Ancient Memory

Remember the poor,” Paul told the Galatians. But what did that mean?

Peter Brown (The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity, 39-40) explains that “For early Christians, as for many other ancient persons, memory was far more than a passive storage space. It implied an act of will. In the ancient world, memory was a tool of social cohesion par excellence. Patrons held clients to them by remembering and rewarding their services. In return, clients were careful to remember their patrons, even to the extent of solemnly celebrating their birthdays.”

Brown suggests that there was a “militant” element in memory: “To ‘remember,’ to ‘hold in the mind,’ was not to store away a fact: It was to assert a bond; it was to be loyal and to pay attention to somebody. Memory was as much a gift to the potentially forgotten dead in the other world as almsgiving was a gift to the all-too-easily forgotten poor in this world. In the same way, ‘forgetfulness’ was nothing as innocent as mere absence of mind. To forget was an aggressive act. It was an act of social excision that severed links that had previously been established by an equally purposive act of memory.”

For early Christians, further, “to remember was to intercede.” To remember the poor was to share a bond, and to extend and strengthen that bond by intercessory prayer. Brown argues that this same logic is evident in the practice of invoking saints: Believers invoked Peter and Paul “to further the prayers of human petitioners by presenting these prayers to the memory of God.” Inscriptions on Christian graves thus reflected a “double appeal to memory – they asked for the petitioner to be remembered by the holy dead who, in turn, had the power to mobilize the memory of God.” Tertullian spoke of a prayer assembly as “a military unit” that forced its way to God, offering a vis, a power, “pleasing to God.”