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Christianity and Literature Vol 52. No. I {Autumn 2002)

REVIEW ESSAY

What Is Reading For?

Michael Vander Weele

Griffiths, Paul J. Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-512577-0. Pp. x i i + 210. $39.95.

Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Ghicago: University of Ghicago Press, 1993. ISBN 0-2263-7235-9 (cloth), 0-2263- 7236-7 (paper). Pp. 154. $24.95 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).

Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8^33-6577-5 (cloth), 0-8133-6556-X (paper). Pp. ix + 186. $65.00 (cloth), $20.00 (paper).

Jeffrey, David Lyle. People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-8028-3817-0. Pp.xx + 396. $25.00 (paper).

Ritchie, Daniel E. Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-8028-4140-6. Pp.302. $27.00 (paper).

Stock, Brian. After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text. Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8122-3602-5. Pp.132. $32.50.

. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Ktjowledgey and the Ethics of Inter- pretation. Gambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-674-05276-5 (cloth), 0-674-05277-3 (paper). Pp.463. $48.50 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).

What do we do when we read? The 1990s brought us a small library of books trying to answer that question. These included popular books such

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as Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age {1994), Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (1996), Anne Fadimans Ex Libris: Gonfessions of a Gomnwn Reader (1998), Harold Bloom's How to Read ami Why (2000), and even an anthology, Steven Gilbar's Reading in Bed: Perso)ial Essays on the Glories of Reading (1995). Some books on writing, such as Nadine Gordimer's Writing and Being (1995), also told us much about reading. This small library included books on reading during a particular historical period and books on the production as well as the reception of books. Louise M. Rosenblatt's The Reader, the Texty the Poem: The Transac- tional Theory of the Literary Work (1979; rpt.1994) made a new appearance, as had her Literature as Exploration a decade earlier (1938; rpt. 1983). Faced with such a rapidly expanding library, we might ask: Why all this attention to reading now? What is reading for? and Where are we most likely to find help in rethinking the place of reading today? These questions are related, of course, but I will briefly address each one separately before launching this review of the seven books that instigated them.

First, why all this attention to reading now? There are more contribut- ing factors than we can name, no doubt, but we should at least recognize the confluence of academic and cultural affairs. In part, literary criticism has brought us to this state of affairs. Even after the 1960s' challenges to the dominance of the author had largely run their course, interest continued in readers reading. This interest grew, not only in response to a philosophical or metacritical question but especially through a new emphasis on the ma- terial culture of the book. So the discipline brought us here. So, too, did social realities. As far as I can tell, there has been no decline in the book business (sadly, the decline of small book shops is another story), but in the 1990s readers grew concerned about the implications of the computer, e-books, and Internet novels for reading as we have known it. Though the production of books has not declined, their power as governing image has. The screen has largely replaced the book as the metaphor around which we organize our lives. Many of the popular books on reading have been written as a sort of testimonial to the private reading of books that the electronic age seems to threaten. Finally, the diminishment of the book as organizing metaphor accompanies a more general cultural crisis—the separation of ethics and technique, private and public life—that both liberal and conservative thought seem insufficient to address. This question of values strikes our discipline as well. In literary studies we swing between literature as formal apprecia- tion and literature as social symptom, without enough exploration of the space between.

Second, the epistemological question may become manageable if we give it a more practical turn: not "What is reading?" but "What is reading for?" The return of pragmatism helps this question receive a hearing today, but I

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have in mind not so much William James or John Dewey, or their modern- day champions, as the contemporary writer and farmer Wendell Berry. In his short essay "What Are People For?" Berry describes the government's forty-year history of moving people off the farm and into the cities, all the while improving efficiencies of scale to do so.' Berry rightly asserts that this efficiency cannot be judged on its own terms but rather requires us to an- swer the antecedent question of what people are for. He uses the language of "economy" to make such a claim, a term to which we will return at the end of this essay. If a discussion of farm economy seems too distant from a discussion of reading. Berry makes a similar argument about the "industri- al university." He asks us to consider the education it makes available in light of the prior question of what learning is for. The question of education, of course, is inseparable from the question of reading.

Third, where are we most likely to find help in rethinking the place of reading today? In what follows I shall emphasize the particular, though re- lated, sources of premodern literature and theological reflection, both his- torical and contemporary. First, premodern literature has two advantages: sufficient distance to question what we now take for granted, and an impor- tant focus for what Paul Saenger calls "the nascent discipline of the history of reading" {Space between Words 244). It is a complicated task, however, to explicate the uses of history for life. Second, theology not only has a long tradition of reflection on reading (Augustine and Hugh of St. Victor, for start- ers), but contemporary theologians may also situate reading within its so- cial situation in less deterministic ways than literary critics have. Alert to the importance of memory for reading and to the roles of public as well as pri- vate reading, theology challenges us to think of reading in terms other than those of textual dominance. Historical and comparative theology keeps before us—or should keep before us—the relationship of reading to Berry's finally religious question of what people are for. In addition to these two sources, a third can be found in the history of rhetoric. Though too large a field to be covered here, near the end of the essay I will suggest a few helpful resources in this field as well.

An early puzzle one finds in trying to answer the question of what read- ing is for concerns the autonomy of the text. How do we judge the literary text's relation to its culture's values and technologies, to the history of con- ventions associated with its genre, and to the social, religious, and political interests of its reader? Christians have given very different responses to this question. While Christianity's influence on the spread of reading is relatively easy to mark (e.g., the early affirmation of classical education; the rescuing of classical texts through the work of monasteries and cathedral schools, as well as through Islamic scholarship; the rise of literacy and a growing pub- lic sphere after the Reformation; the push toward literacy wherever the Gospel

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has been preached), the question of the relative autonomy of the text leads to a puzzling contradiction: Christians have been more prone to defend the autonomy of the text in modern than in premodern times. In the history of aesthetics we find clear traces of religion's role in asserting the autonomy of the text. However, in the medieval tradition from Augustine to Hugh of St. Victor, the text was never granted such autonomy.

Martha Woodmansee's important work on the intersection of econom- ics and literature. The Aiithon Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, includes an analysis of the theological traces found in secular aes- thetic theory. She shows, convincingly I'm afraid, that the principle of "dis- interested pleasure" was transferred from a quietist brand of German Pietism and its understanding of the appropriate approach to God. Woodmansee quotes from Karl Philipp Moritz's 1785 autobiographical novel:

[They] are concerned for the most part with that . .. total abandonment of the self and entry upon a blissful state of nothingness, with that complete extermination of all so-called 5t'//-Aiess [Eigenheit] or self-love [Eigenliebe], znd a totally disinterested [uninteressierte] love of God, in which not the merest spark of self-love may mingle, if it is to be pure; and out of this there arises in the end a perfect, blissful tranquillity which is the highest goal of all these strivings.

This summary of the religious goals of his father's group of extreme Pietists "is transported," Woodmansee writes, "almost verbatim into Moritz's theo- ry of art, where it serves precisely to characterize what we now term the 'aes- thetic attitude.'" This aesthetic attitude, with its principle of disinterested- ness or of unselfish pleasure, suggested art's self-sufficiency rather than its "instrumental," or what I would call its "rhetorical," value. When Moritz wrote Toward a Unification of All the Eine Arts and Letters under the Goncept of Self-Stifficiency {Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schonen Kilnste und Vfis- senschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten), also in 1785, he used a language similar to his father's language for contemplating God but turned it toward his ideal attitude for contemplating a work of art:

As the beautiful object completely captivates our attention, it diverts our at- tention momentarily from ourselves with the result that we seem to lose ourselves in the beautiful object; and precisely this loss, this forgetfulness of ourselves, is the highest degree of pure and disinterested [uneigeyuuitzigen] pleasure which beauty grants us. (19)

Just as God had been seen as an end in Himself, so the attitude described here suggests that art should be viewed as an end unto itself.

