Abstract
Carol Harrison,
The Art of Listening in the Early Church
, Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 2013; 336 pp.: 9780199641437, £65.00/$125.00 (hbk)
This remarkable book creatively builds on recent trends in early Christian studies to offer a new perspective on early Christian culture with significant implications for Christian theology more widely. From the beginning our attention is drawn to the fact that early Christian texts come from an ‘auditory culture’: literacy was limited, reading was almost invariably aloud, publication meant reading to an audience, and two-thirds of early Christian texts were taken down by stenographers as the authors delivered sermons, debated in councils or against heretics, or engaged in catechesis. Other written texts were also meant to be heard: prayers, creeds, liturgical material, poems, even theological treatises and biblical commentaries.
Part One explores first ancient theories about the process of hearing, then the all-pervasive art of rhetoric – the Fathers’ resistance to its seductive ploys yet constant employment of its techniques, while shifting the focus to what this meant at the receiving end, for listeners. The third chapter shows how fundamental was the sense that hearing created images in the mind, how dangerous was hearing the wrong things and how transformative was hearing the truth. The loss of God's image at the Fall put a premium on hearing the Word so that that image might be restored. Engraining the truth in the memory was the key to salvation. Part Two explores in some detail how this was done through catechesis and through exegetical preaching, demonstrating the importance of committing to memory the Creed, which then provided the grammar for endless variations on the theme. Part Three opens with by far the longest chapter on the ‘Polyphony of Prayer’, exploring something absolutely fundamental to patristic theology yet rarely the subject of scholarly investigation. The focus is again on receptivity – the fact that prayer is a kind of listening, for it makes no difference to God; rather ‘in the conversation of prayer, God is the first one to speak, but in order to hear Him and respond to Him we need the ears of faith’ (p. 190). But in the end words fail, and the final chapter explores the ‘creative tension between listening to presence and transcendence’ (p. 228).
Interspersed with the main chapters are three Impromptus (the pervasive musical analogies anticipate a subsequent study on music in the early Church); it is these, along with the final chapter, which highlight the key themes and enable the possibility of appropriation. The first Impromptu, for example, explores listening as embodied experience which carries us beyond words, drawing on the work of McGilchrist (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2010)) to give it purchase on our contemporary cultural context, while the final chapter engages in dialogue with contemporary discussions about the nature of theology. It is in this context that I would voice my one criticism of this exciting book: to make its most significant point it too easily imports into the patristic material the modern dichotomy of heart and head. For the Fathers the mind encompassed both, and was ‘the divine sense’ (A. N. Williams, The Divine Sense: The Intellect in Patristic Theology (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007)); and in the end the necessary integration of left- and right-brain hemispheres is McGilchrist's key point.