Teaching Christianity
"basilica, where they were collaborating, not prophesying"; and that this is how the Jewish historian Josephus also tells the story. See City of God XVIII, 42 and 43.
[51]. Not necessarily Greek-speaking Churches. He would have had primarily in mind the Churches of Carthage, Rome, and Milan—and would soon have won the right to include the Church of Hippo Regius among them.
[52]. See Jn 9:6–7. As the name means "Sent," the pool signifies Christ, in whom we wash in the sacrament of baptism, thereby having the eyes of our faith illuminated. This provides Augustine with the key by which to interpet the whole passage in terms of the salvation brought to humanity (born blind in original sin) through the Word becoming flesh (spittle mixed with soil).
[53]. See Mt 10:16. It is indeed usually the fabulous knowledge of things that helped the Fathers, and great spiritual writers like Saint Francis de Sales, to extract profound mystical meanings from the figurative expressions of scripture.
[54]. See Eph 4:22–24; Col 3:9–10.
[55]. See Gn 8:11.
[56]. He is not referring to ignorance of elementary arithmetic, but of what one may call theological or mystical arithmetic, the symbolism of numbers—let us call it arithmology.
[57]. He is lightly apologizing for a Latin pun which cannot be conveyed in translation: Ingenium quippe, ut ita dixerim, ingenuum…
[58]. See Ex 24:18; 1 Kgs 19:8; Lk 4:2.
[59]. The four elements of ancient chemistry, earth, water, air, and fire.
[60]. See Mk 9:2–8.
[61]. Reading et instead of the text's vel, or. He is not giving the Trinity as an alternative reason for multiplying 50 by 3, but as a reason for then adding 3, to get 153.
[62]. See Jn 21:11. The fish represent the Church of the blessed after the resurrection of the dead. This gives us Augustine's earliest way of interpreting this number 153. See Sermon 229M, 2–3 for his more mature preference in this matter, treating 153 as the "triangle" of 17; that is, 17+16+15…+1 = 153. See also Sermons 250, 251, 252A, 270. In Sermon 252, on the other hand, an earlier sermon preached in 396, about the time he was writing this work, he treats the number as here in our text.
To us it may all seem rather bizarre; and yet surely Augustine is right in assuming that the evangelist regarded the number 153 as significantly symbolic.
[63]. It is I who impose this word on Augustine; he just says unskilled in numbers; but we have seen what a very special "science of numbers" he has in mind.
[64]. Quidam in the singular. I suspect he means Tychonius. See
Translator's Note.
[65]. With the first three commandments, as Augustine counted them, referring to our duties to God, and the next seven to our duties to our neighbor.
[66]. To explain how this number has something musical about it, and how knowledge of musical theory helps to unravel its mystery, would call for a rather long article. Instead of writing one here, I refer the reader to The Trinity in this series, Book IV, sections 1–10, and note 40 to that book.
[67]. Two manuscripts have Minerva instead of Memory. But in his work on Order II, 41, he mentions the same myth, and there too the Muses are daughers of Memory.
[68]. Whether this "rational" explanation of the three original Muses, so to say, comes from Varro or Augustine himself, I cannot tell. Given the derivation of the word "music" from "muse," the explanation seems likely enough. Of the nine to whom Hesiod is said to have given names, Euterpe was conventionally the Muse of music, and Polyhymnia, presumably, of choral singing; Calliope possibly of instrumental music. But they do not seem to have been allotted the spheres of influence which Augustine suggests. The other six were Clio, the Muse of history, Thalia of comedy, Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dancing, Urania of astronomy, and Erato, presumably, of lyric poetry.
[69]. So the CCL text, with almost all the manuscripts. The Maurists, however, emend deum to repertorem, "their inventor," without giving its warrant for doing so. As a sheer emendation of the text it is certainly very bold.
[70]. As the Maurists punctuate, this sentence would run: "… and acknowledging it, they should repudiate all superstitious fictions even in the sacred books." While Augustine could indeed allow that the scriptures contained superstitious fictions —for example, the brazen serpent (2 Kgs 18:4)—I do not think that that interpretation fits this context, and what he goes on immediately to say, which refers to idolatries universally condemned in the scriptures.
[71]. See section 41 onward.
[72]. They were of a quasi licentiore vanitate, because they were the official diviners employed by the Roman state, before it was formally converted to Christianity.
