My topic this evening is A Catholic Appreciation of Memory. Essentially, I will contend that such an appreciation is much the same as the more phenomenological understanding of memory that has become fashionable in recent decades: that is, of memory as being ‘about the body’. The celebrated American poet and author Walt Whitman tells us that his most important insight for his future correspondence about the Civil War occurred at the slave markets in New Orleans, where he witnessed the flogging of a Negro. Ever afterwards he was to say that the American Civil war was fundamentally a war about the ‘body’. That is to say it was about whether the human body can be bought and sold as a piece of meat, which he saw as the great crime of the Confederacy. His insight was famously expressed in his words, ‘to whip the body is to whip to the soul’.¹

Anybody who has seen old Australian photographs of Aboriginal chain gangs or listened to the stories of the stolen generations will appreciate that our own nation is not immune from similar sad legacies. The national gesture of the apology provided an interesting context for understanding what Marcel Proust suggested: that the ‘self’ is essentially a ‘remembered self’ and that memory is critical to the survival of both personal and cultural identity.² The apology was a formal acknowledgement that Aboriginal dispossession was not simply about memories of hard things happening, but of the stealing of memory itself: the strategic obliteration of stories and cultural tools; of language, ritual and a sense of belonging. Such things have been referred to by David Malouf as ‘the fearful loneliness of the absence of ghosts’³; the trauma of a felt abandonment to the rush of a fragmented present, without context or meaning.

So many of the sociological crimes of the modern rationalist world were founded in the fatal separation of the mind from the body. The belief that life can be engineered according to mathematical principles; that a master nation can create a population of rational persons uncontaminated by belief in God and religion. During the 20^th century the destruction of memory has so often been the chillingly familiar hallmark of totalitarian regimes: the annihilation of the cultural ways in which people make sense of life and consolidate aspirations. George Orwell, in his classic work Nineteen Eighty-Four, terms it memory holes (shredders, in which the past is consigned to oblivion) and we now know that such destruction of cultural memory has verifiable de-humanising effects upon individuals and communities.⁴

National apologies, war crimes tribunals, the tearing up of whole neighbourhood, and the now enormous international refugee and displaced persons problem have prompted a renewed academic interest in the phenomenology of memory; as an embodied, and not simply an em-brained reality. Memory is no longer seen as a grainy old reel of film. Its study is no longer simply concerned with data collection, biology and behaviour and electrical impulses. Many professional fields: medicine, law, psychiatry, sociology and architecture, have re-examined what is meant by memory and its essential links to identity, to imagination and profoundly, also to redemption. Most such fields now recognise and appreciate what is generally termed as a ‘holistic’ approach to the person; one that extends beyond the strict data and delineations of any singular field. For what after all is a war crimes tribunal for instance if not essentially a process of psychotherapy. As the patient lies on the psychiatrist’s couch; and that patient may indeed be an entire nation, the oppressive weight of memory is lifted through structured re-visitation of that memory in the flesh, so that fragments of a narrative, a shattered story are re-established as one that is not simply about punishable crimes but importantly for communities intelligible events. And ones that may also be redemptive, enabling an imaginative moving forward.⁵

In recent times memory is once more appreciated in its very ancient; and one might suggest its ancient Catholic understanding as something that is ‘incorporated’ in the body of the individual and in the bodies that form a community; in bodily perceptions, attitudes, hands and ritual actions, things which the body ‘understands’⁶ and in which memory is seen as a dynamic creative and redemptive activity. Culturally speaking, in such organisations as UNESCO and ICOMOS these meanings are currently taken up in such terms as ‘sense of place’ and ‘spirit of place’.

Memory maps are now appreciated as very complex, and perhaps more physically (and even chemically) in-corporated than we realised.⁷ There have even been some recent interesting experiments that seek to examine the subtle ways in which memory may in fact attach to DNA.⁸

Mary Carruthers, in her great work, The Book of Memory points out that the understanding of memory as a physical process involving physical organs was fundamental to the whole history of medicine and philosophy for thousands of years before the rationalist era. From Greek philosophy through to the Alexandrine medical schools it was understood that in the body two parallel systems operated; one of spinal marrow and nerves that centred in the brain and which housed sensitivity, motion and neurological function, the other of blood vessels that centred in the heart and which facilitated warmth and vital spirit, and something more mysterious, the layered functioning of memory as intuitive and imaginative knowledge, as instinct and inspiration. ‘Memory’ as ‘heart’ she notes was encoded in the common Latin verb recordari to recollect, from revocare, to call back and cor for heart. It is a concept that came to influence the word ‘heart’ for memory in the English language. Chaucer often used the phrase ‘by heart’ and of course we still use it. The great St Jerome asserted that in so many of the hundreds of uses of the words memory and remembrance in the Scriptures, the heart is often the appropriate metaphor.⁹ And of course we often speak of a broken heart, and of learning by heart, heartfelt, and so forth.

This is the context out of which our Catholic understanding arises; originating in large part from two great sources: Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy.

