HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Augustine retract his view and rank the deuterocanon below the canonical Scriptures?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — for the interpretation it serves (that Augustine's "Yes" to the longer canon was really a soft "No": he retracted his high opinion of the disputed books and ranked them below the genuine canonical Scriptures, so he is no witness for the Catholic canon). The load-bearing pieces do not hold up. The "retraction" in Augustine's Retractations corrects only the authorship of the Wisdom of Solomon, not the book's canonical standing; the "read from a lower place / not as Holy Scripture" custom is the canonical-versus-"ecclesiastical" distinction of Jerome and Rufinus, not anything Augustine says; and Augustine lists the disputed books inside his forty-four-book canon and cites them as "Scripture" to the end. What survives is a smaller, true kernel — Augustine's reception-criterion grades authority by breadth of reception, so the disputed books rank lower on that scale — but that is a gradation within the canon, not the categorical demotion the argument needs · advanced by Archibald Alexander

Related arguments: Augustine's canon witness — see also should Augustine's witness be discounted because he was "no biblical expert" and could not read Hebrew, unlike Jerome? and did Augustine accept the deuterocanon only because he mistakenly thought it stood in the Hebrew canon?

The claim

In The Canon of the Old and New Testaments Ascertained (1826), the Old-School Presbyterian theologian Archibald Alexander — first professor of Princeton Seminary — grants that Augustine is the one early Father who "seems to favour the introduction of these six disputed books into the Canon," then reclaims him for the shorter canon on three counts:¹

These two last mentioned, he says, "are called Solomon's, on account of their resemblance to his writings; although it is known that one of them was composed by the son of Sirach: which deserves to be received among the prophetical books." But this opinion he retracted afterwards.

It may be admitted, however, that Augustine entertained too high an opinion of these apocryphal books, but it is certain that he did not put them on a level with the genuine canonical books. He mentions a custom which prevailed in his time, from which it appears that although the apocryphal books were read in some of the churches, they were not read as Holy Scripture, nor put on a level with the canonical books; for he informs us that they were not permitted to be read from the same desk as the Canonical Scriptures, but from a lower place in the church.

So the interpretation has three legs: (1) Augustine retracted the opinion that Ecclesiasticus "deserves to be received among the prophetical books"; (2) Augustine himself reports a liturgical custom that subordinated the apocrypha — read in church "from a lower place," not "as Holy Scripture"; and therefore (3) Augustine "did not put them on a level with the genuine canonical books." The conclusion is that the maximal reading of Augustine — the full longer canon, with "no second rank" — overstates him, and that even the Catholic canon's strongest patristic witness held the disputed books at arm's length.

Who advances it

Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), founding professor at Princeton, wrote The Canon as a learned Protestant handbook on the limits of Scripture; the reading survives in the Old-School Presbyterian and broader Reformed tradition that recruits Augustine for the shorter canon by distinguishing the senses in which he called books "canonical" — the line of the Elizabethan divine William Whitaker.¹ It is the third of a family of moves on this timeline that try to neutralize Augustine's vote: the others discount his competence (he read no Hebrew) and his knowledge (he supposedly thought the books stood in the Hebrew canon). Alexander's is the one that goes after Augustine's view directly.

The evidence for

The retraction is real. Alexander is right that Augustine revisited the Wisdom passage of On Christian Doctrine. Late in life, cataloguing his corrections in the Retractations (c. 426–427), Augustine writes of the second book of On Christian Doctrine:²

In the second book I made a mistake as to the authorship of the book commonly called the Wisdom of Solomon.

And the gradation is real. Alexander is also right that Augustine does not flatly equalize all books. The criterion of On Christian Doctrine II.8.12 ranks books by degree: prefer those received by all the catholic churches to those some do not receive, and among the latter prefer the more widely and anciently received. A book held by fewer churches therefore carries, on Augustine's own scale, a lower grade of authority. That much of Alexander's instinct — that Augustine sees a hierarchy among the books — is grounded in the text.³

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The retraction exists, and Augustine's reception-criterion really is a graded one. To that extent Alexander has hold of something true: Augustine neither treats the canon as a flat list of equals nor pretends the disputed books enjoy the same breadth of reception as Genesis or Isaiah.

