If there is a God, it is possible that he cannot be known by our reason. If reason could attain to religious truths, faith would be unnecessary. If faith is needed, reason is somehow inadequate. But why? Either because the human mind cannot comprehend the mysteries of God in whole or in part, so that (at least some) religious truths - such as the Resurrection or the Day of Judgment, according to Augustine (De vera relig. 8.14, cf. De Trin. 4.16.21) - are inaccessible to unaided reason; or because such truths cannot be demonstrated and can only be shown to be more or less plausible or possible; or because our minds are now damaged and need to be habituated - by faith, by the practice of the virtues or by both - to reason more effectively, and above all not merely to rationalize.

Augustine's most extensive discussions of philosophical and theological cosmology are found in his commentaries on Genesis (De Genesi contra Manichaeos, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim), in the last three books of the Confessions, and in Books 11 and 12 of the De civitate Dei. The main lines of his view of the creation are as follows. God created both the spiritual realm of angels and the visible world, including the incarnated souls, out of nothing (ex nihilo), without any pre-existing matter or other things outside God, so that ontologically new beings came into existence. The creation was based on an eternal free act of God's perfectly good will. It took place through God's omnipotence without toil, effort, or industry. God created simultaneously all first actualized things and, through “seminal reasons” inherent in them, the conditions of all those things which were to come up to the end of the world. God is the only creator. Created beings cannot bring things into existence out of nothing. God created time in creating movement in the universe. The story of the six days of creation is a metaphor which helps human imagination. Augustine sometimes interprets the “beginning”' (in principio) of Gen. 1.1 as a temporal beginning, but following an established tradition, he also takes it to refer to the Word or the Son of God (John 1.1-3): “In this beginning, God, you made heaven and earth, in your Word, in your Son, in your power, in your wisdom, in your truth” (Conf. 11.9.11).

In Rome at the beginning of his stay in Italy, Augustine became disenchanted with the Manichaeism he had provisionally embraced in Carthage. He found himself increasingly attracted to the skeptical position taken by the Academics, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who, as he writes in his Confessions, “held that everything is a matter of doubt and asserted that we can know nothing for certain ” (5.10.19). What Augustine knew of ancient skepticism, including the debate between Arcesilaus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium, he seems to have learned from Cicero's Academica.

By “post-medieval Augustinianism” I shall mean characteristically Augustinian concepts, questions, arguments, responses, and ways of thinking that are prominent in various modern philosophers, whether or not those philosophers ever acknowledge the Augustinian provenance of these aspects of their own thinking. On this way of understanding “Augustinianism ” Descartes is perhaps the most Augustinian of modern philosophers, even though Descartes himself declined to acknowledge that there was any significant affinity between his own thought and that of Augustine (let alone that Augustine had actually influenced his thinking!). Both because Descartes was so profoundly Augustinian in his ways of thinking and because he inaugurated the “post-medieval” period in Western philosophy, I shall begin with him.

In 386, at the age of 32, Augustine converted to Christianity. As he tells the story in the Confessions, the complex and dramatic events that constituted his conversion brought to successful conclusion a search he had begun as a teenager at Carthage with his reading of Cicero's Hortensius. Cicero had inspired in him a passionate yearning for the sort of immortality that comes with wisdom. After more than a decade of fruitless searching, Augustine finally discovered that the wisdom he had longed for was to be found with the God of Christianity. The discovery came in a moment of intellectual vision in which Augustine glimpsed and thereby came at last to understand the divine nature. “At that moment,” he tells us, “I saw [God's] 'invisible nature understood through the things that are made' [Romans 1.20]” (Conf. 7.17.23).

Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine conceived of God as a supremely good being who is “incorruptible, inviolable, and immutable ” (Conf. 7.1.1). At the same time, he was aware of the existence of evil in the world, evil that can be divided into two major classes. First, physical objects have limitations and defects. In particular, the limitations of living things result in hardship, pain, illness, and death. Secondly, there are people who behave wickedly and whose souls are characterized by such vices as pride, envy, greed, and lust.

Augustine regards ethics as an enquiry into the Summum Bonum: the supreme good, which provides the happiness all human beings seek. In this respect his moral thought comes closer to the eudaimonistic virtue ethics of the classical Western tradition than to the ethics of duty and law associated with Christianity in the modern period. But even though Augustine addresses many of the same problems that pagan philosophers do, he often defends very different answers. For him, happiness consists in the enjoyment of God, a reward granted in the afterlife for virtue in this life. Virtue itself is a gift of God, and founded on love, not on the wisdom prized by philosophers.

