20057871

Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of Historical Experience
Author(s): Brian Stock

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 36, No. 1, Essays on the Humanities (Winter, 2005), pp.
1-17
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057871
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Ethics and the Humanities:
Some Lessons of Historical Experience1
Brian Stock
We live at A time when it is no longer fashionable to believe

that ethical behavior can be taught effectively by means of the
humanities.
Changes in the economics of higher education have reduced funding
for the literae humaniores, while controversies within its disciplines,
especially in literary studies, have created the impression among non
specialists that the field no longer has clearly articulated objectives.
These difficulties have fostered an atmosphere of negativity concerning
the subjects that normally fall within the humanities curricula. Some of
this feeling has inevitably spilled over into ethical issues.
One of the consequences of this negative attitude has been the virtual
abandonment of the notion that historical precedents are useful in
making ethical decisions. Historical materials routinely provide a back
ground for ethical inquiries, but few people believe, as they evidently did
in earlier generations, that the past is an authoritative guide for moral
conduct in the present. We pay less attention than we did even fifty years
ago to the main sources of traditional ethical doctrines in our culture,
ancient philosophy and biblical religion. Classical moral theories have
an honored place in the history of ethics, but they are not considered
necessary for the resolution of practical ethical problems. In religion we
have brought about a similar state of mind by separating inherited
beliefs from the evaluation of actions. The Dalai Lama has shrewdly
remarked that where ethics is concerned it does not seem to matter
whether the persons making the decisions are believers or not.2
There is a handful of historical events that have acquired moral
authority in our time: for example, Hiroshima, the Nazi death camps, or
the killing fields of Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, as a rule, moralizing has
disappeared from historical writing, just as historical considerations
have disappeared from ethical thinking. Books on ethics, even if they are
not philosophical, follow a pattern that was laid down in the time of
New Literary History, 2005, 36: 1-17
2 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, by which it is assumed that

historical factors need not necessarily be taken into account in the
analysis of ethical issues.
In the study of literature, too, there is a lot of talk about ethics, or
rather about its absence; but with the exception of Marxism (and
possibly new historicism) no contemporary school of criticism has had a
serious stake in history. The decline in interest in the historical dimen
sion of ethical problems can be charted through the major critical
movements of our time: New Criticism, structuralism, hermeneutics,
semiotics, deconstruction, and postmodernism. The acrimonious de
bates that have taken place over the ethical positions of figures like
Mircea Eliade, Martin Heidegger, and Paul de Man are less concerned
with what their views meant in their own time than in ours. The
contemporary theorist who has done the most to justify this focus on the
present is Michel Foucault, who empowered the notion of discours but
argued, erroneously in my view, that successive phases of this empower
ment were historically discontinuous.
In deemphasizing the historical context of ethical issues, the thinking
in a number of fields in the humanities has thus converged. As a
consequence, the disciplines that make up the literae humaniores are all
faced with a similar interpretive predicament. The teachers of these
subjects all address ethical issues in one way or another. But, with so
many inherited explanations in disfavor, they are no longer sure they
know what it is in people's education that fosters ethical behavior. To
add to the confusion, they are not convinced that the courses they teach
should have anything to do with ethical matters. We have entered a
period of soul-searching on these issues and there is no solution in sight.
As a response to this challenge, I suggest that we reexamine one of
our fundamental assumptions concerning ethics and the humanities.
This is our belief that the relationship between the two areas was firmly
established in earlier centuries and has come apart only in recent times.
Skepticism over the possibility of such a connection was in fact as
widespread in the past as it is nowadays. Our contemporaries have
nothing to teach ancient, medieval, and Renaissance students of the
theme, who rehearsed many of today's fashionable arguments against
the teaching of ethical behavior through literature, philosophy, or other
branches of the humanities.
The pertinent question is whether the humanities were ever successful
in teaching ethics, and, if so, how they managed to be so. This is an
important matter, if only because our educational institutions seem to
have run out of ideas on how to establish practical ethical norms that
can work against the widespread immorality affecting many of our
business and professional organizations. It may turn out that earlier
ETHICS AND THE HUMANITIES 3
thinkers on the role of ethics in the humanities have nothing to teach

