St Anthony preaching to carp: sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. (illustration credit 4.10)
More recently, the Christian oratorical tradition has been further developed by African-American preachers, particularly those of the Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. In churches across the United States, a Sunday sermon is not an occasion to sit with one eye trained on the clock while, from a lectern in the apse, a cleric impassively dissects the story of the Good Samaritan. Instead, believers are expected to open their hearts, clasp the hands of their neighbours, erupt into shouts of ‘All right now’ and ‘Amen, preacher’, let the Holy Spirit enter their souls and finally collapse in paroxysms of ecstatic wailing. Up on the stage, the preacher stokes the fires of his congregation’s enthusiasm through call-and-response, asking repeatedly, in a mesmerizing blend of vernacular expression and the vocabulary of the King James Bible, ‘Will you say Amen? I say will you say Amen?’
However powerful any proposition may be, it becomes so much more so in front of a crowd of 500 people who exclaim in unison after every point:
‘… Thank you, Jesus.’
‘… Thank you, Saviour.’
‘… Thank you, Christ.’
‘… Thank you, Lord.’
Could a lecture on Walt Whitman be as moving? (illustration credit 4.11)
There is little chance of resisting a theological argument which flows like this one, from the stage of the New Vision Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee:
‘None of us today is in jail.’
(‘Amen, All right now, Amen, Preacher,’ say the members of the congregation.)
‘Lord have mercy.’
(‘Amen.’)
‘So, brothers, sisters, we should never be in prison in our minds.’
(‘Amen, Preacher.’)
‘Do you hear me, my brothers and sisters?’
(‘Amen, amen, amen!’)
The contrast with the typical lecture in the humanities could hardly be more damning. And unnecessary. What purpose can possibly be served by the academy’s primness? How much more expansive the scope of meaning in Montaignes essays would seem if a 100-strong and transported chorus were to voice its approval after every sentence. How much longer might Rousseau’s philosophical truths linger in our consciousness if they were structured around rhythmical verses of call-and-response. Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers. Only then will our timid pedagogues be able to shake off their inhibitions during lectures on Keats or Adam Smith and, unconstrained by false notions of propriety, call out to their comatose audiences, ‘Do you hear me? I say do you hear me?’ And only then will their now-tearful students fall to their knees, ready to let the spirit of some of the world’s most important ideas enter and transform them.
4.
Aside from needing to be delivered eloquently, ideas also have to be repeated to us constantly. Three or five or ten times a day, we must be forcibly reminded of truths that we love but otherwise will not be able to hold on to. What we read at nine in the morning we will have forgotten by lunchtime and will need to reread by dusk. Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration.
Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules which lay claim to the lengths as well as the depths of their followers’ lives, letting no month, day or hour escape without administration of a precisely calibrated dose of ideas. In the detailed way in which they tell the faithful what to read, think, sing and do at almost every moment, religious agendas seem at once sublimely obsessive and calmingly thorough. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance, decrees that its subscribers should always gather at six-thirty in the evening on the twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, as the candlelight throws shadows against the chapel walls, to listen to a reading from the second section of the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch, just as on 25 January they must always think of the Conversion of St Paul, and on the morning of 2 July reflect on the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and imbibe the moral lessons of Job 3. Schedules are more exacting still for Catholics, whose days are punctuated by no fewer than seven occasions for prayer. Every evening at ten they must, for example, scan their consciences, read a Psalm, declare In manus tuas, Domine (‘Into your hands, Lord’), sing the Nunc dimittis from the second chapter of the Gospel of St Luke and conclude with a hymn to the mother of Jesus (‘Virgin now and always, take pity on us sinners’).
How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us and gives us weekends off for consumption and recreation. Like science, it privileges discovery. It associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of new information — and therefore it prompts us to forget everything.
For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire existence in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste. And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration, just like so much else which once impressed us but which we soon enough came to discard: the majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the poetry recital in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In the end, all modern artists share something of the bathetic condition of chefs, for whereas their works may not themselves erode, the responses of their audiences will. We honour the power of culture but rarely admit with what scandalous ease we forget its individual monuments. Three months after we finish reading a masterpiece, we may struggle to remember a single scene or phrase from it.
We won’t remember what we don’t reread: a Catholic schedule of texts. (illustration credit 4.12)
Our favourite secular books do not alert us to how inadequate a one-off linear reading of them will prove. They do not identify the particular days of the year on which we ought to reconsider them, as the holy books do — in the latter case with 200 others around us and an organ playing in the background. There is arguably as much wisdom to be found in the stories of Anton Chekhov as in the Gospels, but collections of the former are not bound with calendars reminding readers to schedule a regular review of their insights. We would face grave accusations of eccentricity if we attempted to construct liturgies from the works of secular authors. At best, we haphazardly underline a few of the sentences that we most admire in them and which we may once in a while chance upon in an idle moment waiting for a taxi.