Augustine’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Its Three Characteristics and Significance for Today

Augustine’s Theory of Signs: the Scriptures as Signs

Augustine’s theory of signs is crucial in his biblical hermeneutics. Though Origen and Ambrose before him adopted the tradition of signs as a way of interpreting the Scriptures, ⁸ Augustine’s theory of signs has become known as ‘the first to merit the name of semiotics, its originality consisting in its success in round off the achievements of classical antiquity in a new synthesis’. ⁹ He is also widely said to be ‘the first to have integrated the theory of language—“fifteen centuries before De Saussure”—into that of the sign’. ¹⁰ One hermeneutical scholar even called him ‘the father of “semiotics”’. ¹¹ In this section, I first introduce Augustine’s general theory of signs and then examine its implications for his hermeneutics.

Augustine’s theory of signs in DDC begins with his distinction between res (thing, reality) and signum (sign). According to Augustine, all reality can be divided into res and signa. ¹² Res, in the strict sense, are ‘those that are not mentioned in order to signify something, such as wood, a stone, an animal, and other things like’. ¹³ Augustine defines signs twice in DDC. First, signs are ‘those things…which are used in order to signify something else’. ¹⁴ Second, a sign ‘is a thing, which besides the impression it conveys to the senses, also has the effect of making something else come to mind’. ¹⁵ Augustine gives us the following examples of signs: a spoor signifies an animal, smoke signifies a fire, a cry signifies one’s mood, and trumpet sound signifies advance or retreat. Despite the distinction between a thing and a sign, Augustine points out that ‘every sign is also a thing [res], because if it is not a thing at all then it is simply nothing’. ‘But’, he continues, ‘not every single thing is also a sign’. ¹⁶ He claims, ‘All teaching is either about things or signs; but things are learned about through signs’. ¹⁷

Res he then divides into things to be enjoyed and things to be used. ¹⁸ To enjoy a thing means clinging to it ‘lovingly for its own sake’. ¹⁹ To use a thing is to ‘employ it as a means to obtaining what one desires to enjoy’. ²⁰ The only true object of enjoyment is the triune God: ‘The things therefore that are to be enjoyed are the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in fact the Trinity’. ²¹ All other things are to be used to obtain this enjoyment of God. ²² Human beings are to be enjoyed in God: ‘all of us who enjoy [God] should also enjoy one another in [God]…. But when you enjoy a human being in God, you are really enjoying God rather than the human being’. ²³ This discussion by Augustine of things to be enjoyed and things to be used is regarded as a ‘strikingly original discussion’. ²⁴

Augustine, then, divides signs into two kinds: natural signs (signa naturalia) and given signs (signa data). Natural signs are

those which have the effect of making something else known, without there being any desire or intention of signifying, as for example smoke signifying fire. It does not do this, after all, because it wishes to signify; but through our experience of things and our observation and memory, we know that fire is there, even if only smoke can be seen. ²⁵

Other examples of this kind are the spoor or tracks of a passing animal and the facial expression of an angry or sad person, which signifies his mood without his actively wishing it to do so. Augustine says that he will not discuss this type of sign further, for what is more important to him is the other kind—given signs—because it relates to the Scriptures.

Given signs are

those which living creatures give one another in order to show, as far as they can, their moods and feelings, or to indicate whatever it may be they have sensed or understood. Nor have we any purpose in signifying, that is in giving a sign, other than to bring out and transfer to someone else’s mind what we, the givers of the sign, have in mind ourselves. ²⁶

As we see from this definition, given signs result from acts of communication. That is to say, the only reason for giving this type of signs is to indicate more fully what is going on in the sign-giver’s mind and to communicate it to another’s mind. ²⁷ The most important type of given signs are words: ‘Words, after all, are far and away the principal means used by human beings to signify the thoughts they have in their minds, whenever anyone wishes to express them’. ²⁸ Words are used only for the purpose of signifying. ²⁹ They are essentially not written but oral communication. ³⁰ However, letters were invented as signs of (spoken) words because ‘words immediately pass away once they have agitated the air waves, and last no longer than the sound they make’. ³¹

The most significant implication of Augustine’s theory of signs for his hermeneutics is that for him the words of Scripture are signs. ³² The signs of Scripture are ‘intentionally given by God, presented to us by men, and set forth in language’. ³³ As given signs (signa data), the words of Scripture ‘bring out and transfer’ to human minds ‘what its author, God, has in mind’. ³⁴ They point beyond themselves to the transcendent spiritual reality (res)—’the spiritual, illuminating reality of God in Christ’. ³⁵ The signa (the Scriptures) are not the res (God). ³⁶ As Werner Jeanrond notes, ‘This semiotic insight leads Augustine to reject all efforts to identify the Scriptures with what they talk about and point to’. ³⁷ The interpreter of Scripture must avoid ‘a conflation between the signa and the res’, and read the content of Scripture in light of the transcendent spiritual reality of God. ³⁸ Since the words of Scripture are ‘not ends in themselves’, the interpreter’s ‘key task’ is to interpret this spiritual reality and ‘to discover the will of God’. ³⁹ As Jeanrond aptly summarizes, for Augustine,

the Scriptures are human texts which refer to God. They themselves are not to be treated as a god, but instead they need to be used by the Christian reader as guides to the proper attitude towards God, towards him or herself, and towards the reader’s fellow human beings. ⁴⁰

