God the Rhetorician: History as Figurative Speech in Augustine’s Scriptural Hermeneutic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study gives an account of an early transition of the use and understanding of allegory within Christian exegesis, focusing on Augustine as the progenitor of a new-found relationship between allegory and history. I argue that by conceiving of God as a rhetorician who speaks history into being, Augustine offered a new conceptual tool for an understanding of allegory that was based upon history or event (allegoria in factis; allegoria in rebus gestis) rather than upon text (allegoria in verbis). Allegory based upon history or event (allegoria in factis) presents the spatiotemporal realities referred to in Scripture as meaning something else; allegory based upon text (allegoria in verbis) presents the words in Scripture themselves as meaning something else. Before Augustine, Philo and Origen understood allegory in line with its traditional rhetorical and literary meaning: a text that says one thing and means another (allegoria in verbis). Augustine reconceived scriptural allegory: he envisioned God as a master rhetorician who speaks history into existence and who uses allegories and other tropes in his speech of history. Thus, Augustine reimagined figures of history as figures of speech. In other words, he conceived of history as God’s metaphorical narrative. In so doing, Augustine successfully shifted allegorical interpretation from the textual to the historical plane (from allegoria in verbis to allegoria in factis). As a result, he was able to integrate Scripture’s historical and allegorical components without diminishing the one for the sake of the other. Augustine, therefore, was the first Christian theologian to provide a coherent account of allegoria in factis, one that did justice both to the text’s history and to the features of allegory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".