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Note: these excerpt threads are
subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority
permits
Ivan Illich: "Medieval manuscripts were usually untitled. They came to be named after opening words, called their incipit. Popes still use the incipit in lieu of a title when they write an encyclical letter... When a medieval document is cited, one gives its incipit and its explicit, the last words. The mode of reference to a letter by its first and last line makes it sound more like a piece of music, whose first and last few notes identify it for the performer... Titles are labels. But an incipit is like a chord. Its choice permits the author to evoke the tradition into which he wants to place his work. By the subtle variation of a frequently repeated sentence he can state the purpose that prompts him to write. Hugh's incipit leaves no doubt that he places his book into a long didascalic tradition whose roots go back to Greek reflections on paideia, or the formation of the young and their introduction into full citizenship. This tradition was brought into Latin by Varro, a man Cicero called the most learned of Romans. Varro, librarian of Ceasar and Agustust, wrote, among other things, the first normative grammar of Latin... Varro was the first who defined learning as the search for wisdom, a phrase repeated by successive generations of writers on learned upbringing... Hugh's writings are drenched in Augustine. He lived in a community that followed Augustine's rule. He read, reread, and copied the texts of his master. Reading and writing were for him two almost indistinguishable sides of the same studium. How throughly Hugh's texts are compilations, interpretations, and rewordings of Augustine can best be seen in his work on the sacraments... As with Augustine, wisdom was for Hugh not something but someone. Wisdom in the Augustinian tradition is the second person of the Trinity... The wisdom Hugh seeks is Christ himself. Learning, and specifically reading, are both simply forms of a search for Christ the Remedy, Christ the Example and Form which fallen humanity, which has lost it, hopes to recover. The need of fallen humanity for reunion with wisdom is central to Hugh's thought..." [8-10] In the Vineyard of the Text "Agustine writes as a former pagan who cannot forget that he recently discovered Christ as a Person. Boethius is born in 480, exactly fifty years after the death of Augustine. He is the heir of a Christian tradition of several generations. As a Roman consul, he entered into the service of King Theodoric, the Ostrogoth invader. Accused of treason, he writes his De Consolatione while awaiting execution. Unlike the passionate newcomer Augustine, who sought to detach himself from the sages of this world, Boethius turns toward them. In Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Vergil he sees trailblazers who prepared the way for the coming of Christ... he became a major source on antiquity for medieval scholars who accepted the idea that classical philosophy, especially Stoicism, was a preaparatio evangelii, a preface to the Gospel. The philosphers taught that the goal of learning was wisdom as the perfect good, and Christians accept the revelation that this perfect good consists in the Word of God made Flesh... When we translate the incipit as of all things to be sought, the first is wisdom, it would be easy to get full approval from any first-year student of Latin. Prima is the first. But precisely this seeming transparency of the Latin word presents the difficulty encountered by anyone who attempts to English such a text... I translate prima with first I cannot but cause misunderstanding. For us today the first thing is that which comes at the beginning of a series or is closest at hand. We take the first of many steps when we start a book or a research project, suspecting that our endeavour will lead us on, perhaps beyond our present horizon. But the thought of an ultimate goal of all readings is not meaningful to us. Even less is there any idea that such a goal could motivate or cause our action whenever we open a book. We are steeped in the spirit of engineering and think of the trigger as the cause of a process. We do not think of the heart as the cause of the bullet's trajectory. We live after Newton. When we see a stone that is falling, we perceive it as being in the grip of gravity. We find it difficult to share the perception of a medieval scholar who sees the same phenomenon as caused by the stone's desire to approach the earth; this is the causa finalis, the final cause of this movement. Instead we perceive a force that is pushing the heavy body. The ancient desiderium naturae, which is a natural desire of the stone to come to rest as close as it can to the bosom of the earth, has become for us myth. Even more thoroughly, the idea of one first or primary Final Cause, one ultimate motivating reason of all desires that are hidden in the nature of the stone or the plant or the reader, has become foreign to our century. End stage