Recollection without Images

Augustine describes Paul's vision as one without any images, similar to intro-spection. But it is images, similes, words, and signs that make dialogue with another person possible. After all, when the vision of the prophet is over and the experience ceases, he must descend from the mountaintop and deliver the message he heard to his audience, and, even earlier—to himself. The enraptured Paul was not a prophet, but he did return from his unique experience to himself and to his people. The difficulty raised for the first time by William of Auxerre,Footnote ⁵ a prominent theologian in 1220 in Paris, turns out therefore to be remarkably simple: if Paul saw God only through his presence without any mediating images or impressions, no images could have remained in his memory upon his return to his previous state. Hence, when the vision was over, he could not have remembered it. Paul, however, did relate his experience, so he undoubtedly recalled something: if not what he saw, at least the mere fact that this rapture occurred. How is recollection possible without images?

In order to solve this problem, William of Auxerre distinguishes between two kinds of cognitions. Cognitio realis, he explains, is created by encountering the real presence of a thing or by an image emitted by this real thing. Cognitio nominalis, on the other hand, is not related at all to the real thing (res), directly or indirectly. It is the result of a verbal explanation (nomina exponencia rem) or a definition (ratio).Footnote ⁶ This is how a blind man cognizes colors: through a verbal description such as “‘color’ is something that is known by a bodily sense.” He knows what a bodily sensation is since he knows things through touch, and thus has a faint knowledge of what a color is. Such knowledge is of course inferior to the knowledge of a sighted person, yet it is still knowledge (“color” is not, say, a vegetable).Footnote ⁷ When Paul returned, William argues, he only had nominal knowledge of his rapture, knowledge of the definitions of things rather than of their real essence, knowledge like the knowledge of definitions described by Aristotle.

Both Roland of Cremona, an avid thirteenth-century reader of William's Summa aurea, and Ribaillier, the text's modern editor, claim that there is no such knowledge in Aristotle's texts. Yet, although in An. post. 2.10 Aristotle does not treat different types of cognitions, he does discuss therein various types of definitions. “Since a definition is said to be an account of what a thing is,” he observes, “it is evident that one type will be an account of what the name or a different name-like account signifies, e.g., what ‘triangle’ signifies.”Footnote ⁸ James of Venice renders this passage as follows: “Diffinitio autem quoniam quidem dicitur ratio ipsius quid est, manifestum est quoniam aliqua quidem erit ratio ipsius quod quid significat nomen aut erit ratio altera nomina ponens, ut quid significat quid est secundum quod triangulus est.”Footnote ⁹

As Ross explains in his commentary on the Analytica posteriora, although Aristotle's first kind of definition seems identical to the third in its form, namely “thunder is noise in the clouds,” they answer different questions. The first is an answer to the question “what does the name ‘thunder’ signify?” while the third is a response to “what is the nature of this thing we know as thunder?” Concerning knowledge, the one who receives the first answer now knows as one who finds an unknown word in a book and goes to a dictionary for a clarification of its meaning; he may never have heard the sound of thunder in his life. He who asks the other question probably has heard the sound of thunder, and then asked for further explanation. Whatever Aristotle's intention, William of Auxerre seems to under-stand him at this point as alluding to a kind of knowledge derived from verbal description, and thus related to words alone, as opposed to knowledge about the real nature of a thing.

An incidental remark in the Physica refers to the blind man as well. There is no point in demonstrating that nature exists, claims Aristotle in the opening to his discussion of nature in book 2, since its existence is obvious. Such demonstration would be contrary to the normal course of knowledge, i.e., from the known to the unknown. Nevertheless, Aristotle briefly remarks, such a reversal is possible, and he provides as an example a man blind from birth who reasons about colors. Such men necessarily use names without understanding their meaning.Footnote ¹⁰ According to William, the nominal knowledge that remained in Paul's mind upon his return is not related to anything real or to the experience itself. It belongs to the world of words and verbal approximations of men blind from birth. It is as if he had seen nothing.

