Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages 0226425312, 9780226425313

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Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages

Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages MICHELLE KARNES

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Michelle Karnes is assistant professor of English at Stanford University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11    1  2  3  4  5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42531-3 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-226-42531-2 (cloth) The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Department of English at Stanford University toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Karnes, Michelle.   Imagination, meditation, and cognition in the middle ages / Michelle Karnes.     p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-226-42531-3 (cloth: alkaline paper)   ISBN-10: 0-226-42531-2 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Imagination (Philosophy).  2. Philosophy, Medieval.  3. Imagination in literature.  4. Devotional literature, Latin (Medieval and modern)—History and criticism.  5. Devotional literature, English (Middle)—History and criticism.  6. Meditationes vitae Christi.  7. Bonaventure, Saint, Cardinal, ca. 1217–1274—Criticism and interpretation.  8. Bonaventure, Saint, Cardinal, ca. 1217–1274. Itinerarium mentis in Deum.  9. Jacobus, Mediolanensis, 13th cent. Stimulus amoris.  10. Langland, William, 1330?–1400? Piers Plowman.  11. Love, Nicholas, fl. 1410. Mirrour of the blessed lyf of Jesu Christi.  I. Title.   B738.I53K37 2011   128'.3—dc22 2011010290 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Shane

C ontents

Acknowledgments / ix Abbreviations / xi To the Reader / xiii

Introduction / 1 one

two

three

f our

/ A Bonaventuran Synthesis / 63

/ Imagination in Bonaventure’s Meditations / 111

/ Exercising Imagination: The Meditationes vitae Christi and Stimulus amoris / 141

five

si x

/ Aristotelian Imagination / 23

/ From “Wit to Wisedom”: Langland’s Ymaginatif / 179

/ Imagination in Translation: Love’s Myrrour and The Prickynge of Love / 207 Conclusion / 237 Bibliography / 241 Index / 263

A cknowled g ments

These acknowledgments should begin where this project began, with my graduate education at the University of Pennsylvania. The members of my dissertation committee, Rita Copeland, David Wallace, Ann Matter, and Emily Steiner, were as encouraging and helpful as any advisers could be. They managed to find coherence in my project in its early stages and were unerringly supportive, even when I ventured into the deepest recesses of Sentences commentaries and disappeared from view for months at a time. They provided expert guidance in medieval literature and religion, but equally important was the kindness they showed me and the confidence they expressed in me. Appropriately, I wrote a good part of this book during summers I spent in David and Rita’s house in Philadelphia, summers made possible also by Jim English, who helped to arrange my access to Penn’s library. While at Penn, I was also fortunate to work with Jim Ross in the philosophy department. Although he was most proud of my marriage, which he believed he had orchestrated, his instruction in medieval philosophy was also much appreciated. I owe an enormous debt to Steve Justice, my undergraduate adviser at Berkeley, who has read all the scholarship I have written since I began my dissertation. He is a fantastically good reader, and his always insightful and learned comments have influenced my work profoundly over the years. Jessica Rosenfeld has been my most faithful interlocutor. Her advice has been impeccably reliable, and I am grateful both for it and for her overall wonderfulness. Shane Duarte has generously talked through many an idea with me and has read multiple drafts of the book’s early chapters. He has been always supportive and encouraging throughout the lengthy process of this book’s composition. I am indebted to others who have read parts of this book as it came to fruition or discussed its ideas with me, including

 / Acknowledgments

Holly Barbaccia, Dan Birkholz, Kevin Brownlee, Clare Costley, John Foley, Marissa Greenberg, Bruce Holsinger, Eleanor Johnson, Ian Johnson, Johanna Kramer, David Lawton, Emma Lipton, Alastair Minnis, Anne Myers, Stella Singer, and Vance Smith. I also thank my readers for the University of Chicago Press for their remarkably careful and thoughtful reports. My editor, Randy Petilos, has been a delight to work with and has made the process of publishing a book as pleasant as I suspect it can be. When I was hired at Stanford, the chair, Ramón Saldívar, told me it was a magical place. I now understand what he meant. I’m extremely fortunate in my colleagues and would especially like to thank John Bender, George Brown, Terry Castle, Claire Jarvis, Saikat Majumdar, Stephen Orgel, Stephen Sohn, Hannah Sullivan, Jennifer Summit, Blakey Vermeule, and Alex Woloch for their support. Stephen Hinton, Joshua Landy, and Tanya Luhrmann, although not in the English department, have also been remarkably supportive. The staff in the English department has ably and eagerly helped me with matters large and small and I extend my thanks to them all: Alyce Boster, Judy Candell, Katie Dooling, Dagmar Logie, Nelia Peralta, and Nicole Yun. I also thank Bridget Whearty, graduate student extraordinaire, and the many graduate students and undergraduates who have helped me to think more perceptively about medieval literature. Special thanks are due to Janet Kim, Jennifer Luther, Ruth McCann, Alexander Real, Kate Thomas, and Esther Yu from Stanford, as well as Andrew Stuart from the University of Missouri–Columbia. My work on this project was supported by a Spencer Foundation dissertation fellowship as well as a Research Board fellowship and Summer Research fellowship from the University of Missouri–Columbia. An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared as “Will’s Imagination in Piers Plowman,” JEGP 108, no. 1 (January 2009): 27–58 (copyright 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois). Parts of chapter 6 appeared in “Nic­ holas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” Speculum 82, no. 2 (April 2007): 380–408 (copyright 2007 by the Medieval Academy of America). I thank both journals for permission to print revised versions here.

A bbre v iations



CCSL



CCCM

Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis



CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum



EETS

Early English Text Society



JEGP

Journal of English and Germanic Philology



Itinerarium



Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum

LT James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, expanded fourteenth-century version (i.e., long text)



MVC

Meditationes vitae Christi



Myrrour



PL

Patrologia cursus completus, Series Latina (or Patrologia Latina)



PP

Piers Plowman



Prickynge



ST



STC

Nicholas Love, Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ

Prickynge of Love James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, short text Short Title Catalogue

T o the R eader

The foreign language translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I have retained the orthography of original editions with one exception, which is that I modernize u’s and v’s in Latin quotations throughout. In many cases, I have made silent alterations to the English translations I cite.

Introduction

There is no dearth of histories of imagination. Among those that concern imagination as a mental power, one finds a familiar narrative: imagination limps along for centuries, feeble and error-prone, before finally achieving prestige as the engine behind human creativity. In its prolonged prepubescent state, imagination mimics rather than invents, serving only to reproduce sensory or other data until it becomes “a productive or creative power which autonomously frames and constructs its own image of reality.” The long and homogeneous age of the re-presenting imagination extends from Plato up until, usually, the eighteenth century, whence “the efflorescence of modern theories of the ‘productive imagination’ in German idealism and European romanticism generally. Only then would the philosophy of ‘mimetic’ imagination be definitively overturned and a more positive and humanist portrait come to occupy the centre stage of Western thinking.” The eventual ascendancy of the creative imagination is almost always treated as a positive development, in part because it is seen to parallel the coming of age of humanity itself. For instance, in Kearney’s study, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling have the honor of “releas[ing] imagination from its long philosophical imprisonment,” and as they do so, they allow man to “declare his autonomy from all given being.” The unfettering of imagination, so understood, is accompanied by a discovery and celebration of the individual’s fullest creative potential. No longer controlled by God or limited in his or her mental activity to simple reproduction of natural objects, the individual invents, and by doing so, asserts his or her uniquely human authority over . Murray’s introduction to Cocking, Imagination, vii. . Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 131–32. . Ibid., 156.

 / Introduction

the world. The creative imagination is both the vehicle of the individual’s empowerment and its consequence. Although this is the dominant narrative of imagination, it is not the only narrative. Eva Brann, for instance, instead focuses on the modern demotion of imagination, one most easily witnessed by the eventual transformation of the Greek word for imagination, phantasia, into the less weighty terms “fancy” and “fantasy.” The role of medieval imagination in these narratives, when it has been granted a role, is nonetheless consistent. Medieval imagination is there a static concept, distinctive not because the period advanced a new theory of imagination but because it succumbed wholeheartedly to imagination as it was already conceived. This results in what might seem contradictory readings: the Middle Ages was simultaneously beholden to imagination and wary of it. Regarding the former, James Simpson writes that “English writers from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries understood the later Middle Ages as an age wholly subject to, and dangerously infantilized by, the rule of imagination.” From this perspective, imagination had exceeded its proper bounds in the Middle Ages. Unsupervised by reason and prone to fanciful inventions, it was a mental faculty run amok. As such, it provided a basis from which to herald a later triumph of reason over imagination, as witnessed by Descartes’s seventeenth-century declaration, “imagination . . . is not a necessary constituent of my own essence, that is, of the essence of my mind.” Although the dominion of imagination in the period can be formulated positively as well—Jean Leclercq comments on the vigor of medieval imagination, which enabled people to make themselves present in imagined biblical scenes and renders ours by contrast “lazy”—it is almost eerily potent in either case. Imagination’s power has more often been viewed negatively than positively, and we read that it inspired trepidation more than confidence. Thus, the Middle Ages was “hostile” to or “suspicious” or “distrustful” of imagination. . 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). . Brann, World of the Imagination, 20–21. . Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” 4. . Descartes, Meditations, 6, in Oeuvres de Descartes 7:73. Trans. Cottingham et al., Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2:51. . Leclercq, Love of Learning, 75. . 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

Introduction / 

Commonly believed to be the vehicle by which demons could tempt the would-be virtuous Christian, whether in dreams or outside of them, imagination could easily be a force for evil.10 The two characterizations of medieval imagination—its authority and the distrust aimed at it—are compatible, of course. The very power of imagination might have elicited suspicion. But there is a fundamental problem with this reading, one visible in its competing claims that imagination was unusually powerful in the period and that medieval thought about imagination lacked innovation. I do not deny that imagination figured prominently in medieval thought—there is a sense in which it is fair to call the period an age of imagination, as I will explain in a moment—but I will argue that such prominence was at least in part the result of a carefully articulated philosophy of imagination. It was, in other words, thanks to the period’s innovative philosophy of the faculty, especially in the context of its theories of cognition, that medieval imagination enjoyed uncommon authority. Theories of cognition were debated with more passion in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries than they had been since the time of Aristotle and than they would be until the seventeenth century.11 Imagination occupied a central place within them, and this alone invites us to look more carefully at medieval thought about imagination. What we discover is that medieval philosophy invested imagination with a new authority, one drawn from the Aristotelian philosophy of the soul made available to the Latin West only in the late twelfth century.12 In Aristotle’s philosophy, and all the more in Arabic commentaries on it, imagination occupied a privileged position because it was involved centrally in every act of knowledge acquisition. As Aristotle famously said, “The soul never thinks without an image,” an image provided by imagination (De anima III.7, 431a16–17).13 Any good Aristotelian held that knowledge originates with the senses and becomes available to the intellect in 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, 408b13–15, 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.

 / Introduction

normal circumstances only through imagination. The last of the sense faculties, imagination made a unique contribution to the process by which sensory knowledge became intellectual apprehension (a process detailed in chapter 1). In tandem with the agent intellect, imagination formed the crucial bridge between sense and reason. Often reliable and accurate in these contexts, medieval imagination is least like imagination as we discuss it, and might therefore be least easy for us to recognize. Today, imagination is most celebrated for its power of invention, and while that attribute is promi­ nent in medieval discussions of the faculty as well, the most important cognitive task assigned to medieval imagination was the discovery of truth. By understanding the cognitive importance of imagination, we might better appreciate the richness of the faculty not only in a philosophical but also in a literary context. The scope of this book is the cognitive work that medieval imagination performs, both in Aristotelian philosophy and in meditations on Christ.14 It strives to recuperate the full range of the meaning of imagination in medieval philosophy and to illuminate its role in the period’s religious literature as well. Indeed, the consistent association of imagination with truth requires us to rethink the relatively humble aims that we assign both to it and to imaginative meditations in the period. The prominence of imagination in late-medieval piety has sometimes been seen to demean it,15 but this book encourages a different perspective by linking Aristotelian philosophy of imagination to the period’s gospel meditations, the genre of literature in which imagination is most prominent.16 Depending for its value, 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

Introduction / 

in part, on an Aristotelian notion of imagination, whereby imagination en­ abled any transition from sensible to intelligible apprehension, imagining the life of Christ drew on the power of imagination to impel the meditant from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Imagination did not participate in the highest forms of contemplation, but it did guide the meditant to the point at which mystical transports began.17 The Paris-trained master of theology Bonaventure has a central place in this study because he first applied scholastic philosophy of imagination to medieval meditations on Christ, as we will see in chapters 2 and 3. Relying on a newly powerful faculty of imagination, he made more powerful the act of imagining the life of Christ, both in his own meditations and, through their influence, in many of those that followed. The purpose of this book, then, is to establish not only that medieval imagination had a unique authority, but that imaginative meditations on Christ were more ambitious and purposeful than the scholarship on them has recognized. The particular power of medieval imagination that Bonaventure identified arose not from the simple importing of Aristotelian philosophy into the Latin West but from its application to Augustinian theology, a union discussed in chapter 2.18 This study focuses especially on Aristotelian philosophy of the mind, which has been relatively neglected and which was, in the thirteenth century, the new influence that made imagination newly potent. However, in its theological applications, it always interacted with Augustinian theology, a fact that my attention to Aristotelian philosophy 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).

 / Introduction

should not occlude. Further, it is important to recognize that imagination was a composite, fundamentally heterogeneous construction in medieval thought. By focusing on its elevated role in cognition, I am not denying the prominence of other aspects of the faculty, either those that are more prestigious or those considerably less so.19 At its most powerful, imagination was thought to channel divine influence in the form of prophecy, a feature that can be traced back to Plato and was best known to the Latin West from Avicenna. Imagination’s relationship with prophecy often figures in medieval discussions of visions, a legacy of Augustine’s designation of the “imaginative” or “spiritual” vision as the middle of three levels of vision.20 Imagination’s most basic functions were to store sensory data and create images of things not seen by combining images of things that had been seen, as in the ubiquitous example of the golden mountain.21 Imagination could misunderstand sensory data, interpreting a stick partially immersed in water, for instance, as bent. It generated dreams and furnished foresight. From an array of medieval literature, we are familiar with imagination’s capacity to distract or impede reason.22 For instance, in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, Januarie’s “fantasye” serves as a “mirour” in which he surveys mentally all the women in town, finally selecting one who is, of course, nothing more than a figment of his imagination.23 Januarie’s unwise preference of imagination to reason, itself represented by Justinus’s rational counsel, results inevitably in his unhappy marriage. Imagination also performs an array of lesser-known functions, such as inciting desire and movement and even enabling an individual to remember the beginning of a word when hearing its end.24

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

Introduction / 

Whether a cogent faculty of imagination might be found at the heart of all the different attributes listed above is an open question. Scholars of Aristotle still struggle to find coherence in Aristotle’s own account, and medieval imagination, with its inclusion of various attributes from Neoplatonic, Stoic, and Arabic philosophy, is more eclectic still.25 I do not believe that the various accounts of imagination can be reconciled, but neither do I think that reconciliation is a helpful goal when we study the faculty. Medieval philosophers, at least, did not concern themselves with relating all the functions of imagination to each other. Aristotle begins his discussion of imagination by separating its technical meanings from its “metaphorical” ones, revealing his concern with narrowing the scope of imagination, not extending it (De anima III.3, 428a1–2). When medieval philosophers wrote about imagination’s cognitive function, as chapter 1 shows, they assumed the faculty’s capacity for reliability. Its ability to relay sense-data to the intellect in a form that the intellect could comprehend was not compromised by its mistaken judgments about sensory data, for instance. Rather, the scholastics’ comfort in holding apart the different aspects of imagination might encourage us to adopt a similar attitude. The defining heterogeneity of medieval imagination explains why the existing scholarship on it goes in so many different directions, in each case finding support for its claims. It was an ”associative” faculty that traded in analogy and similitude; it was relatively low in the hierarchy of mental powers but was nonetheless necessary; it was a trusted receptacle for divine influence in the form of prophecy; and it was a means of mental picturemaking in medieval rhetoric that might inform our reading of monastic meditations or courtly love literature.26 It was affective or intellectual, parochial or scholastic, authoritative or trivial. These characterizations are contradictory, but they are not wrong. Imagination was not one thing, and any effort to speak exclusively of “the” medieval imagination is bound to falter. Nonetheless, the negative aspects of medieval imagination have figured disproportionately in many of these studies, and by focusing on one elevated

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.

 / Introduction

but critically neglected aspect of medieval imagination, I hope to right the balance.27 This book’s ultimate goal is to illuminate the role of imagination in, and thus the cognitive work of, medieval gospel meditations. In their reliance on a predominantly Aristotelian understanding of imagination, they are unlike the bulk of mystical texts from the monastic and/or apophatic traditions, which rely far more heavily on Neoplatonic thought and which, therefore, figure little into this study.28 Neither does this book study visionary literature in any detail. My interest is in those texts that most overtly describe and defend the value of imagining the life of Christ, texts in which meditation is presented as a deliberate process whose end should programmatically be worked toward. Although many mystics acknowledge that the individual can put herself in the way of visions—through a good life, heartfelt prayer, and various devotional activities, for instance—such revelations remain fortuitous occurrences, not systematically realized in the way that gospel meditations often are. The opposition I am making here is not between meditation and mysticism. Insofar as gospel meditation is treated as integral to mysticism, as it is in various of Bonaventure’s works and in James of Milan’s Stimulus amoris, for instance, it is within the purview of this study. What the literature that this book studies has in common is a certain treatment of meditation, one that investigates its purpose and deliberately describes how to achieve it.29 Both the popularity of gospel meditations and their concern with imagination have been effectively established. The genre’s best-known member, 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 anachronistic. My interest instead lies in the technical meaning of imagination in the period. 28. On Neoplatonic influence on Christian mysticism, see Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, and Turner, Darkness of God, 1–8. Neoplatonic imagination is discussed in chapter 1. 29. Although the first two chapters study medieval theories of imagination in a European context, the book as it proceeds increasingly turns toward English texts or texts that were especially important in England. This does not mean that other vernaculars do not integrate imagination as a cognitive power into literature in fascinating ways—Dante’s Commedia, Jean de Meun’s section of the Rose, and Christine de Pizan’s Chemin de long estude most obviously demonstrate that they do—but simply that they have their own contexts that I cannot address adequately here. Christine de Pizan is of particular interest since she places imagination at the center of her text and makes it one of two paths that lead from earth to heaven. Her main character thus ascends a ladder of imagination in order to view heaven. Akbari has covered some of this terrain, studying the Commedia and the Rose in light of scholastic theories of optics in Seeing through the Veil.

Introduction / 

the Meditationes vitae Christi, survives in more than two hundred manuscripts. It and its generic kin profoundly influenced not just literature, notably medieval drama, but also visual art.30 Their relationship to imagination takes root in one between imagination and meditation more broadly, as suggested by the twelfth-century regular canon Richard of St. Victor when he writes that speculation which consists in imagination “occurs more easily to one meditating.”31 Aside from the fact that gospel meditations frequently refer to imagination, the link between the two is made explicit by the late fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, which defines imagination when controlled by reason as the imagination of gospel meditations: “ymaginacion,” when it is “in grete party refreynid by þe liʒt of grace in þe reson,” manifests itself “in contynowel meditacion of goostly þinges, as ben þeire [the believers’] wrechidnes, þe Passion & þe kyndenes of oure Lorde God, wiþ many soche oþer.”32 Modern scholarship recognizes the connection between such meditations and imagination, as already indicated by Jean Leclercq’s comment that the power of medieval imagination announces itself in the readiness with which medieval people imagined themselves into biblical narrative. Imagination is especially prominent in studies of the Meditationes vitae Christi, as Michael Sargent, for instance, demonstrates when he writes that “no discussion of the role of imagination in late medieval meditational technique can safely ignore” the text.33 “Imagination” as addressed in these studies, however, concerns the imagery of the text as well as the role of mental imaging in it, not imagination as a faculty of the soul. Further, such imaging is granted only limited value. Devotion based in it appears as a last resort of fallen humanity, an imperfect tool that leads to sin more often than grace but gives postlapsarian humans the most spiritual insight that they can usually muster.34 30. The classic study of the relationship between the Meditationes and medieval art and drama is Mâle’s Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages, 26–48. For a more recent study focused on medieval drama, see Beadle, “’Devoute ymaginacioun.’” 31. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, xix, PL 196:13B:“meditanti facilius occurrit, quae in sola imaginatione consistit.” 32. The Cloud of Unknowing, c. 65, p. 65. Walter Hilton makes a similar observation (“Epistle on the Mixed Life,” 285). 33. Sargent, “Bonaventura English,” 148. For other discussions of imagination and the Meditationes, see Gillespie, “Strange Images of Death”; Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence, 163–67; Despres, Ghostly Sights, 34–54; and Fleming, An Introduction to Franciscan Literature, 242–51. 34. Hence, “Utility and recognition of the fallibility and weakness of human endeavour governed the qualified appraisal given to image-based meditation” (Gillespie, “Strange Images of Death,” 118). Recently, N. Watson has also written in support of this view: “Essential but unreliable, imagination is thus figure and symptom of the miseria condicionis humanae” (“The Phantasmal Past,” 11).

10 / Introduction

To the extent that scholars have inquired into the value of imaginative meditations, the answer has typically been love. Creating vivid mental images of Christ’s sacrifice of himself for humankind heightens affection for him. This affective purpose, however, could be claimed, and rightly, of any devotional practice. I argue that gospel meditations have another, cognitive purpose that becomes visible only when we study the meditations’ references to “imagination” in concert with medieval philosophical thought about imagination. My emphasis is less on the practice than on the theory of such meditations, and this to show that such meditations have a theoretical basis. Approaching gospel meditations in this way, we can better understand why imagining Christ’s life was considered an especially useful thing to do. It should be clear by now that imagination in this study is not “a sort of draught-horse of the sensitive soul” whose “lowly, working-day status” made it unworthy of the “awe” reserved for memory.35 Nor do I claim that imagination outranked memory. Imagination’s status varies considerably depending on which of its wide array of functions it was performing. Imag­ ination enjoys greater prominence here than in Mary Carruthers’s studies on memory primarily because this book focuses on Aristotelian psychology, whereas Carruthers’s works focus on Platonic/Augustinian psychology, especially as it features in monastic meditation.36 To be sure, the two philosophical traditions are more often interwoven in scholastic thought than not, but the fault lines between them are always visible. They never merge into syncretic union. What most clearly distinguishes this book’s treatment of medieval imagination from others is its contention that medieval imagination is, among other things, a cognitive faculty and in that capacity deals with what is real and true. It must, because the intellect could not otherwise know, and knowing is what the intellect is designed to do.37

35. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 1. 36. Carruthers claims that, although the “Neoplatonist-Aristotelian distinction is crucial in some areas of medieval culture,” on the subject of memory it is not (Book of Memory, 13). Nonetheless, her emphasis is consistently on the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, which gives memory higher status than the Aristotelian one. On the fundamental disparities between Augustinian/Platonic and Aristotelian theories of knowledge, including memory’s role in them, see Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 229–68, and Pasnau, “Human Nature,” 213–221. Hatfield also outlines and contrasts the two systems of cognition with admirable concision in “Cognitive Faculties,” 954–61. 37. Despite some critical discussion of skepticism in medieval thought, especially in Ockham’s thought, it is undoubtedly the case that all the influential scholastic philosophers thought that the intellect was capable of attaining, and in fact often attained, knowledge. See Perler, “Skepticism.”

Introduction / 11

This argument is likely to elicit skepticism on at least three counts. The first is the intimacy it posits between medieval philosophy and devotional literature; the second, the emphasis it places on the cognitive as opposed to the affective work of gospel meditations; and the third, the trustworthiness it assigns to mental images. I will address them in turn. For many decades now, gospel meditations have been assigned firmly to the laity, and thus located far outside the ambit of medieval scholasticism.38 Nicholas Watson, for instance, writes, “While meditation on Christ’s life continued to be practiced by male monastics and clerics, long before 1400 the genre and this suffering humanity of Christ that was its focus were . . . firmly associated on a symbolic level with the same ill-defined constituency for whom vernacular theological writing was often composed, those non-Latinate readers known as the ‘unlettered.’”39 Watson, acknowledging that gospel meditation was actually practiced by the lettered and unlettered, even if symbolically affiliated with the latter, captures the ambiguity of certain members of the genre, such as Nicholas Love’s early fifteenth-century Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. It expressly claims for itself and for gospel meditations generally a “symple” audience, even though it is clear that the text’s audience extended further.40 Few scholars would maintain that late-medieval meditations were as firmly wedded to the unlettered as Love would have us believe. Elizabeth Salter thus notes that “the remarks of authors with regard to their ‘unlettered’ readers and hearers must not . . . be interpreted narrowly.”41 In the process, she points to another common claim about gospel meditations, one that runs parallel to the conviction that they are appropriate for the laity, which is that women are the intended audience for and even the motivating force behind them.42 Indeed, women are central to many of the members of the genre. Abelard, for instance, suggests that Heloise reroute her affection away from him and toward Christ via assiduous meditation

38. This is especially true of vernacular meditations. For an early example of this perspective, see Deanesly’s 1922 article, “Gospel Harmony of John de Caulibus,” 10. It should be noted that, much as these meditations are often classified as “vernacular theology,” they did not make a linear transition from Latin to the vernacular. Latin meditations continued to be written through the fifteenth century, and Bestul claims that Latin continued to be their “principal language” (Texts of the Passion, 68). On the general scholarly neglect of Latin meditations relative to vernacular ones, see Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 1–4, and Sargent, “Bonaventura English,” 157. 39. N. Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” 93. 40. See Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, prologue, 10. 41. Salter, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, 67–68. 42. This approach has been defended most recently and extensively by McNamer in Affective Meditation but finds support elsewhere, as in Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy and Bynum’s Jesus as Mother and Holy Feast and Holy Fast.

12 / Introduction

on his passion, and several authors, including Aelred of Rievaulx and the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, direct their meditations to female religious.43 Comments on the “lay” or female orientation of gospel meditations, however, have not gone unquestioned.44 For instance, Thomas Bestul argues that, in spite of the late-medieval growth in lay and female readership, “the audience for the Passion treatises remained predominantly clerical and predominantly male.”45 He accordingly claims that meditation not only was practiced by the lettered but was the special property of them. Further, with regard to the female-directedness of such devotion, Vincent Gillespie has observed that texts overtly addressed to women often enjoyed a broader audience than they claimed, and it is generally recognized that meditation on Christ was not confined to women.46 Jennifer Bryan, for instance, has written against the belief that English devotional literature in general is “the special province of women readers,” a perspective also shared by Rachel Fulton.47 Sarah McNamer, although maintaining that compassionate meditation remained primarily affiliated with women, acknowledges that men practiced affective piety. According to her argument, so firmly was such meditation associated with women that it eventually posed a challenge to its male practitioners’ masculinity, contributing not only to the formation of less intensely affective lyrical forms but also to the Reformation.48 It should be remembered, however, that various male authors of affective meditations, including Bernard of Clairvaux and the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, acknowledge that they practiced such meditation them-

43. See Abelard, La vie et les epistres, letter 5, p. 83; Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum; CCCM 1:636; Meditationes vitae Christi, Prologue, CCCM 153:8. McNamer offers a fuller list of meditations directed toward women in Affective Meditation, 60–61. 44. I use the term “lay,” in its various forms, to refer to those medieval texts often called “unlettered,” “symple,” “lewed,” “lay,” or, in Latin, “idiotae” or “laici,” namely, non-clerics who were unschooled in Latin. Thus, distinguishing between the two in his exposition of Francis’s Regula, Bonaventure writes, “as he wanted no one from the laity to proceed to the clergy, so he did not want clerics to be made lay by rejecting study” (Epistola de tribus quaestionibus, in Opera omnia 8:334: “Vult enim . . . ut ad clericatum de laicatu nullus ascendat, nec vult, quod clerici efficiantur laici studium recusando”). What separates lay from cleric in this formulation is simply learning. I take Gillespie’s point that, in the late Middle Ages, such terms as “lered and lewed . . . were rapidly losing their precise classifying force” (“‘Lukynge in haly bokes,’” 16), but they were no less prominent for that. “Lay” and “cleric” still functioned, if imperfectly, to denote two groups of people that medieval texts themselves often distinguished. 45. Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 67–68. 46. Gillespie, “‘Lukynge in haly bukes,’” 4 and 17. 47. Bryan, Looking Inward, 20; and Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 168. 48. See McNamer, Affective Meditation, 20–21 and 174–206.

Introduction / 13

selves.49 My preference is to label these meditations neither lay nor learned, neither male nor female, since the evidence indicates that they crossed both boundaries. Unconvinced that compassion belongs essentially to women, I hold that affective meditation is at its foundation neither female- nor layoriented. To the extent that this book credits scholastic philosophy with influencing gospel meditations, it does not seek to replace an unlettered audience with a predominantly lettered one. It does, however, posit influence between scholastic philosophy and devotional literature by arguing that Bonaventure applied an Aristotelian understanding of imagination to his own gospel meditations and, through their influence, to various of the meditations that succeeded them. My purpose is not to impose theories of cognition on medieval literature according to a rigid model of cause and effect, as some studies of cognition and literature have been accused of doing.50 Rather, I contend that the way medieval philosophers thought the mind worked might well have influenced their judgments about which devotional activities would be most useful and effective. Given the prominence of cognition in medieval philosophy and the fact that the authors of the period’s religious literature were often the authors of its philosophy, it is surely no great stretch to associate the two.51 Augustine, for instance, had long before ensured cognition a central place in Christian theology when he located a person’s greatest likeness to God precisely in his or her act of knowing. Bonaventure’s own joint interest in medieval theories of cognition and meditations on Christ is especially crucial for this study. As chapters 2 and 3 argue, Bonaventure’s translation of his philosophy of imagination into devotional imagining demonstrates the potential impact of philosophy, even at its most technical, on religious literature. Focusing on the philosophical tradition in which imagination was most important, the Aristotelian tradition, and the body of medieval literature in which imagination was most prominent, meditations on the life of Christ, this book uses medieval thought about imagination to link two bodies of

49. McNamer has suggested that the Meditationes vitae Christi was written by a woman, but she provides only one piece of evidence that is far from conclusive to support the claim (Affective Meditation, 110–15). It is more likely that the author was male. 50. For such a criticism, see Tallis, “The Neuroscience Delusion,” Times Literary Supplement, April 9, 2008. My thanks to David Wallace for drawing my attention to this piece. Richardson provides a survey of scholarship on cognition and literature in “Studies in Literature and Cognition.” 51. Doyle studies the role of clergy in English religious literature in Survey of the Origins.

14 / Introduction

writing commonly taken to be antithetical to each other. Along with making specific claims about medieval imagination and meditations on Christ, then, this study also aims to undermine the barriers typically erected between philosophy and devotional literature.52 Finally, this project bears on current scholarly interest in the intersections between cognition and literature by placing imagination squarely at the heart of both. Thinking is integral to the experience of reading literature, and it makes sense that imagination should have cognitive as well as literary significance. It is a risk of critical methods that rely on intellectual history that they subordinate literature, making it merely an instance of a larger phenomenon or reducing it to its ideas alone.53 The model of influence I present is mutual. There is no trickling down of philosophy to literature here, nor does literature express a watered-down version of philosophy. Rather, philosophy in this study articulates a theory of how the mind works, while devotional literature concerns practice, specifically describing how the mind might use its resources to bring the individual closer to God. Although imagi­nation is not the vehicle of literary creativity—as Alastair Minnis rightly notes, the Middle Ages did not develop “a full theory of imaginative aesthetics”— chapters 3, 4, and 5 show that imagination acting at its highest potential often expressed itself in especially vivid literature.54 Indeed, medieval writers sometimes hinted at a relationship between imagination and literary invention or interpretation. Richard of St. Victor, for instance, tantalizingly implies that imagination is responsible for the poetic beauty of the Song of Songs.55 And Bonaventure suggests that the individual understands the imagery of the Bible because divine illumination falls on the “intellect joined

52. It should be noted that philosophy has long proven central to studies of medieval literature, but it has not, for the most part, been Aristotelian philosophy. Neoplatonic philosophy, rather, occupies a prominent position in some of the most important studies of twelfth-century literature, including Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry; Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society; Endre von Ivánka, Plato christianus; and Simpson, Sciences and the Self. Aristotelian philosophy has not enjoyed the same prominence in studies of late-medieval English literature, although it does appear more consistently in studies of medieval French and Italian literature. 53. Discussing scholarship on Piers Plowman, Middleton thus notes that readings seeking to position the poem in its historical or intellectual context often neglect form. Rather than adding depth to the poem, she contends, such criticism can instead render it “empty and flat” (“Narration and the Invention of Experience,” 93). 54. Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” 243. 55. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, xxiii–xxiv, PL 196:16A–17C. Various studies trace the origins of the creative imagination back to ancient Greek philosophy, but the evidence they amass is indirect. See Bundy, Theory of Imagination, and G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought. If medieval writers saw a firm connection between imagination and the writing and reading of literature, they were less than straightforward about expressing it.

Introduction / 15

to imagination.”56 Nonetheless, their comments on the topic are only suggestive. What this study shows is that imagination can be powerful, even in literature, without necessarily powering creativity itself. Medieval imagination is at once a cognitive, theological, and literary resource, and it realizes the full scope of its power at their intersection. It is also at this nexus that the gospel meditation resides. The second likely objection is that gospel meditations espouse an affective piety that is at odds with the rational speculation of scholastic philosophy and its theories of cognition.57 The standard narrative of the rise of affective piety, traced back to the eleventh or twelfth century, features gospel meditations prominently.58 So wedded are they to affect in this narrative that they are commonly referred to as “affective meditations.” To deny the affective emphasis of the works would be to disregard a great deal of textual evidence to the contrary, but I do argue that affect is not the whole of their purpose.59 I am not alone in this, as various studies have suggested that gospel meditations offer theological benefits beyond affective ones.60 However, none has focused on the cognitive work of such meditations. One barrier to doing so is the frequency with which affect and intellect have been opposed in medieval studies, a phenomenon that is especially visible in the study of medieval mysticism. As Bernard McGinn has sagely argued in opposition to this tendency, medieval mystics typically linked various forms of affect, including love, to understanding. “Where Christian mystics do differ,” he explains, “is in their varying conceptions of the roles that both intellect and love play in the path to and enjoyment of union.”61 In one respect, medieval sources encourage scholars to oppose the two, as in Cistercian arguments 56. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XVII.8, Opera omnia 5:410: “intellectum iunctum imaginationi.” 57. Not only gospel meditations but late-medieval devotional literature as a whole is often designated as affective. Hence Gayk, commenting on late-medieval England, writes, “Vernacular devotional works of this period typically are affective and incarnational” (“Images of Pity,” 176). 58. For a couple of accounts of this narrative, see Watson, “Middle English Mystics,” 545–46, and Cousins, “The Humanity of Christ.” 59. In her recent study of blood in medieval thought, Bynum shows that aspects of medieval devotion tend to become flattened by being subsumed under such headings as “affective piety.” The lessons she draws with respect to the study of blood might be extended elsewhere. The subsuming of meditations on the life of Christ under the category “affective piety” likewise flattens them and puts a constraint on what we are able to argue about them. See Wonderful Blood, xvii and 9. 60. See, for instance, Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, and Ross, Grief of God. 61. McGinn, “Love, Knowledge, and the Unio Mystica,” 85. McGinn shows that the difference in medieval religious literature between an affective and cognitive way to God has been exaggerated. Pitting them against each other has accordingly been counterproductive.

16 / Introduction

against the universities that tend to privilege love of God over learning for its own sake.62 Nonetheless, as Jean Leclercq famously showed, the monasteries had their own brand of learning, and to oppose affect to intellect entire is to distort the sources.63 Affect and intellect more often complement each other in medieval texts than not. The Franciscan Bartholomaeus Anglicus, drawing on Isidore of Seville, explains in his early thirteenth-century De proprietatibus rerum that man resembles God in two ways, “having an image of God in his power of knowing and a similitude to God in his power of loving.”64 In possession of both an affective and intellectual likeness to God, the individual can follow different trajectories to him, but they are not exclusive.65 In meditation on Christ’s humanity, both affect and intellect are operative. The twelfthcentury Cistercian mystic William of St. Thierry thus claims of the meditant who imagines the passion and contemplates the highest good, “The cross itself becomes for her the face of a mind that is well-disposed toward God.”66 This intriguing quotation expresses with great eloquence the complexity of medieval thought about affect and intellect. The way in which the meditant sees the cross is determined by her mind’s attitude toward God. The cross is the face of her mind, and the compassion that the cross evokes from her is both in proportion to and a reflection of her intellectual disposition. Affect and intellect are proportionate and interdependent, and the accord between them is well demonstrated by Bonaventure himself. While this study focuses on Bonaventure’s philosophy and the role of the intellect in his devotional writings, it is more common for studies to focus on Bonaventure’s Augustinianism and his promulgation of affective piety.67 We do not need to choose between the affective and the intellectual Bonaventure, however. One perspective need not be proven false to make the other true. Bonaventure clearly devoted his attention to the role of both desire and knowledge in the spiritual life, and by focusing on the latter, I do not intend to efface the former. Nonetheless, given the dominance of affect in studies 62. See Ferruolo, Origins of the University, 47–92. 63. Leclercq, Love of Learning. 64. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, III.1, 1:149: “divinam habens imaginem in potentia cognoscendi et similitudinem in potentia diligendi.” 65. The most balanced account of the relationship between affect and intellect in latemedieval devotion is Constable, Three Studies, 143–248. 66. William of St. Thierry, Meditationes, X.9, CCCM 89:60: “ipsa crux efficitur ei ad Deum facies mentis bene affectae.” Trans. Lawson, The Works of William of St. Thierry, 1:154. 67. Largier, for instance, credits Bonaventure with guiding the substantial late-medieval literature on the inner senses, whose purpose was to stimulate desire (“Inner Senses—Outer Senses,” 12–13).

Introduction / 17

of gospel meditations, my effort here is to show that such meditations also had a cognitive purpose. The final likely objection is that my argument ignores the much-touted medieval suspicion of images. The focus of this study is solely on mental images, visual images having been the subject of many excellent studies and mental images having been relatively neglected.68 Both types of image were derogated on occasion. Medievalists are familiar with the ideal of imageless devotion espoused most notably by the twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux, one that repudiates visual as well as mental images. Bernard admits the near-impossibility of attaining this ideal—he reserves it for those precious few with “angelic purity” (angelicae puritatis) and endorses image-based devotion as profitable for the masses—but imageless devotion nevertheless remains his ideal.69 He repeatedly enumerates the benefits of gospel meditation, but because he ranks such image-laden devotion below image-independent contemplation, he has been seen as an opponent of the former. Likewise, Gregory the Great’s commonly quoted characterization of visual images as libri laicorum, or books for the laity, has encouraged scholars to see mental images as equally lay and thus, perhaps, as unsophisticated.70 A couple of points need to be made here. First, in recent years, art historians have persuasively shown that Gregory’s dictum does not accurately reflect the use of devotional images, neither in the sixth century when Greg­ ory wrote his famous letter nor in the later Middle Ages.71 Bernard’s comments have also been importantly qualified. Mary Carruthers, for instance, argues that Bernard simply encourages his fellow Cistercians to create their own mental images, rather than internalizing seen images.72 The common belief that medieval people distrusted mental images, then, might simply be mistaken. Second, the concept of cognitive images was never subject to controversy in the Middle Ages. Augustine and Aristotle both based cognition on a series of images, and although scholastics debated the composition of those images and the existence of certain types of images, they accepted that cognition was fundamentally, and profitably, imagistic. There was

68. For some recent studies of medieval religious art, especially on the passion, see Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late-Medieval Italy; Belting, Image and Its Public; Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary; and Marrow, Passion Iconography. 69. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, LII.iii.5, Opera omnia 2:93. 70. See Gregory’s letter to Serenus, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistolae, II.2, p. 270. 71. For a list of recent work on this topic, see Lipton, “‘Sweet Lean of His Head,’” 1172n2. See especially Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography. 72. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 84–87.

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nothing suspect about the mind’s forming an image of an apple for itself when thinking about an apple, or, for that matter, one of Christ when thinking about Christ. In this book I suggest that we might look at the mental picturing involved in gospel meditations from this cognitive perspective. The purpose of imagining Christ’s life was, after all, to know him as well as to love and desire him. Indeed, in his De Trinitate, Augustine takes great pains to demonstrate that nothing, including God, can be loved without first being known: “Certainly a thing cannot be loved unless it is known.”73 The soul’s affective and intellectual powers do not brook separation. This makes an important point. We are accustomed to talking about knowledge or experience that is mediated by images as indirect and therefore inferior to unmediated knowing. However, as we will see most clearly in chapter 2, the human mind understands through images by design and to its own benefit. According to Augustine’s supremely influential trinitarian theology, for instance, human beings understand through images because their minds in particular are images of God. As God himself is engaged in an eternal act of self-knowing, so the mind that knows God is most like him. The mind is, in this respect, the image through which the individual sees God. Augustine glosses 1 Cor. 13:12, “we see now through a mirror darkly” (per speculum in aenigmate),74 accordingly. For him, it means that God is visible above all through the divine image that is the human mind.75 Images likewise suffuse the mind, but they enable rather than impede its activity. The mind is not hobbled by its reliance on images, a point that Augustine makes most clearly when he explains that, even in heaven, one does not cease to be an image of God.76 When one sees God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), one does so as a better image of God, as an image more like Christ who is himself a perfect image, even a cognitive image, of God the Father. Mental images function not to alienate the mind from its object but to provide access to that object. Chapter 1 begins with the cognitive work of imagination in the Neoplatonic tradition before turning to the Aristotelian one.77 It studies most 73. Augustine, De Trinitate, X.i.2, CCSL 50:312: “Certe enim amari aliquid nisi notum non potest.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 43. Augustine repeatedly returns to this idea, as it relates to knowledge of God and to the mind’s knowledge of itself, in books VII through X. 74. References to the Bible are to the Vulgate and to the Douay-Rheims English translation, unless otherwise noted. Here the translation is mine. 75. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xxiii.44, CCSL 50A:522. 76. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV.xix.25, CCSL 50A:457. 77. It has become scholarly convention to use “Neoplatonism” only as a chronological term, denoting the forms of Platonism from Plotinus onward, and I use it in this respect. I refer

Introduction / 19

concertedly the philosophies of Avicenna, Averroes, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, detailing the process by which imagination contributed to intellectual apprehension for each. It shows that imagination functioned crucially within scholastic Aristotelianism to bridge the potentially gaping divide between sensory and intellectual cognition. The senses know an object’s material attributes, its size, color, and so on, but the intellect understands what the object is, that is, its essence or quiddity. The senses know, for instance, that an individual person with certain features approaches. The intellect knows what a person is. It understands people as a group, aware of the attributes that define a man (as a rational animal, for instance) in his unindividuated generality. The obvious challenge in this philosophy is to explain how the mind progresses from sensory to intellectual apprehension based on the same piece of sensory data. The answer is, in part, imagination; the last of the sense faculties, imagination provides the intellect with its knowable object. This chapter thus details the cognitive operations of imagination while showing that scholastic philosophers regularly discussed imagination’s cognitive work. Chapters 2 and 3 provide the core of the book’s argument and claim that Bonaventure used Aristotelian imagination to inform his imaginative meditations. The second chapter studies Bonaventure’s philosophy. First examining the role of images in Augustine’s theory of knowledge, the chapter argues that Bonaventure drew on Augustine’s theory as well as Aristotelian imagination to create an especially potent imaginative power. Aristotelian philosophy makes images pervasive in the act of knowledge acquisition, and by interpreting them through Augustinian philosophy, Bonaventure is able to locate Christ’s presence to the mind in its cognitive images. Drawing on the fact that both Augustine and the Latin translations of Aristotle refer to these images as “species,” Bonaventure links the two philosophies, with the result that mental images are not just intellectually but mystically resonant. On the basis of these images, the mind achieves understanding at the same time that it knows Christ. The mechanisms of understanding itself, properly considered, become a means to ascend to Christ. Chapter 3 explores pre-Bonaventuran gospel meditations before considering Bonaventure’s innovations in the genre, innovations made visible by the philosophy of imagination explained in the preceding chapters. In Bonaventure’s writings, it argues, gospel meditation serves to traverse the distance between Christ’s humanity and divinity, a feat it accomplishes in part through imagination. to Platonism or the Platonic tradition when I want to refer to the entire philosophical tradition. On the terminological debate, see Gersh, Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, 1:1–50.

20 / Introduction

Since Christ functions in the mind to draw understanding out of sense knowledge, the mind that directs itself to Christ uses Christ to proceed from sensory knowledge of his humanity to spiritual understanding of his divinity. Imagining Christ’s life accordingly takes advantage of the mind’s own cognitive resources to draw the meditant closer to God. Chapter 4 turns to post-Bonaventuran meditations, especially the Meditationes vitae Christi and the Stimulus amoris. Showing that such meditations build upon the power of imagination that Bonaventure had given them, it argues that they make imagination into a trainable tool. As the meditations’ readers and hearers deliberately attach themselves to Christ through meditation, they become capable of sharing, eventually, his journey to heaven, finding in such meditation a path toward salvation. In his epistles, Paul exhorts young Christian communities to suffer with Christ in order to rejoice with him. “God forbid,” Paul writes, “that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14). As this chapter shows, gospel meditations often presented themselves as means to fulfill this Pauline prescription, and to fulfill it particularly well. Suffering with Christ through meditation on his life and passion, the meditant could satisfy her obligation to travel to heavenly glory through the cross. Properly used, then, imagination promised substantial spiritual rewards, and for that reason it merited careful cultivation. These meditations view imagination as a faculty to be trained, one whose value was well-attested and whose power needed to be harnessed. The fifth chapter turns to one poem, Piers Plowman, that relies on imagination overtly. Although he has occasioned much debate in Langland scholarship, Piers Plowman’s Ymaginatif serves the familiar function of drawing the mind—here Will’s mind—from natural, sensory cognition to clergy, or revealed, spiritual understanding. The chapter argues that Will’s learned ability to use his imaginative faculty properly allows him to see the spiritual in the natural in the remainder of the poem. His own meditation on Christ’s life, then, indicates that he has learned to use his imagination effectively. The final chapter focuses on Middle English translations of the two gospel meditations featured most prominently in chapter 4, the Meditationes vitae Christi and Stimulus amoris. It argues that the translations—Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ and the anonymous Prickynge of Love, respectively—make substantial changes to their sources, with the effect of limiting the power of imagination. The chapter’s purpose is to mark an end, albeit a porous one, to the period of imaginative meditations that this book considers. As we will see, imagination’s high-level cognitive work started to garner less attention toward the end of the fourteenth century, when imagination became a less pressing concern in the universities.

Introduction / 21

Reflecting both contemporary philosophical trends and the church’s more suspicious attitude toward mystical experience, the translations considered in this chapter scale back the theological ambition of gospel meditations. They accordingly reconfigure imagination, making it consonant with the works’ different aims. In these translations, imagination remains useful for meditating on Christ’s earthly life, but it no longer provides a bridge to his divinity. The tradition of imaginative meditations studied in this book does not come to a screeching halt, but it does begin to fade. By the early sixteenth century, as the conclusion shows, it becomes possible to look back to an earlier period when imagination, and imaginative meditations, were exceptionally powerful. This is not to say that the later meditations are less rich or less interesting, but that they no longer seek to transport the meditant, via his or her imagination, from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. In other words, imaginative meditation as Bonaventure conceived of it did not long survive him. As a result, medieval gospel meditations, and imagination’s role in them, are not best studied retrospectively, from the perspective of late medieval examples of the genre. Only by looking at the earlier meditations can we understand the distinct power that imagination enjoyed in them. Indeed, the book’s final point is that there is some merit to later claims that the Middle Ages was an age of imagination. However, the nature of imagination’s power has been misunderstood. Imagination is familiar to medievalists as a sensory faculty that misleads, distracts the mind, and channels diabolical influence. It is less familiar as a faculty that enables the mind to apprehend truth, gives the intellect reliable access to the natural world, and channels divine influence in the form of prophecy. It is familiar as an affective power, but not as a cognitive one. Understanding its positive features in addition to its negative ones, we are better positioned to appreciate the role that imagination occupies not only in gospel meditations but in medieval culture more broadly.

One

Aristotelian Imagination

The Greek word for imagination, phantasia, makes its first recorded ap­ pearance in Plato’s middle dialogues. Before it was anything else, then, “imagination” appears to have been a philosophical term, and philosophy continued to shape its development through the Middle Ages and beyond. However, in its inception, imagination bore little of its future significance. Plato’s writings on the subject are sparse and allocate a limited function to it. It is, in his account, a combination of sensation and belief tied inextri­ cably to cognition of the sensible world. Aristotle also places imagination in league with the senses, designating it as the last of the sense faculties, but whereas the senses can provide sure access to knowledge in Aristotle’s philosophy, such is not the case for Plato. For Plato, one has only opinion

. Rees, “Aristotle’s Treatment of Φαντασία,” 503n7. Although scholars dispute whether “phantasia” can fairly be translated as “imagination,” medievalists can confidently equate the two with sanction from many Latin writers who followed Augustine’s lead in translating “phantasia” as “imaginatio.” Gerard Watson credits the elder Pliny with coining “imaginatio” and men­ tions other uses before Augustine by Tacitus and Calcidius, but he writes that Augustine gave the term “currency in the Latin West” (Phantasia in Classical Thought, 138). . Philosophy was not, of course, the only discourse to shape medieval views of imagina­ tion, but given this book’s interest in imagination’s role in cognition, the most relevant sources are philosophical ones. . Bundy and Watson have both argued for a more positive valuation of imagination in Plato’s work, but they do so largely by looking beyond his usage of “phantasia” proper. See Bundy, Theory of Imagination, 19–59; and G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, 1–13. Both acknowledge that the term phantasia itself is linked to deception (Bundy, Theory of Imagination, 23; and G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, 10). Following Plato’s lead, scholars of Plato’s philosophy likewise devote little attention to imagination, as indicated by the fact that neither “imagination” nor “phantasia” made it into the index of the Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Kraut.

24 / Chapter One

(pistis) or belief (doxa) about the sensible world. He grants imagination importance in the realm of sensation, but that is a dubious distinction, one that keeps imagination far from the serious work of intellectual cognition. As Lloyd Gerson notes, imagination in Plato’s philosophy is in fact the exact opposite of the highest sort of cognition. In Plato’s wake, phantasia quickly grew in popularity, figuring into all of the other major traditions of Greek philosophy, whether that of the Aristotelians, Stoics, or Neoplatonists. In each it enjoyed greater prominence than it had in Plato’s philosophy, and in each it had a more substantial role in knowledge acquisition, but nowhere was the cognitive value of imagination developed more fully than in the Aristotelian tradition. This chapter describes the cognitive function of imagination according to Aristotle as well as various of his commentators, principally Avicenna, Aver­ roes, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. In the philosophy of each, imagination has the crucial function of processing sensory data and trans­ mitting it to the intellect in a form that the intellect can understand, a pro­ cess described in detail below. The intellect cannot in normal circumstances understand without imagination, a mental faculty that makes communi­ cation between sense and intellect possible. Recognizing that imagination was regularly credited with cognitive significance, we might then reconsider the cognitive role it occupies elsewhere in medieval thought, especially in imaginative meditations on Christ. There, as the following chapters will ar­ gue, imagination operates in its cognitive aspect, in addition to its affective one, to draw the soul closer to God. Although concerned especially with Aristotelian imagination, however, this chapter begins with a brief discus­ sion of Neoplatonic imagination, and this because Neoplatonic writings on the topic have figured disproportionately in modern studies of medieval imagination. As a result, some of the claims made for medieval imagination entire most accurately describe Neoplatonic imagination, and this chapter’s first project is to distinguish between the two.

. See, for instance, Plato’s Republic, 511e, and Philebus, 59a. . Gerard Watson’s effort to elevate Plato’s concept of imagination by defining it as “noth­ ing less than our knowledge of the sensible world” is fraught for the same reason (Phantasia in Classical Thought, 15). . Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 37. Sheppard likewise notes, “For Plato, phantasia and ‘phantastic’ belong firmly to the realm of appearance and illusion” (“Plato and the Neopla­ tonists,” 15).

Aristotelian Imagination / 25

Platonic and Neoplatonic Imagination Plato had little to say about imagination, but the same is not true of Neo­ platonists. Neoplatonic imagination was essentially a hybrid creation, inheriting essential features from both Platonic and Aristotelian philoso­ phy. From Aristotle, the Neoplatonists adopt the notion that imagination occupies an intermediary position between sense and reason. They typi­ cally locate imagination at the intersection between the higher and lower souls, and sometimes duplicate it so that one imagination pertains to each. At the same time, Neoplatonists inherit from Plato a fundamental distrust of the sensible, material world, expressed in a doctrine of forms that alienates the true essence of a thing from its material instantiation. Sensation accord­ ingly contributes little to intellectual apprehension, which consists in the understanding of forms. Although inhabiting a location similar to that of Aristotelian imagination, then, Neoplatonic imagination performs a more marginal role in knowledge acquisition. For Aristotle and Aristotelians, knowledge begins with sense, which means that imagination, in its capacity as intermediary between sense and intellect, functions crucially in the pro­ cess of understanding. The Platonic tradition grants sensation a less construc­ tive role in understanding and consequently requires less of imagination. In Neoplatonic thought, imagination’s alignment with the senses means that it functions most often to impede understanding, and it is therefore no sur­ prise that the tradition’s dominant attitude toward phantasia is negative.10 Medieval Christian Neoplatonism is another matter. There, the domi­ nant model of knowledge acquisition maps a trajectory from visible to in­ visible things. The rigid barrier between the sensible and intelligible worlds witnessed in the Platonic tradition is tempered in various ways. Accord­ ing to the Dionysian doctrine of divine self-effusion, for instance, God is present throughout creation.11 An emanationist God extends his influence . On Neoplatonic philosophies of imagination, see Blumenthal, “Neoplatonic Interpreta­ tions of Aristotle on ‘Phantasia’”; Gerson, Ancient Epistemology, 147–51; and G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, 96–133. . As Gerard Watson writes, “In the Neoplatonic treatment of phantasia the Platonist and Aristotelian views are thoroughly mixed” (Phantasia in Classical Thought, 96). . For an introduction to Plato’s doctrine of forms and its role in his theory of knowledge, see N. White, “Plato’s Metaphysical Epistemology.” 10. Gerard Watson writes, “The negative attitude to phantasia, in spite of the interest in it, as we have seen, is the most striking aspect of the Neoplatonic treatment of phantasia” (Phantasia in Classical Thought, 131). 11. See Gregory, “Platonic Inheritance,” 74–76.

26 / Chapter One

down the chain of being, with the result that all created things participate in God, albeit with differing levels of intensity. The properly disposed in­ dividual, perceiving the divine influence within those things, can follow them back to God. Of course, it is unwise to generalize overmuch regarding medieval Neoplatonism. Each of the principal transmitters of Neoplatonic philosophy to the medieval West, Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius, of­ fered a distinctive interpretation of the tradition.12 Nonetheless, the general conviction that knowledge proceeds from visible to invisible things is hard to escape. Augustine, for instance, counsels his interlocutor to advance with him in instruction “in order that we might cross over from the corporeal to the incorporeal.”13 Referring to Augustine’s comments in this text, Janet Coleman writes, “This theory of mind’s education . . . would be the most influential paradigm for all western theories of knowledge during the mid­ dle ages until the reintroduction of Aristotle’s writings.”14 The theory that knowledge proceeds from the corporeal to incorporeal resonates in much twelfth-century Latin literature, whose Neoplatonic investments have been ably studied.15 Thus, Winthrop Wetherbee calls the movement from vis­ ible to invisible things “the archetypal pattern of Christian allegory” in the period.16 According to this perspective, symbols saturate the sensible world, and the assiduous intellect can profitably decode them.17 Imagination figures into this movement at a relatively early stage, but it nonetheless performs work that is necessary and, potentially, construc­ tive. According to the twelfth-century, pseudo-Augustinian Liber de spiritu et anima, “When the mind wants to rise up from lower to higher things, we first meet with sense, then imagination, then reason, intellection, and understanding, and at the top is wisdom.”18 The information that imagi­ nation provides to the intellect in this scheme is largely symbolic, hinting through its visibility at invisible truths. Reason initiates the real work of

12. On the different brands of Neoplatonism espoused by these three, see Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 49–98. There were others who influenced medieval Neoplatonism, such as Martianus Capella, Avicenna, and John Scotus Eriugena. However, there is no denying the domi­ nance of the three thinkers listed above. 13. Augustine, De musica, VI.i.2, p. 8: “ut a corporea ad incorporea transeamus.” 14. Coleman, “Christian Platonism of St. Augustine,” 31–32. 15. See especially Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry; Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society; and von Ivánka, Plato christianus. 16. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry, 8. 17. On symbolism in twelfth-century writings, see Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 99–145. 18. Liber de spiritu et anima, PL 40:786C: “Cum ab inferioribus ad superiora volumus ascen­ dere, prius occurrit nobis sensus, deinde imaginatio, postea ratio, intellectus et intelligentia, et in summo est sapientia.”

Aristotelian Imagination / 27

understanding by delving beneath the symbols that imagination presents to it. We will see that this is not the same intermediary work performed by Aristotelian imagination, which transmits not symbols but carefully configured data. In medieval Neoplatonic writings, imagination is easily distracted by the glitz of the sensible world. When it leads the mind to be equally distracted, imagination obstructs understanding. As Bartholomaeus Anglicus explains in his encyclopedic De proprietatibus rerum, the more the individual immerses himself in bodily things through imagination, “the more slowly and imperfectly he understands.”19 Imagination relies for its value on a powerful reason that constantly supervises it. It communicates with reason, but is not always worth listening to, and reason bears the ul­ timate responsibility for curbing imagination’s unproductive impulses and nurturing its productive ones. Imagination participates in the cognitive process, then, insofar as it inter­ acts with reason, whether serving as reason’s antagonist or assistant. Given that imagination serves above all to convey information to reason, its value not surprisingly depends on the quality of the information it delivers. To ap­ preciate the nature of imagination’s activity, we might turn to the allegories of Richard of St. Victor, which show with unusual depth what Neoplatonic imagination was considered capable of doing in the realm of knowledge acquisition. Richard’s writings feature prominently in modern studies of medieval imagination, a consequence not only of his evident interest in the topic but also of his stature.20 There is no disputing the longevity of Rich­ ard’s influence or his reputation as an authority, even the medieval author­ ity, on contemplation.21 That he was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism is a given. Dispute on the topic exists only with respect to the relative influ­ ence of Augustine, Boethius, and Dionysius on his thought.22 His central 19. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, III.xiii, p. 160: “quanto plus se corpori immerserit, tanto tardius et imperfectius intelligit.” Bartholomaeus is well-known for bring­ ing various philosophical traditions to bear on his work, but his account of imagination is largely Neoplatonic. On the importance of this text to late-medieval theories of imagination, see Minnis, “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” 239. 20. From Jones’s 1914 article “Imaginatif in Piers Plowman” through Minnis’s recent “Medi­ eval Imagination and Memory,” Richard is regularly cited. For more on Richard’s thought, see Chatillon, “Richard de Saint-Victor”; McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 398–418; Javelet, Image et ressemblance; and Zinn, introduction to Richard of St. Victor, 1–49. 21. Dante and Bonaventure famously praised Richard’s eminence as a contemplative, praise cited by Zinn in the introduction to Richard of St. Victor, 1. Richard’s much-quoted definition of contemplation, “Contemplatio est libera mentis perspicacia in sapientiae spectacula cum admiratione suspensa,” is in Benjamin Major I.4, PL 196:67D. 22. Chase emphasizes Augustine and Dionysius’s influence on Richard’s thought (Angelic Wisdom), whereas Coulter, disagreeing with Chase, emphasizes Boethius as well as Augustine

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role in shaping views of medieval imagination justifies our taking a look at his treatment of imagination in some depth. What we find is an appreciative assessment of imagination that emphasizes its power and necessity more than its unreliability. Sometimes, certainly, imagination tempts the mind with seductive, ignoble images and leads it to value corporeal over incor­ poreal things. Imagination can also wander from one sensation to another, without promoting the rational consideration that makes imagination valu­ able. Richard, however, attributes such disreputable work to the “bestial imagination” (imaginatio . . . bestialis) and expressly excludes it from the work of contemplation.23 The path toward contemplation that Richard charts in the Twelve Patriarchs, also known as Benjamin Minor, focuses on the “rational imagination” (imaginatio . . . rationalis).24 The text presents Richard’s allegory of Jacob’s twelve children, and in it imagination contributes significantly to the mind’s ascent from visible to invisible things, an ascension that lies at the heart of Richard’s contemplative program. Richard explains that the individual is “raised up by means of the ladder of exterior knowledge to the under­ standing of invisible things,” a feat it cannot accomplish without the assis­ tance of imagination.25 Imagination contributes to this journey not only by transmitting sensory images but by composing its own, as Richard explains through reference to Rachel’s handmaiden, Bala, and her two children, Dan and Naphtali. Bala and her children serve Rachel, the personification of reason, and each represents imagination. In the person of Bala, imagination ministers to reason. As it is embodied by the children, imagination has a special facility with similitudes. In Dan’s case, imagination imagines only visible things, whereas Naphtali can rise to invisible ones. Accordingly, the lesser child, Dan, knows only corporeal things and acts primarily to order thoughts so as to ward off sin. In that vein, he evokes images of hell to keep the individual from submitting to carnal pleasures.26 The better child, Naphtali, “rises to the understanding of invisible things by means of the

(Per visibilia ad invisibilia, 63–64). Chenu and McGinn likewise comment on Boethius’s influ­ ence (Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, 75; McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 400). 23. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, xvi, PL 196:11B. 24. Ibid. 25. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, lxii, PL 196:44D: “per exterioris scientiae scalam ad invisibilium intelligentiam sublevatur.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 119. On the im­ portance of this progression from the visible to the invisible in Richard’s theology, see Coulter, Per visibilia ad invisibilia. 26. Richard describes Dan most fully at Benjamin Minor, xviii–xxi. On Dan and Naphtali, see DiLorenzo, “Imagination as the First Way,” 85–92.

Aristotelian Imagination / 29

form of visible things.”27 His special talent is imagining heaven. Based on biblical descriptions of heaven as a land flowing with milk and honey, rich with jewels and precious metals, Naphtali can form an image of heaven in which none of those things exists in its own nature (per speciem), but only through likeness (per similitudinem).28 The mind cannot arrive at invisible things without imagination, and this ensures its importance to Richard’s theology. Richard grants imagination its greatest significance in his Mystical Ark, or Benjamin Major, his magnum opus on contemplation. There, it participates in the first three of six levels of contemplation, described allegorically through the figure of the ark. The first level of contemplation “is in im­ agination and according to (secundum) imagination only,” the second is “in imagination and according to reason,” and the third is “in reason and according to imagination.”29 In the first stage, imagination teaches one to devalue earthly things and rise above them. It is especially appropriate for the unlettered and for beginners.30 In the second, imagination passes im­ ages of visible things along to reason so that reason might look to their na­ ture (ratio) and, as a result, marvel at the order of creation and the wisdom of its creator. In the third stage, reason perceives invisible goods through the visible objects pictured in imagination. Richard explains that, because “all corporeal things have some similitude to invisible goods,” the soul has a natural inclination to seek spiritual, invisible goods by means of visible ones.31 Acting at the height of its powers, imagination here “brings reason to that place to which it did not know how to go by itself.”32 In the final three stages, imagination cannot act, but it can be pondered. In the fourth level of contemplation, which consists of self-knowledge used as a means to know God, Richard presents imagination’s creation of im­ ages at will as a counterpart to the divine act of creation. To understand imagination’s image-making, then, is to understand in some measure di­ vine creation. Moreover, Richard ties the work of imagination overtly to the 27. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, xviii, PL 196:12D: “Nephtalim per rerum visibil­ ium formam surgit ad rerum invisibilium intelligentiam.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 70. 28. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, xv, PL 196:11A. 29. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major, I.vi, PL 196:70B: “Primum itaque est in imagina­ tione et secundum solam imaginationem. Secundum est in imaginatione secundum rationem. Tertium est in ratione secundum imaginationem.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 161. 30. See Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major, II.i, PL 196:79A-B. 31. Ibid., II.xii, PL 196:90B: “Habent tamen corporea omnia ad invisibilia bona similitudi­ nem aliquam.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 191. 32. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major, II.xvii, PL 196:96A: “illuc eam conducit quo per se ire nescivit.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 199.

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individual’s status as image of God: “In the foregoing you will discover a very remarkable thing. God reserved the truth of things, which is the su­ preme truth, for Himself, but He conceded to His image the formation of images of things at whatever time.”33 Since man is image, it is especially ap­ propriate that he think in images, an act that, in turn, reflects his imageness. What is so “very remarkable” about Richard’s insight about imagination is that imagination reflects the status of human knowledge relative to God in a way that encapsulates the purpose of the fourth level. As God is truth and man is image, so self-knowledge reveals, as if imagistically, divine truth. Richard’s imagination is thus a necessary, albeit indirect aid to rational apprehension. However, it is easy to lose sight of imagination’s productiv­ ity given Richard’s entertaining account of its shortcomings. One of imag­ i­nation’s personifications in the Benjamin Minor, Bala, is so garrulous that Rachel, or reason, has great trouble restraining her. Richard has Bala act as “decrepit old men and inveterate old women” do, still talking when nobody, including reason, is listening to her.34 Even when transmitting suitable information to reason, imagination remains a servant who dirt­ ies herself in the streets of visible things in order to carry them back to her mistress. Rachel/reason preserves her purity by remaining in a bedchamber that imagination, as servant, is not permitted to enter.35 Occasionally fool­ ish and always subordinate to reason, imagination is nonetheless crucial to Richard’s brand of contemplation. Although he has some unkind words for it when he describes the final three levels of contemplation in Benjamin Major, when reason should jettison imagination entirely, those comments do not undermine the important work that he assigns it. It is thanks to imag­ ination, rather, that reason can ultimately ascend to the higher reaches of contemplation. Richard’s imagination helps the intellect to begin to think past visible things, but imagination in the Aristotelian works discussed below presents to the intellect its proper object, namely, the intelligible content within sensory data. The difference between medieval Neoplatonic and Aristote­ lian imagination is not one between a negative and positive imagination. Rather, with respect to imagination’s role in cognition, the difference is more subtle. In both cases, imagination serves an intermediary function, 33. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Major, IV.xx, PL 196:162A: “In quo et illud invenies valde notabile, quod rerum veritatem, quae summa veritas est, reservavit sibi, rerum vero imagines qualibet hora formandas suae concessit imagini.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 298. 34. Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, vi, PL 196:6A: “decrepiti senes, vel inveteratae anus.” Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 59. 35. See Richard of St. Victor, Benjamin Minor, v, PL 196:5A-B.

Aristotelian Imagination / 31

providing the intellect with access to sensible things. However, for Richard, imagination filters sensory data, ideally blocking the bad, as well as generat­ ing similitudes to invisible things based on visible ones; for the scholastic philosophers treated below, imagination in its cognitive role participates in understanding directly, presenting sensory data to the intellect such that the intellect can know. The greater intellectual significance of the sensible world in Aristotelian philosophy extends to imagination, leaving it with the task of paring down sensory data to the point that the intellect can find intelligi­ ble data within it. Aristotelian imagination, in other words, deals not with symbols but with truth. As discussed in the introduction, this is not the usual characterization of medieval imagination. It is more often branded “a relatively unimportant faculty” or “a relatively low faculty” whose value is determined by the extent to which it obeys reason.36 Mary Carruthers writes that imagination’s (and memory’s) images have no “objective truth content,” or “have it at best incidentally.”37 But, in the Aristotelian tradition, objective truth content is exactly what imagination’s images possess, even though that content cannot be accessed without the aid of the agent intellect. Historians of philosophy are familiar with the role that I am claiming for medieval imagination,38 but it is less familiar to those in other disciplines. Moreover, the cognitive func­ tion of imagination has received little study from any discipline in recent years.39 For that reason, the rest of this chapter offers a fairly detailed account of its role in the cognitive process as described by Aristotle and medieval Ar­ istotelians. The chapter provides the foundation for later chapters, which ar­ gue that it is imagination’s cognitive function that most influences medieval meditations on Christ. Its capacity to mediate between sense and intellect thus constitutes its cognitive power and, in part, its devotional one.

Aristotle’s Imagination Aristotle placed great importance on imagination and made it a discrete and reliable faculty of the soul. He begins his famously confounding account of 36. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse, 170; and Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B Text, 92. See also Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 74. 37. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 120. 38. For instance, Hatfield lays it out clearly in “Cognitive Faculties,” 955–57. 39. The most in-depth studies of imagination’s role in medieval philosophy are Bundy, Theory of Imagination; Wolfson, “Internal Senses”; and Harvey, Inward Wits. However, those of Bundy and Wolfson, published in 1927 and 1935, respectively, are rather dated, and Harvey’s contains many inaccuracies. Gerard Watson devotes some attention to the Middle Ages in Phantasia in Classical Thought.

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phantasia in De anima, III.3, by isolating imagination in its technical aspect from its metaphorical connotations. Imagination in his discussion is “that in virtue of which we say that an image occurs to us and not as we speak of it metaphorically” (De anima, III.3, 428a1–2).40 Disputing Plato without naming him, Aristotle explains that phantasia is neither sensation nor belief, nor a combination of the two. Instead, he gives “the first extended analyti­ cal description of imagining as a distinct faculty of the soul.”41 He assigns imagination functions pertaining not only to sensation but also to intel­ lectual apprehension, making imagination a sense faculty that participates, in admittedly obscure but nonetheless crucial ways, in any act of human knowing. Whether used to indicate mental acuity or weakness, “imagination” in its modern incarnation quietly evokes certain features of its predecessor, but shows little trace of the most sophisticated functions of Aristotelian imagination. For us, imagination deals with mental pictures, but as medi­ eval philosophers discussed it, it did more than retain and reorder pictures of perceived objects. The Latin translation imaginatio puts a premium on images in its very etymology in a way that the Greek term does not.42 For evidence that imagination can be understood differently, we can turn to Hebrew, which is credited with an especially powerful concept of imagina­ tion because the word for imagination, yetser, derives from the same root as the Hebrew words for “creator,” “creation,” and “create.”43 Aristotelian imagination is more than a tool for simple mental picturing, and for this reason it is easy to misunderstand. We might readily believe that imagina­ tion was responsible for sensory misperceptions (failing to see the spokes, for instance, in a moving wheel), but there is little in our everyday con­

40. Nussbaum writes that Aristotle uses the phrase “kata metaphoran” (translated above as “metaphorically”) “to designate a transfer or extension of a term to an area where it does not strictly apply—a conscious shift away from the basic ordinary usage” (Aristotle’s De motu animalium, 253). Although the term “phantasia” was new, she sees Aristotle as excluding the recently developed meaning, “mere show” (254), thus isolating a technical understanding of phantasia from a figurative one. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, II.xxix: “secundum quam fantasma aliquod nobis fieri dicimus, et . . . non aliquid secundum metaphoram dici­ mus.” I cite the William of Moerbeke Latin translation of the De anima as the version most rel­ evant to the Latin West, although Ross’s English translation and his line references are based on the Greek text. The best edition of William of Moerbeke’s translation is in the Leonine edition of Aquinas’s commentary on the text, Opera omnia 45.1, which I cite here. The numbering of the Latin text is slightly different, so I give book and chapter number instead. 41. Schofield, “Aristotle on the Imagination,” 249. 42. The word “phantasia” derives from the Greek verb “phainesthai,” meaning “to appear.” 43. See, for instance, Kearney, Wake of Imagination, 39.