Woodmansee's claim of historical influence seems right: "In its origins

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the theory of art's autonomy is clearly a displaced theology" (20). Though other elements may have been involved, Woodmansee's evidence of theolog- ical influence seems compelling. In the mid-twentieth century the New Critics, several of whom were confessing Christians, similarly associated liter- ary texts with disinterested pleasure. In "Ars Poetica" Archibald MacLeish described the reader's appropriate stance toward the aesthetic work in his famous lines, "The poem should not mean / but be." For students of read- ing seeking a longer theological trace, however, there is an earlier, radically different approach to consider. In People of the Book: Ghristian Identity and Literary Gtdture, David Lyle Jeffrey argues that "Christian literary theory in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages was itself explicitly, not merely tac- itly, ideological" (90). Jerome and Augustine were important influences, using the image of "Egyptian gold" (Augustine) or "captive beauty" (Jerome) to describe the appropriate use of classical literature. Both also took seri- ously PauFs injunction to "take every thought captive for Christ" (2 Cor. 10:5). This led to an early Christian conviction that "no reading takes place in an ethical vacuum, and that even the most technical elaborations of lin- guistic and genre conventions will have at their foundation the question of function, of action" (Jeffrey 90). Nothing could be clearer: in early Chris- tianity the reading and writing of literature were considered useful, not ends unto themselves. Literature was, in Woodmansee's too narrow terms, taken to be "instrumental" or rhetorical. Jeffrey describes the tension between early and modern Christian approaches to reading this way: "What must seem odd about many'Christian' defenses of formalism is their apparent forget- fulness that the inaugural commitment of Christianity to hterature was it- self hardly of a formalist character" (95).

It would be a safe assumption for most of us that in the West "the inau- gural commitment of Christianity to literature" developed through Augus- tine. Brian Stock's recent work makes such a position incontrovertible. In Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpre- tation, Stock's analysis ranges from Augustine's earliest letters and dialogues to his late work on teaching and on the Trinity, though the Gonfessions is never left far behind. The reader has to work through a lot of close summa- ry, but this brilliant as well as patient study gives enough of the early, minor texts to mark the development of Augustine's thought. Indeed, at times read- ing Stock on Augustine is like reading one of John Freccero's students on Dante, marking the various repetitions and pahnodes as we move from one canticle (or book) to another. Put another way. Stock reads like a musician, both vertically and horizontally, giving us the movement as well as the chordal structures of Augustine's thought.

Stock shows Augustine's shift, for example, from early attention to the text that is read to later focus on the mind of the reader. Texts, like pointing or.

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better, gesture, are eventually found inadequate. The minds of readers, not texts, create coherent philosophies of life. In this view a passive reader is a bad reader, and reading is never a goal unto itself. The reader must com- pare, assimilate, and transform what is read. The ethical requirement for the reader is hardly disinterestedness but personal judgment. Memory both establishes the link between text and mind (reading : text and telling : : re- membering : storage and recall) and forms the foundation for a moral life. The analysis of the way memory links text and life takes two rival directions in Stock's narrative. The first analyzes reading in relation to self-understand- ing; the second analyzes reading in relation to social conduct. For the first, reading is related to stories of self-representation already available through memory. These stories comprise what Stock calls a "second narrative." Read- ing the physical text or "first narrative" helps us read our minds. It clarifies and eventually joins our "second narrative." The act of reading can give us an idealized, instructive version of self or life against which we can judge the remembered narrative and have the possibility of transforming it.

The second direction Stock takes, that of analyzing the relation of read- ing to social conduct, is weaker than the first due to Stock's overemphasis on an ascetic ("world-denying") Augustine whose primary interest is in de- veloping his own interiority. (Indeed, the language of "self," "interiority," and "asceticism" became somewhat jarring to this reader.) Thankfully, Stock gives enough quotation and analysis, some of it through footnotes, to track the relation of reading to conduct as well. Stock is clear, for example, that for Augustine reading is shaped by a prior behavioral pattern, but reading leads to subsequent behavior and has the potential to transform it. Stock also states that for Augustine a text's relation to life resembles the relation of discipline to conduct, but for the most part his reading of Augustine drives toward a tradition of private meditation rather than public action. The so- cial is named but regularly plays a secondary role to the individual.

To his credit the self-understanding in Augustine that interests Stock so much is not only contemplative but also transformative. Stock describes Augustine's division between kinds of reading not in terms of aesthetic or nonaesthetic reading but in terms of informing and transforming reading, or between the comparative scrutiny of texts and the deliberative reflection that can reorient the ethical direction of one's life. Augustine writes in On Ghristian Doctrine that through reading we travel a road "'not of places but of affections'" (195), and these affections trigger choices to attach our lives to larger commitments that Stock refers to as "nonpersonal frameworks for behavior" (126).

Stock presents more that we can learn from in agreement or disagreement with Augustine. For example, he tells us that for Augustine meaning is cre- ated for events by putting them in a sequence (157). (This seems, for Aug-

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ustine, to resemble the clarity that comes to a qualifier only after we know its object.) He also states that it is not particular representations but a prin- ciple of organization that Augustine finds worthy of imitation: "It is the life- informing process that is imitated, not the content of a narrative" (215). In Augustine's instructions not to neglect pagan teachings necessary for living in society, we also find a principle for reading that which falls outside one's belief system and beyond one's own pleasure. Finally, Stock finds in Augus- tine a "hermeneutics of tradition." By this phrase he suggests that reading can become an instrument of behavioral and intellectual change when a common tradition holds together separate but similarly oriented states of mind. This recognition of a hermeneutics of tradition lets Augustine move beyond his early interest in the inspired or suddenly illuminated reader, since the later Augustine finds it illusory to believe that the narratives we live are our own constructions. "The reading process," Stock writes, "is institution- alized through group memory. If memory fails, rules are of little use" (193). Memory links past and future through empathetic love, the focus of Augus- tine's mature writings: "A community of readership overcomes the tempo- ral distance that separates the two narratives in time" (165). Such a textual community is "interpretive in formation and behavioral in possibility" (215). Stock approves Augustine's shift of attention from text to reader. He con- siders reading very much an ethical activity that requires our personal judg- ment of the current text in relation to the older narrative of our life held in memory. While Stock's primary emphasis is on self-reflection, the notion of memory links reading to conduct, and his notion of group memory ("hermeneutics of tradition") keeps open the relation of reading to society.

In his slimmer sequel. After Augustine: Tlie Meditative Reader and the Texty Stock becomes more of an advocate, less of an explicator, than in the earlier text. He moves from the fourth to the seventeenth century, tracing the de- velopment of lectio spiritualis out of lectio divinis. He clearly is interested in those Renaissance and post-Renaissance figures (Montaigne, Pascal, Vico) who "envisaged cultural understanding as a contemplative experience" (7), or those who preceded them in introducing "contemplative practice into their reflections on the problem of the European identity" (114). At stake is wheth- er reading is a means to an end or an end in itself, an autonomous activity. The end Stock imagines is "a contemplative state of mind" (16).