So important is this that Francis Fiorenza regards Augustine’s understanding of Scripture in terms of the theory of signs as ‘his original contribution to hermeneutics’. ⁴¹

The understanding of Scripture as signs entails other important implications, too. First, Augustine admits that the Scriptures possess a multiplicity of meanings. ⁴² The following passage from DDC shows this position well. He writes,

[W]hen from the same words of scripture not just one, but two or more meanings may be extracted, even if you cannot tell which of them the writer intended, there is no risk if they can all be shown from other places of the holy scriptures to correspond with the truth. ⁴³

We see the same idea in his Confessions, too. There, he states,

Accordingly when anyone claims, ‘He [Moses] meant what I say’, and another retorts, ‘No, rather what I find there’, I think that I will be answering in a more religious spirit if I say, ‘Why not both, if both are true? And if there is a third possibility, and a fourth, and if someone else sees an entirely different meaning in these words, why should we not think that he was aware of all of them, since it was through him that the one God carefully tempered his sacred writings to meet the minds of many people, who would see different things in them, and all true?’ ⁴⁴

Augustine distinguishes between the truth and the intention of the human author: ‘It is one thing to seek the truth about the making of the created universe, and another to inquire what Moses…wished his reader or hearer to understand from his words’. ⁴⁵ Of course, an interpreter of the Scriptures ‘must make every effort to arrive at the intention of the author through whom the Holy Spirit produced that portion of scripture’. ⁴⁶ To Augustine, however, the gaining of truth is more important than the precise understanding of the intention of the human author because ‘God works through Scripture and foresees meanings not intended by the human author’. ⁴⁷ Augustine states,

Provided…that each person tries to ascertain in the holy scriptures the meaning the author intended, what harm is there if a reader holds an opinion which you, the light of all truthful minds, show to be true, even though it is not what was intended by the author, who himself meant something true, but not exactly that? ⁴⁸

For Augustine, such a multiplicity of the meanings is inevitable for several reasons. First, it comes from the incompleteness of human words as signs. As Karla Pollmann notes, signs cannot represent the things signified in their completeness, and ‘there is a gap between the sense of a sign/proposition and the reality of that to which the sign/proposition refers’. In the case of the Scriptures, this gap between sign and reality is reinforced because ‘the contingent, human, limited, material language of the Bible deals with the unchangeable, eternal, and absolute God’. ⁴⁹ Thus, as Maria Boulding says, ‘there is always a “plus” of meaning’. ⁵⁰

The second reason is that ‘our ability to get at the author’s intention is limited’. ⁵¹ We cannot enter the mind of the author in order to discern his intention definitively. ⁵² Also, as Augustine says, the author is not around for us to ask him questions: ‘[Moses] is not here face to face with me now. If he were, I would take hold of him and ask him and in your name implore him to open these mysteries to me’. ⁵³

The third reason is that what guarantees the veracity of the human author, and thus the sacred text, is the divine truth. ⁵⁴ Augustine is convinced that ‘the God of truth who inspired the writer and guarantees the text abides also in the minds of believing readers’. ⁵⁵ He claims, ‘Truth says to me with a strong voice in my inward ear’. ⁵⁶ As scholars point out, Augustine’s idea of the multiplicity of the meanings is not so far distant from today’s reader response theories, and anticipates Paul Ricoeur’s idea of a written text’s ‘surplus of meaning’. ⁵⁷

Augustine’s understanding of the Scriptures as signs also implies the ‘temporalness of Scripture’. ⁵⁸ For Augustine, the role of Scripture is provisional and instrumental. ⁵⁹ In order to save humanity, God carries out the ‘massive rescue program’, which Augustine calls the ‘temporal dispensation’. Scripture is a part of that program, which also includes ‘the church, sacraments, and even the flesh of Christ’. Scripture is as indispensible ‘as daily bread on one’s life pilgrimage’. ⁶⁰ As Andries Polman states, however, Augustine believes that ‘there comes a time when Scripture as the Word of God has fulfilled its task. After all, the Bible was meant to kindle and support our longing for the fatherland, in which the Scriptures are fulfilled’. ⁶¹ Augustine writes,

When we finally get [to the fatherland], do you imagine that we shall be listening to a book? We shall be seeing the Word itself, listening to the Word itself, eating it, drinking it, as the angels do now. Do the angels need books, or lectures, or readers? ⁶²

Moreover, though Scripture is necessary in this life, its necessity is ‘a qualified necessity’ ⁶³ —qualified because ‘even on earth, we, the children of God, will have ever less need for the voices of the prophets and the apostles, or even of the gospel, as we increase in wisdom’. ⁶⁴ Augustine boldly declares,

And so people supported by faith, hope and charity, and retaining a firm grip on them, have no need of the scriptures except for instructing others. And so there are many who live by these three even in the desert without books. ⁶⁵

Clearly, Augustine distinguishes between things to be enjoyed and things to be used. Only the triune God can be enjoyed, and all other things are to be used to obtain that enjoyment—including even the Scriptures. ⁶⁶ The Scriptures are ‘given to us to be used in and for our faith-praxis’, ⁶⁷ and we must love them with a transient love. Augustine writes,

So in order that we might know how to do this [to achieve love] and be able to, the whole ordering of time was arranged by divine providence for our salvation. This we should be making use of with a certain love and delight that is not, so to say, permanently settled in, but transitory, rather, and casual, like love and delight in a road, or in vehicles, or any other tools and gadgets you like, or if you can think of any better way of putting it, so that we love the means by which we are being carried along, on account of the goal to which we are being carried. ⁶⁸

