Augustine's rhetorical priorities
1. Speak the truth
2. Speak with clarity
3. Speak with eloquence
If anyone can complicate these for me, I certainly welcome it. Boiled down, this is what I got from Augustine.
Does "truth" correspond to logos? I've been wondering about this because it seems to me to be so similar to how we still teach writing. We frequently want students to start with the argument. Do the research. Get the logic part down. Then we want them to focus on clarity. Then (god willing)–yes, that's a shout out to Augustine–we worry about eloquence or what I would think of as advanced style or rhetorical devices.
Audience
I was also interested in Augustine's mention of audience in book IV. Particularly, he writes:
'instructing is a matter of necessity, delighting a matter of charm, and moving [the audience] a matter of conquest' (117).
Clearly a power-over attitude.
But he also has a complex view of audience. On page 115 he writes the following:
Always assume "that our listener or disputant has the will to learn and does not lack the mental capacity to absorb such things, in whatever way they are presented by a teacher"
"Latin unless it is obscure or ambiguous, but which is used in colloquial speech in a way that avoids obscurity and ambiguity, is not used as it is used by educated people but rather as the uneducated tend to use it."
I guess what strikes me about this is that Augustine isn't concerned with pandering. Apparently, as long as you've got truth, package it however you need to in order to teach people.
I thought it was interesting how aggressive Augustine is towards... well...his former profession. Augustine taught for years before he took up the cloth, and when he stops the teaching gig he starts being a little rough to the sophists (see quote below). He advises what many people have advised in the past, which was to go and listen to people who were good at the rhetorical stuff (could stir the passions in the right way... not the bad way, of lying sophists) and learn. However, I was mighty impressed with how much credit he gives to the other pagans... all those right thinking pagans.
"It would be tedious to follow out other points, or to indicate such features in other places of the Holy Scriptures. What, if in the passages at least which I have quoted illustrative of the Apostle's eloquence, I had also wished to point out the figures of speech also taught in rhetoric? Would no serious-minded men consider that I was going too far, rather than any student, that I was satisfactory to him? All these things, when taught by professors, are esteemed of great value; they are brought at a great price, and sold with great display. Such display, even I fear to smack of, as I thus discuss these matters; but it has seemed necessary to answer the ill formed who think that our writers deserve contempt, no because they do not possess, but because they do not make display of the eloquence which the former too highly esteem."