What is Memory? Augustine's Ascent from the Self to God

Most of us never stop to wonder at our own memory. We notice it only when it fails, when a name slips away or we can't find the car keys. Augustine does the opposite. In the middle of the most personal book in Christian literature, he stops his story and stands amazed at the ordinary fact that he can remember anything at all. What he finds there leads him down into the depths of his own soul and then out the other side, toward God.

This reflection walks through that journey step by step. The passages are short, but they are dense. Augustine turns a small puzzle over and over, like a jeweler turning a stone to the light, and every turn reveals something new.

Where we are in the story

As I begin this reflection, it would help to know where these chapters sit. Books I through IX of the Confessions tell the story of Augustine's life: his restless youth, his long wandering through false philosophies, his conversion in a Milan garden, and the death of his mother, Monica. By Book X the story is over. Augustine is now a bishop, and he tells his readers that he will confess no longer what he was, but what he is.

The question is no longer "How did I find God?" but "Where is God now, and how do I reach Him?" Augustine has already searched the created world. In a famous passage just before our chapters (X.6), he questions the earth, the sea, and the stars, and they all answer, "We are not your God; seek above us." So he turns inward. If God is not found by looking out, perhaps He can be found by looking in. The first thing he meets on that inward road is memory.

Images and realities

Chapter 15 begins with a simple observation: when Augustine says "stone" or "sun," he knows what he means, even though no stone or sun is in front of him. Something stands in for them. He calls these stand-ins images: faint copies left in the mind by things once seen, heard, or touched.

So far this sounds like common sense. Then Augustine starts testing the idea, and it begins to crack.

Take the word "pain." Augustine is not in pain as he writes, yet he knows exactly what the word means and can tell it apart from pleasure. So memory must hold some image of pain. Now take "health." Here the thing itself is actually present, since he is healthy, and yet he still needs the image in memory to understand the word. And a sick man, who has no health at all in his body, still understands "health" perfectly well. What this tells Augustine is that memory holds something the body does not.

Then comes the decisive example: numbers. When Augustine names the numbers we count with, he says it is "the numbers themselves and not their images" that are in his memory. This is a remarkable claim because you have never seen the number seven, but you have seen seven apples or seven chairs; seven itself has no color, weight, or location. When you think of it, you are not calling up a faded picture. You are holding the real thing, directly.

This distinction is the key to everything that follows. Augustine goes on (X.17) to name three ways things are present in memory:

• Bodies (stones, suns, faces, Carthage) are present only by their images.
• The arts and sciences (numbers, grammar, the rules of reasoning) are present in themselves.
• The affections of the mind (joy, grief, fear, desire) are present in a third way, as a kind of notion or awareness. You can remember sadness without becoming sad, which is why you can recall a past grief calmly.

Étienne Gilson, in The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, stresses what Augustine is doing here. Memory is not merely a storehouse of old sense-impressions, a kind of attic where pictures of the past are kept. It also holds truths the senses never delivered, truths that are unchanging and belong to no particular time or place. This is the first hint that the inward road leads somewhere beyond the self (something modern philosophers like Descartes and Kant failed miserably at identifying). A mind that contains the number seven is in contact with something eternal.

A reader who knows Plato will hear an echo of his doctrine of anamnesis, the idea that learning is really remembering what the soul knew before birth. Augustine flirted with this idea early on. Later, in his Retractations, he explicitly set aside any suggestion that the soul lived before the body. His mature answer, which we will return to, is richer: we recognize eternal truths not because we once saw them in a past life, but because we see them now, in a light that is not our own.

The riddle of forgetfulness

Chapter 16 is where Augustine's playful seriousness is on full display. He asks what happens when he says "forgetfulness." He knows what the word means, but to know what it means, he must remember forgetfulness. And what is forgetfulness? It is the absence of memory, what the scholastics would later call a privation. So how can the absence of memory be present in memory?

Augustine lays out three possible answers and knocks each one down.

1. What I remember is not in my memory. This is plainly absurd.
2. Forgetfulness itself is in my memory. Then it should make me forget, which is what forgetfulness does. It would be like a fire that you store in your pocket without burning.
3. Only an image of forgetfulness is in my memory. But images are made by things that were once present, the way Carthage left its image when he lived there. For forgetfulness to leave an image, it would have to be present first, and its presence destroys the very records it would need to leave a mark.

