On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- J.F. Shaw
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~86,300 words · 410 passages
Cite this work
- APAAugustine. (n.d.). On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-christian-doctrine-de-doctrina-christiana
- MLAAugustine. "On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-christian-doctrine-de-doctrina-christiana.
- ChicagoAugustine. On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/augustine/on-christian-doctrine-de-doctrina-christiana.
What it is about
Augustine's handbook on how to read Scripture and how to preach it, begun in 397 and finished thirty years later.
Context and history
The first three books are about how a text is understood: the distinction between things and signs, the problem of obscure passages, and the rule that if a literal reading leads to something contrary to charity, the reading is figurative. The fourth, written much later, is on rhetoric: Augustine had been a professor of that trade before his conversion, and here he decides that Cicero's tools may be used for preaching without this being a cheat. The justification he gives — that truth may use what its adversaries invented — became the permit under which the Christian West kept ancient culture instead of discarding it. It is, in fact, Europe's first treatise on hermeneutics.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The four books of St. Augustin On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana, iv libri) are a compend of exegetical theology to guide the reader in the understanding and interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures, according to the analogy of faith. The first three books were written A. D. 397 ; the fourth was added 426. He speaks of it in his Retractations, Bk. ii., chap. 4, as follows : " Finding that the books on Christian Doctrine were not finished, I thought it better to ■complete them before passing on to the revision of others. Accordingly, I completed the third book, which had been written as far as the place where a quotation is made from the Gospel about the woman who took leaven and hid it in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.1 I added also the last book, and finished the whole work in four books [in the year 426] : the first three affording aids to the interpretation of Scripture, the last giving directions as to the mode of making known our interpretation. In the second book,2 I made a mistake as to the authorship of the book commonly called the Wisdom of Solomon. For I have since learnt that it is not a well-established fact, as I said it was, that Jesus the son of Sirach, who wrote the book of Ecclesiasticus, wrote this book also : on the contrary, I have ascertained that it is altogether more probable that he was not the author of this book.