By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine -
Christianity did not entirely disavow the world it came to replace. What it did was salvage all that was good in it, including the idea of memory, which underwent a kind of baptism thanks to the leaven of the Christian Gospel. It was the poet Pavese who perhaps expressed it best when, in describing the power of memory, he called it “a passion repeated,” the exercise of which effects an actual re-presentation of the event itself, thus repeating the passion first awakened by one’s encounter with it.