by CCW | 4 March 2026 09:00
Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, is fundamentally a treatise on teaching the Christian Faith as revealed in the Scriptures. Doctrine is teaching and that presupposes two things right from the outset: first, a kind of faith that there are things to be known, and, second, a capacity, willingness or desire, to learn. Thus the preface touches on the problem of the unteachable for various reasons: 1) those who just don’t get or understand the teaching, it seems, 2) those who are unable to apply the teaching to obtain the meaning of obscure parts of Scripture, and 3) those who think they know and understand the Scriptures without any need of instruction or rules about learning.
He employs the language of signs and things. Those who don’t get it fail to see the finger which is pointing to what is to be known while those who can’t apply the instruction fail to see that to which the finger is pointing; in short, one can’t see the signpost, the other to what it is pointing. Those who think they know without the need for any aid or instruction forget that they know only because others have taught them at least how to read or they have remembered what has been spoken and heard, an important point about the oral traditions which historically precede writing. Augustine commends, for instance, Anthony the Great of Egypt, the illiterate desert father who “committed the Scriptures to memory through hearing them read by others” and by “wise meditation arrived at a thorough understanding of them.” That is testament to the strong desire to know and to love the truth.
From the outset Augustine highlights the primacy of Scripture in terms of what it teaches and in what ways but without negating or denying other disciplines of knowing and learning that belong to human experience. They too have their use and, to be sure, their abuse. “All men are seeking for thee,” the disciples say to Jesus who in turn says “I preach … for therefore came I forth.” As Austin Farrer notes, preaching and teaching are necessarily rhetorical; they have to do with making ideas, concepts, and things known, a sharing of things learned.
The structure of the argument is clearly stated and reiterated throughout the treatise. It is divided into two parts: first, “the mode of ascertaining (or discovering) the proper meaning of Scripture,” secondly, “the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained” (modus inveniendi quae intelligenda sunt, et modus proferendi quae intellecta sunt). Composed of four books, the first three written in 327 AD deal with what the Scriptures teach, and the fourth, written in 426 AD (four years before his death in 430), treats the mode of making the meaning known. He says that the second is the more difficult part but it is really about the necessity of sharing with others what has been learned. Such is teaching really.
Drawing on the story of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, Augustine suggests that what is shared with others multiplies the understanding just as in the story of the multiplication of the loaves in the gathering up of the fragments. There is more not less through the sharing of knowledge and understanding.
The emphasis is on understanding the meaning of what is known. This is what he calls wisdom, sapientiae in contrast to scientia, knowledge, an important distinction that runs through the whole treatise. The work refers to many passages of Scripture in support of understanding the teaching along with other disciplines albeit in a subordinate fashion to the supremacy and excellence for what is revealed in the Scriptures.
All instruction is either about things or signs. By things he means “what things are in themselves” without being used as a sign for something else, though recognising that things are learned through signs, namely, words that signify things in themselves. Critical to the whole argument is the distinction between things which are to be enjoyed, things which are to be used, and things which are both used and enjoyed. This introduces the underlying ethical question about the summum bonum as articulated in a Christian sense, namely the enjoyment of a thing for its own sake and the use of things for the sake of obtaining that highest good. This belongs to the idea of pilgrimage, the way to the proper end or good of our humanity, via ad patriam, the way to the heavenly country, an Augustinian commonplace. On Christian Doctrine is about the journey of the soul from “wandering in a strange country” of confusion and uncertainty to our homeland in God.
We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father’s home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, – that is, that by means of what is material and temporary [i.e. the things of the world in themselves] we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.
Aquinas, some 750 years or so later builds on the teaching of Augustine and those before and after him about the nature of sacred doctrine. God, he says, is the author of the Holy Scripture, who “can signify his meaning not by words only (as humans can, but by things themselves.” Words that signify things belong to the literal and historical sense; things signified by words relate to the spiritual understanding based on the literal sense which it presupposes. The spiritual sense is threefold: the allegorical (or figurative) sense, the moral sense in terms of what we ought to do, and the anagogical sense of what leads us to our end with God in glory.
Two fundamental concepts associated with Augustine from other texts are adumbrated here as Fr. Walter Hannam has noted (Nodo in unitatis et caritatis) and are indicated from the outset: the idea of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, a phrase much celebrated through Anselm, and ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora, the movement from outward or exterior things to inward things, from inferior or lesser things to superior or higher things; in short, an ascent but one which is predicated upon what has come down to us and made known to us by grace in revelation. What is to be enjoyed in and for itself is God as Trinity.
