[livore carens] he wrote it on writing-tablets [rem . . . scripsit in tabulis] and gave it
to one of the brethren of the monastery for safe-keeping. 31
There are a number of interesting features to this description. Eadmer
describes the activity of composition as one of profound concentration, a
meditative withdrawal that takes one from food, sleep, and even the most
sacred routines of the day. This activity is described in the repeated terms
intentio, ‘‘concentration,’’ and cogitatio, ‘‘mulling over.’’ This cogitatio is
spoken of initially as an enemy; Anselm wants to repell it (‘‘repellere’’), but
it more and more aggressively and hostilely took over (‘‘infestabat’’) his
intentio, even when he turned it to the liturgical office (which is to be
performed also with intentio). So obsessed is he that he fears the devil is
tempting him. Then, of a sudden, cogitatio is completed (Eadmer attributes
the grace of God) and only at that moment is a product, called the res,
committed to a writing surface – but to one that is traditionally associated
with unfinished work and with the formation and functions of memory. By
no means has it yet been ‘‘authorized,’’ that is, become an auctor or source-
text for other minds and memories to use.
I have already stressed that cogitatio involves recollection since it uses
memory-images; however, it is a pre-intellectual process even though it
involves making judgments, for these are emotionally and intuitively based
at this point rather than logically so. Like meditative reading, invention is
not, to use the categories of medieval psychology, a process of the intellec-
tual soul, but primarily of the sensory-emotional one, dependent upon the
images stored in memory and the effectiveness of the heuristic structures in
which they have been laid down there.
This antiquated language conceals from us an important characteristic
of memorial cultures, one I have stressed before but that is worth pointing
to again. Alexander Murray has reminded us that what constitutes rational
behavior is, to some considerable extent, a matter of culture. His Reason
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and Society in the Middle Ages traces how reasonableness as a category of
thought was influenced in the later Middle Ages by a tension between
monastic culture, whose roots were in the disciplines of meditational
prayer (among other things), and intellectual culture, which developed in
the urban ambience of the universities. These tendencies existed equally in
the same institutions and even the same individuals. They were not often
perceived as tensions in conflict, but their eventual incompatibility is
reflected in our sharp division now between reason and emotion, to the
point of assuming them to be incompatible altogether.32 In the teaching
and practice of composition, however, the monastic cultivation of medita-
tional prayer, itself evolving from practices in the ancient schools,
remained dominant. This stressed that feeling and sense, the bases of
memory, are key components of creativity, as we can readily see from the
fact that medieval cogitatio translates, as I emphasized in Chapter 2, not as
our phrase ‘‘reasoning out’’ in logic, but as ‘‘mulling over’’ and getting the
sense of an idea.
Quintilian assures his students that cogitatio can be greatly helped by an
orderly consideration of the case, but that order is not necessarily what we
would call logical or intellectual. It is a heuristic structure which we follow
by habit rather than deriving it anew from each separate occurence; that is,
we follow a set form or procedure we have memorized. (For example, we
might apply an invention procedure like the adverbial questions which my
school-teachers taught me: who, what, where, when, how, why? Or, were
we medieval clerics needing a sermon on a text, we might use the heuristic
of the four levels of interpretation.) Reason alone cannot help that franti-
cally murmuring student, for he has not yet gathered up his memory-
images to the point where reason can process them. All that can help is a
recollected heuristic, a trained memory which proceeds by habit and
emotion, pre-rationally.
The highly emotional state described by Quintilian is very like that of
Anselm as he desperately sought what he couldn’t quite find (‘‘nec adhuc
quod quaerebat ad plenum capere valens’’). We recall also what Thomas
Aquinas’s biographers said of his habit of intense prayer: ‘‘At night . . . he
would rise, after a short sleep, and pray, lying prostrate on the ground; it
was in those nights of prayer that he learned what he would write or dictate
in the day-time. Such was the normal tenor of his life – a minimum of time
allowed to sleeping and eating, and all the rest given to prayer or reading or
thinking or writing or dictating.’’33 Such physical accompaniments of
cogitatio are apparent in all the accounts of composition, prostration
being its common posture; Quintilian’s student lies down on his back,
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249
Thomas Aquinas face-downwards. It is a position designed to shut out
external stimuli, especially visual ones, which would serve to confuse or
distract one’s recollective eye as it looks through its inventory of places, for
both strepitus and turba are great mnemonic enemies.
