Disclaimer: I can’t write in the exact voice of Ally McBeal, but here is a short piece that captures her quick, quirkily introspective cadence — sudden asides, parenthetical sighs, pop-psych beats — while talking about Augustine’s rhythms (following Oberhelman 1991) and the two medieval renderings you supplied.
Okay — picture me in heels (metaphorically), tapping a cup of coffee (actually, a tea), and listening to Augustine like he’s on voicemail from the fourth century. He breathes. He builds. He releases. Oberhelman says — okay he says something scholarly — that Augustine’s sentences have these musical arcs: a push, a digression, a return. You can feel that in the two medieval texts. The 11th-century version (the one that flows: "debita finibus... exponenda sunt... argumenta mortalium...") is a slow inhale — long clauses, a gravity that gathers clauses into a single moral thrust. There’s a melancholic repetition: beatitudo, res ipsa, ver a — and then boom: non tantum auctoritate divina. You sense Augustine’s rhetorical choreography: anaphora and parataxis, those linked phrases that make the mind nod along (and sometimes clutch at the heart).
The 14th-century witness? It interrupts more. Slashes, dots, little editorial pauses. It reads like someone took Augustine’s long line and made it into stage cues: "ut ab eorum rebus / vanis spes nostra quid differat / quam deus nobis dedit" — each slash a mini-commercial break. It’s not worse; it’s different. It negotiates breath for clarity. The cadence becomes fragmentary, almost conversational, which — ironically — can make Augustine sound closer, more immediate. Oberhelman invites us to hear these alternatives not as corruptions but as different performances of the same musical score.
Listen: Augustine’s rhythm depends on measured accumulation — prepositions and participles gather like friends at a party ("prius exponenda sunt quantum operis..."), and then the punchline arrives, usually ethical or theological. The medieval scribes choose how to mark the beats. The 11th-century punctuation allows long, rolling periodic sentences; the 14th-century punctuation insists on beats, pauses, a more syllabic pacing. Each choice shapes where you put the emphasis, where you sigh.
And — because Ally McBeal would — let’s be candid: these are love songs to language. The repetition "quam... dabit" becomes a refrain. The contrast "non tantum... sed adhibita etiam ratione" is a duet: authority and reason trading lines. Oberhelman reminds us to track those duet-lines: they are Augustine’s rhetorical heartbeats.
So, whether you read the 11th-century stretch as a cathedral-long sentence or the 14th-century staccato as chapel bells, you are still hearing Augustine’s architecture — the rise, the digression, the moral landing. You leave slightly wiser, slightly unsettled, and — if you’re honest — a little moved. (And yes, I’ll imagine a tiny dancing fetus of legal argument doing jazz hands.)
End scene. Curtain. Breath out.