Augustine in His Own Words
Confessions 33 images of colors, despite the fact that they are present, do not intervene or break in when that other storeroom, which has flowed in through the ears, is reviewed. Thus, I can remember at will the other things which have been taken in and piled up through the other senses. I can distinguish the fragrance of lilies from that of violets while smelling nothing, and I can prefer honey to musk, smooth to rough, and not by tasting or touching anything at the time, but by recollecting.
(8.14) I do this inside, in the immense palace of my memory. In it sky, earth, and sea are present before me, together with the things I can perceive in them, except for those which I have forgotten. In it I even encounter myself and I bring myself to mind: what, when, and where I did something, and how I felt when I did it. In it are all the things which I remember, either those personally experienced or those told me by others. . . .
(8.15) Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God; it is a vast and unlimited inner chamber. Who has plumbed its depths? Yet this is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. I myself do not grasp all that I am. Is then the mind too narrow to grasp itself? So then a question arises: Where is this part of myself which it cannot grasp? Is it outside it and not inside it? How then does it not grasp it? This question brings up something really astonishing to me. It leaves me awestruck: People go out to admire mountain peaks, giant waves in the sea, the broad courses of rivers, the vast sweep of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars—and yet [the immense depths of] their own self they ignore and leave aside.54
"Late Have I Loved You"
One of the most famous passages in Confessions is a brief poetic prayer in Book 10. I have tried here to capture the poetic feel of Augustine's elegant Latin. Following his French translators, I have set the passage in free verse and with the Latin in parallel. From Confessions, Book 10:
(27.38) Sero te amaui, Late have I loved You, pulchritudo tam antiqua beauty so ancient, et tam noua, so new, sero te amaui. late have I loved You.
54. Conf. 10.8.12–8.15 (CCL 27:161–63); trans. Bourke, FOTC 21: 273–76 (modified). See Roland Teske, "Augustine's Philosophy of Memory," in Stump and Kretzmann, Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 148–58; O'Donnell, 3:174–78.