Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Exegete 167 matter, one's memory is of very great value. Without a good one, these principles cannot be of much help.30
Exiles Seeking Home
Augustine believed that one has to see the big picture first. So he devotes the entire first book of On Christian Teaching to setting out certain broad, philosophical perspectives. He begins by defining terms and making a series of philosophical distinctions whose relevance emerges only slowly. One initial and famous distinction is between "things to be enjoyed" and "things to be used."31 For Augustine, God is the "thing to be enjoyed" since God alone provides genuine happiness. All other "things" need to be read as signs of God's presence and used as goods that spur us back to God. This lengthy discussion seems, at first sight, oblique to the practical task of interpreting the Bible, but its relevance is teased out slowly. In the passage below, I highlight a key thread in his argument. As Augustine sees it, the human condition is one of exile. We, like Odysseus, may yearn to get back to our homeland, but somehow along the way we have become distracted, seduced by other beauties. Augustine here lays the foundation for his view that the Bible is a collection of road signs that helps us to read the world right and so orients us to use the world as a roadway to get back to God, our true home. From On Christian Teaching, Book 1:
(3.3) There are, then, some things that are to be enjoyed, others that are to be used, still others that are to be enjoyed and used. Those that are to be enjoyed make us happy. Those that are to be used help us as we strive for happiness and, in a certain sense, sustain us so that we are able to arrive at and cling to those realities that make us happy. But if we, who both use and enjoy things, strive to enjoy things we are supposed to use, we find our progress impeded and sometimes even turned aside. Because we are fettered by affection for lesser goods, we are either delayed from gaining those that we are to enjoy or are even drawn away from them altogether.
(4.4) To enjoy something means to cling to it with affection for its own sake. To use a thing is to employ what we have received for our use to obtain what we want, provided that it is right for us to want it. (An unlawfully applied use ought rather to be termed "abuse.") Suppose, then, that we were
30. Doc. Chr. 2.8.12–9.14 (Green, 66–70); my trans. On this, see Anne-Marie LaBonnardière, "The Canon of Sacred Scripture," in Pamela Bright, ed. and trans., Augustine and the Bible (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 26–41.
31. On this famous distinction, Raymond Canning, "Uti/frui," AugEncy, 859–61. For a valuable, but rather technical study, see Oliver O'Donovan, "Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De doctrina christiana I," Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 33 (1982): 361–97.