“The Scriptures are the heart of Augustine’s lexicon” by James K.A. Smith
“The Book that would finally arrest this search for a story was the Bible. The script that would finally guide his way was the Scriptures.
As Brian Stock notes in his magisterial study Augustine the Reader, Augustine realized that identity was storied, and that meant finding your story in the story revealed by your Creator.
“What distinguishes him from other philosophical thinkers on this issue,” Stock comments, “is the link that he perceives between self-knowledge and an appreciation of God’s Word, in which the reading of scripture plays a privileged role. Throughout the lengthy period of his intellectual development after 386-387, his main guide was scripture.”
What was it about the biblical story that “fit“? Why was it that this particular story became the governing narrative for the rest of his life?
The very notion will scandalize us, we who’ve been encouraged to live “our” truth, to come up with our own story, for whom authenticity is the burden of writing our own de novo script.
The notion of a governing narrative that is not your own feels like signing over the rights to your life—-which it is! But for Augustine, being enfolded in God’s story in Scripture was not an imposition but a liberation.
When you’ve realized that you don’t even know yourself, that you’re an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn’t received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.
God’s Word for Augustine wasn’t experienced as burden or buzzkill but as autobiography written by the God who made him. Scripture irrupted in Augustine’s life as revelation, the story about himself told by another, and as illumination, shining a light that helped him finally understand his hungers and faults and hopes.
To spend any time in Augustine’s corpus, but perhaps especially the letters and sermons, is to hear a voice that has been soaked by the language of Scripture.
The Bible– especially the Psalms– was Augustine’s gift of tongues.
Augustine’s speech is so suffused with the Scriptures that the contemporary translator is almost at a loss to know where the Bible stops and Augustine begins. For the rest of his life, Augustine, like a hip-hop bricoleur, “samples” Scripture in everything he says.
The Psalms, especially, are always on the tip of his tongue, a storehouse of metaphors and comfort. It’s incredible how quickly the Scriptures became Augustine’s first language, so to speak.
The Scriptures are the heart of Augustine’s lexicon because the cosmic story of redemption is his governing story. This was the language of the homeland he’d never been to. Like glossolalia, he quickly found himself able to speak a language that wasn’t his but also wasn’t foreign.
It’s less a language he owns and more a language that owns him and comes naturally. Jacques Derrida, his fellow North African, would say something similar much later: “I said that the only language I speak is not mine, I did not say it was foreign to me.”
This is the lexicon of an émigré spirituality, when a foreign tongue finds you and becomes your first language. You become who you are because this Word gives you the words to finally say who you are.
‘To hear You speaking about oneself is to know oneself.‘”
–James K. A. Smith, On the Road With Saint Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2019), 167-169.
