Book X

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Book X marks the transition in the Confessions from autobiography to the

direct analysis of philosophical and theological issues. It is also noteworthy
that the length of the Books begins to increase dramatically here (Book X is
more than twice the length of most of the previous Books). Although this is a
sudden transition in form and content, Augustine is following an underlying
structure. This structure depends mainly on his view (which is not explicitly
mentioned in the work) that the story of a soul's return to God is essentially
the same as the story of the return to God of creation as a whole. Thus, the
last four Books of the Confessions, in their deep vindication of Christianity,
focus primarily on details of the world's existence in God rather than
Augustine's own ascent to God.
Book X pursues this aim through an analysis of memory, which poses truly
mystical problems for Augustine. This topic may seem like a somewhat odd
choice to us, and it may help to note that Augustine's sense of the
Latin memoria carries overtones of Platonic ideas concerning the life of the
soul before birth; Plato argued that learning is really a process of the soul
remembering what it already knew and forgot upon taking human form. In any
case, Augustine will focus less on this idea than on the idea of memory as
unconscious knowledge--a new, inward twist on the Platonic idea.
[X.1-11] Augustine introduces his investigation with an appraisal of his love for
God. "When I love [God]," he asks, "what do I love?" It is nothing to do with
the five physical senses, but rather with their five spiritual counterparts:
metaphorical and intangible versions of God's light, voice, food, odor, and
embrace. In other words, Augustine must look inward at his own mind (or
soul) to "sense" God.
This is an ability that is not directly possible for inanimate things or beasts.
Nonetheless, Augustine argues, they all participate in God because they have
their existence only in him. Further, they highlight the wonder of the
consciousness of God attainable by humans: "the created order speaks to all,
but is understood" only by contrasting it with inner truth.

Yet "sensing" God with his spiritual faculties is not quite direct knowledge of
God, and Augustine delves deeper into himself in this attempt to "find" God
and know him. Briefly considering the life of the body, which God gives,
Augustine rejects it--God is not this, but the "life of life." Moving on, he
considers "another power," not that which animates his body but "that by
which I enable its senses to perceive." This is the mind, but Augustine is again
unsatisfied: even horses, he points out, have this basic form of mind.

[X.12-26] And so "I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory," writes
Augustine. He begins his analysis of this most puzzling human faculty with a
discussion of what kinds of things the memory holds. Each kind, considered in
turn, raises its own (often extremely involuted) philosophical dilemmas.

The first kind of memory to be treated is the rough category of sensory

perceptions--the most familiar and obvious kind of memories. Augustine
draws the initial metaphor of a storehouse of memory, in which images of
things experienced are stored (sometimes inconveniently), retrieved, and re-
stored (sometimes in new places).

This leads Augustine to consider what sort of things the images stored in the
memory are. Profoundly strange entities, these "images" can be tasted, heard,
seen, etc., all without the things of which they are images actually being
present. Augustine professes to be flabbergasted at the sheer immensity of
such a storehouse of images, which can seem almost real: memory is "a vast
and infinite profundity."

The vastness of memory is thus more than Augustine can grasp, which
means that "I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am." This state of
affairs, however, seems to be a paradox. How, asks Augustine, could the
mind be external to itself such than it cannot know itself? Memory is seeming
increasingly enigmatic.

Leaving this train of thought for a moment, Augustine notes that his memory
also holds skills. This kind of memory seems to be another case altogether,
since it is not images of the skills but the skills themselves that are retained.
From skills, Augustine moves quickly to consider ideas, which constitute yet
another distinct kind of memory. By ideas, Augustine means the ideas
themselves, not any sensory information by which they might be
communicated. How is it, he wonders, that a new idea can be self-evidently
true? There are many cases in which we believe something not on the
authority of the source, but because the idea itself strikes us as true.

Augustine's answer is a deeply Platonic one: the memory of such ideas must
have been "there before I learnt them," waiting to be recognized. Augustine
suggests that, although we don't recognize them as memories when we
recognize the truth of ideas, the pieces of these ideas are present somewhere
far back in our memories. In coming across an idea (whether through our own
thoughts or through an external source) whose truth we recognize, we are
actually "assembling" the disordered pieces of an eternal "memory."

To secure the distinction between the idea itself and the form in which we
learn it, Augustine here points to the examples of mathematical lines and
numbers: although we may see a line or number written, this material form
simply signifies a more perfect form already in our minds (a perfect form we
have never actually seen outside of us).

The next type of memory named is emotional memory, which poses the
following problem: how is it that we can remember emotions without re-
experiencing them? Augustine recalls times when he has even found himself
sad at the memory of joy (the joy of his carnal lusts, for example), or joyful
upon remembering a past sorrow. Are emotional memories images, then,
stored at some sort of remove from the original? Emotion seems too much a
part of the mind itself for this to be likely.

Leaving these dilemmas as well, Augustine's inward analysis reaches a fever

pitch when he tries to understand how he can remember forgetfulness.
Reaching no real conclusion in the rapidly expanding knot of paradoxes this
question generates, Augustine stops to marvel at memory, "a power of
profound and infinite multiplicity."

