Can we read?
The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) has issued a report on the decline of book reading. Is it true? Or better how accurate is it? I am doubtful. I am a reader; the child of readers; the spouse of a voracious reader; the mother and grandmother of readers (well, one is still working on it; he’s only four). I read the non-reading trend news skeptically.
But I could be wrong. Caleb Crain in the “Christmas” issue of the New Yorker takes up the issue in some deatail citing the neuro differences between readers and non-readers; quoting my favorite Walter Ong, S.J., on the coming culture–second orality; analyzing the role of TV watching (visual) vs. web-surfing (textual), and concluding with the threat a non-literate culture would present too democracy. Here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain
So fellow readers and writers what do you make of this. You read. Do your kids? your students? your spouses? And what? fiction? poetry? history? etc.
Will those who can read, in the projected future of psychological dyslexia, have an advantage over those who cannot? Or will they be regarded as freaks with retrogressive tendencies?
When I worked with the state library association, I was stunned to learn from public librarians that you have to get kids BEFORE pre-school. Many libraries have “lap sit” programs (yeah, weird name) where parents bring young toddlers in to cuddle up with a book. The program addresses the fact that most young parents don’t really know how to read to their kids because they don’t read themselves.
Librarians also note that reading falls off dramatically among teenagers, though librarians specializing in this age group have been pretty savvy about trying to provide good programming. They credit J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter hands down for promoting reading among boys, and this year’s hot topic among librarians was how to keep the momentum going now the series is over.
Joseph Gannon, I think the answer is “yes” and “yes.” There are a growing number of lunkheads at my son’s school who think reading is for “queers.” My kid still reads, but at age 12, he keeps it quiet. However, a “Talk of the Nation” program cited studies that showed kids who read were better adjusted, happier, and more likely to succeed in and enjoy their work.
P.S., yes I read, and recommend Powell’s review-a-day service to keep up with current fiction. My Christmas project was His Dark Materials trilogy. Absolutely the most relentlessly humorless, boring and preachy thing I have ever read (worse than “Lord of the Rings,” William Collier), but I’m glad I know firsthand what the fuss is about.
As someone who was once one of those publis librarians, let me offer an opposite point of view. Reading is nearly irrelevant, except that it is a means to communicate ideas, stories, knowledge, and even wisdom. Watching TV, movies, plays opera can also give access to the same kind of ideas, stories, knowledge and wisdom.
What we need is for people to be engaged with ideas and stories. Reading will follow, as writing is one of the easiest ways to explore those things. (But people explore them on YouTube without writing.)
What is perhaps most important is encouraging people to spend time with something. Stop all these blogs that want a few seconds thought on a topic, and then give up on it. Learn to see the cinematography as a revelation of something. No Country For Old Men has a wonderful sequence of shots of 2 trees that give a sense of distance as some events fade into the past. People may not notice it, or reflect it in their writing, but it has an impact that gets expressed in other ways. (maybe on YouTube?)
Jim, I don’t think you you have opposite view so much as a more complete answer about what public librarians do.
I mention what they do in the way of encouraging reading at a very young age because it illustrates the fact that lots of new parents just don’t read books to their kids, and you have to develop that kind of enjoyment–and willingness to spend time, as you say–in infancy. And you have to train the parents to do it.
Certainly the larger mission is to provide ideas, stories, knowledge and wisdom to patrons through a variety of media. And, in Michigan, which is incredibly stingy to libraries re state funding, they do it on next to nothing.
If I read Crain right (and who knows whether he’s right?), the neuropathways that absorb ideas, stories, knoweledge, etc. are not equivalent, i.e., people who gain their knowledge from an oral tradition “know” things in a different way than people who gain their knowledge from a written tradition. The implication of some studies, reported in Crain’s article, suggest that those who read have an enhanced ability to compare and contrast what they are reading and to take some critical distance from the writing. People in oral traditions must remember what they hear and do not have the same facility in “critical reasoning.” Crain has some interesting things to say about the Greeks and their alphabet, their literacy and their culture. Greeks couldn’t remember Homer forever!
What I see, both in my work in the public schools and in the publishing world maxim that books should generally be written at an eight grade reading level, isn’t encouraging. While I don’t think larger numbers of people have stopped reading or become illiterate, I suspect that the general level of literacy is lowering.
Paul – Original Faith
Paul, is this maxim still valid or an urban legend?
My students believe this, too, so in the past couple of semesters, we analyzed newspaper and magazine stories using the Gunning Fog and other indices (there are handy text analyzers online now), and 10th grade is about the lowest level.
I keep going back to what Jim McK said–about engaging with stories and spending time with them. My kid is not only a reader, but he is able, unlike most of his friends, to understand a Monty Python sketch, a Groucho Marx movie and will sit through a movie with subtitles. In other words, he will take a certain amount of trouble to access a story.
He also spends hours writing adventure stories and making mini-movies of his cat (in which the cat does virtually nothing but flap it’s tail, but it’s the hand-lettered on-screen captions about what the cat is thinking that makes it funny. They are also written in a kind of Huntz Hall dialect.)
