Book 1, Ch. 8, 13

Augustine contemplates how he learned to communicate when growing from infant to boy. He got by with grunts and gestures, but eventually learned the verbal signs needed to engage in the “stormy fellowship of human life.”

When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which a indicate disposition and attitude - either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid.

Emphasis is mine. I find it interesting that Augustine attributes the ability to recognize body language to the common language shared by all nations. If one holds to a basic creational theology where all of humanity was created in the image of God, there would be some common markers.

Of course, there was a common language before the fall and confusion at Babel, but Augustine hints that there is still a bond of language spanning all peoples, which even God’s divine confusion did not break. Perhaps as a foreshadowing that all of humanity would again be reunited under a single banner, as a single family.

The only way for this to happen and for the bond to be reforged and strengthened is for humanity to truly embrace its original vocation as the image bearers of God to the good creation. The only way to have a chance at this is to look at Jesus.

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