This “aural hallucination” may have been true also in the days of Augustine, when the words on the page did not just “become” sounds as soon as the eye perceived them; they were sounds. The child who sang the revelatory song in the garden next door to Augustine’s, just like Augustine before him, had no doubt learned that ideas, descriptions, true and fabricated stories, anything the mind could process, possessed a physical reality in sounds, and it was only logical that these sounds, represented on the tablet or scroll or manuscript page, be uttered by the tongue when recognized by the eye. Reading was a form of thinking and of speaking. Cicero, offering consolation to the deaf in one of his moral essays, wrote, “If they happen to enjoy recitations, they should first remember that before poems were invented, many wise men lived happily; and second, that much greater pleasure can be had in reading these poems than in hearing them.”20 But this is only a booby-prize tendered by a philosopher who can himself delight in the sound of the written word. For Augustine, as for Cicero, reading was an oral skill: oratory in the case of Cicero, preaching in the case of Augustine.
Until well into the Middle Ages, writers assumed that their readers would hear rather than simply see the text, much as they themselves spoke their words out loud as they composed them. Since comparatively few people could read, public readings were common, and medieval texts repeatedly call upon the audience to “lend ears” to a tale. It may be that an ancestral echo of those reading practices persists in some of our idioms, as when we say, “I’ve heard from So-and-so” (meaning “I’ve received a letter”), or “So-and-so says” (meaning “So-and-so wrote”), or “This text doesn’t sound right” (meaning “It isn’t well written”).
Because books were mainly read out loud, the letters that composed them did not need to be separated into phonetic unities, but were strung together in continuous sentences. The direction in which the eyes were supposed to follow these reels of letters varied from place to place and from age to age; the way we read a text today in the Western world — from left to right and from top to bottom — is by no means universal. Some scripts were read from right to left (Hebrew and Arabic), others in columns, from top to bottom (Chinese and Japanese); a few were read in pairs of vertical columns (Mayan); some had alternate lines read in opposite directions, back and forth — a method called boustrophedon, “as an ox turns to plough”, in ancient Greek. Yet others meandered across the page like a game of Snakes and Ladders, the direction being signalled by lines or dots (Aztec).21
The ancient writing on scrolls — which neither separated words nor made a distinction between lower-case and upper-case letters, nor used punctuation — served the purposes of someone accustomed to reading aloud, someone who would allow the ear to disentangle what to the eye seemed a continuous string of signs. So important was this continuity that the Athenians supposedly raised a statue to a certain Phillatius, who had invented a glue for fastening together leaves of parchment or papyrus.22 Yet even the continuous scroll, while making the reader’s task easier, would not have helped a great deal in disentangling the clusters of sense. Punctuation, traditionally ascribed to Aristophanes of Byzantium (circa 200 BC) and developed by other scholars of the Library of Alexandria, was at best erratic. Augustine, like Cicero before him, would have had to practise a text before reading it out loud, since sight-reading was in his day an unusual skill and often led to errors of interpretation. The fourth-century grammarian Servius criticized his colleague Donat for reading, in Virgil’s Aeneid, the words collectam ex Ilio pubem (“a people gathered from Troy”) instead of collectam exilio pubem (“a people gathered for exile”).23 Such mistakes were common when reading a continuous text.
In the fifth century BC, a reader would have read out loud, unrolling her scroll with one hand while rolling it up with the other, exposing section after section. (photo credit 3.2)
Paul’s Epistles as read by Augustine were not a scroll but a codex, a bound papyrus manuscript in continuous writing, in the new uncial or semi-uncial hand which had appeared in Roman documents in the last years of the third century. The codex was a pagan invention; according to Suetonius,24 Julius Caesar was the first to fold a roll into pages, for dispatches to his troops. The early Christians adopted the codex because they found it highly practical for carrying around, hidden away in their clothes, texts that were forbidden by the Roman authorities. The pages could be numbered, which allowed the reader easier access to the sections, and separate texts, such as Paul’s Epistles, could easily be bound in one convenient package.25
The separation of letters into words and sentences developed very gradually. Most early scripts — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Sanskrit — had no use for such divisions. The ancient scribes were so familiar with the conventions of their craft that they apparently needed hardly any visual aids, and the early Christian monks often knew by heart the texts they were transcribing.26 In order to help those whose reading skills were poor, the monks in the scriptorium made use of a writing method known as per cola et commata, in which the text was divided into lines of sense — a primitive form of punctuation that helped the unsteady reader lower or raise the voice at the end of a block of thought. (This format also helped a scholar seeking a certain passage to find it with greater ease.)27 It was Saint Jerome who, at the end of the fourth century, having discovered this method in copies of Demosthenes and Cicero, first described it in his introduction to his translation of the Book of Ezekiel, explaining that “what is written per cola et commata conveys more obvious sense to the readers”.28
Punctuation remained unreliable, but these early devices no doubt assisted the progress of silent reading. By the end of the sixth century, Saint Isaac of Syria was able to describe the benefits of the method: “I practise silence, that the verses of my readings and prayers should fill me with delight. And when the pleasure of understanding them silences my tongue, then, as in a dream, I enter a state when my senses and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.”29 And in the mid-seventh century, the theologian Isidore of Seville was sufficiently familiar with silent reading to be able to praise it as a method for “reading without effort, reflecting on that which has been read, rendering their escape from memory less easy”.30 Like Augustine before him, Isidore believed that reading made possible a conversation across time and space, but with one important distinction. “Letters have the power to convey to us silently the sayings of those who are absent,”31 he wrote in his Etymologies. Isidore’s letters did not require sounds.
