Alienation and Redemption through Time and Memory: An Essay on Religious Time Consciousness Author(s): Louis Dupr Source:

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1975), pp. 671-679 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1460786 Accessed: 05/06/2010 07:32
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Alienation and Redemption Through Time and Memory: An Essay on Religious Time Consciousness
Louis
DUPRtf

N the distention of time man experiencesperhapsthe most fundamental estrangementfrom himself. Men and women of every age have been of deeplyconcernedabout the transitoriness life. The experiencethat what was no longer is, and that what is will soon no longer be, including one's very existence, creates a need of redemptionfrom the annihilatingimpact of time, "To expressedby Nietzsche'sZarathustra: redeemthose who lived in the past and to recreate all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it' - that alone should I call redemption."'Not surprisingly,it is above all from this constant passage into othernessand non-being that religion offers salvation. In the following pages I propose to investigate how the Christian vision achieves this goal, not by abolishing time, but by interiorizingit through the function of memory. Muchhas been writtenabout the cyclicalrepetitionsin which myth and ritual recall the foundational events of life, and thereby convey permanence and necessity to the transitory phases of life. Returning time here overcomes the passageof time. By being reversiblethe so-calledmythicalpast in fact ceasesto be a past. It becomes an absolute time, not preceded by a more remote past or followed by a future,in which "theend is likethe beginningand the beginninglike the end, a kind of eternity,since it is not a sequenceof time but only one time."2 Religion, to the extent that it succeeds in detaching itself from purely mythical thought, attempts to replace this "kind of eternity"by a real one. Meanwhilethe purely mythical presentationdisplays already an important featureof such religionsas Judaismand Christianity,namely,that the access to a permanentpresent must be found not in the present but in the past. The myth returnsto the past in orderto establishthe present.This does not mean that the myth alwaysattemptsto returnthepast (this is certainlynot the case for evil), but at leastthatall importantevents,includingthe negativeand painfulones, requirea foundation in the past in order to become meaningfuland therebymanageable. The past alone presentsa wholeness which the continuing present lacks: in its
'Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), p. 251. 2Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Siimmtliche Werke(Stuttgart, 1856), vol. 2, p. 182. In the dialectic between a non-reversibletime (the mere past) and a reversible one Claude Levi-Strauss sees the distinctive characteristic of mythical thought. Louis DUPRt is T. Lawranson professor in the philosophy of religion at Yale. In his latest book The Other Dimension (Doubleday) he searches for the meaning of religious attitudes in a secular world. 671

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even those which grant time itself a redemptiverole, from the archaicmyth with to respectto temporalsuccession.In referring it as a distinctiveprinciple,I do not mean that eternity is clearly separated from time. Indeed, such a separation seldom occurs. Usuallyeternityitself appearsas an extensionof time, but one that is no longersubjectto successionand development.Nor arethe relationsbetween this eternityand ordinarytemporalityidenticalor even similarin all cases. What we find is rathera varietyof symbolicrepresentations eternityand of its relation of to time. Thus while Vedantic Hinduismachievesredemptionthrougha negation of time as principleof separationand fragmentation,Judaismand Christianity attribute a permanent meaning to the passage of time itself. In the following reflections I shall concern myself primarilywith the Christian view, but this cannot be understoodwithout some referenceto Greekphilosophy and Hebrew faith. Clearlythere is no "Greek" position on time, but only a long development. Nevertheless is safeto claim, I believe,that Greekphilosophyin generaldoes not it ignore or abolish time, as some religiousphilosophiesof the East do. Though the suppression of temporality was not entirely unknown - for Parmenides all becomingis illusory - generallythe Greeksattributeda positive significanceto time. The eternal,far fromexcludingthe temporal,foundsit. Eternityconveysthe permanenceand necessitywithout which time would remainwholly amorphous. Thus to Plato time, the image of eternity, is also its only gate of access. Only through the essentially temporal process of recollection can the soul regain its originaldwellingplace, the eternal kingdomof the ideas. The differencebetween the two realmsis essentialfor understanding true meaningof the immortality the to which Plato devotes so muchattention.It is a new mode of beingresultingfrom a transformationof existence, not from an addition of time. This qualitative distinction between time and eternity will remain. In fact to Epicurusand his disciples true eternitymust be attainedexclusively by a certain mannerof living the present,not by an infinitely protractedtemporality.3 Yet Plato or later Greek philosophers never entirely integratedtime with eternity. The two would remainjuxtaposed, until time itself, mainly under the influenceof Plotinus'philosophy,becamethe form of internalduration.We must not forget that even for Plato time was still primarilycosmological, an intrinsic quality of the cosmos itself. To Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine time was a primarily psychologicalcategory.The ChristianFathersintroducedyet another innovation. As heirs of Hebrewtheology they regardedtime as derivinga lasting significancefrom God's deeds in history. History thus came to interactwith an eternity which they believed to be incarnatedin time.4The new vision does not automaticallyabolish the alienationof the time experience.To the Christianalso
3Rodolfo Mondolfo, Problemi del Pensiero Antico (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1935), p. 218. 4T. S. Eliot perfectly captures the Christian view of the interrelatednessof time and eternity in his verse: A moment in time, but not like a moment of time, A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

