Summer Gone

I haven’t posted much recently on this blog, but I do intend to use it more frequently once I start teaching for the academic year.  My summer school obligations were very stressful, and I was crushed in more than one way.  But I am ready to go back to the basics of my faith, pray, do some planning, and launch myself into my new career.

My reading plans for the summer didn’t turn out so well.  I was going to read Fear and Trembling quickly, and then move on to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  Turns out I haven’t finished the former.  Oh well.  I will finish it this week, and likely put the latter on hold indefinitely—unless I can do an insane amount of planning before Day 1 at my high school.

In other news, I started translating Leibniz’s Monadology for fun.  Leibniz is the best of all possible rationalists. I’m not keen on rationalism, to put it gently, but he seems to be a bit more familiar with the Bible than many of the others who worked on the Enlightenment project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  He may even have had a genuine faith in Christ, though it’s not immediately clear in the works of his with which I’m familiar. All the same, the translation has been fun, and challenging.  I’ll post it once I’m done with the first draft.

The Devil’s Dictionary

I recently bought a Dover Thrift Edition of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. For $3.50, I am very happy with my purchase.* This thin volume, whose definitions are usually maxims in disguise, satisfies the appetite for aphoristic writing I have been cultivating since my sophomore year at St. John’s College, thanks largely to Solomon and Francis Bacon.  My favorite entry for the moment is

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

It has a touch of Socratic, but even more of Pascalian, irony. See, for example, the middle of Pensée 327 (my translation):

The sciences have two extremes that touch each other. The first is the pure natural ignorance, in which all men find themselves at birth. The second extreme is the one reached by great souls who, after having rigorously passed through all that men can know, find that they know nothing, and encounter the very same ignorance they left behind; but this is a knowing ignorance, acquainted with itself. Those between the two—who have moved on from the natural ignorance and been unable to arrive at the other—they have some hint of this self-important science, and pretend to be knowledgeable. It is those who trouble the world and judge everything poorly.

The entry from Bierce and the pensée from Pascal overlap, but (as I consider it more) they are obviously thought out in very different spirits. In the end, though Bierce has the bite of wit and concision, I can’t say that I prefer it to Pascal et al.  He is just too odious sometimes, too dark. As I thumb through some of the other entries,† I find the same feelings building up for Bierce that I have for other aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche—a blend of admiration and contempt—

for all of what they write is written well,
but much of what they think is black as hell.

Some of the entries betray a blackness in him that cannot be excused by the usefulness of satire. Being wary of the corrosive effect of wit and pessimism, I’ll keep The Devil’s Dictionary on hand for special occasions, but only holding it at a distance.

* I know what one of my readers might be saying: “Philip, you should be careful with that book! Look at its title!” But relax. Just because a book is called a “dictionary” doesn’t mean that it’s evil!
† See entries for delusion, emotion, evangelist, extinction, and oblivion, to name a few.

Finished My Paper

I have finished my project on Augustine’s Confessions. It looks almost nothing like what the discrete chunks posted beforehand might suggest.  In some way, I had to cut myself short of where I wanted to go.  I didn’t have time to flesh everything out, so I had to leave off my inquiry at a good stopping point and allow for the rest to be summarized in speculations.  The final title is “Developing the Hermeneutic for the Whole.”  Even though some details are best understood in light of the whole inquiry, I’ve decided to post the final section on the blog:

We return, then, to the project of finding the wholeness of the Confessions.  Clearly, those last two Books, in which Augustine displays his relationship to the Bible as a text, cannot be dismissed or read as an addendum.  And clearly his autobiography can be structured around his learning how and why to approach the Bible in this way.  Even the middle books on memory and time, though not at first glance, have to do with Augustine’s “spiritual interpretation”: as much as the Bible is the expression of the unchanging and eternal Word in time, he must come to terms with the rule of the whole that extends over all he parts, including all the parts of his particular life.

Given another long inquiry into the Book on time and more details from the last two Books on Genesis 1, this might ultimately suggest that hermeneutics is not limited to texts.  Maybe it is the case that Augustine is not only trying to show us his relationship to the Bible, but also that he holds the same relationship to the Bible as to his past, to his present, to the whole world.  So the wholeness of the Confessions that we found when examining the texts may only itself be a part of a greater wholeness. He has spent his life learning how to achieve this iconic relationship to Genesis 1, and in the process has learned also how to read these other things.  Maybe there is a hermeneutic for the whole.

