These Essays: Moving on from Augustine

            An amended Augustine must be, of course, a bare beginning of these essays. But it contains the components of authority and empathy which I argue compose the criterion of salutary force. And Augustinian interpretation contains the degree of cohesive holism which most commends the antique understanding of interpretation to our fractured society.

            What Augustine’s enormously valuable thinking lacks is, perhaps, a certain amount of sophistication. Our understanding of the authority of an interpretation has become more complex than determining the author’s intent. Now, we ask ourselves if an interpretation’s understanding maintains fidelity to the nature and contents of the Scripture itself, about which we have learned a great deal.

            Likewise, our understanding of empathy has grown more intricate than the noble and laudable good of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Now, we ask ourselves if an interpretation’s understanding enables us to empathize with the experience of the people of Scripture and their actual and imagined world, to see if we ourselves can learn from them. Of course, neither of these has happened because our knowledge has overturned Augustine’s dictum but because his forays would make more nuanced understanding possible.

           Am I, then, proposing an Augustinian hermeneutic? I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I propose a hermeneutical criterion within an Augustinian tradition. I do not agree with Augustine on all accounts. But I ask no question that I believe he himself does not venture. I share his understanding that understanding connotes authority, trust, and love. And I certainly include the interaction between rhetor and audience in my understanding of empathy; I, too, take the sermon as something of a proving ground—if it works there, it may work elsewhere.

           And I believe that, ultimately, I propose nothing that Augustine would vehemently object to. For what I mean to be most clear in my own criterion is also most implied in his hermeneutic: validity gauged by an interpretation’s effect, and not solely on its content, and not solely on its explicatory strength. The growth of love cannot be predicated in advance. Neither may salutary force. All must wait to see how the audience reacts.

            At the same time, neither I nor Augustine write for reader-response. I share through my notion of textual fidelity what Augustine cautions us about with his concerns of authorial intent. Scripture comes to us bearing contents. These contents matter. Indeed, the wisdom of Scripture may well be one of God’s greatest gifts. How we hear it in its own voice and on its own terms while maintaining our own anxieties and concerns will be the focus of the next chapter.

These Essays: Amending Augustine

If I dare to be a bit clever, and if my readers dare excuse it, then I would amend Augustinian interpretation. I do not propose to solve all the problems. But a little more complexity might help him. You see, Augustine ended up in what seems to be a lot of trouble because his only first-tier, technical consideration of Scripture was authorial intent. 

That was his one criterion, and if you missed it you had to “save the day” through loving allegory. Today we have many more technical interpretive criteria, and need not excuse anything. Some additional flexibility might mean that in every case we can still respect the Scriptures for what they say themselves.

For example, dare we say the following?  

"Whoever, then, thinks to understand the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them that tends to neither edify one’s self nor build up one’s neighbor in the wisdom of God, does not yet understand them as one ought."

This retains Augustinian understanding. Interpretation is about the transformation from ignorance to consciousness, and building up one’s neighbor in wisdom certainly accomplishes this.

 

But we cannot just continue with the second half of the Augustinian rule and say “though one does not happen upon the precise meaning which the author whom he reads intended to express,” because we do not look for only one meaning in any case. Our first-tier criteria validate a range of interpretations which adhere to Scripture: the appropriate, the fecund, the consistent, the comprehensive, the methodologically responsible. We insist on fidelity to a text, its form and content, its grammar and its history.

Now these methods may themselves be corrupted by our own cultural and historical assumptions. But Christians should value the best of the interpretations so produced because they have been valiantly struggling to break free of our confessional assumptions. Our traditions, however justifiable from Scripture, are not Scripture themselves, under whose authority all Christians submit. So we have not listened to the Scriptures perfectly. 

But the corruptions of first-order criteria ought not discourage us from using them entirely. Technical criteria encourage us to hear past our own pre-understanding so that we can understand the Scriptures anew, in their own voice and on their own terms. Just as Augustine should not have excused us from his own criterion of authorial intent, we should not excuse ourselves from our own first-tier criteria today. 

Because if we have a greater number of possibly valid interpretations, we need not be so eager to say that misunderstanding can lead to understanding. Instead, we may say explicitly that which Augustine structurally implies: that understanding, even understanding free of error, is not sufficient. Rather, we can ask a different question: does the interpreter submit to the authority of Scripture because he or she values the transformation of all in light of the knowledge of God? 

If so, then he or she will endeavor to satisfy all the first-tier criteria of interpretive validity, and avoid as many errors as possible. Just such a recognition of authority is a proper understanding of Scripture in the first place.

Surely, our errors of misappropriating Scripture for ends that harm others and serve ourselves must exceed those technical errors that Augustinian love itself would correct but not condemn. The mistakes which interpreters must be most wary of are those moral errors that eschew Scriptural authority, rather than technical errors like those that fail to discern or convey content and context. 

This does not mean that those errors are unimportant—think of misunderstandings between lovers! Yet it does mean that we must determine which errors matter most, and rightly seeks to avoid technical error for fear of leading our neighbor into confusion, distress, or despair.

