How Augustine Eats Yet Still Has His Hermeneutical Cake
©Lawson G. Stone, 2005
Buckle your seat-belts. This is gonna be long. It's time to bite the bullet and think about St. Augustine's hermeneutic. This terrifies me. In matters patristic, I am not an expert with a vast knowledge of Augustine's works. I'm a rank amateur who reads Augustine because I just like the guy. The Himalayan mountain of scholarly literature that looms over the debates about Augustine's manner of interpreting the Bible also makes a guy hesitate. As if that weren't enough, Augustine himself wrote rather self-consciously on his interpretive values, and an adequate discussion should integrate Augustine's methodological writing in works like On Christian Doctrine and On the Spirit and the Letter with his actual practice as an interpreter. Then, of course, Augustine could not stop writing about Genesis 1! The guy needed a recovery group or something, you know? He has serious studies of this chapter in Confessions, then he wrote several treatments on Genesis, one called Genesis According to the Literal Sense, and he also returns to creation in City of God. Surely, the best approach would be to integrate all these works. Maybe when I'm done raising the dead, walking on water, and grading my papers, I'll give it a shot! I've read On Christian Doctrine, but I'm by no means prepared to do that larger correlation, and that troubles me. I'm a hobbiest when it comes to early church history so take what I say here as one guy's attempt to make sense of what Augustine says in one, and only one (albeit one very important) locus.
Book 12 of his Confessions caught my eye precisely because Augustine repeatedly poses to himself, to God, and to the reader the question "Is my interpretation of Genesis 1 the meaning Moses intended?" Since Augustine is part of the "western" tradition of exegesis, he would claim that he is interested primarily in the literal sense of the text. In fact, Augustine actually states in On Christian Doctrine that every important truth of the faith, and every important prescription for Christian conduct, is plainly stated in the literal sense of the Bible, somewhere. He claims that one should only read the text figurally when the literal sense itself contradicts the aim of biblical study, the formation of the reader in Christ toward faith, hope, and love. Thus Augustine saw himself as standing at some remove from, say, Origen and Didymus the Blind, as representatives of the Alexandrian "school" of interpretation. So Augustine's thoughts about the validity of his reading explore those things that he considered important for the sensus litteralis of scripture. And in Book 12 of the Confessions, the front-and-center question is the intended meaning of the author.
I'll try to summarize Augustine's understanding, to the best of my ability, in a series of observations. The first three I've already discussed, but I'd like here to restate and extend them.
Observation One: Augustine ascribes to "Moses' meaning" (i.e. the author's meaning) a high value, claiming that it would be the most "exalted" interpretation. He believed no divinely inspired author could have written any falsehood or error, and that the biblical writers were taught by the Spirit what to write, even though they wrote in language that some would consider simple and "lowly." So the faithful Christian reader cannot simply ignore or dispose of the question of what Moses, or any biblical author, meant in their writing.
Observation Two: Augustine expresses significant uncertainty about how precisely and exhaustively we can know Moses' intended meaning in Genesis 1, and by extension, the meaning intended by any biblical author But this uncertainty does not bring the exegetical enterprise to a halt. Rather, if an interpretation (a) fits the wording of the text, (b) coheres internally with the text's line of argument (res gestae another component of literal sense), and (c) does not conflict with the overarching message of the Bible, he will not reject that interpretation merely because he does not know if that was the meaning the inspired author intended. His shorthand for this is to claim that the interpretation is "true" or is "the Truth." So Augustine asks God in Confessions 12.24.33:
...who among us has discovered what you [God] meant by these words? Who can say that in his narrative Moses meant this or that as confidently as we can say this or that interpretation is true, whether Moses meant it or something else? ...Would I say with the same confidence that this was what Moses made in mind, when he wrote in the beginning God made heaven and earth? Through your truth I see that this is certainly true; but I cannot see what Moses had in mind when he wrote these words....I see that he could have meant any of these things, and still spoken the truth. I do not see what Moses, that great and holy man, beheld in his mind when he uttered these words; but whether it was one of these things or something else I have not listed, I do not doubt that he saw what was true, and expressed it in fitting terms.