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cept of imagination to suggest that it could function in every regular act of knowledge acquisition. Aristotle’s imagination participates in a wide range of activities, so wide that it is difficult to find a coherent theory of imagination at the heart of them. It is an internal sense faculty that retains images of things sensed, creates mental images of things not sensed, creates dream images, facilitates consideration of likely future events (Aristotle’s example is of a beacon that indicates the coming of enemy troops, De anima, III.7, 431b5–6), catalyzes desire so as to incite movement, and presents images to the intellect that enable its understanding.44 The final function, which forms the focus of this chapter, places imagination in the province of the intellect, and it is worth emphasizing that, in this context, it operates without the penchant for error that otherwise characterizes it. Undoubtedly, imagination falters regularly, as when it inaccurately interprets sense images. Aristotle admits that “imaginings are for the most part false” (De anima, III.3, 428a12).45 He nonetheless distinguishes the purely sensory functions of imagination from its role in understanding. Granting imagination in its lower-level sensory functions to all animals, he endows only rational animals, in other words, humans, with imaginations capable of generating conviction and contribut­ ing to understanding. Insofar as imagination conveys data to the intellect, it is perfectly reliable, having an elevated function in that context that is reflected in its highest ap­ plication, prophecy. A strong imaginative faculty was considered by various Arabic and Jewish philosophers, including Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Mo­ ses Maimonides, to be a prerequisite for prophetic visions.46 The eleventhcentury Persian philosopher Avicenna, or Ibn Sina, thus explains that one pathway to prophecy resides in a pronounced and potent ( fortissima) imagi­ native power.47 Thanks to it, “a [thing’s] likeness often appears and seems to those who perceive it as if the image itself were speaking, as if they heard the words that they held and read.”48 Imagination accordingly ac­ counts for the vividness of images in visions and, apparently, for visions’

44. Our common association of imagination with creativity seems to postdate Aristotle. Gerard Watson traces its origins to the Stoics in Phantasia in Classical Thought, 59–95. 45. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, II.xxix: “fantasie autem plures false.” 46. Hasse, “Soul’s Faculties,” 317. 47. Avicenna discusses two other mechanisms for prophecy. See his full discussion in Liber de anima, IV.2, 2:12–34; and also Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 116–26. 48. Avicenna, Liber de anima, IV.ii, 2:19: “multotiens apparet similitudo et videtur eis quod id quod apprehendunt sit locutio illius imaginis [literally “as if it were a speaking of the image itself”] veluti verba audita quae tenent et legunt.”

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accuracy. Among the soul’s powers, imagination is particularly receptive to divine influence and has a unique capacity to translate that influence into lived experience. This aspect of imagination appears as well in the philos­ ophy of Latin thinkers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. It likewise informs medieval literature, which often positions imagination at the juncture between the earthly and the divine. Thus, in Pearl, the dreamer gains access to spiritual understanding and heaven itself through a dream that imagination generates. While prophecy may reflect the highest capacity of the medieval imagi­ nation, this chapter focuses on the faculty’s more regular, everyday role in knowledge acquisition. Imagination’s cognitive function garners far more attention than prophecy in medieval sources, where it enables understand­ ing by bridging the perceptions of the senses and the knowledge of the in­ tellect. Aristotle’s own account is undeniably frustrating, and contemporary scholars of Aristotle’s psychology fundamentally disagree about the scope of its activities and its precise mechanisms.49 Their disagreement is anticipated by that of medieval philosophers, who devoted a great deal of attention to Aristotle’s principal work on the soul, the De anima, which includes his most extended consideration of imagination. Translated from Greek into Latin by James of Venice in the mid-twelfth century, the De anima became prominent in Latin scholasticism only in the thirteenth. The original translation was supplemented by those of Michael Scot, who translated the Arabic De anima into Latin in the 1220s or ‘30s, and William of Moerbeke, who produced the authoritative Latin translation from the Greek sometime before 1268. All together, a mass of almost five hundred manuscripts of the Latin De anima survives. Michael’s additional translation of Averroes’s commentary on the De anima and William’s translations of the ancient commentaries of Themistius and Philoponus, along with the separate translation of related texts such as Avicenna’s Liber de anima seu sextus naturalibus, brought a rich variety of Greek and Arabic views on the soul to the West.50 The importance of the De anima to medieval philosophy has accord­ ingly never been in dispute, although neither has its difficulty. Averroes, or 49. For some varying accounts of Aristotle’s imagination, see Frede, “Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle”; Wedin, Mind and Imagination, 23–159; G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, 14–37; Modrak, “Φαντασία Reconsidered,” and Aristotle, 81–110; Schofield, “Aristo­ tle on the Imagination”; and Rees, “Aristotle’s Treatment of Φαντασία.” 50. I use the term “Arabic” rather than “Arab” because, as Taylor and Adamson note, the philosophers who wrote in Arabic were often not Arab (introduction to Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, 3–4). Neither did all of the philosophers in this tradition write in Arabic (Avicenna, for instance, wrote some of his works in Persian), but their language unites them more than their ethnicity.

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Ibn Rushd, the eminent twelfth-century Islamic philosopher from Muslim Spain, thus acknowledges general consternation with the text but blames his predecessors for effecting it: “moderns, believing this book to be impos­ sible to understand, dismiss the books of Aristotle and consider those of commentators, particularly on the topic of the soul.”51 Averroes criticizes in particular his illustrious predecessor Avicenna for misinforming read­ ers about Aristotle’s doctrine, claiming that Avicenna properly understood Aristotle only when it came to his Dialectic.52 Nonetheless, the controversy elicited in the West by Averroes’s own commentary undermines his claims for a transparent Aristotelian philosophy of the soul. The sketchiness of Aristotle’s account promoted disparate interpretations, both medieval and modern, and the pronounced disagreements among medieval interpreters of the text steeped it in controversy. Its particularly offending interpretation by Averroes, at least from the perspective of Christian doctrine, placed the text at the heart of debates about the very viability of scholastic theology in the 1270s, and active discussion of the text in the West continued into the mid-fourteenth century. Western medieval commentators nonetheless established a basic con­ sensus about the operations of imagination that are not explicit in (and are variously faithful to) Aristotle’s philosophy. Although their individual accounts vary, sometimes quite substantially, they tend to agree that imagi­ nation’s most important non-prophetic function is to connect the senses to the intellect, providing a certain mechanism for knowledge acquisition that is faithful to Aristotle’s conviction that all knowledge begins with the senses, or experience.53 Because Aristotle assigns sensation and intellection to dif­ ferent parts of the soul, his designation of sense as the origin of all knowl­ edge requires him to account for their communicability, to explain how the senses interact with the intellect so as to generate knowledge. However, be­ fore considering medieval answers to this question and imagination’s role in them, we need to consider some other features of Aristotle’s philosophy that inform them. For Aristotle, the work of imagination follows on that of the senses and of common sense. After a sense receives data from an appropriate sense object, 51. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.30, p. 470: “Moderni dimittunt libros Aristotelis et considerant libros expositorum, et maxime in anima, credendo quod iste liber impossible est ut intelligatur.” 52. Immediately following the preceding quotation, Averroes writes, “Et hoc est propter Avicennam, qui non imitatus est Aristotelem nisi in Dialectica” (III.30, p. 470). 53. See, for instance, Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, 981a2: “hominibus autem scientia et ars per experientiam accidit” (“knowledge and art come to men through experience”).

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it makes some first-level judgments, for instance that this object is white, that object cold, and so on. Regarding these sorts of judgments, as long as the sense faculty is healthy and is not overwhelmed by extremes, such as extreme cold or extreme brightness, it does not err. He writes, “We are not mistaken on the point that there is white, but about whether this white object is this thing or another thing we may be mistaken” (De anima, III.3, 428b21–2).54 Common sense accomplishes a higher level of sensory data processing and is more susceptible to error. The source of each individual sense, it perceives what is common to more than one sense, or common sensibles (Aristotle’s examples are movement, rest, number, shape, and size), distinguishes among the perceptions of different senses, and allows people to sense that they are sensing. The succeeding and final sensory stage is imagination, which Aristotle defines as “a movement taking place as a result of actual sense-perception” (De anima, III.3, 429a1–2).55 When a sense faculty actively perceives, it moves imagination to act, and im­ agination, in turn, moves the intellect. Aristotle does not explain what this movement consists of, more often asserting imagination’s tasks than describing how it performs them. His most ambitious claim for imagina­ tion is that “the soul never thinks without an image,” an image provided by imagination (De anima, III.7, 431a16–17).56 Every act of understanding, therefore, involves imagination. He makes the same assertion in his De memoria, there offering a geometric analogy. As we cannot think about the general concept “triangle” without imagining a certain triangle of a certain size, so, apparently, we can never understand without making use of some mental image.57 One might end an account of imagination’s role in understanding there, satisfied that imagination in Aristotle’s scheme functions only to give the intellect an image of an object when the intellect thinks about the object’s essence,58 but Aristotle’s comments require a more interesting explanation of the intellect’s dependence on imagination. As the De anima continues, Aristotle writes, “That which can think, therefore, thinks the forms in im­

54. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, II.xxx: “quod quidem enim album, [sensus] non mentitur, si autem hoc album aut aliud, mentitur.” 55. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, II.xxx: “fantasia utique erit motus a sensu secun­ dum actum facto.” 56. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, III.vi: “nequaquam sine fantasmate intelligit anima.” 57. See Aristotle, De memoria 1, 450a2–7. 58. See, for instance, Schofield, “Aristotle on Imagination,” 271–76; and Modrak, “Φαντασία Reconsidered,” 57–58.

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ages” (De anima, III.7, 431b2).59 Imagination’s images, or phantasmata, not only give the intellect something to focus on when it understands, but provide the undistilled content of its understanding. To see precisely what Aristotle means by thinking “the forms in images,” however, we need to look briefly at Aristotle’s physics, which he develops in contrast to Plato’s. The two phi­ losophers offer competing answers to the same basic question, which is how our experience of the material world contributes (if at all) to knowl­ edge of non-material realities like goodness or, more mundanely, treeness. For both, true knowledge concerns not individual, material, changeable things, such as a particular house, but general, unindividuated categories or universals, in this case houseness generally speaking, in other words, a form that can shelter people and goods. In Aristotle’s words, “Actual per­ ception is of particulars, while knowledge is of universals” (De anima, II.5, 417b22–3).60 Material things, because always in a state of flux and decay, cannot provide a basis for true knowledge, a common principle that Bon­ aventure succinctly expresses: “There can be no certain knowledge except where there is immutability on the part of the object known and infalli­ bility on the part of the knower.”61 Only a thing’s form—its quiddity or whatness—can be known, properly speaking. However, whereas Plato had exported forms to a separate realm, Aristotle locates them within material things, allowing universals to be known through the perception of the ma­ terial world. Aquinas, albeit with bias, explains the difference, “We can see that the intellect’s proper object is the quiddity of a thing—a quiddity that is not separated from things, as the Platonists claimed. Thus that which is the object of our intellect is not something existing outside sense objects, as the Platonists claimed, but something existing in sense objects.”62 Aristotle 59. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, III.vi: “Species quidem igitur intellectivum in fantasmatibus intelligit.” 60. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, II.xii: “singularium qui secundum actum sensus, sciencia autem universalium.” Albertus Magnus distinguishes between the objects of sense and those of intellect in this way: “That which pertains to one thing and not another is proper to the thing and singular, and is something material and individual. Those things which are common and so pertain to one thing and another in the same way without doubt are universals, which alone the intellect receives” (“Hoc enim quod convenit uni et non alio, proprium est et singu­ lare, et est aliquid de materialibus et individuantibus. Quaecumque autem sunt communia et ita uni sicut alii et eodem modo convenientia, absque dubio sunt universalia, quae solus accipit intellectus”), De anima, II.3.4, Opera omnia 7.1:102. 61. Bonaventure, Quaestiones disputatae de scientia Christi, iv, Opera omnia 5:23: “cognitio certitudinalis esse non potest, nisi sit ex parte scibilis immutabilitas, et infallibilitas ex parte scientis.” Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 135. 62. Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri De Anima, III.2, Opera omnia 45.1:212–13: “proprium obiectum intellectus est quiditas rei, que non est separata a rebus, ut Platonici posuerunt. Unde

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accordingly makes the material world an object of the intellect, for as the intellect understands thanks to data it discovers in the physical universe, the universe itself becomes intellectually significant. Knowledge originates with sensation because the senses receive, albeit in undistilled form, the data that the intellect requires in order to know. Accordingly, when we perceive, our senses receive information about a material object, and in a form acceptable to them. Following a general philosophical principle that what is known must be proportioned to its knower, Aristotle explains, “It is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form” (De anima, III.8, 431b20–432a1).63 The sense faculty receives not the material stone but information about the stone, what is generally called by Aristotle’s Latin successors the sensible form or species of the stone.64 The perceived object makes an impression on the sense organ that is somehow like that object (De anima, II.5, 418a5–6), and the soul is thus informed by the object. The senses perceive in this sensible species an object’s size or pitch or odor, common sense uses the sensible species to perceive features common to more than one sense, among other things, and imagination reconfigures that data into a form that the intellect can use. Sensible species thus provide information appropriate to sense, which is information about an object’s sensible features, but sense also receives infor­ mation about the object’s form or essence. The senses perceive the material features of a particular object, and the intellect knows the immaterial form common to that object and others of its species. As Boethius, in a muchquoted line, affirms, “Sense is concerned with particulars, the intellect with universals.”65 This intelligible content, often called by later philosophers the intelligible species, is contained within the sensible species. Intelligible species contain data about the object’s quiddity or form, which the intellect considers when it understands. Proportioned to the intellect rather than sense, such species communicate data only about the object’s essence. The

id quod est obiectum intellectus nostri non est aliquid extra res sensibiles existens, ut Platonici posuerunt, set aliquid in rebus sensibilibus existens.” Trans. Pasnau, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, 357. 63. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, III.vii: “non enim lapis in anima est, set species.” 64. “Species” here means “representation.” Aristotle uses the Greek term “eidos,” which translates as either “species” or “form.” “Species” becomes the common Latin translation in the thirteenth century, as we will see in chapter 2. 65. Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, V.4: “sensus est particularium, et intellectus uni­ versalium.”

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intelligible species is the intellect’s object in the way that the sensible spe­ cies is sense’s object or, as Aristotle puts it, “To the thinking soul images (phantasmata) serve as sense-perceptions” (De anima, III.7, 431a14–15).66 Imagination’s images, particularly the intelligible forms within them, are to the intellect as sense-perceptions are to sense. Thus, when Aristotle says that one who can think “thinks the forms in images,” he means that the thinking intellect focuses on the intelligible form or species within imagination’s im­ age or phantasm.67 The intellect’s object accordingly exists within the sense perception. The relationship between those objects is analogous to that be­ tween the concrete material object and its form. The intelligible object exists within the sensible one, but only the intellect can comprehend it. The intellect cannot focus on the intelligible species as it exists within the sensible species of the sense faculties or in common sense, but can only retrieve its data from imagination’s sensible species, more specifically called its phantasm. Albertus Magnus suggests that this is because imagination contains sensible species in their least material form. He describes the dif­ ferent sensible species in the various sense powers through different grades of abstraction, assigning imagination the second grade. The first belongs to sense, which requires the presence of a sense object in order to perceive. One cannot perceive a rock unless the rock is present. The sense faculty con­ tains sensible species that represent the material object but are not them­ selves material. Because it cannot receive the material object as material, the sense faculty receives the sensible species or form that transmits information about the material object, and this separation of species from matter marks the first and lowest level of abstraction. Albert assigns no separate grade of abstraction to common sense, and so proceeds to imagination, which re­ ceives the sensible species without the presence of the object. Imagination is still a sensory faculty because it considers “appendiciis materiae,” the mate­ rial conditions that make something individual rather than universal.68 The sensible species in imagination, then, has been separated from matter, but not from the object’s material conditions. It has been pared down to its bar­ est materiality and can in that form be acted on by the intellect. Albert here

66. Trans. William of Moerbeke, De anima, III.vi: “Intellective autem anime fantasmata ut sensibilia sunt.” 67. “Phantasm” sometimes describes an image in memory as well as one in imagination, but in Aristotelian psychology, memory’s phantasms typically originate in imagination. 68. Albertus Magnus, De anima, II.3.4, Opera omnia 7.1:101. Avicenna offers a similar read­ ing; see Avicenna’s Psychology, c. 7, pp. 38–39.

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attempts to explain what his predecessors tend to take for granted, which is that imagination’s phantasm alone offers intelligible data to the intellect in the form in which the intellect can receive it. He seems eager to reduce the distance between sense and intellect, but making imagination’s image less material does not make it immaterial. He therefore takes us back to the problem—the fundamental difference between sense and intellect and yet their need to communicate—with which we began. Aristotle certainly has no doubt that the two can and do communicate with each other. As Dorothea Frede writes, “It is undeniable that Aristotle displays scientific optimism when he describes how the mind progresses from sense-perception to knowledge.”69 Aristotle designates understanding as the soul’s highest and defining activity and believes that it falls within the capacity of the intellect, one of the soul’s faculties, actually to achieve understanding. As Aquinas much later explains, “Human beings would not have been adequately established by nature if they did not have in them­ selves principles by means of which they could carry out their operation, which is to cognize intellectively.”70 Since cognition begins with sense and ends with the intellect, it would seem reasonable that imagination, as the last sense power, would have some role in bridging the divide between sense and intellect. Nonetheless, as a sense power—Averroes writes that it is “with sense and in sense and similar to sense in all its dispositions”71— imagination is hardly capable of extending into intellectual matters itself. Imagination can reduce the material baggage attached to the intelligible species, but it cannot independently remove all of it. Because any material thing is unintelligible insofar as it is particular and material, imagination is not sufficient in itself to inform the intellect. It must interact with the agent intellect, in a way only hinted at by Aristotle. Imagination’s contribution to the progression from sensory to intellectual cognition and the aid it receives in the process are topics addressed by Aristotle’s later Greek and Arabic in­ terpreters. In the course of their commentaries, imagination occasionally rises to the foreground, most dramatically in the philosophy of Averroes, and it is thanks to him that the medieval West inherits a multi-faceted and potentially controversial philosophy of imagination.

69. Frede, “Cognitive Role of Phantasia in Aristotle,” 292. 70. Aquinas, Sentencia libri De Anima, III.4, Opera omnia 45.1:220: “Non enim homo esset sufficienter a natura institutus si non haberet in se ipso principia quibus posset suam operatio­ nem explere, que est intelligere.” Trans. Pasnau, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, 367. 71. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, II.161, p. 376: “fuerit pos­ itum ipsam esse cum sensibili et in sensibili, et similem ei in omnibus suis dispositionibus.”

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Imagination in a No-Man’s-Land The earliest extant commentary on Aristotle’s De anima places imagination “as if in a no man’s land” (ho¯sper methorion) between sense and intellect.72 By defining imagination as the last of the sensory faculties while also giving it a crucial role in intellectual cognition, Aristotle associates only imagi­ nation with both sense and intellect, an anomaly that Themistius appears to register by placing imagination at least figuratively between the two. Of course, there can be no no-man’s-land between sense and intellect if think­ ing is to proceed from the former to the latter, so even as Themistius places imagination in the void, he uses it to fill the void, to place sense and intel­ lect within reach of each other. To account for this most puzzling move­ ment in the Aristotelian process of knowing, Aristotle’s commentators tend toward a common solution: imagination belongs to sense but is used by the intellect. To see more precisely how this works, we can look to the first commentator on the De anima to rise to prominence in the medieval West, Avicenna. Avicenna is the towering figure in the history of Arabic philoso­ phy and a reasonable starting point for this survey of medieval philosophi­ cal accounts of imagination.73 Copleston calls him “the real creator of a Scholastic system in the Islamic world,”74 and his system travels to the West primarily through partial translations of his massive encyclopedic work, the Kita¯b al-Shifa¯. The section of the work devoted to the soul, what was called the Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus, was translated into Latin at To­ ledo in the second half of the twelfth century. Van Riet estimates that the translation was produced between 1152 and 1166,75 and therefore shortly after the Latin text of Aristotle’s De anima itself, so it is not surprising that one finds mention of it in some of the earliest Western responses to Aristo­ tle’s philosophy of the soul. Avicenna’s Liber de anima is a treatise on the soul rather than an express commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, and Avicenna there develops his own views without feeling compelled to justify their fidelity to Aristotle’s. His in­ novations are easiest to perceive in his multiplication of the soul’s powers, 72. Themistius, Commentaire sur le traité De l’âme d’Aristote, bk. 5, p. 203: “quasi in con­ finio amborum posita.” Trans. Todd, On Aristotle’s On the Soul, 111. I quote from William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation. The English translation is based on the Greek text. 73. Adamson and Taylor write, “From the time of Avicenna’s death in the eleventh century, all philosophical work of note in Arabic responded to him” (Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, 6). 74. Copleston, History of Philosophy, 2:190. 75. See Van Riet’s discussion of the Latin tradition of the Liber de anima in the introduction to her edition of the work, 1:91*–136*. Her proposed date range is on p. 95*.

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including his division of imagination into two powers, a lower retentive imagi­nation, which preserves images, and a higher compositive imagination, which functions actively to combine images, present them to the intellect, and so on.76 It is the higher power that operates in dreams and prophecy, the activities of imagination that most interest Avicenna, as well as in cognition. Avicenna’s division of imagination is registered by some Latin scholastics, as by Albertus Magnus, who distinguishes between phantasia and imaginatio, but the general tendency was to equate them, as even Albert does on occa­ sion.77 Thomas Aquinas, for instance, writes that the preservation of sense images requires “phantasia or imagination, which are the same.”78 Avicenna devotes little attention to imagination’s cognitive function but outlines what becomes a standard interpretation in the West when he writes, “When the power of reason considers the individuals that are in imagina­ tion and is illuminated with the light of the agent intellect in us, of which we spoke before, the individuals are denuded of matter and its conditions and they are imprinted on the rational soul . . . because the consideration of these individuals prepares the soul so that what is abstracted might emanate into it by the agent intellect.”79 Understanding the process that Avicenna here describes requires some further explanation of Aristotle’s philosophy and Avicenna’s own. Although Aristotle never named an “agent” or “active intellect,” his early commentators almost universally credited him with cre­ ating one to supplement the potential intellect, itself named only once in the chapter of the De anima that has given rise to the most controversy, III.5. Aristotle there explains that, as in nature it is one thing to be matter and another to produce matter, so in the soul there is one intellect that becomes all things and another that produces all things (De anima, III.5, 430a14–15). In other words, one intellect is acted upon, becoming what it thinks, and

76. As we have seen, the tendency to duplicate imagination, to distinguish a higher from a lower sort, dates back to Neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle. 77. Albert notes that he follows convention by using “phantasia” to refer to both the higher and lower imagination. See Albertus Magnus, De anima, III.1.7, Opera omnia 7.1:172: “accip­ iemus modo generaliter phantasiam pro imaginatione et phantasia, vocantes totam illam ani­ mae potentiam phantasiam, secundum quam nobis fit phantasma.” See also III.1.8, Opera omnia 7.1:174–5. 78. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a.78.4, resp., Opera omnia 5:256: “phantasia sive imaginatio, quae idem sunt.” 79. Avicenna, Liber de anima, V.5, 2:127: “Virtus enim rationalis cum considerat singula quae sunt in imaginatione et illuminatur luce intelligentiae agentis in nos quam praediximus, fiunt nuda a materia et ab eius appendiciis et imprimuntur in anima rationali . . . quia ex consid­ eratione eorum aptatur anima ut emanet in eam ab intelligentia agente abstractio (mujarrad).” For a recent discussion of Avicenna’s psychology, see McGinnis, Avicenna, 89–148.

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this is the potential or material intellect.80 There is another that acts, mak­ ing what is potentially thinkable actually thinkable, and this, according to the standard interpretation, is the active intellect. The active intellect en­ ables potential objects of knowledge to be actually known, and this through a process typically called “abstraction.” Since Aristotle locates intelligible forms within sensible ones, he needs to provide a process by which the intellect extracts its intelligible object from the sensible one, presented to it by imagination. Abstraction is that process. The active intellect abstracts, or separates, the intelligible kernel from the sensible shell. In doing so, it turns what was a potential intelligible object (the intelligible form as it resides in the sensible species or phantasm) into an object that can actually be known. This actual intelligible object can be thought by the intellect, specifically by the potential intellect. It is the active intellect’s job, then, to isolate the intelligible form or species so that the potential intellect can become and know that form. It is far from clear that Aristotle would recognize this process so described as his own, but many of his commentators confidently attributed it to him. Accordingly, Avicenna describes the process of abstraction with attention to the active intellect and the “individuals” (or phantasms) within imagina­ tion. As he describes the process, the active intellect shines its light on the phantasm, which has the effect of distilling the intelligible content of the phantasm, removing from it anything pertaining to matter or sense. What remains after the distillation, the intelligible form, is then imprinted on the rational soul, which we might also call the potential intellect, and from this process knowledge results.81 Avicenna’s writing in the passage quoted above, as elsewhere, is less than clear, so to confirm that he understands the process in this way, we might look at a text unavailable to the Latin West, the Kita¯b al-Naja¯t. There, Avicenna writes, “Some power emanates from the active intellect and proceeds to the objects of imagination which are

80. “Potential intellect” is often interchangeable with “material intellect” and, sometimes, with “possible” or “passive intellect.” Although some philosophers, like Themistius and Aver­ roes, understand the passive intellect to be distinct from the potential intellect, such distinctions are not relevant to the current discussion. 81. The famous Persian philosopher al-Ghazali describes the process in similar terms, per­ haps no surprise given his familiarity with Avicenna’s philosophy. His description comes in the Maqa¯s·id al-fala¯sifa, or Intentions of the Philosophers, the only one of his works to be translated into Latin in the Middle Ages. Al-Ghazali writes, “The light of the agent intellect illuminates the forms present in imagination, and from these the abstracted universal comes into the soul, so that from the form of Peter one apprehends the universal ‘man’” (Algazel’s Metaphysics, 184: “irradiat lumen intelligencie agentis super formas presentes in fantasia, et proveniunt ex eis in animam universalia abstracta, sic quod ex forma Petri apprehendit hominem universalem”).

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potential intelligibles, and makes them actual intelligibles and the potential intellect an active intellect.”82 This passage, at least in Rahman’s translation, uses language more typical in later discussions of imagination as it charges the active intellect with converting imagination’s potential intelligible ob­ ject, the intelligible form as it exists within the sensible object, into one that can be known. By doing so, it turns the potential intellect, which houses potential intelligibles, into an intellect that is actively understanding. The active intellect draws the intelligible content out of the phantasm and, by imprinting that intelligible form on the soul, draws the potential intellect into actual thought. The potential intellect is called potential because it is capable of thinking. It is the active intellect that brings the potential intellect from a state of potentiality to one of actuality, that is, enables it actually to think. One element of Avicenna’s philosophy bears noting here because it will become controversial in the Latin West. Avicenna, in line with ancient and Arabic interpreters of the De anima before him, believes the active intellect to be a separate power, not proper to each individual but one in number and accessible to individual souls when they understand. In other words, each person does not have her own active intellect in her soul. Rather, every­ one uses a single active intellect in order to understand. The Parisian con­ demnations of 1270 and 1277 denounce the doctrine of a separate active intellect, but it is worth noting that various Western philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas, do not.83 The separateness of Avicenna’s active intellect, as well as his Neoplatonism, is evident in that intellect’s “emana­ tion” of the abstracted intelligible object into the soul.84 For Avicenna, as

82. Avicenna, Avicenna’s Psychology, II.vi.16, p. 69. It is worth clarifying that Avicenna is not saying that the potential intellect replaces or collapses into the active one. He means simply that the potential intellect, thanks to the active intellect’s power, actually knows. See Davidson’s dis­ cussion of Avicenna’s philosophy of imagination in Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 93–95. He argues that Avicenna does not mean to imply that the universal is found within imagination’s phantasm, but that the phantasm prepares the intellect to receive the universal from the active intellect. 83. Regarding the active intellect’s separateness, Aquinas writes, “Forte enim de agente hoc dicere aliquam rationem haberet, et multi philosophi hoc posuerunt: nichil enim videtur in­ conveniens sequi, si ab uno agente multa perficiantur, quemadmodum ab uno sole perficiuntur omnes potentie visive animalium ad videndum“ (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, iv, Opera omnia 43:307). Trans. McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averroists, 103: “There would perhaps be some reason for saying this of the agent intellect, and many philosophers do say it, for nothing absurd seems to follow from several things being perfected by one agent, as by one sun the visual powers of all animals are able to see.” 84. For more on the active intellect’s emanation in Avicenna’s philosophy, see Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 95–102.

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we have seen, the rational soul initiates understanding by “consider[ing] the individuals that are in imagination.” Directing its attention to those individuals or phantasms, the rational soul calls on the active intellect to act and so “prepares the soul” to receive the intelligible forms or species which will emanate into it thanks to the active intellect. The individual soul must focus its attention on its desired object, but it does not act on that object. Rather, through the forms imprinted on the soul by the active intellect, the individual, and particularly her potential intellect, has the ability to think and understand. In this system, then, the independent active intellect reaches across the sense/intellect divide to extract the intellect’s object and communicate it to the individual intellect. It acts on imagination’s phantasm to find that object, and by isolating it, it makes the intelligible object thinkable. Imagination’s role in this process is hardly active—Avicenna’s active intellect performs its activity with no direct assistance from any part of the individual soul—but imagination still offers the means by which sense perception can become intellectual apprehension. It presents the active intellect with an object suited to its activity and accordingly enjoys a central role in the soul’s most sophisticated function, understanding. The basic procedure that Avicenna outlines, in which the active intellect isolates and activates the intelligible form latent in imagination’s phantasm, appears repeatedly in thirteenthcentury Latin philosophy, as well as in the philosophy of Avicenna’s Ara­ bic successors. Even the thirteenth-century French master of theology and later bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, who rejects basic components of Aristotelian philosophy, such as the existence of the active intellect and of intelligible species, accepts the basic process of abstraction, defined as “the stripping away of forms coming to the phantasy or imagination from sensible things.”85 However, Avicenna’s comments about imagination do not extend far beyond the passages quoted above, so while he popularizes a certain process of knowledge acquisition, he does not focus a great deal of attention on imagination at work in it. The Latin scholastics who devote extensive attention to imagination owe their interest less to Avicenna than to his eminent successor in the Arabic-speaking world, Averroes.

85. William of Auvergne, Tractatus de anima, VII.7, Opera omnia 2:213: “denudationis for­ marum ad phantasiam sive imaginationem a sensibilibus venientium.” Trans. Teske, The Soul, pp. 449–50. For more on William’s theory of cognition, see Marrone, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste, 52–73.

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The Commentator on Imagination Averroes, best known to the medieval West as “the Commentator,” had his greatest impact not on Arabic but on Latin philosophy. Regarding his philosophy of soul in particular, Herbert Davidson writes that his views were “completely ignored in the Arabic world and virtually unknown in Jewish circles.”86 Spending his life in Seville and Cordoba, and thus on the western edge of the Muslim empire, Averroes seems to have had easy access to the Arabic-Latin translation circuit. Several of his works, including his Long Commentary on the De anima, were translated into Latin by the early thirteenth century, and by around 1230 their influence appears in the work of Albertus Magnus. Averroes’s value as a commentator resides in large part in his careful attention to Aristotle’s texts, to which he sought to be as faith­ ful as possible. His esteem for Aristotle was boundless: he writes of him, “I believe that this man was the standard in Nature, and the model which Na­ ture created to demonstrate the ultimate human perfection in material mat­ ters.”87 He therefore endeavors to interpret Aristotle faithfully and quotes him frequently. He greatly elaborates Aristotle’s comments on imagination, positioning that faculty at the heart of his philosophy and involving it in his most controversial doctrine. He thereby assures its continued prominence in thirteenth-century Latin philosophy. In the Christian West, Averroes’s psychology became notorious because of his belief in one separate potential intellect, a belief contrary to various tenets of Christian doctrine, including the immortality of the soul. If the ac­ tive and potential intellects are not specific to the individual and no sensory power survives death (as all agreed), then there will remain little of each individual soul to survive death and preserve individuality. And indeed Averroes did not believe in the immortality of the soul. Avicenna was, among Arabic philosophers, the notable exception who thought otherwise.88 Aver­ roes’s belief in a separate and single active intellect was neither original nor particularly controversial, but rather, as noted earlier, the standard position in earlier Greek and Arabic commentaries on Aristotle. Averroes himself notes that his views on the potential intellect are what really immersed him in controversy. Regarding the separateness of the active intellect, he writes, “It is a wonder how all agree that this demonstrative argument is true, 86. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 314. 87. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.14, p. 433: “Credo enim quod iste homo fuit regula in Natura, et exemplar quod Natura invenit ad demonstran­ dum ultimam perfectionem humanam in materiis.” 88. See Black, “Psychology: Soul and Intellect,” 310–11.

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namely regarding the active intellect, but they do not agree regarding the po­ tential intellect.”89 The 1277 Condemnation does attack the doctrine of the separate active intellect, but it reserves its real indignation for the doctrine of the separate potential intellect.90 For our purposes, what is most interest­ ing about his position on the potential intellect is the pressure it places on imagination to establish the individuality of each person’s understanding. The benefit of positing separate and unindividuated active and potential intellects is that it explains how two people can know the same thing in the same way. You and I would have the same understanding of “house,” for instance, because we understood that concept through the same intellect. It would be left to our different intelligible species to distinguish your under­ standing and make it distinctly yours as opposed to mine. Averroes explains that the intelligible object is plural in the form of phantasms, or “imagina­ tion’s forms,” but one single thing is understood.91 To locate individuality in imagination’s forms alone is to elevate the importance of imagination dra­ matically, leaving it at the top of the powers that belong to the individual. It should be noted that other philosophers who do posit individual and numerically distinct active and potential intellects also distinguish thinking according to intelligible species, although they still rely on the potential intellect to give each person an individual, unique intellect. Aquinas, for in­ stance, explains that, in different individuals, knowledge “is the same with respect to the thing known, but not with respect to the intelligible species whereby each knows.”92 Individuals understand differently through differ­ ent intelligible species, but they know the same thing, not because they share one intellect but because each intellect is naturally equipped with the means to understand a thing’s form, which is one, through different intel­ ligible species. For Aquinas, understanding differs by individual because of 89. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.19, p. 441: “Et mi­ rum esse quomodo omnes concedunt hanc demonstrationem esse veram, scilicet de intellectu agenti, et non conveniunt in demonstratione de intellectu materiali.” 90. For an English translation of the Condemnations, see “Condemnation of the 219 Propo­ sitions,” trans. Fortin and O’Neill. Wippel offers a useful discussion of the circumstances in which the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 were written in “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris.” 91. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.5 p. 412: “Cum igitur posuerimus rem intelligibilem que est apud me et apud te multam in subiecto secundum quod est vera, scilicet formas ymaginationis, et unam in subiecto per quod est intellectus ens (et est materialis), dissolvuntur iste questiones perfecte.” Averroes believes that here he has resolved questions about how understanding differs by person when the potential intellect is one. 92. Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, v, Opera omnia 43:312: “Est enim eadem quantum ad rem scitam, non tamen quantum ad species intelligibiles quibus uterque intelligit.” Trans. McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averroists, 135.

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each person’s distinct intelligible species, but these species have the added function of creating for each person a distinct, individual potential intellect. As a result, not only do the understandings of two people differ, but so do their intellects, and after death, their proper potential intellects preserve their individual identity. Averroes, excluding the possibility of individual and numerically many potential intellects, relies only on intelligible spe­ cies, and the imagination that contains them, to individualize understand­ ing. Accordingly, Richard Taylor, commenting particularly on the earliest of Averroes’s commentaries on the De anima, writes that imagination there “ac­ counts for the personal intellectual activities of each individual person.”93 Imagination in Averroes’s philosophy therefore bridges not just sense and intellect but the individual soul and the separate intellects that enable its activity. He explains, “The potential intellect is not joined to us per se. It is only joined to us by being joined to imagined forms.”94 Our only access to the potential intellect accordingly comes through the phantasms that exist in imagination. Only when the potential intellect and imagination’s forms are joined can the individual soul be conjoined to the active intellect.95 The individual’s only access to understanding and to the intellect that enables it, in other words, comes through imagination. Before proceeding, I should note one potentially confusing element in Averroes’s philosophy, which is his reference to the intelligible form or spe­ cies in imagination as an “intention” (ma’nan). He does so in the interests of precision. The intelligible content in the sensible form is not the form as it exists in an object; rather, the form as it exists in sense imparts information about the individual object in a manner appropriate to sense. Averroes bor­ rows the term “intention” from Avicenna, though he defines it differently, using it to refer to the intelligible content or species in the sensible image.96 For our purposes, Averroes’s “intention” differs little from the intelligible species we have been discussing. It is still the intellect’s intelligible object contained in imagination.97 And this intention or form is the basis for the 93. Taylor, “Averroes: Religious Dialectic,” 191. 94. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.36, p. 486: “intellectus materialis non copulatur nobiscum per se et primo, sed non copulatur nobiscum nisi per suam copulationem cum formis ymaginalibus.” 95. See ibid., III.5, p. 404. 96. For more on “intention” in Avicenna and Averroes, see Black, “Imagination and Estima­ tion,” 59–63. 97. See Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.4, p. 384: “Et ideo anima rationalis indiget considerare intentiones que sunt in virtute ymaginativa, sicut sensus indiget inspicere sensibilia” (“the rational soul needs to consider the intentions which are in the imaginative power, as sense needs to inspect sensibles”).

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individual’s conjunction with the potential and active intellects, without which no understanding could occur. For Averroes, the individual act of understanding is nothing other than the joining of the intelligible content within imagination’s phantasms to the intellective capacity of the separate intellect: “The conjunction of intelli­ gibles with us men is through the conjunction of intelligible intentions with us, and these are imagined intentions.”98 Imagination’s intelligible species accordingly connect the individual to the separate intellect. Aquinas will point out a problem with this system, which is that intentions in act do not exist in imagination, and since imagination contains only potential inten­ tions, still wedded to material conditions, the active intellect in Averroes’s system has nothing in us to which it can actually connect.99 In other words, Averroes so wants imagination to be the individual’s point of access to the potential and active intellects that he partially and illogically elides the dis­ tance between them. He explicitly elevates imagination as a cognitive power when, departing from Avicenna, he defines imagination as a fourth type of intellect.100 With the removal of the potential intellect as a component of the individual soul, Averroes expands the powers and cognitive promi­ nence of imagination. In spite of the controversy that developed around his doctrine of a separate potential intellect, Averroes nonetheless managed to direct new attention to the faculty of imagination, expanding the power of the faculty in a way that proved significant to Western philosophy. Before turning to the Latin tradition, however, we should get a fuller sense of Averroes’s philosophy of imagination and how it elaborates on that of Avicenna. His position on the potential intellect altered markedly in the course of the three separate works on the soul that he produced, though in each the individual’s access to the potential intellect comes through imag­ ination.101 The earlier texts, the Epitome and the Middle Commentary on the De anima, were unavailable to the Latin West, which had only his Long Commentary, conveniently also his final word on the subject. It is only in the Long Commentary that he posits a fully separate potential intellect, a position that he devotes a great deal of the text to defending. There, the potential 98. Ibid., III.5, p. 405: “remanet ut continuatio intellectorum cum nobis hominibus sit per continuationem intentionis intellecte cum nobis (et sunt intentiones ymaginate).” 99. See Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, iii, Opera omnia 43:303. 100. See Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.20, p. 452. The others are the active intellect, potential intellect, and speculative intellect. Black notes that this actually brings the total number of intellects up to five (including the intellect in habitu). See her “Psychology: Soul and Intellect,” 318. 101. On the development of Averroes’s thought, see Taylor, “Averroes: Religious Dialectic,” 190–95; and Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 265–98.

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intellect, defined as that which contains all imagined forms in potential­ ity,102 becomes actual through the active intellect, which “makes intentions that are in the imaginative power move the potential intellect actually after they were moving it potentially.”103 When the active intellect isolates and ac­ tivates the intelligible species or intention, it also activates the potential in­ tellect. Once the potential intelligible species becomes actually intelligible, the potential intellect, always potentially moved by that intelligible species, is actually moved by it. The result, finally, is that the potential intellect actu­ ally understands. The active intellect only abstracts the intelligible content from imagination’s phantasm, while it is the potential intellect that thinks. As Averroes explains the action of the active intellect, “To abstract is nothing other than to make imagined intentions actually understood after they were potentially intelligible; to understand is nothing other than to receive these intentions” in the potential intellect.104 Understanding is the reception of intelligible species by the potential intellect. Various elements in Averroes’s philosophy of imagination are already familiar from the earlier discussion of Avicenna, though his treatment of imagination is far more elaborate and sustained than Avicenna’s, reflecting the greater importance it has in Averroes’s philosophy. Indeed, Averroes al­ ters Avicenna’s philosophy of the internal senses with the effect of elevating imagination’s standing. Although Aristotle confines the internal sense pow­ ers to common sense and imagination, Avicenna expands them significantly, leading to their incorporation into Latin philosophies of the soul. As De­ borah Black notes, the Latin West received its “schema of the internal sense powers from the philosophers of the Islamic world,” beginning with Avi­ cenna.105 Among these new powers was one that Avicenna explicitly ranked above imagination, called estimation or the estimative power (wahm). For Avicenna, estimation processes intentions, which carry a narrower mean­ ing for him than they do for Averroes. Avicenna’s intentions communicate information about an object to the senses, although information that is not actually perceived. To use the most common example, when a sheep sees a wolf, there is nothing in the perception of the wolf per se that indicates to 102. See Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.5, p. 387: “dif­ finitio igitur intellectus materialis est illud quod est in potentia omnes intentiones formarum materialium universalium.” 103. Ibid., III.5, p. 406: “est illud quod facit intentiones que sunt in virtute ymaginativa esse moventes intellectum materialem in actu postquam erant moventes in potentia.” 104. Ibid., III.18, p. 439: “Abstrahere enim nichil est aliud quam facere intentiones ymagi­ natas intellectas in actu postquam erant in potentia; intelligere autem nichil aliud est quam recipere has intentiones.” 105. Black, “Imagination and Estimation,” 59.

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the sheep that it should be scared, but it nonetheless becomes scared and flees. Intentions account for this response, and they are processed by estima­ tion. Estimation stands at the top of the list of internal sense powers and in some way appears to manage the operation of the other powers, including imagination, that stand below it. Avicenna writes, “And it seems that the estimative power is itself cogitative and imaginative and memorative, for it is itself the judge. For through itself it is a judge, whereas its activities and its motions are imaginative and memorative. For it is imaginative through what it effects in the forms, and memorative through what its activity terminates in.”106 Estimation rules over and to some extent subsumes the other internal sense powers. Although he still allows imagination a special relationship with the active and potential intellects, Avicenna considers the operations of estimation to be more sophisticated. Averroes, in response, eliminates the estimative power and expands the function of imagination.107 We should pause to address a potential problem with this interpreta­ tion, which lies in the relationship between imagination and the cogita­ tive power. Although Averroes excludes estimation from his philosophy, he does assign some of its functions to a separate power, called the cogitative power, that is possessed only by humans. This power might appear (and, to some Averroes scholars, has appeared) to usurp imagination’s most impor­ tant functions, but Averroes’s sustained tendency is to sideline it in favor of imagination. In Avicenna’s philosophy, cogitation is simply equivalent for humans to the higher of the two imaginative powers that Avicenna names, called the compositive imaginative power. This power performs a broader range of functions in humans than in other animals, so only in humans can it be called “cogitation.” For Averroes, cogitation is distinct from and pos­ sibly elevated above imagination. Richard Taylor, for instance, argues that Averroes’s cogitative power determines what an individual thing is (that the object I perceive is a particular book, for instance), provides intelligible species to the intellect, and provides images of absent objects.108 His defini­ tion of the power is striking because the second and third functions that he 106. Avicenna, Liber de anima, IV.1, 2:11: “Videtur autem quod virtus aestimativa sit virtus cogitativa et imaginativa et memorialis, et quod ipsa est diiudicans: sed per seipsam est diiudi­ cans; per motus vero suos et actiones suas est imaginativa et memorialis: sed est imaginativa per id quod operatur in formis, et memorialis per id quod est eius ultima actio.” The translation is from Black, “Imagination and Estimation,” 71n20, modified to account for differences in the Latin text. Emphasis mine. 107. As Hasse writes, “Averroes claims that the assumption of an estimative faculty in ani­ mals can be dispensed with altogether, since all of its functions are performed by the faculty of imagination” (“Soul’s Faculties,” 314). 108. Taylor, “Cogitatio, Cogitativus, and Cogitare,” 114.

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lists so typically characterize imagination. As a result of seeing in Averroes’s philosophy a reassignment of roles typically performed by imagination, Taylor credits cogitation, rather than imagination, with constituting a bridge “from the realm of particulars of sense to the grasp of universals.”109 It is, according to him, cogitation rather than imagination that connects sense to in­tellect. Averroes appears to provide some warrant for this interpretation, writ­ ing of the cogitative power that “its action is nothing other than to place the intention of imagination’s form with its individual in memory, or to distinguish the intention from the individual in the form-bearing power and imagination.”110 The cogitative power separates the intention from all material conditions so that it no longer denotes a certain sensible object but rather represents the universal. He adds, “It is clear that the potential intellect receives imagined intentions after this distinction.”111 So whereas it seemed that the active intellect had itself extracted the intelligible intention from the phantasm, here cogitation seems to perform that role, apparently requiring the active intellect only to make that intention actual rather than potential. By assigning these functions, along with the job of representing images of absent sense objects,112 to cogitation, Averroes seems not only to allocate imagination’s defining functions to cogitation but to give cogita­ tion one of the active intellect’s typical functions, namely, the ability to isolate intelligible species. Cogitation seems to surpass imagination, adopt­ ing its powers so that imagination ends up with a barely discernible role in intellectual apprehension. Nonetheless, Averroes’s claims regarding cogitation look quite different when placed in the context of his commentary as a whole, where he ha­ bitually discusses the potential and active intellect only with regard to the imaginative power. Whereas Averroes makes only a handful of references to cogitation, he regularly discusses imagination, assigning it every func­ tion attributed to cogitation except the ability to distinguish intentions and place them in memory. His overlapping portraits of imagination and cogi­ tation occasionally jar saliently, as when he twice defines imagination as the passive intellect only to define cogitation as the passive intellect shortly 109. Ibid. 110. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.18, p. 449: “actio eius nichil est aliud quam ponere intentionem forme ymaginationis cum suo individuo apud rememorationem, aut distinguere eam ab eo apud formationem et ymaginationem.” 111. Ibid.: “Et manifestum est quod intellectus qui dicitur materialis recipit intentiones ymaginatas post hanc distinctionem.” 112. See ibid., III.33, p. 476.

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thereafter.113 Although Taylor sees cogitation as meaningfully distinct from imagination in Averroes’s commentary, the two intertwine quite thor­ oughly. Averroes’s own effort to relate them accordingly raises more ques­ tions than it answers. He writes that the cogitative power “is nothing other than the power which distinguishes the intention of the sensible thing from its imagined image (idolo),” but the relationship between imagined image and intention is rendered obscure by the text’s use of idolo here for image, a usage that I have noticed nowhere else in the text.114 Nonetheless, even if Averroes here endows cogitation with the ability to separate the intelligible species, or intention, from the phantasm, he preserves imagination’s central role in understanding. Cogitation might here seem to surpass imagination in the scheme of internal powers, but it is Averroes’s habit to assign the most sophisticated cognitive functions to imagination rather than cogitation. He clearly endeavors to distinguish the two powers, but his default tendency is to expand and elevate the function of imagination rather than cogita­ tion. With the exception described above, on the topic of understanding he makes no claim for cogitation that he does not make, and more often make, for imagination. Averroes’s best-known adherent in the West, at least in the thirteenth century, is Siger of Brabant, the defining member, perhaps along with John of Jandun, of the school of thought labeled Latin Averroism or Radical Aristotelianism. His views were condemned repeatedly, most notably by Bonaventure, Aquinas, and the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, though he may be known to scholars of medieval literature principally because of Dante’s surprising decision to place him in paradise, on the left-hand side of Thomas Aquinas no less. His philosophy of the soul, at least in its early form,115 follows Averroes’s closely, and he shows how easily the notion of a separate potential intellect supports an expansive concept of imagination. Siger writes, “Insofar as imagined intentions, which are afterward under­ stood, are joined to us, so the intellect is joined to us, and according as these imagined intentions are different in different men, so the intellect is differ­ ent.”116 Siger makes imagination, and specifically the intelligible species or 113. Averroes equates imagination with the passive power in Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.20, pp. 449 and 452. He does the same with the cogitative power at III.33, p. 476. 114. See ibid., III.6, p. 415. 115. Siger altered his philosophy repeatedly, partially in response to Aquinas’s criticisms, and eventually denied the position that follows. See Mahoney, “Sense, Intellect, and Imagina­ tion,” 615–22. 116. Siger de Brabant, Quaestiones in Tertium de Anima, III.9, p. 28: “Unde per hoc quod in­ tentiones imaginatae, quae post efficiuntur actu intellecta, nobis copulantur, per hoc intellectus

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intentions it contains, responsible for establishing the individuality of each intellect, insofar as it can be individual. Only through imagination’s inten­ tions, or intelligible species, can the individual soul connect to the potential and active intellects, again giving imagination an elevated role in cognition and even in establishing personal identity. Siger clearly absorbs Averroes’s philosophy of the soul and accepts its premises, but even those Latin scholastics who modify Averroes’s claims owe to him their concerted interest in imagination. Imagination has lit­ tle cognitive heft in our usage, but for many prominent thirteenth-century philosophers, its importance and authority are undeniable. Even as some dispute the range of its powers and attempt to distance their philosophy from Averroes’s, they consistently grant imagination the power to connect the sense faculties to the intellect, and thus to enable intellectual apprehen­ sion. Thanks in part to Averroes, imagination becomes a topic worthy of extended and sometimes polemical discussion in the West, and its defining cognitive function encounters no serious resistance until late in the thir­ teenth century.

The Latin West One of the earliest masters of theology to grapple with Aristotle’s philoso­ phy of the soul and Arabic works on it was the Dominican Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Aquinas, who claims the bittersweet distinction of having been a good historian of philosophy. Alain de Libera summarizes the stan­ dard view of Albert in order to disagree with it: “an encyclopedist, though confused, a theologian fascinated with philosophy, though not original . . . Albert was more historian than thinker.”117 Albert can be easy to dismiss because of certain errors or oversights that are obvious to the modern reader—for instance, Albert initially failed to notice that Averroes believed in a separate potential intellect—even though such inaccuracies more ac­ curately reflect his effort to familiarize himself with philosophical texts that were new and unfamiliar to the West. He marks a transitional period in the reception of Aristotle’s philosophy of the soul, now supplemented with Ara­ bic commentaries on it and posing new challenges to a Christian interpreta­ tion. Accordingly, his understanding of imagination possesses features that fade from view in the work of his successors. For instance, as I noted earlier, nobis copulatur, et secundum quod diversificantur huiusmodi intentiones imaginatae in diver­ sis hominibus, secundum hoc diversificatur intellectus.” 117. de Libera, Métaphysique et Noétique, 11–12.

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he posits two imaginations in the tradition of Avicenna, designating them as imaginatio (the lower) and phantasia (the higher). While his commentary adopts many of Avicenna’s interests, like prophecy and the mechanisms for the soul’s conjunction with the active intellect, he agrees with Averroes that imagination is not subordinate to the estimative power and he likewise presents an ambitious account of imagination. So heavily influenced by Averroes is Albert that de Libera describes his psychology as “nothing but a dialogue with Averroes on thinking.”118 Perhaps the first Latin philoso­ pher to study Averroes’s long commentary on the De anima, Albert brought Averroes’s imagination into the Latin intellectual tradition. His own esteem for and interest in the Commentator’s philosophy also did a great deal to determine Averroes’s influence in the West. Given Albert’s concerted interest in Averroes, it is no surprise that his views on imagination have much in common with Averroes’s. In explain­ ing Aristotle’s comment that all understanding requires an image, Albert adds simply that it is this image “from which the universal is elicited.”119 This universal, derived from imagination’s phantasm and equivalent to its intelligible species, once again emerges from the active intellect’s activity: “In the phantasm, universals are not universal actually, but potentially, and are made universals proper through the [active] intellect’s abstraction.”120 As we have seen, the active intellect isolates the intelligible, universal content within imagination’s image, or phantasm, and in doing so it makes the potential intelligible species thinkable by the intellect. The intelligible con­ tent thus isolated and activated is imprinted on the potential intellect and results in understanding. Albert writes that the potential intellect is related to the active intellect “as that which is completed by its light” and is related “to the forms elicited from phantasia as that which is moved and formed by them.”121 The intelligible content of imagination’s phantasms literally in-forms the potential intellect and determines its activity. Accordingly, “The [potential] intellect sometimes understands and sometimes does not, be­ cause it is moved by phantasms, which are potential intelligibles and do not

118. Ibid., 265. 119. Albertus Magnus, De anima, III.3.3, Opera omnia 7.1:212: “phantasmate, ex quo univer­ sale elicitur.” 120. Ibid., Opera omnia 7.1:100: “In phantasmate autem universalia sunt non secundum ac­ tum universalia, sed potentia, quae per abstractionem intellectus fiunt universalia simplicia.” 121. Ibid., III.2.19, Opera omnia 7.1:205: “possibilis duplicem habet comparationem; com­ paratur enim ad agentem sicut completus lumine suo et comparatur ad formas ex phantasiis elicitas sicut motus et formatus ab eis.”

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always move [the potential intellect] actually.”122 The potential intellect’s activity begins and ceases depending on whether the intelligible species that inform it are in potency or act. Albert’s imagination, again much like Averroes’s, has a much more ac­ tive role than Avicenna’s. While Avicenna relies on the active intellect to transmit intelligible species to the potential intellect, in Albert’s philosophy imagination’s phantasms, once acted on by the agent intellect, act directly on the potential intellect. Their abstraction depends on the active intellect, but once isolated and made active, intelligible species suffice on their own to activate the potential intellect. So intimate is the connection between imagination and the potential intellect that Albert can characterize phan­ tasms as understanding’s cause: “The cause of understanding is the univer­ sal in phantasms moving the [potential] intellect.”123 The active intellect extracts the intelligible species, but it is that species, once impressed on the potential intellect, that yields understanding. Describing the action of imag­ ination’s image in particularly strong terms, Albert not surprisingly rejects Avicenna’s elevation of estimation over imagination in the scheme of inter­ nal sense powers. Albert states declaratively that imagination is “the greatest cognition which the sensible soul has and is the highest of its powers.”124 Inclining toward Averroes in this and several other matters, Albert favors a broadly powerful imagination, and his influence surely contributed to his successors’ evident interest in the faculty. As de Libera notes, “Albert was for the Latins what Averroes was for him, the Commentator par excellence,”125 so it is no surprise to find a powerful imaginative power in the philosophy of Albert’s most famous student, Aquinas.

Aquinas on Imagination Aquinas’s commentary on the De anima was his first on one of Aristotle’s texts, finished in 1268, although his astonishing productivity meant that he addressed the issues it covers several times, most importantly, for our pur­ poses, in his De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas (1270) and his magnum

122. Ibid., Opera omnia 7.1:206: “intelligit aliquando et aliquando non, hoc ideo est, quia movetur a phantasmatibus, quae sunt potentia intelligibilia et ideo non semper actu movent.” 123. Ibid., II.3.3, Opera omnia 7.1:100: “causa intelligendi est universale in phantasmatibus movens intellectum.” 124. Ibid., II.4.7, Opera omnia 7.1:157: “illa est maior cognitio, quam habet anima sensi­ bilis, et est ultimum virtutis eius.” 125. de Libera, Métaphysique et Noétique, 329.

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opus, the Summa theologiae (written 1266–73). Regarding imagination, his views reinforce the basic system already described. For instance, he writes, “The agent intellect abstracts intelligible species from phantasms insofar as, through the power of the agent intellect, we are able to receive into our consideration the natures of species without their individuating conditions, and through the similitudes of these natures the possible intellect is in­ formed.”126 For the active intellect to abstract the intelligible species is for it to stock the potential intellect with those species, drawn from the phan­ tasm within imagination.127 Such species then inform the potential intellect. Imag­ination here enjoys the full range of powers it acquired in Averroes’s and Albert’s philosophy. For Aquinas, the intellect depends for various of its activities on phantasms, turning toward them before, during, and even after knowledge acquisition.128 Aquinas does, nonetheless, exercise some caution regarding imagina­ tion, particularly because he recognizes, most obviously in his De unitate intellectus, that Averroes’s anathematized doctrine of the potential intellect requires a potent imaginative power. Although the accuracy of Aquinas’s characterization of Averroes’s philosophy has been questioned,129 he cor­ rectly recognizes that Averroes’s ideas about the potential intellect and imag­ ination go hand in hand, and it is perhaps for this reason that he adds a major qualification regarding the powers of imagination. The qualifica­ tion develops from Aquinas’s expansion of imagination’s powers. We are familiar with imagination’s role in understanding, specifically in grasping a thing’s essence. Aquinas departs from his predecessors by explicitly and sys­ tematically extending imagination’s influence to the cognizing of particu­ lars. Imagination’s phantasms thus serve to generate apprehension of both a thing’s essence (what it is to be a human being) and its individuality (that particular human being is Socrates). As a result, imagination earns a con­ crete role in recognizing individuals, in the process by which the intellect

126. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Ia.85.1, ad 4, Opera omnia 5:332: “Abstrahit autem intel­ lectus agens species intelligibiles a phantasmatibus, inquantum per virtutem intellectus agentis accipere possumus in nostra consideratione naturas specierum sine individualibus conditioni­ bus, secundum quarum similitudines intellectus possibilis informatur.” 127. Panaccio credits Aquinas with breaking new ground here, writing that it was he, “under the influence of Albert the Great, who most systematically applied the species scheme to the realm of intellectual perception and fused it into a general theory of abstraction” (“Mental Rep­ resentation,” 348). Aquinas’s interest in this system was considerable, but the relation of species to perception and abstraction certainly pre-dated him. 128. Hasse, “Soul’s Faculties,” 319. 129. See Taylor, “Cogitatio, Cogitativus, and Cogitare,” 116. He provides references to articles in this debate in notes 14 and 15.

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concludes that this object with these particular sensible features is this par­ ticular object (that the person with Socrates’s material attributes is in fact Socrates). Aquinas was not the first to assign imagination some role in the recognition of particulars, but his predecessors’ comments on this score are infrequent. Aquinas makes imagination’s phantasms the means through which one grasps individuals (Socrates qua Socrates).130 Imagination does not itself inform the intellect but rather provides the lens through which the intellect can recognize an individual as a particular individual. Aquinas explains that the intellect “has cognition of the nature of the species (or what-it-is) by directly extending itself into it, whereas it has cog­ nition of the individual itself by a kind of reflection, insofar as it returns to the phantasms from which the intelligible species are abstracted. . . . It ap­ prehends the quiddity of flesh directly, but flesh itself by reflection.”131 The intellect, he explains, grasps quiddities or intelligible species directly—such apprehension occurs when the potential intellect receives such species, with no intermediary—but grasping particulars requires a secondary use of imag­ ination’s images. In order to apprehend not the nature of a thing but the in­ dividuality of one particular thing, the intellect uses not intelligible species but the phantasms from which they derive. Looking back at the phantasm, the intellect directs itself to the individual and away from the universal. In other words, Aquinas’s intellect depends on phantasms for its apprehension of a thing’s shared nature and its particularity. Imagination supports both intellectual operations because its phantasm, itself composed of sensory and intelligible data, appropriately contributes to the cognition of particu­ lars and universals. Aquinas extends the functions of imagination and the mechanisms it uses to perform them, albeit with a substantial qualification, which is that the intellect does not grasp the intelligible species itself or the phantasm itself. Rather, the intellect apprehends its object, whether univer­ sal or particular, by means of the phantasm. Skeptics had long before objected to any theory of cognition that di­ rected the intellect’s attention not to the object but to a mental representa­ tion of it. In such circumstances, of course, the intellect might understand its own representations rather than the object, which could well be different. 130. On this aspect of Aquinas’s philosophy of imagination, see Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 278–84. 131. Aquinas, Sentencia libri De anima, III.2, Opera omnia 45.1: 211–12: “cognoscit enim naturam speciei sive quod quid est directe extendendo se in ipsam, ipsum autem singulare per quandam reflexionem in quantum redit supra fantasmata a quibus species intelligibiles abstra­ huntur . . . directe apprehendit quiditatem carnis, per reflexionem autem ipsam carnem.” Trans. Pasnau, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, 355–56.

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This complaint finds some voice earlier in the thirteenth century—William of Auvergne, for instance, denied the existence of intelligible species and believed that the intellect was naturally equipped to understand a thing’s nature directly132—but they find new force in the criticisms of Aquinas’s suc­ cessors, particularly Peter John Olivi, Henry of Ghent, and, most famously, William of Ockham.133 Aquinas, however, attempts to forestall (or perhaps to address early formulations of ) such criticisms, explaining that the intel­ lect does actually perceive its object directly, but does so with the help of intelligible species and phantasms. The same rule applies to the senses: they perceive not the sensible species but the object it represents. Intelligible species and sensible species are not the objects of intellect and sense, respec­ tively, but the means by which they understand or perceive. Accordingly, the intellect does not understand by directing its attention to the intelligible species which has been extracted from the phantasm, but uses the intelligible species as a medium, a vehicle by which it directs itself to a thing’s nature. He explains: intelligible species, by which the possible intellect becomes actualized, are not intellect’s object; for they are related to intellect not as what is intellectively cognized but as that by which intellect cognizes. In the same way, too, the species that is in the sense of sight is not what is seen but that by which the sense of sight sees. What is seen is the color that is in a body. Similarly, what intellect cognizes is the quiddity that is in things, but not the intelligible species (except insofar as intellect reflects on itself ). . . . And so intellect’s object is clearly not an intelligible species but rather the quiddity of the thing being intellectively cognized.134

Aquinas never explains how, exactly, this process works, although he re­ peatedly insists that the intelligible species is not the intellect’s object but 132. See William of Auvergne, Tractatus De anima, VII.7, Opera omnia 2:213: “intellectus per semetipsum substantias illas sub esse varietatibus sensibilium accidentium perpendit.” (Trans. Teske, The Soul, 449: “through itself the intellect considers that those [intelligible] substances underlie the variety of sensible accidents.”) 133. On later theories of cognition, see chapter 6. 134. Aquinas, Sentencia libri De anima, III.2, Opera omnia 45.1: 213: “Manifestum est etiam quod species intelligibiles, quibus intellectus possibilis fit in actu, non sunt obiectum intellec­ tus. Non enim se habent ad intellectum sicut quod intelligitur, set sicut quo intellectus intelligit, sicut et species que est in visu non est quod videtur, set quo visus videt, quod autem videtur est color qui est in corpore; similiter et quod intellectus intelligit est quiditas que est in rebus, non autem species intelligibiles, nisi in quantum intellectus super se ipsum reflectitur . . . unde manifestum est quod species intelligibilis non est obiectum intellectus, set quiditas rei intel­ lecte.” Trans. Pasnau, Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, 357–58.

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its tool, its means to perceive a thing’s essence.135 He does so in order to protect the validity, in his view, of the intellect’s operation. Were the in­ tellect only truly to perceive representations of an object, it might have no reliable connection to the external world and therefore be prone to error or misunderstanding. Such a philosophy might give rise to external world skepticism, like that which is found in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury philosophy. Aristotle appears not to have shared this concern be­ cause he repeatedly treats the intelligible species as the intellect’s object, as did his commentators. Themistius, for instance, whose commentary was newly available to Aquinas through a translation by William of Moerbeke, defines thought as “the activity of the intellect towards the image that is its object.”136 Even Aquinas elsewhere calls the phantasm the “object” (obiectum) of understanding.137 His considered opinion, however, was clearly that the phantasm is not the intellect’s object but its tool. The intellect uses but does not focus its attention on species. His failure to describe the mechanism by which the intellect uses the intelligible species to see the thing itself reflects his innovation in treating in such detail the distinction between tool and object. This takes us back to Averroes. Aquinas explains that, if we believe that knowledge is of species rather than of objects, we return to the errors of Plato and, implicitly, of Averroes.138 He uses the example of a rock: if the intellect knows not the rock but its species, then knowledge is not of this world but of species. We would return to Plato’s theory of forms, according to which knowledge comes not from sensible things but from separated forms or species. Each intellect, then, would understand numerically the same species. The real danger of this model is that, if each intellect under­ stood one singular object, if one and the same species sufficed for all, then there would be “only one intellect, not only for all men, but absolutely speaking.”139 Aquinas does not explain how the antecedent of this condi­ tional is connected to its consequent, but suffice it to say that, for him, an intellect that knows species rather than knowing through species sacrifices its own particularity. In order to refute Averroes’s doctrine of a single potential

135. See, for instance, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, v, Opera omnia 43:312, and especially Summa theologiae Ia.85.2, which is devoted entirely to this topic. 136. Themistius, Commentaire sur le traité De l’âme d’Aristote, bk. 6, p. 260: “operatio intel­ lectus circa phantasmata subjectum ipsi.” Trans. Todd, On Aristotle’s On the Soul, 143. 137. Aquinas, De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas, i, Opera omnia 43:299. 138. Ibid., v, Opera omnia 43:312. 139. Ibid.: “sit unus inellectus tantum, non solum omnium hominum, sed etiam simplic­ iter.” Trans. McInerny, Aquinas against the Averroists, 131.

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intellect, then, Aquinas believes he must supplant species as the intellect’s object and replace them with real extramental objects. As a result, imagina­ tion’s phantasms provide not the content of knowledge but the mechanism by which the intellect focuses on its true objects (the rock rather than its species within the soul). Aquinas thus revises the received philosophy of imagination in such a way that protects rather than minimizes its impor­ tance. His decision to do so is somewhat surprising, given how clearly he recognizes that Averroes’s much-condemned philosophy of the potential intellect involves a powerful imaginative power. Aquinas, however, does not reduce imagination’s cognitive significance—if anything, he seems to expand it—but changes it just enough to allow him to distance his philoso­ phy of imagination from Averroes’s. Imagination, with a specified and ex­ tended range of activities, remains the crucial link between sense knowledge and intellectual apprehension. Aquinas was Bonaventure’s contemporary and, as we will see in the next chapter, Bonaventure shared the same basic understanding of imagina­ tion that Aquinas articulated. As the Latin West familiarized itself with Aris­ totle’s philosophy of the soul in the thirteenth century, it clearly followed Averroes’s lead in positing, with an articulated and oft-repeated method, an expansive faculty of imagination that could help connect the senses to the intellect. It was Bonaventure’s innovation to translate philosophical imagi­ nation into devotional imagining. As Aristotelian imagination regularly me­ diated between sense and intellect, so devotional imagination would serve an analogous role, mediating between earthly meditation on Christ’s hu­ manity and spiritual contemplation of his divinity. Moreover, incorporating Augustinian illumination more fully into his theory of cognition than did Aquinas or Albert, Bonaventure gave imagination the additional function of receiving such illumination. Imagination became a vehicle by which divine influence reached individuals as it became a means to reverse direction and facilitate human contemplation of the divine. When Bonaventure counseled systematic imagining of Christ’s life, he was therefore offering a methodical system for spiritual ascent. Meditating on the life of Christ was, for him, an especially useful thing to do because it utilized the considerable cognitive and spiritual potential of imagination.

Two

A Bonaventuran Synthesis

“rationalis creatura . . . janua contemplationis facta est pariter et via” (the rational creature . . . has been made his own gateway and road to contemplation) —Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus diebus

In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, theories of cognition were debated with uncommon intensity in the universities, and as the previous chapter endeavored to demonstrate, imagination held a prestigious place within them. The current chapter focuses on Bonaventure’s contribution to such theories. It begins with Augustine’s theory of knowledge and then focuses on Bonaventure’s efforts to reconcile it with an Aristotelian one. Bonaventure is the crucial figure in this story both because he maximizes the cognitive power of imagination in his philosophy and because he demonstrates an unusually fervent interest in mining the mystical potential of that philosophy. Active in thirteenth-century scholastic debate about cognition, he also authored an early and especially influential meditation on the life of Christ. My claim is that Bonaventure translated Aristotelian imagination into meditative imagining and that he expanded the spiritual ambition of such meditations by increasing the potency of the faculty, imagination, on which they depend. This chapter explores Bonaventure’s philosophy, showing how he integrated Augustinian and Aristotelian theories of knowledge . Hugh of St. Victor, De tribus diebus, xvii, CCCM 177:36. . I take Tachau’s point that the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions are not the only contributors to medieval theories of knowledge (she mentions, among others, the influence of other Neoplatonists, the medical tradition of Galen, and the Greek mathematical tradition), but I focus primarily on the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions as the dominant ones. See Tachau, Vision and Certitude, xvi–xvii.

