Orality and the Sound of the Spirit: Intoning an Acoustemological Pneumatology. Part II
Presented to the American Theological Society, Princeton Seminary,
28 March 2015
In order to probe deeper into the implications of orality for a theology of preaching, I want to expand our field of analysis to include both the nature of speaking vis-à-vis vocalization and the nature of hearing in relationship to sound. The former might be considered an exercise in what Werner Kelber calls oral ontology, the latter that of what Don Ihde designates ontology of the auditory.1 Throughout, we will be in dialogue with the maestro of orality studies, Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, even as we connect the discussion of pentecostal preaching to our pneumatological theology of preaching to come. In effect, the following can be considered a pneumatological rendition of Ong’s explorations of the oral, sonic, and auditory dimensions of the human experience.
According to Ong, there are a number of features of oral cultural interaction that are underestimated or completely overlooked by literate cultures that rely on written modes of communication.2 Most of us reading this essay presume a logical, analytic, informational-based, propositional, categorical, abstract, and chronologically-and-sequentially oriented form of discursive rationality. This is based on an ontology of sight, dominated by visual observation, that presumes distance between the individual knower and the known, and focuses (notice the correlation of the verb with the optic lens) on distinctions within a field of awareness.3 By contrast, oral cultural communicative patterns, as pre-logical, formulaic, testimonial, narrative, and proverbial, are phonologically, metrically, syntactically, and mnemonically constrained to greater or lesser degrees. But its performance presumes verbal, vocal, and aural embodiment; its environments are participatory, situational, and social; and its eventness is characterized by evanescence, dynamism, and present-ness.
Stereotypical pentecostal preaching can be understood along each of these registers as an oral-cultural event. Its rhetoric, repetitiousness, and rhythms engage speaker and audience. Preachers bridge existentially to congregations through patterned sets of comparative and contrastive tropes, narratives, and testimonies. The masses connect with alliterativeness, popular cultural stock, and religiously- and theologically-coded formulations. There is also a personalization of the message through the preacher’s gestures, vocal inflections, facial expressions, and other animations. Yet we have to probe deeper. What is it that connects the preacher and the audience? Here we segue to a phenomenology of sound to understand oral cultural dynamics.
Oral vocalizations connect human beings as subjects, from heart to heart, as it were. Ong thus speaks about “interiority of sound”4 in this way:
My voice really goes out of me. But it calls not to something outside, but to the inwardness of another. It is a call of one interior through an exterior to another interior. Because presence is itself interior, it is involved in the world of sound with which we have here been concerned more intimately than in the world of space. Sound, as we have seen, reveals interiors. For man the paradigm of sound is voice, in which communication between man and man (man in the deepest of interiors) flowers as in no other sensory manifestation. Voice is alive.5
Think about how sounds emanate from within–as in tapping a can allows us to discern what might or might not be in it–and about how human voices represent themselves as subjects, emerging from within, and being directed to other subjects. Thus, “Sound reveals interiors because its nature is determined by interior relationships,” and “Sound binds interiors to one another as interiors.”6 My point is that preaching as event is thoroughly intersubjective surely because of the oral medium, and pentecostal preaching is exemplary in this regard perhaps because of its oral virtues (without ignoring its potential problems).
