Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages by Michelle Karnes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages by Michelle Karnes Michael G. Sargent Michelle Karnes. Imagination, Meditation and Cognition in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 280. $50.00 cloth. Michelle Karnes has written a thought-provoking argument for the elevation of the role of the imagination in our perception of late medieval contemplative and devotional thought. Specifically, she argues that a synthesis of elements of Scholastic and Augustinian psychology achieved by Bonaventure led to the promotion of the power of imagination from its lower role (as it is usually conceived) in the memory and projection of sense impressions into the cognitive faculty, so that it came to have a function in the higher cognition of those ideas that are eternally in the mind of God: that it is through the functioning of the power of imagination that we know the highest truths that the human mind is capable of knowing. This synthesis worked out in Bonaventuran psychology, [End Page 320] Karnes goes on to point out, characterizes Bonaventure’s authentic works of devout, imaginative meditation, and further influences the circle of works attributed to him in the later Middle Ages, like the Stimulus amoris and the Meditationes vitae Christi. But it was dismissed by later medieval English writers like Walter Hilton (if it was indeed he who wrote the Prickynge of Love) and Nicholas Love, in whose vernacular versions of these pseudo-Bonaventuran works imagination was reduced once more to the lower rank that it had held in the monastic tradition as a helpful but problematically illusory aspect of sensuality. Karnes’s study is divided into six chapters: the first provides an overview of classical and early medieval thought on the imagination, beginning with Plato and the Neoplatonists; focusing on Aristotle; and continuing through the medieval Aristotelian/Scholastic tradition, including Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas. The second chapter treats first of Augustinian thought on imagination (particularly in De Trinitate) before proceeding to deal with Bonaventure’s philosophical writings. The third shows how the Bonaventuran philosophical position on imagination expressed itself in the devotional writings that were assuredly written by him; the fourth follows this emanation of influence into the most prominent Latin devotional writing in the “Bonaventuran” tradition, the Stimulus amoris and the Meditationes vitae Christi, as well as Suso’s Horologium sapientiae and Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi. The sixth chapter follows directly on from this, demonstrating what happened to the Bonaventuran strand of imaginative contemplation in the two prominent Middle English versions of the Stimulus and the Meditationes, the Prickynge of Love and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The fifth chapter interrupts the flow of this argument, in an excursus on “Imaginatif” in Piers Plowman that demonstrates the usefulness of this study to those other than specialists in contemplative and devotional literature. The crux of Karnes’s argument lies in her observation that Bonaventure synthesized the late medieval Aristotelian conceptualization of the operation of the agent intellect in illuminating the intelligible species abstracted from common sense perception as phantasmata by a higher-level form of imagination, with Augustine’s trinitarian psychology, according to which reason illuminates the intelligible species that reside eternally in memory. For Augustine, as Karnes demonstrates with admirable lucidity, the soul is a created trinity made in the image and likeness [End Page 321] of the uncreated Trinity: memory in the individual human soul is the image of the Father, in whom eternal truth resides; reason is the image of the Son, the Word in whom/which eternal truth expresses itself; and will is the image of the Holy Spirit, the love that flows from this truth to this truth. For Bonaventure, as Karnes argues, the Son, the Word of the Augustinian Trinity—through which we know the ideas (“verba” or “species”) that reside properly in the Mind, the Father (to the limited extent that we do know them)—functions in the individual human soul in the same way as the Aristotelian/Scholastic agent intellect in illuminating the intelligible species. I am not certain that I am convinced by this, but I will admit that my undergraduate study of medieval...