The topic of Augustine's political philosophy must be approached with care. Augustine never devoted a book or a treatise to the central questions of what we now call “political philosophy.”Unlike Aristotle, he did not attempt serially to address them and to draw out the institutional implications of his answers. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, he did not elaborate a philosophical theory of politics, if by that is meant a synoptic treatment of those central questions which relies on theoretical devices contrived for the purpose. Discussions of politics can be found in a number of Augustine's writings, but these are generally conducted in service of conclusions which neither we nor he would regard as philosophical. Indeed it is questionable whether Augustine thought that political philosophy has a subject-matter which should be sharply distinguished from the subjectmatters of other areas of philosophy or of political enquiry. His own treatments of political subjects draw heavily upon ethics, social theory, the philosophy of history, and, most importantly, psychology and theology. It is possible to recover a distinctive set of political views from Augustine's texts. That set constitutes not a political philosophy, but a loose-jointed and heavily theological body of political thought which Augustine himself never assembled. It does not fit comfortably into any one of the disciplinary categories now standardly associated with the study of politics.

Augustine began writing commentary on scripture not long after his conversion. His first such work, meant as a counterblast to Manichaean attacks on the creation account, was De Genesi contra Manichaeos (388-390). In many ways it sets the tone for much of his later work: Augustine admits an allegorical sense but warns against overenthusiasm for allegory and denigration of the literal sense; we see also from the outset Augustine's interest in scripture as a controversialist and polemicist. After his ordination to the priesthood in 391, he seems to have gone through something of a writer's block, starting but leaving incomplete a treatise on exegetical theory (De doctrina christiana, begun 396 but not completed until 427), another commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, 393-394), and an exposition of Romans (Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio, 394-395). He did manage to finish a verse-by-verse commentary on Galatians, giving the literal sense (Epistolae ad Galatas expositio, 394-395) and a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (De sermone Domini in monte, 393-396). His Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistola ad Romanos (394) derives from conversations with the monks at Hippo, who recorded his answers to their questions about Romans; Augustine tells us later that he missed what he eventually came to see as the main point of the epistle.

The contents of this chapter have been removed for rights reasons.

Philosophers have come to speak of an Augustinian picture of language. The picture is not really Augustine's, as we shall see, but it makes a good starting point for exploring what his views actually were. Those views, though not as crude as the “Augustinian picture,” will turn out to be mainly unoriginal, following a tradition that was already several hundred years old in his day, and helping to sustain that tradition for a further millennium and more. We know better now, thanks mainly to the fundamental insights of Frege and Wittgenstein.

In writing De Trinitate Augustine had three main objectives. He wished to demonstrate to critics of the Nicene creed that the divinity and co-equality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are rooted in scripture. He intended to tell pagan philosophers the need for faith in a divine mediator so that divine self-revelation and redemption can occur. Finally, he wanted to convince his readers that salvation and spiritual growth are connected with knowing themselves as images of the Triune God, from whom they came and toward whom they go, with a dynamic tendency to union realized by likeness to God who is Love.

Introduction

From the time it became a secure sea-lane following the collapse of the Spanish Armada in the late 1580s until well into the twentieth century, the North Atlantic brought people from all parts of the British Isles to a new life in what became the United States. Emigrants represented a broad sampling of lower and middling ranks, but few at either extreme of the social spectrum, as the latter lacked either the motivation or the means to come. These emigrants usually came voluntarily and were often accompanied by fewer material possessions than such intangibles as their hopes and beliefs. They included tens of thousands of indentured servants who sold years of labor for passage and sometimes training in a trade. Involuntary emigrants included London paupers and orphans and Irish military transportees in the seventeenth century and convicts in the eighteenth, but in proportion far fewer than to Australia and other British colonies.

Whatever their station and however meager their belongings, all emigrants brought their speech habits, usually untutored ones. Some were bilingual in a Celtic language, but with few exceptions and in ways reflecting the distinct history and culture of their regional origins, these people spoke either English or Scots (the latter being the close sibling to English that achieved national, autonomous status as the literary and governmental language of Scotland in the sixteenth century).

Introduction

“You sockdologizing old man-trap” were the last words Abraham Lincoln heard before the assassin's bullet buried itself deep in his brain. Laughter at Ford's Theatre in Washington was suddenly interrupted by the gunshot. A line from a popular British comedy, Our American Cousin, these words produced hearty guffaws from the audience; sockdologizing was funny because it was an “American” word put in the mouth of an American type, the hearty backwoodsman, whose intrusion into the drawing room of an English country house established incongruity and created humor. Like many American expressions that became known abroad, it was fantastic, improper, and extravagant. As recreated for the London stage, it was also wrong.

The author of Our American Cousin was Tom Taylor (1817–80), a brilliant child of a brewing family in the north of England, a gold medalist as an undergraduate at the University of Glasgow, and subsequently a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in classics and mathematics. From 1845 to 1847, Taylor was Professor of English Literature and Professor of English Language at the University of London; he then qualified as a barrister and, not long after, accepted an appointment in the newly founded public health service. All the while he was a regular contributor to the daily newspapers and to the humor magazine Punch, eventually rising to the position of editor. By mid century, Taylor had become one of the most popular of English playwrights, adapting familiar tales like Cinderella and Whittington and His Cat for the London stage and recreating in dramatic form such novels as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Dickens's Tale of Two Cities.

