Christian Reading: Language, Ethics and the Order of Things by Blossom Stefaniw (review)

This is a very personal book—one might almost say experimental in its tone. I am not sure that the experiment has been entirely successful; but that is in no way a reason for not taking the work seriously. The author makes points that are still too easily forgotten or ignored, yet still vital to our understanding of how texts are read—hence the “reading” in the title— and of how readings change from setting to setting.

The personal element resides chiefly in how the author sees herself now in relation to the ancient texts she is concerned with; how so many of us in the 2020s are immediately inclined to define them in certain ways, seek within them what we imagine to be their essence, arrange them in familiar ranks in appropriate rooms and buildings, which more than hint at the probably limited uses to which we think we can put them, and narrow above all the perceived character of what they contain.

This worthy and not entirely novel conviction prompts a degree of self-flagellation that can at times include readers in its radius and arouse impatience as well as sympathy. Let this stand, nevertheless, as an evident virtue of the argument. When we open the volumes available to us today, we have to be ruthless in schooling ourselves, in opening our eyes wide, to see them, as far as is possible, the way their creators saw them; at least to be alert to the unexpected, to what might be disastrously missed.

So, volumes of what? The book is about the Tura Papyri and Didymus the Blind—something the title might have made clearer, although its breadth is justified by the time you read the final pages. The Tura Papyri, of course, were asleep for a long time—more than a millennium—from the late sixth century until their rediscovery in 1941. Oddly, perhaps, that makes them better grist for Stefaniw’s mill: they have been less messed about by intervening readers, bringing us closer to the Alexandria of Didymus and to Arsenius, who lugged them further south to his desert retreat in the first quarter of the fifth century.

It is the fresh complexity of the corpus, therefore, that has awakened the author’s ardor. And what is the excitement? Crucially, Didymus was a grammarian: that is the core of the argument. The Tura Papyri offer us a unique clue: they include students’ questions and show us Didymus answering them specifically, even when they appear to interrupt the flow of the discourse. Indeed, the flow is as much in the minds of those learning as it is in the teacher’s. That means that we are able to eavesdrop on a class in session; a class natural to a grammarian’s basic task. These are not commentaries on Scripture, as we might think of such. The questioners do not seek exegetical analysis or moral guidance: they want to know how you handle language and make it work for you.

Grammarians provided that information: it was their fundamental responsibility in the preparation of youth for civic life. What makes the Tura dossier different, of course, is that Didymus takes his examples from Scripture, not from the pagan classics. If Homer can teach you how to be handy with words in the public sphere, then so can Ecclesiastes. Stefaniw makes the point count heavily, and I agree that it proves Didymus more than an exegete. I would argue, however, that a deep change is represented here, since Didymus was part of a generation intent on redefining the church, weaning itself from the perceived inadequacies of Constantine’s vision, and intent upon instilling a civic etiquette more suited to a reformed respublica Christiana. The author comes much closer to saying as much in a later chapter.

So, here we have two major chapters: the first describing the fortunes of the dossier across time...