Did St. Augustine Know Greek?

Addressing a Common Misconception

A few weeks ago, I ran across an apparently popular misconception. I’d been scrolling through X - otherwise known as Twitter, otherwise known as The Hell of Ignorance - and saw some folks piling on poor, dead St. Augustine for not knowing Greek. They wondered aloud how differently church history would have gone, had Augustine simply understood the Greek language, and mourned his ignorance in pious dust and ashes.

Now to me, at face value, that claim already sounded absurd. Augustine would have grown up with years of classical Greek, far more than a pastor receives in their year of training at seminary.

But apparently, this idea is a popular one, probably stemming from Augustine’s own (clearly hyperbolic) claim in the Confessions that he could “understand nothing” of his Greek lessons growing up. Which, if you follow the story, doesn’t totally track…since Augustine becomes a traveling professor of rhetoric later in life.

As it happened, I was reading through Augustine’s “On Christian Teaching” when I stumbled into the Hell of Ignorance. Here is Augustine himself, instructing local pastors on how they might clear up interpretive difficulties:

The great remedy for ignorance of proper signs is knowledge of languages. And men who speak the Latin tongue, of whom are those I have undertaken to instruct, need two other languages for the knowledge of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, that they may have recourse to the original texts if the endless diversity of the Latin translators throw them into doubt. (On Christian Teaching (p. 31)

Bit of an odd piece of advice, wouldn’t you say, from someone who is apparently an ignoramoose in linguistics?

Augustine goes on to demonstrate how the knowledge of original languages is important when discerning the meaning of the Latin texts:

And very often a translator, to whom the meaning is not well known, is deceived by an ambiguity in the original language, and puts upon the passage a construction that is wholly alien to the sense of the writer. As for example, some texts read: "Their feet are sharp to shed blood;"[Rom. 3. 15.] for the word ozus among the Greeks means both sharp and swift. And so he saw the true meaning who translated: "Their feet are swift to shed blood." The other, taking the wrong sense of an ambiguous word, fell into error. Now translations such as this are not obscure, but false; and there is a wide difference between the two things. For we must learn not to interpret, but to correct texts of this sort. For the same reason it is, that because the Greek word hoskos means a calf, some have not understood that moskeumata [Wisd. 4. 3.] are shoots of trees, and have translated the word "calves;" and this error has crept into so many texts, that you can hardly find it written in any other way. And yet the meaning is very clear; for it is made evident by the words that follow. For "the plantings of an adulterer will not take deep root," is a more suitable form of expression than the" calves;" because these walk upon the ground with their feet, and are not fixed in the earth by roots. In this passage, indeed, the rest of the context also justifies this translation. (On Christian Teaching (p. 31).

Augustine uses several examples like this in Book II of “On Christian Teaching”, trying to demonstrate the usefulness of direct understanding of the Greek. And while to Greco Roman standards, he probably was a bit of an amateur, to modern standards he’d probably have enough of a grasp of the Greek to be teaching a seminary course himself. His grasp of the grammatical system of Latin alone would have given him a leg up on any westerner beginning Greek today, as is evident in his discussion of some of the Latin textual nuances:

But indeed even the expression sapientius est hominibus (stronger than men) is not free from ambiguity, even though it be free from solecism. For whether hominibus is put as the plural of the dative or as the plural of the ablative, does not appear, unless by reference to the meaning. It would be better then to say, sapientius est guam homines, and fortius est quam homines. (33)

Speaking of Ignoramooses…

Mischief managed.