Roland of Cremona, the first Dominican master in Paris, had William's summa before his eyes and he invested a great deal of intellectual energy in resolving the problem of Paul's remembrance. This problem first appears immediately after the main discussion of seeing through a medium or image. Roland, equipped with a rich knowledge of natural philosophy, enhances William's arguments with scientific, natural material that strengthens the connection between image and memory. At this point in the text, however, he just attempts a short, obscure solution that rests on the distinction between memory and recollection: Paul could recall, he asserts, but could not remember.Footnote ¹¹

William does not explicitly refer his readers to Aristotle, but Roland does, and with him, let us turn to Aristotle's De memoria et reminiscentia. Aristotle associates memory with imagination since it involves the element of time. It is related to thought only accidentally: mere gazing at an intellectual object is not recollection but simply knowledge. Recollection involves awareness of the time when one acquired that specific information, in addition to its content.Footnote ¹² According to Aristotle, time must be in the faculty of the imagination, with which one cognizes magnitude and motion. Memory involves images, and recollection is unquestionably associated with images that were earlier imprinted in the soul.Footnote ¹³ Aristotle, therefore, does not seem to help Roland but only makes things worse.Footnote ¹⁴

Indeed, whatever Roland's first intention concerning recollection without memory, the same difficulty arises again a few passages later, as if he had not dealt with it before. Now, though, he presents it with thoroughness, examining at length the problematics of supposing that there are intellectual images or forms. If there were a form of God in Paul's mind, what kind of form would that be? It could not be an abstract form, since God is simple. If it were an infused form, however, it would be different from God. Suppose we accept infused forms against Augustine; what was the nature of this form? Was it similar to God? If not, how could it have led Paul to see God, when cognition according to all philosophers is based on similarity? On the other hand, what similarity could there be between a creature and its Creator?Footnote ¹⁵ All this puts Roland in a quandary. “It would have been so easy to say that Paul saw God without any images; if only we could see how he was able to recall what he saw, it would have been a great thing. Neither authority nor pure reason allows us to say he saw all that through images.”Footnote ¹⁶

But the Summa aurea, in which the issue is raised, also suggests a solution, does it not? Roland attacks William's solution, the idea of cognitio nominalis, word by word with a surprisingly emotional criticism. First he criticizes the idea that Paul knew the definition of his vision. What do definitions have to do with the situation, he asks, immediately after “correcting” William's use of ratio (translating λοϖγο~) to diffinitio (οϑρισμοϖ~). Paul's account does not resemble a definition at all. Moreover, even if he did hold the vision's definition, all he knew was the substance of the vision itself, not its content, namely God and the occult things that he reports he saw. This is however an absurd claim—one cannot have knowledge devoid of content. Knowing a definition, Roland maintains, must consist of knowledge of the forms of the genus and the differentia. As he returns to the Analytica posteriora, Roland rejects the idea of nominal cognition altogether and refuses to accept knowledge that is not a true Aristotelian scientia. The cognition of the blind man in which he knows colors is not based on prior sense perception, and therefore it is not knowledge at all. To say that Paul had this form of knowledge is to say he had none. How can a reasonable man think that blind people have any knowledge of colors whatsoever? Roland remarks, “I vehemently wonder how such a prudent man could say that.^”Footnote ¹⁷

Roland endeavors to fashion his own solution to the problem; in fact, he proposes three solutions. During the rapture, he argues first, no mediating images are involved. There is, however, a different kind of medium, which is not an image: created light. It is true that God is present in every creature substantialiter and presentialiter. Nevertheless, taking physical perception as a model, he argues that even when all veils are removed, the eye still needs a “visual spirit” or light in order to see a present object.Footnote ¹⁸ It is this light that imprints stigmata of the occult things seen. After Paul returned, he could retrieve what he saw by using these stigmata or engravings and “a certain created light.”Footnote ¹⁹ These engravings or light are not considered media in Roland's eyes, for they are not images in the traditional meaning of corporeal images.

