You can't do/be everything

'After St Jerome translated the Old Testament in the fourth century, the need to know Hebrew as a sacred language grew weaker. This happened to Greek as well. A typical example of this cultural lack is given by St Augustine, a man of vast culture, and the most important exponent of Christian thought at the end of the empire. The Christian revelation is founded on an Old Testament written in Hewbrew and a New Testament written, for the most part, in Greek. St Augustine, however, knew no Hebrew; and his knowledge of Greek was, to say the least, patchy (c.f. Marrou 1958). This amounts to a somewhat paradoxical situation: the man who set himself the task of interpreting scripture in order to discover the true meaning of the divine word can read it only in a Latin translation. THe notion that he ought to consult the Hebrew original never really seems to have entered Augustine's mind. He did not entirely trust the Jews, nurturing a suspicion that, in their versions, they might have erased all references to the coming of Christ. The only critical procedure he would allow was that of comparing translations in order to find the most likely version. In this way, St Augustine, though the father of hermeneutics, was certainly not destined to become the father of philology' (14).

Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Fontana Press, 1997.