Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings
INTRODUCTION
On the Trinity Augustine explicitly rejected Plato's theory of recollection and said:
But we ought rather to believe that the nature of the intellectual mind is so formed as to see those things which, according to the disposition of the Creator, are subjoined to intelligible things in the natural order, in a sort of incorporeal light of its own kind, as the eye of the flesh sees the things that lie about it in this corporeal light, of which light it is made to be receptive and to which it is adapted.?4
Although, like Aristotle, he spoke of the memory as a treasure house of the knowledge of those things acquired through itself, through the senses and through the testimonies of others, he referred to a "principal memory," a "latent memory" very much like a subconsciousness or superconsciousness in which the memory of God is present.
For we usually say that we understand what we have found to be true by thinking of it, and this indeed we again leave in our memory. But there is a more profound depth of our memory, where we also find those contents which we think of for the first time, and where the inner word is begotten which does not belong to the language of any nation, as it were, knowledge of knowledge, vision of vision, and understanding of understanding, for the understanding which appears in thought comes from the understanding which already existed in the memory but was latent there.?°
It is not God in the past but God in the present who is remembered. 'The memory as the presence of truth and the origin of knowledge was underscored when Augustine said that the intellectual memory has a likeness to the Father, the Unbegotten who begets. How does knowledge of God belong to the memory
24. Trin., X11.15.24. 25. Ibid., XIV.11.14.