Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages

Michelle Karnes

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226425337
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period's meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure's meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love's Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Murray’s introduction to Cocking, Imagination, vii.

2. Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 131–32.

3. Ibid., 156.

4. There is some disagreement, for instance, about when the triumph of imagination occurred. Alan White sees imagination’s redemption only in the twentieth century (Language of Imagination), whereas Mark Johnson thinks it has yet to occur, but should. He offers a modified understanding of Kant’s theory of imagination as a means to help us appreciate “the central role of human imagination in all meaning, understanding, and reasoning” (Body in the Mind, ix).

5. Brann, World of the Imagination, 20–21.

6. Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” 4.

7. Descartes, Meditations, 6, in Oeuvres de Descartes 7:73. Trans. Cottingham et al., Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2:51.

8. Leclercq, Love of Learning, 75.

9. Minnis offers “suspicion” as the common thread that connects medieval thought about imagination (“Medieval Imagination and Memory,” 240). Rambuss refers to “the suspicion with which the imaginative faculty was typically regarded in the Middle Ages” (“‘Processe of tyme,’” 670). Kearney likewise speaks of the medieval “suspicion of” and “hostile view” toward imagination (Wake of Imagination, 130–32).

10. For instance, the author of the Chastising of God’s Children, citing Aquinas, explains that demonic, false visions proceed from imagination (c. xx, p. 179).

11. On theories of cognition in the Middle Ages, see Tachau, Vision and Certitude; Pasnau, Theories of Cognition; and Spruit, Species intelligibilis, vol. 1.

12. Here and throughout this study, I treat “imagination” as a subject capable of doing things. Technically, it is the individual who acts, using his or her imagination. Aristotle makes a relevant point: “It is doubtless better to avoid saying that the soul pities or learns or thinks, and rather to say that it is the man who does this with his soul” (De anima I.4, 408^b13–15, trans. Barnes, p. 651). Aristotle nonetheless gives himself permission to sacrifice some precision in the interests of brevity, and I will claim for myself the same right to treat imagination as an agent.

13. All future references to Aristotle’s De anima will be to Hamlyn’s translation, with Bekker references drawn from Ross’s edition, unless otherwise noted.

14. As I refer to it, “meditation” is not monastic meditation, defined by Leclercq as a sort of moral training nearly equivalent to lectio divina (Love of Learning, 16–17). Rather, I refer to a later, more general sense of the term, according to which meditation is a perceiving of God through careful, well-disposed attention to the created world. McGinn comments on the marked changes in the definition of meditation during the Middle Ages in The Growth of Mysticism, 135–38. See also méditation in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 10:906–14.

15. For Cousins, for instance, late-medieval “use of the imagination in a specific method of meditation, with its extensive cultivation of human emotions, especially compassion, with its almost exclusive emphasis on the passion” is a major failing, a means of separating too sharply Christ’s humanity from his divinity (“Humanity and the Passion of Christ,” 376). Huizinga similarly finds in late-medieval Christian art “the utmost elaboration, and even decomposition, of religious thought through the imagination” (Waning of the Middle Ages, 241).

16. What I call “gospel meditations” or “meditations on the life of Christ” are more often called “affective meditations,” “lives of Christ,” or even “Franciscan meditations.” Their purpose, however, is not wholly affective, and the texts are concerned less to recount Christ’s life than to present individual episodes from it for meditation. I tend not to label them “Franciscan” because doing so asserts more than we know about who wrote and read many of these texts. John Fleming addresses this problem by defining Franciscan literature by its themes rather than its authorship, but the result is to beg the question of what constitutes a Franciscan rather than a Dominican or secular theme. As Fleming acknowledges, his approach results in some illogical assertions, as when he says, “The greatest ‘Franciscan’ masterpieces of penitential literature are probably those of Dominicans” (Introduction to Franciscan Literature, 12). The category of “gospel meditations” has its own problem, namely, that the texts frequently include extrabiblical material, but I think it more accurately captures the purpose of the texts.

17. In spite of the attention devoted to the topic by medieval writers, mysticism is notoriously difficult to define. Attention in recent years has gone to what mysticism is not—whether an experience, a synonym for union, or theophany—rather than what it is (see McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, xiii–xx, as well as Turner, Darkness of God, 160–68). McGinn settles for an encompassing definition, whereby Christian mysticism “concerns the preparation for, consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God” (Foundations of Mysticism, xvii). I have no desire to amend this definition. I will only note that mysticism focuses on the presence of God in his divinity, not his humanity alone. On the topic of mystical union, and the various forms that it might take, see McGinn, “Love, Knowledge, and Unio mystica.”

18. Bundy observes that the efforts to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy (which he discusses under the headings of the “mystical” and “empirical” traditions of medieval imagination, respectively) “resulted in an appreciation of the imagination not for many years to be achieved again,” but his position is not echoed much elsewhere, and Bundy himself does not elaborate on it (Theory of Imagination, 178).

19. See Minnis’s “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” 239–48, for a survey of many of medieval imagination’s positive and negative functions.

20. See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII, CSEL 28.1:379–435. For a recent discussion of Augustine’s vision theory and medieval visionary literature, see Newman, “What Does It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?” For a direct medieval adaptation of Augustine’s scheme, see the Chastising of God’s Children, c. xviii, pp. 169–73.

21. See, for instance, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, III.xi., p. 158. Carruthers describes the retentive and compositive functions of imagination in Book of Memory, 51–54.

22. The opposition between imagination and reason is especially well attested in medieval texts. Bundy discusses its origins as well as its legacy. He credits this opposition with “in part determing a hostile attitude toward the imagination until comparatively recent times” (Theory of Imagination, 70).

23. Chaucer, The Merchant’s Tale, l. 1582. The Merchant mentions “fantasye” directly at ll. 1577 and 1610.

24. On imagination’s relationship to desire and movement, see Aristotle, De anima, III.3. Nussbaum discusses this aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy of imagination in Aristotle’s De motu animalium, 221–69. See also Modrak, “Φαντασία Reconsidered,” 59–61. On imagination’s retention of the beginning of a word, see Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII.16, CSEL 28.1:402.

25. On the state of scholarship on Aristotle’s imagination, see chapter 1.

26. See, respectively, Hanna, “Langland’s Ymaginatif”; Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif”; Kaulbach, “‘Vis Imaginativa’” and “‘Vis Imaginativa Secundum Avicennam’”; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 46–79, “Imaginatif, Memoria, and ‘The Need for Critical Theory’ in Piers Plowman Studies,” and Craft of Thought, 68–77; and Kelly, Medieval Imagination. There is some overlap in these characterizations.

27. I have focused on studies of imagination that engage at some level with medieval philosophy of the soul. “Medieval imagination” has meant other things, such as the medieval view of literature, the medieval worldview, its cultural imaginary, or artistic creativity. See, for instance, Lewis, Discarded Image, and Le Goff, Medieval Imagination. These are important studies, but their use of “imagination” is an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• To the Reader
• Introduction
• ONE / Aristotelian Imagination
• TWO / A Bonaventuran Synthesis
• THREE / Imagination in Bonaventure’s Meditations
• FOUR / Exercising Imagination: The Meditationes vitae Christi and Stimulus amoris
• FIVE / From “Wit to Wisedom”: Langland’s Ymaginatif
• SIX / Imagination in Translation: Love’s Myrrour and The Prickynge of Love
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index