"Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called 'scholasticism' at its higher levels," McLuhan wrote on page 174 of Understanding Media.
Grand Canyon and Book
Goaded, I found myself on an automobile tour of forgotten New England monasteries. After weeks of fruitless searches I remember looking down and out of a drapeless bay window towards the quaint main street of Newton, Massachusetts, having a Tom Collins with Sigmund's granddaughter, Stephanie. She feigned ignorance for some time, before I pried out a fact or two about her grandfather's collection of Gutenberg bibles. He had two of them, which were donated to the museum in Mainz when he died, and I later learned that Freud took great care to point out how moveable type was a metaphor for repression. Of course his theory flies in the face of McLuhan's subsequent statement that "print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate." Today, we find the patterns of mediated memory visible on the horizons of psychology, poking up like a clouded mountain range.
Geologically speaking, mountains are the remnants of our tectonic childhood, their striations encyclopedic, earthquakes the return of the repressed. McLuhan describes how "printing ended the scholastic regime of oral disruption very quickly," but he fails to give us an accurate Richter reading.
Gutenberg's first press, artist's rendering
Numerology
Sharing the German Hellenistic obsession, McLuhan reminds us of Dantzig's statistical research on medieval illumination, namely "that in the age of manuscript there was a chaotic variety of signs for numerals and that they did not assume a stable form until printing" (Understanding Media, p. 114). Each monastic order had it's own highly specialized form of counting script, symbolically ranging from old roman numerals to heirogryphic hand symbols, and in the famous example of the Abbey of St. Boniface in Northern Switzerland, counting was performed in base 12 to accommodate Father Mielziner, the six-fingered head of the order.
The Number 5 and Illumination
Thus print reconfigured the formation of order out of chaos, and in a very literal sense created the foundation for the mathematical revolution that followed. McLuhan would have us believe that it was Gutenberg's numerology that became conerstone on which Tyco de Brahe buit his astronomical castle, high atop a Danish island near Elsinore, passing along a lifetime of astral accounting to Kepler and his followers. If so, it's a stunning irony that the printing of bibles represented the first small fissure between the worlds of science and religion, a gape that still bleeds in certain places.
