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Words and the Word: Augustine’s preached theology of language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2025

Adam Ployd Open the ORCID record for Adam Ployd [Opens in a new window]
Adam Ployd*
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Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
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Abstract

What can we learn from Augustine’s preaching about the nature and purpose of preaching? In this paper, I will argue that in his preaching Augustine presents to his audience a theology of words and the Word that achieves what it declares; that is to say, rather than a mere doctrinal curiosity, Augustine’s preached theology of words and the Word accomplishes a homiletical goal that transcends the transmission of an idea and, instead, guides the faithful listener’s heart towards the eternal Word of God through the temporal words of the preacher and the written words of scripture. To put it another way, Augustine’s theology of words and the Word is both a theological claim and a practical pastoral tool.

Keywords

AugustinelanguagepreachingTractates on Johnthe Word

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Research Article
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Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , February 2025 , pp. 12 - 23
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Whenever I teach Augustine, someone inevitably raises a concern about the doctrine of predestination and the work of ministry. One common version of this question is, ‘If God does all the work of conversion, why did Augustine preach so much? What’s the point if God is going to save whom God will save anyhow?’ The answer, of course, has something to do with the mystery of how God chooses to work upon and draw our hearts and minds towards God. But something more needs to be said about why exactly preaching is a fitting way for this to happen.

Much ink has been spilled on the theology of rhetoric and preaching as found in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana and implemented in his sermons.Footnote 1 But what can we learn from Augustine’s preaching about the nature and purpose of preaching?Footnote 2 In this paper, I will argue that in his preaching, Augustine presents to his audience a theology of words and the Word that achieves what it declares; that is to say, rather than a mere doctrinal curiosity, Augustine’s preached theology of words and the Word accomplishes a homiletical goal that transcends the transmission of an idea and, instead, guides the faithful listener’s heart towards the eternal Word of God through the temporal words of the preacher and the written words of scripture.Footnote 3 To put it another way, Augustine’s theology of words and the Word is both a theological claim and a practical pastoral tool.

To support and clarify this claim, I will focus on Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John, analysing loci where he describes the way spoken words ‘sound and immediately pass away’.Footnote 4 This observation of the spoken word’s temporal materiality supplies an analogical contrast to the eternally abiding Word of God.Footnote 5 This contrast then becomes the basis for a journey from the material to the immaterial, and from the created to the uncreated, as Augustine guides his audience from the spoken word to the inner word, and from the inner word to the divine Word. In some ways, this is a well-trod aspect of Augustine’s theology.Footnote 6 But, by reading about words sounding and passing away in the context of a sermon, we can gain a greater appreciation for how Augustine’s theology of language undergirds his own use of language as a theological and pastoral tool.

Ephemera

If one were to synthesise and systematise synchronically Augustine’s preaching on the topic of words and the Word – as I intend to do here – the first ‘moment’ in his theological movement is an acknowledgement of the limitations of spoken words. As someone trained in and who himself trained others in the art of persuasive speaking, Augustine knows not only the power of words but also their limitations, specifically their ephemerality. As he says in the first homily on John, ‘Words, through being spoken every day, have become vile to us, because they sound and then pass away, they have become vile to us’.Footnote 7 Or, as he says in homily fourteen, ‘We speak words that fly off and pass away; as soon as your word sounds from your mouth, it passes away; it brings forth a sound, and then passes away into silence’.Footnote 8 Spoken human words, as powerful as they are, are inherently part of this created, material world, in which things come to be and pass away. Spoken words may seem immaterial, even if created, but they are not: they involve the exhalation of breath and the vibration of the air, making them invisible, yes, but all too material. And this materiality entails spoken words’ temporality, too. At one point in time, the breath begins and the air starts to vibrate and at another point, the breath and vibration cease, the ear of the listener receiving aural stimulation for but a passing moment.

This created, material, temporal limitation provides Augustine with his first contrast between our words and God’s Word: the Father does not speak his Word with breath, in time, or even in a language. God’s word is eternal, never coming to be nor passing away, but eternally ‘spoken’ in a way distinct from all human speech:

For who speaks in the way that the Word speaks which was in the beginning with God? Do not consider these words and from these words which you are accustomed to try to measure the Word which is God…. You recall us to your way of speaking, and you say to yourself: ‘What’s a [mere] word? What’s so great about a word? It sounds and passes away; beating the air, it strikes the ear, and afterward it is no more’. But listen still: ‘The Word was with God’; it was abiding (manebat), not passing away after sounding.Footnote 9

This eternal ‘abiding’ is what distinguishes the divine Word from spoken human words. Therefore, contemplation of the limitations of spoken human words can apophatically lead the soul to ponder the Word that is not spoken in space and time. ‘God was never without the Word, because the Word abides, not passing away. [The Word] is God, not a sound by which heaven and earth were made, not a sound that passed away with the things that were made upon the earth’.Footnote 10 Similarly, Augustine has Christ speak prosopopoeiatically, ‘I am from [the Father], but as a word comes from the one whose word it is, not one that sounds and passes away, but one that abides with the one speaking and draws the one hearing’.Footnote 11 I will return to this brief passage later, as it suggests not only the negative analogy based on the coming to be and passing away of spoken human words but also a rhetorical sensibility about the purpose not only of human words but also of the divine Word to persuade. For now, though, I want to highlight something else this sentence hints at: a word that abides with the speaker.

