Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis by Michael Cameron (review)

To track Augustine’s formation as a reader and expositor of the Bible is, in so many respects, to track Augustine’s formation. But while there are numerous excellent studies of his hermeneutics, not all sufficiently interweave the different layers of his self-investment in the work of interpretation. Michael Cameron’s monograph is exemplary in this regard, revisiting the period 386–400 that includes Augustine’s early Catholic conversion, his ordination and novice ministry, and his early episcopate.

In this larger period, Cameron suggests, Augustine learned interpretation “on the run” (13). The process was both an upheaval and a liberation for him, encompassing his initial revulsion at the Bible’s rhetorical vulgarity, his interpretive awakening through exposure to Ambrose’s preaching, his release from Manichaean reductionism, his deepening insight into the authority governing interpretation, and his retraining himself on a model of figurative exegesis that would unearth the hidden treasures of Scripture. Cameron aptly calls this process Augustine’s “homecoming” (29–30), as he weaned himself from premature skepticism and learned to trust the paradoxically sophisticated rhetoric of the Bible, making strange texts strangely “familiar.” Cameron shows how, in a number of early works—but most especially his first great test—De Genesi contra Manichaeos—Augustine developed a pedagogical, exegetical paradigm that, while heavy on applying classical rhetorical axioms, aspired foremost to mirror the Bible’s own internal economy—both the temporalis dispensatio of sacred history and the “arrangement” of language by the divine Author/Rhetor to accommodate human receptivity. Exegesis became playing along with God’s own rhetorical play through the texts—a game of “hide and seek.”

At its core, says Cameron in scrutinizing the two-volume De moribus and the De vera religione, interpretation became for Augustine a therapy for souls, goading them beyond earthly fetishes toward spiritual beauty. Ironically, Scripture’s own earthiness was precisely what enabled humanity to transcend its earthliness. Sealing this emphasis, Cameron suggests, was Augustine’s anti-Manichaean commitment to the incarnate Christ as the galvanizing link of Old and New Testaments, and as the material likeness (similitudo) to God expediting creatures’ assimilation to him.

But early in his priesthood, Augustine also re-encountered Paul, who provided him a more forceful template for understanding how the economy of sacred revelation fit together, and so too how it could become a “tutorial” for a congregation in Hippo that included quite simple folk (the “little ones”). After Paul too, as registered in the Propositiones from Romans, Augustine’s interpretation became markedly more cruciform, such that sacred narrative was to be replayed in the cross-bearing life of the Christian. Paul’s arresting comments about Christ being “cursed” (Gal 3.13), “in the likeness of the sinful flesh” (Rom 8.3), and “becoming sin” (2 Cor 5.21) solicited another breakthrough in Augustine’s maturing figurative exegesis, one that pushed him beyond naiveté about Christ’s “likeness” to sin and sinners and that conveyed Christ’s passion as a power in its own right and not simply a portrait of divine condescension designed to accelerate human spiritual ascent. In Cameron’s view, Paul decisively pushed Augustine beyond a pious nominalism to a fresh embrace of the human Christ as Mediator (1 Tim 2.5), thus revolutionizing Augustine’s preaching. Scriptural figures, as deployed by Paul himself, demanded solid anchoring in the physical reality of Jesus Christ—a fact all the more important when Augustine as pastor returned to the multitudinous figures of the Old Testament, wherein Christ’s “sacramental” grace had already been released. Cameron argues that this revamped christocentric reading of the Old Testament gradually but saliently registered itself in the Enarrationes in Psalmos, which Augustine composed on the heels of rediscovering the Pauline gospel. The Psalms now came alive for him through prosopological exegesis that identified the voices of Christ, the Father, the Church, and other characters, as well as through a kind of prosopopoeia...