Teaching Christianity
[118]. See The Instruction of Beginners III, 6, 4.
[120]. IV, 15, 32. See Letter 130. See The Teacher 7 for the connection between prayer and teaching.
[121]. Alici, S. Agostino d'Ippona, 360, note 1
Sign and Language
"Through Material Things to Immaterial"
Following an obviously classical model,[1] Augustine identifies "three classes of seafarers" in the introduction to his youthful dialogue The Happy Life. The first "consists of those who, having reached the use of reason, with but little effort and a slight stroke of the oars, go only a little distance away. There they establish themselves in such tranquillity that they erect for as many other citizens as possible a very bright sign of their own work." The second class includes all who let themselves be fooled by the apparent state of the sea, head out into the deep, and sail far from their homeland, driven by an uncontrollable wind. The third class, finally, in which Augustine places himself, consists of all who, "on the very threshold of youth, or after being already long tossed about, still perceive some familiar signs and remember, even amid the waves, the great sweetness of home…. They take the direct course, in no way deceived, and without delay reach home again." [2] The image is not simply a vague literary reminiscence; it already contains, in a nutshell, an idea that will leave a deep mark on Augustine's interior journey in search of truth, giving it that special combination of faith lived and faith thought out that has made it in many respects emblematic of the human condition itself and has given it a classical, perennially valid status.[3] Above all, the image expresses the conception of a quest in which the subject himself is called into question, to the point of laying siege to the roots of his being. Thus Augustine will exclaim in the Confessions: "I have become for myself a soil which is a cause of difficulty and much sweat." [4]
Sailing, then, is a disquieting metaphor for human confusion, in which the ups and downs of a life are interwoven with the labor of reflection: the nostalgia for a safe harbor, which the reading of Cicero awakened in Augustine, is not enough by itself to bring him out of the darkness that condemns him to drift, although it is a first and indispensable way of orienting himself. Enthusiasm and disillusionment alternate as long as he has not yet glimpsed the polar star that will show him the irreversible course his life is to take. But long-standing resistances hinder the sailing and render its progress uncertain; among these, is "a huge mountain that rises in front of the harbor." [5] This is in a certain sense the final temptation, for it represents "the proud quest of an utterly meaningless glory (superbum studium inanissimae gloriae)."
The image Augustine uses of a hollow mountain, of a crumbling but enticing ground that swallows up the traveler now close to his native land by blinding him and causing him to plunge from light into darkness, is not only an effective picture of the gap between authority and reason that is characteristic of his early writings. It also provides an interpretive key to two different ways of conceiving the journey to truth: a proudly and abstractly rationalist way that abandons human beings to captivity by the immediate and suffocates their understanding; the other, that of those who are disposed to let faith guide them by providing what are at best mediated ways of understanding.
The nautical metaphor allows the author to take his own demand for meaning and salvation and to articulate a rereading of it in terms of the pattern of going astray and rediscovery. This in turn is reinforced by a set of appropriate parallels: life as a quest in which the subject is put in the first person and becomes a "great question" to himself; the value of the final goal, which must be identified and reached while overcoming the recurring temptation to let oneself be led astray by false objectives; the importance of the intermediate means of orienting oneself; the necessity of jettisoning all useless clutter.
The outlook is still one of vibrant joy, dominated by the central event of the return to God and by the determination to consecrate himself entirely to God's service. Even at this point it is already possible to catch a glimpse of the guiding lines along which future works will develop, especially the determination not to isolate the event of conversion as a nonrepeatable individual experience that is to be retold simply for edification, and the resultant effort to rethink it in universal terms by discovering in it the source of a structural tension proper to human beings. In this perspective, the problem of the relation between the search for truth and the possession of it, around which much of the Answer to the Academics is structured, will arise again and converge with its parallel, the faith that tends toward truth just as time does toward eternity.[6]
The Cassiciacum dialogues thus seem to reach a first, delicate balance between faith and searching, in which the problems inherent in a philosophical sea journey, though necessary and difficult,[7] are linked with the newness of a "happy life" already glimpsed as the final landfall and even already savored at each stage of an ever more demanding advance in a personal history. These works exist for the most part under the sign of a twofold confidence. The first is confidence in the possibility of rethinking the Christian message in an organized way, in which it is seen as the completion and explicitation of the truest demands of classical culture, from the Neoplatonic idea of a philosophical life as a spiritual asceticism to the combination of authority and reason, through which the inheritance of Latin culture may be filtered. The second is a human confidence in the practicability of this idea, a confidence based on the conviction, initially rather simplistic and, as it were, prepelagian (even according to Pizzolato[8]), of the easy victory of reason over bodily conditions, a thesis, this, that was probably conditioned by the Plotinian idea of the goodness of existence and by a strong will to achieve emancipation from Manichean dualism.
Along with this trend, and partially as a corrective of it, there gradually emerges in the reflection of the now converted Augustine an attention to concrete problems of education. Here a fund of solid pedagogical realism, reinforced to some extent by his not always positive professional experience as a young rhetorician, is combined with the new perspective opened up by his journey in the Christian faith, which he now accepts completely.
This formative intention seems to take concrete form essentially along two lines: on the one hand, in the attempt at an organized rethinking of the whole of the liberal arts, as he plans to devote a series of treatises to each of these;[9] on the other, in starting to think about the communicative potentialities of language and the implications of language in the realm of teaching.[10] Starting with the dialogues, Augustine outlines an educational project that can lead human beings through material things to immaterial (per corporalia ad incorporalia). In this plan, the encyclopedic structure, as it appears in, for example, Order, which contains a kind of "miniature encyclopedia," [11] already has a first philosophical support in the Neoplatonic problematic of the mediation between the intelligible and sensible orders; this problem will later receive a complete, Christocentric solution, but even at this early point it contributes to the sketching of a theory of signs as the essence of this ascent to immaterial things.
