So? What do we care about the reveries of an African who was sometimes a Manichean, sometimes a Christian, sometimes a debauchee, sometimes devout, sometimes tolerant, and sometimes a persecutor? What do we care about his theological twaddle? Would you like me to respect this senseless rhetorician when he says in his twenty-third [sic] sermon that an angel got Mary with child through her ear: impraegnavit per aurem?
Eh! que nous importent les rêveries d'un Africain, tantôt manichéen, tantôt chrétien, tantôt débauché, tantôt dévot, tantôt tolérant, tantôt persécuteur? Que nous fait son galimatias théologique? Voudriez-vous que je respectasse cet insensé rhéteur, quand il dit, dans son sermon XXII, que l'ange fit un enfant à Marie par l'oreille? impraegnavit per aurem.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, September 28, 2017
St. Augustine
Voltaire (1694-1778), "Dinner at Count de Boulainvilliers'," Letters to His Highness the Prince of ****** on Rabelais and Other Authors Accused of Having Spoken Against the Christian Religion (tr. G.K. Noyer):