He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. . . . How to live?11
It’s the hunger for an orienting narrative that our culture industries tap into. Whether it’s Disney or HBO, HGTV or Instagram, they’re all myth-making, which is just to say they are offering scripts we can live into. The danger, of course, is that so many scripts today invite us to become not characters but models—people who are seen but have no story, whose generic stares seem to have no identity behind them. Instead, we know only the clothes they wear, the façade they’ve assumed, which will be stripped and replaced in an instant. They are not selves but machines for displaying products.
An actor, unlike a model, at least has the potential to show us a character we can adopt. It might be an aspirational call to justice in the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington, or crusading for the same in the character of Atticus Finch. It might be black empowerment in Black Panther or female empowerment in Wonder Woman. It might be journalistic communities chasing the truth in Spotlight or The Post. In response to any of these a young person might say, “That’s me,” and then spend a life following their lead. Our fictions often hold out better characters to emulate than the dead-end desire to be merely “famous” (and “famous for being famous”) that plays out in “reality” TV.
It was books that used to play this role (and still do, to some extent): we see ourselves in characters of mythology and fiction. Sometimes we see our own vices and resolve not to play out that character trajectory. In other cases, the allure of a character’s heroism or sacrifice or compassion becomes an aspiration: “I want to be like that,” we say in our hearts, and live a life that steals from the character’s script. Books, as the arks of such stories, are not just technologies for information transfer; they become incubators of life, enshrining icons of who we want to be.
Thomas Wright captures this dynamic in an interesting case study: the life of Oscar Wilde. We might call Wright’s Built of Books a “bibliobiography,” a telling of Wilde’s complex, tragic life in which books are the spine of the narrative. That we can do this is itself part of the tragedy: while Wilde was in prison awaiting the trial that would lead to his demise, the entire contents of his house in Chelsea had to be auctioned off to cover the legal costs of his rash—and ultimately unsuccessful—libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury. Thanks to a surviving copy of the sale catalogue, we know that Wilde’s library, which he had been building since he was an adolescent, contained around two thousand volumes, including French novels, a large library of classics, first editions of his own books, sumptuous éditions de luxe, and volumes of poetry inscribed by the authors. The entire collection was sold off for a song (some friends and acquaintances tried to reacquire some of them once they hit booksellers’ shelves in London).12
It was hard to imagine a more invasive revenge on Wilde, whose library was not just a collection of artifacts but the personally curated archaeological strata of his life. As is true for many, to look at his shelves was to see the person, the spines speaking to the unique shape of a life. “Wilde’s library was far more than a museum of personal mementoes,” Wright argues. “It was the source of so much that was vital in his life. . . . Books were the single greatest influence on Wilde’s life and writings. He sometimes referred to the volumes that most affected and charmed him as his ‘golden books.’” Indeed, he made the same true of his characters: it was the infamous “yellow book” that would lure Dorian Gray into the life that would destroy him. Live by the book, die by the book. Books, for Wilde, were ersatz friends, conduits of personality: “these readerly encounters were as significant as his first meetings with friends and lovers.”13
Wilde is not unique in being “built of books,” but our possession of the catalogue does give us a unique opportunity to peek into the secret script that generated a life. Wright notes a tension on this point. On the one hand, Wilde builds a life out of what he reads. It is an act of self-creation fueled by fiction and mythology. On the other hand, that means even this virtuoso of self-invention—who would decry “influence” in his essay “The Critic as Artist”—was receiving roles to play. “Wilde did not so much discover as create himself through his reading,” Wright suggests. “He was a man who built himself out of books. . . . He always came to life via books, literally seeing reality through them.” But then again Wright sees in Wilde someone who was emulating what he had read. “He was essentially a pre-modern author who adapted and conflated the books he read, rather than a Romantic writer concerned with originality and self-expression.”14
It explains why, “when the prison doors were closed upon him, books were the first things he asked for.”15 And which volumes did he request from the doldrums of Pentonville prison? The first two on Wilde’s list were Augustine’s Confessions and City of God.
The notion that we are built of books, that we live into stories, is as old as the novel itself. At the heart of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the errant knight for whom chivalrous romances are not an escape but a how-to manual. He reads them not as fantasy but as a rule for living. This insight is one that we find inscribed in Augustine’s ancient Confessions. If Augustine writes a hetero-biography, he also offers us a bibliobiography, his life in books. Different books offered different maps of the world, charting different courses, each a different encapsulation of the world. Virgil’s Aeneid, Cicero’s Hortensius, Mani’s Letter of Foundation and Book of Treasures, the Enneads of Plotinus, the epistles of Paul, the parable of the prodigal son: all are stories that Augustine “tried on,” as it were, stepping into their narrative, assuming a role, playing the part of someone who assumed their take on the world. They are books he treated like compasses at various points in his life, until he found one that was finally calibrated to true North.
