"Remembering" the Future

““Its memory, you see.” Said Anathema. “It works backward as well as forwards. Racial memory, I mean.”

            Newt gave her a polite but blank look.

        “What I’m trying to say,” she said patiently, “is that Agnes didn’t see the future. That’s just a metaphor. She remembered it.”” (Good Omens, p.225)

This quote got me thinking about God in Paradise Lost. More specifically, I started thinking about how He reacts to the fall. We know that God knows what’s going to happen in both the future, and what has already happened in the past. In book 3, we see that God is well aware that Satan is heading towards Earth I order to try to deceive man and ruin God’s plan. However, God does nothing, and allows Satan to continue with his plan. I wonder if this is because God could be “remembering” a memory, and that is why he knows what is going to happen. It makes me wonder if God knows everything in the future because he is “remembering” all of these memories, and for him to intervene would have too much of a drastic change on the world.

Where would we be without the fall? Still living in a happy paradise? Would we still be oblivious to harmful things? And what would test our loyalty to Him? We have discussed over and over again that Milton used Paradise Lost to “explain the works of God to man.” But I think there is no explaining. How can one fathom an explanation of God’s actions. Why God didn’t intervene when he had the chance is just as much of a mystery as how our lives would be had Satan not tempted Eve. I think this could be because he is simply looking back on time while the rest of us are going forward.

            I am not elevating Agnes Nutter to the status of God, I just feel that her way of prophesizing is similar to Gods, that is if she is remembering an event. For her, she seems to have written down events, and while they aren’t in a concrete order, they are very accurate. For her to be “remembering” memories seems quite odd, but then again she seemed odd for her time anyway. Is this because maybe she didn’t fit in with that time period? The idea of her remembering events seems to mean that she was more suited for a later time period, one where people already knew what happened.

            I guess it’s just a little strange for me to think of memory working forwards. I always knew that when you have a memory your recalling information, but to have a memory predicting events seems odd, and definitely uncommon. But I also would like to add that this helps me put together a reason for God knowing about the fall. I believe that He could have been “remembering” the future in a way that the rest of the world couldn’t.

 

Rebecca R.