St. Augustine’s Hermeneutics of Friendship:

A Consideration of De Utilitate Credendi, 10-13,

With an Eye to the Author’s Own Conversion

In Confessions, Book VIII

Saint Augustine’s popularity – or notoriety in some circles – continues more or less unabated into the 21^st Century. As is inevitably the case with such a prolific and influential writer, some of the saint’s works have received far more attention than others, either at a particular time, or even when the whole sweep of a millennium and a half is taken into account. Among the perennial favorites is De Doctrina Christiana. Scholarly interest in this work has even intensified in the wake of the so-called “linguistic turn” in the early 20^th Century.[i] Not only theologians and intellectual historians, but literary theorists and philosophers, working in the now respectable fields of semiotics and hermeneutics, want to know what one of the greatest minds in the history of Western Civilization had to say about the fundamental problems of human communication and interpretation (especially interpretation of written texts!). Augustine’s brilliant, well-ordered and (for him) highly focused treatment of these questions in De Doctrina Christiana has deservedly drawn a great deal of attention. Moreover, the text taken as a whole spans more than thirty years of Augustine’s life,[ii] thus providing an optic onto almost the whole vast range of his Christian thought. By contrast, De Utilitate Credendi (On the Profit of Believing), a slim work written even earlier than the first three books of De Doctrina Christiana, is easily overlooked when it comes to an earnest engagement of Augustine’s hermeneutical ideas.[iii] As a partial corrective to what may prove a rather grave oversight, I wish to look closely at a single substantive passage from De Utilitate Credendi, in which the full richness of Augustine’s hermeneutics, so carefully elaborated in De Doctrina Christiana, is already anticipated. In light of insight hopefully gained from this exposition, we will conclude by considering briefly the famous scene of Augustine’s conversion, as recounted in Confessions, Book VIII. Before turning directly to the text of De Utilitate Credendi, chapters 10 to 13, however, it will be useful to make a few preparatory observations regarding Augustine’s whole hermeneutical project – observations based, not surprisingly, on the systematic account provided in De Doctrina Christiana.

            In a paper delivered recently at the Catholic University of America, Father Michael Bellafiore summarizes the hermeneutical thrust of De Doctrina Christiana with the remark that “all reading must aim at love of God and love of neighbor.”[iv] For Augustine, “caritas is the ultimate criterion of all truth.”[v] Concretizing the latter, highly abstract formulation in terms of the [local!] Christian community, Mark Jordan states that “Scriptural exegesis is thoroughly subordinated to the way-of-life found in the faithful community because the way-of-life embodies the intention behind the Scriptural signs.”[vi] Furthermore, Jordan continues, “interpretation requires in the exegete, beyond technical training” – and here he quotes Augustine explicitly – “a meek and humble heart, subjected easily to Christ, carrying a burden that is light, founded and rooted and built up in charity so that knowledge cannot puff him up.”[vii] Christian community, a Christian way-of-life, Christian humility: all these elements inform and ultimately validate a true interpretation of the biblical text. Augustine’s hermeneutics is, in point of fact, intrinsically christological. As Tarmo Toom puts it elegantly in the prospectus to his dissertation on the subject, “Augustine’s whole scientia signorum is constructed around the fundamental Sign, the humanity of Christ, which in its hypostatic union with the divine nature enables one to know God through Christ the man.”[viii] In the same vein, Mark Jordan argues for an analogy in Augustine’s account of “figuration” between the Incarnation of the Word and the human act of interpretation.

            Jordan’s argument regarding figuration brings us to the brink of the hermeneutical crucible in which Augustine had already found himself in the writing of De Utilitate Credendi, a few years before he began to lay out his thoughts on interpretation systematically in the first three books of De Doctrina Christiana. According to Jordan, Augustine’s “heuristic principle” proves to be so “comprehensive and ironic” that it tends “to dissolve the letter in over-construction.” This “dissolution of the text” does not trouble Augustine, however. For, as Jordan continues,

Augustine is not providing a method by which one can discover the hidden core of a text. He is after a method by which the obscure passages of Scripture can be made fruitful. If a man deviates from the true ‘intention’ of an obscure passage in the direction of a charity-building interpretation, the only possible harm is that he may grow accustomed to following his own will.[ix]

Augustine goes so far as to argue that “when the rules for grammatical construction have been exhausted and the context has proven indecisive, ‘any blameless construction the reader makes may be used.’”[x] In concluding this part of his argument, Jordan states: “The dissolution of the text is seen in another way, then, as a recognition that the needs of the community for whom the exegete expounds the Scriptures determine the validity of his interpreting.”[xi]

            This communitarian exegetical principle obtains universally for Augustine as a true Christian hermeneutical principle. It can be extended beyond the context of De Doctrina Christiana, aimed specifically at teachers (bishops and priests) within the community of the Body. In particular, it applies in the chronologically prior, essentially apologetic context of De Utilitate Credendi, in which Augustine strives to persuade his friend Honoratus of the validity, ultimately of the truth, of the Christian claim, in contradistinction to the positions of the Manichees. Since a key difference between the Manichees and the Christians lay in their respective stances towards the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, De Utilitate Credendi shares with De Doctrina Christiana the thematic prominence of the question of the meaning of biblical texts. There is also, however, a striking difference in the mode in which the two works engage the hermeneutical problematic. Whereas in the systematic treatise biblical hermeneutics constitutes the very object of investigation, in Augustine’s appeal to Honoratus, however of a piece the hermeneutical question may be to Augustine’s total perspective, here it functions also as a means to the end of bringing his friend into the Christian fold.