in the tweentieth-century mental universe connotes death. Entropy is our ultimate destiny. We experience reality as moncausal. We know only efficeint causes. This is the reason why the translation of prima as the first is at once a perfect translation and a misleading interpretation..." [12-14] In the Vineyard of the Text "Hugh asks the reader to expose himself to the light emanating from the page, ut agnoscat seipsum, so that he may recognize himself, acknowledge his self. In the light of wisdom that brings the page to glow, the self of the reader will catch fire, and in its light the reader will recognize himself. Here again, Hugh quotes an auctoritas: the gnothi seauton, the maxim know thyself, which is first preserved in Xenophon, remains a standing epigram throughout antiquity and is widely quoted in the twelfth century. However, the mere fact that an authoratative key sentence is quoted and requoted unchanged over a millenium and more is no guarantee that its sense has remain unaltered. This is the reason why I am tempted to translate seipsum, when written by Hugh as thy Self rather than thyself. That which we mean today when in ordinary conversation we speak of the self or the individual, is one of the great discoveries of the twelfth century. Neither in the Greek nor in the Roman conceptual constellation was there a place into which it could have fitted. The student of the Greek Fathers or of Hellenistic philosophy is likely to be made painfully aware of the difference between their starting point and ours. Our difficulty in understanding them is largely due to the fact that they had no equivalent to our person... Hugh's work witness to the first appearance of this new mode of being. As an extremely sensitive person, he experiences the new mode of selfhood characteristic of his generation. As a reader who is well read in all the literature there is, he finds ways to interpret traditional auctoritates and mentalities in such a way that this new selfhood could express itself with them. He wants the reader to face the page so that by the light of wisdom he shall discover his self in the mirror of the parchment. In the page the reader will acknowledge himself not in the way others see him or by the titles or nicknames by which they call him, but by knowing himself by sight." [21-23] In the Vineyard of the Text "I am not suggesting that the modern self is born in the twelfth century, nor that the self which here emerges does not have a long ancestry. We today think of each other as people with frontiers. Our personalities are as detached from each other as are our bodies. Existence in an inner distance from the community, which the pilgrim who set out to Santiago or the pupil who studied the Didascalicon had to discover on their own, is for us a social reality, something so obvious that we would not think of wishing it away. We are born into a world of exiles... This existential frontier is of the essence for a person who wants to fit into our kind of a world. Once it has shaped a child's mental topology, that being will forever be a foreigner in all worlds except those integrated by exiles like himself. It is commonly argued that this frontier comes into existence in Hugh's time, as one aspect of the new meaning of person, persona, and its social recognition. For earlier medievals, person denotes office, function, role, variously derived from the word's origin in the Latin persona, a mask. For us it means the essential individual, conceived of as having a unique personality, physique, and psyche. In the person of still preserves the older sense by formulaic fossilization, as does parson - long held to be the legal persona who could sue and be sued in respect of a parish. What I want to stress here is a special correspondence between the emergence of selfhood understood as a person and the emergence of the text from the page. Hugh directs his reader to a foreign land. But he does not ask him to leave his family and accustomed landscape to move on the road from place to place toward Jerusalem or Santiago. Rather he demands that he exile himself to start on a pilgrimage that leads through the pages of a book. He speaks of the Ultimate which should attract the pilgrim, not as the celestial city for pilgrims of the staff, but as the form of Supreme Goodness which motivates the pilgrims of the pen. He points out that on this road the reader is on his way into the light which will reveal his own self to him..." [24-25] In the Vineyard of the Text "Hugh's recovery of the art of memory training, neglected since antiquity, has been recognized. The importance he gives to a trained memory as a prerequisite to reading has been noticed. But the fundamental development by Hugh of the memory matrix from an architectonic-static to a historic-relational model has rarely been commented on. Preliterate Greek speechmaking and epic singing were based not on visual memory but on the recollection of formulas uttered to the rhythm of a lyre. Before practice had demonstrated that the letters of the alphabet could bind winged