I must also add that my kid has ADD, but he can read for hours with or without the meds. It’s only when he’s reacting with large groups of people and getting overloaded with stimuli that he falls apart. I wish somebody would study THAT phenom, because many of the other mothers I know who have kids with the ADD label notice the same thing.
Cat text! Cat thoughts! A new set of neuropathways. Are they posted?
How are we to view the probability that Jesus was illiterate since 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish State was illiterate at that time. This is based on the understanding that he was an artisan which was slightly below the peasant class. Throw this in the mix and how does it affect many theories?
As far as reading is concerned I assume my father did a good job of pounding it into my brain. I don’t remember ever being without a book and as I look back on it I am amazed. As I sit here in a room surrounded by books (everyone knows that you get Dad, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles or Borders gift car on special occasions) I imagine I would need detoxing if you separated me from reading. James O’Donnell writes that Augustine originated the idea that one can get all of life’s answers out of a book. I don’t quite get all of that but there is something there right or wrong.
If one reads objectively it is necessarily humbling because it becomes clear how little one knows. I long to be 19 again when I absolutely knew everything.
Bill
“James O’Donnell writes that Augustine originated the idea that one can get all of life’s answers out of a book.” He really said that?
As for Jesus being illiterate, John Meier in the first volume of A Marginal Jew makes a case that Jesus was able to read the Hebrew Scriptures and read Aramaic, the language he spoke.
Margaret, I don’t let him post stuff, but one movie shows a hand moving under the rug the cat is sitting on. The cat lunges for it half-heartedly and then settles down like a meatloaf and half shuts his eyes. The dialog is, “I’m gonna kill dat Mr. Hand, someday. Maybe tomorrow. Yeah, that’s it. Cuz right now I gotta get me a little nap.”
We don’t plan to take him to Cannes yet, but, really, anybody who can find any kind plot or narrative for the useless existence this cat leads has clearly been affected by reading.
Personally I think there is reading and there is reading. In the past some people read a lot of what I would call junk fiction. Some still do, but movies and then radio and later television were/are good sources of this sort of fiction. A move from junk fiction in book form to junk fiction in audible or visual form seems to me not terribly significant. Basically such fiction distracts. Like sports events. But there are books, as someone said, that must be chewed and digested. Not to be able, or merely to be disinclined, to engage is such reading seems to me a serious loss.
It is hard to know what to make of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Are books like cigars? if you start reading/smoking mediocre ones, will you go on to better ones? There is at least a chance. I confess to having given up cigars, but I still read.
Jean
I gather Pope Benedict has a cat. I wonder what ideas he imagines the cat to have. It would be interesting to know. A cat theologian? Thomas Aquinas Cat? Probably Aurelius Augustinus Cat.
I recently heard some very literate type, I think it was Norman Mailer, argue that the problem with television is comercials. They prevent the brain from being able to follow a sustained narrative. Instead, it gets used to being interrupted about every six minutes with something entirely disconnected from what it had been doing. I try to integrate this into my teaching, and it seems to help.
At my school, 70% of incoming freshman must take developmental reading, and 50% get a D or F the first time they take it. My inclination is to believe that this creates a genuine failure to communicate in my religion and philosophy classes.
My first two children read like crazy, although the oldest has dropped off a bit (I have to keep hunting for great fantasy/adventure/sci-fi books for him). My first grader seems to be able to read just about anything already. My three year old is suffering from exhausted parents, and so is getting the real short end of the reading attention stick. I am a little worried about what this will yield in the years to come. However, I will also point out that my second son had to deal with pretty exhausted parents, and, like I say, his reading is off the charts.
If I recall correctly, Freakonomics had a discussion of reading in relation to grades, and it found no correlation between the amount of time a child either reads or is read to, and that child’s grades. The upshot was that much of learning ability is genetically hardwired (this does not mean that poor learning environments can utterly fail to tap the learning ability of a child). I am not endorsing the conclusion, only putting it out on the table.
Joseph Gannon,
I am guessing the Pope’s pet would be an advo-cat of cat-ophatic theology. Apologies.
Joe G,
If you look at page 236 at O’Donnells book on Augustine you will find that he did indeed write that. I did ask O’Donnell about this but we got lost on other tangents as it was not the only question. I presume Augustine referred to the Scriptures which apparently is a post classical move shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At any rate our society is imbued with the answers coming from a book from Spencer to Freud. So many books can “change our life.” Etc.
It is a discussion we need more of.
Can you condense Meier’s reasoning for such a position? Meier is a unique scholar but he certainly does not cultivate a love for reading
Yes, I read of the Pope’s fondness for cats. Cat theology, as far as I can figure since I brought home my first stray cat at age 9, can be boiled down to this: Make me comfy.
RE: junk vs good fiction–I get testy when people try to make this distinction. I always want to know what their criteria is.
Our lit crit prof in grad school made us all develop our own critical theory, and then apply it to a book he handed out at random. My theory is that literature is gossip, and the book I got was Graham Greene’s “The Human Factor.”
