Napoléon Roussel: How Not to Preach
Ovid
Now we reach the last of the portraits of bad preachers depicted by Napoleon Roussel in his booklet “How Not To Preach”. Ovid is an preacher lacking sincerity. He has no substance, no depth, and he hides this poverty as to substance behind artifice. He pays great attention to form and rhetoric, he strives for eloquence, and by doing so, he treats his audience as if they were inferior to him: he gives them what he himself would have found unacceptable. Ovid indulges in abstraction and metaphysics, on order not to be found wanting. But in the end his audience grows tired of hirn and will prefer a preacher who is more simple and accessible and who rnoves them from time to tirne.
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