Such a view of the Scriptures, as Jeanrond notes, ‘rules out what we today would call “biblicism”, that is, an attitude of uncritical reverence towards the biblical texts based on the belief in the absolute inerrancy of these works’. ⁶⁹

Another implication of Augustine’s understanding of the Scriptures as signs is his emphasis on a spiritual ascent and purification. Since the central task of the interpreter of Scripture is to interpret the transcendent spiritual reality of God, to which the signs of Scripture point, without identifying the signa with the res, the interpreter needs certain spiritual preparations, ascetic practices, and a proper disposition to be able to understand correctly the sacred text. ⁷⁰ This idea leads us to my next point.

Existential and Moral Dimensions in Augustine’s Hermeneutics

In Augustine’s hermeneutics, there is the essential connection between interpretation of the sacred text and the interior attitude of the interpreter. ⁷¹ This connection lends his hermeneutics an unmistakably existential tendency, ‘which for a long time has earned Augustine the reputation of a protoexistentialist’. ⁷² Augustine looks ‘not so much for meaning as for understanding’, ⁷³ and, for him, the desire to understand Scripture is ‘no detached, purely epistemic process taking place between a subject and object’. ⁷⁴ Rather, all understanding of Scripture is at the same time—and always—understanding of oneself. ⁷⁵ Augustine emphasizes not only that the interpreter’s mind must be purified to understand the Scriptures, but also that the interpreter is transformed by interpreting the Scriptures. ⁷⁶ So, in DDC, Augustine pays attention not merely to rules of interpretation but also to the qualities of mind and spirit required of the interpreter. ⁷⁷

What of the existential and moral dimensions in his hermeneutics? First, Augustine emphasizes the importance and necessity of spiritual preparation for correct interpretation of the Bible. As we have seen above, since the Scriptures are signs that point to the transcendent spiritual reality of God, the interpreter’s central task is to interpret that eternal reality, without identifying the signa with the res. This task requires a spiritual ascent and purification. As Fiorenza points out, ‘Through spiritual purification, converting one’s energies from the visible material goods of life to invisible spiritual goods, one prepare[s] oneself to interpret correctly the Scriptures and their Christian identity’. ⁷⁸ Therefore, spiritual purification, including ascetic practices and prayer, is a presupposition for correct interpretation of the Scriptures. ⁷⁹ In DDC, Augustine underscores the importance and necessity of spiritual purification as follows:

That is why, since we are meant to enjoy that truth which is unchangeably alive, and since it is in its light that God the Trinity, author and maker of the universe, provides for all the things he has made, our minds have to be purified, to enable them to perceive that light, and to cling to it once perceived. We should think of this purification process as being a kind of walk, a kind of voyage toward our home country. We do not draw near, after all, by movement in place to the one who is present everywhere, but by honest commitment and good behavior. ⁸⁰

Augustine proposes a scheme of seven stages leading to spiritual purification. The first stage is fear of God, of which he writes:

What is needed above all else…is to be converted by the fear of God to wishing to know his will, what he bids us seek and shun. Now this fear of necessity shakes us with thoughts of our mortality and of our death to come, and so to say nails our flesh and fixes all the stirrings of pride to the wood of the cross. ⁸¹

The second stage is modest piety. The interpreter of the divine Scripture is required to be humble before it, acknowledging its authority. Augustine writes,

What is needed next is to grow modest with piety, and not to contradict the divine scripture, whether we have understood it when it lashes our vices, or whether we have not understood it, as though we could have better ideas and make better rules ourselves. Instead, we should rather think and believe that what is written there is better and truer, even if its meaning is hidden, than any good ideas we can think up for ourselves. ⁸²

The third stage is knowledge. Scriptural interpretation belongs to this stage, whereas the first two stages indicate the prerequisite spiritual practices that the interpreter must undertake to understand the Scriptures. ⁸³ Augustine writes,

After these two stages of fear and piety, we come to the third stage of knowledge, which I have undertaken to deal with here and now. Because it is with this stage that every serious student of the scriptures has to occupy himself. ⁸⁴

In this stage, Augustine argues, the student of the Scriptures is going to find that charity, the love of God and of neighbor, is the sum of the Scriptures. ⁸⁵ This knowledge, then, leads the student to mourning:

So one first has to discover oneself, in the scriptures, as tied up in love of this world, that is of temporal things, and far removed from such love of God and such love of neighbor as scripture itself prescribes. Then, however, that fear by which one reflects on the judgment of God, and that piety by which one cannot help believing in and yielding to the authority of the sacred books, oblige one to mourn for oneself. ⁸⁶

This grief or remorse is a condition of receiving the divine grace that fulfills the Scriptures’ double command of charity: ⁸⁷ ‘this knowledge, filled with good hope, leads one to bewail oneself, not to vaunt oneself; and in this frame of mind one begs with assiduous prayer for the consolation of divine help, to prevent one from being crushed with despair’. ⁸⁸ With the remorse and the prayer, the student of the Scriptures begins to reach the fourth stage, ‘that of fortitude or courage, in which one is hungry and thirsty for justice’. ⁸⁹ In this fourth stage, ‘one extricates oneself from all deadly delight in passing things, and turning away from that, one turns instead to love of eternal things, namely to the unchanging unity which is at the same time a trinity’. ⁹⁰