This is even more intriguing when we consider Augustine’s peculiar spiritual hermeneutic.  It seems that he is reading the texts, his memories, and all time with the mediation of Jesus Christ.  The healing of our distension may depend upon our effort to apply the spiritual hermeneutic to all of the compartments and distinctions and divisions that we make.  Just as we would approach the Bible as an icon, in this way also would we approach everything else.  To have the spiritual hermeneutic is to read the entire world as an icon, and to destroy all the idols of our distension.

Update on My Paper

I will no longer post chunks of my paper on Augustine’s Confessions as I have been.  I have a better outline now and need to pour my efforts into a more cohesive draft.  From now on, until the paper is finished, this blog will only be used for my personal thoughts, some of which may incidentally be related to my paper.

I will, however, share the introduction to this upcoming draft.  It’s a little didactic still, but it articulates the problem and reveals the first next part of the paper:

According to popular labeling, Augustine’s Confessions winds in and out of autobiography, biography, prayer, apology, psychology, biblical exegesis, metaphysical speculation, commentary, worship, etc.  With such labels in mind the reader may be at a loss to take it in as a whole, and may even miss out on the greatest benefits to be gained from reading it.  To read any text as composed of discrete fragments is to read it carelessly and to risk misreading each of its parts.  Without wholeness in mind, the reader can only treat the parts superficially.  Even after a thorough analysis, the reader may try to find relations between those parts, but will only ever come up with “glues” to repair the shattering he has just done—glues such as literary motifs, the writer’s psychological motivations, or historical circumstances.  These, if well formulated, can bind the pieces together persuasively, and maybe even accurately, but will always beg the question about whether the writer himself bound his text together in that way, or if he ever analyzed it into the same parts chosen by the reader.

So it is a worthwhile project to inquire into the wholeness of the Confessions, at least with the expectation that it will afford a better treatment and understanding of its parts.  But this is admittedly difficult.  Those labels and divisions did not come about by accident.  If it is a whole, at first glance it does seem a very intricate one.

Of all the things to be said about it, I thought that one of the most general theses would be the best place to begin:—that the Confessions is a text.  This articulation ties up the supposition of the text’s wholeness with its being a written work.  Now my inquiry continues with the prospect that exploring what the Confessions asserts about writing in general does reveal something about the wholeness of this particular written work.

A good way to find what Augustine thinks about writing is to look at some of the other texts that he mentions in the Confessions.  Of interest here are those of his liberal arts education, those of the Neoplatonists and Academics, Cicero’s Hortensius, and the Bible.

…

On Augustine’s Confessions: his early encounters with Ambrose

As Augustine moves closer to submission under biblical authority, which is accomplished in the Milanese garden at the end of Book VII, it has already been noted that a certain “wager” in the midst of his suspicions put him in a place to receive catholic teachings about and from the Bible before the garden scene. An important detail in Augustine’s wager was skipped over, and must be revisited.

Before the wager could have happened, Augustine had to be given the smallest glimmer of hope with regard to the Bible. Even though something may promise infinite gain for the gambler, if there is no likelihood of achieving it, then there is no wager: if the Bible were to have no possible refutation for the Manichæan attacks, then the Bible and the Church that teaches from it are not at all an option. But in Book V, Chapters xiii-xiv, just before Augustine becomes a catechumen, he takes the words of Ambrose to heart. Ambrose’s influence on Augustine’s thinking, especially with respect to the Old Testament, cannot be passed over.

In brief, Augustine listens to Ambrose only because the latter is a renowned rhetorician. He wishes to hear how well Ambrose speaks, and does not care of what. But in the listening, what is said eventually takes hold of Augustine and infiltrates some of the Manichæan strongholds, undermining their attack on the Old Testament’s validity.

This brings up the earlier consideration of style and content in the episode about Cicero’s Hortensius. Just as in the reading of that book, here with Ambrose he approaches him desiring to get some great rhetorical training; and just as with that book, the content of some of the words slips in. He weighs the words carefully, and finds Ambrose to be worthy of his fame. And despite trying to keep his mind off the content, he is able to note the effect of Ambrose’s message, at least in retrospect:

And verily with the sweetness of his discourse I was much delighted: which, however it were more learned, yet was it not so pleasing and inveigling as Faustus his was, the manner of the oratory I mean, though for the matter there was no comparison. For Faustus did but rove up and down amongst his Manichæan fallacies; but Ambrose taught salvation most soundly. But salvation is far enough from sinners, such as I was at that instant; and yet I drew little and little nearer toward it; but how, I knew not.

