How the Alphabet Changed the Nature of Religion and Power
Discussion
1. Corpus Noeticum:
"The book or written text in the phonetic alphabet was the disruptor, the revolutionary technology that created a religious environment that no pagan cult could compete with. Maintaining a consistency of narrative and even establishing a common language and internationally recognised clerical authority (other than simply worshiping the Roman emperor because he happens to be in charge) was made possible through this new innovation. Despite the fact that the medieval period is often seen as a time of technological decline, this new religious discipline was required to bring about the kind of systematised study that would lead to the rise of modern science. Obviously, written texts had predated the bible, but the sheer volume, its frequency and distribution, as well as the amount of scholarship and commentary had been unprecedented. One can regard the written texts of antiquity as early adoptions among elite circles of a technology that the Abrahamic faiths managed to spread across the general public. First, the propagation occurred among the priesthoods, but with time the spread of literacy and the invention of the printing press brought with it a second, more thorough wave of religious zeal known as the Reformation.
- Lewis Mumford identifies precisely the individual discipline and sacrificial dedication to otherworldly pursuits as that which was lacking during the inventions of the Hellenistic period. Despite Heron of Alexandria having already constructed an early version of the steam engine, there was no cultural environment that would have society remodel itself around this machine. Christian communities, on the other hand, pioneered by monastic orders, were the first to synchronise their daily routine according to the bell and the clock. Daily life became structured around the perpetual cycle of the clock, the technological image of time. In this way, the clock became an important and frequently overlooked invention of the medieval period that predated the industrial revolution but was perhaps the most important precursor to it.
Physical work no longer occupied the entire day: it alternated with emotional communion through prayer and plainsong. Here the slave’s working day, from sunrise to nightfall, gave way to the five-hour day … This regimen, in turn, was balanced by intellectual effort in reading, writing, discussion, not least in the planning of the varied agricultural and industrial activities of the monastic community. Shared work had the benefit of shared mind.
The order and regularity that was introduced into the monks’ day—with every office performed in due succession at stated intervals, the seven ‘canonical hours’—was timed and paced by the hour-glass, the sun-dial, and eventually, the clock.
Through its regularity and efficiency the monastery laid a groundwork for both capitalist organization and further mechanization: even more significantly, it affixed a moral value to the whole process of work, quite apart from its eventual rewards.
(Source: Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.)
What the written book did for spatial synchronisation of thought and teaching, was achieved on the temporal side by the introduction of the clockwork and calendar. The ancients had been sophisticated astrologers, well capable of keeping track of the eons and cycles of the ages, but the new calendar that accompanies us to this day placed us into a homogenised cosmic narrative, fully aligned and equally applicable across countries and empires. Naturally, calendars remained vastly contradictory and disharmonious for many centuries, but the tendency was always towards increasing universal agreement. The birth of Christ was no longer an event in the past, but the global anchor point at which our tracking of time begins. It launched us onto a timeline that would keep moving to the same, standardised pulse until the end times would usher in the apocalypse. For the first time, time itself had a beginning and an end.
- A glance at the clock or the calendar shows this very vividly. If one finds that it is now 12 o’clock on the 12th day of the 12th month of the year 1212, then this can at the same time serve to determine a point in time within the stream of an individual life, within the stream of a society, and within the stream of natural events. At its present stage of development, time is, as one can see, a symbolic synthesis at a very high level — a synthesis by means of which positions in the succession of physical natural events, social events, and the course of an individual life can be related to one another.
(Elias, Norbert. Über die Zeit: Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie II. Herausgegeben von Michael Schröter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984.)
The entangling of our individual lives with the events detailed in scripture enabled us to not only understand causality as a relationship between isolated events, but something that was always derivative of the overall fate of the universe. In a sense, the Platonic and Aristotelian project could only come to its full fruition once cosmic narratives were unshackled from their local rites and became integrated into a formalised theological framework. The entire cosmos could now be reduced to a single ultimate principle, a highest being. The narrative conveying this singularity of the universe is referred to as creation."
(https://deepnoetics.substack.com/p/the-technics-of-time)
2. John Baird Callicott :
"a few centuries prior to the advent of Greek philosophy in the 6th century BCE. Indeed, the advent of Greek philosophy was a consequence of the Transition 1.0. It was driven by a revolution in communication technology—alphabetic writing—according to classicist Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write) and Catholic philosopher and theologian Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word). Its reach was expanded by Alexander’s conquests and a mega-library in Alexandria Egypt established by his general Ptolemy—T1.2. Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy) chronicled the further technologizing of the word by the invention of the printing press—T1.3.
Writing goes way back (~3,200 ybp) to Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, but there was something uniquely powerful about the Greek alphabet. Along about the 8th century BCE, the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician abjad, similar to Hebrew in only having letters for consonants, to unambiguously render the spoken into the written word. To get a sense of how profoundly transformative this was, take a look at Hesiod’s Theogony, originally an orally transmitted epic. The forms and forces of nature are therein personified as gods, one of whom castrates his father and then swallows his own children, setting up a war between the Titans and the Olympians, eventually won by the latter, led by Zeus. People took all that stuff seriously and believed it to be what actually happened. And you could get in big trouble if you questioned it—just ask Socrates. Then, sample Aristotle’s biological treatises for a stark contrast in the Greek mentality before and after the alphabetic technological revolution.
It is no exaggeration to say that alphabetic writing reconfigured human consciousness among the Greeks. In contemporary terms, alphabetic writing rewired the Greek brain. Plato knew it. In Phaedrus, he nostalgically casts doubt on the value of the exchange of pre-literate consciousness for that wrought by writing—doing so, of course, ironically, in writing. Aristotle repurposed the Greek word for “letter,” stoicheion as the word for “element.” The Greek elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are the letters composing the myriad other stuff in the natural world, just as the literal letters compose the myriad words of the cultural world.
In Greek orality, there were mnemonically gifted rhapsodes who could recite the Iliad from start to finish, word perfect. And Greek education consisted of students reciting poetry and accompanying themselves on the lyre. With the arrival of alphabetic writing, all the brainpower devoted to preserving the rich and precious Greek culture in living memory was thus freed up for other uses. Oral culture is necessarily stored and transmitted in narrative form; it requires vivid characters and dramatic action, along with rhythmic meter, to be memorable. With the unlimited storage capacity of writing, thought and discourse could take other forms, like philosophy and geopolitical history. Oral communication is necessarily relational; one speaks, others hear, in close proximity. Written communication can be—or rather, must be, to avoid distraction—solitary and can extend over great distances of space and time. Alphabetic writing engenders abstract thought, by its very nature. If a word can be embodied in the material of both sound and visible runes, it itself is immaterial. Ergo, Plato’s Theory of Ideas and the related concept of an immaterial immortal soul apprehending those Ideas, residing, until liberation upon death, in a material body."
More information
- Book: The Alphabet versus the Goddess