...Memorize the Faith! (and Most Anything Else): Using the Methods of the Great Catholic Medieval Memory Masters
by Kevin Vost
My review is here. As always a helpful vote is appreciated since I'm trying to drive my ranking below 5,000.
I want to add my voice to the cavalcade of five star ratings.
I first heard Kevin Vost explain his memory system - developed, he says, from the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas - on Catholic Answers while I was working out in the gym. He ran through his memory picture for the Seven Deadly Sins while I was doing curls. By the time I got to the next machine, I had all seven deadly sins memorized, backwards, forwards, or in any other order.
I had never thought I could do that, and I have a first rate memory.
My daughter and I made a game out of memorizing the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Virtues and the Beatitudes. We got to where we could call out "the seventh commandment" or "the eighth beatitude" and nail the answer with no effort.
Amazing.
We haven't worked our way through the rest of the book, but I intend to start up again.
Vost is also absolutely right about the importance of memory to knowing and then to living the faith. This lists exist for a reason, i.e., because it enables us to reflect intelligently on the life we live and to order our life to the truth.
I highly recommend this book.
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3 comments:
Nice blog and thanks for the Amazon review. Glad to hear you heard the Catholic Answers spot because they are publishing the sequel this year -- Memorize the Reasons! The Catholic Art of Memory for Apologetics. Keep on blogging -- and pumping iron! Kevin
I gather that this is the "memory palace" idea, where you arrange the things you want to remember "physically" in a house you picture in your mind. Is that right?
Apparently this is working for you; are you usually a visual thinker? (I'm not, and so I'm skeptical.)
Yes, that's the idea, coupled with fanciful images that "pun" or otherwise relate to the word in question.
It's a fairly typical memory technique, and it seems that Aquinas used it.
A side-note is that Aquinas' memory had to be prodigious. His works quote continuously from other sources, and this was before printing, xeroxes, a well-established alphabetical order.
I am very spacially oriented. Even before reading Vost's book I would instinctively "park" things in different directions of my mental sphere. I also have the knack for remembering where on a page a given bit of text will be.
So, for me, the system works.
The hard part is developing one's own absurd and monstrous images to associate concepts and words with. Vost makes that part seem way to easy, but I take it that develops over time with practice.
What this book really needs is an audiobook version.
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