The Memory of Paradise (Part II)

Owing to our long sense of Zamani, African societies have something that the modern world has lost and desperately needs: a deep anchorage to the past.

Jan 11, 2025

(Click here to read Part I.)

The Memory of Paradise is not a mere nostalgia for the “Good Old Days”. Paradise is not a fantasy of days gone by. It is as real as our deepest memories, and as those memories elusive. Regarding space, glimmers of paradise are preserved in some places more than in others. Signs and images of paradise can be glimpsed here and there (as William Blake reminded us in his poem Auguries of Innocence) in particulars like Wild Flowers and Grains of Sand. Memories are to images what time is to space.

One way of interpreting the notion of paradise could be to see it as an inner, centripetal force that pulls a person back “home” whenever he finds himself drifting away from his center into the peripheries of his existence. The Memory of Paradise is a real power, ever calling us back to the purity of our origins. While calling us from the past, it simultaneously projects us into the future. It is simultaneously memory and destiny. Anamnesis is the name we gave (in Part 1 of this series) to this rootedness in the past that serves as an anchorage for the present and launchpad for the future.

Although modern man prides himself in living in and for the moment, an ominous emptiness surrounds his relationship with the present. The more he tries to escape from the past, the more it reasserts itself. As a pilgrim of time, he cannot help but have a sense of a “before” and an “after”. We can glean a hint of his inescapable attachment to the past from the ecological movement’s conflicting desires for a better, future world that man may never inhabit. In fighting for such an uncertain future, these homeless “climate warriors” unnecessarily detach present action from future fulfillment. They fail to acknowledge that their inexplicable longing for such a future can only make sense if they were also to appreciate their present longing as a simultaneous “retrogressive” call from the past to restore the original paradise. Whether these “ecological pilgrims” are aware of it or not, they are hopelessly incapable of resisting the call of Eden. In short, for a temporal being, the continuum between the past, the present, and the future is inescapable.

Martin Heidegger, modern technology and the desire for alternative paradises

There are some in the modern world who (though they may not be willing to admit it to themselves) have chosen an alternative route to that of our abovementioned ecological pilgrims. Rather than choosing the route of restoring our Common Home, they have instead chosen the more “modern route” of recreating an altogether new home for mankind—an alternative paradise remade in their image and likeness.

Could the desires of modernist scientists like Elon Musk to transplant humanity onto a new planet be considered a suitable case study of an attempt to replace the “old transcendence” with a “new transhumanism” —a longing to recreate a future on our own (post)modernist terms?

You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.1

These words from the homepage of SpaceX bring us back to the question we posed in Part 1 of this series on the Memory of Paradise: the question about the trajectory of the universe as a whole. What is time (and space, for that matter) and what is the point of history? Can man still be man if he is transplanted from the Earth onto another planet? Is the destiny of humanity tied to this planet and this planet alone—much like a particular plant can only flourish in a particular kind of soil—or will any planet out there do? Could the literal “flight” from Earth to Mars (the desire “to be” among the stars) be interpreted as one of the proofs of modern man’s despair of his current state, a desire to be liberated from the past so that he can finally be free to restart humanity afresh?

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of the few 20^th-century philosophers who wrestled with the question of Being and its relation to Time.2 In his 1971 essay, Poetry, Language and Thought, the German philosopher spoke about the terrifying destruction it would mean to Being Human if we left behind the Earth and, therefore, the world.

For Heidegger, the world is, first and foremost, a place “to be” in and, therefore, “to act” within. In other words, he places ontology before epistemology: unlike so many modern philosophers who have interpreted the world and the things that make up the world as, first of all, a place to be known, Heidegger denied that our primary relationship with the world is that of “knower-known” Instead, he said that we are “engaged” in the world as participants acting in an agent-arena relationship.

As for his thoughts on technology, they are perhaps more relevant today than they were at his time.3 Heidegger saw technology as not just a tool but instead a way of thinking and understanding the world. Technology, he observed, shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Heidegger coined the phrase, “technology enframes being” to mean that technology shapes our worldview (often unconsciously) in such a manner as to reduce reality to a resource to be exploited. Heidegger questioned the ultimate benefits of technology, suggesting that our view of the world as an “infinitely malleable resource” arose from the disastrous Cartesian split between the mind and the body. A technocratic relationship with existence can easily dull us into a kind of unconsciousness that makes us imagine ourselves to be demigods, capable of bending reality to our whims, rather than as always already standing within the world, always already “engaged” in it as participants, as agents in an arena, “thrown into history” in Heidegger’s words. Such hubris can easily end up alienating us from an authentic sense of ourselves, which consists in embracing finitude, mortality, and responsibility for our existence. From the perspective of his notion of Dasein4, it is no longer clear to modern man what “the self” means.

Augustine Revisited

The contemporary world is averse to using the word “sin”. We have tried our best to suppress, cancel, and bury it but this “monstrous word” simply refuses to die. The more we try to decapitate this “beast of chaos”, the more its manifestations multiply—like the multiple heads of that primeval dragon of Greek mythology—Hydra5. Sin is indeed mysterious and monstrous, but that is no reason to hide from it. Naming our fears is the first step to overcoming them. Thanks to modern psychology’s multiple attempts at totally removing the notion of sin from our psyche, it has resurged with a vengeance, with multiple Hydra-heads: psychosis, neurosis, guilt, dissonance, schizophrenia…6 And yet, in an age more concerned with notions of self-consciousness and self-esteem, it might be logical that sin is characterized as personal disintegration, inner fragmentation, or the sense of the loss of self.

Original sin is not merely a theological doctrine. It is a fact of history. It is a thing rooted in our origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have believed that there is something wrong with mankind. It was G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) who pointed out that original sin is an observable fact that one can “see in the street.”

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. (…) But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.7

In Augustine’s account of man’s fall from grace, it was precisely original sin (humanity’s primordial loss of self) that shattered the original unity of mankind into many individual shards at odds with one another. Sin came about as a result of man’s choice. It was not part of the original plan. In his City of God, St. Augustine reminded us of the paradisiac state of humanity, i.e., man’s state before he was expelled from paradise or “thrown into history” (to use a Heideggerian expression). The original plan was for all men to be one people in a peaceful relationship with one another through the Spirit of God. Unfortunately, the Earthly City became the estate of sinful humanity without God’s Spirit. Not only did sin disrupt the relationship between the Earthly City and God, but the absence of the Spirit in the Earthly City made the godly relationship between the Earthly citizens and the Godly citizens impossible.

Augustine identified this “Spirit” as the principle bringing together the multiple shattered shards of fallen humanity. Spirit is that which brings about unity not only in man (the microcosm), but also in the whole (the macrocosm). It was, in fact, the Spirit or Breath (Ruah in Hebrew) of God, breathed into inanimate dust, that transformed dead dust into a living being. Dust symbolizes primordial disintegration—this is why a living thing reverts to dust when it dies. Man was made from the fusion of dust and spirit, two principles that did not originally belong together; the former signifies disintegration, and the latter, unity. The more materialistic his desires, the more he would descend into death; the more spiritual, the more he would ascend into life.

In this vein, St. Augustine summed up the forces that determine the movement of human history into the struggle between two cities—an Earthly City and a Godly City—as they pursue their desires, one for earthly pleasure and peace, the other for peace and righteousness through Jesus Christ. These differing desires—for self or God—oppose one another and create strife within humanity.

And thus it has come to pass, that though there are very many and great nations all over the earth…yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, which we may justly call two cities…The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other to those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind.” (City of God, Book XIV, 1)

According to St. Augustine, then, history ultimately consists of these two strains or tensions that will persist in all of us until the end of time—in both our individual and communal states. These disparate forces unleashed into the world from the time of the Fall will battle for superiority within every one of us until the end of the world. According to this model of history, progress is not inevitable because of our real capacity to freely choose our destiny. Human history is not fixed or fully determined—it is open to the vicissitudes of human freedom, called to life and unity, pulled downwards towards death and disintegration. The side of history any person or collective chooses will be a function of which aspect of reality they choose to pay attention to.

