Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
ciples of biblical interpretation and will be discussed in the next chapter. Augustine left the work incomplete for decades, but around the year 426 or 427, he brought it to a close, adding a fourth book on the art of preaching. This final book, while brief, has special poignancy because it comes at the very end of his career, after more than three decades as a preacher.13
In this chapter, I assemble excerpts from Augustine's sermons and intersperse with these his reflections on preaching, drawing especially on Book 4 of On Christian Teaching. This back-and-forth movement between theory and practice will give readers a sense of the way Augustine's reflections intersect with his actual practice. Once again, I recommend that texts be read aloud. This is particularly true of the sermons, which were, of course, delivered orally. You may meet them only in translation, but you can still hear something of their wordplay, their balanced parallelisms and antitheses, their spontaneous, sometimes conversational, tone. Of course, preaching includes—indeed, requires—the interpretation of Scripture. But we will defer looking at the specifics of his exegesis (both in theory and in practice) until the next chapter.
Preparing to Preach
Augustine recognized that preaching differed both from teaching in an academic sense and from public speaking, whether in a political or in a legal forum. He presumed preachers had thorough command of the Scriptures and solid oratorical aptitude. Here he advises that preachers follow his lead, preparing not by reading or writing but by praying. From On Christian Teaching, Book 4:
(15.32) In praying for himself and for those he is about to address, the preacher should be a person of prayer before he is a speaker of words. As the hour when he is to speak approaches, before he uses his tongue, he should raise his parched soul to God that he may gush forth what he has drunk in and pour out what has filled him up. For on any subject that needs to be discussed with regard to faith and love, there are many things to be said and many ways in which they may be said by those who know about them. But who knows what is appropriate for us to say or for our audience to hear at the present moment except the One who sees "the hearts of all" (Acts 1:14)? And
13. On this, see especially Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright, eds., De Doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Karla Pollmann, Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana (Freiburg: Universitätverlag, 1996).