Previous section of this paper

Next section of this paper

Back to New Media Communications Home Page

Back to Index for this Theology Paper

My initial Web Theology Page

Send Me Comments, Suggestions, Resources or links to resources for this study

The Printing Press And The Church

BY

Dale Lature

The invention of the printing press represents for the church a crucial moment in history for its communication strategies. What Walter Ong has called "the technologizing of the Word" ( the move of societies from an oral communication paradigm to a writing/printing paradigm) has had a dramatic effect on the way people process experience. The Church story in this context provides us with a way to explore just what these shaping influences of the press were doing (and continue to do) to the way we religious people of the church process the traditions, of our faith. Since we have a "message" to communicate, and we seek to do that in a way which "Connects" to the experience of those "receivers" of our message, the forms of our attempts to communicate throughout history may shed some light on our thinking about how "authentic" our message really is. I was fascinated by the insights communicated to me first by Tom Boomershine in August 1990, and from recommendations he made for further reading in "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong, and then further searchings for ideas in the process of doing research for this paper (which itself represents a product of the age of print: an attempt to "set parameters" of organization and categorization of all the insights to which I was exposed in my reading).

Luther himself described printing as "God's highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the gospel is driven forward".. Other less lofty appraisals of the forces unleashed by the invention of the printing press described it as a "progressive enlightenment" . My own appraisal is a mixed review. Even though the opportunity for widespread availability of the insights of tradition and new thinking was provided for by the presses, I also see the church in a struggle to maintain faithfulness to a tradition while also reshaping the message to appeal to contemporary modes of thinking. Boomershine's article helped me to dig deeper into this issue by calling into question whether the biblical tradition can be "in" the words of a book. His conclusion is that it cannot be; that this mindset is the product of an age of print which tends to identify "truth" in statements which can then be "encoded" in print. These tendencies can be seen in church history almost immediately after the first printing presses began rolling.

These "effects" of printing began "almost immediately" not because the press changed everything so quickly, but because the processes that the press further mechanized were set in motion by writing in the "age of manuscript,". It may help at this point to explain what Ong meant by "technologizing of the word". Technology refers to the use of tools to create an extension of the senses (in this case, the sense of hearing, as :in the sounds we hear as someone speaks). Therefore, writing began a process of technologizing of words, that is, re-creating the experience of hearing words spoken. The process is not pure; the "words" of writing very crudely represent the sounds. This explanation sounded strange when I first heard it, because I had never thought of words primarily in terms of sound. I am a person of the age of print, accustomed to conceiving of words as marks on a page (Boomershine points out that print itself moved from being designed for reading out loud to "silent reading" which is what we assume today has always been the dominant way of perceiving it). Manuscript culture began the shift away from orality, although it began in a clearly subordinate role to oral experience. Writings clearly pointed to the experience of "hearing" the words, and early manuscripts often included marks to indicate rhythm, loudness, and intonation. The seemingly strange arrangement of early manuscript pages catered to the importance of sounds rather than the content encoded in the words. But the process of separating "words" from their sense experience ( from the actual context of their utterance) began a move toward objectification of words, and the idea that ideas and their words can be "set down" and "captured". Indeed the idea of "capturing" words seemed to some a sacrilege. Most written material was a kind of sacred writing. and most of the writing was on "sacred" subjects. and craftsmen were often cloistered men devoting themselves to their manuscript production of sacred writings. So it seems that the "sacrilege" of writing came to be less offensive and more appreciated (at least in our western culture, since Ong points out that only 78 of 3000 languages spoken today have a literature, and only 106 of all the many thousands).

The first use of the press by the church signaled the relationship between printing and capitalism. Eisenstein observes that the first known publication by Gutenberg's press was an indulgence. The printers were "pressed" into service (sorry) by the church in pursuit of financial gain. This muddies the story of the grand beginnings of the printing press, but it also places the entire struggle inside the print shop. It wasn't just Luther's response to the indulgences that began the widespread utilization of the presses to distribute dissenting viewpoints, but the initiating offense of indulgences themselves were circulated through this new medium. This debate between the Reformers (usually represented by Luther) and the Catholic Church became public through the presses. The presses soon found their interests allied with the Reformers as the Catholic Church began its campaign of censorship, publishing its INDEX which condemned various writings and sought to prohibit the printers from producing the submittals of men like Luther and his supporters. In some ways the INDEX helped the cause of the printers in bringing to attention the titles of specific books and authors deemed heretical. This helped demand (much like today's controversial matters given publicity which helps attract an audience to otherwise obscure matters) for such books. Even burning of books made demand for books higher if some printer could safely continue to publish it, and they kept producing more as fast as they could be burned.

My earlier discussion about "technologizing" of the word may give us some insight into one aspect of the Protestant-Catholic difference that was accentuated by the press. Since writing moves one toward "internalizing" the word in the mind, the Protestant emphasis upon "reading the word" and separation of themselves from externally experienced "channels of grace" such as the sacraments may have widened the conceptual gaps between the groups. (This inward-growth of the sacred experience may have formed the direction of the next major shift in communication: the move from print culture to the "image-oriented culture" of the electronic age - most clearly seen in the power of TV and its images. Gregor Goethals discusses a "sublimation" kind of response to the Protestant rejection of images in the early years which is now coming back out of the unconscious in the form of new "non-religious" images which are mysteriously powerful.) So this movement toward the word in print began new forms of Biblical interpretation. Some may have arisen because of the nature of thinking about truth as "words on a page", and others because of the encouragement of lay reading of the Bible. When individuals are encouraged to read it for themselves, the risk is run that something "radical" will happen. Both of these factors may have been a part of the revolution in religious thinking which took place.

