page_title: Affective piety
section_title: Michelle Karnes
hierarchical_section_title: Affective piety / New directions: rhetorical antecedents, philosophical underpinnings, and history of the emotions / Images, the emotions, and knowing: philosophy and theories of rhetoric / Michelle Karnes
context_page_description: Affective piety is most commonly described as a style of highly emotional devotion to the humanity of Jesus, particularly in his infancy and his death, and to the joys and sorrows of the Virgin Mary. It was a major influence on many varieties of devotional literature in late-medieval Europe, both in Latin and in the vernaculars. This practice of prayer, reading, and meditation was often cultivated through visualization and concentration on vivid images of scenes from the Bible, Saints' Lives, Virgin Mary, Christ and religious symbols, feeling from the result. These images could be either conjured up in people's minds when they read or heard poetry and other pieces of religious literature, or they could gaze on manuscript illuminations and other pieces of art as they prayed and meditated on the scenes depicted. In either case, this style of affective meditation asked the "viewer" to engage with the scene as if she or he were physically present and to stir up feelings of love, fear, grief, and/or repentance for sin.
context_section_description: Michelle Karnes' book Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (2011) addresses the "cognitive work that medieval imagination performs, both in Aristotelian philosophy and in meditations on Christ." She writes that
  Creating vivid mental images of Christ’s sacrifice of himself for humankind heightens affection for him ... I argue that gospel meditations have another, cognitive purpose that becomes visible only when we study the meditations’ references to "imagination" in concert with medieval philosophical thought about imagination.
  In other words,  "such meditations have a theoretical basis...One that will allow us to "better understand why imagining Christ's life was considered an especially useful thing to do."
  Bonaventure is a key figure in this study. "The particular power of medieval imagination that Bonaventure identified," Karnes writes, "arose not from the simple importing of Aristotelian philosophy into the Latin West but from its application to Augustinian theology."  Bonaventure, in "[r]elying on a newly powerful faculty of imagination...made more powerful the act of imagining the life of Christ, both in his own meditations and, through their influence, in many of those that followed."
  
  The "Aristotelian imagination,"as Karnes calls it, "connects the senses to the intellect, providing a certain mechanism for knowledge experience" (35). In one reviewer's summary, "Imagination is the bridge between the senses and the intellect, a key link between the apprehension of sense data and the comprehension of it through a process of gradual abstraction, refinement and intellectual generalization, a movement from particular observations and the experience of specific sensations to universalizing knowledge, from sensibilia to intelligibilia. The devotional imagination as described by Bonaventure would likewise be a mediator, but "between earthly meditation on Christ's humanity and spiritual contemplation of his divinity," and it could do so "because it utilized the considerable cognitive and spiritual potential of imagination"(61).
  
  As Karnes puts it,
  in Bonaventure's gospel meditations, imagination harnesses its cognitive power to enable the meditant to conform to Christ in both his natures.  The work of meditation is therefore cognitive, as well as affective. Imagination helps the meditant to imagine scenes vividly and feel appropriate emotion, but it also uses the light that shines on it when engaged in the act of knowing in order to lift the meditant to Christ.  Bonaventure wants the meditant to love Christ, but also to know him. (112)
  Rather than inventing gospel meditations or this way of thinking about their aims, Bonaventure provided them with theoretical underpinnings and a method, or "mechanism," for making the journey to God (112–113). They became a means of contemplative, even mystical, ascent in ways that they had not been before (119–120). For example, in Bonventure's own meditative texts, such as the Tree of Life (or Lignum vitae), "ascent to God in heaven proceeds through the mind and through Christ crucified" (130).  In it, "It is imagination that affords the meditant special presence within gospel scenes and provides the mechanism of the meditant's ascent" (131).  In Bonaventure's words in the Vitis mystica (as quoted by Karnes),
  "Let us be bound with the bonds of the passion of the good and most loving Jesus, so that we may also share with Him the bonds of love. For, made fast by these latter, He was drawn down from heaven to earth in order to suffer the former. Conversely, we who desire to be drawn from earth into heaven must bind ourselves to the Head with the bonds of the passion, through which we will attain the bonds of love and thus become one with him. (135–136)
  Karnes reveals, in the end, the deeply intellectual, philosophical influences on a range of later medieval meditative texts, among other things calling into question the common characterization of meditation on the life of Christ as a genre for the unlettered and the layperson.
caption: Vittorio Crivelli (1450–1502), Saint Bonaventure Holding the Tree of Life (Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris). The Tree of Life (or Lignum vitae) was Bonaventure's most popular meditation on Christ.
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