God must be sung to be known.
Once, reading was communal, Christians listened to Gospel reading almost as part of an aesthetic experience, one which attuned the listener into a specific way of being, liturgically shaping disciples into a certain type of people.
After the printing press, Christians began to read silently, inside their head, and began to conceive of knowledge as affirming propositional beliefs to a closed off inner self.
There are things that only certain types of people can know.
This was the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.
For example, the content of a song may have lyrics about going to sleep, but if the form is musically rock & role and not a lullaby, you will not sleep. Likewise if the content of a Church service is about Jesus, but in the form of a rock concert, you will be “formed” into a way of being consonant with rock & role.
In Eastern Orthodox Christianity there is certainly an oral communal doxological epistemology.
Christian Roy HERE uses the insights of Marshall McLuhan to note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar and the spatial gutenburg galaxy of visual print perception that favors individual rational interpretations of the Bible, as opposed to oral, audio communal doxological epistemology through time :
“I don’t think concepts have any relevance in religion,” Marshell McLuhan wrote.
“Analogy is not a concept. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the Divine Logos.”
His son Eric McLuhan :
To a Catholic, faith is not simply an act of the mind, that is a matter of ideology or thought (concepts) or belief or trust, though it is usually mistaken for these things.
Faith is a mode of perception, a sense like sight or hearing or touch and as real and actual as these, but a spiritual rather than a bodily sense."
(The Protestants, he found in his research, had decided to regard faith in terms of ideas and concepts. Their decision meant that they had, in terms of the trivium, hitched their fortunes to dialectic, and abandoned the old alliance of rhetoric and grammar to which the Church still resolutely adhered.)
Elsewhere Roy put it this way :
"Literacy becomes a substitute for common sense, the "communis sensus" of analogically resonant audile-tactile experience acquired through whole-body practice rather than bookish rote or purely mental ratiocination, with manufactured spectacular emotionalism thrown into the mix to add some punch to mass mobilization over homogenized spaces when required for sectarian, administrative, military and/or industrial purposes."
John Vervaeke also speaks of this HERE :
"So Christianity splits between an Eastern Orthodox and what’s going to be called a Catholic version of Christianity. This of course weakens Christianity. It also has an impact on it: by separating itself from the East, Christianity loses some of the connection that leads to Christianity in the West, [in] Western Europe. Christianity loses some of its deeper connections to that Neoplatonic mystical theology.”
That starts to have an impact! The West starts to become less and less Platonic and more and more Aristotelian. Now as always, this starts what a change in Psycho-Technology.
What’s happening is there’s a shift in reading - how people read! And it’s after the schism. (*Krantz, Corbin, Chatham*)
So before that, and this is something I can speak to from first person, before that reading is done, largely aloud; people read aloud! They read the Bible, for example, because that’s mostly the only thing that can be read! And some of the church fathers, people like Augustine for example, they read aloud. Reading is often done communally.
First of all, you’re embedded in a cultural context, you’re embedded in a sapiential community. You read aloud, and more than you read aloud, you’re reciting….
But when somebody is singing a song, singing a poem - and most songs are poems if you think about it - it is appealing to you! Not just propositionally - it's not just that kind of knowing; its not just try-ing to create beliefs in you! First of all, by reciting the poem, you… and trying to communicate it to others, you have to bring in all your know-how of communication, being able to share with other people.
You have to… all your ways of paying attention [are] much more embodied. There's a Perspectival stuff: What does it feel like? What is it like to be here, in this space, in this context with these people uttering these words? And with that, it has the potential to be Participatory because people are like, “these are poems that have changed [me]!”. [They] have made a difference to their identity. They know these poems, not the way you know the words on the back of your cereal box, they know these poems because of the way in which they have been changed by them; their very sense of identity has been altered by [them].
See, so when people were reading then, they're reading the Bible, they're reciting it. They're reciting it communally. They're also doing something [else] - and I do this practice now and other people do - It's called Lectio Divina as the book “Sacred Reading” is shown on screen). It's a way of reading a text in which you are not speaking]…
The point is not to have the propositions and to speak. It is to let the text, as much as possible, speak to you! It is to engage with the text in a meditative, mindful fashion, opening yourself up to the possibility of it transforming you. It is much more like going to listen to a piece of music and having prepared yourself, prepared [your] receptivity to have a profound aesthetic experience. It's analogous to that.
You're reading and you're reciting in such a way that you're trying to open yourself up to this text speaking to you. People that are religious will often talk about this as if God is present in the text and speaking to them through the text.
This is how people were reading. It’s a form of reading that is ontologically remedial; it's designed to heal you transform you. It's designed to trigger, activate and educate your procedural, Perspectival and Participatory knowing, not just give you propositions. It's about helping you, in your reading, [to] remember the Being mode and not just Have beliefs and propositions.
And what that really means is a shift to giving exclusive priority to definitions….
So people now start to read silently to themselves and what they're trying [to do], what they give priority to, is coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves in the world.
So what matters is how the various symbols - and I don't mean that in a spiritual sense - the various propositional terms and logical connectives fit together coherently. So, a new model for thought emerges. See the old model was “thought is a conforming to the world”, and then we get this articulated and developed and expanded into this whole process of Gnosis and Anagoge and self-transformation, that model of knowing that's also a way of Being, that's also a way of Becoming.
That's being taken away and it's being replaced by a different model. Thought, knowing, is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have a coherent set of propositions in your head. So Kranz talks about, “we shift from the extensive self, the self that is trans-projectively connected to the world, that understands itself in terms of its conformity to the world, to an intensive self”.