I'll return to this quotation below. For now, Augustine's inability to get into the mind of an ancient author places a boundary on how much that factor in isolation should control the outcome of exegesis.
Observation Three: Augustine does not yield to either extreme suggested by my first two observations. Here he parts company with both moderns and post-moderns. On the one hand, contra post-moderns, clearly Augustine thought the question of the writer's aspirations regarding the text played a critical role. On the other hand, contra so-called Enlightenment Modernity, Augustine did not make the writer's original meaning the exclusive, final or controlling standard. But, Contra post-moderns, Augustine did not think this lack of finality demanded abandoning the quest for authors' meanings as a shaping force in the text's interpretation.
So how does Augustine hold together an eager interest in the authors' meanings and a happy confidence that even absent definitive knowledge of Moses' intention, we may still know the truth of scripture? The long quotation above provides some clues. Augustine assesses his reading of the text constantly with reference to authorial intention functioning as a kind of foil, one of the foci in an ellipse. It seems to me that Augustine would have not entertained as a right interpretation something he thought Moses clearly would have denied. Here Augustine introduces a major criterion for interpretation: the Truth. This is Observation Four: Augustine believes the author, the text, and the reader all serve the Truth. This Truth transcends the authors, texts, and readers. This Truth exists outside them, indeed, the authors and their texts serve the Truth, and readers come to the texts to find the Truth. And this Truth inhabits the church. Sometimes Augustine seems to mean the church's confession, other times he seems to mean the overarching narrative of scripture as a whole, found in the "plain" passages of the Bible. Likely he sees both constituting the Rule of Faith.
I need to think more about what Augustine means by "the Truth" but in Book 12, he constantly points out that a particular intepretation is "true" and so unobjectionable, even if we don't know whether Moses meant that particular meaning. Augustine reasons that an inspired author would be instructed and gifted by God to write in such a way that no statement that could be born by the wording of the text, that fit the flow of the text's narrative or argument (res gestae again), that did not conflict with the confession of the church, which commended itself to godly observation and reflection, and which tended to move the reader toward faith, hope, and love, would be "wrong." At times Augustine seems to feel that Moses actively and conciously intended that the full range of meanings meeting these criteria would be right. In one quaint passage (quoted below) he basically argues "That's how I'd have felt if I'd been Moses!" (Moments like that are one reason I love this guy!).
For now, let's note that Augustine raises a caveat for both moderns and post-moderns. Both of these Spawn of Kant share a disquiet with.. Truth. Both want truth, especially the truth about God and salvation, to be...negotiable. Neither wants an inconvenient "meta-narrative" to bound their "meaning making." Both prefer the truth to be inaccessible, valuing the lattitude for a multiplicity of "stories" afforded by Truth's elusiveness. Kant's modernist children show their stripes by marshalling the open-endedness of the historical quest to undermine any witness to...the Truth. It's somewhat out of context, but I think Augustine exposes the mendacity of both when, in attacking those who quibble over his interpretation not being that of Moses, he says
Rather they are proud and know not Moses's meaning, but love their own, not because it is true but because it is theirs (Confessions 12.25.34 emphasis added)
Neither wants to be held accountable to a Truth that simply sits there and demands allegiance. To both groups, I suspect--but I am no expert--Augustine would say "A pox on both your houses!" Those who love the Truth do not put that truth at risk when they confess the inadequacy of their historical quest for the inspired authors' meanings because they are not seeking to escape anything. They are simply being humble. Likewise, those who love the Truth will not hold it hostage to a quest that inherently cannot end, and that might never return a final answer. They will pursue their quest, but realize that even as we pursue the truth we are embraced and sustained by "the Truth."