[73]. Saltandis; so CCL and almost all the manuscripts. The Maurists, on the strength of one manuscript, of which CCL does not even acknowledge the existence, substitutes aptandi, "or even to be applied somehow or other." But this is very feeble and flat.
The "dancing" of charms or spells is, I believe, a feature in some socalled voodoo rites of the Caribbean, or vodun of West Africa— dancing controlled by symbolic signs marked out in various colors on the dancing floor.
[74]. The casters of horoscopes. The Oxford English Dictionary does give "genethliac" as an English word; the Greek genethlia means first of all a birthday party—an important element of which, no doubt, was the casting of the host's horoscope. The Latin word translated "astrologers" is mathematici. The superstition he is here attacking is of course both very common and very lucrative today.
[75]. The text, both CCL and the Maurists, has et aliquando etiam pervestigent; but pervestigent adds nothing to the previous verb, consectentur; it simply means to investigate thoroughly. So I am guessing that Augustine wrote praevestigent—possibly inventing the word, as it does not figure in Lewis & Short. He would have been thinking, I assumed, of forecasts of eclipses and other such celestial phenomena made by astrologers.
[76]. He is referring to the names of the signs of the zodiac, as well as of certain constellations. The human beings would be Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, Virgo, Sagittarius, Aquarius, and constellations such as Orion.
[77]. Presumably what he means is that the goddess Venus never actually existed.
[78]. The old names for July and August, counting the months from March. As no other imperial worthies emerged to match the two founders of the Julian dynasty, the next months remained the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth; September, October, November, December.
[79]. Literally, "constellations"; but the use of this word in its astrological sense is obsolete in English, while its nearest equivalent, "conjunctions," is a respectable term of scientific astronomy.
[80]. See Eph 2:2. It was a common Jewish belief that the lower atmosphere was infested with evil spirits, just as it is a common contemporary belief that it is infested with germs. See also Lk 10:18, Rv 12:9.
[81]. Such as going back to bed if you sneeze when putting on your shoes.
[82]. See 1 Sm 28:8–19, Acts 16:16–18.
[83]. The only return scripture mentions as being barred to us is the return to paradise, Gn 3:24, and that was barred by an angelic sentry placed there by God. Augustine is writing rather loosely here; but that seems to have been the image at the back of his mind.
[84]. The letter X—ten in Roman numerals, the letter chi in the Greek alphabet, the equivalent of the guttural German "ch" in achtung.
[85]. It means a beet root in Latin.
[86]. In Greek it means "say," in Latin "choose" or "read." For Augustine personally it would primarily have meant "read," recalling the dramatic incident of his conversion, when he heard a child's voice singing Tolle, lege, tolle, lege—"Pick up and read, pick up and read"—and he picked up the volume of Paul's letters, opened it at random, and read Rom 13:3–14 (Confessions VIII, 12).
[87]. Augury was the art of divination by bird watching. Augustine seems here to be assuming what he is setting out to prove, namely, that such things are only signs when they are being observed as such. The fact, if it was a fact, that augurs only observed them when divining, and not at other times, hardly implies that they did not regard them as being signs of their very nature. The fact that I am not always reading a book does not imply that I think it only has a significant content when, and because, I am reading it.
[88]. The only other sort that occurs to me is mosaics; but perhaps he may have been including straightforward stage plays, acting out a story.
[89]. Clearly Augustine would have had no more time for novels and for "light reading" than he had for theatrical performances. In modern times it looks as if he would have found himself at home in the strictest, one may say narrowest, Puritanical tradition. And yet he was not in fact a narrow-minded bigot; the bark of his bigotry, a characteristic rhetorical Ciceronian bark, was much more severe than its bite.
[90]. In the text, both of CCL and the Maurists, section 40 begins with this sentence.
[91]. See sections 15—25 above.
[92]. Literally, "… notes, learned by those who are called notaries."
[93]. That is to say, the holy scriptures and how to expound them.
Augustine does not want the clergy so to specialize in some secular branch of learning that they neglect their proper theological studies, and the application of them to their pastoral duties.
[94]. There he leaves these arts and sciences—his Latin just says "these things/matters"—which pertain to the senses. We have to remind ourselves that all the time he is talking about signs; and the only reason I do not translate here as "those signs," but as "those arts and sciences," is that we do not naturally talk about history, natural science, logic, etc., which he goes on to discuss at length, as signs.
