On Christian Doctrine

“[L]ove itself, which binds men together in the bond of unity, would have no means of pouring soul into soul, and, as it were, mingling them one with another, if man never learned anything from their fellow-men.”

In this passage from the Preface, Augustine forges a link between two key themes in this work: the centrality of love in the life of a Christian and the importance of education. Augustine depicts teaching itself as an act of love, as something that can bring people together and help them form stronger connections with one another. In creating this connection, Augustine elevates teaching and learning, as knowing how to love one’s neighbor is interlinked with knowing how to love God. Therefore, education is essential not just for intellectual knowledge, but for faith.

“There are two things on which all interpretation of Scripture depends: the mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.”

One of Augustine’s preoccupations is helping readers distinguish between what is literal and what is figurative in scripture. This sentence sums up Augustine’s main motivation in writing this work: He wishes to instruct readers in the art of correct interpretation and on how best to share their acquired knowledge with others in turn. Since scripture holds such importance to Augustine, knowing how to interpret it is crucial for forging a strong and orthodox faith.

“We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen.”

Augustine repeatedly uses the metaphor of people wandering through a foreign land to describe the life of a Christian believer. Augustine believes that the things of this world are ephemeral and worthless compared to the afterlife and the love of God; for this reason, he insists that this world is but a temporary journey on our way back to “our Father’s home,” i.e., heaven. Furthermore, Augustine’s emphasis on how everything mortal and worldly must be “used, not enjoyed,” is a warning against valuing anything nonspiritual too highly. Instead, it is the “invisible things of God”—faith and its spiritual and moral values—that a Christian must learn to prize above all else.

“We used our immortality so badly as to incur the penalty of death; Christ used His mortality so well as to restore us to life. The disease was brought in through a woman’s corrupted soul; the remedy came through a woman’s virgin body. To the same class of opposite remedies it belongs, that our vices are cured by the example of His virtues.”

The reader learns two important things in this passage, both about Augustine’s theology and about his literary technique. First, Augustine’s faith is based in a literal reading of biblical events; his writing makes it plain that he believes the Garden of Eden, the virgin birth, and the Resurrection were all historical events and not metaphors or allegories. The Garden of Eden is alluded to in humanity’s loss of immortality; Christ “restore[s] us to life” by coming in the flesh and dying on the cross; and “a woman’s virgin body” refers to Mary and the miracle of the virgin birth. Second, in setting up a series of contrasts—immortality/mortality; corruption/virginity; vice/virtue—Augustine uses the literary technique of juxtaposition to create a pleasing rhetorical effect, one that helps to impress his point more vividly upon the mind of the reader.

“For he who does not believe he can be pardoned, falls into despair, and becomes worse as if no greater good remained for him than to be evil, when he has ceased to have faith in the results of his own repentance.”

Central to Augustine’s Christian faith is the idea of repentance and redemption. By confessing his sins and asking for forgiveness, the believer can receive Divine Grace, and live a life freed from his sins. Augustine warns against despair and against the mistaken belief that some sins are too great for God’s mercy. He believes that failing to believe in the power of God’s grace only leads to a man becoming more sinful, creating a vicious cycle of ever-increasing bad behavior and, in turn, more despair. In warning against this trap, Augustine emphasizes the unshakeable power of repentance and grace in the Christian faith.

“And when some people say that they would rather be without a body altogether, they deceive themselves. For it is not their body, but its corruptions and its heaviness, that they hate. And so it is not no body, but an uncorrupted and very light body, that they want.”

Augustine believes that a believer’s faith can help them learn how to “use” the things of this world instead of enjoying them for their own sake. Here, Augustine applies that same idea to the human body. A body—like all worldly things—can be a tool for good, so long as the believer understands it is just a tool and not an end in and of itself. The issue is not the body itself but how a believer feels about it; a sinner indulges the body, but a believer may mistakenly hate and reject the body by mistakenly believing that its “corruptions” are an ineradicable part of it. Instead, Augustine urges the believer to instead focus upon how to gain a more “uncorrupted” body—one that can be used as a tool for living a godly life of faith.

“Thus the end of the commandment is love, and that twofold, the love of God and the love of our neighbor.”

This sentence distils the most important essence of Augustine’s thought in this work: the central importance of love as the ultimate end and highest expression of the Christian faith. This love takes two crucial forms: the love for one’s neighbor, and the love for God. These are connected, as the love for one’s neighbor is an expression of Christian charity and mirrors the love the believer should have for God as the ultimate good.

“For when we come to Him [Jesus], we come to the Father also, because through an equal an equal is known; and the Holy Spirit binds, and as it were seals us, so that we are able to rest permanently in the supreme and unchangeable God.”

This passage features the Trinity, a doctrine that is essential to understanding Augustine’s thought. Augustine believes in the three-in-one theory of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the three manifestations of the same godhead. For Augustine, the Trinity is both a divine mystery and a crucial tenet of orthodox Christian faith. It is through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing in harmony that the divine is made manifest.

“Now faith will totter if the authority of Scripture begins to shake. And then, if faith totter, love itself will grow cold. For if a man has fallen from faith, he must necessarily also fall from love; for he cannot love what he does not believe to exist.”

