LETHE

HARALD WEINRICH
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY STEVEN RENDALL
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
;;;:;;
For Benjamin and Anna Lea,
grandson and granddaughter. _ H. VIZ
German edition, Lethe: KunstundKritik des 1997 by C. H. Beck,
Munich ,
English translation copyright 2004 by Comell University
The translation of this work was published 'with the assistance of the Goethe-
Institut Inter Nationes.
Kraft und Schmerz," by Paul Celan, from his Sch1UiefJart (coPyright
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971) and uSe questo e un uomo, " by Primo Levi, from
his Se f{Uf'sto if un uomo (copyright Finaudi, 195
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First published 2004 by Cornell University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weinrich, Harald.
[Lethe. English]
Lethe: the art and critique of forgetting / Harald Weinrich;
rranslated by Steven Rendall.
p.cm.
nc1udes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-4193-5 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Memory (Philosophy). 2. Memory in literature. r. Title.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
I. The Language of Forgetting
II Mortal and Immortal Forgetting . .
. L The Art of Remembering-The Art of Forgetttng
(Simonides, Themistocles)
2. Odysseus Tells about Forgetting (Homer)
F etful Love (Ovid) .
3 org . and Earthly RecollectIOn
4. Transcendental ForgettIng
(Plato, Augustine) en
b . g and Forgetting before God and M 5. Remem enn
(Dante)
III. The Wit of Forgetful J
1. Is There Still Room In Head,
(Vives, Rabe1ais, MontaIgne) . _ ;>
Does the MInd Need. .
2. How Much Memory d L . Cordemoy, HelvetIus)
(Cervantes, Huarte an essIng,
IV. Enlightened Forgetting . a1 Fetting
1. Reasonable Thinkm.g, MethodologIc org
(Descartes, Thomasms) .
gu1 d d Unregulated Experiences "'nth 2. Re ate an .
Forgetting (Locke, VoltaIre)
H . to Learn by Rote (Rousseau)
3
No Longer a\l1.llg
. N "Lampe" Be Completely 4. Why Must the ame
Forgotten? (Kant)
V On the Risks of Remembering and Forgetting
. Aff:' Truly Narrated (Casanova) 1 Forgotten Love arrs,
2: An Ode on Forgetting (Frederick the Great)
vii
1
9
9
13
16
39
39
45
57
57
79
79
85
L The Language of Forgetting
Everyone is forgetful. We have all had the experience of forgetting some-
thing now and then, and even of totally forgetting many things we learned
with great effort. Thus no one can blithely say: "That is unforgettable; I
shall never forget that. " Man is by nature a forgetful being (animal oblivi-
seens). Recognition of our own or others' forgetfulness is among every-
one's elementary experiences ofIife and a plague of old ilge. Hence in this
book there is no need to provide a didactic definition of the word "forget."
vVe all already know what this word means, and it is the thing we are least
likely to forget.
However, the content this word designates is not adequately known. Our
daily encounters >vith forgetting have not taught us enough about how
much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it
evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose-
with sympathy or antipathy-forgetting, and finally what political and cul-
tural barriers can be erected against forgetting whenIfCannot be recon-
ciled with what is right and moral.
-If we try to acquire a better understanding of all these aspects of for-
getting, and to form a more discriminating attitnde toward them in our
own lives, we find that cultnral history provides a helpful perspective in
which the value of the art of forgetting emerges, along with the v-aIue of a
simultaneous, indispensable critique of forgetting-including the art of
forgetting. That is t.lJ.e subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the
meandering stream of forgetfulness) >vill try to represent and discuss by
means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literatnre. We
shall seek our first clues, however, in the inconspicuous wisdom of every-
day language usage.
Let us begin with English. The verb "forget" is composed of the verb "get"
and the prefix "for." The prefix converts the movement toward implicit in
"get" into a movement away, so that one might paraphrase the meaning of
"forget" as "to get rid (of something). " This is already almost a definition
of "forgetting." Precisely the same kind of word formation underlies the
German verb vergessen, but it is less obvious because a verb gessen no longer
111 uerman. It can, however, be compared by analogy with the verb
pair kaujen/verkaujen, "buy / selI," which involves a similar reversal of di-
rection.
The verb "forget" is surrounded by a whole family of words that come
from the same root. Among these that may be mentioned in particular are
the common adjective "forgetful" and the abstract noun derived from it,
"forgetfulness, " as well as such additional forms as "(un) forgettable," "for-
getter, " and "forgottenness." It should also be noted that the verb "forget"
can be both transitive ("to forget the flowers") and intransitive ("to forget
about the flowers"). The transitive form is used chiefly in concrete situa-
tions, while the intransitive form is generally used in a broader context.
Mention should also be made here of a colloquial expression that has
become common in everyday speech: the imperative "forget it. " It is used
mainly to suggest, occasionally with a condescending or graciously dismis-
sive gesture, that something or someone is not to be taken seriously and
need no longer be taken into account. To relieve, exonerate, or relax an
interlocutor one says: "Oh, forget it!" This expression gave rise to a similar
one in German, das kannst du vergessen, which quickly became widespread
after its introduction in the 1960s. In my opinion, neither expression
should be taken lightly in an analysis of forgetting. In the medium of U'lO
languages an important psychic experience is reflected here: the not un-
problematic discovery that the decision that something or someone is ir-
relevant and may be forgotten can be of
relievino- the ental econom and utting everyone involved in a relaxed
mood. _
--
However, the image of forgetting mirrored in language is stilI not com-
plete as long as we have not taken into account the ways in which forget-
ting is modalized, that is, the ways of making its application flexible. This
occurs by means of the modal verbs and expressions (often used in the
negative) "can," "may/might," "shall/will," "must," "have to," "W<Ult to,"
"ought to, " and other forms of the grammatical paradigm that precede the
infinitive "to forget" and contribute in various ways to the psychic flexibil-
ity of forgetting. All these modalities of forgetting can be seen as linguistic
"gears" of forgetting, with their negative forms as "reverse gears. " With the
help of various modal expressions a highly variable and complex set of
modalizations can be cO:qjugated, particularly with contrasting emphases,
as in the follOwing examples:
o I want to forget that, but I can never forget it.
e I couldn'tforget that, even if I wanted to.
o "And we forget because we must, / And not because we will" (Matthew
Arnold,1822-88).
With regard to forgetting, negation can be regarded as a limiting case
.f modalization. Since to some extent the ways of expressing forgetting can
. f memory connecting them with a
already b.e seen as the key!") 'produces a double nega-
grammatlcal negatlo . . and this in turn appears as a supple-
tion with an affirmatlve meamng, . f ("Think of the
.c: th positive paradIgm 0 memory .
mental verb :..orm ill e . is the little flower known ill
key!"). Particularly well this both forms derived
English as the myosotis), which .vas often
from.Old F:enc ne.mo has become indispensable for
mentloned m the Middle Ages h' h . l'nder to be faithful that is at
. tries and w lC IS a rem
lovers ill many coun '. . . the pansy (derived from French pen-
least as effective as its pOSltlve verSIOn,
see) . d d-family in English that has spread to
Th 's however a secon wor ... . < b
ere 1 : '." ed" ori . . At its center stands not aver
this semantlc field and IS of. "ih: is a loan-worn derived directly
but rather an abstract noun. 0 '. f" br' " belong further
. blivio To the paradIgm 0 0 IVlon
Latln . . "and "obliviscence." No corresponding verb
denvatlons such as 0 famil is favored particularly by literary
form is in "cold oblivion" (Shelley), "the
1 . eo "sweet 0 IVlon, ) It.
anguag . .. " h Clare) "Oblivion monster" (Shakespeare. IS,
Muse ObllVlon 00 n . 'I l' 1 age where amnesty laws are
however, also favored ill scho ar )' "'
" f bli' " or "bills of obllVlon.
termed acts 0 0 VIon E li h with the Romance Ian-
The word-family of lead of Latin and pri-
all f which have ill thIS case 0 owe th .
guages, 0 . . . (" for et") This is a "deponent" verb, at IS,
marily of the verb oblzv'lSct to g . . . - S h formal charac-
one that has a.J?assive form butha:'l actlve. a which is in fact
teristic fits in well with lC .w In anv ca;e in the Vulgar
. d halfWay bet\Veen aCtIVlty an passlVl ....: 1 '
SItu. ate . the com Heated deponent verb form was re-
Latln of late Roman tlmes . P blitare which was derived from
d b . to-handle actlve orm, 0 , . /
place yan eaSler- . . '. h bf /aubli Italian obltare
. th . articiple of oblzvzscz. Frenc au zer ,
oblztus, e past p lvida /olvido evolved from these Vulgar
oblio, and Spanish forms are, moreover, to be seen
Latin forms. Italian an. d'menticareis a negative derivative of Latin
as common vanants; thus ItalIan z metaphorical derivation
mente, "memory," and Portuguese esquecer IS a
. "fall"
from Lal:ill cadere, to. . h (ancient) Greek, in which we
Special attention should be ere I to the conceptual history of
th '. t estl'ng informatlon re a v
gain e most ill er fl' this context. I re-
. from a word that at first seems out 0 p ace ill '.
forgetung d leth' "truth" which is, of course, central to Greek philo-
fer to the wor t f this word a- is no doubt a
h
al th ught The first componen 0 "h' h th
sop 1C 0 . " followin component -mtll,-, Vi lC e
negative prefix (alpha pnvatzve!. The d g concealed or "latent" (this
a- negates, designates so the b;;s of the
word derived from Latln IS relate to:.......-.' b the un-
. f the word "truth" appears, as Heldegger suggests, to e
meanlllgo .
covered, the unconcealed, the nonlatent.
1
But since the semantic element
-leth-, negatea:DyThe alpha privative, also occurs in the name of Lethe the
mythical river of forgetting, on the basis of the construction of the
aletheia one can also conceive truth as the "unforgotten" or the "not-to-be-
" In fact, for
f0l!0wmg- the thus
of memory and remembrance; only in modern times has it more or less
liesltantly attempted to graii'tforgetting a certain truth as welL .
The example of the word aletheia ("truth") has alreadv shown us that im-
ideas reaching far back into myth may provide/models for the var-
IOUS nuances of in the word-family of "forgetting."
Now let us turn to Its metaphoncs as expressed in either words or word-
linkages of forgetting.
In one respect or another metaphors of forgetting are connected with
of memory_ l!, for memory is represented as a ("top-
ICal ) landscape-as It IS ill the illIage-field dominant in the rhetorical art
of memory-then the metaphorics of forgetting occupies primarily the
wastes, sandy areas in which what is to be forgotten is gone with
the wz.nd. Thus amaunts to almost the same thing as writing on sand or on
wznd. In landscape, which may have been produced by clear-cut-
tmg, somethmg can be voluntarily buried in such a way that the dust settles
and grass grows over it. Then it is out of the world.3
If with the help of the ancient philosophers we imagine memory as a
storehouse, then the deeper we descend into its cellars the closer we come
forgettin? There remembrance imperceptibly passes over
mto forgetting-or climbs back out of it. But this depth can also be that of
a shaft, to be imagined as the deep well oftke I (Hegel) or as the foun-
t:aznhead of tke past (Thomas Mann). Perhaps forgetting is also only, in triv-
Ial terms, hole into which something falls or disappears (entfiillt).
