1 2 Vessey

Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"
Mark Vessey
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer 1993, pp. 175-213 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.vessey.html
Access Provided by Nanyang Technological Univ at 10/22/10 4:28AM GMT
Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"

MARK VESSEY
In the decade or so between his ordination to the priesthood and the completion of the Confessions Augustine can be seen working towards a "literary pragmat-
ics" that would provide an integrated vision of the relations between (1) the
Christian writer, (2) texts of his own composition, (3) the biblical text, and (4) his fellow Christian readers-and-writers. As expounded and enacted in the De doctrina Christiana and Confessions this Augustinian literary pragmatics de-
pends on the ideal of the biblical "conference": a text act performed jointly by
two or more human beings in the presence of God and in a spirit of charity. Au-
gustine formulates the conference paradigm in reaction to Jerome's advocacy of an ascetic and professional practice of scriptural interpretation, using hints supplied by his epistolary conversation with Paulinus of NoIa. The ensemble of the
De doctrina Christiana and Confessions may thus be construed as an apologia contra Hieronymum silently dedicated to Paulinus.
According to his first biographer, when Augustine returned from Italy to

his native North Africa in 388, he and his friends gave themselves up to a
life of fasting, prayer, good works, and Bible study. Like the blessed man in the Psalms, the former public orator of Milan now delighted in "meditating day and night in the law of the Lord." The fruits of this meditation, too, were made public: Et de his quae sibi deus cogitanti atque oranti intellecta revelabat, et praesentes et absentes sermonibus ac libris docebat ("And
what God revealed to his understanding as he thought and prayed, he would teach in conversation to those who were present and in books to those who were not").1 Possidius did not join Augustine's circle until a few
1. Vita S. Augustini 3.2. Quotations follow the edition of A. A. R. Bastiaensen in Vite dei Santi, ed. Christine Mohrmann, Vol. 3: Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino (s.l.: Mondadori, 1975). Journal of Early Christian Studies 1:2 175-213 1993 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
176
JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
years later, so it is possible that he allowed subsequent developments to
influence his description of the primitive community at Thagaste.2 Be that as it may, the account given in the Vita Augustini of the saint's activity in teaching and writing is fully consistent for all phases of his post-conversion career. As pious layman, priest, and then bishop, Augustine continually
meditated on "the things of God", imparted what he discovered (that is, what God revealed to him) by word of mouth to those he could reach in this way, and committed the same to writing for the benefit of readers in other places and times. Possidius' attention to the processes of doctrinal transmission is aston-
ishingly scrupulous; his narrative is punctuated throughout with references to Augustine's habits of Bible study, preaching, writing, and publication, and to the experiences of his listeners and readers. No other saint's life from late Latin antiquity stands comparison with the Vita Augustini in
respect of such information.3 How are we to account for this peculiarity? If

the choice is between regarding it as a hagiographer's quirk and as the reflection of Augustine's personal preoccupation with the modalities of
Christian doctrina, we shall have no difficulty preferring the latter alternative. Possidius' presentation of Augustine's life and literary works (listed in
an appendix to the Vita) reposes on a set of reasoned assumptions, worked

out or approved by Augustine himself, about the cooperation of literate and articulate Christians in the intellection and promulgation of revealed Truth. Those assumptions relate to the nature of divine revelation (includ-
ing the function of Scripture); the personal qualities, lifestyle, and public
comportment of the religious teacher; the social and institutional contexts of Christian instruction; and the needs and abilities of a late antique Christian readership. More concisely, they specify the conditions of a doctrinal
and literary practice dedicated to bringing human beings to a knowledge and love of God; or, in terms of a distinction proposed by Augustine himself, a policy of charitable use in the service of everlasting enjoyment. Although modern humanistic discourse has no ready way of naming this
ensemble of concerns, many of them can be shown to fall within the province of "literary pragmatics,"4 defined as a science of the relations
2. But see now George P. Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45-62, and William J. Collinge, "Developments in Augustine's Theology of Community Life After A.C. 395," AugStud 16 (1984): 60. 3. Cf. Christine Mohrmann's introduction to Vita di Cipriano, etc., xliii; Philip Rousseau, "The Spiritual Authority of the Monk-Bishop: Eastern Elements in Some Western Hagiography ofthe Fourth and Fifth Centuries," JThSn.s. 22 (1971): 380-419
at406n.l.
4. The essays in Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger D. Sell (London: Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, 1991) offer a variety of definitions of this concept. My own use of the term is
VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION
177
between texts, the users of those texts, and the conditions (material and ideological) of such use. In another article, conceived in conjunction with
this one, I hope to show that Possidius' simplified and systematized account of the principles of Augustinian doctrina can serve as a basis for theorizing Christian literary activity in late antiquity. Here I want to take a closer look at some of those principles as they emerge from Augustine's writings of the 390s, and to begin to distinguish the stages by which Augustine himself
arrived at a settled and ultimately normative vision of the relations between the Christian writer, his own texts, the text of the Bible, and other Christian
men and women.
Whatever Possidius may have known about his subject's life at Thagaste in the period ca.5 89-3 91, the description he gives of it is merely schematic. Apart from the monastic colour provided by a standardized list of activities (ieiuniis, orationibus, bonis operibus) and a biblical commonplace (in lege
domini meditans die ac nocte), all he offers is a cluster of binaries intended to evoke certain routine procedures (cogitanti atque oranti; revelabat. . . docebat; praesentes et absentes; sermonibusac libris). To the mod-
ern reader, following Augustine through works as strenuous and inchoate

as the De Genesi adversus Manicheos, De magistro and De vera religione, such formulas are bound to seem somewhat glib and deceptive. The chro-
nological sequence of the Retractationes enables us to retrace the author's own steps, even where they faltered; what mattered to Possidius after 430
were the established norms of Augustinian pastoral practice, not the pro-
cess by which they had been reached. The difference in perspectives between the Retractationes and the Vita is particularly marked for the period
in question. Augustine's writings from the years immediately following his

influenced by recent work in and between the fields of literary theory and textual bibliography, tending to emphasize the instability and historicity of the notion of (a) text. See, for example, D. C. Greetham, "Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 1-24; Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). Granting, with Greetham and most contemporary theorists, that "there is no 'natural' or 'self-evident' ontology of the text" (3), we have to allow for a potential indeterminacy in the object(s) of a literary pragmatics as defined above. The specification of a meaning for "text" appropriate to the Christian discourses of late antiquity is one of the major challenges facing (literary) historians of this period. I share the methodological assumptions of Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 16: "What is textually possible cannot be theoretically established. What can be done is to sketch, through close and highly particular case studies, the general framework within which textuality is constrained to exhibit its
transformations." To which I would add that the "framework" thus sketched defines
what we mean by text/textuality when referring to the phenomena considered to fall

within it.
178
return to Africa reveal an urgent, sometimes frantic desire to ascertain the
conditions for successful Christian learning and communication. These

are the very conditions that Possidius takes for granted. By 390 Augustine knew that literate, eloquent converts like himself had
an important role to play as teachers in the Catholic Church; the Confessions contains a record of his acquaintance with several men who had filled
such a role, either as laypersons or as members of the clergy. He was also persuaded of the value of a sound biblical knowledge for anyone called or aspiring to a public office of instruction. Beyond these basic convictions,
however, almost everything to do with the theory and practice of Christian teaching, in the literary medium or viva voce, had still to be worked out. He was, it is true, unusually well equipped for the task. A trained orator,
widely read in classical literature, practised both in writing philosophical dialogues and in debating problems of biblical interpretation with the
Manichees, he was likely if put on to prove most magisterial. And in 391 he
was "put on", elevated to the public stage of the African church by a Greekspeaking bishop who had long prayed for one like him to edify the church
of Hippo "with the word of God and saving doctrine".5 How did he then
proceed? How, as a matter of fact, did Augustine assume the figure of the
biblical teacher-and-writer that Possidius ascribes to him?
To start more modestly, and confine ourselves to the sphere of literary

pragmatics: how did Augustine address the requirements implicit in the
Possidian scheme of Christian mediation, intellecta . . . et praesentes et absentes sermonibus ac libris docere? Even this question opens up a vast
field of inquiry, but if we neglect for the moment the evidence of his " local " performance in the diocese of Hippo (praesentes sermonibus . . .) and focus on his contacts with persons physically separated from him (absentes libris . ), part of the answer seems to be that in the course of the 390s Augustine's understanding of the relations between his own (written) words, the word of God in Scripture, and the situation of other literate
Christian men and women in the world came to centre on the act of biblical
interpretation conceived as conference or conlatio.
The development of that idea in Augustine's works of the decade, especially the De doctrina Christiana and Confessions, is the subject of the following pages. By concentrating on certain recurring features of his approach to the biblical text in their occasional variations, I shall try to provide a view of the processes of Augustinian doctrina that makes fuller allowance for circumstance and historical contingency than Possidius was inclined to. To that end, unlike the author of the Vita Augustini, I shall not
5. Possidius, Vita S. Augustini 5.2: "verbo dei et doctrina salubri."
179
consider the hero alone. As presented here, Augustine's pragmatics of the literary conference is to be seen not just as the resolution of certain long-
standing concerns of his own, but also as a creative (if at times polemical)
response to the attitudes and opinions of his contemporaries, notably those of two individuals whom he frequently encountered in writing but never
met: Jerome of Bethlehem and Paulinus of NoIa.6

SCIENTIA SCRIPTURARUM: JEROME
We may begin by recalling some of the issues raised by Augustine in the first work he wrote as a priest, the De utilitate credendi. Addressed to a friend and alter ego named Honoratus who was still affected by the Manichaean charge that Christian recourse to authority was an abdication of reason,
the treatise conflates an essay in hermeneutics with a sustained defence of the auctoritas of the Catholic Church as interpreter of the Bible.7 Au-
gustine sets himself a limited goal, and makes a show of saying more than
would be needed to achieve it. Yet for all his bluster it is evident that he is
grappling with problems more intractable than any ascribed to his correspondent. Granting the essential unity of the Old and New Testaments and trusting the Catholic Church to interpret them could be represented as the
first step for Honoratus, but for Augustine, who had taken this step and been ordained a teacher in that Church (vtil. cred. 2.4), other matters were
already pressing. Predictably, many of them concerned the Bible. What

kind of book was this that he now had to expound? How was it related to other books he knew? Why and how had it been promulgated? How did it fit into the (Christian Platonic) scheme of God's mediation of wisdom
through Christ? Why was it often so difficult to understand? What were the
constraints on its interpretation? How were reluctant readers to be reconciled to it? Some of these questions are raised formally in the De utilitate credendi, then deferred. Others merely suggest themselves. Few are con6. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in Chicago in May 1992, as part of a panel on "Interpretation in Theory and Practice" organized by Elizabeth A. Clark. In revising it for publication I have been helped by the comments and advice of Professors Clark, Patricia Cox Miller, and Robert Markus, and by Karla Pollmann, Stefan Rebenich, and Dennis Trout. To all my thanks. 7. Text ed. J. Zycha in CSEL 25.1 (1891), 3-48. See now 01ofGigon,"Augustins'De utilitate credendi'," in Catalepton: Festschrift fr Bernhard Wyss, ed. C. Schublin (Basel: Seminar fr Klassische Philologie der Universitt Basel, 1985), 138-57; Christoph Schublin, "Augustin, 'De utilitate credendi', ber das Verhltnis des Interpreten zumText," VC 43 (1989): 53-68. Both writers emphasize the tensions within the
work and its final incoherence.
180
vincingly answered. Behind them all, we sense, lies a single great unspoken question: who were these ideal teachers, the magistri, praeceptores or
doctores who embodied the authority of the Catholic Church? More precisely: what kind of men were they, and how did they discharge their teaching functions ? A sign of Augustine's concerns is the almost exclusively generic and anonymous style of his frequent references to expert Christian interpreters. In the recent past he had met, observed and heard about a number of distinguished Christian teachers (e.g. Ambrose, Simplicianus,
Marius Victorinus). Now he was being forced to generalize and draw

lessons from their individual performances. In only one place is the anonymity of the ideal Christian teacher seriously compromised.8 Although no human master steps forward to lay claim to the title in the De utilitate, a shadowy figure beckons from between its lines. In order to read the Bible with understanding, Augustine tells Honoratus, you must find a qualified interpreter: "Is he difficult to find? Then search harder. Not to be found in your own country? Then travel. Not on the same continent? Take a boat. Not just across the water?
Then go further, if necessary to the very land in which the events recorded
in those books are said to have taken place" (usque ad illas terras, in quibus ea, quae HHs libris continentur, gesta esse dicuntur)? At this point, Augustine's rhetoric takes another turn. Nowhere else in the work does he suggest that in order to understand the Bible one must visit the holy places;
such a radically historicist thesis would in fact be quite foreign to his

thought. Unless the passage quoted is simply a flourish, we should suspect another reason for its eastward trajectory. If the Holy Land recommends itself as a place to study Scripture, is it not because Jerome was there? He, surely, is the genius behind Augustine's latest thinking de magistro. Augustine had missed meeting Jerome in Rome in the early 380s,10 but
8. The teaching of Ambrose is briefly evoked at vtil. cred. 8.20: "et iam fere me commoverant nonnullae disputationes Mediolanensis episcopi, ut non sine spe aliqua de ipso vetere testamento multa quaerere cuperem." However, Ambrose's role is restricted to that of one who helped Augustine to reach a conviction of the value o- auctoritas in the Christian religion; he is not yet cited as an exemplary teacher, as he was to be in the Confessions (though even there Augustine makes only limited claims for him). This autobiographical passage in til. cred. begins with a reminiscence of Faustus the Manichee, the master from whom Augustine had vainly expected so much ("cuius nobis adventus, ut nosti, ad explicanda omnia, quae nos movebant, quasi de celo promittebatur").
9. Vtil. cred. 7.17. Translations my own unless otherwise noted. 10. Cf. John Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364-425
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),212: "It was of course the merest coincidence that the
visit to Rome of Augustine was contemporaneous with the second stay there of Jerome. The two men never met, nor had occasion to: Jerome's present preoccupations . . . were
181
would have had many opportunities since then to hear about him and his work. The internal evidence of his earliest reading of Jerome has yet to be collected. We know, however, that as early as 392 bishop Aurelius of Carthage took steps to secure copies of Jerome's biblical writings for the African church. A recently discovered letter of Jerome to Aurelius enables us to suppose that the author of the De utilitate credendi already had access at least to some of the translations of Origen's homilies.11 When Alypius returned from a visit to the Bethlehem monastery shortly afterwards, he
probably brought more manuscripts with him. By then, too, the Africans
were in contact with one of Jerome's literary agents in Rome, from whom copies of his future works could be obtained.12 Thus although it would be a few years before Augustine could claim close acquaintance with Jerome
through the medium of his writings,13 already in the early 390s he would
have had a strong impression of his literary personality.
worlds away from those of Augustine. Yet a point of similarity is worth noting. Jerome was a court official turned ecclesiastical politician [and writer, we might add], Augustine a professor of rhetoric who became bishop of an African town: both of them, as a result of conversions experienced in court circles, were lost to the service of the imperial government." For further remarks on the "coincidence" of Jerome's and Augustine's
activities in the early 380s, see below.
11. Letter 27* in SanctiAureli Augustini. . . Epistolaeex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, ed. Johannes Divjak, CSEL 88 (1981), from Jerome to Aurelius, 2: "Scribis te quaedam nostrae parvitatis habere opuscula, id est paucas in Ieremiam homelias et duas cantici canticorum. ..." The writer invites Aurelius to send a copyist to Bethlehem to procure texts of all his more recent works "de scripturis Sanctis". There is an excellent commentary on this letter by Yves-Marie Duval in Bibliothque Augustinienne 46B (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 560-68, who judiciously concludes: "Il ne me semble pas invraisemblable que cette Ep. 27s ait contribu a nouer des liens entre Carthage-Hippone et Bethlem et favoriser la diffusion des oeuvres de Jrme en
Afrique."
12. For Alypius' travels, see the Prosopographie de l'Afrique chrtienne, ed. Andr Mandouze (Paris: CNRS, 1982), 55-56, and for the role of Domnio, to whom Alypius refers Paulinus in 395 (Paulinus, ep. 3.3 = Augustine, ep. 24.3), as Roman distributor of Jerome's works, E. Arns, La technique du livre d'aprs saint Jrme (Paris: De Boccard, 1953), 147-48. Augustine's aristocratic patron Romanianus appears to have played a similar role in diffusing his writings in Italy (see below, n.27). 13. Ep. 40.1 : "Quattadgredere, quaeso, istam nobiscum litterariam conlocutionem, ne multum ad nos disiungendos liceat absentiae corporali, quamquam simus in domino spiritus unitate coniuncti, etiam si ab stilo quiescamus et taceamus. Et libri quidem, quos de hrreo dominico elaborasti, paene te totum nobis exhibent. ..." The terms of
this summons seem to reflect the influence of Paulinus' ideal of the conloquium Utterarum (see below). The letter is traditionally dated to 397; it miscarried and was a
cause of much resentment on Jerome's part: D. de Bruyne, "La correspondance change entre Augustin et Jrme," ZNTW 31 (1932): 233-48, modifying H. Lietzmann, "Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Briefsammlung Augustins," Sitzungsberichte der Preuischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, (1930): 374-82, repr. in his
182
That literary personality or persona was founded on emulation of Origen.14 "It is in your power," Augustine would write to Jerome in 394/5,
"to let us have that man whom you so delight in celebrating in your
writings" (quem tu libentius in tuis litteris sonas).15 Jerome would not
oblige Augustine and the rest of the "studious society of the African churches" by delivering a complete Latin translation of Origen's works, but he did aspire to the reputation for biblical scholarship that Origen had
acquired among the Greeks. The ideal of scientia scripturarum that the
Alexandrian represented for him is proclaimed repeatedly in the letters,

prefaces and other promotional pieces that he published or republished in
the late 380s and 390s after his removal from Rome to the East. Mean-
while, he sought to realize that ideal in his own major works, the biblical
translations and commentaries. No other Latin Christian writer had ever
made so determined or exclusive a claim for interpretative expertise, or supported it with such overwhelming evidence. From all round the Mediterranean, Christian studiosi were now sending messengers, or going themselves to sit at the feet of the scholar of Bethlehem.16 The newly
ordained priest of Hippo, who had lately begged his bishop for a little
leisure for Bible study,17 was bound to reckon with his example.
Jerome was not a particularly original theorist of biblical interpretation, or of the relations between Christian readers, writers, and texts. His own literary pragmatics are pragmatic in a vulgar sense, the reflexes of one who
Kleine Schriften, Vol. 1, TU 67 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 286-96. Augustine's letters of the period ca. 391-401 are quoted in the edition of A. Goldbacher, CSEL
34.1-2 (1895-98).
14. See my "Jerome's Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona," in Studia Patr-stica: Papers Presented to the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford, 19-24 August 1991, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters Press, forthcoming). 15. Ep. 28, 2. One group of manuscripts offers the synonymous variant "personas": as Boethius would say, "persona a personando" (duab. nat. 3; PL 64.1343). On Augustine's acquaintance with Origen see B. Altaner, "Augustinus und Or-genes," HJ 70 (1951): 15-41, repr. in his Kleine Schriften, TU 83 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967), 224-52; A.-M. La Bonnardire, "Jrme, 'informateur' d'Augustin au sujet d'Origne," REAug 20 (1974): 42-54.
16. See now Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: Prosopographische und sozial-geschichtliche Untersuchungen, Historia Einzelschriften 72 (Stuttgart: Steiner,
1992).
17. Ep. 21.3: " . . . debeo scripturarum eius [sc. dei] medicamenta omnia perscrutari et orando ac legendo agere . . . Quod ante non feci, quia et tempus non habui; tunc enim ordinatus sum, cum de ipso vacationis tempore ad cognoscendas divinas scripturas cogitaremus et sic nos disponere vellemus, ut nobis otium ad hoc negotium
posset esse."
183
by birth and education conformed closely (more closely than Augustine) to
the type of the late Roman litteratus so memorably evoked by H.-I. Marrou,18 and who set out to make a profession of Christian writing. His
unprecedented success in this venture can be put down to the combination of a gift for languages (real, however exaggerated) and the inspired decision to capitalize on Origen's biblical philology at a time when large numbers of
educated Christians in the West were looking for intellectually respectable
ways of expressing their piety.19 Add to these assets a remarkable flair for self-promotion, and we have the figure of Jerome that a well informed
African reader could have discerned ca.39\.
Augustine may soon have concluded, if he did not already know, that this man could not answer all the questions posed in the De utilitate credendi. However, Jerome's practice of the sacred text, and the assumptions on
which it was based, were current and widely respected before Augustine's
reputation as a Christian teacher had spread beyond the circle of his friends. Whether he liked it or not, Augustine was engaged in a dialogue with Jerome from the moment he began to write on Scripture. The history of their personal communications in the 3 90s is for the most part a depressing tale of mistrust, miscarriage and malentendu.20 Few attempts at opening a long-distance literary conversation have been as unsuccessful as this
one of Augustine's.21 Nevertheless, by reading Jerome's works down to
and including the De viris illustribus of 392/3 against the De utilitate, we may be able recover some of the heads of a discussion that never took
place.22
1.
Augustine asks after the magistri, doctores or (as he calls them once)
professores of the Christian religion. Jerome for his part offers the
18. Henri-Irne Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: De
Boccard, 1938; reissued with a Retractatio, 1949).
19. For a thorough reassessment of Jerome's work as a biblical philologist, emphasizing his strengths as both a Hellenist and a Hebraist, see Adam Kamesar, Jerome, the Hebrew Bible, and Greek Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
20. See the articles cited above, n. 13, and J. de Vathaire, "Les relations de saint
Augustin et de saint Jrme," in Miscellanea Augustiniana (Rotterdam: Brusse, 1930), 484-99. A new study by R. Hennings is announced. 21. Note especially ep. 28.6: "Multa alia cum sincerissimo corde tuo loqui cuperem et de studio christiano con ferre ..." 22. The references given below are necessarily very selective. For the positions ascribed to Augustine, see vtil. cred. passim. Jerome's side of the conversation can be derived from his letters, prefaces to this biblical translations and commentaries, and the De viris illustribus. Quotations from the letters follow the edition of I. Hilberg, CSEL
54-56(1910-18).
184
living example of a Christian magisterium that is also a professio, in
the sense of a specialized occupation for which training is required.23
2.
Augustine endeavours to classify the different kinds of error that are

possible when we try to understand a text (vtil. cred. 4.10). Jerome
introduces a wholly new consideration: the text is a faulty translation from another language, which the interpreter probably cannot read. We may not need to travel to Jerusalem, but we ought to learn
Greek and Hebrew.24
3.
While ready to place the Bible in a special category of books, Augustine assumes a basic analogy between the study of secular literary or philosophical texts and the study of Scripture (vtil. cred. 4.10, 6.13, 7.17). Jerome makes a similar assumption, but takes every opportunity in his earlier writings to mark the distance between
the two realms of discourse.25
4.
Augustine represents Bible study as hard work (cf. ep. 21). Jerome goes much further. In his eyes, the Studium scripturarum is an allconsuming askesis, a mortification of the body and a rejection of
the world. Naturally the province of monks, it can be prosecuted by

5. clergy or laypeople only if they are prepared to follow a monastic way of life.26 The De utilitate credendi presents itself as a preliminary to the Catholic exposition of Scripture; it implies nothing about the literary forms such exposition might take, or about other possible uses of writing in the service of the Christian religion. For Jerome, Chris-
23. E.g., ep. 37.3: "Est sermo [sc. Reticii] quidem conpositus et Gallicano coturno fluens: sed quid ad Interpretern, cuius professio est, non, quomodo ipse disertus appareat, sed quomodo eum, qui lecturus est, sie faciat intellegere, quomodo intellexit ille, qui scripsit" (cf. Augustine, vtil. cred. 4.10-5.11). On this sense of "profession" and its application in a late antique context, see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 33-35.
24. Kamesar (cited n. 19 above); Stefan Rebenich, "Jerome: The 'Vir Trilinguis' and the 'Hebraica Veritas'," forthcoming in VC; Vessey, "Jerome's Origen." 25. The locus classicus is of course ep. 22.30 ("'Ciceronianuses, non Christianus'"). For evidence suggesting that Augustine may have read this letter as early as 387/8, see John Kevin Coyle, Augustine's "De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae": A Study of the Work, Its Composition and Its Sources, Paradosis25 (Fribourg: University Press, 1978),
214f.
26. Denys Gorce, La "Lectio divina " des origines du cnobitisme saint Benot et Cassiodore, 1: Saint Jrme et la lecture sacre dans le milieu asctique romain (Wpion-sur-Meuse: Monastre du Mont-Vierge, 1925), esp. 165ff; Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis, 154-70.
185
tian writing is essentially writing de scripturis,17 and the Christian
literary form par excellence is the biblical commentary as practised by Origen. Those principles notwithstanding, he himself had essayed or improvised several other genres, including the biblical quaestio and (closely associated with it in his use) a kind of epistolary causerie on exegetical topics.28 These are just a few of the matters that Augustine might have wanted to take up with his fellow priest in the early 390s. In his first extant letter to
Jerome of 394/5 (Letter 28), he defends the principle (already stated in the
De utilitate) of the absolute veracity of the biblical text, against Jerome's
recent exegesis of an awkward passage in Galatians. Other topics of that letter and its sequels likewise bear on questions of biblical pragmatics. But I
do not wish to review Augustine's correspondence with Jerome, important though it is for the history of Christian literary pragmatics. Instead I want to suggest that many of the most significant elements of his theoretical response to Jerome are to be found outside the letters he wrote to him: to propose, in fact, that we read two of his major works of the 390s as
constituting a kind of apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis.