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in a way that augmented imagination’s power. Part of what generated that power was Christ’s direct interaction with imagination’s images, which enabled imagination to support meditation on Christ. Its operations within those meditations are explored in the next chapter. The task here is to see how Bonaventure depends on the mechanisms of cognition, and specifically of imagination, to create a model of spiritual ascent so powerful that it gave rise to a new kind of devotional literature in the generations that followed. Theories of cognition had found their way into Christian theology long before the thirteenth century. In the patristic period, Augustine made the connection between cognition and theology most authoritatively when he located the individual’s greatest resemblance to the Trinity expressly in the mind’s cognitive processes. According to him, the individual is an image of the Trinity proper, which is why Genesis reads “let us make man to our image” (Gen 1:26, emphasis mine). The mind most truly is this image when it emulates the Trinity’s own self-knowing. As the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit unite in the process of knowledge, so the mind’s memory, understanding, and love, respectively, best mirror God when united in the process of knowing him. As a result, the mind that inspects its own cognitive activities can discover God to some measure within them. In the second half of De Trinitate, the work in which Augustine most thoroughly describes the knowing mind’s likeness to the Trinity, he proceeds systematically from lower, external trinitarian analogies to higher ones in the human mind. However, although such progression structures the text, it is not a spiritual program; Augustine does not frame it as a journey to God. His conviction that God is most present to the soul, and the soul most present to God, in the human act of knowing nonetheless invited further exploration and application. By the high Middle Ages, cognition and theology met most often not in the Trinity but in Christ’s passion, the event that enabled the human mind to apprehend spiritual truth. Accordingly, the twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux writes that the individual experiences the incarnation and passion every day when “the light of understanding floods our hearts.”

. See Augustine, De Trinitate XII.vi.6, CCSL 50:360. Clark notes that Augustine’s conviction that human beings were created as images of the entire Trinity rather than the Son alone distinguished him from some of his predecessors (“De Trinitate,” 99). . Augustine describes the logic of the text’s organization at De Trinitate XIV.iii.5, CCSL 50A:426–27, and XV.ii.3, CCSL 50A:462. . Whether Augustine was himself a mystic is still a question that occasions debate. See McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, 230–31. . Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, XVI.ii.2, Opera omnia 1:90: “cordi scilicet tribui intelligentiae lumen.” Trans. Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 1:115.

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Knowing is its own sort of passion meditation because the passion made possible a new level of knowledge. Wedding Aristotelian theories of cognition to Augustine’s trinitarian theology, Bonaventure in turn invested the act of imagining Christ’s life and passion with all the power of the mind’s likeness to God.

Christ’s Role in Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge Augustine’s trinitarian theology and his theory of knowledge profoundly influenced Bonaventure, who was especially indebted to Augustine for two ideas that are discussed in this and the following section. The first is that Christ participates repeatedly and profoundly in every act of human knowing. The second is that the mind mirrors the Trinity in large part through its cognitive images. Such images do not alienate the mind from its object but rather enable the mind to perform its proper work, as Augustine defines it, which is to know God through its own operations. Bonaventure thus draws from Augustine the conviction both that God is nowhere more present to human beings than in their minds and that the mind’s images have special spiritual significance. From Aristotelian philosophy, Bonaventure inherits a precise mechanism of knowledge acquisition that begins with the senses and ends in the intellect. Mental images function in that scheme to connect sensory to intellectual cognition, a process that requires the work of imagination. Combining the two philosophical traditions, Bonaventure creates an especially robust theory of both imagination and mental images. In his philosophy, Christ, relying on his dual human and divine natures, manages the mind’s transition from sense to intellect, from matter to spirit. He functions as the agent intellect to draw the intelligible content out of imagination’s phantasms or species. The mind that uses those images to imagine Christ therefore has an especially effective means of conforming to him, in both his humanity and divinity. Imagination, in other words, becomes a profoundly potent cognitive and spiritual resource. Augustine’s theory of knowledge is fundamentally Neoplatonic, and imagination occupies a minor role within it. There is, as a result, little . For a good introduction to Augustine’s theory of knowledge, see Matthews, “Knowledge and Illumination.” . Markus writes that Augustine adopts “the essential core of the Platonic theory of knowledge” (“Augustine,” 370). On the influence of Neoplatonic thought on Augustine’s philosophy, see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 103–4. Augustine details his initial enchantment with and eventual movement away from Platonic philosophy in his Confessions, but his theory of knowledge remains indebted to it. Augustine’s knowledge of Aristotle’s works was limited.

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scholarship on Augustine‘s views about imagination. Typically characterizing imagination as an impediment to productive intellectual activity, he defines it primarily as Plato did, as a combination of sensation and belief. Imagination performs other activities, creating images of things not sensed, as in dreams, and storing sensory images as it always does. It also enables foresight.10 Sometimes it overlaps with memory, but never shares its highest functions.11 Bonaventure, then, does not derive his understanding of imagination’s power from Augustine, but Augustine nevertheless helps Bonaventure to augment the cognitive power of mental images. He does this in part by involving Christ in various aspects of the mind’s path to understanding. We are familiar with his characterization of Christ as the inner or interior teacher who enlightens the individual intellect, but Augustine gives Christ multiple, overlapping roles in the process of human cognition.12 These roles take root in the doctrine that the Son as Word contains the eternal forms of all created things. According to Augustine’s realism, the essence of anything, such as the goodness that underlies all good things or the blackness that all black things share, resides as an eternal form or idea in the divine mind. These forms are what the human intellect knows when it knows anything, since material things, being subject to change and decay, cannot be known. Only their forms are stable and therefore knowable, and, for Augustine, those forms exist in God rather than in sensible things.13 Augustine thus redefines Plato’s intelligible world, which for Plato is the locus of all forms, and makes it equivalent to the divine mind, and in this he follows contemporary fashion.14 He further Christianizes the doctrine by O’Daly notes that Augustine knew Aristotle’s Categories, probably in translation, “but cannot have had access either to De anima or other Aristotelian texts, such as the parva naturalia, which deal with problems of perception” (Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 102). . O’Daly notes that “there is no satisfactory account of Augustine’s views on imagination,” but his own attempt to provide one is impeded by how limited Augustine’s pronouncements about the faculty are (Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 106n1). See also G. Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought, 135–53. Augustine addresses imagination at some length in De Trinitate, XI.ii.2–XI.xi.18, and De Genesi ad litteram, XII.8–XII.23. 10. See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII.23, CSEL 28.1:415. 11. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.iv.7–XI.v.8 and XI.vii.11–XI.ix.16. Carruthers discusses this overlap between imagination and memory, but overstates it (Craft of Thought, 68 and 296n29). 12. On Christ as the inner teacher, see Augustine, De magistro, XI.38, CCSL 29:196: “Ille autem qui consulitur, docet, qui in interiore homine habitare dictus est Christus.” See also Turner’s discussion of metaphors of inwardness in Augustine’s theology, as well as the relationship between self-knowledge and ascent (Darkness of God, 74–101). 13. See O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 92. 14. O’Daly attributes the idea that the forms are God’s thoughts to the Middle Platonists (Augustine’s Philosophy of the Mind, 193). On the Middle Platonists, see Dillon, Middle Platonists.

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defining the Trinity through these forms, such that the Father contains the forms, the Son is their expression, and the Holy Spirit links the one to the other. Augustine explains, “The Father, as though uttering Himself, begot the Word, equal in all things to Himself.”15 The Word is the Father’s expression of his knowledge, and the Word, in a separate gesture, expressed those forms in creation. The Father thus “begot one Word in whom He said all things before the several works were made.”16 Like a word that is conceived mentally and then spoken, so the Word exists in one form as the expression of the Father’s knowledge and in another as the created, spoken universe itself.17 As Christ incarnate, he is spoken in yet another way. Joined to flesh, he becomes sensible like a word that, once spoken, can be sensed.18 The significance of this doctrine, as far as human cognition is concerned, is that all knowledge takes place in and through Christ. Since human knowing is equivalent to the knowledge of forms, and these forms as they exist in creation are based in Christ, so the intellect that knows anything knows, in part, Christ. Later theologians realized that a more startling claim lay implicit in Augustine’s trinitarian theology, which is that human knowledge involves a glimpse at Christ’s self-knowing. An English commentary on John, probably written around the eighth century, explains that Christ is the light of men “because he illumines the hearts of all men that deserve to be illuminated with the presence of his own cognition.”19 The author does not expand on this intriguing comment, but it suggests that Christ himself provides the content of human knowledge, that his knowledge of forms becomes, although always to a lesser degree, a human being’s. The ninthcentury court philosopher John Scotus Eriugena likewise writes that God “presented his cognition to all seeking to know him.”20 What the individual 15. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xiv.23, CCSL 50A:496: “Proinde tamquam se ipsum dicens pater genuit verbum sibi aequale per omnia.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 195. Efrem Bettoni writes that this doctrine—that the Son is the expression of the Father’s knowledge—“is common to all Christian thought, at least from Augustine on” (Saint Bonaventure, 48). 16. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, II.6, CSEL 28.1:41: “unum quippe verbum ille genuit, in quo dixit omnia, priusquam facta sunt singula.” Trans. Taylor, Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1:54. 17. See Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium, I.i.8–10, PL 35:1383–84. 18. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xi.20, CCSL 50A:487. 19. Attr. to Bede, Expositio in Evangelium S. Joannis, PL 92:639D: “Lux quippe est hominum Christus, quia omnia quae illuminari merentur corda hominum, suae praesentia cognitionis illustrat.” Glorieux rejects the attribution to Bede, though still noting that the commentary is based on Alcuin’s (Pour revaloriser Migne, 52). 20. Eriugena, Homilia in prologum S. Evangelii secundum Joannem, PL 122:290A: “suamque cognitionem omnibus cognoscentibus se praestitit.”

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knows in this case is Christ’s knowing of himself. From this perspective, knowing any worthwhile object means seeing, opaquely, Christ. Knowing itself becomes a spiritual, even semi-mystical activity.21 This doctrine is a more extreme version of that which makes Christ the repository of forms. In both cases, Christ is the intellect’s true object, housing the forms that the intellect knows when it knows fully. The intellect often fails to recognize the import of its activity, but that import is no less clear. True knowledge of any sort is knowledge of Christ. It is also Christ who enables the intellect to know things in their fullness. Through his incarnation and passion, he provided access to eternal things via earthly ones, not only clearing a path to heaven but also enabling the human mind to rise from knowledge to wisdom. His incarnation, in other words, bore both soteriological and cognitive significance. Augustine affirms that we could not otherwise “pass from being among created things to eternal things, unless the eternal allied himself to us in our created condition, and so provided us with a bridge to his eternity.”22 Before the incarnation, the intellect, corrupted by original sin, could rise only fitfully to wisdom, what Augustine defines as “cognition of eternal things.”23 It could make conclusions based on its natural observations, but it could not refer its knowledge back to God. As Gentile philosophers, to take Augustine’s example, were unable to rise to eternal things because they “philosophized without the Mediator, that is, without the man Christ,” so Christians could not progress from earthly knowledge to spiritual wisdom without Christ’s aid, aid that he delivered through his incarnation and resurrection.24 Augustine thus opposes wisdom, the “cognition of eternal things,” to knowledge, the “cognition of temporal things,”25 and presents Christ as the gateway between the two. The Word became human precisely “in order that

21. Only proper, charitable knowledge qualifies. See, for instance, Augustine, De Trinitate, IX.x.15, CCSL 50:306. 22. Augustine, De Trinitate, IV.xviii.24, CCSL 50:192: “nec ab eo quod orti sumus ad aeterna transire possemus nisi aeterno per ortum nostrum nobis sociato ad aeternitatem ipsius traiceremur.” Trans. Hill, The Trinity, 170. 23. Augustine, De Trinitate, XII.xv.25, CCSL 50:379: “ad sapientiam pertineat aeternarum rerum cognitio intellectualis.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 102. 24. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.xix.24, CCSL 50A:416: “sine mediatore, id est sine homine Christo philosophati sunt.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 132. 25. Augustine, De Trinitate, XII.xv.25, CCSL 50:379: “ad scientiam vero temporalium rerum [pertineat] cognitio rationalis.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 102. On Augustine’s use of “scientia” and “sapientia,” see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 92–102. As Markus notes, the terms can be used interchangeably (“Augustine,” 362).

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we may contemplate Him steadfastly in eternal things.”26 Uniting a divine nature to a human one and thus wedding the eternal to the material, Christ created a link between the two realms. He made it possible for human beings, when properly motivated, to know spiritual things.27 When it grasps any truth, then, the mind relies on the cognitive resources of Christ’s incarnation and passion, which built a bridge between this world and God. Augustine explains, “Through Him we travel to Him; through knowledge we proceed to wisdom; but we do not depart from the same Christ.”28 With respect to Christ, knowledge is wisdom because his human nature is linked to his divine one. Material and spiritual knowledge intersect in him.29 The path from knowledge to wisdom is, therefore, always an ascent to and through Christ. As Augustine succinctly expresses the doctrine, “It is his divinity toward which, his humanity by means of which we proceed” when we know.30 Although ensconced in material bodies and a material world, human beings rise to wisdom because Christ charted a path from matter to spirit within himself. In Augustine’s formulation, then, Christ’s incarnation serves a specifically cognitive function, in addition to theological ones. It allows the mind to know eternal things. Christ is thus what the mind knows and how the mind knows it, but the postlapsarian intellect requires further aid in order to know the forms that inhere in Christ. It requires, specifically, direct assistance in the form of divine illumination. Only through the light of illumination can the intellect understand forms. Augustine maintained the Platonic position that perception contributes to sensory cognition without furnishing the materials of intellectual cognition. Augustine writes that the sensible world “is in fact something of an obstacle (impedimento)” to understanding.31 To the exact extent that Augustine alienates the intellect from the material world, he 26. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.xix.24, CCSL 50A:416: “ut eum stabiliter contemplemur in rebus aeternis.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 132. 27. The doctrine of Christ’s two natures, that he is wholly human and wholly divine, was only definitely established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but Augustine seems already to have accepted its orthodoxy. On this doctrine, see Pelikan, Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 256–66. 28. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.xix.24, CCSL 50A:417: “Per ipsum pergimus ad ipsum, tendimus per scientiam ad sapientiam; ab uno tamen eodemque Christo non recedimus.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 132. 29. See, for instance, Augustine, De Trinitate, XIII.xix.24, CCSL 50A:415. 30. Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium, XLII.viii.8, PL 35:1702D: “divinitas eius quo imus, humanitas eius qua imus.” 31. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, VII.14, CSEL 28.1:213. See also De Trinitate, XI.ii.3, CCSL 50:336.

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draws it closer to Christ, for Christ discloses forms to the intellect that it cannot discover on its own. To arrive at understanding, then, the human mind depends on the constant presence of divine light. As Augustine explains, “The Light is God Himself,” and, although itself not perceptible except in cases of mystical rapture, the light establishes a direct link between God and the intellect that is his trinitarian image.32 It is thanks to this light that the intellect can access the forms that it knows and, as a result, acquire knowledge. As it is the purpose of the mind to know, and illumination makes it possible for the individual to know, so illumination is “the means whereby man’s true mental nature is realized.”33 Christ is thus the light by which the intellect knows, the treasury of forms that the intellect apprehends, and the means through which knowledge rises to wisdom. As a result, the act of knowing is ripe with spiritual significance. As Bernard McGinn writes, “In Augustine we can never separate accounts of contemplative vision from theory of knowledge.”34 The intellect ascends to God by knowing, but it makes best use of itself when it turns itself to the task of knowing God.

Augustine’s Mental Images The intellect’s capacity to understand derives from its creation in the image of God, and its status as image is reflected in its reliance on cognitive images. Understanding how the mind’s images support cognition and how they make the mind resemble the Trinity, we can understand the emphasis that Bonaventure places on mental images in his theology and philosophy. Bonaventure is able to elevate the cognitive and spiritual significance of mental images because Augustine had already invested them with considerable value, especially in his trinitarian theory of knowledge. The Trinity as Augustine defines it is engaged in an eternal and perfect act of self-knowing. The Word is “born” from “the knowledge of the Father, or from the wisdom of the Father, or, to be more explicit, from the Father who is knowledge, from the Father who is wisdom.”35 The Holy Spirit proceeds from both as

32. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII.31, CSEL 28.1:425: “nam illud iam ipse deus est.” 33. O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 206. Christ does not deliver knowledge ex nihilo to the mind but rather makes knowable forms that exist, in potentia, inside the memory. He illumines; he does not transmit. 34. McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, 234. 35. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xiii.22, CCSL 50A:495: “‘de patris scientia, de patris sapientia’; vel quod est expressius, ‘de patre scientia, de patre sapientia.’” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 195.

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the love they share.36 Image unites the three, for the Son is the perfect image of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the bond between knowledge and its expression. The human mind mimics the activities of the Trinity by likewise devoting itself to understanding. It mirrors the trinitarian persons most accurately when it remembers, understands, and loves. Human beings are images of God in their minds insofar as they contemplate eternal things.37 More specifically, they are images of God when they use their “reason and intelligence to understand and behold God.”38 The mind advances to such understanding only after it has first understood itself. Such is its disposition; the mind is its own proper object not just because it is created in God’s image, but because it is entirely present to itself. As Augustine explains, “The mind knows nothing so well as that which is present to itself, and nothing is more present to the mind than it is to itself.”39 In the case of the mind’s selfknowing, knowledge thoroughly matches its object. The mind that knows is also the mind that is known, and the symmetry between the two distantly represents the perfect mirroring of Father and Son. Once it knows itself, as well as the way in which memory, understanding, and love interact within itself, the mind’s task is to know God through itself. Augustine explains that the intellect is the truest image of the Trinity not because it remembers, understands, and loves, “but because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom it was made.”40 The intellect is designed to comprehend 36. As Chadwick explains, Augustine was unaware that the Council of Constantinople of 381, which was attended only by Eastern Christians, had declared that the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father (Augustine, 97). Disagreement about whether it proceeded from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, what is known as the filioque dispute, ended up widening the gap between Eastern and Western Christendom. See Herrin, Formation of Christendom, 462–64. 37. Augustine, De Trinitate, XII.iv.4, CCSL 50:358. In the De Trinitate, Augustine calls the human being simply “image of God” (imago Dei), rather than using a formula he favored in earlier writings, which was that the individual was created “to the image of God” or “ad imaginem Dei.” The later phrasing expresses the individual’s likeness to God more strongly. On this shift in Augustine’s writings, see Teske, Augustine of Hippo, 171–80. 38. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV.iv.6, CCSL 50A:428: “ratione atque intellectu ad intelle­ gendum et conspiciendum deum.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 142. Elsewhere, Augustine explains that understanding and beholding God are the same. See Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII. iv.6, CCSL 50:275. 39. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV.v.7, CCSL 50A:429: “Nihil enim tam novit mens quam id quod sibi praesto est, nec menti magis quidquam praesto est quam ipsa sibi.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 143. 40. Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV.xii.15; CCSL 50A:442–3: “sed quia potest etiam meminisse et intelligere et amare a quo facta est.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 154.

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the mechanisms by which it knows, to know them, and to see God within them. Augustine explains at length the analogy between the mind’s remembering, understanding, and loving, on the one hand, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, on the other. This is his favored trinitarian analogy, the one that gives the individual his or her best insight into God. We begin with memory. Augustine explains, “The memory of man . . . , that in which intelligible things are so contained that they do not come in through the senses of the body, has, in proportion to its own small measure in this image of the Trinity, a likeness, incomparably unequal, of course, but yet a likeness of whatever kind it may be to the Father.”41 According to Augustine, memory is not just a faculty that enables recollection of past events. It is not solely temporal.42 There is, rather, a “more profound depth of our memory” according to which it understands not those things already known, but new things whose knowledge was latent (latebat) in the memory.43 As Robert Markus explains, memory contains “everything the mind is capable of knowing or thinking about. . . . Memoria is the whole potential knowledge of an individual mind at any one time.”44 God places within memory the forms by which the mind knows in potentia all that it knows before it knows anything. In this respect, memory is like the Father, who possesses all knowledge. The Father’s expression of his knowledge in the Son, or Word, is intimated by the mind’s creation of its own word. When the mind actually knows the potentially knowable forms housed in memory, it creates an image, or mental word, of its own knowledge.45 Augustine repeatedly returns to the concept of the mental word, which “cannot be uttered in sound nor thought in the likeness of sound. . . . It precedes all the signs by which it 41. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xxiii.43, CCSL 50A:520: “memoria hominis . . . qua res intelligibiles ita continentur ut non in eam per sensus corporis venerint, habeat pro modulo suo in hac imagine trinitatis incomparabiliter quidem imparem sed tamen qualemcumque similitudinem patris.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 213. 42. For a good description of memory in Augustine’s philosophy, see O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind, 131–51. Carruthers discusses Augustine’s “rhetorical” memory in Craft of Thought, 31–35. 43. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xxi.40; CCSL 50A:518: “abstrusior profunditas nostrae memoriae.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 211. Augustine’s most concentrated exploration of memory is in his Confessions, X.viii–xxv. 44. Markus, “Augustine,” 371. Teske disagrees with this, the majority view regarding Augustine’s philosophy of memory, although I think unpersuasively. See Teske, Augustine of Hippo, 61–75. 45. Colish attributes the origins of this concept of the inner word to the Stoics (Mirror of Language, 51). For a Christian adaptation of the concept before Augustine, see Tertullian, Adversus Praxean v, CCSL 2:1164.

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is signified, and is begotten by the knowledge which remains in the mind when this same knowledge is spoken inwardly, just as it is.”46 The mental word is the mind’s actual thinking of its potentially knowable content. Knowing the images contained in memory through its own word, the mind can comprehend in limited measure the Father’s self-imaging in the Word.47 Finally, “The love of man which proceeds from knowledge and combines the memory and the understanding . . . has in this image some likeness, although very unequal, to the Holy Spirit.”48 The Holy Spirit is represented by the love that connects memory to understanding. The mind sees God, then, through its own processes, knowing God and knowing the process by which it knows him simultaneously. The mind, Augustine explains, resembles what it knows, and as a result, “We are like God inasmuch as we know Him.”49 The mind in this circumstance resembles God’s own knowing of himself, for both are directed toward God. The intellect’s knowledge of God therefore increases in proportion to its awareness of its own operations. The mind shows itself to be made in the image of God insofar as, in the process of knowing, it creates images that resemble those of the Trinity. Thus, the mind’s “word,” its knowing of the images contained in memory, constitutes its own self-expression and its own image. Images greet the intellect at various other stages of knowledge acquisition as well. For instance, Augustine offers as an early trinitarian analogy the form of the object perceived, the image impressed by that object on sense, and the will that connects them.50 He likewise discusses the images in imagination and memory. What makes all these images potent is the mind’s own status as image. Indeed, the mind is the ultimate image through which it sees God. Augustine glosses 1 Cor. 13:12, “We see now in a mirror darkly (aenigmate),” at some length. He explains, “They who see through this mirror and in this enigma, as it is permitted to see in this life, are . . . they who look upon their mind as an image, so that they are able, in some way or other, to refer what they

46. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xi.20, CCSL 50A:488: “neque prolativum est in sono neque cogitativum in similitudine soni . . . sed quod omnia quibus significatur signa praecedit et gignitur de scientia quae manet in animo quando eadem scientia intus dicitur sicuti est.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 188. 47. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xi.20, CCSL 50A:488. 48. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xxiii.43, CCSL 50A:520–21: “amor hominis de scientia procedens et memoriam intellegentiamque coniungens . . . habeat in hac imagine aliquam licet valde imparem similitudinem spiritus sancti.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 213. 49. Augustine, De Trinitate, IX.xi.16, CCSL 50:307: “in quantum deum novimus similes sumus.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 37. 50. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.ii.5, CCSL 50:338.

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see to Him, whose image it is.”51 For Augustine, the mind itself is the image through which we see darkly in this life, and God is perceived murkily through it based on the resemblance between the two. The great value of cognitive images is therefore determined by the mind’s own status as image. The mind is not only an image of God but the image through which it knows God. Images in Augustine’s philosophy testify to the validity of the mind’s operations and the intimacy between the mind and God. Image is nearly the highest state of being, second only to being itself. As Mary Clark explains, Augustine revised the “Neoplatonic notion that an image is always inferior,” as in the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation.52 In the Trinity as Augustine understands it, image is equality. In that unique case, representation is perfect. The Son is not only an image but a cognitive image of God. The viator’s goal is not to leave behind images, then, but to become a better image of God, more like the image that Christ is. To that end, Augustine explains that, even when the blessed see God “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), they still see him through a cognitive image. In the intelligible world, or heaven, the brightness of God will be seen “not through a symbolic or corporeal vision, as it was seen on Mount Sinai, nor through a spiritual vision, such as Isaiah saw, . . . but through a direct vision and not through a dark image.”53 What Taylor here translates as “direct vision,” however, is “per speciem,” or “through species.” Such species are cognitive representations, images within the mind that help the mind to think about an object. To see God through species is, then, to see God as one sees an object directly in front of oneself. But the individual will still see through an image, because all knowledge arrives through images, and this to the mind’s own benefit. For Augustine, the mind’s dependence on images reflects the fact that mind is image, and through this dependence, the mind celebrates its proximity to Christ who is the ultimate image. Whereas Plato’s Socrates, in the famous seventh book of The Republic, speaks of the unknowingly image-

51. Augustine, De Trinitate, XV.xxiii.44; CCSL 50A:522: “Per quod tamen speculum et in quo aenigmate qui vident sicut in hac vita videre concessum est . . . illi qui eam tamquam imaginem vident ut possint ad eum cuius imago est quomodocumque referre quod vident.” Trans. Matthews, On the Trinity, 214. See also De Trinitate, XV.vii.14–XV.ix.16. 52. Clark, Augustine, 69. 53. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII.26, CSEL 28.1:420: “non per visionem significantem sive corporalem, sicut visa est in monte Sina, sive spiritualem, sicut vidit Esaias . . . sed per speciem non per aenigmata.” Trans. Taylor, Literal Meaning of Genesis, 2:217. See also De Trinitate, XIV.xix.25, CCSL 50A:456–57.

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dependent cave dwellers with evident sympathy and regret, such dependence on images cannot be bemoaned in a system that understands human beings’ relationship to God and God’s relationship to his own triune self through images. For Augustine, understanding is an act enabled by God, self-understanding resembles God, and from both one might understand, in part, God. For the Franciscan Bonaventure, as we will see, this suggests that the act of imagining Christ can be made into a powerful spiritual program. With the additional resources of Aristotelian philosophy, he unites the entire process of cognition around its images. Continuing to understand Christ as the perfect cognitive image, Bonaventure has Christ interact with imagination’s phantasms. Himself both sensible and intelligible, Christ is uniquely qualified to assist the mind in its progression from sensory to intellectual cognition. Bonaventure recognizes the implication in Augustine’s philosophy that the mind, knowing itself and God through itself, has at its disposal an excellent means to ascend to God.

Cognition and God in Bonaventure’s Philosophy Through its trinitarian design and Christ’s multiple roles in its operations, Augustine’s intellect was well-suited for devotional applications, but such was not Augustine’s interest. Rather, by showing that cognition involved Christ directly, he sought to demonstrate that the intellect could attain knowledge (contra the Skeptics) and that the intellect had natural means to know God.54 Bonaventure was instead fervently interested in the mystical potential both of Augustine’s theory of knowledge and of his own, and in this respect he distinguished himself not only from Augustine but from his contemporaries as well.55 He transformed the process of cognition into a systematic means to find God as he exists within it. As Etienne Gilson notes, no aspect of Bonaventure’s philosophy was “more deliberate or more fully elaborated” than his theory of knowledge, and that theory’s originality consists in both its detail and its “general mystic orientation.”56 Bonaventure builds on certain familiar Augustinian ideas—namely, that God is present in every act by which the intellect apprehends truth and that the knowing intellect understands through God—and allows the soul that inspects its 54. On Augustine’s concern with skepticism, see Matthews, “Knowledge and Illumination,” and O’Daly, “Response to Skepticism.” Of course, there is an unspoken judgment in the claim that such knowledge is “natural,” which is that belief in Christianity alone is natural. 55. On Bonaventure’s distinctive interest in the mystical implications of cognitive theory, see Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance, 1:222. 56. Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 341.

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own cognitive procedures to climb toward God. Bonaventure thus tells the would-be contemplative, “You are able to see within yourself the Truth that teaches you.”57 The mind that sees God operating within it can rise above itself and conform to God. Bonaventure’s cognitive psychology, as we will see, is heavily indebted to Augustine’s, but he incorporates crucial elements from Aristotelian philosophy as well. Of course, Aristotle had nothing to say about knowledge acquisition insofar as it involved the Christian God, but his interest in imagination and cognitive images nonetheless gave Bonaventure the means to develop a precise theory of God’s involvement in the intellect’s activity. Christ takes on the role of the Aristotelian agent intellect and extracts intelligible data from imagination’s phantasm. That phantasm, containing both sensory and intelligible data, is proportioned to Christ with his dual humanity and divinity. He therefore has the unique ability to act on imagination’s image and generate intellectual cognition out of sensory cognition. Every act of knowing, so understood, is a mini-journey from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Imagination becomes a crucial locus of divine presence within the mind, and the mind that then turns itself to the task of imagining Christ has, according to Bonaventure, an especially effective means of ascending to him. The rest of this chapter might be understood as an exposition of the following passage from Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaëmeron, a work that Bonaventure left unfinished upon his death in 1274 and that, as a collation, survives through a friar’s notes: Christ teaches interiorly, so that no truth is known except through Him, not through speech as it is with us, but through inner enlightenment. Wherefore He must necessarily have within Himself the most clear species, which He cannot possibly have received from another. He Himself, then, is intimate to every soul, and He shines forth by means of His most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding. And in this manner, these obscure species, mixed with the darkness of phantasms, are lit up in such a way that the intellect understands.58

57. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, III.3, Opera omnia 5:304: “Videre igitur per te potes veritatem, quae te docet.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 20. 58. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XII.5, Opera omnia 5:385: “Christus est doctor interius, nec scitur aliqua veritas nisi per eum, non loquendo, sicut nos, sed interius illustrando; et ideo necesse est, ut habeat clarissimas species apud se, neque tamen ab alio acceperit. Ipse enim intimus est omni animae et suis speciebus clarissimis refulget super species intellectus nostri

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Bonaventure here explains Christ’s direct interaction with the mind’s cognitive images, specifically with imagination’s phantasms. Christ enables those images accurately to represent their objects because he, functioning as the perfect cognitive image, acts upon them. Combining Augustinian illumination and Aristotelian abstraction, Bonaventure enhances the reliability and capability of cognitive images. He invests cognitive images with the power to support not just sensory but also intellectual cognition, making images the common thread that unites the entire process of cognition. They function accurately because Christ shines upon them; and because Christ shines upon them, such images can lead the intellect that apperceives (or perceives that it is perceiving) its own procedures to Christ. To understand fully the system that Bonaventure here describes, however, we need to explore various of its elements in greater detail. This section focuses on the purpose of cognition as Bonaventure conceives of it. God inserts into the cognitive process means by which to ascend once again to him, with the result that knowing is always a journey to God. The rest of the chapter details the role of Christ and imagination in that cognitive process. Focusing especially on Bonaventure’s mystical masterpiece, the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, it explores the mechanisms of spiritual ascent and the role of cognition within it. This section, then, provides the general framework for Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge, while those that follow describe his translation of that theory into a mystical program. The special significance that Bonaventure assigns to imagination explains not only the contours of the Itinerarium but, as we will see in the following chapter, the purpose of his meditations on the life of Christ. There are two sides to the process of human knowledge acquisition as Bonaventure describes it. On the one hand, God extends his influence downward, into creation as well as the human intellect, to ensure that the mind can indeed know. On the other hand, the intellect, perceiving divine traces within created things, including itself, is meant to rise up to God through its own procedures. Knowledge descends from God and returns to him. Bonaventure relies heavily on Augustine in articulating a system whereby God certifies human knowing and is known, in turn, through the mechanisms by which he does so. Both maintain that knowledge ultimately and most perfectly exists in God, specifically in the Word, but Bonaventure collapses more completely than Augustine the activities of knowing and knowing God. Bonaventure explains, “With the same cognition by which tenebrosas; et sic illustrantur species illae obtenebratae, admixtae obscuritati phantasmatum, ut intellectus intelligat.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:174–75.

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anyone knows the Word, he knows things in the Word. Therefore, the soul through the same habit of cognition knows the Word and other things in him.”59 Everyday knowledge acquisition can become an express journey to God. Bonaventure also puts greater emphasis on God’s knowability by identifying God as the immediate, if always elusive, object of the intellect. Appropriately, then, Bonaventure charges the intellect that knows with knowing what is most present to it, namely, God. Like Augustine, Bonaventure ensures the intellect’s ability to achieve knowledge by attaching it to the divine mind. “Our intellect,” he writes, “is joined to that eternal Truth itself.”60 It is joined specifically through illumination.61 Whenever the intellect knows with certitude, it relies on the divine light that shines upon it, that “light of truth” emerging from God “in which all things shine forth infallibly.”62 The intellect has a natural light of its own, and that light was sufficient in Eden to enable understanding, but the intellect suffered from the fall and its natural light no longer “suffices for certain cognition of anything without the light of the eternal Word.”63 This does not mean that knowledge is directly transmitted from God to the individual intellect in the manner of a postal delivery. As noted above, it was a basic tenet of Christian Neoplatonism, and one to which Bonaventure subscribed, that God’s mind encompassed the Platonic forms, meaning that the essence of anything, whether existing or having the potential to exist, was to be found in its truest form within the divine mind. The intellect sees through these ideas, typically called by Bonaventure “rationes aeternae,” in 59. Bonaventure, 3 Sent. XIV.ii.i, arg. 4, Opera omnia 3:307: “eadem cognitione, qua quis novit Verbum, cognoscit et res in Verbo: igitur anima Christi per eundem habitum cognitionis cognoscit Verbum et alia in ipso.” 60. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, III.3, Opera omnia 5:304: “coniunctus sit intellectus noster ipsi aeternae veritati.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 20. 61. Bonaventure’s doctrine of illumination has been the topic of much scholarship. See, for instance, Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance, 1:111–245; Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 341–403; Bérubé, “De la théologie de l’image”; Quinn, Historical Constitution, 523–663; de Zamayon, “Teoría del Conocimiento”; and Crowley, “Illumination and Certitude.” 62. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.9, Opera omnia 5:302: “lux veritatis, in qua cuncta relucent infallibiliter.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 14. 63. Bonaventure, Sermo IV, 10, Opera omnia 5:569–70: “Lux ergo intellectus creati sibi non sufficit ad certam comprehensionem rei cuiuscumque absque luce Verbi aeterni.” Bonaventure says something similar at 2 Sent. XXVIII.ii.iii, resp., Opera omnia 2:690: “the created light is not able to complete its activity without the cooperation of the uncreated light through which every man is illuminated” (“lumen creatum non potest perficere operationem suam absque cooperatione luminis increati, per quod illuminatur omnis homo”). Both passages pose a problem for Crowley’s interpretation of Bonaventure’s illumination doctrine, according to which the intellect’s natural light is capable of perceiving some truths with certainty without any “supplementary illumination” (“Illumination and Certitude,” 439).

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the process of illumination. The eternal ideas do not infuse knowledge into the intellect but rather act as “the regulative and motivating principle,” guiding knowledge but not providing its content.64 Neither this divine light nor the intellect’s natural light functions on its own to generate knowledge.65 The two must work in tandem to achieve their purpose. Insofar as it is an image of God, the soul is always attached to some degree both to God and to the eternal ideas, which are inseparable.66 Bonaventure explains, “Since certain cognition is appropriate to the rational spirit insofar as it is an image of God, so in this knowledge the soul attains to the eternal ideas. But because it is never fully conformed to God (deiformis) in this life, it does not attain to the reasons clearly, fully, and distinctly, but only to a greater or lesser degree as it approaches greater or lesser conformity to God. However, it always attains to the reasons in some way because the ratio of image can never be separated from God.”67 Because the ideas are united so fundamentally to God, they themselves cannot be perceived. To see them would be to see God, and the soul of the viator does not see God directly. For Bonaventure, then, “Illumination is vision in the exemplary divine ideas of all truth known with certainty.”68 It is vision in the ideas but not vision of the ideas. This is what makes the metaphor of illumination, which is borrowed from the realm of vision, apt: “Just as the eye . . . does not see the light through which it sees other things, . . . so our mind’s eye . . . does not notice that Being which is beyond all other categories, even though it comes first to the mind, and through it, all other things.”69 However, Bonaventure is not content to leave matters here. Rather, he elsewhere allows the intellect surprising access to the light that illuminates it. 64. Bonaventure, De scientia Christi, iv, resp., Opera omnia 5:23: “regulans et ratio motiva.” 65. See, for instance, De scientia Christi, iv, resp., Opera omnia 5:24. There Bonaventure explains that, for the viator, except perhaps in cases of divine revelation, “the light of eternal reason is insufficient of itself to produce knowledge” (“non sufficit sibi ad cognoscendum lumen rationis aeternae”) without data provided by the senses. Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 136. 66. On their inseparability, see Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 151. 67. Bonaventure, De scientia Christi, iv, resp., Opera omnia 5:24: “Quoniam igitur certitudinalis cognitio competit spiritui rationali, in quantum est imago Dei, ideo in hac cognitione aeternas rationes attingit. Sed quia in statu viae non est adhuc plene deiformis, ideo non attingit eas clare et plene et distincte; sed secundum quod magis vel minus ad deiformitatem accedit, secundum hoc magis vel minus eas attingit, semper tamen aliquo modo, quia nunquam potest ab eo ratio imaginis separari.” 68. de Zamayon, “Teoría del Conocimiento,” 427. 69. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, V.4, Opera omnia 5:309: “sicut oculus . . . lucem, per quam videt cetera, non videt . . . sic oculus mentis nostrae . . . ipsum esse extra omne genus, licet primo occurrat menti, et per ipsum alia, tamen non advertit.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 29.

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Bonaventure maximizes the individual’s access to God in his theory of cognition, so much so that God becomes, in Camille Bérubé’s formulation, “the immediate object of the intellect.”70 God is the intellect’s proper object, as Bonaventure explains: “God is most present to the soul and is knowable in Himself.”71 He is most present because his illuminative light suffuses the mind, and Bonaventure insists more strongly than Augustine on the knowability of that light. “God himself,” he writes, “insofar as he is the supreme light, is supremely knowable, and insofar as this supreme light fills our intellect, and as much as it is from him, it is supremely knowable to us.”72 Sharing with Augustine the conviction that nothing separates the intellect from God, Bonaventure puts greater emphasis on their intimacy.73 He concedes that God “is inaccessible,” but nonetheless affirms that he is “closest to the soul, closer even than the soul is to itself.”74 Believing, like Augustine, that God’s light shines directly on the soul, he disagrees with those who hold that illumination represents only divine influence, not the light of the divine mind proper.75 So direct and potent was divine aid in Bonaventure’s system of illumination that, as Steven Marrone notes, he had to qualify himself on occasion in order to protect “the inaccessibility of the divine.”76 Thus, although it was a consequence of original sin, Bonaventure views the intellect’s need for God’s assistance in a positive light. It establishes for him the fundamental intimacy of God with the human soul and makes the pro­ cess of cognition itself a means to contemplate God. The mind that knows makes use of the divine light not only within it but within all created things to work its way back to God. Bonaventure is faithful to the Augustinian beliefs that the Father expresses his knowledge in

70. Bérubé, “De la théologie de l’image,” 164. Bérubé argues for this position throughout his article. 71. Bonaventure, De mysterio Trinitatis, I.i.10, Opera omnia 5:46: “Deus praesentissimus est ipsi animae et se ipso cognoscibilis.” Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, 109. 72. Bonaventure, 1 Sent. III.ii.i.i, resp., Opera omnia 1:69: “Deus in se tanquam summa lux est summe cognoscobilis; et tanquam lux summe intellectum nostrum complens, et quantum est de se, esset summe cognoscobilis etiam nobis.” Bérubé places particular emphasis on this section of Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary (“De la théologie de l’image,” 163–65). 73. See Bonaventure, Breviloquium, II.iv, Opera omnia 5:221; and Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.v.8, CCSL 50:344. On the importance of the absence of intermediaries in Bonaventure’s philosophy, see Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 363. 74. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XII.11, Opera omnia 5:386: “Haec lux est inaccessibilis, et tamen proxima anima, etiam plus quam ipsa sibi.” 75. On the matter of influence and the different positions adopted regarding it in thirteenthcentury doctrines of illumination, see Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance, 1:122–51. 76. Marrone, “Matthew of Aquasparta,” 266.

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the Word and that the Word expresses himself in creation.77 Like Augustine, Bonaventure holds that the eternal reasons that guide the intellect through illumination are the exemplary forms of those things. These reasons, in­ hering within the Word, are exemplary because the created world resembles them. Bonaventure explains, “The Ideas must be the exemplary forms and hence the representative likenesses of created beings.”78 All of creation is an image that reflects the Word, and created things themselves participate in the Word. Bonaventure proceeds to explain that the divine ideas “are the principles of knowledge, since knowledge, precisely as knowledge, involves expression and assimilation between the subject and object known.”79 The idea that knowledge consists in likeness between knower and object known is axiomatic to medieval philosophers, often expressed in the ubiquitous, although unattributed, definition of truth as “the adequation of the intellect with its object.”80 To know anything, therefore, is to know it as it accords with its exemplar, in whose image the world was created.81 Beyond seeing created things as symbolically resonant, however, Bonaventure emphasizes the divine presence within them. He draws on both Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy to locate the forms or essences of all created things ultimately in God and allow those forms to exist likewise within sensible things. Thus, “In every creature,” he says, ”there is a refulgence of the divine exemplar, but mixed with darkness.”82 The

77. On the Father’s expressing of himself in the Son, see Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, III.4, Opera omnia 5:343; and Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 142. On the Word’s “saying” of himself in the act of creation, see Bonaventure, 1 Sent XXVII.ii.i.i, conc., Opera omnia 1:482. 78. Bonaventure, De scientia Christi, ii, resp., Opera omnia 5:8: “ideo necesse est, quod sint formae exemplares, ac per hoc ipsarum rerum similitudines repraesentativae” Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 89. 79. Bonaventure, De scientia Christi, ii, resp., Opera omnia 5:8: “ideo cognoscendi rationes sunt, quia cognitio, hoc ipso quod cognitio, assimilationem dicit et expressionem inter cognoscentem et cognoscibile.” Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 89–90. 80. Bonaventure quotes this definition, for instance, at 1 Sent. XL.ii.1.1, ad 1, Opera omnia 1:707 (“Est enim veritas adaequatio rei et intellectus”). The editors attach a lengthy note, 707n5, explaining that, although the definition was variously attributed in the Middle Ages to Aristotle and others, the source had not been identified, and that is still the case. 81. As Quinn explains, “The complete and perfect adequation of the human intellect to a thing that it understands comes about when the intelligible word of the intellect expresses the full conformity of the thing to its exemplar similitude in the creating intellect of God” (Historical Constitution, 385). 82. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XII.14, Opera omnia 5:386: “In qualibet enim creatura est refulgentia divini exemplaris, sed cum tenebra permixta.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:179.

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intellect’s job is to isolate that exemplar, to extract the intelligible content from sensible things. Bonaventure’s Aristotelianism thus makes the intellect’s object reside within sensible objects, with the result that the sensible world, and the mind’s thinking about it, provides a direct means to ascend to God. The intellect knows to different degrees of perfection, and as it attains higher levels of understanding, it also ascends to God. Bonaventure explains that a thing has being in itself (in se) and in its cause (in sua causa), “that is, in its proper genus and in its exemplar,” respectively.83 Something is, then, in itself, but also in God, and one achieves the highest level of knowing when one moves past the knowledge of a thing’s essence to its relationship to God. Hence, “A thing is better known in its divine exemplar than it is known in itself.”84 For instance, the knowledge that a human being is a rational animal is inferior to the knowledge that he is an image of God. Understanding in its fullest sense depends on knowing the originary cause of a thing, and as all things originate in God, it is through him that they are most fully known. “No one,” Bonaventure insists, “can have understanding unless he considers where things come from, how they are led back to their end, and how God shines forth in them.”85 Their ultimate truth is their relationship to God, and the intellect that uses itself properly knows in order to return to God. Augustine likewise believed that a thing was most fully known when known with respect to God, but Bonaventure relies also on Aristotelian philosophy to articulate a straightforward pathway from the lowest levels of cognition to God.

The Itinerarium and Bonaventure’s Philosophy of Imagination The great significance of these doctrines, at least for the purposes of this chapter, is the value they install in cognition as a contemplative pathway. As Bonaventure, discussing the eternal laws that guide knowledge, writes, “Our mind, enlightened and overflooded by so much brightness, unless it is blind, can be guided through looking at itself to contemplate the eternal

83. Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XXXIX.i.i, ad 3, Opera omnia 1:686: “id est in proprio genere, et in exemplari.” 84. Bonaventure, 3 Sent. XIV.ii.i, arg. 3, Opera omnia 3:307: “melius cognoscitur res in divino exemplari, quam cognoscitur in se.” 85. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, III.2, Opera omnia 5:343: “Nisi enim quis possit considerare de rebus, qualiter originantur, qualiter in finem reducuntur, et qualiter in eis refulget Deus; intelligentiam habere non potest.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:42.

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light.”86 This quotation comes from Bonaventure’s much-celebrated Itinerarium mentis ad Deum. A densely learned and admittedly difficult text, the Itinerarium describes a six-step journey toward mystical union, the seventh stage being its achievement.87 It lays out the mystical implications of Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge in greater detail than any other of his works, showing what it means for the mind to consider its own cognitive work and rise to God through it. For that reason, the Itinerarium is the focal text for the rest of the chapter, although there will be some excursions into topics that help to illuminate it. Implicit in this chapter’s argument is the claim that Bonaventure’s devotional and mystical works adhere to the same philosophy as his expressly philosophical ones. Indeed, although scholars commonly attribute his scholastic and mystical works to different stages of his career, his philosophy remains largely consistent across them.88 When it comes to the Itinerarium, the line between mysticism and philosophy is hard to draw. The text includes technical philosophical vocabulary about such topics as cognitive images, abstraction, and the contuition of God even as it offers what it presents as a path toward contemplation that anyone can follow. That such philosophical content is to be found in a contemplative treatise is one reason why Steven Marrone calls this text “difficult to categorize” and why Denys Turner labels Bonaventure an “intellectual mystic.”89 But the philosophical content helps to reveal the purpose of the text, which is, in part, to ascend to God through a rigorous, philosophical assessment of one’s cognitive processes. In the Itinerarium’s prologue, Bonaventure describes a vision that he saw thirty-three years after Francis’s death, one similar to the famous vision of the seraph that Francis himself experienced in the same location, on Mount Alverno.90 Likewise understanding the six-winged seraph as an image of 86. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, III.7, Opera omnia 5:305: “mens nostra tantis splendoribus irradiata et superfusa, nisi sit caeca, manuduci potest per semetipsam ad contemplandam illam lucem aeternam.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 22. Emphasis mine. 87. Bérubé, for instance, writes that the Itinerarium “is considered the prime work of the seraphic doctor. It is perhaps also the most difficult to comprehend according to the literal sense” (“De la théologie de l’image,” 175). 88. On the different stages in Bonaventure’s career, see Cousins, “Two Poles of St. Bonaventure’s Theology.” Cullen, agreeing with Etienne Gilson, affirms that Bonaventure’s philosophical thought changes little over time (Bonaventure, xii). 89. Marrone, Light of Thy Countenance, 1:118; and Turner, Darkness of God, 131. 90. Francis did not himself report his vision, which was communicated through a witness. However, it is regularly recounted in lives of Francis. With Bonaventure began the tradition that Francis received the stigmata from the seraph he saw (Constable, Three Studies, 223).

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Christ crucified, Bonaventure realizes that the seraph image represents a six-stage path to contemplation. The text charts the contemplative’s progress from knowledge of earthly matters (the first two stages), through an investigation of the mind (the next two), to direct consideration of God (the final two).91 Rigorously organized with a structure based on Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Major, the text’s trajectory is from external things to inner things to higher things.92 The first clue to the important cognitive dimension of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium is the fact that the text follows, in this organization, the same path as cognition itself. As Bonaventure explains, “We ascend from the lowest things to the highest things, from things outside us to those that are within, from the temporal to the eternal.”93 Bonaventure maintained that the individual learns about the created world through a process that begins with sense and proceeds to reason and finally to God as the repository of all truth. The soul, he writes, is designed to proceed in this order—“We are so designed that the material universe is a ladder by which we may ascend to God.”94 It is a ladder because “the rays of wisdom” (radios sapientiae) shine within it; “the supreme power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator shine forth in created things.”95 This is not to say that the text is cognitive rather than affective or ethical. Bonaventure is unequivocal that prayer and a good life are necessary prerequisites to contemplation, as love and desire are essential to its achievement.96 However, the mind’s cognitive operations are likewise essential to the soul’s journey toward mystical union. The cognitive component of Bonaventure’s mysticism has received considerably less scholarly attention than the affective, and so it receives fuller consideration here.

91. Seven-stage systems of spiritual ascent were popular in the thirteenth century, a trend evident in, for example, David of Augsburg’s Septem gradus orationis and Rudolph of Biberach’s De septem itineribus aeternitatis. The seven-stage program dates back at least to Augustine, whose system Coleman describes in “Christian Platonism of St. Augustine,” 32–33. 92. On Bonaventure’s indebtedness to Richard, see McGinn, “Ascension and Introversion,” 538. 93. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.6, Opera omnia 5:297: “ab imis ad summa, ab exterioribus ad intima, a temporalibus conscendimus ad aeterna.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 6–7. 94. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.2, Opera omnia 5:297: “secundum statum conditionis nostrae ipsa rerum universitas sit scala ad ascendendum in Deum.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 5. 95. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, Pro.4, Opera omnia 5:296; and Itinerarium, I.10, Opera omnia 5:298: “Relucet autem Creatoris summa potentia et sapientia et benevolentia in rebus creatis.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 2. 96. On the importance of prayer and holy living, for instance, see Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.8, Opera omnia 5:298.

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The Itinerarium not only describes the way in which the process of knowing marks out a path toward God but models its own prescriptions. It begins with sensory cognition, proceeds to intellectual cognition, and then finally rises above the mind to God, ascending “through the light that is imprinted on our minds, which is the light of Eternal Truth.”97 Ultimately, then, the intellect reverses the light of illumination and rises above itself. The journey begins with sensory cognition, first with the understanding of created things as images of God and then, in the second stage, with the recognition of God’s presence within those objects. Bonaventure thus places value in sensible things only insofar as the mind thinks about them. In the first stage, the would-be contemplative recognizes the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as they are reflected in created things, reasoning her way from them to their creator. Thus, “From visible things the soul rises to the consideration of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.”98 The second stage more directly concerns the way in which such knowledge enters into the soul. It is here that Bonaventure draws in an especially detailed way on contemporary theories of cognition. Bonaventure begins the second chapter, devoted to the second stage of his contemplative program, with a summary: “We ought to be led to the contemplation of God in every creature that enters our mind through the bodily senses.”99 The soul’s purpose at this stage is to see God as he exists within sensible things and so Bonaventure, after an initial discussion of angels, focuses attention on the mind’s reception and processing of sensory data.100 Bonaventure’s description of the mind’s mechanisms at this point is remarkably precise. This is also the stage of the Itinerarium that Bonaventure assigns expressly to imagination. He devotes each stage of the journey to a different power of the soul: the senses, imagination, reason, understanding, 97. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, V.1, Opera omnia 5:308: “per lumen, quod est signatum supra mentem nostram, quod est lumen Veritatis aeternae.” 98. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.13, Opera omnia 5:299: “Ex his ergo visibilibus consurgit ad considerandum Dei potentiam, sapientiam et bonitatem.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 9. 99. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.1, Opera omnia 5:299–300: “debemus manuduci ad contemplandum Deum in cunctis creaturis, quae ad mentem nostram intrant per corporales sensus.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 11. 100. Angels are often discussed in the context of human cognition, a by-product of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Like most twelfth-century theologians (Peter Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor are the notable exceptions), Peter Lombard focused little attention on the mechanisms of human cognition, only dealing with it briefly while dealing with angels (especially in 2 Sent. d. 3). His successors, commenting on his text, offered more extended discussions of human cognition while remaining in the context that he provided. Spruit mentions this continued fidelity to Lombard’s context in Species intelligibilis, 1:110.

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intelligence, and the summit of the mind (apex mentis), respectively.101 That leaves imagination with oversight over the second stage, whose content focuses above all on the mind’s cognitive images, or species. Bonaventure here explains that Christ, through the divine light of illumination, shines directly on imagination’s images in order to generate understanding. Seeing Christ perform in this way, the intellect can focus on the divine light proper and rise toward contemplation of God. It is in the second stage, then, that we see Christ interacting with imagination in the way that this chapter claims he does. He acts as the perfect cognitive image to enlighten and certify the images of imagination. Before proceeding to discuss how imagination and Christ interact, however, we should linger for a moment over Bonaventure’s philosophy of imagination. In the Itinerarium and elsewhere, Bonaventure adheres to the Aristotelian understanding of imagination analyzed in the previous chapter, according to which imagination helps to manage the transition from sensory to intellectual cognition by configuring data in an intellect-friendly way. However, aligning Bonaventure with any Aristotelian doctrine might strike the reader as odd, given Bonaventure’s much commented upon “hostility to Aristotelianism.”102 Recent scholarship, however, has tempered this position, noting that Bonaventure reserves his real animosity for Averroes and Averroists, and noting as well that Bonaventure has in-depth knowledge of Aristotle’s works, which he quotes frequently—1,105 times by Christopher Cullen’s count.103 Further, Bonaventure’s reliance on Aristotle’s philosophy on the subject of cognition is well recognized.104 Nonetheless, Bonaventure’s philosophy of imagination has received little attention, and for that reason merits careful analysis.105 Once we understand how he adopts an 101. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.6, Opera omnia 5:297. 102. Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 158. 103. Cullen, Bonaventure, 21. See also Speer, “Bonaventure and the Question of a Medieval Philosophy,” 25–29; and Bougerol, Introduction to the Works of Bonaventure, 25–30. 104. See, for instance, Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 370–71; and McEvoy, “Microcosm and Macrocosm.” 105. Bonaventure’s theory of cognition, although unusually elaborate and innovative, has also received less than its due of attention. Bonaventure remains in the shadow of Thomas Aquinas, who attracts most of the scholarly attention on this as on many other topics pertaining to medieval philosophy. Thus, Pasnau, in his study of medieval theories of cognition, never discusses Bonaventure’s philosophy (Theories of Cognition). This is partly because Bonaventure’s comments on the topic are scattered throughout his works and partly because later philosophers positioned themselves against Aquinas and others, like Henry of Ghent, more often than they did against Bonaventure. Nonetheless, Bonaventure’s philosophy of knowledge was very influential in its own right, especially, if I am right, in the realm of fourteenth-century meditative practice.

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Aristotelian concept of imagination, we can better understand how he also draws on Augustine’s theory of knowledge in order to render imagination especially potent. Bonaventure attributes to imagination an array of functions, all of them familiar to us at this point. It stores sensory images and generates new ones, while one is awake or sleeping.106 It can be a vehicle both of prophecy and demonic deception.107 It regularly distracts the intellect, but it also provides the intellect with the phantasms that enable its activity. Regarding these final functions, Bonaventure explains, “There are two ways in which imagination serves the intellect in the act of understanding: (1) it offers phantasms to the possible intellect as the object offers species to the eye, and (2) our intellect has to be roused by a lower power that is joined to the body.” 108 With this, Bonaventure affirms his allegiance to an Aristotelian philosophy of imagination. Accordingly, imagination’s phantasms configure the sensory data received initially by the sense organs and put such data into a form that the intellect can act on and use to understand. Presenting phantasms to the intellect as the object offers species to the eye, imagination contains the intellect’s own object. The phantasm is not itself knowable by the intellect. Imagination knows things in the absence of matter, Bonaventure explains, but still knows “under material conditions,” and the intellect, because immaterial, can only cognize what is immaterial.109 It remains for the agent intellect to divest the phantasm of all matter, leaving only the intelligible kernel, what other philosophers call the intelligible species, that can itself be known.110 In this final, abstracted form, the species can be joined to the possible intellect and enable it actually to know. The purpose of abstraction is thus to strip away the material chaff from the intelligible wheat. The agent intellect acts on the phantasm that imagination presents to it in order to reveal the intelligible core of the object to

106. On imagination’s storage of sensory images, see Bonaventure, 2 Sent VII.ii.i.i, ad 5, Opera omnia 2:190. On its compositive function, see Breviloquium, II.ix, Opera omnia 5:227. On the activity of imagination and phantasms in dreams, see 2 Sent. VIII.ii.i.iii, resp., Opera omnia 2:228. 107. On imagination’s association with prophecy, see De donis Spiritus, II.2, Opera omnia 5:462. Bonaventure returns often to the topic of demonic deception. For one extended discussion of it and of imagination’s role in it, see 2 Sent. VIII.ii.i.iii, resp., Opera omnia 2:228–29. 108. Bonaventure 2 Sent. XXV.ii.i.iv, resp., Opera omnia 2:622: “Dupliciter enim obsequitur vis phantastica intellectui in actu intelligendi, in hoc videlicet, quod offert illa phantasmata intellectui possibili, sicut obiectum offert speciem oculo; et in hoc etiam, quod intellectus noster excitari habet ab inferiori, quamdiu est coniunctus corpori.” 109. Bonaventure, 4 Sent. L.ii.i.i, resp., Opera omnia 4:1046: “sub conditionibus materialibus.” 110. Bonaventure prefers the terms “species” and “phantasma.”

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be understood. Bonaventure, while describing how an immaterial intellect knows through a material body, explains: Because the intellect is joined to a body, it has use of powers, and in accor­ dance with them it depends on the body for its activity. Through these powers the intellect, insofar as it is in a body, exits to exterior things because these powers, namely, particular senses and imagination, are intermediaries. Because the singular does not arrive at the intellect except through these powers, and ascent through them is according to abstraction and purification, and abstraction makes the singular universal, so the intellect cannot understand singulars unless the intellect is immaterial and divine (divinus).111

The intellect relies on imagination and the senses to provide it with data, but relies on the agent intellect, itself entirely immaterial and even “divine,” to make that data commensurable to the intellect. The centrality of imagination to this system is beyond question. All data that the intellect receives from the body pass to it through imagination, which is last in the line of sense faculties. The sense organ concerns itself only with the object’s material features, but as common sense and then imagination receive the sensible species from the sense organ, they pare down its material content. In the form of imagination’s phantasm, the species is finally configured in such a way that its universal content can be accessed by the intellect. The hero of this theory is the agent intellect, which reaches down into imagination to extract the data that the intellect needs in order to understand. Given its central role in the process of understanding, it is no surprise that Bonaventure calls it “divine.” When he does so, he has something specific in mind. Hesitant to equate the agent intellect with God outright, Bonaventure explains that what Aristotle considered to be the agent intellect is in fact the light of illumination.112 Through his illumination, then, Christ performs the work of Aristotelian abstraction. In this doctrine, Bonaventure 111. Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XXXIX.i.ii, ad 2, Opera omnia 1:689: “Quoniam enim coniungitur corpori, ideo habet potentias, secundum quas dependet a corpore quantum ad operationem, et per quas intellectus, quamdiu est in corpore, exit ad exteriora, quia illae sunt mediae, scilicet sensus particularis et imaginatio. Quoniam ergo singulare non pervenit ad intellectum nisi per istas potentias, et ascensus per has est secundum abstractionem et depurationem, et abstractio facit de singulari universale: ideo non potest singularia cognoscere ut intellectus, nisi intellectus sit separatus vel divinus.” 112. At 2 Sent. XXIV.i.ii.iv, resp., Opera omnia 2:568, Bonaventure considers the proposition: “The agent intellect is God himself” (“intellectus agens esset ipse Deus”). He qualifies it, not to deny that the agent intellect is from God, but to affirm that it is also given to the individual so that the intellect might know.

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weds such abstraction to an Augustinian theory of illumination, and he was hardly the only medieval scholastic to do so.113 For instance, John Pecham, Bonaventure’s student at Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, writing in the 1270s, notes that “the intelligible species is not light but illuminated.”114 What is distinctive about Bonaventure’s philosophy on this point is that he has Christ interact with imagination’s images precisely as a perfect cognitive image. Mirroring his exemplar, namely, God the Father, with the utmost fidelity, Christ is the image that makes mental imaging accurate. Bonaventure suggests as much in his Sentences commentary but, we will see, is more explicit in the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum and Collationes in Hexaëmeron, where he explains that Christ works as the principle of reliable imaging to illuminate imagination’s images. As a result, those images, and imagination itself, have special access to Christ. Imagination’s phantasms claim a central place in Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge, one that Bonaventure proclaims in his paraphrase of Aristotle: “Our understanding in this life is not without phantasms.”115 Imagination, it should be said, is not alone in its capacity as phantasm provider. Memory, most notably, stores phantasms and presents them to the intellect. However, when the information that memory preserves derives from the senses, its phantasms come from imagination, and memory provides a long-term storage facility for them. Bonaventure does suggest that some knowledge is innate and therefore independent of sense. Although every “acquired species” comes through imagination, Bonaventure creates another category of species, called innate species, that are imprinted directly on the memory. Bonaventure writes, “Memory has to be informed not only from the outside by phantasms but also from above, by receiving and having in itself simple forms that cannot enter through the doors of the senses, nor through sensible phantasms.”116 In this doctrine, Bonaventure follows Augustine’s lead, 113. As Marrone explains, other scholastics likewise associated the agent intellect with God and divine illumination (Light of Thy Countenance, 1:29 and 1:169–81). See also Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 364. 114. John Pecham, Tractatus de anima, I.iii, arg. 4, p. 11: “species intelligibilis non est lux sed illuminabilis.” Marrone explains that both John Pecham and Matthew of Aquasparta associated species with God and used species to explain the process of divine illumination. See Light of Thy Countenance, 1:142–45. Thomas Aquinas traces intelligible species back to God who is their origin in Summa theologiae I.84a.4, ad 1, Opera omnia 5:320–21: “species intelligibiles quas participat noster intellectus, reducuntur sicut in primam causam in aliquod principium per suam essentiam intelligibile, scilicet in Deum.” 115. Bonaventure, Sermo IV, 18, Opera omnia 5:572: “nostrum intelligere secundum statum viae non est sine phantasmate.” Cf. Aristotle, De anima, III.7, 431a16–17. 116. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, III.2, Opera omnia 5:303: “ipsa non solum habet ab exteriori formari per phantasmata, verum etiam a superiori suscipiendo et in se habendo

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for Augustine had likewise distinguished innate from acquired species.117 By distinguishing these two sorts of species, Bonaventure attempts to reconcile Augustinian and Aristotelian theories of cognition, preserving Augustine’s Platonic conviction that potential knowledge is impressed in the memory as well as Aristotle’s belief that all knowledge derives from the senses.118 Unlike Aquinas, for whom the soul is wholly a blank slate upon birth and for whom all knowledge comes from the senses, Bonaventure seems to hold that the intellect has a natural disposition toward, or image of, certain kinds of non-sensible knowledge. His usual examples are God and virtues of character like charity, which the soul knows through directly impressed species rather than acquired ones.119 This alternative path toward knowledge that Bonaventure describes, with its reliance on species received from neither sense nor imagination, might seem to undermine the importance that I have been assigning to imagination. However, although the motivation for Bonaventure’s discussion of innate species is clear, the philosophical doctrine that results is considerably less so. The detail with which Bonaventure discusses acquired species is not matched by his discussion of innate species, and even his use of the word “innate” is equivocal. He calls those species innate that are impressed on the memory, as we might expect, but he also calls the species abstracted from phantasms innate.120 His comments on the topic have, not surprisingly, resulted in conflicting interpretations. Some conclude that Bonaventure’s innate species are sufficient in and of themselves to generate knowledge, while others claim that innate species are potentially knowable and that the intellect requires data from the senses to render them actually known.121 It is, in my view, far from clear that even the few things Bonaventure lists as known without the senses entirely exclude them. In any event, it is certainly the case that, in his devotional works, Bonaventure ’s interest lies in imagination’s

simplices formas, quae non possunt introire per portas sensuum et sensibilium phantasias.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 19. 117. See Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII.v.7, CCSL 50:276–77. 118. On these two positions and Bonaventure’s attempt to reconcile them in his doctrine of innate species, see Quinn, Historical Constitution, 396–406. 119. On charity, see Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XVII.i.i.iv, resp., Opera omnia 1:301–2. Another important discussion of innate species is at 2 Sent. XXXIX.i.ii, resp., Opera omnia 2:902–4. 120. See Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XVII.i.i.iv, resp., Opera omnia 1:301. 121. Marrone, though describing a shift in Bonaventure’s thought, asserts that, for him, a small body of knowledge is known entirely without the senses (Light of Thy Countenance, 1:152–54). Gilson expresses a similar view (Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 376–8). Bettoni, however, writes that even knowledge that is imprinted on the soul by nature is there only potentially, needing to be realized by sensory cognition (Saint Bonaventure, 99–101).

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phantasms. His road to contemplation proceeds from sense to intellect to God, and it appeals to a cognitive process that follows the same trajectory. Whenever Bonaventure focuses on knowledge that begins with sense, it is imagination’s phantasms that interest him. Imagination retains its unique status as the faculty that helps to bridge sensory and intellectual cognition, and it is this sort of knowledge acquisition that most interests Bonaventure in his philosophical and devotional works. Bonaventure is unequivocal that the process by which the intellect comes to know anything from the outside world involves imagination and its phantasms or species: “Every acquired species is acquired through sense and imagination.”122 Explaining that phantasms are essential to the activity of both the active and possible intellects, Bonaventure writes, “The possible intellect has to turn itself to the species existing in phantasms, and by turning with the help of the agent intellect, it receives the species and from it makes judgment. Similarly, neither is the agent intellect entirely in act, for it cannot understand something distinct from itself unless aided by the species which, abstracted from the phantasm, has to be united to the intellect.”123 The process of knowing ends when the intelligible species is impressed on the possible intellect, because “the soul does not cognize a thing unless that thing imprints its species and form on the soul.”124 The soul cannot do this without imagination. Bonaventure insists that even the agent intellect, although divine, cannot know anything but itself without the aid of phantasms. Of course, God needs no phantasms, a point that Bonaventure makes more than once. By turning to himself, he knows everything.125 Humans, however, are not so self-sufficient, and even though the agent intellect is from God, it does not suffice for human understanding. The divine light, as Bonaventure explains

122. Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XVII.i.i.iv, arg. 2, Opera omnia 1:300: “omnis species acquisita acquiritur mediante sensu et imaginatione.” 123. Bonaventure, 2 Sent. XXIV.i.ii.iv, resp., Opera omnia 2:569: “habet enim supra speciem existentem in phantasmate se convertere, et convertendo per auxilium intellectus agentis illam suscipere, et de ea iudicare. Similiter nec intellectus agens est omnino in actu; non enim potest intelligere aliud a se, nisi adiuvetur a specie, quae abstracta a phantasmate intellectui habet uniri.” Bonaventure focuses especially on judgment because it represents for him a late stage in the process of understanding. See Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 398–400. 124. Bonaventure, 2 Sent. XXVII.i.ii, ad 4, Opera omnia 2:415: “anima non cognoscit rem, nisi speciem eius et formam sibi imprimat.” 125. See, for instance, Bonaventure, 1 Sent. XXXV.i.i, resp., Opera omnia 1:601; and 1 Sent. XXXIX.i.i, resp., Opera omnia 1:686. On how angels know (they split the difference between humans and God, having all species imprinted on their intellects by God but still needing to direct their attention to particular things), see 2 Sent. III.ii.ii.i, resp., Opera omnia 1:119–20.

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above, needs to be supplemented with sensory data in order to generate human knowledge. Thus, the intellect, “together with the eternal reasons, attains to the likenesses of things abstracted from phantasms, which are the proper and distinct principles of knowledge, and without them the light of the eternal reason is insufficient of itself to produce knowledge” except in cases of revelation.126 Recognizing that Bonaventure merges an Aristotelian philosophy of imagination with an Augustinian doctrine of illumination, we can better understand the power he assigns to imagination’s images, images that receive Christ’s divine light and that help to create a path back to him.

Bonaventure’s Doctrine of Christ as Species Imagination functions within the second stage of the Itinerarium as it does in Bonaventure’s Sentences commentary to support the transition from sensory to intellectual cognition. Bonaventure isolates three aspects of the cognitive process for special consideration at this point of the Itinerarium: sensory apprehension, delight, and judgment. He describes how Christ works within each and specifically how Christ works in and through the mind’s images, or species. As we have seen, species are cognitive representations that convey sensory and intellectual data about an object. Bonaventure explains that Christ operates precisely as species, even claiming the title “first Species” (prima species) because, in him, “there is the utmost proportion to and equality with the one generating.”127 He is the ultimate species because he perfectly represents his exemplar, God the Father. He thus acts within the cognitive process specifically as a cognitive image, one that sustains the mind’s own images and ensures that they accurately represent their objects so that understanding can occur. Seeing how Christ participates in the act of understanding, and participates most dramatically at the site of imagination’s images, we can see how the intellect can use those images to contemplate Christ.

126. Bonaventure, De scientia Christi, iv, resp., Opera omnia 5:24: “cum his attingit rerum similitudines abstractas a phantasmate tanquam proprias et distinctas cognoscendi rationes, sine quibus non sufficit sibi ad cognoscendum lumen rationis aeternae.” Trans. Hayes, Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ, 136. 127. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.8, Opera omnia 5:301: “illa prima specie . . . in qua est summa proportionalitas et aequalitas ad generantem.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 14. Bonaventure also notes that Christ is “sometimes” (aliquando) called “species,” as well as “son,” “image,” and “concept,” in Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XI.17, Opera omnia 5:382.

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The concept of species is therefore central to the text, especially to its second stage, and this section seeks to explain why. Specifically, it explores the significance of Bonaventure’s linking of Christ with species, arguing that this association functions to unite the cognitive process through its images, to increase the reliability and power of such images, and to cast illumination as a process that certifies the mind’s images. It enables Bonaventure, ultimately, to make Christ most available to the mind at the level of imagination’s images. That Bonaventure associates species with imagination is not surprising. We have seen that imagination configures its phantasms, sometimes simply called its species, so that the intelligible species can be accessed by the intellect.128 Imagination and species are regular companions in medieval theories of cognition. More noteworthy is Bonaventure’s preference to discuss imagination through its species rather than naming imagination itself with any frequency. It is for this reason, I suspect, that Bonaventure’s treatment of imagination has received little scholarly attention. The previous section showed that Bonaventure adheres to an Aristotelian understanding of imagination and that he expressly assigns the work of the second stage of the Itinerarium to imagination. Within his devotional works, however, he rarely mentions imagination as a faculty. Instead, he focuses on imagination’s images, which he here refers to most often as species. His decision to do so is surely motivated by the fact that “species” is a term shared by both Augustine and medieval Aristotelians. Bonaventure is perfectly willing to favor Augustine over Aristotle when the situation demands it, as when the subject turns to the soul’s immortality, but he is happiest when they agree, or can be made to appear to agree. Bonaventure’s doctrine of species allows him to harmonize Aristotle and Augustine in an especially clever way. At the crossroads between both philosophical traditions, Bonaventure’s species are cognitive images that link sensory to intellectual cognition, but they derive their power to do so from the divine light that shines upon them. Bonaventure’s philosophy of species thus attempts to reconcile Aristotelian abstraction with Augustinian illumination. The two systems of knowledge acquisition provide alternative solutions to the same problem, namely, how the intellect, joined to a material body and placed in a material world, can attain knowledge, which is resolutely immaterial. According to the former, the agent intellect extracts the intelligible kernel from the phantasm. According to the latter, God illumines the mind 128. Species as they exist in the internal senses, especially imagination and memory, are often called phantasms; the terms in this respect are often interchangeable. See Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 121.