From Dialectic to The Teacher
The semiotic practices that had developed in various areas of life in the ancient world, from divination to medicine, had served as a point of convergence for various needs and problems and had fed a theoretical reflection that runs through the whole of Greek philosophy after being given basic form in the work of Plato and Aristotle. "But," Manetti points out, "in the transition from the Greek to the Roman world the semiotic paradigm leaves the field of philosophy in the strict sense of this term and takes a central place in the areas of rhetoric and law." [12] In particular, the fact that in judiciary matters signs came to be regarded as investigative pointers had given rhetoric new tasks in the classification of signs, calling upon it to determine their various degrees of probative worth and of value in argumentation. When the question was faced by the Stoics in a rationalist perspective and by the Epicureans in a more empirical perspective, the challenge put to the legal craft became henceforth an unavoidable point of reference.[13]
Through the study of evidence pointing to guilt broader theoretical implications soon surfaced, beginning with the possibility of moving from a set of sensible data to a set of meanings that are reconstructed through imagination and inference. The problematic character of this movement brings an awareness, according to Crapis, "of the varying epistemological values of signs and of the fact that their capacity to convey meaning is often based on social conventions rather than on scientific laws." Orators are therefore urged "to point out the inherent polysemy of signs when there is question of refuting an adversary's argument." [14]
In this context, Augustine's semiology occupies a crucial position, for he developed a synthesis that was new by comparison with earlier positions, while in other respects he anticipated some tendencies that would show up fully only in modern thought.[15] Augustine seems especially aware of some characteristic elements of Stoic logic, especially of its interest in hypothetical syllogisms and in dialectics.[16]
As early as his youthful work Dialectic, which was composed around 387 and the authenticity of which today seems definitively established, he had explained the relationship between dialectic ("dialectic is the science of good argument" [17]) and grammar, saying that the latter is concerned primarily with the study of words as sounds.[18] In the Stoic perspective, the heart of philosophical discourse is to be found in the logical structure of the sêmeion or sign,[19] thus giving rise to a conception of language as a formal structure of meaning, a conception in which the proposition provides the connecting link between signifier and signified. But this perspective did not seem to offer the fusion between theory of signs and theory of language that appears for the first time, in an explicit and conscious form, in Augustine himself.[20] Augustine's attention is now focused on the verbum simplex, which serves as the starting point for an analysis of words as signs; the latter affect not only sense perception but mental understanding.
In Dialectic, therefore, there already seems to be present a triadic conception of signs, one that distinguishes between meaning (dicibile), signifier (vox articulata, sonus), and referent (res).[21] Augustine will retain the same approach later on, and the majority of interpreters have emphasized, with varying nuances,[22] his dependence on Stoicism in this matter, although others urge that equal account be taken of the Aristotelean conception.[23] In particular, we already find in Augustine, thanks to the notion of dictio, a direct connection between sign and language,[24] with a resultant substantial unification of perspective in which language displays new potentialities that finally transcend the semantic limits of early theories, which were restricted to nonverbal signs.
Not by accident, the Augustinian encyclopedia seems to be based on a fundamental interconnection between language and reality, between the sphere of signs and the sphere of things, an interconnection which medieval education will repeat in the well-known distinction between the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Within this basic system, then, a study of the structure of the liberal arts requires a further investigation into the genesis, nature, and limits of language as a tool. This is the context of The Teacher, a dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus; its focus is the role of the interior teacher, and it attempts to outline an initial philosophical and theological synthesis by combining the invitation to open the self to the teaching of the only real teacher with a more properly methodological problematic that sheds new light on the possibility of learning, of interpersonal communication, and on the profound dynamics of interior understanding.[25] Eco says that in The Teacher "Augustine will effect a definitive fusion between the theory of signs and the theory of language." [26]
The idea of an "interior teacher," which has already made its appearance in Augustine's first writings,[27] receives here its fullest explicit form. As Pieretti observes, "The basis of the ability to convey meaning is not in the signs but in the things to which they refer or, more accurately still, in the truth that renders them intelligible. For this reason, the speakers in the dialogue proceed to ascertain whether and how it is possible to teach. The result is the pedagogical aspect of The Teacher." [28] Augustine himself says:
As for all the things which we "understand," it is not the outward sound of the speaker's words that we consult, but the truth which presides over the mind itself from within, though we have been led to consult it because of the words. Now He who is consulted and who is said to "dwell in the inner man," He it is who teaches us, namely Christ.[29]
In The Teacher, reflection on the dynamics of teaching is concerned essentially with finding a Christological basis for the doctrine of the interiority of truth,[30] although the theme seems to be already filtered through a confrontation with the pedagogical culture of the pagan world and, in particular, with the disciplines by which this culture was transmitted in institutionalized and methodologically articulated forms.
Toward a Christian "Doctrine"
Ratzinger writes that in regard to the contemplative ideal which had been revised and tested during the retreat in Cassiciacum and which was in large measure dominated by the idea of limitless progress in wisdom, "the year 391 created a completely new situation for Augustine." [31] First his priestly ministry and then his episcopal consecration a few years later gave him new reasons for concerning himself with, and a new attentiveness to, the tradition of the Church, the works of the Fathers, and the theological positions that were emerging in Africa. As Marrou, too, has brought out, unforeseen pastoral responsibilities henceforth draw Augustine away for good from the intellectual mold of "a minority that led an artificial and impoverished existence" and opened his heart to the concerns "that make up the rough and simple life of human beings." [32]
A priest at thirty-six and a bishop at forty-two, Saint Augustine had already received his intellectual formation, and it was not possible for him to turn himself into a tabula rasa and rid himself of the intellectual baggage and mental habits he had acquired. But in Hippo his study became more focused and at the same time broadened; according to Marrou, this development "can be summed up in a few words: a deeper interior understanding of Christianity." [33]
Naturally, the works he continued to write reflect this changed state of life; he broke off his projected series on the liberal arts and committed himself to a labor of deeper theological understanding that had formidable ramifications: from philosophical reflection to biblical exegesis, from spirituality to catechesis.