Roland's use of the word stigmata to denote these special signs refers of course to Paul's own testimony in Gal 6:17: “Ego enim stigmata Domini Jesu in corpore meo porto.” But in Roland's and his contemporaries’ ears it probably also had the resonance of the stigmata that appeared on Francis of Assisi's body in 1224, just a couple of years before Roland wrote his text.Footnote ²⁰ It is most revealing, therefore, that the first textual testimony of Francis's stigmata, in Thomas Celano's Vita prima of 1229, describes them not as an immediate result of the vision but as a result of Francis's efforts to uncover the hidden meaning of his vision afterwards:

Both Celano and Roland, therefore, tend strongly to construe the relation between experience and its later processing and interpretation as mediated through real vestiges, not merely words and thoughts.

This must not have been, however, an entirely satisfactory solution, since Roland immediately proposes a better version of it. In his improved model, the original vision did not involve any signs and the “preparing light” and the “light for vision” were not separate. During the vision, light had one nature. Only as a result of Paul's descent were real vestiges of this light created. This was therefore not an example of seeing through images, but through the proper essence.Footnote ²² The medium of light serves as a sign or image, but it is not to be considered as such; rather, it is the proper essence.

Roland finally proposes a third solution, meant for those who are not able to follow the intricate explanation above. This solution exemplifies a similar separation of the process of seeing from that of recollecting, but a much more radical one: After the apostle returned to his senses, God created or inspired in his mind certain images. He did not see through them during the rapture, but they aided him to recall later what he had seen.Footnote ²³

The fact that Roland does not prefer this solution demonstrates his keen interest in real continuity of vision and recollection. Yet, by proposing this option, Roland locates himself in a hierarchy of knowers. On the one hand, he says: “Do not be surprised that we cannot see clearly how Paul, returning to himself, could have reasoned about what he had seen, because the human intellect, glorified then for a while, was much more powerful than we can possibly consider now.”Footnote ²⁴ On the other hand, “we,” who understand occult explanations such as the one above, still see much further than the “little” ones who cannot follow it at all, and for whom this last solution was designed. The author of quaestio 454 in the famous codex Douai 434 presents a similar yet simpler answer than that of Roland. He has the instrumental concept of habitus of vision in his arsenal, and it serves him well for this purpose. Natural and spiritual perceptions require two media, he maintains: a habitus on the part of the one who sees, and an image or species of the thing seen. In the special case of Paul's vision, no species of the thing seen—God—was needed. On the part of the seer, however, a habitus was still required. This habitus that was conferred on Paul during his rapture as a special sort of eyeglass put on his mental eyes remained in his mind after his return and thus enabled him to recall his vision.Footnote ²⁵

Now one of the questions that has been treated since the late twelfth century by certain theologians is whether Paul held to his faith during this experience (his usual pair of eyeglasses, if you wish), and if so what the consequences of its presence were, even if it was inactivated. In the context of this problem, we find a complete description of the situation following the rapture, that is, when Paul had his faith activated again. The light that had been infused during the rapture was subsequently joined to the light of faith, thus becoming a lesser light that could not be fully activated. Paul remembered his vision with the aid of this habitus, though he did not recall all that he saw. Paul, he adds, had to recall, for the benefit of the church.Footnote ²⁶

This article cannot discuss in detail the problem of seeing through a habitus or medium, a highly interesting problem in its own right. Yet it is worth noting in brief that in this period a tripartite perception of the process of vision was gradually being replaced by a four-part system. Earlier, theologians and philosophers were accustomed to perceiving the subject as an eye that receives an image of the seen object, but, as shown above, in this period a sharp distinction developed within the subject itself: it is not enough to have an eye, for there is also a spirit of sight, a light or a kind of habitus, distinguished from the ability to see. Two “middles,” therefore stand between the “naked” power-subject and the object, one on each side: the image (of the object) and the light habitus (of the subject). When one of these middles is absent, as in the case of Paul's imageless vision, one middle still remains. Usually, one would say the light of the lamp or the eyeglasses does not carry in itself the colors we see with its help. Yet in this case, it seems that the subjective habitus, which the author identifies as the light infused into the subject during rapture, is forced to take on the semiotic, objective function of the image. It has something of the object in it. Not only does it enable recollection, the implication is that it is meant to propel the message forward, out of Paul's experiencing self to his community: the author claims that Paul, unlike plain dreamers, must have remembered “for the benefit of the church.” He assumes, therefore, that this light habitus must contain useful information, what one has seen, and not only that one has seen.

