Religions Reviewed

The solitude of monastic meditation is not one that confers exceptionality, then. It is, however, one that potentiates interiority. This orientation to the anima or the homo interior was characteristic of the Cistercian tradition.  Colin Morris has pointed to this feature as an innovative development of individual self-consciousness in the medieval period.  In response, Caroline Bynum affirms the psychological interiority highlighted by Bernard and kindred thinkers of his period.  But she stresses that an interest, or even a preoccupation with an interior self does not fully account for the sense of the human person encountered in twelfth century writings. To complete the picture, she offers first a reciprocal sensibility of social groups and roles, and then a utilization of types and models.  The “sense of model” that Bynum describes is in many ways rooted in the medieval idea of memory. She quotes a passage from Hugh of St. Victor’s De arca Noe morali: “And now then, as we promised, we must put before you the pattern of our ark. Thus you may learn from an external form, which we have visibly depicted, what you ought to do interiorly, and when you have impressed the form of this pattern on your heart, you may rejoice that the house of God has been built in you.”

This same passage also appears in some manuscripts of Hugh’s De pictura Arche (or De arca Noe mystica).  To “have impressed the form of this pattern on your heart” is, of course, to commit it to memory, and “our ark” is a structure for organizing memories.  When Bynum quotes Guigo II regarding reading the lives of the saints, so that “by chewing and digesting this food…its strength can pass into our inmost heart,” it is again a passage describing an act of memorization, by which ruminative reading leads to placement in memory.  Rather than a modern model in which the interior self seeks expression through a personality of outward words and behaviors, these texts—as construed by Bynum—provide a reversal of the process, in which the behavior and words of others is impressed on the interior self.