In our last article, we established that Augustine rejected the possibility of the Bible containing myth, any attempt to interpret nature independently of the Bible, and any attempt to interpret the Bible based solely on nature. He came to these conclusions because the Bible claims to be a revealed account of God and man. As the modern church is beset by both enemies and intended friends pressing natural and mythological accounts of God upon us, it is extremely important that we understand Augustine’s “historical literalism.” The importance of this is heightened by the modern problem of literalism and the rhetorical weight of the term literal among modern Christians.
Let us, return to Augustine’s understanding of literalism:
I have started here to discuss Sacred Scripture according to the plain meaning of the historical facts, not according to future events which they foreshadow. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 39, 1.17.34.
He believed that the Bible’s meaning was “the precise meaning [the author] intended to express (On Christian Doctrine, 1.36.40). The Bible then teaches historical facts when the author represents them as such. And he accepts the book of Genesis as providing such facts. To understand what the Bible teaches about reality is to have its literal meaning. He rejects the possibility of Genesis being mythical, but what he does not reject is that it takes effort to understand what the historical or literal significance of the text is.
Here’s an example of the sort of work that he attempts:
Was it from the unformed material substance that God made a material voice by which He might utter sound, Let there be light? In this supposition, a material sound was created and formed before light. But if this is so, there already was time, in which the voice moved as it travelled through successive localities of the sound. And if time already existed before light was made, at what time was the voice produced which sounded the words, Let there be light? To what day did the time belong? For there is a day on which light was made, and it is the first day in the series. Perhaps, to this day belongs all the extent of time in which the material sound of the voice, Let there be light, was produced, and in which the light itself was made. Ibid, 28,1.9.16.
What Augustine is exploring with exegetical care is the relationship between time, the existence of sequential order, and the number of days in creation. In Augustine’s mind to understand the literal significance of the first day of creation requires that we understand whether time is defined by the existence of sequential order or the existence of light. And he then probes the relationship between the term day and time and the sequential order of words.
Obviously this is not the way that most moderns of any stripe come to the text. We tend to charge in with our presuppositions of Old Earth, Young Earth, neo-Darwinist, or whatever. But Augustine’s meditation includes what we are taught by nature (grammar, lexicon, context, and physical observation) and reason. In his mind, the question of what time is, and the coming into existence of time decide the literal significance of the text.
His tentative conclusion, seen below, is that the text teaches that creation includes at least one twenty-four-hour period, the seventh, or perhaps four twenty-four-hour days:
The more likely explanation, therefore, is this: these seven days of our time, although all the seven days of creation in name and in numbering, follow one another in succession and mark off the division of time, but those first six days occurred in a form unfamiliar to us as intrinsic principles within the created. Hence evening and morning, light and darkness, that is, day and night, did not produce the changes that they do for us with the motion of the sun. This we are certainly forced to admit with regard to the first three days, which are recorded and numbered before the creation of the heavenly bodies. Ibid., 4.18.33.
Our modern materialistic presuppositions require a natural temporal uniformity and continuity which is rarely articulated, but which is quickly exposed by Augustine’s probing. And he has every right to ask both Christians and secularists by what authority we presume. He does not reject that Genesis 1 represents history: the issue is that portions of Genesis 1 may not exist in an identical temporal order to our experience. We know that his conclusion is tentative, because he would be open to readdressing the number of days. He goes to say in this vein:
In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such a case, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search of truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it. That would be to battle not for the teaching of Holy Scripture but for our own, wishing its teaching to conform to ours, whereas we ought to wish ours to conform to that of Scared Scripture. Ibid., 1.18.27.
For Augustine reason is not the source of truth. God is the source of both truth and reason. Reason is fundamentally the ability to distinguish between things and to establish the relationship of those things to each other (cf. On Free Choice of the Will, 6.51-56).Yet given man’s finitude and jejune heart, it is always possible for believers to misinterpret the world and to a lesser degree the Word. Given this possibility, the Christian apologist must accept the posture of humility before both of God’s revelations. “Faith seeking understanding” must allow for correction, even by heathens, but the faith must trump even persuasive natural explanations:
When they are able, from reliable evidence, to prove some fact of physical science, we shall show that it is not contrary to our Scripture. But when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture, and therefore contrary to the Catholic faith, wither we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. And we will so cling to our Mediator, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, that we will not be lead astray by the glib talk of false philosophy or frightened by the superstition of false religion. When we read the inspired books in the light of this wide variety of true doctrines which are drawn from a few words and founded on the firm basis of Catholic belief, let us choose that one which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. But if this is not clear, then at least we should choose an interpretation in keeping with the context of Scripture and in harmony with our faith. But if the meaning cannot be studied and judged by the context of Scripture, at least we should choose only that which our faith demands. For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of a writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief. If both these difficulties are avoided, the reader gets full profit from his reading. Failing that, even though the writer’s intention is uncertain, one will find it useful to extract an interpretation in harmony with our faith. Ibid., 45, 1.21.
Augustine sought to harmonize three components of God’s revelation of himself—nature, the Word, and the faith. The faith for Augustine is the doctrine necessary for us to cling to Jesus Christ as our mediator. This doctrine is found clearly in the Scripture and impressed on at least the hearts if not the minds of all those who believe (cf. Rom. 8:7, 1 John 2:27, 1 Thess. 4:9, Heb. 8:11). Without these beliefs, the catholic or universal faith, there is simply no Christianity 1. To pull a tread from the fabric of the faith begins the process of destroying the entire garment. The Bible and the different communities of Christ’s followers say much more than “the faith,” but to contradict this central core of profession is to jeopardize the possibility of salvation 2. There cannot be a contradiction between the beliefs necessary for salvation, the Word of God, and the world of God, because without the faith there are no people of God.
And so let us conclude here. Literalism in Augustine’s work is the “plain meaning of the historical facts,” but this is not a firstsight reading. The literal meaning is to discern the mind of an infinite God with abject humility and the use of all mental resources. God reveals to us the reality of the events of creation, salvation, and universal human history in the Bible. Augustine’s literalism is a careful harmonizing of the faith, the Word, and the world for the purpose of understanding God’s account. It is a position of humility and not presumption. Bold in what it declares about salvation, but careful in regards to establishing the necessary harmony between the faith, the Word, and the world.
Lord willing, next month, we will continue with the problem of literalism by considering Spinoza’s caustic literalism.
- The catholic faith here cannot mean all the distinctions, past or present, held by the Church of Rome. Proof of this can be found in the Church of Rome’s sporadic persecution of Augustinians since at least Gottschalk (c. 804-c. 869) which intensified and culminated at Trent. The Jesuits’ bitter destruction of the Jansenists, an Augustinian reform movement in the post-Trent Roman Church, also requires that there are contradictions between Augustine’s universal faith and the contemporary doctrine of the Church of Rome. Further, it is not a coincidence that Luther was an Augustinian monk and that one can barely turn a page of Calvin’s Institutes without finding a quote of Augustine nestled among the Scripture citations.
- The absolute minimum for orthodoxy or to be within the faith as to Genesis 1 and 2, requires creation ex nihilo, an historical first man, and an historical fall.