the reaches permanence. completeness flux of becoming It appears betheconcept eternity of to which advanced distinguishes religions,

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the days are evil (Eph 5, 16)and time must be redeemedbeforeit can be accepted. But his redemptioncan no longerconsist in an escapefrom temporality,for "only His through time time is conquered."5 aim in the strugglebetweeneternityand time can only be the victory of eternity in time, not the abolition of time.6 Nor can he be satisfiedwith a historicalsalvation,for the time of historyis the past and salvationtakes place in the present. The Christianthen must re-present the past. The events of the Incarnationremainhistoricallyunique: they belongto the past and bear no repetition. Yet faith enables the believer to become with them. In doing so he becomescontemporary with his own past contemporary as well, and indeedwith the entirepast of history.The instantin whichthe eternal penetratestime, and to which the believerbecomes presentat his own instant of grace, marks each moment with permanentsignificance. Again, such a synthesis presupposesthat time be recognizedprimarilyas a quality of the mind. Only the mind can transcendtime without ceasing to be intrinsicallytemporal,because only the mind is able to hold onto the past and to anticipatethe future. An objectivesuccessionof events cannot account for either retentionor anticipation: the past would not survivethe presentand the future would remaintotally unknown. In Augustine'simmortal words: time.- WhatI measure theimpress is It is in you, O my mind,thatI measure in produced you by thingsas they pass and abidingin you whenthey have the I whosepassage passed:andit is present. do not measure thingsthemselves the it that whenI measure time.7 produced impress; is the impress I measure the Yet in remembering past I do more than merelyretainit: I recreateit and give it a newmode of beinginsteadof the one whichit lost whenit ceasedto be present. Since the studies of Husserl and Bergsonwe have come to realizefully how erroneous the empiricist conception of time is, according to which the remembered impressions,with the past is no more than a series of "reproduced" representationof time conveyed entirely by the succession of ideas itself. (The original,unadornedversion of this theoryappearsin Hume's Treatiseof Human Nature.) Memorynevercopies the past: it constitutesit as past by breathingnew life into a bygonereality,and by placingit in a whollynewcontext. Thusmemory mysteriouslyrevivesthe past in a new time and a new space. In rememberingI move from the outerspace of perceptionto the innerspaceof the mind. Similarly, I retemporalizeevents, not merely by rememberingthem as past, but also, and especially, by withdrawingthem from the original context and succession of actual perception. I can remember events without having to recall all the circumstanceswhich surroundedthem; I can lift them out of the chain of cause and effect; I can even invert their order of appearance.And I do so constantly. Memory contracts the world into an inner space and recollects history into
From "Choruses from 'The Rock,"' in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace &World, 1952), p. 107. 5Eliot, "Burnt Norton," in The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 120. 6Nicolas Berdyaev: "The interaction and clash between the eternal and temporal principles is that between life and death, for the final sundering of time from eternity, a victory of the temporal over the eternal, would signify the triumph of death over life just as the final transition from the temporal to the eternal would mean a severance from the historical process." From The Meaning of History (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1936), p. 68. 7St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Frank Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), vol. 11, p. 27.

