Augustine was a professionally trained speaker and teacher of rhetoric. Already before his conversion he was well-known for his eloquence. Although after his conversion he was critical of his earlier career as a "worldly" speaker, he still acknowledged that rhetoric played an important function in helping to convey the Christian message about the salvation of the soul. He even wrote a treatise outlining core points of what a Christian rhetoric should look like, which contains – by ancient standards – some revolutionary points, in particular that grammatical mistakes were allowed for a preacher if it ensured the audience could follow the sermon’s content better. Around 800 of Augustine‘s sermons are extant today (out of many thousands he must have delivered), and new ones continue to be found.

This lecture aims at elucidating some of the rhetorical strategies and challenges Augustine had to master during his career and explores in which ways his homiletic activity correlates to modern notions of mass communication.