The true objects [things] of enjoyment [res igitur quibus fruendum est] are the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are at the same time the Trinity, one Being, supreme above all, and common to all who enjoy Him, if He is an object [res, thing], and not rather the cause of all objects [things, omnium rerum causa].
God is the highest good or greatest excellence among all things about whom “it is better to speak [or name] in this way: The Trinity, one God, of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things … To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power,“ essentially running through some of the divine attributes but pointing to their interrelation and interdependence as belonging to the mystery of the Three-in-One. “In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality.” This way of thinking informs the 1st Article of the Anglican 39 Articles , “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”(cf. Cdn. BCP, p. 699) and the 1st question of The Westminster Shorter Confession. “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.”
And why? Because God is the supreme and highest excellence and eternal being upon which all things depend. Augustine provides a short excursus on what humans have understood by God in earlier times and cultures that ultimately points to what Anselm will later express as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” and as such cannot not exist and is life itself and in itself. Here Augustine sees God as “unchangeable wisdom” in the ascent from lower forms of life to the highest principle of life itself, God. This means going from nutritive (or vegetative) life, such as plants, to sentient (or animate) life, such as cattle, to intelligent life, such as that of humans. But in terms of intellective life there remains the longing and quest for unchangeable wisdom (God only and always wise) as opposed to a wisdom that is subject to change. The “rule of truth,” as he styles it, compels us to affirm the unchangeable life as superior to all changeable forms. To find such a rule means “going beyond our own nature, for [we] find nothing in [ourselves] that is not subject to change.”
Yet what we seek and are oriented towards is what is unchangeable, namely God, and to enjoy that truth forever is our goal and purpose. For that the soul must be purified in order “to perceive” and “to rest in what it perceives.” That can only happen by “wisdom incarnate,” God “condescending to adapt Himself to our weakness, and to show us a pattern of holy life in the form of our own humanity.” Indeed, “Wisdom was Himself our home, He made Himself also the way (via) by which we should reach our home”(patriam). Christ is the Word made flesh, the Wisdom of God who heals our humanity either through things opposite to the defects of our condition or through likenesses to our nature. And all through the Church, the body and spouse of Christ, “the bond of unity and charity,” (nodo in unitatis et caritatis) in whom is forgiveness and resurrection by which we are renewed and recreated for the sake of our end in God everlastingly. For God alone is to be enjoyed and everything else in Him.
All this leads to the main thesis of the treatise. The rule or principle of Christian doctrine is the love of God and the love of neighbour which embraces the love of ourselves, the love of our enemies, the love of the angels, and the love of all things but only for the sake of God. The teaching and its expression is about learning the radical nature of this twofold love of God and neighbour and how that provides the necessary measure for the correct interpretation of the Scriptures. The whole treatise is about learning how to love rightly and anything that does not “tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour” falls short of the understanding of what is given to be known in faith, hope, and love. The argument moves from this consideration of things that are signified by words in the Scripture to words as signs and what they signify.
Book II begins the consideration of “the subject of signs” distinguishing between “natural and conventional signs”, and examining the problem of unknown signs, meaning difficult and obscure parts of the Scripture and how to approach such difficulties. The argument calls attention to the role and place of accessory forms of knowing that may assist our understanding such as a knowledge of the biblical languages of Hebrews and Greek and in appreciating the importance of translations, often by comparison.
Augustine was, of course, well-versed in Latin. Here he explores the question about good and faulty translations in Latin and about the benefit from diversities of interpretations and even the possibility of learning from errors in translations or at least recognising the ambiguities of linguistic expression. Book III focuses more closely on the question of ambiguous signs but in Book II, Augustine calls attention to how we can learn things that can help our understanding with respect to the obscurities of Scripture not only by acquiring the biblical languages but also by learning about things in the natural world – the nature of animals, minerals, and plants – that are used by way of comparison in Scripture, or by acquiring a sense of numbers and their use and significance, the idea of certain symbolic numbers.
