Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine's Early Figurative Exegesis (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780199751297, 0199751293

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Christ Meets Me Everywhere

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia THE UNACCOMMODATED CALVIN Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition Richard A. Muller

THE JUDAIZING CALVIN Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms G. Sujin Pak

THE CONFESSIONALIZATION OF HUMANISM IN REFORMATION GERMANY Erika Rummell

THE DEATH OF SCRIPTURE AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL STUDIES Michael C. Legaspi

THE PLEASURE OF DISCERNMENT Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian Carol Thysell

THE FILIOQUE History of a Doctrinal Controversy A. Edward Siecienski

REFORMATION READINGS OF THE APOCALYPSE Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg Irena Backus

ARE YOU ALONE WISE? Debates about Certainty in the Early Modern Church Susan E. Schreiner

WRITING THE WRONGS Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation John L. Thompson

EMPIRE OF SOULS Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth Stefania Tutino

THE HUNGRY ARE DYING Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia Susan R. Holman RESCUE FOR THE DEAD The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity Jeffrey A. Trumbower AFTER CALVIN Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition Richard A. Muller THE POVERTY OF RICHES St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered Kenneth Baxter Wolf REFORMING MARY Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century Beth Kreitzer TEACHING THE REFORMATION Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 Amy Nelson Burnett THE PASSIONS OF CHRIST IN HIGH-MEDIEVAL THOUGHT An Essay on Christological Development Kevin Madigan

MARTIN BUCER’S DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION Reformation Theology and Early Modern Irenicism Brian Lugioyo CHRISTIAN GRACE AND PAGAN VIRTUE The Theological Foundation of Ambrose’s Ethics J. Warren Smith KARLSTADT AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUCHARISTIC CONTROVERSY A Study in the Circulation of Ideas Amy Nelson Burnett READING AUGUSTINE IN THE REFORMATION The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 Arnoud S. Q. Visser SHAPERS OF ENGLISH CALVINISM, 1660–1714 Variety, Persistence, and Transformation Dewey D. Wallace, Jr. THE BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION OF WILLIAM OF ALTON Timothy Bellamah, OP MIRACLES AND THE PROTESTANT IMAGINATION The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany Philip M. Soergel

GOD’S IRISHMEN Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland Crawford Gribben

THE REFORMATION OF SUFFERING Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany Ronald K. Rittgers

REFORMING SAINTS Saint’s Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 David J. Collins

CHRIST MEETS ME EVERYWHERE Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis Michael Cameron

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ON THE TRINITY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD In Your Light We Shall See Light Christopher A. Beeley

Christ Meets Me Everywhere Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis

michael cameron

1

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cameron, Michael. Christ meets me everywhere : Augustine’s early figurative exegesis / Michael Cameron. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes. ISBN 978-0-19-975129-7 1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. I. Title. BR65.A9C26 2012 220.6092—dc23 2012003854

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To my sons, Erik and Matthew To my wife, Lorie sine quibus non

Sed nos, iam corpus Christi, agnoscamus in psalmo vocem nostram et dicamus ei: Narraverunt mihi iniusti delectationes, sed non sicut lex tuae, Domine. Christus mihi ubique illorum librorum, ubique illarum scripturarum peragranti et anhelanti in sudore illo damnationis humanae sive ex aperto sive ex occulto occurrit et reficit. Ipse mihi et ex nonnulla difficultate inventionis suae desiderium inflammat, quo id quod invenero, avide sorbeam medullisque reconditum salubriter teneam. But let us, who are now the body of Christ, acknowledge our voice in the Psalm, and say to him: “The unjust have told me stories of their pleasures, but they are nothing compared to your Law, O Lord.” As I journey through it, breathing hard in that sweat of our human condemnation, Christ meets and refreshes me everywhere in those Books, everywhere in those Scriptures, in their open spaces and in their secret haunts. He sets me on fire with a desire that comes from having no little difficulty in finding him. But that only makes me eager to clutch whatever I find, to soak it deep into my bones, and to hold it close for my salvation. (Against Faustus the Manichee 12.27 [CSEL 25/1: 356])

Contents

Preface Abbreviations

ix xv

Introduction: Ask, Seek, Knock: Approaching Augustine’s Figurative Reading

3

PART ONE: Novice: Rhetor, Convert, Seeker of Wisdom (386–391) 1. Eureka! in Milan: When Ambrose Taught Augustine What He Already Knew

23

2. A Thousand Words Is Worth a Picture: The Experiment of On Genesis, Against the Manichees

43

3. Enigma Variations: Playing Hide-and-Seek in the Figurative Reading Framework

77

4. Book Binder: Christ the Glue of Scriptural Unity

97

PART TWO: Journeyman: Priest, Apprentice, Student of Paul (391–396) 5. Reading Moses in the School of St. Paul: The Apostle and Christology 101

133

6. Hearing Voices: Christ at Prayer “in the Psalm and on the Cross”

165

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PART THREE: Master: Teacher, Defender, Pastor of Souls (396–ca. 400) 7. High and Low on Jacob’s Ladder: Reading Scripture from Both Ends in On Christian Teaching and On Instructing Beginners

215

8. The Old Testament as the First Book of the New: Augustine Figures It Out Against Faustus the Manichee

251

Epilogue: The Astounding Exchange

283

Notes Bibliography Scripture Index Works of Augustine Index Author and Subject Index

293 361 382 388 397

Preface

reading augustine is like contemplating a cathedral, not a chapel. When Oliver O’Donovan wrote the foreword to the reprint of John Burnaby’s landmark study, Amor Dei: A Study in the Religion of St. Augustine, he explained how the gentle Cambridge scholar sustained his decades-long engagement with Augustine’s works. Burnaby, he wrote, “had found in Augustine of Hippo a Christian whose thought was large enough for a modern believer to devote a lifetime to.”1 A few decades into my own study of the great North African, I can now say that I know what Burnaby felt. “Large” indeed—broad, capacious, multifaceted, with grand features that nearly incarnate timeless universal truth itself, but also with hundreds of nooks and crannies belonging decisively to their time that variously fascinate, amaze, provoke, confound, or just confuse. But for all this variety Augustine reaches into the whole range of human experience, a single titanic mind that embraces the familiar and the strange while displaying both sublime harmonies and jarring contradictions.2 His sheer size makes Augustine a genuine companion for life, a friend for the journey from whom one might learn without idolizing and might dissent without bickering, as one might dissent from oneself (see Conf. 4.8.13). This outsized Augustine has been a companion like that for me and for many. All this from a man of antiquity who remains relevant to many discussions in our day, even nonreligious ones, from pre- to postmodern thought, from political science and depth psychology to philosophies of history and theories of language. And, of course, theology: Augustine remains an inexhaustible source for Christian thought and life, like the Gothic cathedral that has remained a functioning parish church. Why this book? I’ve always wanted to know what made this man’s mind tick. The best first place to look for an answer is, of course, the Confessions, the shimmering literary edifice rising up from the late antique landscape that remains a must-read for a modern liberal education, even for those

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without any interest in Augustine’s intense Christian spirituality. More than a millennium and a half after he wrote, readers of all kinds still find themselves enchanted by its rhetorical savvy, childlike candor, surging emotion, astute observations and blistering self-analysis. But they soon also become aware of having stepped into sacred space. Opening Confessions reminds me of entering Chartres Cathedral in the French countryside southwest of Paris. The atmosphere suddenly changes as you pass under the massive judgment scene on the west façade. Light, temperature, and sound seem different, and everything compels the senses toward a heightened way of seeing and feeling. How to take in such magnitude? First-time visitors to Chartres invariably gaze upward at the dazzling sculpture and stained glass, trying to make sense of everything they see; yet often they do not notice the cathedral’s own best clue to understanding, strategically placed beneath their feet. There an enormous labyrinth built into the floor lies, with a rose at the center, symbolizing the long, twisting journey of spirit that one must take in order to truly arrive at this place, that is, inwardly as well as outwardly. The labyrinth at ground level readies the mind to explore the mysterious stories above. I suggest that Augustine, with no little difficulty, learned a similar lesson about Scripture itself, which jolts readers by first commending the humility of “divinity made weak at their feet” (Conf. 7.18.24) before raising them up to envision the sublime. While Chartres offers itself as the vestibule of heaven, the Scripture maze of Confessions seeks to bring readers into the anteroom of spiritual truth. Augustine’s figurative reading likewise leads readers along a labyrinthine path of asking, seeking, and knocking that prepares them to understand the rest of what he had to say. Not only do we find again and again that Augustine uses Scripture’s words to form or determine or otherwise advance his most important teachings. It becomes apparent that his way of composing thoughts strategically disallows mere casual dipping and detached observation about spiritual truth, and compels readers to make some kind of commitment to follow his lines of spiritual logic to their end.3 Augustine laid down these lines measure by measure in the first decade and a half as a committed Catholic Christian, while gradually building up his framework for understanding Scripture as a single Book. The launch point for these lines of logic, as we’ll see, was a lesson in learning how to read the Old Testament figuratively. This book describes Augustine’s progress in constructing a Christian spiritual logic about Scripture.

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Small seeds of this study were sown when I first read Confessions as a young man; that event changed me in more ways than one. Besides prompting my own pilgrimage of faith, it also single-handedly ignited my serious interest in the Bible. The italicized Scripture quotes that dapple R. S. Pine-Coffin’s Penguin translation of the Confessions were as mystifying to me as they were numerous. What the heck was going on between Augustine and that Book? So I began to study the Bible, eventually taking up critical New Testament studies in graduate school at the University of Chicago. But when I kept looking for a way to marry my fascination with the biblical texts to my desire to engage theology historically, eventually I returned to Augustine and his reading of Scripture. Bernard McGinn had just treated the patristic era in the first volume of his history of western Christian mysticism, The Foundations of Mysticism; he told me about the growing scholarly interest in ancient exegesis and suggested looking into Augustine’s expositions of the Psalms. Reading those books was an exotic revelation; they were, of course, unlike anything I’d learned about in New Testament Studies or the Journal of Biblical Literature. But their very strangeness was compelling, and stoked me to understand them on Augustine’s own terms. I wrote a dissertation on his reading of the Psalms against the Donatists whose first part took a stab at describing the trajectory of his early reading; a summary of that attempt was published as an essay in the volume Augustine and the Bible.4 While this book doesn’t contradict that essay, it does use different language and develops entirely new aspects. More reading and deeper research—with Augustine one can always do more and go deeper, and then there’s the secondary literature—gave me the experience of countless others before me who have turned a page in Augustine only to find some vast new tract of thought waiting to be traversed. The poetic sigh of Pope came to mind more than once: “Hills peep o’er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!”5 But at the same time it was clear that these new ideas were necessary for mapping the wider and richer terrain of Augustine’s developing construction of Christian hermeneutics. Like the earlier essay, this book explores Augustine’s thought about salvation’s “temporal dispensation” centered on the historical human reality of Christ. But it gives much sharper attention to the importance of Christ’s crucifixion in Augustine’s hermeneutics, to the ongoing importance of his anti-Manichean polemic, and to the rhetorical dimensions of his exegesis. The new work turned up fresh perspectives that this book explores, like Augustine’s construction of Christ’s human will-to-death as the expression of divine love par excellence, his interrelationship of perspectives on

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Scripture for beginning and advanced believers, his use of rhetorical impersonation as a theological template, his perception of Christ changing the Law of Moses into a medium of grace and truth, and his theory of Christian reading for explaining the New Testament’s annexation and transformation of Israel’s Scriptures. All of this fed into Augustine’s gradual development in reading the Old Testament figuratively in the 380s and 390s, and the story that this book seeks to tell. Most of the translations of Augustine are my own, but when using an existing translation I indicate it with a note (e.g., “trans. Chadwick”). I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to use translations for which they hold copyright: the Augustinian Heritage Institute, which owns the rights to works by various translators in the series “The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century,” published by New City Press of Hyde Park, New York; Oxford University Press for permission to use Henry Chadwick’s translation, St. Augustine: Confessions, in their series “World’s Classics” (Oxford: 1992). For permission to use my previously published work to which they hold copyright, I thank WileyBlackwell for use of “Augustine and Scripture,” from The Blackwell Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey (2012), 200–214; University of Notre Dame Press, for the use of “The Christological Substructure of Augustine’s Figurative Exegesis,” in Augustine and the Bible, trans. and ed. Pamela Bright (1999), 74–103; and Augustinian Studies, for use of “Totus Christus and the Psychagogy of Augustine’s Sermons” (36:1 [2005], 59–70); “Figures of Speech and Knowledge of God in Augustine’s Early Biblical Interpretation” (38:1 [2007], 61–85); “Valerius of Hippo: A Profile” (40:1 [2009], 5–26); and “‘She Arranges All Things Pleasingly’ (Wis. 8:1): The Rhetorical Base of Augustine’s Hermeneutic” (41:1 [2010], 55–67). I wish to thank my family for their longstanding support: parents Geri and Ben (+2008) Cameron; brothers Gary, Jeff, Steve, and Tom (+2001); sister Peg; and in-laws Jane and Neil (+2007) Simmons. Many others have helped to make this work possible: Linnea Martin, Fr. Tom Seitz (+2007), Robert F. Jerrick, Carole Eipers, Larry Hurtado, Gary B. McGee (+2008), Murray Wagner, Lauree Hersch Meyer, Grady Snyder, Hans Dieter Betz, Langdon Gilkey (+2004), B. A. Gerrish, Susan Schreiner, David Tracy, and especially Bernard McGinn, whose mentoring and friendship have meant so much to me. A number of scholars over the years have given generous support by sending me their work or discussing mine at meetings of the North American Patristics Society, the Reconsiderations conference at Villanova University, the Oxford International

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Conference on Patristic Studies, and elsewhere. I am deeply grateful to them all: Isabelle Bochet, Patout Burns, Phil Cary, John Cavadini, Brian Daley, Hubertus Drobner, Paula Fredriksen, Carol Harrison, Bill Haynes, David Hunter, Kari Kloos, Paul Kolbet, Rick Layton, Peter Martens, Mick McCarthy, Hildegund Müller, Chad Pecknold, Eric Plumer, Karla Pollmann, Ed Smither, Ken Steinhauser, Caroline Tolton, Tarmo Toom, Fred Van Fleteren, Mark Vessey, and Dorothea Weber. I have learned from them all, and beg their indulgence for the times I’ve disagreed with their views or stubbornly stuck to my own! I also give heartfelt thanks to people who went above and beyond scholarly duty to comment on my work in detail. The distinguished Robert L. Wilken, whose blend of high-quality scholarship, deep faith, and lucid writing I can only hope to emulate, gratified me with a perceptive critique of an early version of the book; he sharpened my focus and gave deep encouragement. The omnivorous Lewis Ayres read the manuscript at a middle stage, clarified questions, offered wise suggestions, and gave real support. Also a candid and kindly obstinate anonymous reader at Oxford University Press pushed me to rethink key perspectives. My friend Jean Brodahl contributed much needed editorial expertise at an important moment, while the sagacious William Harmless, S.J., helped me to aim for both a work of high-quality scholarship and a worthy piece of writing. He and Jonathan Yates each generously read portions and made comments in lengthy conversations over lunch, on the phone, and by email. My former student Paul Senz was smart and dogged in helping to prepare the indices. At Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read shepherded this project with patience and grace for longer than she expected, and I thank the stable of editors there for their expertise, especially Kay Kodner and Kiruthika Govindaraju. I am deeply grateful to all these people for their time and energy, which has made this book so much better, or at least less wrong-headed, than it would have been without them. Needless to say, though it must be said, none among those mentioned is responsible for errors of judgment or detail in what follows—I took care of that all by myself! I am grateful for gifts of time and financial backing from my institutional home in the gorgeous Pacific Northwest, the University of Portland. A portion of the manuscript was written with the help of a grant from its Arthur Butine Faculty Development Fund, and it was completed during a full-year sabbatical from teaching in 2010–2011. That support was seconded by a succession of chairs in the Theology Department, Russ

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Butkus, Matt Baasten, and Will Deming, and of deans in the College of Arts and Sciences, Marlene Moore and Fr. Stephen Rowan. Thanks to all. I wish to give special thanks for Thomas F. Martin, O.S.A., dear friend and fellow Chicagoan (and longsuffering White Sox fan). I discussed many of this book’s ideas with Tom, and without him it simply would not have happened. Along with many others, I’ve missed Tom’s love and wisdom since his passing in 2009, but was gratified to complete the book’s final writing push as the inaugural Thomas F. Martin Saint Augustine Fellow at Villanova University in the fall of 2010. So I send warm thanks to all my friends at Villanova, especially the director of the Augustinian Institute which sponsored me, Allan Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (yet another generous conversation partner), and his assistant Anna Misticoni, for their many kindnesses during those idyllic months. Finally, profound gratitude goes to my sons, Erik and Matthew, twin rods of spiritual steel in my heart who strengthen me constantly with their love, music, laughter, and hope; and to my beautiful wife, Lorie Simmons, skilled reader, tender and dearest friend, for a thousand and one kindnesses and the utter joy of her companionship. I dedicate this book to them. Portland, Oregon May 5, 2012

Abbreviations

Works of Augustine (Note: English abbreviations are for frequent main text references. Latin abbreviations are for end notes.) English Titles

Eng. abbrev.

Latin Titles

Lat. abbrev.

Against Adimantus the Disciple of Mani

Adim.

Contra Adimantum Manichaei discipulum

c. Adim.

On the Advantage of Believing

Adv. Believ. De utilitate credendi

The Christian Contest On Christian Teaching

De agone christiano Chr. Teach. De doctrina christiana

The City of God Commentary on Galatians

Comm. Gal.

Unfinished Commentary on Romans

util. cred. agon. doc. Chr.

De civitate Dei

civ. Dei

Expositio epistulae ad Galatas

exp. Gal.

Epistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositio

ep. Rm. inch.

Confessions

Conf.

Confessiones

conf.

On Dialectic

Dial.

De dialectica

dial.

Eighty-Three Miscellaneous 83 QQ. Questions

De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus

div. qu.

Expositions of the Psalms

Enarrationes in Psalmos

en. Ps.

De ordine

ord.

Exp. Ps.

On Divine Order On Faith and the Creed

F. Creed

De fide et symbolo

f. et symb.

Against Faustus the Manichee

Faust.

Contra Faustum Manichaeum

c. Faust.

(continued)

xvi English Titles

Ab b r e v i at i o n s Eng. abbrev.

Against Felix the Manichee Against Fortunatus the Manichee, a Debate

Fort.

On Free Choice

Latin Titles

Lat. abbrev.

Contra Felicem Manichaeum

c. Fel.

Acta contra Fortunatum Manichaeum

c. Fort.

De libero arbitrio

lib. arb.

On Genesis, Against the Manichees

Gen. Man.

De Genesi contra Manichaeos

Gn. c. Man.

Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis

Un. Lit. Gen.

De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber

Gn. litt. imp.

Literal Commentary on Genesis

De Genesi ad litteram

Gn. litt.

Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love

Enchiridion de fide spe et caritate

ench.

On the Happy Life

De beata vita

b. vita

On the Harmony of the Evangelists

Harm. Ev.

De consensu evangelistarum

cons. ev.

On Instructing Beginners

Instr. Beg.

De catechizandis rudibus

cat. rud.

Letters

Epistulae

ep.

The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount

De sermone Domini in monte

s. Dom. m.

On the Soul’s Magnitude

De quantitate animae

quant. an.

Against Mani’s Letter Called “The Foundation”

Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti

c. ep. Man.

Against Maximinus the Arian

Contra Maximinum Arrianum

c. Max.

On Merits and Forgiveness of Sin and Infant Baptism

De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum

pecc. mer.

Answers to Simplicianus

Ad Simplicianum de diversis quaestionibus

Simpl.

On Music

De musica

mus.

Abbreviations

xvii

English Titles

Eng. abbrev.

Latin Titles

Lat. abbrev.

Practices of the Catholic Church and of the Manichees

Practices

De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et Manichaeorum

mor.

De praedestinatione sanctorum

praed. sanct.

Expositio quarumdam propositionum ex ep. ad Romanos

exp. prop. Rm.

A Psalm against the Faction of Donatus

Psalmus contra partem Donati

ps. c. Don.

Questions on the Heptateuch

Quaestiones in Heptateuchum

qu.

Questions on the Gospels

Quaestiones evangeliorum

qu. ev.

Retractationes

retr.

Against Secundinus the Manichee

Contra Secundinum Manichaeum

c. Sec.

Letter of Secundinus to Augustine

Secundini epistula

Sec. epist.

Sermones ad populum

s.

Sermones Dolbeau

s. Dolbeau

On the Predestination of the Saints Propositions on Romans

Revisions

Sermons

Propp.

Rev.

Serm.

Sermons (Dolbeau) Against the Skeptics

Skept.

Contra Academicos

c. Acad.

Soliloquies

Sol.

Soliloquiorum

sol.

On the Soul and its Origin

De anima et eius origine

an. et or.

On the Spirit and the Letter

De spiritu et littera

spir. et litt.

On the Teacher

De magistro

mag.

In Iohannis evangelium tractatus

Io. ev. tr.

In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos

ep. Io. tr.

Tractates on John’s Gospel

Tr. John

Tractates on John’s First Letter On the Trinity

Trin.

De trinitate

trin.

On True Religion

True Rel.

De vera religione

vera rel.

De duabus animabus

duab. an.

On the Two Souls

xviii

Ab b r e v i at i o n s Modern Publications

De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture, ed. Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, 1995).

Arnold-Bright

Augustinus-Lexikon

A-L

Augustinian Studies (Villanova)

AS

Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia

ATA

Bibliothèque augustinienne

BA

CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts

CLCLT

Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité

CEASA

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CCL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

CSEL

Fathers of the Church (CUA Press)

FC

Journal of Early Christian Studies

JECS

Loeb Classical Library

LCL

Oxford World’s Classics

OWC

Patrologia Latina

PL

Recherches augustiniennes

RA

Revue des études augustiniennes [et patristiques]

REA[P]

Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum

SEA

Studia Patristica

SP

Works of Saint Augustine (New City Press)

WSA

Christ Meets Me Everywhere

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Introduction

Ask, Seek, Knock approaching augustine’s figurative reading

on august 24, 410, a late antique version of September 11, 2001, the sack and pillage of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric sent shock waves through the empire. Long-established Roman families abuzz with dismay and indignation blamed the imperial capitulation to Christianity. Though Constantine had legitimated Christianity nearly a century before, and Theodosius had made it the official religion thirty years earlier, many cultural elite still thought that this upstart mystical philosophy from the east had weakened Rome and displaced traditional values. Among them was a quick-witted young aristocrat named Volusianus, lately arrived in North Africa, who was skeptical about the newfangled Christian religion. His mother and niece, among others, had already been swept away by the Christian tide, but he himself remained unmoved. One day a note arrived from a local bishop, known to his family, who briefly invited a conversation about the Christian Scriptures. At the bottom appeared a simple signature: Augustinus episcopus. Volusianus could not know that coming centuries would reverberate with the sound of that name—Augustine of Hippo, teacher of love, bishop of souls, and doctor of the Church catholic. Volusianus’s response was cordial, urbane, even artful, but also laced with irony (Letter 135). Aware that Augustine taught rhetoric and loved philosophy, Volusianus told a story. He had attended a dinner party with erudite friends who loved to converse about the heady pleasures of rhetorical composition, the sweetness of poetry, and the sublimity of philosophy. But then someone interrupted the amiable proceedings with an incongruous question about Christianity. Could anyone help him understand this strange philosophy? Can someone “full of Christianity’s wisdom” help him make sense

4

c hrist meets me ev erywher e

of its claim about a divinity bundled in a tiny human body? What strange divine “arrangement” (dispensatio) allows a god to take flesh? Is he not a capricious god who demands sacrifice at one time and refuses it at another (136.2)?1 Did others not work better miracles than Jesus? Did not Jesus’ teachings overturn the very foundations of the state and, indeed, did not those who follow them fatally compromise Rome’s security against the marauding Visigoths in 410? Augustine picked up quickly on the thinly veiled ruse—at one point Volusianus drops the pose with a wink and calls them “my questions” (135.2)— but the questions struck a nerve, as we can see from Letters 137 and 138 where Augustine works through the issues in brief. But the beginning of Augustine’s reply is notable: he instructs Volusianus about the need to understand first, before considering any particular claim of Christian thought, how Christians think. Seeing that so many people seek Christian salvation, Augustine contends, and so many discriminating minds seek Christian wisdom, the right first question should concern its source, the Christian Scriptures. One finds there humility so disarming, and wisdom so rich, and eloquence so deep that its attraction for so many begins to make sense. “Before I answer your questions,” Augustine tells Volusianus in so many words, “you must enter into the Christian mind by learning how to read the Christian books.” The Christian writings are so astonishingly profound that even if I had more free time, more intense desire, and more talent to master them alone, from the beginning of boyhood up to my decrepit old age, I would still find myself making progress in them on a daily basis. I don’t mean to say that readers come to those matters necessary for salvation with such great difficulty. But even though each person grasps them through the faith without which no one lives a pious and upright life, many, many things remain to be understood by those making progress. These matters are cloaked in such shadows of mysteries, and such fathomless wisdom lies hidden in them—not only in the words they use to say what they say but also in the realities that give themselves to be understood in them. So much so that those with the most years of experience, with the most intelligence, and with the most intense desire to learn are the very ones who experience what the same Scriptures say elsewhere: “When people come to the end, then they’re at the beginning” [Sirach 18:6].2 This paragraph, streaked with allusions to Cicero that Volusianus will have recognized,3 sowed the seed of what became one of Augustine’s most celebrated works, The City of God. Volusianus’s questions had prompted Augustine to form plans for a large-scale work to detail Christianity’s

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place in the world and its relationship to Rome. The following year he wrote the first of the work’s thousand pages and spent the next decade writing the rest. The last twelve books unfurled, at great length, a biblical vision of world history that became the closest facsimile of a biblical theology that Augustine ever wrote. Augustine had come a very long way round to write that paragraph, which contrasts sharply with his first opinion of Scripture recounted in Confessions. In his student days in Carthage he was fresh from small-town North Africa and oh-so-ready to drop the folksy, anti-intellectual ways of the Church of his mother Monica. Sensitive, ambitious, rhetorically gifted, and intellectually haughty, Augustine became hungry for wisdom. On first picking up the Scriptures, however, looking for a Ciceronian eloquence that simply wasn’t there, he reacted with dismay and tossed them aside (Conf. 3.5.9). That high-horse attitude, he later winced to confess, wrecked whatever chance he had of attaining Christian wisdom early on and also left him vulnerable to spiritual wolves. Clueless about Scripture’s strategy of leading readers into teachable humility, he made the beginner’s mistake of hasty judgment. He later saw that to the extent he judged Scripture backward and foolish, its power recessed and its wisdom turned opaque. Hindsight had taught him that what he had actually needed was instruction in how to read; this odd collection of writings required first submitting to its humble, earthy style. But Scripture not only counsels humility, it also imparts it. The simplicity and concreteness of its “humble discourse” (sermo humilis) stamps the believing reader with its own lowly character; the response of faith replicates the humility of the humble man Jesus Christ, whose example lances the boil of human pride.4 It was a perspective Augustine hoped Volusianus would understand before making any judgments about Christianity: But as to its way of communicating, Holy Scripture is composed in a style that is accessible to everyone, even if only a few plumb its depths. It contains plain passages that speak like a familiar friend, without pretense, to the hearts of the unlearned and learned alike. Indeed, whenever hiding something in a mysterious passage, it doesn’t mount up with the kind of exalted speech that sluggish and untrained minds dare not pretend to (think of how the poor feel in the presence of the rich). Instead, it invites everyone with its humble discourse (sermo humilis), and feeds them all, not only with passages whose meanings stand out plainly, but also with ones enveloped in secrecy. It does this so that all readers can be exercised

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in the truth—the same truth shared out equally in obvious texts and hidden ones. But so that open truths (aperta) do not become tiresome, the same ones can become closed (operta), so that readers may yearn for them; and being yearned for, they are in a way refreshed, and being refreshed they nestle agreeably into the soul. These saving truths correct twisted characters, feed little ones, and delight great ones.5 Augustine was handing Volusianus the golden key to reading Christian Scripture that astutely discerns the interplay between its clear and obscure passages, the aperta and operta, the “open” and the “closed.” These were Augustine’s most basic hermeneutical categories.6 In learning how to read, one first plotted the baseline of understanding by locating the aperta passages, chief among them being the twin commands to love God and neighbor “on which hang all the Law and Prophets” (Matt. 22:38–40). Then came scrutiny of the operta passages; though fashioned as “mysteries” because of the mists of their figurative language, yet those were the passages that generated fresh understandings of the marvelous but oftrepeated truths of salvation. This interplay of open and closed texts worked to communicate saving truth, and affected readers in such a way that they not only received truth but also delighted in it. This, in a nutshell, was the scriptural strategy for figurative reading. The aperta/operta dynamic worked microcosmically when applied to individual passages, but more importantly it operated macrocosmically for comprehending the complete Christian Bible. Yet the unity between its two major parts, the Old and New Testaments, was counterintuitive. On the surface, nothing seemed more opposed to Christianity than the Scriptures of Israel. These two bodies of literature could not have been more differently composed or oriented to more different ends; produced in various languages, times, and cultural milieus, they reflected diverse practices, institutions and values, esteemed different heroes, ideas, and worldviews, and rested upon contrasting dramatic scenarios. The deliverance of the Exodus and giving of the Sinai covenant through Moses were intended to confirm the election of Israel and build its earthly kingdom in time; that contrasted sharply with the spiritual salvation wrought by Jesus of Nazareth and proclaimed to all nations as a gospel leading to an eternal kingdom after time. The split was especially evident in their attitudes toward the Law of Moses, which parts of the New Testament openly contrasted with the salvation of Christ.

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A few Christian groups eventually felt that contrast so sharply that they never accepted the Old Testament’s authority as Christian Scripture, and they just lopped it off from the New. Such were the Marcionites and Gnostic groups in the second century; and also their heirs in the third century and later, the Manichees, with whom Augustine fell in as a teenager. For nine years Augustine the Manichee argued publicly that Israel’s god and its preoccupation with material goods were antithetical to true Christianity. That was at the beginning of his long road from hyperreligious vehemence as a Manichean Hearer rejecting the Old Testament to second naïveté as a Catholic bishop preaching those same texts to feed his flock. His path features a gradually developing rationale for faith that could articulate how the two Testaments were bound together and were mutually interpreting. This book tells the story of Augustine’s trajectory of understanding: how he recovered the Old Testament by learning how to read it figuratively. The logic of biblical unity, suggested in the New Testament’s use of the Old, drew on the familiar rhetorical analysis of figurative language but also transformed it for spiritual purposes. Readers of Confessions will recognize the dramatic shift that happened under the preaching of Bishop Ambrose in the 380s; less well known are the incremental shifts and accommodations that occurred after he became a priest in the church at Hippo in the early 390s. The beginning splash that remade Augustine’s mind in Milan sent smaller and subtler ripples of insight back to him in North Africa; cumulatively, but just as momentously, they too altered his thought. This study covers the years from his conversion to Catholicism under the bishop of Milan to his achievement of relative stability in reading and preaching Scripture during his first years as bishop of Hippo. Not accidentally this was the same decade and a half of his ongoing campaign to overcome the peculiarly Manichean form of biblicism that he had once embraced.

How the Study Is Structured The study divides this period of Augustine’s most significant development into three chronologically ordered segments of roughly a halfdecade each, and then subdivides each segment into chapters dealing with the most important texts and themes in that period. Part One covers the earliest period from Augustine’s embrace of Catholicism to the eve of ordination to priesthood (386–391), when he worked as a Christian teacher and writer at-large with strong philosophical and ascetic leanings.

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Chapter 1 treats the critical early turning point in Augustine’s relationship to the Bible, when Ambrose reversed his youthful distaste and rejection of the Old Testament by positing the Pauline axiom, “the letter kills, but the spirit makes alive” (2 Cor. 3:6). That helped Augustine to identify God’s communication in Scripture with what he knew from his own teaching of rhetoric. We’ll look at how Augustine suddenly “got” the Bible and the way that major spiritual-intellectual puzzle pieces fell into place for him. Chapters 2 and 3 consider how Ambrose’s Pauline insight played out in this period. Chapter 2 studies Augustine’s initial foray into the work of biblical interpretation, On Genesis, Against the Manichees, where he adumbrates his earliest approach to figurative Old Testament interpretation. We’ll see how certain categories, tools, and strategies that were familiar from Augustine’s teaching of rhetoric helped him to translate Scripture’s rough-hewn imagery into spiritual-intellectual categories. Augustine hoped to train spiritual readers and preachers of Genesis to think figuratively and spiritually. Thus he would create a cadre of teachers who would defend simple Catholic believers from insidious Manichean attacks on their trust in the Old Testament. Chapter 3 steps back from the “trees” of Augustine’s interpretation of individual passages of Genesis to survey the “forest” of his larger hermeneutical outlook. It considers principally two works that translated his highly rhetorical approach to Scripture into a tool for spiritual ascent, Practices of the Catholic Church and of the Manichees and On True Religion. Chapter 4 then proposes a thesis for locating the center of Augustine’s developing framework for interpretation in his understanding of Jesus Christ, the center of God’s temporal plan for salvation. Augustine’s early focus upon immaterial, transcendent spiritual reality in this time paralleled his preoccupation with Christ’s divinity and the human Christ’s “pedagogy of the Incarnation.” Just as believers had to pass through Christ’s outer humanity to find his divinity within, so interpreters had to pass through the “husk” of the Old Testament to find its “nut” of spiritual truth within. This paralleled the key concept of his anti-Manichean argument for biblical unity at the time, congruency: While the Old obviously showed a contrast with the New, only spiritually astute readers understood its coherence with it. Despite ancient Israel’s apparent materialistic obsession with temporal goods, the Old Testament hid deeply spiritual truths that were plain to the trained Christian eye. In this period Augustine already practiced a sophisticated method of Scripture reading for spiritual ascent.

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Part Two studies Augustine’s transformative period as a priest of the Catholic Church (391–396), a critical transitional time when his patterns of reading Scripture rapidly developed. His unexpected ordination to priesthood wrenched him from a much-desired life of contemplation and immersed him among the masses of simple believers who peopled the great church at Hippo. Augustine worked not merely to adjust his language to their simpler outlook but also to articulate more sharply the beginning steps of the spiritual life that made those advanced steps possible. Prior to this Augustine the lay philosopher had pursued argument and reason to express Christian faith for elite audiences, but now Augustine the Catholic presbyter tried hard to match that with skill in expressing Scripture’s most elementary teachings for the Church’s “little ones.” In order to construct a fully conscious Christian hermeneutic he immersed himself in the Bible’s central texts: Genesis, the Sermon on the Mount, the Psalms, and above all the Letters of Paul. Chapter 5 considers how Paul changed Augustine’s perception of the crucified man Jesus Christ as the core of redemption and the implications of that change for his reading of the Old Testament. He watched how Paul portrayed Christ the human being “taking up” death in a way that complemented the divine Word “taking up” human flesh. It taught Augustine a fresh understanding of redemption accomplished by the “one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), a small but crucial advance that then rippled through the interstices of Augustine’s thought. After that his perception of scriptural unity shifted correlatively as he discerned Christ speaking in both texts, albeit in different ways. The actual fleshly death of Christ preached by Paul (and prophesied by Moses) not only advanced Augustine’s case against the Manichean “likeness” Christology that implicitly denied his true flesh but also explained the “figurative realism” by which Paul read the Old Testament Scriptures as conveying true events with larger meanings. Augustine then applied Paul’s lessons about Christ and Scripture’s figurative dimension to his reading of the Psalms. Chapter 6 studies the impact of Paul’s hermeneutic insights upon Augustine’s early readings of Psalms 1–32, written while he was still a priest, comprising the first installment of his great Expositions of the Psalms. He read them according to the Church’s already ancient tradition, which heard them not only as speaking about Christ but even as transcribing the thoughts of Christ’s inner life. But Augustine put his own stamp on these readings. His expositions of Psalms 1–14 show him continuing to pursue earlier spiritual-philosophical

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-ascetic concerns but also striking out in new directions. Some rhetorically configured readings of the Psalter provocatively suggested the use of “prosopological” exegesis, an analytical device used in the schools of grammar and rhetoric to interpret texts by identifying different speaking voices. Then he introduced something new by recalibrating his reading of Psalms 15–32 as words of the crucified Christ. With Paul’s help, Augustine discerned the dying Christ’s anguished cry of Psalm 21:2 (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) as coming from the assumed voice of sinful Adam praying for redemption, a harbinger of the believer co-crucified with Christ. Augustine discerned in this the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia, or impersonation, which became for him a template for understanding the “wonderful exchange” of Christian redemption, that is, Christ’s life for our death, and his justice for our sin. That template also helped to explain Christ’s presence in the Old Testament by revealing him as the speaking voice transposed into the words of the prophet-psalmist. On this basis, ordinary Christian believers, members of the same body of which Christ was the head speaking in the text, could find themselves in the words of the Psalms. This fresh and powerful vision of biblical unity grounded his work of figurative reading. Part Three shows these views percolating through Augustine’s work in the first half-decade or so of his life as a Catholic bishop (396–ca. 400). Preacher to the simple and teacher of teachers, he also remained a defender of the Christian message, especially against the Manichees. All three roles appeared directly or indirectly in the works studied in this part. Chapter 7 compares the Pauline prophecy-fulfillment structure of the Psalms expositions with the well-known hermeneutical handbook, On Christian Teaching. Their differences show Augustine working with audiences on different ends of the hermeneutical spectrum: while the Psalms expositions were largely concerned with beginners, On Christian Teaching focused on the spiritually advanced. Perhaps because it broke off in the middle of Book 3 in 396 (not completed until thirty years later), On Christian Teaching left largely unexplained the elementary biblical hermeneutics involved in the beginner’s faith in Scripture’s “temporal dispensation of salvation,” a principal theme of his many sermons. Fortunately that aspect received poignant brief treatment in the little work On Instructing Beginners, written in the early 400s. Reading these two works side-by-side shows both aspects of Augustine’s twopronged hermeneutic: the humble beginners’ “bottom-up” approach that seeks Christ the Man everywhere in both Testaments, and the adepts’ “topdown” approach that seeks spiritual understanding of the divine. Chapter 8

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studies the full display of this framework in Augustine’s massive assault on Manichean hermeneutics, Against Faustus the Manichee. This work’s central thesis is that Christ indissolubly united the Testaments by “fulfilling” the Law and Prophets when he carried out what they commanded and promised; on this basis, Augustine argued, he transformed the way Christians read these texts. The clearest statement of this outlook appears in Books 15–19 that unfolded Augustine’s potent but idiosyncratic construction of John 1:17, “the Law was made grace and truth through Jesus Christ.” That is, Christ transformed the Law’s commands into channels of grace and the prophets’ promises into witnesses of truth. Because Christ thus interrelated the Old and New Testaments, figurative readings point constantly to him. As Augustine wrote in a lilting passage, “Christ meets and refreshes me everywhere in those Books.” Those trying to get quickly to the heart of things can read chapter 1 on Augustine’s transformation under Ambrose, chapter 4 on Christ as Scripture’s hermeneutic linchpin, chapter 5 on Paul’s tutelage, chapter 6 on Christ’s voice in the Psalms, and chapter 8 on Augustine’s anti-Manichean hermeneutic. The other chapters (chapters 2 and 3 on rhetorical influences in the early works, and chapter 7’s analytical comparison of hermeneutical perspectives) offer supporting discussions or explanatory comparisons that can be skipped without losing the book’s thread.

Some Embedded Perspectives Obviously I am going far beyond On Christian Teaching to retrieve Augustine’s way of reading Scripture. Although it is an oversimplification to say so, this approach suggests my desire to go beyond abstract statements about Scripture to try to catch his hermeneutic in the act of rising out of his practice. Augustine helps me out here because so much of his interpretative work emerges from the cut and thrust of theological engagement with real people and vital issues, in this case, (whether a passage openly acknowledges them or not) with the Manichees and their rejection of the Old Testament. Furthermore, while hoping to give usefully clear analytic descriptions of what Augustine is doing, I wish not only to describe but also to interpret Augustine’s work on Scripture, that is, to pull up what I think are the central themes of his interpretative practice along with the insights that packed the most punch for his ongoing practice of figurative reading. Let me spell out a few of these themes that will unfold in the

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study. These are ideas that recur at various places or underlie wide swaths of the book and can’t be repeated without being tedious. Perspectives from Above and Below. My hunch has always been that Augustine’s On Christian Teaching primarily addressed only one part of his potential audience, that is, those beyond the beginning stages of spiritual understanding who had aspirations of climbing toward Christianity’s spiritual heights. This implied audience was composed of those able to use powers of regenerated spiritual reason for learning how to read Scripture as a tool for spiritual ascent. By contrast, the Expositions of the Psalms and Sermons to the People typically addressed simple folk who probably would never attain those heights; and so they aimed their perspective at simple faith. Augustine concentrated there on Scripture’s earthy, historically dense stories and images for igniting and sustaining faith, and he had frequent recourse to the Church’s basic creed. Central to his approach was a focus on Christ the Redeemer and Savior; the often-meandering Expositions and Sermons constantly looped back to him. Though Augustine made occasional brief forays into more advanced subjects like grace or the Trinity, he never preached theology per se; he rather pointed toward higher truths so as to encourage faith’s inherent desire to understand as far as possible what it believes. Without rigidly separating the groups into exclusive categories, Augustine seemed to address two broad types of Christians; in the Pauline language that so shaped his consciousness, these were the “spirituals” (spiritales), fed with the solid food of On Christian Teaching (1 Cor. 2:14); and the “little ones” (parvuli), fed with the milk of the Expositions and Sermons (1 Cor. 3:1–3).7 This distinction and the gradients between them are important in what follows. Christ the Center. With St. Paul’s help, Augustine moved restlessly in the early 390s toward a fuller understanding of Christ in his humanity, and this was critical to his biblical reading. Goulven Madec famously suggested that “Christ our knowledge and our wisdom” was the “principle of coherence” in Augustine’s thought.8 This book tests that claim for Augustine’s hermeneutics. Augustine wrote no treatise on Christology, and he usually addressed it on the way to other issues.9 But that’s because Christ for Augustine was less a theological proposition and more a way of seeing. He wasn’t preoccupied with exactly defining the constitution of Christ’s person in two natures; or if he was it was for reasons of pastoral care, in order to more exactly convey Christ’s work in the “temporal dispensation for humanity’s salvation” (True Rel. 7.13). That is, Christ for us wove himself into the warp and woof of Augustine’s thought. For that reason, Augustine’s

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thought on Christ was entwined with the Church and with Scripture. Written by members of Christ’s body acting in concert with their head, Scripture came from Christ’s own hand (Harm. Ev. 1.35.54).10 Like Christ, and through Christ, Scripture “mediates” God’s love to its readers, especially when amplified by preaching in the liturgy. For Augustine the rhetorical character of Scripture was not merely decorative, but potent. Figurative reading released a kind of centripetal spiritual force that unified Scripture’s many far-flung images, sayings, rites, events, and characters and drove readers back to its central load-bearing beam (i.e., its “end”) of love for God and neighbor (Chr. Teach. 1.35.39; Instr. Beg. 4.8). The reader’s access key was faith, which made them living participants in the self-sacrificial love that poured forth from the cross and fulfilled Scripture’s love commands. Loving God and neighbor from within Christ the head’s own love, his body also fulfilled Scripture’s commands to love God and neighbor and so rose into spiritual understanding. Development. Peter Brown once said that among the features that attracted him to study Augustine’s life was the fact that “above all, he was a man who changed.”11 That’s also true for his Scripture outlook. Augustine’s framework for reading did not develop all at once, and indeed in some early works it does not appear at all. Clearly Augustine learned his hermeneutics, as it were, “on the run.” The most appropriate approach to Augustine’s work therefore is what Eugene TeSelle called a “cinematic” method of study that tracks the movement of his thought as “a coherence that is always changing.”12 Cinematic study shows Augustine’s work marked by adaptive movement, like a great rolling river pushing relentlessly toward the sea while maneuvering and adjusting to the terrain along the way. Augustine himself cheerfully admitted as much, confessing himself to be among the class of thinkers who “write as they progress and progress as they write,” another of those catchy Augustinian epigrams that has attracted readers from John Calvin to Karla Pollmann.13 His retrospective Revisions even invited readers to follow his development (Rev. 2.27). To see how his hermeneutic ideas grew up, one has to back up to early works like On True Religion and the biblical commentaries of his priesthood. Viewing his progress in the late 380s and early 390s, we see Augustine working hard to integrate several competing viewpoints: classical views on language and rhetoric in which he was professionally trained, philosophical insights gleaned from “the books of the Platonists,” claims of traditional Christian faith of the North African community, and the rough-hewn language of the Old Latin Bible. These lines of influence often loudly collided rather than gently

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blended, and scholarship still debates the timing and extent of the collisions.14 This is the intellectual-theological shape of the Augustinian “restless heart” (Conf. 1.1.1). Particularly intriguing is St. Paul’s impact on Augustine the priest under Valerius while he was still searching for his exegetical voice. We’ll try to map the terrain of Augustine’s progress. Mapping the Mind of the Historical Augustine. Please allow me a brief soapbox moment. One of the ironic aspects of modern thought’s easy dismissal of “precritical” thinkers in the name of history is that it makes moves that impede the very act of doing history. That is, although historians laudably intend to understand the past on its own terms, sometimes their angle of approach blocks that from happening. I think here of some modern attitudes toward ancient biblical exegesis that presume that it is all mere question-begging and deserves satirizing with the term “eisegesis” (reading “into” the text rather than “out of” it what one believes).15 A corollary of this view is that since the ancients had a device like figurative reading ready-to-hand in their culture, we all know they constantly “resorted” to it to escape intellectual difficulties in the text. Inarguably that often happened. But the presumption of that comment often seems to be that the essential transaction of figurative reading was an intellectual cover-up, flaccid pietism, cultural power-grab, or what-have-you; which therefore, de facto, turns its practitioners into intellectually impoverished victims or morally devious louts. Leaving aside the question of the degree to which the ancients deserve such criticism, I confess to having always wondered about the degree to which that slant of disrespect skews one’s historical perspective. That is, if doing history is like straining to listen to very weak radio signals that wave in and out and throw up mostly static and dead air, except for some blessed brief moments of clarity, then a historian will worry about anything that disables the antennae and loses data. I don’t pretend we can jump out of our historical milieu into theirs, through the transmitter so to say, and into spontaneous sympathetic union with an ancient mind like Augustine’s. But even if the contemporary language about a “fusion of horizons” is a little strong, nevertheless perhaps with patient determination we might work long enough among the texts to gain enough of a feel for his world of thought so that we might responsibly reach an imaginative hand into it to grasp his central concerns.16 For what it’s worth, I think Augustine himself did that very thing with the biblical texts, never mind his strained or strange individual interpretations. In my judgment, when Augustine located Scripture’s hermeneutical center in the love of God and neighbor, he brought the Christian

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reading enterprise to rest at precisely the right spot. Think of Augustine, who saw biblical interpretation as a game between us and God (True Rel. 51.100), as the Babe Ruth of ancient Latin Christian theology; he strikes out a lot, but at the crucial moment he hits the mammoth home run that wins the game. In any case I am trying to read Augustine on his own terms, so let me give one orienting perspective on the issue of presuppositions. Let’s agree that ancients and moderns read the biblical texts differently, often not only with different goals but also with different premises, and so it is not a simple matter for them to speak in their own voice or be heard on their own terms. Modern critical readers often try to understand the ancient mind better than it understood itself, to discover the author’s hidden intention lying behind the text or the social-psychological complexes betrayed by the text despite itself. Even modern religious readers positively disposed to Scripture often look upon it as an object from which to extract dogmas, myths, history, morals, or random inspiration.17 But those concerns blunt the effectiveness of our interpretive antennae. Ancient interpreters thought the text itself determined the circumference of meaning that lay within and before it. They didn’t view the Bible as an object yielding correct content to those operating on it with the proper analytic method. Scripture for them was first of all a divine unity, mysterious but accessible, mediated through a wild variety of earthly voices, genres, events, teachings, and even contradictions, all of which were kaleidoscopic variations of a single divine picture. In their minds the divine author embedded these variations purposefully in order to lure readers into becoming part of that picture. Ancient readers believed that meant at least two things: first, that God accommodated divine truth to human limitations by adapting its form to our understanding, or in other words, it was like the Incarnation; and second, that this situation required readers to develop the reading skills needed to discern divine truth in the latticework of Scripture’s figurative patterns. Asking, seeking, and knocking at mystery’s door (Matt. 7:7, one of Augustine’s favorite texts) required, on the one hand, an upright character devoted to finding and living by spiritual wisdom, and on the other, a taste and talent for doing gumshoe detective work. The key concept of the enterprise appears in the Latin word figura, “shape” or “form,” and the related Greek word tropos, “turning,” both used in connection with figurative reading. Many texts were like bodily forms that had to be “turned,” that is, examined from different angles, in order to be understood. Figures gave truth a dimensional shape or form that

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readers “turned” in order to discover aspects that did not appear on the flat surface of its literal appearance. Augustine’s sermons are exercises in “turning” texts over and over so that readers might catch the various hints and glints of their truth. He and other ancient interpreters asked first, not how Scriptures were composed, but how they were to be received. Augustine worked not so much analytically upon Scripture’s content (“What can we observe about this text?”) as hermeneutically with Scripture’s intent (“How does this text disclose the mind of God?”). As purely religious as that sounds, his reflections on the nature of understanding were astute and humane enough to shed light on the act of interpretation as such, as modern theorists like Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur have recognized.18 One might say that Augustine’s exegesis sought not so much to determine meaning as to achieve understanding—and that the difference appears on every page he wrote. Thus while Augustine’s work added new chapters to the history of Christian biblical interpretation, it also added to the general history of hermeneutics. However, to see this we are obligated first to describe well what the historical Augustine really thought.19 This book offers an exercise in reading Augustine closely that hopes to follow well the development of his practice of reading Scripture figuratively, that is, to give an exegesis of the exegete. I hope to recover one important aspect of the historical Augustine’s thought by using a temperate historical sympathy to think his thoughts with him. This sympathetic self-transposition is necessary because we can’t follow the exact movements of Augustine’s thought without taking the risk of imaginatively “being that thought itself.”20 As I hope to show, that is a method that Augustine himself knew and used. “Figurative” Interpretation. Talk of the “historical Augustine” raises the issue about the choice of historically faithful and yet analytically useful terminology for describing what he’s doing. Most agree that the common terms “allegory” and “typology” describe certain aspects of nonliteral biblical hermeneutics; there is disagreement over whether that distinction is historically and analytically useful. Scholarly opinion seems to favor seeing the terms as competitors, viewing “allegory” as arbitrarily denigrating or dismissing the literal historical base of the word or event that, by contrast, “typology” respects.21 “Typology,” a modern term (though Augustine and other ancients did speak of “types”), describes the figurative link forged between narrated biblical events, something that appeals to the modern preoccupation with historically verifiable accounts. A minority view disagrees with the competition angle in favor of complementarity

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and sees typology as a species of which allegory is the genus.22 But for both the distinction turns on typology’s rootage in history, which is modernity’s most prized category of legitimation. So it is difficult to avoid entangling the historical study of ancient interpreters in modern ideas about “history” that prejudge typology as worthwhile and allegory as worthless. But, in my judgment, our preoccupations preload the terms “allegory” and “typology” with issues that Augustine didn’t know about or deal with in the same way, and they severely impair the analytical usefulness of these terms for understanding the historical Augustine. Where does Augustine himself come out on this? The word “allegory” appears fairly frequently, especially early in his career, but he later grew wary of its theatrical connotation of false representation (Exp. Ps. 103.1.13). He apparently began to worry, perhaps after getting confusing signals from live audiences, that even if allegory helped some people up the spiritual ladder, it denigrated or even denied for others a text’s underlying historical realities. So, although he never abandoned allegoria or gave up reaching “through the letter” of Scripture into the depths of the mysteries within (Exp. Ps. 131.2),23 he came to prefer the less precise but more serviceable term “figure” (figura).24 Augustine did become more concerned with “visible” events of history but always to stimulate pastorally the initial steps of faith. Biblical “types” prompted or ignited the spiritual life, and so remained essential. But on the overall scale they were the most primitive form of figurative reading and ever needed completion in “allegory.” Spiritual interpretation was hardwired into the historical “figures” of the Bible because, like Jesus’ miracles or parables, their whole point was to go beyond them toward spiritual understanding. As we will see, the corollary was that for reading and interpreting, historical events formed the base of the ladder of spiritual ascent (e.g., True Rel. 26.49). Mystery’s historical dimension was crucial insofar as it gave access to spiritual understanding; indeed, the encounter with Scripture’s earthy words and deeds punched faith’s ticket into the spiritual world by healing the soul’s self-absorption and desire for external realities. Within the spiritual world, the texts exercised the soul’s new capacities for seeing differently and reoriented the reader’s desires toward loving God and neighbor. So the historical and spiritual dimensions were inextricably laced together such that eliminating one or the other made both incoherent. The modern antagonism between allegory and typology created by the preoccupation with history would have made little sense to Augustine. In my view the categories “typology” and “allegory” so prejudice the basic sympathy needed for historically understanding

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these interpretive practices that they are virtually useless as analytical tools. So this book avoids using those terms except when necessary and with clear qualifications, and instead it draws on Augustine’s preferred word group based on figura.25 “Figurative,” though perhaps not as incisively analytical as scholars might like, offers several benefits that collectively outweigh its costs: it is familiar from Augustine’s own usage; it covers several dimensions of his practice; it emphasizes the rhetorical-literary base of his understanding; and it does the least harm to our perception of the range of Augustine’s concerns, that is, the unity of the “historical” and the “spiritual.” Hopefully the analysis that follows will justify this decision by clarifying the dynamic unity of Augustine’s figurative reading.

Some Limits of the Study Biblical explorations poured forth from Augustine’s pen, first as a lay thinker, then as a priest, and finally as a bishop. The torrent was so stupendous that even his most avid later readers despaired of surveying it all. But he soaked everything in Scripture. Besides the hundreds of biblically drenched Letters and Sermons to the People, Confessions was a Bible patchwork, half of City of God is an exposition of the biblical storyline, and treatises like On the Trinity were also Scripture-laced. Augustine commented on the first chapters of Genesis many times. Meanwhile, the Tractates on John’s Gospel and especially the Expositions of the Psalms, both endlessly copied in medieval times, made Augustine the most widely read patristic commentator on Scripture in the west for more than a thousand years. One has to find a manageable way through it all. My concern is to illumine particular lines of Augustine’s interpretive approach to figurative reading and reveal the hermeneutical framework that he gradually developed during his first years as a dedicated reader of Catholic Scripture. So I am not interested in making a general survey of “Augustine and the Bible,” listing Augustine’s use of specific texts to prove this doctrine or fight that opponent, or describing his studies of individual biblical books. Many studies already address individual themes,26 and some full-length monographs address biblical books.27 Nor do I attempt to cover his entire hermeneutic approach, for which I am glad to acknowledge the magisterial work of Isabelle Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture”: L’hermeneutique augustinienne (2004).28 The study also does not search out Augustine’s early sources, for which I gratefully refer the reader to Martine Dulaey’s collection of articles

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dealing with Augustine’s biblical “apprenticeship.”29 Augustine usually rethought his sources from the ground up. In the early period we will be studying, he experimented with ideas, used them for a time, and then dropped them without notice. To take two examples, Scripture’s “four senses” (Adv. Believ. 3.5–9) and the concept of Christ “the Lordly Man” (homo dominicus),30 both seemed important for a time, but neither survived his priesthood. He filtered other ideas through new sources, like Tyconius’s “bipartite body of the Lord.”31 Augustine constantly pushed past his sources toward their broader implications, often transforming them in the process.32 Readers should not misread the obviously necessary and useful studies of Augustine’s sources as boxing them into a merely genetic approach that explains Augustine by saying simply that he “took over” this or that idea from a source.33 My more modest (though perhaps still ambitious) goal is to understand Augustine’s practice of biblical interpretation from the narrower angle of its figurative dimension and to concentrate on the early development of his thought about that until achieving its provisionally stable form by the early 400s. Finally, this study won’t cover the practice of figurative biblical interpretation throughout Augustine’s life. By the early 400s Augustine had been a Catholic Christian for about fifteen years, a priest for ten, and a bishop for five. Augustine’s ideas, as always, continued to develop; but I think around 400 is a good moment to mark the stabilizing of his views on figurative interpretation, for several reasons. First, it coincides roughly with his completion of Confessions, clearly a bend in his personal road. At this time he also begins to wind down his polemical campaign against the Manichees, which, while not formally concluded (several anti-Manichean works were still to come), figured less prominently in his work after this time.34 Above all, at this time he satisfactorily explained to himself how the two Testaments were bound together and mutually interpreting; that settled confidence goes on full and self-assured display in the thirty-three books of Against Faustus the Manichee, some of which are as long as entire treatises, as he himself noted (Rev. 2.7.1). Another work of this time was small by comparison, but its very brevity suggested the maturity of his framework: On Instructing Beginners masterfully compressed the perspective of Against Faustus the Manichee into the space of a book one-tenth the size. Indeed in that book we find a pithy saying about scriptural unity that summarizes the focus of Christ Meets Me Everywhere: “In the Old Testament is the secret hiding of the New, in the New Testament is the showing forth of the Old” (Instr. Beg. 4.8).35

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PART ONE

Novice Rhetor, Convert, Seeker of Wisdom (386–391)

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Eureka! in Milan when ambrose taught augustine what he already knew

Introduction: Looking for a Mentor Augustine’s departure for Milan from Rome late in the year 384 marks a watershed in Augustine’s life, and arguably also in the history of Christianity. That city was home to Ambrose, the bishop of the empire’s western administrative center. A son of nobility, highly educated, and a former provincial governor, Ambrose had been bishop for about ten years and was at the height of his powers when Augustine arrived. This man decisively altered Augustine’s mind about the Catholic faith; significantly, the chief catalyzing agent was Ambrose’s practice of figurative Scripture interpretation. It was he who initiated the young African into the luxuriant forest of biblical figures that Augustine would search out for the next forty-five years. However, all that was far in the future in 384, a year that found Augustine in an unsettled state. Outwardly his career was on a fast track; the famous Symmachus had appointed Augustine to the prestigious post of imperial orator, a major promotion up the ranks of the civil service. But inwardly Augustine’s personal turmoil had reached a crisis point; the direction of his life remained a puzzling question. Manichean contacts, perhaps friends of Faustus, had pulled strings to get him the new job, but relations with the group had been souring for some time. Certain doubts plagued him, and Augustine couldn’t shake the memory of a certain Elpidius, a feisty Catholic apologist back in Carthage who struck a nerve by openly mocking the Manichean claim that Catholics corrupted the

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Christian Scriptures. Augustine privately agreed that the argument was weak (Conf. 5.11.21). A few other issues also troubled him, but Manichean friends promised that the great bishop Faustus one day would come to answer all these pesky questions. Faustus did come, but unfortunately the long-anticipated meeting was a dud (ibid. 5.6.10). The disappointment sent Augustine reeling at the thought of having drifted nine long years in the windless waters of Manicheeism with nothing to show for his pains. But he also became aware that the Manichean grip on him was loosening. “I was parched and almost overcome by prolonged thirst,” Augustine later wrote, “crying and groaning .  .  . [ for] what I needed to restore me and bring me back to the hope of life and salvation.”1 Looking north from Rome to Milan, he secretly scanned the horizon looking for a new mentor, especially someone who might explain the Bible to him because he “had studied those books thoroughly” (Conf. 5.11.21). That someone quietly appeared when Augustine “came to Milan, and to Ambrose, the bishop” (ibid. 5.13.23). He visited Ambrose’s church to hear the famous man speak; then having come for the style he stayed for the substance. Over the course of the next eighteen months Augustine’s thinking about Christianity, starting with his thinking about the Bible, was completely remade.

I. Ambrosian Influence After initial hesitation, Augustine began to listen to Ambrose’s “energetic preaching.” In time it swept away many of his old Manichean bugaboos, and it did so using Scripture, especially the Old Testament. Ambrose’s approach was deeply mystical. As he once wrote a correspondent, “Holy Scripture is a sea which has within it profound meanings and the mysterious depths of the Prophets. Into this sea many rivers have entered. Delightful and clear are these streams; these fountains are cool, springing up into life everlasting.”2 A sermon dating from a few years after Augustine’s time in Milan gives a taste of Ambrose’s biblical approach. A text in Joshua 20:6 instituted a “city of refuge” that should welcome and protect a fugitive man-killer “until the high priest dies.” Ambrose commented that the vagaries of chance and uncertainty made a literal interpretation of that verse seem unlikely; therefore, he announced, because “the letter causes difficulty, let us search for spiritual meanings,” and he proceeded to interpret the text in terms of Christ.3 Ambrose offered an undreamt-of feast for the famished Augustine, who later said it was like tasting “the choicest wheat and the joy of oil and the sober intoxication of wine” (Conf. 5.13.23). Augustine heard

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Ambrose encapsulate his exegesis in terms of a sentence from Paul, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6), and he recalled that Ambrose often referred to that sentence “as if he were carefully putting forward something like a rule (tanquam regula)” (Conf. 6.4.6). Studies of Augustine’s encounter with Ambrose routinely look to philosophy to explain the origins of his changed outlook on the Bible. They point out that Ambrose taught him how to think in terms that were spiritual, that is, nonmaterial. The case is a good one. “A spiritual exposition of the Scriptures” involved giving “an explanation [that] involves the conception of God or the soul as incorporeal realities.”4 Books 5 and 6 of Confessions recalled Ambrose teaching Augustine how to envision God and the soul as immaterial realities. He even credited Ambrose with correcting his mistaken idea that Catholics thought Gen. 1:26, on God making man “in his image and likeness,” mandated belief that God had a huge body extended through space (Conf. 6.3.4). Furthermore, one of Augustine’s first post-conversion dialogues supports this view. The ex-Manichee commented that “our priest,” that is, Ambrose, often counseled in his sermons that “when thinking about God one should think about absolutely nothing bodily” (On the Happy Life 1.4). Ambrose went on to solve many biblical puzzles this way, as Augustine recounted in the following familiar passage of Confessions: Once, and again, and indeed many times I heard Ambrose untie some knotty obscurity (aenigmate soluto) from the old scriptures. These texts, because I was taking them in a literal sense (ad litteram), were killing me. And so after having several passages of those books explained spiritually (spiritaliter), I reproached myself for that despair of mine insofar as I had trouble believing that the Law and Prophets couldn’t be defended at all against the people who loathed and mocked them.5 So the picture of Augustine using Ambrose’s teaching to construct a new and philosophically enlightened spiritual interpretation of Scripture is plausible. Nevertheless, a close reading of Confessions reveals an intriguing discrepancy in this chronology. Augustine wrote that his thought inched forward as Ambrose pummeled his objections to the Old Testament (“I kept listening every Lord’s day”; omni die dominico audiebam; 6.3.4), until he allowed that it might be intellectually defensible. But in the same passage

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he wrote that, just as he was coming to accept Ambrose’s view of the Old Testament, Augustine was still hitting an intellectual stone wall on the subject of immateriality. “I had not the least notion,” he wrote, “or even an obscure suspicion how there could be a spiritual substance” (ibid.). So even as he granted Ambrose’s premise that the Old Testament was not absurd, Augustine nevertheless admitted, regarding spiritual substance, “I had no idea whether this teaching was true or not” (6.4.6). While the conception of immaterial spiritual reality provided possible answers to certain questions, of itself it seems not to account for Augustine’s radical change of perspective on the Bible. Indeed his problem was the much bigger one of the relation between faith and reason: not the inability to understand this or that text but his inability to believe the global Catholic claim to Old Testament authority in the first place. Accepting plausible nonbodily interpretations of a few texts was not enough. His change of perspective required a reorientation to a comprehensive biblical hermeneutic. How did that happen? For nearly a decade Augustine the Manichee had seen the Old Testament as an intractable mass of crude narratives, contradictory genealogies, immoral stories, nonsensical rituals, and even blasphemous curses aimed at Christian faith. Then he changed his mind. Why? We mostly think of him shifting his philosophical views, but philosophy was still an avocation in 385, a way of life that was not well developed. However, there is another option. I suggest that Augustine’s profession as a teacher of rhetoric is the best place to look for clues to his makeover. We see the Milanese Augustine moving from resistance and disdain to acceptance and approval of the claim that the Old Testament too contains, as he later put it, “divinely given signs” (Chr. Teach. 2.2.3). What happened? Ambrose helped him connect the biblical dots within a rhetorical framework that was familiar from Augustine’s daily teaching routine. In particular, with Ambrose’s help Augustine recognized in Scripture an operation based on the second of the traditional five parts of rhetoric, the “arrangement” (dispositio), in which an orator arranges the elements of a discourse. In that theme Augustine recognized God’s providential ordering of creation, history, and redemption. The rhetorical angle was a natural one. Like Ambrose, Augustine had wedded his grammatical and rhetorical training to unusual speaking abilities, and he advanced in society accordingly. As a practitioner and teacher of rhetoric, even at age thirty-two Augustine was an established professional. So he and the bishop of Milan were two men who spoke a common language. Above all, Augustine himself tells us that Ambrose’s

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rhetoric—before spiritual philosophy—was the tripwire for the change in his thinking. Ambrose’s reputation as an orator was well known; indeed Augustine’s curiosity about his skill was the original reason for going to the cathedral. But things didn’t happen all at once. Perhaps from the fall of 384 into the spring of 385, Augustine listened and struggled with what he was hearing. He repeatedly says that his progress under Ambrose was painful and halting, occurring only “slowly” (sensim; Conf. 5.13.23), “gradually” (gradatim; 5.14.24), and “little by little” (paulatim; 6.5.7). This incremental movement suggests a sequence of steps taken before Augustine finally achieved a Catholic understanding of the Bible. In brief, rhetoric was the common thread running through all these moments; it prepared Augustine to receive Ambrose’s insights into immaterial spiritual reality, which in turn he learned more fully from the “books of the Platonists” (ibid. 7.9.13).6 Augustine’s original problem with the Bible was not intellectual but rhetorical: not that it was unphilosophical but that it was un-Ciceronian. Let’s rewind for a moment to the famous passage in Book 3 of Confessions where Augustine’s view of the Bible went off the Catholic rails. The year was 373. His father had just died; supported now in school by his mother, the teenager from the African backwater set out to conquer the big city. Carthage, that seething “cauldron” (playing on Carthago-sartago; 3.1.1), a city perpetually on the make, provided the backdrop for Augustine acting out his adolescent passions and indulgences, constantly “in love with love” and recurrently “spellbound by the theatrical shows.” Nevertheless he progressed in his prestigious course of legal studies and stayed in the express lane toward a lucrative law practice and possibly a governorship. His gift for eloquence, for the ars loquendi, was his saving grace. He lavished attention upon his practice and studied works in the field; his teachers took notice, and they considered him “the ablest student in the school of rhetoric” (ibid. 3.3.6). He found one book especially compelling, the Hortensius of Cicero (now lost), which couched an exhortation to seek philosophical wisdom in rhetorical suavity. “The book changed my way of feeling and the character of my prayers to you, O Lord,” Augustine later recalled. Worldly hopes suddenly appeared vain, and so “with an unbelievable intensity my heart burned with longing for the immortality that wisdom seemed to promise. I began to rise up in order to return to you” (ibid. 3.4.7; trans. Boulding). However, Augustine’s ardor cooled after he realized that Cicero never mentioned Christ, whose name “my infant heart had piously drunk in with my mother’s milk, and at a deep level I retained in the memory” (Conf. 3.4.8). Cicero remained his paragon. So an easy remedy seemed

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ready to hand, for a moment anyway: he would bring his Ciceronian passion to the Church’s book of wisdom, the Bible. But upon finally reading the Bible, he found it dismayingly awkward, even bizarre. His youthful disgust still peeks through the lines of his revisionist hindsight in Confessions. He hadn’t been ready for what he found. The text, he recalled, was neither “accessible to the scrutiny of the proud nor exposed to the gaze of the immature, something lowly as one enters but lofty as one advances further (incessu humilem, successu excelsam), something veiled in mystery. At that time, though, I was in no state to enter, nor prepared to bow my head and accommodate myself to its ways . . . I disdained to be a little child (parvulus) and in my high and mighty arrogance regarded myself as grown up” (ibid. 3.5.9).7 In other words, the Bible seemed simplistic and hopelessly incoherent, an unworthy vessel for wisdom. Ciceronians thought that truth and good form appeared together. But these books of the Bible were strange, rough and uninviting, texts that hindered rather than helped the search for wisdom. The three-part report that he brought back to his friends shows clearly: (1) “I decided to pay attention to the Holy Scriptures to find out what they were like”; (2) I judged that they were “unworthy (indigna) compared with the dignity of Cicero”; and so (3) “I shunned the Bible’s style” (ibid.). Here was a precocious kid’s typically sophomoric veni, vidi, vici: he read, he judged, he shunned. Which part of the Bible he read is unclear, but his judgment was swift and certain. The Ciceronian biblical experiment ended as quickly as it began; when Augustine closed the codex he also closed his mind to the Catholic Scriptures for nearly a decade. His grounds were rhetorical, but the effects were spiritual: as he later analyzed it, having shunned the Bible’s style, it inevitably followed that “my gaze never penetrated to its inner depths (interiora)” (ibid.). Here as elsewhere in Confessions, we must peel away the layers of retrospective self-correction to uncover the young Augustine’s attitude. Book 3 gives us a clear picture of his mind as a newly minted bishop in Hippo in 397, but his state of mind in Carthage as a student rhetor in 373 remains half-hidden. However, we get some help from Book 6’s look into his state of mind as a vexed ex-Manichean inquirer in Milan in 385. Ambrose’s preaching forced Augustine to revisit the judgment of his younger self; that’s when he caught something about Scripture that he missed the first time around in 373, namely, that its strategically rough rhetoric was designed to repel scoffers even as it welcomed seekers. It worked like this: God gave Scripture a low doorway of simple language in order to compel a reader’s deep bow that would allow one to pass to its

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inner precincts. Once inside, the staircase toward spiritual wisdom came into view; in short, he needed “to bend my head to climb its steps.”8 The fact that he couldn’t do it at the time, as he later saw it, left him open to the Manichean wolves (Conf. 3.6.10). But Ambrose changed all that by identifying the Bible’s rhetorical strategies with the same Ciceronian lessons that Augustine himself was teaching every day to his students. As a result, the whole Old Testament suddenly leapt back into play as a work of divine eloquence that stirred Augustine in his search for wisdom. Eureka! It was a lesson he never forgot.9 In what follows we’ll pursue the elements of the Ciceronian approach that clicked as Augustine listened to Ambrose.

II. Enter the Lawyers: “Interpreting What Is Written” (Interpretatio Scriptum) Rhetorical training in the ancient world prepared lawyers and others to fight for clients in cases determining innocence and guilt, wealth and poverty, and even life and death. Disagreements over documents like wills and treaties brought rules of interpretation into play. Cicero and Quintilian followed Aristotle in grounding the interpretation of ambiguous and obscure texts in a tradition of analysis called interpretatio scriptum, “interpreting what is written.” A long section in Book II of Cicero’s On Invention (40.116– 48.143) describes this process. The heart of the discussion distinguishes a text’s written words (scriptum, “what is written”) from the writer’s intention (sententia, “meaning,” or voluntas, “will”). Because written letters are mute in themselves, a document can ambiguously or even only obscurely convey the will of its author. The oratorical handbooks taught various strategies for advocating interpretations that sided either with a strict reading of the “letter” or with a general one based on “intent.” When discrepancies made literal meanings difficult to pin down, the principle of “equity” (Greek, epieikeia; Latin, aequitas) accommodated the dead letter to a living tradition of justice. Aristotle, followed by Cicero, even imagined a dead author coming back to life to speak on behalf of the judgment invoked by equity.10 Equity “fitted” or “accommodated” the law’s generalities to particular cases and even authorized interpreters to make adaptive corrections to a written law. Equity’s mediation of a document’s scriptum and voluntas, its “letter” and “spirit,” was a procedure of accommodation imitated by rhetorically trained early Christian thinkers.11 So the process of learning to read well, that is, to make a text’s interpretation seem satisfyingly sensible and right, was like a “homecoming”: good interpretation domesticated a strange text

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and made it familiaris, “familiar,” that is, “part of the family.”12 The ancient literary critic and teacher Plutarch made a comparison between adolescents learning to interpret a poem and Odysseus coming home. Two and a half centuries later the Christian bishop Basil of Caesarea used the same image to speak of teaching young people to read rightly.13 Augustine for his part also compared good interpretation to reaching a destination, and he compared learning to read well to Aeneas’s journey home.14 What happened to Augustine in Milan was also something of a homecoming. Ambrose’s preaching featured a familiar rhetorical construction that accommodated Scripture’s written letter, scriptum, to its divine author’s intention, voluntas. That reversed the estrangement that had settled into Augustine’s mind after that first unfortunate encounter with the Bible. This is the rhetorical dress for the famous text from St.  Paul that named for Augustine what Ambrose was doing, namely, 2 Cor. 3:6, “the letter kills and the spirit gives life.” These categories of “letter” and “spirit,” transposed from his training and teaching about scriptum and voluntas, grounded what he came to understand as the “figurative” sense. Augustine’s reorientation to Scripture, therefore, was rhetorical before it was philosophical. He listened with new ears, deeply impressed by the Bible’s strategy of accommodating truth to people at all levels of understanding, while at the same time it protected that truth from the attacks of the proud. As it turned out, Augustine came to see that the Bible’s homespun eloquence not only did not fall short of Cicero but actually surpassed him. Thus Augustine became “the first major thinker to regard the Scriptures generically as a work of rhetoric, that is, as a work of figural eloquence with designs upon its audience.”15

III. Twin Strategies for Accommodation: Arrangement and Decorum Let’s look at two special features that translated Augustine’s rhetorical framework into a usable hermeneutical approach. The whole purpose of rhetoric, “the speaking art,” was to master the ways of accommodating a message to an audience. Each of its traditional five parts focused upon this goal. Briefly, they are: (1) inventio, establishment of material for argument; (2) dispositio, arrangement of material clearly and cogently; (3) elocutio, style that shapes speech most appropriately to the subject and the audience; (4) memoria, digestion of the speech’s content to make it one’s own; and (5) actio, gesticulation on the occasion of delivery.16 According to

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Quintilian, rhetorical strategies deriving from the second and third of these parts were outstanding for their accommodative power. The first was “economy” (oeconomia), a special form of arrangement (dispositio) that related to the discourse’s “proof.” In fact, Quintilian used the phrase oeconomica dispositio for constructing a speech’s elements to make the greatest impact by artfully omitting or rearranging certain elements.17 The second strategy was decorum, an aspect of style (elocutio). It referred to the work of adapting speeches for particular times, places, and contexts. Both strategies drew their power from the dynamic interrelationship between the whole discourse and its various parts. Decorum, or literary propriety, governs the suitability of words to an audience.18 For instance, an off-color joke at a funeral not only shows bad taste but also breaks decorum: it doesn’t “fit.” Decorum also governs the suitability of words to their ideas and the agreement between two texts or sets of texts. Augustine’s Letter 138, as we have seen, clearly related decorum to the unity and congruence of the Scriptures. The pagan Volusianus had objected to Christian Scripture on the grounds that God contradicted himself by commanding animal sacrifices at one time and rejecting them at another.19 Augustine answered that while something can be judged beautiful in itself without reference to something else, a thing is fitting or apt (thus observing decorum) because of its relationship to some other thing. The different parts of Scripture, Augustine explained, show the divine author respecting decorum by composing them like an ineffably gifted artist combining movements in a sung poem.20 The Bible’s apparent contradictions are only different components in a single grand scheme. If one misses the scheme, he contended, one loses the thread of Scripture’s practice of decorum; but if set within the framework of God’s accommodating speech, it occasions the discovery of deeper truth.21 Quintilian paired decorum with an even greater tool of accommodating speech, oeconomica dispositio; together they formed the most important skill set that young orators must learn.22 Because arrangement took precedence over style, the handbooks of Cicero and Quintilian followed Aristotle in discussing arrangement before style, and thus they considered oeconomica dispositio as not merely the complement of decorum but its premise. For them the formal principle of “economy” pulled back the hearer’s or reader’s attention from the interlocking parts of discourse to discern the speaker’s central intention.23 Whereas decorum looks at the congruence and unity of a speech from the perspective of how its parts fit together, dispositio regards the conceptual unity of a speech as the presupposition of

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the whole into which the parts fit. As Kathy Eden has written, “Subordinating the individual parts of the discourse to the overall plan of the whole, oeconomia, the principle of composition and interpretation, presupposes the whole in the disposition of the parts.”24 So Augustine’s Letter 138, while indeed emphasizing the “fittingness” of the parts to each other and to the audience, made that fit depend on the integral beauty of the entire discourse. That is to say, decorum’s power derives from the speech’s arrangement, the oeconomica dispositio. Volusianus expressly admired Augustine’s skillful approach to the “rhetorical distribution of the parts of a discourse” (rhetorica partitio); and he mentioned his use of oeconomia as a powerful poetic tool.25 Augustine responded in kind (thus exemplifying decorum26) by trying to get Volusianus to see the Scriptures as a record of the stages of salvation history from Abraham to Christ that unfolds the providential order of time for the benefit of human salvation. This outlook bears the imprint of Quintilian’s oeconomia dispositio. Throughout the time of the Old Testament, Augustine wrote, the “divine arrangement” (dispositio divina) became “more and more visible as promises were fulfilled.”27

IV. A Closer Look at Rhetorical “Arrangement” (Dispositio) Augustine’s sense of the divine dispositio derived from his analogy between the providential work of divine Wisdom and the ordering work of the speechmaker. Wisdom, says Scripture, “arranges everything pleasingly from one end to the other” (Wis. 8:1). Augustine quoted this text many times, especially in his early writings, often in conjunction with a discussion about Scripture.28 The character of Lady Wisdom in the Old Testament was a kind of first image of the Son of God, the divine Word, “the wisdom and power of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). On True Religion, as we will see, used Wis. 8:1 strikingly to climax a discussion of the pageantry and mystery of the Scriptures considered as a single divine strategy: God playfully used earthly images to heal sick spiritual eyes by applying a mudpack (cf. John 9:1–5) of biblical parables, figures, and allegories (50.98). In other early works like the Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, dispositio rendered the mysterious ordering of images in the creation account in Gen. 1 (7.28), as well as the whole order of Providence and its calibration of number, measure, and weight that gives the universe its luminous coherence (Wis. 11:21). A passage in Catholic and Manichean Practices identified the figure of Wisdom “arranging all things pleasingly” with the Word “through whom

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all things were made” (John 1:3) (1.16.27). The dispositio referred not to the ordering and unifying of Scripture as such but to the ordered unity of creation whose interlocking coherence Scripture replicates. Augustine’s first work as a priest, The Advantage of Believing, explained that God unified all things in creation by a dispositio that also ordered the times of history reflected in Scriptures (3.6). Sermon 8 later saw Wisdom’s “divine providence spread abroad in all things” and encourages trust that the same power orders the events of the Scriptures (8.1). Augustine’s On Free Choice suggestively compared the operation of God’s providential arrangement to a manager bringing order to his household. When such a manager, Augustine wrote, punishes a slave for some fault by forcing him to clean out a drain, he is actually integrating the slave’s deviance into the overall dispositio of the house: “Each of these two elements, that is, the disgrace of the slave and the cleansing of the drain, now conjoined and reoriented by some unique kind of unity (in quadam sui generis unitatem), is thus adapted and subjoined to the planned arrangement (disposita) of the house, in order that it may harmonize fittingly (decore) with the perfect order of the whole.”29 The image of a house’s “unique kind of unity” connected to the idea of “economic management” at work in Augustine’s concept of dispositio. He often used a related term, dispensatio, to invoke the “distribution” of goods and services throughout a great house. This term was basic to Augustine’s important early concept of God’s “temporal dispensation” (dispensatio temporalis) for referring to the salvation plan for the human race grounded in history.30 God so ordered the household of temporal creation that he brought the recalcitrant human part back to its proper order of loving the Creator more than the creature. In the service of this temporal dispensation, history and prophecy operate in Scripture as the first elements in the order of time: the act of hearing and believing Scripture’s authoritative account of God’s goodness heals the soul to see and imitate the logical order (ratio) of God’s creation; that is, it heals the mind’s powers of spiritual reasoning. The spiritual mind sees God’s salvation plan as a unified work of art, which Augustine eventually likened to a “sung poem by some indescribable artist.”31 A suggestive passage of Confessions shows how fertile an image this was for Augustine. A person chanting a psalm, he wrote, holds the whole work in mind while voicing each bit, and the individual parts reflect the entirety. “What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that psalm plays a part (particula est). It is also

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valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are parts (partes) of a whole, and of the total history of the ‘sons of men’ where all human lives are but parts” (trans. Chadwick; quoted by permission of Oxford University Press).32 The individual as microcosm links the deeply personal perspective of Confessions to the world-historical perspective of The City of God. The rhetorical base of both works used the analogy whereby God beautifully arranged (“disposed”) the divine discourse of temporal events into a congruent whole. Augustine thought divine power spoke through human events the way human beings speak through words. His Letter 102 spoke of biblical miracles and their effect on human understanding of the divine plan of salvation: “As human custom speaks using words, so also divine power speaks using events. And as new or little-used words, if used sparingly and sprinkled about appropriately (decenter), add splendor to human speech, so wondrous deeds that fittingly symbolize something bring extra luster to the divine discourse (eloquentia).”33 Not only the content but also the style of God’s speech was crucial to human conversion. Scripture’s prominence in the divine ordering of human events gives it “a certain eloquence in teaching conducive to salvation that is suited to turn the affections of the learners from visible things to invisible ones, from bodily things to non-bodily ones, and from temporal things to eternal ones” (Letter 55.7.13; trans. Teske).

Stepping Toward Beauty What Augustine realized in the days sitting under the influence of the bishop of Milan appears like the flash of Eureka! But it probably took months to work out the implications and integrate them into a coherent view. The movement in Augustine’s mind unfolded as a series of “steps.” Let’s take a moment to lay these out. Step 1. Augustine critically accepted the quality of Ambrose’s speaking style, that is, his “words.” On a Sunday perhaps in late 384, amid the buzzing cathedral crowd, Augustine first heard Ambrose speak. The anonymous encounter between the ex-Catholic, now a confused almost ex-Manichee, and the famously learned and austere Catholic bishop happened on a strictly professional level. As he later wrote, “I used enthusiastically to listen to him preaching to the people, not with the intention which I ought to have had, but as if testing out his oratorical skill to see whether it merited the reputation it enjoyed or whether his fluency was better or inferior than it was reported to be. I hung on his diction in rapt attention, but remained

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bored and contemptuous of the subject-matter” (5.13.23, trans. Chadwick; quoted by permission of Oxford University Press). Augustine’s mental checklist of rhetorical pluses and minuses attuned him to Ambrose’s words at a frequency that was inaudible to most people. But to the teacher of rhetoric standing before the bishop’s cathedra, these points were familiar and obvious. “I was not interested in learning what he was talking about,” Augustine wrote, “and listened only for his rhetorical technique” (5.14.24). In other words, Augustine judged Ambrose by the same oratorical and Ciceronian criteria that he had used to judge the Bible many years before (3.5.9). But this time Augustine was pleasantly surprised. “My pleasure was in the charm of his language,” Augustine remembered. “It was more learned than that of Faustus, but less witty and entertaining, as far as the manner of speaking went” (5.13.23). Not only was Ambrose rhetorically eloquent, but he was also philosophically coherent and intellectually exacting, and refused to dumb down the material even at the expense of style. Step 2. Overcoming his resistance, Augustine welcomed not just Ambrose’s words but also his message. Like his hero Cicero, Augustine believed it was functionally impossible to separate words from ideas. This stood in some tension with his attraction to Platonism. Antagonism had flared between rhetoric and philosophy already in the days of Socrates’ attack on the empty charm and deception of eloquence in the Gorgias.34 Rhetoric, Socrates said, imparted no real insight or actual knowledge of justice, as dialectic does. But Socrates’ contemporary Isocrates protested that eloquent speech was essential to the achievements of thought. Aristotle built upon Isocrates by casting rhetoric as the completion of dialectic. The synthesis of Aristotle and Isocrates reappeared in Cicero, who deplored the divorce between philosophy and rhetoric. Speaking in the person of Crassus in The Orator, Cicero recalled that practitioners of both disciplines had once been united under the single name “philosopher.” But then Socrates robbed [the rhetoricians] of this designation, and in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together (re cohaerentes . . . separavit). . . . This is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible (absurdum sane et inutile et reprehendum) severance of the tongue from the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak. (The Orator 3.16.60, trans. Sutton and Rackham)

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So Augustine participated in a tradition running from Isocrates and Cicero all the way to Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan, and Barack Obama, that refuses to honor a divorce between linguistic form and meaning. Verba might be analytically distinguished from res (and so criticized), but these thinkers insist that they cannot be functionally separated. Speech matters because words not only describe things but also do things.35 Augustine loudly and often deplored the sorry history of rhetoric being hijacked for sophistry and deception (already a venerable part of rhetoric’s rhetoric about itself); nevertheless, as every page he ever wrote testifies, “he had Plato in his mind and heart, but he had Isocrates in his blood.”36 Step 3. Augustine began to learn about “spiritual” interpretation from the rhetorical structure of “letter” and “spirit” (2 Cor. 3:6). Augustine wrote that he “delighted to hear Ambrose often saying to the people in his sermons, as though very carefully pronouncing a principle (regula) of exegesis: ‘The letter kills, the spirit gives life’ [2 Cor. 3:6]. He would explain spiritually those texts—which seemed to contain perverse teaching if taken literally (ad litteram)—by removing their mystical veil (remoto mystico velamento spiritaliter aperiret)” (6.4.6; trans. Chadwick; quoted by permission of Oxford University Press).37 Ambrose’s use of Paul’s regula picked the lock that had hung for a decade around Augustine’s thought on the Old Testament, and it released him to a new conception of Scripture that both honored its words and respected its style. Ambrose’s rhetorical approach helped Augustine to connect the Bible’s figurative strategies with what he was teaching to his students every day. Ambrose’s preaching led him, first, not to interpretations about immaterial spiritual reality but to a rhetorical construction that accommodated Scripture’s written letter, scriptum, to the divine author’s intention, voluntas. These categories familiar from his training and teaching grounded what he came to understand eventually in terms of philosophy as its “spiritual” sense. The Bible’s obscure roughness, it turned out, bore a unique eloquence that he had not known. Step 4. Augustine decided that it was “not absurd” to accept the Old Testament’s authority and that it deserved “reverence and faith.” Ambrose motivated Augustine, at first a little, then more and more, to read the Old Testament differently. As a result, Augustine gave a new hearing to Catholic Christianity. “I was also pleased that when the old writings of the Law and Prophets came before me, they were no longer read with an eye to which they had previously looked absurd, when I used to attack your saints as if they thought what in fact they did not think at all” (6.4.6). If Ambrose was right—still a big “if” at this point—then perhaps the idea of an authoritative Old Testament was at least defensible, if not yet fully convincing. But even

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this hint of Catholic credibility drove up the Church’s stock in Augustine’s eyes; it might after all contain “educated people who asserted its claims and refuted objections with abundant argument and without absurdity” (5.14.24). “Nonabsurdity,” however, removed only one obstacle, and by itself did not decide the issue of faith. Augustine was intrigued but remained noncommittal. Nevertheless, Augustine was in the process of reconceiving the relationship between reason and faith. The Hortensius had taught him that philosophically informed reason must judge a position before one commits to it. But that optimism about the strength of reason paradoxically played into the hands of a similar-sounding Manichean claim. “You people believe everything impetuously (omnia temere credis),” Faustus told his Catholic critics, and “denounce (damnas) human reason, the very gift of nature to us.”38 Augustine’s swift passage from Ciceronian devotee to Manichean Hearer (3.6.10) is indeed striking; Confessions narrates it in the space of two paragraphs. Though the Manichees were otherwise pessimistic about human nature, which they thought was created by demonic powers, they nevertheless aggrandized human reason’s power to discriminate between true and false, right and wrong, even before becoming enlightened by Mani. But Ambrose reset the issue from a different perspective that respected the size of the mysteries that reason was called upon to consider. From that perspective, faith was not irrational; though faith takes its start from reason, it employs a basic rationality that turns the work of reason upon faith itself. This was not full-throttle spiritual reason (it did not depend on accepting Ambrose’s teaching about immaterial reality) but a sort of incipient reason that measured the credibility of faith’s first moves. For this reason it needed the help of a defensible “authority of the sacred writings” (6.5.8). This new welcoming acceptance of the Bible’s rhetorical savvy allowed Augustine to reconsider its spiritual wisdom.39 Augustine had recently flirted with Academic skepticism. But it was never a good fit; he concluded that the mind was too spectacularly endowed to be completely unable to find truth. “But often again, as I reflected to the best of my ability how lively was the human mind, how wise, how penetrating, I could not believe that the truth must always elude its grasp.” He later remembered thinking, “Possibly the manner of seeking truth might be concealed and we have to accept it from some divine authority” (Adv. Believ. 8.20). Augustine’s early writings repeatedly return to this insight about authority, which for him meant not raw power but authoritativeness based on persuasive coherence, intellectual beauty, and moral grandeur. Augustine wrote in an early treatise, On Divine Order: “The task of learning

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necessarily leads along a twofold path of authority and reason. In the order of time (tempus), authority is first, though reason is first in the order of reality (res)” (2.9.26). It seemed reasonable to think that divine grace, desiring to aid weak human beings and bring them to faith, might confer authority on some external guide. A few years later, On True Religion compared the commands of authority to a doctor’s orders to which a sick patient must agree before recovering enough strength to recognize why they work (though it demanded thought to put trust in a doctor in the first place): “So the healing of the soul, which God’s providence and inexpressible kindness brings about step by distinct step, is something extremely beautiful. It takes place in the stages of authority and reason. Authority requires faith, and that paves the way for people to use reason. Reason leads us to understanding and knowledge, although authority does not lack reason” (True Rel. 24.45).40 This was enough to reverse one of the great Manichean claims that had lured him so many years before. The titanic mysteries that the mind was called to deal with made the Catholic approach seem more coherent, more honest, and “more moderate” (modestius) than that of the Manichees, who strained at the gnat of rationalism while swallowing the camel of cosmic phantasmagoria (Conf. 6.5.7). He became deeply impressed by the wisdom of the Old Latin version of Isa. 7:9 (translated from Septuagint), “Unless you believe you will not understand.” It was a text to which he would return for the rest of his life. It suggested that the great mysteries put reason’s powers into realistic perspective; that the human problem was not with the objects upon which reason acted but with the dullness of reason itself. His more sober estimate concluded that human beings are “too weak to discover the truth by pure reasoning” (liquida ratione; Conf. 6.5.8). Once Augustine adopted this perspective, he never gave it up.41 Step 5. Augustine became impressed that the Bible gave easy access to simple believers. Augustine was persuaded by the biblical economy’s internal strategy, which welcomed all people at their own level of understanding while simultaneously protecting its sublime truths from corruption or dilution. “The authority of the sacred writings seemed to me all the more deserving of reverence and holy faith in that Scripture gave easy access to every reader, while yet guarding a mysterious dignity in its deeper sense” (6.5.8). This put Scripture into an entirely different light. Augustine now read it from a place of humble acceptance, as it were, looking “from the bottom up.” Scripture’s once-repulsive simplicity now appeared as a shrewd strategy of God’s Spirit to attract the greatest number of people,

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unlike the elitist philosophers who spoke only to the intelligentsia and left the masses in ignorance. The Bible’s simplicity appealed to beginners and challenged the wise. This wider perspective changed everything. “In plain words and very humble modes of speech [Scripture] offered itself to everyone while stretching (exercens) the understanding of those who were not shallow-minded. It welcomes all comers to its hospitable embrace, yet through narrow openings attracts a few to you—only a few, perhaps, but far more than if it had not spoken with such noble authority and drawn crowds into its embrace by its holy humility” (6.5.8). Step 6. Augustine referred the Bible’s humble speech to “the sublime heights of the sacraments.” What Ambrose offered was not an explanation of this or that passage, but a new way of seeing the texts. “Having already heard many parts of the sacred books explained in a reasonable and acceptable way, those passages which had previously struck me as absurd, and therefore repelled me, I now referred them to the sublime heights of sacraments (ad sacramentorum altitudinem referebam)” (6.5.8). Augustine was not merely dismissing the ballast of the literal sense in order to fly away to timeless truth. He was learning to apply to Scripture the Christian “sacramental principle” that oriented physical and temporal reality to spiritual truth, in view of which the Old Testament’s characters, rites, deeds, and events carried irreducible spiritual value. Under Ambrose, Augustine saw the texts not as mere earthly and carnal husks to be shucked but as powerful spiritual vessels of grace to be held. Israel’s old sacraments bore witness to Christ’s grace that was about to appear in the near future just as the Church’s new sacraments witnessed to Christ’s grace that had appeared in the recent past. Step 7. Augustine perceived Scripture’s vast divine strategy of rhetorical “accommodation.” Equity’s mediation of a document’s scriptum and voluntas, its “letter” and “spirit,” was a procedure of accommodation. Orators routinely adapted their words to fit particular cases and audiences, that is, they “accommodated” their speeches to individual situations and audiences. For this reason rhetoric was “first and foremost the art of accommodation.”42 The two strategies of rhetorical art especially admired for their accommodative power were arrangement and decorum. Both strategies gave priority to the whole discourse over its part. Orators in training were “encouraged to consider both the whole text and the whole set of circumstances that inform its production.”43 Ambrose helped Augustine to recognize these rhetorical principles which set the Bible within an intelligible rhetorical context. Ambrose used them to help vivify for Augustine

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the Bible’s central claim: the Incarnation of God’s Word in flesh and Scripture as a stupendous act of divine accommodation to humanity’s inability to perceive spiritual reality. That Word and its accommodation form the core of Scripture’s unity. As Augustine later preached: There is but one single utterance of God amplified through all the Scriptures (sermo Dei in scripturibus dilatatus), dearly beloved. Through the mouths of many holy persons a single Word makes itself heard, that Word who, being God-with-God in the beginning, has no syllables, because he is not confined by time. Yet we should not find it surprising that to meet our weakness he descended to the discrete sounds we use (ad particulas sonorum nostrorum), for he also descended to take to himself the weakness of our human body.44 Step 8. Augustine grasps “clear passages” and “obscure passages” (aperta and operta) as Scripture’s basic figurative categories. Ambrose taught Augustine that Scripture’s “plain words and very humble modes of speech” offer themselves to everyone, while a few “narrow openings” attracted a few with deeper meanings (6.5.8). On that basis one can grasp its aperta and operta as rhetorical tools that correct, lure, and exercise Scripture’s readers; this is the proper context for understanding its figurative speech. Correlatively Augustine’s first concern in reading was to determine whether a passage was plain or obscure.45 This aligned Augustine with other ancient interpreters like Philo and Origen who treated sacred texts not as objects to be analyzed but as communications to be understood. They launched the act of interpretation as soon as obscurity presented itself, busying themselves first with identifying and removing any obstacles to understanding before filing them into categories like literal, figurative, historical, or allegorical. Some figurative texts were perfectly clear just as they stood, while other plainly literal statements were deeply obscure and required interpretation. Augustine understood “letter” and “spirit” as rhetorical and legal categories that determined a document’s sense by comparing its letters on the page, the scriptum, with its author’s intention or will, the voluntas. But Ambrose helped Augustine go a step further by relating those categories to the divine design. “It is a wonderful and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organized Holy Scripture so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones. Virtually nothing unearthed from these obscurities cannot be found quite

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plainly expressed somewhere else” (Chr. Teach. 2.6.8, trans. Green). Augustine thought that God purposefully embedded all the plain, obscure, and ambiguous passages of Scripture. This revealed not only Scripture’s character but also formed the attitude necessary for the interpreter to understand it. For him the veil over the Old Testament didn’t hide spiritual mysteries so much as adorn them in order to excite the attraction of believers. “Isn’t it the case that the more eminent and respectable a person is, the more veils and curtains hang in his house? Veils inspire respect for the secret hidden behind them (Vela faciunt honorem secreti). But for those who show respect the veils are lifted, while those who scoff at the veils are turned out and not allowed anywhere near them. Because we, then, have passed over to Christ, the veil is taken away [2 Cor. 3:16]” (Serm. 51.5).46 What is that hidden thing for which one “asks, seeks, and knocks” (Matt.7:7)? Augustine explicitly states that the fundamental goal of reading Scripture is to discover God’s will, voluntas Dei (Chr. Teach. 2.9.14); plain passages stand out from obscure ones according to their proximity to love (ibid. 1.35.39). “Then, after gaining a familiarity with the language of the divine Scriptures, one should proceed to explore and analyze the obscure passages, by taking examples from the more obvious parts to illuminate obscure expressions and by using the evidence of indisputable passages to remove the uncertainty of ambiguous ones” (ibid. 2.9.14). Once the central ideas are clear, obscure texts can be “turned” until they align with that central purpose. Skill in spiritual interpretation makes the interpreter strongly aware that Scripture is a vast forest of figures that hide the soul’s nourishment for the spiritual deer that roam, rest, and ruminate in its pages (Conf. 11.2.3). These Scripture foragers find and crack open the letter of the text (Exp. Ps. 131.2) and “shell the nut” (enucleare) to feed on its nourishing spiritual kernel (Chr. Teach. 3.12.18).

Conclusion: “I’ ve Just Seen a Face” Thus for Augustine rhetoric paved the way for spiritual philosophy. Seeing the Bible as a vast unified divine discourse opened Augustine to receive the concept of immaterial reality, first from Ambrose and then from “the books of the Platonists” (Conf. 7.9.13). Together their teaching sprang him free at last from the iron cage of materialistic thinking. The “Platonist books” proffered the idea that all being, truth, and goodness resides in the intelligible realm, the only truly real world of spirit. It suggested a conception of deity as immaterial, immutable, and supratemporal, utterly different from

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the world of flesh, sense, and history. In the Christian version, the human soul, a natural citizen of the spiritual world, disastrously defected from it by turning against God; cut off from its life source the soul had turned away from its own spiritual nature and toward external, this-worldly things. That inversion disrupted what should have been a natural process of spiritual perception. But now, Augustine thinks, humans perceive the spiritual realm—he thinks principally of God and the soul—through cracked lenses that only fracture and distort the perception of intellectual truth. Meanwhile, a restless spiritual hunger gnaws the human soul. But God rescues us by the embodying the Word of God in flesh and in Scripture, whose figures point us back to the spiritual realm. Augustine’s conjunction of Scripture’s rhetorical unity and a heady sense of immaterial spiritual reality bathed the Old Testament landscape in a strange new glow, like a lightning flash in the night. The new Catholic reread the old Scriptures with wide eyes and a far different understanding than either a teenaged Ciceronian or twentysomething Manichee. He once thought Paul’s reading of the Old Testament was at best enigmatic and at worst self-contradictory. After all, had not Paul cast the Law of Moses as an outworn schema transcended by Christ (Gal. 3:19)? Manichees thought that Moses’ “law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2) came from the demonic Hebrew god, for even the Apostle said that it “provoked sin” (Rom. 5:20). So the Law that Paul called “holy and just and good” (Rom. 7:12) was a different entity, a law of truth (Faust.19.2). But Ambrose’s rhetorical-spiritual perspective on the Old Testament resolved these discrepancies from a different angle by integrating Scripture’s many parts under a single aspect. Just as the natural mind “configures” the many features of a human face into a personal unity, so the spiritual mind configures the unity of Scripture. “In that pure eloquence,” Augustine wrote, “I saw one Face, and I learned to rejoice with trembling” (Conf. 7.21.27; trans. Sheed).47 This is the net gain of Augustine’s recovery of Old Testament Scripture under Ambrose. Seeing the Bible’s rhetorical coherence and rational congruity allowed Augustine to move toward his often figurative and sometimes strongly spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament. Solving the problem of the Old Testament by figurative interpretation may fairly be called the hinge point of Augustine’s turn toward Catholic Christianity. Once he returned, the communal Catholic tradition gave him a stable perspective from which to read Scripture spiritually. We turn next to consider the first fruits of that new reading, his first foray into the work of biblical commentary in On Genesis, Against the Manichees.

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A Thousand Words Is Worth a Picture The Experiment of on genesis, against the manichees

Introduction: Looking for Worthy Words Augustine was a changed man after the revolutionary days in Milan. Flush with faith and intellectual enthusiasm, he launched a project that began to translate the basics of ancient rhetorical and philosophical knowledge into a Christian context (a move he would later portray by adapting the already traditional biblical image of Israel plundering the Egyptians [Chr. Teach. 2.40.60–42.63]). But the series of works orienting the liberal arts toward Christian spiritual ascent were never completed after he left northern Italy and lost his mother at Ostia. On returning to North Africa about 388, however, new ideas began to take shape. Major works like On the Teacher and On True Religion show a wide-ranging spiritual and philosophical vision taking hold during this period. The horizon twinkled with possibilities. Faith had given Augustine a way not only to search for truth but also to take pleasure in finding it. He pictured a life of retirement spent in a spiritual community seeking spiritual ascent, pursuing contemplation, cultivating deep conversation, and then publishing the results; he laid plans for leading a community that included his son Adeodatus and like-minded friends who would contemplatively savor the Word of God. But a short time later the horizon looked quite different, as we’ll see. This period and the next decade are unified by Augustine’s animus against his now sworn spiritual enemy, the Manichees. His campaign against them differed from his future polemics against the Donatists and

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Pelagians in one major respect: it was not only intellectual and spiritual, but also, and above all, personal. Augustine was aware of the wreckage he left behind in his Manichean years. As he confessed in one of his first public debates as a representative of the Catholic Church, “What I used to think was truth, I now think is error” (Fort. 1).1 By that reversal he admitted having torn up the lives of many people he had personally won over as Mani’s apologist, only to leave them twisting in the winds of error with their lives and destinies in danger. He wanted to make amends, not only by contesting this or that Manichean teaching; he also wished to strike at the root of the Manichean threat by contesting their two most basic selling points. The first was their show of religious practices. Augustine treated this as early as his time in Rome on the way back to Africa. In a pair of books yoked together under the title On the Practices of the Catholic Church and On the Practices of the Manichees (hereafter, Practices), he worked one by one through a series of Manichean outlooks, ideas, and rituals (especially in Book 2). The second of their “enticements” (illecebrae; Practices 1.1.2) was their attack on the Old Testament. Book 1 of Practices shows Augustine already working with a solid if still imperfect knowledge of the Old and New Testaments in the attempt to show their “compatibility” (congruentia).2 But after getting back to Africa, amid the scenes of his former Manicheeism, he addressed the issue directly and at greater length in his first sustained commentary on a biblical text titled On Genesis, Against the Manichees. At the end of his life he considered this an immature work (Rev. 1.10), but it shows Augustine beginning to expand Ambrose’s “rule” about the biblical “letter and the spirit” as a full-blown rhetorical-spiritual reading of the Old Testament. That liberating exegesis had sparked Augustine’s exit from Manicheeism, and now he hoped to free others by training those who could fight the incessant Manichean harassment of the Church’s defenseless “little ones.” The commentary plants Augustine within the spiritual-hermeneutic tradition of Philo and Origen that believed Scripture never teaches anything “unworthy of God.”3 The surface meanings of the text and deep spiritual truth are linked by the literary process of figuration, understanding of which required an astute literary sensitivity that Augustine believed the Manichees simply did not have. His analysis of biblical figures shows Augustine reaching back deep into his grammatical and rhetorical training to make sense of the Bible’s linguistic patterns and structure. This work allows us to plot the coordinates of Augustine’s thought on biblical figuration at the beginning of his Christian life by seeing its intersection with

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ancient rhetorical handbooks that he knew, particularly Cicero’s The Orator, the Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.4 These works show how the ancients were fascinated with the devices of language, which used the world’s visual phenomena as a means of human understanding and manipulated pictures and images that move the mind. They considered an orator’s mastery of figuration as an essential task in learning how to become persuasive. Reviewing Augustine’s parallels with the handbooks will help us to clarify his practice of figurative reading by putting flesh on the bones, as it were, of the Pauline exegetical “rule” learned from Ambrose about letter and spirit. Along the way we will see how the practice for Augustinian figurative reading grew up.

