Teaching Christianity
something emerge from our scrutiny that is not controversial, or else if it is so, let the matter be settled from the same scripture by finding and applying testimonies from anywhere else in the sacred books.
29, 40. Educated readers, however, should know that our authors used all the figures of speech, to which grammarians give the Greek name of tropes, much more freely and abundantly than people who are unfamiliar with them, and who have learned about these things in other writings, could possibly guess or believe. Still, those who know these tropes will recognize them in the holy texts, and will to some extent be helped by this knowledge in understanding them. But this is not the right place for handing them on to those who are ignorant of them; else I might seem to be teaching the art of grammar. My advice certainly is that this should be learned elsewhere, though I have already given this advice above, that is in the second book, where I was discussing what knowledge of languages is necessary.[59] Letters, after all, from which grammar gets its name—the Greeks, you see, call letters grammata—are of course signs of the sounds making up the articulated words we talk with.
Not only, though, are there examples in the divine books of all these tropes, but even the names of some of them can be read there, like allegory, enigma,[60] parable. As a matter of fact, though, practically all these tropes, which are said to be learned in the liberal art of grammar, are also to be found in the speech of people who have never taken any courses in grammar, and are quite happy with the speech of common people. Is there anybody, after all, who never says, "May you blossom like that," [61] which is the trope called metaphor? Or who does not call any pool a fish pond, even though it has no fish in it, and was not even made for fish? And yet it got its name from fish; this trope is called catachresis.
41. It would take too long to run through the rest of the tropes in this way; after all, common speech gets as far as using those which are all the more surprising, because they signify the opposite of what is said, such as the one called irony or antiphrasis. But irony indicates by the tone of voice what is intended to be understood, as when we say to a person behaving badly, "You are behaving well," whereas antiphrasis manages to signify the opposite of what it says, not by the tone of voice, but either by having its own words, which derive from the opposite meaning, like calling a grove a lucus, though it is almost devoid of lucis, light, or by saying something in that way, although it can also be said without meaning the opposite, as when we ask for something which is not there, and are told, "There's plenty," or when we show by the context of our other words that what we say is to be understood in the opposite sense, as if we were to say, "Beware of that fellow, because he's a good man."
And are there any uneducated people who do not use such expressions, though they do not have the slightest idea of what tropes are, or what they are called? The reason knowledge of them is necessary for unraveling the ambiguities of the scriptures is that when the sense of the words, if they are taken literally, is absurd, we have of course to inquire whether the passage we do not understand was said according to this or that trope; and in this way, often enough, the meaning of what was obscure is laid bare.[62]
The seven rules of Tychonius
30, 42. There was a man called Tychonius, who wrote against the Donatists in a manner that it is quite impossible to refute, and whose unwillingness to part company with them completely reveals the utter absurdity of his attachments. He composed what he called a book of Rules, because in it he worked out seven rules by which the hidden meanings of the divine scriptures might be unlocked, as with keys. The first of them he states as being "about the Lord and his body"; the second, "about the twofold body of the