St. Augustine on Interpretation
Biblical controversialists seem to forget that many of the interpretive thickets they find themselves in were assailed long ago by the Church Fathers. In reading through the Slate.com Hot Document that Steven posted, I was reminded of some passages that I came across in reading City of God recently for tutorial. St. Augustine is helpful because he knows the scriptures thoroughly, and he has thought long and deeply about some of the most difficult passages in the Old and New Testaments. He helps us step outside the narrow confines of current debates, presenting a way of interpreting scripture that accounts for both historical and prophetic matter. Following are a few salient quotes that I marked in my reading.
On the creation of the world in Genesis:
“The world was in fact made with time, if at the time of its creation change and motion came into existence. This is clearly the situation in the order of the first six or seven days, in which morning and evening are named, until God’s creation was finished on the sixth day, and on the seventh day God’s rest is emphasized as something conveying a mystical meaning. What kind of days these are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of describing them.” (XI.6)
On the obscurity of Scripture:
“There is something to be gained from the obscurity of the inspired discourses of Scripture. The differing interpretations produce many truths and bring them to the light of knowledge; and the meaning of an obscure passage may be established either by the plain evidence of the facts, or by other passages of less difficulty. Sometimes the variety of suggestions leads to the discovery of the meaning of the writer; sometimes this meaning remains obscure, but the discussion of the difficulties is the occasion for the statement of some other truths.” (XI.19)
On Allegory as the authoritative method of interpreting the Old Testament (after quoting from Galatians 4.21-25, in which Hagar and Sarah are taken as figures for the Old and New Covenants):
“This manner of interpretation, which comes down to us with apostolic authority, reveals to us how we are to understand the Scriptures of the two covenants, the old and the new.” (XV.2)
On historical truth in Genesis:
“My present duty, as it seems to me, is to defend the historical truth of the scripture account, in case it may seem incredible that a city should have been built by one man at a time when there were apparently only four men in existence on the earth – or rather three men, after Cain had killed his brother.” (XV.8)
On the interplay of historical and prophetic meanings in Scripture:
“These hidden meanings of inspired Scripture we track down as best we can, with varying degrees of success; and yet we all hold confidently to the firm belief that these historical events and the narrative of them have always some foreshadowing of things to come, and are always to be interpreted with reference to Christ and his Church, which is the City of God . . . To be sure, we must not suppose that all the events in the narrative are symbolical; but those which have no symbolism are interwoven in the story for the sake of those which have this further significance. ” (XVI.2)
Labels: Patristics, St. Augustine
20 Comments:
I'm not sure I know what the "narrow confines of current debates" are: please define.
I suppose I mean that, in the current debate about creationism vs. evolution (for example) the dichotomy of a historical / literal interpretation of scripture vs. a non-historical / symbolical or prophetic (mythical, as Kelly put it?) interpretation is put very starkly. One must be in one camp or the other.
For Augustine, on the other hand, these ways of interpreting scripture are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they exist as different levels of interpretation. Some kind of commitment to a historical reading of the OT is necessary to begin reading it theologically, but the end and goal is the theological interpretation. I especially like Augustine's agnosticism in the first quote about the sort of days that Genesis speaks of in Ch. 1 - it is 'difficult or even impossible for us to imagine' what they were like.
One question that seems to come out of this - both the Hot Document and the Augustine quotes - is, what sort of commitment should we have to the historical reality of the Old Testament?
The Creationists seem to err in attempting to view the Bible as a collection of facts which can be marshaled in support of a scientific thesis. As Augustine writes in the last quote, the Bible is a book about Christ. To use it otherwise is to mis-use it.
But Augustine also seems to think that some kind of historical grounding is necessary in order to begin interpreting the OT theologically. The structure of his thought about the fall of man and original sin, for example, depends upon the historical reality of Adam and of his space-time fall (to use a phrase from Francis Schaeffer).
However, as we learned from Dr. Fortner (and read from C.S. Lewis in our Garner study of Reflections on the Psalms), the early chapters of Genesis are also full of mythical reverberations that defy a kind of interpretation that reads the book according to the demands of scientific rationalism.