Figuration Patterns: Classical Rhetorical Handbooks Cicero stands at the head of the classical Latin rhetorical tradition, but he himself mediated the Greek tradition of rhetoric. A long passage in Book 3 of Cicero’s The Orator shows this for the process of figuration.5 Figurative words, he wrote, come from literal meanings that have been “transferred” (transferre, translatus) into a strange context. The term translatio gives a Latin name to the process that Greeks called “carrying over” (Gk., metaphero), when words shifted between realms of meaning. Cicero then broke down the concept according to a range of figurative effects. One form of word-transfer he calls traductio, “substitution,” or immutatio, “changeover.” By this trope, “one proper term is substituted for another.” (Though Cicero does not mention the Greeks, he is referring to what they called metonymia, “name change,” which later Latin tradition transliterated.) An example of immutatio occurs when poets exploit the names of inventors by affixing their names to their inventions. So they attach the names of gods to the goods they produced: poets call wheat “Ceres,” wine “Liber,” and the sea “Neptune.” However, Cicero continued, another kind of trope “borders on” immutatio (he gave it no special name) that occurs when a singular noun indicates a plural and vice versa. So poets speak of “the heart of the Roman” to refer to many Romans, and a squadron is collectively called “the cavalry of Rome.” This applies when individual parts take the name of whole entities, as when “wall” or “roof” indicates a complete house. Later called “synecdoche,” this part-whole conjunction links meanings and terms by drawing on proportional or representative relationships between part and whole.6

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A passage from the putatively Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium (4.32.43–45) continues the discussion.7 Speaking of language that “departs from the ordinary meaning of words,” it uses labels that substitute a name drawn “from things close and associated (ab rebus propinquis et finitimis), and so give understanding about something that “is not called by its own name.”8 The work refers to denominatio, or “labeling,” clearly a parallel to Cicero’s traductio and immutatio; but Ad Herrenium gives greater detail and more examples. For instance, when some amusement is called “idle” because it makes someone idle, a cause has given its name to an effect; similarly, freezing weather is called “numb” because it makes one feel numb. Alongside this cause-effect dynamic of metonymy stands another, container-contained. Containers give names to their contents, in a way, when people are known by the place where they live, as when “Italy” refers to Italians. But, Ad Herrenium teaches, this suggests a nearby trope called intellectio, which names a plural by a singular: “the Carthaginian gave aid to the Spaniard.” Many “parts” are understood from the single “whole” (de toto pars); conversely, one may also understand “a whole thing from a small part,” as when a dramatic play uses the mere sound of flutes to suggest an entire wedding ceremony. This is clearly the same sort of single-plural trope that Cicero left unnamed. Book 8 of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria continued this discussion of “transferences of expression from their natural and principal signification to another, or the transferal of words and phrases from their own place to another that is not theirs.”9 He introduces the transliterated Greek terms that remain in English use to this day. “Synecdoche” (synekdoche) parallels Cicero’s nameless trope that “borders on immutatio” and the intellectio of Ad Herrenium. Quintilian points out that the historian Livy used synecdoche to describe many things by one thing (“the Roman won the day”) and also named a whole from its part (“point” for “sword,” and “roof” for “house”). Quintilian used the transliteration “metonymy” (metonymia) to refer to the trope of authors who “substitute certain words for some other words” (ponuntur verba alia pro aliis) or “put down one term in place of another” (nominis pro nomine positio). For instance, inventors give their own names to their inventions, and owners give their names to possessions; so people say “Vergil” when pointing to a book of Vergil’s poems. So also poets denote causes by the name of their effect; for example, “pale death knocks” describes the approach of an epidemic. Similarly, Quintilian wrote, “common usage” accepts the idea that a container gives its

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name to what it contains in phrases like “civilized cities,” “drinking a cup,” or “a happy age.” These name changes describe various kinds of figurative relationships. Cause-effect relationships exchange names on the basis of causal sequence. Because human beings routinely describe the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, metonymy works by figuratively projecting known effects back on their unknown cause, and naming the cause in terms of the effect, even though the cause remains hidden behind the effect. For example, the phrase “thunder roars” likens the rumbling sound in a stormy sky to the cry of a lion; the explicit reference to an actual lion is suppressed (or “transumed”), while the expression projects the effect back upon the imagined cause by embedding it figuratively in the verb. The relationship between a container and its contents draws similarly on the dynamics of association. Thus one does not literally “drink a cup,” but rather drinks a cup of coffee. The “coffee” clearly doesn’t cause the “cup,” nor is coffee part of the cup; yet people say they “drink a cup” because they spontaneously associate the content with its container. But a certain ambiguity arises here. When elements are perceived as merely in association but as functionally inherent to each other, the structure of figurative association shifts. For example, a boss who habitually drinks from a certain cup may so fuse his personal identity with the cup that no one else uses it. Likewise, as all forlorn lovers know, random things and places can strongly invoke an absent person’s presence; even though the relationship has ended, the movie ticket from that first date remains redolent. Container-content relations therefore often mimic part-whole relations, as the perception of two things belonging to one another fuses them functionally in the mind of the perceiver. That kind of relationship, therefore, more closely approaches a hazy kind of synecdoche—even though its actual basis is metonymy by association. Synecdoche proper forges figurative links not primarily by causation or association (though these may also be included) but by the participation (or perceived participation) of parts in a greater whole. So “head of cattle” uses one part of the animal to refer to the whole herd. In this case the part-whole relationship is intrinsic. Name changes result from a link between elements within a single entity, just as married people share a single identity; legally they are a single unit, so that the two individuals share ownership of goods and often even the same name. Children both literally and figuratively combine the twoness of their parents into one.

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Augustine’s Reading of the Rhetorical Handbooks I. Studying How Words Happen: On Dialectic (386) What interests us in this technical analysis of figurative dynamics is that Augustine clearly knew and used the works of those who went before him in constructing his practice of figurative reading. The early incomplete treatise On Dialectic, a remnant of the projected curriculum that would have transposed the liberal arts into a Christian key, reproduced portions of Augustine’s teaching on rhetoric in Rome and Milan. It clearly shows the influence of the rhetorical handbooks.10 For their future service to the law courts or imperial service, Augustine taught students “the knowledge needed for arguing well.”11 This demanded a precise understanding of words and meaning, so On Dialectic analyzed both the inherent force of spoken words and various obstructions to understanding them. Augustine twice discussed the dynamics of figurative language while treating two aspects of how words work, “the origins of words” (par. 6) and “the ambiguities of words” (par. 10). In the first Augustine admitted that determining the first spark of word creation is often pure guesswork (“like the interpretation of dreams it is a matter of each person’s ingenuity”; pro cuiusque ingenio; 6.9.5–6). But word formation clearly depends on patterns of figuration whose basic principle is likeness (similitudo). The Stoics claimed that words take shape in likeness to onomatopoeic sounds that serve as “word-cradles” (cunabula verborum); thus tinnitum sounds like the clinking that the word actually means. A word might also arise from the likeness to a certain experience, as with the harsh sound of crux, “cross,” that arose from the bitterness of crucifixion (6.10.11). Still others claimed that words come from the misapplication (abusio) of a word that “takes over” (usurpo) its literal sense for some larger figurative purpose (6.10.13). But Augustine thinks that the search for word origins faded into absurdity when Stoics claimed that some words emerge from the juxtaposition of opposing meanings, as, for example, when they derived the word “war,” bellum, from “pretty,” bella, because all war is ugly. However, another more promising principle stated that nearness of sense, or proximity (vicinitas), forms the link between a word’s literal and figurative meanings (6.10.18). For example, a “little bath” was called a piscina by its semantic proximity to pools that have fish (pisces)—even though piscinae contained no fish. According to this principle, new words appear when “what comes about gets its name from that thing that makes it come about” (id quod fit

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ab eo per quod fit nominatur; 6.11.1), a version of a cause giving its name to one of its effects. Augustine then discussed factors that blunt or lose “the force of words” (vis verborum) (8.14.3), especially ambiguity, which Augustine compared to a crossroad with many paths (multivium; 8.15.11). Among several types of ambiguity, Augustine especially addressed the multivalence of “equivocation” and drew on the same patterns of word figuration that underpinned his discussion of word origins in On Dialectic 6. Equivocation, he explained, occurs when a word’s multiple possible meanings impede a reader or hearer’s ability to understand (chap. 10). So without any context the name “Tullius” (i.e., Cicero) might indicate variously the historical man Cicero, a statue of Cicero, a book of Cicero’s letters, or Cicero’s dead body in the grave (10.18.1–5). From this Augustine built into his discussion three major conceptual pairs of figurative expression that result from the dynamic of transferred meaning appearing in the rhetorical handbooks (see Table 1 for details): (1) cause-effect, where a cause names its effect, or an effect names its cause, (2) part-whole, where a part names the whole, or a whole entity confers its name on one of its parts, and (3) container-contained, where a container names its contents or the content gives a name to its container.

II. Figures of Speech in On Genesis, Against the Manichees How do these perspectives help us to understand how Augustine read the Old Testament? They show how rhetorical figuration allowed him to render the God of Scripture as an orator who used different devices at different times to communicate with humanity. That vision proffered a unity of design amid the Bible’s wild variety of language, figures, literary genres, chronological times, cultural idioms, and so on. Since the ultimate purpose of knowing Scripture was to know its Author, one had to learn the skill of reading backward from its words and figures to the One whose will they expressed. Augustine first transposed his knowledge of rhetorical tropes for spiritual understanding in his earliest biblical commentary On Genesis, Against the Manichees. There he widened the scope of figures of speech beyond their technical literary limits and made them modes of spiritual understanding. That allowed figurative reading to mediate between spiritualphilosophical perspectives and the realistic images and narratives of the biblical text. Augustine thought humanity desperately needed these figures because spiritual truth was attainable in no other way. They were necessary

Table 1 Augustine’s Figuration Dynamics: Ancient Rhetorical Handbooks and De dialectica A. Metonymy Cicero, (De Oratore 3.42.167–68). Transposition or substitution (traductio atque immutatio; i.e., metonymy) refers to an expression in which “a proper term is substituted for another for the sake of ornament” (ornandi causa proprium proprio commutatum). “The same meaning (eadem res) is conveyed more elegantly by modifying or altering a word” (inflexo commutatoque verbo).

[Cicero]Rhetorica ad Herrenium 4.32.43. “Metonymy (denominatio) draws from things close and bordering (ab rebus propinquis et finitimis) an expression that makes it possible to understand something not called by its own name . . . It is used abundantly by poets and orators, but also in everyday speech.”

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.6.19–27. “Metonymy (metonymia) moves only a short distance from that kind of trope [i.e., synecdoche]; it substitutes one word for another (ponuntur verba alia pro aliis).”

Augustine, De dialectica 6. Discussing word origins, Augustine theorizes that words are often formed from a nearness of sense (vicinitas) that is governed by discernible dynamic patterns of figuration. The discussions in De dialectica 6 and 10 do not reference metonymy or synecdoche by name, but adapt elements of their respective traditional rhetorical definitions.

Augustine, (De dialectica 10). The discussion concerns types of “equivocal ambiguity” in speech. Words signify differently things because of their capacity for transference of meaning (translatio). Example: “Tullius” can refer to a man, a statue, a codex, or a corpse. Ambiguity arises because figurative speech multiplies the possibilities for meaning practically without limits, though it does follow certain patterns.

A. Metonymy A.1 cause for effect

Something that happens is named from that which makes it happen (id quod fit ab eo qui facit), as when a warrior is told, “Mars forced you to [act warlike] necessarily.” That which effects is named from that which is effected (id quod efficit ex eo quod efficitur), as “headlong anger,” “cheerful youth,” or “slothful ease.”

A.2 effect for cause

“Toga” [non-military dress] stands for peace, “guns” for war.

What makes something happen is named from what happens (quod facit ab eo quod fit), as when we call an “idle art” an art that makes one idle, or “numb cold” the cold that makes one numb.

A.3 container for contained

“The House” for the ruling senate, or the poet’s verse, “Cut off, O Rome, your foes.”

Something contained will“Usage accepts” (usus recipit) a container be termed from what contains it (ab eo quod naming what is continet id quod continetur contained (ex eo quod hoc modo denominabitur), continetur) as in as “Italy” refers to “civilized cities” or Italians, or “Greece” to “a cup was drunk up” Greeks. or “happy age.”

Something that happens gets its name from that through which it happens . . . through the cause (id quod fit ab eo per quod fit nominatur . . . per efficientiam).

An effect is named from the cause (ab efficiente effectus), as “Cicero” refers to a codex of Cicero’s writing.

A cause is named by its effect (per effectum); so the term “well,” puteus, derives from its intended result, “drinking,” potatio.

A cause is named from its effect (ab effectu efficiens), as when “terror” refers to the person who causes terror.

When a name is given by that which contains (per id quod continet); so some derive urbs [city], from orbis [circle, from encircling boundary].

That which contains names what is contained (a continente quae continentur), as when “house” speaks of people who are in the house . . .

(continued)

Table 1 (continued ) A. Metonymy The converse [naming the container from what it contains] is rarely heard.

A.4 contained for container

A container is named from what is contained (per id quod continetur), e.g., granary, horreum, from barley, hordeum,

or vice versa [i.e., the container named from what it contains], as when “chestnut” refers to a tree with that fruit.

B. Synecdoche Cicero De Oratore 3.42.168.After discussing metonymy, Cicero says a certain unnamed trope creates “expressions that border on it [traductio or immutatio, i.e., metonymy] are less decorative, though not to be ignored.”

[Cicero] Rhetorica ad Herrenium 4.32.44–45.Synecdoche is given a name (intellectio), but defined only by examples.

Augustine, De Quintilian, Institutio dialectica 6. Oratoria 8.6.19–27. Synecdoche (synecdoche) is named, but defined only by examples. Like metaphor (translatio), it moves the soul and creates vivid images. But it also attractively varies speech. It appears in poets, sometimes in orators, and in everyday speech.

Augustine, De dialectica 10.

B. Synecdoche B.1 part for whole

When we wish to understand . . . “a whole from a part (ex parte totum), as when ‘walls’ or ‘roofs’ refer to houses.”

B.2 whole for When we wish to part understand “a part from a whole (ex toto pars), as when we call a single squadron ‘the cavalry of Rome.’”

B.3 species for genus

“The House” for the ruling senate, or the poet’s verse, “Cut off, O Rome, your foes.”

When the whole is understood from a small part (de parte totum), so the single note (signum) of a flute recalls an entire wedding rite.

A whole from the part is understood (parte totum) . . . it is accepted to use mucro, “point,” for sword and tectum, “roof,” for the house.

Implied: “All these A part is understood from the whole (de toto can be reversed” (omnia haec contra). pars), as if one says to someone luxuriously dressed, “You’re showing off your wealth and waving your treasure piles at me.” The genus from the species (specie genus).

Naming the whole from a part (a parte totum), as when we call a sword mucro, which is the point of the sword.

The whole is named from its part (ex parte totum), as when by “roof” we refer to a whole house.

A part named from the whole (a toto pars), as capillus [hair, scalp] comes from capitis pilus [head of hair].

The part is named from the whole (ex toto cum pars), as when Tullius’s corpse (cadaver) can be called “Tullius.”

The genus is named by the species (ab species genus), as a “scholar” once only referred to one in school, but now to all who live in study of letters.

(continued)

Table 1 (continued ) B. Synecdoche B.4 genus for species

Implied: “All these can be reversed” (omnia haec contra).

Species is named by its genus (a genere species); so we call verba the things we speak, but properly speaking (proprie) they refer to what we inflect for mood or tense.

C. Concluding “Catch-all” Statements “Or in whatever way a word is used not in its proper sense but in a suggested sense (aut quocumque modo non ut dictum est in eo genere intelligitur sed ut sensum est). (De oratore 3.42.168)

“Or whatever else that can be found that is acknowledged to come from the same origin by a kind of transferring” (vel si quod alius inveniri potest quod ex eadem origine quasi transferendo cognominetur). (De dialectica 10)

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because of the epistemological chaos wrought by humanity’s fall into sin. For him that spiritual disaster not only derailed our relationship to God but also wrecked the organs of spiritual understanding which otherwise would have naturally and intuitively perceived the things of the spirit. He illustrated this spiritual epistemology, which is Scripture’s raison d’être, in an important passage while commenting on Gen. 2:5–6 (Gen. Man. 2.4.5–5.6).12 The biblical text envisioned earth in the moments just after creation; pristine, green, and lush with vegetation, it was watered by a source deep inside the earth that flooded it as the Nile flooded the Egyptian fields. Augustine saw this as an image portraying God as he nourished the human soul spontaneously from within, prior to external speech. For Augustine, the soul receives the sensory impact of external realities upon its lower appetitive consciousness (“Eve”), which in turn fashions images that pass to the higher rational understanding (“Adam”). These two parts of the soul correlate with the intelligible and earthly realms. The perfect union of the man and the woman in the garden of God’s delight figuratively pictured the composition of any human person, male or female. The human couple’s knowledge of God, self, and each other was immediate; their communion occurred vitally and intuitively without words. However, when sin disrupted the order and inverted the knowing process, they turned away from God and from each other; then the soul’s two parts turned inside-out toward merely sensory, temporal, and external things. Sin distorted consciousness and warped the ability to know spiritually, while the natural hunger for God became inverted as a hunger for external things. An incommensurable gap opened up between “Eve” and “Adam”—between the soul’s sensory awareness and its rational-spiritual understanding—that disordered human knowledge. At that point something became necessary to bridge the gap between the soul’s sensory and spiritual dimensions in order to return humanity to sound understanding. Biblical figures are that bridge. Nevertheless, God’s plan was paradoxical. The figures came from material reality; and so humanity’s way out of its inner imprisonment oddly was dug out from the same external realities that created the prison in the first place.13 But God accommodated the fallen and parched human condition by sending the external “rain” of human words. The words of Scripture fell like showers from the heavens of the prophets and apostles, called “clouds” because of their foggy and obscure allegories.14 But, Augustine continued, the showers became a flood after the Incarnation, when “our Lord, having deigned to assume (assumere) the cloud of our human flesh, poured out with astounding abundance the soaking rain of the holy Gospel”

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(Gen. Man. 2.5.6). The mystery of Christ thus mirrors the mystery of Scripture, and divine teaching pours forth from both. We’ll address this Christ-Scripture connection in more detail later. Good interpreters, Augustine wrote, learn quickly that Scripture has accommodated revelation to the faith of “little ones” (parvuli; 1.5.9) who are not yet strong enough for spiritual perception. Smart spiritual readers, Augustine contends, understand that both Testaments use familiar earthly images to lead the mind to unfamiliar spiritual things. “Under the labels of tangible things” invisible realities are conveyed (Gen. Man. 1.7.12).15 Spiritual interpreters decode the images that lead parvuli to find them. Simply put, God accommodated human ways of understanding by using humanity’s own rhetorical strategies.16 As he worked through the text of Genesis, Augustine avoided the technical rhetorical terminology of On Dialectic and the rhetorical handbooks, but the concepts are clearly operative as he notes in turn each figure of speech. We find Augustine distributing different figuration types across a wide spectrum of relationship possibilities in the Bible, from the simple correspondence of likeness and proximity to the complex insinuation of ironic contrast. Simple correspondence likens some concept to a familiar earthly image that the reader knows and spontaneously understands by means of a spiritual-intellectual “transfer.” Such simple metaphors highlight the closeness and likeness between the terms involved; a small gap between a figure and its referent carries a minimum of dramatic “tension.” For example, an easy figurative transfer occurs between Eve’s creation and the idea of human love. After God fashioned Eve from Adam’s side, he covered up the place with “flesh” (Gen. 2:21). For Augustine, this flesh signified the natural human “feeling of love” (affectus dilectionis) with which a soul loves itself; it is modeled upon a man’s love for his wife (cf. Eph. 5:28). The phrase picturesquely expresses a literal reality; even though it is metaphorical, it actually qualifies as a “literal expression” (Gen. Man. 2.12.17).17 At the next level of understanding, Scripture uses a figurative expression (figurata locutio) that correlates a physical image to a spiritual reality, as when “paradise” signifies human happiness (2.9.12). This pattern is especially important for understanding biblical images of God. Many texts portray God with human-like eyes, ears, hands, and feet: they follow a strategy designed to assist weak human understanding, especially simple minds having trouble with nonmaterial thinking as they seek to comprehend the reality of “spiritual powers” (1.17.27).18 Spiritual believers understand that “transferred speech” offers one-to-one correspondences

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that train the mind to see parallels between the material and spiritual realms. At the other end of the spectrum, contradictory figures like irony and catachresis yoke disparate images in order to create meaning out of incommensurability. So Augustine finds an “ambiguous expression” in God’s words, “the man has become like one of us” (Gen. 3:22; Gen. Man. 2.22.33).19 For Augustine the impossibility of this statement’s literal sense points to its figurative character; but the higher purpose of such jarring images is to heighten the sense of figurative tension which readers can resolve only by reaching a deeper level of understanding about opposites reconciled in the unity of faith. That need for striving makes each figure of speech a mini– spiritual exercise for the soul. Augustine’s figurative practice in his earliest anti-Manichean Genesis commentary draws on speech patterns that stand for the most part between these two extremes of figurative correspondence and contradiction. He typically exploits the more complex patterns of interaction between reality and image; each episode explicates the relations between the temporal and spiritual realms in a slightly different way. Here I want to focus on three modes of figurative dynamism that work by exchanging names and properties; they are based on the three principal conceptual-figurative relationships that we saw operating in the rhetorical handbooks and in Augustine’s early rhetorical analysis. That is, we’re watching for how Augustine interprets Genesis by using (1) the relationship of causation (cause and effect), with its special affinity with metonymy; (2) the relationship of participation (part and whole), with its special affinity with synecdoche; and (3) the relationship of association (container and contained), which oscillates between the first two.

A. Cause and Effect The first process names an effect in terms of its cause. Augustine pictures the change produced by the human reaction to spiritual reality as if it described God’s own action. For example, Gen. 1:4 says, “God saw the light was good.” That ostensively contradicts the truth of God’s omniscience by portraying God as surprised by creation’s goodness. That’s what the Manichees thought the Catholics believed, and they used this text to mock the absurdity of Catholic carnal thinking. But Augustine countered that the Manichees simply miss Scripture’s use of a figure of speech that projects human delight in creation back upon God; by that pedagogic strategy Scripture teaches us not about God but about ourselves. Above all, when

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Manichees woodenly misread the text as portraying God’s ignorance, they miss the reality that God took pleasure in executing a design that he conceived long ago (Gen. Man. 1.8.13–14). But further, they fail to see God’s human-like moment of delight as a literary role-play for prompting and shaping the human response to creation. God was acting like a teacher leading a class discussion who feigns ignorance in order to lead students to deeper understanding; the teacher assumes a pose of weakness in order to bring students to a fresh perspective. The Genesis picture of divine delight actually taught us how we might delight in creation. People with spiritual understanding “get” this maneuver. They know that effect-forcause figurative speech challenges one’s skill in tracing the exchange of names back to its underlying spiritual truth. “But wherever it says ‘he called,’” wrote Augustine, “it means ‘he caused to be called,’ because [God] so distinguished and arranged all things as to make it possible for them to be told apart and given names. Thus we say, for example, ‘That proprietor built this house,’ meaning he caused it to be built; and many such things are to be found throughout all the books of the divine Scriptures” (1.9.15).20 Augustine lavishly invoked this effect-for-cause trope in a passage explaining Gen. 1:31, “God rested”: the deep sense of this strange picture is that God “rests” by giving rest to his people after they have performed good works (1.22.33–34). If the Manichees only paid attention to the way figures work, Augustine wrote, they would see this trope everywhere in the Bible. It appears in both Testaments and with reference to each person of the Trinity, a teaching that the Manichees supposedly believed. In reference to the Father, Moses declared to Israel during their wilderness wandering, “the Lord our God is testing you in order to learn whether you love him” (Deut. 13:3). Literally understood, the sentence is theological nonsense; it becomes coherent only when referred to the hindsight meaning of suffering. Only after suffering has ended can the Israelites see how much they themselves truly love God. So it said that God “comes to know” their love in the sense of making it known to them (Gen. Man. 1.22.34). In reference to the Son, the same pattern explains Christ’s enigmatic statement that the Son of Man “knows not the day or hour” of the world’s end (Matt. 24:36). Since this cannot be literally true for the all-knowing Son of God, our confusion must stem from failing to read “according to the same way of speaking” (secundum ipsam locutionem). The Father “knows” the hour and the day of the world’s end by making it known to the Son, while the Son “knows it not” when refusing to reveal it to his disciples.21 In grammatical terms, the

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effect-for-cause figure reads the intransitive verb as a transitive. Finally, in reference to the Holy Spirit, Paul declares, “the Spirit himself pleads for us with inexpressible groans” (Rom. 8:26). We must, Augustine wrote, see the Apostle using “this same figure of speech” (ipsa figura locutionis) because the Spirit’s groan is causative and not actual. “The Holy Spirit, after all, doesn’t groan, as though he were in want or in sore straits, seeing that he intercedes for the saints at God’s behest; but he is said to do so himself because he moves us to turn our groanings into prayers, which we only do as moved to it by him” (1.22.34; trans. Hill). Perceiving here the structure of metonymy is crucial to understanding the passage. By cause-effect God does not literally “groan” or “know” or “rest” but “groans” by making creatures groan, “knows” by causing knowledge, and “rests” by giving rest. God arranges the conditions by which people do these things. Thus the figure of speech rendered God’s effect upon creatures as a narration of the Creator’s own act. This figure recurs so often in Scripture, Augustine wrote, that it amounts to a “rule of speech” (regula locutionis). Experienced interpreters who recognize it “already know this kind of expression solves many problems in the divine scriptures without any difficulty” (1.22.34).22 Similarly in Gen. 1:5 divine speech has adapted itself “to our understanding” in saying, “God called the light day and the darkness he called night” (Gen. Man. 1.9.15).23 Augustine concludes that such expressions in Scripture, so far from teaching us that God is weak, rather teach us about our weakness by accommodating to it. “Nothing, after all, can be said about God that is worthy of him at all. But so that we should be suitably brought up and helped to attain those things that cannot be uttered by any human speech, things are said in Scripture which we are able to grasp” (1.8.14; trans. Hill).

B. Part and Whole Augustine was perfectly aware of the two creation accounts in Gen. 1–3 but did not ascribe them to different sources as modern scholars do. With virtually all ancient commentators, he presumed that the chapters were written by Moses and so comprised a literary unity; both accounts described the single act of humanity’s creation, but from different points of view. While the first account climaxes God’s work on the sixth day with humanity’s creation, the second envisioned the whole creation occurring in a single day. The seven days of the first account give a detailed version of the single day, while the one day of the second account condenses the seven. Augustine distinguished them in terms of their dominant interpretive patterns, metonymy of cause and effect in the first, and synecdoche of

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whole and part in the second. This is particularly evident where Gen. 2’s sequential creation of man and woman rehearses “in greater detail” the instantaneous creation of male and female in Gen. 1:26 (Gen. Man. 1.23.35).24 Similarly the union of “two in one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) made the couple a single whole that was greater than the sum of two individuals. For Augustine this synecdoche scripted a drama in which the rest of humanity participates. Augustine wanted to emphasize the couple’s figurative relation to other people and how their disastrous sin transmitted its effects to all humanity. The idea of original sin was not at issue here, even if the account foreshadowed it. His point concerned redemption: the Word made flesh reversed sin’s effects by becoming a new “part” that transformed the human “whole,” as yeast leavens a whole lump. Augustine’s key interpreter was the Apostle Paul, whom he was already reading carefully in this early period. The Apostle refracted the Gen. 2:24 “two in one flesh” oracle through an explicitly Christological and ecclesial prism that revealed the “great sacrament” (magnum sacramentum) that is “in Christ and in the Church” (Eph. 5:31–32). That allowed Augustine to superimpose the synecdochic hermeneutical principle of microcosm and macrocosm upon the relationship between Christ and believers. Adam and all humanity were a single person allowed to enjoy the garden and forbidden to partake of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Adam fell from grace, he brought us with him, and we were destined for death. When Christ became one with Adam by sharing his flesh, his life and death altered our destiny. Christ not only exchanged names with us but also established a single identity whereby each member of the body shares his glory as the head. Augustine wrote that every individual Christian “not unfittingly carries the person of Christ” (non incongrue sustinet personam Christi; 2.25.38), so that the Lord could say therefore, “What you did to one of the least of mine, you did to me” (Matt. 25:40). This Christian work of imitatio takes up the image of Christ on the basis of their shared flesh. It represents an early plank in the construction of what became totus Christus, the “whole Christ” of head and body. But he had not yet arrived at that conception; true to his moral and ascetic purpose at the time, Augustine emphasized our imitation of Christ rather than Christ’s identification with us.

C. Container and Contained A third dimension of the figuration process combined aspects of metonymy and synecdoche. Augustine saw this pattern operating in the mysterious past tense of the verb “make” in Gen. 1:1 (“God made heaven and earth”). In terms of the narrative sequence, creation does not happen until

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verse 2. In this discrepancy Augustine found figuration at work: the past tense revealed the foreordained certainty of God’s future action, indicating that what God wills is as good as already done. Human language telescopes the promised future and the unchangeable past by grammatically rendering the future as past. Similarly, Augustine explained, even a tree’s seedling is called “a tree” because it contains the future roots, branches, leaves, and fruit; people understand the figure “not because they are actually there but because they are going to come from there” (Gen. Man. 1.7.11). This locutio, plentiful in the Scriptures, discerns a fully formed body in the embryo that “contains” it, and this anticipation allows speech to render the verb in a figurative way. In the same way Christ first told his disciples, “I have told you everything from my Father” (John 15:15), and then he later said, “I still have much to tell you, but you cannot bear it now” (John 16:12). There’s no contradiction, Augustine observed; people talk this way every day when they tell someone before completing a task, “Consider it done.” Augustine’s brief remarks suggest the hybrid quality of this trope. Augustine does not use the technical figurative term “synecdoche” but clearly integrates metonymy’s name exchange and synecdoche’s part-whole symbolism. God’s future act “takes the name” of a past act (metonymy), while God’s creative intention organically grounds and virtually actualizes its future accomplishment (synecdoche). Scripture’s verbal collapse of the temporal sequence into a single reality functionally guarantees the sequence. The organic image of a tree that grows from its seed, and the seed that is called “tree,” anticipates Augustine’s later thinking about sacramental figures.

Exploring the Depths of Scripture’s Story On Genesis, Against the Manichees was a kind of clinic for how to answer those who dismissed the Old Testament and simple faith while claiming they alone honored plain reason. Working line by line through the first three chapters of Genesis, Augustine countered each Manichean objection as it arose. Book 1 treated Gen. 1:1–2:4a and Book 2, 2:4b–3:24. The Manichean threat had created a pastoral emergency: roving missionaries were continually invading Catholic congregations in search of new recruits among both the learned (docti) and the unlearned (indocti) (Gen. Man. 1.1.1).25 The learned advanced Christians, or “spirituals” (spiritales), understood Scripture’s physical images as aids to seeking truth in the intelligible realm.26 However, they sweated for their spiritual bread like every other

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child of Adam (Gen. 3:17–19), because the human tendency to mix truth with earthly phantasms was always difficult to overcome. Even the most advanced spiritual believers had to conceive of spiritual reality in images that arise from the senses (2.20.30).27 Furthermore, even if they succeeded in ascending to spiritual understanding, they had to descend again to rewrap their spiritual ideas in sensory images in order to make them intelligible to anyone (1.7.12). Nevertheless, they welcomed the spiritual exercise of such labor and rejoiced in going from strength to strength. These people became excellent teachers, though often they needed the provocation of some heresy like Manicheeism to goad them into action. While Augustine was not unconcerned about ministering to these educated Catholic Christians (docti)—already by this early date they could refer to several works like Practices, On Divine Order and On the Soul’s Magnitude— they defended themselves more or less well in the late antique religious marketplace. So some learned Catholic friends gently urged him to write something for “the untaught” (indocti), that is, those without knowledge of how scriptural images work, and who were unlikely to read or understand his more abstruse works on the faith. Augustine distinguished several grades among these indocti. At the lowest end of the scale were “the little ones,” parvuli, simple Christian folk who lived solely by faith in material images without ascending to rationalspiritual reflection (Gen. Man. 1.1.2).28 Such believers pictured spiritual things as literally true according to images derived from sensory experience; in a sense they were unreflective materialists (2.20.30). When God declared, “Let there be light,” the parvuli supposed that God sounded forth words familiar to human beings in a sentence that began, progressed, and ended. For Augustine, such people had not yet comprehended God’s rhetorical strategy in the Scriptures. While their faith brushed against the spiritual or “intelligible” understanding, their contact with it was like that of an infant feeding at its mother’s breast.29 According to Augustine, people who follow only the way of faith in authority relate to the spiritual realm merely indirectly. Yet Scripture nourished these parvuli at their own level (2.25.38); it accommodated itself to them by giving the names of visible things to spiritual realities. It did so “out of consideration for the weakness of the little ones, who are less capable of understanding invisible things” (1.5.9; trans. Hill).30 The stronger people who responded “with solid faith” and with “a longing to come to know the Scriptures” ask and receive, seek and find, and knock at the door of Scripture’s mysteries and it swings open to them

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(Gen. Man. 1.1.2; Matt. 7:7).31 However, some with ability are simply unwilling to be taught unless they’re roused by some mortal danger. Though capable of learning how to read spiritually they wanted training and lacked awareness of present danger (1.1.2). Still others on the fence were looking for a kind of satisfaction that Catholic teaching seemed unable to give, and so perhaps they wandered off. If they keep asking questions they may return—perhaps tired and thirsty after great labors and indeed nearly dead—to the flowing fountains they lost track of (clearly a small selfportrait of Augustine in his recent past). Augustine aimed his commentary especially at people in this last group, who needed training to understand Scripture’s figures for their spiritual safety and development. In effect Augustine was performing the work of a spiritual coach offering instruction in exegesis to his aspiring adepts. He tried to help them go beyond believing the truth and to reach toward understanding it. He was trying to train readers who might see not only that Catholic Christian faith is true, but also how it is true. For Augustine, God so arranged the words of Scripture that he might make the labor of exegesis a health-giving exercise for a reader’s rational-spiritual intelligence. The soul’s commitment to a regimen of inner cleansing and discipline prepared it both to receive scriptural truth for itself while learning how to protect the Church’s “little ones.”

I. Historia and the Literal Sense In writing about Genesis, Augustine was not dealing with a philosophical text but with a story that purported to give an account of events. But this was no ordinary series of events; the creation of the world and humankind by definition could not be witnessed live but only rendered by a constructed narrative using earthly images to convey a divine act. So Augustine pictured Moses writing under the direction of the Spirit, using the genre of history, historia, understood as the written account of things past: “according to history events are narrated” (Gen. Man. 2.2.3; cf. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4.2.31). Historia stood once removed from the events it described, while the writer stood between the past of the event and the present of the reader. The act of writing created a sort of zone of interaction between the author and the reader wherein Spirit-sponsored rhetorical invention mediated between the writer’s divine inspiration and the reader’s spiritual instruction. Creation, for instance, was not an event in the flow of time but the beginning of time; so the narrative of the seven days of creation was inherently a nonliteral account. Augustine wrote that Moses adopted the narrative

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format in order to accommodate the mystery of creation to simple minds in such a way “that even a little child could understand it” (1.3.5). But it veiled mysteries in such a way that their depths remained inaccessible except to those with the skill of interpreting them spiritually. Augustine’s hermeneutical conflict with the Manichees was as much concerned with the literal sense as the figurative. He thought that their wooden literalism predisposed them to reject legitimate texts that required figurative readings. Drawing on the lessons learned from Ambrose about the coherence of the Old Testament’s literal sense with Christian spiritual understanding, he wrote that his first concern was always to interpret literally, secundum litteram, “in no other way than as the letter sounds.”32 But when the literal sense remained incongruous and offered “no other way out (exitus),” then the figurative reading became necessary (Gen. Man. 2.2.3). Sometimes the literal sense of the words already clarified spiritual knowledge directly; in that case, the literal sense was already the spiritual sense. This was especially clear for moral commandments like the Decalogue and the command to love God and neighbor. But astute interpreters knew that other texts like narratives and ritual commands often took indirect, figurative routes toward the spiritual sense. This required the special skill of figurative reading. Augustine further deciphered the relation between the literal and the figurative senses as he discussed metaphor. Often in the Bible, he wrote, we find that the literal sense of an event, character, or object transposes itself into metaphor even when it might have been conveyed directly. While the sense remains literal, the literal meaning “carries over” or “transfers” to a figure or likeness that conducts the reader’s mind from some sensory image to the intelligible realm. Recognizing this rhetorical strategy is critically necessary for understanding Genesis, Augustine wrote, because the way that God made and formed the heavens, the earth and every creature “can in no way be expressed by the use of words” (Gen. Man. 1.23.41).33 Scripture strategically uses figurative expressions to describe otherwise unimaginable events for those without access to the higher spiritual perspective; it has “a habit (consuetudo) of transferring words associated with human things to divine things” (ibid. 1.14.20).34 Individual metaphors do not necessarily change a passage into a full-blown “figurative expression as such” (proprie figurata locutio), like an allegory or an enigma (Chr. Teach. 3.11.17). But those metaphors keep the reader alert to the “language game” that appears even in literal descriptions. These figures prompt the human mind to stretch and combine the literal word

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meanings into new constellations that leap into an imaginative mode so as to make it possible to understand what is literally indescribable. Myriad plays of meaning upon meaning are possible for human understanding in this metaphoric mode. Like an orator helping an audience with wordpictures, Moses accommodated his account of creation to his audience’s habits of thought. The seven-day sequence of Gen. 1, therefore, figuratively described the literally indescribable moment of creation by adapting to our human understanding. This fundamentally rhetorical act of accommodation stands at the heart of the figurative strategy. As Augustine wrote a few years later in his Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, “This book of Genesis most accommodatingly (commodissime) sets out the story (narratio) of the things made by God as though it happened through intervals of time. In this way the very constitution (ipsa dispositio) of creation that weaker intellects are unable to contemplate is laid out in the order of a discourse (ordo sermonis) as though written by an eyewitness to it” (Un. Lit. Gen. 7.28).35 Augustine thinks that the Spirit guided Moses to adopt a form of discourse that uniquely answered to something deep in the human mind. This story about a sequence of days “got set up (ordinata est) in line with the custom dictated by human frailty, by a basic law (lex) of how to tell stories and of how to suggest sublime truths to lowly people in a lowly way, a law that by definition means you can’t have a narrative discourse without a beginning, middle, and end” (ibid. 3.8).36 This pattern of accommodation implied that spiritual understanding was necessary even to recognize the literal sense, since the text’s continuous string of metaphors necessitated distinguishing properly literal from purely spiritual expressions. The Manichees, weak-minded literalists that they were, labeled as absurd anything their unspiritual eyes simply could not see; clearly for them even the common human ability to understand simple metaphors had atrophied.

II. Historia and the “Allegorical” Sense By addressing the question of how divine speech works rhetorically with metaphors, Augustine set the stage for explaining spiritual interpretation. The examples of spiritual meaning that attach to historia are plentiful in On Genesis, Against the Manichees. For Augustine, historia not only narrated events but also grounded a literary and rhetorical strategy that pointed to higher meanings. These facets appear at the beginning of Book 2, where Augustine promises to discuss Gen. 2 and 3 twice, first as history,

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then as prophecy: “So then, this whole text must first be discussed in terms of history, then in terms of prophecy. In terms of history, deeds and events are being related, while in terms of prophecy, future events are being foretold” (Gen. Man. 2.2.3; trans. Hill). We’ll look at his view of prophecy and its relation to figuration below. How did Augustine fulfill this promise to treat the “figures of history” in Book 2? Augustine drew on traditional modes of spiritual interpretation to interpret the four rivers of paradise of Gen. 2:10–14: the rivers Phison, Geon, Tigris, and Euphrates are the spiritual virtues of prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance (Gen. Man. 2.10.13).37 The first two rivers were known by other names in his time (i.e., the Ganges and the Nile) while the others bore the same names. But their visible and earthly reality did not prevent the names from bearing spiritual meaning. After all, he wrote, Scripture uses “Jerusalem” to refer both to a real city and to spiritual peace, and “Sion” is both a literal mountain and a symbol for contemplation. Augustine calls these “allegories of Scripture” (2.10.13). Jesus’ parables likewise used place names that are geographically real “according to history” (secundum historiam). Augustine clearly equated historia with what is “visible and earthly” (visibilis et terrenus). Yet elsewhere historia appears broader than the strictly “visible and earthly.” For instance, the “coats of skin” that God made for Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21) were real clothing, but also “signified” the human body’s mortality in this life (2.21.32). Historia here carries a spiritual meaning, and allegoria is a part of, and arises from, historia. We can summarize Augustine’s outlook this way. In Scripture God co-opted the human capacity for understanding mediated by speech. The model is lexicographic: biblical figures are like words in a dictionary, defined first by their straight literal meaning, then by their extended or figurative uses. The ancients were quite aware of a word’s different capacities. They knew that an author might deploy a word metaphorically without negating its literal sense; they depended on readers to spontaneously link its literal and figurative senses. For Augustine the spiritual interpretation of texts followed a similar pattern. The human mind discerns the correspondence between the form of intelligible truth and material reality by recognizing the form of a “likeness,” similitudo. Likeness forms the basic template for figurative exegesis by using “visible words” that point to heavenly realities. Scripture’s figures span the gap between the literal and figurative senses by lines of similitudo suspended between events, characters, rites, and texts and the spiritual realities of the soul.

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Such spiritual-figurative discernment required not only reading skill; it also required that the soul should conform intellectually and morally to spiritual reality. Such inner preparation licensed the transformed mind to interpret historia in a spiritual way. So two senses of historia operate side by side in the commentary on Genesis, one broad and the other narrow: the broad sense included spiritual meanings, while the narrow sense excluded them. For instance, Augustine’s exegesis sees the figure of Eve standing among the “figures of things belonging to history” (Gen. Man. 2.2.3); she is “a visible woman according to history” (2.12.17).38 But, as became apparent in dealing with the first creation account, at this time for Augustine historia could serve as a rhetorical device that merely mediated conceptual realities. So Eve may have existed only textually for the sake of the story line in Genesis, becoming “visible” only as a conceptual reality. In a word, Moses may have been telling parables, just as Jesus later would. “Whether these things were spoken figuratively (figurate) or were also done figuratively,” Augustine concluded, “they were neither spoken nor done this way without a reason. Rather, they are plainly mysteries and sacraments” (ibid.).39 God moved Moses to write a narrative, using a common human way of speaking, in order both to nourish the simple believer and to prompt spiritual adepts to look for deeper meaning (1.22.33). At this time Augustine focused more on the “narrative world” of the text than on realities in the flow of time and space per se. So “Eve” becomes an occasion to clarify Scripture’s conception of the soul’s composition. Adam’s authority over her rendered a picture of the properly ordered bipartite soul within every human being, male or female, wherein an upper rational function rules a lower sensory appetite. The soul’s “animal” attachment to sensory experience bound it to the bodily realm (Eve), while its “rational” orientation to intelligible truth joined it to the spiritual world (Adam). When the two parts are properly ordered in a kind of marriage, reason subordinates the carnal appetite and the soul properly rules the body. The narrative that coupled masculine-rational Adam with the feminine-animal Eve represented universal intrapsychic dynamics. “It was to provide an example of this that the woman was made, whom the natural order of things makes subject to the man. In this way what can be seen more clearly in two human beings, that is, in male and female, may be considered in a single person” (Gen. Man. 2.11.15; trans. Hill). The strangeness of Eve’s creation out of Adam’s side as he slept tipped off readers to something deeper. She “was made this way for no reason except that she should suggest some secret meaning” (2.12.17).”40

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III. Historia and the Prophetic Sense, First Part: The Figures of History However, mining the spiritual sense of historia by allegoria was not the only figurative dynamic of the biblical text. The seven-day imagery of Genesis did triple duty as historical description, spiritual allegory, and figurative prophecy. The very same letters pointed “outward” toward sensible events in their literal sense, “upward” toward intelligible and spiritual truth in their spiritual sense, and “forward” to future salvation in their prophetic sense. “No words whatever, therefore, can possibly say how God made and established heaven and earth and every creature that he put there. But this explanation (expositio) narrating the order of days, presents them like a chronicle of things that happened so as to focus above all on the way they predict things to come” (Gen. Man. 1.23.41).41 Augustine sharply contrasted history and prophecy at this early stage.42 History deals with past events (praeterita), but prophecy treats of future events (futura). Fulfillment of the prophetic dimension of the Old Testament’s characters, events, sayings, and rites— the “figures of prophecy”—lay in Christ’s advent which anchored God’s self-revelation on the temporal plane. But prophecy became apparent in two ways: as a result of the powers of spiritual judgment in the advanced Christian, and by the authoritative pronouncement of the New Testament. The end of Book 1 highlights the first kind, while Book 2 addresses both. The conclusion of Book 1 pressed the prophetic perspective by asking why, given the use of figurative language about creation, Moses chose just this figurative language. Using his own rational-spiritual discernment (video, “I see”), Augustine answered by reconsidering the first chapter of Genesis from its prophetic angle. One who looks into the creation story with spiritual eyes, he wrote, finds something unexpected in a crack in the text that jars the spiritual senses, namely the statement, “God rested on the seventh day” (Gen. 1:31). He has already explained this sentence using metonymy, as we have seen. But now he writes, “In my judgment (arbitror) this text should be analyzed more thoroughly (diligentius) in order to find out why God’s rest is assigned to the seventh day” (Gen. Man. 1.23.35). In the chapters that follow, Augustine unfurls his vision of the seven days of creation as a prophecy of the ages of salvation history.43 “I see throughout the vast braiding (totus textus) of the divine scriptures something like six ages for working, distinguished from each other by definite border posts, so to say, such that one hopes for rest in the seventh age. I also see that these same six ages bear a likeness to those six days in which were made those things Scripture reports God made” (ibid.).44 Historia is here reconfigured

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as prophecy by way of likenesses within the narrative about creation; the likeness of days conforms not only to future ages of the world but also to the steps of spiritual progress. These dimensions of meaning are not obvious; the Spirit purposefully buried these lines of likeness in the creation narrative for spiritually astute readers to dig up, and so helped to nurse back to health their powers of rational spiritual discernment. Augustine’s work of commentary served as a training lesson for such spiritually aspiring interpreters. In order to see at a glance the scope of Augustine’s rereading of the creation story as prophecy, Table 2 summarizes the similitudines that surfaced in his study of the narrative of creation in Gen. 1.

IV. Historia and the Prophetic Sense, Second Part: The Figures of Prophecy The spiritual understanding of the creation account yields a prophetic-allegorical picture of the future that coheres with the steps of the soul’s spiritual ascent. But from another angle creation-as-prophecy narrows its focus when Book 2 analyzes the second creation account. Its “mysteries and sacraments” point both to spiritual truths in the intelligible realm and to prophetic fulfillment in the age of Christ and the Church. So Augustine makes a distinction between the spiritual understanding of the prophetic account and the more historically focused and traditional account of salvation in the coming of Christ and the Church. Historia’s conjunction with allegoria in Book 1 of On Genesis, Against the Manichees contrasts with the sharp distinction between historia and prophetia in Book 2. The prophecy sections at the end of Book 1 already suggested the contrast between history and prophecy, and they are confirmed by an important passage at the beginning of Book 2. Augustine most desired to give a literal interpretation of the text within the framework of Catholic thinking. But if that literal option was not available, Augustine asserted, then intelligent interpretation required a responsible and reverent figurative treatment of the texts: “Let us then stay with this way of explaining things that we have in mind, relying on the help of the one who urges us to ask, seek, and knock [Matt. 7:7]. Let us unravel all these figures of spiritual realities (figurae rerum) whether they belong to history or to prophecy, in accordance with Catholic faith” (2.2.3).45 The several highly figurative treatments that follow between 2.2.3 and 2.23.36 resemble the spiritual interpretations of Book 1. But then Augustine abruptly declares that now, having completed his work of interpreting the text “according to history” (secundum historiam) he will view them from the angle of prophecy.

Table 2 On Genesis, Against the Manichees, Book 1: Days of Creation in Genesis Spiritually Understood as Prophecy Day of Creation

Literal Events of Creation (Gen. 1:1–31)

Ages of Salvation History (Mt. 1:1–17)

Ages of Biblical History Ages of Humanity

Stages of Spiritual Person

Day 1

light

Adam to Noah (10 gen)

morning, beginning of humanity; evening, the flood

infancy, whose memory is lost in flood of forgetting

light of faith grasps visible things

Day 2

firmament between the waters

Noah to Abraham (10 gen)

morning, Noah’s peace; evening, confusion of tongues

childhood, which is not forgotten; no people of God because children do not generate

firmament of learning discerns carnal and spiritual things

Day 3

land is separated from waters

Abraham to David (14 gen)

morning, promise to Abraham; evening, sins of the people through evil Saul

adolescence, generates people of God separated from unstable “sea” of idolatrous world

soul separates from carnal temptation

Day 4

heavenly bodies in the firmament; commands animals to increase

David to the Exile (14 gen)

morning, kingdom of David; evening, sins of the kings

youth, “king” of the ages, like a sun

various kinds of spiritual knowledge appear

Day 5

living things in the waters and birds of heaven; “reptiles with living souls”

the Exile to Christ (14 gen)

morning, “leisure” in exile; evening, sins cannot recognize Christ

Day 6

“let the earth produce a living soul”—human made to image and likeness of God

first to second advent of Christ (indefinite)

old age morning, the gospel preached, Church born; evening, loss of faith

living soul appears, obedient to reason and justice, ruling the mind

Day 7

God’s rest

morning, Christ comes in glory; no evening

rest from works is granted

maturity

eternal life

spiritual deeds benefiting communion of peoples

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“In this discussion I promised to consider events that happened, which I think I’ve explained, and then afterwards (deinde) to consider prophecy, and that’s what now remains to be explained briefly” (2.24.37).46 Previous sections treated Adam and Eve as figures of the past, but prophetic interpretation shifts the focus to the future Adam, Christ, who includes the Church. In historia Eve pointed to the carnal appetite, but in prophetia she symbolizes the Church created from Christ’s body sleeping in death. The phrase “coats of skin” no longer signifies the mortality of the body “that it signified in history” but rather points to the illusions, phantasmata, of future heretical minds captive to the flesh (2.27.41). The serpent in historia referred to spiritual evil, but in prophetia it became a symbol for heresy luring the Church from its pure devotion to Christ, and so on. Table 3 shows the differing figurative perspectives of Genesis 2–3, with historia referring to Adam and Eve and prophetia signifying Christ and the Church. Gaps in the text between the earthy drama of Genesis 2–3 and a properly spiritual understanding of God clued Augustine into even deeper strains of figuration. But Augustine’s “more careful” reflection on humanity’s creation emerges not from his own spiritual judgment but from the authoritative interpretations that appear in the New Testament. This highlights an important feature of Augustine’s figurative approach. In contrast with spiritual interpretation that starts with rational-spiritual reflection (note the verbs “I see” and “I reckon” above), it begins with something that a biblical text specifically tells him to believe. The Spirit aids the work of all interpreters, beginners and advanced alike, by building such authoritative interpretations into the biblical text. In other words, the authority of the New Testament supplies conclusive interpretations of certain Old Testament passages. This device gives a reader both free content and a hermeneutical model. The Letter to the Ephesians (indubitably Pauline for Augustine) likened Eve’s creation from Adam’s side to Christ bringing forth the Church (Eph. 5.31–32 reading Gen. 2:24, “the two will become one flesh”). The apostolic authority’s “clear signal” interpreted the whole passage Christologically and ecclesially in a single stroke. For Augustine this gracious gift to spiritual reason was quite literally a “godsend” saving time and intellectual sweat that, for a moment at least, made interpretation easy. “A sort of clear signal (signum manifestum) having been set up to which everything else [in the prophecy] can be directed, I don’t think our study of prophecy will delay us very long” (Gen. Man. 2.24.37).47 The link between Genesis and Ephesians lit up the figurative landscape for advanced and beginning readers alike and relieved Augustine of proving the connections one by one. Augustine’s entire exposition “according to prophecy” was only four chapters long (secs. 37–41), a

Table 3 On Genesis, Against the Manichees, Book 2: Events of Genesis 2–3 as Figures of History and Prophecy Literal Event

Figure of Historia

Figure of Prophetia

References

2:5

“no man had worked upon the earth”

time before sin required toil

virginity of Mary

Luke 1:34

2:6

“a spring came up from the earth and watered its face”

God spoke directly to the soul; intuitive knowing

conception by the Holy Spirit

John 7:38–39

2:7

“man formed from the mud of the earth”

body and soul, like dirt and water, form a kind of paste

Christ born of David’s seed according to the flesh

Rom. 1:3

2:15

man placed in paradise to work and guard it

cultivation of spiritual delights

Christ came in Father’s will to fulfill and keep it

2:21

man put to sleep

withdrawal from earthly senses

Christ sleeps in the passion

2:22

woman formed from side of the man

emergence of wisdom from within

Church formed from the pierced John 19:34 side of Christ

2:24

union of man and woman in one flesh

desire united to reason

Christ united to the Church in human flesh

Eph. 5:31–2, John 1:14, Phil. 2:7

3:1–5

serpent tempts the woman

temptation of the affections

poisons (venena) of heretics tempting Church

1 Cor. 11:19, 2 Cor. 11:3

3:21

garments of skin

mortality of the flesh

phantasms drawn from senses of the flesh

3:24

dismissal from paradise

loss of happy life, sent to earn merit to return

removal from Catholic faith, opposition to it

3:24

cherubim

fullness of knowledge

charity

Matt. 22:37–40

3:24

flaming sword

endurance of tribulations

repentance

Rom. 5:3–4, Heb. 12:6

3:24

tree of life

wisdom

eternal life

Genesis Text

Ps. 3:6

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concrete instance of how authority provided the exegete with a “shortcut” (compendium).48 As he will note years later, a single clue can clarify many figurative details, as when Paul unfolded many aspects of the Exodus by means of a key detail, and so “by the explanation of one figure, he made sense of all the rest” (Faust. 12.29).49 If a reader became stuck on a passage that did not make rational-spiritual sense as it stood, then it was likely that some kind of mystery was afoot. Sometimes “no other way out (exitus) has been given to understand what was written that is reverent and worthy of God (pie et digne Deo) except by supposing that it has all been set before us figuratively and in riddles (figurate atque in aenigmatibus). Then we have authority from the apostles for reading figuratively, seeing that’s the way they solved so many riddles in the books of the Old Testament” (Gen Man. 2.2.3).50 On the other hand, interpreting texts on the basis of authority alone indicated a low level of spiritual maturity. By tacking it onto the end of his predominantly rational-spiritual approach to Genesis, Augustine clearly assigned to interpretation by authority a second-class status. It was the spiritual mind’s fail-safe mode of interpretation, for use in case of emergency. But the more dignified work of interpretation engaged the powers of regenerated spiritual reason and understanding rather than mere faith in authority.

Summary Understood as a work of divine rhetoric, the Bible revealed its complexity as accommodated speech. For Augustine understanding this complexity was essential to understanding Scripture’s use of figures. His work of reading and exegesis in these early years harvested basic rhetorical insights for spiritual understanding whose first fruits appeared in On Genesis, Against the Manichees. It is there that Augustine first fully exploited the Ambrosian paradigm of spiritual exegesis in the campaign against Manichean literalism and showed three ways that it affected reading of the Old Testament narratives. First, one might read “according to history,” secundum historiam, that is, literally, within everyday parameters of meaning, “just as the letters sound.” But even simple metaphors connected the literal sense to an imaginatively figurative mode of reading. Second, one might read for hidden spiritual truth, that is, in allegoria, relating a text’s likenesses to the intelligible world of understanding beyond sense. Just as a word’s ordinary literal sense could be turned to figurative uses, so figurative understanding could grow from a narrative’s

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written form. By the exercise of learning to see likenesses between the earthly and heavenly worlds, someone whose powers of spiritual-rational reasoning had been healed by faith could become skilled in spiritual reading. Augustine thought that these spiritual interpreters nevertheless still read a text “according to history” whether or not the events described in it actually happened. Third, one might also read a text according to prophecy, secundum prophetiam, as a microcosm of the history of salvation. That occurred when spiritual reason analyzed it as foretelling the entire course of world history in six ages, or when faith, helped by the authority of the New Testament, zeroed in on history’s climax in the sixth age of Christ and the Church. The two figurative perspectives contrasted: “figures belonging to history” pointed beyond sensible things to the invisible spiritual realm, while “figures belonging to prophecy” found fulfillment in events of salvation in future time. On Genesis, Against the Manichees reveals Augustine’s rich if still developing (and not a little vague) spiritual reasoning process. Barely three years after Augustine’s decisive shift from Manicheeism to Catholicism, an impressively coherent interpretive framework armed aspiring spiritual adepts and front-line pastoral defenders against Manichean poaching. The gift of authoritative open texts gave spiritually minded interpreters heaven-sent relief from the sweaty labor of foraging for spiritual food by the use of reason alone. Meanwhile these authoritative links nourished the Church’s “little ones” like rich milk from God’s maternal breast. Augustine tried to communicate, however prosaically, what he learned from Ambrose about the depth of spirit in the letter of Scripture. By divine design, historia conveyed nourishment to the Church’s suckling simple believers while it also camouflaged deep canyons of spiritual truth that yawned before its spiritual seekers. As he wrote prayerfully in Confessions: What astonishing depth (profunditas) in your words! Its surface (superficies) lies open before us, and charms the faith of the little ones (parvuli). But what astonishing depth, my God, what astonishing depth! Looking into it sends a shudder through me— a shudder of awe, and a trembling of love! (Conf. 12.14.17)51

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Enigma Variations playing hide-and-seek in the figurative reading framework

Introduction: A View of the Forest Augustine was a born debater, and he never felt more at home than when wielding an argument. Fittingly then, On Genesis, Against the Manichees launched Augustine’s career as an exegete. The commentary reveals Augustine’s rapidly growing competence as a biblical interpreter; assiduous reading had already given him an impressive command of texts from different parts of the Bible. Scripture was more than a pretext for argument; beneath the polemical fireworks we can see a critical hermeneutical premise already in place, namely the unity of the Old and New Testaments. We also see sophisticated if still developing reflections on the divine strategy at work in the texts.1 We have only the one biblical commentary from this period, but fortunately Augustine helps us with his habit of sometimes commenting, if only briefly, on his work of interpretation. In this chapter we’ll step back from the trees of Augustine’s verse-by-verse exegesis of Genesis to survey the forest of his larger hermeneutical outlook in the late 380s. What approach to figurative reading was under construction in these early years, however provisional it turned out to be? Figurative reading, Augustine thought, made sense for spiritual seekers from several different angles. First, its way of learning cohered with ordinary processes of human education. Ambrose had convinced Augustine that faith is the primary condition for spiritual understanding in general and for reading Scripture in particular. The insight finalized his break with the Manichees. Even casual readers cannot miss the repeated

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references in Augustine’s early works to the battle cry of the Latinized Isaiah 7:9, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” But we should not mistake this for Tertullianesque fideism. For Augustine faith was above all a proper and reasonable response to the encounter with the authority of divine Wisdom, for human reason was too weak to figure out how to heal its own sickness and untwist its gnarled ideas about God and truth. A person believing this kind of authority, he thought, was every bit as rational as someone without medical knowledge who ventures to trust a doctor at a time of illness. Second, figuration made sense as part of a coherent divine design for salvation whose different parts worked together in a planned sequence. It honored the tremendous diversity in the Old Testament while integrating it with the covenant of Christ. The salvation economy, the so-called temporal dispensation (dispensatio temporalis), used many different earthly images, characters, events, laws, and so on, spread through a succession of times and places. But all these elements pulled the scriptural rope in the same direction; they all strived toward touching the eternal world of spirit. Scripture reflected and mediated knowledge of the unity of the divine nature, of creation, and of salvation’s plan. That diversity-in-unity was a pillar of Augustine’s figurative Old Testament reading. A third factor addressed the effect of figurative reading on the reader: the reunification of the fragmented self, a common theme in Augustine’s work.2 Scripture’s figures and realities gained a sort of centripetal force when understood in the light of its central vision of God, grace, and the practice of love. Unearthing the unity hidden in Scripture’s wild multiplicity of forms and images released a force that synthesized the soul and created an inner harmony that continued to grow as the soul exercised its rational-spiritual powers in reading. Sensing the harmonics of the text without helped to create a harmonics of the spirit within. The reader’s sweaty labor of seeking to understand spiritually not only warded off the soul’s ennui bred by having too easy access to truth but also pricked its illusion of having earned that access on its own. Figurative reading conformed spiritual people to Scripture’s unity by drawing them incrementally nearer to the Source of all unity, the divine Likeness and perfect Exemplar who is God’s own Power and Wisdom. Two early works in particular show the conceptual structure of Augustine’s early figurative reading. The first has a long and rather wooden title that literally translated reads On the Practices (mores) of the Catholic Church and On the Practices of the Manichees. The Latin mores (plural of mos) has

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been translated into English somewhat misleadingly as morals: the Latin connotation broadly includes not just what English calls “morality” but also all kinds of habits of life, virtuous and otherwise.3 So I’ll refer to this work as Catholic and Manichean Practices and, for short, simply as Practices, in the sense of “life practices,” “behavioral customs,” or “patterns of intentional conduct.” The two parts of the work compare the Catholic and Manichean approaches to religious expression—that of Catholics in Book 1 and Manichees in Book 2. We will concentrate on the first book’s treatment of biblical material. Then we’ll consider another work, one with a more easily translated title, On True Religion, whose synthesis of Platonism and Christianity simultaneously attempts to refute Manichees and appeal to thoughtful pagans. Along the way Augustine gives us his most important extended discussion of figurative hermeneutics in the period before his ordination as priest.

Getting Christianity Right: Practices of the Catholic Church and of the Manichees Augustine’s arguments about biblical unity and its implications run through several early works from this period. Catholic and Manichean Practices is the most relevant document to begin our discussion, because it is there that Augustine first explained how reading Scripture leads to spiritual knowledge. Book 1 rebuts the Manichean dismissal of the Old Testament from a rational-spiritual perspective. Any fool can see the Testaments are different, he observed; but only those with healthy spiritual faculties can see that they are complementary. The premise of his approach is that Manichees (mostly) agreed with Catholics about the authority of the New Testament. That made Augustine’s polemical strategy simple: insofar as Augustine might show that New Testament agrees with the Old, he would also display the irrationality of Manichees rejecting the Old. Nevertheless, it presented Augustine with a chicken-and-egg problem of methodology, because he needed the Manichees to grant an aspect of the perspective he was arguing for in order to make his case. The Apostle Paul crystallized the issue when he wrote, “spiritual things are known to the spiritual” (1 Cor. 2:13), a saying that presented both a sublime truth and an epistemological dilemma. Demonstrating the congruence of the Testaments had force only for those with the requisite rational-spiritual insight. But if the Manichees rejected it out of hand, then how might his other arguments be persuasive? “So where then shall I begin? From authority or

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from reason?” Augustine asks (Practices 1.2.3). A complicated personal history lies just beneath the surface of this innocent question, as we have seen. Once upon a time Augustine’s old agreement with the Manichean demand for rationality up front, before any religious commitment, paradoxically boggled his mind; he reversed himself when he began to suspect that his problem lay not in hyper-reverence for reason per se but in misconstruing reason as a starting point in matters of the soul. Right reason, it seemed, began to operate from a point that lay beyond reason. Actually an ordinary insight confirmable by daily experience here takes on cosmic significance: trust helps reason to operate properly even in quotidian matters, as when children assume as fact their parents’ claim to be their actual parents. Catholic and Manichean Practices briefly rehearsed the rationale for trusting authority. A proper method of argumentation, Augustine wrote, typically begins with assertions of authority and progresses toward statements justified by the force of reason, for an appeal to authority’s say-so after giving rational arguments seems like special pleading. Moreover, authority precedes reason because it respects the nature of human learning. Philosophers had mused on this for centuries, most famously in Plato’s allegory of the cave: human minds in the dark about the ultimate reality constitutionally resist the piercing light of pure rational thought. (For Augustine this “darkness” was both intellectual and moral; the soul’s sins and vices made it not only unready for truth but also unworthy of it.) This explains the necessity for authority’s “shade”: truth accommodates our habituation to ignorance by shrouding the soul in a protective semidarkness. This regimen allows the inner eye to adjust gradually to the light of truth and to emerge into the light at its own pace. Then one is free to go beyond faith in authority to proper rational thought. This is an arrangement of “the natural order,” wrote Augustine: “Authority, as if shaded by the branches of humanity, leads the squinting eye of the mind into the light of the truth” (Practices 1.2.3). But the Manichees obstinately refused to recognize this order, mistakenly thinking that rational truth’s precedence in the order of reality requires a corresponding precedence in the order of pedagogy. As a result they disastrously distort the way human beings learn the spiritual truths on which their eternal destinies depend. Augustine granted, on the other hand, that tough audiences call for tough rhetorical strategies. So he conceded the debate contest’s opening coin toss about whether it should begin with reason or with authority. Reason won. “But since we are dealing with people who think, say, and do

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everything out of order (contra ordinem), and above all say nothing else but that a reason must be given first, I shall go along with them and undertake what I admit is a defective manner of arguing. For I find delight in imitating, as much as I can, the gentleness of my Lord Jesus Christ, who clothed himself (indutus est) even with the evil of death of which he wanted to strip us.”4 Augustine then goes on to write about advanced rationalspiritual topics like knowledge of the intelligible world, the nature of the soul, the practice of virtue in wisdom, and the happy life that comes from loving the soul’s highest Good, which is God (Practices 1.2.4–6.9). But he unfolds rational truths grounded in a faith that the Manichees don’t have. Why? If they don’t believe, how can they understand? In the key statement, Augustine explains that he discusses these rational-spiritual truths not in the hope that they will understand them (an impossibility under present conditions) but rather “in order that at some point you may desire to understand them” (ibid. 1.17.31). Augustine’s rhetorical savvy (or caginess) allows his opponents’ premise about reason while somewhat preciously calling attention to his Christian faithfulness. But like the trickster’s “pick a card, any card,” the ruse sets up his adversaries for beating themselves at their own rationalistic game when he examines the premises of reason’s primacy. Merely to talk about spiritual truths is not yet to know them. Unspiritual minds aren’t naturally aware of lofty spiritual realities; and even when they do become aware, as it were from a distance, they find it impossible to retain them (as Augustine knew from painful experience; Conf. 7.1.1). Pained by truth’s brightness, such minds backpedal involuntarily toward safer, less glaring realms. “When it comes to divine realities, [reason] turns itself aside; it can’t see, it throbs, flames, and gasps with love, and then, struck by truth’s light, it retreats to its familiar place in the darkness, not from choice but from fatigue” (Practices 1.7.11). Augustine captures the predicament created by humanity’s epistemological shipwreck. Where to turn? Truth is hard to find in the “dense forest” of the mind’s questions (Sol. 2.14.26). It is at this point that divine authority rides in to save the aspiring but expiring soul from its ignorance. Its simple approach is familiar from everyday life: as a parent wraps a child’s medicine in something sweet, so God embeds spiritual truth within familiar elements of the world. The sugary coat on the spiritual truth is the near likeness to things we know. “We shall never be able to understand how beautiful, how great, how worthy of God, how—finally—true is that which we seek unless we begin from things that are human and close by (ab humanis et proximis incipientes).”5

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In Scripture’s astounding words, wondrous events, and beguiling stories, divine Wisdom’s accommodating authority “comes out to meet us.” “When we desire to take refuge in the darkness, that’s when shadiness of authority comes to meet us, and charms us (blandiatur) through ineffable Wisdom’s providential plan (per dispensationem ineffabilis sapientiae)— both by miraculous events and by the words of the holy books, as if by gentler signs and by shadows of the truth (veluti signis temperatioribus veritatis umbrisque).”6 This is how Old Testament images work: not by conveying truth directly but by casting “shadows” that prepare the inner eye to receive it. The spiritual context reframes all puzzling or off-putting surface impressions left by ancient Israel’s many strange and earthy stories, words, and deeds, particularly those of the patriarchs and prophets. So we find Augustine arguing from reason—about the necessity of faith in authority. That is where souls start the road back to spiritual health. Humanity’s problem lay not with the obscurity of truth but with its faulty grasp of truth; the root of misperception lay not in people’s knowledge but in the people themselves, who insist unbowed on setting their own terms for recognizing truth. Authority intervenes like an emergency medic to heal the soul’s weak powers of spiritual perception. While divine Wisdom’s plan for that healing remains opaque to outside observers, God lays out a way for believers to understand it. “If we keep the faith of the true religion and the commandments, we shall not abandon the way (via) that God has constructed for us by the calling of the patriarchs, by the bonds of the Law, by the predictions of the prophets, by the mystery of the Man whom God took up (suscepti hominis sacramento), by the testimony of the apostles, by the blood of the martyrs, and by the conversion of the nations.”7 Two great metaphors dominate Augustine’s discussion of figures: therapy and education. After authority heals the soul’s inner eye, it then restlessly seeks to examine spiritual truth in sharper detail. The evidence of the soul’s growing health is its ever-stronger practice of love. The natural world analogously features a “certain great and utterly ineffable pattern (ratio)” that mysteriously orders human bodily health. Doctors do not themselves heal, but help to restore the proper functioning of the body’s “design” for self-healing. To take a modern example, any of a hundred minor ailments might kill us were it not for the saving mechanism that today we call “the auto-immune system.” Though analysts intently study this mysterious “economy” of health, they can only describe and not explain it. For Augustine something similar operates in the world of the

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soul. Love is a “medicine (medicina),” he writes, that “restores health to the soul” (Practices 1.28.55). A person who learns how to love her neighbor “does good in part to the body but in part to the soul of a human being. With regard to the body this is called medicine; with regard to the soul it is called learning (disciplina)” (ibid. 1.27.52). That suggests Augustine’s other central metaphor, education. For him the biblical story of salvation is a great school for the soul, wherein love forms the disciplina, or “course of learning” (1.28.56). It takes place in two phases, the first in the difficult time of compulsion (coercitio), whose product is fear, and then later in the more pleasant time of instruction (instructio), whose end is love. For Augustine, the Old Testament primarily (though not exclusively) represented the first, compulsory phase, and the New Testament the second, instructional phase. Fear seems to prevail in the Old and love in the New, though actually each is found in both. Fear promotes the formation of love, so they are not antithetical but complementary. The Old remains pedagogically necessary for the New to complete the course of instruction. But the complete rule of learning (regula disciplinae) appears only when the two Testaments stand together. Like the twentysomething young adults who finally “get” the onerous parental rules they once hated as teens, so a soul that has learned to love looks back appreciatively on the bad old days of discomfiting fear and discipline. The Manichees are blind to this logic, and so they reject its lessons; but they do so to their loss, because they saw off the scriptural branch on which they are sitting. To the reader’s natural eye, the Old Testament can look like a bizarre brew of spiritual prayers and sublime ideals oddly mixed with nationalistic tales, tribal laws, family lore, folk wisdom, and temporally focused promises and benefits. Side by side the two Testaments seem to feature wildly disparate economies of salvation, contradictory views of truth, asymmetrical ideas about God, conflicting visions of religious community, mutually exclusive templates of covenant, competing behavioral practices, and opposing forms of worship. But for Augustine, the savvy spiritual thinker knows that the earthy particularities of the Old anticipate the universal, deeply spiritual truths of the New, and that the two are mutually necessary and reciprocally enlightening. No two documents, he wrote, could be “friendlier” (amicius; Practices 1.9.15). Practices conducts a show-and-tell of biblical quotes that juxtapose partly obscure testimonies in the Old with fully open testimonies in the New. Augustine stresses their unity by deploying a wealth of verbs with the prefix con- (“together”): the Testaments “come together” (convenire; 1.9.15), “sing together” (concinere; 1.14.27),

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“sound together” (consonare; 1.16.28), and “fit together” (congruere; 1.17.30), and many passages display a unique kind of “harmony” (concordia; 1.18.34). Augustine demonstrates their complementarity by pairing important passages on the cardinal importance of love. Thus Deut. 6:5, “You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, soul and mind,” and Lev. 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” resonate with the teachings of “the Gospel and the Apostle,” that is, Jesus and Paul (Matt. 22:37–40; Rom. 13:8–10; Practices 1.8.13–9.15). Anyone, Augustine wrote, who claims that these ancient commandments do not order human life in the best and most salutary way fights not just being Christian but being human! His polemic is blustery but also suggests something theologically crucial: the Bible’s complex unity spins on the axis of love. Thus Christ the Teacher pointedly declared that upon the twin commandments of love to God and neighbor “hang the whole Law and Prophets” (Matt. 22:37–40). If so, then “it cannot be right to censure whatever depends upon these two commandments” (Practices 1.29.59). Therefore anyone who claims to be Christ’s disciple must agree with Christ about loving God and neighbor, and simultaneously commits both to Christ and to the Old Testament. Both spiritual reason and biblical authority converge upon this point: love both binds the Testaments together and opens up their meaning. “The one God of the two Testaments” (Practices 1.17.30) orchestrated the Bible’s different events, rites, and symbols into a “wondrous arrangement” (mirifica dispositio; ibid.) that both accommodates weaker minds and exercises stronger ones. When the Catholic Church, “truest mother of Christians” (ibid. 1.30.62), reads Scripture, she simultaneously nurses her childlike “little ones” (parvuli), accustomed to playing in the sandbox of carnal life, and feeds her adult “spiritual ones” (spiritales). “Many things are said in a more lowly way, a way more accommodated to souls crawling around in the dirt (humi repentibus animis accommodatius) in order that they may rise by means of human things into divine things. Many things are also said figuratively (figurate) so that the studious mind may exercise more profitably (exerceatur utilius) when it seeks, and rejoice more abundantly when it finds.”8 Augustine here repackages Ambrose’s great lesson about divine pedagogy into a line worthy of an ancient bumper sticker: carnal minds use earthly images to “rise up by means of human things into divine things.” Scripture’s humble form woos the earthbound. Love stands at the center of the Old Testament, just as it does the New; therefore, the Old can in no way be said to obstruct the Christian search for the truth about God and the soul. Both urge the same love; in both, “love asks,

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love seeks, love knocks [cf. Matt. 7:7]. . . . Love reveals, and in the end love abides in what has been revealed. The Old Testament does not deter us from this love of wisdom and from fervently seeking it, but rather spurs us on to it even more eagerly!” (ibid. 1.17.31). Catholic and Manichean Practices actually said very little about figurative reading as such. But its theme of scriptural unity grounded the gradual revelation of God’s will that, in Augustine’s mind, allows spiritually astute readers to understand God’s figurative strategy. Once that strategy becomes clear, Scripture offers a virtually endless variety of spiritual exercises that sharpen the soul’s skills of spiritual discernment (1.10.16–17).

The Great Rapprochement: On True Religion A second early piece gives an even more detailed account of Augustine’s hermeneutical framework and deals directly with the approach of figurative exegesis. On True Religion (390) is a sprawling speech to late antiquity’s cultured despisers of true religion, that is, Catholic Christianity, that fulfilled a promise that Augustine had made to his friend, benefactor, and onetime fellow Manichee Romanianus.9 This man had witnessed Augustine’s conversion; but despite having become a convinced Manichee at Augustine’s urging, he did not follow his friend into the Catholic Church. Augustine lamented his absence from the Cassiciacum discussions and wanted a chance to reclaim his friend. So Augustine promised to send him a tract one day that explained his move (True Rel. 7.12). The tract that became On True Religion stands as the philosophical high-water mark of Augustine’s work as a lay Catholic apologist; it also faithfully captures his outlook as a new Catholic. Despite being written after the lapse of four years since the heady days at Cassiciacum, On True Religion should be regarded “as mirroring the intellectual and spiritual outlook of Augustine only a few months after his conversion in the garden at Milan.”10 On True Religion sought to construct a philosophical platform on which Catholic Christians might both speak to the concerns of pagan intellectuals and also contest the teachings of the Manichees, especially their claim about two cosmically opposed “natures” (Rev. 1.13.1). This two-sided engagement developed four interlocking themes: Christianity’s revelation of true worship of the only God; the logic of the so-called dispensatio temporalis, the “temporal economy” of salvation; that economy’s function in healing the soul; and the Catholic triumph over Manichean dualism.11

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While contesting the Manichean view of a cosmos constructed out of the conflict of good and evil, Augustine also argued that Christianity correlated and completed the best insights of ancient philosophy.12 Perhaps in answer to Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus whose work The Return of the Soul (De regressu animae) he had probably read in Latin translation, Augustine developed a Christianized version of “the ascent of the soul.”13 While he admitted that ancient philosophy accurately developed certain important insights about the course of this spiritual ascent, he also argued that it had one fatal flaw: it failed to give a soul the power to ascend to truth. Only Christianity did this. Augustine famously wrote that if the old Platonists had known the teaching of Christ, “with the change of a few words and phrases they would have become Christians” (4.7).14 Along the way Augustine revealed his rationale for figuratively reading the Old Testament, so bringing to public fruition the seeds of figurative hermeneutics sown by Ambrose’s Pauline rule about letter and spirit. He picks up on a number of themes discussed in Practices, especially the issue about the relationship of authority and reason. He also goes on to explain the premises, to justify the approach, and to preview the practice of his figurative Old Testament reading by setting ancient Israel’s story in the context of Christianity’s spiritual ideals. On True Religion’s rationale for spiritual reading addresses three aspects of the framework of figurative reading that are worth a closer look: the diagnosis of the humanity’s spiritual plight, the therapy offered by temporal and eternal faith, and the spiritual ascent made possible by reading the texts as allegory.

I. Salve for the Human Malady Augustine bleakly characterizes the predicament of humanity, which finds itself “overwhelmed and entangled in its sins” (True Rel. 10.19). The human race, Augustine thought, persists as it were on spiritual life support, blind to divine light, and unable even to acknowledge the seriousness of its plight. The soul severely wounds itself by love and sorrow for transitory things that it cannot possibly hold on to (3.3). Past philosophers have been aware of humanity’s need for healing, and even diagnosed it; but they too contracted the disease they claimed to cure by worshipping the creature rather than the Creator (37.68). So even the best human beings seek pleasure from trivial things that uselessly incite desire (40.75); they perversely ape God’s power (45.84) and insatiably scratch a deep itch to know only for the sake of knowing (49.94). This distorts humanity’s perception of its

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purpose, retards its pursuit of happiness, and weakens its grasp of truth. People misperceive the Creator’s intentions and misconstrue the reason and order embedded in creation, and so they fall to the illusion that evil can freely choose to buck God’s order. They do not see that God constantly uses contrary means to achieve redemption and tends to our plight like a physician following a healing regimen. To describe this, On True Religion recasts the “marvelous arrangement” of Practices with a new phrase, dispensatio temporalis, the “temporal dispensation” or time-bound economy.15 The root metaphor referred to a steward’s management of a great household. Conceived in eternity and enacted in time, the divine plan speaks to human beings in the “visible words” (verba visibilia, 50.98) of events like Abraham’s calling, Israel’s Exodus, David’s dynasty, Judah’s exile and return, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, and the Church’s story.16 Salvation history’s events, institutions, rites, and characters all trumpet God’s truth through familiar “carnal forms” that embody higher spiritual realities (24.45). The sometimes crassly earthy tales of patriarchs, prophets, and kings, along with Israel’s customs, rituals, and laws, offer “an intermediate step (gradus)” by which humanity might climb back to perfection. In a tightly packed summary statement, Augustine described his vision of Christianity’s essence: If we cling to the eternal Creator, eternity is bound to affect us too. But the human soul, being overwhelmed and entangled in its sins, has nothing of its own that it can see or hold on to as an intermediate step for grasping the divine, nothing human by which it can climb up from earthly life to God’s likeness. Because that is so, God’s unspeakable mercy, by means of a temporal economy (temporalis dispensatio) deploying changeable creatures that nevertheless keep his eternal laws, came to the rescue of both individual people and the whole race by reminding humanity of its original and perfect nature. That, in our times, is the Christian religion. To acknowledge and follow it is our most secure and certain salvation. (10.19)17 Christianity is “temporal medicine” (True Rel. 24.45) for humanity’s enervated spiritual powers. As modern vaccinations cure sicknesses by using the malady’s own microbes, God cures the carnal mind by using the same carnal forms that sickened the soul in the first place. “We have to strive by means of the very fleshly forms that box us in to learn about those things that flesh can’t talk about” (ibid.). This progress from illness to

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health symbolizes the soul’s movement from convalescent faith in external authority to the recovery of spiritual reason’s powers of discernment. Faith in the divine mercy cleanses the soul and prepares it to receive spiritual knowledge. The marvel of orderly beauty of the original creation reemerges within redeemed persons. “So the soul’s healing process itself, which divine Providence offers with inexpressible kindness, gradually and distinctly appears ever more beautiful. It is divided between authority and reason. Authority requires faith, and prepares a person for the use of reason. Reason leads to understanding and knowledge” (ibid.). This suggests to Augustine a Christian adaptation of the venerable image of the spiritual ladder (ibid. 26.49). On the lowest rung, (1) the infant soul suckles at the breasts of authority, which nourishes faith with examples from history. As it climbs the maturing soul (2) forgets carnal things and seeks to understand eternity’s laws; (3) then after joining fleshly appetite to the use of spiritual reason, (4) it becomes more able to fend off persecution, and (5) to savor the abundance of spiritual wisdom. On the upper rungs of ascent, (6) it transcends temporal life altogether, and eventually (7) looks forward to the eschatological bliss. For Augustine, this upward movement is both aesthetically fitting and worthy of Divine Wisdom. God accomplishes salvation not only with power but also with style. On True Religion places Scripture reading on the lowest rung of the ladder of spiritual ascent. The divine physician’s program of healing requires believers to rigorously obey the divine instructions before they seek understanding, just as patients in emergency triage must obey orders before asking questions (and so “believe before they understand”). Augustine’s heretofore abstract teaching on authority and reason (e.g., On Divine Order 2.9.27) now becomes concrete in some sharply worded biblical texts. Christ’s commanding authority slapped his followers awake (True Rel. 3.4): “Lay up treasures in heaven!” (Matt. 6:19); “Love your enemies!” (Matt. 5:44); “Turn the other cheek!” (Matt. 5:39). His apostles continued similarly: “Sow to the spirit!” (Gal. 6:8). “Love not the world!” (1 John 2:15). Magisterial authority commended the mysteries of the spiritual world with short bursts of insight: “The kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:21). “The unseen things are eternal!” (2 Cor. 4:18). Believing obedience to this authority, Augustine wrote, gradually forms a pattern of life that cuts ties to earthly things and cleanses impure desires. Spiritual reason revives and resensitizes the “tip of the mind” (acies mentis).18 Little by little the soul’s capacity to perceive divine light returns, and it becomes “fit” (idonea) to perceive the eternal things without past,

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future, or change; in short, the soul becomes ready to receive knowledge of God (True Rel. 7.13).19 Reading Scripture was the temporal economy’s foundational strategy. “The starting point (caput) for following this religion,” Augustine wrote in an important passage, “is the history and prophecy concerning Divine Providence’s temporal economy (dispensatio temporalis) given for the salvation of the human race in order to reform and restore it to eternal life” (True Rel. 7.13).20 Recalling key concepts from On Genesis, Against the Manichees, Augustine wrote that historia and prophetia launched the soul’s pedagogic program of ordered instruction (disciplina) that was designed by Providence and fulfilled by Christ’s coming (ibid. 25.46). In other words, reading (hearing) texts began the healing process by conveying the salvation that the prophets anticipated, history accomplished, and the holy books recorded. Augustine wrote as a spiritual teacher, a spiritalis, whose powers of reason and perception had been healed by faith and continually exercised by reading. From that advanced position he spelled out the divine pedagogy of Scripture, where truth hints, teases, and darts alluringly among words and images in a kind of figurative fan dance (True Rel. 17.33). “Now as to the way of presenting this teaching in its fullness: it comes partly in complete openness, and partly in pictures that use words, events, and sacraments—and everything is adapted for instructing and exercising the soul. What other pattern does this fulfill than reason’s regular course of instruction?” Studies of this passage have often noted Augustine’s argument that the Christian economy fulfilled ancient philosophy’s tripartite pedagogy of instruction in ethics, ontology, and epistemology.21 The teaching of Christ as mediated by Scripture functions in the realm of epistemology, or the logic of knowing; it demonstrated how the divine strategy adapts itself to the capacity of seekers by insinuating divine truth, and leading them to it gradually rather than openly stating everything at once. “Now the explanation of the mysteries is referred to what is quite plainly spoken” (ibid.). The reason is simple: like a good teacher, God stirs his soporific students by playing a game of peekaboo in order to make truth’s discovery interesting and fun. “If these plain truths that Scripture teaches were easily understood,” Augustine continued, “then we would neither seek truth with any diligence nor find it with any pleasure. Moreover, if there were no sacramental signs in the Scriptures, and no signposts of truth in the sacraments, then conduct would not come together well enough with knowledge” (ibid.). Reading figuratively excites a person not

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only to gain theoretical knowledge but also to embrace it personally; it foments both the longing to know truth and the determination to possess it, which is to say, to be possessed by it. Scripture’s design unfolding through time catalyzes fallen humanity’s movement of conversion from old to new, from fleshly Adam to spiritual man, from faith in the carnal promises of an earthly kingdom to understanding the spiritual promises of the heavenly kingdom. If salvation begins in fear about judgment, it progresses in the longing for grace, and then blossoms in love (True Rel. 17.33). In other words, temporal movement is etched into the very structure of salvation. Like all things in the stream of time the salvation economy runs restlessly from “then” to “now”; but “now” doesn’t make “then” obsolete, and life is changed, not ended. In Augustine’s thought, many Old Testament laws “back then” bound Israel in fear like a band of slaves, “a crowd chained together” (multitudines compeditae; ibid.).22 But “now” Christ has freed his followers from those laws, and they no longer need carry them out physically. Yet the laws remain “on the books.” That puzzles readers until they perceive that those laws assumed a different function after Christ transposed them into the new mode of Christian spiritual reading, what Augustine calls reading “in faith and interpretation” (in fide atque interpretatione; ibid.). We must wait more than a decade for him to unpack that dense phrase in Against Faustus. But it is already clear, however counterintuitive to the novice, that the very same laws that once froze ancient Israel in mortal fear before God now melt Christians in warm love for God. Spiritually obtuse people like the Manichees don’t understand this; they even think that different times and teachings prove that the two Testaments come from different deities! But nothing is more dangerously wrong-headed. Doctors often change their strategies with patients according to their needs, without subverting their single-minded intention to heal, much less falsifying their claim to be doctors. God’s prescription plan likewise has two parts. If the Manichees didn’t grasp that God has different strategies for different times and peoples, then that was only one more sign of their wooden outlook. For Augustine Scripture itself indicated this inner unity. Many Old Testament events and sayings are impenetrably vague when read in isolation, but they emerge into clarity when read in the light of the whole Bible. Patriarchs, prophets, and other Old Testament characters seemed to act and speak strangely because they heard a different drumbeat from their fellows, understanding that they lived in the divine plan’s penultimate stage. That made them spiritually amphibious “double agents” who

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secretly lived according to the New Testament while living in the time of the Old. The people of their time could not understand this, so the ancient saints hinted at Christ’s future salvation by prophetic symbols. Then much later Christ unveiled not only the truth by which they secretly lived but the whole biblical structure of prophecy and fulfillment (True Rel. 28.51).

II. Figurative Hermeneutics at Center Stage Augustine addressed this prophecy-fulfillment structure in a late section of On True Religion that spells out his early theory of figurative reading better than any other. It sits in the context of a discussion about the nature of true knowledge that occurs at the end of the treatise’s long treatment of the soul’s ascent (True Rel. 24.45–54.106). That section features three segments. The first treats Christian salvation (soteriology) by studying the need for authority and the dispensatio temporalis (24.45–28.51). The second discusses the study of being (ontology) by referring to the work of spiritual reason and the soul’s ascent to communion with the divine Word (29.52– 36.67). The third returns to soteriology by analyzing humanity’s triumph over its three most characteristic temptations, according to the list that appears in 1 John 2:15: “the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life.” Augustine thematizes these as the pursuit of pointless pleasure (39.72–45.83), arrogant pride (45.84–48.93), and empty knowledge, or curiositas (49.94–51.100). Each of these simultaneously and paradoxically revealed both humanity’s grandeur and its misery. Each weakness inverts and also reveals a natural human endowment from God: misplaced pleasure reveals the human sense of beauty; misguided pride suggests humanity’s glorious destiny; and unfettered curiositas pointed to the human capacity for truth. Like a strip of photographic negatives, the picture of humanity’s rebellion disclosed features of its lost greatness. Our passage on reading Scripture occurs at the end of the section on curiositas—the itch for earthly knowledge for its own sake and for selfglorification apart from eternal values. That fault brings humanity’s failures to a crescendo (which Augustine underscored by switching the order of the list in 1 John) in its hapless inability to discover truth and in its dangerous addiction to falsehood. Augustine pulls out all his rhetorical stops in order to render the tragedy of human folly. Subject to “silly figments born of far too many pleasures, we sank into oblivion with our thoughts and turned all of life into some kind of empty dream” (True Rel. 50.98). Our natural passion for truth having been vitiated by a willingness to settle

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for its cheap imitations, we wander confused without a sense of spiritual due north, dazzled by flashing intellectual lights that ultimately lead nowhere and illumine nothing. We victimize ourselves, Augustine wrote, with “theatrical and poetic trifles, exhausted and parched by hunger and thirst for empty curiosity and inane delusions, while uselessly desiring to be refreshed and satisfied by them as though by painted banquets” (ibid. 51.100). Nevertheless, the Eternal stepped into the midst of the human debacle and declared, “I am who am” (Exod. 3:14; True Rel. 49.97). Though eternity remained far beyond our reach, Providence gave hope that we could taste truth if only we might “let our minds eat and drink by closely examining and working with the divine Scriptures (divinarum scripturarum consideratione et tractatione)” (51.100). Though curiositas played “trifling and deceptive games” with us that trapped us in an error-prone intellectual “circus” (spectaculum), Scripture invited us to join in the healthy sport of reading. Augustine urged, “Let’s get instruction by playing this truly liberating and ennobling game” (hoc vere liberali et ingenuo ludo erudiamur; (51.100). The back-and-forth of reading makes us “fit”: God speaks, we believe; God cures, we heal; God calls, we return to him running. The game’s winnings include the prizes of recovering our rational selves and reclaiming our inner freedom. This long and arduous therapy by the exercise of reading was only a start—but it was a real start. “Let’s climb the steps (gradus) that divine Providence deigned to set up for us” (50.98). Augustine mapped three aspects of reading: a description of scriptural healing for humanity’s ills, an analysis of the different aspects and functions of faith, and a survey of the different dimensions of sacramental figures. Let’s look at them individually. Diagnosis and Healing by Scripture Reading. How does God lift humanity out of spiritual quarantine and vulnerability to infectious error? Ironically God frees us by using the very forms that originally made us sick. “By means of sounds and letters, fire, smoke, and cloudy pillar— using what amount to ‘visible words’ (verba visibilia)—the unspeakable mercy of God did not disdain to ‘play,’ so to say, with our dumb childishness (infans), using parables and pictures to heal our inner eyes by a kind of mud.”23 In short, Scripture draws playful pictures for spiritual tots. Even in antiquity a baby’s inarticulate gurgling suggested the concept of one who was in-fans, “unable to talk.” In divine perspective, human beings were spiritual babblers. But they weren’t cute for they weren’t created that way, having suffered a catastrophic self-inflicted wound that enclosed them in solitary cosmic silence. But God accommodated this

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condition with the power of Scripture’s miraculously restorative words. Augustine took his master image for describing this from the Gospel story of Jesus healing the man born blind (John 9:1–5). Mixing spittle with dirt he had rubbed mud into the eyes of the man who washed and saw for the first time. So Scripture, Augustine wrote, rubbed an earthy mix of parables and pictures into the human mind’s eye, a mudpack of sounds and letters that gently oozed a new language into humanity’s closed and silent world (50.98).24 The Complex Character of Faith. God’s intervention is determinative, but the human response to this healing initiative remains crucial. Faith in external events starts a trajectory that leads the mind to understanding. But just as reason is not absent from faith in authority (because it is a reasonable response to the divine overture), so faith is not absent from understanding, because the spiritalis knows that she cannot grasp the divine mystery’s utter gratuity and power from reason alone. So Augustine subdivided the act of faith into two related forms, “historical-temporal” faith that enters into the spiritual realm by believing the authority of external events, and “spiritual-eternal” faith that ascends within the spiritual realm by gradually understanding the verities beyond time.25 So let’s make a distinction. What kind of faith do we owe to history (historia), and what kind of faith do we owe to understanding (intelligentia)? That is, what may we commit to memory, not knowing it to be true but believing it anyway? And where might we find “the True,” which doesn’t come and go, but always remains the same? . . . Moreover, what can we say about that steadfast faith (stabilis fides), whether historical and temporal, or spiritual and eternal, to which every interpretation of authority should be directed? Can we describe the advantage of faith in temporal things for understanding and possessing things of eternity, where one finds the end of all good deeds? (True Rel. 50.99)26 In good Platonic fashion Augustine distinguishes between the passing things of historia and the eternal truths of intelligentia. Each realm commands its own form of faith; but actually each form is the same faith seen from the perspective of one of its complementary developing stages. Reading Scripture promotes faith on both levels but in different ways. “Historical and temporal faith” accepts the authority of Wisdom’s

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commands and Scripture’s stories and sayings. It doesn’t demand rational clarity as a precondition of accepting that authority but ventures trust as a reasonable investment in the promise of healing and understanding. As healing realizes the new state of being, then “spiritual and eternal faith” begins to explore the intelligible realm. Spiritales remain believers, but they ascend the ladder of spiritual understanding as faith advances in strength through the exercise of Scripture’s temporal images that arc toward eternal truth. Biblical Delights for the Discerning Soul. Now equipped with spiritual understanding, the believing soul explores the many layers of spiritual understanding embedded in Scripture. The wealth of biblical imagery leads Augustine to ask a series of rhetorical questions about the nature of allegory. But these should not be mistaken for the questions of a vexed thinker pondering a set of conundrums; rather they are the questions of an excited reader encountering mysteries like a child finding treasures under the Christmas tree. What are these wonders? Can we know what’s inside them? What will we find as we open them? How many are there? How do they work? How exactly should we interpret allegory, which we believe that Wisdom spoke in the Holy Spirit (per sapientiam dicta creditur in spiritu sancto)? Does it suffice to carry through (perducere) images from visible things of the ancient past to visible things of the more recent past? Or should we carry them even further to cover the affections and the nature of the soul? Or may we even go as far as unchangeable eternity? In other words, do some allegories signify visible deeds, and others, the motions of souls, and still others, the law of eternity? And might there be others that trace out all these things? (True Rel. 50.99)27 Allegoria, as the popular etymological definition went (Gk., allos, “other” plus agora, “speaking”), “says one thing and means another.” More particularly for Augustine at this time, reading Scripture allegorically unveiled the mystery inscribed in the text’s letters, litterae—again the lesson of Ambrose.28 By it all the faithful gradually learned the basics of spiritual truth. But astute readers also learned how to discriminate between degrees of spiritual meaning. In some cases it sufficed to read the historia of an event like the Exodus through the lens of more recent events (e.g.,

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the coming of Christ); alternatively, the story may figuratively describe the soul’s affections; again, it may even suggest truth about unchangeable eternity itself. And certain rich texts may contain all these levels of meaning.29 At the same time, the spiritually trained eye can even discern subtly different types of allegories. God can embed spiritual truth in a written narrative (historia); or an underlying event (factum); or a reported speech (sermo); or some veiled symbol, artifact, act, or expression (sacramentum). Any and all of these propel spiritually alert minds from sign to reality and from faith to understanding. For On True Religion the very structure of allegory mimics the stages of spiritual ascent. Reading figuratively is thus an essential practice of the Christian life.30 Augustine wrote that the training ground for figurative reading is the intrinsically metaphorical character of all language. Every human tongue, he observed, contains idiosyncratic expressions that seem absurd when translated word for word into another language. So God took a great risk by subjecting eternal truth to the vagaries of human speech. The risk is particularly apparent in the Old Testament stories about the deity himself, where the eternal and unchanging “I AM” looks jarringly human (True Rel. 50.99): “Not only does Scripture show God as wrathful, sad, waking from sleep, remembering things, forgetting things, and not a few other traits that can befall good people—we also find the sacred books describing God with words like ‘repentance,’ ‘jealousy,’ ‘drunkenness,’ and others like them!” Scripture speaks of God’s “eyes, hands, feet, and other body parts.” We know perfectly well that this kind of talk can’t be taken literally, Augustine contended. But literalistic thinkers like the Manichees incite spiritually astute Christian believers to tease out what Scripture is up to. Thus figuration ignites the work of interpretation by searching out God’s humble way of speaking (loquendi humilitas). Readers ask with Augustine (ibid.): “Should this language be referred to the visible form of the human body? Or rather are they symbols of intelligible and spiritual powers, just the way we understand God’s ‘helmet,’ ‘shield,’ ‘sword,’ ‘belt,’ and the like?” This is an essential spiritual discipline because what’s crucial to understanding figuration is also crucial for comprehending God’s entire program of salvation. Significantly God executed this program neither by personal fiat nor by the work of angels or other elements of the “spiritual creation.” God rather used “the rational, sexual, and bodily creation that serves him along with us.” Why so? Spiritual seekers learn the answer to that question and so determine the exact value of the fleshly in relation to the spiritual. “The moment we figure out this one thing,” Augustine

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wrote, “then we’ve shut out from our minds every strain of childish impertinence and holy religion comes into its own” (ibid.). The exercise of reading Scripture figuratively develops the very skills that are critical to this process. The principle is basic: the eternal by means of the temporal.31

A Framework for Reading Figures This was Augustine’s framework for reading Scripture figuratively when he wrote his earliest commentary on Genesis. On the eve of ordination, Augustine perceived the sequential relation between the temporal and eternal realms and understood the divine plan on the model of a stairway up from faith to understanding that seekers ascended by reading Scripture. Biblical figures played a central role in this ascent by training readers to perceive the figurative unity that underlies Scripture’s wild diversity. Augustine’s argument for that unity drew on his rhetorical-philosophical views on fittingness and symmetry wherein the beauty of some whole entity orders the coherence of its parts. For readers of the Old and New Testaments, the work of interpretation follows the same rule: clear passages illuminate obscure ones, and finding one’s way from the one to the other requires both faith and the skill that develops from the invigorating spiritual exercise of searching and finding. Jesus’ parables replicated the Scripture’s pedagogic game of hide-andseek. Yet something even greater stands on the horizon here, namely, the perception that the great paradigm for reading Scripture figuratively is not merely Jesus’ parables but rather Jesus himself. The next chapter will propose the thesis that as the years passed Augustine more and more clearly articulated the person and work of Christ as central to a complete understanding of how to read Scripture in general and the Old Testament in particular.

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Introduction: Augustine’s Early Thought About Christ The God-Man Jesus Christ stands at the crossroads of Augustine’s thought and life.1 From the time of his baptism, Augustine worked to interrelate his perceptions of God and humanity, eternity and time, and spirit and flesh by grasping the central Christian wonder that the divine Word “mystically took up a Man” (Letter 11.2). Eventually Augustine’s thought on Christ embraced the conjunction of invisible and visible creation, divine grace and human will, and the human soul and body. Not coincidentally, the Confessions conversion scene in the garden at Milan pivots upon Christ when a child’s voice directs Augustine to “take up and read” the commanding word of Scripture, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ!”2 Though at first he famously wished to know “nothing more” than God and the soul,3 Augustine learned by ceaseless striving that knowing God and the soul demanded that he come to know the God who took up a human soul, “the Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5; Conf. 7.18.24). For Augustine grew gradually to perceive “Christ” as a multidimensional reality. The “person” of Jesus Christ referred not only to the man of Nazareth rendered by the Gospels; being intimately tied to his mission of bringing God’s saving love to the world, by definition his “person” included the community he saved, his body the Church. The theme of Christ and Church’s nuptial union as “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:30–31) appeared already in the first Genesis commentary (Gen. Man. 2.24.37), though that theme remained secondary to his interest at that time in the soul’s spiritual ascent. But soon after beginning his pastoral ministry in Hippo, Augustine gave strong new attention to Christ and Church as the central reality of the Christian life. They appeared

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as two aspects of one spiritual reality, in fact a single living and speaking person, for, as he often said, “If the two are in one flesh, why not two in one voice?” (e.g., Exp. Ps. 142.3). That voice sounded throughout Scripture as head and body, indeed Christ’s saving energy as the head suffused all the accoutrements of his body, above all sacred Scripture and the sacraments. Eventually this “whole Christ” (Christus totus) permeated Augustine’s thinking, preaching, and writing. Though he never dedicated a treatise specifically to Christology, it may be said that everything Augustine wrote breathed “Christ.”4 Augustine’s devotion to Christ appeared early in life but only took on definite shape over time, and then not merely by dint of orthodox doctrine or inquisitive genius; it rather developed in reaction to Manicheeism, at first by his commitment to it as a Hearer, and then by his conflict with it as a Catholic. This story of development especially concerns the Manichean construction of Christ’s humanity, the sharpest point of contention between Manichees and Catholics. But the nub of Augustine’s problem was not Christ’s generic human nature by which he assumed a sort of “universal human flesh,” as Christian theology has usually portrayed it; rather it was the very particular Jewish flesh that Christ took up by being “born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4). In other words, Augustine’s central problem in relation to the Manichees concerned Christ’s Jewishness and his relation to the Law of Moses; by implication it concerned the Jewish roots of Christianity and its claim on the ancient Jewish books that it calls “the Old Testament.” Understanding this Christological dimension of the anti-Manichean struggle is critical for seeing the way Augustine learned to read the Old Testament figuratively. This chapter will take stock of the issue in the first phase of Augustine’s Christian life; later chapters will trace the developments in thinking about Christ and Scripture. My thesis throughout is that his thought on the humanity of Christ correlates with how he read Scripture figuratively.

Overview of Augustine’s Development, 373–391 Our first question is simple: How did Augustine’s thinking about Christ change as he moved into and out of Manicheeism? In order to make sense of the trajectory of Augustine’s thought on Christ, we need to clarify the difficulties posed by Manichean claims about Christ in his young adult years, and examine the reasons he took so long to extricate himself from those views and even longer to reach a functionally balanced view. We first must survey the Manichean movement that impressed the young Augustine

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so deeply, then stitch together a composite picture from fragments scattered in several of Augustine’s works, indications in the Confessions, extrapolations from the words of his opponents, and indirect associations from surviving Manichean texts. Different features of each period play into what eventually emerges, so we need to spend some time following the development of Augustine’s thought about Christ before showing how Christ was the load-bearing beam of his hermeneutical framework. I propose to examine the growth of Augustine’s understanding of Christ in five phases: I. Child of Monica, Child of the Church (before 373): When Augustine identified with the Catholic views of his mother. The source for this very early time is Confessions. II. Manichean Hearer (373–ca. 384): The years of Augustine’s Manichean commitment. In looking to reconstruct Augustine’s Manichean views of Christ, our best sources are surviving Manichean texts, works like Against Faustus and Against Secundinus that reproduce the actual words of the Manichees (sometimes extensively), and Confessions. III. Platonic Thinker, Catholic Catechumen (384–386): An interim time between listening to Ambrose to his embrace of Catholicism. Again our source for this brief but critical period is Confessions, which shows him adopting some important aspects of the Catholic view of Christ but misunderstanding others. IV. Catholic Lay Philosopher-at-Large (386–391): From his Catholic switch to the eve of ordination. Material for this period comes from Confessions and from various works written at this time. V. Unresolved Issues on the Eve of Ordination (391): Augustine’s formal faith in Christ’s humanity being solidly Catholic, his understanding of that faith remained under construction.

I. Child of Monica, Child of the Church (before 373) “By your mercy, Lord, my infant heart piously drank in this name, this name of my Savior your Son, with my mother’s milk” (Conf. 3.4.8). (Translations in this paragraph come from Chadwick, quoted by permission of Oxford University Press.) Augustine’s youthful attachment to the name of Christ was an inheritance from his intensely devoted Christian mother, Monica. His father, Patricius, though not a believer until near death, did

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not block Monica or the children from Christian faith (ibid. 1.11.17). So Augustine was “already marked with the sign of the cross and seasoned with salt from the time I came from my mother’s womb” (ibid.).5 In that fervent Catholic atmosphere the Church’s devotion to Christ rang sonorously. “When still a boy I had heard about eternal life promised to us through the humility of our Lord God coming down to our pride” (ibid.).6 At one point the desperately sick boy “begged for the baptism of your Christ” so that he might be “initiated and washed in the sacraments of salvation, confessing you, Lord Jesus, for the remission of sins” (ibid.). Monica made hasty arrangements, but when he recovered sooner than expected she postponed the sacrament so as not to risk later defilement; the adult Augustine remained mystified by her decision (ibid. 1.11.18). The young Augustine’s genuine Christian ardor was undoubtedly fed by liturgical experiences and his mother’s devotion. But that ardor was simplistic and uncritical; he judged books merely according to whether or not they used Christ’s name. The Christlessness of Cicero’s Hortensius quickly cooled his burning enthusiasm for that book (ibid. 3.4.8). Being still theologically inarticulate, Augustine only awkwardly faced real intellectual challenges.

