Christ Church

Written for our learning

A defining feature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that they are more or less explicitly logocentric, word-centered. For all three of these religions of ethical monotheism, God is understood largely in terms of Logos, the Greek word for reason or word. Thus the Word as Law defines Judaism; the Word made Flesh is central to the Christian understanding; and the Word as the Will of Allah is a major feature of Islam. All of the world’s great religions to one extent or another give priority to written texts: the Vedas and the Upanishads of Hinduism; the various Buddhist texts in pali or sanskrit, the commentary traditions in philosophy, to give but a few instances. There is something inescapably significant about written texts, the scriptures and the writings of religion and philosophy.

This calls attention to the mystery and the wonder of reading and writing, one of the most profound of all human abilities and one which speaks to the idea of civilisation. The ancient Sumerians were among the first to do so many things practically speaking in terms of technology that gave them a power over nature: such things as sailing – using wind and therefore not necessarily determined by the flow of water; irrigation – being able to redirect water to where it can be used for agriculture; and a host of other practical inventions. But perhaps the most important invention was writing: cuneiform script, wedge-shaped marks in clay, that probably originated in a warehouse. Why? There is a necessary connection between numbering and naming things which then leads on to stories and ideas. Reading and writing signify civilisation.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul famously says. He is referring to the Hebrew Scriptures but paradoxically his remark will extend to the inclusion of his own writings which comprise the greatest part of the Christian Scripture, the New Testament. What is written is written for our learning. This speaks to the prominence and the significance of reading and writing, to the significance of books.

This is a particular concern and challenge for our age as Maryanne Wolf wonderfully explains in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018). Following upon the success of Proust and the Squid (2008), she has written an engaging book about what has transpired in the last ten years in terms of neuroscience and the impact of the digital culture on our reading. Far from being a technophobe, she nonetheless seeks to alert us to the dangers of losing the capacity for “deep reading,” for a kind of collectedness, “a place of stillness,” that belongs to Aristotle’s idea of contemplation as the highest form of human life. This complements the theme of our attention to ethical principles which alone can properly shape our lives. Sitting and listening like Mary is necessary for Martha’s activity, too. Without it, we are the endlessly distracted in a culture of distraction, unable to focus and at the mercy of digital overstimulation and manipulation. The theologian John Dunne notes that wisdom is “but contemplation in action.” Wolf wants to show this in part through literature and philosophy and in part through neuroscience.

Reading is not natural to our humanity, yet it is one of the most distinctive things that humans do. Thus there is the importance of being aware of the profound changes happening to our brains and our reading because of the digital revolution. At issue is our ability to attend to what matters most and to one another, to the capacity of “passing over” into an appreciation of the situations of others, a kind of empathy. At stake, she suggests, by way of the dialogue between Umberto Eco and Cardinal Martini, is “the collective moral conscience that is the basis of orderly cohabitation.”

Her range of illustrations is exemplary. “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” T.S. Eliot asked in the first half of the 20th century, questions that continue to haunt us in the 21st. She quotes Martin Heidegger’s misgivings about our technocratic age that leads to an “indifference toward meditative thinking” and even more to the denial of what he calls our “special nature,” namely that humans are “meditative being[s]”. At issue, he says, is “the saving of man’s essential nature – the keeping of the meditative thinking alive.”

That idea is foundational to our intellectual cultures even as we face the forces of anti-intellectualism. Some even argue that texts themselves are a form of imperialism, overlooking the freeing nature of thought that writing provides. Others note that “without books – indeed without literacy – the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs” (Steve Wasserman in Truthdig as quoted by Wolf).

In Chapel, Paul’s words have  a visual reference in the window depicting Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer which, along with the poems and plays of Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible, itself largely derived from William Tyndale, has contributed so much to the development of the English language in all its glory. The window is based upon Gerlach Flicke’s 1546 portrait of Cranmer who holds a book of the Epistles of St. Paul in one hand while his other hand rests on a pile of books, one of which is on Faith and Works by St. Augustine. Underneath the figure of Cranmer in the window are the famous words from a prayer which he composed based on the reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans about words “written for our learning.” They highlight the nature of an intellectual community: “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”. Such metaphors for reading stand in stark contrast to our images of scanning, skimming, browsing, and surfing, images that are all about the surface at the expense of an inner depth.

This Sunday the School will engage collectively in an activity of deep reading through the pageant of Word and Song in the Advent Services of Lessons and Carols. This service is 100 years old and was first used at King’s College, Cambridge, just after the devastations and destruction of the First World War. It speaks profoundly to our need to attend to the deeper principles of our humanity, to our need for peace and hope in the face of a dark and despairing world. It challenges us about the intellectual task of sitting and listening so “that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.”  Such is deep reading.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy