by Kevin Vost
4. Portrait
Friends smiling/arguing
5. Gun rack
Globe entangles your fingers
6. Center of foyer
Christ surrounded by saints
7. Chandelier
Tooth admired by Mnemosyne
8. Mirror
Book with legs stands under generator
9. Cushioned bench
Cupboard on base with no ledge
10. Drawer
Mentalist fails at trick
So far, so good? If you now know these ten locations and associated images, that’s great! If not, do a few more “mental walks” around the foyer until you have them, until you can picture them vividly in your “mind’s eye.” Got them? Good. If you do, you’re very close to knowing and retaining the gist of the ten key precepts from Thomas’s “Letter to Brother John” that are found in this book’s ten chapters.
This is what we’ve done. Each of those strange visual images was used to represent and remind us of one of the titles of our chapters which capture the gist of each of Thomas’s precepts. Theodore Roosevelt at the front door speaks slowly and carries a big stick with a heart and mind painted on it to remind us of chapter 1’s title: “Speak Slowly and Carry a Big Heart and Mind.” Roosevelt was used as a reminder of Thomas’s advice “to be slow to speak” because the beginning of the president’s most memorable phrase — the words “speak softly” — will trigger our altered phrase to “speak slowly.” We added the images and phrase of a big stick with a heart and a brain painted on it to incorporate the end of his memorable phrase, “and carry a big stick,” adding the heart and the brain to remind us of our title’s conclusion “and carry a big heart and mind.” After all, we aren’t training ourselves to be slow to speak in readiness to thump anybody, but rather training our hearts and minds to focus on attaining truth.
The hands in prayer emitting sparks on the doormat remind us of the second chapter’s title “The Power of Pure Prayer.” (The sparks are there to remind us of “power.”) Thomas studying in the cell and the wine cellar we see through the glass panel in the front yard are reminders of chapter 3’s title “From Cell to Wine Cellar: On Crafting a Study Space You Can Love.” Our fourth image, the painting with friends smiling while examining a book in one panel and arguing in the next, will remind us of chapter 4’s title: “The Benefits and Perils of Friendliness to Study.” That globe atop the gun rack of our fifth location entangled your fingers as a visual reminder of our chapter 5: “Set Your Intellect Free by Avoiding Worldly Entanglements.” (I considered having your brain get entangled in the globe as a more direct reminder for the intellect, but fingers seemed to make a more natural image. Anyway, I hope our image, like your fingers, will stick.)
Christ and your favorite saints in the center of the foyer (location 6) is a very direct reminder of chapter 6’s title: “The Imitation of Christ (and of Those Who Imitate Him).” As for the tooth held and admired by Mnemosyne up in the chandelier, we use the word “tooth” as a concrete reminder of the abstract word “truth,” and the goddess of memory as a reminder of, well, memory. Chapter 7’s title is “Loving Truth Regardless of Its Source (and On the Perfection of Memory).” In the mirror (location 8) you saw that book with legs standing under a power generator to help you remember, in advance, chapter 8’s title: “How to Read Any Book: On the Power of Understanding.” The book image is pretty straightforward. It is “standing under” to remind us of understanding. The power generator is there of course to visually represent the word “power.”
That full cupboard on the cushioned bench (location 9) should remind us of the first half of chapter 9’s title: “Filling Your Mental Cupboard to the Brim: On Building a Knowledge Base.” The base with no ledge serves as our reminder, of course, for the second half about a knowledge base. Finally, the mentalist in the drawer of the bench fails at his trick to remind us in advance of chapter 10’s title: “Knowing Your Mental Powers — and their Limits.”
Do you have all that? If not, just repeat the exercise a time or two, or study just a bit the summary table, remembering all the while that what matters is not exact wording of the chapter titles or precepts, but their underlying meanings, which you might choose to summarize in words of your own.
Now, this method is a form of an ancient memory system called the method of loci (locations) that St. Thomas himself endorsed.77 The locations I present in the table are like a mental notepad that can be used again and again to memorize different subjects. The images placed at each location are like the ink in which you can “write” whatever you like upon this notepad in your memory, be they study tips, facts of the Faith, or even the principles of macroeconomics! In fact, in part 2 of this book, you will be shown how to continue to build imaginary memory rooms and to stock them with all kinds of information relevant to thinking like Aquinas, so you’ll have them right at hand whenever you need them.
Doctor’s Orders ✍
Prescription for Committing Truths to Memory Like the Medieval Memory Masters
Reflect
Have you come to share St. Thomas’s (and St. John Paul II’s) respect for truth, whatever its source? Have you learned anything new about the value of and the methods for committing important truths to memory?
Read
St. Thomas addresses memory as a part of prudence in his Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 49, art. 1. Insights on St. Thomas as a memory master, as well as his teacher St. Albert’s complete line-by-line analysis of the Ad Herennium, the oldest extant book on these memory methods (ca. 80 B.C.), can be found in Mary Carruthers’s Book of Memory. My own first and most detailed treatment of these and other memory methods, complete with a book-length tutorial on just how to use them, can be found in Memorize the Faith! (And Most Anything Else) Using the Methods of the Great Catholic Medieval Memory Masters.