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so that it can proceed from matter to spirit. For Bonaventure, the two find their common ground in a doctrine of divinely illumined species. Placing imagination, along with its species, at the heart of the human process of knowing, Bonaventure preserves the importance that the Aristotelian tradition accords to the faculty without calling attention to its inconsistency with the Augustinian one. He appeals to both philosophical traditions in order to invest mental images with maximal value. “Species” is a term with an interesting history. As we use it, the term is often opposed to genus and denotes something specific rather than general. In its medieval usage, the term can mean a great many things—beauty, appearance, shape, exemplar, form, and image among them.129 The term “species” expands its semantic scope considerably during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and this expansion has significant repercussions for the period’s theories of cognition and the role of mental images within them. “Species” becomes the most popular term for a cognitive image, but what is especially important for the purposes of this chapter is the sort of cognitive image it describes.130 Summarizing the meaning of “species” in thirteenth-century theories of cognition, Pierre Michaud-Quantin writes, “It is the image of the sensible object or the intellectual concept thanks to which the object is cognized by sense or intellect” respectively.131 The crucial fact here is that “species” are common to both sensory and intellectual processes. Species therefore become the basic and veridical units of cognition. Clearly supporting an Aristotelian philosophy, whereby the intellect’s true object exists within the sensory one, species unite the entire cognitive process. They are the common thread that links every stage of knowing, and for that reason they can plausibly be interpreted as the object of the light of illumination. Christ, both human and divine, shines on them because he is like them, in both their material and immaterial features. Bonaventure even uses the same phrase to describe Christ and species. Each is the “principle of understanding” (ratio cognoscendi) that guides the intellect in its activity.132 When

129. On the range of meanings of species in the Middle Ages, see Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 113–50. 130. Michaud-Quantin comments on the new place that species come to occupy in thirteenth-century theories of cognition in Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 117–18. Panaccio also provides a brief narrative of the development of species’ place in medieval theories of cognition in “Mental Representation,” 347–50. 131. Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 118. 132. Bonaventure makes this claim about species at 2 Sent. XXXV.ii.ii, ad 4, Opera omnia 2:832. He makes it about Christ as Word at 3 Sent. XIV.ii.i, arg. 4, Opera omnia 3:307.

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Bonaventure likens Christ to species, and even calls him the first species, he relies on a new understanding of species as especially powerful mental images. As species link the process of knowledge acquisition from sense to intellect, so they suggest to Bonaventure the influence of Christ on the intellect. Himself bridging the earthly and eternal through his incarnation, Christ brings his dual natures to bear on every act of understanding. Cognition itself is a journey to and through Christ. We begin with the role of species in sensory cognition. It is in this respect that Augustine used the term “species.” He lists four types: “From the species of the body that is perceived comes that which exists in the sense of the one perceiving, and from this that which exists in memory, and from this that which exists in the power of thought.”133 In his view, “species” are how a perceived or known thing exists in the mind. When you look at an apple, for instance, it is clear that your sensory apprehension of the apple cannot involve the apple’s entering into your sense organ, but it is also clear that the sense organ has an image of the apple and that the intellect can think about that image. For Augustine, “species” primarily concern the external features of an object, and he discusses them when compiling trinitarian analogies to be found in the “outer” as opposed to the “inner” man.134 The role of species in sense perception, and especially in medieval theories of optics, has received a good deal of attention from both philosophers and literary critics.135 They show that Latin scholastics, influenced by Arabic theories of optics, posited a series of representations connecting the object perceived to the percipient, representations that philosophers called species.136 This theory “became the canonical framework for the analysis of perception” in the Latin West by the second half of the thirteenth century.137 The doctrine as it develops becomes known as the multiplication of species, and it owes its articulation to the Oxford lecturer and eventual bishop of

133. Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.ix.16, CCSL 50:353: “Ab specie quippe corporis quod cernitur exoritur ea quae fit in sensu cernentis, et ab hac ea quae fit in memoria, et ab hac ea quae fit in acie cogitantis.” 134. See Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.xi.18, CCSL 50:355. 135. Discussions of species as they relate to medieval literature can be found, for instance, in Akbari, Seeing through the Veil, 24–38; and Paddock, “Rhetorical Species.” On species in medieval theories of optics, see Smith, “Perception,” and Lindberg, Theories of Vision. 136. Lindberg credits Bacon with popularizing “species” as opposed to “forma” and suggests that Bacon used “species” to reconcile very different theories of visions put forth primarily by Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers (Theories of Vision, 113–14). 137. Smith, “Perception,” 338.

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Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste.138 A secular theologian and the first university master to teach at the Franciscans’ Oxford studium, Grosseteste explained that the object perceived emits a series of representations or species of itself, arranged in a continuous sequence, that together occupy the space between the object and the individual who perceives it. These species, often called species in medio, serve to give the relevant sense organ a faithful report of the object’s sensible features. They allow the sense organ to be connected directly to its object and thus get around the potentially problematic notion of action at a distance.139 Although primarily discussed with respect to vision, the theory often extended to hearing and smell as well; in Chaucer’s House of Fame, every sound travels to Fame “thurgh hys multiplicacioun.”140 In spite of various objections, the species-based or perspectivist theory of perception survived up until Johannes Kepler advanced his theory of retinal imaging in the seventeenth century.141 The new theory of optics gave species a central place in the process of cognition from its earliest stages, but a different development made them integral to the work of the intellect as well. Again influenced by Arabic Aristotelian philosophy, the Latin West started to translate the Greek eidos, which means either “species” or “form,” as “species.”142 For medieval Aristotelians, form just is, or is at least the principal part of, a thing’s essence. It is that which is responsible for a thing’s being what it is. In the human being, it is the soul. In a plant, it is plant soul. Pierre Michaud-Quantin notes that a Latin translation of Aristotle’s work is much more likely to use “species” than “forma” if it passed through an Arabic version, and it is well-known that much of the new Aristotle reached the West through the Arabic translation circuit.143 The result is that “species” appears often in the most popular Latin translations of Aristotle. For instance, in the De anima, Aristotle describes the intellect as “eidos eidõn,” or “form of forms,” a phrase that the most authoritative Latin translation of the De anima in the Mid138. Lindberg notes that Grosseteste’s greatest innovation in optics was his articulation of this “multiplication of species” doctrine, which heavily influenced his successors (Theories of Vision, 250n66). On the development of the multiplication of species doctrine, see also Tachau, Vision and Certitude, 3–26. 139. As Pasnau explains, both Olivi and Ockham wrote that the desire to avoid action at a distance was a factor motivating the theory of species (Theories of Cognition, 161–62). 140. Chaucer, House of Fame, 1. 784. See also 1. 820. 141. Smith, “Perception,” 345. 142. Modern English translations prefer “form” as medieval Latin ones did “species.” 143. Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 136. On medieval Latin translations of Aristotle and their dependence on Arabic versions, see Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus.”

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dle Ages, that by William of Moerbeke, translates as “species specierum.”144 The translation of “eidos” as “species” becomes standard not only through Latin editions of Aristotle but through another tradition that dates back to Boethius. As Michaud-Quantin explains, “Boethius is for medievals the great authority, the one who introduces into their vocabulary species in the sense of form.”145 In no less significant a text than Peter Lombard’s Sentences is “species” used in this way. He writes, for instance, that “Aristotle named two principles: matter and form (speciem).”146 Bonaventure accordingly defines “species” as “substantial form” (formam substantialem), and thus draws on a newly popularized notion of species in the thirteenth century.147 This equation of “species” with “substantial form” profoundly changes the meaning of the term, allowing it to refer not just to an object’s sensible features but to its very essence (not unlike the semantic range of “form” in our usage).148 As Leen Spruit explains, translating “eidos” as “species” “significantly alters the philosophical perspective, because the species has instrumental and representational connotations, whereas the Aristotelian form stands for the defining characteristics of a thing.”149 In other words “species” now represents the object’s surface and its substance. As a result, species unite the entire cognitive process, from sense perception to intellectual apprehension. Katherine Tachau explains that, by the late thirteenth century, “most Parisian scholars held that the process of multiplication did indeed continue into the intellect, via the conversion of phantasms into intelligible species.”150 Although thirteenth-century philosophers typically distinguished between the sensible and intelligible content within the species by distinguishing sensible from intelligible species, they 144. Aristotle, De anima, III.8, 432a2. Spruit discusses the significance of William of Moerbeke’s use of “species” in this and other translations in Species intelligibilis, 102–6. MichaudQuantin pays special attention to the Latin translations of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which, he writes, gave medieval readers the impression “that Aristotle gave the name ‘species’ to ‘form’ (forma) and considered the two terms equivalent” (Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 139). 145. Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 137. 146. Peter Lombard, 2 Sententiae I.iii, 1:333: “Aristoteles vero duo principia dixit, materiam et speciem.” Michaud-Quantin comments on this line in Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 137. 147. Bonaventure, 4 Sent. XLIV.ii.ii.i, resp., Opera omnia 4:926. 148. “Form” still carries its strict Aristotelian sense, whereby it is the principal part of essence, but also refers to external shape and appearance. Pasnau explains that “species” “might represent the specific nature of the object, but it might also represent its genus or an accidental feature of it” (Theories of Cognition, 14). 149. Spruit, Species intelligibilis, 1:102. 150. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, 31.

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nonetheless made such species the common thread of the cognitive process.151 Given the new-found prominence of species in cognitive theories, it is no surprise that the thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon can enthusiastically affirm, “Species produces every action in the world, for it acts on sense and intellect, and on all matter.”152 The medieval doctrine of species did not find many fans in later periods. Descartes, for instance, wrote derisively of “all those little images flitting through the air.”153 Even within the Middle Ages, the doctrine became controversial, finding a central place for itself in the well-known contest between nominalism and realism.154 There was, for instance, much debate regarding the nature of species’ existence (intentional, material, both, or neither) and their manner of reception. There were various puzzles that the species doctrine raised. For instance, how does one apprehend distance? Does distance itself produce species? An early and persisting point of controversy involved the intellect’s attention to species. If the intellect knows the species of an object rather than the object proper, then the certitude of intellectual cognition would seem to be deeply compromised.155 Moreover, the intellect would be unacceptably passive if it were acted on by sensible objects in this way.156 But there is no denying the centrality of species to medieval, and particularly to thirteenth-century, theories of cognition. For Bonaventure, the species doctrine was rich with mystical implications, and

151. Although early philosophers like Proclus, Calcidius, and Augustine used the term “species intelligibilis,” Spruit notes that their usage is substantially different from that of the thirteenth-century schoolmen. See Species intelligibilis, 1:96–106. In evidence as early as 1230, the newly defined phrase species intelligibilis becomes especially visible in Latin philosophy of the later thirteenth century (Spruit, Species intelligibilis, 1:121). As it is used in such philosophy, the phrase “stands for the intelligible kernel of sensible things” (Spruit, Species intelligibilis, 1:137). Spruit surveys different thirteenth-century views on intelligible species, up through Aquinas, in Species intelligibilis, 1:109–174. 152. Bacon, Opus majus, 4.2.1, 1:111: “hanc species facit omnem operationem huius mundi; nam operatur in sensum, in intellectum, et in totam mundi materiam.” Trans. Grant, Source Book, 393. 153. Descartes, La dioptrique, 1, Oeuvres de Descartes 6:85. Trans. Hatfield, “Cognitive Faculties,” 958. 154. Medieval controversies regarding species are studied in detail by Tachau, Vision and Certitude, 27–153; Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 161–289; and Spruit, Species intelligibilis, 1:175– 351. 155. It was above all those philosophers who objected to the species doctrine who claimed that species replaced the object in the intellect’s activity. Olivi and Crathorn, for instance, objected on this basis; see Perler, “Skepticism,” 391–93. 156. The typical answers were that species were not themselves seen but were that by which the object was seen, as we saw in the discussion of Aquinas in the previous chapter, and also that the intellect played an active role by turning its attention to species.

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it was above all in the context of species that he discussed Christ’s direct involvement in the mind’s cognitive activity.

The Itinerarium’s Cognitive Mysticism Within the second chapter of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure associates Christ with species in three ways, corresponding to the three cognitive topics there addressed, sense perception, delight, and judgment. At first articulating analogies between the functions of Christ and species, Bonaventure advances to his most ambitious claim, which is that Christ is species. As such, he illuminates imagination’s species to render their images faithful to their objects and thus to generate understanding. Bonaventure begins by explaining that all sensible things enter into the soul through the senses, and these enter through species that proliferate in the medium (speciei in medio) between the object and percipient and end up impressed on the sense organ.157 The process of perception, and specifically the way in which an object emits species from itself that are then impressed on sense, suggests to Bonaventure the Father’s expression of the Son. He explains, “Since the perceived species is a similitude generated in the medium and then impressed on the organ [of sense] itself, and through this impression it leads us to its starting point, that is, to the object to be known, this process manifestly suggests that the Eternal Light begets from itself a Likeness, a coequal, consubstantial, and coeternal Splendor.”158 Likening the act of perception to God’s self-diffusion, Bonaventure parallels Christ with species. Each is emitted from its source and represents its source, although Bonaventure is clear that the object’s ability to generate its likeness is far less perfect than God’s. In the Collationes in Hexaëmeron, Bonaventure marks out the limitations of the parallel he constructs, noting that the species, unlike Christ, does not contain “the truth of the object” (veritas rei).159 Nonetheless, he is more interested in the similarities than the differences, and his final point in this passage is that, as species direct the mind back to its originating object, so Christ leads the individual back to God.

157. See Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.4, Opera omnia 5:300. 158. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.7, Opera omnia 5:301: “Nam cum species apprehensa sit similitudo in medio genita et deinde ipsi organo impressa et per illam impressionem in suum principium, scilicet in obiectum cognoscendum, ducat; manifeste insinuat, quod illa lux aeterna generat ex se similitudinem seu splendorem coaequalem, consubstantialem et coaeternalem.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 13. 159. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XI.16, Opera omnia 5:382.

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Up to this point, Bonaventure reworks an idea expressed by Augustine and, more recently, by Robert Grosseteste. One of Augustine’s trinitarian analogies involves the species of the physical object (species corporis), its image impressed on sense, and the will that directs a sense to the object.160 When listing his own trinitarian analogies, Grosseteste likewise turns to the object’s generation of species, creating a trinity out of the object, the species, and the mind that connects the two. Vision unites the three—“the begetter, the begotten, and the inclination that connects the begotten with the begetter”—revealing a trinity that is found “in any of the external senses.”161 The species that are in turn begotten in common sense, imagination, reason, and memory all display, albeit imperfectly, the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Trinity.162 The object’s generation of species suggests a basic truth about the Trinity for both Bonaventure and Grosseteste. So convinced are they that human knowing provides information about God that they assume their theories of cognition must reflect divine truths. Here, the relevant truth is that the Father expresses himself throughout creation. The idea that the Father must express himself is axiomatic to Bonaventure, based on his Neoplatonic conviction that God, as the supreme good, must also be supremely self-diffusive. He quotes Dionysius to this effect: “The good is said to be diffusive of itself.”163 God expresses himself in the Son as Word. Whenever perceiving anything, then, the individual really perceives the Son and perceives him above all in the mechanisms of perception proper. Bonaventure elsewhere affirms that “God gave to every object this power, that it give birth to its likeness, and this out of a natural fecundity. And so, insofar as an object gives birth to its image, it represents the eternal generation [of the Father from the Son].”164 An object is naturally generative as, although not exactly as, God himself is. Bonaventure then adds rather enigmatically, “And insofar as the intention of the mind unites this image

160. Augustine, De Trinitate, XI.ii.5, CCSL 50:338. 161. Grosseteste, Hexaëmeron, VIII.iv.7, p. 223: “fitque una visio ex gignente et genito et intencione copulante genitum cum gignente. Et similiter est ista trinitas in quolibet exteriorum sensuum.” Trans. Martin, On the Six Days of Creation, 227. 162. See Grosseteste, Hexaëmeron, VIII.iv.8–12, pp. 223–24. 163. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, VI.2, Opera omnia 5:310. So popular was this particular quotation, “bonum dicitur diffusivum sui,” that Chenu gives it the status of “axiom,” one which attests to the widespread influence of Dionysius (Nature, Man, and Society, 85). 164. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XI.23, Opera omnia 5:383: “secundum quod obiectum gignit similitudinem suam, sic repraesentat generationem aeternam.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:170.

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with the eye, so it represents the incarnation of the Word.”165 When the incorporeal image is wedded to the matter of the eye, the process of perception somehow mimics the incarnation of Christ. That two natures, spiritual and material, were joined in Christ provides warrant for and is reflected in the sense organ’s union with the species. Sensory perception thus provides insight into God, but here only indirectly. The expressiveness of objects depends on the expressiveness of God, and both sorts of expression have their root in God and lead the attentive individual back to him. Bonaventure, however, like Grosseteste, remains up to this point at the level of analogy. Bonaventure ventures further and indicates that Christ in fact inheres within species: We can perceive that He Who is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15) and the brightness of his glory and the image of his substance (Heb. 1:3), Who is everywhere by His first generation like an object that generates its similitude in the entire medium, is united by the grace of union to the individual of rational nature as the species is united with the bodily organ, so that through this union He may lead us back to the Father, as to the Fountain-head and Object. If, therefore, all knowable things must generate a species (speciem) of themselves, they manifestly proclaim that in them, as in mirrors (speculis), can be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son, eternally emanating from God the Father.166

Christ is the species of the Father, existing throughout the medium that is creation in the way that sensible species fill the medium between the object and the sense organ.167 However, Bonaventure does not simply claim that Christ, in his propagation throughout creation, is like species emerging 165. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XI.23, Opera omnia 5:383: “secundum quod intentio animae eam oculo unit, sic repraesentat incarnationem Verbi.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:170. 166. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.7, Opera omnia 5:301: “et quod ille qui est imago invisibilis Dei et splendor gloriae et figura substantiae eius, qui ubique est per primam sui generationem, sicut obiectum in toto medio suam generat similitudinem, per gratiam unionis unitur, sicut species corporali organo, individuo rationalis naturae, ut per illam unionem nos reduceret ad Patrem sicut ad fontale principium et obiectum. Si ergo omnia cognoscibilia habent sui speciem generare, manifeste proclamant, quod in illis tanquam in speculis videri potest aeterna generatio Verbi, Imaginis et Filii a Deo Patre aeternaliter emanantis.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 13–14. 167. For more on how objects were thought to transmit data to the sense organ—as Bon­ aventure has it, the object sends off images in every direction, but that was only one option—see Lindberg, Theories of Vision, 122–46.

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from an object. Although Bonaventure writes that Christ is united to the individual reason as species are to the sense organ, he further suggests that Christ is actually present in the species that travel to the sense organ. Because Christ is the exemplar of any object, the species of an object leads one not only to apprehend the object but, to some degree, Christ. Species lead the individual to know the object that generated it, and so the impression of divine species, or Christ, on the soul leads the individual back to God. Christ is species because he is the source of all objects and of the species they emit. In this sense, all objects express Christ and lead the individual toward him. Bonaventure emphasizes the importance of species in particular as a means to know God when he creates a verbal link between species and speculis, or “mirror,” late in the quotation. It is above all in the operation of species that the individual sees Christ. The consequence of the reception of species, as long as it concerns an “appropriate object” (rei convenientis), is delight.168 At this second stage of knowledge acquisition, as it is described in the Itinerarium, Christ simply is species. The reception of species generates delight because the species is proportionate to the object that emits it, and their proportion calls attention to that between Father and Son. Bonaventure explains, “The species which delights because it is beautiful, sweet, and wholesome leads one to realize that there exists a first beauty (prima speciositas), sweetness, and wholesomeness in that first Species (prima specie), in which there is the utmost proportion to and equality with the One generating.”169 Bonaventure follows philosophical convention in defining pleasure as a response to proportion—“all pleasure,” he writes, “is by reason of proportion.”170 His labeling of Christ as species, however, is not conventional at all. In the Itinerarium’s description of the process of human cognition, Bonaventure has pointed to the proportion between an object and its species, between the species and the medium through which it passes, and between the species and the organ that receives it.171 This proportionality is a basic requirement of cognition, because disproportionate things cannot act on each other.172 Therefore, pro-

168. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.5, Opera omnia 5:300. 169. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.8, Opera omnia 5:301: “Secundum hunc modum species delectans ut speciosa, suavis et salubris insinuat, quod in illa prima specie est prima speciositas, suavitas et salubritas, in qua est summa proportionalitas et aequalitas ad generantem.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 14. 170. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.5, Opera omnia 5:300: “Omnis autem delectatio est ratione proportionalis.” 171. See Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.5, Opera omnia 5:300. 172. See, for instance, Bonaventure, 2 Sent. VIII.ii.i.iii, resp., Opera omnia 2:228–29.

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portion is both a cognitive and aesthetic necessity, and insofar as Christ is maximally proportionate to the Father, so he is maximally beautiful and also the source of beauty. Bonaventure thus draws on two meanings of species, one as cognitive image and the other as beauty, in the first two aspects of knowledge acquisition that he describes. Pierre Michaud-Quantin explains that the original meaning of the Latin term “species” appears to have been beauty, and that this meaning little by little gave way as the term came to translate the Greek “eidos.”173 By linking Christ as cognitive image with Christ as beauty, Bonaventure unites the two poles of the term and uses them to link the first two stages of understanding. Both as the expressive image of the Father and as primal beauty, Christ is the ultimate species who leads the knowing intellect back to God. As created things originate ultimately in God, so does the delight that the individual derives from thinking about them. It is more truly God, then, who delights the soul when it perceives than any particular object. The intellect inquires into the reason for its pleasure through judgment, which is the third and final stage of understanding that Bonaventure describes. Bonaventure equates judgment with abstraction: “Judgment . . . is an action which, by purifying and abstracting the sensible species received sensibly through the senses, causes it to enter into the intellective power.”174 Judgment accordingly represents the end of cognition, the point at which the intellect grasps its intelligible object. Reminding us that the agent intellect is equivalent to the divine light of illumination, Bonaventure explains that it is this light to which the individual makes recourse whenever she judges anything correctly. God is therefore present in this final stage as the “Being that contains the forms in all creatures, and [as] the rule that directs the form in them.”175 The ultimate intelligibility of a sensory object consists in the form’s foundation in God. Through his illumination, then, God enables the intellect to perceive the forms within created things and, in part, their exemplar in Christ. God thus proclaims his presence in each stage of 173. Michaud-Quantin, Études sur le vocabulaire philosophique, 150. Bonaventure likewise plays on these two meanings of “species” in Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XII.8, Opera omnia 5:385. Bonaventure’s association of mental image, imagination, and beauty through the term “species” hints at an aesthetic component to imagination, but notably only hints at it. 174. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.6, Opera omnia 5:301: “Diiudicatio igitur est actio, quae speciem sensibilem, sensibiliter per sensus acceptam introire facit depurando et abstrahendo in potentiam intellectivam.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 13. On Bonaventure’s equation of Augustinian judgment with Aristotelian abstraction, see Gilson, Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 398–99. 175. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.9, Opera omnia 5:302: “ens in omnibus formam tenens et regula dirigens.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 15.

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the cognitive process, at each inviting the individual to see him through the process of knowing. In this final stage, Bonaventure uses the term “forma” rather than “species” to describe the essence of created things and Christ himself. However, we can return to the passage from the Collationes in Hexaëmeron with which this chapter’s discussion of Bonaventure began to see that he could just as easily have called Christ in his illuminative action “species.” For convenience, I reproduce the passage here: Christ teaches interiorly, so that no truth is known except through Him, not through speech as it is with us, but through inner enlightenment. Wherefore He must necessarily have within Himself the most clear species, which He cannot possibly have received from another. He Himself, then, is intimate to every soul, and He shines forth by means of His most clear species upon the obscure species of our understanding. And in this manner, these obscure species, mixed with the darkness of phantasms, are lit up in such a way that the intellect understands.

Adapting the Augustinian notion of Christ as the inner teacher, Bonaventure details the work of Christ within the mind with exceptional precision. Christ as the divine light shines through the agent intellect when that intellect abstracts intelligible species from imagination’s phantasms. He does so as the divine light and also as the species of God, the perfect cognitive image who mirrors the Father’s knowledge perfectly. Likewise the exemplar in relation to which all created things are images, Christ is the truth that the intellect apprehends when it knows. What is most remarkable about the passage is its treatment of species. Identifying Christ once again as the ultimate species, Bonaventure steers Christ’s action within the mind precisely to its own species. Through the light of illumination, Christ isolates the intellect’s “obscure species, mixed with the darkness of phantasms,” and divests them of matter. As a result, he functions as the premiere cognitive image to make the intellect’s species accurately represent their objects. In this capacity, he supplements the imperfect images of the imagination in order to convert sensible into intelligible species. Thus illuminated, the mind can understand an object’s form in the way that Christ does, even, implicitly, using Christ himself as the image in which the object is known. This implication bears stressing. Recall that, according to Bonaventure, Christ through his incarnation became a cognitive resource that enabled the intellect to perceive more clearly the truth of

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the created world—“Our soul could not be perfectly lifted up out of these things of sense to see itself and the eternal Truth in itself had not Truth, taking on human form in Christ, become a ladder restoring the first ladder that had been broken in Adam.”176 As it advances from sensory to intellectual apprehension, then, the intellect relies on Christ’s multiple natures. Because he joined his divine nature to a human one, he made it possible for eternal things to be known through earthly and material ones, a feat that occurs in every act of knowing. Bonaventure describes more clearly how the individual, in the act of understanding, proceeds from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. He instructs the individual to “gaze at the wonders of truth” and, by gazing at them, and particularly at Christ’s presence within them, rise up to God.177 The triple way of gazing at these wonders that the Itinerarium describes—seeing external things and then internal things and finally divine things—“reflects,” Bonaventure explains, “the threefold existence of things in matter, in the understanding, and in the Eternal Art.”178 In Bonaventure’s Christian theory of cognition, the process of understanding is only complete once a thing’s relationship to God is grasped. There are, then, three levels of cognition: sensory, intellectual, and divine. All created things likewise exist in three ways. We have seen that, in Bonaventure’s philosophy, as in Augustine’s, creation begins with the Word, in whom the principle or form of all created things exists before it assumes a second sort of being, namely, material being, in the act of creation. Created beings also exist in the human mind that understands them. These three forms of existence—in matter, in mind, and in God—correspond to Christ’s different natures. He “is our ladder” from earthly to eternal things because of his own “triple substance, namely, corporeal, spiritual, and divine.”179 Christ’s multiple natures, derived from his joint humanity and divinity, make him uniquely capable of bridging the different natures both within the created world and between earth and 176. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, IV.2, Opera omnia 5:306: “non potuit anima nostra perfecte ab his sensibilibus relevari ad contuitum sui et aeternae Veritatis in se ipsa, nisi Veritas, assumta forma humana in Christo, fieret sibi scala reparans priorem scalam, quae fracta fuerat in Adam.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 23. 177. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.8, Opera omnia 5:298: “veritatis spectaculis intendendum.” 178. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.3, Opera omnia 5:297: “respicit triplicem rerum existentiam, scilicet in materia, in intelligentia et in arte aeterna.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 6. 179. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.3, Opera omnia 5:297: “triplicem substantiam in Christo, qui est scala nostra, scilicet corporalem, spiritualem et divinam.”

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heaven. “It belongs to him,” Bonaventure elsewhere affirms, “to bind the lowest with the highest.”180 Insofar as the individual inquires into the three levels of anything’s being, then, he engages in a cognitive journey to and through God. He does so by recognizing Christ in each level of existence, climbing from lower to higher ones. According to the imagery of the Itinerarium, the reader even joins Christ on the cross as he ascends, for the reader advances from the lowest to the highest wings of the seraph, or from the bottom to the top of the crucifix.181 The process of human knowing thus corresponds to a journey within the mind from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. This idea will be essential to the next chapter, because it explains how, for Bonaventure, imagination functions within meditations on Christ’s life to connect the meditant first to Christ’s humanity and then to his divinity. Imagination, operating at the nexus between sense and intellect, is appropriately the site of Christ’s illumination, which manages the transition between them. Through imagination, the mind traverses Christ’s own human and divine natures. One might object that a mystical resource as powerful as I have explained imagination to be hardly deserves to be only the second of six stages toward contemplation. Bonaventure, after all, dedicates the first two stages of his journey expressly to beginners who need instruction in how to make the transition from the sensible to the intelligible.182 Indeed, it is a common reading of the Itinerarium that the intellect gets left behind in the individual’s progression toward affective union with God, one supported by Bonaventure’s final emphasis on affect.183 At the seventh and final stage, he writes, “all intellectual activities ought to be relinquished, and the loftiest affection transported to God, and transformed into Him.”184 However, it is clear that cognition remains central to the text up until the final stage when all human efforts cease. Bonaventure’s discussion of imagination’s images occupies the 180. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, III.13, Opera omnia 5:345: “Unde habet ligare infima supremis.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 5:48–49. 181. That the individual thus joins Christ on the crucifix in order to make this ascent is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. 182. See Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, II.11, Opera omnia 5:302. 183. McGinn discusses this common reading, focusing particularly on von Ivánka’s Plato christianus, in “Ascension and Introversion,” 549. 184. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, VII.4, Opera omnia 5:312: “oportet quod relinquantur omnes intellectuales operationes et apex affectus totus transferatur et transformetur in Deum.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 38. See also Collationes in Hexaëmeron, II.29, Opera omnia 5:341, where Bonaventure calls on Dionysius and writes that mystical union “is a most secret operation, transcending every intellect, which no one knows unless he experiences it” (“Et ibi est operatio transcendens omnem intellectum, secretissima; quod nemo scit, nisi qui experitur”).

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second stage because that is where he is interested in the mind’s cognition as it originates in sensory data, but the mind continues to consider its own activity in the following stages. The entire Itinerarium, in fact, reproduces in six stages the process of knowing described in the second. In the second stage, the process of knowing is described, but throughout the text, the process is used as a means to ascend to God. The mind rises from sense (the first two stages) to intellect (the third and fourth) to God (the fifth and sixth). For Bonaventure, mystical union results from a schematic process that begins with the sensible world. Following such a path is the intellect’s nature and its disposition, and union cannot be reached without ascending from sense to intellect to God. Bonaventure does not repudiate intellect, even if it fades from view at the summit of mysticism. As Bernard McGinn explains, the highest stage “is itself the culmination of the entire process of ascent.”185 The second stage is, then, the cognitive component of the Itinerarium’s contemplative pathway in microcosm. Intellectual cognition continues to feature importantly in the rest of the work. In the third stage of the Itinerarium, for instance, Bonaventure borrows Augustine’s favored trinitarian analogy, that between memory, understanding, and will on the one hand and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on the other. There, the mind considers its own cognitive processes in a different, more Augustinian way before the individual reforms her inner senses in the fourth stage through careful reading of Scripture. Having thus considered its own faculties from various perspectives, the individual can focus on God more directly. Bonaventure explains, “We are guided to things divine through the rational soul itself and its naturally implanted faculties.”186 Using those faculties, the mind can surpass itself, and thus the fifth and sixth stages involve the mind’s consideration of God’s being and then his goodness, and thus his unity and trinity, respectively. Even here, Bonaventure is clear that the mind’s contemplation of its own procedures, and specifically its cognitive procedures, allows it to rise above itself. When the mind is contemplating God’s being and goodness in the final stages, it is still thinking. To appreciate the continued relevance of cognition to mystical union, we might consider a challenging passage from the sixth chapter, where Bonaventure instructs his reader to understand the fullness of image and his status as image of God. Bonaventure has focused in the sixth stage on the

185. McGinn, “Ascension and Introversion,” 550. 186. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, IV.7, Opera omnia 5:307: “in divina manuducimur per ipsius animae rationalis potentias naturaliter insitas.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 26.

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union of opposites in God, both those that inhere in Christ as God and human being, eternal and temporal, and so forth, and those that inhere in the Trinity. Its three-and-oneness contains a host of other paradoxes about divine simplicity and complexity (Itinerarium VI.5). These trinitarian paradoxes, Bonaventure concludes, are meant not to be understood but instead to be marveled at (Itinerarium VI.6). Bonaventure then explains, In this contemplation consists the perfect illumination of our mind, when, as it were, on the sixth day it sees man made to the image of God. For, if an image is an expressed likeness, then when our mind contemplates in Christ the Son of God, Who is by nature the image of the invisible God, our humanity so wonderfully exalted, so ineffably united, and when at the same time it sees united the first and the last, the highest and the lowest, the circumference and the center, the Alpha and the Omega, the caused and the cause, the Creator and the creature, that is, the book written within and without, it has reached something that is perfect. Thus it arrives at the perfection of its illuminations on the sixth step, as God did on the sixth day.187

Bonaventure parallels the sixth step with the sixth day of creation, when mankind was created.188 The implication is that the individual’s contemplation of God’s goodness has given him the means to better understand his own creation in the image of God. Thinking about his status as image, a status he shares to a degree with Christ, he realizes his potential and the full power of his intimacy with God. The mind thinks and thinks about its thinking in the same gesture, giving us a good example of what it looks like when the mind considers its own operations, as Bonaventure wants it to do. What Bonaventure presents here is a cognitive puzzle that surely engages the mind as much as it does the affections. That puzzle is not meant to be solved, but neither is it to be left uncontemplated. The high point of contemplation, until God snatches the contemplative up in the seventh stage, is 187. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, VI.7, Opera omnia 5:312: “In hac autem consideratione est perfectio illuminationis mentis, dum quasi in sexta die videt hominem factum ad imaginem Dei. Si enim imago est similitudo expressiva, dum mens nostra contemplatur in Christo Filio Dei, qui est imago Dei invisibilis per naturam, humanitatem nostram tam mirabiliter exaltatam, tam ineffabiliter unitam, videndo simul in unum primum et ultimum, summum et imum, circumferentiam et centrum, alpha et omega, causatum et causam, Creatorem et creaturam, librum scilicet scriptum intus et extra; iam pervenit ad quandam rem perfectam, ut cum Deo ad perfectionem suarum illuminationum in sexto gradu quasi in sexta die perveniat.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 36. 188. McEvoy explains the significance of the human being’s creation on the final day for Bonaventure (“Microcosm and Macrocosm,” 314–15).

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for the individual to see the complexity of his relationship to God through his own thought processes. It is here that the sixth stage ends, with the individual having reached the equivalent of the sixth day of creation, his efforts having reached their full fruition. In the final stage, all human efforts cease, but the journey up to that point has been as cognitive as affective.189 All that remains is for the contemplative to relax the efforts of the mind (“requiescat humanae mentis perspicacitas ab omni opere”) and enjoy the mystical union that cannot be described.190 The cognitive journey to God that Bonaventure describes most concertedly in the Itinerarium makes for a broadly accessible contemplative program. Allowing one to rise to God through careful investigation of one’s own cognitive processes, Bonaventure provides a natural means toward contemplation that many can pursue. Bonaventure, in fact, explicitly favors an accessible contemplative program. Philotheus Boehner explains that, in Bonaventure’s theology, “No special calling is required for the contemplative life; it should be the normal culmination of every truly Christian life and consequently should be desired by every just man.”191 Boehner may overstate the idea, but it is certainly clear that Bonaventure believes that everyone should seek contemplation and that everyday experiences can, when properly considered, provide a means to that end. Although Bonaventure’s philosophy figures prominently in his Itinerarium, the implication is not that extensive philosophical training is necessary for the contemplative life. Bonaventure, in fact, was wary about the prominence of philosophy in the study of theology. If not properly subordinated to biblical study, philosophy can dilute “the wine of Sacred Scripture” and convert it back into water.192 Theology, rather, “uses philosophical knowledge as its servant, 189. McGinn concludes that “love and knowledge are eventually identical” in the text (“Ascension and Introversion,” 550). 190. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, VI.7, Opera omnia 5:312. 191. Boehner, commentary on Hayes’s translation of the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 147n10. See also Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.7, Opera omnia 5:297: “Secundum enim primam naturae institutionem creatus fuit homo habilis ad contemplationis quietem.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 7: “according to the original plan of creation, the human being was created with the capacity to experience the quiet of contemplation.” Original sin introduced impediments, but surmountable ones. Boehner also cites Bonaventure’s Sermo I de Sabbato Sancto, Opera omnia 9:269: “Modo non debetis desperare vos simplices quando audistis ista, quia simplex non potest ista habere, sed poteritis postea habere.” Cited in Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, trans. Hayes, 147: “You who are simple should not despair when you hear such [elevated] things, feeling that the simple person is not capable of this. For eventually you will be capable of it.” 192. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XIX.14, Opera omnia 5:422: ”Non igitur tantum miscendum est de aqua philosophiae in vinum sacrae Scripturae, quod de vino fiat aqua.”

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borrowing from the natural order what it needs to make a mirror for the representation of things divine.”193 This chapter explains how philosophy, and especially the philosophy of cognition, serves Bonaventure’s theology. Bonaventure turns to philosophy not to make theology more abstract, but rather to convey with greater specificity how theological doctrines are visible within the operations of the mind. The following chapter will consider the way in which Bonaventure’s philosophy of knowledge informs his meditations on Christ. We have seen, both in this chapter and the previous one, that imagination functioned at the transition between sensory and intellectual cognition to assist in the production of knowledge. It functions similarly, I will argue, in meditations on the life of Christ, where imagining Christ’s life in a systematic and selfconscious fashion results in an analogous progression from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. To imagine Christ in this way is thus to make use of the mind’s cognitive resources and to realize in a fuller way a transition that the mind accomplishes whenever it knows anything. It is Christ’s dual natures that enable human apprehension, however limited, of God. It only makes sense that the properly oriented mind could consider and traverse those very natures.

193. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Pro. iii, Opera omnia 5:205: “ipsa substernens sibi philosophicam cognitionem et assumens de naturis rerum, quantum sibi opus est ad fabricandum speculum, per quod fiat repraesentatio divinorum.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 2:13. See also Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XVII.25, Opera omnia, 5:413.

Three

Imagination in Bonaventure’s Meditations

The previous chapter described Bonaventure’s expansion of imagination’s cognitive power and his development of its mystical potential. It remains to be seen how Bonaventure’s philosophy of imagination influenced his construction of meditations on the life of Christ. Bonaventure’s meditations include not only the well-known Lignum vitae (1260), one of the earliest meditations on the whole of Christ’s life, but also a figuratively dense meditation structured around the image of the mystical vine, the Vitis mystica (perhaps c. 1263), as well as a brief passion meditation in his treatise to the Poor Clares at Longchamp, De perfectione vitae ad sorores (1259–60). The previous chapter sought to demonstrate that the mind, when it knows anything, journeys from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Shining the divine light of illumination on imagination’s phantasms, Christ manages the transition from sensory to intellectual cognition. Understanding thus conceived is a journey through Christ, one that begins with this world and ends with God. This chapter argues that meditation relies similarly on imagination to impel the meditant from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. The meditant imagines Christ’s life systematically so that she might follow his own trajectory from earth to heaven. Bonaventure thus invests gospel meditations with great value, greater than has traditionally been recognized. Modern scholarship usually assigns gospel meditations a relatively humble aim, namely, greater devotion to Christ’s humanity, considered separately from his divinity. As Bonaventure conceives of them, meditations are useful precisely

. Bryan accordingly writes of English literature on the Passion, “By the fourteenth century, . . . the Passion was coming to be considered an ideal subject for lay and female devotion—anchored as it was in the humanity, rather than the divinity, of Christ” (Looking Inward, 110). See also Cousins, “Humanity and Passion of Christ,” 376.

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because they provide a path from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. The meditant who completes that journey would seem to arrive at nothing less than mystical union. We have seen that the key challenge of Aristotelian theories of cognition is to account for the soul’s progression from sense to intellect. The difficulty arises from the dual convictions that, on the one hand, sense and intellect are incommensurable and, on the other, that they have to communicate with each other. Likewise, the transition from Christ’s humanity to divinity is all-important in a spiritual context, not only because contemplation of his divinity is incomparably better than meditating on his humanity but because the essential difference between the two natures makes them exceedingly difficult to traverse. It is no coincidence that Bonaventure in fact collapses the two binaries, reading the mind’s progress from sense to intellect precisely as one from Christ’s human to divine natures. Only the miracle of Christ’s joint natures can enable human beings to overcome the materiality of their bodies and their surroundings to know immaterial things. Imagination lies at the nexus of both transitions within the mind, functioning crucially in both cognitive and spiritual capacities. Bonaventure, as we saw, counsels the contemplative to consider her cognitive processes in order to focus attention on the divine light that shines upon them. Similarly, in Bonaventure’s gospel meditations, imagination harnesses its cognitive power to enable the meditant to conform to Christ in both his natures. The work of meditation is therefore cognitive, as well as affective. Imagination helps the meditant to imagine scenes vividly and feel appropriate emotion, but it also uses the light that shines on it when engaged in the act of knowing in order to lift the meditant to Christ. Bonaventure wants the meditant to love Christ, but also to know him. Bonaventure did not independently invent this conception of gospel meditations, but rather developed various comments made by his pre­­ decessors who had understood meditations, at least implicitly, as journeys . I adopt here the late-medieval convention whereby meditation concerns earthly things and contemplation eternal, immaterial things. As the Liber de spiritu et de anima describes it, the faithful Christian “meditates through meditation on the universe which from the beginning of the world until its end God made for our benefit” and “contemplates through contemplation the heavenly things that are above” (PL 40:787A: “per meditationem universa quae a principio mundi usque ad finem Deus propter salutem nostram operatus est meditatur; per contemplationem quae sursum sunt coelestia contemplatur”). . Thus, the contemplative ascends “through the light that is imprinted on our minds, which is the light of Eternal Truth” (Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, V.1, Opera omnia 5:308).

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to God. Making that journey explicit, he provided a concrete mechanism by which to accomplish it. That mechanism, in fact, is Bonaventure’s defining innovation to the genre. In his hands, gospel meditation becomes a technical activity with an ambitious goal and a systematic method by which to reach it, and that method is based in his philosophically informed understanding of imagination. As Bonaventure builds on his predecessors in one respect, he departs from them in others. This chapter shows that earlier meditations regularly conceive of meditation as a plea or sacrifice. As such, they seek to incite desire for God and inspire divine mercy. In these respects they stand opposed to Bonaventure’s meditations, which present a more direct path to God that runs through imagination. Building meditation’s potential as a vehicle for spiritual ascent, Bonaventure promises the well-intentioned meditant spiritual intimacy in his mortal life and salvation thereafter. Bonaventure was the first university theologian to devote himself to the genre of gospel meditation, and his philosophical and theological training announce themselves in his reworking of it. Far from being a quaint or “sentimental” diversion for the laity, gospel meditation shows itself to be a nearly unsurpassable spiritual resource. This is not to say that Bonaventure makes meditation more complex or interesting than it had been. The richness of the meditational literature that precedes Bonaventure’s is beyond dispute, and many studies have explored it thoroughly. My claim for Bonaventure is that he develops one element of earlier meditations, namely, their construction of meditation as a journey from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, through recourse to his philosophy of imagination, and by doing so makes a decision crucial to later medieval literature. He provides such meditations with a concrete method by which to reach their exalted goal. This chapter therefore proceeds first by considering pre-Bonaventuran literature, both gospel meditations and other “affective” texts with which such meditations are usually associated. It then analyzes Bonaventure’s meditations and argues that he assigns them an ambitious purpose while providing an innovative means by which to reach it. As he presents them, meditations fulfill Paul’s requirement that one suffer with Christ in order to share his glory. Bonaventure takes the requirement literally and offers imaginative meditation on Christ’s life as an especially effective means to

. Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 57. . Among the most important studies of these meditations in recent years are McNamer, Affective Meditation; Fulton, From Judgment to Passion; Ross, Grief of God; Bestul, Texts of the Passion; and Constable, Three Studies, 143–248.

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share Christ’s earthly toil and advance on its basis to his heavenly bliss. The following chapter will argue that gospel meditation as Bonaventure reimagines it profoundly influenced various of the genre’s later installments. One qualification and one clarification are in order before we proceed. The qualification is that Bonaventure only indirectly associates gospel meditation with his theory of knowledge. However, this chapter will demonstrate that imagination operates similarly in both his philosophical and his devotional works, and it is reasonable to suppose that he applies the same understanding of imagination to both discourses. That affective texts such as those considered here contain philosophical and theological content has not gone unnoticed, but the tendency has been to consider such content tangential to their primary affective purpose. Thus, in her recent Affective Meditation, Sarah McNamer reads such content as evidence of interpolation by redactors and as a departure from an originary textual state of pure affectivity. My alternative is to make room for theological and philosophical speculation in the original purpose and constitution of so-called affective piety. The clarification is that imagination connects meditation on Christ’s humanity with contemplation of his divinity, but it does not participate in the heights of contemplation. As imagination generates but does not operate directly within intellectual apprehension, so it leads to but does not act in the apex of contemplation. Its purpose in both respects is to serve as a bridge.

Distance, Sacrifice, and Desire in Early Meditations on Christ The history of gospel meditations is usually told through the history of affective piety, which typically begins in or around the work of the eleventhcentury monk and eventual Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm. Neither the origin nor the precise definition of such piety has been easy for scholars

. McNamer makes her most developed argument along these lines in her discussion of the Meditationes vitae Christi, Affective Meditation, 95–110, and in “Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi.” . McGinn notes that late-medieval mystics had various views on whether rational operations were subsumed into the highest levels of mysticism (“Love, Knowledge, and Unio Mystica”). However, mental faculties below reason (including imagination) were typically exempt. . Southern thus calls Anselm the “founder of this new type of ardent and effusive selfdisclosure” that was central to the new, deeply personal piety (Making of the Middle Ages, 227). Watson provides a concise summary of the standard history of affective piety in “Middle English Mystics,” 545–46.

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to determine. However, Richard Southern offers a reasonable description of the literature within this “movement” according to its “emphasis on personal experience,” its “appeal to individual conscience,” its focus on Christ’s humanity, and its emotional character.10 Gospel meditation, an especially popular literary genre within medieval affective devotion, meets these crite­ ria prescribing systematic imagining of the events of Christ’s life and usually encouraging the meditant to imagine himself or herself within those scenes. Various studies seek to determine the origin of or motivation behind such meditations, but my interest instead lies in their development.11 In her landmark study of affective piety, Rachel Fulton defines the difference between pre- and post-Anselmian religious literature as one, in part, of distance. She cites an early eleventh-century prayer as “representative” in its creation of “great distance between Christ and the sinner.”12 When she turns to the later eleventh-century mystic and Benedictine abbot John of Fécamp, she writes, “Gone (or so it seems) is the vast distance between the human supplicant and his or her Lord.”13 However, distance remains integral to many early meditations, where God’s elusiveness fuels desire for him, desire that the meditant hopes is strong enough to inspire God to satisfy it. The emphasis on distance serves as a useful counterpoint to Bonaventure’s meditations, which not only insert the meditant into the events of Christ’s life but allow the meditant to climb the crucifix and join Jesus on it. That Bonaventure permits the meditant such intimacy is striking. Even where earlier meditations do grant the meditant entrance to gospel scenes and place her within earshot of Jesus, they do not typically allow her to share . The most ambitious effort to explain the emergence of such piety is Fulton’s From Judgment to Passion. For a recent effort to define the body of writings that participate in it, see McNamer, Affective Meditation, 207n1. 10. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 228. 11. The origin of these meditations is variously defined. Raw and Chazelle discuss early movements toward gospel meditation, Raw by discussing devotees’ habit of placing themselves in artistic representations of biblical scenes as an early form of gospel meditation (Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography, 24), and Chazelle by commenting on the new structuring of the liturgy around the chronological progression of Christ’s life (The Crucified God, 34; on this see also Salter, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, 58; and Constable, Three Studies, 203–6). Salter, who attributes the development of English affective piety to Continental influence (Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, 127), writes that the practice of meditation on Christ’s life was systematized between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (133). She credits Goscelin of Berlin’s late eleventh-century Liber confortatorius with making passion meditation into a devotional exercise (137). Constable provides a thorough survey of these meditations, dating back to the patristic period, in Three Studies, 143–248. 12. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 153. 13. Ibid., 163.

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the cross with him.14 That Bonaventure does bespeaks the power that he accords to imagination, but his meditations’ value does not consist solely in the meditant’s proximity to Christ. Rather, joined so firmly to Christ on the cross, the meditant can follow Christ’s own ascent from matter to spirit, earth to heaven. That distance is a vexing, even driving concern of many early treatments of Christ’s passion is well-demonstrated by a thirteenth-century treatise, often attributed to Anselm in the Middle Ages, called “Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de Passione Domini.”15 In the dialogue, “Anselm” asks the Virgin Mary to explain to him the events of Good Friday as she witnessed them, and Mary complies. She begins her account with the disciples running to tell her of Jesus’s capture, proceeds to relate her direct witnessing of Pilate’s questioning of Jesus, and finally describes her efforts to follow Jesus as he is led to the cross, efforts initially thwarted by the large and aggressive crowd.16 She tells Anselm, “I wanted to follow him and see him, but I was not able because of the great multitude of the crowd, which had gathered in hatred of my son. But with Mary Magdalene I decided that we would go around by a nearby path close to a certain spring until we met up with him.”17 Her access to Jesus is insistently mediated, as demonstrated most entertainingly when she and Mary Magdalene peak in at a window in order to hear Peter’s three denials.18 The two women together exercise considerable ingenuity in order to follow all of the major events, not always successfully. The Virgin Mary, for instance, cannot manage to approach Jesus when he is questioned by Caiaphas.19 Their sustained effort to achieve proximity to Christ, however, informs the narrative so fully that the treatise ends up concerning Jesus less than it does the effort to get close to him, a focus that mirrors the speaker’s own desire to hear a first-hand account of Good Friday. Neither Anselm nor the Virgin Mary, however, enjoys the intimacy they seek. In-

14. Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd concludes with the image of the speaker hanging next to Christ, but not hanging on the cross with him. See EETS, o.s., 241, 35–38. The Rothschild Canticles has an arresting visual representation of a nun climbing the cross to join Christ; see McNamer, Affective Meditation, 55–57; and Hamburger, Rothschild Canticles, 48–49. 15. On the date and authorship of the text, see Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 51–54. 16. Margery Kempe also describes herself accompanying Mary and witnessing the passion and surrounding events (Book of Margery Kempe, bk. 1, ch. 79–80). 17. Pseudo-Anselm, “Dialogus beatae Mariae,” PL 159:282A: “volui eam sequi et videre, sed non potui prae maxima multitudine populi, quae ad opprobrium filii mei convenerat. Sed tandem cum Maria Magdalena deliberavi quod per viam adjacentis plateae circa quemdam fontem circuiremus, quatenus illi obviaremus.” 18. Ibid.,275C–276A. 19. Ibid., 276C: “volens illum amplecti, non fui permissa accedere.”

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stead, the distance they suffer inspires in them all the greater a desire for Christ. Such distance is to be mourned so that, loving God as much as he can, the speaker might elicit divine mercy and finally receive the intimacy that he most desires. On the topic of distance, nobody is more thoughtful than Anselm. Anselm’s best-known prayer, the “Prayer to Christ,” expresses his anguish at being separated from God at the same time that it heightens that separation, using the pain of distance as the basis from which to ask for God’s mercy and, ultimately, salvation. After praying for greater devotion, Anselm emphasizes both his failure to attend adequately to the passion and his unfortunate absence from it. He affirms, “As much as I can, though not as much as I ought, I am mindful of your passion.”20 What such mindfulness accomplishes for Anselm, however, is an appreciation of how distant he is from the event, of “the hardships of my exile,” as he puts it.21 Chastising his soul for his absence at the monumental event, blaming his soul for its weakness, Anselm makes a surprising transition. Suddenly wishing again to have been there, he asks, “Will you not make it up to me for not seeing the blessed incorruption of your flesh, for not having kissed the place of the wounds where the nails pierced, for not having sprinkled with tears of joy the scars that prove the truth of your body?”22 Anselm’s absence is now a hardship for which he deserves recompense. The pain of not being at the crucifixion deserves its own reward. The rest of the prayer focuses on this regrettable absence, no longer providing cause for self-recrimination but an opportunity to appeal for God’s mercy. Anselm’s closing hope that God might come to console him indicates what he perceives the purpose of the passion meditation to be. Helping the soul to wish to have been at the passion, leading it to see that it cannot truly be present there but must always stand at a distance from God, the meditation insists on Anselm’s present inability to arrive in God’s presence. As a result of his now-unfulfillable desire to see God, Anselm fans the flames of that desire. Awash in love and virtuous desire, he is well-positioned

20. Anselm, “Oratio ad Christum,” Opera omnia 3:7: “non quantum debeo, sed quantum queo, memor passionis tuae.” Trans. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 95. 21. Anselm, “Oratio ad Christum,” Opera omnia 3:7: “exilii mei aerumnas.” Trans. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 95. John of Fécamp likewise characterizes his separation from God as exile (“exsilii”); see Meditation 20, PL 40:916C. 22. Anselm, “Oratio ad Christum,” Opera omnia 3:8: “quando restaurabis mihi quia non vidi illam beatam tuae carnis incorruptionem? Quia non sum deosculatus loca vulnerum, fixuras clavorum? Quia non respersi lacrimis gaudii cicatrices testes veri corporis?” Trans. Ward, Prayers and Meditations, 97.

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to seek mercy, to request eternal presence in the form of salvation. Anselm’s prayer does not minimize, but instead heightens, the pain of distance, transforming it into a vehicle through which to enflame his desire for God and, as a result, fulfill that desire. At the end of the prayer, after Anselm has called attention to the events of the passion that he did not see or hear, he asks, “Where shall I seek him?”23 Clearly not having found Christ in the meditation itself, Anselm proceeds to quote a series of biblical passages and thus suggests his answer: he finds Christ in Scripture, and until he arrives in heaven, Christ will be most present to him there. A related convention in early meditations concerns sacrifice. The meditant frequently casts meditation, and the pain it causes him, as an offering to God, intended like the offerings of the Hebrew Bible to appease God and inspire divine favor. Sorrow is the sacrifice that the individual can make to honor Christ’s own. Although he writes little of passion meditation, John of Fécamp makes an offering of himself in his Meditations, a text that rarely traveled under his name in the Middle Ages, but was tremendously popular.24 “In the fire of compunction,” he exhorts Jesus, “make me at every hour a living sacrifice before you.”25 The mere thought of Christ’s passion is enough to consume John. He responds to Christ’s sacrifice by sacrificing himself. In the following prayer, John is more dramatic still: “My God, may the fire of compunction make of my inmost being a rich holocaust in your sight. Let me be wholly immolated on the altar of my heart, and accept me as a rich holocaust that pleases you with its fragrance. Grant me a flowing, a crystal-clear fountain in which to wash this sullied sacrifice.”26 Meditation on Christ creates a pious pain that functions, the meditant hopes, to elicit love from God. His burning is a testament to the intensity of his desire, a desire that meditation functions above all to increase. Likewise, Alexander of Ashby, an Augustinian canon and prior of Ashby about whom little is

23. Anselm, “Oratio ad Christum,” Opera omnia 3:9: “Ubi eum quaeram?” 24. Leclercq writes, “The writings of John of Fécamp were the most widely read spiritual texts before the Imitation of Christ” (Love of Learning, 61). McNamer credits his Meditations with being “the earliest text in the genre of affective meditation” (Affective Meditation, 74). 25. Attr. to Pseudo-Augustine, Liber meditationum, Meditation 35, PL 40:929B: “fac me per ignem compunctionis coram te omni hora hostiam vivam fieri.” Trans. O’Connell, Meditations of Saint Augustine, 101. The prayers in the Latin text that are typically assigned to John are 12–25, 27–33, and 35–37. 26. Attr. to Pseudo-Augustine, Liber meditationum, Meditation 36, PL 40:932B: “Efficiar in conspectu tuo, Deus meus, per ignem compunctionis holocaustum pingue et medullatum: macter totus in ara cordis mei, et tanquam pinguissimum holocaustum assumar tibi in odorem suavitatis. Da mihi fontem irriguum, fontemque perspicuum, in quo lavetur assidue istud inquinatum holocaustum.” Trans. O’Connell, Meditations of Saint Augustine, 107.

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known except that he died early in the thirteenth century, writes in his “Oratio luctuosa” that he offers to Christ a sacrifice (sacrifitium) of tears derived from his compunction for Christ’s passion.27 Observing that this is the least he owes Christ, he makes his tears the only payment he can give to Jesus for his own, greater suffering. The two writers create a bond with Jesus through pain, awaiting the hoped-for reward of God’s mercy and salvation. Even in their attempts to connect with the passion, however, they emphasize their distance from it. Through their meditations, they fling themselves at their memory of the passion, casting their devotion as sacrifice rather than participation. One of the most influential voices in late-medieval piety, the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux likewise characterizes meditation as a lure for divine mercy. The importance of the Cistercians in the formation of medieval affective piety has long been recognized. In Richard Southern’s reading, Anselm was the master of emotion, Bernard of thought; Bernard incorporated in­ tellectual content into affective piety.28 It is hard to support so rigid a binary between affect and intellect, or to deny the originator of the ontological argument any but an affective interest in meditation. However, Bernard’s centrality in the history of affective meditation on Christ’s humanity is beyond dispute.29 The authors of various gospel meditations accordingly claimed him as their forebear.30 He is clearest about the place of passion meditation within his mystical program in his De Deo diligendo, his “central mystical treatise.”31 Glossing Song of Songs 2:5, Bernard likens the apples and flowers that the bride piles around herself to remembrances of the passion and resurrection, respectively. Although subordinating the former to the latter—the tokens of the passion “are like last year’s fruit,” whereas the

27. Alexander of Ashby, Meditations of Alexander of Ashby, Meditation 10, p. 77. 28. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 232–33. 29. Bernard’s writings about devotion to Christ’s humanity became so well-known in the Middle Ages, and were so often excerpted, that it is easy to overestimate their place in his mysticism. As Constable notes, “He and other Cistercian writers were ultimately less concerned with Christ’s earthly life and body than with the eternal Christ, and how man can rise and conform to Him” (Three Studies, 188). 30. Bonaventure in his devotional works and the author of the Meditationes vitae Christi, for instance, cite Bernard regularly, even, in the case of the Meditationes, somewhat compulsively. Bernard, of course, wrote to monks, which distinguishes him from most of the writers discussed in this chapter. However, although he was, admittedly, rather elitist about the superiority and distinctiveness of monks (see McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 182), the fact that he was claimed by authors of later gospel meditations as one of their own justifies his inclusion in the tradition of affective piety that this chapter considers. 31. McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 164.

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signs of the resurrection “are like this year’s flowers”32—both nonetheless serve to lure God to the bride: “where he [God] sees a mind occupied with the grace of his Passion and the glory of his Resurrection, he is willingly and zealously present there.”33 In the way that John of Fécamp hopes that sacrificing himself in affective meditation creates an alluring fragrance that attracts God’s mercy, so Bernard casts meditation as a captatio benevolentiae. It is a plea for divine favor, an expression of fervent devotion, but not a means of ascent.

Meditative Presence and Ascent We will see that Bonaventure’s meditations distinguish themselves from these texts in two key respects, first, by allowing the meditant greater access to Christ’s humanity and then, as a result, by making the meditant capable of ascending to his divinity. In both regards, Bonaventure departs from certain conventions in the genre only to build upon others. He was the first neither to place the meditant as an actor within gospel scenes nor to construe gospel meditation as a mechanism of spiritual ascent. Rather, he developed such elements, incorporating them into a more systematic meditation with a self-consciously ambitious purpose. His conviction about the importance of such meditation is reflected in his implication that everyone should do it, that Christ intended for his life to be meditated upon and that doing so fulfills the biblical requirement that one share Christ’s suffering before ascending to his glory. In Bonaventure’s interpretation, the Bible not only sanctions but counsels gospel meditation. Let us begin with access. Anselm, despairing of his separation from Christ, finds that Christ is most present to him in the Bible. The Bible makes Christ present in a more vivid sense for other writers, who permit the meditant to witness gospel scenes first-hand and even act within them. One of the most colorful examples comes from the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx. In his well-known treatise addressed to anchoresses, De institutione inclusarum (c. 1160–62), Aelred shows how accessible Christ’s life is to the properly disposed meditant. Perhaps the first schematic meditation on Christ’s life, Aelred’s text insists on the fullness of the meditant’s imagined

32. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Deo diligendo, III.8, Opera omnia 3:125–26: “fructus . . . anni quasi prateriti . . . novos . . . flores sequentis temporis.” Trans. On Loving God, 10. 33. Bernard of Clairvaux, De Deo diligendo, III.8, Opera omnia 3:125: “ubi suae videlicet aut Passionis gratiam, aut Resurrectionis gloriam sedula inspicit cogitatione versari, ibi profecto adest sedulas, adest libens.” Trans. On Loving God, 10.

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presence in gospel scenes.34 She is so free to act in the scenes she imagines, in fact, that Aelred counsels her to exercise discretion within them. He advises her, accordingly, not to submit to emotion and cut off the ear of one of the guards who come to take Christ away. “If, like Peter,” he explains, “you cut off someone’s ear, amputate an arm or a foot, he will restore it and without any doubt he will bring back to life anyone you may kill.”35 Choosing the example of Peter, a disciple whose action Christ undid, Aelred sets the rules of meditation. The anchoress can introduce new actions, but she should expect them to be undone and for the order of the original biblical narrative to reassert itself. Nonetheless, she is fully part of the scenes she imagines, like Peter himself, and can both act and elicit a countervailing response from Jesus. The limitation that Aelred imposes on the anchoress’s power to shape gospel scenes only underscores the surprising extent of that power. The discussion of Peter provides the most dramatic example of the wide-ranging freedom that the meditant enjoys in Aelred’s work, hugging Jesus while he is still in Mary’s womb, collecting drops of blood shed by Christ during his beating and crucifixion, and even lying on Christ’s breast with John. Aelred’s meditant fully inhabits biblical scenes, and as a result she is present to Christ, and he to her. The wholly rational tone of Aelred’s instruction, delivered as though he were not instructing the meditant to inhabit historical events in the manner of a time traveler, is perhaps the most striking feature of the passage above. Suggesting that there is nothing especially remarkable about his advice, Aelred indicates that Christ’s life is uniquely open to imagined participation. Speaking of Christ, he explains, “The Mediator of God and men hangs midway between heaven and earth, unites the heights with the depths and joins the things of earth to the things of heaven.”36 Jesus is where earth and heaven meet, as well as, apparently, past and present. His life is, therefore, especially accessible to meditation, as we will see more fully in the following chapter. Accordingly, Alexander of Ashby, echoing Anselm’s regret that he 34. Watson credits Aelred with “the earliest developed Passion meditation” (“Middle English Mystics,” 545). McNamer writes of the text, “Here we find for the first time in a single text many of the stylistic qualities and affective strategies that were to become so prominent in Passion meditations of later centuries” (Affective Meditation, 85). 35. Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, 31, CCCM 1:669: “Si instar Petri cuiuslibet aurem abscideris, si ferro brachium tuleris, si pedem truncaveris, ipse restituet omnia, qui etiam si quem occideris absque dubio suscitabit.” Trans. Macpherson, Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, 1:88. 36. Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, 31, CCCM 1:669: “mediator dei et hominum inter caelum et terram medius pendens, ima superis unit, et caelestibus terrena coniungit.” Trans. Macpherson, Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, 1:89.

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was not present for the crucifixion, concludes optimistically, “But thanks to you, oh Lord, what I could not then do to the feet of the flesh [i.e., kiss them], I can in a way (modo) do to the feet of thought, mentally, through the sufferings of faith and love. Behold indeed I was with you somewhat (paulo) before in Egypt, with you I was turned back in Judea, and with you I will ascend into the temple.”37 Imagined presence in the events of Christ’s life compensates considerably for physical absence. Vivid meditation such as this is a gift in its own right, a capacity born of Alexander’s faith and love. It also promises further rewards. Accompanying Christ in Egypt and Judea, Alexander suggests that he is all the better positioned to enter into the temple with Christ. Imagining Christ’s life gives Alexander the opportunity also to imagine salvation and perhaps greater resources to attain it. The upward trajectory of gospel meditation is suggested as well by the twelfth-century Cistercian William of St. Thierry. Meditation on Christ’s humanity frequently marked the first stage of a spiritual program, one especially suited to beginners, for whom such devotion is “better and safer” than less bodily, more spiritual kinds.38 William accordingly advises that the individual ascend to God not “going up by steps to the altar; he should walk calmly and smoothly over the level path of his own likeness, to a man like himself.”39 In this piece of advice, William recalls his illustrious predecessor Bernard of Clairvaux, who reads the incarnation as Christ’s concession to human weakness: “In taking a body he stooped to me.”40 Christ became incarnate precisely in order to provide a more accessible pathway from human being to God. However, while meditation on Christ’s humanity is wholly beneficial according to Bernard, who admits that he meditated on Christ’s life and passion himself in the early days after his conversion, it does not itself generate higher levels of spiritual intimacy.41 For William, 37. Alexander of Ashby, Meditations, Meditation 5, p. 59: “sed gratias tibi domine quod non potui tunc pede corporis, possum modo pede cogitacionis, motu mentis, passibus fidei et dilectionis. Ecce enim sic paulo ante tecum fui in Egipto, tecum reversus sum in Iudeam, et tecum iam ascendam in templum.” 38. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 174, CCCM 88:264: “melius et tutius.” 39. William of St. Thierry, Meditationes, X.10, CCCM 89:60: “non sit ei ascendendum per gradus ad altare ejus, sed per planum similitudinis, placide et pede inoffenso, eat homo ad hominem similem sibi.” Trans. Lawson, Works of William of St. Thierry, 1:154. 40. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, XX.ii.3, Opera omnia 1:115: “in carnis assumptione condescendit mihi.” Trans. Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 1:152. 41. For Bernard, such meditation purifies the inner senses but does not lead to higher forms of contemplation. This is most evident in sermons LXI and LXII of his commentary on the Song of Songs, where he dissociates passion meditation from contemplation of God’s majesty and of the heavenly city.

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on the other hand, meditation on Christ’s humanity leads the meditant beyond the human Christ. As the monks’ faith develops, passion meditation gives way and they “begin to know him [Christ] no longer according to the flesh,” having come to recognize God within man.42 Passion meditation thus leads beyond and above itself. He explains that, for those who picture the passion, “your cross becomes to us like the linen sheet that was shown to blessed Peter, let down from heaven by four corners. All sorts went into it, clean creatures and unclean, and we rejoice that we are lifted up to heaven, where also we, who were unclean, are cleansed. For through this picturing (mediante namque imagine) of your passion, O Christ, our pondering on that good that you have wrought for us leads us forthwith to love the highest good.”43 Peter’s vision, related in Acts 10, marks the official end of Jewish dietary restrictions for the nascent Christian church. As William refers to the vision, Christ’s blood, shed at the passion, cleanses unclean sinners and thus makes possible their ascent. As the cross descended from heaven, so it returns there, carrying with it those who have pondered the passion. Imagining the passion thus initiates an upward movement to God in heaven, a movement made possible by Christ’s passion itself. William’s suggestion that the cross descends from heaven and can lead the meditating individual back to it is echoed by a twelfth-century meditation regularly attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux in the Middle Ages but now inconclusively attributed to the Archbishop of Ostia, Drogo of Laon, the Meditatio in passionem et resurrectionem Domini.44 Counseling complete devotion to the cross, the author writes, “On this cross, the soul is suspended from the earth, and plucks sweet apples from the tree of life.”45 The soul ascends the cross and takes the fruit of salvation from it. Praising the cross directly, the author writes, “O glorious cross! Take root in me, so that

42. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 175, CCCM 88:265: “incipiunt eum iam non secundum carnem cognoscere.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 69. 43. William of St. Thierry, Meditationes, X.8, CCCM 89:59: “crux tua linteum nobis efficitur illud, quod beato Petro ostensum est quatuor initiis demissum de caelo; in quod omnes intrantes et munda et immunda animalia, in caelum nos levans gratulamur, in quo et mundamur qui sumus immundi. Mediante namque imagine passionis tuae, Christe, cogitatum a nobis circa nos bonum tuum repente nos transfert in summi boni affectum.” Trans. Lawson, Works of William of St. Thierry, 1:153–54. 44. Although the work was written in the twelfth century, the passion sections discussed here appear to be later additions, making it difficult to know whether the meditation precedes or follows Bonaventure’s writings. My purpose, regardless, is to note the continuity between the two. On the dating and attribution of the text, see Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 209n123. 45. Pseudo-Bernard, Meditatio in passionem et resurrectionem Domini, PL 184:751D–752A: “In hac cruce anima suspenditur a terra, et dulcia poma de ligno vitae decerpit.”

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I might ascend in you.”46 Meditation connects the individual so firmly to the cross that he can rise through it from earth to heaven. Thus conceived, meditation on Christ’s life is powerful precisely because it leads beyond his humanity, all the way to God in heaven. The ability of meditation to provide access to such heights, as well as its ability to transport the meditant into gospel scenes, become crucial components in the genre’s later development. Bonaventure not only embraces these elements of earlier meditations, concentrating more attention on them, but provides a concrete method for meditative ascent to God. Before turning to Bonaventure, however, we should first appreciate that his joint interest in cognition and literature was far from unprecedented. He was preceded in this regard most notably by William of St. Thierry, who in the era before the rediscovery of Aristotle anticipated Bonaventure’s interest in articulating a cognitive method for his devotion.47 William’s adaptation of the mechanisms of cognition to his mysticism merits discussion here not just because of its richness (William’s works are much more interesting than is suggested by his persistent subordination to Bernard of Clairvaux in modern scholarship), but also because it shows how widespread was the effort to bring cognition to bear on devotion. Although equally dependent on Augustine, William takes a different tack than Bonaventure, emphasizing the Holy Spirit as a means of union rather than Christ and focusing on love rather than imagination. He nonetheless anticipates Bonaventure’s use of the cognitive image as a means to achieve mystical union. William understands the Holy Spirit as that which binds the Father to the Son and constitutes the unity between them. The Holy Spirit “is the Love of Father and Son, their Unity . . . and whatever else they have in common.”48 As William describes it, the soul has a natural capacity to love God and thus to emulate the Holy Spirit, whose occupation it is to love God. As senses are affected by objects and become like them in the act of perception, so the soul, when it loves God, becomes like God. “The soul’s sense,” William explains, “is love.”49 Made to love, then, the soul conforms to the object of its 46. Ibid., 752A: “O gloriosa crux! radicare in me, ut ascendam in te.” 47. As a philosophical or theological topic, cognition did not garner much attention before the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings on the subject. Hugh of St. Victor and Abelard are the two most notable exceptions; see Hugh’s De unione corporis et spiritus and Abelard’s Expositio in Hexaemeron. 48. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 263, CCCM 88:282: “est amor Patris et Filii, et unitas . . . et quicquid commune potest esse amborum.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 96. 49. William of St. Thierry, Meditationes, III.10, CCCM 89:17: “Sensus enim animae amor est.” Trans. Lawson, Works of William of St. Thierry, 1:106.