In passages like this last one, Augustine seems determined to employ every
rhetorical device at his disposal to illustrate the profundity and infinite
complexity of memory. This is due to some extent to his overall effort to
demonstrate the finding of an infinite God within one's own mind, but he also
wants to designate memory as a particularly fecund ground for self-
investigation.

Summarizing the kinds of memory covered thus far (senses, skills, ideas, and
emotions), Augustine briefly suggests looking for God elsewhere in himself,
since even "beasts" have memory. But one question intrudes: how can we be
mindful of God if he is not already in our memories? This same question, the
reader will remember, opens the Confessions in Book I: how can we seek
God if we don't already know what he looks like?
[X.27-37] Augustine's initial response to this paradox here offers a slightly
different account of the same answer given in Book I (which amounted to
"seek and ye shall find"). He suggests that, even when something is lost to
memory, we should still look for it there. It's likely, he argues, that some part
or trace is retained such that we can "reassemble" the knowledge of God as
we "reassemble" other true ideas from their scattered parts deep in the
memory.
The same question, he then notes, applies to the pursuit of the happy life
(which for Augustine is life with the knowledge of God). People everywhere
seek the happy life, but how can they seek it without already knowing what it
is? "Where did they see it to love it?" Perhaps, he considers, we did know
happiness once (this is a reference to Adam, our common ancestor, according
to the Bible, who led the supremely good life before his fall into mortality).
Something like a memory of this original goodness seems likely, since the
characteristics of the happy life that people seek seem largely universal.

Specifically, the universal feature of what people seek in life seems to be joy.
The true and greatest joy, argues Augustine, is joy in God. Even those who do
not seek God nonetheless "remain drawn toward some image of [this] true
joy." Their will is for this joy; the obstacle to their pursuit of it in God is nothing
but a lack of will. This idea is, again, Neoplatonic. Wickedness or distance
from God is due not to any flaw in God's creation, but rather to the
misdirection or impotence of the human will to recognize God's perfection.

Augustine bolsters this argument with the further proposition that the joy
universally sought in the happy life must be joy in the truth.Thus, we know
how to seek the happy life not because we remember any particular joys but
because we remember the nature of truth itself(in the Platonic sense of
memory beyond a single human life). Augustine makes the point that the
desire for truth is at least as universal as the desire for joy; no one wants to be
deceived.
This "memory" of eternal truth, however, is tenuous. People often love
mundane objects or bodies themselves in place of the higher truth in them,
and are reluctant to change because to do so would be to admit deception.

At this point, Augustine stops again to take stock of his pursuit of knowledge
about God. He cannot find God in the senses, nor in emotion. Neither, he
says, can he find God himself in the mind, which is much too changeable.
Asking yet again how he could have ever found God if God wasn't already in
Augustine's memory, Augustine finally identifies one characteristic by which
he sought God without knowing him per se: he found God simply by the fact
that God transcends the mind where he had been looking. God is that which is
above all aspects of the mind. The beauty of this account, it seems, lies
largely in the fact that the nature of God, if he is provisionally defined as that
which transcends the mind, can only be known in as much as the mind is
known first. Thus, the search for God remains an inward search.

[X.38-69] Perhaps in humble response to the knowledge of the search for

God that he has just claimed, Augustine spends the remainder of Book X
confessing the ways in which he is still separated from a truly (almost
impossibly) Godly life.
The first obstacle is that, although celibate, he is still plagued by erotic
images. Wet dreams are particularly disturbing to him, since it appears that
his reason (with which he would normally fend off lurid images) falls asleep
along with his body. Food, although it is necessary, also holds "a dangerous
pleasantness," and Augustine struggles to eat as though he were simply
taking medicine. Smell is also mentioned briefly, though Augustine doesn't
see it as much of a problem.

Sound is equally dangerous in its potentially pleasing qualities. (It should be

noted that the appreciation of the beauty of God's creation is not the issue in
these "dangerous" sensory phenomena, but rather the potential attachment to
worldly things at the expense of God himself). A particularly tricky issue with
regard to sound concerns music in church--what is the proper balance
between inspiring the congregation to seek God and miring them in the
sensory pleasures of his creation?

Vision comes next, and gets the same wary treatment. Considering light itself,
Augustine prays, "may [this] get no hold upon my soul." Taking sight as the
best sensory metaphor for knowledge, he also takes this opportunity to return
briefly to the issue of beauty in mundane objects (the subject of his early
work On the Beautiful and the Fitting). As before, Augustine attributes most
false attachments to worldly beauty to a confusion of means with ends (things
should be loved for their ends, their use value). Thus, artistic beauty should
never be "excessive" and art should never be made without a careful
consideration of its morality.
Augustine continues his most up-to-date confession, admitting that he still
enjoys a certain feeling of power or glory when he is praised. He feels he has
"almost no" insight into this problem, though he knows that praise should only
please him in as much as it expresses the true benefit someone else has
gained from him. The ego, he notes, should not be the focus of praise, since
(as stated in the discussion of memory above) it is not God.

In the end, Augustine feels he "can find no safe place for my soul except in
[God]." He must do his best against the bombardments of sin from all sides,
and have faith that God will have mercy on him.

Book X concludes with a note against the visions of God claimed by the
Neoplatonists. These were not true insights, since they were based on a kind
of pagan "theurgy" that did not include Christ. "They sought a mediator to
purify them," writes Augustine, "and it was not the true one."