Understanding the medieval meditative ascent : Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, & Dante

Resource Information

The work Understanding the medieval meditative ascent : Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, & Dante represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Understanding the medieval meditative ascent : Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, & Dante

Title remainder

Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, & Dante

Statement of responsibility

Robert McMahon

Creator

• McMahon, Robert, 1950-

Subject

• Anselm (von Canterbury)
• Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1033-1109
• Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, 354-430
• Augustinus, Aurelius
• Boethius, -524
• Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus
• Confessiones (Augustine, of Hippo, Saint)
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Dante (Alighieri)
• Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
• Devotional literature
• Devotional literature -- History and criticism
• Divina commedia (Dante Alighieri)
• Electronic books
• LITERARY CRITICISM -- Medieval
• Meditatie
• Proslogion (Anselm, Saint, Archbishop of Canterbury)
• RELIGION -- Christian Life | General
• De consolatione philosophiae (Boethius)

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Electronic books

Language

eng

Summary

Annotation.

Member of

• Ebook Central Academic Complete

Cataloging source

E7B

Dewey number

248

Index

index present

LC call number

BV4818

LC item number

.M36 2006eb

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Summary expansion

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 left these 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