words in a row and row of script, no one would have conceived of a storage room or wax tablet within the mind. This kind of memory and its artificial enhancement through memory training come into being in the transition from archaic to classical Greece... During the twelfth century the art of disciplined and cultivated recall went through a metamorphosis which can be compared to that which took place in the transition from preliterate to literate Greece. There is a patent analogy between the discovery of the word and syntax at the turn of the fifth century B.C., and the discovery of layout and index shortly before the foundation of the University in Europe. We sometimes forget that words are creatures of the alphabet. The Greek language originally had no word for a word, singly indentified. Greek had only various terms referring to the sounds and other signals or expressions: utterances could be articulated by the lips, the tongue, or the mouth, but also by the heart when it spoke to the friend, by the thymos (which we might call gall) which rose in Achilles and drove him into battle, or by the onrush of a wave of blood. Our kind of words, like the other syntactic parts of speech, acquired meaning only after they had been hatched under the alphabet during the first centuries of use. This is one first obvious reason why, before the fifth century, a string of words could not have been learned or retained. We can fix our mind on such units, and cull them from our mental dictionary, because we can spell them..." [38-39] In the Vineyard of the Text "The symbol of preliterate memory was the bard who stitched together the rags of the past... he was called rhapsode: stitcher. According to Plato, he was simply inspired to utter that to which the muse impelled him; not by rule of art, but by divine grace he sang... The god took away his mind to use him as his minister... Like a magnetic force the muse ties the listener to the chain of singers. The bard did not reflect on words, but was driven by the beat of his lyre. Homer was such a singer. But Homer sang in a unique epoch: in a world in which letters already existed, even though most of them were just scratches made by potters as dedications on commemorative vessels. But that was sufficient to let the utterance dawn on Greek eyes... this still innocent synergy between sound and the awareness of its shape was a distinctive type of creative composition which straight literacy, even in Greece, has never been able to recreate. The term rhetoric was coined for the new, non-oral skill by which a public speaker prepares within his own mind the sentences which he wants to utter in public on some later occassion. Plato clearly distinguished between the esoteric power of creative recall and exoteric script-bound skill of learning a written text by heart. As public speaking became a major art, the rhetor wanted to memorize not only sentences, but also the argumental structure and metaphors he would use to stress his point. The one most common method used by the Greeks to achieve this purpose was the mental construction of a memory palace... To become the student of a reputable teacher, the pupil had to prove that he was at home and at ease in some vast architecture that existed only in his mind, and within which he could move at an instant to the spot of choice. Each school had its own rules according to which this edifice had to be constructed... Early on it was found that the most effective way for locating and retrieving memories was that of randomly affixing to each one a mental label from a large set familiar to the student... Hugh's request that young beginners move with ease from one numbered spot to another on the same mental road, and that they jump from the station on one to any station on another, thus creating interconnections, introduces them in the simplest way possible to this traditional skill..." [40-42] In the Vineyard of the Text "Hugh not only revives the old art of memorization but radically transforms it by placing it at the service of historia. Reading is for him equivalent to the re-creation of the texture of historia in the ark of the reader's heart. His concept of science is 'based explicitly on the assumption that time is subject to an order that can be investigated through the literal study of Scripture.' Everything can make sense when it is related to this ordo of time; and nothing is meaningful that is not placed by the reader into this ordo. Hugh's moral spiritual Ark of Noah is more than a mnemotechnic palace with biblical features. The Ark stands for a social entity, a process that begins with creation and continues to the end of time, what Hugh calls the Church. The activity which Hugh calls reading mediates between the macrocosmic Church and the microcosmos of the reader's personal intimacy. Each person, each place, each thing within this spatiotemporal cosmos must first be literally understood. It then reveals itself as also something else: as sign for something to come in the future, and as accomplishment of some other thing that, by analogy, has