Ueli Zahnd: Denominating Augustine : The Controversial Reception of Augustine's Semiotics in Early Protestant Scholasticism

Throughout the Middle Ages up to the 17^th century, Augustine's conception of signs, as presented in De doctrina christiana II, was one of the common starting points of any semiotical discussion. Around 1600, however, the majority of Lutheran scholastics started, in open dispute with their denominational counterparts, the Calvinists, to explicitly reject the father's definition of a sign as “a thing which, in addition to the impression it makes on the senses, also brings something else to mind”. This controversy was caused less by differing logical assumptions and was motivated more by contradicting theological convictions concerning Christ's presence in the Eucharist: To keep the basic (and likewise Augustinian) conception of the sacrament as a sign, the Lutherans, defending Christ's real presence in the sacrament, had to concede a sign to be self-referential, while the Calvinists, conceiving of the sacrament only as a mnemotic sign of Christ's passion, could hold on Augustine's definition of a sign as referring to something else. It was this sacramental debate that determined the value of Augustine's semiotical sayings, giving thus a denominational shape to a merely logical matter. The paper aims to present this denominational reception of Augustine's semiotics, analysing its theological entanglements and tracing it back to the late medieval roots not only of the two conquering semiotical positions, but of their respective theological background as well.