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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)
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