“Tolle lege.” St. Augustine tells us in his Confessions that during a time of great intellectual and emotional tumult, he heard the voice of a young child singing those words: “Take and read.” He then picked up a Bible and read a passage from Romans that kickstarted his journey to discipleship. It is a famous moment in Christian history for many reasons, not the least of which is that Augustine’s own writings would gain an influence for many centuries in the church second perhaps only to that of Scripture itself.
Note, however, that the invitation (or command) to open himself to the good news did not tell St. Augustine to listen. We’ve heard Jesus do just that the last few weeks in the Gospel on Sunday, saying “Whoever has ears ought to hear.” Nor did it tell him to watch, to open his eyes, another image found throughout the Old and New Testament. Rather, he was told to read.
Historians tell us that literacy in the Mediterranean basin at the time of St. Augustine was somewhere between 5 percent and 15 percent. In other words, news in antiquity—be it the good news or otherwise—was largely communicated orally, not by literary means. St. Augustine’s experience as a reader was the exception, not the rule.
For the past two centuries, particularly in the Global North, literacy has been more or less taken for granted in a way that probably would have surprised St. Augustine and his peers. But a recent article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic suggests that we ourselves are rapidly passing out of a literate culture—not into an illiterate world, but into a postliterate one. We don’t read, and even when we do, it’s not the kind of literature that requires “the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis,” Horowitch writes. Texts and emails and TikTok captions and X threads abound, but none of them entail much in the way of sustained intellectual engagement.
This does not portend well if you’re the type who believes in the power of complex literary narrative and dense argumentation to communicate and preserve a culture’s heritage and core beliefs. What are we losing when we forsake our fat tomes and textbooks for TikToks and texts?
A more pertinent question for believers: What does that mean for the church? What does it mean for the way the average Catholic internalizes the faith and passes it on? At a primary level, how can we be a “People of the Book” when we don’t read books?
Do you need to read to be a good Catholic?
Visual catechisms
Any visitor to the great cathedrals of Europe will recognize a familiar motif in the stained glass windows, statues, frescoes and other art in many such structures. They often function as a visual catechism, a way for teaching salvation history and other Christian narratives to the unlettered. In medieval and even Renaissance Europe, that would include almost the entire population. They are a reminder that the Christian story has not always or even primarily been taught by means of the written word. The 12 Apostles living 20 centuries ago were surely illiterate, but so too was the Canadian St. André Bessette, who died in 1937. The inability to read or write did not get in the way of many of the church’s most prominent evangelizers.
In 2008 in America, Leo O’Donovan, S.J., interviewed Malcolm Miller, the world’s leading authority on Chartres Cathedral, and Miller had the following to say:
When lecturing on Chartres Cathedral, I liken it to a modern public library, except that its texts are written in the stained glass and sculpture of the 12th and 13th centuries. Printing had not yet been invented; paper did not exist in Europe. Most of the population could not read or write, but people knew how to “read” a window. The lives of the saints were well known, and the educated could understand the more complex symbolic interpretations of the biblical texts.
Pope John Paul II had made the same point in his 1999 “Letter to Artists,” writing that “in times when few could read or write, [artistic] representations of the Bible were a concrete mode of catechesis.”
Note that this use of visual art as the medium for transmitting the faith did not entirely disappear with the advent of widespread literacy. The historian John O’Malley, S.J., wrote extensively on the artistic methods of the early Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries, noting that some of the primary teaching tools of Jesuit evangelizers and spiritual directors were woodcuts and engravings—depicting biblical stories, visualizing the patterns of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises or facilitating rote memorization of a basic catechism.
In addition, probably every single one of us can point to a person, not a text, as the primary source of religious knowledge and inspiration: a parent, another relative, a teacher, a mentor. That is why we sometimes call the lives of holy men and women a “living Gospel,” as their witness and contribution serve as extensions of scriptural revelation.
So is it that big a deal for the future of Christianity if we can read but don’t read? Can’t the visual and auditory methods of communication take the place of the written word? Can’t we all just learn from wisdom figures, the way most of humanity did throughout history?
Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that.
Modes of communication
Among the many accomplishments of the great 20th-century American Jesuit Walter Ong was his substantial intellectual contribution to our understanding of the ways in which oral cultures and literate ones interact and transform one another. Expanding on the work of others, Ong argued in works like Orality and Literacy that the move from an oral culture to a literate one entailed serious and oftentimes permanent changes in other aspects of that culture—and in the consciousness of the people involved.
Oral cultures tend to retain knowledge and wisdom through communal storytelling, be that on the level of family, tribe, town or otherwise. Such storytelling relies on memory and the repetition of cultural touchstones and prized convictions; even literate cultures still do this to some degree, in the form of fables and sayings and taboos. But the move to literacy, Ong wrote, has effects far beyond simply making it possible to communicate information without memorization (or without being physically present to one another). Once the written word enters a culture, its members view everything differently, including basic notions of truth and morality and even basic assumptions like cause and effect or the evidence of one’s own eyes.
This new way of communicating tends to be more conducive to abstract and analytical thought, and more detached from people’s day-to-day lives and normal ways of conversation. (It also, by the way, can destroy a culture’s appreciation and respect for its elders and wisdom figures.) It allows for far greater preservation of facts, nuances, the possibility of alternative realities and more. A person can be quizzed for information in a lot of ways, but it’s never going to be as exhaustive or as easily repeated as the interrogation of a text.