The Dominican master Hugh of St. Cher (active in the 1230s), unlike Roland and the author of quaestio 454 in Douai 434, is quite willing to deprive Paul of the content of his vision and leave him with only its substance. As we sometimes see certain things in a dream, then forget them, but remember that there was a dream, Paul remembered that he saw ineffable words, but could not know or tell what they were when the experience was over.Footnote ²⁷ Hugh does not need, therefore, any images for the objects of Paul's vision. But he still needs some residue of the dreaming experience. What remained to enable Paul to remember the mere fact of the vision? Hugh ascribes it to what he calls a “spirit of imitation,” the state of the mind itself during the experience. This is a second-order reflection that survives after the experience has faded, as his example of wine shows: you may remember that a wine you once drank was good, but not its taste.Footnote ²⁸

In the quaestio de raptu of Guerric of St. Quentin, a Dominican colleague of Hugh, the issue of remembrance is invoked in relation to the question of “whether faith remained in Paul's soul during the rapture.”Footnote ²⁹ His solution is rather surprising: without further ado he argues that during the rapture, while seeing what he saw, Paul put images on it, and hence could use them when he returned.Footnote ³⁰ Albert the Great seems to follow in this direction, dismissing the problem by asserting that the effect of the vision remained in Paul, as what he saw was represented in his mind with inferior species and symbols, supposedly, during the rapture. Like Guerric, he does not seem to be bothered by the seeming contradiction in the total abstraction from the senses Paul experienced.Footnote ³¹ A few years later, Thomas Aquinas would argue as well that certain species remained in Paul's intellect, allowing him to recall something of the experience. Although the vision was apprehended through its essence, the recollection used these species and later applied them to sensory images already existent in the mind.Footnote ³² As Aquinas's main objective is to keep the vision pure from sensory powers, the peculiarity of immediate, non-signified vision thus entirely disappears: the idea of intellectual species annihilates the problem.

The act of recalling is both an act of self-awareness and of communication to others. The account of Paul's rapture, revealing as well as obscuring, presented in its mere existence a real problem to theologians active in the 1220s and 1230s. This account could not exist if Paul had not remembered his vision. From a certain historical moment, Paul's intellectual experience was no longer intimate and non-communicative. Presence had to become information and take a communicable form, as it did for Moses. What could that communicable form be, if not a corporeal image? The solutions varied. If we look at them, we find that the field of mediating mechanisms changed radically. Images and signs are not the only media of vision, and words, light, or habitus take their function as media, at least for a short period, before intellectual species come in.

* Index, icon, and symbol are used here in the Piercian meaning. Charles S. Pierce's (1839–1914) theory of signs is of course much more complex, but here I find useful his most famous, early division into “index” (the signifier is tied to the signified by virtue of some brute existential fact), “symbol” (the signifier is tied to the signified by convention), and “icon” (the signifier is tied to the signified by virtue of a similarity or a common property) (see Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition [ed. Max H. Fisch et al.; 8 vols.; Bloomington: Indiana University Press1982–2010] 2:53–54)., 1982–2010] 2:53–54).

We may describe William's alternative to the image as an arbitrary sign, or symbol—words whose disconnection from their signified meaning is as clear as the gulf between seeing a flower and reading its definition in a dictionary. The third solution of Roland suggests discontinuity between the real experience and the “fake” recollection. Hugh of St. Cher does not offer any recollection of the imageless appearances; for him the only thing left is the remembrance of the soul itself. He completely denies the ability to recollect information. On the other hand, Roland and the author of quaestio 454 in ms Douai 434 look for something real to sustain continuity between both stages, an index, or even a seminal part of the signified itself—the same light that is lessened but endures even after the object and the strong light have vanished. They both recognize the substantial difference between image and light with the image, or the species belonging to the object while the habitus belongs to the subject. However, both attempt to claim the habitus's capacity to transmit information relating to the object, since both are committed to demonstrating that Paul has a remembrance of what he saw and not just that he saw. Both fail to explain properly how a preparatory habitus of light can carry this necessary objective information within it. Since Guerric of St. Quentin, however, Dominican masters have simply assumed a process in which immediate experience is transformed into informative representation, images, or intelligible species already during the rapture. The nature of rapture as immediate knowledge is thus completely blurred and we return to iconic epistemology once again.

