The title of one of Augustine’s most brilliant and accessible works—De doctrina christiana (On Christian Doctrine) is likely to mislead and possibly discourage potential readers who probably would find its contents fascinating. In our English language doctrine usually means a specific dogmatic proposition or article of faith, but doctrina here refers less to what is taught than to what teaching itself is. He begins by saying that all doctrina deals with one of two objects, res (things) and signa (signs). Oversimplifying only wildly, the world of res is our STEM world: empirical observation, measurements, calculation, material analysis and so on. The sign-world of signa is our humanistic world of interpretation and moral and aesthetic analysis and judgment. Augustine was curious about the world of things (science), but this particular book is devoted to that of signs, concerning which he makes another two-part distinction. All signs are either natural or conventional. Smoke on the horizon is a natural sign of the thing fire. Any sentient human being can interpret the sign correctly. But how about the word “fire” (ignis in Latin)? It too is a sign of fire, but only by convention among speakers of Latin. Other groups, according to other conventions, will call it pyr, fuoco, brand, feu, ogién, and fire. The identification of human language as conventional sign systems is what makes Augustine’s book an important contribution to language theory to this day.
Not everybody acknowledges the kinds of signs that animate this essay, but they permeate our language in such phrases as signs of life, signs of spring, signs of the times, or the tired joke that “it’s a sign that you’re getting _______ when you ________". I have now enjoyed the excellent protections of our national Medicare insurance for many years. For quite a while, eligible recipients could use their Social Security cards for purposes of Medicare identification. A few years ago, however, partly in an effort to combat fraud and identity theft, the Federal government developed a special Medical Insurance card with an eleven-part identification code, a mixture of majuscule letters and Arabic numerals. The transition complete, these new cards became, in theory, required for all Medicare business. We swim in an ocean of little paper or plastic rectangles in order to go places by bus or subway, buy things, gain admission to museums, drive machines, or get a free cup of coffee as a reward for buying twenty overpriced ones. One can carry about in one’s wallet those few that may be needed on a daily basis. In addition I made two special little packets—one marked “Medical,” the other “New York”—to be fetched when needed from their special box and returned to it.
Trouble is, I hardly had gotten the new Medicare card when I lost the whole “Medical” pack. I used it at a doctor’s office and when I went to fetch it a couple of weeks later, it was not in the designated box. Lost! If you are far enough along the spectrum that you make little packages of business cards in the first place, you’re certainly far enough along it to obsess over losing one of them. The lady in the gospel who swept her house “diligently” in search of her dropped drachma had nothing on me. I turned the place upside down. No luck. And there were annoying practical consequences. Despairing of finding the card, I sought to replace it. The Medicare website has to be among the top ten digital hells in the entire national bureaucracy; and that, as we say, is saying something. Lasciate ogni speranza…
Months passed, and at this point my story becomes cloudy and serious because my wife had a serious health event that involved scary tests and the kind of scary specialist consultation concerning test results at which a husband wants also to be present. My nervous preparations for this meeting included a desire to dress halfway decently. I went to my rack of shirts and chose one of the better ones, long unused during the Pandemic. The moment I took it from the hanger I could sense a slight surplus weight on the left side. Something was in the pocket. Without investigating, I immediately knew what it was, and more importantly that it was a sign, a very good one. This consult was going to be okay.
At first blush, this experience is so embarrassingly easy to demystify that I scarcely have the nerve make an anecdote of it. I wore a certain shirt to a go to a medical appointment many months ago, and I chose the same shirt for the same purpose a week ago. In the interval the shirt was simply hanging unvisited in its closet. Yet those facts, which certainly are facts, have embarrassments of their own. The shirt is not one that I would be likely to wear without a jacket. I always (I thought) secured the little packet of documents in the inner left-hand pocket of a jacket. So firm was my misplaced faith in the inviolability of this practice that when I was doing what I considered a root-and-branch search for the lost items, and ransacking the pockets of every jacket I own, including the highly improbable ones in dress suits and even (absurdly) a tuxedo, it never entered my mind to work through a row of shirts.
The “signs” that Augustine was interested in were biblical. Like his Jewish and Christian contemporaries he regarded the sacred text as a vast web of allegories. The signs I have encountered during my life tend to be secular and often enough banal—the kind of amusing wake-up calls from the Universe that Carl Jung called “synchronicities” or meaningful coincidences. I was very impressed years ago by Arthur Koestler’s book The Roots of Coincidence—at least to the extent that I could follow it. Like all flirtations with ESP (“extra-sensory perception”) Jung‘s speculations concerning synchronicity have been assailed by materialistic physicists as pseudo-science. But all dogma, whether spiritualistic or materialistic has to be assessed within the context of an individual life experience. For there is more than one kind of empiricism. Physical theory teaches us that effects have causes; that does not preclude them from having forms or echoes as well. My own experience leads me to suppose, slightly paraphrasing Hamlet to Horatio, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your departments of philosophy. It was a mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal, who wrote “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.”
There is a difference between being open to the possibility of providential signals and the attempt to cultivate them through necromancy, the examination of the inner organs of birds and beasts, Tarot cards, ouija boards, or the I Ching. Divination created a kind of extra-linguistic conventional sign system needing interpretation by an elite priestcraft. The search for “signs” by state augurs and oracular interpreters was a major part of the Roman state religion, but some philosophers disdained it for its fatalistic “insider trading”. Kings wanted to know in advance which side would win a prospective battle before deciding on fight or on flight. In Lucan’s Pharsalia the great moral hero Cato declines the opportunity to consult the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, for his interest is in the justice rather than the prosperity of the cause for which he fights. Our word “auspicious” derives from the Latin term for an interpreter of the predictive meaning of bird flights! Self-interested clients wanted to know whether a prospective journey, marriage, horse purchase, or financial investment was auspicious. One form seemed specially designed for literature professors: bibliomancy, or the use of great texts like the Odyssey or the Aeneid as philosophical bingo cards. Virgil himself has some harsh things to say about ancient divination—though that of course is Dante’s Virgil (Inferno 20: 29-30). The tedium of Medicare cards lost and found is typical of my small and banal sign-life, one far from shared and conventional but individual and eccentric. Yet perhaps there is still time for an upgrade. Jung thought you could by training fine-tune your resonance to synchronicities. But then he himself had gotten off to a flying start by finding a gold bug on his windowsill at the very moment he was listening to a patient’s account of her dream of a golden scarab. I have never stumbled upon a golden Medicare card.
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