Picture this scene: St Thomas Aquinas, travelling by horse with two of his companions, both secretaries, by road between Rome and Paris. They travel about 10kms a day and then take two or three days at monasteries en route, basking in the hospitality of the fellow Dominicans.
During all of these rest stops, Aquinas stays in his cell and he works, composing. He can dictate whole passages of text and thought, on two and sometimes three different tracts, to two or three different secretaries, at the same time. All of this composition and thought he can contain in his one super-sized mind. Imagine having the mental faculty to compose three concurrent documents in your minds eye. How was this skill developed?
Aquinas, like other medieval scholars, learned all the texts he thought worth reading by heart. And think of the loveliness of that phrase that has survived to our time "to learn by heart". That to know something so well, to incorporate it into your very being, you "learn it by heart".
Mary Carruthers is a joy to listen to on this subject of memory. While visiting Australia I heard her speaking about the centrality of memory in medieval life. From her study The Book of Memory:
"When we think of our highest creative power, we think invariably of the imagination. "Great imagination, profound intuition," we say: this is our highest accolade for intellectual achievement, even in the sciences. The memory, in contrast, is devoid of intellect: just memorization, not real thought or true learning. At best, for us, memory is a kind of photographic film, exposted (we imply) by an amateur and developed by a duffer, and so marred by scratches and inaccurate light-values.
We make such judgements (even those of us who are hard scientists) because we have been formed in a post-Romantic, post-Freudian world, in which imagination has been identified with a mental unconscious of great, even dangerous, creative power...Ancient and mediaval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect."
Carruthers offers wonderful contrasting contemorary portraits of St Thomas Aquinas and Einstein which are fascinating. Leopold on Einstein:
The greatness of Einstein lies in his tremendous imagination, in the unbelievable obstinacy in which he pursues his problems. Originality is the most essential factor in important scientific work. It is intuition which leads to unexplored regions, intuition as difficult to explain rationally as that by which the oil diviner locates the wealth hidden in the earth. There is no vreat scientific achievement without wandering through the darkness of error. Tbe more the imagination is restricted, the more a piece of work moves along a definite track - a process made up rather of additions than essentially new ideas - the safer the ground and the smaller the errors
.... The most amazing thing about Einstein was his tremendous vital force directed toward one and only one channel: that of original thinking, original research.
Gui on Aquinas:
Of the subtlety and brilliance of his intellect and the soundness of his judgement, sufficient proof is his vast literary output, his many original discoveries, his deep understanding of the Scriptures. His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whaterver he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book.
...Still stronger is the testimony of Reginald his socius and of his pupils and of those who wrote to his dictation, who all declare the he used to dictate in his cell to three secretaries, and occasionally to hour, on different subjects at the same time.... No one could dictate simultaneously so much various material without special grace. Nor did he seem to be searching for things as yet unknown to him; he seemed simply to let his memory pour out its treasures....
It was Einstein who said "imagination is more important than knowledge" encouraging us down this forgetful path. Perhaps Einsteins context for that remark was at the frontier of physics were it may be true, but as a whole culture this amnesia seems tragic to me.
The intense role of memory in Medieval times and its diminishment thereafter, relates of course to the technology available for retaining and recording thoughts - once books were commonplace, the role of memory changed. How will the availability of all books online at nearly all times change our relationship with the printed word and with memory itself?
In fact, mention the word memory and for many, the first mental association will not be about personal or intellectual narrative but computer memory: RAM or hard-drive capacity. Science fiction has already taken us to places where memory can be uploaded like software. Think of the movie Total Recall.
And as I leave my digital footprint in cyberspace, what role memory?
I have often reflected on the world of 'reality TV' and now Facebook and how much of people's mindshare is now colonised by images of themselves and the people around them, people their own age, similar to them, from their own time and place. It's a sort of collective timebound narcissism. How deep can your thoughts be when you have no temporal context for them. When they are not set in context to a broader sweep of understanding that can only be formed with some sort of historical knowledge.
Cicero said to not know about the world before you were born is to remain forever a child. For hundreds of years, higher school educated Westerners shared a common minds eye inheritance of Greek City States, Romans amphiteatres, Biblical stories, English countryside, Egyptian pharoahs, Medici Florence, Conrad's Africa. If Cicero was right, how do we grow up in a digital world where we are overwhelmed with images of now and 2 minutes ago?
It used to be said, 'The past is a strange country, they do things differently there'. In this world of facebook friends, does anyone have time to even visit this country?
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