Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- 1 Plato
- 2 Aristotle
- 3 Cicero
- 4 Pliny and Roman naturalists on memory; Borges's Funes the Memorious
- 5 Plotinus and the early neo-Platonists on memory and mind
- 6 Augustine: the early works
- 7 Augustine's De Trinitate; on memory, time and the presentness of the past
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- PART III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SCHOLASTIC UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Augustine's De Trinitate; on memory, time and the presentness of the past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- PART I THE CRITICAL TEXTS OF ANTIQUITY
- Introduction
- 1 Plato
- 2 Aristotle
- 3 Cicero
- 4 Pliny and Roman naturalists on memory; Borges's Funes the Memorious
- 5 Plotinus and the early neo-Platonists on memory and mind
- 6 Augustine: the early works
- 7 Augustine's De Trinitate; on memory, time and the presentness of the past
- PART II THE PRACTICE OF MEMORY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY TO THE CHRISTIAN MONASTIC CENTURIES
- Introduction
- PART III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SCHOLASTIC UNDERSTANDING OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART IV ARISTOTLE NEO-PLATONISED: THE REVIVAL OF ARISTOTLE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF MEMORY
- Introduction
- PART V LATER MEDIEVAL THEORIES OF MEMORY: THE VIA ANTIQUA AND THE VIA MODERNA.
- Introduction
- Conclusion: an all too brief account of modern theories of mind and remembering
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Augustine's De Trinitate divides into two parts, the second (books 8–15) centring on the human soul's psychological experiences. Here he turns to the human soul in order to try to penetrate into the mystery of this soul being the image of God which he knows through revelation: Genesis i, 26, where it says God made man in his image. He attempts to unite the two kinds of knowledge available to man, that derived from the exterior world and that which resides in one's mind. In the process of perception where exterior sense objects are perceived, the sense does not come from the perceived body or object but from the body of the subject, the perceiver, endowed with sensation and life. Perception through this sensing body is performed by the soul in a manner proper to it and which Augustine describes as a mysterious manner of knowing (quodam miro modo contemperatur) (XI, ii, 3). But it is the object perceived which engenders vision, the object ‘informs’ the subject's senses but it cannot do this alone; it requires a perceiver. Sensation would be totally impossible if there were not produced in the sense organ some similitude of the perceived sense object, (aliqua similitudo conspecti corporis) (XI, ii, 3). He now confirms the Aristotelian mode of sense perception by drawing upon the analogy of seal and wax, the form of the seal remaining in the wax after the seal is removed.
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- Ancient and Medieval MemoriesStudies in the Reconstruction of the Past, pp. 101 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992