us. But we will not know whether any of the solutions proposed over the
centuries are applicable to contemporary problems until we have a
better understanding of what they were.
II
The inquiry has to begin with a review of the methods utilized in the
routine teaching of ethics by means of the humanities in antiquity.
In the Graeco-Roman world this instruction usually took place by two
means, speech and writings.3 These forms of communication were
conveniently brought together in the practice of reading, which con
sisted in the vocal recitation of the written discourse, usually
unpunctuated, that was recorded on rolls or scrolls. A different type of
oral reading, possibly liturgical in origin, seems to have been the norm
in the other major literate culture in the Hellenistic world, Judaism. The
two educational systems, which were rivals on many intellectual issues,
shared an interest in reading as a foundation for moral instruction. This
similarity in method was to prove invaluable in late antiquity, when
Judaism consolidated the rabbinic tradition of exegesis and Christian
thinkers attempted to create a unified picture from the different ethical
doctrines in ancient philosophy and the Hebrew Bible.
In ancient Greece and Israel, texts were usually read aloud. Silent
reading was not unknown in antiquity but did not become widespread
until centuries later, toward the end of the Middle Ages.4 By that time,
two important changes in the nature of reading materials had taken
place, which can be dated, respectively, from the beginning and the end
of this lengthy period. From the second century CE, the codex book
superseded the ancient roll; and by the thirteenth century, the manufac
ture of paper had made its way from Islamic lands to Italy and Spain as
an inexpensive replacement for parchment. The next stage in the
evolution of book culture was of course the introduction of movable
type by Gutenberg, which took place in the 1450s. It was essentially these
technical achievements that laid the textual foundations for the Western
tradition of the humanities in the modern age.
When we speak of ethical values within this reading culture, we have
to take account of the different types of audiences for which books were
written. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, literate culture
was largely elitist. Books were scarce, expensive, and not widely distrib
uted. The major change in the size of the readership took place during
the eighteenth century, when the large-scale printing of books in the
vernacular languages made it possible for persons of limited means to
own private libraries for the first time. The presence of reading materials
accessible to people with moderate incomes was accompanied by a rise
in the rate of literacy in most Western countries. During the nineteenth
century, programs in general education were undertaken and book
culture reached many unlettered communities, particularly in the
countryside.
The expansion of literacy had political, and therefore ethical, implica
tions. Teaching people to read and write was popular with progressive
intellectuals like John Stuart Mill, who saw a connection between literacy
and economic development, as well as with Protestant and Catholic
thinkers who wanted to spread Bible culture in non-Christian lands.
Conservative rulers, fearing disruptive social changes, were notably less
enthusiastic about communicating literate disciplines to potentially
volatile masses of people. Nonetheless, the movement toward universal
literacy gained momentum after World War I, both in Western Europe
and, initially at least, in Soviet Russia. During the twentieth century, this
activity was extended to experiments on the way in which children learn
to read. While the focus of studies of reading and interpretation in
classes in literature remained the adult reader, the field of reading was
considerably expanded through inquiries into perception and cognition
in the period between infancy and adolescence.
Nowadays we do not question the usefulness of these developments,
even though it is clear that the rise of a more literate society has had
both positive and negative consequences. These have to be taken into
account in any attempt to generalize on ethical issues. While the benefits
of literacy appear to be obvious to both literates and illiterates, there are
nonetheless three types of problems that can be attributed to the spread
of a culture of reading and writing over time. First of all, from the period
of the establishment of Greek cities in Asia Minor to the heyday of the
British Empire, the spread of a literate culture has never been free of the
charge of intellectual colonialism. The most recent instance has oc
curred in the debate over "Orientalism." Also, the establishment of a
single dominant culture based on the written word has generally worked
against the perpetuation of linguistic pluralism: a recent example is the
imposition of Hebrew in Israel, which resulted in the decline of spoken
forms of Yiddish. Finally, as skills in reading and writing have gradually
penetrated the illiterate societies of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, both
Western and indigenous observers have complained that fragile oral
traditions have been threatened, along with the ethical values that they
enshrined. A classic statement of this problem is found in the celebrated
"writing lesson" in Claude L?vi-Strauss's Tristes tropiques.5
Objections to purely Western literate institutions have likewise arisen
from students of the venerable civilizations of China, Japan, and India,
which were faced with an unprecedented challenge to the inherited

