Time is Illusory

[Physics Guy]

... it might be objectively true that Augustine wrote too redundantly.

Too redundantly for what? For who?

D'oh. You're right, of course. I do think there should be some objective measure of how redundant a text is, but how much redundancy is too much, or not enough, obviously does depend on the audience.

It's not even a matter of dim ancient people having lower standards than we do, never having seen YouTube. If you literally repeat the same sequences of characters then that's definite redundancy, but if you say the same thing several times in even slightly different ways, then the meaning of each passage could be slightly different in each case, and depending on how you are writing, and to whom, those slight differences might be important enough that they don't actually count as slight for your readers. Or rather, your readers should recognize that the differences really are slight in a broad context, but they might also note that within a certain narrower context they're not slight, and they might insist that that narrow context is an important one.

A verbose but clumsy author might come roughly near the same point several times, and not mean anything more precise with any of the attempts than that same general area, thus effectively saying exactly the same thing several times in a row. A precise writer addressing a narrow subject might say several things that are all roughly the same, but different in nuances that are important. Whether the writer was clumsy, or the nuances are simply no longer significant, is not easy to determine after sixteen hundred years. The amount of time I've put into Augustine is certainly not enough to be sure of a judgement like that.

What I'm more confident in judging, however, is that Augustine often seems repetitive to a modern reader who doesn't find all his nuances important. That might be par for the course for anyone being read centuries after they wrote—but some ancient writers do hit far below par. Some ancient writers still seem pithy after all this time. For my money, at least, Augustine is not one of those. And if we're not allowed to say things like that, then to me that isn't protecting the reputation of people like Augustine, but rather devaluing the contributions of those other ancient writers who remain much more readable. Some ancient stuff you can really just read, even now. Most ancient stuff needs a fair bit of editing.