Producing Christian Culture

Medieval Exegesis and Its Interpretative Genres

Giles E. M. Gasper, Francis Watson, Matthew R. Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317075424
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Producing Christian Culture takes as its thread the 'interpretative genres' within which medieval people engaged with the Bible. Contributors to the volume present specific material as a case study illustrative of a specific genre, whether devotional, homiletical, scholarly, or controversial. The chronological range moves from St Augustine to the use of gospel texts in polemical writing of the first two decades of the 1500s, with focal sections on early medieval Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian theology, the scholastic turn of the High Middle Ages, and the influence of vernacular writing in the later Middle Ages. The tremendous range and vitality of medieval responses to biblical texts are highlighted within the studies.

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Part I

Inheritances

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1 Augustine, rape, and the hermeneutics of love

Melanie Webb

Although I had no desire and experienced no pleasure, I did have what appears to be “consent.” I instinctively “decided” to live—unlike any number of female saints half-remembered from my childhood who chose death over the loss of their “virtue.”

Nancy Venable Raine¹

Rape was a common experience for women living in the Roman Empire. While “rape, violence, and complicity” had been a literary topos in Greco-Roman literature since its beginning, there was in the fifth and sixth centuries CE “a heightened awareness of, and controversy about, rape and the moral, legal, social, and emotional ramifications of abduction and rape.”² In Roman and Roman Christian custom, women who, when threatened with or after suffering rape, killed themselves to protect and attest to their chastity were upheld as exempla for other women to imitate. In the opening chapters of City of God Augustine speaks to the aftermath of rape in the lives of Roman and Christian women who have refused to imitate any number of beloved exempla; his argument concerns not only figures commemorated in martyr stories and shrines, but also all those who might see themselves and their own situations represented in them.³

What is at stake in Augustine’s discussion? In 410, the Visigothic leader Alaric and his troops attacked and penetrated Rome; it was the third siege in two years, and the looting and the violence that constituted the “sack” lasted for three days. While Alaric’s troops secured their famed clemency by sparing Rome’s architecture and, according to Augustine, permitting two basilicas to be sanctuaries for those taking refuge there, still they deployed rape as a weapon of conquest.⁴ At the outset of City of God, we find Augustine arguing that Christ did offer protection for several whose lives would otherwise have been lost, while also recognizing the devastating aftermath of this “custom of wars,”⁵ including the loss of material possessions, torture, starvation, terrible kinds of death, the inability to bury one’s loved ones, and captivity.

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He focuses at length, however, on the realities of rape and its distinctive aftermath.⁶ Rape was deployed within ancient warfare as a weapon of conquest, and represented the violation of the city as a whole.⁷ For Augustine, “The happiness of a city and of a human (homo) do not, after all, arise from different sources; for a city is nothing other than a concordant multitude of humans (hominem).”⁸ A city’s wellbeing could be ascertained through surveying the wellbeing of its members. Augustine is certainly not the first to make this connection, but he does so in City of God to surprising effect.⁹ He introduces the co-identification of the city and its citizens in his discussion of Regulus, that famous Roman general who endured torture rather than commit treason against Rome. Yet, the citizens on whom Augustine focuses at length are women, and women whose violation would now – were they to conform to Roman and Roman Christian scripts for chastity – require their deaths.¹⁰

Augustine sets out to write a different script, based on many women’s refusal to kill themselves in the aftermath of rape in the sack of Rome. Such a project requires not simply convincing the women who have survived the horrors of rape to go on living; they already are doing so. Rather, Augustine seeks to re-draft the social expectations that scaffold the whole enterprise of the Roman virtue tradition and its Christian manifestations. To do so, Augustine must make his (primarily male) readership see that their humanity, and therefore their happiness, is bound up with the humanity and happiness of these women. The good life is a life of mutual love and regard, marked by trust rather than suspicion. Augustine sets out to render shared life after rape not only imaginable but also desirable, both for these women and for his (elite) male readership.

