De Doctrina Christiana - Allegorical and Literal Reading of Scripture

Allegorical and Literal Reading of Scripture

Augustine's early study of the Bible had been unsatisfactory, but when he moved to Milan he encountered Ambrose, who used allegoresis, the use of allegory as an interpretive tool, to comprehend the Bible, particularly those Old Testament passages that, if read in a purely literal way, seemed nonsensical. Allegoresis first emerged in Greece as a way of defending poetry and myth against the new proto-scientific thinking that tended to dismiss both as nonsensical (and often immoral) stories (see B. Clarke, 1996). Something was lost, it was thought, when texts describing Zeus hurling his thunderbolts came to be understood as an allegorical representation of a natural phenomenon, not as the god's anger. Ambrose argued that the difficulties or seeming impossibilities in the Scriptures must be understood as allegories requiring interpretation to make them comprehensible, which assuaged Augustine's discomfort regarding what he saw as the Bible's stylistic irregularities, logical flaws, and frequent lapses in morals. His rhetorical training had schooled him well in hermeneutics, so interpretation was not new to him. But Ambrose's approach relied on sheer imagination, freeing interpretation from the text.

As a student of rhetoric, Augustine no doubt had learned that allegory was related to structure, a figure of speech like metaphor and synecdoche. Donatus, writing in the fourth century, included allegory as a trope in his widely influential Ars Grammatica (Kennedy, 1980), classifying it as an element of style. Ambrose's use of allegory, however, whether he was aware of it or not, went beyond allegoresis; it drew on an older approach—hyponoia, the ability to find deeper levels of meaning hidden below the surface meaning.

We find a cursory treatment of allegoresis in Confessions VII.18, where Augustine wrote:

"Provided, therefore, that each of us tries as best he can to understand in the Holy Scriptures what the writer meant by them, what harm is there if a reader believes what you, the Light of all truthful minds, show him to be the true meaning? It may not even be the meaning which the writer had in mind, and yet he too saw in them a true meaning, different though it may have been from this."

His formal treatment, however, appears in On Christian Doctrine, where Augustine noted that words are "signs," of which there are two classes, "natural" and "conventional." Signs can be approached on two levels, "what they are in themselves" and "what they signify" (II.1). Words are conventional signs, and the words of the Scriptures are obscure because they were "divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil" (II.6). Augustine wrote that fear of God, piety, and knowledge of the Holy canon are key factors in biblical interpretation, but the central guiding principle is that interpretation must be congruent with "the judgment of the greater number of Catholic Churches" (II.8)—that is, all interpretation is free as long as it supports Church doctrine.

De doctrina christiana expressed Augustine's view that the process of free interpretation was a discovery procedure that led to truth, however multifaceted it might be. With respect to Scriptures, two governing factors made this view conceivable: (1) the conviction that the Scriptures were absolutely true, thus making it impossible for a person of faith and goodwill to produce falsehood in any interpretation, and (2) the proposition that interpretations should be shared only with Christians, who were predisposed to receive the truth. On this basis, Patton (1977) and Troup (1999) argued that Augustine viewed interpretation as rhetorical invention that aimed to provide an adaptation of the biblical text to match the beliefs of the audience while simultaneously making the obscure language of the Bible comprehensible. But the depth of Augustine's religious convictions enabled him to transcend conventional notions of allegoresis and thereby see the act of interpretation as a discovery procedure unbound by the dimensions of text. Thus, we find that in Confessions he extended the application of free interpretation beyond Scripture to his life, and in City of God he extended it further to the totality of human history.