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Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Brittany Whitstone

Brittany Whitstone — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:49:41 +0000

Augustine begins Book IV by discussing the place of pagan rhetoric in Christian teaching. He argues that although eloquence is not necessary for the Christian speaker (unlike wisdom, which is necessary), it can help the speaker relay his message more effectively. He seems to view rhetoric as primarily an addition to not only wisdom (a distinction we’re all used to at this point) but an addition to (and thus separate from) speech itself, which I find interesting. In some ways this is similar to the sorts of things that people say about “rhetoric” nowadays: all style, no substance, as though there were such a thing as speech that was not rhetorical.

On subjects we have not talked to death, I was particularly interested in the section V.8 where Augustine gestures toward intertextuality. If someone cannot speak eloquently, Augustine says, he should rely on reading scripture often so that his words intermingle with and rely on scripture for meaning and effect. In a way the speaker will draw his ethos from the other text and what he says will be a mix between the two. Augustine himself demonstrates this when he quotes scripture throughout On Christian Doctrine and interprets it with his own words.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:13:32 +0000

I find Augustine’s focus on clarity almost ironic given the current position of academia. Too many times I have been told that it is far more important to “sound” like you are making a significant statement rather than make an actually significant statement. Probably the most significant example of this is Judith Butler, who famously proclaimed that she would never write clearly because the subjects she talks about are too complicated to write clearly about. I have always distained this attitude in academia that we have to make our writing incomprehensible to the layman, so I was very happy to see that Augustine sided with me on this issue. In my work, I notice that many of my students tried at the beginning of the semester to make their papers “sound” intelligent through the use of complicated jargon or other stupid measures to seem intelligent without actually being intelligent, so I always point them towards a directive I found amidst reading some papers from Isaac Asimov, in which he always tried to write as clearly as possible, and make his writing as close to perfect clarity as he could without sacrificing his message. This has become my philosophy on writing as well, as I refuse to abide pompous writing in my own work and the work of my students. Well done, Augustine.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Christopher Simpson

Christopher Simpson — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:39:32 +0000

Book Four of Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine concerns itself with the actual teaching of doctrine to others rather than the interpretation of it. I thought it was very interesting that Augustine asserted at the beginning of this section that he was not going to be teaching the rules of rhetoric. This is also strange since he asserted that knowledge of rhetoric was important for teachers of the church because it was not good for false teachers to manipulate rhetoric to deceive while the teachers of truth were stumbling over their words. He asserted that such things could be learned outside of the church, but it made me wonder whether teachers of rhetoric or rhetoric schools had a bad reputation among Christians at that time.

Augustine offers as an alternative to learning rhetoric from one of the outside teachers to instead learn it from the scriptures and some of the church’s prominent teachers’ writings. He asserts that in this way one can learn both eloquence and wisdom. And, of course, in order to prove the scriptures capable of doing this, Augustine provides several examples from the texts to show that they reflect many of the desired attributes of rhetoric. In the course of this he made several references to some of the elements of speech that I remember reading about in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. So I suppose despite Augustine’s avowal not to teach any rules of rhetoric he still couldn’t resist putting some of it in.

Overall, I felt that Augustine was more concerned with the manner of presentation of a teacher than getting down into the basics of how to construct their speech. He refers to the subdued, moderate, and grand styles and asserted that the manner of presentation must be suited both to the audience and to the topic at hand. Yet despite the time Augustine spends giving examples of each of these types from the scriptural texts, Church teachers, and from his own experience, he ultimately asserts that the best form of eloquence, or what one could also say is the element that will contribute most to the speaker’s ethos, is that of a holy life which will say just as much as a speech. I think this is probably why Augustine in this book has derided the ideas of teaching grammar and rhetoric in the church because for him, the whole point is to help someone be a good Christian and rhetoric, interpretation, and teaching are all just means to that end.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Janet Ramirez