This positive assessment of different disciplines of the mind may help our understanding of the meaning of what words signify in the Scriptures. Yet Augustine is also aware of the different problems with some forms of so-called human knowing that can be a kind of pseudo-science, a misuse of the empirical sciences and the mathematical sciences with respect to the ethical and the spiritual, the problem with forms of divination and superstition, for instance. But to use a later Latin tag: abusus non tollit usum. The abuse of something does not negate its proper use.
Augustine recognizes that history, natural science, astronomy, the mechanical arts, forms of logic and dialectical reasoning, for example, are all aids to the understanding because they are not inventions of man simply but belong to the structure of reality as intelligible. As he notes about definitions: they can be applied to things which are false even though the form of reasoning is sound. It just may not result in any truth. A perfectly logical syllogism can be perfectly nonsensical. But the argument here is that whatever is true in the human sciences is of value and use in the divine science.
Book III builds on this foundation in the examination of ambiguous signs following a similar pattern of argumentation about what can be used and in what kinds of ways to assist our understanding of the wisdom of the Scriptures. It is an acknowledgement of the ambiguities of Scripture and ways of removing ambiguity through paying attention to punctuation, and pronunciation as measured by what he calls “the rule of faith” or by attention to the literary context of passages. He draws largely upon New Testament passages from the Gospel and the Epistles to illustrate this approach. This leads to the distinction between figurative and literal forms of expression. He highlights the danger of taking a figurative expression literally and taking a literal expression figuratively and thus missing the understanding; the one mistaking signs for things and the other mistaking things for signs where there is no signification.
The means of distinguishing correctly between the literal and the figurative is through charity or love by which he means “that affection of the mind which aims at the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and one’s neighbour in subordination to God.” Augustine argues that:
Scripture asserts nothing but the catholic faith, in regard to things past, future, and present. It is a narrative of the past, a prophecy of the future, and a description of the present. But all these tend to nourish and strengthen charity, and to overcome and root out lust.
This all leads to the important rule of faith with respect to the interpretation of Scripture about what can and cannot be attributed to God and in what kinds of ways. This entails how to make sense of the wrath of God, namely, the attribution of human emotions to God. The point is that such passages are to be understood figuratively and are to be turned about and applied to us, to the things which we think, say, and do that are contrary to the goodness of God and his will for us. As Augustine argues about the rule for interpreting figurative expressions, the measure is whether or not the interpretation “tends towards” (or away) from “the reign of love.” He goes through a host of passages to provide concrete examples of how best to understand them in accord with “sound doctrine.”
He treats as well the differences between things commanded and allowed in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, such as polygamy versus monogamy, for instance, noting the different contexts and the sense of narrative progress. What is needed in one situation does not obtain and apply in all other situations. Equally the same word does not always signify the same thing. This shows a sophisticated understanding of language, and its power and its beauty.
Scripture interprets scripture as another rule or practice helps the understanding but this requires or at least is aided by an understanding of the different forms of verbal and written expressions. This leads to a remarkable moment in Book III where he examines “the rules of Tichonius, the Donatist.”
The Donatist heresy was one against which Augustine contended for years in North Africa. They were heretical schismatics of a rigorist temperament with respect to those who had ‘betrayed’ the faith by handing over the Scriptures to their persecutors and for whom there was no repentance and restoration. But here Augustine looks for the most part favourably or at least charitably upon the rules which Tichonius lays down, rules which in some sense or another, Augustine thinks, are inconsistent with the Donatist position. He lists the seven rules of Tichonius: first, the Lord and His body – Christ and His Church; second, the twofold body of Christ which he thinks is not a suitable name and is better expressed in terms of the mixed Church; third, the promises and the law or as Augustine prefers, the spirit and the letter; fourth, distinguishing between species and genus, the specific and the general; fifth, times, dealing with the ambiguities about the measuring of time, what is being measured and in what kind of way; sixth, the rule of recapitulation, the way in which the narrative sequence unfolds and reverts to what had been previously passed over. This has largely to do with making sense of the meaning of events as represented in the Scriptures; and seventh, the devil and his body, a kind of reverse of the first rule about the Lord and his body.
Overall, Augustine uses Tichonius to illustrate the main thrust of the argument of Book III about figurative matters of expression and shows a generosity of spirit that belongs to the common endeavour to make sense of the Scriptures. In another way, the argument of Book III completes the treatise with respect to discovering what is to be grasped intellectually in the Scriptures in various ways and leads to Book IV about “the means of communicating our thoughts to others.”
