Fascinating memory - immersed in the Bible

It is only when we get to foreign countries where we cannot read notice boards that we appreciate our culture of reading. In China or Russia, the tourist quickly discovers how frustrating it can be not to be able to read the language. Where is a hotel, the station, the hospital? Often reading can become a matter of life and death.

Books are so obvious and normal to us, that we fail to appreciate those cultures which existed before book printing made books available to most people. We need to defamiliarize ourselves in a similar manner in order to understand previous centuries and how they were educated. The ordinary person in the twelfth and thirteenth century did not have books. It was mostly the clergy and some privileged people who could own books and read them. Manuscripts were expensive. In fact, many monasteries, where hand written books were produced, generated a good income because they produced manuscripts of the Bible and even classical authors and sold their products at high prices to the rich, famous and powerful people of their times.

The paralysing result of not being able to read wass, for example, an important reason why Geerte Grote, the founder of the New Devotion, empowered laypeople in the fourteenth century to read. He wanted most of all for them to be able to live close to Scripture.

But what did people do without school books or libraries? They memorised them. People were trained to memorize texts, following rules laid down by classical authors like Aristotle and Cicero. It was a much debated and intensely practiced educational matter. One could even speak of a science of memorising. The training of the memory received as much attention as the training of one’s body in contemporary sport centres and gymnasia.

One could roughly distinguish two phases:

Texts were broken up, firstly, in shorter units, learned and then integrated in a system. Units were numbered in order. Books of the Bible were first learnt word for word, bit by bit. Or to be more precise, they even broke up the words in its syllables and learnt them mechanically by heart. They were then tested and asked to recite the text. They even had to perform the text in reverse order, or to leave out certain units from a section they had to recite. Thus they had to recite, for example, units 11 to 18 without 12 to fourteen. A favourite book was the Psalms, which took an average of two to three years to memorize. Students of the Bible would generally know the Psalms by heart. The main aim of this first approach was for a student to recite a text mechanically in order. It was like in some stages of education where students were asked to learn their tables before they actually did any mathematics.

Then, in a second step, one integrated this first memory with a second one in which one focussed on the meaning of the texts which one had memorised in the first phase. Students then had to combine texts that belong together. The process flows naturally from the first phase. If one knows a text by heart, it soon happens that one understand that the law in Psalm 1 is also mentioned in Psalm 119. Themes like arrogance, the temple, the Exodus would all be addressed in different texts and could then be systematised together. It is in this second phase that one begins to interiorize a text. What one can recite mechanically, is now digested and understood in a deeper sense of the word. One then “composes” a new text, so to speak. It is on this point that one becomes an artist who creatively discovers the “meaning” of a text. The main aim of this second approach was to empower students to move texts around and combine them in terms of what they mean.

When one reads about this praxis of memorising, one understands why someone like Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ is so steeped in Biblical language. He was educated in this culture of memorising. In such a culture one is deeply immersed in a text. You live with a text for a number of years, are able to recite it almost in your sleep and are constantly reminded of how parts of this text interact and determine each other. Thomas a Kempis was steeped in this culture of memorising. For every moment of his life, he could cite a word from Scripture. It is like in our modern pop culture where people can recall a popular song or even a whole lot of them, for every possible mood they experience. They know the words. Thomas a Kempis had this immersion – the Bible, as his Imitation reveals, was for him the fountain of inspiration. Without it this work would not have been written.