This study of Augustine's efforts to practice the virtue of humility in his preaching and to cultivate it in his hearers reports dissertation research under the direction of Prof. David Meconi. Kim applies Speech Act Theory to Augustine's sermones ad populum to investigate the efficacy of his activity. Throughout the study, he acknowledges the tension between this methodology and Augustine's assimilation of preaching to the other forms of ministry, so that all good effects of the activity are attributed to the action of Christ working in both the speaker and the hearer. In practice, then, the theory provides the hypothesis that speaking can produce real effects in the human realm and structures the division of the material in each of the two parts of the study into what is spoken, the speaker's action, and what the hearer actively receives (xlii). This study succeeds almost despite its methodology – whose narrow range is amply on display – in demonstrating that Augustine used his well-cultivated talents as a rhetor in the service of the Christian Gospel rather than his own glorification.
The first three chapters (part one) are dedicated to a survey of the context of Augustine's preaching: a variety of issues focused on the relation of the preacher to Christ and the church. Adapting the “chair of Moses” from which the scribes and Pharisees taught (Matt 23:2), Kim names the cathedra Christi (a phrase that appears only three times in Augustine's opera) and uses it repeatedly to link the teaching role of the bishop on earth to that of Christ in heaven. He distinguishes these two applications by noting that Augustine claimed to be not the teacher but a fellow student of the congregants. Despite its attraction as a contrast to the haughty magister of the rhetorical schools in which Augustine studied and taught, this educational role is actually quite different from that of the sacramental minister, to which Augustine sometimes compared it. The human understanding of the preacher necessary for effective teaching rather than ritual performance remains inadequately explored in this investigation. Moreover, Kim's claims about the preacher as a manifestation of Christ are sometimes closer to those of Parmenian the Donatist that Augustine rejected strenuously in Sermo Dolbeau 26.36–63.
The second chapter establishes the difference between Christian preaching and the secular roles of the rhetor in the law courts, imperial celebrations, and the training of students for these professions. The Christian preacher was committed to the exposition of the scriptures as a source of truth rather than those objectives that were unrelated to justice and truth. Augustine found his model in Ambrose who followed the scriptures (and their Greek commentators).
Kim next offers a devastatingly careful evaluation of the contemporary scholarship on the identities and qualifications of the audiences to which Augustine preached. By examining the limited sources consulted and methods used in the widely appreciated reports of Ramsey McMullen and Leslie Dossey, he successfully undermines their conclusions. Kim then turns to Stanley Rosenberg's studies of oral, nonliterate cultures to conclude that Augustine's congregations were capable of following the intricate expositions of scriptural texts that changed the Christian Latin readings of, for example, Romans 7. This section might have been further enhanced by attention to Augustine's efforts to train his hearers in thinking about such nonsensible realities as the human soul and its operations, a skill his own literary education had not provided.
The second part of the book deals with Augustine's surviving sermons themselves, following the divisions of Speech Act Theory: the speech, the speaking, and the hearing. In the fourth chapter, Kim shows that Augustine used the vocabulary of the Latin translations of the Bible familiar to his hearers. He adapted rather than abandoning his skills as a rhetor to make his presentations both accessible and pleasing to his hearers. Sound, rhythm, repetition, and allegory were employed to establish connection and contrast, as well as offering memorable phrases and images.
The fifth chapter, on Augustine's teaching style, is designed to contrast it with the training of rhetors through practice and criticism and with the persuasive or laudatory political rhetoric of the empire. Kim fails to note that Augustine had gladly abandoned both these practices in order to pursue the philosophical dialogue method exemplified in his early writings. This form of discourse was the one Augustine sacrificed when he humbly accepted the burden of clerical ministry, particularly for the tasks of teaching, exhortation, and controversy.
In the sixth chapter, Kim fully comes to terms with the inadequacies of Speech Act Theory for understanding the efficacy of the activity of preaching. Augustine taught and followed a doctrine that Christ and the Holy Spirit inspired and guided the searching, sharing, appreciating, and enacting of the truth of the Gospel by both speaker and hearer.
This study succeeds admirably in exploring Augustine's adaptation of the tradition in which he was trained as a rhetor to the ministry of Christian preaching and in reporting the state of related questions in the secondary literature. It also opens an avenue to a fuller exploration of the difference between the minimal qualifications of the sacramental minister and those required by the episcopal roles of teaching and governance. Augustine addressed the difficulties facing Christian audiences only in his commentaries on John and Psalms (Eu. Io. 45.7; En. Ps. 115.1; 103.2.11; 106.14), which are outside the scope of this study.