Modernity and the fragmentation of attention

In Part 1 of our Memory of Paradise series, we mentioned that, insofar as it can be considered a mode of being-in-time, the present moment is “held together” by what any particular human being chooses to direct his attention towards. Augustine synthesized this idea in his Confessions:

Time is present to us as past in memory, as present in attention, and as future in expectation.

There is, for Augustine, a psychological and interior dimension of time that governs man in his here-and-now, according to which that section of reality that he grasps as present (the “now”) is determined not solely by the calendar or by the movement of heavenly bodies, but primarily by mental attention. Mental attention is the capacity to “hold” that ever-elusive “now” as it flows between the “before” and the “after”—like a surfer skillfully maintaining his balance on a surfboard as it titters on the crest of a moving wave.

In many ways, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein balances Augustine’s notion of psychic time and the ancient world’s notion of cosmic time. As beings moving in time, we can, to some extent, manipulate the flow of time according to our interior inclinations—but only up to a certain extent. Psychic time must coexist with cosmic time lest both devolve into the empty randomness typical of modernity.

Fractured by so much inner tension and assaulted by so many competing forces, modern man can no longer hold the present moment together. The so-called multi-tasking has frayed our capacity to pay attention. The ancient Greeks called man’s incapacity for attention “acedia”.8 We can describe acedia as a type of mental malaise characterized by divided attention, listlessness, boredom, apathy, despondency, tedium, ennui... It is the state of mind we frequently see nowadays among our young people, “killing time” as they doom scroll, zombie-like, from one TikTok to another, day in, day out—completely numbed from the actual “tick-tock” of nature’s clock. In his Summa, St. Thomas described acedia as “a sort of heavy sadness . . . that presses down on a man’s mind in such a way that no activity pleases him.” Blaise Pascal might have been referring to this malaise in his Pensées when he wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The Bible describes acedia as “the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday” (see Psalm 91:6). Modern psychologists might have been grappling with this notion when they came up with the expression, “Attention Deficit Disorder”.

With so many examples of our metaphysical hollowness, is it any wonder so many of our young people have sunk into a leaden emptiness of a lusterless and selfish existence? Is it any wonder they are struggling with clinical depression and suicidal thoughts? To lose a sense of the present is to lose the ability to hold oneself in being. It is to lose one’s story and, with it, a sense of the importance of history. Such utter inner disintegration of the self is, in and of itself, a veritable death—a death worse than physical death because it involves the death of meaning itself. Sin and death are ontological equivalents.

The meaninglessness that results from this kind of disintegration is at the heart of the modern world’s full-frontal assault on the ancient stories that used to give us a sense of identity. All modern heroes are mere deconstructions of ancient heroes. All our movies and series have become case studies of criticizing the foibles of classic heroes to destroy them as role models. Not satisfied with dismantling our native stories and heroes, these postmodernist iconoclasts have embarked on a new project of deconstruction: altering the very meanings of the words we use in our everyday languages. These destroyers of meaning will not rest until they have dismantled every trace of The Logos in the world.

This “grammar of fragmentation” has also found multiple expressions in our digital ecosystems. How else should we interpret hate speech, cancel culture, and the mimetic patterns of accusation we witness daily on Twitter/X and the comment sections of our YouTube videos, if not as tangible manifestations of our already disintegrated interiors?

Africa’s Anamnesis as an antidote to Modernity’s Amnesia

… the memory is that wherein we take thoughts and images into ourselves and incorporate them so that they co-constitute our very identity, our selfhood. 9

Owing to our long sense of Zamani, it can be argued that African societies have something that the modern world has lost and desperately needs: a deep anchorage to the past. This strong desire to cling to the living memory of our forefathers could be exactly what Western culture currently needs to “rescue their father from the underworld”, in the words of Jordan B Peterson, a phrase which has gained considerable popularity in the contemporary West.

