Augustine on Memory

Grove's Augustine on Memory is a landmark in Augustinian studies. * Pierre Hegy, Adelphi University, Catholic Books Review * This entirely welcome book takes up one of the most characteristic themes in Augustine, so commonly treated that it could be hard to imagine something genuinely new, creative . . . and important could be said about it, but here it is! Fr. Grove has produced a brilliant reworking of this theme, with significance that is at once scholarly and pastoral. Highly recommended! * John C. Cavadini, University of Notre Dame * Memory is a much-studied theme of Augustinian thought, focused principally on Confessions and De trinitate. But Kevin Grove enlarges this analysis by harvesting fruit from his preaching, particularly the Enarrationes in psalmos and its major hermeneutical-soteriological theme, totus Christus. Grove's close reading reorients our understanding of Augustine's thought, not only for 'Christic memory,' but also for his pervasive communal Christology and the fraught issue of the Augustinian 'self.' A clearly written, freshly conceived contribution. * Michael Cameron, University of Portland * This valuable study illumines the nature of the developing links between the reasoning self and Augustine's growing awareness of how Christ is Christ and what makes the church the church. Rather than yet one more narrow exploration of ancient epistemology, Grove, restores memory to its original and rhetorical context in Augustine's mature works and too often overlooked sermons. In so doing, he discovers Augustinian memory not only to be a site of coherence and instability of the self in the flux of time, but, more importantly, a site of the exploration of the permeable boundaries of the individual self and the community in which it participates. Memory, thus, becomes less of a solution to the problem of the self and more of a constructive way into the complications posed by selfhood itself and a path toward amendment of life. * Paul R. Kolbet, Yale Divinity School *