Augustine on Memory, Kevin Grove offers a solution, one that reflects the progress of Augustine scholarship in recent decades. At the start of my career, Anglophone scholarship on Augustine tended to dwell on the treatises and neglect the works written for preaching, many of which had not been translated into English. There was a sharp divide between philosophy, where Augustine on memory was studied, and patristics, where Augustine's Christology was studied. Treatments of Augustine on memory tended to jump from the Confessions (397 CE) to the latter books of De Trinitate, which Grove reasonably dates to 419–427. Grove's main argument develops a connection between them through close analysis of several Enarrationes in Psalmos (Expositions of the Psalms), which Augustine most likely preached, or composed for preaching, in the intervening years. Like the classroom for a professor, the basilica was often a place where Augustine worked out his ideas.
As Augustine makes clear in Book 10 of the Confessions, “memory” includes not only recall of the past but anything that is in our mind and is not an immediate object of consciousness. Grove's analysis of Book 10 (35–53) shows how memory, the “anthropological mediator,” fails to find God due to Augustine's habitual temptations, which Grove calls a sort of sensory memory. The last chapter of Book 10 introduces Christ the “true Mediator,” and the last paragraph of the chapter, studded with quotations of psalms, points the way forward. In it, Augustine stands in the church, eating and drinking the Eucharist, and distributing it to the congregation (Confessions 10.43.70). Ascent from the temporal world to God's eternity, Augustine indicates, is not done through memory by individuals in isolation but mediated by Christ within his body, the church.
In the central four chapters of his book, Grove studies Augustine's sermons on the psalms. Augustine understands the speaker in the psalms to be Christ, not only the incarnate Christ but the “whole Christ” (totus Christus). Sometimes the psalms speak in the voice of the Word incarnate on Earth, sometimes as his body, the church, or its head, ascended to heaven. Grove's thesis is that, for Augustine, Christ in his body, the church, mediates between the individual and God by means of the “work of memory.”
Grove's analysis begins with a chapter on Augustine's commentaries on Psalms, 38, 61, and 76 (39, 62, and 77 in the Hebrew), which in his text say “for Idithun” in the first verse. Our texts read “Jeduthun,” and most modern scholars think the term has something to do with the musical performance of the psalms, but Augustine's sources tell him “Idithun” is a name meaning “one who leaps across.” Augustine interprets this leaper as the body of Christ. “Idithun the leaper stands for the congregation in itself (Asaph), and by means of the psalm they, the Body of the whole Christ, are leaping into Christ as their end and head” (88).
Idithun's leap is carried out through the “work of memory.” It has three phases. The first is remembering back. We remember past sins, and through liturgical and other acts, we rejoin ourselves to Christ's sacrifice as it “happens in the present with full renewing grace” (121). The second is remembering forward, as when we “remember Zion” (Ps 136 [137].1). We do not remember the heavenly Jerusalem from some prior existence there, but rather we have in Christ, who as our head is already there, anticipatory traces of our own final end. The third phase, paradoxically, is the “work of forgetting.” Here Augustine often cites Philippians 3:13–14, “Forgetting what lies behind … I continue my pursuit to the goal.” It is the letting go of whatever might hold us back and the renewed determination to continue in the whole Christ following Christ the head (157).
Grove next argues that the later books of De Trinitate show the fruits of the understanding of the work of memory that Augustine has worked out in his preaching. Books 9 and 10 of De Trinitate portray a seemingly individual, interior ascent to the divine Trinity through a series of Trinitarian images in the human soul, the image of God. The best image at first appears to be the soul's memory, understanding, and will (love) of itself. But this ascent fails because our understanding and love of ourselves are too impeded by sin, so that the image of God in us is de-formed (deformis). Augustine thus turns in Book 13 to faith in Christ. Beginning from faith, he locates a truer image in memory, understanding, and love of God. That image is re-formed in us through the work of memory in the graced life of the church, in the “whole Christ,” through whom we participate in the life of the Trinity. “This Christological mediator, unearthed in Augustine's preaching, provides the link between the failed interior triad of the human person and the remembering-understanding-loving God that renews the broken and tarnished image of God” (211–12).
Augustine on Memory, though too difficult for students below the graduate level, is indispensable for teachers concerned with Augustine's rich and complex theology of memory.