Abiding

While meditating on the limitations of spoken human words that come to be and pass away is the first step in Augustine’s theology of words and the Word, he does not leave his readers or listeners there; he does not rest in the gulf between human and divine speech but identifies a sort of middle ground that can provide a more positive analogy: the internal, immaterial word of the human heart.

There is also a word that remains within the human person, for [only] the sound comes out of the mouth. There is the word which is truly spoken spiritually, that which you understand from the sound but which is not itself the sound … Therefore, whatever things are said and then pass away are sounds, letters, and syllables. This word that sounds passes away; yet what the sound signified abides both in the cogitation of the one who spoke and in the understanding of the hearer; this is what abides when the sounds passes away.Footnote 12

This inner word is the immaterial idea that transcends language, even language in thought. This inner word does not sound in the air and then pass away; rather, it abides within the speaker and, if the spoken word is effective, within the hearer, well beyond the cessation of airy vibrations of sound.

This inner word, then, in its immaterial abiding, provides a solid foundation for ascending in contemplation to the divine Word and its eternal abiding within the Godhead, especially as the Word is understood to be borne by the Father. Returning again to the words that come to be and pass away, Augustine affirms, ‘It is not thus that he is the Word of the Father; it is not thus that he is the Word, which does not pass away in its sounding but which abides by being born’.Footnote 13 This idea that the Father’s eternal speaking of the abiding divine Word is a form of ‘birth’ or of the Word being ‘begotten’ lines up well with how he elsewhere describes the inner human word, contrasting the latter in turn with the ephemeral words of human speech:

Consider your heart… When you conceive the word which you will bring forth, then, you wish to say a thing, and the conception of that thing is already a word in your heart; it has not come forth, but it has already been born in the heart and abides that it might come forth… Therefore, when you have in your heart the word that you are going to speak and it is with [apud] you,Footnote 14 and this concept is something spiritual (for just as your soul is spirit, so also the word which you have conceived is spirit; for it has not yet taken on sound so that it would be divided into syllables, but it abides in the conception of the heart and in the perception of the mind), similarly God brought forth the Word, that is, he begot the Son. And, indeed, you begot a word in your heart within time; God, outside of time, begot the Son through whom all times were created.Footnote 15

The conception of an internal word, then, not only helps us to contemplate the Father’s eternal speaking of the divine Word but also aids our ruminations on the eternal begetting of the Son, a birth differentiated from our inner linguistic birth by the Word’s begetting occurring beyond the bounds of time.

Further, Augustine compares the inner word to a plan in the heart, again providing an analogical path to contemplation of the divine Word: ‘If you are able to have a word in your heart, like a plan born in your mind, so that your mind might give birth to a plan, that plan is like the child of your mind, like the son of your heart’.Footnote 16 This internal human plan of the heart can only be recognised by the works it produces, such as a beautiful statue (more on that later). ‘Therefore’, Augustine continues:

if a human plan is lauded on account of some great structure, do you want to see how the Lord Jesus Christ is the plan of God, that is, the Word of God? Attend to the structure of this world; see what has been made through the Word, and then you will be able to consider what the Word is like. Attend to these two parts of the world, heaven and earth: Who will explicate in words the splendor of the heavens? Who will explicate in words the fecundity of the earth? Who can worthily praise the changing seasons? Who can worthily praise the power in a seed? … therefore, from this structure, turn your mind to what the Word must be like through whom it was made.Footnote 17

If an internal human word-qua-plan is recognised and understood by what it produces, so should the divine Word be contemplated according to what has been created and sustained through it. Yet, while a panegyric might be composed for an impressive sculpture, no human rhetoric can encompass the mystery of the world let alone the Word through whom it was made.