            In Chapter 9 of De Utilitate Credendi, just prior to the passage I have selected for particular consideration, Augustine names Christ as the hermeneutical key to the reading of Scripture. He states: “[T]hrough Christ that may be understood, and, as it were, laid bare, which without Christ is obscure and covered.”[xii] So saying, Augustine anticipates not only a central point of De Doctrina Christiana, but a touchstone of his whole hermeneutical enterprise. Nevertheless, Augustine declines at this point to go to any lengths demonstrating the proper application of the christological hermeneutic to “so great secrets of figures.”[xiii] Instead, at the beginning of Chapter 10 he proposes “to deal with you as I think I ought to deal with my intimate friend; that is, as I have myself power, not as I have wondered at the power of very learned men.”[xiv] Then abruptly: “[T]here are three kinds of error, whereby men err, when they read anything.”[xv]

At a strictly philosophical level, the three errors Augustine delineates, taken together, constitute a fascinating interpretative optic through which to view the problem of interpersonal communication, both spoken and written. Taken on its own, the third error is by far the most fascinating. Over against getting the author’s intention wrong when that intention is in fact correct (Error 1), or getting the author’s intention right when that intention is in fact incorrect (Error 2), Augustine’s third kind of error consists in getting the author’s intention wrong when this intention is in fact incorrect, but in such a way that the resulting “misreading” is beneficial. On such occasions, says Augustine: “[F]rom the writing of another some truth is understood, whereas the writer understood it not. In which kind [of error] there is no little profit, rather, if you consider carefully, the whole entire fruit of reading.”[xvi] The rest of Chapter 10 is devoted to examples of each kind of error. In the case of the third kind, however, Augustine is not content with a single example of misreading a written text. He offers in addition the hypothetical circumstance in which he misinterprets the reported words of “someone whom I loved”[xvii] – that is, of a friend. Here Augustine pushes his argument for friendly reading as far as it can go. In the scenario he imagines, his friend dies before Augustine is able to verify the meaning of the reported words. Not flinching at the possibility of seemingly total “dissolution” of the text of his friend’s words, Augustine maintains that even if the speaker in fact intended “folly,” Augustine’s charitable – or friendly – interpretation is both salutary and laudable. Indeed, Augustine strongly implies that such a “reader” excels the one who is persuaded of the speaker’s flawed intention and then enshrines it as true and good. Brian Stock finds in Augustine’s argument a hermeneutical-moral gradient, whereby as “the possibility of error increases, there is a greater moral weight on the reader/hearer to intend the good.”[xviii] What should already be apparent is the way in which Augustine’s willingness to dissolve the text, at least on its most literal and linear level, opens wide the door to a mystical hermeneutics, the parameters of which are established and secured in terms of Christian friendship.[xix]

In Chapters 11 and 12, Augustine continues to develop his conviction that the first aim of good reading is profitable understanding, the benefits of which render far less important a precise determination of the author’s literal intention. From the classical literary examples employed in Chapter 10, he now turns explicitly to Scripture. Given Honoratus’s presumably agnostic stance vis-à-vis the question of the Bible’s truth-claims, the privileging of benefit over bare truth as the desired outcome of reading receives increasing emphasis. Augustine maintains that the demonstrability of an author’s good character as a “matter of fact” is of secondary importance. What matters most is that he is “most fairly believed good, whose writings have benefited the human race and posterity.”[xx] At the close of Chapter 12, Augustine offers himself to Honoratus as a reliable authority and teacher, not on the grounds of having acquired any special “knowledge,” but rather precisely because, contrary to the Manichees, Augustine believes that the authors of the Old Testament both “profitably delivered to memory all things, and that they were great and divine.”[xxi]

In the opening of Chapter 13 Augustine waxes eloquent on the incomparable “prudence, chastity and religiousness” of the documents recognized as Scripture by the Catholic Church, protesting in the same breath his own ardent and total commitment to these texts.[xxii] His point here, and the main thesis of the chapter, is that the reader’s relationship to the author – hostile or friendly – bears crucially on the possibility of gaining access to the true meaning of the Biblical text. Alongside this thesis, Augustine deftly extends the dynamic nexus of his hermeneutical enterprise from the author-reader dyad to a community in which one (primary) reader, whether friendly or unfriendly to the author, influences other auditors or fellow-readers. In what amounts to an ingenious transposition and conversion of his third kind of error, Augustine asks rhetorically why anyone would look to the enemy of Aristotle for a trustworthy exposition of Aristotle.[xxiii] How essential are these relationships among author, authoritative reader and adherent to this primary reader? In the most plaintive tone, Augustine urges Honoratus: “[F]irst I must so treat with you as that you may not hate the authors themselves; next, so as that you may love them: and this I must treat in any other way, rather than by expounding their meanings and words.”!![xxiv] Augustine concludes the chapter by recalling with repugnance the hermeneutical approach which he had shared with Honoratus in their youth, when, ignorant of the Scriptures themselves and “without having sought teachers,” they had “thought that nothing in them is to be believed, moved by the speech of those who are unfriendly and hostile to them, with whom, under a false promise of reason, we should be compelled to believe and cherish thousands of fables.”[xxv]