The emotions (affectus) are the starting-point, as they must be in order to
engage memoria and cogitatio. Reginald, Thomas Aquinas’s socius, said of
him that ‘‘in his soul, intellect and desire [intellectus et affectus] somehow
contained each other . . . his desire [affectus] through prayer, gained access
to divine realities, which then the intellect, deeply apprehending, drew into
a light which kindled to greater intensity the flame of love.’’34 Desire begins
the ascent to understanding by firing memory, and through its stored-up
treasures the intellect is able to contemplate; the higher its understanding,
the more desire flames in love as it both gets and gives more light. It is a
sentiment worthy of Dante himself. So Anselm, searching his memory
places for the pieces he can’t quite find to complete the design which his
meditation is constructing, fears the devil, fears the intense emotion that
has invaded his body as well as his thoughts, keeping him from food and
sleep as well as from liturgical prayer. So Thomas falls prostrate in tearful
prayer. But the products of this non-logical, obsessive, emotional activity
are closely reasoned monuments of scholastic logic, the Proslogion and the
Summa theologica.
It is significant that the times when both Anselm and Thomas Aquinas
are described as being particularly distraught are when they are stuck,
searching for connections they can’t quite get hold of. ‘‘Once at Paris,’’
writes Gui of Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘when writing on Paul’s epistles, he came
upon a passage which quite baffled him until, dismissing his secretaries, he
fell to the ground and prayed with tears; then what he desired was given
him and it all became clear.�
�’35 Thomas wept in order to solve an intellec-
tual difficulty; Anselm behaved like a monk in love until his rational
problem came clear. A modern scholar similarly blocked would go to the
library or thumb through notes. By such transports of fear and desire,
Thomas and Anselm expected to stimulate their memorial libraries.
Gui reports that Thomas never set himself to compose without tearful
prayer, and ‘‘[w]hen perplexed by a difficulty he would kneel and pray
and then, on returning to his writing or dictation, he was accustomed to
find that his thought had become so clear that it seemed to show him
inwardly as in a book the words he needed.’’ It is clear also from Gui’s
account that Thomas deliberately and habitually cultivated the posture of
prostrate prayer in order to produce a solution to a specific compositional
problem.36
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T H E D I C T A M E N
After invention comes the process of shaping the res into the version called
dictamen. The mental activity required is still what the philosophers called
vis cogitativa, but rhetoricians appear to use cogitatio for the revision stage
of composition. (This is a bit confusing because Eadmer speaks of Anselm’s
invention stage as cogitatio, perhaps because he was not a teacher of
rhetoric.) One is still composing, but working on a much more complete
form of the text than at the start of inventio. There seem to be a number of
terms used for this stage – Fortunatianus and Julius Victor both call this
compositio; Quintilian reserves the word cogitatio for it; Augustine calls it
collectio; for Hugh of St. Victor, as we shall see, it was a kind of collatio. In
any event, the root concept is still a recollective one, bringing matters
together, collecting from different places, into a designed text (res) which
now exists in a common place in one’s memory. A related distinction is
made by the scholastic terms for these two stages, invention and compo-
sition, called respectively forma tractatus and forma tractandi. The forma
tractatus corresponds to the res of a text, the content arrived at during
invention, or the drawing of material – both out and together (the root
meaning of traho) – into a fully coherent textual argument. The forma
tractatus can then be shaped up and refined stylistically in a forma tractandi.
The continuous, polishing nature of this latter activity is indicated in the
fact that a present participle is used for it (tractandi), whereas the res is
finished (tractatus) when invention is complete. A tract (tractatus) is
philosophical or moral argumentation without stylistic embellishments
or figures; the basic expression of reasons, ideas, logical connections, and
all structural elements such as divisions belong to the forma tractatus and
the various figures of style to forma tractandi. Such definitions follow
naturally from the pedagogy and practice of composition I have described.
The distinction is correlative to that between memoria rerum and memoria
verborum, and also to the emphasis given to the former in the pedagogy of
memoria.37
Fortunatianus says that memoria has two essential objects: that material be
securely retained, and that it be directly (cito) retrievable. This is essential not
only for composing that makes use of writing but ‘ immo et cogitatio,’’
‘ especially cogitation.’ 38 Later, speaking of Simonides’ artificial memory
system, he remarks that for ‘‘scripta vel cogitatio,’ ‘ writing or cogitation,’’
we should place together orderly heuristic cues and memorial similitudines.