As part of the Passover ritual in the Jewish tradition, the youngest member of a family (who can speak) asks the oldest (inter-generational) ‘what are we doing this evening’: The answer of course you know: MY father was a wandering Aramean; he went down into the land of Egypt few in number; there WE became a great nation; the Egyptians treated US harshly; we cried out to our God; God liberated us and brought us into this land and the POWER IS NOW ... as I offer the first fruits. Likewise the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is that the past is made permanently present; time is interiorised; and bygone realities are given new breath in a present context with new power. ¹⁰ And even beyond the Eucharist, this understanding forms part of the daily Office of the Church. Throughout the world, in each generation, the Prayer of the Church includes the three great memory prayers: the Benedictus at Morning Prayer; the Magnificat at Evening Prayer and the Nunc Dimittus at night. They are taken from the initial chapters of Luke’s Gospel. Each is about both God’s memory and ours. It is memory that was and is incorporated into the bodies of the faithful. It is as physical as the ligaments of the tongue being loosened and the child who leapt in the womb. Moreover it is about power; a power that is present in the ‘now’.

This similarly provides an insight into the way in which the great theological Doctors of the Church understood memory as appreciated in classical Greek philosophy; particularly in Plato’s idea of a parallel universe. In his psychological explanation of the Trinity for instance, Augustine ascribes to the Son action & will, to the Holy Spirit love, but to the Father he attributes pure memory; past present and future. For both the Church and for the individual, Augustine sees memory as the path to a kind of inner centre, ~ a memoria Dei, the memory of God the Father himself. In memory, we have the power not only to remember and understand ourselves; but more profoundly, to remember, understand and love our Maker. In this way memory releases the silent forces of the unconscious from which all speaking originates’.¹¹ To borrow an insight from the more recent theologian, Schillebeeckx, we remember in order to be kept in memory; for what is ‘mortal’ sin, he chillingly reminds us, but perhaps allowing ourselves to slip out of the memory of God. Moreover, it is in this appreciation of the way in which the Father holds creation in his memory that we might also understand what is otherwise termed as instinct in the wonder of nature: how specifically the spider knows how to build its web; a single and simple example of that which we can analyse, but simply cannot understand.

This idea of a kind of ‘sparking’ across parallel universes through the keyhole of memory also provides the context for understanding an extraordinary little analysis that Hugh of St Victor makes of the double emotional response of which we are sometimes aware in the presence of intense beauty. We might like to think for a moment of the most beautiful image, or scene, or piece of music, or operatic aria that we know. At the same time that the heart swells with intense joy, there is also, oddly, a melancholic void, which is sometimes expressed in tears. Perhaps, he says, ‘the fragments of the Divine sadden us because they evoke our sense of loss in the fall, and our yearning for the goodness to which we still aspire’.¹² His analysis is at least a remarkable demonstration of the way in which memory was regarded at that time as being simultaneously a past, present and future phenomenon.

Indeed, phenomenological simultaneity is the strange thing about memory; that in order for past things and events to be brought into present reality, they must be imaginatively interpreted into images, narrative, text and often ritual action. At the same time (as is now well established by studies on memory loss), it is almost impossible to have imagination (especially about the future), and to act imaginatively if one has no memory.

There is a simple story of complex physical pathos told by the protestant theologian Paul Tillich. During World War I, after months in the trenches as a chaplain, Tillich found himself one rainy Paris afternoon standing in a small gallery in front of Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels. On meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, he surprised himself by sobbing uncontrollably.¹³ He sobbed with his whole body. He calls it the disjunction between the exceptional tenderness of the Virgin and the terror and cruelty of war. It is ironic but true, that the only reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know: that we experience ourselves as the ghost, not as the machine. The artist can so delicately portray the rather inseparable mysteries of memory and imagination, reminding us that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our ghostly consciousness. Reminding us too, that no map of matter can fully explain the manner in which, or reasons for this ghostly consciousness being so palpably and precisely located in the body: inspiration and love centred in the thorax; loathing, deep in the nasal cavity; fear and panic in the pit of the stomach; profound awe on the surface of the skin; all tightly bound to a type of body memory. In this regard, the Danish architect academic Juhani Pallasmaa has pondered why it is that the cry of the seagull in the harbour reminds us of distant horizons; why the smell of seaweed conjures up the ocean depths; why a bell awakes in us the sense of community and why muted combinations of light and shadow (particularly in certain sacred places) so powerfully facilitate memory and imagination. Pallasmaa contends that the ancient origins of architecture are found, not in the retina, but in the oral/nasal cavity.¹⁴

Perhaps there is a need at this point of history to recover some of this ancient, ‘incorporated’ understanding of memory as part of our fuller appreciation of incarnation. The Sydney theologian David Ranson in his recent text The Paschal Paradox concludes by suggesting that the two most important pieces we have on the chessboard of life are our memory and our imagination. ‘We live in a curious time’ he says, ‘where both our memory and our imagination are now critical. Memory is not incidental for us but in fact in many ways it constitutes the fabric of our present and becomes the cloth from which the future itself is made’.¹⁵