If our students are looking for more explicit examples of spiritual—as opposed to literal—readings of scripture, Books 12 and 13 of the Confessions are great places to look. Alas for my own students; I very infrequently assign these books to them!

Part of the reason for not assigning the books beyond the narrative material from Confessions (that is, Books 1–9) is their difficulty. My sense is that it would be rather taxing for today’s undergraduate theology students to follow the particulars of the various spiritual interpretations of Genesis 1:1 that Augustine considers in Book 12. (He discusses five valid but different interpretations at 12.20.29 and following.)

Still, most of my students—even the increasing numbers who come into my classroom with little knowledge of the biblical material, to say nothing of knowledge about Augustine—are at least familiar with the controversy (still interesting to some of them!) between religion and science on the question of the “creation” of the world. Even though fewer and fewer of my students are able to identify the relevant Bible passages and their locations in the canon, some of them are at least aware that the positions they hold—whatever they happen to be—take a stand on either a literal reading or what they might understand as a more symbolic reading of the creation story.

From my point of view, this entire debate is confounded by the so-called experts (on both sides!) who enter it with their many varieties of confusion, leaving students with what I consider to be a false choice between the findings of modern science on the one hand, and a faithful reading of scripture on the other. It is not my aim in bringing this up to rehearse the specifics of my own way of deconstructing this particular false choice for my students—but check out Creator God, Evolving World by Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod for a sense of the direction I take. The reason I refer to the so-called debate between science and religion at all is to suggest a possible point of entry for discussing these matters with today’s theology students. (For those professors who, like me, don’t usually assign Book 12, but who still want to find a way to exploit this point of entry as a way of engaging with Augustine’s text, I recommend smuggling the religion-and-science debate in alongside Book 5’s discussion of the Manichees versus the Natural Philosophers on the meaning of the sun, moon, and stars.)

Aside from, and I would argue even more important than, the content of Augustine’s exegesis of Genesis 1:1 in Book 12 is the form of his exegesis. Whatever biblical text Augustine happens to be considering in any given moment, it is fairly clear that he is modeling for us a specific mode of approach. This way of interpreting scripture has at least two key features—which are also virtues—that I would like to hold up for consideration; we can think of it as Augustine’s hermeneutic of love and humility.

Much has been written—including in these very blog posts (see this essay by Michael Cameron)—on the role that love (caritas) plays in Augustine’s interpretive strategy. In his On Christian Teaching Augustine writes: “So if it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin caritas of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them” (1.35.39). Notice that Augustine is not simply encouraging us to see the theme of love as a merely conceptual key to unlocking the meaning of the text. Rather, Augustine is enjoining us to make love the guiding principle of the entire activity of scriptural interpretation—which includes not just the individual’s intellectual activity of trying to grasp meaning, but also the motivation that brings people to scripture in the first place as well as the mode of conversing with others about its meaning.

“Moses meant whatever he did mean in his books with an eye to those twin commandments of charity,” Augustine writes in Book 12; and for that reason, “[i]f we engage in hurtful strife as we attempt to expound his words, we offend against the very charity [caritas] for which he said all those things” (conf. 12.25.35; tr. Boulding). Scripture is not just about love; it is for love—for the building up of a community constituted by and dedicated to the very Love who is the Primary Author of these words…as well as the Author everything else in the universe.

Love, of course, covers all, and at the highest level it burns away all vice—including pride. So from a certain perspective, one can say that humility is already a part of an authentically charitable spirit, and by extension a biblical hermeneutic grounded in charity. But there is a conceptual as well as an existential specificity to pride—and to its opposite, humility—that Augustine does not want us to overlook, evidenced by the many opportunities he takes in his Confessions to discuss the importance of these themes from his own point of view.

One relevant instance of pride’s effect in Augustine’s life, narrated in Book 3, is when it kept him from appreciating scripture after coming off what I like to call his “Hortensius moment”: “[M]y swollen pride recoiled from its style” (conf. 3.5.9). In this case, pride manifested as an intellectual arrogance, balanced later in Book 12 by the thoroughly converted tone of one who approaches scriptures with genuine intellectual humility.

At the end of his discussion of the various interpretations of Genesis 1:1 under consideration, Augustine now is able to write: “[I]f anyone asks me which of them is what Moses, your servant, intended, these writings are no true confession of mine unless I confess to you, ‘I do not know’” (conf. 12.30.41, emphasis mine). I don’t know about you, but when I see someone I consider to be one of the brightest minds of the ancient world—if not the brightest—saying “I don’t know,” it makes a deep impression.

It is this intellectual humility that I am suggesting is another crucial part—or, if not a different part, perhaps just a dimension—of Augustine’s much discussed hermeneutic of love. He doesn’t really know—in the strict sense of “to know”—what the scriptures are; nevertheless, he believes with the fullness of his faith, and bets his life on it, that they are about (as well as by and for) love. He has learned how to approach God’s holy scriptures, but also the world as a whole—including his own self—with genuine love and humility. And of course, he’s implicitly inviting us to do the same.

One way of reading Augustine’s masterful work as a whole, then, is as a prayerful record of his learning to approach the Bible but also reality with a spirit of charity and humility; the narration of this radical transformation (Books 1–9) followed by the rather heady and elaborate illustration of its effect (Books 10–13) reflect the way God’s grace has given Augustine a new way of being in the world. You don’t really need to read all the way to Books 12 and 13 of the Confessions to get the basic point. But it certainly couldn’t hurt.