The Figurative and the Literal

The point that a few people brought up in class about how St. Augustine interpreted ambiguous signs in such a way that any old texts which seemed to go against the message of love could be reinterpreted, the right way, was very interesting to me. St. Augustine puts forth the important notion that, "anything in the divine discourse that cannot be related either to good morals or to the true faith should be taken as figurative."(75) This puts christianity, as someone else pointed out in class, in a very buffered safe zone, since anything that could be found in the holy texts which clearly went against the basic ideology could be said to mean something else. For example, in the Psalms when it stated God as ordering the babies of the enemy to be thrown against walls, it was to be interpreted as meaning that God wished the sins of the world to be abolished.

My very first post talked about my frustration with people changing the literal meaning of something in the bible, and making it fit into modern day beliefs. The example that I used was the creation story, where God created the world in 7 days, as stated by the bible, that my friend took to mean 7 indeterminable periods of times. This was a way, similar to St.Augustine's procedure, of putting a buffer on this part of the Bible so as not to be able to find it contradictory. This trend of interpreting ambiguous signs to fit in with an ideology is very common in christianity, and is very important for the religions compatibility with an ever changing world and society.