Cavadini suggests that Augustine’s theory of the inner word is a theory of cultural production, formation, and transformation. First, Augustine’s theory opens space for the person’s transcendence of culture, a space that allows for critique and transformation. But this transcendence of culture does not mean removal from culture. The inner word is a product of will, and since the will is fallen the inner word itself can take perverse forms. Further, the inner word is prior to any particular language, but it comes to expression only in specific codes of language and culture. Cultures may deform the inner word because they encode a preference for power over justice, that is to say, they encode pride, so the move from inner word to specified expression distorts the inner word. By union with the Incarnate Word in His humility, the soul is transformed to express justice and truth, and as we are healed in the soul, the various disciplines can become more and more “transparent to the justice the divine doctrina is teaching us to love,” and thus “more able to participate in imaging God.”

Cavadini makes a specific epistemological application: “the usefulnes of the doctrine of the inner word is that it enables Augustine to show how human beings cannot simply transmit pure knowledge independent of value judgments. Knowledge cannot simply be read off the mind and replicated in the exterior world of sign. But the problem in the communication and significant of knowledge is not primarily the difficulty of representing what is ‘inner’ in what is ‘outer’ (a problem more characteristically emphasized in the earlier Augustine), but rather the difficulty that knowledge cannot be represented at all until it is ‘spoken’ within, ‘conceived’ by a love which binds it to the understanding as a word ‘begotten.’ And because the image of God within is distorted by original sin, by a primal preference for power over justice, our sign systems will inevitably be marked by and inevitably transmit this preference encoded into them, and so fail in their own way to ‘image’ God effectively.”