The fifth stage is the counsel of mercy. Augustine writes,

On fixing your gaze, to the extent that you are able, on this light as it sheds its rays from afar, and on perceiving that with your weak sight you cannot bear its brightness, you come to the fifth stage, that is to the stage of counsel which goes with mercy. ⁹¹

In this stage, one purges one’s ‘restless and ill-behaved soul of its appetite for inferior things and the dirt it has picked up from them’. ⁹² It is at this stage that one exercises the love of neighbor and comes to perfection in it. Filled with hope and having all one’s powers unimpaired, one climbs up to the sixth stage, that of the purification of the heart, in which one dies to this world and purges one’s eyes to see God. Augustine states,

[at the sixth stage] you purge and clean those eyes with which God can be seen, insofar as he can be by those who die to this world, insofar as they can; because we see, to the extent that we do die to this world, while to the extent that we live for this world, we do not see.

He continues:

[A]t this stage those who have died to this world so purge and clean the eyes of their hearts that they do not even put their neighbors before the truth, or on a level with it, nor themselves either, therefore, because not the ones whom they love as themselves. So these holy people will be so singleminded and pure in heart, that they cannot be diverted from the truth either by any determination to please men, or by a concern to avoid any of those inconveniences that tend to spoil this life. ⁹³

Finally, one reaches the seventh stage, that of wisdom, ‘which is to be enjoyed in peace and tranquillity’. ⁹⁴ Augustine concludes his description of the seven stages of spiritual purification with a quotation from Psalm 110: ‘Thus the fear of the Lord, you see, is the beginning of wisdom; and it is through these stages that one moves from that to this’. ⁹⁵

Augustine’s seven-stage schema of spiritual perfection has both a biblical and a Platonic background. On the one hand, his quotation from Psalm 110 provides ‘the scriptural support for his description of the move from the first stage, the fear of the Lord, to the seventh stage, the love of wisdom’. ⁹⁶ Moreover, Augustine’s schema integrates the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:3–9 with the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit in Isaiah 11:2–3 (LXX). ⁹⁷ According to Pollmann’s analysis, each stage of Augustine’s schema corresponds to each verse of the Beatitudes and ‘Augustine here lists the gifts of the Holy Spirit attributed to the messianic king in Isaiah 11:2–3’ that says,

And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and courage, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and the spirit of the fear of the Lord will fill him completely. ⁹⁸

In his seven-stage schema, Pollmann points out, Augustine ‘works backwards from the last, the fear of the Lord, to the first, the spirit of Wisdom. He reverses the Old Testament order because “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”’. ⁹⁹ Pollmann explains the significance of Augustine’s integration of the two scriptural passages in his scheme as follows:

He seems to be the first to interweave the Beatitudes of the New Testament with the gifts of the Holy Spirit from the Old Testament. The Beatitudes represent programmatically the new moral order and the new reality that Jesus came to proclaim. As the founder of this new kingdom, Jesus already represents the messianic king prophesied in Isaiah; by linking that prophecy with the Beatitudes, Augustine makes it valid for every Christian taught by Jesus, who came to fulfill the Old Testament (Matt 5:17). The messianic perspective of Isaiah is seen as something that can be fulfilled by or in a Christian individual, who thereby becomes part of its eschatological realization. ¹⁰⁰

On the other hand, though Augustine uses entirely biblical language and ideas, Platonic influence on him is obvious. ¹⁰¹ As Fiorenza argues, ‘Augustine’s stages of ascent embody a long Platonic tradition, from Plato’s affirmation that the eye must become sun-like in order to see the sun, to Plotinus’s elaboration of the stages of ascent in order to have a vision of the Good’. ¹⁰² Van Fleteren also asserts that Augustine ‘employs [the] Porphyrian theme of purification of the soul to see God immediately’. ¹⁰³ Pollmann likewise notes that the Neoplatonic influence is visible in Augustine’s change of the messianic-prophetic context:

[W]hereas the passage in Isaiah depicts a future vision that will transform the whole of society and establish a new and just order, Augustine concentrates on the spiritual progress of the individual. Here Neoplatonic influence is visible, though the language and ideas are otherwise wholly biblical. The idea of progress and ascent is Neoplatonic, as is that of the final vision in a state of calm…and of fellow human beings left behind. ¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, Pollmann underscores, ‘[f]or Augustine…these effects can only be worked by divine grace; there is thus a genuinely Christian quality to his presentation’. ¹⁰⁵

In fact, we find Neoplatonic influence not merely in Augustine’s seven-stage schema. As Fiorenza notes, his entire hermeneutical theory ‘should be understood in relation to his Neo-Platonic background and his attempt to come to grips with the incarnation of the divine wisdom’. ¹⁰⁶ Fiorenza’s explanation is helpful in grasping one of the cruxes of Augustine’s hermeneutics:

The Platonic chorismos schema—namely, the distinction between the changeable and unchangeable, the temporal and eternal—provides the background theory to his rules of interpretation. The changeable should be interpreted in relation to the unchangeable, the temporal to the eternal, the world to the transcendent, historical events to the divine plan of salvation, and the human Christ to the divine Word. Augustine’s hermeneutical theory bases signification on the ontological priority of the unchangeable eternal to the changeable material. ¹⁰⁷

Thus, for Augustine, the major problem of hermeneutics consists in understanding the transcendent referent: ‘The person who interprets the words only in their literal or historical sense and not in their reference to the transcendent has failed to grasp the meaning of the Scripture’. ¹⁰⁸

In addition, Augustine emphasizes the importance of the interpreter’s moral quality and attitude in several places in his writings. Charity and humility he declares to be the most important virtues for the biblical interpreter. I discuss humility here but postpone the discussion of charity until the third section of this paper.