Forgettmg, whIch lIes hidden or secluded, is dark in accord with its na-
ture} it is jinstere Vergessenheit (Schiller), le sombre oubli (Victor Hugo). Even
out the open and by daylight forgetting is darkened by clouds (Pin dar)
or llU.sts (Jorge Semprlin). This does not necessarily have a negative con-
even soft twilight is conducive to forgetting insofar as it is longed
for, as m a few unforgettable verses of Matthias Claudius's "AbendIied"
("Evensong") :
Wie ist die Welt so stille
Und in der Diimmerung Hiille
So traulich und so hold,
A15 eine stille Kammer,
<:> <:> oF
Wo ihr des Tages Jammer
Verschlafen und vergessen sollt.
How still is the world,
And in the shroud of twilight
So sad and fair,
Like a quiet room,
Where the day's misery
May be laid to rest and forgotten.
4
In this poem laid to rest and forgotten (Verschlafen and Vergessen) are almost
synonymous. In the same vein Paul Valery once wrote: go to sleep is to
forget" (S'endormir c'est oublier). Not being able to IS thus compara-
ble to sleeplessness; Nietzsche suffered from both. Hence to call some-
thing out of oblivion back into remembrance (French rappeleris equivalent
to English "recall" and German erinnern an) almost amounts to a wake-up
call.
s
In another way and once again in correlation with the memory-meta-
phorics that from Plato onward also favored the illustrative image of the
book and writing materials, forgetting appears as a gap in the text, which
must be filled in by means of efforts of writing and thinking but which per-
haps also makes the text really enigmatic and interesting in the first place.
At the end of the text (the inclination to) forgetting draws a broad line, a
bottom line. What is written falls even more violently into oblivion when-
as for the first time in Alexandria-libraries burn: an obsessive thought in
the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Elias Canetti, and Umberto Eco and a Ger-
man trauma since 10 May 1933, the day the Nazis burned books in front
of the University of Berlin.
From the experience of "writing and reading comes also the favorite im-
age of the wax tablet, which allows further metaphors that can be put to
various uses. In antiquity the wax tablet was a cheap and handy writing in-
strument for everyday life since the layer of wax could be smoothed out
with little effort and, as a tabula rasa, used for new "WTiting purposes ..
Smoothing out the wax tablet was therefore an activity to which many au-
thors in the Platonic heritage repeatedly resorted as an image of (volun-
tary) forgetting. Today we still collillIonly say "I had flat forgotten that!"6
With the modification and modernization of writing materials the
metaphors a"f remembering and forgetting are also altered. Thus if some--
thing written on paper or on a blackboard can or should be forgotten, it
is erased, wiped out, exting;uisked, or expunged (perhaps in the latter case with
a damp sponge: Schwamm druberf).
7
Reflection on the forgetfulness of old
age is accompanied by the metaphor of erasure (Thomas Bernhard), even
in the time of the most modern writing and calculating devices connected
with data processing. Thus the delete key (Liischtaste, literally "erasure
key") has become one of the most important parts of the computer; and
woe betide the person who uses it in error or at the wrong time, for then
occurs the nightmare feared by all computer users (and which is expressed
in terms of the usual storage and gap metaphorics): the crashing (Absturz) of
the program. This is the death of the mental work performed, and what
was stored in memory sinks into "a formless ruin of oblivion" (Shake-
speare).
However, the most powerfUlly effective of all the images and similes of for-
getting comes dO\vn from myth, and in fact from the time of early Greek
vvTiters such as Hesiod and Pindar. Among the Greeks, Lethe is a feminine
divinity opposed to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and the mother
of the muses; Lethe was, as John of Salisbury later put it, "that hostile and
faithless stepmother to memory, According to genealogy and
theogony Lethe descends from the race of the Night (Greek Nyx, Latin
Nox), but I must also mention her mother's name: Discord (Greek Eris,
Latin Discordia), the dark element in Lethe's family.
Genealogy nonetheless plays only a minor role in the reception of this
myth, for Lethe is above all the name of a river in the underworld that con-
fers forgetfulness on the souls of the dead. In this image and image field
forgetting is wholly inunersed in the fluid element of ,vater. There is a
deeper meaning in the symbolism of this magical water. In its soft flowing
the hard contours of the remembrance of reality are dissolved and so to
speak, liquidated.
8
/'
Through which fortunate or unfortunate lands the waters of the Lethe
flow and how the course of the river should be located ,\lith respect to other
rivers of the underworld (Acheron, Styx, Phlegeton, Kokytos) is a matter
of debate among ancient authors. In classical antiquity the Greek geogra-
pher Pausanias claims to know its location most precisely; he identifies a
source of the Lethe in Boetia, near which a Mnemosyne spring also flows.
9
However, ancient authors generally agree that the souls drink the waters
of the Lethe in order to free themselves, by forgetting their earlier exis-
tence, for rebirth in a new body. In Virgil we find the following:
Tum pater Anchises: Animae, quibus altera Jato
Corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis unam
Securos latices, et Zanga oblivia potant.
Then his father Anchises said: Souls fate
Has destined for other bodies scoop up \vater
From the Lethe, and drink long oblivion.
10
As we shall see later (chap. 2, sec. 5), it is from Virgil that Dante learns
everything he knows about the river Lethe, and in Paradise Lost (
166
7-74)
Milton takes his information in turn from Dante. In Milton's poem we
must carefully distinguish between "the forgetful lake" (to be imagined as
a "burning lake," which he conceived as punishment for the angels who
rebelled against God and were therefore cast out of heaven) and the !ar
gentler stream Lethe, which is not accessible to t.he fallen angels and which
Nlilton describes this \vay:
Far off from these a slow and silent stream,
Lethe the river of oblivion rolls
Her wat'ry labyrinth, whereof who drinks,
Forth-with his former state and being forgets,
1 d
11
Forgets both joy and gne , p easure an pam.
In the work of the Smss poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, who also wrote
verses on the Lethe, drinking the waters of the Lethe leads to a happy re-
union mth the dead beloved, at least for a brief final moment:
Und die &ihe war an dir zu trinken,
Und die volle Schale hobest du,
Sprackst zu mir mit trautem Augenwinken
Hen, ick trinke dir Vergessen zu!"
And it was your turn to drink;
And as you lifted the brimming cup,
You mnked to me and sweetly said:
"Dear heart, I drink oblivion to you! "12
The waters of this river of the beyond are thus not necessarily, as the un-
sympathetic student in Goethe's Faust thinks, "Lethe's murky flood" but
can also be, as Faust learns, a reviving "thaw from Lethe's flood" or, -as
Goethe says of himself, "an ethereal Lethe-stream [ein atherischer Lethestrom]
that runs through and quickens all of life." Concerning the latter, Goethe
confesses in a letter written in the last year of his life: "I have always known
how to treasure, use, and intensifY this sublime divine gift. "13
II. Mortal and Immortal Forgetting
1. THE ART OF REMEMBERING-T1IE ART OF FORGETTING
(SIMONIDES, THE...l\:USTOCLES)
We move now to Greece. The time is around 500 B.C.E. A celebration is be-
held. This celebration provides the framework for the fundamental
myth of the art of memory (an memoriae).
A boxer by the name of Skopas has won a victory and asks the poet Si- --,
monides of Keos (ca. 557-ca. 467 B.C.E.) to compose a'song of praise L 11 i L
(ept1ion) to commemorate this athletic achievement and to present the
song at the victory celebration. Everything goes as planned, and the poet
ceremoniously praises the athlete.
It is not just any poet whom Skopas has sought out to sing his fame. Plato
said that Simonides was a "wise and godly man," and Lessing, who has a
clear idea of him and attributes the Greek enlightenment to him, calls him
the "Greek Voltaire." Simonides is known above all for his aesthetic view
expressed in the adage "Painting is silent poetry; poetry is speaking paint-
ing." Of his poetic work we cannot, however, form an adequate impression,
since it is not extant.
1
Not even the song in praise of Skopas remains. We know about it only
through an anecdote related by Cicero al'ld Quintilian in their works on
rhetoric ana repeated 6yvanous later authors. The story was also handed
dow'll, with diverging variants, in the form of a fable (Phaedrus, La Fon-
taine).
2
According to all these anecdotal and fabulous sources, Skopas
was not pleased "With the work Simonides delivered because the poet de-
voted two thirds of his poem to the youthful, athletic r.vin divinities, the
Dioscuri Castor and Pollux, and only one third to Skopas himself. Hence
he maintained that Simonides was entitled to only one third of the
promised honorarium and suggested that he ask the gods to pay the other
two thirds.
There is, however, more to the story. During the banquet at the end of
the celebration, to which the boxer has also invited his poet, the door-
keeper unexpectedly asks Simoni des to come outside the hall. Two young
men have come, he says, who want to speak to him right away. Simonides
leaves the room but finds no one waiting for him outside. At that moment
the ceiling of the room collapses and buries the host along with all his
guests under the rubble. Only Simonides, called outside in the nick of
time, escapes death. In this way the gods-Castor and Pollux in pcrson-
n:
1fill
their to the poet while Skopas, who tried to forget
hIs duty to e:::press hIs gratItude for his poem, is punished.
IS the art of memory in all this? The rhetoricians Cicero and
know s?ll another continuation of the story (which no longer
When, after the terrible accident, the relatives try
to IdentifY theIr dead, they find the bodies so mangled and mutilated that
they cannot recognize them. Simonides, however, can help. As a poet he
has a fine memory and remembers exactly which place at the
:ach individual guest. This spatial memory allows
hIm to IdentifY the ViCtimS by their location in the room.
since mnemonic performance the poet Simonides has been
the mventor of the technique of memory or "mnemotechnics,"
and thIS IS as art that can serve to overcome forgetting. 3 It may
even be that thIS ImplICItly refers to the forgetting of the dead if Stefan
Goldmann is correct in arguing that the Simonides anecdote and its vari-
ants document the derivation of the art of memory from the Greco-Roman
::ult of the the beginning of Simonides' mnemonic effort stands,
m fact, a m.enacmg catastrophe of forgetting: the sudden death that makes
a However that may be, in Cicero and Quintilian,
Sillomdes astomshmg mnemonic performance has become an "art"
(Greek techne, Latin ars). The word must be understood here in its pre-
modern as a body of knowledge of a certain complexity that can be
expressed m rules and thus taught, though learning it requires consider-
able effort and for "art is long, life short" (ars tonga, vita brevis).
all the and postromantic associations with spontaneity,
CreatIVity, and gemus must be erased. Nor can we even see this as a science;'
What were late: called the "free" or liberal arts (artes liberates), which in-
::luded With rhetoric art of memory, are propaedeutic, preced-
mg SCIences, and well mto modern times they belong to a general
stock that has not yet been differentiated into separate disci-
pimes.
. In the ancient. and art of memory-and this is already recog-
mzable as the. the Simonides anecdote-memory is funda-
spatIallZed. In. Its very substance, then, it is a spatial art (a
). The memory artIst who follows Simonides' example first seeks for
hIS. a arrangement of "places" (Greek topoi, Latintocz) with
IS familIar, such as his house or the forum. Then he transforms
memory contents into "images" (Greek phantasmata, Latin
zmagznes}-if they are not already images-and associates them with these
places in sequer:tial He does this by making use of his "imagination"
LatIn zmaginatio). When he makes his speech the mem-
ory artIst has thus only to stroll mentally (permeare, pervagari, percurrere)
through the places in order to call up the memory images in sequence.