Now compare oral communication to what has happened in literature cultures dependent on the written word: “Writing and reading…are solo activities (though reading at first was often enough done communally). They engage the psyche in strenuous, interiorized, individualized thought of a sort inaccessible to oral folk.”7 So if visuality separates the knowing subject from the known object,8 hearing binds knowers together with the known. This is what makes oral communication thoroughly interpersonal and communal as well. “The word, which is essentially sound, unites not just one man and another; it forms men into groups. It is the expression and incarnation of community.”9 More pointedly, in an auditory world, “One feels knowledge as our possession rather than as my possession.”10
Yet it is not just that oral culture presumes human communities. Beyond communal relationality, oral interactivity catalyzes an ethos, ambience, and “entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex”11 that supports what I have called a sonic rationality. We can consider again Turner’s assessment that, “Music in black preaching establishes a direct link between the spirit within the preacher, the word that is uttered, and the worshiping congregation. It operates beneath the structures of logical discourse and produces a captivating effect upon the hearer.”12 What Turner is gesturing to is that oral communication is a deeply affective and embodied medium that operates bidirectionally, as preacher and congregation are constituted by a sound-filled event. Thus, as already augured, if chirographic cultures privilege the author, even the author’s intention, oral cultures prioritize neither speaker nor listener but their relationship.13 Historically, then, oral communication presumed both that the audience’s background knowledge enables completion of the speaker’s meaning, but also that the latter is influenced by the former. Ong thus notes that, “Orally managed language and thought is not noted for analytic precision,” and that “In an oral culture, the flow of words, the corresponding flood of thought, the copia advocated in Europe by rhetoricians from classical antiquity through the Renaissance, tends to manage discrepancies by glossing over them–the etymology here is telling, glossa, tongues, by ‘tonguing’ them over.”14 Oral communication is therefore interactive with meaning contextually emergent and communally negotiated (between speakers and hearers and vice-versa), but more rather than less definitive; in contrast, written communication is closed and in that sense static, even as it’s meaning is open-ended because texts invite interpretation but without authorial feedback available.
Before turning from orality to the auditory, we need to make a preliminary pneumatological connection. Stephen Webb’s important contribution to theology of proclamation foregrounds the spoken word in relationship to Christology: the primordial Word and voice is that of Jesus Christ.15 The Christological emphasis is not surprising given the Barthian provenance of Webb as constructive theologian. Yet there is passing reference in this regard to Barth’s pneumatology as including not only speech but also hearing,16 which parallels the pentecostal understanding of the miracle of Pentecost as one of either speech or hearing. My point here is twofold: not only that the Spirit empowers proclamation and reception of the message but that the Spirit’s communicative modality is from deep to deep – i.e., the “Spirit bearing witness with our spirit” (Rom. 8:16) – even from heart to heart (cf. the Johannine account and gloss of Jesus’ teaching about the Spirit: “‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive” (John 7:38-39); and that the communality of preaching as an oral event is fundamentally pneumatological, funded indeed by “the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:13). In short, preaching understood as an oral, auditory, and sonic event resounds pneumatologically, inviting even a pneumatological ontology that comprehends, analogously, the “presence of the Spirit, in which we live, move, and have our being, [as] the space in which the infinitely full utterance of life reverberates.”17
Such a pneumatological ontology begs for further elucidation, especially of its sonic dimensions. This leads us from orality to audibility and the auditory. We have already begun to appreciate the all-encompassing and yet intimate nature of sound. Any phenomenological analysis will perceive ephemeral sounds surrounding and penetrating. We can compare for instance experiencing a symphony on the one side with participating in a black pentecostal worship service on the other side; the musical harmonies and the call-and-response envelops, submerges, inundates, even invades the human soul from all directions. Ong puts it thus:
Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer…. You can immerse yourself in hearing, in sound. There is no way to immerse yourself similarly in sight. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart…. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.18
This is why a sonic rationality is both fully embodied but yet environmentally constituted, interconnected, and reverberated.
