Quotation
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“Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, my God, a deep and boundless manifold.”
Augustine of Hippo · Christian Platonism · Medieval · c. 397–400
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes memory as a vast inner store in which the self meets images, skills, and feelings, and is frightened by the depth because the mind contains more than it can survey. He is not writing a treatise on study skills. A rival reading modernises the passage into a compliment to reminiscence, as if the fear were really tenderness about the past. Book ten is searching for God in memory and finding that God is not an item stored beside other items; The manifold is part of that search.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of Confessions book ten, on the fields and palaces of memory. The Latin is secure. Augustine is astonished at an inner capacity, not praising nostalgia. This English is a translation.
Where it comes from
Confessions X.8.15
Approximate date: c. 397–400.
How to use it
Sorting a dead relative's papers in a flat in Norwich, someone finds that a skill, a grievance, and a prayer are all somehow present without being in the room, and that none of them can be fully laid out on the table. Augustine's fear is about that excess, not about sentiment. The box of papers is smaller than the memory that knows how to read them; The passage does not say the past is reliable just because it is vivid.
A mindset reading
Power of memory can be recruited as a boast, a mind that forgets nothing and therefore judges everyone. He calls it fearful, which cuts against the boast. The depth is also not an excuse for treating every vivid picture as true; Later in the same book he is well aware that memory can be disordered; Astonishment and suspicion belong together.
Understand the philosophy
Book ten's key term is memory, memoria, the great hall and the storehouses where the mind holds what it has sensed and what it has learned, including numbers and emotions. He wonders how the mind can contain what contains it. The search is theological: where, in all this, is God to be found. Chadwick's English keeps both the scale and the fear; The passage is philosophy of mind inside a prayer.
- mind
- self
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes memory as a vast inner store in which the self meets images, skills, and feelings, and is frightened by the depth because the mind contains more than it can survey. He is not writing a treatise on study skills. A rival reading modernises the passage into a compliment to reminiscence, as if the fear were really tenderness about the past. Book ten is searching for God in memory and finding that God is not an item stored beside other items; The manifold is part of that search.
Did Augustine of Hippo really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Henry Chadwick's translation of Confessions book ten, on the fields and palaces of memory. The Latin is secure. Augustine is astonished at an inner capacity, not praising nostalgia. This English is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Confessions X.8.15 Approximate date: c. 397–400.