Living Letters of the Law. Jeremy Cohen
independence of Augustine's distinctions between literal and allegorical, on one hand, and history and prophecy, on the other hand, was short-lived. Within several years of his first commentary on Genesis, Augustine returned to the interpretation of the biblical cosmogony in his De Genest ad litteram liber imperfectus (An Unfinished Book on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, ca. 393), in which he listed a fourfold scheme of biblical interpretation: “according to history, according to allegory, according to analogy, according to etiology. It is history when past deeds (of God or of humans) are recorded; allegory, when statements are understood figuratively; analogy, when the congruence of old and new testaments is demonstrated; etiology, when the causes of statements and deeds are related.”61 The particulars of this passage and its context—an avowedly literal commentary on Scripture—appear to signal some change in Augustine's hermeneutic. One cannot help but infer a measure of opposition between history and allegory; although the definition of history—the narration of events— remains the same as in De Genesi contra Manichaeos, its differentiation from allegory suggests a link between the historical and the nonallegorical—namely, the literal. No longer did Augustine allow for the possibility of nonfactual history; that is, a narrative about the past relating events that never, in fact, occurred. And Augustine's inclusion of much figurative interpretation—that is, not exactly the “the letter sounds”—in a commentary he entitled On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis hints further that he wished to reevaluate the essence of the literal sense. Nevertheless, if Augustine harbored the intention of definitively identifying the historical with the literal in the early 390s, it remained unfulfilled for quite some time. This first rendition of his literal Genesis commentary was admittedly imperfectus, a failed attempt abandoned prior to its conclusion.
Perhaps this failure derived directly from Augustine's inability to define and to capture the literal, nonfigurative understanding of the Bible that he had hoped to convey; and, until the turn of the century, at least, his interpretation of the Old Testament remained overwhelmingly figurative.62 The first books of the De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine), which Augustine wrote in 397, boldly subordinate the literal meaning of Scripture to its allegorical sense, inasmuch as “there is no reason for us to signify, that is, to give a sign, if not to draw forth and transmit to the mind of another that which transpires in the mind which gives the sign.”63 Provided that one interprets Scripture so as to enhance his Catholic faith, the grounding of the interpretation in the concrete reality of the sign—that is, the dependence of a figurative reading upon the literal meaning of the text— matters relatively little. In fact, “a person supported by faith, hope, and charity so that he retains them resolutely does not need the scriptures except for teaching others,”64 whereas “he who honors or venerates some signifier while ignorant of what it signifies is enslaved to the sign.”65 Not the plain meaning of the biblical text but the doctrine—and unity—of the church serves as ultimate arbiter in the reconciliation of ambiguities,66 because the Bible “asserts only the Catholic faith in matters past, future, and present.”67 Despite the attribution of value to Mosaic law in the historicizing typology of the Contra Faustum,, it too belittles the value of the literal sense in its own right. Many provisions of the law—for instance, the uncleanliness of nonkosher animals—can be understood only figuratively;68 Augustine pointed out that Philo the Jew himself recognized that much in the Old Testament, when understood literally, casts “the disgrace of ridiculous fables” on books of divine authorship, and he resorted to allegory as a result.69 Therefore,
one should not believe that there is anything narrated in the prophetical books which does not signify something in the future—except things placed so as to explain those matters which foretell of that king [Christ] and his people, whether through literal or figurative speech and deeds. For, just as in harps and other such musical instruments, not all things which are touched resonate with sounds, only the strings; the other parts of the entire body of the harp have been fashioned in such a way that those [strings], which the musician will strike to create a pleasant sound, may be appropriately fastened and stretched. So too in these prophetic narratives, those matters of human history selected by the prophetic spirit either relate things of the past because they signify the future or, if they signify no such thing, are interspersed so as to connect those matters which do resound with such significance.70
The predetermined doctrinal lessons of Scripture's allegorical sense, which may not contradict Catholic belief, impose limits on the literal, although the literal sense hardly controls the use of the allegorical.
Scholars have noted instructive links and parallels between the educationally oriented hermeneutic of the De doctrina christiana and the introspective account of Augustine's conversion related in the Confessiones (Confessions, 397–400). In Peter Brown's words, “Augustine's attitude to allegory summed up a whole attitude to knowledge” in the De doctrina christiana; in the Confessiones, this attitude to allegory provided Augustine with the basis for knowledge of himself.71 Composed in the immediate aftermath of the De doctrina christiana and the Contra Faustum, the Confessiones thus continues to employ the nonliteralist, figurative hermeneutic that dominates Augustine's fourth-century compositions. Contrasting well with statements of Augustine's later career, it follows the lead of the earlier Genesis commentaries in its symbolic interpretation of the creation story. As Augustine wrote in the final pages of the Confessiones, the opening verses of Genesis, in their instruction to man and woman to “be fertile and increase,” justified the very principle of allegorical exegesis: “I perceive in this blessing the capacity and power granted us by you, both to express in numerous ways what we may have understood in a single way, and to understand in numerous ways that which we may have read, expressed only in one obscure fashion.”72
Only as he approached the second decade of the fifth century,73 with the account of his own spiritual awakening behind him, did Augustine finally nurture the literal dimension of his hermeneutic to its maturity— again with regard to the opening chapters of Genesis—in his massive De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis). Early in this commentary, Augustine explained his new exegetical approach by rejecting an allegorical understanding of Genesis 1:5 (in its Old Latin translation: “evening was made, and morning was made, one day”); namely, “that in ‘evening was made’ is signified the sin of the rational creature and that in ‘morning was made’ is signified its restoration. But this is an argument of prophetic allegory—which we have not undertaken in this treatise. For we have now endeavored to speak of the scriptures according to the proper sense of past events, not according to the mysteries of future ones.”74 In this programmatic statement, Augustine has overcome the distance between the two contrasts—literal versus allegorical, on one hand, and history versus prophecy, on the other—that characterized his earlier work. The literal interpretation of the biblical past, the goal of the De Genesi ad litteram, is now equated with the historical truth of the biblical narrative and concerns “the proper sense of past events”; allegorical or prophetic interpretation alludes to “the mysteries of future ones.” Yet if literal and allegorical also refer to chronological orientation in the interpretation of biblical narrative, not merely to the degree that such interpretation focuses either on the sign (exactly as “the letter sounds”) or on what it signifies (“figuratively and in enigmas”),75 how is the “literal” sense genuinely plain or literal? Augustine responded that the literal meaning of Scripture denotes first and foremost the intention of the “writer of the sacred books”;76 accordingly, “when we read the divine books amidst so great a number of true interpretations, which are…fortified with the sanity of the Catholic faith, let us emphatically choose that one which clearly manifests what he (whom we are reading) intended.”77 One must immediately take note that this criterion of authorial intention hardly precludes the “literal” understanding of the Bible's language as metaphorical. For example: The first light of creation, understood literally, refers simultaneously to earthly light and spiritual light;78 God made man, but had Scripture related that he formed him with bodily hands, “we ought sooner to believe that the writer used a metaphor”;79 even though Scripture's report that the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened (Genesis 3:7) after their sin does not mean that