Janet Ramirez — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:09:37 +0000

In book four of St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, Augustine opens up with his views on Rhetoric in accordance with Christian Teaching. Augustine states that Rhetoric has its uses but, that he had no intention of explaining the rules of rhetoric in this particular text, mainly due to the fact that the audience can go else where to learn rhetoric and should be learned if you have nothing better to do, are a boy, or you have no intention into going into the church. He also says, that rhetoric can easily be learned on ones own by reading and being around those who speak correctly. Now, Augustine doesn’t give up on the matter entirely. He builds on his criticism of rhetoric and focuses on what he calls, eloquence. He states that it is essential that one has eloquence with WISDOM. Eloquence is useless without Wisdom. I found this extremely interesting due to the fact that it fits somewhat with my topic of News appealing to a younger audience. Young adults are not idiots, we can appreciate eloquence in many authority figures (presidential candidates, Bill O’Reily, FOXNEWS, etc.) it’s actually an essential skill for news anchors in society today. However, as John Stewart said in an interview with Bill O’Reily, news today is horrible and has a large ignorant viewing audience due to laziness in presenting information CORRECTLY by doing their research and matching their “eloquence”, to use Augustine’s term, with well researched and solid facts. Of course Bill O’Reily didn’t like this response and retaliated by saying that John Stewart was simply a comedian. However, John Stewart has an eloquence uniquely his own that appeals to a young audience and pairs it with wisdom.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Joel Morrow

Joel Morrow — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:45:06 +0000

I particularly enjoyed Augustine’s juxtaposition of eloquence and wisdom in this book. For him, eloquence is dressing up a statement, making it interesting or engaging, and pleasing the audience with it. In other words, engaging in what he calls secular rhetoric. Wisdom, contrastingly, is saying something of depth and meaning, something which will interest people who are there to be taught and not those who are there to be persuaded. A lot of Augustine’s prose is rather dry, as I would assume he wrote meaning to teach, and not to entertain and therefore did not care how “abjectly or rudely” he presented his discussion as long as the reader makes the effort to engage with it. Still, he comes up with quick little metaphors and bits of humor. When he says “Of what use is a golden key if it will not open what we wish?” he is making a pithy and powerful interrogative (136). Like Aristotle’s mistrust of compound words and flowery language in general, Augustine is cautioning against the practice of saying too much and meaning too little. The metaphor he uses fits well with his discussion of science in book three, as it again implies that truth or wisdom is not created, but hidden and waiting to be discovered.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Jay Ewald

Jay Ewald — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:40:37 +0000

How should one teach? In book four of St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, he begins by stating that there will be no instructions as to the rhetorical rules in any of his writing. Not that they are useless, but rather that if one wants to learn them they should go elsewhere. The reasoning for this is because, according to St. Augustine, it is more important to be eloquent and rhetoric is for children.
Augustine says that we learn through observation and imitation and should seek out the eloquent in order to learn to be eloquent, but as a teacher it is important to tailor the lesson to the needs of the individual so that you can clarify any uncertainties through the use of examples from the Scriptures. It is better to speak wisely if you cannot speak with eloquence and there are specific kinds of eloquence that are dependant of the genre and audience. He wishes that one would teach delight and move, but what I found the most interesting in this part of the book was when Augustine speaks on speaking of grand things, but not necessarily in grand terms.
He states, “Nevertheless, although our teacher should speak of great things, he should not always speak about them in the grand manner, but in a subdued manner when he teaches something, in a moderate manner when he condemns something or praises something. But when something is to be done and he is speaking to those who ought to do it but do not wish to do it, then those great things should be spoken in the grand manner in a way appropriate to the persuasion of their minds,” (145). Augustine goes on to explain that one might speak of the important in a diminished way while attempting to teach, praise something in a moderate way and use a grand manner when trying to convert, “but no one should think that it is contrary to theory to mix these three manners; rather, speech should be varied with all types of style in so far as this may be done appropriately,” (158).
Many comics mix their own styles in order to teach, entertain and/or to create dissonance to move. Two good examples are R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Both men use the interplay of art and language to create a disjunction in the mind of the reader. Crumb addresses moderate to grand topics of American society in the 60s and 70s and a moderate to subdued manner while Spiegelman uses the subdued to address the grand while occasionally interjecting the grand to address the grand. How do they do this? Frank L. Cioffi states in his article Disturbing Comics published in the book The Language of Comics, “Crumb’s comic books contain images that resonate with iconography of 1950s advertising and children’s cartoons, but the stories they tell and the words being used to tell them go in directions that oppose the often conventionalized, homey, if sometimes wackily exaggerated images,” (111). An example of this can be seen in his stories about the Blow family, a moderate, middle-class family from middle-America. They are perceived as generic and wholesome through the images Crumb renders, but he disturbs the reader’s thoughts of the family when the text states their enjoyment of incest. Spiegelman similarly disrupts the reader by using cartoony animals in order to depict the events of the holocaust. This creates a disjunction in the reader that Cioffi claims diminishes after a while. When the reader becomes desensitized to Spiegelman’s holocaust mice, he jars them once again “to remind readers of the kind of double-think they are engaged in, to increase the level of disturbance, Spiegelman breaks the imaginative world by inserting photographic images,” (117)
Both artists manage to teach the grand by mixing their methods and creating a certain disharmony between the words and images that are not always on the grand scale, but rather by subduing that shock and awe of one while using the other in a moderate or, on the occasion of Spiegelman’s photos, grand manner.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Jacob McKeever

