Annotatio CCXXVIII

”The former distresses are given over to oblivion.” — Isaiah 65:16

Jerome, in book 18 on Isaiah, seems to hand down that the saints in heaven will not have memory of [their] preceding evils or crimes.¹ For he says: “In the new heaven and in the new earth, all memory of the former conversation is blotted out, lest this very thing be a part of the evils — to remember the former distress.” The Master of the Sentences, in book 4, distinction 43, citing this passage otherwise than it is read in the Hieronymian codex, says that it must be so understood by us that we do not exclude from the blessed the memory of [their] preceding evils, but [only] the injury and molestation of the memory: for the memory of [their] offenses will not in any part diminish the felicity of the Saints, but will render [them] the more prompt and eager to render thanks to God. Which interpretation there is no doubt that he took from Gregory, who most aptly explained this at the end of book 4 of the Explanations on Job, saying thus: “It must be asked, how the mind of the elect can be perfect in beatitude, if the memory of its own guilt touches it amid [its] joys? But it must be known that, as often now we joyfully remember [past] sad things, so then we shall remember the wickedness [we have] passed through, without injury to our beatitude: for often, in the time of wholeness, we recall past griefs to memory without grief, and by how much we recollect ourselves [as having been] sick, by so much [the more], being whole, do we love [our health]. There will be, therefore, in that beatitude a memory of guilt — not [one] that pollutes the mind, but [one] that binds us more closely to gladness: so that, while the mind remembers its own grief without grief, it both more truly understands itself a debtor to the physician, and loves the more the salvation received, by how much it remembers the trouble which it has escaped.”