Finally, in his infatuation with "the Truth" Augustine entertains another idea that allows him to affirm authorial meaning without being locked into a hopeless dilemma by the impossibility of defining it exhaustively. Observation Five: The Truth, Augustine argues, can emerge in a variety of interpretations. So, contramodern Kant-kin, Augustine does not seem to think that "what Moses meant" demands a single or unitary meaning of the text. Any interpretation that squares with the language and is "true" he believes likely comports with Moses' intention. In Confessions12.26.36 Augustine prays:
...I cannot believe you would give Moses, your faithful servant, less of a gift than I would hope and pray that you give me,...I would want you to give me such ready eloquence, such skill at weaving language, that those who cannot yet understand how God creates, would not reject my words as going beyond their own powers, nor would those who can understand find that I, your servant, had in the course of my few words overlooked any notion that they had themselves formed in the course of their own meditations, so long as that notion were true; and that if any one of them had by the light of Truth come upon any other notion, it would not be impossible to take that meaning also from my words
Again, not being an Augustine scholar, I invite response from those who know Augustine more thoroughly than I. But it seems to me that Augustine believes that God enabled Moses to pen words that ultimately could cohere with anything later revealed by God to be true, even if unknown to Moses himself. This is not a concept of sensus plenior that inheres somehow in the words, but a peculiar susceptibility of the words to denote realities not yet known to the writer. The inspired words are re-usable. Augustine's sense of multiple meanings seems to arise from his views of inspiration and providence. The warrant for going beyond Moses appears in the recognition that the NT illuminates the text and discloses an importance far beyond that seen or intended by Moses, and that the totality of the biblical presentation of God's saving way with humanity, expressed in the church's regula fidei provide both a heuristic resource and a sensible boundary. Moses is caught up in the total purpose of God. Moses' words, therefore, can express that purpose even when it transcends the immediate meaning he intended.
On the surface, we might think Augustine's sanguine attitude toward multiple meanings would comport well with a more post-modern approach to meaning. This, however, collides with Augustine's argument. Augustine grounded his sense of a sacred text expressing a multiple meanings on (a) the direct divine inspiration experienced by the author, namely, Moses; (b) the existence of Truth outside the author, the reader, and even the text, to which the author and text bear witness, and to which readers must submit; and (c) the larger structure of the canon with its narrative flow and discursive coherence. In other words, it is a bounded multiplicity of inter-related meanings flowing out of a vastly different set of assumptions from those that claim that absolute spiritual Truth does not exist, or cannot be known, or that meanings do not exist in texts but are "made" by readers out of the dialectic of linguistic polysemy and social conditioning. The assumptions driving much post-modern heremeneutic collide as violently with Augustine's argument, and faith, as the historicism of the 19th century.
So in our exploration of what the "minters" of the concept of an authoritative literal sense of scripture meant by that idea, we find in Augustine a genuine interest in authors and their meanings, a godly humilty about the limits of that search, and a godly confidence in the Truth. The believer can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the truth of scriptures in the midst of a salutary and fruitful quest for the authors' meanings which will refine, clarify, correct, and often extend the reader's knowledge of, and delight in, the Truth.
I want to spend some more time on this, because other ancient intepreters go even farther than Augustine in their concern for the transaction between the text's producers (authors, editors, compilers) and its consumers (readers).
So the next question I want to explore is this: just what does a dead fish have to do with interpreting the Bible?
A Kentucky drystone masonry fence has no mortar. The artisan places the stones so that their own weight and peculiar shapes hold them together from within. At first sight the stones can seem ill-fitted. Small stones occupy odd spots, loose fill can be seen spilling out. But the stones are placed to shift over time. Weather, oddly shaped stones, shifting ground, incidental damage, rather than undermining the fence, actually compact it together through the years, so that the fence grows even stronger and more beautiful. These fences have stood for over 150 years. Sometimes I feel my own thoughts to be ill-fitted, uncemented, and loose, but I trust under the pressure of the years and the forces of life, they can somehow fit together as well...
