Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Preacher 131 those others be able to attack truth with fallacious arguments, while truthtellers are not strong enough either to defend truth or to refute falsehood? That those others, in order to move or force their hearers' minds into error by their speaking, know how to inspire fear, to move hearers to tears, to get them laughing or burning with enthusiasm, while truth-tellers seem slow and tepid and end up putting people to sleep? Who's so insane as to think that's right? Look, the capacity for eloquence—so very effective in persuading people to either wrong or right—is available to both sides. Why, then, do the good not acquire the skill to battle for truth, if the wicked, in order to win unjustifiable and baseless cases, usurp it on behalf of injustice and error?18
Spicy Speech
Augustine, while trained to speak in elegant, high-brow Latin, was quite willing to violate canons of proper Latinity to get his point across. Clarity was his bottom-line. He also knew that just as many people enjoy spicy food, so many in his audience enjoyed spicy speech as the favored medium for instruction. From On Christian Teaching, Book 4:
(11.26) Eloquence in teaching does not consist in speaking in such a way that we prompt a person to like what was distasteful or to do what he was reluctant to do, but in making what was obscure come clear. Yet if this is done without elegance, its benefit reaches only a few very zealous students who are anxious to know what they should learn no matter how low-brow or unpolished things are said. Once they have grasped it, they feast upon truth itself with delight. It is an outstanding quality of noble minds to love not the words themselves, but the truth within the words. Of what use is a golden key if it is unable to open what we desire? Or what objection is there to a wooden one if it can? We are asking only that what is closed be opened. But since eating and learning have some similarity to each other, food, without which we cannot live, must be spiced to satisfy the tastes of the majority.19
Rap Latin
Augustine peppered his speech with rhetorical seasonings of various sorts. Rhyme was one favorite. It pervades all his works but appears especially in his sermons. Remember that since he delivered sermons extemporaneously, his rhymes flowed extemporaneously.
18. Doc. Chr. 4.2.3 (Green, 196–98); my trans. See John C. Cavadini, "The Sweetness of the Word: Salvation and Rhetoric in Augustine's De doctrina christiana," in Arnold and Bright, De doctrina, 164–81.
19. Doc. Chr. 4.11.26 (Green, 226–28); my trans., based on Gavigan, FOTC 2:192.