Augustinian Studies 38:1 (2007) 147–159

The Force of Memory:

Reflections on the Interrupted Self

James Wetzel
Villanova University

Martha Nussbaum has devoted a great deal of her considerable literary output to
the task of wedding human aspirations for clarity and wisdom to the fluid logic of
the emotions.1 Within this logic, we see not so much darkly through the prism of the
flesh, but in ways that forbid us, on pain of tragic simplification, from confining the
motion of spirit to a single rhythm of sense or to some paralyzed abstraction. Platonists
are the semi-historical beings of her stories who like to confuse beauty of form with
monotony, truth-seeking with control, goodness with self-sufficiency. Augustine is
not likely to fare well with Nussbaum, in so far as he gets cast as one of her priestly
Platonists, anxious to direct souls to the there that is never there. In her massive work
on Hellenistic ethics, based on her 1986 Martin Classical Lectures, she pauses briefly
to take the measure of Augustinian ethics, and she finds that it is the worst kind of
Platonism. It keeps Plato’s notion that the good may be utterly unlike our current
ways of conceiving goodness, and then it adds a heaping dose of sin to ignorance,
further augmenting the pathetic character of most people’s moral striving. “For both
Platonists and these Christians,” she writes, “digging more deeply into ourselves is
not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry. For the possibility must always be
left open that everything we are and want and believe is totally in error.”2

1. I have in mind three of her major works, but this is but a selection: The Fragility of Goodness, rev.
ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, The Therapy of Desire, Princeton, N.J.: Princ-
eton University Press, 1994, and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
2. Therapy of Desire, 19.

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Nussbaum has a strikingly different take on Augustine some years later, when
she is delivering her 1993 Gifford Lectures, the basic material for yet another mas-
sive book, this one a history and a polemic on behalf of the emotions. In Upheavals
of Emotion, Augustine rates his own chapter, and although he is not going to fare
nearly so well as Dante, Nussbaum’s favorite stylist of the Christian ascent, his
interests in transcendence are no longer damningly Platonist. She does not say why
she has changed her mind about Augustine or even that she has, but I suspect that
the change—which is dramatic—has much to do with her reading of Peter Brown’s
biography of Augustine, particularly his oft-cited chapter, “The Lost Future,” where
he describes Augustine’s disillusionment with classical perfectionism, specifically
of the Platonist variety.3 For the man who was reading Paul assiduously in the late
390s and preparing his confession, the victory of spirit over flesh was beginning to
look short-lived and inevitably so. “Augustine came to appreciate,” writes Brown,
“the sheer difficulty of achieving an ideal life.”4 Nussbaum gratefully acknowledges
her debt to Brown, but she also claims that his picture of Augustine’s departure from
Platonism is distorted. He depicts the Augustine who comes to find the Platonist
vision of liberation unworkable in this life, but still hauntingly desirable; he leaves
largely out of the picture, she says, the Augustine who finds the vision undesirable,
here and in the life to come.
Nussbaum finds much of her evidence for this latter, much preferable, Augus-
tine in Confessions X, where Augustine movingly describes the incomprehensible
depths of his memory and seems none too keen, at least as Nussbaum reads him, to
leave these depths behind. The ascent to the God of pure spirit, whatever that may
mean for the memory-touring Augustine, cannot be an ascent towards amnesia.
Nussbaum is now able to find in her new and improved Augustine what seemed
so weirdly lacking in her Augustinian Christian: some motive for digging deeply
into the self.
If Nussbaum is right about Augustine’s development, then somewhere in the
neighborhood of writing the Confessions Augustine radically rethinks his concep-
tion of the redeemable self and trades in a disembodied soul for something less
abstracted from a personality and considerably more complex in its affections.
Brown, it seems to me, is not claiming by contrast that Augustine simply becomes
more pessimistic about his or anyone else’s chances for clear soul-sight in this life.
“What begins, perhaps, as the dangerous disillusionment of a perfectionist,” Brown
writes, “emerges in the Confessions as a new view of man, a reassessment of his

3. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edition with an epilogue, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 2000.
4. Brown (2000), 141.

