The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, an the Making of Images, 400-1200

The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric, an the Making of Images, 400-1200. Introduction Orthopraxis is a category developed for the comparative study of religions, specifically Christianity and Buddhism' Orthodox believers seek, in the words of Paul Gchl, to reproduce the experience of learning from the teacher, whose teaching lives on in authentic texts, verbal traditions or creeds. An orthopractical adept, by contrast, seeks to achieve an inmanent experience of the divine equivalent to that of the founder. Usually by following a devotional practice presumed to be similar. Orthodoxy explicates canonical texts, whereas orthopraxis emphasizes a set of experiences and techniques, conceived as a 'way " to be followgz leading one to relive the founder‟s path to enliglitenment. Because it seelts an experience, an orthopraxis can never be completely articulate; instead of normative dogma, it relies upon patterns of oral formulae and ritualized behavior to prepare for an experience of God, should one be granted. Like chance, grace also favors a prepared mind. Orthopraxis and orthodoxy often co-exist in the same religion. Christianity, though a religion primarily of orthodoxy, has always had groups within it who have created for themselves an orthopraxis. Monasticism is one such practice.: It began as a movement of pious laypeople, not clergy (monks were not ordinarily priests until late in the Middle Ages, and nuns never) and as a particular way of living to be adopted only as an adult, often after one‟s dynastic obligations to marry and have children were fulfilled. Yet orthopraxis is a concept not unique to religion. Any craft develops an ortho raxis, a craft “knowledge' which is learned, and indeed can only be learned by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarization of exemplary masters' techniques and experiences. Most of this knowledge cannot even be set down in words; it l The craft of thought must be leamed by racticing, over and over a again. Monastic education is best understood, I think, on is apprenticeship model, more lilte masonry or carpentry than anything in the modern academy. It is an apprenticeship to a craft which is also a way of life.) It is 'practice both in the sense of being 'preparation' for a perfect craft mastery which can never fully be achieved, and in the sense of „working in a particular way.” The craft of making prayer continuously, which is the craft of monasticism, came to be called sam: pagina in Latin, the constant meditation based on reading and rccollecting sacred texts. The early desert monks called this set of practices in sacra pagina, “the memory of God.” This kind of 'memory' is not restricted to what we now call memory, but is a much more expansive concept, for it recognizes the essential roles of emotion, imagination, and cogitation within the activity of recollection. Closer to its meaning is our term "cognition,' the construction of thinking Monastic meditation is the craft of making thoughts about God. I have chosen to deal with meditation primarily as a rhetorical process and product. This choice of analytic method is somewhat unusual. Monastic spirituality, in this century, has most often been examined in the context of psychology, an analytical focus set by William ]ames and Sigmund Freud. It has been very fruitful; I do not wish to deny this. But I hope to demonstrate in my study of spiritual texts that to bring rhetoric to bear upon them redresses an imbalance which psychological analysis has tended to impart: over»concentration on the individual and personal. ln medieval monasticism, the individual always had his or her being within a larger community, within which a single life was °'perfected,” “made complete,” by a civic being and identity. That civic being, I will suggest, was brought into consciousness through learned practices that were both literary and rhetorical in their nature. T_h_|§as of monasticism, the civic, can be best seen, I believe, through the lens of rhetoric, not psychology. The monks never themselves produced any textbooks of rhetoric by which we might now recognize, as we can for antiquity, an orthodoxy of written principles and niles. They did, however, produce an orthopractice for the invention of meditation and the composition of prayers. Such 'creative thinking” was leamed by a method of apprenticeship based upon imitating examples, and mastery came only to a few and only after long discipline and 2 Introduction continual practice. This craft is what I mean in this study by “monastic rhetoric.” Monastic rhetoric emphasized "invention," the cognitive procedures of traditional rhetoric. Rhetoric was thus practiced as primarily a craft of composition rather than as one primarily of persuading others. The typical product of monasticism, the meditation – even though, as an