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affection. It “is transmuted into the object loved,” though, William qualifies himself, “it does not become of the same nature as that object.”50 William recalls Augustine, who offers as an early trinitarian analogy the example of love. Love, Augustine explains, loves itself as loving something, and thus reveals a trinity made of love, the love of that love, and the object loved.51 The soul that loves God best emulates the Trinity’s self-love, specifically by emulating the Holy Spirit. William explains that the soul has a special affinity for the Holy Spirit and is affected directly by it. Much as Christ, in Bonaventure’s philosophy, makes it possible for the soul to know, and thus to ascend to God through knowledge, so the Holy Spirit makes it possible for the soul to love and ascend to God through love. The Holy Spirit does this by affecting the intellect and enabling it to experience “spiritual or divine sweetness.”52 It acts specifically on memory to transform into love the understanding that is directed to God.53 The soul, as a result, enjoys mystical contemplation, conforming to the Holy Spirit, and thus to the Trinity, through love. Entering into the position of the Holy Spirit, the soul “finds itself standing midway in the Embrace and the Kiss of Father and Son.”54 It uses its cognitive powers, turned toward love, to enter to some degree into the Trinity. Through the Holy Spirit’s aid, the soul achieves “unity of Spirit,” which signifies for William so complete an identification of the soul with the Spirit that “it makes man one with God.”55 Although taking care on occasion to specify that the soul does not become wholly one with God, William is clear that the soul becomes his resemblance almost as completely as the Holy Spirit, who simply constitutes the imageness of Father and Son. For William, image remains the goal and mechanism of mysticism—were the soul not already an imago trinitatis, it could not become what it most desires to become in William’s theology, a similitudo trinitatis.56 When the soul moves toward God, “the devoted image hastens to cling to its exemplar” in hopes 50. William of St. Thierry, Meditationes, III.10, CCCM 89:17: “quadam sui transformatione in id quod amat transmutatur; non quod idem sit in natura.” Trans. Lawson, Works of William of St. Thierry, 1:106. 51. Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII.viii.12, CCSL 50:287. 52. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 249, CCCM 88:279: “spiritualis vel divinae suavitatis.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 92. 53. See William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 249–51. For a fuller discussion, see McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 257–8. 54. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 263, CCCM 88:282: “in osculo et amplexu Patris et Filii mediam quodammodo se invenit.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 96. 55. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 262, CCCM 88:282: “unitas spiritus . . . fit homo cum Deo unus spiritus.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 95. 56. McGinn asserts that this progression was central for William. See Growth of Mysticism, 229. McGinn’s very helpful discussion of William of St. Thierry runs from 225 through 274.

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of achieving in heaven “full resemblance to him.”57 In other words, “resemblance to God is the whole of man’s perfection.”58 The soul as William describes it is an image that seeks to become a better image, and in this sense it has a good deal in common with the soul as Bonaventure describes it. William also focuses, notably, on the mechanisms of cognition to detail the process by which the soul conforms to God through love. Mystical knowing involves the intellect’s usual operations, though altered due to the action of the Holy Spirit on them. William’s interest in cognition, specifically as it operates in contemplation here and perception of God in heaven, is distinctive. McGinn calls his analysis of the process by which mystical knowing transforms the regular processes of understanding “the most detailed and the most subtle of the entire twelfth century.”59 Sharing William’s interest in the relationship between cognition and mysticism, Bonaventure charts a different course, one that focuses on Christ and imagination rather than the Holy Spirit and love. While for William emphasis shifts away from the normal mechanisms of cognition to the operations of the Holy Spirit, Bonaventure finds a spiritual program within the normal mechanisms themselves.

Bonaventure’s Ladder of Christ Bonaventure most directly incorporates his philosophy of imagination into his devotional writing in the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum. The previous chapter addressed the philosophy of imagination in the text, according to which Christ as species acts on mental images, enabling them to represent not just the sensible features of an object but its intelligible nature. Directly interacting with the mind’s images through the process of illumination, Christ draws on his dual natures to translate sensible species into intelligible ones. He thus ensures the accuracy of mental images and enables knowledge to be discovered through them. One might reasonably observe that the Itinerarium is a mystical treatise, not a gospel meditation, but it should be noted that it organizes its mystical program according to the image of Christ crucified. More than that, it figures progress in the spiritual program that the 57. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 209–210, CCCM 88:272: “adhaerere festinat similitudini suae devota imago . . . plena similitudinem adepturum.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 82. 58. William of St. Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 259, CCCM 88:281: “haec hominis perfectio est, similitudo Dei.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 95. For more on William’s theology of images, see Bell, Image and Likeness, 89–124. 59. McGinn, Growth of Mysticism, 258.

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text prescribes as an increasingly complete joining of Christ on the cross. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Bonaventure organizes the text around the image of the six-winged seraph, doubling as the image of Christ crucified, that he saw in a vision. Climbing the mystical “ladder of Jacob,” the individual begins with the lowest rungs, which are “the entire sensible world.”60 The individual’s spiritual progress is measured by her movement up the cross. Bonaventure explains, “The figure of the six wings of the Seraph reveals six steps of illumination which begin with creatures and lead up to God, to whom nobody rightly enters except through the Crucified.”61 As the mind journeys to God, it actually travels along Christ’s own body, attaching itself so firmly to Christ, and specifically to Christ crucified, that it follows his own movement from earth to heaven, from matter to spirit. Thus joined to Christ after the first six steps, the meditant is prepared for the seventh: mystical union. To ascend the cross is ultimately to rise above it, to follow Christ’s journey from earth to heaven. Christ’s humanity thus figures centrally in mystical ascent as Bonaventure presents it, for that humanity is the means of the soul’s upward movement. Bonaventure’s vision of the six-winged seraph in the form of Christ crucified is not just the inspiration for the text but its governing image, representing in graphic form the centrality of Christ to Bonaventure’s spiritual program. Bonaventure’s depiction of the crucified Christ as a ladder is not his novelty; Abelard, for instance, tells Heloise that Christ erected the cross “as a ladder for our use.”62 What is distinctive is Bonaventure’s belief that the ladder is climbed by the mind that thinks systematically about Christ’s life. When Bonaventure writes that there is no route to the ecstatic heights of Christian wisdom other than through Christ crucified, he is not being metaphorical. The individual must journey expressly through Christ crucified, as present in the meditant’s mind, in order to ascend from earthly to eternal things. Accordingly, Bonaventure writes, “We are guided to things divine through the rational soul itself and its naturally implanted faculties.”63 Stages three and four, the middle stages of Bonaventure’s journey

60. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.9, Opera omnia 5:298: “scala Iacob . . . totum istum mundum sensibilem.” 61. Ibid., Pro. 3, Opera omnia 5:295: “Effigies igitur sex alarum seraphicarum insinuat sex illuminationes scalares, quae a creaturis incipiunt et perducunt usque ad Deum, ad quem nemo intrat recte nisi per Crucifixum.” 62. Abelard, Letter 5, La vie et les epistres, 84: “ad hoc nobis erexit scalam.” 63. Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, IV.7, Opera omnia 5:307: “in divina manuducimur per ipsius animae rationalis potentias naturaliter insitas.” Trans. Boehner, Journey of the Mind to God, 26.

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that correspond to the seraph’s middle wings, thus concern the human soul, the best image of God available to human beings. The individual rises to God through his mind, a capacity born of the belief that Christ resides within it: “As the Incarnate Word, [Christ] dwells in rational minds that are still united with flesh.”64 Because Christ inhabits the mind, the mind can attach itself to him. Bonaventure more expressly counsels his reader to join Christ on the cross, and more directly relates the journey up the cross to gospel meditation, in the Lignum vitae. Written shortly after Bonaventure at least began the Itinerarium in 1259, the Lignum vitae survives in almost two hundred manuscripts and is, in one sense, Bonaventure’s defining work.65 One can often identify Bonaventure in medieval art by the tree of life, sometimes containing the chapter headings of his text, that stands beside him. Like the Itinerarium, the text centers around the image of Christ crucified, this time without the overlying seraph image. As the text begins, Bonaventure instructs the meditant, “Picture in your mind (describe in spiritu mentis) a tree.”66 He proceeds to explain that the tree has twelve fruits hanging from its branches, each marking a different period from Christ’s life. Chronologically arranged, the fruits take the meditant through Christ’s life, starting with the lowest fruits that represent the earlier episodes. The meditant works his way systematically to the top.67 To make chronological progress in meditation is thus to ascend the cross. Bonaventure counsels elsewhere, “On the cross with Christ be fastened; share it with Him, that (ut) in heaven you may see him face to face.”68 Joining Christ on the cross is valuable not just because it offers a foretaste of heavenly intimacy, but because it provides access to heaven itself. Uniting herself to Christ’s humanity through meditation, the meditant prepares herself for fuller, more joyful union in heaven. Bonaventure’s representation of the individual’s spiritual ascent to God as an increasingly complete joining of Christ on the cross bears pondering. Bonaventure hardly invented the idea that heartfelt devotion to Christ entails sharing his suffering. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul famously wrote,

64. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, XII.46, Opera omnia 8:85: “ut Verbum incarnatum [est] in mentibus rationalibus carni unitis.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:141. 65. On the manuscripts, see Bonaventure, Opera omnia 8:xl. 66. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, Pro. 3, Opera omnia 8:68: “Describe igitur in spiritu mentis tuae arborem quandam.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:98. 67. See Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, Pro. 5, Opera omnia 8:69. 68. Bonaventure, Laudismus de Sancta Cruce, 8, Opera omnia 8:667: “Christo sis confixus cruci, / Ut sic valeas perduci / Secum ad caelestia.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 3:3.

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“With Christ I am nailed to the cross” (Gal. 2:19). Likewise, the idea that sharing Christ’s suffering was a necessary prerequisite to heavenly delight had a long and distinguished pedigree before Bonaventure embraced it. It is not at all hard to find statements such as this one from Gregory the Great, referring to salvation and Christ’s suffering: “If your mind craves that which soothes, first drink what causes pain.”69 To fulfill the familiar obligation to suffer with Christ, however, it typically had been thought sufficient to undergo the trials and tribulations of life with patience, not specifically to share Christ’s suffering through vivid meditation. Consider Bede: He who says he abides in Christ should walk as Christ walked, that is, not seeking earthly things, not pursuing fleeting goods, but fleeing honors, holding all the world in contempt before the glory of heaven, profiting willingly from all things, bearing injuries as nothing, patiently suffering those things leveled against him, also asking God for grace from such attacks, seeking always the glory of the Creator and never his own, and leading those with him as much as they are able to higher things. To do these and other such things is to follow the footsteps of Christ.70

Here, the injunction to suffer with Christ is one to suffer earthly discomfort willingly and to remain focused on Christ at all times. For Bonaventure, sharing Christ’s suffering means imaginatively witnessing it, suffering emotionally where Christ suffered physically. Bede’s understanding of everyday hardship as the means to suffer with Christ persists, but Bonaventure proposes gospel meditation as an extension of it, as an especially effective means to share Christ’s suffering and to journey assuredly through it to heavenly delights.71 Bonaventure’s conviction that imagining Christ’s suffering weds the soul to Jesus on the cross brings into relief an important but underemphasized feature of the newly intense devotion to Christ’s humanity in the late Middle Ages, which is its participatory imperative. Casting meditation as sacrifice, 69. Gregory the Great, “Homily 27,” PL 76:1206D: “Si mens vestra appetit quod demulcet, prius bibite quod dolet.” 70. Bede, Homeliarum, I.21, CCSL 122:150: “Qui enim dicit se in Christo manere debet sicut ille ambulavit et ipse ambulare quod est non ambire terrena non caduca lucra sectari fugere honores infimos contemptum mundi omnem pro caelesti gloria libenter amplecti cunctis prodesse amare iniurias nulli inferre ac sibi inlatas patienter sufferre sed et inferentibus a domino veniam postulare non umquam suam sed conditoris semper gloriam quaerere quotquot valet se cum ad amorem supernorum erigere. Haec et huiusmodi gerere Christi est vestigia sequi.” 71. Some instead opted for physical suffering as a means to replicate Christ’s own. See Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 89–121.

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as we saw above, implies an obligation to perform it, as meditation fulfills the requirement that the individual engage actively in Christ’s life.72 Meditation attaches the meditant to Christ’s suffering and enables him to move beyond it, ultimately to attain salvation. The angst and suffering that gospel meditations call for have received far more attention than the joy that is their goal.73 It is certainly the case that, in Bonaventure’s view, meditation on Christ’s life fulfills with special efficacy the long-standing requirement to share Christ’s pain, but more importantly, it provides the means to rise above it to joyous union. As the soul ascends through meditation, it participates in the movement from matter to spirit that Christ enabled. Christ’s unique ability to mediate between earth and heaven, man and God, was a tenet of Christianity, as we saw in the previous chapter, and it takes visible form in Bonaventure’s positioning of the crucified Christ as the very pathway that the meditant follows. When Bonaventure writes that one reaches the rapturous heights of Christian wisdom only through Christ crucified, he has something quite concrete in mind. The meditant must journey expressly through Christ crucified in order to ascend from earthly to eternal things. This is a mental journey, even a cognitive one. Bonaventure thus locates the image of Christ crucified at the heart of the Itinerarium and the Lignum vitae and, in both cases, counsels the reader to climb the cross mentally and spiritually. In doing so, he establishes a fundamental similarity between the texts, one that elevates the latter. In terms of method and purpose, the “mystical” text and the “devotional,” meditative one follow the same basic trajectory: ascent to God in heaven proceeds through the mind and through Christ crucified. Bonaventure undoubtedly presents the subject matter of the two texts differently—the Lignum vitae does not possess the dense complexity of the Itinerarium—but they articulate the same theology, which depends on Christ to draw the individual from earthly to eternal things. Where the Itinerarium appeals to the cognitive power of imagination to assist the mind in its ascent to God, however, the

72. Fulton argues that the new devotion was sparked by the failure of the second coming to occur at the first millennium. As she explains, Christ’s failure to return intensified fears of judgment, fears that expressed themselves in imaginings of Christ as he would appear at judgment. The meditant imagined his own judgment by Christ so as to judge himself preemptively and, he hoped, avoid damnation (From Judgment to Passion, 60–141). The requirement to participate in Christ’s life that I mention is part of the phenomenon Fulton identifies. Immersing oneself in Christ’s life becomes an effective means to forestall damnation. 73. See, for instance, Aers, “Humanity of Christ,” and Cousins, “Humanity and Passion of Christ.”

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Lignum vitae relies instead on imaginative meditation. The Lignum vitae does not overtly engage with scholastic theories of cognition in the way that the Itinerarium does, but the fact that it replaces the Itinerarium’s attention to the philosophy of imagination with an emphasis on imagining the events of Christ’s life is striking. Bonaventure thus suggests that imagination operates similarly in both cases. Bonaventure relies on imagination to provide the Lignum vitae with not just its emotional power but also its spiritual efficacy. It is imagination that affords the meditant special presence within gospel scenes and provides the mechanism of the meditant’s ascent from earth to heaven. We can begin with the former. Like Aelred before him, Bonaventure allows the meditant to interact physically with gospel figures, encouraging the meditant to embrace Christ’s manger, kiss his feet, and so forth. Bonaventure, however, attaches special import to that presence. His meditant works hard to earn her position near Christ and discovers a profound intimacy with him as a re­ sult. Referring to Christ’s transfiguration before Peter, James, and John, Bonaventure explains, “The soul devoted to Him, now solidly established in the truth and raised to the summit of virtue, could make Peter’s words its own, and exclaim with him: ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here’ (Mt. 17:4)—here, that is, in the peace and joy of seeing Your face; here, where the spirit, in a state of heavenly and ecstatic rapture, can hear ‘secret words that man may not repeat’” (2 Cor. 12:4).74 By dutifully imagining Christ’s miracles, the meditant has become practiced in Christ’s virtues, actually following Peter’s path of moral improvement by diligently imagining it. Thus virtuous, she earns the same reward that Peter did: she exults in Christ’s presence. Working her way through the events of Christ’s life, the meditant now inhabits Peter’s position and, by inhabiting it, resignifies it. Peter’s words, uttered by the meditant, now comment not on the transfiguration but on themselves, celebrating presence proper. Jesus’s transfiguration, his revealing of his divinity to the three disciples on Mt. Tabor, is especially powerful as an object of meditation because it gives the meditant access to the fullness of Christ’s presence. Bonaventure uses this occasion of Christ’s unveiling to establish the fullness of the meditant’s own presence for, in the moment of Christ’s truest expression of himself, the meditant is herself entirely present to him. 74. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, I.12, Opera omnia 8:74: “sic anima Christo devota et iam in veritate firmata et ad apicem virtutis evecta fideliter dicat cum Petro: Domine, bonum est nos hic esse, hoc est in tuae contemplationis perfruitione serena, immissoque in eam caelesti sopore et ecstasi, audiat arcana verba, quae non licet homini loqui.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:111.

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The implication is clear: seeing Christ’s face mentally can be just as powerful as seeing it physically, promising a sort of rapture in either case. Looking at Christ’s face and hearing Christ’s words, the meditant can make Peter’s words her own and enjoy his intimacy with Christ. It is only by seeing and hearing, by meditating her way into this scene, however, that she can earn such a lofty reward. Likewise, after describing the annunciation and Mary’s conception, Bonaventure advises the meditant, If you could perceive the splendor and magnitude of this flame sent down from heaven, the refreshing breeze that came down with it, the consolation it poured forth; if you could understand the loftiness of Mary’s elevation, the glorification of humanity, the condescension of divine Majesty; if you could hear the Virgin singing her delight; if you could accompany her into the hill country and witness how the woman who had been barren embraced her and greeted her with words by which the tiny servant recognized his Lord, the herald announced the Judge, the voice proclaimed the Word—oh, surely then, together with the Blessed Virgin, you would most sweetly sing this holy canticle: “My soul magnifies the Lord . . . ”; surely, then, one with the infant prophet, you would joyfully and jubilantly adore the marvel of the virgin conception.75

Bonaventure here summarizes the major events of Lk. 1:26–55, which describes the annunciation, Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, and Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat. The meditant who diligently follows these events, in chronological order, earns a deeper level of engagement with them. She advances from witness to participant, joining not only Mary in her prayer but John, in utero, in wonderment at Mary’s conception. The journey from witness to participant is, in fact, central to the Lignum vitae, which makes the meditant an onlooker in Christ’s life, joining the Magi, the disciples, and so on, before allowing her to share the cross with Christ. What earns the meditant her

75. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, I.3, Opera omnia 8:71: “O si valeres utcumque sentire, quale quantumque fuerit illud e caelo immissum incendium, collatum refrigerium, infusum solatium, quanta sublimatio Virginis Matris, quanta nobilitatio humani generis quantaque condescensio Maiestatis; si Virginem canentem cum iubilio posses audire, si cum Domina tua in montana conscendere, si sterilis et Virginis suavem intueri complexum et salutationis officium, in quo servulus Dominum, praeco Iudicem, vox Verbum agnovit: puto, quod canticum illud sacrum: Magnificat anima mea Dominum etc., cum beatissima Virgine suavi tunc modulatione concineres mirumque conceptum virgineum una cum Propheta Parvulo exsultans et iubilans adorares!” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:105–6.

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participation in this scene, as at the crucifixion, is her dutiful seeing, hearing, touching, and understanding. Imagining the events in this way enables her to penetrate them more deeply. A salient element of the passage is the series of contrary-to-fact conditionals that structure it—were the meditant to see, hear, and so on, then she would sing with Mary and marvel with John. The syntax makes such singing and marveling what is sought after, the reward held out for one who fulfills the listed prerequisites. There is no question that the meditant will want to join Mary and John in the way Bonaventure describes. The grammatical structure further calls attention to the meditant’s capacity to enter the scene. As Bonaventure presents it, meditation proceeds rather easily from imagined seeing to direct participation. One who places herself in the presence of the biblical events will, it seems almost inevitably, end up acting within them. Although Bonaventure is coy, opting to suggest subjunctively that the meditant might enter these scenes without declaratively affirming that she can, his entire treatise depends on the notion that imagined presence is possible and that it leads to deeper levels of intimacy with Christ. Imagining herself as a spectator to biblical events, the meditant acquires the ability to immerse herself within them. Elsewhere, instructing the meditant to remain at Christ’s side as he is baptized, Bonaventure writes, “Once regenerated in Him, delve into His secrets” so that the meditant might know the Trinity and “be carried up to God.”76 Physical, albeit imagined, closeness to Christ is nearly equivalent to knowing his secrets. Sharing Christ’s baptism through meditation, the meditant finds spiritual insight and a route to heaven. Imagined intimacy is actual intimacy, and it carries substantial rewards. Bonaventure thus expresses great faith in the capacities of imagination, through which the meditant fully inhabits scenes from Christ’s life. It should be observed that, from a sensory, relatively external engagement with the events described, the meditant moves inward, ultimately sharing the subject position of John as he lies inside Elizabeth’s womb.77 As meditation progresses inward, so it ascends upward, but only for one who embraces it eagerly. After describing the Last Supper and John lying on Christ’s breast, Bonaventure exclaims, “How wonderful are these prodigies of love, how full of delight—but only to the one who, called to such a solemn feast, 76. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, III.9, Opera omnia 8:73: “iam regeneratus in ipso, eius scrutare secreta, ut . . . sursum feraris in Deum.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:110. 77. Bonaventure surely appeals to the inner, not the outer senses in this passage. On Bon­ aventure’s influential doctrine of the inner senses, see Largier, “Inner Senses—Outer Senses,” 371.

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will hurry there with all the ardor of his heart, crying out with the prophet: ‘As the hind longs for the running waters, so my soul longs for You, O God!’ ”78 Only the one who rushes to the scene “with all the ardor of his heart” can delight in John’s closeness to Christ and cry out in a verse from the Psalms. Those for whom such meditation is possible have an implicit obligation to perform it. As Bonaventure explains, Christ “was not lifted up on the cross to show Himself less accessible, but in very truth to make Himself more accessible to all.”79 Bonaventure treats the image of Christ on the cross as though it were designed to be memorable, to advertise Christ’s accessibility to later generations. The same applies to Christ’s life generally. Bonaventure thus writes that Christ is stripped of his clothes “so that you may be able to see the ravages done to his most pure body.”80 The events of his life occur so that they might be seen, imaginatively. Christ acts with the needs of his onlookers in mind, and those onlookers include not only the witnesses to the historical crucifixion but those in later generations who will imagine it. For Bonaventure, it is meditation that allows the crucifixion to be seen as Christ wanted it to be seen and shared as Christ wanted it to be shared. That Christ desires such closeness is suggested by Christ’s position on the cross. With his arms outstretched, his head inclined toward the meditant, he “desires you to embrace Him and is waiting to embrace you.”81 Christ’s position on the cross is often read as inviting, as promising a kiss and an embrace to one who receives him.82 Casting Christ’s posture of suffering as one of affection, this convention makes the image of Christ crucified one toward which people are intentionally drawn. In Bonaventure’s version, one responds to Christ’s invitation and rushes to him specifically through meditation on his life. Meditation is, Bonaventure repeatedly affirms, the only option available to those not present to Christ’s historical life. Likening Christ’s binding to the cross to the tying of a vine, for instance, Bonaventure 78. Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, IV.16, Opera omnia 8:75: “O quam mira sunt haec omnia, repleta dulcedine illi dumtaxat animae, quae, ad tam celebre vocata convivium, toto mentis currit ardore, ut possit illud eructare propheticum: Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus!” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:115. 79. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XXIV.1, Opera omnia 8:187: “Non enim elevatus est in cruce, ut se difficilem praeberet accedere ad ipsum volentibus, sed magis, ut posset omnibus paratior inveniri.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:202. See also Vitis mystica, V.6, Opera omnia 8:170–71; and De perfectione vitae, VI.10, Opera omnia 8:123. 80. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, V.4, Opera omnia 8:169: “Ut tu corporis purissimi deformitatem valeas intueri.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:164. 81. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XXIV.3, Opera omnia 8:188: “complexus tuos desiderat, talis te, ut complectatur, exspectat.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:204. 82. Lipton examines the sources and significance of this common characterization in “‘Sweet Lean of His Head.’”

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addresses him: “O Lord Jesus, I see You with the eyes of my mind—the only way now possible to me—tied with the rough rope, dragged like a bandit.”83 Or later, after describing Christ’s words to the thief beside him, promising him a place beside Christ in paradise, Bonaventure writes, “In our mind— the only way possible to us—we come to You, gentle Jesus, seated upon the throne of majesty.”84 The events of Christ’s life can be accessed only through the mind, but the lack of other options does not devalue this one. Given that one should attend to Christ, then, and that meditation is an especially effective way to do so, no doubt remains about the value of such meditation. Rather, it is because Christ can only be seen in this way that meditation establishes its importance, even its necessity. It need not always take the form of systematic meditation on the events of Christ’s life, for as the Itinerarium makes clear, devout ascent from earthly to eternal things itself constitutes a form of gospel meditation and yields its rewards. However, gospel meditation fulfills the devout Christian’s obligations to Christ with special clarity. It is, accordingly, an occupation not just for novices, but for those advanced in faith.85 Meditation is perhaps the most direct path to participation in Christ’s earthly life, but the intimacy it promises is not its only reward. Rather, the meditant shares the events of Christ’s earthly life so as to share Christ’s ascent to heaven. Such ascent was made possible by Christ’s incarnation. Christ, Bonaventure explains, assumed a human nature in order that, “as He had been united to our humanity, so He might unite us to His divinity.”86 One who diligently meditates on Christ’s life fulfills the purpose of the incarnation, realizing the benefits that Christ made possible when he assumed an earthly life. After narrating the torment of Jesus, described, in the imagery of the text, as seven bonds that tied Jesus, the mystical vine, to the trellis of the cross, Bonaventure concludes, “Let us be bound with the bonds of the passion of the good and most loving Jesus, so that we may also share with Him the bonds of love. For, made fast by these latter, He was drawn 83. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, IV.1, Opera omnia 8:166: “Video oculis mentis, quibus possum, Domine Iesu, te tam duris nexibus affectum tanquam latronem trahi.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:158. 84. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, VIII.2, Opera omnia 8:174: “Accedimus ad te, o benigne Iesu, mente, qua possumus, sedentem in throno maiestatis.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:174. 85. See Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XV.4, Opera omnia 8:182, where Bonaventure explains that those who are advanced drink the wine or blood from Christ’s side, whereas novices drink milk. 86. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XIV.1, Opera omnia 8:179: “quod nostrae humanitati unitus fuit, Deitati suae nos uniret.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:185.

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down from heaven to earth in order to suffer the former. Conversely, we who desire to be drawn from earth into heaven must bind ourselves to the Head with the bonds of the passion, through which we will attain the bonds of love and thus become one with him.”87 The bonds that connect Jesus to the cross are the bonds by which the individual is attached to him. Jesus’s love, expressed through his binding, elicits love from those who likewise bind themselves to him and to the cross. The passion thus provides the materials by which the individual joins herself to Christ and, by loving Christ, is able to “be drawn from earth into heaven” and “become one” with him. Imagining the passion, and Christ’s life more generally, the meditant has the resources necessary to conform to him.88 Assiduous meditation enables the meditant to attach herself so firmly to Christ in his humanity that she can journey with him to heaven. The power of gospel meditation derives from the passion, which opens a path from earth to heaven. It is the passion, therefore, that typically constitutes the climax of a meditation and it is to the passion, above all, that the meditant should attach herself. Bonaventure thus advises a community of Poor Clares to contemplate Christ’s passion “always” and then tells them to touch Christ: “Not only put your finger into the place of the nails, not only put your hand into His side, but enter with your whole being through the door of his side into Jesus’s heart itself. There, transformed into Christ by your burning love for the Crucified, . . . seek nothing other . . . than to be able to die with Christ on the cross.”89 Joining Christ on the cross, the meditant not only perfects her life, as per Bonaventure’s title, De perfectione vitae ad sorores, but allows Christ to live in her. What she most desires, however, is to die with Christ and thus to complete his journey to heaven. Bonaventure’s attention falls less on meditative suffering than meditative ascent, and so 87. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, IV.5, Opera omnia 8:168: “Vinciamur ergo vinculis passionis boni et amantissimi Iesu, ut etiam vinculis caritatis cum illo vinciri possimus. Vinculis enim caritatis ipse devinctus, ad suscipienda vincula passionis de caelo tractus fuit in terram, et e contrario, qui de terris trahi desideramus ad caelum prius passionis vinculis nostro capiti colligemur, ut per hoc ad caritatis vincula pervenientes, unum cum ipso efficiamur.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:161–62. 88. Bonaventure explains on several occasions that the whole of Christ’s life, properly speaking, was the passion (see, for instance, Vitis mystica, V.2, Opera omnia 8:169: “Passionem vero non illum unum diem appellamus, quo mortuus fuit, sed totam vitam illius”). The crucifixion nonetheless warrants special attention. 89. Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae, VI.1 and 2, Opera omnia 8:120: “non solum mitte digitum tuum in locum clavorum, non solum mitte manum tuam in latus eius, sed totaliter per ostium lateris ingredere usque ad cor ipsius Iesu, ibique ardentissimo Crucifixi amore in Christum transformata . . . nihil aliud quaeras . . . quam ut cum Christo tu possis in cruce mori.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:239–40.

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he emphasizes not sharing Christ’s pain but rising with Christ to bliss. Bonaventure explains that the individual who has nourished her devotion with frequent meditation on Christ’s life and death can join Christ in her heart through prayer.90 At that moment, he writes, “your heart will be delighted at the sight of your Beloved. . . . You will rush into His embrace, will kiss Him with such intimate fervor that you will be completely carried away, wholly enraptured in heaven, fully transformed to Christ.”91 Having imagined Christ’s life diligently, the Poor Clare enjoys such profound closeness with him that she shares his exultation. Imagined, meditative closeness to Christ thus confers spiritual closeness as it provides a pathway to God in heaven. We have seen that Bonaventure’s path to God in heaven runs through Christ’s humanity and is traveled through meditation. What bears stressing is that the reward for dutiful meditation is salvation. Imagining her way from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, the meditant performs a journey in her mind that qualifies her for its postmortem fulfillment. Bonaventure thus exhorts meditation on Christ’s passion and instructs the meditant to enter Christ’s wounds, which double as the gates to paradise, protected by the cherub with the flaming sword. He writes, “Enter, O soul, this garden more choice than any other; enter into it through your loving meditation—the only way open for you now—so that later you may be admitted, soul and body, into the heavenly paradise.”92 Heaven is located on the other side of Christ’s wounds, as he is the portal between earth and heaven, himself both of earth and of heaven. To approach Christ crucified, notably “through . . . loving meditation,” is thus to approach the divinity of Christ. Bernard of Clairvaux had spoken of entering Christ’s wounds, but Bonaventure links the act more firmly to the discovery of heaven, of God in his divinity. The meditative journey to heaven thus prepares the meditant for actual admittance into heaven. The meditant has, through meditation, fulfilled the obligation to suffer with Christ and will receive the promised rewards. The prominence of textual imagery within Bonaventure’s imaginative meditations should not go unnoticed. Although medieval sources do not

90. Bonaventure addresses the efficacy of such meditation in De perfectione vitae, VI.1–11. 91. Bonaventure, De perfectione vitae, V.5, Opera omnia 8:119: “utcumque cordis oculo dilecto tuo viso . . . in amplexus eius ruas, impressis labiis intimae devotionis oscula figas, ut sic tota a te alienata, tota in caelum rapta, tota in Christum transformata.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:236. 92. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XXIV.2, Opera omnia 8:188: “Intra ergo, o anima, hunc paradisum omnibus paradisis meliorem nunc solo quo potes meditationis affectu, ut postmodum anima et corpore caelestem illum paradisum valeas introire.” Trans. de Vinck, Works of Bonaventure, 1:202–3.

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emphasize the creative capacities of imagination, the elaborate metaphors in Bonaventure’s works do suggest that textual images assist the meditant in imagining Christ’s passion. Take, for instance, the series of images in Vitis mystica XV. There, Christ is described as a rose on the mystical vine, red both because of the intensity of his love and because he was covered by blood. Bonaventure urges the meditant to have pity for this dew- and tear-covered rose, adding that the unmoved meditant should allow Christ’s tears to fall unto the parched land of her heart and to imagine herself pierced on the cross. As love broke down the “adamantine heart” that separated God from man, so Christ’s blood, itself the blood of a kid, should soften the heart hard as diamond.93 The chapter ends with Bonaventure explaining that, as beasts pine for human blood once they have tasted it because it is superior to the blood of any other animal, so man should pine for Christ’s blood, itself immeasurably sweeter than mere human blood. The short chapter is thus crowded with images that almost overwhelm it. Their purpose is clearly to deepen the meditant’s understanding of how Christ is a rose and then, in the following two chapters, to understand how that rose signifies both love and the passion, itself a literalization (Christ actually becomes red) of that love. As Mary Carruthers has shown, these images aid memory, and so says Bonaventure. He speaks of Christ’s blood in such terms “in order that those things that should always be remembered be impressed more deeply upon our memories.”94 However, they do so with the aid of imagination, which is always responsible for creating images of those things that the mind has not seen. The density of images in gospel meditations requires that the meditant’s imagination be attentive, apparently preparing it for its ultimate task, which is to attach the meditant to the image of Christ’s passion. In their own collegial way, images of all sorts assist each other. We have seen that, for Bonaventure, meditation on Christ’s life associates the individual so firmly with Christ that she can follow his journey from earth to heaven. Ascending likewise from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, the meditant travels through her mind, specifically, as the Itinerarium explains, through its cognitive capacities. Imagination enjoys a special prestige in the process, central both to the philosophically dense Itinerarium and to the devotional meditations, the Lignum vitae and Vitis mystica. In each case, imagination operates similarly, in a way that links philosophy to meditation and reveals the cognitive work of meditation. Within Bonaventure’s 93. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XV.3, Opera omnia 8:181: “cor adamantinum.” 94. Bonaventure, Vitis mystica, XVII.1, Opera omnia 8:183: “ut quae iugiter sunt memoranda memoriae arctius imprimantur.”

Imagination in Bonaventure’s Meditations / 139

gospel meditations, imagination connects the meditant so profoundly to Christ’s life that she can travel a pathway from earth to heaven. Structuring his spiritual program around a movement from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, Bonaventure uses imagination to perform the same task that it performs in his theory of cognition, namely, to elevate the mind from sense to spirit. Imagination functions cognitively to assist in the translation of sensory into intellectual apprehension. As it does so, it relies on Christ’s presence within the mind, and specifically on his two natures. Understanding is a process that begins in Christ’s humanity and ends in his divinity, much like gospel meditation itself. The trajectory of gospel meditation, in other words, comes to look suspiciously like that of the intellect that knows. If we understand gospel meditation within the context that Bonaventure’s theory of cognition provides, it becomes clear why such meditation is capable of accomplishing the work that he assigns to it. Bonaventure expressly charges the meditant with imaginatively joining Christ on the cross so that he might graduate from meditation on his humanity to contemplation of his divinity. The journey that he makes parallels the mind’s journey whenever it knows anything, that is, it begins with sensory things and ends with spiritual, intellectual ones. Consciously considered, then, the natural mechanisms of cognition chart out the pathway of gospel meditation. When the individual considers Christ’s life, he creates a mental image of Christ’s humanity, and Christ, participating in the mind’s act of knowing, would seem to reveal the intelligible, divine nature within that image. In other words, Christ acts on the mind’s image of himself in order to lead the cognizing meditant from his humanity to his divinity. This process, like that of cognition itself, depends centrally on imagination. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that the cognitive system outlined in the previous chapters would lend itself to devotional applications. If Christ communicates through the mental image, then the mind that thinks of Christ, and thus creates a mental image of him, would seem necessarily to engage in a valuable and accessible spiritual program. Further, as the brief discussion of William of St. Thierry’s theory of knowledge shows, it also makes sense for Bonaventure to have conceived of gospel meditation as this chapter claims he does, to follow both Augustine and William in linking theories of cognition to Christian spirituality. As minister general of the Franciscan Order from 1257–74, Bonaventure would have had an especially pressing motivation to do so. One factor motivating Bonaventure’s theory of knowledge was his desire to provide a natural mechanism for knowing God. Bonaventure’s egalitarian approach to contemplation speaks to its times.

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It is hard to imagine such a perspective being voiced in the late fourteenth century, a period more anxious to protect contemplation from the rabble. His perspective is appropriate, however, to his station as minister general. An especially successful leader at a difficult time for the Order, Bonaventure did not think about the spiritual life abstractly. Rather, he took seriously his charge of providing spiritual guidance to the members of the Order, and, as Bert Roest has successfully shown, the Order of Bonaventure’s day had members of vastly different levels of learning.95 The spiritual program that Bonaventure offered and the accessibility it promised well suited the needs of differently learned Franciscans. It is only to be expected that Bonaventure would translate his philosophy into an express devotional program—the gospel meditation—whose own dependence on mental images and imagination can hardly appear accidental in light of Bonaventure’s expansive philosophy of mental images. In both cases, spiritual union begins with the mind’s proper use of its own images.

95. Roest, History of Franciscan Education.

Four

Exercising Imagination: The Meditationes vitae Christi and Stimulus amoris

Bonaventure’s work proved foundational to late-medieval meditations on Christ, which often retained and even developed his belief in the unusual efficacy of imaginative meditation. Although the elaborate intellectual framework of Bonaventure’s meditations remained his own—no author of gospel meditations in the period appears to have shared Bonaventure’s fascination with the cognitive underpinnings of meditation—Bonaventure’s successors in the genre announce his influence on their work above all in their untroubled assumption that imagination’s considerable powers render it capable of transporting a meditant from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. This chapter begins by noting similarities between Bonaventure’s conception of meditations and those of various authors who succeed him. The later authors inherit Bonaventure’s conviction that Christ’s life and passion were intended for meditation. For those unable to witness the passion in its historical occurrence, meditation is an excellent means to do what they suggest every Christian should do, which is to engage with Christ’s life. The meditations likewise present themselves as fulfilling the Pauline prescription to suffer with Christ in order to glory with him, a prescription that they expressly cite. The reward for such suffering is both spiritual intimacy in the meditant’s earthly life and as sure a path to salvation as almost any medieval text is willing to promise. Finally, they share Bonaventure’s belief in the universal value of meditation, appropriate to people in any station of life. In addition to eliciting compassion and educating the meditant in virtue, these meditations promise spiritual rejoicing to anyone who engages in them properly. Indeed, the texts discussed below are quite clear that one of the most attractive features of gospel meditation is that almost anyone can do it. They depart from Bonaventure’s meditations only in their firmer conviction that imagination is a trainable faculty that needs to be honed in order

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to bear fruit. Memory, we know, required training, but so did imagination. The final sections of this chapter accordingly read gospel meditations as training guides for imagination. From the texts’ perspective, imagination is a resource to be honed, cultivated, and appreciated. The meditations based on it are, as a result, all the more confident about their value. This chapter studies meditations that are particularly forthcoming about the purpose of gospel meditation and explicit about its procedures. It accordingly devotes the greatest attention to James of Milan’s Stimulus amoris and the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi but draws on other authors, especially Henry Suso and Ludolph of Saxony, as well. The chapter does not delve into the abundant medieval literature on Christ’s life and passion more generally. Its overriding interest is in how gospel meditations conceive of their value and how they think meditation makes use of imagination to reach its goals. Implicit throughout this chapter is the intellectual foundation of the first two, which showed how present Christ was believed to be to the human mind, especially its imagination. The meditations studied here share a conviction that the well-disposed soul that imagines Christ’s life properly conforms to him. Their use of imagination to fulfill this role, and specifically to propel the meditant from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, is not coincidental. As we have seen, this journey between Christ’s natures is one that imagination is especially well-suited to make and, in fact, makes every time the mind knows.

Meditation in the Divine Plan The second chapter showed that, in medieval theology, the mind thinks about Christ by design. His incarnation gave the mind its ability to understand eternal things, and the mind that thinks about his life simply follows its own cognitive disposition. As the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic Henry Suso explains, the mind that meditates on Christ also accepts Christ’s invitation, initially extended in the incarnation proper, to see him. Suso addresses the topic in the Horologium sapientiae, the Latin work in which Suso both retells and extends his earlier Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom). The Horologium was, according to Edmund Colledge, “one of the three most popular devotional treatises in Western Europe.” In . Colledge, Introduction, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 15. The other two that he names also feature prominently in this chapter, the Meditationes vitae Christi and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi. The Horologium was translated into Middle English as Seven Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom. For a discussion of the translation, see Sargent, “Versions of the Life of Christ,” 42–59.

Exercising Imagination / 143

it, Wisdom, in his aspect as Christ, describes the enormity of his suffering on the cross and then concludes, “Even here and now it is granted to you through my dispensation in some fashion to look upon this.” Through Wisdom/Christ’s “dispensation,” the Disciple has the capacity to see Christ’s wounded body, to make the passion present to him. Making himself visible to human beings when he assumed human nature, Christ accommodates those living after his death by continuing to make his life available to meditation. His passion is a historical event like no other, intended to be witnessed mentally by those who could not witness it physically. Its accessibility to the human mind is here God’s additional gift to mankind. Whereas the Büchlein leaves off with a list of one hundred passion meditations, the Horologium records the insights gained by the “Disciple,” representing Suso, via various “spiritual imaginings” that result from those meditations. The Horologium’s emphasis, like that of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, is on the effects of meditation, specifically the wisdom gained through them. After they conclude, therefore, Suso’s Disciple “had many a bright inpouring of Divine truth, of which they were the cause.” Chronicling the Disciple’s initial attraction and then devotion to Wisdom, the Horologium is best known for its poetic declarations of love for Wisdom, but it also tells us a great deal about the benefits that Suso believed derive from meditation on Christ’s life, especially his passion. At the precise moment that Wisdom/Christ invites the Disciple to inspect his wounds, Wisdom shifts from the past to the present tense, no longer simply narrating past suffering but now presenting his body for the Disciple’s own inspection. He directs the Disciple, “See now my slender, lovely hands both cruelly riven by nails. . . . Look at my body’s limbs,” and so on. The targeted shift to the present tense underscores Suso’s point, which is that Christ’s passion exists in an eternal present and is meant to be seen. Suso writes passion meditation into the divine plan even more clearly by explaining that one who does not attend sufficiently to the passion while living will be punished in purgatory. Purgatory, in other words, picks up

. Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.3, p. 394: “Et hoc quoque iam in praesenti tibi aliqualiter videre dispensative conceditur.” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 88. Newman discusses the work, with special attention to Wisdom and the Disciple’s shifting genders, in God and the Goddesses, 207–22. . Henry Suso, Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, pro., p. 197: “gewan er mengen liechten influz götlicher warheit, dero sú im ein ursach waren.” Trans. Clark, Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, 44. . Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.3, p. 394: “Vide nunc manus meas utrasque longas et pulchras clavis acerrime perfossas . . . Respice delicata corporis membra.” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 88.

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where lackluster meditation leaves off. It exists, according to Suso, “because not only should a man ask after the effects of this Passion, but he must also be conformed to it.” Purgatory will accomplish what passion meditation might have achieved on its own, suggesting very strongly that meditation is the individual’s obligation, and one with a specific task to perform, namely, conforming the soul to Christ. Allowing meditation to pre-empt purgatorial suffering, Suso casts meditation as a form of suffering and as penance. In both respects, meditation is a prerequisite to heavenly rejoicing. If the individual bound for salvation does not dutifully perform the task himself, it will be foisted on him in the form of extended, postmortem corporeal suffering. Thus equating real with imagined suffering, Suso describes the power of meditation as he defends its importance. The Meditationes vitae Christi (henceforth MVC) more explicitly connects Christ’s incarnation to the human mind’s never-ending ability to meditate on him, showing that meditation is an extension of Christ’s gift of himself in the incarnation. The MVC is an early fourteenth-century Latin meditation on the life of Christ written by an Italian Franciscan to a Poor Clare. It survives in over two hundred manuscripts and had a well-documented influence not just on medieval devotional literature but also on the period’s visual art and drama. In modern scholarship, it figures as the authoritative source for late-medieval affective piety as well as the perfect emblem . Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.14, p. 498: “quod homo consequatur effectum passionis huius, oportet ipsum ei configurari.” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 207. . McNamer has recently argued that the text was originally written in Italian rather than Latin and that the original Italian manuscript is witnessed by Canonici Italian 174 (“The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi” and Affective Meditation, 95–110). This argument builds on her earlier claim that the Meditationes vitae Christi was written not in the early fourteenth century, as typically supposed, but in mid-century, between 1336 and 1364 (“Further Evidence”). I am not persuaded by either argument. Her case for the Italian original depends on her rejecting the traditional dating of one manuscript of the Meditationes de Passione Christi (Trinity College 293), an excerpt from the MVC, to the early fourteenth century. As McNamer notes, the script is typical of early fourteenth-century manuscripts (“Further Evidence,” 245), but she argues that such evidence is inconclusive. She favors the Italian manuscript because of what she considers to be its stylistic superiority and its affective coherence (Affective Meditation, 106), but even if those claims are accepted, they do not mean that the text is the original version. Further, her argument prompts some serious questions. For instance, one would need to explain why the original text, in spite of its stylistic superiority, would disappear from view, surviving in only one manuscript as opposed to the Latin text’s 217. Further, the Latin text has been shown to be the basis of many of the vernacular versions. Were the Italian text primary, then the Latin translation of the text, which is three times the length of the Italian version, and the text’s European circulation would also need to have happened very quickly. . A classic study of the relationship between the MVC and medieval art and drama is Mâle’s Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages, 26–48.

Exercising Imagination / 145

of Franciscan spirituality. John Fleming thus calls the MVC “a virtually ‘pure’ Franciscan work,” and Daniel Lesnick interprets it, though without evidence, as a Franciscan preaching manual that gives us direct insight into Franciscan sermons of the period. Of course, the text was written by a Franciscan to a Poor Clare, so in a basic sense it is Franciscan, but the claims go further than this to suggest that the MVC is medieval Franciscan spirituality in condensed form. This is not the Franciscanism of Bonaventure or Scotus, but rather one of the “simplified forms” or a “more popularized version” of Bonaventure’s theology that, according to Denise Despres, found favor with the laity.10 However, the text neither aligns itself with the laity alone nor dilutes the power of its philosophical inheritance. Rather, it insists on the value and power of the spiritual program it describes. Instructing its reader or hearer to meditate systematically on the events of Christ’s life and often modeling meditations for her use, the text is the most self-conscious of medieval gospel meditations, which is why it features prominently in this chapter. The author tells the meditant that her ability to meditate on Christ now is an extension of his adoption of humanity at his incarnation. Thus, at the moment when Jesus first entered Mary’s womb, “he began to journey along with us.”11 His adoption of human nature signifies his entrance into every individual’s life. Accordingly, after telling the meditant a couple of chapters later to visit Jesus in his crib, greet Joseph, kiss Jesus, and so on, the author explains, “You can do this because he came to sinners for their salvation. He humbly conversed with them and finally left himself as food for them. Therefore his loving kindness patiently permits his person to be touched as you wish, and he’ll not attribute it to your presumption but to your love.”12 By the text’s logic, because Jesus became human and remains even now on earth through the eucharist, the meditant can imagine touching him. Not only that, but she can actually touch him in her mind, knowing that he submits himself to the affection of anyone

. Fleming, Introduction to Franciscan Literature, 242; Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence, 143–71. Lesnick simply affirms, “The Meditations was obviously intended as a sermon or series of sermons for the edification of the laity” (143). . Not only does the text define that spirituality, but, in circular fashion, it often provides evidence of it. See, for instance, Jeffrey, Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality, 250. 10. Depres, Ghostly Sights, 32; Cousins, “Humanity and Passion of Christ,” 382. 11. MVC, iv, CCCM 153:23: “cepit peregrinari nobiscum.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 16. 12. MVC, vii, CCCM 153:35: “Hec facere potes quia ipse ad peccatores venit pro eorum salute. Et cum eis humiliter conversatus est et tandem se ipsis dimisit in cibum. Unde benignitas sua pacienter se permittet tangi pro tuo velle, nec imputabit presumpcioni sed amori.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 28.

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who imagines him. Meditation is an adjunct to the gift of the incarnation. It is how those who were not present for Jesus’s historical life can share it. To this extent, Christ’s life and passion are intended for mental commemoration. When the author of the MVC rules out the possibility of a physical journey with Christ, he exhorts the meditant, “Let us nonetheless ascend mentally with the Lord, or rather, to the Lord.”13 Meditation substitutes for the experience of seeing Christ physically, but it is by no means inadequate. Rather, as we have seen Suso suggest, imagined presence is nearly equivalent to real presence. In the Stimulus amoris, itself heavily influenced by Bonaventure, the Franciscan mystic James of Milan makes a similar point. James wrote this, his only identified text, late in the thirteenth century. In its original version, it survives in ninety manuscripts, but the text expanded in James’s wake, growing from twenty-three to fifty-three chapters by the early fourteenth century and growing yet again in its 1476 and 1596 printings. There are at least six forms of the Latin text in existence.14 The expanded fourteenthcentury version, which I will here call the long text and is elsewhere known as the Stimulus maior or forma longa, exists in complete form in a stunning 221 manuscripts and partially in another 147. On the correspondence between the chapters of the two Latin texts as well as the Middle English Prickynge of Love, see Table 1. It is the long text that provides the basis for the Middle English Prickynge of Love, a text considered in detail in chapter 6. The long text incorporates the whole of the short text without substantial alteration to the original chapters, but it brings organization to the rather chaotic original text, often schematizing the material by enumerating, for instance, the benefits of passion meditation and gathering together chapters on like themes. It establishes a focus on the passion by increasing the number of chapters devoted to it from two to fifteen, and although it expands to meet some peculiarly fourteenth-century concerns, as with Christ’s name and blood, it clearly intends itself as a good-faith extension of the short text and is notable for its theological consistency. The Stimulus is less a gospel meditation than a mystical treatise, but it calls for regular meditation on Christ’s life, especially his passion, and describes the content of those

13. MVC, cvi, CCCM 153:347: “Ascendamus autem mente cum Domino vel pocius ad Dominum.” 14. Kirchberger unravels the complicated textual history of the Stimulus in her introduction to Goad of Love (attr. Hilton, 13–44), her modernized version of the Prickynge. McGinn briefly addresses the manuscripts in Flowering of Mysticism, 380n28.

Table 1  Correspondence of the chapters of the Stimulus amoris and Prickynge of Love The Long Text of the Stimulus amoris

Short Text

Prickynge of Love

Part I. Chapter 1. How a man should meditate readily on Christ’s passion

Chapter 14

Chapter 1

I.2. How a man should endeavor to have compassion for Christ crucified I.3. Meditation on the pain of the Virgin Mary on Good Friday

— Chapter 15

Chapter 2 Chapter 3

I.4. Six things to be considered regarding the Passion

—

Chapter 4

I.5. How God’s Passion is fitted to four affections of the soul

—

Chapter 5

I.6. How God’s Passion is fitted to our faith and other theological virtues

—

—

I.7. On the sevenfold ascent of contemplation into the Passion

—

Chapter 6

I.8. That Christ had eight blessings in his Passion

—

Chapter 7

I.9. That the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit are apparent on the cross

—

—

I.10. That on the cross we are able to see the ten commandments

—

—

I.11. That all ecclesiastical sacraments draw their virtue from God’s Passion

—

—

I.12. That all the offices of the angelic hierarchy shine in the Passion

—

—

I.13. That the highest power, wisdom, and mercy shine there

—

—

I.14. That the human heart is inflamed to seven works of mercy in the Passion

—

Chapter 8

I.15. A devout prayer regarding God’s Passion Part II. Chapter 1. How a man can advance and be more pleasing to God

— Chapter 1

Chapter 9 Chapter 10

II.2. How a man should be excited to love of God

Chapter 17

Chapter 11

II.3. How a man should readily give his heart to God

Chapter 20

Chapter 12

II.4. How a man should direct his thoughts to God

Chapter 7

Chapter 13

II.5. How a man should be more mindful of God’s works in God’s service

Chapter 10

Chapter 14

II.6. How a man should hate himself perfectly in order to love God perfectly

Chapter 18

Chapter 15

II.7. How a man should enjoy contemplation in all his actions

—

Chapter 16

Table 1  (continued ) The Long Text of the Stimulus amoris II.8. Something delectable and pleasing

Short Text —

Prickynge of Love Chapter 17

II.9. How a man might be well regulated in thought, speech, and action

Chapter 22

Chapter 18

II.10. On one’s behavior toward others

Chapter 21

Chapter 19

II.11. How a lover of souls should regulate himself

—

Chapter 20

II.12. That a soul should be so afflicted with Christ’s love that it hate sin

—

Chapter 21

II.13. Description of blessedness

—

—

II.14. A most devout prayer

—

—

II.15. Something notable

—

—

II.16. Something else notable

—

—

II.17. How a priest should hold himself when approaching the body of Christ

—

II.18. A request to inflame the heart with love of Jesus

—

Chapter 22 —

Part III. Chapter 1. What things lead man to the quiet of contemplation

Chapter 4

Chapter 23

III.2. How a man can be changed into God and how glorious it is

Chapter 19

Chapter 24

III.3. How surprising it is that one who tastes God can want to be separated

Chapter 2

III.4. How man can become perfect in a short time

Chapter 23

Chapter 25

III.5. How a soul is inebriated by its Creator in contemplation

Chapter 8

Chapter 26

III.6. How a soul is inebriated in various ways before rapture

Chapter 9

Chapter 27

III.7. That a contemplative should rejoice in the good deeds of others as if his

—

—

—

III.8. That a contemplative not judge others because of apparent sins

Chapter 11

Chapter 28

III.9. That a contemplative not consider others to be less than himself

Chapter 16

Chapter 29

III.10. Against pride

Chapter 5

Chapter 30

III.11. On the scarcity of true obedience

Chapter 12

Chapter 31

III.12. That temptations are useful to servants of God

Chapter 6

Chapter 32

III.13. That temptation regarding predestination should be checked

Chapter 3

Chapter 33

Exercising Imagination / 149 Table 1  (continued ) III.14. A question of the flesh to God the Father about Christ

Chapter 13

Chapter 34

III.15. The Father’s response to flesh

also in Chapter 13

Chapter 35

III.16. Meditation on the Ave Maria

—

Chapter 37

III.17. Meditation on and exposition of the Lord’s Prayer

—

Chapter 36

III.18. Two other expositions of the same

—

—

III.19. Meditation on the Salve Regina

—

Chapter 38

III.20. On the state of the blessed in heavenly Jerusalem

—

Chapter 39

meditations in detail.15 Meditations are, in other words, the method behind James’s mystical transports. In this chapter, I will focus especially on the short text, but the Stimulus in either version has been badly neglected by critics.16 Its popularity and influence on medieval religious literature were substantial, and while that claim that can often be made for medieval texts that are not much fun to read, the Stimulus is not among them. Consider the following passage on prideful men who glory in gifts of grace that are not truly theirs: Supposing that you do have these gifts, let us see how you possess them. Our most kind God gave to you, unfaithful servant, betrayer, and destroyer of your Lord, the justice that you have, justice which is like most white bread, and you do not stop dripping menstrual blood on it. Oh great madness! Would that you had at least as much shame as a female whore. I ask you which is the whore so corrupted that she glories in menstruation? You regard as nothing the whore who is not abashed about this, nor does the bride dare to reveal this to her most beloved bridegroom. Therefore why, oh foolish one, do you glory in your wickedness? If you were to fail only once a month, in the manner of a woman, would you not have high cause for glory? But blush and suffer, because your flux is constant. If so much wickedness comes from you, and so much goodness from God, glory not in yourself but in God, and 15. Although James’s focus remains at most times on the passion, he does occasionally counsel the meditant to share other episodes in Christ’s life with him through meditation, as in ST, c. 14; LT I.i. (I cite both the short and long text when the passage is present in both versions, but I quote from the short text.) 16. Fleming called for more study of the Stimulus in 1977, but the text remains understudied (Introduction to Franciscan Literature, 7).

150 / Chapter Four as you will not cease to be lacking, so you should constantly be ashamed for your foulness before the eyes of the divine majesty.17

This passage is not even the greatest of the Stimulus’s many, underappreciated charms. Like many of the most startling of James’s passages, it also fails to make it into the Middle English translation.18 James directly addresses the realness of imagined suffering with Christ. Explaining how one who “lingers on the torments of Christ through meditation” wants to join Christ and suffer what he suffers, James concludes, “If I cannot do this [i.e., experience what he suffered] bodily, at least I want to do it in heart,” or, as the long text has it, “mentally” (mente).19 As we will see more fully below, the content of the Stimulus indicates that James, like the author of the MVC, perceived no great limitation in the mentalness of meditation. James is clear that the meditant is not supposed to suffer physically, to be wounded in his or her flesh as Christ was. One who directs his inner eyes toward Christ suffering and wants with all his heart to suffer those pains again is “sufficiently punished,” for Christ “does not want the passion to be born twice for the same misdeed.”20 God gives few the grace to suffer for him physically, but he gives many the desire to suffer. Physical suffering is therefore not required, but affective suffering, what James calls “labor of the heart” (labor cordis), is.21 To meditate on Christ’s life and passion is to do what God inspires the individual to want to do. To that end, meditation is not just a trick that the mind plays on itself or some delightful diversion. The author of the long text reminds his reader that the passion was more 17. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 5, p. 24 (LT, III.x, p. 686): “Sed etiam, quod tu habeas, supponamus; qualiter autem ea possideas, videamus. Tibi infideli servo, proditori Domini, destructori tui, iustitiam, quam possides, noster benignissimus Dominus tanquam pannum albissimum tibi dedit, et tu eam stillare non cessas sanguine menstruoso. Sed o vesania plene, utinam saltem frontem mulieris haberes meretricis! Quaeso, quae sit meretrix sic corrupta, quae de menstruo glorietur? immo, quam velis invenias meretricem, quae de hoc non intime confundatur? nec etiam hoc audet sponsa suo amantissimo revelare. Quid ergo, o stultitia, in malitia gloriaris? Si tantum semel in mense ad modum mulieris deficeres, haberes forsan causam aliquam gloriandi? Sed erubsesce et dole, quia continuus est fluxus tuus. Si ergo est a te tantum malum et a Deo tantum bonum, non in te, sed in Domino glorieris et de tua turpitudine coram divinae Majestatis oculis continue erubescas, sicut deficere non desistis.” On menstruation in medieval thought, see Wood, “Doctor’s Dilemma,” and McCracken, Curse of Eve. 18. On other omissions in the Middle English translation, the Prickynge of Love, see chapter 6. 19. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, pp. 70–71 (LT, I.i., pp. 633–34): “Nam per meditationem commorans in Christi tormentis”; “Sed, etsi hoc modo non possum facere corpore, saltem hoc volo facere corde.” 20. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, pp. 110–11 (LT, II.vi, p. 669): “sufficienter punitus . . . quia non vult, ut pro eadem injuria bis passio inferatur.” 21. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, p. 114; LT, II. vi, p. 670.

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about the human mind than the body even in its historical occurrence. He writes, “After Jesus was sacrificed on the cross for us, he cast out every vice from our forebears’ minds not through a change in location, but through the enlightenment of our minds.”22 The passion continues to effect mental enlightenment for one who meditates on it. In other words, meditative witnessing of the passion promises substantially the same benefits as direct witnessing. In his Vita Christi, the fourteenth-century Carthusian Ludolph of Saxony at first suggests that the presentness of gospel meditation is a fiction, but he eventually makes it clear that Christ’s life actually is present to the meditant. In this anomalous case, imagination approximates reality. Ludolph’s weighty Vita Christi dates to the 1350s and enjoyed immediate success in his own lifetime, although it found far greater favor on the continent than in England during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, it survives in Middle En­ glish translation, and its own dependence on the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulus amoris, and Suso’s writings place it squarely in the tradition of gospel meditations that this book explores.23 So heavy is its dependence on prior works, usually unattributed, that one critic describes it as a “mosaic,”24 but it manages to articulate its own thoughts about the genre to which it contributes. Borrowing from the prologue to the Meditationes vitae Christi, Ludolph tells his meditant to conduct himself as though he were present to Christ’s actions and words, adding, “And although many of these deeds are described in the past tense, you should meditate on them all as though (tanquam) they were done in the present.”25 Here, it is up to the meditant to translate past into present, as though when Ludolph tells the meditant that it is of utmost importance that “you think yourself present with your thought, as though you were present at that time when the passion occurred,” the meditant must simply pretend that fiction is real.26 However, 22. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.vii, p. 646: “postquam pro nobis in cruce immolatus est, in mentes nostras omni malitia antiquatas misit non per loci mutationem, sed per mentium nostrarum irradiationes.” 23. On the Vita in Middle English, see Salter, “Ludolph of Saxony and His English Translators.” 24. See Bodenstedt’s discussion of the sources of the text in Ludolphus the Carthusian: Vita Christi. Introductory Volume, 24–52. 25. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Christi, pro., 1:4: “Et ideo quamvis multa ex his tanquam in praeterito facta narrantur, tu tamen omnia tanquam in praesenti fierent, mediteris.” Bodenstedt discovered that the Vita borrows from sixty chapters of the MVC and estimates that the MVC comprises five percent of the Vita (Ludolphus the Carthusian: Vita Christi. Introductory Volume, 30–31). She also makes note of some of the existing scholarship relating the two texts (ibid., 25n8). 26. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Christi, II.58, 4:599: “Necessarium enim erit, ut aliquando ita co­ gites te praesentem cogitatione tua, ac si tunc temporis. Ibi praesens fuisses quando passus fuit.”

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Ludolph crucially adds, “The Lord will be present to you in spirit as he is thought to be present by you.”27 If spiritual presence perfectly corresponds with actual presence, then meditation entails no lack, and a devotional program based on it suffers no restrictions. Ludolph’s instruction that the meditant think himself present in gospel scenes has many parallels in the genre. It serves, much as Suso’s targeted transition into the present tense (also a common technique in gospel meditations), to underscore the omnipresence of Christ’s life and passion. The meditant does not manufacture scenes from Christ’s life but inhabits them. For Ludolph, meditation not only reveals the eternal presentness of Christ’s historical life but even makes foreign lands in which Christ lived inhabitable by the meditant. Meditation, in other words, traverses both time and space when they relate to Christ. In a striking passage, Ludolph bemoans pagan possession of the holy land and calls for a new crusade, but even as he acknowledges the special importance of the places in which Jesus lived, he allows meditation alone to provide salutary experience of them. Meditation is the best way to possess the holy land now, and to this end, James will describe to the meditant the places in which particular episodes of Christ’s life occurred: It is of great benefit to a man when he hears the Bible read and that this or that deed was done in a certain place to know the deed done and the place in which it occurred. It is delightful to aspire to the holy land, which all the faithful of Christ do not cease day and night to pursue, and which land, inhabited by that good Jesus and enlightened by his word and deed, Jesus then consecrated with his blood. But it is more delightful to see that land with bodily eyes and to ponder with the understanding of the mind how in certain places in that land the Lord worked for our well-being. Who is equal to saying how many of the devout, running through each of these places, kiss the land in an ardent spirit and embrace the places in which they have heard that Jesus either stood or did something? Or how they now strike their chest, now emitting tears, cries, and sighs, and through the bodily gestures and signs of devotion that they show externally, and no doubt possess internally, often move even Saracens to tears? What shall I say of the patriarchs Jacob, Joseph, and their brothers who, because they were not able to abide in that land while living, chose to be buried there in death? Why say more? The inaction 27. Ibid.: “Ita enim et ipse Dominus in spiritu tibi praesens erit, sicut a te cogitabitur praesens esse.”

Exercising Imagination / 153 of Christians of our time—who, having so many examples, are slow to rip the holy land from the hand of his enemies, the land which Jesus Christ consecrated with his blood—must be lamented. Have this as a general rule, that whenever you don’t find detailed meditations in what follows, it is enough for you to place before the eyes of your mind the thing done or said by our Lord Jesus, and that you converse with him, and make yourself familiar to him.28

As defenses of mental imagining go, this is a strange one. Ludolph insists on the holiness of the places that Jesus visited, but uses this paean to physical place to defend a practice of meditating that would seem to have no access to it. Ludolph, nonetheless, explains that both physical seeing and mental imagining are superior to simple aspirations to the holy land, and by aligning imagining with seeing, he gives meditation its purchase on place. Meditation is how the holy land is available to Christians in his lifetime. It is certainly true that he believes Christians need to rise up and recover that land so that it might be seen with bodily eyes, but he still offers meditation as a sort of pilgrimage. After building up the intensity of the passage, Ludolph finally returns to meditation, making meditation not just the culmination of the passage but, apparently, of the crusading enterprise for which it calls. Ludolph’s transitionless movement from crusading rhetoric to meditational instruction thus invests meditation itself with something of the heroism of crusading, as well as some of its power. The final impression that Ludolph gives is that meditation is made to connect the meditant to the events and places of Christ’s life, which are themselves made to be available to him. 28. Ibid., pro., 1:4–5: “multum valet homini cum audit Evangelium legi, hoc vel hoc factum tali loco gestum, cum rem gestam scit et loci situm. Ad terram enim sanctam, quam universae Christi Ecclesiae nocte dieque sociare non desinunt, quam bonus ille Jesus inhabitando, et verbo vel doctrina illuminando, illuminatam suo sacratissimo sanguine consecravit, delectabile est aspirare: sed delectabilius eam oculis corporis intueri, et mentis intellectu revolvere, quomodo in locis singulis, in ea nostram salutem Dominus operatus sit. Quis enim enarrare sufficit, quot devoti discurrentes per loca singula, in spiritu vehementi osculantur terram, amplectuntur loca in quibus dulcem Jesum, vel stetisse, vel aliquid egisse audierunt? Nunc tundunt pectus, nunc fletus, nunc gemitus, nunc suspiria emittentes, gestu corporis et devotionis quam foris osten­ dunt, et absque dubio intus habent, in lacrymas provocant, plerumque etiam Saracenos? Quid dicam de Patriarchis Jacob, Joseph, et fratribus ejus, qui quia vivi in terra illa esse non potuerunt, elegerunt in ea mortui sepulturam? Quid plura? tarditas ingemiscenda est Christianorum nostri temporis, qui tot exempla habentes, tardi sunt de manibus inimicorum eruere terram, quam consecravit sanguine suo Jesus Christus. Et nota pro regula generali, quod ubicumque in sequentibus meditationes singulares non inveneris, sufficit tibi quod rem per Dominum Jesum dictam vel gestam, ante mentis oculos ponas, et cum eo converseris, ac familiaris ei fias.”

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From Pain to Glory through Meditation It is no big leap from the belief that an individual living at any given time can meditate on Christ to the conclusion that he should, but the movement is no less significant for that. In the previous chapter, I argued that meditation as Bonaventure conceived of it fulfilled the long-standing imperative to suffer with Christ in order to share his glory. The author of the MVC directly addresses the Pauline prescription to suffer with Christ, claiming for his meditations the ability to satisfy it and even suggesting that Paul intended for individuals to suffer precisely through meditation. The author accordingly tells the meditant, “A person who wishes to glory in the passion and cross of the Lord (Gal. 6:4) should persevere in earnest meditation on it.”29 Meditation simply is the way that one meets Paul’s requirement to suffer along with Christ, and it is also the way that one reaps the rewards for such suffering. Toward the end of the text, the author explains that anyone who meditates on Christ’s life according to a weekly schedule, devoting Friday and Saturday to meditation on the passion, will enjoy on every Sunday an Easter celebration with Jesus. He promises here nothing less than direct access to Christ, who will appear to the dutiful meditant in the same way that he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection. Referring to Christ’s post-resurrection appearances, the author writes, “I think that if you knew how to share in his sufferings . . . you would realize an Easter in each and every one of these appearances. It could happen for you on any day, if you would prepare yourself for it with an uncompromised mind: with meditations on the Lord’s passion every Friday and Saturday. For it is in that sense especially (maxime) that Paul says, ‘If we become associates of his sufferings, we shall be [consoled]’ (2 Cor. 1:9).”30 Meditation enables the meditant to share Christ’s suffering, and Christ appears to her as a result. The author suggests that Christ’s presence is the reward that Paul had promised. It is worth emphasizing that the meditant enjoys the fruits of her imagined suffering even in her mortal life. Such meditation does not confine itself to Christ in his suffering humanity. Meditation thus conceived has an unquestionable prestige, but more important for this book’s purposes is the fact that it does 29. MVC, lxxiv, CCCM 153:252: “Qui ergo in passione Domini et cruce gloriari desiderat sedula meditacione debet in ipsa persistere.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 236. 30. MVC, xci, CCCM 153:315: “Credo quod si in passione compati scires . . . in qualibet vice sentires Pascha. Et qualibet die dicatur contingere posset si mente integra diebus Veneris et Sabbati te cum passione Domini prepares maxime dicente apostolo: Si fuerimus socii passionem erimus, etc.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 295.

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precisely what imagination in Bonaventure’s interpretation makes the mind capable of doing, namely, travel a mental pathway from Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Nor is the MVC the only text to assign meditation this particular duty. James of Milan also allows meditation on the life of Christ to satisfy the biblical prerequisite for spiritual joy in this life and salvation in the next. On the subject of meditation’s ability to generate the requisite suffering with Christ, James writes, “You should strive, insofar as you can, to suffer along with the passion of Christ and carry it in your heart with you wherever you go. Unless we learn to suffer with him, we will not be able to take delight with him. If you meditate well on his passion and enter far into his side, you will soon arrive at his heart.”31 Passion meditation provides the meditant with such profound closeness to Christ that he feels Christ’s torment and earns its rewards. Here, to meditate on Christ’s passion simply is to suffer with him, to unite in some sense with him, and thus to reach glory through him. Like the author of the MVC, James literalizes the biblical injunction to suffer with Christ. Suffering entails not the general tribulations of life but specific engagement with Christ’s suffering, and meditation has the power to produce it. James registers the familiarity of that injunction by switching temporarily to the first person plural—“Unless we learn to suffer with him, we will not be able to rejoice with him”—as though quoting a well-known dictum.32 He offers a distinctive interpretation of it by casting meditation as an entering into Christ’s wounds and a journey toward his heart. To approach the heart through meditation is to feel compassion for Christ, and the two actions represent each other so perfectly for James that they simply collapse. Symbol and referent cannot be distinguished here; the feeling of compassion is a physical movement toward Christ’s own heart, which is also compassion’s source. James is well aware of the etymology of compatior and insists that there is no arriving at compassion without sharing, albeit mentally, the passion. With characteristic zeal, James is clear that one who expects the benefits of the passion without suffering through compassion is the worst kind of ingrate. It is worth thinking at greater length about James’s conviction that passion meditation constitutes an entrance into Christ’s wounds, an idea elaborated in the long text when the author describes the second of seven stages 31. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 4, p. 20 (LT, III.i, p. 677): “ut nitaris, quantum potes, Christi compati passioni et ubique eam tecum circumferre in corde. Nisi ei compatiendo noverimus pati secum, secum non poterimus iucundari. Si enim bene passionem suam fueris meditatus et multum intraveris latus eius, cito venies ad cor eius.” 32. James’s words here are close to Rom. 8:17: “si tamen compatimur ut et conglorificemur.”