Hence this art is always practiced in a memory-scape in which everything
that must be remembered has its own specific place. Only forgetting has
no place there.
Or is forgetting perhaps nearer at hand than it at first appears? That is a
question that gave rise to another fanlOUS ancient anecdote. It is closelyas-
sociated with the Simonides anecdote because of the persons involved.
One of the poet Simonides' contemporaries in Athens, a.Tld much better
known than he, was the politician and military leader Themistocles (ca.
524-459 B.C.E.). He made Athens an important seaport and, after the vic-
tory over the Persians in the naval battle at Salamis (480) > the greatest sea
power in the western Mediterranean. Despite these brilliant military ex-
ploits, in his old age he was ostracized and banished from the city. He lived
as a refugee in Persian territory, where he finally committed suicide.
Themistodes was, as we learn from Plutarch and other sources, a man
of great intellectual gifts with an outstanding mastery of the art of oratory.
In the sources there is, however, much that is unfavorable with regard to
his character. Among the victims of his penchant for mockery was the poet
Simonides.
These two Athenians are bound together in an anecdote that Cicero re-
counts at various points in his writings on eloquence.
6
One day Simonides
is supposed to have come to Themistocles and offered to teach him the art
of memory so thatwith its help he "might be able to remember everything"
( ut omnia meminisset). Themistocles replied that he did not need any art of
memory. Rather than learning how to remember everything, he would
prefer to learn how to forget everything he wants to forget (gratius sibi il-
ium esse facturum si se oblivisci quae vellet, quam si meminisse docuisset). Ac-
cording to another version of the anecdote Themistocles curtly replied
that he was not interested in an art of memory (ars m(JllZ()'Yiae) but rather
was interested in an art of forgetting (ars oblivionis).
Why does Themistocles "Want to learn the art of forgetting? Cicero an-
swers: "because everything he had ever seen or heard stuck in his memory"
or, in a concluding commentary on the same anecdote, "because nothing
that flowed into this man's mind ever flowed out "That is in accord
with Plutarch's biographical observation certifying that this Athenian
politician knew the name of every single Athenian And later on,
even as an old man in exile, in just one year he is supposed to have learned
the Persian language so well that he was able to converse with the king with-
out an interpreter. Apparently the Themistocles of Cicero's anecdote was
able to scorn Simonides' art of memory and value its opposite, the art of
forgetting, only because he possessed an excellent "natural memory" (me-
moria naturalis) that retained too much rather than too little.
Thus, at first in the form of an anecdote, was born the idea of an art of
forgetting (ars oblivionis, ars oblivionalis) that was never again to disappear
from the world. We shall encounter it again under various other names,
such as "amnestonics" (from amnesia, forgetting), "lethognomics" or "letho-
technics" (both derived from Lethe, the mythical river of forgetting) .
Moreover, Cicero can also tell us what the Athenian military man found
most troubling in remembering and forgetting. Cicero reports Themisto-
cles' words verbatim: ""Vhat I don't want to remember I remember vet
what I want to forget, I cannot forget" (Nam memini quae nolo, oblivfsci
non possum quae vola).
Bearing the stamp of Cicero's authority, the Themistocles anecdote,
along with the idea of a desirable or at least conceivable art of forgetting,
makes its way through the world and reaches, aher two and a half millen-
nia and via many way stations, Umberto Eco. One day Eco is having a few
glasses of wine with some friends and they think up a parlor game the point
of which is to imagine disciplines that not only do not exist-overcoming
this obstacle would already be part of the intellectual challenge-but also
cannot exist because they are impossible, for historical or logical-episte-
mological reasons. Among these the art of forgetting, which he calls ars
oblivionalis, occurs to him. Immediately he writes a conference paper
(lg66)-thoroughly serious, moreover-in which, using a strict semiotic
method, that is, one based on the theory of signs, he seeks to erove that
there can be no art of forgetting as the counterpart of the art of memory
because all signs produce presences, not absences. Eco is willing at most
to assign this art of forgetting a small place on the margin of semiotics, sug-
gesting that an inordinately industrious mnemotechnics, by an excep-
tional success in "multiplying presences," can eventually produce a critical
-!?efuddlement of memory that in turn has forgetfulness as its consequence.
This ot forgettingconnected with the art of remembering
only as a sort of overload relief valve. Eco's reflections can still be read as
a scholarly article; it appeared in English under the title "An Ars Oblivion-
alis? Forget It. "8 But my curiosity was aroused by Eco's suggestion that we
should forget the ars oblivionalis almost as soon as he had so cleverly drawn
attention to it, and I would like to ask my reader to be on the watch for
clues that indicate that !his art of forgetting, even though it should not ex-
ist, according to Eco's argument, exists nonetheless and is encountered
we go, from Homer up to our own d:i:a::::-:-.-----------
2. ODYSSEUS TELLS ABOUT FORGETTING
(HOMER)
In the seventh book of the Odyssey, Homer tells how Odysseus, on his dif-
ficult way home from Troy, is shipwrecked on the Phaiakian island of She-
ria. Miserable and exhausted, he is found on the beach by the princess
Nausikaa and her friends and is taken to the palace of her father, King Alki-
noos. There the shipwrecked man is received with the greatest hospitality
a stranger could hope for in the Homeric world. Odysseus remains three
days with the Phaiakians, and then, laden with precious gifts, he is given a
ship, which has been freshly outfitted by his host, and sails off toward his
home in Ithaca.
Before Odysseus leaves the hospitable island of the, Phaiakians, however,
he agrees during the farewell dinner given in his honor to grant his hosts'
request that he tell his story. He begins: "I am Odysseus, son of Laertes."
The subsequent narrative fills four books of the Odyssey (9-12) and sum-
marizes the situation that for ten years has prevented the hero from re-
turning home. Odysseus has had to contend v,Jith rocky cliffs and storms
at sea, and hostit;;poWers have sought to take his life-among them not
only Polyphemus but also the powerful sea god Poseidon, who caused his
shipwreck on the Phaiakian shore. The greatest and most perilous obsta-
cles to his return home to Ithaca, however, have arisen from mapifqld
.. - .. q... that he has been eXE0;'-ed
dering. e t . ans about these temptations in three episodes
0rIils narrative: the ones about the Lotus-eaters, Circe, and
Odysseus talks about the of We s1DQ::..he
tells in the ninth book. In doing so he reaches far back in time to a point
at W'iIich things still look promising for him and his fleet includes twelve
ships. He anchors the ship off an unknown coast-was it perhaps the is-
land Meninx, today Djerba?-and sends a few of his men ashore to find
out about the island. They do not return. Did they run into unfriendly in-
habitants, who took them prisoner or even killed them? That is not what
happened. The inhabitants of the island received them in a friendly man-
ner and treated them as their guests. They were offered a delicious fruit
that tasted like honey, known as lotus, which was regularly eaten by the is-
landers, who were accordingly called "Lotophagoi" ("Lotus-eaters"). In ad-
dition to its wonderful taste this fruit has the property of causing
forgetfulness. And so Odysseus's scouts, after eating of the lotus, not only
completely forget the goal of their voyage-the homecoming in Ithaca-
but also forget the aSSignment Odysseus gave them, and they entirely give
themselves up to the pleasure of eating the delicious fruit and the delight
of residing among the friendly Lotus-eaters.
Concerned about his scouts, Odysseus sends another party in search of.
o.L ,L-\, JJ

.. are in. a ecstasy of oblivion and are brought
wee?mg and agamst thelrwdl back to the ship. To prevent them from re-
t? the dangerous pleasures of the Lotus-eaters they are chained to
theIr rowmg-benches. Odysseus strictly forbids them and the other sailors
u: his fleet to partake of this drug. He hastily weighs anchor and continues
his voyage.
. Philologists and have labored mightily to discover pre-
oselywhat plant thIS drug of obhvIOn might be. It is probably a certain kind
of lotus-flower meaning in the Egyptian cult of the
was as a ceremonial meal. But we can no longer clearly de-
whether Its role had to do ,vith memorializing the dead or \vith
forgettmg them, and we know nothing more about the subject than what
Odysseus tells us. In particular, the verses of Homer's epic do not tell us
whether the forgetfulness.produced by this drug is lasting or only tempo-
rary. All we sure IS that the lotus-fruit does not merely taste sweet
but also prOVIdes sweet forgetfulness," so that those who eat of it desire
only to go on living in the comfort of this beautiful present.
2
The second episode in which Odysseus tells about forgetting occurs in
the tenth book of the Odyssey and deals 'with the beautiful but treacherous
goddess Circe (Kirke). Once again Odysseus and his companions land on
an ::mkno"Wn c.oast, and once again scouts are dispatched. In the course of
theIr exploratIOn they come to Circe's palace; it is soon clear that she has
a many evil powers at her command. Odysseus's scouts immediately
expenence tt:e of th:se on their own bodies, for they are
transformed mto svvme by s magIc wand and shut up in a pigsty, al-
though they do not lose theIr human consciousness as a result. But before
about this metamorphosis Circe had already given the unsus-
pectmg scouts potion, which once again proves to be a drug
of forgetfulness smce, like the lotus-fruit, it erases all memory of their
The pharmacological recipe for this drug is described in detail
ill Homer's verses; it is a carefully dosed mixture of ,vine, cheese, flour, and
golden. honey. "fatal drug" (Greek pharmakon lygron) has the effect
of who innocently eat it "lose all memory of their home-
-which m thIS case may have made their swinish fate somewhat eas-
Ier to bear. /
Now how does the story continue? Odysseus sets out to find his lost com-
panions. Hermes, the gods' messenger, ,varns him about this treacherous
host's magical powers and equips him \vith an antidote. With his strength
help Odysseus succeeds in rendering Circe's magical powers ineffec-
tlve and moreover in persuading her to transform back into men the
sailors who have been changed into swine.
Od!sseus soon falls victim himself to another
spell, agamst whlch he has no antidote. He allows himself to be be\vitched
by Circe, and in her arms he delivers himself up to the spell of love.
Odysseus remains ",i.th Circe a full year and forgets, so long as the drug of
forgetfulness produces its effect, his return home to Penelope. His com-
rades finally have to urge him to voyage further, and with a heavy heart he
leaves his beloved.
The third episode about forgetfulness narrated by Odysseus deals with
the arts and 'wiles of the nymph Calypso. In her case, as in that of Circe,
love is the most powerful drug of oblivion. Its effects last seven years. That
is a long time, and Odysse:us's thirst for action eventually overcomes his
love for t..h.e nymph, although between them there is an important differ-
ence in status-he is mortal, but as a goddess she is immortaL So Calypso
plays her last trump card. She offers to make Odysseus immortal if he will
love her, and then amid divine nectar and ambrosia he will forget all
earthly things forever-including, of course, his "rife, Penelope.
But Zeus has other plans in mind. He has Hermes inform Calypso that
she must let Odysseus depart immediately. On a raft Odysseus leaves her
island. Angered by Zeus's infringement on his equally divine rights, Po-
seidon dashes the raft to smithereens. Thus Odysseus reaches the Phaia-
kians as a shipwrecked man. And he them about this
perilous temptation to forget.
