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Albertus Magnus, Commentary on Aristotle,

On Memory and Recollection
translated by Jan M. Ziolkowski

Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great (ca. 1193–1280), also known sometimes as
Albert of Cologne or as Friar Albert the German, was born at Lauingen in Swabia and
died at Cologne. After studying at the University of Padua, he entered the Dominican
order in the summer of 1223. He completed his novitiate and early theological studies
in Cologne, which is one of the many cities where he taught. The 1240s he spent largely
in Paris, where he was the first German Dominican to receive the degree of master in
theology.
In his extensive lecturing and writing, Albertus Magnus was especially significant
for striving to come to terms with the ‘‘new Aristotle’’ translated from Greek and Arabic
and with the Arabic commentaries that arrived with Aristotle. His teaching influenced
many students, foremost among them Thomas Aquinas, and a group of these students
accompanied him to Cologne in the summer of 1238. In the following year Albertus
undertook an enormous paraphrase of Aristotelian philosophy that he had completed
by 1270 and that presented the whole of Aristotle’s logic, natural philosophy, moral phi-
losophy, and First Philosophy ( Metaphysics and Liber de causis). In dealing with natural
science he aimed to incorporate not only parts of Aristotle that had been lost but even
topics Aristotle had never covered. Throughout, Albertus sought to clarify Aristotle by
rephrasing, supplementing, and reconciling him with Platonism, Epicureanism, and the
Pre-Socratics. In the process he brought Christian Aristotelianism to a high point.
In addition to writings on natural science and systematic theology, Albertus also
produced prolifically on logic, the moral sciences, metaphysics, and scriptural exegesis,
and left many sermons. In view of Albertus’s status as a saint, doctor universalis of scho-
lastics, and one of the few medieval men to be called ‘‘the Great,’’ surprisingly few of
his writings have ever been published in English translation. Indeed, many of his works
have not yet been found or edited, and the authenticity of many remains under dispute.
Albertus accomplished all his teaching and writing despite heavy administrative
duties, first as prior provincial of the Dominican province of Teutonia (1254–57) and then
as a bishop (1260–62). During his term as provincial he wrote the collection of nine short
works on natural science known as the Parva naturalia, among which his treatise on
memory and reminiscence is a companion piece to his treatise De anima ( On the Soul).
The treatise gives a very different perspective on memory from that evidenced in his
earlier De bono (On the Good; 1246–48), a work of systematic theology.
This treatise offers his views on the function and character of memory, within the
broader human capacity to think and to know. In it Albertus follows Aristotle, who had
elaborated a kind of psychology in which a material form passes through the eyes to
create a mental impression ( phantasma), which the common sense (sensus communis)
fuses with images from the other senses to create the ‘‘intention’’ (intentio) and likeness
of the material form. But Albertus sees a gap between the initial act of memory that im-
presses a sensory image and its recollection, in that the original experience cannot be
entirely reconstructed.
 Commentary on Aristotle, On Memory and Recollection 

