In Memoriam: Memory and Imitation in Augustine and Athanasius

Compositions moved Augustine, and nowhere is that more evident than in his Confessions. I argue that in this late-fourth-century biography-cum-protreptic, Augustine tries to replace earlier philosophical (Cicero’s Hortensius) and Christian (Athanasius’s Vita Antonii) protreptics with an updated version – his Confessions, which, in part, seeks to move the reader to embrace the Christian ascetic life. Augustine accomplishes his goal by modeling Confessions partly on the memory-imitation-text triad found in the Vita Antonii. The memory of stories and texts serves as a major focus of the account of his conversion experience in the garden in Milan, and he chooses to imitate those stories as the response to the call to embrace the Christian life. Imitation, in turn, leads him to asceticism through reading Scripture and remembering to imitate others who imitated Antony