Courtney McGrailFr Conor McDonough OP
In the far-east of Switzerland – la Suisse orientale, as the French speakers in the West charmingly call it – lies a town bearing the name of an Irish saint: St Gallen, a disciple of Ireland’s single greatest contribution to Europe, St Columbanus.
The abbey that gave the town its name is now empty of monks, but for more than a millennium it was not only a place of prayer, but also a hive of scholarly activity.
At its heart is an extraordinary baroque library whose over-the-top, Trumpesque décor gives glory, not to any man, but to the treasures it contains on papyrus, vellum, and paper, including some of the earliest glosses in the Irish language, examples of the oldest stage in Western musical notation, and the first medieval architectural plan.
Above the door to the library is a message to readers in elegant Greek majuscule: ‘PSYCHES IATREION’, ‘a healing-house for the soul’.
Where Christianity flourishes, reading flourishes. Think of the patient art of manuscript illumination, which honours the presence of God in the words of Scripture, or monastic readers, as hungry for words as cats are for mice, or copyists who preserved even pre-Christian works of literature.
Think of medieval nuns who decorated their cloisters with pictures of reading women – a young Virgin Mary learning her letters on her mother’s lap – and whose abbeys were oases of female literacy.
Think of the Church’s key role in the development of universities in the thirteenth century, or the spread of mass literacy in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Even Church censorship of books pays a strange kind of compliment to the power of reading. If our post-Christian age finds censorship incomprehensible, it is probably because we have lost the sense that words can edify and corrupt.
The St Gallen inscription makes no sense to us: we fail to see how words can heal or infect the soul. Why have we lost this wisdom? It is perhaps because of the sheer abundance of words that flow over us as denizens of the digital age.
Bare essentials
Studies have shown, by tracing the path of readers’ eyes, just how rare it is for online readers to read to the end of each line of an entire article. Instead the eye hops from introduction to conclusion to sidebar, foraging for bare essentials and then looking for links to the next novelty.
Words flow over us and we, like the proverbial duck’s back, remain largely unaffected.
In the age of Twitter, the age of ugly soundbites, echo chambers, and shallow reading, I’m convinced that we Christians should commit ourselves to the rebellious act of reading, and retrain our eyes and heart for the pursuit of beauty, truth and goodness.
In an age that doesn’t want us to think, the slow, reflective, patient engagement with a book – whatever the genre – is subversive, and a book club is a cell of the Resistance.
This Christmas, I’ll be making my annual trip to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway, a true ‘healing house for the soul’. I’ll search the stacks for presents for friends and family (with the possibility of the occasional personal purchase…).
There I’ll find novels to develop the moral imagination, travel writing to inspire adventure, science writing to provoke wonder, works of history to lead to wisdom, and theology to lead to prayer.
I’m ready to join the Readers’ Resistance. Who’s with me?
A cosy comfort: In Iceland, Christmas means books. Iceland holds the first place in the world for the reading and publishing of books, and the vast majority of book-buying takes place in the run up to Christmas. The pre-Christmas frenzy has a special name: ‘Jólabókaflóð’, or ‘Christmas book flood’. On Christmas Eve, Icelandic families gather to exchange books, and the books are traditionally taken to a cozy bed to be read, along with some chocolate to sweeten the moment. A word-loving tradition to celebrate the Incarnation of the Word – it certainly beats vegetating in front of a screen!
The diocese of Milan has recently opened the Cause for Canonisation of a young Italian, Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia in 2006. According to online reports, he was an extraordinary young man, devout, courageous, joyful.
One little quotation of his struck me as particularly wise: “We are all born as originals, but many die as photocopies.” Many pioneers of the Internet expected the digital age, with its boundless seas of variety, to produce individuals with original interests and ideas.
Paradoxically, it seems to have the opposite effect in many cases: we watch the same videos, laugh at the same memes, scroll through similar newsfeeds.
And online journalism reinforces this sameness with the weasel word ‘everyone’: ‘Everyone on Twitter went crazy when X happened’, ‘Everyone loves this new video’, ‘Everyone will cry when they see this picture’.
How boring to be assimilated to this beige collective. If the Lord wanted clones, he would hardly have created a world with such wild diversity. Here then is the challenge for the contemporary Christian: to keep one’s God-given colours, to polish one’s peculiarities, to remain an original, to refuse to become a photocopy.