Carol Harrison's most recent study is an exploration of hearing and listening within a religiously contoured cultural context that is, simply put, beautiful. She evokes with great success what she calls the “auditory culture” of late antiquity—a world wherein ideas are learned, values shared, and lives crafted, especially through what and how one listened. Begun as a study of music in the early church, Harrison developed this into a study of how people cultivate a love of God through hearing, and how they learn to hear God's silence through the voices of other humans.
Harrison shows quite clearly how scholars, celebrating a “corporeal turn,” have delved into the visual culture of late antiquity, but have generally neglected—with a few notable exceptions—the other senses. So she turns naturally to hearing, since, with low literacy rates and styles of reading which privileged vocalization, most people's encounters with the scriptures as well as other texts and teachers, would have been auditory rather than visual. We have many analyses of sermons, of course, and of rhetorical technique, but these tend to focus on either the text or the speaker. What we lack is an appreciation of the hearer. This is a gap that, this reviewer agrees, is all too glaring. It highlights our modern privileging of texts and silent reading with its concomitant visualization of signs, and ignores the simple fact that the ancient world does not share this with us. To understand the rhetoric of Christian authors, as well as pagan, we must instead appreciate the aurality of texts, and to understand the process of learning or conversion, we must appreciate the work of hearing. Harrison accomplishes this with an ear well attuned to silence as well as speech. She puts her deep understanding and appreciation of music to work, developing consistent musical metaphors that translate between late antiquity's auditory culture and the modern world. Her examples range across Greek and Latin fathers—Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose all feature heavily—as well as rhetoricians and grammarians like Cicero and Longinus. Harrison works hard to find in works on speaking the implications for hearing, and does so with great success.
Harrison first develops a broad account of the perception, uses, and transformations of rhetoric in Christian antiquity. Harrison uses this account of what was entailed in active listening to explore first catechesis and then preaching. She argues with care and precision that much of the difficulty faced by Christian preachers and teachers emerged from the interplay of their own ambitions as rhetoricians, with the sheer intransigence of the biblical material (being as it was, a rather disreputable text) and the expectations of their audience. They had to negotiate, then, a careful path to impressing and persuading their audience without deviating from the message and material of the gospel. In preaching, Harrison astutely argues, the work of persuasion became, really, the call to conversion, and in the hearers this was felt as the call of God, mediated through the words of the preacher as he attempted to present the gospel in conversation with his audience. In the third part, Harrison turns to the work of prayer. Harrison moves through practices of public and private prayer to the ascetic practices of continual prayer in which, ultimately, images and words give way to the silence that is appropriate to the infinite experience of God. Finally, Harrison spends a chapter meditating, effectively, on the contours of listening and hearing—that it unfolds temporally, that it is culturally conditioned, that it evolves a process of dialogically thinking-through which begins not so much from rational assent to propositions but from faith. Harrison concludes that, unlike sight, hearing involves active participation, drawing the hearer into conversation with the speaker, with what is spoken of, and, in the end, with God.
Between these larger sections, Harrison has incorporated several “Impromptus”—case studies and meditations on themes and ideas that move perhaps tangentially to the main argument. The “Impromptus” do not distract, though, and often add richness to the argument itself. Harrison likewise structures chapters around poems and musical themes in order to bring out the sense that listening to one text or one speech means hearing echoes of innumerable others, and that it is in the interplay of these echoes and resonances that participatory knowing takes place.
Certainly, Harrison has attempted a broad survey of late antiquity's “auditory culture.” It should not be surprising that at points it feels a bit forced. Augustine, the two Gregories, Chrysostom, and Ambrose are excellent conversation partners, but they are not necessarily representative of a full culture. To some extent, it must be admitted, Harrison is bound by the texts we have, but even so, there is nothing here of the great Syriac or Coptic traditions, in which powerful preachers and entranced listeners feature so frequently, and which share many cultural values and assumptions with Greek and Latin authors. Likewise, Harrison tends to read backward from the fourth and fifth centuries into the second and third—she does at times draw on Clement of Alexandria or Cyprian of Carthage, but more often she takes for granted a degree of continuity between Christians of different centuries that this reviewer, at least, finds problematic—particularly in catechetical procedures, uses of creeds, ideas about creatio ex nihilo, the centrality of incarnation, and corollaries of Christology. That being said, these points where Harrison's argument stretches thin are excellent opportunities for further research, which Harrison has now made possible.
This work is a milestone contribution to patristic scholarship, marking out just how much we have been missing of late antiquity, and opening up further exploration of auditory culture. For all its novelty, Harrison's study is unabashedly theological, yet sensitive to the rich polyphony of voices that make up the competing choirs of late antique Christianity. This is a rare achievement, and a testament to the sensitive musicality with which Harrison approaches her subject. Her study, then, calls us back, demanding that we hear as well as see, and that we learn to appreciate the silent listener through the resounding voice of the orator.
