Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Exegete 175
Certainly a mind with an innate genius for ingenuity41—if I can put it that way—cannot help but be intrigued that Moses and Elijah and the Lord Himself fasted forty days. The knotty mystery this act symbolizes cannot be unraveled except by thinking about and pondering this number. It holds four times ten—symbolizing the knowledge of all existence as intertwined with times and seasons. Now it is by the number four that the cycles of both day and year run their course: the day is spaced out over morning, afternoon, evening, and nighttime hours; the year, over seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In the times we live in, we need to fast and abstain from enjoying times' delights for the sake of the eternity we want to live in, but in a roundabout way it is in time's very cycling that disdaining the temporal and grasping the eternal are brought home to us. . . . In similar ways, certain analogies lie buried secretly in many other places and other numbers in the Sacred Books, which are closed to readers lacking knowledge of numbers.42
John's Gospel vs. the Synoptics
I wish to illustrate how all these principles come together to shape Augustine's practical exegesis. For this, we will examine a lengthy sermon from the Tractates on the Gospel of John. First, a brief word on how Augustine viewed John and his Gospel. He used to speak of John as an eagle who flew above the misty earth; he also often noted that John had leaned on Jesus' breast at the Last Supper, symbolic of him nursing at the breast of the Word of God.43 In the following passage, Augustine alludes to both images and spells out the difference between John's Gospel and the Synoptics. From Tractates on the Gospel of John 36:
(1) In the four gospels, or rather the four books of the one Gospel, the holy Apostle John, not unjustly compared to an eagle because of his spiritual understanding, has elevated his preaching more highly and much more sublimely than the other three. And in this elevation of his, he also wanted our hearts to be elevated. The three other evangelists, as though they were walking on earth with the Lord in his humanity, said few things about his divinity, but this [evangelist], as if he loathed to walk upon the earth, thundered from the very prologue of his discourse, elevating himself not only above the earth and above all the circuit of air and sky, but also above even the whole host of angels and above the whole hierarchy of invisible powers, and he came
41. "Innate genius for ingenuity" (ingenium quippe . . . ingenuum): an effort to capture Augustine's wordplay.
42. Doc. Chr. 2.16.25 (Green, 84–86); my trans. 43. On the eagle theme, see Jo. ev. tr. 15.1 (BA 71:756); on the nursing theme, see Jo. ev. tr. 1.7 (BA 71:140).