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The shift in the Western philosophical tradition during the Enlightenment period resulted in a solid break from authority-based hermeneutics of theology to the autonomy of the mind of modern philosophy. This dissertation will be a study of the influence of the Christian tradition of caritas in the philosophy and the subsequent hermeneutic of Saint Augustine of Hippo and will seek to establish the value of Augustine’s hermeneutic of caritas within contemporary philosophical scholarship. I conclude by suggesting based on my analysis how his conception of doctrina changed over thirty years and posing questions that this account raises for the broadly Augustinian traditions. An outline of the second stage of composition from the 420s reveals that he has largely stepped away from using systems of principle to construct doctrina based on analogies with gemina caritas. But this structure leads to several seemingly insoluble problems for Augustine, and he abandons it. Beginning from the prominence that immaterial rules and principles had for Augustine in the 390s, I outline a structure of the first stage of composition based on analogies with Augustine’s central hermeneutic principle, gemina caritas, the double love of God and neighbor. Part of the reason for this, I argue here, is that the composition of the work over two stages thirty years apart reveals significant structural differences (so far unnoticed), differences even in how doctrina itself is conceived.

There is no unified account of Augustine’s De doctrina christiana in the contemporary scholarly literature.