Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

'Mind Your Own Business' - How We Are All Living In a J.S. Mill World

John Stuart Mill wrote in 'On Liberty': "All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the action of other people." This striking quote is a good entry point to Mill's consideration of freedom as a choice of what kind of coercion we submit to.

In Mill's life, I see that there are two forms of opinion:

1. Reasoned Judgments with evidence supporting,

OR

2. Love and passion backed with experience, true motive and practice.

JS Mill has both forms. But here is a man who lived a virtual world, feeling false passions, loving what he was always taught to love, and praciting his father's will until he fell in love. That he didn't abandon intellectual life altogether is a pretty grand drama to me.

The question which Mill seems to have lived is: what does theory look like in practice? What role does idea play in forming motive passions that infuse powerful opinions? From these questions arises the theory of representation and his (in my opinion) extreme views on liberty.

Mill's first principle: the only good motive for coercion is self-protection.

This is flat out useless as a practical standard of political power. The 'self' that is protected of a gang of thieves is not the same 'self' that is protected within a cloister of monks. 'Self' is a moving target, dependent on context for validity. So this rational ideal of coercion is only valid for rational agents. And, to be honest, rational agency is a little thin on the ground in human history so far.

Mill qualifies this standard by limiting it to those who can be convinced or pursuaded, but again... this is a hopelessly idealistic burden for reason to carry alone. Mill quite overrates the power of reason to effect pursuasion in my opinion - but this comes back to my enquiry on theory and practice, reason and passion.

Freedom that matters, for Mill: the right to go chasing your own unharming good in your own unharming way. This is the liberal enlightenment view of freedom without an end (telos), or freedom as an end in itself.

What is the latest application of freethinking liberal philosophy for Mill? I can sum it in four words: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

From all this, I conclude that we are living in a John Stuart Mill kind of world. When I walk down the street and nobody says hello to me, that's because they are free not to. Courtesy and community are secondary or irrelevant. The key consideration of a liberal society is that you mind your own business.

This also accounts both for the intense sense of alienation in the West, on the one hand, and the strong sense of purpose and rational passion in Western liberal movements. All three of these qualities - the alienation, the passion, and the MYOB - are all essential traits of JS Mill's personality.

When I walk past a sloppy drunk, a glossy hiphopper, a neat businesswoman, a greasy mechanic, and more ethicities than i can name, with a perfect equanimity and complete indistraction from my own affairs - when I walk this way I see I live in the world of John Stuart Mill's imagining, from almost two centuries ago.