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of ascent into contemplation as passion meditation. One who meditates intently on the passion becomes “inebriated with Christ crucified.”33 He “feels his way into his wounded Spouse and takes him in hand, and his heart is completely wounded. He applies his heart to the wounded spouse . . . and wound is joined to wound.”34 That meditation provides entrance into these wounds is a familiar notion, as we saw in the previous chapter’s discussion of Bonaventure’s Vitis mystica. Before Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux had interpreted the clefts in the rock of Song of Songs 2:14 as Christ’s wounds that provide shelter for the devout, an interpretation he expressly adopts from Gregory the Great.35 Bernard writes of the bride, “All her affections are preoccupied with the wounds of Christ; she abides in them by constant meditation.”36 He counsels his audience to do the same. For James, the wounds extend all the way to the divinity of Christ. The soul, wounded by meditation on the wounds, attaches itself to Christ’s innermost being. As James explains, it is not fitting for Christ to be wounded again, meaning that Christ’s wounds should instead be renewed in the meditant.37 The fact that meditation inflicts wounds in James’s theology shows clearly how powerful he considers such meditation to be. James’s wounds are both more accessible and easier to navigate than Bernard’s, and this points to another crucial feature of James’s theology, which is its inclusiveness, or “dem­ ocratic universality,” as Bernard McGinn puts it.38 Whereas revelations might befall any good Christian, regardless of station, meditation makes intimacy with Christ much more a matter of personal effort. Imaginative meditation provides a pathway to the inner depths of Christ that is powerful not least because it is self-consciously accessible. Through his discussion of Christ’s wounds, James shows what spiritual heights meditation can achieve when it is pursued deliberately and even arduously. He directs the meditant, “Enter therefore through the open wounds

33. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.vii, p. 643: “Inebriat se Christi cruore.” 34. Ibid., p. 644: “Palpat et tractat Sponsum suum vulneratum, et totum vulneratur cor ejus. Applicat cor suum vulneribus Sponsi . . . et vulnus vulneri copulatur.” 35. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, LXI.i.3, Opera omnia 2:149. 36. Ibid., LXI.iii.7, Opera omnia 2:152: “in Christi vulneribus tota devotione versetur, et iugi meditatione demoretur in illis.” Trans. Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 3:146. 37. See James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 6, p. 29 (LT, III.xii, p. 688): “Accede ergo ad Christum et eum suppliciter depreceris, ut, ex quo ipsum non decet denuo vulnerari, dignetur in tuo sanguine sua vulnera renovare.” 38. McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 118.

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and with your thought you will obtain delights,”39 giving the meditant so immersed access to fruit from the tree of life, or Christ. James pauses to praise the wounds of Christ in a passage that merits extended quotation: O most beloved wounds of my Lord Jesus Christ! For when I entered into them somehow with eyes open, those eyes were filled with blood, so that, able to see nothing else, I began to proceed, reaching with my hands until I came to the inmost substance of his charity, and once embraced on all sides, I could not turn back. And for that reason I live there, and with what food he is fed, I am fed, and I am intoxicated with his drink. I abound there with such delights that I cannot describe them to you. He who first entered into a virginal womb on account of sins now deigns to carry wretched me inside him. But I fear greatly lest the time for birth arrive, and I be expelled from these delights that I enjoy. But certainly, even if he births me, he will have to give me milk from his breasts as a mother, wash me with his hands, carry me with his arms, console me with his kisses, and hold me in his lap. I know what I will do. Even if he gives birth to me, I know his wounds are always open, and through them I will enter into his womb, and repeat this until I am joined to him inseparably.40

Throughout the Stimulus, James maps out a trajectory for meditation. It generates suffering and wound-entering, which in turn generate compassion for and conformity to Christ. To suffer with Christ is to be inside his wounds, and to have compassion for him is to conform to him. There is no better way to be with Christ than to suffer with him.41 The most striking feature 39. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, p. 74 (LT, I.i., p. 634): ”Intra ergo per vulnerum aperturam, et cum cognitione delicias obtinebis.” 40. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, pp. 71–72 (LT, I.i., p. 634): “O amantissima vulnera Domini mei Iesu Christi! Nam, cum ea quadam vice oculis subintrarem apertis, ipsi oculi sanguine sunt repleti, sicque nihil aliud videns coepi ingredi manu palpans, donec perveni ad intima viscera caritatis suae, quibus undique circumplexus reverti nequivi. Ideoque ibi inhabito et, quibus vescitur, cibis vescor, ac ibi inebrior suo potu; ibi tanta abundo dulcedine, ut tibi non valeam enarrare. Et qui prius pro peccatoribus fuerat in utero virginali, nunc dignatur me miserum inter sua viscera comportare. Sed multum timeo, ne veniat partus eius, et ab illis deliciis excidam, quibus fruor. Certe, et si me pepererit, debebit me sicut mater suis lactare uberibus, lavare manibus, portare brachiis, consolari oculiis et fovere gremiis. Aut certe scio, quid faciam; quantumcumque me pariat, scio, quod semper sua vulnera sunt aperta, et per ea in eius uterum iterum introibo, et hoc toties replicabo, quousque ero sibi inseparabiliter conglobatus.” Bryan analyzes the Prickynge of Love’s version of this passage (Looking Inward, 131–33). 41. James allows that intimacy or even union with Christ can also result from moral imitation. Charitable behavior thus makes one Christ-like and “deifies” the heart (the clearest expression

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of the passage is surely the cyclical birthing of James. Representing the periodic separation from Christ that every mystic bemoans, this birthing also indicates that, as Christ can enclose the soul in a spiritual haven, so he can just as easily expel it back into the world. Although the soul thus expelled remains in Christ’s care, such maternal pampering by Christ is far inferior to the nearly heavenly delights that the soul experiences within Christ’s womb. We tend to associate gospel meditations with the lesser relationship that James here describes, with imagined interactions with Christ in his maternal aspect, but by placing James within Christ’s womb, the passage clearly shows that meditation is capable of greater heights. At the same time, the passage underscores the difficulties of meditation and its deliberateness as James vows constantly to work his way back into the womb. Meditation is a matter of self-conscious effort, of “labor cordis” as James puts it. It is also, James insists, a methodical, systematic enterprise. Meditation requires the mind to use all of its resources to join itself to Christ at the level of his flesh and then advance to his heart. Bernard had associated the outer clefts in the rock, or wounds of Christ, with his humanity and the inner recesses with his divinity.42 James characterizes them similarly, although he allows the meditant a more direct path from the former to the latter than Bernard does. For James, the meditant strives laboriously to proceed from Christ’s flesh to his heart. The fact that this is the same journey imagination facilitates within the human act of knowing shows why imagination grounds these meditations. The labor of meditation is the work of imagination. Aside from providing another example of the “Jesus as mother” motif analyzed so capably by a variety of scholars, the passage also demonstrates vividly what James receives from his immersion into Christ’s wounds, namely, union.43 Short-lived and partial now, such union will, James is certain, result in permanent union, elsewhere called simply salvation. This union is expressed through a slippage James employs between vulnus and vulva, one noted by various scholars, though it is hardly original to James.44 The wound into which James enters doubles as a vagina that leads James into Christ’s womb. The depth of Christ’s wounds, their extension to the of this idea is in the long text, II.vii, p. 671). Nonetheless, conformity through passion meditation remains the most powerful tool in the text. 42. See Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, sermons LXI–LXII. 43. The key study is Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 110–69. See also Newman, God and the Goddesses, 222–34. 44. See Riehle, Middle English Mystics, 46; Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” 189– 92; and Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 59.

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very core of Christ’s being, could be no more clearly expressed. James highlights the wounds’ special power when he writes, “If you strive to enter Christ through these narrow openings, not only your soul but also your body will find there repose and marvelous sweetness, and what is carnal and tends toward carnal things will indeed be made spiritual through entrance into those wounds.”45 The wounds themselves translate the carnal into the spiritual, as is demonstrated by the effacing of James’s own body, which is replaced by Christ’s more than carnal flesh. Christ’s body has a unique ability to purify and elevate any carnal substance that enters into it, and James depends on it to translate matter into spirit. The second chapter showed that the mind, when it knows, journeys to and through Christ. For James, the meditant similarly progresses from meditation to contemplation literally within Christ. Although James describes Christ’s suffering both vividly and prolongedly, it is clearly a mistake to think that meditation stops with that suffering. Christ’s humanity is a gateway to his divinity, and only when the meditant reaches Christ’s heart does he reach his goal. I mentioned above that compassion is integral to James’s theology, which is hardly surprising in itself, but what is worthy of note is compassion’s role in this and other meditations. Compassion is the closest that the meditant can come to Christ’s suffering, and as such it constitutes the meditant’s gift to Christ, his own inferior but nonetheless significant effort at compensation. Whereas physical suffering was Christ’s burden, compassion is the meditant’s. The author of the MVC accordingly writes of Christ’s suffering before the crucifixion that it is “quite productive of the compassion that results in your own suffering with him.”46 Of course, one can suffer with Christ in more quotidian ways, as when one suffers humiliation or various sorts of mistreatment, but no suffering seems to accomplish quite as much as passion-oriented suffering, or compassion. It not only serves as the individual’s always lesser enactment of Christ’s suffering, but it connects the individual so profoundly to that suffering that the soul in question attaches itself to Christ. Such attachment carries two rewards. The first is the ability to cross over from suffering to exultation through Christ, and the second, obviously related, is the goodwill that one earns from Mary and the Father. As Suso’s Wisdom tells the Disciple, “Sprinkled with the blood of compassion, 45. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 14, p. 73 (LT, I.i, p. 634): “si in ipsum per haec angusta foramina intrare contenderis, non solum anima, sed et ibi quietem ac mirabilem dulcedinem inveniet corpus tuum, et quod carnale est et ad carnalia tendit, ex illo vulnerum introitu fiet adeo spirituale.” 46. MVC, lxxvii, CCCM 153:270: “multum ad compassionem faciencia, quinimmo passionem inferencia.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 251.

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you will make yourself like to me and lovable.”47 The passion pulls on Mary’s and the Father’s heartstrings as it should on humans’. Compassion for it is doubly meritorious, for it reveals both that one is devoted to the passion and that one is devoted to it in the right way. James of Milan does not just aspire to reach Christ’s heart, however, but to join himself to Christ, to conform to him, so that he can also share in Christ’s good fortune. Thus attached to God, the soul cannot be denied salvation, for as James explains, God would then have to deny himself, which is at the least illogical. Because “I know that ‘God cannot deny himself ’” (2 Tim. 2:13), James explains, “I will therefore hug him with the deepest reaches of my mind, and holding him tightly . . . I will not release him. . . . I am permitted forcibly to set myself upon him in this way, because he himself commends those who ‘seize heaven by force’” (Mt. 11:12).48 The apparently odd contrast between mental action and physical action, as James hugs Jesus with his mind, is familiar from other medieval texts, notably the Book of Margery Kempe. In one scene, God the Father takes Margery “be [by] þe hand in hir sowle,” an action that might seem to confuse the boundary between matter and spirit.49 However, Margery, like James, instead insists on the reality of mental action, its ability to place the meditant in contact with Christ’s physical body. His physicality, apparently, is best accessed mentally. With the confidence so characteristic of medieval Christian literature, James also stakes his claim on salvation and suggests his own awareness of the enormous powers he grants himself by warning the meditant not to ponder predestination overmuch. He devotes an entire chapter to warning against excessive curiosity about salvation, a warning made necessary only by James’s extreme confidence in the meditant’s ability to latch on to God. James’s meditant is present to Christ with a vengeance, so much so that his immersion into Christ’s wounds starts to smack of assault. Continuing his earlier line of reasoning, James explains that he will climb into Christ’s wounds because God could not properly expel him from that position.50 47. Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.4, p. 403: “quodam modo sanguine compassionis respersus, mihi similis amabilisque efficieris.” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 99. 48. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 3, p. 17 (LT, III.xiii, p. 689): “scio, quod se ipsum negare non potest. Eum ergo totis mentis visceribus amplexabor et ipsum stringens fortiter . . . non dimittam . . . Licitum est enim mihi sibi inferre violentiam in hac parte, cum ipse commendet illos, qui caelorum regnum rapiunt violenter.” 49. Book of Margery Kempe, xxxv, p. 87. 50. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 3, p. 17 (LT, III. xiii, p. 689): “exire compellere non decebit.” Although Fulton does not mention the Stimulus, passages like this support her argument that the affective intensity of late-medieval passion meditations was motivated in part

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Here passion meditation explicitly aims at securing salvation, a feat James accomplishes by securing himself so fully to Christ through meditation that Christ cannot shake him. Nor does he want to. Addressing God, James explains that, through the incarnation, “you wanted to unite human nature to yourself inseparably.”51 The long text looks forward to a time when this union will be complete, when humans will be reunited with God. The author writes that God wants the soul to ascend to him, just as God wants to join himself to “our heart.” “You are drunk with our love, and we with yours,” James tells God.52 “Therefore the weight of love powerfully joins you to us and us to you” until, eventually, the soul and God will join in a “mutual embrace.”53 The love that the soul expresses through James’s arduous passion meditation prepares the soul for salvation in a concrete, specific way. The union between soul and God is no mere mental fiction. Not only suffering with Christ in order to glory with him, the compassionate soul inhabits Christ so firmly that Christ himself seems unable to evict him. Further, in the vivid imagery of the text, the soul that meditates on the passion and enters Christ’s wounds bedecks itself with blood, and thus clothed, it cannot help but appeal to the Father and win entrance into his kingdom: “so dressed in purple you will be able to enter the palace of the king.”54 In the same way that Mary, according to Ludolph of Saxony, cannot but be positively disposed toward the meditant who carries her son by means of meditation, so the Father cannot deny one who has fully immersed himself in his son’s suffering. James has achieved such closeness with Christ through his meditations that the two are nearly inextricable. He could hardly provide stronger testament to those meditations’ power.

Meditation as Everyman’s Contemplation For James, passion meditation generates contemplation, a belief that the long text defends directly not just by schematizing “the sevenfold ascent of contemplation in the passion according to the sevenfold grace of the Holy by post-millennial fears of divine judgment (From Judgment to Passion, 60–141). Especially supportive of her argument is James’s discussion in ST, c. 7 (LT, II.iv), of how the soul should judge itself in this world in order to increase its chances of favorable judgment in the next. 51. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 17, p. 98 (LT II.ii, p. 664): “humanam naturam tibi unire inseparabiliter voluisti.” 52. Stimulus amoris, LT, III.xvii, p. 697: “Et inebriatus es nostri, et nos tui amore.” 53. Ibid.: “Te ergo ad nos, et nos ad te cum impetu jungit pondus amoris . . . mutuus fit amplexus.” 54. James of Milan, Stimulus amoris, ST, c. 6, p. 29 (LT III.xii, p. 688): “sic indutus purpura poteris Regis introire palatium.” The long text repeats this idea at I.vii, p. 650.

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Spirit” (the title of part 1, chapter 7) but also by affirming that the passion “fosters mutual love, increases internal devotion, and elevates one toward the heights of contemplation.”55 In fact, James hardly comments on the movement from meditation to contemplation, so fluid is it. He proceeds from the flesh side of Christ’s wounds to their inner reaches without much fanfare. In a much more elaborate discussion of the topic, the author of the MVC not only characterizes gospel meditation as contemplation proper, but insists that no higher level of contemplation can be reached without it. The author’s precise location of gospel meditation in his self-labeled “tract of contemplation,” which occupies about a third of the text, is fraught. It relies on Bernard of Clairvaux for its categories but departs from Bernard to assign a higher value to meditation. The author thus distinguishes meditation from contemplation even as he figures gospel meditation as the first of three levels of contemplation, the second being contemplation of the heavenly court, and the third contemplation of God’s majesty.56 The tension reflects the author’s eagerness to bend Bernard to his purposes and validate meditation by linking it as firmly as possible to (other sorts of) contemplation. The proximity between gospel meditation and contemplation imagined in the Stimulus amoris and the MVC reflects their high estimation of such meditation and, perhaps more importantly, their project to make meditation into an accessible pathway to contemplation. One unmistakable value of meditation thus presented is that anyone—given sufficient grace from God and the proper, charitable disposition—can do it. Its foundation in imagination puts the devotional activity within reach of any thinking human being possessed of his or her normal natural faculties. As striking as the intimate kinship these authors establish between meditation and contemplation is the fact that both the Stimulus and MVC refuse to permit gospel meditation to give way to traditionally higher levels of contemplation. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s theology, meditation serves a preparatory role and there is no compelling reason to return to it once the individual has proceeded beyond it. James, on the other hand, many times affirms, with characteristic fervor, that passion meditation is his only oc55. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.xv, p. 659: “Ipsa fovet mutuam dilectionem, auget internam devotionem, elevat ad supernam contemplationem.” 56. At the end of c. li, the author writes, “ideo ista de humanitate Christi reccius forte et proprius meditacio quam contemplacio nominari debet” (MVC, CCCM 153:190). Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 177: “that contemplation of the humanity of Christ perhaps more correctly and properly ought to be called meditation, rather than contemplation.” He nonetheless continues to refer to it as contemplation.

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cupation and delight and that the passion is to be ruminated upon daily. In the MVC, the author is equally convinced of the benefits of continued passion meditation, although he might not at first appear to be. Discussing the first level of contemplation, that of Christ’s humanity, he provides the traditional defense of gospel meditation: “You must begin with this kind if you wish to ascend to the higher kinds; otherwise, you could not so much rise to the others as be in awe of them. See, therefore, how necessary the teaching of this little book is for you.”57 Meditation appears to be a beginners’ exercise, albeit a crucial one. Its value seems to derive above all from its results. The author thus characterizes meditation as the lower rungs of a “ladder” (scalam) that begins with meditation on Christ “in carne” and proceeds to contemplation of him “in spiritu.”58 The author writes, Let your meditating on this earthly life of Christ be your one and only purpose, your recreation, your sustenance, and your lasting pursuit. For by these methods you will not only be marching toward the good results [i.e., contemplation] that I mentioned, and marching up the ladder to your heavenly home and the vision of his majesty, but you will also have unending and everlasting consolation. For those who strive for higher contemplation ought not give up on this kind of meditation, wherever or whenever it occurs. Otherwise, they might appear to be despising such meditation as quite worthless. This would be the mark of great pride.59

By this reasoning, the meditant needs to keep meditating on Christ’s life simply to show that she is not above it. Its benefit resides in the meditant’s never-ending affirmation of its benefit, which is hardly a strong defense of the practice. Although clear that the value of meditating must be believed in, the author leaves that value unarticulated. The author, however, offers a more substantial defense in his advice that the meditant complete a full cycle of meditations every week. As we saw 57. MVC, 1, CCCM 153:185–86: “Et ideo ab hac tibi incipiendum est si vis ascendere ad maiora; alias non tam ascendere quam revereri posses. Vide igitur quam necessaria tibi sit huius libelli doctrina.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 172. 58. MVC, cvii, CCCM 153:348. 59. MVC, cvii, CCCM 153:349: “Hec ergo meditari sit tota et una intencio tuo, requies tua, cibus tuus et studium tuum. Nam ex his non solum predicta consequeris bona, nec solum eciam tibi gradus ad celestis patrie et ad majestatis contemplaciones, sed eciam erit continua et perpetua consolatio tua. Non enim qui ad majorem contemplacionem ascendunt hanc dimittere debent pro loco et tempore. Alioquin viderentur hanc quasi vilem contemnere, quod esset magne superbie.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 330.

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above, the author promises the meditant the reward of Christ’s presence on every Sunday if she meditates on his life during the week and on his passion every Friday and Saturday. While she would certainly prefer to have nothing but Sundays, the meditant has to work her way back into Christ’s presence continually through meditation. In the way that James must keep crawling back into Christ’s womb, only to be expelled again, so the meditant here must keeping striving for presence that will quickly be taken from her. In both cases, meditation on Christ’s life is work, its cessation effortless. James labors to get into the womb, after all, not to get out. Largely a matter of individual effort, meditation prepares the individual to enter into Christ’s presence by imagining herself already within his range. Meditation takes work, but work that nearly any properly disposed individual can perform. The theology of both the MVC and Stimulus amoris once again implies that the capacity for meditation is innate to the mind and, therefore, that meditation is what the mind is supposed to do. Given that both texts share a project to make contemplation accessible, it is no surprise that both explicitly call on everyone to meditate on Christ’s life, regardless of station. Although some later authors of gospel meditations associate them with devotion to Christ’s humanity and lay piety, as we will see in chapter 6, gospel meditations were lay exercises neither in their inception nor in their early development. Devotion to Christ’s humanity did not at all preclude other forms of devotion that we typically label more sophisticated, but provided access to them. The Stimulus actively refutes the belief that medieval writers conceived of passion meditation as simply a beginner’s exercise, addressing the matter most clearly in the long text. Explaining that one must ascend the cross with both Christ and Mary, the author explains, Let us ascend the palm tree with them and grasp its fruit, for the heart of the Virgin hangs on the tree with her son. Let nobody be exempt, regardless of his station, because there is nobody who will not find on this tree the most sweet fruit and most fulfilling sustenance. For if you are a sinner, consider that most bitter and ignominious passion in order to hate sin and tremble, because he is dead for our sins. If you are a beginner and penitent, consider that passion as a model of penitence and in order to have satisfaction. If you are advanced, consider that passion in order to explore and ponder its effects, in which man progresses very much. If you are perfect, consider that passion in order to have profound compassion for Christ and his mother and to transform yourself completely into that passion. If you are consummate in righteousness, consider that passion in order to marvel at the love and honor of God that he

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The Stimulus returns to this topic often, eager to demonstrate that passion meditation is not, in fact, an occupation for the religious novice quickly to be surpassed. Hence, Ludolph of Saxony, addressing meditation on Christ’s life and building on an image from Is. 12:3, writes, “Anyone, whether beginner or novice, experienced or advanced, can have this life, and in it find a good nest for himself, where turtledoves repose and shield the chicks of their pure love, each according to his capacity.”61 Even here, in a text written in the second half of the fourteenth century, we find an author insistent that meditation on Christ’s life befits everyone. The wide audience that meditations here claim for themselves reflects the breadth of their purpose. They conceive of themselves as lay neither in audience nor content. Henry Suso makes the point: “The frequent recollection of this Passion makes any dullard most learned, and it turns amateurs and simpletons into teachers.”62 The purpose of meditation is to elevate its practitioner. The MVC uses Francis to show what gospel meditation can achieve. The author expresses his conviction about the more than trivial value of gospel meditations even as the text begins, where he writes that ruminating over the episodes of Christ’s life is “more necessary and beneficial than all the

60. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.xv, p. 661: “Ascendamus cum eis in palmam, et apprehendamus fructum ejus: nam in ea cor Virginis cum Filio pendet. Nullus se excuset, in quocumque sit statu, quia nullus est, qui non inveniat in hac arbore suavissimum fructum, et sufficientissimum nutrimentum. Nam si peccator es, illam acerbissimam, et ignominiosam passionem considera ad detestandum peccatum, et horrendum, quia ipse pro peccatis nostris mortuus est. Si incipiens et poenitens es, considera illam passionem ad exemplum poenitentiae, et satisfactionem habendam. Si es proficiens, considera illam passionem ad ejus effectus rimandum et ruminandum: in quo multum proficit homo. Si es perfectus, considera illam passionem ad Christo et Matri ejus intime compatiendum, et totum te in illam passionem transformandum. Si tu es in justitia consummatus, considera illam passionem ad Dei dilectionem et dignationem erga nos admirandum. Nullus ergo se excuset, quin hic inveniat suum pabulum, quin hic inveniat portum, domicilium, et centrum suum.” 61. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Christi, pro., 1:4: “Hanc quicumque incipientes et parvuli, quicumque proficientes et perfecti possunt habere, et in ea invenire bonum nidum sibi, ubi tanquam turtures reponant, et abscondant casti amoris pullos, quisque pro sua capacitate.” William of St. Thierry discusses the same passage, also with the purpose of distinguishing between novices and the spiritually proficient, though to different effect, in Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 187–94. 62. Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.14, p. 494: “Frequens passionis huius memoria indoctum quemque reddit doctissimum, et imperitos ac idiotas facit proficere in magistros.” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 202. Building on Suso, the fifteenth-century Speculum devotorum makes a similar claim, as noted by Gillespie, “Strange Images of Death,” 112.

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schools of spiritual practice, and one that can lead to a higher state.”63 Not only designating gospel meditation as one such school, the author gives it top billing. The value of this particular spiritual exercise consists partially in the familiar schooling in virtues over which all such meditations linger. Pondering Christ’s life teaches one to emulate the virtues that he possessed and to flee the vices that he condemned, and so to follow Christ’s path to heaven in a moral sense. However, the benefits far exceed moral instruction, as the author makes clear when he writes of Francis and Clare that, “as a result of their devout meditation on his [Christ’s] life, their souls were not residing in their own bodies but in that of Christ.”64 Much like James of Milan crawling his way into Christ, Francis and Clare inhabit Christ and rise to spiritual heights through him, but they are not unique in this respect. “There have been many unlettered and simple persons who have come to know about the great and puzzling truths of God in this way,” the author adds.65 Included among them is, implicitly, the Poor Clare to whom the text is directed, for the author more than once calls attention to her “lack of erudition.”66 Francis is the model of the exalted heights to which the meditant might aspire. His stigmata, by which he was “totally transformed” into Christ, shows “to what an exalted height meditation on the life of Christ leads.”67 Francis, the ultimate model of the lay man turned religious, turns out to have made that transition, in part, through meditation on Christ’s life. The author could not recommend the practice more highly.

Meditationes vitae Christi: A Training Guide for the Imagination In Ludolph of Saxony’s call for a new crusade, discussed above, he comments on the insufficiency of written explanation and implies that it needs to be supplemented with mental imagining through meditation. At first, his attention to the incapacities of the written word alone might seem surprising, given that he is at that point introducing a written work, and a very 63. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:7: “Super omnia namque spiritualis exercicii studia hoc magis necessarium magisque proficuum credo, et quod ad celsiorem gradum producere possit.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 1. 64. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:8: “ipsorum anime non erant in ipsorum corporibus sed Christi, ex devota meditacione vite ipsius.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 2. 65. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:9: “plures fuerint illiterati et simplices, qui magna et probanda Dei propterea cognoverunt.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 3. 66. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:10, and lxxviii, CCCM 153:276: “ruditati tue.” 67. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:9: “totaliter transformatus . . . ad quam excelsum gradum meditacio vite Christi perducet.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 3.

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long one with very many written words at that. What the passage suggests, however, is that words need to be read in a lively, imaginative way in order to yield their benefit, and it is in this sense reminiscent of monastic instructions for salutary, ruminative reading.68 At one level, Ludolph’s reliance on imagination to bring the places and scenes he describes to life evokes later theories of imagination as a creative power and suggests how those theories came to develop. At another, it shows that imagination does not function effortlessly, for Ludolph’s imagination needs to be activated deliberately. His perspective on imagination recalls that of the MVC, which not only counsels the meditant to utilize imagination self-consciously but also constructs meditations with the express goal of making them imaginable. According to the MVC, imagination is a resource whose powers need to be learned, developed, and employed, a perspective on imagination that shows the MVC to be Bonaventure’s heir. It is because imagination has power as a faculty of the soul that one needs training in how best to use it, and it is because imag­ ination has special access to Christ, in both his natures, that it befits gospel meditation. The MVC pays more attention to the requisite training for imagination than Bonaventure’s works, but Bonaventure ultimately gives imagination the power that the MVC finds in it. The MVC identifies imagination’s powers and directs its reader to capitalize on them, focusing throughout on the need for the meditant to create detailed, realistic scenes in which to invest all of her mental energy. The more she caters to imagination’s capacities, the more vivid her invented scenes will be; and the more vivid they are, the more they will benefit her. The author tells her, “If you wish to profit from all this, Sister, you must place yourself in the presence of whatever is related as having been said or done by the Lord Jesus, as if you were hearing it with your own ears and seeing it with your own eyes, giving it your total mental response.”69 The author insists on this advice, referring back to it at least a dozen times in the text as “the general rule” that governs the meditant’s activity. Ludolph of Saxony imports the MVC author’s advice, along with much of his prologue, into the Vita Christi and adds, “Great sweetness appears to be had in this, and more powerful devotion, and practically the whole fruit of these meditations appears to consist in this, that everywhere and always with devotion you see Jesus in his work and conduct,” advice that he follows

68. On monastic lectio divina, see Leclercq, Love of Learning, and Stock, After Augustine. 69. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:10: “si ex his fructum sumere cupis, ita presentem te exhibeas his que per Dominum Iesum dicta et facta narrantur ac si tuis auribus audires et oculis ea videres, toto mentis affectu diligenter.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 4.

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with a long list of scenes from Christ’s life into which the meditant should imagine himself.70 Neither text directly explains why the meditant needs to make himself present to the scenes or what great benefit accrues to him as a result, but they imply that doing so fulfills the stated goals of the texts, what the MVC characterizes as Francis-like exaltation to contemplation and enlightenment. By indicating that the meditant can reach these goals only through vivid meditation, by placing himself in biblical scenes created in his own mind and interacting with the figures within them, both texts stake the success of their devotional programs on imagination. When they insist on the fullness of the meditant’s imagined presence, then, they insist that he extract from imagination all the vividness and presence that it is capable of providing. In this way, they indicate that meditation’s success depends on the full-scale application of imagination, at the height of its powers, to it. It is imagination that accordingly transforms Christ’s imagined, carnal presence into his real, spiritual presence. It is thus imagination that makes imagining Christ’s life “more necessary and beneficial than all the schools of spiritual practice, and one that can lead to a higher state.” Imagination’s vivacity, the lifelike quality that imagination can confer on objects or scenes, is a topic that has garnered considerable interest in modern philosophy and criticism, although not as it pertains to medieval literature. Nonetheless, vivacity is an abiding concern for medieval meditations like the MVC and the Vita Christi, as we have seen, and although these texts’ mechanisms for attaining it are not those of later works, they do indicate that imagination was prized in the period for its ability to bring scenes to life. Given the spiritual rewards that these earlier texts promise, we might argue that imagination enjoys its greatest power in them. As mentioned above, the MVC promises the meditant who completes a full cycle of meditations every week an Easter celebration with Jesus every Sunday. Using her imagination properly, the meditant trades Jesus’s imagined presence for his actual presence. Uniquely powerful with regard to Christ, imagination crosses the boundary between fiction and reality. The MVC, like Ludolph’s Vita Christi, shares the aspiration of later authors to heighten imagination’s capacity to bring imagined objects and activities to life in the mind. This is not to say that writers in the Middle Ages had a coherent theory of the creative imagination. They did, however, rec70. Ludolph of Saxony, Vita Christi, pro., p. 5: “in hoc videtur haberi major dulcedo, et devotio efficacior, et quasi totus fructus harum meditationum consistere, ut ubique et semper intuearis eum devote in actu suo et moribus.”

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ognize that both vivid reading and successful meditating required an active imagination. The MVC many times says as much, but scholars have tended not to focus on such passages. If we approach the text with an eye to its purposeful use of the imaginative faculty, however, we see that it has a great deal of faith in imagination’s powers. Only thanks to those powers can the author confidently affirm that the meditant has access to Christ in both his humanity and divinity, directing her at one point to turn away from his humanity and “return now to his divinity and consider that immense, eternal, incomprehensible and imperial Majesty incarnate.”71 First instructing her to direct her attention away from Christ’s divinity, the author suggests that the meditant has had access to it all along. He frets not at all about his assumption that the meditant will see Christ’s divinity in his humanity, that she will see his divinity specifically as Christ performs such mundane tasks as picking up his clothes and getting dressed. There is a line between humanity and divinity here, but it is utterly traversable. Modern literary criticism and philosophy agree with these medieval texts in locating imagination’s greatest potential for vivacity in its processing of literary rather than sensory images. In its aspect as sensory storage facility, imagination lessens the vividness of objects more often than not. To take Hume’s example, an imagined apple never has the vividness of a real apple, and so with other sensible objects. Nevertheless, as Hume noted, imagination fares much better when it confronts written images, and not just any written images, but literary ones. With specific reference to epic poetry, he writes, “ The imagination, both of reader and writer, is more enlivened, and the passions more enflamed than in history, biography, or any species of narration, which confine themselves to strict truth and reality.”72 The key variable is narrative: because imagination associates like ideas, it transfers to one literary scene the passions elicited in another. As a result, literature can derive more vividness from imagination than, to use Hume’s example, history. In a more recent study, Elaine Scarry advances her own explanation for why literature brings out the best in imagination, but she agrees that imagination’s images “do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects” in response to literature.73 The MVC likewise relies on the power of narrative to get the most out of imagination, insisting throughout that meditations follow the events of 71. MVC, lxxvii, CCCM 153:268: “Redeas post ad divinitatem et considera illam immensam, eternam et incomprehensibilem et imperatoriam Maiestatem incarnatam.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 249. 72. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 3.10, p. 20. 73. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 5.

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Christ’s life in chronological order. Narrative progress in the text doubles as spiritual progress, especially as the text culminates in the passion, resurrection, and ascension. Through her chronological meditations, the meditant grows up with Jesus, as the author makes clear when he advises her, “Become like a little girl with the little child [Jesus] and grow with him as he grows older. . . . Follow him wherever he goes and gaze upon his face.”74 Although such meditations might seem “childish,” they lead on to “greater things,” and thus the progress of the meditations parallels Jesus’s own growth.75 The meditations mature as he does. This helps to explain why the meditant cannot simply pick and choose among the events of Christ’s life. She has to travel through the events of his life consecutively if she wants to continue to journey with him as his earthly life ends. The “ladder of meditations” that the MVC provides draws on the power of narrative to propel the meditant toward contemplation of God and heaven, as the structure of the text makes clear. Even as he outlines the stages of meditation, then, the author makes meditation the entryway into contemplation of God’s majesty and of the heavenly court. The author recognizes that narrative is easiest to imagine and reveals his interest in catering to the capacities of imagination when he periodically removes from the text all content that does not facilitate imagination’s work. He expressly avoids content which is not amenable to meditation, excluding, for instance, the lessons delivered at the Sermon on the Mount, because “instructional materials of this type do not always lend themselves well to meditations.”76 Although making frequent digressions into moral instruction and other works in the middle of the text, he realizes that they detract from meditation and therefore announces when he begins the passion section that he will rarely cite references “so that you can more suitably (commodius) dwell on the passion and its preceding events.”77 Likewise, the author skips over some of Jesus’s deeds and teachings delivered in Jerusalem “so that your meditation on his passion will not be encumbered.”78 Stripping away the non-narrative components of the Bible and its exposition, the 74. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:52–53: “cum parvulo parvula et cum grandescente grandescis . . . Et sequaris eum quocumque ierit, et intuearis faciem eius semper.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 45. 75. MVC, xiii, CCCM 153:57: “puerilia . . . ad maiora.” 76. MVC, xxi, CCCM 153:101: “nec tales exposiciones bene videntur semper in meditaciones cadere.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 88. 77. MVC, lxiv, CCCM 153:226: “ut circa passionem et eius preambula ut possis commodius immorari.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 213. 78. MVC, lxx, CCCM 153:237: “ne meditacio ipsius passionis impediatur.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 222.

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author focuses the meditant’s attention on narrative action, thus implying that the meditant herself should use meditation as more than an occasion for moral instruction. Rather, she should focus on narrative action because it best engages her imagination. Moral instruction is always a goal of gospel meditations, and it is therefore easy to mistake for their final purpose, but the expendability of such content in the MVC reveals its secondary importance. The meditant’s priority here is narrative action, and the author thus suggests that imagining such action best enables the meditant to achieve the stated goals of the text. Paramount among them is meditation’s ability to unite the meditating soul to Christ. Imagining herself with him, she actually draws closer to him. When she despairs over Christ’s absence, she should “not languish mentally, but . . . diligently seek Him out through continuous engagement in holy meditations and by persisting in good works and she will find Him once again.”79 Good works are a prerequisite, but, as the author makes clear throughout, it is meditation, and specifically meditation on Christ’s deeds, that gives the imagined scenes such vivacity that Christ himself will be present to the meditant through them. No medieval gospel meditation is as clear about its purpose or how the meditant is to achieve it than the MVC. The author loves phrases such as “in this consists the very great power of meditation.” He is always attuned to the value of the devotional program he prescribes and frequently articulates it. The text focuses its attention on honing imagination’s considerable powers with the goal of placing the meditant in scenes from Christ’s life and drawing her closer to Christ, in his humanity and divinity, as a result. The text is, among other things, a how-to guide for imaginative meditation. Mary Carruthers has shown us how earnestly medieval rhetoricians trained their memories, but it was not the only faculty of the soul that required exercise.80 Imagination likewise needed training and likewise promised elevated spiritual benefits to those who used it properly. In the context of the MVC, meditation both provides that training and reveals its fruit. One might object that the author’s high appraisal of imagination contradicts his pronouncements against image-based devotion, pronouncements quoted from Bernard of Clairvaux. On their basis, scholars have focused their attention on the imagery of the MVC, and their assessments have not been

79. MVC, xiv, CCCM 153:63–64: “Non ergo mente tabescat sed diligenter eum querat per continuum exercicium spiritus in sacris meditacionibus et bonis operibus persistendo, et reinveniet eum.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 55. 80. Carruthers, Book of Memory and Craft of Thought.

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especially favorable.81 With its preponderance of imagery, in other words, the MVC might appear to undermine the legitimacy of its own method. However, a more plausible reading is that the author’s quotations of Bernard show that the text does not consider itself prone to the errors Bernard discusses. Literary imagery only accentuates and heightens the power of imagination in it.

“Aspice bene per singula”: Inventing Detail in the Meditationes vitae Christi The MVC presents itself as a training manual for the imagination even as it instructs the meditant in the value of meditating on Christ’s life. To this end, the author walks the meditant through a series of meditations in the first seventeen chapters before leaving him to develop meditations on his own, reminding him at that moment that his first priority is to “converse” with Jesus in every scene and “become a friend to him.”82 Because of the sheer importance of the passion sequence at the text’s end, the author returns to his initial, detailed approach when narrating it, but the meditant still has considerable meditative latitude; the author apprises him of the various decisions he gets to make when imagining. The progress of the text assumes that the meditant becomes more adept in his activity as he proceeds. The author not only allows him greater decision-making freedom, but gives him license to create his own meditations, and they can presumably be as tangentially related to the details of the Bible as the author’s own meditations often are. What determines the success of a given meditation is not its fidelity to the Bible, and this fact might give pause to those who think that meditations such as the MVC provide Bible substitutes for the laity.83 The author both assumes the meditant’s familiarity with the Bible, to which he makes reference and to which he refers the meditant often, and shows little concern for the accuracy of the meditations. The author thus adds figures into scenes in which the Bible does not expressly place them, invites the meditant to imagine resurrection appearances not mentioned in the Bible, and adds details to the appearances that are described. Although Jesus was originally reluctant to let Mary Magdalene touch him, for instance, the author explains, “I can hardly believe that before he left there, she did not 81. See, for instance, Gillespie, “Strange Images of Death.” 82. MVC, xviii, CCCM 153:93: “cum eo converseris et familiaris ei fias.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 80. 83. For a discussion of and argument against this perspective, see my “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ.”

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reach out fondly to him, to kiss his hands and feet” and that he allowed it.84 So carefree is the author with respect to the Bible’s details that he here argues for their undoing. This points to a salient, and rather odd, feature of the text, which is that it insists that meditations be detailed even as it freely departs from the details of Scripture. As a consequence, it privileges the meditant’s own decision-making processes over her fidelity to the Bible. To this end, the author describes two different ways in which Jesus might have been attached to the cross and two different seating arrangements for the Last Supper, leaving the meditant to choose whichever she prefers. Subordinating any obligation to determine the “right” answer to the meditant’s freedom to choose for herself, the author prioritizes the meditant’s act of making a decision over the actual decision that she makes. The author suggests that the meditant make the scenes real by subjecting them to her own thought processes. By shaping these scenes and asserting ownership over them, she heightens the realism of the scenes she describes. Detailed scenes are easier to imagine than non-detailed ones, and details determined by the meditant herself and her own conclusions about which scenario is most likely are more effective than those imported from an authoritative text. The meditant brings the imagined scenes to life by deliberately thinking through them. Similarly, the author tells her repeatedly to expand on the scenes he gives her. Discussing the Lord’s supper, he tells her to contemplate carefully every word and deed which, “like all the other deeds of the Lord Jesus, should not be shortened but should be expanded. For in this consists the very great power of all meditations about him.”85 The power, note, is not in the events described in the Bible per se, but rather in the meditant’s (good-faith and reasoned) departure from them, for it is there that she brings the scenes to life in her own mind. In doing so, the meditant only follows the author’s lead. He consistently reasons his way to the most likely or most credible scenario, and encourages the meditant to do the same. For instance, when addressing Luke’s assertion that Mary and Joseph brought “two turtledoves or two young pigeons” (Lk 2:24) to the temple in order to make an offering, he writes, “because they were poor, it is more credible (credendum est magis) that their offering was 84. MVC, lxxxiv, CCCM 153:305: “vix credere possum quin eum familiariter tangeret antequam inde discederet, deosculando pedes et manus.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 284. 85. MVC, lxxiii, CCCM 153:243: “nec abbrevianda sunt sicut cetera facta Domini Iesu, sed dilatanda. In hoc enim est maxima vis omnium meditacionum de ipso.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 229.

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the young pigeons.”86 Of course, it does not really matter which animals the holy family offered—Luke himself feels no obligation to decide one way or the other—which means that the act of reasoning through the best alternative must itself have value according to the author. Likewise, after considering at length what the angels might have fed Jesus in the desert and rejecting various possibilities, the author decides to “settle on” (immoremur) one possibility, that an angel carried Jesus away to eat and then returned him in the manner of Daniel.87 Or in what is perhaps the most elaborate such passage, the author presents three reasons why the meditant should believe that the Virgin Mary attended as a servant the wedding feast in which Jesus changed water into wine.88 What matters here is that the meditant, following the author, think through the scenes and inhabit them cognitively in order to inhabit them spiritually. The author could not be clearer that meditation occurs in the mind, specifically, the actively thinking mind. The meditant who maximizes the activity of the mind thus augments the imaginative power of meditation. The author’s apparent interest in activating the mind’s powers through meditation also announces itself in his concern that the meditant follow a logical order of events and conduct herself properly within meditations. She must above all show good manners, as the author illustrates with particular attention to her polite entrance into and departure out of her imagined scenes. Thus, after visiting with Mary during her time in Egypt, the meditant should “ask permission to leave, and, after kneeling to receive a blessing first from the child Jesus, then from his mother, and afterwards from Joseph, with compassionate tears, bid them farewell.”89 At the moments when the meditant most obviously invents the scenes, that is, when she inserts herself into them and then removes herself from them, she must resist their fictionality by acting in a wholly realistic way. Greetings and farewells do not round out the fiction but counteract it. Similarly, the author tells the meditant to imagine Jesus’s resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene, saying, “Place yourself there, in reverence, modesty and joy, but a distance apart: it

86. MVC, xi, CCCM 153:45: “Et quia erant pauperrimi credendum est magis de pullis columbarum.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 39. 87. MVC, xvii, CCCM 153:89. 88. MVC, xx, CCCM 153:96–100. 89. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:55: “pete licenciam recedendi; et benediccione recepta primo a puero Jesu, deinde a matre, postea a Joseph genibus flexis cum lacrimis et compassione magna, valefacias eis.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 48.

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may be that, moved with pity, he would have you called over.”90 Although the meditant has tremendous latitude when inventing imagined scenes, and is told to do so with tremendous confidence, she must show all due humility within the scenes, as though they were real. Accordingly, Jesus’s agency in this scene needs to be absolute, and the meditant must be asked by Jesus to participate more actively in the scene that she created. That is, she must act as though the scene is real in order to recognize its own reality. To facilitate the meditant in this project, the author appeals to the capacities of imagination, steering the meditant toward details that are easier to imagine. As the text opens, he tells her that he will often describe scenes not narrated in the Bible itself. To make these things “stand out” (ad maiorem impressionem), he writes, “I will tell you about these unwritten things just as if they had actually happened, at least insofar as they can piously be believed to be occurring or to have occurred, doing this in accord with certain imaginary scenarios which the soul perceives in a varying way.”91 To create the “impression” that the author seeks, he will use imaginary scenarios to bring even extrabiblical scenes to life, thus suggesting that these “imaginary representations” create the vividness he desires. The author suggests throughout the work that the meditations only work if they have a lifelike quality and, more daringly, that when they do work, they involve the meditant so profoundly in Christ’s life that she ascends to heaven through scattered glimpses before death and for eternity thereafter. The real consequences of meditation depend on their realism. Indeed, as we have seen, the mind was believed to have been endowed with a special ability to connect to the events of Christ’s life, so the meditant here is not so much injecting realism into them as discovering Christ’s real presence in her own mind. The realism of the meditations results from various devices. For instance, the author repeatedly refers to relics and places that he and others have seen, often relying on others’ accounts to affirm that a place looks a certain way. With an attention to place that surely influenced Ludolph’s own, the author of the MVC repeatedly compares the distances between places within imagined scenes to distances that the Poor Clare to whom he writes knows well. Thus, the distance between Jesus praying and the apostles is 90. MVC, c, CCCM 153:330: “Sta et tu reverenter et verecunde sed gaudenter, a longe tamen, si forte misericordia motus faciat te vocari.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 311. 91. MVC, pro., CCCM 153:10: “ea sic ac si ita fuissent tibi narrabo prout contingere vel contigisse pie credi possunt, secundum quasdam imaginarias representaciones quas animus diversimode percipit.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 4.

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the “length of one of our houses,” the distance between the tomb and the place of Jesus’s crucifixion was “equal to the length of our chapel,” and the distance between Mount Calvary and the city gate is equivalent to that between “our place” and San Gimignano.92 The Franciscan house in question stands as the point of reference for biblical places, surely with the purpose of helping the meditant to imagine them all the more clearly. Other devices are clearly intended to assist her in her imaginative work as well, as when the author tells her to imagine the church fathers in limbo with their postresurrection bodies.93 Jesus, without a body at the moment of his descent into hell, should likewise be imagined back into one.94 The author caters to the capacities of imagination, which has no facility with distance and no aptitude for creating mental pictures of non-corporeal figures. By doing so, he can get the most out of imagination, using it to create vivid mental images that have concrete spiritual rewards. By way of conclusion, it is worth looking at one of these meditations in greater detail to see how the author expects them to work. In an especially colorful and bizarre scene, the author relates “a beautiful, loving, and extremely compassionate meditation” that occurred to him regarding Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’s time in Egypt.95 As elsewhere, the author reasons his way through the scene. This time, he reaches the conclusions that Mary must have made money for the family through sewing, that she must have advertised her services to her neighbors, and that Jesus, five years old at the time, must have helped her, both by seeking work for her and by returning completed garments to customers. As he often does, the author proceeds by way of questions, leading the meditant to think through the parameters of the scene. Thus, he asks, “When the boy Jesus was five years old, did he not consider himself his mother’s agent by seeking work for her? She had no other helper. Did he not also return the finished work, asking for payment for his mother?”96 In both cases, of course, the answer the author expects is “yes.”

92. MVC, lxxv, CCCM 153:258: “longitudo domorum nostrarum”; lxxx, CCCM 153:283: “quantum est longitudo ecclesie nostre”; lxxvii, CCCM 153:269: “locus noster.” 93. MVC, lxxx, CCCM 153:289; and MVC, xci, CCCM 153:315. 94. MVC, lxxx, CCCM 153:289. 95. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:51: “pulchra, pia, et valde compassiva meditacio.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 44. 96. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:51–52: “cum puer Jesus cepit esse quinquennis vel sic, nunquid et ipse portabat ambasiatas matris, petendo pro ipsa ea in quibus operari valeret? Non enim habebat alium scutiferum. Sed et nunquid reportabat opera facta, petens ex parte matris solucionem et precium?” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 45.

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Having gone this far, the author reasons yet further, “But what if, on an occasion when he had returned the finished work and asked for payment, some haughty, quarrelsome and garrulous householder reacted abusively toward him, snatched the finished work, threw him out without payment, so that he returned home empty-handed? O how often and deeply did this kind of person wrong the strangers.”97 Indeed, what if such a moment had occurred? How does it benefit the meditant to imagine that it had? Doing so has some obvious moral rewards. Imagining Jesus thus mistreated, the meditant would presumably think twice before complaining about any slight, and hoping to emulate young Jesus more than the mean householder, he would thus be schooled in virtues. Such schooling is the sine qua non of successful meditating, but it tends not to be the goal. Rather, the high drama of the scene, with its colorful description of the bad man and the evocative series of events it describes, functions to make the scene more vivid not just in description but in imagination and in this way to draw the meditant all the more fully into it. Mary Carruthers notes that emotion serves as an aid to memory, and it functions similarly with respect to imagination.98 Indeed, there is a reason why affective piety and imaginative devotion tend to intersect: strong emotions contribute to vivid imaginations. In addition, the scene above demonstrates the same reasoning processes that we are familiar with, whereby the author thinks through the most logical scenario and immerses himself into the scene cognitively. Feeding imagination in so many respects, the author also expects to get a great deal from it, namely, union with Christ and a solid pathway to salvation. Only an imagination enlivened to its greatest capacity, it seems, can yield imagination’s greatest rewards. This scene expresses in condensed form the components that make for successful meditating according to the MVC: invention, detail, mental labor, emotion, and rational deliberation. Their ultimate effect is to create imaginative vivacity, which in turn makes imagination capable of the substantial spiritual accomplishments ascribed to it. Only a fully activated imagination can realize its greatest potential, which is to turn the merely imagined presence of Christ into real, spiritual presence, in turn enabling the meditant to conform to him. Imagination thus acts creatively, cognitively, and affectively. The specific capacities of imagination here demonstrated—its 97. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:52: “Sed quid si aliquocies dum opus reddidisset et precium peteret, aliqua superba, rixosa, et loquax eidem, injuriose respondit, opus factum accepit, eum sine precio expulit, et sic vacuus domum rediit? O quot et quante fuerunt injurie huius advenis” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 45. 98. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 173 et passim.

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ability to breach the barrier between matter and spirit and unite the soul so profoundly to Christ that the soul can preview spiritual delights to be enjoyed in perpetuity after death—establish these texts as Bonaventure’s heirs. If not adopting his philosophical framework, they adopt its consequence, which is a remarkably powerful imaginative faculty that achieves its greatest potential when activated in a systematic and purposeful way. These gospel meditations do not just prod imagination to life in order to witness gospel scenes. Rather, they activate imagination in order to receive spiritual rewards unattainable by human effort alone.

Five

From “Wit to Wisedom”: Langland’s Ymaginatif

The previous chapter has shown how widely disseminated was the Bonaventuran tradition of imaginative meditation, a project that this chapter shares. It analyzes one great poem from the late fourteenth century, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, and explores the role of imagination in it. The character Ymaginatif advertises the poem’s interest in imagination, although Ymaginatif ’s position in the poem and the nature of its commentary on imagination have been much disputed. Typically associated with the Aristotelian faculty of imagination, Ymaginatif has prompted studies of Langland and Aristotelian philosophy more generally, but imagination’s cognitive function has not figured into them. The dominant critical perspective is that Ymaginatif is creative but unreliable, an associative power prone to making unexpected and sometimes unsound connections. The argument of this chapter is that Langland’s Ymaginatif performs crucial cognitive work, work that is informed by imagination’s role in Aristotelian theories of cognition. Mediating between sense and intellect, he assists Will in his quest to make proper spiritual use of his sensory experience. It is thanks to Ymaginatif ’s training, I argue, that Will learns to unite the spiritual to the natural so firmly that the spiritual simply becomes natural, that . Hanna provides a survey of recent scholarship on Ymaginatif in “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 81n1. . Hanna disputes the association of Ymaginatif with scholastic philosophy, instead aligning the character with grammar school instruction and “pragmatic learning” (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 93). . N. Zeeman concludes that Ymaginatif is a “hypothetical and exploratory power” that works in “a provisional way” (Piers Plowman, 246), and Minnis credits him with advancing “plausible hypotheses” rather than “necessary truths” (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 81). Hanna reads Ymaginatif as a master of “sub-learned discourses” notable for his penchant for sometimes illogical association (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 87).

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Will simply lives biblical narrative, at the poem’s end. When he immerses himself in gospel scenes and understands current societal ills in biblical terms, Will uses his imagination as Ymaginatif advises that it be used. In Piers Plowman, imagination occupies its usual position between sense and intellect, but the poem’s interest lies less in intellectual cognition as it concerns the essence of things in themselves than in how they relate to God. Chapter 2 showed that Christ was believed to participate profoundly in the process of human knowing, with the result that nothing could be fully understood without recognizing its relationship to God. Bonaventure uses the examples of the ant and serpent. Their significance to the individual who perceives them consists first in the virtues that they teach, the serpent teaching prudence and the ant wisdom, and then in their manifestation of the excellence of creation. Finally, they lead their percipient to praise God who created them and all of creation. To understand them not simply as examples of prudence or wisdom but rather as expressions of divine goodness is to understand them at a higher level. From this Christian perspective, the truth of the natural world is spiritual, and any real comprehension of that world must likewise be spiritual. Jean Leclercq thus observes, “To understand things is to realize the relationship they have to Christ.” What most concerns Langland is how to make the transition from natural knowledge, the knowledge that the individual attains through the natural faculties of sense and reason, to what we might call spiritual understanding, that is, understanding created things as they pertain to God. Imagination participates centrally in the process by which anything is understood in its fullness, and so it does in Piers Plowman. Ymaginatif helps

. Scholarship on Ymaginatif has long noted that imagination resides between sense and intellect in medieval psychology, beginning with Jones’s 1914 article, “Imaginatif in Piers Plowman” (587), and including N. Zeeman (“Idol of the Text,” 43), and Ryan (“Scripture and the Prudent Ymaginatif,” 230). However, they do not grant it much authority at this juncture or elaborate on its function. . Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, XIII.12, Opera omnia 5:390: “Liber ergo Scripturae reparativus est totius mundi ad Deum cognoscendum, laudandum, amandum. Unde si quaeras, quid tibi valet serpens, vel de quo tibi servet? Plus valet tibi quam totus mundus, quia docet te prudentiam, sicut formica sapientiam.” (The book of Scripture restores the entire world to knowing, praising, and loving God. So if you wonder, what is the value of the serpent for you, or how is it useful to you? It is more valuable than the whole world, because it teaches you prudence, as the ant teaches wisdom.) Bonaventure here builds on Proverbs’s praise of the industrious and wise ant, Prov. 6:6–7. . Leclercq, Love of Learning, 39. Leclercq writes here specifically of monastic culture, but the point applies more generally. . Intellectual apprehension is, of course, spiritual in the sense that the intellect is immaterial, but I use “spiritual” here in its religious sense.

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Will to recognize the spiritual significance of created things. In the vocabulary of the poem, Ymaginatif enables Will to reconcile kynde knowynge and clergie. The terms “kynde knowynge” and “clergie” correspond to two categories of knowledge discussed by medieval philosophers: natural knowledge, which derives from the senses and depends on natural faculties, and revelation, which is acquired knowledge, expressed primarily in the Bible. As Thomas Aquinas explains early in the Summa theologiae, one knowledge “deals with those things that are known by the light of natural reason, and another knowledge deals with those things that are known through the light of divine revelation.“ To the former belongs natural theology, which includes all that the intellect can know about God through its own powers of reasoning. To the latter belongs “supernatural theology,” which “exceeds human reason” and is necessary to the intellect in order that it think correctly about God.10 Based only on its own powers, the intellect would err frequently (it would badly botch the doctrine of the Trinity, for instance), and so it requires an influx of divine light to guide it. What Will needs above all is to reconcile the two sorts of knowledge, a feat that Ymaginatif helps him to achieve. In Piers Plowman, then, Langland uses different terms than those we have been dealing with, but the basic function that he allocates to imagination is the same. Natural knowledge in its origins simply is sense knowledge, given that senses gather data from the natural world, their only object. The intellect receives the data that it uses from them, and when it proceeds to spiritual conclusions—when it recognizes that corrupt clerics demonstrate the dominion of the Antichrist, for instance—it grasps the true meaning of the natural world. Ymaginatif helps Will to advance from sense to intellect to God and to see how each form of cognition testifies to the . On clergie and kynde knowynge as categories of knowledge, see Kirk, Dream Thought of Piers Plowman, and Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience,” 99–121. . Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1a.1.1, ad 2, Opera omnia 4:7: “ . . . philosophicae disciplinae tractant secundum quod sunt cognoscibilia lumine naturalis rationis, et aliam scientiam trac­ tare secundum quod cognoscuntur lumine divinae revalationis.” Bonaventure is more concise: “there are two kinds of knowledge, through discovery [i.e., sensory cognition] and through doctrine.” Commentarii in Ecclesiasten, 1, Opera omnia 6:16–17: “duplex est cognitio: per inventionem et doctrinam.” 10. Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a.1.1, resp., Opera omnia 4:6: “quae rationem humanam excedunt.” Without using these terms, Bernard of Clairvaux identifies the same basic categories, explaining that there are different paths by which people attain truth, “either from learned men or holy books, or certainly through those things that are made, seeing the invisible, understandable attributes of God” (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, LIII.iii.5, Opera omnia 2:98–99: “vel a doctis viris, vel a sacris libris, vel certe per ea quae facta sunt, invisibilia Dei intellecta conspicientes.” Trans. Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 3:62–63).

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same truth. He not only tells Will how to make the best use of his natural faculties but is the very mechanism by which Will does so. This argument runs counter to a standard narrative about the poem, which is that it proceeds from intellect to affect.11 Testing out the efficacy of academic, rational instruction in the third vision, this reading goes, Will finds it wanting. He repudiates it and instead hones his affective powers for the duration of the poem. Kynde knowynge ultimately succeeds where clergie fails, and Will learns the salutary lesson that true wisdom comes from within. Ymaginatif, however, says quite clearly that clergy, or revelation, is necessary for the wayfarer who would find Dowel. It does not suffice on its own, but it is a necessary adjunct to natural knowledge and affect, as we will see. Ymaginatif  ’s prominence in the poem is justified by his proficiency in associating, rather than alienating, the two bodies of knowledge. Will’s eventual success in harmonizing experience and doctrine demonstrates that he has learned Ymaginatif ’s lesson. His success manifests itself in his own immersion into biblical narrative, in his ability to witness the annunciation and the passion, for instance, at the poem’s end. In Piers Plowman, as in the texts studied in the previous chapters, gospel meditation is evidence of a well-used imagination. Piers Plowman reaches the same conclusion as the meditations we have been considering, which is that the meditant discovers God much as he discovers truth, even following the cognitive pathway that leads to truth in order to discover God. In both respects, this journey depends on imagination. Nonetheless, Piers Plowman’s examination of imagination’s role in meditation and spiritual ascent is distinctive for the emphasis it places on process. Langland painstakingly depicts both the way in which the soul reaches the point at which it can meditate on God and the role imagination plays in that journey.

11. Simpson’s influential reading of the third vision sees it in terms of a long-standing tradition of dividing the soul into cognitive and affective powers, which he translates into an opposition between reason and will (Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B Text, 95–96). Although proposing that Langland makes this “commonplace scheme” into “a more elaborate psychological scheme,” with joint indebtedness to Augustine and Aristotle (97–99), Simpson ultimately sees Will as using the “acquired arts of learning” in order to move beyond them “to a kind of knowledge which is more profound, more experiential, and more ‘natural’”—in other words, more affective than cognitive (134). In “From Reason to Affective Knowledge,” he reads this progression through a formal shift in poetic modes, from “disputative and analytical” up through the third vision to a “poetic mode of paradox and prophecy” thereafter (14 and 17). N. Zeeman comments on the continued dominance of this reading (Piers Plowman, 65). Although she initially resists it, she reinstates it later in her book (see, for instance, 262).

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More than the texts we have been considering, Piers Plowman shows how knowing correctly—how proceeding cognitively from sense to intellect to God—hones the soul’s meditative capacity. Only after learning to perceive divine truth within the natural world can Will participate in Christ’s life and read his own life in biblical terms. Langland’s portrait of imagination, then, provides unique insight into the way in which imagination’s cognitive and spiritual capacities inform each other. Although scholarship on Piers Plowman and gospel meditations usually opposes the two, noting that the poem does not display the affective abandon common in gospel meditations, Piers Plowman’s relative tameness with respect to affect instead helps us to recognize that affect is not the whole of gospel meditations’ purpose.12 Rather, it shows that the project of imagining oneself into biblical narrative, the central activity of much medieval religious literature, requires all the resources of the intellect and the will. The joint necessity of affect and intellect to spiritual advancement is evident not just in Piers Plowman but also in the obsequiously affective Book of Margery Kempe.13 In a well-known scene, Margery Kempe responds to a pietá with the loud wailing that she picked up in Jerusalem, leading a clearly irked priest to attempt to quiet her with sedate reason. “Damsel,” he says, “Ihesu is ded long sithyn.”14 Margery responds with characteristic confidence, saying, “Sir, hys deth is as fresch to me as he had deyd þis same day, & so me thynkyth it awt to be to ʒow & to alle Cristen pepil.”15 The priest appeals to time to draw Margery out of her fervor, making a level-headed distinction between past and present in hopes of rousing Margery from what he thus portrays as her irrational hysteria. She has failed, in his view, to apprehend the past as past, to view it from a rational perspective. Although Margery’s sudden transition from full-bodied shrieking to composed refutation might

12. On Piers Plowman and gospel meditations, see Aers, “Christ’s Humanity and Piers Plowman,” as well as Powers of The Holy, 15–42. See also Kirk, “Langland’s Narrative Christology,” 21–23; and Minnis, “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 91. 13. It is worth noting that, although Piers Plowman does not share the affective intensity of texts like Kempe’s, it has only positive things to say about affective devotion. Defining charity, for instance, Anima explains, “The mooste liflode he lyueþ by is loue in goddes passion” (XV.255). Will likewise wakes up from the passion sequence in Passus XVIII with a cry to his wife and daughter to “reuerenceþ goddes resurexion / And crepeþ to þe cros on knees and kisseþ it for a Iuwel” (XVIII.427–8). Unless otherwise noted, I cite the B text. I cite C only when it differs significantly from B, and A when it differs from both. I have retained the editors’ brackets, removing them only when I have restored the base manuscript’s text. 14. Book of Margery Kempe, c. 60, p. 148. 15. Ibid.

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seem improbable (or insincere), it serves to identify and refute the priest’s assumption that affective intensity denotes intellectual incapacity. In fact, Margery denies that the transition is awkward at all. Her response suggests that her affective fervor emerges from reasoned belief, and as reason gives rise to such emotion, so emotion easily translates back into reason. Margery’s accomplishment, here and elsewhere, is to see biblical events in her everyday life, integrating the former into the latter in a manner only commended in the period’s religious literature. From a Christian standpoint, creation cannot help but signify God and cannot be understood fully without recourse to God. Margery’s feat of integration, shared eventually by Langland’s Will, is accomplished in part through imagination, which helps the mind to advance from sense to intellect to God. As various writers noted, imagination is the mental faculty at work in meditation on the life of Christ.16 Although Margery’s priest dismisses the import of her accomplishment, seeing the spiritual in the natural world is instead one of the primary challenges of late-medieval Christian piety. Imagination as it assists with that project functions both affectively and cognitively.

Natural Knowledge, Revelation, and Imagination As is well-known, Piers Plowman concerns itself with the spiritual life not of enclosed religious but of wayfarers living in the world. When Will offers to give up his poetry-making for an understanding of Dowel, he determines to find it through the active, earthly life. He says, “if þer were any wight þat wolde me telle / What were dowel and dobet and dobest at þe laste, / Wolde I nevere do werk, but wende to holi chirche / And þere bidde my bedes but whan ich ete or slepe” (B XII.25–28). The comment might initially confound, given the fact that, if Will were to devote his life to prayer in this manner, he certainly would have achieved and surpassed Dowel.17 In C’s revision, Will even claims already to be living a life of prayer and devotion (C V.45–47), but this neither resolves nor obviates his need for a wayfarer’s guide to salvation. Insisting that Will approach spiritual matters from the perspective of the active life, the poem thus foregrounds the natural. Will’s quest is to make his experience of the natural world spiritually profitable, to 16. Walter Hilton, for instance, tells his reader, “þou may have mynde of þe manhede of ure lord, in his burþe or in his passion or in eny of his werkes, and fede þi þouʒt wiþ gostly ymagina­­ cion of hit” (“Epistle on the Mixed Life,” 285). See also Cloud of Unknowing, c. 65, p. 65. 17. As Justice notes, if Will were to act in this way, he would also be following Piers’s lead (Writing and Rebellion, 114).

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make of his earthly life a path toward salvation, learning key lessons about charity and love from his experiences along the way. Even the most cursory survey of medieval discussions of Christianity would show the natural world to be the principal means of learning about God and Christian virtues. According to the fourth-century “Cappadocian father,” Basil of Caeserea, the created world is “the school for reasonable souls to exercise themselves, the training ground for them to learn to know God.”18 As a school, the natural world merits diligent and rational study. Thus, Augustine’s proof for the existence of God begins with the senses: because the senses cannot sense that they sense, there must be a power above them, reason, that judges them. Reason, in turn, recognizes that its judgments of truth and falsity cannot come from itself alone but depend on a higher power, indicating the existence of truth or God.19 The senses not only point to God’s existence, but show that all good things, including free will, come from God. Augustine can therefore conclude, “Whoever has contemplated the whole creation and considers it carefully, if he follows the way that leads to wisdom, will indeed see that wisdom reveals itself graciously to him along the way and that in all of providence it runs to meet him.”20 By design, then, the senses are one’s first point of access to spiritual truth. Their truth-finding power only expands in the works of later Christian theologians, who are not content with the general guidance that Augustine attributes to nature but empower it to give specific knowledge of God’s attributes. In his Didascalicon of the 1120s, Hugh of St. Victor comments on the expanse of knowledge available to the attentive observer of nature: “every nature tells of God; every nature teaches man . . . and nothing in the universe is infecund.”21 So knowable is God’s existence through these means that Bonaventure allows no merit to attach to belief in it.22 Strictly

18. Basil of Caesarea, Hexaéméron, I.6, p. 110: “eiper to¯ i onti psucho¯ n logiko¯ n didaskaleion kai theogno¯ sias esti paideute¯rion.” 19. Augustine, De libero arbitrium, II.3–17, CCSL 29:239–268. 20. Ibid., II.17, CCSL 29:268: “Intuitus ergo et considerans universam creaturam quicumque iter agit ad sapientiam, sentit sapientiam in via se sibi ostendere hilariter et in omni providentia ocurrere sibi.” Trans. Williams, On Free Choice of the Will, 63. 21. Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon, VI.5, PL 176:805C: “Omnis natura Deum loquitur. Omnis natura hominem docet . . . et nihil in universitate infecundum est.” Trans. Taylor, Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, 145. 22. See Bonaventure, De mysterio Trinitatis, I.i.14, resp., Opera omnia 5:31. Bernard of Clairvaux had explained that all rational beings have access to knowledge of God’s existence (Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, XXXI.ii.3, Opera omnia 1:221). Bonaventure makes such knowledge not only accessible but obvious.

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speaking, only subsequent articles of faith are meritorious, because the created world makes God’s existence so knowable. It takes no great skill to experience the natural world, of course. The senses, whose only object is the natural world, may be error prone, but they are certainly easy to use. As Chaucer likes to remind his readers, nothing is as easy to believe as experience.23 The challenge for Langland, though less for the sublunarly-focused Chaucer, lies in understanding those experiences profitably, in correctly perceiving spiritual lessons within the natural world. Late-medieval natural theology and natural philosophy make nature both more fruitful and less easy to read. Historians assign the origins of natural philosophy—which seeks “natural explanations for natural phenomena”—to the thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s libri naturales were first available and studied in the West, and identify its heyday as the century from 1277 through 1377.24 The impact of this movement on theology depends in part on the fact that theologians, often having earned a master’s degree in natural philosophy themselves, applied such research to theological inquiry. They thus extended the parameters of natural theology, which treats reason as a welcome adjunct to faith.25 The late-medieval promotion of nature depends not just on this union, however, but also on the accep­ tance of an Aristotelian understanding of nature. In Aristotle’s thought, truth resides within nature and is discovered through nature, not symbolically but actually. Nature accordingly becomes the object not just of the senses but also of the intellect. Aristotle enjoyed considerable authority over things natural in the Middle Ages, leading Averroes to label him, as we saw in chapter 1, “the stan­ dard in Nature, and the model which Nature created to demonstrate the ultimate human perfection in material matters.”26 Aristotle’s intimacy with Nature here implied takes explicit allegorical form in Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de la vie humane, where Aristotle is Nature’s spokesperson. Aristotle

23. See, for instance, Chaucer, “Prologue,” Legend of Good Women, F text, ll. 1–28. 24. See Grant, “God, Science, and Natural Philosophy,” 265. Grant sees this movement as the beginning of modern science. 25. Grant writes that theologians “were expected, if not required, to attain a master’s degree in natural philosophy” (“God, Science, and Natural Philosophy,” 247). Natural theologians use reason to investigate theological matters. For a lucid, succinct account of natural theology, see Van Engen‘s entry for “natural theology” in the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. 26. Averroes, Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, III.4, p. 433. It is certainly the case that the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 discouraged uncritical acceptance of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, but it is equally clear that Aristotle retained authority on natural matters in its wake. For a review of different positions on the Condemnations and their impact on medieval Aristotelianism, see Thijssen, “Condemnation of 1277,” especially section 5.