For Augustine, scripture is of such importance to a believer because it is, in his theology, the word of God himself. Therefore, to lose faith in scripture—through skepticism or incorrect interpretation—is to risk losing faith altogether, and with it, that Christian love that Augustine believes is the most important thing in the life of a believer. Augustine’s general belief in the legitimacy of various kinds of authority—such as educational authority, or ecclesiastical authority—is also embodied in scriptural authority. Augustine is committed to sharing his views on scriptural interpretation in this work because he believes the stakes are very high: anything that might mistakenly undermine scriptural authority could have serious consequences for the faith of an individual believer.

“But hasty and careless readers are led astray by many and manifold obscurities and ambiguities, substituting one meaning for another; and in some places they cannot hit upon even a fair interpretation. Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty.”

Augustine believes that interpreting scripture is an art that one must learn how to do properly. If a reader is “hasty and careless,” they run the risk of growing confused by the more difficult passages in scripture and may draw incorrect theological conclusions from what he has read. In this passage, Augustine both acknowledges the fact that scripture can be difficult, with many “obscure” passages, and suggests that the hard work of interpreting scripture is a form of spiritual edification; it was God’s will that believers should have to seek diligently for true meanings and to learn how to be intellectually humble while doing so.

“Now, in regard to the canonical Scriptures, he [the reader] must follow the judgement of the greater number of Catholic churches; and among these, of course, a high place must be given to such as have been thought worthy to be the seat of an apostle and to receive epistles.”

Augustine speaks of the importance of following “canonical scriptures”—that is, those accepted as orthodox by the Catholic church. In Augustine’s day, the supremacy of the Catholic Church was not as concrete as it would later become and several competing sects—who sometimes had their own ideas about what counted as biblical scripture—still existed as rivals. Augustine urges his readers to follow the orthodox line by accepting the authority of the oldest and most established churches in these matters, instead of having the reader attempt to decide for himself what is or is not valid. In accepting such judgements as authoritative, the reader is less likely to go astray in terms of doctrine.

“Signs are either proper or figurative. They are proper when they are used to point out the objects they were designed to point out […] Signs are figurative when the things themselves which we indicate by the proper names are used to signify something else.”

Since Augustine is concerned with ensuring his readers know the difference between literal and figurative passages in scripture, he needs to first offer a definition of what the contrast is between the two. When something is called by its proper name and means nothing else apart from what it indeed is, it is literal. When something is called by a proper name but is a stand-in for another thing or an idea, it is figurative. Learning to distinguish and correctly interpret both kinds of signs is, Augustine believes, essential for the Christian believer.

“[T]o correct the Latin [versions of Scripture] we must use the Greek versions, among which the authority of the Septuagint is pre-eminent as far as the Old Testament is concerned; for it is reported through all the more learned churches that the seventy translators enjoyed so much of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in their work of translation, that among the number of men there was but one voice.”

Augustine addresses the issue of variations between translators/translations of scripture by once again stressing the importance of authority in guiding the way. There are two sources of authority in this passage: the authority of “the more learned churches,” and the authority of the text of the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament. The testimony of these churches is granted high status due to their learning and spiritual authority, and what they claim about the Septuagint is miraculous: seventy translators agreed on everything, and there were no variations between the works of all the men. For these reasons, Augustine advises his readers to accept the verdict of the translation’s reliability, and to turn to it to resolve the competing translations amongst the Latin versions of the scriptures.

“For we ought not to refuse to learn letters because they [the pagans] say that Mercury discovered them; nor because they have dedicated temples to Justice and Virtue, and prefer to worship in the form of stones things that ought to have their place in the heart, ought we on that account to forsake justice and virtue.”

At the time Augustine lived and wrote, paganism was still very much alive as a religious force. The question of which pagan influences to accept—albeit in modified form—and which to reject as a Christian believer was therefore a rather contentious one. Augustine’s approach is one of cautious moderation. He reminds his readers that certain things are still good even when misused or distorted by the pagans, such as literacy (“letters”) and moral virtues such as justice.

“[W]hen we reflect upon the dates, it becomes much more probable that those [pagan] philosophers learned whatever they said was good and true from our literature, than that the Lord Jesus Christ learned from the writings of Plato—a thing which it is the height of folly to believe.”

Despite Augustine’s reasoning in Quotation #15, the influence of paganism still makes him slightly uneasy. Augustine reflects on the moral values of pagan philosophers like Plato, who offer in their work many precepts that predated Christianity and appeared to have developed independently of the Judaic tradition. Such pagan philosophy appears as a potential threat to the Judeo-Christian tradition by suggesting that Christianity’s moral precepts don’t originate from the faith itself or are not exclusive to it. Therefore, to diminish the power of the pagan philosophers, Augustine claims that such philosophers probably learned their moral precepts from Hebrew literature instead of having developed them on their own.

“There are also certain rules for a more copious kind of argument, which is called eloquence, and these rules are not the less true that they can be used for persuading men of what it false; but as they can be used to enforce the truth as well it is not the faculty itself that is to be blamed, but the perversity of those who put it to bad use.”

