Tag: Augustine

MA Dissertation Journal 2: Rereading Signs and Meanings, World and Text in Ancient Christianity

~ Liam Greenacre ~ Leave a comment

In 2019, I published an article on Markus’ Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity. Now I want revisit this collection of lectures in light of my dissertation, which is inspired by it. When writing my review, I had foresight of some of the issues that would occupy my thinking. For example, I mentioned Markus’ concept of ‘linguistic communities’ and the fact that he covers semiotics. I now want to expand my discussion of these issues, as well as cover his chapter on Gregory the Great, the most relevant to my dissertation

Lets begin however by reiterating the central thesis of this collection, that is how individuals read scripture influenced their worldview or how the way they ‘read’ the world. My work looks at this, but through a comparison with Paul Ricouer. If scripture influences how we interpret reality, then we need to look at if modern hermeneutical theories can be compared with historic ones, in order to understand whether they can be applied to the past. This forms the core of my dissertation. I am therefore heavily indebted to Markus for my project.

However, I now wish to comment on Markus’ treatment of Gregory. Compared to Augustine, Gregory gets very little space- only one chapter. However, Markus nevertheless has some interesting things to say. A sentence I raised in my review was as follows: ‘The complexity of Augustine’s world had collapsed into simplicity. Compared with Augustine, Gregory could take for granted the settled contours of his spiritual landscape.’ However, I would raise Gregory’s view of the world was far from simple. He read scripture in multiple senses, meaning he also read the world in multiple ways. His insistence on the importance of allegory would have also complicated this picture- he would have seen allegory all around him. Furthermore, we need to consider, admittedly as Markus mentions, the turmoil in Italy during the period he was alive. Markus writes ‘convinced of the crumbling away of the fabric of the material world around him, of the remnants of the Roman past, he was driven to look beyond’. Essentially, Markus is suggesting that Gregory distanced himself from the world of immediate experience (which was perhaps equivalent to the historical sense) to focus more on spirituality. But surely a spiritual reading of the world is more complicated than a sensory one? I would argue that Gregory’s view of the world was far from simple.

An interesting point raised in the chapter on Gregory is that ‘understanding a miracle is like reading a script and understanding its meaning’. This point of view has implications for my chapter on Gregory’s Dialogues. That book contains miracle stories and my study shall aim to understand how Gregory read these scripts of events and how he viewed the world in relationship to deciphering their meaning.

I now wish to comment on semiotics. I understated the importance of this topic in my review of Signs and Meanings , I now believe this topic to be crucial in linking text to world. Markus writes ‘signs are the most indispensable means of directing the mind’s attention to things, and that nothing, therefore, can be learnt without the use of signs’. Signs are present everywhere in the world, but they are also present in a text. Text and world both share the same system of signification, one uses words, the other uses all the senses. Yet how one person reads the world is vastly different to how another reads it. We need to consider the fact that the self (where the scriptural interpretative ideas reside) needs a connection to the world as well. Idhe, in Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, comments ‘man is language’. We therefore have three things connected, the self, text and world all by language. Semiotics plays a crucial role, in three layers, when we discuss how scripture influences worldviews.

I therefore want to propose the relationship between the world and the self is determined by their mutual linguisticality. Originally, I believed the answer lay in emotions. I thought this for two reasons. The first was due to William Reddy’s idea of emotives. He argues that emotional utterances automatically confirm the world outside of language through failing at representation- my belief was that this created a bridge to link the world and the self. Secondly, Markus, while commenting on Augustine, writes that love is the emotion that urges the mind to discover the meaning of a sign in reality. Therefore, mind and world are connected again by emotions. However, this position no longer seems tenable, it is now clear that language conditions on three fronts therefore uniting them, to an arguable extent, by their shared characteristics of reference.

This post has made me think long and hard about semiotics, the relationship between world and text, and at times I have went on a bit of a philosophical ramble. However, I believe that the purpose of these posts is to give me a way of developing ideas and showing them in the creation stage. Therefore, my answers need refining, but I hope so far you have been given insight into my thinking.

Strangely, emotions also get another mention in this post (I took an undergraduate course on emotions). Barbara Rosenwein introduced the concept of emotional communities to help understand Late Antiquity. However, Markus, writing before Rosenwein, already theorised the Late Antiquity consisted of linguistic communities that shared the same world of reference. I think communities are a useful concept, however we need to be careful when using them as an idea. How do we define their boundaries? What about the relationship between the self and others? How can we be sure that individuals were viewing things or objects the same way? This sounds like a radical scepticism, but I have few answers to these questions at this stage. What I would like to say is that if language conditions the self then surely a being’s mind has similar features to that of another being’s (which is also determined by language).

