WHAT HATH AUGUSTINE TO DO WITH JANE AUSTEN?: ON READING REVERENTLY

Photo courtesy of Lumen Fidei.

It’s late January as I write this, so, as I have for the past three years, I’m teaching Augustine’s Confessions. Imagine it: twenty or so first-year college students in a small, overheated seminar room, working through the puzzles and contradictions of this late-fourth-century text, which takes up 479 pages in Sarah Ruden’s beautiful new translation.

I’ve come to expect polarized reactions. For some students, the man – this bishop, this saint, this controversialist – is fascinating enough to be worth the trouble. As Michel de Montaigne put it, speaking of his own essays, Augustine is the very stuff of his book, flesh made words. For other students, his endless self-recrimination, hunger for freedom from his own anxieties, and preoccupation with the workings of his own mind are off-putting. ‘Get over yourself,’ I can hear them saying.

It’s an enjoyable irony, then, that in my favorite passage, reserved near the end of the Confessions for students of unusual persistence, Augustine enacts a kind of ‘death of the author’ that one tends to associate with postmodern literary criticism, severing text from intention and reading from biography. Augustine has in mind the reading of scripture and not his own writing, but the lesson is perfectly general, and it’s a lesson in how to read that I’m convinced we need.

In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine is working through various possibilities for understanding the logic of creation in Genesis 1. He concludes that

“while one person says, ‘Moses interpreted the way I do,’ and another says, ‘No, the way I do!’ I think it’s more reverent for me to say, ‘Why not both instead, if both are true? And if there’s a third or fourth true interpretation, or absolutely any further one seen in these words, why shouldn’t all these views be credited to Moses, through whom the one God modulated these sacred writings in due proportion for the sensibilities of many people” (Confessions XII 42, trans. Ruden).

Augustine goes on in this passage to speak about false interpretations and how the true ones can be expressed in a way to exclude them. For all his talk here of many true interpretations corresponding to different people’s sensibilities, he’s no relativist. 

Still, the practices he recommends of reading a text with care, striving to interpret it as best one can, and undogmatically offering these interpretations to one another are strikingly generous. It is this unusual combination of generosity and love for the truth that I want to explore a little further here. 

The key word is ‘reverent’.

While I certainly do not think we should treat every text as the Word of God, there are two kinds of reverence described in this passage that I think are needed in my own life as an academic and in the lives of my students, who are being inducted into the scholarly community, at least for a time. 

The first sort of reverence is for the truth. If we are reading texts that matter and doing so with care, we should not try to consume them, that is, to let our own sensibilities constrain and strangle the truth that might lie within. This sort of mentality of consumption is ever-present in our mode of life, whether we are binging a television show at home or shopping for classes at the start of a semester. 

Wise reading is about allowing yourself – your tastes and experiences, your vision and your values – to be transformed by welcome but unexpected truth. Not every text contains truth, or at least, a truth we can see easily. But every encounter of reader and text can promise the hope of such truth. 

The other sort of reverence in Augustine’s vision is reverence for a community of readers, starting from the community that envelops you in a classroom or a library, and stretches backward through the generations to the first readers of a text and forward into any future in which the text survives. 

Some readers, of course, will resemble those Augustine describes in the passage, who feel as though they have discovered a proprietary truth, whether others agree with them or not. We should try not to emulate them. But always maintaining an attitude of provisionality in what we are saying is just as unsatisfying. Isn’t joint inquiry reduced to a game if we can’t fully affirm something as the right answer?

Happily, Augustine offers a third option to dogmatism and wishy-washiness: the recognition of multiple truths in a single text. Indeed, on the subjects that matter most, there will always be a plurality of true interpretations. This plurality of truth is a sign of the overflowing reality of the world, not a mark of its unreality.

One dimension of plurality is temporal. The concerns of our own social and cultural context will shape the truths that a given text affords us. Every generation of readers can, therefore, discover texts like Augustine’s Confessions for themselves, even while taking note of what loving readers of the past have found in them. (This approach gives us an alternative to the narrow-minded mentality that I described above of consuming texts and turning them into what we already were, an alternative that still makes a special place for our contingent differences and our peculiar interests.)

In fact, the changing circumstances of our own lives often affect what we appreciate in texts we return to time after time. I loved Pride and Prejudice when I read it for the first time as a teenager, perhaps because I lived in a small town (small in every sense) and hungered for more in the way the Bennet sisters do. Inevitably, I saw the novel as describing a journey into maturity and freedom. 

When I came back to Pride and Prejudice at the start of my career as a professor of philosophy, I saw in it instead a profound meditation on the ways that happiness depends on both character and luck: character to endure inevitable hardships and luck to sweeten the better times that come. Both versions of the novel that I encountered are, I think, true. What’s more, thinking back over my encounters with Pride and Prejudice helps me at once to understand myself and the world. 

Another dimension of plurality is the sheer complexity and diversity of human experience. I enjoy seeing my students discover that not all their disagreements over a text require a resolution. The reverent act of seeing the world through another’s eyes can enlarge our grasp of it and foster our love for them. 

In all this activity of reading and reasoning, I submit, we should see ourselves as pursuing the truth alongside others and not merely for ourselves.

My class has a long and, at times, arduous journey ahead of it this term. Sancte Augustine, ora pro nobis.