I got the idea from reading a lot of Jane Austen and George Eliot. Like all gossip worth listening to, literature makes us care about people, teaches us something about what it means to be human, how we hold up (or not) under adversities like scandal, tragedy and death or double-edged swords like success and love. And the writing has to somehow support whatever it is the author is trying to teach us about human-ness.
It has to teach, and though it may not necessarily delight us with its subject matter, we must at least admire the way in which the story is told and expressed.
As one learns more and more about humanity through literature, it requires one to demand more from what one reads. A “grow along with me” critical theory, if you will.
Hardly brilliant, I realize, but it’s been a serviceable way for me to read.
And I better get offa here because I think my ham is drying out!
Joseph Gannon wrote, “…[T]here are books that must be chewed and digested.” That led me to recall – and go look for the exact words of – something Simone Weil said. It’s in the “Spiritual Autobiography” section of “Waiting for God:”
Jean: great cat dialogue. More???
Joe Petit: how about the first grader reading to the three-year old? (while the parents take a cat-nap).
I learned to read voraciously and love every minute of it because (1) the Dominican sisters who taught me ensured that we read for pleasure as well as for school, and (2) I lived in a very small town across the street from the library. I was allowed 3 books (by the librarian) twice a week. No matter how hard I tried to get more, she wouldn’t let me have them. She kept the attraction of reading alive for me and I have retained it all throughout life.
Now, I wonder if Catholic schools sans sisters foster that love of reading. My hometown no longer has a library … folks have to order from the regional bookmobile. I suspect the fostering of the love of reading has diminished immensely because of that, as well as TV, the internet, gameboys, semi-illiterate adults, etc.
Bill
I would say that the idea developed in post-exilic Judaism that one could find a full guide to life in the Scriptures. This is so far from being post-classical that it is some centuries pre-Christian. So I really don’t think it makes sense to say that it originates with Augustine.
As for Meier, you should read A Marginal Jew I, 268-278 on the question of literacy. You should also read the following section on the social status of an “artisan”.
Jean
I didn’t say that fiction was junk, and I would agree that novelists like Jane Austen have a decidedly nutritively quality. (Actually I fell in love with Ms. Austen in my youth.) But there is a kind of fiction that caters for those who chiefly want reassurance about life, or would rather escape than confront reality. It is produced by almost interchangeable hacks. I think one designation is “pot boiler”. It is the equivalent of eating at McDonalds.
Joe
How about “catapophatic theology”?
Joe
Have you heard of the Flynn affect? Flynn made a study of IQ scores and how they have been rising aver the last half century. He points out that the scores are fairly constant in some areas, for instance, mathematics, but have been rising in others. It seems unlikely that mankind is really getting brighter. He puts tje rise to greater facility in using abstract categorical thinking, which is something that is learned. He claims that some educational environments, right at home, are more productive of learning of this sort than others. Flynn, by the way, is a professor emeritus from New Zealand. This put me in mind of my childhood hero Errol Flynn, but I believe he came from Tasmania.
Joe
The full name is James Flynn and there is an article in the Arts and Letters Daily.
Margaret: That is a great idea! Strange how these possibilities can be right in front of you and you still miss them.
Joseph: Thanks for the source. I will likely look it up as I try to understand what is going on in some neighborhoods in Baltimore.
Back to cat theology, I was thinking Prof. Feline might be interested in es-cat-ological theology, or perhaps some archeological work exploring the…yes, cat-acombs (for early Christian artwork indicating the central role of cats during the last supper). Perhaps the good professor will also call for Christian interest in avoiding the full spelling of God (thus G-d, as I have known some Jews to do), since one would not want to encourage the surely heretical conclusions that might emerge with too much attention to the fact that God spelled backwards is dog. Believe it or not, I have not (yet) had anything to drink! Which probably makes this all the more unforgivable.
Cat-echetics! Followed by a Christian analysis of the cat-egorical imperative.
One part of the problem is that there are dstinct ways of thinking for oral, written, visual, musical, etc. Crain is saying, I think, that only readers think like readers. I can go along with that, though perhaps not with the idea that everyone should think that way.
Sacred Scripture should probably be understood orally. That is part of what “reading with the Church” is all about, and the whole spirit/word antagonism in St Paul. Literalism is the result of interpreting by a reader’s categories, instead of a listener’s.
I think this is an appropriate example. In Jn 12, a woman pours perfume on the feet of Jesus and wipes them with her hair; in Jn 13, Jesus pours water on the feet of the disciples and wipes them with a towel. I can only think of one, maybe two, theologians referring to that. But I know of a couple of stained glass representations that highlight the similarity, and I spend far more time reading books that I do looking at stained glass. The analytical readers do not ‘see’ the connection, while the visual retellers do.
Of course, I ancourage reading. But it is not the only way to learn, especially in an era of video.
What became of Ratzinger’s cat? Last I heard they were afraid he would scratch up the furniture in the papal aprtments. In any event, I don’t think theology was his cup of tea as much as music. A Felinious Monk rather than a Catechist.