Paul and the Self-Image of Scholastic Theologians

Let us step outside this meticulous discussion and set it in its broader intellectual and cultural context. Its emergence in this specific period, I claim, has to do with the historical state of theology at the time and with its complicated relationship to the concept of experience. It is in these decades, after all, that systematic reflection on theology took its first steps. This investigation was preceded and accompanied by new investigations as to the specific nature of various forms of cognition of God, fueled by Aristotelian and Avicennian ideas on epistemology: faith, beatific vision, prophecy, and rapture. The aim of these theologians was to understand better their position among different knowers such as prophets, simple believers, contemplators, and mystics. The deeper layer of the problem of Paul's memory lies, as I will argue in this part, in the fact that it provides us with a hidden reflection on the way the participants in the discourse negotiated the nature of their own practice, symbolizing in particular the tension between letters and experience. Paul's persona and his knowledge intrigued theologians of the newborn university in their search for self-definition.

Let us return to William of Auxerre's nominal cognition, and notice the resemblance of this verbal “blind men's knowledge” to the knowledge created by scholastic theory and practice in William's time. Definitions were substantial to the scientific enterprise delineated by Aristotle in the Organon and in the demonstrative model of Euclid's Stoicheia. Since the twelfth century analyzing, correcting, and suggesting definitions had been common practice among scholastic theologians investigating “what is x?” The use of definitions had become a marker of the school's way of thought, of the scientific mode of thought, and of the scientific approach to theology. When Andreas Capellanus in his De amore plays with the idea of love not only as the subject of experience (experimentum), but also of doctrine, he chooses to open his answer with a scholarly definition of love in order to create a quasi-scholastic style.Footnote ³³ A 1240s guide for students summarizes the scientific method itself as a modus diffinitivus divisivus.Footnote ³⁴ So do the authors of the Summa fratris Alexandri, who claim that the modus of science consists of definitio, divisio and collatio.Footnote ³⁵

Tractates on many theological issues written in the 1220s and 1230s begin by an inquiry “quid est,” and then deal with a definition or several definitions of the thing under discussion, although the extent of this practice differs. Thus, while discussions of rapture rarely have a definition in their center, almost all the treatises on prophecy in this period include a thorough analysis of Cassiodorus's definition, “a divine revelation or inspiration announcing things to come in an unchanging truth”Footnote ³⁶ Each of its parts is discussed, briefly or at length, generating arguments and counterarguments. What is a “revelation” and how does it differ from “inspiration”? Who reveals and inspires? What does “an immobile truth” mean? Similarly, all treatises on faith address Paul's definition of faith in Heb 11:1, discussing the precise meaning of each term, the relationships among its parts, whether it is a sound Aristotelian definition or merely a description, and so on. In the circles of Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, and John of la Rochelle this practice was so developed that several definitions were presented, obliging an author not only to explain the peculiarity of each and the particular aspect it addresses, but also to reconcile seeming contradictions. Philip the Chancellor examines several definitions in almost every one of the tractates of the Summa de bono.Footnote ³⁷ In his Summa de anima, John of la Rochelle (O.F.M., d. 1245) brings forth eleven definitions of the soul, analyzing them and solving apparent contradictions.Footnote ³⁸ In the Summa fratris Alexandri tractate on formed faith, an entire quaestio is devoted to diverse definitions of faith before heading to the classical Paulinian one.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, an interesting feature echoing William of Auxerre's division of cognitions also appears in this period. In the same group of theologians writing only a few years after his Summa aurea, next to the investigation secundum diffinitionem, there appears one secundum rem. In the treatise on formed faith in the Summa fratris Alexandri, an inquiry into what faith secundum rem is precedes the inquiry secundum diffinitionem. Only after settling the issues of whether faith is necessary for salvation, whether this faith is attained by persuasion, and whether it is a virtue, species, or genus, does the author tackle the definitions of faith. The distinction between secundum rem and secundum diffinitionem is also made by Philip in his treatment of the articles of faith, and by Hugh of St. Cher in the quaestio de prophetia, as well as in many other quaestiones.Footnote ⁴⁰ In some of these cases the investigation secundum rem precedes the one secundum diffinitionem.

