The Art of Preaching: A Cistercian Anthropology (Cistercian Fathers Series)

by Alain de Lille

Preaching was a much admired, much studied, and much practiced art by both abbots and secular clergy. This handbook designed for training future preachers gives moderns an insight into the technique and the content of those twelfth-century sermons.

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1200

About the author

1128-1203

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_d...

Reviews

[Joel Zartman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Insularis wrote a number of interesting works, was called Doctor Universalis for his great learning, and was the greatest Latin poet of his age. This manual on preaching is a little gem. Not only does it provide an early scholastic account of the nature of preaching, it also contains a series of instructions on different topics: what texts, what approaches, what sayings, what divisions can be used in preaching against, for example, gluttony or for perseverance. Alan curiously includes the topic of learning, but finds no real Biblical support, so he gets authority for this commendable activity from elsewhere. Though most of his texts are derived from Scripture, and he has a list of most useful books for harvesting texts, my favorite is his sermon which takes a text from Cicero—not found in this volume: “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere.” He begins: “Consider, my most dear fellow soldiers, how the Hebrew is made rich by this precious wisdom stolen from the Egyptian.” Perhaps not so much stolen as by this time completely absorbed, for all that the provenance is Egyptian. That is an allusion to Agustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, at least. The geometrical approach is eminently Platonic, and specially Plotinic, and the content of this sermon is as Neoplatonic a cosmos as one could hope to wonder at.

The joy of the manual on Christian preaching is the useful meditation on vice and virtue in thirty-six chapters. There is much profit to be had from careful reading and leisured consideration. It is a worthwhile book of piety.