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

humanities 369 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 poems were independent of each other and a fortiori of the Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps they already existed as poems alongside the Homeric epics. He is cautious about chronology, however, and reasonably so, for reputable scholars have recently assigned Homer both to the early eighth century and to the late seventh. Powell discerns an allusion to >Nestor=s cup= in a graffito on a mid-eighth-century artifact; West relies on the secure representation of Homeric scenes from the late seventh century and their questionable appearance earlier, when scenes from the cycle were in favour. Burgess stresses this point strongly to the extent of giving none of the iconographic evidence the benefit of the doubt. His response to Powell exemplifies his argumentation: >Nestor=s cup could have exited in mythology independently of Homer.= Of course, it could have. This subjunctive mood B might/could/would/must have been B dominates his discourse. That is inevitable B and honest B though one suspects that >could have been= is often code for >is.= Its ubiquity, however, emphasizes not only the hypothetical nature of any reconstruction of the history of the Trojan story, but also what sometimes seems to be an excessive scepticism in the evaluation of our scanty evidence. (BRYAN HAINSWORTH) Brian Stock. After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text University of Pennsylvania Press. viii, 132. US $32.50 This is a brief but expansive book. In seven chapters, none of which is longer than twenty pages, it touches on topics ranging from ancient philosophy to Petrarch, Thomas More, and Romance philology of the twentieth century. At the centre of each chapter is the commanding figure of Augustine. That Augustine seems to speak so compellingly and so variously to concerns of our time is of course an obvious tribute to the monumental achievement of his thought, but that continuing sense of his importance also owes much to his contemporary commentators, among whom Brian Stock stands in the first rank. Stock has presented us with a collection of richly suggestive essays connected by the ideas of Augustine on reading and meditation, particularly the fruitful notion that periods of reading and meditation could lead to self-improvement and the shaping of ethical values. The manifold aspects of the role of reflective reading in Western culture since late antiquity constitute the unifying theme of the volume. The first chapter, on reading and self-knowledge, traces the development of the connection between reading, devotion, and contemplative practice as it is worked out in Augustine=s Confessions, a work which, according to Stock, begins the age of the self-conscious reader in Western literature. Especially valuable is the distinction drawn between Augustine and postromantic conceptions of autobiography. The following chapter on ethical 370 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 values and the literary imagination shows Augustine=s contribution towards establishing the link between ethics and literature through narrative, especially personal narrative. Careful distinctions are made between Augustine and such >reflective thinkers= of antiquity as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. The chapter on ancient literary realism offers subtle modifications to the well-known work of Erich Auerbach by comparing Augustine=s uses of representation with one of his sources, Porphyry. The following chapter on the problem of self-representation compares the uses of reading and writing in Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine, who alike see these activities not as ends in themselves, but as a means to make a better person. The chapter moves forward to consider Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Guigo I the Carthusian, and Christina of Markyate. This is followed by one of the most incisive chapters, on Petrarch=s portrait of Augustine in the Secretum. Here Petrarch is placed in a broad context of writing on the self that extends from Augustine through Descartes. Chapter 6 compares More=s Utopia with Plato=s Republic and Augustine=s City of God. In More, contemplation of an idealized community is not only an ascetic exercise, but articulates a new humanist program of social change. The last chapter takes up lectio spiritualis, or the use...