It is no exaggeration to say that, for Augustine, Scripture is a book of humility. He writes, ‘There is, in fact, almost no page of the holy books in which the lesson is not echoed, that God withstands the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. ¹⁰⁹ For Augustine, humility is important in two ways. On the one hand, humility is an appropriate pre-understanding for the interpreter of the Scriptures. ¹¹⁰ In Matthew 11:28–30, a cardinal passage for Augustine, Jesus himself summons his followers to learn from him to be gentle and humble of heart. ¹¹¹ In order to understand the sacred text correctly, one must follow and imitate Jesus’ example of humility. In other words, one must approach Scripture, ‘being gentle and humble of heart, submitting to Christ’s easy yoke, and burdened with his light load’. ¹¹² In the Confessions, Augustine says that although the books of the Platonists enabled him to glimpse the truth from afar, they could not show him the way to reach it because ‘No one there hearkens to a voice calling, Come to me, all you who struggle’. ¹¹³ The Platonists are ‘too scornful to learn from him [Jesus], because he is gentle and humble of heart’. ¹¹⁴ Augustine stresses that God has hidden the truth ‘from the sagacious and shrewd’ and revealed it to ‘little ones’. ¹¹⁵ What he finds in the Scriptures is ‘something not accessible to the scrutiny of the proud’. ¹¹⁶

On the other hand, not only must one become humble to understand what Scripture says, but Scripture itself helps the interpreter to become humble. ¹¹⁷ For Scripture cures pride, humans’ primary vice. ¹¹⁸ Scripture encounters a human will that resists it and breaks down that resistance, as proud human readers encounter divine humility through its words. ¹¹⁹ As Michael Cameron notes,

Scripture’s humble form melts human pride in order to render us fit to hear the inner teacher’s voice. Scripture not only portrays his humility; its humble form imitates the teacher’s humility in flesh. If Scripture, anywhere, seems too unbecoming as the word of the eternal, infinite, invisible, and unchanging God of power, goodness, and love, then spiritual readers know that its very simplicity and homespun qualities are the marks of God, lowering himself to human understanding while also laying an axe to human pride. ¹²⁰

Even the obscurities of the Scriptures assume a pragmatic function in the art of winning over a contemptuous audience. ¹²¹ Augustine writes,

But those who read them in a light-minded spirit are liable to be misled by innumerable obscurities and ambiguities, and to mistake the meaning entirely, while in some places they cannot even guess at a wrong meaning, so dense and dark is the fog that some passages are wrapped in. This is all due, I have no doubt at all, to divine providence, in order to break in pride with hard labor, and to save the intelligence from boredom, since it readily forms a low opinion of things that are too easy to work out. ¹²²

The existential and moral tendencies in Augustine’s hermeneutics anticipate and have influenced contemporary hermeneutical theory, according to which ‘a life-relation to the subject matter to be interpreted is essential to understanding’. ¹²³ Heidegger is

surely impressed by the unmistakable connection that Augustine advances between understanding the text and the zealous stance of the person seeking understanding, whose singular concern is to seek the living truth…. The fact that understanding always simultaneously implies a self understanding is a perspective with which Sein und Zeit could explode the tacit epistemological boundaries of the hermeneutics of its time. ¹²⁴

Rudolf Bultmann, who represents the existential approach, asks, ‘Since the Scriptures are about God’s revelation, how then do humans have a pre-understanding of God’s revelation?’ ¹²⁵ And he answers,

Unless our existence were moved (consciously or unconsciously) by the question about God in the sense of Augustine’s ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee,’ we would not be able to recognize God as God in any revelation. ¹²⁶

Liberation theology also ‘understands this life-relation and pre-understanding as the self-transcendence of solidarity with the poor and oppressed’. ¹²⁷ I agree with Fiorenza that ‘The existential question of Bultmann’s hermeneutics and the solidarity affirmed by liberation theology both stand in a continuity—yet with considerable modifications—with Augustine’s stress on self-transcendence and spiritual purification as a condition for the proper understanding of Scriptures’. ¹²⁸