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are autobiography.In its purifyingcruciblerepresentations transformedinto the soul's own substance. Even so memoryalone cannot completelyundo the destructivework of time. lost. The past can neverbe relivedin its immediacy,and much of it is irretrievably The mind's own temporal perspective prevents it from ever exhaustively understanding its past.8 "The individual human who recalls the past and comprehendsits meaningwas not the being who constitutedthe past in the first the place."' Moreover,to remember past is not yet to redeemit. Clearly,not every would be a less complex art,if a simplerecall is liberating.Psychoanalysis memory of a traumatic experiencewould curethe patient.Indeed,often it is the oppressive weight of certainmemorieswhich drove the patient to seek treatmentin the first campneverknewhow to place. Manywho sufferedthroughwar or concentration unburden themselves of all too vivid memories that continue to haunt their present. Of course, the person who is neuroticallyobsessed by the past does not really rememberthe past, but rather attempts to repeat it and, in relivingthe painfulevents of his past, to attain a new endingdifferentfrom the one he cannot does not heal the wounds accept. This is entirelytrue. Yet even full remembrance of the past. Remembrancealone offers no cure. Nor does it offer religious far salvation.Persistentmemoriesof past evil, sufferedor perpetrated, from being have graduallydrained the faith from many a believer'sheart. redemptive, Moreover,if memorycan disturbthe present,it mayalso obliteratethe future. the Remembering past may fascinate one into forgetfulnessof the present. The attitude reducesthe real to reflectionin which "enterprises lose ... remembering the name of action " (Hamlet III, 1). Memory itself then assumes the three dimensionsof past, present,and future,but projectsthem all into the past. ThusI come to remember presentand futureinsteadof creatingthem. The hardedge the of actuality, which solely conveys the full sense of the real, is softened into the of remembrance a dream. It is the evaporationof the presentwhich Kierkegaard describesin his Diapsalmata: There nothing is moredangerous methanremembering. moment have to The I remembered some life-relationship, momentit ceasedto exist. - -- A that life-relation alreadypassedinto eternityand has no more remembered has temporal interest.10 and AlreadyRousseauwas acquaintedwith this "romantic" reflectivity analyzesit in his Confessions: I do not knowhow to see what is beforemy eyes;I can only see clearlyin it that can I nor retrospect, is onlyinmemories mymind work. haveneither feeling for that before eyes.All understanding anything issaidordoneorthathappens my thatstrikes is theexternal me it manifestation. afterwards all comesbackto But the and me, I remember placeandtime,the toneof voiceandlook,thegesture me." situation, nothing escapes
'Our defective retention of the past was one of the main reasons which convinced the Buddha of the futility of the temporal process. 9John Burbidge, "Concept and Time in Hegel," Dialogue 12 (1973), p. 414. This article shows well how the rememberedpast is always a diminished past. The author's argument on the relation between memory and a religious absolute, though presented from a different viewpoint, leads to conclusions similar to my own. 'tSoren Kierkegaard, Either/or, vol. 1, trans. David and Lilian Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), pp. 31-32. 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books,

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The romantic mind has always found itself mysteriouslyattractedto the silent realmof memorywherepresentgesturesfreezeinto returningrhythmsand actual sounds into repeatedechoes. There,as in the strangecastle of Resnais'film Last Yearin Marienbad,we wander aimlessly around, shadows in a past that never When was, but that consists of projectionsreversedinto the time of remembrance. the presentis experiencedas djti vu, each new sensationis prefacedby "unefois de plus ... ." Proust has inimitablyexploitedthe poetic potentialof those instantsof timelessnessin which we rememberthe presentwhile relivingthe past. But every artist re-presents(and re-creates)past experience.He consciously re-enactswhat of he lived but incompletelyunderstood.Throughthis creativeinterpretation his memorieshe achieves a new, symbolic present. From his endeavorswe learn an It importantlesson. The self can only be remembered. is presentmerelyas the reof representationwhich, uniting all experiences in time and space, transcends them in a timeless past.12 of Yet the aestheticmemoryis not redemptive the present.And this is precisely How then can memoryever what religionclaimsfor its own way of remembering. become salutary and introduce the permanenceof eternity into the passage of time? Augustine, who first disclosed the full religious significanceof memory, raises the question: where mymemory youabide? in do Butwhere mymemory Youabide, in do Lord, builtfor Whatrestingplacehaveyou claimedas Yourown, whatsanctuary Yourself?'3 Experiences come and go, and memory is the awareness of their constant destruction.Yet it is in the double awarenessof this continuouspassageof the self into nothingness and of the permanenceof the rememberedself that the pious mind attains the still point wherethe passingcomes to rest and the past is forever of of preserved.Such a transcending time is achievednot by the merereminiscence the past but by a new perspectiveon the present. Pious recollectionconsists in a conversion,via the past, towarda more interiorself which is no longersubjectto the passage of time, because it rests in eternity. Its aim is not so much to evoke memories as to review temporal succession in its totality. By returningto the nothingness at its beginning the self places its entire history in a contingent perspective. The experience of radical historicity together with an insistent perceptionof lasting selfhood evoke the expectation of an atemporalpresentat the origin of existence.14Thus to know oneself is to rememberoneself, and to
1953), p. 114.
12According to Freud all poetic creation draws its phantasies from early, and mostly forgotten, memories of fulfillment. (Cf. "Writersand Day-Dreaming" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works,trans. James Strachey et al. [London: Hogarth Press, 1959], vol. 9, p. 147.) An interesting illustration of the theory may be found in "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"(vol. 9, pp. 1-95 of the Standard Edition) where a young archeologist dreams up an imaginary present out of his unconscious past, and then has to return to the historical past (the ruins of Pompei) in order to discover his real present. Yet in the end Freud's most important contribution to esthetic theory may well be one which he never recognized as such. By positing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle repetition itself as the most fundamental drive of the self, he provided us with a more adequate interpretation of the artistic impulse than the desire to recapture forgotten pleasures of the past. '3St. Augustine, The Confessions, vol. 10, p. 25. 14George Morel argues in Problimes actuels de religion (Paris: Aubier, 1968), pp. 114-40, that the very experience of historical contingency is the awareness of an absolute ground. Cf.

