Nodo unitatis et caritatis: The Structure and Argument of Augustine's De doctrina christiana

Abstract

Much work has been done in the last half-century to shed some light upon the historical background of (and the intellectual motivation for) St Augustine's composition of his great hermeneutical treatise the De doctrina Christiana. In particular, the reason for the work's interruption and its subsequent completion some thirty years later has been the subject of some debate. Perhaps the most useful examination of this problem, as well as the most convincing conclusion, is found in the essay by Charles Kannengiesser. “The Interrupted De doctrina christiana," a paper delivered at the international colloquium entitled "De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture" held at the University of Notre Dame in 1991. Professor Kannengiesser argues that the interruption of the De doctrina christiana was a direct result of a confusion in Augustine's own hermeneutic, precipitated by his investigation of the hermeneutic of the Donatist Tychonius (whose Liber regularis Augustine examines in the conclusion to book III of De doctrina Christiana, under the title of Liber regularum). While this insightful and important article postulates answers to many questions about the Bishop of Hippo's intellectual motivation, both for the interruption of his work and for its resumption, it implicitly raises a further question of no little significance—namely, given the interruption of the work and Augustine's personal intellectual development in the intervening years between its interruption and completion, does the De doctrina christiana present a unified argument or a coherent philosophical understanding of the work of doctrina? For the purposes of this paper historical references will be secondary, as I will examine the De doctrina christiana solely in terms of its structure and argument, as well as its place in the Augustin ian philosophy of which it is a part.