1.2.vessey

Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's"Apologia contra Hieronymum"

Mark Vessey

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer1993, pp. 175-213 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Nanyang Technological Univ at 10/22/10 4:28AM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.vessey.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.vessey.html

Conference and Confession:Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's"Apologia contra Hieronymum"MARK VESSEY

In the decade or so between his ordination to the priesthood and the completionof the Confessions Augustine can be seen working towards a "literary pragmat-ics" that would provide an integrated vision of the relations between (1) theChristian writer, (2) texts of his own composition, (3) the biblical text, and (4)his fellow Christian readers-and-writers. As expounded and enacted in the Dedoctrina Christiana and Confessions this Augustinian literary pragmatics de-pends on the ideal of the biblical "conference": a text act performed jointly bytwo or more human beings in the presence of God and in a spirit of charity. Au-gustine formulates the conference paradigm in reaction to Jerome's advocacy ofan ascetic and professional practice of scriptural interpretation, using hints sup-plied by his epistolary conversation with Paulinus of NoIa. The ensemble of theDe doctrina Christiana and Confessions may thus be construed as an apologiacontra Hieronymum silently dedicated to Paulinus.

According to his first biographer, when Augustine returned from Italy tohis native North Africa in 388, he and his friends gave themselves up to alife of fasting, prayer, good works, and Bible study. Like the blessed man inthe Psalms, the former public orator of Milan now delighted in "meditatingday and night in the law of the Lord." The fruits of this meditation, too,were made public: Et de his quae sibi deus cogitanti atque oranti intellectarevelabat, et praesentes et absentes sermonibus ac libris docebat ("Andwhat God revealed to his understanding as he thought and prayed, hewould teach in conversation to those who were present and in books tothose who were not").1 Possidius did not join Augustine's circle until a few

1. Vita S. Augustini 3.2. Quotations follow the edition of A. A. R. Bastiaensen in Vitedei Santi, ed. Christine Mohrmann, Vol. 3: Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita diAgostino (s.l.: Mondadori, 1975).Journal of Early Christian Studies 1:2 175-213 Â© 1993 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

176 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

years later, so it is possible that he allowed subsequent developments toinfluence his description of the primitive community at Thagaste.2 Be thatas it may, the account given in the Vita Augustini of the saint's activity inteaching and writing is fully consistent for all phases of his post-conversioncareer. As pious layman, priest, and then bishop, Augustine continuallymeditated on "the things of God", imparted what he discovered (that is,what God revealed to him) by word of mouth to those he could reach in thisway, and committed the same to writing for the benefit of readers in otherplaces and times.

Possidius' attention to the processes of doctrinal transmission is aston-ishingly scrupulous; his narrative is punctuated throughout with refer-ences to Augustine's habits of Bible study, preaching, writing, and publica-tion, and to the experiences of his listeners and readers. No other saint's lifefrom late Latin antiquity stands comparison with the Vita Augustini inrespect of such information.3 How are we to account for this peculiarity? Ifthe choice is between regarding it as a hagiographer's quirk and as thereflection of Augustine's personal preoccupation with the modalities ofChristian doctrina, we shall have no difficulty preferring the latter alterna-tive. Possidius' presentation of Augustine's life and literary works (listed inan appendix to the Vita) reposes on a set of reasoned assumptions, workedout or approved by Augustine himself, about the cooperation of literateand articulate Christians in the intellection and promulgation of revealedTruth. Those assumptions relate to the nature of divine revelation (includ-ing the function of Scripture); the personal qualities, lifestyle, and publiccomportment of the religious teacher; the social and institutional contextsof Christian instruction; and the needs and abilities of a late antique Chris-tian readership. More concisely, they specify the conditions of a doctrinaland literary practice dedicated to bringing human beings to a knowledgeand love of God; or, in terms of a distinction proposed by Augustinehimself, a policy of charitable use in the service of everlasting enjoyment.

Although modern humanistic discourse has no ready way of naming thisensemble of concerns, many of them can be shown to fall within theprovince of "literary pragmatics,"4 defined as a science of the relations

2. But see now George P. Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45-62, and William J. Collinge, "Developments inAugustine's Theology of Community Life After A.C. 395," AugStud 16 (1984): 60.

3. Cf. Christine Mohrmann's introduction to Vita di Cipriano, etc., xliii; PhilipRousseau, "The Spiritual Authority of the Monk-Bishop: Eastern Elements in SomeWestern Hagiography ofthe Fourth and Fifth Centuries," JThSn.s. 22 (1971): 380-419at406n.l.

4. The essays in Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger D. Sell (London: Routledge Sc KeganPaul, 1991) offer a variety of definitions of this concept. My own use of the term is

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION 177

between texts, the users of those texts, and the conditions (material andideological) of such use. In another article, conceived in conjunction withthis one, I hope to show that Possidius' simplified and systematized accountof the principles of Augustinian doctrina can serve as a basis for theorizingChristian literary activity in late antiquity. Here I want to take a closer lookat some of those principles as they emerge from Augustine's writings of the390s, and to begin to distinguish the stages by which Augustine himselfarrived at a settled and ultimately normative vision of the relations betweenthe Christian writer, his own texts, the text of the Bible, and other Christianmen and women.

Whatever Possidius may have known about his subject's life at Thagastein the period ca.5 89-3 91, the description he gives of it is merely schematic.Apart from the monastic colour provided by a standardized list of activities(ieiuniis, orationibus, bonis operibus) and a biblical commonplace (in legedomini meditans die ac nocte), all he offers is a cluster of binaries intendedto evoke certain routine procedures (cogitanti atque oranti; revela-bat. . . docebat; praesentes et absentes; sermonibusac libris). To the mod-ern reader, following Augustine through works as strenuous and inchoateas the De Genesi adversus Manicheos, De magistro and De vera religione,such formulas are bound to seem somewhat glib and deceptive. The chro-nological sequence of the Retractationes enables us to retrace the author'sown steps, even where they faltered; what mattered to Possidius after 430were the established norms of Augustinian pastoral practice, not the pro-cess by which they had been reached. The difference in perspectives be-tween the Retractationes and the Vita is particularly marked for the periodin question. Augustine's writings from the years immediately following his

influenced by recent work in and between the fields of literary theory and textualbibliography, tending to emphasize the instability and historicity of the notion of (a)text. See, for example, D. C. Greetham, "Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing theMatrix," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 1-24; Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and An-gels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1991). Granting, with Greetham and most contemporary theorists, that "there is no'natural' or 'self-evident' ontology of the text" (3), we have to allow for a potentialindeterminacy in the object(s) of a literary pragmatics as defined above. The specifica-tion of a meaning for "text" appropriate to the Christian discourses of late antiquity isone of the major challenges facing (literary) historians of this period. I share the meth-odological assumptions of Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1991), 16: "What is textually possible cannot be theoret-ically established. What can be done is to sketch, through close and highly particularcase studies, the general framework within which textuality is constrained to exhibit itstransformations." To which I would add that the "framework" thus sketched defineswhat we mean by text/textuality when referring to the phenomena considered to fallwithin it.


return to Africa reveal an urgent, sometimes frantic desire to ascertain theconditions for successful Christian learning and communication. Theseare the very conditions that Possidius takes for granted.

By 390 Augustine knew that literate, eloquent converts like himself hadan important role to play as teachers in the Catholic Church; the Confes-sions contains a record of his acquaintance with several men who had filledsuch a role, either as laypersons or as members of the clergy. He was alsopersuaded of the value of a sound biblical knowledge for anyone called oraspiring to a public office of instruction. Beyond these basic convictions,however, almost everything to do with the theory and practice of Christianteaching, in the literary medium or viva voce, had still to be worked out. Hewas, it is true, unusually well equipped for the task. A trained orator,widely read in classical literature, practised both in writing philosophicaldialogues and in debating problems of biblical interpretation with theManichees, he was likely if put on to prove most magisterial. And in 391 hewas "put on", elevated to the public stage of the African church by a Greek-speaking bishop who had long prayed for one like him to edify the churchof Hippo "with the word of God and saving doctrine".5 How did he thenproceed? How, as a matter of fact, did Augustine assume the figure of thebiblical teacher-and-writer that Possidius ascribes to him?

To start more modestly, and confine ourselves to the sphere of literarypragmatics: how did Augustine address the requirements implicit in thePossidian scheme of Christian mediation, intellecta . . . et praesentes etabsentes sermonibus ac libris docere? Even this question opens up a vastfield of inquiry, but if we neglect for the moment the evidence of his " local "performance in the diocese of Hippo (praesentes sermonibus . . .) andfocus on his contacts with persons physically separated from him (absenteslibris â– . â– ), part of the answer seems to be that in the course of the 390sAugustine's understanding of the relations between his own (written)words, the word of God in Scripture, and the situation of other literateChristian men and women in the world came to centre on the act of biblicalinterpretation conceived as conference or conlatio.

The development of that idea in Augustine's works of the decade, espe-cially the De doctrina Christiana and Confessions, is the subject of thefollowing pages. By concentrating on certain recurring features of his ap-proach to the biblical text in their occasional variations, I shall try toprovide a view of the processes of Augustinian doctrina that makes fullerallowance for circumstance and historical contingency than Possidius wasinclined to. To that end, unlike the author of the Vita Augustini, I shall not

5. Possidius, Vita S. Augustini 5.2: "verbo dei et doctrina salubri."


consider the hero alone. As presented here, Augustine's pragmatics of theliterary conference is to be seen not just as the resolution of certain long-standing concerns of his own, but also as a creative (if at times polemical)response to the attitudes and opinions of his contemporaries, notably thoseof two individuals whom he frequently encountered in writing but nevermet: Jerome of Bethlehem and Paulinus of NoIa.6

SCIENTIA SCRIPTURARUM: JEROME

We may begin by recalling some of the issues raised by Augustine in the firstwork he wrote as a priest, the De utilitate credendi. Addressed to a friendand alter ego named Honoratus who was still affected by the Manichaeancharge that Christian recourse to authority was an abdication of reason,the treatise conflates an essay in hermeneutics with a sustained defence ofthe auctoritas of the Catholic Church as interpreter of the Bible.7 Au-gustine sets himself a limited goal, and makes a show of saying more thanwould be needed to achieve it. Yet for all his bluster it is evident that he isgrappling with problems more intractable than any ascribed to his corre-spondent. Granting the essential unity of the Old and New Testaments andtrusting the Catholic Church to interpret them could be represented as thefirst step for Honoratus, but for Augustine, who had taken this step andbeen ordained a teacher in that Church (vtil. cred. 2.4), other matters werealready pressing. Predictably, many of them concerned the Bible. Whatkind of book was this that he now had to expound? How was it related toother books he knew? Why and how had it been promulgated? How did itfit into the (Christian Platonic) scheme of God's mediation of wisdomthrough Christ? Why was it often so difficult to understand? What were theconstraints on its interpretation? How were reluctant readers to be recon-ciled to it? Some of these questions are raised formally in the De utilitatecredendi, then deferred. Others merely suggest themselves. Few are con-

6. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the annual meeting of theNorth American Patristics Society in Chicago in May 1992, as part of a panel on"Interpretation in Theory and Practice" organized by Elizabeth A. Clark. In revising itfor publication I have been helped by the comments and advice of Professors Clark,Patricia Cox Miller, and Robert Markus, and by Karla Pollmann, Stefan Rebenich, andDennis Trout. To all my thanks.

7. Text ed. J. Zycha in CSEL 25.1 (1891), 3-48. See now 01ofGigon,"Augustins'Deutilitate credendi'," in Catalepton: Festschrift fÃ¼r Bernhard Wyss, ed. C. SchÃ¤ublin(Basel: Seminar fÃ¼r Klassische Philologie der UniversitÃ¤t Basel, 1985), 138-57;Christoph SchÃ¤ublin, "Augustin, 'De utilitate credendi', Ã¼ber das VerhÃ¤ltnis des Inter-preten zumText," VC 43 (1989): 53-68. Both writers emphasize the tensions within thework and its final incoherence.


vincingly answered. Behind them all, we sense, lies a single great unspokenquestion: who were these ideal teachers, the magistri, praeceptores ordoctores who embodied the authority of the Catholic Church? More pre-cisely: what kind of men were they, and how did they discharge theirteaching functions ? A sign of Augustine's concerns is the almost exclusivelygeneric and anonymous style of his frequent references to expert Christianinterpreters. In the recent past he had met, observed and heard about anumber of distinguished Christian teachers (e.g. Ambrose, Simplicianus,Marius Victorinus). Now he was being forced to generalize and drawlessons from their individual performances.