So, coming to those which pertain to the senses, it will transpire that he includes history among them—I presume because it deals with external, physical events and realities; also astronomy and all practical arts and crafts.
[95]. Respectively the official Greek and Roman methods of dating events. An olympiad was a period of four years between Olympic games, the first games having been traditionally celebrated in what we now call 776 B.C. As Roman consuls held office just for a year, dating events by who were the consuls that year was about the clumsiest method imaginable, requiring huge lists of consuls dating back to the expulsion of the kings from Rome. So a rather better way of dating was ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city, traditionally put in 753 B.C. Our AD/BC chronology was only introduced some 100 years after Augustine's death; and as is well known, the ingenious monk who invented it, Dionysius Exiguus, or Denis the Short, got it wrong by about 6 years, Jesus in fact being born about 6 B.C, seeing that Herod the Great, in whose reign he was born, died in 4 B.C. But we should not be too hard on Denis the Short; collating all those different calendar systems—there was also the Seleucid one of the Hellenistic kingdoms, dating events from "the year of the Greeks," from 312 B.C., to be found in the books of the Maccabees—must have been mind-boggling.
[96]. See Jn 2:20–21.
[97]. See Lk 3:23.
[98]. The accepted period of three years for Christ's ministry derives entirely from John's gospel. From the synoptic account it could have lasted as little as one year or as long as four or five. Presumably Augustine thought it lasted three years—but he is not really interested; his only concern here is to save the number 46 from being taken literally as applying to Christ's age, and so to preserve its mystical sense. See note 66 above.
[99]. See the passage from Revisions given above, before Book I.
[100]. In section 24 above.
[101]. He is alluding, I presume, to the practice of using certain scriptural texts as protective charms, or in the concoction of love philtres and other suchlike superstitious tomfooleries.
[102]. See section 30 above. It is these "characters" that would often be little scriptural texts, frequently the divine name.
[103]. That such a superstitious signification could be effective
Augustine did not doubt; it would be so thanks to demonic collaboration.
[104]. Fatua fata in the Latin—or, as I am interpreting Augustine's mind, fatua Fata, the Fates as goddesses. So astronomy is cavalierly dismissed because of its close relationship with astrology; and to be fair to Augustine, the two arts/sciences were almost indistinguishable in the minds of nearly all his contemporaries, including almost all astronomers.
[105]. Reading fata with six manuscripts mentioned by the Maurists, instead of the facta "our deeds," of both the Maurists' and CCL's text. CCL does not even mention this alternative reading.
[106]. See section 32 above, note 74.
[107]. Since public speaking and argument were, in civil life, almost exclusively confined to the law courts, it is lawyers and their tricks and their rhetorical tours de force that he primarily has in mind in this section.
[108]. This, of course, is not itself a universal statement about the truth of all statements. We must again not forget that Augustine's work is concerned with teaching Christianity, and so the only statements or opinions he is interested in are religious and theological ones.
[109]. The Latin word is sententia, which I have also been translating as "statement." Augustine is surely equivocating somewhat in his use of it. In the case of the resurrection we begin with a false statement that there is no resurrection of the dead; and we then in effect, to set our logical argument in motion, put it in the form of a true proposition: "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ risen from the dead"—a true proposition containing two false statements.
But now we are beginning with a false proposition (still a sententia in Augustine's Latin), "If a snail is an animal, then it has a voice," which starts from the true statement, "A snail is an animal."
[110]. Here, by the word conexio, which I have been translating "logical inference," he must mean the conclusion inferred, not the valid rule by which it is inferred.
[111]. The essential aim of eloquence in classical antiquity was to persuade, above all to persuade judges and juries, since it was before all else a forensic art.
[112]. The error of treating education as an end in itself, or of imagining that it is the infallible key to success and happiness in life. Nowadays it is more likely to be a scientific rather than a liberal education that is the subject of such mistaken ideas. For Augustine, of course, the happy life is not obtainable in this world; it is identical with the eternal life of the next.
[113]. This statement could be thought to call in question Augustine's whole enterprise in writing this work! Remember how it begins: "There are some rules for dealing with the scriptures, which I consider can be not inappropriately passed on to students."
[114]. The Latin calls them "intelligible numbers," intellegibiles numeri, which I find quite inexplicable and unintelligible, getting no help at all from dictionaries and encyclopedias.
[115]. To geometry, music, and astronomy.
[116]. The truth of which, that is, does not derive from human invention or institution.
