Augustine’s Decentered Self

Maguire again, this time describing Augustine’s idea of memory and self: “This dynamism of relation, manifest above all in the way that God’s love permits the love of creatures for God, and the love among creatures through God, is for Augustine the ‘ground’ of the self’s unity. That this relationality is constantly exceeding itself is not a source of fragmentation, but an intimation of the divine’s infinite and constant excess, at once beyond change and beyond limit.”

That is, the very “decentering” of the self is the self’s imagining of an infinite God.