Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

reading. Next, the educational process continues to another stage, which Hugh calls meditatio. An obvious translation here would be “meditation”; a better one might be “rumination.” Hugh describes it as a kind of undirected procedure of pondering over what one has read and memorized (III.10). He seems to see it almost as a kind of reward for the hard work one has put into reading and memorization, speaking of the delight of the ruminative process. Finally, after memoria and meditatio comes moralia, which means putting one’s insights into practice ethically. In another of Hugh’s beloved parallels, and in this case a fairly plausible one, the three stages of learning are said to correspond to his three approaches to Scripture. History is analogous to memoria, the more open-ended search for allegorical interpretation is analogous to meditatio, and the “tropological” discovery of ethical lessons in Scripture is of course analogous to moralia.