their role in Thomas’s compositional style:
St. Thomas has learned from many men of wisdom, but on the present occasion
they are summoned to court [to discuss the nature of temperance], summoned
from their chambers in his mind. I am not going to name them all, but they are
hovering outside the courtroom in crowds, ancient Greeks and ancient Romans,
members of all the philosophical schools, some of their poets, as we have seen, and
Christian poets like Ambrose, doctors of the Roman church and of the Greek,
Popes all down the line, saints and heretics – at least the mighty Origen – writers of
the early Middle Ages from England, France and Spain, writers of the Renaissance
of the twelfth century, writers of his own day, the Hebrew Rabbi Moses, or
Maimonides, the Arabs with Averroe¨s at their head, mystics, monastics, and
metaphysicians, writers of lawbooks and decretals, Church councils and liturgy,
yes, Holy Scripture, Old Testament and New and the glosses thereon.
The material from secular Roman authors alone quoted in the Summa
theologica is remarkable: it includes Cicero, Juvenal, Ovid, Terence,
Seneca, Boethius, Macrobius, Caesar, Livy, Sallust, Valerius Maximus,
Varro, Vegetius, and Virgil.101 It is an immensely rich set of memories,
but it can be paralleled in any number of other medieval works. The point
to realize is that Thomas’s experience was consciously made up from them
all, a mighty chorus of voices able to be summoned at will from the tablets
of his memory. The very usefulness of memory as a treasury of knowledge
and experience lies in its ability to be nurtured and trained. Memory is a
‘‘habit of retention,’’ as Thomas says in ST Ia, Q. 79, art. 7. Thus, ‘‘the
aptitude for prudence is from our nature, while its perfection is from
practice or grace. And so Cicero observes that memory not only is devel-
oped by nature alone, but owes much to art and diligence.’’102
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85
The nature of the memorial phantasm as passio or affectio animi is
important to understand, for this idea is basic to the notion of trained
memory as the habitus that perfects, indeed makes possible, the virtue of
prudence or moral judgment, and to the corollary idea that memory is the
faculty that presents (or re-presents) experience, the basis upon which
moral judgments must be made. As the subsequent history of the words
passio and affectio shows, the making and re-presentation of a phantasm is
also closely bound up with the physiology of emotion.
Since each phantasm is a combination not only of the neutral form of
the perception but of our response to it (intentio) concerning whether it is
helpful or hurtful, the phantasm by its very nature evokes emotion. This is
how the phantasm and the memory which stores it help to cause or bring
into being moral excellence and ethical judgment. Every emotion involves
a change or movement, whose source is the soul, but which occurs within
the body’s physiological matrix: such ‘‘affects’’ are ‘‘movement[s] of the
soul through the body,’’ as Theodore Tracy happily translates De anima,
403a 24.103 Thus the phantasm is ‘‘conceived as a controlling factor in the
whole mechanism of emotion and action, with which moral excellence is
concerned.’’
The word which Aristotle uses to classify the memorial phantasm is
pathos, translated by William of Moerbeke as passio:104 the pathos is what a
sense perception causes in the soul as a kind of image, the having of which
we call a memory. 105 Since it is a physical change or ‘‘affect,’’ a phantasm is
also an ‘‘affection’’ or passio. Memory itself is neither perception nor
conception, but a ‘‘condition,’’ habitus (Greek hexis) or ‘‘affection’’ (pathos)
touched off by these, after some time has passed, and a phantasm has been
formed.106 Memory is hexis or pathos in that ‘‘it is a state or affection . . . that
follows on perceiving, apprehending, experiencing, or learning’’ – all of
which require the production of phantasms. 107 This basic connection
between the process of sensation which ends in memory, and that of
human emotional life is fundamental for understanding the crucial role
memory was thought to have in the shaping of moral judgment and
excellence of character.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that ethical excellence, charac-
ter (¯ethos), results from habituation (¯ethos as, literally, one’s haunts and
accustomed places).108 The organism’s hexis or habitus is a matter of
custom, particular emotional responses and acts performed in the past
and remembered, which then predispose it to the same response in the
future. 109 Both vices and virtues are habitual dispositions, formed in this
way. What develops, as Tracy describes it, is a ‘‘moral organism’’ akin to
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and embodied in the physical organism.110 Experience is made from many
repeated memories, which in turn are permanent vestiges of sense per-
ceptions: ‘‘Thus [a] sense-perception (aisth¯eseo¯s) gives rise to [a] memory
(mn¯em¯e), as we hold; and repeated memories of the same thing give rise to
experience (empeiria); because the memories, though numerically many,
constitute a single experience. And experience, that is the universal
when established as a whole in the soul – the One that corresponds to
the Many . . . – provides the starting-point of arts (techn¯es) and sciences
(epist¯em¯es); art in the world of process (geńesis) and science in the world of
facts (to on).’’111 Experience – memories generalized and judged – gives rise
to all knowledge, art, science, and ethical judgment, for ethical judgment,
since it is based upon habit and training and applies derived principles to
particular situations, is an art, and part of the ‘‘practical intellect,’’ that is,
directed to the world of process and change rather than of essence and
unchanging Being (‘‘to on’’).
