Augustine in His Own Words
before marriage, a virgin in marriage, a virgin while pregnant, a virgin while nursing. Her all-powerful Son in no way deprived His holy mother of her virginity by being born, she whom He had chosen to be born from. Fruitfulness in marriage is certainly a good thing, but integrity in holiness is better. Therefore, the human Christ, who was able to furnish her both—for the same One was God as well as human—would never have granted His mother the good thing which married people care about in such a way as to deprive her of the better gift for which virgins forgo motherhood.
And so the virgin holy Church celebrates today a virgin's child-bearing. For to the Church the Apostle says: "I have betrothed you to one husband to present you a chaste virgin to Christ" (2 Cor 11:2). How "a chaste virgin" when there are in so many communities persons of both sexes, including not only children and virgins, but also married people, fathers and mothers? Why, I ask, "a chaste virgin" unless [the phrase refer to] the integrity of faith, hope, and charity? And so Christ, intending to establish virginity in the heart of the Church, first preserved Mary's in the body. In human marriage, naturally, a woman is given to her spouse so that she is no longer a virgin. The Church, on the other hand, could not be a virgin unless she had found that the Spouse to whom she had been given was the Son of a virgin.17
Rhetoric as a Tool for the Gospel
The intricate paradoxes of this sermon illustrate Augustine's consummate skills as an orator. He knew rhetoric inside and out, as both a practitioner and a theoretician. He knew its power and its perils, that language is a tool—and, potentially, a weapon—that can be used for good or for ill. He begged that Christian preachers start learning how to use it. From On Christian Teaching, Book 4:
(2.3) Since the art of rhetoric is about persuading people to things, whether true ones or false ones, who would dare to say that the defenders of truth should stand their ground unarmed against falsehood? That those who try to convince people of falsehoods should know how to use their opening remarks to win over the audience's goodwill, to grab their attention, to make them receptive, while defenders of truth do not know how to do this? That those who argue falsehoods know how to do so cogently, clearly, and plausibly, while defenders of truth make their case in ways too boring to listen to, too convoluted to understand, and, in the end, too distasteful to believe? That
17. S. 188.1–4 (PL 38:1003–5); my trans. On this linking of Mary and the Church, see David G. Hunter, "The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine," Church History 69 (2000): 281–303.