Letter and Spirit

An article on the Transfiguration from the excellent Rector’s Corner begins by quoting from St Paul:

Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
     2Co 3.4–6

Our writer goes on to touch upon this relationship between ‘ “letter” (the filtered experience of written or a third party transmission) [and] “spirit” (the direct encounter)’, the movement from one to the other of which, he suggests, is ‘the natural condition of the Christian’: ‘It is a regular sign of spiritual progress to go from a faith based on what others have written or told us to a direct experience of God ourselves.’

Without in any way disputing the good Rector’s parsing of this dilemma, nevertheless I want to look a bit more literally at a distinction which St Paul may be, or may be seen to be, making between the written and spoken word. The somewhat uneasy relationship between the two is not only typical of the age of secondary orality (the long age before the advent and internalization of print, in which the two still vied for authority) but may have some consequences for Christian faith and life not unlike those which the Rector posits, and all this may furthermore have something to say to us particularly in the post-Gutenberg age.


Now the good Rector hastens to add that ‘there is nothing remotely “wrong” with the former [i.e., written or third-party transmission] – to say so would be to dishonor the Holy Scriptures, the saints and great Christian thinkers and poets through the ages.’ (Note that he ranks ‘poets’ with ‘thinkers’, and that he ascribes honor to all those who have handed down – ‘traditioned’ – the faith to us.) Indeed, Christians are sometimes called ‘people of the Book’, a term used in Islam to refer to Jews and Christians, and used by some Jews and Christians to refer to themselves and their own coreligionists. Similarly, the Christian Scriptures are often called ‘the Word of God’. Both of these terms – though problematic, as we shall see – highlight the importance of writing in our traditions and indeed in all the ‘great’ or ‘world’ religions, religions which could only have grown up after writing was well established. Indeed we honor the writings of our tradition artistically and ceremonially; we call them Holy Scripture; we expend tremendous energy, and write many more books, in pursuit of their promulgation and interpretation.

Writing furthermore plays a very important part in the scenes recounted in the Scriptures themselves: the very finger of God writes the Law on the tablets of stone, which then form a focus for the divine presence among the people; the historical narratives refer constantly to other annals and accounts; the rediscovery and reëstablishment of the sacred writings is a recurring theme and priority in periods of national and religious renewal; prophets are commanded to write what the Lord has spoken to them.

But although the Scriptures contain plenty of references to writing, the words most often translated ‘word’ – Hebrew dâbâr and Greek lógos – do not primarily refer to a written artifact at all, but rather to the spoken word, the utterance, or by extension any sort of discourse; a matter or affair (like Latin res); the faculty of speech, or the faculty of thinking and reason that precedes speech; or the cause or ground of a given matter or affair. Such a ‘word’ may be recorded in writing – and this is often done ‘in the presence of the people’ – but even then it is written mainly in order to be reconstituted as speech before an audience (St John the Divine even suggests that such reading aloud may be a source of blessing). In the Scriptures, the term ‘word of God’ or ‘word of the Lord’ never refers to the Scriptures themselves, and (just as Solomon confessed that no temple made by human hands, nor even heaven itself, could contain God) the same St John exclaims that the whole world could not contain the written accounts of the deeds of the Lord.

Why, we may ask (even putting aside the mundane question of the literacy rate in any particular Biblical place and time), this continuing primacy of the spoken word in a culture in which writing is well established? We might well protest that in one sense the time-bound spoken word is evanescent, vanishing as soon as it is uttered, and that writing would seem a great advance. From another perspective, however, we may say that the spoken word endures, for once put forth, it cannot be erased or taken back. Conversely, though writing may seem permanent, at the same time it is (or, before the advent of electronic text, was) relatively fixed and thus in a sense dead like a track or a fossil, subject only to decay, capable perhaps of replication (like a virus), but not of renewal or growth (this is not quite true; a story once written down can of course be rewritten, adapted, etc. – but writing tends toward the fixed and the final). Thus the reliance on personal testimony in cultures in which writing is relatively new or restricted, and the importance of ‘witness’ in Christianity in particular: Christ is the ultimate ‘faithful witness’, and His followers are called and claimed over and over to be witnesses.

Furthermore, a piece of writing is essentially external to the person, whether the writer or the reader; though we may certainly manipulate the materials (pen, ink, paper) of writing, they do not ordinarily act upon us or enter our bodies, our ability to see written words being dependent (again, before the advent of electronic media) upon their reflection of energy from a separate light source. Writing is thus always distant and mediated. Speech, however, requires and implies presence and even a certain intimacy; the spoken word begins, physically, deep within the speaker, and the vibrations of the air disturbed by the breath (spirit) of the speaker enter and act upon the body of the hearer. This is true no less for us than for members of an oral or semi-oral culture.