As a result, the gulf between the pagan and Christian authors also widened: the view that attributed to the former an exclusive competence in the matter of signs and to the latter an exclusive competence in dealing with things[34] is followed by a less black-and-white and more complex one that can be glimpsed in the Confessions. Without going into the theological questions that were preparing the slow gestation and composition of Teaching Christianity, since this would distract us from our specific concern here, we cannot fail to note how the Christian message is henceforth dealt with across the entire range of its theological, cultural, and pastoral potentialities.
In the letter to Dioscorus, written soon after Augustine's episcopal consecration, this vision is already outlined in a rather detailed way: the supreme and immutable good is something close to us and unmerited, nor should human beings try to attain to it by winding and misleading ways. It is therefore necessary to submit one's whole life, including the intellectual life, entirely to God. Jesus Christ is truth personified and only "a blindness of mind brought on by the filth of sin and the love of the flesh" [35] could make the learned waste all their time in empty debates. For this reason, the disciplines must be subordinated to the requirements of doctrine, that is, of what is to be taught. Neoplatonic philosophy with its powerful spiritual inspiration and Roman culture with its pragmatic awareness of institutions are now placed in the service of a new project: the development of a global plan for education in the faith.
The primary point of reference here is the scriptures. "The Bible," Jaspers writes, "is [for Augustine] the sole source of essential truth." [36] When dealing with the sacred text one must therefore move beyond the idea of a rhetoric that is the science of persuading people regarding truth and falsehood[37] and undertake a new synthesis of wisdom and eloquence. During this period Augustine in fact devotes himself with greater intensity to the writing of exegetical works, such as the commentaries on the psalms, the gospel, the first letter of John, and Genesis, while at the same period attempting some theologico-pastoral syntheses.[38]
It is also important to note how in a letter to Jerome in 415 Augustine attacks the Stoics for their inability to grasp the element of perfectibility in the moral life and for imagining instead an immediate and painless passage from folly to wisdom. He defends rather the idea of a gradual progress in wisdom and of a love that is proportionate to the nature and degree of the virtues. We must not think, therefore, he writes, "of someone who as he passes from the water into the air, no sooner breaks the surface than he suddenly begins to take in all the air he needs, but rather of someone who as he advances from darkness toward the light, is more illumined, the closer he comes to it." [39] The text is a significant one, and Verbeke is right to stress its importance; he points out that for Augustine virtue has an essentially analogical character and by comparison with it Stoic ethics can only be rejected as inadequate, since it does not take account of human weakness and the constant need of divine grace. Consequently, human beings cannot find the source of their true happiness and perfection within themselves, but only in God.[40]
The idea of a progress in wisdom that depends on history and is subject to moral weakness and sin constitutes the philosophical ground on which Augustine erects his projected Teaching Christianity. In working on this project he revises some fundamental theses of Platonic and Neoplatonic anthropology and cosmology, which he had accepted in his youthful works and applied to the crucial problem of the soul's location intermediate between the body and God. Plotinus had discussed this question in Enneads IV, 8 ("The Soul's Descent into the Body"), where he reflected the tension felt by Plato himself between the more familiar idea of the soul as prison of the body and the idea which emerges especially in the Timaeus, namely, that the soul contributes from within to the elevation of the world.[41]
It was on this basis, then, that the question was raised of an intermediary (medium) that would make it possible to unite and cross over between the sensible and the intelligible worlds in virtue of what may be termed the ambivalent structure of the created world, a structure capable of joining within itself various orders of reality. Faced with this question, Augustine draws upon the technical baggage that came with his formation as a rhetorician, a formation that combined various elements in the culture of the age. Along with the inheritance of Quintilian's classical rhetoric, there was his scholastic and literary education with its important debt to Varro and Virgil; there was the reading of Cicero,[42] which merged with the rethinking of Plotinian and Porphyrian themes and with traces of Pythagoreanism.[43]
Following these paths he would reach the point of looking to language itself for the keys to a true and proper semantic ontology that would enable him to move from a view of signs as simply the tools of rhetorical manipulation to an interpretation of them as the ontological key to a fundamental hierarchical klimax (ladder) uniting body, soul, and God.
Following this line, the thesis that thought is internal discourse (a thesis already present in Plato[44] and shared in its essentials by the Stoics, for whom the endiathetos logos [immanent word; mental conception] is what properly distinguishes human beings from animals[45]) is combined with the Neoplatonic primacy of the interior dimension and, more particularly, with the assertion of a constitutive weakening of the mediational capacities of expression. If it be true, moreover, as Johnson has pointed out, that Augustine "was also a man of words" [46] and that this remained a factor creating continuity between his youthful profession of rhetorician and his mission in later life of proclaiming the gospel and commenting on the scriptures, then the entire process of his spiritual maturation could not but be deeply influenced by the way in which he conceived of communication.[47]
Theological Investigation
This nucleus of ideas offers, therefore, the theoretical scaffolding for a theological rethinking that seems to move in at least three directions. First of all, and especially beginning with the work Commentary on Genesis, against the Manichees, moral reflection on original sin and on the consequent obscuring of God's direct interior presence to the human person provides new justifications for the necessity of external communication. Second, the recognized centrality of Christ the incarnate Word provides a theological foundation for the theory of linguistic signs. Finally, Augustine's pastoral concerns commit him to a deeper biblical and ecclesiological study of Christian revelation. The work Teaching Christianity will provide a place for the gradual sifting and clarification of these several deeper understandings.
