Paige Hochschild - Unity of Memory in Augustine's De musica

The final book of Augustine’s De musica offers the most detailed, early account of a whole anthropology.  In this text, Augustine reflects on sense perception, imagination, memory and judgment, considering the unity of these powers in the human person.  Memory receives particularly careful attention, with a clear distinction between memory as ordered to sense perception, and memory as ordered to the aeterna which surpass discursive knowledge.  Augustine overcomes a dualist anthropology that would reject the epistemic and spiritual value of knowledge based in sense perception; rather, he argues for a theology of ordo in creation through number and harmonia.  The ability of number to contain both unity and multiplicity foreshadows Augustine’s mature consideration of the unity of temporal and eternal in Confessiones XI.  In De musica, memory allows the soul to contain the “multiplicity” of embodied life in a psychological unity, insofar as the soul is ordered to its end in God.  In this presentation, I argue that this picture is continuous with Augustine’s early (“Cassiciacum”) dialogues.

This paper is a more in-depth consideration of a text (De musica) only briefly considered in my monograph on Augustine that is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.