Before turning to those works we must take account of the vital role played by a third party. CONLOQUIUM LITTERARUM: PAULINUS
At the same time as they worked to establish links with Jerome, the new
men in the African church were opening channels of communication to the Christian elite of Italy. In the summer of 395, Aurelius' special envoy to Bethlehem, Alypius, took the initiative in writing to Meropius Pontius
27. Jerome's literary biblicism awaits its proper exposition. Meanwhile, see the valuable remarks of Reinhart Herzog, Die Bibelepik der lateinischen Sptantike: Formgeschichte einer erbaulichen Gattung, Vol. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1975), 173-75, and Jacques Fontaine, "L'esthtique littraire de la prose de Jrme jusqu' son second dpart en Orient," in Jrme entre l'Occident et l'Orient: Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (septembre 1986), d. Yves-Marie Duval (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1988), 32342.
28. G. Bardy, "La littrature des 'quaestiones et responsiones' sur l'Ecriture Sainte," RB 41 (1932) : 357-69. In his letters of the 38Os to Marcella and other Roman ladies, Jerome maintains the illusion of a daily interchange of biblical problems and solutions within his group, carried on both in face-to-face meetings and in writing. While the remains of Origen's correspondence may have provided hints for this scenario, its full development must be attributed to Jerome's genius for creating the conditions for his
own literary art.
186
Paulinus, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat with poetic ambitions whose ascetic conversion had caused a great stir a few years earlier, and who had now moved to NoIa in Campania.29 In return for a service he asked of Paulinus,
Alypius sent him a collection of Augustine's anti-Manichaean writings. The result, no doubt intended, was the beginning of a correspondence between Augustine and Paulinus that would continue with only brief interruptions for the next thirty years. The sequence and much of the literary
and historical interest of these exchanges have been painstakingly expounded by Pierre Courcelle.30 The latter's suggestion that Augustine's new correspondent could have been partly responsible for the genesis of the
Confessions, though not universally accepted, has helped undermine the once common view of Paulinus as a passive partner in the two men's
epistolary conversation. Even so, modern Augustinians may still be guilty

of underestimating the impact that the "discovery" of Paulinus had on
Augustine's sense of Christian vocation, and in particular on his literary

pragmatics. The African party evidently hoped that Paulinus would assist in winning
a wider audience for Augustine's writings. To that end, he was not only sent copies of the latest productions but also referred to Romanianus for any
others he might want.31 If Paulinus' actions matched the enthusiasm of his first letters to Augustine, he may indeed have done much for the promotion of his work in Italy. Equally if not more important to Augustine, however, were the terms in which that initial enthusiasm was expressed. As Pierre Fabre has shown in his classic study, Paulinus was the apostle of epistolary
29. Janine Desmulliez, "Paulin de NoIe: Etudes chronologiques (393-397)," Rech Aug 20 (1985): 35-64; Dennis E. Trout, "The Dates of the Ordination of Paulinus of
Bordeaux and of His Departure for NoIa," REAug 37 (1991): 237-60. Trout convinc-
ingly reasserts the traditional date of Christmas Day 394, o- 395, for Paulinus' presbyteral ordination in Barcelona; he would have come to NoIa in the spring/summer of 395, a year before Augustine's episcopal ordination in 396, o- 395 as recorded by Prosper of Aquitaine (see Trout, "The Years 394 and 395 in the Epitoma chronicon: Prosper, Augustine, and Claudian," CPh 86 [1991]: 43-47). 30. "Les lacunes de la correspondance entre saint Augustin et Paulin de Noie," REA 53 (1951): 253300, revised and expanded in his Les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin dans la tradition littraire: antcdents et postrit (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1963), 559607: "La correspondance avec Paulin de Noie et la gense des 'Confessions'".
31. Augustine, ep. 27A: "Librorum autem nostrorum copiam faciet [Romanianus] venerabili studio suo; nam nescio me aliquid sive ad eorum, qui extra ecclesiam dei sunt, sive ad aures fratrum scripsisse, quod ipse non habeat." The passage that follows this statement is quoted below. Romanianus' bibliographical services are described by Jrgen Scheele, "Buch und Bibliothek bei Augustinus," Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 12
(1978): 14-114 at 33-5.
187
caritas.32 Believing more passionately than most other men that letters were the portraits of their writers' souls, that letter-writing was true conver-
sation, and that educated Christians had a duty to build up each other's spiritual strength by correspondence, this converted disciple of Ausonius
(another zealot for epistolary reciprocity) had turned the hackneyed topics of amicitia into a sacrament of communion. Augustine positively reels under the shock of his first letter, but he also recognizes at once the potential value of the Paulinian literary conversation or conloquium litterarum as a medium for religious instruction of the kind that he was now called upon to dispense. In his first letter Paulinus dilates upon his joy at receiving Augustine's
writings, "not just for our own instruction, but for the use of the church in
many of our cities" (25.1: non pro nostra instructione tantum, sed etiam pro ecclesiae multarum urbium utilitate)?1 After acclaiming the author's services to Catholicism in the most extravagant terms, he continues with a characteristic figure of literary and spiritual refreshment:
25.2: Vides . . . quam familiariter te agnoverim, quanto admirer stupore, quam magno amore complectar, qui cotidie conloquio litterarum tuarum fruor et oris tui spiritu vescor. Os enim tuum fistulam aquae vivae et venam fontis aeterni mrito dixerim, quia fons in te aquae salientis in vitam aeternam Christus effectus est, cuius desiderio sitivit in te anima mea et ubertate
tui fluminis inebriari terra mea concupivit. [You see how intimately I have come to know you, how fondly I admire you,
with how great a love I embrace you, who daily enjoy the converse of your writings and feed upon the spirit of your words! For I may justly say that your
mouth is a conduit of living water and a course of the eternal well-spring, because Christ has become in you "a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4.14), in desire of which my soul's ground has thirsted for you and craved inebriation with the fullness of your flood.]
On the basis of the relationship thus proleptically established, Paulinus

32. Saint Paulin de Noie et l'amiti chrtienne, Bibl. des Ecoles franc. d'Athnes et de Rome 167 (Paris: De Boccard, 1949). For closer analysis of epistolary topics in Paulinus and other late antique writers, see Klaus Thraede, Grundzge griechisch-rmischer Brieftopik, Zetemata48 (Munich: Beck, 1970). The letters of the pagan senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his circle provide rich matter for comparison: J. F. Matthews, "The Letters of Symmachus", in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed. J. W. Binns (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 58-99; Philippe Bruggisser, Symmaqueou Ie rituel pistolaire de l'amiti littraire: Recherches sur le premier livre de la correspondance, Paradosis 35 (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993). 33. References are to letters in the order in which they appear in Augustine's correspondence. Letter 25 = Paulinus, ep. 4 (ed. G. Hartel in CSEL 30 [1894]), 30 = 6.
188
asks to receive more of Augustine's works and to be fostered and strengthened by him in his literary and spiritual endeavours: fove igitur et corrobora me in sacris litteris et spiritalibus studiis (25.3).
Though more restrained in its use of biblical language and imagery,

Augustine's reply is scarcely less ecstatic. O bone vir et bone frater, latebas
animam meam (27.1: "O goodly man and goodly brother, you were hidden until now from my soul"), it begins. Here indeed was a man he might have met sooner, one fit to have been an interlocutor in the dialogues of
Cassiciacum, fitter perhaps than some who had been. A priest in a minor North African town could not expect to receive many such overtures, and Augustine makes the most of this chance to adapt the amities and aspirations of his Italian past to the realities of the present. Paulinus is enlisted to help with the difficult case of Licentius, the son of Augustine's patron Romanianus, who was excessively attached to secular learning. He is also
fashioned into the ideal Christian reader. His own vision of himself as an
ardent consumer of Augustine's works was dangerously enthusiastic, but it could be modified. Reverting to the neo-Platonic pedagogy outlined in the
De magistro and combining it with a traditional model of literary emendatio or friendly copy-editing, Augustine now represents Paulinus as the
reader who will discriminate critically but charitably between the words
spoken by the divine Truth through Augustine's books and the words written in error by Augustine:
27.4: Sed tu cum legis, mi snete Pauline, non te ita rapiant quae per nostram
infirmitatem Veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus diligenter advertas,

ne dum avidus hauris bona et recta quae data ministro non ores pro peccatis et erratis quae ipse committo. In his enim quae tibi recte si adverteris displicebunt ego ipse conspicior, in his autem quae per donum spiritus quod aeeepisti recte tibi placent in libris meis ille amandus, ille praedicandus est apud queni
est fons vitae. . . . Quid enim habemus, quod non aeeepimus?

[When you read ... I would not have you so transported by what the Truth speaks through our infirmity as to observe less carefully what I speak in my
own right, lest in avidly drinking in the good and right things that I administer, having myself first received them, you neglect to pray for the sins and errors that I myself commit. For in those things which will rightly displease you if you take good notice, I am myself revealed; but in those which (through the
gift of the spirit you have received) rightly please you in my books, He is to be
loved and proclaimed, in whom is the well-spring of life. . . . For what have
we that we have not received?]
In another context, such remarks could be dismissed as conventional modesty.34 Occurring in this case as the response to an impassioned appeal
34. For the topics of emendatio, see Tore Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in
189
from an exceptionally qualified Christian reader, immediately after directions for obtaining copies of Augustine's works,35 immediately before the announcement of a project destined to form part of the Confessions,36 and in the context of an exchange saturated on both sides with expressions of confidence in the virtue of letters (in two senses) as vehicles of Christian charity and instruction,37 they carry considerable weight. Here in nuce was a literary pragmatics befitting both the Christian writer and the Christian
reader, already consistent with the most rigorous theology of grace (note the echo of 1 Cor 4.7). All that was lacking was a clearly defined place for
the biblical text.
In the event, Augustine's conversation with Paulinus had barely begun when Jerome broke in on it with an imperious reminder of the demands of the Studium scripturarum as he conceived them.38 His Letter 53 to PauLiterary Conventions (Stockholm: Almqvist-Wiksell, 1964), 141-3. The works of Ausonius afford many good examples. 35. See the passage quoted above, n. 31. 36. Ep. 27.5 concerning the project of a "life" of Alypius; interpreted in this sense by Courcelle, Les Confessions, 57Of. 37. In addition to the passages already signalled, note ep. 24.1-2 (Paulinus to Alypius) : "Haec est vera caritas, haec perfecta dilectio, quam tibi circa humilitatem nostram inesse docuisti. . . . Accepimus enim per hominem nostrum Iulianum de Carthagine
revertentem litteras tantam nobis sanctitatis tuae lucem adferentes, ut nobis caritatem
tuam non agnoscere sed recognoscere videremur. . . . Accepimus . . . insigne praecipuum dilectionis et sollicitudinis tuae opus sancti et perfecti in domino Christo viri, fratris nostri Augustini. . . . Itaque fiducia suspiciendae nobis unanimitatis tuae et ad ipsum scribere ausi sumus, dum nos Uli per te et de inperitia excusandos et ad caritatem commendandos praesumimus . . ." (cf. 25.5 and 30 to Augustine); 27.23 (Augustine to Paulinus): "Legi enim litteras tuas fluentes lac et mel, praeferentes simplicitatem cordis tui. . . . Legerunt fratres et gaudent infatigabiliter et ineffabiliter tarn excellentibus donis dei, bonis tuis. Quotquot eas legerunt, rapiunt, quia rapiuntur, cum Iegunt. . . . Haec atque huius modi suavissima et sacratissima spectacula litterae tuae praebent legentibus, litterae illae, litterae fidei non fictae, litterae spei bonae, litterae purae caritatis." There is an interesting variation on the theme of the conloquium per litteras in Augustine's ep. 31 to Paulinus (written in response to ep. 30, which had
crossed with his earlier answer), in which Paulinus' letter-carriers Romanus and Agilis
are represented as a human page inscribed with the character of their sender: "Sanctos fratres Romanum et Agilem, aliam epistulam vestram audientem voces atque reddentem et suavissimam partem vestrae prasentiae . . . suscepimus. . . . Aderat etiam, quod nulli chartae adesse potest, tantum in narrantibus gaudium, ut per ipsum etiam vultum oculosque loquentium vos in cordibus eorum scriptos cum ineffabili laetitia legeremus. Hoc quoque amplius erat, quod pagina quaelibet, quantacumque bona scripta contineat, nihil ipsa proficit, quam vis ad profectum explicetur aliorum; hanc autem epistulam vestram, fraternam scilicet animam, sic in eorum conloquio legebamus, ut tanto beatior appareret nobis, quanto uberius conscripta esset ex vobis. Itaque illam ad
eiusdem beatitatis imitationem studiosissime de vobis omnia percontando in nostra corda transcripsimus."
38. On Jerome's correspondence with Paulinus, see Pierre Nautin, "Etudes de chro-
190
linus, also written in 395, is a programmatic statement of his view of
biblical science as a distinct discipline, one not to be attempted by any mere