From this point on, Augustine looks upon the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel as describing not so much the act by which language in the proper sense was born,[48] but rather a fundamental experience of division between peoples that resulted from a breaching of the original communion of humanity with the creator.[49] At the origin of language, therefore, there is a profound distortion that shows itself not only in the difficulty of achieving an honest interpersonal communication but also in a much more radical kind of split between language and thought.[50]
In this context the mediating function of signs is burdened with an ambivalence and a new tension by comparison with the elitist and optimistic voluntarism of Neoplatonic asceticism[51] as well as with the naive anthropocentrism of Stoic ethics. This is true even though Augustine remains especially open to the Stoic thesis, which inspired even Varro, according to which, says Pizzani, "the giving of names is the result of a conscious, rational initiative of human beings with a view to reciprocal communication." [52] The historically conditioned proclamation of Christian truth seems in Augustine to be as it were suspended between the unfathomable mysteries of sin and grace, which sum up the alternating experiences of humanity itself on its journey to salvation. When we compare Teaching Christianity with The Teacher we can gauge the distance traveled by the author in rehabilitating the mediational function of language, which is now seen less as a degraded manifestation of the spirit's life than as a positive, intentional projection of the created universe.[53]
In parallel fashion, again in comparison with The Teacher, the person of Christ and the primacy of the one Teacher are rethought in the context of a fallen humanity that is marked in a radical degree by a kind of inability to effect any direct interior contact with God the Truth and thus a need of a structured and reliable doctrinal support that is based on the positive message of the scriptures and guaranteed by the authority of the Church. I cannot agree on this point with all those interpreters, from Trapè[54] to Madec, [55] who have seen the Christocentric orientation as the decisive factor in the very experience of conversion and therefore as the basic interpretive key for the whole of Augustine's thought.
It is just as true, finally, that as Augustine pursued his studies he gradually acquired a deeper biblical and ecclesial understanding of the doctrine of the incarnation. This can be verified in, among other things, the gradual emergence of the idea of "word" (verbum), which is now seen in a perspective that is more open to Pauline pneumatology and Johannine Christology. Johnson differs from other critics[56] in pointing out that the increasing use of verbum is accompanied by a personalization of Augustinian Christology, in which the person of Christ is gradually removed from the Neoplatonic categories of truth/wisdom. In the works composed from 386 to 389 Augustine never uses "Word" (Verbum) as a proper name, whereas from the Commentary on Genesis, against the Manichees to Teaching Christianity this term, despite the irreducible complexity of its meanings, acquires an ever more explicit reference to the incarnation.[57]
As Gadamer among others has pointed out,[58] the theological use of verbum in close connection with the theology of creation and of the incarnation is the springboard for moving completely beyond Platonic dualism. It is on this basis that in his Trinity Augustine will propose the wellknown thesis regarding the interior germination of the word, having reached the point of recognizing that there is an irreducible gap between external communication and interior word: "Thus the word which makes a sound outside is the sign of the word which lights up inside, and it is this latter that primarily deserves the name of 'word.' " [59] Thus there is a doubling of levels: the level of de facto communication, which plays a fundamental role in integration into society, and the level of expressive potentiality, where thinking and speaking combine to form a kind of "dwelling-place of thought," meaning a primitive nucleus of self-conscious and spiritual life.[60]
There is thus a close analogy between the process of articulating meaning that is expressed in the external order of the human voice and the process that goes on in the interior order of the mind. The analogy seems to be based precisely on the relationship between thing and sign. That is: as the activity of communication, taken globally in its reified exteriority, is a sign of a power of thought that goes beyond the level of empirical fact, so the interior act that embodies meaning is a sign and image of the ontological status of the human person which gives intentional existence to, while also transcending, its own acts: the word as "offspring of the mind." [61]
This analogical structure, though not made the subject of a formal theory, grounds the possibility of a "step back" from phenomenological recognition to a true and proper transcendental reflection, and makes it possible to establish a dialectical connection between exteriority and interiority, semantic horizon and ontological horizon. Thus the idea of "word," understood in its essential structure as a dialectic of immediacy and ulteriority, makes explicit the twofold intentionality that determines the intermediate character of a sign. The condition for the possibility of its reaching beyond the objectivity of things, by establishing a relation of meaning with other signs or things, is, in fact, to be looked for "behind" the sign itself, in the ontological intentionality that is constitutive of the human creature.
Finally, the revealed truth of the incarnation is the decisive theological contribution when it comes to facing, on a different terrain and in new terms, the Neoplatonic problem of mediation. In Teaching Christianity this approach is thematized in a systematic and explicit way: the incarnation means that the Word of God became flesh in order to dwell in the midst of us but "was not changed"; in the same way "when we talk…the word which we have in our thoughts becomes a sound, and is called speech. And yet this does not mean that our thought is turned into that sound, but while remaining undiminished in itself, it take on the form of a spoken utterance by which to insert itself into their ears, without bearing the stigma of any change in itself." [62]
The difference that makes it possible to see human word and divine word as having a relationship of participation within a context of transcendence is to be found in the different nature of the divine Person who lives in a perfect communion in the Trinity but at the same time cannot remain alien to the world.[63] In comparison with the Word of God who becomes flesh without ceasing to be part of the trinitarian unity[64] but even fulfilling this unity completely in the trinitarian plan of salvation, the word of human beings is born in a setting of sin and division. Christ, the true mediator, became a human being because "in the Wisdom of God…. the world was unable to come to know God through wisdom." [65]
For this reason, in Teaching Christianity the relation of Christ to human beings, without losing its interior depth, is thematized primarily in light of its biblical foundations and as mediated by the Church: the Church is the body and spouse of Christ, and he puts her to the test and purifies her through trials.[66] The human journey, which is interrupted by the weight of sin, is restored to continuity within the Church, where every sinner can find forgiveness and a refuge.[67]
Moreover, the development of Augustine's own thought on original sin[68] appears explicable not so much in relation to contingent influences (such as a supposed residue of Manicheism, or contact with the African theology of Tertullian and Cyprian) as in the framework of a much more organized theological reflection that focuses on the figure of Christ the redeemer.[69]
Augustine's consciousness of the catholicity of the Church, which he recognizes as having a universal vocation that corresponds to the common destiny of humanity, has for a consequence that he passes, in principle, beyond any purely sociological or methodological perspective as well as any relativistic vision of culture and communication.[70] This being the case, his attention to signs takes on a meaning that goes beyond the linguistic dimension to which the work is chiefly attentive.
