Christians
read the Bible to understand – as far as it is possible – God and life. But, from
before the ink was even dry on the page, Christians have had to grapple with
the fact that faithful readers of scripture do not always come to the same understanding
of what it means. One common solution is to claim that each passage only
means one thing and what I understand it to mean is the only faithful
understanding. But that way leads to factions and schism.
I’ve
written elsewhere about how Augustine’s focus on the double love of God and neighbor leads him to make space for the relative faithfulness of different interpretations of scripture.
In
an essay on Augustine’s Biblical Interpretation, The Rev. Dr. Thomas Williams
shows that the great saint and theologian was willing to allow that there might
be more than one true understanding and that the biblical author’s intended
meaning might not be the only true one:
Suppose, then, that Augustine says Genesis
1:1 means x, and I say it means y; suppose further that upon consulting Christ
as Inner Teacher we find that both x and y are true. The only question is,
which did Moses mean, x or y? Augustine asks, why not both?
So when one person says “He meant what I
say,” and another says “No, he meant what I say,” I think it would be more
pious to say “Why not both, if both are true?” And if someone should see in his
words a third truth, or a fourth, or indeed any other truth, why not believe
that Moses saw all these truths? (Confessions 12.31.42)
Somewhat surprisingly, it is not pride but
just good Augustinian theology (and epistemology) to suspect that we might find
truths in Moses’ writings that had never crossed his mind:
Finally, Lord, you who are God and not flesh
and blood, even if one who was merely a man did not see all there was to be
seen, did not your good Spirit, who will lead me into the land of uprightness,
know everything that you would reveal through these words to later readers,
even if the one who uttered them was perhaps thinking of only one of the many
true meanings? If so, let us suppose he was thinking of whichever meaning is
most exalted. O Lord, show us that meaning; or if you please, show us some
other true meaning. In this way, whether you show us just what you showed your
servant, or something else that emerges from the same words, we will in any
event be fed by you, not mocked by error (Conf. 12.32.43).6
Augustine
is able to be generous in allowing more than one true interpretation because of
what he understands the purpose of scripture to be. Professor Williams
continues with reference to Augustine’s De Doctrina
Christiana
(On Christian Teaching):
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is
bankrupt, as far as Augustine is concerned. Such a pursuit springs from
curiosity, which for him is no admirable trait but a vice; he identifies it
with that “lust of the eyes” of which John wrote, “For all that is in the
world—the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life—is not
of the Father but is of the world” (1 John 2:16). So it is not surprising that
when Augustine discusses the legitimacy of rival interpretations of Scripture,
he reveals a deep concern with the morality of exegetical disputes. Undue
attachment to one’s own exegesis manifests a sort of pride, the love of one’s
own opinion simply because it is one’s own opinion. In Confessions 10 Augustine
describes this as a form of the “pride of life,” the third of the unholy
trinity of sins from 1 John 2:16. It is more grievous still when the exegete is
driven by the desire for a reputation as a brilliant scholar; “this is a
miserable life and revolting ostentation” (Conf. 10.36.59). Moreover, since
truth is common property, one’s own opinion is not really one’s own at all if
it is true; it is the common property of all right‐thinking
people, and no one has any individual stake in it: “No one should regard
anything as his own, except perhaps a lie, since all truth is from him who
says, ‘I am the truth’” (doctr. chr. Prologue, 8). Also, only temerity and
insolence could justify such confidence in something we cannot actually know.
We can know what Truth itself says, but we cannot know with any degree of
certainty what Moses or Paul was thinking when he wrote the biblical text we
are expounding. Most important of all, charity demands that we abstain from all
such “pernicious disputes.”
For charity is the ultimate aim of all worthy
exegesis. “Whoever thinks he has understood the divine Scriptures or any part
of them in such a way that his understanding does not build up the twin love of
God and neighbor has not yet understood them at all” (doctr. chr. 1.36.40).
Charity is, moreover, the unifying and animating theme of Augustine’s treatise
on biblical interpretation, De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching). Its
message is this: Be always mindful of the end, and be on your guard against the
pernicious tendency of means to encroach upon the ends. The end of all things,
Augustine insists, is God. He alone is to be loved for his own sake—“enjoyed,”
in Augustine’s terminology. Whatever else is to be loved should be “used,” that
is, loved for the sake of God. Even human beings, including ourselves, should
be “used” in this sense, which does not mean “exploited.” But Augustine cannot
quite bring himself to talk consistently of “using” ourselves and our fellow
human beings, and he defines charity as “the motion of the soul toward enjoying
God for his own sake and oneself and one’s neighbor for God’s sake” (doctr.
chr. 3.10.16). Its opposite, cupidity, is “the motion of the soul toward
enjoying oneself, one’s neighbor, or any bodily thing for the sake of something
other than God” (Ibid.). Scripture, Augustine says, “commands nothing but
charity and condemns nothing but cupidity” (doctr. chr. 3.10.15).
Interest in Biblical interpretation for its
own sake is one such form of cupidity; exegesis is to be used for the sake of
charity, not enjoyed for its own sake. In Augustine’s metaphor, it is not the
distant land where we will be happy, but merely a vehicle by which we may be
conveyed there.
The fulfillment and end of the Law and of all
divine Scripture is the love of a being that is to be enjoyed [i.e., God], and
of a being that can share that enjoyment with us [i.e., our neighbor]. . . .
That we might know this and be able to achieve it, the whole temporal
dispensation was made by divine providence for our salvation. We should use it
not with an abiding but with a transitory love and delight like that in a road
or conveyances or any other means. . . . We should love those things by which
we are carried for the sake of that towards which we are carried (doctr. chr.
1.35.39; see also 1.4.4).
So overriding is this end that even
misreadings of Scripture are scarcely objectionable if they build up charity.
Someone guilty of such a misreading is to be corrected only on pragmatic
grounds, not in the interest of scholarly correctness (an ideal to which
Augustine shows not the slightest allegiance):
He is deceived in the same way as someone who
leaves a road by mistake but nonetheless goes on through a field to the same
place to which the road leads. Still, he should be corrected and shown how much
more useful it is not to leave the road, lest his habit of wandering off should
force him to take the long way around, or the wrong way altogether (doctr. chr.
1.36.41).
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