literary amateur. Also containing a summary of the biblical canon, the
letter was later prefixed to the Vulgate. In a long and rhetorically elaborate exordium Jerome piles up classical and biblical exempla designed to convince Paulinus and all other readers that they could never hope to enter the maze of Scripture without the help of a trained guide. The message is broadly that of the De utilitate credendi stripped of Augustine's ecclesiology and metaphysics, only this time it is delivered by a self-professed and practising magister scripturarum.39 In his Letter 58 to Paulinus, despatched in the following year, Jerome completes the picture of the perfect biblical reader-and-writer, both positively by associating his activity with a
specifically monastic propositum, and negatively by pointing out the defects of earlier Latin commentators on the Bible.
Some scholars have detected a likeness of Augustine in the rogues' gallery of unqualified biblicists pilloried by Jerome in Letter 53.40 If we assume that Alypius had taken copies of some of his friend's works to Bethlehem in 392, this may even have been part of the author's intention.41
Jerome's self-serving polemic certainly ran too close to the documented

nologie hironymienne (393-397)," RE Aug 19 (1973): 213-39, and Yves-Marie Duval, "Les premiers rapports de Paulin de Noie avec Jrme: moine et philosophe? pote ou exgte?" Studi Tardoantichi 7 (1989): 177-216, both now to be revised in the light
of Trout, "Date" (cited n. 29 above).
39. The opening sentences of Jerome's ep. 53 carry an echo of the topics of caritas which may be presumed to have formed part of Paulinus' initial letter (no longer extant) :
"Frater Ambrosius . . . detulit . . . suavissimas litteras, quae in principio amicitiarurn
probatae iam et veteris amicitiae praeferebant. Vera enim ilia necessitudo est, Christi glutino copulata, quam non utilitas rei familiaris, non praesentia corporum tan tum, non subdola et palpans adulatio, sed timor domini et divinarum scripturarum studia conciliant." In general Jerome shows little interest in the theory of epistolary amicitia, or that of the conloquium litterarum: in this case he simply adapts the Paulinian ideology of communion to suit his own purpose, emphasizing the studia divinarum scripturarum as one of the bases of true fellowship. 40. E.g., A. Kurfess, "Vergils vierte Ekloge bei Hieronymus und Augustinus: 'lam nova progenies celo demittitur alto' in christlicher Deutung," SEJG 6 (1954): 5-13, who argues that Jerome's criticism of the Christian exegesis of Vergil was inspired by a passage in Augustine's unfinished commentary on Romans of ca. 394. 41. Though cf. Jerome, ep. 105.5 (to Augustine in 403/4): "Hoc dico, non quod in operibus tuis quaedam reprehendenda iam censeam. Neque enim lectioni eorum umquam operam dedi nee horum exemplariorum apud nos copia est praeter Soliloquiorum tuorum libros et quosdam commentariolos in Psalmos." Of course this may be disingenuous, and even if Alypius did not take copies of Augustine's works to Bethlehem he may have said enough about him (and his relations with Ambrose?) to excite Jerome's suspicion of a possible competitor.
191
anxieties of the priest, soon to be bishop, of Hippo for the latter not to have felt himself implicated, had it come to his attention at this time. And it is very likely that it did come to his attention, for as Jean Doignon observed thirty years ago, there are several traces of Jerome's Letter 58 in the De
doctrina Christiana.42 Acting on this and other hints, Doignon imagines a contest between Augustine and Jerome over the literary vocation of Pau-
linus, an aspect of the relations between the two great doctores which had gone unnoticed by commentators concerned primarily with their differences over biblical exegesis. I now wish to argue that the components of
this triangular relationship are more closely connected than even Doignon would seem to allow, that Augustine has in effect left us an apologia contra Hieronymum tacitly dedicated to Paulinus, in which the Paulinian conloquium litterarum is made to serve as the theoretical matrix for a distinctively Augustinian biblical pedagogy, incorporating as much of the
Hieronymian scientia scripturarum as Augustine was able to use. The "apology" as it has reached us is in two parts, the second of which significantly modifies or "retracts" the first: it begins with the De doctrina Christiana of 396/7 and continues in the Confessions.
FIRST PART OF THE "APOLOGY": DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA
By 396 Augustine was ready to offer solutions to many of the problems

raised five years earlier in the De utilitate credendi. Then he could only evoke the ideal of a Christian teacher, now he would lay down guidelines for his activity: Sunt praecepta quaedam . . . (Prol. 1: "There are certain precepts, etc.").43 The new treatise would have to have a name. He had already written De magistro: to use that title again, or a variant of it, would be to invite confusion between the ultimate and proximate sources of knowledge, an error that he was as keen to discourage now as ever. What was needed was a phrase that would encompass the whole economy of
saving instruction, without prejudging relations between the divine and

human agencies involved. Augustine's phrase is doctrina Christiana, a char-
acteristically qualified form of the only Latin substantive whose meaning was both broad enough for his purpose and so far uncompromised by
42. Jean Doignon "'Nos bons hommes de foi': Cyprien, Lactance, Victorin, Optt, Hilaire (Augustin, De doctrina christiana, IV, 40, 61)," Latomus 22 (1963) : 795-805.
For traces of Letter 53 in the same work, see below.
43. Citations of the De doctrina christiana follow the edition of J. Martin, CCSL 32
(1962).
192
others' use.44 The latter consideration was not trivial. Already in his choice of title Augustine was staking a claim in an area which, if not yet heavily built up, had lately seen a lot of speculative development. Though we are apt to forget it, the De doctrina Christiana was only one of several attempts to establish norms for Christian instruction in late Latin antiquity.45 From
the outset, Augustine was defining his position with reference to, and partly against, those adopted by others.
The oppositional quality of the De doctrina appears most clearly in the

prologue in which the author defends his project against three sorts of objection, the third of which he takes seriously.46 To those who rejoice in a God-given ability to interpret Scripture without the use of such precepts as
he is about to impart, Augustine opposes a carefully balanced theory of the

instrumentality of human beings in the ministration of God's Word (Prol.
49). The argument is built up of a number of elements: a characteristically

Augustinian view of the mediation of transcendent truth, a demonstration
of the social basis of language acquisition that anticipates the sign theory of Book 2, a series of biblical exempla showing men of faith deferring to other
men, and two a priori assertionsthat the human condition would be
debased, and charity defeated of its aim, si homines per homines nihil
discerent (Prol. 6: "if men learnt nothing through their fellow men").
To whom is the argument addressed? Since none of the proposed identifications of a hostile charismatic party commands general assent, we are
free to entertain Rudolf Lorenz's suggestion that Augustine is rejecting an

extreme version of his own illuminism, and that the main purpose of the prologue is therefore apologetic.47 We should then suppose that the author
44. For possible alternatives see Marrou, Saint Augustin, 549-60. Lactantius had used Institutiones, Hilary and others made play with eruditio, Jerome was investing heavily in scientia and Studium. Augustine himself tends to associate litterae closely with texts and employs litteratura as a synonym for grammatica; disciplina he reserves for another application. Much of the modern debate (since Marrou) over the sense(s) of doctrina in Augustine's treatise is vitiated by a lack of sensitivity to the creative, appropriative, and potentially exclusive quality of Christian vocabulary-building in late antiquity. See now Gerald A. Press, "'Doctrina' in Augustine's 'De doctrina Christiana'," Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984): 98-120. 45. Alongside the names mentioned in the preceding note, we should allow for the efforts of Roman pontiffs from Damasus onwards to fix the standards and conditions of clerical education (partly coinciding with the aims of Ambrose's De officiis ministrorum), and the later initiatives of monastic educators like John Cassian. "Christian education", variously named and conceived, was a highly contentious issue in the "Age
of Theodosius".
46. Peter Brunner, "Charismatische und methodische Schriftauslegung nach Augustins Prolog zu 'De doctrina Christiana'," Kerygma und Dogma 1 (1955): 59-69,85103.
47. R. Lorenz, "Die Wissenschaftslehre Augustins," ZKG 67 (1955-56), 29-60,
193
of the De doctrina christiana chose deliberately to stress the outward or
social aspect of Christian instruction in order to correct what might otherwise be perceived by readers of his works as a pastorally and ecclesially
disastrous emphasis on its inward or psychological aspects. Plausible as
this argument is, it requires us to consider why Augustine should particularly fear such an objection in 396. While it is easy to see how a text like the De magistro could be construed as hostile to the claims of professed (a
fortiori ordained) teachers of the gospel, those claims had been amply
endorsed in the De utilitate credendi and other more recent works. More-
over, there is no reason to believe that Augustine's epistemology had itself
changed significantly since the time of the De magistro.4* Thus when he goes out of his way to assert the validity of a human science of Scripture at
the outset of the De doctrina, he cannot be doing so merely for the purpose of a retractatio or internal revision of his published opinions. Rather, he
appears to be measuring his own approach to the biblical text against one
that set more store than he ever would by the competence of the human
interpreter. As we have seen, his properly cautious attempt to establish his authority as a Christian teacher (writer and now bishop) had recently been crossed by Jerome's propaganda for a "professional" discipline of biblical interpretation. It cannot be coincidental that two of Augustine's four biblical examples of human instruction in the prologue to the De doctrina (Paul
213-51 at 237. Lorenz's insight is confirmed by C. P. Mayer, "'Res per signa.' Der Grundgedanke des Prologs in Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina christiana' und das Problem seiner Datierung, " REAug 20(1974) : 100-12. For attempts to identify Augustine's opponents, see G. Folliet, "Des moines euchites Carthage en 400401," Studia Patr-stica!, TU 64 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957) 386-99; Ulrich Duchrow, "Zum Prolog von Augustins 'De doctrina christiana'," VC 17 (1963): 165-72; and, most recently, Charles Kannengiesser, "Local Setting and Motivation of 'De doctrina christiana," in Collectanea Augustiniana 2, forthcoming. 48. Contra U. Duchrow, Sprachverstndnis und biblisches Hren bei Augustin (Tubingen: Mohr, 1965), 206-13 who interprets what he takes to be a radical discrepancy between the theory of language and learning expressed in De magistro and that of the prologue to the De doctrina christiana as a sign that the latter text was composed as an afterthought in 426/7. In a similar vein: Graziano Ripanti, "Il problema della comprensione nelPermeneutica agostiniana," REAug 20 (1974): 88-99. For a more nuanced view of the development of Augustine's thought, which nevertheless stresses the formative importance of the years 391-397, see A. D. R. Polman, The Word of God according to St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1961), 13-38. Polman observes that "The . . . interpretation of the Logos as the inner teacher who shows us how to contemplate truth was never rejected by St. Augustine, and made its influence felt throughout his writings on the Word of God as Holy Writ and as proclamation" (30). Likewise Mayer, "'Res per signa,'": "Nirgends jedoch ist im Prolog ein ernsthaftes Rtteln an den in De magistro niedergelegten Fundamenten seiner Zeichenlehre und der damit engstens verknpften Sprach thorie festzustellen" (109).
194
and the Ethiopian eunuch) had appeared in exactly the same cause in Jerome's first letter to Paulinus.49 Like so much of Augustine's writing, the treatise De doctrina christiana is visibly over-determined. As correction, the prologue and all that follows in 396/7 is ostensibly directed at wouldbe charismatic or inspired interpreters of the Bible, perhaps even Augustine himself at an earlier stage of his theological development. As defence, it
must contend with their arch-opponent: the magister scripturarum Jerome.
Augustine's response to the Hieronymian theory of biblical scientia is
not only defensive, however. Even as he domesticates Jerome's polemic pro magistro, he undercuts the social ambitions of the expert interpreter by
assimilating his function to that of the humblest of the literary "professionals", the primary school teacher or magister litterarum (Prol. 9). The same
process of reaction, adaptation, and critique can be observed throughout the length of the two and a half books of the De doctrina completed in the
390s. Most of the issues of literary pragmatics raised by a confrontation of the De utilitate credendi with Jerome's early programme as a biblical
writer are there specifically addressed, and dealt with in ways that would
be hugely influential.50 Augustine theorizes the scientia scripturarum more comprehensively than Jerome does, but is careful to place it no higher than
the third step on a seven-rung ladder to sapientia (2.7.911). He accepts

