Class began today with Kevin delivering a dissertation on chapters 2 and 3 in Francis Yates, which pay particular attention to Plato and Aristotle and their linking together of three principle things: memory, imagination and soul. In general we find that Yates is perhaps more intrigued by Plato, but she does spend time with Aristotle, connecting him to the Scholastics(scholars in the Middle Ages). Yates quotes Aristotle on page 33 as saying "Memory belongs to the same soul as the imagination." She also quotes Plato's Phaedrus on page 37--"Memory is the groundwork of the whole". Memory is a crucial component of rhetoric, for Plato. It was pointed out by Kevin, quite perceptively I thought, that you can't develop memory without an imagination. And both memory and imagination are integral components of the soul. Which leads into something that Plato certainly believes and that Yates is apparently intrigued by as well: great use of memory is ulitmately divine.

This notion of memory having divine or spiritual significance is something that carries through to many other venues. Such as Neo-Platonism, or the influence of Plato after Plato( Marsillo Ficino is an example of one, and the author of a commentary on Plato's Symposium), which in itself has links to Gnosticism in believing that there is a divine spark within human beings and that the way to nurture it is through knowledge and the exercise of memory.

It is in the Phaedrus that Plato develops the myth of anamnesis: which is recollection of everything that has been forgotten. Jung was clearly influenced by this when he started talking about the Collective Unconcious, nut-shell version of which is: you can remeber everything, even before you were born. This is in contrast to Freud who said you can remeber everything, including being born. This is essential, because we have all drunk from the Lethe, the river of forgetfullness, from which the word "lethal" is derived. For Plato, it is lethal to forget.

And Augustin, after his self-rightous conversion from a profiligate life-style, adapted the notion of memory imagination and soul into the basis for the Trinity--memory, understanding and will.

And I think I will close this long-winded blogg with a quote about eros, fitting since tomorrow is Valentine's Day. It was Dante who said "Eros drives the sun and stars."