Abstract
The topic of memory in Augustine has a well-trodden path in scholarship. Studies often focus on Augustine’s earliest writings, De trinitate (trin.) 9–12 and Confessions (Conf.) 10. Augustine on Memory, however, does not really build on this prior scholarship, but rather offers a reframing of Augustine’s understanding of memory. Instead, using a diachronic approach, Grove focuses on the Enarrationes in Psalmos (En. in Ps.) in the period between Conf. and the later books of trin. (ca. 400–425). The central key, which G. adds to an examination of Augustine’s complex articulation of memory, is the crucial and loadbearing place of the Totus Christus. G., in effect, argues that ignoring the place and function of Christ and the Totus Christus yields a truncated depiction, thus interpretation, of memory for Augustine.
The first two chapters briefly provide a limited presentation of memory in Augustine’s early writings. Memory, G. argues, has a largely anthropological limit in these writings. In contrast, Conf. displays the limitations of memory and the empty security of the “self.” G. reads Conf. 10, sometimes called the “book of memory,” as “the spectacular failure of memory.” In chapter 2, G. turns to the early En. in Ps. for the gradual realization of the Totus Christus. While offering attentive readings of Conf., G.’s depiction of Conf. as a “failure” of memory is, in this reviewer’s judgment, incomplete. Conf. culminates in books 12–13—not considered by G.—with an emphasis on “memory” (commemoratio) that aligns with G.’s subsequent reading of trin.
The second section of the book (comprising chapters 3–6) provides a reading of select En. in Ps. to unravel the “work” of memory for Augustine. These chapters offer a compelling interpretation of En. in Ps. that is largely wanting within (and wholly wanting outside of) Augustinian scholarship. G. presents the work of memory through the lens of Idithun (“the one who leaps across”) of the Psalms. Idithun is not simply an image of the individual human but also a “trope for the body of Christ” (87). Idithun is a figure who in leaping shows the “dynamic relationship between Christ and memory” (86). G. identifies three leaps: “memory into Christ, memory out from Christ, and forgetting into Christ” (87).
The first leap is joining with the Totus Christus and leaping into Christ as head. This is a “leaping out” from self into the “memory” of God (what God has done and the community of remembrance). The second leaping is from memory in Christ to leaping out “horizontally” to others. The third leaping is “forgetting” into Christ. G. describes this as “forgetful of self while straining toward Christ” (101), found in, for instance, mindfulness for the poor. Each image of memory (and forgetting) is “continual, within the whole Christ” (101). Through the figure of Idithun and the images of the types of leaping, G. criticizes the depiction of Augustine’s spirituality as “inward and upward.” Instead, by looking at the “work” of memory, that is, what the Christian is to remember persistently, G. notes how the interior forms the Christian to “return to the exterior” (107). In a sense, one never departs from remembering the whole Christ in content and act.
In the last section, G. provides a rereading of memory in trin. G. argues that the work of memory, outlined in the previous chapters, “bridges” the “psychological” triad of books 9–12 with the restoration of the imago Dei in books 14–15 (189). G.’s discussion of the later books of trin., though brief and textually limited, convincingly glosses existing scholarship. The “fruitful failure” of the triadic internal images is linked with the “failure of the self.” Both failures, G. argues, indicate a “failure” into the whole Christ, where the image of God is made anew. G. emphasizes Augustine’s terms of transitus and transiliens to disclose the dynamic movement of memory out of the self into Christ. Transitus describes the mediation of Christ who has “crossed over.” Transiliens is an image of the active leaping of the Totus Christus, specifically the body, in Christ and to Christ. G. contends that trin. shows that “reflexive contemplation” of the self or mind, even in Augustine’s subtle triads, is not able to mediate the Trinity. Such mediation, as G.’s examination of memory in En. in Ps. has shown, is not “consummated by self-awareness or mindfulness” (202). Rather, the failure of memory in trin. presumes, G. asserts, the success of memory as disclosed in En. in Ps.
Augustine on Memory is a significant contribution to Augustinian and theological scholarship. G. has convincingly shown the integration of Augustine’s theology of the Totus Christus with his profound reflection on memory. By moving beyond the concern of memory as a faculty, G. reconfigures how to understand memory and its work. The consequence of this move is ultimately to suggest a completely different, more textured Augustinian anthropology.