Stock is concerned about our shrinking knowledge of the Western tradi- tion, given the near demise of Latin in educational programs and the con- comitant disconnection of the vernacular literatures of Western Europe from each other. He redefines the problem, however, from the loss of Latin lan- guage and literature to the loss of a type of reading that is largely forgotten, though still recoverable, today. This type of reading he sees as a development of lectio spiritualis, which itself developed out of the earlier and stricter lee-

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tio divina. Sometimes, as at the end of his fourth chapter. Stock seems sorry that the post-Petrarchan world transferred "from the divine to the human sphere" the authority for making statements about the self. He sees the in- creased difficuhy this transfer created in "connect[ing] the inner nature of the self with its outer literary expression in a convincing manner, as well as the incapacity to portray inwardness without play, irony, theatrics, or philo- sophical ambiguity." He ends this chapter somewhat nostalgically: "The question is not whether this transition 1 from the divine to the human sphere] took place in reality or just in words, as Augustine might have asked, but whether representations of the self in literature ever fully recovered from it" (70).

At other times it is not religious reading so much as the "poetry of the inner life" whose loss Stock regrets. He fears that "the century of Proust was the period in which literary studies finalized its detachment from tradition- al Western methods of relating literature to the problem of self-knowledge." We have "considerably obscured the relationship between reading and con- templative practice that was deliberately incorporated into many late ancient and medieval writings on the self." The result is dismal: "A new generation of readers has largely been deprived of the historical disciplines that are need- ed to attain an understanding of this poetry of the inner life" (23). Stock has much to teach us about the meditative reader and the reception of texts af- ter Augustine, but the question is whether "poetry of the inner life" will pro- vide a strong enough site of resistance to transform the disconnection be- tween inner nature and outer expression. I don't think it does. Stock does help us to ask, however, what account a Christian learning community could give of reading after the early modern age when reading is no longer tied, culturally, to religious self-understanding.

The question of terms for Stock's argument becomes more insistent in this sequel than in Augustine the Reader. It is difficult to take at face value such terms as "self-improvement," "self-discovery," or "self-mastery" in re- lation to Augustine or early Christianity. Phrases such as "the subject's in- ner experience" or "methods of self-analysis" also seem to me quite distant from his subject. Dissonance is not limited to terms and phrases either. Claims such as the following will seem incomprehensible to many Christian readers: "Contemplative practice thereby helps men and women to attain the objective of transcending the body that is common to neoplatonic and Christian theology" (6). Stock gives a great deal of help to one trying to understand an early Christian tradition of reading, but his language and argument can be oft-putting at times, especially for one who otherwise is such an important guide.

Stock is on more solid ground when he marks a shift in Augustine's work to philosophy as "a way of knowing and living, not an abstract body of know-

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ledge." It was to "give the individual some guidance in reorienting himself or herself in relation to others" (36). This new understanding of philoso- phy's role meant that narrative, memory, and the body grew in importance: "[In Augustinian terms] our memory of the real is inseparable from our awareness of the passage of time in which sensory reality is perceived" (43). Stock sees a second shift as well, a postmedieval shift to reading as a more autonomous activity.

Stock marks this later shift in the work of Petrarch, More, and Descartes, with special sympathy for the first two. In Descartes he sees most clearly a return to the pre-Christian "trust in the logic of one's own thinking" (71). The stories of More and Petrarch are more complicated and more impor- tant for understanding the transition to modern notions of reading. More's behef in the limits of human rationality made him more suited. Stock argues, to work out of the tradition of lectio spiritualis, which Stock describes as an internal voyage based on a variety of both biblical and nonbiblical texts. At the same time. More wished to transform "this ascetic exercise into a pro- gram for achieving social change" (97). More is close to "Augustine's pessi- mistic hermeneutics, which proposes that our understanding of texts is like our understanding of time and language—fragmentary and incomplete" (99), close enough to Augustine, in fact, that his trust in the logic of his own thinking could never match Descarte's. More works the seam between the modern and premodern world. His problem is our own—"not only how to create a rational society, but how to prevent the creation of a society that was only rational." "More did not solve that problem," Stock writes. "Nor, for that matter, have we" (100).

In his final chapter Stock tries to bridge the gap that E. R. Curtius found between theology and poetry in the Middle Ages. Stock argues for a major but overlooked tradition of reflection on ethics that included contemplative as well as analytic practice. To contemplative practice he ties the reading of poetry or other kinds of imaginative writing. As Latin fades today, we might still learn how even the vernacular authors "had been taught [through the influence of lectio spiritualis] to meditate on words and images in essential- ly the same way" (104). But what was this lectio spiritualis that had roots in the Middle Ages but became prominent from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century?

Stock describes twelve differences between divine and spiritual reading, ofwhich I will highlight five. 1. The continuity in lectio divina between read- ing, meditation, and prayer modulated in lectio spiritualis to a continuity on the frontier between reading, interior reflection, and "a number of other devotional activities" (106). 2. In lectio divina meditation focused on the words actually read, while in lectio spiritualis it focused on words or images that arose during or after reading. 3. Lectio divina was not an autonomous

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activity, whereas in lectio spiritualis the reading process acquired an auton- omous status. 4. Lectio spiritualis included texts other than the Bible and texts that could not all be read in the same way. Further, it suggested an inner discipline that could involve self-exploration as part of one's spiritual pro- gress. 5. Wliile lectio divina focused on content and constantly returned the reader to Scripture, lectio spiritualis attended to the reader's emotions dur- ing and after reading and saw expression as an outgrowth of the individu- al's affective lite. In fact, the thinking subject. Stock claims, was the "central- izing element" of lectio spiritualis (108). This seems to be where Stock takes his stance, too. It remains to be seen whether such a transitional stage can be reclaimed or whether the separation of theology and poetry, ethics and reading, does not require a more radical turn, one in which it is more clear- ly understood that neither reading nor self is its own end.

Such a commitment is clearly present in Jeffrey's People of the Book. Jef- frey covers much the same ground as Stock, and he also depends upon Aug- ustine as the source for much of his theory of reading. Though his atten- tion to Augustine is less detailed than Stock's, he gives more attention to the English tradition: from Bede and Alcuin to Chaucer; then to Bunyan, New- ton, Baxter, and Cowper; and finally to Coleridge and Arnold, with Goethe as the one prominent non-English author he considers. In his final chapter Jeffrey attends to American writers, primarily Melville and Hawthorne from the nineteenth century and Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Wendell Berry from the twentieth. The final chapter also includes references to one of former President Ronald Reagan's speeches and to televangelism. This is an impressive historical range, though it is not intended as history so much as a series of historical reflections on Christian identity and contemporary critical concerns. In this way, at least, Jeffrey's book might be compared to the goals and the genre of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. At the center of these historical reflections is the question of reading.

Jeffrey raises an inevitable question about doing literary criticism within a theological tradition: "How does a literary theory formulated to deal with Revelation—sacred Scripture—develop in such a way as to deal with prod- ucts of the writerly imagination—'secular scripture'?" (xix). He gives at least four answers. First, he notes the responsory nature of most biblical writing, referring itself "to the Torah, to the history of the conversation" (30), and suggests that most medieval literature is likewise a response to, or reading of. Scripture. Even later authors saw themselves as scribes or translators and their writing as a "text with a context, with reference to another and prece- dent text" (157). In this sense Jeffrey, like Stock, reverses Geoffrey Hartman's famous statement that the purpose of reading is writing. Second, Jeffrey argues that in a scriptural tradition reading is subordinate to "a profoundly

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mediated theory of the 'meaning of person'" (10). He thus confirms the movement he sees in Augustine and Wyclif from the question of language to that of person, or from text to reader, as we have also seen in Stock's anal- ysis. Third, Jeffrey finds strong evidence for what Stock calls a "hermeneu- tics of tradition" or a community of readers across time. This follows from a Christian skepticism about the privatization of interpretations (171), rec- ognizing that our human perspective is "inextricably middled" (143)—that is, never privileged to know the beginning or end of our history. Jeffrey's argument for a hermeneutics of tradition, however, also reflects the hope that a conversation with readers past and present will exercise an important con- trol on any single effort. Fourth, Jeffrey finds in scriptural tradition a clear ethics of reading, one in which "right reading emerges in performance, par- ticipation, and ethical action" (364). That is, reading both contributes to and is governed by the imitatio Ghristi; it has roots in the right affection, and its fruit should be right action.

These four responses share quite a lot with Stock's analysis. Jeffrey has a better (because higher) appreciation of the status of the physical world in Augustine and his followers, not finding the same asceticism in Augustine as Stock does. There is, writes Jeffrey about the early Christian tradition, "much less dualism here than is popularly supposed" (152). Indeed, "the created world is seen [by medieval Augustinians] as a 'voicing,' a kind of narrative [. . .], an expression consistent with other expressions of [God's] divine imagination" (150). Jeffrey's notion of a second "voicing" or narra- tive outside of the self helps him resist a too narrow emphasis on personal reflection or privatized reading. Wisdom in a Christian tradition, Jeffrey asserts, is communal; it is an inheritance rather than an individual experi- ence or genius (169). Faithfulness, not independence, is the test of both the late medieval author and the late medieval reader (172). Finally, whereas Stock writes appreciatively about the transitional stage of the lectio spiritua- lis, Jeffrey critiques a later English transition that, from the time of Bunyan to Coleridge, gradually replaced Scripture and the bearers of tradition with the authentication of individual experience, of the heart's inner light. This critique of Christian and secular pietism, as Woodmansee showed, cannot be avoided. The question is whether Jeffrey's recommendation of an "incar- national aesthetic" can provide a strong enough check on the modern West's attraction to individual experience or illumination.

The term itself seems an unlikely one, most often being connected to embodying experience in language. John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God") is its scriptur- al anchor, with the imaginative word gaining special status as an analogue to the Word: we image God better in our creativity than in our rational or- derliness. A sort of Christian Romanticism in this ratio has become a deep

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influence on American Christianity, but Jeffrey's "incarnational aesthetics" pursues a ditterent direction. It does not describe the embodiment of expe- rience in language but a covenant between book and reader, a transaction open to both history and community. Jeffrey's analysis begins with biblical accounts of readers—that is, of writers as readers. "We may say of the evan- gelists as symbolic readers," he writes, "what we say about David or Mary, that their faithful reading is an incarnational activity and part of an incarnational process whereby the Word becomes, for all who will so faithfully read it, an 'ingested' or 'seminal' word" (230).

This is the kind of incarnation that Jeffrey has in mind: the cross as sign can represent the Christian faith, but the individual Christian living in the Way ot the Cross symbolizes ("bodies forth") the radical transformation brought about by Christ's sacrifice. Just so, the reader of Scripture can rep- resent the process for getting to know the Law and the prophets, but as faith- ful reader she can also symbolize the inner transformation that occurs "when the Word becomes flesh again in a penitent, obedient heart" (244). The in- carnation is not ot experience in language but ot language in hfe.

So far so good. Does symbolic reading, however, transfer from sacred to "secular scripture"? What happens when the authority of the primary text is not so much recognized as resisted, or when the point of encounter be- tween reader and text should not be intimacy? (Think of Dante's Paolo and Francesca.) Does not Jeffrey's welcome correction of "incarnational aesthet- ics" still depend upon knowing the moral worth of the text in advance? Does not it have difficulty accounting for writing that should only be tasted, or screened, or rejected? Or, to change the image, does not Jeffrey's "incarna- tional aesthetics" have difficulty taking into account writing that can be a false instead of true guide? What is the place of non-symbolic readers who dis- tance themselves from rather than incorporate the words of a text?

Daniel E. Ritchie has an easier time answering that question, I think, than Jeffrey does. Ritchie would agree with Jeffrey that Christians, as part of a life lived according to discipline and grace, should read whatever they read in the light of Christ's incarnation and resurrection. Reading in this respect, however, is no different for the Christian from any other action and is, like other actions, both hopeful and fallen. Ritchie wonders how Christians make room in their conversation for readers with other commitments—or for reading that does not contribute to worship, broadly defined. In Reconstruct- ing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke, Ritchie argues that Genesis 1 is a better source than the Gospels for framing a theory of reading that would help "reconstruct our conversations about literature, among various readers, whether or not those readers accept the'discourse'of biblical faith" (129). This is not to slight the Christian influence on reading, either in the life of a religious community

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or in the life of others. Ritchie quotes Michael Edwards approvingly: "'If the biblical reading of life is in any way true [Edwards refers especially to the movement of creation-fall-redemption], literature will be drawn strongly towards it'" (15). For Ritchie, nonetheless, a theory of reading based on early Genesis and its language of blessings has the potential to embrace human cultural achievement as well as point beyond such achievement (145).

From where, though, does the idea of reading as "blessing" come? While it may have some affinity to Jacques Derrida's notion of "gift," Ritchie draws upon three other related sources. Because his effort to shift our defense of reading from the New Testament to Genesis, from Christ's redemption to the story of Creation, merits further attention, I will discuss each of his three sources in some detail.

Ritchie's first source is H. Richard Niebuhr's Ghrist and Gulture. Let me step outside Ritchie's text a moment to give Niebuhr's description of the ten- sion involved in Christians' attempt to "be in the world but not of it":

Belief in him and loyalty to his cause involves men in the double movement from world to God and from God to world. Even when theologies fail to do justice to this fact, Christians living with Ghrist in their cultures are aware of it. For they are forever being challenged to abandon all things for the sake of God; and forever being sent back into the world to teach and practice all the things that have been commanded them. (29)

Niebuhr articulates a range of stances between rejection and accommoda- tion for Christ's—and for Christians'—relationship to culture. In the his- tory of Christian interpretation, Ritchie writes, some, like Tertullian, "reject all secular culture, including all works of literature, or [. . .] regard them as so tainted by sin as to be useful only as negative examples" (119). Others, like Justin Martyr, see the goodness of creation more than the prevalence of sin, "presuppos[ing] that all good poets and philosophers must, on some level, ratify biblical revelation" (120). In Justin's case this included making parallels between Zeus and God the Father and between Mercury and Jesus. Ideological criticism suffers from a similar impulse, Ritchie asserts. It either rejects everything that does not fit its agenda for liberation, or it subsumes everything under it. Niebuhr's intermediate range of stances allows more flexibility, more attentiveness, Ritchie believes. Ritchie finds an example in Milton's work to "transform the area of human endeavor that God has giv- en him" (121). This is the approach that Ritchie stakes his claim on as well. It views Christ as the one "who not only transforms man in his culture but offers the potential to transform culture itself [. . . ] . Redeemed humanity thereby becomes a partner in the process of restoring creation and culture" (Larsen 11-12). This fits Niebuhr's fourth paradigm, that of "Christ as the

