Augustine and Emily: On Virtues and Explanation

After reading about the early years of Aurelius Augustinus, who came to be known as St. Augustine of Hippo, I find it fascinating how he applies his rhetorical training to his religious documents. While he clearly points out that he is not planning to enumerate on the rules of rhetoric, he certainly alludes to and uses the method by which he thinks such rules are established. He talks about emulation. Here I gather a dual meaning in both emulation of the character of a man as well as the way he presents his oratory. I am not certain whether Augustine was considered primarily a speaker or a writer. He writes about speaking, but our textbooks emphasize his written work (Bizzell and Herzberg, pp. 382-383). Perhaps, he was more of an orator in his earlier years of teaching. This would be fitting considering his rhetorical education in Carthage, and the emphasis on speaking from Greek and Roman texts. After his conversion to Christianity, he seems to have focused more on documentation, considering he now had much greater access to scripture. He lived a decently long life of 77 years, marked by consistent passion across many fronts (Herrick, pp. 125, 128). I would imagine that Plato would approve of Augustine's commitment to absolute truth from divinity while Cicero (through the character Crassus in Of Oratory) might praise Augustine for his natural gifts that were further polished through training (though Augustine might have claimed that they were much improved through his conversion). As I think about Augustine's discussion on eloquence and wisdom, I'm also drawn back to the long explanations of virtues from Aristotle.

We can see the great recycling that occurs as new authors attempt to explain rhetoric during subsequent times and ages. I think it is fair to say that we do likewise. In fact, in this course, especially in writing for our three projects, it's almost a game to try to apply the rules and/or exemplars of specific rhetoricians. For example, I've been trying to come up with enthymeme in Aristotelian style for my second project while hoping to create a metaphor that refutes Plato’s mind/body battle within my third project. My examples have ranged from boring to ridiculous, and in doing such practices, I realize the challenge of explaining something so non-containable like rhetoric or philosophy. So what do I turn to? Well, just like Augustine states, I turned to examples. Augustine looked to speeches and discourses to learn about eloquence. I have been turning to Dr. Ken Baake’s book on metaphor to gather examples of what works and what becomes more problematic. As eloquence is to wisdom for Augustine, metaphors are to explanation for me (see Bizzell and Herzberg, Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, p. 388). Writers then and writers now are often looking not only to explain something, but also to emphasize the positive or negative qualities that such an item or concept carry (in the writer's opinion of course). In my writing and in his, we both seem to be looking for the right combination of virtues. For Augustine, who lived during the time of further establishment of what liberal arts meant (consider that Martianus Capella published his work The Marriage of Philology and Mercury the year before Augustine died), he was also versed in what it meant to have a right combination of learned subjects. As an example of one such subject, Augustine pulls rhetoric into scriptural examination and missionary-like expounding (Herrick, pp. 125, 130). He does this by explaining to his readers how delicious the two are together. I think his quote regarding wisdom and eloquence, virtues which he certainly uses as he pulls together rhetoric and scripture for the purpose of teaching Christian concepts, is also appropriate here: “But as often even bitter medicine must be taken, so always harmful sweets must be avoided. Still, what is better than wholesome sweets or sweet wholesomeness [read, in this case: rhetoric and scripture]? For the greater the desire of sweets [read: the pleasing way in which rhetoric convinces and converts] in such a case, the more readily does their wholesomeness [read: the Gospel] prove beneficial” (Bizzell and Herzberg, p. 389, Herrick, p. 126). It becomes ever more evident how easily we can perform a mental trackback as we read the actual works of these rhetoricians.