the importance of an acquaintance with Greek and Hebrew for the correct understanding of the Latin Bible, but applies to it to a general restraint on all knowledge of human conventions: quantum satis est, "as much as is necessary" (2.26.40; cf. 2.11.16-14.21). Perhaps most striking of all, at least to modern readers, is his subjection of secular literary and philosophical culture to the principle of usus iustus, "right use" (2.40.60), a criterion at once more generous and more rigorous than any hitherto proposed by Jerome. All these initiatives, it is worth noting, are fitted within the framework of a theory of the biblical text as consisting of signa divinitus data [sed] per homines nobis indicata, "signs given by God but pointed out to us by men" (2.2.3). From first to last, Augustine's is a Christian doctrina simultaneously human and divine, historical and transcendent.51 There are two further respects in which the De doctrina christiana of 3967 promises to correct or enlarge the biblical pragmatics that a Latin
49. Prol. 6-7; Jerome, ep. 53.2, 5. 50. My awareness of "Hieronymian" elements in the De doctrina christiana owes much to a fine paper by Christoph Schublin which inaugurated the conference on "Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana': A Classic of Western Culture" held at the University of Notre Dame in April 1991.
51. Cf. Meyer, " 'Res per signa,' " 111.
195
reader like Paulinus could have learnt from Jerome. First, it offers to shift the ethical conditions of acceptable or "successful" exegesis from the realm of askesis to that of caritas. Secondly, it announces precepts for the trac-
tatio scripturarum that would govern the enunciation of biblical meanings by human interpreters (modus proferendi) as well as their discovery
(modus inveniendi). Neither of these promises is kept. Although Book 1
contains prolonged and often difficult discussion of the rule (or rules) of charity, it does not make good the providential connection between caritas
and doctrina asserted in the prologue. And the first draft of the treatise breaks off before the author reaches the part devoted explicitly to the
modus proferendi. Some time in 397, it seems, Augustine turned aside from
the De doctrina christiana to concentrate on other compositions.52 The work we know under that name would only be completed thirty years later,
as part of the tidying-up operation represented by his Retractationes. This

does not mean, however, that his contemporaries were obliged to wait three decades for the remainder of his apologia contra Hieronymum de
scripturis. For within a short space they had this (and much else besides) in
the form of the next extant work listed in the Retractationes: the so-called
Libri confessionum.
SECOND PART OF THE "APOLOGY": CONFESSIONES
Much of the controversy surrounding the De doctrina christiana has been created by scholars who treat the work as an organic whole, even though
they know perfectly well that its two parts were composed respectively near
the beginning and at the very end of the ecclesiastical career of a man who never stopped thinking about what he was doing, or seeking words in
which to explain himself to others. Not content to wonder at the persistence of a writer who went back to finish a manuscript half a lifetime after putting it away, they want to believe that he completed it just as he would have done had he not been "interrupted". The inconsequence is
particularly grave with regard to Book 4, since there are no grounds for
52. See Josef Martin's introduction to his edition in CCSL 32, vii-xix, and his "Ab-
fassung, Verffentlichung und berlieferung von Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina chrisstoria: Studi in onore di E.D. Theseider (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 2, 541-59. The break
between the unfinished treatise of 396/7 and its later continuation occurs at 3.25.35/36.
tiana," Traditio 18 (1962): 69-87, with Augustine, retr. 2.4 and Alberto Pincherle, "Sulla composizione del 'De doctrina christiana' di S. Agostino," in Storiografia e
The evidence of the early fifth-century Codex Petersburg Q. v. 1.3, containing doctr. chr.
Prol.3.25.35 and other early works of Augustine, is reassessed in a paper by Kenneth Steinhauser in the proceedings of the Notre Dame De doctrina christiama conference (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
196
assuming that Augustine's statements on Christian rhetoric ca.427 bear any close relation to the ideas he had when he began the treatise in 396. In fact, as even Marrou has to admit, the last book of the De doctrina is manifestly more "ecclesiastical" than the others, in the sense that it is directed to the teaching (especially preaching) needs of the clergy.53 By contrast, Books 12 avoid any reference to the institutional conditions of Christian teaching, and never once evoke the situation of the priest or bishop preaching ad populum. Augustine's imagined reader of ca.396 is
simply that: a Christian reader confronting the biblical text. This reader,
after learning certain rules, is supposed capable of instructing others in
turn; whether by writing or speaking is not specified. Interestingly enough,

although Augustine begins the prologue with a plurality of studiosi scripturarum in view, by the end of it he has narrowed his attention to a single
lector. Thus in the taxonomy of Christian utterance subsequently provided in Book 4, the De doctrina itself approaches most nearly the form of a
collocutio cum aliquo uno sive cum pluribus, a conversation with some
one or a few.54
And yet in 397 this unfinished treatise would have counted as one of the least conversational of all Augustine's works, a heroic but failed attempt by a master of dialogue to commit himself to a monologic mode of instruction: Sunt praecepta quaedam. . .. For the first time ever Augustine seems to have begun a major work without an interlocutor, without a dedicatee, without even so much as an alter ego. In the continuing absence of Jerome,
the man who (in Peter Brown's words) "would never be alone" suddenly
found he had no-one to talk to. The strain on him is apparent from the start. Having announced the two parts of his subject at the beginning of
53. Saint Augustin, 507 and 638 n.l. Similarly Mark D. Jordan, "Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana'," AugStud 11 (1980): 177-196, notes that "even without the historical evidence, one would notice a
shift of stance near the end of Book III which makes the close of the work more
insistently pastoral and anti-speculative," yet still holds that "it is appropriate ... to take from the early and late parts of the work equally" (180). While I agree that any general study of Augustine's thought should take equal account of both parts of this work, it seems to me important not to attribute to Augustine in 397 ideas that he cannot
be shown to have entertained until later.
54. 4.10.25: "Et hoc quidem non solum in conlocutionibus, sive fiant cum aliquo uno, sive cum pluribus, verum etiam et multo magis in populis, quando sermo promitur, ut intellegamur instandum est, quia in conlocutionibus est cuique interrogandi potestas; ubi autem omnes tacent, ut audiatur unus, et in eum intenta ora convertunt, ibi ut
requirat quisque, quod non intellexerit, nec mor-s est nee decoris." Cf. 4.9.23,18.37;
serm. 23.8.8 (PL 38.158): "Iam multos vestrum intellexisse non dubito. Non video, sed ex collocutione, quia loquimini ad alterutrum, sentio eos qui intellexerunt, velle exponere iis qui nondum intellexerunt" (cited by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 506 n.5).
197
Book 1, he proceeds to a division: De inveniendo prius, de proferendo
postea disseremus. Magnum opus et arduum . . . ("We shall first discuss

the discovery [of scriptural meanings], then the manner of their enunciation. A great and difficult task . . ."). The reminiscence of the Orator underlines the difference between the leisurely Ciceronian dialogues of Cassiciacum and the heavy business of the present monologue. Magnum
opus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur, Cicero had written, sed nihil
difficile amanti ... ("A great and difficult task it is that we attempt, Brutus, but nothing is difficult for one who loves his friend as I do
you . . ."). Ostensibly the expression of a friendship, the Orator is presented as a natural continuation of private conversations between Cicero and Brutus, conversations duly commemorated in the next sentence of the treatise.55 This fiction was one that Augustine had earlier used to great
advantage, but was now trying to do without. Not surprisingly, when the task of laying down precepts for the interpretation of Scripture finally proved too much for him, he transferred the matter in hand to a literary
conversation already in progress between himself, his God, and his spiritual friends in Christ. In this respect as in others, the Confessions is the first
and aptest sequel to the unfinished De doctrina christiana of 397.56

55. Orator 9.33-34: "Magnum opus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur; sed nihil difficile amanti puto. Amo autem et semper amavi ingenium, studia, mores tuos. Incendor porro cotidie magis non desiderio solum quo quidem conficior, congressus nostras, consuetudinem victus, doctissimos sermones requirens tuos, sed etiam admirabili fama virtutum incredibilium. . . . Iam quantum illud est quod in maximis occupationibus nunquam intermittis studia doctrinae, semper aut ipse scribis aliquid aut me vocas ad
scribendum."
56. See Alberto Pincherle, "S. Agostino: tra il 'De doctrina christiana' et le 'Confessioni',", Archeologia classica 16-17 (1973-74): 555-74. The author concludes that the Confessions "si rivela come il proseguimento, o meglio l'attuazione del programma, di quello rimasto interrotto [i.e. in doctr. chr.]" (574). In a related article, "Intorno alia genesi delle 'Confessioni'," AugStud 5 (1974): 167-176, Pincherle implicates Paulinus of NoIa in the commissioning of the De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum and sketches an Italian background for the composition of the Confessions. Note especially his description of Augustine's position in 397 as men like Paulinus and Simplicianus, alarmed by the direction of his new thinking on grace and free will, broke off their correspondence with him: "Agostino dovette sentir si abbandanato, se non proprio tradito, da coloro sulla cui amicizia o benevolenza contava. E, per di pi, senza spiegazioni, senza avviare quella franca discussione che, tra amicie sopratutta nell'amicizia cristianapermette di esprimersi con chiarezza, e magari durezza, senza che la diversit dei pareri rompa il vincolo di affetto e fiducia, o, tanto meno, violi la carita." This theory of the charitable conference, though clearly Augustinian, anticipates the Confessions itself. Courcelle, Les 'Confessions', 56568, ascribes Paulinus' silence towards Augustine at this time to doubts about the validity of his episcopal ordination. Whatever its cause or causes, the temporary rupture of relations between the two men coincides closely with Augustine special initiative in literary conversation.
198
Already in the De utilitate credendi Augustine had experimented with autobiographical narration as a means of "opening the way" to a study of Scripture within the Catholic communion.57 Now, perhaps encouraged by Paulinus' request for a Life of Alypius, certainly eager to exploit the new opportunities for charitable converse that his correspondence had indi-
cated, he recast his scriptural propaedeutic in the form of a narrative of

praise delivered in the presence of God and his fellow Christians, with a particular eye to those whom he calls the "spiritual ones" (spiritales). The Confessions dramatizes the substance of the first or unfinished De doctrina christiana, recuperates elements of the author's epistemology that had
there been deliberately suppressed, and supplies a temporary but enduring

substitute for the missing chapters on the modus proferendi. Since a full comparison of the two works is beyond the scope of this article, I shall concentrate on the last point, which happens to be the most significant from the point of view of literary pragmatics.
CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION
Paulinus' correspondence had reminded Augustine of the delights of epistolary conversation and suggested to him a way of turning them to religious account. It had also, as a result of Jerome's interference, made him acutely aware of the awkwardness of maintaining simultaneously a belief in the dependence of human insight on divine illumination and a public practice of scriptural exegesis. This difficulty, which his developing notions of divine grace could only exacerbate, was to exercise Augustine for the rest of his life. The immediate challenge, deferred at some cost in the De doctrina christiana, was to locate the activity of biblical interpretation within the literary-colloquial mode. Biblical theology, in the strict sense of "talking about God on the basis of his word in Scripture", had to be made part of a human dialogue conducted in writing. Thus formulated, the task confronting Augustine posed both a danger and a problem. The danger was that the dialogue would become merely human, mere chatter among men; this hazard he averts in the Confessions by the bold expedient of bringing God himself into the conversation.58 The problem was that the message of a
57. Vtil. cred. 8.20: "His igitur constitutis . . . edam tibi, ut possum, cuiusmodi
viam usus fuerim, cum eo animo quaererem veram religionem, quo nunc exposui esse
quaerendum." The narrative begins with Augustine's departure for Italy. 58. The dynamics of this conversation has been expounded with admirable subtlety by Reinhart Herzog, "'Non in sua voce': Augustins Gesprch mit Gott in den 'Confessiones'Voraussetzungen und Folgen," in Das Gesprch, ed. Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning, Poetik und Hermeneutik 11 (Munich: Fink, 1984), 213-250. On his analysis, Books 1-8 of the Confessions enact the gradual fulfilment of the conditions
199
voiceless and at times barely intelligible text, the Bible in a Latin codex, had somehow to be inserted into the current discourse of late antique men and women: it is the problem of the modus inveniendi et proferendi, in reality a single complex procedure rather than two separate (or separable) ones.
The standard forms of biblical commentary, as Augustine who had lately

