Take and Read
“Tolle lege, tolle lege.” St. Augustine hears a mysterious voice sing these words in a garden in Milan, beckoning him to “take and read.” At this strange invitation, he takes up St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and, inspired by the passage he finds there, at last commits himself wholeheartedly to God.
This moment of conversion has become quite famous. So famous, in fact, that we do not consider how differently it might have unfolded. After all, a call to conversion might have taken the form of a vision, or of some painful experience through which the need for God’s grace was revealed. Many other saints have had such experiences. But for this particular saint, the only appropriate summons to conversion was one inviting him to read.
From the beginning of his biography, Augustine makes it clear that he is the sort of man for whom reading is a high stakes affair. He picks up a copy of Cicero’s Hortensius, and commits himself to a life spent in the pursuit of truth. He studies the tracts of the Manicheans, and fervently throws himself into the practices of their cult. Even in the ambivalence he expresses about the influence of the Aeneid on his youthful mind, Augustine reveals his sense that the act of reading can always be a formative - or a de-formative - experience.
One gets the sense that Augustine never read casually, that every time he sat at his desk and opened a volume, he was under an acute awareness that the words he encountered there might compel him to reform his character. Augustine seemed to hear in every text he read the same words the poet Rilke suggested every great work of art speaks to us: “you must change your life.” So when, in the garden in Milan, Augustine turns to that passage in St. Paul, he is already prepared to respond to those words in the proper manner - by entirely changing the way he lives.
It is for this reason that Augustine serves as such an important model in my classes. We begin our sophomore year with a deliberate study of his Confessions, in order to introduce students to the distinctively Christian understanding of human nature that begins to emerge in its pages. But we also find in Augustine an exemplar of the right way to read.
I want my students to hear the voice of every author they encounter speaking uniquely and especially to them. I want them to approach their studies in the same spirit of reverence as Augustine, with “fear and trembling” towards the demands each text may lay upon their own character. And I want them to recognize that every time they pick up a good book, they might not be the same person by the time they put it back down - and that that’s the whole point of reading.