Augustine the Liberal, Evangelical Contemplative

It’s an obvious game to play: If Augustine were around today – Twenty First Century America – in whose church camp would he be? Of course the answer is that he doesn’t fit easily into anybody’s, but the question provides an accessible frame for reflecting on his treatment of scripture.

He is one part liberal in his highly allegorical reading of Genesis. For example, he says the six days of creation should not be understood as 24 hour periods of time:

Of course, what we mean by the ‘days’ we know in experience are those that have a morning because the sun rises and an evening because the sun sets. But the first three ‘days’ of creation passed without the benefit of sun, since, according to Scripture, the sun was made on the fourth day. Of course, there is mention in the beginning that ‘light’ was made by the Word of God, and that God separated it from darkness, calling the light day and the darkness night. But no experience of our senses can tell us just what kind of ‘light’ it was and by what kind of alternating movement it caused ‘morning’ and ‘evening.’ Not even our intellects can comprehend what is meant, yet we can have no hesitation in believing the fact.

With this basis for an allegorical reading, Augustine is off and running to find figures for the cities of man and God throughout Genesis. Interestingly, he is sometimes quite concerned with textual criticism. In playing out the allegory of the two cities in the descendants from Adam to Noah, Augustine has a lot riding on the actual ages of the named men and women. Are these people truly of another age, living many hundreds of years? Or, should these years be understood by a measure other than the 365-day solar year? Augustine takes up point and counter, discrepancies in various translations, and the possible motivations of redactors. It all sounds very nineteenth-century-Germany (only the conclusion is different!).

Augustine is also an evangelical. When apologizing to pagans and philosophers, he leans heavily on Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially Paul’s contention that the splendor of creation is its own sufficient argument – to all – for the existence of one truth God. He has no problem calling competing gods “unclean spirits”. There’s no political correct impulse to call non-Christian religions and philosophies different-but-equal.

He is, though, at heart – according to my contention –, a contemplative so steeped in prayer that he slips into speaking with fragments of Psalms. It seems that as he writes he has ideas that are either inspired by pieces of psalms or confirmed by them. And so snippets of psalms appear in a pious mode – because they resonate with truth and elegance – without regard to literary criticism or even apologetic logic.