3
Homer is not the only Greek poet who rr.:
akes
an
place in literaro:r-e-for forgetting as well as for remembenng, as Michele Sl-
mondon in particular has persuasively demonstrated.
4
Hesiod plays a key
role here. In his Theogony the memory goddess Mnemosyne (Latin Memo-
ria), who is associated \vith the light of day and \vith the sun god Apollo, is
for the first time accompanied by the dark goddess of forgetfulness, Lethe,
who is associated \vith night. Both goddesses have their rights and their
own domains, and mortals can offer sacrificial victims to them whether
they are hoping for powerful aid from memory or from forgetting. Salva- .
tion and healing are sou?ht in ab?ve when a.mortal is
ened by pain and suffermg. Forgettlng one s mlsfortune IS already half of (
happiness. This is known in poetry and par. ticularly among the tragedians) \
(especially Euripides) and the love poets (especially Alkaios). \ '\
In this process drugs (Pharmaka) are once again helpful. In them we can
see anew the ambivalence of the strength of the human soul \vith regard '\
to remembering and forgetting. The Greeks had drugs for both. On the
side of remembrance, it has been said that Simonides, who invented the . t-
art of memory, took memory-enhancing drugS.
5
On the side of forgetting, I
there is, in addition to the drugs already kno"Wn from Homer, the plant ne- '.
penthe, which came from Egypt and was mixed \vith wine. It was said to
have the power, by inducing forgetting, to alleviate pain and suffering,
vyrath and rage, and all other such afflictions. The fair Helen resorts to thIs
driig of forgetfulness when she learns what suffering her beauty has caused
the Greeks and Trojans.
In addition to all these sources of forgetfulness and consolation, ever
since the ancient Greeks there has been another drug that has never
ceased to play an important role in the art of forgetting. I refer to wine,
whieh "drives cares av.-ay" (Euripides). Wine is a cherished gift of the gods
for which we are indebted to Dionysos (Latin Bacchus), whose frenzied
worship quickly spread throughout post-Homeric Greece and the whole
Mediterranean world. Because wine makes us forget our troubles more e..
fectively than does any other drug, Alkaios, the poet of Lesbos, calls it "the
best drug" (pharmalwn ariston). 6
More-recent poets feel much the same way. From an overwhelming mul-
titude of witnesses let us select here only Schiller, who like Goethe knew
how to appreciate a good wine and spent many high-spirited hours drink-
ing with his friend from Weimar. I shall cite a few verses from Schiller's
poem 'The Victory Celebration" ("Das Siegesfest"), which is situated in the
mythological context of the Trojan V.dr. Nestor, one of the Greek-victors,
hands a goblet of wine to the prisoner of war Hecuba, the Trojan king
Priam's and says to her:
Trink ihn aus, den Trank der Labe,
Und vergifJ den grojJen Schmerz!
Wundervoll ist Bacchus' Gabe,
Balsam firs zerriss'ne Hen.
Drink this up, a festive potion,
And forget your great travail!
Wonderful is Bacchus's gift,
Balm for the broken heart.
7
It is a wise man who speaks this way. The Greeks willingly took his advice.
3 FORGETFUL LOVE
(OVID)
In love much is forgotten. In ancient Rome this was well known to boys and
girls; when love's forgetting was involved they therefore went to the Col-
linie gate, where near the temple of Venus there was said to be a shrine to
Arnor Lethaeus (Lethean Love) -so called after Lethe, the mythical stream
of oblivion. This di\'inity did not promise to work against forgetting, how-
;.
l
ever; in the fiction of the poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.E.-Ca. 17
c.E.) its role ,vas to ensure thorough forgetting when an unworthy beloved
or a villainous lover no longer deserved to be loved. Then young people
hurried to the statue of Arnor Lethaeus to make their prayers and vows and
''beg for forgetfulness" (oblivia poscere).l . .
How precisely does this Roman god help? How does he
since Arnor Lethaeus is a river god-the troublesome embers of pasSIOn-
ate love? This is a difficult task even for a god, and it takes time to achieve
the longed-for goal: "the end of love" (finis amoris). Even .Arnor Lethaeus
does not have a miraculous cure to offer. Rather he helps m a human 'way,
namelv throuO'h the art of forgetting, which can be learned. So far as love
is "'Ovid shows himself to be a master of this art, and by means
of his "Art of Love" (Ars amatoria) he won a name for himself in Latin lit-
erature. In his verses one and the same poet thus teaches both the art of
loving (amare) arld the art of org . ve dedisce:e amare) when nec-
essary. This reminds us of the m Rome who, a
much admired virtuoso in forensic rhetonc, spoke m favor of somethmg
one day and spoke against it the next day (cf. below, 5, sec. 3):
So far as the art of forgetting in love is involved, OVld declares hlillself
its advocate in his humorous-didactic poem Remedy for Love (Remedia amoris),
which deals, as its title indicates, with an art of healing. 'I he poet Ovid is
here the physician-a physician who himself often suffers from the illne.ss
that he claims to be able to heal (medicus aeger) . No matter; the author stIll
knows this art and can name the remedy by means of which the person who
needs to forget call-he hopes-bridge the gulf to for-
get and being able to forget. Moreover he off:rs hIS recom-
mendations to both male and female patients alike; he prm,l"j,des, as he puts
it in an image, weapons for both the warring parties. But himself
male, for his presentation he nevertheless chooses the perspectIve of a man
in love who wants to forget his faithless beloved. . . .
What kinds of remedies are prescribed for this illness? In OVld It 18 not
a matter of medicinal pharmaka; he seems to spurn the drugs of forgetting,
though fTom his reading of Homer he must have known at least lotus-
flower. Wine is just briefly mentioned, and Ovid that drunk m
eration it increases love but that drunk to excess It dulls love along v",-th
the other senses. With this exception all the remedies Ovid recommends
are-to put it in modern terms-psychotherapeutic in nature.. .
vVhat is so clever about this erotic (or antierotic) <g"t of forgettmg IS first
of all that, using apparently p;;;doxical but actually
methods, the com etent physician uts the art of e v ..
of the art of forgetting. a patient the lover t? all
hIS powers of memory to set before his eyes, as VlVl?ly as possI?le an? m ac-
cord with all the rules of the art, just how odious hIS beloved III reality was.
Did she have a well-rounded figure? She was fat. Was she slender? She was
skinny. Likewise she was not a brunette but rather her hair was pitch-black.
And then her characterl Does he no longer remember how greedy, miserly,
temperamental, mendacious, hard-hearted, and, of course, faithless she
was? The first step iu learning this art of forgetting love consists in recall-
ing as clearly as one can all the beloved's defects (omnia damna) and how
much paiu love has caused him. One must constantly keep the goal in view:
to make the sweetness of the earlier love grow sour (inascecere) in one's
memory. And the patient must absolutely persist in all these efforts until
the goal is achieved (perjer.0.
In still greater detail than these positive achievements Love then sets
forth the negative efforts that are, according to his doctrine, conducive to
forgetting. Thus there follow strategies of forgetting in the proper sense of
the :"ord that work directly on the mind. The first thing to do is to get all
the Images of the beloved out of the house. Here Ovid expressly refers to
''waxen (cer.
ae
) , which immediately remiuds us that according to
preVIously mentlOned Platonic and Aristotelian metaphor the memory
IS like a wax tablet, on which the images and signs that are to be remem-
bered are impressed. In addition letters from the beloved, which the lover
has probably kept, must under no cirCUlllstances be reread: "Into the fire
with them!" (omnia in ignes!). As for the rest, the lover must strictly avoid
all places with which memories of the beloved are connected-first of all,
naturally, the bedroom and the bed, which could quickly make the embers
flare up agaiu-and also everywhere else that the beloved Ii.ked to fre-
quent and where one might even-and this would be disastrous for the
therapy!-meet her agaiu.
To get away from all these potential obstacles to effectively forgetting
the beloved, travel is particularly recommended. The lover should travel
as long. (lentus abesto) and as far (via long a) as possible if he wants forget
love. It IS best to go to country, where he will easily think of olher things,
he should take a friend along so that he does not end up broodiug over
hIS lo:v
e
. Besides, comt:anionship and lively conversations are among the
most Important for love. On the other hand, music, dancing, and
are to b: aVOIded; they are too close to love ana might quickly re-
VIve the old p::ssI?n. Caution in general is recommended since "the slight-
est spark can IgnIte a bonfire" (e minimo maximus ignis).
In his healiug phase may the practitioner of the art of forgetting read
Greek and Roman poets such as Callimachus, Sappho, Ana-
creon, Tlbullus, and Propertius? Here, too, great care is advised because
reading a highly: One can say of all of
them wh.at. satd of the lyric poet Callimachus: "He is no enemy to love"
(non est znzmzcus amort). In fact, Ovid considers his own love poems, which
sound "somewhat siuIilar," to belong to the satne kind of poetry, and he
counsels a persQn who wants to forget love not to read Ovid either.
What else can distract the lover? Of course, since idleness al"Ways goes
hand in hand "'ith love there is always one's work (opus), profession (fora,
leges), or business (res) and service to the state iu peace (toga urbana) or
war (munera Martis). All these activities help one gradually to forget love.
It might be a long process, but that is not a problem since only he who for-
gets slowly (knte desinere) forgets enduringly. And let no one follo",ing this
path groan and deceive himself with the complaiut "1 atn no longer in
love." Anyone who talks this way is still far from having forgotten his love.
Finally, to put an end to all wavering and hesitation the most extreme
and effective remedium amoris must be invoked, and it is almost always suc-
. cessful. This is: a new love, a new passion (novus qmar; novae flammae).
Thereby the lover quickly lces a crucial decision and must make up his
rniud: Is the old beloved or the new one more important? If the new
beloved wins out, then all problems are resolved since love is over-
come by its successor" (successore novo vincitur omnis amor). With this ex-
treme remedy Ovid's art of forgetting finally (oh, really?) reaches its goal.
4. TRANSCENDE:N,AL FORGETTING AND EARTHLY RECOLLECTION
(PLATO, AUGUSTINE)
In Plato's dialogue lVleno, Socrates, in whom Plato's spokesman can be rec-
ognized, uses an experiment to show Meno his pedagogical method (the
"Socratic method"). It relies on teaching by questioniug. Socrates demon-
strates this method by the way he uses a series of questions to lead a youn..,g
slave boy with no conception of mathematics to discover by himself the el-
ementary laws of geometry. It is true that the boy makes some errors, which
have to be corrected by means of supplementary questions, but at the end
of the question-and-answer gatne the "subject" (as we would now say) has
achieved the pedagogical goal set for him and now knows that if one dou-
bles the length of one side of a rectangle its area increases not twofold (as
he at first thought) but fourfold.
1
Where did the boy get this knowledge if it had not already been given
him as material to be learned? Plato's answer reaches fur beyond the realm
of pedagogy iuto the very heart of his metaphysics. He is convinced that
this knowledge proceeds from an existence precediug birth, iu which the
soul, unhindered tiy any corporeanty, has lim sed the eternal Ideas of
things an us so the true nature of geometric figures. Le;gning is Leo.-r IA; lJ
therefore essentially recollectIon (anamnesis). Only a s11ght pedagogical f.a. <D I Ie
impetus in the form of questions is required to set this process in motion.