Remember
How can we forget this chapter’s lessons on memory, of all things? Did you successfully memorize the ten themes of this book’s ten chapters? If not, don’t despair, for repetitio est mater memoriae (repetition is the mother of memory). Give it another try or two, and I think you will have them down. Further, we’ve employed the loci technique for fairly complex phrases. Even ancient memory masters distinguished between “memory for words” (rote, word-by-word repetition of phrases) and “memory for things” (the ability to memorize key concepts or ideas). Indeed, it is “memory for things” for which these methods are best suited (as you will see and experience in the exercises in part 2). That’s why I suggested that you feel free to memorize the key lessons from each chapter in your own words if you prefer them to mine.
These methods were invented and used by orators who would memorize the key points (not the exact words) of their literary orations, political speeches, or legal arguments, using visual images in an ordered memory system, perhaps even using various features of the very building or forum they spoke in as their location system. This way, as they spoke, they needed merely to glance around them to be reminded of all the important points they wanted to make in their exact order. (That’s what I do in all my talks.)
I’ll close with a story from a greatly gifted modern orator, a man whose lecture-based program (blackboard, chalk, and all) once led in national television ratings — and, indeed, a man who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas!
Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) told a story to illustrate why he trained his memory and spoke without notes. While delivering a homily one Sunday, Sheen tells us, a certain bishop paused for quite some time while he noisily shuffled his notes, trying to find his place. To the bishop’s chagrin, an elderly parishione
r in the pews could contain herself no longer and called out for all to hear, “How does he expect us to remember all of this when he can’t remember it himself?”
73Exceptions being the pope and Magisterium under certain circumstances. The pope is gifted by the Holy Spirit with infallibility, but only when he speaks ex cathedra (from the chair) of Peter as pope, “when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful — who confirms his brethren in the faith — he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. . . . The infallibility promised to the Church is also present in the body of bishops when, together with Peter’s successor, they exercise the supreme Magisterium, above all in Ecumenical Council.” Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), no. 891. As Thomas himself wrote regarding the pope, he has “authority which is empowered to decide matters of faith finally, so that they may be held by all with unshakeable faith. Now this belongs to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff, to whom the more difficult questions that arise in the Church are referred.” Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 1, art. 10. Further, “The universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by the Holy Ghost, who is the Spirit of Truth.” Ibid., II-II, Q. 1, art. 90.
74From De Bono (On the Good), cited in Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 275.
75Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 49, art. 1, numbers and emphasis added.
76OK, I’ll admit it’s my own — with just a few alterations.
77Indeed, readers familiar with my book Memorize the Faith! (Sophia Institute Press, 2006) will unfailingly recall that when I first introduced this memory foyer, it housed the Ten Commandments. That is why the fifth location of the foyer housed that odd image of a gun rack, which I do not have in my actual foyer. The reason a padlocked gun rack first appeared as our fifth location was to help us memorize the Fifth Commandment. (Yes, you guessed it: “Thou shall not kill!”).
And as for the different subject matters, the subtitle of Memorize the Faith! began with the words “And Most Anything Else” because these memory methods can be used for memorizing just about anything else. I later applied them to books about Catholic apologetics and the rites of the Mass. Further, to my great delight, I found, in a journal of economics and finance, of all places, that Memorize the Faith! was listed as a reference in a report on an empirical study demonstrating the power of the mnemonic techniques of the method of loci for college students: M. Shaughnessy and Mary L. White, “Making Macro Memorable: The Method of Loci Mnemonic Technique in the Economics Classroom,” Journal of Economics and Finance Education 11, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 131–141. Among their conclusions: “An advantage of the method of loci technique is its applicability to any discipline, and students who discover the technique in an economics course likely will find it useful in any other course that requires some amount of memorization” (p. 137) — to which I say, “Amen.”
Chapter 8
How to Read Any Book: On the Power of Understanding
Try to understand whatever you read and to verify whatever is doubtful.
Thomas and Thomists Proclaim the Power of Reading
The prolific twentieth-century philosopher Mortimer J. Adler once wrote a book entitled How to Read a Book. Many jokingly asked him how anybody could read his book if they did not already know how to read a book. Adler would then point out the subtitle: “The Art of Getting a Liberal Education.” His book, of course, was not a primer on how to read, but a guide to reading more effectively and to reading the kinds of books that liberate and educate the mind. He also had the last laugh, so to speak, since that book became his best seller!
His book was, in a sense, a lengthy explication of the first part of this precept from Thomas’s letter on study. Indeed, Adler was a great admirer of St. Thomas Aquinas and considered himself a Thomist. Further, although he was born into a Jewish family and called himself a “pagan” throughout most of his adult life, Adler became a Christian in his seventies, and he died in his nineties as a member of the Catholic Church. Talk about a man devoted to study and following the truth wherever it might lead him! Indeed, in my forties, Adler’s books How to Think about God and The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes led me to read St. Thomas for the first time, which, in turn, brought me back to God and the Catholic Church!
