Teaching Christianity
Where, however, I do not understand them, their eloquence is indeed less apparent to me, but I do not doubt that it is of the same quality as where I do understand. It was also right for this obscurity of the divine and saving utterances to be mixed in with such clear eloquence, because in order for us to make progress in our understanding we need the mental exercise of wrestling with the text as well as the intellectual satisfaction of discovering what it means.[11]
10. Here are these people, rating their style above the style of our authors because it is more inflated, not because it is grander; well, I could show them all the strengths and graces of eloquence, on which they so preen themselves, in the sacred writings of those authors, whom divine providence has provided us with, to instruct us and transfer us from this crooked age into one of blessedness.[12] But it is not what these men have in common with the orators or poets of the Gentiles that delights me more than I can say in their style of eloquence. What really amazes and astonishes me is that through another kind of eloquence of their own they employed this eloquence of ours[13] in such a way that it was neither lacking nor obtrusive in their writings, because it was important that it should be neither rejected nor paraded by them. The first would be true if they avoided it altogether, the second could be thought to be the case, if it was too easily recognized in their writings. And in those passages where it can perhaps be detected by the learned, such things are being said that the words they are said with seem to spring spontaneously from the subject matter, rather than to be contributed by the writer, so that you could almost imagine wisdom stepping out from her own house, that is from the breast of the wise man, followed by eloquence as her inseparable, even if uninvited, lady in waiting.
7, 11. Could anybody fail to see, for example, what the apostle was wishing to say here, and how wisely he said it: We glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation results in