Conveyance

There is, of course, a crucial relationship between these two human words, the inner and the spoken. The latter is an expression of the former, an effort to make the inscrutable mind of one subject perceptible to that of another:

Within yourself, O Human, when there is a word in your heart, it is something other than a sound; but the word which is within you, so that it might pass to me, seeks a sound like a vehicle. Therefore, it takes on a sound, places itself somehow in the vehicle, journeys through the air, comes to me, and does not leave you. Yet the sound, in order to reach me, passes from you and does not remain with me. Therefore, is it not the case that the word that was in your heart did not perish when the sound perished? You said what you were thinking; and so that what was hidden within you might come to me, you sounded out syllables; the sound of syllables led your thought to my ear, and through my ear your thought came into my heart, while the intermediary sound passed away; but that word which took on sound was with you before you made a sound.Footnote 18

We see here the contrast between the inner word which abides and the spoken word which passes away. And we see the hope of intersubjectivity, understood as the aspiration to have the same inner word conveyed to the mind of another, the immaterial transmitted by the material. At the end of this long passage, Augustine offers a hint at the theological significance of this observation: ‘Attend to this, whoever you are, you examiner of words. You demean the Word of God, you who do not comprehend human words!’Footnote 19

Given this admonition, where are our minds to go in light of this understanding of linguistic conveyance in regard to the eternal speaking of the divine Word? Does the phenomenon of human verbal communication tell us anything about how the Father speaks to the Son the very Word that the Son is? Augustine suggests that it does, though by way of contrast rather than similarity:

Therefore, when [the Gospel] adds, ‘that which I say, I say just as the Father spoke to me’, we must not interpret ‘[the Father] spoke to me’ as if the Father spoke a word to the only Word, nor that the Word of God was in need of the words of God. Thus, the Father spoke to the Son, just as he gave life to the Son, not what he did not know or did not have but what the Son himself is. Yet what is this – ‘Just as he spoke to me, so I speak’ – if not ‘I speak the truth’? Thus the [Father] spoke as truthful, the [Son] as the Truth. But the truthful begot the Truth.Footnote 20

The concept of material conveyance of an internal word to another, separate subject is completely alien to the Trinitarian mode of being. In a sense, the Father’s speaking to the Son is synonymous with his speaking the Word who is the Son, that is, synonymous with the begetting of the Son that is more akin to the conception of an internal word in the human heart, prior to all physical speech. This results in what we may conceive of as a perfect intersubjectivity that transcends created human possibilities because there is no distinction between the Word the Father speaks and the Word that the Son is.

Augustine articulates the same point by returning to the idea of the inner word as a plan. Here he contrasts how a human father might communicate a plan to his son with how the Father communicates his plan to the Son who is that very plan:

[Between] the one speaking and the one hearing, an articulated sound flies, a sound which is not you and which is not him. The sound which exited from your mouth, reverberating through the air, touched the ear of your son, and, filling his sense of hearing, brought your thoughts to his heart; therefore, these words are not you yourself nor are they your son himself. A sign has been given by your spirit to your son’s spirit, and that sign is neither your spirit nor your son’s spirit, but something different.Footnote 21

Here Augustine points to the key difference between the conveyance of human words and the speaking of the divine Word. Human intersubjectivity must be mediated by material signs and, if those signs function effectively, the inner word of one person is able to be impressed upon the heart of another. But those material words are distinct from the inner word of one’s spirit.

This distinction, of course, does not hold for the persons of the Trinity precisely because the Son is the very Word that the Father speaks to Him:

Are we to think that this is the way in which the Father spoke with the Son? Were there words in between God and the Word? How could this be? For whatever the Father wished to say to the Son, if he should wish to say it with a word, given that the Son himself is the Word of the Father, would he ever use a word to speak to the Word? … Was some sound like a kind of temporal and inconstant creature going to exit from the mouth of the Father and strike the ear of the Son? … Remove all bodily things and look upon something simple if you would be simple.Footnote 22

We can see clearly, then, the negative analogical work accomplished by contemplation not only of spoken words or internal words but also of the relationship between the two. After all, the purpose of spoken words is to convey the internal thoughts or desires of one person to another. But that presumes a created, material context in which human subjects are separated by space and time, their hearts inscrutable to one another but through the mediation of frail and fallible human signs. These created limitations do not obtain for the Trinity, and, therefore, intratrinitarian speech entails a more immediate – if even that word is appropriate – relationship between the Father’s thought and the Son’s being, such that, unlike our spoken words, the Father’s speaking to the Son is constitutive of the Son’s identity as the Father’s Word itself.

