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

Mention the imagination in almost any context other than the most strictly philosophical (or historical), and it is almost guaranteed to conjure images of a fantastic, ideally medieval Other, all the more paradoxical for the fact that the Middle Ages often is assumed to have been peculiarly hostile to or suspicious of imagination’s workings. It is the burden of the book under review to suggest otherwise, not only philosophically but also in the highly charged devotional realm of affective meditation on the life and human sufferings of Christ.

Karnes’s principal contention is that, philosophically speaking, “medieval imagination is … a cognitive faculty and in that capacity deals with what is real and true” (p. 10). Her primary concern is to show the way in which this philosophical position, grounded in new readings of Aristotle (chapter 1), was taken up in his contemplative work by St. Bonaventure, the great thirteenth-century Franciscan Scholastic, thereby enabling him to draw a powerful cognitive link between sensory, material images associated with perceiving Christ in his humanity and intelligible, spiritual images associated with understanding Christ in his divinity (chapters 2 and 3). As Karnes explains, Bonaventure believed, like his contemporary Aristotelians, that imagination was the faculty of the soul responsible for transmitting sensory data to the intellect. As such (and contrary to prevailing neo-Platonic convictions), it was not only trustworthy but moreover essential to the work of cognition insofar as it was the imagination acting as a bridge between sense and intellect that made understanding possible. According to Karnes, Bonaventure was nevertheless unique among his contemporaries in arguing for a further bridging facilitated by the imagination, between earthly meditation on Christ’s humanity and spiritual contemplation of his divinity.

Karnes’s argument here depends upon a sophisticated exposition of Bonaventure’s likewise sophisticated synthesis of Augustinian and Aristotelian theories of knowledge, by way of which Christ is shown to be best understood through a theory of species as “cognitive images that link sensory to intellectual cognition, but … derive their power to do so from the divine light that shines upon them” (p. 93). Christ, from this perspective, “is the ultimate species because he perfectly represents his exemplar, God the Father” (p. 92). Cognition, for Bonaventure, is therefore a process that takes place in and through Christ, “the ultimate species who leads the knowing intellect back to God” (p. 103) by way of his multiple natures: human (earthly, material) and divine (eternal). It is this sense of Christ as the object of human knowing, Karnes argues, that Bonaventure sought to realize in contemplative works such as Itinerarium mentis in Deum and that thereby became central to the meditative tradition on the life of Christ as manifested in works such as the Meditationes vitae Christi (long attributed to Bonaventure) and James of Milan’s Stimulus amoris (chapter 4).

Karnes’s reading of these devotional works as grounded ultimately in Bonaventure’s philosophical speculation about cognition goes radically against the tendency in much recent scholarship to associate them more with the perceived devotional needs of the less-educated laity (particularly women) than with the clerical intellectuals in the schools; it likewise challenges prevailing emphases on these works as intended to appeal primarily to the affect, rather than to the intellect as well. The difficulty (as Karnes herself acknowledges) is that neither the author of the Meditationes nor James of Milan discusses these cognitive underpinnings. More persuasive is Karnes’s reading of Ymaginatif’s role in schooling Will of Piers Plowman to reconcile natural knowledge with spiritual understanding (chapter 5). Nevertheless, by the late-fourteenth century, it would seem that the Bonaventuran moment has passed. Nicholas Love’s instructions (heavy-handed, according to Karnes) on how to use the “ymaginacion” in his Myrrour of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ shy away from suggesting anything like true spiritual ascent, whereas the Prickynge of Love (a Middle English...