The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as bypassing the traditional oral authority of the Church, on the one hand, and the need for rational critical scholarship on the other. It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency. Nobody who had read manuscripts could achieve this state of mind concerning the nature of the written word. But the assumption of homogeneous repeatability derived from the printed page, when extended to all other concerns of life, led gradually to all those forms of production and social organization from which the Western world derives many satisfactions and nearly all of its characteristic traits.

Posted via We Need More Bags on November 16, 2009 with 5 notes