Divine Mystery of Memory

Detail from "Prophetia" (2024)

"On the Divine Mystery of Memory"

(Edited, in collaboration with Dr. Diego Benardete, from a mechanically produced transcript of a video posted on You Tube on 26 January 2025 by Marco Andreacchio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro6WjpTFlWE&feature=youtu.be )

Let us reflect today on the divine mystery of memory. In our age we are raised of course to discount, dismiss, all mystery unless it is mechanically contrived. Divine mystery is a different story. What is divine about memory? After all we decide what we remember and what we don’t remember unless we're sick, in which case medication supplies the answer to our troubles. If, however, we step outside of our modern persuasions, if we look at things innocently, even spontaneously, we recognize or begin recognizing that memory is quite spontaneous, that we do not remember because we decide to remember, that memory is as a philosopher once put it the re-surging, the coming out of the imagination, of common sense, sensus communis. The imagination, that other great mystery. So why do we remember and what is it precisely that we remember? We say that we remember the past. So be it. Why not the future?

We might say that the past is the arena of fragments that if recomposed would constitute the future. We cannot remember the future because the future is the redemption of the past and we cannot know redemption, we cannot see redemption. All we have access to is the brokenness of being; and yet this assumption goes hand in hand with, or is based on a further assumption, namely that redemption is not a divine gift. That the Divine does not make himself or itself known in the signs it gives us; the signs that are what fills our past, the past as realm of signs. So what is it we remember? We say we remember the past. In remembering the past we begin to have a glimpse of the future, the future we often think of in terms of possibilities. And yet in ancient and medieval times the future is preeminently the realm of the gods, or of God, of the Divine; and it is primarily, therefore, the realm of actuality, of fulfilment, of redemption. Possibilities are what the past is filled with. When we look at the past we see moments that could have been fulfilled and that were left unfulfilled. Whatever is in the past died and so was not to reach the Promised Land, the future.

What is it that we remember? We remember the fragments, the signs of redemption. Why do we remember them? How is it that we remember? Memory is tied to the question of dreams. When we dream, we have visions. We do not choose our dreams, no more than we choose just about anything else in life, perhaps. But we certainly do not assume in our hearts that we choose what we are to dream, notwithstanding techniques attempting to empower us to choose our own dreams. And we say, of course, that we choose our dreams in the sense that we choose our ideals, that which we are to pursue. In fact, we also assume sometimes, maybe always, that the future is our dream that we must build together collectively or otherwise, but usually collectively, through a collective effort, so that there would be no future aside from our own power or empowerment. But then again this is all part of our most-modern upbringing or ideology or rhetoric, however you wish to put it, that we are all too familiar with. Step outside of that bubble, and now, well, now you start seeing things as they are outside of the project which is sometimes called modernity.

Well, let us return to this question: why do we remember? Why do we dream? Of course we can come up with mechanisms and say that, well, there are neurobiological dynamics involved and so really there is a mechanistic answer to everything. But that is a complete abstraction. For machines are abstractions. They are entities that we conceive of, concepts that are devoid of the unit of causation, so they have no finality, no intelligence, really. They presuppose a unity of causation, of what, in Greek, Aristotle calls aitia. The Greek notoriously distinguishes, propaedeutically, four types ofaitiai. So we have the formal, the final, what is usually called the efficient, and the material. Anybody who’s not familiar with these terms can easily look them up, even though accounts are very often misleading. Be that as it may, we are speaking of causality in its fullest sense. Why do we remember? Why do we dream? Why does the content of the imagination emerge, and what does it emerges to? To whom? Is it that I am this one thing independent of my imagination, of my memory, so I am just waiting there for this memory to come to me? Or am I nothing other than memory? I am fragmented as my memory is, fragmented and yet unified in the redemption of the fragments. What is it that redeems the fragments? One might say, reflection. Reflection involves a turning of the fragments back to their integrity, their unity. Now, we have a problem here, because today this notion that the fragments, in other words the past, presuppose a lost unity, a Paradise Lost as it were, is rejected by our institutions of learning, shall we say, in favor of the notion that we are to build the unity as a new world, a new future. But again, this is ideology and it presupposes a world that is pre-ideological. And that is what this moment of ours, today, is dedicated to reflecting upon—the pre-ideological situation of man with respect to memory.

