Reading Three Ways

1) The first kind of reading is ‘academic reading’. This is the reading that focuses on technical mastery. ‘This is reading whose principle tools are the concept deployed in coercive argument and the repeatable experiment’. As this reading is primarily for explanation and analysis, it may well be the primary mode of reading you practice through your training for ministry. It's the kind fo reading you do when you need to excavate a text for resources to help you write your essays and assignments.

2) Proustian reading, by contrast, is reading for pleasure, for reverie, for sensual, aesthetic and very likely sexual enjoyment. The content of the book is secondary to its style and its rhetorical and physical effects upon the reader. Reading is a tool of self-development, not so much training of the mind – as in the first approach – as inculcation of aesthetic sensibilities.

3) The third type of reading, Victorine reading, is reading for moral and religious instruction, formation and value. This is akin to the ancient understanding of lectio divina, although formalized in a complex theory which I need not go into here.  Lectio divina, holy reading, was practiced by early Christian monastics, building on Jewish practices of reading scripture, in which communities of monks gave themselves to a slow, ruminative reading and re-reading of the scriptures. This was part of their daily practice, a means of taking the words of scripture from the surface level of the eyes and the mind down into the heart, the seat of the will and of the affections.  They understood that the word needs to be chewed slowly before it can be absorbed by the mind and the heart and that this is the slow, patient work of years. The aim was for transformation of mind and heart, the development of the ‘mind of Christ’ in the believer which not only inform thinking but also shape action and disposition, forming a Christlike character in the believer.  Reading undertaken in this spirit and conviction is an act of prayer and devotion as much as it is an intellectual discipline. For the early Christians thought and prayer were not separate spheres; the theologian was a person rooted and grounded in scripture and in prayer and right thinking was the fruit of right living, right praying, right desire.  

These different approaches to reading can be in real tension and conflict, and this can pose a dilemma for the researcher who is committed to the practice of research as part of their discipleship or spiritual life and yet is required to read comprehensively and exhaustively within the confines of limited time. Academic life, like the rest of society, is increasingly driven by models of consumption and production and it is not surprising that, in this environment, reading (and writing) becomes just another product to consume, to master and to ‘own’, with the emphasis on speed, efficiency of recall and reproduction and a mechanical, mastery model of relationship to the text.  This is fundamentally in conflict with models of reading for pleasure (the Proustian) or for contemplation and spiritual formation (the monastic and Victorine).   

It sounds like an obvious point to make – that there are different ways of reading the same text – but calling attention to the kinds of ways we read  texts can help us to keep track of the theological significance of reading.

The following exercise seeks to apply Griffiths's three fold typology to reading a section from Augustine's Confessions.