Rhetoric—the art of persuasive public speaking—becomes an increasingly dominant theme. As with pagan philosophy, Augustine’s attitude towards rhetoric follows a similar line of argument. A Christian believer can still benefit from the knowledge and/or techniques even if such things are occasionally distorted or misapplied by others, especially nonbelievers. In the case of rhetoric, Augustine argues that the rules of eloquence can be put to good use; it can, in theory, “be used to enforce the truth,” and can therefore help to strengthen and promote faith.

“[If a man] does not strive to make all things redound to the praise and love of the one God from whom he knows that all things have their being—the man, I say, who acts this way may seem to be learned, but wise he cannot in any sense be deemed.”

Just as Augustine warns the reader against intellectual hubris in the Preface to his work, here he warns against misapplying intellectual powers. For Augustine, the intellect—like all other things of this world—is meant to be used to serve higher spiritual ends, not enjoyed as an end in and of itself. This is what Augustine means when he makes a careful distinction between what it means to be learned versus wise. A man of intellectual gifts and strong education may indeed know many things, but only the man who uses his intellect as a tool to serve and praise God possesses true wisdom.

“For he who follows the letter [and] takes the figurative words as if they were proper, and does not carry out what is indicated by a proper word into its secondary signification […] is unable to lift the eye of the mind above what is corporeal and created, that it may drink in eternal light.”

Augustine stresses the importance of learning how to interpret figurative language as both a means for correctly understanding scripture and as a spiritual exercise. If the reader takes the figurative as the literal, he will fail to discern the correct meaning, and this failure will in turn deny him the pleasure of the “eternal light” of gaining higher spiritual knowledge. Augustine’s language here is telling: the literal is likened to what is “corporeal and created”—something worldly and earthy—while the figurative is of a more spiritual, and therefore more enlightening, nature.

“In the first place, then, we must show the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set it down as figurative. Purity of life has reference to the love of God and one’s neighbor; soundness of doctrine to the knowledge of God and one’s neighbor.”

For Augustine, the essence of Christian doctrine is love—love of God and the love of one’s neighbor as oneself. In instructing his readers regarding the literal versus the figurative, Augustine decides that the best way to avoid moral confusion is to insist that everything to be taken literally in the Bible must uphold these key precepts about love. If a passage appears otherwise, it is to be regarded as figurative and requires more careful and learned interpretation.

“[Using reason] is a dangerous practice. For it is safer to walk by the light of Holy Scripture; so that when we wish to examine the passages that are obscured by metaphorical expressions, we may either obtain a meaning about which there is no controversy, or if a controversy arises, may settle it by the application of testimonies sought out in every portion of the same Scripture.”

For Augustine, problems of interpretation in scripture can be solved through using other parts of scripture as a reference. Augustine warns against relying too much upon “reason,” as reason is a faculty exercised both outside of the bounds of the scriptures themselves and may be used independently by the believer without reference to the authority of the church. To avoid creating too much confusion in the minds of readers and to help limit their opportunities from wandering from the orthodoxy of the faith, Augustine chooses to emphasize the self-sufficient nature of scripture to dissuade his readers from seeking explication elsewhere.

“And thus the spiritual Israel is made up, not of one nation, but of all the nations which were promised to the fathers in their seed, that is, in Christ […] For the Church, without spot or wrinkle, gathered out of all nations, and destined to reign forever with Christ, is itself the land of the blessed, the land of the living.”

Despite the many competing Christian sects and religious controversies of his day, Augustine celebrates the ideal of a unified, authoritative church “without spot or wrinkle” in this passage. He draws a contrast between the traditional insularity of Judaism with the multiethnic, multilingual nature of Christianity, which welcomes “all nations” and is therefore a “spiritual Israel” that is more expansive and inclusive than Israel as a historical entity. This passage reveals Augustine’s vision of a unified church and his firm belief in the universal power of the Christian faith.

“[I]t is one of the distinctive features of good intellects not to love words, but truth in words.”

Book 4 is concerned with techniques of effective rhetoric, but Augustine is still wary of the potential pitfalls of eloquence. He reminds his readers here that, while rhetoric may give one the tools to speak beautifully and persuasively, it is important to remember that the ultimate end of the Christian speaker is to speak the truth. This is why Augustine claims that a “good” intellect—and, by extension, a wise Christian believer—knows how to prioritize the truth first and foremost, in order to avoid engaging in or being led astray by empty rhetoric.

For as the function of all eloquence, whichever of these forms it may assume, is to speak persuasively, and its object is to persuade, an eloquent man will speak persuasively whatever style he may adopt; but unless he succeeds in persuading, his eloquence has not secured its object.”

Augustine does not shy away from emphasizing that rhetoric is only useful insofar as it is persuasive: a speech that is beautiful, but unpersuasive, is useless. Rhetoric is, like everything else nonspiritual in essence, a tool to be used in order to achieve spiritual ends. For him, the Christian speaker needs to persuade to draw his audience to the truth of faith; therefore, the techniques and rhetorical styles he can employ are always secondary to the ends which he wishes to achieve.