Teaching Christianity (continued)
Now a person is all the more or the less able to speak wisely, the more or the less progress he has made in the holy scriptures. I don't mean just in reading them frequently and committing them to memory, but in understanding them well and diligently exploring their senses. There are people, after all, who read them and neglect them—read them in order to have them at their finger tips, neglect trying to understand them. Unquestionably far and away to be preferred to these are people who do not have their words at their finger tips, but can see into the heart of them with the eyes of their own hearts. But better than either is the man who can both quote them at will and understand them as they deserve.
8. For the man, therefore, who has the duty of saying wisely even what he cannot say eloquently, it is supremely necessary that he should have the words of the scriptures at his finger tips.[8] For the poorer he perceives himself to be in his own words, the richer it behooves him to be in those of scripture. In this way he can prove what he says in his own words from the words of scripture, and what carried less weight said in his own words[9] can somehow or other grow weightier with the support of that greater testimony. For though he may not be so good at pleasing his audience by the way he states his point, he will please them by proving it.
There is the man, on the other hand, who wishes to speak not only wisely but eloquently, since he will surely be of more use if he can do both. Him I much prefer to send off to read or listen to eloquent speakers and to practice imitating them, rather than instructing him to devote his time to teachers of the art of rhetoric, provided, that is, that those whom he reads or listens to are genuinely and reliably renowned for having spoken, or for speaking, wisely as well as eloquently. Those, you see, who speak eloquently are listened to with pleasure, those who speak wisely, with wholesome profit. That is why scripture does not say, "A multitude of eloquent men" but A multitude of wise men is the health of the world (Wis 6:24). Now just as bitter but wholesome things often have to be taken, so pernicious sweet things have to be shunned. But what could be better than the pleasantly wholesome, or the wholesomely pleasant? The more eagerly, after all, what pleases is sought here, the easier it is for what is wholesome to be imparted. There are, then, churchmen who have commented on the divine utterances not only wisely but also eloquently;[10] it is more a matter of there not being time enough to read them than of their not being available to those who have the will and the leisure to do so.
Examples of eloquent wisdom from biblical authors: Saint Paul
6, 9. Here, no doubt, someone may ask whether our authors, whose divinely inspired writings have provided us with a canon of the most salutary authority, are only to be called wise, or also eloquent. This is indeed a question that it is the easiest thing in the world for me to answer, and for those who agree with what I say in this matter. The fact is that where I understand these authors, it seems to me that not only could there be nothing wiser, but also nothing more eloquent. And I make bold to say that all who rightly understand what these authors are saying also thereby understand that they could not and should not have said it in the least differently. For just as one sort of eloquence goes with youth, while another suits riper years—and it should not in fact be called eloquence if it does not match the person of the speaker—so too there is a kind that becomes men thought worthy of the highest authority and in fact of being called divine. This is the style in which they spoke, and no other becomes them, nor does this one become any other persons. With them it accords perfectly, whereas the more lowly it appears, the higher does it soar above other writers, not by any kind of windiness, but by its very solidity.