Signs, Idols, and the Incarnation in Augustinian Metaphysics

Abstract

Augustine had no theory of signs . Indeed, one might properly say that Augustine had no philosophy of representation, no critique of idolatry, and no theory of time. This is not to say that Augustine did not think about language, or that in doing so he did not incur debts to earlier essays on the nature and origin of signs. Rather, Augustine confronted signs and the failings of language, and sought to explain the referential capacity of religious art, in response to contingencies that were, for him, embedded in philosophical and theological debates. These debates are now the subject of discrete modern discourses whose presuppositions Augustine would reject. The objects of Augustine’s inquiry, and of modern inquiry into Augustine, are rarely the same. In the Ž rst years of the Ž fth century church and state moved with ever greater resolve against the remnants of Greco-Roman paganism, and Augustine as bishop cooperated in the policies of the institutions that ordered his world. That he did so should not, however, allow the philosophical basis of his critique of pagan idols and classical texts to remain unexplored. For Augustine, if pagan culture were to be wrong, it had to be wrong for a reason. Challenged in daily converse and by daily experience to explain his distinction between true and false religion and true and false religious practice, Augustine ultimately argued that signs served diVerent functions in pagan and Christian life because pagans and Christians sought access to aspects of creation that possessed diVerential ontological statuses and that had, therefore, diVerent places in late classical metaphysics. But by casting a religious debate in shared philosophical language, Augustine had somewhat uneasily to describe a problemof religious faith in intellectual terms. Again and again, the pursuit of signs and idols led him to a fact for which traditional metaphysics could not account and that traditional language could not describe, the fact of Christ. It was an impasse that Augustine broke by an argumentative sleight of hand: it was the truth of the incarnation, he insisted, that revealed the deŽ ciencies of classical metaphysics and the frailty of human language. If Augustine confronted the metaphysics of representation in order to solve a religious problem through reason, signs them-