Book Review: Memory in Augustine's Theological Anthropology

Abstract

in Theological Anthropology. By Paige E. Hochschild. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 251 pp. $95.98 (cloth).Paige Hochschild s work is divided into three parts, each of which concludes with summary reflections: Philosophical Tradition, Augustine's Early Writings, and Confessiones and De Trinitate. The structure begins with the that Augustine inherits, not by direct textual influences, but by tradition that he considered authoritative and received through an eclectic variety of sources (pp. 63, 2). This philosophical authority plays a significant role in his developing understanding of memory. While indebted to the trajectory as a whole, however, final conception is distinctive and original.Augustine inherits an impoverished picture of the teachings of gratefully receiving the liberation of the theory of forms, but unaware of Plato's own resolution of the soul-body dualism, which appears in the mature dialectical argument of Philebus (p. 66). Aristotle is only an indirect influence on Augustine, most importantly through Plotinus and Porphyry (p. 228). Plotinus is the chief inspiration for bringing memory to the fore. Memory has both a lower sense that pertains strictly to sense perception, and a higher sense pertaining to the retention of the forms. More clearly than Plato, he calls memory a 'habit' that needs to be cultivated and developed so that the soul becomes less mindful of the physical things that are below, and more attentive to the intelligible things above .... Augustine is very much at home in the language of Plotinian anthropology (p. 65).Casting her gaze over the Middle Early Dialogues, Hochschild leads us through developing doctrine of memory. In Soliloquia, memory holds both the horizontal experience of the senses and the vertical ascent from sensible objects to their ideal cause (p. 101). In De Animae Quanitate, the memory gives a mediatory power to the soul, enabling a habitual activity, reminiscent of Plotinus, which brings the multiplicity of experience into itself, and thereby knows its own simplified subjectivity, which in turn finds its stability in the approach to God. The movement of the soul is made possible only through faith in the incarnation of Christ and by the nourishment of the church (pp. 108,109).Both De Magistro and De Musica offer an exercitatio animi: De Magistro shows the universal character of knowledge which is experienced in the same manner by both teacher and student; in De Musica we find most articulate understanding of memory to this point. …