Sacred text

A theme running throughout Augustine’s preaching on words and the Word is the limitation of spoken words. Though he posits the possibility of the material conveyance of our inner, immaterial words, he places that conveyance squarely in the realm of coming to be and passing away, a created reality that suggests the frailty of human speech and, as he has strongly argued elsewhere, its unreliability. After all, a human father might communicate his plan for a house to his son for the latter to construct, yet there is no guarantee that what the son understands has any resemblance to what the father conceived. Yet, Augustine himself is working to communicate something through his own spoken words, something inspired by the reading and hearing of scripture, itself a compendium of word signs believed by Augustine and his audience to convey the mind of God – in one way or another. How can scripture and preaching be reliable vehicles of salvation if they are composed of such imperfect material?Footnote 23

I begin with scripture. The homilies under consideration are sequential treatments of the Gospel of John. Therefore, scripture and its communication lie at their heart. Not surprisingly, then, Augustine brings his theology of words and the Word to bear upon his theology of scripture and its inspiration. Indeed, in the first homily, Augustine examines the lofty heights to which the mind of the evangelist ascends in order to proclaim the mystery of the eternal Word, becoming, as it were, the mountains to which we look for help:

When you raise your hearts to the scriptures, when you hear the Gospel being read out loud, saying, ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’, and everything else that was read, you should understand that you have lifted your eyes to the mountains. For unless the mountains were saying these things, you would not find anything to contemplate. Therefore, your help comes from the mountains, so that you might hear these things. But you are not yet able to understand what you hear. Call upon the help of the Lord, who made heaven and earth, because, though the mountains are able to speak, they on their own are not able to illuminate because they themselves have been illuminated by hearing.Footnote 24

Augustine here provides an important caveat for the ability of scripture to communicate the truth: scripture by itself, as a collection of written signs, cannot illuminate the truth to us. No matter how holy the words of the evangelist, no matter how high his own initiation into the mysteries of God, the reader or hearer of scripture can only be illuminated by the one who first illuminated the Gospel writer:

Brothers, it was from there that John himself who said these things received them – John, who reclined upon the Lord’s breast, and from the Lord’s breast he imbibed what he would give us to drink. But he gave us words to drink. So, you must grasp the understanding [of those words] from where the one who gave you to drink first drank.Footnote 25

We may, then, understand scripture as a continuation of the incarnation, in a sense. Because when he took on flesh, the Word spoke in created, material words:

The Truth itself speaks as it was spoken to; but, to those who understand it teaches that it was born. Yet so that humans might believe what they were not able to understand, words sounded from a mouth of flesh, and then were gone; the flying words made noise, for a brief moment of time, but the things themselves of which the sounds are signs, these things were somehow brought over into the memory of the one who heard them, and they have even come to us through letters which are visible signs.Footnote 26

The letters of scripture are faithful records of the created words that Christ spoke in order to teach the truth to us. To put it another way, ‘Since, therefore, the Son is the Word of God, and since the Son spoke to us not his word but the Word of the Father, he who spoke the Word of the Father wished to speak himself to us’.Footnote 27 But Augustine is still sceptical about the ability of even so faithful of words to bring about such understanding on their own. And, in the end, the material signs of scripture and the spoken words even of Christ himself are not the primary way in which the Word speaks to us: ‘The Truth does not speak in this way. It speaks interiorly to understanding minds. It instructs without sound. It pours forth with an intelligible light’.Footnote 28 We see here, therefore, an echo of Augustine’s early work on language, the De Magistro, in which the fallibility of human language is overcome by Christ, the inner teacher, speaking directly to the heart of one who would understand and recognise the truth. The eternal Word speaks himself to us through the spoken words of the human Christ as recorded in the holy words of scripture, but he does so ultimately through the direct illumination of our hearts.

Holy speech

If the Gospel is the written, linguistic record of the Word’s self-speaking through the incarnation, then preaching, inasmuch as it points to scripture or to that to which scripture points, is another key verbal vehicle for conveying that same Word.

Therefore, the Word is both God and the Word of a stable doctrine, not sounding through syllables and flying away, but abiding with the Father; but to this abiding doctrine let us be converted by the persuasion of transient sound. For this sound, which passes away, does not call us to things that pass away. We are being persuaded so that we might love God. All this that I have said was by way of syllables; they reverberated, striking the air, so that they might arrive at your sense of hearing, and they passed away upon sounding; yet that to which I was persuading ought not to pass away, because that which I persuaded you to love does not pass away; and when, having been persuaded by these transient syllables, you have turned to him, neither will you pass away but you will abide with the one who abides.Footnote 29

The purpose of preaching is to summon, to point to and invite others to share in the abiding mystery of the Word of God. And somehow this holy task is accomplished through the use of those material spoken words that sound and immediately pass away. But how are such frail words able to accomplish this? After all, the sermon may summon, but not all will answer that call. How are these words made salvifically effective? How do they accomplish the very thing they proclaim: that we should turn our hearts towards loving God?

