A Reader's Companion to Augustine's Confessions (review)

The modern "companion" to a classic work or author is usually a kind of tourist's guide. It walks the reader round the chosen monument, supplies some context, points out significant features, and suggests avenues of closer approach. Augustinian tourists with theological and philosophical interests already have a Cambridge Companion on that model. The editors of this new "reader's companion," to their credit, have attempted something different. Instead of the Confessions as monument, they present the work as a recurring hermeneutic problem—one with at least as many possible solutions as it has "books," each of the thirteen of which is here treated in turn by a separate contributor as furnishing the key to an overall interpretation. Such a view of the Confessions as a text that continually poses and answers itself as a question is admirably suited to current ways of reading it and not only in the classroom. Addressing themselves to "nonscholars" (6) on the basis of deep scholarship, the thirteen writers have between them produced a well-considered and teacherly book, the sum of whose parts (including a first-rate index) is much more a whole than collective volumes normally yield. In another case, one could suspect editorial coercion. Not, however, with Augustine's Confessions and these readers. For if the Confessions is an exemplary problem-text for a contemporary literary hermeneutic, it is also, when read—as here—primarily on its own terms, a master-class in a powerful and long-since broadly disseminated practice of consensualist interpretation. Read Augustine ex Augustino, observe his rules of faith and charity, keep an eye to a community that is something like the church catholic as he himself once conceived it, and you will find yourself reading along comfortably with this Companion and a much larger company besides.

Excellent as many of the essays in the volume individually are (and there is no space to review them singly here), the near seamlessness of their fusion may make us pause if only for the length of a short preface of our own before inviting others to join the reading-party. One could give the usual caution about interpretative communities, and note how much besides "Augustine" these thirteen exegetes already have in common. All are professors in North American universities, most of them associated with the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame or with Augustinian Studies at Villanova University; all but one of them are male, the majority plainly within or close to a Roman Catholic tradition of religious belief. (The only self-identified Protestant ends a genuinely provocative analysis of Book 7 with a citation of Pope John Paul II.) All share a discourse that is predominantly philosophical-theological even when it would be literary-critical and that rarely descends to historical realia. Mutual citation by contributors runs at a high level. Peter Brown's biography of Augustine and James J. O'Donnell's commentary on the Confessions are invoked often but not for what is most remarkable in them. Other recent, avowedly revisionist studies of Augustine and his culture by scholars of early Christianity are politely cordoned off or mildly disparaged.

The breadth of this Companion's prior understandings must partly account for the consistency of its results. It may also help explain the paucity of real surprises sprung by its pages despite the seeming boldness of the editors' initial premise. Granted, it is hard to model exegetical surprise; like the tourist's guide, the reader's companion has always been there before. Yet it is possible to imagine a work devised on similar principles to this one, even if not as pleasing in its final coherence, whose contributors, for the sake of future readers of the Confessions, including themselves, would be less willing to grant all Augustine's key postulates, the transparency of his key terms, the existential centrality of his problems, and the cogency of his solutions—less ready, in short, to leave this...