Christendom Claims This Ground: Rhetoric Essay

Christendom Claims This Ground

 In the art of memory the mind creates a visual palate with a room or a familiar place. When one wants to remember something, he places a poignant mental object in the room. Eventually he can do a mental walk-through of the room and recall his thoughts again. But innocent as it may seem, it is a warrior of Christian thought. Why? Paganism cannot explain it. It presupposes Christian truths that pagans deny exist. One by one as they try, pagan “ism’s” fall trying to squeeze their way in.

At a foundational level, the art of memory requires the existence of absolute truth . To peg things to a mental picture, we have to believe the thing is real, and that it has real characteristics to compare with the mental object. If we remove absolutes there is comparing because we can’t define anything. We can’t say a guy’s faster than a speeding bullet, because we have to ask,” What’s a guy to you? What’s a bullet to him? “ Try as it may, relativism has no part in the art of memory. Nothing becomes reality in relativism, it just wallows in the gray undefined.

Part of using the art of memory requires emotion and creativity. To best remember things we form an object or person that is hyperbolic, miraculous, or shocking. Our ability to do this shows that we recognize the possibility of something that isn’t. We’re able to create things and color things with emotion by remembering something more beautiful or scary than it really is. This creating in the mind’s eye makes nonsense of Stoicism and Naturalism that deny emotion and the miraculous. Thus, they too fail the mind. They can’t admit a creativity because truly they don’t admit a Creator.

The art of memory also frustrates Gnostic separation of body, mind, and soul. When a grandmother searches her mind for days to remember that fourth birthday of her son long ago, we don’t ask why. We know. It gives her pleasure to recall it. She doesn’t earn money by it; she’s not more efficient because of it; and it doesn’t throw her soul into a higher sphere. No, her mind searches because she longs to recreate that afternoon. She wants to smell the melting candles and hear the laughter and feel the boy’s hand on the plate she serves him. Gnosticism sits speechless at this. Where is the separation of body and soul here? It’s gone. Our very purpose in memory rests on the grounds of combining the spiritual and physical, the transcendent with the carnal. And only Christianity can sanction the perfect union of the two.

Christendom provides the most fertile ground for good things to grow. Pagans may touch on an art or method, but it is not theirs. Memory is one of these things. In its very inability to reconcile with paganism it displays the light of Christendom and blinds the darkness. Absolutes must exist for memory to work. Relativism dies. Imagery and creativity make memory potent. Stoicism dies. Memory connects the physical and the spiritual. Gnosticism dies. Christendom claims this ground.