Samizdat

“Indeed there are many features of neo-Platonic cosmology which would have appeared transparent in the structure of the Ars notoria ritual to its late medieval operators.

In a most basic way, the idea of an intrinsic congruence and similitude between the human mind and divine archetype of the world is a recurrent feature of twelfth-century neo-Platonic thought. Thus, Thierry of Chartres notes that »the soul is proportioned to the nature of the universe«; and in a similar vein, Hugh of St Victor, another prominent twelfth-century writer in the same neo-Platonic tradition, says at the beginning of his Didascalicon that »similars are comprehended by similars; […] in a word, the rational soul could by no means comprehend all things unless it were also composed of all of them[…] the soul grasps the similitude in and of itself, out of a certain native capacity and proper power of its own«.

But this is a similitude which traverses the spiritual cosmos as well as the human mind. Hugh explains in an appendix to the Didascalicon that knowledge emanates from God in such a way that ideas subsist in themselves only after they are created in the minds of the angels:

“What exists in actuality is an image of what exists in the mind of man, and what exists in the mind of man is an image of what exists in the divine Mind […] For the angelic nature first existed in the divine Idea as a plan, and then afterwards it began to subsist in itself through creation. The other creatures however, first existed in the Idea of God; next they were made in the knowledge of the angels; and finally they began to subsist in themselves.”

“In other words, all created things necessarily proceed, from highest to lowest, through the subsistence of creatures who have the capacity for ideas. The divine transmission of the world’s pattern through angelic minds of which Hugh speaks here is rendered visible in the presence of angels mingled with the liberal arts on the Chartres archivolt and rendered functional in the association of the angelic orders and liberal arts in the Ars notoria prayers.”

–Claire Fanger, “Sacred and Secular Knowledge Systems in the Ars Notoria and the Flowers of Heavenly Teaching of John of Morigny.” Pg. 165.

Quoted by Peter Dronke: >>Thierry of Chartres«, in: A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. by Peter Dronke, Cambridge 1988, p. 372.

Hugh of St Victor: The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor, translated with an introduction and notes by Jerome Taylor, New York 1961, l.i, pp. 46-47.