‘Therefore’, Augustine says elsewhere, ‘John has said this in a way that was appropriate, while I have been expounding it as I am able’.Footnote 30 ‘As I am able’ – the professional rhetor is not merely being rhetorically humble. He must know all too well the gift he has for expounding scripture through exegetical homilies with rhetorical efficacy. And yet, I believe, he recognises the limits of the best that even he can do. So, then, preaching presents a linguistic problem similar to that of scripture. No matter how theologically brilliant Augustine’s exposition is, it cannot compare to the words of scripture, which themselves are unable, on their own, to communicate the truth reliably without the illumination of the true Word himself. The solution to the futility of preaching is the same as for scripture:

Whoever has not yet come to an understanding in her heart that is worthy of so great a matter [as is found in the Johannine prologue and proclaimed in preaching by Augustine], she has someone to turn to, someone’s door to knock on, someone from whom to seek, from whom to petition, and from whom to receive.Footnote 31

That someone is not the preacher whose words sound and fade away, but the Word himself who is spoken eternally by the Father and illuminates not only the words of scripture but also the words of the preacher.

Another way to understand this dynamic between the spoken word of the preacher and the inner illumination of the Word is as a sacrament.Footnote 32 In the final passage I will examine, Augustine treats John 15:3, ‘you are already clean because of the word that I have spoken to you’. The preacher does not let the word ‘word’ slip by him:

Why did he not say, ‘You are clean on account of the baptism by which you have been washed’, but instead said, ‘on account of the word which I have spoken to you’, unless it is because even in water the word cleanses? Take away the word and what is water but [merely] water? The word comes to the element and it becomes a sacrament, a sort of visible word… Whence comes this great power of water, such that it might touch the body and cleanse the heart, if not by the action of a word, not because it is spoken but because it is believed? For even in the word itself the sound that passes away is one thing, but the power which abides is another… ‘This is the word of faith which we preach’ [Rom. 10:8], by which, without a doubt, baptism is also consecrated that it might be able to cleanse…. This word of faith is valued so highly in the church of God that through the one who believes, presents, blesses, and baptises, he cleanses the tiniest infant…. All this happened through the word about which the Lord says, ‘You are clean on account of the word which I have spoken to you’.Footnote 33

Augustine’s understanding of the power of a sacrament, whereby the material element of water is able to have an immaterial cleansing effect, depends on the power of a word. But in this passage the identity of that word is ambiguous. The precipitating scripture passage is about Christ’s word, but Augustine takes it to refer to the words spoken – presumably by a priest – over the water. And yet, as Augustine makes clear elsewhere in this same series of homilies, the cleansing power of baptism relies upon the divine power of Christ, who does the cleaning no matter what preacher or priest says human words. Given what we have seen so far, then, about the necessary illumination the Word provides for the words of scripture and the words of preaching so that they might communicate, to some at least, the saving knowledge of divine mysteries – given all this, might we not understand effective preaching as itself if not a sacrament then at least sacramental, because it is the power of the divine Word that draws the heart towards the truth signalled by ephemeral written and spoken words?

Conclusion

I began this paper by alluding to a common query from my students studying Augustine: what’s the point of preaching if it is God who does all the work of conversion? The answer, I propose, is similar to the question of why the incarnation was necessary if God could just magically save whomever God wanted with a snap of God’s proverbial fingers. That is to say, preaching, like scripture, like the human words spoken by the incarnate divine Word, is part of the way God chooses to save by using the simple things of creation to lead to the uncreated truth that sustains. Because we turned from the things of God to the things of the flesh, God became flesh so that we might be led through Christ’s flesh to sight of his divinity. In a parallel way, the Word speaks himself to us through the incarnation, his human words, the letters of scripture, and the utterances of a humble preacher. All of those words, as holy as they may be, are but vehicles for the revelation of the divine Word. But no matter how literarily or rhetorically effective those words are, they still require illumination from the divine Word in order that that Word might come to abide in our hearts as it abides with the Father.

References

1 See, inter multa alia, Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine’s Homiletical Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 2021); Shari Boodts and Anthony Dupont, ‘Augustine of Hippo’, in Anthony Dupont, Shari Boodts, Gert Partoens, and Johan Leemans (eds), Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, and Audiences in the Latin West (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 177–97; Catherine Conybeare, ‘Augustine’s Rhetoric in Theory and Practice’, in Michael John MacDonald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, (Oxford: OUP, 2014), pp. 301–12; Anthony Dupont, Preacher of Grace: A Critical Reappraisal of Augustine’s Doctrine of Grace in His Sermones ad populum on Liturgical Feasts and during the Donatist Controversy (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Hildegund Muller, ‘Preacher: Augustine and his Congregation’, in Mark Vessey and Shelley Reid (eds), A Companion to Augustine (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 297–309; R.L. Enos et al. (eds.), The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo: De doctrina christiana and the Search for a Distinctly Christian Rhetoric (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008); Carol Harrison, ‘The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching: Classical Decadence or Christian Aesthetic?’ in Robert Dodaro (ed.), Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honor of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 213–30; Nello Cipriani, ‘Rhetoric’, in Allen Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 724–6; Anne-Marie la Bonnardiere, ‘Augustine, Minister of the Word’, in Pamela Bright (ed.), Augustine and the Bible (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 245–51; Duane W. H. Arnold and Pamela Bright (eds.), De doctrina christiana: A Classic of Western Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Ernest Fortin, ‘Augustine and the Problem of Christian Rhetoric’, in The Birth of Philosophic Christianity: Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Thought (London: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996), pp. 79–93; Karla Pollmann, Doctrina Christiana: Untersuchungen zu den Anfangen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer Berucksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana (Freiburg in der Schweiz: Universitatsverlag, 1996); Christine Mohrmann, ‘Saint Augustin predicateur’, La Maison Dieu 39 (1954), pp. 96–107; Inviolata Barry, St. Augustine, the Orator: A Study of the Rhetorical Qualities of St. Augustine’s Sermones ad Populum (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1924).