I believe we now begin to get at why, for example, Our Lord left no writings behind, but, speaking in stories and enigmatic sayings, and in actions even louder than words, was said to have ‘taught... as one having authority’, while the scribes, whose religion (we are told) remained external, separate, ossified, did not and could not: the oral realm refers to the physical, to the real life-world, to things of both immediate and ultimate concern, not to abstractions or propositions. And this in turn brings us back to the Apostle’s statement above that ‘the grámma [letter or written word] kills, but the pneûma [breath or spirit] gives life’. Though St Paul may have been speaking of what we moderns mean, somewhat metaphorically, by ‘the letter of the law’ and ‘the spirit of the law’ – certainly elsewhere he contrasts the constraints of the Law (as interpreted by pharisaical Judaism and his own psychological makeup) with the freedom of life in Christ – I think he also meant, more broadly and yet more simply, that the life of the Kingdom cannot be reduced to a closed and definitive collection of writings, but rather must continually be animated by the intimate presence of the Word spoken in and by the divine breath/spirit within, and emanating from, the Body of Christ, the Church, of which he can say

You yourselves are our letter [epistolê], written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter [epistolê] of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
     2Co 3.2–3

The historic Churches, in the varying ways and degrees to which they remain faithful to tradition, retain something of this reluctance to ascribe final and sole authority to the written word, even to that which is called Holy Scripture, even as they revere it and read extensively from it in the liturgy (it is, I note, in, and only in, the context of a fairly traditional Roman Mass that I have more than once had the very strong sense that the Epistle being sung had been addressed by its author quite directly to the congregation there present). Roman Catholicism plainly identifies tradition and the magisterium as loci of authority alongside the Scriptures. It also (in theory) retains a rich sacramental and ceremonial practice, though its range of speech and thought is somewhat constrained by the codifications of literate culture, and it has not been immune to the rationalizations brought on by print. The Orthodox, who maintain an even closer link to the oral realm (witness the characteristic expansiveness of their liturgical language and their even more tradition-guided approach to the faith) even more clearly place the Scriptures within the preëxisting context of the Church, whose very life in Christ is the ultimate origin and source of authority.

Anglicanism still struggles with the disease sola scriptura. The restoration of the regular public reading-aloud of Scripture in the verrnacular was a founding and salutary principle of the English Reformation, but the divorce of this reading from the interpretive matrix of the historic liturgy – the imaginative use of the Psalms and other Scriptures as well as hymns and patristic commentary, not to mention the sacramental and ceremonial context – left Anglicans, officially at least, all too willing to equate the written word (now increasingly fixed in print*) with the eternal Word. Not only do the Preface to the First Prayer Book and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, among the now non-binding ‘Historical Documents’ found in bcp1979, conflate the Holy Scriptures with the ‘pure’ or ‘revealed’ ‘Word of God’, but ordinands in the Episcopal Church are currently required to declare that they ‘do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God’ (emphasis mine).

The Prayer Book Catechism attempts to nuance this term by answering ‘we call [the Holy Scriptures] the Word of God because God inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the Bible’, but this is a somewhat unconvincing evasion of the difficulty. The Articles of Religion, perhaps surprisingly, are slightly more helpful: Article II explicitly states that ‘the Son... is the Word of the Father’, and if the term ‘word of God’ or its equivalent refers to the Scriptures elsewhere in the Articles, it is always in a very slightly open-ended way. And whatever the formularies might say, Anglicans have found in their history and in themselves a willingness to admit tradition, reason, revelation, and experience as sources of authority alongside Holy Scripture.

Unfortunately, however, in an age in which we not only think we do not need to memorize Scripture because we can so easily read it, but moreover seem to think we do not even need to read it because we can so easily search it electronically (I condemn myself here), a too glib invocation of the supposedly Hookerian ‘three-legged stool’ – a modern and often overworked and oversimplified construct – is an easy and all too common companion of a lazy ignorance of the Scriptures and other aspects of sacred tradition.


This article, I find, is already a bit diffuse and proving resistant to my efforts to bring it to a satisfying conclusion – perhaps the result of the electronic medium by means of which it is being composed.† I think what I ultimately want to say is that both public recitation and private contemplation of the Scriptures are of very great importance in the life of faith – but even the famous collect calls us to a more physical apprehension of them, to ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ them (cf. the commands to both Ezekiel and St John the Divine to eat scrolls, the patristic admonition to chew on the Scriptures, and the more literal meaning ‘mutter’ of the Hebrew word usually translated ‘meditate’). This, in turn, must be done in the context of a comprehensive practice of liturgy, prayer, community, and works of mercy, to the end that the true and lively Word – indeed, the very source, plan, and means of all that is – may indeed be, in the words of the Apostle and before him the Prophet Jeremiah and the Proverbs, ‘written on the heart’.

*  Existing means of communication, or making meaning, have always been disrupted, distanced, and displaced with each new medium. If speech remains ordinary and authoritative in a writing culture, action (ceremony, gesture, even to some extent the spectacle of costume and sacred space – still at the center in oral culture) has already been constrained and pushed to the side somewhat. With the advent of printing, in turn, speech is displaced and largely constrained by writing – it must be as precise and intelligible as the written word, the early reformed English liturgical directives essentially say – while action is allowed to lapse. Electric and electronic media have pushed action right out the window – dance, for example, has nothing like the place in our culture that it did, say, seventy years ago, and clerics who think ceremonially and are comfortable using their bodies formally are rare in my experience – and even speech has been gutted by the microphone, so that the formality, rhetorical patterning, and physical approach that were once required simply to be heard and understood are lost. The aural and now visual amplification and/or broadcast of the speaker creates a false sense of intimacy with both remote audiences and crowds who are physically present, even as the glowing screen presents a false and yet almost irresistible (even down to the physiological level) sense of spectacle.

†  See previous footnote. The effects of successive changes in communication technology affect not only the way in which a message is sent and received, but even the way in which it is conceived. If writing and later print allowed and then demanded the construction of logically structured and sequenced argument and also put some economic and even physical constraints upon length, the fluidity and insubstantiality of the electronic text coupled with the difficulty, when screen-bound, of seeing the larger sweep of a narrative or argument, makes it that much harder, in my experience, to tighten things up.