Reading, Writing, and Charity

His purpose in writing A Theology of Reading, Alan Jacobs informs us, was to make “an academic case for governing interpretation by the law of love.” Hence his frequent references to the work of literary theorists and moral philosophers, the most important being Martha Nussbaum and Mikhail Bakhtin. But this is by no means a purely theoretical exercise; readers fearing a heavy dose of academic prose will be delighted by Jacobs’s light touch and charming examples from Shakespeare, Dickens, and company. A Theology of Reading is best described, perhaps, as a cross between a scholarly monograph and a collection of essays aimed at Christian readers. It is obviously a labor of love: of Jacobs’s own passionate love of reading.

The patron saint of Jacobs’s “hermeneutics of love” is St. Augustine, who made charity the test of biblical interpretation in On Christian Doctrine. Early on, Jacobs quotes Augustine (as translated by D. W. Robertson):

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived. (1.36)

Later, Augustine offers the following example of charitable interpretation:

It is written, “Give to the merciful, and uphold not the sinner.” The last part of this lesson seems to condemn beneficence. It says, “Uphold not the sinner.” Therefore you should understand “sinner” to be used figuratively for sin, so that you should not uphold the sin of the sinner. (3.16)

The question is whether Augustine’s rule of charity ought to be extended to the interpretation of “profane” texts, where there is no presumption of divine meaning.

Jacobs’s answer is yes, but it involves a significant twist. In the case of secular literature, he suggests, the rule of charity applies not to the meaning of the text but to the will of the interpreter:

Fundamentally, it is the reader’s will that determines the moral form the reading takes: If the will is directed toward God and neighbor, it will in Augustinian terms exemplify caritas; if the will is directed toward the self, it will exemplify cupiditas.

It is here that Jacobs parts company with Martha Nussbaum and her mentor Aristotle, for whom love is a matter of passion rather than will. Aristotelian philia, Jacobs adds, is an aristocratic virtue applicable only to one’s friends (or one’s favorite books); it lacks the universality of Augustinian caritas, which applies to all one’s neighbors (and all one’s books).

To clinch his academic case for a hermeneutics of love, Jacobs turns to the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work he finds more relevant to questions of reading and interpretation than I do. (Perhaps Jacobs is simply a more charitable reader.) Rather than follow Jacobs through the narrow gate of Bakhtinian exegesis, I would prefer to return to Augustine, whose “theology of reading” deserves a closer look. For charity is by no means the only hermeneutical principle taught in On Christian Doctrine; Augustine acknowledges a number of complementary principles as well.

The first of these complementary principles is truth. Thus Augustine proposes the following method for determining whether a scriptural locution is literal or figurative:

Whatever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative. Virtuous behavior pertains to the love of God and of one’s neighbor; the truth of faith pertains to the knowledge of God and of one’s neighbor. (3.10)

As with charity, Augustine considers truth to be a surer guide to meaning than authorial intention. Thus he writes,

When … from a single passage in the Scripture not one but two or more meaning are elicited, even if what he who wrote the passage remains hidden, there is no danger if any of the meanings may be seen to be congruous with the truth taught in other passages of the Holy Scriptures. (3.27)

But what if there are no clear parallels elsewhere in the Scriptures? Augustine has an answer for this interpretive situation, too, although he calls it “a dangerous pursuit”:

However, when a meaning is elicited whose uncertainty cannot be resolved by the evidence of places in Scripture whose meaning is certain, it remains to make it more clear by recourse to reason, even if he whose words we seek to understand did not perhaps intend that meaning. (3.28)

The implication is that the meaning of Scripture is reasonable—that reason, used with caution, is a necessary help in discerning the truth of faith. In addition to a hermeneutics of reason, Augustine teaches what might be called a “hermeneutics of freedom,” applying the doctrine of Christian liberty to the practice of interpretation. Thus he warns the interpreter against a purely literal reading of Scripture:

He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else. For example, if he hears of the Sabbath, he thinks only of one day out of the seven that are repeated in a continuous cycle; and if he hears of Sacrifice, his thoughts do not go beyond the customary victims of the flocks and fruits of the earth. There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things. (3.5)

But Christ died to set interpreters free, teaching them the true, figurative meaning of the Sabbath, the sacrifices, and other things signified in the Scriptures:

On this account Christian liberty freed those it found under useful signs [i.e., the Jews], … interpreting the signs to which they were subject, and elevating them to the things which the signs represented . …For those it found under useless signs [i.e., the Greeks] it not only prohibited and destroyed all servile obligation to those signs, but also destroyed the signs themselves. (3.8)

Thus the Christian reader, having been liberated from bondage to the letter of the law, is free to interpret the whole of Scripture spiritually, in charity and in truth.

Few interpreters have asserted their Christian freedom from literal meaning more forcefully than John Milton. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, for example, he defends the right of divorce in cases where the divine purpose of marriage—namely, companionship—is incapable of fulfillment. When confronted with Christ’s words in Matthew 5:32 (“whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery”), Milton replies that we must consider the occasion (controversy with the Pharisees) as well as comparable sayings of Christ (“in one place he censures an unchaste look to be adultery already committed, another time he passes over actual adultery with less reproof than for an unchaste look”). In such cases, Milton concludes, “we are not to repose all upon the literal terms of so many words.”

More important than the technical rules of exegesis, however, is what Milton calls “the all-interpreting voice of charity,” which is the great end of every divine commandment. Charity alone, Milton implies, should teach us that Christ did not intend to limit divorce to the sole cause of fornication in the literal, carnal sense. In fact, says Milton, we cannot believe a commandment that is inconsistent with charity. That is why Paul proclaimed, in 1 Cor. 13, that “charity believeth all things”—”not as if she were so credulous,” Milton explains, ” … but to teach us that charity is the high governess of our belief, and that we cannot assent to any precept written in the Bible, but as charity commends it to us.” This is not just the hermeneutics of love but also the epistemology of love.

As with Augustine’s hermeneutics of love, however, we must ask whether Milton’s hermeneutics of freedom is applicable to secular literature. It is worth noting that Milton himself applied the doctrine of Christian liberty, as taught by the Apostle Paul, to the reader of secular literature. I refer, of course, to the Areopagitica, Milton’s famous plea for the unlicensed printing of books. Quoting Paul’s reminder that “to the pure all things are pure,” Milton adds,

not only meats and drinks; but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil: the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said without exception, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat,” leaving the choice to each man’s discretion.

To this I would add that a purely literal reading of any text—not just the Scriptures—is liable to miss its true meaning.

I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for prompting these modest footnotes to his “hermeneutics of love.” Whether he will succeed in convincing his fellow academics to make love the law of interpretation remains doubtful. But if his little book accomplishes nothing except to send us back to Augustine, Milton, and other passionate Christian readers, he will have done us a great service indeed.

Mark Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University. With Susan VanZanten Gallagher, he is the editor of Literature and the Renewal of the Public Sphere (St. Martin’s).