Things and Signs
As Todorov has rightly remarked, Teaching Christianity has a claim to be considered "the first semiotic work." [71]
We may add, with Eco, that in it Augustine "develops what we today would call a textual semiotic and, certainly, a hermeneutical methodology." [72] But, to speak frankly, I find it difficult even in undertaking simply an inquiry that is meant to be introductory, as this one is, and to provide only a key to the reading of Augustine's work and some elementary tools of interpretation, without locating the problem within a broader speculative, theological, and pastoral perspective.
It is perhaps this fact, moreover, that presents a first and fundamental difference between Augustinian theory and modern semiotics, which arise out of an inquiry that is from the outset neutral in its philosophical implications, and this not always as a simple methodological option. It is precisely this neutrality that often prevents readers from grasping the metaphysical perspective in which Augustinian semiology is located, thereby turning the metaphysical element in Augustine's analysis into a simple set of psychological observations.[73]
In Teaching Christianity, then, Augustine's semiology undergoes a profound theological and philosophical amplification, in which, however, the pastoral intention leads to a special emphasis on the mediational function of signs themselves—this, in comparison with other works, such as The Trinity and Homilies on the Gospel of John, which tend rather to support the idea that the verbum is completely irreducible to any form of exterior signification.
The overall plan of Teaching Christianity contains two fundamental thematic units, which are enunciated at the beginning of the first book: the first unit, which includes the first three books, is devoted to the identification and understanding of the truths of faith ("a way to discover what needs to be understood"); the second unit, which is developed chiefly in the fourth book, is concerned rather with the setting forth of these truths ("a way to put across to others what has been understood").[74] The first book, which offers an elementary introduction to the Christian life and gives first place to the truths that are to be looked for in the scriptures (that is, the doctrinal and moral content of the faith, and the teachings which every believer is obliged to follow), already contains three important and careful definitions. The first is the thesis that "all teaching is about either things or signs, but things are learned about through signs";[75] to this is added a further division within "things," in light of the categories of "enjoying" and "using"; finally, these categories in turn are made more specific in the "third distinction."
It is important to note that the Augustinian theory of signs, with the linguistic suppositions that lie behind it, is contained within the first unit (discovery). As a matter of fact, attention is focused chiefly on things as they are ("what has to be considered about things is that they are").[76] The latter in turn are divided into things we are to enjoy (frui) and things we are simply to use (uti). Signs in particular are things that can mediate knowledge of other things "that are not mentioned in order to signify something." [77]
Anthropocentric teleology, of the kind proper to a Stoicizing Platonism,[78] is thus rehabilitated in light of the doctrine of creation: no created nature has within itself the source of its own subsistence, but presents itself to the human intellect as an essence that is drawn out of nothingness and finds its proper good in God, that is, in the supreme being who formed it as such.[79] As a result, there is no place for hypothesizing an ontological dualism, much less for a rupture between semiology and ontology, since signs are not placed in a closed and, as it were, neutralized limbo. Rather there is a single created nature that has different valences according to the meaningful intentionality it can acquire in human society. On the one hand, then, some objects can be regarded as signs;[80] on the other, words, "which are used only for signifying," are also "something." Conclusion: "Every sign is also a thing, because if it is not a thing at all then it is simply nothing. But not every single thing is also a sign." [81]
The connection between signs and things, then, is an expression of a still more primitive connection that tends to interpret in terms of analogy the distance between creation and the creator. It is in relation to this perspective that the difference between use and enjoyment is defined, for this difference is not regarded as an extrinsic notion but is one that traverses the entire order of things as the expression of a primitive ontological difference between the "being toward" of humans and the "supreme being" of God. "Things used," says Todorov, "are transitive, like signs, and things enjoyed are intransitive…. This distinction has an important theological extension. In the last analysis, nothing other than God deserves to be enjoyed, to be cherished for itself alone." [82]
What emerges here is a fundamental parallelism between epistemology, ethics, and ontology: the gap between thing and sign, as thematized in a philosophical theory of meaning and language, decides the difference in ethical tonality between use and enjoyment and reflects the infinite distance between history and eternity. The grace of God transforms this distance into a space for salvation, a space that is intelligible to and traversible by human beings, on condition that an ordered love[83] plans the concrete itinerary by which human beings on pilgrimage—homo viator—are effectively raised above their condition.
The second book turns directly to signs themselves. In the background is the three-stage formulation sketched back in The Teacher. The first hypothesis had been to consider the relationship to a sign that is mediated by another sign, a phenomenon made possible by the very nature of signs, which as signs can signify and as things can be signified. The second hypothesis concerned the relation to the thing that is mediated by a sign, and confirmed that knowledge of the thing comes before knowledge of the sign as such. The third hypothesis had to do with the direct relationship to the thing. [84] It is against this background that Teaching Christianity makes its contribution, which takes the form essentially of delving more deeply into the idea of sign and attempting to clarify its semantic status.
First of all, signs as such constitute the special class of things that are able to signify something other than themselves. In fact, a sign is defined as "a thing, which besides the impression it conveys to the senses, also has the effect of making something else come to mind." [85] A sign, therefore, is distinguished by a kind of semantic intentionality that is attributed to the thing; a sign is a thing but viewed in its ability to activate, through the indispensable mediation of thought, a relation of meaning with some other thing; it thus becomes part of a circuit of expression and interpersonal communication that transcends the purely empirical horizon of "things." [86]
With this idea of sign as a starting point, the author launches into a series of further clarifications and distinctions, which have been given different interpretations according to different classificatory hypotheses.[87] In any case, there seem to be three levels in Augustine's analysis, corresponding to three different orders of factors. First of all, as far as their nature is concerned, signs are either natural or intentional ("given," "conventional"). Second, in relation to the understanding of them, signs that are recognized are distinguished from those not recognized or ambiguous, the latter being the principal reasons for the failure to understand.[88] Finally, depending on their meaning, signs are either proper or transferred.
