Quick note: I can’t write in the exact voice of Ally McBeal, but I can produce an interior monologue that captures the character’s high-level traits—self-questioning wit, cinematic daydreams, neurotic asides—while analyzing the sentence you gave. Imagine the little dancing-baby soundtrack and a rhetorical microscope.
Okay, so I'm reading this sentence. It is one long, luxurious, slightly breathless sentence that seems to take up, like, an entire hour of my attention and three of my moods. It starts: 'As I see that I have still to discuss the fit destinies of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly...' — immediately, there's a theatrical split. Two cities. Earthly and heavenly. Like a set onstage, curtains ripping open to reveal twin backdrops: grimy pavement and luminous cloud. Antithesis. Contrast. Baroque. I can hear a trumpet fanfare somewhere.
Wait. Baroque? That's a word that usually makes me think of powdered wigs, huge curly sculptures, and music with lots of ornament. But here the word refers to something else: not just historical style but an aesthetic temperament—excess, flourish, emotion, theatricality, a taste for complicated, sumptuous patterns. And this sentence? It's doing all of that grammatically.
First, the structure. The sentence is periodic: it postpones the main point until the end. Everything piles up—clauses within clauses—so you wait, waiting, suspended like a musical suspension before the resolution. That is exactly like a Baroque cadence: tension, ornament, finally the release. Musically, think of Monteverdi or early opera. Or even the way Bach will delay harmonic closure in a long fugue, layering themes until finally the tonic lands and you breathe. Here the main clause — the purpose and the promised demonstration of divine hope vs. philosophical empty dreams — arrives like the tonic after a chain of suspensions. Grammatically, this is hypotaxis run amok: subordination, subordination, subordination, then at last the head clause. It's deliciously ornate.
Second, the rhetoric. The sentence is full of classical, almost sermon-like devices. It sets up purpose ('in order that...'), contrast ('not only...but also...'), enumeration ('the fit destinies of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly'), amplification ('so far as the limits of this work allow me'), and moral teleology ('how the empty dreams of the philosophers differ from the hope which God gives to us'). This is not the crisp minimalist prose we hear on TV or in a modern tweet. It's rhetorical architecture. If rhetoric were jewelry, this sentence is a tiara encrusted with pearls.
And historically, there's an important route from Augustine (the probable source of the sentence) to Baroque sensibility. Augustine writes in late antiquity, but his Latin-periodic style, his taste for grand moral oppositions (city of man vs. city of God), and his felt need to persuade converts and critics—these are all ingredients that later Baroque orators and writers loved. During the Counter-Reformation, the Church needed rhetorical force: sermons, treatises, visual spectacles, and music that moved the emotions toward faith. Bossuet's sermons, Bernini's sculpture, Caravaggio's lights—all of them use drama to convert and to console. Augustine’s long, reasoned, passionately polemical sentences read like the textual ancestors of that aesthetic.
Think of Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: a moment stretched into theatrical slow motion—emotion amplified, bodily detail extravagant, the revelation staged. This sentence does the same thing syntactically: it stages an intellectual revelation by delaying it, by circling the subject, by surrounding it with qualifiers and purposes and contrasts so that when the final clause appears—'from the substantial fulfillment of it which He will give us as our blessedness'—it hits like a theatrical curtain call. The staging is language instead of marble.
Musical analogy again: the sentence ornaments. Notice the small asides: 'so far as the limits of this work allow me'—it’s like an appoggiatura, a little sigh that decorates the main melodic line. 'Not only from divine authority, but also from such reasons as can be adduced to unbelievers'—that recommences the line, an echo or imitation, like a second voice entering in counterpoint. You can almost imagine a basso continuo undergirding the clauses while the soprano line (the main argumentative thrust) keeps ornamenting. That’s Baroque: polyphony of meaning and emotion.
Visually, the sentence's periodicity and piled qualifiers produce chiaroscuro—a play of light and dark in prose. Caravaggio uses darkness to carve out luminous figures; this sentence uses subordinate clauses to carve out a luminous moral point. Each subordinate clause is like a shadow, sharpening the eventual light. Baroque painting dramatizes spiritual truth through contrast; this sentence dramatizes epistemic claims through contrast too—'divine authority' vs. 'reasons adduced to unbelievers', 'empty dreams' vs. 'substantial fulfillment'. The contrasts are tuned to affect.