Nonetheless, the prebirth of the Ideas and the earthly rec-
favorable educational conditions-of what was prew.
o!:lSly seen, there lies an abyss. For birth means forgetting. Total forgetting?
No, because in that case even the most brilliant method of questioning
would not be capable of reviving through recollection the knowledge ac-
quired before birth. A latent knowledge persists despite the forgetting that
birth, as incarnation in a body with alflts defects, has brought along with
it. But even when the "Socratic method" is subsequently applied, a labori-
ous process of teaching and learning is still required to ",rest forgetting:s
prey away from it. Forgetting stands at the beginning of human life on
earth and sets its rhythm from birth to death.
The metaphysical theorem of a trilevel process with three phases-the
glimpse of the Ideas, forgetting, recollection-is so central to Plato's phi-
losophy that he shows hardly any interest in the question as to whether
what one has learned through recollection can be forgotten again during
one's life on earth. Is there a secondary forgetting of this kind, and if so,
what can be done to connter it?
To this question we find in Plato only scattered and incomplete answers.
In any event he had no confidence in the art of memory, which was already
part of the repertoire of rhetoric in his time. He has Socrates make fun of
the orator Hippias, who was famous for his mnemonic skilL "Vith the doc-
trine of amamnesis in mind Plato probably connted entirely on natural
rather than artificial memory.2 ..
This is accompanied by_ a certain underestimation of writing insofar as
Plato assumes that it comes to help memory "from outside. " In his view the
opposite result is to be feared: relying on the fhlse certain ty of written' mem-
ory, oral memoryv.rill eventually wither away. According to a myth Plato re-
counts with approval, the god Theuth, the Egyptian inventor and "father"
of writing, is supposed to have caused this objection to be expressed by the
Egyptian king Thamos, who as a mortal was obviously better acquainted
with human weaknesses. Plato's skepticism regarding the ability of writing
to aid memory was, however, less fundamental since he left us his written
work-unlike Socrates, who never wrote a line.
3
This is also indicated by the previously mentioned metaphor, which
owes much to Plato and which provided the nndedying conceptual model
for many later reflections on remembering and forgetting: the image of
memory's "wax tablet." We have already noted that the ancient Greeks and
Romans, in addition to inscriptions on harder materials, used two kinds of
writing material: paper made from papyrus-quite expensive and hence
to be used only for important writing tasks-and tablets overlaid with a
layer of wax. On the latter one wrote with a stylus those things that had only
temporary importance, and those could quickly be erased by smoothing
out the wax. Such wax tablets, which could be employed for various writ-
ana 1mmonm I'orgeuzng 2i
ing purposes, were much less expensive to use and were thus particularly
suited to casual notes to aid oral memory. To this extent they were closer
to forgetting than were paper and, in later times, the even more costly
parchment. In the passages on the doctrine of amamnesis in which Plato
refers to the way the soul's innate knowledge sinks at birth into an obliv-
ion that is nonetheless not final, he makes the comforting observation that
at birth every human soul is simultaneously overlaid ,vith a layer of wax that
as yet contains no "impression." Thus it is similar to a wax tablet, and it is
a gift that humans owe to Mnemnosyne, the goddess of memory and
mother of the muses.
4
It remains to be mentioned that according to Plato the goddess has not
given all humans as their birthright individual wax tablets of the same qual-
ity. The tablet of memory differs in size from one person to another, and
the wax is not equal in purity and hardness. At birth nothing is written on
the wax tablet; it is a tabula rasa (later people will say "a blank sheet of pa-
per"), but it does not .serve everyone in the same way in the course of life.
If we now seek among philosophers oflater centuries those who may be con-
sidered Plato's spiritual heirs, those who in his wake have reflected on the
interplay of memory and forgetting, we must move to a time as long after
the birth of Christ as Plato is before it. At that point we enconnter Aurelius
Augustinus (354-430 c.e.), a philosopher and Father of the Church who
reflects as a ChIistran believer on the enigmatic mystery of memory and
tries to bring Platonic philosophy (transmitted in many ways by Plotinus)
into relation with biblical theology insofar as apostolic doctrine permits him
to do so. First, the Bible must be read and precisely interpreted in its overt
and hidden meanings. Here it is above all a matter of building a strong
memory-bridge between the Old and New Testarn on which ews and
Christians can mee as adherents to a monotheistic memor -reli . on.
In the Jewis 1 , ich has been taken over in the Christian canon
as the Old Testament, the relationship between God and his chosen peo-
ple, Israel, is already represented as a covenant (pact, bond) that is based
on mutual remembrance and whose validity is not temporally limited (joe-
dus sempiternum). This covenant stipulates that Israel must honor God's
name and live in strict accordance with his law and that God in return ,\ill
forever protect Israel with his mighty hand. Thus God will never forget his
chosen people so long as this people does not in any way forget its God.
But it is precisely this forgetting that is constantly threatening to occur, for
instance when Moses leads the Israelites from exile in Egypt into the
Promised Land, where "milk and honey flow" and where prosperity de-
creases piety. 22
LETHE:IHE ART AND GRITIQUE OF J<ORGETTING
The Bible inveighs against this constant menace of forgetting particu-
larly in the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy) when the voice 'of God's
calls in God's name on the people not to forget the God that de-
lIvered them from "Remember that you were a slave in the land of
Egypt and the Lord your God freed you from there ,\lith a mighty hand and
an outstretched hand." There is a covenant of remembrance that is valid
for the future and binding on both sides, and God stands fast: "He will not
fail you nor will He let you perish; He 'Will not forget the covenant which
He made on oath with your fathers."5
The Christian Church Fathers want this "old" covenant to remain valid
under the sign of the "new" covenant but strengthened and enriched
the salvation. that Christ has brought about through be-
commg a man and bemg crucified. At the center of this memory stands
Supper and its command of remembrance to the disciples: "Do
thIS m of me" (Luke 22:1g;Vulgate: Hocfacite in meam com-
rr:emoratzo:um). Through this covenant of memory Christianity became,
lIke Judaism, a memory religion whose dimension is
altered with respect to Judaism chiefly in that the "real pres-
ence m the Sacrament of the Eucharist, at least for Catholics tends to
overlay the "memorial presence" of God. 6 '
With the old and new covenants of memory that are contracted between
and believers, is all danger of forgetting ultimately at an end?
ThIS questlon agI:ates the.passionate heart of Augustine the saintly C;hurch
and don:mates his most personal book, his Confessions (ca. 4
00
).
The BIshop of HIPPO in North Africa had not always led the life of a saint.
For of his li!e he was a pagan and a sinner. The profound break
marked by hIS conversIOn divides his life in forgetfulness of God from his
religious meditations, and the saint's confessions indicate for him-at the
as. a prayer of repentance-the way out of forgetfulness of God
(oblzvto Det) mto the community of memory of Christian belief. For Au-
gustine the deepest experience of faith consists in the fact that the selfsame
God he had sinfully forgotten did not similarly forget him. Thus
God did not repay like with like but rather in his forbearance and grace re-
sponded to the sinner's forgetfulness with his continuing divine remem-
brance. Thus Augustine can pray: "I call upon you, who made me and did
not forget me when I had forgotten you" (Invoco te . .. qui fecisti me et obli-
tum tui non oblitus 7
. The asymmetry benveen human forgetting and divine remembrance as
It be discerned this appeal to God, moves Augustine to further're-
flectlon and leads hIm to include in his a comprehensive the-
ory of memory, which fins the tenth book. His philosophical-psychological
meditations begin with a great astonishment at the achievements of hu-
man memory: "Great is the power of memory" (Magna vis memoriae).
Places and houses, fields and meadows-these and other landscapes con-
stitlIte the "immense spaces" (spatia ingentia) that are stored up in human
memory, so that it is possible for the human mind to "stroll" (spatian)
among the countless memory images located there. This is conceived en-
tirely in the spirit of the ancient art of memory; this is not surprising in
view of the fact that Augustine spent many years of his life teaching
rhetoric. In connection with this professional-sounding observation Au-
gustine marvels most of all, however, at the fact that even forgetting is
found among the multitude of memory's contents (inesse oblivionem in
memoria mea). One can remember that one has forgotten something.
Augustine explores this paradoxical characteristlc' of human memory
further through the example of the biblical parable of the lost silver coin.
The relevant passage in Luke (15:8-9) goes like this: "Or what woman,
having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and
. sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has
found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, 'Rejoice with
me, for I have found the coin which I had lost.' " In the Evangelists, Jesus
recounts this parable-a modernized, money-economy variant of the para-
ble of the lost sheep-in order to show the scholars and Pharisees the kind
of joy the angels in heaven feel when even a single sinner finds God again.
But Augustine recognizes still another meaning in this parable. He seeks
to understand it mnemologically, asking himself: A woman has lost a silver
coin-but has she forgotten it as well? If so, she could never again find
what she had lost. For she can only hope to get it back if she can at least
recognize the coin when she comes across it. Consequently in looking for
it she must have retained the image of the coin in her memory.
Just as the woman in the biblical parable seeks the lost coin with an im-
age of it that may be rather vague, so in his life Augustine seeks the lost but
not entirely forgotten God. Where 'Will he look first? He looks first in his
memory. Memory is the place where God, mindful of his covenant
men, abides even among sinners in order to await, not entirely (non omni
modo) within the reach of the sinner's forgetting, the day on which the sin-
ner finally finds his way back to him. From the depths of memory God
sends signs that can help men discover the way out of the errors of their
forgetting. These signs are the eternal Ideas, which God in his mercy has
implanted in the memory of all human beings without their knowledge or
desire. They are at first merely "latent," but by appropriate mental efforts
they can be brought into consciousness and indicate the path toward God.
Augustine conceives this in a-almost-Platonic manner: there is no "re-
remembering" of a vision of the Ideas vouchsafed before birth but rather
innate and hence a priori "pre-remembering" of wisdom that develops
In the course oflife and culminates in the knowledge of God. To seek God'
thus means seeking, in the forgetfulness of God (oblivio Dei, understood as
a genitivus obiectivus), the signs of God's remembrance (memoria Dei, un-
derstood as a genitivus subiectivus)
8
and allowing oneself to be led by the
"traces" on the path returning to God.

v
In this way God is not only sought in human memory and through this
memory but also ultimately found. Augustine offers a foundation for this
hope in another passage that speculates both psychologically and theo-
logically on the essence of the Trinity.
9
In his later book De Trinitate, Au-
gustine argues that it is not only God who is tripartite, with his three
persons Father-Son-Holy Spirit, but also the human soul, with its three
faculties memory (memoria) -reason' (intelligentia, cogitatio) -,viII (volun-
tas, providentia). These two trinities correspond to each other point for
point:, so that in human memory the Trinitarian mark of the first divine
person is at the same time discernible: God the Father as the personified
memory of God. If this attribution is to have theological meaning, then the
reference cannot be to a memory of words (memoria verborum) but rather
only, in the strict ontological meaning of the word, to a memory of things
(memoria rerum), which in God is identical with the whole of his creation.
