Augustine's Hermeneutics: How to Read the Confessions

Abstract

Whether we like it or not, we must deal with texts. When a text contains specific hermeneutic principles instructing the reader how to interpret it, it seems that these principles should be examined closely and should be given priority, when interpreting that text, over other, perhaps conflicting, hermeneutic principles. In such a case, the question of a hermeneutic circle arises: how can the reader approach the text in order to learn how to interpret it appropriately without first knowing how to interpret what one finds? The Confessions is such a text, and Augustine's answer to this question would be that a faith that is motivated by charity is needed in order to transcend this gap between the author and reader, this severance whose source can be traced back to humanity's original separation from God. The result of this original separation, this Fall, is the splitting apart of the members of a true, Christian community, a group of individuals bound together under God by mutual charity and love. While this paper does not deal with the hermeneutic circle, per se, it does examine Augustine's guidelines for correctly interpreting Scripture and suggests that these same hermeneutic principles can be applied to the Confessions itself. This is done not for the sake of mere curiosity, although it is interesting to apply a text's hermeneutics to itself, but because Augustine implies that we should (XII.31; XII.26). Because I apply the Confessions' hermeneutics to the Confessions, this paper restricts itself to this work alone, referring to Augustine's other writings only rarely. Since the Confessions calls for an openness to a plurality of interpretations, and because this paper applies these hermeneutic principles to the work itself, it is important to see the Confessions from various perspectives. In section I, three such approaches to the Confessions are presented: the theological, the spiritual, and the historical. From the theological perspective, one may ob-