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By Brian Stock Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Reprint) [Paperback]
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- GenresReligion
Paperback
First published January 12, 1996
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November 6, 2014
Stock's work is at once a focussed intellectual biography and an analysis of an aspect of its subject's thought. It is "a study of Augustine's attempt to lay the theoretical foundation for a reading culture" and, so, deals with materials we might classify under the rubrics of epistemology, ethics, psychology and hermeneutics. A single modern term for it is lacking, particularly as given its original theological and apologetical character. Why? Perhaps because our culture bought the argument during the Middle Ages and is now a culture that does read, albeit not generally the kinds of materials the Saint would have approved of. To understand the issue at hand, to even apprehend how it might be an issue, we must be re-educated along the lines of Augustine's own education, a task outlined, but not accomplished, in the first half of the book.
The nature and function of texts and the reading of them was radically different in the ancient world. Before printing an "edition" was a single handwritten copy. Editions, being rare and expensive, were often the valued, even revered, possessions of institutions. In other words, they were commonly held and familiar to the communities which they helped to define. The cultural canon, being relatively small, was much more clearly delineated than today, though textual variations abounded owing to the exigencies of production and reproduction. Silent, private reading was, while not unknown, unusual. It was primarily an oral culture, the core of the traditional higher learning being rhetoric with an emphasis on the public recitation of already "classical" exemplars. An author's audience was substantially, as the term suggests, made up of auditors, hearers, not readers. Cultural inertia carries this tradition on even now in the emphasis placed on lecturing as a dominant mode of instruction.
Scholarly standards were also very different. Convenient codices were just coming into fashion. Writing intended to last was more often consigned to inconvenient rolls, demanding two hands to roll while simultaneously unrolling and consequently making exact citation by reference to an original difficult and its practice almost unheard of. Compensatorally, mnemonics was a common discipline, memories better, yet the mediation of memory encouraged interpretative tendentiousness, glossing and reshaping of the recollected original. Exact quotation was virtually unheard of and not greatly valued. The use of abbreviations, suspensions and contractions, was widespread. Handwriting varied, though book styles of penmanship existed that aimed for the regularity and neatness demanded by the market. Additionally, owing to the dearth of such standardized aids as initial capitalizations, word separation, punctuation, paragraph indentation, accents, quotation marks and the like, much more was demanded of the actual reader, or, more commonly, reciter. Reading was obviously an exercise in hermeneutics, the literate person called upon to an authority we assign almost solely to writers, to authors themselves.
To get a sense of this one may consider the forms of congregational worship which persist in churches and temples--and academe--today. The hierarchies of clergy and laity, of master and choir, made sense under the old, necessary structures of authority. The Spirit, the reception of which made the priest, was, one recalls, the Word and the ability to interpret it correctly. Augustine read and "wrote" (dictated) and reflected on this in his free time, but his job was to preach, to interpret the "teachings of the Fathers."
During the fourth century the issue of what to preach and how to preach it, of canon and its interpretation, was still relatively fluid. Christianity was arguably committed to follow the path blazed before it by rabbinic Judaism, to become an historical religion founded upon the solid rock of scriptural testimony. The life and sayings of Jesus, now generally regarded as the manifestation of God in time and space, were of paramount importance, the lives and teachings of those related to him of secondary importance. But there was still no incontrovertibly established text--or, rather, there were too many texts, too many original testimonies and versions of testimonies.
Ironically, despite his insistence on authority, Augustine preferred the old Latin bibles over the path-breaking translations from the Hebrew and Greek that Jerome, his elder contemporary, had been making in Palestine. His resistance to change, yet concern for authenticity, was typical of the West. Few there, including Augustine, knew much Greek. Virtually no one knew Hebrew.