pointed towards its coming... Exegesis implies three steps: first, literal reading by which the first, material sense of Holy Scripture is properly embedded in the soul's ark; second, allegorical interpretation; and third, personal recognition on the part of the reader that he too has his place within this order, and that this order is temporal... From his earliest writings, he shows irritation at people who press the breasts of Holy Scripture to extract its allegorical sense before they have solidly embedded all historical detail into their memory... Hugh elaborates the doctrine about the triple sense of the Bible in such a way that the act of reading becomes an act of worship at whose center stands the incarnation of wisdom..." [45-50] In the Vineyard of the Text "When Hugh reads, he harvests; he picks the berries from the lines. He knows that Pliny had already noted that the word pagina, page, can refer to rows of vines joined together. The lines on the page were the thread of a trellis which supports the vines. As he picks the fruit from the leaves of parchment, the voces paginarum drop from his mouth as subdued murmur, if they are meant for his own ears, or recto tono, if he addresses the community of monks... Not only did oral activities predominate in the act of reading, they also determined the task of the eyes. The root of the English word to read connotes to give advice, to make out, to peruse and interpret. The Latin legere comes from a physical activity. Legere connotes picking, bundling, harvesting, collecting. The Latin word for the branches and twigs that are collected is derived from legere. These sticks are called lignum, which contrasts with materia somewhat as firewood can be distinguished from timber. The German to read (lesen) still clearly conveys the idea of gathering beech sticks (the word for letter is equivalent to sticks of beechwood, reminding us of the runes used in magical incantations.) For Hugh, who uses Latin, the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood: his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables. The eyes are at the service of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, and the lips that do not usually utter single letters but words... Both for the classical rhetor or sophist and for the monk, reading engages the whole body. However, for the monk, reading is not one activity but a way of life..." [57-59] In the Vineyard of the Text "Hugh wants his student, by searching the three senses of scripture, to embody the sacred past of the whole world in his own present. He wants him to interpret the exodus of the Jews out of Egypt as a prefiguring of the way from Jerusalem to Golgotha, of the way Christians follow Jesus, applying the stories to himself: abandon his family for the monastery, which appears under the image of the desert. Unhoused, he finds his temporary home in the pages of the book. Thus, the meaning which is given to the studium legendi by Hugh and his age was shaped by Old Testament ideas. Further, the Benedictine Rule creates a framework in which symbolically the whole body is involved in lifelong reading. The individual monk might be a rudis - an unlettered servant or uncouth dullard. Even so, he attends the seven daily assemblies in the choir and, in front of the book, sings the Psalms. They have become part of his being, and like the most learned brother, he can mouth them while he watches goats. The process by which the written text of Scripture becomes part of each monk's biography is typically Jewish rather than Greek. Antiquity had no one book that could be swallowed. Neither Greeks nor Romans were people of a book. No one book was - or could be - at the center of the classical way of life, as it is for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For the first Christian millennium, memorization of this one book was performed by a process which stands in stark contrast to the building of memory palaces. The book was swallowed and digested through the careful attention paid to the psychomotor nerve impulses which accompany the sentences being learned. Even today, pupils in Koranic and Jewish schools sit on the floor with the book open on their knees. Each one chants his lines in a singsong, often dozen pupils simultanously, each a different line. While they read, their bodies sway from the hips up or their trunks gently rock back and forth. The swinging and recitation continue as if the student is in a trance, even when he moves his eyes or looks down the aisle of the mosque. The body movements re-evoke those of the speech organs that have been associated with them. In a ritual manner these students use their bodies to embody the lines. Marcel Jousse has studied these pyschomoter techniques of fixing a spoken sequence in the flesh. He has shown that for many people, remembrance means the triggering of a well-established sequence of muscular patterns to which the utterances are tied. When the child is rocked during a cradle song, when the reapers bow to the rhythm of a harvest song, when the rabbi shakes