Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading by Eugene Peterson
Author:Eugene Peterson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9781444717631
Published: 2011-10-26T23:00:00+00:00
Meditatio
Plato, writing at the moment when a primarily oral culture was giving way to writing, made the astute observation that writing was going to debilitate memory. Ivan Illich characterizes him as “the first uneasy man of letters,” for Plato observed how his students’ reliance on silent, passive texts narrowed the stream of their remembrance, making it shallow and dull.7 When words were primarily exchanged by means of voices and ears, language was living and kept alive in acts of speaking and listening. But the moment that words were written, memory was bound to atrophy — we would no longer have to remember what was said; we could look it up in a book. Books rob us of the right and pleasure of answering back. He made his observation by telling a story that we can now “look up” in his book, Phaedrus.8
Here’s the story. In Egypt there was a god by the name of Thoth. He was the inventor of many things, but his proudest invention was the letters that make writing possible. One day he was more or less showing off, bragging of his accomplishment before King Thamus, telling him that this would make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories. King Thamus would have none of it. He said that it would ruin their memories, that it would have much more to do with forgetting than remembering, that they would have the show of words without the reality. Plato has Socrates comment on the story by comparing writing to painting. The figures in the landscape of the painter have “an attitude of life and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” Similarly, with writing, “put a question and they give the same unvarying answer.” Once the words have been “written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.” Socrates, who, like Jesus, never wrote anything, prefers a “living word which has a soul . . . graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.”
Northrop Frye summarizes Plato’s concern this way: “The ability to record has a lot more to do with forgetting than with remembering: with keeping the past in the past, instead of continuously recreating it in the present.”9
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