In brief, Augustine offers a magisterial treatment of the art of rhetoric as having a role and place in the teaching of the Christian faith but not just by a catalogue of rules. Instead, eloquence in speaking is entirely subordinate to clarity in teaching what is right and true and to refute what is wrong and false. Wisdom is more important than eloquence to the Christian teacher though that does not deny the eloquence of many parts of Scripture which he points out by way of examples from the Apostle Paul, not surprisingly, and the prophet, Amos, perhaps surprisingly. He argues that wisdom and eloquence are both from God. Eloquence follows and is secondary in importance to wisdom and understanding. What matters most is perspicacity, making things clear.
As with the earlier books, Augustine draws upon the humanistic arts, especially Cicero, “a great orator, who has truly said that ‘an eloquent man must speak so as to teach, to delight, and to persuade.’” The priority is on teaching. “To teach,” Cicero says, “is a necessity, to delight is a beauty, to persuade is a triumph.” As Augustine notes, the first point, that teaching is a matter of necessity, “depends on what we say; the other two on the way we say it.” This correlates well with the structure of de doctrina Christiana, where the first three books on things and signs treats what is intelligible, what is to be known, which is what the teacher endeavours to show while the fourth book focuses on the mode of making the meaning known of what is said and this allows for some attention to be paid to the way we say what we say. But the subordination of style to substance, of eloquence and persuasion to teaching is quite clear. Teaching is necessary but eloquence and persuasion are secondary to “the true function of teaching,” namely, clarity about the truth itself.
We can be delighted and persuaded after all by things that are quite mistaken and false; a problem only too well noted in our so-called post-truth world which highlights all of the problems of rhetoric absent of truth and reduced to the sophistry of what one can get away with. Or the not uncommon experience of eloquence without any substance; elegant speakers speaking nothing.
Augustine was himself a great orator and an imperial professor of rhetoric in the Roman Empire in Milan. He was well versed in the extremely sophisticated and powerful forms of rhetoric which was the way to get ahead and be successful in his world. But reading Hortensius on philosophy changed him as he tells us in his Confessions and launched him on the quest for truth with a clearer sense of the necessary subordination of style and expression to truth and clarity.
This did not negate the usefulness and even the importance of eloquence and rhetoric about which he found copious examples in Scripture and in other preachers such as Cyprian of Alexandria and Ambrose of Milan. In Book IV he undertakes to identify three directions or forms of expression that are of benefit in teaching Christian doctrine. They are the subdued style, the temperate style, and the majestic style. Augustine examines these three approaches to the task of making the meaning of Scripture known as found in the Scriptures themselves while advising on the need to use different styles for different occasions.
The calm and subdued style is best suited for teaching, the temperate style for giving praise or censure, and the majestic style when seeking to impress and move people to action. He provides examples from the Scriptures and from certain preachers, including himself, of the usefulness and importance of these three styles of communicating ideas and truth to others. His own example about the effectiveness of the majestic style was in preaching at Caesarea in Mauritania to dissuade them from an annual civil war between factions in the community. The majestic style, he suggests, does not simply elicit applause but more importantly, as in this instance, tears. “It was not, however, when I heard their applause, but when I saw their tears, that I thought I had produced an effect.” The tears showed that they were subdued, that they had received the teaching, and resulted in an end to their barbaric actions, in short, a change of life.
Ultimately, in teaching what is of greatest importance and effect is that the teacher be in harmony with his teaching. The truth is what really matters. “The man who cannot speak both eloquently and wisely should speak wisely without eloquence, rather than eloquently without wisdom.” Exactly. Augustine notes that the manner of living of the priest can be an eloquent sermon in itself even if he struggles in the pulpit. He allows that there may be some who have good delivery but can’t compose anything to deliver and so suggests that there is nothing wrong with them taking what others have written, memorizing it and delivering it to the people albeit without deception; in other words, acknowledging the author. For ultimately wisdom belongs to God and all that is true from whomever and whenever belongs to the truth of God.
The penultimate chapter of Book IV advises most strongly that whoever addresses the people ought to pray to God to put into his mouth suitable words. For as the Book of Wisdom puts it “both we and our words are in God’s hands.” In keeping with the rule of charity or love that is the overarching principle of Christian teaching, he concludes that the teacher “labours not for his own instruction only, but for that of others too.”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Feria (using the propers for the Lenten Ember Days)
March 3rd, 2026
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