What is African-American English?

The term African-American English (AAE) is used here for “the whole range of language [varieties] used by black people in the United States: a very large range indeed, extending from the Creole grammar of Gullah spoken in the Sea Islands [and coastal marshlands] of South Carolina [and Georgia] to the most formal and accomplished literary style” (Labov 1972a, xiii). This chapter is focused, however, on vernacular varieties characterized as basilectal or mesolectal. A basilect is a variety most different from educated, middle-class English, called an acrolect, and a mesolect is intermediate between the basilect and the acrolect.

The term AAE is used here as a general, umbrella term that must be distinguished from more specific ones such as Gullah – also known as Sea Island Creole – and African-American vernacular English (AAVE). Gullah is any of a range of creole varieties, and AAVE is any of the continental nonstandard varieties of African-American speech. Following several African-American scholars (J. Baugh 1983; M. Morgan 1989; Smitherman 1977; Spears 1988; Tolliver-Weddington) but in contrast with William Labov (1972a, cf. however 1982) and others, the term “vernacular” is used here for varieties of AAE allegedly used by 80 to 90 percent of continental African-Americans as a primary means of communication for their day-to-day intragroup communication (Smitherman 1977, 2; Spears 1988, 109; Wofford 367). That percentage is only an estimate suggesting that most African-Americans speak those varieties of AAE.

Introduction

American dialects record the contents of the English language as social facts realized in a geographic framework. As complete linguistic systems, all dialects report speech within the context of larger constructs – a language or a national variety of a language at a given point in the history of its development. American dialects transmit a national variety of Modern English in a distinctive pattern of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.

The first speakers of American English received the language in a plastic state and shaped it according to their experience. Current regional and social dialects of American speech reflect the experiences of explorers and settlers on the Atlantic seaboard, of Western pioneers who followed them, and of later immigrants who energized the society as it moved across the continent. The dialects echo developments in the English language at critical historical junctures. They mirror cultural interaction – distinguishing Northern, Southern, Midland, and Western divisions of American geography, stratified according to the racial caste, sex, age, and education of American society. And they unite in the formation of American English, unmistakable to any speaker of the English language today.

The sounds, syntactic structures, and lexicon of American English unite in an integrated system. The phonology provides a system of contrastive sets (phonemes) that distinguish consonants, vowels, and units of intonation (stress, pitch, and juncture). The grammar outlines the arrangement, selection, and inflection of speech parts. And the vocabulary records a cultural index through distinctive words that identify the artifacts, ideas, and behavior of the American people.

Buckaroo and megabuck, glitz and glam, tightwad and uptight – all are slang. Since the days of the fast clippers, thousands of similar idioms have raced from home shores to be recognized everywhere as particularly “American slang.” Thanks partly to the telegraphers of the Atlantic cable, the laconic OK (1839 OED) had reached England by 1866 and turned up as “an Americanism” in a subsequent edition of Hotten's British slang dictionary (OED; Hotten 1874); in the twentieth century it became probably the most widely recognized Americanism on earth. The common noun guy took two or three generations to overhaul the earlier bloke in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere, but the American term (ultimately traceable to the name of Guy Fawkes) is now familiar wherever English is spoken. American slang has circled and recircled the globe.

In spite of its worldwide influence, the significance of American slang has been long slighted. Except for Richard Bailey (1996), Gerald Cohen, Connie Eble, and Karl Sornig, trained linguists have rarely given slang more than a quick hello. Indeed, the word slang itself may be on the decline as a term of art; the four heavy volumes of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Bright), for instance, do not offer an article on the subject and mention slang in passing only. Yet the increasing perspicuity of critical thought about language is what resulted in the recognition of slang in the first place, and slang's rise to prominence is a salient fact in the history of American English.

Pre-contact: languages before English in North America

English speakers were relatively late participants in the expansion of European colonialism. Long before English was much used outside the British Isles other European languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch had reached around the world. The first signs of the global expansion that was to characterize the development of English in subsequent centuries and bring it into contact with many other languages appeared in the sixteenth century. Before that time English was little used abroad, and languages outside Europe had hardly any direct influence on it.

The waves of settlement and immigration that brought the first settlers to the North American continent covered an enormous time span and involved widely scattered settlements. Initially, there was little two-way contact between the first English settlers and the indigenous people in North America (R. Bailey 1991a, 62). English speakers had come explicitly as colonists, unlike the French, for instance, who came to trade. The English settlers lived in self-contained communities dependent on Britain for supplies until necessity drove them to seek help locally. The earliest words to make their way back to England came in travelers' reports and were more usually from European rather than indigenous languages. Even many of the indigenous words such as tobacco that eventually were to become part of international English came in via another European language first (§ 4.2.2.2).