What Augustine did know was rhetoric and the philosophy of the schools. While his biblical acumen was poor his philosophical acumen was considerably above the standards of the age. Consequently, while he contributed little compared to Jerome in the field of Biblical scholarship, he contributed quite a lot towards re-formulating Greek philosophy in Christian guise, making it respectable in the West as Clement, Origen and others had generations before in the East.
Sadly, Stock deals with very little of this. Presuming much of his readers, he treats Augustine out of context. One must already know the period, church history in general and Augustine in particular, to avoid obtaining a distorted picture of his thought, to avoid wondering how any of this material, so dated now, could possibly have any relevance. Hermeneutics was important to his thought as was the problematic of what precisely constituted soteriologically trustworthy knowledge, but such were certainly not his only concerns. As bishop of one of the richest and most stable areas of a crumbling empire, he had many more pressing concerns. He actively, politically, combatted not only the remnants of paganism, but also a host of Christian tendencies which threatened the authority of that universal Church with which he identified. A great deal of what he wrote about, his doctrines, arose out of dealing with such practical concerns. What Stock presents, however, is a man in the privacy of his study or alone with a few intimates, a reflective thinker. This may have been true of the young man. It certainly is how he represented himself, his better self, in his autobiography. But it is certainly not true of the public figure who wrote Confessiones or any of the major works for which he is remembered, most of which had a polemical purpose. Augustine had enemies. Augustine sanctioned the killing of many of them. Augustine wrote to attack others and to defend--or justify-- himself. Augustine was no ivory tower recluse.
Stock's work may constitute an acceptably thorough and original dissertation. It does not constitute a good read. It is, in fact, a painful read, a walk through a forest devoted to cataloguing its trees, detail with little perspective, work not pleasure.
It is customary to contrast the originality of the Hellenic classics with the inferior work of their little-remembered epigones, the scholars of the Hellenistic "Library of Alexandria." Augustine, for enthusiastically, even desperately, reinvigorating some of the classical tradition with the spirit of the new, Christian age, has some of that originality and deserves his place in our more democratic libraries. Stock's entirely derivative work, however, will be of interest only to cloistered specialists.
The nature and function of texts and the reading of them was radically different in the ancient world. Before printing an "edition" was a single handwritten copy. Editions, being rare and expensive, were often the valued, even revered, possessions of institutions. In other words, they were commonly held and familiar to the communities which they helped to define. The cultural canon, being relatively small, was much more clearly delineated than today, though textual variations abounded owing to the exigencies of production and reproduction. Silent, private reading was, while not unknown, unusual. It was primarily an oral culture, the core of the traditional higher learning being rhetoric with an emphasis on the public recitation of already "classical" exemplars. An author's audience was substantially, as the term suggests, made up of auditors, hearers, not readers. Cultural inertia carries this tradition on even now in the emphasis placed on lecturing as a dominant mode of instruction.
Scholarly standards were also very different. Convenient codices were just coming into fashion. Writing intended to last was more often consigned to inconvenient rolls, demanding two hands to roll while simultaneously unrolling and consequently making exact citation by reference to an original difficult and its practice almost unheard of. Compensatorally, mnemonics was a common discipline, memories better, yet the mediation of memory encouraged interpretative tendentiousness, glossing and reshaping of the recollected original. Exact quotation was virtually unheard of and not greatly valued. The use of abbreviations, suspensions and contractions, was widespread. Handwriting varied, though book styles of penmanship existed that aimed for the regularity and neatness demanded by the market. Additionally, owing to the dearth of such standardized aids as initial capitalizations, word separation, punctuation, paragraph indentation, accents, quotation marks and the like, much more was demanded of the actual reader, or, more commonly, reciter. Reading was obviously an exercise in hermeneutics, the literate person called upon to an authority we assign almost solely to writers, to authors themselves.
To get a sense of this one may consider the forms of congregational worship which persist in churches and temples--and academe--today. The hierarchies of clergy and laity, of master and choir, made sense under the old, necessary structures of authority. The Spirit, the reception of which made the priest, was, one recalls, the Word and the ability to interpret it correctly. Augustine read and "wrote" (dictated) and reflected on this in his free time, but his job was to preach, to interpret the "teachings of the Fathers."
