Tractates on the Gospel of John
INTRODUCTION 7 ran counter to his Neo-Platonic contemplative inclinations, and which weighed heavily upon him, and required great effort on his part.^^
Literary Style of the Tractates
(6) The 124 Tractates on the Gospel of John exemplify Augustine's theory of preaching which is presented in the treatise De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Instruction). The ornate, erudite, and affected style of the Second Sophistic which controlled the oratory of his times was rejected by Augustine as inappropriate for Christian preaching; yet he did not altogether discard the classical theory which was studied, particularly in the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian. That theory could provide a suitable framework for a Christian oratorical style, but there were certain conditions faced by the Christian preacher that compelled modification of the theory. For the Christian, content was of overriding importance: what was said was more significant than such things as choice of vocabulary or sentence structure or elaborate phraseology. Content had to be clear and understandable if the sermon was to teach, to exhort, or to persuade. Augustine did not reject the classical figures of speech; indeed he showed that Scripture and the earlier Fathers made use of such figures as effectively as the great Latin orators.^^ Yet he used primarily those figures which produced clarity and which were popular with his largely uneducated audiences: paratactic parallelisms, antitheses, climaxes, pithy alternations of questions
20. See Brown, Augustine, 256.
21. DDC 4.24.53. The various statements made here about Augustine's theory of Christian oratory are supported by a detailed study made in the doctoral dissertation of G. Doyle, "St. Augustine's Tractates on the Gospel of John Compared with the Rhetorical Theory of the De Doctrina Christiana," Ph.D. diss., (University of North Carolina, 1975). Cf., Dissertation Abstracts International ^J.^ (igjG) 1525-A.
22. DDC 4, passim. 23. For a good, brief account see Hamman, 231 — 234; C. Mohrmann, "Saint Augustine and the 'Eloquentia,'" Etudes sur le latin des chretiens, 1 (Rome, 1961), 351-370; and Van der Meer, 417—432.