It’s no surprise, then, that books function like characters in his own book’s rehearsal of his conversion. In book 8 of the Confessions, the drama unfolds as a call-and-response litany of friends with books, including Simplicianus—who points Augustine to Victorinus, the translator of the Neoplatonic books Augustine has been reading and who was himself transformed by reading the Bible—and Ponticianus, who drops in and, when he spies the book of Paul’s letters on the gaming table, shares the story of his friends’ discovery of The Life of Antony (itself the story of a life revolutionized by hearing the Gospels), which then turns out to be a bookish encounter that changes everything. All of these books are like literary stained glass, holding up images of exemplars to imitate, trailblazers to follow. And so the culmination of Augustine’s conversion is picking up a book in which he finds himself. In Gozzoli’s portrayal of the scene in San Gimignano, Augustine’s conversion is depicted almost as a kind of studiousness (see figure 6). But perhaps we might imagine him poring over the book as an atlas, as if the world were finally coming into focus—like he’d spent his life trying to drive in Los Angeles with a map of San Francisco, but now someone has given him the sacred Thomas Guide, and all of a sudden he knows where he is, and where he wants to go, and how to get there. He realizes he’s holding a map given to him by the One who made the cosmos. Spying the arrow that reads, “You Are Here,” Augustine says to his friend, “That’s me.” And in Gozzoli’s image, Alypius is eager to get his hands on such a book.
Books will be the wallpaper of all ensuing iconography. Just like Wilde always posed for pictures in his library, or with book in hand, the bishop of Hippo will always appear with books: reading them, writing them, studying them, stomping on them, surrounded by them, inhaling them (see figures 2 and 8). It’s also not surprisi
ng that someone so shaped by books gave his life to writing them (“ninety-three works in two hundred and thirty-two books,” plus letters and sermons).16 He would die writing, in fact. Hounded in his old age by Quodvultdeus to write a critical catalogue of heresies (which Augustine promised), he would fail to finish his Answer to Julian. Also unfinished would be his Retractations, the book in which he reviewed all of his own books. He found himself in a story that had once been unbelievable to him. He would spend the rest of his life inviting others to find themselves in that story.
THE BOOK THAT would finally arrest this search for a story was the Bible. The script that would finally guide his way was the Scriptures. As Brian Stock notes in his magisterial study Augustine the Reader, Augustine realized that identity was storied, and that meant finding your story in the story revealed by your Creator. “What distinguishes him from other philosophical thinkers on this issue,” Stock comments, “is the link that he perceives between self-knowledge and an appreciation of God’s word, in which the reading of scripture plays a privileged role. Throughout the lengthy period of his intellectual development after 386–387, his main guide was scripture.”17 What was it about the biblical story that “fit”? Why was it that this particular story became the governing narrative for the rest of his life?
The very notion will scandalize us, we who’ve been encouraged to live “our” truth, to come up with our own story, for whom authenticity is the burden of writing our own de novo script. The notion of a governing narrative that is not your own feels like signing over the rights to your life—which it is! But for Augustine, being enfolded in God’s story in Scripture was not an imposition but a liberation. When you’ve realized that you don’t even know yourself, that you’re an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn’t received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss. God’s Word for Augustine wasn’t experienced as burden or buzzkill but as autobiography written by the God who made him. Scripture irrupted in Augustine’s life as revelation, the story about himself told by another, and as illumination, shining a light that helped him finally understand his hungers and faults and hopes.
To spend any time in Augustine’s corpus, but perhaps especially the letters and sermons, is to hear a voice that has been soaked by the language of Scripture. The Bible—especially the psalms—was Augustine’s gift of tongues. Augustine’s speech is so suffused with the Scriptures that the contemporary translator is almost at a loss to know where the Bible stops and Augustine begins. For the rest of his life, Augustine, like a hip-hop bricoleur, “samples” Scripture in everything he says. The psalms, especially, are always on the tip of his tongue, a storehouse of metaphors and comfort.
