The Coherence of Memory: Robert Grosseteste on Confession and the Harmony of Body and Soul

The memory found in scholarship of confessional manuals is that of mnemonics, used as evidence of a return to classical rhetoric, to the ars memoria of Cicero, Quintillian, and the pseudo-Cicero. It focuses on grammar, on the use of mnemonic prompts such as the circumstantiae to reveal a resurgence in classical training, on how to recollect. What it misses is a discussion on the act, not the art, of recollection itself, and those participating in it, the locus of the memories recalled and their relationship to the autobiographical self. Alexander Murray has identified the importance of memory/memories in confession, writing that confession is the discovery of a ‘historical world; the medium of its exploration, memory,’ recalling a highly Augustinian notion of memory as a topos that must be explored and searched. The locational aspect of classical rhetoric proves especially useful when discussing Augustinian memory, and its purpose, because Augustinian memory is profoundly locational. Augustine’s Confessions 10 positions memory as the habitus and dwelling place of not only God but of the individual herself; it is where God, and the self, can be found. The memoria of Confessions is introspective and deeply personal, it is autobiographical in that it holds within the summation of a person’s experiences, and it also allows her to abstract from these varied experiences to higher, theological considerations. It is in the completeness of memory that Augustinian theology and Aristotelian psychology can sit comfortably alongside each other; if Augustine’s memory contains everything, so too does Aristotelian memory, David Bloch argues, ‘constitut[ing] the life of an individual in general, providing it with coherence.’ Indeed, memory for Aristotle was character-building, tied to action: in his Nicomachean Ethics Book IX he intimates that those with happy memories are at peace, whilst those with wicked memories will be in a state of ‘constant internal discord.’ Importantly, good memories, Aristotle writes, give men hope.