Thus A, as Augustine’s Christian, ascending not through the pure and active intellect, but through the complex psychology of receptivity and love, is deeply at the mercy of contingency, in two ways. She must depend for ascent not on her own self-control but on aspects of her personality that she neither governs nor fully understands. And these responsive elements in her personality depend, in turn, for their happy activation, on the mysterious ways of God’s call. She cannot count on a stable perfection. Such progress as she does make is not made primarily through her own effort. The future, as Brown’s chapter title puts it, is “lost.” Her story is one of unending longing, of bewilderment and unstable motion. God is indeed eternal, perfect, and just, whereas the objects of earthly love are inconstant, mutable, and liable to moral error. But the inscrutability of that justice and the seeming arbitrariness of that perfection make A’s subjective experience as a Christian lover very much like her old love.

Does Augustine still think of the Platonist ascent as good for Christian humans, yet sadly unavailable? Or does his new moral psychology lead, at the same time, to the creation of a new Christian norm? I think that the second is clearly the right option: the Platonist ladder is an altogether inappropriate path for the good Christian soul. It is in this line of argument that we find the really deep contribution of Augustine to the ascent tradition we are following.

Let us return to the difficulties for Platonism that come from the power and significance of memory. It is clearly Augustine’s view that we cannot free ourselves altogether from psychological continuity with our past through memory and habit. We are bound indissolubly to the parts of ourselves that cause moral trouble by their undependability, their independence of control by reason. Above all, in Confessions, our sexuality serves Augustine as an example of the ungovernable from which we can never sever ourselves, for it exerts its influence even in our dreams (X.30).

The Platonist project, then, is doomed. But I believe it is just as clearly Augustine’s view that we ought not dissociate ourselves from our past in the way that the Platonist urges. Certainly we can and must combat the sinful urges that are fed by a certain sort of memory. But memory is also crucial to a person’s sense of identity and continuity in time. A really successful dissociation of the self from memory would be a total loss of the self – and thus of all the activities to which a sense of one’s own identity is important. “I cannot comprehend the power of my memory,” Augustine writes, “since I cannot even call myself myself apart from it” (X.16).

But this means that without memory, which with its links to sin makes perfection impossible, the soul cannot progress at all. The search for goodness, self-knowledge, and knowledge of God that the Confessions movingly records presupposes, throughout, Augustine’s own sense of himself as a continuous temporal being. This temporal history may be a non-necessary property of his soul; it is still crucial to his salvation. Self-knowledge, insofar as he achieves it, is said to be a “fruit” of confession, that is, of an activity that centrally involves the drawing forth of his past through memory. His search for God, he explicitly declares, must be carried out “in the fields and broad meadows of memory, where there are treasure chests of innumerable images brought in from things of all sorts experienced by the senses” (X.8). Memory is a capricious faculty. It does not always obey the will, nor is its material always available for deliberate inspection. But Augustine cannot have its fruits without its difficulties and darkness. To cut it away, as the Platonist ascent urges, would be to forfeit the sense of self, therefore to cease to aspire and to love:

I do these things within, in the vast court of my memory. For there I have at my disposal the sky, the earth, the sea, along with everything that I have been able to experience in them – and, in addition, all the things I have forgotten. There I myself happen upon myself (mihi occurro). And I recollect what, when, and where I did something, and how, when I did it, I was affected. (X.8)

The Platonist, in cutting away from A all susceptibility to contingent occurrences, cuts away the susceptibility to an occurrence that is central to growth and knowledge: the one in which a person “happens across” himself. The use of the vocabulary of the Ad Simplicianum is no accident. Human development is irreformably a matter of happening. An adequate view of moral growth must be built on this psychological reality.

The Platonist might attempt to counter this objection. Surely, he could say, we can allow ourselves to retain, in memory, enough connectedness with our past to ground the sense of self and of personal continuity, without retaining the sinful memories that vex our contemplative efforts. As for these, if we can rid ourselves of them, we certainly ought to do so; and we need not fear that in so doing we will be lost to ourselves. Augustine would probably deny this as a psychological claim. For, to judge from what he sees fit to remember and record in the Confessions, so much of his history is taken up with sin that very little basis for his sense of personal continuity would survive if the memory of all that were erased. Indeed, he believes that the normal course of every human life, from infancy onward, is thoroughly steeped in sin. But even were he to concede to the opponent this point about connectedness, he has a further argument that would suffice to take him to his anti-Platonist conclusion. This argument concerns the connection between memory and responsibility.

In Augustine’s view, every deed one has ever committed is a deed for which one is going to be judged by God. The Christian, therefore, in order to be maximally prepared for this judgment and maximally able to make an adequate confession, must be not less mindful of his past than another, but more mindful, not less concerned with what his bodily self has done, but more concerned. He must cultivate a very keen sense of his own continuity and unity. He must dredge up the past, rather than severing himself from it. To use the words in which Nietzsche perceptively analyzes the operations of the Christian “bad conscience,” he must, working on himself, “breed an animal with the right to make promises.”[^12] The work of self-recollection and self-scrutiny carried out in the Confessions would seem both unproductive and risky to a Platonist; to a Christian it is of the deepest importance. On the other side, the Platonist curriculum of progressive dissociation from the bodily self and progressive identification with the pure intellect would seem to the Christian the creation of a fiction about the self that impedes true self-knowledge and appropriate responsibility.[^13]