Dame Yates spends the first 200 pages or so reconstructing the classical arts of memory--developed primarily by Simonides and Cicero--and continued through the medieval thinkers Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Raymond Lull--and moving into the Renaissance with a long chapter on Camillo's Theatre of Memory. But it is really the chapters on Bruno that the book starts moving into interesting territory, for Bruno's various and convoluted memory projects are really his religio-magico techniques that lead to gnosis, to unification of the cosmos and man through the mind of the magus.
The mind of man holds archetypal images that can be retrieved and activated by the magus through the arts of memory that allows him to achieve a vision of unity of the One through the All, and the All through the One. "the art of memory was … the inner discipline of his religion, the inner means by which he sought to grasp and unify the world of appearances" The creation of this vast memory apparatus that tries to unify all knowledge is really an attempt to articulate Chardin's noosphere, I think, and to lead to the salvation both of man and of the universe by tapping "into the powers of the cosmos, which are in man, himself."
But Dame Yates also makes clear, as she did in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, that this search for a method also underlies the search for a method that undergirds the thinking of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz--"the profound conviction that man … can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination" and "prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics."
Author: Yates, Francis
Date Published: 1966
Length: 389pp
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