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can serve as Nature’s defender because he provides nature with considerable authority in his philosophy. At the beginning of the Posterior Analytics, he affirms, “All teaching and all learning of an intellectual kind proceed from pre-existent knowledge.”27 This pre-existent knowledge, he proceeds to explain, is in us but only becomes actively known by us thanks to sense perception. Sensation is thus the starting point for all knowledge, a position that various of Aristotle’s medieval commentators interpreted in the broadest terms. According to Robert Grosseteste, for instance, sense perception provides knowledge of the first principles from which all deductive knowledge derives, as well as the knowledge that derives from them.28 Christian theologians, who had long applied pagan natural philosophy to their work, reflect this emphasis on nature in their spiritual programs.29 Of course, according to these theologians, Aristotle misinterpreted the natural world when it came to divine matters. He recognized the existence of a god but did not have access to divine revelation and so did not understand God properly. His authority extended to nature, not its creator. However, Aristotle’s perceived limitations did not limit natural philosophy, but rather showed its potential. With access to revelation, theologians like Aquinas felt they could raise natural philosophy to the heights that Aristotle did not reach. As a result, nature became a promising but also a complicated guide to spiritual truths. It had to be understood properly, and therein lay the challenge, as we see so clearly in Langland’s Will. One cannot make spiritually profitable use of nature without a firm grasp of the truths of revelation. Failing that, the individual will, like Will, follow his reason to whatever uncharitable and even heretical conclusions it supports. Before he is corrected by Ymaginatif, Will relies almost exclusively on his natural faculties of reasoning, appealing to Thouʒt and Wit without the guidance of revelation

27. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I.1, 71a1–2. English translation, Barnes, Posterior Analytics, 1. Latin translation, Gerard of Cremona, Analytica posteriora, Aristoteles Latinus IV.3, p. 3: “Omnis doctrina et omnis disciplina cogitativa non fit nisi ex cognitione cuius precedit esse.” 28. See Grosseteste, In Aristotelis Posteriorum Analyticorum libros, II.6, 40r: “ascendit ab his cognitio donec perveniat in simplicia universalia. Et in hoc similiter manifestum est quoniam universalia primo composita sicut et simplicia ex inductione a sensibilibus facta nobis sunt manifesta. Quomodo autem ex sensu perveniatur in universalia tam simplicia quam composita.” (Cognition rises from these [singulars] until it arrives at simple universals. And from these it is likewise clear how the first composite universals, like simple universals made inductively by sensibles, are made clear to us. In this way it [i.e., thought] is drawn from sense to simple as much as to composite universals.) 29. Pelikan discusses the influence of pagan philosophy on early Christianity in Christianity and Classical Culture.

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and so falling into error. The lessons of revelation at first fail to help him, because he uses his own reason to oppose them. Ymaginatif schools Will in the proper use of natural knowledge and revelation, teaching him to subordinate the former to the latter even as he advances from sensory cognition to God. That Ymaginatif serves this function is evident not just in his instruction of Will but in the effects of that instruction on Will. In the remainder of the poem, Will showcases his newfound ability to reconcile the natural and the spiritual. He perceives the spiritual significance of Haukyn’s sullied coat, he understands charity through its source in Christ, and, in the final two passus, he understands the corruption of clerics as the Antichrist’s attack on the faithful. He becomes an expert interpreter, integrating himself into biblical narrative and translating the events of his life and society into biblical terms. He has, in other words, learned to make better use of his imagination.

Langland’s Natural Theology As Piers Plowman begins, Will wonders what to make of the world as it appears before him, desiring interpretation but unwilling to offer it. “What þis metels bymeneþ,” he concludes, “ye men þat ben murye, / Devyne ye, for I ne dar, by deere god in hevene” (B Pro. 209–10). By begging off interpretation, he diagnoses its necessity, one not wholly met by Holi Chirche and her successors. His task is more specific, namely, to master natural interpretation by making proper use of his senses. When Will asks Holi Chirche what the initial vision means, she directs him to his senses. God, she says, “yaf yow fyve wittes / For to worshipe hym þerwiþ while ye ben here” (B I.15–16). In other words, Will misuses his senses, his “fyve wittes,” to the extent that he uses them for any purpose other than worshipping God. The idea that senses not directed toward spiritual purposes fail to perform as they should is common, expressed with conviction in the long text of the Stimulus amoris. There, nature chastises the speaker for merely enjoying nature and so failing to make good use of his senses: All creatures cry in their way and say, ‘This is he who has misused us, and who should use us to please the creator, but has made us serve the evil intent of the devil. While he has loved us above God, he has done us great injury. This is that most wicked man who has turned us away from honoring God and toward injuring God. He should use us in order to please God, but he prefers rather to misuse us in order to serve the devil. His soul was made to the image

From “Wit to Wisedom” / 189 of God, and he destroys it and wants it to be marked with the image of all of us. He is more earthly than earth.”30

At some point, we realize, Will will need to use his senses as they were intended to be used, to draw spiritual conclusions from the natural world and see cause in nature to praise God. That natural experience is necessary to Will’s development is not at all surprising. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, emphasized the importance of what he calls the “book of experience.”31 He builds on two “books” with a much longer history in Christian thought, the “book of creation,” which was sufficient for a human being’s enlightenment until the fall, and the “book of Scripture,” which supplemented it after the fall.32 Bernard’s liber experientiae emphasizes all the more that learning must be experiential, not solely speculative. From the poem’s outset, Will roots his search for Dowel in nature, but in no way does wisdom “run to meet him” as a result. Nature is not so self-explanatory in the poem, and Will fails to interpret it properly for two related reasons. The first concerns disposition, as Will is hampered by a willful will that exposes itself in his penchant for criticism. Positioning himself against the Christian community, he seeks opportunities to criticize clerics, Clergie, Reson, and the rest, rather than responding to nature with love for its creator. Will’s second obstacle is his misunderstanding of the mechanisms of natural theology, and so his pursuit of the wrong sort of natural knowledge. He many times diagnoses his need for natural knowledge, beginning in the poem’s first passus when he pleads lack of “kynde knowynge” to defend his inability to understand Holi Chirche’s discussion of truth (B I.138).33 He is not wrong; he does need natural knowledge in order to discover truth, 30. Stimulus amoris LT, I.vii, p. 649: “Clamant suo modo creaturae, et dicunt: Iste est qui nobis abusus est, et qui debuit in beneplacito Creatoris nos ordinare, fecit nos ad diaboli dolum servire: dum nos supra Deum amavit, magnam nobis injuriam fecit. Iste est nefandissimus homo, qui nos ad honorem Dei factas in injuriam Dei convertit: debuit nobis in beneplacito Dei uti, et voluit potius nobis in diabolica servitute abuti. Erat anima eius ad imaginem Dei facta, et ipsam deturpans voluit omnium nostrum imagine insigniri. Terrenior enim fuit terra.” 31. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, III.i.i, Opera omnia 1:14. McGinn, relying on Jean Leclercq, credits Bernard of Clairvaux with having first used the phrase “liber experientiae” (Growth of Mysticism, 497n157). His near contemporary, however, Guigo the Carthusian, also mentions reading “in libro experientiae” (Scala claustralium, vi.7, PL 184:479D). 32. McGinn comments on the antiquity and popularity of the notion of these two books (Growth of Mysticism, 186). 33. There is a great deal of scholarship on the meaning and significance of kynde knowynge in the poem. See, for instance, Simpson, “Role of Scientia in Piers Plowman”; Wittig, “‘Piers Plowman’

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but he fails to recognize a joint need for clergie, or revelation, to guide his natural observations.34 As a twelfth-century commentary on the Aeneid explains, “the exercise of wit and the instruction of doctrine must be joined together.”35 Natural theology is not as easy as Will wants it to be. Ymaginatif explains the difference between the two categories of knowledge in this way: “Of quod scimus [what we know] comeþ Clergie, [a] konnynge of hevene, / And of quod vidimus [what we see] comeþ kynde wit, of siʒte of diverse peple” (B XII.66–7).36 “Kynde wit” derives from natural faculties, while “clergie” is revealed and must be learned.37 That clergy, understood in this sense, represents the body of revealed knowledge in Piers Plowman is largely accepted by Langland scholars, who regularly link clergy to Scripture, as the source of revelation.38 As Nicolette Zeeman explains, “If Clergie represents the synthesis of Christian teaching, Scripture represents the bare bones of the originary texts themselves; the one is a teacher and guide, the other is an ultimate and authoritative resource.”39 Clergy, then, is the body of Christian teaching that derives from Scripture, and as such Will does not get simply to dismiss it. What Will has yet to understand is that natural knowledge does not simply rely on the application of reason to the natural world. Rather, it assimilates its natural observations to revealed truths, culled from the Bible, and to this extent distinguishes itself from the natural philosophy of the Greeks.40 Whereas philosophers like Aristotle had

B, Passus IX–XII”; and Davlin, “Kynde Knowynge as a Major Theme in Piers Plowman B,” and “Kynde Knowynge as a Middle English Equivalent for ‘Wisdom.’” 34. “Clergie” is also a term that has been much scrutinized in the poem. See, for instance, N. Zeeman, Piers Plowman, 134–42 and 201–26; Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience, 22–61; and Wittig, “‘Piers Plowman’ B,” 263. I prefer a general translation with “revelation,” a translation that N. Zeeman uses interchangeably with doctrina (Piers Plowman, 134–42). Wittig also translates “clergie” as doctrina (263), and Hugh White translates “clergie” as “revelation” (Nature and Salvation, 22). 35. Bernardus Silvestris, Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid, 107. 36. The C text removes these lines and revises some earlier ones in a way that might at first seem confusing. There we find, “Ac clergie cometh bote of syhte and kynde wit of sterres” (C XIV.30). However, as the passus continues, we see that “clergie” derives from metaphorical seeing, made possible by clerics’ books (C XIV.43–45). 37. I treat “kynde wit” and “kynde knowynge” as inextricable. As Ymaginatif explains, “kynde knowynge” is the kind of knowledge that a “kynde witted man” possesses (see B XII.107 and 135; see also C XIV.72 and 79). 38. See N. Zeeman’s survey of Langland scholars’ definitions of “clergie” in Piers Plowman, 133n1. 39. N. Zeeman, Piers Plowman, 206. For her extended definition of Scripture, see Piers Plowman, 143–47. 40. Gerson distinguishes between the natural philosophy of Christians and ancient Greek philosophers in God and Greek Philosophy, 1–2.

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no given set of doctrine to which their natural investigations had to conform, Christian philosophers had to let revelation guide them. For them, nature is evidence of doctrine that cannot be contradicted. Not only is revelation a necessary adjunct to natural knowledge, but it takes precedence, as nature demonstrates predetermined conclusions rather than establishing its own. In other words, revealed truths are always prior to natural investigation. Consider the following passage spoken by Wisdom in Suso’s Horologium sapientiae: “Since man, because of the imperfection of the human intellect, can know only a very few things that are true, even about natural and mundane matters, by means of scientific deduction, and even those he will not master except by the greatest effort and toil every day, before he perhaps advances by natural means from what is visible to the invisible, from what is bodily to the spiritual, how, I ask you, could the divine mysteries more fittingly be known . . . which exceed every power of the intellect, than by being revealed through divine Wisdom . . . taking flesh?”41 Natural knowledge is difficult, limited, and fitful. Its purview is things visible and bodily, and even to know the “very few things” that the intellect can know by these means, it must exercise tremendous effort. It advances to the invisible and spiritual only through revelation, expressed originally through the incarnation, which linked the visible to the invisible. Clergy, then, or revelation in Suso’s formulation, is not nature’s antagonist but its guide and its completion. In the first half of Piers Plowman and particularly in the third vision (B VIII–XII), Will fails to recognize this basic principle of Christian natural theology, instead rejecting in clergy what should shape and determine the lessons his experience provides him. He opposes natural knowledge to revelation, incorrectly privileging the former over the latter. That Will does so hardly requires demonstration. In his response to Scripture in B X, Will goes so far as to claim that wise instruction, or clergy, has damned many. Even the most sinful deeds, he claims, hurt one’s chances for salvation less than sound Christian teaching, for those who “wrouʒte wikkedlokest in world” have been saved, while “þo þat wisely wordeden and writen manye bokes / Of wit and of wisedom wiþ dampned soules wonye” (B X.432–35). According 41. Henry Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.3, pp. 390–91: “Cum autem homo paucissimas veritates rerum etiam naturalium et inferiorum deductionibus scientificis ob imperfectionem intellectus humani sciat, et easdem non nisi cum maximo studio et diutino labore tandem conquirat, itemque naturaliter de visibilibus ad invisibilia, de corporalibus ad spiritualia procedat, quomodo quaeso congruentius divina mysteria sciri poterant . . . omnem facultatem intellectus excedentia, nisi ut sapientia divina . . . per assumptam humanitatem nota fieret?” Trans. Colledge, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 84.

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to Will, deeds do not damn anyone, no matter how bad, but wise words have consigned many to hell. Will’s position is rendered suspect if only by its flawed reasoning, for he concludes, in a confusion of correlation with causation, that Aristotle and Solomon were damned because they were wise simply because they were wise and, according to Will’s authorities, damned. His logical error contains a more significant one. By figuring clergy, or spiri­ tual instruction, as an impediment to salvation, Will chooses natural knowledge to the exclusion of revelation. By opposing the two categories of knowledge and choosing one over the other, Will anticipates modern scholars of the poem who likewise tend to privilege kynde knowynge over clergie.42 However, Will falters to the extent that he prefers either. It is thus in clergy’s defense that Ymaginatif appears, saying, “Why I have told [þee] al þis, I took ful good hede / How þow contrariedest clergie wiþ crabbede wordes” (B XII.155–56). As Ymaginatif explains, Will does not have the option to reject clergy. While he may object to the behavior of various clerics, clergy as a category of knowledge deserves no scorn. Ymaginatif accordingly advises Will, and all people, “no clergie to dispise / Ne sette short bi hir science, whatso þei don hemselve” (B XII.121–22). As Ymaginatif explains, Will will not discover or become Dowel without it. In the same way, then, that Dowel depends on a harmonizing of word and deed, as scholars have shown, so its discovery depends on the harmonizing of natural knowledge and revelation.43 Will’s interpretive blunders early in the third vision make it clear that Will needs to see continuity rather than discord between nature and doctrine and thus needs to learn the art of Christian interpretation. When Ymaginatif appears, he offers to fill this need by explaining Will’s errors and their solution. The reader, however, does not require Ymaginatif ’s championing of clergy to recognize Will’s mistake. Before he happens on Ymaginatif, Will has demonstrated all on his own the limitations of his particular brand of natural theology. In the course of conversing with his faculties Thouʒt and Wit, Will shows that natural knowledge, when divorced from clergy, goes badly astray. This is not to support the common reading that the poem rejects clergy in favor of natural knowledge; the third vision demonstrates not the failure of clergy but the failure of natural faculties that are not governed by it. Accordingly, both Thouʒt and Wit comment ably on the natural world, but neither ad-

42. A notable exception is Middleton, who notes that Ymaginatif teaches Will to wed experience to clergy (“Narration and the Invention of Experience,” 112). 43. On Dowel, see in particular Middleton, “Two Infinites,” 186; and Smith, Book of the Incipit, 202–11.

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dresses spiritual topics with any success. Reasoning from natural observations to spiritual conclusions, they discover error. We begin with Thouʒt. When he appears to Will, he seems a promising guide.44 Will is thinking, at any rate. Further, Thouʒt expands Dowel into the triad Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, an expansion that the poem’s subsequent characters generally adopt. However, Will’s initial faith in Thouʒt’s ability to lead him to Dowel turns out to be misplaced. Although his early comments on the triad seem innocuous, after twenty lines Thouʒt starts to ramble about the three having elected for themselves a king to “rule þe Reme” (B VIII.109). The king, they determine, will punish Dowel and Dobet should they oppose Dobest (“if dowel [and] dobet dide ayein dobest / [And were vnbuxum at his biddyng, and bold to don ille]”; B VIII.102–3), yet the king will act only as the three together determine he should.45 Thouʒt here shows himself to be more expert at creating trinities than explaining them.46 He has accordingly transformed his trinity into a secular and internally divisive power structure that is expressly illogical, especially as it accounts for the ill-doing of Dowel and Dobet. Comparing spiritual matters to earthly ones, Thouʒt reasons so badly that he flirts with heresy. In his analysis of the Trinity, he anticipates the lords whom Studie excoriates for saying of the Trinity “[how two slowe þe þridde]” (B X.54), a phrase replaced in all of the surviving B manuscripts.47 Though less commented upon, Thouʒt’s reflections on the Trinity are no less controversial. His most striking comment, at VIII.103, cited above, is excised in all but one B manuscript, the unauthoritative F manuscript, surely because it too bears heterodox implications. Thouʒt’s exposition overreaches when it departs from its initial, rather grounded definition of the three persons of the Trinity/Dowel triad to consider the relationship among 44. Readings of Thouʒt vary. N. Zeeman links him to Ymaginatif and reads both as lower internal powers (Piers Plowman, 78–84), while Harwood calls him “the highest faculty of medieval psychology short of intelligentia” (Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief, 54). “Cogitatio,” the Latin from which “Thouʒt” presumably derives, is too capacious a term to offer much clarity, so I read Thouʒt simply in terms of his own presentation in the poem. 45. The C text omits any mention of Dowel and Dobet opposing Dobest but keeps the political metaphor and so shows Thouʒt to commit the same general error. See C X.100–6. 46. Thouʒt’s limited learning is evident in his academic ambitions. Smith notes that Thouʒt “appears in a setting that recalls the three-day disputation . . . in which a university candidate establishes his status as baccalarius principians or incipiens” (Book of the Incipit, 195). He also notes Middleton’s compatible comments on academic features in other parts of the third vision (ibid.). Will’s imperfect emulation of academic discourse, along with his interlocutors, casts him as foolish as much as the Wife of Bath’s “learning” serves as an ironic commentary on herself. 47. Lawton discusses the removal of Studie’s line along with various fraught efforts by vernacular authors to describe the Trinity in “Voice, Authority, and Blasphemy,” 108–11.

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the three figures, analogously shifting focus from the three persons of the Trinity to their more perplexing relationship to each other in a manner that is at best confounding and at worst heretical.48 Thouʒt’s deductive failings indicate Will’s inability to think capably about spiritual matters with this natural faculty alone. Wit represents a more sophisticated stage of natural data processing than Thouʒt, though his purview remains natural knowledge—“kynde wittede men” rely on “kynde knowyng” (C XIV.72, 79). Steven Justice defines Wit as representing “the Aristotelian vocabulary of the arts faculty, which is committed to philosophical deduction from the known world,” and though Wit may be adept at philosophical deduction when confined to the natural world, he fares less well when he ventures into theological matters without the guidance of revelation.49 Wit’s speech might at first seem more strange than wrong. Nicolette Zeeman thus faults Will’s actions for having “put wit in the wrong,” because “Wit does not seem to have said anything misleading or overly abstruse.”50 Nonetheless, Studie, and particularly Wit’s response to Studie, suggest otherwise, identifying the culprit not as Will but specifically as his wit. We have already seen that Studie’s comments about the blasphemous lords help to cast light, retrospectively, on Thouʒt’s trinitarian blunder, and her comments serve a similar function with respect to Wit’s lesson. Her most explicit, and for Wit her most damning, criticism comes in her discussion of the lords at the table who “carpen ayein clerkes” (B X.107). The lords ask why God allowed Satan to beguile Eve and then question the fairness of a punishment for Adam and Eve’s sin that affects all of humankind. In the course of their imagined complaint, the lords directly echo Wit’s own comments. The presumptuous lords and Wit rely on the same biblical verse to make their arguments, a repetition that casts doubt on Wit retrospectively and shows him to fare as badly at biblical exegesis as Studie’s impious lords.

48. In a discussion primarily of Abraham and Samaritan’s trinitarian analogies, Galloway observes their indebtedness to “immediate social experience” (“Intellectual Pregnancy,” 134). As we see here, the association of the Trinity with such experience makes understandings of the Trinity as morally volatile as that experience. 49. Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 112. It should be noted that Wit and Thouʒt are clearly both Will’s wit and thought: Thouʒt resembles Will and Wit mirrors his behavior (compare, for instance, Will’s and Wit’s similar “louting” to Studie at B X.140, 145, and 147). Through his errors in reasoning, then, Wit reflects the sorry state that Will’s wits are in. 50. N. Zeeman, Piers Plowman, 121. She reads Will’s wit-based errors as an indication of Will’s misuse of his intellect and his need to submit himself to the rigors of study, or Studie (ibid., 202–5). Tavormina also blames Will for his failure to learn from Wit’s instruction (Kindly Similitude, 103).

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The lords dispute clerics by noting an apparent scriptural discrepancy: Ezekiel 18:20 indicates that sons will not bear the sins of their fathers, but all sons were punished for Adam’s sin (B X.113–16). The fictive lord fulminates against what he calls the unreasonable punishment. The verse from Ezekiel strikes the reader as familiar because Wit discussed it himself not long before (B IX.149ff). Wit likewise highlights a contrast between the verse and a father’s sin, though he focuses on Seth’s sin in allowing his kin to copu­ late with Cain’s rather than Adam’s in eating from the tree.51 Wit says that Seth’s sin resulted in the flood, which punished sons for their fathers’ sins, and calls attention to the contrast between Ez. 18:20 and this far-reaching punishment. Wit does not question the fairness of the punishment—indeed, he endorses it, making reference to his own witnessing of inherited sin—but his error is still parallel to the lords’ to the extent that both dispute scripture by appealing to their own powers of reasoning. Wit disagrees with a verse because it is contradicted by his experience, and the mocked lord disagrees with an event because it is, in his opinion, unreasonable. Vance Smith, observing that Wit here “contradict[s] biblical observations” through recourse to his own experience, thus believes that Wit serves “to illustrate imperfect understanding” in this section of the poem.52 What is imperfect about it, I contend, is its ill-conceived effort to interpret the Bible through empirical reasoning, rather than allowing the Bible to guide that reasoning. Together, Wit and the misguided lord show how volatile biblical interpretation is when it defers to personal experience and misdirected reason. Pitting biblical verse against biblical verse is a hubristic, zero-sum game. Studie’s reference in her pointed satire of the lords to the biblical verse introduced by Wit casts suspicion on Wit’s own glossing.53 By misapplying

51. On medieval readings of Cain and his presentation in Piers Plowman, see Tavormina, Kindly Similitude, 84–87. 52. Smith, Book of the Incipit, 153. As Smith proceeds to observe, Wit of the C text bases his objection not on personal experience but on “Westm[in]stre lawe” (C X.239; Smith, Book of the Incipit, 153). His use of man-made law rather than experience to resolve an apparent scriptural discrepancy is, however, no less presumptuous. 53. It should be noted that Studie’s indictment of the blasphemous lords and the other passages cited in this paragraph (B X.92–139 and 141–43) are absent from the C text and are replaced only with a short pun. Studie says, “‘For is no wit worth now but hit of wynnynge soune. / Forthy, wit,’ quod she, ‘be waer holy writ to shewe / Amonges hem þat haen hawes at wille’” (C XI.77–79). “Wit” should not show “writ” to those disposed to earthly delights, because their errant wills deprive them of any benefit their wits might offer them. Will, then, is clearly culpable here, but in such a way that still implicates Wit for overreaching by discussing “writ.” Certain passages, notably B V.587–58 and C XII.2, oppose Will to Wit, but here both are equally incapable of considering Scripture profitably.

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lessons learned from his own experience, he favors his natural, experiencederived knowledge, supported by a reading from the commentary tradition (which links the flood to the sexual sins of Seth’s progeny), over explicit biblical verse.54 That he errs in doing so appears not just from the repetition of the Ezekiel verse and his opposition to it. His treatment of Scripture may seem suspect, but it is his response to Studie’s speech that really inculpates him. As she winds down, Studie wishes on one “‘þat wilneþ to wite þe [whyes] of god almyʒty’” that “‘his eiʒe were in his ers and his fynger after’” (B X.127, 128). She then says, “‘þo þat useþ þise havylons [for] to blende mennes wittes, / What is dowel fro dobet, [now] deef mote he worþe’” (B X.134–35). In wishing that such overreachers be deaf, blind, and mute, Studie directly attacks their senses, the source of natural knowledge and of their error. Wit, in his response, adopts her wished-for punishment: “whan þat wit was ywar [how his wif] tolde / He bicom so confus he kouþe noʒt loke, / And as doumb as [a dore] drouʒ hym [aside]” (B X.140–42).55 Wit’s silence in response to not just hearing but understanding Studie’s speech indicates his recognition of his error. He henceforth communicates only through motions, used simply to direct Will to Studie. Wit thus seems to have understood Studie accurately, becoming mute after Studie wishes that such be the fate of irreverent and critical expositors. When he does so, he assumes Studie’s punishment not just for bad glossers but also for inappropriate examiners. Indicting those who use tricks to confuse men’s wits about the distinction among Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest (B X.134–35, cited above), Studie clearly refers to Will’s own testing of Wit, for he had asked Thouʒt to test Wit (“to preven his wittes”—B VIII.125) about this very distinction. We see how badly prepared Will is to consider spiritual matters with the aid of his natural faculties alone.56 Wit, however, is capable of better, a potential implied by his intimate relation to Inwit and

54. Wittig cites Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica and the Glossa ordinaria as blaming the flood on the mixing of Seth’s progeny with Cain’s (“‘Piers Plowman’ B, Passus IX–XII,” 227). 55. As a gloss on Wit’s actions and errors here, consider the following comment from Bon­ aventure, condemning those who refuse to interpret nature correctly, “Whoever is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind; whoever does not heed such outcries is deaf; whoever does not praise God from all these effects is mute” (Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, I.15, Opera omnia 5:299: “Qui igitur tantis rerum creaturarum splendoribus non illustratur caecus est; qui tantis clamoribus non evigilat surdus est; qui ex omnibus his effectibus Deum non laudat mutus est.”) For Bonaventure, the natural world is so transparent a spiritual guide that its misinterpretation signifies a fundamentally insensate viewer. 56. Will could well be seen as modeling Wit’s error in his bizarre commentary on Noah’s ark and his questioning of the Bible, specifically the legitimacy of Mary Magdalene’s and Paul’s salvation (B X.405–19 and 428–31).

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by Studie’s own marriage to him. When Studie calls Clergie a man who “kan manye [wittes]” (B X.172), she offers Clergie as a means to mould Will’s wit and put it to profitable, clergy-friendly ends. This makes an important point: Wit, as well as Thouʒt, can support spiritually valid conclusions in the right circumstances, but, when divorced from clergy, each flounders. Scripture and Clergie, however, prove no more helpful to Will, because, with his anti-clergy prejudice, he lacks the proper disposition toward learning, and a proper disposition is the sine qua non of any medieval spiritual program. Thus, after Clergie’s address, Will simply relies on his own empirical reasoning once again (“I se ensamples myself”; B X.475) to deny clergy any role in the well-done, salvation-worthy life. The internal dreams of B XI encourage Will to adopt a different attitude toward the natural world, each from a different perspective and each without success. Both are lessons in the misuse of nature, as Will first fails to realize how fruitless sensual gratification turns out to be and then mishandles a prime opportunity to derive appropriate conclusions from the natural world.57 In the first dream, Fortune shows Will what life looks like when it seeks from nature pleasure rather than spiritual profit. When Rechelessnesse tells Will “it be wel do Fortune to folwe” (B XI.39), there is an apparent pun. To follow Fortune is not to Dowel but rather to choose Dowel’s inverted and perverted twin, “wel do.”58 Kynde instead tries to show Will the spiritual lessons that might be inferred from creation. When Will wonders who taught the magpie to build a nest and marvels that birds conceal their eggs so cleverly, he seems to be on the right track, making exactly the sorts of observations that should lead him to see God’s hand in creation. This is natural theology 101: the very least that any Christian should be able to apprehend from the natural world is the fact of its creation by God and his fundamental goodness.59 Kynde clearly encourages such reasoning, setting Will on “a mountaigne þat myddelerþe hiʒte,” so that he might “knowe / Thorugh ech a creature kynde [his] creatour to lovye” (B XI.324–26). Instead, 57. On the inner dreams and their relation to the action of the poem, see Schmidt, “Inner Dreams of Piers Plowman.” 58. My emphasis. The phrase “wel do” appears in all the referenced B manuscripts except F. 59. In Benjamin Major, for instance, Richard of St. Victor explains that the first kind of contemplation is to see visible things according to imagination. Those who do so “are amazed by how many, how great, how diverse, how beautiful and joyful are these corporeal things that we imbibe by means of corporeal senses. Marveling, we venerate and venerating, we marvel at the power, wisdom and generosity of that superessential creatrix” (C. vi; PL 196:70C: “corporalia ista quae sensu corporeo haurimus quam sint multa, quam magna, quam diversa, quam pulchra vel jucunda, et in his omnibus creatricis illius superessentiae potentiam, sapientiam, munificentiam mirando veneramur, et venerando miramur”). Trans. Zinn, Richard of St. Victor, 161.

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however, Will’s “mood chaunged,” and he concludes angrily that Reson rules all animals except man (B XI.369). His errant will again expresses itself in undisciplined reasoning that perverts spiritual truth, here leading him to misunderstand God’s purpose in creation. Without the guidance of revelation, Will follows his natural observations to whatever flawed conclusions they appear to support.

The Ymaginatif Doctrine That natural knowledge must coexist with clergy to be profitable is well demonstrated by Kynde, whom the C text expressly introduces as Clergie’s aid—“kynde cam clergie to helpe” (C XIII.131). Kynde thus seeks to establish continuity between natural and spiritual knowledge, but Will resists, and it is only with Ymaginatif ’s overt instruction on the topic and the correct functioning of his imagination that he can do otherwise. Ymaginatif ’s discussion with Will has typically been interpreted as the site of clergy’s rejection in the poem, thus paving the way for the ascendancy of affect in Will’s quest for Dowel. Interestingly, Ymaginatif serves this function whether he is aligned with clergy or affect: Fiona Somerset calls Ymaginatif “the poem’s most committed spokesperson for ‘clergie’ in the conventional status-bound sense,” whereas Wittig sees Ymaginatif as demonstrating “the bounds of intellectus.”60 Either by promoting the poem’s intellectual orientation in such a way as to demonstrate its failings or by criticizing it directly, Ymaginatif is seen to consolidate a movement away from clergy and toward affect. Ymaginatif, however, cares more about reconciling natural knowledge and revelation than choosing one over the other, and by teaching Will to do the same, he schools Will in the rudiments of natural theology.

60. Somerset, Clerical Discourse, 39; and Wittig, “‘Piers Plowman’ B, Passus IX–XII,” 276. Somerset’s argument is close to that of Simpson, “Role of Scientia,” 62. N. Zeeman (Piers Plowman, 245–62) expresses a position similar to Wittig’s. Implicit in these comments about Ymaginatif is a more basic disagreement about the character, that is, whether he possesses intellectual authority. Minnis, for instance, grants him significant authority, though opposing scholars for whom “Langland’s conception of imagination is an unusually elevated one” (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 91), while Hanna is concerned to limit the purview of Ymaginatif ’s learning and authority, which he notes are “not at all august” (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 93). By reading Ymaginatif in the context of scholastic theories of cognition, this chapter obviously accepts Ymaginatif as both learned and authoritative, but it does not require Langland to have had in-depth knowledge of scholastic philosophy. We have seen that the Aristotelian concept of imagination to which I claim Ymaginatif is partially indebted had made its way into medieval religious literature well before Langland composed any version of his poem.

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By the time that Will encounters Ymaginatif, he has expended considerable effort repelling clergy, particularly in the earlier passus of the third vision. The vision, which John Alford calls “the most detailed analysis of the learning process in Middle English literature,” nonetheless features a hostile, willful learner.61 Will resists his lessons more than he learns from them, as he demonstrates in the inaccurate summary of his lessons that he provides at the end of B XI. His persistent confusion when he comes across Ymaginatif does not reflect badly on his teachers or on clergy, but instead demonstrates Will’s need precisely for clergy, as Ymaginatif shows. Ymaginatif contrasts salutary knowledge, defined as the proper balancing of natural knowledge and clergy, with unsalutary knowledge, which is the cognitive overreaching demonstrated by Will in earlier passus. Ymaginatif ’s prescribed approach to knowing therefore remedies Will’s cognitive and dispositional problems. By learning to make use of experience in the way that Ymaginatif outlines, Will will also learn to quash the hubristic tendencies that have derailed his quest for Dowel in the past. Ymaginatif enters into these themes in a less than straightforward manner, and although scholars criticize Wit’s speech for flagrant disorganization, Ymaginatif ’s requires at least as much parsing.62 After introducing himself and criticizing Will, Ymaginatif jumps into a warning against excess, urging married and religious to act in such a way that befits their station and indicting the wealthy who do not give as they should (B XII.29–58). As he ends his introductory discourse on excess, he seems to change topics abruptly with the line, “Clergie and kynde wit comeþ of siʒte and techyng” (B XII.64). He informs Will that he can avoid cognitive excess, or hubris, by submitting natural knowledge to the oversight of clergy. The common thread in Ymaginatif ’s initial and scattered comments is excess, whether material or spiritual, recalling Studie’s dual concern with misspent words and money. Some seek spiritual authority that their works do not support while others acquire more goods than they profitably distribute, and all such overreachers are in spiritual peril. These people demonstrate Ymaginatif ’s theme at this stage, “Catel and kynde wit was combraunce to hem alle” (B XII.45). When material possessions and natural reasoning outpace their proper, spiritual use, they lead to one’s damnation.63 Ymaginatif implies that “clergie” 61. Alford, “Langland’s Learning,” 3. 62. On Wit, see Frank, Piers Plowman and the Scheme of Salvation, 51; and Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 112. 63. The C text shifts emphasis somewhat. Not nearly as concerned with material overreachers, C XIV expands on the dangers of cognitive overreaching, adding Ymaginatif ’s advice to Will

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and “kynde wit,” when unified, decrease the risk of cognitive excess. Toward the end of his speech, he makes it clear that Will overreached both when he discussed at the end of B X who was saved and why, and when he sought to know the causes of natural phenomena in opposition to Reson in B XI (B XII.217–26). In doing so, Will exceeded the bounds of both clergy and natural knowledge. Regarding Will’s interest in the reason why animals are situated and flowers are colored as they are, Ymaginatif says, “Clergie ne kynde wit ne knew nevere þe cause, / Ac kynde knoweþ þe cause hymself, no creature ellis” (B XII.225–26). By saying that such information cannot be grasped from nature or clergy, Ymaginatif suggests that natural knowledge, here “kynde wit,” and clergy together define the proper boundaries of Will’s knowledge. Ymaginatif repeatedly emphasizes that the two need to operate in conjunction with each other, and he does so explicitly. After defending the value of clergy, Ymaginatif tells Will, “Forþi I counseille þee for cristes sake clergie þat þow lovye; / For kynde wit is of his kyn and neiʒe Cosynes boþe / To our lord” (B XII.92–94). Clergy’s value here derives not only from its origins in Christ but from its proximity to natural knowledge. As Ymaginatif summarizes most clearly in the C text, “So grace is a gifte of god and kynde wit a chaunce / And clergie a connynge of kynde wittes techyng” (C XIV.33–34). Although grace is God’s to give, clergy in one sense derives from natural knowledge and so depends on the natural world. The dependence of clergy on natural knowledge does not mean, however, that natural observations determine the content of clergy, but rather (and counterintuitively) the opposite. Although clergy follows upon natural knowledge, it also supervises such knowledge: “And ʒut is clergie to comende for cristes love more / Then eny connyng of kynde wit but clergi hit reule” (C XIV.35–36). Natural knowledge unsupervised by the truths of revelation lacks merit. Clergy may derive from natural knowledge but it also turns that knowledge in a spiritually profitable direction. Ymaginatif thus diagnoses Will’s fundamental problem in the third vision. Unwilling to submit his natural observations to clergy, he is guilty of cognitive excess. As we saw in his exchanges with his Thouʒt and Wit, Will’s natural faculties cannot proceed independently to spiritual topics without significant error. Will becomes like the pagan philosophers whose natural knowledge, while commendable, never saved anyone because it confined itself to the natural world (B XII.133, 135). What that he not “lere þat is defended” (XIV.6) as part of his larger emphasis on accepting rather than questioning God’s will, the topic with which C’s Ymaginatif concludes.

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Will needs, and what Ymaginatif tells him he needs, is to let clergy determine the conclusions he reaches on the basis of his natural observations. Ymaginatif demonstrates the direction such natural observations should take in his analogy of the peacock and the lark at the end of the passus. Ymaginatif there turns his attention to birds and beasts and the “ensaumples” that men have long taken from them (B XII.233–37, 237). He continues with a comparison of peacocks to rich men and larks to poor men, demonstrating the theme he introduced early in the passus, the spiritual dangers of possession and excess. Accordingly, after noting that the peacock’s lavish plumage prevents it from flying, he concludes, “So is possession peyne of pens and of nobles / To alle hem þat it holdeþ til hir tail be plukked” (B XII.250–51). Ymaginatif implicitly contrasts the wrong sorts of inquiries, namely, Will’s seeking after “þe whyes” whose understanding belongs to God alone (B XII.217), with the right sort, namely, those which use the natural world to illustrate spiritual truths. Wealth imperils the soul as lush plumage imperils the peacock, making it easy prey because it cannot easily flee. Ymaginatif has also proceeded in the proper order, discussing the dangers of possession directly early in the passus and then using the natural world to reinforce a conclusion he has already established. Clergy, here rooted in the biblical passages about charity and wealth that Ymaginatif uses for his support, precedes natural knowledge, which functions only to illustrate it. Ymaginatif thus offers his discussion of the peacock and the lark as a corrective and alternative to Will’s less profitable use of his experience. Instead of using the natural world as a basis from which to question divine mysteries, he should use it to support spiritual instruction. It is therefore fitting that Ymaginatif ’s speech should abound in metaphors and puns, since Ymaginatif excels at making unexpected connections.64 To take one of many examples, Ymaginatif describes clergie as the “roote” of Christ’s love immediately before explaining that God “wroot” to instruct people—clergy is the written root (B XII.71, 72). He tends to compare spiritual matters to natural ones, using the example of swimmers in the Thames to demonstrate the necessity of clergy, mentioning the near-stoning of the adulterous woman as well as the saving of criminals who know the

64. Ymaginatif ’s tendency in this direction is well noted. See, for instance, Harwood’s discussion of the prominence of metaphor and similitudes generally in “Imaginative in Piers Plowman,” 255–59, as well as Hanna’s characterization of Ymaginatif ’s language as figurative and punning (“Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 85) and his several observations about Ymaginatif ’s interest in establishing similarities (“Langland’s Ymaginatif”).

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neck verse to demonstrate the value of clergy, likening the different positions of the blessed in heaven to the seating arrangement at a formal meal, and of course discussing the damnation of the greedy through peacocks. Ymaginatif overtly makes connections, albeit often bizarre ones, and they help to define his purpose in the poem. It is Ymaginatif ’s job to harmonize revelation and natural knowledge, to show how the natural world supports spiritual truths.

Will’s Lesson Learned In helping Will to transform sensory data into spiritual truth, Ymaginatif represents a creative adaptation of an Aristotelian faculty of the soul. Although he fades from view after the third vision, his influence remains, for it is surely the imaginative power that helps Will to make better use of his experience in the remainder of the poem. Under the tutelage of various guides, Will minimizes the distance between his experience of the natural world and its spiritual significance until experience just is spiritual in the later passus of the poem. That such minimization is the point of the late passus is suggested by various of Will’s guides, who model for him the proper method of reasoning by interpreting the natural world spiritually. As noted above, it has become common to read the poem’s progression as one from intellect to nature or affect, a transition generally located around B XII or XIII, but Ymaginatif instead indicates that Will henceforth needs to wed nature to revelation, and the subsequent development of the poem indicates that Will has taken Ymaginatif ’s words to heart. As Will’s own ability to reconcile the two increases, so does his spiritual progress in the final third of the poem. Will not only finds greater continuity between nature and doctrine, but extends the boundaries of his own natural life to encompass key events in salvation history. Experience realizes its spiritual potential when it perceives its biblical roots. The emphasis on experience in the remainder of the poem is unmistakable: Conscience joins Patience on a pilgrimage to learn more, Will uses this pilgrimage to learn to identify the sins that can accompany the active life, Will touches the tree of charity, he witnesses the passion and the harrowing of hell, and he lives Armageddon. Further, Peace explains that Christ’s incarnation reflects Christ’s own need for experience in the natural world, and the experience of Christ, particularly of his blood, earns Longinus instant enlightenment.65 Nature becomes spiritual, and bib65. Christ’s physical appearance is often credited with effecting mental illumination, as in the Meditationes vitae Christi, where the Magi are enlightened by it. See MVC, ix, CCCM 153:42:

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lical narrative expresses itself through nature. What does Armageddon signify at the poem’s end but the dangers of clerical corruption? Will translates the sins within society into biblical terms and depicts the true significance of clerical corruption.66 As in meditations on Christ’s life, here experience penetrates temporal distance most vividly when directed toward episodes of Christ’s life. Christ’s life is uniquely accessible, but Piers Plowman shows that it still takes considerable effort for Will to reach the stage at which he can immerse himself in it. However accessed, Christ’s life is not just the paramount means of spiritual growth but its very essence and achievement. Living biblical narrative, Will shows that he understands its relevance to his own life and salvation. His success in this respect casts light on imagination not only because imagination was typically linked to gospel meditations, but because Will accomplishes in the poem’s final third the exact work that Ymaginatif counseled him to perform. He unites natural knowledge to revealed truth so firmly that he effaces the boundary between them. In the final third of the poem, not only does experience become spiritual, but dreamed experience becomes all the more closely connected to lived experience. Will’s sleep cycles become shorter and shorter, thus drawing more attention to the relationship between the dreams and his life and also drawing the one more vividly into the other. Further, the attention to Will’s waking devotion as he creeps to the cross and the extensive liturgical references which carefully place Will in a church, listening to mass during holy week when the final visions occur, insist that his present-day devotion is inextricable from its basis in the passion. The church’s own commemoration of the passion provides access to its historical reality. At the same time, Will is able to translate liturgy into biblical event, thus integrating the Bible into his devotion.67 He moves from present to past in a way that unites them more closely together. In doing so, he follows the lead not only of Ymaginatif but of his later guides, particularly Patience and Anima, who insist that spiritual truths be perceived through the natural world by themselves repeatedly associating

“Et benigne respicit eos et illi multum delectantur in eo, tam visu mentali tanquam intus edocti; et illuminati ab eo quam corporali, quia speciosus erat pre filiis hominum.” 66. The fraught, unresolved ending of the poem is thus inevitable: although looking through the lens of Scripture, Will still sees the society of which he is part and whose future is uncertain. There is no possibility for heavenly ascent or peace here because Will remains within the realm of the natural, even if the natural is here resolved to its spiritual meaning. 67. As Kirk notes regarding B XVIII, “The liturgy makes the past present in the world of Langland’s and the society’s ‘now,’ whereby history is (literally) represented in its immanence to the life of that community” (“Langland’s Narrative Christology,” 27).

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the one with the other. The difference is even visible at the formal level, for, as Helen Barr has shown, Will’s immersion into biblical narrative corresponds with the poem’s greater incorporation of Latin references into the alliterative line in B XVIII.68 Prior to his interactions with these guides, Will repeatedly makes spiritual conclusions based on his experiences, but he does so badly, rationalizing without a net. What Ymaginatif teaches Will is to rein in his generalizing tendencies and redirect his observations toward their proper, spiritual conclusions. Ralph Hanna notes that Ymaginatif “generalizes from the particulars experience has provided, perceives some connection among specific, yet apparently dispersed, sense data, and groups these connected items together under abstract categories.”69 While for Hanna this indicates Ymaginatif ’s lack of sophistication, from the perspective of Aristotelian philosophy, the process here described simply is the process of knowing. As Will’s later guides show, grouping such data and making deductions from it in this way is Will’s best means to reach Dowel. Although Ymaginatif reasons eccentrically, the conclusions he reaches are above reproach, spiritually speaking. He shows that nature is flexible with regard to interpretation, as long as the conclusion it supports is accurate. His successors teach the same lesson, positioning Will more clearly within the world to show him how he might best understand it. When Will witnesses the passion and then the harrowing of hell “secundum scripturas,” he not only shows himself to have been a good student of Ymaginatif, who first taught him to unite nature to its spiritual significance, but flaunts his increased capacity to use his imagination. Rendering nature spiritual and biblical narrative natural, Will showcases the powers of his honed and properly motivated imagination. The poem’s ending remains ambiguous, but it is clearly a victory for Will to have immersed himself in the drama, to live the crisis that draws the poem to its close. Imagination figures into a great deal of late-medieval religious literature, but Langland shows with particular clarity that its use requires rather than precludes intellectual effort. Will’s need to wed clergy to natural knowledge reflects his more basic need to bring his intellectual resources to bear on his experience of the natural world. The conclusion that this chapter supports, that Will learns to see in nature the truth of doctrine and thus to merge the two together, might seem to lessen Will’s achievement at the moment it describes it. Ymaginatif ’s lesson that clergy needs to guide Will’s natural reasoning might seem to curtail his freedom and to provide precisely the 68. Barr, “Use of Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman.” 69. Hanna, “Langland’s Ymaginatif,” 82–83.

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sort of constraint that leads to scholars’ contentions about the undeveloped subjectivity of medieval people.70 Will might thus appear flat, or a cog in an ecclesiastical wheel, rather than a self-determined character.71 It is perhaps to avoid such a reading that, in Langland scholarship, “clergy” has been the less favored member of the “clergie”/“kynde knowynge” binary. Associated with Latin, institutions (the church and the university), the intellect, hierarchy, communalism, systematization, cognition, and formal learning, clergy is easily derogated in favor of kynde knowynge, which is associated with experience, action, will, affect, the vernacular, the laity, charity, individualism, and poetry.72 Kynde knowynge is allied to human nature itself. However, Ymaginatif ’s eccentric creativity and the widely acknowledged excellence of the poetry in the final section of the poem require a more generous perspective toward clergy. The final section is precisely where Will has learned to inhabit biblical narrative, and yet his conforming of his own experiences to biblical narrative does not render them flat. Rather, the poetry of the final section of the poem is especially vivid. It does not suffer from the weight of doctrinal determinacy, in part, because doctrine is hardly as onedimensional and obvious as it is often taken to be.73 The capacious framework that biblical narrative provides here incites creativity and licenses clever reinterpretation. Beginning with the tree of charity’s coming to life in B XVI, the character of the poetry of Piers Plowman changes. The allegory had mostly confined itself to people and institutions, but now objects come to life along with biblical stories and characters. It is hard not to associate imagination with these changes. If this chapter’s argument is right and Will’s newfound ability to immerse himself in biblical narrative is a result of his learning to use imag­­ ination properly, then we might fairly conclude that Will’s well-deployed imagination also contributes to the special vividness of the poem’s final third. He sees the spiritual significance of the natural world more clearly,

70. On these claims, see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; and more recently, Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance En­ gland, 1–23. Such histories of subjectivity are criticized by Aers, “Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists.” 71. Kay describes as “critical orthodoxy,” the valuing of “playfulness, irony, multiplicity, and indeterminacy” over unity, and certainly over a doctrinally determined one (Place of Thought, xi). Kay disputes this perspective, as do I. 72. Many of these associations can be found in N. Zeeman, Piers Plowman, and Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience.” 73. Addressing this issue directly, Justice shows that “belief” in the Middle Ages was, and was supposed to be, “uncertain, difficult, inaccessible” (“Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” 12).

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and as a result the world appears to him richer and more colorful. Imagination functions not only as a cognitive and spiritual resource, then, but also as a poetic one. Piers Plowman thus depicts an imagination that is at the height of its powers. However, the special relationship between imagination’s cognitive and meditative work that this book has been exploring does not long survive Langland. The following chapter will show that meditations come increasingly to limit the purview of imagination to the sensible world and to redefine the scope of meditation accordingly. Providing further evidence that the fates of imagination and meditation were linked, such meditations also provide a vantage point from which to appreciate the cognitive power of earlier gospel meditations.

Six

Imagination in Translation: Love’s Myrrour and The Prickynge of Love

If this book has succeeded in demonstrating that imagination in its technical, cognitive aspect was pervasive in medieval philosophy and literature, then it answers one question—Why was imagining Christ’s life considered an especially useful thing to do?—only to provoke another: What happened? How did imagination-based religious literature become associated with lay simplicity? This chapter addresses the question by analyzing two Middle English translations of popular Latin meditations, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ (a Middle English translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi) and the anonymous Prickynge of Love (a translation of the long text of the Stimulus amoris). It argues that the translations scale back the purpose and potency of imaginative meditation by limiting the scope of imagination proper to sensible, earthly things. Gospel meditations were not simple in their inception, but were recalibrated in order to meet the perceived needs of a wider, less learned audience. This change reflects, in part, the growing concern with various forms of unrest, social and theological, that made the creation of innocuous forms of lay piety a desideratum. It also reflects decreased interest in theories of cognition, and imagination’s role in them, in late-medieval philosophy. Untethered to a philosophical tradition that invested it with cognitive authority, imagination instead features prominently in debates about visionary experience and the Eucharist, among other things. As a result, imagination’s potential for deception received increased attention, and although the tradition of imaginative meditation that this book has been charting did not die out, it did become less prominent. . On this, see Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change.” . See, for instance, Fogleman, “Finding a Middle Way,” and Phillips, “John Wyclif and the Optics of the Eucharist.”

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This chapter contrasts Love’s Myrrour and the Prickynge with the texts studied up to this point, a project that inevitably requires us to see what is missing in the later meditations. They simply do not share the same purpose as the earlier meditations we have examined. However, my position is not that the later meditations are inferior to their predecessors. They certainly have their own richness, one that manifests itself, for instance, in their distinctive narrative and performative power. My argument is not that meditations became worse over time, but that imagination as Bonaventure conceived of it became less visible in later gospel meditations, which counsel their readers and hearers to imagine only Christ’s earthly life. They alter the purpose of imaginative meditation by altering the function of the faculty, imagination, on which such meditations depend. For this reason, medieval gospel meditation is not best studied from the perspective of Love’s Myrrour and the Prickynge. Both substantially revise their source texts with the effect of limiting the cognitive and spiritual capacity of imagination. In doing so, they speak to their times, for they reflect not only the church’s heightened sensitivity to theological overreaching but also a change of emphasis in medieval philosophies of cognition. The former having been the subject of much excellent criticism, I turn to the latter. Histories of medieval theories of cognition typically end in the 1340s in recognition of the fact that philosophical interest in cognition dropped off significantly after mid-century. The platform for assigning imagination a special role in cognition diminished accordingly. Even before this dissipation of interest, however, the theories of cognition discussed in chapter 1 had become increasingly controversial, and imagination had begun to garner less authority within them. Imagination continued to perform the familiar function of handing phantasms over to the intellect. As the Franciscan “realist” John Duns Scotus explains early in the fourteenth century, “The essences of things are known in virtue of the agent intellect, which participates in the Uncreated Light that illumines the phantasms and in this way purity of truth results.” However, other components of earlier theories of cognition, especially the doctrines of species and of direct divine illumination, began to vary considerably. These components had provided . In addition to Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” see Hudson, Premature Reformation, and Aston, Lollards and Reformers. Late-medieval theories of cognition have also been thoroughly studied, especially thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century theories. See Tachau, Vision and Certitude, and Pasnau, Theories of Cognition. . John Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, I.iii.iv, ad 1, Philosophical Writings, 131: “virtute intellectus agentis, qui est participatio lucis increatae, illustrantis super phantasmata, cognoscitur quidditas rei, et ex hoc habetur sinceritas vera.” Trans. Wolter, Philosophical Writings, 132.

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imagination with much of its power in the realm of cognition, and their contestation left imagination weakened. Illumination-based theories of cognition, with their illumined species, gave way to alternatives that championed an individual’s natural faculties and, in the process, shifted attention from the divine to the natural in discussions of cognition. As Timothy Noone writes, “Although the tradition of divine illumination dominated discussion of epistemology in the second half of the thirteenth century, by the second decade of the fourteenth illumination was no longer considered a viable option.” Preferring to certify cognition through the accurate functioning of natural faculties rather than divine illumination, philosophers like Scotus and Ockham gave God a less direct role in human understanding. Imagination still participated importantly in knowledge acquisition, but typically without the close contact with God that had made it so potent a cognitive and devotional tool for Bonaventure. Criticisms of species appear in thirteenth-century philosophy, intermittently in the first half of the century and more frequently toward its end. William of Auvergne, for instance, provided an early argument against intelligible species, as well as the agent intellect. It was later in the century, however, with the philosophy of the controversy-ridden Franciscan Peter John Olivi, that the rejection of the species doctrine became a prominent issue. What Olivi objected to was the notion that species emanated from an object to the relevant sense organ, thus rendering the individual in some sense passive. To attribute any degree of passivity to the intellect was, in Olivi’s view, to set up a slippery slope that would lead an individual to the more perilous conclusion that the will was passive. He feared, he said, that philosophers might see in the reception of such species “the destruction of free will and consequently of the entire faith.” In what became a particularly popular criticism, he further objected that the doctrine of multiplied species led to what modern philosophers would

. Noone, “Divine Illumination,” 382. . See William of Auvergne, Tractatus de anima. . On Olivi’s tribulations, see Burr, Persecution of Peter Olivi. . See, for instance, Olivi, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 58, ad 14, 2:461: “Quia autem illud quod meo iudicio super omnia movit multos ad credendum quod voluntas nostra sit totaliter passiva fuit et est hoc quod pro firmo tenent omnes alias potentias esse passivas.” (That which, according to my judgment, above all moves many to believe that our will is totally passive was and is the idea that all our powers are passive.) . Olivi, Epistola ad R, c. 13, p. 55: “Ego enim timens in posterum in commune vulgi philosophantis deduci destructionem liberi arbitrii ac per consequens fidei totius.”

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call representationalism, with the intellect perceiving not the object but the species that it emitted. The doctrine of species, in this view, opened up a dangerous gap between the intellect and its object, inviting concerns regarding deception.10 This gap especially troubled the fourteenth-century Franciscan “nominalist” William of Ockham, who ended up eliminating all species from his philosophy in order to put the intellect into less mediated contact with its object.11 Certitude, in fact, became a pressing issue in late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century philosophy. Whereas illumination had provided it—as Etienne Gilson notes, one adhering to a doctrine of direct divine illumination “could distrust sense knowledge without falling into skepticism”—some late-medieval philosophers instead found such naked dependence on divine aid disconcerting.12 They preferred to find certitude in natural faculties themselves. The secular master Henry of Ghent, best known for his participation in the commission that compiled the Condemnations of 1277, is typically credited with introducing the issue of skepticism into late-medieval philosophy.13 Ancient debates over skepticism were not foreign to the medieval West, having been preserved in Augustine’s widely circulated refutation of skepticism, Contra academicos (386). Nevertheless, the contentiousness that had surrounded the issue in and after the second Academy abated in subsequent centuries, remaining relatively dormant in the West until the late thirteenth century, when Henry wrote his Summa quaestionum ordinarium. Henry dedicates the opening questions of the text to a recitation and then rebuttal of ancient arguments for skepticism, and the fact that Henry’s sources largely predate him by nearly a millennium indicates how silent the contro-

10. Thus, Olivi suggests a scenario in Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 58, ad 14, 2:470: “Praeterea, ponatur quod Deus talem speciem exhiberet aspectui nostro re non existente aut a nobis absente, tunc ita bene videretur res sicut si esset praesens et actu existens, immo non esset ibi nec plus nec minus.” (“Let it be supposed that God might exhibit such a species to our attention when the thing does not exist or is absent from us. Then the thing would be seen just as well as if it were present and actually existent, although it wouldn’t any more or less be there.”) Trans. Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, 292. Perler (“Skepticism”) discusses the centrality of species to fourteenth-century debates about skepticism. 11. For Ockham’s most developed discussion of species, see his Reportatio, II.12–13 and III.2, Opera theologica, 5:251–310 and 6:43–97. On this topic, see Stump, “Mechanism of Cog­ nition: Ockham on Mediating Species.” 12. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 447. 13. Henry attests to his participation in Quodlibeta, II.9, Opera theologica 6:67. Tachau writes that Henry “introduced the issue of existential certitude into late medieval discussions of the acquisition of scientific knowledge” (Vision and Certitude, 37), and Pasnau offers Henry as “a precursor to the increasingly skeptical tone of much fourteenth-century philosophy” (Mind and Knowledge, 93).

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versy had been in the interim. Like Augustine, Henry neutralizes the threat of skepticism with illumination. An individual’s natural faculties need not be flawless when he or she has access to a constant stream of divine enlightenment.14 Paradoxically, however, Henry’s antidote to skepticism appeared to later philosophers, especially Duns Scotus, to invite skepticism. Steven Marrone makes note of the “curious” fact that Augustinian illumination lost its authority shortly after men like Henry had made “the most vigorous attempts” to locate it in their theologies.15 The relationship between the two can, however, be read less as paradoxical and more as causative. Illumination became so potent a force in Henry of Ghent’s theology that it rendered natural faculties secondary to the process of knowledge acquisition, a position that made some later philosophers uncomfortable. What Henry saw as the justification for illumination, namely, the fallibility of created faculties, Scotus saw as too high a price to pay for divine aid. Scotus accordingly sought to shore up natural faculties, relying on innately knowable propositions to ensure the accuracy of cognition.16 However, once the question of certitude arose, it proved difficult to contain, and it was only a matter of time, here a few decades, before Nicholas of Autrecourt and John of Mirecourt were on trial in Paris for advancing the skeptical argument that the intellect does not actually attain truth.17 The controversy that began to surround cognition contributed to its lesser prominence in the philosophy of the later fourteenth century, and imagination did not emerge from the various tribulations unscathed. In the work of some of the most important philosophers of the century, imagination lacked the contact with God that had made it a devotional, even mystical, resource for Bonaventure. These philosophical developments surely do not account on their own for the altered function of imagination within Love’s Myrrour and the Prickynge of Love, but they might well have contributed to it. If the philosophy of imagination fueled the cognitive and spiritual power of earlier gospel meditations, as I have argued, then it follows that later meditations, which limit that power in key respects, should be without that same influence.

14. For a systematic discussion of Henry’s illumination doctrine and its various stages of development, see Marrone, Truth and Scientific Knowledge. 15. Marrone, Truth and Scientific Knowledge, 10. On the decline of the Augustinian doctrine of illumination, see also Pasnau, “Henry of Ghent and the Twilight of Divine Illumination.” 16. “There is,” Scotus writes, “always some proposition to set the mind or intellect aright regarding which acts of the senses are true and which are false” (Opus Oxoniensis, I.iii.iv, Philosophical Writings, 113: “semper aliqua propositio rectificat mentem vel intellectum de actibus sensus quis sit verus et quis falsus.” Trans. Wolter, Philosophical Writings, 114). 17. See Kennedy, “Philosophical Skepticism,” and Perler, “Skepticism.”

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This chapter argues that the two vernacular translations it studies convert imagination into a tool for meditation on Christ’s humanity that no longer leads to his divinity. The key difference, however, is not language. Various Middle English texts, such as the anonymous Book to a Mother from the late fourteenth century, treat meditation on Christ’s life as a supremely effective spiritual tool, and various Latin meditations, as we have seen, do not. Because a good deal of scholarship has been written in recent decades on the political commitments of vernacular religious literature, it is worth noting that this chapter’s argument makes no claim about the whole of vernacular religious literature or its ideology.18 Sometimes such literature is more daring in its content than Latin literature, sometimes less so, for as Steven Justice observes, “the vernacular has in itself no fixed ideological function.”19 The recent interest in vernacular theology has tended to emphasize the shared and progressive politics of vernacular literature. 20 It is my position that late-medieval vernacular religious literature often seems unequal to, and perhaps uninterested in, the political work that it is asked to perform. Indeed, the Middle English meditations studied in this chapter limit the potency of meditation relative to their Latin exemplars. The politics of texts surely need to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Both of the Middle English translations considered here, as well as their Latin source texts, enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages. The Prickynge of Love is a translation of the extended Latin text of the Stimulus amoris and was made around 1380, perhaps by Walter Hilton.21 It survives in sixteen manuscripts, eleven from the fifteenth century. It is presumably this translation that Margery Kempe has in mind in her repeated references to the Stimulus amoris, although separate, piecemeal translations of the Stimulus appear elsewhere, most notably in the Chastising of God’s Children.22 The Myrrour of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ survives in sixty-four manuscripts. It appears to have been the most popular new piece of literature in fifteenthcentury England and was published at least ten times between 1484 and 18. On those politics, see N. Watson, “Visions of Inclusion”; Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular; Somerset and Watson, Vulgar Tongue; Gillespie, “Vernacular Theology”; and KerbyFulton, Books under Suspicion, 358–96. 19. Justice, “General Words: Response to Elizabeth Schirmer,” 389. 20. Although McGinn defined “vernacular theology” rather broadly, as “a reflective presentation of Christian belief” written in the vernacular and made public (McGinn, “Introduction,” 6), Watson expanded the claims of the phrase in an article written three years later. For him, vernacular theology unites texts according to their language and content. They share interests and beliefs that correspond to their vernacularity (“Visions of Inclusion”). 21. For an introduction to the authorship debate, see Sargent, “Bonaventura English,” 161–62. 22. Bryan discusses Kempe’s references to the Stimulus amoris in Looking Inward, 127.

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1606.23 Michael Sargent calls the Myrrour “one of the most well-read books in late-medieval England,” falling below only the Wycliffite Bible, the Prick of Conscience, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with respect to the number of surviving manuscripts.24 Both the MVC and the Myrrour are the most popular representatives, in their respective languages, of one of the most popular genres of prose devotional literature in late-medieval England, but the Myrrour has the added distinction of institutional authorization.25 Because of its official approval by Archbishop Arundel in 1410, Love’s Myrrour has influentially been read as an expression of what the fifteenth-century church wanted lay devotion to be.26 The translated texts conceive of the capabilities, purpose, and proper audience of gospel meditations in strikingly different ways than their source texts. Both translators self-consciously direct their translations to a non-clerical—whether lay or mixed-life—audience, and both shape their treatment of gospel meditations to suit its needs. Confining the scope of imagination’s activity to the sensible world, they disqualify it from supporting the ascent to Christ’s divinity that had made gospel meditation so powerful for earlier authors.

Love’s Audience We start with Love’s Myrrour, although it is the later text, because it is more explicit about its motivations and purpose.27 Little is known of Nicholas Love’s life beyond his station first as rector and then, beginning in 1410, as prior of the Carthusians’ Mount Grace Charterhouse. The study of his text has focused around its style, Love’s omissions (his version has sixty-three chapters; the original has one hundred and eight), his additions (especially those pertaining to Lollards), and the manuscripts, many of which possess apparatus and ornamentation sophisticated enough for Vincent Gillespie 23. See Hellinga’s “Nicholas Love in Print” for more on the print history of Love’s Myrrour. 24. Sargent, introduction to Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, by Love, ix. Sargent is surely confining himself to Middle English texts. Doyle shows that scholarly interest in Love’s Myrrour was slow in coming, failing to appear in a survey of English literature until 1947 (“Study of Nicholas Love’s Myrrour,” 167). 25. Sargent notes that the forty-four copies of the MVC in English libraries, the vast majority indicating English provenance, constitute “the largest single national group” (introduction to Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, by Love, xix). 26. See Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” 852–56. 27. At least ten Middle English translations of part of the Meditationes vitae Christi survive, although Love’s Myrrour is the only complete medieval translation. See Salter, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, 102–3; along with the section entitled “Non-Love Versions of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050–1500, ed. Hartung, 3106–7.

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to label the text “a devotional thoroughbred.”28 The Myrrour’s alterations to the original Latin text have been noted more for their overall fidelity to the original than their departure from it. Thus, Elizabeth Salter’s authoritative study of Love affirms, “Love preserves the content and disposition of the Meditationes in his translation, making only such changes as are forced upon him by the demands of a wider, more varied class of readers.” He alters the text only by moving “towards greater simplicity of thought, and directness of presentation.”29 I agree that Love’s concerns for his audience motivated his alterations, but the audience he appeals to is the one that he selects for himself, shaping the text to accommodate what he takes to be their needs. In the process, Love significantly recasts the purpose of the MVC, redefining it both in his original prologue and in the individual meditations that constitute the text. The Myrrour self-consciously directs itself to a lay or “symple” audience.30 While the MVC was written to a Poor Clare, and so a member of an enclosed religious community, the Myrrour explicitly redirects the text away from the “religiouse woman” to “symple creatures.”31 As Kantik Ghosh notes, Love “aligns the affective tradition of ‘carnal’ meditation on Christ’s humanity with intellectual and religious infancy much more sharply than does his source.”32 Befitting this shift in audience is of course one in language. However, although Love presents himself in the prologue as a simple translator, using a time-honored rhetorical technique best known through Chaucer, he makes a complicated and subtle argument about the content of the MVC. He explains that he has produced this translation because the MVC, “for þe fructuouse matere þerof [,] sterying specialy to þe love of Jesu and also 28. Gillespie, “Vernacular Books of Religion,” 331. On the Myrrour’s translation of the MVC, see Salter, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, 39–54; and Sargent, introduction to Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, by Love, 38–54. On Love’s possibly anti-Lollard sympathies, see Stanbury, Visual Object of Desire, 172–90; N. Watson, “Conceptions of the Word” and “Censorship and Cultural Change”; and Ghosh, “Nicholas Love” and Wycliffite Heresy. 29. Salter, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, 320–21. 30. The word that Love most often uses to describe his readers is “symple,” but “lay” is the standard term in scholarship on the text. See, for instance, Ghosh, “Nicholas Love”; Gibson, Theater of Devotion; Beckwith, Christ’s Body; and Stanbury, Visual Object of Desire. 31. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, prologue, 10. The same text is reprinted in The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, also edited by Michael Sargent. The two editions have the same page and line breaks, but the reading text dispenses of much of the critical apparatus of the earlier critical edition. Unless otherwise noted, I cite the critical edition. 32. Ghosh, “Nicholas Love,” 56. Ghosh likewise claims that the Myrrour “explicitly casts the original’s status and implied audience through a series of changes designed to adapt the text to the alleged intellectual and spiritual (in)capacities of a lay audience,” but he says no more about the changes (56).

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for þe pleyn sentence to comun undirstondyng[,] semeþ amonges oþere sovereynly edifyng to symple creatures þe whiche as children haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyʒte doctryne.”33 Thus, the rich yet comprehensible matter of the MVC constitutes milk particularly appropriate to “symple creatures.” Love accordingly suggests that content that was appropriate to a religious woman is now appropriate to a “symple” audience, and, through translation, he renders the text accessible to its new target audience. Love might seem here simply to address directly a general devotional trend whereby educated lay readers increasingly embraced vernacular texts originally written for women religious. However, Love does not simply translate the content of the MVC, as his foregoing comments suggest he will. He makes systematic alterations that belie his claims about the inherent simplicity of the content of the MVC and complicate his equation of gospel meditations with lay spirituality. Love’s changes far exceed verbum pro verbo translation, not simply because of his additions and excisions but because of his systematic alterations to the meditations he describes. Although presenting his translation with the justification that the Latin of the MVC impeded it from fulfilling the purpose to which its content and method called it, he nonetheless alters that content to make it more suitably lay. Typically silent about his alterations, he acknowledges their existence when he offers his translation “with more putte to in certeyn partes & wiþdrawyng of diverse auctoritis and maters as it semeth to þe wryter hereof moste spedefull & edifyng to hem þat bene of symple undirstondyng.”34 Some of the text’s copiers sought to make these changes transparent, for twenty-seven of the surviving manuscripts repeatedly place an “N” or “B” (for Bonaventure) into the margins to signal changes.35 The notations are not comprehensive, nor can they be, given the often subtle alterations Love makes to the text. Contrary to the purpose of their notations, the scribes show how pervasive Love’s changes are and therefore how difficult they are to track. The subtlety of many of Love’s alterations, however, does not minimize their significance. Love charges the MVC with obscuring its essential simplicity by citing “diverse auctoritis” and discussing sophisticated “maters,” but in doing so he allies gospel meditations to the laity by removing the higher associations that the MVC had given them. Love’s alterations extend to the text’s purpose as well. Although he argues that he is only purifying or distilling the text so 33. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, prologue, 10. 34. Ibid. 35. On these notations, see Ghosh, Wycliffite Heresy, 172.

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that it might better communicate a single, constant purpose, his excisions are targeted, simplifying the text to meet the audience he assigns to it. In the same gesture, he acknowledges that he changes the text but boasts its fidelity to the spirit of the original. Discovering continuity in change, Love uncovers the layness of the MVC by creating it. His careful and consistent changes contradict his claims about the transparent layness of the MVC and gospel meditation generally. The MVC is clearly not ready-made for lay consumption, even according to Love, who curtails its purpose in order to make it appropriate to the audience he designates for it. Love proceeds to explain how meditation on Christ’s life best meets the spiritual needs of “symple soules.” Quoting William of St. Thierry’s Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei,36 Love explains that, to such people, “contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more likyng[,] more spedefull[,] & more sykere þan is hyʒe contemplacion of þe godhed[,] ande þerfore to hem is pryncipally to be sette in mynde þe ymage of crystes Incarnacion[,] passion[,] & Resurreccion so that a symple soule þat kan not þenke bot bodyes or bodily þinges mowe have somwhat accordynge unto is [sic] affecion where wiþ he maye fede & stire his devocion.”37 Unable to contemplate intelligible matters, such as Christ’s divinity, simple souls should instead content themselves with thoughts of his humanity and use them to foster their devotion. William of St. Thierry does indeed recommend meditation on Christ’s humanity to the religious novice, but where Love’s quotation ends, William’s passage continues, adding that one who thinks about Christ’s humanity “does not wholly depart from the truth, so that as long as his faith does not separate God from man he will learn eventually to grasp God in man.”38 For William, meditations on Christ’s humanity possess value because of both their validity (they are not false) and their destination. They achieve their highest purpose when they defer to contemplation of Christ’s divinity. They do not offer ends in themselves, as they do for Love, who accordingly places the laypeople to whom he directs his translation in an unending novitiate. Love’s simple souls confine themselves to meditations on Christ’s humanity, unable to progress to his divinity in a way that had made gospel meditations so powerful to various of Love’s predecessors. 36. Love attributes the text to Bernard of Clairvaux, a common misattribution in the Middle Ages. 37. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, prologue, 10. 38. William of Saint Thierry, Epistola ad Fratres de Monte Dei, 174, CCCM 88:265: “a vero non usquequaque recedit; ut dum per fidem Deum ab homine non dividit, Deum aliquando in homine apprehendere addiscat.” Trans. Berkeley, Golden Epistle, 69.