During the fourth century the issue of what to preach and how to preach it, of canon and its interpretation, was still relatively fluid. Christianity was arguably committed to follow the path blazed before it by rabbinic Judaism, to become an historical religion founded upon the solid rock of scriptural testimony. The life and sayings of Jesus, now generally regarded as the manifestation of God in time and space, were of paramount importance, the lives and teachings of those related to him of secondary importance. But there was still no incontrovertibly established text--or, rather, there were too many texts, too many original testimonies and versions of testimonies.
Ironically, despite his insistence on authority, Augustine preferred the old Latin bibles over the path-breaking translations from the Hebrew and Greek that Jerome, his elder contemporary, had been making in Palestine. His resistance to change, yet concern for authenticity, was typical of the West. Few there, including Augustine, knew much Greek. Virtually no one knew Hebrew.
What Augustine did know was rhetoric and the philosophy of the schools. While his biblical acumen was poor his philosophical acumen was considerably above the standards of the age. Consequently, while he contributed little compared to Jerome in the field of Biblical scholarship, he contributed quite a lot towards re-formulating Greek philosophy in Christian guise, making it respectable in the West as Clement, Origen and others had generations before in the East.
Sadly, Stock deals with very little of this. Presuming much of his readers, he treats Augustine out of context. One must already know the period, church history in general and Augustine in particular, to avoid obtaining a distorted picture of his thought, to avoid wondering how any of this material, so dated now, could possibly have any relevance. Hermeneutics was important to his thought as was the problematic of what precisely constituted soteriologically trustworthy knowledge, but such were certainly not his only concerns. As bishop of one of the richest and most stable areas of a crumbling empire, he had many more pressing concerns. He actively, politically, combatted not only the remnants of paganism, but also a host of Christian tendencies which threatened the authority of that universal Church with which he identified. A great deal of what he wrote about, his doctrines, arose out of dealing with such practical concerns. What Stock presents, however, is a man in the privacy of his study or alone with a few intimates, a reflective thinker. This may have been true of the young man. It certainly is how he represented himself, his better self, in his autobiography. But it is certainly not true of the public figure who wrote Confessiones or any of the major works for which he is remembered, most of which had a polemical purpose. Augustine had enemies. Augustine sanctioned the killing of many of them. Augustine wrote to attack others and to defend--or justify-- himself. Augustine was no ivory tower recluse.
Stock's work may constitute an acceptably thorough and original dissertation. It does not constitute a good read. It is, in fact, a painful read, a walk through a forest devoted to cataloguing its trees, detail with little perspective, work not pleasure.
It is customary to contrast the originality of the Hellenic classics with the inferior work of their little-remembered epigones, the scholars of the Hellenistic "Library of Alexandria." Augustine, for enthusiastically, even desperately, reinvigorating some of the classical tradition with the spirit of the new, Christian age, has some of that originality and deserves his place in our more democratic libraries. Stock's entirely derivative work, however, will be of interest only to cloistered specialists.
May 14, 2024
Another of Stock’s books that I’ll need to read twice to fully get.
Basically, a close reading of Augustine’s development as a reader in Confessions 1-9 and then his theory of reading in 10-13. Between these chapters are studies of the relevant texts published between his conversion and writing the Confessions (I.e. De Magistro, De Utilitate Credendi). It ends with an interpretation of De Trinitate 18-25 and the ideas of reading therein.
Basically, a close reading of Augustine’s development as a reader in Confessions 1-9 and then his theory of reading in 10-13. Between these chapters are studies of the relevant texts published between his conversion and writing the Confessions (I.e. De Magistro, De Utilitate Credendi). It ends with an interpretation of De Trinitate 18-25 and the ideas of reading therein.
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