TEORIA DEL CONOCIMIENTO

In the first part of this chapter, we repeated the common claim that we live in a culture caught in the transition from modern to postmodern. Second, we claimed that with this transition has come a renewed appreciation for the role imagination plays in discerning how to interpret not only texts, but also the reality these texts point us towards, which has significance for preaching today. In this third part of the chapter, it is our task to think about recent changes in communication and how they bear upon the preacher. This section will focus primarily on the work of Walter Ong, who argues that the

(Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2003),96-98. Webster’s point is a good caution, though his critique of Green over states our ability to be as precise when thinking about the imagination. Indeed, his same critique can be raised by reason. Webster seems to resist Green’s attempt to take seriously the role the imagination plays with Word and Spirit in constructing the meaning of faithfulness.

Western world has undergone a significant shift in communication and that our current cultural moment is recovering the communication patterns of orality. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong traces three main periods in the history of communication.55 _{We will briefly introduce his argument and listen to his critics with} the goal of better understanding the way our shifting culture can both communicate and receive descriptions of reality. The recovery of orality identified by Ong leads us into the heart of the challenge and opportunity of postmodernity for the Christian preacher.

a. Primary Orality

Ong begins his communication typology by suggesting that primary orality occurred among people who were not writers and whose communion was given primarily through spoken and heard words. In this era, words were “sounds” from within a person’s “interior consciousness,” and these sounded-out words were eventsin themselves. Hence, the Hebrew word dabar means both “word” and “event.” The ear was primary to communication because only sound mattered. There was no backup for memory if people failed to hear and remember what was heard. If people could not speak or remember what they heard, the result was a failure of communication.

Printing would later aid and abet memory by preserving words on paper and in dictionaries. Prior to such help, people possessed a small vocabulary and used words carefully so that truths could be remembered. To recall something important, speakers had to “think memorable thoughts.” Many techniques were developed to help people remember, such as mnemonics, linguistic rhythms, and phrase repetitions, but the most obvious and far-reaching technique was the use of story. The “stitching together” of stories, as Ong calls it, was a fundamental way of ensuring that truths were passed on from generation to generation. Because primary orality required speakers and listeners to be physically present, the telling of stories was inevitably also responsible for nurturing community experience and identity.

55 _{Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982). It is worth noting} that while Ong’s historical typology may be overly simplistic, ignoring the complexity of human experience in history, it is still a helpful foil for us to consider in the attempt to understand our own cultural moment. I am seeking only to make modest claims using Ong’s thought as a helpful guide.

Ong prefers to call these primitive societies oral-aural rather than illiterate because he refuses to concede that the lack of widespread reading skills is a disadvantage. Oral-aural cultures, or cultures of primary orality, have strong social bonds precisely because their interactions are connected by the immediacy of sound rather than being mediated in print. Cultures governed by primary orality are incapable of ornate syntax and abstraction, but they are rich with a communication culture marked by personal interaction.56 _{Indeed, without artificial amplification, we need to be fairly close to each} other in order to hear each other speak. In contrast, the emergence of cultures of literacy meant that over time much of communication became less dependent on interpersonal interaction. In short, such communication was not interactive but isolated.57 _Ong admits that the submissive character of listening tends to lead oral societies toward authoritarian forms of social institutions. Every organization of the “sensorium” has its limitations, but Ong insists on using primitive societies as a standard for all others.58 This is because he believes that listening honors human dignity in a way that seeing, which objectifies and fragments, does not.

By giving primacy to the story of how oral culture was supplanted by writing, Ong opens our eyes to consider a different way of understanding human history – through changes in communication rather than political transitions. Ong helpfully outlines some

characteristic differences between oral and written cultures and gives a detailed analysis of the psycho-dynamics of oral culture.59 _{He also calls us to an understanding of sound} that forms our relationship and response to the viva vox Dei.

56 _{Ibid., 119. “Writing served largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world, as in medieval} university disputations, in the reading of literary and other texts to groups, and in reading aloud even when reading to oneself. At least as late as the twelfth century in England, checking even written financial accounts was still done aurally, by having them read aloud (hence our word audit).”

57 _{For example, in his Confessions, Augustine notes one of his most important experiences in his early days} in Milan was the discovery of a new method of reading. He had been taught to read in a way that maximally engaged the body and senses: reading aloud, seeing and hearing words, simultaneously moving the lips and projecting the words with one’s breath—an expressive art of tone and emphasis. So he was astonished as a young man, new to the sophisticated imperial capital of Milan, to witness Bishop Ambrose reading silently: "When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” In Augustine’s time, reading aloud was a public practice, conducted in a company of people, so that those who were illiterate could benefit. But Ambrose read both in silence and in private, observed but not heard, his thoughts about what he was reading unspoken, inaccessible to others. See, Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1991), 92.

