CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Akirtava, Nino |
|---|---|
| Title | Per Verbum Ad Verbum: Augustine's Metonymic Theory of Language |
| Summary | This thesis examines Augustine’s philosophy of language through a metonymic-anagogical framework of signification: one that challenges metaphor-based readings by emphasizing indication, contiguity, and moral orientation. For Augustine, the word is signum par excellence: a sign whose being lies in pointing beyond itself. Language, fractured by the Fall, is neither transparent nor self-sufficient; its value rests in its capacity to guide the soul toward what exceeds it. Through close readings of De Dialectica, De Magistro, and De Doctrina Christiana, the thesis traces how Augustine’s semiotics departs from classical models of resemblance and representation and is reconfigured around ethical direction and theological ascent. Signs function not by analogy but by proximity, and serve not to depict, but to direct. Insofar as language belongs to the realm of res ad utendum, it attains its purpose only in leading the soul to the only res fruenda, God. By recovering the metonymic structure underlying Augustine’s theory of signs, this study offers a rearticulation of language as a theological act, situated not within the logic of representation, but within the movement of return. |
| Supervisor | György Geréby, István Perczel |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/akirtava_nina.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University