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transformer of culture" (190). A second source for the idea of reading as blessing comes from that strand

ot the history of Christian interpretation that goes back from Milton to John Calvin and before him to Basil. We know that Milton read Calvin's commen- tary on Genesis because he referred to it in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Ritchie finds in this commentary Calvin's clear sense that the bib- lical language of blessing "extends beyond the [Fjall, even to the cultural achievements ot those outside the chosen race." He points to Calvin's com- ments on Genesis 4:20, in which Calvin "locates [the invention of the arts by the sintul tamily of Cain] under God's blessing and distinguishes it from the regenerating work of salvation" (142). After quoting at some length from Calvin's commentary, Ritchie concludes: "Man's original sin does not ne- gate God's original blessing. Calvin suggests the limits to 'blessing' in his principle that cultural endeavors should raise the common welfare of soci- ety without encouraging idleness or temptation, but within those limits the passage embraces a wide area of autonomy" (143). Calvin's argument has a longer history. In his commentary on Paul's use of Greek poetry in Titus 1:12, Calvin refers to Basil to argue that it is appropriate to "'dedicate to [God's] glory everything that can properly be employed for such a purpose.'" Mil- ton also knew this history. In Areopagitica he refers twice to the same dis- course by Basil that Calvin had used, "first to remind Parliament that Moses and Daniel had attained skill in the learning of the Egyptians and Chaldeans [. . .| and second, to suggest that however Jerome may have rejected Cicero, Basil recommends the reading of Homer" (144). God's blessing extended beyond the regenerating work of salvation to the common welfare of human society.

The third source for the idea of reading as blessing comes from the lan- guage of blessing found in Genesis 1-2:4 and echoed in the covenant of Gen- esis 9:6-7. Referring to Claus Westermann's Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Ghurch, Ritchie comments that "blessing is the next 'speech-act' God undertakes after creation, first with sentient creatures, then with human beings (Gen. 1:22,28) [...]. While blessing originates in God and establish- es the creature's relationship to God, it also places the creature in its own authentic realm" (138-39). The blessings of culture are not bestowed ready- made but must be developed by humankind. Ritchie concludes:

The God-given capacities that result from blessing enable humanity to ful- fill God's commands to be fruitful and to exercise dominion as responsible stewards of the earth. Nevertheless, the blessings of Genesis 1 -11—family, agriculture, viticulture, metal-working, music, and so on—are not closely linked to faith in God or even knowledge of God. They are secular, human products. (139)

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These are the three sources that enable Ritchie to consider reading under the general category of blessings bestowed at Creation. What difference does it make, however, to consider reading as blessing?

If reading is one of the blessings of a common grace (see Mouw), that grace warrants both an appreciation for non-Christian literature and a con- versation about literature with those who do not share a similar faith. Ac- cordingly, Ritchie describes his goals in the chapter on Paradise Lost this way: "I hope to have contributed to a common, pluralistic effort of reading Mil- ton historically and critically without having to bow to any current ideolo- gy. I hope also to have related past literary history to the most profound religious truths without turning literature or criticism into religious allego- ry" (179). The relative autonomy of human culture also means, for Ritchie, that the Christian critic should confirm the power of literature to encour- age a good civic life, something Milton puts this way: "'[The talents of po- ets] are of power [...] to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu, and publick civility"' (149). This is an argument reminiscent of The Gity of God, in which Augustine urges his readers to care for the social and political institutions of this world that have been given as a gift from God to serve as a framework for life's activities. Of course, seeing reading as bless- ing also reminds us that, like other blessings, this one too can be corrupted. Finally, seeing reading as a blessing that all people hold in common by God's grace leads to an affirmation of pleasure in literature, which, Ritchie be- lieves, receives too little attention in ideological readings. In truth, a Chris- tian theory of pleasure is badly needed for Christian art to thrive.

Help for constructing a Christian philosophy of pleasure can come from contemporary theorists, of course, as well as from Genesis or from the work of earlier writers, such as Milton or Dante. A recent essay by Gerald L. Bruns on Jean-Francois Lyotard is a good case in point. At the end of his life Lyo- tard was writing on Augustine's Gonfessions. Fie was especially interested in Book 10, the book on memory in which Augustine professes his love to God. Bruns describes Lyotard's perception of Augustine's address this way: ''An invisible God [...], appearances aside, does not abolish or repress the libid- inal economy of Roman religion but appropriates it, focusing and intensi- fying desire, drawing it toward himself (if'himself is the word) by the sheer force of his transcendence." Bruns comments on Lyotard's reading, "In any case there is no separating theology from desire as if our relation to God could be merely philosophical or contemplative" (4). Lyotard helps us address Stock's question about creating a rational society while preventing the cre- ation of a society that is only rational.

Lyotard is not the only one interested in understanding a libidinal theol- ogy, of course, or the only one to fmd a libidinal theology in Augustine's work. Freccero made the same strong claim in the 1970s and 1980s for Augustine's

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influence on Dante. And we find a similar influence, in a completely differ- ent style from that of Lyotard or Bruns, in Paul ). Griffiths' recent work tit- led Religiotis Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion. Being pleased by, and seized by, our reading is nearly a lost disposition, Griffiths tears, in an age of consumerism.

Griffiths conflates the religious and the aesthetic or, more accurately, re- fuses to let them separate in the first place. In his preface he admits that his own situation is not unlike that of other consumerist readers: "I was never taught, and have still not properly learned, how to read with careful, slow attentiveness; it is difficult for me to read with the goal of incorporating what I read, of writing upon the pages of my memory; I find it hard to read as a lover, to caress, hck, smell, and savor the words on the page, and to return to them ever and again" (ix). Such sensual reading seems an unusual counter to his customary practice, especially for one so evidently steeped in the dis- tinction-making drive of analytic philosophy. Griffiths learns the vocabu- lary for slow, sense-involved religious reading, we find later, from early Bud- dhist literary texts and early Christian works from Roman Africa, but he also learns this vocabulary of excess from medieval readers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Anselm of Canterbury. Where, however, does the aesthetic pleasure of religious reading leave off and aesthetic reading for its own sake begin? Griffiths might wish that there had been no such separation, but there has been; and aesthetic reading has often been taken as its own independent counter to a consumerist culture. In asking the question, we see that Grif- fiths' contrast between religious and consumerist reading is too narrow un- less "consumerist" also includes compensatory reading, that which compen- sates for, at the same time as it enables, a consumerist society. Aesthetic de- light for its own sake has been heralded since the late eighteenth century as compensation for the rigorous efficiencies of an industrial age and, at the same time, as compensation for the loss of faith. Such a view has elevated literature, at least until recently, to a lofty pedestal, but it also has often dis- missed literature from the world of day-to-day realities.

Griffiths' work is not primarily about pleasure and delight, however. It is more often "a jeremiad against the pedagogical and reading practices of the academy," including, of course, the dismissal of pleasure and delight by such practices. He anticipates our concern that his writing this jeremiad while depending upon the academy for his livelihood might be "ethically or practically disabling" (188). It is not, of course, and for the same reason he offers: the academy boasts that it encourages such sites of resistance. A more disabling paradox might be Griffiths' use of positivist language to encour- age our rescue of religious reading.

