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3 What Is “Memory”? As stated at the outset of this work, memory is central to the covenant theologies of the deuteronomic and priestly traditions. But what is “memory” for each? Is it recollection or retrospect? Is it retrieval or retention? Does it concern specific episodes or extended events? Is it information or experience, ideas or images? As historians of memory theory know, the question of what is memory has occupied philosophers, theologians, and scientists for millennia. Most chart the consideration of this question from Aristotle (384–322 bce), whose essentially static view of memory held sway for nearly 2000 years. Both Aristotle and later Augustine (353–430) conceptualized memory as a “storehouse of images” from which intact and immutable pictures of past events could be drawn. This notion of memory as a discrete act of retrieval performed at a particular time held through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, continuing even in the work of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831).1 It was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) who challenged this view by recognizing the personal and subjective aspects of memory and, by implication, the dynamic, imaginative aspect of memory.2 The Study of Memory The modern study of memory begins with Henri Bergson (1859–1941). Bergson’s 1896 Matter and Memory provided a phenomenology of memory that has profoundly influenced subsequent analysis from both philosophical and psychological perspectives.3 Bergson’s distinction between “image” memory and “habit” memory is the basis of memory taxonomy today. Habit-memory is consciously imprinted on the mind through repetition. It is the acquired skill or 1. The preceding summary is based on Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 6–21. 2. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “The Sources of Memory,” Journal of the History of Ideas58 (1997): 717. 3. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004). 49 the lesson “learned by heart” that is expressed in the present as something acted, such as a ritual or recited liturgy.4 “Image” memory, constituting “the principal share of individual consciousness in perception [and] the subjective side of the knowledge of things,” concerns unique, unrepeatable events.5 Bergson’s analysis concentrates on memory as an individual experience. A generation later, Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) coined the term “collective memory” to explain the participation of socially constructed reality in the formation of memory.6 In two groundbreaking books, La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles enTerre sainte: Étude de mémoire collectiveand Le mémoire collective, Halbwachs investigates aspects of the intersection of memory and religion. In the first, Halbwachs explores the identification of landmarks in Jerusalem, namely the location of each of the Stages of the Cross, to concretize and secure the authorized account of Jesus’ passion. In his chapter on “Religious Collective Memory” in Le mémoire collective, Halbwachs considers the uses to which religious remembrances are put. Religious movements, he explains, invoke memory to establish origins or to demonstrate continuity with older traditions.7 Furthermore, and to a greater extent than other categories of collective memory, “religious remembrances” are represented as eternal and immutable. Here is Halbwachs on Catholicism: When believers participate in the Sunday Mass, go to church and participate in rites on holy days, recite prayers every day, or fast, they undoubtedly do not think above all of past events of which these practices reproduce certain traits, like an echo resounding across the centuries. Preoccupied with obtaining salvation according to the customary forms and with complying with the rules observed by the same members of their religious group, they indeed know that these institutions existed before them. But these institutions appear so well 4. Ibid., 89, 91. Bergson’s “habit” memory is termed by philosophers, “procedural memory” and by psychologists, “embodied skill,” like riding a bicycle. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F. J. Ditter and V. Y. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), translation of Le mémoire collective(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1950). See also La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre sainte: Études de mémoire collective(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941). 7. “Society is aware that the new religion is not an absolute beginning. The society wishes to adopt these larger and deeper beliefs without entirely rupturing the framework of notions in which it has matured up until this point. That is why at the same time that society projects into its past...

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