I have this memory that Mark Twain made up a story for his children in which every other word or so begins with cat-. Is this true? Google is of no avail.
Jim McK, What Became of Ratzinger’s Cat? Sounds like a great short story title! I seem to recall that Ratzinger hasn’t kept a cat of his own for some time, but used to enjoy cat-sitting for a friend. Scratch up the furniture, indeed! Man made the upholstery, but God made the cat. Or at least that’s what I tell people when they look at my shredded couch.
Kathy, I think you’re right about that Twain story; I’ll have to consult my books later today. I can find a lot of quotes by Twain about cats (“Cats are more intelligent than you think; they can be taught to commit any crime”). And there are some good items on this site:
http://www.mtwain.com/l_shortstoryandessay.html
CAUTION: Don’t read “A Dog’s Tale” if you are tender-hearted about animals. Twain often used animal stories to show how beastly people were, and the level of cruelty he describes usually reflects the depth of his outrage over people’s behavior.
I love the “Advice to Little Girls.”
Anyhow, we could all do worse than start out the New Year reading a bit of Mark Twain, if only to take ourselves down a peg or two. Happy 2008 everyone, and may the Lord answer our petitions in the way that is best for us.
In the throes of a preemptive war which even many liberals, unnerved by 9//11, supported, Twain is especially relevant. http://www.lexrex.com/informed/otherdocuments/warprayer.htm
He is hardly ever quoted by politicians and the reason seems obvious.
Just a comment or two on Wolf. She misses the importance of the invention of the Semitic alphabet. Aramaic spread throught out the Near East from Syria down through Mesopotamia because Aramaic was written in an alphabet, the ancestor of our alphabet, It was easier to read or write with twenty some signs than with the hundreds that cuneiform uses. In a Semitic language it is relatively easy to use a consonants-only alphabet because every syllable begins with a consonant you dont’ have words in which a vowels follow each other with no consoants intervening. The same is not true of Greek. Hence the need to represent the vowels as well as the consonants.
The idea that the Greeks before the alphabet was invented had to preserve the Iliad by memorizing it is erroneous. The Iliad was the product of a tradition of oral poets. The oral poet performs his work. He has not memorized a spectral text. The poem is the performance, or more precisely, each performance is a distinct poem, although the poet may be telling the same basic story in each performance. An interesting and very controversial question is when and why and by whom was the Iliad put in written form.
Joseph Gannon: This same question comes up among “Beowulf” scholars. And, of course, our written version of the poem is probably a “fossilized” version of several “Beowulfs” that floated around out there.
My graduate work examined the oral tradition and hagiography, in which early Christian cultures selected elements for saints lives not only from real historical accounts, but gussied them up with elements from the Gospels as well as pagan legends. One of the very worst hagiographies is Bradshaw’s life of St. Werburh of Chester–worst in that it simply takes everything that was ever written about St. W. and throws it in a kind of stew with no regard for shifts in tone and narrative.
But its very horrible-ness makes it a goldmine, if you’re interested in peeling off the various layers of the life and getting some idea of the pool of historical facts, legends and Bible stories from which it was made.
Jean, “if you’re interested in peeling off the various layers of the life and getting some idea of the pool of historical facts, legends and Bible stories from which it was made” then you come from a culture of writing and reading.
If you are more interested in talking to people, and conveying a sense of holiness in images they can identify with, you are probably in an oral culture.
Much hagiography is written at the boundary, by people who think in oral terms. That is why its term “legend” (=reading) has become almost an antonym of “historical fact”.
To get back to the original question, it would be a shame to lose the desire to peel away the various layers of a legend. But it would also be a shame to lose the desire for rhetoric, the ability to convince and convert people, that guides oral cultures.Or to lose desire for beauty that guides visual cultures.
Jim McK
“But it would also be a shame to lose the desire for rhetoric, the ability to convince and convert people, that guides oral cultures.Or to lose desire for beauty that guides visual cultures.”
Is an interest in rhetoric really incompatible with literacy? Are the literate really unable to appreciate visual beauty? Will someone who at first shares Gregory the Great’s idea that Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and the anonymous “sinner” of Luke 7:36-38 were one and the same woman lose something of she/he becomes undeceived?
Jim McK and Joseph Gannon, my guess is that literal (i.e., provable) truth of incidents described doesn’t matter as much to someone in an oral culture as the “higher” truth of the ideas and values a work presents.
There are tons of stories about how St. Cuthbert engaged in severe penances. In these stories, God sends food if he fasts too much, warms him up if he stands too long in the cold sea, etc. Usually, these comforts were sent through animals (birds, otters, etc.), that probably had some special significance to the local people from pagan times.
Familiar elements would establish the saint as belonging to that culture, and they would be gratifying and entertaining to the audience. My guess is that sometimes those stories were even played for laughs. If I recall correctly, in one story, a bird has to drop food on Cuthbert’s head to break a fast so severe he’s swooned.