The danger here is an old one: the possibility of slipping into a view in which we have two separate, entirely enclosed spheres of truth. Science deals with truths; so does the Bible. What kind of definition of truth can we have that includes both of those sources of knowledge under it? The creationists want to reconcile the Bible and science according to scientific criteria (I might be mis-representing them here). Another error might be in viewing the Bible as the purveyor of exclusively otherworldly, spiritual truths. It does do that, but not simply.
Not sure if I'm rambling or getting somewhere here, but I'd like to hear other North Locust patrons to weigh in. This blog needs some more attention, and the question seems worth discussing.
To me, it seems the particular difficulty put forth by document arises out of the Modern turn, specifically with the writings of Bacon, Hume, and Descartes. Bacon and Hume are startlingly relevant here. In the following generations, their writings sparked a movement which came to be called Scottish Common Sense Realism. A certain Alexander Campbell's father was more or less in the thick of it, and as several immigrants brought the conversation with them, it had a broad influence in much of American (Southern) religion around the time of the Restoration Movement [See Hughes: Reviving the Ancient Faith]. At some level, the hot document is poor theology funneled through (dated) modern science, and it has left no recourse to examine its founding. Thus, every criticism of its method is seen as criticism of its doctrine. This is a peculiarly modern view of truth, and to some degree, Nietzsche has every right to rail against it.
For me, the impulse is to return (hide?) in the ancient mind. But I do not want to be guilty of mere nostalgia. But again I am truly at a loss in how to beneficially critique the modern project (Nietzsche is not for me). At the moment, it is very striking to me that Heidegger turns strongly to Aristotle, and almost all of his students (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Eva Brann) turn to Plato. Moreover, his strongest student, Gadamer, makes his lifelong task a clear enunciation of philosophical hermeneutics, a main tenet of which is that method cannot exhaustively discover truth [See online "Gadamer," Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy].
I like feminist scholar Nancy Hartsock's critique of both the modern and postmodern approaches. Take a look at her article in the book Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. I can't accept her viewpoint whole cloth--for me, there is still a universal and a truth--but I think she offers powerful practical/philosophical (can these go together?) solutions.
Oh, but Nietzsche IS for me...
By the way, I don't think it's helpful to conflate the ideas we have about reading (i.e. what Augustine was talking about there) with the ideas we have about truth. It's not a helpful prejudice to insist the two must go together. And that distinction is perhaps more important than the one between approaches to truth with their different permeabilities.
In terms of biblical hermeneutics, it's a fake discussion anyhow. Just read Paul's counterintuitive interpretation of Leviticus in 1 Cor 9:6-12 and of Genesis in Galatians 4:21-31 to note that the different inspired biblical authors interpret each other in much more variegated ways (and much more according to whatever point they want to prove than whether their reading "does justice" to the text) than such a discussion would desire. Perhaps the Holy Spirit takes a more generous approach than we do...
(This coming from a non-relativist.)
I suppose what I'm really interested in is a defense of allegory in Biblical hermeneutics - and I think this might include a defense of reading the OT for historical truth as well (though the connection might not be necessary - not sure about this). As far as Paul's interpretation of the OT, he gives the key in Gal. 4.24 - "These things may be taken figuratively." Both the OT and the NT are full of figural echoes, in which tightly-packed, symbolically resonating images are un-packed by later writers. The validity of this approach, of course, depends on a view of the world vastly different from our own, in which historical coincidence, rhetorical strategizing (merely), textual errata, etc. (all of these the stock in trade of Biblical Scholarship) do not have any meaning when reading the scriptures. It's worth noting, also, that Christ uses a figural reading of Jonah in Matt. 12.38-42 and Luke 11.29-32, so when Paul read this way, he had Christ's example to follow.
My defense of reading the OT historically comes from the belief that the Bible is not simply a collection of non-material truths, but rather that the figural reading sooner or later 'touches down' in historical reality. Otherwise, all we have is something like a collection of esoteric sayings. We might argue whether there is an all-or-nothing approach, here - some parts may be more historical than others to our post-Enlightenment sensibilities. Do they have to be? Not sure.
To be honest: now that I'm out of the Bible Belt, and I attend a church on the more liberal side of the spectrum I don't even think about this anymore. I have no contact on a regular basis with anyone who is opposed to seeing allegory in scripture, but on the flip side most people I know (if they're Christians) also see historical truth in the scriptures as well. I guess what I'm saying is that while I find these sorts of things intellectually stimulating, there is no practical application, or need to defend this, in my current Christian life.