Want an example? Open up your Bible and look at the endless tiny notations at the bottom of each page. They’re offering textual variants, notes on the provenance of certain phrases or manuscripts, possible changes in meaning and more. After 20 centuries (more for the Old Testament), the body of knowledge demonstrated there has far, far surpassed anything an oral culture could preserve.
Another example: In Greek, the word kai means “and” but can also mean “even,” “also” or even “really and truly.” It’s the most common word in the New Testament because it’s the most common word in ancient Greek. A German scholar a century ago decided to write his dissertation on Uses of ‘Kai’ in Ancient Greek. In a time before computers and artificial intelligence, he sat down with concordances and massive textual records and accounted for every single way that word had been used. He was probably a terrible storyteller, to be honest, but he was using literate culture to its utmost.
If a culture becomes postliterate, won’t it lose some of the nuance and ability to lock in complex information that came with using reading and writing as primary mechanisms for cultural communication? Inevitably yes. Think of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Your grandparents might have struggled through having to translate passages of the Homeric text from Greek; it’s likely your parents had to read large parts of the poem in English, at least. Your children? They might be seeing that movie without the slightest hint that it is part of 25 centuries of rumination on the same stories and themes—that it began life in oral cultures, was transmitted through memorization and recitation, was preserved through the literate cultures that followed and is now being produced and consumed by a postliterate one.
Catholics can extend that scenario to a vast repository of religious knowledge and commentary that has been communicated through the written word. Not just the Bible or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but hagiographies, legends, textbooks, missals, spiritual reading and more. And that is just the situation for most of us living in the everyday; it does not account for scholars working in theology, philosophy, history, anthropology and more, who every day add to our understanding of revelation, and who do so in large part by relying on the written word.
The disappearance of that world—or, to be fair, its diminishment—actually changes the way we think and pray and act.
Ong, who died in 2003, saw a lot of this coming. He wrote decades ago of a “secondary oral” culture, one in which text and the written word might underlie our thought patterns and processes, but our cultural production would veer back toward the visual, the auditory. Sound familiar? It’s all around you.
How that works in cultures that no longer have the “thick” connections of tribal, family or community ties in other ways is anyone’s guess, but we are seeing it worked out day by day.
Contemplation
It may be that our individual and collective faith is stronger and more adaptable than we give it credit for, that we should not worry too much about a loss of literacy in matters of faith. If the church is to perdure until the Last Day, ought we worry overmuch about how it does so? Catholicism in particular has such a long history of devotional images and paintings and statuary and more that it is actually far better off than more iconoclastic expressions of Christian faith in a culture ruled by image and transitory flows of information.
For example, the sacraments also show us that a postliterate world need not be a post-Christian one. The sacrament of confession alone shows us that there are times when literacy and the written word are not helpful; they are in a sense excluded. The church does not and never will condone confession that does not involve a face-to-face conversation between penitent and confessor.
So is it all a lot of fuss over nothing? Will postliterate Catholicism be just fine?
I don’t think so. I think we need that literate culture in some form or another. There is something about a culture of reading and writing that is absolutely central to a life of faith. Not essential, mind you—let us not pretend we are more faithful or faith-filled than our illiterate ancestors—but central, at least in our time. Too much else in modern communication diminishes our understanding of what is lasting and true for us to lose the primary method by which we learn and confirm those touchstones.
An example from Ignatian spirituality: Say you are on a retreat, or a day of reflection with your coworkers or church group or peers. You are invited to read and pray over a biblical passage and then imagine the scene itself in your head, perhaps even inserting yourself as a character in the action. You then take an inventory of how it made you feel, what it stirred up in you, what God might be communicating to you in that moment.
The method is classic Ignatius, delineated in the Spiritual Exercises and practiced for centuries throughout the church. It can be done without reading a text, of course: Someone can read Scripture aloud to you. But the interaction between one’s own reading of the text and one’s imagination bringing the scene to life can only be a thousand times harder in a postliterate world. Can I imagine Jesus on the cross and not see bloodied-up Jim Caviezel? Can I read the words of Jesus that “I stand at the door and knock” and not giggle at the thought of Walter White’s boast in “Breaking Bad”? A world in which our mental images are packaged for us in advance is not all that conducive to Christian contemplation.
In our spirituality and our devotional lives, the loss of literacy is also inevitably going to result in the diminishment of some complexity and nuance and deep-in-the-details understanding of our shared faith and its history. It’s not something particular to Ignatian spirituality either; imagine lectio divina in a postliterate world; imagine participating in the Liturgy of the Hours when no one reads the words. And on an individual level, we will never have another St. Augustine again. After all, what is Confessions in the end but a very well-written spiritual diary?
Scripture
One final note: Scripture (that written text that continues to give us God’s revelation long after the apostolic age) has something to say on this subject. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus reads from the Torah in the Temple, suggesting he is literate, if not a regular reader and writer. But in Jn 8:6, we get a suggestion there’s more to that question. It is the story of the woman caught in adultery, where the enemies of Jesus try to use Mosaic law to trick him and trap him. Before he answers their queries, however, Jesus does something unexpected. The King James Bible has it best:
This they said testing Him, that they might have cause to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground, as though He heard them not.
What’s going on here? What is Jesus writing? The Greek word, egraphen, doesn’t seem to mean “doodled” or “drew’; it means “wrote.” Is Jesus writing a new law, a la Moses on Mount Sinai? Is he cataloging the sins of the woman’s accusers in the dirt, as some church fathers argued? Is he fulfilling a prophecy? Or does Jesus just need a moment to gather his thoughts?
We don’t know. But we know he could hear them, and nevertheless he wrote, as though He heard them not.
Be like Jesus. Read and write.
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts