Relearning How to Read
Saint Augustine by Carravagio
“So with Augustine’s responses to Virgil and Cicero in mind, how would you compare his relationship with classical literature to his relationship with scripture?” My discussion section, already hesitant, fell silent. “Can anybody characterize Augustine’s hermeneutics in this passage for me?” Crickets. Our week on Augustine’s Confessions for the gen-ed English course “Transforming Society” was wrapping up poorly. I’d focused our conversation on intertextuality, analyzing how Augustine reads and rereads a variety of texts. I’d hoped Augustine’s sophisticated interpretation of Old Testament details that seemed morally objectionable, like the patriarchs’ multiple wives, would illuminate how he thought about social change, but the students seemed confused not only by the word “hermeneutics” but why we were talking about interpretation of texts at all. I left the class unsure whether they understood my point—that Christianity characteristically recuperates elements of pre-Christian cultures, Roman and Hebrew alike, honoring the good to be found in the works of strangers—or if they just thought Augustine takes and leaves the Bible as he pleases.
It’s funny how the same text can generate such different experiences, depending on how we read. Almost a decade before, when I’d encountered the Confessions as a freshman in a Great Books course, I’d been deeply impressed by the very passage I’d struggled to help my students appreciate. I came into college an adherent of Absolute Truth, ready to resist the evils of “relativism.” I was shocked to find Augustine, one of the heroes of my faith, arguing that polygamy was morally relative—appropriate in some contexts, forbidden in others. By acknowledging the real weight of context without wavering in his commitment to truth, Augustine collapsed my simplistic binary and gave me permission to see God at work in particularity and contingency, expressing his unchanging nature within diverse cultures and languages. To my freshman self, this text was challenging, revelatory, transformative, not an exercise in abstruse analysis.
What was I doing wrong as a teacher? My students were no less smart or engaged than I’d been. Instead, the disconnect was between different modes of reading. As an undergraduate, I cared about Confessions because I wanted to understand the problem of evil, the nature of God, my own earnest search for truth. Yet years of graduate education in English have disciplined me, shaping my habits and perceptions, so that when I looked at the Confessions again, its most interesting features seemed to be its innovative narrative technique and deft manipulation of a dense intertextual network. Invested in literature as an end in itself, I was drawn to Augustine’s acts of interpretation, relationships with texts, and expressive literary form, rather than his longing to know and love what is good. Those without my training are unlikely to share this interest in textuality—unless they can be convinced that literary analysis can help them answer the questions that matter to them, not just the ones posed by the TA. If I wanted my students to care about our books, I had to employ an older, more universal way of reading, one focused less on the text itself than the realities it attempts to describe.
My disciplinary development—falling in love with literature for its expressions of profound truths, only to realize that professional study of artistic expression has made it harder to talk about truth at all—recapitulates in miniature the story of my discipline as a whole. Like grad students honing heartfelt love of books into razor-sharp performance in a cutthroat job market, literary studies have lost their sense of purpose, and forgotten how to edify outsiders, in the struggle to shed the stigma of amateurism.
In medieval education, the study of literature belonged to grammatica, the most foundational of the seven liberal arts. Grammatica encompasses reading, from the ability to sound out letters to interpretation of poetry. The texts of elementary instruction were unapologetically didactic, drilling moral maxims into students’ memories. More advanced texts grounded readers in a shared cultural tradition and were understood to transmit indirect moral instruction, since the accessus ad auctores commentaries used to introduce them typically treated poetry as a branch of ethics. Twelfth-century theologian Hugh of St. Victor sums up medieval views on education when he says that all arts and disciplines are directed toward philosophy, which is the love of “that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things.” For medieval students, all education—even the reading of secular poetry—invites us to restore our likeness to God by participating in divine Wisdom.
While specifically religious interest in literature declined in modernity, literary reading retained its strong associations with philosophy and moral instruction. As the eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson expounds in Rasselas, poetic images and allusions are “useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth,” and great poetry rises above its historical origin to express “general and transcendental truths. For Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic, criticism serves “to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world,” and poetry effectively replaces religion as a source of “high seriousness,” meaning, and consolation.