Where it breaks (1): the retraction is of authorship, not canonicity. Alexander makes the Retractations note recant the words "deserves to be received among the prophetical books." It does not. The whole correction concerns who wrote the book: Augustine had loosely treated the two Solomonic-styled books as the work of "the son of Sirach," and now withdraws that attribution — "I made a mistake as to the authorship." The canonical status he assigned them is left exactly where it stood; the same Retractations review, going through On Christian Doctrine line by line, also touches his sentence "The authority of the Old Testament is contained within the limits of these forty-four books," and there he qualifies only his use of the phrase "Old Testament" (per "ecclesiastical usage"), not the contents of the forty-four-book list, which include Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus among the prophetical books. A note correcting an authorship slip is read by Alexander as a retraction of canon — an overread the primary will not bear.²

Where it breaks (2): the "lower place" custom is not Augustine's. Alexander says Augustine "informs us" that the apocrypha were read in church "from a lower place," "not as Holy Scripture" — and gives no citation. No such passage is found in Augustine, and the distinction Alexander describes is in fact the program of Augustine's opponents on the canon. It is Jerome who consigns Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, and the Maccabees to be read "for the edification of the people," "not for establishing the authority of the doctrines of the Church," and Rufinus of Aquileia who fixes the very category Alexander invokes — books not "canonical" but "ecclesiastical," which the Fathers "wished to be read in the churches" yet not "appealed to for the confirmation of doctrine." That canonical-versus-ecclesiastical distinction is precisely the position Augustine does not take: he uses "canonical" in the wider sense and places the disputed books inside the canon proper. Alexander has projected the Jerome–Rufinus rubric onto Augustine and credited Augustine with reporting it.⁴

Where it breaks (3): Augustine cites the disputed books as Scripture, by name, to the end. The thesis that Augustine "did not put them on a level with the genuine canonical books" runs straight into his own usage. In works spanning decades he quotes the deuterocanon with the same formulae he reserves for the rest of the Bible: Sirach as "the words of Scripture" (City of God XXI.14), Wisdom with "Holy Scripture says" (On the Trinity XIV.1.1), and the mother of the Maccabees as authoritative testimony (On Rebuke and Grace 41, c. 426) — the last written about the same time as the Retractations Alexander leans on. A man who calls Sirach "Scripture" in his old age has not quietly demoted it.⁵

The surviving kernel, kept in proportion. What is true is the graded criterion of (3) above — and it is worth conceding plainly, because it is the strongest form of Alexander's reading. Augustine's reception-rule does sort books by breadth of reception, and on that sort the disputed books, received by fewer churches, stand lower than the universally-received ones. But this is a gradation of degree of authority within the canon, not the categorical demotion (in vs. out, "Holy Scripture" vs. merely "ecclesiastical") that Alexander needs to reclaim Augustine for the shorter canon. Augustine grades; he does not exclude. The "no second rank" the wiki ascribes to him is the absence of a separate apocryphal tier in his canon-list — the kind Athanasius and Jerome drew — not a claim that every book carries identical weight on his reception-scale. Read that way, Alexander's true observation and Augustine's actual position are compatible, and neither yields Alexander's conclusion.

Assessment

Weak. The interpretation — that Augustine retracted his high view of the disputed books and ranked them below the genuine Scriptures, so his witness should be discounted — does not hold on its best case. Its two factual props fail: the Retractations correct the authorship of the Wisdom of Solomon, not its canonicity, and the "read from a lower place / not as Holy Scripture" custom is the canonical-versus-ecclesiastical distinction of Jerome and Rufinus, misattributed to an Augustine who explicitly takes the opposite line. Against the thesis stand Augustine's forty-four-book canon-list with the disputed books inside it, the reception-criterion that carries them there, and his citation of Wisdom, Sirach, and 2 Maccabees as "Scripture" into his final years. What survives is the smaller, sound point that Augustine's criterion grades authority by breadth of reception — a real hierarchy, but one within Scripture, not a line between Scripture and non-Scripture. So Alexander has correctly noticed that Augustine is no flat egalitarian about the canon, and wrongly concluded that he therefore held the shorter one. Flag on Alexander's framing the overread retraction (authorship taken for canonicity) and the misattributed "lower place" custom. (The companion attempts to neutralize Augustine's vote are weighed on the "no biblical expert" and "thought it was in the Hebrew canon" pages; the underlying Augustine–Jerome dispute over the criterion is the fault line this timeline traces.)

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