reading the Bible, sufficient to undergird an intelligent appreciation of Jewish
texts in a gentile culture. He was writing, after all, for provincial North African
seminarians. But in his adequation of the goals of Ciceronian education
to a biblical order of reasoning about language and truth his work became a
touchstone for more than a millennium of later humanistic authors. The list of
those indebted to it is long, but certainly includes Cassiodorus, in hisDe
institiutione divinarum et secularum litterarum, Rabanaus Maurus’sDe in-
stitutione, Hugh of St Victor’sDidascalicon, Bonaventure’sReductione artium
ad theologiam, John Wyclif’sDe veritate sacrae scripturae, translated sections
in the preface of the Wycliffite Bible, and it extends to the writings of Erasmus,
Petrarch, Salutati, Milton, J. H. Newman, and C. S. Lewis, to name just a few.
Even this abbreviated list should renew our appreciation of an enormous
contribution that derives, essentially, from one magisterial attempt to develop
a method for reading the Bible.
The pedagogical stratagems of Augustine regarding the disciplines re-
quired for an intelligent reading of Scripture became in some ways more
influential than his specific exegesis, helping the Bible eventually to tran-
scend theology and become not only the historical foundation for hu-
mane learning in the West, but also the procedural and methodological
basis of nearly all scholarship in the humanities. Textual criticism, philo-
logical analysis, poetics, language theory, narrative epistemology, histori-
ography, anthropology, positive law, and natural law are all among the
immediate beneficiaries.
With regard to the goals of education Augustine does not, at one level, seem
to differ much from Cicero: eloquence and wisdom are the enduringdesider-
ata. But though himself a teacher of rhetoric, Augustine is emphatic that
eloquence is but instrumental, not an intrinsic good. Why is this important?
Well, because divine wisdom is essentially the burden of Scripture’scon-
tent and superior wisdom in the life of the reader is its ultimate purpose.
Acquisition of this wisdom, in turn, provides a more reliable platform
for a distinctive and superior grace in utterance:‘[O]ne speaks more or
less wisely’, Augustine thinks,‘totheextentthathehadbecomemore
or less proficient in [the Holy Scriptures]’(4.5.8). Wisdom, rather than
Ciceronianeloquenceinitself,istheultimatejustification of all higher
learning. Meanwhile biblical language constitutes a special order of elo-
quence,‘fitting for those of higher authority’(4.6.9). These convictions
also have had incalculable influence on Christian culture.
Yet the instrumentality of language nevertheless requires careful reflection,
and in Augustine’s analysis of things and signs there emerges a biblically
grounded basis for semiotic and linguistic ponderings that continue to rever-
berate through Saussure and beyond (1.2.2; all of 2). His polemic against what
he called‘that miserable servitude of the spirit in the habit of mistaking signs
for things’(3.6.9), opposing idolatry of the sign, still echoes in the swirling
166 David Lyle Jeffrey