In only one place is the anonymity of the ideal Christian teacher seri-ously compromised.8 Although no human master steps forward to layclaim to the title in the De utilitate, a shadowy figure beckons from be-tween its lines. In order to read the Bible with understanding, Augustinetells Honoratus, you must find a qualified interpreter: "Is he difficult tofind? Then search harder. Not to be found in your own country? Thentravel. Not on the same continent? Take a boat. Not just across the water?Then go further, if necessary to the very land in which the events recordedin those books are said to have taken place" (usque ad illas terras, in quibusea, quae HHs libris continentur, gesta esse dicuntur)? At this point, Au-gustine's rhetoric takes another turn. Nowhere else in the work does hesuggest that in order to understand the Bible one must visit the holy places;such a radically historicist thesis would in fact be quite foreign to histhought. Unless the passage quoted is simply a flourish, we should suspectanother reason for its eastward trajectory. If the Holy Land recommendsitself as a place to study Scripture, is it not because Jerome was there? He,surely, is the genius behind Augustine's latest thinking de magistro.

Augustine had missed meeting Jerome in Rome in the early 380s,10 but

8. The teaching of Ambrose is briefly evoked at vtil. cred. 8.20: "et iam fere mecommoverant nonnullae disputationes Mediolanensis episcopi, ut non sine spe aliqua deipso vetere testamento multa quaerere cuperem." However, Ambrose's role is restrictedto that of one who helped Augustine to reach a conviction of the value oÃ auctoritas in theChristian religion; he is not yet cited as an exemplary teacher, as he was to be in theConfessions (though even there Augustine makes only limited claims for him). Thisautobiographical passage in Î½ til. cred. begins with a reminiscence of Faustus the Mani-chee, the master from whom Augustine had vainly expected so much ("cuius nobisadventus, ut nosti, ad explicanda omnia, quae nos movebant, quasi de cÃ¡elo promit-tebatur").

9. Vtil. cred. 7.17. Translations my own unless otherwise noted.10. Cf. John Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364-425

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),212: "It was of course the merest coincidence that thevisit to Rome of Augustine was contemporaneous with the second stay there of Jerome.The two men never met, nor had occasion to: Jerome's present preoccupations . . . were


would have had many opportunities since then to hear about him and hiswork. The internal evidence of his earliest reading of Jerome has yet to becollected. We know, however, that as early as 392 bishop Aurelius of Car-thage took steps to secure copies of Jerome's biblical writings for theAfrican church. A recently discovered letter of Jerome to Aurelius enablesus to suppose that the author of the De utilitate credendi already had accessat least to some of the translations of Origen's homilies.11 When Alypiusreturned from a visit to the Bethlehem monastery shortly afterwards, heprobably brought more manuscripts with him. By then, too, the Africanswere in contact with one of Jerome's literary agents in Rome, from whomcopies of his future works could be obtained.12 Thus although it would be afew years before Augustine could claim close acquaintance with Jeromethrough the medium of his writings,13 already in the early 390s he wouldhave had a strong impression of his literary personality.

worlds away from those of Augustine. Yet a point of similarity is worth noting. Jeromewas a court official turned ecclesiastical politician [and writer, we might add], Augustinea professor of rhetoric who became bishop of an African town: both of them, as a resultof conversions experienced in court circles, were lost to the service of the imperialgovernment." For further remarks on the "coincidence" of Jerome's and Augustine'sactivities in the early 380s, see below.

11. Letter 27* in SanctiAureli Augustini. . . Epistolaeex duobus codicibus nuper inlucem prolatae, ed. Johannes Divjak, CSEL 88 (1981), from Jerome to Aurelius, 2:"Scribis te quaedam nostrae parvitatis habere opuscula, id est paucas in Ieremiamhomelias et duas cantici canticorum. ..." The writer invites Aurelius to send a copyistto Bethlehem to procure texts of all his more recent works "de scripturis Sanctis". Thereis an excellent commentary on this letter by Yves-Marie Duval in BibliothÃ¨que Augusti-nienne 46B (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 560-68, who judiciously concludes:"Il ne me semble pas invraisemblable que cette Ep. 27s ait contribuÃ© a nouer des liensentre Carthage-Hippone et BethlÃ©em et Ã favoriser la diffusion des oeuvres de JÃ©rÃ´me enAfrique."

12. For Alypius' travels, see the Prosopographie de l'Afrique chrÃ©tienne, ed. AndrÃ©Mandouze (Paris: CNRS, 1982), 55-56, and for the role of Domnio, to whom Alypiusrefers Paulinus in 395 (Paulinus, ep. 3.3 = Augustine, ep. 24.3), as Roman distributor ofJerome's works, E. Arns, La technique du livre d'aprÃ¨s saint JÃ©rÃ´me (Paris: De Boccard,1953), 147-48. Augustine's aristocratic patron Romanianus appears to have played asimilar role in diffusing his writings in Italy (see below, n.27).

13. Ep. 40.1 : "Quattadgredere, quaeso, istam nobiscum litterariam conlocutionem,ne multum ad nos disiungendos liceat absentiae corporali, quamquam simus in dominospiritus unitate coniuncti, etiam si ab stilo quiescamus et taceamus. Et libri quidem,quos de hÃ³rreo dominico elaborasti, paene te totum nobis exhibent. ..." The terms ofthis summons seem to reflect the influence of Paulinus' ideal of the conloquium Ut-terarum (see below). The letter is traditionally dated to 397; it miscarried and was acause of much resentment on Jerome's part: D. de Bruyne, "La correspondance Ã©chan-gÃ©e entre Augustin et JÃ©rÃ´me," ZNTW 31 (1932): 233-48, modifying H. Lietzmann,"Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Briefsammlung Augustins," Sitzungsberichte der Preu-ÃŸischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, (1930): 374-82, repr. in his


That literary personality or persona was founded on emulation of Ori-gen.14 "It is in your power," Augustine would write to Jerome in 394/5,"to let us have that man whom you so delight in celebrating in yourwritings" (quem tu libentius in tuis litteris sonas).15 Jerome would notoblige Augustine and the rest of the "studious society of the Africanchurches" by delivering a complete Latin translation of Origen's works,but he did aspire to the reputation for biblical scholarship that Origen hadacquired among the Greeks. The ideal of scientia scripturarum that theAlexandrian represented for him is proclaimed repeatedly in the letters,prefaces and other promotional pieces that he published or republished inthe late 380s and 390s after his removal from Rome to the East. Mean-while, he sought to realize that ideal in his own major works, the biblicaltranslations and commentaries. No other Latin Christian writer had evermade so determined or exclusive a claim for interpretative expertise, orsupported it with such overwhelming evidence. From all round the Medi-terranean, Christian studiosi were now sending messengers, or goingthemselves to sit at the feet of the scholar of Bethlehem.16 The newlyordained priest of Hippo, who had lately begged his bishop for a littleleisure for Bible study,17 was bound to reckon with his example.

Jerome was not a particularly original theorist of biblical interpretation,or of the relations between Christian readers, writers, and texts. His ownliterary pragmatics are pragmatic in a vulgar sense, the reflexes of one who

Kleine Schriften, Vol. 1, TU 67 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 286-96. Augustine'sletters of the period ca. 391-401 are quoted in the edition of A. Goldbacher, CSEL34.1-2 (1895-98).

14. See my "Jerome's Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona," in StudiaPatrÃstica: Papers Presented to the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Stud-ies Held in Oxford, 19-24 August 1991, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: PeetersPress, forthcoming).

15. Ep. 28, 2. One group of manuscripts offers the synonymous variant "personas":as Boethius would say, "persona a personando" (duab. nat. 3; PL 64.1343). On Au-gustine's acquaintance with Origen see B. Altaner, "Augustinus und OrÃgenes," HJ 70(1951): 15-41, repr. in his Kleine Schriften, TU 83 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967),224-52; A.-M. La BonnardiÃ¨re, "JÃ©rÃ´me, 'informateur' d'Augustin au sujet d'Ori-gÃ¨ne," REAug 20 (1974): 42-54.

16. See now Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: Prosopographische undsozial-geschichtliche Untersuchungen, Historia Einzelschriften 72 (Stuttgart: Steiner,1992).

17. Ep. 21.3: " . . . debeo scripturarum eius [sc. dei] medicamenta omnia pers-crutari et orando ac legendo agere . . . Quod ante non feci, quia et tempus non habui;tunc enim ordinatus sum, cum de ipso vacationis tempore ad cognoscendas divinasscripturas cogitaremus et sic nos disponere vellemus, ut nobis otium ad hoc negotiumposset esse."


by birth and education conformed closely (more closely than Augustine) tothe type of the late Roman litteratus so memorably evoked by H.-I. Mar-rou,18 and who set out to make a profession of Christian writing. Hisunprecedented success in this venture can be put down to the combinationof a gift for languages (real, however exaggerated) and the inspired decisionto capitalize on Origen's biblical philology at a time when large numbers ofeducated Christians in the West were looking for intellectually respectableways of expressing their piety.19 Add to these assets a remarkable flair forself-promotion, and we have the figure of Jerome that a well informedAfrican reader could have discerned ca.39\.

Augustine may soon have concluded, if he did not already know, that thisman could not answer all the questions posed in the De utilitate credendi.However, Jerome's practice of the sacred text, and the assumptions onwhich it was based, were current and widely respected before Augustine'sreputation as a Christian teacher had spread beyond the circle of hisfriends. Whether he liked it or not, Augustine was engaged in a dialoguewith Jerome from the moment he began to write on Scripture. The historyof their personal communications in the 3 90s is for the most part a depress-ing tale of mistrust, miscarriage and malentendu.20 Few attempts at open-ing a long-distance literary conversation have been as unsuccessful as thisone of Augustine's.21 Nevertheless, by reading Jerome's works down toand including the De viris illustribus of 392/3 against the De utilitate, wemay be able recover some of the heads of a discussion that never tookplace.22

1. Augustine asks after the magistri, doctores or (as he calls them once)professores of the Christian religion. Jerome for his part offers the

18. Henri-IrÃ©nÃ©e Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: DeBoccard, 1938; reissued with a Retractatio, 1949).

19. For a thorough reassessment of Jerome's work as a biblical philologist, emphasiz-ing his strengths as both a Hellenist and a Hebraist, see Adam Kamesar, Jerome, theHebrew Bible, and Greek Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

20. See the articles cited above, n. 13, and J. de Vathaire, "Les relations de saintAugustin et de saint JÃ©rÃ´me," in Miscellanea Augustiniana (Rotterdam: Brusse, 1930),484-99. A new study by R. Hennings is announced.

21. Note especially ep. 28.6: "Multa alia cum sincerissimo corde tuo loqui cuperemet de studio christiano con ferre ..."

22. The references given below are necessarily very selective. For the positions as-cribed to Augustine, see vtil. cred. passim. Jerome's side of the conversation can bederived from his letters, prefaces to this biblical translations and commentaries, and theDe viris illustribus. Quotations from the letters follow the edition of I. Hilberg, CSEL54-56(1910-18).


living example of a Christian magisterium that is also a professio, inthe sense of a specialized occupation for which training is re-quired.23

2. Augustine endeavours to classify the different kinds of error that arepossible when we try to understand a text (vtil. cred. 4.10). Jeromeintroduces a wholly new consideration: the text is a faulty transla-tion from another language, which the interpreter probably cannotread. We may not need to travel to Jerusalem, but we ought to learnGreek and Hebrew.24

3. While ready to place the Bible in a special category of books, Au-gustine assumes a basic analogy between the study of secular liter-ary or philosophical texts and the study of Scripture (vtil. cred.4.10, 6.13, 7.17). Jerome makes a similar assumption, but takes ev-ery opportunity in his earlier writings to mark the distance betweenthe two realms of discourse.25

4. Augustine represents Bible study as hard work (cf. ep. 21). Jeromegoes much further. In his eyes, the Studium scripturarum is an all-consuming askesis, a mortification of the body and a rejection ofthe world. Naturally the province of monks, it can be prosecuted byclergy or laypeople only if they are prepared to follow a monasticway of life.26

5. The De utilitate credendi presents itself as a preliminary to theCatholic exposition of Scripture; it implies nothing about the liter-ary forms such exposition might take, or about other possible usesof writing in the service of the Christian religion. For Jerome, Chris-

23. E.g., ep. 37.3: "Est sermo [sc. Reticii] quidem conpositus et Gallicano coturnofluens: sed quid ad Interpretern, cuius professio est, non, quomodo ipse disertus appa-reat, sed quomodo eum, qui lecturus est, sie faciat intellegere, quomodo intellexit ille,qui scripsit" (cf. Augustine, vtil. cred. 4.10-5.11). On this sense of "profession" and itsapplication in a late antique context, see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: TheGrammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press,1988), 33-35.

24. Kamesar (cited n. 19 above); Stefan Rebenich, "Jerome: The 'Vir Trilinguis' andthe 'Hebraica Veritas'," forthcoming in VC; Vessey, "Jerome's Origen."

25. The locus classicus is of course ep. 22.30 ("'Ciceronianuses, non Christianus'").For evidence suggesting that Augustine may have read this letter as early as 387/8, seeJohn Kevin Coyle, Augustine's "De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae": A Study of theWork, Its Composition and Its Sources, Paradosis25 (Fribourg: University Press, 1978),214f.