To begin with, a sign is natural if, instead of manifesting a relation of meaning that had been established by the human community, it "signals," in a univocal way, a relation of continuity/affinity between things. Here again a type of spiritual understanding is required on the part of the human mind, which is called to recognize the meaning of things in relation to the capacity for grasping their degree of relatedness to the Absolute.[89]
In comparison with natural signs, Augustine's book devotes special attention to "given signs," that is, those consciously produced in order to externalize and communicate what arises in the mind.[90] This class contains verbal signs and, as a subclass, written signs with the limitless possibilities of communication that they provide but also with the inevitable difficulties of understanding them due to the diversity of languages.
These two kinds of signs, then, are distinguished by the presence or absence of an intention to convey meaning.[91]
According to Todorov, given signs are characterized by their origin and use: "Intentional signs are things that have been produced for the purpose of serving as signs (origin) and that serve only to this end (use)." [92] The definition, already sketched in The Teacher,[93]is now subjected to a reworking that preserves the same conceptual contours but explores more fully the constitutive elements and the fundamental motivations. The author seems to be interested here in calling attention chiefly to two levels: the first is that of a kind of phenomenology of communication, which is invoked to prove the semantic functionality of given signs: "Given signs…are those which living creatures give to one another in order to show, as far as they can, their moods and feelings, or to indicate whatever it may be they have sensed or understood." [94] Thus understood, a given sign is a means of interpersonal mediation, its function being to render visible what is interior.
A second level, to which Augustine looks for the conditions that render the communication of meaning possible and the motivations that make it a reality, is the level established by a true and proper ontology of interiority: "Nor have we any purpose in signifying, that is in giving a sign, other than to bring out and transfer to someone else's mind what we, the givers of the sign, have in mind ourselves." [95] The emphasis placed on the goal of communication, so that signs are regarded as mediating between the thing and the intention of producing a meaning ("the will to signify"),[96] allots first place to the idea of an "interior self," conceived essentially as a spiritual subject which assigns and interprets signs while keeping an eye on prevailing linguistic conventions.
Language and Interpretation
In approaching the question in this twofold perspective, the author could only confirm, as a corollary already implicit in his analysis, the primacy of the linguistic sign which he asserts in studying signs according to the nature of their symbolic relationship.[97] His assertion is based not only on factual observation (of all signs those addressed to the ear are in the majority) but also on a much deeper reason: "Words… are far and away the principal means used by human beings to signify the thoughts they have in their minds." [98] They are, in fact, the only signs that can represent all others and therefore even themselves, while the converse is not true.
We might say that theoretical status is being given here to those properties of verbal language which are called, in modern terminology, "semantic omnipotence" and "metalinguistic reflexivity or capacity." [99] Simone insists that
Augustine is the first not only to point out the peculiar (semiotic) character of words by identifying the properties that distinguish them from all other kinds of signs, but also…to realize that, unlike other signs, the linguistic sign has the supreme capacity of being able to say everything… that is, it is "stronger" (in the logical sense) and "more powerful" than other signs and at the same time…can function as a metasign in relation to them.[100]
The focus on the linguistic sign, instead of limiting the scope of the inquiry, makes it possible to broaden further the entire problematic into a more general vision of the processes involved in understanding and interpretation. Here the problem of the nonunderstanding of written texts due to the presence of unknown or ambiguous signs intersects, as I said earlier, with the further distinction between proper and metaphorical signs. The former correspond in substance to given signs, but the latter have a complex structure: signs "are metaphorical when the very things which we signify with their proper words are made use of to signify something else." [101] Such signs, therefore, says Todorov, "instead of being used for their original purpose…are redirected toward a second function, just as things were when they became signs." [102]
Given these foundations, the dynamics of understanding seem to operate continually on two levels: the level of knowledge and the level of interpretation. When we are faced with proper signs that are unknown to us, certain things are indispensable: knowledge of languages, attention to sources, a continual expanding of our fund of information, and an ability to compare texts and the different ways in which they are translated. But when it is metaphorical signs that are unknown, readers "need to investigate them partly by a knowledge of languages, partly by a knowledge of things." [103] Always with the aim of a better understanding of the revealed text, Augustine reflects on the usefulness of the sciences, the arts, and human institutions, reviewing the most important values of ancient culture and judging them according to their usefulness as prerequisites in the formation of the Christian.[104]
The third book, in contrast, adopts a markedly more hermeneutical perspective and opens a still more explicit dialectical investigation of knowledge and interpretation. To the forefront now are ambiguous signs which oblige the interpreter of scripture to face up to the more controverted passages (Augustine recommends that these interpreters be given a fundamental preparation that looks to both content and methodologies). The author studies the ambiguities connected with signs used in their proper sense, these ambiguities being for the most part reducible to the ways in which words are phrased or pronounced or to grammatical construction,[105] but he pays greater attention to ambiguities arising when terms are used in a metaphorical sense.[106]
As a matter of fact, the Christian faith helps liberate readers from enslavement to the carnal meaning of the scriptures, of which the Jews have continued to be victims, and from enslavement to useless signs, by which the pagans have continued to be imprisoned. To this end one must be able to distinguish between the proper sense and the metaphorical sense and to grasp, in all passages that cannot be interpreted according to the letter, the meaning hidden in many figurative expressions that are used to fight against selfishness or to nourish charity. The building up of "the kingdom of charity" [107] is the principal goal and supreme interpretive criterion for exegetical activity.[108] In the last part of Book III Augustine then sets himself to explain the seven rules of the Donatist Tychonius,[109] which Augustine regards as useful in understanding the more controverted passages of the scriptures, provided one exercises an ever watchful and cautious judgment.[110]
The identification of metaphorical signs, which constitutes the basic theoretical core of the hermeneutical problem, was in Augustine's time a heritage shared by both the pagan and the Christian ways of thinking, from the Stoics to the Jews of Alexandria and from Philo to Plotinus.[111] In Augustine's book, in which the distinction is made for clearly hermeneutical purposes, "proper signs" express the literal meaning of the scriptures (Origen's "somatic" sense), while "metaphorical signs" embrace everything that is not directly understood through the immediate meaning of the words, and include what in a different theological terminology is the figurative literal sense and the true and proper spiritual, or allegorical, meaning.[112]
Insofar as allegory yields "an intellectual understanding mediated by a concept," [113] it points to a capacity to rise above the horizon of the senses, and it is precisely in this horizon that Augustine locates it, drawing from it an essential exegetical principle. The semantic foundation of this Augustinian conception derives from "the twofold intentional structure of signs," by which one moves from sign to thing signified and then to the thing's further symbolic meaning, and, according to Ripanti, "corresponds to Augustine's way of conceiving revelation as a sacramentum, as a veiling/unveiling, in a degree proportionate to its object's transcendence, by reason of which this object has no choice but to manifest itself 'in the obscurity of allegories.' " [114]
Ancient rhetoric had, of course, been quite familiar with the civilizing function of allegory, as Pépin shows,[115] but in Teaching Christianity this attention to allegory becomes central, and the author provides a formal treatise on it.[116]
According to Augustine, it is God himself who has placed within the human person zones of greater semantic density that can hide his mysteries as in a casket.[117] Allegory, Pépin writes, "has as its providential purpose to humble human pride," [118] while stimulating the desire and search for truth.