Quintilian defines hexis as that ‘‘assured facility’’ (firma facilitas) in any
art which supplements, bends, and transcends its rules, and constitutes
what we call mastery. 112 As the psychologist George Miller observed,
learning can be regarded as the acquisition of ‘‘richer’’ and better mne-
monics. Donald Norman describes a fine instance of this in posing the old
problem of Cannibals and Missionaries, who all want to get from one side
of a river to the other but have only a boat that carries two, and neither
cannibals nor missionaries want to be left alone with one another. Their
early efforts to solve this problem take his students many moves and much
time, but gradually the problem is reduced to a few seconds and a half-
dozen moves as the rules of this art, derived from many memories of the
same thing, are worked out.113
Hexis is physiological, as the memory is trained to respond with certain
movements, just as a dancer’s muscles are, but is also reasoned, for it is
facilitated and consentual rather than automatic response. Thomas
Aqu
inas makes this distinction between ‘‘automatic’’ and ‘‘considered’
response the crux that differentiates the prudentia of humans from that of
animals, for though animals have a certain kind of prudence, theirs is
entirely by natural instigation (‘ ex eo quod instincter naturae move-
ntur’’), whereas the human virtue is ‘ ex ratione,’ from considered judg-
ment. And because this is so, human prudence requires both memory of
the past and the ability to recollect it in a considered manner, for prudence
(meaning something like ‘ the ability to make wise judgments’ ) can
project into the future only because it also knows the present and remem-
bers the past. 114
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The hexis or orientation of the moral organism which disposes it to
act righteously is prudence. And this learned disposition or virtue in turn is
the product of ‘‘repeated individual emotional responses [what I have
called reactions, the intentio part of each phantasm], leading to action in
a variety of situations.’’115 Hence, the ability of the memory to re-collect and
re-present past perceptions is the foundation of all moral training and
excellence of judgment. Moreover, the representation produces an emotional
response; since it is an affectio it is experience as genuine as what initially
produced it. Averroe¨s writes of memory-images, ‘ Since that which is to be
recalled is similar to the thing comprehended by [a person] in actuality, the
one who recollects will experience the same pleasure or pain in this situation,
which he would experience were the thing existing in actuality. It is as if he
brought the thing to be recalled into effect . . . Accordingly pain can occur in
connection with a thing to be recalled or pleasure too, in the same way as it
would occur, were the thing existing in actuality.’ 116
Trained memory (memoria) is ‘‘one of the conditions required for
prudence,’’ an integral or enabling part of the virtue. 117 Thomas Aquinas
quotes Tullius, but he could also have quoted his own mentor, Albertus
Magnus. Albertus’s discussion is in some ways clearer and fuller than
Thomas’s, with respect to just how memory can be regarded as a habit
and why it is an attribute of prudence; and so we might begin our
discussion of how memory was trained in the late Middle Ages with
Quaestio II, ‘‘De partibus prudentiae,’’ articles 1 and 2, of Albertus’s treatise
De bono (translated in Appendix B).
The first article of this question is ‘‘Quid sit memoria.’’ Albertus quotes
Cicero to the effect that the parts of prudence are memory, intellect, and
foresight, corresponding to the three tenses. First, he considers in what
way memory can be a part of prudence, since he earlier had defined
memory as simply a function of the soul, not a trainable characteristic
(a feature required of something that is a habitus and thus a virtue).
Prudence is knowing how to do what is good or bad, a knowledge which
in turn depends upon past experience, because we can only judge of the
future by what is past. Memory can be considered in two ways, as the
storage capability of the brain, or as its recollective process. As the store of
what is past, memory is the nurse and engenderer of prudence and so a part
thereof. As the process of recollection, memory is a habit; recollection is a
natural function which can be strengthened through training and practice.
This makes it truly necessary in order for prudence to exist. Albertus
concludes this article by defining memory as ‘‘habitus animae rationalis,’’
a trained facility of the rational soul.