26. Denys Gorce, La "Lectio divina " des origines du cÃ©nobitisme Ã saint BenoÃ®t etCassiodore, 1: Saint JÃ©rÃ´me et la lecture sacrÃ©e dans le milieu ascÃ©tique romain(WÃ©pion-sur-Meuse: MonastÃ¨re du Mont-Vierge, 1925), esp. 165ff; Rebenich, Hiero-nymus und sein Kreis, 154-70.


tian writing is essentially writing de scripturis,17 and the Christianliterary form par excellence is the biblical commentary as practisedby Origen. Those principles notwithstanding, he himself had es-sayed or improvised several other genres, including the biblicalquaestio and (closely associated with it in his use) a kind of epistol-ary causerie on exegetical topics.28

These are just a few of the matters that Augustine might have wanted totake up with his fellow priest in the early 390s. In his first extant letter toJerome of 394/5 (Letter 28), he defends the principle (already stated in theDe utilitate) of the absolute veracity of the biblical text, against Jerome'srecent exegesis of an awkward passage in Galatians. Other topics of thatletter and its sequels likewise bear on questions of biblical pragmatics. But Ido not wish to review Augustine's correspondence with Jerome, importantthough it is for the history of Christian literary pragmatics. Instead I wantto suggest that many of the most significant elements of his theoreticalresponse to Jerome are to be found outside the letters he wrote to him: topropose, in fact, that we read two of his major works of the 390s asconstituting a kind of apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis.

Before turning to those works we must take account of the vital roleplayed by a third party.

CONLOQUIUM LITTERARUM: PAULINUS

At the same time as they worked to establish links with Jerome, the newmen in the African church were opening channels of communication to theChristian elite of Italy. In the summer of 395, Aurelius' special envoy toBethlehem, Alypius, took the initiative in writing to Meropius Pontius

27. Jerome's literary biblicism awaits its proper exposition. Meanwhile, see the valu-able remarks of Reinhart Herzog, Die Bibelepik der lateinischen SpÃ¤tantike: Form-geschichte einer erbaulichen Gattung, Vol. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1975), 173-75, and Jac-ques Fontaine, "L'esthÃ©tique littÃ©raire de la prose de JÃ©rÃ´me jusqu'Ã son second dÃ©parten Orient," in JÃ©rÃ´me entre l'Occident et l'Orient: Actes du Colloque de Chantilly(septembre 1986), Ã©d. Yves-Marie Duval (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1988), 323-42.

28. G. Bardy, "La littÃ©rature des 'quaestiones et responsiones' sur l'Ecriture Sainte,"RB 41 (1932) : 357-69. In his letters of the 38Os to Marcella and other Roman ladies,Jerome maintains the illusion of a daily interchange of biblical problems and solutionswithin his group, carried on both in face-to-face meetings and in writing. While theremains of Origen's correspondence may have provided hints for this scenario, its fulldevelopment must be attributed to Jerome's genius for creating the conditions for hisown literary art.


Paulinus, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat with poetic ambitions whose asceticconversion had caused a great stir a few years earlier, and who had nowmoved to NoIa in Campania.29 In return for a service he asked of Paulinus,Alypius sent him a collection of Augustine's anti-Manichaean writings.The result, no doubt intended, was the beginning of a correspondencebetween Augustine and Paulinus that would continue with only brief inter-ruptions for the next thirty years. The sequence and much of the literaryand historical interest of these exchanges have been painstakingly ex-pounded by Pierre Courcelle.30 The latter's suggestion that Augustine'snew correspondent could have been partly responsible for the genesis of theConfessions, though not universally accepted, has helped undermine theonce common view of Paulinus as a passive partner in the two men'sepistolary conversation. Even so, modern Augustinians may still be guiltyof underestimating the impact that the "discovery" of Paulinus had onAugustine's sense of Christian vocation, and in particular on his literarypragmatics.

The African party evidently hoped that Paulinus would assist in winninga wider audience for Augustine's writings. To that end, he was not only sentcopies of the latest productions but also referred to Romanianus for anyothers he might want.31 If Paulinus' actions matched the enthusiasm of hisfirst letters to Augustine, he may indeed have done much for the promotionof his work in Italy. Equally if not more important to Augustine, however,were the terms in which that initial enthusiasm was expressed. As PierreFabre has shown in his classic study, Paulinus was the apostle of epistolary

29. Janine Desmulliez, "Paulin de NoIe: Etudes chronologiques (393-397)," Re-ch Aug 20 (1985): 35-64; Dennis E. Trout, "The Dates of the Ordination of Paulinus ofBordeaux and of His Departure for NoIa," REAug 37 (1991): 237-60. Trout convinc-ingly reasserts the traditional date of Christmas Day 394, Â«oÃ 395, for Paulinus' presby-teral ordination in Barcelona; he would have come to NoIa in the spring/summer of 395,a year before Augustine's episcopal ordination in 396, Â«oÃ 395 as recorded by Prosper ofAquitaine (see Trout, "The Years 394 and 395 in the Epitoma chronicon: Prosper,Augustine, and Claudian," CPh 86 [1991]: 43-47).

30. "Les lacunes de la correspondance entre saint Augustin et Paulin de Noie," REA53 (1951): 253Â—300, revised and expanded in his Les 'Confessions' de saint Augustindans la tradition littÃ©raire: antÃ©cÃ©dents et postÃ©ritÃ© (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes,1963), 559Â—607: "La correspondance avec Paulin de Noie et la genÃ¨se des 'Confes-sions'".

31. Augustine, ep. 27A: "Librorum autem nostrorum copiam faciet [Romanianus]venerabili studio suo; nam nescio me aliquid sive ad eorum, qui extra ecclesiam dei sunt,sive ad aures fratrum scripsisse, quod ipse non habeat." The passage that follows thisstatement is quoted below. Romanianus' bibliographical services are described by JÃ¼r-gen Scheele, "Buch und Bibliothek bei Augustinus," Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 12(1978): 14-114 at 33-5.


caritas.32 Believing more passionately than most other men that letterswere the portraits of their writers' souls, that letter-writing was true conver-sation, and that educated Christians had a duty to build up each other'sspiritual strength by correspondence, this converted disciple of Ausonius(another zealot for epistolary reciprocity) had turned the hackneyed topicsof amicitia into a sacrament of communion. Augustine positively reelsunder the shock of his first letter, but he also recognizes at once the poten-tial value of the Paulinian literary conversation or conloquium litterarumas a medium for religious instruction of the kind that he was now calledupon to dispense.

In his first letter Paulinus dilates upon his joy at receiving Augustine'swritings, "not just for our own instruction, but for the use of the church inmany of our cities" (25.1: non pro nostra instructione tantum, sed etiampro ecclesiae multarum urbium utilitate)?1 After acclaiming the author'sservices to Catholicism in the most extravagant terms, he continues with acharacteristic figure of literary and spiritual refreshment:

25.2: Vides . . . quam familiariter te agnoverim, quanto admirer stupore,quam magno amore complectar, qui cotidie conloquio litterarum tuarumfruor et oris tui spiritu vescor. Os enim tuum fistulam aquae vivae et venamfontis aeterni mÃ©rito dixerim, quia fons in te aquae salientis in vitam aeter-nam Christus effectus est, cuius desiderio sitivit in te anima mea et ubertatetui fluminis inebriari terra mea concupivit.

[You see how intimately I have come to know you, how fondly I admire you,with how great a love I embrace you, who daily enjoy the converse of yourwritings and feed upon the spirit of your words! For I may justly say that yourmouth is a conduit of living water and a course of the eternal well-spring, be-cause Christ has become in you "a well of water springing up into everlastinglife" (John 4.14), in desire of which my soul's ground has thirsted for you andcraved inebriation with the fullness of your flood.]

On the basis of the relationship thus proleptically established, Paulinus

32. Saint Paulin de Noie et l'amitiÃ© chrÃ©tienne, Bibl. des Ecoles franc. d'AthÃ¨nes et deRome 167 (Paris: De Boccard, 1949). For closer analysis of epistolary topics in Paulinusand other late antique writers, see Klaus Thraede, GrundzÃ¼ge griechisch-rÃ¶mischerBrieftopik, Zetemata48 (Munich: Beck, 1970). The letters of the pagan senator QuintusAurelius Symmachus and his circle provide rich matter for comparison: J. F. Matthews,"The Letters of Symmachus", in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed. J. W. Binns(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 58-99; Philippe Bruggisser, Symmaqueou Ierituel Ã©pistolaire de l'amitiÃ© littÃ©raire: Recherches sur le premier livre de la correspon-dance, Paradosis 35 (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993).

33. References are to letters in the order in which they appear in Augustine's corre-spondence. Letter 25 = Paulinus, ep. 4 (ed. G. Hartel in CSEL 30 [1894]), 30 = 6.


asks to receive more of Augustine's works and to be fostered and strength-ened by him in his literary and spiritual endeavours: fove igitur et corrobo-ra me in sacris litteris et spiritalibus studiis (25.3).

Though more restrained in its use of biblical language and imagery,Augustine's reply is scarcely less ecstatic. O bone vir et bone frater, latebasanimam meam (27.1: "O goodly man and goodly brother, you were hid-den until now from my soul"), it begins. Here indeed was a man he mighthave met sooner, one fit to have been an interlocutor in the dialogues ofCassiciacum, fitter perhaps than some who had been. A priest in a minorNorth African town could not expect to receive many such overtures, andAugustine makes the most of this chance to adapt the amities and aspira-tions of his Italian past to the realities of the present. Paulinus is enlisted tohelp with the difficult case of Licentius, the son of Augustine's patronRomanianus, who was excessively attached to secular learning. He is alsofashioned into the ideal Christian reader. His own vision of himself as anardent consumer of Augustine's works was dangerously enthusiastic, but itcould be modified. Reverting to the neo-Platonic pedagogy outlined in theDe magistro and combining it with a traditional model of literary emen-datio or friendly copy-editing, Augustine now represents Paulinus as thereader who will discriminate critically but charitably between the wordsspoken by the divine Truth through Augustine's books and the wordswritten in error by Augustine:

27.4: Sed tu cum legis, mi sÃ¡nete Pauline, non te ita rapiant quae per nostraminfirmitatem Veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus diligenter advertas,ne dum avidus hauris bona et recta quae data ministro non ores pro peccatiset erratis quae ipse committo. In his enim quae tibi recte si adverteris displice-bunt ego ipse conspicior, in his autem quae per donum spiritus quod aeeepistirecte tibi placent in libris meis ille amandus, ille praedicandus est apud queniest fons vitae. . . . Quid enim habemus, quod non aeeepimus?[When you read ... I would not have you so transported by what the Truthspeaks through our infirmity as to observe less carefully what I speak in myown right, lest in avidly drinking in the good and right things that I adminis-ter, having myself first received them, you neglect to pray for the sins and er-rors that I myself commit. For in those things which will rightly displease youif you take good notice, I am myself revealed; but in those which (through thegift of the spirit you have received) rightly please you in my books, He is to beloved and proclaimed, in whom is the well-spring of life. . . . For what havewe that we have not received?]

In another context, such remarks could be dismissed as conventional mod-esty.34 Occurring in this case as the response to an impassioned appeal

34. For the topics of emendatio, see Tore Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in


from an exceptionally qualified Christian reader, immediately after direc-tions for obtaining copies of Augustine's works,35 immediately before theannouncement of a project destined to form part of the Confessions,36 andin the context of an exchange saturated on both sides with expressions ofconfidence in the virtue of letters (in two senses) as vehicles of Christiancharity and instruction,37 they carry considerable weight. Here in nuce wasa literary pragmatics befitting both the Christian writer and the Christianreader, already consistent with the most rigorous theology of grace (notethe echo of 1 Cor 4.7). All that was lacking was a clearly defined place forthe biblical text.

In the event, Augustine's conversation with Paulinus had barely begunwhen Jerome broke in on it with an imperious reminder of the demands ofthe Studium scripturarum as he conceived them.38 His Letter 53 to Pau-

Literary Conventions (Stockholm: Almqvist-Wiksell, 1964), 141-3. The works of Aus-onius afford many good examples.

35. See the passage quoted above, n. 31.36. Ep. 27.5 concerning the project of a "life" of Alypius; interpreted in this sense by

Courcelle, Les Confessions, 57Of.37. In addition to the passages already signalled, note ep. 24.1-2 (Paulinus to Aly-

pius) : "Haec est vera caritas, haec perfecta dilectio, quam tibi circa humilitatem nostraminesse docuisti. . . . Accepimus enim per hominem nostrum Iulianum de Carthaginerevertentem litteras tantam nobis sanctitatis tuae lucem adferentes, ut nobis caritatemtuam non agnoscere sed recognoscere videremur. . . . Accepimus . . . insigne prae-cipuum dilectionis et sollicitudinis tuae opus sancti et perfecti in domino Christo viri,fratris nostri Augustini. . . . Itaque fiducia suspiciendae nobis unanimitatis tuae et adipsum scribere ausi sumus, dum nos Uli per te et de inperitia excusandos et ad caritatemcommendandos praesumimus . . ." (cf. 25.5 and 30 to Augustine); 27.2Â—3 (Augustineto Paulinus): "Legi enim litteras tuas fluentes lac et mel, praeferentes simplicitatemcordis tui. . . . Legerunt fratres et gaudent infatigabiliter et ineffabiliter tarn excellen-tibus donis dei, bonis tuis. Quotquot eas legerunt, rapiunt, quia rapiuntur, cum Ie-gunt. . . . Haec atque huius modi suavissima et sacratissima spectacula litterae tuaepraebent legentibus, litterae illae, litterae fidei non fictae, litterae spei bonae, litteraepurae caritatis." There is an interesting variation on the theme of the conloquium perlitteras in Augustine's ep. 31 to Paulinus (written in response to ep. 30, which hadcrossed with his earlier answer), in which Paulinus' letter-carriers Romanus and Agilisare represented as a human page inscribed with the character of their sender: "Sanctosfratres Romanum et Agilem, aliam epistulam vestram audientem voces atque reddentemet suavissimam partem vestrae prasentiae . . . suscepimus. . . . Aderat etiam, quod nullichartae adesse potest, tantum in narrantibus gaudium, ut per ipsum etiam vultumoculosque loquentium vos in cordibus eorum scriptos cum ineffabili laetitia legeremus.Hoc quoque amplius erat, quod pagina quaelibet, quantacumque bona scripta con-tineat, nihil ipsa proficit, quam vis ad profectum explicetur aliorum; hanc autem epis-tulam vestram, fraternam scilicet animam, sic in eorum conloquio legebamus, ut tantobeatior appareret nobis, quanto uberius conscripta esset ex vobis. Itaque illam adeiusdem beatitatis imitationem studiosissime de vobis omnia percontando in nostracorda transcripsimus."

38. On Jerome's correspondence with Paulinus, see Pierre Nautin, "Etudes de chro-


linus, also written in 395, is a programmatic statement of his view ofbiblical science as a distinct discipline, one not to be attempted by any mereliterary amateur. Also containing a summary of the biblical canon, theletter was later prefixed to the Vulgate. In a long and rhetorically elaborateexordium Jerome piles up classical and biblical exempla designed to con-vince Paulinus and all other readers that they could never hope to enter themaze of Scripture without the help of a trained guide. The message isbroadly that of the De utilitate credendi stripped of Augustine's ecclesiol-ogy and metaphysics, only this time it is delivered by a self-professed andpractising magister scripturarum.39 In his Letter 58 to Paulinus, des-patched in the following year, Jerome completes the picture of the perfectbiblical reader-and-writer, both positively by associating his activity with aspecifically monastic propositum, and negatively by pointing out the de-fects of earlier Latin commentators on the Bible.

Some scholars have detected a likeness of Augustine in the rogues' gal-lery of unqualified biblicists pilloried by Jerome in Letter 53.40 If we as-sume that Alypius had taken copies of some of his friend's works to Beth-lehem in 392, this may even have been part of the author's intention.41Jerome's self-serving polemic certainly ran too close to the documented

nologie hiÃ©ronymienne (393-397)," RE Aug 19 (1973): 213-39, and Yves-Marie Du-val, "Les premiers rapports de Paulin de Noie avec JÃ©rÃ´me: moine et philosophe? poÃ¨teou exÃ©gÃ¨te?" Studi Tardoantichi 7 (1989): 177-216, both now to be revised in the lightof Trout, "Date" (cited n. 29 above).

39. The opening sentences of Jerome's ep. 53 carry an echo of the topics of caritaswhich may be presumed to have formed part of Paulinus' initial letter (no longer extant) :"Frater Ambrosius . . . detulit . . . suavissimas litteras, quae in principio amicitiarurnprobatae iam et veteris amicitiae praeferebant. Vera enim ilia necessitudo est, Christiglutino copulata, quam non utilitas rei familiaris, non praesentia corporum tan tum, nonsubdola et palpans adulatio, sed timor domini et divinarum scripturarum studia conci-liant." In general Jerome shows little interest in the theory of epistolary amicitia, or thatof the conloquium litterarum: in this case he simply adapts the Paulinian ideology ofcommunion to suit his own purpose, emphasizing the studia divinarum scripturarum asone of the bases of true fellowship.

40. E.g., A. Kurfess, "Vergils vierte Ekloge bei Hieronymus und Augustinus: 'lamnova progenies cÃ¡elo demittitur alto' in christlicher Deutung," SEJG 6 (1954): 5-13,who argues that Jerome's criticism of the Christian exegesis of Vergil was inspired by apassage in Augustine's unfinished commentary on Romans of ca. 394.

41. Though cf. Jerome, ep. 105.5 (to Augustine in 403/4): "Hoc dico, non quod inoperibus tuis quaedam reprehendenda iam censeam. Neque enim lectioni eorum um-quam operam dedi nee horum exemplariorum apud nos copia est praeter Soliloquiorumtuorum libros et quosdam commentariolos in Psalmos." Of course this may be disin-genuous, and even if Alypius did not take copies of Augustine's works to Bethlehem hemay have said enough about him (and his relations with Ambrose?) to excite Jerome'ssuspicion of a possible competitor.


anxieties of the priest, soon to be bishop, of Hippo for the latter not to havefelt himself implicated, had it come to his attention at this time. And it isvery likely that it did come to his attention, for as Jean Doignon observedthirty years ago, there are several traces of Jerome's Letter 58 in the Dedoctrina Christiana.42 Acting on this and other hints, Doignon imagines acontest between Augustine and Jerome over the literary vocation of Pau-linus, an aspect of the relations between the two great doctores which hadgone unnoticed by commentators concerned primarily with their differ-ences over biblical exegesis. I now wish to argue that the components ofthis triangular relationship are more closely connected than even Doignonwould seem to allow, that Augustine has in effect left us an apologia contraHieronymum tacitly dedicated to Paulinus, in which the Paulinian conlo-quium litterarum is made to serve as the theoretical matrix for a dis-tinctively Augustinian biblical pedagogy, incorporating as much of theHieronymian scientia scripturarum as Augustine was able to use. The"apology" as it has reached us is in two parts, the second of which signifi-cantly modifies or "retracts" the first: it begins with the De doctrina Chris-tiana of 396/7 and continues in the Confessions.

FIRST PART OF THE "APOLOGY":DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA

By 396 Augustine was ready to offer solutions to many of the problemsraised five years earlier in the De utilitate credendi. Then he could onlyevoke the ideal of a Christian teacher, now he would lay down guidelinesfor his activity: Sunt praecepta quaedam . . . (Prol. 1: "There are certainprecepts, etc.").43 The new treatise would have to have a name. He hadalready written De magistro: to use that title again, or a variant of it, wouldbe to invite confusion between the ultimate and proximate sources ofknowledge, an error that he was as keen to discourage now as ever. Whatwas needed was a phrase that would encompass the whole economy ofsaving instruction, without prejudging relations between the divine andhuman agencies involved. Augustine's phrase is doctrina Christiana, a char-acteristically qualified form of the only Latin substantive whose meaningwas both broad enough for his purpose and so far uncompromised by

42. Jean Doignon "'Nos bons hommes de foi': Cyprien, Lactance, Victorin, OptÃ¢t,Hilaire (Augustin, De doctrina christiana, IV, 40, 61)," Latomus 22 (1963) : 795-805.For traces of Letter 53 in the same work, see below.

43. Citations of the De doctrina christiana follow the edition of J. Martin, CCSL 32(1962).


others' use.44 The latter consideration was not trivial. Already in his choiceof title Augustine was staking a claim in an area which, if not yet heavilybuilt up, had lately seen a lot of speculative development. Though we areapt to forget it, the De doctrina Christiana was only one of several attemptsto establish norms for Christian instruction in late Latin antiquity.45 Fromthe outset, Augustine was defining his position with reference to, andpartly against, those adopted by others.

The oppositional quality of the De doctrina appears most clearly in theprologue in which the author defends his project against three sorts ofobjection, the third of which he takes seriously.46 To those who rejoice in aGod-given ability to interpret Scripture without the use of such precepts ashe is about to impart, Augustine opposes a carefully balanced theory of theinstrumentality of human beings in the ministration of God's Word (Prol.4Â—9). The argument is built up of a number of elements: a characteristicallyAugustinian view of the mediation of transcendent truth, a demonstrationof the social basis of language acquisition that anticipates the sign theory ofBook 2, a series of biblical exempla showing men of faith deferring to othermen, and two a priori assertionsÂ—that the human condition would bedebased, and charity defeated of its aim, si homines per homines nihildiscerent (Prol. 6: "if men learnt nothing through their fellow men").

To whom is the argument addressed? Since none of the proposed identi-fications of a hostile charismatic party commands general assent, we arefree to entertain Rudolf Lorenz's suggestion that Augustine is rejecting anextreme version of his own illuminism, and that the main purpose of theprologue is therefore apologetic.47 We should then suppose that the author

44. For possible alternatives see Marrou, Saint Augustin, 549-60. Lactantius hadused Institutiones, Hilary and others made play with eruditio, Jerome was investingheavily in scientia and Studium. Augustine himself tends to associate litterae closely withtexts and employs litteratura as a synonym for grammatica; disciplina he reserves foranother application. Much of the modern debate (since Marrou) over the sense(s) ofdoctrina in Augustine's treatise is vitiated by a lack of sensitivity to the creative, appro-priative, and potentially exclusive quality of Christian vocabulary-building in late antiq-uity. See now Gerald A. Press, "'Doctrina' in Augustine's 'De doctrina Christiana',"Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984): 98-120.

45. Alongside the names mentioned in the preceding note, we should allow for theefforts of Roman pontiffs from Damasus onwards to fix the standards and conditions ofclerical education (partly coinciding with the aims of Ambrose's De officiis minis-trorum), and the later initiatives of monastic educators like John Cassian. "Christianeducation", variously named and conceived, was a highly contentious issue in the "Ageof Theodosius".

46. Peter Brunner, "Charismatische und methodische Schriftauslegung nach Au-gustins Prolog zu 'De doctrina Christiana'," Kerygma und Dogma 1 (1955): 59-69,85-103.

47. R. Lorenz, "Die Wissenschaftslehre Augustins," ZKG 67 (1955-56), 29-60,


of the De doctrina christiana chose deliberately to stress the outward orsocial aspect of Christian instruction in order to correct what might other-wise be perceived by readers of his works as a pastorally and ecclesiallydisastrous emphasis on its inward or psychological aspects. Plausible asthis argument is, it requires us to consider why Augustine should partic-ularly fear such an objection in 396. While it is easy to see how a text likethe De magistro could be construed as hostile to the claims of professed (afortiori ordained) teachers of the gospel, those claims had been amplyendorsed in the De utilitate credendi and other more recent works. More-over, there is no reason to believe that Augustine's epistemology had itselfchanged significantly since the time of the De magistro.4* Thus when hegoes out of his way to assert the validity of a human science of Scripture atthe outset of the De doctrina, he cannot be doing so merely for the purposeof a retractatio or internal revision of his published opinions. Rather, heappears to be measuring his own approach to the biblical text against onethat set more store than he ever would by the competence of the humaninterpreter. As we have seen, his properly cautious attempt to establish hisauthority as a Christian teacher (writer and now bishop) had recently beencrossed by Jerome's propaganda for a "professional" discipline of biblicalinterpretation. It cannot be coincidental that two of Augustine's four bibli-cal examples of human instruction in the prologue to the De doctrina (Paul

213-51 at 237. Lorenz's insight is confirmed by C. P. Mayer, "'Res per signa.' DerGrundgedanke des Prologs in Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina christiana' und das Prob-lem seiner Datierung, " REAug 20(1974) : 100-12. For attempts to identify Augustine'sopponents, see G. Folliet, "Des moines euchites Ã Carthage en 400Â—401," Studia PatrÃs-tica!, TU 64 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957) 386-99; Ulrich Duchrow, "Zum Prologvon Augustins 'De doctrina christiana'," VC 17 (1963): 165-72; and, most recently,Charles Kannengiesser, "Local Setting and Motivation of 'De doctrina christiana," inCollectanea Augustiniana 2, forthcoming.

48. Contra U. Duchrow, SprachverstÃ¤ndnis und biblisches HÃ¶ren bei Augustin(Tubingen: Mohr, 1965), 206-13 who interprets what he takes to be a radical discrep-ancy between the theory of language and learning expressed in De magistro and that ofthe prologue to the De doctrina christiana as a sign that the latter text was composed asan afterthought in 426/7. In a similar vein: Graziano Ripanti, "Il problema della com-prensione nelPermeneutica agostiniana," REAug 20 (1974): 88-99. For a more nu-anced view of the development of Augustine's thought, which nevertheless stresses theformative importance of the years 391-397, see A. D. R. Polman, The Word of Godaccording to St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1961), 13-38. Polman ob-serves that "The . . . interpretation of the Logos as the inner teacher who shows us howto contemplate truth was never rejected by St. Augustine, and made its influence feltthroughout his writings on the Word of God as Holy Writ and as proclamation" (30).Likewise Mayer, "'Res per signa,'": "Nirgends jedoch ist im Prolog ein ernsthaftesRÃ¼tteln an den in De magistro niedergelegten Fundamenten seiner Zeichenlehre und derdamit engstens verknÃ¼pften Sprach thÃ©orie festzustellen" (109).


and the Ethiopian eunuch) had appeared in exactly the same cause inJerome's first letter to Paulinus.49 Like so much of Augustine's writing, thetreatise De doctrina christiana is visibly over-determined. As correction,the prologue and all that follows in 396/7 is ostensibly directed at would-be charismatic or inspired interpreters of the Bible, perhaps even Augustinehimself at an earlier stage of his theological development. As defence, itmust contend with their arch-opponent: the magister scripturarum Je-rome.

Augustine's response to the Hieronymian theory of biblical scientia isnot only defensive, however. Even as he domesticates Jerome's polemic promagistro, he undercuts the social ambitions of the expert interpreter byassimilating his function to that of the humblest of the literary "profession-als", the primary school teacher or magister litterarum (Prol. 9). The sameprocess of reaction, adaptation, and critique can be observed throughoutthe length of the two and a half books of the De doctrina completed in the390s. Most of the issues of literary pragmatics raised by a confrontation ofthe De utilitate credendi with Jerome's early programme as a biblicalwriter are there specifically addressed, and dealt with in ways that wouldbe hugely influential.50 Augustine theorizes the scientia scripturarum morecomprehensively than Jerome does, but is careful to place it no higher thanthe third step on a seven-rung ladder to sapientia (2.7.9Â—11). He acceptsthe importance of an acquaintance with Greek and Hebrew for the correctunderstanding of the Latin Bible, but applies to it to a general restraint onall knowledge of human conventions: quantum satis est, "as much as isnecessary" (2.26.40; cf. 2.11.16-14.21). Perhaps most striking of all, atleast to modern readers, is his subjection of secular literary and philosophi-cal culture to the principle of usus iustus, "right use" (2.40.60), a criterionat once more generous and more rigorous than any hitherto proposed byJerome. All these initiatives, it is worth noting, are fitted within the frame-work of a theory of the biblical text as consisting of signa divinitus data[sed] per homines nobis indicata, "signs given by God but pointed out to usby men" (2.2.3). From first to last, Augustine's is a Christian doctrinasimultaneously human and divine, historical and transcendent.51

There are two further respects in which the De doctrina christiana of396Â—7 promises to correct or enlarge the biblical pragmatics that a Latin

49. Prol. 6-7; Jerome, ep. 53.2, 5.50. My awareness of "Hieronymian" elements in the De doctrina christiana owes

much to a fine paper by Christoph SchÃ¤ublin which inaugurated the conference on"Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana': A Classic of Western Culture" held at the Univer-sity of Notre Dame in April 1991.

51. Cf. Meyer, " 'Res per signa,' " 111.


reader like Paulinus could have learnt from Jerome. First, it offers to shiftthe ethical conditions of acceptable or "successful" exegesis from the realmof askesis to that of caritas. Secondly, it announces precepts for the trac-tatio scripturarum that would govern the enunciation of biblical meaningsby human interpreters (modus proferendi) as well as their discovery(modus inveniendi). Neither of these promises is kept. Although Book 1contains prolonged and often difficult discussion of the rule (or rules) ofcharity, it does not make good the providential connection between caritasand doctrina asserted in the prologue. And the first draft of the treatisebreaks off before the author reaches the part devoted explicitly to themodus proferendi. Some time in 397, it seems, Augustine turned aside fromthe De doctrina christiana to concentrate on other compositions.52 Thework we know under that name would only be completed thirty years later,as part of the tidying-up operation represented by his Retractationes. Thisdoes not mean, however, that his contemporaries were obliged to waitthree decades for the remainder of his apologia contra Hieronymum descripturis. For within a short space they had this (and much else besides) inthe form of the next extant work listed in the Retractationes: the so-calledLibri confessionum.

SECOND PART OF THE "APOLOGY": CONFESSIONES

Much of the controversy surrounding the De doctrina christiana has beencreated by scholars who treat the work as an organic whole, even thoughthey know perfectly well that its two parts were composed respectively nearthe beginning and at the very end of the ecclesiastical career of a man whonever stopped thinking about what he was doing, or seeking words inwhich to explain himself to others. Not content to wonder at the per-sistence of a writer who went back to finish a manuscript half a lifetimeafter putting it away, they want to believe that he completed it just as hewould have done had he not been "interrupted". The inconsequence isparticularly grave with regard to Book 4, since there are no grounds for

52. See Josef Martin's introduction to his edition in CCSL 32, vii-xix, and his "Ab-fassung, VerÃ¶ffentlichung und Ãœberlieferung von Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina chris-tiana," Traditio 18 (1962): 69-87, with Augustine, retr. 2.4 and Alberto Pincherle,"Sulla composizione del 'De doctrina christiana' di S. Agostino," in Storiografia estoria: Studi in onore di E.D. Theseider (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 2, 541-59. The breakbetween the unfinished treatise of 396/7 and its later continuation occurs at 3.25.35/36.The evidence of the early fifth-century Codex Petersburg Q. v. 1.3, containing doctr. chr.Prol.Â—3.25.35 and other early works of Augustine, is reassessed in a paper by KennethSteinhauser in the proceedings of the Notre Dame De doctrina christiama conference(University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).


assuming that Augustine's statements on Christian rhetoric ca.427 bearany close relation to the ideas he had when he began the treatise in 396. Infact, as even Marrou has to admit, the last book of the De doctrina ismanifestly more "ecclesiastical" than the others, in the sense that it isdirected to the teaching (especially preaching) needs of the clergy.53 Bycontrast, Books 1Â—2 avoid any reference to the institutional conditions ofChristian teaching, and never once evoke the situation of the priest orbishop preaching ad populum. Augustine's imagined reader of ca.396 issimply that: a Christian reader confronting the biblical text. This reader,after learning certain rules, is supposed capable of instructing others inturn; whether by writing or speaking is not specified. Interestingly enough,although Augustine begins the prologue with a plurality of studiosi scrip-turarum in view, by the end of it he has narrowed his attention to a singlelector. Thus in the taxonomy of Christian utterance subsequently providedin Book 4, the De doctrina itself approaches most nearly the form of acollocutio cum aliquo uno sive cum pluribus, a conversation with someone or a few.54

And yet in 397 this unfinished treatise would have counted as one of theleast conversational of all Augustine's works, a heroic but failed attempt bya master of dialogue to commit himself to a monologic mode of instruc-tion: Sunt praecepta quaedam. . .. For the first time ever Augustine seemsto have begun a major work without an interlocutor, without a dedicatee,without even so much as an alter ego. In the continuing absence of Jerome,the man who (in Peter Brown's words) "would never be alone" suddenlyfound he had no-one to talk to. The strain on him is apparent from thestart. Having announced the two parts of his subject at the beginning of

53. Saint Augustin, 507 and 638 n.l. Similarly Mark D. Jordan, "Words and Word:Incarnation and Signification in Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana'," AugStud 11(1980): 177-196, notes that "even without the historical evidence, one would notice ashift of stance near the end of Book III which makes the close of the work moreinsistently pastoral and anti-speculative," yet still holds that "it is appropriate ... totake from the early and late parts of the work equally" (180). While I agree that anygeneral study of Augustine's thought should take equal account of both parts of thiswork, it seems to me important not to attribute to Augustine in 397 ideas that he cannotbe shown to have entertained until later.

54. 4.10.25: "Et hoc quidem non solum in conlocutionibus, sive fiant cum aliquouno, sive cum pluribus, verum etiam et multo magis in populis, quando sermo promitur,ut intellegamur instandum est, quia in conlocutionibus est cuique interrogandi potestas;ubi autem omnes tacent, ut audiatur unus, et in eum intenta ora convertunt, ibi utrequirat quisque, quod non intellexerit, nec morÃs est nee decoris." Cf. 4.9.23,18.37;serm. 23.8.8 (PL 38.158): "Iam multos vestrum intellexisse non dubito. Non video, sedex collocutione, quia loquimini ad alterutrum, sentio eos qui intellexerunt, velle ex-ponere iis qui nondum intellexerunt" (cited by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de laculture antique, 506 n.5).


Book 1, he proceeds to a division: De inveniendo prius, de proferendopostea disseremus. Magnum opus et arduum . . . ("We shall first discussthe discovery [of scriptural meanings], then the manner of their enuncia-tion. A great and difficult task . . ."). The reminiscence of the Oratorunderlines the difference between the leisurely Ciceronian dialogues ofCassiciacum and the heavy business of the present monologue. Magnumopus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur, Cicero had written, sed nihildifficile amanti ... ("A great and difficult task it is that we attempt,Brutus, but nothing is difficult for one who loves his friend as I doyou . . ."). Ostensibly the expression of a friendship, the Orator is pre-sented as a natural continuation of private conversations between Ciceroand Brutus, conversations duly commemorated in the next sentence of thetreatise.55 This fiction was one that Augustine had earlier used to greatadvantage, but was now trying to do without. Not surprisingly, when thetask of laying down precepts for the interpretation of Scripture finallyproved too much for him, he transferred the matter in hand to a literaryconversation already in progress between himself, his God, and his spiritu-al friends in Christ. In this respect as in others, the Confessions is the firstand aptest sequel to the unfinished De doctrina christiana of 397.56

55. Orator 9.33-34: "Magnum opus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur; sed nihildifficile amanti puto. Amo autem et semper amavi ingenium, studia, mores tuos. Incen-dor porro cotidie magis non desiderio solum quo quidem conficior, congressus nostras,consuetudinem victus, doctissimos sermones requirens tuos, sed etiam admirabili famavirtutum incredibilium. . . . Iam quantum illud est quod in maximis occupationibusnunquam intermittis studia doctrinae, semper aut ipse scribis aliquid aut me vocas adscribendum."

56. See Alberto Pincherle, "S. Agostino: tra il 'De doctrina christiana' et le 'Confes-sioni',", Archeologia classica 16-17 (1973-74): 555-74. The author concludes thatthe Confessions "si rivela come il proseguimento, o meglio l'attuazione del programma,di quello rimasto interrotto [i.e. in doctr. chr.]" (574). In a related article, "Intorno aliagenesi delle 'Confessioni'," AugStud 5 (1974): 167-176, Pincherle implicates Paulinusof NoIa in the commissioning of the De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum andsketches an Italian background for the composition of the Confessions. Note especiallyhis description of Augustine's position in 397 as men like Paulinus and Simplicianus,alarmed by the direction of his new thinking on grace and free will, broke off theircorrespondence with him: "Agostino dovette sentir si abbandanato, se non propriotradito, da coloro sulla cui amicizia o benevolenza contava. E, per di piÃ¹, senza spie-gazioni, senza avviare quella franca discussione che, tra amiciÂ—e sopratutta nell'am-icizia cristianaÂ—permette di esprimersi con chiarezza, e magari durezza, senza che ladiversitÃ dei pareri rompa il vincolo di affetto e fiducia, o, tanto meno, violi la carita."This theory of the charitable conference, though clearly Augustinian, anticipates theConfessions itself. Courcelle, Les 'Confessions', 565Â—68, ascribes Paulinus' silence to-wards Augustine at this time to doubts about the validity of his episcopal ordination.Whatever its cause or causes, the temporary rupture of relations between the two mencoincides closely with Augustine special initiative in literary conversation.


Already in the De utilitate credendi Augustine had experimented withautobiographical narration as a means of "opening the way" to a study ofScripture within the Catholic communion.57 Now, perhaps encouraged byPaulinus' request for a Life of Alypius, certainly eager to exploit the newopportunities for charitable converse that his correspondence had indi-cated, he recast his scriptural propaedeutic in the form of a narrative ofpraise delivered in the presence of God and his fellow Christians, with aparticular eye to those whom he calls the "spiritual ones" (spiritales). TheConfessions dramatizes the substance of the first or unfinished De doctrinachristiana, recuperates elements of the author's epistemology that hadthere been deliberately suppressed, and supplies a temporary but enduringsubstitute for the missing chapters on the modus proferendi. Since a fullcomparison of the two works is beyond the scope of this article, I shallconcentrate on the last point, which happens to be the most significantfrom the point of view of literary pragmatics.

CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

Paulinus' correspondence had reminded Augustine of the delights of epis-tolary conversation and suggested to him a way of turning them to religiousaccount. It had also, as a result of Jerome's interference, made him acutelyaware of the awkwardness of maintaining simultaneously a belief in thedependence of human insight on divine illumination and a public practiceof scriptural exegesis. This difficulty, which his developing notions of di-vine grace could only exacerbate, was to exercise Augustine for the rest ofhis life. The immediate challenge, deferred at some cost in the De doctrinachristiana, was to locate the activity of biblical interpretation within theliterary-colloquial mode. Biblical theology, in the strict sense of "talkingabout God on the basis of his word in Scripture", had to be made part of ahuman dialogue conducted in writing. Thus formulated, the task confront-ing Augustine posed both a danger and a problem. The danger was that thedialogue would become merely human, mere chatter among men; thishazard he averts in the Confessions by the bold expedient of bringing Godhimself into the conversation.58 The problem was that the message of a

57. Vtil. cred. 8.20: "His igitur constitutis . . . edam tibi, ut possum, cuiusmodiviam usus fuerim, cum eo animo quaererem veram religionem, quo nunc exposui essequaerendum." The narrative begins with Augustine's departure for Italy.

58. The dynamics of this conversation has been expounded with admirable subtletyby Reinhart Herzog, "'Non in sua voce': Augustins GesprÃ¤ch mit Gott in den'Confessiones'Â—Voraussetzungen und Folgen," in Das GesprÃ¤ch, ed. Karlheinz Stierleand Rainer Warning, Poetik und Hermeneutik 11 (Munich: Fink, 1984), 213-250. Onhis analysis, Books 1-8 of the Confessions enact the gradual fulfilment of the conditions


voiceless and at times barely intelligible text, the Bible in a Latin codex, hadsomehow to be inserted into the current discourse of late antique men andwomen: it is the problem of the modus inveniendi et proferendi, in reality asingle complex procedure rather than two separate (or separable) ones.The standard forms of biblical commentary, as Augustine who had latelybegun to practise them knew only too well, represented at best a partialsolution. A new literary pragmatics was required, for which recent experi-ments in Latin biblical poetry ( Juvencus, Proba, Paulinus) and epistologra-phy (Jerome, Paulinus) offered precedents but no clear directions.59 TheConfessions shows what this new Christian literary pragmatics might belike.

For the first seven of the ten books which he wrote about himself, Au-gustine represents reading and conversation either as distinct and poten-tially opposed activities, or as related forms of time-wasting. Learning toread and write might be useful; reading and reciting pagan poetry wasdangerous self-indulgence (1.12.19ff ) . When Monica asks the local bish-op to speak with her son (3.12.21: ut dignaretur mecum conloqui), heassures her that he will find his own way by reading (ipse legendo reperiet).The society of the friends with whom Augustine is wont to talk, laugh andread (4.8.13: conloqui et conridere, simul legere libros) is a snare. He readsCicero, Aristotle and other difficult pagan texts on his own (4.16.28Â—31:solus, per me ipsum, nullo hominum tradenti, nullo adminiculo humanimagisterii) and has no trouble undertanding them, but does less well withthe Bible. The long awaited conversation with Faustus the Manichee is adisappointment: the two men end up studying classical authors together

for a dialogue between Augustine and God (one of which is the exclusion of other,human partners-in-conversation), a dialogue which properly begins in the garden inMilan: "Die Szene im Garten von Mailand wird in der Tat bis zum SchluÃŸ der Confes-siones arretiert: Augustin vor der Schrift spricht mit Gott" (233). No sooner has thedialogue begun, than it expands to include other human interlocutors: "Das GesprÃ¤chmit Gott . . . erweitert sich in den Confessiones bereits bei seiner ersten Realisierungzum zwischenmenschlichen GesprÃ¤ch" (236, italics in the original); see also the dia-gram, 240. Herzog notes the relevance of the De doctrina christiana for the develop-ments he outlines, especially with regard to Augustine's " 'caritas'-Asthetik' ",but leavesthe tracing of connections for later study. In its use of a terminology of "speech acts"Â—partly suggested, in this case, by Eugene Vance's work on the ConfessionsÂ—Herzog'sarticle is an impressive demonstration of what I would call a literary-pragmatic ap-proach to early Christian texts. See now Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics andSign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,1986), 1-50, esp. 28f. on the Confessions "as a sequence not only of events, but ofdiscursive acts which carry us beyond the narrative to the philosophical, and beyond thephilosophical to the exegetical. "

59. Cf. Herzog, "'Non in sua voce'," 241.


(5.6.10Â—13). Even Ambrose, reading silently apart, is unavailable for thetalk that Augustine now so urgently desires to have (6.3.3).

By this stage of the narrative, the reader of the Confessions already has astrong sense of the kind of talk that would be. It is represented in Au-gustine's text by a word that appears with remarkable frequency in Books4Â—7, the verb conferre. In his use of it, which largely exploits the range ofmeanings in the classical lexicon, this compound typically signifies one ormore of the following: (1) to converse or confer, (2) to share or placesomething in common, (3) to compare ideas, opinions or impressions. Inmost instances in the Confessions it is applied in such a way as to empha-size the social and communicative implications of the con-prefix. Au-gustine was too good a grammarian to play idly with morphemes; asKenneth Burke has shown, prefixes and their corresponding prepositionsoften mass with coercive force in the Confessions.60 In this case the reiter-ated conferre inclines the reader surely if insensibly to accommodate theactivity of conloqui ("to converse"), for which it is a common synonym, tothat of legere ("to read"), with which it is regularly associated in the text.Three examples will serve to illustrate this process:61

1. As a student in Carthage, Augustine had read Aristotle's Categories.Here are his reflections on the experience:

4.16.28: Et quid mihi proderat, quod annos natus ferme viginti, cum in ma-nus meas venissent AristotÃ©lica quadam, quas appellant decern categorÃas . . .legi eas solus et intellexi} Quas cum contulissem cum eis, qui se dicebant vixeas magistris eruditissimis non loquentibus tantum, sed multa in pulvere de-pinguentibus intellexisse, nihil inde aliud mihi dicere potuerunt, quam egosolus apud me ipsum legens cognoveram.

[And what did it profit me that, being scarce twenty years old, the book of Ar-istotle, called the Ten Categories, fell into my hands, and 1 read and under-stood it without a teacher? For when afterwards I conferred about them with

others they professed that they had much to do to understand them, thoughthey had been instructed therein by most learned masters, and that not by lec-tures only but by means of many delineations drawn in the sand; yet couldthey not, for all that, tell me anything about the matter, which I myself hadnot learned, by reading them alone.]

60. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 1970), 43-171.

61. Translations are from the version by Sir Tobie Mathew (London, 1620), adaptedas necessary. Where comparison with a more modern English translation can helpillustrate a feature of the Latin original, I refer to the rendering by R. S. Pine-Coffin(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).


Two solitudes are depicted. The first is that of the lone reader of Aristotle,contrasted with the company of master and disciple(s) in a teaching sceneof "classical" type. The second is that of the would-be participant in adialogue, exposed by the inability of his interlocutors to bring anything tothe interpretation of a text that he has not already discovered for himself.The two solitudes are generalized in Augustine's subsequent assertion thathe had likewise read and understood by himself the whole cycle of liberalarts texts (4.16.30: omnes libros artium, quas liberales vocant. . . per meipsum legi et intellexi, sine magna dificÃºltate nullo hominum tradenteintellexi) and found few men able to follow him when he expounded them(cum eis [sc. studiosis et ingeniosis] eadem conabar exponere . . . erat illeexcellentissimus in eis, qui me exponentem non tardius sequeretur). Thesestatements acquire their full significance in conjunction with his remarkson education in the prologue to the De doctrina christiana. There Au-gustine had presented human intercourse as the normal prerequisite forany science, specifying the relation between teacher and pupil, and hadargued for the role of the human teacher in Christian instruction.62 Here hepresents himself as a brilliant autodidact, unable to engage in any produc-tive discussion with his fellow men, in order to argue for a Christian"conversion" of secular science according to the principle of usus tustÃºsoutlined in De doctrina 2.40.60. The object of his scorn in this chapter ofthe Confessions is neither Aristotle nor students less talented than himself,but his own motives as a reader and interpreter (discussant and/or exposi-tor). His former attempts at communication concerning secular literaryand philosophical texts had failed because he was not aiming at their rightuse (non ad usum sed ad perniciem, mihi bona res non utenti bene). Where-as Book 2 of the De doctrina christiana concentrates on the theory of theChristian use of pagan texts in relation to their contents, the Confessionsstrives for a vision of its practice in relation to the human parties involved(eas conferre cum eis, eadem exponere eis ).

2. For nine long years Augustine had looked forward to meeting Faustusthe Manichee, in conversation with whom (5.6.10: conlatoque conloquio)

62. The argument is already well developed in the vtil. cred., e.g. at 7.17: "Cumlegerem, per me ipse cognovi, itane est? Nulla inbutus poÃ©tica disciplina TerentianumMaurum sine magistro adtingere non auderes,Â—Asper, Cornutus, Donatus et alii innu-merabiles requiruntur, ut quilibet poeta possit intellegi, cuius carmina et theatri plaususvidentur captareÂ—tue in eos libros, qui quoqo modo se habeant, sancti tamen di-vinarumque rerum pleni prope totius generis humani confessione diffamantur, sine duceinruis et de his sine praeceptore audes ferre sententiam. . . ." The passage evoking theideal teacher of Scripture, quoted n. 9 above, follows.


he hoped to find solutions to the difficulties he was experiencing with thesect's doctrines. On finally hearing him speak, he was charmed by hiseloquence. As described in the Confessions, Faustus' performance is com-parable to that of the show-orators of the Second Sophistic, men like hiscountryman Apuleius who had held earlier audiences of educated Africansspellbound with their verbal artifice. The mature Augustine takes him as apretext for separating the claims of truth from those of eloquence, verbalform from doctrinal content, the human minister from the divine source.He also uses him to dramatize the problem of the "conference" evoked inconnection with his earlier readings of the poets and philosophers. Theyoung Augustine, we are told, was not prepared just to listen to Faustus andapplaud him with the rest:

5.6.11: [M]oleste habebam, quod in coetu audientium non sinerer ingerere illiet partiri cum eo curas quaestionum mearum conferendo familiariter et acci-piendo ac reddendo sermonem.

[I was nothing well content that, in the throng of them that listened to him, Imight not be suffered to urge him and to impart to him the burden of somequestions that I had a mind to ask, by familar converse and the giving andtaking of discussion.]

These quaestiones related to things he had read. There were certain Mani-chaean texts he wished to discuss, passages he had marked as conflictingwith other authorities:

5.7.12: Libri quippe eorum pleni sunt longissimis fabulis de cÃ¡elo et sideribuset sole et luna: quae mihi eum, quod utique cupiebam, conlatis numerorumrationibus, quas alibi ego legeram, utrum potius ita essent, ut Manichaei li-bris continebantur, an certe vel par etiam inde ratio redderetur, subtiliter ex-plicare posse iam non arbitraban[For their books are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, of the stars, of thesun and moon; and while I greatly desired to discuss with him the reasons ofthese things, which I had read elsewhere (Pine-Coffin: I badly wanted Faustusto compare these with the mathematical calculations which I had studied inother books), and to find out if the things delivered about them in the Mani-chaean books were true or at least possible, I did not now think that he wouldbe able to explain them with any true knowledge.]

Although the modern translation of conlatis . . . rationibus is strictly pref-erable to Mathew's, the context allows room for both, and more besides.Augustine's desired conversation or conference (conlatio, sense 1) wouldinclude a comparison of ideas (conlatio, sense 3) based on a sharing ormise-en-commun (conlatio, sense 2) of relevant texts, extracted or summa-


rized. Unfortunately, Faustus turns out not to be the conference-partner heis looking for, and he is once again confined to an unequal dialogue con-cerning texts he has already mastered:

5.7.13: Refracto itaque studio, quod intenderam in Manichaei litteras. . . coepi cum eo pro studio eius agere vitam, quo ipse flagrabat in eas

litteras, quas tunc iam rhetor Carthaginis adulescentes docebam, et legerecum eo sive quae ille audita desideraret sive quae ipse tali ingenio apta exis-timaren!.

[And so, the pursuit whereby I was bent towards that learning of the Mani-chees being checked, I began at his request to pass some time with him in thatstudy after which he thirsted. This was the study of letters, which I, beingthen Master of Rhetoric at Carthage, did teach my scholars; and I read withhim either those books which he himself desired to hear, or those which 1thought most fit for such a kind of wit as his.]

3. Incompetence or unwillingness to ventilate their own texts is not theonly failing for which Manichaean teachers are castigated in the Confes-sions. Their pragmatics of the biblical text is also sharply criticized. Com-pelled by their philosophy to discount large portions of the scriptures heldcanonical by the Catholic Church, they justified themselves by claimingthat the excluded matter had been interpolated by judaizing heretics. Incontending with this view, and finally rejecting it as untenable, Augustinewas led into considerations of biblical philology:

5.11.21: Deinde quae illi in scripturis tuis reprehenderant defendÃ posse nonexistimabam, sed aliquando sane cupiebam cum aliquo illorum librorum doc-tissimo conferre singula et experiri, quid inde sentiret. ... Et inbecilla mihiresponsio videbatur istorum . . . cum dicerent scripturas novi testamenti fal-satas fuisse a nescio quibus . . . atque ipsi incorrupta exemplaria nulla profer-rent.

[Besides 1 thought that those things which the Manichees reprehended in theScriptures could not be defended; but yet I sometimes desired to examinethem one by one with some man most learned in those books, and thereuponto see what he held. And I thought the answer of the Manichees was weak,for they would say that the Scriptures of the New Testament were falsified by 1know not whom, but themselves did yet produce no copies thereof whichwere uncorrupted.]

This is as close as Augustine comes in the Confessions to using the verbconferre in the technical sense (4) of "collating" manuscripts.63 Even with-out such codicological precision, the passage is important testimony to the

63. TLL, s.v. "confÃ©ra", I. B. b (citing, inter alia, Jerome, and Augustine, cresc.1.34.40); cf. "collatio", I. B. 1. a.


role played by the Manichees in shaping his view of the biblical text quatext, that is, as a set of verbal signs transmitted by writing, subject to theusual hazards of literary tradition in a manuscript culture. Interestinglyenough, Augustine's dissatisfaction with the Manichaean view of the textand desire to confer with "some man most learned in those books" (aliquoillorum librorum doctissimo) are recorded in the Confessions at a pointjust before the announcement of his departure from Rome in 384. Theirdramatic date thus coincides exactly with the launching in the same city ofJerome's career as a biblical philologist, an event closely associated with hiscollation (in the technical sense) of Greek and Latin manuscripts of theNew Testament. Augustine's experience as a Manichee undoubtedlyhelped make him receptive to Jerome's insistence on the philological aspectof the Studium scripturarum, at the same time ensuring that he would notfollow him all the way in his editorial revisionism.64 In 397, as in 391,Jerome would have been a natural choice as "man most learned in thosebooks". But in 3 84 Augustine was bound for Milan, where (always accord-ing to his own account) he was destined to profit from the preaching ofanother contender for that title, though without ever obtaining the privateconference he craved: "and so I came to Milan, to bishop Ambrose"(5.13.23: et veni Mediolanium ad Ambrosium episcopum).

These examples from Books 4Â—5 by no means exhaust the implicationsof the verb conferre as used in the Confessions.65 They may suffice, how-ever, to establish the importance of conlatio as a multivalent literary-pragmatic concept and to justify our considering other scenes andepisodesÂ—including some that are described without recourse to the verbconferre itselfÂ—in the light of the "conference" paradigm. They may evenwarrant our taking a general, albeit partial, view of the Confessions as therecord of a series of conlationes conducing to a literary-interpretativetransaction, or "text act", of potentially definitive type. As we should

64. For a clear statement of Augustine's position, see Gerhard Strauss, Schrift-gebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (TÃ¼bingen: Mohr, 1959),esp. 44-73.

65. Note also 6.11.19: "Pereant omnia et dimittamus haec vana et inania: confer-amus nos ad solam inquisitionem veritatis. . . . Quid cunctamur igitur relicta spesaeculi conferre nos totos ad quaerendum deum et vitam beatam?"; 6.14.24: "Et multiamici agitaveramus animo et conloquentes ac detestantes turbulentas humanae vitaemolestias paene iam firmaveramus remoti a turbis otiose vivere, id otium sic moliti, ut, siquid habere possemus, conferremus in medium unamque rem familiÃ¤rem conflaremusex omnibus . . ."; 6.16.26: "Nee considerabam miser, ex qua vena mihi manaret, quodista ipsa foeda tarnen cum amicis dulciter conferebam nee esse sine amicis poterambeatus etiam secundum sensu, quem tunc habebam quantalibet afluentia carnaliumvoluptatum."


expect in a work that resumes so much of the programme of the abandonedDe doctrina christiana, the culminating conference of the Confessions hasthe Bible as its focus. Herein lies the main achievement of the work as thesecond instalment of a hypothetical apologia contra Hieronymum descripturis ad Paulinum. By persistently associating human conversationwith various kinds of comparison or collation involving texts, and gradu-ally narrowing the range of texts considered to the Bible, Augustine con-trives, first, to identify Christian discourse with attention to the biblicaltext and, secondly, to present the literary-colloquial mode as an appropri-ate vehicle of biblical exegesis.

The autobiographical climax of Augustine's Collations is reached in thethreefold conversion-narrative of Book 8. Reading and conversation playdecisive roles in the stories of Marius Victorinus and of the two imperialofficials at Trier, but the privilege of conversion by biblical "conference" isreserved for Augustine and his life-long partner in God-talk, Alypius. Theword conferre does not appear in the surface text of the famous gardenscene. Instead, as in the preceding description of Ponticianus's visit, thenarrator uses the verb sedere ("to sit") in the first person plural to create thecontext for a shared activity of reading. In his distress, we are told, Au-gustine laid down the copy of Paul's Epistles that was to have been theirstudy that day, got up from the place where he and Alypius were sittingtogether (ubi sedebamus), and prostrated himself under a fig tree somedistance away (8.12.28). It is while he is lying there crying that he hears thechildlike voice summoning him back to his reading: tolle lege, tolle lege("take it up and read, take it up and read"). The singular imperative (legenot legite) can only apply to one reader, but since it is delivered more thanonce (crebro) by an invisible speaker, it could in principle be addressed tomore than one person. We are not told whether Alypius heard the voice;the sequel suggests that he did, but was less quick than Augustine tointerpret it, otherwise he would have been the first to pick up the book.Augustine, returning to stand or sit again beside his friend, opens the codexat random and reads in silence from Romans (legi in silentio). This is not aconversation, at least not between men, nor yet a conference.66 Even now,in the close company of Alypius his fellow reader, Augustine (like Ambrosein the earlier scene) reads alone. The silence continues after he has finishedreading and as Alypius reads in turn. The two men communicate over thetext by facial expression and gesture:

66. Cf. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, "St. Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence," Journal of theHistory of Ideas 23 (1962): 175-97, esp. 189-92.


8.12.30: Tum interiecto aut dÃgito aut nescio quo alio signo codicem clausi ettranquillo iam vultu indicavi Alypio. At ille quid in se agereturÂ—quod egonesciebamÂ—sic indicavit. Petit videre quid legissem: ostendi, et adtendit etiamultra quam ego legeram. Et ignorabam quid sequeretur. Sequebatur vero: in-firmum autem in fide recipite. Quod ille ad se rettulit mihique aperuit.

[Then shutting the book, and putting my finger or some other mark betweenthe leaves, I showed it to Alypius, my countenance now calm. And he also, inlike manner, showed me what was in his heart, of which I knew nothing. Hedesired to see what I had read: I showed him, and he read on further than Ihad done. For I was ignorant of what followed, which was this: "Him that isweak in the faith receive ye" (Rom. 14:1). And this he applied to himself, ashe then revealed to me.]

Of course if one translates the verbs indicare, petere, ostendere and aperireas "to declare", "to ask", "to tell" and "to explain", as many good transla-tors have, the silence is immediately broken. Augustine, however, seems tohave gone out of his way to use deictic terms which do not require anyspeech to take place. The scene is certainly more dramatically powerful, aswell as more theologically significant, if no articulate sound is heard in thegarden after the (divine) utterance from the neighbouring house.67 Thesubsequent "conversation" with Monica can also be seen as occurring inconditions of wordless rapture: Inde ad matrem ingredimur. Indicamus,gaudet ("Thence we went in to my mother. We indicated to her [what hadhappened], she rejoiced."). Only then, and with heavy emphasis, doesAugustine introduce a verb that necessarily implies speech: Narramus,quemadmodum gestum sit ("We related how it had happened"). If thisinterpretation is accepted, the conversion of Augustine and Alypius ap-pears as an example of what could be called the literary conference degrÃ©zÃ©ro, a text act involving two people who confer without speaking. Para-doxically but predictably, this minimal form of the literary conference is forAugustine also its highest form, unattainable without supernatural help.As shared human experience it is surpassed, in this life, only by suchmoments of textless communion as the vision of Ostia described inBook 9.

The deixis of the conversion-scene may be regarded as an epitome of theautobiographical part of the Confessions, Books 1Â—10 on the author's

67. Cf. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin, 2nd ed.(Paris: De Boccard, 1968), 306-10, for whom the voice saying "fo//e, lege" is an internalvoice heard only by Augustine. Whether this point is granted or not, Courcelle is surelyright that "Il s'agit matÃ©riellement d'une scene muette, d'une histoire sans paroles[humaines]" (307).


reckoning.68 Augustine's narration is self-indication, lndicabo me ("I willshow myself ", lit. "I will point myself out", with the possible further senseof "I will accuse myself"), he says repeatedly at the beginning of Book 10,in a passage which is of the utmost importance for an understanding of hispurpose in the work as a whole (10.1.1-4.6). We recall that in the Dedoctrina christiana Augustine had defined the contents of the Bible as"signs given by God but pointed out to us by men" (signa divinitus data[sed] per homines nobis indicata). Now he is intent on reading his own lifeas a divinely inspired narrative.69 By revealing himself, not merely as heonce was but also as he now is, he hopes to induce in his readers a responsecomparable to Monica's at the end of Book 8: joy and praise of God,mingled with holy terror. As in the garden, so in the Confessions as aliterary work, the act of self-indication is achieved through the medium ofthe Bible. The "character" Augustine reveals himself to Alypius and Mon-ica by reading himself into (and out of) a passage in Romans in a mannersuggested to him by the Vita Antonii; the "author" Augustine revealshimself to his fellow human beings by writing himself into (and out of) abiblical narrative of loss and redemption artfully reconstituted from theGospels and the Psalms. In neither case are the moment and means ofdiscovering-himself easily distinguishable from the moment and meansof discovering-himself-to-others, or from the moment and means ofdiscovering-God-for-himself-and-so-to-others. The complex dynamics ofthis multiple process of discovery and indication is the main subjectof Book 10, in which Augustine considers his own memory as the groundof his knowledge both of himself and (in an infinitely mysterious way) of hisGod, and as the source of all his utterances. Although the biblical text itselfis conspicuously absent from the discussion, the return of two key termsfrom the De doctrina christiana, namely invenire ("to find, discover") andproferre ("to utter"),70 reminds us that these reflections on discovery and

68. Retr. 2.6.1 (ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57 [1984]): "... A primo usque addecimum de me scripti sunt, in tribus ceteris de scripturis Sanctis, ab eo quod scriptumest; In principio fecit deus caelum et terram. ..."

69. The same point is made somewhat differently by Ralph Flores, "Reading andSpeech in St. Augustine's 'Confessions,' " AugStud 6 (1975): 1-13.1 agree with Floresthat Books 1-9 provide "a frame within which the events of the narrative itself can beviewed as a discovery of a kind of textuality or reading," but am at a loss to understandwhat he considers that textuality to be.

70. 10.14.22: "Sed ecce de memoria profero, cum dico quattuor esse perturbationesanimi ... et quidquid de his disputare potuero . . . , ibi invento quid dicam atque indeprofero, nee tarnen ulla earum perturbatione perturbor, cum eas reminiscendo con-memoro; et antequam recolerentur a meet retraetarentur, ibi erant. . . . Forte ergo sicutde ventre eibus ruminando, sie ista de memoria recordando proferuntur. . . . Quis enim


declaration are the sequel to conferences textual (Book 8) as well as non-textual (Book 9), and prepares us for the transition from the ten booksAugustine wrote about himself to the three he wrote about the Bible. Anydating of individual books of the Confessions is necessarily speculative, butit is tempting to postulate a link between the abandonment of the Dedoctrina christiana, with its anxious affirmation of the role of the humanteacher, and the extraordinarily arduous Book 10 de memoria, with itsunqualified reassertion of the rights of the Veritas docens, the divine truththat alone truly teaches.71

Book 11 of the Confessions resumes the unfinished business of the"apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis'", inserting the act of biblicalinterpretation into the conference paradigm established in Books 1Â—9 (10).The narrative of Augustine's life, we are now given to believe, has delayed amore important enterprise:

11.2.2: Quando autem sufficio lingua calami enuntiare omnia hortamenta tuaet omnes terrores tuos et consolationes et gubernationes, quibus me perdu-xisti praedicare verbum et sacramentum tuum dispensare populo tuo? Et sisufficio haec enuntiare ex ordine, caro mihi valent stillae temporum. Et oliminardesco meditari in lege tua et in ea tibi confiten scientiam et inperitiammeam. . . .

[But when shall I be able with this tongue of my pen to declare all thine ex-hortations and comforts and particular providences, whereby thou hastdrawn me to preach thy word and to dispense thy sacrament to thy people?And although I should be able to declare these things in order, yet the verymoments or drops of time are precious unto me; and for a long time have Ibeen fired with a desire to "meditate in thy law", and therein to confess tothee both my knowledge and my ignorance. . . .]

