LOVE IN INTERPRETATION

CHAPTER 1 CARITAS AS THE SPIRIT OF INTERPRETATION This chapter will seek to define the Christian concept of caritas as the spirit of interpretation deemed central in Augustine’s thought. By the spirit of interpretation, this study will apply the idea of an inner quality or nature of a person or thing to the action of interpreting Scripture. Augustine’s hermeneutic follows that caritas is a product of understanding while at the same time is the method, or means, by which understanding is produced. For Augustine, the sensus spiritualis of Scripture is not to be seen as the meaning of the text as the spirit of the text is not reducible to grammar. Gerald L. Bruns describes the spirit of the text: “It is rather the spirit of fore-understanding in which the text is to be studied.” For Augustine, the understanding of things logically precedes the understanding of words. A thorough study of De doctrina Christiana will show that, as an intimate thing, caritas is the nature of Scripture, while at the same time directly affects the method of reading Scripture. This chapter will show the inspiration for Augustine’s epistemology in that where the pride of knowledge results in arrogance, caritas edifies the soul. Therefore, since Augustine’s intimate knowledge of caritas defines his epistemology, the same should also define his hermeneutic. Intelligent Charity Daniel Day Williams remarks, “St. Augustine formulated the conception of love at a critical time in the development of early Christianity, and his vision in some way informs all subsequent Christian thought in the West.” Humility, an aspect of charity, became the standard of Augustine’s pedagogy by which he taught understanding derived from biblical texts. The Doctor gratiae confessed, “Where was the charity, which builds on the foundation of humility which is Christ Jesus?” Alan Jacobs considers Augustine’s humility as a method of textual study the means by which one is “to read with intelligent charity.” Jacobs argues for the application of reading with the humility of love toward all textual situations, scriptural, poetic, and prose. He acknowledges that any proposed hermeneutic guided by love, or any human action for that matter, will inevitably meet opposition since love in any of its genuine forms is a fearful thing. Love requires openness and vulnerability exposing elements of our character that are not pleasant. As such, Jacobs points out that to love God means to subject what we read, and those who write what we read, to the authority of God’s righteousness. Augustine’s hermeneutic serves as a model from Christian philosophy in reading with love. For Augustine, the hermeneutic of caritas clarifies the role of wisdom in action as selfless and as an attachment to God. Through this approach, hermeneutics is not solely dialectic. It is also kenotic. The hermeneutic of caritas requires a sacrifice, inspired by incarnation, desiring attachment, and seeks to be understood in this investigation of Augustinian hermeneutics. Caritas in Augustinian Hermeneutics Augustine’s dependence on God’s love, rather than dependent folly on his youthful “in love with love,” is arguably the key to his hermeneutic thought. Since caritas involves God’s love for a disloyal humanity, relational aspects of love, as seen in fourth-century trinitarian theology, may be viewed as a beneficial hermeneutic necessary for interpretation. Understanding this concept, Augustine connected the role of the Holy Spirit in the interpretation of Scripture through compassionate love. To determine this connection, it is prudent to remember that the Holy Spirit is viewed in the Christian tradition as God’s presence with his people as was familiar in the Hebraic tradition of hesed, or God’s loving presence through kindness. Since Augustine admittedly had little knowledge of Hebrew, the Vulgate usage of misericors (long-suffering or merciful) for the hesed idea of God would have been more familiar to the bishop of Hippo as seen throughout the Confessions. In referencing Psalm 86:15, Augustine responds to the vanity expressed when eloquent rhetoric covered vulgarity in the scholarship of his youth: “Lord you are ‘long-suffering and very patient and true’; you see this, and you keep silence.” Pneumatology in the Hermeneutics of the Ancient Church The fourth-century Church Fathers held a pneumatology centered partly on the aspects of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the Word of God. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed presented the Holy Spirit as the Lord “who spoke by the prophets” and as the divine subject, Κύριος, who established relationships as the “speaking Spirit” who spoke to believers in person. The Church Fathers, including Augustine, emphasized the self-revelation of divine inspiration of all the Holy Scriptures when defining trinitarian doctrine. This doctrine followed Pauline theology: “Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love [quia caritas Dei – Vulg.] has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” T. F. Torrance argues that “the fathers were not very interested in the mechanics of inspiration or with its supernatural features, but they were deeply moved by the fact that in and through these Scriptures it is none other than God himself who continues to speak in the Spirit as the Lord, with the unrestricted majesty and holiness of his being.” The hermeneutics established by the fourth-century Fathers of the Church emphasized less the letter of the text and more the spirit of the text aimed at the Holy Spirit’s activity in the Word of God. Augustine must have certainly read the works on Trinitarian thought from previous fourth-century scholars Gregory Nazianzen and Didymus the Blind. Augustine is credited for taking the ideas of Didymus, on distinctions of the Trinity as relational rather than substantival, into the language of his own De Trinitate. Didymus expressed strong conviction that the Word of God in the Holy Scriptures was the θεολογία of the Spirit. Condemned for adherence to the dualistic heresies of Origen, most of Didymus’s works were destroyed. However recent scholarship by J. A. Mingarellio claims that the De Trinitate originally attributed to Didymus was truly the work of John Cassian, the fifth-century Church Father. Yet, Ambrose of Milan’s earlier work on the Holy Spirit written in 381, De Spiritu Sancto, was based closely on Didymus’s work by the same title. Didymus taught that the Spirit dwelt in the words of Scripture as the words of the human authors came by means of the Holy Spirit “because the Holy Spirit [was] present furnishing a word worthy of God.” The hermeneutic of Didymus was less structural and more theological while embracing a Christian elevation, or ἀναγωγή. The anagogical method implied an ascent to a spiritual interpretation of statements. Didymus saw that the Word of God heard in the reading of the texts was not idle language, rather the Word brought to the hearer, or reader was from the mouth of the living God by his life-giving Breath or Spirit, the θεόπνευστος Word. As such, one’s returning soul to God did not follow after a progressive illumination but was reshaped according to arete, or virtue. The pneumatological views expressed by Didymus reflect the common theological understanding in the fourth century which influenced Ambrose and subsequently Augustine’s trinitarian thought. The hermeneutic discussion by T. F. Torrance concerning the Spirit as Paraclete in the theology of the ancient Church argues that the Spirit is Christ’s, or the Word’s, Alter Ego or Alter Advocatus. “The vicarious advocacy of the Paraclete was a favourite theme with the Nicene and post-Nicene fathers,” states Torrance. This theme of advocacy follows in the Pauline doctrine of Romans 8 where the Spirit is viewed as an active intercessor: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.”