Let me give some examples: religion as an accotmt (3), and not so much a narrative account as a legal or catechetical commentary (187); the redirec-

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tion of our will and our appetites as a skill (18); worship as a tool for devel- oping such a skill (19); occurent, dispositional, and implicit information as the other requirements of religious learning; bracketing reference to the sub- stance of what is read while applying formal analysis to the modes of teach- ing and learning religious reading (5); to say nothing of the myriad distinc- tions Griffiths makes, such as dividing the literary work into three different kinds of work—composition, display, and storage—for redisplay (22). Does this language and do these moves serve an argument for the sense-involved pleasure of religious reading? (They move us a long ways from the discourse of Bernard and Anselm.) I yet can imagine great benefit to this stretching the pragmatic terms our institutions use to describe learning. Since "skills" and "information" and "tools" have become the terms of our academic mis- sion statements as well as of our instructional practices, and since institu- tional forms and practices are very much involved in the question of what reading is for, why not take the reductionist language given us but then apply it to the ability to give a religious account? Griffiths argues, rightly, that "giving rehgious accounts is a practice, a human activity. It follows that every instance of giving a religious account, every token of the type, is learned, and learned in a particular social, linguistic, and institutional con- text" (13). This puts good pressure on matters such as forms for and prac- tices of assessment, as wefl as on the recent call for engaged learning.

Griffiths attends to the implications of institutional and pedagogical prac- tices for religious reading most clearly in his third chapter, "The Context of Religious Reading." Its opening lines show the kind of pressure that the chapter will place upon "information and skills," "teaching and learning," and "institutional forms":

To be religious is to offer a comprehensive, unsurpassable, and central ac- count. Offering such an account requires the possession of both informa- tion and skills, and these are not innate: they have to be acquired, which means that they have to be learned and taught. Religious reading is one of the more important skills involved in offering a religious account, and it, too, needs to be learned and taught. What can be said about the institutional forms within which the teaching and learning of religious reading can take place? (60)

Almost all of what Griffiths has to say about that question is frightening. In his "Conclusion" he warns us: "When the intellectual identity given by reli- gious reading is gone, all that's left is appetite, unhampered, undirected, uneducated, unfettered. The act of consumption is the only remaining de- liberate act" (184). He lays the responsibility for this state of affairs at the feet of his readers, regardless of their religious persuasion, for their inade- quate resistance to consumerist attitudes and practices, to what Berry calls

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the "industrial university." "University scholars," Griffiths writes, "in their role as creatures of global consumerism, have made major contributions to the eradication of religious reading as an intellectual or cultural force of sig- nificance" (185). Asking what in our current educational context could es- tablish a stronger connection between the reader and what is read, he sup- poses that we need relations characterized by "reverence, delight, awe, and wonder" that can alter the course of readers' cognitive, affective, and active lives. Instead, the pedagogical practices of modernity are based on the as- sumption that "the individual is the locus of value" and that "a central goal of education is the maximizing of the individual's knowledge of alternatives and capacity to choose among them." This promotes, however, "the endless deferral of commitment" (68), which leaves the reader's life untouched—or, if not entirely untouched, then bouncing from one spark of ecstasy to an- other, what Griffiths refers to in his preface as "the quick orgasm of consump- tion" (ix).

Finally, it would be wrong to conclude this analysis of Griffiths' book without noting his work on two little-remarked genres, commentaries and anthologies. Griffiths notes the "enormous amount of theoretical attention paid by students of religion in recent decades to narrative, mythopoesis, rit- ual, and the like." He takes his own countercultural lead from Jonathan Z. Smith in Map Is Not Territory. "'I expect that scholars of religion in the fu- ture,'" Smith wrote in 1978, "'will shift from the present Romantic herme- neutics of symbol and poetic speech to that of legal-exegetical discourse.'" Griffiths then remarks: "I want to go some way toward writing [the biogra- phy of the genre], and in so doing to help in correcting the mixture of ratio- nalist and romantic biases that still infect the study of religion" (78). This explains why Griffiths' earlier description of "religious account" slanted to- ward legal and catechetical commentary rather than toward narrative, but it also raises difficult questions. Has the humanities' interest in tracking images as they cross disciplinary boundaries, an approach prominent at least since Carolyn Walker Bynum's early analyses of medieval images of food and of mother, begun to recede? Is there another alternative to image or symbol besides narrative? How thoroughly must the study of symbol be redirected (as in Jeffrey's work) in order to avoid the charge of Romantic bias when thinking through the purpose of reading? In their largest form these ques- tions become, "What is the influence of our hierarchy of genres on our un- derstanding of reading?"

Griffiths' argument that attention to commentaries and anthologies should rival the study of symbols and narratives raises the issue of pleasure once again. How could the former be as pleasurable as the latter? In Ivan Illich's recent work on Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon, a commentary yields much pleasure. The main title of his book. In the Vineyard of the Text, could

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be applied to Illich's rich text as well as to Hugh's. Illich, whose earlier writ- ing has often been in cultural criticism, begins his book with commentary on the lead sentence of Hugh's text: "Of all things to be sought, the first is wisdom." He carefully and separately considers "all things," "first," and "wis- dom." Subsequent chapters, one could argue, provide commentary on the remaining phrase, "to be sought." Illich gives the same careful attention to the subtitle of Hugh's work, studio legendi, which gave Hugh claim to the first book on reading. The opening chapter includes sections on incipit, auctori- tas, stadium, disciplina, sapientia, lumen, and ''page as mirror." These sec- tions show a sensitivity to the narrative of history that continues through- out the book.

In Hugh's time of the monastic text, observes Illich, "the reader's order is not imposed on the story, but the story puts the reader into its order" (31). The story Hugh enters most often is Augustine's. Illich notes "how thorough- ly [Hugh's] texts are compilations, interpretations, and rewordings of Augus- tine" (9). This is by no means unique to Hugh. "In Hugh's youth," writes Illich, "learned books were either venerable ̂ scriptures' (Bible, church Fathers, philosophers) or commentaries upon them" (97). Within a generation af- terwards, however, the situation had changed: "The learned book has ceased to be a sequence of commentaries that are strung like beads on the thread of somebody else's narration [. . .]. [The author] himself chooses a subject and puts his order into the sequence in which he will deal with its parts" (99). Illich sets out to understand this change, in his view more momentous than the discovery of print. The commentary form he adopts allows him to fol- low the ideas and movement of Hugh's text from the perspective of our own time's transition from the printed to the electronic text.

"Around 1140," Illich writes, "a page is turned. In the civilization of the book the monastic page is closed and the scholastic page opens. The clois- ter of St. Victor institutionalizes the precarious moment at which the page is being turned" (81).- This change in the history of the book also effects a change in reading. "As the leaf in the book of civilization is turned from the monastic to the scholastic page, a radical change takes place also in the reader: his social status before and after the turn is not the same" (82). The shift, Illich beheves, was matched in significance only by the creation of the alpha- bet in ancient Greece and by the appearance of the screen as newly domi- nant metaphor for our age: "The page became a bookish text, this latter shaped the scholastic mind, and the text-mind relationship was as necessary a foundation for print culture as alphabetic recording had been for the cul- ture of literature and philosophy in ancient Greece" (116). If Illich is right, then our modern relation to texts dates not from the rise of the printing press so much as from the rise of the "bookish" or "scholastic" text. Getting the beginning of this epoch right may help us understand its end, but what is

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Illich's goal in dating the rise of modern reading more than three centuries earlier than most critics do? And what can this shift in attention contribute to our review of the uses and purposes of reading?