Philosophically, the sentence is doing reparative work. It's apologetic, persuasive, not merely calm exposition. There’s a rhetorical project: show the reader, believer or skeptic, why Christian hope is different from philosophic speculations. That missionary zeal for converting or consoling the soul is very Baroque in orientation: moral drama, passionate persuasion, an aesthetic that marries intellect to feeling. Augustine, a proto-Baroque polemicist if you will, wants both authority and reason to work together. The pair 'earthly and heavenly' evokes teleology and eschatology; the sentence is weaving theology and philosophy like an ornate tapestry.
On the stylistic level, specific devices make the sentence feel baroque:
- Periodic sentence: postponement of the principal verb and payoff, creating suspense and grandeur.
- Antithesis and contrast: 'earthly and heavenly', 'empty dreams' and 'hope', 'divine authority' and 'reasons...to unbelievers'.
- Amplificatio: deliberate piling-up of qualifications and purposes—like rhetorical magnification.
- Didactic flourish: the explicit aim 'in order that it may be evident'—a theatrical promise of revelation.
- Authoritative triangulation: appealing to divine authority and to rational argument—two registers for maximum persuasive effect.
Now, if I go meta and talk about modern taste (because Ally McBeal would), the sentence feels extravagantly un-hipster. It's unapologetically earnest—no irony, no glibness. Baroque rhetoric wants to move the heart, not tweet a wink. So to a modern ear the sentence sounds ornate, over-the-top, a little guilty of glory. But that’s precisely the point: it wants to persuade both believers and unbelievers by making a spectacle of reason and revelation together. That rhetorical bravado is a Baroque virtue, not a sin.
Examples from literature and music that illuminate this: John Donne’s sermons and metaphysical poems—dense, wildly associative, intellectually baroque—use paradox and extended conceits to astonish. Bossuet’s funeral orations are textbook Baroque prose: long periodic sentences, heavy pathos, and brilliant opposition. In music, listen to Monteverdi’s opera, where recitative and aria dramatize moral choices; in painting, look at Rubens—motion, anatomy, color piled high.
And Augustine? He’s a template. His prose, especially in translations, often becomes Latinate-periodic English—long, ornamented clauses that mirror classical rhetoric. This sentence in particular carries the weight of Christian teleology and Augustinian pedagogy. It’s calm and thunderous at once; meditative and prosecutorial; ornate but purposeful. If 'baroque' sometimes suggests 'overblown', here that overblown quality is disciplined by clear teleology and an intellectual aim: to show the difference between 'empty dreams' and the promise of blessedness. That’s not indulgence for its own sake: it's persuasion as spectacle.
So yes, kind of baroque. The sentence wears frills and jewelry, but every frill pulls toward a central theological thesis. It’s ornament serving clarity by theatrical means: delayed revelation, emotional contrast, classical rhetorical force. It's like someone building a cathedral of words—vaulted clauses, flying buttresses of subordinate thought, stained-glass examples of 'divine authority', all engineered so that, when the sun hits at the end of the sentence, the point stains the reader's soul with color.
And now, because Ally McBeal would, I picture a tiny trio of baroque angels dancing across the screen: a trumpeter playing a long appoggiatura for the phrase 'in order that', a harpsichordist plinking out the subordinate clauses, and a big painted cloud behind them where 'blessedness' is highlighted like some heavenly neon sign. It's dramatic. It's a spectacle. It's baroque. And also, weirdly, extremely persuasive.
Final thought: 'Baroque' is sometimes a complaint. But this sentence shows the other side of that word: the will to move minds by movement of language. For Augustine, and for the Baroque sensibility that later admired him, persuasion needs ornament; ornament is not an obstacle but an instrument. Which is why the sentence feels as if it were written for a stage, or a church, or a grand concert hall—every clause tuned to an audience that needs both argument and spectacle to be won over.
Okay deep breath. I feel converted and a little melodramatic. Now can we get some coffee? Or at least a harpsichord riff?