To examine how Augustine structures this argument, this chapter proceeds in two parts. I seek first to re-examine Augustine, who is often charged with holding “attitudes towards women that tended permanently to demean them,”¹¹ and then, in the second part, we can turn to Augustine as a resource in order to transform the aftermath of rape so that continued life is both imaginable and desirable. Also in the second part of the chapter, I turn to the voices of women who have experienced something like the atrocities that Augustine addresses in City of God, relying on contemporary sources to reconstruct what is absent from the historical record.

In the first part, I explore how Augustine represents his education as a young man in what might be called a “hermeneutics of lust.” I lay out the approach by which Augustine, in the first book of his Confessions, engages a key text, Terence’s Eunuch, that informs the social values to which he is responding. I then explicate how, in the third book of his Confessions, he charts a reading strategy, his “hermeneutics of love,”¹² in order most fruitfully to approach Scripture, in which he repurposes the rules of classical poetic metre to illustrate faithfulness to God’s justice as displayed in God’s law.

In the second part, I demonstrate how Augustine, in City of God 1, enacts his hermeneutics of love in response to the aftermath of rape in the lives of Roman Christian women. I focus particularly on Augustine’s deductive exegesis of the neighbour-love commandment and two commandments from the decalogue: do not kill, and do not bear false witness against your neighbour.

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As a case study, I read his deployment of these commandments through his interpretation of story of the celebrated Roman matron Lucretia, who killed herself after being raped by the king’s son. In addition, while we have little witness or testimony from any of the women who fled after the sack of Rome,¹³ we do have accounts of rape and its aftermath from women in our own day.¹⁴ I draw on their accounts in my reading of Augustine’s response to the women raped in the sack of Rome. According to Karyn Freedman, “[D]espite the differences in the ways that people experience sexual violence, there is something universal about rape and its aftermath.”¹⁵ These women’s narratives are not meant to stand in for all such voices, but attentiveness to them better positions us to engage Augustine’s argument about the fittingness of certain commandments for strengthening one to endure the intra- and interpersonal challenges endemic to the aftermath of rape. Towards this end, I rely on insights from memoirs written by women who have experienced rape and, in the aftermath, have chosen to live and bear witness.¹⁶ This method takes as its compass Peter Brown’s phrase: “understanding is no substitute for compassion.”¹⁷ Indeed, understanding is impossible apart from compassion.¹⁸

Hermeneutics, or lust and love in Augustine’s Confessions

Because I am interested in exploring how Augustine deploys his hermeneutics of love in City of God 1, I choose to focus here on passages in Confessions 1 and 3. Confessions and City of God have often been recognized as sharing a basic framework, with the former offering an account of Roman cultural transformation in the person of Augustine and the latter doing so in the citizens of Roman Christian society. As a result, when similar themes, such as rape, are discussed in Confessions 1 and City of God 1, readers should take note. I will explicate Augustine’s hermeneutics through a close reading of passages from the early books of Confessions,¹⁹ before explicating how Augustine enacts his hermeneutics in City of God 1.²⁰

In Confessions 1, as we shall see, Augustine criticizes Roman customary education that, in his view, promotes male sexual exploitation of women. The thematic parallels with City of God 1 are striking. There, Augustine criticizes Roman, and other societies’, customs of war, particularly the deployment of rape in order to demonstrate the moral incoherence of those customs. Second, in Confessions 3, Augustine contrasts human custom and divine law in order to illustrate the value of a consistent but flexible strategy for interpreting not only Scripture, but also human experience through the dual love commands. Augustine deploys his hermeneutics of love in City of God 1 in order to inspire a new social and theological imagination of what these women’s lives, grounded in the law of God, could look like in the aftermath of rape.

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Confessions 1 and the hermeneutics of lust

As a schoolboy, Augustine’s curriculum included memorization and re-composition of select portions of Rome’s literature. In addition to memorizing lines from Virgil, he also developed his oratorical skills and vocabulary by memorizing and reciting lines from Terence’s plays, such as The Eunuch. The sele...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Producing Christian Culture
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Inheritances
• PART II Learning and Teaching through Scripture
• PART III The Changing Roles of Scripture
• PART IV Scripture and the World
• Index