HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does Augustine's case against the angelic reading hold?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the structural case largely holds: Augustine sets the Enochic books aside on independent canon-history and builds the Sethite reading from the canonical text, so the "circular argument" charge against him does not survive contact with City of God XV.23. But the case is not decisive — it rests on one unargued angelological premise (holy angels cannot so fall) and Augustine himself could not settle the verse the angelic reading leans on (1 Peter 3:19) · the leading modern critique advanced by Fr. Stephen De Young

Related arguments: the Sethite reading — see also the Rabbinic-origin thesis · Chrysostom's authorship

Here the question is whether the turning-point witness's case holds: does Augustine's argument against the angelic reading (City of God XV.23) actually work? The sharpest modern attack on it — Fr. Stephen De Young's charge that it argues in a circle — is the natural way in, and is weighed first; the deeper soft spots follow.

The question

Augustine is the hinge of the whole timeline: with him the angelic reading of Genesis 6 gives way, for the Latin West, to the Sethite reading. So the live question is not just what he held but whether his case for the turn is good. Fr. Stephen De Young (with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick) presses the broader thesis that the angelic reading was the original and the Sethite reading a later rationalization, and that the Fathers who turned against the "watchers" — Augustine above all — rejected a misunderstanding rather than the ancient claim. The cutting edge of that thesis, aimed at Augustine, is a charge of circularity. In the Lord of Spirits episode "Land of Giants" he reconstructs City of God XV.23 as a self-defeating reductio:

St. Augustine was saying this text we have now must represent Enoch's work, but he says: Look, that makes it so old. We can't verify what in this text we have now actually comes from Enoch and what doesn't. And then he makes this circular argument where he says you can't trust this story about the watchers, about these sinful angels, in the book of Enoch, because not everything in the book of Enoch is true and goes back to Enoch. So you say to him: Well, what's an example of something that's not true and doesn't go back to Enoch? And he says: Well, the watchers story. … "It's untrustworthy because it has stuff like this story in it, so you can't believe this story." This is circular argument. So he has some problems even getting this view forward.

— Fr. Stephen De Young, Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants."¹ The charge is precise: not that Augustine rejects 1 Enoch wholesale because of the watchers, but that — having granted he cannot tell which parts of the book are genuinely Enoch's — he then brands the watchers story the non-genuine part with no criterion except that it is the very claim in dispute. If that holds, the case never gets off the ground. So we test it first, then ask whether the case survives once it fails.

What Augustine actually argues

In City of God XV.23 Augustine does two distinct things. First, he sets the apocryphal books under Enoch's name aside — and the reasons he gives are matters of provenance and canon-history, not of the giants' paternity:

Let us omit, then, the fables of those scriptures which are called apocryphal, because their obscure origin was unknown to the fathers from whom the authority of the true Scriptures has been transmitted to us by a most certain and well-ascertained succession… But it is not without reason that these writings have no place in that canon of Scripture which was preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests; for their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings, and they were not brought forward as genuine by the persons who were found to have carefully preserved the canonical books by a successive transmission.

— The City of God XV.23, historicalchristian.faith.² He even grants that Enoch genuinely wrote something inspired — "We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle" — so his target is not Enoch but the pseudepigrapha circulating under his name, "just as many writings are produced by heretics under the names both of other prophets… set apart from canonical authority under the title of Apocrypha."²

Second — and separately — he builds the Sethite reading out of the canonical text, not out of Enoch's exclusion. He takes the Septuagint's own "angels of God / sons of God" and reads it of men raised by grace and then fallen: "by the Spirit of God they had been made angels of God, and sons of God; but declining towards lower things, they are called men, a name of nature, not of grace," appealing to Psalm 82 ("I have said, You are gods").³ His denial that holy angels fell is then a flat theological assertion, hedged only by the popular "incubi" report: "certainly I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen."⁴

Is the case circular? (De Young's charge)

What holds in the charge. It is not pulled from nowhere. In cataloguing what makes the Enochic books spurious, Augustine does fold in their content — they "contain these fables about the giants, saying that their fathers were not men, are properly judged by prudent men to be not genuine."² Taken in isolation, that clause does treat the angelic origin of the giants as already false, which is what was to be shown. And De Young's wider point — that the standing of 1 Enoch and the fortunes of the angelic reading are historically entangled — is itself a defensible observation, weighed at length on the companion canonicity page, which rates the strong "received as Scripture across the early Church" claim weak but affirms the narrower "early, widely used, held authoritative by some" core as plausible — and the entanglement observation rides on that plausible core.⁵

Why "circular" overstates it. As a characterization of the argument the label does not survive contact with the text, for three reasons.

1. The load-bearing reason is independent. Augustine's decisive ground for setting the books aside is that they are of "obscure origin… unknown to the fathers," have "no place in that canon… preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests," and "were not brought forward as genuine" by the custodians of the canonical books. None of that presupposes the falsity of the angelic reading; it would set the books aside whatever they taught. The content clause is an illustration of "false statements," not the premise that carries the weight.

2. The canon he invokes is pre-Christian. Augustine appeals to non-reception by the Hebrew temple priesthood — a canon fixed before any Christian quarrel over the watchers. So even the historical form of the circle ("Enoch dropped out of the canon because the Church abandoned the angelic reading, and Augustine then cites its non-canonicity against that reading") misfires: the non-reception he relies on is not an artifact of the shift he is part of.

3. The positive case stands without Enoch. The Sethite reading is derived from the canonical Genesis text — the LXX "sons of God / angels of God" read of Seth's line graced and then fallen, with Psalm 82 — so rejecting Enoch is not the only, or even the main, thing standing between Augustine and the angelic view.³ Knock the Enoch paragraph out entirely and the argument for the Sethite reading remains.

The selection step is not criterion-free. De Young's reductio needs Augustine to brand the watchers story spurious with no reason except that it is the disputed claim ("it's untrustworthy because it has stuff like this story in it"). But Augustine does give a reason, and it lies outside the book: his angelology. He holds independently that "God's holy angels could [not]… have so fallen," and it is that prior conviction — not the book's canon-status — that marks "their fathers were not men" as a "fable."⁴ So the circle does not close: the content is judged false by an external premise, not by its own exclusion from the canon. As a structural assessment, then, "circular" fails — but it points, correctly, at where the real weight sits.

Where the case is genuinely soft

That the case is not circular does not make it airtight; relocating De Young's instinct exposes two real soft spots.

An unargued premise. Everything ultimately turns on the claim that "God's holy angels could [not]… have so fallen." Augustine asserts it; he does not argue it, and a defender of the angelic reading need not grant it — the older view precisely held that a class of angels (the "watchers," "sons of God") did so fall, and reads Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 to that effect. Resting the decisive judgment on a contestable premise the opponent rejects is a real weakness — a lesser fault than arguing in a circle, but the fault that actually carries the case.⁴

An admitted aporia at the load-bearing verse. The angelic reading's strongest New Testament foothold is 1 Peter 3:19–20 (Christ's preaching to "the spirits in prison," read by the older camp of the imprisoned Watchers). Augustine reaches that verse in Letter 164 and concedes he cannot settle it: he calls the question "intricate" and declines "to pronounce any definite opinion," reading the spirits as the human dead but without dislodging the rival reading.⁶ A case that demythologizes Genesis 6 but leaves the New Testament verse its opponents lean on unresolved has not closed the exegetical question — by its own author's admission. (Whether the verse does carry the angelic reading is itself contested; see the 1 Peter 3:19 page, assessment: contested.)

The counterfactual: would Augustine revise given 1 Enoch and the Scrolls?

A popular modern challenge, pressed by Taylor Marshall, reframes the whole dispute as an accident of evidence: Augustine and Aquinas, it runs, built the Sethite reading without access to 1 Enoch — the complete text lost to the Latin West until James Bruce brought three Ge'ez copies back from Ethiopia in 1773, first Englished by Richard Laurence in 1821, with the Aramaic Qumran fragments (which established the work's pre-Christian antiquity and wide circulation) surfacing only in the early 1950s.⁷ Would they, the challenge asks, have revised their reading had they held all this?

The premise is overstated for Augustine. He did not lack the claim; he lacked the manuscript. City of God XV.23 explicitly engages "the fables of those scriptures which are called apocryphal… which contain these fables about the giants, saying that their fathers were not men," and sets them aside.² So he had the Enochic giants-tradition's central assertion in front of him and rejected it — on canon-history, not from never having encountered it. Aquinas is the stronger case for genuine non-access; but even he inherits Augustine's considered verdict rather than a mere gap in the record. (The misstatement is flagged on Marshall's page.)

The honest counterfactual is narrower — and his own case answers it. What Augustine could not weigh is real but specific: the Dead Sea evidence that the angelic reading was no late or fringe embroidery but old, widely copied, and, in the Second Temple period, close to standard.⁷ The live question, then, is not "would he learn the claim?" (he knew it) but "would the reading's now-demonstrated antiquity and ubiquity have moved him?" On his stated ground it would not, because antiquity is not what was at issue. Augustine set the Enochic books aside for obscure provenance and non-reception by the priestly custodians of the pre-Christian Hebrew canon — not for being recent — so a book can be both ancient and non-canonical, which is exactly what he judged 1 Enoch to be.² That the Scrolls now show the reading older and more widespread than he could have known sharpens the historical picture the canonicity page weighs — which rates the narrow "early, widely used, held authoritative by some" core plausible and the strong "received as Scripture across the early Church" claim weak — but it does not reach the canon-history ground: antiquity is not canonicity.⁵ Fairly stated, the counterfactual does not defeat the case; it restates the very premise Augustine already had before him, and answers it the way he did.

Assessment

Sound. Augustine's case against the angelic reading is stronger than its sharpest modern critic allows and weaker than a decisive refutation. The "circular argument" charge identifies something real — Augustine does list the angelic-giant content among the marks of a spurious book, and the canon-status of 1 Enoch is genuinely entangled with the reading-history — but it overstates that kernel into a structural assessment the text will not bear: his rejection of the Enochic pseudepigrapha rests on independent canon-history (obscure provenance; non-reception by the priestly custodians of the pre-Christian Hebrew canon), and his Sethite reading is drawn from the canonical Genesis text itself, so the argument is not viciously circular. What survives, once the circle is set aside, is the case's real soft underbelly: it leans on an unargued angelological premise (holy angels cannot so fall) that the opposing camp denies, and Augustine himself could not settle 1 Peter 3:19–20, the verse that reading leans on. So the core of the case holds — it is a coherent, canonically grounded reading, not a self-defeating one — but it does not decide the question against the angelic interpretation; it presupposes the contested premise at the crucial step. What should be flagged on De Young's page is the inflation — a fair, narrow observation about one clause delivered as a charge that the whole case is circular.

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