God the Father has created the world, and now it "is" in his memory-in-
cluding the blind spots that have come about through man's sinful for-
getting. Thus even the sinner Aurelius Augustinus, ifin prayer he confesses
to God the Creator his long forgetfulness, can expect a blissfurexistence
ir: God's memory and at the same time hope that the sin ofhis.Jorgetting
WIll be erased forever. - . -
5. REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING BEFORE GOD AND MEN
(DANTE)
Death is the most powerful agent of forgetting. But it is not all-powerfuL
On] p. From time immemorial men have erected barriers against forgetting m'
'"_,,.0 '.0 m""o
death, so that clues suggesting remembrance of the dead are considered
by specialists in prehistory and archaeology to be the surest indications of
the presence of human culture. The rituals of worship of the dead with
their pleas for intercession, sacrificial acts, and burial objects no doubt
serve in many cases primarily to ensure that the dead person enjoys a
smooth journey into the beyond. But gravestones always also serve as
"monuments" warning the living not to forget their dead-and yet people
often forget all too easily, for "life goes on."
ThlJ time is associated with forgetting rather than with remembrance.
Our forefathers' wisdom drew the practici! conclusion thatprivate memo-
rials in the public worship of the dead should be. set "Within a framework
that in the usual sequence of days of commemoranon, mem-
orv bevond the grave and at the same time limited it through Its SOCIal CllS-
Thus an ever-greater length of time the event of
death from the decreasing number of the customary occasIons for a com-
mmoratio mortuorum.
But if poets, using the power of their pens, make the
memoration of the dead their subject, then forgettmg can n.a .longer. m-
dulge in its usual sport with human memory. To have shown .thiS In
completeness is the privilege of one of the In world htera-
ture, Dante, who built the immortal cathedral of hIS DZVln Comedy around
the commemoration of the dead that is constantly threatened by forget-
fulness. . k 'th
. The Florentine poet Dante Alighieri )""wrote thIS wor , WI
its hundred cantos and 14,233 verses, at the beginning
century when he had been driven out of his hometo"W:n In e::u
le
was
threatened by forgetfulness. The poem deals with an unagrnary Journey
through the three realms of the beyond, Inferno Purgatorw (Purga-
tory), and Paradiso (Paradise). This journey is a VISIt to the dead: Dante
is the only living person who has access to this world the beyond, C?n-
sequently he alone has to bear the whole burden of thIS commemoratlon
of the dead ifwe, the living in this world, are to have news about them.
We must begin by mentioning that alr;ad
y
forth ,the p:ob:
lem of memory in an earlier workenntled Vzta J\uova ( The New ille,
129
2
-93).1 This "little book" (libello) , which comb.ines poetry prose,
is a memorial to the-real or ideal-beloved of hIS youth: ,:ho
died so young that Dante was not able to to her her lifetm1:
all the veneration and love he felt for this "glonous lady of [his] memory
(la gloriosa donna de la mia mente). And now that she is dead and already
among the "blessed" ("beata" Beatrice) in heaven, her here on
earth is threatened by human forgetting since the young Dante s eyes are
not immune to the temptation of turning to the attractions of other beau-
ties, which these "damned eyes" ought not be permitted to do:
Voi non dovreste mai, se non per morte
la vostra donna, ch'e morta, obliare.
You should nevermore, even in death,
forget your lady who is dead.
In order to avoid all the seductions of forgetfulness Dante vows at the end
of the Vita Nuova to devote the rest of his life to erecting a literary
ment in enduring commemoration of Beatrice so that she shall be pralsed
"as no other woman has ever been praised by a poet" (diceY- di lei quello ehe
mai nonfue detto d'alcuna).
This is the foundation in memory for Dante's Divina Commedia.2 In the
poem Beatrice, interceding from the highest sphere of Paradise, prays for
the poet on his journey and collaborates in her own commemoration.
The spaces through which Dante passes on his journey through the be-
yond constitute a cosmic landscape in which the soul of each dead person
is assigned its own place.
3
He finds his way through this landscape with the
help of guides, among whom the Roman poet Virgil at the beginning and
the Christian Saint Bernard of Clairvaux at the end of the journey are par-
ticularly informative companions. The first part of the journey leads into
Hell" which in Dante's imagined landscape has the form of an immense
funnel that was produced by Lucifer's plunge into Hell long before the cre-
ation of the world of men. Dante climbs down into this "amphitheater"
(Goethe) reaching to the center of the earth. Purgatory, in contrast, has
the form of a conical mountain corresponding in volume to the Hell-fun-
nel; hence it is also referred to as a "mountain of purification," whose spi-
raling ascent Dante has to make after climbing back out of Hell. At its
summit is located the "earthly paradise. " Dante finally comes to know the
third realm of the beyond, the heavenly Paradise, which atches in con-
centric, crystalline spheres over the earthly world below. He is lifted up to
these celestial heights and eventually proceeds to the most elevated
sphere, the Empyrean, not far from where the triune God is enthroned in
unapproachable brilliance.
On his journey through these three realms Dante encounters the souls
of the dead, wh9 are located in the place (loco, luogo) in Hell, Purgatory,
or Paradise that is assigned them by the "great sentence" (la gran sentenza)
pronounced by divine justice. He enters into conversation with them, takes
an interest in their fates, and stores up their stories in his memory. Thus
he becomes the universal memory-man, who can ultimately report in the
verses of his great poem what he has seen at the various stages of his imag-
inary journey in the beyond and that has been artfully stored in his mem-
ory. ,
/ In Dante's Divine Comedy we have a precise literary imitation of the an:
,/ cient art of memorf"(m-smemonaej. well'ave seen thit the basic principle
"----ottfiIS art of memory IS that an memory contents are to be conceived as
"images" that the prator then deposits at specific "places" in a previously
chosen memory-scape. In following his "path" the orator moves through
the places of memory in order, so that he can call up in the right sequence
lQU sz;O$,!&!$2CC ,n ..i#UQZ 2.", j K_"" .i
the memory images that have been deposited there (cf. above, chap. 2,
1). That is predselywhat Dante does. souls of the. dead he meets
the beyond are for him various memory Images that he Impresses on therr
respective memory places along with the latter, so that he se:s. about
""Titing his poem after returning to the world the livmg
can call up from memory his encounters 'WIth the dead m the order m "-
which they occurred. In this sense Dante's.Divine Comedy as a whole can be /'
seen as a memory artvvork. .
poetic landscape of the beyond we co?slder
not only the mnemological but also the theolOgIcal perspecTIve, m the
sense of the Augustinian Memoria-theology (cf. ab?ve, 2, 4): We
have seen that Augustine discerns in the PSYChIC tnad memorza-zntel-
lectus - voluntas a human image of the divine tri;nity, in such a vtay that of
the three divine persons God the Father represents memory, God the Son
represents the capacity for knowledge, and Holy
will (or foresight). Dante explicitly adopts thIS speculatIon on the Trmlty
at several points in his work, including in the Divin: Comedy. However, God
the Father, as the quintessence of divine memory, IS also the creator of the
world. It follows for Dante's theology that the world produced .by ?od the
Father as his creation has its being in the fact that It is stored up 1ll hIS mem-
orv. That holds for this world as well as for the next. Thus moves
th;ough the beyond as a landscape of memory in accord With all rules
of the rhetorical art, he uses his human memory to seek out God.s mem-
(memoria Dei as a a-enitivus subiectivus) in a poetic way. Dante dIscovers
ory , b' . "1 b I
this, as a memory-man who has come out of this world, pnmarl y
. that all the souls whom he meets in the beyond have also retalned therr
mg . h . t b
memories intact. They remember-with one excepTIon t at remams 0 e
discussed-'with the utmost precision everything that they done or
left undone on earth and that has determined their fate. !n :hlS way mem-
ory is ever-present in the But is when..qne
at the same time reflects that the Lethe, the nver offorgettmg, also flows
through this memory-scape of the beyoll-d. _ . .. . __
We have been acquainted with the Lethe smce the
book, and we have learned that according to tlie'most anClent tradITIOn ,
this mythical and poetic river belongs to the topology of the underworld Le
(see chap. 1). The waters of the Lethe have the power to ... k.
the dead, as they enter the realm of death, all memor!
This happens, aepending on the sources of the tradiTIon, ways.
According to some versions of the myth the dead. are spnn:t:Ied With
_ waters of the Lethe or immersed in them. More WIdespread :s the
that the dead drink the water of oblivion from the Lethe. FmaIly, m cer-
tain versions of the myth the w,{ters of the Lethe work in two or more ways,
with increasing power the memories of this world. Thus Dante says
m one passage that the dead "wash" one another in the waters of the Lethe
that they "consume" forgetfulness from this W'ater.
4
. '
From the difference benveen the passages cited, a peculiar structural
that Dante to resolve in his poem ifhe wants to pro-
Vide everyone m the beyond WIth an undiminished memory. Where can
the author locate the Lethe in this memory-scape if Dante himself
IS a character in this poe:n representing memory and consequently may
not be exposed to forgetting? Dante the memory-man is fully aware of this
Thus when, in the seventh circle of Hell, his guide Virgil names
the nvers of the the Lethe does not appear among them.
Dante responds WIth surpnse, but VIrgil promises to answer his question
later: "Later you will see the Lethe" (Lete vedra). In fact Dante still has to
wait a while before he arrives at the bank of this river. Only at the end of
the in the delightful surroundings of the earthly paradise, does
the nver Lethe flow by Dante, and the pilgrim learns what effect this wa-
produces: "it removes from people all memory of sin" (toglie altrui memo-
del peccato). It follows from this that in all of Hell and most of the cantos
In up to the earthly paradise at the end of the second part of
the ?ivzne Comedy, none of the souls Dante encounters are subject to for-
gettmg.
But they have drunk the waters of the Lethe are they then subject
to forgetting? Even that can hold true only for an instant, for out of the
same source :rom which the Lethe flows there springs in the Divine Com-
edy another nver, the Eunoe, which means "good mind" or mem-
ory." !n the spirits who rise from the earthly to the heavenly
the healing water of this win river has the P9wer to work again;t
the obliVion of the Lethe and to strengthen in them the memory of the
good deeds that they have done during their earthly lives, so that in this
respect they enter into heaven with a good memory. But through the
these spmts have lost part of their power of memory since under the
of the river Eunoe they can no longer remember their earlier
sms (WhICh certainly-in a venial form-must have occurred even in a
saintly life)-a deficiency with which they can probably be com-
fortable.
. And so it is everyone Dante the pilgrim meets in the Divine Conzedy,
of the mentioned blessed souls, can engage
WItt: him m an of Ideas and memories 'with their mnemonic pow-
ers mtact. of th:: Lethe's location_to the earthly paradise,
the opposmg mfluence of the River Eunoe, makes""'1'his-
:,nnemotechmcal work of art possible. -
DeVIatmg now from the order of Dante's pilgrimage through the be-
yond, let us first turn to the second part of the Divine Comedy in order to
see how things stand with memory and forgetting in the Purgatorio.
5
From
this point of view Purgatory is the most interesting part of Dante's world
of the beyond. This becomes particularly clear when one has Jacques Le
Goff's The Birth of Purgatory at hand while reading Dante's poem.
