Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation
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.
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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.
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