One of the benefits of reading books with related themes back-to-back (or at least within a certain duration where the read is fresh) is that the reader can contextualize the content of latter more deeply than he or she otherwise could. I remember being in awe of the Syed Hussein Al-Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native within the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The theses in both work in my head feed on each other and make both of them even more profound. When I read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, I immediately followed up with Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms. While Armstrong explained the origin and evolution of Abrahamic monotheism through the lens Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Russell explored the minor offshoots of these three big religions by tracing how that divergence could have occurred. And every time Russell described some of the minor cults, I found myself understanding exactly how that cults’ belief evolved, thanks to material from Armstrong’s book.
I recently finished another of Karen Armstrong’s book—The Bible: The Biography and the next read was something related: the translation of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions. Any person with a passing interest in philosophy would have heard of Augustine, who lived in the 4th and the 5th century during the common era. He is perhaps better known to most as a major Christian theologian who rationalized certain foundational concepts in Christianity. Without him, Christianity or maybe more precisely Catholicism would have been a very different religion than what it is today.
But Confessions is not primarily a philosophical or theological work. Instead, it is mostly an autobiography full of, well, confessions of the author’s sins. These confessions essentially retell his conversion over the years from Mandeanism (which incidentally the subject of the first chapter of Heirs to the Forgotten Kingdom) to Catholicism.
Karen Armstrong in all likelihood would have read Confessions and she wrote The Bible: The Biography close to 2,000 years later. I can see that some of the points in the latter are obviously influenced by the former. But I experienced these two in the reverse order. And so when I read Confessions, I see echoes of Armstrong’s points, which undoubtedly originated from Augustine. As Augustine wrote centuries ago:
For this reason, although I hear people say ‘Moses meant this’ or ‘Moses meant that’, I think it more truly religious to say ‘Why should he not have had both meanings in mind, if both are true? And if others see in the same words a third, or a fourth, or any number of true meanings, why should we not believe that Moses saw them all? There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scriptures in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in each case!
For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend.
I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offence. And if this is what I would choose for myself, I will not be so rash, my God, as to suppose that so great a man as Moses deserved a lesser gift from you. As he wrote those words, he was aware of all that they implied. He was conscious of every truth that we can deduce from them and of others besides that we cannot, or cannot yet, find in them but are nevertheless there to be found.
This echoes the point highlighted by Armstrong that I wrote earlier: scriptures and texts should be interpreted and reinterpreted to reveal multiple truths that might not necessarily be evident if we stick to just one interpretation.
But this brings me to a more meta-concern.
The book in my hand is a translated version of Confessions and that, it is not the full Confessions. I was deeply unhappy when I discovered my edition was merely an abridged work, which the publisher failed to make it clear without going through the fine prints. At the time of purchase, I was unaware of its abridged nature since there is no indication of it on the front or the back page. That information was written in the copyright page. I am absolutely livid of this and the publisher should have made the fact plainly at the front page stating it is an abridged translation.
A translated book means a certain kind of interpretation is already set in stone but since I do not read the original language Confessions was written in (which is Latin) and that I do not intend to read multiple different translations of the book, I am happy to accept this limitation.
The worst limitation by far are the cuts made to the book. I learned the from the internet that possibly half, or even two-thirds of the content, had been disposed of.
This had a negative effect on my reading experience. I for one found Augustine’s conversion to Catholicism as unconvincing and his confessions seem… truncated. I was left to wonder if there was more context to consider that could have been his confessions and conversion more satisfying.
The abridge edition also appears to present Augustine as a person with an anti-science bias, as if he was rebelling against his secular training. There are multiple instances in the version where he criticizes those with inclinations to the natural sciences but a little investigation online reveals otherwise, that he has a deep respect science and tries to incorporate rational thoughts into his religion.
So, while I did learn new things from reading this abridged edition, I keep on questioning whether my interpretation of Confessions from this particular edition is trustworthy. Maybe, I managed to gain something out of it, as Augustine would have wanted, as he had indicated in the quoted passages above.