A linguistic model of communication is preeminent in Western culture, and part of its power arises from the Western preoccupation with word, particularly the Christian meditation on the Word, the second person of the Trinity. Augustine's philosophy and theology of the word made him a proponent of a linguistic epistemology: all knowledge is knowledge of the word and words are signs of reality. Anselm shifted the grounds of the discussion of the word-Word metaphor from rhetoric to grammar. He worked from within language and built up his argument from a series of grammatical and logical equivalences, making the issue the definition of the Word. Peter Lombard's treatment of the word-Word metaphor dealt with predication about the Trinity and the application of the "Categories" of Aristotle to the Trinity. Thomas Aquinas changes the notion and scope of the inner word and its metaphorical relation to the divine Word by substituting Aristotelian epistemology for Augustinian. Aquinas also blends poetry and theology in his treatment of the Word, so that what he attempts to explain theologically he evokes poetically. The word-Word metaphor reveals a view of communication common to the Middle Ages: communication always reveals the inner, making it concrete. (SRT)