Augustinian Semiotics

In a 1988 article in the Journal of Literature and Theology (2:1), Milbank sketches the contours of a “theology without substance.” Along the way, he offers a critique of Augustine’s signum-res distinction and the implied metaphysics.

On the one hand, Augustine pours some of the foundations for a Christian linguistics and semiotics. Milbank says that in de Magistro, he “is so aware of the sign-character of words, and the indispensability

of the artificial system of language for thought, that in De Magistro he
declares that one can give the meaning of a word only by another word, or
else by a gesture which is still a sort of sign” (7).

Beyond the Stoics, for whom signum mainly referred to natural relationships (smoke and fire, e.g.), Augustine saw verbum as a species of signum. This innovation had “momentous” potential, since it “opened the way to
seeing that word and ‘dictionary definition’ are never fully reciprocal. Quite to the contrary, words can only be explicated ‘intensionally,’ through
a process of semiotic inference which relates no longer (as for the stoics)
more or less readily to nature, but only to a particular cultural-linguistic
‘segmentation’ of reality” (7).

This was not, however, the path that Augustine followed. Instead, the ultimate result of his semiotics was “to bring the ‘natural’ realm of the sign itself under the sway of ‘linguistic equivalent’” (7). Thus, “Augustine finally obliterates the
stoic vision of reality as a chain of implications and adopts a semantics and an
ontology founded on denotative unambiguity” (7). Every word can be “reduced” to a noun, which stands “in a one-to-one correspondence with reality” (8). His “concern for a stable order
of creation, for free-will and for the ultimacy of the soul leads Augustine to
endorse the ‘linguistic rationalism’ . . . . While signs are necessary, just as teaching is
necessary, both belong to usus rather than fruitio and their point is to recall
res, and finally to recall spiritual res in the soul, where Christ speaks,
wordlessly” (8).

This has massive consequences for hermeneutics: “even the signs that constitute the Bible are for
Augustine ultimately no more than teaching instruments, almost dispensable
for the mature Christian. And Biblical typology, also, falls under the
tyranny of ‘equivalence’ . . . The possibility
of allegorical meanings arises beyond the literal, historical level, because
certain res can also be used as signa.”

For Augustine, then, “the ‘natural’ sign is
thought of on the model of the human linguistic word. Figurative and
allegorical meanings are to be resorted to when the literal meaning appears
immoral or unsuitable, and these usages have been ‘foreseen’ by the Holy
Spirit as assisting our instruction – partly because of the delight which the
mind takes in metaphor and the moral usefulness of the hard work involved” (8).