Spent a pleasant day wandering the libraries and archives at Yale University. The Sterling Memorial Library is currently hosting a special exhibition, “Copying Sacred Texts: A Spiritual Practice.”
This, combined with our visit to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, was a revelatory experience. That building’s design includes a “six-story glass-enclosed tower of book stacks inside a cube with large “windows” made of translucent Vermont marble panels, an inch and a quarter thick, in a Vierendeel trust of sleel clad in grant on the exterior. The marble panels protect the collections from damaging direct sunlight while absorbing and diffusing the exterior light in warm hues on the interior.”
In one sense no one should be surprised a university emphasizes the sacredness of texts, right down to the copying and storing of them. It is after all, at least historically, the beating heart of studies.
In another sense, it’s a startling re-invitation into a media we engage less and less frequently.
Master Kim Kyeongho was designated by the Korean government in 2020 as the sole Traditional Sutra Copying Skills Transmitter… somehow this fact reveals how rare a focus on the textuality of texts has become as discipline and practice.
Most (not all) religious traditions have holy books, sacred texts. In Christian tradition, every aspect of the texts become wrapped up in the aura of sacrality. The writing of the Scriptures is said to be inspired. The copying of the Scriptures is holy work. The book or text is handled in a sacred manner. And the Word itself is one central dogmatic loci of the religion.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was from God, and the Word was God.”
There is indeed something about words. Linguists have long asked whether words describe reality or construct it. Whether its strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language determining what we think, and thinking determining our “reality”).
Or whether it’s the beginning of Genesis, God speaking creation into existence, or the Word of God hypostasized as Jesus Christ, Christian tradition in particular (though other traditions have their own versions of this), the word and words, spoken and later written and read, are integral to, well, everything.
Given all of this, it’s no surprise there is a certain fluidity between God and certain wordhoards that point us toward God.
The only problem created in and through the “divinizing” of the Word is a certain kind of reification of divinity. I’m thinking here of the times when I’ve been reading a book about some reality in the world, something that could be studied and written about “at first hand,” and instead the author endlessly defers direct examination of the matter through the study of other texts. In fact, most dissertations in the humanities almost require this practice, because dissertations are books written engaging other books.
Hence collections like the archives at Yale.
But before I inadvertently appear to be denigrating textuality, I think we all recognize that texts carry reality in ways unique. As another recent example on our trip, we stopped for a day in Concord, Massachussets. Concord has a pond. You my have heard of it: Walden Pond.
Why are many of us aware of the significance of Walden Pond over other ponds?
Later that day we drove into Concord to view the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.
Why are many of us aware of these residents of Concord and less so of others?
The written word. Books.
Words have this power, especially written down, to draw humans much closer to some attributes of the divine (omniscience, immortality) than almost any other human “tool.”
Although these simple reflections will not disentangle the entire complexity of the intermingling of a theological sense of the word and the practical “divinizing” power of the written word, perhaps it can help us enjoy, a bit more, why it is we create such amazing archives and are drawn to (at times) old books.
Each word a God.