But I don’t think listeners lost sight of the lesson that St. Cuthbert was sometimes too hard on himself and made himself unable to do God’s work through penance that was too harsh.
There’s also a wonderful story about how he visited a woman whose baby was dying. He couldn’t do anything for the baby, but knew the woman needed rest, and told her he would hold the baby and pray for it. He fell asleep praying for the baby, and when they woke, the child was cured.
Again, I think to people in an oral culture, the miracle is not so much the climax of the story, but the clincher that makes it clear St. Cuthbert, in comforting the woman, has done Christ’s work, hence Christ’s results: cure.
St. Cuthbert was a real person, and the hagiographical formulae were carefully, probably lovingly, chosen to help listeners understand Cuthbert’s particular virtues. I would never presume to “peel” St. Cuthbert’s hagiographies; they’re too beautiful.
St. Werburh’s, however, was a different story; there are clearly a lot of barnacles attached to that one–and, interestingly, most of them accrued in the literate versions. An oral composer would never have been able to hold that kind of mish-mash in his head, and would have been ashamed of reciting it.
Playing the rhetorical game in the oral tradition required a great deal of the performer, and also of the audience, who had to understand and appreciate the art involved as well as pick up the nuances of the message. And someone from a writing culture has to do quite a bit of work to appreciate and understand what is going on, when reading something from an oral tradition.
Jean’s ability to distinguish the difference between the treatment of St. Cuthbert’s life and and St. Werburh’s in these pieces, and to speculate on the likely reaction of contemporary audiences was obviously hard won, though her dissertation does sound like fun.
I would agree that when a story is told and retold, it tends to change. One way this happens is that the parts that seem signficant to each retailer–can that be right?–of the story receive emphasis and the story gets “better” and more pointed as irrelevancies are forgotten. Actually I have observed this in others and even in my literal self as I have passed on an anecdote. Another thing that happens is that elements not originally parts of the story get incorporated because they seem to fit. Also points are forgotten in one version bet remembered in another.
Here is an illustraion of some of this from the Gospels. Find a New Testament and read Mark 14:1-9; John 12:1-8; Luke 7:36-50. Notice the similarities and the differences. Hee is Pierre Benoit’s explanation. He suggested that similarities as well as the differences and the peculiarities (e.g., the anointing of the feet) in these three accounts are best explained by positing two distinct incidents and supposing that in the telling, many years later, some of the details have passed from one incident to the other.
Incident (1). In Galilee at the house of a Pharisee, a penitent sinner enters and weeps in Jesus presence. Her tears fall on his feet, and she hastily wipes them away with her hair. There is no anointiung with perfume in this scene. The (scandalous) action of loosening her hair in public fits the character of the woman and helps to explain the Pharisee’s indignation. This incident forms the original basis of Luke’s narrative.
Incident (2). At Bethany at the house of Simon the leper a woman (named Mary), as an expression of her love for Jesus, uses her expensive perfume to anoint Jesus’ head. This incident forms the original basis of the narratives in Mark/Matthew and in John.
(The version in Matthew is virtually the same as that in Mark.)
In his massive work, “Jesus Remembered,” James D.G. Dunn argues that many of the differences between accounts in the Gospel stories reflect differences in the remembering and oral telling of the stories rather than deliberate literary changes made to their common text by Matthew and Luke. It’s a very interesting book.
Joseph G, I certainly do not intend to say that one lives in only one culture or another. But the techniques and aims of one do not apply equally in another. It is ineffective if we examine the rhetoric of a rock band to find out which town is the greatest in the world. The concerns of the rocker, who seeks a connection with his audience, are not the same as the concerns of the literalist, the extreme form of a written culture.
I pretty much agree with Jean’s description. Hagiography is often written at the edges of written and oral cultures, and varies in the success with which it joins the two. “Historical fact, legend and Bible stories” tell the story of an historical person whom others remember as embodying Christ; the way these elements are used convey who the saint is, as well as who he was.
But don’t get me started on the woman who anointed Jesus unless you have a looong time to read. I might end up convincing you that there is a single incident behind the stories, the Resurrection of Jesus. The attempt to find two historical events treats the gospels as part of a written culture; “The different versions are a single story with varying details” is the oral approach. I think the gospels are crafted in a more oral fashion “that you might believe.” Except Luke might be more written, giving an ordered account of material in other versions. The decisions about how to understand these texts are not simple, but often reflect the interpreter’s culture rather than the gospels’.
Of course, the elephant in the room here is the Jesus Seminar. And dragging that in would REALLY derail the conversation.
Just to wind up my own thoughts about Margaret’s original post and the “neurology” orality and literacy: My students do read–Facebook, novels, textbooks, e-mail, Web documents. But they’ve also got their iPods and phones plugged into their heads almost constantly, listening not just to music, but conversations, books on tape. I presume many go to church and hear sermons and homilies.
So: are we in a post-literate culture? Or are we in a culture that now incorporates BOTH elements of literate and oral culture in a big way? Will our children and grandchildren, growing up in this mix, have different neurological wiring than ourselves? And what will it mean for human culture?
