So often when we think of Augustine we might see him as a rigid, uncompromising thinker. Sometimes we are right to view Augustine in this way—for example, when he categorically condemns lying. But he is also capable of being far more receptive to other perspectives than this stereotype suggests. Augustine’s discussion of scriptural interpretation in Book 12 of the Confessions can remind readers (including myself) of Augustine’s ability to recognize and validate approaches to the truth that are different from his own.  

At the outset of book 12, Augustine continues the parsing of Genesis 1 that he began in the previous book. His focus is on spiritual versus material creation. He struggles to imagine the timeless, formless abyss that existed before mutable bodies (conf. 12.3.3-12.6.6; tr. Boulding) and tries as well as he can to make sense of God’s mysterious, eternal, unchanging existence (12.11.11-12.11.14). While doing so, Augustine acknowledges the wide disagreement about how to interpret Moses’s words (for Augustine accepts Moses to be the author of Genesis)—and even goes as far as to provide opponents’ counterarguments in dialogue with his own view (12.14.17-12.17.26). 

Having entertained these divergent views, Augustine confesses: 

…what does it matter to me that various interpretations of those words are proffered, as long as they are true? I repeat, what does it matter to me if what I think the author thought is different from what someone else thinks he thought? All of us, his readers, are doing our utmost to search out and understand the writer’s intention, and since we believe him to be truthful, we do not presume to interpret him as making any statement that we either know or suppose to be false. Provided, therefore, that each person tries to ascertain in the holy scriptures the meaning the author intended, what harm is there if a reader holds an opinion which you, the light of all truthful minds, show to be true, even though it is not what was intended by the author, who himself meant something true, but not exactly that? (conf. 12.18.27). 

I am fascinated by Augustine’s claims about truth, intention, reading, and authorship here. When I teach undergraduate students, they tend to think that interpreting texts is either a matter of simply trying to figure out the author’s intention (often relying heavily on that author’s biography to do so) or forgetting the author entirely and focusing instead on what the text means to them as readers (all but ignoring the text’s historical context). The author is either alive and hovering over their shoulders as they read or so very dead that the text no longer belongs to them. 

Augustine here suggests that readers should approach scripture by trying their best to understand the author’s intention and believing that the author is being truthful. In this regard, he seems to emphasize the authority of the author over that of the reader. But immediately thereafter he says that so long as the reader is committed to the search for truth then it is all right if another reader holds an opinion that is not your own nor intended by the author. So long as there is truth, there is no harm. 

This is not quite reader-response theory. Augustine is not arguing that any and every response to the text is valid. Rather, more carefully, he is suggesting that there is a capaciousness to the truth of scripture that resists simplistic homogeneity. There is a “rich…variety of highly plausible interpretations” of scripture (12.25.34). One might be able to see something in the text—because God has “granted them the grace” to do so (12.20.29)—that is true at the same time that others notice other truths. Truth need not be uniform to still be truth. 

Augustine writes that once an exegesis is true it is no longer the property of the interpreter. Instead, assuming that the interpreter loves the truth because it is true, the interpretation “belongs to me as well as to them, because it is a common bounty for all lovers of truth” (12.25.34). God’s “Truth is not mine, nor his, nor hers, but belongs to all of us whom you call to share it in communion with him” (12.25.34). 

I think this is a very helpful way of thinking about the truth of scripture, as well as the mission of a university. We each have gifts that allow us to seek truth in different ways, but so long as we share in a commitment to the truth, the manifestation of truth need not be uniform but beautifully variegated.