---
slug: sinkewicz-memoria-216b7857
title: "Sinkewicz on Memoria"
author: "Robert E. Sinkewicz"
work: "Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus"
section: ""
year: "2003"
tradition: classical
themes:
  - memoria
fragment: |
  Memory of death meant, in keeping with contemporary ideas on memory, vivid and even grotesquely imagistic description. Memory was generally under-stood to be based in the "imagination" (φαντασία),111 and to operate imagistically 109 Wortley (2006, 317-18); see also Regnault (1990, 110, 115-16). 110 Systematica 3.55. 111 The most important accounts of memory as it relates to perception are: Aristotle, De Memo-ria 1 (450a24-25) and De Anima 3.3; and Plotinus, Enneads 4.3.30-32, 4.6.1-3. Late antique and modern commentaries on both regard memory as a function of the imagination and likewise understand it as working imagistically. On Aristotle and Plotinus' theories of memory see Blu-menthal (1996, 141-42, 145-47); Sorabji (2004, xvi-xvii, 14-16). On ancient theories of memory generally, see King (2009, 224-40). Biblical and Philosophical Foundations 75 through individual impressions either (in Stoic and Peripatetic thought) received from past experience (as πάθη)112 or (as Plotinus would have it) conjured up in the mind.113 To "remember" meant, then, to "imagine" either something that has already happened or that could happen-memory, understood broadly, could be of the past or the future, though Aristotle would say that we reserve the term "memory" for the past, "perception" for the present, and "speculation" for the future.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Evagrius inherits a psychology in which memory is never bare information — it is image, impression, the felt residue of what the soul has passed through. The Greek *phantasia* does the work here: imagination and memory share the same faculty, which means remembering is always a kind of re-encounter with the image, not a retrieval of a fact. When Evagrius instructs the monk to keep death before the mind, he is not proposing an intellectual proposition to hold abstractly. He is prescribing the manufacture of a vivid, even grotesque picture — because that is the only kind of memory the soul's apparatus can actually sustain.
  
  What Aristotle separates out — memory for the past, perception for the present, speculation for the future — Evagrius collapses back together under the pressure of ascetic practice. The remembered death is also the anticipated death; the image conjured is also the image received. Plotinus would agree with the conjuring: the mind brings the impression up from itself, not from the world. This is why desert psychology is stranger than its reputation for severity suggests. The cell is not a place of emptiness but of relentless image-work — the monk populated by phantasmata, learning to distinguish which images serve discernment and which ones the logismoi ride in on. Memory as imagination means the interior is always already crowded.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The Aristotelian partition is the hinge here: memory for the past, perception for the present, speculation for the future — three clean offices, each with its domain. Evagrius, working inside this framework and then pressing against it, instructs the monk to "remember" death, which has not yet occurred. That is not a small move. It conscripts the imaginative machinery of memory — the vivid, almost violent image-making that ancient mnemotechnics required — and aims it at something speculative, even fictional. Plotinus makes this less paradoxical: if memory conjures rather than merely replays, then to remember one's death is not a category error but an act of deliberate imagination, rehearsed until it carries the phenomenological weight of the past. The monk who does this is not dwelling on history. He is manufacturing a future so concrete it begins to govern the present.
parent_id: Sinkewicz_2003_Evagrius_of_Pontus_The_Greek__par0032
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Sinkewicz writes:

> Memory of death meant, in keeping with contemporary ideas on memory, vivid and even grotesquely imagistic description. Memory was generally under-stood to be based in the "imagination" (φαντασία),111 and to operate imagistically 109 Wortley (2006, 317-18); see also Regnault (1990, 110, 115-16). 110 Systematica 3.55. 111 The most important accounts of memory as it relates to perception are: Aristotle, De Memo-ria 1 (450a24-25) and De Anima 3.3; and Plotinus, Enneads 4.3.30-32, 4.6.1-3. Late antique and modern commentaries on both regard memory as a function of the imagination and likewise understand it as working imagistically. On Aristotle and Plotinus' theories of memory see Blu-menthal (1996, 141-42, 145-47); Sorabji (2004, xvi-xvii, 14-16). On ancient theories of memory generally, see King (2009, 224-40). Biblical and Philosophical Foundations 75 through individual impressions either (in Stoic and Peripatetic thought) received from past experience (as πάθη)112 or (as Plotinus would have it) conjured up in the mind.113 To "remember" meant, then, to "imagine" either something that has already happened or that could happen-memory, understood broadly, could be of the past or the future, though Aristotle would say that we reserve the term "memory" for the past, "perception" for the present, and "speculation" for the future.

— Robert E. Sinkewicz

Evagrius inherits a psychology in which memory is never bare information — it is image, impression, the felt residue of what the soul has passed through. The Greek *phantasia* does the work here: imagination and memory share the same faculty, which means remembering is always a kind of re-encounter with the image, not a retrieval of a fact. When Evagrius instructs the monk to keep death before the mind, he is not proposing an intellectual proposition to hold abstractly. He is prescribing the manufacture of a vivid, even grotesque picture — because that is the only kind of memory the soul's apparatus can actually sustain.

What Aristotle separates out — memory for the past, perception for the present, speculation for the future — Evagrius collapses back together under the pressure of ascetic practice. The remembered death is also the anticipated death; the image conjured is also the image received. Plotinus would agree with the conjuring: the mind brings the impression up from itself, not from the world. This is why desert psychology is stranger than its reputation for severity suggests. The cell is not a place of emptiness but of relentless image-work — the monk populated by phantasmata, learning to distinguish which images serve discernment and which ones the logismoi ride in on. Memory as imagination means the interior is always already crowded.

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Robert E. Sinkewicz · *Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus* · 2003