It’s incredible how quickly the Scriptures became Augustine’s first language, so to speak. The Scriptures are the heart of Augustine’s lexicon because the cosmic story of redemption is his governing story. This was the language of the homeland he’d never been to. Like glossolalia, he quickly found himself able to speak a language that wasn’t his but also wasn’t foreign. It’s less a language he owns and more a language that owns him and comes naturally. Jacques Derrida, his fellow North African, would say something similar much later: “I said that the only language I speak is not mine, I did not say it was foreign to me.”18 This is the lexicon of an émigré spirituality, when a foreign tongue finds you and becomes your first language. You become who you are because this Word gives you the words to finally say who you are.19 “To hear you speaking about oneself is to know oneself.”20
When, in the garden, Augustine scrambles back to pick up the book of Paul’s epistles and lights on Romans 13, there is an infusion of more than information—this Word will be the conduit of the grace that transforms him. “I didn’t want to read further, and there was no need. The instant I finished this sentence, my heart was virtually flooded with a light of relief and certitude, and all the darkness of my hesitation scattered away.”21 The Word is a sacrament—it is a means of God’s action, not just God’s disclosure. When Augustine explains why he would bother sharing his own story with others, “my fellow citizens and sojourners abroad with me,” he situates his words in relation to the Word, but more important, he situates his act in relation to God’s action. “And this, your Word to me, would not have been enough as a mere precept spoken by you; it had to precede with action by you. And I myself carry out that Word with both actions and words; I carry it out under your wings; the danger would be too great unless my soul were under your wings,” echoing (you guessed it) the psalms.22
After that garden transformation, Augustine, Alypius, Adeodatus, and several others retreated north of Milan to Cassiciacum, between the city and Lake Como. While this would be a season of philosophical reflection that would generate some of Augustine’s earliest works, preceding his baptism, in the Confessions he notes that this was really an opportunity for intensive language learning, giving himself over to the psalms. The episode illustrates how this language was a gift that he could also make his own. In the psalms, God gave him words that he could speak back to God. These songs, he says, were a school for his passions: “The words I poured out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those faithful songs, the sounds of godliness that shut out the spirit that’s full of itself! I was then unschooled in true passion for you.”23 The Cassiciacum curriculum of psalm-singing was like a Berlitz program for the soul, training his affections by giving him new words, a new cadence of aspiration, a new story to live out. But this wasn’t instantaneous. As he notes, when he wrote to Ambrose from Cassiciacum and asked where he should begin reading in the Scriptures, Ambrose recommended the book of Isaiah (perhaps wanting to challenge any lingering Manicheanism in Augustine’s imagination that would have dismissed the Old Testament). “But I didn’t understand the first part I read,” Augustine admits, “and thinking it was all like that, I put off taking the book up again until I was more practiced in the Master’s way of speaking.”24
THE MASTER’S WAY of speaking. If Scripture became Augustine’s governing narrative, then story, we might say, became the bass note of his rhetorical method. As Stock notes, Augustine ultimately landed on a different understanding of identity that was tied to Scripture in a way the philosophers would never have entertained, and his rhetoric would reflect this conviction. Augustine spent his life inviting others into this story, in his Confessions and then in a lifetime of preaching, by a performance of the truth rather than an argument. To side with performance over proof was, in a sense, to stand with the imagination as prior to reason—to take sides in the longstanding battle between philosophy and poetry.
From its beginning, philosophy banished poetry. When Plato imagined the ideal republic, governed by philosopher-kings trained in logic and mathematics, he wanted the mushy poets exiled outside its walls. The republic would be governed by ratio, not rhetoric; the city would traffic in syllogisms, not stories. You’re welcome in this city as long as you leave your imagination at the door. Otherwise, the philosopher-kings and thinking things will see you out.
Riffing on Philip Rieff, we might call this “the triumph of the didactic.” It is a construal of the world that treats us as brains-on-a-stick, reducing what matters to what we think, what we can analyze, what we can quantify and process in server farms owned by Google and Amazon. Our so-called information age is still an outpost of this city.
And it is surely an irony that Christianity has been prone to a similar kind of rationalization and privileging of the didactic (especially in Protestantism). We reduce the wonder and mystery of grace to teachable bullet points and statements of faith. We prefer the didactic environs of the epistles to the action and metaphor of the Gospels. We reduce the dramatic narrative of Scripture to a doctrinal system. We say we love Jesus, but we prefer to learn from Paul, who gi
ves us God straight, without the meandering meaning of parables.
I confess that this is how I came to Christianity, or how I learned to be a Christian very early on. The gospel quickly became something to know, to analyze, to systematize, to wield. The nineteenth-century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge taught me that the Bible was a “storehouse of facts,” and Christian philosophers taught me the logic that would chop it up into digestible bits for cognitive processing. In fact, as a young man I used to be proud of the fact that I didn’t read novels or poetry—why would I waste time on such sentimental stuff when there was all this knowledge to acquire? Why would I wallow in the lies of made-up fictional worlds when I was interested in the Truth? I had effectively re-created the kingdom of God as if it were Plato’s republic: Poetry prohibited. Imagination excluded.
I can’t remember exactly how I began to break out of this. I do remember reading Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes and coming to understand something about the broken beauty of God’s world that I couldn’t have understood any other way. And I remember an English professor at the University of Waterloo, John North, who introduced me to the enchanted wonder of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And I remember Cardinal Ratzinger, long before he was Pope Benedict XVI—in fact, when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the doctrine police of the church—challenging this triumph of the didactic when he said: “Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story.”25
But perhaps it has been my decades of wrestling with St. Augustine that have most challenged the rationalization of faith. If you know Augustine only from a distance, as one of the great “doctors” of the church, or someone anthologized in theology textbooks, you might imagine that he too falls prey to the triumph of the didactic, just another scholastic who flattens the gospel to the measure of the intellect. But then you’ve probably never read his Confessions, which are infused with the grace of God from beginning to end and could never be confused with the sterile skeletons of systematic theology. The Confessions is a book that breathes, a book with a beating heart. Augustine isn’t just trying to convince you; he’s trying to move you. He is trying to “stir up” his fellow travelers.26
On the Road with Saint Augustine Page 18