The avatars of punctuation continued. After the seventh century, a combination of points and dashes indicated a full stop, a raised or high point was equivalent to our comma, and a semicolon was used as we use it today.32 By the ninth century, silent reading was probably common enough in the scriptorium for scribes to start separating each word from its encroaching neighbours to simplify the perusal of a text — but perhaps also for aesthetic reasons. At about the same time, the Irish scribes, celebrated throughout the Christian world for their skill, began isolating not only parts of speech but also the grammatical constituents within a sentence, and introduced many of the punctuation marks we use today.33 By the tenth century, to further ease the silent reader’s task, the first lines of the principal sections of a text (the books of the Bible, for example) were ordinarily written in red ink, as well as the rubrics (from the Latin for “red”), explanations independent of the text proper. The ancient practice of beginning a new paragraph with a dividing stroke (paragraphos in Greek) or wedge (diple) continued; later the first letter of the new paragraph was written in a slightly larger or upper-case character.
The first regulations requiring scribes to be silent in the monastic scriptoriums date from the ninth century.34 Until then, they had worked either by dictation or by reading to themselves out loud the text they were copyi
ng. Sometimes the author himself or a “publisher” dictated the book. An anonymous scribe, concluding his copying sometime in the eighth century, writes this: “No one can know what efforts are demanded. Three fingers write, two eyes see. One tongue speaks, the entire body labours.”35 One tongue speaks as the copyist works, enunciating the words he is transcribing.
Once silent reading became the norm in the scriptorium, communication among the scribes was done by signs: if a scribe required a new book to copy, he would pretend to turn over imaginary pages; if he specifically needed a psalter, he’d place his hands on his head in the shape of a crown (in reference to King David); a lectionary was indicated by wiping away imaginary wax from candles; a missal, by the sign of the cross; a pagan work, by scratching his body like a dog.36
Reading out loud with someone else in the room implied shared reading, deliberate or not. Ambrose’s reading had been a solitary act. “Perhaps he was afraid,” Augustine mused, “that if he read out loud, a difficult passage by the author he was reading would raise a question in the mind of an attentive listener, and he would then have to explain what it meant or even argue about some of the more abstruse points.”37 But with silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal. The reader had time to consider and reconsider the precious words whose sounds — he now knew — could echo just as well within as without. And the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession, the reader’s intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, the market-place or the home.
Some dogmatists became wary of the new trend; in their minds, silent reading allowed for day-dreaming, for the danger of accidie — the sin of idleness, “the destruction that wasteth at noonday”.38 But silent reading brought with it another danger the Christian fathers had not foreseen. A book that can be read privately, reflected upon as the eye unravels the sense of the words, is no longer subject to immediate clarification or guidance, condemnation or censorship by a listener. Silent reading allows unwitnessed communication between the book and the reader, and the singular “refreshing of the mind”, in Augustine’s happy phrase.39
Until silent reading became the norm in the Christian world, heresies had been restricted to individuals or small numbers of dissenting congregations. The early Christians were preoccupied both with condemning the unbelievers (the pagans, the Jews, the Manicheans and, after the seventh century, the Muslims) and with establishing a common dogma. Arguments digressing from orthodox belief were either vehemently rejected or cautiously incorporated by Church authorities, but because these heresies had no large followings, they were treated with considerable leniency. The catalogue of these heretical voices includes several remarkable imaginations: in the second century the Montanists claimed (already) to be returning to the practices and beliefs of the primitive Church, and to have witnessed the second coming of Christ in the form of a woman; in the second half of that century the Monarchianists concluded from the definition of the Trinity that it was God the Father who had suffered on the Cross; the Pelagians, contemporaries of Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose, rejected the notion of original sin; the Apollinarians declared, in the last years of the fourth century, that the Word, and not a human soul, was united with Christ’s flesh in the Incarnation; in the fourth century the Arians objected to the word homoousios (of same substance) to describe the stuff of which the Son was made and (to quote a contemporary jeu de mots) “convulsed the Church by a diphthong”; in the fifth century the Nestorians opposed the ancient Apollinarians and insisted that Christ was two beings, a god and also a man; the Eutychians, contemporaries of the Nestorians, denied that Christ had suffered as all humans suffer.40
Even though the Church instituted the death penalty for heresy as early as 382, the first case of burning a heretic at the stake did not occur until 1022, in Orléans. On that occasion the Church condemned a group of canons and lay nobles who, believing that true instruction could only come directly from the light of the Holy Spirit, rejected the Scriptures as “the fabrications which men have written on the skins of animals”.41 Such independent readers were obviously dangerous. The interpretation of heresy as a civil offence punishable by death was not given legal basis until 1231, when the emperor Frederick II decreed it as such in the Constitutions of Melfi, but by the twelfth century the Church was already enthusiastically condemning large and aggressive heretical movements that argued not for ascetic withdrawal from the world (which the earlier dissenters had proposed) but for a challenge to corrupt authority and the abusive clergy, and for an individual reckoning with the Divinity. The movements spread through tortuous byways, and crystallized in the sixteenth century.
