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Memory, Parallel Texts, St. Augustine and Guy the Carthusian

© alberto esmeralda

The present article and the one that will follow it is intended to explain how the parallel texts supplied in our modern translations of the Bible can be used to aid in understanding a passage one is reading. For our purpose, I understand "parallel text" to be "a scriptural passage similar in words or in theme to the bible passage being read." The parallel texts supplied in our modern translations should be understood as minimal helps in the understanding of a given passage. These can still be enriched by the reader's own contact with the sacred page : attentively reading, assiduously remembering the lesson learned, and constantly reflecting on its meaning for his/her life. Following is a discussion of how parallel texts were used by men in the past whose experiences with the Scriptures form the bedrock of the tradition of the lectio divina.

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In his De doctrina christiana  (On Teaching Christianity), St. Augustine recommends the use of parallel texts in clarifying the meaning of an obscure passage. He writes: "(W)hen we wish to examine passages rendered obscure with words used metaphorically, either let something emerge from our scrutiny which is not controversial, or else if it is so, let the matter be settled from the same scripture by finding and applying testimonies from anywhere else in the sacred books." (Edmund Hill OP (trans) St. Augustine's On Teaching Christianity in The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/11), p. 186

During his time, and for centuries after that, this meant understanding the meaning of a given passage by comparing it with texts found either within the same biblical book or one different from it. The practice required that the reader had great familiarity with the Bible; it was a familiarity acquired through years of assiduous study of the sacred page. And familiarization with the Bible meant the memorization of texts. Augustine speaks about this when he talks about the "rumination" of Scriptures:

By rumination, ... this means that everyone should put in his heart whatever he hears (from Scriptures) so that afterwards he would not be lazy in thinking about them; when he listens, let him be like one who chews. When he memorizes (in memoriam revocat) what has been heard and by meditation he recalls their sweetness, he becomes like a ruminant.

The memorization of a passage, therefore was not a mechanical act similar to what some students do when they "memorize" formulae and definitions. Rather, memorization is more of a vital act, comparable to the act of rumination, whereby a passage "enters" one's memory, so to speak, by one's thinking and rethinking it. It is to the memory's store of texts and passages that the mind turns - at least according to the practice of Augustine and those who followed him -- whenever it is confronted by a text or passage that needed closer examination.

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