Illich wants to show that the printing press was not simply a step forward in the history of technology but that it both ratified and resulted from an earlier shift in reading habits. In the following passage he articulates his goal of understanding the transition in Hugh's time as well as the transition oc- curring in our own period:

I want to understand what Hugh did when he read the book of his time, what habits and meanings were shaped by the interplay of the social skill of read- ing and the recording technique called ''book" or litterae at that time. I want to interpret what Hugh intended to do by reading, to understand what sig- nificance he gave to the use of alphabetic technology and reading habits with- in the context of a Canon Regular's life. I want to understand the symbolic effects of an age-specific technology on the habits of a particular historical time. (95)

Hugh anticipates the fact that after his death a "new kind of reader comes into existence," one who "wants to acquire in a few years of study a new kind of acquaintance with a larger number of authors than a meditating monk could have perused in a lifetime" (96). Along with new demands came new reference tools—demands sometimes triggering the discovery of new tools, tools sometimes triggering new demands. The new tools included indices, library inventories, and concordances, all based on alphabetic order. At the level of the page, new tools included "chapter division, distinctions, the con- sistent numbering of chapter and verse, the new table of contents for the book as a whole, the summaries at the beginning of the chapter referring to its subtitles, the introductions in which the author explains how he will build up his argument" (104). Such tools "remain fundamentally unchanged un- til the text composer program of the 1980s." Along with these tools came certain fundamental conceptual changes: "shifts from the recording of speech to the recording of thought, from the record of wisdom to the record of knowledge, from the transmission of authorities inherited out of the past to the storage of promptly usable, well-coined 'knowledge'" (96). Perhaps the most important shift was the "revolutionary use of a trivial [alphabetic] se- quence rather than concrete events to order subject categories" (104).

In Illich's commentary, as well as in other books reviewed here, we see the purposes of reading change according to time and place. We also find clear- ly laid out in Illich's work the symbiosis of technology and ethos. Though Illich locates himself within the epoch of the bookish or scholastic text, he values some of the elements of the monastic text and of meditative reading. I shall enumerate eight. 1. Reading and writing are two almost indistinguish-

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able sides of the same studium (9). 2. Though Christ and wisdom were thought to be the supreme remedium, remedy is also the purpose of learn- ing and reading (11). 3. Though remedial, reading also is pleasurable. Hugh's reader harvests the text as if it were a vineyard or garden, picking, bundling, and collecting what is needed (57-58). 4. Virtues are needed for and devel- oped by reading (15), and reading is "a moral rather than a technical activ- ity" (75). 5. The ultimate aim oi studium is friendship (amicitia), a classical value that gets reinterpreted as"a union in the arms of a delightful God" (28). As if Woodmansee's account were in the background, Illich writes that "Hugh's meditation is an intensive reading activity and not some passive quietist plunge into feelings" (54). 6. Memory is essential to reading, con- necting studies and habits with a way of living (37). 7. Reading is tied to both an historical and a social order, the former being always superior to the or- der in which we come to learn things. For it to become meaningful, the reader must insert what he or she reads at the point where it belongs between Gen- esis and the Second Coming (32-33). 8. The book of Hugh's time pointed to nature more than to mind. "'All nature is pregnant with sense,'" Hugh wrote, "'and nothing in aU of the universe is sterile'" (123). These eight ele- ments, historically qualified, remain important to us today as we think about the choices made and not made during our modern relationship to the book.

Finally, I want to call attention to a work that has similar theological aims to those described in books about reading in the Middle Ages, yet one that develops its ideas not from historical analysis so much as from a Bakhtinian conversation with modern texts.^ Alan Jacobs'A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love picks up the Augustinian principle of charity as the rule of interpretation and tries to play it out, with rigor and discernment, in a postmodern setting. Jacobs recognizes, of course, that "love" can be reduced to an emotional cipher, and so he spends much time discussing its links to discriminating judgment. To make the principle of charity specific, he com- ments on the important contexts of a reader's education and the expecta- tions set up by a work's generic conventions; on attentiveness (Kierkegaard and Weil come in for more criticism than Dostoevsky and Bakhtin); on the need to work against "the instinct for self-preservation" (34); and on the relationship of love to recreation or play. In fact, "pl^y" "dance," and "run- ning a circus" (Sleary's circus in Dickens' Hard Times) are all images that Jacobs uses to describe his own interpretive work. While A Theology of Read- ing v/orks as linear commentary, with chapters on love and knowledge, sus- picion, kenosis, and justice, the emphasis on play or dance also brings with it a spiral structure, with authors and themes, even quotations, from one chapter getting picked up again in subsequent chapters as a new focus ex- pands their discussion.

In fact, many authors and passages reenter this work as Jacobs tries to

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work out a "logic of exchange and reciprocity" characteristic of a charitable hermeneutics (150). By the end Dickens' lisping circus worker, Mr. Sleary, reappears as an emblem of charitable hermeneutics, stating to Gradgrind that "there ith a love in the world [... and] it hath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating." Jacobs gives two carefully chosen, tough-minded exam- ples: lane Tompkins' reading of Buffalo Bill and W. H. Auden's reading of Kierkegaard. Recognizing such works as examples of a charitable hermeneu- tics is one of the very great strengths of the book. (Perhaps it would have been uncharitable to provide a counterexample, but I found myself wishing he had done so.) )acobs thinks with and often enough against theorists such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, Basil, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Maclntyre, Milbank, Nussbaum, Gadamer, Murdoch, Tompkins, and Bakhtin. He also thinks with and often enough also against writers such as Dickens, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Nabokov, Auden, Shakespeare, and Rich. Though the two groups mix easily, all of their writings being engaged as "answerable acts," the shorter interludes focus especially on literary works, "I echo Martha Nussbaum's argument," Jacobs warns us early on, "that literature, carefully read, is an ir- replaceable tool in the development of discernment or practical wisdom" (1). Jacobs, unlike Woodmansee, includes not only critical but also Hterary works in the logic of exchange and reciprocity that he pursues.

Of the various items that enter Jacobs' discussion, I want to focus on the relation of literature and theology, the role of a Christian ideology in read- ing, the substitution of "neighbor" for "friend" as guide for reading and crit- icism, and the recreational element in reading.

The relationship between literature and theology obviously was close in medieval writing. Most written literature was religious, and almost all lit- erature was read in the light of Scripture and the Church Fathers. The in- terpretation of literature was still an ethical act related to the interpretation of law and Scripture. How is that normative now, however, when literature, like music, has moved beyond the Church to develop in a sphere of its own? Jacobs supposes this to be more a theological than a literary question. "Does not theology," he asks, "have an interest in language even if it isn't the lan- guage of faith? Is there not a theological stake in language about money, or eros, or architecture?" (12). Jacobs clearly believes that there is. Theology's interest should not be limited to the sacred, yet "almost no one seems to have considered the reading of non-[b]iblical texts a theologically significant ac- tivity" (111). It is significant, Jacobs asserts, because reading well requires theologically based counsels, beginning with the duty of "extending the of- fer of affection and attention without knowing whether the other would reciprocate" (112). In thinking through the relation between literature and theology, Jacobs does not make any wordAVord analogies or argue for pro- tecting the purity of one based on the purity of the Other. Bakhtin's under-

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standing that our relation to language is more that of a renter than that of an owner or prisoner would keep him from such an argument. Nor does Jacobs suggest the normative character of an earlier age. Instead, he argues for theology's interest in such matters as duty and enjoyment; he also claims that an understanding of both is required by good reading.

When does theological influence, however, become ideology? One's read- ing, Jacobs is clear, can fail either on the side of passivity or on the side of determinism. He follows Bakhtin in regarding a passive reconstruction of the text as "'leav[ing] the speaker in his own personal context, within his own boundaries'" (106), and "damag[ing] the self of the interpreter as well" (107), in both cases revealing itself as an ethical failure. On the other hand, Jacobs does not believe that Jeffrey's characterization of the "'unabashedly ideolog- ical appropriation of the text'" by early Christians should be normative for a charitable hermeneutics today. Jacobs threads his way through Augustine's analogy of the gold taken out of Egypt and Jerome's analogy of the beauti- ful woman taken captive in warfare. "Given the uncertain cultural position of Christianity in its early centuries, this combative attitude may be compre- hensible," Jacobs writes, but such an approach and the allegorical methods that accompanied it are no longer acceptable today. First, the hermeneutics of love requires that "books and authors, however alien to the beliefs and practices of the Christian life, be understood and treated as neighbors" (13). Second, allegory "isolate[s] the gold of identity" and"dispose[s] of the dross of difference" (14). Jacobs chooses a third Church Father, Basil, to direct his reading of doctrinally challenging works. The Greek patriarch had argued for a less scrupulous, more equitable reading of pagan authors, but that more generous reading of the text is possible only if one is scrupulous about "obe- dience to Scripture and to the dictates of the Catholic Church [...]. For Basil, it is this framework of faithful obedience to the Gospel witness that liber- ates the reader to read more generously, according to the spirit rather than the letter" (142).

This respect for the doctrinally foreign text is also directed by the substi- tution of "neighbor" for the ancient moral category of "friend." Texts, and even to some extent characters and authors, can be viewed better as neigh- bors, Jacobs argues, than as friends, though they may become friends. (Here too I found myself wishing that a counterexample had been considered,) Classical friendship is too closely tied, for a Christian ethics of reading, to the aristocratic virtues available to those freed from labor and able to expect that others similarly free would reciprocate. Not only is the classical notion of friendship susceptible to elitism and calculation, but the ethic also under- estimates the ways in which sin can distort friendship. For the Christian, then, "what Aristotle and Nussbaum provide is simply an inadequate account of the barriers to friendship," an inadequate account of the "disorder of the will"

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(48). Finally, the social framework that allows for the development of either friendship or neighborliness differs in important ways. The difference be- tween polis and Church lies in their goals: in the latter, ''agape rather than phitia is the love that produces knowledge" (49).^ The notion of book as neighbor brings with it a fundamental duty that we owe a book as we read, a debt of "faithful attentiveness" (64). If we pay this debt "to all the books we read—whether they be friends, foes, or neighbors—we provide for our- selves what Bonhoeffer calls the cantus firmus, the ground [of eternal love for God and His creation] over which variations can be elaborated and de- veloped" (67). In other words, with the debt comes opportunity.

Finally, Jacobs warns us not to lose sight of the recreational character of literature. As counterpoint to Bakhtin's "carnival," he gives us Sleary's cir- cus. His commentary qualifies the formalism involved in the concept of play so important to Johan Huizenga and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Dickens' Sleary also shows us the dual character of love. While love appears disruptive and unpredictable, at the same time it has its own way of "calculating or not cal- culating," its own pattern of exchange and reciprocity (145).

Another element in the recreational character of literature is pleasure, our capacity for which depends upon our view of the emotions' relation to rea- son. Jacobs affirms Nussbaum's claim that "emotion should not be set in opposition to reason" (43), but he complicates this view by bringing to bear an Augustinian notion of the will. The will, according to Augustine, is di- rected by love and in turn directs both reason and emotion, not separately but together. A good poem or story affects both reason and emotion and has the ability to change the will. We should accept it as a gift, as a relational good. Jacobs compares our pleasure in the well crafted literary work to our pleasure in a well prepared meal: "It is a gift that we honor, and whose giver we honor, by receiving it with gratitude. It is not always appropriate, it is not always charitable, to take that which is offered to us in a spirit of pleasure and recreation and use it according to a rigid criterion of studious applica- tion," Jacobs quotes with approval Goethe's distinction between three kinds of readers: "one, who enjoys without judgment; a third, who judges with- out enjoyment; and one between them who judges as he enjoys and enjoys as he judges" (24), Bonhoeffer places this concept within another context by proposing that Christianity has something to say not only about duty but also about the enjoyment of this world:

God want us to love him eternally with our whole hearts—not in such a way as to injure or weaken our earthly love, but to provide a kind of cantus fir- mus to which the other melodies of life provide the counterpoint. One of these contrapuntal themes (which have their own complete independence but are yet related to the cantus firmus) is earthly affection. (30)

W H A T IS READING FOR? SI

Bonhoeffer speculates that polyphony in music may be a musical reflection of the dual nature of Christ as both fully human and fully divine. That du- ality does not lead us away from the things of this world but toward them, including our own bodies and passions. The goodness of Creation, the play- fuhiess of art, the valuation of passion alongside reason, and the dual nature of Christ—all contribute to Jacobs' defense ofthe recreational nature of lit- erature.

These four themes spiral throughout Jacobs' commentary, which insists that love has its own logic of exchange and reciprocity as well as the ability to disrupt the status quo. This economy can contribute to contemporary thought about what reading is for. Other contributions will come from ar- eas besides premodern literature and theology, not only from the history of reading but also from the history of writing."^ The history of rhetoric thus becomes a further source, as does contemporary work on rhetorical herme- neutics being done by such writers as Steven Mailloux in literary studies and Don Compier in theology. Finally, while Hugh and Basil are helpful resources to bring alongside the more frequently consulted work of Augustine and Jerome, we could draw from Calvin as well. Let me end with a passage from Andre Bieler's The Social Hunmnisiu of Calvin and suggest that in this an- thropolog)^ what Calvin says about economic exchange pertains also to lin- guistic exchange:

"God has created man," Calvin says, "so that man may be a creature of fel- lowship." [. ..] Companionship is completed in work and in the interplay of economic exchanges. Human fellowship is realized in relationships which flow from the division of labor wherein each person has been called by God to a particular and partial work which complements the work of others. The mutual exchange of goods and services is the concrete sign of the profound solidarity which unites humanity. (17-18)

Reading is first of all an exchange between people, an exchange whose dy- namic reminds us that we were created as limited human beings who are enriched by fellowship with others.^

Trinity Christian College

NOTES

'The blunt grammar of Berry's question triggers memory of Robert S. Lynd's Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture, the title of the four Stafford Little Lectures he gave at Princeton in 1938 and whose question has

MICHAEL VANDER WEELE

been revisited in at least two recent national conferences on scholarship and educa- tion. Let Berry's and Lynd's questions remind us that our understanding of what we do when we read affects the education we plan and the life we conduct—and that the education we plan and the life we conduct inevitably also affect what we do when we read.

-In his favorable review of IlliclVs work, Sacnger says thai Illich's date is too late bul that his argument is correct (245-46).

Jacobs' book develops the argument of his essay in Bakhtin and Religion: A Feel- ing for Faith.

•'Recall that Fiugh accepts the classical goal of friendship but redirects it toward God. The opposition of agape to philia may suggest a greater clarity in the relation- ship of agape, philia, and eros than actually exists.

^See Murphy, Reynolds, and Woods in this regard. "̂I would like to thank Donald Marshall, Susan VanZanten Gallagher, Paul J. Con-

tino, Virginia LaGrand, and Susan M. Felch for calling my attention to some ofthe books referred to in this review essay; students Charity Carroll and Tyler Ryan for the chance to try out my responses in the company of eager learners; and Trinity Christian College for a sabbatical semester that gave me extended time for reading and writing. Late in the process I also benefited from colleagues at the Fieldstead Seminar on Hermeneutics held at Calvin College, especially its generous leader Kevin Vanhoozer.

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