Why does a truth stop working on us once we know it well — and is that the truth's failure, or ours?
In 1907 two researchers published a short paper with a title that reads like a small tragedy: "On the Loss of Associative Power in Words After Long Fixation."[^sev] What Elsie Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn had done was simple. They gave people a single printed word and had them hold their eyes on it. Not read it. Fix on it, and keep fixing.
The word came apart. Not visually — the letters sat exactly where they had been, perfectly legible. What went was the meaning. At some point the thing on the page stopped being a word and became a shape, a set of marks with no more sense in them than a crack in plaster. The sign was intact. The signifying had quietly stopped.
Fifty-five years later a graduate student at McGill gave the effect its name. Leon Jakobovits James called it semantic satiation,[^sat] and you can produce it in about forty seconds. Pick a word — spoon is a good one — and say it aloud thirty or forty times. Somewhere around the twentieth repetition the word turns into a noise. It comes back a few seconds later, slightly embarrassed, like a friend who was briefly asleep.
I find this genuinely strange, and the strangeness is worth sitting in before we do anything with it. Nothing was taken away. No information was lost. Everything you knew about spoons when you started, you still know. The word is as true as it ever was and you cannot get at it.
The obvious move is to file this under optical illusions — a quirk of the perceptual system, interesting, harmless, irrelevant to anything that matters.
But in 1917, with no apparent knowledge of the psychologists, a young Russian critic made a much larger claim about the same machinery. Viktor Shklovsky argued in "Art as Technique" that habit does to everything what fixation does to a word.[^shk] Objects we handle daily stop being perceived and start being merely recognised — filed, labelled, skipped over. We see enough of the thing to know which thing it is, and then we stop. He thought this was the central problem art exists to solve: the job of art is to slow perception down, to make the familiar strange again so that a stone can feel stony.
That is an ambitious claim, and I don't think it is obviously true of everything. But it is plainly true of some things, and I can test it on myself. I could not tell you, without looking, which way the face on a coin in my pocket is turned. The information has passed in front of my eyes ten thousand times. None of it is in me.
So here is the question I actually want to ask, and it is not a question about coins.
If this is what familiarity does to words and objects, what does it do to truths?
Because we carry an assumption that almost never gets examined: that to know something is, more or less, to see it. We talk about information as though delivery were the hard part — if people only knew, they would act differently; if I only understood, I would be changed.
What Severance and Washburn stumbled into suggests that knowing and seeing come apart, and that they come apart most reliably where knowledge is densest. The more often a thing has passed in front of you, the less likely you are to be looking at it.
That is an uncomfortable thought in general. It is a much more uncomfortable thought if you have been a Christian for thirty years.
There is an episode in the Gospels I used to read as a sad little anticlimax and now think is one of the most clinically precise things in the New Testament.
Jesus goes home. He has been teaching across the region, and the reports have run ahead of him; by this point he has a reputation. He comes to Nazareth, goes into the synagogue on the Sabbath, and teaches. And Mark records that his neighbours were astonished — genuinely so. They are not sceptics in the modern sense. They can see that something is happening:
> Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands?
And then, in the same breath:
> Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.[^mk]
Read the question and the answer next to each other. The first is a real question, and the right one. The second is offered as the answer and is not an answer at all — it is a list of facts, every one of them accurate. They know his trade, his mother's name, his brothers in birth order, his sisters. On any measure of available data about Jesus of Nazareth, these are the best-informed people in the Gospels.
They are also the only crowd he cannot work in. Mark's note is not that they argued him down or that he chose to withhold:
> And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.
Matthew sharpens it to five words: Is not this the carpenter's son?[^mt] It is a conversation-ender. It works the way the twentieth repetition of spoon works: the information all present and correct, and gone opaque. They have fixed on him so long that he has become a shape.
There is a cheap version of this point and it is not mine: that the Nazarenes were provincials who failed to recognise greatness, and that we, having recognised it, are fine. The story runs the other way. The ones most exposed to this failure are not the people who have never heard. They are the people who have heard most.
