One of the best ways of reading
is that in which we seek the truth.
(DIEGO ALVAREZ DE PAZ)

Reading  is an intellectual activity that demands silence and concentration. The act of reading under this profile sees us recollected on a text, bent on it in an ideal circle, which by itself sends us back to reflection and gives us the image of an immaterial experience. “He who reads –E Bianchi writes- becomes, for the one who observes him, an icon of interiority, an image of recollection, an allusion to the journey of mind”. 

Going through some pages of the Fathers of the Church, we can possibly come across portraits of readers who return this intact impression: for instance that of Jerome’ essential lines.  Postumiamo says that Jerome “was totally immersed into reading and books, day and night, always reading or writing something without ever stopping” (Sulpicio Severo, Dialoghi 1,8); or that of St. Augustine, who portrays Ambrose while he is reading, “In reading, he strolled through the pages with his eyes, his mind tried to penetrate the sense, while his voice and tongue took a rest. On our entering… we often saw him reading in silence, never differently” (The Confessions VI, 2, 3).

Are these snapshots on reading, transmitted to us from the past, enough to describe the act of reading from within? Which particular intention must animate this action so that it may be truly “meaningful” for us, in the sense that such a common gesture as that of reading may leave a sign that goes to imprint itself within us?

Lectio cubicularis

Following the Patristic phenomenology, one of the first characters of personal reading is that we interrupt it to give space to meditation and that we somehow feel no more the need of a book, of its pages. We find in germ this way of reading in St Jerome. He writes to Demetriade, “Do fix the time for your reading, not to get tired, but for your delight and spiritual formation” (Epistles n.130, 15). In the monastic life, a similar personal and private reading is often connected with a complementary activity, which is parallel to the Lectio Divina (théia anágnosis) or to studium.

The Benedictine Rule orders it as legere sibi, as an individual reading for which the monks must seek more spaces and more time during the day (See: Rule 48, 9). This personal reading has always been recommended over the centuries. For instance, Simeon, the new theologian, has given us a very suggestive and poetic description of it, “Shut up the door and take a book. Read attentively two or three of its pages, then get praying, quietly singing  and praising God, like a person who is never listened to by anyone” (Catéchèses 26).

Julius Negroni, the author of a very important treatise on reading, (De lectione privata librorum spiritualium, Milan 1621), speaks of it in details. Quoting a saying of Pliny the Young, according to whom we must “multum legere non multa”, he establishes that, in other to do a “quality” reading we do not necessarily need the long times of the lectio regularis. We definitively need less fractions of time at the side of our prayer and study. These fractions of time must not be shorter than one quarter of an hour, or longer than one hour. In fact, if they are shorter than fifteen minutes the reading would be of no use; if they are longer than one hour, they may cause discomfort and afflict the spirit”  (§22). However, this way of reading carried on in the silence of one’s own room (Negron speaks of lectio cubicularis), and in recollection, is still too much bound to an exterior, though personal, aspect of private reading. In fact, we do not know its content. We do not know what is necessary to happen so that the act of reading may change into a spiritual experience, thus becoming spiritual reading.

Lectio spiritualis

We find for the first time the expression lectio spiritualis (pneumatiké anágnosis) in John Chrysostom. The well-known passage censors the bad habit of buying and possessing books for their exhibition in the shelves. In fact his question sounds rhetoric, “Is there any one of you who, being at home, takes in hand a Christian book, examines what is written in it and explores the Scriptures?”,  (Homilies on John 32, 3). The tone of this question is aglow and vibrating, as it often happens in his writings. It is what he adds to it that leads us to a certain proper criticism of costumes, as he writes that, “the Scriptures have not been given to us so that they may remain only in the books, but so that we might impress them in our hearts”. This kind of possession coincides with the Judaic aspiration: “…our God wrote the Law on the fleshy pages of the heart”.

The spiritual reading is precisely the law written in our hearts. It defines, indicating it, the distance of the opposition between the letter and the spirit (See: 2 Co, 3.6): in fact, it transforms into life what might remain a dead letter.

This passage makes a confrontation with the Judaic Law, but it is valid for all the interpretations that are unable to transfer to the heart what we read, that do not know how to read themselves in the fleshy pages of the heart”. 

In speaking of spiritual reading, John Chrysostom alludes to a dynamic horizon of confrontation with ourselves, of self-relation that reflects itself in every action of man, for which reading is not a space where we shut up ourselves to operate a detachment from the World. It is rather a way of fetching deeper meanings of oneself, “Honour your intelligence”, a self-knowledge that does not exclude the world that rather presupposes it as space of its realisation and as capacity of witnessing with life what one has studied.

Lectio cordialis

The Fathers spoke of lectio cordialis, namely, of a reading that calls us to cause and challenges our heart, to indicate the type of reading, “where the book evaporates and disappears” (G. Brillet) and what we have read does not become an abstract deposit of culture, but appeals to our authenticity and truth. “If you want, examine your thoughts…If you want, read with your heart”  Barsanufio writes to John from Gaza  (Correspondence 143).

Reading with the heart and from fleshy pages (according to the metaphor of Chrysostom), means to enter in contact with what we read; it means listening to oneself through a book; it means exploiting the book’s transparency to reach ourselves through its lines.    

In this way, reading carries on a function similar to that of the spiritual father and integrates, so to say, its work. Balthasar Alvarez, director of St. Theresa from Avila, catches clearly the relation by which “life has communicated to the books the master who speaks through them and instructs our heart” (Luis de la Puente, Vita B. Alvarez 22).

The spiritual reading concentrates on a capital experience in which the book can enter in contact with our lived experience in a relation that, through the page and the words we read, becomes self-listening and self-deciphering. 

«One of the best ways to read is that by which we seek the truth and desire its beauty”, the Jesuit Alvarez de Paz writes to express the very truth of the act of reading (De vita spirituali, Lugduni 1608, 329). In this way, the spiritual character of our reading coincides with the research. It coincides with self-discovery, with the openness that the reading solicits within us, when it succeeds in touching the deepest chords of our souls, by placing at the centre of this common and old gesture a question of authenticity, with which the reader cannot help to correspond, if he does not want to miss his very essence and his alétheia.

Lucio Coco
Scholar in old Greek and Latin Christian literature
Via dei Castani, 1 - 28813 Bée (VB)