Ars Memoria--Giordano Bruno and the Art of Memory

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post  509

The images presented here today are related to graphical memory, ars memorativa, the technique of aiding the storage (and retrieval!) of info in the human brain.  This was accomplished  by mnemonic devices that associated the location of the data with a striking or jarring or geometric image, all structured in such a way that the correlation of the continued image would relate to more and deeper remembered information, one bit leading to the next, expanding into other bits, and so on, in a kind of fractal way.  The visual tools held a space for the data; they were a constant structure into which information could be poured, allowing for chains of info to be formed and retrieved.  And so by the effort of visualizing the structure of where the memories where (supposed to be) the user would be able to recall them by simply remembering their placement, and since the structure built on itself, one memory would lead to the next, and so on, a cascade of rushing memories.

Giordano Bruno (who I wrote a little about here some time ago) established his system in 1582 based upon the concentric circles of Raymond Lull, grouping the circles with symbols and letters and other designs,. Forming tighter cells of memory, much in line with the long practices of the later Hermeticists. 

Part of the goal, it seems to me, was to be able to not only recall this information, but to be able to get it out of the way, so to speak, to be able to put all of the factual stuff necessary to think in a safe place so that real thinking could be done.  Bruno was one of those who tried to go beyond the veil of the known by having a clear, orerdly mind.  Also, the process of getting there—to the point where you have a lot of info loaded into these memory spaces—involved lots of quiet time, or meditation, or deep thought, or something, which also led in that inexorable way to a finer modality of thinking.  (Jeff, Laura?) Perhaps it was a mode of composition that could only come after long, deep meditation and memory exercises.

Certainly this approach to though/logic/rhetoric/composition is nothing new.  Ancient it is, really.  This sort of process reaches way back to the Egyptians, and to Cicero's De oratore (Bk II 350-360), and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, (ca. 90 BCE), and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (Bk XI), and (of course) Aristotle  On The Soul and On Memory and Reminiscence; to the delightful Matteo Ricci  A Treatise On Mnemonics and to Simonides of Ceos, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Cosmos Rossellius Theasurus artificosae memoria (1579).; to Jacobus Publicius, Oritoriae artis epitome,  Peter of Ravenna, Phoenix, sive artificiosa memoria,  and to Johannes Romberch, Congestorium artificiose memorie.  And these are examples that don’t get us even out of the 16^th century. 

Some of the writers listed above used memory devices that were architectural in style, or showed levels of the heaven and earth as memory place-holders, or used the human body and body parts to elegantly display to the mind where the memory was hiding on the body.  I've included one example from Johannes Romberch--who used city and architectural images in addition to a wide assortment of astronomical, alphabetical and geographical devices--because it is an extremely early depiction of a bookstore (in the upper right, "bibliopola").

The practice of the art of memory was taken by some groups as a sort of religious experience--as a matter of fact even in the late 18th century the Quakers thought enough of the practice to want it banned, leading as it did to too much thought on matters that were far strewn from religious tolerances.  Some of the ars memoria practices, like those of Lull, were too far removed into the spheres of the esoteric and astrologic to do much good for the Straight & True believer.  The great historian of memory, Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, says the following about Lull:

"Lullism had a vast diffusion which has only recently begun to be systematically studied. Owing to the core of Platonism, and of Scotist Neoplatonism, within it, it formed a current which, not acceptable to many in the ages dominated by scholasticism, found itself in a much more welcoming atmosphere at the Renaissance. A symptom of the popularity that it would gain in the full Renaissance is the interest accorded to it by Nicholas of Cusa. In the full Neoplatonic stream of the Renaissance, stemming from Ficino and Pico, Lullism took a place of honor. Renaissance Neoplatonists were able to recognize in it notions very congenial to them and reaching them from mediaeval sources which, unlike the humanists, they did not despise as barbarous.

"There is even, at the heart of Lullism, a kind of interpretation of astral influences which would have aroused interest in the age of Ficino and Pico. When the Art is done on the level coelum, it becomes a manipulation of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven planets, in combination with B to K, to form a kind of benevolent astral science, which can be worked as astral medicine, and which, as Lull points out in the preface to his Tractatus de astronomia, is a very different matter from ordinary judicial astrology.... Lullism thus establishes itself at the Renaissance as belonging with the fashionable philosophy, and becomes assimilated to various aspects of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition. "  (p. 187-8)

Be that as it may, I do have a soft place for Bruno, the defrocked Franciscan who met his end in flames*.  He may have actually been of great value to the birth of modern science, perhaps not--he did seem to have the idea of the infinite universe and the idea of the fluidity of time and space, along with some other stuff (see extended reading) that rubbed the Catholic fur in the wrong direction.  Needless to say, the Church's foundation felt threatened by Bruno's cosmological beliefs, and found that the best thing to do about dealing with superior and scientific thinking to their own was to burn the author. 

Bruno was sent to his maker(s) for a number of official reasons, listed below, not the list of which (though not identified specifically) was his Copernican heliocentric cosmology:

• Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
• Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
• Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass.
• Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity.
• Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
• Dealing in magics and divination.
• Denying the Virginity of Mary

 

Comments

[Joshhostels]

Thanks for your very interesting post. Do you know where to find Ars Memoriae in English? I've only found versions in Latin like this one:
http://www.esotericarchives.com/bruno/arsmemor.htm

[John F. Ptak]

Esoterica: no, I don't have any knowledge of an English translation of the Bruno, though this site http://mattsalusbury.blogspot.com/2009/05/renaissance-man-giordano-bruno.html says there is one coming "soon".