Jacob McKeever — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:13:32 +0000

A lot of Book IV was concerned with technique and style. He made a lot of points that seemed similar to Quintilian and Aristotle, and a lot of these points seemed fairly intuitive. For example, he writes about fitting your style to the audience in that it is better to be understood in lieu of eloquence in some cases, especially when giving a speech as opposed to having a conversation. Obviously, there is a lot of Platonic ideas in this work as a whole, but I really picked up this Platonic vibe in his elaboration on eloquence.

First, he makes the point that eloquence should be used in speech in order to persuade, but his requirement is that rhetoric be used for Good. This should remind all of us of both the Gorgias and Phaedrus dialogues. His second point is that the best way to “learn” eloquence is by imitation. He writes that “For those with acute and eager minds more readily learn eloquence by reading and hearing the eloquent than by following the rule of eloquence” (119). We can easily relate this back to Plato’s Ion and his ideas of forms—poetic art consists of imitations of imitations, all copied from an abstract perfect form.

He moves on with an example of eloquent speech from the Apostle to Corinthians. In concluding analysis of the speech he writes that “For these words were not devised by human industry, but were poured forth from the divine mind…” (132). Augustine clearly seems to point out that eloquence’s “innateness” really lies in a sort of gift from the divine. He solidifies this when he writes “Take no thought how or what to speak: for it shall be given you in that hour what to speak. For it is not you that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you” (140). We have seen this before in Ion when Plato determined that poetic art was a divine madness. But there is an inherent problem with this idea of the divine gift of speech, which Augustine actually poses and then attempts to answer, in that it seems to indicate that there is no need for teachers. He compares this idea to praying in that if you believe that speech is given by the divine, then you must also question praying because “for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask him” (141). I say he attempts to reconcile this issue because I’m not sure about his answer in that he seems to simply indicate that teachers teach with the “assistance [that] is granted by God” (142).

I particularly enjoyed the beginning and ending of Book IV in that Augustine comes across as rather humorous: I’m writing what I want to write about (i.e. he is not writing to give readers the rules of rhetoric), and if you think this book is too long, and didn’t like it, then you “should not complain about its length” (169). I’m not sure if the humor was intentional, but it was amusing to me.

Comment on On Christian Doctrine, Book 4 by Sarah Visser

Sarah Visser — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 22:50:31 +0000

I found many things in Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine book 4 that connect with my paper on students composing endings/conclusions/epilogues for their own essays.

Augustine speaks much in this section of teaching, delighting and persuading. Of persuasion he says that “instruction should come before persuasion,” which points to me of the structure of student essays. Student essays should instruct–prove their argument–before they persuade at the very end to have a strong ending. Their ending which persuades is, Augustine says, “victory, for people may be taught and pleased and still not consent. And of what use are the first two if the third does not follow?” (4.XII). This means for my argument that students should often include in their conclusions persuasion and convincing others to come to their own views/make some type of application based on agreeing with the argument of the essay. These are two things that are often taught when teaching conclusion writing to students. Augustine continues in the same vein when he says that the speaker should not be “content with its end that the audience may be pleased, but rather using them in such a way that they assist the good which we wish to convey by persuasion” (4.XXV). An academic argument is not complete without persuasion, pleasing talk is not enough, and the ending of a short student essay is often a good place to put the final push for persuasion.

I see more support here for the idea for my seminar paper that student need to read lots of high quality endings to essays before they are able to write their own high quality conclusions. Augustine says that “men [are] . . . made eloquent . . . by having them read . . . the expressions of the eloquent and imitate them in so far as they are able to follow them” (4.III). I can argue that students should read good essay conclusions and then try to imitate the good qualities of these conclusions when the students write their own.

Augustine’s three styles seem like they could overlap somewhat with Aristotle’s logos, ethos and pathos. The grand style, which “is forceful with emotions of the spirit,” seems similar to pathos (4.XX). The subdued style which needs “evidence as proof” seems to be logos (4.XXI). The moderate style, however, seems to have nothing to do with ethos. The choice of which style to use when does seem to be the ethos of the speaker, which Aristotle says when he says, “no one should think that it is contrary to theory to mix these three manners; rather, speech should be varied with all types . . . appropriately” (4. XXI).