Mark adds a clause I would rather he had left out: and they took offense at him. Taking offense is something a person does, and his word for their condition is not inattention but unbelief. So proximity is not the cause here; it is the occasion, the material out of which an objection could be built by people who wanted one.
And we want one. A familiar Jesus has been accounted for, filed, finished with, and a thing already filed makes no claim on us. The blindness pays: we keep the running of our own lives. The carpenter's son can be left in the room; the Son of God cannot. Thirty years in, the sentence gets politer. Not is not this the carpenter's son, but yes, I know all that — and a Jesus we have mastered is a Jesus we no longer have to be rescued by. So the blindness is not only something that happens to us. It is partly something we keep.
If Nazareth can be dismissed as the hostility of people who had cause to resent him, the harder case is seven miles up the road and three days later.
Two people are walking to Emmaus. A stranger joins them and asks what they are discussing, and what follows is one of the most remarkable speeches in Luke — remarkable because it is entirely correct. They give him Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word. The chief priests and rulers. Condemned, crucified. The third day. The women at the tomb, the body gone, the vision of angels saying he was alive. Others went and confirmed it.[^lk]
There is not an error in it; if you were marking a paper you would give it full marks. One clause, though, is not a fact: we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.
That clause is doing more work than all the accurate ones around it. Redeeming Israel is not a wrong hope — it is simply the brief they had written, and he had declined it. And this is the half of the blindness I find harder to own. It is not only that the sentences about him have been said so often that they went to shape. We also lose sight of him because the real one keeps failing the brief we wrote for him. We commission someone to clear the obstacle, settle the verdict our way, make the life we had already planned work; and the one who turns up asks for the very thing we were hiring him to protect. So we go on scanning the road for the Jesus we ordered and walk straight past the one keeping pace with us — which is what these two are doing, with every fact in place, their faces down, the last clause of their account giving them away: but him they did not see.
They say it about the tomb. It is true of the road.
Luke had told us why four verses earlier, and he puts it in the passive, which I think is the most important grammatical choice in the chapter: their eyes were kept from recognising him. Not they failed to notice. Luke leaves the agent out the way Scripture habitually does when the agent is God. It is one hand at both ends — holding the recognition shut, and then opening it. And when the opening comes it does not come where you would expect. He walks them through the whole of Scripture, which does not do it. They sit down to eat, he takes the bread and breaks it, and their eyes were opened, and they recognised him. That phrase has been in the book since its third chapter: in the garden the eyes of both were opened, and what they saw was that they were naked, and the first thing they did with the new sight was hide from him. The eyes opened in Eden cost us the sight of him. The eyes opened at Emmaus hand it back.
Afterwards they work out that something had been happening the whole time — did not our hearts burn within us? — which is its own quiet joke. The burning was in them on the road. They could not read it until later.
Set the two stories side by side. Christianity does not treat seeing as a function of information. It assumes throughout that a person can hold the facts completely and still not perceive what they are holding, and that this is the normal condition rather than a rare malfunction. Paul calls it a veil. John opens his gospel with it: he was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not. It is the oldest complaint in the prophets — a people with the whole revelation in their hands, functionally blind to it. And the tool cuts both ways. Israel is not the foil here; Israel is the mirror. The church has held it longest, which on my own argument is no safeguard.
Now: that is either a convenient excuse for a religion whose evidence underwhelms — you don't see it because your eyes are closed is the sort of thing an unfalsifiable system says — or it is an unusually accurate description of how human minds actually work in front of anything they have known for a long time.
I think the honest answer is that it can be used as the first and is in fact the second. A believer who reaches for blindness to dodge every hard question has made their faith unreachable by argument. But the veil was never offered in place of evidence: the claim stands or falls at a public event in Jerusalem, and what would end it is not an argument but an object — a body, still in its tomb. Produce it and there is nothing left to be blind to. This piece is only about what happens to people who already have the facts. And the observation underneath it is no theological special case invented to protect a claim. It is what Severance and Washburn measured in a word, what Shklovsky complained of in a stone, and what any of us can reproduce with a spoon. Familiarity really does blind. Christianity is one of the few accounts of the human person that expected it to.
