Rafael Simian’s Inventio meditativa: The Rhetoric and Hermeneutics of Meditation in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio is part of a recent effort in the discipline of philosophy to undo the shadow that post-Enlightenment misinterpretations of Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia have cast on pre-Cartesian writings. The era when Descartes enjoyed the reputation of being the “herald of a new scientific epoch that finally broke with its superstitious and decadent past” (9) is coming to an end. In the twenty-first century, philosophers are becoming increasingly aware of just how much Descartes’s Meditationes were shaped by earlier authors, specifically authors of the very genre Descartes invoked in his title: meditations. While philosophers have already explored the ways that Descartes borrowed from Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, or Teresa of Ávila, Simian’s book jumps onto the scene to declare that the sources of the Meditationes come not just from late antiquity or early modernity, but also from central medieval monastic writings on meditation, specifically those of Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guigo II, and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Simian’s thesis is that it is not the content of these twelfth- and thirteenth-century thinkers’ meditations that shows up in Descartes, but rather it is their understanding of meditation as a process of specific rhetorical and hermeneutical principles. In this light, Descartes is not a “new scientific” thinker, but is rather building on the compositional methods that had long defined medieval monastic (note: not scholastic) thought. And by focusing on the meditative methods of these medieval thinkers, Simian shows that medieval monastic thinkers were not searching for a final “truth” or “reality,” but rather were interested in developing an ever-evolving process of collecting and discovering truths never fixed. To Simian, these medieval texts were not “paintings to be hanged on the walls of a museum,” final and unmovable, but rather “incomplete sketches drawn by a master for her aids and apprentices to make their own compositions” (232).
Simian argues that to understand medieval meditation, one needs to understand the medieval grammar and rhetorical training (articulated by men like Cicero, Quintilian, Boethius, or Cassiodorus) that formed the basis of every medieval monastic education. Simian believes that the lens of rhetoric “offers indispensable analytical tools for exploring, discerning, and understanding the very concepts, doctrines, and arguments that give shape” to medieval meditative work (22): as an “introspective exercise,” as a “compositional textual practice,” and as a “form of literary reception” (23), meditative rhetoric provided the structure for inventio—structured discovery—to the monastic author. To make his arguments, Simian focuses on six specific works: Hugh’s Didascalicon, Guigo’s Scala claustralium and First Meditation, and Bonaventure’s Itinerarium, De triplici via, and Soliloquium. Each of these works were not for merely “interiorizing dogma” (25) but rather “function[ed] as a seedbed for those who receive[d] it to start their own creative process” (24) of meditating themselves, guided by these three masters’ compositional procedures.
Simian’s book is divided into three main sections. The first, on Hugh’s Didascalicon, argues that Hugh showcased how learning was the education of memory, and that the process of dividing universals into particulars was the most fruitful way to educate, because it ultimately worked to create in a student a “complete architecture of all her knowledge” (54). Such architecture was the game plan that served as a how-to blueprint for meditative thought—to Hugh, meditation was a prescribed process of gathering and accumulating knowledge (which eventually led to a consummating, unifying principle, pure intelligence, a.k.a. God). The second section of the book, on the Scala, paints Guigo as an embracer of “hermeneutic openness” (105), providing his reader with a process that (radically) sought meaning “under the direction of one’s own understanding” (95). In this chapter, Simian painstakingly shows how Guigo was “open to receive different and enriching conceptions” from his readers (139) if they followed his particular method of reading and internalizing the Bible and other important Christian texts. The third and final section of the book says Bonaventure embraced a similar “openness” to Guigo’s, likewise focusing on process over particulars, though a bit more exegetical, Christ-centered, and canon-centered than the writers of the previous century. Simian then includes two short appendices at the end: the first, “On the Hermeneutic Reflexivity of Hugh’s Didascalicon”; and the second, much appreciated, a short translation of Guigo’s First Meditation without citations, paragraph divisions, and footnotes, in order to better elucidate how the absence of these on the medieval manuscript page might have aided in the experience of meditative reading.
Simian’s Inventio meditativa is a learned close reading of three medieval authors. It is clear from his book that Simian is deeply knowledgeable about medieval theological texts from late antiquity to the early modern period. But what is most lovely about Simian’s book is his fierce defense of medieval “openness”—that, contrary to the misconception that medieval people conceived of reality as “a God-given, fixed metaphysical order” and therefore only pursued “univocity” (221), medieval people in fact relied on tradition in order to actively cultivate new knowledge and moral virtue. To Simian, Guigo and Bonaventure’s works indicate just how much these medieval authorities hoped that their readers would perform the labor of meditation: thinking, exploring, and discerning God for themselves. In Simian’s hands, the medieval past is not so “superstitious and decadent” after all, but rather looks like a road map for the kind of “scientific thinking” we used to think only began with Descartes.