The Rule of Charity and the Rule of Faith

According to Augustine, difficulties and misunderstandings in scriptural interpretation arise from unknown or ambiguous signs. ¹²⁹ In Book II and III of DDC, he offers several rules and methods for overcoming the difficulties arising from unknown and ambiguous signs. Signs are treated differently according to whether they are either literal (or proper) or figurative (or metaphorical). ¹³⁰ Signs are proper or literal when they ‘signify the things they were originally intended for’, as when one says bos (ox) to signify the animal which everyone using the Latin language calls by this name. ¹³¹ Signs are figurative when ‘the very things which we signify with their proper words are made use of to signify something else’. ¹³² For example, the sign bos is figurative when by saying bos one has in mind the evangelist of the apostolic injunction: “You shall not muzzle the ox that threshes the corn” (1 Cor 9:9). Unfamiliar literal signs are typically overcome by a knowledge of languages, in particular of Greek and Hebrew. ¹³³ Unknown figurative signs are remedied partly by a knowledge of languages, and partly by a knowledge of things, including knowledge of plants, animals, numbers, history, music, stars, arts, crafts, dialectic, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, and so on. ¹³⁴ In order to clarify ambiguous literal signs, pronunciation and punctuation must be inspected, the rule of faith (regula fidei) consulted, literary context checked, and other translations considered. ¹³⁵ When literal meaning does not suffice, figurative (allegorical) interpretation must be sought. ¹³⁶ The ambiguities of figurative signs are the most difficult. ¹³⁷ The rule of charity determines whether an expression is literal or figurative. As a general rule, Augustine also advises the readers to understand more obscure passages through clearer passages. ¹³⁸ Among these various rules and methods, in this section I focus on the rule of charity and the rule of faith—the two most important principles in Augustine’s hermeneutics.

If one must summarize Augustine’s hermeneutics in a word, it would have to be charity, or love. For Augustine, the framework and aim of every interpretation of the Scriptures is love towards God and one’s neighbor. ¹³⁹ What the interpreter of the Scriptures should do, he says, is to discover its core claim upon the reader and let the work of interpretation drive incessantly toward that claim. ¹⁴⁰ According to Augustine, that core claim, or the summa of Scripture, is none other than love—love of God and neighbor in particular. ¹⁴¹ Augustine states, ‘The serene love with which we love God and the neighbor, contains the whole greatness and breadth of the divine sayings. In what you understand of them, love is manifest; in what you do not understand, love is hidden’. ¹⁴² He derives this hermeneutical principle from Jesus’ and Paul’s teachings on the primacy of the law of love. In DDC, Augustine quotes,

You shall love, he [Jesus] says, the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depends the whole law, as well as the prophets (Mt 22:37, 39–40). And so the end of the commandment is love (1 Tm 1:5)…. The apostle Paul also teaches the same lesson, when he says, For, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment there may be, is summed up in this saying: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to your neighbor (Rom 13:9–10). ¹⁴³

Augustine defines love as ‘any urge of the spirit to find joy in God for his own sake, and in oneself and one’s neighbor for God’s sake’. Its opposite, cupidity, is ‘any impulse of the spirit to find joy in oneself and one’s neighbor, and in any kind of bodily thing at all, not for God’s sake’. ¹⁴⁴ And he stresses, ‘Scripture…commands nothing but charity, or love, and censures nothing but cupidity, or greed’. ¹⁴⁵

The love of God and love of neighbor are both a point of departure and a goal of scriptural understanding. ¹⁴⁶ On the one hand, the doctrine of love ‘defines the spirit in which the Scriptures are to be taken’. ¹⁴⁷ That is to say, the love of God and of our neighbor is ‘the proper reading perspective for a Christian believer’. ¹⁴⁸ The interpreter who loves has found the key to interpret the Scriptures well; that interpreter knows what Scripture will say before he or she begins to read it. ¹⁴⁹ As Jeanrond points out, once the interpreter ‘is moved by love towards God and the neighbour, he [or she] cannot totally miss the spiritual sense of the biblical text’. ¹⁵⁰

On the other hand, all authentic scriptural interpretation should lead to the goal of love towards God and our neighbor. ¹⁵¹ Augustine argues,

So what all that has been said amounts to…is that the fulfillment and the end of the law and of all the divine scriptures is love (Rom 13:8; 1 Tim 1:5); love of the thing which is to be enjoyed [i.e. God], and of the thing which is able to enjoy that thing together with us [i.e. our neighbor]…. So if it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them. ¹⁵²

He also says in one of his letters:

My hope in the name of Christ is not sterile, because not only do I believe that on these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets, but I have also experienced, and I still experience every day, that not a single mystery or obscure word of holy Scripture becomes clear for me, unless I meet with these two commandments. ¹⁵³

For Augustine, this goal is so overriding that ‘even misreadings of scripture are scarcely objectionable if they build up charity’. ¹⁵⁴ He writes,

If…you have made judgments about them [the divine scriptures] that are helpful for building up this love, but for all that have not said what the author you have been reading actually meant in that place, then your mistake is not pernicious, and you certainly cannot be accused of lying. ¹⁵⁵

If some biblical interpreters

are mistaken in a judgment which is intended to build up charity, which is the end of the law (1 Tim 1:5), they are mistaken in the same sort of way as people who go astray off the road, but still proceed by rough paths to the same place as the road was taking them to. ¹⁵⁶

For Augustine, the love of God and neighbor is thus the ultimate criterion for interpreting ambiguous scriptural signs. ¹⁵⁷ With regard to the difficulties in the interpretive process which arise because of the confusion between literal and figurative signs, Augustine states that the interpreters need a method for discovering whether an expression is literal or figurative. And that method is the rule of love. Augustine writes,

And here, quite simply, is the one and only method: anything in the divine writings that cannot be referred either to good, honest morals or to the truth of the faith, you must know is said figuratively. Good honest morals belong to loving God and one’s neighbor, the truth of the faith to knowing God and one’s neighbor. ¹⁵⁸

He continues,

So this rule will be observed in dealing with figurative expressions, that you should take pains to turn over and over in your mind what you read, until your interpretation of it is led right through to the kingdom of charity. But if this is already happening with the literal meaning, do not suppose the expression is in any way a figurative one. ¹⁵⁹

