The title of this book is somewhat misleading. ‘The letter killeth’ is part of the watchword of spiritual reading (‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’, 2 Corinthians iii.16), which is different from the ‘incarnational paradigm’ of reading (p. 117) that Lal Dingluaia identifies as the key to how Augustine connects the authority of Scripture to the redemption of time. The incarnation of God in Christ establishes what Dingluaia, following the New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann, calls ‘the tension of time’ between the already and the not yet: a redemption already accomplished in Christ but not yet consummated in the eschaton, revealed to the world in the present by the authority of the Scriptures.
To see the authority of Scripture as based on the way the Incarnation shapes historical time is standard fare in scholarship on Augustine and on Christian thought in general, and to connect this specifically with a dialectical tension between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ makes for a worthwhile thesis. It allows Dingluaia to position Augustine between the unqualified ‘already’ of Eusebius’ Christian triumphalism after Constantine and the fanatical ‘not yet’ of Donatist apocalypticism awaiting the destruction of Roman power – with Augustine accepting neither – and likewise between the Manicheans’ docetic denial that God is already present in the Incarnation and Pelagius’ perfectionist denial that individuals are not yet fully righteous in this life. Most importantly, it indicates a turn to a more literal reading of Scripture, as Augustine's deepening interest in the Incarnation pushes him beyond his early enthusiasm for the spiritual reading taught by Ambrose (depicted in the Confessions) toward his surprising uptake of the more historically-informed hermeneutical rules of the Donatist writer Tyconius (presented in On Christian doctrine when Augustine completed it in his old age).
The book presents relatively self-contained studies of Confessions (chapter iii) and On Christian doctrine (chapter iv) and concludes with studies of Augustine's mature thought on historical time in City of God (chapter vii) and his own temporal progress of learning in Retractations (chapter viii). In between are two chapters charting his turn to more literal and historical reading, surveying his correspondence with Jerome (chapter v) and his Pauline re-reading of the creation narrative of Genesis against the Manicheans (chapter vi). These chapters are preceded by studies of the concepts of authority and Scripture. Chapter i examines the classical notion of auctoritas exemplified by the Res gesta of the emperor Augustus, highlights the term exousia in the Septuagint and the Gospel portrayals of Jesus, and takes a very brief look at the usage of auctoritas in early Latin church Fathers (chapter i). Chapter ii is an informative look at some of the meanings of the term ‘Scripture’ for Augustine, including a quick overview of the canonisation process that produced the concept of ‘New Testament’ as Scripture, as well as the translations available to Augustine and his preference for translations based on the Septuagint rather than Jerome's insistence on translating from the Hebrew (chapter ii).
The book is unfortunately not easy to read. It takes some work to discern what Dingluaia intends his thesis to be (as the problem with the title suggests) and it is often difficult to see how the accumulation of detail in his chapters is meant to count as an argument or evidence for the thesis. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that no one with competence in English appears to have read the book before publication. At least no one has taken the trouble to correct its glaring grammatical errors, misused words, unclear phrasing and elementary failures of subject-verb agreement, which confront the reader on nearly every page. Academic presses should be kinder to their authors than this and provide copy-editing, especially for authors for whom English is not a first language.