Taylor:
I'm not sure it works that way.
It's not like at one point in history there was this golden age where there was "view of the world vastly different from our own, in which historical coincidence, rhetorical strategizing (merely), textual errata, etc. (all of these the stock in trade of Biblical Scholarship) do not have any meaning when reading the scriptures."
That's just not ever been the case. There is no naive moment in the history of Christianity. No pure state of word-to-soul readings. The church fathers in their commentaries already all discuss in great and often tedious detail such things as rhetorical strategizing (and since all writing is rhetorical, there is no 'merely' about it), textual errata, historical coincidence, etc. Pick up any scriptural commentaries by Origen, Athanasius, the two Cyrils, Eustathius, Diodore, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea... the list is endless. They all do that.
I think maybe what you're trying to get at is that we should recognize that scripture might best be read when the reader is more concerned with the hupothesis of scripture than with such things per se (cf Irenaeus adv. haer. 1.8&9 for an explanation of hupothesis as Christians appropriated it from the Gk rhetorical tradition).
Secondly, I'd be careful not to be imprecise with my terms here. "Figuratively" and "allegorically" are not the same thing. "Allegory" (Gk "other" reading) is a specific rhetorical tool learned by the ancients as part of the basic padeia specifically to make a certain kind of point about obscurity (where a more literal reading would not make sense), usually of a law in court; it's not merely a sort of metaphorical reading -- there are lots of ways of figurative reading in ancient hermeneutics, and allegoria is only one of them. (Cf, for starters, the Progymnasmata by Aphthonius and then Cicero's De Inventione and his Orator, paying special attention to the sections about qui scriptum defendet and qui contra scriptum dicet). Nor is our sense of "historical" and the early Christian/Hellenistic Gk idea of historia very much the same (Everett, feel free to wax etymological).
As to Paul in Gal 4.24, he does not speak merely of a figurative reading, but specifically of an allegorical one, ατινα εστιν αλλεγορουμενα, and it is indeed one: he is using a text his opponents would claim as literally true in a way more conducive to his point, suggesting the "literal" meaning is not the real meaning. But what Christ does in Matt 12 and Luke 11 would not have struck the ancients as technically allegorical at all because Christ does not claim that Jonah wasn't actually swallowed by a whale or that his reading is superior to traditional understandings of Jonah. He just reads those events as ALSO prophetic. But that isn't allegory. That's typology, like Paul also uses it in Col. 2:16&17.
Let's not let the blunted understanding of allegory and typology of the Middle Ages smash apart the delicacies of the Biblical text just because we wish they would solve a problem for us that probably isn't so much hermeneutical as one related to the desire to walk with a swagger and be smug about the supposed superiority of our devotional reading.
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What do we mean by a 'naive moment' in the history of Christianity? Because I might have to disagree with you about whether or not there was one in early Christianity. There does seem to be some kind of childlike delight in the way the Fathers read the Old Testament, finding Christ everywhere they looked.
I'm not disputing the fact that specific and complex rhetorical tools were used to read the OT. I'm wondering, on a more basic level, what sort of assumptions allow us to read that way, or to accept that kind of reading (whether allegorical or typological). Don't we have to assume a view of history vastly different from our modern one? We have to believe that history is a grand narrative at the center of which is Christ; and we have to believe that his name is written in every detail of that history, whether in conscious prophecy or unconscious typology. This is not the world of Biblical Scholarship, for which writing is always done firmly in, for, and of the local context.
To me, the question is more like: do we read allegorically because there is a happy coincidence of Christian doctrine and OT image, that we can rhetorically exploit for our polemical purpose in furthering the Gospel or attacking some heresy; or, do we read allegorically because we believe that the OT is actually full of Christ, and in finding him in a particular image or story we are not merely rhetorically strategizing but genuinely discovering his presence in reality?
I think what I'm saying is that to take the NT and Church Fathers on their own terms, we need to acclimate ourselves to view of the world in which what is writ large in the cosmos about Christ is also there in every detail.
Accidentally posted as Lydia. Please excuse.
Well, I'd agree with you that it would be nice if that were true. But I don't see the evidence for it. (Feel free to present some.)
