The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge by Marcia L. Colish (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 377 The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge. By MARCIA L. CoLISH. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968. Pp. 427. $10.00. Marcia Colish has selected a fascinating theme for this work, the way in which the classical liberal arts tradition of language theory combined with the Christian theologies of the Divine Logos to influence the epistemological theories which lay at the basis of scholasticism. Too often this liberal arts tradition is considered only as an item in the history of education, and its deeper philosophical implications are passed over. After an introduction in which she expounds the general issues, she selects four key authors to illustrate these, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. Very neatly, and in my opinion quite justly, these four authors exemplify respectively the differing influences of rhetorical theory, grammatical theory, logical theory, and poetic theory of language on philosophy and theology. Each of these authors stands for a whole tendency to use one or the other of these dialectical instruments, to construct a philosophical or theological system. Thus St. Augustine is constantly influenced in the way he states or solves a theological question by his own bent of mind which had been so disciplined in the rhetorician's concern for the effect of language on the hearts of his audience and the various " figures of speech" and modes of discourse by which this is achieved. At the same time his Christian conviction that God has revealed himself to man both through the Scriptures and through the Creation, and finally through his Son, the Word entering into the created world, gave to this rhetorical point of view a profound metaphysical and theological depth. Similarly St. Anselm, living in a period when the Aristotelian logic was not yet very well known, tended to use the more familiar techniques and categories of grammar to state and solve questions that would be given a logical formulation by Aquinas. In my opinion the most original and helpful of the sections is that on St. Augustine. It is very revealing to trace, as the author does, the theme of the truthful word and the lie through Augustine's account of his own mental and spiritual development in the Confessions. This approach helps to explain the relevance of many otherwise rather puzzling passages in the Confessions. We see why Augustine so carefully analyzes the phases of his infancy and boyhood in terms of his learning to talk and his learning to lie. It also casts light on the important role which memory plays in Augustine's thought. Finally, the author helps us to understand how for Augustine human speech must be redeemed by the Word of God in order to speak the truth, and even then it must end, after the theological attempt "to express the Inexpressible" in the words of prayer. The least successful section is that on Thomas Aquinas. I have the impression that the author is uncomforable with Aquinas and does not quite know how to fit him into her scheme. To tell the truth, St. Thomas is too Aristotelian in his method to be reduced to a single mode of discourse, 378 BOOK REVIEWS since it is precisely the Aristotelian method to insist on the multiplicity of modes of discourse and their special functions. Of course, it is correct to say that St. Thomas largely occupies himself with the logical approach, but within this he carefully distinguishes dialectical argumentation from demonstration. It would have been very interesting if the author had examined the interplay of these different modes in St. Thomas's thought. She centers, instead, on the topic of analogy, which is, of course, of great importance in the Summa Theologiae. However, she adopts the view, with which I do not agree, that analogy is a purely logical problem. It would have been more revealing if she had showed how St. Thomas uses the logical theory of analogy as an instrument to develop an ontological theory of the order of knowledge. I found her discussion of the topic neither very clear nor illuminating. In her view "the principal reason for the inclusion of the proofs...