[117]. These, in my view, are the young men we would now call seminarians or ordinands. There were no seminaries in those days, but there were boys and young men who had received the minor orders of reader and acolyte, and who usually lived with the clergy of their town or village, to receive some kind of education from them; and perhaps they were sometimes sent by them to the equivalent of the local grammar school.
[118]. The text reads et ignotas propter suspiciones errantium, literally, "and unknown because of the suspicions of those who err"—a text with which I consider a translator is entitled to take as much liberty as is needed to make sense of it.
[119]. In the Latin, praeter rationem disputationis et numeri.
[120]. Terence, Andria, 6l.
[121]. That is, Aramaic; its later form is known as Syriac, the language of several Christian liturgies.
[122]. The Church historian, a contemporary and sycophantic biographer of the Emperor Constantine I. Augustine is here probably referring, not to Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, but to his Chronicon, a summary of world history. Eusebius did write a book on biblical topography, Bible place names, called the Onomasticon, which Augustine was presumably unaware of.
[123]. An imperfect, as well as an excessively long sentence. I take it as indicating that while Augustine completed this work when he came to his Revisions, he did not in fact revise what he had already written.
[124]. See Ex 3:22; 11:2–3; 12:35–36. It is not quite clear why
Augustine says they secretly (clanculo) despoiled the Egyptians. Perhaps it is because they asked their Egyptian neighbors to lend them these things, while having no intention of giving them back. How often most of us have been secretly plundered in this way, or secretly plundered others!
[125]. These, I imagine, would be superstitious practices and pagan rites.
[126]. Lactantius, an apologist, an older contemporary of Eusebius', who died about 320 as a very old man, and tutor to Constantine's eldest son Crispus, who was murdered by his imperial father a year or two later; Victorinus, an older contemporary of Augustine's, also an African, something of a philosopher, whose conversion in Rome fairly late in his life made a great impression on Augustine (Confessions VIII, 2); Optatus, also an older contemporary, and bishop of Milevis in Numidia, an anti-Donatist writer who died about 400; Hilary, bishop of Poitiers from about 353 till his death in 367, a staunch ally of Athanasius in the fight against Arianism. As Augustine does not mention Ambrose, for whom he had the greatest admiration, one may infer that he wrote this work, or at any rate reached this part of it, before Ambrose's death in 397.
[127]. See, for example, 1 Cor 10:1–11.
[128]. See Jn 5:39.
[129]. See Heb 10:1.
[130]. Doing good works in Christ is signified by the breadth of the cross on which his hands were stretched, hands standing for works; persevering in adhering to him is signified by its length, where his whole body was fixed; hoping for heavenly things is represented by its upper part where his head was, he the head of the body being now in heaven; not profaning the sacraments is represented by its depth hidden in the ground, because it meant observing the discipline of the secret.
[131]. See 1 Kgs 3:13.
[132]. What Augustine probably meant by the lowliness or humility of scripture was its lack of the polished style of the classical Latin authors. It was this that had put him off Christianity and its scriptures as a very young, and very conceited, student and teacher of rhetoric.
Book III
Introduction
1, 1. Those who fear God are conscientious about seeking his will in the scriptures. And so, being gentle with the spirit of piety, to preserve them from a love of rivalry; well equipped too with a knowledge of languages, to save them from getting stuck over unknown words and expressions; well equipped also with a knowledge of a number of things that are necessary, lest they should be ignorant of the force and nature of things that are mentioned by way of comparison; assisted as well by the accuracy of their copies of the text, which a conscientious and expert work of correction has procured them—they must come now, thus well furnished, to the discussion and solution of the ambiguities of the scriptures.
But in order not to be led astray by ambiguous signs, as far as it is possible for them to be instructed by me—it could happen, though, that with the brilliance of their intellect or their more thorough enlightenment they scorn these ways I wish to show them as just childish—but still, as I had started to say, insofar as they are capable of being instructed by me, those who are in the right frame of mind to be instructed by me should know that the ambiguities of scripture are to be found in words used either in their proper or in their metaphorical senses, two ways of using words which we pointed out in the second book.
Ambiguities over phrasing
2, 2. But when ambiguities arise in scripture about the meaning of words used in their proper sense, the first thing we must do is see whether we have phrased or pronounced them wrongly. So when, on paying closer attention, you still see that it is uncertain how something is to be phrased, or