Commonplaces from C. S. Lewis’ Discarded Image, a seminal work for understanding a long-lost way of thought.
“Whatever else a modern feels when he looks out at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out–like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is ‘outside the city wall.’ When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life.”(118-119)
“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is, perhaps, for those of us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered…Is there nowhere any vagueness?” (121)
“When you memorize, you do not import facts into a computer system; you plant seeds in a soul.” –Andrew Kern
It is thought that monks would use hypothetical floor plans for elaborate buildings, perhaps like this 9th century floor plan from St. Gall Monastery, to help them build memory palaces, a common technique used to memorize large quantities of information.
I was listening to a fantastic podcast from CiRCE once, in which Wesley Callihan, my old highschool Great Books teacher, and Andrew Kern, CiRCE’s founder, discuss Homer, Classical Education, and memory. The discussion was fascinating, challenging me along the same lines as a podcast Jenny Rallens also gave for CiRCE on the role of memory. It’s been a while since hearing the podcasts, but one of the things that really stayed with me from listening to them was how much we underestimate the power of memorization to shape us. As the quote above indicates, it’s about so much more than simple facts. Memory is what builds the liturgy of the mind.
Consider how in our information age, there’s very little room for memorization. We don’t memorize directions to get somewhere; we ask Siri for directions. We don’t memorize phone numbers; we tap a name in our favorites. We don’t memorize Bible verses; we just pull up the verse online.
As we rediscover classical education, we want to rediscover what our ancestors valued in teaching and learning. I for one have been surprised to realize how much memory was a central part of education! Our ancestors would be shocked to discover that many of us can’t recite a full poem, or lengthy passage from the Bible, or passage from Homer off the cuff! As one author points out about the Renaissance, “Even the invention of the Guttenberg printing press and the relative availability of books had little effect on the status of a trained memory; books were considered aids to recall rather than a replacement for a well-stocked mind.”
I confess this lesson is a hard one for me as I am not naturally very gifted at memorization, and didn’t have much focus on memorization in my own education. May we all be encouraged to “plant seeds” in our souls and the souls of our students, cultivating an age of wisdom rather than an age of mere information!
