4. Civ. Dei 11.1 (CCL 48:321); trans. Walsh and Monahan, FOTC 14:187. (continued)
The Exegete 157 mere classic of world literature; that its words hold a wisdom and a power, a density and a mystery, befitting divine speech; that of its very nature, the Bible draws in the restless, searching human mind, orders it, and elevates it.
Augustine normally read the Bible in Latin translation, the so-called Vetus Latina ("Old Latin").5 Its various versions—and there seem to have been several—used a clumsy, clunky Latin. When the teenage Augustine first read them, he thought them laughably bad literature compared to the elegant prose stylings of a Cicero. But on the far side of his conversion, he saw things differently. He came not only to love the broader biblical message and the epic biblical narratives; he even came to savor the Vetus Latina's often odd and ungainly turns-of-phrase.
Meanwhile, Jerome (d. ca. 420), the greatest biblical scholar of the day, had settled in a monastery in far-off Bethlehem and had set himself to the task of replacing the Vetus Latina with an elegant new translation.6 Jerome had linguistic skills as had few before him (and as no one would again until the Renaissance), combining a solid command of both Greek and biblical Hebrew with the gifts of a Latin stylist. Jerome's translation, the Vulgate, became the Bible for Western Christianity during the Middle Ages. Around 394 or 395, Augustine embarked on a long-running and, initially, quite contentious correspondence with Jerome. The exchange bore fruit, prompting Augustine to articulate some deeply held convictions about the Bible and the task of interpretation. In one letter, Augustine touched on the difference between their respective talents and respective ministries: "For I neither have nor can have as much knowledge of the divine Scriptures as I see abounds in you. If I do gain any stock of knowledge, I pay it out immediately to the people of God."7
The young Augustine had found the Bible, especially its Old Testament, a serious stumbling block. Only in his 30s, listening week after week to Ambrose's "spiritual" interpretations, did he slowly come to consider that Christianity might have some intellectual plausibility. In Confessions, he noted how Ambrose used to quote 2 Cor 3:6 ("The letter kills, but the spirit gives life") as though an exegetical principle. On the far side of ordination, Augustine passed on to his North African congregation this Ambrosian fondness for "spiritual" interpretation. Readers today tend to describe Augustine's method as "allegorical." That is inexact. "Figurative" was Augustine's usual term
5. See Philip Burton, The Old Latin Gospels: A Study of Their Texts and Language, OECS (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. On Jerome, see J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Mark Vessey, "Jerome," AugEncy, 460–62.
7. Ep. 73.2.5 (CCL 31A:47); trans. Parsons, FOTC 12:332.