The Book of Memory

by Mary Carruthers

  [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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  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

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  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