forms of education in which ethics, spirituality, and religion were
intermingled. But concern with this issue has not greatly slowed the pace
of literacy's advance, since the prime motive has been economic, nor has
it brought about a serious questioning of westerners' faith in its
universally beneficial effects, which are usually defined in material
terms. It goes without saying that the influence of this normative literacy
has been greatly increased by film, television, and computers. These
media of communications may have brought about fundamental changes
in the way we think about the issues, as some have argued. But even if
this claim is exaggerated, there is no doubt that they have extended the
range of the dominant written languages, chiefly English. It can there
fore be argued that technologies like the Internet support the globaliza
tion of reading practices that have given continuity to Western educa
tion in the humanities since ancient times.
Because reading in the ancient world was largely oral, discussions of
the subject were inseparable from the analysis of other forms of spoken
discourse. Within these discussions the major fear on ethical grounds
that was expressed by classical thinkers concerned the status of rhetoric.
The standard way of presenting the rival positions in modern scholar
ship is by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Isocrates, who founded
their schools, respectively, in 387 and 393 BCE. In books 2, 3, and 10 of
the Republic and in the Laws, Plato criticizes the traditional role played
by the study of Homer in the moral education of the young. Poetry, he
argues, achieves its effects by creating literary illusions: this amounts to
teaching ethics by means of falsehood rather than truth. Of course,
Plato's dialogues are themselves works of high literary art, which are
even viewed by some scholars as a rival for ancient drama. Plato
nonetheless made it clear that the education of the "guardians" in
Socrates' imaginary republic should be based on a rational methodol
ogy, for which, in his view, the only acceptable model was mathematics.
By contrast, Isocrates did not leave a clearly articulated outline of his
program for the education of the young. Nor did he make Utopian
claims for the possibilities of education through instruction in virtues
like justice. Nonetheless, it is evident from his speeches that he advo
cated a literary approach to moral development that was underpinned
by rigorous training in public speaking. He was convinced that one
could become a better person by learning to speak with the grace and
eloquence of a distinguished orator.6 His program laid the foundation
for a type of humanism that was highly influential in the classical and
postclassical periods. Its most powerful spokesman in the ancient world
was Cicero, whose speeches were much studied as models of civilizing
rhetoric in subsequent centuries, especially during the revival of oratory
in the Renaissance.
It was Isocrates' plan for ethical education, therefore, rather than

Plato's, that became the norm for the teaching of ethics through
literature. In another respect, however, Hellenistic and late ancient
education abandoned the priorities of both thinkers. For each in his way
had advocated an oral mode of communication?in Isocrates' case, the
public speech, in Plato's, the spoken dialogue. In reality, the teaching of
ethics in the ancient world almost always took place through the study of
texts, since reading and writing, as Aristotle observed, were the means of
learning everything else.7 Training in these skills began in primary
school, where children progressed, as they do today, through the
alphabet, syllables, words, sentences, and continuous passages of prose
or verse. Because of the widespread use of reading materials in which
there was no word separation, learning to read sometimes presented
formidable difficulties for youngsters. The anthologies of literary texts
that were used in classrooms all reiterate the same familiar passages
from the heroic and lyric poets, which appear to have been recited from
memory as they were read aloud.
In the normal cycle of studies, the student passed through what we
would call primary, secondary, and university levels. In the first stage, he
was taught the rudiments of reading and writing by the ypa|i|iaTi(jTf|?,
or grammatista; in the second, more advanced literary and linguistic
matters by the ypcx|i|iaTiKO?, or grammaticus; and, in the third, he
mastered public speaking and literary criticism under the direction of a
priToap, or rhetor. Despite Plato's arguments in favor of philosophical
training, Hellenistic education was less concerned with developing the
student's powers of reasoning than with handing down its literary
heritage. Far from wishing to break with tradition, Henri Marrou notes,
the system "rested essentially upon the peaceful possession of an already
acquired capital."8 In late antiquity, the foundations of this type of
literary study were codified under four headings: textual criticism,
expressive reading, literary exposition, and value judgment. It was in the
last of these subjects that the grammatici and the rhetores attempted to
find an articulated moral or ethical scheme within a literary work.
Ill
The question we have to ask is whether this system was effective in

teaching ethics. The answer, to the degree we have one, is no.
The chief problem with the routine method of ethical instruction
through literature, in the ancient world as nowadays, is that it leads
invariably to the production of forms of thought rather than forms of
behavior. There is nothing within this scheme that teaches the student
how to relate what has been learned from texts to the ethical challenges
encountered in everyday life. The major literary works of moral inspira
tion in the Greek world, the epics of Homer, were in any case so remote
from the experience of the majority of people that they could serve as
moral guides only through allegorization. Furthermore, the methods of
teaching were grammatical and rhetorical, not philosophical: they did
not relate theory to practice but to interpretation, or, as Plato argued, to
the creation of illusions. An ethical situation in a text might give rise to
a second ethical situation in the reader's mind, but neither reflected
lived experience nor was their purpose to influence that experience
directly.
Ancient thinkers were not unaware of these issues, and as a conse
quence each major school of philosophy improvised ways of relating the
moral reading of texts to ethical practices in life. Pierre Hadot, the
acknowledged authority in the field, notes that these exercises could be
physical, as in the case of a dietary regime; discursive, as in the case of a
dialogue or meditation; or based on interior intuition, as in the case of
pure contemplation.9 Needless to say, these mental disciplines could
operate in the absence of the traditions of reading and writing that were
associated with more mundane ethical instruction in classical antiquity.
However, by the end of the Hellenistic period, the descriptions that we
possess of such techniques of thinking, including the dialogue, all point
to some form of involvement with the written word. A corresponding
literary genre also makes its appearance in relation to these exercises.
This is a hybrid form?a written transcription of what is presumably
conceived and composed as oral discourse. The understanding of these
works as literary texts helps considerably in determining the kind of
ethical instruction that their authors had in mind.
There are a number of examples of this mixed genre, among them
Cicero's Tusculanae quaestiones, which dates from around 46 BCE;
Epictetus's lectures (otcrrpt?at), which were edited and published by
Arrian around 130 CE; and Marcus Aurelius's un titled "Meditations,"
which were composed as a set of private memoranda after he became
emperor in 161 CE. The two best-known works in this tradition are
Seneca's Moral Epistles and Augustine's Confessions, whose models for the
integration of ethics and literature were often imitated by medieval and
Renaissance authors and are still widely studied today.
Seneca wrote his celebrated letters to Lucilius during the last two
years of his life, 63-65 CE. We do not have Lucilius's segment of the
correspondence, to which Seneca frequently alludes, nor do we know
much about this enterprising young man, who appears to have risen
rapidly through the ranks of the civil service to become procurator in
Sicily. But our appreciation of the Moral Epistles is not reduced by this
lack of biographical information, since the Seneca and Lucilius of the

letters are not conceived as persons of historical record but as literary
creations based on real people. In their combining of the actual and the
fictional they represent a significant innovation in the dialogue tradi
tion. This form was later imitated by Augustine and Petrarch, each of
whom invented dialogues in which historical figures take part.
Once we move beyond the particulars of the lives that Seneca's letters
convey, we realize that his purpose is chiefly to provide his audience with
an introduction to the means of acquiring secular spirituality within a
Stoic outlook, largely by means of reading and contemplation. As a
point of departure, he takes pains to outline the type of advice on
reading in depth that might have come out of any Hellenistic manual on
moral education.10 He warns Lucilius against reading too many books:
his disciple should limit himself to a small number of works of certain
distinction and study them carefully. To be everywhere is to be nowhere:
Nusquam est qui ubique est. In reading as in life, continual travel produces
many acquaintances but few genuine friends. A multitude of books has
the effect of a diversion: Distringit librorum multitudo. Lucilius cannot
read all the books he owns: he should own no more than he can actually
read. He should stick to proven classics, and, when he is overcome by a
craving for novelty, he should be disciplined enough to return to them
with renewed enthusiasm. From the many ideas that he finds in these
volumes, he should select just one each day as a fortification against
poverty, death, and misfortune. That is what Seneca says he does
himself: Ex pluribus, quae legi, aliquid adprehendo.
In such moments Seneca sounds more like a pedantic schoolmaster
than a serious moral thinker. But it soon becomes clear that he envisages
reading as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. The larger goal is
the making of a self-sufficient person, guided by precepts from within.
Lucilius's reading is intended to supply these principles of self-govern
ment: to this end, he is to memorize and mull over his gleanings from
different texts in all his moments of leisure, as if, so to speak, he were
engaging in a secular type of liturgical devotion. Reading is also the
starting-point for the mental discipline by which these maxims are to
become a part of his everyday life. In this respect, lectio, as it is presented
in the letters, consists in two successive phases, the reading itself and the
postreading experience. The reading focuses the mind, eliminates
distractions, and creates the conditions for inner tranquility. The
postreading experience uses the precepts taken from the texts as a point
of departure but then progresses by means of its own interior momen
tum and logic.
Seneca reminds Lucilius that the only thing we have wholly to
ourselves is the time at our disposition during our lives.11 If we are to
realize its value, our minds have to be concentrated on the present