And that makes a prediction, which is the part I find difficult. If it is right, then the gospel is not merely subject to this effect. It is the single thing in a long-standing Christian's life most exposed to it — because it is the thing most repeated. The sentence you have heard more than any other sentence is the one most likely to have gone to shape.
C. S. Lewis noticed this in 1944. Introducing a translation of Athanasius sixteen centuries old, he argued that every age is blind in the same places, because everyone in it shares the blindness and nobody in it can point it out. His remedy was not harder thinking but the air of other centuries. That is a real technique and I would defend it. But the Emmaus road stops me from making it the whole answer.
Those two had Moses and all the prophets opened by the best possible expositor, and it warmed them without opening their eyes. The seeing came at a table, through one gesture: bread taken and broken — the crucifixion in miniature, the part they had just recited as where it all went wrong. Their eyes opened at the scandal itself. Moses and the prophets had said as much. Isaiah 53:2–3 describes a servant with no form or majesty that we should look at him, one from whom men hide their faces — and delivers the verdict in the first person plural: we esteemed him not. The not-seeing is not our problem with the text. It is in the text, named as ours. The very next verse names the load: surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows — and the contempt of verse 3 is the first item in it. On the cross he cried into that dark — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — and received no answer: the one from whom men hid their faces was himself shut out of the sight of God, so that our shut eyes could be opened. He was the one nobody would look at, and he was that in our place, so our not-seeing can be forgiven and healed, and not merely corrected.
So I am left with two things that both seem true and sit awkwardly together.
The first is that there are real practices here, and we are not helpless — though what we have are not methods we operate but means, which is to say places we go to meet someone. We open the book and come to the table not to manufacture sight, but because he has promised to be there. And so none of it can be graded: we do not get in on the quality of our attention but on somebody else's name, and the week we try hardest can be the deadest week we can remember. The knocking was never what opened the door. The help, when it comes, arrives mostly in forms we cannot administer to ourselves. A table we do not set and do not serve ourselves at. A sermon preached at us rather than selected by us, which is why it can say the thing we would never have gone looking for. Reading the account we know best in a translation we don't, which works the way looking away from a word and back at it works; it restores the sign. But a brother who says, in a voice that is not ours, the sentence we have heard so often it stopped meaning anything — and in his mouth, for some reason, it means something again: that is not something we arranged. It was handed to us, in a week we had nothing to do with.
The second is that none of it is the thing itself. The one account we have has it arriving unannounced and late. Luke uses one verb three times: he opened the Scriptures on the road, their eyes at the table, their minds that evening. One hand, three openings — which is the oldest meaning of revelation, and the one we keep mislaying: knowledge as grace.
That is not an argument for looking harder. The two on the road were walking the wrong way and talking about the right thing, and he had already drawn near and fallen into step. He did not wait for them to recognise him. He walked the whole seven miles with people who did not know who he was, and when they asked him to stay, he stayed.
That may be the most that can be said about a familiar truth we cannot presently see. It is not gone. We have fixed on it too long and it has become a shape. And the carpenter's son is still, maddeningly, standing in the room with us.
[^sev]: E. Severance and M. F. Washburn, "On the Loss of Associative Power in Words After Long Fixation," American Journal of Psychology 18 (1907), 182–186.
[^sat]: Leon Jakobovits James coined the term in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University, Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior.
[^shk]: Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique" (Iskusstvo kak priyom), 1917 — also translated "Art as Device." The argument is that habit turns perception into mere recognition, and that art exists to slow it down again.
[^mk]: Mark 6:1–6 (ESV).
[^mt]: Matthew 13:54–58 (ESV).
[^lk]: Luke 24:13–35 (ESV). Their account of the facts runs from verse 19 to verse 24; "but him they did not see" is the last clause of it.