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Love’s express limitation of his audience to “symple” people has the logical consequence of distancing him from the piety he describes.39 The author of the MVC writes that he recommends systematic imagining of the scenes of Christ’s life because he has derived great benefit from this very exercise.40 Love’s Myrrour does not perpetuate the participatory spirit of the original. Instead, Love guides meditation on Christ’s earthly life without any reference to the benefits that might accrue to him. He assumes the role of religious director, establishing his authority over the devotional exercises he counsels and constructing a hierarchical relationship between author and audience. The Book to a Mother advises that the “mother” study Christ’s life internally and emulate it lovingly in order that she might “better konne Holi Writ þan ony maister of divinite þat loveþ not God so wel as þou” and adds, “who loveþ best God, can best Holi Writ” and “who þat loviþ him best is best clerk.”41 Love’s meditant instead remains on the near side of the lay/cleric divide. She does not experience the progress of the Book to a Mother’s reader, but rather adopts a practice of meditating that expressly excludes it. Love’s selected quotation of the Epistola indicates the defining alteration that he makes to the content of the MVC and how he makes it. The MVC allows the meditant to proceed from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, following a similar though more accelerated and direct path than William’s dutiful student. Love, however, strengthens the boundary between humanity and divinity. As Sarah Beckwith notes, he insists that the meditant’s imagining “not confuse what is spiritual with what is bodily, what is high with what is low.”42 What allows for such confusion in the MVC is its reliance on imagination to propel the meditant from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, progress enabled by the intellect’s own capacity to bridge sensible and intelligible cognition. Love, in contrast, understands imagination as a sensory faculty incapable of promoting higher spiritual activity. The disparity

39. It should be noted that Love does sometimes refer to recluses and other religious, but his focus rests primarily on the “symple” people he designates as his audience. 40. He writes, “Cumque etiam vitam Domini Iesu quam hoc libello tibi transcribo meditando procurarem et circuibam quasi comprehensam quamlibet ebdomadam ut plurimum complerem, et hoc per plures annos continuarem.” The author explains that, because he once forgot what he considered to be a particularly beautiful meditation, he decided to write them down, to his benefit and hers (“et sic forte tibi prodest illa oblivio”). MVC, lxi, CCCM 153:222–23. Ludolph of Saxony is likewise clear that he often meditates on Christ’s life (Vita Christi, pro., 2–3). 41. Book to a Mother, 39. 42. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 65. Beckwith reads the Myrrour as empowering to the lay reader in spite of its adherence to a “clerical project” (69). She writes that it unwittingly “gave an extraordinary dynamism to lay piety, whilst it subtly de-authorized clerical authority” (70).

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between the texts shows that the genre of gospel meditations, although popular, was not static, and we can find in its often overlooked development a variation in the purposes to which it was put.

Love’s Revisionary Translation Love directly associates his “symple” audience with earthly meditation, explaining that he offers his audience the meditative practice that best suits them. Accordingly, he writes that the images of Christ’s life evoked by his text are appropriate to “a symple soule þat kan not þenke bot bodyes or bodily þinges.”43 The quotation’s adjectival clause is nonrestrictive; no simple soul can venture beyond carnal thoughts. Therefore, by “styryng symple soules to þe love of god,” the text’s “diverse ymaginacions & likenessis” appeal to a lay capacity to imagine bodily things.44 Meditations on Christ’s humanity here foster lay piety because they respect the same limitations that the lay intellect does. By preventing gospel meditation from leading the meditant to Christ’s divinity, Love distinguishes his text from contemporary contemplative treatises. As Nicholas Watson notes in comparison of the two, Love “insists on treating as permanent a state of the soul they think of as a beginning.”45 Love diverges not just from contemplative treatises but from earlier gospel meditations, most notably his source text, as well. In the MVC, gospel meditations explicitly lead to higher contemplation, which is why the text contains an extended “tract on contemplation.” Although the tract comprises about one-third of the text, Love omits it. Where the MVC counsels the meditant to proceed from Christ’s humanity to his divinity, the Myrrour retreats, replacing the exercise with one decidedly less concrete. Love removes a sizable and, with respect to the MVC, integral passage that falls before its narration of the crucifixion. It reads: “Return afterwards to his divinity and think of that immense and eternal, incomprehensible and imperial incarnate Majesty, bending humbly to the floor, stooping and collecting his clothing. . . . Having compassion by means of these thoughts, you can gaze on him the same as when he was tied to the column and horrendously flogged.”46 The MVC can include this passage because it requires that Christ’s divinity be considered through the 43. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, prologue, 10. 44. Ibid. 45. N. Watson, “Conceptions of the Word,” 97. 46. MVC, lxxvii, CCCM 153:268: “Redeas post ad divinitatem et considera illam immensam, eternam et incomprehensibilem et imperatoriam Maiestatem incarnatam, se flectentem humiliter ad terram inclinatem pannos recolligentem . . . Eisdem eciam consideracionibus compaciens

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lens of his humanity, but Love permits no such transition. Removing the passage above, Love creates a gap that needs filling. It is no longer clear what purpose the meditations serve. Love’s addition, original to him, explains that the meditant should ponder Christ’s crucifixion even though the scene is painful to witness, because it is also “a likyng siht to us, for þe matire & þe effecte þat we have þerbye of oure redempcion.”47 Love offers no further clarification of this ambiguous sentence. Somehow the matter of the scene, Christ on the cross, results in human redemption. The benefits that derive from meditating on Christ’s passion are therefore only the (albeit profound) benefits that derive from Christ’s passion. Meditating on gospel scenes neither offers a clear means to achieve salvation nor promises additional rewards, such as spiritual intimacy in this life, to the meditant. Significantly, Love removes the MVC’s plentiful references to touching Christ and other biblical figures, an omission that appears not to have received scholarly attention even though it removes a fundamental element of the MVC’s spiritual program.48 Love’s divergence from his source in this matter indicates his different understanding of the power of imagination. In Love’s translation, imagination creates distance from rather than proximity to imagined scenes. Describing the journey of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, the author of the MVC writes, “You too go with them: help carry the boy and observe carefully each and every thing said and done because they are sacred actions.”49 Love instead writes, “Now lat us here go with hem by devout contemplacion & help we to bere þat blessed birþen þe child Jesus in oure soule by devocioun, & take we inwardly gude entent to all þat bene here seide & done, for þei ben ful devoute.”50 Love’s qualifications alienate the meditant from the scene. She joins the trip “by devout contemplacion” and carries Jesus in her soul “by devocioun.” We have seen that earlier meditations often allowed the meditant barely fettered access to biblical scenes, but meditation as the Myrrour describes it remains within the confines of the present. Journeying into biblical scenes through contemplation and participating in them through devotion, the meditant intueri potes eundem cum ad columpnam ligatus sic enormiter flagellatur.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 249. 47. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xxxix, p. 181. 48. There is one possible exception, when Love instructs the meditant to help Mary prepare food for her guests after the passion, but even then he makes it clear that the meditant is not actually tending to the guests (Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xlviii, p. 190). 49. MVC, xi, CCCM 153:45: “Vade et tu cum eis: adiuva portare puerum et conspice attente singula que dicuntur et fiunt, que devotissima sunt.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 39. 50. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ix, p. 47.

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imagines scenes that are unmistakably fictive. The fact that Love changes the address from the second person command (“You too go with them”) to the first person plural (“lat us here go”) replaces the MVC’s union between the meditant and the biblical scene with one between himself as author and the meditant. The meditant of the MVC has the freedom to engage directly with the Bible, whereas Love, attaching himself to the meditant, permits an engagement that is decidedly more remote. Although Love’s qualifications regularly appear where the MVC has the meditant physically interact with biblical figures, they also occur where the meditant originally witnesses a scene directly. Thus, the MVC declaratively narrates, “Jesus then walked between the two sisters” Mary and Martha, while Love writes, “we mowe se by devout ymaginacion how oure lord Jesus goþ before bytwix þo tweyn sistres.”51 Seeing “by devout ymaginacion” seems to be less potent than just seeing. Likewise, describing the mistreatment of Jesus by the crowd, the MVC orders the meditant, “See how they shout and rail at him, bold and insolent.”52 The mocking comments follow. The Myrrour describes the same crowd “Abreydyng him & reprovyng in þees maner wordes as we resonably mowe suppose.”53 Love replaces seeing with reasonably supposing, a crucial distinction, and one that Love consistently makes by means of his alterations and omissions. The care that Love takes to alter the MVC in this respect—making what might appear inconsequential changes but doing so consistently and therefore consequentially—indicates his awareness that he is altering the text by way of redefining the imaginative component of imaginative meditations.54 In his prologue, Love writes, “þe discrivyng or [sic] speches or dedis of god in heven & angels or oþere gostly substances bene only wryten in þis manere, & to þis entent[,] þat is to saye as devoute ymaginacions & likenessis styryng symple soules to þe love of god & desire of hevenly þinges.”55 Love presents “devoute ymaginacions” as synonymous with “likenessis” that are merely representational, and uses

51. MVC, lxvi, CCCM 153:230: “Vadit ergo Dominus Iesus medius inter duas sorores.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 216. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xxxiv, p. 133. 52. MVC, lxxv, CCCM 153:262: “Intuere igitur qualiter illi audaces et pessimi conviciantur eidem.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 244. 53. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xl, p. 168. 54. It should be noted that Love does retain a couple of the original passages that do not accord with his Myrrour’s revised purpose as I have described it. For instance, he keeps the MVC’s promise that the dutiful meditant will begin to feel the spiritual joys of salvation in this life (Mirror, xl, p. 162; MVC, lxxiv, CCCM 153:252). However, the few instances are so overwhelmed by Love’s many changes that they simply appear anomalous and inconsistent. 55. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, prologue, 10.

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this equation to articulate his text’s purpose. The meditations that follow “only” seek to increase love of God, and while the MVC never disavows this purpose—rather, the love of God is in a sense the height of its aim—that love, when achieved, is coupled with fullness of knowledge and even mystical union. The love that Love describes has little to do with either. Likewise, when Love narrates the ascension, he allows the meditant to witness it only indirectly. Compare the following accounts: MVC: The Lord Jesus opened the gates of Paradise which up to that time had been closed to humanity, and entered in triumph and joy, with all that happy and magnificent multitude.56 Love’s Myrrour: Nowe go we up by devout contemplacion to oure lorde Jesu[,] beholdyng in ymaginacion of hevenly þinges by likenes of erþely þinges, howe he with alle þat forseide worþi & blisfulle multitude of holi soules, oponyng heven ʒates þat were before þat tyme sperede aʒeynus mankynde, . . . seide, Fader I þonke þe.57

The passage from the MVC occurs in the midst of a description of all the things one “sees” when Christ ascends, and it thus permits the meditant to participate in the journey with Christ. As the gates to Paradise open, the meditant herself seems to gain access to the heavenly wonders, which the author evocatively describes in the chapter’s continuation. Love’s ascent entails no departure from earth. A “devout contemplacion,” it permits access to “hevenly þinges” only by indirect analogy to “erþely þinges.” Love’s meditant witnesses Christ’s return to heaven by comparing it to sensible things, beyond which he never ventures. Imagination thus conceived constitutes a restriction for Love, a means to distance the meditant from imagined scenes, where it had provided the meditant of the MVC with a means to engage in precisely those scenes. Where the MVC writes regarding Christ, “At this point regard him lovingly for a long while,” the Myrrour writes instead, “Take now here gude hede by inwarde meditacion of alle hees peynes.”58 The meditant does not get to see Christ directly and prolongedly, but instead ponders his pains, thus 56. MVC, cv, CCCM 153:342: “Dominus autem Iesus cum universa illa felici et magnifica multitudine aperiens ianuas Paradisi usque tunc humano generi clausas, intravit triumphaliter et gaudienter.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 323. 57. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, lxii, p. 214. 58. MVC, xlvii, CCCM 153:165: “Hic igitur eum diligenter considera per longam moram.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 247. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xli, p. 171.

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engaging with his feelings rather than his person. The addition of the reference to inward meditation in Love’s far less intimate scene renders that meditation a distancing tool and insists on a difference between the place of the meditant and that of the imagined gospel scene. The meditant travels inwardly but remains in a fixed and real “here” while Christ is decidedly elsewhere. Love constricts gospel meditations by also lessening the freedom he gives to his meditant to mold gospel scenes. When conjecturing about what the angels might have fed Jesus at the end of his forty-day fast, the author of the MVC writes, “Scripture does not tell us about that. We can, however, order up this triumphant luncheon as we please.”59 The text revels in its freedom. Compare Love’s Myrrour: “Here of spekeþ not holi writ, wherfore we mowe here ymagine by reson & ordeyne þis worþi fest as us likeþ, not by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymaginyng & supposyng, & þat aftur the comune kynde of þe manhode.”60 Love takes the fun out of the exercise, restricting the meditant’s ability to imagine a celestial feast by warning against too ambitious a creation. The feast must be imagined within reason and stay within the boundaries of “the comune kynde of þe manhode.” The meditant should not depart from Christ’s humanity or his own. Devout imagining is made synonymous with mere supposing and also stands in notable opposition to erroneous affirming. With this opposition, Love seeks to render such imagining safe because wholly conjectural. His contrast recalls that of Archbishop Arundel, whose Constitutions of 1409 protect devotional activities such as pilgrimage and the honoring of images against the heretical declarations of Oxford theologians.61 Although the intimacy of Love’s relationship with Arundel has likely been overstated, the two nevertheless share a common impulse to praise devotional exercises as they condemn theological overreaching and thus to distinguish safe from unsafe forms of piety.62

59. MVC, xvii, CCCM 153:89: “De hoc enim scriptura non loquitur. Possumus autem hoc victoriosum prandium sicut volumus ordinare.” 60. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xv, p. 74. Aers interprets the passage differently (Sanctifying Signs, 168–69), and Simpson’s analysis of the passage is the opposite of mine. He reads the passage as an example of the “imaginative freedom” that Love gives to his readers (Oxford English Literary History, 2:436). 61. For Arundel’s comments on acceptable devotional practices, see the 9th Constitution, Constitutions, 317–18. Thomas More similarly positions devotional texts like the Myrrour (which he names) as correctives to the Lutheran writings that he deemed heretical. See More, Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in Complete Works, 8:37. 62. For a succinct review of the evidence for Love’s and Arundel’s relationship, see Sargent, Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 33–37.

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Reminding the meditant of certain inviolable rules that contain his activity, Love sets conditions that must be met for gospel meditation to be fruitful. He therefore warns against too much imaginative freedom. When describing the incarnation, the author of the MVC writes, “Although the Blessed Trinity is everywhere, now you may meditate that it is present there [at the incarnation] in a special way because of its special activity.”63 Love instead offers an extended warning against thinking too deeply about the Trinity or any topic that falls outside the purview of natural reason: “when þou herest any siche þinge in byleve þat passeþ þi kyndly reson, trowe soþfastly þat it is soþ as holy chirch techeþ & go no ferþer.”64 As the meditant should not proceed beyond gospel scenes, so he should respect the limitations of natural reason and defer to the church when appropriate. Love therefore disqualifies the Trinity as a topic for meditation. Further, in his appended and apparently coeval treatise on the Eucharist, Love writes, “it is grete foly & gostly perile, to seke curiously in ymaginacion of reson þe merveiles of þis worþi sacrament.”65 Love clearly fears excessive speculation on the part of his audience and therefore installs barriers to their meditating that the MVC does not. The author of the MVC prohibits any meditating that contradicts doctrine, justice, morality, or truth generally, but these restrictions are minimal and do not restrict meditative freedom any more than Augustine’s rule of faith limits biblical interpretation.66 Indeed, as he continues, the author of the MVC requires the meditant to accept various extrabiblical scenarios as true. Stipulating that he will often attribute a statement or action to Jesus that “cannot be proven through Scripture,” he writes, “You should nonetheless accept it, as devout meditation demands.”67 The efficacy of meditation depends on a largely uncritical acceptance of it. Love deletes the instruction. He instead counsels a critical attitude on the part of his meditant, who is neither to accept the truth of all described meditations nor to expand upon

63. MVC, iv, CCCM 153:20: “Nam licet ubique sit sancta Trinitas, ibi nunc aliquo singulari modo esse mediteres racione singularis operacionis.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 13. 64. Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, iii, p. 22. 65. Love, De sacramento, in Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 229. Sargent argues that the treatise on the eucharist was written at the same time as the translation itself (“Versions of the Life of Christ,” 58). 66. The rule of faith is Augustine’s hermeneutical principle that approves of all charitable interpretations that remain consistent with faith. As Allen notes with respect to this rule, which he calls the doctrine of charity, “It is given in advance, but in practice it is broad enough to include an almost infinite range of expressions” (Friar as Critic, 58). 67. MVC, prologue, CCCM 153:10. Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 4.

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them. When discussing the flight to Egypt, the author of the MVC writes, “I have given you the setting. Enlarge on it and proceed as it seems fit.”68 The meditant has narrative and imaginative control. Love again deletes the instruction. Love’s clear separation between meditation and contemplation, and his reworking of imagination to accord with that separation, receives external support from other late-medieval vernacular texts. For instance, the Cloud of Unknowing likewise sharply distinguishes meditation from contemplation, although it looks at the division from the perspective of a contemplative treatise rather than a meditative one. Imagination, the author insists, has no relevance to his recommended spirituality, because it concerns itself only with sensible things.69 Accordingly, while he emphasizes the spiritual value of meditating on Christ’s life, he insists that one who desires contemplation “algates leve . . . þeese meditacions.”70 As we have seen, such meditations serve a similar purpose for Bernard of Clairvaux, who writes, “Of course this devotion to the humanity of Christ is a gift, a great gift of the Spirit. I have called it carnal with comparison to that other love which does not know the Word as flesh.”71 Meditation on Christ’s life has devotional merit, but it does not provide entry to contemplation. So firm about the division between meditation and contemplation is the Cloud-author that he seems to have upset some of his readers. In his later Book of Privy Counselling, he praises such meditation more passionately and explains its value more clearly, lest anyone think him its opponent.72 He is equally clear, however, that neither gospel meditation nor imagination ventures beyond the sensible world, and so neither bears directly on his spiritual program. The fourteenth-century mystic and Augustinian canon Walter Hilton soft­ ens the division between meditation and contemplation but still expresses a clear interest in distinguishing between them. Addressing his reader, he writes that while God cannot be seen “bi bodili liknes in ymaginacion,” “thou may through devout biholdynge of His precious manhede fele His 68. MVC, xii, CCCM 153:52 “dedi tibi occasionem. Tu vero sicut videbitur extendas et prosequaris.” Trans. Taney et al., Meditations on the Life of Christ, 45. 69. On the role of imagination in the Cloud, see Turner, Darkness of God, 186–210; and Minnis, “Affection and Imagination.” 70. Cloud of Unknowing, c. 7, p. 15. 71. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, XX.v.8, in Opera omnia 1:120: “Licet vero donum et magnum donum Spiritus sit istiusmodi erga carnem Christi devotio, carnalem tamen dixerim hunc amorem, illius utique amoris respectu, non tam verbum caro.” Trans. Walsh, On the Song of Songs, 1:154. 72. See Book of Privy Counselling, 90–93. Minnis discusses this passage and its apparent inconsistency with the Cloud in “Affection and Imagination,” 350.

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godenesse and the grace of His Godhede, whanne thi desire is esid and holpen and as it were maad free and myghti from alle fleschlie thoughtes and affeccions, and is mykil lifted up bi a goostli myght into gosteli savour and delite of His goostli presence.”73 Passion meditation may generate a desire for the Godhead and in that respect lead the meditant to greater heights, but it does not contribute directly to ascent. The meditant who sees Christ “in ymaginacion” might be lifted up to contemplation, but contemplation requires the meditant to relinquish precisely such imagining. As Hilton explains, “goostli thinges are seen and knowen bi undirstondynge of the soule and not bi ymaginacioun.”74 Meditation usefully incites desire for God but cannot fulfill it, a perspective also expressed in some of the pre-Bonaventuran meditations analyzed in chapter 3. That Hilton makes contemplation dependent on divine aid and excludes imagination from its purview is not remarkable. We have seen that imagination, even at its most potent, provides a bridge that leads from meditation to contemplation but does not participate in contemplation. More noteworthy is the fact that imagination here provides no continuous path from meditation to contemplation. Equally striking is the concerted interest of both Hilton and the Cloud-author, each clearly knowledgeable of and influenced by the other, in determining the precise relationship of imaginative meditation to contemplation. According to both the Cloud and the Scale of Perfection, such meditation is an exercise for beginners that is to be surpassed. Likewise linking imagination to earthly meditation, Love widens the gap between them, on the one hand, and contemplation, on the other.75

The Stimulus behind the Prickynge of Love Love likewise has company insofar as his translated meditation tempers the enthusiasm of an originally Latin devotional text. The Prickynge of Love, the Middle English translation of the Stimulus amoris, also alters its source by making its spirituality more earthbound and by shifting its audience, in this case from Franciscans to adherents of the mixed life.76 The late fourteenth

73. Hilton, Scale of Perfection, I.25, p. 58. 74. Ibid., II.30, p. 205. 75. Gillespie interprets Hilton, as well as Nicholas Love, as responding to imaginative meditations, recognizing the “limitations of imagination,” and therefore expressing more reservations about it. See “Strange Images of Death,” 117–18. 76. N. Watson reads the vernacular text otherwise. For him, the Prickynge unites meditation on Christ’s humanity with contemplation of his divinity, thus standing in opposition to the hierarchized spirituality of Love’s Myrrour (see “Conceptions of the Word,” 109–110). He does

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and early fifteenth centuries saw the translation of many Latin religious texts into Middle English. Michael Sargent notes that, thanks to this translating impulse, “the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were the great age of thirteenth and fourteenth century spirituality.”77 Nonetheless, there has not been much attention paid to what is different about the translations. While the Prickynge differs from the later Myrrour to the extent that it retains many graphic images of crawling into wounds and relishes images of contact with Christ’s body, it shares the Myrrour’s impulse to diminish the spiritual scope of its original Latin text through various qualifications, omissions, and additions. A wonderfully explicit example comes from the Prickynge’s discussion of how passion meditation affects the meditant. For the Stimulus, the passion is an “ineffable drink” that “makes one, as though drunk, run totally into God.”78 Drinking of the passion results ultimately in the soul’s being poured into God and so leads to union with him. For the Prickynge, the passion is still a drink, but one that turns drunkenness into soberness. It “maketh a man drunken & alienyd fro hymself like into hevenli sobernesse.”79 In the Middle English text, emotional intensity and union are replaced by temperance. Drunken union becomes a more ambiguous, and certainly a more sober, spiritual experience. The expanded fourteenth-century version, or long text, of the Stimulus amoris served later in the century as the basis for the Middle English translation, the Prickynge of Love. Whereas the long text of the Stimulus only adds to the short, the Middle English translation omits fourteen chapters, taken from both texts, and consistently, often dramatically, alters the chapters it does keep (see table 1 in chapter 4 for the correspondence of the chapters among these three versions).80 In spite of the changes wrought by the translator of the Prickynge, the two texts invite comparison. The Prickynge removes and revises passages but keeps the Stimulus as its constant guide, deviating from it with targeted changes that appear to be deliberate.81 What one finds

not address the Stimulus. Bryan’s analysis of the Prickynge hinges explicitly on its appeal to those in the mixed life. See Looking Inward, 127–43. 77. Sargent, “Bonaventura English,” 176. 78. Stimulus amoris LT, I.7, p. 643: “ineffabilis potatio . . . et quasi ebrius corruit totus in Deum.” 79. Prickynge of Love, vi, p. 39. 80. There are separate, partial Middle English translations. The tenth chapter of The Chastising of God’s Children, for instance, translates LT III.xiii (see Sargent, “Bonaventura English,” 162). 81. Since the extended Latin version, which serves as the basis for the Middle English translation, is what concerns us in this chapter, I will refer to it simply as the Stimulus amoris or Stimulus.

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is that the Prickynge shares the impulse of Love’s Myrrour to add qualifications, tones down the Stimulus’s unbounded enthusiasm, and scales back the Stimulus’s purpose. The Prickynge’s tendency toward qualification is easy to demonstrate. Where the Stimulus reads, “I want always to see you crucified,” for instance, the Prickynge reads, “ai mote I se þe crucified with myn inner yʒe.”82 Simple seeing becomes seeing with the inner eye, with the result that Christ appears less accessible to the meditant. Compare the passages as they continue: Stimulus: Wherever I look, I want everything to appear to me to be red with your blood, as if everything extended toward you so that I was able to discover nothing beyond you, nothing unless I was able to look at your wounds.83 Prickynge: wat þat i loke on al reed [make] þat hit seme with licour of þi blode, and ʒif I mai not do þis ay in hoolnesse of devccioun [sic] ne in likynge of goostli ymaginacioun, at þe laste þat I mai do hit in stabilnesse of feith & in holi conversacioun.84

Where the Latin text expresses a desire to see nothing that is not Christ’s blood or an extension of it, the Middle English decreases the intensity and extent of the desire. If the devotional exercise as described does not work, the speaker of the Prickynge wants lesser piety based in faith and conversation. There is no obligation to meditate on Christ’s life here. Rather, devotion can be had in pieces and parts. The author of the Prickynge also adds a prayer asking that he not be led astray, thus casting meditation as potentially confounding and undeniably potent. The perspective of the Prickynge is not that meditation on Christ’s life lacks power, then, but that its considerable power renders it in its most advanced form appropriate only to a small elite. The author uses imagination to distinguish a lower brand of devotion from a higher one. The elevated brand, the one that fully immerses the meditant in Christ and that the average person may not be able to achieve, is equated with “whole” devotion and “goostli ymaginacioun.” The author implicitly distinguishes a spiritual and high-functioning imagination from a lower and error-prone one, using spiritual imagination to mark the higher species of devotion. Unlike 82. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.ii, p. 638: “semper te videam crucifixum.” Prickynge of Love, ii, p. 22. 83. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.ii, p. 638: “et quidquid aspexero, in tuo sanguine mihi appareat rubricatum: ut sic in te totus tendens, nihil praeter te valeam invenire, nihil nisi tua vulnera valeam intueri.” 84. Prickynge of Love, ii, p. 22.

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the Myrrour, the Prickynge does not deny the possibility of an imaginationbased path toward contemplative union, even in this life. It simply reserves that possibility for a select few, removing many of the scattered references to such union throughout the Stimulus and focusing them into one chapter called, following the Stimulus, “Hou good hit is to a man to be turned into God.”85 Kirchberger notes that the “less courageous” scribe of the Vernon manuscript changes the chapter title in the table of contents to “how joyful it is to a man on what manner he may please God,”86 but the Prickynge itself is not uncomfortable with the possibility of union.87 It simply separates that possibility from the run-of-the-mill passion meditations described elsewhere in the text, meditations that lack the emotional intensity and mystical ambition of meditation as the Stimulus describes it. The Prickynge is temporally as well as conceptually closer to the MVC than the Myrrour. Where the Myrrour shies away from imagined contact with Christ, for instance, the Prickynge has no such reservations. The Prickynge abounds with images of physical contact with Christ, even increasing their number with new, sometimes extensive passages on the powers of Christ’s blood.88 Reflecting the popularity of this topic in late fourteenth-century England, these additions also keep the meditant’s attention focused on the physical being of Christ. Directing attention toward Christ’s body, however, the Prickynge directs it away from the contemplation that the text’s source had used that body to support. In this respect, the Prickynge shares the disposition of Love’s Myrrour. Distinguishing higher from lower forms of meditation, the Prickynge closes off the possibility of contemplative union to the average meditant. The most salient alteration that the Prickynge makes to the Stimulus is, as Clare Kirchberger noted, a toning down of the Stimulus’s enthusiasm.89 Whereas the Stimulus abounds with apostrophes, for instance, the Prickynge tends to tame or eliminate them, restructuring sentences to avoid impassioned, direct addresses to whatever person or object the Stimulus had selected. For instance, both texts assail the narrator’s heart for failing to love God more fully, but the Prickynge does so far more economically. Their passages begin, 85. Ibid., xxiv, pp. 125–28. 86. Kirchberger, introduction to Goad of Love, 30. 87. Sargent discusses the confusing state of the Prickynge manuscripts’ tables of contents, which often do not align with the actual content, in “Bonaventura English,” 159–161. 88. See, for instance, Prickynge of Love, v, 35–36. 89. Kirchberger, introduction to Goad of Love, 26, 30, et passim.

Imagination in Translation / 229 Stimulus: Oh heart harder than stone, oh heart that is not a heart, why are you not inflamed with love? A stone melted with heat is turned into brass [Job 28:2] but you remain unchangeable before such heat. I wish that you were made of stone rather than flesh!90 Prickynge: A my herte harder þen a ston þat wole not breke with þe mynde of þis passioun. God wolde þat my herte were of ston and not of flesh, forwhi stones al tobrasten in tyme of cristes passioun, but my herte wole not cleve neythir breke.91

Nonetheless, the Stimulus continues in this vein for another thirteen sentences (“Oh most evil heart! Oh most inanimate heart! Oh most unfaithful heart!” and so on), while the Prickynge ends its investigation into the evils of the unbelieving heart here. Kirchberger credits the author, whom she claims is Walter Hilton, with tempering the Stimulus’s ”extreme devotion” in preference for a more intimate and commonsensical spirituality.92 Where the Stimulus displays “a certain lack of delicacy,” the Prickynge, she explains approvingly, espouses a more sophisticated because less affective (though still unmistakably affective) spirituality.93 It is not hard to find expressions of this bias, which treats affect as inherently unsophisticated, but in this case as in others, the more “affective” text presents a spirituality that is no less sophisticated. The Prickynge even dampens the ambitions of the Latin and more committedly affective text, for whereas the Stimulus allows its reader union with Christ in this life and vivid imagining of the delights of heaven, the Prickynge typically shies away from talk of union and removes discussions of what the soul will feel in heaven. The Prickynge largely avoids mention of transforming into or conforming to God, although the Stimulus is replete with such talk. The result is a meditative treatise that promises considerably fewer spiritual benefits to the meditant. The differences between the texts, then, are not confined to tone, but extend as well to purpose, as we can see by investigating an area of apparent agreement. Both texts abide by the familiar hierarchy that ranks meditation on Christ’s humanity below contemplation of his divinity. The Prickynge accordingly advises one who finds himself separated from 90. Stimulus amoris LT, II.ii, p. 664: “O cor plusquam lapideum, o cor non cor, cur non accenderis ex amore? Lapis calore solutus in aes vertitur, et tu ad tantum calorem immutabilis perserveras. Utinam ergo lapideum esses, non carneum!” 91. Prickynge of Love, xi, 82–83. 92. Kirchberger, introduction to Goad of Love, 30. 93. Ibid., 30, 26. See also Bryan, Looking Inward, 128–29.

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God because of sin, “haste þe þanne to þe manhode of criste” because, as the Stimulus says, he is “next to you.”94 Nonetheless, although the Prickynge offers access to Christ’s body, it counteracts this movement with “images of violent hierarchization.”95 What is different in the Prickynge is not its attention to Christ’s humanity or its treatment of that humanity as an introductory devotional exercise, but the fact that such meditation no longer leads to more advanced forms of spiritual closeness. Accordingly, the Prickynge often turns discussion of Christ into discussion of his attributes. For instance, where the Stimulus writes of the ecstatic soul, “It leaves behind its own place, and runs into God, absorbed by God and forgotten to itself,” the Prickynge writes that the soul “leveth þe propre place & rennyþ into ihesu criste as metal molten in þe fire, and openyth þe inli wittes, and makeþ hem sharp & clere for to see sumwhat of cristes charite.”96 The soul in the Stimulus is absorbed into God completely, but that in the Prickynge enters him only figuratively, as metal runs into fire. The result is that the Prickynge’s meditant has sharpened mental faculties that enable him to see something of Christ’s charity.97 Union with God is replaced with a clearer vision—although not perfectly clear since the soul still sees only “sumwhat”—of one of his attributes. Whereas, in another passage, the speaker of the Stimulus wishes for his heart to rest “in divine majesty,” the Prickynge replaces “in divina majestate” with “in þi charite.”98 The soul’s union with God in the Stimulus is more substantial. There, passion meditation isolates the inner man so that he might be absorbed into Christ and be made divine. The Prickynge shies away from such talk. Whereas passion meditation in the Stimulus promises the highest of spiritual rewards, namely, union with God in this life in anticipation of fuller union in heaven, the Prickynge reserves the possibility of union for the next life. Accordingly, the Prickynge adds a passage on Christ’s manhood, making it the gateway to his divinity (“þat is þe weye, þat is the mene, þat is þe brigge, þat is þe doore and þe ledder ledande to þe godhed and noon odir”), but the bridge appears to be closed until death.99 The Stimulus offers imme-

94. Prickynge of Love, xxxii, p. 164; Stimulus amoris, LT, III.xii, p. 688: “tibi proximum.” 95. Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 64. 96. Stimulus amoris, LT, II.viii, p. 672: “nunc extra se exit, et in Deum tota se diffundit, proprium locum relinquit, et in Deum currit, absorbetur a Deo, et obliviscitur sui”; Prickynge of Love, xvii, p. 109. 97. Also evident here is the Prickynge’s general tendency to replace “God” with ”Christ,” a tendency that Kirchberger mentions (introduction to Goad of Love, 33). 98. Stimulus amoris, LT, II.iii, p. 666; Prickynge of Love, xii, p. 85. 99. Prickynge of Love, ix, p. 73.

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diate rewards, allowing one who exercises his “heart’s labor” (labor cordis) to rise completely (totaliter) above earthly matters and ascend to “heavenly things.”100 The Prickynge instead permits its meditant to turn his love from earthly things and raise it “up to ʒernynge or love of hevenly þynges.”101 He can desire heavenly things but he cannot yet have them, as desire for ascent replaces ascent proper. Making the difference yet clearer is a question that the Prickynge appends. After characterizing the spiritual desire thus evoked as “restful,” and again prioritizing tempered over fervent emotion, the author asks, “What is more restful to a soule þenne felynge of goddis grace and a litel festenynge to hym?”102 The heart has some connection to God, but the Prickynge stays rather illogically on the fence. The meditant can only have “a litel festenynge,” as though union admits of degrees. Indeed, the word “litel” expresses all the awkwardness of the Prickynge’s relationship to the Stimulus. Such passages participate in the Prickynge’s basic interest in replacing the Stimulus’s call for union with one for imitation of Christ’s virtues. In line with this interest, the Prickynge addresses Christ’s life before the passion with much more frequency than the Stimulus, which focuses far more heavily on the passion. Extending the parameters of the meditant’s activity, the Prickynge shifts her attention away not just from the passion but from the ecstasy that the Stimulus offered through it. The Prickynge thus recommends meditation on Christ’s entire life, much in the manner of the MVC. The translator advises the meditant, “Rekene, ʒif þou kan, fro þe tyme of his birthe & acounte wel bi processe of þe gospell to þe hour of his deth.”103 There is no such suggestion in the Stimulus. When an anthropomorphized flesh complains to the Father about the soul’s abandonment of him for Christ, in one of the more bizarre chapters of the Stimulus, the author describes the soul sharing some activities with Christ, specifically his infancy and passion.104 The Prickynge expands the passage in order to place the soul at many of the milestones in Christ’s life before allowing it to join Christ on the cross.105 The progression becomes more systematic and chronological. The Prickynge’s interest in the whole span of Christ’s life reflects not just the greater popularity of systematic meditations at the time when the 100. Stimulus amoris, LT, II.vi, p. 670. 101. Prickynge of Love, xv, p. 102. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., iv, p. 30. 104. Stimulus amoris, LT, III.14, p. 690. On debates between flesh and soul in medieval literature, see Raskolnikov, “Confessional Literature,” and Body against Soul. 105. Prickynge of Love, xxxiv, p. 173.

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translation was made but also the translator’s interest in Christ as moral exemplar. Gospel meditations regularly emphasize the moral benefits of passion meditation, but the Prickynge promises little beyond them. Compare the texts as they describe imitation as the first goal of passion meditation: Stimulus: The highest and most perfect life is to imitate Christ. This is the highest and perfected religion, and religious perfection. This is the rule and exemplar of perfection in every life and virtue, namely, to imitate Christ in his passion and death. Let the rule of our living be the passion of the Savior, and however much we are consoled in this, so much are we conformed to Christ, and however much we abandon him, so much are we removed from this exemplar and rule.106 Prickynge: þou shalt sette crist in syʒhte of þi sowle, þat is for to seye, his lif, his passioun, & his deth. And make þat þi rewle & þi saunplarie for to lyve by & conforme þe to be like hym & his passioun þourʒe wilful sufferynge of al maner disese. And in þat be þi counfort & þi solace þat þou myʒt ouʒte suffre for his loue. Thow may nevere plese hym bettir þanne ʒif þou wolt be crucified with hym not bodily but goostly.107

The Stimulus makes Christ’s death “the rule of our living,” whereas the Prickynge extends its interest to the whole of Christ’s life—“his lif, his passioun, & his deth.” More important are the different purposes that the texts assign to meditation on Christ. For the Prickynge, such meditation provides moral guidance; Christ is the exemplar “for to lyve by.” The meditant imitates the passion “þourʒe wilful sufferynge of al maner disese.” We saw this perspective in some of the pre-Bonaventuran meditations discussed in chapter 3: imitation of Christ consists in everyday trials and tribulations. The Stimulus instead insists that the meditant participate in and conform to the passion through compassion. As the Prickynge continues, the author hedges and explains that the meditant who follows his prescription will be “sumwhat conformed to cristis 106. Stimulus amoris, LT, I.iv, p. 639: “Haec est summa et perfectissima vita imitando Christum. Haec est summa et perfecta religio, et religiosa perfectio. Haec est regula et exemplar perfectionis omnis vitae et virtutis, scilicet Christum imitari in passione et morte. Sit ergo regula nostra vivendi passio Salvatoris: et tanto amplius in hoc consolemur, quanto amplius Christo conformamur; et tanto amplius desolemur, quanto ab hoc exemplari et regula amplius elongamur.” 107. Prickynge of Love, iv, p. 26.

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passioun.”108 Whereas the Stimulus promises the reward of immediate union, the Prickynge, with another illogical “sumwhat,” suggests that true conformation awaits heaven. Along these lines, the Prickynge adds several lists of virtues and vices not present in the Stimulus that reinforce its emphasis on moral living rather than union.109 So, when the author of the Prickynge summarizes the virtues of passion meditation in another new passage, he writes, “This is my boke and my clergie, my studie & my meditacioun, for to strengþe my feyth and my hope þourʒe cristes blood & his passioun.”110 The “study” of passion meditation strengthens faith and hope, but it neither immerses the meditant in Christ’s life nor promises her glimpses of mystical union in her mortal life. We have seen that meditation had been capable of fulfilling the Pauline prescription to suffer with Christ, uniting the meditant so firmly to Christ that she proceeded to his divinity and, ultimately, to salvation. Meditation in the Prickynge resembles that of the pre-Bonaventuran texts discussed earlier, in which meditation is wholly virtuous but provides little access to Christ’s divinity. The author of the Prickynge also limits the meditative freedom of his audience. He regularly inserts references to God’s grace, and while no author in the period would deny the necessity of divine grace for any devotee, the Prickynge calls considerably more attention to that aid than the Stimulus. The difference has the effect of limiting what the meditant can accomplish through his or her own effort. The Prickynge tells the meditant to find Christ through charity, chastising one who would skip this stage when he asks, “wherto makes þou þe as þouʒe þou woldest kisse cristes mouth & as ʒif þou woldest ravyshe þyself to hevene out fro þiself bi travaile of þyn owne desire?”111 The Stimulus has only, “Why, bride, do you daily approach your spouse in order to kiss him with a kiss?”112 The question’s purpose in the Stimulus is clearly to chastise the presumptuous devotee who wants only the sweetness of devotion without the service that God demands, but the Prickynge shifts it elsewhere. There, the meditant’s presumption resides not in his failure to be charitable but in his belief that he can approach Christ in heaven through will alone. The regular reminders of the need for grace have the effect of stressing the boundaries of the meditant’s authority. 108. Ibid., p. 28. 109. See, for instance, ibid., p. 27. 110. Ibid., vi, p. 60. 111. Ibid., xvi, p. 105. 112. Stimulus amoris, LT, II.vii, p. 671: “Cur instas, Sponsa, quotidie, ut Sponsi osculo osculeris?”

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Overall, meditation in the Prickynge is less confident. The Stimulus writes that Christ’s love “makes God man and men God,” whereas the Prickynge writes that “hit makeþ God manlyk & man godli.”113 Nouns become adverbs in order to deny commutability between man and God. In the Stimulus, Mary approaches Jesus with the meditant to ask for forgiveness; in the Prickynge, Mary approaches Jesus alone.114 The translation limits the meditant’s participation. As in the passage above where the soul was running into God like metal into fire, the Prickynge adds numerous similes, metaphors, and analogies that render the closeness between the meditant and Christ more figurative than actual. For instance, the Stimulus advises its reader to imagine God everywhere present “in his substance and essence” and, “as he is able in this life, delight in Christ, and rest in him and in nobody else.”115 The Prickynge advises the meditant simply to love God as “ʒif he were ay bodyli in [the meditant’s] presence.”116 The meditant no longer holds Christ in a spiritual embrace, but imagines him bodily and loves him in a human way. As in Love’s Myrrour, so here the meditant is decidedly less present to Christ than he is in the original Latin meditation. Christ is still imagined, but as this chapter tries to make clear, imagining has more and less potent forms. It could be claimed that the changes discussed above constitute the sort of watering down and generalizing that one would expect from texts that have been translated into Middle English and thus aspire to a wider and more diverse audience. However, the changes are systematic, constellating around certain topics and expressions in a way that would not be the case were the texts simply and homogeneously watered down.117 Not all the changes are equally targeted, of course. Some are clearly designed just to increase the clarity of the original text, precisely in the interests of a wider readership. These include inconsequential rephrasing, the reordering of sentences, the removal of redundant phrases, the addition of relevant examples or ideas, the addition of explanations that function only to clarify the meaning of the original, and a rather pedantic literalizing of images. “The 113. Ibid., II.viii, p. 672: “Deum facit hominem, hominem facit Deum”; Prickynge of Love, xvii, p. 108. 114. Stimulus amoris, LT, III.xiii, p. 689; Prickynge of Love, xxxiii, p. 169. 115. Stimulus amoris, LT, II.i, p. 663: “prout potest in via, fruatur, et in ipso, et non in alio requiescat.” 116. Prickynge of Love, x, p. 77. 117. Other studies likewise resist the temptation to interpret vernacular translations as somehow simplified for purposes of broader readership. Hollywood thus compares Beatrice of Nazareth’s Treatise and its translation and acknowledges the translator’s “literalizing tendencies” (Sensible Ecstasy, 251), but she locates the translator’s motivations for such changes in concerns far more profound than his potentially larger audience. See Sensible Ecstasy, 247–57.

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fountain of pity” becomes simply “Jesus” and “the highest good” simply “God.” The Prickynge also tends to provide answers to the Stimulus’s obviously rhetorical questions. When the Stimulus asks what better incites love of God than his love for you, the Prickynge inserts the answer, “Soþetli no þynge more.”118 When it asks whether Christ’s love is not endless, the Prickynge adds, “ʒys sotheli.”119 When it asks whether God has not made all men to his image, the Prickynge confirms, “ʒis certis.”120 These changes, although amusing, are not particularly significant. Their intent is surely, if perhaps condescendingly, to foreclose any possibility for misinterpretation.121 The Prickynge’s most fundamental changes, however, cannot be explained away as necessary for the understanding of the lay reader or hearer. Explicitly distinguishing lower from higher forms of spirituality, the text matches its potentially egalitarian impulse with a hierarchical one that assigns different forms of spirituality to different groups. The Prickynge does not simply extend itself to a wider audience, but recasts the power of imaginative meditation in a careful, deliberate way. Love likewise revises the MVC so that it accords with lay piety as he defines it. As gospel meditations seem to him to concern themselves solely with sensible matters, so the faculty of imagination that they use and the audience they appeal to are equally earthbound. Gospel meditation thus defined accords with lay capacity as he portrays it. Neither Love nor the author of the Prickynge, however, issues the final word on gospel meditations or imagination, a point that Margery Kempe’s Book supports. Through the visions that she variously characterizes as “thoughts,” “meditations,” “revelations,” and “contemplations,” Margery experiences Christ’s humanity as a bridge to his divinity and accordingly treats her spirituality as utterly sophisticated. Confidently chastising and contradicting clerics, Margery imposes no limitations on the efficacy of her piety or the authority it provides her. Margery may hesitate when offered access to the divinity of God, but unlike Julian of Norwich, she proceeds and weds God by means of Christ’s humanity. God the Father appears to Margery, commends her for her whole-hearted

118. Prickynge of Love, xi, p. 78. 119. Ibid., i, p. 10. 120. Ibid., xxxvii, p. 187. 121. This is not to position the text too firmly with the laity or to make too sweeping claims about its audience and that of other vernacular religious texts. The Prickynge retains and even sometimes expands the Stimulus’s addresses to Franciscans (see xvi, p. 106, and xx, pp. 114–17), similar to the way that Love addresses himself to priests and various religious, and the Prickynge also includes a chapter advising priests how to minister the sacrament (xxii, pp. 118–23). The text’s audience is explicitly mixed.

236 / Chapter Six

devotion to Christ’s humanity, and says, “‘Dowtyr, I wil han þe weddyd to my Godhede, for I schal shewyn þe my prevyteys & my cownselys.’”122 Margery responds with trepidation: “sche cowde no skylle of þe dalyawns of þe Godhede, for al hir lof & al hir affeccyon was set in þe manhode of Crist & þerof cowde sche good skylle & sche wolde for no-thyng a partyd þerfro.”123 Claiming a greater proficiency with and capacity for Christ’s humanity than his divinity, she appears to adopt the boundaries that Love prescribes for his meditant. However, Jesus then appears to Margery and facilitates her higher union, and as he answers her questions he, the humanity of God, explicitly mediates between Margery and the Godhead. Margery’s faith in the powers of imagination reinforces the point that the strongest claims for meditation on Christ’s life are made where imagination itself is most powerful.

122. The Book of Margery Kempe, xxxv, p. 86. 123. Ibid.

Conclusion

Studies often end at the terminus of their chosen literary period, sometimes with intellectual justification and sometimes without. Although there has been a laudable effort, now well-established, to question the arbitrariness of the medieval/early modern divide in particular, on the topic of imagination, the traditional divide turns out to be a little tardy, but generally appropriate. We have seen that medieval writers were expressing more reservations about imagination by the end of the period, rendering Margery Kempe’s spirituality, not itself that unusual by an earlier standard, strange enough to render her a spectacle. Indeed, as noted in the introduction, later writers began to look back to the Middle Ages as a period in which imagination was especially potent. A striking example comes from John Fewterer’s Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion (1534), a translation of Ulrich Pinder’s Speculum Passionis Domini nostri, which was published earlier in the sixteenth century. Drawing on the popular apocryphal notion that Avicenna believed imagination was so powerful that it could fell a camel and alter one’s physical health, Fewterer writes, “Avicen reciteth how that a certan man by stronge ymaginacion that he had ymaginynge hemselfe to be a leprouse man: therby he was made a leprouse man.” From the man who imagined himself into leprosy, Fewterer proceeds to meditations on the life of Christ, thus anticipating this book’s methodology by associating meditation with medieval philosophical writings about imagination. He even emphasizes Bonaventure in the process: . On the relationship between the Latin text and the English translation, see Da Costa, “John Fewterer’s Myrrour.” . Fewterer, Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion, XXIr.

238 / Conclusion So in lyke maner yf a man fervently & devoutly continue in the remembraunce of the passion of Christe, he may so have a great sorow in his hert & true compassion of þe passion of Christe & so suffre payn with hym & so consequently al worldly pleasure shall be bytter & paynfull unto hym. Herunto sayeth saynt Bonaventure: whoso fervently remembreth the passion of Christe, he desyreth to be crucified with Christe Jesu. He reputeth & thynk­ eth hymselfe to be in servitude, bondage, & misery. He doth sygh & sorow & is in continuall hevynes, unto þe tyme he be all to wasshed or drowned in the blood of Christe & so transfourmed into his lord crucified. & yf he be nat kept in the blood of his saviour, he thynketh himselfe no man, yea worse than a beast, yf he be nat clad with the passion of Christe. Therefore, whosoever doth ofte and fervently remembre the passion of Christe, he shall lytle regarde the vanities of this worlde, and set them at nought.

As one can imagine himself into leprosy, so, according to Fewterer, can he imagine himself into Christ’s suffering. Seeking to augment the force of his own gospel meditation, Fewterer looks back to an earlier, medieval tradition in which both imagination and imaginative meditation were distinctly powerful. Fewterer’s belief that Avicenna described a peculiarly, even supernaturally powerful imagination in his philosophy is shared by various medieval and early-modern writers, including Nicole Oresme, Thomas Bradwardine, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and Robert Burton. In its later citations, this legend about Avicenna functions to recall an earlier belief in an exceptionally powerful imagination. Fewterer refers to Avicenna’s imagination rather hopefully, encouraging the individual to apply his imagination, thus elevated, to the task of meditating on Christ’s life. He invokes a past tradition with the aim of perpetuating it, embracing the potency of medieval imagination. In various late-medieval and early-modern meditations, authors increasingly counsel the meditant not to immerse herself in gospel scenes but to ask Jesus to remember his own passion. The individual’s own access to Christ’s passion is often mediated, and the strong imagination that had enabled open access begins to appear as a relic from the past. For instance, in the Fifteen Oes from the mid-fifteenth century, one repeatedly finds the speaker asking Christ to remember his passion and so to provide the speaker . Ibid. . Minnis discusses Avicenna’s supposed belief in an object-moving, health-altering imagination in “Medieval Imagination and Memory,” 248–49.

Conclusion / 239

with various manifestations of grace. For example, the speaker writes, “I beseche thee for the depnes of thy woundes that went thurgh thy tendre flesshe also thy bowelles and the mary of thy bones that thou vouchesauf to draw me out of sinne.” The Oes is a series of poems focused on Christ’s utterances from the cross. Eamon Duffy calls them “the most distinctive, and probably the most popular, of all prayers in late medieval England.” Translated into English by Caxton in 1490, they became a regular component of Reformation primers. In them, the speaker hesitates to embark on meditation of gospel scenes himself, instead asking Christ to meditate on his own passion. “For mynde of this blessed passion,” the speaker asks, “I beseche the benygne Jesu graunte me afore my deth very contricyon,” and elsewhere asks for remission of sins and the desire to perform good works. Christ’s recollection of his sufferings is the basis from which the speaker might thus receive grace. This formula in which the speaker asks Christ to remember his own passion exists in earlier medieval texts, as in the pseudo-Augustinian Meditations and in Suso’s Horologium sapientiae. However, medieval meditations more often sanction direct meditating on the passion, and the request that Christ meditate on his own life and passion becomes more common in the later period. In Anker’s early sixteenth-century Fruyte of Redemcyon, for instance, the speaker asks, “For this dolorous passion and deth Ihesu I beseche the to be mercyfull to me in the dredefull houre of my deth and graunt me right mynde and speche to the last ende of my lyfe and that I may have more mynde of thee and of thy passyon than of the dolours and paynes that I shall suffre.” Based on the pain of Christ’s suffering, the speaker asks Christ for mercy and deliverance from pain. As in the Fifteen Oes, here the author describes elements of the passion by way of asking Christ to remember them. Of course more direct meditation remains an option in the later period, as indicated not just by Fewterer’s Myrrour but also by the continued production of medieval meditations. Nonetheless, the earlier tradition of gospel meditations persists increasingly as an earlier tradition. To the extent that early modern authors recognized that there was something especially powerful about medieval imagination and the meditation that derived from . Fifteen Oes, p. 6. . Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 249. . Fifteen Oes, pp. 2–3. . See Liber meditationum, Meditations 6 and 8, PL 40:905–6 and 908–8; and Suso, Horologium sapientiae, I.4, pp. 395–403. . Simon the Anker of London Wall, Fruyte of Redempcyon, xxvi.

240 / Conclusion

it, I have tried to argue that they were not wrong. Indeed, there is a sense in which the Middle Ages was an age of imagination. This, however, was not simply the distracting and misleading imagination that has become familiar to us, but also a reliable imagination performing essential cognitive tasks and bearing considerable intellectual, spiritual, and literary power.

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i nd e x

abstraction, 39–40, 43, 87–89 active intellect. See agent intellect Adamson, Peter, 41n73 Aelred of Rievaulx, 12, 120–21 Aers, David, 222n60 affective piety, 177; and cognition, 15–18; history of, 15, 114–15; meditations on the life of Christ as, 10, 15–17, 114, 183–84 agent intellect, 42–45, 49–50, 87–89; doctrine of separate active intellect, 44–45; God as, 88–89 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 8n29 Albertus Magnus, 37n60, 39, 54–56 Alexander of Ashby, 118–19, 121–22 Alford, John, 199 al-Ghazali. See Ghazali, alAllen, Judson, 223 angels, 85, 91n125 Anselm (Archbishop of Canterbury), 114, 117–18, 119, 120 Aquinas, Thomas: on cognizing individuals, 57–61; criticism of Averroes, 49, 57, 60–61; on imagination, 56–61; on in­ telligible species, 47–48, 89n114; on a separate agent intellect, 44; theory of cog­nition of, 47–48, 56–61 Aristotle, 186–87; De anima, 31–42, 44; on imagination, 3, 4, 7, 13, 23–24, 25, 27, 30, 31–40; theory of cognition of, 3, 5, 7, 10, 17, 18–19, 23–25, 30–43 Arundel, Thomas (Archbishop of Canterbury), 213, 222 Augustine, 185, 210, 223; on Christ’s role in cognition, 65–70; De Trinitate, 18,

64, 66–74; divine illumination, doctrine of, 69–70; on eternal ideas, 66–67; on imagination, 6, 65–66; on memory, 72; on mental images in cognition, 18, 70–75; on mental words, 72–73; Neoplatonism of, 65–66; on selfknowledge, 71–72; on species, 95; theory of cognition of, 13, 64–75; trinitarian theology of, 64, 67, 70–74, 100 Averroes, 186; Aquinas’s criticism of, 49, 57, 60–61; on Aristotle’s De anima, 34– 35; on the cogitative power, 51–53; com­ pared to Avicenna, 49–51; on imagination, 46–54; on a separate potential intellect, 46–48; theory of cognition of, 46–54 Avicenna, 237–38; compared to Averroes, 49–51; on the estimative power, 50–51; on imagination, 41–45; Kita¯b al-Naja¯t, 43–44; Liber de anima, 34, 41–43; on prophecy, 6, 33; theory of cognition of, 41–45 Barr, Helen, 204 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 6n21, 16, 27 Basil of Caeserea, 185 Beckwith, Sarah, 217 Bede, Saint, 129 Bernard of Clairvaux, 64, 122, 181, 185, 189; on Christ’s wounds, 137, 156, 158; on contemplation, 162; on imageless devotion, 17, 171; on meditation, 12, 119–20, 224 Bernardus Silvestris, 190

264 / Index Bérubé, Camille, 80 Bestul, Thomas, 11n38, 12 Bettoni, Efrem, 67n15, 90n121 Black, Deborah, 50 Bodenstedt, Mary, 151n25 Boehner, Philotheus, 109 Boethius, 26, 27, 65, 97 Bonaventure, meditations of, 5; compared to earlier meditations, 112–22; and con­ templation, 84, 109; crucifix imagery in, 106, 126–29; De perfectione vitae ad sorores, 111, 136–37; influence on later meditations, 141–78; Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 126–27, 130–31; Lignum vitae, 111, 128–34; as means of ascent, 135– 37; and position as minister general, 139–40; presence of meditant in, 131– 36; and salvation, 137–39; Vitis mystica, 111, 134–36, 138. See also meditations on the life of Christ Bonaventure, philosophy of, 63–66, 75–110, 180, 181n9, 185n22, 196n55; Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 76, 89, 99–101, 104–6; compared to Aristotle’s, 63–65, 76–77, 81–82, 86–87, 93–94, 107; com­pared to Augustine’s, 63–65, 75–82, 93–94, 104; doctrine of Christ as species in, 92–104; doctrine of divine illumination in, 78– 80, 85–86, 103; on eternal rea­sons, 78– 79, 81; on imagination, 5, 13, 14–15, 87– 110; Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 83–86, 92–93, 99–109; on memory, 89–90; on phantasms, 89–92; roles of affect and intellect in, 16, 84, 106–9 Book of Privy Counselling, 224 Book to a Mother, 212, 217 Brann, Eva, 2 Bryan, Jennifer, 12, 111n1 Bundy, Murray Wright, 5n18, 6n22, 14n55, 23n3, 31n39 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 11n42, 15n59 Carruthers, Mary, 6n21, 7n26, 10, 17, 31, 66n11, 138, 171, 177 Chadwick, Henry, 71n36 Chase, Steven, 27n22 Chastising of God’s Children, The, 3n10, 212 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 96, 186 Chazelle, Celia, 115n11 Chenu, M.-D., 14n52, 28n22, 100n163 Christine de Pizan, 8n29

Clark, Mary, 64n3, 74 Cloud of Unknowing, 9, 224 cogitative power, 51–53 Coleman, Janet, 26, 84n91 Colish, Marcia, 72n45 Colledge, Edmund, 142 compassion, 12–13, 141, 155, 157, 159– 60, 232 Condemnation of 1277, 44, 47, 53, 186n26, 210 Constable, Giles, 16n65, 115n11, 119n29 contemplation, 5, 29–30, 84, 109–10, 112n2, 161–66, 224–25 Copleston, Frederick, 41 Coulter, Dale, 27n22, 28n25 Cousins, Ewert, 4n15, 15n58, 83n88 Crowley, Theodore, 78n63 crusades, 152 Cullen, Christopher, 83n88, 86 Dante Alighieri, 8n29, 53 David of Augsburg, 84n91 Davidson, Herbert, 44n82, 46 Deanesly, Margaret, 11n38 De anima. See under Aristotle de Libera, Alain, 54, 55, 56 Descartes, René, 2, 98 Despres, Denise, 9n33, 145 Dialogus beatae Mariae et Anselmi de Passione Domini (Pseudo-Anselm), 116–17 Dionysius, 25–26, 100 divine illumination, 61, 69–70, 78–80, 85–86, 103, 208–11 Doyle, A. I., 13n51, 213n24 Duffy, Eamon, 239 Eriugena, John Scotus, 67 estimative power, 50–51, 55, 56 Fewterer, John. See Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion Fifteen Oes, 238–29 Fleming, John, 4n16, 9n33, 145, 149n16 Francis, Saint, 83, 165–66, 168 Frede, Dorothea, 40 Fulton, Rachel, 12, 15n60, 115, 130n72, 160n50 Galloway, Andrew, 194n48 Gayk, Shannon, 15n57 Gersh, Stephen, 19n77

Index / 265 Gerson, Lloyd, 24 Ghazali, al-, 43n81 Ghosh, Kantik, 214 Gillespie, Vincent, 9nn33–34, 12, 213–14 Gilson, Etienne, 10n36, 75, 80n73, 90n121, 210 Glorieux, Palemon, 67n19 gospel meditations. See meditations on the life of Christ Grant, Edward, 186nn24–25 Gregory the Great, 17, 129, 156 Grosseteste, Robert. See Robert Grosseteste (bishop of Lincoln) Guigo the Carthusian, 189 Guillaume de Deguileville, 186 Hanna, Ralph, 7n26, 179nn2–3, 198n60, 201n64, 204 Harvey, Ruth, 31n39 Harwood, Britton, 193n44, 201n64 Hasse, Dag Nikolaus, 51n107 Hatfield, Gary, 10n36 Heloise, 11 Henry of Ghent, 210–11 Hilton, Walter, 9n30, 184n16, 224–25 Hollywood, Amy, 11n42, 234n117 Hugh of St. Victor, 63, 124n47, 185 Huizinga, Johan, 4n15 Hume, David, 169 illumination. See divine illumination image-based piety, 17–18 imagination, 211; cognition of individuals through, 57–61; as confined to the sen­ sory world, 207–8, 212–36; and contemplation, 5, 29–30; demonic deception through, 2–3, 87; early modern views toward medieval, 2, 237–41; histories of, 1–3, 23–24; and literature, 13, 14–15, 167, 168, 172; and meditations on the life of Christ (see under meditations on the life of Christ); and memory, 10, 66; modern understanding of, 4, 32; and place, 152–53, 175–76; and prophecy, 6, 33–34; and reason, 2, 6, 26–30; and species, 93; sus­picion toward, 2–3; tasks performed by, 3–4, 6–8, 14–15, 21, 32– 34, 66, 87; terms for, 2, 23n1, 32, 55; as trainable faculty, 141–42, 167–71; vivacity of, 168–71, 175–77, 205. See also individual philosophers

individuals, knowledge of, 57–61 intelligible species. See under species intentions, 48–49 James of Milan. See Stimulus amoris, short text (James of Milan) Jean de Meun, 8n29 Jeffrey, David, 145n9 John Duns Scotus, 208, 211 John of Fécamp, 115, 117n21, 118, 120 John of Mirecourt, 211 John Pecham (Archbishop of Canterbury), 89, 118, 120 Johnson, Mark, 2n4 Jones, H. S. V., 180n4 Julian of Norwich, 143, 235 Justice, Steven, 184n17, 205n73, 212 Kant, Immanuel, 1 Kaulbach, Ernest, 7n26 Kay, Sarah, 205 Kearney, Richard, 1, 3n9 Kelly, Douglas, 7n26 Kepler, Johannes, 96 Kieckhefer, Richard, 129n71 Kirchberger, Clare, 228, 229, 230n97 Langland, William. See Piers Plowman (William Langland) Largier, Niklaus, 16n67, 133n77 lay piety, 207, 214–18 Leclercq, Jean, 2, 4n14, 9, 16, 118n24, 180 Le Goff, Jacques, 8n27 Lesnick, Daniel, 9n33, 145 Lewis, C. S., 8n27 Liber de spiritu et de anima (PseudoAugustine), 26, 112n2 Liber meditationum (Pseudo-Augustine), 115, 117n21, 118, 120, 239 Lindberg, David, 95n136, 96n138 Lipton, Sara, 17n71, 134n82 Love, Nicholas. See Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ (Nicholas Love) Ludolph of Saxony. See Vita Christi (Ludolph of Saxony) Mâle, Emile, 9n30 Margery Kempe, 116n16, 160, 183–84, 212, 235–36, 237 Markus, R. A., 65n8, 68n25, 72

266 / Index Marrone, Steven, 75n55, 80, 83, 89n114, 90n121, 211 Matthew of Aquasparta, 89n114 McEvoy, James, 108n188 McGinn, Bernard, 5n17, 15, 28n22, 70, 107, 109n189, 114n7, 125n56, 126, 156, 212n20 McNamer, Sarah, 11n42, 12–13, 114, 115n9, 118n24, 121n34, 144n6 Meditatio in passionem et resurrectionem Domini, 123–24 Meditationes vitae Christi, 144–46, 154–55, 213–25; audience of, 12, 144, 214; con­ templation in, 162–66, 224–25; Franciscan spirituality of, 144–45; Francis in, 165–66, 168; freedom of meditant in, 172–74, 222–24; imagery of, 171–72; imagination in, 9, 166–72; importance of narrative in, 170–71; organization of, 169–70; techniques of, 172–78 meditations on the life of Christ: accessibility of, 109–10, 141, 162–64; as alternative to purgatory, 143–44; audience of, 11– 13, 141, 164–66; compassion in, 16, 141, 155, 159–60, 232; as contemplation, 161–66, 224–25; definition of, 4; dis­ tance in, 115–18; and Franciscans, 4n16; as fulfilling Christ’s desire, 133–35, 142– 53; imagery in, 137–38; and imagination, 4–5, 8–10, 130–31, 138–40, 158, 172–78, 207–8, 211, 220–22; as ladder, 126–27, 163, 170; as means of ascent, 122–24, 135–37; as means to suffer with Christ, 113–14, 128–30, 142–57; as moral instruction, 170–71; as obligation, 154–61; from pain to glory through, 154–61; and place, 152–53, 175–76; preBonaventuran, 112–22, 232, 233; and presence of meditant, 120–22, 131–36; pur­pose of, 8–10, 15, 21, 111–40; realism of, 175–76; as sacrifice, 118–20; and salvation, 137–39, 158–60; and theories of cognition, 13–14, 111–14, 124–40, 141–42, 208–11. See also affective piety; Bonaventure, meditations of; Meditationes vitae Christi memory, 10, 66, 72, 89–90, 152 Michael Scot, 34 Michaud-Quantin, Pierre, 94, 96, 97n144, 97n146, 103 Middleton, Anne, 14n53, 192n42, 193n46

Minnis, Alastair, 2n9, 7n26, 14, 27n19, 179n3, 198n60, 224n72 monastic meditation, 4n14, 8, 10, 167 More, Thomas, 222n61 Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ (Nich­ olas Love), 207, 212; audience of, 11, 213–18; compared to Meditationes vitae Christi, 213–25; distinction between meditation and contemplation in, 224– 25; freedom of meditant in, 222–24; meditations of, 218–25; position of the author in, 217, 220; as translation of Meditationes vitae Christi, 214–18 Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion, 237–38 mysticism, 5, 8, 15–16, 83, 99–110, 114n7, 124–26 natural philosophy, 186–87 natural theology, 181, 188–92 Neoplatonism, 8, 24–31, 65–66. See also Augustine; Boethius; Dionysius Nicholas of Autrecourt, 211 nominalism, 98 Noone, Timothy, 209 Nussbaum, Martha, 6n24, 32n40 O’Daly, Gerard, 65n8, 66n9, 66n14, 68n25 optics, theories of, 95–96 Panaccio, Claude, 57n127, 94n130 Pasnau, Robert, 10n36, 58n130, 86n105, 96n139, 97n148, 210n13 Paul, Saint, 20, 113, 128, 154 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 69n27 Peter Abelard, 11, 124n47, 127 Peter John Olivi, 98n155, 209 Peter Lombard, 85n100, 97 phantasia: meaning of, 2, 32n42; as opposed to imaginatio, 42, 55 phantasms, 39–40, 55–61. See also species Piers Plowman (William Langland): affect and intellect in, 182, 183–84; and biblical narrative, 179–80, 188, 202–5; Dame Studie, 194, 195–97; and imagination, 179–80, 182–84, 188, 203, 204–8; internal dreams of, 197–98; and meditation on the life of Christ, 182– 83, 203; natural knowledge in, 180–81, 184–88; natural theology in, 188–92; and revelation, 181, 190–92; Thouʒt, 187, 192–94; Wit, 187, 194–97; Ymagi-

Index / 267 natif, 179–81, 182, 190, 192, 198–202, 203, 204–5 Pinder, Ulrich, 237 Plato: on imagination, 23–24, 66; on prophecy, 6; The Republic, 74–75 potential intellect, 42–44, 49–50, 55–56; doctrine of separate potential intellect, 46–48 Prickynge of Love, 146, 147–49 table 1, 207, 212; compared to Stimulus amoris, 225– 35; and contemplation, 227–28; different brands of imagination in, 227–28; freedom of meditant in, 233–34; and moral instruction, 231–32; qualifications in, 227; tone of, 228–29 Pseudo-Dionysius. See Dionysius purgatory, 143–44 Quinn, John, 81n81 Rambuss, Richard, 2n9 Raw, Barbara, 17n71, 115n11 realism, 98 Richard of St. Victor: Benjamin Major, 29– 30, 84, 197n59; Benjamin Minor, 28–29, 30; on imagination, 14, 27–31; on meditation, 9 Richardson, Alan, 13n50 Robert Grosseteste (bishop of Lincoln), 95–96, 100, 187 Roest, Bert, 140 Roger Bacon, 98 Ross, Ellen, 15n60 Rothschild Canticles, 116n14 Rudolph of Biberach, 84n91 Ryan, Thomas, 180n4 Salter, Elizabeth, 11, 115n11, 214 Sargent, Michael, 9, 11n38, 213, 223n65, 226 Scarry, Elaine, 169 sensible species. See under species Sheppard, Anne, 24n6 Siger of Brabant, 53–54 Simon the Anker, 239 Simpson, James, 2, 14n52, 182n11, 198n60, 222n60 skepticism, 10n37, 58–60, 75, 210–11 Smith, Vance, 193n46, 195 Somerset, Fiona, 198 Southern, Richard, 114n8, 115, 119

species: acquired versus innate, 89–90; as alternative to forma, 96–97; Christ as, 92–104; criticism of species doctrine, 208–10; definition of, 19, 94; intelligible, 38–40, 47–48, 58–60, 98n151; multiplication of, 95–96, 209; sensible, 38–39. See also phantasms Speculum devotorum, 165n62 Spruit, Leen, 85n100, 97, 98n151 Stimulus amoris, long text, 146, 147–49 table 1, 161–62, 188–89, 226–35 Stimulus amoris, short text (James of Milan), 146–51, 155–62; audience of, 164–65; on Christ’s wounds, 155–59; salvation in, 155, 158–60 stoicism, 24, 72n45 Suso, Henry, 142; Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit (Little Book of Eternal Wisdom), 142–43; Horologium sapientia, 142–44, 152, 159–60, 165, 191 Tachau, Katherine, 63n1, 96n138, 97, 210n13 Tallis, Raymond, 13n50 Tavormina, Teresa, 194n50 Taylor, Richard, 41n73, 48, 51–53 Tertullian, 72n45 Teske, Roland, 71n37, 72n44 Themistius, 41, 60 theories of cognition, 3, 23–61, 63–109, 179; Christ as ladder in, 84, 105–6; and Christian theology, 13, 64, 139; in the fourteenth century, 207–11; intersection between Augustinian and Aristotelian, 5–6, 10, 63–65; and meditations on the life of Christ, 13–14, 111–14, 124–40, 141–42, 208–11. See also individual philosophers Turner, Denys, 5n17, 66n12, 83 Van Riet, Simone, 41n75 vernacular theology, 11n38, 212 Vita Christi (Ludolph of Saxony), 151–53, 161, 165, 166–68 von Ivánka, Endre, 14n52 Wallace, David, 13n50 Watson, Gerard, 14n55, 23n1, 23n3, 24n5, 25n8, 25n10, 33n44 Watson, Nicholas, 9n34, 11, 15n58, 121n34, 212n20, 218 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 14n52, 26

268 / Index White, Alan, 2n4 William Crathorn, 98n155 William of Auvergne, 45, 59, 209 William of Moerbeke, 34, 60, 97 William of Ockham, 210 William of St. Thierry, 16, 122–26, 139, 165n61, 216–17

Wippel, John, 47n90 Wittig, Joseph, 196n54, 198 Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, Þe, 116n14 Wolfson, Henry, 31n39 Zeeman, Nicolette, 179n3, 180n4, 182n11, 190, 193n44, 194, 198n60