Here is a helpful comparison: Think about darkness. You know what darkness is, yet darkness is not a "thing" you can put in a box. It is only the absence of light. You understand it through your understanding of light. Forgetfulness is similar: we grasp it only against the background of memory, as a hole in a sock is understood only by the fabric around it. Later Catholic philosophy, following Augustine, would say that privations have no being of their own. They are known through the being they lack. Augustine does not tie the knot that neatly here, and he is honest enough not to pretend he has. He ends the chapter with a confession of faith in his own experience: however it happens, "I am quite sure that I do remember this forgetfulness."

"I have become to myself a piece of difficult ground"

At this point Augustine breaks off his argument and prays. "For me, Lord, certainly this is hard labor, hard labor inside myself," he says, "and I have become to myself a piece of difficult ground, not to be worked over without much sweat."

Any reader of Genesis should catch the allusion. After the Fall, Adam is told that the ground will be cursed and that he will eat bread by the sweat of his brow. Augustine applies this to his own soul. The ground he must work is himself, and it is hard ground because it is fallen ground.

Then comes one of the most striking lines in the book. We are not, he says, measuring the distances of the stars or asking how the earth hangs in space. "It is I myself who remember, I, the mind." It is no surprise that faraway things are hard to understand. But "what can be nearer to me than my own self?" And yet the power of his own memory is "incomprehensible" to him, even though without it he could not even call himself himself.

This is the heart of the passage. The closest thing to us, our own mind, turns out to be a mystery. We cannot fully see to the bottom of ourselves. Modern people tend to assume the self is the one thing we know perfectly, and that everything else is doubtful. Augustine discovers the opposite. The deeper he goes into himself, the less he finds a floor.

Memory is the mind

Chapter 17 opens with an exclamation that sounds almost like fear:

"Great indeed is the power of memory! It is something terrifying, my God, a profound and infinite multiplicity; and this thing is the mind, and this thing is I myself."

Notice the progression: memory, then the mind, then I myself. Augustine is not describing a gadget the soul happens to own, but for him, memoria is much broader than our word for "memory." It is not only recollection of the past but the mind's whole hidden depth, its constant presence to itself. Gilson makes this point with great care: Augustinian memory includes what we might call the soul's self-awareness, the background of everything it knows, even when it is not actively thinking of it.

Augustine develops this later, in his great work On the Trinity. There he finds in the human soul an image of the Blessed Trinity: memory, understanding, and will. They are three, yet they are one mind. Memory is the mind's possession of itself; understanding is the mind's knowing of itself; will is the mind's loving of itself. In Book XIV, he goes further still. This image is most truly itself not when the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but when it remembers, understands, and loves God, who made it. The image reaches its fullness when it turns toward its Origin.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who revered Augustine, adopts this teaching and clarifies it. In the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 79, aa. 6–7), Thomas asks whether memory is a separate power of the soul. He answers that in the higher, intellectual sense Augustine means, memory is not a separate faculty from the intellect at all. It is the intellect considered as retaining what it knows. This is not a correction of Augustine so much as a sharpening. It confirms his insight that memory, at its deepest, is simply the mind itself holding on to truth. Later, when Thomas treats the image of God in man (I, q. 93), he follows Augustine's trinitarian reading closely.

"I will go beyond this force of mine called memory"

Having descended into the "plains, caverns, and abysses" of memory, Augustine confesses that he can find no end. Then comes the turn that gives the whole passage its direction: "What shall I do, you true life of mine, my God? I will go past this force of mine called memory; I will go beyond it so that I may draw nearer to you, sweet light."

Why go beyond? Because, as he notes in the lines right after our excerpt, animals have memory too. Birds return to their nests; beasts find their way home. If memory alone were the path to God, the cattle would find Him as well. Memory is a marvel, but it is a created marvel. It is not God.

