So too in these prophetic narratives, those matters of human history selected by the prophetic spirit either relate things of the past because they signify the future or, if they signify no such thing, are interspersed so as to connect those matters which do resound with such significance.70
The predetermined doctrinal lessons of Scripture's allegorical sense, which may not contradict Catholic belief, impose limits on the literal, although the literal sense hardly controls the use of the allegorical.
Scholars have noted instructive links and parallels between the educationally oriented hermeneutic of the De doctrina christiana and the introspective account of Augustine's conversion related in the Confessiones (Confessions, 397–400). In Peter Brown's words, “Augustine's attitude to allegory summed up a whole attitude to knowledge” in the De doctrina christiana; in the Confessiones, this attitude to allegory provided Augustine with the basis for knowledge of himself.71 Composed in the immediate aftermath of the De doctrina christiana and the Contra Faustum, the Confessiones thus continues to employ the nonliteralist, figurative hermeneutic that dominates Augustine's fourth-century compositions. Contrasting well with statements of Augustine's later career, it follows the lead of the earlier Genesis commentaries in its symbolic interpretation of the creation story. As Augustine wrote in the final pages of the Confessiones, the opening verses of Genesis, in their instruction to man and woman to “be fertile and increase,” justified the very principle of allegorical exegesis: “I perceive in this blessing the capacity and power granted us by you, both to express in numerous ways what we may have understood in a single way, and to understand in numerous ways that which we may have read, expressed only in one obscure fashion.”72
Only as he approached the second decade of the fifth century,73 with the account of his own spiritual awakening behind him, did Augustine finally nurture the literal dimension of his hermeneutic to its maturity— again with regard to the opening chapters of Genesis—in his massive De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis). Early in this commentary, Augustine explained his new exegetical approach by rejecting an allegorical understanding of Genesis 1:5 (in its Old Latin translation: “evening was made, and morning was made, one day”); namely, “that in ‘evening was made’ is signified the sin of the rational creature and that in ‘morning was made’ is signified its restoration. But this is an argument of prophetic allegory—which we have not undertaken in this treatise. For we have now endeavored to speak of the scriptures according to the proper sense of past events, not according to the mysteries of future ones.”74 In this programmatic statement, Augustine has overcome the distance between the two contrasts—literal versus allegorical, on one hand, and history versus prophecy, on the other—that characterized his earlier work. The literal interpretation of the biblical past, the goal of the De Genesi ad litteram, is now equated with the historical truth of the biblical narrative and concerns “the proper sense of past events”; allegorical or prophetic interpretation alludes to “the mysteries of future ones.” Yet if literal and allegorical also refer to chronological orientation in the interpretation of biblical narrative, not merely to the degree that such interpretation focuses either on the sign (exactly as “the letter sounds”) or on what it signifies (“figuratively and in enigmas”),75 how is the “literal” sense genuinely plain or literal? Augustine responded that the literal meaning of Scripture denotes first and foremost the intention of the “writer of the sacred books”;76 accordingly, “when we read the divine books amidst so great a number of true interpretations, which are…fortified with the sanity of the Catholic faith, let us emphatically choose that one which clearly manifests what he (whom we are reading) intended.”77 One must immediately take note that this criterion of authorial intention hardly precludes the “literal” understanding of the Bible's language as metaphorical. For example: The first light of creation, understood literally, refers simultaneously to earthly light and spiritual light;78 God made man, but had Scripture related that he formed him with bodily hands, “we ought sooner to believe that the writer used a metaphor”;79 even though Scripture's report that the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened (Genesis 3:7) after their sin does not mean that they were previously closed, these words “we ought not to consider an allegorical narrative.”80 Such metaphoric interpretations of past events fall well within the realm of the literal sense, because the author clearly intended them. “The narrative in these books [like Genesis] is certainly not of the genre of figurative speech like that in the Song of Songs, but of a completely historical genre, like that in the books of Kings and others of this sort.”81
The precise change that the De Genesi ad litteram marked in Augustine's hermeneutical outlook warrants further qualification. Despite the allegorical emphasis of his earlier Old Testament exegesis, Augustine had already affirmed the reality and importance both of the literal sense and of the exposition of biblical narrative as history. Yet the unabashed identification of the literal with the historical that one encounters in the De Genesi ad litteram underscores the priority of the “literal” sense for Augustine. Although “no Christian will dare say that events should not be interpreted figuratively,”82 literal interpretation now takes precedence. It commandeers the lion's share of Augustine's exegetical energy, and it engages him well beyond his previously acknowledged need to establish the historical reality upon which Christological allegory and typology depend. Even in the case of the paschal lamb, so critically important a prefiguration of the crucified Jesus, Augustine acknowledged the exegete's mandate first to accept and to define Scripture's literal, historical meaning:
He [Christ] is the sheep which is sacrificed on the Passover; yet that was prefigured not only in speech but also in action. For it is not that that sheep was not a sheep; it clearly was a sheep, and it was killed and eaten. Something else was prefigured in this actual fact, though not like that fattened calf which was slain for the banquet of the younger son when he returned [Luke 15:11–32]. In that latter case the narrative itself consists of figures, not of events with figurative significance. For the Lord himself, not the evangelist, narrated this…. The narrative of the Lord himself was a parable, in which it is never required that the things conveyed in speech be shown to have literally occurred.83
In the case of narrative intended by the biblical writer as history, however, the factual event must be expounded first, and, as John Hammond Taylor has observed, its exposition commands Augustine's definite preference. When considering the account of Adam and Eve in Paradise, the De Genesi ad litteram first contrasts the figurative discourse of Scripture (locutio figuratarum rerum) with its exposition in a literal sense (ad litteram), then such a figurative exposition (figurate) with a rightful or proper one (proprie), and finally the allegorical understanding of the text (secundum allegoricam locutionem) with its rightful one (secundum propriam). In short, figurative and allegorical contrast with literal and proper.84 Gone is the license that Augustine had previously allowed the Catholic reader of the Bible in the early books of the De doctrina christiana; there, as long as an interpretation accords with the doctrine of the church, anything goes.85 Here, in the De Genesi ad litteram, the objectively determined historical facts take precedence, and only when the intention of the author remains indeterminable may the exegete reach a conclusion based on faith alone. A Christian must believe that Christian faith will comport with the literal meaning of Scripture:
If those irrationally impelled by reason of a stubborn or dull mind refuse to believe these things [in Genesis], they still can find no reason to prove that they are false…. Clearly, if those things rendered here in a material sense could in no way be accepted in a material sense and the true faith yet preserved, what other option would remain but that we understand those things as spoken figuratively, rather than impiously to condemn Holy Scripture? Yet if these things understood in a material sense not only do not impede but defend the narrative of divine eloquence more effectively, there will be no one, I think, so unfaithfully stubborn as to see those things expounded in their proper sense according to the rule of faith and yet prefer to remain in his former opinion (if perchance they had seemed to him open to figurative
