Brian Stock's Integrated Self is not a book for the faint of heart. In this discussion of Augustine's understanding of the self as it relates to his interpretation of scripture, Stock delves deeply, not only into the thought of the bishop of Hippo, but also into the preceding philosophical context that influenced Christianity in late antiquity, presenting careful reflections on topics such as soliloquy, music, medicine, and memory. In the process, Stock takes his readers on a demanding but rewarding journey into numerous related aspects of the intellectual world that provided the setting for Saint Augustine's understanding of the human person in relation to the biblical text.

Stock, who until 2007 taught history and literature at the University of Toronto, is well-known to students of Augustine and of his understanding of interpretation. In Augustine the Reader (Harvard University Press, 1996), Stock explored Augustine's view of the self in relation to his understanding of reading in the Confessions and showed how Augustine arrived at a self-understanding through a re-reading of narratives that were lodged in his mind. Augustine's Inner Dialogue (Cambridge University Press, 2010) focused on Augustine's use of soliloquy in the Confessions, The City of God, and The Trinity. This new publication, The Integrated Self, continues the trajectory of these earlier publications and again focuses on Augustine's dialogues, his understanding of the self, his understanding of sacred reading, and the role of memory in each of these.

The title of Stock's book alludes to the fact that Augustine used a variety of disciplines to articulate his notion of the self, and it also highlights Stock's important theme of Augustine's move away from a dualistic, Platonic understanding of the human person to one that is inspired largely by the Bible (1). As Stock sees it, “Augustine's view of the self is based on biblical history. Philosophical discussions of the soul . . . have to be viewed in the context of the events recounted in the Bible” (4). Stock explains that as Augustine matured, he was less and less convinced that philosophical methods, such as the Socratic elenchus or dialogue, remind us of eternal verities, and began instead to rely increasingly on sights “arrived at by means of hermeneutics and the interpretation of passages of Scripture” (147). Unlike Plato, Augustine recognized the prominent role of history as an intermediary between the temporal and the eternal (74).

Stock makes this argument for an integrated, biblically shaped self in Augustine in the course of six chapters. The first outlines the approach to sacred reading as found in John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia, both of whom insisted on the importance of renouncing “an autonomous or independent self” (18). The second chapter deals with sacred reading in Augustine, a practice that Stock links with Augustine's appropriation of classical thinking about creative imagination, particularly in Cicero and Quintilian. Stock makes clear that Augustine went beyond his philosophical predecessors by relating the imagination to his own (conversion) experience. Chapter 3 deals with Augustine's appropriation of the Socratic elenchus. After sketching the literary form of dialogue as it developed in Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, Stock next turns to Augustine's appropriation of Plotinus's Enneads in the Cassiciacum dialogues and in some of Augustine's later writings. Stock concludes that Augustine's and Boethius's use of the dialogue prepared the way for later medieval appropriations of the philosophical soliloquy (126).

The discussion on “Self and Soul” in chapter 4 focuses on Augustine's works De immortalite animae and De quantitate animae. Here Stock argues that Augustine's move toward an integrated self arose from his combination of a revised Platonism and biblical Christianity, in which the “self” is the result of a “synthesis of the psychological and physical elements in the person's makeup” (137). Stock observes a similar move away from Platonism in Augustine's revision of the Platonic notion of reminiscence, a topic that Stock discusses in chapter 5. He explains that, for Augustine, anamnesis was not the recollection of a previous life, but the combination of cultural (and literary) memory and liturgical performance (147). Stock also provides here a lengthy and detailed discussion of how memory, time, and morality function in Augustine's De musica. The concluding chapter deals with the role of reading and meditation in medicine; Stock observes that ever since Hippocrates, Western medicine has largely been naturalistic (202–204), thereby avoiding mind-body practices.

Stock's treatment of various aspects of human personhood and its relationship to reading displays his in-depth knowledge of ancient philosophy, of Augustine, and of the history of meditative practices in the history of Western thought. Many scholars, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, will find Stock's book a rewarding reading experience. At times, the reader may wish for greater overall consistency in the argument that is unfolding in the book: it may seem out of place to begin a book that focuses on Augustine with a chapter on Cassian and Benedict of Nursia, and also at other times, the African bishop seems a little removed from the discussion. In the chapter on “The Philosophical Soliloquy,” Augustine is merely one of a number of authors discussed (Boethius being the last), and the final chapter almost completely leaves Augustine behind for a broader discussion of the role of meditation in healing. That said, in each of these instances, the relationship between personhood and reading (meditation) does remain central.

On another note, I wonder about the felicity of the expression “the self” in connection with Augustine. The term seems anachronistic in the context of late antiquity, and particularly with regard to Augustine. While Stock has both Augustine and Jesus refer to people's “selves” (130, 134, 138–139), these translations are rather free. I do not mean to say that Augustine maintained a body-soul dualism throughout his career, and Stock is certainly right to suggest that the Bible (and the history it relates) deeply shaped Augustine's perception of the human person. Nonetheless, the modern notion of the self is of course hardly the same as Augustine's “integrated self,” and so a more cautious use of vocabulary would not be inappropriate. Despite these reservations, Stock has again provided an erudite and scholarly discussion that elucidates our understanding of the relationship between human personhood and reading practices in late antiquity.