On Religion and Memory

Introduction: On Religion and Pastness

1 Introduction: On Religion and Pastness Burcht Pranger This volume brings together a number of studies dealing with the pastness of the religious, Christian past.1 While it is generally accepted that temporality and historicity are constitutive elements of the Christian religion to the extent that Christianity is sometimes credited with being their founder, the actual status of time in religion is far from self-evident. First, there is the issue of the proximity of eternity as it hovers over each and every temporal manifestation of both Christian worship and reflective, religious language. This incarnation of timelessness inside the Catholic tradition was coined by Vincent of Lerinum in the crudest terms possible as “that which is believed everywhere, always and by all.” Yet it is not this hyperbolic claim to timelessness within history that holds center stage in this collection of essays. If anything, this study could be characterized as aiming at the opposite of hyperbole: the fragility, scatteredness, and multidimensionality of time beneath the surface of the literary Christian tradition. Resulting as this volume does from a research project that took its cue from the Augustinian concept of temporality, it may make sense to sum up the reasons why it is Augustine who provides us with the tools to do jus- 2 Burcht Pranger tice to the intricacies of time and eternity in the past, the present, and the future. Although less hyperbolical than Vincent of Lerinum, Augustine is first and foremost known for his grand design of history as outlined in his City of God. In that book we can observe Augustine tracing the vicissitudes of the heavenly city as it pilgrimates on earth under toilsome circumstances from a sinful beginning toward a blissful end. Although, inevitably, Augustine ’s interpreters throughout the ages, from Orosius to Ratzinger, have taken this grand design of time and history to be a narrative with a beginning and an ending, Augustine’s skepticism with regard to the means at our disposal to delineate the events of history has gone mainly unnoticed. Yet skepticism is a key concept here, since time and again Augustine reminds his reader that the scope and presence of the celestial city—and, for that matter, of the earthly city as well—cannot be pinpointed. Neither can we distinctly separate the one from the other. And lofty though the presence of the Church may be and despicable the behavior of its opponents, there is no fixed point in time and history that guarantees the undisputed contours and recognizability of either.2 In that respect Augustine maintains the skeptical view of time he had entertained in his Confessions. Not only does his famous quote hold true that we know what time is as long as no one asks us about it but that we are at a loss as soon as we have to answer that question.3 Augustine also draws more drastic conclusions from the fact that time eludes us because its momentary status as present prevents us from holding on to that very moment. The implications of this view are that “time is and is not.” It is to the extent that the present is always there comprising as it were the future and the past as “a present of the future and a present of the past.”4 It is not to the extent that time, whether future, present, or past, evaporates the moment we try to get hold of it, from expectation through the focus of the present to memory. Yet the fact that neither future nor past—and, by implication, neither expectation nor memory—can stand on its own but is always in the grip of the “present of the present,” which, in its turn, cannot be pinpointed, leaves us with a skepticism that at the same time represents the force of destiny in the guise of eternity’s pressure. For what else could this ineluctable present that governs the course of time be called but a reflection of eternity? That very pressure also blocks any attempt to characterize Augustinian temporality as subjective, since, in spite of expectation, attention, and memory being the vehicles of the soul that shape time, there is no moment at which they could act independently out of sight of the possessive presence of present time as eternity’s emissary. In that respect the shaping of time through expectation and memory is nothing but a wake-up call to the soul preoccu- [3.139.107.241] Project MUSE (2024...