Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther, and Rousseau to those of Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides the first full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine’s early dialogues, his Confessions, and his systematic treatises.
Augustine was convinced that words and images play a mediating role in our perceptions of reality. In the union of philosophy, psychology, and literary insights that forms the basis of his theory of reading, the reader emerges as the dominant model of the reflective self. Meditative reading, indeed the meditative act that constitutes reading itself, becomes the portal to inner being. At the same time, Augustine argues that the self-knowledge reading brings is, of necessity, limited, since it is faith rather than interpretive reason that can translate reading into forms of understanding.
In making his theory of reading a central concern, Augustine rethinks ancient doctrines about images, memory, emotion, and cognition. In judging what readers gain and do not gain from the sensory and mental understanding of texts, he takes up questions that have reappeared in contemporary thinking. He prefigures, and in a way he teaches us to recognize, our own preoccupations with the phenomenology of reading, the hermeneutics of tradition, and the ethics of interpretation.
Brian Stock is Professor of History and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
Table of Contents
Introduction
I CONFESSIONS 1-9
Learning to Read
Words
Reading and Writing
Self-Improvement
Intellectual Horizons
Manichaeism
Ambrose
Neoplatonism
Reading and Conversion
Alypius
Simplicianus
Ponticianus
Augustine
From Cassiciacum to Ostia
Cassiciacum
Ostia
II THE ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION
Beginnings
The Letters
The Dialogues
Speaking and Reading
On Dialectic
The Teacher
Defining the Reader
Toward Theory
Tradition and Beliefs
The "Uninstructed"
Christian Doctrine
Memory, Self-Reform, and Time
Remembering
Conduct
Time
The Self
A Language of Thought
The Reader and the Cogito
The Road toward Wisdom
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
R.A. Markus
The book is entirely original. What it does has not been previously attempted--except perhaps in small-scale and fragmentary, article form. It is a reading of Augustine which is on the one hand entirely scholarly and rigorous; on the other hand, it is at the same time focused in terms of a modern preoccupation--concern, in this case, with text and textual understanding. This sort of interest has been gaining ground in patristic, and especially in Augustinian studies; but not hitherto worked out fully and systematically as Stock has done. And it is worked out in a thoroughly coherent and integrated fashion. Augustine the Reader will quickly become something of a classic, certainly for people seriously interested in Augustine, for it provides an entirely new dimension for understanding his work and, indeed--for the author convincingly presents his life as text--his whole development, spiritual and intellectual. — R.A. Markus, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Nottingham
Alastair Minnis
This book offers a fascinating narrative, the story of St. Augustine's 'moral and spiritual progress through reading,' beginning with the Confessions and proceeding through other texts. It is masterly, a major scholarly event. The explication de texte of major works, with special attention being paid to reading and related subjects (this being the fundamental method employed) is excellent, highly revealing. There is no study like this, in the thoroughness and acumen with which it works its way through those texts, offering nuanced readings, rich and fascinating details. — Alastair Minnis, Professor of English, York University
