Augustine on Signs, Interpretation and Eloquence

Augustine wrote On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina christiana) for people who read and teach the Bible. Its plan fits any hard text. "There are two things on which all interpretation of Scripture depends", he begins: finding out what is meant, and making that meaning known (I.1.1). Books I to III deal with the first, Book IV with the second (IV.1.1). The theology is Augustine's. This page reports it without taking a side, and asks what of his method carries over to other texts. Quotations are from James Shaw's translation.

Things and signs

"All instruction is either about things or about signs", and "things are learned by means of signs" (I.2.2). A sign is "a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses", brings something else to mind (II.1.1). When we see smoke, "we know that there is fire beneath" (II.1.1).

Augustine sorts signs by where their meaning comes from. Natural signs work "apart from any intention or desire of using them as signs", as smoke indicates fire (II.1.2). Conventional signs "are those which living beings mutually exchange" to show what they feel or think (II.2.3). Among people, "words have obtained far and away the chief place" (II.3.4).

This is grammar's ground floor. Before you can judge a claim, you must know what its words stand for, and for whom. Observe, Define, Represent: The First Three Moves makes the same demand of a definition.

Why a text resists you

Augustine names "two causes which prevent what is written from being understood": signs that are unknown, and signs that are ambiguous (II.10.15). Either kind can be proper, a word used for what it usually names, or figurative, a thing named in order to signify something else: "Signs are either proper or figurative" (II.10.15).

Some remedies are knowledge of the world. "Ignorance of things, too, renders figurative expressions obscure", and "ignorance of numbers" blocks what is set down "in a figurative and mystical way" (II.16.24-25). Reading, on this view, needs the other arts. His licence to learn from any teacher is one sentence: "wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master" (II.18.28). Of logic he says that "the validity of logical sequences is not a thing devised by men, but is observed and noted by them" (II.32.50). Proof and Precise Reasoning: From Arguments to Theorems treats validity the same way, as something checked, not invented.

Ambiguity: an order of remedies

For words ambiguous in their proper sense, Augustine works in a fixed order (III.2.2). First, "we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation". A pause in a different place can change the sense. If doubt remains, "let the reader consult the rule of faith", which he has gathered "from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church". If both readings still fit, "it remains to consult the context, both what goes before and what comes after".

Figures carry their own danger: "when what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner" (III.5.9). His test for a figure is whether the literal sense can be referred to purity of life or soundness of doctrine. Whatever "cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life" or to sound doctrine, he says, is figurative (III.10.14).

Book I adds a check by purpose. A reading that does not build up the love of God and neighbour shows that the reader "does not yet understand them as he ought" (I.36.40). A reader who reaches that end by a wrong reading is like "a man who by mistake quits the high road, but yet reaches through the fields the same place to which the road leads". Still, "he is to be corrected", and shown "how much better it is not to quit the straight road" (I.36.41). Reasoning for What Ends? Wisdom, Character and the Examined Life sets out his ethics of rightly ordered love.

Eloquence that serves wisdom

Book IV asks whether a teacher of truth should study rhetoric. Since rhetoric can commend falsehood, "who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood?" (IV.2.3). Yet wisdom ranks first. Even those who think rhetoric should be taught, he notes, hold that "wisdom without eloquence is of little service to states", but "eloquence without wisdom is frequently a positive injury, and is of service never" (IV.5.7).

His advice on learning matches the Roman schools. Quick minds "find it easier to become eloquent by reading and listening to eloquent speakers than by following rules for eloquence" (IV.3.4). The Orator's Education: Cicero and Quintilian on Forming a Speaker shows that training of imitation in full, and Cicero's complaint about the split between the tongue and the heart (De oratore III.61).

Augustine quotes what "a great orator has truly said", Cicero (Orator 21.69): a speaker "must speak so as to teach, to delight, and to persuade". "To teach is a necessity, to delight is a beauty, to persuade is a triumph" (IV.12.27). Each aim has its style: "a subdued tone when he is teaching, temperately when he is giving praise or blame" (IV.19.38), and great matters spoken "with power, and in a manner calculated to sway the mind" (IV.19.38; see IV.17.34). In teaching, clarity governs, hence the golden key that will not open and the wooden key that will (IV.11.26). And "whatever may be the majesty of the style, the life of the speaker will count for more in securing the hearer's compliance" (IV.27.59).

Signs and the five acts

The site's five acts are its own synthesis, not Augustine's. Loosely, his book maps onto the first three. Signs and their remedies serve understanding exactly. Ambiguity and dialectic serve examining the reasons. Teaching, delighting and moving serve expressing truly. The Levels path puts him among the teachers who explain what the arts are for. How to Read a Great Book: Levels, Modes and the Completion Standard gives a modern routine for the first task, finding what a book means.

Where this could be wrong

The strongest objection. Augustine checks a reading by its fruit in love of God and neighbour (I.36.40), and his second remedy for an ambiguous word is the rule of faith (III.2.2). That lets a reader's beliefs help decide what a text means. Carried to other books, "read for the best sense" can become reading your own views into an author.

The best reply. He does not let belief excuse a misreading. Punctuation is checked before anything else (III.2.2), and even a reading that builds up love is to be corrected if it misses the writer's meaning (I.36.41). For his own purpose, reading a text he held to be true and good, the check follows from his premise. For other texts, keep the textual steps, punctuation, plainer passages and context, and put the author's own stated aims where he puts the rule of faith and the test of love.

What would settle it. Readers who start from different beliefs, working the same hard passage. If his order of remedies brings them to the same reading, the method is doing the work, not the belief. This page cites no such test, so the method stays Provisional as a general guide; as history, what he wrote is Established.

Try this

1. Find a sentence in a contract, a policy or a poem that can be read two ways. Write both readings, then apply Augustine's order: punctuation, plainer passages, context. Record which step settled it, or that none did.
2. List three natural signs and three conventional signs from your own work, such as a hot smell from a machine and a green status light. For each conventional sign, say who agreed on its meaning.
3. Plan a five-minute talk. Mark each part as teaching, delighting or moving, and cut any part that delights without teaching.

Further reading

• Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Books II to IV, trans. James Shaw (New Advent).
• Cicero, De oratore III.61, on the split between wisdom and speech (Latin, Perseus Digital Library).