According to Albertus, memory is similar to imagination (with which he had dealt

in On the Soul ) in requiring an image—a mental picture. Perpetuating a connection be-
tween memory (often memory of names or words) and images, he compares the phe-
nomenon of memory with both a painted portrait and the impression of a signet ring on
wax. Both metaphors derived directly from Aristotle, who regarded such impressions as
being the essential first step in the acquisition of knowledge. Sense impressions precede
all knowledge, all thought, and all activity of the intellect. Memory, like other mental pro-
cesses such as dreaming, is a power of perception that is characteristic of both body and
soul. In contrast to memory, recollection (or ‘‘reminiscence’’) is a kind of reasoning—a
search—motivated by thought rather than perception; but recollection too bears traces
of the corporeal.
Albertus knew the rules for places and images from the Rhetorica ad Herennium,
which he would have studied with a commentary. Four running commentaries on the
complete text had been composed by the early thirteenth century. Albertus’s comments
on the vivid image of the ram bear a close resemblance to those in a commentary known
as Etsi cum Tullius, attributed to William of Champeaux and composed c. 1100. Like other
medieval readers, Albertus knew the Ad Herennium as ‘‘The Second Rhetoric of Cicero’’
and regarded it as the sequel to the De inventione or ‘‘The First Rhetoric of Cicero.’’ Under
scholasticism rhetoric in general was often presented as having a strong ethical compo-
nent: for instance, Aristotle’s Rhetoric was viewed as a book of ethics. Against this back-
drop it is understandable why the two treatises ascribed to Cicero were brought within
the purview of ethics, especially since the De inventione—the First Rhetoric—contains
definitions of the four parts of virtue near its conclusion (2.53.159–65). First among the
four parts of virtue is wisdom, which itself comprises three parts, and of these memory
is foremost. Thus there were many justifications for Albertus (and Thomas Aquinas after
him) to subsume artificial memory under memory, memory under prudence, and pru-
dence under ethics. Consequently the acquisition and application of artificial memory
are part and parcel of prudence, which is a virtue.
Especially with regard to artificial memory, Albertus viewed Aristotle’s On Memory
and Recollection through lenses that had been shaped by his study of the Rhetorica ad
Herennium. In his commentary on Aristotle’s tract, Albertus makes much of passages that
he takes as referring to a formal mnemonic technique—an artificial memory—along the
lines of what is described in pseudo-Cicero. Indeed, he even integrates into his discus-
sion of recollection a distinctive distillation of an image (the ram) used in the Rhetorica ad
Herennium as an example of the formal ‘‘art of memory.’’ For him Aristotle’s treatises are,
after a fashion, an art of memory comparable to that laid out in the Rhetorica ad Heren-
nium. In a circular process, Albertus first uses loose resemblances between Aristotle and
pseudo-Cicero to enable an elaboration of Aristotle along the lines of the Rhetorica ad
Herennium and then makes Aristotle into the philosophical basis for artificial memory
in general.
Although a less definite influence on Albertus Magnus than the Rhetorica ad Heren-
nium, the mystical approach to rhetoric that is salient in the writings of Boncompagno
da Signa and other members of the so-called Bolognese school of dictamen (which refers
narrowly to letter writing and broadly to prose style) could have held special appeal for
him in his thinking on memory. Boncompagno’s tripartite definition of memory bears a
 Albertus Magnus

resemblance to the three parts of prudence discussed in Albertus and other scholastics,
and like the scholastics Boncompagno gives hints of connecting this three-part classifi-
cation with the distinction between natural and artificial memory found in the Rhetorica
ad Herennium.
One major obscurity in Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection is how the technique
of midpoints, in which a person recollects by starting a series of associated topics in the
middle, is meant to function. This obscurity is maintained and perhaps even heightened
in Albertus’s account. Another aspect of Albertus’s treatise that may seem peculiar to
a modern reader is his physiological explanation of how different temperaments have
differing capacities for memory and recollection. The best qualities for attainment of
memory as an art are dryness and coldness in the posterior cell or ventricle of the brain.
Despite—or because of—such strangenesses, the treatise by Albertus Magnus was fun-
damental in its influence on later medieval thinking and writing on memory.
—Jan M. Ziolkowski

About the Drawing

The image accompanying this selection is adapted from a schematic drawing of the
brain in Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 1.1, fol. 490v, a large anthology of diverse
material comprising several verse chronicles, an Apocalypse with fifty-five illustrations,
a manual of sins, elementary prayers, and psalms, and a version of the encyclopedic
romance ‘‘Siddrak and Bokkus.’’ Almost all are composed in French, but the book was
intended for a household in England, since some materials are in English and Latin. Evi-
dently it was intended as an anthology for teaching reading and basic morals, perhaps
made for (or under the guidance of ) a household chaplain. This drawing of the brain ac-
companies a short text entitled ‘‘Qualiter caput hominis situatur/Descripcion del teste
de home.’’ We have redrawn the outlines of the original and translated its Latin titles
into English. The idea that there are five ‘‘cells’’ in the brain (shown as circles in this
drawing) that are active in the construction of human thought comes from Avicenna’s
commentaries, a refinement on the Galenic tradition that recognized three ventricles
or ‘‘pouches’’ in the brain, identified with the common sense and image-making power,
the cogitative power, and the memorative power. The estimative power, which is the
power to respond to sensory material with an immediate positive or negative reaction,
connects to the image-making process in this drawing, in accord with Avicennan doc-
trine. Notice that both the common sense and the ‘‘imagination,’’ understood in the first
instance as the power of shaping sense-impressions collected by the ‘‘common sense’’
into coherent mental images, are connected directly to the eyes. The cerebellar vermis or
‘‘worm’’ is drawn plainly at the juncture of the cogitative (also called imaginative) power
and the remembering power. This structure (not that now called the vermis but rather
the choroid plexus of the lateral ventricles) was thought to act as a kind of valve, actively
opening and closing the passage between the middle and posterior parts of the brain—
memory and cogitation—as thinking procedures required. For further examples of early
depictions of the brain, see Edwin Clarke and Kenneth Dewhurst, An Illustrated History
of Brain Function (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
—Mary Carruthers