Any Christian consideration of literature has to reckon with Augustine. Namely, we have to reckon with Augustine’s contradictory stance on pagan literature.
On the one hand, Augustine decries it. His Confessions opens with him weeping over how he wept for The Aeneid’s Dido instead of for himself. Virgil’s epic deceived him, and he wishes he’d never read it.
On the other hand, Augustine says that when pagan literature contains truth, we should claim it. Like the Israelites taking the gold out of Egypt, Christians should put pagan riches to better use. He includes literature as one of the jewels we might lawfully make off with.
In his investigation of this conundrum, Donald Williams says that Augustine’s mixed reception of literature is a starting place but not a definitive statement on how Christians should take literature.
It is not fiction itself that Augustine objects to. He knows Christ told parables. Nor is it rhetorical elegance. His own work testifies to his approval of that.
Like Tertullian, then, Augustine’s opprobrium is for non-Christian literature. He mitigates that with his comment about Egyptian gold. Implicitly, he agrees that the Bible isn’t literature. It’s something else.
So that prompts me to ask the question: why am I interested in talking about the Bible as literature?
A tentative answer is that the features in the Bible I think we must embrace–especially in preparation for reading and understanding non-sacred work–are symbols (repeated images) and types (repeated patterns of action). These features are more the domain of literary writing than scientific writing, and I think the Bible is too rich in these features to downplay them. Maybe “literary” is the wrong adjective. Still, the symbolic and typological features of scripture are what I’m trying to describe and use as the foundation for a Christian study of literature.
Experiments in Criticism 