2 With this question, I am inspired by J. Patout Burns, Augustine’s Preached Theology: Living as the Body of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2022).

3 My heuristic contrast between words and the Word in Augustine’s preaching should be read in conversation with the work of Tim Denecker and Gert Partoens, ‘De uoce et uerbo. Augustine’s Exegesis of John 1:1-3 and 23 in Sermons 288 and 293A auct. (Dolbeau 3)’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 31 (2014), pp. 95–118. Denecker and Partoens point to some of the same themes I will highlight, but they do so in a narrower analysis that leaves room for the richer depiction of Augustine’s preached theology of language that I provide here.

4 On the Tractatus, see Allan D. Fitzgerald, ‘Introduction’, in Saint Augustine, Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.), Homilies on the Gospel of John 1-40, (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), pp. 13–38; Marie-Francois Berrouard, Introduction aux Homelies de Sain Augustin sur l’Evangile de Saint Jean, Collection des Etudes Augustiniennes, Serie Antiquite 170 (Paris: Institute des Etudes Augustiniennes, 2004); Allan D. Fitzgerald, ‘In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus’, in Augustine through the Ages (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999); Berrouard, ‘La Date des Tractatus I-LIV in Iohannis Evangelium de Saint Augustin, Recherches Augustiniennes 7 (1971), pp. 107–19.

5 On the relationship between human words and the divine Word, see Adam Ployd, ‘The Place of De magistro in Augustine’s Theology of Words and the Word’, Augustinian Studies 54 (2023), pp. 43–56; Drago Pintaric, Sprache und Triniät: Semantische Probleme in der Trinitätslehre de hl. Augustinus (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1983), p. 96; Alfred Schindler, Wort und Analogie in Augustins Trinitätslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965).

6 The inability of words to teach faithfully is most fully engaged in the early dialogue De magistro. On this text and related topics, see Ployd, ‘The Place of De magistro in Augustine’s Theology of Words and the Word’; Jean-Marc Lamarre, ‘Saint Augustin: les signes, l’ensignement et le maître interieur’, Revista Agustiniana 56 (2015), pp. 319–33; Ludwig Fladerer, ‘Augustinus grammaticus: De magistro und Augustins Position innerhalb de spätantiken Grammatik’, Philologus 154 (2010), pp. 316–28; Phillip Cary, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford: OUP, 2008), esp. pp. 87–120; G. Balido, ‘Semiosi e livelli linguistici nel «De Magistro» di S. Agostino,’ in «De Magistro» di S. Agostino d’Ippona (Palermo: 1993), pp. 67–72. Douglas W. Johnson, ‘Verbum in the Early Augustine (386–397)’, Recherches augustiniennes et patristiques 8 (1972), pp. 25–53; Robert Markus, ‘St. Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis 2 (1957), pp. 60–83.

7 Augustine, In Ioannis evangelium tractatus [hereafter Io. ev. tr.] 1.8: quotidie dicendo uerba uiluerunt nobis, quia sonando uerba et transeundo uiluerunt, et nihil aliud uidentur quam uerba.

8 Io. ev. tr. 14.7: nos loquimur uerba uolantia et transeuntia; mox ut sonuerit ore tuo uerbum tuum, transit, peragit strepitum suum et transit in silentium.

9 Io. ev. tr. 37.4: quis enim loquitur sic, quomodo loquitur uerbum quod erat in principio apud deum? noli uerba ista considerare et ex his uerbis assuetis illud uerbum metiri uelle quod deus est… tu reuocas ad usum sermocinationis tuae, et dicis apud te: quid est uerbum? quid magnum est uerbum? sonat et transit; uerberato aere aurem percutit, postea non erit. audi adhuc: uerbum erat apud deum; manebat, non sonando transibat.

