Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius and Dante
Understanding the Medieval Meditative Ascent: Augustine, Anselm, Boethius and Dante
by Robert McMahon
Catholic University of America Press, 2006 Cloth: 978-0-8132-1437-5 | eISBN: 978-0-8132-1628-7 Library of Congress Classification BV4818.M36 2006 Dewey Decimal Classification 248
ABOUT THIS BOOK | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Preface
1 . The Meditative Ascent: Paradigm and Principles
Ascent and Return
The interior journey: human being as the epitome of being
The Hierarchy of Being and Analogy
Foreshadowing and Fulfillment
The Meditative Ascent and Philosophical Content
Numerological Structure
The Pilgrim Figure
Habits of Understanding
Summary
2. The Unity of Meditative Structure and Texture in Augustine's Confessions
Meditative Structure: Return to the Origin
Meditative Texture and Pilgrim Figures
Paradigm at the Climax: Book 13
3. A Moving Viewpoint: Augustine's Meditative Philosophy in the Confessions
Moving Viewpoint in the Small
Moving Viewpoint in the Large: Books 2 and 8
Analogy: Friendship and Conversion
Analogy and Reconfigured Understanding: Memory, Conversion
Coda: the Hermeneutics of Meditation
4. Meditative Movement in Anselm's Proslogion
Structure of the Ascent
Patterns in the Ascent
Prayer and Understanding
Reconfigured Understandings
5. Recollecting Oneself: Meditative Movement in the Consolation of Philosophy
Structure of the Ascent
Metamorphoses of the Circle
Diagnosis and Cure: Recollecting Oneself
Numerological Structure
Bibliography
Index