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There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.
Reckon you could give us some idea of the other side? What are the alternative explanations proposed? The passage here (albeit translated) seems pretty unequivocal.
It also doesn't seem that unlikely. I know a fair few adults who mutter to themselves under their breath while reading, never having managed to kick the habit of reading aloud.
For the other side there's A. K. Gavrilov's "Techniques of reading in classical antiquity", not (legally) freely available but quoted in various places such as https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/02/reading-silently-...
The argument for the Ambrose case is that the surprise isn't him reading silently, it's him reading silently while he has guests. (and elsewhere in the text Augustine mentions himself reading silently by himself in a way that suggests it's entirely normal)
It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].
“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520
Not sure. Since LLM's have their spot, I, personally, have been reading much more. And I was no slouch when it came to consuming written materials.
Sure, some of it is slop, some of it is pretty good. But I did read more.
I'm sorry, are you reading more because LLMs are doing your job in the meantime or are you reading more because you're mostly reading LLM output day to day now?
Seems hard to square your claim that “today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy” with the PISA [1] research.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
There's different levels to literacy, there was quite sobering research published recently about English college students who couldn't parse the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, even with assistance[1].
It's not been limited to the US but in the developed world broadly cognitive performance has been crashing for about a decade, i.e. the 'learning recession'. Talk to anyone who teaches these days and you usually get a fairly depressing story about kids being unable to decode basic information
[1]https://www.adorableandharmless.com/p/college-english-majors...
Bleak House’s opening paragraph
A completely functional high earning English-speaking software developer might easily find the above sentence hard to parse.
I find old school sitcoms hard to enjoy, probably because I am missing a lot of subtle cultural context. It doesn’t imply my comprehension skills are poor.
If you're accustomed to reading, for instance, a modern English language novel such as Stephen King's "1963", it's going to be difficult and awkward to sit down and read the first few chapters of Moby Dick.
But that's kind of the point. Even a person who knows zero old timey nautical terminology or anything about New Bedford and its history will have to pick up what's going on by inferring it from the context.
You missed out "and it"! That doesn't help with the parsing.
Nitpick: This is old data; US performance in reading dropped to basically the lowest levels ever during the latest test:
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...
US is still near the top globally, though, and other countries like Germany had a bigger drop in reading performance that started earlier, so your point still stands.
What they're getting at is that people aren't able to sit down and digest a moderately challenging book. This is due to attention span, the habit of 'scrolling' vs turning a page, etc... Those people can still 'read' and are literate in a sense.
I would say most of us have this situation already but it's much worse when you look more broadly around. People without an interest in books used to read tabloids which for all their faults were still more edifying then what the TikTok or YouTube shorts algorithms are presenting.
I would be very curious to see stats on what percent of American adults will answer a poll claiming in the affirmative to have read any type of novel cover to cover in the past year.
the Augustine passage is a fascinating piece of evidence, but i wonder how much we can infer from it about the wider reading habits of the ancient world.
To get to that, we have to first think about the literacy rate in antiquity, which is estimated at 5 to 10%. And of those, most could probably read well enough to get by, but didn't routinely read longer texts. So someone who was well-enough versed in reading to not have to read the text out loud in order to understand it was probably a rare and noteworthy creature indeed...
And you can't read long texts if there aren't that many to begin with. But it raises a question - why didn't China, which invented printing press earlier, didn't fare better?
Moveable type was invented in the 11th century [1]. Kublai Khan moved in in the 13th. Then the Mings spent a couple centuries being autocratic menaces, Qianlong went on a pogrom of China's scholars and Europe caught up.
By the 13th century, China–uniquely–had both moveable-type presses and joint-stock companies. A combination of bad luck (the Mongols) and a tendency towards political shitshows squandered that lead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...
Yeah, we tend to forget that progress unfortunately doesn't move steadily in one direction...
