ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Augustine represents his education as a young man in what might be called a "hermeneutics of lust". It discusses the approach by which Augustine, in the first book of his Confessions, engages a key text, Terence's Eunuch that informs the social values to which he is responding. The chapter explicates how, in the third book of his Confessions, he charts a reading strategy, his "hermeneutics of love", in order most fruitfully to approach Scripture, in which he repurposes the rules of classical poetic metre to illustrate faithfulness to God's justice as displayed in God's law. It demonstrates how Augustine, in City of God, enacts his hermeneutics of love in response to the aftermath of rape in the lives of Roman Christian women. The chapter focuses particularly on Augustine's deductive exegesis of the neighbour-love commandment and two commandments from the decalogue: do not kill, and do not bear false witness against your neighbour.
