ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of Augustine's personal characteristics, which in interaction with his cultural context, and explains the modernity of his writings on memory despite the interval of 1,600 years. It develops the central components of his theory of memory, taking into account that Augustine was interested in the memory process, which he considered to be the unique method to know God. The chapter comments on his capacity of introspection and his personality against the background of two philosophical currents, Neo-Platonism and Christianity (the only true philosophical theme for Augustine). It shows that the formation of mental images of the external world is the fabric, so to speak, of recollections, but that this general memory process raises important questions and some problems when Augustine wonders about memory-images of God, emotions, and forgetting. Among Augustine's "thousand volumes", in Isidore of Seville's parlance, the Confessions and most particularly book 10 are consensually acknowledged to represent, par excellence, his work on memory.