Consequently, the very nature of a sign, by reason of the stock of meaning that makes it a sign, calls for the continuous mediation provided by interpretation, which, according to Augustine, must be done on the basis of the literal sense. But the unity of this last, as De Margerie notes, "is not completely monolithic but relative to a set of other unities and to the overall unity of the total meaning of all the scriptures." [119] Even more complex, of course, will be the exegesis of metaphorical signs, which seeks understanding of the figurative, allegorical meaning. This understanding requires not only knowledge of the entire apparatus of rhetorical figures but also a full store of information about the Bible and, more generally, about the world of "things." [120] Allegorical exegesis thus appears possible and legitimate, but under certain conditions, such as unwavering acceptance of the Church's outlook, fidelity to the Christian message in its entirety, readiness to complete a full course of formation, and possession of an elementary competence in textual and literary criticism. Only under these conditions can the interpreter of the scriptures gradually make all their spiritual fruitfulness to emerge, to the advantage of the entire community of believers.
The acknowledgment of a multiplicity of spiritual senses[121] sets in motion a hermeneutical dynamism that is literally inexhaustible. According to Studer, at this point the Augustinian conception of allegory fuses with a theory of the sacramentality of the Bible and creation.[122] In Teaching Christianity, in particular, Christian exegesis is directed toward a search for the "things of faith" and the "things of charity": "The first of these two goals corresponds in the last analysis to the 'mystery' (sacramentum), for the aim is in fact to find in the Bible, and this means especially in the Old Testament, both Christ and the Church, the things that are to be believed, the means of purification, the sacramentum." [123] What we see here is once again the structure of belonging and subordination that Augustine had identified in the relationship between use and enjoyment, between knowledge and wisdom; that is, the letter is regarded as the basis of the spiritual understanding, and history is open to prophecy, just as the New Testament is the key to the understanding of the Old.[124]
On this point it is possible to measure concretely the way in which Augustine's thought matured. The process began with the discovery of the spiritual sense of the Bible, a discovery originally fostered by the preaching of Bishop Ambrose but in turn drenched in Neoplatonic elements. The result was that the original allegorizing tendency, which had enabled Augustine to combat in a thorough way the errors of the Manichees, henceforth reached a balance, despite the persistence of some forms of naive allegorism,[125] and was bound over to coexist with the determination to "hold steadfast to the historicity of the res gestae." [126]
The exhortation to look beyond the letter to the deeper spiritual meaning[127] that had been issued by the more moderate representatives of the Alexandrian school reappears therefore in Augustine, but it is made here in the name of charity rather than of wisdom. The fundamental exegetical principle of "understanding metaphors," which is an expression of the process of ascent from the sensible to the intelligible that marks the human journey toward the happy life, is consistent with that vision: "So this rule should be observed in dealing with figurative expressions, that you should take pains to turn over and over in your mind what you read, until your interpretation of it is led right through to the kingdom of charity." [128]
Luigi Alici
Notes
[1]. See, among others, Plato, Polit. 518c-d; Aristotle, Nicom. 1095b17.
[2]. The Happy Life I, 2. L. Pizzolato emphasizes in detail the importance of this passage in his "Il De beata vita o la possibile felicità nel tempo," in L'opera letteraria di Agostino tra Cassiciacum e Milano (Palermo, 1987) 53–55.
[3]. I refer the reader to my essay "Agostino tra fede e ricerca: la conversione del'intelligenza," Agostino e la conversione cristiana (Palermo, 1987) 35–53.
[4]. Confessions X, 16, 25; see X, 28, 39; X, 33, 50. Citing this passage in his Being and Time, Heidegger would observe: "That which is ontically closest and well-known, is ontologically the farthest and not known at all" (M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York, 1962) 69.
[5]. The Happy Life I, 3.
[6]. See The Trinity 4, 18, 24.
[7]. See The Happy Life I, 5.
[8]. See Pizzolato, 31–112: between 394 and 397 Augustine explicitly holds the thesis that, as long as it is in time, the body invincibly resists the spirit and therefore happiness cannot be attained within history (see 109). This judgment is very different from that of Flasch who maintains, on the basis of other arguments, that the Augustinian "exaltation of rationality was entirely rhetorical and external or, to put it better, was the result of a Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy that had been reduced to mere edification and taken from its context" (K. Flasch, Agostino d'Ippona. Introduzione all'opera filosofica [Bologna, 1983] 133).