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is one'sorigin.At thispointimmanence remember oneselfentirely to remember into and turnsinto transcendence, autobiography confession. the mind which modern detects the in Theconnotations guiltandsinfulness of is termconfession notfortuitous, to knowone'spastin itsentirety to know for are to as To to oneself guilty. bepresent one'swholeselfisto bepresent oneself both as wrote that I can choose myself truly only in good and evil. Kierkegaard evil for do part repentance, onlyin repentance I bothaccept as anessential of my of it and repudiate as an estrangement my realself.'5Heidegger developed past of in because the all thisideain Being Time declared existence timeguilty and and in To of essential being.6Guiltis accepted confession. inauthenticity a "thrown" of thanof an the be able to confessrequires admission one'srealpast,rather the self one imaginary orofno pastatall.Butto condemn selfthatis,withno other in is Drake's task.Temple available, a mostpainful Requiem difficulty Faulkner's she for a Nun is deeplysymbolic.Unableto "confess," movesbackand forth to the and desire becleansed. between sinfulpastthatshehasbecome herpresent The psychoanalytic offerssome methodof therapythroughremembrance Dei. of to analogy thismemoria Forherealso, morethantheevocation singular me memories required. is Memories much recall, never can reveal I alone,however to myself.For to knowmyselffully,I wouldhaveto remember myselfentirely. to totalmemory couldI hopeto assign eacheventits dueplaceand Onlythrough no of couldever Yet however proportion. obviously process recalling, prolonged, return my entire past. Instead of attemptingsuch a futile undertaking and characteristic "remembering," uncovering releasing psychoanalytic by yet or a aims at discovering new, moreintegrating memories, neglected repressed it Gestalt the past. Rather for thanaccumulating the memories, changes entire of perspective remembering. ClaudeLkvi-Strauss argued,apparently has with the approvalof some that ratherthan being a specificset of psychoanalysts,'7 the unconscious, memories thepreconscious consists a fundamental of structure (as is), underlying allconscious Ifbrought consciousness means a mythorwiththeaidof life. to of by an analyst, structure this a within meaningful memories which integrates totality the self was unableto acceptin their unstructured What is presentation.'8 in of but interesting this theoryis thatit is not newmemories a newcoherence which No memories cures. lesssignificant thefactthatthisstructure achieved is is of To models. Jung,mythical for are bymeans mythical archetypes indispensable theinterpretation expansion dream and of memories. evenFreud's But of models invite and stories myths Oedipus interpretation a recallof suchancient (the cycle
or the mythsconnectedwith the totem cult) as the religiousmemoryusesto reach ultimate self-understanding.To the faithful Jew no act has deeper religious thanthe remembrance the origins.The memoryof historyis a pious of significance duty, and one whichextends not only to those times when Israelfelt close to God, such as the Exodus event and the Sinai revelation,but also to those whichseemed

comments in Gerald McCool, "George Morel's Metaphysics of Historicity," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 43 (1969), pp. 101-08. 15Kierkegaard, Either/or, vol. 2, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Doubleday, 1959). '6Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 325-35. '7JacquesLacan, "Lestade du miroir,"in Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), vol. 1, p. 91. "The Effectiveness of Symbols," in Structural Anthropology, pp. 186-205. 18LUvi-Strauss,