Definitions, therefore, played a significant role in scholastic theological practice. Masters of theology used and analyzed definitions, terms, and words in school. But where were the real things behind them? The contemporary image of science included working with definitions and first principles. But in addition to ratio and auctoritas, a growing attention was being given also to sense experience, experientia, as part of every investigation about reality.Footnote ⁴¹ What was the true place of experience in the theology classroom of the thirteenth century, and how, if at all, was it imagined? Did these theologians look for the sense experience of theology, its cognitio realis?

First, let us look at school practice itself. The textual remnants of the faculty unquestionably show that systematic theological discourse consisted of and referred almost exclusively to texts and reasoning. Experience had little place in it, if any. While the twelfth-century Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) invites his troubled interlocutor in De anima to conduct a spiritual exercise and look into himself in order to prove the incorporeality of the soul, the works of the school masters of Aelred's day, as well as the treatises on the soul translated from Arabic and Greek or composed later by university masters, are devoid of any such experiential remarks. Masters almost never turn to either their own or their friends’ personal experience in order to explain, support, or illustrate their arguments in disputed questions.Footnote ⁴² Nor do they admit, as does Herbert of Bosham (b. 1120) when he speaks about theophanies, the difficulty of writing about “sweetness I have never tasted myself.”Footnote ⁴³

It is possible, however, that we are facing a difference in norms of expression rather than one in practices of thought or teaching. What real school life was like is hard to reconstruct. Thus, the following story, told by Stephen of Bourbon, seems to reveal a lesson involving personal experience. One disciple asks his master why Adam ate from the tree from which he was forbidden to eat, when he could have freely eaten the fruit of all the other trees. The master replies that we always desire to do what is prohibited. Unsatisfied, the student says that he would not have done the same were he in Adam's place. The master then enters his room, takes a little bird, and puts it between two salvers (scutellae), and then calls the disciple in. Showing him all the books and other nice vessels and delicacies he has there, he says he is now going to mass, and promises his student that he will think of a better answer. In the meantime, the disciple is welcome to walk about and do whatever he wishes in the room, except move these salvers that hold something secret between them. The disciple browses the books but keeps thinking about why he is allowed to touch all the other things except the salvers. As his curiosity leads him finally to open them, the bird flies off. When the master returns, the student admits he needs no further answer. “By experiencing he had already learned that the first solution was true” (ipse experiendo dedicerat [read: didicerat] priorem solucionem veram esse).Footnote ⁴⁴

In practice, however, most of the intellectual play in the university did not involve birds, but rather the desired books in the master's little paradise. Exams and lessons centered on reason and words. Local prophets were not summoned to testify in class on what they had seen in their vision, and we have no way of knowing to what extent tricks such as the one Stephen relates were common—the attractiveness of the story as an exemplum may betray its uniqueness. That, however, does not mean that there were no attempts to find a place for experience even in the field of theology, which, more than all other disciplines, inherently lacked direct cognition of its object, having therefore to rely on authority and revelatory words alone.

In the attempts to address this problem two different traditions relating to experience became merged. From the twelfth century onwards, both within and without academic circles, notions of experiential-experimental knowledge appeared in two fields: natural philosophy—including medicine and occult doctrines—and Cistercian spirituality.Footnote ⁴⁵ Along with the translation of the Analytica posteriora came the Aristotelian conception of experience, carrying, as Peter King has keenly distinguished, two main meanings.Footnote ⁴⁶ First, experience was seen as an intermediary stage of knowing. After sensory occasions of a similar nature have been collected and compared, the result is a partial abstraction or generalization. This, in turn, forms the basis for future abstract, intellective knowledge. Experientia should in this regard be located somewhere between isolated sense impressions of particulars, on the one hand, and the intellectual grasp of a universal, on the other, is an essential part of the scientific enterprise. The second, less emphasized conception of experientia is a different, separate kind of knowledge that competes with theoretical knowledge rather than serving as a temporary database for it. Consider our usage of the term “experience” in the job market, and of its complementary, yet sometimes opposing, relation to formal education: a fresh diplomat may know less than a skillful artisan and an astronomer cannot find his or her way at sea without the help of the “inferior” knowledge of the navigator. Trying to find out which is the noblest and best—experientia, ars, or scientia—Aristotle determines that experience is superior only in regard to actions. An action always involves a particular, and experientia is closer to particulars or facts than scientia, which is closer to universals and causes. He concludes that, as a rule, it is the theoretical that is to be called true wisdom.

