Въпросът за познанието на душата и познаването на Бога при Августин с оглед на учението за паметта
The question of the knowledge of the soul and the knowledge of God in Augustine in view of the doctrine of memory

Summary/Abstract: In the following paper, I attempt to clarify how memory mediates between God and man within the frame of the teaching of Augustine. The emphasis lays on two very important aspects of knowledge, namely, the self-knowledge of the soul and the knowability of God. We shall discuss whether the soul is the starting point of knowledge or that is God, who resides mysteriously within the soul as someone interior intimo meo, thus granting the soul the capability to grasp itself in self-reflection. For Augustine the latter is possible, only if the soul has already acquainted the most inner light, which is God. The thesis of this paper is that the memory plays a constituent role in providing the continuity and the identity of man throughout time, who is essentially a historical being, and thus it is ensuring one’s self-reflectivity. For Augustine, as a Christian thinker, history is the special temporal realm, where the man falls and is resurrected again by God, who becomes flesh. Memory is a necessary condition also for the historicity of man, as much as only by its means the human, being a historical entity, could enter into communion with God. Here I elaborate on Christ as mediator between the temporality and eternity and on how the memory concept by Augustine resembles Christ. My main goal is to show how Augustine is fully engaged into developing a thorough theological anthropology.

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