Augustine

Okay so after reading Augustine of Hippo’s essay “On Christian Doctrine” my mind got to working on this idea of “signs” and “significance”. He says in his first section that “in this distinction between things and signs when we speak of things, we shall so speak that, although some of them may be used to signify something else, this fact shall not disturb the arrangement we have made to speak of things as such first and of signs later” (188). Here I was intrigued because he is saying that before we can try to find some sort of meaning or underlying significance, we need to just speak of the object as the object. I can remember in my high school English class when some of my classmates would get irritated at the teacher because she was always assigning deeper significance to every single thing that happened in the books we were reading. They would argue that maybe the author just meant for the reader to take it at face value and nothing else. I never chimed in because secretly I liked to derive hidden meaning from the words on the page and I wanted to believe that the author intended for the text to mean something more. However, I found Augustine’s words to be refreshing after spending three years enrolled in English classes here at Messiah. I guess I too appreciate a little face value reading every now and again.

Augustine goes on in the next section to write “Just as I began, when I was writing about things, by warning that no one should consider them except as they are, without reference to what they signify beyond themselves, now when I’m discussing signs I wish it understood that no one should consider them for what they are but rather for their value as signs which signify something else” (188). So here Augustine is focusing on the “sign” itself and not an object or thing. These signs need to be interpreted as signs with some sort of larger meaning. Augustine goes on to talk about the different signs surrounding Jesus Christ’s time on earth. He writes about the lady who reached out and simply touched Jesus’ robe and was healed of her bleeding. To me this is a vivid image of the power of signs. This sign of healing proves Jesus’ divinity. Signs are proof; signs make connections between something concrete and something spiritual.