Inner words

Milbank finds Augustine’s theory of signs unsatisfactory, since signs are there only to “recall res ” and “finally to recall spiritual res in the soul, where Christ speaks, wordlessly.” At the same time, he finds a “counter-failing tendency” in Augustine’s notion of the interior word, since that “construes thought as ‘intentional,’ or as having a sign-character . . . which, especially in the De Trinitate , promotes a non-substantive, relational ontology, together with an account of the ‘inner’ space of the soul as merely the trace of a past externality, or else ecstasis towards an externality still to come.”

That is, as “inner word,” our thought either bears the imprint of words that have been spoken to us (and therefore is not purely “inner” after all) or our soul generates an inner word for the purposes of incarnating that inner word in the codes of a particular language so that others can know something of the motions of our souls (and therefore, again, it is not a purely “inner” word). The soul is an “inner” space only in inverted commas, molded as it is by what comes from without and oriented as it is to what it seeks to express.