Journal of Early Christian Studies

In Augustine on Memory, Fr. Kevin Grove joins the list of scholars wishing to probe Augustine's larger corpus with a view to shedding new light on well-trodden themes in his thought. While, at first glance, much seems to have been written on the Augustinian conception of memory, Grove argues that the focus on Confessiones and De Trinitate has distorted our grasp of his thought on the subject, and he ably makes the case that we must turn to his preaching, particularly his Ennarationes in psalmos, if we are to see that Augustinian memory is actually "Christic memory," at work in the whole Christ (138). In this way, Grove provides more evidence that the Augustinian turn towards the self, so famously described by Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992]), is something of a mischaracterization.

Setting out his argument chronologically, Grove begins by looking at Augustine's famous meditation on memory in book 10 of Confessiones. There, he argues that Augustine's failure to find God in his memory is indicative of his growing realization that the self cannot find God by itself. Instead, using terminology to which he returns throughout the book, Grove describes Augustine's failure in book 10 as a failing "into a salvific mediator who succeeds" (49). Pointing out that book 10 ends with an invocation of Christ as the true mediator, Grove makes the case that even though Augustine's understanding of Christ remains less developed at this stage, he already has a sense that, somehow, Christ "drives Augustine not out to be with himself in solitude so as to gain self-mastery but into a communion of broken and impoverished people being fed together in the action of the Eucharist" (52–53).

In Chapters Two through Six, Grove turns to Augustine's Ennarationes in psalmos as the locus of his discovery of what this intimation means. Arguing that Augustine's encounter with the Psalms, beginning with Psalm 21, turned him into a preacher of the whole Christ, Grove traces the development of Augustine's sense that Christ's mediation amounts to an ongoing transfiguration of the members of his body. Linking this idea to Christ's appropriation of Adam's voice in the Psalms, Grove argues that "Christ transfigures not only the cry of Adam from the fall in Eden but the cry of every person after him" by making their cries his own (80). Important for Grove's argument is that this transfiguration takes place through the work of memory, particularly in its acts of remembering and forgetting. Yet, building on his earlier claims about the limitations of individual memory, Grove again depicts authentic Augustinian memory as "shifting the self into the whole Christ" (116).

Moving, then, from his discussion of the beginning of memory to the work of memory in Chapter Three (the beginning of Part Two), Grove zeroes in on three Psalms involving Idithun, an obscure character that Augustine takes as a [End Page 650] historical figure but also uses as a trope for the body of Christ, leaping upwards towards God. This section on leaping is arguably the heart of the book, as it lays out Grove's reasons as to why the "inward-upward" model of Augustinian ascent needs to be revised. For Grove, "the work of memory is not as simple as a flight into a removed interior space"; rather it is the "ongoing reconciliation of interior and exterior realities in Christ" in the communal act of leaping (107). This claim is corroborated by his textual analysis of sermons, which suggest that remembering in Christ moves us to care for the marginalized members of his body, thanks to a greater awareness that we are becoming Christ together with them.

Delving more deeply into the work of memory in Chapters Four, Five, and Six, Grove makes the case that "Augustine preaches with memory language because memory enables and structures existence in the totus Christus...