Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Dante

Abstract

Confessions, Proslogion, and Consolation of Philosophy, like the Divine Comedy, all enact Platonist ascents. Each has a pilgrim figure, guided dialogically on a journey of understanding. Each rises to progressively higher levels of understanding and culminates in a supreme intellectual vision. The higher levels contain and surpass earlier understandings and thereby reconfigure them, but implicitly, for the questing pilgrim rarely stops to reflect on the stages of his ascent. Augustine's conclusions about in book 11, for example, embrace memory as time past, but he does not reconsider his account of memory in book 10 from this new perspective. He left these for his reader's meditation, as a spiritual exercise. In this way, a Platonist ascent generates implied meditative meanings, which scholars have explored only in part. Each work calls us to read forward, on its journey of understanding, and to meditate backwards on the stages of the ascent and the relations between them. Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Dante wrote for readers experienced in meditating on the Bible, adept at exploring relations between far distant passages. They designed these works as spiritual exercises for the same kind of reading and meditation. Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent uses literary analysis to discover new philosophical meanings in these works. Clearly written in non-technical language, its account of their literary structures and of the hidden meanings they generate will inform non-specialist and specialist alike.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.