On Christian Doctrine

Overview

On Christian Doctrine is a manual, not a meditation. Anyone arriving from the Confessions will find it a completely different kind of book: organised, practical, occasionally dry, written to answer a working problem. The problem is that the church had a text it believed was authoritative and no agreed method for reading it.

The title misleads in English. The Latin is De Doctrina Christiana, and doctrina here means teaching in the sense of instruction, the activity rather than the content. Books I to III are about understanding what scripture says. Book IV is about how to say it to other people. The modern translation by R. P. H. Green is titled On Christian Teaching for exactly this reason.

It was written in two goes, thirty years apart. Augustine drafted the first three books in 396 or 397, not long after becoming a bishop, stopped partway through Book III, and returned to finish it around 426, at the end of his life. He mentions the gap himself in the Retractations. There is no obvious seam, but the fourth book has the confidence of a man who has been preaching for three decades.

It is about a hundred and seventy pages and it is the most useful thing on the shelf for understanding how the Middle Ages read anything.

The argument

Book I: things. Augustine begins with a division that governs the rest. Everything is either a thing or a sign, and a sign is a thing that points beyond itself. Book I is about things, so that we know what the signs of scripture are pointing at.

Things divide again, into those to be enjoyed and those to be used. To enjoy something is to rest in it for its own sake; to use it is to take it as a means toward what you rest in. Only the Trinity is to be enjoyed. Everything else, including other people, including yourself, is to be used, which sounds cold until you see what he means: to love a person properly is to love them toward God rather than to stop at them.

From this comes the rule that made the book famous. Scripture exists to teach the twofold love of God and neighbour. Therefore any interpretation that builds up that love has arrived where the text was going, even if it is not what the author intended. Augustine adds the correction immediately: such a reader is like a traveller who leaves the road and reaches the destination by crossing a field, and should still be put back on the road.

Book II: unknown signs. Now the practical difficulties. Scripture is obscure in places, and Augustine argues the obscurity is deliberate, placed there to subdue pride and to keep the mind from boredom, since nothing found with effort is despised. He gives the canon, advises comparing translations, and recommends learning Hebrew and Greek.

Then the curriculum. To read the Bible you need history, because it dates events; natural science, because it mentions animals and stones and plants; number, because scripture counts; music; logic, which is not a human invention but a discovery of how inference already works; and rhetoric. All of it comes from pagan sources, and Augustine’s defence is the gold of the Egyptians: the Israelites leaving Egypt took gold and silver and clothing that the Egyptians had used badly, and put it to better purpose, and Christians may do the same with whatever is true in pagan learning. He is equally firm about what to leave: astrology, divination, and the whole apparatus of pagan religion, which he analyses as a system of signs agreed with demons.

Book III: ambiguous signs. How to handle a passage whose words you understand but whose sense is unclear. Check the punctuation and the pronunciation. Consult the rule of faith and clearer passages elsewhere. And then the working rule for figure: anything that, taken literally, cannot be referred to purity of morals or truth of faith, is figurative and must be read as such. He applies this to the patriarchs, whose polygamy and violence embarrassed readers then as now, arguing that a practice can be innocent in one age and shameful in another. The book closes with the seven interpretive rules of the Donatist writer Tyconius, given at length and with criticism, which is a notable thing for a bishop to do with a schismatic’s work.

Book IV: teaching. The oldest Christian rhetoric. Augustine, a professional rhetorician before his conversion, addresses the suspicion that eloquence is manipulation. His answer is that eloquence is neutral and currently monopolised by liars: since the art of persuasion can be used for truth or falsehood, it would be absurd for truth to be the side that stands there unarmed and dull.

He takes Cicero’s three styles, plain, middle and grand, and reassigns them to three duties: to teach, to delight, and to move. Teaching is obligatory and the others serve it. A preacher whose hearers do not understand has failed, whatever else he achieved, and Augustine is prepared to sacrifice correctness for clarity, remarking that it is better to be blamed by grammarians than not understood by the people. He then demonstrates by analysing the prose of Paul and Amos for its rhetorical structure, and ends on the point everything has been building to: the life of the speaker weighs more than any style he can command.

How to read it

Read Book I entire, Book II through the gold of the Egyptians, and all of Book IV. Book III’s detail on ambiguity is for specialists, though the rule about figurative reading is worth having.

Read it after the Confessions, not before. It is much more interesting once you know that the man laying out this calm curriculum was a rhetoric professor who thought his own profession had been a sales job.

Keep the things-and-signs distinction in front of you. Almost every difficulty in the book dissolves once you ask which of the two Augustine is talking about.

Notice how much the rule of charity permits. It licenses an enormous amount of allegorical reading, and the medieval fourfold interpretation of scripture grows straight out of this permission. Notice also the limit he immediately attaches, which later readers often did not.

The common misreading is to treat the use-and-enjoy distinction as contempt for the world. Augustine is arguing about where a love terminates, not about whether things are good, and he says elsewhere and often that they are.

Questions it raises

• If an interpretation that increases love is not wrong, what work is the author’s intention still doing?
• Augustine says scripture’s obscurity is providential. Is difficulty ever evidence of depth, or is that a way of protecting a text from criticism?
• The gold of the Egyptians licenses taking what is true from anywhere. Who decides what counts as gold, and by what standard?
• He rules that a passage which offends morals or faith must be read figuratively. Does that method make the text unable to correct the reader?
• Is rhetoric really neutral? Augustine says the tool serves whoever picks it up, but he spent his youth teaching people to win arguments they should have lost.
• The preacher’s life is said to matter more than his eloquence. What follows for a true thing said by a bad person?