Augustine in His Own Words
chapter 5
Augustine the Exegete
First-time readers of Augustine are struck by his deep biblicism. Every page, every paragraph, is threaded with biblical quotations, biblical allusions, biblical images. Augustine did more than comment on the Bible: he spoke Bible, making its words his words. Once, on the anniversary of his ordination, he explained why: "From what I feast on, from that I feed you. I am a table servant, not the master of the house. From what I set before you, from that I too draw my life."1 For Augustine, the Bible's words were food, were life itself. In this chapter, we turn to the Bible Augustine gazed upon as he preached, exploring how he read it and how he opened up its words to feed his hearers.
Augustine's culture held books in deep esteem. In the ancient world, books were valuable commodities, made of expensive materials and preserved with great care.2 To be educated in the ancient world was to be a reader. Ancient education focused almost obsessively on mastering "the great books." Educated Latins like Augustine had spent long years not only reading their Vergil, Cicero, Horace, and Ovid; they memorized them and could quote and analyze them word-for-word, line-by-line.3 Educated Christians brought such skills to reading the Bible. But for Augustine, the Bible was not just another classic to be memorized, quoted, and analyzed. Addressing pagan readers in his City of God, he noted that the Scriptures' "divine authority puts them above the literature of all other peoples and brings under their sway every type of human genius."4 This is his view in a nutshell: that the Bible is no
1. S. 339.3 (PL 38:1481); my trans. Cf. s. 101.4; 179A.8; and 260D.2. 2. See Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
3. See Henri I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (1956; reprint: Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); R. A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
4. Civ. Dei 11.1 (CCL 48:321); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:187.