The hermeneutical principles Augustine proposes in De Utilitate Credendi, 10-13 are evidently existentially rooted in the concrete particular concern for Honoratus’s salvation, via his hoped-for conversion to the true faith of the Catholic Church. The work’s conspicuous existential character contrasts with the far more formal and systematic account of the problem of textual interpretation presented some five years later in the treatise De Doctrina Christiana. Nevertheless, the earlier effort should not be lightly dismissed or denigrated on the supposition that Augustine’s thought here is yet hermeneutically naïve or simplistic. To put the point in more general terms, we ought to resist the very modern dogma of automatically attributing greater sophistication, and usually importance, to the more discursive and logically more linear of two expositions of some thesis, idea, or set of ideas. The hermeneutics of De Utilitate Credendi is “hermeneutics on the ground,” single-mindedly dedicated to the purpose of a friend’s conversion (and thereby, the possibility of his salvation), though no less ingenious for all that. Moreover, the “utilitarian” character of Augustine’s hermeneutics as we have described it here – aiming for conversion and growth in holiness by means of reading texts with the eyes of charity – does not ultimately vitiate this hermeneutics as a tool for discovery of, and growth in, truth. Notwithstanding the modern tendency to vest moral activity so strongly in the will that the intellectual content of goodness appears to be evacuated, for Augustine, the True is the Good. Love in the end cannot possibly contravene truth, which is only another way of naming the same divine personal reality.

The tension admittedly reflected in this last cluster of assertions echoes a profound tension built into Augustine’s whole hermeneutical enterprise: it is the tension between truth and rhetoric, a tension that may be summarized in the single word: persuasion. John Cavadini writes that “Augustine characterizes this doctrina of the ‘Good Teacher’ specifically as persuasive, appealing to the will by presenting to it a moving sign of God’s love.”[xxvi] But what is a “moving sign,” one that moves the heart, if not… rhetoric? Indeed, Cavadini argues that for Augustine God the Father is the Divine Rhetor, Who speaks His persuasive and eternal Word in the form of the Incarnation.[xxvii] “If conversion is a matter of persuasion,” writes Cavadini elsewhere, “then if God is to convert anyone, God too must speak persuasively.”[xxviii] True Christian rhetoric then, for Augustine, must always serve God’s desire for conversion of hearts, and can do so only as a participation in God’s own rhetoric, recorded in the Bible, yet spoken most persuasively in His Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. The art of persuasion, whether practiced by God Himself or by one of His creatures, is nothing else than “the art of speaking sweetly.” This is essentially a classical definition of eloquence.[xxix] Just one more of John Cavadini’s elegant contributions to Augustine scholarship has been to draw attention to the etymological connection between per-suasion and suavitas, or sweetness, and to elucidate the potency of this connection in Augustine’s communicative style.[xxx]

In the famous scene in the garden in Book VIII of Confessions, we find in microcosm the whole concatenation of language and circumstance conducive, with God’s grace, to Augustine’s conversion. There is indeed at work here a kind of rhetoric of conversion, to which Augustine gives literary expression over and over again in the Confessions.[xxxi] At the climactic moment of Augustine’s spiritual crisis, we find him in the company of a dear friend, the Scriptures close at hand, and in a beautiful place: a garden, replete with the sweetness of growing things, laid out in disciplined order by a gardener’s hand. Into this haven, rings out the soft, sing-song voice of a child, with words and in a tone sweet enough to penetrate the maelstrom of Augustine’s tormented soul. Tolle lege, Tolle lege, over and over again. The words are persuasive for Augustine, both because of their sweetness and because of their authority: whether the instrument is angelic or the voice of a living human child playing a game next-door, Augustine has no doubt of the providential origin of the invitation, and so the invitation is irresistible. Taking up the book of Paul’s Epistles and opening it without aiming to find any particular passage, Augustine finds exactly what he needs, and reads no further. There is an unmistakeable hermeneutics operative here, not only in Augustine’s literal reading of Romans 13:13-14, but in his interpretation of the child’s voice, in his passionate interior battle with himself, and in his keen awareness and attentiveness to his friend Alypius from beginning to end of this monumental event in his own life. It is most decidedly not a hermeneutics of suspicion.[xxxii] The hermeneutics of Confessions VIII is essentially the same Augustine had worked out a year before in the systematic detail of De Doctrina Christiana, the same by which he hoped to sway his friend Honoratus to conversion five years before that. It is a hermeneutics of friendship. Take it and read. Then, go and do likewise.