My favorite part of the first reading of the Vita Martini was the preface--for the elegance of its prose, for its outrageous modesty, but above all for the light its sheds on the extreme ambivalence of early Christian writers towards literary eloquence. This discomfort with rhetoric as somehow contrary to the spirit of a gospel "proclaimed by fishermen" is everywhere in Augustine, for example, from the eloquent anti-eloquence of the Confessions to the conflicted endorsement of beautiful expression in book 4 of the De Doctrina Christiana. (Did he and S correspond? I know that Augustine and S both corresponded with Paulinus of Nola, so there's only one degree of separation, regardless.) It's interesting to wonder to what extent this distrust of "flashy" language in Augustine and Sulpicius is specifically Christian, as opposed to Roman--one thinks of Cato's "verba sequentur". As far as Sulpicius' own style, its rolling periods are unabashedly pleasing, yet without sacrificing clarity or veering into obfuscation--"integer", as he might say, "ab iis vitiis" which Latin Christian writers most feared in rhetoric.
From Sam
Sam! You've read De Doctrina Christiana?! James and I wrote an article last year on DDC. We settled on an understanding that Augustine's endorsement of beautiful expression, as you say, is geared towards the rhetoric of the late republic, and specifically that of Cicero. It rejects the flash and flair of the rhetoric of the second sophistic (so linked with pagan values and imperial propaganda) and recalls an age when a man was eloquent to the degree that he was good (an idea still present in late antiquity to a certain degree, as we read in Rutilius). Augustine makes explicit allusions praising Cicero's eloquence, in addition to imitating his style in a measurably significant way (thanks, Tesserae). But rhetoric still needed a degree of domestication to be used in Christian contexts so freely. To achieve this, we argued that Augustine figures Paul as a new Cicero, and scripture as a new model of style for Christians to imitate - all by showing how Ciceronian Paul's language is, both in its colometry, periodicity, vocabulary, and style. Augustine gives this extended colometric analysis of Paul's rhetoric, showing how excellent it is, and comparing him to Cicero, in addition to other intertextual shenagans (revolving around Cicero's metaphor of the body for eloquence) that equate Paul with Cicero. This way, Augustine gets to have his rhetoric cake and eat it too.
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