Loud Book

Joseph Mangina ( Revelation (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible) ) makes this shrewd comment on the “visuality” of Revelation: “the Apocalypse is equally a book of auditions . . . . Revelation is a very loud book, situating us in the midst of an extraordinarily aural universe. This sets it in tension with the dominant traditions of Western thought, which have a long history of privileging the eye over the ear. From Plato onward, sight has been understood as the most powerful and reliable among the senses, the faculty that merits us to control the world in godlike fashion. But perhaps vision is not quite as sovereign as we like to think. Ein Bild heilt uns gefangen , wrote Wittgenstein; ‘a picture held us captive.’ We must allow for the possibility that the Apocalypse subverts our confidence in our capacity to dominate the world by making representations of it.”