Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (review)

This volume brings together essays in which M. has pursued his investigation of Augustine’s theory of signs over the last forty years. He rather too modestly observes that his foundational 1957 article was not the first study of this subject and that it provoked a good deal of discussion. Somewhat like Augustine himself, whose interrupted de doctrina christiana provides the principal exposition of the theory of signs, M. has returned to the subject some thirty years later. The volume contains the essay originally published in Phronesis, M.’s 1995 Forwood Lectures at Liverpool in 1995, and two additional studies published about the same time.

The original essay lays out the background of Augustine’s discussion of signs in de magistro and de doctrina christiana, making the distinction between natural and conventional signs, and the problem of the origin and elaboration of conventional signs. Turning to the final book of de trinitate, M. then shows the shift in the understanding of the interior teaching of Christ: in de magistro, that illumination clarified the meaning of sensuous signs; in de trinitate, it generates the interior word which is itself a reality rather than a sign, a meaning which is carried by the conventional signs of language. This essay also notes, but does not develop, Augustine’s understanding of magic through the conventional signs shared by humans and demons.

The essay printed fourth in this collection, delivered at a conference on de doctrina christiana in 1991, recaps the work of the earlier paper and then develops the further point that realities to which signs refer may themselves function as symbols of further realities. As human communities are established by linguistic systems, subcultures may be distinguished by treating the things to which common words refer as signs of different realities. Thus Jews and Christians differ not in the primary meaning they assign to the words of scripture but in the realities which they take to be symbolized by the events which are the literal referents of the text. Similarly, Christians shared some the meanings assigned to objects and practices with their idolatrous neighbors but avoided those that were peculiar to the demonic society.

The final essay in the volume distinguishes Augustine’s understanding of the efficacy of magic through conventional signs shared by humans and demons from techniques which rely on cosmic sympathy. M. then draws upon the distinction between common and private goods to demonstrate the perversion of language in magic. This in turn leads to the examination of Christian rituals as a privileged form of communication with God, which engenders saving effects. M. proposes a remarkable analysis of Augustine’s own sanction for burial in the proximity of a saint as a form of condensed speech, a prayer in action.

The Forwood Lectures, chronologically most recent, are offered here for the first time printed at the front of the volume. One amplifies Augustine’s theory that the text of scripture as signifies events which themselves signify other realities. The more obvious instance of such theory is the Christian typological interpretation of the Old Testament in terms of the New. The Jewish reading is, according to Augustine, captive to the signs in that it fails to read the narrated events precisely as signs pointing to Christian realities. The Christian interpretation attempts not only to read the foreshadowing of Christ but to discern the language of divine speech, so that it may in turn grasp the meaning of contemporary experience in the scriptural narrative. The different meanings assigned to the realities and events distinguish Christian traditions and communities.

The final essay, on Gregory the Great’s interpretative method, demonstrates what changed in the two centuries separating him from Augustine. The Christian view of the world has become established and assumed; Christian experience may confidently be read into the text of scripture and read out as moral lessons. Augustine’s painful attempts to decipher the signs which are themselves the literal referents of the...