rather than reminiscing on the past, which is irretrievable, or speculat
ing about the future, over which we have no control.12 Accordingly, his
advice to his disciple is to utilize reading as a way of raising his level of
self-awareness and providing himself with the principles of inner disci
pline. Again and again Lucilius is advised to persist in his studies, not
only for the intellectual benefits that they yield, but because, in focusing
his mind on the texts, he remains with himself in the present, enjoying
the "purified and well-ordered" mind that results from this inner self
awareness. Summarizing his view of the two-stage process, Seneca notes
that he will derive this enjoyment in the first place from his perusal of a
text, by which his mind is corrected and freed of imperfections, and
secondly from the mind's contemplation of its own unencumbered
insights.13 Speaking of his own studies at the beginning of letter 6, he
observes that he has not only been corrected but even transfigured in
this process: Lntellego, Lucili, non emendari me tantum sed transfiguran.
Seneca is the grand synthesizer of this Hellenistic tradition of philo
sophical contemplation in Latin literature. The corresponding figure in
early Christian writing is Augustine, who lived some three centuries
later, between 354 and 430. Seneca appears to have had little direct
influence on Augustine, but what Augustine says about the mechanics of
reading as a preparatory stage for inner experience is essentially in
continuity with what is found in the Moral Epistles.
The two authors are united through the use of a literary device that is
brought to a high state of art by Seneca's dramatic talents: this is the
soliloquy or interior dialogue. Augustine's adaptation of this technique
can be set in perspective if we recall that in the Moral Epistles the familiar
philosophical genre of the oral dialogue is in fact replaced by an
exchange of written letters. A different sort of dialogue is then created
mentally, as each correspondent speaks to himself about what the other
has said. (In the absence of Lucilius's letters, his interpretations are
sometimes incorporated into Seneca's responses.) In its production,
therefore, the Senecan letter proceeds from an oral to a written form,
whereas in its reception, from written to oral.
In contrast to Seneca, who makes the soliloquy a commentary on the
books he and Lucilius are reading together, Augustine takes as the
subject of his internal conversations his recollection of the events of his
life up to his thirty-second year. In the Moral Epistles, therefore, one
might propose that the ethical development of two figures is cotermi
nous with the unfolding of their compositions, whereas in the Confessions
a comparable development takes place as one version of Augustine's
self-representation succeeds another. This is Augustine's understanding
of the method of conversion outlined by St. Paul, in which an "old life"
is shed and a "new life" is born.
Augustine also differs from Seneca on another point. He is convinced

that he will never fully understand the motives for his actions. He does
not know why his body does not obey his mind, especially in resisting the
temptations of the flesh, as he notes in his celebrated soliloquy on the
"two wills" shortly before his conversion. For this reason he cannot
conceive of ethics as a purely rational system, which depends, as Socrates
argued, on the logic of argument alone. In attempting to account for
what he believes is not humanly accountable, Augustine is obliged to
introduce a somewhat different set of factors into the analysis of human
behavior: these are all literary strategies for understanding life narra
tives, along with the notion of grace, which is, among other things, a way
of defining the limits of such strategies. His views on these themes are
underpinned by a sophisticated philosophy of language in which it is
argued that we can never be certain of the connections between
thoughts, things in the world, and the words that we use to describe
either of them.
He also champions the view that much of what we know about
ourselves, and consequently what we use to make ethical decisions, is
constituted in our minds through memory. But memory is something
that we do not know completely either, since, even when we have total
recall, we do not recall what the memory is itself. He falls back on what
we can know for sure, and among those certainties he finds the
historical events lodged in our memories that we can verify through
authenticated accounts. As a creation in time, bound by his own history,
he is convinced that he can best achieve spiritual progress by imitating
the most exemplary figure from this historical record, namely Christ.
His faith in the incarnation is thus the basis for his limited self
knowledge: his belief in the possibility of such self-knowledge is the basis
for his faith in the reality of the incarnation. Porphyry, who opposed
such views, argued that they are founded on crude physicalism, but
Augustine desperately needed the physical, historical Christ in order to
transcend his own insurmountable physical desires.
Although Augustine wrote the Confessions as a bishop, in books 1 to 9
he described the period of his life when he was a layman. In this respect
he was talking about a period in which he was seeking ethical values
through the practice of an essentially secular type of spirituality. But
secularism failed dramatically. None of the philosophical systems that he
studied in his youth provided a satisfactory solution to the existential
problems that tormented him. In the end he returned to the religion
into which he was born, taking with him, however, many lessons from
ancient thought. Seneca represents the other pole of this experience.
Despite a firm belief in a Stoic god, his commitment to secular self
sufficiency remained unperturbed, even in the hour of his unjust death
by suicide at Nero's command.
What the two authors have in common is a belief in the reader's