begun to practise them knew only too well, represented at best a partial solution. A new literary pragmatics was required, for which recent experiments in Latin biblical poetry ( Juvencus, Proba, Paulinus) and epistolography (Jerome, Paulinus) offered precedents but no clear directions.59 The Confessions shows what this new Christian literary pragmatics might be
like.
For the first seven of the ten books which he wrote about himself, Augustine represents reading and conversation either as distinct and potentially opposed activities, or as related forms of time-wasting. Learning to
read and write might be useful; reading and reciting pagan poetry was
dangerous self-indulgence (1.12.19ff ) . When Monica asks the local bishop to speak with her son (3.12.21: ut dignaretur mecum conloqui), he assures her that he will find his own way by reading (ipse legendo reperiet). The society of the friends with whom Augustine is wont to talk, laugh and read (4.8.13: conloqui et conridere, simul legere libros) is a snare. He reads Cicero, Aristotle and other difficult pagan texts on his own (4.16.2831:
solus, per me ipsum, nullo hominum tradenti, nullo adminiculo humani

magisterii) and has no trouble undertanding them, but does less well with the Bible. The long awaited conversation with Faustus the Manichee is a disappointment: the two men end up studying classical authors together
for a dialogue between Augustine and God (one of which is the exclusion of other, human partners-in-conversation), a dialogue which properly begins in the garden in Milan: "Die Szene im Garten von Mailand wird in der Tat bis zum Schlu der Confessiones arretiert: Augustin vor der Schrift spricht mit Gott" (233). No sooner has the dialogue begun, than it expands to include other human interlocutors: "Das Gesprch mit Gott . . . erweitert sich in den Confessiones bereits bei seiner ersten Realisierung zum zwischenmenschlichen Gesprch" (236, italics in the original); see also the diagram, 240. Herzog notes the relevance of the De doctrina christiana for the developments he outlines, especially with regard to Augustine's " 'caritas'-Asthetik' ",but leaves the tracing of connections for later study. In its use of a terminology of "speech acts" partly suggested, in this case, by Eugene Vance's work on the ConfessionsHerzog's article is an impressive demonstration of what I would call a literary-pragmatic approach to early Christian texts. See now Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1-50, esp. 28f. on the Confessions "as a sequence not only of events, but of discursive acts which carry us beyond the narrative to the philosophical, and beyond the philosophical to the exegetical. " 59. Cf. Herzog, "'Non in sua voce'," 241.
200
(5.6.1013). Even Ambrose, reading silently apart, is unavailable for the talk that Augustine now so urgently desires to have (6.3.3). By this stage of the narrative, the reader of the Confessions already has a strong sense of the kind of talk that would be. It is represented in Au-
gustine's text by a word that appears with remarkable frequency in Books

47, the verb conferre. In his use of it, which largely exploits the range of meanings in the classical lexicon, this compound typically signifies one or
more of the following: (1) to converse or confer, (2) to share or place

something in common, (3) to compare ideas, opinions or impressions. In most instances in the Confessions it is applied in such a way as to emphasize the social and communicative implications of the con-prefix. Augustine was too good a grammarian to play idly with morphemes; as Kenneth Burke has shown, prefixes and their corresponding prepositions often mass with coercive force in the Confessions.60 In this case the reiterated conferre inclines the reader surely if insensibly to accommodate the
activity of conloqui ("to converse"), for which it is a common synonym, to

that of legere ("to read"), with which it is regularly associated in the text. Three examples will serve to illustrate this process:61 1. As a student in Carthage, Augustine had read Aristotle's Categories. Here are his reflections on the experience:
4.16.28: Et quid mihi proderat, quod annos natus ferme viginti, cum in manus meas venissent Aristotlica quadam, quas appellant decern categor-as . . . legi eas solus et intellexi} Quas cum contulissem cum eis, qui se dicebant vix eas magistris eruditissimis non loquentibus tantum, sed multa in pulvere depinguentibus intellexisse, nihil inde aliud mihi dicere potuerunt, quam ego solus apud me ipsum legens cognoveram. [And what did it profit me that, being scarce twenty years old, the book of Aristotle, called the Ten Categories, fell into my hands, and 1 read and understood it without a teacher? For when afterwards I conferred about them with
others they professed that they had much to do to understand them, though
they had been instructed therein by most learned masters, and that not by lectures only but by means of many delineations drawn in the sand; yet could they not, for all that, tell me anything about the matter, which I myself had not learned, by reading them alone.] 60. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 43-171. 61. Translations are from the version by Sir Tobie Mathew (London, 1620), adapted
as necessary. Where comparison with a more modern English translation can help
illustrate a feature of the Latin original, I refer to the rendering by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
201
Two solitudes are depicted. The first is that of the lone reader of Aristotle, contrasted with the company of master and disciple(s) in a teaching scene of "classical" type. The second is that of the would-be participant in a
dialogue, exposed by the inability of his interlocutors to bring anything to

the interpretation of a text that he has not already discovered for himself. The two solitudes are generalized in Augustine's subsequent assertion that he had likewise read and understood by himself the whole cycle of liberal
arts texts (4.16.30: omnes libros artium, quas liberales vocant. . . per me ipsum legi et intellexi, sine magna dificltate nullo hominum tradente
intellexi) and found few men able to follow him when he expounded them (cum eis [sc. studiosis et ingeniosis] eadem conabar exponere . . . erat ille excellentissimus in eis, qui me exponentem non tardius sequeretur). These statements acquire their full significance in conjunction with his remarks on education in the prologue to the De doctrina christiana. There Augustine had presented human intercourse as the normal prerequisite for
any science, specifying the relation between teacher and pupil, and had
argued for the role of the human teacher in Christian instruction.62 Here he presents himself as a brilliant autodidact, unable to engage in any productive discussion with his fellow men, in order to argue for a Christian "conversion" of secular science according to the principle of usus tusts outlined in De doctrina 2.40.60. The object of his scorn in this chapter of
the Confessions is neither Aristotle nor students less talented than himself,
but his own motives as a reader and interpreter (discussant and/or expositor). His former attempts at communication concerning secular literary and philosophical texts had failed because he was not aiming at their right use (non ad usum sed ad perniciem, mihi bona res non utenti bene). Whereas Book 2 of the De doctrina christiana concentrates on the theory of the Christian use of pagan texts in relation to their contents, the Confessions strives for a vision of its practice in relation to the human parties involved (eas conferre cum eis, eadem exponere eis ).
2. For nine long years Augustine had looked forward to meeting Faustus
the Manichee, in conversation with whom (5.6.10: conlatoque conloquio)
62. The argument is already well developed in the vtil. cred., e.g. at 7.17: "Cum legerem, per me ipse cognovi, itane est? Nulla inbutus potica disciplina Terentianum Maurum sine magistro adtingere non auderes,Asper, Cornutus, Donatus et alii innumerabiles requiruntur, ut quilibet poeta possit intellegi, cuius carmina et theatri plausus videntur captaretue in eos libros, qui quoqo modo se habeant, sancti tamen divinarumque rerum pleni prope totius generis humani confessione diffamantur, sine duce inruis et de his sine praeceptore audes ferre sententiam. . . ." The passage evoking the ideal teacher of Scripture, quoted n. 9 above, follows.
202
he hoped to find solutions to the difficulties he was experiencing with the sect's doctrines. On finally hearing him speak, he was charmed by his
eloquence. As described in the Confessions, Faustus' performance is comparable to that of the show-orators of the Second Sophistic, men like his
countryman Apuleius who had held earlier audiences of educated Africans

spellbound with their verbal artifice. The mature Augustine takes him as a pretext for separating the claims of truth from those of eloquence, verbal form from doctrinal content, the human minister from the divine source. He also uses him to dramatize the problem of the "conference" evoked in connection with his earlier readings of the poets and philosophers. The
young Augustine, we are told, was not prepared just to listen to Faustus and applaud him with the rest:
5.6.11: [M]oleste habebam, quod in coetu audientium non sinerer ingerere illi et partiri cum eo curas quaestionum mearum conferendo familiariter et accipiendo ac reddendo sermonem.
[I was nothing well content that, in the throng of them that listened to him, I might not be suffered to urge him and to impart to him the burden of some questions that I had a mind to ask, by familar converse and the giving and
taking of discussion.]
These quaestiones related to things he had read. There were certain Manichaean texts he wished to discuss, passages he had marked as conflicting
with other authorities:
5.7.12: Libri quippe eorum pleni sunt longissimis fabulis de celo et sideribus et sole et luna: quae mihi eum, quod utique cupiebam, conlatis numerorum
rationibus, quas alibi ego legeram, utrum potius ita essent, ut Manichaei libris continebantur, an certe vel par etiam inde ratio redderetur, subtiliter ex-
plicare posse iam non arbitraban [For their books are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, of the stars, of the sun and moon; and while I greatly desired to discuss with him the reasons of these things, which I had read elsewhere (Pine-Coffin: I badly wanted Faustus to compare these with the mathematical calculations which I had studied in
other books), and to find out if the things delivered about them in the Manichaean books were true or at least possible, I did not now think that he would
be able to explain them with any true knowledge.]
Although the modern translation of conlatis . . . rationibus is strictly preferable to Mathew's, the context allows room for both, and more besides. Augustine's desired conversation or conference (conlatio, sense 1) would include a comparison of ideas (conlatio, sense 3) based on a sharing or mise-en-commun (conlatio, sense 2) of relevant texts, extracted or summa-
203
rized. Unfortunately, Faustus turns out not to be the conference-partner he

is looking for, and he is once again confined to an unequal dialogue con-
cerning texts he has already mastered:

5.7.13: Refracto itaque studio, quod intenderam in Manichaei litteras
. . . coepi cum eo pro studio eius agere vitam, quo ipse flagrabat in eas litteras, quas tunc iam rhetor Carthaginis adulescentes docebam, et legere cum eo sive quae ille audita desideraret sive quae ipse tali ingenio apta existimaren!.
[And so, the pursuit whereby I was bent towards that learning of the Manichees being checked, I began at his request to pass some time with him in that
study after which he thirsted. This was the study of letters, which I, being
then Master of Rhetoric at Carthage, did teach my scholars; and I read with him either those books which he himself desired to hear, or those which 1
thought most fit for such a kind of wit as his.] 3. Incompetence or unwillingness to ventilate their own texts is not the
only failing for which Manichaean teachers are castigated in the Confessions. Their pragmatics of the biblical text is also sharply criticized. Com-
pelled by their philosophy to discount large portions of the scriptures held canonical by the Catholic Church, they justified themselves by claiming
that the excluded matter had been interpolated by judaizing heretics. In contending with this view, and finally rejecting it as untenable, Augustine was led into considerations of biblical philology:
5.11.21: Deinde quae illi in scripturis tuis reprehenderant defend- posse non existimabam, sed aliquando sane cupiebam cum aliquo illorum librorum doctissimo conferre singula et experiri, quid inde sentiret. ... Et inbecilla mihi responsio videbatur istorum . . . cum dicerent scripturas novi testamenti falsatas fuisse a nescio quibus . . . atque ipsi incorrupta exemplaria nulla proferrent.
[Besides 1 thought that those things which the Manichees reprehended in the Scriptures could not be defended; but yet I sometimes desired to examine
them one by one with some man most learned in those books, and thereupon to see what he held. And I thought the answer of the Manichees was weak, for they would say that the Scriptures of the New Testament were falsified by 1 know not whom, but themselves did yet produce no copies thereof which were uncorrupted.]
This is as close as Augustine comes in the Confessions to using the verb conferre in the technical sense (4) of "collating" manuscripts.63 Even without such codicological precision, the passage is important testimony to the
63. TLL, s.v. "confra", I. B. b (citing, inter alia, Jerome, and Augustine, cresc.
1.34.40); cf. "collatio", I. B. 1. a.
204
role played by the Manichees in shaping his view of the biblical text qua text, that is, as a set of verbal signs transmitted by writing, subject to the usual hazards of literary tradition in a manuscript culture. Interestingly
enough, Augustine's dissatisfaction with the Manichaean view of the text
and desire to confer with "some man most learned in those books" (aliquo illorum librorum doctissimo) are recorded in the Confessions at a point
just before the announcement of his departure from Rome in 384. Their
dramatic date thus coincides exactly with the launching in the same city of Jerome's career as a biblical philologist, an event closely associated with his collation (in the technical sense) of Greek and Latin manuscripts of the
New Testament. Augustine's experience as a Manichee undoubtedly
helped make him receptive to Jerome's insistence on the philological aspect

of the Studium scripturarum, at the same time ensuring that he would not follow him all the way in his editorial revisionism.64 In 397, as in 391, Jerome would have been a natural choice as "man most learned in those
books". But in 3 84 Augustine was bound for Milan, where (always according to his own account) he was destined to profit from the preaching of
another contender for that title, though without ever obtaining the private
conference he craved: "and so I came to Milan, to bishop Ambrose"

