Consolation in Medieval Narrative: Augustinian Authority and Open Form by Chad D. Schrock (review)

In this book, Chad Schrock argues for a distinctive medieval and early modern tradition of consolation inspired by Augustine rather than Boethius, author of the widely influential Consolation of Philosophy. For the range of writers Schrock studies—Peter Abelard, William Langland, the poet of the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas More—Augustine introduced both a vexing epistemological problem and a narrative solution, albeit a paradoxical one. Boethius’s visionary work, famously composed upon his imprisonment by King Theodoric the Ostrogoth, pursues solace in Philosophy’s “Neoplatonic interpretive closures” that point Boethius “away from events in space and time” and so finally away from narrative itself (p. 2). By contrast, Augustine sees time and narrative as redeemed by Christ’s Incarnation, even as the meaning of fortune, bitter and sweet alike, becomes a still more radically open question in this theological light. As loci for Augustine’s vision, Schrock sees a shared structural form in the City of God and Confessions. Both works “begin with a pattern of events that moves steadily toward a climax assigning meaning to all that has come before and will come after”: Incarnation in the profane and sacred histories recounted in the City of God, and conversion in Augustine’s account of his own wanderings in and beyond the “region of dissimilarity” (p. 15). Interpretive “closure” in these texts, their revelatory pivot, comes not at their end but at their center, which means it does not simply resolve the unclarities of history and moral agency but rather throws Augustine and his readers back into an “open form” of hermeneutic struggle, what Schrock calls a “posthistory.” As Schrock explains, drawing especially on the work of R. A. Markus, for Augustine, history after the Incarnation had become “illegible”: in the wake of late antique Christian ascendancy, Augustine demythologized not only Roman historicist triumphalisms but also their Christian rivals, as in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, a work that applauds the “Christian times” that show God’s favor and augurs the Constantinian and Theodosian settlements soon to come. By the time he wrote the City of God Augustine was deeply skeptical of such claims about the direction of history—whether Rome’s, the church’s, or indeed, Schrock insists, Augustine’s own. If under such Augustinian skeptical scrutiny the time between Incarnation and eschaton is “shapeless,” “formless,” “nameless,” and even “meaningless,” a peculiar form of consolation seems called for (pp. 15, 29, 30, 153, 7). And yet an Augustinian consolation must not collude with the epistemological triumphalism that gives rise to Augustine’s critique in the first place. As Schrock puts the good news, accordingly: “The sufferer can rest in authoritative incomprehension . . . Augustinian consolation of narrative consoles through a lack of closure” (pp. 6, 7).

On Schrock’s account, lack of closure in this Augustinian vein (Introduction and Chapter 1) opens the way to “improvisatory” and even “original” performances of Biblical exegesis, ethical action, and imaginative labor (pp. 28, 31, 155). Schrock’s language of “originality” here seems ill-considered if not wildly out of place for describing the authorial ideals of a thinker who wrote so deliberately about the hollow lures of curiositas (Augustine’s views on the imagination could proceed on grounds other than originality), but the wider point is that Augustine’s version of consolatio carries its own literary rationale: seeking consolation for the “illegibility of history,” we have more not less reason to read and write. In Chapters 2–6, Schrock seeks to bear out this claim in readings of a minority report of Augustinian consolations that rejected the Boethian paradigm, otherwise the “dominant model of consolation” throughout the Middle Ages (p. 31). In his Historia calamitatum (ca. 1130), Abelard seeks out a logician’s “proportional” consolation in the face of his calamities, by way of a range of classical and Christian sufferers (Chapter 2). And...