his head while he prays or searches for the right answer, or when the proverb comes to mind only upon tapping for a while - according to Jousse, these are just a few examples of a widepsread linkage of utterance and gesture. Each culture has given its own form to this bilateral, dissymmetric complementarity by which sayings are graven right and left, forward and backward into trunk and limbs, rather than just into the ear and eye. Monastic existence can be viewed as a carefully patterned framework for the practices of such techniques." [60-61] In the Vineyard of the Text "Hugh's pupils were the last of their kind, the last medieval Latinists for whom reading, writing, and Latin were all part of the same thing. Within their own lifetime Latin became one among other languages. The next generation of students composed vernacular poetry alongside Latin verses. It discovered that Roman lettershapes could register vernacular speech. For Hugh's pupils the shape of the Roman letters still had a Latin voice. By its Roman letters Latin was visibly one of the three holy languages, next to Hebrew and Greek. What people spoke was sermo, experienced as something as different from the use of language, lingua, as with us singing or dancing is something different in kind from speech. Latin was sound and letters in one; and it kept not only letters but theory captive. The speculative grammarians of the mid-twelfth century remain prisoners of Latin. What they call modal logic is an ontological interpretation of grammatical categories defined by Cicero's contemporaries. Hugh's pupils did not learn Latin as a second, dead, or learned language. They entered into Latin as an integral part of the monastic way of life. Religious conversio as the commitment to monastery life was then called led into Latin, letters, lifelong rootedness, and the complex ritual of prayer as just different facets of monastic obedience. The dialects spoken in the novice's home were almost never written. Nor were they conceived yet as a mother tongue. This was as true for the peasant as for the knight. The alphabet did not yet throw a shadow on everyday speech. There was no way of analysing the vernacular in syllables or words. Stories told in Romance or Germanic tongues still followed the rules of oral societies, flowed by like water, even though the age of epic poetry had long past, and chroniclers sometimes recorded these tales - usually in Latin. The time for the concept of language as a generic term, allowing a comparison of two kinds - vernacular and Latin - had not yet arrived..." [66-67] In the Vineyard of the Text "From the day of his entry the child sat with the other novices at the feet of the monks. Seven times each day the community gathered for prayer, the opus Dei - God's work. Each week all the 150 Psalms of David had to be recited at least once. Soon the young man would know them by heart. The recitation of the Psalms was interrupted by antiphons and responsories, but these could be easily learned. Within a few weeks the child would associate the rustling of cloaks at the end of each prayer with the rising of the monks and the gloria Patri. The rhythmic repitition of the gesture of rising and bowing and its coincidence with a small canon of short formulas was easily associated with pious feelings and habits even before the novice was able to spell out the literal meaning of the Latin words. Deo gratias - thanks be to God - is felt as a response of relief at the end of a long Bible reading which takes place in the middle of the night. So also, in the refectory at noontime, it is the anxiously awaited sign that mealtime prayers are over and dinner may begin. Most of the Latin the pupil heard in the cloister was not conversationally modulated speech. Rather, it was a series of stylized invitations and responses, intoned according to the strict rules of plainsong. Recitation differs from speech as much as the sound of dictation differes from that of an ordinary conversation. Prayers and lessons, lectures and calendar information were recited, not told. Latin was the articulation of song as much as of letters. There are many theories on the origins of plainsong, and its roots in the synagogue. On one point, however, all authorities are agreed: it exhibits pecularities which can be detected in no other kind of music whatever, peculiarities so marked that they can scarcely fail to attract the attention of the most superficial hearer, and so constant that we find no difficulty in tracing them through every successive stage of development through which plainsong has passed from the third to the nineteenth century. One of its characteristics is its tie to Church Latin, which remained to his day as tight as the tie of Roman letters to Latin in Hugh's youth. The simplest portion of plainsong were the so-called accents to be used in reading... Public reading of the twelfth century strikes the twentieth-century ear as a strange kind of song. Strict rules were given for the distinctive accent to be used for different kinds of books: the literally