At least twice before—the reading of the Hortensius and the refutation of Faustus—has a great rhetorician changed Augustine’s mind, he being quite unable to explain how. The Hortensius gives him beautiful words and yet dissuades him from the career path of a lawyer, in which Augustine has been planning to put such words to money-winning use. Next Faustus gives him beautiful words and yet simultaneously shows the inadequacy of Manichæan thought behind the words. And here again Ambrose gives him beautiful words whose effect on him is unanticipated.

In a previous post the effect of these words was described as the deciding factor in the wager to become a catechumen. What is of interest here is the role Ambrose the human teacher has in relation to the Old Testament, which consists of supposedly “God-breathed” words, as at 2 Timothy 3.16, whose authority is the question of most of the Confessions. Of Ambrose there is no question that Augustine thinks of him as an angel of God: “To him was I led by thee, unknowing, that by him I might be brought to thee, knowing it.” According to God’s own plan, it seems, Ambrose is a necessary part of Augustine’s journey. He is responsible for changing Augustine’s views of the Old Testament, at least just enough to expose him to the remainder of biblical doctrines and allow for a non-literal hermeneutic. The Bible, though, apart from Ambrose, would have forever been subject to the abuses of the Manichæan interpretations and dismissals. It, being in need of interpretation at all, was unable to defend itself in the world. So we return to the point brought out in Plato’s Phædrus about writing.

With this instance, it seems that the Bible is need of defending. It seems that even it, as a text, is not exempt from the dangers associated with writing. Does Augustine also think of it as merely an excellent specimen among the infinitude of books?

On Augustine’s Confessions: the first steps toward accepting biblical authority

Augustine before his conversion had a strange relationship to the Bible. His thirst for “the immortality of wisdom” that he got from Cicero’s Hortensius, as in Book III Chapter iv, encouraged him to take up the Bible after years of disdaining it, but he could not bring himself to appreciate it at the time, for he came to the text already distrusting the content.  Diverse Manichæan teachings had undermined Christian claims about biblical authority, and he also found the style “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence” that had led him to approach the text again. As long as anyone despises both the content and the style of a text, it has nothing to offer him. So Augustine was repelled from it.

How would it be possible for him to approach the Bible and read it successfully? He could admire its style if he would radically alter his taste, or else forsake, or forget, his highly technical knowledge about literature and style. But even if he achieved admiration of its style, this would make the text enjoyed in the same way that a painting is enjoyed, as Socrates describes in the Phædrus; it would offer nothing to him but light pleasure, being unable to answer its questioners or teach any new knowledge. Words read as merely pleasing sounds are themselves mute. By this Augustine might have come to admire the Bible, even its writers, and even the personages of its stories, but admiration falls short of the required adoration. The Gospel Accounts repeatedly tell of how Jesus Christ tries to draw a distinction between mere fans and his faithful disciples: to love Jesus Christ for his eloquence would be an ironic failure to hear what he says.

Again, how to approach the Bible and abide? He would need to find a way to apprehend its content without Manichæan contentions before he could ever honestly examine it, let alone be content with it. This is precisely what the books of some astronomers and philosophers did for him. He found in them claims to the wisdom that he craved from Cicero’s exhortation, and also highly plausible accounts that ran against the mystical teachings and fables of the Manichæan books. Against the astronomers, Faustus, the great Manichæan preacher, fell short and was forced to acknowledge so much. And then the skeptics gave young Augustine a place to stand suspended; now the Manichæan fables were as dubious to him as the Bible. The end of Book V, Chapter xiv, describes how he loses his love for the one, but does not thereby gain an appreciation for the other:

[I judged] in that very time of my doubt, that I could not safely continue in that sect, before which I now preferred divers of the Philosophers: to which Philosophers notwithstanding, for that they were without the saving Name of Christ, I utterly refused to commit the curing of my languishing soul. This therefore I determined, so long to be a catechumen in the Catholic Church, (which had been so much commended unto me by my parents) till such time as some certain mark should appear, whereto I might steer my course.