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far away, such as the goldencalf episodeand, later,the holocaust.19 morethan Yet of beinga sacredobligation,the remembrance Israel'spast providesthe Jew with a and patternfor understanding acceptingthe present.Identifyingwith the types of the past, he finds meaning in the vicissitudes of his own existence. This remembrance becomes, of course, most effective when it is rituallyrevived,as in the Seder celebration.Yet also the daily presence of the biblical word provides effectivepatternsof meaningthat allow the individualto find his own place in a sacred history. Thomas Mann disclosed a fundamentalHebrew attitude in his famous tetralogy when he presentedJoseph and his family constantly searching for the appropriatehistorical precedentsof their actions. Yet what he revealed appliesto some degreeto everyreligiousconsciousness.Only in the completeness of the past does the presentattain final significance. Christianremembrance concentrated has moreexclusivelyon a singlechainof events - the life, death, and resurrectionof Jesus Christ. Other persons and events are magneticallycentered,as prefigurations imitations,aroundthe God or incarnate.Throughoutthe ages Christianshave found meaning and consolation in the remembrance Jesus'life and passionwhilesacramental of ritualshave made this life contemporarywith their own. However, the Christocentricnature of Christianrecollectionby no meansrestrictsits function to a mererecallof the life of Christ.Since its beginningsChristianpiety has regardedmemory as far more than a means of establishingcontact with a Redeemerwho lived and died in the past. Memorywas, above all, the road to the innercenterin whichany encounter with God takes place. For that reason all cognition of God had to be a memoria Dei. This has been adequatelyrecognized(though perhapstoo easily ascribedto Platonicinfluences)in St. Augustine.But it alreadyappearsin those Fatherswith whom the formal study of spiritual life began, the Capadocians.20 What one commentatorconcludes about the dynamisms of St. Basil's ascetical theology holds to a great extent true for all spiritualwriters of East and West: It doesappear Basilwasaware there that that were suchpsychic forces playin at the encounter with God as led to a profound transformation man'svery of character wayof being.Andthattheseforceslay in thememory in the and and diathesis dynamic [the unconscious].21 Christiansand Jews tend to distinguishhistorical faith from mystical piety, and the emphasisupon one or the otherhas beenone of the divisiveissuesbetween Catholicsand Protestants.Yet the distinctionbetweenpersonalrecollectionand historical memory need not be exclusive. One inevitably leads to the other, as states remembered the in appearsclearlyin St. Augustine.The autobiographical Soliloquies are recollectedas stages of God's grace in the Confessions,and then again assumed into sacred history in The City of God.22Augustine progresses from personalto historicalrecollection.The ordinarycourse runs in the opposite direction: the recollection of sacred history precedes,and usually initiates, the reditus in seipsum.
'9Thecentral importance of remembering became clear to me in a series of conversations with Rabbi Arnolti Wolf of the Yale Divinity School. 201. Hausherr,"Noms du Christ et voies d'oraison," OrientaliaChristianaAnalecta 157(1960), pp. 160ff. 21JohnEudes Bamberger,"Mndm6-Diathesis,"Orientalia ChristianaAnalecta (1968), p. 246. 22JohnDunne, A Searchfor God Through Timeand Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 45-57.

