Those who are very familiar with the life of St. Augustine of Hippo know that he was deeply informed by the rhetorical influence of Cicero and that he even went as far as to credit Cicero's lost Hortensius for his eventual conversion to Christianity. Regarding the title of this essay, I don’t mean to frame Cicero as a Sophist in the classical sense, nor in a demeaning sense, but his rhetorical background would likely have immersed him in the school and language of Sophist thought. Now, you do not need to live in the 20th or 21st century to know that language has been the victim of clever men with little care for truth (which is my loose, back-handed definition of a Sophist), but such men exist today as they existed in the 4th and 5th centuries BC, or even during Augustine’s time in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. What, then, can we learn from St. Augustine when it comes to safeguarding language against the sophists of our own day? My hope is to impart just a simple lesson here.
Upon his conversion to Christianity, Augustine discovered a conflict between his newfound faith and his love of Cicero’s rhetoric and philosophy. The Neoplatonist scholar Joseph Anthony Mazzeo writes, “Every student of the Confessions recalls how Augustine was originally convinced of the incompatibility of Christianity and philosophy because of the extreme difference in the styles of the Bible and Cicero.” As one of the most prominent teachers of rhetoric in the Roman Empire during his lifetime, from which he had to resign due to a throat illness, you can imagine this apparent conflict between Scripture and Cicero caused him much chagrin. It was only under the influence of St. Ambrose's teachings on the allegorical and symbolic modes of interpreting Scripture that Augustine began to address this conflict. Even then, “he treated all of the basic problems of rhetoric in Ciceronian terms,” writes Mazzeo, “and he freely adapted his source to platonic and Christian context.”1 In other words, Augustine sought to save rhetoric from itself.
This conflict between faith and philosophy is founded on the foundational question of how rhetoric, the ability to use persuasive, compelling arguments via language, related to reality and truth. As a brief preface, I would like to clarify that rhetoric is not of course synonymous with sophistry, but rhetoric is certainly an essential tool of sophistry. That said, it is in Book IV of his De doctrina Christiana especially, according to Mazzeo, that we see Augustine attempt to return rhetoric to its ancient concern for truth by adopting it into a platonic framework:
“The nature and uses of signs became strictly related to the realities to be sought (discovery) and to their formulation (statement), so that the use of the arts of language is utterly dependent on the structure of reality, a relationship with which no classical rhetorician other than Plato had been concerned. Thus the theme that underlies the whole of Book IV is that of the eloquence of words (verba) versus the immeasurably greater eloquence of realities (res), of truth.”
If one was in touch with the “eloquence of realities,” of truth, believed Augustine, then the eloquence of words would inevitably occur. “This was a revolutionary doctrine for its time,” says Mazzeo, “a time in which rhetoric was virtually an end in itself, in which the teaching of rhetoric was extremely formalistic, and we can recognize in it the modern sentiment about the teaching of the arts of language.” Augustine realized of course that the eloquence of rhetoric could be used for good or bad, but ultimately taught that, while it was a great tool for preachers like him, it was ultimately dispensable, at least as an end to be attained per se.
For the Sophists, meanwhile, to master language was to master perceptions of reality. The eloquence of language took precedence—whether or not truth corresponded to their claims was a secondary matter. The castles they built in the sky had little need for foundations on the ground. “We must beware of the man,” Augustine continues in Book IV, “who abounds in eloquent nonsense, and so much the more if the hearer is pleased with what is not worth listening to, and thinks that because the speaker is eloquent what he says must be true.” How many such people like this exist today? Although they hardly measure up to the classical Sophists, think, for example, of all the pseudo experts on social media, with thousands of followers, peddling health methods, finance advice, or political and social commentary.
Having embraced Christianity as true, Augustine went on to develop a deeply sacramental notion of signs and language that was based wholly on Scripture. If language is formed by the dynamic patterns of reality, which is what Augustine believed, he also found in Scripture the truest patterns not just of material reality but of divine reality as well. Divine reality, in turn, informs the patterns of the material world. “Therefore,” writes Augustine, “the real utility of knowledge of things [i.e., reality] lies in the clarification of signs rather than vice versa. We must thus pass, as it were, from the voices of men to the silent voice of God's creation.” For Augustine, reality dictated the formulation of language, whereas the Sophists began with language, manipulated it, and made it to serve their ends.
My short summary here may not have fully scratched your philosophical itch to understand the relationship between language and reality, nor have I dealt with the Sophists properly, but I hope that I have pointed you in the direction of one who provides deep insight into the matter. A large problem, however, is that Augustine never got around to writing a comprehensive theory of language, even if he stated an intent to do as much. At the end of De Magistro, Augustine stated, “at some other time, God willing, we shall investigate the entire problem of the utility of words, which, if considered properly, is not negligible.” Alas, such an account was never written. For your sakes and mine, I didn’t attempt to piece together the disparate fragments we do have of an Augustinian theory of language, but hopefully my broad strokes have given you a fair introduction to the topic. What we do undoubtedly see from these broad strokes is one of the Church’s greater minds attempting to reconcile the larger conflict between reason and faith, between the Hellenic and the Hebrew, between our ways and God’s ways. If considered properly, it is not a negligible task.
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “St. Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Apr. – June 1962), pp. 175-196.