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There is a passage from one of Augustine's less frequented texts which has achieved considerable infamy. Whenever critics gather to discuss examples of patristic eisegesis, of allegorical interpretation run wild, someone will turn to Augustine's reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Quaestiones Evangeliorum 2.19. There such scholars find Augustine polishing the surface of a parable until he can see in it the reflection of the whole of ecclesiastical doctrine; and they find that, looking in Augustine's mirror, their eyes are kept from resting on the parable itself. Augustine's reading is, they say, not an engagement with the parable but its avoidance.
The passage in question runs:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho: Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means "the moon," and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely, of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead-he is therefore called half dead. The Priest and Levite who saw him and passed by signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, which could profit nothing for salvation, Samaritan means "guardian," and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which he deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travellers are refreshed on their return from pilgrimage to their heavenly country. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle. The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest...