The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

“where monastic texts do refer to reading, the forms they prescribe are intensive rather than
extensive, meditative rather than scholarly” (Williams 2006: 177).
The notion of a „sacred‟ reading must be allowed for, as exemplified by lectio divina
and this had always been the case for early Christians. As Lane Fox (1994: 145) stated, “in
the absence of personal reading, we must allow for the power of sacred literacy in Christian‟s
other senses”; and Gamble (1995: 141), “for Christians, texts were not entertainments or
dispensable luxuries, but the essential instruments of Christian life. One cannot imagine a
Christian community in antiquity, even the earliest, that would not have relied upon texts […]
texts had a constitutive and regulative importance for Christian thought and action […]
thought not every Christian could read, every Christian regularly heard reading”.
Perhaps an interesting and illuminating comparison could be made with the Muslim
holy book, the Qur‟an; “for the Muslim believer the Qur‟an is the primary source on matters
theological and legal, but in addition to that it is a daily presence in the life of the community
and its individual members” (Allen 1998: 83). The idea of a text occupying a position of
authority, both spiritual and pragmatic, is incidentally something transferable to the monastic
rules. Ideally, Muslims are required to learn the entire text by heart in the original Arabic and
commit it to memory, just as the monastic rules state should be done by a monk. More often
than not, Qur‟anic Arabic differs significantly to modern Arabic dialects and although the
text might be recited aloud it is not necessarily understood; rather, importance is placed on
correct pronunciation. The comparison here is that some modern Muslims do not necessarily
understand the text of the Qur‟an when it is placed in front of them, although they might have
learnt the text to recite orally. It does not necessarily imply silent reading, although this
would no doubt have taken place with monks who possessed the literacy ability.
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