Whatever sense we attach to "confessing" in Augustine's previous use ofthe verb, there is no denying the novelty of his idea of a confessio scientiae[sc. scripturarum], of a voluntary exposure of his limited expertise as aninterpreter of the Bible. If explanation be needed for the plural confessiones

talia volens loqueretur, si quotiens tristitiam metumve nominamus, totiens maerere veltimere cogeremur? Et tamen non ea loqueremur, nisi in memoria nostra non tantumsonos . . . sed etiam rerum ipsarum notiones inveniremus. ..." These reflections leadnaturally to others concerning the problems of finding (invenire) and uttering (confiten,praedicare) God/the Truth.

71. Conf. 10.65.40. Note also 10. 6.10, on man's "conversation" with the naturalworld and the internal "conference" on which its sense depends: "Nonne omnibus,quibus integer sensus est, apparet haec species? Cur non omnibus eadem lo-quitur? . . . immo vero omnibus loquitur, sed Uli intelligunt, qui eius vocem acceptamforis intus cum veritate conferunt."


of the title, the simplest may be that this "professional" confessionÂ—whichis not a confession at all in any sense current at the timeÂ—was grafted on toa work originally planned without it. To say this is not to call in questionthe much-debated "unity" of the Confessions, merely to remark anotherinstance of Augustine's habit of allowing his various, often simultaneousliterary projects to cross and combine with one another. It is easy enoughto find warrants for the developments of Books 11Â—13 earlier in the Con-fessions. As the author turns from the narrative of himself to the mysteriesof Scripture, his references to God's people and to the preaching of God'sword recall the theme of praedicatio announced in the opening sentences ofthe work, and can be taken as a sign that the confessional mode is nowfinally expanding to encompass the professional functions of the priestlyinterpreter.72 This is a legitimate inference, provided we respect the rela-tions between confessio and professio implied in the work as a whole, anddo not try to read Augustine's exegesis of the Creation story in Books 11Â—13 as a specimen sermo ad populum of the kind he might have preached tohis congregation in Hippo. We do indeed see the professional biblicist atwork in these books, but in a context dictated by the preceding parts of theConfessions rather than by the as-yet-unwritten fourth book of the Dedoctrina christiana.

When Augustine says he will "confess" before God whatever he "discov-ers" in the sacred text (11.2.3: confitear tibi quidquid invenero in libristuis), he invites us to consider confession as a possible modus proferendi forthe biblical interpreter. At the same time, he makes that possibility contin-gent on our own activity as readers. As a statement at the beginning ofBook 11 reminds us once again, the aim of his personal narrative in theearlier books has been to turn each and every reader into a fraternal accom-plice in the act of confession: "to stir up the affections both of myself and ofothers who shall read these things; that so together we may say: 'The Lordis great and greatly to be praised'" (11.1.1: ut . . . affectum meum excitoin te et eorum, qui haec legunt, ut dicamus omnes: magnus dominus etlaudabilis valde).73 That affective design does not lapse as confession turnsto, or more fully becomes, biblical interpretation. When, a few lines later,

72. Thus Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 556; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 123,135.1have used this argument myself in discussing the later reception of the De doctrinachristiana and Confessions: "John Donne (1572-1631) in the Company of Augustine:Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance," forthcoming inREAÂ«g39(1993).

73. Cf. refr. 2.6.1 : "Confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de maus et de bonis meisdeum laudant iustum et bonum, atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et affec-tum. Interim quod ad me attinet, hoc in me egerunt cum scriberentur et agunt cumleguntur."


the intending exegete proclaims his desire not only to benefit himself butalso tobe "of use to fraternal charity" (11.2.3: desiderium meum . . . nonmihi soli aestuat, sed usui vult esse fraternae caritati), we are meant torecognize the same perfect symmetry between the self-interested and thealtruistic, feel the accumulated weight of innumerable con-prefixes, andunderstand that we (the fraternal reader) are to carry on participating in aspeech act that is now manifestly a text act of the type prefigured in earlierbooks.

The last three books of the Confessions, Augustine's invitation to acharitable conference de scripturis Sanctis, rank among the hardest inLatin literature. "Anfractuous" one scholar has rightly called them. Theyembrace, inter alia, an exegesis of the biblical Creation story, a demonstra-tion of the multiplicity of possible exegeses of the same, and a discussion ofthe principles on which different exegeses (of this or any biblical text)should be rejected or accepted. Reduced to a set of precepts, a large part ofwhat is said repeats statements already made in the unfinished De doctrinachristiana.74 But Augustine is no longer giving precepts; he is workingthrough examples with his imaginary partners in conference, includingsome who he knows will want to contradict him. Problems of interpreta-tion and adjudication that had been raised theoretically in works such asthe De utilitate credendi and practically by his earlier attempts to expoundGenesis, problems that had become embarrassingly personal in the trian-gular correspondence with Paulinus and Jerome, and with which he hadwrestled at length in the De doctrina christiana, are now the subject of adebate that relentlessly solicits the reader's involvement. Though few lateantique readers can have felt themselves wholly adequate to the task, nonecould mistake what was being required of them: to "seek, ask, knock" incompany with Augustine, in the faithful and charitable hope of "receiving,finding, and entering" with him.75 At the risk of over-simplification, we

74. While some of what is said anticipates the still-to-be-written second part of Book3: Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 565f.

75. Conf. 13.38.53 (the closing sentences of the work): "Et hoc intellegere quishominum dabit homini? Quis Ã¡ngelus angelo? Quis Ã¡ngelus homini? A te petatur, in tequaeratur, ad te pulsetur: sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur." The finalphrase is potentially ambiguous: though the biblical subtext suggests that the "opening"will be made to the human postulant (i.e. by God), the passive form allows the additionalpossibility that one human recipient ("sic accipietur") will "open" what is found ("sicinvenietur") to another. For the implied equivalence "aperire" = "proferre" cf. the open-ing sentences of doctr. chr. prol. 1: "Sunt praecepta quaedam tractandarum scrip-turarum, quae studiosis earum video non incommode posse tradi, ut non solum legendoalios, qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt, sed etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant."


could say that the author of the Confessions had reverted to the manner ofhis earlier "literary debates with those present and with himself alone inthe presence of God" (9.4.7: libri disputait cum praesentibus et cum ipsome solo coram te), the dialogues of Cassiciacum or the De magistro,76 onlythis time with the biblical text as the centre of conference and the City ofGod as its declared goal.

CONCLUSION: CHRISTIAN LITERATUREAS BIBLICAL CONFERENCE

The confessio scientiae of Confessions 11Â—13 registers an importantliterary-pragmatic advance on the De doctrina christiana of 396/7, andmarks a turning-point in Augustine's relations with the Latin reading pub-lic.77 While the earlier treatise had laid an initial emphasis on the socialaspect of biblical interpretation, only to lose itself in semantics, the Confes-sions finally envisages the actus inveniendi et proferendi as the combinedwork of two or more human beings in the presence of God, as an actusconferendi or "conference" performed in the spirit of charity. It therebydeflects possible criticism of the author as one who would undervaluehuman instruction in the science of Scripture, yet without committing himto a fully "professional" (or for that matter markedly ascetic) conceptionof the interpreter's task and social function. It defines an ideal context inwhich a recently elevated bishop could communicate on biblical topicswith men like Paulinus, and not fall victim to the philological rigour of a

At its close the Confessions comes back to the point-of-departure of the De doctrinachristiana, in order to "retract" (but not withdraw!) the statements made there aboutthe role of the human teacher.

76. Thus Pincherle, "Quelques remarques sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin,"La Nouvelle CIb 7-9 (1955-57): 189-206, 206 and "S. Agostino," 574 n. 73, withreference to the Confessions as a whole. But cf. Herzog, " 'Non in sua voce,' " passim,and Franca EIa Consolino, "Interlocutore divino e lettori terreni: lafunzione-destinatario nelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Materiali e discussioniper I'an-alisi dei testi classici 6 ( 1981 ) : 119-46, who both stress the generic innovativeness of thelater work.

77. It is impossible to enter here on the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Confessions, or onthe rich and varied history of the conlatio in Latin Christian literature after Augustine.For evidence of contemporary reaction to the workÂ—little of it directly relevant to theaspects considered hereÂ—see Courcelle, Recherches, 235-47; Les 'Confessions', 201-6. While it is unlikely that Augustine's contemporaries "totally ignored" the last threebooks (as suggested by Consolino, "Interlocutore divino," 135), their engagement withthis part of the Confessions has left fewer traces than one might have hoped for.


Jerome. And it does all this without compromising Augustine's view ofGod as the only source of knowledge, the inner teacher in conference withwhom we discover what is true and what is false. The delicate balancebetween the respective claims of the external divine text and the internaldivine voice is struck at the moment of approach to Genesis 1.1 in Book 11 :

11.3.5: Audiam et intellegam, quomodo in principio fecisti caelum et terrani.Scripsit hoc Moyses et abiit, transiit hinc a te ad te Ã±eque nunc ante me est.Nam si esset, tenerem eum et rogarem eum et per te obsecrarem, ut mihi istapanderet, et praeberem aures corporis mei sonis erumpentibus ex ore eius, etsi hebraea voce loqueretur, frustra pulsaret sensum meum nee inde mentemmeam quiequam tangeret; si autem latine, scirem quid diceret. Sed unde sci-rem, an verum diceret? Quod si et hoc scirem, num ab illo scirem? Intus utiq-ue mihi, intus in domicilio cogitationis nee hebraea nee graeca nee latina neebarbara veritas sine oris et linguae organis, sine strepitu syllabarum diceret:"verum dicit" et ego statim certus confidenter illi homini tuo dicerem: "ver-um dicis."

[Let me hear and understand how thou, "in the beginning created the heavenand the earth." Of this Moses wrote and passed away, he went hence fromthee, to thee, and he is not now before me. For if he were, then would I holdhim fast and beg of him for thy sake that he would discover these things tome; and I would lay these ears of mine to the sound that should break out ofhis mouth. Yet if he should speak Hebrew, in vain would it fall upon my ears,nor would aught of it reach unto my mind; but if he spake Latin, I shouldknow what he said. Yet how should I know, whether he said true or no? Andif I knew this also, should I know it of him? Indeed I should not. For withinme, in that very house of my thought, neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin,nor any barbarous tongue, but Truth itself, without instrument of mouth ortongue, and without the noise of any syllables, would say unto me, "It is thetruth"; and I, being assured thereof, would confidently avow to that man ofthine, "Thou speakest truly."]

The ground on which Augustine rejects an imaginary conversation withMoses is the ground on which he joins in an imaginary conference with hisreaders. Responding to Jerome in the De doctrina christiana, he had stipu-lated a limited knowledge of the original biblical languages, quantum satisest. Now even that requirement is tacitly lifted. Jerome, who in his recourseto the Hebraica Veritas (as he called it) had seemed to identify biblical"truth" with the language of its first expression, might converse withMoses in Hebrew if he wished. The author of the Confessions is not inter-ested in that kind of conversation.78 Less than a decade earlier, in the De

78. The relevance of conf. 11.3.5 to Jerome's theories is remarked by Pincherle,"Quelques remarques", 205. Cf. Gennaro Luongo, "AutobiografÃa ed esegesi bÃblicanelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Parola del Passato 31 (1976): 286-306 at 304-5.


utilitate credendi, he had briefly hinted that the aspiring Christian biblicistshould seek a master in the Holy Land, by implication someone like Je-rome. However, the experience of the intervening years, in particular hisepistolary converse with Paulinus, had convinced him of the pointlessnessof such expedients. Augustine was in Hippo, and there would remain, theanimator of a biblical "conference" of ever-growing dimensions that wouldgo on for centuries after his death. His biographer's attempt to formulatethe nature of this activity (absentes libris docere) may miss something of thecomplexity of the process of Augustinian doctrina, but his services asliterary executor were carried out in precisely the right spirit.

In taking leave of Moses, Augustine also takes his distance, charitablybut deliberately, from his chief rival and partner in the exacting new enter-prise of writing de scripturis for a Latin readership. Jerome had pioneeredthat art, but in a way that was forbidding to all but the most intrepid fellow-travellers. With a little help from his friends (less perhaps than he had oncehoped for), Augustine was now able to open a broader, more companion-able road. The third chapter of Book 11 of the Confessions is the end of theapologia contra Hieronymum and the beginning of one of the greatestconversations in western literature.79

Mark Vessey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University ofBritish Columbia

79. The main tendency that I have discerned in Augustine's literary pragmaticsÂ—namely his desire to establish caritas rather than askesis as the ethical basis for biblicalinterpretationÂ—is consistent with his reinterpretation of the monastic life as describedby Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), 63-83. For a divergent reading of the final books of the Confessions, whichI nevertheless find very persuasive, see Geoffrey Gait Harpham, The Ascetic Imperativein Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119-34. ForHarpham, the Confessions demonstrates an "ascetic practice of reading" that is "atonce, and profoundly, personal, transcendent, and social" (134).

1.2.vessey

Documents

Transcript of 1.2.vessey