Recognition and Religion A Historical and Systematic Study

new understanding and attaches the person to a new group. For
Augustine, agnitioremains a fairly subjective event that cannot
replace the cognitive side of Christian doctrine. As Augustine also
employs the legal language of adoption and political allegiance, this old
sense ofagnitioremains important for Latin theology. Elements of
group belonging are thus related to the idea of recognition. At the same
time, religious recognition remains an act of faith that is given by God
in a downward expectation. While the‘downward’divine influence is
strong, the verbagnoscodepicts the upward movement of the faithful.
This being said, Augustine can also useagnoscoin the everyday
sense of‘knowing’, for instance, infirst-person sentences. In the
elaboration on memory inConfessions,Augustine usesagnoscoin
the sense of recollecting a thing from its earlier appearance:

When I...recognize a thing I am naming, whence comes my recogni-

tion, if not from an act of remembering? I do not mean recognition of

the sound of its name, but of the thing signified, for if I forgot that,

I would be unable to recognize the meaning of the word.^35

Although thefirst-person connotation ofagnoscois also relevant in
Confessions, the verb is often employed in this text to highlight the
event of recollecting something from the memory.
In a similar manner, Augustine also uses the verbrecognosco. This
verb means for him a review or recollection of something that is
already known. In music, for instance, the event of remembering a
tune makes the music more vivid because of recollective recogni-
tion.^36 People who remember something that they have read before
‘recognize’the text. Augustine can also say that those who know
‘recognize’, whereas those who don’t know‘hear’.^37
InThe Trinity, Augustine compares the human mind to the Trin-
ity. He considers that

when the mind views itself by thought, it understands and recognizes

itself (se recognoscit); thus it begets this understanding and self-

knowledge (cognitionem suam)...When the mind by thinking views

and understands itself, it does not beget this awareness of itself as

though it had previously been unknown to itself; it was already

known to itself (sibi nota erat) in the way that things are known

(^35) Conf. 10, 16, Trans. Boulding. (^36) Mus.6,8.
(^37) En. Ps. 140, 10, 3.
The Latin Traditions 57