The main stream in natural philosophy accepted this hierarchy to the point of neglecting experience. But in later Greek and Arabic thought, experience found its place in a group of knowledge-based fields that included medicine, optics, and alchemy, as well as occult domains, precisely because of its better position regarding particulars and its interface with practice. The classic medical textbooks claimed ratio and experientia as the two foundations of medical knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁷ A similar approach with regard to the hidden properties of minerals, herbs, and the like, which could only be known through experientia, was common in the Latin world, especially since the twelfth century. Lynn Thorndike, in his monumental project, was the first to identify systematically the multitude of references to such scientia experimentalis and to understand the importance of this tradition.Footnote ⁴⁸ Books of experimenta were widespread from the beginning of the thirteenth century, standing on the gray zone between medicine and nigromancy. Recent scholarship has attempted to assess the intellectual weight of this growing acknowledgment of sensory experience in the medieval period in general, as well as regarding individual Latin figures such as Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and Albert the Great.Footnote ⁴⁹ All these individuals were aware of this tradition and of the role that sensory experience and scientia experimentalis played in its image of science, and tried somewhat to integrate such knowledge into their own writings, although the precise epistemological value they each attached to experience is difficult to determine.Footnote ⁵⁰ All of them were in contact with the Parisian school of theology of the early thirteenth century, and undoubtedly other contemporary theologians of the time were aware of these developments as well.

Authority, reason, and experience were seen as different—harmonious or rival—strategies for attaining knowledge and legitimating it. The treatise De potentiis anime et obiectis, ascribed by A. D. Callus to a master of theology active in the 1220s, distinguishes experience from reason with exactly the above-mentioned occult tradition in mind. Scientia is defined as that which is attained through experiment or doctrine (cognitio sumpta per viam experimenti aut doctrine), and the motive habitus that pertains to knowing are divided into those through which we know by ratiocination and those “such as alchemy, through which we experience the natures of things.”Footnote ⁵¹ This new formulation of the Aristotelian tension leads us to the second tradition, which constituted experience both as a concomitant and as a possible competitor to books.

The terms experientia and experimentum have an extremely important place in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, and their Cistercian circles.Footnote ⁵² In Bernard's thought, experientia is constructed as the interior concomitant and “antipode” of exterior words heard during lessons. “Your interior experience should correspond to what I speak exteriorly,” he frequently remarks, advising his readers to ask for experience, rather than for what he is saying, when they are reading the Song of Songs together. Look at the “book of experience,” he bids them. Experience authenticates, enriches, and transcends external words. It carries precious certitude with it, which in his eyes faith lacks: “What they do not know from experience, let them believe,” he proclaims, and adds that the soul who knows by experience has a fuller and more blessed knowledge. There are cases in which understanding can follow only where experience leads. Even Christ was incarnated in order to achieve an experiential knowledge of the miseries of humanity (homo factus experimento sciret).Footnote ⁵³ The nature of this experience is never truly explicated by him, but it is very broad, including not only rare moments of rapture and vision, but also daily experiences that occur while reading the Scriptures or praying.Footnote ⁵⁴

