Of canons and canonicity

I suppose we all keep a list of books in our minds that we feel we should read just because they seem so integral to the drama of human history. Atheists who refuse to read the Bible offend me because they're bound to miss out on 90% of the allusions of English and American literature. Christians who refuse to read the Koran offend me because I think it's sort of important for the average citizen of the world to understand that Islam (so routinely characterized as a more misogynistic religion than Christianity) pins the fall of humanity on Adam rather than Eve.

But even if we could all agree that the Bible and the Koran are two books that every thinking person should read, how many other books would we categorize in the same way? Most of my students would shoot me before they would allow me to cast my votes for Melville's Moby-Dick or James' The Wings of the Dove, but they could probably be shamed into accepting such texts as Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching or Plato's Republic. Western civilization used to have fairly fixed notions concerning its literary canon, but then we started to argue about why so many canonical books had been written by dead white males. And then the French became involved and everybody decided that the cool thing to do was to pose at rejecting canonicity entirely.

If there's anything that I have a knack for, it's being uncool. So I will fully and frankly confess that I'm not really distressed by the notion that a literary canon is innately hierarchical, elitist, phallocentric, and even fascistic. Mussolini may have been a monster, but he did make the trains run on time. And I for one am persuaded that whatever fascist negativity may be inherent in a literary canon, that negativity is more than offset by the benefits that we as a society reap when we urge people to expose themselves to the very best that has been thought and said. Maybe such Arnoldian phrases as "sweetness and light" sound like meaningless burgeois-speak to some people, but I happen to believe that literature is really nothing more than an ongoing conversation between the most articulate individuals in history. And I think it's important to direct those who want to participate in that conversation to the most compelling interlocutors.

When I first picked up Augustine's Confessions, I was not looking to be entertained. I was merely convinced that too many important thinkers had read his book for me to be able to get away with skipping it. (I'm the sort of person who thinks it's important for everyone to get to know the King James Version of the Bible simply because that's the version that was relied upon by extraordinary thinkers from Swift to Hawthorne.) I don't know how the Confessions ended up higher on my list than such texts as Plutarch's Lives and Shikibu's Tale of the Genji, but I feel confident in saying (without having yet read either of those works in their entirety) that the priviliged position that I gave to the Confessions was unwarranted.

Sure, the Confessions is an important book. It will teach you some important lessons. It might even change your mind about a thing or two. But I had the idea that it was one of the thousand or so most important books ever written. Let me try to explain why I'm pretty certain I was wrong about that.

Augustine and the Intellectual Prestige of the Catholic Church

There's something about the letter A and the intellectual history of the Catholic faith. St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, and St. Anselm are known the world over for their forays into theological thinking. And then there's the celebrated Abelard, known for his forays into a certain Eloise. Although I have to respect the extraordinary effort that went into Aquinas' Summa Theologica, one glance at his work was enough to convince me that it is best used as a reference and not plowed straight through. If the exhaustive Summa Theologica is at one end of the spectrum of Catholic thought, then perhaps we can put Anselm's absolutely inspired (and extremely elegant) ontological proof of God's existence at the other. Whether you think it's possible to define God into existence or not, you have to respect Anselm's cleverness.

If only because it would be nearly impossible to be more elegant than Anselm or more exhaustive than Aquinas, I had the idea that Augustine's Confessions would strike a sort of happy middle ground. I think he found that middle ground, but it wasn't as happy a discovery as any of us would have wished.

Are We There Yet?

Augustine's contention is that he is the greatest of sinners--that if a wretch like him could find his way to the Christian faith, then anyone can. Whenever he returns to this theme (which he did rather less often than I expected), it can be a little tedious for anyone not really looking to find their way to the Christian faith.

It's also sort of annoying to discover, after he goes on and on about how terrible a sinner he was, that the great wrong he did was to have a mistress. Certainly his waywardness is less excusable than it would be in others because his mother (St. Monica) was right there in his life, urging him over and over to join the Christian cult--er, I mean faith.