6
In this
book, whose last chapter is devoted to the "theologian" Dante Alighieri,
the eminent French historian shows how through the gate of Purgatory
(human) time breaks into the beyond and challenges the domination of
(divine) eternity. In this'1\ray Purgatory, which Le calls a "te:upora:y
Hell "becomes the most human part of the beyond smce the pemtent sm-
ners'in Purgatory are the only ones whose fate is not yet
It is true that, like the damned in Hell and the blessed III Paradise, they
have already heard their ultimate sentence pronounced and can be sure
that after completing the penitence for their temporal sins they ,vi?
attain eternal blessedness. But the time they must spend as pemtents III
Purgatory is not determined once and for alL Thus f?r souls in Pur-
gatory it is possible that the time they have to repent lU thIS of the
beyond will be shortened through a divine act of mercy-lU
terms, by a pardon. However, the penitent souls cannot prOVide
the impetus for such an abbreviation; their life on earth IS already over, and
so they no longer have an opportunity to act and have,,? effect m way.
Only the living can act on behalf of the souls m m or-
der to bring about a shortening of their punIshment for theIr
sins and to hasten their entry into heaven. But this can happen only m?i-
rectly, when their prayers move a saint, or especially the Madonna, to lU-
'tercede with God on behalf of the poor soul.
Here again memory comes into play. A penitent soul in Purgatory is in
a bad way if no living person fulfills his duty as a relative or friend (or even
just as a Christian) and no commemoratio mortuorum is practiced. If this dan-
ger of oblivion threatens, then it is in the "vital" interest of the t?
send an emissary, an agent, a memory-man back to report on theIr penI:-
tent afterlife in purgatory and to convey to the living their plea for
Dante is this memory-man. The penitent souls in Purgatory turn to hIm
for his memory as soon as they notice the presence of a living in
the realm of the dead. But is the pilgrim Dante willing to burden himself
with all these messages? And if he is, will he be able to carry out his mis-
sion when so many souls in the beyond call on his memory? So far as
Dante's willingness to help is concerned, it is not in much doubt since the
poet shoWS himself easy to move to sympathy and compassion. But
comprehensive and reliable is his memory if he must store up such :n
an1
-
fold experience in it? Is the pilgrim's brief sojourn in a given place. the
beyond really sufficient to protect all he has seen and heard on hls JOur-
ney from being overlaid by memory images acquired in his further
and thus driven into oblivion? A natural memory, no matter how good It
might be, would surely not be up to the task. Only a professional memory,
a memoria artifieiosa, can perform this feat, precisely insofar as the memory-
man has been properly trained in mnemotechnics. '
Let us examine two encounters-I am almost tempted to say two
"cases" -by means of which the various aspects of our investigation can be
illuminated. The first case concerns the Pisan judge Nino Visconti, who
had been a friend of Dante's. Divine judgment has assigned him to Pur-
gatory, where a long period of penitence for his sins awaits him. May one
hope that his widow might pray for his soul? Unfortunately not, it seems,
because the widow quickly remarried, and her erstwhile husband in Pur-
draws the conclusion that she no longer loves him and has long
smce forgotten him. But luckily there is still his daughter Giovanna, on
whose prayers her father now pins his hopes since a child's prayer always
comes from a pure heart. But precisely because she is a child occupied with
her childish games it is not certain that she 'Will think about her father. Chil-
dren are forgetful, So here too a memory-man is necessary in order to
counter childlike forgetting:
Di'a Giavanna mia ehe per me ehiami
La dove agl'innaeenti si risponde.
Non credo ehe la sua madre piu m 'ami,
Paseia eke trasmutO le bianeke bende,
Le quai eanvien ehe, misera, aneor brami.
Per lei assai di lieve si eomprende
Quanta in femmina Juaeo d'amor dura,
Se l'aeehio a il tatta spesso non l'aeeende.
Tell my Giovanna to pray for me
There, where the innocent are heard.
I believe her mother no longer loves me,
Since she has laid aside the white band,
For which later she will long in misery.
By her example one easily learns
How long love's fire lasts in women,
If eye and hand don't constantly rekindle it.
Against the rule "La donna e mobile, " memory seems not to be of much help;
against childlike forgetting, perhaps it is.
The second case to be discussed in this connection is that of Marco Lom-
bardo. This dead sinner is no longer at the beginning of his penitence but
rather on the third loop of the path leading up the mountain of repen-
tance. Thus he does not have an extremely long time to wait. Nevertheless
when he tells Dante his life story he adds a request that the poet put in a
'good word for him back on earth. Without hesitation Dante to us.e
his powers of memory to do so and promises to to 0-e living.this
call for help from the beyond. In this way a regular cham of mterceSSlOns
comes into being that reaches from the penitent Marco Lon:bardo to
Dante the pilgrim, from Dante to the related people who are. still among
the living, from the latter to the saints, and finally from the samts to.
and which leads God to have mercy on the poor soul. If one link m
the chain fails, as when memory falters in one of the partICIpants, for ex-
ample Dante, then the whole chain of intercessions breaks apart and noth-
ing changes in the penitent soul's fate in the beyond. ... .
. Yet how is this memory-man to proceed when on returnmg to the world
he has to deliver so many serious, urgent messages? Will he :rave;
in person from one addressee to another in order to out his IDlSSlOns.
Here it seems to me permissible, since Dante's IS to
audience of readers, to consider it, in accord WIth the unmanent of
his poetic fiction, as a highly faithful execution of the comprehenSIve task
of remembering..that mane tIre has the course
of his journey through the beyond. cYv \ '-' .. '-'. c...,

Even more than in Purgatory, in Hell memory stands out against a dark
background of oblivion.
7
This should be understood first in a phys-
ical sense. For in accord with an ancient rule of the ars memo:zae
images, if they are not to be forgotten, must be m
psyche, not too brightly and especially not too But Dante s Hell IS a
dark realm a "blind world" (cieeo mondo). And ill another passage Dante
describes Hell by means of a striking synesthesia: "1 came to the place
where every light WaS mute" (fa venni in luogo d'agni.luce muto). Wltat
be done to counter the associated danger of forgettmg? The ?nly
@;mat IS mnemoteChmCal, deVIce Dante employs here this :m-
pairment of memory is an invocation of the Muses, who are m fact the nme
daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. D:mte ca?s on the
Muses twice in the Inferno. The first, generally noted mvocatton of the
Muses occurs at the beginning of the descent into Hell:
o Muse, 0 alto ingegno, or m 'aiutate:
o mente, eke scrivesti eiG eh'io vidi,
Qui si parra la tua nabilitate!
o Muses, lofty art, help me now!
o memory writing what I have seen,
Here prove your nobility!
Here the connection between the Muses and the memory they promote is
clear. The second invocation of the Muses occurs at the end of the InJerno,
at the point in Dante's journey where he is approaching the deepest and
darkest part of Hell:
May the Ladies help my song
Who once helped Amphion build Thebes,
So that thing and word not be different.
( Si ehe dal Jatto il dir non sia diverso) .
Here Dante is once again referring to the Muses. But how can the Muses
help memory? This question is easy to answer. The Muses help in an artful
way since they are entrusted with the arts. With respect to memory, their
help Comes from the art of memory.
But this concerns only Dante's memory problem. The souls condemned
to H,el! h,;;".e other problems. It is true that in Hell the dead no longer have
any 'vital Interest that could be directed to Dante the memory-man's art
?f memory with the goal of influencing the fate of the souls doing penance
m the beyond; over the entrance to Hell stands the inscription "Abandon
all hope, you who enter here" (Lasciate ogni speranza voi eh 'entrate).
Nonetheless all the souls who suffer eternal punishment in Hell for
their sins have a complete memory of their lives on earth, undiminished
by any Lethe water, as well as of the grave sins to which they must attribute
their damnation. But what is the use of such a memory? Dante answers thi"
question in various ways. Some of these unfortunates seem to find it a com-
forting thought that Dante allows them to tell about their lives on earth
and that therefore they can ask hinI to convey to the living what he has
learned. Thus Ciacco Fiorentino, who ascribes his place in Hell to his
"damnable sin of the gullet," implores Dante:
Ma quando tu sarai nel dolce mondo,
Pregoti eke alta mente altrui mi reehi
Piu non ti dieo e piu non ti rispondo.
But when you are back on fuir earth,
I beg you to tell about me there.
I say nor answer more.
Sinrilarly the sodomites, who in accord ","ith the moral code of the time are
banished to the seventh circle of Hell for their unnatural sexual practices,
beseech Dante to ensure that on earth all memory of them among the liv-
ing is not extinguished: "Make everyone talk about us!" (Fa eke di noi alla
gente Javelle) .
In this circle of Hell, Dante also finds to his dismay his respected teacher
Brunetto Latini, whose "father image" (imagine paterna) he deeply vener-
ates. Among the living Dante learned from him more than from any other
master of words "how man achieves eternity" (come l'uom s 'eterna). And now,
because of his "mortal" sins, Dante meets him in Hell. he nonethe-
less have an afterlife on earth in the form of memory? Yes.; this is in
wish, it must be primarily a literary memory hIS
major wor, z zvres au resor..Ltis 0 viously important to Clacco
tino, Brunetto Latini, and the many other sufferers in Hell whether to theIr
eternal damnation a further condemnation of memory is to be added, a
complete oblivion among the living that would make still more painful
their hopeless fate in the beyond. . .
The of (damnatio mernr:n,ae) IS a legal
. that has played a significant role-m the cultural hIStory of remembenn?,
and forgetting. In its most common form it roceeds from
tutional and crimm" aw..n ome the punishment of damnatw rnernat::IIJe
Was applied primarily to rulers and other o,:erful. ersons who a:, their
eaih or er a revolution were declared to be enemIes of the state. on-
s'esuently images of them
names removea rromlI:iscnpiions. From one day to the next many or theIr
decrees were de rived of vaIiruty since even these references should no
longer remind people of tenon erson .. " For e, this is what hap-
pene ,as Suetolllus reports in one 0 s of the Caesars, to the
hated emperor Domitian after he was assassIllated III 96 c.e. The
immediately had images of him (elipei, imagines) torn down and menoons
of his name chipped out of inscriptions, all with the express purpose of "re-
moving all memory" J!:bolendam omnem from the world.
8
Some kind of damnatio me:rnO'fiae is found m other anCIent legal systems
as well. In the Bible, for instance, we find the prophetic threat of
tnent "its very name is covered with darkness" (in the Vulgate,
delebitur nomen eius, "oblivion shall extinguish its name"). In
canon law the damnatio 'fJ'tem()'l'iae wa.<; associated chiefly with the pumsh-
ment of excommunication. And all these traditional lines seem to con-
verge in the verse Freud cites from Heine: "Nicht gedacht soIl seiner
. werden" ("his [name] shall not be thought").9
Back to Dante. On his way through Hell he cannot help the souls
who are doina- penance for their sins. Their fate is sealed forever; their
damnation holds for all eternity. The most Dante can do, when he is moved
to sympathy and compassion, is through memory work keep damna-
tio memoriae from being added to damnatzo personae. That IS the only ad-
justment he can make, as a memory-man, with regard to the judgment that
condemns to Hell-so far as the damned actuallyvvant him to do so. Bocca
degli Abbati, for example, who is doing penance in the ninth circle of Hell
for his sins as .a "traitor," rejects any such words of comfort for himself.
Dante has accidentally struck him with his foot and injured his face as he
is proceeding through Hell. As a compensation for this involuntary injury
Dante offers to see to it that he lives on in the memory of people on earth.
But this is not at all what Bocca wants, and he curtly rejects Dante's offer:,
"I'm still alive, and you may be pleased,"
I replied, "if you prize your reputation,
That I mention your name with others."
