# “The Scriptures are the heart of Augustine’s lexicon” by James K.A. Smith

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2024/05/08/the-scriptures-are-the-heart-of-augustines-lexicon-by-james-k-a-smith/
- Published: 2024-05-08T11:00:00-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“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_](https://amzn.to/4bjGKpe)(
Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2019), 167-169.

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