'Stood There and Stared at Silence, Silent Too'

St. Augustine observes of St. Ambrose in Book VI, Chapter 3 of his Confessions:

 

“When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. . . . Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading and never otherwise.”

 

Scholars disagree: Was Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, an eccentric or pioneer? Did others in the fourth and fifth centuries not read silently? Augustine found it sufficiently noteworthy to point out Ambrose’s peculiar manner of reading: “Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did.” Did Augustine ever ask Ambrose to explain himself?

 

After millennia of silent reading, it seems like the “natural” thing to do. Reading aloud is conventionally reserved for young children not yet able to read on their own, or for special cases. It’s a “performance,” not unlike acting, especially if you add accents and sound effects. Even when alone in the house, many of us would feel self-conscious reading Daniel Deronda aloud to the empty rooms. Reading is so interior an act, so intimate an engagement with a text, that it would seem almost indecent to broadcast it.

 

Deborah Warren takes Ambrose’s peculiar act and Augustine’s account of it as the premise for her poem “Silent Reading” (Zero Meridian: Poems, 2004):

 

“Ambrose read silently, astonishing

those who watched and pressed around him spellbound,

never having heard of such a thing:

Romans didn’t read except aloud.

And here was Ambrose who, without a sound,

swallowed the hidden words before a crowd

so thunderstruck you’d think the earth had stopped --

 

“And twitching an instant at the poles, it had.

It leaned on its axis to read the constellations

printed in all the volumes of the sky

and shifted its shoulder, riffling the ocean's pages,

the way it does when it’s stunned by something new,

and then resumed its spinning while the Romans

stood there and stared at silence, silent too.”

 

Warren hints that Ambrose’s practice was “earth-shaking.” Perhaps it helped make possible the modern understanding of our discrete interior lives.  

 

[The Augustine passage is quoted from Henry Chadwick’s translation of Confessions (Oxford University Press, 2008). In a footnote to the passage, Chadwick writes: “In antiquity silent reading was uncommon, not unknown.”]