III. Clinical Therapies, Readerly Mentalities

1.

In the previous section I discussed the connection between meditation and reading in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. This relationship was substantially diminished by the end of the sixteenth century as a result of changes in education, reading habits, book production, and scholarly methods, despite statements on behalf of traditional meditative practices such as Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises and philosophical revivals of ancient pagan meditation between Ficino and Montaigne.

As a result of this situation, meditative thinking was no longer anchored in a single discipline, namely sacred reading. It gradually found its way into art, secular poetry, and nondevotional music. Some three centuries later it has turned up in medicine. If one takes the long view, the transition over the centuries consists in the expansion of a single methodology into different disciplines and bears witness to what I have called the enduring qualities in the spiritual dimension of Western intellectual life.

The shift in the location and function of contemplative practices within Western culture was not the subject of extensive comment in the early modern period. No notice was taken by medical thinkers because the mind-body treatments that utilize meditation nowadays fell outside the rationalist tradition of medical science that originated in Hippocrates and Galen. There was not a widespread discussion in literary circles either, although it is difficult to generalize owing to the ambiguity of the humanists concerning the medieval heritage, which frequently took the form of criticizing scholastic endeavors while making use of modes of thought derived from medieval authors. The new way of looking at the issues can be seen by the mid-fourteenth century, when Petrarch illustrated the contrast between the antiqui and moderni in the history of reading in his autobiographical account, the Secretum.

One of the important transitions consisted in the growth of analytical reading, whose purpose was the extraction of information from texts. This method of reading was concerned with observation and comprehension. The analytical reader looked upon reading as an end in itself, whereas the meditative or devotional reader regarded the knowledge arising from the text as a means to an end: a higher purpose or meaning suggested by what was written but not communicable by means of a text. This knowledge lay beyond or above spoken or written words, as it did, for example, in the dialogue between Augustine and Monica at Ostia in book nine of the Confessions, which began in verbal conversation and ended in silent communication between souls. Meditative reading, while not neglecting the content of biblical texts, probed into personal experience and explored meaning in a manner that was associative rather than orderly, logical, and linear. Analytical readers considered this type of reading an impediment to getting information out of a text, just as the apparent disorder of nature, which revealed God's creative genius, could be considered a distraction to the scientific investigator in search of the mathematical laws by which the natural world was organized.

It not surprising, therefore, that the period of decline in meditative reading corresponds more or less to the centuries in which there is a weakening of mind-body therapies that had long inhered in the reading process. When the value of meditation was rediscovered by contemporary mind-body medicine, it was done largely outside the reading process. But the rise in interest in meditation within medicine has in turn renewed thinking about meditative topics in literature, theology, and even psychoanalysis, despite Freud's view that religion is a type of obsessional neurosis. It is this inquiry in its medical-literary context that is the theme of this presentation. My specific topic is the rehabilitation of thinking concerning the emotions and narrative as instruments for healing.

2.

Thomas Merton said that "meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life."¹ In practical terms, being rooted in life means being situated in one's personal life story. Mind-body treatments involving meditation that arise in a literary context, such as writing a diary, a journal, or a record of treatment for disease, frequently explore the themes of rootedness, authenticity, and spiritual values...