The right kind of reading opens us to deep reservoirs of knowledge. Following St. Thomas’s earlier advice, we can start with narrow streams of slim and accessible books as we work our way over time to drink of the deepest knowledge that larger, loftier tomes, such as the works of St. Thomas, contain!
Understanding Makes All the Difference
Thomas knew well that the power to understand defines us as human beings. He would write in his masterwork that “the nature of each thing is shown by its operation. Now the proper operation of man as man is to understand; because he thereby surpasses all other animals.”78 This power of understanding is the fundamental “difference of man” that Adler, too, believed makes all the difference. It is the fundamental fact of our human nature. Further, as modern-day Thomist Dr. Peter Redpath points out: “Since human nature is the proximate principle of all the reasoning principles that flow from it, being wrong about human nature will never generate a correct understanding of philosophy, science, metaphysics, ethics, or religion (including Catholicism.)”79
Dr. Redpath was not the first to make such a claim, though (nor was St. Thomas). Aristotle hinted at it more than 2,300 years ago when he noted that “acquaintance with the soul would seem to help much in acquiring all truth, especially about the natural world; for it is, as it were, the principle of living things.”80 St. Thomas was well aware of Aristotle’s opinion, too, since he wrote a detailed commentary on every line of Aristotle’s book De Anima (On the Soul), from which that statement comes. Thomas himself argued that we cannot know proper moral behaviors, for example, unless we understand the powers of the soul; we cannot reason about the highest, most divine immaterial things unless we understand the immaterial powers of our intellects; and we cannot properly understand living things unless we understand how all their actions originate in the soul.
If we want to think like Aquinas, we must pay serious attention to what he thought about the nature of understanding. Indeed, the operation of understanding is what distinguishes us from every other animal on earth and is one important way in which we were made in the image and likeness of God. So let’s take a whirlwind tour of Thomas’s understanding of understanding. It will help us understand whatever we read — and everything else in ourselves and the world as well!
The Nature of Human Nature
Perhaps you have heard of the “mind-body problem” in philosophy and psychology. How can the purely mental events of our minds impact the separate physical realities of our bodies, and vice versa? The British atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell once dismissed the issue with a quip: “What is mind? It doesn’t matter. What is matter? Never mind!” Great thinkers throughout the ages have held a variety of views on this key issue of human nature, some of which pitted the mind against the body or collapsed them into one. Plato, for example, believed that we are essentially spiritual souls trapped within material bodies while on earth. Others, such as Democritus in ancient times and many people today who consider themselves scientific, believe we are nothing but matter, and that the mind, let alone the soul, is an old-fashioned fiction. Aquinas could not disagree more with both of those views. He says that the body and soul (a broader term than mind, but one that encompasses it), are not two separate natures within us but together form the composite unity that is a human being. Aristotle had tersely noted fifteen hundred years before Thomas, “We can dismiss the question of whether the soul and body are one; it is as though we were to ask whether the wax and its shape are one.”81
Thomas gives the question a thorough answer. He notes, “Matter is that which is not as such ‘a particular thing,’ but is in mere potency to become a ‘parti
cular thing.’ Form is that by which a ‘particular thing’ actually exists. And the compound is the ‘particular thing’ itself.”82 The soul is the form of the body — that gift from God which makes us particular human beings.83
A word about perfection, which St. Thomas uses in a specific way: to be perfect is, literally, to be complete. In Latin, per plus factus means “thoroughly made.” God is perfect in that He is complete in every attribute, fully actualized, pure spirit without matter, and therefore, immutable or unchangeable. Thomas says that in matter, there are four degrees of perfection: (1) existence, (2) living, (3) sensing, and (4) understanding. As living human beings, you and I reach all four. Your concrete driveway has attained only the first degree, which in itself is good — for Thomas echoes God in the book of Genesis that “all that exists is good.” And yet your driveway can’t do much more than lie there for cars to park on, because it does not have a soul. But do those irksome weeds by it have a soul? St. Thomas answers with an unequivocal yes, though in a specific and relatively limited sense. Of course, our interest here is in the nature of man and the human soul, and not that of the cement or the weeds in our driveway, but they do provide us with our starting point on the road to understanding the human soul — including its unique powers of understanding!
We sometimes call nonliving things at the first level of perfection inanimate objects, and living things at the next three levels animate objects. That is thinking like Aquinas, because anima is Latin for “soul.” The weeds by your driveway, like the daffodils and trees nearby, are indeed alive and therefore have a soul — a vegetative soul, fitting for vegetables and for all forms of plant life! The rock or asphalt in your driveway has no soul, but the weeds and any kind of plant life do, since that is the most basic function of soul, to be the “form” that gives life to the matter of a living being’s physical body. This life-giving vegetative soul has three main powers: (1) nutrition, (2) growth, and (3) reproduction. (You might notice at this point that you also possess these three powers.)