Memory, Time and Rest

“There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.” — Hebrews 4:9 (KJV)

The story ends at Ostia. But the Confessions has four more books, and they surprise most readers. Augustine stops telling what he was and starts telling “what I now am.” He is a bishop, and he admits he is still tempted: to eat for pleasure rather than need, to be nosy (even a lizard catching flies can steal his attention from prayer), and most of all to love praise. He's honest about that: “I am delighted with praise, but with truth itself, more than with praise.”

Then he explores memory. He calls it “the fields and spacious palaces of my memory,” full of every place, face, smell and fact he has ever known. He is amazed that he can't get to the bottom of his own mind. “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea ... and pass themselves by.” Searching through it all, he realises God isn't just one memory among others. God is above his mind, and had been calling to him all along. That leads to the book's most famous prayer:

“Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.”

“Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace.”

Book XI asks a question that sounds easy: what is time? “If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” The past is gone and the future isn't here, so where are they? His answer is that they live in the mind: “a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” In other words, memory, attention and expectation. Someone once asked what God was doing before he made the world. An old joke answered, “He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries.” Augustine won't mock a serious question. He answers that time itself is something God made, so there was no “before” for God to fill. God lives in an eternal now. We live stretched out and scattered: “my life is but a distraction.” Christ gathers us back together.

Books XII and XIII read the first chapter of Genesis slowly. Augustine doesn't claim to have every answer, and he warns against people who love their own reading of Scripture “not because it is truth, but because it is theirs.” Then he finds in creation a picture of the whole book. Everything moves toward its proper place, as a stone falls and a flame rises. “My weight, is my love; thereby am I borne, whithersoever I am borne.” What you love is what pulls you, where you end up. And he ends by looking forward to “the peace of the Sabbath, which hath no evening,” when we “shall rest in Thee also in the Sabbath of eternal life.”

So the book closes where it opened. The restless heart of the first page finally has a resting place. The last words are a promise from Jesus, turned into a prayer for anyone still looking: “so shall it be received, so shall it be found, so shall it be opened.”

That's the Confessions for you, in one line. Your heart will love something, and what it loves will carry it somewhere. You can spend years, as Augustine did, searching “abroad” for what was “within” all along. Or you can start knocking now.

One thing to do this week: find ten quiet minutes, with no phone, and ask yourself Augustine's question: what do I love most, and where is it carrying me? Then turn his last line into your own prayer: “Let me ask, seek and knock, and find you.”