In reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions, it is easy to make a mistake that throws the whole work into a total nonsense. When the Eagle of Hippo talks about memory, he means a memory of the future. He doesn’t mean a memory of the past. Or more accurately, Augustine’s idea of memory is an openly, explicitly eschatological memory: memory purified by an experiential knowledge of what God will do and what he is doing.

This theme of eschatological memory fills the whole of the Confessions. If we grasp it, the reading makes more sense. Every page is easier, more lucid, more alive. Once one notices it – or, as it was in my case, gets told it – the whole structure is illuminated in one go: Of course these confessions and recollections are about God, because God has purified and taken hold of the memory. Of course memory and eternity are two themes of the book. These recollections have to do with the past – hence memory. And memory is, in its way for Augustine, turned towards eternity. Memory must be eschatological. It all makes sense. It is so simple, yet of great depth.

This is not just a theme of Saint Augustine. It belongs to the whole spiritual and “mystical” tradition of the Church.

Although the language and focus are sometimes different, this is much the same thing that one reads in Saint John of the Cross, the Church’s Mystical Doctor, who says that the memory must be purified (in much the same way he says the imagination must be purified). In fact, on one occasion, John’s language becomes very close to Augustine’s meaning:

The memory, too, was changed into eternal apprehensions of glory. (Dark Night, bk II, ch 4, #5)

Memory must live in the knowledge of contemplation, the knowledge of God, the knowledge-by-love-of-God that is contemplation.

Indeed, if one goes a step farther, one can say that it is a theme of the transformation of each and ever faculty of the human person by Love. John of the Cross calls it transformation,

amada en el amado transformada

From the summit of our soul to the tips of our fingertips and everything in between: we must be transformed. John teaches transformation, transformation, transformation. Over and over again, he comes back to it. The Eastern Fathers were more likely to call it Transfiguration. They are words for the same reality. And the memory, which was a typical case for Saint Augustine, is just one example!

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