His participation in the church as a catechumen is the intriguing detail here that will be explored in another article with the help of Blaise Pascal.

Update on the Paper

I am currently reformulating the original “Phædrus dichotomy.”  I was flat-out wrong about something, and I feel a little bit silly about it, but the discovery is very helpful.  Now the way some of the books discussed in the Confessions has changed a bit.  More on that to come.

Also, today I found a working title: “Books, the Book, and Augustine’s Book.”  It sounds a bit corny, but it gets at the summary of my work with the Confessions.  I will explore what Augustine thinks his own book is, by examining the books he mentions within it.  In seeing his differing evaluations of the liberal arts, philosophical literature, and the Bible, the role of reading and writing for Christians will be brought to the forefront, maybe suggesting an ahistorical reason for Augustine to make his confessions both public and written.  Within the scope of the paper is an explication of Augustine’s account of the Holy Spirit’s work, especially as it relates to reading and writing, and also a brief look at Plato’s Phædrus, which will furnish my examinations of particular books with some structure and important distinctions.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the Hortensius dialogue provides the negative

Augustine, in the Confessions, recalls a few books from his studies in youth that he considers to have contributed to the overall confession of his life. Among those of which he gives favorable mention is Cicero’s Hortensius,* described in Book III Chapter iv.

When Augustine is around eighteen or nineteen, he is supposed to be acquiring the excellences of oratorical and written style in order to become a lawyer. He approaches the reading of Cicero—“whose tongue almost everyone admires, though not so his heart”—expecting to find beautiful language that he might adopt for his own uses in the rhetorical fields. But Augustine takes the Hortensius to heart in a strange way: he enjoys what is written more than how it is written! This aberration is celebrated by Augustine because that book happens to contain an exhortation to philosophia, which Cicero straightforwardly defines as “the love of wisdom,” as opposed to the common love of dispute that characterizes many activities under the same name. The change in his manner of reading coincided neatly with a message that would change his young views and values.

This was what delighted me in that exhortation, that it did not engage me to this or that sect, but left me free to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace Wisdom itself, whatever it was.

It was a turning point in his life in which he left behind “vain hopes” of becoming a wealthy or famous lawyer in order to pursue “the immortality of wisdom.” He even admits that at this time his prayers were turned toward God. And then he writes at the beginning of the next chapter, “I resolved thereupon to bend my studies toward the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were.”

Before examining his view of the Bible, it is worth looking at Augustine’s account of the Hortensius in light of the Phædrus dichotomy between books that are barren and those that are fecund. While Augustine speaks favorably of it, he does not bother sharing with the reader any of its content other than the exhortation to love wisdom and how that exhortation led him to reexamine the Bible. It cannot be considered among the fruit-yielding books, because it lacks a manner of endurance. He receives it, and he takes its words upon him, but they do not positively teach him. The Hortensius only provides the negative. In other words, it only leads him away from his current practices, but does not impregnate him with knowledge beyond its own words. It is efficacious, but not fecund. It tells him to pursue wisdom, but Augustine adds “quæcumque esset”—Wisdom itself, “whatever it was”—showing that he was entranced by the thought, but that its marrow escaped him at the time.

In Chapter v he admits that the Bible’s message eluded him in his youth, even though the exhortation to wisdom had encouraged him to read it. It seemed “far unworthy to be compared to the stateliness of the Ciceronian eloquence. For my swelling pride soared above the temper of their style. . . .” Evidently the impression left by the Hortensius, while providing the negative, did not teach Augustine the humility that he considers prerequisite to an understanding of the Bible. It gave him the appearance of wisdom by means of the exhortation to pursue wisdom, but it did not give him the wisdom itself; and so he did not at that time pursue the catholic faith, in which he believes wisdom is found, but fell into the good words and strange Manichæan teachings.

Bringing the Hortensius under the scheme developed from the Phædrus is convenient for speculating about Augustine’s views on the matter, but it will become clear that his views on the Bible do not fit so conveniently into the scheme.  This is equally insightful, though, and so the scheme will continue to be used to bring out a principle that Socrates and Phædrus did not anticipate.

*Because the dialogue is no longer extant, Augustine’s account must suffice for a judgment in this inquiry.