Augustine and the Limits of Politics

By Jean Bethke Elshtain

University of Notre Dame Press

143 pp.; $21.95

Augustine the Reader

By Brian Stock

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press

463 pp.; $39.95

As Jean Bethke Elshtain notes in her new book, anyone with the temerity to write about that titanic enigma Augustine of Hippo must reckon with "the fact that there are so many Augustines--the pessimistic Augustine; the pluralist Augustine; the romantic Augustine; the reactionary Augustine; the sexist Augustine; the anti-sexist Augustine; even a sort of proto-socialist Augustine." The bishop himself had to acknowledge the problem when, near the end of his life, in his Retractions, he sorted through his works and tried to figure out what in his mature judgment he could endorse and what had to be repudiated. Clearly, his prolific mind had produced less a unified corpus than a clamoring crowd of books, jostling one another and arguing (like Jesus' disciples) over precedence and quality. Leaving aside his "wanderings," as he called them, in the fields of Manichaean error before his conversion to Christian orthodoxy, one still has, in the 30 years between the Confessions and the completion of the City of God, a bewilderingly diverse array of texts.

Given this profusion, one is tempted to conclude that evidence can be found somewhere in these works for any thesis about Augustine one might be inclined to formulate. This temptation Elshtain seems determined to resist: for her, a great many interpretations of Augustine are indeed valid, but some simply miss the mark. Indeed, one of the key purposes of the book seems to be to launch a kind of pre-emptive strike against some of the more common false Augustines. For instance, the picture familiar in some academic circles of Augustine as a world-hating ascetic receives its quietus in this passage from On the Trinity that Elshtain uses as her epigraph:

Behold, and see again if you can. Certainly you love only the good, because the earth is good by the height of its mountains, the moderate elevation of its hills, and the evenness of its fields; and good is the farm that is pleasant and fertile; and good is the house that is arranged throughout in symmetrical proportions and is spacious and bright; and good are the animals, animate bodies; and good is the mild and salubrious air; and good is the food that is pleasant and conducive to health; and good is health without pains and weariness; and good is the countenance of man with regular features, a cheerful expression, and a glowing color; and good is the soul of a friend with the sweetness of concord and the fidelity of love; and good is the just man; and good are riches because they readily assist us; and good is the heaven with its own sun, moon, and stars; and good are the angels by their holy obedience; and good is the lecture that graciously instructs and suitably admonishes the listener; and good is the poem with its measured rhythm and the seriousness of its thoughts.

Well, so much for that caricature! Likewise, early in the book Elshtain demolishes the dime-store psychoanalysis that portrays the Augustine of the Confessions as an obsessive narcissist; she points out that the Confessions "is, among the many things that it is, a story of the claims of others upon the self" and of how Augustine came to acknowledge those claims--in short, that the story is one of an emergence from narcissism. It is also, she reminds us, a very beautiful story, and she bluntly states that "to be unmoved by the Confessions . . . is to have a head of stone and a heart of brick."

But this clearing away of cant is only preparatory to Elshtain's real project, which is to enable us to listen to Augustine's political wisdom. Even with the various false Augustines disposed of, this is not an easy task, "because Augustine's categories are not simple and do not comport with those most familiar to us in late-twentieth-century liberal political life." Chiefly, Elshtain contends that Augustine's understanding of selfhood and his view of evil cannot be reconciled with beliefs common in our time. And as she patiently delineates the broad outlines of his thinking on these matters, it becomes clear that a genuinely Augustinian politics must continually acknowledge the strong constraints--some of which derive from our creatureliness, others from our fallenness--upon the expansion of selfhood and the possibility of full self-understanding (by persons or communities) in this world.

In short, Augustinian politics is a "politics of limits." For Elshtain, the enduring value of Augustine is his constant awareness of two facts: first, that what we do in this world matters, because God made the world and has placed it under our stewardship; and second, that there is another world, another city, which finds its fulfillment later but begins now, in the life of the church. Those who cannot accept these facts will not appreciate Augustine; but they will not form a viable polis either.

