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Subject: BMCR 96.3.13, Green, ed./trans., Augustine De Doctrina Christiana
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With apologies for the duplication, here is a review I just published in
BMCR of a recent and importantly useful Augustinian volume. The paradox
is that I have a very old and now quite dated translation of the same
work on my WWW site freely available, but must still recommend the book
as a distinct advance, for all its limitations.
jo'd
R.P.H. Green, ed. and trans. Augustine: De Doctrina
Christiana. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xxvi, 293.
ISBN 0-19-826334-1.
Reviewed by James J. O'Donnell -- University of Pennsylvania
Augustine's handbook on the interpretation of scripture, designed
for the Christian rhetorician in a pulpit, is a book of genuine
originality and long-lasting impact. It was one of the first
things written by Augustine after his elevation to the ambivalent
position of bishop in the church of Hippo. He evidently planned
four sections or books: one on the content of Christian
instruction, one on strategies for dealing with "unknown signs",
one on "ambiguous signs", and one on modes of rhetorical
presentation. In more ways than one the text evokes Cicero's
Orator, especially in the fourth book, and the deployment
of a Ciceronian model to Christian purpose itself recalls
Ambrose's De officiis ministrorum of the previous decade.
The ambivalence of his episcopal position arises from the way he
and a few others like Ambrose were busily transforming a
charismatic ministry into a public office (Neil McLynn's
Ambrose of Milan (Berkeley 1995) is richly instructive in
this regard.)
But Augustine did not finish the book he started when he started
it. In his last years, he tells us in his Retractationes,
he found it incomplete in his library (broken off in the middle
of the third book) and carried it forth to completion. (There is
palaeographical evidence to suggest that the first two books had
a circulation in Augustine's lifetime before he came back to
complete the work.) I am not sure that if he had not told us,
any wise scholar would have detected the discontinuity of more
than 30 years in the work's composition.
The work's reputation in our times depends on its curious
anticipation of some of our concerns. With its abstract
discussion of "things" and "signs" it holds an important place in
the history of semiotic theory, while its application of theory
to biblical texts gives it a shaping place in the history of
allegorical interpretation generally and medieval culture
specifically. The last widely disseminated translation of the
text was made in the 1950s by D.W. Robertson, Jr., the American
Chaucerian who held that this text was a key to the
interpretation of virtually all of medieval vernacular literature
and so sought a broader distribution for it. It does indeed
offer a twofold interpretation of texts that might as well be
called "literal" and "allegorical". Most readers have accepted
Augustine's assertion that the literal sense is prior to the
allegorical, but the most unsettling thing about the book is the
way it really suggests the exact opposite: that figurative use
of language is natural, and the desire to take figurative
language literally is a disordered interpretation conditioned by
seeing texts on a page, where irony and metaphor can leak away.
Read with that optic, the De Doctrina Christiana is a
landmark in the history of the naturalization of the written word
as a bearer of culture. The ease with which we understand even
the parts we disagree with is a sign of its success, and its
ability to mislead.
R.P.H. Green is well known for work in fourth century Latin,
especially for his magisterial edition of Ausonius' works
(Oxford, 1991). He has produced a serviceable text and
translation in a compact volume which deserves to be widely
available in paperback. The text has been reviewed against the
manuscripts, but is still based on the Green and Martin editions
of a generation ago. The translation is fresh and represents
Green's most substantive contribution. The introduction is brief
and makes no original contribution, while the annotation is quite
thin and appears to arise out of a preoccupation with this
particular text and whatever puzzles present themselves rather
than any long frequentation of the Augustinian corpus. The
translation is remarkably accurate as far as Latinity goes, but
falls down, when it does, on the interpretation of substance.
The first sentence of the text (pp. 2-3) is instructive:
Sunt praecepta quaedam tractandarum scripturarum quae
studiosis earum video non incommode posse tradi, ut non solum
legendo alios qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt sed
etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant.
Green: There are certain rules for interpreting the
scriptures which, as I am well aware, can usefully be passed
on to those with an appetite for such study to make it
possible for them to progress not just by reading the work of
others who have illuminated the obscurities of divine
literature, but also by finding illumination for themselves.
One Latin sentence produces on English sentence, whose back might
break for some readers around the phrase "to make it possible".
It would be possible to quarrel with "as I am well aware" (the
point is not that others would hold this position but that
Augustine would assert it: "video" is closer to "I think" or "I
would suggest"), but in the last phrase there is a real
breakdown. "Aperire" in this context (as in the previous phrase)
is clearly used of exposition of a text and the striking
("etiam") conjunction lies in the claim that illumination comes
not only from reading but even from the act of interpreting for
others itself. One might think of the character in Forster who
said she didn't know what she knew until she heard what she had
to say, or one might think of Augustine himself, "egoque ipse
multa quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse confitear" (Aug.
de trinitate 3, pro. 1: "and I would confess that there
are many things I did not know that I have learned in the course
of writing"). (Robertson had this point right, but a
selective comparison reveals that indeed this version is superior
in accuracy on numerous points.) The error here is not so much
Latinity as sense: failing to get Augustine's point. The few
other similar points of disagreement I have found all lend
themselves to the same explanation.
This volumes comes on the heels of the recent De doctrina
Christiana : a classic of western culture (edited D.W.H.
Arnold and P. Bright: Notre Dame, 1995) and its companion volume
Reading and wisdom : the De doctrina Christiana of Augustine
in the Middle Ages (ed. by E. D. English: Notre Dame, 1995).
The two are products of a conference held in South Bend several
years earlier and present a variety of quite valuable papers.
There is also a concise commentary in Italian by Luigi Alici and
others, a study of the text's relation to Ciceronian rhetoric by
Peter Prestel, and a recent Konstanz Habilitation by Karla
Pollmann that offers promise but does not yet appear in the RLIN
catalogue. One comes away feeling that the text has not yet
given up its secrets with an open hand, but for it to do so would
require a fuller and deeper study of Augustine's exegetical
theory and practice than we yet possess. In the meantime, this
volume may (and should) stimulate investigation in that direction
and will find a wide and grateful readership among patristic and
medieval students.