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Great is the power of memory, exceeding great, O my God—an inner chamber large and boundless (penetrale amplum et infinitum)! Who has plumbed its depths? Yet it is a poer of mine, and apertains unto my nature; nor do I myself grasp all that I am (nec ego ipse capio totum, quod sum). . . . A great admiration rises upon me; astonishment seizes me. And men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the extent of the ocean, and the courses of the stars, and omit to wonder at themselves (et reliquunt se ipsos).
This concern with the memoria, and its function in the human mind, was to be one of the most important spiritual legacies Augustine would leave to the Latin, and especially monastic, Middle Ages. In fact, it would be possible to say without much exaggeration that the entire history of monastic spirituality in the Latin Middle Ages (at least until approximately A.D. 1200) is the record of the development of understanding of the power of memoria. A central reason for this is that memoria was described as a faculty that worked by recalling the human person to the knowledge and intuition that they were created in the image and likeness of God. Thus the words of Genesis 1:26–27 stand at the beginning of an entire spiritual tradition: "God said let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves. . . . God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them." Augustine frequently exhorts himself, as in Confessions 7.10, to "return to myself" (redite ad memet ipsum). This was also the continual refrain of the Cistercian author of the twelfth century, William of St. Thierry, in his Golden Epistle, and it serves as one of the themes on which he builds this work. William's treatise, folloing in the path of Augustine, is a call to discover the image and likeness of God in the individual person.