After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (review)

Reviews 211 Stock, Brian, AfterAugustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text, Philadelphia, University ofPennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. 132; R R P US$32.50; ISBN 0812236025. Augustine never ceases to generate enthusiasm from a wide range of readers, for many different reasons. Brian Stock is interested in him not as a theologian, but as a theorist of meditative reading, responsible for developing the idea that it is by readingnarrative texts, in particular the text ofsacred scripture, that w e gain insight into the ethical life. In this slim little book, more a collection ofessays than a monograph , Stock traces h o w Augustine's understanding of reading both drew on and differedfromthat ofthe ancients, and then gradually shifted in the Latin West through Petrarch's own re-reading of the Augustinian legacy. Brian Stock's intellectual journey is characterised by a long-standing preoccupation with notions oftext and interpretation. In these lectures, he extends ideas originally developed in Augustine theReader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics ofInterpretation (Harvard University Press, 1996) into reflection on the theory of meditative reading that Augustine inspired. This is an engaging, provocative book that is worth reading for anybody engaged with broader issues about the character of the Western tradition. Stock is fully familiar with that grand philological tradition represented by Auerbach and Curtius, for w h o m Western cultural identity was to be found in the story of continuity and change in language. H e loves the Latin medieval tradition, but is aware that their philological vision is in potentially terminal decline. His way of revisiting that tradition is to focus not on language per se, but to see reading as a path to a way of living. Fascinated by Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995), he sees Augustine as transforming this philosophical attention by an attention to the truth-telling power of narrative, in a way that effectively transformed the classical tradition with which he was so familiar. Inevitably, the essay-type format of After Augustine runs the risk of encouraging impressionistic assertions rather than carefully argued analysis. The best sections are those on Augustine's theory of reading and on Petrarch's reworking of the Confessions in his Secretum. The potential criticism that could be made of these lectures is that they flit from one text to another, without ever engaging in any depth. Stock simply sidesteps the theological ideas that Augustine sees as underpinning the narrative of sacred scripture. His sympathy is more for the meditative reflections of the Confessions, than for the authoritative assertions ofAugustine's City of God. 278 Reviews Stock argues that a concern with intentionality behind a textfirstbegins to surface in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Adopting a quite traditional stance that this is the age of n e w awareness of individual identity, he mentions but does not develop the claim that this new age begins with Otloh of Emmeram (ca. 1010-70). While he comments on Abelard's Historia calamitatum as attesting to a new degree of intentionality, the prologue to the Sic et Non would have provided a more important clue to the way in which Abelard shifted Augustinian paradigms of reading, by appealing to Aristotelian dialectic. Stock's comparison ofAugustine and Petrarch is more satisfying in being based on specific text. Whereas Augustine presents reading as serving a higher end, Petrarch reads Augustine's Confessions as autobiography, thus making him thefirst'modern' author. I suspect that Petrarch on Augustine is a metaphor for the author himself, similarly engaged in a never-ending dialogue with the master. The final chapters of this little book are chronologically confusing. He moves from Petrarch to More's Utopia, contrasted with Augustine's City of God, and then reflects on an apparent transition in the High Middle Ages from lectio divin (meditative reflection based on scripture) to lectio spiritualis (meditation on ment images, inspired by a wide range ofreading). H e sees this transition as prefiguring a m o v e away from monastic concentration on scripture to a more highly personalised form of meditative reading, given a new twist by Petrarch. While Stock acknowledges...