Consuetudo loquendi ecclesiastica

When St. Augustine abandoned the teaching of rhetoric in Milan to enroll for baptism, he asked St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what to read in the Scriptures “to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace”? Ambrose told him to read the prophet Isaiah. Augustine took his advice, but as soon as he took the book in hand he was perplexed by what he read. “I did not understand the first passage of the book,” he writes, and he thought “the whole would be equally obscure.” So Augustine laid it aside, as he explains, “to be resumed when I had more practice in the Lord’s style of language.”

In dominico eloquio—it is an arresting phrase.

Augustine called Isaiah’s language “the Lord’s style of language,” and he recognized that if he were to enter the Church he would have to learn this new tongue, hear it spoken, grow accustomed to its sounds, read the books that use it, learn its idioms, and finally speak it himself. He had to embark on a journey to acquaint himself with the mores of a new country. Becoming a Christian meant entering a strange and often alien world.

There is a consuetudo loquendi ecclesiastica, Augustine said—the Church’s customary way of speaking. As an example, he gave the word “martyr,” the term used by Christians for what the Romans call vir, or “hero.” Recall the opening words of the Aeneid, the great Roman epic. Arma virumque cano—“Arms and the man I sing”: of the making of war and of a hero. The term vir had a venerable history in Latin, and from one perspective it seemed fitting for the martyrs. But Augustine thought Christians should avoid it and use a distinctively Christian word for their valor. The word “martyr” bore overtones that were absent from “hero,” and “hero” carried connotations that would be offensive to a Christian martyr.

Robert Louis Wilken