16. De catechizandis rudibus 12.17 (CCL 46:141); my trans.
Introduction xix
rious, heartfelt sympathy between teacher and learner: "For so great is this feeling of compassion that when people are touched by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell each in the other, and so it is as if they speak in us what they hear while we, in some way, learn in them what we teach."16 That, I hope, has guided what I have gathered here. I agree with Augustine: Beginners are the best of teachers, and what we do, we do for love.
! A Note on the Translations: The genesis of this book came about several years ago, when David McGonagle, Director of the Catholic University of America Press, asked whether I would be interested in putting together a new Augustine reader by drawing on the 30 volumes of Augustine's works previously published in the eminent Fathers of the Church (FOTC) series. This, I knew at once, was a great opportunity. I also knew that one could not, without further ado, simply pick and choose from those 30 volumes. The Fathers of the Church series offered a valuable starting point and a solid core, but its volumes were not, of themselves, sufficient to survey the breadth of Augustine's corpus. None of his Expositions of the Psalms appear in the series, nor does it include any of his anti-Donatist treatises; and it has only a small selection of his Sermons to the People. There are, as well, many other smaller gaps. In addition, many of the Augustine volumes were translated in the 1940s and 1950s and sometimes use a style and word choice that now seems awkward and outdated. In a number of cases, older translations have been superseded because new critical editions of Augustine's Latin text have been published. My general policy has been to make use, wherever possible, of the FOTC volumes, but I have taken the liberty of altering those earlier translations wherever needed. To insure accuracy, I have checked each excerpt against the best edition of the Latin text, as well as against one or more recent translations in English or French. Many passages required at least a few small amendments. In a number of cases, I have used the FOTC translation as a starting point and then thoroughly reworked sentences and often whole paragraphs. In these instances, I note that the passage is not "translated by so-and-so," but is "based on so-and-so's translation." About one third of this book consists of my own new translations; the remainder are either drawn from or are much revised versions of the FOTC.
Translating Augustine is demanding. He was, by talent and training, an orator. His words are often melodious. There are rhymes, alliterations, long chains of balanced antitheses, all sorts of baroque embellishments. Such musicality was part of the orator's craft, and Augustine carefully and con-
16. De catechizandis rudibus 12.17 (CCL 46:141); my trans.
xx Introduction sciously cultivated it. His word-choice also routinely plays on complex chains of images, some drawn from the Bible, some from the world around him, so that ideas move along as much by metaphor as by logic. These qualities defy easy translation, but, here and there, they can be captured in English, if only roughly and sporadically. I have tried, wherever possible, to give readers some taste of both his musicality and his poetics.
There is much else about Augustine's Latin that is difficult to render in idiomatic English. Like many Latin speakers, he had a fondness for long, winding periodic sentences. While these can, with difficulty, be replicated in English, the English version tends to come off as unwieldy, obtuse, and abstract, while the Latin originals are models of terse elegance and clarity. On occasion, I have broken down such sentences into shorter units; other times, I have replicated their length, tying them together by repeating a key word that appears but once in the Latin original, but which serves as the linchpin linking the chain of clauses. My concern is that the English be as readable as possible. Latin grammar is not English grammar, and readers are meeting Augustine in English, not Latin. An obvious point perhaps, but one not always honored by translators. Augustine's own bottom line was clarity. I have tried to honor that. I have translated as much for the ear as for the eye. Augustine spoke his works out loud, and that orality needs to be respected and translated where possible. At several junctures, I encourage readers to read the texts aloud, and, while they are in English and not Latin, some of Augustine's oral flair does come through, even in translation.
I should also add that Latin as a language is, to some extent, word-poor. This means that a single Latin word can possess many different meanings. Augustine often exploited this. As a translator, one has to make choices. What does one do when it is clear that Augustine wanted to exploit a single word's multiple meanings? I have, in certain cases, chosen to use several words where Augustine uses but one. Also hard to capture is tone. Augustine's letters display a diplomat's flair and finesse and adopt a stately rhetorical style. In his controversial works, his voice can shift rapidly, much the way an able lawyer's does, now interrogating witnesses, now probing the evidence, now appealing to the jury. His sermons vary even more widely in tone and style, sometimes using an intricate elegance, other times adopting a conversational informality. To translate this more popular touch, I resort to occasional contractions, even the occasional slang, to give some equivalent to Augustine's tone.
Augustine's prose is saturated with biblical quotations, biblical allusions, biblical echoes. It is hard to decide how best to cite these. One runs the risk of cluttering the text with parenthetical references or glutting the bottom of