When Christopher Nolan met St. Augustine (Confessions, Bk 10-11)

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am obsessed with Christopher Nolan films.

Just in case you haven’t been tracking, Christopher Nolan is the legendary British-American director behind the visionary masterpieces such as The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and most recently Tenet. However if you follow Nolan’s filmography back, you discover this hidden gem with a strong cult following: Memento. In Memento, the main character suffers reoccurring short term amnesia, in which, while retaining his long term memory, he forgets everything he encounters every 5 minutes or so. It’s a mind bender that forces you to consider what it would feel like to live as if you couldn’t remember what you had been doing, where you were, or why you were there.

Which really surfaces a fascinating thought you can’t help feel Christopher Nolan was hoping you’d get to as you watch the film: are any of us really that different from his main character?

To ask such a question is to ponder the significance of memory and time on our identity. Who have we been? Where are we going? What are we doing here? These are not simple questions. Yet they are the very same question that St. Augustine himself has been pondering in his Confessions. Ingeniously, Augustine is not content to merely end with his own story. Instead, Augustine wants to push deeper.

He wants to push in to the significance of memory and time on his own identity.

What Augustine discovers will be so significant that some of his concepts are still reverberating today with fresh significance in fields as vast and far removed as physics and psychology. Yet they are also intensely personal: what does Christ have to do with my memories? What does God have to do with my relationship to time?

So this episode, I want to ask, what would it look like if Christopher Nolan were to have a conversation with St. Augustine? The reflection might just offer you new insight into aspects of your own identity.

Join us as we continue this in-between series on Augustine and the Crisis of Identity.