58 _{Ong uses the term “sensorium” to denote the way socialization involves building patterns of relationship} among the senses. He assumes that the organizational structure of the senses that results from

socialization can never be democratic or egalitarian. One sense always rules the others. Consequently, cultures, or movements in history, can be compared according to the senses they privilege. He argues that cultures specialize in one of the senses because a hierarchical organization of our perceptual skills makes the act of knowing more productive.

It is important for preachers to be aware of aural-orality’s significant role in Jesus’ ministry and in much of Scripture itself. Jesus did not write a book, and most of what is written down in the Bible was most likely first spoken aloud for a listening audience. Of course, there were written manuscripts, especially those that compose what is now referred to by Christians as the Old Testament, which were crucial for understanding how Jesus fulfilled his own ministry. Jesus began his public ministry by unrolling the “scroll” and reading it aloud (Luke 4:17). However, Jesus’ own preaching ministry was oral and had the characteristics of primary orality as described by Ong. Jesus revealed and communicated memorable images and lessons through the techniques of a primarily oral culture. At the center of Jesus’ discipling were sounded-out words that created a community of the ear. From the first, Christianity was profoundly oral.60 Writing of similar dynamics, Walker argues that primary orality was profoundly

significant for the birth of the Christian faith because oral culture created the most stable of human societies and was the most conducive for the creation of community. The reliance on voice for communication encouraged immediacy in communication, and resulted in a cohesion of techniques, especially the use of story, that enabled people to recall and pass on the testimony of Jesus Christ. Walker wonders what would have happened to the gospel in other communication cultures, writing:

If the gospel had come into existence in an electronic culture, it is difficult to see how it could have survived intact. Its texuality –for we must assume that the gospel events would have been written down – would have been subject to the manipulation and infinite maneuverability of word processing.61

Film would have allowed even more distortion of gospel truth, as “film can be

manipulated by script, camera and editor. This pales into insignificance, however, with the advent of digital recording and the new special effects this makes possible.”62 _For

60 _{See also Pierre Babin, The New Era in Religious Communication (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 19. Babin} emphasizes the importance of communal life as the Christian faith was learned through what he calls “immersion.” Immersion, which was representative of life until the fifteenth century, was characterized by “the preeminence of communal life, by liturgy and practice, by stories and images, and by the sacred part played by the person teaching.” Hearers were drawn into a deep belonging where there “was no gap…between the sacred and the profane. The whole of life was bathed in a religious climate.” (21) It was a learning experience in which to understand was to participate.

61 _{Walker, Telling the Story, 94.} 62 _Ibid.

Walker, all of this adds up to show “just how crucial oral culture was for establishing the gospel.”63

Building further on these ideas, one could argue that the idea that we are present to each other in sound helps us to understand God’s relationship to us. For Ong, hearing connects us with another person in an immediate and inward way while paradoxically preserving some distance between us. The sense of hearing, then, can point to the way God is simultaneously with us and beyond us. Put another way, the voice of God reveals God’s innermost purpose without exposing God to our objectifying gaze. Sound is the medium that best carries a revelatory message because it delivers something external without putting us in control of its source. Of course, hearing is not always so benign. Hearing can be used for spying and eavesdropping, activities that aim at mastery and control. Listening, in its theological guise, needs to be learned. It is a moral skill, related to the virtue of patience. For Ong, the sacramental theology of his Roman Catholic faith is instructive for practicing the faithful habits of intimate and loving hearing. We are enabled to listen to each other only if we learn to listen to God. Thus, the spoken word elevates our merely physical presence to each other into something deeply spiritual. Ong’s perspective could be summed up in the Pauline phrase that faith comes through hearing (Fides ex auditu; Rom 10:17).

b. Writing and Print

According to Ong, a second era of communication was initiated by the writing down of the phonetic alphabet into words that could be read. In contrast to oral speech, which welled up from unconsciousness, writing involved artificial “context-free language.” Communication was now possible through the eye and not the ear. Though this process took centuries and began with primitive symbols, it evolved into more complex and diverse languages that could be written down. The point Ong wants to press is that this communication practice, because it could happen without sound, was a paradigm shift. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1450s had a profound influence on human culture because, for the first time, individuals expressed themselves on paper for mass distribution. No longer was the story read through stained glass windows by the

masses; rather, the words of the Bible could be located on a page. Writing became indispensable. Words became precise “things” that could be recorded in indexes, dictionaries, and lists, and science became possible through exact verbalization. The eye was now primary instead of the ear. No physical relationship was necessary between speakers and hearers; individual readers picked up and put down words on paper within their private worlds. Community was no longer essential. Though stories remained vital to communication, they were no longer necessary for the practice of memorization. The process of secularization in the West has persuaded most people that any belief in the transformative power of oral speech is only a vestige of magic from the past. Ong helps us understand how the secularization that occurred during modernity, when the print-literary culture was at its peak, is also the byproduct of a certain loss of hearing. In a culture of print-literacy we are in danger of forgetting how to hear with full

significance. Ong is eloquent on this point, even as he overstates the connection between the decline of orality and the rise of modern secularism:

Man is religious when the sensorium has a certain type of organization, and when it changes, he is no longer so. Religion has to do somehow with the invisible, and when the earlier oral-aural world, with its concentration on voice and sound finally yields to the more markedly visual world incident to script and print, one may be tempted to argue religion must go.64

What happens with a change of communication culture is a change in the way we think. Ong contrasts the right-brain thinking of aural-orality with the left-brain cerebral

thinking associated with writing and print. With print, doctrinal catechesis could have a logical order and could be memorized from texts with greatly extended vocabularies. Ong makes the judgment that this led to a “more cerebral form of faith…but one day we woke up to the fact that, for the majority of people, the living reality of faith had fled.”65 To connect this with preaching, preachers in a print-literary world have their tacit

consciousness fashioned by the linear message of print. Print affects how preachers understand reason, discern truth, and attempt to communicate. Ong writes:

64 _{Walter Ong, Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 9-10.} 65 _{Ibid., 99.}

Without writing the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.66

Through writing, the mind learns to think in linear patterns. This new mental mode of thinking fostered by the alphabet changed the ways humans, and in turn preachers, think and relate to the world. This may be why those centuries marked by phonetic literacy have favored the chain of inference as the mark of logic and rationality. Likewise, sermons composed in the print-literary era of communication have favored linear and rational forms of thought. This is still in evidence today, although, if Ong’s argument is correct, our culture has moved into a third communication era.

c. Secondary Orality

The third communication era identified by Ong, secondary orality, is marked by the advent of the electronics revolution. Ong argues that “the electronic transformation of verbal expression has both deepened the commitment of the word to space initiated by writing and intensified by print and has brought consciousness to a new age of secondary orality.”67 _{Comparing secondary orality with primary orality, Ong stresses that secondary} orality is “both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality.”68 _{He further} explains:

Like primary orality, secondary orality has generated a strong sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primary oral culture – McLuhan’s “global village.” We are group minded self-consciously and programmatically.69

The electronics revolution has opened up new possibilities for group listening and preaching, where head and heart, word and image can merge into one experience. Secondary orality has brought a new way of learning, combining both the right brain and

66 _{Ong, Orality and Literacy, 28.} 67 _Ibid.,135.

68 _{Ibid., 136} 69 _Ibid.

the left brain. The differences between the three communication eras suggested by Ong may be summarized as in the table below.

Primary Orality Writing and Print Secondary Orality

Before writing but also affect- Alphabetic letterpress Since 1985

ing a majority of the population Invention of print (1450s) Electronic revolution

before print

Aural/oral way of thinking Literate way of thinking New ways of thinking

Ear – thought relates to sound Eye – thought relates to sight Ear and eye: thought

relates to sight and sound

Mono – right brain Mono- left brain Stereo – right and left

brain, image, beat, and visualization

Story – memorable, mnemonics, Ideas – conceptual, abstract Narrative, story and

Rhythms, repetitions Analytic, explanation, linear, ideas, symbolic,

one way image, experiential,

modulation, participation intuitive, holistic, two-way

Language – mobile, warm, Language – inhuman, passive, Language – new self-

personally interactive unresponsive consciously informal

style

Community-group minded Individually- private world Community-self-

because no alternative of print conscious global

village, spectacle _______________________________________________________________________

Table 2. Characteristics of Ong’s Three Areas of Communication

It is particularly important to notice the reemergence of narrative in the era of secondary orality. This classical method of acquiring knowledge was eclipsed in the West with the rise of modernity in the seventeenth century. This was significant for preachers because it meant that the work of interpreting Scripture was dedicated to identifying the ideas that could appeal to reason through ordered proposition. Rather than trusting the Biblical story itself, the preacher had to find the ideas behind the story. As Hans Frei comments in The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative:

In the course of the eighteenth century it [interpretation] came to signify not so much a literary depiction that was literal, metaphorical, allegorical, or symbolic, but rather the single meaning of a grammatically and logically sound propositional statement. 70

Frei argues that during modernity, story was often considered an inferior way of knowing, but postmodernity has led to the recovery of the importance of story. Kevin