For Augustine, the spiritual sense of a scriptural expression is not identical with the figurative or allegorical sense. The rule of love determines the spiritual sense of an expression. Quoting DDC, Cameron aptly summarizes,

Every true interpretation is spiritual in the sense that it reads everything in relation to love, the linchpin of spiritual understanding. Accordingly, the literal sense of many expressions is already spiritual. But if the rule shows that a text is figurative and obscure in relation to Scripture’s central thrust, then spiritual readers know how to deploy the right skills for ‘shelling the nuts of the text’s secrets…for the nourishing food of love’. ¹⁶⁰

The rule of charity is also important in regard to a multiplicity of meanings. As we have seen above, Augustine admits that the Scriptures possess a plurality of meanings. It is the rule of love that adjudicates diverse senses of the Scriptures. As Gerald Bruns claims, ‘[G]ranting the presupposition of charity, [Scripture] is capable of being taken in diverse senses’. ¹⁶¹ Augustine writes,

Let us not go beyond what is written, inflated with pride and playing one off against another. Rather let us love the Lord our God with our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole mind, and our neighbor as ourselves. Unless we believe that Moses meant whatever he did mean in his books with an eye to those twin commandments of charity, we shall make the Lord out to be a liar, by attributing to our fellow-servant a purpose which is at odds with the Lord’s teaching. Since, then, so rich a variety of highly plausible interpretations can be culled from those words, consider how foolish it is rashly to assert that Moses intended one particular meaning rather than any of the others. ¹⁶²

Interpreters of Scripture ‘can pursue a variety of interpretations while letting love adjudicate their merits’. ¹⁶³ Augustine therefore prays to God, ‘[As] for those who feed on your truth in the wide pastures of charity, let me be united with them in you, and in you find my delight in company with them’. ¹⁶⁴

Eric Plumer’s comments on Augustine’s hermeneutical principle of love are insightful and thus worth mentioning here. According to Plumer, it is important that Augustine does not derive this hermeneutical principle from outside but discovers it within Scripture. ¹⁶⁵ For Augustine, as Jeanrond also points out, love is ‘the only perspective through which the biblical canon itself wishes to be read’. ¹⁶⁶ Moreover, Plumer states,

neither for Paul nor for Jesus is the assertion of the primacy of love merely a remark made in passing. Rather, it is a conscious retrieval from the tradition of that which has been recognized as a hermeneutical key to the law in its entirety. ¹⁶⁷

Also, in one form or other the assertion of the primacy of love ‘is made repeatedly and emphatically in the New Testament’. Therefore, Plumer argues, Augustine has not used a hermeneutical principle that is alien to the New Testament, as Bultmann has been blamed for doing in his use of Heidegger’s existential philosophy. ¹⁶⁸ Augustine has likewise not used ‘a secondary idea as if it were primary’, as Luther is accused of doing in his ‘foregrounding of the Pauline concept of “justification by faith”’. ¹⁶⁹ Rather, Plumer concludes, Augustine ‘has recovered a central hermeneutical principle sanctioned in Scripture itself by both Jesus and Paul’. ¹⁷⁰ Here we find one more example of the resonance between Augustine’s and today’s hermeneutics:

despite the fact that Augustine is often dismissed out of hand as pre-critical, 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’. ¹⁷¹

Another important criterion of biblical interpretation is the rule of faith (regula fidei). In Augustine’s hermeneutics, as Pollmann points out, ‘[L]ove (caritas) and, to a lesser degree, the Rule of Faith (regula fidei)…form the hermeneutical horizon’. ¹⁷² For Augustine, the faith of the church as an interpreting community is the communal context of biblical interpretation. This faith is ‘most clearly manifest in the church’s rule of faith’. ¹⁷³ In DDC, Augustine ‘stipulates that a proper interpretation of Scripture should conform to the rule of faith’, ¹⁷⁴ which is learned both ‘from the plainer passages of scripture and from the authority of the Church’. ¹⁷⁵ More precisely, ‘he recommends that the interpreter of Scripture turn to the rule of faith not at the first sign of trouble but rather after other methods to resolve the ambiguity’. ¹⁷⁶ He writes,

[W]hen ambiguities arise in scripture about the meaning of words used in their proper sense, the first thing we must do is see whether we have phrased or pronounced them wrongly. So when, on paying closer attention, you still see that it is uncertain how something is to be phrased, or how to be pronounced, you should refer it to the rule of truth. ¹⁷⁷

He offers as an example the interpretation of John 1:1–2:

The well-known heretical punctuation In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and there was God, giving a different sense in what follows (this Word was in the beginning with God), refuses to acknowledge that the Word was God. This is to be refuted by the rule of faith, which lays down for us the equality of the members of the Trinity, and so we should say and the Word was God, and then go on, this was in the beginning with God. ¹⁷⁸

This example shows that the rule of faith functions as ‘a dogmatic restriction’ on scriptural interpretation. ¹⁷⁹ No scriptural interpretation ‘may be proposed which is incompatible with the Catholic faith’. ¹⁸⁰ Since the ‘only thing…[Scripture] ever asserts is Catholic faith’, ¹⁸¹ scriptural interpretation ‘must be guided by the Church as an interpretive community’. ¹⁸² This means that ‘a firm limit’ is imposed on the scope of private judgment allowed to the scriptural interpreter. ¹⁸³

