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.

From the Notebook: vanity

Vanity.  When I am reading with a friend, I cannot help but emote as I read—give a smile, a chuckling laugh, a scoff, a scowl.  I do this, unthinking, so that my friend will be provoked to participate in what I am reading.  Reading together almost inevitably becomes talking together.  Sometimes, we would resolve beforehand not to talk, only to read and study, and yet I emoted anyway.  So I did not resolve to refrain from emoting, but my friend resolved to refrain from responding to my provocation; I did not resolve to master my vanity, but my friend resolved to ignore it in me for a little while.

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.

…

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 relationship of many interpretations to one written word

In a previous post, I already noted that Augustine says love stands over all the diverse interpretations of Genesis. His central argument is, in short, that if the interpreter believes that all the Law and Prophets is summarized by the commandments to love his God and his neighbor, then he discredits his own interpretation by violating love whenever he quarrels about the supposedly true meaning of the words. And in Book XII chapter xviii of the Confessions, Augustine writes:

All which things being heard and well considered of, I will not strive about words: for that is profitable to nothing, but the subversion of the hearers; but the law is good to edify, if a man use it lawfully, for that the end of it is charity, of a pure heart and good conscience, and faith unfeigned.

This sentence—which contains citations from 2 Timothy 2.14 and 1 Timothy 1.5,8—may seem straightforward on its surface, but it has roots tapping into some of the main themes running like an underground river through the entire work. First, on the surface, quarrels about words can cause divisions among people who are explicitly commanded to strive to agree on all things. Whereas the disputes may have begun from a desire to come to a better understanding of a biblical passage, which all had agreed beforehand was true, all hope of reaching this better understanding is thwarted by the disappearance of love in the midst of such a dispute. And how exactly is the hearer “subverted”?  Maybe his heart cannot be pure because he is told to hold another’s words in suspicion, even if that one reads from the same passage and presents a tenable interpretation. Maybe his conscience cannot remain good because he will have at the same instant assented to two interpretations while also assenting to the tenet of one possible interpretation, making him divided against himself and unable to plainly confess the truth of the passage. Maybe his faith will become feigned because he will have changed the basis for that faith, now subject to pondering one interpreter against another instead of resting in the unchanging character of the plainly written words; it is no longer a faith in God’s words, but now a faith that must waver in between little gods who have hijacked the words in their disputes. The moment of subverting the hearer is when one claims as his own what had been common to all. In other words, the interpreter’s unduly bold claim forces the hearer or reader to choose one among many instead of the one at the source of the many.

Now this is getting below the surface into one of the main themes of the Confessions:—the relationship of the many and the diverse to the one. The problem arising here in the inquiry about interpretation echoes lofty discussions on both the trinity of God and the catholicity of the church. Of course, for Augustine, three persons are in one God, and many members are in one body, the church, and so an indefinite number of true meanings are found in one written word. In all of these cases, the one is supposed where the many are apparent.  And this supposition has an interesting effect.

At the end of the same chapter cited above, xviii, Augustine poses the possibility that a reader might find a true or truth-yielding interpretation that even the writer did not intend or would not understand. This means that the written word might have the capability of expanding into new territory, of advancing its message according to the sophistication or intelligence of the reader. But this is not in exact accord with the supposition of oneness just mentioned. This is oneness inasmuch as it is a source whence the many pour out. But this sense suggests that the one loses control of the many, that the many have a longstanding independence from the one after they are drawn out. More concretely, this means that the new interpretation suggested by one man stands independent of the passage it was founded in, and also independent of the diverse other interpretations all standing independent from that passage. If two interpreters severally pull out of Genesis what Moses did not put in to it when he wrote it, then these two interpretations can be held against each other on the level of new revelation, competing holy books, whose legitimacy depends not on Genesis or Moses, or any of the Bible, but on the authority of the interpreter. This, clearly, is not what Augustine thinks or advocates.

The supposition of the one mentioned above leads him away from that possibility to a much stronger statement in chapter xxx:

. . . Let us in such manner honour that servant of thine, the dispenser of this Scripture, so full of thy Spirit, that we may believe him, when by thy revelation he wrote these things, to have bent his intentions unto that sense in them, which principally excels the rest, both for light of truth, and fruitfulness of profit.

And then even stronger in xxxi:

And if there be a third truth, or a fourth, yea, if any other man may discover any other truth in those words, why may [Moses] not be believed to have seen all these; he, by whose ministry, God that is but One, hath tempered these holy Scriptures to the meanings of a many, that were to see things true, and yet diverse? For mine own part verily, (and fearlessly I speak it from my heart) that were I to endite anything that should attain the highest top of authority, I would choose to write in such a strain, as that my words might carry the sound of any truth with them, which any man could apprehend of concerning these matters; rather than so clearly to set down one true sense concerning some one particular, as that I should thereby exclude all such other senses, which being not false, could no ways offend me. I will not therefore, O my God, be so heady as not to believe that this man obtained thus much at thy hands. He without doubt both perceived, and was advised of, in those words whenas he wrote them, what truth so ever we have been able to find in them: yea, and whatsoever we have not heretofore been able, no nor yet are, which nevertheless can be found in them.

So the written words also contain the many truths coming from it. The passage is not a source of new revelations, but a single revelation from which interpreters of various abilities and conditions may see different truths, like different faces of the same solid, while also having the other truths available to their consideration if they should change their hermeneutic. And every single interpretation is linked back to the source, back to Moses and the intention under which it was written. The one is not merely the source of the many, it also comprehends the them and lays claim to them. Two interpreters now point back to the original written word in their conversation with each other. Any given passage is now under the scrutiny of the whole of Moses’s writings, or the whole of the Bible. No single interpretation can stand if it does not stand alongside all the other interpretations that hold the written words to be true. This brings to mind something Plato mentions in the Phaedrus, something I will save for another article.