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potentialities, an exciting and profound discovery of the true sources of his motiva-
tion.”5 It is hardly the arc of pessimism that is being described here. Midway on his
life’s journey, Augustine loses his straight path to God, but he also becomes more
receptive to unexpected sources of delight. Instead of a certain future with God, he
has an open one. I hesitate to say that I really know what this means, even as I am
disposed to believe—especially given my age—that one of my spiritual mentors had
a midlife crisis that helped him become more imperfectly human and also wiser. I
am afraid that I cannot tell the story of Augustine that Nussbaum would have me
tell of him, that he fell away from an inhumane Platonism and started to make his
human mistakes honestly, without ever looking back at the lost future. I am too
aware of the sense of loss that permeates the Confessions, even as Augustine is
happily learning a new language of delight. We can call this sense of loss ‘original
sin’ and hastily debate the blessings of a mothered birth, but to my mind this is to
give an undiscovered country a name, and no more.
In the first book of his Confessions, Augustine admits, with a less than credible
glumness, that as a boy it was his delight to read Virgil’s Aenead and weep for
Dido, who took her life for lost love.6 I reread the Aenead recently, and I confess
that I lacked sufficient heart to weep for Dido. I was nonetheless moved by one of
her lines, which she relays to her sister Anna, but intends for the ears of Aeneas,
her departing lover. At this point in the epic, Dido is no longer trying to convince
Aeneas that he ought to feel more for her and respect the marriage that is between
them, sealed in flesh if not in law. She accepts that his fate, or at least his sense of
it, is leading him ineluctably to Italy and the bloody birth of a Roman nation. She
asks him, through Anna, only for a gift of more time. “All I want is time,” she says,
“some breathing room for my passion, until fate has taught me how the vanquished
should grieve.”7 I am caught by this question of Dido’s, of how the vanquished
should grieve, and I cannot help but think that much of the Confessions is, in rela-
tion to this question, Augustine’s prayer for more time.
He does not, however, put himself in the position of Dido or God in the posi-
tion of Aeneas. When Augustine berates himself in confession for having wept for
Dido, he claims that he ought to have been weeping for himself, too unmoved at
the time to notice how his lack of love for God was killing him. The tender boy,
from the perspective of the middle-aged man he was to become, was a venerable
Aeneas under a weeping persona—a stony heart. The Dido to this self-deceived
5. Brown (2000), still 141.
6. Conf. 1.13.20–21.
7. Aenead, lines 433–434: tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque furori, dum mea me victam doceat
fortuna dolere. I have used Stanley Lombardo’s free but faithful translation of these lines. See lines
503–504 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Indianapolis, Hackett, 2005.

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Aeneas is not God but the older Augustine, who in Confessions X confesses to
having had his stony heart breached. “You cut through my heart with your word,”
he tells God, “and I loved you.”8 If we wonder why the man with a pierced heart is
bothering to berate his younger, stonier self, the answer, I suspect, has something
to do with the older man’s continued identification with that self. Augustine car-
ries his Aeneas with him, and like Dido, he needs time to learn a lesson of grief,
a lesson about letting go.
In any case we should not expect the writer of the Confessions to describe for
us a straight path to God. However illuminated his soul may be, he cannot avoid
the detours that come to him from an unmasterable past. Nor should we expect
Augustine, on the other hand, to offer us the sanctuary of finitude, where human
concerns are all blessedly limited. It is too late for that. The movement of his God
into the flesh has left Augustine with an eternally open conception of his own hu-
manity—as if he were perpetually faced with the prospect of being born again. It
is not an entirely comfortable prospect, to say the least, and it should come as no
surprise that Augustine craves some sense of the time that is reliably his.
It is also true, however, that he is ambivalent about having to claim his life
from time. Augustine’s memory never seems to offer him a stable self; either he
gets reminded of something incomprehensible, or he gets a vision of hopeless
distention—a Babel of scattered selves, presumably once united. It might be nice
not to have to recollect a self at all. Nussbaum never mentions this resolution of
Augustine’s in Confessions X: “I will pass beyond this power of mine that is called
memory,” he writes; “I will pass beyond it, sweet light, so that I may reach you.”9
Nussbaum is not wrong to think that Augustine mostly resolves to labor in the fields
of his memory and find God there, and not in some translucent empyrean. Still,
this resolution of his is not very telling apart from some sense of the ambivalence
which dogs it. For the remainder of my talk, I plan to walk that dog.