At the same time, the presentness of the hearing experience means that while sounds are fleeting, they both grow and fade; they can be anticipated and felt as echoes. In that sense, there is both synchronicity and diachronicity to sound: in its transitory evanescence, the presence of sound is the moment in which we find ourselves connected with our surroundings, and the passage through which our past meets our future. Yet there is a dynamicity to sound: the next moment introduces a re-intonated past and a new realm of possibilities, even as we find ourselves resituated vis-à-vis others and our environment. From this auditory “standpoint,” the self emerges as a temporal and spatial field: “The centering action of sound (the field of sound) is not spread out before me but is all around me) affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world.”19
Yet it is precisely this dynamic, vital, and depth dimensionality of sound that intimates a pneumatologically infused world. Ong suggests that, “earlier man, under the influence of oral-aural or preliterate communications media, the world tended to be vaguely animistic…. Economies of thought built around the study of nature are thus vaguely animistic, for natura means at root birth”; by contract, the scientific and Newtonian revolution, especially with its “accompanying exaltation of the sense of sight at the expense of hearing, spelled the end of the feeling for a vitalized universe…. The old more or less auditory syntheses had presented the universe as being, which was here and now acting, filled with events. For the new, more visual synthesis, the universe was simply there, a mass of things, quite uneventful.”20 Any recovery, or at least appreciation, of the oral imagination thus will bring with it also a pneumatological reinvigoration. “The spirit (Latin, spiritus),” Ong reminds us, “meant to breathe, the vehicle of the living word in time.”21
So if the modern synthesis resulted first in a deistic God, removed from human affairs – out of sight, literally, meant out of mind and out of contact – and then later in agnostic (at best) or atheistic (at worst) dispositions, the postmodern reaction prompt at least two lines of deliberation. On the one hand, it is “evident enough that in general Asian and African cultures remain to this day far more radically oral than those of the West,”22 and this reconnects us to the prior discussion of the expansion of pentecostal spirituality in the majority world. While some anthropologists have long called attention to the “excluded middle”–the realm of ancestors, angels, and other spiritual realities between the human and divine planes23–contemporary oral cultures remains irreducibly tri-dimensional, to extend this metaphorical conceptualization. On the other hand, within the western context, there is a gradual if also palpable “reenchantment” of the world that is arguably due to the influx of new spiritualities derived from global South resources due to migration.24 My point is the pneumatological one: (re)attunement to the world of sound brings with it awareness of other presences, interiorities, and even subjects so that we may be rediscovering ourselves as in the midst of and resounding with others. If modernity produced a “devocalized, depersonalized universe,”25 our time booms with its acoustic animations, potentially replenishing our cosmic hallways with ancestors, spirits, and even deities.
The preceding ontological inquiries into the oral and the auditory is indicative of how sonic considerations open up toward what Werner Kelber calls a metaphysics of presence?27 While Kelber is interested primarily in how orality makes human agents (speakers) present to one another and how sound locates human subjects in relationship to their environments, I want to take more seriously than Ong, whose language of “earlier man” might be interpreted paternalistically, how the acoustemological imagination has pneumatological implications in multiple directions. If the apostle Paul, who is generally agreed upon as operating primarily in an oral frequency,28 speaks not only regularly about the principalities and powers but also, in the context of kerygmatic proclamation insists that “through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10), then oral cultural animism re-emerges with a pneumatology of preaching in line with the present inquiry. This is not to suggest a “spirit” behind every pulpit–to riff off the common criticism of pentecostal-charismatics that they see a demon behind every tree–but it is to recognize that the context of the preaching event is multiply constituted by preacher, audience, the Holy Spirit, and perhaps other spiritual dynamics when considered acoustemologically and pneumatologically.29
Our pneumatological turn might be considered too much, or at least too hazardous for our theological health, since it seems like we are asking now not only about the Holy Spirit but about the sounds of other spirits as well. I am going out on a limb, I admit, much further than even as innovative and constructive a theologian as Jeremy Begbie has gone in his efforts to provide “music therapy for theologians.”30 Begbie’s project was to draw on acoustemics to reproblematize classical theological conundrums like the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. When considered spatially, what emerges is a zero-sum game whereby gains on either side threaten the other. He suggests that the sound angle opens up the possibility of “two in one space” (151) and “three in one space” (154)–here calling to mind incarnational (divine-human) and Trinitarian (Father-Son-Spirit) logic–that allows us to see harmonization but also “interpenetration” between otherwise competing realities in order to re-secure the notion of creaturely freedom without compromising divine sovereignty.31 In this vein, I am proposing an exercise in acoustemic therapy for theologians and preachers that foregrounds orality and sound, and thus affectivity, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and animation, as a way forward beyond the tunnel vision dominated by literary textuality and its intellectualistic rationalism for understanding the event of proclamation and of the good news of the gospel in a pneumatically infused cosmos. If Begbie is correct that music “is capable of evoking a space for the hearer that is, so to speak, ‘edgeless’, an inherently expansive space that has no close parallel in the world of the eye,”32 then the preaching of the gospel is a sonic event that tolls out cosmic dimensions for human creatures that are historical and material, although irreducibly so.
Notes
1. See Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 167, 185, and Ihde, Listening and Voice, 15.
2. The magisterial comparative study is Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982).
3. Thus, the “preference for vision is tied to a metaphysics of objects. Vision already is on the way to being the ‘objective’ sense” (Ihde, Listening and Voice, 7).
4. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 71-74.
5. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 309.
6. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 118 and 125.
7. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 153.
8. Ong notes how Kantian and Husserlian epistemology are predicated on sight that presume the chasm between the phenomenon and noumenon, the manifestation/appearance and the ding an sich (The Presence of the Word, 74); might modernism thus be reliant upon a visually impaired modality of knowing?
9. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 310; in his later book, Ong put it this way: “the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups…. Writing and print isolate….” (Orality and Literacy, 74).
10. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 233; emphasis Ong’s.
11. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 6.
12. Turner, “Foreword,” x.
13. See also Werner H. Kelber and Tom Thatcher, “‘It’s Not Easy to Take a Fresh Approach’: Reflections on The Oral and the Written Gospel (An Interview with Werner Kelber),” in Tom Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond The Oral and the Written Gospel(Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008), 27-43.
14. Ong, Presence of the Word, 104.
15. See Stephen H. Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). Webb also writes that “the inner life is a soundscape that integrates body, mind, and emotion, all of which are revealed in the voice” (p. 44).
16. Webb, The Divine Voice, 174.
17. Christopher Emerick, “Not By Bread Alone: An Ontology of Christian Proclamation in Theological Perspective” (PhD dissertation, Regent University School of Divinity, 2011), 203; Emerick’s thesis is much more pneumatologically funded than the title suggests.
18. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 72.
19. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 73.
20. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 227-28. Further, Ong writes: “Early man had a true, if at the same time, confused, sense of the mystery, power, & holiness of the word. He lived by the word in its natural habitat, the world of sound, partly because he did not know how to do otherwise. He was undistracted, although at the same time he was relatively undeveloped” (The Presence of the Word, 314).
21. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 138.
22. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 75.
23. See, e.g., Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), part III.
24. See Christopher Partridge, ed., The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture and Occulture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); cf. James K. A. Smith, ed., After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Reenchantment of the World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008).
25. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 231.
26. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Kirsteen Kim, and Amos Yong, eds.,Interdisciplinary and Religio-Cultural Discourses on a Spirit-Filled World: Loosing the Spirits (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), unfolds, although not quite sounds out, just such a pluralistic and pneumatological cosmos in contemporary terms.
27. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel, 99-100.
28. See Joanna Dewey, “Textuality in an Oral Culture: A Survey of the Pauline Traditions,” in Joanna Dewey, ed., Orality and Textuality in Early Christian Literature, Semeia 65 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995), 37-65.
29. For those interested in how I have carried forward – rather than demythologized in the Bultmannian sense – this complicated matter of the principalities and powers vis-à-vis pentecostal theological projects in political theology and in the theology and science dialogue, see respectively my In the Days of Caesar: Pentecostalism and Political Theology – The Cadbury Lectures 2009, Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), ch. 4, and The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination,Pentecostal Manifestos 4 (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), ch. 6.
30. Jeremy Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142.
31. Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God, 151, 154, and 159.
32. Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God, 162.