The Catholic response was to discourage lay education and reading of vernacular translations. They went as far as to oppose the press as a contributor to Godlessness and heretical ideas. They even put these ideas into print in the INDEXES. There were also the roles of the scribes, many of whom were in Catholic cloisters, and in danger of losing their usefulness if society continued in the direction of capitulating to the rapidly growing "print culture". The Catholic Church also resisted the vernacular translations, insisting that the uniformity of worship would be lost (which was and is true). They utilized the presses to achieve a more thorough uniformity which was less achievable for the more remote regions until printing made it possible to circulate liturgical books, catechisms, and other unifying writings and instructions. It seems that although the Catholic Church opposed the "objectification" of truth (which was an outgrowth of the "technologization of the word" resulting from writing and printing), they nevertheless reacted to writings such as Luther's as if they did hold power as words on a page. And soon after the presses were rolling, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica" became the theology par excellence in the church after 300 years of relative obscurity. The press had brought to the front many new ways of thinking, but the church resisted the rise of this new literacy, and in the "Great Refusal" of 1546, decided to stand by the Latin Vulgate as the authorized scripture translation. This was a most visible sign of their repudiation of the Reformist movement. rejecting vernacular translations and encouraging continuation of lay dependence on ecclesiastical interpretation.

Within Protestantism, the proliferation of vernacular translations allowed for a diversity previously unknown, and for the development of cultural churches which reflected more of the peculiarities of each culture. Many new elements and characteristics were assimilated in various contexts. The interchange and accommodation happening in the first two centuries after print were unparalleled in church history since the infancy of the church. It was during this infancy, interestingly enough, that the previous changes in communication were taking place, and the Christian tradition was "flavored" with oral traditions, manuscript writings addressing Greek culture and utilizing its thought patterns and folklore to carry the Christian gospel (or was it a "mutation"?) Eisenstein stated that "Lutherans held the essence of scripture to be unaffected by the means used to transmit it ". This is a view which strikes at the heart of most recent communication theory. It is certainly rejected by the McLuhan school. It also seems to be of the same mind-set which forms the fundamentalist approach to scripture. That truths have been chosen by God himself to be contained in the words of a book (the Bible), and that there is no need for an interpreter (or that the revelation of God will somehow come through the words). The contemporary rise of scientific thought also seems to have had its beginnings in the concepts built by the culture of writing/print. The objectification of truth became more specialized. The fashioning of closed statements became more and more accepted as fact, and perceived to be like fact. New debates about the "textus receptus" (the correct text; the authorized and authentic text) began in the religious community as a result of the implications of scientific study. Both radical and conservative thinking was put into print and opened inquiry into the relation between religion and science, and between religion and other previously unconsidered disciplines.

Eisenstein observed that the printing press sharpened and heightened each division within the church to a degree not possible before. She therefore gives the printing press credit for not only the spread of Christendom, but also for enabling a more thorough and lasting schism:

Sixteenth-century heresy and schism shattered Christendom so completely that even after religious warfare had ended, ecumenical movements led by men of good will could not put all the pieces together again. Not only were there too many splinter groups., separatists, and independent sects who regarded a central church government as incompatible with true faith; but the main lines of cleavage had been extended across continents and carried overseas along with Bibles and breviaries. Colonists who crossed a great ocean to arrive safely in the new world offered prayers to the same God, much as had medieval pilgrims or crusaders. But the sign of the cross had become divisive. There was no longer any one language to serve for common prayer. The forms of worship shared by congregations in New England markedly diverged from those of fellow Christians who attended mass in the Baroque churches of New Spain. Within a few generations, the gap between Protestant and Catholic had widened sufficiently to give rise to contrasting literary cultures and life-styles. Long after theology had ceased to provoke wars, Christians on both continents were separated from each other by invisible barriers that are still with us today. 6

These pictures paint a picture of the press as a "mixed blessing", which I feel is an adequate assessment. I can't say whether or not I feel that things could have come out any better or worse had we had no printing press. My own journey in the faith has been deeply enriched by the print materials (I had started to say "by the printed word", but I caught myself.) Their influence has even eventually led me into this study where I can turn and observe the culture which has shaped the way I think and understand "truths".

The things I have found have led me to feel a kind of kinship with the question Pilate is said to have put to Jesus at the "trial"., "What is truth?" I. can only say that it is only reflected in words and writing; words on a page can only give us a view of truth as "through a glass darkly". I am nevertheless thankful for the resource of writing. Through it I can work on my thinking about a subject to the point of "reducing" it to words. In my various attempts to say it many times in many different ways, my "literate" mind might grasp something which clues me in to something about that subject which is more than "intellectual". but also incorporates my emotions, body, and who knows what else. I realize the power of stories when I glance back through my personal journal and re-read about a long forgotten experience, and not only remember the events, but reexperience the feelings that I had about the events. But it was the events themselves which comprise the "truth", not the words used to describe them, or the way I chose to express them. I only hope that the church might discover this in the electronic age, and be able to shift its emphasis from print to experience; from "words" to "the word". "The medium is the message" is like a prophetic warning for us. The medium of print cannot be expected to faithfully and uncompromisingly carry the message. When it is expected, the medium IS the message; what we get is the empty false categories of thinking in abstractions and scientific "facts" and cultural modes of thinking. THE MESSAGE awaits our experiencing the "story" as our story; truly a "peace that passes all understanding".