Augustine in His Own Words
The Exegete 173 when we Latins say bos, we mean an ox, because that is the name by which we and all Latin speakers call it. Signs are metaphorical when the very things we signify by the literal term are used to signify something else. So when we say bos, we recognize by this syllable the animal to which we typically give that name; but we also understand by that farm animal "evangelist" because Scripture, as the Apostle interpreted it, applied this meaning to it, saying: "You shall not muzzle the ox that treads the grain" (1 Cor 9:9; cf. Dt 25:4).38
The Pleasures and Pedagogy
of Obscurity
Augustine was convinced that the Bible's "obscure signs," that is, its hard-to-grasp texts, were part of God's conscious pedagogy. God placed some signs to block the proud from entering. God also built in certain obscurities to evoke delight in the discoverer. From On Christian Teaching, Book 2:
(6.7) Casual readers are misled by the [Scriptures'] many and multiple sorts of obscurities and ambiguities, misjudging one meaning for another. In some passages they do not find anything to think about, even wrongly, so thoroughly do certain texts wrap themselves in the densest fog. I am convinced that divine foresight anticipated this so that hard work would tame pride and would reinvigorate our intellects, which tend to disdain things investigated and resolved too quickly and easily. Why is it, I wonder, that there are those saintly, perfect people whose lives and morals the Church of Christ puts forward to those who come to her from all manner of superstitions, that she incorporates these [converts] into herself by having them imitate these good men and women, that these [converts] become good and truly faithful servants of God, ridding themselves of worldly burdens, coming to the holy washing of baptism, and rising up from the font having been conceived by the Holy Spirit to give forth as fruit the twin loves, that is, of God and neighbor? Why is it, I ask, that when one simply asserts all this to an audience, it affords less delight than when one explains exactly the same ideas using that text from the Canticle of Canticles where the Church is spoken of as though she were a beautiful woman deserving praise: "Your teeth are as flocks of shorn sheep, which come up from the washing, all of which give birth to twins, and there is none barren among them" (Sg 4:2)? Does one learn anything more than when one hears that same set of ideas phrased in plain words without
38. Doc. Chr. 2.1.1–10.15 (Green, 56–70); my trans. See Robert A. Markus, "St. Augustine on Signs," and B. Darrell Jackson, "The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine's De doctrina christiana," in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert A. Markus (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972), 61–91 and 92–147.