That not-so-subtle typographical accident that I pretended to have at the end of the preceding paragraph is relevant to Augustine because he at first regards Christianity as just another cult, not unlike the Manicheans (a group to which he once belonged himself). He approaches Christianity from an intellectual perspective that is foreign to most people raised in a predominantly Christian society. He sees it as a philosophy in competition with rival philosophies. The Manicheans are only one set of competitors. There are also astrologers and Platonists to contend with. To my mind, the most interesting confession that he makes concerns the way in which Christianity and Platonism might have vied for his allegiance if he had encountered Platonism first:

But how could I expect that the Platonist books would ever teach me charity? I believe that it was by your will that I came across those books before I studied the Scriptures, because you wished me always to remember the impresion they had made on me, so that later on, when I had been chastened by your Holy Writ and my wounds had been touched by your healing hand, I should be able to see and understand the difference between presumption and confession, between those who see the goal that they must reach, but cannot see the road by which they are to reach it, and those who see the road to that blessed country which is meant to be no mere vision but our home. For if I had not come across these books until after I had been formed in the mould of your Holy Scriptures and had learnt to love you through familiarity with them, the Platonist teaching might have swept me from my foothold on the solid ground of piety. (154-5)

Despite his obvious fascination with Greek philosophy, however, Augustine does not hesitate to turn the Socratic argument concerning the merits of poetry and philosopy on its head. Contrary to Plato's contention that poetry (because it is based in fiction/untruth) is less useful to people than philosophy, Augustine writes:

For surely the fables of the poets and the penmen are better than the traps which those impostors [philosophers] set! There is certainly more to be gained from verses and poems and tales like the flight of Medea than from their stories of the five elements disguised in various ways because of the five dens of darkness. These things simply do not exist and they are death to those who believe in them. Verses and poems can provide real food for thought, but although I used to recite verses about Medea's flight through the air, I never maintained that they were true; and I never believed the poems which I heard others recite. But I did believe the tales which these men [philosophers] told. (62)

Augustine has an extremely tenacious and an innately materialist mindset. He takes an extraordinary pleasure in pointing at things and doesn't mind asking such questions as "[If] my infancy left me, where did it go?" (29). But through Christianity, he manages to transmute such idiotically physical questions into poetically metaphysical ones: "Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind?" (78).

And although he can be extremely stuffy and allows himself to get more caught up in his own questions than is useful to his readers (not unlike certain Slouchos), he occasionally tosses off astute (and perhaps even cynically inflected) observations that are likely to seem arresting, considering that they come from a fifth-century consciousness. I was shocked as I encountered the following casual insight:

[We boys] enjoyed playing games and were punished for them by men who played games themselves. However, grown-up games are known as 'business', and even though boys' games are much the same, they are punished for them by their elders. (30)

But he can be as silly as he is profound, and his silliness may get on the reader's nerves, as in the miracle of the toothache:

I have not forgotten the sting of your lash nor how quickly your mercy came, and in how wonderful a way. During that vacation you let me suffer the agony of toothache, and when the pain became so great that I could not speak, my heart prompted me to ask all my friends who were with me to pray to you for me, since you are the God who gives health to the body as well as to the soul. I wrote down the message and gave it to them to read, and as soon as we knelt down to offer you this humble prayer, the pain vanished. (189)

Hallelujah! Behold the power of the Almighty to cast out the demons that are a-dwellin' in the teeth of sinners everywhere. Augustine's philosophical training should have told him that the story of his miracle is an absolutely worthless rhetorical exercise. The only ones who will believe in it are those who already believe in Christian miracles. Those who don't believe are hardly going to be convinced merely because they have the word of a high-ranking Catholic official that his pain stopped after some people prayed for him. Obviously, we have no way of knowing that the pain stopped--or even that it started. But perhaps the story is only intended to demonstrate the inherently self-involved and self-referential nature of a confession.

Conclusions

Augustine's Confessions was not at all a waste of my time. It wasn't painful to read (although I'll admit that I found it extremely easy to read myself to sleep with the final three books concerning the interpretation of Genesis). I'm glad I read the book, and yet I think it could have waited. It's not often that I have both the time and the inclination to check off a box on my intellectual must-read list, and I think that I probably would have gotten more out of a book concerning Catholic thought. I could easily list a thousand books that seem to me to be better examples of the best of what has been thought and said. But if we just bump up the order of magnitude by one notch, then we're fine. It probably is one of the ten thousand most important books ever written. I just never expected to read that many books.



Recommended: No