Political thinking is but one element of Augustine's thinking, as Elshtain notes. There are many others. But a thread that runs through them all is that of Augustine as reader, as an encounterer and interpreter of texts. Brian Stock's new book is a formidably scholarly and extremely important study of, as Stock puts it, "Augustine's attempt to lay the theoretical foundation for a reading culture."

The first part of Augustine the Reader draws on the Confessions to extract a kind of phenomenology of reading: what, he asks, can we conclude (or what did Augustine conclude) about the mind in the act of reading by scrutinizing Augustine's autobiographical account? Then, in the second part, Stock uses Augustine's other works (especially On Christian Doctrine and On the Trinity) to show how Augustine gradually develops an "ethics of interpretation." In this phrase Stock refers to one of the more consistent themes in Augustine's profuse writings on interpretation, which is that reading, especially the reading of Scripture, is properly driven and guided by caritas, which Augustine famously defines as "the movement of the soul towards God." In a great passage from On Christian Doctrine, the depths of which have yet to be plumbed, Augustine writes,

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them in such a way that it [i.e., his interpretation] does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand [the Scriptures] at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way.

This is primarily what Stock is referring to when he speaks of "the ethics of interpretation." I am pretty sure that this phrase is inadequate to comprehend Augustine's point, and this inadequacy points to a difficulty in the book as a whole.

Augustine the Reader bears the marks of scholarship to an exaggerated (sometimes even an absurd) degree. The 278 pages of text proper are accompanied by 185 pages of critical apparatus, including an astonishing 2,135 notes that provide (among other things) extensive quotations from Augustine's works--in Latin only. The learning is real and its records valuable, but a 19-page introduction with 274 endnotes is, well, rather over the top.

This is worth noting because, despite Stock's erudition and expertise, he seems to lack something the acknowledged amateur Elshtain clearly possesses: an understanding of Augustine's deepest concerns and purposes. Stock seems not to know, or not to care, that the "reading culture" Augustine wants to build is an ecclesial culture. The readers Augustine wants to educate and then exhort are the citizens of the altera civitas, the civitas Dei. Indeed, the City of God--although it plays only a marginal role in Stock's account, largely because it does not deal overtly with reading and interpretation--provides the context within which the Augustinian "ethics of interpretation" finds its proper place and makes meaningful sense.

Stock is persuasive in arguing that Augustine's approach to reading and interpretation "lays a foundation" for the future of reading, the readerly ways and means with which we are familiar: silence, privacy, "interiority," introspection, contemplation. But Stock neglects to consider the importance of this approach being formulated within a cultural context in which reading was primarily an aural and communal activity--especially the reading of Scripture in the church. Hence the famous scene in the Confessions in which Augustine relates his own surprise, and the surprise of others, at Ambrose's habit of reading silently.

Stock of course pays attention to this scene, but chiefly to indicate the contrast between the quiet but substantial Ambrose and Faustus, the Manichaean windbag in whom Augustine had once placed his hopes. He also notes, and properly, that Ambrose's example would provide the impetus for Augustine's then-nascent theory of reading. But Stock fails to consider a point that Augustine makes directly: that Ambrose the silent reader stood in contrast to everyone, not just to Faustus. Augustine's private and hence "modern" theory of reading, like Ambrose's reading practice, was developed to supplement, not to supplant, the church's public and liturgical modes of reading and listening.

That all of Augustine's writings--whether theological or semiotic, political or hermeneutic--are for the church should not require constant re-emphasis. But Stock, for all his remarkable erudition, remains so captive to the fully modern way of reading (that is, one in which the public and liturgical has been supplanted by the silent and contemplative) that he either doesn't notice this or doesn't think it worthy of emphasis. Using a term coined by the great historian Herbert Butterfield, Stock is a classic Whig interpreter, interested in Augustine only insofar as he prefigures (or creates) our modern ways of reading and thinking. Stock is far superior to that other kind of Whig interpreter, the kind Elshtain notes, who can only condemn Augustine for not being more like us. But something more is needed. A book that combined Elshtain's sensitivity to Augustinian purposes with Stock's erudition would be a book to celebrate indeed. But if I had to choose between these two books at hand, I'd choose Elshtain.

Alan Jacobs is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His essay "A Bible Fit for Children" appears in the May issue of First Things.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 30

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