I. Pyrrhic Ascent
Let’s start with the idea of an ascent. In the philosophical sense, an ascent is a
catharsis and not literally a move to a higher elevation, although, like ascending
to a mountain peak, the catharsis is supposed to disencumber a person’s point of
view. The encumbrances have to do with the tangle of bodily desires—for satiety,

8. Conf. 10.6.8: percussisti cor meum verbo tuo, et amavi te. My source for the Latin text of the Con-
fessions is James J. O’Donnell’s edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. Translations of Augustine
are my own.
9. Conf. 10.17.26: transibo et hanc vim meam quae memoria vocatur, transibo eam ut pertendam ad
te, dulce lumen.

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for release, for recognition—that dispose a person to confuse soul with body and
tie immortality to some image of bodily perfection. Catharsis is a matter of getting
the soul, the higher part in us, to forget bodily birth and recollect birth in spirit.
Most of us, most of the time, are under the impression that we begin life tied to a
woman, the one we learn to call ‘mother.’ Augustine complains in Confessions VIII
that he was still tied fast to a woman, or to the idea of women, well past the waning
of his profane ambitions, and that this tie was keeping him from a spiritual life.10 In
the ascent to spirit, he would presumably come to see that he is more his heavenly
father’s son than his mother’s child. The heavenly father creates the earthly mother
who births the soul, and the soul, while incarnate, struggles to sort out father from
mother, spirit from flesh. It is perhaps understandable that most of us, most of the
time, are confused.
There have been predominantly two opinions about the ascending Augustine
in the scholarship. One is that he is bad at ascents and motivated by this badness
to seek help from Christ, the universal mediator between flesh and spirit; the other
is that he is good at ascents and motivated by how little this goodness matters to
turn to Christ. Pierre Courcelle lends his weighty authority to the first opinion,
and just about every scholar of Augustine, francophone or otherwise, knows his
phrase, “les vaines tentatives d’extases Plotiniennes”—the title of his influential
analysis of the Platonist adventures of book VII of the Confessions.11 Courcelle
reads Augustine to have described three futile tries at rising to the level of a Ploti-
nus, who, as Porphyry tells us, experienced oneness with the One on at least four
separate occasions.12 No less an authority than James J. O’Donnell has pointed out,
sensibly enough, that Plotinian ecstasies, as Plotinus conceives of them, tend to
be brief in duration.13 Augustine could have had one and not found the pleasure or
the illumination terribly sustaining. O’Donnell thinks that Augustine does in fact
describe having had one in Confessions 7.17.23, where he writes: “It amazed me
both that I was loving you then and not some figment in your place and that I was
not fixated with enjoying you, my God; I was carried off to you by your beauty and
just as soon ripped away from you by my weight.”14 For O’Donnell what Augustine
describes just is the amazement that is Plotinian ecstasy, as Augustine would have
10. Conf. 8.2.2: sed adhuc conligabar tenaciter ex femina. It is possible to read Augustine simply to
mean that his sexual attraction to women was causing him spiritual problems. No doubt, but there
is nothing simple about that.
11. Recherches sur les Confessions de Saint Augustin, Paris, de Bocard, 1950, 157–167.
12. See chapter 23 of Porphyry’s life of Plotinus, volume one of Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Arm-
strong, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989).
13. See Volume II, 434–437, of O’Donnell’s edition of the Confessions.
14. Conf. 7.17.23: Et mirabar quod iam te amabam, non pro te phantasma, et non stabam frui deo
meo, sed rapiebar ad te decore tuo moxque diripiebar abs te pondere meo.