ethical responsibility for postreading experience. Nowadays, this would
appear to be a strange, even somewhat bizarre notion. We do not make
authors responsible for what they write, and so it would seem illogical to
make readers responsible for what they read. But this is what the Moral
Epistles and the Confessions assume. It is evident to both Seneca and
Augustine that the initial sensory, perceptual, and cognitive aspects of
the reading experience cannot provide adequate guidance on ethical
matters. These activities depend on the passage of time, whereas
solutions to ethical problems have to be permanent, in their eyes, if they
are to have universal validity. In search of this changelessness they turn
from the reading to the postreading experience, in which the modalities
of the text are left behind and the individual is alone within the stillness
of his or her thoughts. There is also a change in the locus of ethical
activity: the first stage of reading is concerned with getting meaning out
of texts, whereas the second leads to methods for getting meaningful
behavior out of people.
Here they encounter problems that differ from those taught by the
grammatici and rhetores. Their attempted solutions provide a telling
illustration of the difference between reading and ethical experience in
the ancient world and the modern age. After the sixteenth century, we
assume that reading is usually done by a single person, who is alone with
a text, reading silently or aloud. If ethics, in a broad sense, can be
defined as a concern for the well-being of others, then proceeding from
the reading of a text to some form of ethically approved behavior would
imply a move from an experience that affects this individual to one that
affects others. By contrast, ancient reading was frequently a group
activity to begin with, in which a single person, such as a poet, orator, or
performer, read to others, who may not have been in possession of the
work in question. Reading therefore began with a collective, and
finished with an individual, experience: the vocal representation of the
text was shared by all who were present, but the postreading activity,
including a variety of interpretations, took place particularly in each
person. The separation of the oral reading from the silent interpretation
made it easier for the ancient reader to isolate the second phase of the
experience, to treat it autonomously, and to turn it into a mental
discipline whose methods and goals were different from the initial
encounter with the text. It was at this point that the reader was able to
communicate with himself, as did Seneca, or with himself and God, as
did Augustine.
I have spoken of ethics in this context as a preoccupation with the
well-being of others. This is another way of saying that for Seneca and
Augustine ethics is essentially concerned with the ancient ideal of
achieving happiness. Beau omnes volumus, they remind us, again and
again. Both authors wrote treatises on this theme with virtually identical
titles: De vita beata and De beata vita. What prevents us from being happy,
they agree, is the evil we bring on ourselves rather than the evil that is
brought about by forces beyond our control.14 They ask how we can
reorder our thoughts and emotions in order to counter the powerful
internal force of evil in our lives. They reject solutions that involve the
senses, the emotions, or material goods, all of which arise from the
outside, and ask instead for interior qualities?withdrawal and inner
discipline. They know that there is no sensory experience that is is free
of interpretation. Depending on the way we handle this interpretive
experience, we can either be enslaved to habit or freed from this type of
dependency.
For Seneca, the answer is to control the emotions, whereas for
Augustine, it is to try, however imperfectly, to transform them. Seneca is
convinced that our emotions are appendages that we can somehow do
without, as Darwin later argued on evolutionary grounds. Augustine
believes that emotions are a part of our genetic inheritance after the fall,
which we can never fully overcome: we can manage them but never
eliminate them entirely from the field of moral thought. He warns us
against taking an emotion out of context and giving it more importance
than it deserves, thereby unbalancing the harmony of our life-narrative.
This is the way he decribes himself in the episode involving the theft of
pears in Confessions, book 2. Instead, he asks us to adopt a hermeneutic
attitude toward the narratives that we live, in which we strive constantly
to relate the parts to the whole. In both authors, therefore, reading leads
to a study of the self that is intended to achieve selflessness. But in
Seneca this process is conceived as a virtue in itself, whereas in
Augustine it leads to the recognition that our self-understanding is
always incomplete. More than Seneca, Augustine is aware of the many
ways in which our lives are interdependent with those of others. Among
the lives that inhabit our minds are those that we have read about, as
Augustine himself read of the life of St. Antony.
IV
Seneca and Augustine provide examples of an effective method for

teaching practical ethics. But few people in the ancient world, including,
some have argued, Seneca himself, were willing to make the sacrifices
necessary to lead the type of philosophical life they recommended. Nor
did it have much success among lay people in the following centuries.
During the late ancient period and the early Middle Ages, there was
some continuity in the use of ancient spiritual practices in both lay
pagan and Christian groups. However, after St. Benedict, who died
around 550 CE, they became almost exclusively associated with the types
of devotional reading practiced by men and women who had entered
the religious life. With rare exceptions like Proclus, who died in 446 or
447 CE, we do not hear of such exercises carried on by lay people until
the second half of the eleventh century, when they made a shadowy
appearance in heretical groups opposed to the Church's hegemony over
the spiritual life. At that time there was a weak revival of Augustine's
major innovation in this tradition?the use of autobiography as a form
of self-scrutiny?in works like the Confessio fidei of John of Fecamp, the
anonymous biography of Christina of Markyate, and the De vita sua of
Guibert of Nogent. Systematic approaches to ethics likewise appeared in
Anselm of Canterbury, the School of Chartres, and above all Peter
Abelard.
This period marks a turning-point in the use of reading as a spiritual
practice. It is a time of genuine, sustained revival, but it is also a
transitional period when it becomes clear that the future of this
technique is in doubt. Abelard, who lived between 1079 and 1142,
provides an illustration of this dimension of the spiritual life and the
difficulties it was to face in the early modern period.
Abelard revived both the Senecan and Augustinian literary genres in
his correspondence with Heloise. The collection begins with the Historia
calamitatum, in which, like the bishop of Hippo, he offers his readers a
critical view of his early years as a scholar and teacher. The other letters
employ Seneca's method of spiritual elevation by means of correspon
dence between master and disciple, in which Heloise takes the part of
Lucilius. Seneca is the chief stylistic influence on the correspondence,
or, as some would have it, on its revision in the early thirteenth century.
In the letters of spiritual direction, moreover, which are the lengthiest
and most complex in the collection, Abelard writes as a layman, even
though he gives Heloise the advice of a person who is part of a religious
community. By contrast, in his Ethics, he speaks as a philosopher,
working things out rationally for himself instead of being guided by
biblical doctrines. This approach represents a return to Augustine by
another route, since his solution to the problem of sin follows book 1 of
De libero arbitrio, in which it is argued independently of theological
considerations that an evil action occurs when a person assents inter
nally to a wrongful act.
Abelard also stands at a crossroads on the question of ethics and
literature in another sense. Although he has recourse to two types of
ancient spiritual practice in his writings, namely the consolatio and the
confessio, he proposes to solve philosophical and theological problems by
means of a type of thinking unknown in antiquity, namely the scholastic
method. In this approach, an attempt is made to achieve a consensus