example for others to follow, it was obviously addressed to an audience - presented itself as a product of disciplined cognitive activity, or °„silence," silentium, the term for it in monastic rhetoric.” This was also called cumpetens silentium, suggesting the 'compentency” of those adept in a craft, a 'spirit' or attitude of mind towards what one was doing, the "litness" of craftsman, craft, and work. The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental or cognitive 'pictures' for thinking and composing. The use of such pictures, I will argue, derives both from jewish spirituality and from the compositional practices of Roman rhetoric. The emphasis upon the need for human beings to 'see' their thou hts in their minds as o ized scliemata of at pictures, en to use d } ihinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images in And the monks' 'mixed' use of verbal and visual media, their often synaesthetic literature and architecture, is a quality of medieval aesthetic practice that was also given a major impetus by the tools of monastic memory worltf‟ These tools, as in all rhetoric, were made of language and image, primarily the tropes and figures and schemes discovered in the Bible, the liturgy, and the arts produced by their means, understood and handled as rhetoric. Monastic art is, as monastic authors themselves talked about it, an art for mneme, "memory," rather than one for mimesis. This is not to say that the aesthetics of 'representation' were unknown to it, only that in it mimesis was less of an issue, less in the forefront of their conscious practice, than mneme. The questions raised about a work by mneme are different from those raised by mimesis. They stress cognitive uses and the instrumentality of art over questions of its "realism." Mneme produces an an for 'thinking about' and for “meditating upon' and for “gathering” ' a favored nastic metaphor for the activity of mneme theou, deriving fromnxc pun in the Latin verb legere, 'to read” and also 'to gather by picking.” An art of tropes' and figures is an art of 3 The craft of though! patterns and patnem-making, and thus an art of "meme orrnemonle, of cogitation, thinking. To observe the obvious, tropes cannot exist unless they are recognized. That is a function of memory and shared experience, including shared education. Thus tropes are also social phenomena, and in monastic culture they were considered, as they had been in late ancient culture, to have ethical, communal instrumentality. Tropes and figures are the memory-resident tools, the devices and machines of monastic reading craft. I have occasionally been asked if l believe that different mnemonic techniques in themselves produce different material expressions (various book layouts, different literary structures or architectures). The question seems to me to show misunderstanding of the nature of mnemotechnic. Like other rhetorical tools, it is not a single systematic entity with a rigorous intrinsic grammar, according to which, for example, “Zx-3y” must always produce a result different from "2x + 3y.‟° The tools of mnemoteclmic(that is, the specific schemes an individual may use) are more like a chisel or a pen.‟ So l must ask of my readers a considerable effort of imagination throughout this study, to conceive of memory not only as "rote,' the ability to reproduce something (whether a text, a formula, a list of items, an incident) but as the matrix of a reminiscing cogitation, shuffling and collating “things” stored in a random-access memory scheme, or set of schemes - a memory architecture and a library built up during one‟s lifetime with the express intention that it be used invcntivcly. Medieval memorila was a universal thinking machine, macbinn ntemonhlis - both the mill that ground the grain of onc‟s experiences (including all that one read) into a mental Hour with which one could make wholesome new bread, and also the hoist or windlass that every wise master-mason learned to make and to use in constructing new matters. Meditation is a craft of thinking. People use it to make things, such as interpretations and ideas, as well as buildings and prayers. Since I focus on the craft and its tools, I am not particularly concemed in this study with henneneutics, the validity or legitimacy of an interpretation, but rather with how an interpretation, whatever its content, was thought to be constructed in the first place. I do not think that hermeneutical validity is an unimportant or simple issue: far from it. But the main emphasis in litcrauy studies for the past twenty-Eve years has been on this matter, while the basic craft 4 Introduction involved in making thoughts, including thoughts about the significance of texts, has been treated as though it were in itself unproblematical, even straightforward. It is neither. In the idiom monasticism, people do not “have” ideas, they “make” them.

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