II. Manichean Hearer (373–ca. 384) Augustine the bishop pitied the memory of himself as a young and wistful novice philosopher, baying for certainty (Conf. 3.6.10): “‘Truth, truth’: how I sighed for you in my inmost being, in my soul’s very core!” Fresh from the Hortensius and smitten with philosophia, young Augustine little realized the precarious position his passions had put him in; he was an easy pluck for some enterprising philosophy. At that moment the Manichees offered themselves as companion truth-seekers who understood the confused seeker’s language. “‘Truth! Truth!’”—he ironically mimics the Manichees in Confessions mimicking his own younger self—“they were always saying that and had a lot to tell me about it” (Conf. 3.6.10). But they had something on Cicero: they spoke the language of Christ whose name “was never absent from their lips” (ibid.). A prayer from the Manichaean Psalm Book hints at what Augustine heard when he attended their prayer services (Fort. 2): Christ is the word of Truth: he that hears it shall live. I tasted a sweet taste, I found nothing sweeter than the word of Truth. I tasted a sweet taste, I found nothing sweeter than the name of God. [I] tasted a sweet taste, I found nothing sweeter than Christ.7

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The Manichees told odd stories about God’s limits, about a prehistoric conflict between divine beings, about multiple levels in the cosmos, and about the material nature of evil. However, they honeyed their appeal by coupling the exaltation of rational truth with their impassioned devotion to Jesus Christ. Augustine portrays himself as gravitating quickly to them after his repulsion from Catholic Scripture (Conf. 3.6.10). Remaining a Manichean Hearer for nine years, though not privy to the practices of the Elect, Augustine held their views and argued their case publicly. Augustine was thus not a fringe adherent; he made friends, discussed issues, gained converts, and coveted promotions in the Manichean ranks. Monica rendered her judgment on all this by refusing to live with him under the same roof for a time (ibid. 3.11.19). The Manichean Back Story. Let’s look closely for a moment at the Manichean worldview. Twentieth-century recoveries of primary texts like the Manichean Psalm Book and the Kephalaia of the Teacher have spurred intense interest and a small but significant scholarly industry.8 Debate continues about whether and to what degree the movement was related to mainstream Christianity. Christian themes certainly appear at the movement’s origins: but does that mean it was an offshoot from Christianity or an independent group that adapted Christian themes for missionary purposes? A recent consensus has formed that Christianity in general, and devotion to Christ in particular, was indeed endemic to Mani and to his movement. Manichean Christology in particular has therefore begun to receive significant attention. Though only a bare outline can be given here, a sketch of the Manichean understanding of Christ and his role in salvation will help to suggest the Christological views of Augustine the Manichee.9 Mani was born about 216 in Parthia, in Mesopotamia, apparently into a Jewish-Christian “baptist” sect in which his father had assumed an important role.10 As an adolescent he received a personal revelation from a heavenly “Twin,” whom Mani identified as the Paraclete promised by Jesus in John’s Gospel (chaps. 14–16). The Twin revealed to Mani the deep secret truth of Christianity, what Mani called “the totality” (Kephalaia 15:19–23). Mani kept this revelation private until adulthood, when after coalescing with the Twin he began to call himself “the Paraclete”; later texts also call Mani by that title. He saw himself as standing at the climax of a long series of important patriarchal Gentile teachers, such as Seth and Noah (Gen. 4–9), and religious founders like Buddha and Zoroaster. But Mani’s dominating figure was Jesus. He himself was Jesus’ final and

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universal “apostle” who modeled his world mission on the Apostle Paul. Mani preached across a wide area and established his message in power centers of the Roman and Iranian empires, and eventually Mani’s movement did the same in Central Asia. However, after initial success in Babylonia, Mani fell from royal favor and was executed in 276 or 277. Manichean literature describes his protracted torture and death as a crucifixion, envisioning Mani’s ascent after death along a path of light that passed through the moon and the sun. Manichees celebrated his death and ascent in the so-called Feast of the Bema (“judgment”), a springtime festival designed to supplant the Catholic celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. What Manichees Believed. For people in the Roman Empire, Manicheeism was presented as a kind of superior Christianity. However, it was a total religion in its own right that presented a complete and self-contained worldview with its own texts, liturgy, and power structure.11 The Twin’s revelation to Mani supplied the highly organized and systematic Manichean account of the cosmos, human history, and the natural world. Above all Manicheeism was a “religion of light” whose drama of salvation was summarized by the catchphrase, “two principles and three moments.” The “two principles” were light and darkness; they shape Manicheeism’s strongly dualistic outlook that exalted God’s purity and goodness, though at the expense of God’s power. An intractable mass of evil challenged and effectively limited God, who remained vulnerable to attack by darkness. The “three moments” referred to the beginning, middle, and end of the epic battle between the cosmic forces of good and evil: God’s powerful light and the darkness of evil stand opposed in the beginning, commingling precariously in the middle moment of engagement, until light ultimate triumphs over darkness and death. Human history goes forward in the middle time, when individual humans are pawns in the struggle for power. God’s victory plan uses three divine emanations that invade the material evil realm, a series of surreptitious raids intended to redeem light from its fleshly imprisonment. But at a cost: these emanations’ engagement with evil produces suffering in the divine being, though God the Father remains hidden and suffers only by proxy. In the first emanation the Father evokes the Great Spirit, who is the “mother of life”; she in turn gives birth to the First Man, “the Son of God.” The First Man descends to battle with his five “sons,” the so-called light elements that make up the “Living Soul.” This Living Soul is the portion of divine being that engages evil directly, by sacrificing itself to ingestion by its powers in order to destroy it from within the way rat poison destroys its host. All this takes

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place before the creation of the cosmos; in effect the primordial divine sacrifice transfers to original time mainstream Christianity’s understanding of Jesus’ self-sacrifice.12 In order to establish the theater of action where redemption will take place, a second divine emanation brings forth “the gods of creation.” Among them, one called “the Living Spirit” attempts to rescue the First Man by fashioning the universe out of the evil matter where divine light lies embedded. So for Manichees, while the “stuff” of the universe is inherently evil, nevertheless its structure is divinely conceived. That structure includes ten heavens and eight earths over which the visible planets and stars reign as evil rulers, and the sun and the moon serve as vessels of purified light, transport “ships” that shuttle gods and purified souls from darkness to light. Mani proposed all this as intellectual knowledge confirmed by rational-scientific observation of the heavens. This sets the scene for the appearance of humanity. After divinity set in place the structure of the universe, a third divine emanation brings forth “the gods of salvation,” or ascent. One called “the Messenger” dwells in the ship of the sun while his feminine doublet, the Virgin of Light, sits enthroned in the ship of the moon. During the conflagration between warring masses, in an orgiastic spasm the demonic gods fashion the human race as fleshy receptacles that entrap divine light. These demons use the image of the Messenger whom they glimpsed and embed it in the human beings, who are thought of as “abortions.” So for Manicheeism human nature is a mixture of death-dealing, lustful flesh and entrapped particles of divine light. Carnal human bodies serve the demonic design because humanity’s urge for sexual reproduction ensures that more and more bodies will entrap the light. But the demonic strategy is risky, because humanity has within it a truly divine light, however faint. The gods of salvation exploit this vulnerability by making the redemption of the divine light their top priority. One among the gods of salvation stands out: “Jesus the Splendor”—not to be confused with the Jesus of the Gospels—whom Manichees identify with the androgynous sun-moon god. In an archetypal moment, Jesus the Splendor temporarily takes up Eve’s body as his vehicle of communication; he approaches the newly created Adam and awakens him to saving knowledge of his dual condition. Importantly his Eve-form is an actual human being; and, indeed, for a moment Jesus the Splendor effectively becomes Eve while remaining himself; at the same time he is both nonbodily and bodily, he is Eve and not-Eve. This moment inaugurates revelation within human history and

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remains exemplary for all future human redemption, including what happens through Jesus of Nazareth. The knowledge of humanity’s true condition as mixture of evil and good is the substance of salvation. Humans act on that saving knowledge by refusing to cooperate with the dark power within their material bodies by following ascetic practices like vegetarianism and especially sexual abstinence. In this way over time they “liberate” more and more of the Living Soul. To spread this saving knowledge to the rest of the human race, Jesus the Splendor invokes something called “the Light Mind” (Nous), which is actually an aspect of his own being. Nous summons another figure known as “the Apostle of Light,” one who inhabits the great religious leaders of history; through them he dispenses the teaching of enlightenment that transforms the demonic “old man” into a godly “new man.” No one embodies the Apostle of Light more completely than the Savior figure that Manichees see portrayed (albeit imperfectly) in the Gospels. The “Liberator” (a favorite Manichean title) is not born from a human womb, which Manichees consider the incubator of corruption and slavery; rather he takes up the adult Jesus at the moment of his baptism by John. Wearing him like a garment, Jesus the Splendor then becomes “Jesus the Apostle of Light,” or “Jesus the Apostle” for short. He is the Manichean Lord.13 Just as Jesus the Splendor inhabited Eve in order to teach Adam, so (in effect) he ambiguously inhabits his human vessel in order to bring saving knowledge. The authenticity of the human image is key, a faithful likeness of humanity that conjoins—yet does not contaminate—divine Light. Jesus the Apostle’s mission succeeds because the likeness entraps the enemy. Jesus the Apostle’s strategic deception envelops the powers of darkness in their own schemes. A Manichean psalm sings: He passed the powers by taking their likeness. He mocked the principalities by likening himself to them. The powers and dominions—he darkened them all.14 The psalm then uses the language of Phil. 2:5–11 (which speaks of Christ being found in the “likeness of a man”) to praise Jesus the Apostle’s descent to earth in the form of flesh, “the garment of slavery.”15 Thus Jesus takes up the human form without passing through the womb of a woman. For this reason Manichees strenuously disputed the Catholic claims about Jesus’ human birth; for them this was by definition impossible because, like God the Father, Jesus the Apostle was incorruptible. Fortunatus the

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Manichee publicly reminded the newly ordained Catholic presbyter Augustine of what he used to believe: This is our profession: God is incorruptible, luminous, and cannot be approached, held, or made to suffer. He dwells in an eternal light that is all his own. He brings forth from himself nothing corruptible, neither darkness nor demons nor Satan, and nothing in his kingdom can be concocted to oppose to him. But we profess that he sent a Savior like himself, the Word, born at the founding of the world when he made the world, and that he came among human beings after the world was made. . . .16 You contend that he was born “according to the flesh as a descendant of David” [Rom. 1:3], while proclaiming him born of a virgin and glorified as the Son of God. But this cannot be the case (fieri enim non potest) except that what comes from spirit be grasped as spirit, and what comes from flesh be understood as flesh [cf. John 3:6]. Against this stands the authority of the gospel by which it is said, “Flesh and blood shall not possess the kingdom of God, nor shall corruption possess incorruption” [1 Cor. 15:50].17 For Manichees the utter distinction of flesh and spirit was an iron rule and a critical principle. The concept of a Christ born physically from Mary was not merely disagreeable but literally inconceivable, for a human womb would only re-embed divine light in dank flesh—the exact definition of defeat in the war of light against darkness. When the Manichee Secundinus pleaded with Bishop Augustine to renounce his Catholic error and return to the Manichean fold,18 he pointed directly to the point at issue: “Stop closing up Christ in the womb—I beg you—lest you yourself become encased back in the womb.19 Stop making the two natures one. That draws dangerously close to the Lord’s judgment! Woe to those who accept such a saying—who change over a sweet thing into bitterness!”20 From the Manichean viewpoint, a physical birth of Christ would have collapsed good into evil, and drowned divinity in the demonic. Their sense of the “spiritual savior” that was sine qua non for human salvation made a Manichee shudder at the Catholic concept of incarnation: “If our Lord had been carnal,” wrote Secundinus, “it would have severed us from all hope.”21 Such a Christ would have completely undermined the spiritual work of human redemption; as a result, for Secundinus Augustine’s scandalous belief in divine incarnation effectively defined him as an ex-Manichee.

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A. Augustine the Manichee In the mid-380s, not long after Augustine knew him personally, the bishop and member of the Manichean Elect, Faustus of Milevis, wrote a missionary handbook called the Capitula (“Chapters”). Augustine largely incorporated this work into his reply to it, Against Faustus the Manichee. Faustus, of course, shared Secundinus’s horror at a physical birth of Jesus and vigorously argued his case exegetically by questioning the discrepancies in the Gospel genealogies. But Faustus was quite candid that his exegetical argument flowed from his conviction that a human birth of Christ was out of the question: the divine simply cannot be born from the human. Tinker with the genealogies all you like, Faustus challenged. Even if someone, somehow proved that the genealogies agree, that fact alone would not change his mind. “If you are so great that you can get rid of this stumbling block [in the genealogies], then go ahead and do it. If it happens that you make them agree with each other, and somehow or other I give in: even then it still will not be right to believe that God— the God of Christians no less!—was born from a womb” (Faust. 3.1; cf. 23.3). The texts supplied Faustus with some surprisingly strong support. Matthew’s genealogy, he pointed out, refer only to “the Son of David,” not “the Son of God” (Matt. 1:1). Matthew distinguished between the two because he thought the divine Son of God began to inhabit the human son of Mary at his baptism by John (Faust. 23.2). At that moment the Son of God took the human “form of the servant” who symbolized the “new man” (ibid. 23.2–3). Jesus himself never spoke of his human birth, but rather said he was “not of this world” (John 8:23). No genealogist was an eyewitness to his birth, and Matthew knew Jesus only as an adult (Faust. 7.1). Mark began from the baptism, and forthrightly called Christ “Son of God” (1:1), as if to correct Matthew (Faust. 3.1). John (1:1–5, 14) only said that the Word of God “came.” In any case, Faustus argued, “genealogy is not gospel” (Faust. 2.1); the Sermon on the Mount proved that one becomes a Christian by following Jesus’ teachings and not by believing “facts” like the virgin birth (ibid. 5.2–3). Furthermore, even Paul changed his mind about this; at first he said that Christ was born from David’s line (Rom. 1:2–3) but later wrote that he “knew Christ after the flesh no longer” (2 Cor. 5:16) (Faust. 11.1). Augustine the Manichee agreed—which would explain Augustine in Book 5 of Confessions only gingerly reviewing his former Manichean state of mind. He admitted to persisting in many Manichean ideas even after the disappointing summit with Faustus made his confidence wane; a number of their views remained intact even during his flirtation with philosophical skepticism in Milan. One important summary

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passage (5.10.20) confessed with chagrin that, despite withdrawing from the group, he still held Manichean ideas about God, sin, evil, the Catholic Church—and Christ. His brief sketch, as far as it goes, tallies with the Manichean sources we have. Augustine wrote: I thought of our Savior himself, your only Son, as if he were emerging from the mass of your dazzling monolith of light (tamquam de massa lucidissimae molis tuae porrectum) for our salvation. I could not believe of him anything other than what I could imagine in my empty head. I thought a nature like his could not have been born of the Virgin Mary without being mingled with flesh. I didn’t see any way he could be mixed with us and not defiled, because that’s the only picture I had. I was afraid to believe him born in flesh (in carne natum) lest I be forced to believe him defiled by flesh (ex carne inquinatum).22 Augustine the Manichee thought that the Catholic belief about Jesus born into the regular course of life from a human womb, even a virgin’s womb, was not merely physically disgusting but also intellectually nonsensical and religiously counterproductive. The idea of divinity-in-flesh could only be self-defeating. Christ did appear in the world, but he could not possibly have violated the divine purity by bottling it up again in flesh. Young Augustine agreed with Monica’s Church that the Son of God appeared, but he radically disagreed on how he appeared. His body was indeed “real”—but as Manichees defined reality. It was a body of light that reflected Jesus the Splendor’s origin in the realms of Light. The Manichean Christ spanned heaven and earth in a way that associated them without intermingling them. Just as Jesus the Splendor “became” Eve bodily in order to teach Adam, and the Paraclete had taken up Mani’s actual body so that he “became” the Paraclete, so Augustine probably conceived of Christ’s appearance in terms of the Pauline “spiritual body.” Fortunatus later explained it in the language of Paul’s famous hymn in Phil. 2: 5–11, a passage that Manichees drew upon frequently to describe Christ’s spiritualized human form (schema) as a likeness. Majella Franzmann’s summary of the Manichean position approximates Augustine’s view as a Manichee: In order to come into contact with the physical world, he takes on an appearance, an image, or a mask of the heavenly body, which does not change his inner spiritual body of Light, and, if

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the concept of the morphe [ form] is a separate notion from schema [likeness]—which is not at all clear—then he also takes on a form or modality of being human or being a slave, which means he acts in a certain way to the outside observer.23 Manichees and Catholics agreed that some kind of bridge was necessary from divine to human; but for Manichees, incarnation by birth from a human womb was “a bridge too far,” an abasement too deep either to be worthy of the divine person or safe from earthly defilement. Franzmann continues: What bridges the two natures makes it possible for the heavenly to come into the world; makes it possible for the heavenly to suffer in the world; makes it possible for the heavenly to communicate liberating insight to believers in the world, although believers, too, somehow possess some kind of appearance or shape of their own in which the Light natures exist; and makes it possible for the heavenly to undo the connections to the world and thus to return to the heavenly region, and not be caught irretrievably in the nets of flesh.24 For Catholics any “bridge” from the divine side that excluded the Lord’s true human birth was incomplete; it unacceptably preserved divine purity at the expense of divine compassion—and human salvation.

B. Rejection of Old Testament Scriptures The same Manichean presuppositions that excluded the Catholic Christ from their faith also expunged the Old Testament from their Bible. Historical life, either as Christ’s flesh or as Israel’s history, would have encased divinity in material and fleshly evil. Their claims about Christ’s spiritual flesh and the Catholic Old Testament were corollaries of central Manichean principles that they debated in the mission field. What appears as central in Catholic anti-Manichean polemics may not have been so clear to Manichees themselves; the themes most prominent in Catholic polemics probably reflect the most neuralgic differences between the two movements. The cardinal Catholic complaints about Manichees rejecting Christ’s flesh and the Old Testament may have rather been, for Manichees themselves, part of the backwash of their cosmological views. But Augustine’s early anti-Manichean works against Fortunatus, Adimantus, Faustus, and Secundinus offer something extraordinary: a view into Augustine’s

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mind as a Manichee. They set the backdrop for his radical turnabout under Ambrose and for his Catholic figurative exegesis in the later 380s.

III. Platonic Thinker, Catholic Catechumen (384–386) Such portrayals, even after sifting out the polemical vituperation, present a fairly clear and self-consistent position that attracted Augustine the Manichee in his twenties and then repulsed Augustine the Catholic in his thirties. This section reviews his shifts at that time concerning Christ and Scripture, and the interrelationships between them, after Ambrose and the Platonic books altered his way of seeing. Book 7 of Confessions celebrates the profound impact of reading “the Platonic books” that prompted Augustine to “return within himself” and so decisively recast his vision of spiritual reality (Conf. 7.10.16). But in light of what we’ve just discussed, it is clear that about the same time a quieter but equally momentous change occurred: the Catholic catechumen lurched away from his Manichean views by affirming Christ’s actual human birth. Augustine pictured these changes occurring together. Immediately after reporting the moment of his Plotinian experiment in nonmaterial thinking, in which he first glimpsed and then quickly lost sight of the divine essence, “That Which Is” (ibid. 7.17.23), Augustine commented on his state of mind regarding Christ. Augustine’s ultraspiritual visionary experiment regrettably failed, he wrote, because he had not yet embraced Christ the Mediator (1 Tim. 2:5; Conf. 7.18.24); we’ll see in the next chapter how long an inner development lay behind that sentence. But in terms of describing his inner state in Milan while reading the Platonic books, he took a huge step in asserting Christ’s “wonderful birth from a virgin” (ibid. 7.19.25). If the vehemence of Faustus, Fortunatus, and Secundinus on this point is any barometer, it was at that moment that he crossed the Catholic Rubicon. Augustine had apparently pondered this decision from the time of concluding with Ambrose that the Church’s ideas were credible. He had “decided for the time being (tandiu) to remain a catechumen in the Catholic Church” (5.14.25). The path toward a new understanding of Christ lay through a remarkable series of momentous events accompanied by inner turmoil. Spiritual questions about the nature of evil and the goodness of God continued to gnaw at him, and enjoyment of truth and happiness continued to elude him. Self-recrimination had also surged after he realized that more than a decade of assiduous truth-seeking had brought no success;

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his thoughts still tossed every which way in inner winds that “blew first one way, then the other, pushing my heart to and fro” (6.11.18–20, here 20). Yet the small plant of Catholic faith in Christ, however delicate, serenely grew in the eye of the storm. In many respects his faith was still “quite unformed and wavering (fluitans) about the norm of teaching,” Augustine remembered; “nevertheless, belief concerning your Christ, our Lord and Savior, stuck fast (stabiliter haerebat) in my heart within the Catholic Church.” If other matters like the origin of evil had made Augustine wander thirsty through an intellectual house of mirrors, at least this was one well of truth from which he “drank in more and more every day.”25 You would not allow any of my wildly fluctuating thoughts to carry me away from the faith by which I believed, first, that you really do exist, that you are an immutable substance, and that you both care for humanity and call it to account; second, that in Christ, your Son and our Lord, and by your Scriptures commended by your Catholic Church’s authority, you have laid out a way of salvation leading humanity to a future life after death. With these matters safe and immovably solid in my mind (his salvis atque inconcusse roboratis in animo meo), I looked feverishly for the origin of evil.26 Augustine’s faith in Christ had endured even when the books of the Platonists rearranged his mental furniture (7.9.13). But just as when he read the Hortensius, joined the Manichees, or flirted with Skepticism, his flip into a completely nonmaterial way of thinking caused him to reaffirm faith in Christ as his criterion by which to judge. The Platonic books passed this test when they taught, “not of course in these very words, but for all intents and purposes the same, supported by many kinds of reasons, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’” (John 1:1; Conf. 7.9.13). Those books proposed to him the idea of One who is the source of all things and even being itself, and whose perfection was reflected in Nous, Intellect.27 Higher than even the superior parts of God’s creation, Nous had made all things, continued to dwell in hidden splendor within and beyond all things, and enlightened everyone coming into the world. It abided immutably before and above all ages, while all created things strove to actualize its beauty. Nous spoke to Augustine of Christ. He therefore followed the Plotinian exhortation to “return within” to find the place of transcendence in his own soul. For the first time Augustine caught sight of a vast inner world that was “different,

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utterly different from everything else” that he had known in the material world.28 Yet it did not negate or denigrate that world, but rather reaffirmed its goodness (“if things exist, they are good”; ibid. 7.12.18). Thus it remarkably converged with his newfound faith in the God of the Bible who had made all things “very good” (Gen. 1:31). The Platonic books surprisingly if indirectly supported something distinctively Catholic: belief in Christ’s actual humanity. Though Augustine accepted this notion as part of the common stock of doctrine as a Catholic catechumen, spiritual philosophy’s refusal to see the material world as inherently evil (even if it ranked low in the hierarchy of being) allowed Augustine to affirm Jesus’ birth from a human mother in a philosophically coherent way. In these first days as an ex-Manichee, Augustine wrote that Christ appeared “as a man of excellent wisdom whom none could equal. I thought his wonderful birth from a virgin was an example of despising temporal things to gain immortality for us, and such divine care for us gave him great authority as teacher” (Conf. 7.19.25; trans. Chadwick, quoted by permission of Oxford University Press).29 Augustine now accepted from the Gospels the narrative description of Jesus possessing both a true human body that ate, drank, slept, and walked, and a true human soul that suffered, grieved, and rejoiced. “I acknowledged the whole man (totus homo) in Christ, not just a man’s body, or a soul and body without a mind, but an actual human being.”30 Augustine’s belief about Christ at this time, an amalgam of Catholic doctrine and Platonic statements, did not yet fully plumb orthodox faith in the Word made flesh. Only “some time later” (aliquanto posterius) did he recognize his beginner’s mistake of accepting as though it was Catholic a defective understanding of Christ that actually came from a certain Photinus, whose teaching a Church council had rejected more than thirty years before.31 Photinus thought Christ’s divinity was derivative. Unwittingly Augustine also “thought that [Jesus] excelled others .  .  . because of the great excellence of his character and more perfect participation in wisdom” (Conf. 7.19.25). Catholics, of course, thought differently: Christ was the divine source of all wisdom and not merely a participant in it. Augustine, having “not yet begun to puzzle out (suspicari) the mystery of the Word made flesh” still did not grasp Christ as “Truth-in-person” (persona veritatis). On the other hand, he did affirm even then that somehow this complete man born from a human mother was “conjoined (haesisse) to your Word” (ibid.).32 Though as yet unable to rationally articulate this union, Augustine wrote, he grasped it “to the best of my understanding,

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nor had I the least doubt on the subject” (ibid.).33 However, Augustine’s mistake concerned not the truth of Christ’s divine and human natures, but the mode of their union—a piece of unfinished intellectual business from his days as a Manichee when he claimed that they related to each other by way of “likeness.” For Augustine the truth of Christ’s lived human story became a matter of salvation, because a birthless Christ would have fatally circumscribed the reach of divine humility. If God’s compassion had in this way stopped short of touching the bottom of humanity’s abject condition, then the lifeline of divine love would have sheared off at the exact spot where it was most needed. For Augustine, the Manichees’ unborn Christ ultimately failed to transform human history, populated as it is, after all, by womb-born human creatures whose daily living and dying make history’s ages roll on. A Savior without birth is finally a Savior outside history, a mythical being who might perhaps project certain ideas about humanity but can’t redeem any actual people caught in history’s web. Even if Christ entered through its “back door,” so to say, by suddenly inhabiting a full-grown man, then the depths of the human story remained alien to him. The theological consequences of this view were dire: a Christ who exempted himself from history also disqualified himself (and the Scriptures that conveyed his story) from embedding God’s grace and truth in human life. History without a fully human Christ can neither foresee nor recall him, and the whole sacramental principle becomes untenable. If Christ avoided birth from a human mother, then human history was sealed off from divine involvement. Augustine’s changed perception of Christ deepened his grasp of scriptural unity, when it became clear that the historical flesh of the Word and the historical texts of Israel derived from the same sacramental strategy. Coming to believe, however inchoately, that the Word conjoined the man Jesus made clear that just as his historical flesh conjoined divine revelation and grace so also does the whole biblical story, including Israel’s history. Augustine therefore turned eagerly to reread Paul from this new angle. Immediately after accepting the affirmation of creation’s goodness and Christ’s true humanity, he reexamined Scripture: And so (itaque) with great intensity I seized upon the hallowed etchings of your Spirit (venerabilis stilus Spiritus tui), above all the writings of the Apostle Paul. My earlier problems reading him vanished: where once it had seemed to me that the text of his words was

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self-contradictory, and did not agree (non congruere) with the witness of the Law and the Prophets, now your chaste words presented a single Face to me, and I learned “to rejoice with reverence” [Ps. 11:7].34 The Bible’s big puzzle suddenly fell together, and with a gasp he saw the terrain covered by biblical unity grow much, much larger. Like a sort of spiritual Louisiana Purchase, the addition of a vast new territory of open plains and obscure wilderness suddenly increased Scripture’s size exponentially.

IV. Catholic Lay Philosopher-at-Large (386–391) The manifesto of Augustine’s Christian Platonism, On True Religion (390), portrayed Christianity as the fulfillment of humanity’s philosophical dreams. Platonist forebears, Augustine conceded, got many theoretical things right about the spiritual realm. They well described a gleaming spiritual “homeland,” but they also showed him how far away from it he was as he wandered from God “in the land of unlikeness (regio dissimilitudinis)” (Conf. 7.10.16). But however much those talking heads spoke of the homeland, they failed to do the most crucial thing: get him back to it. Their books were like glossy travelogues that described exotic lands but prohibitively overpriced the trip. Only Christ, he realized, rectifies our stunted spiritual posture and helps us to mount up for the trip back home. So potent was Christ’s actual fulfillment of what Platonism merely promised (and not only for the elite, but for the masses) that if the old Platonists had lived to know of Christ, Augustine was pleased to assert, “with the change of a few words and phrases they would have become Christians” (True Rel. 4.7). Here we’ll tease out the different elements of how Augustine in this early period sees Christ’s role in the soul’s spiritual ascent, and then connect it to his understanding of reading Scripture. We’ll find that Christ, God’s power and wisdom, catalyzed spiritual-intellectual vision by giving him the model and the motivation for spiritual seeing. And we will locate an element in the learning process that was also central to reading Scripture figuratively, namely, likeness. In Augustine’s Platonically ordered universe, spiritual communion arises between beings that are somehow like one another. Even at the very bottom of the scale of physical being, things might be “like” other things by the bare fact of existing. They may even primitively be like God: a mere slab of rock, just by being a single slab, distantly replicates the divine

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Unity. But human beings are like God in much more sophisticated ways, having been etched at creation with God’s “image and likeness” (Gen. 1:26–27). In our finiteness, which cannot perceive all things at once, and in our sinfulness, wherein we do not look past outward material forms, truth is necessarily mediated to us by indirect means, that is, by likeness (similitudo). Living in the time of what Augustine later called “the economy of likenesses,”35 humans have the capability to see the spiritual world in the material world by way of figures that, when perceived rightly, lift them into the invisible realm of understanding. Though the process is mysterious, a common human experience suggests this basic truth when we spontaneously delight in the harmony of symmetrical designs (True Rel. 30.54–56). That joy speaks of an innate sensibility; as Augustine quaintly suggests, it’s what makes us wince on seeing poorly placed windows on the side of a house. This carries a couple of implications. First, it indicates that the human mind both transcends and judges the material world. According to Platonic metaphysics, higher beings judge lower ones; so spiritual persons exceed fleshly creatures of the world, while nothing fleshly judges them (cf. 1 Cor. 2:14). But second, and more importantly, it speaks to humanity’s accountability to a higher spiritual order. In this vein Augustine recalled Paul’s words: “We shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10); that is, Christ will judge the degree of our harmonic likeness to the spiritual order. However, this does not yet address the human predicament caused by our catastrophic fall into chaos, which broke up our natural communion with God and (ironically) distorted our natural likeness to God in the attempt to “become like God” (Gen. 3:5). The resulting self-distortion enervated human spiritual reason and disabled its power of spiritual perception. It turned us upside-down and inside-out and inverted our grasp of values. Instead of rightly judging the spiritual order, now we perversely “worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator” (10.19). But mercy has intervened. The Son of God, God’s perfect likeness, came to restore order by appearing to us; now believers have the rational-spiritual order renewed within them and testify to the Word of God by their likeness to him. In them the power of spiritual judgment reemerges, having been healed from sin by the divine likeness. In a dense passage Augustine explains how likeness to the Word, “the Beginning” who is Truth and Light, grounds our recovery of likeness to God. (For ease of reading I italicize the statements about likeness, and capitalize references to Christ as God’s “Likeness.”)

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We are given to understand that there is Something [Wisdom] that is so like that one and only One—the Beginning (principium) from which any single thing is a unit in any way at all—that Something altogether perfectly realizes this likeness and is exactly the same (idipsum). And this is the Truth [John 14:6], and the Word in the beginning, and the Word, God with God [John 1:1]. . . . This is the Truth which shows him [i.e., God the Father] as he is, which is why she is called his Word and his Light. Everything else can be said to be like that One to the extent that it has being; to that extent it is also true. She, however, is his very Likeness, and thus is Truth (Haec autem ipsa eius similitudo et ideo veritas). Just as it is truth, after all, by which true things are true, so it is likeness by which anything like is like. And just as truth is the form of things’ being true, in the same way likeness is the form of things’ being like. Accordingly, since things are true insofar as they have being, while they have being insofar as they are like the original One, she [Wisdom] is the form of all things that have being, she who is the supreme Likeness of the Beginning and is Truth, because she is without any unlikeness at all.36 The dizzying philosophical verbiage shouldn’t derail us from this passage’s two essentially simple ideas. First, likeness conducts form. Two like things share in Likeness, just as two true things share in Truth. This draws on the stock Platonic concept of participation wherein the universal and eternal Form or Idea shares itself out to particular tangible realities, images of which conduct our minds to the eternal. Second, likeness to the Word forms our likeness to God. Augustine’s Christian adaptation sees the Word as perfectly like the Father, for he is “in the form of God” (Phil. 2:6). Therefore, if likeness conducts form, then participation bequeaths the form of the thing that is like. The bottom line is that those who become like God’s Word become like God, and so commune with God. Likeness is therefore the engine of our healing process. Many texts show Christ’s divinity to be the focus of the soul’s spiritual ascent and of Augustine’s earliest Christological reflections. Augustine’s first post-conversion work, Against the Skeptics (2.1.1), speaks of prayer offered to “the power and wisdom of God,” which is biblical code for Christ: “What else is the one whom the mysteries present to us as the Son of God?” The phrase from 1 Cor. 1:24 is the most important Christological text in the early period. He undoubtedly already knew it well, for it was a staple of Manichean Christology.37 But it struck the new ex-Manichee hard

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after he “seized” the writings of the Apostle Paul,38 and it appeared in a new light. This was his first Catholic quote of Paul, indeed his first Scripture quote of any kind. It reappeared in Catholic and Manichean Practices where Augustine played on the double meaning of the Latin word virtus, which can mean both “power” and “(moral) virtue.”39 In order to show that obedience to Scripture’s love command is the very definition of virtue (Practices 1.15.25), Augustine conflated the quote from Paul with others from John’s Gospel and Deuteronomy; together they underscored his link between Christ, love, power, and wisdom: Let the same Paul tell us who this Christ Jesus our Lord might be: “To those who have been called,” he says, “we preach Christ, God’s virtus and God’s wisdom [1 Cor. 1:24]. Why does he say this? Does not Christ himself say, “I am the truth” [John 14:6]? If therefore we ask what it means to live well, that is, to strive for happiness by living well, that will of course be to love virtus, to love wisdom, to love truth, and to “love with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole mind” [Deut 6:5]. This is the virtus that is inviolable and unconquered, the wisdom that no folly can attain to, and the truth that knows no change or has any other being than it always has. Through this very one we see the Father, for he said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” [John 14:6].40 “To love virtus” can hardly mean “to love power”; it must rather mean to love virtue. The pair of references to John 14:6 double-underscores that only the divine Son, God’s virtus and wisdom, brings the soul to the Father. Augustine here “Christologizes” the Plotinian Nous that mediates the soul’s return to the One. We see the Father “through this very one (per hanc ipse, i.e., God’s virtus).’”41 To live well means to love Christ, Augustine wrote, because loving well means living justly. And to love Christ also means to love truth, because Christ said, “I am the truth.”42 The traits of divine power, justice, wisdom, and truth are thus not only unchangeable but also interchangeable.

Incarnation: How God’s Likeness Reaches Us How do we receive God’s form? That question leads to another about the exact workings of the divine “likeness.” God entered the world of humanity in order to deliver this likeness to us in person by the spiritual pedagogy of the Incarnation. Augustine’s earliest writings even before his baptism acknowledge the divine teaching function of Christ’s humanity.43 Against

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the Skeptics already declared that the true philosophy (i.e., Catholic Christianity) teaches that we humans, deeply enmeshed in bodies belonging to this world, would never have aspired “to that other, intelligible world” unless “the most high God, because of a certain compassion (clementia) for the masses, should have bent low and subjected (declinaret atque submittaret) the authority of the divine intellect down as far as the body itself.”44 On Divine Order also acknowledged the fullness of the divine clementia that “for our sake deigned to assume and actuate (adsumere atque agere) our kind of body.”45 The Incarnation had a single objective: to hand on true and vital knowledge of the divine. So that authority should be termed “divine” which not only outstrips every human capacity by using signs that impact the senses, but also shows humankind how deeply it would abase itself for their sake by actuating a real human being (ipsum hominem agens). . . . For it is fitting (oportet) that divine authority’s deeds should teach about its power, that its humility should teach about its compassion, and that its commandments should teach about its nature. The sacred rituals by which we are being initiated are handing on all these truths to us in a more secret and powerful way; in them the life of the good is cleansed most easily, not by the vagaries of disputations but by the authority of the mysteries.46 The picture of divine Wisdom stooping all the way to earth shows that Augustine’s thought about Christ has crossed a frontier. This statement not only marked Augustine’s turn from his recent Manichean anti-flesh Christology but also shows him having moved past his beginner’s mistake of thinking that Jesus merely participated in (and did not fully embody) divine Wisdom (Conf. 7.19.25). If the idea of Jesus’ “upward” human participation in the divine Word made Augustine’s pre-conversion Christology “Photinian,” then this new statement about divinity’s “downward” participation in the human made his post-conversion Christology Catholic.47 How does the Word teach? He instructs with words, certainly, but also just by being present in the world. About the same time that he composed On True Religion Augustine discussed this aspect of the Incarnation in two letters to his friend Nebridius, our Letters 11 and 12. Nebridius, whom Augustine later praised as “a very acute investigator of the most difficult questions” (Conf. 6.10.17), had written to ask one: Why, he puzzled, did the Son of God alone become incarnate, and not the Father or Holy Spirit?

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Augustine’s answer, fully seven hundred years before Anselm of Canterbury’s Why Did God Become Human?, exemplified the pattern of “faith seeking understanding” that used formal rational analysis and philosophicalanalytical categories to describe the work of the second person of the Trinity.48 Every substance, Augustine theorized, displays three aspects: being (it exists), form (it exists as that thing), and endurance (it exists continuously as that thing). Each person of the Trinity displays one of these interdependent traits: the Father as God is; the Son as God is God’s form; and the Spirit as God is God continuously. But because the second person uniquely expressed “the form of God” (Phil. 2:6), the work of “mystically ‘taking up’ a man (susceptio hominis mystica)” was most appropriate for the Son (Letter 11.2).49 Thus Christ appeared as the divinely “informed” part of humanity in order to “reform” what was “deformed” in human nature. He did this by the spiritual pedagogy of the Incarnation, that is, by offering a humanly accessible divine form and giving “a way of learning and a model of living out what was commanded” (Letter 11.4).50 As wayward children need clear direction, we needed “majestic and utterly clear principles” of divine instruction. But God accommodated these principles to our condition by “a norm and rule for learning” by adapting them through “the economy (dispensatio) of the Man who was ‘taken up.’” Christ delivered his teaching as much by who he was as by what he did: “The very teaching and the form of God . . . is called ‘the Son.’ But anything done through that Man whom he took up was done to instruct and educate us” (Letter 12).51 In other words, at this time for Augustine God became human primarily to carry out a program of spiritual instruction that would communicate God’s form and so refurbish the divine image within the human race. Above all, Christ’s act of becoming one with humanity was a living likeness of divine humility. Christians learn this likeness in Scripture and replicate it in the act of faith. They actualize within themselves the likeness of humility proffered in the Incarnation by the humble act of receptive reading. In Augustine’s early construction of Christ’s divine-human union, the divine element dominated the human in the same way that spiritual reason ruled the fleshly soul within a human mind (figuratively portrayed by Adam’s rule over Eve). The Word inhabited Christ’s personal center and worked through the Man. Lowering himself to “take up” this Man (suscipere; Practices 1.7.12), or “assume” him (assumere; Gen. Man. 2.5.6), the Word “clothed” himself (indutus) with humanity’s weakness and mortal “garment of death” (Practices 1.2.3). “His whole life on earth was an exercise in teaching through the Man (per hominem) whom he deigned to take up.”52 This language could easily be misunderstood as picturing the Man as the

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Word’s passive external instrument.53 Yet Augustine early and repeatedly confessed Christ’s full humanity, so we must narrow our inquiry further to examine Augustine’s early take on Christ specifically as human, insofar as it specifically relates to the work of salvation’s “temporal dispensation,” of which Scripture was a major component. For Augustine at this time Christ was primarily the inner Teacher (On the Teacher 11.38) who took up human existence to serve his didactic ends. The Man despised temporal goods, overcame characteristic human fears about their loss, and lived for God alone. On True Religion unfolded this view at length in a much-studied section (16.30–17.33) that portrayed Christ using a “pedagogy of the spirit” that resembled classical paideia. That model featured a tripartite distribution of instruction in morals (disciplina morum), physical nature (disciplina naturalis), and rational philosophy (disciplina rationalis); in other words, it was organized into ethics, ontology, and epistemology.54 Augustine adapted that schema to a Christian sensibility. First, Christ offered the most complete “instruction in moral training” that the world had ever seen by teaching his followers to despise what the world desires, and to endure what the world loathes. That is why they willingly embraced poverty, refused worldly honors, scorned breeding a posterity, and, where necessary, suffered vilification, torture, and death. Second, Christ gave “instruction about the physical world” by his resurrection from the dead, which showed that nothing properly belonging to human nature can be lost; if God valued humanity enough to preserve a person through death, then no created thing can be naturally evil (contra the Manichees) and everything must have been designed to serve the Creator. Third, Christ’s way of teaching followed “the rule of rational discipline” by an orderly and rigorous search for truth that cleanses and readies his followers for eternal life. Christ played enigmatic sayings and deeds off his other plainer declarations of truth, and so teased his puzzled hearers into a restless longing to understand. He wanted people to ask, “What is he saying? What is he doing?” because it stirred and sensitized and expanded their minds to find his spiritual truth. Spiritual pedagogy still works that way, Augustine contended; for the same pedagogy operates in the Scriptures, especially its figures. “Now this program of total instruction operates partly by quite direct speech, and partly by likenesses in sayings, deeds, and sacraments. All of it is accommodated to the complete instruction and exercise of the soul. What other rule did it fulfill than what we call ‘the rule of rational learning’? Now, the explanation of mysteries was directed toward what was most plainly spoken.”55 Ancient educators

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will have recognized Scripture’s pedagogy from their own teaching strategies. Christ’s mysterious parables and miracles replicated Scripture’s game of hide-and-seek that playfully goads and guides inquiring souls toward saving knowledge. Christ himself was the key to understanding this pedagogy, because he alone taught readers how to understand Scripture’s obscure and ambiguous figures. As with the audiences who heard Christ in living voice long ago, so Scripture lured its readers’ interest by challenging their minds and warming their hearts so that they might search Scripture for ever-deeper draughts of truth. Christology set the context for answering the question that Augustine posed in On True Religion’s extended discussion of Scripture’s function (50.99): “What advantage does faith in temporal things give for understanding and possessing eternal things?” God’s Scripture strategy appeared in the tableau of Christ healing the man born blind (John 9:1–5). This Christological framework was not accidental. Scripture’s healing mud of sounds, letters, fire, cloud, and smoke not only symbolized Christ’s parable strategy: it also symbolized Christ himself. The key to understanding Scripture was replicating Christ’s incarnate humility by reading “low to the ground,” so to say, in the humility of faith.56 The likeness between the humble Christ and the humble believing reader conducted the healing grace that restored spiritual reason. Augustine broke through to this insight when he finally embraced the incarnate Mediator, the Man in whom eternal Word “here below built for itself a lowly cottage of our clay,” and through whom he “was calling unto me and saying, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’” (John 14:6; Conf. 7.18.24).57 Paul crystallized the spiritual translucence of creation in a critical statement that Augustine discovered in Rom. 1:20, where the Apostle wrote about “God’s invisible nature understood through the things which are made.” That sentence fragment forged a new template for spiritual understanding that both affirmed the material creation and also saw a new spiritual world through it. The effect on Augustine was galvanizing and deep; he wrote, “I would have found it easier to doubt whether I was myself alive than that there is no truth ‘understood from the things that are made’” (Conf. 7.10.16; trans. Chadwick; quoted by permission of Oxford University Press). This text’s repeated appearances throughout Book 7 of Confessions testify to that effect as he approached the climax of his intellectual conversion: visible and material reality now more clearly took up a teaching function in relation to the invisible, and the physical creation shifted its role from being an obstacle to spiritual thinking to being a tutor for it. Mounting

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up from temporal realities, he glimpsed “your invisible nature understood through the things which are made” (ibid. 7.17.23). Material and temporal realities interlocked with spiritual and eternal ones, and the bogey of Manichean dualism finally retreated (ibid. 7.14.20). This was a crucial intellectual change. As we’re about to see, Augustine saw that it was above all Christ’s humanity, historical and real, that brought him knowledge of the divine, and biblical figures worked exactly the same way. For that reason Romans 1:20 became axiomatic to Augustine’s thought, particularly for biblical hermeneutics.58

V. Unresolved Issues on the Eve of Ordination (391) A. Anomaly of Augustine’s Near “Crossless Christ” Looking over Augustine’s early thought we see the prominent, indeed crucial place given to Christ’s divinity and his clear teaching on the fact of the Incarnation. Yet the picture still doesn’t hang quite right. His peculiar way of seeing the incarnate Christ caused him to neglect, if not outright ignore, the need to develop a theology of the crucified Christ.59 The imbalance has not gone unnoticed in scholarship; early-twentiethcentury studies began to use it as evidence that in 386 Augustine was more truly converted to Platonism than to Christianity.60 Though scholarship eventually rejected that thesis after decades of discussion, the texts still look puzzlingly one-sided. For example, we’ve already seen that Augustine frequently alludes to 1 Cor. 1:24; it appears again in Practices 1.13.22, where Augustine declared with Paul, “to the called we preach Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God.” But Augustine has read this text selectively; in full it reads: “We preach Christ crucified; to Jews, a stumbling block and to Gentiles, stupidity; but to the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Paul’s reference to the cross here is not incidental; indeed his entire train of argument in 1 Cor. 1–2 works to show that in the “power and wisdom” of Christ’s crucified humility, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human power” (1 Cor. 1:25). Yet Augustine never acknowledges that “the power and wisdom of God” referred to either Christ’s humanity or his cross. It’s difficult not to suspect that Augustine cherry-picked Paul’s words that he found unclear or unpalatable. If Augustine “seized” Paul’s writings at this time, as he claimed (Skept. 2.2.5; Conf. 7.21.27), nevertheless evidently only certain parts of the Apostle’s teaching had seized him.

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Augustine did refer to the cross in his early work, yet subordinated it to Christ’s “instruction in moral conduct.” On True Religion portrayed Christ’s crucifixion as a teaching device that confirmed his sacred example of poverty of spirit, detachment from earthly things, and humility of heart. “Christ suffered to show contempt for merely temporal values, and to draw people’s faith toward his humanity, in contrast with his miracles that drew faith toward his divinity” (True Rel. 16.31). A set of poetic antitheses embedded the cross within Christ’s total teaching effort and indeed showed how it crowned his entire life of suffering: Most people dangerously desired riches, pleasure’s acolyte: he wanted (voluit) to be poor. They craved honors and political power: he refused to be made a king. They thought children after the flesh a great good: he scorned marriage and progeny. They arrogantly bristled at insults: he absorbed every kind of insult. They considered injuries unbearable: but can there be any greater injury than for a just and innocent man to be condemned? They loathed bodily pains: he was whipped and crucified. They were afraid of dying: he was sentenced to death. They thought the cross was the most ignominious kind of death: he was crucified.61 Everything we desired to have while not living rightly: he scorned by doing without. Everything we desperately avoided as we turned from pursuing the truth: he cut down to size by patiently suffering. (ibid.) “Thus his entire life on earth,” Augustine concluded, “was a course of instruction in right living through the Man (per hominem) he deigned to take up” (ibid. 16.31–32).62 In short, the crucifixion was a device of the divine pedagogy that did not communicate the divine presence but pointed to it, and did not mediate an encounter with God, but prepared for it. Despite his intensive reading of the Apostle’s letters, Augustine’s newfound Catholic faith cannot be called a true Pauline faith in “Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).63 Catholic and Manichean Practices was a broadside against Augustine’s former sect. On True Religion certainly targeted a pagan philosophical public, and so perhaps unsurprisingly stressed nobler aspects of the cross

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while avoiding more offensive ones, particularly ideas about blood sacrifice.64 On the other hand, one of On True Religion’s professed aims was to dispute Manichees, and indeed Augustine had composed it for a Manichee. So it is surprising that the treatise never refers to Manichean claims about Christ’s illusory death. I suggest that this omission has to do with his still recent emergence from Manicheeism. In the transitional period 386– 391, Augustine was still fighting with the Manicheeism of his immediate past, not only publicly and polemically, but also personally; his Catholic Christianity was still under construction. So it will be useful to examine Manichean teaching about the cross, not only to grasp its inner coherence but also to explore the extent to which it shaped Augustine’s thought about Christ, salvation, and figurative reading. Study reveals a parallel perception: as Augustine folded Christ crucified into Christ the incarnate Teacher, just so his approach to Scripture folded redemption into spiritual knowledge. In effect Augustine’s ideas were passing through an intermediate stage on the way to a full Catholic outlook; his ideas about the cross still bore some resemblance to Manichean views. The Manichean and Augustinian outlooks often diverged sharply after 386; but they also featured some surprising continuities. It’s important to be clear about Augustine’s shifting Christological-hermeneutical patterns in order to recognize his eventual arrival at a convincing Catholic way of reading Scripture.

B. A Survey of the Manichean Cross Brief surveys of the Manichean view of the cross are typically content to label it “docetic” or “gnostic,” and move on. But this judgment must be qualified within the specific Manichean context. Christ’s unreal crucified flesh was not a principal Manichean claim per se but a byproduct of their view of the cosmos and salvation; it was a corollary rather than a cause. The complete picture of their views is more complex and indeed paradoxical. The one thing Manichees vehemently argued, as we’ve seen, is that Christ could not have been born from a human womb. Their “simulated” crucifixion was a consequence of this, surely shaped by skirmishes on the Catholic mission field while attempting to caricature the views of their orthodox opponents. Interestingly, they were not as vehement about teaching the unreal flesh of the crucified Christ as they were about his unreal birth. When Manichean writings used the language of “natures,” they were often ambiguous or even contradictory. Some insisted on false flesh while others accepted it as a price for salvation—but usurped flesh without actual birth. This ambiguity is worth investigating because it

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bears on the idea of “likeness” that Augustine brought with him to the study of Scripture. Catholics made a strong connection between the reality of Christ’s birth and death. So when Manichees insisted that Jesus was not born from a human womb, Catholics retorted, “If Jesus was not born, he could not die.” Faustus took up this question in his Capitula (Faust. 5.1, and Books 26–29). If, he wrote, Catholics insisted that “Jesus didn’t suffer if he wasn’t born” (or conversely, “If he suffered, then that proves he was born”), then that only pushed him to assert a parallel logic on the virgin birth. Do Catholics claim Christ was born without a father? Then it was possible also to say, “He suffered without being born” (ibid. 27.2). It’s just as easy to say that someone not born of a father was not born of a mother. Faustus suggested that Manichees might even concede that Jesus’ death was “real”—if they are allowed to define “real” in their own way, even from other parts of the Catholic Bible. Take Elijah, for instance, wrote Faustus; he was truly born but he did not die (2 Kgs. 2:11), and so he violated the law of human mortality. But it is logically possible to suggest the reverse, namely, that Jesus transgressed a law of immortality by dying a real death without undergoing a real birth. The illogic of saying, “Elijah wasn’t born because he didn’t die,” proves as faulty as saying, “Jesus didn’t die because he wasn’t born” (26.2). But also consider Jesus, Faustus continued: he worked many miracles against nature, but does that not mean that he was more capable of dying than Elijah was capable of not dying? If the feebly mortal Elijah was able to “storm” (invadere) the realm of immortality, Faustus asked, then why couldn’t the almighty and immortal Christ legitimately do the opposite and so “take over (usurpare) something from death?” (26.1). Both bodies underwent something unnatural. Catholics exalted Elijah against his nature and sealed him forever in heaven; so why then, asked Faustus, “may I not concede that Jesus died if he wanted to, even if I agreed that it was a true death and not a figure of death?”65 Faustus allowed that possibility only for the sake of argument in deference to the Catholic fondness for debate (“you get pleasure out of arguing,” vobis placet argumentari; 26.2); but it also suggests that Faustus was unwilling to go to the mat for the idea that Christ’s death was unreal. This attitude was quite casual compared with the usual Manichean intractability about Christ’s unreal birth. However, Faustus continued, in the end it makes no difference whether Christ had real or unreal flesh on the cross, because all we need is Christ’s likeness to us. Paul wrote that from the beginning Jesus took on human likeness (similitudo; Phil. 2:6–7). So it stands to reason that his likeness

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should have “simulated every experience of the human condition” and that “for the sake of underwriting the salvation economy he was also seen to die” (26.1).66 But Faustus was speaking paradoxically. At another point (14.1) his line of argument denying Moses’ status as a prophet depended on Christ hanging physically upon the cross; only so could he be the object of Moses’ damnation of everyone hanging on a tree (Deut. 21:23).67 Yet elsewhere he contended that Manichees “believe that he only apparently suffered and did not really die.”68 That confused even the ex-Manichee Augustine, who railed against such a chameleon Christology that claimed Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate” and yet without genuine flesh: Finally, tell us how many Christs you say that there are. . . . Regarding the Christ who you admit suffered under Pontius Pilate, though you say that he existed without flesh, I do not as yet ask how he could suffer such a death without flesh. . . . But, if he had a body, I ask where he got it, since you say that all bodies come from the nation of darkness, although you were never able to think of the divine substance except as bodily. Hence you are forced to say one of the following: (a) that he was crucified without a body (than which nothing more absurd or crazy can be said); or (b) that he seemed to be crucified in a figment of the imagination rather than in reality (in veritate) (again, is anything worse than that impiety?); or (c) that all bodies do not come from the nation of darkness but that there is also the body of the divine substance which is not immortal but could be nailed to the cross and die (something that is full of madness); or (d) that Christ had a body from the nation of darkness. (Faust. 20.11)69 It is (c), in italics, that most likely approximated Faustus’s actual opinion. How can that be? The paradox relates to the Manichean teaching about the two principles (not really “two natures”), which simultaneously denied and granted the substantive reality of Jesus’ physical suffering.70 The so-called Manichean Amen Hymn presented Jesus as speaking to his disciples about his death in a series of antitheses: Amen, I was seized; Amen again, I was not seized. Amen, I was judged; Amen again, I was not judged. Amen, I was crucified; Amen again, I was not crucified. Amen, I was pierced; Amen again, I was not pierced. Amen, I suffered; Amen again, I did not suffer.71

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In other words, Jesus suffered in the one form but not in the other, which was conceived along the lines of the Pauline “spiritual body” in 1 Cor. 15:44.72 This human schema acted as a “bridge that allows real suffering, even while it keeps the divine untouched.”73 It also eliminated the need for a purely human birth while allowing Manichean preachers to speak in a limited sense of the human Jesus as “the Apostle of Light.”74 The duality did not merely protect the divine nature from contamination; more importantly it universalized Jesus’ suffering or revealed the universal state of divine light that suffers throughout material reality. This is the so-called Manichean cross of light, which describes the phenomenon of divine light particles that suffer everywhere from being entrapped in matter, but are liberated by the “machinery” of human asceticism. (Manichean vegetarianism preferred light-colored vegetables because they held more divine light, and eschewed darker foods like wine and meat because they had less.) This undergirded the concept of Iesus patibilis, that is, the “woundable” or “vulnerable Jesus.”75 This figure referred not to the historical Jesus per se but to the suffering divine element “hanging upon every tree” that the tableau of his passion revealed. That is, in the Manichean system Jesus’ crucifixion taught humanity about the five light elements, the “sons” of the First Man, who surrendered themselves to ingestion by evil matter. The Manichean Christ revealed that divinity that was made vulnerable to suffering. Faustus’s confession of faith in Capitula mentions this “vulnerable Jesus”: So we worship the deity under a threefold name: God the almighty Father, Christ his Son, and the Holy Spirit, one and the same God. But we believe the Father indwells the highest light itself which Paul elsewhere calls “light inaccessible” [1 Tim. 6:16], while the Son resides in this second and visible light. The Son is also twofold, as the Apostle understands him, calling him “God’s power and wisdom” [1 Cor. 1:24]; and so we believe his power dwells in the sun while his wisdom dwells in the moon. We confess also that all the surrounding air is the abode of the Holy Spirit, who is the third majesty. From his powers and spiritual outpouring, the earth also conceives and gives birth to “vulnerable Jesus” (patibilis Iesus), who is the life and salvation of humanity, hanging from every tree. (Faust. 20.2)76 Notice that Faustus locates the crucifixion not after Christ’s divinity, but after describing the Holy Spirit and the creation of earth that emits

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patibilis Iesus; this links the “vulnerable Jesus” to the All that emerges in the great cosmic communion of the divine. By contrast the Catholic Eucharist, Faustus contends, erroneously localizes this communion in bread and wine: “That’s why (quapropter) we have the same religious attitude regarding all things as you have regarding the loaf and the cup” (20.2). Along the same lines the Manichee Secundinus wrote to Augustine the bishop that Christ was “crucified both in the whole world and in every soul.”77 The crucifixion story therefore illumined for Manichees a sort of Christo-pantheism.78 For them Christ’s death was not a moment of redemption, even though it taught a revelation. Their focus was Christ’s “mystical crucifixion (mystica fixio) that reveals to our souls the wounds of his passion” (Faust. 32.7).79 The Gospel stories rendered the “mystical passion” (mystica passio) that symbolized universal cosmic suffering, and Jesus’ crucifixion was code for the work of God’s mercy (33.1).80 For spiritual enlightenment only a likeness was needed. The words of Faustus describe the faith of Augustine the Manichee as he aspired to rise higher in the movement’s ranks. From his later Catholic perspective, Augustine lamented that since he could not believe Christ had been born, he inevitably disregarded Christ’s human death. Recalling his move from Carthage to Rome and a near-fatal illness he suffered at that time, he shuddered to think that belief in a phony Manichean cross nearly brought him to ruin. I arrived there beaten down by bodily sickness. But I was on my way to hell, carrying along all the sins I had committed against you, against myself, and against others. They were many, and they were heavy, all piled on top of the bond of that originating sin whereby “we all die in Adam” [1 Cor. 15:22].81 You had not forgiven me any of them in Christ, nor had he undone by his cross the hostility toward you that my sins infected me with. How could he undo any of that if his cross was a mere phantasm (in cruce phantasmatis), which is what I believed it was? To the exact degree that it seemed to me his fleshly death was unreal, that’s how real was the death of my soul. And to the same degree his fleshly death was real, that’s how unreal was the life of my soul that disbelieved it. (Conf. 5.9.16)82 This view of Christ paralleled his view of the Bible. He rejected the entire Old Testament with its carnal attitudes, values, people, and events, along

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with significant portions of the New. Manichean rejection of Jesus’ human (Jewish) birth proscribed the whole history of Israel inscribed in his flesh; it deleted from the drama of salvation everything tied to the patriarchs, prophets, priests, and kings, and everyone in the ancient Chosen People. For the Manichees and young Augustine, Christ came to earth apart from Israel, and not from Israel; he came despite Israel’s history, and not because of it. They rejected all the Jewish writings because they formed part of Israel’s “body,” as it were, and were immersed in its carnal values, practices, and goals. Manichees saw the patriarchs as Jewish malefactors plucked from earth’s carnal wreckage and hanging by the gossamer thread of God’s undeserved reprieve, like that given to the thief on the cross (Faust. 33.1). For them Christ came to earth without mingling with human flesh. By the same critical principle they not only ejected the Old Testament from the canon but also disputed certain New Testament narratives about Jesus’ life. Faustus wrote in the Capitula that Manichees merely imitated the Catholic cafeteria attitude toward the Old Testament: Why is it strange if we have also accepted from the New Testament only those things that we found were said to the honor and praise of the Son of Majesty either by him or his apostles—but who were already perfect and believers—and simply ignored the other things that the uneducated said there naively and ignorantly or that enemies indirectly and maliciously raised as objections or that those writers unwisely asserted and handed on to posterity? And by this I mean that he was shamefully born of a woman, that he was circumcised like a Jew, that he offered sacrifice like a gentile, that he was baptized in a lowly manner, that he was led through the desert by the devil and tempted by him most wretchedly? (Faust. 32.7)83 Faustus’s wholesale denunciation of physical aspects of the stories about Jesus duplicated his utter rejection of the Old Testament. Augustine the Manichee agreed with him.

C. The Manichees and the Likeness to Christ Crucified “Likeness” was the critical Manichean principle for understanding Christ, accepting the New Testament, and rejecting the Old. This principle extrapolated a spiritual kernel from the texts that clutched saving knowledge but left behind its carnal husk, whether that was Christ’s flesh, the events of his life, or Israel’s long history. The Manichee Fortunatus used

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Paul’s language of Phil. 2 to summarize the Manichean outlook: Christ’s crucifixion revealed saving knowledge to all souls caught in the nets of mortal flesh. We think about ourselves the same way we think about Christ: while he was established in the form of God, he was made subject even as far as death so that he might show a likeness to our souls (ut similitudinem animarum nostrarum ostenderet). And the same way he showed in himself a likeness of death (mortis similitudo), and showed he was from the Father by being revived from amidst the dead (de medio mortuorum resuscitatum), so we think the same way about the future of our souls: through him we shall be able to be freed from this death.  .  . . If Christ plunged into suffering and death, so should we. If he sank into suffering and death by the will of the Father, so should we. (Fort. 7–8)84 Interestingly Augustine did not challenge Fortunatus on this issue. “In that man whom he took up,” Augustine replied, “he demonstrated those things that you talked about” (Fort. 9). The Manichee still closely matched the contours of Augustine’s thought at the time, even as a priest. But things were about to change. In particular the human Christ—the Word become crucified flesh—was about to emerge as the radiating center of the temporal dispensation of salvation, and of the scriptural figures that convey it.

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PART TWO

Journeyman Priest, Apprentice, Student of Paul (391–396)

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5

Reading Moses in the School of St. Paul the apostle and christology 101

Introduction: Valerius of Hippo and the Rupture of Ordination By late 390 the contours of Augustine’s life seemed to be emerging. Though the deaths of two important people, his son Adeodatus and his friend Nebridius, had darkened Augustine’s horizon, he responded by pouring great energy into founding a small community of like-minded, largely ex-Manichean postulants aspiring to the spiritual life of Christian philosophers. He also continued to produce apologetic tracts characterized by astute learning and spirited intellectual jousting. The recently completed On True Religion had been a lengthy and sophisticated tour de force that integrated Christian faith and the Platonic tradition. It had secured his renown as an apologist and religious thinker. Nevertheless, Augustine remained a seeker whose future was only partly clear, a man “groping, half-consciously, for new fields to conquer.”1 One field Augustine had no special desire to conquer was church ministry. As he traveled the region looking for new members for his contemplative community, he avoided some cities for fear that some bishopless church might preempt his life of spiritual searching (Serm. 355.2). Ambrose had been called to the episcopacy in just this way even though he had been only a catechumen. On a recruiting mission for his community Augustine visited the seemingly safe seacoast city of Hippo Regius, where the venerable Greek-speaking Valerius occupied the see. But Augustine

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didn’t realize that he had wandered into the crosshairs of a wily bishop who was on the lookout for an assisting priest. Many modern narratives, following Augustine’s biographer Possidius, portray Valerius as a somewhat doddering foreigner whose weakness in Latin prevented him from properly serving his people.2 As the story goes, Valerius’s predicament moved him to importune Providence to send a helper, and Providence responded spectacularly by sending him a future Doctor of the Church. But Valerius was more alert and cagey than either Possidius or his readers have given him credit for. His affinity for the brilliant Augustine suggests that he had a keen mind.3 Against the typical picture of a declining bishop in desperate need, the texts tantalizingly sketch the outline of a resourceful, crafty, and mildly irascible man who at strategic moments displayed “the courage of his eccentricity.”4 Stitching together the little word-portraits of Valerius in Possidius and Augustine, especially his Letter 21, we come to see Valerius as resembling a chief executive officer who preferred to exercise authority indirectly, though decisively, and above all when the good of his community was at stake. He brought plans to fruition by outmaneuvering rather than steamrolling his opposition. Valerius’s combination of authority and decisiveness with modesty and gentleness offered Augustine a model to which he apprenticed himself for more than five years before he himself was made bishop. In this way Valerius served as Augustine’s mentor.5 He engineered Augustine’s priestly ordination, pushed the limits of North African tradition by arranging for him to preach, hid Augustine from would-be poachers, and connived to make him a bishop. He became a formidable and commanding, lively and intriguing, strange and important character in Augustine’s story.

“Biblical Apprenticeship” and the World of Pauline Discourse Something in Valerius’s dossier stands out: references to the old bishop in Augustine and Possidius consistently portrayed him as having a strong interest in Scripture.6 Indicators point to him as a primary catalyst in Augustine’s sharp turn to biblical study in the early 390s, the one who pushed Augustine toward his “biblical apprenticeship” as a priest and perhaps especially toward his new reading of Saint Paul. This picture fits the Pauline resonances in the fascinating exchange between Valerius and Augustine in Letter 21, which contains Augustine’s famous request for time off to study Scripture.7 This was hardly a request for time to learn

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Holy Writ from scratch, as it is sometimes portrayed,8 nor a desperate attempt at personal healing,9 much less a cover for cowardice about his calling.10 Augustine sought basic training in ministerial skills in the form of a request to study their source in Scripture.11 Letter 21 is replete with artful references to Scripture, especially to Paul. Valerius and Augustine shared a Pauline world of discourse as part of the late-fourth-century “generation of S. Paul.”12 A single word might invoke whole passages of the Apostle’s works, just the way the ancients expressed themselves using allusions to Homer or Vergil. Augustine’s letter contested Valerius’s too-generous opinion of him by using one such word when he wrote, “Though I know myself better, you somehow consider me ‘capable’” (idoneus: “ready,” “able”),13 apparently quoting Valerius’s language back to him. This word fits the military conceit of the first part of the letter by picturing a soldier made “capable” for combat. But in a Pauline world of discourse, idoneus also invoked the Apostle’s discussion about the capacity for ministry in 2 Cor. 3, where Paul wrote, “We are not sufficient in ourselves to think of anything as coming from ourselves, but our sufficiency comes from God, for he makes us capable [Old Latin, idoneus] as ministers of the new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:5–6). We can easily imagine the shell-shocked Augustine, fresh from the tears of his ordination day and still bewildered at the turn of events, grieving the loss of hope for a monastic life of perpetually seeking wisdom in Scripture. Augustine doubted that ministry would allow him to follow Paul’s example of spiritual striving, for even he asked “Who is sufficient (idoneus) for these things?” (2 Cor. 2:16).14 But then “dear old (senex) Valerius” turned the tables by pushing him to read Paul’s words a little further on: “God makes us idoneus!” (2 Cor. 3:6). Valerius upped the Pauline ante, reframing the young priest’s devotion to the Apostle by challenging him to see a different Paul, the pastor who described himself as “seeking not what is advantageous to me but to the many, that they may be saved” (1 Cor. 10:33). That text crystallized the core issue and so became the hinge of Letter 21. Augustine sought instruction, but also imagined Valerius puzzling over why his learned new priest needed it. But perhaps your Holiness says, “I should like to know exactly how your instruction falls short.” Let me count the ways! I can more easily list what I have than what I wish to have. I dare to say that I know and hold with complete faith what belongs to our salvation. But the question is: How (quomodo) do I minister this very thing for

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the salvation of others, “not seeking what is advantageous (utile) to me, but what is advantageous to the many (multa), that they may be saved” (1 Cor. 10:33)?15 “How do I minister?”—Quomodo? Clearly it is the quomodo question that drove Augustine’s anxiety: not about what he knew, but about how he knew what he knew; not about knowing more for himself, but about bringing knowledge to people struggling to maintain their purchase on the lowest rungs of the ladder of spiritual ascent. That’s where “the many” dwelt— beginners in faith (rudes), catechumens and competentes on the brink of baptism, and the horde of baptized but unreflective faithful who all looked up dizzily “from below” at the daunting spiritual climb that lay before them. Augustine had suddenly thrust upon him the responsibility for their salvation, and so also the need to reorient his prodigious intellectual skills to examine faith’s basic “advantage.” Valerius in effect urged Augustine to become the authority for faith that he had theorized about in his earlier works (e.g., True Rel. 24.45, On Divine Order 2.9.27) and to do this by studying and preaching Scripture for the simple. One of his assignments was instructing candidates for baptism.16 Not surprisingly Augustine’s first treatise as a priest, written to persuade his old friend Honoratus to forsake the Manichees, took its theme of the priority of faith from 1 Cor. 10:33: it is called On the Advantage of Believing. Even less surprising, that booklet’s first topic was how to read Scripture (2.4–3.9). A possible footprint of Valerius’s theoretical interest in hermeneutics appears in a curious feature of this work when Augustine frames Scripture as “handed down” (traditur) in a fourfold way, according to history, allegory, analogy, and etiology (historia, allegoria, analogia, aetologia).17 This fourfold division is both suggestive and puzzling. Though often mentioned in studies of Augustine’s biblical work, Augustine’s own explanations of it are not very clear, and he himself “seems not to feel entirely at ease with a borrowed vocabulary.”18 Despite his antipathy for Greek, Augustine used Greek terms for the schema because, as he explained to Honoratus, “that is how I received it, and I would not presume to convey it to you differently” (Adv. Believ. 3.5). But the sequence doesn’t appear in the works of Ambrose or any other early Christian writer, nor does it appear anywhere in Augustine’s works during the five years between conversion and ordination, when (as we saw) he used the quite different dual framework of history and prophecy.19 Moreover, the fourfold schema disappears after Augustine’s priesthood,

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and it is conspicuously absent from his handbook of scriptural interpretation, On Christian Teaching.20 Martine Dulaey plausibly suggests that the source for the fourfold schema was none other than Valerius.21 But if so, in this case Valerius’s influence was abortive. The fourfold framework never quite fit; Augustine used the schema only temporarily, and then quietly dropped it. But Valerius may have helped Augustine to discover, or see differently, several crucial Pauline texts that relate to the hermeneutics of scriptural unity. On the Advantage of Believing strung together a number of passages from Paul to demonstrate the importance of allegoria in the New Testament (3.8–9). He repeated the critical text of 2 Cor. 3:6 that he learned from Ambrose, but others that he would quote constantly in later works (to be discussed below) appear here only for the first time. Especially important among these was 1 Cor. 10:1–11, Paul’s extended figurative reading of the Exodus story in relation to Christian instruction. Augustine read there that everything happened to the Israelites “in a figure” (in figura, v. 11), for “they were figures for us” (v. 6), especially when they drank from the rock, for “the rock was Christ” (v. 4). Augustine had also discovered the reference to allegoria in Gal. 4:24, where Paul saw Sarah and Hagar as allegories of the old and new covenants. Though Augustine had referred to allegoria many times before this, especially in On True Religion, this text appears for the first time. Augustine also quoted 2 Cor. 3:14–16, where Paul that says that for fellow Jews reading the Old Testament without Christ, “the veil itself remains, and the veil is not lifted for it is taken away in Christ.” Augustine previously alluded to this text in On Genesis, Against the Manichees, but there it referred to stripping the outer husk of textual allegory and likeness to spiritually reveal “naked truth.”22 By contrast, On the Advantage of Believing stressed Christ as the one who takes away the veil of misinterpretation.

Paul’s Ministry to “Infants in Christ” Hearing the echoes of Valerius’s concerns in Letter 21 suggests that Augustine’s new perspective on Paul resulted primarily not from feeding an inner need or following his ingenuity but from obeying the orders of his bishop. If so, it was the second time within a decade that a bishop had pushed Augustine to reread Paul. As we’ve seen, Ambrose (with help from “the books of the Platonists”) led Augustine to spiritual heights beyond time, flesh, and history where Augustine could look out upon the patterns

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in the scriptural terrain and map salvation’s design. But map is not territory. Valerius pushed Augustine to meet Paul down in the human valley where simple people lived life’s joys and sorrows and enigmas according to the creeping increments of time. Of course, assuming the “bottom-up” perspective of faith by looking up the spiritual ladder from below along with simple believers, required as much spiritual wisdom as taking the “top down” perspective of reason by looking down the ladder from above with the élite. But Valerius’s prodding helped Augustine to find models for both in Saint Paul, who wrote about both soaring to speak heaven’s mysteries among the wise (2 Cor. 12:1–2) and stooping to feed milk to “infant” believers (1 Cor. 3:1–3).23 A very early sermon dating from Augustine’s time as a priest, and so apparently preached in Valerius’s presence, reflects the “bottom up” perspective of preaching Scripture to the simple. The passage contains themes that became common in Augustine’s later works that addressed the needs of the “little ones”: care given with spiritually advanced wisdom; the nourishing historical narrative of Scripture; and its coherent center in the coming of Christ. Commenting on the words of Psalm 8:3, “From the mouths of infants and nurslings you perfected praise,” Augustine concluded: I cannot take “infants and nurslings” to refer to anyone other than those to whom the Apostle says, “As if to little children in Christ I gave you milk to drink, rather than solid food” [1 Cor. 3:1–2]. . . . The psalmist was quite right not to say “you effected” (fecisti), but rather, “you perfected praise” (perfecisti), for in the Church there are also some who are given milk to drink no longer, but are fed on solid food. To them the same Apostle refers when he says, “We speak wisdom among the perfect” [1 Cor. 2:6]. But the churches are not made perfect by drawing only on people like this, because if they consisted of these alone, there would be scant regard for the human race as a whole. There is due regard given, however, when those too who are not yet able to understand things spiritual and eternal are nurtured by faith in the history that unfolds through time (nutriuntur fide temporalis historiae). After the period of the patriarchs and prophets this history was carried through for our salvation by the most excellent “power and wisdom of God” [1 Cor. 1:24], especially in the sacramental mystery of the Man he took up (suscepti hominis sacramento). In this lies salvation for everyone who believes. (Exp. Ps. 8.5)24

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Augustine’s analysis of salvation’s “history that unfolds through time” is among the most important factors affecting his views of Scripture and figurative interpretation in the 390s. We mustn’t isolate this from his other ongoing concerns: the burden of pastoral care, the work of presiding at the church’s liturgy, the questions of his confreres, the imperfect state of his manuscripts, the growth of his philosophical insights, his ascetic impulse, his grasp of other Christian teachings, his persistent worries about the Manichean and Donatist threats, and undoubtedly also his personal searching and curiosity. Nevertheless, his construction of salvation’s temporal arrangement was critical for the care and feeding of the spiritual “infants” in his charge. As a preacher and teacher for beginners in faith, it was urgent that Augustine should present the logic of salvation’s plan as clearly as possible. So it became an object of intense analysis at this time as he reread the Scriptures closely, especially Genesis, the Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Letters of Paul. But it was Augustine’s reading of the Apostle that transformed his outlook most.

The New Encounter with Paul: Reading Romans Paul taught Augustine not just about salvation history: he taught him how to read salvation historically, that is, with a spiritually alert temporal consciousness. Using a Christian compass Paul tracked the crucial moments of Israel’s salvation story, such as times when covenants were established, when Abraham responded to God in faith, when circumcision became a requirement, and when the Law of Moses was instituted. Paul gauged the Law’s strategic purpose and function at each stage of the story and fitted it into the larger story of grace. Augustine already had a concept of the temporal arrangement; but Paul helped him to see not only that it had distinctive constituent parts but also how to interrelate the parts within the vast divine design. This help was transformative. It reoriented Augustine’s perspective as a view “from below,” that is, from the vantage point of one ministering to beginners in faith. Paul’s time-sensitive, “street-level” biblical tutorial outfitted Augustine for working with his simple congregation at Hippo. Henceforth, Augustine’s thought became more attentive to the dynamism of temporal change and the movement of history. This fresh perspective opens up noticeably in a brief unfinished work, the Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans.25 Augustine reduced the schema of “Seven Ages” from his earlier Genesis commentary to a series of “Four Ages” that described salvation’s movement through time.

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This critical framework seems to have been his own construction.26 In the first age “before the Law” (ante legem), sin was “in the world” but lay hidden and uncounted; but “death reigned” anyway, even though transgression had not been exposed. The second age appeared when sin began to be reckoned “under the Law” (sub legem), that is, it began to be counted as transgression and to become punishable by physical suffering and even death, and Israel served God in fear. The third age came with the revelation of Christ’s grace, and sin began to be overcome, though only partially because remnants of sin remained in the heart. Nevertheless, “under grace” (sub gratia) it was possible to escape sin’s grip and to choose the righteousness of faith. Christ’s grace-filled example strengthened the effort to overcome sin by setting the example for the Christian practice of love for God and neighbor. The fourth age remains in the future time when sin will be eradicated and humanity will dwell “in peace” (in pace).27 For Paul, the shifting ages of salvation history pointed to the dynamism of grace being gradually revealed over time. The most critical transition occurred in the shift from being “under Law” to “under grace.”28 The slow but steady progress of time was therefore not accidental but endemic to salvation, whose essential unity became evident in the continuities between stages of the temporal plan. The new Four Ages schema shows that Augustine thought that Paul displayed the unity of the temporally diverse elements of salvation by using the concept of “likeness,” similitudo. For instance, Paul observed that before the Law was given, “death reigned over those who did not sin in the likeness (similitudo) of Adam’s sin” (Rom. 5:14), that is, after receiving a command.29 In other words, death reigned everywhere, but Israel’s transgressions in the wilderness were “like” Adam’s sin “under the Law.” On the other hand, the gift that appeared in the third age “under grace” was “not like” (non sicut) Adam’s transgression (Rom. 5:15). Death reigned through Adam only temporally, Augustine wrote, whereas grace surpassed time by rising into the eternal, and Adam’s condemnation after one sin strongly contrasted with Christ’s gift of eternal life that followed many sins (Rom. 5:16). Moreover, Christ’s gift of justification did not merely reverse Adam’s sin but created a “new humanity.” And the most important operative likeness matched the Lord’s physical crucifixion with the moral crucifixion of believers who put their illicit desires to death. That likeness bridged humanity’s second age “under Law” to its third age “under grace,” since Christ’s crucifixion of the old man occurred on the moral plane for believers, spiritually speaking, “at the same time” (simul).30

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I. The Theater of Salvation: The Believer Plays Adam’s Role Augustine discerned the work of similitudo in Paul’s statement, “We know that our old humanity was crucified at the same time, so that the body of sin might be emptied out” (Rom. 6:6).31 The “likeness” of the cross signified the soul’s mortification of worldly lusts and desires; the practice of spiritual discipline continually “destroyed” the old way of life by the moral power of the Lord’s death. Augustine portrayed this transformation as a likeness to the Lord’s crucifixion, supported by Paul’s statement that all those who belong to Christ “have crucified (crucifixerunt) their flesh with its vices and appetites” (Gal. 5:24).32 The plural verb is important to note— “they crucified their flesh”—for it highlighted the proliferation of many self-mortifying acts that derived from the Lord’s one self-sacrifice. Between the event of the crucifixion and the reality of the believer’s state, the cross was the sign that indicated that mortification. Christ’s death disclosed the death of evil in the soul and exemplified “co-dying” with Christ in moral renewal (Col. 3:1; Propp. 32–34.4). The passion narratives of the Gospels thus portrayed the salvation drama playing out in every Christian soul: “The crucifixion of the old man (vetus homo) was signified (significata est) in the cross of the Lord, just as the regeneration of the new man was signified in the resurrection.”33 Christ’s death by crucifixion became a living tableau that motivated and guided the soul to “re-present” it. Augustine emphasized this with the language of drama by declaring that Paul “plainly” taught that we “play the role (agere) of the old man” (ibid.).

II. But Did Moses Curse Christ? For Augustine the relation between Christ’s crucifixion and the believer’s self-mortification affected how Christians read the Old Testament because it illumined a darkly enigmatic saying of Moses found in Deut. 21:23, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.”34 Augustine asserted that Rom. 6:6 “must be referred to what Moses said” (Propp. 32–34). But the quote awkwardly intruded on an otherwise purely exegetical discussion of Romans. Paul nowhere mentions a curse in Romans 6, and the idea actually disrupts the Apostle’s line of thought. So Augustine’s connection is a surprise—until we realize that we’ve just walked into the middle of a long-running argument between Catholics and Manichees over this text. Manichees claimed that Moses’ saying was anti-Christological: if he was a prophet he diabolically blasphemed the Son of God and so stood

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condemned; on the other hand, if he spoke unwittingly about Christ’s cross it negated his claim to be a prophet. The logic was airtight: either way one read it, Deut. 21:23 opposed Christ, and the Old Testament fatally contradicted the New. The Manichees liked the text so much, Augustine later wrote, that they “would often air it” (saepe ventilata sint) to confuse unsuspecting Catholics (Adim. 21); and he admitted that as a Manichee he had used it that way too (Faust. 14.8). But Augustine now was using Moses’ text to model the Catholic way of spiritual interpretation and to oppose the literalism of the Manichees, who completely misunderstood the common biblical idea that words and deeds of one age point to spiritual realities of the next. Spiritually astute people know how such figuration works, Augustine contended; they quickly see that Moses’ prophecy never cursed Christ. But one must understand the way figures work, in this case the figurative relationship between Christ and sin.

III. Christ and Sin: A Picture-Book Relationship To demonstrate Christ’s figurative relationship to sin, Augustine introduced a series of apostolic texts that forged the rhetorical and figurative link between them (Propp. 32–34.3). “He carried our sins,” said one (1 Pet. 2:24); and another, “he committed sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21); and a third, “by sin he condemned sin” (Rom. 8:3). “No one doubts,” Augustine wrote, that in each of these texts, “on account of him [i.e., Adam, the “old man”], ‘sin’ also refers to the Lord” (et de domino dictum esse).35 Odd as it sounds, the biblical writer even used the word “sin” as a sort of title to refer to Christ. He could do this because Christ represented or “signified” the “old man” in whom sin dwelt, though of course he himself was not a sinner. Therefore he was clearly being called “sin” figuratively; the “curse” was also figurative and so Moses was not only innocent of blasphemy but proven to speak prophetically. So Christians could declare confidently, as Augustine did, that “Moses did not curse the Lord, but prophesied what his crucifixion would show forth (ostenderet).”36 Therefore the Manichean claims about contradiction between the Testaments were conclusively false. What interests us here is the way that Augustine thought about the figuration process. His operative figure of speech was metonymy, which, as we saw above, exchanged names between concepts based on association. The term “sin” migrated metonymically to the Lord who “carried” it for the sake of redemption. Augustine saw an entire network of metonymies stretching from Moses’ curse to Christ’s crucifixion, from Christ

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crucified to Christian self-mortification, and from the self-mortifying Christian reading the letters of Paul and Peter back to Moses writing Deuteronomy. These interrelationships disclose a dense set of analogical associations that becomes clear from the wording of the texts. TEXT #1, 1 Pet. 2:24: “he carried our sins” (peccata nostra portavit). This quote from 1 Peter occurs only here in Propositions. Christ himself was sinless: as the passage itself says, “he committed no sin” (1 Pet. 2:22). While carrying sin he was therefore a sort of “sinless sinner,” that is, he was not a personally sinning subject but one who “took up” the sins of others. So that made his figurative relationship to sin obvious; its construction as metonymy was evident. TEXT #2, Rom. 8:3: God sent his Son “in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and he condemned sin from sin” (in similitudine carnis peccati et de peccato damnavit peccatum in carne).37 We have already seen how Augustine connected Rom. 6:6 and Rom. 8:3 (Propp. 32–34); now Propp. 48 explored the logic of the figurative Christ-sin relationship while treating Rom. 8:3 itself. His terse exposition made several points. The major one was that God sent the Son not “in the flesh of sin” but “in the likeness of the flesh of sin” (Propp. 48.4). Paul’s use of similitudo channeled the dynamic of figuration into Augustine’s thought on both salvation (soteriology) and the person of Christ (Christology), as well as the deep interconnection between them. The Lord’s “likeness” to sinful flesh distinguished the divine Son from the stain of sin, but it also linked them together by way of the metonymic name exchange that referred “sin” to Christ because of his human mortality. The Word’s relationship to “sin” was therefore clearly figurative. Translation of Rom. 8:3 into any language is tricky because the construction of the Greek is awkward; literally it reads, “God, sending his own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and for sin (kai peri hamartias) condemned sin in the flesh.” The problem phrase occurs in the middle, “and for sin.” Old Latin translators faced separate problems of how to understand both kai, “and,” and peri, “for.” First they asked, did “and” suggest a new thought unit? They decided that kai marked the beginning of an independent sentence and so made “and” the link between two separate actions occurring in a sequence. Second they asked, how then may peri be understood, if it is part of an independent sentence whose main verb is “condemned”? The translators elected to use the directional proposition de, which carried a general sense of “concerning” or “in relation to.” So the two sentences in Old Latin read roughly as follows: (1) “God sent his Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin, and (2) in relation to sin he condemned sin in the flesh.”

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Augustine in Propp. 48.1 correspondingly portrayed redemption as a divine drama in two “acts.” Act One occurred in the eternal realm when the Father commissioned the redemptive work of his divine Son. The acting subject was God the Father, and “sending” referred to the mission of the Word to become incarnate. Act Two occurred in the temporal realm when the Son of God, now dwelling in the likeness of sinful flesh, took action against sin. So the second sentence switched the subject from the Father to the Son dwelling in flesh; the incarnate Word is the acting subject. Consequently de takes on a strong directional sense of “from,” and “sin” becomes the name of the incarnate Son by metonymy. While de’s range of meaning includes “for” or “about,” it also just as naturally suggests direction of movement “from,” either spatially or conceptually. Standing at the head of an independent sentence, therefore, de lent itself to an instrumental meaning “from” or “by means of.” Thus the second sentence could be read the way Augustine understood it, “and from (or by means of) sin he condemned sin”; that is, the Word performed the work of condemnation by means of the sinless “Lordly Man” (dominicus homo). That Man, who figuratively “carried our sins” and so was called “sin,” was God’s instrument for condemning sin in the flesh (Propp. 48.6). Acting through the death of the Lordly Man, the Son of God “destroyed and removed” (destructa et ablata) the false “calculating shrewdness” (prudentia) that cultivated fear of the Law’s punishment and replaced it with love for the Law’s righteousness (Propp. 48.7).38 In other words, the first sentence of the sequence described God the Father’s resource for condemning sin (sending the divine Son in the Incarnation), while the second sentence described the Word’s method (using the Lordly Man Jesus to condemn sin). Augustine thus made theological sense of the Old Latin’s difficult grammatical construction. But theological meaning subtly shifted in the move from Greek to Latin. When the Greek kai peri hamartias became the Latin et de peccato, the Greek’s reference to sin as the object upon which God acted became the Old Latin’s reference to sin as the instrument with which God acted. As Augustine understood the text, then, “from ‘sin’ (the man Jesus) he (the divine Word) condemned sin in the flesh” (Propp. 48.6).39 The Word assumed a man who identified himself with sin by taking on its penalty, and so by metonymy was called “sin.” The Lordly Man “ceased to fear death, neither seeking worldly goods nor fearing worldly evils” (ibid.); he spurned sin and so “condemned” it, and thus figurative divine “sin” overcame literal human sin. This gave rise to an elegant irony wherein “sin” became the instrument of its own demise.

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TEXT #3, 2 Cor. 5:21: “he committed sin for us” (peccatum pro nobis fecit). Augustine explained the logic by which the Word took the name “sin” by way of another Pauline text that had become garbled in the Old Latin translation, 2 Cor. 5:21, and so became the most complicated of all (Propp. 32–34.3; 48.5). The Greek of Paul’s sentence was striking but straightforward: God imposed sin upon Christ, who “became sin for us” after the manner of the ritual scapegoat in Lev. 16:21: “[God] made him (ton), who knew no sin, to be sin for us, so that we might become the justice of God in him.”40 The Latin manuscript tradition or the Old Latin translators, or both, either mistook or overlooked Paul’s Greek accusative pronoun (ton) referring to Christ, which in fact sits awkwardly at the beginning of the sentence. But by failing to render it with the Latin eum at the beginning of the sentence they changed the subject of the sentence. Augustine’s Latin manuscript should have read (as in fact some manuscripts did read),41 eum non noverat peccatum peccatum pro nobis fecit: “Him [Christ] who knew no sin he [God] made sin for us.” Without the beginning eum, however, “the one who knew no sin” became the subject of fecit, that is, “him” became “he”: the object of the Greek sentence became the subject of the Latin sentence. In short, the Greek “He [God] made him to be sin” became the Latin “He [Christ] committed sin.” That transformed the theology of Paul’s statement: whereas for him, Christ was the one upon whom action was taken (“God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us”), for the Latin reader, Christ himself became the one who took the action (“He committed sin for us”; Propp. 32–34.3; 48.5).42 So Augustine understood Christ to be the acting subject in both parts of 2 Cor. 5:21: Christ both “knew no sin” and he “committed sin.” And so the sense of this text matched 1 Peter, which portrayed Christ as “the sinless sinner.” But this concept was clearly absurd—Paul himself saying in the same verse that Christ “knew no sin”—and so it demanded a figurative construction. The difficulty was easily resolved by referring to the metonymy that took the name “sin” figuratively, “as if” he had sinned. To emphasize this Augustine inserted the marker tanquam, “as it were,” or “so to speak,” the Latin equivalent to English scare quotes. So he wrote, “The Apostle calls ‘sin’ his taking up of mortal flesh; although his flesh was not sinful, he ‘commits sin’ when he dies.”43 Augustine reasoned that Christ, who was divine and immortal by nature, was not able to die any more than he was able to sin. So dying—even taking up the capacity to die—figuratively “transgressed” his immortality.44 This set up a cause-effect metonymy wherein “sin” could be figuratively ascribed to Christ.

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IV. Summarizing Augustine’s Logic about Christ and Sin We can sum up the logic in Augustine’s orchestration of these New Testament texts as follows. Adam’s sin caused death to every human being and made death a virtually intrinsic feature of human life; flesh became “mortal.” The divine Word, though without sin, assumed a human body from the stream of mortal bodily human life. In this way the Word achieved the capacity to die in the Incarnation “by taking up (suscipiendo) mortal flesh” (Propp. 48.4).45 This “taking up” formed a figurative relationship of metonymy between Christ and sin whereby the sinless Christ was said to “carry sins.” “Death is sinful flesh’s debt,” wrote Augustine (Propp. 48.5);46 it was inextricably associated with sin as its primary effect. That association made it possible for the one who took the debtor’s place, and then died to pay the debt, to be figuratively called “sin”—even though the debt belonged not to him but to “the flesh of sin.” By association the term “sin” legitimately applied to everyone who dies, even to Christ. Scripture preserved the understanding of Christ as sinless even as he submitted to a death due only to sin. The figure of metonymy neatly juxtaposed Christ and sin, while sacrificing neither his sinlessness nor his true humanity; it explained the complexity of the Word’s relationship to human sin as a result of being simultaneously involved in it and distinct from it. Augustine’s understanding of salvation from his Catholic conversion into the early period of his priesthood emphasized the soul’s spiritual striving according to Christ’s example of scorning worldly life and fear. This perspective paid huge dividends for Augustine in pursuing Catholic Christianity as a moral, spiritual, and ascetic path. It gave a framework for understanding the constitution of the human person as belonging not only to the earth but also to God, and for mortifying the inner passions that deflected the soul away from communion with God. Christ, truly God and truly human, embodied God’s love by accommodating the divine to changeable time and flawed human understanding. Appearing in the likeness of mortal flesh, by unimpeachable spiritual authority Christ gave direction to the soul, purified it from besetting sins, and prepared its spiritual ascent. Modeling self-abnegation and the rejection of worldly values, the Lord’s passion displayed this teaching as an all-encompassing “likeness” that signified the destruction of the old sinful life and the rejuvenation of new life. The Manichean accusations about Moses cursing Christ, Augustine contended, both missed the actual point of Christian teaching about the cross and contradicted the teaching of the Apostle.

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Challenges to Augustine’s Thought about Salvation Augustine’s perfectly orthodox concept of Christian likeness to Christ’s passion worked well as a model for the spiritually striving Catholic. But as a polemic against the Manichees, it suffered from a peculiar weakness. Manichees disputed the Catholic take on the physical reality of Christ’s humanity; as we’ve seen, they were content for his “likeness” to physical death to free humanity from its bondage to materiality and evil. This became clear during the priest Augustine’s debate with Fortunatus in late August 392.47 Though the frustrated Augustine pressed him to explain rationally how souls first fell into evil, Fortunatus kept reverting to Scripture and insisted on describing the soul’s escape from evil by Christ’s “likeness” to their flesh.48 He quoted Paul’s exhortation in Phil. 2:5–8 that urged Christians to “perceive within themselves” what was also in Christ Jesus, who “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, having been made in the likeness (similitudo) of a man, and having been found in human appearance (habitus), humbled himself and was made subject even to death.” Christ’s self-subjection, Fortunatus continued, occurred in order to show “its similitudo to our souls.” However, this did not occur in the stream of human events, for it was a divine act. “He showed the likeness of death in himself, and having been raised from the midst of (de medio) the dead, showed himself to have come from the Father. We ‘perceive’ that it will also be the same way (eo modo) with our souls, because through him we can be freed from this death.”49 In the Manichean chain of logic, Christ’s “likeness in death” replicated his “likeness as a man,” and it propelled the human imitation by which souls were “freed from this death.” Interestingly, although Augustine objected to other claims of Fortunatus, he did not object to him spiritualizing the crucifixion; in fact, Augustine agreed: “In the same man whom [the Word] took up, he demonstrated what you are talking about.”50 However, it is evident that he “agrees” by understanding the word “likeness” in a different way: they can appear to agree when actually they are talking past each other. Fortunatus said, “So the Apostle spoke of the way we ought to perceive about our souls what Christ showed us: if Christ was in suffering and death, so are we; if by the will of the Father he descended into suffering and death, so do we” (Fort. 7). To this Augustine simply reasserted the reality of the Incarnation. But this reveals a weakness in Augustine’s approach: he still had no independent theology of the cross.51 This state continued for

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perhaps another two years; the Propositions from Romans made the cross a prominent means of instruction by signs: “The crucifixion of the old self was signified (significata est) in the cross of the Lord.”52

I. A Threatening Theological Weakness Despite asserting the reality of the Lord’s flesh, Augustine at this time understood the cross primarily as pointing beyond itself to realities of the intelligible realm. The “sign of the cross,” he insisted, need not exclude the literal reality of the event; yet “need not” is not the same as “can not”: it failed to fully rebut the Manichean claim. This theological gap left many questions. Was the physical and historical reality of the crucifixion event really necessary? If it was necessary, then what exactly was the purpose of Christ’s suffering for liberating the soul? Where did the actual drama of salvation take place: Was it in the theater of the individual soul transformed by the Lord’s example, or did it take place on Golgotha as Christ exerted a spiritual force upon all believing souls? And further, if Christ’s suffering was primarily a spiritual event portraying the crucifixion of the old humanity, by what operation was sin actually destroyed? By folding the cross into the spiritual pedagogy of the Incarnation, Augustine successfully avoided the taint of a too-realistic notion of Christ’s relationship to sin; but the price tag for that was exposing a flank of Augustine’s soteriology to a Manichean attack on Christ’s human and historically real death. Because Augustine tied salvation closely to the person of the Savior, Manichees could challenge the adequacy, even if not the orthodoxy, of Augustine’s Christology.53 More questions follow: If Christ was fully human, how did his divinity relate to his humanity in the work of salvation? What specific role did Christ’s humanity play? Was it a cipher for spiritual truth or an instrument of that truth? Augustine’s early works so emphasized Christ’s divinity that they tended to obscure the integral human reality of Christ; the man Jesus qua man often seems passively subordinate to the Word rather than actively engaged in the human enterprise.

II. Conspicuous by Omission These questions link to a curious feature of Augustine’s discussion in the Propositions from Romans: despite the intrusion of Moses’ curse text from Deuteronomy, Augustine ignored Paul’s own definitive treatment of the curse in chapter 3 of Galatians. Paul argued there that the Law was

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penultimate to Christian faith, that no one can expect salvation by its works alone, and that Abraham’s faith demonstrated this. In contrast to his Letter to the Romans, Galatians stressed negative aspects of the Law by recalling its curse upon sinners. He wrote, “All who rely on works of the Law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the Law, and do them’” (Gal. 3:10, quoting Deut. 27:26). But then Paul dramatically defined redemption as an act carried out by Christ in direct relation to the Law’s curse. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law,” he wrote, “by being made a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Gal. 3:13, quoting Deut. 21:23). Augustine’s omission of this passage from the Propositions from Romans is odd for several reasons. Elsewhere he had purposefully argued that Paul’s “apostolic authority” acted as a “shortcut” for faith in its quest to understand difficult Old Testament texts (Gen. Man. 2.2.3; 2.24.37). In Galatians Paul addressed the curse text directly. Moreover, Paul clearly saw Moses’ curse as a prophecy that arrestingly foresaw the power of Christ’s redemption. Augustine was arguing that exact point, and he used a string of Pauline texts to prove it. So why did the Propositions from Romans ignore the one Pauline text that could have decisively proven his case in a single swipe? I suggest that at this time he was working with an understanding of “likeness” that inadequately explained Paul’s treatment of the curse.

III. Paul Challenges Augustine’s Ideas about Likeness Galatians 3:13, “Christ became a curse for us,” confronted Augustine with something different than 1 Pet. 2:24, 2 Cor. 5:21, and Rom. 8:3, texts whose pattern of figuration was more or less clear. Paul’s statement that Christ “became a curse for us” was a nonnegotiable, nonfigurative description of the very mechanism of salvation. It uncovered the nucleus of God’s temporal arrangement for salvation in the historical exchange of Christ’s life for ours. In other words, Christ took up this curse not only to teach, but also to redeem. Paul’s sentence, unlike the other texts, carried no obvious rhetorical figure that clearly pushed its meaning into the spiritual realm, and so was not so amenable to explanation by figures and likenesses. Galatians 3:13 unambiguously taught that Christ’s crucifixion directly and effectively neutralized sin and its consequences. Paul’s phrase, “he redeemed us,” referred not to the soul’s spiritual self-crucifixion but to Christ’s unique and unilateral self-surrender to death in love for sinners. That fact was central to Paul’s

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argument in Gal. 3. Augustine now saw Christ’s passion as an event of narrated history that conveyed that act of love not simply as a picture but as a power: it preemptively imposed itself upon the soul that responded in faith; it reoriented desires, and made possible the imitation of self-mortification. Mortification not only replicated Christ’s denial of self but also entered into the depths of redeeming love that made possible the denial of self. As Augustine would later explain, nothing arouses love so much as the discovery that one is loved, and communicating divine love was the purpose of the cross (Instr. Beg. 4.7). Christ’s sinlessness certainly contradicted sin and taught the wisdom of an alternative path from sin, but it was Christ’s love that confronted sin with a countervailing power and destroyed it. This line of logic pushed Augustine to rethink the didactic pattern of “likeness” structured according to figures of association. The transformative power of love that underlay Gal. 3:13’s reversal of the Deuteronomic curse revealed the inadequacy of mere “likeness” alone for describing Christ’s work of salvation. It lacked the subtlety to convey both the picture that taught the soul to practice self-mortification and the divine love that empowered that practice. Association alone did not coherently integrate the figuration and the realism that the power of redemption presupposed. If Augustine’s construction of “likeness” by association worked well on the upper rungs of the ladder of spiritual ascent, where the advanced soul already knew how to reach beyond signs toward spiritual reality, it was inadequate for describing how divine love’s power propelled the dull and unbelieving soul toward faith. This carried implications for Augustine’s understanding of scriptural unity that was the basis for figurative interpretation. Up to this point, Augustine had opposed the Manichees mainly by arguing for the complementary unity or congruence (congruentia) between the Old and New Testaments within God’s providential design (e.g., Practices 1.17.30). According to that argument, just as a doctor gives different orders for different patients at different times, or one and the same artist uses different stones in a large mosaic, so Scripture integrated disparate pieces in a grand plan that converged upon the coming of Christ, the event that the Old Testament foresaw and the New recalled. However, did mere “noncontradiction” between the Testaments supply enough of an argument to contest the Manichean dismissal of Scripture’s unity? It seemed not: for while scriptural congruence and the reinforcement of prophetic likenesses certainly showed the coherent possibility of the unity between the Testaments, it fell short of demonstrating the logical necessity of that unity.

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Paul’s Tutorial on Redemption in the Letter to the Galatians This is where Augustine’s rereading of Paul shoots in a fresh direction. In late 394 or early 395 Augustine took up Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and produced his only complete commentary on a Pauline letter.54 Galatians, not Romans, clinched the insight that salvation took place not despite the temporal process but through it, by means of a man “born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4). Augustine’s take-away insight from reading Galatians was that salvation not only accommodated to historical events, but salvation itself was essentially historical. Just as Augustine’s Pauline discovery of the spiritual realm as a seeker in Milan decisively reoriented his materialistic thinking, so as a priest in Hippo his strong Pauline identification of spiritual salvation with Christ’s human and historical crucifixion eradicated any trace of spiritualism or devaluation of the material. The critical lesson he learned from Paul’s teaching concerned the human Mediator, “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), who bridged the divine and human as well as the spiritual and material. Christ revealed God’s design of offering spiritual reality through material and physical means throughout the different times of salvation history. So Scripture read through Christ appeared now as a sacramental diversity-in-unity, and the Old Testament conveyed true grace, if only partially, indirectly, and figuratively, while the New Testament conveyed it fully, directly, and really. As Augustine later concluded, “the teaching is not different, though the time is different.”55 In treating Gal. 3, Augustine discovered Paul’s time-sensitive thinking on display in striking detail. Temporal movement swinging back and forth from past to present to future and back again was endemic to the Apostle’s argument. Scripture foresaw Abraham’s justification by faith, Paul wrote, and so “preached the gospel beforehand” to him by promising, “In you shall all the nations be blessed” (Gal. 3:8–9; Gen. 12:1–3). This covenant promise came to Abraham long before the Law was given 430 years later. So Scripture’s sequence of events demonstrated the priority of faith in the story of salvation. The Law’s function was different. While it does not rest on faith (Gal. 3:12), neither does it contradict the promise. The Law’s late arrival shows that it was never intended to give life (3:21); so its purpose must lay elsewhere, namely, in functioning as a “pedagogue to Christ” before the promise to faith was fulfilled (3:24–26). But the Law’s pedagogic methods were draconian, cursing all who failed to perform its works (3:10) and targeting them for condemnation (3:22).

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This was Paul’s context for invoking the curse of Deut. 21:23 as a prophecy of redemption: “Christ redeemed us from the Law’s curse by becoming a curse for us—as it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (3:13). The text prophesied redemption because it foresaw Christ exchanging his life for ours, not beyond or despite the Law’s curse on us but by means of it.

I. Breaking the Logjam: Christ the Man Took Up the Curse for Us Augustine’s thought changed as he treated the Deuteronomic curse in Chapter 22 of the Commentary on Galatians. He uncovered the link between Moses’ curse and God’s redemptive strategy by showing how Christ precisely as a mortal man performed the work of salvation on the cross, before he became “wholly God” in the resurrection.56 Augustine bookmarked the turning point of the Gospel story at the moment when the Son of Man allowed his disciples to eat picked grain on the Sabbath. In doing so Jesus refused to follow the Law according to the letter alone (ad litteram), that is, “literally” (Comm. Gal. 22.1).57 This enacted his strategy for turning his followers from a carnal to a spiritual reading of the Law, from living “under the Law” to living “under grace.” Christ acted in this way, Augustine wrote, as only a true man could, when “the Son of God still bore a mortal human nature on earth” (Comm. Gal. 31.5). Precisely as “Son of Man”—for Augustine this title was a marker of the Lord’s humanity—Christ acted as “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28) who rescued people that had been enslaved to merely carnal observance of the Law (Comm. Gal. 22.2). But the obverse of this act was to incur the judgment reserved for those who did not follow the Law “to the letter,” that is, literally. Here was the Pauline solution to the puzzle about redemption: only a man could take on this punishment, one “born of a woman, born under the Law, in order to redeem those who were under the Law” (sub lege, Gal. 4:4; Comm. Gal. 31.10). Not only being fully human but also acting uniquely human, Christ “became a curse for us,” he “became sin,” and the one who “condemned sin from sin”; he did all this by freely “taking up” the punishment to which he was humanly subject. Christ “under the Law” defied the naked (i.e., spirit-less) letter of the Law for the sake of the Law’s spiritual core. This act of his human will transformed his disciples’ carnal fear of the Law’s punishment to spiritual love for God.

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Consequently, on the verge of granting freedom to believers the Lord Jesus Christ did not follow certain observances literally (ad litteram). Thus, when the disciples were hungry on the Sabbath and plucked heads of grain, he responded to those who objected by saying that the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath [Mark 2:28]. And so by not observing those things in a carnal way he incited (conflagravit) the hatred of carnal people and indeed took up (suscepit) the punishment laid down for those not observing them. But he did so to set those who believed in him free from the fear of such punishment. With this in mind the Apostle continues: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by being made a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” [Gal. 3:13, quoting Deut. 21:23]. (Comm. Gal. 22.1–3)58 Augustine’s discovery of Paul’s solution to the enigma of redemption opened fresh avenues for understanding the Apostle’s quite realistic language about the curse. Christ’s human humility unto death did more than merely enact the proper attitude or show the likeness of the soul’s ascent, as though the cross only pointed the way from the carnal to the spiritual realm. Rather, the Son of Man voluntarily took up (suscepit) the penalty of the Law meted by carnal justice in order to turn human beings from the fear of carnal punishment to the love of spiritual justice. In other words, he turned them from living “under the Law” to living “under grace.” And by reading the Gospel narrative through the insights of Paul, Augustine saw how the man Jesus Christ inscribed the spiritual interpretation of the Law into the very constitution of Christianity.

II. Human Humility Extraordinaire: Christ’s Act of Taking Up Death The cardinal point is that Christ’s self-surrender on the cross was a uniquely human act. The divine Word took up human flesh and its mortality, but only Christ the man could undergo actual human death. As we have seen, Augustine insisted that Christ in his divine nature as the Word could not die; by becoming incarnate he took up the capacity to die (Propp. 48). The poverty of our language makes it sound as though the divine Word and the man Jesus possessed different wills that could conceivably conflict; but for Augustine that isn’t in view here. In order to stress the integrity of the human offering on the cross, his teaching on redemption

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requires the will of the man Jesus to act uniquely as a human being, even as he continued to be dependent upon the Word.59 In concert with the will of the Word who assumed him, then, Jesus invited the curse that fell upon him as a humble human act of embracing death. This shift rippled across Augustine’s language. The telltale move at this time is Augustine’s expanded use of the word suscipere, “to take up,” to include the crucifixion as a human event. Prior to the Galatians commentary, Augustine had used the suscipio word group in relation to Christ exclusively to refer to the Incarnation, the act of the Word who “took up” a whole man.60 Under Paul’s tutelage in Galatians, Augustine began to speak of the human Jesus Christ’s act of inviting sin, death, and the curse upon himself. “And so by not observing those things in a carnal way he incited the hatred of carnal people and indeed took up (suscepit) the punishment laid down for those not observing them” (Comm. Gal. 22.2). The distinctively human humility of the cross, and Christ’s proactive work in assuming it, stands out in this word. In willing to take up human death, the man Jesus paralleled, replicated, complemented, and fulfilled the humble divine will of the Word who condescended to take up mortal flesh. Jesus’ humble will-to-death and the humble divine will of the Word coalesced seamlessly as a reciprocal unity within a single person immersed in the tumult of historical events.61

III. Revisiting the Texts About Christ and Sin The Galatians commentary’s subtly different perspectives on the curse and Christ’s relation to sin tweaked Augustine’s interpretations of the four New Testament texts on redemption treated in his Propositions on Romans that he had read quite differently only a few months before: 1 Pet. 2:24, 2 Cor. 5:21, Rom. 8:3, and Rom. 6:6. Augustine’s earlier take on 1 Pet. 2:24, “he carried our sins,” pointed to the figurative relationship between Christ and sin. But the Commentary on Galatians—quoting the text in its more complete form, “he bore our sins in his body on the tree”—emphasized Christ’s corporeal suffering (“his body”) and the material instrument (“the tree”).62 Further, the commentary corrected the earlier translation error that had made Christ rather than God the subject of 2 Cor. 5:21 (that is, “he [Christ] committed sin for us,” Comm. Gal. 22.9). The accusative pronoun “him” now appeared in its proper place where Paul had intended it; that reinstated God as the acting subject who “made Christ to be sin” so that we may become righteous. Jesus “knew no sin” when he took up sin’s

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punishment, so his relationship to sin remains figurative; however, “taking up” sin in death also truly destroyed sin. Augustine interlocked the figure of sin with the event of Christ’s human death; Christ and sin interacted in a way that not only juxtaposed but also conjoined figure and reality. So Paul was “neither ashamed nor afraid,” Augustine wrote, to utter the audacious sentence that declared God “to have made him to be sin for us” (peccatum eum fecisse pro nobis).63 Furthermore, this refurbished reading of 2 Cor. 5:21 altered his construction of Rom. 8:3: what had been previously two independent sentences that envisioned salvation in two acts now became a single sentence with a purpose clause. Augustine changed the second sentence to a purpose clause by altering the Old Latin’s et (“and”) to ut (“so that”); that carried a sense of cause and effect wherein God made him to be sin for us so that by means of sin God might condemn sin. Finally, Augustine also shifted the perspective on the co-crucifixion text, Rom. 6:6. The Propositions from Romans had explained Paul’s phrase “to destroy the body of sin” as a reference to the soul’s self-renewal in mortifying the deeds of the flesh; that is to say, it paralleled the sentence that followed, “that we might no longer serve sin.”64 But when the Commentary on Galatians conjoined “destroying the body of sin” to the event on Golgotha, the cross then appeared more clearly as the foundation (not merely a free-floating “likeness”) of the soul’s mortification. There would be no self-crucifixion at all, wrote Augustine, “unless in that death of the Lord should hang a figure of our sin ‘so that the body of sin should be destroyed (evacuaretur), so that we should no longer serve sin’” (Comm. Gal. 22.10). Augustine reconceived the removal of the body of sin by describing it as an effect flowing from the Lord’s crucifixion, the event that precedes, grounds, and empowers the soul’s work of self-renewal.

IV. The Abolition of Sin on Golgotha Augustine once more dealt with Moses’ curse in a section of his polemical treatise Against Adimantus, written about the same time as the Commentary on Galatians.65 Augustine’s argument initially resembled earlier treatments that criticized the Manichees for misunderstanding the spiritual likeness between the Lord’s cross and the Christians’ moral crucifixion of vices and desires. He recalled Paul’s statement about the “spiritual cross” that “those who have been crucified with Christ have crucified their passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24), and then commented, “By such a cross,

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the old self, that is, the old life, is being destroyed” (perimitur; Adim. 21). However, for Against Adimantus the death of the Lord not only illustrated sin’s destruction within the believer but also performed it. To show this, Augustine combined the language about the Lord “making empty” (evacuo) the body of sin with his new language for the Lord “taking up” (suscipio) death and the curse.66 Augustine wrote compactly that when the curse of death threatened us, our Lord “emptied it out by taking it up” (suscipiendo evacuavit).67 The cross not only conveyed the visual image of Christ’s self-abnegation; it also “demonstrated” (commendavit) Christ’s love. But love given not only adds knowledge but also bestows power; so Christ suffused the human will with spiritual energy “by taking up the most ignominious kind of death known to humanity, . . . namely, the death of the cross.”68 This demonstration drew a picture, but it also communicated real and effective change, since by definition love’s self-giving affects the beloved. The Lord’s humble human act of love in his volition toward death later became the wellspring of Augustine’s teaching on “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As we will see, it also transformed the way the Church reads “the Law and the Prophets.”

V. A Fresh Perspective: Christ the Mediator (1 Tim. 2:5) The tipping point appeared in the Galatians commentary’s treatment of Paul’s concept of mediation in Gal. 3:19–20, where the Apostle supplied Augustine with something that had been missing from his work thus far, namely, an explicit understanding of the critical function of Christ’s humanity as mediator. The divine Word’s condescension was astounding, but by itself the Incarnation only set up the possibility of redemption. God did not redeem by divine fiat but by a conjunction of divine and human humility in Christ. Only a human being qua human could complete the salvation drama. As Augustine explained in the Commentary, the Word was one with God and so could not be a mediator, for the divine oneness precluded the prerequisite “twoness.” The one God who by nature acts unilaterally cannot be a mediator, who by definition acts bilaterally.69 As Paul put it, a mediator belongs to two parties and so “is not of one, whereas God is one” (Gal. 3:19). Nevertheless, Augustine continued, this mediator was also “one” with a different kind of “oneness.” Paul explained this “more clearly” (planius) in a text that served Augustine ever after as a Christological paradigm, namely, 1 Tim. 2:5: “God is one, one also is the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” Though nearly

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a decade had passed since he embraced Catholic Christianity, it is surprising that Augustine was quoting this text only for the first time.70 But it is impossible to overstate its importance for him after that point. Christ the Mediator then set the template for understanding the exchange whose crossing point was divine-human humility. Divine humility brought the Word to earth, and human humility brought the Man to the cross. Christ’s “visible” humility on the cross not only indicated God’s wisdom and power in the temporal arrangement for salvation but also put it into effect; that is, Christ crucified mediated it. The human soul now begins the journey to the spiritual realm first by descending to believe Christ’s human humility, and only from there ascends to understand his divine humility. The Mediator united in himself the human and divine, the temporal and eternal, the fleshly and spiritual—and as we will see, the figurative and real. A characteristically dense but provocative sentence of the Galatians commentary spells this out. So the only Son of God was made a Mediator belonging to God and to humanity, when the Word of God, God with God, both laid aside his majesty in descent to the human (suam maiestatem suam usque ad humana deposuit), and bore aloft human humility in ascent to the divine (humilitatem humanum usque ad divina subvexit), so that he might be the Mediator between God and man, through God a Man beyond humanity (homo per Deum ultra homines). (Comm. Gal. 24.8)71 Repeated references to Christ’s human aspect emphasized Augustine’s new awareness. Not surprisingly Augustine displayed a new concern to address this important point in other works of the period. Among the latter pages of the Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions from about this time, for instance, we find the theme of Christ the Mediator addressed for its first and only time (80.3). With a strong new awareness that Christ’s humanity drove the engine of redemption, Augustine became increasingly absorbed with the physical reality of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Book 14 of Augustine’s later Against Faustus the Manichee developed many themes from the Galatians commentary and Against Adimantus. Augustine again started by grounding his figurative reasoning process in metonymy: as “the Greek tongue” refers to an entire language, he wrote, so “from another angle” (alio modo) the punishment for sin that Christ suffered is also called “sin.”72 But now the physical component was crucial. The use of the figure was grounded in the literal

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reality of both the physical Christ’s body and the actual death that he died. Augustine’s view of the physical generation involved in original sin appears here. Genesis 2:17, Augustine recalled, pronounced the curse of mortality, “On the day you eat you will die the death.” Then Adam’s flesh received mortality, which he bequeathed to his descendants, who in turn passed it on in succession all the way to Mary, who gave her Son the flesh that suffered on the cross. What hung on the tree accursed by death was therefore a real body. This insistence on the physical reality of Christ’s death sounded a new note, and extended his argument about the curse in order to attack the Manichean denial of it. Moses’ curse, Augustine wrote, was in fact an elegant prophecy about future deniers of the crucifixion’s literal and historical reality. It warned readers against the future heretics’ backdoor way of denying not only the Lord’s literal death but also the curse upon sin. The Manichees, Augustine wrote, deny the actual (vera) death of the Lord in order to unhinge (sejungere) Christ from the curse, for if his death was not real, then no curse hung on the tree. That’s why, Augustine wrote, Deut. 21:23 “added the word ‘everyone,’ lest Christ be said not to have met with real death if out of foolish respect he were kept separate from the curse that was bound up with (coniunctum est) death” (Faust. 14.6).73

Sacramental Signs as Figurative and Real at the Same Time In the course of studying Paul’s letter to the Galatians, then, Augustine’s fresh analysis of Christ’s death reorganized his understanding of eternaltemporal relations. Rather than only distinguishing or juxtaposing or sequencing the two realms, the cross interrelated them as Christ took up sin, death, and the curse both figuratively and really. The resulting “sacramental” template altered Augustine’s understanding of the unity in Christ’s person and work; it also eventually affected his view of Christ’s unity with the Church, and the unity of sign and reality in sacraments. Augustine had earlier thought that Christ’s death, however real in itself, was primarily a tool of spiritual pedagogy that used “likenesses” to excite and coach the believer’s self-mortification. But a loophole inadvertently allowed the Manichees to say that self-mortification by likeness did not require Christ’s physical death. Augustine closed that loophole by adjusting his view of how figures work. The real flesh of Christ on the cross was necessary not only to show redemption but also to conduct it; Christ instructed the human mind with truth but also mediated grace to the human will.

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The cross therefore recast Augustine’s way of understanding the relation between the divine and the human, not by juxtaposing them, but by interrelating them. Rhetorical categories again decisively shaped his theological perspective. We have already studied his use of metonymy by association, the figurative verbal exchange of names between sin and the sinless by which Christ could take sin’s name as his own, and by dying, figuratively but really “destroy” it. But Augustine learned from Paul that Christ, participating in our flesh and “taking up death,” made redemption a human act. The human and historical realism was endemic to the story of salvation, and from this time Augustine insisted on it with greater and greater urgency. The realism inherent in the effective act of redemption, Christ’s double-edged death on the cross, required an expanded concept of “likeness.” He adapted the figure of associative metonymy in the direction of synecdoche, wherein a part stands for a greater whole, as we’ve seen (e.g., “head of cattle,” “all hands on deck,” and so on). Conceptually, not just the name of the part but the part itself stands for the greater whole. Christ destroyed sin when his dying flesh stood for all flesh, not only verbally but also really. He participated in the same flesh wherein the rest of us were condemned to death by the mortality inherited from Adam. So Christ died as one part of humanity representing the whole race, both verbally as well as historically; he thus “became a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13) so that we might be crucified with him and “the body of sin might be emptied out” (Rom 6:6–7). As a result, the one “who knew no sin” both figuratively and really (that is, in synecdoche) “became sin for us” so that we might “become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). In a word, Augustine’s perception about Christ and Scripture drew on a combination of associative metonymy and part-whole synecdoche that led to a figuratively real concept of “sacrament.” The “likeness” of the cross to mortification was also a “sacrament” with inherent power to alter the condition of individual believers and of humanity as a whole. This allowed Augustine to assert that those with spiritual understanding read the curse of Moses as a “sacrament of freedom” (sacramentum libertatis; Comm. Gal. 22.3). The proof of its power, and further evidence of Moses’ office as a prophet, lay in the symbolic enactment that signified healing. After the Israelites had been punished for their sins of rebellion by being bitten with snakes, God instructed Moses to raise an image of a snake on a pole, and everyone who looked at it was healed by an image of the very snake that had sickened them (Num. 21:9). This mimicked the healing enacted by the Lord’s crucifixion; we

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have Christ’s own authority for this (John 3:14). Augustine wrote, “It’s no cause for wonder, therefore, that he who overcame death by death, and sin by sin, and the serpent by the serpent, overcame the curse by the curse. Not only that, but death is cursed, sin is cursed, the serpent is cursed, and the cross triumphed over them all. That’s the meaning of, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’” (Comm. Gal. 22.16–17). Augustine’s verbs “overcame,” “cursed,” and “triumphed” here carry their full active force. The destruction of sin and death occurred both figuratively and really at the same time when the cross enacted what it signified. This points to a fresh view of “likeness” that combined truth’s teaching power to enlighten the mind with grace’s moral power to move the will. When set side by side, Augustine’s statements about Moses’ curse display a striking trajectory. The Propositions from Romans declared flatly, “Moses did not curse the Lord” (Propp. 32–34.5). Against Adimantus 21 altered the point: “The Lord did not deserve (meruit) the curse from the tongue of God’s servant Moses, but rather death itself deserved it, which our Lord destroyed by taking it up.”74 Then Against Faustus flatly stated that Moses’ curse indeed included Christ when he wrote, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” Augustine pointed out, “Not this one or that one, but absolutely everyone! Even the Son of God? Yes, absolutely!”75 But Augustine’s changed language came not from a changed view of the curse, but rather a changed understanding of figuration: the curse was indeed real—but in a figurative way.

Christ in the Old Testament: A Fresh Understanding of Scriptural Unity With all this in mind, let’s wind back around to Augustine’s way of reading the Old Testament. In a nutshell: Augustine’s developed understanding of Christ’s death as the divine-human act of mediation between God and man altered his perception of scriptural unity from which his practice of figurative reading flowed. Paul’s temporal way of thinking lodged itself in Augustine’s mind after he closely read Romans and Galatians, and it opened up fresh perspectives on the salvation process. One catalyzing question about how the heroes of the Old Testament were justified by faith (Comm. Gal. 24.1–17) was suggested by a related question on the Law’s function in the interim period before Christ. For Augustine, Paul answered those questions in Gal. 3 by unearthing a deep premise that showed how the Old and New Testaments are interrelated. Paul declared that because

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God’s promises were based on faith, the Law was given for pedagogic reasons to counter transgressions until the coming of the promised “seed” of Abraham, who was Christ (Gal. 3:19). Unlike the promises given immediately to Abraham, God “arranged” for the Law to be given to Israel through angels by the hand of a mediator, that is, Moses. However, Augustine read Paul’s word “mediator” (Gal. 3:20) as referring not to Moses but to Christ.76 Viewing the Law through this lens, with his thought now permanently altered by Paul’s transposition of Israel’s story into Christian salvation history, Augustine saw Christ as not only coordinating but also interweaving the old and new covenants. That answered Augustine’s question of how the old saints were saved by faith, for in believing the promises they effectively believed in Christ, as the Holy Spirit revealed his future coming to them, in just the same way that Christians believed in him by looking back upon his past coming. The whole process disclosed the comprehensive “Christ-unity” of Scripture (Comm. Gal. 24:1).77 In order to see Augustine’s move here, we must attend closely again to grammatical quirks in the translation of Paul’s Greek, for another remarkable Old Latin mistranslation helped Augustine to crystallize these decisive ideas. Paul’s letter had sought to call the Galatians back from forsaking Christ by having reverted to outmoded Jewish practices. As mentioned, to underscore the Law’s temporary character he drew on a rabbinic tradition that pictured God using Moses as a mediator so as to “order” the Law for Israel (Gal. 3:19–20). Paul’s masculine Greek participle, diategeis, “ordered,” referred back to the masculine antecedent, nomos, “law”: that is, for Paul, God gave the Law to Moses the mediator by means of angels. For him it was an argument about the Law’s penultimate status in the salvation story. But the Old Latin translators garbled Paul’s sentence by rendering the Greek masculine diategeis by the Latin neuter dispositum (“arranged” in the sense of “set up” or “placed”); this word therefore naturally looked back for its antecedent to a neuter noun, in this case semen, “seed.”78 So as Augustine read the Old Latin, God’s action took place in relation to the seed (“God placed the seed”), rather than in relation to the Law (“God ordered the Law”), as in the Greek. Other elements of the sentence shifted accordingly. For Augustine, the custodianship of the angels helped the seed take its place within the interpersonal and transtemporal body called “Christ” comprised of head and members. Paul had said explicitly that “the seed of Abraham” was Christ (Gal 3:16); for Augustine, therefore, all the elements of Christianity already existed in inchoate form in the old covenant. Christ the head was virtually incarnate already in the Old Testament, and his

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members existed already in the time of Israel: indeed the body of Christ already existed as Israel, being cared for by angels in lieu of Christ’s still future appearance. The force of the Latin preposition in correlatively inclined toward a sense of location (“in the hand of the mediator”), rather than the Greek’s sense of instrumentation (“by the hand of the mediator”). Thus in its time, Augustine reasoned, the Law functioned negatively alongside an embryonic but real faith in the future Mediator; thus it was a hidden form of Christian faith that justified the ancient saints. The Word, “though not yet incarnate,” nevertheless in the time of Israel became deeply involved in the workings of temporal salvation by deploying angels as surrogates to “arrange” salvation’s temporal process. The same Holy Spirit who was active in the angels would later be active in Christ’s earthly ministry. As a result, the future “Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” was already provisionally incarnate in the work of the angels who administered the old covenant. Through them he used the Law to stir Israel, despite its incomprehension, to long for his future coming; through them also the Holy Spirit revealed Christ’s future humility to Israel’s patriarchs, prophets, and spiritual people. Augustine concluded that Christ’s own pre-incarnate presence ensured that “prophetic faith” in his future human humility justified the Old Testament saints no less effectively before his advent than the Church’s faith in the gospel justified Christians after it. “So everyone who by believing loved and by loving imitated Christ’s humility (which was made known by revelation before Christ humbled himself and through the gospel afterwards79) was cured of the impiety of pride so as to be reconciled to God” (Comm. Gal. 24.10). The presence of Christ, the reality of the Church, and the unity of Scripture each perdured in different forms from the first Testament to the second. To summarize, when God acted to “place the seed in the hand of the mediator,” Christ incarnate-to-be was embodied in Israel and cared for by angels. The ancient saints’ faith in God’s promise equated to faith in Christ obscurely present among them, and so his future humility saved them. The Law operated separately for those caught in transgression, though it also foreshadowed the future revelation of grace. This perspective had implications for Augustine’s approach to reading the Old Testament. Christ’s proleptic or anticipatory human presence in Israel underlay the work of the angels who “administered the entire arrangement of the Old Testament” in the stead and for the sake of the mediator to come.80 Their surrogate service in effect turned the angels into the future Mediator’s temporary “stunt doubles.” They were able to perform this service,

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Augustine wrote, because “the Holy Spirit was active in them, and the Word of Truth himself, though not yet incarnate, never withdrew from any service-work of speaking the truth (veridica administratio)” during Israel’s phase of the salvation story.81 Their modus operandi was a device that so conjoined God’s voice with the voices of characters in Israel’s story that Scripture could mediate the very presence of the Lord to Israel. This special way of speaking authorized the angels and the prophets not only to speak and act in God’s name but also even to speak as God; they used the first person “I” when speaking the word from God in order to indicate its divine authority. “The angels acted sometimes in the person of God, sometimes in their own person, as was the practice of the prophets.”82 A text from the contemporaneous Against Adimantus spelled this out more clearly. For as the Word of God is in the prophet, and it is correct to say, “The Lord spoke,” because the Word of God, that is, Christ, speaks the truth in the prophet, so he himself speaks in the angel when the angel announces the truth, and it is correct to say, “God spoke” and “God appeared.” In the same way it is also correct to say, “The angel spoke,” and “The angel appeared,” though in the first case Scripture spoke of God dwelling in the creature (ex persona inhabitantis Dei) and in the second case of the creature acting in obedience to him (ex persona servientis creaturae).83 The messengers often prefaced their words with the notification, “Thus says the Lord” (e.g., Amos 1:3, 6, 9, etc.), but at other times simply declared “I” in God’s place (e.g., Exod. 3:2–6; Hos. 11:1–9). The voice of God and the voice of the messenger thus “inhabited each other.” This way of speaking carried over to the time of the New Testament apostles who spoke in Christ’s name after his coming. “According to this rule,” Augustine continued, recalling 2 Cor. 13:3, “the Apostle also says, ‘Do you want to experience Christ who speaks in me?’” The operative figurative structure was not limited to the mere exchange of labels connected with associative metonymy, for the creature’s words actually were God’s words in accommodated form. The more suitable figure is synecdoche, for an angel or prophet who spoke God’s words in the first person was a “part” that stood for the “whole” by taking up divine words into its own voice. In terms of rhetorical analysis, this pointed to a figure of speech that Greek rhetoricians called prosopopoeia, literally, “making a face,” which Latin handbooks either

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transliterated or paraphrased as fictiones personarum, “masking of persons”; in short, it was a practice of “impersonation.”84 The importance of this figure to Augustine’s ever-deepening understanding of the Christ-centered unity of figure and reality, as well as the unity of times and themes in Scripture, will become evident in the next chapter.

Conclusion: The Importance of the Apostle During his priesthood, Paul equipped Augustine with the conceptual and pastoral tools—and the “street perspective” on faith—that he needed to minister, preach, and teach the unsophisticated “many” in the congregation at Hippo. Paul made Augustine’s earlier ladder-shaped “vertical” outlook more “horizontal,” and his practice of exegesis became more time-sensitive by focusing upon the dynamics of “the temporal arrangement for human salvation.” Above all Paul helped Augustine to plumb its center in the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ, whose integral humanity stood out more clearly against the dark backdrop of the cross. In this way Paul supplied Augustine with the new conceptual tools he needed to reformat his template for relating eternal and temporal dimensions of creation, Christ, and salvation. Augustine so tightly interwove his thought that changes in one area of thought affected related parts at the same time.85 Clustered around Christ were companion elements in the temporal arrangement: the Church, the sacraments, and the Scriptures. Augustine’s altered vision of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal in turn modified, as we’ll see, his approach to the rhetorical unity of Scripture. By penetrating through the text to the course of saving events which gave rise to the text, Augustine’s faith shaped his reading and reception of those events. By the end of his priesthood, Augustine had fixed the elements of a stable understanding of scriptural unity that would ground a supple practice of figurative reading. Augustine learned rhetoric from the speeches of Cicero, and he learned philosophy from the books of the Platonists. But he learned Christianity from the letters of St. Paul. The Apostle was already Augustine’s model for becoming a Christian ascetic and thinker, but now he also became the model for becoming a Catholic pastor and biblical preacher. When Augustine turned to study the Psalter, he used the lesson learned from Paul to read the great collection of ancient Israel’s prayers through the Church’s faith in Christ. The next chapter examines how Paul’s insights percolated throughout Augustine’s reading of the Psalms.

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Hearing Voices christ at prayer “in the psalm and on the cross”

Introduction: A Symbiosis with the Psalms The Book of Psalms surfaces at crucial moments in Augustine’s life.1 At his post-conversion retreat in Cassiciacum outside Milan in 386, the first Old Testament text on which Augustine sets his Catholic eyes is a psalm (Conf. 9.4.8). Fast-forward forty-five years to 430 as the Vandals prepare their siege of Hippo: we find the aged and infirm Augustine on his deathbed asking for psalms to be hung around him in large letters to console his final hours.2 The years in between witness him not only praying psalms daily with his little community of monastic brothers but also preaching and dictating hundreds of expositions, many of which have survived to our day.3 Augustine’s attraction to studying the Psalms is hardly a surprise. His restless spirit flowed well with their prayers that eddied with human feeling, and their words that channeled the most primitive human desires, cravings, fears, sorrows, and joys into the search for God. Augustine’s intensely analytical mind combined with his natural emotional sensitivity to create “a sort of preset harmony between the text of the Psalms and the soul of Augustine.”4 That made them an ideal laboratory for analyzing the movements of the religious soul. Their vehemence fit Augustine’s pattern of seeking truth out of a sense of personal longing, and he could read the Psalms for both their “diagnostic” and “therapeutic” properties.5 As Augustine examined the human soul’s darker depths under the Psalms’ white light, each verse became a mini-exercise in spiritual living and a

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catalyst for “the conversion of the affections.”6 Their dialogical literary form, as well as their central place in the Church’s liturgy, parlayed his lofty but solitary early intention to “know God and the soul, nothing more” (Sol. 1.2.7) into a scriptural mode of communal spiritual searching. But he also gradually discovered in the Psalms a vast field of biblical prophecy whose fulfillment in Christ brilliantly illumined the contours of Christianity and invited every Christian reader to apprentice themselves to its wisdom. The Psalms became a mirror in which Augustine examined his soul, a lens through which he examined Old Testament prophecies of Christ, and indeed a prism through which he read the entire Bible. Augustine conceived a series of Psalms studies early in his priesthood, perhaps originally seeking to nourish his small monastic community living on the cathedral grounds at Hippo. His work was not without personal models, as he (probably) had the extraordinary fortune of hearing Saint Ambrose preach on the Psalms in living voice. But when Augustine became a priest and preacher, he went beyond this early personal exposure to immerse himself in the already centuries-long tradition of Christian psalm interpretation. We know, for instance, that he read Hilary’s Psalms expositions as part of his “apprenticeship” in the craft of biblical commentary.7 Augustine completed studies of the first thirty-two Psalms (thirty-three in modern Bibles8) before he became a bishop; these date probably from late in his priesthood, about 394–395.9 As bishop, he extended the series over several decades into many sermons delivered in Hippo and elsewhere. Eventually filling in the gaps with dictated expositions, he completed work on the Psalter late in life and considered the collection a single work.10 This massive series has come down to us as the Enarrationes in Psalmos, or Expositions of the Psalms, the most extensive treatment of the Psalter that has survived from the ancient church; indeed it is longer than all other extant patristic works on the Psalms combined.11 It is also the longest of all Augustine’s surviving writings, more than twice the length of The City of God. The first series of studies covering Psalms 1–32 stands apart from the rest of the Expositions in several respects as a distinct product of his priesthood.12 Some of these expositions are full-length treatments, others mere sermon drafts, and some barely more than notes; doubtless they include material that Augustine would have later left on the cutting-room floor. But their roughness gives us a unique opportunity to watch Augustine’s mind at work in his new exegetical workshop. Internal markers show Augustine composing the studies in the order of the Psalms themselves.

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He cross-referenced later passages with earlier ones: comments on Psalm 3 referred back to Psalm 2 (3.5); Psalm 7’s title connected Judas to Absalom, David’s traitorous son, “as we saw in Psalm 3” (7.1); at 10.3 he fulfilled a promise made in 8.9 to interpret the word “moon” in relation to the Church.13 This orderliness throws light on how Augustine dealt with issues as they arose in each text. Furthermore, scholars think the expositions of Psalms 1–32 fall into two major groupings, though the exact dividing line remains disputed, some breaking after Psalm 10, others after Psalm 14. I have adopted the position here that recognizes a pause between the expositions of Psalms 14 and 15.14 Augustine studied the text of Psalms 1–14 more extensively, at times with a nearly pedantic attention to grammar, vocabulary, and Greek manuscripts. They also showed characteristics that fit his early concern to map the road of spiritual ascent for advanced believers. By contrast, the second block of studies covering Psalms 15–32 is a sheaf of exegetical notes that Augustine apparently compiled fairly quickly; indeed their choppy brevity suggests that he was pressed for time, perhaps while events were moving swiftly toward his ordination as bishop.15 Augustine reread Paul and studied the Psalms concurrently during his priesthood. This chapter examines Augustine’s Psalms studies and explores Paul’s impact on them. We will see how they filled out Augustine’s understanding of Christ’s humanity, developed his ideas about redemption, and advanced his practice of reading the Old Testament figuratively. I will argue that although Augustine read Paul continually throughout the period, the Apostle’s insight about Christ’s crucified humanity that I discussed in the last chapter emerged at a transition point that becomes visible midway through his treatment of Psalms 1–32. What follows will describe that movement by characterizing the approach of the first block, then compare it to the second. Once Augustine read the Psalms in terms of Paul’s insights about Christ’s crucified human humility, they yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of insights that permanently altered Augustine’s Christian faith and reading of Scripture. The Psalms were ripe for Augustine’s close study and teaching because traditional Christian exegesis of the Psalter had long focused on Christ’s humanity; wizened old Bishop Valerius may have awakened him to this. Indeed the headwaters of the river of Christian reflection on the Psalms were in the New Testament itself, which already illumined some notoriously obscure patches of the Old Testament’s “vast forest of prophecy” by setting them in the light of Christ.16 The canonical Gospels portrayed Jesus using psalms to explain his identity, his message, and above all his passion.

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The Synoptics cast the story of the crucifixion in terms of lament psalms, especially Psalm 21 (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), Psalm 30 (Luke 23:46), and Psalm 68 (Matt. 27:34). Luke’s post-resurrection Jesus is said to have explicitly taught the apostles “everything about himself in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). The apostles are portrayed preaching and teaching the Psalms as prophecies of the messianic age in general and of Messiah in particular (Acts 2:25–28; 4:25–26; 13:33–37; Rom. 15:8–11; Heb. 1:5–13). But Christians also read the Psalter as the Book of Christ in another way: not only as an “objective” account of fulfilled prophecy but also as a spiritual revelation of his human soul, in fact as a virtual transcript of his inner life while accomplishing the work of redemption. Paul particularly taught Christians to read the Psalms as echoes of the voice of Christ.17 Second-century writers like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus continued this Christological reading; so did Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen in the third century. In the fourth century, the Christ of the Psalms was important to Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom in the east and Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, and Ambrose of Milan in the west.18 Augustine’s search for Christ’s humanity in the Psalms was not the product of mere theological curiosity. We’ve already seen that the lay Augustine saw Christ’s work on the “visible” plane of history as faith’s starting point for salvation and spiritual ascent. Augustine the Catholic priest faced the pastoral challenge of ministering to “the many,” the simple believing folk who would never become spiritual adepts. He also dealt with the challenges presented to the Church by people who misconstrued the Christian message in various ways, that is, by puzzled inquirers (pagans), obstreperous outsiders (pagans and Jews), subversive heterodox (Manichees), and scheming schismatics (Donatists). Augustine became supremely concerned at this time to understand more exactly the beginnings of the act of faith and to find more effective ways to assist simple people to become and remain believers. That required a sharper analysis of God’s “temporal arrangement for salvation.” He had theorized about it in his early works but in daily ministry he needed to articulate as exactly as possible how this plan emerged in the real realm of flesh and history. Clearly the humanity of Jesus Christ was essential. Sometime past the midpoint of his service as presbyter under Valerius, while still serving as an “apprentice” under Paul’s biblical tutelage, Augustine took up the Psalms in order to think deeply and intentionally about the human Christ. The poignant texts taught him

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how God, “in Christ your Son our Lord and by your Scriptures,” deigned to show “the way of salvation” (Conf. 7.7.11).

Part One: Looking for Christ in Psalms 1–14 As he opened the Psalms Augustine found Christ the Man quickly, for Christians saw him in the very first verse of the first psalm: “Blessed is the Man who has not strayed in the counsel of the ungodly.” (I capitalize “the Man” to stress Augustine’s construction.) “This sentence,” Augustine wrote, “should be taken as referring to our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, ‘the Lordly Man’ (dominicus homo).”19 The special phrase dominicus homo, borrowed from other early Christian writers,20 emphasized the uniqueness of “the Man beyond all others.”21 But Augustine’s usage was experimental; after a flurry of references over several months, it quietly dropped from view.22 Augustine explained in Revisions that he became disenchanted by its imprecision after concluding that any member of Christ’s body might be called a “Lordly Man” (1.19.8). But dominicus homo reveals the rough contours of Augustine’s thought on Christ in his late priesthood. The title supported Augustine’s anti-Manichean polemic by stressing the Word’s actual appearance in earthly flesh. But more importantly for him, the title signified Christ’s human lowliness by underscoring the fathomless depths to which God plunged in order to save lost humanity. This “Lordly Man” had a special status before God and indeed was rooted like “a tree planted by the streams of waters” (Ps. 1:3); that is, his divine nature dug itself into earthy human nature and took root alongside the constantly flowing river of time (1.3). There his humanity, the small, dotlike “apple of the eye” (pupilla oculi; Ps. 16:8), exercised the divine prerogative of judgment (Exp. Ps. 16.8). Almighty and all-encompassing Wisdom, who orders all things pleasingly from one end of the cosmos to the other (Wis. 8:1), forswore her glory in order to “carry” the tiny being who was “less than the angels” (Ps. 8:6; Exp. Ps. 8.11; cf. 1.3). For describing the stunning act of divinity stooping to embrace human nature, Augustine chose the word suscipere (“take up”). So his salvation-historical reading of Psalm 10:5, “His eyes look kindly upon the poor one,” pictured the Word looking upon “the poor One” (the Latin is singular) “whom he took up according to his Godhead (quem suscepit secundum Deum)” (Exp. Ps. 10.12). The Word did not merely append or employ the Man like a utensil but rather lifted him into a mysterious

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and unique personal unity with divinity. “The Word so took him up that God became one with him” (ibid. 3.3). For that reason dominicus homo could speak the words of Psalm 3:4 and call the Word “my glory.”23 Proud people, Augustine wrote, should note that the Man is the model for all human reception of divine grace on which he utterly depended in his union with the Word. “You are my Susceptor,” says the Man; the word might be literally if clumsily translated, “my Up-taker.” Augustine reached for a way to express the divine-human bond so profound that not even the convulsions of crucifixion could shake it. The mind (mens) of dominicus homo, Augustine wrote, “so inhered and, so to speak, grew together with (inhaesit et quodammodo colavit) the surpassing excellence of the Word who took up the Man, that it was not displaced (deponeretur) even by so great a humiliation as the passion.”24 Augustine tentatively described Christ’s soul as the nexus of the divine-human conjunction that later tradition called “the hypostatic union.” Augustine did not pause to clarify the oddity that the Man was praying to the divine person united to him; he simply let the enigma stand. Augustine strained at this time to explain this mystery to his satisfaction; his language stiffened while scrupulously trying to distinguish Christ’s humanity and divinity. If his faith was sure, his thoughts still stumbled and his words still stuttered. A wrinkle in the wording of Psalm 3 particularly shows Augustine’s difficulty (Exp. Ps. 3.4). Verse 5 of the Psalm reads, “He heard me from (de) his holy mountain.” “He” who hears prayer is clearly the divine Word (Augustine has just pictured the Man speaking to the Word in 3.3). Augustine further reasoned that because Scripture elsewhere calls Christ a “mountain” (Dan. 2:34), the “holy mountain” refers to the “person” of dominicus homo. But that conclusion inconveniently scrambled the idea that “me” also refers to dominicus homo, for that would picture the Man illogically saying, “he heard me from me.” Furthermore, the directional preposition de, “from,” ill fit the Christological union of the Man and the Word; because dominicus homo was always one with the Word, no prayer ever went out “from” him to the Word. So who was the “me” speaking here? Augustine met the conceptual emergency by inserting a metaphorical qualifier tamquam (“as if”) that reset the sentence in figurative mode. “This prayer,” Augustine wrote, “cannot be understood as coming from the Lord’s own person (ab ipsius persona, i.e., homo dominicus), unless perhaps he wanted to speak like this: ‘Out of myself, as if from (tamquam de) his holy mountain, he heard me, seeing that he dwelt in me,’ that is, in this mountain.”25 The figuration allowed him to tweak the sense of de away from “from” and toward its sense

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of “in.” However clumsy the maneuver, it allowed Augustine to refocus the text upon the divine Word dwelling within the man Jesus. In his ineffable oneness with the Man, the Word hears the Man’s prayer “as if” it was external to him. This preserves the distinction and transcendence of the divine. The Man remains a conduit or a stairstep to the divine, a cipher for the whole temporal dispensation that leads from earth to heaven.

I.“Who Speaks Here?” The Work of Prosopological Exegesis That line of interpretation of Psalm 3 reveals one of Augustine’s more remarkable tools for the figurative exegesis of the Psalms that listens to Christ as the speaking voice of the Psalms. Not only do various voices in the Psalter describe or speak about Christ: Christ himself speaks. For Augustine, even if only a few in ancient Israel faintly heard his voice, Christ nevertheless really spoke. Then after amplifying his voice in the Incarnation, it was clearly audible to Christians who chanted the Psalms. Augustine’s tool for distinguishing Christ’s voice behind the other voices in the text came from adapting a standard practice of his grammatical and rhetorical training called “prosopological exegesis.” A number of fine studies of this practice have appeared.26 Briefly, prosopological exegesis refers to the work of literary analysis that identifies the various speaking voices in a poetic text. The speaking person, prosopon in Greek (lit., “face,” which Latin writers often translated as persona, “person”), had to be identified because texts were transcribed without cues, line breaks, punctuation, or even spaces between letters. Grammatical exercises taught the young how to distinguish and identify voices in passages of Homer or Vergil. Grammarians also trained readers to attend to the form of a verb that indicates its “person,” that is, the first person I, the second person you, or the third person he, she, or it. Framing the text as a dialogue between interlocutors required a disciplined analysis that rigorously discriminated between each speaking voice. The distinctive features that emerged from each prosopon built up a distinct profile for each character in the story and shaped the reader’s overall comprehension of the text. Prosopological exegesis was therefore an important tool for literary understanding. Early Christian writers adapted prosopological analysis for interpreting poetic biblical texts like the Psalms and the Song of Songs, and routinely identified the speaking “I” (ego) of the Psalms as Christ. Augustine’s early Psalms expositions often asked, “Who is speaking here?” His first such answer occurs in the exposition of Psalm 2:6–7, where the voice of the Son

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of God announces, “I have been established by [God] as king over Zion” (Ps. 2:6; Exp. Ps. 2.5). The Father having “selected” him for his messianic mission (2.5–6; cf. Exp. Ps. 44.19), the Son recounts the words of the Father, “The Lord said to me, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’” But Augustine closed the Son’s quote of the Father at that point, and shifted voice identity back to the human Christ at v. 8, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your heritage.” This was the voice of the Son speaking “according to the Man he took up” (secundum susceptum hominem) just as the Man begins to execute the temporal dispensation for salvation.27 Augustine resorted often to prosopological analysis in the other early Psalms expositions; he identified in Psalm 5 the voices of Christ the Son, God the Father, as well as the Church (5.1), and heard the words of individuals like the “perfected soul” in Psalm 7 (anima perfecta; 7.1) and the “Catholic soul” in Psalm 10 (anima catholica; 10.6). At times he discriminated between voices that alternated within a single psalm (2.6–7; 9.4, 7), or differentiated voices within a portion of a psalm (9.6), or even recast and reinterpreted entire psalms according to a different voice (3.9–10; 7.20).

II. Back to Augustine’s Adventure with Psalm 3 Prosopological analysis was especially important for explaining Psalm 3. As we’ve seen, Augustine struggled to make this exposition coherent by correctly identifying its voices. His exegesis was tediously exact and exhaustive; but this deliberateness allows us to watch Augustine as he makes his interpretive moves, as it were, in slow motion. He established the interpretive baseline in v. 6’s death and resurrection imagery: “I rested and fell asleep, and I arose” compels us, he contends, to read the psalm as though spoken “in the person of Christ” (ex persona Christi; Exp. Ps. 3.6).28 This exposition draws our interest for its abrupt shift between different hermeneutical perspectives. First, he subdivided the Christological perspective into alternative divine-eternal and human-temporal lines of interpretation; one reads the Gospel story spiritually (spiritaliter) according to the divine Son’s flight from his betrayer, while the other reads it historically (historice) according to the Man’s human suffering (3.1). This Christological reading continued through the whole psalm in 3.1–8 as the prayer of the head of Christ’s body. But in 3.9 he backtracked to reread the entire psalm from the beginning as the words of a different persona, Christ’s body the Church as it journeys through its time of temporal affliction. Then in 3.10 he returned to the start once more to read the psalm as the prayer of an individual

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member of the body. Augustine thus sharply distinguished at least three speaking voices and perspectives. This self-consciously fastidious approach shows Augustine still experimenting with his style of exegesis,29 but it also points to his concern to avoid confusing the divinely transcendent and humanly immanent perspectives.

III. The Importance of Figuration in the First Psalms Expositions This same concern to distinguish the transcendent and immanent dimensions appears in the way the early Psalms expositions use figurative devices. Scripture talks about God indirectly, Augustine contends, because we cannot know God directly. Scripture’s strategy requires readers to develop skills in translating visible images to invisible reality; that presupposes not only sharp literary skills but also a profound shift in one’s spiritual perspective. Scripture constantly “speaks in our way,”30 but it cannot be understood by carnal standards.31 Its metaphors often play off an image’s literal absurdity in order to point the reader to figurative thought.32 This includes garden-variety metaphors wherein body parts refer to powers by which we perceive the acts of God; for example, God’s ear refers to his power (potentia) to perceive the heart’s intentions (Exp. Ps. 13.3). In the same vein Scripture borrows the image of the face, that unique human icon of identity and expression, by speaking of “God’s face” to portray the power by which he makes himself known (10.11). Further, because just souls reflect the character of heaven, so they are figuratively called “heavens” (2.4). Such metaphors recur in Scripture so often “as a matter of principle” (regulariter) that Augustine asks his readers to keep track of them, in order to spare both him and them the busywork of constantly repeating himself (9.33). But for interpreting the Psalms Augustine uses a more subtle and potentially stronger figure that we have already encountered in the early Genesis commentary: metonymy, figurative “name exchange” through association. Metonymy remains Augustine’s figure of choice for the way it effectively protects God’s transcendence from the perversions of simple-mindedly literal readings. Metonymy often describes an effect in terms of its cause. A simple example is the two-word prayer of Psalm 3:7, “Arise, Lord.” Is God asleep or inattentive? No, obviously. Scripture’s provocative figure actually means, “Lord, so act in me that you may cause me to arise” (Exp. Ps. 3.6; cf. 5.4; 6.1). Augustine writes, “It is customary in the divine Scriptures to attribute to the person of God what he does in us.”33 Examples abound in these early Psalms

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expositions. God’s “laugh” (Ps. 2:4) actually describes the power (vis) of his saints who, having been formed by God’s justice, observe the ridiculous futility of the nations’ resistance to Christ—as if from God’s point of view (Exp. Ps. 2.3). God’s “anger” is not a divine emotion, but rather the innerworldly power within the saints, produced by God’s righteousness, that checks sinners in the world (ibid. 2.4; 7.12). Augustine comments: “What takes place in [God’s] agents is referred to as ‘his anger’ because it happens through his laws” (6.3). Scripture says that God “hates” those who work iniquity; but that comes “from that way of speaking” (ex illa locutione, i.e., metonymy) whereby an effect is attributed to a cause by association. In the literal sense, only sinners hate truth; but figuratively “truth seems to hate all whom she does not allow to remain with her” (5.7). Unworthy people turn from God all on their own; nevertheless Scripture says figuratively that God “turns his face away from” sinners” (12.1). Likewise, Augustine writes (6.6), the psalmist figuratively (that is, by way of metonymy) “calls the sin committed in contempt of divine law ‘death,’ just as we give the name ‘death’ to the sting of death, because it causes death to happen; thus, ‘the sting of death is sin’” (1 Cor. 15:56). These examples all name a cause from its effect, and point to God’s transcendence over the temporal and human. Such figurative moves, plentiful in the Scriptures, are plain to the spiritually astute but baffle the carnally dull-hearted. This kind of “effect for cause” metonymy at this time also governs Augustine’s perception of divine knowledge. Augustine’s key text is Deut. 3:13, “The Lord your God tests you in order to know if you love him.” The sense is incongruous: it is “unworthy of God” to speak of him testing anyone in order to learn something. So the text evidently uses a cause-for-effect metonymy that turns the intransitive verb “know” into a transitive “cause to know,” or “inform,” with an implied object, “you.” The verse says, in effect, “God tests you in order to inform you of whether or not you love him” (Exp. Ps. 5.4; 6.1). The reality of the majestic, immaterial, unchangeable, supratemporal God trumps all images, and metonymy guards God’s transcendence. Furthermore, Deut. 3:13 also shows how Augustine thinks about the way Scripture speaks of Christ by explaining the classic Christological problem of the Lord’s ignorance about the date of the apocalypse (6.1). Jesus says that “not even the Son” knows when the world ends (Mark 13:34). Augustine explains that it is said “the Son does not know” because he does not make known the precise date to his disciples. Metonymy changes “know” from an intransitive to a transitive verb (6.1).34 Augustine’s “scriptural orchestration”35 in 3.6 invokes, along with Psalm 3:7 and Deut. 3:13, the important

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Christological metonymy embedded in Paul’s query in 2 Cor. 13:3: “Do you want proof that Christ speaks within me?” Projecting back upon Christ the sensation of being moved to speak, Paul credits Christ with speaking in him. The axial principle “nothing unworthy of God,” already an operative hermeneutical rule in his lay works,36 here applies Christologically: nothing unworthy may be spoken of Christ, the Son of God. Metonymy supplied a critical understanding of the text that protected the perception of the Word’s divinity from the taint of a literalistic reading. Such cause-for-effect metonymy, which Augustine first used in the anti-Manichean Genesis commentary, extended into Augustine’s understanding of how Christ speaks in Scripture. This figure’s frequency suggests that Augustine principally aimed these first Psalms expositions not at the Church’s “little ones” but at budding spiritual thinkers who had some ability to crack open Scripture’s surface images to find its rational-spiritual truths.

IV. Reaching for Christ’s Divinity in the Expositions of Psalms 1–14 For that kind of audience, the first Psalms expositions strongly emphasized the soul’s aspirations to embrace Christ’s divinity. Advancing believers stood “high up” on the spiritual ladder of ascent, so to speak. This “top-down” approach is apparent in the exposition of Psalm 2, where Augustine saw a description of the Father’s eternal generation of the Son, and therefore read “today” in v. 7 as a nontemporal word (Exp. Ps. 2.6; cf. 18.7). The absolute phrase “the Son” emphasized him as the only-begotten of the Father (ibid. 9.1). Paul’s acclamation of the divine “Christ, the power and wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24) reappeared here, as often in the earliest Psalms expositions (Exp. Ps. 2.6; 3.1; 5.8; 8.5; 9.7; 9.35). “God’s Wisdom” (12.1), or simply “Wisdom” (8.11), is the divine Word who “deserted” Judas the betrayer as light flees darkness (3.1). Though the Son’s “Power” will one day render divine judgment at the second coming openly (aperte), he has already done so at his first coming secretly (occulte) (9.5–8). Even now Christ secretly separates the godly and ungodly according to the character of each one’s inner desires (9.17). This abundant use of metonymy to protect against attenuating the perception of Christ’s divine transcendence parallels the way it elsewhere protected the image of God’s transcendence. But there’s a twist: Christ could not only be transcendent, because by definition he conjoined the transcendent Godhead and immanent humanity. Christ’s interrelation of human and divine therefore challenged Augustine’s linguistic categories. He gingerly

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approached the subject of Christ’s humanity, because several concerns collided there: on the one hand, the Incarnation encompassed the mystery of uniting the human with the divine, and on the other, careless phrasing about that mystery risked the danger of collapsing the divine into the sensory world. Up to this point metonymy’s emphasis on transcendence and the “spiritual pedagogy of the Incarnation” held the problem at bay; but this spiritualintellectual approach could not fully explain the potent spiritual change that occurred at Christ’s advent, particularly humanity’s redemption from sin and death. Furthermore, if the Psalms really portrayed the inner life of Christ’s soul in all its tumultuous humanity, then this reading was already kicking against the limits of Augustine’s neat pedagogic Christology. How after all did Christ bring together the divine and human and the eternal and temporal?

V. Conflating the Divine-Human: Images of Christ as King and Priest Augustine’s first concern was not merely to articulate a more exact and satisfying theoretical Christology but rather to gain an understanding of how the divine and human natures functioned for salvation, that is, “for the benefit of the many that they may be saved” (1 Cor. 10:33; Letter 21.4). His aim was pastoral before it was philosophical, and functional before it was metaphysical. Figurative images helped him out. To envision Christ’s union, Augustine turned to a figurative reading of scriptural images that showed the divine and human working together. Two images from ancient Israel were especially effective for manifesting the divine-human Christology at play in Augustine’s early Psalms exegesis: the gloriously strong divine King who came down to earth to defend and teach his people, and the sympathetically weak human Priest who lifted himself to heaven as a sin-offering. Images of these two figures are strewn throughout the early Psalms expositions (e.g., Exp. Ps. 19.10). But Augustine’s fullest analysis appears in Question 61 of the Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions, written about the same time as the first Psalms expositions. There he figuratively elaborated the tale of Jesus feeding 5,000 people as told in John 6:3–13. The story’s five loaves represent the five books of Moses, while the two fish, Augustine wrote, “signify those two offices by which the people [Israel] were ruled, so that thanks to them they would be subject to the government of wise counsel—namely, a kingship and priesthood.”37 Kings and priests, of course, performed different functions in ancient times. A

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king fought his people’s enemies, rectified their wrongs, and in their desperate moments led the people to safety. In times of peace, the king taught, guided, and encouraged his subjects; he shared their lives and customs and generally promoted their welfare. The people in turn embraced the king as a larger and better version of themselves and bound their loyalty and their welfare to him. In the Old Testament “these two character-roles (personae) foreshadowed our Lord,” wrote Augustine, “for he alone upheld them both, and he alone fulfilled them, not figuratively but actually.”38 God descended to earth as a man-King to fight for his followers and to clear their path to liberation. He defeated their satanic adversary and modeled the right kind of struggle against sin. Conflating the images of Israel’s kings and the Exodus-era tribal lords, Moses and Joshua, Augustine wrote: For our king is Jesus Christ, who gave us an example of overcoming by taking on our sins in his mortal flesh, yielding nothing to the enemy’s temptations, neither his pleasures nor his terrors. Finally, shedding his flesh, he confidently despoiled the principalities and powers, triumphing over them in himself [Col. 2:15]. And so, he himself leading us, we are liberated from the burdens and travails of this pilgrimage of ours, as though (tamquam) escaping from Egypt. During our escape, the sins that furiously pursued us are drowned in the sacrament of baptism. And as long as we hope in his promise, which we do not yet see, it’s as though (tamquam) we are being led through the desert, with the Word of God consoling us in the holy Scriptures just as (sicut) manna from heaven consoled them. And so with him still leading us, we’re confident we can be welcomed into the heavenly Jerusalem as (tamquam) into the Promised Land, where he will keep us forever, ruling and protecting us. Thus our Lord Jesus Christ is shown to be (ostenditur) our king.39 The divine-human King battles for his subjects’ welfare and freedom, fights the forces of sin, and leaves his followers a model of courage in the face of death and a strategy for outwitting evil. Christ our “Deliverer” (liberator) is a prominent theme in the early period.40 Meanwhile, Christ the Priest won the purification of sins by his death and so fulfilled the figures of Israel’s ritual sacrifices in the temple; death therefore conferred the office of intercessor upon him.41 This priest emerged from a different tribe than Levi; he was Melchizedek, the “kingpriest” who offered a sacrifice not of animals but himself (Exp. Ps. 2.8).

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Self-sacrifice displaced the people’s sins and repaired relations with God by transforming the people. Christ fulfilled and communicated this role by offering the sacramental “likeness” of his body and blood. “He is also our priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek, who offered himself as a whole burnt offering for our sins. He established the likeness (similitudo) of his sacrifice to be celebrated as a memorial of his passion, so that what Melchizedek offered to God we may see is now offered throughout the world in the Church of Christ.”42 The Gospel genealogies clarified the royal and sacerdotal lines of prophecy that intersected in David.43 Matthew listed Christ’s ancestors in descending order from Abraham through King David down to Christ (Matt. 1:1–17), as though he were “descending” to become one with his people; this royal “descent” emphasized the Lord’s divine humility. Luke, on the other hand, followed the “ascent” of ancestry from Jesus’ baptism for the remission of sins up through David the adulterer to Adam the sinner (Luke 3:23–38), as though Christ were “ascending” with a sin offering for God; the “ascent” emphasized Christ’s human gift on our behalf. The person of David intersected the two lines figuratively, while Christ, David’s Son, actualized them: at one and the same time he stooped down as King to take up his people’s sins, and also offered up himself as Priest for their sacrificial cleansing. The union of these two roles underlay Augustine’s exploration of the saving work foreseen by the prophet-king David who sang of the mystical prophecies (Acts 2:30). David foresaw his Son uniting kingly and priestly images in birth and in death: the divine Word “took up” a Man in order to teach divine humility on the visible plane by his lowly birth and submission to suffering; the human Christ thus modeled the self-detachment and freedom from pride that could initiate humanity’s spiritual ascent (Exp. Ps. 8.11). His cross particularly taught how humility moved human souls from illness to health.44 When the Lordly Man suffered, the sword of divine power lay obscurely silent within what Augustine strikingly called (perhaps alluding to his lowly human birth) the vagina humilitatis, “the sheath of humility” (ibid. 7.13). Though technically he was glorified only after his passion (8.4), the Man was virtually exalted in the humility of his death, which confounded his enemies who stupidly equated humility with weakness and defeat. “By humility itself he was exalted—that is, not understood” (7.15). So the psalmist, as a prophet who was certain of the divinely ordered future, called upon the pre-incarnate Word to come down from heaven in order to live out the humility that the covenant demanded. “Arise, O Lord my God, in the precept you have commanded!” Augustine

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paraphrased: “Because you commanded humility, so come now, show your humility. Fulfill ahead of time what you have commanded so that [you may save sinners] by your example of conquering pride” (7.5).45 Psalm 7’s exotic title, “for the words of Hushai” (i.e., “Silence”), alerted readers to a figurative code that the Lord secretly communicated by his mysterious silence before his accusers during the passion. The Prophet-Psalmist, assuming the persona of the “perfected soul” who seeks understanding through faith, asks God for “the words of silence,” that is, for the right expressions to articulate the mysteries of Christ’s passion. When God grants these words, he learns that the Priest-King’s death will bring cleansing from sins and an example for living (7.3). The figures of “the King” and “the Priest,” then, along with the clusters of royal and sacerdotal metaphors that spring up in their wake, coalesced in Christ’s death; in so doing they integrated Augustine’s early Christology and soteriology. Augustine conjoined Christ’s divinity and humanity exegetically (not metaphysically) by conflating Old Testament images of his saving work.

VI. Finding the Voice Within the Voice: Impersonation (Prosopopoeia) To emphasize the King-Priest’s union with his people before God, Augustine adverts to a striking figure of speech that extends but also transcends prosopological exegesis: impersonation. The Prophet-Psalmist in Psalm 7 at first seems to relay the words of the “perfected soul” who sings God’s mysteries; but close reading shows that actually he imitates the voice of the perfected soul by using the first-person “I.” He not only identified the voice but also impersonated it. Likewise at the end of his exposition, Augustine adds that we understand the psalm differently if we hear it spoken “in the person of the Lordly Man (in persona dominici hominis),” so long as we “refer whatever is spoken in lowly manner to our weakness, which he carried” (Exp. Ps. 7.20). That is, the psalmist may be read as impersonating the voice of Christ himself. This device of impersonation goes beyond prosopological analysis by hearing a second voice speaking within the first voice. What is this peculiar kind of figurative speech? The Greeks called it prosopopoeia, literally “face-making.” Latin rhetorical handbooks either transliterated the term or translated it as fictiones personarum, “imagined persons.” Prosopopoeia is a rhetorical device whereby an author of a text, or a character in the text, or

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even the interpreter of a text (as we’ll see in Augustine’s case), takes up or impersonates the voice of some character either well known or invented.46 It stands alongside the host of other rhetorical devices that play with the sound of the human voice: for instance, diatribe, a rhetorically staged dialogue that addresses an imaginary proponent in a dispute; personification, which gives the power of speech to an inanimate object; and apostrophe, imaginary address made to some fictional or abstract figure. Because authors, especially poets, dexterously use all these devices, astute readers must learn to identify not only different voices (exegesis of speaking persons) but also different voiceovers (exegesis of impersonation). While prosopological exegesis is the work of a text’s interpreter, prosopopoeia is the literary device of a text’s author. The best ancient examples of impersonation come from the progymnasmata or elementary rhetorical exercises of Greek grammarians like Theon and Hermogenes.47 Teachers asked students to compose letters that imagine what certain persons might say under given circumstances. Rhetoricians commended the device, and it was a stock device practiced in exercises of speech declamation. Cicero commended its ability to move the emotions, as did the Rhetorica ad Herrenium. The elder Seneca composed many exercises using the device. This figure was so potent that writers counseled that it be used sparingly. So said Quintilian, from whom we have antiquity’s most detailed theoretical treatment of the device. A bolder form of figure, which in Cicero’s opinion demands greater effort, is impersonation of characters (fictiones personarum) or prosopopoeia. This is a device which lends wonderful variety and animation to oratory. By this means we display the inner thoughts of our adversaries as though they were talking with themselves (but we shall only carry conviction if we represent them as uttering what they may reasonably be supposed to have had in their minds); or without sacrifice of credibility we may introduce conversations between ourselves and others, or of others among ourselves, and put words of advice, reproach, complaint, praise or pity into the mouths of appropriate persons (9.2.29–30). . . . It is also convenient at times to pretend that we have before our eyes the images of things, persons or utterances (9.2.33). . . . We may also introduce some imaginary person without identifying him, as when we say “Here someone says,” or “Someone will say.” Or words may be inserted without the introduction of any speaker at all. (9.2.36–37)48

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This device, Quintilian wrote, had the capacity “to bring down the gods and raise up the dead,” so its potential in religious discourse is evident (9.2.31).49 Recent New Testament scholarship has shown Paul using it in Rom. 7:7–25 when he takes up the voice of a Gentile Christian convert trapped in trying to obey the Law of Moses.50 Origen referred to prosopopoeia in many passages of his Contra Celsum in order especially to counter Celsus’s own satirizing images created by impersonating skeptical pagans or puzzled Jews who looked askance at Christianity.51 Origen perceived Paul’s prosopopoeia in Romans 7,52 and so did Augustine.53 Impersonation conjoins multiple voices within a single character and so recalls its archaic roots in theatrical religious drama, where speeches impersonating the gods made their voices sound upon the earth. A roleplayer “took up” (suscipio) or “held up” (sustineo) a character mask and assumed that character’s voice by speaking through it; one spoke “out of” that person, or ex persona. (The Latin persona perhaps derived from that image by describing one who “makes a sound through” [sonare + per] the medium.) An actor’s skill in suspending an audience’s disbelief depends on coaxing people to spontaneously attribute one’s voice to a persona; actors “take up” a voice in order to bring a character to life. To take a modern example: Marlon Brando played Marc Antony to great acclaim in the 1953 film, Julius Caesar. His performance remains well known, particularly his rendering of Antony’s dramatic speech on the death of Caesar that begins, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (of course, put into his mouth by Shakespeare). For many audiences that performance still dissolves all cinematic artifice of script, set, costume, and now even the YouTube video frame, and for all intents and purposes brings them into that imaginative universe. By taking up Antony’s voice, Brando becomes Antony, and in a mysterious way lives through the character.54 But the reverse is also true: Antony comes alive again by inhabiting Brando’s voice. So the Shakespearean “Marc Antony” hosts an exchange of voices, and this is the quintessential figurative transaction that prosopopoeia replicates. Fine acting puts into effect a psychodramatic exchange of identities that draws on the searing power of impersonation to make characters live; meanwhile an audience’s consent to suspend disbelief allows a character to inhabit the actor’s voice. Such figurative reciprocation points to the elementary human hunger for communion and mutual understanding that sees through the eyes or hears through the ears of another. By this device the self transcends itself to become the other, even if only briefly. Its power comes from figuration’s capacity to conjoin

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selves and to overcome disjunctive isolation. The exchange in speech or drama is only fleetingly temporary; but prosopopoeia became a rhetorical template for a spiritual thinker like Augustine to portray the eternally reciprocal character of redemption. As it happens we know that Augustine was thinking about prosopopoeia and its conjunctive power at this very moment (393–394), for he was using it to make the opening argument of his case against Donatism. This schism that had split the North African Church for more than three generations would absorb Augustine’s energy over the next two decades. During his priesthood he entered the fray by composing an unusual polemical piece that took the form of a poem, the Psalmus contra partem Donati, or A Psalm Against the Faction of Donatus. The only surviving poetic composition from Augustine addressed the fractious struggle by appealing to the Donatists’ suppressed bond of identification with the Catholic Church. Its climactic final section enlisted the emotional power of impersonation by putting a plaintive appeal for unity into the mouth of Mother Church.55 Augustine pictures her crying out to the wayward Donatist children who rejected her love and tore at her heart: Now what if Mother Church herself addressed you calmly, in peace, And said: “O my children, what complaints have you against your Mother? Why have you deserted me? I want to hear it from you now. You accuse your brethren, and this lashing-out wounds me deeply. Many deserted me, but they did so in fear. But no one’s forcing you to rebel against me so. You say you are with me; you see that to be false. I’m spoken of as Catholic, and you are of Donatus’s sect. . . . But what have I done to you, I, your mother, spread across the world?”56 Augustine invoked the emotive power of prosopopoeia’s personal immediacy to drive home his call for reconcilation.57 But more importantly for our purposes, this device advanced Augustine’s spiritual-theological template for understanding Scripture. As we’ve seen, Augustine was also thinking at this time about the Old Testament angels and prophets, who spoke God’s words in the first person, and the New Testament Apostle who spoke Christ’s words in his name (Adim. 9.1). In the latter case, Augustine qualified the cause-for-effect metonymy by reference to the personal gift that Christ had

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given to Paul: Please note, Augustine observed, that Paul does not speak of Christ merely giving him enlightenment and authority; rather he “attributes his speech directly to Christ, by whose gift he spoke.”58 The “hard” figure of cause-for-effect metonymy could emphasize Christ’s transcendence over the human. But this “gift” conjoined Christ’s voice to Paul’s voice: impersonation’s figure of container-for-contained is closer to synecdoche, which suggests the closeness, cooperation, and even communion of two parties. This trope generated for Augustine a different stream of language than he had previously used for discussing the divine Word’s relation to time, earth, and humanity. For instance, one psalm exposition from this period used container-for-contained to help explain Scripture’s Christological resonance. Psalm 8’s title, “for the winepresses,” suggested (among other things) that the divine Word comes into the mind and memory of the Church like a grape bursting its juices in a wine vat. The Word hides itself in human words by “commandeering” (usurpat) human vocal sounds that encase spiritual understanding as grape skins encase wine. When these words penetrate the listening mind, it delivers wisdom as truth oozes into the understanding. From there it trickles into the “vat” of memory, where time and care turn it into the wine of right thinking and virtuous action (Exp. Ps. 8.2). The human voice becomes the carrier of the divine voice. Impersonation appears in Augustine’s first Psalms expositions in suggestive ways that, while experimental, foreshadow the profundities of the later and larger Expositions of the Psalms. For instance, after Augustine interprets Psalm 3 from the typical Christological angle (Exp. Ps. 3.1–8), he observes that the psalm can be read “in terms of the person of Christ (ad personam Christi) in another way” (3.9). Since the Church is part of Christ, the psalm may be read as the words of the Church as it praises the Word for “taking it up” (suscepta) along with the risen Man to “sit at one with him (una cum illo) even in heavenly places” (ibid.; see Eph. 2:6). That is, in raising Christ from the dead the Word also raised up the Church “in that Man” (in illo homine), for Christ’s love guaranteed that “where the head goes the members will follow” (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 4:15–16; cf. Rom. 8:35). Christ and Church are thus a single entity whose voice Augustine heard in the psalm’s speaking ego. Then Augustine interprets the psalm a third time, now as the prayer of an individual Christian (3.10). Different voices might speak (Christ, Church, Christian), though each speaks within what Augustine called the totus, “the whole.”59 The consonance of interpretations stressed the conjunction of voices; the individual Christian prays within the Church’s voice, just as the Church prays within the voice of

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Christ. The different voices of the body and the head speak in unison (simul) with Christ’s voice, but the Church and its members speak through him. For Augustine the Psalms reverberate with several kinds of impersonation. On one level the prophet “hosts” all the voices. So in Psalm 3, Christ and the Church speak apud prophetam, that is, “in the presence of the prophet.”60 But on another level the divine Word inhabits the prophet’s voice, so that the word spoken was truly God’s word. Reference to prosopopoeia helps Augustine out of several interpretive jams. One such jam occurs in an awkward reading of Psalm 4. Wanting to interpret the psalm in terms of Christ’s humanity, Augustine came upon Psalm 4:2, “in tribulation you enlarged me.” He wrote, “I don’t see how these words can possibly fit the person of the Lordly Man whom God’s Wisdom took up, because Wisdom never abandoned him at any time” (Exp. Ps. 4.2). Since we know, Augustine reasons, that the Man was always one with the Word, we also know that the Man never needed any “enlarging.” But building on the imagery of the body of Christ and the royalpriestly divine-human intercessor, Augustine took his interpretation of dominicus homo in a new direction by using the figure of impersonation. The concept of “enlargement,” Augustine suggested, relates not to Christ speaking for himself as the body’s head but to Christ speaking on behalf of his members. Out of overflowing love for his body Christ speaks to God in prayer on behalf of his “least ones” (minimi) by assuming their identity before God. So as he prays it is not he, but they, who become “enlarged.” The Man took up not only his people’s sins, but also their very persons, and that is how he speaks for them. Christ’s intercession means that he prays for his people by praying as his people. “His prayer is a token (indicium) of our weakness,” wrote Augustine. “It is the same way concerning this sudden ‘enlarging’ of the heart: the same Lord can speak for (pro) his faithful ones, whose person he took upon himself (quorum personam sibi imposuit) also when he said, ‘I was hungry and you did not feed me’” (Matt. 25:42).61 This imagery combined the roles of king and priest into a single persona that both wore his people’s identity and offered prayer in their name. Similarly Augustine’s exposition of Psalm 9 took its acclamation that God “has not forgotten the cry of the poor” (plural), and conflated it with the prayer that followed, “Lord, be merciful to me” (singular) (Ps. 9:13–14; Exp. Ps. 9.14). The text’s move from plural to singular signaled to Augustine the action of a single intercessor who had gathered up his followers’ many cries into the single voice of his own prayer. Christ having been made poor, even though he was rich (cf. 2 Cor. 8:9), has now been

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raised from the dead and intercedes for the many (9.14). The roles of King and Priest coalesced in the prosopopoeia of the heavenly intercessor.

VII. Metonymy’s Inadequacy to Express the Mystery of Christ Something else important must be noted about the shape of Augustine’s understanding of Christ’s humanity at this stage: he has come to think that effect-for-cause metonymy is inappropriate for describing the relation of human and divine in Christ. Augustine never, either in these early Psalms expositions or anywhere else, uses it to describe God speaking, as though the Word used a kind of divine ventriloquism in dominicus homo. Christ the Man never appears as a purely passive or merely temporary channel or expendable instrument of the Word, despite their massively asymmetrical relationship. Effect-for-cause metonymy, which is the best figure of speech for expressing divine transcendence over the temporal world, simply failed to render rightly the relationship between the Man Jesus and the divine Word. On the other hand, Augustine does speak of Christ’s humanity “holding” or “containing” the divine presence. So for Augustine the words of Psalm 10:5, “the Lord-in-his-temple,” referred to Christ, whom he called “the Word-in-a-Man” (verbum in homine; Exp. Ps. 10.12), and “God-in-a-Man” (Deus in homine; Exp. Ps. 9.8). We’re forced to conclude that as far as Augustine could articulate an understanding of his Nicene faith, Christ’s divinity and humanity, while distinguishable, were also mysteriously and ineffably, yet really and metaphysically, joined and not merely juxtaposed. Correlatively Augustine conceived of the divine Word as immediate in the human words of Jesus. The words of Jesus, like all human words, were inevitably ephemeral and inherently obscure and image-laden, even when they were not figurative. (Augustine never addressed the issue that Jesus’ original words, the so-called ipsissima verba, had been twice translated— first from Aramaic into Greek, and then from Greek into Latin—before they ever reached him, much less that they were subject to the changes of oral and written tradition.) For him the Word somehow so invested itself in the Man—the grape permanently identified with its grape skin—that for all practical purposes the Man’s words are words of the Word. They are sui generis, because like the human-divine union itself these words are joined to the Word. With this union of the speakable and unspeakable, figuration becomes a mediating point, a place of exchange between the

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eternal and the temporal. By the Incarnation, the spiritual instruction of Christ the “inner teacher” (see On the Teacher 11.38) is made externally intelligible in order to return the wandering human creature back to its true home.62

VIII. Unanswered Questions About Teaching and Redemption Notwithstanding certain successes in these early expositions, Augustine’s interpretations are clearly labored, even forced. I suggest that that reflects his complicated perspective on Christ’s humanity at this time, when overly rigid categories hinder him from satisfactorily articulating the divinehuman interrelationship. This is not a question about Christ’s divine-human reality. He rather wondered how Christ’s work was both an act of divine teaching and an engine of human redemption. One way of approaching this issue is to look at how Augustine perceived Christ’s work of priestly intercession. Augustine read Psalms 3 and 4 as showing the intercessory bond between Christ the risen head in heaven and the Church, his suffering body on earth; in other words, intercession was dominicus homo’s work after his resurrection, when the Word “took up” the Church with the Man into heaven (Exp. Ps. 3.9). This post-resurrection creation of the Church accorded with the picture drawn a few years earlier in On Genesis, Against the Manichees (2.24.37), where Augustine imagined the Church as emerging with the blood and water from the side of the dead Christ (John 19:34), just as Eve emerged from the sleeping Adam (Gen. 2:21). In fact, the Genesis commentary filled out that precise picture by referring to Christ in the words of Psalm 3:5 that speak of “sleeping and waking.” However, when Augustine came to explain Psalm 3 itself, the strictly post-resurrection existence of the Church presented an exegetical problem. The prayer of Psalm 3:7 read, “Rise up (exsurge), Lord, save me, my God!” Augustine conjectured that “the body can say this to its head for it has been saved by his rising up (exsurgente)” (Exp. Ps. 3.9), but then he seemed to realize that saying things that way tied up salvation’s temporal sequence into a knot. How could the Church plead for a resurrection that had not yet happened, when its very existence depended on that same resurrection having already happened? So Augustine quietly changed the voice identity of the speaker from the Church to the Prophet-Psalmist, who prayed for God’s predestined plan to take effect so that the Church might come into being. But Augustine’s next sentence barely succeeded in undoing the

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tangle. It is quite dense, not to say opaque, so I translate here literally, and add my interpretive remarks in bracketed italics: This [the saying, “Rise up Lord!”] was spoken by the prophet in [the mode of] predestination [so as to help Israel look forward patiently] until it [God’s predestinating plan] planted our Lord all the way down into the earth, that [fruit-bearing accomplishment of salvation] which the Gospel spoke about as “the ripe harvest” [the harvest of Christian believers] whose salvation lay in the resurrection of the one who deigned to die for us.63 But a problem still remained. Augustine’s alternative ecclesial rereading of the psalm beginning in 3.9 made it the prayer of Christ’s pilgrim body grieving amid persecutions but also rejoicing that the Lord had “heard me from his holy mountain.” This mountain imagery had already troubled his thinking about Christ, as we’ve seen; now it troubled his thinking about the Church. If the Church, though living “under grace,” still lives among painful ambiguities, and still prays to reach its destiny in the fourth age “in peace,” then how can the psalm declare that the Lord has already “heard” (exaudivit) the Church’s prayer “from the mountain”? Augustine’s answer was to ignore the past tense of the verb and aver that the Church is presently being heard through Christ’s ministry of intercession. “Even now (iam),” he wrote, “the Church is being heard (present tense, exauditur) from the very mountain which is also its head.” Augustine repeats this past-to-present move when reinterpreting the psalm from the individual perspective in 3.10. There he tentatively recasts a Christological term that up until recently he had used quite differently, namely “mediator.” Prior to this, Augustine had conceived of mediation as an exclusively divine function by which the Word ushered believers into the Father’s presence.64 Augustine emphasized this as recently as October 393 in his talk on the Creed for a bishops’ council meeting in Hippo that has survived as On Faith and the Creed. The idea appears in a passage explaining the trinitarian resonance of Paul’s exclamation in Rom. 11:29, “from him, through him and in him are all things” (F. Creed 9.19). Paul, said Augustine, wrote “‘from him’ meaning as from one who owes his being to no one; ‘through him’ as through the mediator, and ‘in him’ as in him who holds together, that is, joins together by connecting.”65 But we see a change in the Exposition of Psalm 3.10, where “mediator” has been made a title for the Man, “the mountain,” in his post-resurrection work as intercessor at God’s right hand. God hears human prayers “from his holy

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mountain,” that is, Augustine writes, from that Man “through whom God aided us (subvenit), and by which mediator he hears us (quo mediatore nos exaudit).” The mountain imagery of Psalm 3:4 clearly referred to a human mediator and provoked a shift from the trinitarian divine mediator of On Faith and the Creed. Augustine also alludes here to the temporal process of Christ becoming a mediator. The first verb was past tense (“God aided us”), but the second was present tense (“God hears us”): at a past moment Christ offered himself for sin, but in the present moment he offers prayer for us since being raised to God’s right hand. The same past-present sequence appears in the Exposition of Psalm 2.7 where Augustine refers to the Man “who offered himself as a sacrifice in place of all other sacrifices, who intercedes for us” (quoting Rom. 8:34). So also at the beginning of the next exposition of Psalm 4 (which as we’ll see features a strong intercessory component), Augustine alerts readers to look for “the words of the Lordly Man after the resurrection” (4.1). The shift of tenses from past to present underscored Christ’s ongoing work of helping the Church on its journey. It’s important to stress these shifts—despite their grammatical subtlety—because they preserve an important snapshot of Augustine’s liminal understanding of Christ the Mediator at this moment. But the “mountain” imagery of Psalm 3 presented Augustine with a perhaps even greater difficulty. How exactly did the Man become invested with the office of “mediator” if mediation was the prerogative of the divine Word? Augustine’s tinkering with the verb tenses of the psalm suggests his solution for this. To emphasize the present, post-resurrection reality of Christ’s ongoing mediation and intercession, he put the verbs into the present tense. The Man’s resurrection drew a bright line between his time as a mere mortal, and the time now (iam) after his resurrection, when he became—in words that Augustine borrowed from Hilary of Poitiers— “wholly God” (totus Deus; Comm. Gal. 2.3–4).66 That odd phrase confused some of Augustine’s readers: Wasn’t Christ already God before his resurrection? When Augustine revisited that passage in Revisions he explained that it did not really deny that Christ was always divine; rather it emphasized that the human Jesus Christ received divine immortality at his resurrection. The old bishop reminded his readers that his job in the Galatians commentary had been to explicate Paul’s strange language in Gal. 1:1 that said he had received apostleship “not by men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father.” Did Paul mean to say that Jesus Christ was not a man? No, old Augustine wrote, but the Apostle’s phrasing suggested that perhaps after his resurrection “on account of his immortality the Christ-God was now no longer a man,” that is, he was no longer

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human in the strict sense of one subject to death.67 Whatever the plausibility of that late explanation, it gives us a clue about how he read the Psalms as a young priest. At that time he asked, how is Christ a human “mediator” if mediation is a divine function? In the young Augustine’s logic, resurrection imbued the Man with the Word’s divine immortality, and so the Man became a worthy human host for the divine function of mediation when he overcame humanity’s major flaw, namely, mortality. In other words, at the moment he was interpreting Psalm 3, Augustine figuratively delegated the divine function of mediation to the Man. And by what figure of speech did Scripture bestow upon the Man the divine title “mediator”? Being the product of association, it was clearly none other than metonymy. For the moment, however, I must leave dangling this conversation about Christ and mediation; its conclusion must await our discussion in the next section, where we’ll see Augustine’s views on the subject advance further. For the moment I will say that however orthodox his faith in Christ’s divinity and humanity, his understanding of the relationship between these categories remained a work-in-progress, and that incompleteness bollixed up his interpretation of Psalm 3 in several places. The certainty of his faith drove his confidence about their unity; but as shown by Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions (Question 61.2) and the early exposition of Psalm 3, these idea-boxes were becoming uncomfortably confining, and he escaped only by resorting to rhetorical maneuvering and sheer figurative inventiveness. Augustine stretched his analytical language to the breaking point, I suggest, because he was not yet playing with a full Christological deck; that is, he had not yet sorted out all the dynamics necessary for constructing a coherent understanding of how Christ’s humanity conjoined his divinity. He works a little too hard to make all his puzzle pieces fit, and so his expressions suffer from a certain tentativeness and rigidity. Meanwhile he kept looking for that master puzzle-piece that would bring everything into a graceful coherence. Thanks again to the Apostle Paul, that puzzle-piece was about to appear.

Part Two: “My Sheep Hear My Voice”: The Exposition of Psalms 15–32 Here we insert Augustine’s scintillating new Pauline insight about Christ’s humanity discussed in chapter 5, that is, Christ’s humble human willto-death that both made him “the Mediator between God and man” and made our redemption figurative and real at the same time. Anchored by

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Paul’s help in reading Psalm 21, Augustine read the second set of Psalms 15–32 intensively through the looking glass of Christ’s death.68 In this part we’ll look closely at this second block of expositions and mark the shifts of emphasis in the way Augustine spoke of Christ.69 In brief, because Christ became the Man, a Jew, “born of a woman, born under the Law, that he might redeem those under the Law” (Gal. 4:4), his humanity and the Christian reading of the Old Testament are deeply intertwined. Augustine’s fuller view of Christ’s humanity suggests the fuller framework for scriptural unity that securely grounded his practice of reading the Old Testament figuratively. Table 4 lists references to Paul in the two blocks of Psalms expositions in order to give a synoptic view of their interesting continuities and discontinuities. Augustine referred to Paul in mostly similar ways across the two blocks.70 Nevertheless, certain trends suggest Augustine’s refocused reading between the first and second blocks. First, several multiple reference texts in the first block drop from view in the second: specifically, Rom. 1:28 and its portrayal of the carnal mind’s “depraved way of thinking,” and 1 Cor. 1:24’s reference to the divine Christ as God’s Power (virtus) and Wisdom. In the first block they reflect Augustine’s strong interest in the soul’s moral purification as a condition of achieving a spiritual vision of Christ’s divinity. The purification emphasis was so strong that it construed Paul’s teaching about co-crucifixion with Christ in moral terms. For instance, when Psalm 9:4 says that the ungodly “will be weakened and perish before your face,” Augustine comments that the convert’s old self “perished” just as Paul himself “perished” when he put away his former life, and that is why he wrote, “I no longer live my own life—it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). In other words, Christ’s death killed Paul’s moral corruption (Exp. Ps. 9.5). Another Galatians crucifixion text (6:14: “The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world”), similarly spoke to Augustine about moral conversion: conversion “orphaned” Paul because his old sinful world died. The divine pledge to “help the orphan” (Ps. 9:14) therefore refers to God’s promise of grace for the new believer (9.31). Augustine’s emphasis on moral purification in the first block of Psalms expositions contrasts with the second block’s stronger theological analysis of salvation accomplished by Christ. Paul’s salvation-historical perspective evidently pushed Augustine to describe more exactly the foundational saving work of Christ that made Christian moral striving possible in the first place. The second group of Psalms expositions interpret co-crucifixion in Rom. 6:6 (“we were crucified with him”) not in moral but in theological

Table 4 Augustine’s Use of the Letters of St. Paul in Expositions of Psalms 1–32, first series Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

Rom

1:24

9.15

1 Cor

1:24

2.6, 3.1, 5.8, 8.5, 8.6, 9.15, 9.35, 12.1, 12.6

Rom

1:25

13.7

1 Cor

1:28

Rom

1:28

6.6, 6.8, 9.17, 13.2

1 Cor

1:31

7.4

Rom

2:5

6.3

1 Cor

2:2

Rom

2:9

4.2, 11.4

1 Cor

Rom

2:15

9.9

Rom

2:15–16

Rom

Eph

2:2

23.10

28.5

Eph

2:12

28.8

23.10

Eph

2:20

5.8

8.6

Eph

3:16–17

9.12

2:6

8.5

Eph

3:17

4.8, 9.15

1 Cor

2:9

9.14

Eph

3:18–19

8.5

5.13

1 Cor

3:1

5.7

Eph

3:19

17.34

3:23

5.17

1 Cor

3:1–2

8.5

Eph

4:13

30.4

Rom

5:3

9.2

1 Cor

3:1–3

8.10

Eph

4:15–16

3.9, 10.7

Rom

5:3–5

4.2

1 Cor

3:2

Eph

4:22

6.2

Rom

5:5

1 Cor

3:11–15

6.3

Eph

5:14

3.9

Rom

5:10

1 Cor

3:13–15

1.5

Eph

5.27

32.22 5.17

22.5

17.17

(continued)

Table 4 (continued) Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

1 Cor

3:17

5.8, 9.12, 10.7

Eph

5:32

10.10

1 Cor

4:7

3.4 Phil

1:15–17

11.7

Phil

2:7

28.6

29.12

Rom

5:14

6.2

Rom

6:6

21.1

1 Cor

4:15

Rom

6:9

21.1

1 Cor

8:1

1.4

Rom

6:12

9.8

1 Cor

9:9

8.12

Rom

6:21

6.13

1 Cor

9:26–27

2.8

Rom

7:22–23

1 Cor

11.3

3.10

Col

1:18

Rom

7:24–25

3.8

1 Cor

11:19

7.15

Col

2:16–23

8.6

Rom

7:25

3.10, 6.7

1 Cor

12:17

32.15

Col

3:9–10

6.9

Rom

8:6

17.47

1 Cor

12:27

3.9

Rom

8:10

26.6

1 Cor

15:27

8.12

1 Cor

15:28

29.12

1 Th

4:12

3.5

1 Cor

15:33

10.2

1 Th

5:2

6.1

9.4

1 Th

5:3

6.13

1 Th

5:7

3.9

26.6

Rom

8:20

24.6, 30.8

Rom

8:24

5.4

1 Cor

15:47

Rom

8:25

4.2, 4.9, 9.33 17.12

1 Cor

15:54

28.2

26:4

1 Cor

15:56

4.9, 6.6

Rom

8:29

7.1

Rom

8:30

5.18

2 Cor

2:14–16

7.15

Rom

8:31–33

5.17

2 Cor

2:16

10.10

Rom

8:33–39

7.14

2 Cor

3:14–15

Rom

8:34

2.7

19.7, 23.9

2 Cor

3:18

2.5

Rom

8:38–39

23.10

2 Cor

4:18

9.14

Rom

9:32–33

19.9

2 Cor

5:1

14.1

Rom

10:3

17.28, 19.9, 27.8

2 Cor

5:7

Rom

10:4

Rom

10:10

Rom

11:25

7.1, 7.6 9.1

2 Cor

12:10

Rom

11:25–26

13.8

2 Cor

13:3

4.1, 12.1 13.1

17.15

2 Th

2:3

9.19

2 Th

2:4

9.23

18.9

17.25

1 Tim 1:9 1 Tim 2:5

17.12

9.14

8.12

5:19

9.6

1 Tim 5:18

26.6 31.3 2 Cor

8:9

9.14

1 Tim 6:5 19.7

25.1

1 Tim 5:6

17.1, 18.1 2 Cor 19.1, 20.1 21.1, 24.1 29.1, 30.1

3.6, 4.8

1.2

25.10

1 Tim 6:7–8

6.12

1 Tim 6:10

9.14, 15

(continued)

Table 4 (continued) Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

Paul’s

Exp. Ps.

Exp. Ps.

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

text

1–14

15–32

Rom

11:33–34

7.1

1 Tim 6:16

6.8

Rom

11:36

5.3

Rom

12:1

Rom

13:10

11.3

2 Tim 2:17

1.1

Rom

13:12

7.19

Gal

2:20

9.5

32.1

Gal

5:6

17.11

Gal

5:15

3.7

Gal

6:14

9.31

17.25

No quotes of Paul appear in the Expositions of Psalms 15, 16, and 20. Augustine does not refer to Philemon, Titus, or Hebrews.

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terms, emphasizing their mystical union in flesh; meanwhile a fresh reference to 1 Tim. 2:5 (“the one Mediator between God and man”) suggests that he had recently passed the milestone of seeing Christ the Man as mediator. But a shift is strongly evident as we examine his use of the phrase common to many psalm titles, “to the end” (ad finem).” The phrase suggests that Paul’s diachronic, salvation-historical outlook has refocused Augustine on Christ’s humanity as the instrument of God’s saving power. Augustine always linked the phrase “the end” to Christ in Rom. 10:4, “Christ is the end (finis) of the Law.” The link appears three times in the first block and eight times in the second. Defining it as “culmination” rather than “cutoff,” Augustine uses “the end” to signify that Christ fulfills and perfects the Law rather than terminating or canceling it. However, the two blocks had different emphases: the first refers “the end” to Christ’s divinity, while the second referred it to Christ’s humanity. So in Psalms 4, 12, and 13, “the end” represents fulfillment of the obedient believer’s desire to see the divine Lord, the ultimate goal of the soul’s journey. The exposition of Psalm 12 connects the phrase to the words of its first verse, “How long will you forget me? Even to the end?” Augustine paraphrases this text with an eye to Christ’s divinity: “How long will you put me off from spiritually understanding Christ, who is God’s Wisdom, and the straight and true end of the soul’s every intention?” (Exp. Ps. 12.1).71 Similarly, Psalm 13 contrasts the soul’s incremental progress in faith with its ultimate aspiration to see Christ in his glory: “We believe in him when we begin to walk the good road (via bona), and we shall see him when we have arrived (cum pervenerimus). That is why (ideo) he is called ‘the end’” (13.1).72 By contrast, in the second block’s expositions of Psalms 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 29, and 30 “the end” refers to Christ the Man who consummates salvation history. Augustine read these psalms as prayers of the human Christ striving on the path (in via) of mortality, passing through his agonizing death, and reaching toward resurrection life. Augustine builds upon the figurative resonance in the name “David,” meaning “strong-handed.” Psalm 17’s title, “to the end, for the Lord’s servant, David himself” clearly strikes the human note: “This means ‘for Christ, strong-handed in his humanity’” (17.1).73 This emphasis connects reading the Law as a believer to Christ the suffering Man; for the full sentence in Rom. 10:4 reads, “Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”74 Augustine’s growing awareness of Christ’s death as the font of grace made it also the font of righteousness. For that reason the second block of Psalms expositions begins to pair Rom. 10:4 with the statement in the previous verse,

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“they failed to recognize God’s justice and sought to establish their own” (Rom. 10:3). Three times (17.28, 19.9, 27.8) Augustine used Rom. 10:3 to speak against the self-sufficient pride that contrasts with the prevenient and sufficient grace that lives in God’s justice.75 Shifts of focus within the Exposition of Psalm 15 also suggest that Augustine has altered his approach. Readers immediately notice the change in length and format and the shift from prose paragraphs to short notes.76 After this most expositions in this block are little more than paraphrases (e.g., on Pss. 19, 20, 22). Such brevity offers little detail; nevertheless several striking shifts stand out to indicate that Augustine had recently adopted a more intensively Christological approach. Alongside his prosopological analysis of the text’s voices, he extends Christ’s act of prosopopoeia to whole psalms. As we’ve seen, Augustine had concluded that Christ intercedes for his people by speaking in their voice as his people. But what appeared only occasionally in the first block of expositions now becomes a primary hermeneutical device: the words of these Psalms strikingly evoke Christ’s paschal suffering by being cast as spoken by Christ in the first person from the cross. All or part of the Expositions of Psalms 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 29, and 30 hear the voice of Christ speaking during the crucifixion. As we will see, the Exposition of Psalm 21 is the centerpiece and interpretive axis of the entire group of seven “Psalms of the Crucified.” Augustine even briefly experiments with prosopopoeia as a tool of exegesis by transposing his voice into the text’s voice, and thus attempts exegetically to imitate Christ’s redeeming self-transposition into flesh and death. The detached, professorial voice of the expositions of Psalms 1–14 recedes as Augustine takes up the Prophet-Psalmist’s voice in the first person. He turns the text’s “I” and “me” into communal pronouns, and sees the text as possibly hosting several speaking selves: the pre-incarnate Word, the Prophet-Psalmist, the Man Jesus Christ, the Church, and several individuals within the Church, including Augustine himself. Though that free-ranging experiment soon ends, it suggests how much prosopopoeia’s model of “becoming as” was powerfully shaping Augustine’s act of reading. The changing voices sometimes makes it hard to tell the speakers without a scorecard, though certain interpretive rules help to sort them out (Exp. Ps. 17.51). But Augustine’s principle of the exchange of voices offers an extraordinarily supple apparatus for imaginatively exploring the relationship between Christ and the Church. Because Christ and Church stand together (“for where the head is, there too is the body,” 15.5), Christ’s voice always potentially includes the Church’s voice. While the Psalms

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open a window onto the highs and lows of Christ’s human soul, Christians get personal access to the Psalms’ array of human emotions, situations, and persons, from those that glorify God as creator and giver of grace to those that lament the sinner’s lost and abject condition. The texts speak directly to Christian readers about salvation history as Christ actualized it in his earthly life, the life of the Christian community, the Christian’s individual life, and indeed all three together. The voices all belong to Christ but they also belong to the reader, and can set in relief any of the human soul’s myriad subtle movements. As Augustine later wrote, “Everything written here is our mirror.”77 Self-transposition into the text ultimately became his paradigm for rightly reading Scripture, and allowed his sermons to become brief spiritual exercises. So the short annotations to these psalms not only show Augustine’s transformed understanding of Christ and the Church but also reveal his changing way of reading the Old Testament.

I. The Keystone Exegesis of Psalm 21 The Exposition of Psalm 21 establishes the framework for the other expositions in this block. The opening paragraph skillfully splices the Gospel passion accounts and the co-crucifixion insights of the Apostle Paul into the words of the psalm title, “To the end, for taking up in the morning, a Psalm of David.” “To the end,” because the Lord Jesus Christ himself speaks, that is, praying for his own resurrection. Now, his resurrection happened on the morning of the first day of the week. He was “taken up” into eternal life, and death will no longer be his master [Rom 6:9]. But these words are spoken in the person of the Crucified One (ex persona crucifixi). The beginning of this psalm has the words that he cried out as he hung upon the cross while also holding fast (servans) the person of the “old man” whose mortality he carried (portavit). Now this “old man” was nailed to the cross with him [Rom. 6:6].78 This preface sets the expository perspective for the seven “Psalms of the Crucified.” Its exegesis carries bedrock spiritual authority because it came from the lips of the dying Savior himself as he prayed from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For Augustine the word “me” in this prayer is a figurative act of prosopopoeia raised to the power of

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redemption: Christ takes as his own the voice of the sinner Adam. Augustine learned this from Paul’s teaching in Rom. 5 and 6, where the Apostle contrasted Adam and Christ, and spoke of the old sinful human self as crucified with Christ. On the cross Jesus’ humble human will “took up” the voice of Adam; that very act of embracing human death displayed the exchange of life for death that is the essence of redemption. Augustine “triangulates” the words of the Psalmist, the words of the Savior, and the words of the Apostle: the plaintive cry of Psalm 21:2 fuses with Christ’s cry of dereliction in Matt. 27:34 (Mark 15:34), and with Paul’s articulation of our redemptive union with him in Rom. 6:3–9 (especially v. 6). The cross of Christ now locks into position within Augustine’s rational-spiritual thinking. It is not too much to say that if one had to choose a single moment when Augustine emerged from a predominantly religious-philosophical mode to a distinctly Christian mode of spiritual reasoning, this would be it. The Exposition of Psalm 21 marks a watershed in his career as a Christian reader of Scripture, and indeed as a Christian. The Word becoming incarnate was an astounding act of saving humility, yet it remained incomplete without the Man ratifying it upon the cross. The sinner’s words of Psalm 21 taken up by the Crucified uncover the very engine of human redemption: the voice exchange between Savior and sinner that engineered an astounding trade of life for death. Augustine reads the words of the Psalmist through the words of the Apostle as if looking at them through a cross-shaped glass. As usual, references to “the end” and “David” indicate Christ, and so the suffering Son of David offers his anguished prayer in hope of being “taken up” (susceptio) into the resurrection. The dying Jesus held fast (servo) the sinner Adam to himself; and so the little pronoun “me” enfolds the huge gift of grace that rescues him. In order to submerge himself in humanity’s sinful ego the crucified Christ spoke in the voice of Adam. Thus the Lord’s “me” refers not merely to his humanness considered in the abstract, but includes the deadly curse that stuck fast to it. Christ counts himself among Adam’s mortal issue lost in the maze of sinful consciousness after its rebellion against God, an act of betrayal so catastrophically numbing that the man cannot even recall why God abandoned him. Christ drinks to the dregs Adam’s terrible cup of torment while confessing to the ignominy of “my” sins. Christ’s crucifixion prayer from Psalm 21 embeds several layers of impersonation.79 The first is the prosopopoeia of the Psalmist himself, who speaks the words of the Psalm ex persona crucifixi, “in the person of the

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Crucified” (Exp. 1 Ps. 21.1), Christ himself impersonates the voice of the first sinner, speaking ex persona Adam (21.7); that is, he speaks “in the person of the old man whose mortality he carried.”80 As we’ve seen, Augustine had already pictured Christ the intercessor speaking in the voice of his “least” (4.2), and having taken up the voice of his Church (3.9). Already in the first block of expositions the risen Christ speaks his followers’ words at God’s right hand in heaven in the aftermath of redemption. But here we find a wider picture: Christ speaks as a mortal man, indeed in the very midst of dying violently by the hands of sinners. Augustine breaks fresh ground by picturing Christ immersed in the person of Adam, after plunging himself into the murky world of the “I” lost in sin (21.3). This human act of “taking up” the sinner on the cross reveals the depth of the humble human love of Christ that ratified and conjoined with divine love. This unique conjunction of divine-human love transacts the exchange of redemption. Prosopopoeia’s rhetorical transposition of voices provides Augustine with the Christian theological pattern that articulates that momentous exchange. The Word took up our flesh and its mortality, but the Man’s will-to-death pours out perfect human neighbor-love that fulfills the Law and accomplishes redemption. Christ impersonates Adam in order to reveal the structure of redemption that he later calls “the marvelous exchange, the divine transaction.”81 Augustine had a shorthand term for this: “sacrament.” Christ’s will-to-death gives what it portrays, and so makes all other events, words, and signs sacramental insofar as they partake of it. Because that includes the Old Testament’s words and deeds, it too is sacramental. And that sacrament legitimates Augustine’s figurative reading of Scripture.

II. Implications for Exegesis It is impossible to overstate the importance for Augustine of Psalm 21. It is the “prophecy par excellence”82 that intersects Israel, Christ, and the Christian. Like a lightning flash in the night it sheds a brilliant light on the whole biblical landscape. Augustine eventually expressed the nut of the matter in a summary sentence: “Christ and the Church, the total mystery of all Scripture.”83 From now on this psalm assumes a central place in Augustine’s biblical work.84 Constantly recalled in the texts and treatises of the ensuing years, it continually reinvokes his fuller understandings of Christ’s redeeming humanity and of scriptural unity for the remainder of his days.

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Augustine had already declared that Christ takes away the veil from the Old Testament (contra the Manichees, not the Old Testament itself; Adv. Believ. 3.9), and his self-sacrifice takes away all other sacrifices (Exp. Ps. 2.8). But hearing Christ’s redemptive prosopopoeia upon the cross in Psalm 21:2 brings Augustine to a new level of understanding, not only about redemption but also about Old Testament fulfillment. Christ’s cry from the cross implicitly includes the rest of Psalm 21, including verse 15, “My heart was made like melting wax in the middle of my belly.” As Augustine sees it, the prayer of the Crucified “dissolves” the hard, enigmatic wisdom in the Old Testament. In speaking these words from the cross, Augustine comments, Christ reveals that his wisdom “which the holy books spelled out about me was not understood, like something hard and opaque. But after the fire of my passion set upon it, it became clear like a pure liquid stored up in the memory of my Church” (21.15). So the cross reveals limpid pools of grace and truth that lay hidden in the murky stories, characters, rites, and institutions of the Old Testament. Suddenly what had been obscure to even the most advanced spiritual minds in ancient Israel became clear to the humblest Christian believer, namely, God’s truth flowing freely even in the darkest corners of the old Scriptures. Christian preachers and teachers now used figurative reading to navigate the waters of Scripture and to train simple and sophisticated Christians alike by continuous exercises in spiritual reading. Psalm 21 affected the way Augustine read all the rest of these “Psalms of the Crucified” and handed him the key that unlocked their mysteries.85 Nine of this block’s fifteen expositions relate to Christ’s death.86 Besides the two that speak about Christ’s redemptive suffering from a thirdperson point of view (on Psalms 19 and 20), seven others focus directly on the crucifixion. Of these seven, three explicitly link to the passion narratives of the New Testament (15, 21, 30), while the other four explore the psalm’s paschal implications (16, 17, 27, 29). But the most striking fact is that in these seven expositions, either in whole or in part, Christ prays the psalm in the first person from the cross. Let’s look briefly at them in turn.

A. Psalm 15 The Exposition of Psalm 15 dramatically underscores Augustine’s fresh reading. The New Testament had already read key verses of this psalm (“You will not allow your holy one to see corruption”) as prophecies of Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 2:27; 13:35–37). But Augustine remarkably rereads

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these words as spoken by Christ from the cross. He signals this line of interpretation in his first line while commenting on the psalm’s heading, “The Inscription of the Title (tituli inscriptio), a Psalm of David himself,” a reference to the placard above the crucified Lord’s head, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (Matt. 27:37). Augustine comments, “In this psalm our King speaks in the person of the human being he took up (ex persona susceptionis humanae), concerning which the royal title, written at the time of his passion, stood out (eminuit)” (Exp. Ps. 15.1). Jerome had recognized the title as a reference to the passion,87 but Augustine goes further by interpreting the entire psalm as spoken from the cross. In the midst of suffering Christ calls upon God to preserve him from death; that is, it is a prayer for resurrection (ibid. 15.2; cf. 21.1). By reading the psalm as a prophecy of Christ speaking from the cross Augustine makes sense of the future tenses of the psalm’s verbs: congregabo, “I will gather” (4); restitues, “you will restore” (5); caro mea requiescet, “my flesh will rest” (9); non derelinques, “you will not abandon” (10); ne dabis “you will not give” (10); and adimplebis, “you will fill” (10).88 Augustine carefully observes the future tense of these verbs because they were spoken by the Prophet as anticipations of God’s saving acts; however, also carefully setting them in the scene of the crucified Christ, they continue to anticipate God’s deliverance in resurrection. The psalm therefore portrays the Savior’s dying moments as he recalls teaching the disciples about himself: “They have come to see how much profit for them resides in the humanity of my divinity that I might die, and divinity of my humanity that I might rise” (15.3). The crucified Lord mercifully says that although they were stumbling as defectors at that moment, his disciples were about to realize their need of him (ibid.). He envisions a future when they and many others will gather in holy assemblies, not to offer blood sacrifices but to offer spiritual ones; their resulting transformation will erase forever the memory of their sinfulness (15.4). Maintaining hope in God right up to that last agonizing moment, Christ confidently declares that his dead flesh “will rest in hope” for “you will not abandon my soul (anima) in hell, nor allow your holy one to see corruption” (10). For Augustine Psalm 15 shows the Church emerging into existence at a different point in time than in Psalm 3. There the Church appeared from the dead Christ’s side in order to arise “in that Man,” for when “the head has gone before, the body will follow” (Exp. Ps. 3.9). But in the Exposition of Psalm 15 the Church already exists in the earthly Savior dying upon the cross. In Christ it has a kind of “preexistence” and is already the subject of

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his intercession before he died. The Church is a reality not merely from the moment of his redemptive death but from the eternity of his everliving love, and so must be seen as existing even “before the foundation of the world” (see Eph. 1:4). Because he has forever been alive Christ has also forever loved the Church, for “where the head is, there too is the body.” A special expression of this love appears in a recurring phrase of this exposition, “because I am within them” (or “among them”): in quibus quia ego sum.89 Augustine repeats this exact phrase four times in this short exposition (Exp. Ps. 15.5, 6, and twice in 10), and again in 27.9; however, it never again appears in Augustine’s works, suggesting that it was an experimental expression that temporarily captured something important. Here are the four occurrences in the exposition of Psalm 15: [1] (15.5): “You are the one who will restore to me my inheritance” [Ps. 15:5], so that those whom I set free might know the glory that I had with you before the world came to be [John 17:5]. You won’t restore to “me” glory that I myself never lost. Rather you will restore the knowledge of that glory to these who lost it. But because I am within them, the psalm says, “you will restore to me” (in quibus quia ego sum, mihi restitues). . . . [2] (15.6): “Indeed my inheritance is glorious to me” [Ps. 15:6]— yet not to all, but only to those who see it. But because I am within them, the psalm says, “to me” (in quibus quia ego sum, mihi). . . . [3] (15.10): “You have made known to me the ways of life” [Ps. 15:10]: that is, you made known through me the ways of humility so that people might return to the “life” from which they fell through pride. But because I am within them, the psalm says, “you have made known to me” (in quibus quia ego sum, mihi fecisti). . . . [4] (15.10): “You will fill me with the joy of your face” [Ps. 15:6]. You will fill them with joy so that they will seek no other when they see you face to face. But because I am within them, the psalm says, “you will fill me” (in quibus quia ego sum, mihi adimplebis).90 In quibus quia ego sum recalls the Johannine Christ’s ego sum, “I am” (John 6:35, 8:12, 8:58, etc.), itself an echo of the divine self-revelation to Moses in Exod. 3:14 (“Tell them ‘I am’ sent you”). But it also reflects the “high priestly” prayer that the still mortal, pre-crucifixion Christ prays for his disciples at the climax of the “farewell discourse” of John 17:1–26.91 In John 17:23 the Lord declares, “I in them and you in me” (ego in eis et tu in me;),

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and in v. 26, “I have made your name known to them so that I may be in them” (ut . . . ego in ipsis; v. 26). He has transposed himself into them; so now they can make his identity their own “because I am within them.” This contrasts with Augustine’s previous view that Christ’s intercessory work at God’s right hand was an exclusively divine work that was delegated to the Man only after his resurrection. This exposition reads intercession back into the mortal life of Jesus before his death. No longer seeing the inauguration of this ministry put off until Christ was raised to God’s right hand, Augustine sees him actively interceding during his passion. The psalm, as Augustine sees it, portrays Christ interceding for his followers by including them within his first-person pronouns “I” and “me.” This is St. Paul’s figurative realism about co-crucifixion with Christ read back into the Gospel narrative about Jesus’ prayers at Gethsemane (“Let this cup pass from me”; Matt. 26:39) and at Golgotha (“Why have you forsaken me?” Matt. 27:46). In quibus quia ego sum captures the profound exchange of identities upon the cross that derives from the rhetorical trope of prosopopoeia. That phrase doesn’t merely clarify this or that obscurity in the psalm for Augustine; it rather expresses the whole economy of the Incarnation in the compass of a single phrase.92 The psalm’s personal pronouns alongside Christ’s speaking ego instructs Augustine about the union of Christ and the Church. God will restore the inheritance “to me” (v. 5); the inheritance is glorious “to me” (v.6); he made known the paths of life “to me” (v. 10); with joy you will fill “me” (v. 10). These sayings use cause-for-effect metonymy whereby what has been made known “to me” is actually made known “through me” (15.10). But this was a metonymy with a twist. The ecclesial force of Christ saying “because I am within them” emerged clearly in the light of v. 5, “the Lord is my apportioned inheritance”: Augustine explains that the possessive pronoun “my” is appropriate because Christ and the Church share personhood within a single body. Augustine himself then voices the words of Christ: “When I say ‘my’ I adjoin (adiungo) the Church, because where the head is, there too is the body” (15.5). Augustine’s phrasing suggests that this goes beyond a mere exchange of names to a shared identity; that is, the figure’s structure is determined not by a cause-for-effect metonymy but by a part-for-whole synecdoche. The part stands for the whole because Christ confers his own status on, and bequeaths his goods to, his Church. In short, the name exchange grows out of the exchange of identity that results from the wedded oneness of Christ and the Church whom Paul calls “one flesh” (Eph. 5:30–31; Gen. 2:24).

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B. Psalm 16 Psalm 16 spoken as a prayer from the cross strongly continues the theme of Christ’s humanity as the instrument of salvation, this time focusing specifically on his human soul. Augustine paraphrases v. 13, “Free my soul from the ungodly,” as words of the Crucified: “My soul is your sword .  .  . which your hand—that is, your eternal Power—assumed (assumsit), so that through it your Power might subdue the kingdoms of iniquity and divide the just from the ungodly” (Exp. Ps. 16.13). We know that at just this time Augustine was preoccupied with Christ’s authentic human soul.93 But here he insists not only that Christ’s human soul is real but also that it is the instrument of power by which God will judge the world. Collapsing this eschatological perspective into his passion, the crucified Christ prays for God not to delay judgment until his return in glory but to render it at that moment. As in Augustine’s treatment of Psalm 15, Christ and Church are yoked in prayer. He attributes its title, “a prayer of David himself,” to “the person of the Lord adjoined (adiuncta) to the Church, which is his body” (16.1). Accordingly v. 5, “for perfecting my steps in your paths,” reports the Lord’s dying prayer “that the Church’s love might be brought to maturity in the narrow roads by which it arrives at your rest.” Augustine also hears parts of the psalm in two possible ways. The prayer “that my footsteps (vestigia) might not be removed” might refer either Christologically to the Lord praying for his own resurrection, or ecclesially to the Church’s sacraments and Scriptures (16.5). C. Psalm 17 The Exposition of Psalm 17 brings Augustine’s first known use of the phrase totus Christus, “the whole Christ.”94 The words of this psalm too come from the cross. As usual the title phrase, “to the end,” indicates Christ, “strong-handed in his humanity.” In v. 2, when the voice praises the Lord “my strength . . . my firm support, my refuge, my liberator,” the epithet “my strength” pointed to God “through whom I am strong.” So Augustine finds “Christ and Church speaking together here, that is, the whole Christ, head and body.” But interestingly, Augustine now hears the voice as alternating between the head and body. At times it becomes difficult to tell who is speaking, for they speak not merely individually but on each other’s behalf; it is a prosopopoeia wherein Christ speaks on behalf of the Church. Because Christ and the Church are one body and one voice, Christ can impersonate the Church and vice versa. On top of that, the

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Prophet-Psalmist envelops the voice of totus Christus within his own voice in a sort of impersonation of the impersonator.