These changes can occur very quickly, but whether we “literates” will have the tools to even see what is happening and to understand what’s really going is another question.
Interesting times ahead, I’m sure, if you can stay tuned for another 20 years.
I was just “reading” a little book this morning on the chemistry of cooking and in distinguishing between spices and aromatics the author points out that the former pique our tastebuds while the latter our olfactory whatevers. This reminded me, as Jean has above, the modes of “knowing” and recognizing and remembering are many. If we are now in the midst of a culture shift that multiplies ways of knowing, that is a different proposition than the NEA study of trends, which suggests that one mode (literacy) is waning.
Crain’s article goes on to look at the neuropathway differences between literate and oral traditions. There are multiple neuropathways. Who knows what new modes may emerge?
Since I am reading Jesus: A Historical Portrait by Daniel J. Harrington, which I think James Martin recommended, and since I received a number of other books on Jesus for Christmas (including some which were presents from myself), I believe I can legitimately bring up the Jesus Seminar.
What I find frustrating (and fascinating) about reading books on Jesus, and particularly the “historical Jesus,” is that every syllable of the Gospels has been written about in such excruciating detail that everything in the Gospels has ten or twenty plausible interpretations. (See the discussion on “peace on earth, goodwill toward men” in another thread.) An example from Harrington is that he takes it quite for granted that Jesus was influenced by John the Baptist (something I have read in any number of books about the historical Jesus), whereas Benedict XVI takes the Gospels at face value and says Jesus came to be baptized by John to make a point. He says (and it can’t be denied) that there is nothing at all in the text to say that Jesus was a follower of John. I tend to believe Harrington, personally.
Now, what the Jesus Seminar does (as everybody knows) is assembles a collection of scholars and takes votes on various things, such whether each saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospels was actually said by him. They lay out their procedures, you can look up the credentials of the members if you want to, and they give you the vote totals. It doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing to do. When you read one of the books, find out that out of a collection of scholars, x percent thought a particular saying was actually uttered by Jesus, y percent thought it probably was, and so on. You don’t find out as much as you would if you read a book by someone who argued that the particular saying was authentic, and another book by someone who thought it probably was authentic, and another book by someone who argued it was doubtful, and another book by someone who argued Jesus would never have said that. The Jesus Seminar gives a quick synopsis of what a group of scholars thought. It just doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me.
I am also reading A Jesuit Off-Broadway, which is very entertaining.
David,
Is it just me, or does a positivistic attitude toward the scripture tend to thin out its richness and make it bland?
I have intellectual issues with the use of scientific methods in the humanities. First, I think that the method is too incisive for the subject matter. Secondly, in the academy the overthrow of plain meaning seems to often lead, paradoxically, to wild theories with no substantiation except someone else’s need to write an original dissertation. (Has the pendulum swung back on this yet, by the way?)
But beyond these intellectual concerns, I feel almost hurt at the apparent desire by some to impoverish the Word of God. Knowing human beings, it’s easy to see that they are more subtle and complex than any group of scholars would approve of. Why would the richness of reality be any less, when the self-revelation belongs to God?
Jim McK
The Gospels are written accounts that draw upon oral traditions. Many of the variations that occur in Gospel accounts of what seem to be the same incident undoubtedly arise from variations in oral telling and retelling and the limitations of human memory. But the Gospels themselves are texts. What does it mean to say that a text is crafted in an oral fashion? Is it just another way of saying that a text relies on oral traditions as its sources? Of course it is true that more people in the early days heard than read what was written in the Gospels, both because many people were not literate and because books were expensive to produce. But there is still an irreducible difference between an oral tradition and a written text.
Similarly the Iliad as we have it is a text, although it certainly had its origins in a world of poets who composed orally.
The problem with the Jesus Seminar is not the the participants use historical criticism. The problem is that very many of the participants share the same presupositions, presuppositions that are little more than rationalist prejudices.
I seem to remember Fr. Komonchak praising NT Wright’s detailed methodology of biblical criticism.
Jeepers, that was a long time ago. Must be a good teacher.
Joseph,
this discussion started with a look at the differences between readers and non-readers. My remarks have not been about the creation of the text, but how it is received — by hearing or by reading. Lk, Mt & Jn clearly are based on written texts, and we just do not know about Mk.
But the evangelists probably expected their renditions of the Gospel to be heard and repeated. Their writing is directed toward encounter and belief, rather than analysis and archives. When Lk fashions Mk & Q & L into “an ordered account”, he is doing the kind of analysis that is characteristic of writing. When people hear Lk’s gospel proclaimed, they hear it as one rendition of the Gospel, like an oral tradition being retold. Some will retell what they heard, as a story but generally not word for word.
I doubt that Luke expected his gospel to be repeated for 2000 years, mass produced with no variations, or treated like copyrighted works. He expected it to be read aloud and be heard, bringing Christ into the lives of others. Those two sentences reflect the differences in expectations between written and oral cultures, and tell us something about the thinking and brains of each.
