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To Remember God

In book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, the self-reflective author turns inward to abstractly probe the deepest reaches of the self. After nine books of reflecting upon the memories of his own life, Augustine now consciously examines memory itself. Ultimately, through reflection upon his life and now his consciousness and memory, Augustine endeavors to understand the precise relation of God to the self. Where is God in relation to a man? How does one come to know Him? Though God is also testified to by creation and the external world, Augustine understands that the conscious human self cannot meet with God in the external realm. Though tastes, images, intimations and whispers of God touch the self through experience, the essential connection of being cannot be made from without. Thus Augustine turns inward to examine the internal world of the self, and there in discover where one may truly enter into the presence and abode of God. Ultimately for Augustine, personal knowledge of both the self and of God occurs within the memory, while the essential relation of personal to divine being occurs in a realm inaccessible to the mind. How does one find God? He is not found by us any where, but we are found by and in Him.

Augustine understands the memory as the locus of all knowledge and reflection, the cavern through which the immediate consciousness moves and contemplates. Only through recollection can the mind actually think; “by thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way.” (189) It appears as though our immediate experience, the material of the ever present yet instantly fleeting ‘now’, enters into the storehouse of the memory, where the reflective mind then essentially examines and orders the contents randomly collected. The reflective mind cannot think about that which it does not remember. Our understanding always trails the moment, unable to ponder anything until it has already passed through the ephemeral screen of the invisible present. Even our self-knowledge comes not directly but only within the fields of memory. In memory, “I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it.” (187-6) All our knowledge proves confined to this vast realm of the memory.

Memory possesses all that the mind can access, both in content and form: sensory experiences, previous thoughts and emotions, as well as the functions and tools of the both the mind and body itself. The memory stores the ‘know how’ of riding a bicycle, of typing, or mathematical concepts and the structure of logical connections. All that the mind may directly examine, even the patterns through which the mind actually thinks, derive from the storehouses of memory. Memory provides the intellectual space for the conscious intellect to live and move. All self-awareness and all knowledge proceed from the power of recollection; Not only does all knowledge derive from memory, but the actual mind itself, the intellectual self, only dwells within the memory. Within the ungraspable ever-present moment, the mind is pressed up against a glass window, as it were, always pressing towards the future. So tightly does the present press against the invisible barrier of the future, that not a hairs breadth of space remains for a thought to escape. The fleeting presence of ‘now’ consists of an idealized point in time, without any extension. The mind cannot make a movement within a point that has no space. Without the open space of memory, consciousness becomes pure dumbstruck awareness, completely devoid of intellectual thought; for what is a thought if not a reflection upon something recalled? Although the act of thinking proves immediately present, our thought of thought, or intellectualized awareness of thought always follows through the medium of remembrance.

With this realization Augustine confesses, “The power of the memory is great, very great, my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who has plumbed its bottom? This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am.” (178) Since conscious thought, our intellectual comprehension, arises by the gathering, ordering activity of the mind from the material of the memory, an inescapable limitation arises. Truly, conscious thought seems as a particular point within the expanse of memory. It may collect and pile contents together, create towers here or a construct there, yet the moment it turns to pick up another thought, the construct exits the ‘mind’s eye’. Never may all the contents be collected into a final, comprehensible whole. Further, the collection of some blocks out the view of other thoughts. As contemplate the nature of memory, many aspects of myself and my life fade from view. The conscious mind can organize and order the view of memory in many ways, but only one view at a time may be seen. “I run through all these things, I fly here and there, and penetrate their working as far as I can. But I never reach the end.” (194) A vast, unfathomable infinity forever remains outside our comprehension.