The beloved loves by listening to what the lover has to say. We love the lover’s voice because it is beautiful, and because it leads us to the lover. That is the authority of the lover over the beloved, and it is where our understanding of Scripture begins. But as the two clauses of the commandment of love and the two books of Christian Doctrine remind us, authority is not the only component of love. 

There is also empathy, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, which Augustine enfolds in rhetoric: “in this process of speaking, he should win over those who are hostile, rouse the lazy, and describe to the ignorant what is occurring now and what they should expect in the future.” 

But we will go a bit further in our understanding of empathy. For we cannot understand it to be only a component of the love the lover has for the beloved. Wide-eyed love, after all, would find it certain strange to preach only to the lazy, hostile, and ignorant. What if one was preached to? Augustine, pointed here only toward God, misses the opportunity. In Christian Doctrine no one is ever loved by their neighbor, anymore than one loves a neighbor for his or her own self. Augustine implies such things elsewhere in his work, but does not apply them here. 

So I would suggest a more mutual understanding of empathy, one more like the reciprocity of love implied by Paul, declared by John, and following from the Synoptic teachings, so that we might we might reinscribe the famous quote from Augustine thusly:

"Whoever, then, thinks to understand the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them that neither edifies oneself nor bears up one’s neighbor in the wisdom of God, does not yet understand them as one ought. If, on the other hand, one diligently draws forth a meaning from the Scriptures that mends a neighbor to one’s own self, or draws both souls together toward the mercy of our Lord, then one has begun to understand these passages by heeding the authority of God, whose Scriptures lead none astray."

Page a Day: One Hundred Thirteen

            I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know that it matters anymore. I am only one person. Even you cannot fight this war alone, or you would not be gathering an army. I’ll  help in what way I can. But I don’t think it will be very much.”

            He laughed. “In my dreams you are always fighting, stabbing, cutting. You are a great warrior. So I placed a dagger in your hand. But it is not what you want to hold. I have seen you writing. This task absorbs you as no other.”

            I shrugged. “A way to organize my thoughts.”

            He shook his head. “You forgive me far too much. I read them while you recovered. You must look more hardly at me, and more kindly on Marcus. This war needs telling. If we win, this world and all others should know how. If we are defeated, then what you write will be the only record anywhere of who we fought and why.”

            “They say there is no dissent behind the nightwind. The loyalty change takes all of that away.”

            He frowned, shaking his head. “I was once a Historian. I believed that reading was an infection of its own. But that is the help that you can give me.”

            “Marcus wanted me to carry things.”

            “Well,” he said, picking up a bundle he had lain on the grass. “Everyone does that.”

            He stood and walked away into the ship, taking his burden  with him. It was a few minutes before I stood and walked back the way that he had come. I saw now that the lines of men stretched all the way to the horizon, toward the keeps of the Profuse Hand. Beside the line came, slowly, a second line of the golden disks, each as high as three men, that I knew from story to be Profusionist artillery. But I fell in with those souls returning to the east, swift and empty-handed. The mud of the tundra squelched underfoot. It was not easy walking, but I was glad to be standing at all, breathing, sharing the work of men.

Page a Day: One Hundred Twelve

            Marcus found me first, as he shouted orders at the ones loading the ship. He turned and came over. “It is good that you have woken, he said. "You can carry lighter things.”

            He began to turn away, and I asked, “Is that how you greet a man who died?”

            He turned, eyes flashing. “Died? Timaeus died. Ion died. Philemon died. They all died because of you. You were wounded. Julius came back to sew you. Now we heal like mastodons. But dying hurts.”         

            I stood there as he walked away. I had never thought they would remember that. Exhausted, I sat. The grass of the tundra was coarse and stiff and brown. I knew it would taste acrid if I tried it. The ground beneath the grass was cold and the ground beneath it mud, but the sun fell warm across my shoulders. My eyes closed. A multitude of birds chirped in the shrubs nearby. I drifted, and may have slept. 

            “I owe you an apology,” said the voice of Jerem Cozak, and I started to hear him near. “I misunderstood what the White Swarm said.” He placed his hand upon my shoulder as he spoke.

            “I think that may be a very easy thing to do,” I said. “Faith Gata...”

            He nodded, squatting on the grass beside me. “A memory of the Blood of History, which the White Swarm now holds, one of the oldest.”

            “Was he really...”

            “Your father? Did he raise you, beat you, expect too much? Do you have his skin, his chin, his disposition?”

            “In my dream I never saw myself.”

            He smiled. “Just so. But now you have known the memories of the woman named History and the man named Faith. You know they are both long dead.”

            “And I know I was raised by a poor woman in Ariel until the age of eight, when the Historians of the Temple of the Profusion started caring for me. But I know the Blood of History may manufacture sons,” I said, and nodded to the nearest Never-born. 

            “Just so again. So you must ask yourself: are you an orphan of the street raised for a while by a generous soul, or are you the culmination of a thousand years of dreams and memory and prophecy, anointed for some purpose? Or will you ask why these two must conflict?”