Though he is neither simple traditionalist nor irrationalist, Augustine is ‘deeply devoted to the authority of the church’ and ‘upholds the authority of the rule of faith’. ¹⁸⁴ With regard to the authority of the church, Augustine claims that ‘starting from the apostolic chair down through successions of bishops, even unto the open confession of all mankind, it [the Church] has possessed the crown of authority’. ¹⁸⁵ Augustine frequently points out that the authority of Catholic teaching is proven by its wide acceptance: ¹⁸⁶ ‘this is the faith revealed in holy Scripture, a faith that has gained marvelous and merited authority throughout the world and among all peoples’. ¹⁸⁷ The teaching of the Church is ‘accepted without question everywhere and supported by the testimony of Churches throughout the world’. ¹⁸⁸ He also states,

From whom did I derive my faith in Christ?… I see that I owe my faith to opinion and report widely spread and firmly established among the peoples and nations of the earth, and that those peoples everywhere observe the mysteries of the Catholic Church. ¹⁸⁹

For Augustine, it is ‘the authority of your Catholic Church’ that guarantees the truth of Scripture. ¹⁹⁰ He writes, ‘[F]or the canonical scriptures, they [the readers] should follow the authority of the majority of the Catholic Churches, among which, of course, are those that have the privilege of being apostolic sees and having received letters from the apostles’. ¹⁹¹ And he confesses, ‘I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church’. ¹⁹² It is not important to him whether the Epistle to the Hebrews is the work of Paul or anonymous. What is important to him is that ‘the Catholic Church recognised Hebrews as authoritative for the establishment of doctrine’. ¹⁹³

In Augustine’s emphasis on the rule of charity and the rule of faith, we find another consonance with contemporary hermeneutics—with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer in particular. ¹⁹⁴ Gadamer argues that prejudice is an intrinsic human condition of understanding. All human beings are ‘always situated within traditions’. ¹⁹⁵ Our prejudices are formed and influenced through effective history of traditions. For Gadamer, as Bruns notes, ‘the prior appropriation of a text within a particular tradition of understanding is something that must necessarily take place if there is to be any understanding of the text at all’. Gadamer’s position

presupposes the historicity of all understanding, whence there can be no such things as an unprejudiced hermeneutical analysis of a text but only its appropriation within a particular, historical hermeneutical practice…. [A]ll hermeneutical positions are rooted in one or another tradition of understanding—one or another tradition that hands down normative practices for determining authoritative interpretations. ¹⁹⁶

Augustine’s hermeneutics, too, emphasizes that biblical interpretation does not depend on an unprejudiced analysis of the text but on the application of the traditional Christian rule of love and of faith. Thus, for him, understanding of Scripture takes place within a particular tradition of understanding—the tradition of the New Testament and the Catholic teaching.

In sum, this paper has discussed Augustine’s hermeneutics, focusing on its three distinctive characteristics. First, he understands the Scriptures as signs, which point to the transcendent reality of God. Thus, the key task of the interpreter of Scripture is to interpret the spiritual reality of God, without identifying the signa with the res. This understanding of the Scriptures leads Augustine to admit that the Scriptures possess a multiplicity of meanings. It anticipates today’s reader response theories and the hermeneutical concept of the ‘surplus of meaning’. Understanding the Scriptures as signs also entails that the role of Scripture is provisional and instrumental. This view of Scripture rules out biblicism.

Second, Augustine’s hermeneutics has existential and moral tendencies. He underscores the essential connection between interpretation of Scripture and the interior attitude of the interpreter. A spiritual preparation is necessary for correct interpretation of Scripture. Augustine offers a scheme of seven stages leading to spiritual purification, which has both a biblical and a Platonic background: fear of God, piety, knowledge, fortitude, the counsel of mercy, the purification of the heart, and wisdom. Augustine also emphasizes the interpreter’s moral qualities, and humility in particular. For him, not only is humility an appropriate pre-understanding for the interpreter of Scripture, but the Scripture itself also helps the interpreter become humble. The existential and moral tendencies in Augustine’s hermeneutics anticipate and have influenced contemporary hermeneutical theory. which claims that a life-relation to the subject matter is essential for true understanding.

Finally, the rule of charity and the rule of faith are the most important criteria in Augustine’s hermeneutics. The core claim of Scripture is love. The love of God and our neighbor is not only the proper reading perspective for a Christian believer, but also a goal to which all authentic biblical interpretation should lead. The rule of charity is the ultimate criterion for determining whether an expression is literal or figurative. It also adjudicates diverse senses of Scripture. It is important that Augustine discovers this rule within Scripture; his adoption of this rule is consonant with contemporary hermeneutics which affirm that a reader must be open to the text’s claim. The rule of faith is another important criterion. A proper interpretation of Scripture should conform to that rule. Augustine is deeply devoted to the authority of the Church. He claims that the truth of Scripture is guaranteed by the authority of the Church. His emphasis on the rule of charity and the rule of faith is consonant with contemporary hermeneutics, which underscore that understanding takes place in a particular tradition. Admittedly the scope of this paper was limited by dealing only with principles and rules that Augustine himself presents. To grasp his hermeneutics more fully, examining his actual biblical interpretation in his sermons and commentaries is needed. Perhaps it would be an interesting task to examine whether in his actual exegesis Augustine follows his own principles and rules assiduously or sometimes ignores them.