Kathy,
I don’t see how scripture can be approached seriously without disciplines like linguistics, history, and textual criticism–and more–all of which (it seems to me) employ the scientific method. Of course, those of us who don’t study ancient languages and ancient history have had a lot of the “scientific” work done for us.
I don’t see how the word of God can be impoverished (although exactly how the Bible is the word of God I don’t pretend to know) any more than flowers can be made any less beautiful or fragrant by the study of botany. There is a Zen saying, which I don’t know if I am quoting appropriately here, but as I understand it, it’s pertinent: “If you understand, things are such as they are. If you don’t understand, things are such as they are.” The Jesus Seminar can give their interpretations of the New Testament, but nothing they say changes it.
There is a comment that I run across now and then to the effect that Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. (Those are your only three choices!) I don’t buy that approach at all. (It’s basically apologetics by trick question.) It seems bizarre to me that a believer in Jesus would maintain that the actions and teachings of God Incarnate would have no intrinsic value even to nonbelievers. So I don’t believe the study of scripture by those who believe less than others, or those who don’t believe at all, does any harm to scripture.
David,
CS Lewis makes the apologetic claim you mention, I forget where.
My question is, in terms of the Bible, what constitutes “understanding?” A ten year old boy is analyzed differently by a child psychologist, a biologist, a football coach, a teacher, a parent. And actually I would suggest that the biologist’s understanding would likely be the most reductionist, the least humanistic.
One reason I would think that is that the biologist is scrupulously careful not to say too much. As a scientist he errs on the side of caution, not richness.
Kathy: “The biologist is scrupulously careful not to say too much. As a scientist he errs on the side of caution, not of richness.”
Jean: Sorry, but the neuro-psychologists (i.e., biologist) who analyzed our son’s condition saw the richness in our son better than the teacher, coach, priest–and even his parents, and his life has been better since science provided some insights about how to reach him.
So your analogy just doesn’t work for me.
Kathy (earlier): I have intellectual issues with the use of scientific methods in the humanities. First, I think that the method is too incisive for the subject matter. Secondly, in the academy the overthrow of plain meaning seems to often lead, paradoxically, to wild theories with no substantiation except someone else’s need to write an original dissertation. (Has the pendulum swung back on this yet, by the way?)
Jean: ??? “Wild theories with no substantiation” don’t derive from the scientific method of observation-hypothesize-test-repeat as necessary. A theory without substantiation isn’t a theory at all.
Kathy,
What constitutes understanding the Bible? That’s a difficult one! I do think prerequisites are a knowledge of the history, culture, and language of the time and place each part of the Bible was written. Fortunately for most of us, a lot of that knowledge is delivered to us in a package in the form of the English translation and the particular edition of the Bible we use.
I am not sure how well the analogy to the 10-year-old boy works. Each person you name will be analyzing a different facet of the boy that the others might or might not be interested in. Also, say the boy is showing signs of clinical depression. A child psychologist and a biologist may have conflicting theories of what the problem is, the former wanting to set up therapy sessions and the latter wanting to get the boy on antidepressant drugs.
In any case, I am probably more worried that in dealing with the Bible, there is a lot of erring on the side of richness rather than caution. I don’t know how many Christian denominations there are (Wikipedia says 38,000) all of whom consider the Bible authoritative, and yet they all disagree with each other!
David,
Don’t a lot of those denominations reduce the Bible to a “basic message?” That’s not richness. It’s a multitude of cautions.
Kathy,
I would say it is the richness of Genesis 2-3 that allows Catholics (and other Christians) to come up with one of its most fundamental doctrines, Original Sin, and to see numerous prophecies of the coming of Jesus throughout the Old Testament, while the Jews use the same scriptures and don’t believe in Original Sin or see prophecies about Jesus.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on all 38,000 denominations, but I do know that a great many Protestant lay people take the Bible much more seriously than the average lay Catholic, and I would bet most of those Protestants could give you Biblical reasons why they are not Catholics and explain away Catholic “proof texts” (“You are Peter. . .,” “Whose sins you shall forgive . . .,” and so on.) So I don’t think it is necessarily fair to other denominations to say they reduce the bible to a “basic message,” and even if many of them do, there are many who have well-developed interpretations of the Bible that are possible because the Bible is a treasure trove of sayings and stories that lend themselves to multiple interpretations.
Even within Catholicism, taking just one passage, the discussion of its meaning can go on and on, as with the discussion in the other thread about “good will toward men.” And then, of course, the Catholic Church also has Tradition, which can be used to assert such things as that the men and women referred to as the brothers and sisters of Jesus were not really his brothers and sisters. This is not (necessarily) to criticize the concept of Tradition, but it adds yet another dimension to the “richness” of the New Testament.
Kathy, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. (I realize we often lock horns, but I’m truly not trying to be offensive; simply trying to figure out where you’re coming from.)
Fundamentalists have reduced Scripture to a prescriptive document and bunch of rules basically dictated by God and to be interpreted literally. Is that what you mean by “basic message”? Then I agree.