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All events of history are interwoven: if one can be recaptured,all others become ideally accessible to the present. "Each epoch is equally close to God" - and therefore also to the recollecting soul. Due to this religious perspectivethe study of historyhas takenon a uniquesignificancefor the spiritual orientationof our culture.Berdyaevsuggestively evokes the mood of the Christian encounter with Antiquity in his description of the Roman campagna "where historical monuments became the manifestation of nature," and where the Christiancommuneswith a past "inwhicheternityis triumphantovercorruption and death."23To Jews and Christians history never belongs entirely to the past - it remainsvitally present.Evensuch anti-idealisticonoclastsas Marxand Nietzsche persistentlycontinued to believe in a teleology of history. For the samereasonthe representations whichreligiousfaith expressesitself in must remainpermanently embeddedin time: directlyor indirectly,they relateto a temporal succession of events. Hegel, who keenly noticed the intrinsically historical nature of Christian symbols, claimed that their "Geschehen"may neverthelessbe transcendedin the timeless development of the notion.24Yet in such a detemporalizationthey undoubtedly lose their religious character.To Christiansand Jews redemptionremains permanentlytemporal and accessible of only throughmemory. A purelyexistentialinterpretation those faiths, such as Bultmannproposedin his early work, thereforeconflicts with their very nature. Even events which no historical evidence could ever firmly establish must be recollectedratherthan construed.It may well be the case, as Franz Rosenzweig suggests,that no one ascendedthe mountainand that no one descended,yet the Sinai event, though clouded in historical darkness, remains essentially a "memorable"event.25Similarly the Christian possesses no decisive historical evidenceof the resurrection very little of the "historicalJesus"in general,yet and he cannot believe without what Kierkegaardcalled the "footnote of history." Though history is indissolublyconnected with it, salvation, if the term is to retainits meaning,must take place in the present.Christiansand Jews appearto experience considerabledifficulty in reconcilingthis present with the inherent theirfaithas a new, historicityof theirfaiths. Oftentheyfavorthe latter,regarding decisiveepoch of history. But in doing so they reducethe redemptionof time itself to a purelytemporalevent and sacrificeits basic meaning.In numerouspolemics withthe Hegeliantheologiansof his time Kierkegaard showed - most stronglyin and the subsequentUnscientificPostscript- how such PhilosophicalFragments a world-historical view ceases to be Christianor even religious.Historicalevents, however sacred, become redemptive only when the believer overcomes the distanceof historyin orderto be a contemporary Christ.The Hegelianview has of since been abandonedas an authenticinterpretationof faith. But the same long historicism reappears today in some of the so-called theologies of hope and liberation. They also constitute an attempt to redeem history by history alone. Eschatologies of the future take the place of contemporaneity. While earlier interpretationswere entirely oriented toward the past of which they took the present to be the conclusion, the newer ones are exclusively directed toward a future of which the present is only the beginning. But the forward-looking memory succeeds no more in liberatingman from time than the retrospective.
23Berdyaev,The Meaning of History, p. 19. 24Enzycolpidie (1830), ?565. 25FranzRosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 319.

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Eliot perceptivelydistinguishedreligious recollectionfrom either one. Thisis the use of memory: Forliberation not less of love by expanding and Of lovebeyonddesire, so liberation Fromthe futureas wellas the past... 26 The religiousinteriorizationof time in memoryis a deeply personalachievement of directedat one's own past as much as at history. For this pious remembrance withits connotationof interiority,is particularly one'slife the term"recollection," appropriate. The German Erinnerung conveys a sense of inwardness to all remembrance.Yet in religious recollection this inwardness becomes primary. Beyondbeing a searchfor an archetypalpast, recollectionis an attemptto return to the center of existence from which the distention of time irresistiblyremoves me.27 Only if throughthis past man succeedsin touchinga timelesspresentdoes he consider that past redeemedand himself whole again. At that point he becomes presentto his entire self and to all times. Of this moment Claudel sang: Rienn'apu ou ne peut Etrequi ne soitiace moment toutes meme;
Choses sont presentespour moi. (La Ville)

In it reigns the stillness at the center of all motion, that envelops time itself: Not the stillness the violin,whilethe notelasts, of Not thatonly,but the coexistence the Orsaythatthe endprecedes beginning, werealwaysthere Andtheendandthe beginning Before beginning afterthe end the and Andall is alwaysnow.28 Recollection, the religiousjourney into the past, leads to the silence behind the words. As memory releasesthe silent forces of the unconscious from which all speaking originates, recollection, Augustinian masters teach us, discloses the Divine Silencefrom which the EternalWord springsforth. In De TrinitateXIV, contains the mind'slatent 13, 17, St. Augustine had shown how the "memoria" knowledge both of itself and of God. To William of St. Thierry,Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure,and others in the same spiritualtradition, this meant that recollectionis both the image of, and the encounterwith, the mysterythat gives birth to the EternalWord in time. In Bonaventure's ItinerariumMentis ad Deum we read: Andthusthrough operation memory, appears thesoulitselfis the the it of that of so to Himpresent it that image GodandHislikeness, present itselfandhaving receives inactuality issusceptible receiving inpotency, thatit Him and of Him and canalso participate Him.29 in In general, memory has been far more to Christian spiritual writers than an of ordinary"faculty" the mind;it is the gatewayto the soul's groundwhereGod and the self coincide.
26"LittleGidding" in Four Quartets, The Complete Poems and Plays, p. 142. 27JeanWahl, "Time in Claudel," International Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1963), p. 493. 28Eliot,"Burnt Norton," p. 121. 29TheMind's Road to God, trans. George Boas (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 23.