Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings (continued)
INTRODUCTION
It is undeniable that the whole thrust of his work On the Trinity is to contemplate the Trinity within the human soul. When the soal's capacity for God is actualized, whoever sees the Christian's life of love can find there a mirror of the Trinity. But the true love of neighbor is grounded in the love of God, and in this interior life of love Augustine discovered the image of the Trinity: Now this trinity of the mind is God's image, not because the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but because it has the power also to remember, understand, and love its Maker. And it is in so doing that it attains wisdom. If it does not do so, the memory, understanding, and love of itself is no more than an act of folly. Let the mind then remember its God in whose image it was made, let it understand and love him. In a word, let it worship the Uncreated God who created it with the capacity for himself, and in whom it is able to be made partaker. For this cause it is written: "Behold the worship of God is Wisdom" (Jb 28:28). Wisdom will be the mind's not by its own illumination, but by partaking in that Supreme Light; and only when it enters eternity will it reign in bliss.?3
From this text and others it is clear that Augustinian "memory" is not entirely identifiable either with Platonic reminiscence or with the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of sense or intellectual memory as a storehouse of past images or concepts. It has the functions of Aristotelian memory but is not limited to those functions. To think naturally or spontaneously of things implicitly known is to remember, according to Augustine. God transcends the memory but is present within it, close to the light that enlightens the memory. Although not identified with it, He is its immediate principle, so that by this light, which is His highest work in natural man, He somehow touches man even when the latter is far from Him in the region of unlikeness. Moreover, in Book XII of
23. Augustine, On the Trinity, XIV.12.15. Cf. R. D. Crouse, "St. Augustine's Theory of Personality," in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought (London: Variorum, 1981) (hereafter 77rin.).