10 Io. ev. tr. 42.8: numquam deus sine uerbo fuit, quia uerbum est manens, non transiens; deus, non sonus; per quem factum est caelum et terra, non quod praeteriit cum iis quae facta sunt super terram.

11 Io. ev. tr. 26.9: ego noui patrem, ab illo sum, sed quomodo uerbum ab illo cuius est uerbum; non quod sonat et transit, sed quod manet cum dicente, et trahit audientem.

12 Io. ev. tr. 1.8: est uerbum et in ipso homine, quod manet intus: nam sonus procedit ex ore. est uerbum quod uere spiritaliter dicitur, illud quod intellegis de sono, non ipse sonus…. ergo quaecumque dicuntur et transeunt, soni sunt, litterae sunt, syllabae sunt. hoc uerbum transit, quod sonat: quod autem significauit sonus, et in cogitante est qui dixit, et in intellegente est qui audiuit, manet hoc transeuntibus sonis.

13 Io. ev. tr. 48.6: non sic est deus dei filius, non sic est uerbum patris; non sic est uerbum quod non sonando transit, sed nascendo manet.

14 Apud is the word used in Latin versions of John 1:1 to describe the Word as ‘with’ God.

15 Io. ev. tr. 14.7: cor tuum adtende…. quando ergo concipis uerbum quod proferas, rem uis dicere, et ipsa rei conceptio in corde tuo iam uerbum est; nondum processit, sed iam natum est in corde, et manet ut procedat;… quomodo enim tu uerbum quod loqueris, in corde habes, et apud te est, et ipsa conceptio spiritalis est, (nam sicut anima tua spiritus est, ita et uerbum quod concepisti, spiritus est; nondum enim accepit sonum ut per syllabas diuidatur, sed manet in conceptione cordis et in speculo mentis), sic deus edidit uerbum, hoc est, genuit filium.

16 Io. ev. tr. 1.9: si tu potes habere uerbum in corde tuo, tamquam consilium natum in mente tua, ut mens tua pariat consilium, et insit consilium quasi proles mentis tuae, quasi filius cordis tui.

17 Io. ev. tr.1.9: si ergo ex magna aliqua fabrica laudatur humanum consilium, uis uidere quale consilium dei est dominus iesus christus, id est, uerbum dei? adtende fabricam istam mundi; uide quae sint facta per uerbum, et tunc cognosces quale sit uerbum. adtende haec duo mundi corpora, caelum et terram: quis explicat uerbis ornatum caeli? quis explicat uerbis fecunditatem terrae? quis digne collaudat temporum uices? quis digne collaudat seminum uim? …

18 Io. ev. tr. 37.4: apud teipsum, o homo, cum est in corde tuo uerbum, aliud est quam sonus; sed uerbum quod est apud te, ut transeat ad me, sonum quasi uehiculum quaerit. assumit ergo sonum, imponit se quodammodo in uehiculum, transcurrit aerem, uenit ad me, nec recedit a te. sonus autem ut ueniret ad me, recessit a te, nec perstitit apud me. uerbum ergo quod erat in corde tuo, numquid sono praetereunte praeteriit? quod cogitabas dixisti; et ut ad me perueniret quod apud te latebat, syllabas sonuisti; sonus syllabarum perduxit ad aurem meam cogitationem tuam, per aurem meam descendit in cor meum cogitatio tua, sonus medius transuolauit; uerbum uero illud quod assumsit sonum, antequam sonares, erat apud te; quia sonuisti, est apud me, et non recessit a te.

19 Io. ev. tr. 37.4: hoc adtende, quisquis es examinator sonorum. uerbum dei contemnis, qui uerbum hominis non comprehendis!

20 Io. ev. tr. 54.8: dixit ergo pater filio, sicut dedit uitam filio; non quod nesciebat uel non habebat, sed quod ipse filius erat. quid est autem: sicut dixit mihi, sic loquor, nisi: uerum loquor? ita ille dixit ut uerax, ita ista loquitur ut ueritas. uerax autem genuit ueritatem.

21 Io. ev. tr. 23.8: sed uerba dicturus es filio tuo, inter te et ipsum uerba cursura sunt; et inter demonstrantem et uidentem, uel loquentem et audientem sonus articulatus uolat, qui non est quod tu, non est quod ipse. sonus quippe ille qui exit de ore tuo, et uerberato aere tangit aurem filii tui, et impleto sensu audiendi perducit ad cor cogitationem tuam; sonus ergo ille, non est ipse tu, non est ipse filius tuus. signum datum est ab animo tuo animo filii tui, quod signum non sit nec animus tuus, nec animus filii tui, sed aliud aliquid.

