We are delighted to feature guest contributor Adam Robbert. If you have a piece for Second Voice, pitch us at hello@lightninginspiration.com
Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory highlights the importance of memory and recollection for the medieval and antique mind in contrast to the importance of imagination and creativity in the modern mind.
She illustrates this point by comparing St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert Einstein. While Einstein is often associated with intuition, imagination, and new insight, Aquinas is remembered for a “rich and retentive memory” that accumulated knowledge like pages in a book, transforming his attention in the process.
Carruthers’s point is not to diminish Einstein, but to invite us to notice how different the structure of Thomas’s mind was, and what that difference might mean for us today.
Thomas cultivated a slow, recursive, and sustained attention, remarkable for its range and recall, but also for the role it played in shaping his entire cognitive and contemplative life. Memory on this view is not passive storage alone but an active medium, continuously deepened, and made articulate through practice.
Aquinas’s approach is an endangered species.
In an age of AI-generated insight, outsourced cognition, and the scroll of never-ending novelty, it’s tempting to imagine that memory has become obsolete, and we no longer need to engage in the type of memory practices that Thomas powerfully put to use.
Yet memory, as Aquinas practiced it, structures the ways we come to inhabit the world and changes how that world comes to presence for us in awareness.
This type of memory operates as an active mode of thought and affords a deepening of our very capacity to attend itself, one we neglect at our peril. Memory is a way of being, not just a technique for recall. This is quite a different thing than the type of memory retrieval we see computers perform.
Given our near-constant access to notepads, apps, and voice recorders, it’s not surprising that we’ve let memory slide in favor of creativity. Our need to retain things in active memory decreases as our ability to store information increases.
We may be losing a way of thinking that emerges only through a deeper engagement with memory. What Carruthers wants us to see is that these are two different types of mind: one shaped by recording technology and the other shaped by the necessity of remembering.
Along these lines, she characterizes the medieval mind as fundamentally memorial, formed by the active exercise of memory, while the modern mind is more documentary, shaped by the storage and retrieval of recorded information.
Carruthers shares anecdotes about Thomas’s extraordinary powers of concentration and memory, including accounts of him dictating to multiple secretaries simultaneously on different topics and even continuing his recitations while asleep, a detail that may point less to literal sleep and more to a trance-like state of focused concentration.
His clarity was such that it seemed as though he were reading from an open book before his eyes. Thomas stressed the importance of memory and communed with it constantly. He would not lecture, write, or dictate until he possessed both the right understanding and the exact words required to deliver his insight.
This kind of mind is rare, but Thomas isn’t alone in emphasizing memory. Hugh of St. Victor, writing in the Didascalicon (c. 1130), claims that all learning depends on three things: aptitude, practice, and discipline. Aptitude, he insists, must be paired with memory; just as earnings are useless without savings, or storage vessels are useless without contents, aptitude is empty without memory.
For St. Victor, aptitude is developed through reading and meditation. Reading initiates the learning process, but meditation brings it to completion. Meditation, as he describes it, is a spiritual and synthetic mode of inquiry, directed as it is toward the unfolding of truth through contemplative attention.
The result is a form of attention that transforms the knowing person in the direction of deeper presence and insight.
Memory, understood expansively, preserves the wisdom gathered through study.
It’s tempting to say that in the age of AI it will be more important to teach people ways of thinking rather than the memorization of facts, since, presumably, the AIs will be able to remember everything for us. But this misses that thinking is underpinned by memory, not the rote memorization of specific facts for the sake of knowledge acquisition, but by the capacity to remember itself.
Ways of thinking are secured by the continuity and depth of memory. No memory, no thought. What I’m pointing to is an exercised capacity for remembering that folds back into the quality of your own attention.
Memory practices, even rote memory practices and acts of repetition, like hand-copying quotations or playing scales on an instrument, can strengthen memory as such; this, in turn, shapes the kind of attention and presence we bring to bear on what we’re trying to understand.
If people in the medieval period selected for memory, we today select for novelty.
Contrast that with earlier eras where repetition and appeal to tradition structured the intellectual life. In our case, novelty is abundant and overrated. That’s not to say novelty is inherently bad, or that it can’t be a creative reworking of older insights.
But our media ecology, shaped by platform incentives, rewards novelty for its own sake. We may be producing artifacts that suit the needs of these systems rather than what we actually need as humans seeking understanding and insight.
Plato saw this tension clearly in Phaedrus. Writing, he warned, would weaken memory by encouraging reliance on external marks rather than internal recollection. It would produce not true memory but mere reminders, and not true wisdom but a seeming wisdom; those who appeared knowledgeable would in fact be ignorant, confident in the illusion of understanding.
The result would be not real wisdom but the appearance of it, unearned and shallow.
That dual nature captures our relationship to modern technologies. They promise to extend our capabilities while also threatening to diminish our native powers of memory and thought.
Hugh describes memory as a kind of gathering. Augustine makes a similar point when he writes that thinking (cogitare) gathers what lies scattered in memory (cogere). Without memory, thought disperses, becoming thin and shallow.
So, we read and reread, not just to retain but to reawaken a mode of thinking grounded in memory, and so a deeper continuity with a different type of attention. We enter a richer world through this deeper engagement. We could say, with McLuhan, “the medium is the message” and the medium is our own mind, shaped and transformed by the practices we bring to bear upon it in ways both personal and social.
Indeed, as Carruthers reminds us, the etymology of the word text comes from the Latin verb “to weave.”
Texts, for her, are so-called because they are woven through memory into the fabric of community and tradition. They become institutionalized in memory, and this memorial texture links us across time. Whether words enter through eyes or ears, they must be processed and transformed in memory to become our own.
Memory is what binds thought to perception, anchors insight in time, and weaves a sense of continuity through the scattered details of experience.
Whether in philosophy, craftsmanship, or spiritual exercise, the habits we form are repositories of memory, embodied, pre-reflective, and enduring.
And when we forget the art of memory, we forget the practices that shape us, the repetitions that refine us, and the forms of attention that make thought possible at all.
Even so, the art of memory need not be opposed to the tools of the present. In fact, its recovery may be the very thing that allows us to engage with technology more fruitfully.
But as Plato already warned us with the advent of writing, we cannot afford to forget our capacity for remembrance.
To rely too heavily on what lies outside ourselves, be it paper, screen, or model, is to risk losing the internal architecture of thought that gives our attention depth, coherence, and direction.
The challenge, then, is not to offload memory to our machines, but to preserve and renew the practices of attention and concentration that memory requires.
That is what keeps our thinking human, and it is what will make our use of technology distinct and valuable long into the future.
Adam Eric Robbert is a philosopher by training, and a writer, editor, and researcher by vocation. His focus is on the relationship between practice and perception in the fields of philosophy, religion, and contemplation. This piece is an adapted excerpt from his new book Practice in Still Life. He writes regularly on Substack at The Base Camp.
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