Our sense of the Zamani is, I would wish to argue, the ontological basis of our Ubuntu, our sense of togetherness. Zamani is more primordial to us than Ubuntu. Whereas Zamani is our historical connection to our forefathers, Ubuntu is our present connection to our brethren. The extensive and intensive sense of the past sustains our present and acts as our defense against and counterweight to modernity’s fragmentation. We are, of course, not free from the contagion of fragmentation. After all, we, too, are children of this age; the backwaters of the world we dwell in stain us, too.

The memory devices we are so fond of may “enframe” us into perceiving memory as a purely external phenomenon—like a pen drive that can be plugged and unplugged into a computer’s Central Processing Unit, with no serious detriment to the machine’s overall working. But we should not allow the distortion engendered by such an epistemology to endanger our relationship with our fundamental connection to memory:

There is a properly human way of retaining experience and ideas, which differs from the merely mechanical repetition of data. This way involves the recognition that what we hold onto, what we take into the center of our being, gives us life, connects us to others, opens us to the transcendent order—that is, to God. The lived experiences of the transcendent truth take flesh in us, and then we pass them on to others in an incarnate way. Thus, the “memorials” that bind us to God (…) at the very same time bind us to each other.10

Thus interpreted, memory is not seen as a mere “storage device,” circumscribed within the confines of our individual beings. It is, instead, something much closer to an opening—within the innermost core of one’s being—to what precedes one, what is already there, what is given:

The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path. In this regard, we can speak of a massive amnesia in our contemporary world.11

This is, in fact, one of the most fundamental truths of our being pilgrims in time. It is one of the main facets of human identity that modern individualism is insistently trying to suppress. To these kinds of underhand assaults, we need to reply insistently and forcefully: “We do not and cannot make ourselves. No one ‘is’ just themselves, no one is autonomous.” Neither language games nor reinterpretations of the grand narratives can change these facts of our nature without serious detriment to our identity.

Without the others to ‘fall back’ on, the present moment loses its vitality, the hope of the future evaporates, and human identity disappears altogether. Humans need community to subsist and communities need memories—enshrined in common traditions, customs, and monuments—to thrive. Our historical actions leave marks on our geographical locations. Our ancestors erected monuments in places where their actions transcended the moment. Monuments and pilgrimage sites make visible, almost tangible, the moments when our forefathers encountered the Living God. They serve as proof that He has not withdrawn from the world but is always present to us so that we, too, can encounter Him in the present moment. We cannot flee from those who have gone before us—neither in space nor in time—and hope to remain human.

As part of its identity, Africa is open to transcendence, to adoration, and to the glory of God. The African peoples respect life, but they look beyond it by seeking eternity. The soul of Africa is always open toward God. Unlike a large part of the West, this continent has a fundamentally theocentric vision. Material concerns are always secondary. In this life, the African knows that he is only a sojourner.12

Who would have imagined that the Western world’s flight from God would eventually lead them into a literal flight from this world? Who would have foreseen how the loss of the sense of divinity would lead not only to the loss of the sense of humanity but also to the loss of the sense of the earth itself?

Have we in Africa lost sight of the Memory of Paradise? No! … Or at least not yet. We have not lost contact with Heidegger’s Dasein—with “Being” understood first and foremost as the lived experience of existence. Neither have we lost sight of our fallenness from grace (à la Augustine) and our thrownness into history (à la Heidegger). We are still on the side of Augustine’s Godly City. We are not perfect, but we are yet to reach a “crisis state”—we can still offer the decaying modern world new ways of living and fresh models of life to make the contemporary world a place of true humanity.

To continue preserving this Fundamental Memory of Being, one of the key actions we could adopt here and now is to commit ourselves to pay more attention to the following concrete realities—which already belong to our genius as a people: To remain open to transcendence and religion. To treat Being with reverence and to especially revere the Being that is human from his natural beginning to his natural end. To abhor abortion and respect the elderly. To preserve our communal identities in our communal languages, stories, and monuments. To subordinate technical prowess to moral and spiritual energy. To cooperate with creation instead of destroying it—or as Heidegger would put it, not to allow the use of techne (technology) to replace physis (nature)).

Holding on tightly to such concrete realities could be the key to preserving ourselves and unveiling the Memory of Paradise for our despairing contemporaries.

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