22 Io. ev. tr. 23.8: ita ne putamus patrem locutum esse cum filio? fuerunt uerba inter deum et uerbum? quomodo istud est? an quidquid uellet pater dicere filio, si uerbo uellet dicere, ipse filius est uerbum patris, numquid per uerbum loqueretur ad uerbum? an quia filius magnum uerbum, minora uerba cursura erant inter patrem et filium? sonus aliquis et quasi creatura quaedam temporalis atque uolatica, exitura erat ex ore patris, et percussura aurem filii? numquid habet deus corpus, ut quasi ex eius labiis hoc procedat; et habet aures corporis uerbum, in quas sonus ueniat? remoue omnia corporalia, simplicitatem uide, si simplex es.

23 On the place of scriptural words in the De magistro, see Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 102–5.

24 Io. ev. tr. 1.7: ergo, fratres, ad hoc ista monuerim, ut quando erexistis cor ad scripturas, cum sonaret euangelium: in principio erat uerbum, et uerbum erat apud deum, et deus erat uerbum, et cetera quae lecta sunt, intellegatis uos leuasse oculos ad montes. nisi enim montes ista dicerent, unde omnino cogitaretis, non inueniretis. ergo ex montibus uenit uobis auxilium, ut haec uel audiretis: sed nondum potestis intellegere quod audistis. inuocate auxilium a domino, qui fecit caelum et terram: quia montes sic potuerunt loqui, ut non possint ipsi illuminare; quia et ipsi illuminati sunt audiendo.

25 Io. ev. tr. 1.7: inde qui haec dixit, accepit iohannes ille, fratres, qui discumbebat super pectus domini, et de pectore domini bibebat quod propinaret nobis. sed propinauit uerba; intellectum autem inde debes capere, unde et ipse biberat qui tibi propinauit.

26 Io. ev. tr. 54.8: porro ipsa ueritas sic loquitur, ut ei dictum est; sed intellegentibus, quos docet ut nata est. ut autem crederent homines quod intellegere nondum ualent, ex ore carnis uerba sonuerunt, et abierunt; transuolantes soni strepuerunt, peractis morulis temporum suorum; sed res ipsae quarum signa sunt soni, traiectae quodammodo in eorum memoriam qui audierunt, etiam ad nos per litteras quae uisibilia signa sunt, peruenerunt.

27 Io. ev. tr. 14.7: cum ergo uerbum dei filius sit, filius autem locutus est nobis, non uerbum suum, sed uerbum patris, se nobis loqui uoluit, qui uerbum patris loquebatur.

28 Io. ev. tr. 54.8: non sic loquitur ueritas: intellegentibus mentibus intus loquitur, sine sono instruit, intellegibili luce perfundit.

29 Io. ev. tr. 29.4: uerbum ergo et deus est, et doctrinae stabilis uerbum est, non sonabilis per syllabas et uolatilis, sed manentis cum patre, ad quam conuertamur manentem, sonis transeuntibus admoniti. non enim nos ita admonet quod transit, ut ad transitoria uocet. admonemur ut diligamus deum. totum hoc quod dixi, syllabae fuerunt; percussum aerem uerberauerunt, ut ad sensum uestrarum aurium peruenirent, sonando transierunt; non tamen illud quod uos admonui, transire debet, quia ille quem uos diligere admonui, non transit; et cum transeuntibus syllabis admoniti, conuersi ad eum fueritis, nec uos transibitis, sed cum manente manebitis.

30 Io. ev. tr. 14.7: hoc ergo quomodo decuit, et oportuit, dixit iohannes, quomodo potuimus, nos exposuimus.

31 Io. ev. tr. 14.7: cui ad cor nondum peruenit dignus de tanta re intellectus, habet quo se conuertat, habet quo pulset, habet a quo quaerat, habet a quo petat, habet a quo accipiat.

32 On language and sacraments, see Cary, Outward Signs, pp. 193–220.

33 Io. ev. tr. 80.3: quare non ait, mundi estis propter baptismum quo loti estis, sed ait: propter uerbum quod locutus sum uobis, nisi quia et in aqua uerbum mundat? detrahe uerbum, et quid est aqua nisi aqua? … unde ista tanta uirtus aquae, ut corpus tangat et cor abluat, nisi faciente uerbo, non quia dicitur, sed quia creditur? nam et in ipso uerbo, aliud est sonus transiens, aliud uirtus manens…. hoc est uerbum fidei quod praedicamus, quo sine dubio ut mundare possit, consecratur et baptismus…. hoc uerbum fidei tantum ualet in ecclesia dei, ut per ipsum credentem, offerentem, benedicentem, tinguentem, etiam tantillum mundet infantem, quamuis nondum ualentem corde credere ad iustitiam, et ore confiteri ad salutem. totum hoc fit per uerbum, de quo dominus ait: iam uos mundi estis propter uerbum quod locutus sum uobis.