What I don’t understand is how reducing Scripture to a “basic message” differs from what you call “plain meaning” above (i.e., “in the academy the overthrow of plain meaning seems to often lead, paradoxically, to wild theories”).
As far as I know, the Church applies the scientific method to any number of endeavors–the canonization of saints, the translation of Scripture, carbon dating of relics, etc. etc.
David
The Western Church has tended to follow St. Jerome in saying that the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus were his cousins. The Eastern Church has tended to follow the view of St. Epiphanius that they were the children of Joseph by a previous marriage. Remember that Joseph was legally the father of Jesus. Why identify the Western Church simply with the Catholic Church?
David,
A few examples of impoverishment:
-I don’t know how a highly congregationalist ecclesiology can be reconciled with Colossians and Ephesians
-I don’t know how an adoptionist can reconcile that doctrine with ANY gospel. Not just John, but perhaps most strikingly Mark, in which the demons are totally thrown into confusion by the Incarnation
-When a Christian denomination places its hopes primarily on the charisms, how can that even be reconciled with the texts that speak most clearly about charisms, since these same texts relativize the charisms’ importance?
-Some Christian denominations equate moral freedom with the forgiveness of sins, not with meritorious action or sanctity. But how can this moral minimalism account for the mysticism of 2 Corinthians or the very rigorous examination of conscience in the Letters to the Churches in Revelation?
I think that in order to read the Bible well, the manner of reading the Bible must take all of the Bible into consideration.
Contempation is an exercise in synthesis.
Haha. I meant “contemplation.”
David
I admit and should have noted that if Joseph is only legally and not biologically Jesus’ father, then the “brothers and sisters” are only legally half-brothers and half-sisters. But I imagine, if Epiphanius was right, that this is what the neighbors in Nazareth assumed.
David
I don’t think any contemporary Protestants hold the perpetual virginity of Mary. I think that the branches of the Easter Orthodox Churches do, including those in the U.S. Even in the Roman Church it is by no means, as far as I can find out, a settled thing. John Meier argues against it in A Marginal Jew, I, 327-332. That was published in 1991. As far as I know, Meier is still a priest in good standing in the Archdiocese of New York and a professor at Notre Dame. Benedict cites him in his book Jesus of Nazareth, and he and the CDF certainly know what is in A Marginal Jew.
Joseph,
Well, Meier is not actually declaring the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary to be false, but rather saying that given the criteria he has set up for drawing conclusions in this particular work, the weight of evidence is in favor of the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus being his actual siblings.
I note similarly that in The Birth of the Messiah (1993 updated edition), Raymond Brown says, “In my book on the virginal conception, written before I did this commentary, I came to the conclusion that the scientifically controllable biblical evidence leaves the question of the historicity of the virginal conception unresolved. The resurvey of the evidence necessitated by the commentary leaves me even more convinced of that” [emphasis in the original]. I will admit that I find it startling to read a statement like that in a major work of a major Catholic biblical scholar, but it certainly wouldn’t have been grounds for saying he could not be a priest or teacher in good standing in the Church. He is not actually denying the doctrine of the virginal conception.
Kathy,
I can see the possibility that the Bible might be “impoverished,” at least in the eyes of some, by historical-critical assertions that the infancy narratives are largely literary inventions, that the Sermon on the Mount never took place, and so on. But I don’t see how the fact that different denomonations make use of the Bible in different ways would detract from the Bible in any way. (Except, of course, one might argue that it’s difficult to understand how the Word of God could be so misinterpreted, misunderstood, and misused by so many people. And you don’t have to know who’s right and who’s wrong to know that when there are conflicting interpretations, somebody has to be wrong. If God intended to communicate what he “thought,” why couldn’t he have made it crystal clear?)
I think we have a contributor who is an adoptionist, and based on his previous informed and thoughtful posts, I am sure he could answer your question on that topic. Isn’t it anachronistic (or something) to talk about the demons in Mark reacting to the Incarnation? One of my favorite references (Dictionary of the Bible by John L. McKenzie, S. J.) doesn’t even include an entry for Incarnation.
David,
Did you try looking under “Virgin Birth” or “Hypostatic Union?”
Heh.
My point is that the Bible is an all-or-nothing proposition. It begs to be taken as a whole. Internally, it refers to itself again and again. And that’s where I’m convinced its depth lies, in being taken as a whole.
It seems likely to me that the denominations themselves arose from a particular kind of misunderstanding: the kind of misreading that would simply drop parts of the Scriptures from the canon, either officially or practically.
David
I would just say that it is one thing to say that the biblical evidence for virginal conception leaves the question open, another to say, as I believe Meier does, that the biblical evidence seems to contradict the doctrine of perpetual virginity. As far as I understand the matter, the virginal conception of Jesus is defined teaching and is found in the Nicene creed, the perpetual virginity of Mary is not. As Meier reads them, Tertullian and Hegesippus are witnesses against the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, which would at least tend to show that in the early church it was not universally believed.