Keeping in mind, of course, that there isn't a "spirit of the age" that ties all Fathers together in the first place. It's not like they're a coherent set of ideologues.
Also, I'm still waiting for you to define what you mean by "allegory".
Jonathan,
I have to come clean a bit: although the quotes from Augustine were ones that stood out to me in passing, in the comments here I've been more or less glossing a recent article by Robert L. Wilken, "How to Read the Bible," which appeared a couple of months ago in First Things (I was the happy recipient of a Christmas subscription). Though I'm probably cheating with this appeal to authority, I'll offer some notes from another article in the most recent issue, "The Bible Inside and Out" by RR Reno. It will say clearly what I've been struggling to articulate and bypass (perhaps) the need to provide a wealth of primary evidence that I admittedly do not have available.
Reno is reviewing a new book by James L Kugel, who was a professor of Biblical Studies at Harvard, and now teaches in Israel. Kugel, who is Jewish, draws a sharp line between ancient commentators on the Bible (whether Jewish or Christian) and contemporary scholars. These ancient readers assume, Kugel says, 4 things before they even begin reading: 1) The Bible taught lessons for the their day with a living voice, not one simply determined by a long-past context; 2) "The entire Bible is essentially a divinely given text"; 3) The Bible has no contradictions or mistakes; and 4) It has hidden meanings that must be ferreted out by all sorts of creative interpretive strategies. (I've quoted from Reno for much of this. The bit in quotes is Reno quoting Kugel). The modern historical-critical project denies all four of those claims. Kugel traces it's assumptions back to Spinoza, who formulated the modern assumptions directly.
All of that said, I'm not sure how much we're in disagreement. You're arguing that the ancient commentators knew, rhetorically and hermeneutically, what they were doing, and were not 'divine vessels writing in a trance,' what I take to mean the word-to-soul position. I would wholeheartedly agree. I'm interested in the assumptions that lie behind their activity itself, the assumptions formulated by Kugel above. Our points of view can be combined: the ancient commentators believed the four propositions (the fourth is of most concern here, however), and realized the need to marshal the most complex and sophisticated rhetorical techniques available in the ancient world in order to fulfill them. Our points of view diverge if: you disagree that the commentators affirmed the four propositions, and say that instead they were writing towards a purely polemical purpose, what I was calling 'rhetorical strategizing (merely)'.
I don't know if this helps, and I admit that I'm not speaking originally at all, but along with a crop of theologians (like Wilken and Reno) who are admittedly historial-critical project. But, I think this project has steamrolled though the last two centuries without having its fundamental assumptions examined. It seems like it's high time they were, and then perhaps scholarship might be able to bend itself to learning from the Bible instead of about it (Reno's words).
in the last paragraph, read 'hostile to (or perhaps simply skeptical of) the historical-critical project.'
Taylor,
1. Does Kugel give citations for those four statements. And if so would you mind posting them?
2. What or whom does Kugel define as the ancient readers. It seems like that is a really large blanket statement and leaves a lot up in the air, especially considering how many different sects there were in Judaism and early Christianity.
The book sounds interesting and I'll check it out.
I just realized that you don't have the book, just the book review. I'll see if the library has the book and I'll check it out. It also appears from the description of the book at Amazon that it deals primarily with the Hebrew scriptures so I doubt it addresses the way the Church Fathers read the scripture, especially since very few of them were Jewish. I also wonder what he means when references the ancient commentators. Is he talking about the Talmud? If so which parts? The parts written by the Pharisees or the Sadducees? Just some questions.
I do imagine that the book can offer quite a bit of information about the way Paul and Christ approached the scripture and that is definitely and important question.
Steven,
The Book is "How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now." Without having read the book, I can only suggest Kugel's authority for accepting the four propositions. He is one of the foremost OT scholars working today (others reading this may know much more about him than I do). He also wrote a book on the ancient interpreters, "The Bible as it Was," so I can only assume he is also an authority on the tradition of commentary.
It's worth mentioning that from other reviews of the book I've been reading, it's not clear that Kugel himself if skeptical of the historical-critical project - only that he realizes that the ancient commentators and the modern scholars cannot be reconciled, since they work from vastly different presuppositions. Where we go from there is another question, one that would probably take a lifetime rather than a blog post to consider.
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