Outward signs: The Powerlessness of external things in Augustine’s Thought, by Phillip Cary*

Phillip Cary, Oxford University Press 2008, pp. 344

*Review in Amazon.com, July 22, 2009 (10 people found this review helpfull.)

In: Boekbesprekingen

Saint Augustine, philosopher of signs or converter of Truth?

Central in professor Phillip Cary’s third book on Augustine, `Outward signs‘, stands the problem, raised in Augustine’s De magistro (On the Teacher), that we learn nothing from words. As clear cut as this important and “really startling” claim is raised though, the more striking is the lack of transparency with which Cary treats it.

I don’t like to criticize Cary’s didactic qualities at all, because of the brilliancy he demonstrated in his earlier book Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self and elsewhere, but here I have to. Because of the substance itself he is treating. For what Cary unveiled in his first book, he reveiled again in this third. Although he makes indisputably clear that Augustine’s thinking on `signs’ and words (`shared signs’) is mainly influenced by Platonic thought, he makes this all too clear and by doing that unclear. His argument is too lengthy and, taken together with a lack of urgency, it results in an Augustine who is almost drowned in Platonism, leaving out for instance his lifelong virulent Manichaeism and, which matters more here, his Paulism.

Why should that be of a problem? Because, in spite of Cary’s repeated pledge for loyalty and sympathy to his Christian (Lutheran) background in the beginning and the end of the book, he does no justice to Augustine by making out of him a sheer academic. Moreover, by introducing the hybrid formula “expressionist semiotics” for Augustine’s theory of signs, a misleading flavor of artistic softness enters Augustinian research. If he likes it or not, Augustine’s – as well as Cary’s own and with him all westerners, including mine – monotheism has to do with good and evil, white and black, biblical Truth and idolatry. The same with Augustine’s teaching to his son in his De magistro. Cultural criticism, undermining of old, to be abolished traditions is at stake here, sometimes harsh and uncomforting for modern ears. As is also the case with Paul’s, not in Cary’s book mentioned, but very influential statement in 2 Cor. 3:6, “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (which is, according to Philippe Sellier, a theme “au coeur de toute la théologie augustinienne“, and which is to be taken together here with 1 Cor. 3:18-23 and 1 Cor. 8:1-3).

Sometimes this counter-cultural criticism is used in modern – secularized – terms in the same uncomforting way. Rousseau’s Emile parallels the De magistro in its teaching of a son with a virulent anti-erudition (“I hate books”), -customs and -authority stand all over the book.

Augustine’s legacy is ill-treated when his `we learn nothing from words’ is only explained in Platonic-philosophical terms, and not in terms of for instance his Confessions 1, 13-17, where the educational value of words and poetry is criticized as well (“But woe unto you, O torrent of human custom!”) or his Soliloquies 2,10,18 and 2,19,33, where poetry appears to be “nothing worth of emulation” and bad influence on children’s education is equated with the `shadows’ of imitating others (“Turn away from your shadows! Turn back to yourself!”).

When someone’s legacy is of so much importance to so many people as is the case with Saint Augustine, but at the same time not altogether comforting, even or rather especially then doing justice is at stake, not covering up. (From this viewpoint it is a bewildering fact that almost one – extremist – third of the first chapter of Augustine’s Confessiones, one of the most famous books ever written in western history, has up to the present not yet received any serious analysis, other than in an educational dissertation on the history of literary criticism, namely mine own!) If the latter never passed through professor Cary’s mind, I gladly grant him my apology.