The Fields and Palaces of Memory

Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. PSALM 103:2

The first nine books of the Confessions tell a story. The tenth stops telling it. Having brought his life up to his mother’s death, Augustine turns from what he was to what he is, and the question he asks is startling: where, in myself, do I find God? The answer takes him into the long meditation on memory that fills most of Book X. It is one of the strangest and most original things he ever wrote, and it has a great deal to teach a hurried age that has almost forgotten how to remember.

I asked the earth

He begins by looking outward. What is it that I love, he asks, when I love my God? Not the beauty of bodies, nor the brightness of light, nor sweet melodies, nor fragrance, nor manna, nor limbs made for embracing. And yet there is a kind of light and melody and fragrance and embrace he loves when he loves God — the light and voice and embrace of his inner self. So he goes to the creation and questions it. “I asked the earth,” he says, “and it answered me, ‘I am not He’.” He asks the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answer, “We are not thy God, seek above us.” The air, the heavens, sun, moon and stars all make the same reply. Their answer, he says, was their beauty. They point beyond themselves.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. PSALM 19:1

This is Augustine at his most balanced. The creation is not God, and he will not worship it. But neither is it silent. Everything beautiful is a signpost with the same words on it: not here — higher. The trouble with fallen people is not that they love beautiful things, but that they stop at the signpost.

The vast palace within

So he turns inward. Passing beyond the senses, he comes, he says, “to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images.” He is astonished by what he finds. Everything he has ever seen, heard, learned or felt is stored there, in some fashion, ready to be called out. He can picture colours in the dark and hear songs with his mouth shut. He can remember being happy when he is sad, and remember being afraid without fear. He can even remember that he has forgotten.

“Great is the power of memory,” he exclaims, “a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself.” He had spent years looking at the stars and the sea; now he finds a greater wonder inside his own head, and he marvels that men go abroad to admire mountains and oceans and pass themselves by without wonder.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. PSALM 139:14

In Thee above me

But Augustine is not writing psychology for its own sake. He is looking for God. Where in all these halls is He? God is not an image stored among images, nor a feeling, nor a thought like other thoughts. Yet Augustine knows that since he came to know God he has never forgotten Him; God is somehow in his memory. And how did He get there?

He reaches for an illustration from the Gospel. The woman who lost her coin, he says, and searched for it with a lamp, would never have found it unless she had remembered it; how else would she recognise it? Every search presupposes some knowledge of what we are looking for. And all people, he observes, want the happy life. They may not agree what it is, but they know they want it, and they would all rather rejoice in truth than be deceived. “A happy life is joy in the truth,” he says: and that joy is a joy in God, who is the Truth. Somewhere in the deep places of the soul there is a memory of home, however clouded.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being. ACTS 17:27–28

Yet when he asks where exactly he first found God, he comes to a surprising answer. Not in his memory, for God was not there before he learned Him. “Where then did I find Thee, that I might learn Thee, but in Thee above me?” The search inward does not end in the self. It ends in God, of whom Augustine says elsewhere in the Confessions, “Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest.” We do not find God by digging Him out of ourselves; He finds us, and in the finding we discover that He was closer all along than we were to ourselves.

Too late loved I Thee

It is at exactly this point that Augustine breaks into the famous prayer we met at the start of this book: too late loved I Thee, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new. Thou wert within, and I abroad. And he goes on to describe God’s pursuit of him through all five senses. “Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness.” God flashed and shone and scattered his blindness; breathed fragrance and he drew in breath and panted; he tasted, and now hungers and thirsts; God touched him, and he burned for His peace.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. PSALM 34:8

Remembering rightly

What does this mean for us? At least this: memory is not a filing cabinet. It is the place where we meet God, and it can be trained for good or ill. Scripture commands Israel again and again to remember — the exodus, the wilderness, the covenant — because a people who forget what God has done will soon forget God.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart. DEUTERONOMY 8:2

The Confessions itself is an act of Christian memory: a man going back over his life, not to wallow in it or to boast of it, but to trace the hand of God in it. We can do the same. The past is not only a place of regret. Looked at in God’s light, it is a record of mercy. And our remembering is meant to become thanksgiving.

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. PSALM 77:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Spend ten minutes this week in silence simply remembering — not planning, not reviewing — and ask God to show you where He was in what you recall.

2. Walk outside and look at something beautiful. Let it say to you what it said to Augustine: not here — higher. Then pray.

3. Write a list of ten mercies of God from your past that you had begun to forget, and thank Him for each.

4. If your memory holds wounds rather than blessings, bring one of them to God in prayer and ask Him to show you how He was present even there.

5. At the end of each day, before sleep, recall where God met you that day, and give thanks.

A PRAYER

Lord, You are more inward to me than my inmost self, and I went looking for You everywhere but where You were.

Thank You for the great and fearful gift of memory. Let it be a place where I meet You and not a place where I hide from You.

Call, and break my deafness; shine, and scatter my blindness. Let me taste and see that You are good.

Teach me to remember all the way You have led me, and to turn every memory into praise. Amen.