D. Psalm 29 In Psalm 29 Augustine hears the Church praying at the eschatological moment of resurrection joy. The exposition contrasts with, though it also builds upon, Psalm 28’s picture of Christ the Mediator praying for his Church on its journey to heaven. Augustine discerns the Prophet’s vision of the Church’s moment of change and makeover (mutatio atque innovatio) at the gates of heaven when human mortality finally dons the mantle of immortality. The psalm expresses the awestruck wonder of totus Christus in that exultant moment: “I will exalt you, Lord, because you have taken me up (suscepisti me). . . . I cried out to you, and you healed me. . . . You made me safe from those going down into the pit” (vv. 2–4; 29.2–4).95 The newly glorified Church looks back upon its old unregenerate condition before grace. The voice of the Prophet-Psalmist breaks in at v. 6. As he beholds salvation’s majestic sweep—from the dark sentence of death through redemption to the exultation of triumph—he urges the saints to praise God for the grace that has saved them: “Sing to the Lord, you saints!” (Exp. 1 Ps. 29.5–6). They should “rejoice in the morning” of the resurrection day that dawned at Easter. The Church’s words of praise follow in a passage that consummates Augustine’s experiment with prosopopoeia in these early expositions. The complex passage in 29.7–12. contains a welter of no less than ten different exchanges of voice. The first three are implied in the exposition: (1) Augustine’s prosopopoeia interprets by taking up the Psalmist’s own voice; (2) the pre-incarnate Christ speaks the words of totus Christus on the Church’s behalf; and (3) the Psalmist takes up the voice of totus Christus. The remaining exchanges are explicit. (4) The Church responds to the call to praise God’s grace, by recalling its former state, “I—the people that was speaking at the beginning .  .  . ‘I spoke in my plenty’” (29.7). The Church went on to impersonate its own prayer in its former state of abundance: “I said, ‘I shall not be moved forever.’” But recalling a former time when God turned away, a distressing time when it temporarily lost God’s light, it “learned that your strength stood surety for my beauty.” That is, grace continually sustains the just in their struggle with sin. “For a time you turned away (avertisiti aliquando) your face from sin.” But everything became clearer after the Church “became disturbed when the knowledge of your light receded from me” (29.8). At that moment, the spirit of repentance suggested a dramatic

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move: (5) the Church should vicariously reenter its old state of sinful misery, and take up again Adam’s unregenerate persona before baptism, “as though I were planted back within it (tamquam in eo constitutus).” By this prosopopoeia the Church pictures itself as Adam listening to Christ’s prosopopoeia in Psalm 21, “the voice of your first-born . . . my head about to die for me (pro me morituri).” Then shifting to impersonate the Lord, the Church imitates the dying words of Christ crucified, “To you, O Lord, I cry, and I plead with my God. What use is there in my blood if I sink into corruption? When will the dust ever praise you, or ever announce your truth?” (29.9–10). This is a triple impersonation: (6) the Church impersonates the crucified Christ, (7) who at the same time is impersonating the unregenerate Adam (the foundational prosopopoeia of Psalm 21); and (8) this moves the Church to impersonate Christ as Adam crying out in repentance. (9) The voice then shifts to the risen Christ who intercedes for the Church by thanking God for accomplishing redemption, and “not letting his holy one see corruption.” On behalf of the Church, Christ says, “The Lord heard and took pity on me, the Lord has become my helper” (29.11). (10) Then the Church, “having followed the first-born from the dead,” returns to its own voice on the eschatological day of glory, and rejoices in being saved from death: “‘Now (nunc), at the dedication of your house, I say, ‘You changed my mourning into joy” (29.12).96

E. “The Mediator” in Psalms 25, 27, 28, and 30 Augustine imports his fresh perception of Christ’s humanity learned from Paul into his exegesis of Psalms 15–32, and so displays a new “fleshed-out” concept of “the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). That crucial text appears in a string of references in this second block of expositions beginning in 25.1, followed in quick succession in 27.1, 28.1, and 30.1. As we saw, Augustine’s earlier construction of “mediator” saw it as a function of Christ’s divinity, either a work of the divine Word or delegated to the Man after his resurrection. But the expositions of Psalms 15–32 clearly assign the office of mediator to the suffering human Christ. Augustine so ascribes it in four psalm titles that mention David (“stronghanded”97), that is, Christ, “strong-handed in the conflict of his passion” (27.1),98 and “the Mediator, strong-handed in the midst of persecutions” (30.1).99 The gentle prayer of the Crucified, “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46), allows Augustine to hear Christ’s voice in Psalm 30:2– 5: “In you, Lord, I have hoped; do not confound me forever, and in your

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justice pluck me out and rescue me.” In this prayer for God’s vindication by resurrection, Augustine contends, “the Mediator himself speaks” (30.1).100 Augustine’s ascription of the words of the Psalms to the voice of the Crucified reflects the impact of his Pauline insight about the pre-incarnate Word’s presence in ancient Israel. The members of Christ’s body read the Old Testament as their own, for he is present in it, and “where the head is, there too is the body” (Exp. Ps. 15.5). They claim it as their own because it belongs to him. He speaks its words, and so his members also speak them.

Conclusion: Christ the Master Exegete By reading the Psalms through the lens of the New Testament, and by drawing out the implications of the Incarnation and the reality of Christ’s death, Augustine transforms his framework for understanding Scripture. The New Testament had already defined the basic parameters for interpreting the Psalms by ascribing some to Christ; a variety of writers in the early Church tradition extended that work. Tyconius then spoke of the bipartite body of the Lord in order to distinguish the voices of the Lord and his body in Scripture. But Augustine went beyond them all by driving down to the underlying unity of head and body and to the implied reciprocity between them. The confluence of Jesus’ cry from the cross and Psalm 21:2 is more than a witness to divine grace and love. Augustine sees in it the very pith of salvation, for it opens a way into “the spiritual realities themselves” (Comm. Gal 15.12–13). The bedrock authority of the dying Savior’s exegesis of Psalm 21 discloses his voice throughout the Psalter and indeed the entire Old Testament. Psalm 21 accordingly reveals not only the Mediator’s future work but also his secret pre-incarnate presence in the people, writers, and events of the ancient prophetic people. Augustine later unfolds the same outlook in greater detail in his exposition of Psalm 45. The metaphor of a “key that unlocks” (Exp. Ps. 45.1) replaces Psalm 21’s “fire that melts,” but the line of interpretation is the same. Commenting on words in the psalm title, “the hidden things,” Augustine writes that the psalm is “concerned with what is hidden, but as you know, the one crucified on Calvary rent asunder the veil so that the temple’s secret places were exposed to view [Matt. 27:51]. Our Lord’s cross was like a key for opening what was locked away: so let us be confident that he

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will be with us now, that these hidden things may be unveiled” (Exp. Ps. 45.1). In referring to this passage Henri de Lubac comments that for Augustine Christ’s crucifixion was the critical juncture where Scripture’s depths were exposed. “His Cross is the sole and universal key. By this sacrament of the Cross, he unites the two Testaments into a single body of doctrine, intermingling the ancient precepts with the grace of the Gospel.”101 Paradoxically the Lord’s cry from the cross both confirms the old covenant and confers new meaning upon it; the clock of salvation history chimes as he unfolds the prophecies that anticipated him. He became their center and the ultimate reason Christians read them. De Lubac continues: Therefore, Jesus Christ brings about the unity of Scripture, because he is the endpoint and fullness of Scripture. Everything in it is related to him. In the end he is its sole object. Consequently he is, so to speak, its whole exegesis. . . . Inasmuch as he is the exegesis of Scripture, Jesus Christ is also the exegete.  .  . . This is because Christ’s exegesis, insofar as it is essential and decisive, does not consist of words first and foremost. It is actual. It is Action . . . Jesus is a scriptural exegete par excellence in the act by which he fulfills his mission, at that solemn hour for which he has come: in his sacrificial action, at the hour of his death on the cross. That is why he says, in effect, “Behold I make all things new.”102 Augustine in effect appropriates the legacy of Origen,103 who spoke of Christ’s action in relation to the Old Testament as having “made all things into gospel by the gospel.”104 Therefore, Christ did more than interpret Israel’s Scriptures; by joining them to his person and to his cross, he retroactively transforms them. When Christ transposes all humanity into himself on the cross he trades humanity’s death for divine life. This “marvelous exchange” between spirit and flesh, eternal and temporal, Redeemer and redeemed, introduces heavenly life into earthly life; an exchange of heavenly and earthly nuclei, so to say, brings a new creation into being. That realization set Augustine on the road to seeing how changing historical events could bear God’s eternal grace and truth; temporal things not only anticipate and describe the eternal, but even manifest and convey it. In the words of a psalm that he loved to quote, “Truth has sprung up from the earth” (Ps. 84:12) (e.g., Serm. 185.1–2). But there is one thing more. Augustine himself imitates the prosopopoeia of the crucified Christ, even beyond his experiment of exegesis in the

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first person. Christ supplies him with both a model and an authorization to read Scripture’s words as his own words. Augustine doesn’t storm the text with a claim to own it based on his personal intuitive identification with the writer and with the circumstances of the text’s composition. Rather when faith made him a participant in the salvation story, Christ mediated the Psalms to him. Christ’s “Action” earned him the right to speak the Psalms, not only as the Word who divinely authored them, but even more as the Just Man who humanly lived them. Christ invited Augustine into the text, having lived its words and so made them his own from the human side. Augustine belonged to Christ, and so he too read the words as his own. Christians, Augustine thought, discovered their own voices in Scripture because its words belonged to Christ, he who by taking human flesh inhabited both Testaments as their author and chief subject. With help from St. Paul, Augustine learned to read the Psalms as his own words, transposing himself into them through Christ, as Christ had transposed himself into the Psalms in his passion. Augustine’s preaching on the Psalms and other Old Testament texts sought to train others in the skill to make that transposition. Augustine used Christ’s own trope of rhetorical prosopopoeia to vivify the text’s voice by “taking it up” as his own in a kind of first-person paraphrase. In this way he empowered an understanding of the text from the divine author’s point of view. Augustine adapted this device for exegesis from Christ’s example of impersonation on the cross, a fundamental act of “revelation” that authoritatively disclosed saving spiritual truth.105 It amplified Christ’s pre-incarnate voice within the voice of the Prophet-Psalmist who had mystically taken up the voice of the future human Redeemer. On the one hand, the Psalmist spoke as Christ, while on the other, Christ spoke as Adam and as Church, and made the figure of prosopopoeia a template for reading Scripture. Imitating this device allowed Augustine to take up a position for reading within the text’s own precincts. Accordingly he read the Psalms as Christ, that is, as a member of Christ’s body who participated in the self-understanding of the head. Though Augustine’s experimental use of prosopopoeia for exegesis did not survive his priestly period, it anticipated his later view that pictured the suffering Christ at Gethsemane and Golgotha “transfiguring us into himself” (transfigurans nos in se); that is, incorporating believers into his person as members of his body, the Church.106 The “exchange” between Christ and believers—life given for death, justice given for guilt—suggests the chief characteristic of Augustine’s Christian hermeneutics, that is, the exchange by which readers

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project themselves into the Scriptures. These early Psalms studies, and the later Psalms sermons, were training exercises to help readers to practice this self-transposition into the text through Christ’s gracious Incarnation and death. The hermeneutic pattern in Confessions wherein Augustine voiced the words of Scripture as his own words—especially but not only the words of the Psalms107—was a kind of first fruits of the remarkable practice of exegesis Augustine had achieved by the late 390s (see below, “Epilogue”). At that same time Augustine also wrote his best-known and most influential work on biblical hermeneutics, On Christian Teaching. How does that work fit into the trajectory of development we have been following? In making this comparison we’ll find some surprising discrepancies. So we turn to that work next.

Excursus on Christological Intensification Between Expositions of Psalms 1–14 and 15–32 We can see Augustine’s strong shift of focus to Christ’s humanity by way of changes that occur between the first to the second block of Psalms expositions. These shifts add support to my claim about the “Christological intensification” occurring after Augustine studied the Apostle Paul’s teaching on Christ’s humanity. Five instances are noteworthy. 1. Psalm 15:5: “The Lord is my apportioned inheritance.” Augustine first refers to Psalm 15:5 while treating the title of Psalm 5, “For her who receives the inheritance.” The feminine pronoun had suggested that the “heir” was the Church, who on the last day will receive nothing less than a vision of God himself.108 Augustine clinched this reading by referring to the Church’s words in Psalm 15:5, “The Lord is my apportioned inheritance.” However, when he comes to the actual exposition of Psalm 15, he refers the heir of v. 5 not to the Church but to Christ, who announces that the Church will one day possess the inheritance “with me” (15.5). As he had come to understand it, the inheritance was Christological before it was ecclesial, and it came not merely through Christ (as he had said in 5.1), but because of Christ. So Augustine begins to stress the prior step wherein Christ bestows the inheritance on the Church because it belongs to him.109 2. Psalm 15:7–9: “Even into the night my inward parts (renes) rebuked me.” While explaining Psalm 7, Augustine describes the soul’s renes (literally “reins,” i.e., the seat of human desires) as “the lower part of human nature, the region of carnal pleasure” that sends new offspring into “this life of

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misery and illusory joy” (7.9, commenting on Ps. 7:10, “God examines people’s hearts and renes”). These renes, Augustine asserts, only stir longing for dark earthly ecstasies and fantasies (phantasmata); God therefore never regenerates these renes, but only “examines” them. For this reason, Augustine wrote, the Psalmist said in Psalm 15:7–9, “Even into the night my renes reproved me, I kept the Lord always before my eyes.” However, when Augustine interpreted Psalm 15 itself, “my renes” occasions a discussion of Christ’s true humanity. Christ the Man, Augustine writes, declares that his renes “instructed” (erudivit) him up to the point of death about the shadowy terrors of mortal life, something that his perfect spiritual understanding could not do (15.7). 3. Psalm 17:10: “He bowed the heavens and came down.” While explaining Psalm 8 Augustine referred Psalm 17:10 to Scripture’s humble style, and commented that God accommodated himself (“he bowed the heavens”) in Scripture to the small capacity of spiritual infants and nurslings (8.8). But later while treating Psalm 17 itself, Augustine refers that verse to Christ’s Incarnation: “bowing the heavens” means that God stooped to earth by “making the Just One so humble as to come down to human weakness” (17.10). 4. Psalm 16:13: “Free my soul from the ungodly, your spear from the enemies of your hand.” When treating Psalm 7:13, “Unless you turn he will brandish his sword (gladium),” Augustine had read “sword” as a reference to the Lordly Man (Exp. Ps. 7.13). God did not brandish this “Christ-sword” at first, but hid it in “the sheath of humility”; only Christ’s second coming would feature a dazzling display of judgment between the living and the dead (cf. 9.8). Augustine noted a manuscript variant that replaced gladium with framea, “a glistening spear,” which suggested the “flashing brightness” of eschatological judgment. That linked the verse to Psalm 16:13, “Free my soul from the ungodly, your spear (framea) from the enemies of your hand.” However, the later exposition of Psalm 16 referred framea to the soul of Christ during his passion as he prayed for resurrection.110 5. Psalm 2:8: “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance.” The exposition of Psalm 2:7, as we have seen, discerned the incarnate Christ’s voice as he speaks to the Father, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance” (2.8). In Exp. Ps. 2 Augustine makes “Ask of me” a shorthand reference to the entire temporal dispensation.111 But when he quotes Psalm 2:7 in his exposition of Psalm 27, Augustine re-assigned the words “Ask of me” to the voice of the Father. The Father now tells the Son, “Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance.” So

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the risen Christ now quotes these words back to the Father while interceding at his right hand: “I intercede after my flesh has blossomed anew, because you said, ‘Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as an inheritance’” (27.9). Thus “Ask of me,” had become a continuation of the Father’s declaration to the divine Son, “Today I have begotten you.” Christ was now seen to receive the inheritance of the nations rather than give it to the Father.

PART THREE

Master Teacher, Defender, Pastor of Souls (396–ca. 400)

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High and Low on Jacob’s Ladder reading scripture from both ends in ON   CHRISTIAN TEACHING and ON INSTRUCTING BEGINNERS

the year 396 marked another watershed in Augustine’s remarkable decade of shifting social landscapes. Only ten years after abandoning the Manichees and embracing the Catholics, a mere five years after his surprise ordination as priest at Hippo, and only months after Bishop Valerius maneuvered him into becoming his assistant bishop, Augustine became bishop of Hippo, a post he would hold for the next thirty-five years. Time became tight, and more than ever his early desire to form a community of Scripture contemplatives (Letter 21.3) seemed like a distant dream. Augustine compared himself to the patriarch Jacob who, after looking forward to ecstasy with the rapturous Rachel, reluctantly settled for humdrum with her workaday sister Leah. He wrote, “Who doesn’t see this happening everywhere in the whole world? People leave the world’s works and enter the repose of learning and contemplating truth, as though falling into Rachel’s embrace, only to be hauled off in the opposite direction by the necessity of the Church’s pressing business by being ordained into labor (ordinari in laborem), as if Leah were saying, ‘You’re coming to me.’” The analogy struck a chord among would-be contemplatives everywhere. “What we learn about in the texts,” Augustine commented dryly, “we are living out in real life parallels.”1 But since the time of his priesthood Augustine had worked hard to understand Scripture, “seeking what is advantageous not to me, but to the many” (1 Cor. 10:33), by ever more closely reading the texts with the help of previous commentators. He did not study to become a biblical critic, a role for which he never had the right tools or temperament anyway;2 he wanted rather to be a sort of biblical

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retailer. During his priesthood Augustine tried to sell a rounded approach to the Bible that served spiritual climbers like the monastic brothers for whom he wrote works like Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions, that is, the Church’s small cadre of Rachels. But in the last months of his priesthood, he began to focus intensively on its huge crowd of Leahs. As priest Augustine had preached occasionally under Valerius’s direction, but as bishop sermons were now his daily work. Whatever leisure he once enjoyed as an understudy was over. Augustine continued to love reading Scripture (Conf. 11.2.3): “See, your voice is my joy, your voice, beyond the wealth of other pleasures! Let me have what I love, for I truly love it!” But a bishop’s burdens were relentless and nonnegotiable, in the midst of which the task of turning Scripture’s spiritual delicacies into daily spiritual food for “little ones” was demanding. The passage from the peace of Scripture study and monastic spiritual conversation to the sweaty tumult of preaching was a constant challenge. On an anniversary of his episcopal ordination, he told his congregation, “Nobody could outdo me in enjoying such anxiety-free leisure. There’s nothing better, nothing more pleasant than to search through the divine treasure chest [of Scripture] with nobody making a commotion; it’s pleasant, it’s good. But to preach, to refute, to rebuke, to build up, to manage for everybody, that’s a great burden, a great weight, a great labor. Who wouldn’t run away from this labor? But the gospel terrifies me.”3 In Confessions he wrote that even though he had been “for a long time burning to meditate on your Law” (Ps. 38:4), and “not wanting the hours to flow off into anything else,” there were never enough “drops of time” for reading to ripen into understanding (11.2.2). Much less was there time to train people in matters of technical exegesis, as did Jerome, the renowned translator and master exegete. Augustine wrote him plaintively, “Whatever skill in this area I do possess, I completely pay out (impendo) to the people of God. I am utterly unable, on account of my church duties, to free up time for training people in studies that are more meticulous than what ordinary people listen to.”4 Nevertheless, Augustine took an intense interest in training skilled and savvy readers of Scripture in the service of spiritual ascent. On Christian Teaching was among the first works he produced as a new bishop, continuing his mentor Valerius’s concern to form strong Scripture readers in the Church. Its immense influence has been emphasized as an authentic “classic of western culture.”5 Yet what prompted him to write this work is unclear. Was it an old request from Valerius, or a new one from Aurelius, bishop of Carthage? Was it the spur of reading Tyconius’s Book of

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Rules, which as we know occurred about this time (Letter 41.2)? Was it a felt need for more systematic training of brothers in the community at Hippo and elsewhere who always peppered him with Scripture questions? Was it a desire to put a Platonic-spiritual spin on the Church’s hermeneutical tradition? Or was it some combination of these? Moreover, scholars have had trouble describing the work’s exact subject and purpose. The word doctrina can mean either the act of teaching or the content of teaching. Suggestions about Augustine’s purpose for writing the work have ranged from giving seminary-like training to preachers to mapping plans for a Christian biblical culture.6 Everyone agrees that On Christian Teaching’s approach was hermeneutically innovative, philosophically alert, and spiritually ambitious.7 In particular, the work made two permanent contributions to western Christian discourse on Scripture: it anchored its interpretive center in the double command to love God and neighbor, and it inseminated Christian Scripture reading with a literary-rhetorical and spiritual-philosophical outlook on language as a network of signs. But in the context of Augustine’s developing mind in the 390s, On Christian Teaching was an unfinished, experimental work that reflected his rapidly changing social and spiritual posture. Pastorally oriented Scripture reading had become a central task for Augustine; so in studying his biblical work we are fingering the pulse of Augustine’s life in this period. At stake for him in this project was not biblical knowledge per se but biblical perspective.8 Augustine wanted to construct a hermeneutic platform upon which to erect an enduring framework for interpretation. The question is how much of the framework actually got built. Without minimizing the epochal quality of On Christian Teaching, we must set it within the flow of Augustine’s works in the 390s. This chapter will study this work with an eye toward estimating its net gain for Augustine’s overall hermeneutic as well as toward comparing it with what he wrote just before and after. What we’ll find is that for all its suggestiveness, On Christian Teaching leaves out some important pieces of Augustine’s hermeneutical puzzle. The stream of Augustine’s hermeneutical practice flowing into his early work on the Psalms shows how Paul trained him to find Christ more clearly throughout the Old Testament. The Psalms helped Augustine get the feel of Scripture’s interwoven fabric of difference-in-unity. But certain aspects of On Christian Teaching don’t easily fit into that picture. Its focus seems to be ethical rather than theological;9 Augustine does not clarify the more general conception of Scripture’s role in the economy of salvation, which “remains largely implicit.”10 He subordinates Christ’s humanity

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and the text of Scripture to the goal of achieving spiritual perfection. Spiritual sages like St. Paul “forget” Christ the Man (Phil. 3:13; Chr. Teach. 1.34.38), and the spiritually perfect “no longer need the Scriptures” except to teach someone else (ibid. 1.39.43). At first blush he seems to leave these lesser things behind after attaining his spiritual goal; like exhausted booster rockets they deliver their payload and fade away. On Christian Teaching’s Platonic hierarchical orientation seems to make both Christ’s human flesh and Scripture’s earthly signs obsolescent and utterly powerless, “necessary but provisional” instruments for perfecting the soul’s practice of Christian love.11

Looking from the Top Down with On Christian Teaching On Christian Teaching came from Augustine the teacher rather than Augustine the debater or preacher. It sets God’s effort to communicate his will to humanity into the widest possible learning context. The point of this work was not to prove the worth or establish the doctrine of the Bible but to educate one already committed to it. Augustine offered his personal and almost idiosyncratic spiritual vision for reading Scripture, which he nevertheless suggested as a universal discipline for “reading” all of life and reality. So on the one hand its approach was generally applicable, yet it was also tightly focused upon Scripture’s function for spiritual advancement. It clearly presumed some training in special disciplines like grammar and rhetoric.12 Augustine wrote not for the town baker or cobbler but for people who were at least minimally educated. It was portentous for the western Christian tradition that On Christian Teaching forged an alliance of intellect and spirit; Augustine saw all truth as God’s truth (2.18.28), and he would have thought fideism a quite ridiculous attitude. But this work aimed at spiritually advancing Christians who wanted to search Scripture for deep spiritual meanings, not at the Church’s “little ones” who read or listened only for the text’s historical sense. On Christian Teaching’s ambitious hermeneutical vision contributed important strokes to Augustine’s portrayal of figurative Old Testament reading, but it left other parts of the canvas barely touched. For instance, the fourfold schema of biblical interpretation in The Advantage of Believing 3.5–9 does not reappear. More striking is the lack of instruction about prophecy and fulfillment that already for centuries had informed Christian Old Testament hermeneutics (i.e., the fulfillment of “types”). Moreover, On Christian Teaching skips over many staple Pauline passages on Old

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Testament hermeneutics (which he had previously discussed elsewhere): Rom. 15:4 on Christian hope derived from Israel’s writings; 2 Cor. 3:14–16 on Christ removing the Old Testament veil; Gal. 4:24 on the allegory of Hagar and Sarah; and especially 1 Cor. 10:1–11 on the Christian resonance of the Exodus story. This studied omission seems to indicate that Augustine thought that these texts were too elementary for the audience he was trying to reach. Indeed, On Christian Teaching never argued for the Bible’s authority or persuasiveness. In terms of Augustine’s oft-quoted scriptural formula, its presumption was, “Unless you believe you will not understand” (Isa. 7:9, discussed at Chr. Teach. 2.12.17). This work didn’t explain how to read Scripture in order to believe; rather, it assumed the Bible’s authority and went on to explain how believers read Scripture in order to understand. In short, On Christian Teaching aimed at the Church’s spiritales, the spiritually advanced (or those aspiring to advance), whose question was not, “How do I accept this text?” but rather, “Having accepted this text, how do I handle it?” The challenge of “handling of the Scriptures” (tractatio scripturarum; 1.1.1) embraced the twin skills of finding out what is to be understood (modus inveniendi, Books 1–3) and then effectively presenting that (modus proferendi, Book 4, written belatedly in the 420s). On Christian Teaching was not an unprejudiced exploration of “what the Bible really means,” as though it taught one to read it critically apart from faith and from the upshot of its own subject matter. Rather, On Christian Teaching presumed the Bible’s authority as a revelation for saving faith in order to bequeath a golden interpretive key to the spiritually capable. That key was love (caritas). Defined as desire rooted in the divine will (voluntas Dei), caritas was the “one thing necessary” hidden in Scripture’s wild variety of characters, figures, stories, rites, and events. It was also the one necessary virtue for a person to read rightly; the reader who loves well reads well. Then it was the task of the interpreter (Augustine later called it the officium interpretandi, “the business of interpreting”; Exp. Ps. 79.1) to work with both sides: to find demonstrations (exempla) of love in Scripture and then to stir that love in readers and hearers. This love straddled the two Testaments: sitting half hidden in the lights and shadows of the Old, it goes on brilliant display in the New. On Christian Teaching’s crucial Book 1 forcefully aligned the task of interpreting Scripture with Jesus’ great commands to love God and neighbor (in Augustine’s language, the most important “things” or “realities,” res). Not coincidentally, Augustine observed, the Lord made his point by quoting the Old Testament (Matt. 22:37–40; Deut. 6:5; Lev. 19:18).

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At the end of Book 1 Augustine cogently summarizes the centrality of love to Christian life in general and to biblical hermeneutics in particular: The sum and substance (summa) of everything we’ve been saying about “things” (res) is that love should be understood as “the fulfillment and end of the Law” [cf. Rom. 13:10; 1 Tim. 1:5] and of all the divine Scriptures—love of the Thing that must be enjoyed [God] and love of the thing [the neighbor] that can enjoy that Thing together with us. . . . So whoever likes to think they’ve understood the divine Scriptures, or any part of them, while their understanding fails to build up this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet understood them. (1.35.39–36.40) For Augustine all truly spiritual reading of Scripture radiates from this center. As he later wrote, “Any idea about salvation, whether conceived by a mind or proclaimed by a mouth or carved out of any page of Scripture whatsoever, has no other end than love” (Exp. Ps. 140.1).13 This is the conjunction point of the soul’s union with God its highest Good, and every other created thing in life is instrumental in reaching it. By definition this love is not disembodied or abstract. Accordingly, On Christian Teaching addressed not only the biblical text to be interpreted or the act of interpreting but also the character of the interpreter: Right reading depended not only on what one reads but also on the one who reads. Here a key adaptation of the spiritual ladder image emphasized the upright heart as the ethical prerequisite of right reading. The metaphor of spiritual ascent had already been important in Augustine’s earlier portrayals of spiritual advancement; the image recurred often in prior works.14 On Christian Teaching’s sevenstep ladder of ascent to wisdom (Chr. Teach. 2.7.9–11) locates Scripture knowledge, scientia, on the third step, above fear and reverence (timor, pietas) and below fortitude, compassion, and cleansing of the heart ( fortitudo, misericordia, purgatio cordis). By setting the search for knowledge squarely on the upward path to spiritual wisdom, Augustine sought to protect the interpretive process from humanity’s perennial temptation to curiositas, that is, the lust for knowing things for their own sake. On Christian Teaching thus views Scripture on the spiritual ladder from the “top down,” that is, from the perspective of a reader advancing to the summit of spiritual understanding. This ideal picture had features that not even Augustine himself fully satisfied (most conspicuously, dexterity with the original biblical languages). But Augustine’s implied readers

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were at least motivated spiritual climbers who had passed beyond the beginning point of merely following external authority by faith. Christian love having stirred the workings of their spiritual reason, they had begun to peruse Scripture in order to commune with the invisible and unfathomable Trinity who is beyond thought, time, and change (Chr. Teach. 1.5.5). Can any words, even biblical words, accomplish this? It is logically contradictory, Augustine wrote, to speak the unspeakable (ineffabilis), and nothing one can say is worthy of God. Nevertheless God welcomes (admisit) the homage of the human voice. Our little word “God” cannot package or convey him, but it does stir hearers to route their thinking toward him (1.6.6). “Those who strive by means of the intellect to visualize what God is (videre quod Deus est), esteem him above every visible and bodily nature, even every intelligible and spiritual nature, beyond every mutable thing” (1.7.7).15 The seeker ascends the spiritual ladder of understanding by thinking first about the phenomena of visible forms, rising from them to consider sentient beings and changeable human minds, and ultimately arrives at unchanging Truth and Wisdom itself (1.8.8). Thus far, the picture corresponds to a neatly Christianized Plotinian ascent to the soul’s spiritual homeland (patria). But the clinching Christian factor appears when Augustine introduces the Incarnation as the way (via) to the homeland.16 No spiritual ascent would have been possible for human beings unless the eternal Word of God had descended to purify their hearts and enable their obedience to Scripture’s love command. For Augustine, Saint Paul epitomized the right “way” of ascending from material to spiritual understanding through the earthly forms in Rom. 1:20 (Chr. Teach. 1.4.4).17 In verses 19–21 the Apostle wrote about Gentiles: What could be known about God is evident among them, for God showed it to them. Ever since the creation of the world, his unseen things (ta aorata autou)—namely, his eternal power and divinity— have been clearly perceived (kathoratai) by things that were made. So they are without excuse, for while knowing God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks. Paul addressed the actual knowledge of God for which Gentiles are held responsible despite having no special knowledge from Israel’s Law. For the Apostle, human knowledge of God’s invisible things (“his eternal power and deity”) flows necessarily from the fact of living daily face-to-face with everything God has created. But people sin when, though clearly perceiving

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God from creation, they refuse to honor him as God or give thanks (v. 21). Thus their sin is a consequence of possessing but dishonoring genuine knowledge of God. However, Augustine wanted to make a different point, namely, that knowledge of God comes potentially from created things; and to do this he intriguingly tweaked Paul’s words (though he quoted the text in its proper form elsewhere).18 On Christian Teaching 1.4.4 alters Paul’s (translated) passive indicative conspiciuntur (“they are perceived”) to a subjunctive conspiciantur (“they may be perceived”). Augustine quotes Paul’s statement with the altered word and explains it as referring to the soul’s potential for rational spiritual perception: “By saying ‘so that the invisible things of God may be perceived, being understood through created things,’ he means to say, ‘so that we may receive (capiamus) eternal and spiritual things from bodily temporal things.’” Augustine’s subtle move highlights Paul’s implied premise—anything that does happen, a priori, also may happen—that the human mind has the capacity to climb up into the spiritual realm by using the stairsteps of material creation. But highlighting this presupposition also allows Augustine to turn Paul’s words in the direction of a Platonic epistemological ascent from material to spiritual and to put an apostolic dress on Augustine’s advanced spiritual outlook.19 For Paul, dishonoring the knowledge of God already given made the Gentiles culpable and vulnerable to rampant sin; for Augustine, sin had already undermined the human soul’s capacity to strive for higher intellectual perception, which was restored only by inner cleansing and continuous spiritual exercise. It is instructive to see Augustine insert Rom. 1:20 at critical junctures in the narrative of his intellectual conversion in Conf. 7, especially at the climax of his experiment in Plotinian intellectual ascent (7.17.23). Reaching the top of the intellectual ladder of creation, “in the flash of a trembling glance” he glimpsed “that which is.” Augustine writes, “At that moment indeed I saw (tunc vero conspexi) ‘your invisible things, understood through the things that were made’ [Rom. 1:20]. But I did not possess the strength to keep my focus fixed. My weakness reasserted itself, and I returned to my customary condition.”20 But in the very next moment he confesses that he needed something or rather someone else to sustain the vision, that is, he needed the divine-human Mediator who alone brought healing and conversion of will (Conf. 7.18.24). For Paul, actual spiritual perception had been lost; for Augustine, potential spiritual perception had to be gained. Augustine returns to the same train of thought using Rom. 1:20 in Conf. 10.6.10, where he

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repeats the subjunctive form of Paul’s verb while explaining humanity’s natural rational potential for discerning spiritual reality through created forms: “Human beings are able to ask questions so that they may perceive the invisible things of God, understood through things that were made” (ibid.). But our sinful desire for these same created things has enervated our abilities: human beings “are subjugated (subduntur) by love for [these created things], and being subject, they are unable to judge” spiritual things (ibid.). Augustine’s point would have detracted from Paul’s main argument that the Gentiles refuse to honor the knowledge of God that they already have. Augustine’s rather different point was that sinful desire, having enervated spiritual reason, forfeited its ability to achieve the knowledge of God. However, this point gave Augustine room to underline the human need for grace. On Christian Teaching used this outlook to speak of a sort of epistemological grace that appeared under the “divinely given signs contained in the holy Scriptures” (2.2.3).21

I. The Function of Biblical Signs in On Christian Teaching Spiritual ascent or “anagogy” is the best context for approaching Augustine’s much-studied understanding of scriptural signs in On Christian Teaching.22 The philosophical discussion of signs was already well developed by Augustine’s time; as a lay author he himself had already made contributions from the different angles of rhetorical argument (On Dialectic) and philosophical epistemology (On the Teacher). The anagogic function of signs is evident throughout On Christian Teaching. Book 1 begins by bracketing signs apart from “things” (res), that is, by distinguishing a pointing finger from the objects it points to, dividing visual and physical indicators from the spiritual realities they indicate. “Things” are defined negatively as objects “not applied to signifying anything” (Chr. Teach. 1.2.2).23 A res, like Freud’s cigar, is the brute reality of a thing in itself as distinguished from written words that “point out” or “indicate” that thing. The distinction prepares for the approaching discussion about “things enjoyed” and “things used.” Then, similarly, the beginning of Book 2 brackets things apart from signs in order to concentrate on the process of signification. Here Augustine wants to concentrate on the sign as a “pointing finger” that “indicates” a spiritual reality. To refer to this “pointing” aspect I will speak of “indicative” signs. Such signs “are called literal (propria, i.e., ‘belonging to itself’) when they are applied to signifying those things on whose account they

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were instituted. So we say bos (‘ox’) when we mean a herd animal, because everyone using Latin calls it by this name” (ibid. 2.10.15).24 Thus for his analytical purposes, spiritual things and indicative signs each appear, as it were, in their “chemically pure” form. The mind’s movement from one to the other constitutes an ascent, an “upward” migration of attention from the external material sign to the spiritual reality. This is the essential movement of spiritual “anagogy.” Augustine then speaks of signs that are given (signa data) by the intention of a living being as a means of social communication; by them one “transfers” to another living being a motion or state of the soul. “So ‘given signs’ are those which living beings give to each other for indicating (ad demonstrandos), as far as they are able, the motions of their soul (motus animi) or whatever things that have been sensed or understood. For us there is no other reason for acts of signifying, that is, for giving signs, except for drawing forth and transporting into another mind that which he who gives the sign carries in his mind” (Chr. Teach. 2.2.3).25 God daringly submitted saving truth to the vagaries of the human communication process in Scripture’s “divinely given signs.” Scriptural signs seek “to draw forth and transport” the divine mind to human minds. The word “God” and all biblical signs stir the mind to seek truth by pointing to or indicating it. These dynamics require certain categories that emerge as a series of couplets. Clear/Obscure. Like all human speech, scriptural human words are subject to obscurity and ambiguity (Chr. Teach. 2.6.7–8). But the Holy Spirit, who managed Scripture’s writing,26 turns this negative into a positive by using obscurity to goad the lazy, challenge the strong, and buckle the proud. Along the way he throws in just enough clarity to encourage the weak-minded. The spiritual reader must develop the critical wisdom to discover these plain passages and allow their light to illumine the darkly “obscure” ones. A summary passage in Book 2 explains: Now among the things that Scripture lays out clearly, the reader finds everything that pertains to faith and upright living, namely the hope and charity that we treated in the previous book. Then, after getting some familiarity with the language of the divine Scriptures, one may go on to the level of opening up and unraveling Scripture’s obscurities. That way one can choose examples in which clearer expressions shed light on more obscure ones, and the testimony of statements that we’re sure about can take away the doubt surrounding ones that we’re unsure about. (2.9.14)27

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Literal/Figurative. Interpreters must further develop the skill of discriminating between literal and figurative texts. Like a skilled orator, the divine author uses both to make communication effective and interesting; but readers who confuse them derail the whole interpretive enterprise. The baseline for good interpretation is the increase of love and knowledge of God and neighbor; but readers must first learn to distinguish the literal and figurative modes. As Augustine writes in a well-known passage, “So first we have to demonstrate a method (modus) for finding out whether an expression is literal or figurative. And generally speaking, here is the method: whatever passage in the divine discourse that can’t be referred literally (proprie) to upright living or to the truth of faith, you know to be figurative. Upright living has to do with loving God and neighbor, and the truth of faith with knowing God and neighbor” (Chr. Teach. 3.10.14).28 The reader’s test of skill came with stories about ostensive acts of immorality among Israel’s heroes: Did Scripture tacitly approve and implicitly command such actions, or only judge them in a more subtle way? For Augustine, this is where a reader’s character and attitude played a crucial role, for only practitioners of Christian love can discern caritas being taught in passages whose literal sense contradicts it. The key is to see caritas operating differently at different times in God’s plan. The spiritually doltish Manichees condemned the “immoral” procreative habits of the patriarchs; while the spiritually astute, who grasped the appropriateness of different acts at different moments of God’s salvation scheme, acknowledged their moral credibility even on the literal level (Chr. Teach. 3.5.9). Abraham’s polygamy might indicate that he had a raging lust problem (3.12.19–20); but because the time of salvation history demanded many offspring, Augustine argued, Abraham not only proved himself guiltless but even increased his justice because he fulfilled his duty to propagate a people.29 In that case the literal sense has already yielded the spiritual meaning that strengthens love, caritas, while it weakens illicit desire, cupiditas. In terms of the hermeneutic process, that’s where interpretation stops; when the teaching of charity appears on the text’s surface, then the reader knows it is not figurative. Common sense, Augustine thinks, teaches that the stories about David’s adultery (2 Kgs. [=2 Sam.] 11–12) or Solomon’s harem (3 Kgs. [=1 Kgs.] 11:1–4) do not commend wrongdoing; in fact they critique the desires and motives that all spiritual people shun. However, if the literal sense does not yield the teaching of charity, then figurative interpretation necessarily follows. Skilled readers, he writes, understand that with respect to the stories of

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things spoken or done by God or the ancient saints, whatever seems shameful to the inexperienced (imperiti) is “completely figurative” (tota figurata sunt). These texts are like nuts to be shelled (enucleanda) for their secret pith of charity (Chr. Teach. 3.12.18). Caritas and cupiditas struggle like powerful kings in conflict, one just and benevolent and the other devilish and despotic (Chr. Teach. 3.10.16–11.17). All biblical texts serve to promote justice and charity, and use literary strategies that are either literal or figurative (3.15.23), depending on which mode made caritas most evident. Augustine’s so-called absurdity criterion declares that if the literal sense of a text contradicts Scripture’s overall intent to build up love, then the resulting incongruity demands that the reader take the text figuratively.30 Augustine in one sense broadens that criterion to include a story’s incidental and superfluous features among the material that is amenable to figurative interpretation. But at the same time he narrows it to a nonliteral category that says if a text does not teach the life of virtue or the truth of faith literally on its face, then the reader must move to the figurative mode. However, confusingly then Augustine also declares that Old Testament deeds, rites, events, or texts can be understood both literally and figuratively. “And whatever is thus narrated there, taken not only historically and literally but also figuratively and prophetically, must be interpreted consistently toward the end of charity with respect either to God, or to one’s neighbor, or both.”31 So even when the nonabsurd literal sense already builds up caritas, one can still “shell the nut” of certain passages and find other links to caritas. We will explore this secondary sense shortly. Carnal/spiritual. This couplet clarifies Augustine’s reason for strictly distinguishing sign and thing, letter and spirit, literal and figurative. Interpretation is a risky venture; the soul’s destiny is at stake because of the ever-lurking threat of “soul-death,” mors animae. This isn’t only about interpreting correctly or incorrectly, for Augustine has already explained that wrong interpretation could yield right results if done with the right intention. Rather, the death of the soul occurs when a mind stuck in this present world’s values and perceptions confuses signs for things and blocks the soul’s upward line of sight into the spiritual world. In that case a creeping, flesh-bound outlook has begun to control human understanding and to stymie the soul’s spiritual progress. And nothing is more appropriately called “soul-death” than when the part of the soul that sets us above the beasts, namely the understanding (intelligentia), becomes subject to (subicitur) the flesh by

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following the letter. Now, anybody who follows the mere letter is taking figurative words as though they were literal, and fails to refer its meaning to what the literal word signifies. . . . In the end, a wretched slavery of the soul takes material signs to be spiritual things such that the eye of the mind cannot look beyond the bodily creature for the sake of drinking in eternal light. (Chr. Teach. 3.5.9)32 Augustine here restates his breakthrough insight from a decade before that Ambrose verbalized in Paul’s maxim of 2 Cor. 3:6: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” Soul-killing literalism misconstrues even obvious figurative language before it ever gets down to dealing with Scripture’s enigmas and obscurities.

II. The Anagogic Christology of On Christian Teaching On Christian Teaching’s anagogic, “top-down” viewpoint matches key aspects of Augustine’s earliest Christology. Indicative signs that point above and beyond themselves to “higher” spiritual reality recall Augustine’s post-conversion “pedagogy of the Incarnation.” On Christian Teaching reaffirms that if the Word had not deigned to take up human weakness and to offer “an example of living” (exemplum vivendi), we never would have attained the inner purity necessary for approaching God (Chr. Teach. 1.11.11). The Incarnation clinched the lesson Scripture teaches everywhere about the impermanence of the temporal world. Augustine emphasizes this movement from lower to higher by using several words with the prefix trans-. “We should use these things as if we had, not an abiding love for them, but rather a passing love and delight (dilectio et delectatio transitoria), like the kind we feel for a road or a vehicle or whatever means of travel we use. Let me say it more sharply: let us so love that we love those things by which we are carried only for the sake of that to which we are carried” (ibid. 1.35.39).33 Nothing should be loved for its own sake except God, Augustine warns; and unqualified love for God “uses” all passing temporal things with the kind of conditional self-investment that suits its penultimate status. That happens when we learn to “pass on through” (transire; 1.33.37) our temporal pleasures and set them in relation to God. Strikingly, Augustine places even the fleshly humanity of Jesus Christ under this rule (1.34.38). Even if that Man is an “end” (Rom. 10:4), because he came not to be served but to serve we know that he was not an end in

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himself. Christ’s outwardly visible, incarnate humility instead propels the soul’s return to invisible spiritual reality. Paul exemplified this perspective on the Incarnation, Augustine writes, when he spoke of “forgetting what lay behind” (Phil. 3:13), that is, forgetting Christ’s humanity, because he “knew Christ according to the flesh no longer” (2 Cor. 5:16). Paul passed on (transierat) from the “beginning of God’s ways” (an allusion to Prov. 8:22),34 ascending to spiritual understanding and advancing toward his true end, Christ’s divinity (Chr. Teach. 1.34.38). Augustine comes close to saying that Christian love for Jesus is a “transitional” love that corresponds to his changeable human nature. By assuming the temporal human condition and “wearing it for our salvation,” the Lord accepted the condition of receiving the merely transitional and temporary love due to any earthly thing. “Although he deigned to become our ‘way,’” Augustine continues, “he wanted us not to clutch (tenere) his flesh but to pass on through it (transire), in case it should make us cling weakly to temporal things” (ibid.).35 Christ’s pedagogic strategy, then, uses his own person to teach the soul to desire earthly things only as a means to spiritual ends. This Christology distinguishes sharply between Christ as temporal and Christ as eternal and seems de facto to discriminate between different kinds of love due to him. Indeed for Augustine this kind of love for Christ models transitional Christian love for all things; since not even Christ’s flesh may be loved for its own sake, then no temporal thing whatever may be loved in this way. Augustine seems to extend the apparent obsolescence of Christ’s flesh to the obsolescence of the Bible. “And so,” Augustine writes, “people supported by faith, hope and charity and who retain a firm grip on them do not need the Scriptures except to instruct others” (1.39.43).

III. One Christ in Flesh and Divinity However, close reading of the passage shows that this parallel does not hold: for Augustine, if achieving one’s spiritual goal relativizes Christ’s humanity, nevertheless it does not vaporize it. Augustine certainly stresses that Christ’s humanity must not be loved for its own sake; but he does not use the language of disjunction and obsolescence.36 Augustine never separates Christ’s divine and human natures as he does with his “chemically pure” separation of sign and thing, nor does he commend radically different attitudes toward them. His analogy about roads and carriages admittedly suffers from suggesting surcease upon one’s “arrival” at the goal; when the work is done, vessels are retired. But Augustine is at pains,

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as we’ve seen, to insist that Jesus Christ is not a “vessel” in just that way, and this helps to explain why he thinks the model of “sign and thing” is inappropriate for describing the person of Christ. As far as I know, Augustine never refers to Christ’s humanity as a “sign” of his divinity.37 Rather he consistently and inextricably interrelates the divinity and humanity of “my God, the humble Jesus” (Conf. 7.18.24), and thinks of Christ’s human person as constantly orienting and carrying him toward the divine person. Thus Christ’s flesh possesses spiritual dynamism not in itself but in relation to his divinity. Those trans- prefixes point to this: we arrive at Christ’s divinity by actively “passing along” (transire) his humanity in a perpetual movement that never ends. His flesh is dynamic and essential only as united to his divinity; by itself the flesh was worth nothing. So for Augustine, believing in the humanity of Christ, that integrally historical human creature that lived minute by minute on the temporal plane until death, is crucial to attaining his divinity. The language about obsolescent signs ill fits Augustine’s sense of Christ; we never outgrow our need for the Man, precisely because he is one with God. We love the whole Christ, body, soul, and divinity, though we do not love the humanity for its own sake; we refer it, like all earthly things, to his divine end, and so love him “in God.” But unlike other earthly things whose temporary relation to the divine must be discerned and surpassed, Christ the Man never merely “points out” or “indicates” his divinity but rather conveys and mediates it, for he is “the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). So even if Augustine’s Paul seems to “forget” Christ the human being, what he actually forgets is the illusion that Christ’s humanity is anything apart from his divinity. Flesh means nothing in itself, but flesh joined to spirit conveys divinity itself. In terms of reading Scripture, this recasts the Ambrosian rule of 2 Cor. 3:6: “the letter that kills” refers to the letter without the life-giving spirit. At the same time, spirit only “gives life” as it becomes embodied in a letter.38 For the alternative Christological perspective within On Christian Teaching, Christ the Man is not merely faith’s booster who drops away, useless and obsolete, after giving his lift; he rather remains continually necessary for climbing upward to perceive God. For Augustine, our constantly changing human nature never reaches a state where it can dispense with Christ the Man. To actualize the critical ongoing function of Christ’s humanity, Augustine at long last unveils his understanding of Christ “the Way” (John 14:6), the first such reference in his works. Previously he had referred to other parts of that text, namely, “I am the

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Truth” (On the Happy Life 1.4) and “I am the Life” (On Two Souls 1.1), and “no one comes to the Father but through me” (Practices 1.16.28). But those referred to Christ’s divinity. Surprisingly it was ten long years after becoming a Nicene Christian before he referred to the first clause of John 14:6 and its portrayal of Christ’s humanity.39 That finally happens here because for him the interrelationship of Christ’s humanity and divinity— not their actuality, which he had accepted from the time of his baptism— has finally become clearer. “Therefore, while he himself is the homeland (patria), for us he also made himself the way (via) to the homeland.”40 This is the root of Augustine’s pithy saying in a later work, “to him we go, through him we go.”41 Further on in the paragraph, Augustine shifts the metaphor from physical travel to physical therapy; but the thrust is the same. Christ serves not only as healer but also as the healing itself (Chr. Teach. 1.11.11). “So the medicine of Wisdom was adapted (est accommodata) to our wounds by taking up a human being . . . in curing humanity the Wisdom of God put herself forward for our healing, making herself both medic and medicine” (1.14.13).42 The divine-human Christ, God’s power and wisdom incarnate, both exemplifies salvation and also generates it. Augustine emphasizes the strategic union of Christ’s humanity and divinity by subtly recasting John 1:14, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Augustine has just quoted this verse in 1.13.12 in the typical way, “and he dwelt (et habitavit) among us.” But at the end of the paragraph he changes et to ut, and so quietly transforms the declarative sentence into a purpose clause: “the Word became flesh so that he might dwell (ut habitaret) among us.” Flesh was the Word’s purposefully chosen means of self-giving. The ut phrasing reappears at the beginning of 1.34.38, yoked with the catalytic “way” language of John 14:6: the Lord wanted “to show himself as the way” and therefore “deigned to be our way.” The Word’s divine will made this union happen. But the joint divine-human self-offering fuses salvation’s means and end; thus he became both road and home, medicine and doctor. “That, after all,” Augustine wrote, “is what the Lord meant by saying, ‘I am the way, and the truth and the life’ [John 14:6], that is, ‘It is along me that you come, at me that you arrive, and in me that you abide’” (Chr. Teach. 1.34.38; trans. Hill). Augustine has now explicitly broadened his early “pedagogy of the Incarnation” to emphasize that knowledge of Christ’s “example” also mediates a power of healing that is inherent in the knowledge (Chr. Teach. 1.14.13).43 Christ teaches the mind but also persuades and empowers the will. He came to earth “so that what he shows us must be done we might do,

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not merely without grumbling but with delight” (1.15.14).44 Christ’s fusion of means and end takes place precisely in service of salvation’s “temporal arrangement”—the only passage in On Christian Teaching that addresses this theme directly. Love is the fullness and end of the Law and of all Scripture, therefore “divine Providence set up the whole temporal arrangement for our salvation so that we might know what to do and be able to do it”—that is, to obey its command to love (1.35.39).45 In other words, Christ gives us both the knowledge of love and the ability to love.

IV. Mediative Signs One of Augustine’s strengths as a thinker is his adaptability, and that often forms an ongoing subplot in his story of development. It now appears in the midcourse corrections that Augustine makes in his teaching on signs while writing On Christian Teaching. The alternative Christological perspective just described bred a parallel reflection on signs within Books 2 and 3. Book 1’s Platonic-friendly sign structure sharply distinguished signs from their spiritual reality; but later we also find a second structure that conjoined them. This second kind of sign works intimately with the realities it represents, and indeed mediates what it signifies in a way that is analogous to how the human Christ mediated his divinity.46 Accordingly I will refer to this alternative as “mediative signs,” with the intention of showing how it nuances and complements his prior take on “indicative signs.” Despite On Christian Teaching’s stated intention to distinguish signs and things, mediative signs keep intruding on the discussion about indicative signs. For instance, the work’s opening paragraphs address Augustine’s plan to discuss things, res, defined as “things not used to signify something else” (1.2.2). But then comes a small but telling aside on Christian signification within the Old Testament. Literal signs use letters (litterae) to suggest things, Augustine writes, as when “w-o-o-d” points literally to the actual cellulose and lignin stuff of a real tree; and the same applies to “s-t-o-n-e” and “a-n-im-a-l” as real things. However, Augustine concedes parenthetically, Scripture’s story of salvation alludes to certain kinds of wood, stones, and animals that not only refer to actual things but also hint that these things “may also be signs of other things.”47 Such include the block of wood that Moses used to sweeten bitter waters in the wilderness (Exod. 15:25), the stone that Jacob anointed after his ladder dream (Gen. 28:12), and the ram that Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac (Gen. 22:13). Not coincidentally for Augustine all these signs evoke Christ’s death: the wood recalls the saving wood of

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the cross (1 Pet. 2:24); the stone, the stone that the builders rejected (Matt. 21:42 = Ps. 117:22); and the ram, the Father’s sacrifice of the Son (Rom 8:32). In short, even as Augustine begins On Christian Teaching, a second, conjunctive sign-thing relation qualifies his original, strongly disjunctive analysis of sign and thing. Eventually he writes that these “metaphorical signs” (signa translata) use literal things for figurative purposes, that is, they are literal and figurative at the same time. Their “proper” or actual reality conducts a secondary figurative sense, just as Christ’s flesh conducted a spiritual reality. Signs are called “metaphorical” when the things themselves, which we signify by literal words, are also taken over to signify some other thing. So we say “ox” and by this syllable think, “herd animal,” because we usually call it by this name. But again, by that animal we understand a preacher of the gospel whom Scripture made into a sign when by way of interpretation the Apostle said, “Don’t muzzle the ox that threshes” (1 Cor. 9:9, quoting Deut. 25:4). (2.10.15)48 The thing itself, or its textual image, carries figurative meaning; thus a mediative sign structure operates here alongside the indicative structure. The distinction and correlation between thing and sign has incorporated a second relation wherein sign and thing transpose themselves into one another, and exchange properties within a single entity, just as Christ divine and human was one person. The reality that results is both a thing and a sign, spirit and flesh, literal and figurative. The Sabbath rest was such a thing-sign. When acted out physically it indicated spiritual rest. But Jews erred (so thought Augustine along with all early Christians)49 by taking the Sabbath rest to be an end in itself, and not going on to recognize the fuller res of Christ, the fulfillment of spiritual rest. Jews rightly rested on the Sabbath in worship of the one true God, but they collapsed spiritual meaning into its earthly expression, and so wrongly substituted the earthly sign for the heavenly thing signified. The resulting merely carnal Sabbath rest, according to Augustine, misinterpreted the Law as commanding something earthly. Nevertheless, the ancient patriarchs, prophets, and authors of the Old Testament understood the Sabbath rest on the Christian pattern of the mediative sign as both something true in itself and significant beyond itself (Chr. Teach. 3.6.10). According to Augustine, even as they physically rested, the ancients knew the Sabbath was that kind of sign. So also did the first Jewish

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Christians in the early “churches of the Israelites” that continued their Jewish ritual practices even after Christ. For all these groups, the sign was both literal and figurative, for two reasons: first, it was not a mere empty window frame around the heavenly reality, but something integral that became figurative precisely by being literally acted out; and second, by acting out the command they constituted it as a sign. Augustine’s phrase for describing this conjunction of sign and reality was res significans, “signifying thing” (3.9.13). This concept altered the Christian perception of the Law. In contrast to older writers like Justin and Tertullian who dismissed Law-observance as outdated or even evil,50 Augustine spelled out the Law’s ongoing pedagogic function according to its place in the temporal sequence of salvation. The Old Testament saints already enjoyed true Christian-style inner freedom, Augustine wrote, for they consciously enacted the signs while knowing that they portrayed something greater. That made them “spiritual and free,” even if they were unsure of what exactly it referred to. “A person in slavery to a sign performs or venerates some ‘signifying thing’ while not knowing what it signifies. But the one who performs or venerates a divinely instituted useful sign (utile signum) while understanding its force and significance venerates not a thing that appears and passes away, but rather venerates that to which all such things must be referred. Such a person is spiritual and free” (3.9.13). The difference between freedom from the Law and slavery to the Law turns on the practitioner’s awareness of its work as a sign. The holy ancients did this, actively referring the Sabbath to the mysterious fulfillment to come even without knowing precisely what it indicated. Spiritual climbers know how to read these signs to help them ascend further within the mystery of Christ; and the sign of Christ’s cross especially shows them the upper heights of “the Way.” The cross was made real by their struggles; they understand them as endemic to the journey of the body of Christ, and that the head uses them to bind his body more closely to himself by “training and cleansing” it with healing salves as well as wounding troubles (Chr. Teach. 1.16.15). Christ applies the powerful purgative of divine caritas directly to humanity’s mortal wound by his “sign of the cross” (2.41.62).51 “Since we are still on the way (in via),” Augustine wrote, “how could he have been more generous or compassionate—he who consented to stretch himself out beneath us (substernere) as the way by which we might return—except that the One crucified for us should forgive all the sins of those who have turned to him, and pluck out the deep-rooted blockages to our return?” (1.17.16). The sign of the cross guides

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those who, already instructed in Scripture’s basics, seek to read Scripture closely for ascent (2.41.62). Scripture offers genuine spiritual knowledge; but even that knowledge, like all human knowledge, can bewitch the reader and inflate the ego with its “sweetness” (suavitas, a prime health hazard for the pilgrim; Chr. Teach. 1.4.4; cf. 1 Cor. 8:1). But this knowledge packs its own antidote, for to know the crucified Christ is to know his titanic love that “surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:19). Like Scripture’s symbolic medicinal herb hyssop (Exod. 12:22; Ps. 50:9), the cross of Christ heals the tumor of human pride by the unfathomable humility of divine love (Chr. Teach. 2.41.62).

V. Roots of Mediative Signs in Against Adimantus and Commentary on Galatians This second “mediative” perspective on signs was not a spontaneous concession of On Christian Teaching. Its roots lay deep in Augustine’s encounters with Scripture as a priest. We have already uncovered some of these while considering Augustine’s analytical distinction between the merely literal curse and the figurative but real curse of Moses in Deut. 21:23 (chap. 5). That analysis disclosed Augustine’s new and potent view of scriptural unity. Scripture’s two parts not only did not contradict each other or merely agree: the Testaments actually interwove and reinforced each other. Correlatively, that outlook generated a view of signs that insisted not only on the congruence of sign and reality but also on their sacramental interdependence. The template for this unity was Christological. Against Adimantus shows once more the importance of both Augustine’s anti-Manichean campaign and his reading of Paul. Book 12 of that work answers the Manichee’s objection to the Catholic acceptance of Deut. 12:23, “the flesh’s blood is its soul.” That line taken from of the ancient Hebrew prescription about ritual animal sacrifice had been controversial in Christian circles for a long time because of its possible implication that souls had a physical aspect.52 Manichees thought it encased spiritual light in material evil, and moreover also contradicted Jesus’ statement that persecutors can “kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matt. 10:28). Augustine answers that the text was to be taken as literally true only with respect to animals; however it was also figuratively true when Scripture referred to people as “souls” (e.g., Acts 7:14). A related paradigm of realistic figuration, Augustine contends, operates in many Old Testament sacraments

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that prophesy Christ’s redemption and still operates in the few but more potent New Testament sacraments that recall it. To demonstrate this, Augustine turns to Paul’s reading of the Exodus story (1 Cor. 10:1–11), particularly to the incident at Massah and Meribah when Israel drank water from a gushing rock (Exod. 17:1–7). At that moment, wrote Paul, the Israelites “drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:4; Adim. 12.5).53 For Augustine, Paul’s statement, “the rock was Christ,” refers to a thing-sign (what I have called a “mediative” sign) that is different and structurally more complex than the simple “this-points-to-that” character of indicative signs. The difference between these two stands at the dividing line between the phases of Augustine’s predominantly Platonic and a decisively Christian hermeneutic.54 Paul’s phrasing, Augustine suggests, implies that the indicative structure of signification cannot fully convey the mystery involved here. Augustine specifically notes that Paul “did not say, ‘the rock signifies Christ,’ but rather, ‘the rock was Christ’” (Adim. 12.5).55 For him Paul clearly thinks that a spiritual sense was present in the text of Exodus, but his use of the copulative verb “to be” rather than the transitive verb “signify” insinuates a sort of secondary figuration that operates by “incarnating” rather than merely pointing to spiritual truth. Christ obviously was not a physical geological object; yet that actual rock mediated Christ to the Israelites who drank from its waters. Augustine pictures Paul trying to steer his readers away from misunderstanding the sign as only a generic and incidental pointer to the spiritual thing—as Augustine had typically defined signs elsewhere; this different sort of sign neither merely indicated its object nor became obsolete once it was understood.56 The rock in the wilderness signified Christ by pouring him forth from the actual thing itself. So the physical reality—and by extension, the words that relayed the story to the contemplative reader—is a necessary medium of spiritual presence. The rock functionally “became” Christ for the Israelites, for he gave himself to them through it. For this paradigm of signs, Augustine increasingly reserved the term “sacrament.”57 Indeed, Augustine contended that both biblical sentences are eucharistic: “the flesh’s blood is its soul,” and “the rock was Christ,” he writes, were sacramental in just the same way that “our Lord did not hesitate to say, ‘This is my body,’ when he gave the sign of his body” (Adim. 12.3).58 This same outpouring appeared in other Old Testament rites whose spiritual reality was “set within the sign” (in signo esse positum; ibid.). So despite the incommensurability of the fleshly and spiritual realms, the soul’s ascent to the spiritual realm began by receiving this

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particular earthly sign: Christ came to Israel by that rock, and still comes to Christians by this bread. This is the same sort of redemptive sign that Augustine set aside at the beginning of On Christian Teaching in Moses’ wood, Jacob’s stone, and Abraham’s ram (Chr. Teach. 1.2.2). And like them, “the rock” suggested the crucified Christ, for Moses struck the rock.59 Against Adimantus 21 accordingly enlarged upon the intertwining of signs and realities by showing how Adam’s relationship to us and to Christ overlapped the literal and the figurative. In a certain way, Augustine concedes, we’re not like Adam, since no one sins exactly the way he did, that is, voluntarily; and in a sense we sin involuntarily because we bear “the flesh of sin,” and that is why Paul figuratively called us “children of wrath by nature” (Eph. 2:2). However, Augustine continues, we’re more like Adam than unlike him because of our physical bond with him in flesh and by sin; our “old” nature draws its life from Adam (Adim. 21).60 The idea of a physical bond with Adam in sin was to have a long life in Augustine’s works, and it would become especially prominent in the Pelagian controversy; however, its presence in Against Adimantus is inchoate. Only shortly before, the Propositions on Romans had expressed our relationship to Adam as a kind of theater production in which we all “play the role (agens) of the old man” that Adam embodied (Propp. 32–34). But Against Adimantus takes this a step further by specifying the role-play’s real and physical foundation in our shared flesh. We imitate Adam, and Adam represents us, because we mirror each other; both physically and metaphorically, Adam “is” the rest of us, and we “are” Adam. This reality also appeared figuratively: the name “old man” (vetus homo) or “old human self” picturesquely described the old life drawn from Adam. What we call “the old man” figuratively describes the real condition that he bequeathed to us; the simultaneously figurative and real name bespeaks both representation and cause-effect. By contrast, Christ’s relationship to Adam in Against Adimantus 21 was also both real and figurative, but in a way different from the rest of us. Like us he was born from a real woman, and so Christ inserted himself into the succession of human mortality that began with Adam; but unlike us he was born of a virgin and so he did not contract Adam’s sin. Therefore Christ’s relationship to Adam is both literal in relation to his humanness (Christ was truly human) and figurative in relation to sin (Christ was sinless). History and figuration here stand together: Christ’s crucifixion both figuratively pictured the death of sin and really destroyed the “old man.” This line of thinking moved Augustine to write: “Why is it so absurd (Quid absurdum habet) to think that the curse is

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removed in the old human self because the Lord hung on the cross?” The crucifixion was a sign with a powerful effect. This alternative way of understanding signs emerged when Augustine discovered among earlier Christian interpreters a distinction between two types of works prescribed by the Law, the moral and the sacramental. He employs that distinction for the first time in the Commentary on Galatians to make sense of Paul’s argument in Gal. 3 about “how the grace of faith suffices for justification apart from the works of the Law” (19.1).61 Augustine wrote: But in order to treat this question carefully and avoid being misled by ambiguity, one must first realize that the works of the Law are in two divisions. Some come under sacraments, others under morals (nam partim in sacramentis, partim vero in moribus). Under sacraments are: circumcision of the flesh, the temporal Sabbath, new moons, sacrifices, and all the countless observances of this kind. Under morals are: “You shall not kill,” “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not bear false witness,” and the like. (Comm. Gal. 19.2–3)62 As for most Christian thinkers at the time, Augustine thinks that Paul’s talk about “the works of the Law” refers to Jewish ritual works, apart from which people were justified by imitating the faith of Abraham that justified him before receiving “the sacrament of circumcision” (20.12). Augustine begins now to define sacraments more narrowly in terms of what I’ve called mediative signs.63 As we have seen, Paul altered Augustine’s way of reading Scripture by his redemptive reading of Moses’ curse in Deut. 21:23, “Anyone hung on a tree is cursed” (Gal. 3:13). The Commentary on Galatians says that for those who understand it spiritually, that sentence is a “sacrament of freedom” (22.3). He relates it to Moses in the wilderness lifting up the healing serpent on a pole as a sacrament (Num. 21:4–9). Just as refreshment poured forth to the Israelites from the struck rock, so healing radiated to the poisoned people looking at the impaled serpent. The physical reality for the Israelites, and its textual image for readers, bestows healing spiritual power. The Lord himself explicitly authorized the link to the story of his death (John 3:14). That correspondence of Jesus’ death and Moses’ serpent figuratively bridged the Old and New Testaments. and allowed Augustine to read the crucifixion as simultaneously fulfilling, explaining, and even retroactively empowering Moses’ prophecy. That is, the event (and text) of the healing serpent both indicated and mediated the healing that flowed

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from Christ’s death. For those who understood this text, either as Israelite prophecy or as Christian confirmation, the sign was both figurative and real, both image and truth. Augustine applies the word sacramentum to this narrative in both Against Adimantus 21 and Commentary on Galatians 22. The indicative signs operating in the moral works of the Law also bridged the Testaments, but in a different way; that unity was based on moral continuity rather than sacramental difference-in-unity. Commands like “You shall not kill” belonged to both Old and New Testaments because they never change. However, the grace of the New directs them toward “a different end” than the Old; that is, instead of breeding fear as they once did, now they stir “a love of the sort that henceforth hopes for an eternal reward and awaits it in faith” (Comm. Gal. 43.2). This recalls love as Scripture’s summa and the “goal” of the Law (1 Tim. 1:5; Chr. Teach. 1.35.39). The fearful people of the Old Testament were simply unable (omnino non poterant) to fulfill the moral works of the Law because they acted out of fear. However, Augustine wrote, certain Old Testament characters revealed the force of New Testament grace at work by showing that they were “in” the Old but not “of” it. So David, in refusing to exact vengeance on Saul (1 Kgs. [= 1 Sam.] 24 and 26), “loved his neighbor as himself” (Comm. Gal. 43.4–6). This act not only anticipated but also enacted the Lord’s statement, “I have come not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it” (Matt. 5:17). Time was a crucial element for seeing the shifts and continuities between the Testaments. Augustine carefully showed, first, how David’s moral acts of New Testament love transcended time, and second, how the Lord’s outpouring of love in his sacramental death was deeply embedded in time (cf. Rom. 5:6: “while we were still sinners at the right time Christ died for the ungodly”). The Holy Spirit poured love for God into the hearts of the upright through the cross (Rom 5:5); the Lord’s death empowered David’s love for Saul long ages before the crucifixion actually took place. According to Gal. 5:14, such neighbor-love fulfilled “the whole Law,” that is, the whole moral dimension of the Law, including the command to love God. But how does neighbor-love fulfill the command to love God? Augustine explained that no one is able to love a neighbor without first loving God, because only God’s command and gift (cuius praecepto et dono) can empower one to love that neighbor in the first place (Comm. Gal. 45.4).64 The distinction between the moral and sacramental aspects of the Law entered Augustine’s vocabulary during his late priesthood, and it helped him to differentiate between indicative and mediative signs in Scripture. In the next chapter we’ll see him return to that distinction in order to organize the anti-Manichean polemic of his later work, Against Faustus the Manichee.

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VI. On Christian Teaching: The Half-Finished Classic Returning to On Christian Teaching, we can see this work as experimental and incomplete in more ways than one. Not only did it break off in the middle of Book 3, but also it left dangling several important conversations. First, Augustine only imperfectly resolved the tension between using and enjoying the neighbor by defining love as “use with delight” (Chr. Teach. 1.33.37).65 Second, On Christian Teaching sometimes strongly distinguished Scripture’s literal and figurative dimensions but also used arguments that combined them without ever explaining the difference. Third, two streams of reflection on sign and reality appear, one that separates them and another that combines them. Fourth, On Christian Teaching leaves mostly implicit Scripture’s function in God’s temporal arrangement for salvation. It presumed a moderately knowledgeable audience of spiritual seekers who were securely rooted within the mystery of Christ and hoping to grow by reading; but this work said little about how Scripture plants beginners inside that mystery. Fifth, it actively downplayed some features of the temporal arrangement, for example, viewing sub specie aeternitatis the humanity of Christ and the role of Scripture in a way that might make them seem obsolescent.66 Meanwhile other features were left relatively unexplored, such as the interpretation of Scripture’s predominant teaching device, narrative. Sixth, On Christian Teaching virtually ignored the temporal dynamic of prophecy and fulfillment that for centuries had driven the engine of Christian reading of the Old Testament, especially in its Pauline form (even if certain passages assumed it, e.g., the “plundering the Egyptians” trope at 2.40.61). Seventh, and above all, it presumed without explaining (let alone justifying) the unity of Scripture that grounds all advanced spiritual exercises involving figurative interpretation. These omissions suggest that Augustine did not think of On Christian Teaching as a complete map of his approach to biblical interpretation. Though readers often have considered it so, it was not a comprehensive handbook on Christian biblical hermeneutics. It rather charted one aspect of Christian reading, the “upper register” for spiritual climbers, while leaving to one side the “lower register” for beginning believers. It is possible that the latter part of Book 3 left unwritten in 396 would have addressed this other perspective.67 Augustine certainly cared about how simple believers learned to read and hear Scripture; indeed he thought that those with greater understanding were duty bound to help the less enlightened, and even declared that that responsibility was inherent in

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higher understanding itself: “People supported by faith, hope and charity and retaining a firm grip on them, have no need of the Scriptures except for instructing others” (Chr. Teach. 1.39.43). The responsibility of love demanded that those higher on the spiritual ladder should lower themselves to serve their neighbors climbing up from below.

Looking from the Bottom Up with On Instructing Beginners If the first edition of On Christian Teaching outlined Augustine’s “upward” way of reading Scripture for spiritual ascent, then another work begun soon after, Against Faustus the Manichee, revealed Augustine’s “downward” way oriented toward helping “the little ones.” The contrasting perspectives of the two works deserve a side-by-side comparison. Because of its length and complexity we’ll reserve the study of Against Faustus for our final chapter. But fortunately we are not left without a manageable summary statement to compare with On Christian Teaching. About the same time as Against Faustus, Augustine wrote a little book that addressed the needs of those teaching uninstructed inquirers called On Instructing Beginners. This work descends from the upper rungs of On Christian Teaching down the ladder of spiritual ascent to show how to work with people at the elementary level of faith. Because it articulated the “bottom-up” beginner’s approach to reading Scripture that complemented the “top-down” approach for spiritual adepts, On Instructing Beginners makes a natural companion to On Christian Teaching.68 On Instructing Beginners took shape some time in the early 400s when a discouraged deacon of the church in Carthage, a certain Deogratias, wrote to Augustine looking for help. He had been assigned to instruct inquirers, but his work was not going well. He utterly bored himself by constantly repeating the same truths, and worried that he bored his hearers too. Might Augustine please give him some advice on how to handle the scriptural story line? Where to start? Where to stop? How long to speak? The bishop’s response is a wonder of compression that appears even more remarkable for having apparently been dictated extemporaneously. Addressing the work, care, and feeding of the journeyman teacher, it gives an animated view of instruction in the early Church like a rediscovered reel of forgotten film.69 Augustine analyzes the act of teaching and discusses different adjustments of style and approach that are appropriate for different audiences. As a bonus, for the sake of easing Deogratias toward adopting his instructions, he even impersonates his own teaching voice in two model discourses, one shorter and one longer.

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This little gem enriches readers not only with its polished summary of teaching content but also with its acutely observed pedagogic psychology. There’s no evidence that Deogratias had ever read On Christian Teaching. Yet On Instructing Beginners makes corrective comments as though Augustine was conscious of readers who, though they had absorbed the earlier work’s instruction on love as the heart of Christian reading, nevertheless missed its crucial premise about how Christ forms that love in the heart of the reading Christian. Like On Christian Teaching, the central thrust of On Instructing Beginners is the serious business of caritas; indeed this work has been aptly called “a treatise on the nature of love.”70 But it is more explicit than On Christian Teaching about how caritas develops in communion with Christ the Mediator. Readers who already know that love is the key to Scripture now learn how Christ is the key to that love. Knowledge about God’s love by itself is insufficient. Augustine wrote, “In all that you teach, it is not enough (non tantum) for us to envision ‘the object of the commandment, which is love from a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned faith’ [1 Tim. 1:5], and to which we link everything that we say. We should also stir toward it [ad id, i.e., toward the commandment] the attention of those we instruct by speaking, and direct them to that place (illuc)” (3.6).71 In other words, we need a “way.” If any teachers missed, forgot, or misread On Christian Teaching’s relatively unexplored premise that God’s love became historical in Christ, the mediator of salvation and medium of divine love, then here they find correction. It is right and necessary to teach about love as Scripture’s summa (Chr. Teach. 1.35.39), but that in itself is “not enough”: teachers must first tell Scripture’s love-forming stories so that hearers “by listening may believe, by believing may hope, and by hoping may love” (Instr. Beg. 4.8). That programmatic sentence compactly describes the elementary learning process that underlay the advanced spiritual reading program of On Christian Teaching.72 And it suggests how Christ taught the skill of reading the Old Testament figuratively by “wearing our mortality and accepting death from sinners and for sinners” (Instr. Beg. 17.28). The reader’s loving embrace of Christ’s death is clearly paramount for a right reading of the Old Testament because “for a long time—since the ages began to unroll—this towering mystery has been unceasingly prefigured and foretold” (ibid.). Augustine offers a sacramental template for reading that he has begun to call “mystical” (Lat. mysticus, on which more in the next chapter). It concerned faith’s initiation into the mystery of Christ, or in other words, the beginning believers’

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entry into Christ’s mystery, as distinct (however inseparable) from the “anagogic” ascent of those already inside it; one might call this way of reading “mystagogic.” On Instructing Beginners spells out exactly the prophetic, Christological, and mystagogic perspective on reading the Old Testament that is missing in On Christian Teaching. It uncovers the halfhidden pillars of salvation’s temporal design that silently undergird the skyscraping heights of the earlier work: the importance of narrative, Christ’s humanity (especially his death), prophecy and fulfillment, the figurative hermeneutic practice of Paul, the Christian sacramental outlook, and the unity of the Testaments. Regarding storytelling about salvation, the narratio, Deogratias wants to know: Where do I start and where do I stop? Augustine replies with a wink: Begin and end with—everything! Start with Gen. 1:1 and stop with this morning’s Church news! But, he hears Deogratias ask, isn’t that impractical? No, Augustine answers, not if you know the knuckles of the story line, those critical turning points (articuli) that give the upshot of the whole story quickly yet evocatively (Instr. Beg. 3.5). (Augustine’s model discourses at the end of the work reveal that these articuli refer to transition points between the six ages of salvation history: humanity’s creation and fall, the Flood and Noah’s ark, Abraham’s call, Israel’s Exodus and the giving of the covenant through Moses, David’s anointing as King in Jerusalem, Judah’s Exile and Restoration, Christ’s advent and the Church’s rise. See Instr. Beg. 18.29–24.44, the synopsis at 22.39, and the highly condensed reprise at 27.53.) Teachers, Augustine thinks, who set these out against the backcloth of a quick sketch of the whole story have completed the basic work. They can then linger over the articuli with special reverence, unwrapping them lovingly like precious parchment scrolls from the archive of God’s architectural plans for salvation (Instr. Beg. 3.5). These articuli illumine the contours of salvation’s “temporal arrangement” and show how faith in Christ and teaching on love intersect.

I. Teaching Toward Love: Christ the Model and the Method On Instructing Beginners shows Christ as salvation’s clear center point in terms of teaching content; but it also proffers him as the substance of the Christian teaching method. Deogratias was concerned about droning on constantly about the same basic truths, frustrating his hearers (and himself) as he spoke down to his audience from far up the spiritual ladder. Responding with obvious affection and patience, Augustine pushes the

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deacon to think more deeply about the authentic Christianity displayed by the act of teaching itself, that is, how Christian teachers model the Incarnation by pouring their hearts into their hearers. Is it onerous for you, asks Augustine, to descend from those mountaintops of your spiritual understanding to the plains of simple teaching? Then ponder the descent of the Word, who left us an example to follow (cf. 1 Pet. 2:21). “However far distant is our voice, parsing out its little words, from the liveliness of our inner understanding—then far, far greater is the difference between mortal flesh and equality with God! And yet, though he was in that same form of equality with God, ‘he emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave,’ and so on in that text down to ‘even to death on a cross’” [Phil. 2:6–8] (Instr. Beg. 10.15). Ponder further, continues Augustine, how Paul followed the incarnational model: despite having scaled spiritual heights with ecstasy (2 Cor. 5:13–14), he still lowered himself to become “weak to gain the weak” (1 Cor. 9:22) and “tender like a nursing mother” (1 Thess. 2:7). Like Christ, he became a mother cooing to her baby and even chewing its food, or a mother hen covering her chicks with her wings. The best Christian teachers likewise retain their hold on spiritual understanding while descending to pierce their hearers’ hearts with the arrowhead of love, which is humility: “So if understanding takes delight in exploring a thing’s most pristine inner recesses, let it also delight in understanding how the more obligingly love descends to those in the bottom rank (in infima), the more heartily it makes its way back to those things deep within (in intima) by way of the good conscience that seeks nothing from those it descends to, except their eternal salvation” (Instr. Beg. 10.15).73 Hearers who sense this humble love open themselves more readily to being taught. But Christ’s love creates something even more wondrous, wrote Augustine: a mystical union. Surmounting the barriers thrown up by our opaque flesh and use of merely external word-signs, Christ’s love speaks not only to his hearers but also mystically somehow within them. As a result the love of Christ between teachers and learners plays host to a remarkable exchange: “When they are moved by us as we speak, and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other. And so they speak in us the things they hear, and we somehow learn in them the things we teach” (12.17).74 This “feeling of mutual sympathy” (compatientis affectus), grounded in prosopopoeia, replicates the divine-human transposition of the enfleshed Word who “dwelt among us” (John 1:14) and spoke with our voice. Christian teachers therefore replicate Christ in several ways. They not only follow the example of the Incarnation but also even create a

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miniature version of the totus Christus between themselves and their hearers. Learners learn by becoming part of the teacher; in short, “by the bond of love . . . we are within them” (Instr. Beg. 12.17).75 Christ’s bond of communion foments a headlong but teacherly love for learners that makes all things new—as it makes boredom impossible.

II. The Mysteries of the Scriptures This Christological model carried implications for how Christians read Scripture. Augustine trained Deogratias to develop a variety of strategies for treating his awkwardly unresponsive listeners, one of which was to stoke their imaginations by selecting and summarizing “some things spoken mystically (mystice) in the holy books, especially in the narrative parts” (Instr. Beg. 13.18). Uncovering Scripture’s mysteries sweetens (dulcescere) the strong protein of Christian spiritual teaching. But these strategies face an acid test, Augustine admits, when unresponsive educated seekers become disenchanted with Scripture’s unpolished speech, which the schools of grammar and rhetoric have trained them to loathe. (The irony that Augustine had been just such a seeker is too obvious for comment.) Judged solely by classical standards, Scripture often looks badly composed. Therefore, Augustine counsels, we must instruct beginners first in the lesson of Christian humility, which is the only effective tool for digging into the mysteries hidden in Scripture’s earthy and unassuming speech. Above all these people must be taught to listen to the Scriptures in such a way as not to turn up their noses at its concrete language just because it doesn’t satisfy their highbrow taste. Nor when they read these books should they think that their hidden sayings or human deeds wrapped up in carnal veils should be accepted at face value, “only as the letters sound,” and not unraveled and opened up so as to be understood. We need to teach them about the exact benefit of Scripture’s secrets—the very reason we also call them “mysteries”— that is, to teach them the value of hidden enigmas for sharpening one’s longing for truth and for shaking off the laziness brought on by being too full of a good thing. Experience will be proof enough to this kind of person. So remind them of a time when something that left them unmoved when put right before their eyes came alive when disentangled from some allegorical knot. It is extremely useful for them to know that sense takes precedence over words

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just as the soul takes precedence over the body. The lesson here is that people should pay attention to a discourse that is more true, rather than to one that is merely more fluid, just as they should prefer having friends with good values to those with mere good looks. (Instr. Beg. 9.13)76 Augustine’s beginning point for stirring an educated hearer’s mind toward faith is to explain the “purpose and coherence” (causae rationesque) of the salvation story, and to persistently relate its narratives and characters to Scripture’s big picture, that is, to God’s total design for humanity as summarized by the command to love God and neighbor (Instr. Beg. 6.10). That’s what figurative interpretation does best, and it does this by the way it points to the person of Christ.

A. The Chief Mystery: The Death of Christ Everything in Scripture converges upon Christ, Augustine explains; Christ reveals most clearly the divine voice that narrates salvation’s story. But the Incarnation alone doesn’t tell the whole salvation tale until it reaches the climax and tipping point of Christ’s death. His taking flesh “made it possible for him not only to live with us, but also to be put to death for us and by us” (Instr. Beg. 22.39). The cross unveiled Christ’s willingness to subject himself to the ravages of sin, not just potentially but also really, for the sake of salvation. Augustine underlines this by stitching together a series of Scripture texts about the redemptive love of the cross (ibid. 4.7). God the Father “first loved us” (1 John 4:10); “he did not spare his only Son but gave him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32); and Christ “forcefully” (vehementer) urged God’s love upon us when he died for us who were his ungodly enemies (Rom. 5:6). The conjunction of physical reality and spiritual power at the core of the mysterium has its paradigm in the incarnate Lord’s death. This “mystery of the cross” (mysterium crucis; Instr. Beg. 19.32) collapsed sign and reality just as it collapsed time: ages past witnessed it as the secret “mystery of the wood” (mysterium ligni; ibid.) that saved creation in the ark, and as the “sacrament of the wood,” that is, Moses’ staff, that saved Israel in the wilderness (20.34).77 Earthly promises stirred Israel’s desire for salvation just as carnal punishments stirred Israel’s fear of condemnation; yet both the promises and the punishments carried spiritual mysteries that belong to Christ and the Church (19.33). So despite Scripture’s wild variety, a single splendid current of truth runs through

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the whole. That beautiful thread should run unobtrusively through all the teacher’s many words so as to impress itself upon hearers “like a gold chain strung through a jewel necklace that nevertheless does not spoil the arrangement by calling attention to itself” (6.10).

B. Unity of Body, Unity of Scripture The death of Christ occurred at a single specific moment in time, yet it poured out God’s love backward and forward in time throughout the whole history of salvation. For that reason the body of the Lord, the Church, includes the ancient righteous who were saved by Christ’s future coming just as surely as present-day Christians are saved by his past coming. The image of baby Jacob thrusting forth his hand from Rebekah’s womb figuratively captures the disposition of the Old Testament saints (Instr. Beg. 3.6). The hand that preceded the appearance of the head was prior in time but lower in dignity, joined to the one body underneath the head. That is, Jacob both prefigured the Church and also was part of the Church; indeed he prefigured it because he was part of it, and the sign was part of the reality. According to Augustine, Israel always lived with the Church in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, and indeed Israel was Christ in pre-incarnate form. “So too our Lord Jesus Christ, even before he appeared in the flesh and in a sense came forth from the womb of his secret dwelling before the eyes of men as the Man who is ‘mediator between God and man’ [1 Tim. 2:5] ‘who is over all, God blessed forever’ [Rom. 9:5]—nevertheless sent on ahead a certain part of his body in the patriarchs and prophets” (Instr. Beg. 3.6). For that reason, not only the words of the patriarchs but even their wives and children were prophetic embodiments of Christ and the Church (19.33). They preceded him in terms of their date of birth, but “he is the head of his body, the Church” [Col. 1:18]. By believing in the one they foretold, they all clung (cohaeserunt) to that body of which he is the head. They were not separated from him by running on ahead of him, but rather adjoined him by obeying him (sed adiuncti potius obsequendo). For even if a hand can be sent on before the head, its connection is nevertheless under the head. (3.6)78 Christ’s coming thus reveals the unity of his body and of the Scriptures that describe it; and the core of that unity is love. That makes On Instructing Beginners 4.8 one of the great summary passages relating to biblical hermeneutics

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in all of Augustine’s works. One long sentence describes the relationship between Christ and love, love and fear, and love for God and neighbor; it declares Christ’s humanity as knowledge and power, way and goal, and the antidote to pride; and it interrelates historical events and the varying stages of revelation in the Old and New Testaments. Augustine wrote: So if it’s the case that Christ came chiefly so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this so as to flame with love for him who first loved them, and might also love their neighbor (proximus) by way of him who both commanded them to love and gave his example of love— he who became their neighbor (proximus) by loving the one who, so far from being nearby (proximus), was rather wandering distantly; and if, moreover, all the divine Scriptures written before Christ came were written for the distinct purpose of announcing his coming, and whatever was committed to writing and confirmed by divine authority after he came tells of Christ and counsels love (narrat Christum et dilectionem monet), then one thing is crystal clear (manifestum): On those two precepts of love for God and neighbor hang not only the entire Law and Prophets [Matt. 22:38–40], (which were still the only sacred Scriptures at the time our Lord said this), but also whatever other books with divine lettering that were later set apart for our salvation and marked for handing down to us. That’s why we say: “In the Old Testament is the secret hiding of the New, in the New Testament is the showing forth of the Old.” (Instr. Beg. 4.8)79 As always for Augustine, Christ is the master teacher; but the Master teaches not only the knowledge of love to be grasped or sets the example of love to be imitated; above all he gives the very love that fulfills the Law—that is, he teaches love by loving supremely, not merely by pointing to it or talking about it. Of course, Christ uses words to command that we love God and neighbor. But his death bestows love; in short, by dying he grants mystically

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what he commands verbally (see Conf. 10.29.40). His gift of love enables our love for God and neighbor that fulfills the Law so that Christians now read everything it says in his light and, as it were, with his eyes. The last sentence of the quote from On Instructing Beginners about the relationship of the Old and New Testaments reveals the equilibrium that Augustine’s hermeneutics had finally achieved by the early 400s. It enunciates a principle that grounded and guided his work ever after as a figurative reader of Scripture. Because it is so central, over time Augustine developed a number of rhyming jingles to teach it. Besides the “secret hiding” and “showing forth” of this passage (occultatio/manifestatio), they include, “Old Testament unveiled in New, New veiled in Old” (revelatum/ velatum; Exp. Ps. 105.36), and most famously, “New in Old concealed, Old in New revealed” (lateat/pateat; Questions on the Heptateuch 2.73).80

Comparing On Instructing Beginners and On Christian Teaching On Instructing Beginners explores the lower register of the “mystagogic” reading of Scripture that is appropriate to parvuli, that is, biblical exegesis that leads “little ones” into the mystery of Christ. Its “bottom-up” approach teaches inquirers how to read Scripture’s stories as a way of mounting the first rungs of the spiritual ladder of ascent. Meanwhile, On Christian Teaching explores the upper register of the “anagogic” reading of Scripture that is appropriate to spiritales, that is, biblical exegesis that leads “the spiritual ones” higher within the mystery of Christ. Its “top-down” approach teaches advanced believers how to exercise themselves by reading in order to scale the rarefied heights of spiritual understanding. Together On Instructing Beginners and On Christian Teaching display the polar extremities in Augustine’s theoretical perspective that constantly interact in his practice of interpretation. Setting it in the larger context of Augustine’s works and his continuing effort to understand the biblical witness, we can see that On Christian Teaching presents a portion of Augustine’s overall biblical project. He backhandedly admitted as much by failing to finish the work in the 390s. But Augustine’s daily exegetical practice shows that was only part of the story. On Christian Teaching declines to trace the long inner journey that beginning Scripture readers had to traverse before becoming competent spiritual readers. For that reason, it is a mistake to isolate On Christian Teaching from the rest of Augustine’s works as though it was his only or even his primary statement on biblical interpretation, as brief

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introductions to his thought commonly do. There he did conduct an experiment that superimposed his rhetorical-philosophical theory of signs on the biblical material. But the fit was hardly perfect: something intractable in the biblical material resisted his neat distinction between sign and thing, and undercut his spare schema of “things” that we either “enjoy” or “use.” He was forced to qualify that with an explanation of things that also function as signs, and to patch in an awkward definition of neighbor-love as a kind of “use with delight.” So the wider perspective of On Instructing Beginners was already hatching in On Christian Teaching, because he needed to address how Christ’s grace dwelt in the Old Testament’s sacramental mysteries. Many of Paul’s most important hermeneutic texts that were conspicuous by their absence in On Christian Teaching reappear in On Instructing Beginners. Augustine writes there in reference to the Old Testament saints: He himself is head of his body, the Church. By believing in him whom they announced ahead of time they all stuck fast (cohaeserunt) to that same body of which he is the head. For that reason we read, “Everything that was written beforehand was written so that we might be instructed” [Rom. 15:4]. Again, “They were figurative images (figurae) of ourselves” [1 Cor. 10:6]. And again, “Those events happened to them figuratively (in figura), for they were written down for our sake, we the people upon whom the end of the ages has come” [1 Cor. 10:11]. (Instr. Beg. 3.6)81

Conclusion: Reading on the Rungs On Instructing Beginners thus spells out Augustine’s “bottom-up” approach to new readers trying to get a foothold in Scripture, while On Christian Teaching explores his “top-down” perspective for training spiritually advanced readers. A passage in Against Faustus the Manichee deftly relates the two perspectives by accommodating the stock Platonic image of the spiritual ladder to reading Scripture.82 The patriarch Jacob dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth on which angelic beings ascend and descend (Gen. 28:11–18). Through the Christ-shaped spectacles borrowed from the letters of Paul and the beginning of John’s Gospel, Augustine sees these angels rising into flights of anagogic ecstasy (sublimiter; 2 Cor. 5:13) to contemplate the glory of the Word, who was “in the beginning with God, and was God” (John 1:1). But then these creatures (etymologically an

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“angel” was a “messenger,” and thus an ev-angel-ista and figurative “preacher of the gospel”), with the appropriate restraint (temperanter; 2 Cor. 5:13) for working with beginners, accommodate their spiritual visions to earthbound minds by preaching the human Christ who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). While ascending, these angelic preachers challenge the spiritales, and while descending, they nourish the parvuli. Their model is Paul, who ascended to “speak wisdom among the perfect” (1 Cor. 2:6), and descended to feed his little ones “with milk, not solids” (1 Cor. 3:2). For Augustine the objective link between these aspects is the divine-human Christ, who personally forges that link and quite plainly (apertissime) casts himself as Jacob’s ladder: “You will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (John 1:51). The Christological lenses show Augustine how Scripture reading, figurative interpretation, teaching and preaching, faith and spiritual ascent, all relate to Christ who is “the ladder and the way.” “Compelled by the love of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:14), Augustine writes that the preaching “angels” make Christ both the destination to which they bring their hearers (ad ipsum), and the means by which they bring them there (per illum). Augustine writes, “In him is the ladder reaching from earth to heaven and stretching from the flesh to the spirit, because by progressing or ascending in him the fleshly minded become spiritually minded. . . . We also understand him to be the ladder because he said, ‘I am the way’ [John 14:6]” (Faust. 12.26).83 The ladder image suggests Against Faustus the Manichee as a kind of link between On Christian Teaching and On Instructing Beginners. A long work written between the two shorter ones, it is both massive by volume and massively important for comprehending Augustine’s full development as a figurative reader of the Old Testament. The polemic of Against Faustus goes for the jugular vein of the Manichean argument against the Old Testament, and in doing so reveals Augustine’s mature understanding of how to read Scripture figuratively. To round out our study of Augustine’s hermeneutical vision and its stability by the early 400s, our final chapter examines this work in detail.

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The Old Testament as the First Book of the New Augustine Figures It Out Against Faustus the Manichee

j us t a s a u g us t i n e ’ s tumultuous life in the early 390s was giving way to his more or less stable (if extremely full) life as bishop of Hippo, so Augustine’s earlier exegetical experiments were blossoming into a solid hermeneutical perspective on reading Scripture figuratively. The best evidence for this is the massive work in thirty-three books written about the turn of the fifth century, Against Faustus the Manichee, which climaxed his fifteen-plus-year effort to overturn—and escape—the Manichean understanding of Christ and Scripture.1 His new sense of Christ’s true humanity in redemption, and of history’s capacity to execute God’s design for salvation, now show their full impact on his hermeneutics. Its exegesis has been often noted but little studied, probably because the net results of Augustine’s interpretations seem to blend so easily with the work of other early Christian exegetes;2 it is said that he “effortlessly” made Israel’s texts speak about Christ.3 But even if Augustine’s conclusions seem to chime blandly with other interpreters, his exhaustively argued case in Against Faustus strikes some distinctive notes. Against Faustus created a roomy laboratory for testing out Augustine’s rationale for the relationship of the two Testaments. In the statement of this rationale we find some original insights about Scripture’s difference-in-unity.

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The Manichean Nemesis: The Thought of Faustus of Milevis After the professorial On Christian Teaching, Against Faustus returned Augustine to his natural polemical habitat. Yet this wasn’t just any foe: it was Faustus of Milevis—Manichean bishop, missionary, scholar and devotee of Seneca and Cicero, and onetime personal acquaintance of Augustine.4 Not long before beginning Against Faustus, Augustine told the story of his relations with this man in Book 5 of Confessions. The place was Carthage, and the time was the early 380s. Though he had been a Manichean Hearer for nearly a decade and still aspired to advance in their ranks, Augustine’s progress painfully stalled over some unresolved questions that roiled his faith. Sympathetic colleagues promised that a mysterious figure named “Faustus” would come one day to untie all the knots of his troubles. When the man finally appeared, Augustine was “delighted by the force and feeling of his debating style, by how well he put words together, and by the fluid ease with which he dressed his ideas” (Conf. 5.6.11). In the offing Augustine publicly praised Faustus more than most. But further conversation eventually sowed misgivings and more doubts that Faustus could not erase, and their much-anticipated one-on-one talk fell flat. Up close Augustine found him a reasonably good and gracious man, well-spoken and attractively humble, but also disappointingly narrow and modestly talented— hardly the Manichean oracle he hoped for. For a while the two men enjoyed sharing their admiration for Cicero and discussed books they liked. But Augustine soon peeled off, both inwardly as his Manichean commitment kept sinking and outwardly when he left Carthage for Rome. In Confessions Augustine describes these events as divinely ordained (“That man Faustus, without knowing or willing it, began to unclench my bond .  .  . in your hidden Providence,” 5.7.13; “You worked on me so that I was persuaded to go to Rome,” 5.8.14). But Providence was also working through Politics. Rome had begun to tighten its grip on Manicheeism, which remained an outlaw religion. As the North African Manichees scattered, it may well have been Faustus himself who arranged Augustine’s escape, while he himself remained at his post and eventually was arrested and sent into exile.5 While Augustine taught at Rome and eventually made his way to Milan, Faustus used his forced retirement to compose the Capitula (“Chapters”), a sort of handbook of Frequently Asked Questions for Manichean Missionaries who were working in Catholic- (and Donatist-) dominated areas. Augustine incorporated most or all of the Capitula into Against Faustus, and then he spliced in his rebuttals so as to stage a sort of posthumous debate.

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We lose sight of Faustus after the Capitula. He was certainly dead by the time Confessions portrayed him in some harsh lines (casting him as a biblical “snare of death,” Ps. 17:16; Conf. 5.7.13), though Augustine also dyed his judgments on Faustus with pity and even mild appreciation. But apparently Augustine did not know the Capitula until some time after he had written Confessions 5, when friends discovered a copy and pressed him to reply.6 Reading Faustus’s anti-Catholic broadside must have doused the embers of any lingering warmth he felt for his former mentor. It portrayed the Manichee’s feistiness and facility with language just as Augustine remembered it, and revealed the contours of an unusually articulate and acculturated disciple of Mani.7 But Augustine may have been surprised by the Capitula’s evangelical sarcasm and intellectual venom as well as by its clever use of logic, knowledge of Catholic practices and ideas, and quite un-Manichean command of Old Testament texts. If Faustus was embarrassed by any weaknesses in his religious outlook, it doesn’t show. Faustus announces his pride as a follower of Mani; he thanks God for the Manichean faith (Manichaeae fides) that taught him to read Scripture critically (Faust. 18.3). He expresses gratitude for the renowned early Manichean teacher Adimantus (the target of Augustine’s Against Adimantus) whose work he built upon (Faust. 1.2). But he especially praises the enlightened teaching of Mani, whose instruction has saved him above all, he writes, from the singularly dreadful fate of becoming a Jew. I offer unceasing thanks to my teacher, who held me together when I was teetering on the brink the way you are, so that I can call myself a Christian today. For I too .  .  . like you, had almost decided to become a Jew. . . . Here was Christ, whom I heard speak like the Son of God, saying that he came “not to destroy but to fulfill” the Law: so look, was anything able to stop me from actually becoming a Jew? But the venerable faith of Mani snatched me from that peril. (Faust. 19.5) The nub of Faustus’s argument against Catholic Christianity was that it is a form of crypto-Judaism. But Jesus and the apostles clearly shed that dead husk, he argues, while the Catholic Church keeps clinging to it. Even worse, it hypocritically refuses to follow through on its Jewish identity by honoring the Jewish way of life. It settles lazily for obeying only the parts of the Law it likes and ignoring the rest. Meanwhile, Faustus charges, Catholics miss the larger thrust of Jesus and the Gospel that rejects Judaism root and branch. Its Scriptures are obsessed with carnal promises

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of earthly reward and futile pretensions to spiritual wisdom. Adulterers, warmongers, and false prophets populate all the Old Testament narratives, while the Law of Moses is not merely unhelpful but opposed to God’s will. The only parts worth anything, Faustus writes, are bits that Jews stole from Gentiles (Faust. 19.2–3), while the actual Jewish parts were inspired by demons (30.1–2). Manichees are righteous “enemies of the Jews” (Judaismi inimici; 22.4), because Jews are hopelessly immersed in superstitious lies (1.2; 31.1). Faustus felt the responsibility to train Manichean missionaries to answer the questions of the Catholic “semi-Jews” (33.3). The Capitula is organized around lists of opponents’ questions that preface each discussion; together they give a sense of Faustus’s train of thought:

Chaps. 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15

Why do you refuse to accept the Old Testament?

Chap. 33

Why do you refuse to accept the patriarchs?

Chaps. 14, 16, 30, 31

Why do you refuse to accept Moses?

Chaps. 12, 13, 22

Why do you refuse to accept the prophets?

Chaps. 17, 18, 19, 32

Why do you refuse to accept that the New Testament fulfills the Old?

Above all, Faustus sneered, the Hebrew god Adonai is a capricious tyrant that Jewish texts themselves first picture as dwelling in ignorance, before the appearance of light. This god’s flaws were obvious: first he imposes an impossible command on Adam, and then can’t find him in the garden. He loves sacrificial animal blood and fat and then becomes jealous of the offerings given to other gods. Though easily angered by other nations, he reserves special ire for his own people and punishes them for a thousand little offenses (Faust. 22.4). Nevertheless Adonai continues to pose as Israel’s lover and makes many empty promises about wealth, long physical life, and an earthly kingdom (10.1), though in reality he is penniless, powerless, and unable to keep his word (15.1). But still the Synagogue clung to its miserable inheritance (4.1). Now, if he let down his first wife that badly, how can the Catholic Church flirt with him now and expect any better treatment (15.1)? Little wonder that Jews who become Christians now virtually put Adonai to death (15.1).

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Therefore, Faustus continues, the Jewish Scriptures are full of immoralities and it is nonsensical for Catholics to claim that they are part of Christianity. What true Christian can admire the spectacularly sinful patriarchs, prophets, and kings of the Old Testament (Faust. 22.5; 33.4)? If Jesus indeed spoke about the patriarchs sitting at a table in the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 8:11)—though this may well have been an interpolation—then it was due to deathbed mercy like that given the thief on the cross (Luke 23:43). The Israelites were evildoers from hell’s pit who had no merit of their own (Faust. 33.1). Nor did the lives of the prophets have any redeeming moral value (12.1); fortunately true Christians don’t need their prophecies about Christ, even if by chance they contain some true statements (13.1). Moses might have spoken a few truths; but even thorns yield a few flowers, don’t they? (16.1). But true Christians shudder at Moses’ constant curses, particularly that horrible one, “Everyone who hangs on a tree is cursed” (Deut. 21:23). Moses’ curse upon Christ was a virtual order that he be killed (Faust. 14.1)! No one with God’s Spirit could have said such a thing (16.5). So Moses’ Law cannot be God’s Law. Even if Paul spoke of a Law that is “holy, just and good” (Rom. 7:12), he was referring to “the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” that frees Christians from Moses’ “law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:2; Faust. 19.2). The Ten Commandments? Jews didn’t invent the prohibitions against to murder, adultery, or swearing falsely; natural law already forbade those things. Hebrew writers merely copied those laws while mixing in their useless customs like the Sabbath rest and their disgusting rituals like blood sacrifice and especially circumcision, “that obscene sign on your maimed crotch” (19.4). Those leprous customs covered the beautiful basic natural law with Jewish scabs, stains, and warts (22.2). Not surprisingly, Faustus continues, Jesus fiercely opposed this Law of Moses by reversing the Jewish precepts in his Sermon on the Mount (“You have heard it said . . . But I say to you”; Matt. chap. 5) (Faust. 16.6–7). When Jesus said that he came to “fulfill and not destroy” the Law and Prophets (Matt. 5:17), he was referring euphemistically to what in fact he had already done (Faust. 19.2). When he explained the new covenant as a new patch that simply could not be sewn upon the old one (Luke 5:36), the apostles sold off the Jewish Old Testament like a set of outworn clothes (Faust. 8.1). They passed from the bitter to the sweet: what fool would change back from the sweet to the bitter? Who wouldn’t choose freedom over servitude (9.1)? Let the Jews have their earthly prosperity and kingdom; Christians will take the gospel (10.1). If Christ “fulfilled the Law,” it only means that the New Testament so completely filled up people that no room was left for the Old.

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Catholics who claim divine authority for those old Jewish books are either dumb or duped or deceiving. Their claim to revere them is bogus; in fact they accept its commands for show only and then quickly disregard them. But they lack the spiritual savvy to know that the real reason that the Son of God appeared on earth in human form was to take away everything earthly. Only stupidity or hypocrisy can claim to accept both Old and New Testaments, Faustus charges. Catholics are only half-full of both and so actually possess neither (15.1). Unlike the Catholic semi-Christians (ibid. 1.2), Manichees righteously refuse “to mix Hebrew oldness with Christian newness” (8.1). Catholic Christianity is a monstrous hippocentaur, half horse and half man that is neither horse nor human. Again, the lewd little Catholic girl dressed up as Christ’s virgin bride continually commits adultery by reading letters and accepting love gifts from Adonai, the Hebrew god (15.1). But she actually plays him false too, for while claiming to accept his Law she actually disregards his commands about Sabbath rest, circumcision, sacrifice, dietary law, and all the rest. In sum, according to Faustus, Catholics and Manichees equally despise and “destroy” (destruo) the Old Testament; but Manichees do so honestly while Catholics do it deceptively (Faust. 6.1). Admit this, Faustus rails against the Catholics, your self-contradiction boxes you in. If a Jew asks why you claim to honor the Law while simultaneously disregarding it, you must admit that you think that it is all silly superstition or that the texts are corrupt, or else you cannot call yourselves Christ’s disciples (18.3). You boast of loving the Law, but in reality you scarcely touch, even with “the tip of your lips,” as they say, the first drop of the Old Testament drink (32.7).

Augustine’s Assault on Manichean Hermeneutics After reading the Capitula, Augustine’s pen would not be still, nor would it be brief. “I wrote a huge work (grande opus) against Faustus the Manichee,” he wrote in Revisions. “He blasphemed the Law and the Prophets and their God and the Incarnation of Christ, and claimed that the Scriptures of the New Testament that refuted him were falsified” (Rev. 2.7.1).8 Against Faustus also reveals that Augustine wrote in order to display the prophets’ “foretellings” (praesagia) about Christ, to discuss how these prophecies make faith credible, and to prove how the prophets’ lives match their message (Faust. 12.2). The work was obviously a polemic attack, but it had a deep personal dimension to Augustine because Faustus’s Capitula spoke like a ghost out of his Manichean past. Confessions 5 shows that while as a Manichee Augustine had doubts about his commitment to

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Mani, these doubts had little to do with central Christian teachings like the person of Christ or the function of Scripture. They rather concerned contradictions between the science of the day and Mani’s cosmology (Conf. 5.7.12). As we’ve seen, Augustine confessed that many religious beliefs of his remained heavily Manichean even after his hope in the movement waned (ibid. 5.10.19–11.21). The Capitula echoed Augustine’s old Manichean views on Christ and Scripture; so that means that the rejoinders of Against Faustus stage the unique drama of the Catholic Augustine arguing with an older Manichean version of himself. It is not a stretch to consider parenthetically subtitling this work Against Augustine the Manichee. Its length, passion, and exactness suggest Augustine’s strong personal investment in publicly slaying the last vestiges of his Manichean past. Augustine contests the teaching of the Capitula at every turn, including the staple Manichean views about God’s being, the composition of creation, the makeup of the soul, the relation between faith and reason, and other issues. But he primarily wants readers to think rightly about the temporal dispensation for salvation that culminated in Christ’s advent. Since this dealt directly with exegesis, the central conflict of Against Faustus comes down to differences in how to understand Christ and the Old Testament. Augustine contends that Faustus misunderstands the divine intention to unveil and teach grace and truth gradually during the time of Israel. God first hinted, sometimes clearly and sometimes obscurely, about his commanding will and redeeming love, until Christ put everything into bright lights by transforming the Law and the Prophets into channels of saving grace and truth. That showed not only the Old Testament’s congruence with the New but also its secret participation in it. Augustine’s logic was simple: if the grace of the New Testament lay hidden in the Old, then de facto to reject the Old was to reject the New, and Manichees cut out the religious ground beneath their own feet. Against Faustus fully explored the Christoecclesial fulfillment of prophecy that revealed the Old Testament to be the prologue of the New. A thumbnail description of Against Faustus might call it an extended argument about how to understand the Christian drama of “fulfillment.” The central moment of that drama occurred when Christ’s coming unveiled his hidden presence in the story of ancient Israel. Augustine emphasized that Christ the true man fulfilled the Law and the Prophets and so revealed his intimate bond with Israel’s Scriptures, which both anticipated and explained him. Christ the true man more than ever was central to Augustine’s argument; but he also adds a twist that clinches his claim about scriptural unity: Christ was a true Jewish man. Paul conveniently supplied the structure of Augustine’s core argument by declaring in Galatians

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that Christ was “born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4), a text that Against Faustus quotes six times (3.3, 11.3, 12.3, 12.26, 22.76, 23.7).

I. “Born of a Woman”: Jesus Fully Human Faustus contrasts Paul’s statements that affirm Christ’s flesh with others that seem to negate it. For instance, he blames corrupt manuscripts for something Paul probably never said, namely, that Jesus was “born of the seed of David” (Rom. 1:3). But even if somehow Paul had once entertained such an idea, Faustus contended, he certainly learned better. Paul admitted this, Faustus writes, when he said, “If we once knew Christ according to the flesh, we know him that way no longer” (2 Cor. 5:16). Learning this truth for Paul made “all things new” (v. 17). If perhaps Paul had once used baby talk about Christ having real flesh, Faustus continues, he later grew up and “no longer spoke like a child” (1 Cor. 13:10; Faust. 11.1). Augustine answers that such claims unravel the very fabric of Christianity and make nonsense of a sheaf of Pauline texts that not only are unambiguous in themselves but also are part of the very structure of the Apostle’s whole message. Besides Gal. 4:4 and Rom. 1:3, Augustine also invokes 2 Tim. 2:8 on Christ, “risen from the dead, born of David’s seed, according to my gospel” (Faust. 11.3). Christ’s birth from a real woman ensured not merely that he was no phantom but, more importantly, that he became a true person living a human life on the historical plane. To confess him “born of a woman” is to relate Christ to all of humanity and to the grace-bearing potential of the human historical process. It particularly highlights the critical need to affirm the reality of Israel’s history, since the seed of Christ’s true human flesh lay in the loins of Israel’s patriarchs.9 The affirmation of Christ’s fully real human flesh was the load-bearing beam of Augustine’s scriptural edifice in Against Faustus and the linchpin of its framework. In my judgment, Augustine’s fight against claims about Christ’s feigned flesh is the single most important factor in Augustine’s turn toward the biblical-historical perspective in the 390s.10

II. “Born Under the Law”: Jesus Fully Jewish However, the fact of human incarnation alone did not tell the whole story, for Jesus was not only “born of a woman” but also “born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4). That is, a critical element of his true humanity is that Jesus was

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Jewish. The fact of his human humility went beyond the divine willingness to take up base human flesh, for what he took up was specifically Jewish human flesh subject to the Torah. This interwove Jesus’ life with the whole history of Israel while keeping it tethered to its universal scope. Augustine stressed Israel’s history and Christ’s flesh as a particular feature of redemption over against the unrestricted universalism of the Manichees, who saw divine Light as immediate in every soul. Catholics by contrast saw universal salvation as mediated through particular persons. Augustine wrote: He is Christ, the savior of all who believe in him. The present age reveals his name and his Church just as the past times foretold them. That did not happen by means of just anything (per quemlibet) emerging from the murky canyons of time, but by a particular people and a particular kingdom (sed quadam gente et quodam regno) cultivated and established for just this purpose (ad hoc): namely, that there, from that kingdom (ibi de illo), everything described ahead of time in figures—things now expressed in actual facts—would become known. Moreover, there (ibi) would be written down, through the preaching of the prophets, things that were to be put on display now through the preaching of the apostles. (Faust. 13.6)11 Elements of this perspective were present in the already centuries-old tradition of Christian figurative interpretation. But unlike the apodictic approach of Tertullian, who simply disallowed the common ground of debate (“Heretics have no right to handle our Scriptures”12), Augustine articulates a rational-spiritual foundation for figurative Christian reading by freshly exploring the tradition’s inner logic as a hermeneutic of faith. Since it treats the elementary approach to the faith in temporal things necessary for beginning believers, “the little ones” (parvuli) who peopled his congregation, this work reveals the hermeneutic at work in Augustine’s sermons. That makes Against Faustus a classic of its kind in the history of Christian exegesis. The thrust of Augustine’s argument is that if Christian love or caritas is the true “end” of Scripture interpretation, as On Christian Teaching asserted, then one finds the “way” to caritas through the Christ-centered Old Testament exegesis. He not only argues for the factual reality of Christ’s birth and death (as we have already seen) but also asserts that Israel’s slow march through time toward Christ’s advent remains integral

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to God’s saving plan and to a Christian’s right reading of Scripture. Christ’s human appearance was not just a means to an otherworldly end but the very goal and pinnacle of the salvation-historical process. Far from merely nitpicking about points of orthodox Christology, Augustine’s profoundly pastoral concern argues that any denial of Christ’s full humanity insidiously corrupts the work of salvation at its root. Manicheeism and Arianism presented equally heretical but polar opposite threats; while the Arian denial of Christ’s full divinity short-circuits his saving power, the Manichean falsification of Christ’s true humanity severs the (Jewish) lifeline to that power. Christ “born under the Law” bound Christianity forever to its Jewish and Old Testament roots.

III. The Hinge Point of “Fulfillment”: Augustine’s Exegesis of John 1:17 The fulcrum of the argument in Against Faustus about the Old Testament emerges in Books 15–19 that deal with Christ and the Law, and balance prophecy and fulfillment, law and grace, letter and spirit, and knowledge and love. He asserts that the Law was a divine gift, but that it functioned differently in Israel’s time when Christ had not yet fulfilled it. Having now lived and died “under the Law” while acting in love with gentleness and humility (cf. Matt. 11:28–29), Christ turned the Law into a channel of grace and truth. This exegesis not only marks an advance in Augustine’s articulations about redemption; it also throws light on how his thought intersected grace in history and Christian Old Testament exegesis by harvesting Paul’s claim about Christ “born of a woman, born under the Law, that he might redeem those who were under the Law” (Gal. 4:4). Christ’s fulfillment was the hinge upon which swung humanity’s change before God from being “under the Law,” sub lege, to “under grace,” sub gratia. It also suggests how continuity and change interact in the story of salvation. Though Jews and Christians read the same Law of Moses, for Augustine its function has shifted for Christians from prosecuting sin to channeling grace and truth.13 The crucial claim about Christ and the Law emerges in Augustine’s important reading of John 1:17.14 We need to look at his exegesis closely. The Greek of John 1:17 translated literally reads like this: “The Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Many ancient interpreters considered the two parts of this verse as purely contrasting. In the second part, the only possible grammatical subject of

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the verb “came” (or “happened,” egeneto) was the hendiadys “grace and truth.” This stressed a sort of competition between the two economies.15 While the majority of Greek manuscripts allowed the two statements simply to sit side by side, a few (including the important early papyrus 66 dating to ca. 200 c.e.) added the mild adversative de (“but”) to convey the contrast. That seems in fact to capture the original author’s intent.16 Certain Christian extremists like the Gnostics (and later the Manichees) wanted to remove every putative semblance of obtusely unspiritual Jewish influence from the Christian texts, and so they pressed that contrast into antagonism.17 But the so-called Great Church, which tended to be suspicious of extremism and more aware of Christianity’s Jewish roots, stressed the difference-in-continuity between the economies. Interpreters like Irenaeus and Origen found continuity within the contrast in John 1:17; their exegesis sought to identify the two covenants without collapsing them on the one hand, and to distinguish without disjoining them on the other (perhaps foreshadowing the Church’s later problem of satisfactorily relating Christ’s divine and human natures). They concluded that while Christ revealed the supreme reality of God’s grace and truth, he also showed the Law’s validity in a penultimate and supporting role. They took their cue came from the previous verse, John 1:16: “We have all received from his fullness, grace for grace,” or “grace in place of grace” (Gk., anti, Lat., pro); that is to say, God’s gift of the Old Testament yielded to the gift of Christ in the New. In sum, this stream of orthodox interpreters defined the salvation-historical relationship between Moses and Christ as a continuity that enveloped contrast, and a development that reconciled opposition. Several Old Latin translators, like the Greek copyists who inserted de, indicated a mild contrast by inserting the particle autem (often left untranslated in English, though it can mean “while”). Some interpreters went further; for instance Ambrose quoted the verse with the strong adversative sed, “but” or “however”: “but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”18 Nevertheless, the majority of Old Latin manuscripts, as well as the Vulgate, followed the Greek in simply letting the statements stand side by side. Latin texts therefore usually read, Lex enim per Moysen data est gratia et veritas per Iesum Christum facta est. Still, Latin introduced a new ambiguity by translating the Greek egeneto, “happened” or “came,” by facta est, which is the perfect passive form of the verb facio (“do” or “make,” hence “happen,” and as a passive, “was made” or “took place”). The Greek subject of egeneto was clearly “grace and truth,” but the Latin form made it grammatically possible for facta est to draw its subject from

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the first clause, thus making the subject of “was made” to be “the Law,” rather than “grace and truth.” With the Law as the subject of facta est, then, John 1:17 could read, “The Law was given through Moses; it [i.e., the Law] became [“was made”] grace and truth through Jesus Christ.” This is how Augustine understood the verse in his six quotes in Against Faustus Books 15–19 (15.8; 16.9; 17.6; 19.7; 19.8; 19.18), and one other in Book 22 (22.6).19 Augustine took advantage of the profound theological implications of this statement to clinch his argument against the Manichean rejection of the Old Testament. It elegantly stated a relationship of change within continuity between the Testaments: it both preserved the ancient Law as it stood with all its divine credentials and commanding authority (thus the Law remained) and also asserted the decisive change that occurred at Christ’s advent (thus the New Testament fulfilled the Old). In sum, for Augustine Christ fulfilled the Law by making it grace and truth. By contrast, Augustine thinks Faustus fatally misconstrues the Law’s purpose and status for Christians when he claims that Christ fulfilled Moses’ Law by adding something to it (Faust. 19.3). Rather, Augustine wrote, he fulfilled the Law by doing what the Law commanded and prophesied. These Manichees, he wrote, “are unaware of how the one who lives as the Law prescribes fulfills the Law. Love is the ‘fulfillment of the Law’ just as the Apostle says [Rom. 13:10]. . . . The Law is fulfilled, therefore, either when what was commanded there is carried out or when what was prophesied there is shown forth. ‘For the Law was given through Moses; it was made grace and truth through Jesus Christ’ [John 1:17]. The very Law itself (ipsa lex), when it was fulfilled, ‘became grace and truth’” (Faust. 17.6).20 In short, fulfillment of the Law occurs in a person, not a text. By definition deeds of love are interpersonal and are performed not for their own sake but for another’s; Christ acted on behalf of those unable by themselves either to obey the Law’s commands or to understand its prophetic truths. So his death both showed and bestowed the divine love, which woos and transforms people so that they “by hearing may believe, and by believing may hope, and by hoping may love” (Instr. Beg. 4.8). The one who wills rightly, Augustine writes, “is conjoined to the divine Law.”21 Christ united himself to the Law by fulfilling it, and Christ now also unites to it everyone who is united to him in faith. Christ thus mediates the Law to his members: his body no longer acts against or outside the Law, but in union with its head acts “with the Law” and “in the Law.” Christ transposes believers into his own flow of love for God and neighbor so that they now love by drawing from the same source of love by which Christ humanly fulfilled the Law. Therefore, in

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terms of Augustine’s early “Four Ages” schema, Christ has shifted humanity’s position before God from living “under Law” to living “under grace,” and so from living in fear to living in love. Christ therefore continues to fulfill the Law in his members, both the beginning believers who seek salvation and the advanced Christians who seek virtue. Scripture so harmonizes the words of Isaiah and Peter that their words sound out “as though (tanquam) coming from one mouth” (Faust. 11.6). Its writers agree as members of the one body of Christ, and superficially different details in their writings ultimately converge (3.5).22 Augustine’s synthetic perspective flattened some time distinctions that he had previously emphasized. The earlier “Seven Ages” schema based on the seven days of creation reappears briefly in Against Faustus (12.8) only to collapse into a single long period that anticipated Christ. For Augustine, then, the Old Testament had become the first book of the complete Christian Bible.

IV. Grace and Truth: Distinction Between Types of the Law’s Commands We can analyze more exactly Augustine’s view of how Christ mediates the effects of grace and truth through the Law by recalling his distinction between “moral” and “sacramental” works of the Law. As we’ve seen, Augustine first picked up on this traditional division in the Commentary on Galatians (Comm. Gal. 19.2–3). Against Faustus refers to the moral commands as “precepts of life to be acted out” and the sacramental commands as “precepts of life to be signified” (Faust. 6.2).23 But Augustine now also reads the distinction through John 1:17’s statement that Christ “made the Law grace and truth”: Christ fulfills the moral Law by giving the grace that pertains to the fullness of love; he fulfills the sacramental Law by revealing the truth that pertains to the fulfillment of prophecy (Faust. 17:6). “These commandments deal with moral conduct, and those sacraments convey promises.24 While moral precepts are fulfilled by the help of grace, sacramental promises are fulfilled by the display of truth. Christ fulfills them both: the one by the grace he has always given but now reveals, and the other by making known now the truth he once promised. For ‘the Law was given through Moses, but it became grace and truth through Jesus Christ’” (ibid. 19.18). The language about “Christ fulfilling the Law” was a metonymy for the power of Christ in his members. “Grace” speaks of the moral effect of Christ fulfilling the Law, and “truth” speaks of the spiritualrational effect of Christ fulfilling the Law; the one suffused his divine

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vitality into the will of believers who sought to obey the Law, and the other refracted the shining light of spiritual truth for minds that sought to understand it. But fulfillment of the moral and sacramental Law also affected the way Christians read ancient Israel’s texts. Let’s look more closely at these individually.

A. Augustine’s Theory of Christian Reading, Part I: The Law of Conduct Book 15 of Against Faustus most clearly shows how Augustine saw the link between the moral economy of grace and the way Christians read the Old Testament. For Augustine true Christianity understands Christ to have restructured the Mosaic Law’s relationship between letter and spirit, “which two are expressed in another way as law and grace” (Faust. 15.8). This redefinition does not change the Law itself, but changes how the Law functions for people in the situation of sin. The old regime of sin, Augustine explains, made people guilty under the Law, which only kept a record of infractions and of itself was unable to give life; indeed, paradoxically against its divine author’s intention, it stirred up even more sin (Rom. 5:20). But listen closely to the Apostle’s words, Augustine writes. Even when Paul dares to call the Law “the power of sin” (1 Cor. 15:56), he never calls the Law itself “sin.” Why? Paul knows that “the commandment is holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:13), even if sin’s power hijacks it for evil purposes. For this exact reason Paul also writes, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6). Augustine notes that Paul neither blames the Law for sin, nor divorces it from grace, much less calls it evil; Paul rather speaks of “the killing letter” in order to refer to the spiritless letter that only accuses us. The defect that it reveals is not in the Law but in ourselves. Sin causes us to read the Law as a letter drained of spirit; what accuses us is not the Law itself, but the Law minus grace. Augustine presses this point by comparing it to the Pauline maxim, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). Did Paul glorify love at the expense of knowledge? Hardly, Augustine thinks. After all, Paul himself taught knowledge to the Corinthians, and even wrote in the same passage, “We all have knowledge.” He did not use knowledge to disparage knowledge. What Paul did distinguish were different forms of knowledge, one kind conjoined with love and another disjoined from love. “Now why would the Apostle himself possess (habebat) the very thing that inflates a person, except that together with love knowledge not only did not inflate him but even made him stronger? So, the letter

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with the spirit, and likewise the Law with grace, are no longer called ‘letter’ or ‘Law’ in the same way as when either one taken by itself (per se ipsam) killed as sin abounded” (Faust. 15.8).25 In sum, Augustine told Faustus, we have misread the Apostle if we think he opposed knowledge to love, Law to grace, or letter to spirit; he rather opposed knowledge with and without love, the Law with and without grace, and the letter with and without spirit. Consequently, believers indeed understand themselves as dead to the Law, as Paul said elsewhere, but the Law they’re dead to is the accusing graceless Law; Christ has rather quickened us to the grace-filled Law that saves and teaches. Nevertheless, Augustine emphasized, this is not a different Law: Christian faith now fulfills the very same Law that Moses once received on stone tablets “in the administration of a great sacrament” (Faust. 15.8).26 The Manichees have missed something essential. There’s not one Law that is “holy and just and good,” and another through which “sin produces death,” to which we must die in order to belong to that other one who rose from the dead. No, it is the very same Law (eadem ipsa est). . . . You deaf and blind people! Listen and see! “Sin,” the Apostle wrote, “produces death in me through what is good” [Rom 7:13]. The Law, therefore, is always good. Whether it hurts those who are devoid of grace, or benefits those who are full of grace, it is always good, just as the sun is always good (for every creature of God is good), whether it pains the eyes of the unhealthy or soothes the eyes of the healthy. (Faust. 15.8)27 Augustine here lays a double axe of scriptural difference-in-unity at the root of the Manichean claim of contradiction between the Old and New Testaments. One side stressed the obvious difference between the ways that Jews and Christians read the Law, while the other addressed Scripture’s strong unity as a single book.28 “For in fact the same Law (eadem lex) that was given through Moses ‘was made grace and truth through Jesus Christ’ [John 1:17] when the spirit made its link to (accessit) the letter so that the justice of the Law might begin to be fulfilled” (Faust. 15.8).29 The Law that once commanded and accused has become a channel of grace since Christ, “born under the Law to redeem those who were under the Law” (Gal. 4:4) fulfilled the Law for us and in us. For describing this changewithin-continuity, Augustine drew on Paul’s elaborate metaphor of the remarrying widow in Rom. 7:1–6. The Law’s command of marriage bound

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a certain woman (humanity) to her husband (Adam) until death. Christ became that first husband when he took up the flesh and voice of Adam (cf. 1 Cor. 15:45–47) as a mortal man “born under the Law” and so bound to her until death. The crucified Christ suffered death, but not for his own sake; in willing love he suffered for her so that “the Law might be fulfilled” in her (Rom 8:3). His death freed the woman to marry again; now the risen Christ became the second husband too, the one immortally alive from the dead. Both “marriages” involved the same Christ and the same Law. She united with the same Lord whose self-sacrificing love as a dying mortal stirred in her the same love for God and neighbor by which he himself fulfilled the Law. So her union with the risen Christ imbued her with a self-transcending love that reads the Law not as a threat but as a guide to receiving the divine love. Christ mediated that transformation of her former self-absorbed fear of punishment “under Law” into selfsurrendering love “under grace.” Christians learn to love like Christ from the inside, so to say, and not merely by obeying his command or copying his external example. At the moment that Christ humanly united himself to the Law by selfimmolating love-unto-death for us, he bestowed the holy love that rejoices in the Law upon us. So we obey the Law in a spiritual mode that refuses to worship idols or vainly use God’s name; we spiritually observe the Sabbath rest,30 honor our parents, and resist fornication, thievery, murder, adultery, lying, and covetousness. But our obedience flows continually from the grace of Christ, not in fear of the Judge but in love for the Redeemer who decisively turned humanity from life sub lege to life sub gratia, and from living in fear to living in love. Christ ripens faith into the kind of love that reads the Law as an exercise of living in grace and discovering truth, so that Christians say with Paul, “Christ fulfills the Law in us” (Rom. 8:3). But Augustine thinks that one crystalline sentence in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians expressed this best. The Law’s commands, when “stored up in the consciences of those who live rightly, are fulfilled by ‘faith working through love’” (Gal. 5:6; Faust. 19.18).

B. Augustine’s Theory of Christian Reading, Part II: The Law of Promises Christ’s fulfillment of the sacramental aspects of the Law created something quite different; he disclosed the truth to be discovered and understood in the prefigurations of the Law’s ritual commands, promises, and

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even its curses. Christians benefit from this fulfillment in a different way from that of the moral commands, for they are not required to perform any Jewish rituals. By displaying the full arc of the time-sensitive truth that they promised, Against Faustus showed how Christ changed the Christian mode of fulfilling the ritual Law from doing to reading. Faustus charged Catholic Christians with illogically and deceptively venerating the Old Testament, for they failed to obey the Law’s commands, except for ones they liked. Augustine answered that Manichees simply didn’t understand that the old Law’s different parts function in different ways at different times in the salvation story. The fulfillment of the Law’s ritual aspect works quite differently than its moral aspect. The Decalogue conveyed God’s eternal Law and is therefore inherently unchanging; after Christ the only change occurs in the Christian who acts now from grace rather than fear. But for the sacramental precepts, even though they bear an eternal gift, change is endemic to the commands themselves because of their embedded element of time. “The teaching is not different, but the time is different” (Faust. 16.28).31 Christ swung Israel’s old books toward their larger prophetic meaning and particularly clarified their obscure ritual commands as harbingers of salvation. Christians now honor the prescriptions not by performing them but by reading them as confirmations of salvation. This displays Scripture’s unity: “So the very Scripture (ipsa scriptura) that back then served as exactor (exactrix) of the symbolic work, now serves as witness to the things that were symbolized. . . . And so we hold that the same Scripture (eadem scriptura) works in two ways: back then it forcefully commanded to cover in shadows what now has been opened up, and now it authoritatively testifies in plain light to what used to be covered up” (Faust. 6.9).32 Changes in outward custom mask the constant grace of Christ that was already present to the patriarchs and prophets and to which they bore secret witness. A single biblical message about salvation takes different forms, one old, one new: “there signified, here revealed, there prophesied, here displayed” (ibid. 16.32).33 Providence managed the ephemerality of time for salvation’s advantage when divinity became subject to time: Christ turned time’s inherent instability—the very thing that sin and death hijacked in order to alter humanity’s relationship to God—against sin and death itself, and changed them. Change itself changed when God took up a human being: Christ “passed through” mortal life into real death and then into divine life, thus transforming human life “under Law” to life “under grace.” By changing the people who read the Law he changed the Law into grace and truth. Christians now

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reading the Law in union with their Mediator honor it precisely by not carrying out its ritual commands. Their very inaction bears witness to the fulfillment of the Law’s prophetic dimension and to the change of its function from anticipating redemption to explaining it. The commands in themselves never lost their validity or divine authority; only their function changed when the clock hands of salvation history ticked forward from “will be” to “is.” “That was the time for giving signs, but this is the time for removing veils” (Faust. 6.9).34 Faustus therefore misunderstood Jesus’ sayings about old cloth and old wineskins as though the Lord referred to the Old Testament as outworn (ibid. 15.1; cf. Matt. 9:16–17). Jesus rather referred to older and newer forms of a single Christian life and hope (15.2). Christ’s fulfillment neither impugned nor repealed the Law, much less destroyed it.35 Faustus had thought that if the Old Testament sacraments changed, then that implied either that the old rites were false and should not have been instituted or, if divinely authorized and true, should not have been changed. Augustine answered that changes in a sacrament’s external form indicated neither self-contradiction nor unchangeability. After all, in speaking we constantly alter the forms of verbs in relation to time of action they describe, without falsifying their root meaning. The basic sense of “doing” in the verb facere persists, Augustine observes, even as its forms conjugate in relation to time of action: when “things (yet) to be done,” facienda, are performed, then they become “things (already) done,” facta. The same principle holds even for New Testament sacramenta. The water of baptism comes and goes, and our spoken word “God” sounds and dies away; but God himself is eternal, as is his power (virtus) that works through the sacrament and the spiritual gift (donum spiritale) that it implants (19.16). Israel’s sacraments likewise changed between the Testaments as Christ fulfilled them, though the same grace was given under different forms. Sacramental ritual commands shouldn’t be taken as eternal, Augustine contends, because their inner truth emerges on a sort of time-delay basis. Before Christ came, they were enigmatic but authoritative orders from on high that secretly held saving truth; after Christ came and disclosed their inner substance, the old commands retained their divine authority in a different mode as witnesses to saving truth. The rituals once secretly foretold Christ’s coming; after he came, the practice of physical observance dropped away but their words retained spiritual authority for testifying to the prophecy that had been fulfilled. “Then it was a precept, now it is a testimony. . . . What at one time was carried out for the sake of foretelling

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is now recited for the sake of confirmation” (Faust. 6.9).36 So it was, for instance, with regard to the Law’s commands about blood sacrifice. It is true, Augustine wrote, that we don’t carry out the old rituals any longer; “nevertheless we embrace them (amplectamur) in the mysteries of the divine Scriptures for the sake of understanding the things that they foretold. For ‘they were figures of us’ [1 Cor. 10:6], and all such mysteries signified in many and various ways the one sacrifice whose memory we now celebrate. After Christ revealed and offered that sacrifice in its time, those ritual observances were taken away from active liturgical celebration; but their authority for giving signs remained in place, for ‘these things were written for our sake upon whom the end of the ages has come’” [1 Cor. 10:11] (Faust. 6.5).37 In short, the old commands now mediate the truth of Christ in a figurative way.

C. Differing Sacramental Signs in Prophecy The prophecy-fulfillment dynamic of Scripture in Against Faustus reflects what On Christian Teaching called res significantes, the “signifying things” wherein spiritual truth emerged from real earthly things acting as symbols (which I’ve called “mediative” signs). But the time element embedded within them set up a series of phases in the way the thing-signs function. A central example is the command to observe the Sabbath. Once obedience to this command required a literal physical performance, but Christians now obey it by contemplative reading. [The Law’s command regarding] inactivity on the Sabbath, from which (ex quo) our hope of eternal rest was revealed, is something that we now reckon as unnecessary (supervacua) as far as ritual observance goes. But it is not unnecessary as regards reading and understanding. That’s because back in prophetic times, when these things were prefigured and foretold not only by sayings but also by deeds (things that in this present time have been opened for us), by that sign we read was foreknown this very thing that we hold fast. (Faust. 6.4)38 The structure of mediative signs also maps the complex process of signification that was at work in the old distinctions about clean and unclean animals (Faust. 6.7). But didn’t Paul nullify these categories when he wrote, “to the clean all things are clean” (Titus 1:15) and “every creature of God is good” (1 Tim. 4:4)? Not exactly, answered Augustine. A close

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reading shows that the Apostle was speaking about the animals’ physical nature, which carries no basis for distinctions; but the clean/unclean dyad refers “not to the order of nature but rather to the order of signs” (Faust. 6.7).39 That order of signs called lambs “clean” and pigs “unclean” in order to signify the spiritual distinction between the wise and the foolish. The likeness that linked pigs and fools was their common failure, figuratively speaking, to “chew the cud”: real pigs that literally do not chew their food signify spiritual fools who refuse to “ruminate” on the truth of salvation— an essential exercise of the New Testament economy. Therefore, while Christ certainly obviated the old command about shunning contact with real pigs, that old command retained its authority as a sign portraying the need to avoid associating with spiritual swine (ibid.).40 But one has to understand, Augustine reminded Faustus, that such likenesses involved matching up certain corresponding characteristics and not actual shared physical properties (12.2).41 This pattern of correspondences helped Augustine to find Christ in many Old Testament texts. The order of signs made sense of finding Christ in God’s promise to Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet from their brothers who is like you” (Deut. 18:15; Faust. 16.15). Faustus had objected that Christ was too unlike Moses to fulfill this prophecy for several reasons: Christ was neither prophet nor sinner; he was divine by nature; and in very un-Moses-like fashion he was born of a virgin and died a voluntary death (16.4).42 Augustine replied that being “like” Moses didn’t mean being his exact duplicate, for that would actually destroy the concept of “likeness,” which unlike the concept of “image” presupposes at least some degree of difference.43 Scripture’s many likenesses display striking differences. For example, the Son of God who created animals and stones couldn’t be more unlike them in terms of actual being, yet Scripture still calls him “lamb” (John 1:29) and “rock” (1 Cor. 10:4). Indeed, the very wildness of the disparity between the God-Man and lions, lambs, and stones made these realities apt sacramental figures of Christ, because the enveloping unlikeness makes the threads of likeness all the more instructive. Augustine perceives Christ in the mysterious coalescence of sign and thing that took place in the ancient “mystical anointing” (mystica unctio) of Israel’s priests and kings, from which comes the very name “Christ” (chrisma, “oil,” and Christus, “anointed one,” both from Greek; Faust. 20.18). The mystical anointing bound Israel’s story to the person of Christ, the only true Priest and King. To describe the historical ground and spiritual depth of this imagery, Augustine adapted a new word, mysticus, which

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enjoys a sudden flurry of occurrences around the time of writing Against Faustus.44 Mysticus had been a favorite Manichean term for speaking of Christ—in fact Faustus’s Capitula used it twice to refer to Christ’s suffering, calling it “the mystical nailing to his cross” (32.7) and his “mystical passion” (33.1). But the Manichees used it to stress the spiritual and universal dimension of Christ in a way that negated the particularities of his fleshly existence. Prior to writing Against Faustus Augustine avoided mysticus almost completely, perhaps because he could not yet satisfactorily relate that word to the reality of Christ’s humanity. But the two times that he did use mysticus before writing Against Faustus are revealing for the way they hint at Augustine’s trajectory of understanding about how heavenly and earthly realities interrelate. The first use occurs in Letter 11 (ca. 389) as he was beginning to answer a question from his friend Nebridius about why, of the three persons of the Trinity, only the Second Person assumed human nature. Augustine’s answer addresses more the Son’s divine act than his human reality per se. He speaks of “the mystical assumption of the Man” (susceptio hominis mystica; Letter 11.2); the word mysticus points to the divine act of “taking up the Man” (suscipere hominem), as he terms it a few lines later in the same passage. The second occurrence in On Christian Teaching (2.16.25) equates numbers written “mystically” in Scripture with “transferred” or “metaphorical” signs (translata signa) (i.e., “mediative” signs). Knowledge of a “thing,” in this case the number forty, is necessary for unraveling the mysteries conveyed by Moses, Elijah, and Jesus who all fasted for forty days. In other words, Augustine here alights on mysticus to express his new sense of the historical realities that give substance to figurative readings. After this the references to mysticus begin to multiply. About the same time as writing Against Faustus, Augustine uses mysticus in Confessions to describe the way of interpreting Scripture practiced by Ambrose, who “removed the mystical veil” from the Old Testament (Conf. 6.4.6). Against Faustus itself uses mysticus to refer to a specific quality of Catholic sacraments that differentiates them from Manichean rites: the Church offers not just any bread and wine in the Eucharist, for it “becomes mystical for us by a definite act of consecration” (certa consecratione; Faust. 20.13). Furthermore, Augustine writes, Christians read the Old Testament narratives sacramentally because the patriarchs “lived their lives in a mystical way” (12.48), as did the prophets (22.8). Certain other passages call upon readers to search out some “mystical symbolism” (mystica significatio; 22.94). A few years later, as we saw in the previous chapter, On Instructing Beginners

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commends the “things spoken mystically (mystice) in the holy books” (Instr. Beg. 13.18), where many mysteries evoke the cross of Christ (ibid. 17.28; 19.32; 20.34). About that same time mysticus also appears a half-dozen times in Letter 55 to Januarius.45 Augustine reflects there on the difference between the celebration of Easter, which is a proper sacrament, and Christmas, which for him at this time is only a memorial.46 The commemoration of the Lord’s nativity is a literal sign of a past event, Augustine contends, while the Paschal celebration both portrays Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and communicates its benefits. It does this chiefly by the celebration of the “mystical supper” that the Lord gave to his disciples (Letter 55.1.2). Passing references speak of “mystical numbers” (ibid. 55.3.5), “mystical teachings” (55.6.11), “symbolizing mystically” (55.7.12), “mystical likenesses” (55.8.14), and “signifying mystically” (55.12.22). The sudden proliferation of mysticus/mystice in the late 390s and early 400s points to Augustine’s new sense of the interrelationship between the sacred humanity of Christ, the earthly reality of the Church’s sacramental signs, the subterranean currents of spiritual truth in the Scriptures, and the need for Christians to hone the practice of figurative reading. The Paschal celebration, Augustine writes, pictures and channels Christ’s redemptive power, so we say not only that he died and rose but also that he died and rose for us (Letter 55.1.2).47 Jesus commandeered the passage of time in his transitus,48 his “passage” from death to life, and moved humanity from living sub lege to sub gratia by making his transitus part of the human story. The sacramental signum of Golgotha mediates its “reality,” res, by pouring out the love of God which has no limits. Like people exchanging an actual kiss rather than reading a dictionary definition of “kiss, n.,” or hearing a symphony actually played rather than reading a printed score, the sign itself is powerfully communicative: the signum of Christ’s paschal dying and rising mediates the reality of redemption—functionally speaking, in the sacrament it becomes “incarnate.”49 For Augustine, a sacrament is a sacred sign (signum sacrum; City of God 10.5) wherein God’s saving love “takes flesh” just as (and just because) the Word “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The sign mediates divine love’s “mystery,” the spiritual reality that, although partly knowable through enspirited figures, remains unfathomable. Sacraments nevertheless operate in ways that are not unrelated to ordinary language. “What else are corporeal sacraments,” Augustine writes, “except something like ‘visible words’ (verba visibilia) that have been made holy, but for all that are changeable and temporal?” (Faust. 19.16).50 They offer a sort of working

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knowledge of the Holy, a usable hint that ignites a knower’s desire for fuller understanding and eventual full spiritual vision. Because the limitations of human understanding require that this vision be mediated figuratively, Scripture often “insinuates” truth “through allegories and enigmas that are partly suggested subtly by words alone and partly narrated as events” (Faust. 12.7).51 Effective allegories and enigmas lure the spiritual mind into an adventure of reading designed to excite love in the heart. As Letter 55 puts it with reference to the “likeness of the sacrament” in the Sabbath rest: All these things hinted to us figuratively pertain to feeding and somehow fanning that fire of love that like a weight carries us upward or inward. For they stir and kindle love more than if the truth were put forth unadorned without any likenesses of the sacraments. . . . I believe that the inner stirring of the soul (motus animae) catches fire only slowly as long as the soul is entangled in the affairs of earthly life. But if it is drawn to bodily likenesses, and from them gets directed to the spiritual things pictured by those likenesses, then that very passage (transitus) enlivens the soul, and it flames up, so to say, like a burning torch waving in the wind, and a more ardent love catches the soul up to its rest.52

V. Augustine’s Theory of Christian Reading, Part III: The Hidden Prophecies Within Biblical Stories In the time of the Old Testament it was not merely the Law’s written commands but the commands taken together with physical observance that made the rituals prophetic. An Israelite resting on the Sabbath wittingly or unwittingly enacted a prophetic sign on the plane of visible history, so to say. So it was natural for Christians to use that sacramental lens for reading Israel’s lived history. For Against Faustus the narratives of the Old Testament revealed a sacramental structure of prophetic truth that was similar to the ritual commands, particularly the prophetic narratives of the patriarchs (Faust. 4.2) and the prophets (ibid. 22.24).53 Augustine repeatedly referred to their “sayings and deeds” (dicta et facta) while unfurling Scripture’s prophecies (e.g., Faust. 6.7, 12.7, 12.39–40, 16.9, 19.8). The hermeneutic of Against Faustus opened up Christ’s grace and truth in a vast array of obscure passages, particularly in the long expositions of

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Books 12 and 22; the latter is a virtual textbook for Christians reading the narrative prophecies of the Old Testament. It showed that as the ancient saints performed seemingly carnal rituals like circumcision, they secretly signified the grace of Christ already at work within them. The New Testament agreed with their words and deeds because embryonically it was already present among them. Christ’s future advent, Augustine wrote, “as king to rule and as priest to sanctify those who believed in him, was coming to birth in that whole vast machinery (universus ille adparatus) appearing in the ancient record, with its genealogies, deeds, sayings, sacrifices, ceremonies, festivals, and all the discourses of those who publicly preached about things that happened and figures of things about to happen” (Faust. 19.31).54 For Augustine the whole kingdom of Israel was “one great prophet” (ibid. 4.2), and so to read its story rightly was to understand that “the Old Testament is a prophecy of the New Testament” (ibid. 15.2). All the ancient saints believed in and hoped for the same reality that Christians do (ibid. 19.14) because “their desire sprang from the New Testament.”55 Thus as much as any apostle those old saints “belonged to the New Testament”56 as secret icons of the unity between the old covenant then in progress and the new covenant that was to come. “We don’t believe that earthly things consumed the holy and spiritual people of that time, the patriarchs and the prophets,” Augustine wrote. “They understood what was conformable to (congrueret) their time, because the Spirit of God revealed it to them. They understood the ways by which God would decide about what future things would be signified and foretold through everything they were saying and doing.”57 Thus all their words and deeds became sacramenta that mediated the future revelation of Christ and emergence of the Church. This was the steel ribbing of Augustine’s antiManichean argument for scriptural unity: Christ’s grace and truth that was already present in the words and deeds of the ancient people of God made the Manichees’ rejection of the Old Testament tantamount to rejecting the New.

A. Multiple Meanings in the Narratives Even though they mystically conjoined things and signs, Scripture’s “signifying things” could mediate multiple and even opposing senses; a single event might teach contrasting lessons according to the moral or sacramental perspective on the Law. This was especially clear in the prophetic inversion of narratives that described evil and immorality in the

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Old Testament’s heroes. Augustine’s paradigm for this was the Gospel portrait of the odious Caiaphas (John 11:47–53; Faust. 16.23; 22.83), the high priest who ironically mixed prophecy and malice while plotting Jesus’ death. Afraid of the Roman threat to take the land away from the Jews, Caiaphas suggested that Jesus’ execution was a pragmatic choice for the good of all: “It is more expedient that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:50). The evangelist then added, “He said this not on his own [Lat., a se non dixit], but being the high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the people” (ibid. v. 51). A se non dixit: this apostolic gloss showed how Scripture distinguishes between a thing in itself and God’s use of that thing. The “prophetic unction” (prophetica chrisma) could make even a toxic figure like Caiaphas into a medium of revelation. Despite himself he was a prophet: his impiety blocked only his knowledge of having uttered a prophecy. For Augustine, this man’s lack of understanding or skewed moral judgment was irrelevant to his prophetic role; in fact, that Providence should draft such nefarious characters into serving the divine design was a mark of its power. “Function” clearly transcended “person” in biblical prophecy. Some time after Against Faustus Augustine used the same thought pattern to explain how the power of the sacrament transcended a baptizing minister’s personal virtue or conscious cooperation: it was Christ who spoke, and Christ who baptized, even if Judas Iscariot did the dipping.58 This paradox is evident everywhere in Scripture. Judah’s dalliance with the pretend prostitute who was actually his own daughter-in-law Tamar (Gen. 38:1–30) brought forth children who not only advanced Israel’s history but also were the stock of Jesus’ ancestry (Matt. 1:3). Judah himself acted out of lust; but God used it to further salvation’s cause. The fact that Judah acted “unknowingly” (nesciente) illuminated the same “law of unintended prophecies” to which Providence would later subject Caiaphas. Judah no more intended to prophesy than Judas intended salvation by betraying Jesus, yet God accomplished redemption through them both. “So in terms of his illicit desire Judah’s deed was evil; but without knowing it he signified great good, for while he did the evil consciously, he signified good unconsciously” (Faust. 22.83). The same applies to Moses killing the Egyptian (Exod. 2:12), an image of Christ slaying the devil (Faust. 22.90); and to David seducing Bathsheba (2 Kings [2 Sam.] 11:2–5), a figure of Christ wooing the Church (Faust. 22.87); and so on. Scripture narratives feature a template with two sides that function differently: judgments on moral evil appear on one side and prophecies of redemption on the other. As

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Augustine explains, God sorts out the difference: “God maintained his just judgment on the sin of the people who lived at that time, while also keeping his watchful Providence over the process of signifying future things. As narrated in Scripture, the deed is a prophecy; but when considered as part of the life of those who committed the act, it is a moral disgrace” (ibid. 22.42). Moral flaws were inconsequential for prophecy: Augustine writes that it makes “no difference” (nihil interest) to the prophetic role whether someone’s actions are moral or immoral (ibid. 22.83). God brings good from the evil, just as when a good human child is born of an adulterous union. Providence superintends Scripture’s story line so as to maintain connections within the larger plan of grace. It can extrude prophecy even from evil acts, which Scripture inverts so as to expose what Augustine called their “power of goodness” (virtus bonitatis).59 “Divine Providence everywhere preserves the power of their goodness with the result that . . . from the evil work of human beings comes the good work of God.”60

B. Weaving Sign and Reality from the Prophetic Narratives Events become “laundered” for prophecy, so to say, by the Spirit-driven process of writing and reading. Once written down, stories become available for stitching into the larger quilt of the salvation narrative, “either openly or through figures” (Faust. 19.8). Prophetic authors certainly admonished the moral failings of a Judah or a David as signs of transgression, but as they wrote out the stories they also adapted them as prophetic signs. “So because the very narrative is prophetic,” wrote Augustine, “when the prophetic writings narrate not only the people’s good deeds but their evil ones too, even people’s evil works signify something about future good things. This happens not by the work of sinning but by the work of writing” (ibid. 22.83).61 The Holy Spirit produced Scripture by collaborating with prophets who were “disposed and inspired” to assemble the story of salvation like a mosaic whose complete picture was hidden from the people immersed in its details (ibid.).62 The “prophetic Spirit” (ibid. 16.13; 22.94) moved the writers to collect certain words and deeds into a massive and unified narrative testimony to future things to be revealed. Accordingly the prophetic authors artfully filled their narratives with veiled “figures and sacraments” of Christ (ibid. 16.20). The counterpart to the Spirit-guided writing of the prophets was the Spirit-guided reading of the Christian. Augustine constructed a sort of

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“theory of Christian reading” based on Scripture’s unity that trained audiences to understand the multivalence of scriptural signs.63 Augustine portrays the close work of intertextual reading by the image of “weaving” (contexo). For him it is the reader’s task to weave spiritual understanding out of the texts by passing the weft of Christ’s grace and truth through the warp of Israel’s stories. Using the pattern provided by the New Testament, Christian readers uncovered the figurative patterns woven long ago by the prophets through the Spirit. Like those initially viewing a fine tapestry, readers at first glance cannot appreciate all the patterns in play, for they emerge only with the effort and persistence of contemplative rumination stirred by Christ’s love. In the end even passages without obvious religious or moral content contribute to the pattern, and their very superfluity signals Christian readers to search out their mystical meanings (Faust. 22.96).64 For example, the seemingly gratuitous mention of the side door on Noah’s ark signified Christ’s pierced side from which the water of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist flowed out (12.39; cf. John 19:34).65 On the other hand, extraneous passages might serve as connecting knots (connexiones) between more important texts (Faust. 22.96). Thus everything challenged and stirred the spiritual mind. Then “when everything is studied and the superfluous things are discovered to be ‘woven together’ with the necessary things, so to say, they alert the human mind—that is, the rational mind—first to the fact that they signify something, and then to the need to search out whatever they signify” (ibid. 12.38).66 The weaving work of reading stirred both the beginner’s desire to believe and the advanced believer’s effort to understand. It started with Scripture’s promise-fulfillment structure that weaves together clear and obscure texts. “Unless some things were plain,” Augustine wrote, “the meaning that clarifies the obscurities would not be understood” (Faust. 12.7). In other words, plain fulfillment of prophecy sets up a woven pattern that joins the Testaments. A concatenation of open texts referring to Christ and his universal reign appears in Against Faustus 12.41–44; they included God’s promise to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations will be blessed” (Gen. 22:18); Jacob’s prophecy to Judah, “A prince shall not depart from Judah until there comes what has been laid up for him” (Gen. 49:10); the crucifixion images of Isaiah 53; the promise of God’s worldwide inheritance in Psalm 2:8, “Ask of me, and I will give you the uttermost parts of the earth for your possession”; and Psalm 21:28, “All the ends of the earth shall turn to the Lord.” Jeremiah’s song of Wisdom also foreshadowed the Incarnation: “She was seen on earth, and conversed with people” (Bar. 3:38); and the

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apocalypse appeared in Daniel’s vision of the “Son of Man” who receives the heavenly kingdom (Dan. 7:13–14). These “more open testimonies” of prophecy certified the truth of Christianity all the more persuasively to outsiders because Christians did not compose them (Faust. 12.37).67 The New Testament showed that Christ fulfilled Old Testament prophecy, but the Old Testament retroactively supplied the “pre-understanding” necessary for making sense of what that fulfillment meant (as, e.g., kingship and priesthood in Israel explains Christ as King and Priest; 13.15). The impressive correspondence between Scripture prophecy and actual events draws Gentile inquirers (of the sort that Augustine trained Deogratias to teach in On Instructing Beginners): “From the Christian realities that stand forth already accomplished, the genuine prophecy of these books is proven, while from the prophecy of those same books the Christ to be revered is understood” (16.20).68 This was the sort of logic that had been missing from Augustine’s thinking as a Manichee. Manichees demanded, “Christ is the only key to salvation, so why do we need the Old Testament?” Now Augustine could give an answer based in rational understanding: “The Old Testament is the key to Christ.” Scripture also illumined obscure prophecies by way of authority rather than reason through pronouncements made by Christ or the apostles. Such “zones of hermeneutic grace” bestowed clear understanding without the usual sweaty labor of rationally seeking and showing the lines of correspondence. The New Testament supplied many such shortcuts that were like sutures between the Testaments. As we’ve seen, Jesus linked Moses raising a serpent on a pole to his crucifixion (Num. 21:9 = John 3:14); the Gospel also linked Christ to the sacrificial lamb whose bones remained unbroken (Exod. 12:46 = John 1:29; 19:36). The Apostle Paul’s use of the Exodus tradition in 1 Cor. 10:1–11 was a particularly clear case; the stream of references to that passage in Against Faustus shows its crucial importance for Augustine’s way of reading (Faust. 12.30).69 We’ve already seen the importance of the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness, for Paul wrote, “the rock was Christ” (Exod. 17:6 = 1 Cor. 10:4). For Augustine Paul was handing over a master key to his readers, for “by the explanation of one figure, he made sense of all the others” (Faust. 12.29).70 Augustine accordingly concluded that Christ was also the manna (Exod. 16:13ff.), the cloud and pillar (Exod. 13:21), and the bitter water sweetened by the wood of the cross (Exod. 15:25). Furthermore, the “twelve fountains” in the wilderness anticipated the preaching of the first apostles (Exod. 15:27), while the “seventy palms” foretold Christian fulfillment of the Ten

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Commandments multiplied by the sevenfold operation of the Spirit (Isa. 11:2). As Paul summarized it, “All these things were figures for us” (1 Cor. 10:11). Such free gifts of authoritative understanding sped up the development of readers’ skills of spiritual reason, and ripened faith into understanding more quickly. They also made the work of exegesis easier. We might paraphrase Augustine’s comment on Paul’s “the rock was Christ”: “Authority’s explanation of one figure made rational-spiritual sense of many others.” Pellucid prophetic fulfillment shed light on a host of obscure tales, events, commands, characters, and rites, which spiritually trained readers to know how to “refer” to salvation’s greater design. Christ opened up many such closed “figures and sacraments” by revealing himself as the “substance” of the prophetic “shadows of future things” (Col. 2:16–17; Heb. 10:1; Faust. 6.2; 12.33; 13.10; 32.9). Some of these, Augustine wrote, were actual physical realities presented to the bodily senses, like Sinai’s burning bush (Exod. 3:2) or Moses’ staff (Exod. 4:2–4); some were bodily images presented to the spirit only, like Jacob’s ladder (Gen. 28:12) or Daniel’s “rock hewn without hands” (Dan. 2:34–35); others appeared only in figurative words, like the Song of Songs or Jesus’ parables (Faust. 15.6). Scripture habitually conveyed ineffable truths enigmatically (in aenigma) by such means in order to provoke sense-bound readers to seek truth beneath a text’s surface. These images stirred the Christian exercise of seeking and finding. Simple believers depended on the demonstrable fulfillment of promises to confirm their faith, while mature spiritual people used the record of promises to search out the meaning of their fulfillment. Against Faustus worked through passages one by one in order to uncover what On Instructing Beginners called the Old Testament’s “hidden secret” (occultatio) on “open display” (manifestatio) in the New (Instr. Beg. 4.8). In the big picture Against Faustus transcends its presenting purpose—to attack the Manichean view—and serves as a series of training exercises for aspiring Catholic biblical interpreters. This puts its frequent droning repetitiveness into perspective.71 Augustine wrote, “So if one studies and you might say ‘interrogates’ these Scripture passages— the very same ones that the heretics slander—Scripture answers that the more obscure they seem, the more wonderful is the treasure trove of mysteries (mysteriorum thesaurus) that they hide deep within” (Faust. 22.94).72 He demonstrated that with the support of texts that put fulfillment on open display, figurative prophecy might even supplement the work of rational argumentation.73 Literal fulfillment of prophecy compelled rational acknowledgment by interpreting observable facts (e.g., the promise to bless

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all nations fulfilled by the Church’s worldwide extent). But figurative prophecy instead worked allusively and cumulatively, and persuaded readers by appealing to their imaginative judgment about an image’s coherence and appropriateness to faith; figures invited rather than forced agreement, and persuaded more by pointing to loose threads that were ready to be tied together than by submitting hard proofs.74 The resulting multihued tapestry of truth inundated the reader’s imaginative sense with a vision of truth’s organic wholeness arising from Scripture’s many sentences swathed in figures. Then when “some of them are arranged in a single perspective and sort of ‘woven together,’ they so join their voices in testimony to Christ that they shame the deafness of the most abject dullard” (Faust. 12.7).75

Conclusion: Deep in the Bones For Augustine, Scripture shows God playing a game of peekaboo with his children, a game that they win by reading in such a way that understanding opens up to them. Excited by flashes of half-hidden truths, teasing hints, enigmatic knots, and suspiciously superfluous passages, astute readers rise from faith (an incipient form of love) to full love and understanding of the eternal. For Augustine, love was not only the end of the Law but also the primary rule of spiritual epistemology, for “no one enters into truth except through love” (Faust. 32.18).76 For Augustine, Christianity announces the blockbuster news that Christ himself stirs people to saving love as the Mediator between God and humanity (Instr. Beg. 4.7–8). Inquirers begin with him, little ones stay with him, and spiritual believers return to him by reading Scripture, including the Old Testament texts that prophetically explain him. Book 12 of Against Faustus details Augustine’s conviction that Christ hides and darts everywhere in the leafy forest of Israel’s ancient pages, either openly and plainly or stealthily and teasingly. He appears here in sleeping Adam, there in sacrificing Abel, and over there in the wood of Noah’s ark (Faust. 12.25–26). Augustine peppers the reader with rapid-fire queries: Quis alius? . . . Quis alius? . . . Quis alius? Who else, asked Augustine, was in Abraham leaving his own land? Who else was in Isaac carrying the wood to his own sacrifice? Who else wrestled Jacob to a draw? Like the sightings of the risen Christ after his resurrection, he comes and goes everywhere in the old books. In Joseph’s fiery trials, in Moses’ burning bush, in Passover’s slain lamb, in Israel’s flowing rock, in Joshua’s brave exploits, and in hundreds of other people, events, and images he dazzles

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readers with kaleidoscopic visions that excite their spiritual love (12.28–44). Meanwhile responsive Christian readers playfully invert the punishment for sin in Eden (Gen. 3:19): though Adam’s sweaty work of tilling fields for survival once portended death, now reading Scripture has transformed labor into a spiritual exercise that enlivens, delights, and nourishes. In sum, Against Faustus puts on display the ex-Manichee Augustine’s hardwon achievement: a Catholic sense of the fullness of Christ’s grace and truth that readers recover in the figures of the Old Testament. In a passage that might have come from Confessions, Augustine sums up his experience of Christ in reading Scripture: As I journey through it [i.e., reading the Law], breathing hard in that sweat of our human condemnation, Christ meets and refreshes me everywhere in those Books, everywhere in those Scriptures, in their open spaces and in their secret haunts. He sets me on fire with a desire that comes from having no little difficulty in finding him. But that only makes me eager to clutch whatever I find, to soak it deep into my bones, and to hold it close for my salvation. (Faust. 12.27)77

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Epilogue

The Astounding Exchange

o u r t r e k w i t h Augustine has arrived at the place to detrain, though he himself continues long past it. If with Augustine we compare his progress to him speaking seriatim the parts of a psalm (Conf. 11.28.38), then it appears we’re about to leave him hanging in mid-sentence. At the turn of the fifth century Augustine’s career as a Scripture interpreter was only starting. But as we exit we now know enough to look down the track to where the journey takes him from here, and to get a sense of what he’s thinking about as he goes. Against Faustus marks a turning point. Augustine’s campaign against the Manichees gradually recedes from view, at least its exegetical phase. He has come to the intriguing view that the totus Christus grounds biblical unity: the head composed the Scriptures through his body as if with his own “hand” (Harm. Ev. 1.35.54). Christ’s real and humble humanity has made the whole historical core of Scripture indispensable to coherent Christian exegesis. After thus slaying his inner Manichean dragon, Augustine’s conception of Christ the divine-human Mediator suffuses virtually every aspect of his thinking. Figurative Old Testament readings soon reappear as he composes Books 1–4 of On the Trinity (including Book 4’s profound spiritual-theological analysis of Christ the Mediator, whose agonizing cry of dereliction from Psalm 21:2 sounds out “in the psalm and on the cross”; 4.3.6). He also returns to unsolved problems surrounding Scripture’s literal sense by channeling exegetical energy toward writing the first of what became twelve books of the Literal Commentary on Genesis. Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict with the Donatists, a quite different set of antagonists than the Manichees, begins to boil. Because the schismatics not only accept the Catholic canon of the Old Testament but also are skilled figurative interpreters, Augustine’s biblical debate with

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them focuses less on defending global scriptural unity and more on soundly interpreting specific texts. But the conclusions honed against the Manichees in the 390s ground the premises of his polemic against the Donatists in the 400s: the voice of the totus Christus addresses not just the unity of Scripture but even more the unity of the Church, a theme that absorbs many sermons on the Psalms. Certain developments also adjust aspects of his figurative reading. Augustine’s move in the mid390s to a more consistent concept of operative grace, a shift much studied by scholars in recent decades, refocuses his Ambrosian reading of 2 Cor. 3:6 (“the letter kills, but the spirit makes alive”) that we’ve studied here: moving away from interpreting the figures of Scripture, it tilts now toward mapping the inner workings of grace. In contrast to that first reading that stressed the unity between the Testaments, the second one stresses the contrast within the unity. Though he never renounces the older perspective, eventually he comes to prefer the newer one.1 In the early 400s Augustine’s work of reading and teaching Scripture hits its stride, and many biblically oriented works begin to pour from his pen. Over the next three decades tens of thousands of Scripture references appear in treatises, correspondence, and preaching. The hundreds of written sermons that survive to our day (and remain insufficiently studied), many of them produced by on-the-spot stenographers listening to the bishop’s living voice, fill up the granaries from the harvest of Augustinian figurative commentary. Epistolary essays like Letters 102 and 140 give close readings of the biblical text, while Books 11–22 of The City of God reprise many earlier figurative readings and reflect new ones.2 All this production, especially the preaching, flags the mistaken notion that over time Augustine either lessened or lost his interest in figurative reading. The ongoing demand of preaching ensured that he pored constantly over Scripture for its yield of the Christian pilgrim’s “daily bread” (Serm. 57.7). Augustine’s zest for training “little ones” to read Scripture alongside “spiritual ones” never fades.

Historical Faith for Spiritual Ascent Modern readers who focus more on Augustine’s treatises than on his sermons can get the impression that he moved further from allegory because it disparages history and closer to typology because it respects history.3 In my judgment that is a false dichotomy. Besides being a chief take-away from the anti-Manichean campaign, Augustine’s increasing

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attention to historical matters seems to have more to do with two other factors. First, he more clearly sees the critical necessity for advanced believers standing higher on the spiritual ladder to return regularly to its lower rungs for refreshment at faith’s historical foundations. Even the most advanced spiritual Christians still “walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), and so never stop needing nourishment from the story of the crucified God-Man. Such spiritales don’t simply revert to becoming “little ones” at the breast, however; rather their very maturity compels them to willingly make themselves little in humility. In a manner befitting the essential paradox of Christ, his best disciples humbly bend down to history because their low bow exactly measures their exalted spiritual stature. Second, Augustine comes to believe deeply that the humility of the advanced finds expression in the effort to instruct beginners. As a result he becomes eager to analyze more exactly how faith springs to life for inquirers, initiates, and the unsophisticated when they encounter “the temporal dispensation for salvation.” On Instructing Beginners shows this concern briefly but brilliantly. On the other hand, Augustine never stops prodding simpler believers to climb higher on the ladder; he always wants to make Leahs into Rachels. So his sermons are replete with expositions of the external, historical sense of a text as the propaedeutic to spiritual ascent. But the never-ending work with “little ones” requires the bishop to sit where they sit and hear what they hear. Thus Augustine tries to speak the words of Scripture, he wrote, “in the voice of our ‘little ones,’ among whom I would also count myself” (Faust. 12.48).4 This double prosopopoeia of speaking the words of Scripture and speaking in the voice of the simple—inconceivable when Augustine was merely the talking head of Cassiciacum—becomes possible after Augustine learns to commune humbly with the crucified God-Man. His self-transposition that imitates the Incarnation thus becomes the mark of his Christian maturity. For the spiritales who become parvuli in disguise, Augustine learns to qualify his oft-used maternal metaphor that describes Christians as sucklers at the breast of Wisdom (Conf. 7.18.24). Though it was a favorite Pauline image (1 Cor. 3:1–2), in order to avoid infantilizing everyone Augustine added another picture from that same text, “Christ the foundation” (1 Cor. 3:10). “Christ crucified,” he wrote, “is both milk for the suckling and meat for the maturing. So the likeness of a foundation fits better, for in bringing a structure to completion, you add to the building without taking away the foundation” (Tr. John 98.6).5 The point is that Augustine’s increasing concern for history served rather than severed the link between historical faith and spiritual ascent. In my

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judgment, therefore, this “both-and” makes it wrong to think of Augustine first favoring “allegory” and then “typology” as antagonistic modes of exegesis that either flee or favor history. For him historical faith was simply the first phase of rational-spiritual faith, the crucial catalyst of the soul’s ascent, and the home base to which it returned for renewal.

The Christian Metamorphosis of the Old Scriptures Augustine’s first recorded Catholic prayer in 386 bespeaks his then-heavy intellectual stress upon the divinity of Christ, God’s Wisdom and Power, “whom the mysteries present to us” (Skept. 2.1.1). But by 400 he has attained a certain spiritual equilibrium: Augustine’s identification with the Church’s “little ones” in Against Faustus suggests he has balanced his earlier view with that of “the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5). Soon after this, while preparing himself for immersion in the first chapter of Genesis in Books 11–13 of Confessions, Augustine concludes Book 10 with a Scripture-laced prayer that God may help him to read well. Christ’s importance as both divine Wisdom and human Redeemer for reading rightly is clear: “See, Lord, ‘I cast all my anxiety upon you that I may live’ [Ps. 54:23], and so ‘I will consider the wonders of your Law’ [Ps. 118:18]. You know my inexperience and weakness [Ps. 68:6]. ‘Teach me and heal me’ [Ps. 6:3; 142:10]. Your only Son, ‘in whom lie all the hidden treasures (thesauri absconditi) of wisdom and knowledge’ [Col. 2:3], has redeemed me by his blood [Rev. 5:9]” (Conf. 10.43.70, Chadwick trans.). When Book 11 launches into the properly exegetical portion of Confessions, his prayer continues: Yours is the day and yours the night [Ps. 73:16]. and at your nod the moments fly by. From them grant a space of time for our meditations on your Law’s hidden things (abdita). Do not close it up at the sound of our knocking [Matt. 7:7]. Not for nothing did you will so many dense and dark pages to be written. Nor do those forests lack their deer who refresh and restore themselves in them, Walking and feeding, resting and ruminating. O Lord, bring me to perfection, and reveal those forests to me! [Ps. 28:9] . . .

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I make my prayer through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, the Man of your right hand, the Son of Man whom you have strengthened [Ps. 79:18] to be the Mediator between yourself and us. (Conf. 11.2.3–4) Symbolically he prays to comprehend the entire Bible, which he reads in miniature in Genesis 1, as in a globe. Invoking again “the wonders of your Law” (Ps. 118:18), Augustine then implores God to unfold them from Genesis to Revelation, from the prototypical past to the apocalyptic future, “from the beginning in which you created heaven and earth unto our everlasting reign with you in your holy city” (11.2.3). Augustine’s key to learning Scripture’s abdita, its “hidden things,” is knowing Christ’s absconditi, the “hidden treasures” that the head opens up to his members. To use metaphors from Augustine’s Psalms expositions, the cross is both the “key” that opens up Scripture’s latched gates (Exp. Ps. 45.1), and the “fire” that melts down its hardwaxed prophecies (Exp. 1 Ps. 21.15). For Augustine the crucified Christ effectively traced over the Bible’s Hebrew lettering from Gen. 1:1 with the ink of his grace and the stylus of his cross. Christians now read the words of ancient Israel differently. That is how the Jewish books became the “Old Testament,” a same yet different text with unfathomable depths that yawn open only from the vantage point of the Spirit. It is this transfigured text that Augustine interprets while figuratively reading the Old Testament, and not the Scriptures of Israel per se.

I. Reading as Christ: A Way of Seeing However, Augustine (at his best anyway) does not make Christ the automatic answer to every Bible puzzle. Though he believed very specific propositions about the incarnate Son of God, in the end “Christ” refers less to a concept or dogma than to a person who sustains a way of seeing. In that sense Augustine sees everything in Scripture as Christological and ecclesial. Being part of the totus Christus alters the way Christians read the ancient texts of Israel, by learning that the head is not only the Redeemer of the body but also the Master Interpreter of Scripture. The Lord’s willunto-death shone a brilliant light on Israel’s stories, characters, laws, rites, prayers, even its transgressions, and they all burn incandescently with the light of Christ. His body reads them now not merely as fleshly signs, or even spiritual ones, but as conduits to Christ who fulfilled them all. If one psalm speaks of his passion as a fire that melts, another psalm

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responds, “Nothing can hide from his heat” (Ps. 18:7; Exp. 1 Ps. 18.7). To paraphrase Saint Paul (Phil. 1:21), we might say that for Augustine, “to read is Christ.” “The Law of the Lord,” he declares, “is the Lord himself (Lex ergo Domini ipse est), who ‘came to fulfill the Law and not to destroy it’ [Matt. 5:17]. He is the undefiled Law, he who ‘committed no sin nor was any guile found in his mouth’ [1 Pet. 2:22]” (Exp. 1 Ps. 18.8).6 United to him, therefore, Christians read the Law as Christ reads it, the one who embodies the Law. Augustine speaks of this in a passage of the Tractates on John’s Gospel that treats the puzzling text, “The Father will show the Son all he is doing” (John 5:20). Anticipating the question of how the Son can know all things and yet still “learn” something, Augustine replies: “Because we too are members of the Son, and what we members learn, he in some way learns in his members. How does he learn in us? The way he suffers in us . . . ‘When one of the least of mine learns, I learn’” (Tr. John 21.7; cf. Matt. 25:40). Passages like this vividly reveal the Christo-ecclesial fabric that blankets Augustine’s hermeneutic. With an arachnid’s long-suffering artistry he threads and rethreads the Old Testament Scriptures through the salvation story’s center, which is the Word incarnate, crucified, resurrected, ascended, and interceding. He trains believers to read Scripture from within that same center, but not only because they belong to Christ: as Augustine often announces to his dumbstruck hearers, they themselves are Christ. “So we rejoice and give thanks that we have been made not only Christians, but also Christ! Do you understand, brothers and sisters, the grace of God flowing from the head above us? If he is the head, we are the members, he and we are one whole person.”7 The divine Teacher conjoins his learners as a single “person.” Augustine loves to ring the changes on this union, even to the point of contorting grammar: “because in me they are I,” “because even we are he,” and “because even he is we.”8 As a result Augustine’s purpose in preaching and teaching is not merely to hear Scripture speak of Christ, much less merely to speak correct dogma; he rather seeks to stir spiritual love so that the body’s members might read the Law as their head reads it. In short, Augustine’s sermons are spiritual exercises that train Christians to read Scripture as Christ. When they do, the Law grants to them what it commands because of Christ’s grace, and Prophecy reveals to them what it signifies because of Christ’s truth. Learning “to read as Christ” within the body is the special goal of Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms, which repeatedly begin by positioning people within the totus Christus (e.g., Exp. Ps. 54.3; 60.2; 85.1; 142.3;

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etc.). This is the schola Christi, the “school of Christ” (Exp. Ps. 79.1), where the members of the body learn that the head who became incarnate, died, and rose has transposed himself into them, and that the members are present in the actions of the head. For the paschal event collapses time: Augustine summarizes the transtemporal reality of the cross in simple terms: “We were there too” (Exp. Ps. 142.9). The work of public figurative exegesis stirs awareness of that reality by pushing people to “put on” Christ and thus learn to “wear” the words of Christ in the life of faith. Augustine works hard and long (sometimes very long) to dress his hearers in each text’s words, grammar, thought patterns, and dynamics, and to help people find their own voices in them. “The one singing in this psalm—,” he asks, “who is it? The body of Christ. Who is this? You are, if you will it (vultis)––all of us, if we will it” (Exp. Ps. 83.5). The words of the Psalms refer “to me, to you, to him” (Exp. 2 Ps. 21.4). One psalm exhorts hearers to cling fast (inhaerere) to the members of Christ while reading Scripture, for “we discover ourselves here” (Exp. Ps. 45.1). Scripture reflects the Church to itself: “Everything written here is our mirror” (Exp. 2 Ps. 30.3.1). The mirror both describes and prescribes, it is both informative and performative: “If the psalm prays, then you pray; if it grieves, then you grieve; if it exults, then you rejoice; if it hopes, then you hope; and if it fears, then you fear” (ibid.). The head figuratively urges his members to find themselves in Scripture, for the Church knows its identity only there.9 But if Christians find themselves in Scripture it is because they read through the eyes of the one who fulfilled Scripture by transposing himself into his members. Their reading skills as Christians grow out of the “astounding exchange” of redemption that gave rise to the totus Christus. Its members not only read the Bible’s words as words about Christ the head: they live as Christ inside these words and so speak them as their own words. They own, understand, and speak Scripture with the warmth of Christ’s own self-understanding. This mode of reading shapes the pattern of Scripture quotations that quilts the Confessions. Augustine does not merely use Scripture for “support,” but speaks from within Scripture as if its words are his own words. He speaks the Psalms as if he had personally composed them, so mixing their words with his own that they vocalize “the most intimate feeling of my mind” (Conf. 9.4.8). Augustine’s self-portrayal in Confessions thus rears up from Scripture like a visage in a pointillist painting. Moreover, Augustine accomplishes this self-transposition not by mere fiat or self-assertion, as

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though he had stormed the texts and triumphally made them his personal possession. He rather received the warrant for Christian reading by the self-subordination of faith in the humble crucified Christ. Confessions imitates this Christological pattern of humble reciprocation when Augustine transposes himself into its characters: he becomes Adam in Eden rebelling against God’s command (Gen. 3:1–7; Conf. 2.6.12–13); he becomes the prodigal son of Jesus’ parable seeking forgiveness after wandering (Luke 15:11–32; Conf. 8.3.6); he becomes Paul’s split personality simultaneously devoted and insubordinate to God’s Law (Rom. 7:7–25; Conf. 8.9.20–10.24); he becomes Moses on the mountaintop pleading to see God’s face (Exod. 33:18; Conf. 7.17.23); he becomes the mystical deer panting for the waters of God’s word (Ps. 41:2–3; Conf. 13.13.14). This is the hermeneutical aspect of Christ’s “astounding exchange” of redemption.

II. Reading as Transfiguration These pages have already made much of Christ’s crucified humility as the ground of that exchange. When the Lord invokes Psalm 41:6 in Gethsemane, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death” (Matt. 26:38), he speaks out of every human being’s mortal fear. Likewise the words of Psalm 21:2 from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:34). The word that Augustine eventually selects to elucidate the spiritual exchange is transfigurare: “to transfigure,” that is, in the sense of transferring or carrying over a figure from one domain to another, in this case Christ “bringing us over to himself” (Conf. 7.18.24). He uses it most often in the course of explaining the Psalms, as in the following: Christ “deigned to assume the form of a servant, and in that form to clothe himself in us—he did not disdain to assume us into himself, nor did he disdain to transfigure us into himself (transfigurare in se) and to speak using our words so that we too might speak using his words.”10 Augustine indicates his sense of this act’s transformative power when he collapses the moment of Christ’s agony in the garden into the moment of our future glorification. He observes that when the Lord uses lament psalms to speak of his passion (Matt. 26:38), and when “our old self was nailed to the cross with him” (Rom. 6:6), he “transfigured us into himself, ‘conforming our lowly body to his glorious body’” (Exp. Ps. 142.9). The allusion to Philippians 3:21 dramatically solders Paul’s vision of the Lord Christ at world’s end, exerting his power to raise mortal bodies to glory, to the Suffering Servant of the Gospels. Augustine’s fusion of these

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texts “realizes” the eschatology that he sees deeply etched in the events of Christ’s passion. But my point here concerns Augustine’s pattern for his practice of hermeneutics rather than his thought on redemption. I have argued at length (chapter 6) that Augustine’s matrix of thought for articulating Christ’s “astonishing exchange” was the rhetorical device of impersonation (prosopopoeia). It is no accident that eventually he settles on transfigurare to describe the exchange, for in fact he first used the word to portray something going on rhetorically in a biblical example of impersonation: it described a way of interpreting texts before it described a way of saving souls. In his first work as a new bishop about 396 he characterized Paul’s rhetorical strategy of impersonating the frustrated sinner in Rom. 7:7–25 as a “transfiguration.” “It seems to me,” Augustine wrote, “that in this passage the Apostle has transfigured into himself (transfigurasse in se) a person situated under the Law” (Answers to Simplicianus 1.1.1). By playing this role Paul has projected himself as a character onto a larger screen for the sake of giving instruction. Later Augustine observes something similar going on in 1 Cor. 4:6 where Paul wrote, “I have transfigured these things into myself (transfiguravit in me) and Apollos for your sake” (Against the Letters of Petilianus 3.2.3). It seems to me that as he begins Confessions Augustine has a similar strategy in mind, although the “character” he assumes is a version of “self” constructed from biblical materials filtered through his own life. By “taking up” various biblical figures in the pages of Confessions, he projects the flickering images of his life onto the big screen of salvation’s drama and so universalizes his individual journey.11 Peter Brown has written piquantly of Augustine in Confessions as “gloriously egocentric.”12 I’d like to affirm that assertion with the qualifying twist that the glory has to do with what Augustine does with his “ego-I,” something that brings the hermeneutical arc of transfigurare back around to redemption: he offers his “ego-I” as a meeting place for his readers’ encounter with Christ and Scripture. As we’ve seen above (chapter 7), a memorable passage of On Instructing Beginners imagines teachers and learners indwelling each other by their co-feeling (compatiens).13 Augustine consciously “indwelt” his hearers in love as he taught and relearned “in” them what he already knew; at the same time his hearers “indwelt” him by love and learned what he knew as he himself knew it. Augustine was trying to impress upon Deogratias that Christian teachers routinely interact with their hearers by modeling the love by which the crucified head “indwells” his body. I suggest that something similar occurs in

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Confessions: Augustine offers himself as model and medium for readers to transpose themselves into Scripture as he did, so that they might become transformed by scriptural grace as he was. His strategy for communicating spiritual wisdom and knowledge adopts the Christological model of transfiguring his readers into his “ego-I” so that they may read Scripture with his eyes. Augustine makes himself a Christian Everyman by wooing his readers to see themselves in him. Augustine knits his story to the stories of biblical characters in Confessions because he hopes also to knit his story to readers who might look together with him, through Christ, into the same scriptural mirror. In this way Augustine’s use of Scripture in Confessions intersects with the hermeneutic at work in his sermons. In both cases he hopes to bring biblical obscurities into clarity so that readers and hearers may find themselves figuratively in Scripture’s mirror, for then Christ will meet them everywhere, and in his light they will see light.14

Notes

p r e face 1. Foreword to John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1991), vii. I heard the late Cambridge scholar Daniel Hardy use similar terms to describe his intellectual companionship with the philosopher-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose many-sided personality indicates that this is not just a matter for religious studies. Indeed, Northrop Frye once counseled budding literary critics to apprentice themselves to some great writer as a kind of “spiritual preceptor” because, he wrote, “it seems to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies” (“The Search for Acceptable Words,” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 15). 2. For a sense of these, see the fine short biography by Henry Chadwick, posthumously published as Augustine of Hippo: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3. What Etienne Gilson perceptively wrote long ago about Augustine’s thought applies also to reading Augustine: “Everything [in Augustine’s teaching] stands together and holds together, so much so that Augustine cannot lay hold of one link in the chain without drawing the whole chain.” The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 236 (from 2d French ed., 1943). 4. The essay was titled “The Christological Substructure of Augustine’s Figurative Exegesis,” in Augustine and the Bible, trans. and ed. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 74–103. It was one of the essays that augmented the translation of A.-M. La Bonnardière’s Augustin et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986). 5. An Essay on Criticism (1709), l.232. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 151.

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1. I am collapsing the questions of epp. 135 and 136. Volusianus continued asking his courteous but persistent questions through Marcellinus, their mutual contact, who relayed them through his own letter to Augustine, our ep. 136. 2. Ep. 137.1.3 (CCL 31B:258). 3. The passage plays on Cicero’s portrait of the ideal rhetor in De oratore 1.21.95. 4. Isabelle Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture”: L’hermeneutique augustinienne, CEASA 172 (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustinienne, 2004), 52–53. Cf. Erich Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 27–57. However, Auerbach borrows the phrase to refer not to Scripture but to the plain style of Augustine’s sermons. 5. Ep. 137.1.18 (CCL 31B:272–273). 6. Doc. Chr. 2.9.14 recommends first learning Scripture’s more plainly stated themes before trying to interpret its more obscure ones (manifestior/obscurior). For a figurative exposition of aperta/operta, see the comment on Psalm 10:5 on the open and closed eyes of God in en. Ps. 10.8. Serm. 46.36 addresses the Donatists about how they read Scripture’s figures: “Pay attention to the operta, so that they may become for you aperta” (Audi tu operta, ut fiant tibi haec aperta) (CCL 41:561). 7. For an early passage discussing the two audiences, see en. Ps. 8.5. 8. Goulven Madec, “Christus scientia et sapientia nostra: Le principe de cohérence de la doctrine augustinienne,” RA 10 (1975): 77–85. 9. “The person and saving role of Christ were not a subject on which Augustine became involved in a great deal of direct controversy.” Brian Daley, “Christology,” in ATA, 164. 10. In a tactical move designed to keep focus, I have for the most part left aside any sustained consideration of Augustine’s thought on the Holy Spirit’s role in figurative reading. 11. Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 9. Scholars have long noted the developmental quality of Augustine’s thought since Prosper Alfaric moved it to the fore of discussion in the early twentieth century in L’Évolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin (1918), along with Alberto Pincherle, La Formazione teologica di Sant’Agostino (1947). 12. Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), 20. 13. Ep. 143.2 (PL 33:585): “I count myself among those who write by making progress and make progress by writing (qui proficiendo scribunt et scribendo proficiunt).” Calvin used it to preface his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and Pollmann modified it as a heading for her contribution to a symposium treating her work, “To Write by Advancing in Knowledge and to Advance by Writing,” AS 29, no. 2 (1998): 131–137. 14. For instance, Robert Markus writes that Augustine’s reading of St. Paul in the 390s produced a “landslide,” an “earthquake,” and a “catastrophic turning point

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in his Christian career” (“Comment: Augustine’s Pauline Legacies,” in Paul and the Legacies of Paul, ed. William S. Babcock [Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1990], 223–224). Peter Brown speaks of the “lost future” of Augustine’s fading early dreams of spiritual perfection (Augustine of Hippo, 139–150). Paula Fredriksen says that Augustine lost his classical confidence in the powers of human reason before God’s inscrutable will (“Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul Against the Manichees and Pelagians” [RA 33 (1988): 87–114]). Carol Harrison has criticized this viewpoint in Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Historical-critical biblical scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries usually had little use for ancient Christian exegetes unless they anticipated modern views. For many of them the worst of the lot was Augustine, who became a cautionary tale in their histories of exegesis in whatever little space was given to the ancients. C. H. Dodd’s judgment, often quoted, excoriated Augustine for reading salvation history into the parable of the Good Samaritan: “To the ordinary person of intelligence who approaches the Gospels with some sense for literature this mystification must appear quite perverse” (The Parables of the Kingdom [London: SCM Press, 1935], 2). This even though a historical reading admits that the Gospels do something similar with the parables of the Sower and the Weeds (e.g., Matt. 13:18–23, 36–43). The undisputed letters of Paul read the Old Testament in similar “perverse” figurative ways, as we’ll see. T. S. Eliot’s words to poets about tradition and the historical sense have always struck me as profoundly applicable to historical work: “Tradition . . . cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense . . . a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. . . . This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [originally published 1919], in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 38. John O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 1–23. Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture,” 93; Gerald Bruns, “The Problem of Figuration in Antiquity,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 159. The turn to appreciate Augustine’s exegesis in the latter part of the twentieth century follows an intriguing path. The great French historian Henri Marrou set the pattern. Deeply Augustinian in outlook, Marrou in his Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1938) first proposed that Augustine’s figurative approach partook of late antiquity’s effete “cultural decadence.” But Marrou later

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reversed himself, writing in his 1949 “Retractatio” added to the book’s reissue that perhaps we should rather think of God as not only a creator, lawgiver, and savior but “also a poet” who created Scripture’s “forest of symbols” (648). Marrou’s mind probably changed when he directed the thesis of Maurice Pontet that became L’exégèse de saint Augustin prédicateur (1946). Significantly Pontet explored Augustine’s “forest of symbols” by studying Augustine’s sermons rather than On Christian Teaching. About the same time Henri de Lubac began writing appreciatively about ancient Christian exegesis, and he came to stand at the head of the modern resurgence of interest in it through studies of the Greek Fathers, especially Origen. But de Lubac also contributed positive appreciations of Augustine in several essays, and in the first part of his monumental Exègése Medievale (3 vols., 1959–1964, now translated into English; see Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, 123–132, et passim). In ensuing decades Anne-Marie La Bonnardière devoted her life’s work to Augustine and Scripture, typified in her series Biblia Augustiniana and the collected essays in Saint Augustin et la Bible (1986). An industry of French scholarship in her wake arose on Augustine’s exegesis in the works of Martine Dulaey, Isabelle Bochet, and others. The same happened in German-speaking lands in the wake of C. P. Mayer’s two volumes on Augustine’s understanding of signs (Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus, 1969; Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie Augustins, II. Teil: Die antimanichäische Epoche, 1974). We can mention the names of Dorothea Weber, Hildegund Müller, and Michael Fiedrowicz, among others. Many articles in the Augustinus-Lexikon under Mayer’s general editorship reflect this explosion of interest. The 1999 Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità Cristiana at the Augustinianum in Rome addressed the theme of early Christian exegesis; out of it came a number of seminal articles on Augustine in German, French, and English published under the title L’esegi di Padri Latini, Dalle origini a Gregorio Magno in the series Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum (2000). Several volumes of collected essays in English highlight aspects of Augustine’s exegesis. Augustine and the Bible (1999), edited by Pamela Bright, translated and augmented essays from the La Bonnardière volume of the same name. The series Collectanea Augustiniana contributed a series of essays titled Augustine: Biblical Exegete (ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren, 2001). Many short pieces in the encyclopedia Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (ed. Allan Fitzgerald, 1999) continued to detail Augustine’s interpretive practices. Frances Young concluded her well-regarded Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (1997) with a chapter on “Augustine, Theologian as Exegete.” On the pastoral side, Jason Byassee wrote Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (2007). Other monographs and individual essays might be cited. 20. I borrow the phrase from Etienne Gilson, who was referring to a way of approaching the study of the medieval Franciscan scholar and mystic, Bonaventure. But

Notes to Pages 16–18

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22. 23.

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Gilson’s elegant words could stand over the entry to any house of Augustinian studies: “Multifarious, infinitely diverse and subtly shaded, his thought is but an ever active charity, whose whole movement strives toward objects which escape our view or towards unknown aspects of things which we do in part perceive. There is no way to follow the movement of such thought without being that thought itself; and it must have been for the instruction of his future commentators that he addressed to himself the warning: non enim potes noscere verba Pauli, nisi habeas spiritum Pauli [“You cannot get to know Paul’s words unless you have Paul’s spirit”]” (The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. I. Trethowan and F. J. Sheed [London: Sheed & Ward, 1938], xi–xii). Bonaventure readily acknowledged his debt to Augustine. The lines were clearly drawn in the disagreement between two progenitors of the movement to retrieve patristic exegesis, Jean Danielou and Henri de Lubac, in the 1940s. Danielou thought “typology” properly Christian and permanently valuable but disparaged “allegory” as ephemeral and culture-bound, outdated Hellenism in Christian dress. But de Lubac thought that opposition was literarily artificial, historically inaccurate, and theologically misleading. “Typology and Allegorization,” in Theological Fragments, trans. R. H. Balinski (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 129–164; French original published in Recherches de science religieuse 34 (1947): 180–226. For a review of the issues in relation to the study of Origen, along with good bibliographical help on the modern debate, see Peter W. Martens, “Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction: The Case of Origen,” JECS 16, no. 3 (2008): 283–317. Paula Fredriksen, “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism,” JECS 3, no. 3 (1995): 312. Pace Gerald Bonner (Cambridge History of the Bible I: From the Beginnings to Jerome, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 552). As I will argue, Augustine’s emphasis on the historical and so-called typological was an effort to preserve access to spiritual interpretation. See Robert W. Bernard, “In Figura: Terminology Pertaining to Figurative Exegesis in the Works of Augustine of Hippo,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984, 157ff. The difficulty of parceling out these dynamics appears in a feature of John David Dawson’s fine work, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Dawson wants to reroute the history of supersessionist Christian readings of Judaism and the Old Testament by discriminating between a “figural” reading that retains its earthly signifying reality and a “figurative” reading that leaves it behind. Looking for the “conceptual error” that led to this way of reading, he concludes that the first and fatal misstep was to misconstrue Scripture as a collection of tropes rather than a collection of figures according to a distinction drawn in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Tropes, Quintilian wrote, were figures of speech wherein words “replace

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27.

28. 29.

30.

Notes to Pages 18–19 literal meaning with nonliteral meaning”; by contrast “figures of thought” manage to “preserve literal meaning in their generation of figurativeness” (Christian Figural Reading 14; cf. 248, n. 55). On Dawson’s reading, figures of speech perform a translatio, “carrying over” meaning from one field to another in a way that leaves the original meaning behind (even if the figure remains dependent on it). Figures of thought, on the other hand, feature a conformatio, “shaping” an existing “body” of thought that leaves the original meaning intact. Later use of Quintilian’s distinction supports Dawson’s point, but it must be noted that the Latin theorist’s distinction between figures of speech (tropes) and figures of thought is not inherently sharp, and he himself had trouble defining the border between them (Institutio Oratoria 9.1.1–4, 8–9). Actual cases blur the distinction even further. For example, metonymies of container and content might conceptually leave physical realities behind, but the physical reality is still necessary for the metonymy to make sense, as when the physical house (container) is necessary to refer to people in a house (content) as “the house.” The charge of leaving literal reality behind even more poorly fits part-whole associations of synecdoche, wherein a figurative exchange of names presumes a prior and inherent identity, as when the phrase “the Roman” (part) refers to the entire Roman army (whole). But Dawson ties this distinction to his preference for the term “figural” over “figurative” in a way that seems only to replicate his preference for typology over allegory. However, because Augustine blends the two modes, and indiscriminately uses figura, figuraliter, figurata, etc., I have decided not to abandon the term “figurative” to describe his exegesis. For him “figurative” does not imply leaving behind the underlying reality. See, for instance, Augustin et la Bible, ed. Anne-Marie La Bonnardière (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986); Augustine and the Bible, trans. and ed. Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Augustine the Exegete, ed. F. Van Fleteren and J. C. Schnaubelt (New York: Peter Lang, 2001). The great example is Michael Fiedrowicz’s exhaustive study of the Psalms expositions, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi: Studien in Augustins “Enarrationes in psalmos” (Freiburg: Herder, 1997). This work offers a wealth of insight and analysis, with certain limitations with regard to the issue of Augustine’s hermeneutics; see my review in AS 34, no. 2 (2003): 266–277. An English précis is available as the introduction to the first volume of Maria Boulding’s translation of the Enarrationes titled Expositions of the Psalms 1–32 (WSA III/15), 13–66. See note 4 above. Dulaey’s articles appeared as a series collectively titled “L’apprentissage de l’exégèse biblique par Augustin,” in REAP: (1) “Années 386–89,” REAP 48 (2002): 267–295; (2) “Années 390–92,” REAP 49 (2003): 43–84; (3) “Années 393–94,” REAP 51 (2005): 21–65. Tarsicius J. van Bavel, Recherches sur christologie Augustins, Paradosis 10 (Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1954), 16.

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31. Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles): vol. II—Exégèse prospologique et théologie, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 220 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studium Orientalium, 1985), 366–370. 32. Maureen Tilley, “Understanding Augustine Misunderstanding Tyconius,” SP 27 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 405–408. 33. Paula Fredriksen writes perceptively with reference to Augustine’s use of Tyconius, the Donatist biblical interpreter and apocalyptic thinker: “Augustine’s own intellectual independence, which so transforms his sources, often obscures their precise influence.” The concept of “unambiguous influence,” she continues, is something that, because Augustine “so dominates his sources, I fear we can rarely detect” (“Apocalypse and Redemption in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae 45 [1991], 178n54). On the other hand, even Fredriksen sometimes reduces Augustine to his sources. She writes sweepingly in another article, “The constancy of the way that God works in history, the religious validity of the Law, the historical integrity of events in the biblical past—these are the core convictions, articulated exegetically, that Augustine discovered in and took over from Tyconius” (“Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei”: 312–313). 34. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions I:xlixn97: “Everything exegetical in [Augustine] down to 400 at least must be taken as having an anti-Manichean sub-text.” 35. BA 11/1:70: Quapropter in veteri testamento est occultatio novi, in novo testamento est manifestatio veteris.

c h a p t er 1 1. Util. cred. 1.2; trans. R. Kearney, WSA I/8:117. 2. Ambrose, ep. 2.3; quoted in William Harmless, S.J., Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 87. 3. Ambrose, De fuga saeculi (Flight from the World), 2.13. Saint Ambrose: Seven Exegetical Works, trans. Michael P. McHugh, FC 65 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1972), 289–290. For a sketch of Ambrose’s figurative exegesis and its effect on Augustine, see Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate, 86–89. 4. Roland J. Teske, S.J., “Spirituals and Spiritual Interpretation in Augustine,” AS 15 (1984): 70f. and 67n 7. In the same vein but more nuanced is J. Patout Burns, “Ambrose Preaching to Augustine,” in Augustine: Second Founder of the Faith (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 376. 5. Conf. 5.14.24 (BA 13:510). 6. Probably selections from the writings of Plotinus collected by his follower Porphyry and translated into Latin by Marius Victorinus. For a suggested list see Eugene TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian (New York: Herder, 1970), 43–45. 7. Trans. Boulding WSA I/1:80 (BA 13:376). 8. This is exactly the basic counsel he gives many years later in the exchange of letters with Volusianus (epp. 135–138; see above, “Introduction”). Augustine’s

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes to Pages 29–32 devotee Gregory the Great will say two centuries later, “Scripture is like a kind of river that is both shallow and deep, in which the lamb may wade and the elephant can swim.” Gregory, Ep. ad Leandr. 4 As discussed in the Introduction, this insight grounded Augustine’s counsel to Volusianus (epp. 135–138). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.10.5–6; Cicero, De Inventione 1.247.139 Convincingly argued by Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). What follows is indebted to her work. Ancient teachers like Plutarch understood “the literary interpretive process itself as an accommodation in the radical sense of the term: as a coming to feel at home with the literary text, a process of making it familiar.” Eden, Hermeneutics, 31, emphasis in original. Plutarch, How the Young Man Should Study Poetry 37B; Basil of Caesarea, Address to Young Men on How to Use Greek Literature 5.6–9; Eden, Hermeneutics, 38, 47–53. Doc. Chr. 1.34.38–38.42, esp. 36.41. See Camille Bennett, “The Conversion of Vergil: The Aeneid in Augustine’s Confessions,” REA 34 (1988): 65–69. Gerald Bruns, “The Problem of Figuration in Antiquity,” in Hermeneutics: Problems and Prospects, ed. G. Shapiro and A. Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 148. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 3.3. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 7.10.11–12. Robert Dodaro, “Literary Decorum in Scriptural Exegesis: Augustine of Hippo, Epistula 138,” in L’esegi di Padri Latini, Dalle origini a Gregorio Magno (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum [SEA 68], 2000), 2:159–174; “Quid deceat videre (Cicero, Orator 70): Literary Propriety and Doctrinal Orthodoxy in Augustine of Hippo,” in Orthodoxie, christianisme, histoire, ed. S. Elm et al. (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 57–81; “The Theologian as Grammarian: Literary Decorum in Augustine’s Defense of Orthodox Discourse,” in Studia Patristica 38, ed. M. F. Wiles and E. J. Yarnold (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 70–83. On decorum in ancient literature, see Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). As reported by Marcellinus, who acted as intermediary in their correspondence, ep. 136.2. Ep. 137.1.5. Cf. Dodaro, “Literary Decorum,” 168: “Reading the Scriptures with attention to literary decorum enables us to discern the divine ratio behind the surface contradictions of the biblical precepts.” Dodaro, “Literary Decorum,” 171–174. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.8.17. On dispositio’s “economical” arrangement of the parts in a speech, see Eden, Hermeneutics, 27–28. Ibid. 30.

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25. Cf. ep. 135.1. Volusianus wrote that letter to Augustine. 26. See Augustine’s allusion in ep. 137.1.3 to Cicero’s elegiac description of the perfect orator in De oratore 1.21.95, which the bishop adapted as praise for the Christian Scriptures and their divine author. 27. Ep. 137.4.15–16, here 15: trans. Teske, WSA II/1:221. Quo illam stirpem ex orientalibus partibus promissis effectisque crebrescens dispositio divina transmiserat (CCL 31B:269). 28. Study of Augustine’s use of the book of Wisdom was part of A. M. La Bonnardière’s pioneering research. See Biblia Augustiniana. A. T.—Le Livre de la Sagesse (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1970). For a précis, see “Le Livre de la Sagesse dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin,” REA 17 (1971): 171–175. 29. Lib. arb. 3.9.27: Et utrumque horum, id est turpitudo servi et mundatio cloacae, iam coniunctum et redactum in quandam sui generis unitatem ita dispositae domui coaptatur atque subtexitur ut eius universitati ordinatissimo decore conveniat (CCL 29:291; subtexitur here corrects the CCL misprint subtextiur). Though begun in the late 380s, this passage comes from the later completion in the mid-390s. See further Karl-Heinze Schwarte, “Dispositio,” A-L 2 (1999), cols. 498–504. 30. It figures prominently in vera rel. 7.13, and appears also in f. et symb. 4.6, div. qu. 75.1, doc. Chr. 1.35.39, and often in the early works. See Hildegund Müller, “Dispenso, dispensator, dispensatio im Werk Augustins,” SPHAIROS: Festschrift Hans Schwabl, Wiener Studien 107/108 (Wien: 1994/95), II:495–521. 31. Ep. 138.1.5. Cf. mus. 6.11.29 on the “song of the universe” (carmen universitatis). 32. Conf. 11.28.38 (BA 14:336). 33. Ep. 102.33. The Latin is: Nam sicut humana consuetudo verbis, ita divina potentia etiam factis loquitur. Et sicut sermoni humano verba nova, vel minus usitata, moderate ac decenter aspersa, splendorem addunt; ita in factis mirabilibus congruenter aliquid significantibus, quodammodo luculentior est divina eloquentia (CCL 31B:30). Cf. Gerhard Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1959), 104–113. 34. What follows draws on Samuel Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 7–40. 35. Ambrose once privately counseled Augustine, who had asked for advice on Scripture, to read the prophet Isaiah; but he found it too difficult and laid it aside (conf. 9.5.13). If Augustine had kept reading he would have come upon the Hebrew active word, dabar, which performs what it says (Isa. 55:10–11). God “sends” his word, and like rain that generates vegetation, “it does not return to me empty, but does whatever I intend” (Vulgate, faciet quaecumque volui). However, to my knowledge Augustine never quotes this text. 36. W. R. Johnson, “Isocrates Flowering: The Rhetoric of Augustine,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9, no. 4 (1976): 227. 37. BA 13:528. 38. C. Faust. 18.3 (CSEL 25/1:492).

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Notes to Pages 37–44

39. Augustine suggests that if he had only paid the right kind of attention to the Bible at the time, he would not have fallen into the hands of the Manichees. It begins, “And so . . .” (Itaque; 3.6.10). Chadwick translates, “That explains why . . .” (OWC 40; quoted by permission of Oxford University Press). Some consider this an example of a more general revisionism at work in Confessions that better fits his concern for the right attitude toward the Scriptures. 40. As a new priest in the early 390s Augustine devoted an entire treatise to the topic of faith’s role prior to reason, util. cred. 41. Augustine later analyzed the rational element of the process of coming to the faith that brings health and enables reason to begin its spiritual work. “Heaven forbid, after all, that God should hate in us that by which he made us more excellent than the other animals. Heaven forbid, I say, that we should believe in such a way that we do not accept or seek a rational account, since we could not even believe if we did not have rational souls. . . . If, then, it is reasonable that faith precede reason with respect to certain great truths that cannot yet be grasped, however slight the reason is that persuades us to this, it undoubtedly also comes before faith” (ep. 120.1.3; trans. Teske, WSA II/2:131). The letter dates to about 410. It reflects Augustine’s view from the beginning of his career (util. cred. 9.21) to the end, praed. sanct. 5: “Everybody who believes, thinks—both thinks in believing and believes in thinking.” See J. Roland Ramirez, “The Priority of Reason over Faith in Augustine,” AS 13 (1982): 123–131. 42. Eden, Hermeneutics, 14. 43. Ibid. 18. This balances the overemphasis on training in grammar that emphasized individual words, pace Joseph T. Lienhard, “Reading the Bible and Learning to Read: The Influence of Education on St. Augustine’s Exegesis,” AS 27, no. 1 (1996): 16–18. 44. En. Ps. 103.4.1 (CCL 40:1521); trans. Boulding, WSA III/19:167. 45. Bruns, “Problem of Figuration,” 148. 46. Trans. Hill, WSA III/3:51 (PL 38:336). Bruns (“Problem of Figuration,” 158) contrasts Augustine with Philo and Origen, who think rather of allegorical veils as protecting their treasured spiritual mysteries from profanation. 47. BA 13:638: Apparuit mihi una facies eloquiorum castorum et exultare cum tremore didici.

c h a p t er 2 1. BA 17:132: Ego iam errorem puto quam antea veritatem putabam. These words, transcribed from the opening of Augustine’s public disputation with the Manichee Fortunatus in Hippo, can be dated precisely to August 28, 392. 2. C. P. Mayer, “Congruentia testamentorum,” A-L 1 (1986–1994), cols. 1195–1201. 3. This remains true whatever the degree of Origen’s influence on Augustine’s at this time. See György Heidl, The Influence of Origen on the Young Augustine

Notes to Pages 44–55

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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(Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2000). According to Peter Brown, “Augustine’s relation to the work of Origen remains tantalizingly unclear.” Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 517n59. On the entire subject, cf. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric; A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. M. Bliss, A. Jansen, and D. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 256–262. De Oratore 3.42.167–168, trans. H. E. Rackham (LCL 349:130–135). De oratore comes from Cicero’s maturity, dating to about 55 b.c.e. Cicero also sees metaphoric transference when the natural sense of something is “abused” (abutimur) for effect, as in saying “tall” speech for a long speech, or “little mind” for a small mind, De oratore 3.42.169 (LCL 349:135). Cf. Augustine’s discussion of abusio in dial. 6. This anonymous work, once thought to be the work of Cicero, dates from the first century b.c.e. Trans. Caplan (LCL 403:334–343). Note how Augustine transforms this rhetorical axiom into a theological principle when he says we will never understand spiritual things “unless we begin from things that are human and close by (ab humanis et proximis)” (mor. 1.7.12 [CSEL 90:14]). This suggests how Augustine adapted his original rhetorical framework for viewing how the soul ascends from the historical-temporal to the spiritual-intellectual realm. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.6.1–28 (LCL 126:301–317), here 8.6.1. References to dial. follow the edition of B. Darrell Jackson, Augustine: De Dialectica (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975; hereafter, Jackson), who based his translation on the 1962 text of Jan Pinborg, who had used the 1857 text of Wilhelm Crecelius. Jackson used Pinborg’s method of citing the Maurist chapter divisions by a Roman numeral, followed by Crecelius’s page and line numbers. Thus dial. 5.7.6 refers to the Maurist chapter 5, and Crecelius page 7, line 6 (see Jackson, xii). Though the Maurists doubted the authenticity of dial. and listed it among the spurious works, modern scholarship has favored Augustine’s authorship (Jackson, 1–5). Bene scientia disputandi; dial. 1 (Jackson, 83). Even at this stage Augustine’s work was not a mere academic exercise but an attempt to develop practical skills. See Goulven Madec, La Patrie et Voie: Le Christ dans la vie et la pensée de Saint Augustin (Paris: Desclee, 1989), 292–293; Bochet and Madec, note comp. 7, BA 11/2:474–475. Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture,” 37f. Cf. en. Ps. 17.12, where the “dark water in clouds of air” of Psalm 17:11 refers to the “obscure teaching” (obscura doctrina) of the prophets and preachers of the gospel (BA 57B:24). “Cloud” is a key image that anticipates the Christological turn of Augustine’s figurative exegesis, as we will see. Exegesis presses out Scripture’s many “cloudy” words for the saving teaching of the Gospel. Likewise, the “cloud” image portrays the flesh of Jesus in the Incarnation.

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Notes to Pages 56–62

15. CSEL 91:79: sub his omnibus nominibus. 16. Gerhard Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1959), 98ff.; Robert Bernard, “The Rhetoric of God in the Figurative Exegesis of Augustine,” in Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective, ed. Mark S. Burrows and Paul Rorem (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 88–99. 17. CSEL 91:138–139: propria locutio. 18. CSEL 91:95: spiritales potentiae. 19. CSEL 91:157: ambigua locutio. Martine Dulaey (“Introduction,” Sur la Genèse contre les Manichéens, BA 50 [Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2004], 40) finds here an instance of catachresis that involves irony (352n371). Edmund Hill thinks the figure is irony (On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, WSA I/13 [Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002], 93n46). Roland Teske calls it amphiboly; St. Augustine on Genesis: Two Books Against the Manichees, FC 84 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 129n146. As the ancients recognized, these figures are not mutually exclusive. 20. Trans. Hill, WSA I/13:48; cf. Gn. c. Man. 1.25.43. 21. Cf. div. qu. 60, from Augustine’s priesthood. 22. CSEL 91:103: ex hac figura multa quaestiones in divinis scripturis qui iam genus locutionis huius noverunt sine ulla difficultate solvuntur. 23. CSEL 91:81: Hoc autem totum ad intellectum nostrum dictum est. 24. Martine Dulaey (“Introduction,” BA 50:35ff.) sees synecdoche at work here, and raises the issue of the influence of Tyconius, whom Augustine had certainly read by the mid-390s. Tyconius explicitly named synecdoche as a basic trope in the Scriptures; Karla Pollmann sees synecdoche as the “essence” of his Liber regularum (Doctrina christiana, 61–65). But Dulaey says that one need not posit Tyconius’s influence this early because the same issues had been addressed in previous Latin exegetes like Tertullian and Victorinus of Pettau (36f.). 25. Augustine knew their methods because he himself used to be one. Though only a Manichean Hearer, he was apparently quite successful in confusing simple Catholics (duab. an. 9.11), a number of whom became Manichees “by my exhortation” (util. cred. 1.2). In retrospect he called himself “a barking dog” (mor. 1.18.33). 26. In the language of conf. 12.28.38 (BA 14:408), “the spiritual ones” were mature birds flying freely in the intelligible realm. For them the images function not as nurturing nests but as “dense thickets” (opaca frutecta) where they flutter excitedly, plucking out hidden spiritual food. 27. Cf. c. Faust. 22.54. 28. See Roland J. Teske, “Spirituals and Spiritual Interpretation in Augustine,” AS 15 (1984): 65–82. 29. Cf. conf. 12.27.37; Tarsicius van Bavel, “L’humanité du Christ comme lac parvulorum et comme via dans la spiritualité de saint Augustin,” Augustiniana 7 (1957): 247–281.

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30. According to conf. 12.27.37, the earthly biblical images were “nests” (cunae, nidi) where “little ones” were nurtured like baby birds until they might grow strong and fly free. 31. Matt. 7:7 was a favorite text for speaking of the quest to understand Scripture’s mysteries. It appears repeatedly in Augustine’s works, even very early ones (sol. 1.1.3). It also supplied the last line of the last book of conf. and its figurative reading of Gen. 1 (13.38.53). 32. To read literally, that is, merely mouthing the sound of the letters without broader understanding (Gn. c. Man. 2.2.3 [CSEL 91:120–121]: non aliter intelligere quam littera sonat), envisions an impaired process of interpretation that at its best set up a kind of one-to-one correspondence between words and meanings like an interlinear translation, but at its worst merely decodes broken bits of meaning the way a foreign tourist stutters meanings out of a phrase book. 33. CSEL 91:110–111: Nullo modo ergo verbis dici potest, quemadmodum Deus fecerit et condiderit caelum et terram et omnem creaturam quam condidit. 34. CSEL 91:88: Habent enim consuetudinem divinae scripturae de rebus humanis ad divinas res verba transferre. 35. BA 50:448. 36. BA 50:406. Roland Teske connects this text to Aristotle, Poetics 1450b26 (St. Augustine on Genesis, 149n16). The language here about narration “suggesting sublime things humbly to humble people” (humilibus humiliter insinuandi sublimia) hints at the ultimate narrative of accommodative divine humility that brought about Augustine’s conversion in conf. In explaining his failure among the Manichees and his erratic spiritual progress even after reading the Platonists, Augustine wrote, “I was not holding on to my God Jesus as humble to the humble (non enim tenebam Deum meum Iesum humilis humilem)” (conf. 7.18.24; BA 13:630). With epigrammatic power the phrase humilis humilem specified the place of encounter where God met estranged humanity face to face, that is, the humility of Christ. The divine Word’s humble descent to earth and the human Christ’s humble death together “insinuated” the humility by which human beings might finally forsake their pride and be converted. See chap. 5 below. 37. Roland Teske notes the same references in Philo, Quaestiones in Genesim 1.12 (St. Augustine on Genesis, 109n63). 38. CSEL 91:139: visibilis femina secundum historiam. 39. CSEL 91:139: mysteria et sacramenta. Augustine’s lack of concern for the actual literal historical factuality of Eve’s creation from Adam makes his broad definition of sacraments notable. Within about five years, as I argue below, Augustine will insist that the figurative dimension of the text must not cancel the actual historical reality described. He will tie spiritual reality to a historical, material base, and this will more sharply define his notion of “sacrament.” 40. CSEL 91:139: aliquod secretum intimaret. 41. CSEL 91:110–111: sic indicat tamquam historiam rerum factarum.

306

Notes to Pages 68–85

42. Robert Markus, “History, Prophecy and Inspiration,” appendix A in Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 187–196. However, eventually Augustine joined the categories in speaking of “prophetic history” (civ. Dei 16.2). 43. For Augustine’s teaching on the seven ages see Auguste Luneau, L’histoire du salut chez Pères de l´Eglise: la doctrine des ages du monde (Paris: Beauchesne, 1964), 284–407. 44. CSEL 91:104: “bear a likeness,” habere similitudinem. 45. CSEL 91:121. 46. CSEL 91:160: Sed in sermone pollicitus sum considerationem factarum rerum, quam puto explicatam, et deinde considerationem prophetiae quae remanet explicanda iam breviter. 47. CSEL 91:160: Posito enim tamquam signo quodam manifesto, quo cetera dirigantur, non diu nos, quantum arbitror, ista consideratio detinebit. 48. Cf. quant. an. 7.12 (PL 32:1042): Auctoritati credere magnum compendium est, et nullus labor (“To believe authority is a great shortcut, and no labor at all”). 49. CSEL 25/1:357: exponendo unum in cetera introduxit intellectum. 50. CSEL 91:121: “reverent and worthy of God,” pie et digne Deo; “figuratively and in riddles,” figurate atque in aenigmatibus. 51. BA 14:366: Mira eloquiorum tuorum, quorum ecce ante nos blandiens parvulis: sed mira profunditas, Deus meus, mira profunditas! Horror est intendere in eam, horror honoris, et tremor amoris.

c h a p t er 3 1. The popular conception of Augustine’s early biblical naïveté must be qualified, though admittedly he himself helped to create this impression. See the comments on his biblical work forty years hence, e.g., retr. 1.18. 2. Sandra Lee Dixon, Augustine: The Scattered and Gathered Self (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999). 3. The key word of the title has been translated variously as “morals” (NPNF 4), “ways of life” (FC 56; WSA I/19), and even “lifestyles” (John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 4. Mor. 1.2.3 (CSEL 90:5–6); trans. Teske (WSA I/19:32). 5. Mor. 1.7.12 (CSEL 90:15); trans. Teske (WSA I/19:36). 6. Mor. 1.7.11 (CSEL 90:14–15); cf. c. Faust. 12.27. 7. Mor. 1.7.12 (CSEL 90:15); trans. Teske (WSA I/19:36, adjusted). 8. Mor. 1.17.30 (CSEL 90:34–35). 9. For a good brief overview, see Michael Fiedrowicz’s introduction to On True Religion in WSA I/8:15–28. 10. Fiedrowicz, “Introduction,” 16. 11. The themes follow the outline in Fiedrowicz, “Introduction,” 19.

Notes to Pages 86–89

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12. Goulven Madec, “Si Plato viveret . . . (Augustin De vera religione 3.3),” in Neoplatonisme: mélanges offerts à Jean Troulllard (Fontenay-aux-Roses: Les cahiers de Fontenay, 1981), 231–247. 13. For an overview see Frederick Van Fleteren, “Ascent of the Soul, “ ATA, 63–67. 14. Vera rel. 4.7 (CCL 32:192): paucis mutatis verbis atque sententis. Yet note R. D. Crouse’s comment that “only a few words needed to be changed, but they were crucial words.” “Paucis mutatis verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism,” in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 42. 15. The phrase first appears in vera rel. (7.13, 10.19, 55.110) and later some thirty times according to CLCLT, mostly before 400 when it particularly suits his thinking on the stages of spiritual ascent. After ordination in 391, it appears in the first series of expositions in en. Ps. (2.7, 14.1) and several passages of div. qu. (qq. 57, 75.1, 81.1). Usage peaks with the six occurrences in f. et. symb. (4.6, 4.8, 4.9, 8.15, 9.16, 9.18), and its Christological orientation appears there in an equivalent phrase, “the program of the assumed man” (administratio suscepti hominis; 9.18 [BA 9:54]). The phrase appears in several works of the later 390s, agon. 17.19 and 19.21; doc. Chr. 1.35.39; and qu. ev. 1.28. It also occurs in undated works, s. 252, s. 88, and s. 229T. Retr. 1.13.1 quotes it while commenting on vera rel. But the idea underlies all periods of Augustine’s thinking. 16. Augustine later specifies the verba visibilia as “sacraments”: c. Faust. 19.16 (CSEL 25/1:513); Io. ev. tr. 80.3 (CCL 36:529). 17. CCL 32:199–200 18. Vera rel. 3.4 (CCL 32:190): si ad hoc percipiendum, diligendum, perfruendum, ut anima sanetur et tante luci hauriendae mentis acies convalescat. 19. CCL 32:196: idoneam faciet spiritualibus percipiendis. 20. John H. S. Burleigh’s widely used translation reads this sentence as follows: “Our chief concern is with the prophetic history of the dispensation of divine providence in time” (Augustine’s Earlier Writings, Library of Christian Classics [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953], 232). But translating caput as “chief concern,” instead of “starting point,” blurs Augustine’s point that that story launches a sequential spiritual process leading to conversion. Further, translating historia et prophetia as “prophetic history” blurs a distinction which Augustine at this time considered quite sharp, as Robert Markus has noted (Saeculum: History and Society in St. Augustine, rev. ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 188–191]). As mentioned, much later civ. Dei will refer to “prophetic history” (prophetica historia; 16.2), but by that time Augustine has blended the concepts and it meant something quite different. Finally, translating dispensatio temporalis as the “dispensation of divine providence in time” pictures time merely as a theater where God’s plan plays out, rather than as Augustine saw it, in my judgment, as a critical element of the plan itself.

