Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08582_Field_TCGG T347.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 838b | 16 lines

exact description of exegesis as understood by Claudius . . . We
are invited to look not at the text but through it.”

     Probably any medieval person would be puzzled at our
idea of looking through something. He would assume that the
reality looked through at us, and that by contemplation we
bathed in the divine light, rather than looked at it. The quite
different sensuous assumptions of manuscript culture, ancient
and medieval, from anything since Gutenberg, obtrude from the
ancient doctrine of the senses and the sensus communis . (31)
Erwin Panofsky in his study of Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism  also stresses the medieval bias for light through
and found it helpful to tackle the architectural problem via the
schoolmen:

      “Sacred doctrine,” says Thomas Aquinas, “makes use of