And he said: "The opposite is what I want.
Go away from here and leave me in peace!"
Thus the name Bocca degli Abbati is inscribed against his 'vill in Dante's
memory book, and in his case as well eternal oblivion is avoided.
lo
In addition to the-feared or accepted-damnatio memoriae, we must note
still another juridical aspect of Dante's Inferno: the legal principle of retal-
iation (lex talionis, in Dante, contrappasso, "counterstep"). This legal prin-
ciple is commonly cited in the form of the Old Testament maxim for
eye, tooth for tooth" (Lev. 24:20), although it is found in many other legal
systems, even today. In Dante retaliation is turned toward the transcen-
dental and closely connected 'Vith his memory-theology.
1 1
As an example we can take the episode about the troubadour
Bertrand de Born. The poet, whom Dante admires chiefly for nis verses, is
damned to eternal punishment in Hell because his political poems incited
Henry, the firstborn son of King Henry II of England, to rebel against his
royal father. Rebellion (in Dante, ribellione) is an abstract legal concept, to
be sure, and it is consequently difficult to use mnemotechnically. In order
to anchor it more firmly in the memory it must be made concrete and vi-
sualized in accord with the rules of the art of memory, and this is what in
fact happens in Dante. The unfortunate poet appears in Hell before the
horrified Dante and Virgil in the form of a memory image that produces .
a powerful effect on the pilgrim's imagination and thus also on his mem-
ory:
10 vidi ceno, ed ancorpar ck'io il veggia,
Un busto senza capo andar si come
Andavan gli altri della trista greggia;
E il capo tronco tenea per le ckiome,
Pesol con mana a guisa di lanterna;
E quel mirava noi, e dicea, "Ok me!"
I saw clearly, and I see still there
A headless body walking about,
Like the others in that sad company.
By the hair he held the cut-off head
In his hands, swinging like a lantern;
It looked at us and said: "Woe is me!"
Seen from the rhetorical point of view, a body without a head is an exam-
. pIe, and even a schoolboy of .the masters of art of mem-
ory called an "effective memory Image' (zmago agens) , With help of
which the sinful crime, called "rebellion" in the abstract termmology of
law, inscribes itself in a highly suggestive way-namely, in a com.rletely
graphic way-in the memory of the observer. Thus the. concept IS here
tranSformed into a metaphor in order to be sfored up ill the form o.f a
memory image. For according to medieval logic this.
Livy had made famous-of a rebellion ignited by a subject against hIS king
is comparable to a revolt of the body against its head. . .
In this passage the legal figure of retaliation also once mto
play. In the Inferno, where there is no longer any. SI?S,
whole system of punishment depends on the prmClple As
Dante puts it, "As I was in life, so am I in death" (Qual to 1!'-t mvo, tal son
morto). In divine justice the two sides of the scale are preCISely balanced,
one (quale) holding the sin and the other (tale) the punishment.
Dante has chosen the episode of Bertrand de Born to make thIS pumtive
principle clear in an exemplary manner, and the canto ends with
these words of the unfortunate troubadour: "Thus you see m me the re-
taliation" (Cosi s'osserva in me to contrapasso).
In the Divina Commedia the individual cases of retaliation are nonethe-
less only examples and to a certain extent the
of a lex talionis governing the whole of the beyond, III WhICh Dante s mne-
and theological thought completely This comes once
again out of Augustinian memory-theology: which IS. also fundamental
here for Oante, and in accord ,.vith the follOWIng reflections of the Church
Father: Indeed it is for the sinners who have forgotten God, as t.h.e Psalm-
ist puts it (Ps. ;: 18), that Hell was intended (convertantur peccatores irif.er-
num, ormnes gentes quae obliviscuntur Deum), still grun
salvation if they remember God again, even ifitlS late III theIr lives. For Au-
gustine it is a question of his own certainty of salvation whether he can
count himself among these sinners who finally return to God are thus
taken up again into his memory. For if on the a never
returns to God, then the aequum judicium of retaliation will unfailingly be
meted out to him in Hell, and the way he has forgotten God in this world
will be the way he will be forgotten by God in the beyond. In this nmemo-
logical sense punishment in the Inferno is an expression of the eternal
forgetting of God. This law also holds in the Purgatorio, although "With the
important qualification that the souls doing penance there are only tem-
porarily forgotten by God. Correspondingly, the punishments in purga-
tory are subject to the legal principle of retaliation only within certain time
limits.
It remains to mention the aporia that consists in the fact that in accord
with Dante's Augustinian memory-theology we must see in the Inferno an
eternal and in the Purgatorio a temporary place of forgetting, whereas
both of them, insofar as they belong to the memory landscape of the be-
yond, are components of the divine real memory. Can there be forgetting
within memory then? Yes, and this can even be seen as an experiential
fact, as Augustine showed in the previously mentioned parable of the lost
silver coin. According to Augustine one can certainly remember that one
has forgotten something without knowing what one has forgotten. Thus
God remembers that there are sinners in Hell, but he leaves no room in
his memory for what they have done to him in their lives of sin and what
they therefore have to suffer in the corresponding "counterstep" of pun-
ishment. The objective and automatic character of retributive punish-
ment as aequum judicium is thus here a "reified" punishment memory,
which is, as counterstep, the immediate parallel of divine forgetting. Only
in the Purgatorio does God's memory set a temporal limit to its own
getting, that is, until the time of penance is over. Then the waiting soul-
finally-enters into eternal bliss, which is to be understood mnemologi-
cally and theologically as an assured place in the everlasting memory of
God. Thus in its three realms Dante's poem confirms for the beyond what
the Psalmist and Augustine the Church Father had already taught about
this world.
Whereas Dante's Paradise, as we have seen in our survey of mnema-theol-
ogy, is the everlasting real memory of God in which the souls God calls to
bliss (including Beatrice) in the consciousness of their good works find
eternal life, Dante, who becomes acquainted last with Paradise, as the final
realm of the beyond, nonetheless remains a memory-man with a thor-
oughly human psyche. What can such a limited memory do in Paradise,
even if it has at its disposal all the aids provided by the rhetorical art of
memory?12 Here we must consider the fact that even for this art of mem-
ory the retention of memory images depends on being properly illumi-
nated in the psyche. They must not be too dark (that was the problem in
the Inferno), but they must also not be too brightly illuminated. Precisely
this "optical" problem of memory besieges the pilgrim Dante in the heav-
enly spheres of Paradise, and this specific difficulty becomes greater as
Dante approaches the central light of Paradise, where the triune God is en-
throned in "living light" (vivo lume). Here it is seen, to Dante's deep sor-
row, that "too much light" (troppa luce) can also be detrimental to memory.
The dazzling light of the heavenly spheres, and especially in the Empyrean,
constitutes a danger to memory that proceeds from the fuct that the visual
impressions are perceived with dissolving and hence vague contourS:
From now on my vision was far larger
Than our language, which is not adequate,
And memory failed to meet the demand.
(E cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio).
The word oltraggio, which in modern Italian means "outrage" or "sarcasm,"
should be understood in Dante's verses as meaning "overpowering de-
mand." The memory images that are, as it were, overillUlllinated by the
splendor of the divinity overburden the memory and deprive the poet of
speech. .
However, the logic of Dante's metaphorics obliges us to take into ac-
count another, no less disturbing side effect of this divine plenitude of
light. God is the sun in this sky, so to speak, and from this sun proceeds not
only light but also heat. In this way the "wax" of human memory can eas-
ily be melted. The verses about this suggest that "seeing so much" (tanto
veder) far exceeds human mental capabilities. Hence, Dante does not even
try to describe in earthbound words what he has actually seen in looking
at heaven. Only the "affects" that are thereby produced in his soul may per-
haps-,'\lith divine help-be accessible to human memory.
the reader can find in Dante's modest confession in the last canto ofms
Divina Commedia means very little in comparison with divine glory, insofar
as the poet was allowed to actually perceive the latter during his pilgrim-
age through the beyond. Only a weak reflection of that .visio beatifica r:-
mains in him, and even this remainder can only be put mto language if
Dante's prayer is heard:
o somma luce cke tanto ti levi
Dai concetti mortali, alla mia mente
Ripresta un poco di quel ehe parevi,
E fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
Ch 'una favilla sol della tua gloria
Possa lasciare aUa futura gente;
Chi, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria
E per sonare un poco in questi versi,
Piil si coneepera di tua vittoria.
a light supreme so far above
Mortal conceiving, lend my
Mind a bit of Thy brilliance,
And give my tongue such power
That I might leave a single spark
Of Thy glory to future generations;
So that, if something returns in memory
And is heard a little in these verses,
Thy victory shall be more conceived.
In the verses of this prayer we find once again the basic concepts of the art
of memory (mente, memoria) in dose contextual proximity to the expres-
sions of modesty in which Dante formulates the subordination of human
nature to the laws of forgetting (un poco, alquanto, una favilla sol) . As read-
ers, however, who have accompanied with admiration the memorY-man
Dante through the Inferno and the Purgatorio, we have every reason 'to ad-
mire the poet in Paradiso as well because in this last part of the Divina Com-
media he has succeeded in bringing to completion, with the drama of
human memory and forgetting, the drama of human existence sub specie
aeternitatis.
III. The Wit of Forgetful Reason
1. IS THERE STILL ROOM IK THE HEAD?
(VIVES, RABELAIS, MONTAIGNE)
Before the spread of printing in the sixteenth century books were for most
people hardly affordable and not easily accessible even in libraries. People
read, if at all, "intensively" rather than "extensively."! Thus educated peo-
ple were forced to carry their knowledge around in their heads, and for
them held the rule cited later on by Kant, though he was no longer fully
. convinced of it: "We know as much as we have memorized" (Tantum scimus
quantum memoria tenemus).2 The art of memory, set forth didactically in
countless treatises as the fourth part of rhetoric, was therefore considered
throughout the Middle Ages and well into modern times the indispensable
foundation of all education and upbringing.
This is still evident, without any critical reservation, in the Spanish hu-
manistJuan Luis Vives (1492-1540), who has moreover been called the
founder of modern pedagogy.
3
In his 'various writings on the liberal arts
and humanistic sciences Vives endorses the established high assessment of
the artificially developed power of memory, and it never occurs to him that
forgetting might have any place in the res publ:ica litterarum.
On the contrary, his conception of successful learning and studying re-
lies in this respect on the rules of the ancient art of memory, which through
many practical bits of advice he elaborates into a mnemotechnical dietet-
ics.
4
His ideas reveal his intention to attack forgetting at its roots in the lives
of students. Here are a few samples taken from his mnemotechnical "ad-
vice on studying, " along with my commentary from the point of view offor-
getting:
"The student should exercise his memory every day, so that there is no
day on which it has not learned something by heart" (Memoriam quotidie ex-
erceat, ut nullus sit dies in quo ipsa aliquid non ediscat).
Commentary: The memory thus has to be ever-present in the life of the
educated man. In another maxim on the exercise of the memory Vives
adds that the student should himself learn something by heart everyday,
even "when it is not necessary" (etiam cum non est necesse). The Erinciple zf.
unflagging resistance to forgetting thus takes precedence over any COl)-
ceivable criterion of relevance.
. lve yo y no rest!" (Memorium quiescere non sines),
Commentary: The alternation between effort and relaxation (negotium!