De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture J. Kevin Coyle Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright, editors. De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity, 9. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. xx + 271. $34.95. This volume’s editors rightly note that De doctrina christiana’s history of composition, with its thirty-year hiatus, affords a rare opportunity “for analyzing key issues of Augustine’s thought over the long years of his active ministry” (xiv). The volume is divided into five main sections: Historical setting: Charles Kannengiesser proposes that the long interruption separating Books 1:1–3:35 from the treatise’s final passages comes from Augustine’s eventual decision to address Tyconius Book of Rules. Frederick van Fleteren sees Augustine as the first “to outline an extensive program” whereby the liberal arts “help the Christian reach an intellectus fidei,” and “to achieve a Christian synthesis with secular letters in the Latin West” (14). Pamela Bright perceives in De doctrina christiana’s caution that in Scripture the same thing can have different meanings the exegetical basis of an ecclesiology already developed before Augustine. She then shows how the treatise discusses ambiguity. Kenneth B. Steinhauser argues that the Leningrad manuscript Q.v.I.3 “or its immediate prototype” was commissioned by Augustine himself for Simplicianus of Milan. Delayed from completing the treatise by poor health, Augustine “sent the manuscript with DDC incomplete” (39) to Carthage, where an elegant copy was prepared and forwarded to Simplicianus. Literary structure: Christoph Schäublin discusses the volume’s subtitle. He sees the key to Books 1–3 in Augustine’s use of the rhetorical notion of inventio, whose object is the res, defined here as what the biblical message is and how one obtains access to it. Augustine thus created a “research project,” intended to facilitate “a comprehensive and thorough commentary on the Bible” (55). Adolf Primmer complements Schäublin by addressing the notion of elocutio in Book 4, [End Page 538] where, by “baptizing” Cicero’s rhetoric, Augustine “transcended the categorizations of classical rhetoric” (69). However, Augustine’s true focus is on the preacher, for whom it is important to speak sapienter rather than eloquenter. Takeshi Kato writes on “Sonus et Verbum” in De doctrina christiana 1:13.12. He identifies a fundamental change in Augustine’s attitude to the relationship between the sound of words and their meaning, then examines Wittgenstein’s criticism of Augustine’s theory of language. Sign theory: In “Signs, Communication, and Communities,” R. A. Markus is concerned with “the sign as a means of communication and the way notions of sign and communication opened a way for Augustine to speak of communities” (97). He then investigates each of the terms in his title. Roland J. Teske demonstrates a progression in De doctrina christiana beyond the criterion of absurdity enunciated in De Genesi contra Manichaeos (the scriptural text would make no sense if one adhered to its literal significance) toward the criterion of spiritual interpretation (the text taken literally does not refer directly to truth or morality). David Dawson looks at Augustine’s views on nonliteral refashioning of the biblical text, communication theory, and Scripture as therapeutic. Theology: William S. Babcock addresses “Caritas and Signification” in Books 1–3. Recalling that “the entire treatise has to do with the tractatio of Scripture” (158 n. 7), he observes that the dual love for God and neighbor is “the terminus of all biblical signification” (154). John C. Cavadini’s focus is on “The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric.” The role of the Christian commentator is to make Scripture’s “sweetness, its power to move to conversion, available to others” (165). On the other hand, hearers need to be told truth in a way which will persuade (“delight”) them. J. Patout Burns reviews Augustine’s thinking on conversion when writing Books 1–3, especially the role of Scripture in conversion (passages whose meaning is straightforward lead the seeker to the more figurative ones) and progress in the Christian life (the Spirit assists through the seven gifts). Leo Sweeney suggests that the reason for not listing “infinity” among the...