[9]. The projected works on the liberal arts were to be divided into seven treatises: grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and philosophy (see Revisions I, 5, 6). In opposition to Marrou, who sees formulated in this division the basis of classical culture and the meeting point of Isocrates' literary model and Plato's philosophical model (see H.-I. Marrou, "Les arts liberaux dans l'antiquité classique," in Arts liberaux et philosophie au Moyen Age [Montreal-Paris, 1969] 12), there are those who hold that the idea of a cycle of liberal arts as the first and fundamental stage in the establishment of the Trivium and Quadrivium appeared for the first time in Augustine himself, where it is clearly derived from Neoplatonism and from Porphyry in particular (see I. Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique [Paris, 1984] 25–60). On this point I refer the reader to some reflections in my introduction to: San Agostino. La dottrina cristiana (Milan, 1989) 16–17.
[10]. On this subject see C. P. Mayer, Die Zeichen in der geistigen
Entwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus (Würzburg, 1969) 109–110.
[11]. U. Pizzani, "L'enciclopedia agostiniana e i suoi problemi," in Atti del Congresso internazionale su S. Agostino nel XVI centenario della conversione I (Rome, 1987) 332. The very dialectical movement from the corporeal to the incorporeal displays echoes of Varro according to A. Solignac, "Doxographies et manuels dans la formation philosophique de Saint Augustin," Recherches augustiniennes 1 (1958) 122.
[12]. G. Manetti, Le teorie del segno nell'antichità (Milan, 1987) 201.
[13]. See A. Giuliani, Il concetto di prova (Milan, 1961).
[14]. C. Crapis, "Il concetto di segno nelle teorie retoriche: La Retorica ad Alessansro di Anassimene di Lampsaco," Segni e comprensione 5/12 (1991) 15.
[15]. This is the position of Eco, among others; he sees Augustine as moving toward a new "instructional" model of semantic description, according to which the meaning of a term "is a block (a series, a system) of instructions for its possible insertion into contexts and for its various successful semantic uses in various contexts (all of which, however, can be registered in the terms of the code)" (U. Eco, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio [Turin, 1984] 34). This judgment is reported and shared by Manetti, Le teorie del segno, 241.
[16]. See G. Verbeke, "Augustin et le stoïcisme," Recherches augustiniennes 1 (1958) 77. On Stoic logic see M. Baldassarri, Introduzione alla logica stoica. Testimonianze e frammenti. Testi originali con introduzione e traduzione commentata (Como, 1985); S. Bobzien, Die stoische Modallogik (Würzburg, 1986). On the development of these doctrines see M. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (2 vols.; Leiden, 1985).
[17]. Dialectic 1, 1.
[18]. See J. Pépin, Saint Augustin et la dialectique (Villanova, 1976) 9–
[19]. See G. Preti, "Sulla dottrina del sêmeion nella logica stoica,"
Rivista critica di storia della filosopfia 11 (1956) 5–14; reprinted in Saggi filosofici II. Storia della logica e storiografia filosofica (Florence, 1976) 3–16.
[20]. See Manetti, Le teorie del segno, 226–27.
[21]. In Dialectic a distinction is made between the verbum (the word that designates itself), the dicibile, that is, what the mind understands, and the dictio, that is, the word insofar as it points to something other than itself. The res, finally, is everything that is not the verbum, the dicibile, or the dictio. On this see G. Bouchard, "La conception augustinienne du signe selon Tzvetan Todorov," Recherches augustiniennes 15 (1980) 312–317.
[22]. See, for example, T. Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. C.
Porter (Ithaca, 1982) 37, who agrees with Pépin in emphasizing the correspondence between the terms dictio, dicibile, and res, on the one hand, and the respective Stoic terms lexis, lekton, and tynkanon, on the other. As the reader will know, according to Stoic dialectic there is a difference between signifier and signified, this last being distinct, however, from the really existing thing; from this point of view, Markus says, the Stoics placed an intermediary of a conceptual kind between sign and thing (see R. A. Markus, "Saint Augustine on Signs," Phronesis 2 [1957] 60–83), while other interpreters, who stress the Aristotelean origin of a connection thus conceived, prefer to speak of an incorporeal entity (the lekton) that exists only in thought (see E, Brehier, La théorie des incorporels dans l'ancien stoïcisme [Paris, 19704; 14–36).
[23]. See, among other, Pépin, Saint Augustin et la dialectique, 67–81, who emphasizes the exact correspondence in Augustine with the terminology of Aristotle as well as with that of the Stoics. According to Darrell Jackson, too, who maintains the thesis that it is words that express meanings, Augustine is closer to Aristotle than to the Stoics; see B. Darrell Jackson, "The Theory of Signs in Saint Augustine's De doctrina christiana," Revue des études augustiniennes 15 (1969) 38.
[24]. See M. Baratin, "Origines stoïciennes de la théorie augustinienne du signe," Revue des études latines 59 (1981) 260–268. The thesis is cited and shared by Manetti, Le teorie del segno, 228.
[25]. See G.-H. Allard, "Arts libéraux et langage chez Saint Augustin," in Arts libéraux et Philosophie au Moyen Age, 481–492. I refer the reader to my own work, Il linguaggio come segno e come testimonianza. Una rilettura di Agostino (Rome, 1976).
[26]. Eco, Semiotica, 33.
[27]. See The Happy Life IV, 35; Soliloquies I, 1, 1.
[28]. A. Pieretti, "Introduzione," in S. Agostino d'Ippona. Il Maestro
(Milan, 1990) 50.
[29]. The Teacher 11, 38.
[30]. Pieretti, again, comments: "That which comes last in The Teacher, that is, truth in the interiority of human beings and therefore God as sole teacher is in fact first when it comes to the treatise's logicoconceptual articulation" ("Introduzione," 53).