ARTICOLI / 6 / Alberto Romele
The first part of the paper places Augustine’s and Ricœur’s reflections on evil and textual hermeneutics in their right perspective. The hypothesis is that they both try to articulate an exegetical method through the true «thing of the text» and that their notion of evil is precisely the paradigm of such a «thing». In the second part it is argued that Augustine’s and Ricœur’s hermeneutics move along opposite directions, from allegorical interpretation to allegorical expression in the first case, from symbols to narrations in the second case. The last part is devoted to the problem of evil in order to show how, beyond all criticism, Ricœur shares and radicalizes the Augustinian position. Once the two opposite hermeneutics have been tested on the benchmark of the shared concept of evil, it is shown that Augustine is somehow more consistent than Ricœur in thinking the hermeneutics of evil.
