New Voices, Old Songs

The opening of Book IX of the Confessions finds Augustine engaged in a delicate exposition of Psalm 4, by which he exclaims upon the sweetness of his rediscovery of Scripture. At earlier points in his life, he had been famously contemptuous of the Scriptures, thinking them profane, immoral, and rhetorically unpolished. Book IX retains some of this legacy, for Augustine's meditation upon the newfound sweetness of Scripture comes directly on the heels of his retirement from the professorship of rhetoric. Indeed, the meditation on Scripture seems positioned precisely as the antidote to Augustine's defilement of language in his former life. Once a latrator amarus et caecus adversus litteras (IX.4), he now finds them honey-covered, an herb and medicine that heals him of the vain sophistry of the rhetoricians. With his own language purged and healed by God's own grammar, he cries out to God, who brings forth in Augustine a new voice from old songs.
"You delivered my tongue," Augustine confesses to the Lord, as he reflects upon the day he retired from his professorship, employing the verb used by Isaiah to speak of the Lord's saving his soul (Is. 38:17) and employed to describe God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt (Exod. 18:10). His reflection upon his life as a rhetor mirrors a common critique of sophists in ancient Rome: namely, that they peddled wordplay to the highest bidder without regard for the truth of what was said. Augustine's derisive formulation, nundinae loquacitatis, expresses his newfound disavowal of dishonest vanities (insanias mendaces). Originality and novelty were values, but beneath the florid cover of their belles lettres, both teachers and students suffered from incurable avarice and vice. The education industry found itself deeply corrupted. The "cedars of the schools," impressive as they might appear, are no remedy "against serpents."
Retiring from rhetoric, Augustine undergoes a profound internal transformation. Once a player in the marketplace, he submits to a "domestication" (perdomueris) that will prepare him to be a servant of the house of the Lord. Concurrent with that domestication is a revision of language, its uses and its beauty.
The first thing that changes is the value of originality. Instead of selling his own verbal prowess, Augustine finds himself wishing that the Manicheans could hear him recite the Psalms. That is, Augustine is learning to make his own the words of the Psalmist: "accendebar eos recitare." And yet, those words are sung in the whole world! They are not his; he can lay no claim of his own to them. Another change is the relation of his words to truth. His rehearsal of the Scripture begins to fill the words with the content of God's saving work in his own life. The Spirit, who had spoken in the Psalms, ait nobis. And when the psalmist questions humankind about their heaviness of heart and their love of vanity, Augustine senses himself in the dock. At the proclamation that God had raised his Holy One, audivi et contremui, quoniam talibus dicitur, qualem me fuisse reminiscebar. When the text summons humanity to be angry and sin not, Augustine is moved to anger, and as a result his own sinfulness becomes distasteful to him.

The rehearsal of the Scriptures serves to reorient Augustine's tastes, as God grows sweet (dulcescere) to him. This is a profound reversal; the recitation of the words of others, words which are sung in the entire world (here we see the incipient catholic impulse that will animate Augustine's critique of Donatism), has allowed those words to become true of him. He thus subverts the aims of the sophists on both counts: he speaks the words others wrote, and they become true as God changes Augustine into a man whose life is best described in those terms. Once the great professor, "neque enim dico recti aliquid hominibus, quod non a me tu prius audieris, aut etiam tu aliquid tale audis a me, quod non mihi tu prius dixeris."