the mystery of sudden, numinous, and life-altering events, whose tensions and illusions and disclosures will not let you be, until you start writing about them?2
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BEFORE TACKLING my many questions, I want briefly to examine the origin of writing, the expressive dimension of speech. Speech’s domain is the fountainhead of storytelling and the source of language’s felt nature. To illustrate, consider the shaman who uses his body to conjure fate, or the charismatic Billy Graham, who testifies that God is as real to him as his skin. So much of their communicative value rests on voice, passion, sincerity, emotional logic, oratorical flourish, and the live, sweating, possessed enactor or taleteller whose conviction is on display. It’s called testimony, Tell it, Brother: the more animated its theater, the more enthralled are the bodies who receive it.
First order of distinction. Text is not speech. Such was the great insight of those who wrote or took down God’s dictation as the Bible: in order to make the writing come alive—to a largely illiterate and awestruck audience—disciples had to preach the Word. By contrast, readers have fewer means of verifying the convicted spark when the voice, its arousal, its elegance, its bellow is silenced onto or by the page. As music elicits feeling much more directly than text can, so, too, does the sonority of the heaven-bent pastor elicit faith in and for the community than a treatise on original sin. Better to bloodedly quote Leviticus than to turn in another student essay.
Eric A. Havelock, in The Muse Learns to Write,3 describes “written discourse” as the singular tool that moved us from a wholly speaking culture to a multiliterate one, ca. fifth century BCE. This shift “from Greek orality to Greek literacy” activated the intellect, helped organize thought, developed rules for argument (the source of democracy), and created libraries of knowledge (the birth of hard science). Moreover, Havelock argues that once oral discourse intermingled with written documents in our history, the crossover “represent[ed] a new level of the human consciousness,” “which as it speaks also thinks” (114). As, as in simultaneously.
In its wake, what proliferated, Havelock says, were new terms “for notions and thoughts and thinking, for knowledge and knowing, for understanding, investigating, research, inquiry.” Socrates brought “this new kind of terminology into close connection with the self and with psyche. For him, the terminology symbolized the level of psychic energy required to realize . . . what was permanently ‘true,’ as opposed to what fleetingly happened in the vivid oral panorama.” The basic contrast was that speaking retained its hold on “feeling and responding,” while writing became the “‘true’ mental act of knowing” (115).
Writing became indispensable to—if not a mirror of—knowledge.
Despite the transition, speaking retained its virtues: narrative, dialogue, drama, grammatical and rhetorical improvisation, and the first-person voice, “I.” For a time, vocal finesse remained true of spontaneous debates among disputants in the Greek agora. Each disputant has a point of view, and that point of view is as real as the in-person voice of its utterance. But imagine the speaker has grown more articulate because he also writes. Writing gives him distance and perspective and circulates his ideas among others; he may become known for his individual style. In addition, writing nurtures topicalization, history, reflection, philosophy, and an impersonal “you,” a “he,” or a “she,” which broadens the idea that any “I” might be informed. Here is what many of us regard as worth knowing—a written truth based on but often different from what is said. Recall Plato copying and structuring and emphasizing the ideas of Socrates as foundational to Western civilization.
I don’t think this oral-written distinction and the oral-written merger is too pat. An oral action implies doing, practicing, performing: the Muses sing, dance, and recite in orgiastic rituals. A literate action implies stating, thinking, knowing: as I say, Plato spent his adulthood preserving the ideas of Socrates for future generations to study. Researchers and intellectuals pore over the civilizing juggernaut Greek literacy launched. Though it was a complex shift, the idea is simple: speaking begets writing, and writing, enhanced by the recitation of texts, which, in a sense, is a new way of speaking, begets reading.
How is this relevant to religious and spiritual texts? Declaring a creed, orally or as a scriptor, is the evidence of same. According to one American evangelical, “God said it, it’s in the Bible, I believe it.” Testimony of the speaker differs from the testimony of the writer, of course, although, with the slow-growing authority of a text critical to the speaker’s message, those testimonies begin to merge. The goal is to join what was spoken with what is read. The ensuing book has it both ways. Eventually, for example, the Bible’s textuality supplants the content of what is spoken. The spoken has conquered but the written rules. The spoken cannot be infallible because it can be changed. The text is text for all time.
Confessional writers, churchly and otherwise, testify by stealing or miming or extending the tools of a spoken or acted story. The traits of the hero’s myth or tale are everywhere known: a dramatic rising-and-falling narrative, a narrator who guides a character to his destinal end, and a writerly insistence on telling details and vivid metaphors. This is Homer’s Odyssey and it is the story of Jesus. What’s more, if it’s the latter, a religious text, it must embody direct messages. For example, Christ’s “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
For all that, the best literary writers do something more exacting. They make a person, a mere representation of a woman, say, live on the page. Such animation projects and, thus, possesses a self. She shows more than she tells, she personifies more than she illustrates, she eulogizes and schemes more than she syllogizes and deliberates—tricks of the trade the writer animating a character, even if it is her “self,” uses to both their advantages.
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I THINK it safe to state that when searching for the beginnings of a religious literature, we will find that those beginnings are collective. We read, at times admire, the mouthpieces we know in no other way than via text—Moses and Isaiah, lawgivers, rabbis, and prophets, the vanity-plagued assembler of Ecclesiastes, the gospel writers, Matthew, most magnificent, and Paul, the theological wordsmith. Each fashions his truth claim, via statement and story, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Christian script. They nail down these claims on parchment scrolls, which are collected and bound into a book, the book, a holy book. The Bible is one prime exhibit—a written mélange of polyphonic and centuries-old views whose leather-bound contents, stitched by hand for lap or hand to cradle, canonize derring-do tales and moral choices into portable, quotable creeds.
Writing a religion becomes the religion.
What’s written is scripture—declared by its author (the Lord) or its authors (the scribes) as revealed truth, here John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”4 Note how each succeeding phrase is a rhythmic diminution and how each phrase holds to the anapestic (short/long) stress of “the Word,” creating cadential closure. The aesthetic turn, a testament to that sentence’s composer, kerosenes a literary light and, thus, illumines a bright ore. But as scripture stamps out thousands of these claims, we have a problem. Scripture’s aesthetic is displaced. Instead, the fact or evidence of the words—the Word itself—rules, becomes, as I say, unalterable, inerrant. The “Word of God” is fixed, set in stone. We are no longer in the realm of the writing but, instead, in the realm of the written. (Memoirists know that once your story is written and published, the drama is locked in for good. The degree to which it is factual or exaggerated matters less than its chiseled embodiment in print. The same can be said, in our time, when one’s actions are “caught on video.”)
Most of us know what scripture is: in the West, it is the Torah and the Bible. For two dozen centuries, books emulate scripture. The apocryphal gospels, Gnostic literature, the