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come to understand it—both the heady ascent to divine beauty and the precipitous
fall back to the familiar.
The difference between the two opinions turns out not to be very great. In both
instances, we are being invited to assume that Augustine’s ascents are attempts,
whether successful or not, at a mystical experience. The experience bears the marks
of the mystical as Williams James once famously characterized the mystical in The
Varieties of Religious Experience. Mystical experience, says James, is noetic, inef-
fable, passive, and transient.15 It just happens to you, it doesn’t last, it gives you a
pop of knowledge, and you can’t describe what it is that you now know—not even
to yourself. In his recent book on the question of mysticism in Augustine, John
Peter Kenney has urged a different, less cramped, way of interpreting ascent in
the Confessions: “The ascension narratives of the Confessions are, in fact,” Ken-
ney writes, “portions of a fairly seamless effort at self-examination and cannot be
easily separated into description and interpretation, into observation reports and
theology.”16 Kenney is not denying that Augustine is describing experiences in the
Confessions; he is encouraging us to be more generous-minded about what experi-
ence is and to pay full attention to what Augustine has to say about his. The noesis
of an ascent, such as it may be, is not going to be independent of the reflection that
surrounds it.
Take the case of Confessions VII. In first part of that book, the preface to all the
business about the libri Platonicorum and what those books occasioned in him,
Augustine remembers agonizing over the origin of evil and lamenting the fact
that, at the time, he had no better way to conceive of God than as a material being.
Suppose that we read his subsequent adventures with Plotinus and God as yielding
him a negative insight, or, what comes to the same thing, an ineffably positive one:
that God is immaterial. If Augustine continues to think of himself as a body, then
he has no way to relate to his God: there is simply too much difference between a
material and an immaterial being to speak of a sensible difference between them.
If he thinks of himself as a soul, then his difference from God is too little. One
immaterial being is much the same as another. An ascent, conducted in the con-
ventionally philosophical way, would reveal that lack of difference. But why are
we assuming that Augustine is interested in describing an ascent? Because of the
Plotinian resonances in his language? The much louder context is the context of
book VII itself and Augustine’s antecedent concern with the origin of evil.

15. See 328–330 of The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, New York,
Barnes & Noble, 2004, original text 1902.
16. Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions, New York, Routledge,
2005, 139.

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Right before the sentence where Augustine confesses his amazement at his
genuine, if unstable, love of God, and earns, in O’Donnell’s reading, his Plotinian
wings, he discloses his best insight into the origin of evil: “I sought what iniquity
was, and I found,” he writes, “not a substance, but a will turned away from you God,
the summit of being, and twisted towards the lowest things, where it fattens on the
outside and wastes away within.”17 If Augustine’s mind is ascending to God, his
will is evidently intent on not following. No wonder he is astonished to discover his
love of God. Love without will is not passive admiration; it is, for Augustine, love
without the desire to love or be loved. It is, in short, an impossibility; the mind is
not going to go where the will is unwilling to follow. The challenge to Augustine’s
readers of his puzzling juxtaposition of his two discoveries—one about evil, the
other about love—is this: we have to entertain the possibility that Augustine catches
himself loving God in his very act of turning away.
Much depends here on what we take Augustine’s problem of evil to be. If we
take it to be a problem of theodicy, then Augustine will need to have a will or have
access to a will that is absolutely not God’s; otherwise the lines of responsibil-
ity—human as opposed to divine—get hopelessly crossed. Most interpreters think
he would be helped here if he were to discover that God is immaterial.18 I fail to
see how, but admittedly I have a very limited understanding of how one immaterial
thing originates from another and then establishes its absolute independence. My
two-year old daughter seems to be attempting the independence part, but she is
clearly material and I suspect that she does not really want her independence from
her parents to be absolute. Nor, I think, does Augustine want his independence from
God to be absolute. If God’s dematerialization were to have the consequence of
making Augustine’s will to sin his defining difference from his creator, then Au-
gustine would not be able to ascend to God without also wanting, at the height of
ascent, to abandon the summit and seek a return to lower ground. What Augustine
describes instead is being astounded by his nascent love of God, familiar and yet
distant, and being involuntarily drawn back into the clumsy habit of his flesh. He
still has that tie to a woman.

17. Conf. 7.16.22: et quaesivi quid esset iniquitas et non inveni substantiam, sed a summa substantia,
te deo, detortae in infima voluntatis perversitatem, proicientis intima sua et tumescentis foras.
18. To take a paradigm case: Stephen Menn contends that Augustine has “all the resources of tradi-
tional Platonic theodicy” once he comes to conceive of God in immaterial terms. See Augustine
and Descartes, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, chap. 4, 140 especially. The idea
is roughly this: on the supposition that immaterial being is not, qua immaterial, subject to parti-
tion, two immaterial beings can be independent of one another even when one is derived from
the other. Of course it also follows from this strange logic that God is no position to redeem the
fallen soul.

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It is not clear to me that we have been given a description of an ascent, not if

ascent is basically the return of earth-born spirit to spirit. Kenney reminds us that
in Augustine’s ascension narrative, or what passes for one, Augustine does not meet
up with the undescended portion of his original self; he discovers his divine other.19
That is a reminder that ought to profoundly inform all our readings of Augustine’s
mysticism. Ascents are about unification, about leaving differences behind. Augus-
tine is not trying to get over the difference that distances him from God; he is trying
to get to the difference that he can live with, the one that gives him his life. So far
he has been getting the difference quite wrong. It is not his will to sin that makes
him different. In thinking otherwise, he has turned himself into the problem of evil’s
origin. In Confessions VII, Augustine recollects having been given a jolting response
to that problem, all Platonist niceties to the side. It has been Augustine’s disposition
to believe that for Adam’s race, the human race, sin is second nature, a disposition
bred in the bone.20 His God does him the great grace of refusing to materialize on
those terms. Instead of appearing in the flesh and letting Augustine think that flesh
comes in two varieties—divine and human—he raises up Augustine to a place best
described as “unlikely” (regio dissimilitudinis), calls to him from a distance, points
out creation, and lets him feel in himself an original love. The lesson comes to an
end when God consigns his prodigal son to labor in the soil of his origins, or what
Augustine is more apt to call his “fleshly habit” (consuetudo carnalis).21
It is important to take in that Augustine misses the meaning of his experi-
ence—both at the time and, I suspect, in retrospect as well—the last part especially.
Courcelle was right to think that Confessions VII describes a failure of some sort;
he just mistook the nature of the failure. O’Donnell was right not to see a failure of
Plotinian ecstasy there, but he missed Augustine’s failure altogether. Augustine fails
to stick with God for precisely the reason he suggests he would fail at the beginning
of that book. He brings to his conception of God an imagination that is too dispirit-
edly material.22 I mean by this not that he cannot conceive of immaterial substance,
but that he is still far from thinking of God’s distinctively human side. If he thinks
that he has managed, from his unlikely perch outside of creation, to conceive of
God at all, then of course Augustine’s familiar but forgotten humanity is going to
catch up with him and bring him back to earth. He is, after all, already there.
19. Kenney (2005), 71.
20. Augustine does not expressly invoke the notion of inherited guilt (reatus) until close to writing of
the Confessions. See Ad Simplicianum 1.2.20. Prior to that he entertained the notion of inherited
incapacities: we are all born disposed to have a great deal of trouble finding our way to God; this
is our inheritance from a disobedient Adam. We are condemned, not for having this disposition,
but for failing to seek its remedy in Christ.
21. Conf. 7.10.16–7.17.23.
22. Conf. 7.1.1.

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The disconnection he describes feeling between his love of God and the body
of desire that he calls his fleshly habit is an illusion of time. Augustine loves God
in the way that any child loves a parent—innocently and originally. Over time the
innocence of human love for God can be abused, twisted and tortured, and finally
forgotten, but the originality of the love never changes. To remember the love is to
be returned in affection to an absolute beginning, before any human will has done its
work of fearful obfuscation. In Confessions VIII, Augustine heeds the words of the
apostle and in a moment of clarity accepts the imperative of an incarnation—both
God’s and his own;23 from then on he can begin the redemptive work of memory in
earnest. When he tells us in Confessions X that he intends to transcend his power
of memory (hanc vim meam) in order to reach the sweet light of God, I do not take
him to be suddenly announcing a quest for immemorial knowledge; it is his own
power of memory that he distrusts, not memory as such. As servant to his desires,
Augustine’s memory has been for him a potent, if limited, source of illusion—a
recognition that has left Augustine caught between grief and hope, fear and exulta-
tion. He needs a memory better than his own to break through.
Augustine describes Confessions X as the book of his that is especially invested
with recollecting the present: “So to such as these, those whom you order me to
serve, I will be pointing out,” he explains, “not who I was but who I am now and
who I continue to be.”24 Augustine has given himself the seemingly paradoxical task
of recollecting the ever present moment of his memory’s redemption, a matter of
catching himself in the act of remembering God. In Confessions VII, he was, while
tucked away in a place out of time, given a miraculous reminder of his original
love. Now he must find that love again in his recollected life. To fail here is to risk
not having a life to recollect.

II. The Difficult Gift of Time

Augustine spends nine books trying to recollect the divine thread that runs
throughout the scattered fragments of his past and lends them narrative coherence.
In Confessions X, where we might have expected a relatively unified self to emerge,
he dwells instead on the astonishing narrowness of his self-comprehension and
his continued vulnerability to temptations that tempt him to be unlike himself.
He feels unlike himself whenever his desires make no forward-looking sense to
him, but instead use discredited pleasures to pull him into dark and abandoned

23. Conf. 8.12.29. Augustine reports that, upon reading Romans 13:13–14, he immediately had his
heart soothed by an enfolding light (lux securitatis). There was no need to read further.
24. Conf. 10.4.6: indicabo ergo talibus qualibus iubes ut serviam, non quis fuerim, sed quis iam sim
et quis adhuc sim.

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places. The tug of temptation underscores his need to make peace with his past
self, but Augustine gives his readers little reason to believe that he has met with
such a self in the capacious house of his memory. “The force of memory is great,
my God,” he famously confesses, “excessively great; it is a broad and endless
depth. Who has reached its bottom? And this force is my mind’s own, a natural
endowment, and still I cannot take in the whole that I am.”25
If we hear in Augustine’s confession of interminable imperfection only a lament
about his limited power to order the time of his life, then I think that we misunder-
stand him. He has slowly been letting go of his desire to be always present to himself
and so to be his own best reader, beloveds notwithstanding. Like Dido, however,
he needs more time to be done with his Aeneas. The most revealing sentiment in
Confessions X is also a riddle. After quoting Paul where Paul is telling us that we
now see God darkly through a glass and not yet face to face (1 Cor. 13:12), Augustine
uses Paul to gloss himself: “As long I am a sojourner, away from you,” he confesses,
“I am more present to myself than I am to you.” “Nevertheless,” he continues, “I
know you are not vulnerable to injury, even as I fail to know which temptations I
can resist and which I cannot.”26 The first part of Augustine’s sentiment is striking
in its implications. If Augustine were to achieve a state where he is fully present
to himself, with no possibility of interruption, he will have forgotten God beyond
all possibility of recall. Such perfect narcissism is no longer a misspent love; it is
spiritual death, the soul’s self-entombment. The second part of the sentiment adds
the riddle. If perfect self-comprehension is neither desirable nor possible in a hu-
man sojourner, then Augustine cannot, in the extremity of his travels, ever wholly
lose sight of his point of departure; he will always be able to remember something
of the God he affects to leave behind. But why the recollection of God’s freedom
from being forcibly distended and split apart; why is that particular memento of
God the first to enter and the last to leave Augustine’s scattered psyche?
One possible, even likely answer is that Augustine’s growing awareness of his
disaffected pursuit of happiness is also giving definition to the happiness he is miss-
ing. The assumption here is that sin is essentially a disaffected love of God, and as
such, spoils every kind of happiness. When Augustine wonders where in his memory
his God is to be found, he quickly shifts his attention to whether he can remember
the happy life, the beata vita.27 If he cannot, then his disaffection is not memorable
25. Conf. 10.8.15: Magna ista vis est memoriae, magna nimis, deus meus, penetrale amplum et infi-
nitum. quis ad fundum eius pervenit? et vis est haec animi mei atque ad meam naturam pertinet,
nec ego ipse capio totum quod sum.
26. Conf. 10.5.7: quamdiu peregrinor abs te, mihi sum praesentior quam tibi et tamen te novi nullo
modo posse violari; ego vero quibus temptationibus resistere valem quibusve non valeam, nescio.
27. Conf. 10.20.29.

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and his confession will fail; if he can, then he will have wed a divine possibility to
his present moment. In his brilliant study of negativity in Christian mysticism, Denys
Turner suggests this analogy for Augustine’s cognitive predicament in Confessions
X: “Augustine knew what he was looking for in the increasingly defined shape and
intensity of his unhappiness, in the same way,” adds Turner, “that the crossword
solver becomes more, not less, frustrated as the solution moves nearer and nearer
to the tip of her tongue, but eludes her yet.”28
Like Kenney, Turner hopes to disentangle mysticism from mystical experience,
and so I very much doubt he would want me to extend his analogy past its intima-
tion of a negative askesis—where the crossword solver discovers that the missing
word is not this one and not that, and Augustine discovers that the missing beauty
is also not this one and not that.29 If we extend the analogy ever so slightly, we will
be reminded that Augustine too is searching for a word, albeit the one that supplants
and then lends its sense to all of the others. I would, however, advise caution here.
We are on the verge of a false memory. Augustine is not trying to remember God
de novo. He already has had the experience of having God interrupt his self’s so-
liloquy and interject unlikeness; this experience of his, though it can seem, as it did
in Confessions VII, out of body, is the distillate of his love for a life in time. When
God wrecks Augustine’s self-awareness, he gives Augustine a past and a future, a
perpetually unfinished life, and freedom from having to translate all love into self-
love. Mothers do this for their children by birthing them into a world of flesh and
spirit. Children who grow up to discover that they already love their mothers, even
as they struggle to reclaim this love from time and estrangement, know something
about an original flesh. Augustine’s God is both father and mother to him, and he
begins his recollection of himself, his original flesh, with an unquestioned love: “It
is not with a doubtful love that I love you, Lord,” he writes early in Confessions X,
“but with a sure awareness.”30
I think that it is possible, to a point, to be confident of one’s capacity to love
apart from any reassurance that one is loved in return. It seems more likely to me,
however, that doubts about being loved remain a source, perhaps the source, of
human self-doubt; those of us who cannot remember being loved will have a hard
time not coming to doubt our most revered self-certainties. Those of us who can
remember still have to find some way of conveying to others what being loved is

28. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1995, 66.
29. Note Conf. 10.6.9–10, where Augustine looks for God in the created order. The created beauties
all give the same testimony: that God’s beauty is beyond theirs.
30. Conf. 10.6.8: Non dubia sed certa conscientia, domine, amo te.

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like; otherwise love languishes in soliloquy and is forgotten. We do not as human

beings have an infinite amount of time to recall love.
Augustine seems to be telling us in his Confessions, indirectly and with great
ambivalence, that, for him, recollecting love is like being unlike himself. He does
not much like the unlikeness. He prefers to have all his regrets and hopes gathered
together in one place, where a self, however conflicted, is viewable. In Confes-
sions X, he admits to himself and to his God that he has more to regret than he can
possibly remember and more to hope for than he can possibly anticipate. Is this a
condition for which he can be grateful?
That is the question that animates his next book, his confession about his troubles
with time. After pondering the conjunction of being and nonbeing in the temporal
flow that shuttles him from the ‘not yet’ to the ‘no longer’ and pauses for barely an
instant in between, Augustine comes to this misleading conclusion in Confessions
XI about his grasp of time: “When I measure time, I measure how time affects
me,” he writes; “either my affection is my sense of time, or time is not what I
measure.”31 This conclusion of his is misleading, not so much because it has led so
many interpreters down the rabbit hole of a subjective theory of time, but because
the concluding disjunction sounds like it must be exclusive. I do not think that it
can be. If Augustine is getting his sense of time through his affection for time—and
I am inclined to read affectivity into his use here of the word ‘affectio’—then his
sense is only as good as his love. Time being what it is, he will have to accept,
without resentment, that much of his time is not his to remember and none of it is
his alone—not if his creator is the creator of time.
There are two conclusions that Augustine might draw from never being able
to have himself, as temporal being, in full view. He draws both conclusions, but
not with equal force. One is that he is a temporal being by default of sin and not
by birthright; as long as he lives in time, he will always seem less than who he is
ideally. The other is that he lacks a full view of himself because, at any given time,
not all of his possibilities are his to command. Some slip out of reach because he
grows old, some he drives away because he tries so hard to contain himself, and
still others he lets go because he releases them to a beloved.
Recall that Augustine remembers God’s inviolability even while traveling away
from God and becoming more present to himself. However tempted Augustine may
be to curse his times and, like Hamlet, want his birth undone, he is not remember-
ing a God who will aid him in this oblivion. His God takes on the possibility that

31. Conf. 11.27.36: ipsam [affectionem] metior, cum tempora metior. ergo aut ipsa sunt tempora, aut
non tempora metior.

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Augustine is far too apt to surrender—that life is a lifetime—and his God is not
undone by the result. We may well speak of this as a kind of inviolability, but here
inviolability is no stranger to death, where death is also a release of someone else’s
life. I am inclined to say, out of keeping with the usual way of putting it, that Christ
lives and dies not for Augustine, but with him.
Feeling like one of those whom Augustine was ordered to serve, I take from
him the reminder that memory requires an interruption that comes, as it were,
from within self-awareness. It is not an interruption that a self can make part of a
soliloquy, and in that respect it is not, strictly speaking, an item of recall. On the
other hand, given the propensity of a flesh-born self to self-fixation, it is perhaps
the only thing in this life that is finally memorable.

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