among different positions on a given question through the logical
comparison of written statements. The precondition for arriving at
agreement is a correct philological and philosophical scrutiny of such
writings. This type of reading is the antithesis of reading as a spiritual
practice, in which the goal is the subjective appropriation of the text for
the purposes of meditation and inner discipline. It is nowadays clear to
historians that Abelard was not alone in advocating this method,
although his Sic et non provides its first theoretical statement. Similar
methods were employed in Gratian's Concordance of Discordant Canons
and Peter Lombard's Sentences. A figure who reflects both tendencies is
Hugh of St. Victor, who wrote the first treatise in which the word
"reading" is found in a title, the Didascalicon sive de studio legendi. Hugh's
heart is in the ascetic life of the monastery, where spiritual practices
flourished, but his intellect looks forward to the rigorous thinking of the
nascent university.
These developments are part of the rise of more literate understand
ing in the twelfth century, in philosophy, theology, and other disciplines.
Earlier in this essay I spoke of some negative consequences of this
development in the early modern period, that is, colonial attitudes,
forms of cultural domination, and the weakening of oral traditions. An
equally serious problem was brought about by the spread of pragmatic,
instrumental, and wissenschaftliche reading techniques, which offered a
pathway toward ethics that differed profoundly from both secular and
religious spiritual practices. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
there was a large degree of mutual understanding between the propo
nents of these approaches, as can be seen, for example, in the mystical
theology of St. Bonaventure. However, between Petrarch and Erasmus,
the humanists turned their backs on both established methodologies,
the monastic and the scholastic, and attempted to reintegrate ancient
spiritual practices into Christianity. In the Secretum, which was written
between 1347 and 1353, Petrarch provided his readers with a virtual
inventory of such practices, which were outlined by the historical
Augustine as he tried in vain to detach the poet from his secular
pursuits. By the time Erasmus published the preface to his edition of the
New Testament in 1516, this notion had become transformed into the
philosophy of Christ ( Christianae philosophiae Studium, Christi philosophia) .15
Petrarch wrote his Secretum ostensibly for himself; the work was not
discovered until after his death, in 1378. By contrast, Erasmus counted
on the printing press to make his message accessible to everyone. In his
view, the only training that was needed for practicing the philosophy of
Christ was learning how to read.
The centuries between Seneca and Erasmus have important

