Rule of Love and Rule of Faith in Augustine’s Hermeneutics: A Complex Dialectic of the Twofold Rules

Since the sixteenth-century Reformation, literal interpretation of the Bible has been deemed the best hermeneutical method to unearth the biblical writers’ original meaning. For the Reformers, allegorical interpretation was denigrated for reading an extraneous, or spiritual, meaning into any text. Although Augustine was among the first who champions a literal interpretation of the Scripture—as he outlined in his De doctrina christiana—until recent decades, Augustine is still being perceived as inconsistent in following his hermeneutical method as it is attested in his interpretation of the Good Samaritan. In his interpretation, Augustine seems to have allegorized the parable, thus his method was accused of being inconsistent. Is it really the case? This article attempts to contest such an accusation by showing that Augustine’s method of interpretation cannot simply be categorized as either entirely literal or allegorical. Augustine never professes as a literalist, an exegete who only applies what is now known as a historical-critical method. On the other hand, he did not recklessly legitimate the application of allegorical reading to any text. Taken as a whole, Augustine’s hermeneutics revolves around a complex dialectic of regula dilectionis (the rule of love) and regula fidei (the rule of faith) that allows both interpretations to be considered to be true.

Illuminatrix - stella maris - domina? (św. Hieronim). Patrystyczna interpretacja imienia Maria - wybrane hipotezy

W erze patrystycznej chętnie pochylano się nad etymologią imion biblijnych, ponieważ Ojcowie Kościoła byli przekonani, że imiona używane w Biblii zawierają ukryte znaczenie, jak utrzymywał św. Augustyn w De doctrina christiana 2, 38, 56-57 (por. PL 34, 61-62). Na Wschodzie etymologią imion zajmował się obszernie Orygenes, na Zachodzie zaś św. Hieronim ze Strydonu. Niniejszy artykuł przedstawia wybrane patrystyczne interpretacje na temat imienia Maria, opierając się głównie na przekazie Hieronima (por. Liber de nominibus hebraicis, PL 23, 771-858), który jako pierwszy spośród Ojców Kościoła zachodniego zajął się wyprowadzaniem etymologii nazw własnych. Etymologie zaproponowane przez Strydończyka (Maria = illuminatrix/illuminata/illuminant me isti, smyrna maris, stella maris, amarum mare, domina) konfrontujemy z dzisiejszym stanem wiedzy o językach semickich i zestawiamy je z greckimi Onomastica sacra. W podpunkcie ostatnim zaś analizujemy wybrane pohieronimowe interpretacje tegoż imienia (Ambroży z Mediolanu, Eucheriusz z Lyonu, Izydor z Sewilli).

Christian and Literary Rhetorics of the Early Middle Ages

Chapter 2 considers the fortunes of stylistic teaching about emotion in late antique and early Christian literary rhetoric: Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and Cassiodorus’ psalm commentary. Here the teaching can explicitly articulate an ethical dimension of style, where the teacher/speaker calls attention to his investment in the emotional charge of the text. But when that ethical value is merely assumed, not overtly stated, as in many monastic and clerical rhetorics over the following centuries, the force of the ethical defense of rhetoric diminishes. The chapter traces this “naturalization” of the ethical defense in the rhetorics of Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rupert of Deutz, and the twelfth-century cathedral master Onulf of Speyer.

Tokens of Love

The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist historians have recognized as available in that era. In Aemelia Lanyer's poetry, we find a resistance to established perspectives that is related to her sense that divine signification is always incomplete and that, therefore, the diffidence of female cognition is superior, when approaching religious texts, to the assertive mentality that she associates with men. Despite his sex, however, and his reputation for theological and political radicalism, Milton too explicitly contends that the interpretation of scripture should always be “non-committal” because its signification is always incomplete. The “very magnitude” of the “great mystery” of the Incarnation, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, should encourage the reader's mind to stand on “guard from the outset” against the tendency to make “rash or hasty assertions.” The urge to tamper with, pry into, add to, or hasten to understand the signifiers of divine meaning is shown, in Paradise Lost, to be the original sin of the first human couple. As much as for Lanyer, then, sex is for Milton bound up with hermeneutics—and, for both poets, the individual's relationship with God is a consuming passion, about which one may report a phenomenology of affects but can offer no contentions or arguments.