Julius Victor makes a similar distinction between composing during which
we write (‘‘scribimus’’) and that we do in cogitation (‘‘cogitamus’’), both of
Memory and authority
251
which depend on the same processes of divisio and compositio that character-
ize a trained and designed memory.39
Both these writers are distinguishing between methods of composition,
one which involves writing on a physical surface and one which is entirely
mental, involving no written draft at all. One should take careful note that
neither writer suggests that the two styles of composing require different
mental preparation or procedures, or that one involves memory and the
other not. Indeed, as presented, the difference is no more significant than
our individual preferences for revising in longhand or at a machine. We see
similar idiosyncrasy of choice in the compositional aids of writers through-
out the Middle Ages. The same writer may choose sometimes to work with
a wax tablet and other times not. Thomas Aquinas, we recall, wrote out
portions of his res for the Summa contra Gentiles in littera inintelligibilis.
These pages show the signs of revision and tinkering that characterize
the shaping up of a dictamen. But for the composition of Summa theologiae
(a longer and more complex work) he worked most often without writing
anything down at all, calling a secretary in when he was finished to take
down his dictation in fair hand. Quintilian, advising that prose rhythm is
an effect to be worked on carefully, relates approvingly that Plato tried out
the first four words of the Republic in a variety of orders on his wax tablets
in order ‘‘to make the rhythm as perfect as possible,’’ because this small
elegance could be better worked on with the help of a tablet. Quintilian
himself, however, does not encourage dependence on such physical aids. It
is important to keep in mind that Quintilian was addressing the require-
ments of orally delivered compositions, the need to be able to revise and
change, digress and add, freely and confidently during delivery itself. So the
various techniques he discusses are derived in response to such a situation.
But these same techniques were applied to compositions designed to be
read, and the drafting stages in the production of a final exemplar are
virtually the same; the production of a res and then a dictamen follows the
same successive steps, whether the dictamen was then read to a scribe or
delivered publicly. 40
When was the stylus to be used? Here again individual habits obviously
varied, but Quintilian describes in detail the received pedagogy that lies
behind the distinctions made by later teachers and practioners. The ele-
mentary preparation for eloquence is writing, he says in Book X (on
composition); a beginner must write out maxims and sayings on wax
tablets ‘‘as carefully and as much as possible.’’ Writing is crucial because
it forces us to concentrate, and its slowness makes us attentive and
careful, for ‘‘as deep digging makes the soil more fertile . . . so progress
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which is not sought by superficial means yields the fruits of study more
generously and retains them more faithfully [fidelius continet].’’41 In other
words, one writes as an aid to storing memory: ‘‘This [writing] is where the
roots [of oratory] lie, this is where the foundations are, this is where the
wealth is stored in the emergency reserves of our treasury.’�
��42 The aerarium
was the public treasury (‘‘sanctiore aerario conditae’’). Quintilian’s meta-
phor elegantly captures how the contents of a particular orator’s memory,
no matter how hidden away, are nonetheless public both in sources and in
use for common social good.
A beginner must also learn how to cultivate the circumstances needed in
all meditational activity. Young students should seek out solitude, silence,
and seclusion, and learn to pursue their task with utmost concentration and
involvement. 43 Gestures accompanying strong emotion will likewise serve
to stimulate the mind (animus), and so important is this gestural stimulus
that one should not follow the example of those foolish authors who start
dictating right away to scribes, lest the presence of another inhibit us (recall
how Gui says Thomas Aquinas sent his secretaries away before he pros-
trated himself in tears). 44 The author should learn not to compose in ‘‘the
heat and impulse of the moment,’’ dashing off a speedy draft as some do,
who call such a thing their silva, literally meaning ‘‘forest’’ but used
metaphorically here for unshaped materials. One should exercise care
from the outset ‘‘to shape the work . . . in such a way that it needs only
to be chiselled [caelandum] into shape.’’ Here Quintilian advises that the res
of one’s composition be carefully planned out in one’s mind before it is
committed in any way to formal written form. 45 Finally, even as beginning
students, we should ‘‘acquire the habit of making concentration [intentio]
overcome all hindrances. If you concentrate wholeheartedly on the work in
hand, nothing that strikes your eye or your ear will get through to your
mind [animum].’’46 Therefore, wherever we are, in a crowd, on a journey,
at a party, we must practice fashioning a secret inner sanctuary (secretum)
for our cogitations.
Quintilian stresses one matter in regard to the lay-out of the waxed
tablets. Waxed tablets best serve excision and correction (though people
with poor eyes may have to use parchment in order to see the letters better –
parchment slows down the writing process, however, and so may hinder
thought). Excision and correction were, of course, vital in revision but so
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