teach those who are interested in the issues that relate eth
humanities. I would like to conclude with a few words a
these, which concerns two rather different conceptions of
process in ethical thinking.
Ancient readers, as noted, were convinced that nothing of
importance in ethics could arise from the sensory or percept
reading. The appearance of graphic symbols in the subject's v
the transformation of these symbols into visual or auditor
their incorporation into the mind/brain were considered t
tory events. As a consequence, ethical issues were taken up only
phase of the reading was completed.
For the modern reader, this experience is usually devo
uniquely to some form of interpretation, that is, to e
clarifying, or explaining the text, whereas for Seneca, Aug
later readers who shared their presuppositions, it was also
nity for achieving meditative self-awareness through readi
interesting but unexplained fact that there is no equiva
ancient or medieval worlds for the vast corpus of interpre
criticism that appears after the fifteenth century, when reading
have changed and interpretation has become the only w
postreading activity. The absence of this sort of writin
centuries is an indication that audiences directed their thin
postreading experience less toward the meaning in the text
toward the meaning for themselves. Reading was then, as it i
of acquiring information that could be useful in reach
decisions, but it was also an ascetic exercise through wh
focused their attention, withdrew from sense-perceptions, an
to achieve inner tranquility. It was in this state of mind, it w
that ethical questions could be taken up in a balanced, im
detached manner.
Readers were required to distinguish between two types of
each of which presented a different option for their ethical
In the initial phases of the reading process, the informatio
was primarily cumulative, since one sensory event succeede
the eye scanned the text, line by line. The typical respo
stimuli can be described as innovative, since there was no w
reader who was unfamiliar with the text in question to know
what it said. In the subsequent stage, the thinking was non
since perceptual activity had ceased and the information co
the text was lodged in the reader's mind. Thinkers who differed in
outlook were united in emphasizing the importance in postreading
experience of meditating on maxims, precepts, and other types of
proverbial wisdom. Seneca advised Lucilius to repeat a few sententiae
throughout the day. In Confessions, book 10, Augustine offered similar
advice based on biblical texts in an effort to control the attractions of the
five senses. Centuries later Erasmus was so fascinated by ancient adages
that he wrote an extensive philological commentary on their origin and
development.
Contemporary skeptics about the possibility of teaching ethics through
the humanities have reconstituted a part of the ancient discussion of
these questions. Basing themselves chiefly on the primary stage of the
reading process, they have deployed a variety of arguments to prove
once again that nothing of permanent value can arise from the activities
of reading and interpretation. A more difficult problem is how to
conceive postreading experience in a manner that fulfils its ancient
ethical responsibilities, granting that, within the context of contempo
rary education, it is improbable that there will be a return to the use of
spiritual practices outside religious communities. One potential contri
bution lies through a revision of the history of reading along the lines
recommended in this essay, which would eliminate the modernist bias
that sees all reading in instrumental terms, thereby permitting a more
balanced consideration of the different periods in the development of
ascetic, spiritual, and contemplative disciplines. It would also be possible
to engage contemporary skeptics in debate over the ethical conse
quences of our persistent attempts to relinquish responsibility for
postreading experience. Over the past five centuries we have greatly
extended readers' rights, and in this respect we have paved the way for
today's agenda-driven programs in literary studies. We now need to
remind readers of their traditional obligations, as we have in other
ethical issues in the media, for example, concerning the right to print
child pornography or to expose audiences to violence on television.
Bringing this type of engagement to the humanities would help to
ground ethical instruction in the personal experience of the individual,
where it had a legitimate place in the ancient, medieval, and Renais
sance periods.
University of Toronto
NOTES
1 This essay is based on a lecture for the Forum for Contemporary Thought and the
Institute of Practical Ethics, University of Virginia, in cooperation with New Literary History,
on September 30, 2002.
2 Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai Lama XIV, Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for the
New Millennium (London: Abacus, 2000), 20.
3 The use of images did not play a large role in teaching in ancient times, in contrast to
the late Middle Ages, when imagistic aids were used by preachers and others in the field of
ethics.
4 On this topic, see Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
5 Claude L?vi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Pion, 1955), chap. 17.
6 Compare with Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts lib?raux et philosophie dans la pens?e antique (Paris:
Etudes augustiniennes, 1984), 16-18.
7 Aristotle, Politics VIII, 1338a, 15-17, 36-40.
8 Henri Ir?n?e Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New
York: New American Library, 1964), 225, and elsewhere, on which I have drawn in these
paragraphs.
9 Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002), 6.
10 Quotations in this paragraph are from Seneca, Moral Epistles 2.
11 Sen. Ep. 1.3: "Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tan turn nostrum est."
12 Sen. Ep. 5.8-9.
13 Sen. Ep. 4.1.
14 Sen. Ep. 16.1 and De beata vita, pref.
15 Desiderius Erasmus, "Paraclesis," in Ausgew?hlte Werke, ed. Annemarie Holborn and
Hajo Holborn (Munich: Beck, 1933), 139, 140.

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Ethics and the Humanities: Some Lessons of Historical Experience

Author(s): Brian Stock

We live at A time when it is no longer fashionable to believe

New Literary History, 2005, 36: 1-17

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, by which it is assumed that

thinkers on the role of ethics in the humanities have nothing to teach

which were faced with an unprecedented challenge to the inherited

It was Isocrates' plan for ethical education, therefore, rather than

The question we have to ask is whether this system was effective in

lack of biographical information, since the Seneca and Lucilius of the

realize its value, our minds have to be concentrated on the present

Augustine also differs from Seneca on another point. He is convinced

What the two authors have in common is a belief in the reader's

Seneca and Augustine provide examples of an effective method for

method. In this approach, an attempt is made to achieve a consensus

The centuries between Seneca and Erasmus have important

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