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

166 BOOK REVIEWS historical-critical studies end. Given what the experts say was the wisdom of Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Thomas Aquinas, what does their wisdom mean for us as human beings in our world? The reader is treated to an inquiry into being that covers truth, knowledge, love, desire, affective knowing, person, imago Dei, likeness, perfection, participation, God, providence, evil, shame, guilt, morality, art, and glory. In more than a few of the essays, the topics at hand are discussed in light of an opening statement about the current state of Western culture and prevailing opinions. Many of the essays are thus a kind of metaphysical commentary on the days of our life here below. These are sapiential essays that treat being, not only sub specie aeternitatis, but also as we live out our being clothed in circumstances. JAMES BRENT, O.P. The Catholic University of America Washington, DC Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. BY MICHELLE KARNES. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 268. $ 50.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-226-42531-3. Any visitor to the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan or to the Medieval Academy of America annual conference will be aware that medieval studies is by no means one thing. Rare is the scholar who can (or wants to) converse with both the Scholastic philosophers on the one hand and the Langland scholars on the other. Michelle Karnes is one of those rare scholars, as this ambitious and wellcrafted volume demonstrates. This study begins with Aristotle’s theory of cognition, journeys through St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, and Piers Plowman, and ends with the Middle English translations of the pseudoBonaventurean Meditationes de vita Christi. Such an interdisciplinary scope is admirable and marks clear and hopeful promise for a growing dialogue in medieval studies between philosophers and theologians on the one hand and literary critics on the other. Karnes, a literary critic herself, aims to demonstrate how medieval cognitive theory, specifically the Bonaventurean strong understanding of the role of the imagination, influenced and infused devotional practices such as meditations on the life of Christ. She argues that, under such influence, medieval writers conceived of the imaginative meditation as a path “from sensory knowledge of [Christ’s] humanity to spiritual knowledge of his divinity” (20). Her case is built fundamentally around two central chapters on BOOK REVIEWS 167 the thought of Bonaventure. The first chapter thus serves as a kind of prequel, tracing the history of the imagination, primarily in the Aristotelian tradition, from the Philosopher himself, through Avicenna and Averroës, up through Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. For Karnes, the Aristotelian tradition develops a sophisticated account of the necessity of the imagination (phantasia) to bridge the gap between sensory knowledge of material things and immaterial intellectual understanding. Imagination prepares and assembles sensory input into a form from which the intellect can abstract intelligible species. Thomas Aquinas extends this tradition and expands imagination’s power by arguing that imagination’s phantasms conduce not only to the knowledge of an object’s essence but also to knowledge of its particularity. With this claim, the stage is set for the second chapter’s “Bonaventurean Synthesis.” Refreshingly, Karnes makes no effort to puff up a case for Bonaventure by contrasting him with Aquinas. Instead, she suggests that Bonaventure shares Aquinas’s fundamental Aristotelian conceptions in much of his own theory. Bonaventure’s account is distinct in the way he synthesizes Augustine’s cognitive theory with this tradition. Karnes’s own account of Augustine and Bonaventure follows the mainstream account of the Augustinian “illumination theory” developed so carefully by Stephen Marrone’s two-volume history, The Light of Thy Countenance (Leiden: Brill, 2001), with no apparent knowledge of the critical revisionist account offered by Lydia Schumacher (Divine Illumination [Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011]), which was published at the same time as Karnes’s book. The distinctive feature of Bonaventure’s synthesis was to understand that the presence of Christ in all human knowing as its exemplary cause and regulating and motivating principle creates the foundations for a “cognitive mysticism,” an ascent to the knowledge of God in and through human cognition. Christ...