So let us consider again, let us return to, let us ruminate on this problem of memory: fragments. If the fragments are somehow returned to their Giver, they're illuminated by their source, so to that extent they’re redeemed. Being redeemed, they are the place where a self is saved from confusion, from perplexity. If we renounce for a moment to our self-certainty as Cartesian selves—here we stand formally, filled with memories, and then, as a will, we determine what we are to do with these memories—and recognize ourselves as the memories themselves: we wake up in the morning and we remember; those memories, we say, are what we are. And yet we’re not just the past; we’re not just the fragments. We are the fragments in search of a lost unity; and that’s why we often think of ourselves as moving towards the future; because we are seeking redemption; we’re seeking unity; escape from alienation; alienation being this remaining lost, away from that unity, the unity of memory. Who is not alienated in this world? This is a world in which we find ourselves, a world of alienation from integrity, from the unity of memory. So in classical terms, which really are spontaneous terms, natural terms, the past presupposes a future, just as fragments presuppose a unity.

Plato is known to have appealed to anamnesis, recollection, we often say memory. He noted that all knowledge ultimately is recollection. That knowledge is of fragments, knowledge in ordinary terms; but these fragments presuppose something that is pre-empirical, the unity of knowledge. This unity is found in the understanding; no longer a knowledge alienated from things themselves, but a knowledge that belongs to things themselves and ultimately to the unity of all things. And the unity of all things is, in classical terms again, often referred to as Being. What is meant fundamentally by Being? Not simply a thing, but that which “to be” involves; in other words, an agency. And yet the question of agency is a problem for us.

Goethe once rephrased the Gospels saying, in the beginning was the act, as opposed to the logos; but by modifying the biblical saying from John, what does Goethe achieve, really? He opens the door to what in the modern world would become “historicism”: being defined by becoming. So being is fully itself only in becoming, and so we are to heed this unfolding of being, which in existentialist terms would be History, or more generically Evolution. And we could look at the logic and examine the mechanisms proper to it; at any rate, we are to focus on this movement of being that plays out throughout human affairs, and is manifest especially in human doings; so we study History. But in classical terms there’s no such thing. The classical terms are incarnated by the biblical saying. So what is the difference between Goethe’s phrasing and the biblical line?

The biblical logos of course is the incarnation of being and the logos is returning to being. So being, divine agency proper, in its fullest capacity, is the source of the logos, the source that empties itself out in the logos as in an act of return to the fullness of being. So of course we have a ring here, an eternal ring which is not merely formal logic, it is not mechanistic, it is eternal, but it involves the unfolding of the temporal as a shadow of eternity. It involves a giving out and a bringing back within. Being is kenotic.

What is it that we remember? Fragments of that which gives itself in fragments, so that we may be restored in their source, so that memory may be restored in its source. Memory of which we are personas; we’re personifications of the unity of memory; we are partial manifestations. These partial manifestations in common lore find their authoritative representations in the gods. So we have the stories of gods that are cherished, not by silly people, but by people who seek a confirmation of their being tied to meaning, to divine unity.

The gods are poetic forms in which we recognize our own divinity, or the divine root or source of our own existence. Becoming, in classical terms, implies being. Being not just as a monolith, as some kind of block that is stuck there, some kind of an immutable law aside from everything else that moves; but being as a spring of a return, a spring of becoming, that guides, orders, becoming back to its fullness. The fullness, the actuality, the perfection of that becoming, of that quest. So we could say that the finding that is the goal of the quest—for we seek this finding—is not simply a terminal point where “that’s it, everything is done”; instead, the finding is the fullness of the becoming. That fullness is kenotic, so by its own very nature it floods darkness, so it fills up all that is not full. Why? So that it may be restored. Well these are formulations from earlier ages, but “memory” in these terms is a precious gift.

The Ancients speak of forgetfulness also as a divine gift. The gods bless us with forgetfulness and nd indeed we are to be grateful for forgetting many, many, things that happen, many awful things. But the point of forgetfulness is to be understood in terms of memory of a higher order. So we forget strands in order to recollect, to return to, as memory: we return to the fullness of being, which is really the fullness of understanding, the fullness of illumination, the fullness of all that is.

Is memory a divine gift, or is it merely a phenomenon to be broken down into mechanisms, into controlled data? We can play that game, or we can give it up. We can remain duped by modern promises, or we can let go of them. But that is dangerous and we’re raised to abhor that sort of danger, at any rate, which is the real danger. And we prefer violence to the courage that is needed to remember what we are originally given to remember.