This is a self that's inside my head. It's inside my beliefs. My ‘self’ is primarily the way I talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositional language. So people start to think that the primary way in which we know things is to get as much coherence within our inner language, than instead of conformity in our outer existential modes.
Now, why would people make this shift? People make this shift because the world is starting to open up again. People are starting to get interested in Knowing the world scientifically. We're getting it… And it's gonna… it's just slowly beginning here! But we're going to get the move towards the value of having cl[ear] - and by the way, I believe in this value! I'm a scientist, right?! - the value of logically coherent, well organised propositional theories. The power of this is being discovered. So when I can read in this other way, I can empower my argumentative skills tremendously.
What I'm losing is I'm losing reading as a psycho-technology of psycho-spiritual, existential transformation. Reading is now becoming the consumption of propositions and their structuring in logical coherency.”
"Literacy becomes a substitute for common sense, the "communis sensus" of analogically resonant audile-tactile experience acquired through whole-body practice rather than bookish rote or purely mental ratiocination, with manufactured spectacular emotionalism thrown into the mix to add some punch to mass mobilization over homogenized spaces when required for sectarian, administrative, military and/or industrial purposes."
John Vervaeke also speaks of this HERE :
"So Christianity splits between an Eastern Orthodox and what’s going to be called a Catholic version of Christianity. This of course weakens Christianity. It also has an impact on it: by separating itself from the East, Christianity loses some of the connection that leads to Christianity in the West, [in] Western Europe. Christianity loses some of its deeper connections to that Neoplatonic mystical theology.”
That starts to have an impact! The West starts to become less and less Platonic and more and more Aristotelian. Now as always, this starts what a change in Psycho-Technology.
What’s happening is there’s a shift in reading - how people read! And it’s after the schism. (*Krantz, Corbin, Chatham*)
So before that, and this is something I can speak to from first person, before that reading is done, largely aloud; people read aloud! They read the Bible, for example, because that’s mostly the only thing that can be read! And some of the church fathers, people like Augustine for example, they read aloud. Reading is often done communally.
First of all, you’re embedded in a cultural context, you’re embedded in a sapiential community. You read aloud, and more than you read aloud, you’re reciting….
But when somebody is singing a song, singing a poem - and most songs are poems if you think about it - it is appealing to you! Not just propositionally - it's not just that kind of knowing; its not just try-ing to create beliefs in you! First of all, by reciting the poem, you… and trying to communicate it to others, you have to bring in all your know-how of communication, being able to share with other people.
You have to… all your ways of paying attention [are] much more embodied. There's a Perspectival stuff: What does it feel like? What is it like to be here, in this space, in this context with these people uttering these words? And with that, it has the potential to be Participatory because people are like, “these are poems that have changed [me]!”. [They] have made a difference to their identity. They know these poems, not the way you know the words on the back of your cereal box, they know these poems because of the way in which they have been changed by them; their very sense of identity has been altered by [them].
See, so when people were reading then, they're reading the Bible, they're reciting it. They're reciting it communally. They're also doing something [else] - and I do this practice now and other people do - It's called Lectio Divina as the book “Sacred Reading” is shown on screen). It's a way of reading a text in which you are not speaking]…
The point is not to have the propositions and to speak. It is to let the text, as much as possible, speak to you! It is to engage with the text in a meditative, mindful fashion, opening yourself up to the possibility of it transforming you. It is much more like going to listen to a piece of music and having prepared yourself, prepared [your] receptivity to have a profound aesthetic experience. It's analogous to that.
You're reading and you're reciting in such a way that you're trying to open yourself up to this text speaking to you. People that are religious will often talk about this as if God is present in the text and speaking to them through the text.
This is how people were reading. It’s a form of reading that is ontologically remedial; it's designed to heal you transform you. It's designed to trigger, activate and educate your procedural, Perspectival and Participatory knowing, not just give you propositions. It's about helping you, in your reading, [to] remember the Being mode and not just Have beliefs and propositions.
And what that really means is a shift to giving exclusive priority to definitions….
So people now start to read silently to themselves and what they're trying [to do], what they give priority to, is coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves in the world.
So what matters is how the various symbols - and I don't mean that in a spiritual sense - the various propositional terms and logical connectives fit together coherently. So, a new model for thought emerges. See the old model was “thought is a conforming to the world”, and then we get this articulated and developed and expanded into this whole process of Gnosis and Anagoge and self-transformation, that model of knowing that's also a way of Being, that's also a way of Becoming.
That's being taken away and it's being replaced by a different model. Thought, knowing, is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have a coherent set of propositions in your head. So Kranz talks about, “we shift from the extensive self, the self that is trans-projectively connected to the world, that understands itself in terms of its conformity to the world, to an intensive self”.
This is a self that's inside my head. It's inside my beliefs. My ‘self’ is primarily the way I talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositional language. So people start to think that the primary way in which we know things is to get as much coherence within our inner language, than instead of conformity in our outer existential modes.
Now, why would people make this shift? People make this shift because the world is starting to open up again. People are starting to get interested in Knowing the world scientifically. We're getting it… And it's gonna… it's just slowly beginning here! But we're going to get the move towards the value of having cl[ear] - and by the way, I believe in this value! I'm a scientist, right?! - the value of logically coherent, well organised propositional theories. The power of this is being discovered. So when I can read in this other way, I can empower my argumentative skills tremendously.
What I'm losing is I'm losing reading as a psycho-technology of psycho-spiritual, existential transformation. Reading is now becoming the consumption of propositions and their structuring in logical coherency.”
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