The Art of Listening in the Early Church by Carol Harrison (review)

This book is essentially an examination of early Christian discourse concentrating on the role of the hearer, rather than, as conventionally, on that of the writer. As Harrison notes, writers and speakers in the ancient world (writers also being speakers due to their consciousness of orality) were conscious of the effect that their discourse would have on hearers. Rhetorical handbooks therefore concentrate on the intended effect of a speaker on an audience, thus giving us access through observing the rhetoric of the discourse to the “silent hearer.” As the author notes, this is a means of reading the fathers (the author’s word) on their own terms, since, inhabiting at least in part the world of the classically trained rhetor, early Christian speakers/authors were entirely conscious of their audience. New Testament scholars are beginning to take account of the performative aspect of this literature and of the listening audience, and so perhaps, to extend the study to later Christian discourse is a welcome turn. It seems that students of early Christian discourse have, to an extent, missed the obvious.

Having established the groundwork for the thesis, in demonstrating the profoundly aural culture of antiquity, Harrison treats three areas of discourse: preaching, catechesis, and prayer.

In discussing preaching from the perspective of the audience, Harrison is treading ground which has been prospected before. She manages, however, to find new angles, particularly in noting the manner in which the hearers, who are hearers of Scripture, hear Scripture through the voice of the preacher. In particular Harrison treats John Chrysostom, in whose preaching the audience figures large. But Chrysostom is perhaps atypical; for all that the audience is a silent participant in Chrysostom’s preaching (and is not altogether silent), and for all that later Byzantine preaching incorporates dialogue, it is not accurate to state that this explains the use of the term homilia to describe Christian preaching (152). Nonetheless, in the context of the rhetoric of preaching, it is helpful to find preaching categorized as therapeutic rhetoric (142–43), thus placing the Christian preacher in the tradition of the psychagogic rhetor, even though this is not an insight which derives from the fundamental thesis of the book.

Perhaps most helpful are the chapters on catechesis, in which ancient theories of sense perception and memorization as the formation of a mind through speech are related to the formation of the minds of the catechumens, in particular through the memorization of regulae fidei, leading on to fixed creeds, likewise memorized, and to the traditio and redditio symboli. In particular, given that the content of the earliest catechesis was less dogmatic than ethical, this gives an account of the means by which hearing may bring about reformed minds and thus re-formed conduct.

The discourse of prayer may seem a surprising choice in a work on listening, but Harrison describes this as a “complicated polyphony” (199), in that the congregation may hear each other, believes itself to he heard by God, and might at the same time be said to be hearing God’s words. A surprising omission in the context of the discussion of overhearing is Origen’s discussion of overhearing and of the way in which God thereby answers prayer (Orat. 11.4–5), even though Origen’s work is cited. Rather, we are given a treatment of Polycarp’s prayer at his martyrdom from the perspective of the hearers, perhaps a difficult example given the probability that the prayer (and therefore the hearers) are fictive. We also encounter here a failure to recognize the liturgical nature of the prayer (though there is unsubstantiated reference to liturgical echoes [207]). It is possible that the reason for this somewhat odd treatment, as for the inclusion of the chapter overall, is that the book is fundamentally a work of theology.

There is no question that the turn to hearer response criticism is significant, as is the implied reminder that discourse beyond those fields treated by...