mono-tonous cantus lectionis for the glosses; the tonus prophetiae, epistolae, evangelii by which anyone without understanding a word, would know that the Old Testament, St. Paul, or the Gospel, respectively, was being read. The more solemn parts of the liturgy had and still have their distinguishing musical characteristics corresponding to the season in which they are read. Latin of the time was the product of the choir as much as the scriptorium..." [66-69] In the Vineyard of the Text "Before Hugh's generation, the book is a record of the author's speech or dictation. After Hugh, increasingly it becomes a repertory of the author's thought, a screen onto which one projects still unvoiced intentions. As a young man, Hugh was introduced to monastic reading. He listened when he read it to himself, when he chanted the responses in choir, when he attended a lecture in the chapter room. Hugh wrote a treatise on the art of reading for people who would listen to the sound of the lines. But he composed his book at the end of an epoch; those who actually used the Didasclicon during the next four centuries no longer read with tongue and ear. They were trained in new ways: the shapes on the pages for them became less triggers for sound patterns than visual symbols of concepts. They were literate in a scholastic rather than monastic way. They no longer approached the book as a vineyard, a garden, or the landscape for an adventuresome pilgramage. The book connoted for them much more the treasury, the mine, the storage room - the scrutable text. In Hugh's generation the book is like a corridor with the incipit as its main entrance. If anyone thumbs through it hoping to find a certain passage, there exists little more chance of happening upon it than if the book had been opened randomly. But after Hugh the book can be entered randomly, with a good chance of finding what one looks for. It is still a manuscript, not a printed book, but technically it is already a substantially different object. The flow of narration has been sliced up into paragraphs whose sum total now makes up the new book. What this meant can be illustrated by an experience known to most of us today. Until the late 1970's, musical records could be replayed but there was no sure and easy way of access to a specific passage. By the late 1980s not only elapsed-time counters, but also index numbers to identify movements, operatic scenes, and so on, had become standard features on audio players, enabling random access. In a similar way, the book for the monastic reader was a discourse which you could follow, but into which you could not easily dip at a point of your choosing. Only after Hugh does easy access to a specific place become a standard procedure... During Hugh's lifetime, editing starts; legal decrees are ordered and collected; all known commentaries of Church Fathers on the Bible, verse by verse, are assembled... Tradition is cannibalized and compiled according to the new editors' whim. But Hugh is not one of them..." [95-96] In the Vineyard of the Text "The book, in an age of growing urban wealth, becomes an object of private ownership: its miniature paintings enhance the status of one's own wealth. But this privatization of the book as a physical entity could not have happened without a further set of technological breakthroughs. The Bible as one single bulky object was unknown in the twelfth century: it was still, at it had always been, a collection of seperate tomes... the tomes were of different size, written for different usages, and assembled only occassionally as the canonical collection of sacred books. The Gospel lay on the ambon to the north of the celebrant so that the deacon would face the region of darkness and cold and paganism when reading it, and the Epistle on the opposite side, to be read by the lector. Thus, as a matter of course, these were seperate volumes. The Psalter was open on a lectern in the middle of the choir. The Pentateuch was usually under seperate covers from the Prophets..." [111-112] In the Vineyard of the Text "All nature is pregant with sense, and nothing in all of the universe is sterile. In this sentence, Hugh brings centuries of Christian metaphor to their full maturity. In the lines of the page, the reader enlightened by God encounters creatures who wait there to give birth to meaning. This ontological status of the book yields the key to an understanding of Christian monasticism as a life of reading. The reason why the studium legendi is an effective and infallible search for wisdom is founded in the fact that all things are impregnated with sense, and this sense only waits to be brought to light by the reader. Nature is not just like a book; nature itself is a book, and the man-made book is its analogue. Reading the man-made book is an act of midwifery. Reading, far from being an act of abstraction, is an act of incarnation. Reading is a somatic, bodily act of birth attendance witnessing the sense brought forth by all things encountered by the pilgrim through the pages..." [123] In the Vineyard of the Text |