Yeah, in Ancient Rome, the typical unit of writing was a scroll, not a book. Books (codices) only came to be widespread by 300 AD, and "widespread" still means "quite rare and expensive, but not totally unheard of".
Because the Chinese writing system is immensely complicated, and alphabets are far easier to typeset.
You have to know over two thousand characters to read classical Chinese, with some appearing very rarely.
I would imagine most reading would be "let me read that sign" and not much else. To most folks, writing was probably logographs - "Ah, I've seen that collection of letters before, that meant 'pub' "
Public signage with words was basically nonexistent in the pre-modern era. Why bother? The overhead of getting literate people was reserved for the stuff that couldn't be communicated in symbols, like keeping records for the taxman or contracts to prevent future land disputes.
British pubs traditionally have a hanging signboard with a pictorial illustration of the name. Several examples at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pub_names_in_Great_Britain
“Now Hannah was praying in her heart; only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.”
Samuel 1:13
The Hebrew says literally “speaking on her heart”
That example is prayer not reading, but yes there’s many Hebrew examples of meditating in the heart because most texts were memorised aurally rather than read directly.
A first century explicit example of private reading aloud is Acts 8:28–30 Philip runs up and "heard him reading" (ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ ἀναγινώσκοντος).
Ten minutes of Claude searching the Hebrew and Greek scriptural texts came up with no examples that are explicitly private silent reading of text.
In this case it was a bespoke extemporaneous prayer, not something memorized but your point still stands. This is not an example of reading but it is used for the basis of the institution of the silent Amidah prayer according to the Talmud, even then of course it would have been memorized but today it is read from a prayer book.
I have no idea, but with ADHD and all, I have taken recently the habit of reading aloud, especially course texts, doc’s and other boring stuff I easily get distracted with. I pretend to be a BBC 4 broadcaster. It seems to work. After awhile you can stop and just read silently.
fellow ADHD. if you read in a place with no distractions, you can read silently, and fast for a long time.
My six-year-old is probably a bit ADHD, and with parents like his it's not surprising, but he will sit and read for *hours*, and stuff that's way beyond what you'd expect of a six-year-old. It's about the only time he's really quiet, and I mean the good kind of quiet, not the "sudden transient to quiet" that means you must drop everything and RUN to find out what they're doing *now*.
And then come the questions. So many questions.
I never want that to stop.
Yep, if I am interested or even obsessed by the text. I have read literature classics voraciously and have read books in one go in the past. I probably read some 50 books for my Masters. But unfortunately some documentation of a template language I need for a project, but am otherwise less interested in, fails to adequately fascinate me. Reading aloud helps me to concentrate on the boring text and actually read it, not skim without really understanding.
Point is, it is just one reading tool in the bag and it is foolish to think it has something to do with reading level or comprehension. Might be helpful for many people whose focus has been nuked by platform apps.
Imagine how creepy a reader must seem to a ancient uneducated analphabet.
Guy looks down at artifact, eyes flicker, pages flipped- then looks up: "Now i know.."
My dad told me this (“people used to always read aloud”) as a kid and I didn’t believe him, I thought he was making some kind of joke. It feels like the same kind of discovery as “some people don’t see pictures in their head”.
"silent spell casting"
Makes sense, with oral traditions being so strong back then. Debugging a codebase by vocalizing variables sounds wild.
Augustine describes silent reading himself:
“I returned in haste to the place where Alipius was sitting, for I had left the book of the Apostle there when I stood up. I seized it, opened it, and read in silence the chapter upon which my eyes first fell”
https://sourcelibrary.org/book/meditationes-divi-augustini-e...
Reading was very different in the old times, todays text is clear and filled with many aides that didnt exist back then.
For starters text didnt include spaces which im going to guess would have meant people tried to "sound" out sequences of letters and slowly found words and consumed the text. From what ive seen many times it was difficult to tell letters apart due to ink runs or simply because the ink was too think. Just imagine if its hard for us to tell capital eye and little el, it must have been impossible manytimes back then.