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He next considers more precisely in what way memory displays the
characteristics of habitus, and this leads him directly to a lengthy discus-
sion of ‘‘artificial memory,’’ specifically the Ciceronian technique of
places and images, loci and imagines, and of ‘ memory for things’’ and
‘‘memory for words,’’ taken from the ‘‘Second Rhetoric’ of Tullius, the
Ad Herennium, III. 118 Albertus starts with Tullius’ consideration of the
distinction (echoed in virtually every ancient treatise on the subject)
between natural and artificial memory, that is, whether memory is a
native talent merely confirmed by practice or whether it can actually be
improved. He concludes, as the ancients had, that while artificial memory
schemes cannot make a naturally poor memory good, they can improve
and perfect the potential of a naturally sound, normal memory:
Therefore we say with Tullius that the kind of memoria which relates to human
life and justice is two-fold, that is, natural and trained or ‘‘artificial.’’ That is
natural which by virtue of its talent for finding-out things remembers easily
something it knew or did at an earlier time. The ‘‘artificial,’’ however, is one
which is made from an orderly arrangement of images and places, and, as in
everything else art and virtue are a perfection of natural talent, so also in this. What
is natural is completed by training. 119
By adopting Tullius’ definition of memory as a habit and the condition
for prudence, which is in turn the repository of all liberal knowledge and
ethics, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas both make the conscious
cultivation of memory and the practice of the memorial arts a moral
obligation as well as a scholarly necessity. The training of memory fits
Thomas’s definition of a moral virtue perfectly, such virtues being called
‘‘from mos in the sense of a natural or quasi-natural inclination to do some
particular action. The other meaning of mos, i.e. ‘custom,’ is akin to this:
because custom becomes a second nature, and produces an inclination
similar to a natural one.’’120
The moral aspect of memory training is crucial to understand as we
examine the role of memory throughout the medieval period. Memory
could be aided by an assortment of tools, ranging from conscious mne-
monic systems to written notes on wax tablets or even paper, but these were
no substitute for conscious training. For the trained memory was not
considered to be merely practical ‘‘know-how,’’ a useful gimmick that
one might indulge in or not (rather like buying better software). It was
co-extensive with wisdom and knowledge, but it was more – as a condition
of prudence, possessing a well-trained memory was morally virtuous in
itself. The medieval regard for memory always has this moral force to it,
analogous to the high moral power which the Romantics were later to
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89
accord to the imagination, genetrix of what is best in human nature. As
I have noted, the memory feats of saints are frequently stressed in hagiog-
raphy, even of saints who were not scholars (like Francis of Assisi). This was
done not to show off their intellectual prowess, but to stress their moral
perfection.
In this heavily Aristotelian chapter, I have, inevitably, concentrated on
scholastic traditions in the theo
logy of prudence and character. But schol-
ars writing before the full revival of Aristotle also saw the connection
between memory and the molding of moral character, in terms explicitly
of the seal-in-wax trope. Hugh of St. Victor addresses the moral education
of novices in this manner:
For, [when a seal is stamped] a figure that is raised up in the seal appears depressed
in the impression in the wax, and that which appears cut out in the seal is raised up
in the wax. What else is shown by this, than that we who desire to be shaped up
through the examples of goodness as if by a seal that is very well sculpted, discover
in them certain lofty traces of deeds like projections and certain humble ones like
depressions. 121
The dicta et facta memorabilia, exemplary deeds and words of others
impressed into our memories like a seal into wax, shape our moral life in
shaping our memories. One can recognize in this trope how thoroughly
embedded in the neuropsychology of memory ethical action was consid-
ered to be, and how in stamping the material of the brain with both a
‘‘likeness’’ of sensory experience and a personal response to it, a memory
phantasm also shaped the soul and judgment.
T H E A R C H I T E C T U R A L M N E M O N I C
A device of memory art based specifically on houses – which I will call
hereafter the ‘‘architectural’’ or ‘‘Herennian’’ mnemonic, terms more accu-
rate than Frances Yates’s ‘‘Ciceronian mnemonic’’ and less misleading than
the Renaissance’s overly global ‘‘the art of memory’’ – is described most
fully in Rhetorica ad Herennium, which is dated to c. 86–82 BC, just after
Cicero’s De inventione, and possibly composed by someone who had the
same teacher as Cicero. 122 The basic principles are now familiar to most
scholars, thanks to the efforts of Frances Yates and Paolo Rossi, but a brief
description is perhaps in order here by way of introduction. There are three
chief ancient sources: Cicero’s De oratore (in which it is summarily
described in Book II, 350–360), the Rhetorica ad Herennium Book III (the
most detailed account), and Book XI of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.
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According to the account in Ad Herennium III, the backgrounds are like
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