A contemporary portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder. (photo credit 3.3)
On October 31, 1517, a monk who, through his private study of the Scriptures, had come to believe that the divine grace of God superseded the merits of acquired faith, nailed to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg ninety-five theses against the practice of indulgences — the selling of remission from temporal punishment for condemned sins — and other ecclesiastical abuses. With this act Martin Luther became an outlaw in the eyes of the empire and an apostate in those of the Pope. In 1529 the Holy Roman emperor Charles V rescinded the rights granted to Luther’s followers, and fourteen free cities of Germany, together with six Lutheran princes, caused a protest to be read against the imperial decision. “In matters which concern God’s honour and salvation and the eternal life of our souls, everyone must stand and give account before God for himself,” argued the protesters or, as they were later to be known, Protestants. Ten years earlier, the Roman theologian Silvester Prierias had stated that the book upon which the Church was founded needed to remain a mystery, interpreted only through the authority and power of the Pope.42 The heretics, on the other hand, maintained that people had the right to read the word of God for themselves, without witness or intermediary.43
Centuries later, beyond a sea that for Augustine would have been at the limits of the earth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owed his faith to those ancient protesters, took advantage of the art that had so surprised the saint. In church, during the lengthy and often tedious sermons which he attended out of a sense of social responsibility, he silently read Pascal’s Pensées. And at night, in his cold room in Concord, “covered with blankets to the chin”, he read to himself the Dialogues of Plato. (“He associated Plato,” noted a historian, “ever after, with the smell of wool.”)44 Even though he thought there were too many books to be read, and thought readers should share their findings by reporting to one another the gist of their studies, Emerson believed that reading a book was a private and solitary business. “All these books,” he wrote, drawing up a list of “sacred” texts that included the Upanishads and the Pensées, “are the majestic expressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and are to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart.”45 In silence.
Observing the reading of Saint Ambrose that afternoon in 384, Augustine could hardly have known what was before him. He thought he was seeing a reader trying to avoid intrusive visitors, sparing his voice for teaching. In fact he was seeing a multitude, a host of silent readers who over the next many centuries would include Luther, would include Calvin, would include Emerson, would include us, reading him today.
Socrates in conversation depicted on the lateral face of a second-century sarcophagus. (photo c
redit 3.4)
THE BOOK OF MEMORY
am standing on the ruins of Carthage, in Tunisia. The stones are Roman, bits of walls built after the city was destroyed by Scipio Aemilianus in 146 BC, when the Carthaginian empire became a Roman province and was renamed Africa. Here Saint Augustine, as a young man, taught rhetoric before travelling to Milan. In his late thirties he crossed the Mediterranean once again, to settle in Hippo, in what is today Algeria; he died there in AD 430 as the invading Vandals were laying siege to the town.
I’ve brought with me my school edition of the Confessions, a thin, orange-covered volume of the Classiques Roma, which my Latin teacher preferred to all other series. Standing here with the book in my hand, I feel a certain camaraderie with the great Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca, whom his Anglo-Saxon readers called Petrarch, and who always used to carry with him a pocket-sized edition of Augustine. Reading the Confessions, he felt that Augustine’s voice spoke to him so intimately that, towards the end of his life, he composed three imaginary dialogues with the saint, which were published posthumously as the Secretum meum. A pencilled note in the margin of my Roma edition comments on Petrarch’s comments, as if continuing those imaginary dialogues.
It is true that something in Augustine’s tone suggests a comfortable intimacy, propitious for the sharing of secrets. When I open the book, my marginal scribbles bring to mind the roomy classroom of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, where the walls were painted the colour of Carthaginian sand, and I find myself recalling the voice of my teacher reciting Augustine’s words, and our pompous debates (were we fourteen, fifteen, sixteen?) about political responsibility and metaphysical reality. The book preserves the memory of that far-away adolescence, of my teacher (now dead), of Petrarch’s readings of Augustine, which our teacher read to us approvingly, but also of Augustine and his classrooms, of the Carthage that was built on the Carthage that was destroyed, only to be destroyed once again. The dust of these ruins is far, far older than the book, but the book contains it too. Augustine observed and then wrote what he recalled. Held in my hand, the book twice remembers.
A History of Reading Page 6