In this thoughtful study, Paul Kolbet sets out to chart the course of Augustine's thinking about the value of rhetoric for the teacher whose very aim was to direct attention away from the seductions of speech and toward higher goods whose contemplation might cure souls debilitated by too much commerce with the sensible order. Kolbet identifies the origins of Augustine's position(s) on rhetoric's alliance with philosophy's therapeutic goals in traditions that first took shape in the works of Plato but locates the direct sources of Augustine's inspiration in the philosophical works of Cicero and the preaching of Ambrose. The Confessions provide Kolbet with crucial insights into Augustine's early and Manichaean years but, with Augustine's retirement to Cassiciacum, Kolbet's study moves steadily forward on an advancing tide of contemporary letters and treatises. Eventually that surge washes up on the vast and still exotic shore of Augustine's sermons. From the dialogues composed at Verecundus's villa in the autumn of 386, through treatises written subsequently at Milan, Rome, and Thagaste, to such mature productions of Augustine's episcopate as the De doctrina Christiana and De civitate Dei, Kolbet traces the evolution of Augustine's abiding concern to understand how words, spoken and written, might serve philosophy's mission to lead its adherents beyond the visible to the intelligible realm—or eventually to a richer appreciation of the Christian life. Yet, beneath the shifts in Augustine's thinking over the years, Kolbet persuasively argues, lies his steady conviction that however limited rhetoric's epistemic capacity might be, its psychogogical necessity was “inescapable” (124). Simply put, Kolbet's study is a careful excursion through an undulating terrain shaped by “Augustine's reception and transformation of classical traditions of philosophical therapy” (198).

The book's claims, as well as its eight chapters, pivot around the period of seven years bracketed by Augustine's arrival in Milan in 384 and the period of monastic otium at Thagaste that ended in 391. During these years Augustine produced the series of treatises that yield our best evidence for his absorption and readjustment of classical theories of rhetoric and curative speech. The profound influences of Neoplatonism and Ambrose would inspire Cassiciacum's dialogues as well as the De vera religione, composed in North Africa just prior to his ordination. The former works reveal Augustine's development of an unmistakably Christian philosophical stance that nonetheless still privileged mastery in the liberal arts as the pathway from verba to res and toward the vita beata; while the latter treatise, Kolbet shows, first asserted the preeminence of Christian religious rites by closely aligning their aims with the “rhetoric of the incarnation” that Augustine perceived in the created order and whose contemplation through the lens of Christian scripture offered, he now believed, “a kind of temporal therapy” (114). Thus, Augustine's Milanese Platonism, buttressed now by his exegesis of Genesis, began to embrace more readily Christianity's scriptural and liturgical dimensions, better preparing him for the altered relationship to the ecclesial community that his imminent ordination would entail.

These crucial developments in Augustine's thought, painstakingly presented, are prefaced by several chapters that first survey the conglomerate of ideas about therapeutic speech inherited by Augustine and then consider Augustine's early engagement, both direct and indirect, with that tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 highlight the importance of Plato and Cicero in this regard. The former, especially in the Phaedrus and the Republic, provided the arguments and the imagery (notably in the allegories of the charioteer and the cave) that would long help others to redeem a maligned rhetoric for philosophical ends. The latter, encountered by Augustine in the Hortensius, would not only famously first summon the aspiring North African rhetor to the philosophic life but also lay the foundations of Augustine's lifelong commitment to the use of “wise speech made persuasive through rhetoric” (145). Moreover, these messages would reverberate in other Latin writers known to Augustine (Seneca, for example) along with the doctrine that all speech, to be persuasive, had to be tuned to the ears of the audience. The bishop's Confessions, though perhaps at times too readily trusted, necessarily serve to illuminate the young Augustine's early formation in the philosophic life and his troubled relationship with word-craft and his profession. Following his ordination as priest, however, Kolbet can effectively complement Augustine's more confident advocacy of the value of belief and scriptural study for Christian progress, especially as those claims are advanced in the De utilitate credendi and De catechizandis rudibus as well as the De doctrina Christiana, with the evidence provided by Augustine's homilies. Scrutinized in the context of Augustine's determination to offer his convalescing audience healing medicine, it becomes increasingly clear, as Kolbet argues, that any full understanding of the structure, exegetical strategies, and social agenda of Augustine's seemingly artless sermons must take serious account of the psychogogic aims that informed his public speaking.

Finally, well-known controversies, Pelagianism and Donatism, for example, also appear in these pages, their debates about boundaries closely keyed to Augustine's perceptions of pride and the soul's debility. So, too, do familiar tensions—between rhetoric and truth, between worldly success and spiritual fulfillment, and between the very classicism that Augustine “endeavored to qualify” (198) and his acceptance of classical rhetoric's necessity. Viewed in new perspective, these themes add further depth to a study that, although at times held down by the steady tow of texts read closely and in series, consistently yields fresh insights. In sum, Kolbet's study, gathering in multiple stands of intellectual and social history, resituates significant elements of Augustine's thought within what was then a still vital stream of ancient rumination on the healing power of words while also revealing the limits of those traditions for a bishop who remained convinced that full convalescence was reserved for another realm.