In the twentieth century, though, as English came of age as an academic field, it suffered an identity crisis: did it really take trained experts to understand books in our native language? Inculcating moral and aesthetic sensibilities in the young hardly seemed like a scholarly research program. Rejecting belletristic appreciations and historicist gossip about authors, early twentieth-century scholars of English aspired to the rigor and precision of the sciences. The history of literary theory is a series of bids to distinguish professional scholarship from ordinary literacy, whether through finely honed techniques of close reading, exhaustive study of original historical contexts, or the ability to see through the alluring surfaces of plot, character, and image to uncover unconscious psychological or ideological forces secretly animating a text. These endeavors have produced fascinating and illuminating insights, but they are sometimes remote from lay reasons for reading.
In the last twenty years, there have been stirrings of dissatisfaction with what Rita Felski, borrowing a phrase from Paul Ricoeur, calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—the tendency to uncover hidden, usually sinister, meanings within texts that dominate academic English. Scholars unhappy with the status quo have proposed numerous alternatives: “surface reading,” “thick description,” “reparative reading,” “postcritique.” In proposing exciting new modes of analysis, however, these theorists rarely seem to recognize that what they are calling for is a return to ancient attitudes toward literature—a course correction of a recent and anomalous error, not an innovation.
The professionalization we literary critics have undergone to win departments and professorships, funding and prestige, involves two changes: the acquisition of specialized skills, theories, and habits of mind, and disidentification with amateur reading, a detachment frequently achieved by suspiciously interrogating the text or reading against its grain. While these may seem like two sides of one coin, the skills of literary analysis are only valuable to those who already love books or the truths they express. Our profession, in short, relies on the love of amateurs. Ultimately, nobody is interested in hermeneutics and intertextuality for their own sake except a few freakish English professors—and even for them, the perpetual play of texts divorced from truths becomes wearisome. But everyone wants to know what is real and how we should live, and if books can help us there, interpretation becomes intensely interesting.
To balance earnest love and academic analysis rightly, we should learn from readers like Augustine, a critical scholar and passionate lover of the texts that shaped his life. In his study of scripture, Augustine historicizes, just as literary critics do, placing Old Testament actions within a specific context that changes their significance. He looks through the surfaces of texts to find hidden allegorical meanings, but he does so trusting that the depths of the text hold treasures, not suspicious that they conceal structures of oppression. Even when he despises non-Christian literary works for teaching falsehood, he seeks to recuperate the glimmers of truth found in them. All texts and all readings are profitable insofar as they lead us to love what is good.
By chance—or grace—the theology reading group at my church was discussing Confessions over beers while my students were reading it in the classroom. When the theology group reached that passage about Old Testament polygamy, we felt that Augustine had set himself a relatively easy problem. Could the principles he outlined account for more horrifying changes in moral codes, like God’s command to sacrifice Isaac? My background knowledge about medieval hermeneutics came in handy during the conversation, but I was no final authority, since we wanted to know not just how people in the past had interpreted scripture, but how we ought to do so today. In the end, our discussion wasn’t about Augustine at all—but reading Augustine together made it possible. Instead of dissecting the Confessions under the microscope, we stood shoulder to shoulder with its author, looking together at the same subtle and intricate scriptures, the same ethical and epistemic quandaries, the same God who, absolute and unchanging, condescends to the limits of human language and history.
Reading Woman with Parasol by Henri Matisse
I hope that this lively, earnest search for truth has its place within the university—that I can unlearn the bad habits that distance me from my students, that post-critical ways of reading will win a permanent place among the methodologies of literary studies. But if the university does not foster this kind of reading, it will find a home in other institutions—study centers, book clubs, churches. Wherever books are means to know reality, the study of literature will flourish; wherever they are ends in themselves, it will, eventually, decay.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. She studies late medieval religious writing and liturgical theology.