Ambrose, Bishop of Rome in 383 CE, appears to have been the first person in recorded history to have read silently. There almost certainly would have been someone in another culture with symbolic text, who took in a text silently and is currently lost to history. In any case, reading silently wasn't a thing. The understanding of those pictures and symbols was meant to be spoken out loud. Language was exclusively the spoken word. Those marks were meant to bring forth speech.
Ambrose, however, didn't vocalize text. We know this because Augustine, a Berber from Africa, now known as St. Augustine, wrote about the startling sight of a mind processing text without speaking the words. Describing his experience with Ambrose, Augustine recorded, "When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud." No one in Imperial Rome had observed silent reading before.
Word of this astonishing intellectual feat of reading silently, spread around the Mediterranean.
If you are reading this without moving your lips and vocalizing the sound, it's a consequence of the next part of the story.
Jerome, scholar, bishop, and saint -- contemporary to the scholars, bishops, and saints Ambrose and Augustine -- heard of this silent reading thing, and taught himself silent reading. Jerome had a monastery, school, and library in Bethlehem, adjacent to the site Jesus was reputedly born. Jerome, shall I say it nicely, lacked the customary patience of a saint, his elevation to that status notwithstanding. He taught his students to read silently, probably invented the library, Shush!, and replaced the Socratic method of active discourse with the lecture, where the great one holds forth to silent students.
Jerome's lecture method and elevation of silence entered the Christian monastic system, which became the European university system, which leads to 2000 years later, to our still going to lectures and meetings where we sit in silence, while the great one holds forth.
Who will rid me of this annoying priest?
Humans spoke about 130,000 years before we started to make visible representations of words and sounds. Once we had people who could make representation: let's call them writers, most of those writers, therefore, were the people to interpret those designs: let's call them readers. Readers and writers were pretty much the same person for a while, writing symbols and calling forth those symbols as spoken word. It was another five thousand years before reading silently was established as a norm. Then there was another thousand years before the printing press put text in front of the vulgar masses. I'm pretty sure Jerome would have found mouthy, fidgety me in that category.
Reading
A fascinating neuromuscular activity that, with mover, promotes a neurostimulus when we activate our reading process, and activates it for some of us more than others. First, our eyes search and find the character or word, second, identify that character or word as a symbol, and third identify that symbol as a sound. Traditionally, we would have vocalized that sound as we recognized it. Now we have added a fourth effort of asking our heart to sort out the meaning, as Augustine put it.
What we call dyslexia, shows up in these four efforts. If we struggle with one, it's a mild dyslexia and usually goes undiagnosed. This is my case. I struggle with the first. I tire readily from the search and find. Diagnosable dyslexia shows up from struggles with any two. Dyslexia as a reading disability shows up when one struggles with three of these efforts.
I'm seeing I need to pick this topic up again in the next post. Before then, observe yourself reading, and see if you can recognize your application of these four efforts, and perhaps recognize your differential ability to engage these efforts.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper