A Maxim: criticism

Criticisms often come without council; a person breathes out accusations to knock down another’s “house of cards,” but almost never teaches his tongue to edify.

On a related note, Ephesians 4.25-32, English Standard Version, italics added:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

On Augustine’s Confessions: the relationship of many interpretations to one written word

In a previous post, I already noted that Augustine says love stands over all the diverse interpretations of Genesis. His central argument is, in short, that if the interpreter believes that all the Law and Prophets is summarized by the commandments to love his God and his neighbor, then he discredits his own interpretation by violating love whenever he quarrels about the supposedly true meaning of the words. And in Book XII chapter xviii of the Confessions, Augustine writes:

All which things being heard and well considered of, I will not strive about words: for that is profitable to nothing, but the subversion of the hearers; but the law is good to edify, if a man use it lawfully, for that the end of it is charity, of a pure heart and good conscience, and faith unfeigned.

This sentence—which contains citations from 2 Timothy 2.14 and 1 Timothy 1.5,8—may seem straightforward on its surface, but it has roots tapping into some of the main themes running like an underground river through the entire work. First, on the surface, quarrels about words can cause divisions among people who are explicitly commanded to strive to agree on all things. Whereas the disputes may have begun from a desire to come to a better understanding of a biblical passage, which all had agreed beforehand was true, all hope of reaching this better understanding is thwarted by the disappearance of love in the midst of such a dispute. And how exactly is the hearer “subverted”?  Maybe his heart cannot be pure because he is told to hold another’s words in suspicion, even if that one reads from the same passage and presents a tenable interpretation. Maybe his conscience cannot remain good because he will have at the same instant assented to two interpretations while also assenting to the tenet of one possible interpretation, making him divided against himself and unable to plainly confess the truth of the passage. Maybe his faith will become feigned because he will have changed the basis for that faith, now subject to pondering one interpreter against another instead of resting in the unchanging character of the plainly written words; it is no longer a faith in God’s words, but now a faith that must waver in between little gods who have hijacked the words in their disputes. The moment of subverting the hearer is when one claims as his own what had been common to all. In other words, the interpreter’s unduly bold claim forces the hearer or reader to choose one among many instead of the one at the source of the many.

Now this is getting below the surface into one of the main themes of the Confessions:—the relationship of the many and the diverse to the one. The problem arising here in the inquiry about interpretation echoes lofty discussions on both the trinity of God and the catholicity of the church. Of course, for Augustine, three persons are in one God, and many members are in one body, the church, and so an indefinite number of true meanings are found in one written word. In all of these cases, the one is supposed where the many are apparent.  And this supposition has an interesting effect.

At the end of the same chapter cited above, xviii, Augustine poses the possibility that a reader might find a true or truth-yielding interpretation that even the writer did not intend or would not understand. This means that the written word might have the capability of expanding into new territory, of advancing its message according to the sophistication or intelligence of the reader. But this is not in exact accord with the supposition of oneness just mentioned. This is oneness inasmuch as it is a source whence the many pour out. But this sense suggests that the one loses control of the many, that the many have a longstanding independence from the one after they are drawn out. More concretely, this means that the new interpretation suggested by one man stands independent of the passage it was founded in, and also independent of the diverse other interpretations all standing independent from that passage. If two interpreters severally pull out of Genesis what Moses did not put in to it when he wrote it, then these two interpretations can be held against each other on the level of new revelation, competing holy books, whose legitimacy depends not on Genesis or Moses, or any of the Bible, but on the authority of the interpreter. This, clearly, is not what Augustine thinks or advocates.

The supposition of the one mentioned above leads him away from that possibility to a much stronger statement in chapter xxx:

. . . Let us in such manner honour that servant of thine, the dispenser of this Scripture, so full of thy Spirit, that we may believe him, when by thy revelation he wrote these things, to have bent his intentions unto that sense in them, which principally excels the rest, both for light of truth, and fruitfulness of profit.

And then even stronger in xxxi:

And if there be a third truth, or a fourth, yea, if any other man may discover any other truth in those words, why may [Moses] not be believed to have seen all these; he, by whose ministry, God that is but One, hath tempered these holy Scriptures to the meanings of a many, that were to see things true, and yet diverse? For mine own part verily, (and fearlessly I speak it from my heart) that were I to endite anything that should attain the highest top of authority, I would choose to write in such a strain, as that my words might carry the sound of any truth with them, which any man could apprehend of concerning these matters; rather than so clearly to set down one true sense concerning some one particular, as that I should thereby exclude all such other senses, which being not false, could no ways offend me. I will not therefore, O my God, be so heady as not to believe that this man obtained thus much at thy hands. He without doubt both perceived, and was advised of, in those words whenas he wrote them, what truth so ever we have been able to find in them: yea, and whatsoever we have not heretofore been able, no nor yet are, which nevertheless can be found in them.

So the written words also contain the many truths coming from it. The passage is not a source of new revelations, but a single revelation from which interpreters of various abilities and conditions may see different truths, like different faces of the same solid, while also having the other truths available to their consideration if they should change their hermeneutic. And every single interpretation is linked back to the source, back to Moses and the intention under which it was written. The one is not merely the source of the many, it also comprehends the them and lays claim to them. Two interpreters now point back to the original written word in their conversation with each other. Any given passage is now under the scrutiny of the whole of Moses’s writings, or the whole of the Bible. No single interpretation can stand if it does not stand alongside all the other interpretations that hold the written words to be true. This brings to mind something Plato mentions in the Phaedrus, something I will save for another article.

On Augustine’s Confessions: hermeneutics with love

In Book XII of the Confessions, Augustine acknowledges the large variety of interpretations that arise from the first few sentences of Genesis. In the midst of discussing these, he takes a whole chapter, xxv, to propose a fundamental rule for Bible teachers: in no way should they compromise love in discussions about the meaning of the written word.

Behold now, how foolish a conceit it is, in such plenty of most true opinions, as may be fetched out of those same words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses principally meant: and thereby, with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself; for whose sake he spake everything, whose words we go about to expound.

When I first read this I found it a little surprising. Augustine himself had some very strong opinions about Genesis, for the most part supporting an allegorical hermeneutic for the whole creation story. This kind of interpretation he thought was instrumental in combating some, like the Manichæans, who used peculiar literal readings of passages in Genesis as a means to discredit the Old Testament, to maintain that its putative contradictions render it useless for any instruction. So it is conceivable that, because of his success in combating the Manichæans, he would have highly valued his own opinions. Augustine, however, appears very sensitive to the verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble,”* from James 4.6, 1 Peter 5.5, Proverbs 3.34 Septuagint. This he cites in the second sentence of Book I, and then he repeats it many times throughout the whole. He acknowledges his own great intelligence and skill as a writer, but he fears the fruit of these excellences if his pride should get hold of them. So he would rather be contradicted than stand firm in his conceit. To this point he writes about the proud who love their own opinions and assert them too strongly:

Whereas they are so earnest, that Moses did not mean what I say, but what they say; this I neither like nor love: for even if it is so, yet is this rashness of theirs no sign of knowledge, but of over boldness; nor hath seeing further, but swelling bigger, begotten it. And therefore, O Lord, are thy judgments to be trembled at; seeing that thy truth is neither mine, nor his, nor a third’s; but belonging to us all, whom thou callest publicly to partake of it: warning us terribly not to account it private to ourselves, for fear we be deprived of it. For whosoever challenges that as proper to himself, which thou propoundest for all to enjoy, and would make that his own, which belongs to all; that man shall be driven from what is common to all, to what is properly his own; that is, from truth, to a lie. For he that speaketh a lie, speaketh it of his own.

That last sentence, qui enim loquitur mendacium de suo loquitur, is a fairly literal translation of the Greek, ὅταν λαλῇ τὸ ψεῦδος ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, of Joh. 8.44, which is in reference to the devil, who is often associated with pride and prideful men, as at III.vi and X.xliii. Augustine believes that human conceit runs together inextricably with the devil’s deceit. On this premise alone we could consider the healthy fear of our own pride justified. But Augustine’s main point, getting back to that rule for Bible teachers mentioned above, is that pride leads to discord and upsets love. If we believe what Jesus Christ said about the two greatest commandments at Matthew 22.37-40—especially this last verse, “on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets”*—then we believe that our treatment of Genesis is also swallowed up by the commandment to love our neighbor, and therefore we should conduct ourselves in love and never let our reading cause discord, undue argument, or strife. To this point Augustine rightly cites Paul at 1 Corinthians 4.6: “Let us not therefore be puffed up in favor of one, against another, above that which is written.”

*Bible citations so marked come from the English Standard Version.