On Religion and Memory [Hardcover]

This volume takes up the challenge implied in Augustines paradox of time: How does one account for the continuity of history and the certitude of memory, if time, in the guise of an indivisible now, cuts off any extension of the present? The thinkers and artists the essays address include Augustine, Abelard, Eriugena and Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, De Rance, Stravinsky and Messiaen, Rubens and Woolf.This creatively eclectic volume launches a bold experiment in exploring what it might mean to take Augustines aporetic and non-linear understanding of time and eternity seriously. The questions posed are simultaneously historiographical and literary, on the one hand, and philosophical and theological, on the other. In exploring the relation between religion and pastness, the authors shuttle backward and forward in time, traverse theological and religious differences, and consider works of music and painting alongside those of literature and philosophy. At their best, the essays are fresh, insightful, moving--and challenging.Religion and Pastness examines the implications of the Augustinian concept of time as favoring a-causality over linear continuity. From this viewpoint the various essays address problems of dynamics and stasis in texts, paintings and music ranging from Augustine to Abelard, Eriugena, Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, Rubens, Bach, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Virginia Woolf, Cavell.At once precise and polyphonic, On Religion and Memory takes both terms in a wonderfully wide range of senses. Language, music, and art; meditation and monasticism; memory and oblivion; times contraction and its extension are interconnected and played off one another. This provocative anthology deserves to be read widely in philosophy, theology, religious studies, literary studiesindeed, across the humanitiesto create and continue conversations about the curious structures and experiences of memory.