These two traditions were collated in the 1220s and 1230s by at least three theologians. A primitive attempt to draw an analogy between the natural and the spiritual spheres is found in William of Auvergne. A master of theology in the 1220s and the bishop of Paris from 1228, William exhibits a broad knowledge of the occult sciences of his time.Footnote ⁵⁵ When discussing the difference between scientia and sapientia, he usually refers to the traditional distinction between knowledge attained through sight alone and knowledge attained through taste (sapere). This distinction serves William mainly to distinguish a philosophical cognition of divine things and of God himself from a theological one. In one case, however, the terms scientia and sapientia are applied to the natural field as well. The colors and forms of stones and plants are known through a habitus scientialis, while their occult medicinal virtues are known through a habitus sapientialis.Footnote ⁵⁶ The sapiential way of knowing is therefore common to theology and to experimental lists of natural hidden properties. No clearer allusion to experience as completing reasoned, abstract knowledge by authentication appears than that in William's discussion of rapture. Paul's rapture is an experientia and such experiences are important, he remarks, since they confirm the immortality of the soul. The comparison with other disciplines is explicit: “In all doctrines and disciplines we are aided by the evidence and experiences of the senses, and here as well [sic et hic].”Footnote ⁵⁷

William of Auxerre moves closer to the holistic image of science in the Analytica posteriora in his attempt to fill every rubric in theology's form for standard sciences. The most important step (on which we shall not dwell here) was to replace the notion of faith that was based on doctrine and relied on authority or reason by a notion of faith as an interior illumination analogous to that of Aristotle's cognition of first principles. The articles of faith are, according to William, the first principles of the science of theology, as immediate to the illuminated mind as the principles of every strict Aristotelian science are.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the last chapter of the Analytica posteriora Aristotle maintains that the origin of these indemonstrable principles is experience, and as a rule, all intellectual knowledge is based on sense perception. When faith was seen as doctrinal, the “faith of hearing,” no such experience could be attested to. But now the way was open. What senses could be accounted for in theology? The answer lay in Cistercian spirituality.

As Coolman's monograph shows in detail, William was the first scholastic theologian to treat the theme of the spiritual senses, a metaphor rooted in Origen and highly developed by the Cistercians William of St. Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Baldwin of Ford.Footnote ⁵⁹ In several places in his writings he thus construes faith as a multi-sensory experience of God. The term experientia is not used explicitly but the concept is bound up with his understanding of faith as the knowledge of the principles that form the base of the entire theological enterprise.

Roland of Cremona compares experience's role in earthly and theological forms of knowledge as well, and he does that by appealing to Paul. In a rather amusing fashion the Aristotelian model is turned against Aristotle himself when Roland speaks of the difference between the understanding and wisdom of Aristotle (in this case actually the author of the Liber de causis) and the divine grace-given gifts of understanding and wisdom:

The grace of faith and of wisdom is equal to the experimental knowledge of the senses. Paul had an experience of God; Aristotle did not. Consequently, Paul had true, intellective knowledge of God, as opposed to Aristotle.

Furthermore, Roland elaborates William's implicit idea and articulates it explicitly in the prologue to his summa. Faith is essential for the true knowledge of theology, he maintains, as experience is essential for any other science. It is possible to “play the game” without faith, he admits, but true knowledge of theology will not ensue, that is, in the Aristotelian sense of scientia, since it would not be founded on sensory experience. Precisely at this point our blind man reappears, the one whose knowledge Roland was unable to accept as equal to that of Paul upon his return. A theologian who has not tasted the sweetness of God, Roland argues, will be like the blind man from Aristotle's Physica: he can speak and make complicated syllogisms about colors, but he shall never have true knowledge of them.Footnote ⁶¹

I have not found further explicit references in contemporary thirteenth-century texts to faith or rapture as an experience that is the theological equivalent to sensory experience in the other sciences. Perhaps this is due to the differing approach to the scientific image of theology among William of Auxerre's and Roland's contemporaries and followers. It may also be related to a stronger approach to experience as a distinct, competing road to God, rather than as an integral part of theology. Such a concomitant model is implied in an anonymous question on rapture from the 1240s. The master argues that literate people perfect in their intelligence enjoy immediate apprehension of God through the sense of hearing when they read the Scriptures. Simple ones, on the other hand, who are perfect in their life, enjoy immediate apprehension of God through experience. Paul belonged to both categories.Footnote ⁶²