This is the pattern Augustine had already written down years earlier in On True Religion (39.72). It is perhaps the best short summary of his spiritual method: "Do not go outside; return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man. And if you find your nature changeable, go beyond even yourself." The inward turn is never the end. It is a doorway. The later tradition, especially St. Bonaventure in The Journey of the Mind into God, would compress this into a simple formula: from the things outside, to the things inside, to the things above.

In the chapters that follow our excerpt, Augustine searches memory for one particular thing: the happy life. Everyone wants to be happy, he observes, even people who have never been happy. So we must somehow "remember" happiness, or we could not want it or recognize it. And what is happiness? He answers that it is joy in the truth, and the Truth is God. So the desire for happiness, planted in all of us, is really a dim memory of God.

At last he asks the question the whole book has been building toward: where in my memory, Lord, do You dwell? His answer (X.25–26) is subtle and beautiful. God is in his memory, since he has known Him since the day he learned of Him. Yet God is not in memory the way stones and numbers are, as one more object among the rest. "There is no place," Augustine says; we come near to Him and go back from Him, but there is no where. God is not an item stored in the soul. He is the light in which the soul sees everything else.

This is the doctrine of illumination, and it answers the puzzle of the numbers from chapter 15. We recognize unchanging truths not because we manufactured them, and not because we saw them in some past life, but because the mind is lit from above by the Truth who is God. Eugène Portalié, in his classic Guide to the Thought of Saint Augustine, cautions readers not to push this too far, as if Augustine meant that we see God's essence directly whenever we add two and two. His meaning is that God is the source of the light by which we see truth, as the sun is the source of the light by which we see colors. Aquinas says the same thing in his own vocabulary (ST I, q. 84, a. 5): we know truth "in the eternal reasons" because our intellectual light is a participation in the uncreated Light.

Then comes the passage every Catholic should know by heart (X.27):

"Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within, and I was outside, and there I sought you."

Here the whole meditation on memory bears its fruit. God was never absent. He was nearer to Augustine than Augustine was to himself. As he wrote back in Book III, God is "more inward than my inmost self, and higher than my highest." The man who could not find the bottom of his own memory discovers that its bottom opens onto God.

Why this matters for the rest of us

It would be easy to treat these chapters as a philosopher's puzzle and move on. But Augustine did not write them for philosophers. He wrote them as prayer, and they hold at least three lessons for anyone trying to live the Christian life.

First, sin is a kind of forgetting. The Scriptures constantly warn Israel not to forget the Lord, and the Psalmist speaks of the nations "that forget God." If forgetfulness is a privation, then sin is the soul's forgetting of its own Source. It is not the presence of some positive evil thing so much as an absence, a hole where God should be. Conversion, then, is a kind of re-membering: the soul recollects what it was made for.

Second, prayer begins with recollection. The old spiritual writers spoke of "recollection" as the first step of prayer: gathering the scattered mind back into itself, away from distraction, so that it can rise to God. This is exactly Augustine's movement. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in The Three Ages of the Interior Life, follows St. John of the Cross in teaching that memory itself must be purified by the theological virtue of hope. A memory cluttered with grudges, anxieties, and idle images cannot rest in God. A memory emptied by hope makes room for Him.

Third, the Church herself lives by memory. At every Mass the priest repeats Our Lord's command: "Do this in memory of me." This is no mere mental recollection, as Protestants have often reduced it. It is a memorial in which the one Sacrifice of Calvary is made truly present. Augustine's distinction between things remembered "by their images" and things present "in themselves" offers a helpful analogy here. The Mass is not an image of Calvary that we look back on. It is Calvary itself, made present on the altar.

Concluding thoughts

Augustine set out to find God, looked inward, and found memory: vast, mysterious, and in the end incomprehensible even to its owner. He could not solve the riddle of forgetfulness. He could not reach the bottom of his own mind. But the search was not wasted. By descending into himself he learned that the self is not the end of the road, and by going beyond himself he found the One who had been waiting there all along.

That is the shape of the Christian life in miniature: out of the scattered world, into the soul, and up to God. We too are "difficult ground," and we too must work it with sweat. But the One we seek is not far away. He is the light by which we see, the Truth we remember without knowing it, the Beauty so ancient and so new. The only tragedy is to love Him late.