308 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

Notes to Pages 89–96 Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture,” 340–343. The Latin phrases in this paragraph appear in CCL 32:208. Vera rel. 50.98 (CCL 32:250). One wonders what lessons Augustine would have drawn from the story of the American author and advocate for the blind Helen Keller (1880–1968). Made blind and deaf by illness at age two, she spent her young childhood in a dark, fitful, and wordless world. At age seven her parents enlisted the help of a young teacher, Anne Sullivan, whose work with Helen reached a dramatic climax with the success of her experimentation with verbal-sensory signs. In her famous autobiography, The Story of My Life, Helen describes the dawning of linguistic understanding this way: “Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me” (The Story of My Life [New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904], 23, emphasis added). In lieu of Augustine’s assessment we might allow Arthur Koestler’s interestingly Augustinian-sounding perspective on this passage to speak for him: “Here we have the undiluted bisociative act, the sudden synthesis of the universe of signs and the universe of things. In its sequel each matrix imparts a new significance, a new dimension to the other: the words begin to ‘live,’ to ‘give birth to new thoughts’; and the objects begin to ‘quiver’ under the touch of the magic wand of language.” The Act of Creation (London: Penguin Arkana, 1989 [originally published 1964]), 222. TeSelle, Augustine the Theologian, 128–131; William Mallard, “The Incarnation in Augustine’s Conversion,” RA 15 (1980): 95. CCL 32:251 Ibid. In time Augustine grew distrustful of the term allegoria because of its connotations related to the public shows; see en. Ps. 103.1.13 (CCL 40:1486). By the later 390s he began using alternatives, particularly figura, though he never stopped using allegoria. See Robert W. Bernard, “In Figura: Terminology Pertaining to Figurative Exegesis in the Works of Augustine of Hippo,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984, 157ff. Notice that this framework was in place when Augustine wrote his first Genesis commentary. See the columns of Table 2 above, 70–71. For Jason Byassee, Augustine shows that “Christian life itself is allegorical.” Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007), 9. Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture,” 52: “Dans l’optique augustinienne, on va à l’éternal par le temporal, plus qu’on ne trouve l’éternal dans le temporal.”

Notes to Pages 97–101

309

c h a p t er 4 1. For a sense of the importance of Christ in Augustine’s thought see the following works (and their respective bibliographies): Tarsicius J. van Bavel, Recherches sur la Christologie de saint Augustin, Paradosis x (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1954); Goulven Madec, La Patrie et Voie (Paris: Desclee, 1984); idem, “Christus,” A-L 1, 845–908; Joanne McWilliam, “The Study of Augustine’s Christology in the Twentieth Century,” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, ed. J. McWilliam et al. (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 183–205; Basil Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism? (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1997); Brian Daley, “Christology,” ATA, 164–169; William Mallard, “Jesus Christ,” ATA, 463–470. Nevertheless, scholarly study of Augustine’s Christology has been relatively neglected for several interrelated reasons: “Christ” is a complex, expansive notion in Augustine’s thought, intimately tied to salvation and so radiating out into views on Scripture, Church, ministry, sacraments, and the like; Christology lies so deep and diffused throughout his many works; Augustine wrote no high-profile polemical work on it; and it is usually assumed that Augustine’s way of seeing Christ broke little or no new ground. The perception is that for Augustine’s development, Christology “did not lead the way but changed in response to other changes in his thinking” (McWilliam, “Study of Augustine’s Christology,” 197). I hope to demonstrate that that is not the case from the angle of how he read Scripture. My thesis is that many developments in Augustine’s thought were grounded in movements in his thought about Christ as he tried to overcome his Manichean past. 2. Rom. 13:13; conf. 8.12.29. 3. Sol. 1.2.7. Adolf Harnack wrote, “In these words Augustine has briefly formulated the aim of his spiritual life.” History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (London: Constable, 1900), 5:110. 4. Studer, The Grace of Christ, chap. 2, “The Christocentrism of Augustine,” 39–65. 5. Seasoning with salt was a sacramental ritual for catechumens (conf. 1.11.17; cat. rud. 26.50). Augustine kept his formal status as a Catholic catechumen throughout his young manhood, even as a Manichee. 6. The shorthand description of salvation as “the humility of our Lord and God” anticipates the later core of his understanding of the Incarnation as the conjunction of divine and human humility in the Word’s descent from heaven and the Christ’s acceptance of death by crucifixion. 7. From A Manichaean Psalm-Book, Part II, ed. C. R. C. Allberry (Stuttgart: W. Kolhammer, 1938), 158.19–22; quoted in Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 114. 8. See the “Introduction” to Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, ed. Iain Gardner and Samuel N. C. Lieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 25–45.

310

Notes to Pages 101–108

9. For a helpful overview see Majella Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, and the literature cited there. 10. What follows depends on Gardner and Lieu, “Introduction,” Manichaean Texts, 8–25. 11. Ibid. 8–10. 12. “Manichaeans transferred to a primordial event the same salvational sacrifice of God’s ‘son’ posited in mainstream Christian belief.” Jason David BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 c.e. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 80. 13. What follows draws on Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, chap. 4, “Jesus the Apostle of Light.” 14. A Manichaean Psalm-Book 193.13ff., quoted in Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, 53. 15. A Manichaean Psalm-Book 194.1–3. 16. C. Fort. 3 (BA 17:136). 17. C. Fort. 19 (BA 17:160). Note that for the Manichee, Paul’s words carry “the authority of the Gospel.” 18. Augustine’s c. Sec., written during his early years as a bishop, included his correspondent’s letter. Secundinus, a Manichean Hearer as Augustine had been, argues his cause with a zesty evangelical fervor. The lively exchange that resulted helps to explain why this was Augustine’s favorite among his anti-Manichean works (retr. 2.10). 19. Secundinus warns Augustine that his ideas about incarnation will bury him further in the evil material world. 20. Sec. epist. 5 (BA 17:520): Desine, quaeso, utero claudere Christum, ne ipse rursum utero concludaris. Desine duas naturas facere unam; quia appropinquat Domini iudicium. Vae quo accipent, qui quod dulce est, in amaritudinem transferunt. 21. Sec. epist. 4 (BA 17:518): si noster Dominus carnalis foret, omnis nostra fuisset spes amputata. 22. Conf. 5.10.20 (BA 13:500–502). For Manichees, humanity shares in the same kind of divine light and substance as God, though to a radically different degree and in deep bondage to materiality. The logic of their Christology is that to identify with us, no incarnation was necessary, and actually would have been obstructive. BeDuhn writes of this logic, “Jesus does not have to assume some other nature than his original divine one in order to be connected to humanity; but he does need to retain his transcendence from ‘mixture’ in order to have full liberty to aid humanity.” “The Manichaean Jesus,” in Alternative Christs, ed. Olav Hammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 68. 23. Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, 56. 24. Ibid. 59. BeDuhn warns against slipping into orthodox “two nature” language that Manichees did not accept. For them Jesus the Splendor and the humanity that he came to liberate already shared the only divine nature and light that mattered, and

Notes to Pages 108–113

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

311

that obviated any need to “bridge” natures. Only Catholics who saw a chasm between flesh and spirit saw the need for a “bridge”; their language “depends for its logic on a differentiation between deity and the human soul whose denial stands at the heart of the Manichaean religion” (“The Manichaean Jesus,” 67). On the other hand, Manichees at least on occasion did revert to two-nature language (reflecting the needs of Greco-Roman missionaries?). Thus Felix declares to Augustine, ‘Mani says there are two natures . . . one good and one evil’” (c. Fel. 2.2); and Secundinus pleads with the same recalcitrant ex-Manichee, now a Catholic bishop, “Stop making the two natures one” (Sec. epist. 5). Conf. 7.5.7 (BA 13:594). Conf. 7.7.11 (BA 13:602–604). A. H. Armstrong, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 236. Conf. 7.10.16 (BA 13:616): aliud, aliud valde ab istis omnibus. See also Chadwick’s note on 128n27. Augustine was possibly influenced by his early reading of Porphyry, the disciple and editor of Plotinus who was a critic of Christianity. Despite Porphyry’s dim view of Christianity, he may have indirectly buttressed the intellectual credibility of Augustine’s catechumenal faith by approving of the strong ethical example that made Christ a teacher of spiritual wisdom. The exact degree of the acerbic Porphyry’s influence on Augustine at this time remains debated. If he once naïvely accepted Porphyry’s appreciation of Jesus, his view of Porphyry darkened considerably by the time he dealt with his legacy in civ. Dei 10.27–29. Conf. 7.19.25 (BA 13:632): totum hominem in Christo agnoscebam. This and the quotes that follow come from conf. 7.19.25 (BA 13:632–634). Augustine wrote that he learned later he had unwittingly fallen into “Photinianism.” Photinus was a fourth-century bishop deposed for doubting the existence of Christ before his virginal conception; O’Donnell, Confessions II, 469. Augustine later explicitly says that the conjunction of divinity and humanity occurred in the “bridal chamber” of the virgin’s womb; en. Ps. 44.3. A generation ago Goulven Madec and Robert J. O’Connell held a spirited debate in the pages of Revue des études augustiniennes over the issue of when Augustine arrived at an orthodox conception of Christ. Madec argued for the moment of conversion in Milan, while O’Connell, pressing Augustine’s ambiguous phrase about learning only “somewhat later” about how the Word was made flesh, argued for a time perhaps in the early 390s. Madec issued his challenge in “Une lecture de Confessions VII, ix, 13–xxi, 27: Notes critiques à propos d´une thèse de R. J. O’Connell,” REA 16 (1970): 79–137; O’Connell replied in “Confessions VII, ix, 13–xxi, 27: Reply to G. Madec,” REA 19 (1973): 87–100. In my judgment, which follows the judgment of most observers, Madec’s view was more persuasive. Conf. 7.21.27 (BA 13:638), trans. Boulding.

312

Notes to Pages 114–117

35. Trin. 1.8.16 (BA 15:128): dispensatio similitudinum. 36. Vera rel. 36.66 (CCL 32:230–231), trans. Hill (WSA I/8:74), adjusted with emphasis added. 37. Faustus used 1 Cor. 1:24 in his “confession of faith” (c. Faust. 20.2), where he related “power” to the veneration of divinity clothed in the sun, and “wisdom” to the veneration of divinity hidden in the moon. The text remained important in Augustine’s later work; see the extended analysis in Book 5 of trin. 38. See c. Acad. 2.2.5 (CCL 29:21): “I am seizing (arripio) the Apostle Paul”; cf. conf. 7.21.27 (BA 13:638): “I avidly seized (arripui) [Paul’s’ writings].” See also b. vita 4.34: “What should wisdom be called, if not the wisdom of God? We have heard through divine authority that the Son of God is nothing other than the wisdom of God, and that the Son of God is truly God.” 39. The double-sidedness of the word “virtue” survived into early modern English. For instance, the Authorized (King James) Version of Luke 8:46 reads, “And Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue [Gk., dynamis] is gone out of me.” Then a few verses later the other meaning appears: “Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power [dynamis] and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases” (Luke 9:1). 40. Mor. 1.13.22 (CSEL 90:26–27) 41. Mor. 1.13.22 (CSEL 90:27). The divine Son of God conducting the soul into the Father’s presence is a theme of the early writings. Compare quant. an. 33.76 (CSEL 89:223–224): “I now dare to tell you plainly that if we hold tenaciously to the course which God orders for us, and which we have taken up intending to clutch it tight, then through ‘the power and wisdom of God’ [1 Cor. 1:24] we will arrive at that ‘Highest Cause,’ or ‘Supreme Author,’ or ‘Highest Principle of All Things,’ or whatever other suitable name you might give such a Thing.” 42. John Burnaby perceptively identified the premise of the union between knowledge, love, and moral goodness in Augustine’s thought. “But perfect knowledge of what is good necessarily implies the love of it, else we should not be knowing it as good.” Amor Dei: A Study in the Religion of St Augustine (Norwich, U.K.: Canterbury Press, 1991 [repr. with corrections; originally published 1938], 48), emphasis in text. 43. The following draws on William Mallard, “The Incarnation in Augustine’s Conversion,” RA 15 (1980): 85–93. 44. C. Acad. 3.19.42 (PL 32:956). 45. Ord. 2.5.16 (BA 4/2:210). 46. Ord. 2.9.27 (BA 4/2:242). The translation of R. Russell (FC 5, 304) seems to lose the Christological thread by rendering ipsum hominem agens as “in the very act of leading a man onward”; by contrast, J. Doignon (BA 4/2, 243) has “en assumant l’homme même.” The reference to the Incarnation, moreover, leads seamlessly to the reference to the sacraments of initiation whose focus is the mystery of Christ. On Christ’s “divine authority” in the polemic against Porphyrian theurgy, see Doignon’s note comp. 22, BA 4/2:359–361.

Notes to Pages 117–121

313

47. Mallard comments (“Incarnation,” 88–89), “This shift in agency from the man participating ‘upward’ to God participating ‘downward’ is quite enough to say that a cornerstone of thought has changed for Augustine.” 48. Wesley Trimpi wrote, “Adumbrated in Plato’s works and provided with a terminology and logical context by Aristotle’s Topics and Categories, three central organizing principles begin to inform nearly all inquiry in the Hellenistic period. These three principles were stated as three basic questions: (1) an sit, does something exist, or did it happen; (2) quid sit, if it exists or did happen, what is it; (3) quale sit, given its existence and definition, what kind of a thing or act is it—that is, how did it come to be as it is or to have happened as it did. These questions had the greatest impact upon forensic rhetoric and, adapted to law in the second century b.c. by Hermagoras, offered a method of arriving at the particular point at issue—the constitutio or status upon which a case was to be argued” (Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983], 354). . . . “In his eleventh letter (to Nebridius), St. Augustine applies the three questions of status to the modes of existence of the Trinity. The first, an sit, concerns the original cause of all existence, and hence refers to the Father; the second, quid sit, asserts that existing things are this or that, and refers to the Son as the Logos; the third, quale sit, concerns the power of a thing to remain in its own generic form, and refers to the Holy Spirit” (ibid. 357). 49. CCL 31:26. 50. CCL 31:28 (which reference also covers the next sentence): disciplina vivendi et exemplum praecepti . . . norma et regula disciplinae. 51. CCL 31:30: disciplina ipsa et forma Dei . . . ad eruditionem informationemque nostram. 52. Vera rel. 16.32 (CCL 32:207): tota itaque vita eius in terris, disciplina morum fuit. 53. van Bavel, Recherches sur la christologie de saint Augustin, 7. 54. CCL: 32:206–207; Bochet, ‘Le Firmament de l’Écriture,’ 340–343. 55. Vera rel. 17.33 (CCL: 32:207): rationalis disciplinae regula. 56. This recalls Augustine’s more general hermeneutical statement in Practices 1.17.30: “Many things are said in a more lowly way, a way more accommodated to souls crawling around in the dirt (humi repentibus animis accommodatius) in order that they may rise by means of human things into divine things” (CSEL 90:34). 57. In the charming John Donne–era translation of William Watts (1631) used in the Loeb St. Augustine’s Confessions, vol. 1 (LCL 26:389). 58. Rom. 1:20 played an enduring role in Augustine’s methodology of spiritual perception. It appeared early and epigrammatically in a passage we have already referred to, Practices 1.17.30, which speaks of God accommodating earthbound humanity so that “by means of human things they may rise into divine things.” On Christian Teaching 1.4.4 uses it to shape understanding of Scripture where “we may perceive invisible things through things that are made, that is, that from bodily and temporal things we may take in eternal and spiritual things.”

314

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

Notes to Pages 121–125 To his congregation he explains in en. Ps. 44.6 (CCL 38:498), “through these visible things we are formed for (informaremur ad; so perhaps, “educated to understand”) the invisible things.” Goulven Madec, “Connaissance de Dieu et action de grâces: Essai sur les citations de l’Ép. aux Romains I, 18–25 dans l’œuvre de saint Augustin,” RA 2 (1962): 273–309. For an overview sketch, see Joanne McWilliam Dewart, “Augustine’s Developing Use of the Cross, 387–400,” AS (1984):15–33. Regrettably, because of misprints and errors this must article be used with caution. See the overview in Studer, Grace of God and Grace of Christ, 10–13. This and the previous line are missing from E. Hill’s translation of this passage (WSA I/8:48–49). CCL 32:206–207. That didactic viewpoint extended into the first part of his priesthood at Hippo. The early treatment of the cross in Q. 25 of div. qu. (CCL 44A:31), “On the Cross of Christ,” apparently answered an ad hoc inquiry from his monastic community about the rationale of the crucifixion. Here is Augustine’s reply in toto: “The Wisdom of God took up a Man (hominem suscepit) in order to give us a model of how to live uprightly. Now, an upright life consists in not fearing things that should not be feared. Death is not to be feared. Therefore it was appropriate that the death of that Man whom God’s Wisdom took up should demonstrate this very thing. But some people, although they do not fear death itself, are still horrified by a particular kind of death. Exactly the way death itself should not be feared, so a person living a good and upright life shouldn’t fear any kind of death at all. It was no less necessary, then, for this to be demonstrated by the cross of that Man. For among all the different kinds of death, none appears more detestable and frightening than that one.” Civ. Dei also gives fairly light treatment to the crucifixion as an apologetic work, perhaps for the same reason. C. Faust. 26.1 (CSEL 25/1:729): ego Iesum potuisse mori, si voluit, cur non concedam, etiamsi vere mortem illam fuisse et non mortis figuram consentiam? Ibid.: omnes humanae condicionis simulavit adfectus . . . consignandae oeconomia gratia fuisset visus et mori. In the same passage, a parallel argument about Moses cursing those who fail to generate posterity for Israel (Deut. 25:5–10) depends on the physical reality that Jesus had no children. C. Faust. 29.1 (CSEL 25/1:744): nos specie tenus passum confitemur nec vere mortuum. CSEL 25/1:744, trans. Teske (WSA I/20:271–272, adjusted). I have added the letters distinguishing each listed explanations for ease of reference. Some analysts think this essentially disqualifies docetism as a way of explaining Manichean thought about Christ, whatever use they made of docetic language in anti-Catholic polemic; see Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, 77.

Notes to Pages 125–127

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71. The Manichean Psalm-Book 191.4–8. 72. Fortunatus like Faustus also connected it to the similitudo of Phil. 2:7 (c. Fort. 7). 73. Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, 77. Siegfried Richter is a major proponent of this “real” flesh Manichean Christology, but prefers the language of “two natures.” 74. Quoted in Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings, 77–78. 75. Cf. W. Geerlings, “Der manichäische ‘Jesus patibilis’ in der Theologie Augustins,” Theologische Quartalschrift 152 (1972): 124–131. 76. CSEL 25/1:536: The final sentence reads: Nec non et spiritus sancti, qui est maiestas tertia, aeris hunc omnem ambitum sedem fatemur ac diversorium; cuius ex viribus ac spiritali profusione terram quoque concipientem gignere patibilem Iesum, qui est vita ac salus hominum, omni suspensus ex ligno. 77. Sec. epist. 3 (BA 17:514): Vides enim illum et in omni mundo et in omni anima esse crucifixum. Also see Augustine’s explanation in en. Ps. 140.12 (CCL 40:2034–2035), trans. Boulding (WSA III/20,313): “You ask what this ‘cross of light’ is and they tell you, ‘The members of God that were captured during the battle have been mingled into the whole of this world. They are trapped in trees, in plants, in fruits, and in other crops. Therefore anyone who breaks up the soil into furrows disturbs (vexo) God’s members. Anyone who plucks a plant from the earth disturbs God’s members; anyone who picks fruit from a tree disturbs God’s members.  .  . .’ And Christ himself, they hold, is crucified all over the world (et ipse est Christus, dicunt, crucifixus in toto mundo).” 78. Henry Chadwick comments: “This contrast of universal against particular expressed their negative view of the reality and particularity of the crucifixion of Christ .  .  . [which for them was] a universal myth about the suffering of the faithful Elect” (“The Attractions of Mani,” Compostellanum 34.1–2 [1989]: 210). Augustine later stresses against Faustus the particularity of Israel and of Christ as an essential feature of Christian fulfillment, over against the universalizing and mythopoeic tendencies of the Manichees. “He is Christ, the savior of all who believe in him. The present age reveals his name and his Church just as the past times foretold them, not by means of just anything emerging from time’s hidden recesses, but by a particular nation and a particular kingdom cultivated and established for just this purpose (sed quadam gente et quodam regno ad hoc propagato et instituto): namely, that there, from that kingdom (ibi de illo), everything described ahead of time in figures—things now expressed in actual facts—would become known. Moreover, there (ibi) things would be written down through the prophets’ preaching that were to be put on display now through the apostles’ preaching” (c. Faust. 13.6; emphasis added). With Teske (WSA I/20:163), I have taken the last sentence [et ibi per prophetas . . . ], as declarative, against the CSEL editors (25/1:384), who make it a question. See also the particularity of the Catholic Eucharistic elements (c. Faust 20.13 [CSEL 25/1:552]):

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79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

Notes to Pages 127–135 “Our bread and cup, not just any bread and cup, is made sacramental for us by a particular (certa) consecration” (trans. Teske I/20:273). CSEL 25/1:766: credimus . . . crucis eius mysticam fixionem, qua nostrae animae passionis monstrantur vulnera. CSEL 25/1:784. As Chadwick notes in his translation (82n13), this is the first reference in Augustine’s works to “original sin” (peccatum originale). This indicates the full emergence, by the time of writing Conf., of Augustine’s theology of redemption through Christ (already forming in the early 390s), from its early enfolding within the spiritual pedagogy of the Incarnation. BA 13:490–492. CSEL 25/1:766; trans. Teske, adjusted. BA 17:142.

c h a p t er 5 1. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, New Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 130. 2. For a nuanced account, see Gerald Bonner, St. Augustine of Hippo: Life and Controversies, 3rd ed. (Norwich, U.K.: Canterbury Press, 2002), 111–121. Brown discusses Valerius’s cranky uniqueness in Augustine of Hippo, 132–134. 3. Martine Dulaey, “L’apprentissage de l’exégèse biblique par Augustin (3): Années 393–94,” REAP 51 (2005): 25. 4. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 132. 5. Edward L. Smither, “An Unrecognized and Unlikely Influence? The Impact of Valerius of Hippo on Augustine,” Irish Theological Quarterly 72 (2007): 256–258. 6. Ep. 22.4; 29.7; exp. prop. Rm. 13.1. Possidius says that before Augustine came, Valerius searched for a priest who above all “could build up the Church by the word of God and its saving teaching (qui posset verbo Dei et doctrina salubri ecclesiam Domini aedificare)” (vita Aug. 5.6 [PL 32:37]). 7. For more on Valerius and Augustine’s Letter 21, see my “Valerius of Hippo: A Profile,” AS 40, no. 1 (2009): 5–26. 8. For instance, David F. Wright writes, “After his ordination, he requested from bishop Valerius a couple of months’ leave to familiarize himself with the Bible” (“Augustine: His Exegesis and Hermeneutics,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Saebø [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996], 703). 9. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 199–201; Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap, 1996), 129. 10. James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine: His Time and Lives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge:

Notes to Pages 135–137

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

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Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19; O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 24–26. John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15: “It was the exigencies of preaching, not his already serious Christian life, which impelled this request.” Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 144: “The last decades of the fourth century in the Latin church could well be called ‘the generation of S. Paul’: a common interest in S. Paul drew together widely differing thinkers, and made them closer to each other than to their predecessors.” Ep. 21.3 (CCL 31:49). For Augustine, Paul modeled the spiritual life by “stretching toward things that lay ahead and forgetting what lay behind” (Phil. 3:13). Augustine described his own spiritual aspirations in terms of this text: doc. Chr. 1.34.38; conf. 13.12.13. Ep. 21.4 (CCL: 31:49). For a sample of this instruction, see s. 216; William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 105. Util. cred. 3.5–9 (BA 8:216–228); cf. Gn. litt. imp. 2.5 (BA 50: 400–402). In terms of their lexical sense, historia (history) conveys the plain narrative sense of what happened or what is portrayed as happening; allegoria (allegory) points to an underlying spiritual sense that ultimately relates to Christ as the truth of the Old Testament; analogia (analogy) indicates the overarching harmony of the Old and New Testaments; and aetologia (etiology) explains the origin or reason for some law or practice. Augustine repeats the fourfold sequence about two years later while still a priest in Gn. litt. imp. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis I: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Marc Sebanc (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 123. Gn. c. Man. 2.2.3. Together these facts argue against the suggestion of Roland Teske that Augustine got the fourfold sense from Ambrose (St. Augustine on Genesis, FC 84, 147–148n8) or that of Frederick Van Fleteren that the source was Philo or Origen (“Augustine’s Principles of Exegesis, De doctrina christiana Aside: Miscellaneous Observations,” AS 27, no. 2 [1996]: 115). I cannot agree therefore with Van Fleteren’s assertion, “Grasp of the significance of these four meanings is essential for understanding Augustine’s hermeneutic” (“Augustine’s Principles of Exegesis,” 114). On the contrary, it seems to me, they were coincidental and temporary, even though Augustine put forth a reconstructed version, yet still without any elaboration, in the opening sentence of Gn. litt. (1.1.1). Dulaey, “L’apprentissage (3),” 25. Augustine was criticizing the way Manichees and Jews in their different ways merely literally read Gen. 1:31, “God rested” (Gn. c. Man 1.22.33 [CSEL 91:102]). Their literalism created a veil; but “should either of them cross over to Christ, then ‘the veil is taken off,’ as the Apostle says. For ‘the veil is taken off ’ when,

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

Notes to Pages 137–145 after the covering of likeness and allegory has been removed, the truth stands naked so that it can be seen (quando similitudinis et allegoriae cooperimento ablato, veritas nudatur, ut possit videri).” Tarsicius van Bavel, “L’humanité du Christ comme lac parvulorum et comme via dans la spiritualité de saint Augustin,” Augustiniana 7 (1957): 247–281. BA 57A:342; trans. Boulding (WSA III/15:131), adjusted. Augustine’s works on Romans date from mid- to late 394, when he wrote down the substance of talks that he gave to his community at Hippo. The English translation of Paula Fredriksen [Landes] (Augustine on Romans [Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982]) uses the Maurist numbering system, which I will list first; I will give the CSEL numbering in brackets after the CSEL page numbers. See also Thomas Gerhard Ring, Die Auslegung des Briefes an die Galater. Die angefangene Auslegung des Briefes an die Römer. Über dreiundachtzig verchiedene Fragen: Fragen 66–68 (Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag, 1997). Thomas F. Martin writes that while the “four ages” scenario carried some traditional components, its “overall configuration with the four descriptive labels and the interrelated progression of the stages is uniquely Augustine’s.” It was “a turning point” in his exegetical career whose “ground-breaking exegetical implications” have been understudied. See Rhetoric and Exegesis in Augustine’s Interpretation of Romans 7:24–25a (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 61–62; cf. Auguste Luneau, L’histoire du salut (Paris: Beauchesne, 1964), 357ff. Exp. prop. Rm. 13–18 (CSEL 84:6–7 [12.2]). Fredriksen, Augustine on Romans, 10. Exp. prop. Rm. 13–18 (CSEL 84:6–7 [12.2]). Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34 (CSEL 84:13–14 [26:1]). Augustine’s version of Rom. 6:6 read, Hoc scientes quia vetus homo noster simul crucifixus est ut evacuaretur corpus peccati (Propp. 32–34; CSEL 84:13–14 [26:1]). Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.5 (CSEL 84:14 [26.5]]). Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.2–3 (CSEL 84:14 [26.2–3]). Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.1 (CSEL 84:14 [26.1]). Augustine’s version of Deut. 21:23 read, Maledictus omnis qui in ligno pependerit. Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.3 (CSEL 84:14 [26.3]]). Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.5 (CSEL 84:14 [26.5]]). Exp. prop. Rm. 48.1 (CSEL 84:21[40.1]]). Exp. prop. Rm. 48.7–8 (CSEL 84:22 [40.7–8]]). According to E. Hill, Augustine interpreted Rom. 8:3 rightly, despite the textual obstacles thrown up by his Latin version (n. 13 to his translation of s. 152.10–11; WSA III/5:55–56). For Augustine’s later treatments of the word “sin” as a metonymy for “sacrifice for sin,” see also s. 134.5 and ench. 13.41. Bradley H. McLean, The Cursed Christ: Mediterranean Expulsion Rituals and Pauline Soteriology (Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1996). Augustine eventually discovered and explicitly noted this discrepancy in ench. 13.41.

Notes to Pages 145–148

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42. Contrary to Fredriksen’s awkward “he made sin for us” (Augustine on Romans, 13), and to Joanne McWilliam Dewart’s arbitrary change to the passive voice, “he was made as sin” (“Augustine’s Developing Use of the Cross: 387–400” AS 15 [1984]:28). Roland Teske translates the phrase “he committed sin for us” in Debate with Maximinus [c. Max.] 15.5 (WSA I/18:204). 43. Exp. prop. Rm. 48.5 (CSEL 84:22 [40.5]). Augustine’s Latin sentence reads, apostolus peccatum vocat susceptionem mortalis carnis quamvis non peccatris, ideo quia immortalis tamquam peccatum facit cum moritur. 44. Interestingly, Faustus used this very argument to claim that Christ’s death without actual human birth was possible. Christ “simulated” death, but this picture of human death transgressed Christ’s divine nature; c. Faust. 26.1. 45. Exp. prop. Rm. 48.4 (CSEL 84:21 [40.4]]). 46. Exp. prop. Rm. 48.5 (CSEL 84:22 [40.5): carni enim peccati mors debita est. 47. C. Fort. was a transcription of their public debate (trans. Teske; WSA I/19:135–162). Fortunatus and Augustine both used a version of Phil. 2:5–8 that paralleled the Vulgate. 48. C. Fort. 9 (BA 17:142). The terms of the debate were supposed to restrict disputants to the use of reason alone rather than biblical authority. But because Fortunatus insisted on using biblical quotes as evidence, Augustine consented in odd-sounding language about the Scriptures: “I descend to them” (ad eas ego descendo; c. Fort. 19 [BA 17:160]). By a “descent” to Scripture he means to portray it as the first, “lowest” step on the ladder of spiritual ascent. So Augustine invoked Rom. 1:1–4, where Paul teaches that Christ was both predestined by the power of God “before taking flesh” (ante carnem) and born of the seed of David “according to the flesh” (secundum carnem). As Augustine knew, Manichees believed this was a textual corruption (c. Faust. 11.1). Fortunatus’s objections to this move disrupted the proceedings (c. Fort. 19). 49. C. Fort. 7 (BA 17:140–142). 50. C. Fort. 9 (BA 17:142): In ipso homine quem, suscepit, demonstravit illa quae dicis. 51. John Cavadini comments on this passage, “Augustine seems not to have reflected theologically on the cross or the passion of Christ, or, for that matter, on any sort of redemptive suffering, while Fortunatus has.” “Jesus’ Death Is Real: An Augustinian Spirituality of the Cross,” in The Cross in Christian Tradition: From Paul to Bonaventure, ed. Elizabeth A. Dreyer (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 171. 52. Exp. prop. Rm. 32–34.5 (CSEL 84:14 [26.2]). 53. The “unreality” of Christ’s humanity was probably not a cardinal point of Manichean teaching per se, despite repeated Catholic accusations to that effect. It was rather a corollary of their “spiritual” Christology of the two “principles” of light and darkness that were at war in the cosmos. Some Manichees, as we’ll see, simultaneously affirmed and denied Christ’s actual flesh. See Majella Franzmann, Jesus in the Manichaean Writings (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), especially chaps. 3 and 4.

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Notes to Pages 151–152

54. Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes by Eric Plumer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Exp. Gal. was the only complete commentary on a Pauline letter that Augustine ever produced. 55. C. Faust. 16.28 (CSEL 25/1:473): non ergo diversa doctrina est, sed diversum tempus. 56. Exp. Gal. 2.3 (CSEL 84:57): iam totus Deus. 57. Plumer translates ad litteram, the key phrase of exp. Gal. 22.1 (CSEL 84:81) describing Christ’s action in relation to the Law, as “to the letter” (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 159). Paula Fredriksen (Augustine and the Jews [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010], 254–255) goes a step further in asserting that ad litteram “can be read both to mean ‘to the letter’ as in ‘very scrupulously,’ and it can also mean something like ‘actually’; On Galatians 22.1.” She goes on to say that exp. Gal. 22.1 and doc. Chr. 3.6.10 describe Christ’s utter disregard for Jewish Sabbath observance as it was traditionally understood, whereas in a “striking revision” that occurred “a scant three years or so later, Augustine sees his historical Jesus quite differently” (255). That is, Augustine reversed himself against Faustus by claiming that Christ neither broke any command nor turned Israel away from God (c. Faust. 16.24). Indeed now Augustine thinks, writes Fredriksen, that “so vigilant was Christ in keeping the Law’s commands as the Jews traditionally had understood and enacted them that he remained in the tomb, his body ‘resting from all its works’ during the Sabbath” (255, emphasis in text). However, in my judgment, exp. Gal. anticipates c. Faust., and the Fredriksen thesis misses the continuity between them. It also confuses Augustine’s central point about how Christ turned humanity from living carnally “under Law” to living spiritually “under grace.” Claiming that Jesus’ rest in the tomb respected the Jewish Sabbath doesn’t explain what Augustine thought Jesus was doing when he healed as “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:8). My claim is that Augustine believed that Christ contradicted the purely ad litteram reading, and that the rejection of his spiritual construction did so by means of a hyperliteral and “carnal” reading. But for him that was a sign of “soul-death” (doc. Chr. 3.5.9), and “clinging” (inhaesaere) to that carnal perspective disabled the capacity to recognize Christ as “having come from God or being himself God.” So Christ’s opponents condemned him as anti-God, i.e., one who turns Israel from God, a crime that the letter of the Law pronounced punishable by death. Uncomfortable as it may be to post-Holocaust interreligious relations, the reality is that Augustine and the rest of early Christianity thought that Jews collapsed the Law’s spiritual dimension into a solely literal and external sense and completely missed the Law’s prophetic-spiritual function. Jews didn’t recognize Christ “because they did not recognize the time had come to uncover its truth” (ibid.), while he himself acted in love from a spiritual perspective that respected the fullness of the Law. But this fullness being hidden from the Jews, Christ fulfilled the Law enigmatically, precisely by acts that seemed to disregard it. Moreover, that kind of spiritual reading by indirection was characteristic of figurative reading

Notes to Pages 152–154

58.

59.

60.

61.

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of the Law. Finally, this act of assuming the condemnation of the Law initiated “the astounding exchange” of redemption that took up the punishment of Adam and culminated in Christ speaking Adam’s words on the cross. CSEL 84:81–82. The translation follows Plumer, Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 159, with adjustments. Besides reading ad litteram as “literally,” I have underscored the “willful” aspect of Christ’s resistance to literal interpretations of the Law. Plumer translated conflagravit as “incurred”; but in my judgment, “incited” better captures the provocation expressed here. So also for suscepit: I have altered Plumer’s quasi-passive “received” to the active “took up,” in order to stress Christ’s strategic intent as Augustine seems to have understood it. For Augustine it is paramount that Christ’s work of mediation was grounded in his true and full humanity. Though only in writing to Volusianus about 411 did Augustine begin using technical “person” terminology to articulate an understanding of the divine-human conjunction, he believed it from the time of his baptism. “A Mediator has appeared between God and human beings so that, uniting both natures in the unity of his person, he may raise up the ordinary to the extraordinary and temper the extraordinary to the ordinary” (ep. 137.3.9). Brian Daley comments on this passage: “Augustine emphasizes that the very heart of the redeeming grace claimed by the Christian community is . . . the proclamation of Jesus’ ordinariness as well as his deity, the joining of two complete, wholly unlike realities, the divine and human, in a single agent” (“Making a Human Will Divine: Augustine and Maximus on Christ and Salvation,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. Aristotle Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos [Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008], 113). It was critical that Christ’s full humanity include all the elements of a complete inner life, especially a self-directing will. “For Augustine, as for none of the classical philosophers before him, the will is a distinctive, characteristic feature of the human person: the self-determining source of motion and action within each of our conscious selves that is intrinsically linked to our intelligence and ability to evaluate the situation in which we live, yet that has an unpredictable dynamic of its own” (ibid. 114). E.g., ep. 11.4; vera rel. 16.30; div. qu. 25; and often throughout Augustine’s works, both early and late. One passage from his early priesthood, before the shift I am discussing, spoke of Christ as the king who “took up our sins” (rex noster suscepit peccata nostra; div. qu. 61.2 [CCL 44A:122]). But this still refers to an act of Christ’s incarnate divinity, as he goes on to explain. The phrasing is influenced by the language of 1 Pet. 2:24. Augustine did insist that the Man taken up by the Word from the moment of creation was never distinct from the will of the Word. For this reason, as van Bavel said, Augustine cannot consider Christ as a human person in himself, apart from the Word (Recherches sur la christologie, 112). So the claim here does not oppose the divine and human wills in Christ but recognizes the unique

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62.

63.

64.

65.

Notes to Pages 154–155 work of Christ’s human will in the work of redemption. His humility and obedience was an active human obedience within the grace of union with the divine Word. This preserves the reality of a true human actor (persona) on the plane of history, whose practice of living moment by moment in God’s will infuses time, space, and material reality with the grace and power of the eternal God, and makes them conductors of that grace and power. Compare Brian Daley’s comment: “It is, in fact, the humility of Christ, the human self-emptying of the eternal Word of God for the sake of sinners, that was, both for the early and the late Augustine, the distinctive element of the Christian Gospel” (“A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in St. Augustine’s Christology,” Word and Spirit 9 [1987]: 108; emphasis added). Exp. Gal. 22.7 (CSEL 84:83). The Latin of this quote replaces portavit, “carried,” of the exp. prop. Rm. with pertulit, “bore.” Cyprian had used portavit in quoting 1 Pet., and the Vulgate also used it in translating Isa. 53:4. The longer quote closely matches the translations of this verse found in other Fathers, including the Vulgate. This is the only time in Augustine’s early works that he quotes the text in this form, and one of only two such quotes overall; the other occurs almost twenty years later in pecc. mer. 1.27.54 (c. 412). Exp. Gal. 22.9 (CSEL 84:83): unde nec erubuit nec timuit apostolus dicere peccatum eum fecisse pro nobis. One suspects that other manuscripts with a translation closer to the Greek were always available while choices between variant readings were left to the interpreter. However, it is striking that Augustine does not resort to the Greek text. Though he corrects it here, only many years later does he blame the error on “certain counterfeit manuscripts” (in quibusdam mendosis codicibus); ench. 13.41 (BA 9:180). Augustine’s emphasis is different in exp. prop. Rm. 32–34 (CSEL 84:14 [26:4–5]), where he stressed the moral consequences of self-subjection: “What is it ‘to destroy (evacuare) the body of sin’? [Paul] himself explains: ‘that we might not serve sin any longer,’ along with what he says, ‘If we have died with Christ’ [Col. 3:1], that is, if we have been crucified with Christ. So he says elsewhere, ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their flesh with its vices and passions’” [Gal. 5:24]. That section appears in c. Adim. 21. My approach admittedly adjusts the order of retr., where c. Adim. immediately precedes the works on Romans. In my view, the sequence of thought on Moses’ curse in c. Adim. 21 links more closely to exp. Gal., so at least some sections of c. Adim. seem to have been written after the works on Romans. We know that some of the early works were written piecemeal and “catch-as-catch-can.” He wrote parts of div. qu. on random slips of paper (retr. 1.26.1), as though on the back of an envelope (e.g., Q. 25). Moreover, it is unclear whether he listed works according to when he started (more likely) or completed them. Furthermore, the answers were collected into a book only after he became a bishop. The upshot is that the order of retr. is probably only roughly reliable (Pierre-Marie Hombert, Nouvelles recherches de chronologie

Notes to Pages 155–157

66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

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Augustinienne, CEASA 163 [Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2000], 2–5). Goulven Madec thought that we should resign ourselves to uncertainty about this (Introduction aux ‘Révisions’ et à la lecture des œuvres de saint Augustin, CEASA 150 [Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1996], 149–157). But other problems make it even more difficult to place c. Adim. chronologically, or at least to date all its parts at the same time. Augustine wrote (retr. 1.22.1) that after he composed his answer to Adimantus the work was lost, so he wrote out another set of answers; but then on rediscovering the first version he combined it with the second. The work was incomplete, and so he also intended to add other answers, but got busy and forgot about it. So while Martine Dulaey may well be justified in dating the millenarian c. Adim. before the nonmillenarian en. Ps. 6 (“À quelle date Augustin a-t-il pris ses distances vis-à-vis du millenarisme?” REA 46 (2000): 35–36 and 48–53), that judgment may apply to only one version of c. Adim. My claim is that chap. 21 reflects the changes coming from Augustine’s new insight about Christ the crucified man. It seems that after some rewriting and amending, c. Adim. 21 appeared later. C. Adim. 21 (BA 17:350): mors ipsa . . . quam Dominus noster suscipiendo evacuavit. The translation is Teske’s. Ibid.: non ergo Dominus per linguam Moysi famuli Dei, sed mors ipsa meruit maledictum, quam Dominus noster suscipiendo evacuavit. C. Adim. 21 (BA 17:352): suscipiendo autem ignominiosissimum apud homines mortis genus . . . hoc est, mortem crucis. Cf. Rom. 5:8, a text not treated in the exp. prop. Rm. As we’ll see, this differs from Augustine’s claim made as recently as late 393 that referred Paul’s praise of the divine Lord “through whom are all things” (Rom. 11:36) to the mediating work to the divine Son (f. et symb. 9.19). James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions I:1–7, 461: “The 1 Tim. text itself is never cited before c. 394/5 (Gal. exp. 24, 63; div. qu. 80.3), but is later frequent in [Augustine].” For Augustine’s early concept of mediation, see Goulven Madec, “Connaissance de Dieu et action de grâces: Essai sur les citations de l’Ép. aux Romains I, 18–25 dans l’œuvre de saint Augustin,” RA 2 (1962): 274–284. For later developments, see Gerard Remy, Le Christ mediateur dans l’oeuvre de Saint Augustin (Lille: Université de Lille, 1979), 1:46ff. CSEL 84:87. In exp. Gal. Augustine painted himself into a Christological corner with contrasting Pauline statements about Christ’s humanity. In the first part of Galatians Paul implied that the risen Christ was no longer human. As Augustine reads Paul, the first apostles were sent “through a human being,” that is, through the mortal Jesus prior to his resurrection. Paul by contrast claims that he was “not sent by a human being” (Gal. 1:1), that is, he was sent by the risen Christ who was no longer mortal but “now wholly God” (totum iam Deum; exp. Gal. 2.3); that is, he was no longer technically “human.” But that clashed with Paul’s other explanation in Galatians about the mediator (Gal. 3:19–20) that Augustine linked with Paul’s claim in 1 Timothy about “the

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73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

Notes to Pages 157–162 Mediator, the man Christ Jesus.” (1 Tim. 2:5); Christ’s heavenly work as mediator depended on him remaining human after the resurrection (exp. Gal. 24.4). Thus the dilemma. Augustine reconciled the texts by saying that Paul spoke differently in different contexts, as he also did when having Timothy circumcised (Acts 16:1–3) while also saying, “circumcision counts for nothing” (Gal. 6:15) (exp. Gal. 63.1–10). Much later, retr. 1.24.1 added a more theological explanation based on Christ’s different states before and after the resurrection. The phrase “now wholly God,” Augustine insisted, never denied Christ’s post-resurrection humanity, but rather highlighted Christ’s newly won immortality precisely as a human being, while of course he never surrendered his immortality as God. But now being immortal, it was only in the strict sense that “the Christ-God is now no longer a human being” (iam nunc non homo Christus Deus). Nevertheless, because he ascended into heaven in his human nature he could become “the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” C. Faust. 14. 3 (CSEL 25/1:405). Death is not called “sin” because someone dies (ibid.), and a person does not sin by dying. This reverses the very claim Augustine made about Christ’s death in exp. prop. Rm. 48. CSEL 25/1:408; trans. Teske (WSA I/20:178). C. Adim. 21 (BA 17:350). C. Faust. 14.6 (CSEL 25/1:407): Etiamne et Filius Dei? Etiam prorsus! Augustine’s ascription of title “mediator” in Gal. 3:19 to Christ agrees with most other patristic commentators; Plumer, Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 164n101. On the importance of this text, see Remy, Le Christ mediateur I:46–52. Augustine’s text of Gal. 3.19–20 read as follows (CSEL 84:86): Lex transgressionis gratia proposita est, donec veniret, semen cui promissum est, dispositum per angelos in manu mediatoris. Mediator autem unius non est, Deus vero unus est. (“The Law was laid down on account of transgression until it should come, that is, the seed to whom the promise was made that was placed by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now, no mediator is only ‘of one,’ whereas God is one.”) Many years later he recognized the mistake in reading the Greek text, retr. 2.24.2. Yet Augustine was still using the faulty translation as late as the early 420s while writing the last books of Gn. Litt. (5.19.38; 9.16.30; 9.18.35). As translated by Plumer (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 167), who comments that “humility” stands for the Incarnation by metonymy (166n 103). I suggest that Augustine’s figuration combined associative metonymy with part-whole synecdoche so as to enfold Jesus’ human willingness to embrace the cross within the divine Word’s humble willingness to take flesh. Literally translated Augustine’s phrasing reads, “both through revelation before Christ’s humility took place and through the gospel after it took place” (humilitatem Christi et per revelationem, antequam fieret, et per evangelium, posteaquam facta est [CSEL 84:87]).

Notes to Pages 162–165

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80. Exp. Gal. 24.15 (CSEL 84:88): Per angelos autem ministrata est omnis dispensatio veteris testamenti . . . per angelos disposita est illa dispensatio legis. Cf. F. Edward Cranz, “The Development of Augustine’s Ideas on Society Before the Donatist Controversy” [originally published 1954], in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert A. Markus (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 355f. 81. Exp. Gal. 24.15 (CSEL 84:88): agente in eis spiritu sancto, et ipso verbo veritatis nondum incarnato, sed numquam ab aliqua veridica administratione recedente. “Service-work of speaking the truth” is my attempt to translate the foggy phrase, veridica administratio. Plumer (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 167) translates it as “true administration.” Nevertheless the meaning is fairly clear, that is, that even before becoming incarnate the divine Word constantly engaged in conveying truth to Israel throughout its history. 82. Exp. Gal. 24.16 (CSEL 84:88): [Angeli] cum aliquando suam, aliquando Dei personam, sicut prophetarum etiam mos est, agerent. 83. C. Adim. 9.1 (BA 17:254). Kari Kloos, “Seeing the Invisible God: Augustine’s Reconfiguration of Theophany Narrative Exegesis,” AS 36, no. 2 (2005): 412: “Augustine’s use of inhabitantis here suggests that his understanding of God’s presence in the theophanies is authentic, not merely symbolized by the creature used in the theophany.” 84. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.2.29–32. 85. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 236f.

c h a p t er 6 1. The quoted phrase in the chapter title above comes from trin. 4.3.6 in reference to Christ praying the words of Psalm 21:2 (Matt. 27:46; Mark 15:34), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 2. Recounted by Augustine’s close friend and biographer Possidius, vita Aug. 31.2. 3. The most complete study of the Enarrationes in psalmos is Michael Fiedrowicz’s Psalmus Vox Totius Christi: Studien zu Augustins ‘Enarrationes in Psalmos’ (Freiburg: Herder, 1997). See also the authoritative entry of Fiedrowicz and Hildegund Müller on the Enarrationes in the Augustinus-Lexikon. The first volumes of the Bibliothèque Augustinienne (BA) edition of the Enarrationes have begun to appear under the general editorship of Martine Dulaey; volumes 57A and 57B, with strong introductory material and notes, cover Psalms 1–16 and 17–25, respectively (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2009). Among many rich brief literary-theological studies of Augustine on the Psalms, I select three: Isabelle Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture”: L’herméneutique augustinienne (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustinienne, 2004), 160–186; Martine Dulaey, “L’interprétation du Psaume 21 (22TM) chez saint Augustin,” in David, Jésus et la reine Esther: Recherches sur le Psaume 21, ed. G. Dorival (Louvain: Peeters, 2002), 315–340; Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Les commentaires

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4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

Notes to Pages 165–166 patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siècles): vol. II—Exégèse prospologique et théologie, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 220 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studium Orientalium, 1985), 365–388. For a good overview in English, Fiedrowicz condensed his book into a précis as a “General Introduction” to the recent translation of the Enarrationes in WSA III/15:13–66. I briefly survey the Enarrationes in Psalmos in ATA, 290–296. The statement comes from Gustave Bardy, Saint Augustin, L’homme et l’oeuvre (3rd ed. 1940), who added, “Those who want to know the foundation of the interior life of the bishop of Hippo should read the Enarrationes” (quoted in Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi, 47). Fiedrowicz refers to Augustine’s “special affinity and connatural relationship” with the Psalms (ibid.) Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi, 145–146. Ibid. 211–25. On the sources of Augustine’s early exegesis, see Martine Dulaey’s seminal series of articles collectively titled “L’apprentissage de l’exégèse biblique par Augustin”: (1) Années 386–89, REAP 48 (2002): 267–295; (2) Années 390–92, REAP 49 (2003): 43–84; (3) Années 393–94, REAP 51 (2005): 21–65. References to Augustine’s Psalms expositions can be confusing on several fronts, so let me append an explanation here. (1) Numbering of the Psalms. Augustine’s Latin text followed the numbering of the Greek translation called the Septuagint (LXX), which combined the Hebrew Psalms 9 and 10 into one psalm; thus the Greek and Latin Psalms 9(b) –147 were one behind the Hebrew enumeration used in modern Bibles. Other small irregularities occur, but the versions catch up at Psalm 147. The recent English translation by Maria Boulding keeps the Latin enumeration. However, anyone using the old nineteenthcentury translation in the Oxford Library of the Fathers series should note that Augustine’s expositions were transposed into the Hebrew numbering system of the Psalms. That translation was abridged for the series Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, and has often been reprinted; moreover (beware!) that public domain translation is the one readily available today online. (2) Numbering of (Priest) Augustine’s First Series of Expositions. Augustine treated Psalms 1–32 (modern 1–33) during his priesthood, and that series is my focus in this chapter. I will refer to these simply by the Psalm and section number assigned by the seventeenth-century editors of Augustine’s works, the indefatigable Benedictines of St. Maur in Paris. Migne reproduced these in the nineteenth-century Patrologia Latina, followed by the modern critical editions CCL and CSEL, and by BA. Thus “Exp. 1 Ps. 21.1” refers to the Exposition of Psalm 21, first series, first section. (3) Numbering of (Bishop) Augustine’s Second Series. However, Augustine treated Psalms 18, 25, 26, and 29–32 a second time years later as a preaching bishop, and these have traditionally been called “Enarratio [Exposition] 2 in Psalmum 18, 25,” etc. Furthermore, Augustine often preached several sermons on the Psalms in this later second series, so it is necessary to mark that just prior to the section

Notes to Pages 166–167

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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numbers common to all the expositions. Thus “Exp. 2 Ps. 30.3.1” refers to the exposition of Psalm 30 (modern Ps. 31), second series, third sermon, first section. (4) Numbering the English Translations of the Expositions. Note that the recent WSA translation by Maria Boulding numbers the expositions slightly differently. It groups all the expositions of an individual psalm together and counts them in a sequence. So Augustine’s first treatment of Psalm 30 is Exposition 1, while the three later sermons as bishop in the second series are Expositions 2, 3, and 4. Thus the usual “Exp. 2 Ps. 30.3.1” becomes WSA’s “Exp. 4 Ps. 30.1.” See the comments of Éric Rebillard in BA 57A:41–51. See Augustine’s preface to his dictated exposition of Psalm 118, the last psalm he treated, perhaps as late as the early 420s. However, retr. mentions neither this nor his other exegetical sermon series on the Johannine writings of the New Testament. He seems to have planned to revise and list his sermons separately. The Psalms sermons are mentioned, however, in the catalog drawn up posthumously by Possidius called the Indiculum. Erasmus first referred to the collection as enarrationes, “running explanations,” and the term stuck. Note again that the series of second treatments of Psalms 18, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, and 32 come from his later preaching as bishop. Those expositions are traditionally printed right after their respective first treatments (as in Boulding’s English translation). However, scholarship studies the first series on its own, and that is how they appeared in the recent Latin critical edition in CSEL 93/1 (2003). The new BA volumes (2009–) return to the traditional format. Further, the Christological interpretation of the phrase “to the end” (referring to Christ) in 10.1 recalls the same phrase in 4.1, and the exposition of Psalm 11 recalls a discussion of the nearly identical title of Psalm 6 (11.1). The contemporaneous s. Dom. m. (2.25.87) refers to this exposition (11.7). The sequential procedure remains in place for the second block of expositions, as when 29.1 refers back to the exposition of title of Psalm 28. For an overview of the issues, see BA 57A:29–40. Clemens Weidmann, the editor of the CSEL critical edition of the first series of expositions, drew the line between Psalms 14 and 15 both because of internal stylistic changes that occurred as Augustine shifted from discourses to exegetical notes, and text-critical differences in the manuscript tradition that omit biblical lemmata beginning at en. Ps. 15 (“Unde ipse ita transtulimus: Zur exegetischen technik Augustins in den ältesten Enarrationes in psalmos,” in L’esegi dei Padre Latini. Dalle origin a Gregorio Magno, SEA 68 [Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2000] 1:233–43). However, Martine Dulaey demurs (BA 57A:36–40), and argues for the break between Psalms 10 and 11. She argues persuasively that Augustine included the Scripture verses in his text, and also that, pace Weidmann, the later expositions are just as worthy of Augustine as the first. However, I cannot quite agree that “the method and thought [of the second group] are no different than what one

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finds in the first” (BA 57/A: 37). Their difference relates to what I argued in chapter 5, that is, Augustine’s fresh Pauline insight into the humanity of Christ the Mediator. In this chapter I try to show that this became his lens for reading Psalms 15–32. Principally Augustine’s adoption of prosopopoeia as his tool of exegesis suggests he has taken a different perspective. 15. BA 57A:51. See Augustine’s comment in conf. 11.2.2, where he laments his busy bishop’s life and confesses to his mounting frustration that “the drops of time are too precious for me”—especially for studying Scripture, which he would rather do than anything else. 16. The phrase comes from the Donatist exegete Tyconius, whose celebrated Book of Rules (Liber regularum) appeared perhaps in the 380s. He wrote, he claimed, “in order to fashion (fabricare) keys and lamps, as it were, to the secrets of the Law. For there are certain mystic rules which obtain (obtinet) in the inner recesses of the entire Law and keep the rich treasures of the truth hidden from some people. But if the sense of these rules is accepted without ill will, as we impart it, whatever is closed will be opened and whatever is dark will be illumined; and anyone who walks the vast forest of prophecy guided by these rules, as by pathways of light, will be kept from straying into error” (Prologue; trans. Babcock). Augustine comments on The Book of Rules in the latter part of Book 3 of doc. Chr., written in the mid-420s. But we know that Augustine read Tyconius not later than the mid-390s from a reference to Tyconius and his book in a letter to Aurelius, bishop of Carthage (ep. 41.2). Interest in describing Tyconius’s influence on Augustine has centered recently on how Augustine imbibed Tyconius’s thinking on eschatology, Christ and the Church, and the meaning of the Law; scholars have seen Tyconius as a primary source for everything from Augustine’s “two cities” framework in civ. Dei, to his changed understanding about operative grace in the mid-390s, to the idea of the whole Christ (totus Christus) speaking in the Old Testament Scriptures. I offer the observation that the effort to map such genetic relationships seems often to spring from a tendency to believe that to find a thing’s origin is to understand it. But it seems to me that tracking even valid genetic relationships only begins the process of understanding. My goal in this study is not to settle questions about Augustine’s sources but to try to understand Augustine’s actual practice. In any case, most agree that Augustine transformed his sources as he used them, and it’s never good enough simply to say he took an idea from someone. Tyconius is a case in point, as Marie-Josèphe Rondeau pointed out, in relation to his so-called bipartite body of the Lord (from Rule 1 of The Book of Rules). Some see there the origins of Augustine’s concept of the totus Christus; but the issue isn’t so simple. Briefly, first, the seedbed of the idea is biblical (1 Cor. 12 and passim). Second, Augustine had a version of this concept as he wrote Gn. c. Man. in the late 380s (2.24.37), before he read Tyconius. Third, even if one agrees that Augustine read Tyconius, and that the Donatist shaped Augustine’s thinking, nevertheless their

Notes to Pages 167–169

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

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aims were different. Tyconius proffered a principle that distinguished the voices of Christ and the Church, while Augustine sought to relate them. Rondeau rightly observes Augustine was thinking something new: “What is fundamentally new is something that Augustine sets up as a general principle valid for the entire Psalter, namely, that it is the voice of Christ that makes itself heard, speaking sometimes in the name of the head, sometimes in the name of the body: two in one voice” (Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier II:369). Not only is the phrase totus Christus Augustine’s own (ibid.); he was the first to see the alternation of voices as an exchange that was a microcosm of redemption. New Testament scholar Richard Hays spells this out, beginning with his wellknown Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). See now his recent essay, expanded from a piece first published in 1993, “Christ Prays the Psalms: Israel’s Psalter as the Matrix of Early Christology,” in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 101–118. This essay, which Hays called “something of a turning point in my own thought about Paul’s use of Scripture” (xiii), analyzes Paul’s hermeneutic of Christ praying Psalm 69 (LXX 68) in the first person in Rom. 15:3 (“The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me,” v. 9). He goes on to compare this with similar moves in other passages in Paul and the rest of the New Testament, including Jesus’ cry from the cross in Mark 15:34 (= Matt. 27:46). Hays concludes with a series of theses for reflection on the earliest development of Christology, among which stands #3: “The interpretation of the lament psalms as prayers of the Messiah is already a presupposition of the earliest stratum of New Testament tradition” (117, emphasis in text). See the survey of Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier II (note 3 above). En. Ps. 1.1 (BA 57A:116). The phrase is difficult to translate into English, and has been variously rendered “the Lord-Man” (Boulding [WSA III/15:67], following the Oxford translation); “the Lord’s Man” (D. L. Mosher, Eighty-Three Different Questions, FC 70, 69, with discussion in n. 6); and “Man of the Lord” (Francine Cardman, The Preaching of Augustine: Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973], 112). Here I follow Boniface Ramsey’s translation “Lordly Man” (Revisions, WSA I/2:84], which offers a good compromise between literalness and readability. Tarsicius van Bavel (Recherches sur la christologie de Saint Augustin, Paradosis X [Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1954], 16) similarly translated the phrase, “l’homme seigneurial.” van Bavel, Recherches sur la christologie, 16n11. Exp. Gal. 24.9; see en. Ps. 44.7 (CCL 38:498–499): speciosus forma prae filiis hominum [Ps. 44:3]; et unctus oleo exultationis prae particibus suis [Ps. 44:8]. It appears in several early Psalms expositions (1.1; 4.1, 2; 7.13, 20; 8.11, 13) and in other contemporaneous writings (e.g., s. Dom. m. 2.6.20; div. qu. 36.2; 57.3; 75.2).

330 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

Notes to Pages 170–177 En. Ps. 3.3 (BA 57A:156): sic suscepit Dei Verbum ut simul cum eo Deus fieret. Ibid. En. Ps. 3.4 (BA 57A:158). Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier, the second volume of which is subtitled Exégèse prospologique et théologie; see especially Hubertus Drobner, Person-Exegese und Christologie bei Augustinus: Zur Herkunft der Formel una persona, Philosophia Patrum 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1986); “Grammatical Exegesis and Christology in St. Augustine” SP 18, no. 4 (1990), 49–63. En. Ps. 2.7 (BA 57A:138). En. Ps. 3.1 (BA 57A:152). Martine Dulaey observes that they read like “school exercises” (BA 57A:31). His early Psalms expositions stress rather the Word as the coefficient, even the inhabitant, of the voice. The Word “commandeers” (usurpat) the human voice and intermingles with it in order to enter the ears and so into the habits and the memory of its hearers, just as crushed grapes trickle their juice into the wine vat for aging (en. Ps. 8.2 [BA 57A: 338]). En. Ps. 12.1 (BA 57A:490): more nostro Scriptura loquitur. En. Ps. 2.3 (BA 57A:132–134): nihil horum tamen sapere oportet carnaliter (“None of these things should be judged carnally”). From the same time period, Q. 52 of div. qu. treats Gen. 6:6, “I am sorry that I made man.” God remains unchanging, wrote Augustine; but for people who are unable to turn from one course of action to another without regret, God still becomes “extremely accommodating to lowly human understanding” (accommodatissime tamen ad humilem humanam intelligentiam [CCL 44A:84]). En. Ps. 3.6 (BA 57A:162): moris est divinarum scripturarum personae Dei tribuere quod in nobis facit. The same linkage between Deut. 3:13 and “the Son does not know” occurs in Q. 60 of div. qu. “Orchestration scripturaire” was Anne-Marie La Bonnardière’s picturesque phrase for describing Augustine’s habit of multiplying mutually illuminating biblical texts. It appears in a number of her writings, e.g., “Le Cantique des Cantiques dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin,” REA 1 (1955): 229ff. Gn. c. Man. 1.17.27; 2.2.3; 2.29.43. Div. qu. 61.2 (CCL 44A:121). Ibid.: Quae tamen duae personae dominum nostrum praefigurabant; ambas enim solus ille sustinuit, et non figurate, sed proprie solus implevit. Drobner explains how after this figurative conjunction Augustine began to use “person” as a technical term for the divine-human union (Person-Exegese, 153–169). Div. qu. 61.2 (CCL 44A:121–122). It appears early in mor. 2.11.22, then grows in importance as Augustine the priest builds his doctrine of redemption; it appears five times in the early en. Ps. (1.1; 9.5; 17.3, 48, 51), eight times in exp. prop. Rm., and another seven times

Notes to Pages 177–181

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

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in the Paul-focused Q. 66 of div. qu. The theme becomes prominent partly in opposition to the Manichees, whose teaching on becoming free from materiality made “Christ the Liberator” an important concept, as Fortunatus told Augustine (c. Fort. 7). On Christ’s priesthood, see Daniel J. Jones, Christus Sacerdos in the Preaching of St. Augustine: Christ and Christian Identity, Patrologia xiv (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004). Div. qu. 61.2 (CCL 44A:122), trans. Ramsey, adjusted (WSA I/12:86). The gospel genealogies were a point of neuralgic disagreement with the Manichees; Augustine often explained and defended the differences between Matthew and Luke, as for example in Book 2 of cons. ev. and Books 2 and 3 of c. Faust. Another image group besides King and Priest that also configures Christ’s work of salvation is the Physician. For Augustine, sins are diseases of the soul (en. Ps. 6.4). Christ’s death was the work of a spiritual doctor who brought spiritual medicine that both cured disease and preserved health (7.10). The master image of Christ the healer, of course, had deep roots in the Gospel tradition, and had a long life in Augustine’s teaching. Rudolph Arbesmann, “The Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ in St. Augustine,” Traditio 10 (1954):1–28; M.-F. Berrouard, “Le Christ Médecin,” note comp. 15, BA 71:854–855; William Harmless, “Christ the Pediatrician: Infant Baptism and Christological Imagery in the Pelagian Controversy,” AS 28, no. 2 (1997): 7–34, with more general study of the image in Augustine, 9–16. Thomas Martin broadly studies the concept in relation to Augustine’s reading of Paul in “Paul the Patient: Christus Medicus and the stimulus carnis (2 Cor. 12:17): A Consideration of Augustine’s Medicinal Christology,” AS 32, no. 2 (2001): 219–256, with an extensive bibliography in note 9, 222–223. The passage anticipates the more famous sentence of conf. 10.29.40, “Give what you command and command what you will.” Recent studies have termed this device, “speech-in-character.” New Testament scholar Stanley K. Stowers discusses its use in “Romans 7.7–25 as a Speech-inCharacter (prosopopoiía),” in Paul in His Hellenistic Context, ed. Troels EngbergPedersen (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995), 180–202. I draw on his essay in what follows. Stowers, “Romans 7.7–25 as a Speech-in-Character,” 180–191. From Institutio Oratoria, trans. Butler (LCL 126:390–395). We have already seen Cicero following Aristotle’s picture of the dead appearing in court to argue the case of understanding a document’s intention, which necessarily involved impersonation (above, chapter 1). Quintilian likewise envisioned its use in a court of law, where a speaker might make someone absent seem present for rhetorical effect. Stowers, “Romans 7.7–25 as Speech-in-Character,” 191–193. Ibid. 188–191; Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier, II:51–58. Stowers, “Romans 7.7–25 as Speech-in-Character,” 193–197.

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53. Simpl. 1.1.1: “In this passage it seems to me that the Apostle has transfigured into himself a man placed under the Law, in whose person he speaks those words” (Quo loco videtur mihi Apostolus transfigurasse in se hominem sub lege positum cuius verbis ex persona sua loquitur [CCL 44:8]; cf. en. Ps. 102.15). Significantly, Augustine’s term for this transposition of voices is “transfiguration,” which clearly shows the rhetorical base of what would become a crucial hermeneutic concept for later Expositions of the Psalms. See “Epilogue” below. 54. The performance is available for viewing on the Internet. 55. Carl P. E. Springer, “The Prosopopoeia of Church as Mother in Augustine’s Psalmus contra Partem Donati,” AS 18 (1987): 52–65; Daniel J. Nodes, “The Organization of Augustine’s Psalmus contra Partem Donati,” Vigiliae Christianae 63 (2009): 397. 56. Ps. c. Don. 270–278, and 287 (BA 28:188, 190); trans. William Harmless, S.J., Augustine: In His Own Words (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 245. 57. Like some other devices of this period, extensive use of this rhetorical form was experimental. Yet other briefer passages of impersonation appear not infrequently in Augustine’s works. Some instances are well known, as when in Confessions he recalls hearing “as it were your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me’” (7.10.16; trans. Chadwick, OWC:124, quoted by permission of Oxford University Press). At other times he notes instances in the Scriptures, as with Paul’s appeal to the Galatians, “My little children, for whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you!” (Gal. 4:19). Augustine comments that Paul “spoke this more in the person of Mother Church (ex persona matris ecclesiae)” (exp. Gal. 38.1–2 [CSEL 84:106]). As we’re about to see, Augustine drew profound insight from this figure that helped him to explain Christ’s redemption. 58. En. Ps. 3.6 (BA 57A:162): illi tribuit cuius munere loquebar. 59. En. Ps. 3.9 (BA 57A:168). This is not yet quite the “whole Christ” (totus Christus) of Augustine’s later Psalms expositions. Clearly its sense of the unity of head and body is a premise of the later concept; but we do not see here the interactive or transpositive dynamic of the later conception, in which the head and body exchange voices, or dialogue together. Here the Church speaks using Christ as its mouthpiece. 60. En. Ps. 3.9; pace Boulding’s “in these prophetic words.” 61. En. Ps. 4.2 (BA 57A:184). Augustine had already referred to this parabolic picture of Matt. 25:35–45 in Gn. c. Man. 2.25.38, where he wrote that Christians may be said “not implausibly to bear the person of Christ” (non incongrue sustinet personam Christi [CSEL 91:162]). 62. C. ep. Man. 36.41 (BA 17:492): “The one true Teacher, the incorruptible Truth, the sole interior Teacher, does the teaching. He also became exterior in order to call us back from exterior things to interior ones, and, taking the form of a servant

Notes to Pages 186–190

63.

64.

65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

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[Phil. 2:7], in order that his loftiness may become known to those who are rising up, he deigned to be seen as lowly by those who were lying prostrate” (trans. Teske, WSA I/19:263). Augustine lists this work in retr. as his second after being ordained bishop, so that it dates roughly to the mid-390s. The Latin text reads: hoc enim in praedestinatione a propheta dicatur, quousque ad terras dominum nostrum illa de qua in evangelio dicatur messis matura deposuit, cuius salus est in eius resurrectione qui pro nobis dignatus est mori (CSEL 93/1A:91). Augustine does not yet enlarge upon or even acknowledge, as he would later (cat. rud. 3.6), that the ancient saints lived as actual members of the living body of Christ before his advent; here the prophecy is a function of God’s predestinating will for which all future things are present. Augustine may have here adapted a Plotinian ontology of mysticism. See Robert Arp, “Plotinus, Mysticism, and Mediation,” Religious Studies 40 (2004): 145–163, esp. 161: “It can be argued that the paradoxical claims Plotinus makes with respect to the mystical union actually speak to the fact that Plotinus is trying to locate a place for mediation in the very experience itself. . . . In very clear instances, Plotinus views an erotic or other form of cognitive contact as the mediator; in other instances awareness, conceptualization and self-identity act as the mediator.” Gerard Remy, Le Christ Mediateur dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1979), I:31–34. Enarratio in ps. 5.3 suggests the same trinitarian structure wherein the divine Son brings believers into communion with the Father, sans the title “mediator,” in Augustine’s comments on Psalm 5:3, “Give heed to the voice of my petition, my King and my God.” He saw the sequence of divine titles there as a kind of road map for effective prayer, which is properly made through the Son to the Father. The psalmist showed this when, Augustine claimed, he “rightly” (recte) wrote first, “my King,” and only afterward wrote, “my God” (5.3). Scripture’s title “King,” he continued, customarily refers to the divine Son, who teaches that “one goes to the Father through me” (John 14:6). This phrasing then inspires Augustine’s brief meditation on relations within the Trinity, with the same reference to Rom. 11:36. So while at this point Augustine still thinks of mediation as primarily a divine function, the comments in 3.10 suggest that function now includes the risen Man, who being “now totally God” has received the gift of participating in the divine function. Cf. van Bavel, Recherches sur la christologie, 55. Propter immortalitatem iam nunc non homo Christus Deus; retr. 1.24.1. For a similar view in relation to later expositions of the Psalms, see Thomas F. Martin, “Reading the Psalms of David Through Paul: Augustine’s Commentary on Psalm 31,” L’Esegi dei Padri Latini. SEA 68 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2000), 1:245–252. Most studies of Augustine’s reading of Paul during this time focus on issues of the Law, grace, and free will; to speak only of a recent example, see Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),

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70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

Notes to Pages 190–196 115–163, with references to discussions in scholarship. While these issues are prominent early on (and become hugely important against the Pelagians), the focus here is the relatively quieter issues of Christology and hermeneutics. For instance, see the references to Rom. 8:25 (on hoping for what we do not see); Rom. 8:34 (on Christ interceding for us at God’s right hand); Rom. 13:10 (on love fulfilling the Law); 1 Cor. 1:31 (on boasting only in the Lord); and 2 Cor. 2:16 (on the effectual difference of preaching for believers and nonbelievers). Certain other texts appear in one block only, but comparison with references to the same texts in other works show that their meaning does not change drastically. So Rom. 7:24–25 (“Who will deliver me from this death-ridden body? The grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ”) obviously remained hugely important after this period despite its absence in the expositions of Psalms 15–32. For a history of Augustine’s treatment of this last text, see Thomas F. Martin, Rhetoric and Exegesis in Augustine’s Interpretation of Romans 7:24–25a (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001). BA 57A:490: rectus finis. BA 57A:504. Looking over these early works with a knowledge of his later practice, we note Augustine here oddly bypassed the text’s cue to cite John 14:6, “I am the way (via), the truth and the life.” As we will see, he soon invoked this prime Christological text at almost every opportunity; see chapter 7 below. Here, via bona, “the good road,” refers to the soul’s faith-driven virtue that prepares it for spiritual vision. Nevertheless, “the end” clearly anticipates Augustine’s later sense of Christ in doc. Chr. 1.34.38 (BA 11/2:126): hoc est: per me venitur, ad me pervenitur, in me permanetur. Cum enim ad ipsum pervenitur, etiam ad Patrem pervenitur (“‘Along me you come, at me you arrive, and in me you abide.’ For when you reach him, you also reach the Father” [trans. Hill, WSA I/11:123]). The difference is that by the time of writing doc. Chr., Christ has become not only the end of the via but the via itself. BA 57B:16: manu forti Christo secundum hominem. Augustine explained this more fully later in en. Ps. 54.1 (CSEL 94/1:133): “Why is he called ‘the end’? Because whatever we do, we refer to him. And when we arrive in his presence (ad eum perveniremus), we will have nothing else that we seek. . . . An ‘end’ ought to be our completion (perfectio): Christ makes us complete. For in him we are brought to completion, because we are members of the head [i.e., brought to full maturity, like an adult human body; cf. Eph. 4:15–16]. He is also called “the end of the Law” [Rom. 10:4], because without him no one keeps the Law fully (sine illo nemo perficit legem).” Cf. en. Ps. 45.1. See note comp. 15, “In finem (In Ps. 4,1),” in BA 57A:570–574. Martin, “Reading the Psalms of David Through Paul,” 248. En. 1 Ps. 18 is an anomaly whose more leisurely and detailed approach resembles the expositions of Psalms 1–14. It stands apart from the pattern of using prosopopoeia as well (except for the final two sections) that runs through Psalms

Notes to Pages 196–202

77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90.

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15–17 and 19–21. It breaks the sequence of the psalms that Christ speaks from the cross (15–17), and indeed does not mention Christ’s death at all. En. 2 Ps. 30.3.1 (CCL 38:213): Omnia enim quae hic conscripta sunt, speculum nostrum sunt. En. 1 Ps. 21.1 (BA 57B:132). I leave aside that the Psalmist was stirred to write in what could be called an act of divine prosopopoeia, wherein the pre-incarnate Word takes up the psalmist’s human words as his own. En. 1 Ps. 21.1 (BA 57B:132): in personam veteris hominis cuius mortalitatem portavit. En. 2 Ps. 30.1.3 (CCL 38:192): mira commutatio . . . divina commercia . . . mutatio rerum. Christ deigned “to speak in our words, so that we in our turn might speak in his. This is the wonderful exchange, the divine business deal, the transaction effected in this world by the heavenly dealer” (trans. Boulding [WSA III/15:322–323]). The phrase is Martine Dulaey’s (BA 57/B:126). See also her “L’interprétation du Psaume 21 (22TM) chez saint Augustin” (n. 3 above). En. Ps. 79.1 (CCL 39:1111): Denique hoc testimonium et Christum et vineam confitetur; hoc est caput et corpus, regem et plebem, patrem et gregem, et totum omnium scripturarum mysterium Christum et ecclesiam (“In short, this testimony acknowledges both Christ and vine, that is, head and body, king and people, shepherd and flock, and the whole mystery of all Scripture: Christ and the Church.” It reappears often in Augustine’s sermons, but also in his treatises; it is essential to his argument in, e.g., trin. 4.3.6. Ep. 140, written nearly two decades after his priesthood, essentially is an exposition of Psalm 21. See Isabelle Bochet, “Une nouvelle lecture de la Lettre 140 d’Augustin à Honoratus,” REA 45 (1999): 335–351. Joanne McWilliam Dewart (“Augustine’s Developing Use of the Cross, 387–400,” AS 15 [1984]: 22) dismisses these first Psalms expositions with the comment that despite their wording, they present “considerably more than [Augustine] had appropriated intellectually.” The treatments of Psalms 22, 23, 24, 25, and 28 feature the Church supplicating or acclaiming Christ its head. The speaking voice of Psalm 26 belongs to a new convert within the Church, and that of 31 to a repentant sinner. Psalm 32’s exhortation to praise comes from the prophet-psalmist speaking in his own voice. BA 57A:530n4. BA 57A:534–536. Although the past tense readings appear as alternatives in the manuscript tradition, the future tenses have more support and so were adopted by CSEL, followed by BA. van Bavel, Recherches 164–165, notes the difficulty of the phrase for constructing a coherent theological understanding of Christ’s human knowledge. BA 57A:532–536. Augustine repeated the phrase a fifth time in 27.6 in his comments on Psalm 27:7, “Of my own free will I will confess to him.” Augustine wrote: “Now that the fear of death has been destroyed, those who believe in me will

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confess, not driven by the fear bred by being under the Law, but by a free will that works with the Law. But because I am within them, the psalm says, ‘I will confess’ (in quibus quia ego sum, ego confitebor)” (CCL 38:169). 91. The flurry of references to John 17 begins here. Augustine does not invoke John 17 in the treatments of Psalms 1–14 but refers to it at least seven times in the expositions of Psalms 15–32. References to John 17:1 (“Father, glorify your Son”) appear in 19.2, 19.7, and 20.5. Exp. Ps. 15.5 refers to 17:5 (“the glory I had with you before the foundation of the world”). A quote of John 17:10 (“everything that is mine is yours”) appears in 27.9. In 15.5 appears an allusion to John 17:3, on knowledge of the true God, and another in 18.2 to John 17:4, about the Son glorifying the Father on earth. 92. BA 57A:528. 93. Div. qu. 80.3, in a short analysis directed “against the Apollinarians.” 94. En. Ps. 17.2 (BA 57B:16). En. Ps. 3.9 came close, referring simply to “the whole” (totus). In div. qu. 69.10 Augustine made an unusual reference to universus Christus, “the collective Christ,” whose many members have been “turned into one” (unus + verto). 95. En. 1 Ps. 29.1 (CCL 38:171). 96. En. 1 Ps. 29.7–12 (CCL 38:171–173). 97. BA 57B:16. 98. CCL 38:168: mediatoris vox manu fortis in conflictu passionis. 99. CCL 38:186. 100. The Church spoke the rest of the psalm, except for the prophet’s brief intrusions in vv. 20–22 and 24. 101. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis I: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Marc Sebanc (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 237. This is the root Christian understanding of divine “revelation.” Not everything in Scripture equally “reveals”; revelation rather indicates the unveiling of some central interpretive category, story, or theme that illumines the landscape of Scripture and history. The early Church assigned this function to the “rule of faith,” and Irenaeus criticized the Gnostics for rearranging Scripture in ways that suited them. Scripture rather hides much that remains unclear until this golden thread of understanding is found, what Augustine here calls the “key.” 102. De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis I, 237–239. 103. Ibid. 155: “There are abundant correspondences of both ideas and themes between the work of Augustine and the work of Origen. . . . In its broad outlines, in terms of both its best and most debatable aspects, their systems of hermeneutics is the same.” 104. Origen, Commentary on John, Book 1.33–34: “Because Christ had not yet appeared to clarify their mysteries [spoken by the prophets], before Christ’s presence, the Law and the Prophets did not possess the promise implied by the definition of the gospel. Nonetheless, when the Savior became present, acting

Notes to Pages 208–210

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

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so as to embody the gospel, he made them all into gospel by the gospel. It would not be irrelevant to cite as an example ‘A little leaven leavens the whole lump’ [Gal. 5:9]” (trans. Joseph W. Trigg, Origen, The Early Christian Fathers [London: Routledge, 1998], 111). John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 127–137. On this see Michael C. McCarthy, “The Revelatory Psalm: A Fundamental Theology of Augustine’s Enarrationes In Psalmos,” Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003, chap. 3, “The Cross and Revelation.” This transfiguration was the foundation of the “astounding exchange” previously mentioned. When Christ took the form of a slave and clothed us with himself, “he did not disdain to transfigure us into himself (transfigurare nos in se). . . . This is the astounding exchange. . . .” (En. 2 Ps. 30.1.3 [CCL 38:192]. The transfiguration theme appears often in Augustine’s preaching, e.g., En. 2 Ps. 32.1.2; en. Ps. 142. 9; s. 305.4. For a discussion of the theme, see my “Transfiguration: Christology and the Roots of Figurative Exegesis in St. Augustine,” SP 33 (1997): 40–47. Heinrich Lausberg famously called Confessions “an amplified Psalter” (quoted in Fiedrowicz, Psalmus Vox Totius Christi, 47). On the capacity of the Psalms “to format the way [Augustine] sees and interacts with the world,” see Michael C. McCarthy, “Augustine’s Mixed Feelings: Vergil’s Aeneid and the Psalms of David in the Confessions,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 453–479, here 478. En. Ps. 5.1. Augustine already in 1.4 compared God to an inheritance of land in the comment on a phrase of Psalm 1:4, which warns about the ungodly being swept away from “the face of the earth (terra).” He links this to Psalm 141:6, “You are my hope, my portion in the land (terra) of the living.” God is like solid earth in his steadfastness (stabilitas), which “grounds” the human soul as securely as an inheritance of land. Surprisingly the expositions of neither Psalm 5 nor Psalm 15 refer to Rom. 8:18, where Paul speaks of being “co-heirs with Christ.” However, Augustine does refer to that text in the contemporaneous div. qu., which reveals Augustine undergoing the same torturous efforts to make exegetical sense of Christ’s humanity that we see in the earliest Psalms expositions. Q. 75 on “God’s inheritance” invokes Rom. 8:18 in the course of discussing the claim of the Letter to the Hebrews (9:17) that death alone puts an inheritance into effect. Christ died to make us heirs as “sons of the bridegroom” (Matt. 9:15). But Paul says we are “coheirs” with him, and so Christ too is an heir: but what death made Christ an heir? Certainly the Father does not die, Augustine reasons; indeed “the Father himself is our inheritance,” as Psalm 15:5 says. But when unspiritual minds become spiritual, it involves the death of mere partially developed thinking about the Father (75.1 [CCL 44A:216]). Recalling Luke 2:40’s statement that Christ “grew in wisdom,” Augustine wrote that, as a boy (secundum puer), Jesus’ vision of God was only partial. But as his wisdom grew, “partial” vision passed to completion and so “died”; thus the human Jesus “inherited” his full understanding of the

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Father. But then Augustine hesitates, worrying that some may think it beneath the dignity of “the Lordly Man” (the use of dominicus homo places this piece alongside the expositions of Psalms 1–14) to say that he possessed a merely “partial” vision of God, even as a child. So Augustine offers an alternative: Christ may also be “understood as an heir in his body, i.e., the Church, of which we are coheirs. In the same way we are said to be sons of this mother, even though we make up (constet) her constituent parts” (75.2 [CCL 44A:217]). Thus Christ identifies with us as heirs by a kind of metonymy of cause for effect: because he caused our inheritance, he takes the name “heir” with us. 110. En. Ps. 16.13 (BA 57A:546–548). 111. Augustine repeats the interpretation of the Church as “God’s inheritance” in en. Ps. 5.1 and 7.6, and in div. qu. 75; that text must therefore be contemporaneous with the first set of expositions of Psalms 1–14.

c h a p t er 7 1. C. Faust. 22.58 (CSEL 25/1:654). The Latin of the last sentence is: Experimur in exemplis quod intelligimus in libris. On the Rachel-Leah theme, see Marie-François Berrouard, “S. Augustin et la ministére de la predication. Le theme des anges qui montent et qui descendent,” RA 2 (1962): 494–499. 2. Compare the measured comments of Eugene TeSelle, who wrote that Augustine’s exercises in exegesis were “vehicles of theological inquiry” that “changed his thought in crucial ways from time to time.” Nevertheless, Augustine cannot be called primarily an exegete, not only according to our own criteria of historical and philological scholarship but according to the criteria applicable in his own age. By those standards Origen, Ambrosiaster, Jerome, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and many others get high marks as interpreters of Scripture. Augustine was not cut out, by training or temperament, to be an interpreter; he possessed neither the linguistic skills nor the scholarly patience to accomplish that task, and he never really attempted it . . . All his activities were dominated by a concern to engage himself directly with real problems, to inquire into the truth, to convince others, and to persuade them to decide to act in accordance with it. (Augustine the Theologian [New York: Herder, 1970], 346–347) 3. S. 339.4 (PL 38:1481), trans. Hill (WSA III/9:282). Augustine perhaps echoes Paul in 1 Cor. 9:16: “An obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!” 4. Ep. 73.5 (CCL 31A:47). 5. De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture, ed. Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), hereafter Arnold-Bright. Tarmo Toom, Thought Clothed with Sound: Augustine’s Christological Hermeneutics in De doctrina christiana (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003).

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6. For a review of the issues, see Gerald Press, “The Subject and Structure of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana,” AS 11 (1980): 101–107. 7. For Peter Brown doc. Chr. is “one of the most original [books] that Augustine ever wrote.” Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 261. 8. For Karla Pollmann, love is Augustine’s “normative horizon” for biblical interpretation that wells up from the heart of Scripture itself as a “self-referential hermeneutic” (Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana [Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1996], 121–147, especially 143–144); cf. Bochet and Madec, “Le cercle hérmeneutique,” note comp. 3, BA 11/2:438–449. Eric Plumer adds that Augustine “has recovered a central hermeneutical principle sanctioned in Scripture itself by both Jesus [Matt. 22:35–40], and Paul [Rom. 13:10, Gal 5:14]. Thus despite the fact that Augustine is often dismissed out of hand as precritical, his adoption of this principle is consonant with one of the basic emphases of contemporary hermeneutics: that the reader must be open to ‘the claim which confronts him or her in the work’” (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 96). Plumer is quoting Rudolf Bultmann, “Das Problem der Hermeneutik” [1950]. Bultmann himself was probably drawing on Martin Heidegger who wrote, “Any interpretation which is to contribute to understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted” (quoted in Werner Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics [London: SCM Press, 1994], 61–62). So it seems wooden for James J. O’Donnell to declare that On Christian Teaching merely “extrapolated” Augustine’s method from the Bible so that he “knows what Scripture will say before he begins to read” (“De doctrina Christiana,” ATA, 280). The wax fruit borne by that perspective appears in O’Donnell’s further comment that for Augustine the function of figuratively interpreting Scripture was “to produce a text (the exegete’s) that may not be interpreted figuratively, one in which all the hints and suggestions of the original have been made explicit and flattened into unambiguous doctrine” (ibid.). Even if On Christian Teaching gives that impression, that is not what is going on in Augustine’s sermones or expositions of the Psalms or John, at least at their best. On Christian Teaching simply left undescribed the sweaty work of the spiritual midwife (cf. Gal. 4:19) who helps bring Scripture’s central ideas to birth for faith, first for Augustine himself, and then for his audience. Apart from that maieutic context, On Christian Teaching appears to present arbitrarily “extrapolated” principles from Scripture, and becomes a mere answer book. Augustine indeed asserted that various issues got resolved by “the rule of truth” (1.8.8), “the rule of love” (1.22.21), or “the rule of faith” (3.2.2). Yet his “rule” of doctrina christiana was not a mechanical formula but rather the baseline of his hermeneutics, the ground rule for bringing order to the interplay between life and text. It was not an arbitrary posture but a hard-won Archimedean spot for “handling” (tractatio; 1.1.1)

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

Notes to Pages 217–222 great swaths of otherwise “intractable” biblical material (cf. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 259). Standing in that spot allows one to move wisely within the circle of the text’s “surplus of meaning” (see Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning [Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976], 55). To my mind, that explains the integration of consistency and playfulness in Augustine’s sermons (and perhaps also his remarkable energy over four decades of preaching): being ever renewed at the light-filled center of the biblical “pattern of teaching” (cf. Rom. 6:17), Augustine’s preaching could move to its penumbra with the poetic freedom not only to read the text in ways that aligned with faith and love (e.g., Gn. c. Man. 2.2.3; conf. 12.30.41–31.42), but also to indulge in spirited figurative literary-rhetorical and theological-spiritual wordplay. Pollmann, Doctrina christiana, 128–135. Bochet and Madec, “Place de l’Écriture dans l’economie du salut,” BA 11/2, note comp. 7, 474. Ibid. 480–482. See the essays in Augustine and the Disciplines: From Cassiciacum to Confessions, ed. Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). CCL 40:2026. Cf. the late s. 350.2: “Where you understand something in Scripture, love stands in the open (patet); where you don’t understand something, love lies hidden (latet)”; see Pollman, Doctrina christiana, 137. E.g., quant. an. 33.70–76. After more intensive Scripture reading as priest, he assimilated the seven steps to the seven gifts of the Spirit in Isa. 11:2–3 and to the Beatitudes of Matt. 5:3–10. See s. Dom. m. 1.4.11–12 and 2.11.38, where they correspond to the seven petitions of the “Our Father.” On Augustine’s use of this schema, see Bochet and Madec, note comp. 10, “L’itinéraire spirituel,” BA 11/2:500–503; J. Patout Burns, “Delighting the Spirit: Augustine’s Practice of Figurative Interpretation,” in Arnold-Bright, 186–187. An alternative schema is the soul’s progression through seven ages, e.g., ver. rel. 26.49. BA 11/2:84: Illi autem, qui per intellegentiam pergunt videre quod Deus est, omnibus eum naturis visibilibus et corporalibus, intellegibilibus vero et spiritalibus, omnibus mutabilibus praeferunt. See Conf. 7.21.27 on the strength and weakness of the Platonists, who glimpsed the homeland of peace but failed to help anyone get there. Goulven Madec, “Connaissance de Dieu et action de grâces: Essai sur les citations de l’Ép. aux Romains I, 18–25 dans loeuvre de saint Augustin,” RA 2 (1962): 273–309. Doc. Chr. 1.4.4 (BA 11/2:80): “‘ut invisibilia Dei per ea, quae facta sunt, intellecta conspiciantur,’ hoc est, ut de corporalibus temporalibusque rebus aeterna et spiritalia capiamus.” The subjunctive passive occurs only two other times, in trin. 2.15.25, where the earthly images at Mount Sinai are a special case of the principle of Rom. 1:20, and retr. 1.11.1, which summarizes the early work mus. as actualizing Rom. 1:20. Both the Vetus Latina and the Vulgate read conspiciuntur. Augustine

Notes to Pages 222–225

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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knew and quoted the text with the indicative, in texts both early (ver. rel. 52.101) and late (c. Max. 2.7). The text with the indicative played a critical role in the narrative of his intellectual conversion in conf. 7, which quoted it at 10.16 and 17.23. Cf. en. Ps. 44.6 (CCL 38:498), where Augustine went a step further: “we are formed for eternal things by created things.” Conf. 7.17.23 (BA 13:628–630), Chadwick trans. (OWC:127). BA 11/2:138: signa divinitus data quae scripturis sanctis continentur. The literature on Augustine’s teaching on signs is enormous. Briefly, see R. A Markus, “St. Augustine on Signs,” Phronesis 2 (1957): 60–83; B. Darrell Jackson, “The Theory of Signs in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana,” REA 15 (1969): 9–49; both essays were reprinted in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. A. Markus (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1972), 61–147. William S. Babcock, “Caritas and Signification in De doctrina christiana 1–3,” in Arnold-Bright, 145–163; Pollmann, Doctrina christiana, 147–196; Bochet and Madec, note comp. 8, “Les signes,” BA 11/2:483–495; Toom, Thought Clothed with Sound, 111–222. BA 11/2:78: non ad significandum aliquid adhibentur. BA 11/2:156: Propria dicuntur, cum his rebus significandis adhibentur propter quas sunt instituta, sicut dicimus bovem, cum intellegimus pecus, quod omnes nobiscum latinae linguae homines hoc nomine vocant. BA 11/2:138: nisi ad depromendum et traiciendum in alterius animum id quod animo gerit, qui signum dat. Cf. David Dawson, “Sign Theory, Allegorical Reading, and Motions of the Soul in De doctrina christiana,” in Arnold-Bright, 123ff. For Augustine, Scripture is part of the Holy Spirit’s “marvelous arrangement” (mirifica dispositio; mor. 1.17.30), which included processes connected with “allegory” (vera rel. 50.99). But Augustine remains indefinite about the Spirit’s actual mechanisms for such “arranging,” stressing sometimes the Spirit’s assisting direction, at other times the Spirit’s predominance, even dictation. See A. D. R. Polman, The Word of God According to Saint Augustine, trans. A. J. Pomerans (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961), 40–51. BA 11/2:154: In his enim quae aperte in scripturis posita sunt, inveniuntur illa omnia, quae continent fidem moresque vivendi, spem scilicet atque caritatem, de quibus libro superiore tractavimus. Tum vero facta quadam familiaritate cum ipsa lingua divinarum scripturarum in ea quae obscura sunt aperienda et discutienda pergendum est, ut ad obscuriores locutiones illustrandas de manifestioribus sumantur exempla et quaedam certarum sententiarum testimonia dubitationem incertis auferant. BA 11/2:254: Demonstrandus est igitur prius modus inveniendae locutionis, propria ne an figurata sit. Et iste omnino modus est, ut quicquid in sermone divino neque ad morum honestatem neque ad fidei veritatem proprie referri potest, figuratum esse cognoscas. Morum honestas ad diligendum Deum et proximum, fidei veritas ad cognoscendum Deum et proximum pertinet. Strangely, the English translations of

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

Notes to Pages 225–229 both Green (OWC:75) and Hill (WSA I/11:176) omit the word proprie (“literally”). By contrast D. W. Robertson Jr. includes it in his still widely used but older translation (On Christian Doctrine, Library of Liberal Arts [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958], 88). The French of M. Moreau (BA 11/2:257) reads “en son sens propre.” David Hunter, “Reclaiming Biblical Morality: Sex and Salvation History in Augustine’s Treatment of the Hebrew Saints,” in “In Dominico Eloquio”—In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken, ed. P. Blowers et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 318–324; see also my “Patriarchae,” forthcoming in A-L. See Roland J. Teske, “Criteria for Figurative Interpretation in St Augustine,” in Arnold-Bright, 110. See also H.-I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th ed. (Paris: Éditions E. de Boccard, 1958), 479; J. Pepin “L’absurdité, signe de l’allégorie,” [originally published 1957], in La tradition de l’allégorie (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1987), 173ff. Doc. Chr. 3.12.20 (BA 11/2:264): Et quicquid ibi tale narratur, non solum historice ac proprie, sed etiam figurate ac prophetice acceptum, interpretandum est usque in finem illum caritatis sive Dei sive proximi sive utriusque. BA 11/2:246: Neque ulla mors animae congruentius appellatur, quam cum id etiam, quod in ea bestiis antecellit, hoc est intelligentia carni subicitur sequendo litteram. Qui enim sequitur litteram, translata verba sicut propria tenet neque illud quod proprio verbo significatur, refert ad aliam significationem. . . . Ea demum est miserabilis animi servitus, signa pro rebus accipere; et supra creaturam corpoream, oculum mentis ad hauriendum aeternum lumen levare non posse. BA 11/2:126: Debemus uti, non quasi mansoria quadam dilectione et delectatione, sed transitoria potius tamquam viae, tamquam vehiculorum et aliarum quorumlibet instrumentorum aut si quid congruentius dici potest, ut ea quibus ferimur, propter illud ad quod ferimur, diligamus. Prov. 8:22, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his ways,” had been an important text in the Christological debates concerning Christ’s divinity of the early fourth century. Augustine here applies it to Christ’s humanity. BA 11/2:126: Ex quo intellegitur quam nulla res in via tenere nos debeat, quando nec ipse Dominus, in quantum via nostra esse dignatus est, tenere nos voluerit, sed transire, ne rebus temporalibus, quamvis ab illo pro salute nostra susceptis et gestis, haereamus infirmiter, sed per eas potius curramus alacriter, ut ad eum ipsum, qui nostram naturam a temporalibus liberavit et conlocavit ad dexteram Patris, provehi atque pervehi mereamur. John C. Cavadini, “The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana,” in Arnold-Bright, 169. Phillip Cary’s Platonistic Augustine, I fear, tends in exactly this direction. Cary writes, “When Augustine introduces the notion of inner word, it is because he wants to extend this expressionist analogy to Christianity, where Christ is the

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external word who comes to us in human flesh like an external sign” (Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 145). “The flesh of Christ, like the outward sign of the voice, is a means to be used by the soul to arrive at a deeper and purer intellectual vision of the Word within” (ibid. 147). In my opinion, this one-sided reading of Augustine ignores texts that move in other directions. Even C. P. Mayer is unwilling to read Augustine on Christ’s humanity this way (“Die Bewertung der Menschheit Christi und deren Akte ist somit nach Augustin von signum-res-Schema her eine differenzierte”), despite thereby introducing “ambivalence” into his claims about its sacramentality (Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie Augustins, II. Teil: Die antimanichaeische Epoche [Würzburg: Augustinus Verlag, 1974], 212–216, here 214). Incontestably Augustine was indebted to Platonist thought. However, a rounded reading of the texts shows that in the end he was a Platonist Christian for whom the doctrine of the Incarnation (which he increasingly viewed through the crucifixion) was not merely contrapuntal but determinative. The tension between Augustine’s Platonist and Christian commitments appears in the well-known recollections of “what I did read” and “what I did not read” about Christ in “the books of the Platonists”(Conf. 7.9.13–14). For him the language of those books gave clues about wisdom, but never advocated anything like Christianity’s claim that divine Wisdom inhabits human flesh. Platonism gave Augustine the conceptual frame for conceiving the spiritual world and humanity’s participation in it. But in the end, the countervailing idea of the incarnate Christ kept him from flying off into Platonist dreamscapes, and bound Christian knowledge, wisdom, love, and redemption to the Jesus of the Gospels. 38. In the same way flesh by itself is nothing without the spirit, but joined to the spirit, flesh is life. Augustine stated this clearly years later in a sermon that dealt with the Lord’s saying, “The spirit gives life, and the flesh is no use at all” (John 6:63) (Io. ev. tr. 27.5 [BA 72:540–544]): “So what is this then, ‘the flesh is no use at all’? It is ‘no use at all,’ but in the way those people understood it; they understood flesh as that which is torn off a cadaver or sold at the butcher’s, not as that which is animated by the spirit (spiritu vegetatur). . . . In fact, if flesh had been of no use, the Word would not have become flesh to dwell among us. If it was through flesh that Christ was of the greatest use to us, how is the flesh of no use at all? Yet, through the flesh, the Spirit did something for our salvation (Sed per carnem spiritus aliquid pro salute nostra egit). The flesh was a container (vas); concentrate on what it contained, not on what it was. . . . How has the sound of the Word reached us, after all, if not through the voice of the flesh (per vocem carnis)? What about a pen, about writing? These are all works of the flesh (opera carnis), but they are moved by the Spirit as an instrument (agitate spiritu tamquam organum)” (trans. Hill [WSA III/12:469]).

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Notes to Pages 230–231

39. Leo C. Ferrari (“‘Christus Via’ in Augustine’s Confessions,” AS 7 [1976]: 49) wrote that the idea of Christ the Way “seems to appear as early as 396.” But the question would seem rather to be why it appeared so late. Ferrari seems to have realized this two decades later in another article where he asked why, “if Jesus the Way was such a powerful revelation to Augustine in his reappraisal of Catholicism,” John 14:6 was “so absent” from the early works (“Young Augustine: Both Catholic and Manichee,” AS 26 [1995]: 117). However, in a footnote of the same article (127n53) he oddly refers only to early quotes of John 14:6 that use the latter parts of the verse that relate to Christ’s divinity, while his only quote about “the Way” actually comes from the Manichee Fortunatus (c. Fort. 3)! R. J. O’Connell’s attempt (to which Ferrari appeals) to read “Christ the Way” back into the early philosophical works, as the implied “partner member” of “I am the truth,” is not convincing (St. Augustine’s Early Theory of Man, a.d. 386–91 [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Harvard, 1968], 244–246). In my view, Augustine the ex-Manichee avoided this text until he could exactly understand—and articulate against the Manichees to his satisfaction—the saving function of Christ’s true humanity. Augustine approached this language with caution, for as Fortunatus indicated, Christ “the Way” was an important Manichean theme. 40. Doc. Chr. 1.11.11 (BA 11/2:90): Cum ergo ipsa sit patria, viam se quoque nobis fecit ad patriam. This is the very language he uses to critique the weakness of the strictly “anagogic” Platonist vision in the famous passage at the end of conf. 7: the writers of the “Platonic books” see the homeland gleaming in the distance but cannot show the way there (7.21.27). 41. “Christ as God is the homeland to whom we go; Christ as Man is the way by whom we go. To him we go, through him we go” (s. 123.3.3 [PL 38:685]: Deus Christus patria est quo imus; homo christus via est qua imus; ad illum imus, per illum imus). Or even more epigrammatically, “to Christ through Christ” (Io. ev. tr. 13.4 [BA 71:678]: per Christum ad Christum). These references could be duplicated indefinitely. See Goulven Madec, La Patrie et la Voie (Paris: Desclee, 1989), 161–163; Basil Studer, The Grace of Christ and the Grace of God in Augustine of Hippo: Christocentrism or Theocentrism? trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1997), 44–47. 42. BA 11/2:92: ipsa medicus, ipsa medicina. 43. BA 11/2:94: exemplo virtutum eius vitia nostra curantur. 44. BA 11/2:96: ut id quod ostendit esse faciendum, non solum sine murmure, sed etiam cum delectatione faciamus. BA reads this as part of a question. 45. BA 11/2:126: ut nossemus atque possemus. 46. This “mediative” nuancing of the thing-sign relation fits Carol Harrison’s comments about Augustine integrating the concept of mediator into his thought. “It is not until the mid-390’s, however, that we find [Augustine] taking over the word ‘mediator’ and emphasizing texts such as 1 Tim. 2:5. . . . [Christ] is both the One and the many; truth and faith; eternal and temporal; wisdom and knowledge. By

Notes to Pages 231–235

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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faith in the latter man is led back to the former” (Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 36). These couplets were well known to philosophers of the day, including Augustine. But then, after integrating the concept of mediator into his thought, “Augustine goes one step further than the philosophers in demonstrating that the first of the pairs is in some way concealed in the second, which can then disclose it. What he had in mind, of course, is the incarnation” (ibid. 37). Doc. Chr. 1.2.2 (BA 11/2:78): Hae namque ita res sunt, ut aliarum etiam signa sint rerum. BA 11/2:156: “taken over to signify some other thing,” ad aliquid aliud significandum usurpantur. Even if he was forging a different kind of relationship between Judaism and Christianity, as Paula Fredriksen has argued (Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010]), it is wise to admit that Augustine could not think of Jews as anything other than carnally determined. Whether by tradition or choice or both, it is a stubborn fact that Augustine simply could not conceive of a spiritual Judaism that was not Christianity. Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 246–247. John Cavadini writes: “Charity, as it were, deconstructs those sweetnesses, dismantling them in the ultimate sign (signum), the sign of the cross” (“Sweetness of the Word,” 171). Dawson observes that for Augustine “Scripture is a collection of clear and obscure signs of that single sign” (“Sign Theory,” 140n31). Origen treats it in De principiis 4.2. Cf. c. Faust. 12.29, where Augustine sees 1 Cor. 10:4 as broadly governing the Christological interpretation of many other phenomena in the Exodus story. For how this text functions in Paul, see Richard Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 91–94. The perspective of C. P. Mayer’s magisterial work on Augustinian signs stresses what I have called “indicative” signs (Die Zeichen in der geistigen Entwicklung und in der Theologie Augustins, vols. I–II). Mayer traces the Platonic ontology of sign and reality (I:141–149), but contends that Augustine’s encounter with the biblical salvation-historical understanding did not affect that ontology (I:287), and was “integrated into” his Platonic pattern of thought (I:248ff.). For Mayer, in line with the early work On the Teacher Augustine understood signs to possess “no semantic function” and only reminded the believer of knowledge to be gained elsewhere: “This disjunction (Auseinanderfallen) of sign and reality is the ontological weakness of signs” (I:330). (Mayer thus influences works like Phillip Cary’s Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine Thought.) Such weak signs can defend Scripture’s unity only by demonstrating the “fittingness” or “congruity” of its parts, i.e., how the Old Testament does not contradict the New. Augustine took that tack early on, but I argue that that was not the end of the story. After assimilating Paul’s “clearer” teaching on Christ the

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55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

Notes to Pages 235–237 Mediator, Augustine widened his view of signs to include a model of “interlocking” sign and reality based on mediation. In my judgment, Augustine’s deep grounding of scriptural signs in the “exchange” between Christ and the Church entailed more than what Mayer calls the “flipside” (Kehrseite) of Augustine’s philosophy (II:438; cf. H. J. Sieben, “Die ‘res’ der Bibel: eine Analyse von Augustinus, De doctr, christ. I–III,” REA 21 [1975]: 73). This interlocking view augmented his argument for scriptural unity. Augustine had always asserted that the Manichean rejection of the Old Testament was religiously reckless and intellectually unconvincing because it violated its congruity with the New. But now Augustine also argued for the interpenetration and not just the agreement of the two Testaments; in other words, he began to claim that the rejection of the Old Testament actually did violence to the New. On the other hand, even if Augustine’s insight about Scripture’s interlocking unity put his anti-Manichean polemic on a fresh footing, I think Gerard Remy overstates the opposite case in saying that Augustine’s discovery of the Mediator provoked “a radical conversion of his Platonism” (Le Christ mediateur I:175). On the issue of the paradigm, see Bochet and Madec, note comp. 6, “Herméneutique platonicienne ou herméneutique chrétienne?” BA 11/2:471–473. BA 17:278: nec tamen ait, Petra significabat Christum, sed ait, Petra erat Christus. See Jolivet and Jourjon, notes comp. 27 and 29, BA 17:775. On the different nuances of sacramentum and exemplum in trin. 4.3.6, see B. Studer, “‘Sacramentum et exemplum’ chez saint Augustin,” RA 10 (1975): 89–93, 106–109. On the theme generally see C. Couturier, “‘Sacramentum’ et ‘mysterium’ dans l’oeuvre de saint Augustin,” in Études augustiniennes (Paris: Éditions Montaignes, 1953), 161–332; H. M. Féret, “‘Sacramentum’ et res dans la langue théologique de s. Augustin,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1940): 218–243. BA 17:270: Non enim Dominus dubitavit dicere, Hoc est corpus meum, cum signum daret corporis sui. See c. Faust. 16.17, where Moses striking the rock represents Israel crucifying Christ. Augustine referred to the retelling of the Exodus rock story in Num. 20:2–13, when angry Moses struck the rock unbidden. Just as Moses doubted God’s power when he struck the rock, so the people bound by Moses’ Law crucified the Lord after refusing to believe in him. However, “just as the struck rock poured out water for thirsty people, so the gash of the Lord’s passion brought about life for believing people.” BA 17:350: vetus vita . . . quam de Adam traximus. “Such a division was widely accepted by the Fathers, both Latin and Greek,” writes Eric Plumer (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 152n67, citing Maurice Wiles, The Divine Apostle [1967)]. CSEL 84:76; trans. Plumer, 153. As opposed to, e.g., ver. rel. 50.99, where he spoke of “the allegory of a sacrament.”

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64. As Plumer notes, this anticipates the famous sentence of conf. 10.29.40, “Give what you command, and command what you will” (Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians, 207n219). For Augustine the same kind of indicative sign that moves from earthly act to heavenly reality appears after the Lord’s death in an incident related in Galatians. Paul wrote in Gal. 1:7, “Some were troubling you, wishing to turn you away from the gospel of Christ.” Augustine refers the word “trouble” (conturbatio, “overturning”) to the work of the “Judaizing” interlopers who turned the Galatians’ faith “upside down” by demanding bodily circumcision as a sign of their salvation. This “disordered” the Galatians’ faith by turning them back from spirit to flesh, disrupting the spiritual order, which Augustine defined as “to rise from carnal to spiritual things, not to fall from spiritual to carnal things” (Ordo est autem a carnalibus ad spiritalia surgere, non ab spiritalibus ad carnalia cadere; exp. Gal. 20.5 [CSEL 84:78]). By contrast, Augustine wrote, an example of the proper spiritual order appeared in Peter’s humble response to Paul’s public rebuke (Gal. 2:11–16). When their dispute threatened to upset the entire community at Antioch, Peter defused the situation by his gentle response. At that moment, Augustine said, the Church learned a crucial lesson, namely that humility preserves the community’s bond of charity, its most precious possession. Peter acted as a true disciple of Jesus, who had asked for followers to imitate him—Augustine here impersonates Christ—not because “I raise four-day-old corpses from the tomb and cast out all demons and diseases from people’s bodies,” but rather because they “take my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart” (Matt. 11:29). The distinction was important, for Jesus’ miracles were only “signs of spiritual things” (signa rerum spiritualium), while acts of gentleness and humility were “the spiritual realities themselves” (res ipsae spiritales sunt; exp. Gal. 15.13 [CSEL 84:71]; trans. Plumer, 145). 65. Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 25–29. 66. Even if Paul “forgot” it, Augustine never declared Christ’s humanity obsolete, not even in our future life in heaven. By contrast, Scripture’s value really was limited to this earthly life. In a later sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, Augustine mused on hearing Scripture read in Church as “daily bread,” as necessary provisions for our pilgrimage. Then he contrasted that with the future life. “But when we finally get there, do you imagine we shall be listening to a book? We’ll see the Word! We’ll hear the Word himself, eating him and drinking him the way the angels do now. Do angels need books, or debaters, or readers? Far from it. They read by seeing, since they see the Truth itself” (s. 57.7). 67. A piece of circumstantial evidence for this is Augustine’s eventual restatement of Tyconius’s seven mystical “rules” for understanding Scripture. Tyconius’s Liber regularum employs just the sort of prophecy-fulfillment schema that the first edition of doc. Chr. omitted. Tyconius intended to supply his readers with Scripture’s “keys and lamps” for entering and illuminating its “immense forest

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68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Notes to Pages 239–245 of prophecy” (Liber reg., Prologue). Positively, some of Augustine’s exegesis perhaps drew directly on Tyconius; and some of the Donatist’s ideas may have influenced Augustine, e.g., “the two cities” appearing in cat. rud. 19.31, though Augustine already has a version in ver. rel. 27.50. Much of North African Latin Christian thought from the time of Tertullian having been focused upon the Church, Augustine’s specific interest in the Church as the body of Christ had affinities with Tyconius’s “bipartite body of the Lord” (though Augustine altered the Donatist’s ideas in significant ways). Augustine himself used Tyconius (or his version of Tyconius; see Maureen Tilley, “Understanding Augustine Misunderstanding Tyconius,” SP 27 [1993]: 405–408) to fill out the remainder of Book 3 when finishing doc. Chr. in the 420s. This suggests at least an approximate coherence between the work of Tyconius and Augustine. It is tempting, but still speculative, to think that if Augustine had continued writing Book 3 in 396, he would have articulated a version of Tyconius’s “bottom-up” approach of prophecy and fulfillment in a distinctive Augustinian key that was Christologically grounded and ecclesiologically astute. Comparing these works is of course not a new idea; e.g., Dawson, “Sign Theory,” in Arnold-Bright, 128–129, 133. The most complete study of On Instructing Beginners remains Joseph P. Christopher, De Catechizandis Rudibus Liber Unus, translated with an Introduction and Commentary (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1926). Christopher contributed his revised translation and many notes to the volume First Catechetical Instruction in the series Ancient Christian Writers, no. 2 (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1946). Goulven Madec’s introduction and analytical notes accompany the text in La première catéchèse (BA 11/1). William Harmless offers detailed analysis and social context in Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 107–155. Basic introductory and bibliographical help comes with Raymond Canning’s recent translation, Instructing Beginners in Faith, The Augustine Series no. 5 (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2006), 9–51. Harrison, Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity, 67. BA 11/1:58. As an example of Augustine’s continuing influence, we may note the Second Vatican Council’s quote of this statement in the prologue to its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (noted by Canning, Instructing Beginners in Faith, 72n52). BA 11/1:102. BA 11/1:108–110: habitemus invicem. BA 11/1:110: per amoris vinculum . . . in illis sumus. BA 11/1:90–92. According to Augustine, “the sacrament of the wood” was not lacking in the story of Israel’s passage through the Red Sea, “for Moses struck with a rod so that the miracle might happen.” Augustine’s memory fails him here. Moses did

Notes to Pages 245–251

78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

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not strike the sea, but stretched out his staff over it (Exod. 14:16). Perhaps hastily dictating, the bishop conflated the Red Sea passage with other “striking staff” stories, i.e., when Moses struck the river Nile, turning it into blood (Exod. 7:17), and struck the rock that flowed with water for the people to drink (Exod. 17:6). That Moses struck with a staff of wood was a sign of the cross of Christ, as noted above. In cat. rud. Augustine has just figuratively joined the waters of baptism and the saving wood of the cross to the Flood and Noah’s ark, and so Augustine wanted to extend the symmetry to Israel’s passage through the Red Sea by means of Moses’ staff. Modern translations accommodate Augustine’s slip by an insertion: “Moses struck the sea with a rod” (Christopher [1946], 64); “Moses struck the waters with a staff” (Canning [2006], 135). BA 11/1:62. BA 11/1:68–70: Quapropter in veteri Testamento est occultatio novi, in novo Testamento est manifestatio veteris. See P. Siniscalco, “Christum narrare et dilectionem monere. Osservatione sulla narratio del ‘De catechizandis rudibus’ di S. Agostino,” Augustinianum 14, no. 3 (1974): 605–623. A late Psalms exposition (en ps. 72.1 [CCL 39:986]) compactly expresses the interrelationship between Christ, the Old Testament, and the unity of Scripture. “At that time the New Testament was hidden (occultatus) within the Old, as fruit is in the root (tamquam fructus in radice). If you look for fruit in a root you will not find it; yet you will not find any fruit on the branches either, unless it has sprung from the root. . . . Christ himself, inasmuch as he was to be born according to the flesh, was hidden in the root, that is to say, in the bloodline of the patriarchs. At the appointed time he was to be revealed, like fruit forming from the flower (tamquam fructu apparente), and so Scripture says, ‘A shoot has sprung from Jesse’s stock, and a flower has opened’ [Isa. 11:1]. Similarly, the entire New Covenant was hidden in Christ in those early days, and known only to the prophets and a few devout persons—not known, of course, as already manifest and present, but revealed as to come later” (trans. Boulding [WSA III/17:471]). BA 11/1:62. C. Faust. 12.26 (CSEL 25/1:354–355). Berrouard has thoroughly studied Augustine’s development of this trope in “Le theme des anges,” 447–501, with the most relevant texts listed on 448. For the discussion of c. Faust., see 476–477 and 482–484. CSEL 25/1:355: In illo enim scalae a terra usque ad caelum, a carne usque ad spiritum, quia in illo carnales proficiendo velut ascendendo spiritales fiunt. . . . Ipsum et scalas intellegimus, quia ipse dixit: ego sum via.

c h a p t er 8 1. Proposed dates for the composition of c. Faust typically range from 398–399 to 405. Pierre Hombert argues for a date of 400–402 (Nouvelles Recherches de Chronologie Augustinienne [Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2000],

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25–29). R. Teske gives a date range of 408–410 without explanation (“Introduction” to Answer to Faustus, A Manichean [WSA I/20:9]); but this is certainly too late and may be a misprint. (Repeated attempts to secure a copy of P. Cantaloup, “L’Harmonie des deux Testaments dans le Contra Faustum Manichaeum de saint Augustin” [diss., Institut Catholique Toulouse, 1955], were unsuccessful.) 2. Its “typological” approach has seemed deeply traditional and therefore “unsurprising” (David F. Wright, “Augustine: His Exegesis and Hermeneutics,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Saebø [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996], 715). Paula Fredriksen calls it “hardly very original” (Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010], 240), while also claiming that its validation of Judaism was “revolutionary” (ibid. 244). Pushed by Faustus to defend Christianity’s adaptation of Jewish images and practices, Augustine pointed to the earthly ground of prophetic fulfillment in the texts and history of ancient Israel, which for Fredriksen implies a “defense of Jews and Judaism.” For instance, while Augustine asserted the spiritual truth embedded in blood sacrifice in order to defend the Incarnation, Fredriksen writes, “the reverse is also true: Defending the incarnation, Augustine also defended Jewish blood sacrifices” (ibid. 250). Whether or not something so indirect can be called a “defense” (in reality he was refuting Manichean Christology), even the hint of a defense of Jews—by asserting that the Law of Moses was prophetic for Christianity only insofar as Judaism was valid on its own terms— swam against centuries of strident Christian anti-Jewish invective. Though hardly an overture to inter-religious dialogue—elsewhere Augustine spits out the same anti-Jewish venom as other early Christian writers, though Fredriksen downplays this as mere rhetorical boilerplate (ibid. 260–262)—this position was nevertheless a radical departure for early Christianity. Though it was “not particularly innovative” to read the Law in terms of Christ, by conjoining that reading “with his commitment to reading the Old Testament ad litteram and proprie as also meaningful within its own frame of reference, Augustine’s typology becomes radically innovative. This orientation enabled him to assert not only that the Law itself was good, but also, and much more boldly, that the Jewish understanding of the Law as enacted by Israel and as described in the Bible was also good. . . . This simple assertion was revolutionary” (ibid. 243–244, emphasis in text). Building on this, my twofold claim in this chapter is that (1) this premise was based on an even deeper premise that emerged from the debate with the Manichees, namely, that in fulfilling the Law Christ the true Man transformed it; and (2) the Christological premise was revolutionary for Augustine’s figurative Old Testament reading, even if the net results of his exegesis were often unsurprisingly traditional. 3. Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 241. Augustine might demur, having refused Jerome’s invitation to “play in the fields of the Scriptures,” because the demanding

Notes to Pages 251–260

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

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labor of exegesis made him, Augustine, like someone “panting up a mountainside” (ep. 82.3); cf. c. Faust. 12.27. Jason BeDuhn offers a historical profile of Faustus and his relationship to Augustine in Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 ce (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 106–134. BeDuhn suggests that Augustine left North Africa to escape the growing pressure of imperial legislation against the Manichees, perhaps using Faustus’s connections to secure a position in Rome. Meanwhile Faustus remained behind with his flock, and eventually was arrested and exiled; Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 132. BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, 110. Ibid. 114–123, with interesting observations about the effect of Ciceronian-style skepticism on Faustus, 125. Occasionally Augustine also addressed more philosophical and abstruse issues, such as the origin of evil, Manichean myths, and their claim about God’s “limits” (e.g., chap. 20); but ultimately he brought the discussion back to salvation and the temporal dispensation. See en Ps. 72.1. In the midst of later discussions about the origin of the soul, Augustine explained that Abraham was freed from sexual concupiscence by grace of the literal physical seed of Christ that lay within his loins, and not just Abraham’s privileged spiritual insight into future saving events; Gn. litt. 10.20.35–36. See Hunter, “Reclaiming Biblical Morality,” 332. Other proposed candidates for Augustine’s insistence on the necessity of actual fleshly history underlying the biblical narrative include: embarrassment from Fortunatus’s biblicism in the debate of 392; his correspondence with the exegete Jerome in the mid 390s; reading the prophecy-oriented Liber regularum of Tyconius in the mid 390s; and, less plausibly, his turn to operative grace while writing to Simplicianus about 396. Apart from the last (the logic of which remains unclear), all these could have been contributing factors. But I maintain that Augustine overcame his old Manichean thinking about Christ by means of a rational-spiritual articulation of Nicene faith, and that this accounts for the broad changes in Augustine’s thought and practice at this time. CSEL 25/1:384. The CSEL editors read the sentences “That did not happen . . . preaching of the apostles” as one long question. Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum, 15–19. Augustine continued the early Church’s theological construction of Judaism as the foil to Christianity. To describe this Jeremy Cohen coined the term “hermeneutical Jew,” which has been widely used (Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 2–3). (Fredriksen prefers to speak of the “rhetorical Jew” [Augustine and the Jews, 226, 306].) Augustine’s reading of John 1:17 branched out from his distinctive doctrine of “Jewish witness,” which argued for the appropriateness of Judaism’s

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15.

16.

17.

18.

Notes to Pages 260–261 practices during the time of the old covenant, and also for the need to defend Judaism’s ongoing legitimacy because of its impartial (because unwitting) testimony to the truth of Christianity. For this issue and a helpful overview of the Augustinian roots and medieval effects of this teaching, see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 19–65. Martine Dulaey, “Jean 1, 16–17 dans l’interpretation patristique,” Graphè 10 (2001): 117–123; I. Bochet, ‘Le Firmament de L’Écriture, 410. Phillip Cary calls Augustine’s interpretation of this text “one of the most profound vindications of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition” (Outward Signs [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 240). The English translation tradition reflects this sense. The Authorized (King James) Version (1611) inserted a comma and added an emphatic but: “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” The Revised Standard Version (1971) dropped but and inserted a semicolon, a move maintained in the New Revised Standard Version (1989). The New American Bible (revised 1986) has “while the Law was given.” The New Jerusalem Bible inserts a comma (1985). New Testament scholar Raymond E. Brown comments, “The theory that vs. 17 contrasts the absence of enduring love in the law with the presence of enduring love in Jesus Christ does not seem to do justice to John’s honorific reference to Moses (1:45, 3:14, 5:46). Rather vs. 17 contrasts the enduring love shown in the law with the supreme example of enduring love shown in Jesus.” The Gospel According to John I–XII, Anchor Bible 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 16. Raymond Brown elsewhere (Antioch and Rome [New York: Paulist Press, 1983], 2–8) helpfully distinguishes four Jewish-Gentile groups in the New Testament period according to their different approaches to the Law’s relationship to Christ: (1) ultra-conservatives, such as converted Pharisees who pressed for full Torah observance with circumcision as a condition of Christian salvation; (2) moderate conservatives including Peter and James (and Paul in Acts) who dispensed with the Law, including circumcision, but retained some observances like kosher food laws; (3) liberals, especially Paul of the authentic letters, for whom the Law, though good, served only negatively in salvation by pointing out sin, thus dispensing not only with circumcision but also even minimal observances; and (4) radicals, reflected in the Fourth Gospel and the Letter to the Hebrews, who saw no abiding function for the Jewish cult and feasts. According to this typology, the Gnostics and later the Manichees were extreme schismatic expressions of the fourth group, while “Great Church” Christianity grew out of the third group. Augustine’s approach in c. Faust., as we’ll see, drew heavily on the Apostle Paul, and so may be seen as the effort of a late fourth-century heir of Group 3 (himself once part of Group 4) trying to counter the hyper-Christian extensions of Group 4. In Ps. 118.18.38 (CSEL 62:418.6); Dulaey, “Jean 1, 16–17 dans l’interpretation patristique,” 105.

Notes to Pages 262–266

353

19. On Augustine’s citations of this text, see H. A. G. Houghton, Augustine’s Text of John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 194. Interestingly, Augustine also quoted the verse with autem (e.g., c. Faust. 17.6; 19.8; Io. ev. tr. 3.2), but did not alter his reading of the verse (Dulaey, “Jean 1, 16–17 dans l’interpretation patristique,” 118). R. Teske’s 2007 translation of c. Faust. (WSA I/20:195) honors Augustine’s strong reading of facta est, with or without autem: “the Law became grace and truth through Jesus Christ.” However, other recent translations overlook this nuance, and set the Law against grace and truth in Augustine’s quotation of John 1:17: Exp. Ps. 123.14 (without autem), trans. Boulding (WSA III/20:54); Tr. John 3.2 (with autem), trans. Hill (WSA III/12:69). 20. CSEL 25/1:489. 21. C. Faust. 22.78 (CSEL 25/1:678): hominum autem rectam voluntatem divinae legi coniungi. 22. See cat. rud. 19.33, where the body of Christ includes the Old Testament saints. 23. CSEL 25/1:285: praecepta vitae agendae, praecepta vitae significandae. 24. CSEL 25/1:517: praecepta morum, sacramenta promissorum. 25. CSEL 25/1:433. 26. CSEL 25/1:434: in magni sacramenti dispensatione. 27. Ibid. 28. Paula Fredriksen emphasizes Augustine’s sense of the continuity between Christ and the Law. For Augustine, she writes, “Through his incarnation and crucifixion and bodily resurrection, Christ had revealed that the Law, which had foretold all these events, referred to himself. In this way the Law was the Gospel. ‘The same Law that was given to Moses became grace and truth in Jesus Christ’” (Augustine and the Jews, 243, quoting John 1:17, emphasis in text). In an earlier article Fredriksen wrote of Augustine’s conviction that “the Law of the Old Testament is the same as the Law of Christ,” (emphasis in text; “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism,” JECS 3, no. 3 [1995]: 305). In my judgment this continuity must be qualified to show Augustine’s sense of its dialectical tension with the discontinuity created by Christ’s fulfillment; in other words, in quoting John 1:17 one should italicize became as well as same. It was indeed the same Law, but Christ did more than reveal sameness; he also made a change, and the Law truly became grace and truth. Thus the Christian Old Testament is both the same as and different from the Jewish Scriptures; see “Epilogue” below. 29. CSEL 25/1:434. 30. For Augustine the Sabbath commandment is the only part of the Decalogue that carries a sacramental dimension; cf. ep. 55.12.22. It shows forth God’s eschatological rest, as we have seen. But it also includes a moral dimension that, while still vague in c. Faust. and ep. 55, appears more clearly in Augustine’s Tractates on John’s Gospel, where he claims that refraining from work refers to abstention from sin; Io. ev. tr. 3.19.

354

Notes to Pages 267–272

31. CSEL 25/1:473: non ergo diversa doctrina est, sed diversum tempus. This relates to cat. rud. 6.10’s “golden chain” of truth that runs through the various events of salvation history and impresses itself upon hearers gradually without calling attention to itself. 32. CSEL 25/1:301–302. 33. CSEL 25/1:481: ibi figuratam, hic revelatam, ibi prophetatam, hic praesentatam. 34. CSEL 25/1:301: Illud enim erat tempus significandi, hoc manifestandi. 35. CSEL 25/1:517–518. 36. CSEL 25/1:301: Vnde scriptura ipsa tunc erat praeceptum, nunc testimonium . . . et quae tunc observabatur ad praenuntiationem, nunc recitatur ad confirmationem. 37. CSEL 25/1:290–291: illa de agendi celebritate sublata sunt, sed in significandi auctoritate manserunt. 38. CSEL 25/1:288: illo signo, quod legimus, res ista praenotata est, quam tenemus. 39. CSEL 25/1:294: non natura sed significatione. 40. CSEL 25/1:295: onera observationum non sunt inposita, prophetiae tamen auctoritas commendata; cf. c. Faust. 6.5. 41. CSEL 25/1:350: sciant ita significari Christum .  .  . cuiusdam similitudinis causa, non proprietatis substantia (“They know Christ to be signified by reason of a certain likeness, not actual substance”). 42. Faustus either slips here in speaking of Jesus’ actual death, or allows it for the sake of argument. In any case Augustine pounces polemically on his statement in 16.29. 43. See Robert Markus, “Imago and similitudo in Augustine,” REA 10 (1964): 125–128. Markus summarizes the relevant portion of Augustine’s discussion of terms in div. qu. 74: “Something may be like something else without being its image—as two eggs are like each other, but are not the image of one another; hence the idea of likeness does not include that of image” (125). 44. I thank Bernard McGinn for pointing out to me the sudden multiplication of instances of mysticus/mystice in c. Faust. About the same time it appears once in bap., twice in cat. rud., three times in conf. 10–13, and eleven times in cons. ev. 45. Hombert (Nouvelles recherches, 639) gives a date of 403 for epp. 54–55 to Januarius. Augustine considered this work a treatise rather than a letter, and listed it in retr. 2.20. 46. Augustine eventually changed his mind about Christmas, and most of his Christmas sermons spoke of it in sacramental terms. See Hubertus Drobner, “Christmas in Hippo: Mystical Celebration and Catechesis,” AS 35, no. 1 (2004): 55–62. 47. CCL 31:234. In the same passage: “There is a sacrament in a celebration when the commemoration of the event is carried out in such a way that it is understood also to signify something that must be received in a holy manner (sancte accipiendum est)” (trans. Teske, WSA II/1:216). 48. Augustine also lighted on the word transitus in ep. 55, where it appears nearly a dozen times, usually to equate Christian participation in the death and resurrection of Christ with the Jewish celebration of Passover.

Notes to Pages 272–274

355

49. Christian sacraments mediated the power of past saving events to the present, but were nevertheless essentially oriented to the future. A late homily on Psalm 26 captures the full development of Augustine’s direction. Commenting on the preface, “a Psalm of David before he was anointed,” Augustine reflected on the Christian’s longing for eschatological life after being sacramentally anointed. That anointing belongs to Christ, but it also belongs to us in virtue of the unity of his body. But even for Christians the full anointing remains future. “We are anointed now in the sacrament, and the sacrament itself prefigures something that we shall be. And we ought to desire that unspeakable and who-knows-what future something, and groan for it in receiving the sacrament, so that we may rejoice in that very thing which is previewed by the sacrament (ut in ea re gaudeamus quae sacramento praemonstratur)” (en. 2 Ps. 26.2 [CCL 38:155]). After the pattern of synecdoche a sacrament prophesies the fullness of what we shall become by making it partly present. Thus the sacrament generates longing for that fuller reality, even if until now the fullness exists only in God’s will. The sacraments of the New Testament display the same fragile balance between “already” and “not yet” that operates in the prophetic rites of the Old. 50. Before c. Faust. 19.16, the concept of the visibilia verba appeared in vera rel. 50.99 and again in doc. Chr. 2.3.4. It anticipates the well-known explanation of Io. ev. tr. 80.3: “Take away the word, and what is water but just water? Link the word to the element and it becomes a sacrament, itself also like a visible word (visibile verbum).” 51. C. Faust. 12.7 (CSEL 25/1:335–336): multo plura ibi per allegorias et aenigmata partim verbis solis insinuantur, partim etiam facta narrantur. Cf. Gn. c. Man. 2.12.17 on “things done which are written and things written as if done.” 52. Ep. 55.11.21 (CCL 31:250). See Lynn M. Poland, “Augustine, Allegory, and Conversion,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2 (1988): 37–48. 53. Even stronger is cat. rud. 19.33: “Of the saints who preceded the Lord’s birth in time it can be said not only of their words, but also of their life and their wives and their children and their deeds, that they were a prophecy of this present time when, through faith in the passion of Christ, the Church is being gathered together from among the nations” (trans. Canning, Instructing Beginners in Faith, The Augustine Series no. 5 [Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2006], 132–133). 54. CSEL 25/1:535: Regem [eius] ad regendos et sacerdotem ad sanctificandos fideles suos universus ille adparatus veteris instrumenti in generationibus, factis, dictis, sacrificiis, observationibus, festivitatibus omnibusque eloquiorum praeconiis et rebus gestis et rerum figuris parturiebat esse venturum. 55. C. Faust. 4.2 (CSEL 25/1:269): magisque desiderium eorum de novo testamento erat. 56. C. Faust. 15.2 (CSEL 25/1:419): “And so in that first people, the holy patriarchs and prophets who understood what they did or what was done through them, had that hope of eternal salvation in the New Testament (in novo testamento habebant istam spem salutis aeternae). They belonged to that which they understood

356

57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

Notes to Pages 274–278 and loved (ad illud enim pertinebant, quod intellegebant et diligebant), for even though it was not yet revealed, nevertheless it was already being pictured.” Cf. c. Faust. 22.84. C. Faust. 4.2 (CSEL 25/1:269); cf. c. Faust. 6.9. E.g., bap. 3.4.6; Io. ev. tr. 6.6. In my judgment, Phillip Cary’s attempt (Outward Signs, 234–239) to collapse all Augustine’s uses of virtus in c. Faust. into ethical virtue or the piety of faith runs into trouble in this passage. In any case Cary seems more focused on combating medieval understandings of Augustine than on giving an exposition of the historical Augustine per se. C. Faust. 22.83 (CSEL 25/1:685): Servat enim ubique divina providentia virtutem bonitatis suae, ut .  .  . de hominum opere malo bonum opus dei. Despite its apparent arbitrariness, Augustine’s figurative interpretation uncannily captures the authorial intent of Genesis. When Joseph told his treacherous brothers in Gen. 50:20, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good,” he uncovered one of the deepest theological layers of Genesis and indeed all the Scriptures of Israel. Christian Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has written, “This verse can be used as entry into a major strain of Old Testament faith. . . . The deepest of human intentions are set in the context of God’s unyielding intent” (Genesis, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching [Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982], 373–374). CSEL 25/1:685: non peccantis opere, sed scribentis. CSEL 25/1:685–686: sancto spiritu disponente atque inspirante collegit propheta narrator. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Harvard, 1996), does not address this issue, despite his book’s depth and erudition in other respects. CSEL 25/1:702: satis admonent in eis quaeri oportere mysticae alicuius significationis oraculum. Augustine scoffingly refers to Philo in this passage, the only such reference in his surviving works. While acknowledging the Alexandrian’s learning, he imagines him as forced into illegitimate Jewish allegorizing by his refusal to believe in Christ. The mention is of course unintentionally ironic, seeing that Philo was the fountainhead of the stream of figurative biblical interpretation that by the very act of writing Against Faustus Augustine was extending. CSEL 25/1:365: Sic omnia cum considerantur et quasi superflua necessariis contexta inveniuntur, admonent humanum animum, id est animum rationalem prius aliquid significare, deinde quid significent quaerere. CSEL 25/1:364: nisi forte quis putat ingenio fieri, ut ea quae rerum ordine per sua tempora cucurrerunt, ad Christi significationes interpretando vertantur. (“Or perhaps somebody thinks it is by mere cleverness that these things—which occurred in the ordinary course of events at their proper time—were bent toward symbolizing Christ in the act of interpreting them.”)

Notes to Pages 278–279

357

68. CSEL 25/1:463: Illi ex rerum christianarum iam praesentatis effectibus librorum prophetia uera probaretur, ex librorum vero prophetia Christus colendus agnosceretur. See Augustine’s later comment on Psalm 47:9, “As we have heard, so we have seen” (en. Ps. 47.7). 69. The importance of 1 Cor. 10:1–11, for Augustine’s hermeneutic in general and for c. Faust. in particular, cannot be overstated. We have seen the role of 1 Cor. 10:4 (“the rock was Christ”) in the early developments of c. Adim. (chapter 7). While that text appears incidentally in c. Faust. 16.15 and 16.17, it serves as the hermeneutic key to 1 Cor. 10:1–4 in c. Faust. 12.29. Augustine used v. 6 (“they were figures of us”) in 4.2, 6.2, 12.37, 16.28, and 18.6, and quoted v. 11 (“these things happened to them in a figure [in figura] but were written down for our sake”) in 4.2, 6.2, 6.5, 6.9, 8.2, 10.2–3, 12.37, 13.10, and 32.9. The word omnia, “all,” did not appear in v. 6 or v. 11 of 1 Cor. 10, but Augustine added it to seven of his eleven quotes of 10:6 (“All these things were figures of us” [omnia haec figurae nostrae fuerunt]), and to four of his nine quotes of v. 11. He perhaps adds omnia strategically (i.e., polemically) by conflating 1 Cor. 10 with another favorite Pauline locus, Rom. 15:4, where the Apostle wrote, “All (omnia) these things [ from Israel’s story] were written down so they might teach us” (6.9; cf. Augustine’s quote in 13.18, “whatever things,” quaecumque). Alternatively Augustine tweaks the two 1 Cor. texts by adding omnia from the influence of the risen Christ’s logion in Luke 24:44 (also quoted in c. Faust. 4.2, 12.3, and 12.4): “It was necessary that everything (omnia) be fulfilled that was written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.” As we’ve seen several times in other contexts, such textual accommodations are not uncommon in Augustine, though it’s often difficult to say which ones came from slips of memory and which were intentional adjustments (cf. Houghton, Augustine on John, 67–68). His frequent insertion of omnia here and elsewhere, alongside numerous other quotes that lack it, suggests that the insertions were intentional. A similar conflation shows the influence of Rom. 15.4, “written down to teach us,” where c. Faust. 32.9 replaces “written down for our sake,” propter nos, with “written down for the sake of our correction” propter correptionem nostram. Augustine invokes another important statement of Paul’s hermeneutic, Col. 2:16–17 (“shadows of things to come” umbra futurorum) in c. Faust. 6.2, 16.28, 31.4, 32.9, and elsewhere. 70. CSEL 25/1:357: Exponendo unum in caetera introduxit intellectum. Compare this to Augustine’s early reference to Paul’s “manifest sign,” signum manifestum, that dovetailed Adam/Eve in Gen. 2:24 with Christ/Church in Eph. 5:30–31 (Gn. c. Man. 2.24.37). Paul’s move illumined the entire Genesis passage for him in a single stroke. 71. The late Tom Martin once told me that Augustine’s sometimes confounding prolixity comes into sharper focus if we think of him as an attorney prosecuting a case in court, the work to which all his rhetorical training, practice, and teaching disposed him. I remain grateful for that insight.

358

Notes to Pages 279–284

72. CSEL 25/1:700: perscrutata et quodam modo interrogata, quanto videntur obscuriora, tanto mirabiliores in se mysteriorum thesauros latere respondent. 73. Augustine presumed that figurative exegesis was legitimate in argumentation, but only after its connection to an open and clear “base” text had been established. Arguing against the Donatist use of figurative readings for sectarian ends, he wrote (ep. 93.8.24 [CCL 31A:185]): “What, if not arrogant in the extreme (impudentissime), is a person who argues that something put in allegory should be interpreted with reference to himself (pro se), unless he also has the clear testimonies that illumine Scripture’s obscurities?” Thomas Aquinas used this passage to support his slightly different idea that rational theological argumentation can be built only upon Scripture’s literal sense (Summa Theologiae I.1.10, Reply to obj. 3). 74. The epistemological operation of Augustine’s figures resembles John Henry Newman’s “illative sense,” the faculty of spontaneously inferring right judgment that brings certitude. See chap. 9 of An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, originally published in 1870 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992, 270–299). 75. CSEL 25/1:336: si quaedam velut sub uno aspectu quasi contexta ponantur, ita coniungunt in contestatione Christi voces suas, ut cuiusuis obtunsi surditas erubescat. 76. CSEL 25/1:779: Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem. 77. CSEL 25/1:356: Christus mihi ubique illorum librorum, ubique illarum scripturarum peragranti et anhelanti in sudore illo damnationis humanae sive ex aperto sive ex occulto occurrit et reficit. Ipse mihi et ex nonnulla difficultate inventionis suae desiderium inflammat, quo id quod invenero, avide sorbeam medullisque reconditum salubriter teneam.

e p ilo g ue 1. Augustine broadened the focus of his interpretation of 2 Cor. 3:6 from a more narrowly hermeneutical sense to a soteriological one that articulated the operation of grace in the heart (cf. spir. et litt. 4.6). This development in the mid-390s correlated with his then recently renovated understanding of grace. Nevertheless, he continued to affirm the validity of the hermeneutical view. Cf. Isabelle Bochet, “‘La lettre tue, l’esprit vivifie’: L’exégèse augustinienne de 2 Co 3:6,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 114 (1992): 341–370. 2. To take one example, see civ. Dei 18.46 for Augustine’s exegesis of Psalm 58:12, “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your Law; scatter them in your might.” This text spoke prophetically to Augustine of the place of Jews in Christian salvation history (and to medieval readers of Augustine it was a pretext for the treatment of Jews). The spadework for this exegesis appears in en. Ps. 58.1.21–22 and 58.2.2. See Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 33ff. (esp. the chart on 41); Paula Fredriksen,

Notes to Pages 284–290

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

359

Augustine and the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 345–352; also Fredriksen’s dissent from Cohen (ibid. 432–433; n. 25), and Cohen’s response (Journal of Religion 89 [2009]: 572–578). Eric Auerbach thought that Augustine’s thinking was ”far too concrete and historical” to allow him to “spirit away” the Scriptures into “pure abstract allegory” (“Figura” [originally published 1944], in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [Manchester U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1984], 36–37). Others, even some sympathetic observers, find Augustine’s allegorizing habit an embarrassment. Peter Brown compared his practice to Freudian dream interpretation (Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, new edition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 258). Gerald Bonner’s well-known article, “Augustine as Biblical Exegete,” acknowledged the historical importance of Augustine’s exegesis but lamented his disrespect for the original author’s intention as too much for modern readers to bear (Cambridge History of the Bible I: From the Beginnings to Jerome, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 558–559). In my judgment these views are skewed by the overdrawn allegory-typology distinction. I thank Robert Wilken for seminal help on this issue (and several others) in private correspondence of 2002. CSEL 25/1:376: ex voce parvulorum nostrorum . . . inter quos et me ipsum deputaverim. CCL 36:580: See Roland Teske, s.j., “Spirituals and Spiritual Interpretation in St. Augustine,” AS 15 (1984): 79–80; Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Milk and Meat: Augustine and the End of Esotericism,” in Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, ed. Aleida and Jan Assmann (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 132–146. BA 57/B:54: “undefiled Law,” immaculata lex. Io. ev. tr. 21.8 (BA 72:286–288): Ergo gratulemur et agamus gratias non solam nos christianus factos esse, sed Christus. Intellegitis, fraters, gratiam Dei super nos capitis? Admiramini, gaudete, Christus facti sumus. Si enim caput ille, nos membra, totus homo ille et nos. Respectively, Io. ev. tr. 108.5 (CCL 36:618): quoniam in me ipsi sunt ego; Io. ev. tr. 111.6 (CCL 36:632–633): quia et nos ipse sumus; s. 133.8 (PL 38:742): quia et nos ipse est. See Karl. F. Morrison, “I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 9. Ep. 93.7.23–9.29; s. 46.37. On the connection with the Delphic oracle “Know yourself,” see P. Courcelle, Connais-toi toi-même: de Socrate à saint Bernard (Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1974), 97–100, 117–119, with reference to Augustine on Song of Songs 1:6–7, 147f. For a sample of Augustine’s anti-Donatist figurative interpretation, see my “Augustine’s Use of the Song of Songs against the Donatists,” in Augustine: Biblical Exegete, ed. F. Van Fleteren and J. C. Schnaubelt (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 99–127. En. 2 Ps. 30.1.3 (CCL 38:192); it appears also in en. 2. Ps. 32.1.2; 37.6, and often. For a review of Augustine’s usage see Marie-Josèphe Rondeau, Les commentaires

360

11.

12. 13. 14.

Notes to Pages 290–292 patristiques du Psautier (IIIe–Ve siécles, vol. II—Exégèse prospologique et théologie. Orientalia Christiana Analecta 220 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Studium Orientalium, 1985), 365–388; also my “Transfiguration: Christology and the Roots of Figurative Exegesis in St. Augustine,” SP (1997): 40–47. Note that in the quoted text I have translated Augustine’s nos vestire se as, “to clothe himself in us,” pace Maria Boulding’s “to clothe us with himself” [WSA III/15:322]. Augustine stresses the aspect of the exchange wherein Christ takes up death rather than his act of clothing us in life. The scene in conf. 9.4.8–11 where Augustine the new Catholic believer reads Psalm 4 against the Manichees displays the deep emotional tumult of making Scripture’s words into his words. This transposition seems to lie at the heart of social psychologist Hjalmar Sundén’s profound intuition about this scene in light of his theory about human “role-taking.” See “Saint Augustine and the Psalter in the Light of Role-Psychology,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26 (1987): 375–382. See also Hermann Josef Sieben, “Der Psalter und die Bekehrung der VOCES und AFFECTUS: zu Augustinus, Conf. IX.4.6 und X.33,” Theologie und Philosophie 52 (1977): 481–497; Annemaré Kotzé, “Reading Psalm 4 to the Manicheans,” Vigiliae Christianae 55 (2001): 119–136. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 160. Cat. rud. 12.17 (BA 11/1:108–110). This is the Augustinian version of what modern thought calls the “hermeneutical circle,” that is, it shows “the essential correlation in [Augustine’s] work between interpretation of the scriptural text and the interior attitude of the subject.” Isabelle Bochet, “Le Firmament de l’Écriture”: L’herméneutique augustinienne (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustinienne, 2004), 92.

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BA 13

Les Confessions, Livres I–VII. Introduction and notes by A. Solignac. Reprints critical text of M. Skutella with “additions and corrections” (1998).

BA 14

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BA 57B

Les commentaires des Psaumes: Enarrationes in psalmos 17–25, under the direction of M. Dulaey (2009). Uses an eclectic text modified from CSEL 93/1A (2009).

5. Loeb Classical Library (LCL) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) LCL 26–27

St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. William Watts [originally published in 1631] (1912).

LCL 124–127

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Scripture Index

Note: Passages important for discussions of Augustine’s exegesis are set in bold. Psalm texts are listed according to the Latin numbering that Augustine used, which follows the Septuagint. See 326n8. OLD TESTAMENT Genesis 1:1, 60, 242, 287 1:1–3:24, 61–62 1:1–31, 70 1:4, 57 1:5, 59 1:26, 25, 60 1:26–27, 114 1:31, 58, 68, 111, 317n22 2:5–6, 55 2:10–14, 66 2:17, 158 2:21, 56, 186 2:24, 60, 72, 97, 203, 357n70 3:5, 114 3:1–7, 290 3:19, 281 3:21, 66 3:22, 57 4–9, 101 6:6, 330n32 12:1–3, 151 22:13, 231 22:18, 277

28:11–18, 249 28:12, 231, 279 38:1–30, 275 49:10, 277 50:20, 356n60 Exodus 2:12, 275 3:2, 279 3:2–6, 163 3:14, 92, 202 4:2–4, 279 7:17, 349n77 12:22, 234 12:46, 278 13:21, 278 14:16, 349n77 15:25, 231, 278 15:27, 278 16:13ff., 278 17:1–7, 235 17:6, 278, 349n77 33:18, 290 Leviticus 16:21, 145 19:18, 84, 219

Scripture Index Numbers 20:2–13, 346n59 21:4–9, 159, 237, 278 Deuteronomy 3:13, 174, 330n34 6:5, 84, 116, 219 12:23, 234 13:3, 58 18:15, 270 21:23, 125, 141–142, 148–154, 158, 234, 237, 255, 318n34 25:4, 232 25:5–10, 314n67 27:26, 149 Joshua 20:6, 24 1 Samuel 24, 26, 238 2 Samuel 11–12, 225 11:2–5, 275 1 Kings 11:1–4, 225 2 Kings 2:11, 124 Psalms 1:1, 3, 169 1:4, 337n108 2, 167, 175 2:4, 174 2:6–7, 171–172 2:7, 175 2:8, 172, 211–212, 277 3, 167, 172, 183, 186, 188, 189, 201 3:4, 170, 188 3:5, 170–171, 186 3:6, 172 3:7, 173–174, 186–187 4, 186, 188, 195, 360n11 4:2, 184 5, 172, 210, 337n109 5:3, 333n65 6, 327n13 6:3, 286

383

7, 167, 172, 179, 210–211 7:10, 13, 211 8, 183 8:3, 138 8:6, 169 9, 184 9:4, 14, 190 10, 167, 172, 327n14 10:5, 169, 185, 294n6 11, 327nn13, 14 11:7, 113 12, 13 195 14, 167, 327n14 15, 167, 196, 200, 327n14 15:4, 201 15:5, 201–203, 210, 337n109 15:6, 202–203 15:7–9, 210–211 15:9, 201 15:10, 201–203 16, 196, 200, 204 16:5, 204 16:8, 169 16:13, 204, 211 17, 195–196, 200, 204–205 17:2, 204 17:10, 211 17:11, 303n14 17:16, 253 18, 195, 326n8, 327n12 18:7, 288 19, 20, 195–196, 200 21, 168, 190, 195–196, 197–200, 206, 327n12 21:2, 10, 283, 290, 325n1 21:15, 200 21:28, 277 22, 196 24, 195 25, 26, 326n8, 327n12 27, 196, 200, 211–212 27:7, 335n90 28, 205, 327n13

384

Scripture Index

Psalms (continued) 28:9, 286 29, 195–196, 200, 205, 326n8, 327n12 29:2–6, 205 30, 168, 195–196, 200, 326n8, 327n12 30:2–5, 207 30:20–24, 336n100 31, 32, 326n8, 327n12 38:4, 216 41:2–6, 290 45, 207 47:9, 357n68 50:9, 234 54:23, 286 58:12, 358n2 68, 168 68:6, 286 69:9, 329n17 73:16, 286 79:18, 287 84:12, 208 117:22, 232 118, 327n10 118:18, 286–287 141:6, 337n108 142:10, 286 Proverbs 8:22, 228, 342n34 Song of Songs, 171, 279 1:6–7, 359n9 Wisdom 8:1, 32, 169 11:21, 32 Sirach 18:6, 4 Isaiah 7:9, 38, 78, 219 11:1, 349n80 11:2, 279 11:2–3, 340n14 53, 277

53:4, 322n62 55:10–11, 301n35 Baruch 3:38, 277 Daniel 2:34–35, 170, 279 7:13–14, 277 Hosea 11:1–9, 163 Amos 1:3–9, 163 NEW TESTAMENT Matthew 1:1, 106 1:1–17, 70, 178 1:3, 275 5, 255 5:3–10, 340n14 5:17, 238, 255, 288 5:39, 44, 88 6:19, 88 7:7, 15, 41, 62–63, 69, 84–85, 286, 305n31 8:11, 255 9:15, 337n109 9:16–17, 268 10:28, 234 11:28–29, 260 11:29, 347n64 12:8, 320n57 13:18–23, 36–40, 295n15 21:42, 232 22:35–40, 6, 84, 219, 247, 339n8 24:36, 58 25:35–45, 60, 184, 288, 332n61 26:38, 290 26:39, 203 27:34, 168, 198, 290 27:37, 201 27:46, 168, 203, 325n1, 329n17 27:51, 208

Scripture Index Mark 1:1, 106 2:28, 152, 153 13:34, 174 15:34, 168, 198, 325n1, 329n17 Luke 2:40, 337n109 3:23–38, 178 8:46, 312n39 15:11–32, 290 17:21, 88 23:43, 255 23:46, 168, 207 24:44, 168, 357n69 John 1:1, 110, 115, 249 1:1–5, 14, 32–33, 106 1:14, 230, 243, 250 1:16, 261 1:17, 11, 260–265, 351n13, 352n16, 353nn19, 28 1:29, 270, 278 1:45, 352n16 1:51, 250 3:6, 105 3:14, 160, 237, 278, 352n16 5:20, 288 5:46, 352n16 6:3–13, 176 6:35, 202 6:63, 343n38 8:12, 58, 202 8:23, 106 9:1–5, 32, 93 9:1–6, 120 11:47–53, 275 14–16, 101 14:6, 115–116, 120, 229–230, 250, 333n65, 334n70, 344n39 15:15, 61 16:12, 61 17:1–26, 202 17:1, 336n91

385

17:3, 4, 336n91 17:5, 10, 202, 336n91 17:23, 202 17:26, 203 19:34, 186, 277 19:36, 278 Acts 2:25–28, 168 2:27, 200 2:30, 178 4:25–26, 168 7:4, 234 13:33–37, 168, 200 16:1–3, 324n71 Romans 1:1–4, 319n48 1:2–3, 106 1:3, 105, 258 1:19–21, 221–222 1:20, 120–121, 221–222, 313n58, 340n18 1:28, 190 5, 198 5:5, 238 5:6, 238, 245 5:8, 323n68 5:14–16, 140 5:20, 42, 264 6:3–9, 198 6:6, 141, 143, 154–155, 190, 197, 290, 318n31 6:6–7, 159 6:9, 197 6:17, 340n8 7:1–6, 265 7:12, 42, 255 7:13, 264–265 7:7–25, 181, 290–291 7:24–25, 334n70 8:2, 42, 255 8:3, 142–144, 149, 154–155, 266, 318n39

386

Scripture Index

Romans (continued) 8:18, 337n109 8:25, 334n70 8:26, 59 8:32, 232, 245 8:34, 188, 334n70 8:35, 183 9:5, 246 10:3, 196 10:4, 195, 227, 334n74 11:29, 187 11:36, 323n69, 333n65 13:8–10, 84 13:10, 220, 262, 334n70, 339n8 13:13, 309n2 15:3, 329n17 15:4, 219, 249, 357n69 15:8–11, 168 1 Corinthians 1:24, 32, 115–116, 121, 126, 138, 175, 190, 312nn37, 41 1:25, 121 1:31, 334n70 2:2, 122 2:6, 138 2:13, 79 2:14, 12, 114 3:1–3, 12, 138, 249, 285 3:10, 285 4:6, 291 8:1, 234, 264 9:9, 232 9:16, 338n3 9:22, 243 10:1–11, 137, 219, 235, 278, 357n69 10:1, 249 10:4, 137, 235, 270, 278, 345n53, 357n69 10:6, 137, 249, 269, 357n69 10:11, 137, 269, 279, 357n69 10:33, 136, 176, 215

12, 328n16 12:27, 183 13:10, 258 15:22, 127 15:44, 126 15:45–47, 266 15:50, 105 15:56, 174, 264 2 Corinthians 2:16, 135, 334n70 3:5–6, 135 3:6, 8, 25, 30, 36, 135, 137, 227, 229, 264, 284, 358n1 3:14–16, 137, 219 3:16, 41, 317n22 3:18, 193 4:18, 88, 193 5:1, 193 5:7, 285 5:10, 114 5:13, 249–250 5:13–14, 243 5:14, 250 5:16, 106, 228, 258 5:17, 258 5:21, 142, 145, 149, 154–155, 159 8:9, 184, 193 12:1–2, 138 12:10, 193 12:17, 331n44 13:3, 163, 174, 193 Galatians 1:1, 188, 323n71 1:7, 347n64 2:11–16, 347n64 2:20, 190, 194 3, 237 3:8–9, 151 3:10, 149, 151 3:12, 151 3:13, 148–154, 159, 237

Scripture Index 3:16, 161 3:19–20, 42, 154, 156, 161–162, 323n71, 324nn76, 77 3:21–26, 151 4:4, 98, 151, 152, 190, 258–260, 265 4:19, 332n57, 339n8 4:24, 137, 219 5:6, 266 5:9, 337n104 5:14, 238, 339n8 5:24, 141, 155, 322n64 6:8, 88 6:14, 190 6:15, 324n71

2:15, 177 2:16–17, 279, 357n69 3:1, 141, 322n64 1 Thessalonians 2:7, 243 1 Timothy 1:5, 220, 238, 241 2:5, 9, 97, 109, 151, 156, 195, 206, 229, 246, 286, 323n70, 323–324n71, 344n46 4:4, 269–270 6:16, 126 2 Timothy 2:8, 258

Ephesians 1:4, 202 2:2, 236 2:6, 183 3:19, 234 4:15–16, 183, 334n74 5:28–31, 56, 60, 72, 97, 203, 357n70 Philippians 1:21, 288 2:5–8, 104, 107, 115, 118, 124, 129, 147, 243, 315n72, 319n47, 332–333n62 3:13, 218, 228, 317n14, 317n14 3:21, 290 Colossians 1:18, 246 2:3, 286

Titus 1:15, 269–270 Hebrews 1:5–13, 168 9:17, 337n109 10:1, 279 1 Peter 2:21, 243 2:22, 143, 288 2:24, 142–143, 149, 154, 231–232, 321n60 1 John 2:15, 88, 91 4:10, 245 Revelation 5:9, 286

387

Works of Augustine Index

Against Adimantus [c. Adim.] 9.1, 163, 182, 325n83 12.3, 5, 235 21, 142, 155–156, 160, 236, 238, 322–323n65 On the Advantage of Believing [util. cred.], 19 1.2, 24, 304n25 3.5–9, 19, 33, 136–137, 200, 218 8.20, 37 On Christian Teaching [doc. Chr.], 10, 12, 137, 210, 216–220, 252, 296n19, 339nn7, 8, 347–348n67 1.1.1, 219, 339n8 1.2.2, 223, 231, 236 1.4.4, 221–222, 234, 313n58, 340n18 1.5.5–1.7.7, 221 1.8.8, 221, 339n8 1.11.11, 227, 230 1.13.12–14.13, 230 1.15.14, 231 1.16.1517.16, 233 1.22.21, 339n8 1.33.37, 227, 239

1.34.38, 218, 227–230, 317n14, 334n72 1.34.38–38.42, 30 1.35.39, 13, 41, 227, 231, 238, 241, 259 1.35.39–36.40, 220 1.39.43, 218, 228, 240 2.2.3, 26, 223, 224 2.6.7–8, 40–41, 224 2.7.9–11, 220 2.9.14, 41, 224, 294n6 2.10.15, 224, 232 2.12.17, 219 2.16.25, 271 2.18.28, 218 2.40.60–42.63, 43, 233–234, 239 3.2.2, 339n8 3.5.9, 225–227, 320n57 3.6.10, 232, 320n57 3.9.13, 233, 269 3.10.14, 225 3.10.16–11.17, 226 3.11.17, 64 3.12.18, 41, 226 3.12.19–20, 225 3.12.20, 226 3.15.23, 226 3.30.42–37.56, 328–329n16

Works of Augustine Index The City of God [civ. Dei], 4–5, 18, 34, 166, 314n64, 328n16 10.5, 272 10.27–29, 311n29 11–22, 5, 284 16.2, 306n42, 307n20 18.46, 358n2 Commentary on Galatians [exp. Gal.], 151 2.3, 152, 323–324n71 2.3–4, 188 15.12–13, 207 15.13, 347n64 19.1–3, 237, 263 20.5, 347n64 20.12, 237 22, 238 22.1–3, 152–154, 159, 237, 320n57, 321n58 22.7–10, 154–155, 322n62 22.16–17, 160 24.1–17, 157–163, 169, 324nn71, 77, 79, 325n81 31.5, 10, 152 38.1–2, 332n57 43.2–6, 45.4, 238 63.1–10, 324n71 Confessions [conf.], 7, 18, 19, 99, 210, 281, 289–292, 302n39, 337n107 1.1.1, 14 1.11.17, 100, 309n5 1.11.18, 100 2.6.12–13, 290 3.1.1–4.7, 27 3.4.8, 27, 99–100 3.5.9, 5, 28, 35 3.6.10, 29, 37, 100–101, 302n39 3.11.19, 101 5–6, 25 5.6.10, 24 5.6.11–18.14, 252, 253

389

5.7.12–11.21, 257 5.10.20, 107 5.11.21, 24 5.13.23, 24, 27, 34–35 5.14.24, 25, 27, 35, 37 5.14.25, 109 5.19.16, 127 6.3.4, 25–26 6.4.6, 25, 26, 36, 271 6.5.7, 27, 38 6.5.8, 37–39 6.10, 17, 117 6.11, 18–20, 110 7.1.1, 81 7.5.7, 7.11, 110, 169 7.9.13, 27, 41, 110 7.9.13–14, 343n37 7.10.16, 109, 113, 120, 332n57 7.12.118, 111 7.14.20, 121 7.17.23, 109, 121, 222, 290 7.18.24, 97, 109, 120, 222, 229, 285, 290, 305n36 7.19.25, 109, 111–112, 117 7.21.27, 42, 112–113, 121, 312n38, 340n16, 344n40 8.3.6–10.24, 290 8.12.29, 97 9.4.8, 165, 289 9.4.8–11, 360n11 9.5.13, 301n35 10.6.10, 222–223 10.29.40, 248, 331n45, 347n64 10.43.70, 286 11.2.2, 216, 328n15 11.2.3, 41, 216, 287 11.2.3–4, 286–287 11.28.38, 33–34, 283 12.14.17, 75 12.27.37, 62, 305n30 12.28.38, 304n26

390

Works of Augustine Index

Confessions (continued) 13.13.14, 290 13.38.53, 305n31 On Dialectic [dial.], 48, 56, 223, 303n10 1, 48 6, 50–54 6.9.5–11.1, 48–49 10, 50–54 10.18.1–5, 49 Eighty-Three Miscellaneous Questions [div. qu.], 216, 322n65 25, 314n63 52, 330n32 60, 58, 330n34 61.2, 176–178, 189, 321n60 66, 331n40 69.10, 336n94 74, 354n43 75.1–2, 337–338n109, 338n111 80.3, 157, 336n93 Expositions of the Psalms [en. Ps.], 9–10, 12, 18, 165–189, 183, 191–196, 210–212, 288, 334n76, 336n91, 338nn 1.1, 3, 169, 329n19 1.4, 337n108 2.3–6, 172–175 2.7, 172, 188 2.8, 177, 200, 211 3, 189 3.1–8, 172, 183 3.1, 172, 175 3.3–4, 169–170 3.5, 167 3.6, 172, 173, 174, 183 3.9–10, 172, 183, 187–188, 199, 201, 332nn59, 60, 336n94, 333n65 4.1, 188, 327n13 4.2, 184, 199 5.1, 172, 210, 337n108

5.3, 333n65 5.4, 7, 174 5.8, 175 6, 323n65 6.1, 3, 6, 174 6.4, 331n44 7.1, 167, 172 7.3, 5, 178–179 7.9, 210–211 7.10, 331n44 7.12, 174 7.13, 178, 211 7.15, 178 7.20, 172, 179 8.2, 183, 330n29 8.4, 178 8.5, 138, 175, 294n7 8.8, 211 8.9, 167 8.11, 169, 175, 178 9.1, 5–8, 175 9.4, 6, 7, 172 9.5, 190 9.8, 185, 211 9.14, 184–185 9.17, 35, 175 9.31, 190 9.33, 173 10.1, 327n13 10.3, 167 10.6, 172 10.8, 294n6 10.11, 173 10.12, 169, 185 11.1, 7, 327n13 12.1, 173, 174, 175, 195 13.1, 195 13.3, 173 15–32, 10, 167, 189–207, 210–212, 336n91 15, 200–203, 327n14 15.1–4, 9 201

Works of Augustine Index 15.5, 196, 202, 203, 207, 210, 336n91 15.6, 202 15.7, 211 15.10, 201, 202–203 16.1, 5, 204 16.8, 169 16.13, 204, 211 17, 204–205 17.1, 195 17.2, 204 17.10, 211 17.12, 303n14 17.28, 51, 196 18, 334–335n76 18.2, 336n91 18.7, 8 287–288 19–20, 200 19.2, 7, 336n91 19.9, 196 19.10, 176 20.5, 336n91 21, 196–200, 207 21.1, 197–199 21.3, 7, 199 [2] 21.4, 289 21.15, 200, 207, 287 25.1, 206 [2] 26.2, 355n49 27.1, 206 27.6, 335–336n90 27.8, 196 27.9, 202, 212, 336n91 28, 327n13 28.1, 206 29.1, 327n13 29.2–12, 205–206 30.1, 206–207, 336n100 [2] 30.1.3, 199, 209, 335n81, 337n106, 359n10 [2] 30.3.1, 289, 335n77 44.3, 311n32 44.6, 314n58, 341n19

391

44.7, 329n21 44.19, 172 45.1, 207–208, 287, 289 47.7, 357n68 54.1, 334n74 54.3, 288 58.1.21–22.2, 358n2 60.2, 288 72.1, 349n80, 351n9 79.1, 199, 219, 289 83.5, 289 85.1, 288 103.1.13, 17, 308n28 103.4.1, 40 105.36, 248 123.14, 353n19 131.2, 17, 41 140.1, 220 140.12, 315n77 142.3, 98, 288 142.9, 289, 290 On Divine Order [ord.], 62 2.15.16, 117 2.9.26, 37–38 2.9.27, 88, 117, 136, 312n46 On Faith and the Creed [ f. et symb.], 307n15 9.19, 187–188, 323n69 Against Faustus the Manichee [c. Faust.] 11, 19, 90, 99, 106, 238, 240, 249–250, 251, 252, 256, 257, 267, 283, 286, 320n57, 349–350n1, 350n2, 352n17, 353n30, 354n44, 356n59 1.2 Cap., 253, 254, 256 (Note: Cap. = sections from Capitula) 2–3, 331n43 2.1 Cap., 106 3.1 Cap., 106 3.3, 258

392

Works of Augustine Index

Against Faustus (continued) 3.5, 263 4.1 Cap., 254 4.2, 273, 274 5.1 Cap., 124 5.2–3 Cap., 106 6.1 Cap., 256 6.2, 263, 279 6.4, 5, 269 6.7, 269–270, 273 6.9, 267, 268–269 7.1 Cap., 106 8.1 Cap., 255, 256 9.1 Cap., 255 10.1 Cap., 254, 255 11.1 Cap., 106, 258, 319n48 11.3, 258 11.6, 263 12, 274 12.1 Cap., 255 12.2, 256, 270 12.3, 258 12.7, 273, 277, 280 12.8, 263 12.25–26, 280 12.26, 249–250, 258, 349n82 12.27, 281 12.28–44, 280–281 12.29, 74, 278, 345n53, 357n69 12.30–44, 277–279 12.39–40, 273 12.48, 271, 285, 286 13.1 Cap., 255 13.6, 259, 315n78 13.10, 279 13.15, 278 14.1 Cap., 125, 255 14.3, 157 14.6, 158, 160 14.8, 142 15–19, 11, 260 15.1 Cap., 254, 256, 268

15.2, 268, 274, 355–356n56 15.6, 279 15.8, 262, 264–266 16.1, 5–7 Cap., 255 16.4 Cap., 270 16.9, 262, 273 16.13, 276 16.15, 270 16.17, 346n59 16.20, 276, 278 16.23, 275 16.24, 320n57 16.28, 151, 267 16.29, 354n42 16.32, 267 17.6, 262, 263 18.3 Cap., 37, 253, 256 19.2–3 Cap., 254 19.2 Cap., 42, 255 19.3 Cap., 262 19.4 Cap., 255 19.5 Cap., 253 19.7, 8, 262, 273, 276 19.8, 262, 273, 276 19.14, 274 19.16, 268, 272, 307n16 19.18, 262, 263, 266 19.31, 274 20.2 Cap., 126–127, 312n37 20.11, 125 20.13, 271, 315–316n78 20.18, 270 22, 274 22.2, 4,5 Cap., 254–255 22.6, 262 22.8, 271 22.24, 273 22.42, 276 22.58, 215 22.76, 258 22.78, 262 22.83, 275, 276, 356n60

Works of Augustine Index 22.87, 90, 275 22.94, 271, 276, 279 22.96, 277 23.2–3 Cap., 106 23.7, 258 26.1–2 Cap., 124–125, 319n44 27.2, 124 29.1 Cap., 125 30.1–2 Cap., 254 31.1 Cap., 254 32.7 Cap., 127, 128, 256, 271 32.9, 279 32.18, 280 33.1 Cap., 127, 128, 255, 271 33.3 Cap., 254 33.4, 255 Against Felix the Manichee [c. Fel.] 2.2, 311n24 Against Fortunatus the Manichee, a Debate [c. Fort.], 319nn47–48 1, 44 2, 100 3, 105, 344n39 7–8, 129 7, 147, 315n72, 331n40 9, 129, 147 19, 105, 310n17, 319n48 On Free Choice [lib. arb.] 3.9, 27, 33 On Genesis, Against the Manichees [Gn. c. Man.], 8, 42, 44, 49, 61, 69, 74, 75, 77, 89 1.1.1, 61 1.1.2, 62–63 1.3.5, 64 1.5.9, 56, 62 1.7.11, 61 1.7.12, 56, 62 1.8.13–14, 58

393

1.8.14, 59 1.9.15, 58, 59 1.14.20, 64 1.17.27, 56 1.22.33, 67, 137, 317–318n22 1.22.33–34, 58 1.22.34, 58–59 1.23.35, 60, 68 1.23.41, 64, 68 2, 73 2.2.3–2.23.36, 69 2.2.3, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 74, 136, 149, 305n32 2.4.5–5.6, 55–56 2.5.6, 118 2.9.12, 56 2.10.13, 66 2.11.15, 67 2.12.17, 56, 67, 355n51 2.20.30, 62 2.21.32, 66 2.22.33, 57 2.24.37, 72, 97, 149, 186, 328n16, 357n70 2.25.38, 60, 62, 332n61 2.27.41, 72 Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis [Gn. litt. imp.] 2.5, 317n17 3.8, 65 7.28, 32, 65 Literal Commentary on Genesis [Gn. litt.], 283 1.1.1, 317n20 10.20.35–36, 351n9 Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love [ench.] 13.41, 318n41, 322n63 On the Happy Life [b. vita] 1.4, 25, 230 4.34, 312n38

394

Works of Augustine Index

On the Harmony of the Evangelists [cons. ev.] 1.35.54, 13, 283 2, 331n43 On Instructing Beginners [cat. rud.], 10, 19, 240–242, 285 3.5, 242 3.6, 241, 246, 249, 333n63 4.7, 150, 245 4.7–8, 280 4.8, 13, 19, 241, 246–247, 262, 279 6.10, 245, 246, 354n31 9.13, 244–245 10.15, 243 12.17, 243–244, 291 13.18, 244, 272 17.28, 241, 272 18.29–24.44, 242 19.31, 348n67 19.32, 245, 272 19.33, 245, 246, 353n22, 355n53 20.34, 245, 272, 348–349n77 22.39, 242, 245 27.53, 242 Letters [ep.], 18 11–12, 117 11.2, 97, 118, 271 11.4, 118 12, 118 21, 134–135, 137 21.3, 135, 215 21.4, 135–136, 176 41.2, 217, 328n16 54–55, 354n45 55, 272–273, 354n48, 355n30 55.7.13, 34 73.5, 216 82.3, 351n3 93.7.23–29.29, 289 93.8.24, 358n73 102, 284

102.33, 34 120.1.3, 302n41 135, 3–4, 294n1 135.1, 32 135.2, 137–138, 4 136, 4, 294n1 136.2, 4, 31 137.1.3, 4, 301n26 137.3.9, 321n59 137.4.15–16, 32 137.5.18, 5–6 138.1.5, 31–32 140, 284, 335n84 143.2, 294n13 The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount [s. Dom. m.] 2.25.87, 327n13 1.4.11–12, 340n14 2.11.38, 340n14 On the Soul’s Magnitude [quant. an.], 62 7.12, 306n48 33.70–76, 340n14 33.76, 312n41 Against Mani’s Letter called “The Foundation” [c. ep. Man.] 36.41, 332–333n62 Against Maximinus the Arian [c. Max.] 2.7, 341n18 15.5, 319n42 On Merits and Forgiveness of Sin and Infant Baptism [pecc. mer.] 1.27.54, 322n62 On Music [mus.] 6.11.29, 301n31 Practices of the Catholic Church and of the Manichees [mor.], 8, 44, 62, 78–79, 85, 86, 87, 122

Works of Augustine Index 1.1.2, 44 1.2.3, 80–81, 118 1.2.4–6.9, 81 1.7.11, 82 1.7.12, 81, 82, 118, 303n8 1.8.13–19.15, 84 1.9.15, 83 1.10.16–17, 85 1.13.22, 116, 121 1.14.27, 83 1.15.25, 116 1.16.27, 32–33 1.16.28, 84, 230 1.17.30, 84, 150, 313nn56, 58, 341n26 1.17.31, 81, 84–85 1.18.33, 304n25 1.18.34, 84 1.27.52, 83 1.28.55, 82–83 1.28.56, 83 1.29.59, 84 1.30.62, 84 Against the Letters of Petilianus [c. litt. Pet.] 3.2.3, 291 On the Predestination of the Saints [praed. sanct.] 5, 302n41 Propositions on Romans [exp. prop. Rm.], 148–149, 154, 323n68, 330n40 13–18, 139–140 32–34, 140–143, 145, 148, 155, 160, 236, 322n64 48, 143–146, 153, 324n72 A Psalm against the Faction of Donatus [ps. c. Don.] 270–287, 182 Questions on the Heptateuch [qu.] 2.73, 248

Revisions [retr.], 322n65, 327n10 1.10, 44 1.11, 340n18 1.13.1, 85, 307n15 1.18, 306n1 1.19.8, 169 1.22.1, 323n65 1.24.1, 188–189, 324n71 1.26.1, 322n65 2.7.1, 19, 256 2.10, 310n18 2.20, 354n45 2.24.2, 324n78 2.27, 13 Against Secundinus the Manichee [c. Sec.], 99, 310n18 Letter of Secundinus to Augustine [Sec. epist.], 310n18 3, 127 4, 105 5, 105, 311n24 Sermons [s.], 12, 18 8.1, 33 46.36, 294n6 51.5, 41 57.7, 284, 347n66 123.3.3, 344n41 133.8, 288 185.1–2, 208 216, 317n16 339.4, 216 350.2, 340n13 355.2, 133 Against the Skeptics [c. Acad.] 2.1.1, 115, 286 2.2.5, 121, 312n38 3.19.42, 117

395

396

Works of Augustine Index

Answers to Simplicianus [Simpl.] 1.1.1, 291, 332n53 Soliloquies [sol.] 1.1.3, 305n31 1.2.7, 166, 309n3 2.14.26; 81 On the Spirit and the Letter [spir. et litt.] 4.6, 358n1 On the Teacher [mag.], 43, 345n54 11.38, 119, 186 Tractates on John’s Gospel [Io. ev. tr.], 18 3.2, 353n19 3.19, 353n30 6.6, 275 13.4, 344n41 21.7, 288 21.8, 288 27.5, 343n38 80.3, 307n16, 355n50 98.6, 285 108.5, 288 111.6, 288 On the Trinity [trin.], 18 1–4, 283 1.8.16, 114 2.15.25, 340n18 4.3.6, 283, 325n1, 335n84, 346n57 5, 312n37

On True Religion [vera rel.], 8, 13, 43, 79, 85–86, 113, 122–123, 133, 306n9 3.3, 86 3.4, 88 4.7, 86, 113, 307n14 7.12, 85 7.13, 12, 87–89, 301n30 10.19, 86, 87, 114 16.30–17.33, 119 16.31, 122 16.31–32, 119, 122 16.32, 118 17.33, 89–90, 119 24.45, 38, 87–88, 136 25.46, 89 26.49, 17, 88, 340n14 27.50, 348n67 30.54–56, 114 36.66, 115 37.68–49.94, 86 24.45–51.100, 91 49.97, 92 50.98, 32, 87, 90–93 50.99, 93–96, 120, 137, 341n26, 346n63 51.100, 15, 92 On the Two Souls [duab. an.] 1.1, 230 9.11, 304n25

Author and Subject Index

A Abraham in salvation history, 32, 70, 87, 139, 149, 151, 178, 237, 242 promises to, 161, 277 type of Christ, 231, 280 polygamy of, 225, 351n9 Academics (Skeptics), 37 accommodation, rhetorical as characterizing rhetoric, 29–30 as divine strategy, 15, 36, 39–40, 56, 89 of Scriptures, 61–65, 92–93 Adam. See also Adam and Eve symbol of old life, 60–62, 90, 127, 140–146, 158–159, 178, 236, 281, 290 voice assumed by Christ, 10, 198–199, 206, 209, 266, 321n57 Adam and Eve at creation, 56, 305n39 as figures of body and soul, 55, 66–67, 118 as figures of Christ and Church, 60, 72–73, 186, 280, 357n70 Adeodatus, 43, 133 Adimantus the Manichee, 108, 253, 323n65

Alfaric, P., 294n11 allegory (allegoria), 16–18, 32, 55, 66–67, 94–95, 244, 273, 284–286 Ambrose. See also letter and spirit changes A.’s mind on Catholic Church, 7, 25, 36–37, 109 changes A.’s mind on O.T., 23–30, 36, 39–42, 301n35 as exegete and preacher, 24, 136, 166, 168, 261, 271, 317n19 as orator, 26–27, 34–35 teaching on immateriality, 25–26, 37, 41 Ambrosiaster, 338n2 “anagogic” reading, 223, 227, 242, 248. See also “mystagogic” reading aperta/operta (“open” and “closed” Scriptures). See Scripture Arbesmann, R., 331n44 Arianism, 260 Aristotle, 29, 31, 35, 300n10, 305n36, 313n48 Armstrong, A.H., 311n27 Arp, R., 333n64 arrangement, rhetorical (dispositio), 30–34, 39

398

Author and Subject Index

ascent, spiritual. See also authority; epistemology; reason; sacrament; Scripture; spiritales Christ and, 113, 115, 146, 157, 171, 178, 221 historical faith and, 168, 284–286 as “ladder,” 17, 88, 94, 136, 138, 150, 164, 175, 220–222, 240, 242, 248–250, 285, 319n48 and philosophy, liberal arts, 43, 86, 221, 222 Scripture for, 8, 12, 86, 95–96, 167, 216, 234, 240, 285 and signs, 223–224, 235–236 as “steps” of spiritual progress, 9, 17, 29, 69, 87, 92, 204, 220, 307n15, 319n48, 340n14 Augustine. See also Ambrose; Christ; Christ, death of; Church; Faustus the Manichee; interpretation; Jews, Judaism; letter and spirit; likeness; “little ones”; Paul; prosopopoeia; spiritales and the Bible, early problems, 27–29 as bishop, 10–11, 28, 215–216 as catechumen, 109–113 as lay Catholic, 7–8, 60, 85, 113–129 as reader of Cicero 4, 27–29, 30, 35, 37, 48–49, 100, 164, 252, 301n26. See also Hortensius. early devotion to Christ, 98–100, 110–112 youthful relation to North African Church 5, 99–100, 107 as Manichee, 7, 23–24, 26, 37, 42, 44, 77, 85, 98–99, 100–101, 106–113, 127–128, 142, 251, 252, 256–257, 278, 302n39, 304n25, 305n36 anti-Manichean campaign of, 11, 19, 43–44, 136, 150, 155, 158, 169, 200, 250, 256–260, 279, 283–284, 360n11, 350n2

Platonism of, 113–115, 121, 218, 231, 235, 343n37, 346n54 Plotinian influences on, 109–110, 116, 221, 222, 333n64 as preacher, 7, 136–139, 216, 284, 288 as priest, 9–10, 133–139 as student, 5, 27–28 as teacher of rhetoric, 26, 48 Auerbach, E., 294n4, 359n3 Aurelius, bishop of Carthage, 216, 328n16 authority. See also faith; interpretation; Scripture divine, 88, 117, 312n46 effecting spiritual healing, 38, 82–83 and reason, 38, 79–81, 86, 88–89, 278 of salvation’s temporal economy, 88, 91, 117 B Babcock, W.S., 295n14, 341n22 Bardy, G., 326n4 Basil of Caesarea, 30, 168 van Bavel, T., 298n30, 304n29, 309n1, 313n53, 318n23, 321n61, 329nn19, 20, 333n66, 335n89 BeDuhn, J.D., 310nn12, 22, 24, 351nn4, 5, 6 Bennett, C., 300n14 Bernard, R.W., 297n24, 304n16, 308n28 Berrouard, M.-F., 331n44, 338n1, 349n82 Bochet, I., 18, 294n4, 295n18, 296n19, 303nn12, 13, 308nn21, 31, 313n54, 325n3, 335n84, 339n8, 340nn10, 11, 14, 341n22, 346n54, 358n1, 360n14 Bonner, G., 297n23, 316n2, 359n3 “bottom-up” hermeneutical perspective, 10, 138, 240–250, 348n67. See also “top-down” Boulding, M., 298n27, 326–327n8, 360n10

Author and Subject Index Brown, P., 13, 291, 295n14, 303n3, 316nn1, 2, 4, 9, 317n12, 339n7, 340n8, 359n3, 360n12 Brown, R.E., 352nn16, 17 Brueggemann, W., 356n60 Bruns, G., 295n18, 300n15, 302nn45, 46 Bultmann, R., 339n8 Burleigh, J.H.S., 307n20 Burnaby, J., 293n1, 312n42 Burns, J.P., 299n4, 340n14 Byassee, J., 296n19, 308n30 C Cameron, M., 298n27, 316n7, 326n3, 337n106, 342n29, 359n9 Canning, R., 348n69 carnal interpretation. See interpretation Cary, P., 342–343n37, 345n54, 352n14, 356n59 Cassiciacum, 85, 165, 285 Cavadini, J., 319n51, 342n36, 345n51 cause-effect. See figurative relationships Celsus, 181 Chadwick, H., 293n2, 311n29, 315n78, 316n81 Christ (human being). See also Christ, death of; Christ the Mediator; David; Manichees; Word of God birth from a human mother, 104–108, 111–112, 124, 246, 258, 311n32 center of A.’s hermeneutics, 12–13, 242, 288 dominicus homo (“the Lordly Man”), 19, 144, 169–171, 184–186, 338n109 humanity of, 98, 111–112, 167–169, 176, 195, 210–211, 227–231, 251, 258– 260, 319n53, 321n59, 323–324n71, 347n66 human soul of, 170, 204, 211 humility of, 5, 121–122, 153–157, 162, 167, 178–179, 198–199, 202, 211, 243, 259–260, 305n36, 309n6, 322n61

399

human will of, 152–154, 321nn58, 59, 321–322n61 as Jewish, 98, 128, 190, 257–260 as sinless, 143–146, 150, 159, 236 “takes up” (suscipere) sin and death, 153–156, 321nn58, 60 as teacher of wisdom, 150, 311n29 as uniting divine and human, 175–179, 201, 230, 250, 311n32, 321n59, 321–322n61 as wisdom embodied, 12, 32, 111, 115–116, 175, 195, 230, 285–286, 312n38, 314n63, 343n37, 344n46. See also refs. to 1 Cor 1:24 Christ the Mediator, 323n70, 324n76. See also refs. to 1 Tim. 2:5 as grounding “mediative signs,” 344–345n46, 345–346n54 as intercessor, 177, 184–185, 188, 196, 202–203, 206, 212, 288, 334n70 as interweaving O.T and N.T., 160–163 love and grace affecting the will, 156–159, 222, 229–231, 241, 262–263, 280 and reading the Law, 260–269, 265, 286–287, 353n28 as work of humanity, 120, 205–209, 328n14, 321n59, 324n71 as “way of seeing,” 12–13, 262–269, 286–292 as work of the divine Son, 116, 187–189, 323n69, 324n71, 333n65 Christ, death of. See also Manichees; sign A.’s early weak redemption theology, 121–123, 147–149, 319n51 as hermeneutical key, 208, 241 likeness to as moral example, 122, 158, 140–141, 146–147, 155, 158, 314n63 and redemption, 155–156, 236 as sacramental sign, 100, 199, 233, 272, 348–349n77

400

Author and Subject Index

Christopher, J.P., 348n69 Church. See also Adam and Eve; “whole Christ” A.’s early estimate of, 37, 107, 109–110 element of salvation design, 13, 164, 242 as fulfillment of prophecy, 69, 73, 75, 87, 178, 245, 274–275, 280, 335n83, 355n53 as Mother of “little ones,” 75, 84 O.T. saints included in, 246 united to Christ, 158, 186–188, 348n67, 338nn109–111 speaking voice of, 172, 182–184, 196, 328–329n16, 332nn57, 59, 335n86 Cicero. See also Augustine; Hortensius theorist of figures, 45–46, 50–54, 180, 303n6 theorist of hermeneutics, 29, 331n49 theorist of rhetoric, 31–32, 36, 45 Clement of Alexandria, 168 Cohen, J., 351–352n13, 358–359n2 container-contained. See figurative relationships Courcelle, P., 359n9 Couturier, C., 346n57 Cranz, F. E., 325n80 Crecelius, W., 303n10 Crouse, R.D., 307n14 curiositas (lust for useless knowledge), 91–92, 220 Cyprian, 168, 322n62 D Daley, B., 294n9, 309n1, 321n59, 322n61 Daniel, 278–279 Danielou, J., 297n21 David ancestor of Christ, 105–106, 178, 258 figure of Christ, 195–198, 201, 204, 206

in salvation history, 70, 87, 242 stories about, 225, 238, 276 Dawson, D., 297–298n25, 337n104, 341n25, 345n51, 348n68 Deogratias, deacon of Carthage, 240–244, 278, 291 decorum (rhetorical “fittingness”), 30–34, 39 dispositio. See arrangement, rhetorical dispensation, temporal (dispensatio temporalis), 4, 10, 12, 32–34, 39, 78, 82, 85, 87–90, 139–140, 164, 171, 203, 211, 225, 231, 301n30 Dixon, S.L., 306n2 Dodaro, R., 300nn18, 20, 21 Dodd, C.H., 295n15 Doignon, J., 312n46 dominicus homo (“the Lordly Man”). See Christ. Donatists, 43, 139, 168, 182, 252, 283–284, 294n6, 358n73 Drobner, H., 330nn26, 38, 354n46 Dulaey, M., 18, 137, 296n19, 298n29, 304nn19, 24, 316n3, 317n21, 323n65, 325n3, 326n7, 327n14, 330n29, 335n82, 352nn14, 18, 353n19 E Eden, K., 32, 300nn11–13, 23, 24, 302n42 Eliot, T.S., 295n16 Elpidius, 23 epistemology, 55, 79–83, 89, 114, 119, 223, 280. See also Paul the Apostle equity. See letter and spirit exchange. See also prosopopoeia; transfiguration in figures of speech, 47, 61, 143, 163, 173, 298n25 in impersonation, 181–182, 196, 205 as principle of redemption, 10, 60, 142–143, 149, 157, 159, 198–199, 203, 208–210, 289–291, 321n57, 329n16,

Author and Subject Index 332n59, 335n81, 337n106, 346n54, 360n10 as principle of spiritual understanding, 58, 243–244 in signs, 252 exercises, grammatical and rhetorical, 171, 180, 303n11, 330n29. See also grammar and rhetoric, schools of exercise, spiritual. See also reason A.’s works as, 16, 197, 279, 288 divine strategy of, 5–6, 92, 119, 239 exegesis as, 63, 96, 165–166, 200, 210, 270, 350–351n3 reading figures as, 57, 62, 94 for strengthening spiritual reasoning, 17, 39–40, 43, 48, 78, 84–85, 89, 222, 248, 281 Exodus from Egypt, Israel’s event of salvation history, 6, 87, 177, 242 Christological interpretation of, 74, 94, 137, 219, 235, 278, 345n53, 346n59 F faith. See also authority; reason; Scripture and authority, 38, 78, 82, 88, 93, 136, 221 of beginners and advanced, 93–94, 138, 274, 283–286 in external events, 93, 138, 286 as foundation of love, 13, 162, 241, 262 healing work of, 38, 79–94, 115, 159, 237 as mode of reading, 13, 62 and truth, 43, 90 and understanding, 63, 78, 93, 95, 219 Faustus the Manichee. See also Manichees A.’s early relation to, 23–24, 35, 252–253, 351nn4, 5, 7

401

as critic of Catholic Church, 37, 253–256 , 267–270, 350n2 Manichean confession of, 106, 108, 124–128, 258, 312n37, 319n44, 350n2, 354n42 Felix, 311n24 Féret, H.M., 346n57 Ferrari, L.C., 344n39 Fiedrowicz, M., 296n19, 298n27, 306nn9, 10, 11, 325n3, 326nn4, 5, 6, 337n107 figurative relationships. See also figures of speech; likeness; metaphor; metonymy; synecdoche association (container-contained), 46–49, 57, 60–61 causation (cause-effect), 46–49, 57–59 participation (part-whole), 46–49, 59–60, 96 proximity (vicinitas), 48–49, 56 figures of speech, 57, 261, 304n19. See also figurative relationships Fortunatus the Manichee. See also Manichees. on Christ, 104–105, 128–129, 147, 315n72, 331n40, 344n39 public debate with A., 302n1, 319nn47, 48 “Four Ages” of salvation history. See also “Seven Ages” schema framework of, 139–140, 187, 318n26 turn from “under Law” to “under grace,” 152–153, 260, 263, 266, 267, 272, 320n57 “Four Senses” of Scripture. See Scripture Franzmann, M., 107–108, 309n7, 310nn9, 13, 14, 23, 314n70, 315nn73, 74, 319n53

402

Author and Subject Index

Fredriksen, P., 295n14, 297n22, 299n33, 318nn25, 28, 319n42, 320n57, 345nn49, 50, 350nn2, 3, 351n13, 353n28, 358–359n2 G Gardner, I., 309n8, 310nn10, 11 Geerlings, W., 315n75 Gilson, E., 293n3, 296–297n20, 325n85 grammar and rhetoric, schools of, 10, 30 44, 218, 244. See also exercises, grammatical and rhetorical Gregory the Great, 300n8 H Hardy, D., 293n1 Harmless, W., 299nn2, 3, 317n16, 331n44, 348n69 Harnack, A., 309n3 Harrison, C., 294n14, 333n69, 344n46, 348n70 Hays, R., 329n17, 345n53 Heidegger, M., 16, 339n8 Heidl, G., 302n3 Hermagoras, 313n48 Hermogenes, 180 Hilary of Poitiers, 166, 168, 188 Hill, E., 304n19, 318n39 history (historia) as sequence of events (facta), 17, 63–68, 75, 95, 138–139, 164, 305n39, 351n10 history (historia) as narrative (narratio). See also dispensation, temporal; Scripture as base of spiritual ascent, 17–18, 93, 138 and figuration, 64–71, 73, 95 and instruction, 240–242, 248 as literal description, 63–65, 70–71, 73, 218 as means of salvation, 151, 168 as mode of reading, 63–65, 74, 172 and prophecy, 68–74, 72, 136 as rhetorical strategy, 63–65, 67

Holy Spirit. See also Manichees active in life of Jesus, 162, 238 active in O.T., 161–163, 274, 276–277 as aiding readers, 72, 276, 279, 287, 340n14 biblical strategy of, 38, 40, 69, 72, 94, 224, 341n26, 343n38 and rhetorical invention, 59, 63, 65 in Trinity, 59, 118, 313n48 Hombert, P., 322n65, 349n1, 354n45 Honoratus, 136 Hortensius (Cicero), 27, 37, 100, 110 Houghton, H.A.G., 353n19, 357n69 humility. See Christ; “little ones”; Scripture; reading; spiritales Hunter, D., 342n29, 351n9 I Ijsseling, S., 301n34 immateriality, 8, 25–27, 36–37, 41–42, 174 impersonation. See prosopopoeia “indicative” signs. See sign intercession. See Christ the Mediator interpretation. See also “bottom-up”; reading; Scripture; “top-down” A.’s framework for, 10–11, 18, 75, 77–96, 99, 120, 207, 217, 251 as “business,” 219 carnal, 226–227, 233 as determined by authority, 72–74 as “game,” 15, 64, 89, 92, 120, 280 “nothing unworthy of God,” 44, 59, 74, 81, 88, 174, 175, 221 as requiring upright character, 15, 41, 67, 80, 225 Iesus patibilis. See Manichees Irenaeus of Lyons, 168, 261, 336n101 Isocrates, 35–36 J Jackson, B.D., 303n10, 341n22 Januarius, 272, 354n45

Author and Subject Index Jeanrond, W., 339n8 Jerome, 168, 216, 338n2, 351n10 Jews, Judaism. See also Manichees in A.’s thought, 350n2, 351–352n13, 358n2 as opponents of Christianity, 168, 181, 345n49 as target of Faustus, 253–256 as “unspiritual” readers, 137, 232, 317n22, 320n57 Johnson, W.R., 301n36 Jones, D.J., 331n41 justification of Old Testament saints, 160–162, 246, 274 Justin Martyr, 168, 233 K Keller, H., 308n24 Kloos, K., 325n83 Koestler, A., 308n24 Kotzé, A., 360n11 L La Bonnardiére, A.-M., 293n4, 296n19, 298n26, 301n28, 330n35 Lausberg, H., 303n4, 337n107 Law works of, 237–238, 263–273 “became grace and truth,” 260–263, 265 “Law and Prophets,” 6, 11, 25, 36, 84, 113, 156, 247, 255–257, 336n104 letter of Scripture 92–93. See also letter and spirit as literal sense (litterae), 17, 25–26, 41, 56, 63–65, 68, 74–75, 94, 120, 153, 173, 225–227, 231–233, 244, 305n32, 320n57 as “killing” or “enslaving” 24–25, 227, 320n57 letter and spirit. See also Ambrose; letter of Scripture; refs. to 2 Cor. 3:6 Pauline hermeneutical “rule,” 8,

403

24–25, 30, 36, 44–45, 64, 74–75, 84, 86, 94, 136, 227, 229, 284 A. on relation between, 30, 40–41, 152 226–234, 260, 264–266 in legal documents (scriptum and voluntas), 29–30, 36, 39–41 Lienhard, J. T., 302n43 Lieu, S.N.C., 309n8, 310nn10, 11 likeness (similitudo), A.’s understanding. See also likeness, Manichean understanding; sacrament; Word of God analysis of, 270, 285, 354nn41, 43 “economy of,” 114 humanity made in God’s, 25, 114 inadequate to explain redemption, 147–150, 159 as means of salvation, 87, 113–118 as mediating spiritual truth, 114–115 principle of hermeneutics, 68–69, 71, 113, 137, 318n22 principle linking ages of biblical history, 140, 150 principle of spiritual understanding, 66, 74–75, 81, 113–115, 270 principle of word formation and function, 48, 56, 64 sacramental, 159–160, 178, 270, 273 likeness, Manichean understanding. See also Manichees. as principle of Christology, 9, 104, 107–108, 112, 124, 128–129, 147, 315n72 as principle for attaining salvation, 104, 124, 127–129 “little ones” (parvuli; i.e., simple believers). See also “bottom-up”; spiritales attacked by Manichees, 44, 63, 304n25 A.’s ministry to, 12, 136–139, 175, 216, 239–240, 248–250, 259, 280, 284–286

404

Author and Subject Index

“little ones” (continued) Church feeds with elementary teaching, 9, 84, 138–139, 250 fed by Scripture, 6, 56, 64, 67, 75, 136, 200, 211, 218, 305n30 simplicity of, 28, 38–39, 62, 138, 168, 200, 279, 285 Livy, 46 love as condition for knowing truth, 280, 312n42 as definition of virtue, 116, 225 of God and neighbor, 64, 83, 84, 140, 225, 227, 239, 245 excited by Christ and Scripture, 13, 240–250, 266, 277, 280–281 fulfills the Law, 199, 230–231, 238 as human desire, 56, 227 as means and end of right reading, 17, 41, 218–220, 241–245, 277, 281 as power of healing, 83, 233 as Scripture’s interpretive center, 6, 13–14, 41, 83–85, 90, 217, 219–220, 225, 226, 238, 241, 245–248, 259, 262, 266 de Lubac, H., 208, 296n19, 297n21, 317n18, 336nn101, 102, 103 Luneau, A., 306n43, 318n26 M Madec, G., 12, 294n8, 303n12, 307n12, 309n1, 311n33, 314n58, 323nn65, 70, 340n17, 344n41, 348n69 Mallard, W., 308n25, 309n1, 312n43, 313n47 Mani, 37, 44, 101–103, 107, 253, 257, 311n24 [Manichean] Kephalaia of the Teacher, 101 Manichean Psalm Book, 104, 100, 125 Manichees. See also Adam and Eve; Augustine; Faustus; Mani; “patriarchs and prophets”; Paul the Apostle

anti-Judaism of, 253–256, 352n17 attacks on Catholics, 8, 23–24, 29, 44, 61, 75, 139, 142, 168, 252–256 attacks on Moses, 141–142, 146 belief structure, 100–105, 126, 252, 312n37, 351n8 biblicism of, 7, 319n48, 351n10 Christology of, 9, 100, 105–109, 115, 117, 123–129, 147–148, 158, 310n22, 314n70, 315n77, 319n53, 331nn40, 43 conceptions of Holy Spirit, 126, 255 dualism of, 85–86, 119, 121, 125, 234, 310n22, 310–311n24 “Jesus the Splendor,” 103–104, 107, 310n24 literalism of, 44, 64–65, 74, 95, 142, 225, 317n22 rationalism of, 37–38, 57–58, 61, 79–82 rejection of Old Testament, 7, 11, 44, 79, 83, 90, 108–109, 128, 150, 254–256, 261, 265 as universalizing, 126–127, 259, 271, 315n77, 315–316n78 “vulnerable Jesus” (Iesus patibilis), 126–127 Marcellinus, 294n1, 300n19 Markus, R., 294n14, 306n42, 307n20, 341n22, 354n43 Marrou, H., 295–296n19, 342n30 Martens, P.W., 297n21 Martin, T.F., 318n26, 331n44, 333n68, 334nn70, 75, 357n71 Maurists [Benedictines of St. Maur], 303n10, 318n25, 326n8 Mayer, C.P., 296n19, 302n2, 343n37, 345–346n54 McCarthy, M.C., 337nn105, 107 McGinn, B., 354n44 McLean, B.H., 318n40 McWilliam, J., 309n1, 314n59, 319n42, 335n85 mediation (concept), 116, 231, 333n64. See also Christ the Mediator

Author and Subject Index “mediative signs.” See signs metaphor, 56–57, 64–65, 74, 173 metonymy, 57, 142, 298n25. See also figurative relationships in biblical texts, 59–61, 68, 163, 173–176, 203, 318n39 and Christ, 142–146, 157, 159, 182–183, 185, 189, 263, 324n79, 338n109 discussed in classical handbooks, 45–47, 50–52 Monica, 5, 27, 43, 99–101, 107 Morrison, K.F., 359n8 Moses. See also Law; “Law and Prophets”; Manichees as author of Genesis, 59, 63–68 contrasted with Christ, 260–265, 270 curse of, 125, 141–143, 146, 148–160, 234–237, 255, 314n67 divine self-revelation to, 202 as Israelite leader, 58, 177, 231, 242 Law given through, 161, 260–265, 352n15, 353n28 Law of, 6, 42, 98, 139, 254, 255, 260, 350n2, 352n16, 357n69 as prophet, 9, 125, 142, 149, 159 signs in stories of, 231, 236–237, 245, 271, 275, 278, 279, 280, 290, 346n59, 348–349n77 “mystagogic” reading (mysticus), 241–250, 270–273, 354n44. See also “anagogic” reading N Nebridius, 117, 133, 271, 313n48 Newman, J.H., 358n74 Nodes, D.J., 332n55 O O’Connell, R.J., 311n33, 344n39 O’Donnell, J.J., 299n34, 311n31, 316–317n10, 323n70, 339n8 O’Donovan, O., 347n65 O’Keefe, J., 295n17

405

Old Latin Bible (Vetus Latina), 13, 38, 143–145, 161–162, 322n62, 318n39, 340n18 operta (“closed” Scriptures). See Scripture Origen influence on A., 208, 302–303n3, 336n103, 336–337n104 interpretive tradition of, 40, 44, 181, 302n46, 317n19, 338n2 texts treated by, 261, 345n52 P parables of Jesus, 17, 96, 120, 279, 295n15 as paradigm for scriptural figures 32, 66–67, 92–93, 96, 120 part-whole. See figurative relationships parvuli. See “little ones” “patriarchs and prophets” (O.T.). See also prophets “carnal” deeds of, 82, 87 as figures of salvation history, 128, 138, 258 Manichean attack on, 225, 254, 255 spiritual understanding of, 90, 232, 274, 355–356n56 as part of Christian economy, 246, 267, 273–274, 349n80 prophetic lives of, 249, 255–256, 271, 273–274 Patricius, 27, 99 Paul the Apostle. See also letter and spirit, “little ones,” Moses, spiritales advanced spiritual perspective of, 79, 114, 138, 218, 228–229, 250, 317n14, 347n65 A.’s early reading as lay Catholic, 112, 116, 121–122 A.’s priestly reading of, 14, 134–136, 317n12 and A.’s reading of Psalms, 9–10, 164, 167, 189–199, 207, 209

406

Author and Subject Index

Paul (continued) and A.’s view of Christ’s divinity, 116, 121, 187–189, 312n38, 323n69, 323–324n71 and A.’s view of Christ’s humanity, 9, 12, 151–158, 168, 189–197, 206–207, 210, 345nn53, 54, 357nn69, 70 and Christianity’s Jewish roots, 257–260, 319n48 and death of Christ, 141–160, 164, 203, 290, 322n64 figures of speech in, 59, 140–143, 146, 163, 175, 181–183, 290–291, 332n57 and Law, 160–162, 264–266, 269–270, 352n17 among the Manichees, 102, 106, 124–129, 147, 255, 258, 310n17 ministry to “little ones,” 136–138, 243, 250 Old Testament hermeneutics of, 9, 42, 60, 74, 137, 217–219, 232, 234–238, 242, 249, 269, 278–279 and reading salvation historically, 139, 151, 164 and spiritual epistemology, 120–121, 221–223. See also epistemology; refs. to Rom. 1:20 pedagogy. See also Scripture ancient, 89, 119, 241 of Christ the teacher, 119–120, 122, 158, 228 incarnational model of, 243–244 process of learning, 77, 80, 151 “pedagogy of the Incarnation,” 8, 116, 118, 148, 176, 227, 230, 316n81 Pepin, J., 342n30 Philo, 40, 44, 302n46, 305n37, 317n19, 356n65 philosophy, 3, 25–27, 35–36, 41, 85, 89, 111, 117, 119, 164, 346 Photinus, 111, 117, 311n31 Pinborg, J., 303n10

Pincherle, A., 294n11 Plato, 36, 80, 313n48 Platonism, 35, 79. See also Augustine, Platonism of Platonists, 86, 113, 340n16. “Platonists, books of the” 13, 27, 41, 110, 137, 164, 343n37 Plotinus, 86, 299n6, 311n29, 333n64 Plumer, E., 320n57, 321n58, 324nn76, 79, 325n81, 339n8, 346n61, 347n64 Plutarch, 30, 300nn12, 13 Poland, L.M., 355n52 Pollmann, K., 13, 304n24, 339n8, 340nn9, 13, 341n22 Polman, A.D.R., 341n26 Pontet, M., 296n19 Porphyry, 86, 299n6, 311n29 Possidius, 134, 316n6, 325n2, 327n10 Press, G., 339n6 prophecy (prophetia), 68–75, 166–168, 266–280. See also history prophecy-fulfillment structure of Christian Bible, 10, 68–75, 91, 218, 239, 257, 269, 277, 347–348n67 prophets (O.T.). See also “patriarchs and prophets” moral flaws inconsequential in, 274–276 mysteries in, 24, 303n14, 336n104 as Scripture writers, 55, 276–277 using impersonation, 163, 182 witnesses to Christian salvation, 11, 89, 256, 259 prosopological analysis, 10, 171–172, 179–180, 196 prosopopoeia (impersonation) A.’s use of, 181, 182, 240, 243, 285, 328n14, 332n57, 347n64 Christ and, 10, 179, 183–185, 196–200, 203–210, 243, 291 classical handbooks on, 163–164, 179–182, 331n49

Author and Subject Index in Scripture, 163, 183, 291, 335n79 as theological template, 10, 182, 209 proximity (vicinitas). See figurative relationships Q Quintilian, 29, 31–32, 45–46, 50–54, 63, 180–181, 297–298n25, 331n49 R Ramirez, J.R., 302n41 Ramsey, B., 329n19 reading fulfills sacramental Law, 90, 266–269 mediates humility, 4–6, 28–29, 39, 118, 120, 244–245, 313n56 “reading as Christ,” 208–210, 287–292 reason (ratio) as coherence or order, 33, 87 relation of faith to, 37, 61, 78, 80, 93–94, 302n41 regenerated (spiritual reason), 12, 33, 37, 68–69, 72, 74, 79–80, 120, 198, 277 redemption 142–159. See also Christ; Christ, death of; exchange A.’s early folding within knowledge, 123, 176, 186–189, 316n81, 330n40 and Christ’s humanity, 9, 156–158, 168, 189, 251, 259–260, 321n59, 322n61, 343n37 divine strategy of, 87, 144, 151–154 and figures of speech 60, 142–146, 332n57 as signified, 158–160, 235, 272 Rebillard, É., 327n9 Remy, G., 323n70, 324n77, 333n65, 346n54 Reno, R.R., 295n17 Rhetorica ad Herrenium [Cicero], 45–46, 50–54, 180

407

rhetorical handbooks, classical, 45–49, 50–54 Richter, S., 315n73 Ricoeur, P., 16, 340n8 Ring, T. G., 318n25 Rist, J., 317n11 Romanianus, 85 Rondeau, M.-J., 299n31, 325n3, 328–329n16, 329n18, 330n26, 331n51, 359–360n10 Russell, R., 312n46 S Sabbath Jesus’ “violation” of, 152–153, 320n57 as prophecy, 269, 273 as sacrament, 232–233, 237, 353n30 spiritual rest of, 266, 273 sacrament. See also Christ, death of; exchange; likeness; sign, “mediative”; Sabbath; “visible words” Christ and Church as, 60, 69, 97–98, 357n70 as external realities, 55, 87, 305n39 as feature of salvation history, 39, 98, 164, 259–260, 354n47, 355n49 as figures and likenesses, 92, 158–160, 178, 270, 273 as mode of reading, 67, 95, 238, 241, 268, 271–274, 355n49 as “principle” (spiritual via material), 39, 84, 89, 96, 112, 120, 158, 235–236, 259, 271, 272, 315–316n78, 346n57. See also ascent, spiritual; refs. to Rom. 1:20 as ritual means of salvation, 100, 177, 268, 272, 275, 309n5, 312n46 as Scripture, 151, 199 in Scripture, 39, 67, 69, 89, 95, 119, 151, 159–160, 199, 265, 274, 276, 279, 346n63 as sign, 89, 158–160, 199, 234–238, 272, 343n37

408

Author and Subject Index

Schwarte, K.-H., 301n29 scriptum/voluntas. See letter and spirit Scripture. See also ascent, spiritual; dispensation, temporal; interpretation; letter and spirit; love; sacrament authority of, 7, 26, 36–38, 72, 79, 219 as accessible to simpler minds, 28–29, 38 “difference-in-unity,” 13, 78, 151, 217, 238, 245–246, 251, 260–263, 265, 353n28 divine pedagogy in, 57–58, 83–84, 89, 96, 151, 161, 233 as divine rhetoric, 18, 34, 49 early “Four Senses” schema, 19, 136–137, 218, 317nn17, 19, 20 as humble speech (sermo humilis), 4–6, 38–39, 84, 95, 120, 305n46 mysteries of, 6, 62, 67, 244–246 as “open” and “closed” (aperta/operta), 6, 40–41 rhetorical character of, 13, 18, 28–29, 34, 49, 62–67, 225 unity of, 6–7, 11, 13, 15, 19, 33, 42, 49, 77–79, 83–85, 90, 96, 113, 150–151, 160–164, 199, 234, 239, 246–248, 257, 260–281 as welcoming seekers, 28–29, 39–40 wisdom in, 4–5, 28, 37–38, 83, 135, 183, 200 Secundinus, 105, 106, 108, 109, 127, 310nn18, 19, 311n24 Seneca, 180, 252 Septuagint, 38, 326n8 Sermon on the Mount, 9, 106, 139, 255 Sieben, H.J., 346n54, 360n11 “Seven Ages” schema, 68–72, 139, 263, 306n43, 340n14. See also “Four Ages” sign (signum). See also sacrament cross of Christ as, 122, 141, 148, 233, 237, 238, 245, 272, 345n51

“indicative,” 223–229, 231, 235, 238, 239, 345n54, 347n64 language as network of, 217, 243 as material and external, 227, 287, 308n24, 343n37 as means of instruction, 117, 148 “mediative,” 231–239, 245, 269, 272, 344n46 in O.T., 237–238, 255, 268–270, 347n64 in Scripture, 26, 72, 82, 218, 222–224, 277 union with “thing,” 158, 231–233, 235, 236, 246, 269–270, 272, 274, 344n46 Simplicianus, 351n10 Siniscalo, P., 349n79 Smither, E.L., 316n5 Socrates, 35 soul, the human. See also Adam and Eve; Christ sensory and rational elements, 55, 67, 245 “soul-death,” 226–227, 320n57 spiritales (“spiritual ones,” i.e. advanced believers). See also “little ones”; “top-down” A.’s approach to Scripture for, 10, 89, 219, 240, 248–249 eating “solid” spiritual food, 12, 250, 285 maturity marked by humility, 243, 285 as understanding scriptural images, 61–62, 67, 75, 93–94 Springer, C.P.E., 332n55 Stock, B., 316n9, 356n63 Stoics, 48 Stowers, S.K., 331nn46, 47, 50, 51, 52 Strauss, G., 301n33, 304n16 Stroumsa, G.G., 359n5

Author and Subject Index Studer, B., 309nn1, 4, 314n60, 344n41, 346n57 Sullivan, A., 308n24 Sundén, H., 360n11 suscipere (“to take up”). See Christ; Word of God Symmachus, 23 synecdoche 57, 298n25, 355n49. See also figurative relationships discussed in classical handbooks, 45–47, 50, 52–54 in biblical texts, 59–61, 163, 183, 304n24 and Christ, 159, 203, 324n79 T Ten Commandments, 64, 255, 267, 278–279, 353n30 Tertullian, 78, 168, 233, 259, 304n24, 348n67 TeSelle, E., 13, 299n6, 308n25, 338n2 Teske, R., 299n4, 304nn19, 28, 305nn36, 37, 315n78, 317n19, 319n42, 342n30, 350n1, 353n19, 359n5 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 338n2 Theon, 180 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 358n73 Tilley, M., 299n32, 348n67 “top-down” hermeneutical perspective, 13, 138, 175, 218, 220, 227, 240, 248–250. See also “bottom-up” Toom, T., 338n5, 341n22 totus Christus. See “whole Christ” transfiguration, See also exchange; prosopopoeia; transposition defined, 290–291 hermeneutical (texts), 287, 290–292 redemptive (Christ and members), 209, 291–292, 337n106, 359–360n10 rhetorical (impersonation), 290–291, 332n53

409

transposition. See also transfiguration of Christ into flesh (Christological) 196, 243 of Christ the head and his members (ecclesial), 10, 203, 208, 262, 289, 332nn53, 59 of self into texts (hermeneutical), 16, 196–199, 209–210, 285, 289–292, 332n53, 360n11 verbal, 50, 64, 232 Trimpi, W., 300n18, 313n48 Trinity, 12, 58, 118, 221, 271, 313n48, 333n65 Tyconius, 19, 207, 216, 299n33, 304n24, 328–329n16, 347–348n67, 351n10 typology, 16–18, 284–286, 297n21, 298n25, 350n2, 359n3 V Valerius, bishop of Hippo, 14, 133–138, 167, 215, 216, 316nn2, 7 Van Fleteren, F., 296n19, 307n13, 317nn19–20 Vergil, 46, 135, 171 Victorinus, Marius, 299n6 Victorinus of Pettau, 304n24 “visible words” (visibilia verba), 66, 87, 92, 272, 307n16, 355n50 Volusianus, 3–6, 31–32, 294n1, 299n8, 300n9, 301n25, 321n59 Vulgate, 261, 301n35, 319n47, 322n62, 340n18 W Watts, W., 313n57 Weber, D., 296n19 Weidmann, C., 327n14 “whole Christ” (totus Christus), 13, 60, 98, 183, 204–205, 244, 246, 249, 283–284, 287–292, 328–329n16, 332n59, 336n94 Wiles, M.F., 346n61 Wilken, R.L., 359n3

410

Author and Subject Index

wisdom, spiritual, 15, 29, 73, 81, 85, 88, 111, 116, 138, 220–221, 250, 254, 286, 292, 337n109, 343n37. See also Christ; Scripture; spiritales Wisdom (Scripture character), 32–33, 78, 82, 88, 93–94, 115–117, 169, 277 Word of God (divine being), See also Christ; Christ the Mediator; Wisdom active in O.T., 162–163, 178, 184, 196, 207, 325n81, 335n79 divinity of, 110, 175, 249, 343n37, 347n66 embodied in Scripture, 42, 112, 177, 183, 185, 209, 288, 330n29 humility of, 100, 112, 117, 118, 154, 156, 157, 169, 178, 198, 228, 234, 243, 305n36, 309n6, 324n79 Incarnation of, 4, 40, 55, 60, 120,

129, 144, 169, 211, 221, 228, 230, 272, 311n33, 324n79, 343n38 indwelling biblical figures, 162–163, 175 likeness to, as salvation, 114–115 in “likeness of flesh of sin,” 143–144, 146 and mediation, 156, 187–189, 206 as perfection of divine likeness, 78, 114–115 “takes up” (suscipere) mortality, 82, 118, 138, 146, 153–154, 169–170, 172, 178, 199, 201, 227, 271, 307n15, 314n63 as teaching, 117–118 in union with “the Man,” 117–119, 169–171, 184, 185, 321–322n61 Wright, D. F., 316n8, 350n2