num_pages: 284
description: The 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 time 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 leaves this task 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 nontechnical language, its account of their literary structures and of the hidden meanings they generate will inform nonspecialist and specialist alike.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Robert McMahon is professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Thinking About Literature, The Two Poets of "Paradise Lost," and Augustine's Prayerful Ascent.PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:"A stunning and compelling work of remarkable scope, depth, subtlety, and erudition. It aims to illustrate the kind of thinking that would be engendered in--indeed, demanded by--reading these four works as Christian-Platonic ascents.... McMahon makes a very significant contribution to medieval literary and philosophical/theological scholarship."--Todd Breyfogle, University of Denver"[Refreshes] conceptions of the complexity of these texts and the genius of their writers.... [A] useful example of what can be gained from attention to character, voice and mood as well as from close reading of patterns in these texts."--Mary Agnes Edsall, The Medieval Review"[An] interesting, original, and well-documented monograph, written for nonspecialists and specialists alike.... [T]his contribution to research on the three texts studied provides a useful account of their literary structures and of the arcane meanings they generate."-- Raymond Cormier, Speculum
language: English
title: Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Dante
titlecomplete: Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Dante
ratings_count: 2
publisher: The Catholic University of America Press