Note: I have come to reconsider the content in this article, and it will be re-posted at a later date. I particularly disagree with my reading of the “image” at the end, and will soon be adjusting my interpretation accordingly.
At the end of Plato’s Phædrus, 274C-275B,* Socrates relates a myth, supposedly Egyptian, of the god Theuth speaking to the king-god Thamus about the arts he wishes to give to humankind. Of Theuth’s greatest gifts is writing. He tells the king that writing will be the drug that augments memory and wisdom. Thamus, however, disagrees, saying instead that it will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls” by keeping them from the habitude of recollection and the exercise of memory. Written words remind the learners, but have nothing to do with aiding memory. The distinction is important. For Plato, as described in the Meno, what people call learning is nothing but the soul’s recollection of knowledge it had possessed before its current bodily indwelling. To exercise the memory, then, directly enhances the capability of learning, because it works the same intellectual muscles required to dig up eternal things forgotten in the soul. But to be reminded of something has nothing to do with learning, and it presupposes that the one reminded has already learned, already recollected, the eternal knowledge from within the soul; having what the writer has learned external to him gives him the freedom to no longer practice searching it out within himself, and so he gets out of the habit of searching his soul altogether, thereby reducing his capacity for learning. The distinction between the aid to memory and the reminder might be carried further in the following analogy: the aid to memory is to the reminder as a question is to a dogma, and as a living interlocutor is to a dead book. The antecedents are all stimuli for learning, whereas the consequents are only crutches by which one ceases to think and rests in the ease of merely repeating old knowledge.
Plato through Socrates through Thamus goes on to speak even more disparagingly of writing: “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally not know anything; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Now a nuance is taken into consideration. Above, it was made clear that writing would help someone who had knowledge to keep his knowledge nearby, while atrophying his faculties of recollection. But here, what is at issue is the effect of the writing on those who have not written it, the effect of knowledge that is given from outside and not sought and found within the learner. The conclusion seems to be that the student of the dead book may at best be a parrot for another man’s knowledge, but he himself does not thereby know. The reminders in writing can never be clear or certain for those who have not written them, that is, for those who have not known the things before reading them. This will all take a twist of meaning when it is brought back to Augustine’s thoughts about the Holy Spirit, but Plato has more to say about writing that will aid the inquiry.
Socrates, at 275D-E,* notes that, no matter how lifelike a painting might seem, the painting does not respond to the looker. A piece of writing is exactly like this painting, having the semblance of understanding, but not having life. If the reader asks the words a question, they only give one answer, they only repeat themselves. They cannot read between their own lines, and they cannot explain themselves. They also cannot discriminate: “when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not.” As was pointed out above, writing will give the semblance of knowledge for those who are reminded of something they themselves have not yet learned. It would be better if the words could choose to whom they reveal their meaning and to whom not, acting as reminders to those who have knowledge, and being inaccessible to those who have no business reading them. But as it is, they are perpetual victims, susceptible to violence at all times. They are like illegitimate children, always needing the help of their father the writer to come to their defense. Should he stop defending them, there is nothing to protect them from misuse or abuse.
Shall we conclude that writing is always in some way harmful and always being harmed whenever it is read? Socrates and Phædrus, at 276A, consider another kind of writing that stands in stark opposition to what has already been said, and this second kind will give us substantial questions for comparison between Plato’s view of writing and Augustine’s view of the Bible. This second kind is like the legitimate son from the same father as the other. It is legitimate because it was written according to knowledge in the writer’s soul. Being so, it does not need its father’s protection, but is brought up able to defend itself, discriminating between those to whom it speaks. Phædrus muses that such a speech coming from knowledge is living and ensouled, and that the written form of it is an “image” proper. A careful distinction must be made here: this image is not the same as the mute painting or the dead book mentioned above. It does not enter the soul as a mere appearance, as a shell of something, but as a shell carries with it the substance of the thing imaged. It is like a seed, and hence Socrates goes on to describe the responsible and knowledgeable writer as a serious farmer, 276A-277A.
More of the Phædrus will inform some later inquiries, but what has been brought up so far can be brought back to the Confessions in a series of questions. Augustine tells us much of his early education and his experience with particular books. Some of them he remembers with reverence, like Cicero’s Hortensius, and others he scorns as distractions from God’s call to repentance, like Virgil’s Æneid. But over and above them all Augustine puts the Bible, and of especial interest in his debate with the Manichæans are Genesis and the Old Testament. Does Augustine draw the same distinction as the Phædrus between the dead books and the living? Is it as simple as saying the world’s books are illegitimate sons, and the Bible legitimate? Are the former mute like a painting, but the latter able to impregnate the reader with knowledge? The Bible’s relationship to the dichotomy brought up by Plato will be very insightful, leading directly into a rich understanding of Augustine’s thoughts on Moses, the Holy Spirit, and the role of reading for Christians, which will come up in a few of the following articles.
*All Phædrus citations come from Jowett’s public domain translation.