(5.13.23: et veni Mediolanium ad Ambrosium episcopum).
These examples from Books 45 by no means exhaust the implications

of the verb conferre as used in the Confessions.65 They may suffice, however, to establish the importance of conlatio as a multivalent literarypragmatic concept and to justify our considering other scenes and episodesincluding some that are described without recourse to the verb conferre itselfin the light of the "conference" paradigm. They may even warrant our taking a general, albeit partial, view of the Confessions as the record of a series of conlationes conducing to a literary-interpretative transaction, or "text act", of potentially definitive type. As we should
64. For a clear statement of Augustine's position, see Gerhard Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tbingen: Mohr, 1959),
esp. 44-73.
65. Note also 6.11.19: "Pereant omnia et dimittamus haec vana et inania: conferamus nos ad solam inquisitionem veritatis. . . . Quid cunctamur igitur relicta spe saeculi conferre nos totos ad quaerendum deum et vitam beatam?"; 6.14.24: "Et multi amici agitaveramus animo et conloquentes ac detestantes turbulentas humanae vitae molestias paene iam firmaveramus remoti a turbis otiose vivere, id otium sic moliti, ut, si quid habere possemus, conferremus in medium unamque rem familirem conflaremus ex omnibus . . ."; 6.16.26: "Nee considerabam miser, ex qua vena mihi manaret, quod ista ipsa foeda tarnen cum amicis dulciter conferebam nee esse sine amicis poteram beatus etiam secundum sensu, quem tunc habebam quantalibet afluentia carnalium
voluptatum."
205
expect in a work that resumes so much of the programme of the abandoned De doctrina christiana, the culminating conference of the Confessions has
the Bible as its focus. Herein lies the main achievement of the work as the
second instalment of a hypothetical apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis ad Paulinum. By persistently associating human conversation with various kinds of comparison or collation involving texts, and gradu-
ally narrowing the range of texts considered to the Bible, Augustine contrives, first, to identify Christian discourse with attention to the biblical text and, secondly, to present the literary-colloquial mode as an appropriate vehicle of biblical exegesis.
The autobiographical climax of Augustine's Collations is reached in the

threefold conversion-narrative of Book 8. Reading and conversation play decisive roles in the stories of Marius Victorinus and of the two imperial officials at Trier, but the privilege of conversion by biblical "conference" is reserved for Augustine and his life-long partner in God-talk, Alypius. The
word conferre does not appear in the surface text of the famous garden
scene. Instead, as in the preceding description of Ponticianus's visit, the narrator uses the verb sedere ("to sit") in the first person plural to create the context for a shared activity of reading. In his distress, we are told, Au-
gustine laid down the copy of Paul's Epistles that was to have been their
study that day, got up from the place where he and Alypius were sitting
together (ubi sedebamus), and prostrated himself under a fig tree some
distance away (8.12.28). It is while he is lying there crying that he hears the childlike voice summoning him back to his reading: tolle lege, tolle lege ("take it up and read, take it up and read"). The singular imperative (lege not legite) can only apply to one reader, but since it is delivered more than once (crebro) by an invisible speaker, it could in principle be addressed to more than one person. We are not told whether Alypius heard the voice; the sequel suggests that he did, but was less quick than Augustine to interpret it, otherwise he would have been the first to pick up the book.
Augustine, returning to stand or sit again beside his friend, opens the codex
at random and reads in silence from Romans (legi in silentio). This is not a conversation, at least not between men, nor yet a conference.66 Even now, in the close company of Alypius his fellow reader, Augustine (like Ambrose in the earlier scene) reads alone. The silence continues after he has finished reading and as Alypius reads in turn. The two men communicate over the text by facial expression and gesture:
66. Cf. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, "St. Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence," Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 175-97, esp. 189-92.
206
8.12.30: Tum interiecto aut d-gito aut nescio quo alio signo codicem clausi et
tranquillo iam vultu indicavi Alypio. At ille quid in se agereturquod ego

nesciebamsic indicavit. Petit videre quid legissem: ostendi, et adtendit etiam
ultra quam ego legeram. Et ignorabam quid sequeretur. Sequebatur vero: infirmum autem in fide recipite. Quod ille ad se rettulit mihique aperuit. [Then shutting the book, and putting my finger or some other mark between the leaves, I showed it to Alypius, my countenance now calm. And he also, in like manner, showed me what was in his heart, of which I knew nothing. He desired to see what I had read: I showed him, and he read on further than I had done. For I was ignorant of what followed, which was this: "Him that is weak in the faith receive ye" (Rom. 14:1). And this he applied to himself, as
he then revealed to me.]
Of course if one translates the verbs indicare, petere, ostendere and aperire
as "to declare", "to ask", "to tell" and "to explain", as many good translators have, the silence is immediately broken. Augustine, however, seems to
have gone out of his way to use deictic terms which do not require any speech to take place. The scene is certainly more dramatically powerful, as well as more theologically significant, if no articulate sound is heard in the garden after the (divine) utterance from the neighbouring house.67 The
subsequent "conversation" with Monica can also be seen as occurring in
conditions of wordless rapture: Inde ad matrem ingredimur. Indicamus, gaudet ("Thence we went in to my mother. We indicated to her [what had happened], she rejoiced."). Only then, and with heavy emphasis, does Augustine introduce a verb that necessarily implies speech: Narramus, quemadmodum gestum sit ("We related how it had happened"). If this interpretation is accepted, the conversion of Augustine and Alypius appears as an example of what could be called the literary conference degr
zro, a text act involving two people who confer without speaking. Para-
doxically but predictably, this minimal form of the literary conference is for Augustine also its highest form, unattainable without supernatural help.
As shared human experience it is surpassed, in this life, only by such
moments of textless communion as the vision of Ostia described in
Book 9.
The deixis of the conversion-scene may be regarded as an epitome of the
autobiographical part of the Confessions, Books 110 on the author's

67. Cf. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris: De Boccard, 1968), 306-10, for whom the voice saying "fo//e, lege" is an internal voice heard only by Augustine. Whether this point is granted or not, Courcelle is surely right that "Il s'agit matriellement d'une scene muette, d'une histoire sans paroles
[humaines]" (307).
207
reckoning.68 Augustine's narration is self-indication, lndicabo me ("I will show myself ", lit. "I will point myself out", with the possible further sense
of "I will accuse myself"), he says repeatedly at the beginning of Book 10,
in a passage which is of the utmost importance for an understanding of his purpose in the work as a whole (10.1.1-4.6). We recall that in the De doctrina christiana Augustine had defined the contents of the Bible as "signs given by God but pointed out to us by men" (signa divinitus data [sed] per homines nobis indicata). Now he is intent on reading his own life as a divinely inspired narrative.69 By revealing himself, not merely as he once was but also as he now is, he hopes to induce in his readers a response comparable to Monica's at the end of Book 8: joy and praise of God, mingled with holy terror. As in the garden, so in the Confessions as a literary work, the act of self-indication is achieved through the medium of the Bible. The "character" Augustine reveals himself to Alypius and Monica by reading himself into (and out of) a passage in Romans in a manner suggested to him by the Vita Antonii; the "author" Augustine reveals himself to his fellow human beings by writing himself into (and out of) a biblical narrative of loss and redemption artfully reconstituted from the Gospels and the Psalms. In neither case are the moment and means of discovering-himself easily distinguishable from the moment and means of discovering-himself-to-others, or from the moment and means of discovering-God-for-himself-and-so-to-others. The complex dynamics of this multiple process of discovery and indication is the main subject of Book 10, in which Augustine considers his own memory as the ground of his knowledge both of himself and (in an infinitely mysterious way) of his
God, and as the source of all his utterances. Although the biblical text itself
is conspicuously absent from the discussion, the return of two key terms
from the De doctrina christiana, namely invenire ("to find, discover") and
proferre ("to utter"),70 reminds us that these reflections on discovery and

68. Retr. 2.6.1 (ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57 [1984]): "... A primo usque ad decimum de me scripti sunt, in tribus ceteris de scripturis Sanctis, ab eo quod scriptum est; In principio fecit deus caelum et terram. ..." 69. The same point is made somewhat differently by Ralph Flores, "Reading and Speech in St. Augustine's 'Confessions,' " AugStud 6 (1975): 1-13.1 agree with Flores that Books 1-9 provide "a frame within which the events of the narrative itself can be viewed as a discovery of a kind of textuality or reading," but am at a loss to understand what he considers that textuality to be. 70. 10.14.22: "Sed ecce de memoria profero, cum dico quattuor esse perturbationes animi ... et quidquid de his disputare potuero . . . , ibi invento quid dicam atque inde profero, nee tarnen ulla earum perturbatione perturbor, cum eas reminiscendo conmemoro; et antequam recolerentur a meet retraetarentur, ibi erant. . . . Forte ergo sicut de ventre eibus ruminando, sie ista de memoria recordando proferuntur. . . . Quis enim
208
declaration are the sequel to conferences textual (Book 8) as well as non-
textual (Book 9), and prepares us for the transition from the ten books Augustine wrote about himself to the three he wrote about the Bible. Any dating of individual books of the Confessions is necessarily speculative, but it is tempting to postulate a link between the abandonment of the De
doctrina christiana, with its anxious affirmation of the role of the human teacher, and the extraordinarily arduous Book 10 de memoria, with its
unqualified reassertion of the rights of the Veritas docens, the divine truth
that alone truly teaches.71 Book 11 of the Confessions resumes the unfinished business of the
"apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis'", inserting the act of biblical interpretation into the conference paradigm established in Books 19 (10). The narrative of Augustine's life, we are now given to believe, has delayed a
more important enterprise:
11.2.2: Quando autem sufficio lingua calami enuntiare omnia hortamenta tua et omnes terrores tuos et consolationes et gubernationes, quibus me perduxisti praedicare verbum et sacramentum tuum dispensare populo tuo? Et si sufficio haec enuntiare ex ordine, caro mihi valent stillae temporum. Et olim inardesco meditari in lege tua et in ea tibi confiten scientiam et inperitiam
meam. . . .
[But when shall I be able with this tongue of my pen to declare all thine exhortations and comforts and particular providences, whereby thou hast drawn me to preach thy word and to dispense thy sacrament to thy people? And although I should be able to declare these things in order, yet the very
moments or drops of time are precious unto me; and for a long time have I
been fired with a desire to "meditate in thy law", and therein to confess to thee both my knowledge and my ignorance. . . .]
Whatever sense we attach to "confessing" in Augustine's previous use of
the verb, there is no denying the novelty of his idea of a confessio scientiae [sc. scripturarum], of a voluntary exposure of his limited expertise as an interpreter of the Bible. If explanation be needed for the plural confessiones
talia volens loqueretur, si quotiens tristitiam metumve nominamus, totiens maerere vel timere cogeremur? Et tamen non ea loqueremur, nisi in memoria nostra non tantum sonos . . . sed etiam rerum ipsarum notiones inveniremus. ..." These reflections lead
naturally to others concerning the problems of finding (invenire) and uttering (confiten,
praedicare) God/the Truth. 71. Conf. 10.65.40. Note also 10. 6.10, on man's "conversation" with the natural world and the internal "conference" on which its sense depends: "Nonne omnibus,
quibus integer sensus est, apparet haec species? Cur non omnibus eadem loquitur? . . . immo vero omnibus loquitur, sed Uli intelligunt, qui eius vocem acceptam
foris intus cum veritate conferunt."
209
of the title, the simplest may be that this "professional" confessionwhich

is not a confession at all in any sense current at the timewas grafted on to a work originally planned without it. To say this is not to call in question the much-debated "unity" of the Confessions, merely to remark another
instance of Augustine's habit of allowing his various, often simultaneous literary projects to cross and combine with one another. It is easy enough
to find warrants for the developments of Books 1113 earlier in the Con-
fessions. As the author turns from the narrative of himself to the mysteries of Scripture, his references to God's people and to the preaching of God's word recall the theme of praedicatio announced in the opening sentences of the work, and can be taken as a sign that the confessional mode is now finally expanding to encompass the professional functions of the priestly interpreter.72 This is a legitimate inference, provided we respect the relations between confessio and professio implied in the work as a whole, and do not try to read Augustine's exegesis of the Creation story in Books 11 13 as a specimen sermo ad populum of the kind he might have preached to his congregation in Hippo. We do indeed see the professional biblicist at
work in these books, but in a context dictated by the preceding parts of the Confessions rather than by the as-yet-unwritten fourth book of the De
doctrina christiana.
When Augustine says he will "confess" before God whatever he "discovers" in the sacred text (11.2.3: confitear tibi quidquid invenero in libris
tuis), he invites us to consider confession as a possible modus proferendi for

the biblical interpreter. At the same time, he makes that possibility contingent on our own activity as readers. As a statement at the beginning of Book 11 reminds us once again, the aim of his personal narrative in the earlier books has been to turn each and every reader into a fraternal accomplice in the act of confession: "to stir up the affections both of myself and of others who shall read these things; that so together we may say: 'The Lord is great and greatly to be praised'" (11.1.1: ut . . . affectum meum excito in te et eorum, qui haec legunt, ut dicamus omnes: magnus dominus et
laudabilis valde).73 That affective design does not lapse as confession turns to, or more fully becomes, biblical interpretation. When, a few lines later,
72. Thus Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 556; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 123,135.1 have used this argument myself in discussing the later reception of the De doctrina christiana and Confessions: "John Donne (1572-1631) in the Company of Augustine: Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance," forthcoming in
REAg39(1993). 73. Cf. refr. 2.6.1 : "Confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de maus et de bonis meis
deum laudant iustum et bonum, atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et affectum. Interim quod ad me attinet, hoc in me egerunt cum scriberentur et agunt cum leguntur."
210
the intending exegete proclaims his desire not only to benefit himself but also tobe "of use to fraternal charity" (11.2.3: desiderium meum . . . non mihi soli aestuat, sed usui vult esse fraternae caritati), we are meant to recognize the same perfect symmetry between the self-interested and the
altruistic, feel the accumulated weight of innumerable con-prefixes, and understand that we (the fraternal reader) are to carry on participating in a speech act that is now manifestly a text act of the type prefigured in earlier
books.
The last three books of the Confessions, Augustine's invitation to a charitable conference de scripturis Sanctis, rank among the hardest in
Latin literature. "Anfractuous" one scholar has rightly called them. They
embrace, inter alia, an exegesis of the biblical Creation story, a demonstration of the multiplicity of possible exegeses of the same, and a discussion of the principles on which different exegeses (of this or any biblical text)
should be rejected or accepted. Reduced to a set of precepts, a large part of

what is said repeats statements already made in the unfinished De doctrina christiana.74 But Augustine is no longer giving precepts; he is working through examples with his imaginary partners in conference, including some who he knows will want to contradict him. Problems of interpretation and adjudication that had been raised theoretically in works such as
the De utilitate credendi and practically by his earlier attempts to expound

Genesis, problems that had become embarrassingly personal in the triangular correspondence with Paulinus and Jerome, and with which he had wrestled at length in the De doctrina christiana, are now the subject of a
debate that relentlessly solicits the reader's involvement. Though few late
antique readers can have felt themselves wholly adequate to the task, none could mistake what was being required of them: to "seek, ask, knock" in company with Augustine, in the faithful and charitable hope of "receiving, finding, and entering" with him.75 At the risk of over-simplification, we
74. While some of what is said anticipates the still-to-be-written second part of Book 3: Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 565f. 75. Conf. 13.38.53 (the closing sentences of the work): "Et hoc intellegere quis hominum dabit homini? Quis ngelus angelo? Quis ngelus homini? A te petatur, in te quaeratur, ad te pulsetur: sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur." The final phrase is potentially ambiguous: though the biblical subtext suggests that the "opening" will be made to the human postulant (i.e. by God), the passive form allows the additional possibility that one human recipient ("sic accipietur") will "open" what is found ("sic invenietur") to another. For the implied equivalence "aperire" = "proferre" cf. the opening sentences of doctr. chr. prol. 1: "Sunt praecepta quaedam tractandarum scripturarum, quae studiosis earum video non incommode posse tradi, ut non solum legendo alios, qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt, sed etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant."
211
could say that the author of the Confessions had reverted to the manner of his earlier "literary debates with those present and with himself alone in
the presence of God" (9.4.7: libri disputait cum praesentibus et cum ipso
me solo coram te), the dialogues of Cassiciacum or the De magistro,76 only this time with the biblical text as the centre of conference and the City of God as its declared goal.
CONCLUSION: CHRISTIAN LITERATURE AS BIBLICAL CONFERENCE
The confessio scientiae of Confessions 1113 registers an important
literary-pragmatic advance on the De doctrina christiana of 396/7, and marks a turning-point in Augustine's relations with the Latin reading public.77 While the earlier treatise had laid an initial emphasis on the social
aspect of biblical interpretation, only to lose itself in semantics, the Confessions finally envisages the actus inveniendi et proferendi as the combined
work of two or more human beings in the presence of God, as an actus conferendi or "conference" performed in the spirit of charity. It thereby deflects possible criticism of the author as one who would undervalue human instruction in the science of Scripture, yet without committing him to a fully "professional" (or for that matter markedly ascetic) conception of the interpreter's task and social function. It defines an ideal context in which a recently elevated bishop could communicate on biblical topics with men like Paulinus, and not fall victim to the philological rigour of a
At its close the Confessions comes back to the point-of-departure of the De doctrina christiana, in order to "retract" (but not withdraw!) the statements made there about
the role of the human teacher.
76. Thus Pincherle, "Quelques remarques sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin,"
La Nouvelle CIb 7-9 (1955-57): 189-206, 206 and "S. Agostino," 574 n. 73, with
reference to the Confessions as a whole. But cf. Herzog, " 'Non in sua voce,' " passim,
and Franca EIa Consolino, "Interlocutore divino e lettori terreni: la
funzione-destinatario nelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Materiali e discussioniper I'analisi dei testi classici 6 ( 1981 ) : 119-46, who both stress the generic innovativeness of the
later work.
77. It is impossible to enter here on the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Confessions, or on the rich and varied history of the conlatio in Latin Christian literature after Augustine. For evidence of contemporary reaction to the worklittle of it directly relevant to the aspects considered heresee Courcelle, Recherches, 235-47; Les 'Confessions', 2016. While it is unlikely that Augustine's contemporaries "totally ignored" the last three books (as suggested by Consolino, "Interlocutore divino," 135), their engagement with this part of the Confessions has left fewer traces than one might have hoped for.
212
Jerome. And it does all this without compromising Augustine's view of

God as the only source of knowledge, the inner teacher in conference with
whom we discover what is true and what is false. The delicate balance
between the respective claims of the external divine text and the internal divine voice is struck at the moment of approach to Genesis 1.1 in Book 11 : 11.3.5: Audiam et intellegam, quomodo in principio fecisti caelum et terrani.
Scripsit hoc Moyses et abiit, transiit hinc a te ad te eque nunc ante me est. Nam si esset, tenerem eum et rogarem eum et per te obsecrarem, ut mihi ista panderet, et praeberem aures corporis mei sonis erumpentibus ex ore eius, et si hebraea voce loqueretur, frustra pulsaret sensum meum nee inde mentem meam quiequam tangeret; si autem latine, scirem quid diceret. Sed unde sci-
rem, an verum diceret? Quod si et hoc scirem, num ab illo scirem? Intus utique mihi, intus in domicilio cogitationis nee hebraea nee graeca nee latina nee barbara veritas sine oris et linguae organis, sine strepitu syllabarum diceret: "verum dicit" et ego statim certus confidenter illi homini tuo dicerem: "verum dicis."
[Let me hear and understand how thou, "in the beginning created the heaven and the earth." Of this Moses wrote and passed away, he went hence from thee, to thee, and he is not now before me. For if he were, then would I hold him fast and beg of him for thy sake that he would discover these things to me; and I would lay these ears of mine to the sound that should break out of his mouth. Yet if he should speak Hebrew, in vain would it fall upon my ears, nor would aught of it reach unto my mind; but if he spake Latin, I should know what he said. Yet how should I know, whether he said true or no? And if I knew this also, should I know it of him? Indeed I should not. For within me, in that very house of my thought, neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor any barbarous tongue, but Truth itself, without instrument of mouth or tongue, and without the noise of any syllables, would say unto me, "It is the truth"; and I, being assured thereof, would confidently avow to that man of thine, "Thou speakest truly."]
The ground on which Augustine rejects an imaginary conversation with

Moses is the ground on which he joins in an imaginary conference with his
readers. Responding to Jerome in the De doctrina christiana, he had stipulated a limited knowledge of the original biblical languages, quantum satis est. Now even that requirement is tacitly lifted. Jerome, who in his recourse
to the Hebraica Veritas (as he called it) had seemed to identify biblical "truth" with the language of its first expression, might converse with Moses in Hebrew if he wished. The author of the Confessions is not interested in that kind of conversation.78 Less than a decade earlier, in the De
78. The relevance of conf. 11.3.5 to Jerome's theories is remarked by Pincherle, "Quelques remarques", 205. Cf. Gennaro Luongo, "Autobiograf-a ed esegesi b-blica nelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Parola del Passato 31 (1976): 286-306 at 304-5.
213
utilitate credendi, he had briefly hinted that the aspiring Christian biblicist should seek a master in the Holy Land, by implication someone like Je-
rome. However, the experience of the intervening years, in particular his epistolary converse with Paulinus, had convinced him of the pointlessness of such expedients. Augustine was in Hippo, and there would remain, the
animator of a biblical "conference" of ever-growing dimensions that would
go on for centuries after his death. His biographer's attempt to formulate the nature of this activity (absentes libris docere) may miss something of the complexity of the process of Augustinian doctrina, but his services as literary executor were carried out in precisely the right spirit. In taking leave of Moses, Augustine also takes his distance, charitably but deliberately, from his chief rival and partner in the exacting new enterprise of writing de scripturis for a Latin readership. Jerome had pioneered that art, but in a way that was forbidding to all but the most intrepid fellowtravellers. With a little help from his friends (less perhaps than he had once
hoped for), Augustine was now able to open a broader, more companionable road. The third chapter of Book 11 of the Confessions is the end of the apologia contra Hieronymum and the beginning of one of the greatest
conversations in western literature.79
Mark Vessey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of

British Columbia
interpretationis consistent with his reinterpretation of the monastic life as described

by Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63-83. For a divergent reading of the final books of the Confessions, which I nevertheless find very persuasive, see Geoffrey Gait Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119-34. For
79. The main tendency that I have discerned in Augustine's literary pragmatics namely his desire to establish caritas rather than askesis as the ethical basis for biblical
Harpham, the Confessions demonstrates an "ascetic practice of reading" that is "at

once, and profoundly, personal, transcendent, and social" (134).

1 2 Vessey

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

1 2 Vessey

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Nanyang Technological Univ at 10/22/10 4:28AM GMT

Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"

According to his first biographer, when Augustine returned from Italy to

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

years later, so it is possible that he allowed subsequent developments to

respect of such information.3 How are we to account for this peculiarity? If

an appendix to the Vita) reposes on a set of reasoned assumptions, worked

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

ern reader, following Augustine through works as strenuous and inchoate

in question. Augustine's writings from the years immediately following his

what we mean by text/textuality when referring to the phenomena considered to fall

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

return to Africa reveal an urgent, sometimes frantic desire to ascertain the

conditions for successful Christian learning and communication. These

To start more modestly, and confine ourselves to the sphere of literary

interpretation conceived as conference or conlatio.

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

met: Jerome of Bethlehem and Paulinus of NoIa.6

already pressing. Predictably, many of them concerned the Bible. What

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Marius Victorinus). Now he was being forced to generalize and draw

such a radically historicist thesis would in fact be quite foreign to his

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Alexandrian represented for him is proclaimed repeatedly in the letters,

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

by birth and education conformed closely (more closely than Augustine) to

Boccard, 1938; reissued with a Retractatio, 1949).

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

living example of a Christian magisterium that is also a professio, in

the sense of a specialized occupation for which training is required.23

Augustine endeavours to classify the different kinds of error that are

the world. Naturally the province of monks, it can be prosecuted by

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

tian writing is essentially writing de scripturis,17 and the Christian

constituting a kind of apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis.

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

epistolary conversation. Even so, modern Augustinians may still be guilty

Augustine's sense of Christian vocation, and in particular on his literary

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

On the basis of the relationship thus proleptically established, Paulinus

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Though more restrained in its use of biblical language and imagery,

infirmitatem Veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus diligenter advertas,

est fons vitae. . . . Quid enim habemus, quod non aeeepimus?

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

linus, also written in 395, is a programmatic statement of his view of

biblical science as a distinct discipline, one not to be attempted by any mere

Jerome's self-serving polemic certainly ran too close to the documented

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION

By 396 Augustine was ready to offer solutions to many of the problems

saving instruction, without prejudging relations between the divine and

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

The oppositional quality of the De doctrina appears most clearly in the

he is about to impart, Augustine opposes a carefully balanced theory of the

49). The argument is built up of a number of elements: a characteristically

free to entertain Rudolf Lorenz's suggestion that Augustine is rejecting an

47. R. Lorenz, "Die Wissenschaftslehre Augustins," ZKG 67 (1955-56), 29-60,

VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION