Literature in the News: St. Augustine On Why We Read

This is not really a news item but an essay I came across on why we read and thought it would interest my readers.  The essay comes from the website, The Catholic Thing, and the essay is by Aaron Urbanczyk, who I have never heard of before.  Mr. Urbanczyk laments the demise of reading great books, even at a university level. 

Teaching the great texts has diminished at an astonishing rate for numerous reasons, but two in particular stand out.  For many professional educators, reading is increasingly oriented toward the marketplace and getting a job.  Furthermore, humanistic learning has been dismantled by postmodern critiques, which maintain that texts are unstable, non-signifying, and without reference to truth.

I haven’t kept up with what goes on in literature departments at universities, but when I was going to college, many professors were already watering down their reading lists in the name of diversity.  There are only so many books one can assign for class, and if you have to spread the coursework to include recent works that have not met the test of time, then you can see how a coursework gets watered down.  He continues:

At universities, the great texts are often deconstructed along lines of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation.  After several decades of such ideological demolition, students and parents have reasonably concluded that the humanities are badly politicized and irrelevant, and en masse have migrated to more sensible, practical majors.

Yes, that was already going on some twenty years ago when I was in graduate school.  So what are we missing out?  Urbanczyk finds the answer in At. Augustine of Hippo.

But why should we study the great texts? St. Augustine of Hippo provides a coherent rationale.  The often touted reasons these days for reading great texts – being “well rounded,” or articulate, or culturally “sensitive” – Augustine regards as either irrelevant or a deception. For Augustine, we read great texts for one purpose:  to become wise.  Reading for any reason other than the sapiential motive is trivial.  The Confessions offers his clearest articulation of this view; he argues there that wisdom should lead to personal transformation – a matter of life and death.

The answer is for wisdom.  The classics have demonstrated in a time tested way that their message provides truth.  I’m just going to provide one more quote:

Human beings don’t read simply for information, rhetorical skill, know-how – our real reasons are deeper. Near the end of Confessions, Augustine exclaims, “Let me confess to you [Lord] what I find in your book.” This prayer is an interpretive key to Augustine’s autobiography.  Reading great texts over many years cultivated in Augustine the habit of wisdom, which equipped him to read the one book – the Word of God – which, read well, is the transformation and salvation of the soul.

You can read the rest of his very insightful essay, here.  

I hope here at this blog I am distilling some of the wisdom from the great books for you.