Markus argues that it is through signs we discover the shared world of reference. Yet people read the world in different ways. This is problematic. Again, I need more time to ruminate on this. I will hopefully be able to tell you my answers when I have finished my section on going beyond ‘Gregory’ with the ideas of my dissertation. Nevertheless, it is hoped this post has provided insight into my thoughts and the stimulating intellectual challenges I am facing as I discuss the relationship between hermeneutics and phenomenology.

Bibliography:

Idhe, Don. Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971

Markus, Robert A. Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996.

Reddy, William. “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions.” Current Anthropology 38, no. 3 (1997): 327-51.

Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Review: Signs and Meanings, World and Text in Ancient Christianity

~ Liam Greenacre ~ Leave a comment

This post will review R.A Markus’ 1996 book ‘Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity’. Based on two lectures he gave in 1995, it also contains a number of chapters that build on these. The focus throughout the book is on Late Antique semiotics and biblical hermeneutics and the extent to which these shaped contemporary writers hermeneutics of experience.

The first chapter ‘World and Text 1: Augustine’ focuses on Augustine’s biblical hermeneutics and discusses the extent to which he allows an allegorical interpretation of scripture in his different texts. It also introduces a number of key ideas that are pivotal to understanding Markus’ arguments. It discusses the difference between interpretation and exegesis and introduces the idea of textual communities. Exegesis is the activity of commentating on a text, whereas interpretation is the wider activity of interpreting experience or a worldview ‘in the light of the scriptural text.’ The latter is in contrast to interpreting a text based on one’s experience of reality. A textual community can be defined as a group with a shared language for communication. According to Markus ‘particular languages create particular communities; and special languages within these create sub-communities, or sub-cultures’. Pivotal to the rest of the book, a community may also be created through a joint understanding of the scripture and the meaning it ascribes to the world. It is through these concepts that Markus discusses how interpreting scripture can affect one’s hermeneutics of experience.

The second chapter tackles Gregory the Great and a shift that occurred in interpreting scripture and the world. For Gregory the process by which texts assigned meaning to the world ‘was telescoped into a simpler, more direct act of perception’, when compared with the Augustinian process. The chapter also covers the two authors’ differing views regarding exegesis, covering ideas like the spiritual sense of the text and allegory again. The third chapter of the book delves more into Augustine’s semiotic theory. The space dedicated to it is welcome because Augustine commentates quite heavily on signs and often alters his theory from work to work, as shown by the differences Markus notes between De Magistro and De doctrina Christiana. The chapter also discusses the role of the Hellenistic tradition, different types of signs and symbols and the role of the Interior Teacher in helping to decipher meaning. The Interior Teacher ‘is Christ dwelling in the mind’ who ‘can teach by at once displaying to the mind the reality to be known’ and provide ‘the language for its understanding’.

The next chapter, ‘Signs, Communication and Communities’ expands on some of the ideas Markus introduced earlier regarding textual communities. Furthermore, he notes Augustine’s comments on the limits of communities. Our many languages will always restrict us to moving within a limited variety of communities, therefore also restricting the boundaries of attainable meaning as well. Likewise, the fact that words in the scripture can have several meanings in the scripture means different communities can exist on different levels. One who understands the meaning of the word ‘ox’ would be a participant in a primary community of English speakers. However, one who understands its additional meaning in its scriptural context would also be a member of a secondary community. In this chapter, Markus also covers how communication is necessary for a community and further adds to his discussion on Augustine’s semiotics. The final chapter of the book is titled ‘Augustine on Magic’. This differentiates between religious and Christian miracles and how they are set apart from ‘demonic’ magic communities. It is one of the few instances in the book where Markus focuses on a community outside of a scriptural context.

Overall, ‘Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christinaity’ is a fascinating read. However, its paltry size, of 146 pages, means the reader is often left wanting and with more questions than answers. For example, Markus often refers to modern theorists, like Ricoeur and Peirce, but no comparison between them and Late Antique writers is made. Markus states that is not the point of his work and that is fair, but one cannot help think that there might be some interesting comparisons to be made between them. Furthermore, one wonders how Markus’ ideas regarding textual communities might be applied practically by historians. Could you use Augustine’s semiotics and hermeneutics to understand his and other contemporary texts or do his theories change too much to allow this? Could one read a textual description of experience and look for signs that scripture is influencing interpretation of the world? The book certainly raises a number of interesting research avenues that could be pursued.

On the other hand, ‘Signs and Meanings’ also acts as a useful primer by introducing Augustine and Gregory’s ideas regarding scriptural interpretation.The discussion surrounding the idea of textual communities is also highly nuanced, even if it could have been developed further. However, because the book is based on two lectures given by the author in 1995, the lack of expansion in certain areas is understandable.

To conclude, ‘Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity’ is an interesting and thought-provoking read, that raises many fascinating possibilities along the way.